A Cabinet of Curiosity
Page 21
There is no other worthy digestif for such occasions.
*
Along the quay I encounter a fisherman. He attracts my scrutiny due to his posture—one that was at first trained to cringe and then to stand upright, at attention, with pride. A spine rehabilitated, perhaps, from a position of feeling fear to one of causing fear. He comes to the quay in his own war that is not his war. Fighter jets and Seahawk helicopters constantly overhead and he says before he turned the fifty years he is today he was a bombardier but it’s not true. He’s in his eighties or nineties but with an enticing force of will.
He comes to this quadrant of the quay for several reasons, but at least for this much: these are the houses of the naval officers’ wives of the surrendered Confederacy, grand and glorious yet their ghostly snubs will not protect them from rising seas or from the fisherman bombardier: despite their signs that say no fishing near the estates, there is no method by which a black man who is also a fisherman who is also eighty who is also a bombardier airman could be stopped from exploring the possibilities for instilling discomfort. This draws me to him, our common goal of pushing at the soft places to see how deep the finger goes.
I don’t need to ask. I see the blondes run past and avert their eyes yet mine are drawn to his and his to mine. We are seeking the spine within the slime we both know that we contain. He doesn’t need to ask. I’m the only one who speaks to him at dawn and twilight. He and I are the ones from whom haughty matrons step aside. And he and I know that it has always been so, and we can push them into stumbling should we so desire. I suspect this of him, as he does of me, and we watch them with a dominance that they feel we have not earned, and yet he knows, and I know, that we have. We are here to figure out the compulsion of it, on all sides. But this investigation is clandestine—he is cloaked as a fisherman, and I am daggered.
Perhaps this—and other factors—push us together.
*
He comes here because he likes to catch gaspers. I ask him, Why are they called gaspers and he says, Watch, and gives me the half-smoked Newport cigarette that was between his lips, rips the head from a rotten prawn, and casts his line into the harbor until a pale, bloodless, glistening thing, a fish that is the child of moons, emerges on his hook.
The fisherman bombardier, deft with his fingers—how could he be otherwise—unhinges its jaw with a faint but potent crack and the fish gasps.
As though it has been fondled in the night by German mustard gas.
Listen, says the fisherman bombardier, a gasper. The thing snaps its spine against his bucket until it’s dead. I design a corset for the gasper. One with more flexible metal stays.
*
He comes here because the men-of-war chase the fish into his hooks. The gossamer haints and ghouls of the Atlantic, jellyfish who trail veils behind them, seem still beloved by Tennessee Williams, once a regular at the brothels here, languorous and white and startling, floating lazily in the sea. When they wrap the gasper in their electrical embrace it is shocked with the sear of pain and flips itself into the air, which it cannot breathe for gasping.
When it falls, exhausted, it is into the fetid, baited hooks of the fisherman bombardier.
*
The storm moves in and visibility is low and my anachronistic yet more appropriate than any other option shot-silk corset is getting wet, as it should, because I’m here to see what happens to a wormhole woman on a naval quay at night. Overhead the jets move fast and low as he talks to me. I can’t hear a word he says, just his lips moving: lips that at eighty years old are anything but innocent. Anything except ignorant. Not here. Not now. And while I watch his lips move and no sound makes its way to me because the fighter jets, the fighter jets, the fighter jets, the fighter jets, the fighter jets, the fighter jets, the fighter jets. A Seahawk. The fighter jets. The fighter jets.
They are returning from the aircraft carrier that is returning from classified exercises in an enigmatic Baltic deployment that is returning from the Barents Sea that is returning from the ghoulish grimaces of the gulag skeletons of my Russian ancestors who should by rights and honor have eaten each other alive in the camps rather than reproduced.
So often it is the same thing.
And the fisherman’s lips are still moving but there are so many fighter jets I can relax a while, nodding and watching the electrocutions, because I see the ghost of my Great-Grandfather Lafayette, named after the great general. My Lafayette used to walk this quay with his half brother, of darker skin, who because of that had no name in the white half of the family Bible, and who because of that had no name in the black half of the family Bible, but together they looked for tricks to turn for sailormen along the Norfolk quay, where I am now, except my ancestors put out and I don’t, and they were dying of syphilis and I won’t.
*
And the fighter planes have passed and now the old fisherman bombardier is snapping open cracking open the jaw of a perfectly acceptable cock-sized gasper and he says, Quintan is a man’s name.
Yes, I say. He gives me a seasoned side-eye and squeezes the fish in a way that is ancient and expert. He is eighty or maybe more. He knows how it is done. My name is Lesley, he says. Hello, Lesley, I say, and give him the pause for effect he’s been hoping for but refuse him the satisfaction he seeks. I want to watch what I know will happen next. It’s a girl’s name, he says. And I reply, Yes it is. He pauses. Do you have a husband, Quintan? he asks. I have three; technically, four, but they’re nobody who matters, I say. With any luck they’re dead and without luck at least I’m divorced.
Ah, he says, so it’s just you and the dog on your own.
Yes, I say.
Oh good, he says, and throws the gasper back into the sea for the jellyfish to consume. It was too small for him.
He asks if I go to church. I love the Lord, he says.
No, I say, I don’t go to church. I love the Lord but mine is older than yours. I see a glitter of anger split his eyes of brine then flash away. I relent. I was unkind, and he was hoping we could bond over something closer to the surface—here we realize there are too many possibilities as to what—than our secrets slinking away from inquisition in the brine.
I go to shul, I say, and he eyeballs my attire and says, Really now. The woman with the man’s name and no decent clothes on is a good Jew, he says, Jews, he says, shaking his head in contempt and in the metal bucket the gaspers echo and echo their doomed inhalations.
I have a woman’s name, he says. I could come over to your house and cook you a gasper if you can get a pair of lemons.
Maybe so, I say, but definitely not. Definitely not.
It’s at this point that my great-grandfather and my half great-uncle turn around and grin at me, dark skinned in the shadows, from mouths without flesh. Sailors and sex have never been conventionally heterosexual. They urge me to bend the rules a bit, like they have, hybrids, black and white, male and female, Jewish and Christian, in discomforting ways that had no taxonomical name.
But I am on the quay for different reasons. I tell my ancestors this man wouldn’t give me money because I’m a Jew and he hates us. They shrug their shoulder bones—it’s all they have left to shrug.
Eh, they say, love, hate, just move along, we all wake up for a reason until we don’t.
The crepe myrtle blossoms, an absurd pink, fall into my hair. Genet and his flowers, the syphilitic sores that would have been incubating on the palms of my ancestors, and I’m listening to warplanes again, wanting the bombs to drop. The fisherman bombardier was likely gifted at his art, and well trained. Were black soldiers allowed to drop bombs on white Europeans? It seems unlikely when the matrons’ distaste is fully assessed, and yet many did. Droppers of bombs in a war that was deemed more righteous than the one that needed to be dealt with back in the South. Eh, say my ancestors, holding hands of curiously different hues, love, hate, just move along.
Regardless, even at eighty his salty wet hands don’t shake as he slaps a new gasper again
st his thigh.
Walk on, dog, I say. And the rain falls more angrily than ever and I don’t blame it at all. I would if I could. The embrace of the electric jumps and arcs just beneath the surface of the corset stays.
The Wanting Beach
Lynn Schmeidler
Our mother—gull tattooed across her chest, wishbones for hairpins—told us never to go to the Wanting Beach. She had. We thought this explained her eyes. They looked at you and you contracted. Something inside you was sucked out and gone. No one looked our mother in the eye more than once.
But we were girls, models of curiosity. All three of us. We didn’t listen. We each wanted a particular boy, so we went to the Wanting Beach with a thread from their sleeves, a wad of gum they’d spat on the road, a pebble they’d kicked. We were tracing their initials in the sand with our big toes when three shadows fell over our feet, and we looked up to see their shoulders at our lips.
“What’s this?” said their voices in our hair.
We were embarrassed and so continued to write as if it were not initials, but different secret wishes we were spelling in words, but every next letter pulled us deeper into our want. Then they bent and each put a hand over one of our feet and looked up at us, so we saw our mistake. The Wanting Beach was not where you went to get what you wanted. It was the beach that wanted. The beach wanted and wanted and filled us with its want until we were nothing but bottomless want buckets impossible to fill.
We wanted these boys and these boys wanted us, but you cannot want and also have. The boys saw their mistake too. Their eyes kept taking bits of us, and our eyes kept taking bits of them. And so we stayed like that, looking into each other’s eyes, taking as much as we lost until we were empty of we and they were empty of they. And when they were full of we and we were full of they, the tide turned and the wanting reversed—we wanting we back from them and they wanting they back from us. On the Wanting Beach everything was always shifting, aching, piling wrack lines of nets and bones and broken sparkling things.
Getting to the Wanting Beach was easy, like finding dimes in a soda machine. Leaving was harder. We could not find our shoes in the moonless night, and we lost our sense of direction. We wandered, first holding hands with the boys, then holding hands with each other, finally holding our own hands behind our backs until the sun beiged the black sand and we found a path through the panic grass leading home.
Our mother was smoking on the front stoop when we arrived. Everything about her was clenched. Smoke curled from her fingers like they were coals, and behind us we could feel the horizon disappear. “We didn’t think …,” we began. But before we could finish, she turned her back and went inside. Our mother always knew what we were going to say before we said it. We watched her disappear down the hall in a ripple of heat and realized she had nothing to give us.
That night for dinner our mother served a new dish for our new selves: “Welsh rarebit,” she said, placing a steaming yellow mess on the lazy Susan. She looked like an idea of a mother. We cried as we ate, because we thought it was rabbit—so creamy and velvet—and because there would never be enough.
The next week want was taught in every class. In French—je veux, I want, was corrected for politesse to je voudrais, I would like, but it tasted the same in our mouths. In history, wanting was blamed for the war. In science, an experiment proved subjects who’d recently eaten salt perceived a glass of water as closer than subjects who’d just drunk to their contentment. Conclusion: what you want appears closer than it is.
Since visiting the Wanting Beach, our stomachs ached and our knees looked like faces. We woke, palms sweating, in the middle of the night; small red bumps appeared under our shirts, ringing our waists in itch. We wanted so much, our throats burned. We wanted devotees; we wanted the big, loud world beating around us, vibrating our ribs; we wanted storms; we wanted vistas. We wanted honey and musk; we wanted mouthfuls of cake. We wanted gushing bloody periods and thick eyebrows, wind chafing our faces. We wanted to rename the animals; we wanted to lead cults. We wanted to straddle the weak, to climb skyscrapers and hang statues of ourselves from their towers. We wanted our hymens broken, we wanted our faces on coins. We wanted to lead invasions. We wanted to lie down naked in the middle of the street thrumming under the stampede of the new.
The wanting was so bright it nearly blinded us. We swore never to want again. This quickly grew problematic: wanting not to want. We wanted wantlessness so badly, we gave away all our things: our rings, our mirrors, our dog. The next day our mother left, which we told ourselves was what we wanted, which made us angry because we’d vowed not to want, and so we blamed ourselves. The truth was our mother had long threatened to leave, and her absence was marked less by its suddenness than by how little it changed the tone of the house, though the mood was perceptibly off. No one approached the stove. No one opened a window. The kitchen grew damp and fungal. The refrigerator whistled a high-pitched trill.
In our mother’s wake: a windfall of nightmares—thumbs too big for doors, a discovery of wares—ointments and corsets, boomerangs, drapes, and retractable blades. We asked ourselves what a mother was. A mother was a tree in the middle of a house. A mother was a hole where missing went. A mother was never finished—half-baked cakes, unhemmed dresses, marked catalogs for stores that no longer existed.
We were debating the relationship between wanton and want when a woman appeared in our foyer. We didn’t want her there, but we didn’t want her gone. She appeared in the foyer and lent it an air of formality. We had once had a coat-tree, a shoe rack, and an umbrella stand in the foyer, but soon before she left, our mother had moved them to the stoop.
“Don’t you want,” our mother had called from the doorway to every man who passed. It wasn’t clear if she was offering the furniture or admonishing their desire. One man hefted the coat-tree like a bride over his shoulder and carried it away. A second man snatched the shoe rack, hailed a cab, and sped off. A last man set his bag of groceries in the umbrella stand, tenderly lifted it to his chest, bowed to our mother, and ambled down the sidewalk.
We remembered all this when the woman arrived in a dripping coat and rain boots. Handshakes had never been encouraged in our family whether from fear of intimacy or germs we could not say, but we nodded at the woman. “Mmmm,” she hummed inside her throat as she jotted something down on her clipboard page.
It was a cool day and the woman had a slight shiver. Although we thought of offering her something, none of us did. We’d fought our own wanting so studiously, we found ourselves unsure how to meet the unspoken needs of another. Plus, we had given up entertaining. Ever since our visit to the Wanting Beach, it seemed so much could be wanted and so much could be given that each possible guest was an undeniable argument for temptation and loss. As if with each stranger admitted over our threshold all the desires of all the people in the world might deluge our small apartment. And why wouldn’t it be so? The world was overrun with wants.
Nevertheless, there was something affecting about the woman, so we stepped aside to admit her. She moved her eyes over the foyer, then stepped forward and took in the living room and adjacent dining area and peered a little to the left so she could peek into the narrow kitchen.
“Mmmm,” came the throat murmur again. We suspected she was there to report upon our ability to care for ourselves. We were what they called “underage,” though the term was questionable. After all, like the woman, we each were of an exact age, neither under nor over. Nevertheless, we had expected the arrival of someone for some time now. The woman with the clipboard, however, made no reference either to our youth or our motherlessness, the latter of which we would have denied—our mother having left no sign that she was not about to return at any moment: her slippers beside the bed, her wallet and keys on the counter, in the carpet little crescents of her nails.
“I could sell your apartment,” the woman said.
“No thank you,” we said.
“Does it have Wi-Fi?”
“To appeal to you I could show you some properties my company has recently sold for very impressive sums.”
There was something of a disappointment about her, made more disappointing by the shade of lipstick she wore on her lips and front teeth. Also, by the way she pulled in her chin as she spoke. She withdrew a business card from her purse. On the card was a photograph of a similar woman in a similar coat, with lighter hair and the words: Pivot toward buyers and thrive.
“We see,” we said, passing the card from one to the other. It was wholly unimpressive.
“I just got my license,” the woman said. “I have to start somewhere.”
“Not here,” we said. But then we wondered if we were beginning to want something by not wanting it. Curiosity breeds intimacy. We blushed.
“Can you sing?”
“Can we what?”
“Do you sing together?”
“No,” we said.
“You should. Group singing is easier than working out and cheaper than therapy. Singing fortifies and enriches.”
Was this what they taught in real estate school? To sell something is better than to sell nothing? Could she sell us on singing? Make us the next girl group? Be our agent?
We had never before received a solicitation this professional, as we lived in a building with an off-putting facade. We were, however, accustomed by then to dodging the slew of advertisements aimed at our demographic claiming to have what we wanted. Our latest method was to focus instead on what we needed: twelve hundred calories and invisibility, which required neither wanting nor being wanted, respectively.
It was increasingly difficult to be girls and unwanted, but we worked at it. We bathed just enough not to give off an odor, but not enough as to be fragrant. We wore midcalf-length skirts with loose-fitting tops that didn’t quite match. The idea was to be asexual and uncategorizable—neither hipster nor scene, yet not so puzzling as to encourage scrutiny. When we spoke, we favored verbs and nouns, and our voices were tuned slightly to the nasal. Whenever possible, we farted. We farted now.