My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (51 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“All right,” she says. She turns both her palms up and raises her eyebrows, like:
Here I am
.
One time she came and found me at two o’clock in the afternoon in one of the hangars and turned me around by the shoulders and pinned me to one of the workstations with her kiss. A plane two hangars down warmed up, taxied over, and took off while we kissed. She kissed me the way lost people must act when they find water in the desert.
“Do you think about me the way you used to think about me?” I ask her.
She gives me a look. “How did I used to think about you?” she wants to know.
There aren’t any particular ways of describing it that occur to me. I imagine myself saying with a pitiful voice, “Remember that time in the hangar?”
She looks at me, waiting. Lately that look has had a quality to it. One time in Ketchikan one of my pilots and me saw a drunk who’d spilled his Seven and Seven on the bar lapping some of it up off the wood.
That
look: the look we gave each other.
This is ridiculous. I rub my eyes.
“Is this taxing for you?” she wants to know, and her impatience makes me madder, too.
“No, it isn’t taxing for me,” I tell her.
She gets up and dumps her dish in the sink and goes down to the cellar. I can hear her rooting around in our big meat freezer for a Popsicle for dessert.
The phone rings and I don’t get up. The answering machine takes over and Dr. Calvin’s office leaves a message reminding me about my Friday appointment. The machine switches off. I don’t get to it before my wife comes back upstairs.
She unwraps her Popsicle and slides it into her mouth. It’s grape.
“You want one?” she asks.
“No,” I tell her. I put my hands on the table and off again. They’re not staying still. It’s like they’re about to go off.
“I should’ve asked when I was down there,” she tells me.
She slurps on it a little, quietly. I push my plate away.
“You going to the doctor?” she says.
Outside a big terrier that’s new to me is taking a dump near our hibachi. He’s moving forward in little steps while he’s doing it. “God damn,” I say to myself. I sound like someone who’s come home from a twelve-hour shift and still has to shovel his driveway.
“What’s wrong with Moser?” she wants to know. Moser’s our regular doctor.
“That was Moser,” I tell her. “That was his office.”
“It was?” she says.
“Yes, it was,” I tell her.
“Put your dish in the sink,” she reminds me. I put the dish in the sink and head into the living room and drop onto the couch.
“Checkup?” she calls from the kitchen.
“Pilot physical,” I tell her. All she has to do is play the message.
She wanders into the living room without the Popsicle. Her lips are darker from it. She waits a minute near the couch and then drops down next to me. She leans forward, looking at me, and then leans into me. Her lips touch mine, and press, and then lift off and stay so close it’s hard to know if they’re touching or not. Mine are still moist from hers.
“Come upstairs,” she whispers. “Come upstairs and show me what you’re worried about.” She puts three fingers on my erection and rides them along it until she stops on my belly.
“I love you so much,” I tell her. That much is true.
“Come upstairs and show me,” she tells me back.
 
That night in 1958 undersea communications cables from Anchorage to Seattle went dead. Boats at sea recorded a shocking hammering on their hulls. In Ketchikan and Anchorage, people ran into the streets. In Juneau, streetlights toppled and breakfronts emptied their contents. The eastern shore of Disenchantment Bay lifted itself forty-two feet out of the sea, the dead barnacles still visible there, impossibly high up on the rock faces. And at Yakutat, a postmaster in a skiff happened to be watching a cannery operator and his wife pick strawberries on a sandy point near a harbor navigation light, and the entire point with the light pitched into the air and then flushed itself as though driven underwater. The postmaster barely stayed in his skiff, and paddling around the whirlpools and junk waves afterward, found only the woman’s hat.
 
“You know, I made some sacrifices here,” my wife mentions to me later that same day. We’re naked and both on the floor on our backs but our feet are still up on the bed. One of hers is twisted in the sheets. The room seems darker and I don’t know if that’s a change in the weather or we’ve just been here forever. One of our kisses was such a submersion that when we finally stopped we needed to lie still for a minute, holding on to each other, to recover.
“You mean as in having married me?” I ask her. Our skin is airdrying but still mostly sticky.
“I mean as in having married you,” she says. Then she pulls her foot free of the sheets and rolls over me.
She told me as she was first easing me down onto the bed that she’d gone off the pill but that it was going to take at least a few weeks before she’d be ready. “So you know why I’m doing this?” she asked. She slid both thighs across me, her mouth at my ear. “I’m doing this because it’s
amazing
.”
We’re still sticky and she’s looking down into my face with her most serious expression. “I mean, you’re a meat cutter,” she says, fitting me inside her again. The next time we do this, I’ll have had the operation. And despite everything, it’s still the most amazing feeling of closeness.
“Why are you
crying
?” she whispers. Then she whispers, lowering her mouth to mine, “Shhh. Shhh.”
 
Howard Ulrich and his little boy Sonny entered Lituya Bay at eight the night of the wave, and anchored on the south shore near the entrance. He wrote about it afterward. Their fishing boat had a high bow, a single mast, and a pilothouse the size of a Portosan. Before they turned in, two other boats had followed them in and anchored even nearer the entrance. It was totally quiet. The water was a pane of glass from shore to shore. Small icebergs seemed to just sit in place. The gulls and terns that they usually saw circling Cenotaph Island in the middle of the bay were hunkered down on the shore. Sonny said it looked like they were waiting for something. His dad tucked him in bed just about ten, around sunset. He’d just climbed in himself when the boat started pitching and jerking against its anchor chain. He ran up on deck in his underwear and saw the mountains heaving themselves around and avalanching. Clouds of snow and rocks shot up high into the air. He said it looked like they were being shelled. Sonny came up on deck in his pj’s, which had alternating wagon wheels and square-knotted ropes. He rubbed his eyes. Ninety million tons of rock dropped into Gilbert Inlet as a unit. The sonic concussion of the rock hitting the water knocked them both onto their backs on the deck.
It took the wave about two and a half minutes to cover the seven miles to their boat. In that time Sonny’s dad tried to weigh anchor and discovered that he couldn’t, the anchor stuck fast, and let out the anchor chain as far as he could, anyway, got a life preserver onto Sonny, and managed to turn his bow into the wave. As it passed Cenotaph Island it was still more than a hundred feet high and, extending from shore to shore, a wave front two miles wide.
The front was unbelievably steep, and when it hit, the anchor chain snapped immediately, whipping around the pilothouse and smashing the windows. The boat arrowed seventy-five feet up into the curl like they were climbing in an elevator. Their backs impacted the pilothouse wall like they’d been tilted back in barber’s chairs. The wave’s face was a wall of green taking them up into the sky. They were carried high over the south shore. Sixty-foot trees down below disappeared. Then they were pitched up over the crest and down the back slope, and the backwash spun them off again into the center of the bay.
Another couple, the Swansons, had also turned into the wave and had had their boat surfboard a quarter mile out to sea, and when the wave crest broke, the boat pitchpoled and hit bottom. They managed to find and float their emergency skiff in the debris afterward. The third couple, the Wagners, tried to make a run for the harbor entrance and were never seen again.
Four-foot-wide trees were washed away, along with the topsoil and everything else. Slopes were washed down to bedrock. Bigger trunks were snapped off at ground level. Trees at the edge of the trim line had their bark removed by the water pressure.
Sonny’s dad was still in his underwear, teeth chattering, and Sonny was washing around on his side in some icy bilge water, making noises like a jungle bird. The sun was down by this point. Backwash and wavelets twenty feet high were crisscrossing the bay, spinning house-sized chunks of glacier ice that collided against one another. Clean-peeled tree trunks like pickup sticks knitted and upended, pitching and rolling. Water was still pouring down the slopes on both sides of the bay. The smell was like they were facedown in the dirt under an upended tree. And Sonny’s dad said that that time afterward—when they’d realized that they’d survived, but still had to navigate through everything pinballing around them in the dark to get out of the bay—was worse than riding the wave itself.
A day or two later the geologists started arriving. No one believed the height of the wave at first. People thought that the devastation that high on the slopes had to have been caused by landslides. But they came around.
 
My wife fell asleep beside me, wrapped over me to keep me warm. We’re still on the floor and now it really is dark. We’ve got to be late in terms of picking up Donald from his play date, but if his friend’s parents called, I didn’t hear the phone.
One of my professors at St. Mary’s had this habit of finishing each class with four or five questions, none of which anyone could answer. It was a class called The Philosophy of Life. I got a C. If I took it now, I’d do even worse. I’d sit there hoping he wouldn’t see me and try not to let my mouth hang open while he fired off the questions. What makes us threaten the things we want most? What makes us so devoted to the comfort of the inadvertent? What makes us unwilling to gamble on the noncataclysmic?
Sonny’s dad was famous for a while, telling stories for magazines like
Alaska Sportsman
and
Reader’s Digest
with titles like “My Night of Terror
.
” I read one or two of them to Donald, which my wife didn’t like. “Do
you
like these stories?” he asked me that night. In the stories, Sonny’s mom never gets mentioned. Whether she was mad or dead or divorced or proud never comes up. In one he talks about having jammed a life preserver over Sonny’s head and then having forgotten about him entirely. In another he says something like, in that minute before it all happened, he’d never felt so alone. I imagine Sonny reading that a year or two later and going, Thanks, Dad. I imagine him looking at his dad later on, at times when his dad doesn’t know he’s watching, and thinking of all that his dad gave him and of all that he didn’t. I imagine him never really figuring out what came between them. I imagine years later people saying about him that that was the thing about Sonny: the kid was just like the old man.
I’m pretty sure I first encountered Italo Calvino’s
Italian Folktales
in graduate school. I’d been poleaxed right around then by his
Cosmicomics
and especially
Invisible Cities,
and I remember buying
Italian Folktales
the minute I saw it, which was eloquent, given that it was the kind of hefty hardcover I assumed that only people like teachers, and not their students, could afford.
The last of the two hundred tales he’d compiled was “Jump into My Sack,” and any number of its elements stuck with me over the years. But maybe its most arresting aspect had to do with its protagonist, who starts out hyperaware of his own limitations—
“And what will a cripple like me do to earn his bread?” he wails when his father, facing famine, turns him and his eleven healthy brothers out into the countryside to try to survive there—and then feels with an equal keenness a passionately felt gratitude for the magical good fortune bestowed upon him by a fairy who appears as “the most beautiful maiden imaginable.” She not only cures his lameness but offers him two more wishes as well, which he converts to a sack that will draw in anything he names and a stick that will do whatever he wishes. He’s then able for years to provide for himself and for others with his good fortune.
“Do you think he was happy, though?” the story continues. “Of course not!”
It turns out he’s pining for his family members, whose loss his sack can’t replace (it can only retrieve their bones), and for the beautiful fairy. Waiting for her as an old man back where he first encountered her, he discovers Death instead. And her magic is even good for that. Her sack works to envelop Death and she reappears and offers our protagonist health and youth once more. And he refuses both: he says that, having seen her again, he’s content to die. He offers us, offhandedly and without explanation, that paradox: she means so much to him that he forgoes his chance to extend his time with her. She vanishes and Death reappears and takes him, “bearing his mortal remains.”
“Pleasure Boating in Lituya Bay” hadn’t by any means originated as an attempt to rewrite that narrative. But I wasn’t very far into it before my protagonist’s debt to that earlier protagonist made me reread the tale. And there it all was: the notion of one’s self as already too hopelessly damaged to be fully saved by miraculous good fortune, and the sadness of all of that good fortune seized in gratitude, and yet at nearly the same moment inexplicably refused.
—JS

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