Sea Creatures (9 page)

I pulled the Thermos from my bag and set it in front of him, and Graham crossed his arms and turned back to watching the band. The waitress stumbled over his legs and shot him a glare, which he ignored.

The set was in full swing, the lead singer sweating over a cluster of dancers. I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, which I took as a cue—an excuse, really—to leave. I leaned in to Graham, making my voice as lighthearted as possible. “Do you want to go when we go?”

“Let's finish the set.” He brought his hand to his chest and rubbed in a circle. “
Please
.”

A wave of fury rose inside me. I blinked it back. It wasn't unlike Graham to push, with what I considered a certain brutishness, the issue of Frankie's talking. But it was unlike him to be snide. Frankie watched us, then stared down at his lap.

Graham grit his teeth a little and his eyes jumped from the band to the table and back. I glared at the back of his head. Finally, he turned to me, his mouth tight. “All right. I'm sorry, okay?”

I gathered our things. The set ended, and my father made his way over and lifted Frankie into his arms. “You're leaving?” he said. To Graham, he said, “You, too,
amigo
?”

“You look so handsome up there,
mi amor
,” said Lidia.

“It's just a little smoky,” I said to my father.

He shrugged. “It's not everyone's cup of tea.”

I wanted to say:
There are things in the world that have nothing to do with you.
I bit my tongue.

“I've got an early morning,” said Graham. This made no sense, knowing Graham, but he was making an effort.

By the time we'd made our way to the car, the band had started up again, and from the distance the music was clearer and more melodic, with breathing room between the instruments. We lingered before getting in the car—I was trying to decide on the best route home—and above us a streetlamp buzzed on, though there was only the slightest tinge of evening in the air. Graham sat on the trunk of the car and pulled Frankie up beside him. My eye caught the pale, tender swell of Graham's collarbone. The warm evening sunlight gave his hair a silver-gold sheen. Every time I hardened my heart to him, something softened it again. He'd said he was sorry, and I believed him.

To Frankie, he said, “I just wish you would talk to us, buddy.”

Frankie leaned into his shoulder, scraping at a scar on his knee. Graham pulled him close.

“He will,” I said to Graham. I'd said it so many times by that point, the words had lost all promise.

Graham swung himself to the ground and lifted Frankie, then settled him into his car seat. As he came back around to me—I was a few feet away, digging in my bag for keys—a sharp popping noise came from above. I ducked instinctively, then looked up. Along the trunk of my car were curved fragments of glass, and above us the bulb of the streetlamp was gone—why this happened, I have no idea—and in its casing remained only a single threatening shard. Graham stared down at his hand. Lightly embedded in his palm was a spear of moon-colored glass.

“My God,” I said.

He pulled the glass from his flesh. There was a thin bloody thread left behind in his palm. He said, “Sometimes I don't know why you love me.”

“Just be nice,” I said. “That's all I want.”

He shook his head absently, like this wasn't the right answer. He said, “Do you ever feel like nothing will be good again?”

 

THE LAST TIME GRAHAM AND
I argued about whether to have a child had not been terribly different from the previous times, except that he'd finally allowed me to change his mind. I was just home from a baby shower I'd thrown with two friends from college. The head hostess, my old roommate Sara Brink, mother to ten-month-old twins, came up with the idea that we hostesses should fashion baby bumps from throw pillows, to wear under our clothes. As the only one from our group who had never been pregnant—the other hostess, Meg Pritchard, was expecting her first—I didn't want to do it. But I was wary of being the grown child, the one for whom the others must bend, so I went along. I put on the bump when I got to the restaurant and didn't look at myself in the mirror. I didn't know, then, what awaited me along the path to Frankie, but maybe I had a premonition, because it was impossible for me to foresee pregnancy as a happy time. At best I saw it as a rite of passage—unpleasant but satisfying. I intended to do it only once. This was something I'd said again and again to Graham, who didn't wholly believe me. He believed pregnancy and babies were some sort of addiction, and while he could vaguely stomach the idea of having one, more than one was unimaginable. The reasons he gave never varied: his age, his still-tenuous career, his sleep. This should have been a clue to me of his seriousness, even as my motley counterarguments scattered over us like buckshot.

I drove home from the shower without removing the pillow beneath my clothes. Graham was on the back deck. I stood in front of him until he noticed the bump.

“I'm pregnant,” I said.

His eyebrows came together. “What's wrong?”

“I want a baby.”

He frowned, but he didn't look irritated; he looked resigned.

I said, “No, that's not true. I don't care about having a baby. I want to be a mother.”

It occurred to me, standing there in blotted makeup, that I should call my mother and share with her this morsel of gratitude, which was just occurring to me in that moment: that I wanted to have a baby because I'd so loved having her for a mother, that the two things were inextricable. It had been almost a year since her diagnosis and I'd visited six times. Air travel alone was eating at our savings, not to mention the time spent without paying clients. The possibility of making my mother a grandmother before she died—these were not the explicit terms of her illness yet, but the writing was on the wall—was so seductive, so galvanic, that the alternative seemed monstrous.

Graham closed his book. “I don't know if I can keep having this conversation.”

“Please,” I said. I kneeled. It had rained that morning and the wood of the deck was cool and smelled like a forest. “Please.”

He sighed. “Sometimes I think it would be something. Me, a father?”

Could I picture it, even then? Could I imagine him having the patience or flexibility or focus? Did I realize these traits would be paramount? We seemed equally unlikely parents to me—this was my greatest miscalculation. Most people have children and part of them expands, another part contracts. We call this growth. We call it reordering priorities. I probably shouldn't admit it, but in my head I liken becoming a parent to cancer, maybe because one changed my life on the heels of the change brought by the other: it's this small thing inside you that swells as the baby grows, until it takes over. You can sort of remember what it was like before—maybe you vaguely recall a certain uncluttered pattern to your days and conversations and thoughts—but that ease of existence you once felt, that personal comfort, no longer matters.

I believed at the time that my inability to picture us as parents was a failure of imagination. We needed faith, I thought.

“I can see it,” I lied.

He stood and put a palm squarely on my head. “I hate making you unhappy.”

“Then don't.”

His mouth was a thin line. “Damned if I do, damned if I don't.” He took my hand, and pulled me inside to our bedroom.

7

SALLY LIVED IN A LARGE,
shoddily built home with high ceilings and leaky windows, a formal foyer and a screened pool and a Jacuzzi tub as large as the
Lullaby
's main berth. Between her house and the tightly wedged houses of her neighbors was an umbilical knot of roaring air conditioners. Frankie and I arrived for dinner two weeks after I started working at Stiltsville, and the moment we stepped into her chilly foyer, Sally handed me the number of her pediatrician. I'd asked for it on the phone earlier that week, but she'd been called away before digging it up. I'd never mentioned Frankie's speech problem to her, at least not in a way that was anything but offhand and unconcerned. I'd never wanted to have that conversation.

“She's sort of a ballbuster,” Sally said as I slipped the paper into my bag. “Just ignore that part.”

The walls of Sally's house had the chalky, overly smooth look of new construction covered in gray primer—they'd never been painted. At knee height, next to a hall tree heaped with clothes and books and beach towels, the wall was covered in concentric circles of lavender crayon.

She caught me glancing. “We're pretty shabby here,” she said. “Forgive us.”

I waved a hand. “I know a bit about shabby.”

A shriek came from the living room. “Chaos,” she said. She took the bottle of wine I'd brought and smoothed down her butter-colored sheath dress with one hand. She was the kind of mom who wore dresses, even if her only plans included hanging around the house with her kids, maybe hitting the grocery store.

Frankie peeked out from behind me, and Sally issued a squeal and pulled him into her arms, offering him juice, asking if he wanted a cup with a straw or a cup with dinosaurs on it. I followed them deeper into the house. It was a boisterous house, and not only because of the boys who dashed around the sunken living room, but also because of Sally's high-pitched outbursts, her generosity of spirit. I felt a pang of envy: I would never have a boisterous home. I'd been in other such homes, back in Illinois. There was crayon on the walls of those homes, too, and unfolded laundry heaped on sagging armchairs, and, out of sight, a maze of messy bedrooms and bathrooms. These houses wore me out. I wasn't fastidious, but I liked things to mostly be in their places, and with so many kids and so much space, these homes often reminded me of dollhouses that had been shaken like snow globes, leaving coloring books on the kitchen floor, exercise equipment in the entryway, a tricycle in the living room, a stack of mail on the coffee table. Big families made great neighbors, I'd noticed; strange kids stepped through the back door at all hours, then their parents came with a six-pack and requested help moving heavy furniture, or offered use of the pool or trampoline—and this, too, inspired in me that simultaneous discomfort and envy. I didn't like it about myself, but even as I wished I were the type of person who presided over this kind of casual, friendly, open home, I wanted people to call first. Whenever Lidia rang the cowbell at the
Lullaby
, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, even if I wasn't at all unhappy to see her.

I was inflexible—this was the crux of it. And to have a big family, to have crayon marks on the never-painted walls, one needed to be flexible. It was something my mother had told me once, though I can no longer recall the context. “Georgia, if there were one thing I would want for you, it's that you'd just go with the flow,” she'd said. This was before I'd had Frankie, but I'd filed away not only the comment itself, but also what went unspoken: we want more for our children than they manage to become. By the time I moved back to Miami, I'd gotten a taste of this wanting more, myself.

All three of Sally's boys were home. She'd said on the phone that the older two had been in camps in the morning, baseball for one and basketball for another, and the third had been in preschool. That afternoon they had clearly spent a while wreaking havoc in the house. Sally wouldn't be the type to structure the hours. She wouldn't guide them toward an activity or participate in one with them. She would grab a book and camp out in a comfortable chair where all the kids were in her sightline, and at four o'clock she would pour her first glass of wine.

The kids had made a fort from the cushions of the sectional sofa. One boy, red-haired and freckled like Sally, with her husband Stanley's puggish nose, sprang up from beneath a cushion. “Who are you?” he said loudly.

“
Manners
,” said Sally.

I gave the boy my name—I had only ever met the oldest, and that was when he was just a baby—and told him I was an old friend of his mom's. Before I could introduce Frankie, the boy ducked back into his fort. It rumbled. The youngest boy was at the dining table, which filled an open space off the living room, adjacent to the swinging door to the kitchen. The boy—also red-haired—was quietly coloring. Sheets of paper littered his end of the table. He didn't look up.

Sally handed me a glass of wine. “This is the part of the day when we do whatever we want,” she said. She stooped beside Frankie and looked at him frankly. “What do you want to do?”

Frankie pointed at the dining table.

“Go on,” she said, swatting his rump. “Carson! Share your colors!”

Carson watched Frankie climb onto a chair, then pushed a few sheets of paper and a plastic container of crayons his way. Frankie got to work.

“And what do you want to do?” said Sally to me.

“I love your home,” I said.

She led me to a pair of loungers just beyond the living room's sliding glass doors. The air conditioner was on, but still she left the doors open and closed only the screens. The house gusted mouthfuls of cold air against my bare arms and moist cheeks.

“Stanley's picking up Chinese food,” Sally said, tucking her legs beneath her. I could see Frankie through the screens, his dark head beside Carson's coppery one. The older boys whooped and one whined for his mother. She didn't seem to hear him. “Oh, I've got to tell you—you remember that cunt, Alice Ferguson?”

Alice Ferguson had been a year ahead of us in high school. Once, during a rare conversation, she'd told me that her boyfriend's penis was the size of a McDonald's French fry. I'd been horrified, less by the comparison than by the revelation itself.

“I don't remember her being
that
, exactly,” I said.

“Anyway, she stops by my office this morning—she's starting a party-planning business—and get this: she's driving an Aston Martin convertible.”

“Good lord,” I said.

“I know.”

“But who cares?”

“I know,” she said. “No kids.”

“What?”

“Alice—no kids.”

“Don't be mean.”

“I'm not. It's just, you know, the water heater broke last week, and the roof's leaking in Tuck's closet, and Maxwell needs his teeth fixed, and Stanley works every goddamned weekend.”

We looked inside, where the two older kids were sparring with wrapping paper rolls. The oldest had his father's dark hair and wide cheekbones. His face was a little menacing until he smiled. As we watched, he trounced his brother and they started vying for head locks. I wondered if Sally would do something to break them up, but she just turned back to me.

“But then there's the love,” she said.

“The love,” I agreed.

She slapped my knee. “So you're headed to the Keys?”

This was a plan Graham had hatched just a few days earlier. There had been a vacation domino effect on his team at work: one of the lead investigators needed a day off, so his assistant took that day as well, and if they weren't working, then Graham's lead couldn't really work, so he took off, and so on. I'd gotten the feeling from the way Graham announced it—less like it was a vacation day than a lottery win—that days off, in this job, would be in short supply. I'd known that Graham's new position would involve an adjustment, though I'd underestimated the extent. In Illinois, he'd been home most afternoons, grading papers or preparing lectures in his study, the heavy double doors open to the rest of the house. Some days I'd set Frankie to play on the plush rug beneath Graham's desk and use that time to cook dinner or run an errand. Back when I still had appointments with clients, Graham had been available to watch Frankie, even if I had to drop him off at the college. It wasn't that Graham hadn't been working hard when he worked at home—he had been, relentlessly, which is one reason the tenure decision was so tough to take—but having his body in the house had lightened my load.

Without thinking about it, I'd assumed the position at Rosenstiel would be similar. Graham had warned me there would be hours at the lab in addition to the classroom, hours in committee meetings and writing grants and traveling, that research in his field was a team effort, and the team had to be present to work. But I'd been so desperate to leave Illinois that I'd heard only what I wanted to hear.

We were headed to the Dry Tortugas to kayak and camp for two nights. Frankie would stay with Lidia and my father, which worried me a little. They would heap on the love and attention, sure, but would they hold his hand when crossing the street? Would they remember to buckle his car seat? I'd heard somewhere that most accidents happen when the parents aren't around. I hadn't wanted to be the kind of mother who was never apart from her kid, not for his sake and not for my own. Somehow, this is exactly what I'd become.

“We leave Friday,” I said.

“Before Carson was born, Stanley and I went to Sanibel for the weekend. All we did was talk about the boys and go to bed early, but it was nice.”

“Three seems like a lot, I'll say.”

“It's a lot.” She lay back and closed her eyes. From inside came calls of victory from Tuck and whines from Maxwell. “This is my favorite part of the day,” said Sally, which made me laugh lightly. “No, really. Stanley will be here soon and he's all rules and table manners, and I can't exactly blame him. In the morning it's dressing and brushing teeth and finding sneakers and getting out the door. At night it's cleaning up and baths and maybe, if we're lucky, Stan and I will stay up for a quickie.” She sighed. “I remind myself every day to enjoy them, but then I forget again.”

Carson had been tough to come by, same as Frankie. For both of us, there had been a regimen of pills and shots, disappointment month after month. Frankie was my fourth pregnancy in sixteen months. The first had made it to fifteen weeks, though the others had been briefer. After the third, Graham had lost the little heart he'd brought to the process. He'd begged me to stop trying. Then one night we found ourselves having regular, old-fashioned sex for no reason except boredom and friskiness. No one could have been more surprised than I to find myself without a period two weeks later. Just a week after that, Sally called with her news—she was halfway through by that point, but hadn't told anyone until she'd started to show. We didn't congratulate each other until each boy took breath.

When Frankie was a baby, I'd overheard a largely pregnant woman in the waiting room of my doctor's office, talking to another woman about anticipating her second. “They say the first one makes you a mother and the second one makes you a family,” she'd said, glassy-eyed. I'd glared at her back as she'd waddled off after a nurse. Then what the fuck are we? I'd thought.

I'd been pregnant and I'd given birth, but I'd not gained admittance to that club of happy pregnant people planting and pruning their families like window boxes. To have considered another child would have been to consider another string of miscarriages. It wasn't a question of whether or not the eventual healthy child, if one were possible, might be worth it. It was a matter of sanity, survival. It was also a matter of trying to be a person who is sated by what she has, ending the cycle of wanting more, more, more. When I looked around, it always seemed I was alone in this way of thinking. Sally would never have asked if I was planning to have another. Everyone asked—even my father, who'd known about the miscarriages—but not Sally. Needless to say, Graham and I had never broached the subject; to have done so would have been, on my part, a violation of our tacit agreement.

At the dining table, a small negotiation was under way, an exchange of one color for another. Then both boys had their heads down again.

Sally saw me watching them. “Carson's my sensitive one. Late walker, late talker. They're making noise about holding him back from kindergarten.”

“Really?”

She shifted toward me, gesturing with her elegant fingers. “There's this thing he does. He takes a black crayon or marker, and he makes these little loops all over a sheet of paper, like a sort of free-form spiderweb.” She waited to see if I understood. “Then he meticulously—
meticulously
—shades each tiny section with a different color. He'll do it over and over, for more than an hour at a time. He's probably doing it right now. He needs the largest pack of crayons just to finish one, and even then he gets upset because he has to repeat a color once or twice. His teacher is alarmed. She called us in. She kept using the words
obsessive
and
compulsive
. Stanley was like, ‘What's the problem? He's making nets to catch the light.' That's what Carson calls it, since he learned about the colors on the spectrum of light:
nets to catch the light
.”

“It sounds beautiful,” I said. I thought of the fan coral I'd seen just that morning, on a swim with Frankie and Charlie out at Stiltsville. Crooked jade hollows peeked between each ragged tooth of the coral, like rough sparkling gems.

“We have a few framed. Maybe we shouldn't encourage him, but he's going to be who he's going to be, I figure. Who gives a shit when he starts kindergarten?”