“I am your lily. I am your love. I will be faithful to you and god.” She folded the paper back up.
“Rings!” said the icebreaker captain.
The man in the beige windbreaker held out two rose-gold bands that glinted on his open palm. The rings went on and the couple kissed and the crowd in the stairwell cheered as one more deafening gust shook the tower windows.
“Yes!” boomed the captain. “We may well rejoice and celebrate. But may we never forget the terrible depths of this world!”
4 Irish Lord
FOR THE PAST SEVERAL SUMMERS Livy had worked long-lining for halibut in the Gulf of Alaska. The family that employed her ran a small outfit out of Ketchikan: their boat, a marginally buoyant piece of fiberglass; their skipper, a third-generation fisherman utterly without instinct. As a student of what not to do, Livy studied the man as she would a rare and dying plant.
When he got excited, she too felt a thrill and paid particularly close attention.
“The fish are there!” he’d yell. “I feel it!”
He was always wrong. Pointing at a vague patch of glassy black sea and shouting, Down there! It was the moment he lived for; though it underscored their ever-bleakening prospects, it was his moment, his to take. Down there! Yes. Down there, with the starfish and the Irish lords, down with the albino space shrimp. The most unimaginable things came up on those lines, none of them halibut. Over time Livy learned where the fish were by where the captain didn’t go.
After months of blisters and vomiting over the side of the rail, Livy was often glad when the season ended and she returned to Seattle and went back to driving a cab at night. Floating through the intersections at bar closing time, fishtailing on the barest shimmer of rain in a Crown Victoria, making money, her own captain at last. Yet no eternity exists more vividly than 5:00 a.m. in a Dairy Queen parking lot holding some jackass’s empty wallet as collateral while he tries to borrow the fare from his dealer.
This was how it went for three years. Back and forth, migrational. But now Alaska had fallen through. After a winter of pull-tab binges in Juneau, the family she’d always worked for had sold their boat, converted to Mormonism, and moved south in the embrace of the church. Without another Alaska connection, Livy was out of luck. Driving a cab was changing too. Every jerk with a car was a cabdriver now and all the real money was gone out of the game.
So she got a job refurbishing vintage yachts at a marina on Lake Union. The position flew under the radar of state minimum-wage requirements by claiming to be training—Here’s a scraper, there’s the paint, go forth—so getting up to minimum wage took three months, but she worked without supervision and that was worth a lot.
Then in the early spring Livy found her basement studio; built without permits and well below code, it absorbed 80 percent of her income, but it was the first time in her life that she’d had real privacy. Until Cheyenne showed up and ruined it. Now her boxes of books and records filled the corners. Her chatter was constant. She boiled up all the macaroni and drank all the Folgers. With every economic microaggression she created a soft and persistent financial pressure, reminding Livy of how tentative existence was. A broken arm could shatter Livy’s livelihood. Bronchitis could soak up an entire paycheck. One minor bike accident, that’s it, watch below. Because that’s all it would take to end up on her mother’s couch. Livy began walking to and from work just to be alone, an hour each way. She walked along the ship canal, under the Aurora Bridge, along the edge of the lake, sometimes thinking of it as the edge of a vast and horizonless sea instead.
Coming home one evening, two weeks after the wedding, Livy found the studio empty. Cheyenne had run into an old acquaintance and was out for the night. Livy almost cried in gratitude. Getting out of her work clothes, she sat naked in the lamplight. She sang to herself and drew on her body with a ballpoint pen. She outlined her scars—the dot from a nail gun, the oval on her knee from where she had taken the stitches out too early with a safety pin and a toenail clipper. She stopped at the circular, nickel-sized scar on her upper arm.
* * *
—
She’d done it to herself with a car cigarette lighter the last time she and Cheyenne had lived together. It had been their senior year of high school, a period now referred to as the Year of the Great Crisis, the first of Livy’s elliptical, low-grade depressions, which arrived like a comet and would return about every seven years. The tiniest thing had set it off. Livy had met two girls earlier that fall and the three of them started hanging out around the clock. One night, six months in, she found out that the two girls were dating and had been for months. The idea that you could feel so close to people and not know what was going on, that you could be so very mistaken, caused a foundational crack. She lost weight. Counselors called her into their offices to tell her it was okay to be gay, which she already knew. Kirsten was convinced she’d been in love with one of the girls and had her heart broken. Only Cheyenne got it right.
“She’s fine,” she said, “she just doesn’t like being wrong.”
One evening, just before summer break, Livy borrowed Kirsten’s car and drove to the ship canal. Parking near the fish ladder, she left the motor running. Furious at herself, she started to cry. Enraged at her own weakness, she pushed in the cigarette lighter. When it popped out, she yanked her T-shirt sleeve up over her shoulder and pressed the orange coils into the meat of her upper arm. It hurt like hell and smelled god-awful. She counted to three as it burned then jumped out of the car, walked to the canal, and threw the lighter into the water.
* * *
—
Sitting naked on the rug in the lamplight, she felt the echo of that time. Cheyenne’s presence exposed a fragility that was more than economic. Ever since her sister moved in, Livy had started to doubt herself in ways she hadn’t since she was a teenager. Having the name of the other mother now, after all these years, only made things weirder. Ann Radar—and what is Radar anyway? Kirsten said a lot of people made up names back then. It might have been a band she was in or an idea. It was a lead, though, of some sort.
The sisters hadn’t been able to reach an agreement on what to do with the information. Having the address and not using it made Livy feel more in control, whereas it made Cheyenne feel out of control. Cheyenne began to fixate on the idea that one of them might have come from people who had something. Maybe they want a granddaughter? Maybe she wants to be a mother now? Livy wondered if her sister wasn’t right, and if maybe there wasn’t an opportunity there.
In the morning Livy found a note slipped under her door. It was from her landlord. On a letterpress card with a daffodil in the bottom corner it said: If your sister’s going to stay here then I’m raising your rent by half and doubling your utilities. I’ll also need a larger deposit and $30 for a background check. Thanks!
Under different circumstances Livy would have marched upstairs and threatened to rat out her landlord to the building permits office. But this just might have solved Livy’s problem. Cheyenne would never be able to come up with the rent money and Livy had none to front. Now she could herd Cheyenne along and they could both raise a glass and fairly say, Damn the landlords of this world!
But when Cheyenne came home and Livy handed her the note, Cheyenne had little reaction. We’ll figure it out, she chirped, and then she ate more than her share of the eggs, didn’t do the dishes, and rolled out a yoga mat in the center of the room.
* * *
—
Livy tried to find respite at work but couldn’t. Everything irritated her. Marlinspike in hand, she looked around the repair bay and wondered which of the two rich hippie owners she needed to gut to get NPR turned off. Livy put her earplugs in and ran her hand across the side of a battered sloop.
The bubbling gray paint had blistered and cracked and the wood beneath was rotting. Jesus, what’s wrong with people? The beautiful thing about a bowlin
e knot is that it’s simple. You can even make it one-handed if you’re injured or maimed. The boat Livy was looking at had been rigged and sailed by an imbecile. The mast had snapped in a small storm and the boat had been abandoned, an ark in the weeds. This was her bosses’ specialty, flipping old boats for outrageous prices on a clever paint job and polish—everything is reparable if you change your definition of fixed. Livy grabbed a paint scraper and began to work.
When lunchtime came, she got her food and went outside to eat in the sun. At the end of the dock she saw Kirsten coming toward her. She hadn’t seen her mother since the wedding.
As Kirsten approached, Livy saw she had on her battle shirt. It had faded from purple to lavender and was thin from years of washing. There was a harmless blueberry muffin in the upper left and the words AIN’T NO LOVIN’ LIKE SOMETHING FROM THE COVEN written across the top. Kirsten wore it when gearing up for a fight. Livy had seen her throw an entire tray of lasagna at a couch when she was wearing that shirt.
The shirt made Livy feel like a child.
“I only have a minute,” Livy said when her mother was within earshot.
“We can take a quick walk,” said Kirsten.
They had gone only a few feet when Kirsten started in.
“Cheyenne says you are thinking of going to find Ann.”
“We might. I don’t know,” said Livy.
“This isn’t something Ann did. She didn’t give you the address. Cyril did. Following his whims instead of respecting Ann’s decision is tantamount to firebombing all of second-wave feminism for a pat on the head from the Man.”
“Firebombing?” Livy said.
Kirsten lowered her voice like the FBI was listening. “Would it make a difference if I told you this whole Ann Radar thing was more about Cheyenne than you? It’s her path, not yours.”
“Can we please not talk in terms of paths?” said Livy.
“It’s her story.”
“Are you saying that Ann is her mom?”
Something pulled at Livy. Unlike Cheyenne, she’d grown away from obsessing over whose mother was whose, but that didn’t mean she liked the idea that other people knew something about her life that she didn’t. On its surface, this talk with Kirsten was a typical lecture. Don’t look outside yourself for what you need. Nothing but you will make you whole. Yet the subtext felt like a confession. Then again, Kirsten considered it her job to make every moment a potential initiatory experience. Which pointed toward this not being an admission of parentage so much as a test. An apple from the hag in the forest who is not really a hag.
5 1040-EZ
KIRSTEN, NOCTURNAL AS SHE WAS, rarely woke before 4:00 p.m. If she did, it was for administrative reasons: DMV lines, unpayable bills, courthouses, community college. She preferred these things to come at her half-asleep so she could protect the best of herself for later, because at night she had a shining-diamond mind.
She had come home from meeting with Livy and begun to work through her list of chores since she was already awake, but then stopped in the middle. She was anxious and hadn’t known it. The day had a haze to it. It felt like a future memory, each moment framed like she wasn’t there but looking back at it already. It was a natural step from that feeling to the realization that what was bothering her was Ann. Beneath her visible frustration at Cyril’s violation and the way that it might throw her daughters off course was something moving that she could not name, an undertow.
Kirsten pulled a box out of the closet. Beneath ten years of 1040-EZs, she found her earliest journals and brought them to the kitchen table. On top was her first. It had a denim cover with a gnome at the bottom and she had carved the words FOOD IS EVIL. SLEEP IS FOR LOSERS into the cover. She’d written it back when she was still starving herself and living on Pop-Tarts cut into tiny squares. It was written in the summer she met Margaret, a public-health nurse and midwife from Boston.
* * *
—
Fifteen-year-old Kirsten had walked into Planned Parenthood looking for birth control. Too skinny, stripping her black hair to frost it blond, worried the pill would make her fat but frustrated by slipping diaphragms, creeped out by the sponge, sick of condoms—she demanded Margaret give her something better, as if it were the nurse’s fault.
Margaret started listing all the options but Kirsten did not like what she was hearing.
“This sucks,” she said, jumping off the examining table. “No wonder people pull out.”
“What do you call people who use the withdrawal method?” asked Margaret.
Kirsten glowered. “Parents.”
“Heterosexual,” said Margaret.
Kirsten looked at her but Margaret remained straight-faced.
“Fuck, I wish I was gay,” said Kirsten.
“Well if you’re dead set against condoms you could try the cervical cap. No protection against STDs but it works pretty well if you do it right, and it’s smaller than a diaphragm. Most women are just too chicken to touch themselves and would rather poison their bodies, but you’re not chicken, are you?”
Kirsten tried to figure out if it was more pathetic to be proved a coward or to get goaded into something because someone calls you one. She pulled her pants off and lay back on the table while Margaret measured her cervix. Pulling a small latex cup out of a box, she showed Kirsten how to get it up inside her and get the suction right.
“We’ll have to order the cap. It’ll take a few weeks.”
On the way out, Margaret grabbed some granola bars from a basket in a break room and shoved them into Kirsten’s hands.
“The Man wants you too thin to act. Too thin to think.”
It’s hard to overestimate the impact of meeting someone who is truly free. Pre-Margaret, Kirsten felt flat. Everything washed in pastel, the hideous institutional color palette of the day: baby blue, peach, coral, salmon, pale aqua, taupe. After Margaret, everything began to change. Over their next few appointments she worked on Kirsten like a fucking glorious unicorn of feminism. She came at Kirsten with everything she had. In one summer, she freed Kirsten from nearly every cultural bind, a radical form of rare magic.
* * *
—
Turning the pages of the old journal, rage shot through Kirsten. It wasn’t Cyril’s choice. The agreement she and Ann had made had nothing to do with him. She turned to the back of the journal where she’d kept a list of Ann’s addresses. The one Cyril gave the girls was years old. Ann had left the monastery in Montana when they were in middle school. She also didn’t go by Ann anymore. But that didn’t mean there weren’t ways to find her.
It was best to warn Ann. Sitting down at the table, Kirsten got out pen and paper and wrote a short letter. Then she ripped out the page of addresses and took it to her altar on the bookshelf.
Once it had been a busy collection of small statuary, Hindu death goddesses, superheroes, laminated Klimt bookmarks. Now it was spare. She was long past thinking the images she’d clung to as a young woman still held power for her. Like an old erotic map, they were just too familiar to work. Now her altar was simple. A leaf. An abalone shell. A poem she’d screenshot and printed out at the library. She tore the addresses into strips and, burning them on the altar, applied the first lesson she’d ever learned from Margaret: Never give the Man what he wants.
6 Triumph
CHEYENNE SAT in the temp office watching the woman behind the desk peel the label gum off a bottle of hand sanitizer. The lobby was empty. The daily work assignments had been dispersed and all the other new applicants processed. Cheyenne was the last appointment of the day and had to make a big show and cry to get the slot. Now she sat in a burnt orange upholstered chair covered in brown stains watching a reality show about people getting mangled on crab boats.
It was interrupted every few minutes by teasers for the news—a record of halfhearted diplomatic gestures, the tradition
al mating dance of the war gods, some updates on general cruelty, and, inexplicably, a picture of a beach. Then it was back to the crab boat and someone in a yellow spacesuit getting swept off-deck into the arctic swell.
She looked down at her application and saw a job history comparable to any intellectually ambitious recovering meth head. Newspaper delivery, nonprofit program director, bookstore clerk, nonprofit program director again, university administrative assistant, Christmas retail, university administrative assistant’s lackey, study-skills tutor, bad wife. Then a murky period of off-grid employment that wasn’t worth explaining. She turned in the form and went back to her spot on the orange chair.
Ann Radar was at least a direction. Cheyenne was surprised that Livy agreed to go find her, but Livy set the bar for the trip at $1,000, an impossible amount. Get your half of the money together and we’ll go. Complicating things further, Ann was no longer in Montana. They had spoken to the abbot there and the only lead they had was shaky, a woman who might have once been Ann who was now at a monastery in Boston. They called to see if she was there and were told that she was. And that was enough for them. Three weeks after the wedding, though, they were no closer to making the trip. It would be the same in a month or two or three. Unless Cheyenne started to make some money.
At five o’clock people started leaving the temp office. At a quarter after, the associate placement counselor called Cheyenne back into the administrative catacombs. The associate sat her down, reviewed her clipboard, and told Cheyenne she had a wonderful future in servitude. If she had the right outlook. Which she didn’t. Cheyenne made it through with her eager face on, though barely. The counselor congratulated her on her wealth of hard-won but unrelated skills. We’ll call you for sure. Meanwhile get some slacks.
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 4