I have sat across a table from my brother since 1972, and I have heard let me be devil’s advocate here at three weddings, two funerals, and one committee that decided whether he kept his license. I would like to enter a different exhibit.
Sunday, my brother had a fork in one hand and had not finished chewing.
“Now let me be devil’s advocate here.”
“Orin.”
“No, because if the state’s paying for the culvert—”
“Orin. Everybody at this table agrees with you.”
“That’s not a reason to be right,” he said.
I got up and took the beans in. I have been getting up and taking something in since about 1981. There is a route from that table to that sink that I could walk with my eyes shut and my hands full, and I have walked it, I would estimate, four thousand times.
My sentence about Orin Gott, and I have had one about as long as I have had opinions, runs seven words: he argues because he has to win.
You want the file. In 2014 he took the fish pier lease apart at three town meetings in a row and made four permanent enemies out of a five-member board, and two of those men have crossed the street on him since. He has been divorced since 2007 and I could tell you why in one sentence and he could tell you why in about forty minutes. In 1996 he said a thing to me at that same table that I have carried for thirty years, and it will be along.
And he has been saying let me be devil’s advocate here since 1979, when he was eleven, at a Thanksgiving, to a Baptist minister.
I cut hair. Two chairs on Main since 1998, twenty-eight years, which means I know what everybody in this town thinks about everything, including my brother, and here is a thing I have never said out loud until this sentence: what this town thinks about my brother is mine. I made it. I have a four-minute bit about him. It is very good. I have been doing it since about 1990 and I have never once flubbed it.
March of 2019 we buried our mother, and afterward at the funeral home in Ellsworth I was standing at the coffee urn with a plate, and Deb Sawtelle’s daughter-in-law, who does human resources down in Portland, said four letters to somebody I could not see. She said them the way you would explain a rash. That’s just how he’s wired.
It took me seven years to type those letters into anything, and the reason was not skepticism. The reason was that I had seven words about my brother that had been earning steadily since the Reagan administration, and nobody audits a thing that is paying.
I am booked for twenty minutes at the fire department auction in October.
ENTP Traits: Let Me Be Devil’s Advocate Here
The phrase, in order, so far as I can date it.
1979, Thanksgiving, our grandmother’s, a minister at the table and something about the collection. He was eleven. Our father took him out to the truck.
1987, at the boatyard, to a customer, about the customer’s own boat.
1994, at my wedding rehearsal, about the seating.
2004, in a hospital corridor in Bangor, to a resident, about the resident’s plan for our mother’s hip. He was right that time and the resident changed it and my mother walked again, and I have never given him one inch of credit for that until this paragraph.
2014, three meetings running.
2019, at our mother’s graveside, to the minister, about the reading. Merrill got a hand on his arm.
Sunday, over the beans.
I want to say what that phrase has always sounded like from a chair four feet away. It sounds like a man clearing his throat before he takes something away from you. It sounds like a warning shot. In this family it has never once been heard as a description of what the man was about to do. Put that down somewhere I cannot get at it later, because I do come back to it, and it does not go well for me.
Twenty-eight years in a two-chair shop is an information system nobody built on purpose. A woman sits down and she has forty minutes and her back is to the room and she is looking at herself in a mirror, and that combination does something. I have been told about three affairs, two cancers before the family knew, one embezzlement at a lobster co-op, and every single thing anybody in this town has ever thought about anybody. There are rules. What comes into that room about a person’s health does not leave it. What comes in about a person’s opinions is currency and everybody knows it. I did not invent the rules and I keep them, mostly, and there is one person about whom I have never kept them and he is my brother.
ENTP Careers: The Man Who Writes Down What Is Wrong With Your Boat
Orin has been a marine surveyor since 1996. Thirty years.
Somebody is about to buy a boat and they hire him, or their insurance company makes them, and he goes over it with a moisture meter and a phenolic hammer and a flashlight and he writes a report that says what is wrong with it. Then they read the report and about a third of them decide he is a jerk.
He is no such thing on a boat, and it took me fifty years to notice it. On a boat he is patient, he explains, he shows you the meter reading, he is kind to nervous people about money — and I have watched a twenty-six-year-old cry on a dock in Stonington and my brother sit down on the rail with her for forty minutes and go through the numbers twice.
Then he goes to a dinner table and takes his sister’s opinion about a culvert apart with the beans getting cold.
Nothing gets built on a job like that. There is no firm. He has never taken an apprentice, there is no second surveyor, and there is not going to be one.
Bill Sprague at the marina asked him in 2013 to go in on an outfit — two trucks, a name, an office in Ellsworth, real money — and Orin took it apart across a lunch: the liability, the way a partner’s signature travels, what happens when one of two names is on a report the other one wrote. Every objection was sound. Bill went ahead by himself, and that outfit does about four times the work Orin does, and about a third of it is not very good.
He works out of a truck and a Bangor answering service and he turns down about a fifth of what he is offered, and every time I have asked why, the answer has come back the same: the buyer had already decided.
Whether a market can price a skill like that, and what the answer leaves in a man’s account by the time he is fifty-eight, belongs to whoever draws up rate cards. I have drawn one price list in my life and it covered haircuts. And the same ability coming up the same dock on two different people will not get the same welcome twice.
ENTP vs ENFP: The Wharf
There are three of us. Merrill is sixty-one, Orin is fifty-eight, I am fifty-four, and for half a century this town has had one line for the first two: the Gott boys, they’d argue you out of your own driveway.
They are not one animal, and a single spring will show it.
In 2014 the selectmen brought a proposal to lease the fish pier to an aquaculture outfit out of away, twenty years, with an option. Both my brothers were against it. Both of them stood up.
Merrill got sixty people into the Grange hall on a Tuesday in March. He had four alternatives nobody had thought of, one of which — a co-op berth arrangement — was genuinely good, and he had a flip chart and a sign-up sheet and there was a committee with a name on it before that hall emptied. He was terrific. People still talk about that meeting.
He was in Portland by August. The committee met twice more and then it did not.
Orin read the lease.
He read all of it, and he found a thing on the fourth page about the option and what it did to the town’s right to renegotiate the berth fees, and he brought it to a meeting in April and put it in front of Bud Colwell, who was chairman, and asked him to read the sentence out loud. Then he did it again in May. Then he did it again in June with a different clause, and by that point he had gone through four of five board members in public, and the proposal died in June, and Bud Colwell has not spoken to him since and neither have two of the others.
The pier is still the town’s. The town remembers Merrill as the one who tried to save it.
What actually separates them took me about forty years. The pair of them throw off ideas at a speed that is not ordinary, and once either one is running there is no stopping him. What that generating gets checked against is not the same organ.
Merrill’s runs into something private about what deserves to exist. He thought the fishermen’s kids ought to have a pier. He never argued that; he never had to; he just produced, and the producing was warm and it filled a hall.
Orin’s runs into whether the thing holds. That is the whole test. Not who is right and not who deserves what — whether the sentence on the fourth page and the sentence on the ninth page can both be true.
Trade the two and the pier is gone. Merrill does not find that clause, because he does not read a document for holes, he reads it for openings, and he would have lost that vote with four good ideas on a flip chart. And Orin cannot get sixty people into the Grange, and would not want to, because his instrument makes the failure mode and not the option, and you cannot warm a room you are in the middle of dismantling.
Merrill runs the ice-out pool at the store every year and has since 1991 and has never won it, and he pays for the whole jackpot out of his own pocket if the entries come up short, which they do about one year in three, and he has never told anybody that and I only know because I do his wife’s hair.
ENTP Strengths and Weaknesses: The Kitchen at the Funeral Home
The strength is that he is right, and I want to put it before the rest because I have spent thirty years putting it after.
There is a woman in Sedgwick with a boat because my brother found a soft spot in a stem in 2011 and would not sign off, and the man selling it screamed at him in the parking lot. There is a resident in Bangor who is a surgeon now. There is a pier. He is right at a rate I would put at four times in five and he is right early, before anybody has data, and the thing he is right about is almost never in his own interest.
And here is the other half, which is the same half.
When the room is somebody else’s, and the stakes are somebody else’s, and the thing being taken apart is somebody’s plan that they have already committed to, he does not stop. He cannot tell the difference between a claim and a person holding a claim, and by the time you have realized what is happening you are eleven minutes into being disassembled at your own table.
Now the funeral home.
I told you about the coffee urn. I did not tell you about the kitchen, and I am going to now, and I have never told anybody any of this.
We buried our mother the eleventh of March, 2019, and afterward the funeral home has a back kitchen where the family goes, and there were eleven of us in it. Cousins. Deb Sawtelle. My son. And somebody said something about Orin and the pier, and I put my plate down.
And I did the bit.
Four minutes. The Thanksgiving with the minister, and the seating chart at my wedding, and let me be devil’s advocate here, and I do him — I have the hand thing he does, and the pause, and I have been sharpening it since 1990.
I killed. That is the honest word for it. My cousin Ferd had to sit down.
And Orin was standing in the doorway to the parlor with a plate in his hand, and I saw him see me. Four hours after we buried her. And I kept going. I went on and did the wedding part, which is the strongest part, and he turned around and went back out to the parlor, and he stayed another twenty minutes and then he left, and he called me the next day about the headstone and has never referred to any of it, then or since.
ENTP Behavior: Cody’s Boat
My son Cody is twenty-six and this June he bought his first boat, a thirty-eight-footer out of Beals, and he did the sensible thing and hired his uncle to survey it.
They came back to my kitchen after and Orin had the clipboard and I made supper and I was already braced, because I have watched this man do this to people for fifty years and I did not want it done to my son at my table.
And he did it. He went at that purchase for about eleven minutes. The hours on the engine against what the seller said. The wiring aft. The fact that Cody’s number only worked at a bait price that has not held in four years. He was not cruel and he was not gentle either, and Cody’s ears went red the way they do, and I stood at that stove with a spoon in my hand and I was so angry I could not turn around.
And then Cody said, “The Bowdens are going halves on the bait truck starting in April. So it’s not that price. It’s about eleven cents under.”
And my brother stopped in the middle of a sentence.
He said, “Huh.” He looked at the clipboard for about two seconds. He said, “All right. Then that’s fine.” And he wrote something on the sheet and he asked Cody about the traps.
And that was all of it. He ate two helpings, he was in good humor, and he stayed until nine.
I was at that stove the whole way through and I would like to be exact about what happened in me, and it was not relief. I felt like somebody had opened a door in a house I have lived in my whole life and there was another room in there.
Three weeks after that, in July, Ellen Trundy was in my chair and she said something about how she saw Orin at the co-op, and out of my mouth came the Thanksgiving with the minister and the hand thing, all of it, running by itself like a bilge pump.
She laughed. She laughed hard. And I was watching myself do it in the mirror I have stood in front of every working day since 1998.
What Is the ENTP Personality Type: He Took It Apart
I read about the four letters in June, seven years after a woman said them at a coffee urn. The national number sits near three in a hundred, men ahead almost two to one.
Then I did something I have never done, which is that I printed some of it out and took it over to his place on a Thursday and put it on the table in front of him and said, “Tell me what’s wrong with this.”
He read for a while.
“Okay,” he said. “First one. Where’d they get the number.”
“What number?”
“It says three in a hundred. Where’d they get it.” He turned the page around. “Because there’s two ways to get a number like that. You go find a sample that looks like the country and you measure it, or you count who showed up. And who shows up for a personality test is people who went looking for a personality test, or somebody’s employer bought them a seat at a workshop.” He tapped it. “That second kind is most of what’s out there and it tells you about the people who show up.”
I said the number was from the good kind.
“Fine. Then it’s three or so in a hundred, men running ahead of women, and I’d let that stand.” He kept going. “Here’s the one I’d argue. Underneath this thing there’s four measurements and those are all right — you take them on a man in March, take them again in April, the scores hold. The four-letter label only repeats two times out of three, mind — and that’s at one month. So that’s the real result, and its warranty. It’s the next step I want somebody to defend. Four measurements turn into sixteen named kinds of person, and nobody has ever shown their work on the sixteen. Somebody decided on sixteen. It’s a filing system with a good publicist.”
I said, “So it’s nothing.”
“No, I said the measurements are real. Don’t do that.” He put it down. “It’s a good rough sort and a bad fine sort. That’s all I said.”
Then he read the part about this one and he was quiet for a minute, which he is not, and he said, “Well. That’s a lot of it.”
Here is what is in the four letters, as best I can put it after that Thursday and about a month of thinking.
E — the whole apparatus faces out. He does not have thoughts and then decide to say them. The saying is where the thinking happens, which is why silence costs him more than it costs you.
N — and what it generates is the alternative. Instantly, involuntarily, and whether or not anybody wanted one. He is not deciding to be difficult. The other case arrives.
T — and then something private checks it, and the check has nothing to do with who is right. The check is whether the thing holds together. Cody’s eleven cents ended it in two seconds because the claim failed the test, and the test is the only equipment running.
P — and nothing is ever shut. Not the culvert, not the pier, not a Thanksgiving in 1979.
Under all four there is an order of precedence, sorted by how much of a person went into each. Here the generating and the checking take nearly everything. Reading a room comes third and works beautifully whenever he elects to use it. And the part that is supposed to hold everything a man has already done and said runs close to empty, and that last one is what nobody puts in the pieces about this type, and it is the entire back half of this account.
This was all written about a crowd, incidentally, and not about you. My job is a mirror and forty minutes, so I know exactly what a person does with a general description of herself: she goes hunting for the sentence that fits. Go hunting for the one that does not. That is the only sentence in it nobody else in this county owns.
ENTP Under Stress: The Stretch That Wouldn’t Turn
He does not come apart often. What happened in 2007 when Marcy left was nine days and I have never seen anything like it before or since.
He did not argue. That is the thing I want in here, because everybody who knows him would guess wrong. He went completely quiet and he went into the past, which is a country he does not have a passport for.
Nine days of phone calls to me, at eleven, at one, and what came out was a list. Nineteen ninety-four, what he said at my rehearsal. Nineteen seventy-nine and the minister and our father taking him out to the truck. A thing he said to our mother in 1998 that I had never heard about. He had them all and he had them wrong — he had them turned into the worst possible version of each, and there was not one of them I recognized, and I had been in the room for four of them.
That is a man whose own history is kept in a nearly empty drawer, having the drawer pulled open on him. Nothing is being suppressed. There is no file down there capable of it. And what comes up out of there is a ruling about a Thanksgiving rather than a record of one, arriving already decided, and he carries no second instrument that could hold the ruling up against the actual day. I had the actual day. I could not make it take.
I told him he had 1994 wrong. He said, “Then why do I have it.”
I am going to quit being funny for four sentences. Nine days is nine days. When a stretch like that will not turn — a man still walking 1979 at one in the morning in the fourth month, the sleeping never coming back, what he tells you having come loose from anything that ever occurred — a sister with a telephone will not reach it, and one word set down here will not either. Get a physician into it. Get somebody carrying a counseling license into it. Nobody was ever harmed by hearing that a month too early.
I asked Merrill, once, that week, whether he thought Orin ought to talk to somebody. Merrill said, “About what,” which is a whole Gott conversation in two words.
Tenth day he called me about a truck battery and it was over. He has never mentioned the nine days since and I would put money that he could not produce three of the nineteen items if you sat him down and asked, and the reason is the same reason he could not produce them the first time correctly, which is that there is nothing down there to produce them out of.
ENTP Relationships and Compatibility: Nobody Stays for the End
At fifty-four, in my own kitchen, in June, I learned a thing about a man I have known every day of my life.
Not one person in this family has ever seen the end of one of his arguments. Not one, not ever. We leave. I take the beans in. Merrill goes outside. Our father went out to the truck. Marcy went to her sister’s in Bucksport for eleven years of Novembers and then went there permanently.
Which means every position I have ever assigned that man is a snapshot taken out of the middle of a process, by somebody on her way to the sink.
And there is a second half to it that I like even less. If nobody stays, then nothing ever gets settled, and if nothing gets settled, then the arguing does not stop, and a man who is looking for the place where a claim fails will keep looking as long as the room keeps supplying claims and nobody supplies an answer. Fifty years of us leaving is fifty years of him never once being finished with anything. I have called that a defect in his character since I was about nine.
August of 1996. I was twenty-four and eight months into a marriage everybody had opinions about, and at that table he took my husband’s business plan apart in front of six people and then he said a sentence about me that will not be appearing in here, and I got up and I left the house and I did not come back for two weeks, and I have carried that sentence for thirty years.
Merrill told me in June — after Cody’s boat, when I finally asked somebody — that about ten minutes after I went out that door, Orin said to the room that he had been wrong and that he was going to have to fix it.
Nobody told me. Why would they. A man taking something back is not news in a house where the taking-apart is the event, and it never occurred to one of them that I would want it, and it never occurred to him to say it twice.
What it is to be married to it, in a house with no door worth leaving by and no beans to take in, will have to be told by somebody who lived in that house, and Marcy has not spoken to me about it in nineteen years. And a family and a marriage will not do the same things with an identical silence.
ENTP Cognitive Functions: Where It Stops Being Fun
The first part is the generating and it goes out, not in. The official sequence is extraverted intuition, then introverted thinking, with extraverted feeling third and introverted sensing last, and the wharf has been running that experiment for fifty years.
It is not that he thinks of the other side. The other side arrives, at speed, unbidden, while you are still talking, and it comes whether or not anybody wanted it and whether or not he likes you. The man does not come in a model where it does not.
Which is worth pausing on, because a great deal of what this family has called malice is a man reporting weather. When our father was dying in 2002 and the hospital wanted a decision by Friday, Orin produced, in about ninety seconds, the four ways the plan could go wrong, and two of them happened, and everybody in that corridor wanted to put him through a wall for saying them out loud. He was not undermining our mother. He had them, the way you have a headache.
Second comes the check. Private, unshown, and it is the item this family has had wrong for fifty years. What it tests is whether a claim holds together. Not whether he wins. That is why the phrase is not a dodge — it is a job description, and he has been announcing his job before doing it since he was eleven, and this town has heard a warning shot every single time.
Third comes the room, and he has that, and it is the hardest item in this account to sit with. A twenty-six-year-old crying on a dock in Stonington, and my brother on the rail beside her going through the numbers a second time. He reads a room. He is capable of gentleness inside one. So at my table, on a Sunday, with the beans going cold, the question was never whether he could. He simply did not assess it as being called for.
Fourth is the place where a man’s own conduct is supposed to be stored, and my brother’s is nearly bare. That fact is the mercy and the whole injury at the same time. In fifty-four years he has never once said I told you so to me, and I have been handing him credit for restraint the entire time, and restraint is nowhere in the transaction. He has not got it to say. Which leaves the ledger running one direction: I hold every argument, in order, with the dates on them, and he holds none, and I have spent my life keeping accounts against a man who is not a party to the accounts.
That first marriage came apart in 2004 and I have laid it at my brother’s feet for twenty-two years. Gary stopped me in a parking lot in 2005 and said Orin had had no part in it and that I ought to go hear it from Orin.
I did not believe Gary then. I do not believe him now.
ENTP Personal Growth: The Committee
The growth advice printed for this type says listen more and pick your battles, and I would buy a ticket to watch a person hand my brother a page instructing him to pick his battles.
The only growth in this account belongs to him and it is nineteen years long and it is invisible.
In 2007, the year Marcy left, he got himself appointed to the shellfish conservation committee. Five people, they meet the second Wednesday, they set the flats openings and the take limits and it is the dullest business in this county. He has near-perfect attendance in nineteen years.
He has never spoken at a meeting. Not a motion, not a question, not one word on the record. Nineteen years. I got this from Faye Beal, who has been the clerk the whole time, in my chair, and she said it like it was weather.
I have asked him twice. He says it is a good committee.
I have no idea what that is. I would like it to be a man teaching himself to sit still, and I do not get to have that, because put the question to him and he looks at you the way you would look at somebody asking about a light switch.
Sunday I went over there. He made hash and it was too salty and I did not say so, which is the whole of my growth for this account and I am not claiming a inch more than that.
What I will claim is that I have quit rehearsing. The October auction is coming and there are twenty minutes on the program with my name against them, and for thirty-six years the four minutes have gone in every time, in the same slot, after the raffle. I have written this year’s without them. It is not as good. I have read it out to the mirror twice and I know precisely where it sags and it sags in the place where he used to be.
Somewhere around eight he started in on the harbor committee’s mooring fee schedule and I felt my legs get ready, the way they have since 1981, and there was a bowl on the table that could have gone in.
“Now let me be devil’s advocate here,” he said.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.