I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (23 page)

At my aunt and uncle’s house, there is a crowd in the kitchen: my uncle’s aunt Ellen, my aunt’s sisters, Cliff their neighbor, whom I met for a moment two years ago in his salmon shirt. Many others. Six dogs. I’m on the outskirts again—they don’t know me, don’t know why I’m here. Hours ago they finished their holiday dinner, but they’ve stayed to say hello to me. “She was a little girl the last time you saw her,” Julia tells her sisters, who seem like twins in height, expression. One says, “Oh, you have a friend in Newton.” As if this is the purpose of my visit. At sixty, Julia is still so pretty—her face delicate and fine. A girl’s face. A heroine’s.

Technically, their house is not a mansion, but it feels like one. The many rooms and multiple staircases, fireplaces. With the crowd, it could be the setting for a Chekhov play. Chekhov, who in his glasses actually looks like Eric Clapton. The relatives and guests leave quickly. “It’s not you,” several women say, like echoes, laughing. Julia makes me a plate. I feel like a beggar. The dogs at my feet on the metal rung of the bar stool. Detached from the floor, my body could float, be upside-down.
Sorry,
I’d say.
Sorry
.

The walls feel like plates, crackable. I’m not hungry, but I chew. My aunt and uncle sit on either side of me. A fire is lit between two walls. “Is everything okay with you and your dad?” one of them asks me. I’d been afraid to phone Mark and Julia to say I was coming. But two weeks before, I’d been visiting my parents. My mother mentioned that Julia had emailed my dad. I went on his computer, found her address. Brought it home. When I emailed Julia to say I’d be in Boston over Thanksgiving, that I’d like to stop by, I said I didn’t want to mention the trip to my parents. Said I
didn’t want to hurt their feelings as I wasn’t spending the holiday with them.

But they’re confused. I can see they’re wondering why would I come here and keep it a secret from my parents, ask them not to mention it? They are uneasy, our conversation triple-spaced. Leaning into the island, faces turned toward me, elbows on granite—we make a tableau. She’s lily-like. His eyes are magnified, underwater. Oh, I am a wrong number. Even making conversation with cashiers in the grocery store exhausts me, and I’m here with almost no notice, sitting in a kitchen with people who barely know me. Here for days and days. Everything feels off. A child would be welcome here—a child would fit in. But I am too old for this house; I know why people choose the endless time after death, that quiet, but it’s always terrible when someone stops singing. The three of us create some kind of hum. Invisible bees circle us, raising the hair on my arms. I’ve changed my mind. I want to retract everything, reverse my trip, go back over the bridge, get back to my quiet duplex with the ocean outside. Nobody asking me questions. Mark says, “Why don’t you call your father and wish him a Happy Thanksgiving?”

I say no, and then I say, “Okay,” and Mark dials on his cell. He’s bowled over—that’s what my dad says to Julia when I give her the phone. He can’t imagine why I’m here.

It’s sickening—hurting him. I have to call him back. Mark gives me his phone, which I take, though I have my own phone in my purse. I leave them, go up the stairs, down the long hall past the many bedrooms, to the peach room. I don’t want to hurt my mom either. My dad says that he thinks he has it figured out, thinks I’m here to meet a guy from an online dating service who lives in this town. I’d mentioned him to them last summer, as something light—a funny story—looking for someone to date on the internet. But they’d worried it to pieces—how could I date someone
so far away? I hadn’t even met the guy in person—he’d been too busy, he said.

After talking to them, I can’t sleep, worrying about having hurt them. Then I sleep, but not before my heart is panicking as it did on the plane, on the bus. I’m so sorry I’ve come here. I forget why I’ve come, what our connection is.

But then it’s light. Julia greets me good morning in the kitchen and kisses my cheek. I think a little later, “She remembers.” There aren’t any birds in the trees here—a leaf swaying in the wind I mistook for a bird, familiar movement in trees. It’s cold here, but something blue is blooming outside.

A bird flew beside the window and up, rising as it approached me. Gray-blue feathers above, white below, headed up high. There’s a stone wall outside—a boulder wall and brown-red leaves piled behind it. A wall someone built to contain what they want to keep.

Tell me what you remember—from the moment you got in the car in the garage in Orlando and drove away. He was crying, the last I heard him then, going into the garage or in the car. Tell me everything you remember from then on. How was the plane ride? Did he mind it? Did he sleep?
I practice my questions for Julia, sitting alone at a little table upstairs in a big room with a fireplace, a sound system. Mark had asked me, “What kind of music do you like?” I didn’t know how to describe what I like. I choose one genre called “Acoustic,” blue or another color, and a Scottish singer I like started singing. It’s really two rooms, two sets of couches—a movie-screen against the far facing wall, the door in around the corner. An inset white beam near the sound system monitor blocks my view of the door, secludes me beyond the fireplace.

On the tallest trees, the tops are bare of leaves. Partway down the trees, some branches go straight out instead of up. Here they don’t seem to be raised in escape, more like they are reaching to
touch. The trees at peace. It’ll be white. It’ll be snow. All this low green buried. The yellow leaves like playing card spades. Thin stalked plant with small red hearts and tongues limp, something torn out. Another made of green-yellow stars. One with diamond leaves, red and yellow, that hang heavy though they must be thin as silk—drop earrings—white flowers at the top and on the ground. All of it lifting up the cloudy sky.

Julia said, “If you want to go into town, you can drive the Jeep.” Town sounds like one big whiteness, like being hit in the face and then trying to find the right road. What would I do in town? I remember the bus station, the ride in the car with Mark, arriving at this dead-end road. Years ago, I saw a restaurant on the water, but I’m not sure it was Falmouth. Can I drive to Brockton, to the cemetery? Can I ask that? It’s not around town—maybe that’s what she means, that’s it’s only okay for a short distance. And can I ask that and not be hurtful? On a highway alone, I could calm down, rely on strangers. Today is Friday. There’s still Saturday. There’s Sunday. When can I ask about Tommy? On Sunday maybe, the day before I leave? So it’s not so hard afterward? The snow will be on all of it. I can see flames in the window, small, falling and rising up over the peaceful trees which live just the same.

2.

This house is brand new. There won’t be any baby clothes here, no baby shoes. “Sorg” was the first English word for sorrow, distress; “sorgian” is grieve. The wind is “windan”—move fast, circle round, twist, wave. “Wunden” is twisted as of ornamentation. Can be confused with “wund”: injury, wound. When words were made, someone needed these. It’s Friday night, and no one in this house has said his name. We rode in a silver car in the dark, on
the southwestern tip of Cape Cod, glacier beneath us. Yards of water between us and the Elizabeth Islands, tiny islands owned by the rich, a family apiece. Three miles north over the water is Martha’s Vineyard—the ferry leaves from here. If you miss the last one, there’s nothing until morning. Boston is seventy miles south. Julia had asked me if I liked “bar pizza.” I’ve never had pizza in a bar, but I can tell she thinks it’s special. So I said yes, I’d like to try that. The day after Thanksgiving, they think the pizza place will be slow, but the parking lot is almost full. “It’s one of the busiest days of the year,” the hostess says. Between the cashier counter and the booths, the waitresses run. The three of us stand by a circle of wood, like a tree, waiting a long time for a table. I’m always in the way of one waitress, her tray of plastic glasses, and Mark puts his arm around my shoulders, pulls me in to stand closer to them. But I inch backward, annoy the waitress, come toward Mark and Julia again. I know I have my son’s face, his eyes looking into their faces. Anxiety is a brocade, webbed inside—standing so close to my aunt and uncle is like trying to breathe through heavy fabric. My eyes could be rhinestone ornaments. I was at their wedding in 1969, seven or eight years old—ankleted, buttoned, laced, slippered, with their beauty above me. The wedding was a kingdom—the King and Queen live there—I pointed it out to my brother, a year younger. Pointing out the colors, the spires. That was back when I could tell him to pack his belongings into a paper shopping bag, hide it under his bed until morning, until he put on his Superman outfit, grabbed the bag, followed me out the door in my sunsuit and sandals, walking beside me down the street, clothes spilling out behind us. Trusting I knew where to go.

Finally seated, my aunt and uncle are across from me in the booth. It feels a little like a job interview. I could be made of felt, cut into the shape of a woman—I keep arranging an expression on my face that is the opposite of crying. The opposite of something
is cutting into me. Earlier that day, we’d driven to Wood’s Hole, and I stood in the rain taking pictures of water. Julia had said, “We could go to the aquarium.” Boxes of water, a blue lobster. Two harbor seals that made a regular circuit in their pool, bobbing up like mermaids. Mark had said, “Look at his eyes.” One seal had dark eyes, but the other’s were almost colorless, the blue-gray of the seal’s body, water. He was blinded from a shark attack—by the punctures or the trauma, they don’t know which. Someone found him on a beach. Mark sees what I don’t—the blindness, the tanks of fish that live between two walls like the fire in his house. He hadn’t wanted to come here. “There’s no parking,” he’d said. But then he found a spot.

I’d seen another harbor seal in Wellfleet a few years ago, after dinner at my parents’ house. Cloudy, Mayo Beach had been almost deserted. Down a stretch between the rocks, over another set of rocks, were four people: one man taking a sailboat out just to anchor it, a woman standing at the edge of the shore, another man farther down the beach near more rocks—he had a scoop net in his hands, and a small boy played with him in the shallowest water. It was so quiet, but the tide wasn’t all the way up, and I’d been glad there was room to walk. In the quiet gray sky and water, I’d walked up to a creature. At first, I didn’t know what I was seeing. A baby seal with eyes like dark pools, lashed like a kitten, whiskered like one too. And like a baby, when I talked to him/her, the baby yawned. Flippered feet tucked together in back, toward the water. Smaller flippers on either side were tucked under too, like a folded letter. There was no alarm from the seal, but I didn’t know what to do. She was completely out of the water, and I thought, I’ll need to pick her up, help her back into the harbor. It will be like touching a fish, I thought, but different—skin like a wetsuit. I wondered if the seal had teething teeth like a child, wondered how a seal eats fish—if she’ll bite.

I waved to the boat man—no response. I started to wave to the
woman, but she jumped into the sea. I didn’t want to leave the seal, but I needed help, so walked fast to the faraway net man with the boy. He said, “The seal was sunbathing two and half hours ago. Someone called Audubon. They said she’s not hurt, it’s natural. Just stay a hundred fifty feet away from her.” The net man said, “That’s why there’s a sign.” But there was no sign. I estimated 150 feet from the seal, sat on the rocks where I could see her. All the people on the beach went away, the tide came in far enough to wet her tail, and she turned on her side in the water. Sometimes she lifted her head and tail in an S-like yoga pose. When the water was high, she swam in that same position. For a long time, I saw her nose sticking up out of the harbor, in different places. She liked the blue raft anchored near shore, as if it was a creature too. Then she moved out past it. I was so glad to have looked into her eyes, spoken to her. I’m surprised when an animal doesn’t talk back, and it’s just trancing beauty. A few times, when she swam, I saw the folds of her coat beneath the waves.

The next day, I’d thought about going to the harbor, to just look for the seal. But what was I looking for? Wouldn’t she be gone if all was well? I went to the library, and it was late afternoon, early evening when I got to the beach. A white van in the harbor circle parking lot: Marine Mammal Rescue. Were the Audubon people here to check on the seal? Was she still here? A man and woman came up from the beach. The woman had a shovel with a bright yellow handle. The man had a plastic bag with something dark in it. I said, “You’re not here for the seal?”

The woman said, “Yes. He didn’t make it.” We’re calling the seal “he.”

“He died?”

“Yes,” she says something euphemistic like “passing.” She’s young. The man doesn’t want to meet my eyes—he just carries the bag, keeps walking toward the back door of the van.

“But, yesterday, they said she wasn’t sick.” I am too upset to know what pronoun is right to use.

“She was thin, and she had wounds.” I remember little holes like pennies near her head. “We took samples to find out more.” Shouldn’t a rescue truck be able to rescue? Try to rescue? Why had they left her thin and wounded? She had opened her mouth for me in that sweet yawn. Couldn’t they have just dropped a fish in there? Helped her? I’m sorry I left her side. Later, I read that the rescuers like to leave baby seals in the water, in hopes that the mother is coming back. The next day I swam in the harbor where she swam, right by her rocks. Her grave out there somewhere.

At the Wood’s Hole Aquarium, the other seal had been stranded at a month old, unable to feed itself, wounded too. They brought her here. I take pictures of her swimming. Mark and Julia and I make a little group, looking at the same fins, bones. Sea stars that will appear again the next day when we walk on Plymouth Beach with the dogs. Julia will say, “You don’t see them anymore.” But every few steps, there will be another between the rocks, on the sand. Starfish like hands outstretched. I take a picture of Mark and Julia looking at me in the rain.