The Deep Blue Sea for Beginners (6 page)

“It’s so late in Newport,” her mother said.

“That’s okay,” Lucy said.

“I wish you were here,” her mother said. “With us.”

“You do? You wish I were there?”

“Oh, Lucy, I do. There’s so much to say.”

“There is,” Lucy said, and she beamed even harder as the words tumbled out. “Pell said she’s so happy to be with you, you live by the sea, you like to garden!”

Five

T
alking to Lucy with my mother, how to begin? It was like the best, weirdest, most troubling yet wonderful reunion. I wished Lucy were there to see what her voice did to our mother: her eyes shone, her mouth trembled, and then she smiled and cried.

The combination of all three of us on the phone was like Miracle-Gro on my emotions. When we hung up from Lucy, I walked through a portal into the past and went straight to the brass telescope set up on my mother’s terrace.

“That was amazing,” my mother said. “She sounds so grown up.”

“She’s fourteen now,” I said.

“She didn’t want to come with you?”

“I wouldn’t say that,” I said. “I just thought …”

“You weren’t sure what you’d find here?”

I pressed my eye to the telescope lens, suddenly knowing that I’d done it before. The sun was blindingly bright, the scope trained straight into the sky.

“What are you looking at?” my mother asked.

“I’m not sure,” I said. I’d expected the line of sight to be directed toward the water, yachts and fishing boats.

“You can adjust it if you’d like,” she said.

But the thing was, I didn’t want to. I can’t explain why, but it felt right, gazing up at the sky. I stood there for a few minutes, looking into the cloudless blue. Something sparkled—a plane, a satellite, a planet, I wasn’t sure.

“Do you remember the telescope?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Should I?” She didn’t reply. I moved my face away from the eyepiece, noticed engraving on the telescope’s brass tube. It said
Vega-Capella-Pollux
. “What’s that?” I asked.

“An imaginary constellation,” she said. “Made up of stars that are nowhere near one another.”

“Who thought of it?” I asked.

“I did,” she said.

“You like stars?”

She nodded. “When I was little, my father said I was lucky there was both day and night. Because I loved the flowers by day and the stars by night.”

I loved that, and it surprised me. I didn’t associate soul or poetry with the Nicholson side of the family.

“I used to want to be an astronomer when I was little. Before I wanted to be a gardener,” she said.

New information. I leaned on the stone balustrade, waiting for her to say more. But she didn’t, so I had to press.

“Why didn’t you?”

“One didn’t,” she said.

The phrase was straight out of my grandmother’s mouth. One doesn’t go to such places, one doesn’t associate with such people, one didn’t attend graduate school, one didn’t follow one’s dreams when one already had a trust fund. Here, I’ll conjugate it for you: one doesn’t, one didn’t, one never shall.

“What about after you married Dad? Wouldn’t he have been happy for you to become an astronomer? Or whatever you wanted?”

“I think the moment had passed,” she said. “I was a mother by then. I had you and Lucy.”

I gave her a sharp look, unable to help myself. Did having children mean you had to give up your life? There was no such thing as a woman who was both a mother and a scientist? I could have said, but didn’t want to be contentious,
What about after you left us?
She must have felt it herself, because she blushed. She looked down, her white-streaked dark hair falling across her eyes.

“Did we have the telescope in Michigan?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, looking grateful that I’d let her off the hook. “You loved it when you were little. I’d pick you up and you’d hold on tight, look through the lens, and we’d pretend we were explorers.”

“It’s so odd,” I said. “I remember everything, but not that.”

“Everything?” she asked.

I nodded solemnly. It was a curse, really, having Velcro brain. There are so many memories I’d like to wipe out. My mother is the exception: I want to remember more about her, but can’t. The ones I have get fuzzy and sometimes slip away. This sounded like one I would have loved, a scene of mother-daughter happiness.

“Tell me one thing,” she said.

“That I remember?”

She nodded.

“About you?”

“About us,” she said.

Oh, the possibilities. I had this secret trove of memories of my mother. I’d stored them away, just as if my mind were an attic. A place to put clothes that didn’t fit anymore, broken toys, old furniture—stuff you never used anymore, but weren’t quite ready to toss. I never went up there. But I did now, opened the door, and the rooms were overflowing.

“You taught me how to do somersaults,” I said. “Out in the backyard while Lucy took her nap. She was in her playpen under the crabapple tree, and we were on the grass, and I got stuck on my head. You helped me over. I can still feel your hand on my back. And once that happened, I got it.”

“And you kept going, all across the yard,” she said.

“You did too,” I said. “Together, side by side, somersaulting to the fence and back. We laughed … and Lucy woke up.”

“And you wanted to show her how, but I told you she was too young.”

“A baby,” I said. “You told me she could have hurt her soft spot. Then you showed me, and I kissed the top of her head.”

“You were a good big sister,” she said.

I still am
, I wanted to say. My eyes welled up and I stared at her, wondering what she thought of my tears. They were a combination of remembering the mother I’d loved so much and the worst hurt in the world. How could she have left me? Left us? I was fine—but did she have any idea what this had done to Lucy? Sometimes it seemed to me that my sister had been rent asunder; the phrase came to me, oddly, from earth science class: “galaxies rent asunder in a gigantic cosmic collision.”

“Tell me another,” she said.

Another memory? I didn’t feel like it, think I could. I shook my head. The feelings coursing through me were wild and powerful. I sat down at the other end of the settee. Six feet separated us, an unbridgeable gulf. Being in the same house, on the same terrace, was in some ways harder than living a continent and ocean apart.

“What about you?” she said after a few minutes.

I looked at her, not getting it.

“I told you I wanted to be an astronomer when I was young.”

“And now you garden,” I said.

“Yes. So will you tell me what you want to do?”

“When I grow up?” I asked.

“You seem very grown up now,” she said. “But yes. When you finish high school. Have you decided on a college? Do you know what you want to study?”

“Berkeley,” I said, deciding in that very moment. “And I want to be a psychologist.”

“Oh,” she said. Nothing more. Just a long stare out over the water as the color rushed into her face again. Had my career choice scathed her? I obviously had spent plenty of time in therapy; no need to clue her in there. We stared into each other’s blue eyes; it was really strange, because I saw myself in the future, how I’ll appear in twenty-five years. We look so much alike, it felt scary.

I read a lot of psychology. Winnicott, Schore, Van der Kolk. Mainly because of Lucy. But I also read self-help books. It’s not that cool in high school to read things that appeal mainly to people who’ve been divorced, widowed, brokenhearted, or conned, but I’ve never met a self-help book I didn’t like.

Grief and bereavement, abandonment issues, birth order, dream analysis, codependency sexuality, parenting, body image, women’s health—I can’t get enough. My self needs help, that’s for sure. But looking at my mother, seeing the brokenness in her eyes, I realized hers did too.

“What did we pretend we were exploring?” I asked. “When we looked through the telescope back in Michigan.”

“We had a make-believe country,” she said.

“Dorset,” I said, remembering that part as if it were yesterday. Our country shared its name with our street; we’d lived at 640 Dorset Road. Suddenly I could see the map we drew when I was six; sitting at the kitchen table, we’d spread out a large sheet of paper.

With a green crayon, my mother drew a big wobbly circle. I’d colored it green. My mother had helped me add cities and towns, mountain ranges and bodies of water. Rivers, ponds, lakes, and the ocean.

“But we live in Michigan,” she’d said. “There’s no ocean near here.”

“Our country has an ocean,” I’d said firmly. I’d been to Newport, to visit her family, and been astonished by the Atlantic. Beach, shells, seaweed, rocks. The mystery of where waves came from and where they went, the endlessness of it all.

“If you say so,” she’d said.

“I do,” I’d said. “It’s our country, we can have whatever we want.”

“And you want the sea.”

“Yes!”

Staring at her now, I remembered all that. But I still couldn’t bring back the telescope, and her holding me in her arms while we explored … our yard? Our imaginary country? All I recalled was the map. I’d let Lucy paste tiny foil stars all around the edges, to symbolize the sky. I pictured her now, tiny little girl working so hard to make the sky bright.

And when our father came home from work that night, he’d studied it, and I’d wondered why he seemed so sad. I thought maybe he felt left out, because my mother and Lucy and I had created a country without him. Families were supposed to be together. That night I felt bad, afraid we’d hurt his feelings. The next day, my mother left.

“The map,” she said now. “You did such an amazing job.”

“I loved it,” I said.

“Do you …,” she began. She trailed off, then went for it. “Do you still have it?”

I shook my head. “We got rid of everything,” I said. “When we sold the house after Dad died.”

She nodded, as if I were any old stranger talking about the sale of real estate. She seemed to accept it. Maybe she knew how it went: you give the listing to an agent, and your family lawyer gets in touch with an auction house, to dispose of the contents of your family home. Because Lucy and I were so young, all this was handled by my grandmother’s lawyers. My father’s parents were dead, so even though he wasn’t Edith Nicholson’s kid, she saw to it for our sake, mine and Lucy’s. Suddenly I felt kind of terrible.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. Another lie. I wasn’t okay. My stomach was churning, head spinning, with a general sense of despair rising up.

Lucy and I shared this feeling quite often; I called it the sirocco, the hot, vicious wind that blows off the Sahara. Ironically, it was also the name of our grandmother’s yacht; I thought if I gave Lucy a name for the terrible feelings inside, it could help her. But it kind of backfired. She told me it reminded her that people and things we loved have been swept off this earth.

“Well, I want to show you around the island, but maybe you should take it easy today,” she said. “Jet lag and all. We don’t have to be at Max’s till seven-thirty tonight.”

“Will Rafe be there?” I asked.

The color literally drained from her face. “How do you know about Rafaele?”

“I met him on the rocks,” I said. “When I went for a walk before.”

“Pell,” she said. “He’s very troubled. I know I can’t tell you what to do, but I think you should stay away from him.”

“What do you mean, ‘troubled’?” I asked. If only she knew my friends back home: Travis and his sisters were good examples. Their family had been ripped apart; his older sister had had a baby at sixteen. She’d seen her father drown. Their younger sister, Beck, Lucy’s best friend, stole things. People who were lost and wounded found their ways to one another.

“Rafaele’s had a lot of problems, including with the law,” she said.

“He seemed nice,” I said. “He was rescuing starfish.”

She narrowed her eyes. “Believe me, he’s not a rescuer.” Whatever the truth about Rafe, I could see that she believed what she was saying. It didn’t really matter; I was here for a specific reason, not to make new friends.

“I think I’ll go read in my room,” I said, standing up.

“Have a good rest,” she said.

Pausing, I looked through the telescope. I loosened the knob, swung the scope to watch clouds move across the white face of Monte Solaro. A raptor circled a crevasse. Angling down, I saw the yellow boat heading out from the dock, into the bay. Max was at the wheel, Rafe in the bow, a third man in the stern with piles of fishing nets. I watched for a few moments, wondering what Rafe had done.

Without the telescope, the boat looked tiny—a yellow speck with a white wake. Sunlight bounced off the endless blue ocean, ripples of silver, broken glass, spread out from Capri as far as I could see.

The sight of water always soothed me, no matter how upset I felt. Maybe that’s why I wanted so much of it on the map of Dorset, the country my mother and I had invented. I could almost picture it, the carefully colored green countryside, the rivers, tributaries, coves, bays, and all of it, the green contours of Dorset, surrounded by an ocean. I could see it so perfectly because my other lie, the first one of the conversation, was that I’d thrown out the map. Of course I hadn’t.

I never could.