Envious Moon

I
confess that sometimes I forget what she looks like. This upsets me. It doesn't last for long, though, and lately I've developed a trick. I anchor myself in her freckles, those lovely freckles that covered her cheeks, and then I see her eyes, and her hair, and soon all of her comes into focus. Dr. Mitchell says this is a good sign, my forgetting. It means it's time to move on, Anthony. You're still a young man, he says. The funny thing is that at first they spend all this time having you remember everything. Go over every detail and then suddenly they don't want to talk about it anymore. They want you to think about the future. They'll tell you they believe in memory but the truth is they don't. They want you to erase all that now. It's such a big world out there, Anthony, they say. It could all be yours again. It could all be yours.

I
was born in Galilee, Rhode Island, that small spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. My father used to say our house faced Portugal, which is where he was from. My mother, too, though they met in Galilee. My father's name was Rodrigo and he was a fisherman. My mother's name was Berta and for years she cooked at a small college in Westerly. I was an only child. There was one who came after me, a little sister, Marta, but she lived for less than a week. I was two when that happened so I don't remember it. But I know it had a strong effect on both my parents. They told me later that I spent most of her one week of life just staring at her in her crib. Every year we celebrated her birthday as if she had been a normal sister, someone I had known.

We lived in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of small bungalows built by fishermen for fishermen. Houses painted bright colors but built on cinder blocks with small fenced-in yards. Almost everyone who lived in Galilee made their living from the sea and in our neighborhood everyone was also Portuguese. My earliest memories are all about the ocean. We had only a small sandy yard and so the harbor and the commer
cial wharves, the beaches and the inlets, the tidal streams and rivers, were my playground. My father fished on commercial boats and was often gone for as long as a month at a time during the season. My mother rose early to cook breakfast for college students. My best friend, Victor Perez, who lived one street away, and I were our own keepers. As small boys we swam in the tidal river on warm days, leaping off the bridge that crossed it. We fished off the rocky beach and by seven I could gut a fish by myself. We were from poor families and were expected to work, so we did what we could. We delivered newspapers and shoveled snow in the winter. We washed down decks of boats. Stacked wood. Dug clams out of the tidal flats and brought them in buckets down to Teagan's Seafood. And when my father was in between trips, he'd bring the two of us out at night on his small skiff to fish for blues and stripers. He'd lean against the gunwale and roll his own cigarettes and teach us everything he knew about fishing. He liked to talk and he liked to tell stories. My father was tall and handsome with thick hair and a prominent mustache. He had a quick temper but also a quick wit and he was my hero. Victor's too, I think. Victor's father drank and Victor spent as little time as he could at home. He was always at my house and I considered him a brother. As did my parents. And those times on the skiff are some of my most treasured memories. I wanted to be a man like my father. Roll my own cigarettes and wear my jeans tucked into mud boots. Have strong veiny forearms and a good mustache. Piercing brown eyes. Tell stories like he did.

T
he summer I turned ten my father got a new job on the
Mavis
, a swordboat. Swordfishing was the most lucrative of the commercial fishing jobs and that was a good summer and he made good money. We ate steak on nights he returned and listened to Red Sox games on the radio. The happiest nights of my life were the nights when he came home. We never knew when to expect him because a fishing boat only returns when it is full of fish or out of fuel. But somehow I could sense when he was on land. I don't know how to describe it and maybe it was just luck. But he was never able to surprise us. I'd stand in the front yard and watch the street and think, he's going to turn the corner now. It was like I was willing him to be there. And on those moments when I was right, I'd see him in the distance in the summer heat, at first only a figure outlined against the hot day. But there was no mistaking him, his walk. I'd run out to the street to him, yelling his name and when I got close, he'd stop and wait for me. He'd hold his arms out wide and smile. I'd jump into his arms and smell his cigarettes and all the fish he had caught. His sweat. He'd hold me up and kiss my cheeks and then put me down and tell me to get my mother. And it
didn't matter how tired he was, we'd still spend hours kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the road. He'd tell me stories about life at sea. I wanted nothing more than to be on a boat with him. To learn to fish as he did and sometimes when I told him this, his mood changed. You won't be a fisherman, Anthony, he said.

My father always took the time to tell me how proud he was of me. Especially with how I did in school. I was a straight-A student from elementary school through junior high. They put me in a college-track program. I was the only son of a fisherman in those classes. That made my father prouder than anything. He taped my report cards to the refrigerator and he told all the men he worked with how smart his Anthony was. He used to tell me how I was going to go to a big college and then leave Galilee. I didn't like when he said this because I could not imagine leaving Galilee. He always said I was going to go to New York, and live in a big house and drive a nice car and marry a pretty woman and have kids who had a better life than I had. It should be easier for each generation, he said. That's our job as parents. I wanted to ask him: but what if I don't want to leave Galilee? What's wrong with my life? What if I want nothing more than to be like you? To fish with other men and when on land to kick a soccer ball with my son and eat steaks and listen to baseball?

But I never said these things to him. I knew how happy my report cards made him. I knew how pleased he was when my eighth-grade teacher, Mr. Loomis, called my parents to tell them that I was reading on a college level already. He told them that I could do whatever I wanted to do, and that college was within my sights if I kept working at it.

In 1984, I turned fourteen. This was in July and my father
was on the
Mavis
and they were fishing a seam in a roiling sea at night. It was their fourth night in a row and they pulled sword after sword and even with the high seas, to a man they did not wish to be anywhere else. At the rate they were going, each crewman might walk away with five grand. My father and another fisherman were at the bait table. They stood across from each other and as the line unfurled from the spool they took squid off the table and baited them on the big hooks. It was repetitive and hard work as there was no slowing down the line. But my father was a good fisherman and he was especially good at slapping the bait up there and catching it solid. Later other fishermen would tell me he almost never wasted a single hook.

At one point the men on the other side of the deck doing the butchering called for help, and the man across from my father left. My father was all alone and normally this would not have mattered since he was certainly fast enough to keep up on his own. But in the roiling sea the boat lurched suddenly to port and my father was thrown forward with the squid in his hand. The hook meant for the squid drove through the part of his palm where the thumb met the forefinger. In the whip of the wind whatever cries he might have made were drowned out. He was swept into the black sea.

If he had not been hooked so solidly, they may never have found him. They pulled him out of the icy Atlantic like a fish.

That night men from the co-op came to the house and I woke when I heard my mother's grief. It was a sound like no other. In the days that followed, everything slowed down. The house was always full of visitors and our small dining room table was covered with more food than we could ever eat. They held a wake at O'Brien's Funeral Home, in the small upstairs room they used for the poor people. The fishermen and their wives
all came to pay their respects, and the fishermen looked like men who had no business being inside. I stood in the corner, and no one paid any attention to me, which was good because I refused to take my eyes off my father's body. My mother told me his soul would rise to heaven and I didn't want to miss it. I thought it would look like candle smoke, floating toward the ceiling. Though I didn't see anything. Later I figured it must have risen while he was still in the ocean.

After everyone had left, my mother kneeled in front of my father and said her good-byes. She wore black from head to toe and I remember that she had a run up one leg of her stockings. My mother spoke in Portuguese and she spoke in English and the words were meant for my father and not for me. But I knew, even at that young age I knew, that the words she spoke were words of love.

She spoke for a long while. And while she whispered to him she reached up and pushed her hands through his thick hair. She cupped his lifeless face in her hands. And that night, for the first time, I saw my parents as separate people. As Berta and as Rodrigo, a man and a woman who had loved one another. And I knew that the sea had taken my father. That the sea took many things. But that it could not take their love. Even after he was gone, the love remained. It was in the upstairs room of the funeral home that night. And for as long as I stayed in the small bungalow, it was in that house. I saw it in my mother's eyes.

After the funeral, I told my mother I was a man now and she didn't laugh at me. I said I would go to sea, and she said, “There will be plenty of time for that.”

We went on. In the years that followed I grew tall and strong like my father. I had his curly hair and his big brown eyes. I hung around the docks and got to know the boats and the men.
In the summers, I took what work I could to prove myself. I learned how to tie leaders and how to make lobster traps. And when I turned sixteen, against my mother's objections and the objections of my teachers, I left school. Two of my teachers even came to the house to try to talk to my mother and me. They said I was making a huge mistake. That in two years if I kept studying that lots of colleges would be interested in me. My mother agreed with them but I said, we don't have any money. Keep your grades up, Anthony, they said, and the money will be there. They said it like the money would just appear out of nowhere. I told them I needed to fish. But that I would work on my G.E.D. when I was home and we would see what happened. Berta didn't talk to me for a few days and I took a job on a boat that jigged for cod. She acted as if by leaving school a part of me had died, which I suppose now it had.

Six months later I would join a swordboat. It was as close to my father as I would ever come.

D
uring the season, I worked as often as I could. I crewed on the
Lorrie Anne
, a good boat for the fleet. I worked like a dog when at sea and at home I had a little change in my pocket. I lived with my mother still but Victor had come to a breaking point with his own father and had managed to get his own place, a studio apartment on Main Street. It was above a seasonal clam shack and in the summer the smell of fried food filtered through his windows all day. But he had a good landing on the wooden staircase in the back and on warm days we could sit out there in beach chairs and smoke cigarettes and look across the road to the harbor and the men working on the wharves. Victor got a job at O'Brien's Funeral Home, which was an odd job until you realized that the only things around here were death and fishing. Victor had never wanted to fish and I figured he was afraid of the sea and I never said anything about it. Many men were afraid of the sea and there was much to be afraid of. Victor was short and stocky, built like a fire hydrant. He had a new mustache in those days that he was always combing. I gave him a hard time about it but he said I was just jealous because I couldn't grow one. Which was true. Even
today, my face is almost as smooth as a baby's.

When I wasn't on the North Atlantic, we'd hang out at Victor's apartment or out on the jetty where we could watch the boat traffic coming through the breakwater. If we were lucky one of the older fishermen would buy us some beer to drink. Sometimes we'd go to the mall in Westerly and get something to eat and just walk around. Once in a while, on warm days in the fall and the spring, we'd drive to Providence and sit on the benches on Thayer Street and watch the college girls walk by in their new clothes. They never so much as gave us the time of day, two olive-skinned boys in hooded sweatshirts. We loved to look at them; how pretty they were with their long hair, but it bothered me they didn't acknowledge our stares. I tried to explain this to Victor but he didn't get it.

“Tony,” he said. “What do you care? They're rich girls.”

And I knew he was right, they were rich white girls, and we were a couple of Portuguese, but I couldn't get it out of my head.

I also did something when we sat on the bench that I never told anyone about, not even Victor. Sometimes I'd see a particular girl, and it didn't have anything to do with what she looked like. They might be blond or brunette, occasionally really pretty, other times more plain. It was more a way they carried themselves that caused me to pick them out. The way they walked, the way they stood, how they looked all around, all of it suggesting to me a sadness hidden from the rest of the world. I was always attracted to sad girls, even before I met her. And when I picked out this particular girl, in my mind I imagined our whole lives together. And while I pictured different things, one image returned over and over again. It was a bright summer day and this girl was in the small yard in front
of our house in Galilee. She wore an old sundress and sandals and she had planted flowers and was on her knees tending to them. Her hair was tied up behind her head but one lone strand swung across her forehead. Her hands were covered with dirt and while she worked she sometimes touched her face and there were smudges of dirt from this on her cheeks. She was completely engaged in what she was doing and had no idea she was being watched. I stood in the road and studied her. Over my shoulder was my oilskin bag and I was weary from three weeks at sea. She wasn't expecting me because there was no way to know precisely when I would be back. I would watch her as long as I could, until that moment when she became aware of my gaze, that moment when she looked up and saw me standing there. Then the smile started in her eyes, and quickly moved down her face to her mouth. It took over all of her. She would rise to her feet and wipe her hands on her old sundress, not caring about the streaks she had left on it. She'd run across the small sandy yard then, through the metal gate and out to the road. I'd wait until she reached me before I let my bag slide off my shoulder and hit the ground. I'd smell like the floor of the fish cannery but she wouldn't care less. She'd leap into my arms and I'd spin her, her legs off the ground, while her kisses rained onto my neck.