by Ursula Hegi
“Go ahead then.” Your face got so pale that the freckles were like pencil dots.
My belly was ice.
“You know I didn’t mean that, Mason.” You turned up the collar of your robe as if to hide yourself from me altogether. “But would you really want me to stay because you’re threatening me with suicide?”
“I want you any way I can get you.”
“Well, you blew that.”
“I’m sorry. All right? Christ, you don’t believe me, do you?”
“I don’t know what to believe from you.”
“You were part of it too in the sauna.”
“That’s why I want out.”
“If was just words till you touched Jake. You liked—”
“Yes, and that’s the worst thing I have done,” you said. “The second worst thing is—”
Seven
Stormy
{ Tribe of the Barefoot Women }
N ovember, and I’m walking in the flat wash of the bay, jeans rolled to my knees. Outside I’m fifty-five, but inside I’m my true age—twelve. The age I yearned for when I was a child in Germany. The age that has settled itself within me. Waves nudge my calves, chase me toward the foam and pebbles, that ever-shifting border between wet sand and dry sand, till—once again—I run into the bay. Only a few people are on the beach, people with shoes and socks and scarves and gloves. When they see me, they pull their coats tighter.
My feet are warming the sea. When I walk here alone, I often imagine women who have walked here before me and whose bare feet have warmed the bay so that, even in November or January, fish that would have left for milder waters are still here, attracting birds that, in other parts of the region, have migrated.
I think of them as the tribe of barefoot women. The tribe started with the whalers’ wives and sisters once they came into their middle years and met on this strip of sand, never a planned meeting, always by chance. They’d recognize one another because their feet would be bare as they’d stride along the ocean in winter. While some women dread the sudden heat in their bodies, the barefoot women return that heat to the sea and absorb from the sea great sources of health that make them more limber with each day they age, more vigorous. It’s the kind of health for which they’d have to visit one of the old spas in Europe, like Karlovy Vary in Bohemia, where kings and poets once drank from the hot sulfur springs or bathed in the healing waters.
Annie waves to me from a distance, comes running toward me, hair flying, one red wimple. From this far away, she could be Lotte. Even when Annie was a toddler, Lotte and I could see the boys’ competition for her—Mason mercurial, Jake steadfast—and how Annie dazzled them both.
Hell—I miss Lotte. Even more so when I’m with her daughters and feel I’m getting to know her at ages long before I met her. I see her in earlier incarnations, at the age of Opal. It was different when Annie was a child, because then Lotte was still alive, changing with each day.
I WAIT for Annie. Against my face: mist, dense and slick. Around my calves: the froth of the bay.
She glances at my feet, shakes her head, but then takes off her shoes.
“You’re not old enough for this, Annie.”
She gives me that look from the side.
“I’m serious.”
“I don’t mind cold water.” But the instant a thin wave licks her feet, she yelps. Still, she walks alongside me into the wind, resolutely, her long legs taking larger strides than mine.
“I didn’t even ask you,” she suddenly says. “Would you rather walk alone?”
“Oh no. I’ve had my walk alone.”
“Mason hangs in me, with me…”
I don’t want to scare her away with questions. Though I have so many. Questions and the memory of one day when I loved Mason. One day in September when he and Annie were sixteen and the ocean was at its best and all the lifeguards were gone for the season and a young woman walked into the water.
Legs like tree stumps. Her huge swimsuit a meadow above: red and blue flowers on green stretch. From the back, she was a solid rectangle, the only light coming through between her calves and heels, a small upside-down V-shape of light. She whooped with delight as the first wave hit her, glided in like a sea creature returning to her habitat, weightless as her body crested the waves. “Beautiful,” Mason said. As she swam out, body rising and falling with the waves, she was agile and brave, a young woman the size of three. But when she swam back in and tried to get out, the surf tossed her onto the sand, massive breasts half-spilling from that meadow stretch of suit. Not strong enough to hoist that weight of herself, she was sucked out into the ocean and scrambled by the next wave. On all fours, she crawled toward shore as if she’d suddenly turned into an ancient woman. Such terror on her face. That’s when Mason leapt up and ran toward her, reached her just as another wave pulled her away. He stayed with her, brought her in. Holding on to both of her hands, he helped her to upright herself. And when he walked her to her blanket, talking with her, I felt safe in the world. “You’re one of the good ones, Mason,” I told him.
“I WANT TO be…rid of Mason,” Annie says.
I nod. Let her come to me.
“The roads are too icy for walking,” she says. “The only safe place to walk is the beach, where the tides have taken out the ice.”
“True.”
The sky holds a thousand shades of gray. The sand is as cold as the air, but the water is milder. People we encounter are bundled fingertip to toe and stay above the high-tide line. They have no idea how balmy the bay is in November. But small children can feel the breath of the waves on their faces, want to run in and play.
“I want him in a place where—where he’ll have to answer the question he used to push at me.” She glances toward the shoes she’s left above the high-tide line.
“You can still get your shoes.”
“I don’t need them.”
I take her hand into mine. “Your fingers are cold.”
“The worst thing I’ve done is not keeping him alive.”
“Oh, Annie. No. None of us could have kept him alive.”
“You don’t—”
“Only he could do that.”
“You don’t understand.”
The three of them like a basket of puppies. One playful jumble. Not knowing when to climb out on their own. Staying in far too long.
“I should have stopped him,” she says.
“Maybe you’re not that powerful.”
She looks at me, stunned.
“I certainly am not powerful enough to make someone choose death or life. Mason made that choice. For himself. He was the only one who could make that choice, Annie. No matter what happened before. No matter if you had the biggest fight ever.”
“How do I get out of this then?” she asks. “Of feeling like this?”
“You’re doing it.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Walking…taking care of Opal…working…talking…”
“But it doesn’t stop. I can’t stop it.”
“It’ll never stop altogether.”
“He’s still at me.”
“It’ll be less with each day.”
“Doesn’t feel like it.”
“Not yet.”
She picks up a clump of seaweed and slipper snails whose shells—hues of gray and pink—form a quarter circle where they’re joined, stacked.
“I haven’t known anyone who can pull them apart,” I tell her.
Carefully, she tugs. “I don’t really want to pull them apart.”
“They all start out as males, and they can turn female, but can’t turn back. If there aren’t enough females, some males in the middle will change gender.”
“Amazing. How do they get nourishment?”
“They shift apart a bit—”
“Not now.”
“No, when they’re less…observed, I guess. Then they let in some nourishment and close again.”
I LIKE being old enough to walk with the tribe of th
e barefoot women. At fifty-five, the tides of fire no longer embarrass me as they did when I was thirteen and my body outpaced its memories of itself—playful stubborn shy bookish innocent—and confused me. Not unlike today’s heat that leaves my skin red-hot. Except then the sensation was so different, contrary and puzzling, something to fight or give myself to, completely.
I believed I was the only girl with this mortifying heat that could seize me any moment. Like when I looked at some boy. Was the heat evidence that I was attracted? Even if I didn’t feel attracted? Only red-hot-clumsy. Was that how attraction felt? Against all reason, all will? Did I have to distrust my body because it might betray me?
AHEAD OF US, stuck into the sand, are sculptures of dry phragmites and narrow bits of shell, delicate and sure to wash out.
“I wish I could take one for my garden.”
“They belong here,” Annie says firmly.
I let go of her hand. Crouch in front of the sculptures, each different in how the phragmites and the shells are joined. Next to them is a crushed beer can.
“They belong here,” she repeats. “For whatever purpose the person who created them intended.”
“I’m not taking anything from anyone.”
“What if they are a signal—”
“The next high tide will get them anyhow.”
“—or a message to someone?”
“Then the recipient of that message better hurry.” I should have let her take her own walk. Raising the empty beer can as if in a toast, I ask Annie, “Any objection to me taking that for recycling?”
“It probably belongs to someone who passed by later, not to the person who made this.”
Seagulls blend into the grays of the sky, are outlined by lighter shades of gray as they move from one into the other.
AS THE heavy brown sand sucks itself around my feet and collects their shapes, I continue along the sea, forever twelve—twelve at any age I have lived since; any age I will reach. Collecting. Retaining. Becoming.
Wanting what’s authentic, exquisite. The taste of salt on my lips. The shimmer of light as it soaks through the haze. The grains of sand I will rub from between my toes before I sit on my bed and tell Pete about my walk. He used to run on this beach. But the stroke has shrunk him, made him frail, and he’s fighting to reclaim his body with such grit that I love him even more.
I’ve told him I want to marry him.
“Why…now?”
I couldn’t tell him: “Because you need me more.” I said, “Do it for me. Make me an honest woman.”
“You…are an…extremely…honest woman.”
“All right then. I’m at the right age to be married.”
He smiled. “Why?”
“I’d worry less. About you. If we were married.”
“But…it’s so…good with us…because we…don’t have…marriage.”
Annie has told me he inspires her work. She’s awed by the way he gets up, slowly, emerging into his body, trembling, his fingers touching the floor, walking themselves toward his feet, his weight on one finger, then another, trembling, each movement taken apart into a thousand components as his body invents the sequence of movements the way an infant does. Invents. And repeats. And remembers. Easier the next time because memory kindles invention. Not declining as he might have. A choice. And his joy then when he shows us he’s doing one more thing than the day before.
“Listen,” Annie says.
And I listen. To this wave, now, flooding the bank of pebbles. As it recedes, a murmur rises from those pebbles.
“Hear that?” Annie smiles.
“Oh yes.”
We listen. Wait. Because the murmur does not happen with each wave. Only when the next wave won’t rush in to merge with the receding wave. For this murmur to occur, there has to be that lull between moments, that lull of being one with all that surrounds us, before the pebbles once more stir against one another.
WHILE ANNIE takes Pete for his blood test, Opal and I fry up the fluke I had in the freezer from when Pete and I went fishing the week before his stroke.
Opal dips the fillets in flour. “What does fluke taste like?”
“Almost like flounder, tender and flaky. Your mother used to say they tasted buttery…that butter was part of their natural flavor. I’d fry them up for us after she gutted them. The man who rented us the boat showed us how to. We remembered him year to year, but I don’t think he remembered us. You should have seen Lotte row. Like an arrow…”
Eager for another picture of her mother, Opal leans forward. I think she gets her pictures from different stories, so that Lotte’s image is added to and revised, coming together to look like some cross between Annie and me, perhaps, changing whenever Opal envisions her.
I can see Lotte too, in the boat, and I’m there, with her. “No clunking from side to side, the way I rowed. That’s why she’d do the rowing. Once we rented the Big Bertha—”
“Who’s that?”
“It’s the name of a boat with an outboard motor. Luckily, it had oars too, because the motor wouldn’t start when we were ready to turn back, and Lotte rowed us.”
“I need more flour.”
“After that, we didn’t bother with motors. We loved to fish. When we were still au pairs—”
“What kind of pears?”
“Au pairs. It’s like nannies. That’s how Lotte and I met.”
“Not in Germany?”
“We didn’t know each other in Germany. Not until we came to America and worked as nannies in the same neighborhood. In Southampton. During the off-season, we used to go to Montauk and rent the cheapest little cottage we could find. We’d buy squid for bait and keep it in the refrigerator until Lotte sliced them up.”
Opal grimaces.
“Me too.” I laugh. “They were slimy all right, and I’d go outside while she’d cut them up and the black oozed out.”
“Like ink?”
“Like ink mixed with gray water. We’d go to a marina on East Lake Drive where we could rent fishing poles and boats by the half day. We had to stay in the harbor, and Lotte would row us about a thousand feet offshore and toss the anchor over the side. We’d fish for fluke.”
“What do fluke look like before they’re—” She raises a flour-dusted fillet. “—like this?”
“Flat and almost round. Brownish-gray, with eyes on top.”
“On top?”
“On top. Their underside is white and soft because they lie in the sand. They’re bottom fish. Your mother…she’d get so excited when she caught one.” I see us in the boat, wearing shorts and sweatshirts. Lotte dips her fingers into the slime, hooks two pieces of squid. One for my fishing pole, one for hers. Then she bends across the side of the boat and rinses her hands in the salt water.
“Sometimes we pulled up other fish,” I tell Opal. “Lion fish—I don’t know if it was their regular name—only that they were ugly. We threw them back in.”
I don’t tell her how sorry I felt for the fish because the hooks would be through the sides of their mouths. Or how Lotte would pull out the hooks and toss the fish on the bottom of the boat, where they flopped around. I’d keep my feet away from them. Tried not to see their lips all cut open. One fish had swallowed the hook down into its stomach somewhere, and when Lotte tugged at it, the insides of the fish came out of its mouth, still attached to the hook.
But I can tell Opal this: “Your mother would do the messy work, not just the bait but also getting fish off the hooks and cleaning them. I was squeamish. I thought your mother was tough, but when I told her, she got mad at me and said I didn’t know how hard it was for her.
“I fried up fluke the day your parents fell in love,” I tell Opal. “That’s how your mother got your father—with my cooking. Lotte invited Phillip for dinner, and we pretended that she was doing the cooking.”
“Why?”
“She wasn’t a confident cook. While I enjoyed it. We made Phillip stay in the living room, and then we’d run to
and from the kitchen.”
Opal laughed.
“I told him I was helping Lotte. When I was done cooking, I went out to a movie, and she carried the food to the table.”
I only tell Opal about the dinner part, of course. Not how Phillip and Lotte made love on my couch and left a stain that Lotte couldn’t get out. When she confessed how she’d ruined my couch, I was far more interested in what making love was like, because neither one of us had done it till then. Still, I accepted her offer to trade: her table for my couch.
It’s Make Love, not War, Stupid.
We Need a Regime Change.
Listen to the World, George.
All around us, signs bob in the wind. It’s freezing, and we’re wearing triple layers of clothing. But it’s exhilarating to be in New York for the protest, even if the city has barricaded the side streets. To reach the stage on First, where the speeches are held, we have to head north into the sixties and come down First from the north.
Grim-faced police. Everywhere.
Our crowd is moving as slowly as the line for the women’s room at a matinee.
“Pete could keep up with this,” I tell Annie.
“But the crowds would jostle him.”
“You’re right. Better for him and Opal to look after each other today.”
“The police look terrified.” Annie waves to several of them. “Is this where you have the coffee for the protesters?”
She gets them to laugh. To see us as individuals, perhaps—not a crowd of faceless enemies.
Annie and I wear our posters on string around our necks, covering the fronts of our coats. Annie’s: War is Terrorism. Mine: Early Dissent is essential for democracy.
Yesterday, when I made my poster, it took me hours to settle on this slogan, and it still doesn’t express what I believe, that if my parents and teachers and their generation had spoken out against Hitler’s regime—from the beginning—they would have stemmed the escalation of violence that led to Holocaust.
Way too long. Too formal. Like something that needs footnotes. Better to have just a few words in big letters that people can see all at once.