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Authors: Samantha Hunt

The Seas (10 page)

BOOK: The Seas
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“Oh.” I say. “Did you?’

“I did. Yes. I’m sorry. I did.”

“I don’t give a fuck,” I say and stand to leave, but the word “fuck” has lowered a ceiling making these certain strata in the kitchen’s invisible air even denser than before. I swat the air, trying to get it behind me but instead I end up spilling my mother’s tea into her lap. Which makes her scream. I didn’t mean to do it.

“I’m sorry, Momma.”

“It was an accident,” she says and goes upstairs to lie down to put a cool towel on the burn. She is in her bed and I bring her some ointment. I bring her a cup of tea.

“Don’t be scared of me, please,” I say to her.

“Shh,” she says. “It was an accident,” she says and takes the cup of tea from me. “Sit here,” she says and pats the corner of her bed, right up close to her. I sit down. “What’s making you so sad?” she asks me.

I lift my shoulders up to my ears to say, “I don’t know” or, “Don’t ask me” without actually having to say either.

“Did something happen with Jude?” she asks.

“No,” I say. “That is the problem. Nothing ever happens with Jude.”

“I see,” she say. “Well nothing happened between me and Jude either, if that’s what you thought. If that’s why you spilled tea on me.”

“It was an accident.”

“I know. I know,” she says.

Then I tell her, “Last night I was in the bath and I tried to speak to Dad. I told him, ‘Jude is a stone.’”

“Your father’s dead,” she says and bites her lip. Then asks, “What’d he say?”

“He said, ‘If Jude is a stone then he should sink like one.’ So I let the water out of the tub.” I turn toward her. “I don’t want to be the mermaid who kills Jude, Mom.”

“Oh,” she says in a voice that sounds like the voice of a mother whose daughter just broke something, a piece of china or crystal and she is trying not to get mad about it. But in this instance though the thing that my mother believes is broken is me.

SCIENTOLOGY EXPERIMENT

The Church of Scientology sent us a personality test in the mail. They send them to us on a monthly basis because they want us to join them. Many of the words within the quiz are inappropriately enclosed in quotation marks. For example, Do you keep “close contact” on articles of yours which you have loaned to friends? Could you agree to “strict discipline?” Are you “always getting into trouble?” Are you always collecting things which “might be useful?” Do you “wax enthusiastic” about only a few subjects? Do you ever get disturbed by the noise of the wind or a “house settling down?” Would it take a “definite effort” on your part to consider the subject of suicide? Do you browse through “dictionaries” just for pleasure? These are the real questions. I didn’t make them up.

I am reviewing my answers at our kitchen table. I have the front windows open so that a breeze blows the questionnaire off the table and down to the floor in front of the refrigerator. The paper stays at the bottom of the refrigerator and I remain still. I am beginning to deduce that Scientology is not the same as science at all. The questionnaire scoots across the linoleum in the breeze. It blows beneath the table and I crumple my test underfoot.

Jude is in love with something watery.

My father told me I am a mermaid.

Therefore Jude must be in love with me.

But the above logic is faulty. Lots of things besides me are watery. Alcohol is watery. Water is watery.

I devise my own test. I fill the tub on the third floor. I get in and put my head under the water blowing bubbles. The Test asks, Do you “miss your father” when it rains? Do you stay in this “God-forsaken town” because you think he is still here? Do you only like men who could match your father “drink for drink?” Don’t you know “drinkers” only love drinking? Can you “breathe” underwater? Are you really a mermaid or does it just feel that way in the awkward body of a “teenaged girl?” So I breathe water into my lungs and I wait for my test results.

UNDER

When I surface Jude is there. “Jude,” I try to say, but there is something covering my mouth, a nozzle with oxygen. Jude cannot breathe under the water so I pass him the nozzle of oxygen that is attached to my nose. But he refuses and wraps it again behind my ears. We are not underwater. We are in an ambulance. An EMT is taking my heart rate. I can hear her as she yells, “Sinking! Sinking!” The back doors open and four people carry me into the hospital on this bed. I can’t see much except for the fluorescent lights passing overhead. I’m brought to a small room for more yelling. “Evacuate those lungs! Pump!” one doctor yells. Then I feel a needle enter the vein of my elbow and I don’t remember falling asleep.

When I wake all three of them, Jude, my mother, and my grandfather are there. There is also a doctor. At first it is extremely difficult to open my eyes. The doctor turns to me and can see I am waking up from the drug. The doctor says, “Young lady, what you’ve done is quite serious.” I try to look at him. I can’t quite keep my eyes open, still I can hear what the doctor is saying to my mother. “I don’t understand why she is still alive. Her lungs were sodden, just filled with water. She should be dead,” he says and then, “It’s a miracle.” My mother asks the doctor to leave. My mother wants to save all the scolding she thinks that I deserve for herself.

I am beginning to see what putting my head under the bathwater looks like to them.

My grandfather is holding my chart. He is nervous. “Franklin Gothic,” he says identifying the font they used to print my chart.

My mother looks at me. “Gothic. Right.”

“Momma,” I say and clear my throat. “I wasn’t trying to die.” But she turns away and starts crying.

The drug is making me feel ill. I’d like to leave this place and so I look at my arms and legs under the covers. I am unattached. I try to sit up because I want to leave but my mother stops me. “No,” she says. “You have to stay here.”

When I was young I went down to the pier looking for my father, but I accidentally got on board the wrong boat and fell asleep. The boat was out at sea before the sailors found me. I gave them a big surprise. Three thousand different aquatic life forms are carried daily into new ecosystems by unsuspecting ship’s ballast.

I was scared when I woke on board, surrounded by five sailors. I thought that the captain was a pirate because he had a round bite taken out of his ear. To appease him I told him I’d work to pay for my passage. “What can you do?” he asked and for a long time I had to think. I told him I knew how to set type. He shook his head. “I don’t need a typesetter,” he said and, “I’ve got a brand new dot-matrix printer.” Eventually I told him I would make a good endtable or hassock. “Great,” he said. So I curled up on the dirty floor and prepared for work. I waited for some weight on my back but it never came.

After awhile the captain said, “Come on now. Get up, sweetheart.” Which scared me. If there wasn’t going to be a legitimate trade he was probably going to steal something from me. But he didn’t. Instead, he gave me some ice cream and told me I was a brave girl. Still after the ice cream, I continued working and soon I was a hassock asleep.

My mother always tells this story whenever she meets someone new. She thinks it is funny now. It embarrasses me sometimes because the person my mother tells, for a moment, thinks of me as sea captain’s furniture, which, I believe, most people consider out of date or made from oddly colored Naugahyde. Though it seems like a truthful representation of me—oddly colored, out of date—I still am embarrassed.

The three thousand foreign forms of aquatic life introduced daily into unfamiliar ecosystems usually don’t survive but, more commonly, float to the surface and get burned by the sun.

When I was returned to my family I continued to work as a hassock around our house, and sometimes my father would actually use me, resting his feet while he watched the television. I liked the job because it reminded me of the sailors I had met on board.

*

In this hospital I am embarrassed. Jude looks peculiar here. His paleness is awkward against the maize-colored walls. My mother and grandfather are both too pink and healthy to be here. I’m embarrassed because I want to look foreign here, as they do, and float to the top, get burned by the sun. I want to not belong here. I’m a mermaid. How can I belong in a hospital on dry land? But the gown I have on matches the sheets and there is a label around my wrist saying, “This is where you belong.” So I tuck my head and curl into a ball waiting for weight—something hard or sharp from Jude, a fist or a scream. But it never comes. He sits quietly, uncertain of what to say.

“I’m thirsty,” I finally tell him.

Jude has not said anything. He pours me a glass of water, but while carrying it to the bed it falls from his hand. The water explodes out of the plastic cup and Jude immediately slips on the water. His head nearly smashes on my mechanical bed.

“Shit!” my mother screams because she is completely on edge.

“Hahaha,” the water says and it sounds like my father.

“Did you hear that?” I ask. But they ignore me. “Jude, the water is coming to get you,” I say and then the three of them exchange glances of the saddest kind. My mother looks down at my hands as if to look in my eyes would make her start crying again. She looks at my hands as though I am strange to her.

“Jude, are you all right?” she finally asks. She bends to help him.

“I’m fine. I’m fine,” he says and has a seat in a Naugahyde hospital chair and we sit for awhile in silence.

Eventually I do get more visitors. The men in blue. The men in white. And my grandmother Marcella. She is somewhere in between them like a beautiful horizon line. My grandmother Marcella doesn’t say much but holds up her finger to make a division.

Wet. Dry.

Sea. Sky.

Dead. Alive.

I have to stay at the hospital for three days. I’m required to undergo evaluation. That “undergo” is the word I keep using, as it somehow suggests a passage or secret tunnel to the doctor’s office. There is no secret tunnel though.

In his office the doctor looks at my chart. “Huh. Had some eye trouble, I see,” he says.

“I don’t. Not very well.”

“Now this eye trouble, it says here, there’s nothing physically wrong with your eyes. How does that make you feel?”

“I’m thirsty.”

“I see.”

“I don’t. Not very well.”

“Let’s talk about what happened in the bathtub.” The doctor says, “I’ve read the report—”

“Not read. Just blue.”

“—patient tried to drown herself in the bath. How does that make you feel?”

“Give the chart to my grandfather. When it’s returned it will read, in a nice Garamond or Bodoni, ‘—patience tried.’ Because doctor, this making a mortal love me is tasking business and I’m running out of time. So I tried to drown myself. I want to go back to the ocean. That way I thought Jude could continue living. But you all ruined it.” That’s what I tell the doctor and he looks surprised by my answer. “I’m from the ocean,” I add to clarify my position. The doctor writes that down. He gets up to leave and watches me from the door, and I think he understands me because in a few days, when the hospital finds out that my mother lied about us having health insurance, with some pamphlets and some pills the doctor gave me, I am sent home.

DANGEROSE

At home I am ashamed. They all think I was trying to kill myself, so I walk around sheepishly. I try to be helpful and quiet.

While I was in the hospital our basement flooded with two feet of water. It happens all the time, as our sump pump is nearly as old as the house and tired. So when I get home I go down into the cellar carrying a tiny dinghy constructed of corrugated fiberglass. My father made it for me when I was a little girl and despite being a rough and tiny craft, it is still seaworthy. I row over to the fuse box to turn off all the power in the house before the flood reaches the fuses. I am trying to be helpful. I float for a bit in the dark basement. Overhead I can see dusty cobwebs and ceiling joists. The boat rocks some and I could almost fall asleep down here but I don’t. I don’t want to scare my mother again. I row back to the bottom of the staircase and climb up into the sunlight.

I try to talk to my neighbors concerning the flood, but I can see that I make them nervous now also. It seems all the neighbors also think I tried to drown myself in the bathtub. Still I tell them, “Our basement is flooded. Do you think this is the end?” At first they think I mean because of the terrorists. So I say, “No. Do you think the ocean is coming for us? Well, not me, but you?”

They shake their heads as if to say, “Poor child,” but all they really say is, “Huh. That’s strange,” or they say, “You went to high school. You figure it out.”

So I call Jude. He is glad I am home from the hospital. “Listen,” I tell him and I put the telephone up to the cellar door so he can hear the shore lapping beneath our living room floorboards. “What does it mean?” I ask him.

“I don’t know,” he says and then, “How are you doing? Really?” So I hang up.

I go upstairs to ask my mother. She has been crying. She says she doesn’t know what to do with me, and so I don’t ask her about the flooding.

I ask my grandfather but he is very old. He sets down the plate of dictionary he’s been typesetting.

“What?” he asks, pretending he can’t hear me.

“The water! In the basement!”

“What?”

“Forget it,” I say.

“Look what I wrote this morning” he says and shoves a plate of type in front of me.

danger – A charming, young lady named Dangerose once yielded to the importunities of Damase, the Lord of Asnieres; defying the curses of Thigh, 37th Bishop of Mans, they lived in love together. One day as the Lord was crossing a stream, a violent storm arose, stricken by lightening and overwhelmed by the waters, the wicked Damase was half-burned, half-drowned, and passed to perdition. The distraught Dangerose threw herself at the Bishop’s feet in penitence; she lived thereafter in strict retirement. But her story spread far; and whenever anything drew peril after it, the French said, “Ceci sent la Dangerose.”

“You just made that up,” I say.

“I did not.”

“Then you copied it.” My grandfather tucks his chin to pretend he is hurt, but when I look at his face he’s not hurt. He is laughing because he did copy it. “It’s stolen,” I say to him, scolding.

BOOK: The Seas
5.84Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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