I see you everywhere (7 page)

“Suit yourself,” said Clem. She swam after the men, who now sat on a ledge just above the waterline, their legs submerged to the knee. I lay on my stomach and pretended to read, but I was looking down at the water. Though I’d grown up near the ocean, I had never liked going in over my head. I had seen the rock bottom of the river when I leaned over the ledge, yet I knew that depth is always an illusion; those rocks could have been six or twenty feet down. But come on, I told myself. Here, in front of these two charming, brainy men and my charming, Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 41
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invincible sister, was I really going to lie on this rock by myself, reading
Mrs. Dalloway
?

They talked and laughed. About me, perhaps. I couldn’t hear a word because of the hidden waterfall, its steady hiss. Clem gestured wildly, arms waving overhead. Hector smiled at her antics. What story could I have told with such fervor?

I stripped to my bathing suit and sat on the edge. I hate diving because my ears always fill up with water, and this dive was steep. I turned around on all fours and felt for toeholds in the face of the rock. Halfway down, I slipped, scraping my right shin, but I was in the water—which was so cold that my lungs turned to stone. I gasped and clung to the wall beside me. The surface of the river was calm, but my knees were gripped in a taut undertow. I took a deep breath, let go of the rock, and swam as hard as I could. Without lifting my head, I knew I was going nowhere, my stroke too weak to master the current, which seemed to insist that the party was better downstream. When I came up for air, I saw that I was slowly slipping backward, toward the waterfall. I reached out to grab the rock but could find no cracks or ledges. The surface was glassy with slime.

“Hey, you. No big deal, what did I say?” Clem had spotted me. She was grinning. “Come on up here. Fantastic or what?”

I was kicking like crazy, but my upper body was caged in frigid fear.

“Where did
you
take swimming lessons?” I heard my sister call out in jest. “Oh, that’s right.
Dad
taught you.”

My mouth would not form a single word. I saw vaguely that Ralph was frowning, saying something to Clem. She stood up on the ledge and shouted, “You all right?”

All I could do was shake my head. I was still grappling at the rock when I heard her voice again, directly above me. She stood on the edge of the gorge four feet over my head. Then she was kneeling, her dark wet hair hanging down around her face. I could not see her expression. She said, in a low, deliberate voice, the voice of a teacher, “Swim to the middle of the river.”

“No,” I managed to gasp. “No.”

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Julia Glass

“Swim to the middle, Louisa,” she said again, just as calmly, though her voice was louder. “The current is strongest at the edge, where you are.”

“Can’t be,” I forced out. I felt as if I were wearing a medieval corset. My right shin, where I’d scraped it, throbbed with an icy fire. Christ, I thought, all because of a stupid piece of jewelry and an adolescent grudge, I might die. Actually die. I thought, absurdly, of the clear “picture” Clem had mentioned about the life before her. I had no such picture of mine.

“Do what I’m telling you. Now, Louisa.” Later, I would remember this moment with exceptional clarity, how her voice betrayed not a hint of panic. Tuck stood beside her, looking down at me with his eerie ice-blue eyes, smiling and panting. I wondered if I was about to suffer the humiliating relief of being rescued by a dog. I wondered how he would do it, what part of me he would grab in his jaws.

I pushed away with my right foot and hurled myself, more than swam, toward the middle. She had been right. The water unshackled me as I left the edge. The middle of the river, a fissure of noon sun, was placid and warmer, and after treading water for a moment to let my muscles find their purpose, I swam slowly upstream. Clem walked with me, the way Hector had walked beside Ralph and the dogs, and then she climbed down where the ledge came closest to the water, where I had watched her telling her antic story, and she reached out to reel me in. As soon as I was sitting beside her, I started to sob.

“I always knew you were a weakling,” Clem said, rubbing my back with a towel, “but hey.”

I wept into the towel, bent over my lap. Weeping was my only language.

“Seriously,” she said, “the current is strong. We’ve been swimming here for two months. I kind of forgot to warn you, I guess. But you’re okay. Aren’t you?”

By the time we returned to our picnic, the dogs had staked out the lion’s share of the bedspread, and Hector was picking apart his sandwich Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 43
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to give them each a bite of chicken. Ralph put an arm around my shoulders and handed me an open beer. “To immortality,” he said. I sat next to Moe. His hot fur felt glorious against my thigh. When I stroked his neck, he twisted away from Hector and licked my face with abandon.

“Oh my. He’s in love,” said Hector. “He doesn’t do that with everyone.”

That’s when I lost it again, crying uncontrollably and shaking. I saw Clem not knowing what to do. I wanted to be mad at her all over again, for putting me in this shameful spot, but I couldn’t get back there because I had done what she told me to do, and she had been right. Against all instincts, I’d swum to the middle.

“Hey you, you’re okay. You really are,” she said to me, but she sounded less certain in her chiding. Hector wrapped a second towel around my shoulders. I was thinking how if she wanted the cameo, I’d have to let her claim it now, and then I remembered what she said about hatpins on Kilimanjaro.

Kilimanjaro? And it dawned on me: This was the first time in three years I had an urgent question to ask her, a question to which I really wanted the answer.

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1983

About the only thing we had in common that summer was solitude. Or so I was led to believe. Mine was a solitude of retreat and longing, fraught with wishes and sighs—but Clem’s I imagined as sure and intrepid, a flight from everything soft about civilization. I was copyediting ruminations on art. Clem was counting seals. As usual, we exchanged letters. We communicate best by mail. On the phone, we argue. In person, we tend to become sarcastic. Our letters, though, have a touch of romantic collusion. I had fled my fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn to house-sit for Mars and Leah Katz. I hardly knew these people—they were friends of friends, jetting off to romp in the lavender fields of Provence—but I was desperately glad to slip into their easy, aesthetically cushioned life. The Katzes’ house, a small Victorian with fuchsias lining the verandah, sits snug on a hill near Long Island Sound in one of those Connecticut enclaves whose elegance is tainted only by the hourly hurtle—distant yet always within earshot—of the trains to Grand Central Station. From the master bedroom in the turret, I could see a good stretch of sawtooth coast, a boat-specked horizon, and the chocolate haze over New York City. Until recently, Mars was the chef at a famous restaurant in New Canaan. Leah writes gardening books. They were on a two-month sabbatical and had left me a beach pass, a three-speed bike, and ten pages of instructions: she for her lush thirsty flowers, he for his hutches of rabbits, pheasants, and quail. My only regret about leaving the city was that I had fallen in love.

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So there I was, sitting plush, while Clem, explorer that she is and always will be, made do in a Quonset hut on the coast of Labrador, someplace so desolate it did not merit so much as a flea dot in my cinder block of an atlas. Her mail went to a post office twenty miles away; a fisherman named Spider brought it up by boat, twice a week or so. He brought groceries as well; in general, he was paid to keep an eye on Clem. But the dangers were nil, she wrote. Her routine was placid, the climate benign. Nothing like the time she’d spent in Barrow: three months of hellish cold, predatory bears, fracturing ice floes, drunks with tempers and knives. There she had packed a shotgun. Here, she packed a logbook, a tuna-fish sandwich, a pair of binoculars, and a tube of Bain de Soleil. Out on the water, the seals made excellent companions. At first because they were curious, and then because it amused them, they followed Clem’s boat. Friendly, loud, demanding, they yammered at her all day long.
Before you know it, you’re talking back. You say what you have to say. They
say what they have to say. Nobody contradicts anybody, nobody gets political.
Nobody has any THEORIES. Peace! They have a fine sense of humor, these
guys, they even do impersonations. This one bull, I kid you not, does over-
the-hill Frank Sinatra. But try to reach out and touch him—vamoose, right
down under. Do you know about selkies? Half woman, half seal. I get it now,
how the Irish believe in that myth. It’s the look in their eyes, like they
KNOW you.

Clem was paid by an international wildlife commission whose name I could never quite remember. Systematically, she was to roam her assigned stretch of coast—on foot; by jeep; in some unobtrusive jalopy of a boat—

and tally the various species, both living and dead. An epidemic had struck, killing them off by the hundreds. Clem’s mentor, Kurt, is a marine pathologist at Woods Hole, one of those dashing bearded types you’re always seeing on
Nova,
valiantly rescuing lost baby whales. Having isolated the virus, he was collaborating on a vaccine. He’d persuaded someone in Washington to foot the bill for inoculation trials. To me, all this fuss seemed bizarre, even improper (money to vaccinate
seals
? what about cancer? what about children starving all over the world?), but I’d met Kurt, so I saw it all clearly. . . . Kurt, on his high scientific steed, Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 46 46

Julia Glass

writes to Ted Kennedy, explains how all this arctic seal decimation will have a domino effect, threatening the lobster crops of Maine and Massachusetts. Ted is aghast: What, no more thermidor, no more Newburg, no more
sauce diable
at the Edgartown Yacht Club? Out comes the federal checkbook. Strom Thurmond’s too busy to notice; he’s hard at work trying to vaporize the NEA. How Clem saw such beauty in all that tundra, how she could live there and keep her wits about her, I couldn’t imagine. And how she could abandon Luke—another mystery. Clem’s boyfriend was one I’d have kept in my sights. He was smart, tender, strong. A little moody, but how close can you come to perfection? Luke had been devoted to Clem for over three years, since their sophomore year in college. He had begun to talk about marriage. She didn’t want to lose him, she told me, so she answered his proposal with a speech that went something like this: “Sure I love you, don’t be absurd, but I won’t know if this is really
it
for years. Maybe not till I’m forty. If I live that long. It’s only fair to warn you.” Privately, she worried about Luke’s ingrained Catholicism, never mind that he went to Mass only when he stayed with his parents.
Once they inject you with all
that superstition, practically straight into your marrow, you are theirs for life.
Antibodies to common sense,
Clem wrote to me after they’d been going out together for a year.
Listen to this. Luke told me he grew up thinking that if
the communion wafer touched his teeth, he’d get struck down dead by a holy
thunderbolt. Is that sick or what? They tell you this stuff when you’re five
years old!

But maybe faith, faith of the lowercase variety, gets injected along with all that fear of holy thunderbolts. Because Luke had stuck it out all this time, though Clem was as slippery as one of her seals. Just before I left for Connecticut, he called me up in a funk, all the way from Miami. I was amazed. I was thrilled. “I’m sorry,” he said right off, “I’m hammered, okay, or I wouldn’t be calling, but everything I’m telling you is true, okay? If there was a decent bridge around here, I’d be standing on the edge looking down. That’s how crazy she makes me, that sister of yours.” Luke is a graduate student in engineering. Bridges are his main obsession, his passion (aside from my sister).

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I said, “Then I’m glad you called.”

He said, “I could kill her.”

“Well, I’ve known that feeling myself,” I said.

He’d paid a surprise visit to Woods Hole. Clem, he discovered, had taken up with a guy from a construction site who whistled at her legs. They had been hanging out together on Clem’s front porch when Luke drove up.

“Maybe they’re just friends,” I lied. I knew about this guy. Clem said he was funny, uncomplicated, strong. She had a weakness for strong.

“She was sitting in his lap,” said Luke. “He looked like a frigging troglodyte.”

Clem had apologized to Luke after sending the troglodyte home, but she also told Luke he was a fool. It was nothing, a passing fancy. (That was true.) Anyway, where was
he
? Way the hell down in Florida. If he made a scene, she warned, this was the end. Luke spent the night in the Trailways shelter across from the ferry slips, then left. “Hysterical. She called me hysterical. What goes on in that mind of hers,
what.
” He’d called me, I realized, because he needed calming down. In our family, he calls me the Rational One. My dad’s the Dreamy One, Mom the Colorful One. Clem’s the Wild One—when she’s not the Heartbreaker, the Ballbreaker, the Nemesis, the Bitch on Wheels.

“I wish I could answer that, Luke. I think we’re friends, but we’re not, well, not exactly soul mates. Historically, we’re kind of like England and France.”

“But you
know
her.”

“Better than you?” I said. “Come on. And what goes on inside her head? Who knows? Something way out, I have to say. Something very Robinson Crusoe.”