The Seas (2 page)

“Hello,” I yelled to him. He turned towards me, looked a long time, shook his head and waved. “What are you doing?” I asked.

“Looking for something,” he said.

Me too. “Me too,” I said but the waves were very loud between us.

Finally Jude walked towards me. His lips were turning blue like a drowned man’s. This far north horrible things happen all the time to young girls but I wasn’t afraid of him. He seemed sad and so kinder in his sadness.

“You look like you’ve been in the water forever,” I said.

He stood where the waves began to break, where what was blue became white, a sheet of white paper roiling with the blue that had been written there. Jude kept walking towards me. “My name is Jude,” he said so I saw he was not my father but barely.

“How come I don’t know you?” I asked. The town is small enough that usually everybody knows everybody else.

We watched the water between us. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you do now,” he said and we watched the water between us rushing back out to sea and I swear I saw the ocean fill up with words, like Jude was bleeding all the things he couldn’t tell anyone because it might kill him.

The strip of stores for tourists and the small amusement park beside the ocean only stretches as far as the sandy beach does and on either end of the strip the coast becomes rocky again. The strip is what keeps the town in business, that and an iron works for shipbuilding that once got a government contract back in the 1970s and so continues to operate, holding out hope that one day something like that might happen again.

I sometimes sit underneath our small boardwalk. It’s out of the weather, away from anyone who might recognize me, close to the ocean and I feel as though I am among people while in actuality I am still alone. I can hear many of the most intimate conversations of people passing overhead while sitting in the wet and swampy dark. I like it. I try to build a composite sketch of what a person looks like based on the snatches of conversation that I hear.

Once I heard, “She thought he was going to give her a ring for Christmas. He gave her a pair of slippers from China instead.” And nearly instantly I had created four people in my head. The two who were talking above, a man and a woman whose noses were pointy and prodding, the girl waiting for a ring who wore her hair in a round curl at the bottom—a round curl that sank when she opened the slippers. And the young man. I pictured him whistling, oblivious to the world of women and the various things they want.

Jude sometimes comes under the boardwalk with me. I never think there is anything awkward or strange about an older man closing his eyes under the boardwalk with someone my age, nineteen, but he acts like we have to be careful and sneaky. “Don’t ever tell anyone,” he says and presses his finger to my lips, removing it before I can open my mouth.

“It is best if you don’t peek through the cracks,” I tell him. “It’s more fun to imagine the people.”

“Maybe in your imagination,” he says. Still he tries. He listens. He shuts his eyes. Always at first it is hard to hear people talking over the ocean especially at night as the waves get louder when it is dark out. Tired long creaks in the boardwalk signal an approach and with concentration, the voices that pass overhead become distinct communications. “Like I always say, let peace begin with me,” a voice snakes down through the boards.

“See,” I say. Jude’s eyes are still closed “You can see that man, crystal clear.”

Jude sighs. “Uh huh,” he says. “Yes. I can,” he says. “I can see how his pants are hitched up higher than most people’s.”

More voices pass up above. One says, “Something smells funny. Smells like—” but a wave hits the beach and neither of us can hear what word was said, what it was that it smelled like and so the person who said it seems suddenly very mysterious.

Jude keeps his eyes shut and I take the opportunity to stare at him. His lips are very red and tiny bits of skin are flaking off them. In the light creeping through the boardwalk cracks I see yellow deposits of wax in his ears and this wax intrigues me. It seems so adult and all the things that make us different make me want him more. A wave crashes on the shore and I wish it were a tidal wave, something strong that would rock me backwards and throw Jude’s body on top of mine. I am imagining it so clearly I can feel it when from up above we hear a voice say, “Please, I’m telling you love is a broken- down old car by the side of the road and sometimes you have to rig a fan belt or an alternator with what you’ve got.” It must be a couple breaking up.

I imagine the man who said it looks like Jude though a simpler version of Jude. Like Jude after someone had stood in front of him saying, “Spit it out,” as a parent would to a child. Like Jude if someone had said, “Spit it out,” to him and he had opened his mouth and out came something as black and green as stomach bile and the something was all the bad things about Jude, everything he had seen in the war in Iraq, everything that made him so melancholy. The man on the boardwalk sounds like Jude if Jude had then run down to the ocean and washed the bad parts of himself off his hands, off the corners of his lips, rinsed his mouth out with seawater and as if he’d then stood on the boardwalk as a simpler man, a good man for marrying, saying, “Please, I’m telling you love is a broken-down old car by the side of the road and sometimes you have to rig a fan belt or an alternator with what you’ve got.”

To which I would answer, “You’re right, darling. Let’s get married.” But Jude isn’t saying that. He is still sitting with his eyes closed, saying nothing. “Jude, that’s you. He sounds just like you.”

“You’re right,” he says opening his eyes. “Let’s go see if we can find him,” he says and so we roll out from underneath the boardwalk. As we emerged I laugh loudly to draw attention to us. I think, “I hope everyone sees us coming out from underneath the boardwalk together. I hope they think that Jude and I were kissing underneath there.” I think, “Making out.” I want them to know he is mine even if it’s not true.

Up on the boardwalk we don’t find anyone who matches the voice. Jude turns to look at me, shrugs his shoulders and stares into my eyes long enough that velocity, the force with which a body approaches or recedes from another body, hits me hard. It pushes me towards him by my sternum with everything it has. Jude looks scared and I suppose that is how he should look because the hollow of not having him has given me something powerful to do. He steps backwards.

Some nights I want Jude so badly that I imagine I am giving birth to him. I pretend to sweat. I toss and wring my insides out. Mostly I think this because that’s how badly I want Jude’s head between my legs. It never occurs to me that I imagine he’s my baby because loving him hurts or because with the way he drinks, he acts like one. I never think that. Instead I think, I will create Jude inside my head and that way he will be inside of me which is almost as good as fucking or at least pricking our fingers and touching them together.

My room is on the third floor of our house. The house gets thinner towards the top and the staircase that winds its way up to that floor is so narrow and steep that it is more like a ladder than a stair. It has always made me feel cozy as though I am sleeping curled up in the crow’s nest. Our house was once apartments for sailors and so it is broken up oddly. I have my own bathtub up on the third floor. There is a window over my tub and when I was younger, I’d lie down in the tub instead of in my bed. At first my mother would wake me up and make me move back into my bed but after years and years she finally gave up and let me sleep there. I liked it in the tub because from the window I could see stars and the ocean and sometimes, if it was calm, I could see the stars in the ocean. I liked the tub because if I slept with my ear against the drainpipe I could hear my parent’s conversations all night long, metallic talking that made its way up through the plumbing.

Through the pipe, one night just before my father disappeared, I heard him tell my mother, “I remember how the moon shines into the ocean and the pattern it makes on the sea floor.” She didn’t say anything. “I want to go back there,” he said and the reason I remember that conversation is because my mother started crying when he said that and I had never heard her cry before.

He meant that we were from the ocean. “You’re a mermaid,” he told me at the breakfast table. “Don’t forget it.” A corner of toast scraped the roof of my mouth when he said it. The cut it made helped me to remember. So I don’t think he’s dead. I think he is in the sea swimming and that is kinder than imagining his boots filling up with water and then his lungs.

People often suggest that it would be better if we knew for certain whether or not my father is dead rather than just disappeared. That to me seems cruel, as if they want me to abandon all hope. That is how dreary people try to keep things here on dry land.

Despite them, I remain hopeful. Even though the way I remember my father and these things he once said is becoming more and more like the way a page of paper yellows with time or the way a dream slips ahead of the waking dreamer or the way people get hard-skinned with age and use that hard skin like a file to toughen up their children. Am I a mermaid? I once was certain. But now the older I get, the vaguer things become.

My father has been gone a long time now, eleven years. Still my grandfather, mother, and I keep a lazy vigil, if that combination of words is possible, lazy + vigil. We watch for him all the time, even in the winter though we are so far north that sometimes the ocean freezes across the surface. It is dangerous because where it gets particularly cold, icebergs as big as boulders form. If my father decided to return in the winter he might get crushed by the bergs. We don’t move away from this small town because we are waiting for him to return.

My father’s parents used to work as typesetters until the press where they once worked closed down, my grandfather lost his job, and my grandmother, an immigrant from France named Marcella, died. The press was called the Constantinople Press because they made maps and books about maps and dictionaries about maps. My grandparents were responsible for breaking up printed plates of type into letters again, filing fonts, Caslon with Caslon, Bernhard with Bernhard, Times with Times, and the broken type went into a device called the hellbox, a very hot cabinet where the letters got melted down to lead and readied for recasting.

The press was loud and so the workers there communicated by using plates of letters to write quick notes to one another. That is how my grandfather wooed my grandmother. He would send her plates of type that he had written just for her.

That is how my grandmother fell in love with my grandfather, in backwards words. So that now, even though the Constantinople Press has closed, my grandfather continues to set type into a dictionary he is writing. It gives him something to do and it reminds him of her.

I think my grandfather fell in love with her for the way she spoke. In America, her French began to wither. Her English was slow and clunky, marked by confusions.

bridal – adj. of or relating to a bride or a
marriage ceremony
bridle – n. a harness, consisting of a headstall, bit, and reins, fitted about an animal’s head and used to restrain or guide the beast.

My grandmother had come to the United States during World War II because the town where she had grown up was first destroyed by the Nazis on their charge into Paris. Then it was destroyed and finally toppled—the fields ruined, the houses burned, and the people killed—as the Allies beat the Nazis into their retreat. She was sixteen and orphaned. She sailed to America on a ship named the Mirabella. She liked the ship because she thought its name was close to hers, Marcella. She thought that was a sign from her dead parents. She told me she also liked the ship because, “It was filled with doors,” and that to her seemed like a chance to change. But when she arrived in America she didn’t change at all. She chose this town because it looked like her own town in France: small and cramped. If you can trace a characteristic—curved fingernails or pointy canines or alcoholism—back to one ancestor, I can trace my hatred of the dry land back to her. She had more reasons than anyone to hate the dry land, having lived through a war that she had nothing to do with.

Our house is still divided into sailors’ apartments. We just keep all the doors open in between the different apartments so that it seems more house-like. In this way our house resembles a tremendous heart, one with sixteen chambers. We have many rooms that have become warehouses for the junk my mother collects or items neither she nor my grandfather can bear getting rid of. In the different rooms we keep my grandfather’s drawers of lead type, cardboard files of pretty pictures that my mother has torn from magazines, the contents of my grandmother’s house including a yellow velvet loveseat with lion’s paws for feet and an armoire that still holds the baby clothes for a child my mother miscarried, almost every toothbrush my family has used since we moved into this house the year before I was born. Our dining room has stacked empty frames leaning against the available wall space. They are twenty-five deep in places and my mother hopes to use them one day. Underneath the kitchen sink there used to be a box where we kept spent lightbulbs until my mother decided to store coffee cans there instead. I don’t know what happened to the dead lightbulbs. We have three sewing machines and four typewriters because my grandfather buys cheap ones from the classified section in the weekly newspaper. All seven bedrooms have beds because once my mother thought she could open the house up as a bed and breakfast. It didn’t work out, so now all the extra beds that are not in use are covered: one with contour maps of the islands off the coast where we live, some with my grandmother’s records, mostly opera and European folk songs. The other beds are covered with books.

Still somehow I manage to walk through our house and think that we aren’t trash.

We have so many rugs that in the living room we have spread them out on top of each other. We have two pianos even though my mother is the only one who knows how to play. The saddest thing we’ve held onto is my father’s wing chair. It is frightening because the upholstery is still stained from his hand oil and he has been gone for so many years. In the kitchen we keep the china from both my mother’s and grandfather’s weddings, a set of Stanglware, and an ever-expanding set of daily ware that we acquire one piece at a time when we shop at the A & P Superstore. There are two rooms used as libraries for which my mother and grandfather keep two separate and opposing systems of organization in their heads—hers by subject, his by the way he feels about the author: Animosity, Betrayed, Curious, Delighted, etc. Piles block other piles. Once a neighbor’s young child had his arm broken there when a stack of books gave way.