But I couldn’t go back—and with Mom gone I didn’t want to go back, no matter how many options there might be now that getting married to Kathy was no longer in the picture. I liked the life I was living, washed up at the ocean’s edge. I liked having Chuck and Ginny in it.
I liked seeing movies together, playing volleyball on the beach, talking and laughing and arguing for hours over coffee in some crummy little diner. They studied at the library on campus most weeknights until it was time for Chuck to clock in at the Y, and sometimes they talked me into going with them, and I’d just sit and read while they worked.
I read Cat’s Cradle, which Chuck lent me—then Mother Night and Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, feeling proud of the fact that Kurt Vonnegut had grown up in Indiana. I read Invisible Man and Black Like Me and Johnny Got His Gun—each one its own mind-bending little universe. I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which seriously messed with my head.
It was about this petty criminal who claimed he was crazy so he could get committed to a mental hospital instead of serving jail time, but it turned out that the ward he was assigned to was controlled by this Nazi-like nurse, Miss Ratched. The patients were all too scared to stand up to her, but this guy, McMurphy, decided to bring her down. The problem was, he didn’t realize till too late that a jail sentence is finite, but if you get sent to a mental hospital, the doctors decide when you’ll be released—which might be never. And the doctors were afraid of Nurse Ratched, too. So he was stuck there, totally at her mercy.
What is crazy, I wondered—and who got to decide? What if the person with the authority was mean and vindictive and maybe a little crazy herself? When was it okay—maybe even wrong not—to break the rules? If you convinced people to break the rules with you, what was your responsibility toward them?
Was it ever okay to alter someone’s brain?
I’d heard of shock treatments, but never quite understood what they were until I read that book. I thought lobotomies were a joke, something made up for horror movies. I had no idea that real people had them—whether they wanted them or not. It scared the shit out of me to think about what that would be like.
On the other hand, what if it worked? What if I could lie down on a table, get hit with a couple of bolts of electricity or maybe have a little operation guaranteed to make all the memories of Mom sick and dying go away? Forever.
Wouldn’t I be crazy not to do that?
One overcast day, I was rereading Hemingway’s stories in the public library and glanced up to see that the sky framed by the tall windows had grown dark, almost purple. The palm trees were swaying like dancers in the wind. Then there was a crack and the rain started, lashing the windows, pounding the roof.
The florescent lights in the library seemed suddenly brighter; they took on a strange cast that made my reflection appear in the window across from where I sat. I could also see the reflections of one, then another and another of the down-and-out men as they came into the library through the main door, soaking wet, and quietly took seats around me. Like ghosts.
Hemingway had written those stories in a café in Paris, homesick for Michigan, for the clear vision of the world he had when he was a boy there. I got to the last story, “Indian Camp,” and I knew the Indian man in the top bunk was going to slit his throat because he couldn’t stand the sound of his wife suffering in childbirth. I knew the last line by heart, but reading it that day totally unhinged me.
Not because the boy’s innocence had shocked me into realizing I’d die myself one day. I’d known that, really known it, since I was seven, lying in bed at dusk on a summer evening and the knowledge floated in, as if through the open window. Someday you will not be. My heart raced, my blood felt cold inside me. I had to make myself lie still instead of jumping up and running—I didn’t even know where, just running away from what I knew. Since then, it would sometimes come upon me just like that, always when I least expected it.
Now, because of Mom, I knew what death looked like—which made it worse. But what hit me that afternoon was what it must have been like for my dad to watch Bobby and me watch Mom die, wanting to protect us because that’s what parents did, but helpless in the face of what was happening to us all. I’d sent that one postcard; I still hadn’t gotten up the nerve to call him. For all he knew, I could be dead, like Mom—or in some kind of terrible trouble.
Maybe I was like Schrodinger’s Cat in his mind, neither dead nor alive until somebody opened the box—and that somebody had to be me. But I didn’t want to open it because when I did my other life would flood into it. The one in which Mom was even more dead than she was in the life I was living now.
Dead is dead. I knew that, too. But it didn’t feel that way.
I tucked the Hemingway book into my knapsack, got up, elbowed my way through more men coming inside to escape the weather, and burst through the big front doors. I had no idea where I was going; I just knew I didn’t want to stay there, among all the wrecked men, whose families probably didn’t know where they were, either. Maybe, by now, they didn’t even care.
The hard, cold rain shocked me after the damp warmth of the reading room. It felt like a thousand needles on my face, but it was a good hurt, real, and I stood there on the steps of the library I don’t know how long, my head raised, taking some weird comfort in knowing the pain was manageable. I could make it stop.
It was so stupid, thinking about what might have happened, thinking about alternate lives—real or imagined. I had one life, that’s all—and Mom dying, dad loving me and worrying about me and caring about what happened to me would always be in it. I walked to the banyan tree and sat in the little cave of it until I started breathing like a normal person again. I went back to the Y and changed into dry clothes before I met Chuck and Ginny for dinner at Wolfie’s.
But Ginny took one look at me and asked, “Paul, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”
She didn’t press me, but she knew I was lying.
TWENTY-TWO
A few days later, she invited me to go out to Shell Key with her. We headed for Pass-a-Grille in her green VW Bug after the lunch rush at the Crab Shack—top down, radio blaring. News to me: Ginny had a boat, too, which she kept at Merry Harbor, a sweet little Chris-Craft her dad owned when he was in high school and her uncles had refurbished for her sixteenth birthday. The honey-colored wood was waxed and gleaming, the chrome fittings shone.
“Slipper Shell” was written in script on the side.
“It’s named for sailing slipper shells with my dad,” she explained, and took the key to the boat from the battered army duffel retrieved from her locker in the marina. It was attached to a yellow float, along with a shell that had a hole drilled through it, which she held so that I could see the dried membrane that half-covered the scooped out part.
“See? It’s like a little bedroom slipper,” she said. “But it’s like a little boat, too. If you get a perfectly shaped, perfectly balanced one—like this one—you can float it in calm water. It’s my absolute first memory: my dad looking for just the right one, then showing me how to float it in a tidal pool. I was three, maybe four years old. We spent hours doing that. I spent hours doing it by myself after he died.”
She laughed, which surprised me.
“Sweet little shells,” she said. “But get how they mate: they stack up on each other, maybe eight high—males on top so their sex organs can protrude down into the females beneath. Weird enough, right? But here’s what I love. When the females die, the males above them turn to females—so there’s always a female on the bottom to make babies.”
She looked at me, her face radiant with delight. But I was embarrassed, and not for the first time, by the matter-of-factness about which she talked of such things. I was embarrassed about being embarrassed. It’s just biology, I told myself. What’s the big deal?
She hopped down into the boat and gestured for me to follow. She lifted one of the red leather seats and to
ok out two life jackets, putting one on herself and handing me the other. When I’d secured mine to her satisfaction, she donned a battered sailor hat, brim down, started the engine, and off we went, leaving Pass-a-Grille behind us.
It was a slow wake zone, and I sat back, letting the sun wash over me, enjoying the cool sea breeze. Ginny pointed out Tierra Verde to the west—once sacred to the Indians, who used it as ceremonial and burial grounds until the Spanish explorers tried to claim it. Ponce de León was mortally wounded on Tierra Verde, she said.
Ponce de León. All I could remember of him was a picture in my freshman World History book—a guy in old-fashioned clothes, wearing a feathered hat—and something about the Fountain of Youth. But he had been a real person who’d been in this place, where I was now. Pirates and buccaneers had been here, too.
“People still look for the treasure he supposedly buried somewhere on the island,” Ginny said. “We used to do it when we were kids. We never found any—but more than once we scared ourselves half to death, convinced that we’d seen ghosts. Especially when we were there at night. My uncle Mike is an amateur astronomer and Shell Key is a great place for stargazing, because it’s so dark. So we’d come over—the whole family—and camp out and look at the stars. We can do that sometime, if you want.”
“That would be cool,” I said. “Where I grew up, you can barely see anything in the sky because of all the crap from the factories.”
“It’s terrible what we do to the earth,” Ginny said. “That stupid bridge they made from the mainland to the St. Pete beaches—as soon as it was possible to drive over there, developers started getting dredge and fill permits. All those new hotels and restaurants everyone is so proud of—if you know what you’re looking for, you can actually see how altering the shoreline to build them is affecting the balance of things. The erosion on the beaches, the nesting habits of shorebirds.”
Out to the east, in open water, porpoises arced up and disappeared beneath the waves.
“They talk to each other,” Ginny said, her blue eyes suddenly brimming with tears. “Porpoises. They use certain sounds to alert each other to danger, to keep track of each other. That just kills me, you know? That supposedly dumb mammals would take care of each other like that, while we—”
She shook her head and fell silent, navigating the boat away from Tierra Verde toward Shell Key. As we approached, what had been just a green haze in the distance became a beach, sea grasses, palm trees, and pines. Ginny was always talking about doing research for her classes here, so I figured there’d be a laboratory with biologists bent over microscopes. But as far as I could tell, the island looked a lot like it must have looked to Ponce de León more than four hundred years ago.
“It’s a living lab,” she explained. “One of the last unspoiled barrier islands in the area. Some of it’s protected, a reserve—but a big part of it is a public beach with some of the best shelling on the Gulf Coast. There are signs posted around the island to remind people why it’s so important to keep it unspoiled. But they still camp too close to the nesting areas. They bring their dogs and let them roam free. Don’t even get me started on the trash they leave behind.
“That’s what we need to do today, in fact. Pick up trash. Then check the nests and make sure they’re safe, rope off any new ones we find.”
She cut the engine, dropped the anchor, and we climbed out of the boat and waded to the shore, where she took off at her usual pace, her duffel bag slung over her shoulder. I had to laugh, thinking of what Chuck would say if he could see me hurrying to catch up with her.
We walked the public beach, stopping along the way so Ginny could check off the nesting areas on her clipboard. She told me the names of the birds as we went, both their common and scientific names. Now and then, she stopped, picked up a shell, and told me the name of it, too.
“My dad used to do this with me,” she said. “He carried me in his arms even before I could walk, telling me the names of things. When I got older, we’d go out at low tide and throw shells and sand dollars back into the water just in case they might still be alive.
We walked quietly awhile, Ginny darting up into the grasses to check the nests. When she found a new one, I helped her stake it off—and when I picked up the duffel afterwards, she let me carry it. Heading back toward the boat, we took off our shoes and waded along the shore. The air had cooled; the sun was setting earlier now, and soon it would begin its descent into the water.
“They never found his body,” Ginny said, still walking. “That made it harder for my family—especially my mom and my grandma. But I was only seven when it happened, and I couldn’t figure out why, if he couldn’t be here, they wouldn’t want him to be in the ocean. I knew they buried dead people. I knew he wouldn’t want that. It made me feel better, knowing that’s where he was. I’d imagine him swimming with all the beautiful fish, sleeping in the ocean caves he used to show me pictures of. He seemed real as anything.”
“Sometimes I think of my mom like that,” I said. “But in the kitchen, in the yard.”
She stopped and looked at me. “Is that why you don’t go home?” she asked. “Because if you’re there, you can’t pretend everything’s okay?”
Now I was the one who kept walking. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
I changed the subject to the presidential election, just a week away. All the polls had LBJ winning, but the outside chance that Goldwater might just surprise everyone and edge him out was enough to keep people talking about it.
“He’s completely insane,” Ginny said. “Him and his goddamn nuclear bombs. You read Hiroshima. My God. Some people were unrecognizable afterwards; their faces melted. They had horrible medical problems from breathing in the poison. But did you know that the bombs also killed everything in nature within a huge radius of where they exploded? Plants, animals, fish, birds. Every. Single. Thing.
“Because most people don’t know that. They also don’t know that a lot of the pesticides we use are doing the same thing right now, just not that dramatically—and if we keep it up, we’ll destroy the whole planet. DDT, for example—when we were kids, a truck would come around and spray that stuff practically every night in the summer to kill the mosquitoes. We thought it was so cool; we’d all run after it.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We did that.”
“Everybody our age did,” Ginny said. “The thing is, DDT is like a little mushroom cloud in its own right. Sure, it kills the mosquitoes, but it also kills everything else that gets in its way. When they sprayed the salt marshes for mosquitoes a few years ago, it killed almost all the fiddler crabs that fed there. The runoff that got into the ocean killed oysters and clams—and the ones that didn’t die showed traces of the poison. Which means people who ate them also ingested it. Who knows what might happen to them?
“And crop dusting? The pesticides from that get into whatever you eat in Indiana—” She waved her hands, as if to capture an example. “Corn,” she said. “It’s pathetic the way we take the earth for granted. It’s here. We think it’ll always be here. But it won’t be, if we don’t start paying attention—at least not so anything but cockroaches can actually live on it. You have to make people love the earth. Or at least—
“Sorry,” she said. “I’m doing it again.”
But I liked that about her, how she was so passionate about what she loved—and I said so, which made her blush.
“And you’re right about Goldwater,” I added. “My dad pegged him from the start. A rich guy who thinks he can do whatever he damn well pleases. Including bomb the shit of out of whoever disagrees with him.”
“What’s he like, Paul?” she asked. “Your dad? You’ve told me a lot about your mom, but you don’t say much about him at all.
I thought a moment. “Dad’s a good guy. He was nuts about my mom. Seriously. It was like they were still in high school. He’s smart. Funny. You’d get a kick out of him.”
I told her about our neighborhood, one of those subdivisions tha
t sprung up after the war: six blocks of boxy little houses that looked so much alike, my dad liked to joke that if you had a little too much to drink one night you might end up in your neighbor’s bedroom.
The developer had named it Happy Homes.
“That is guaranteed,” Dad said, pen poised to sign the mortgage contract. “The happy part. Right?”
The salesman gets this look on his face, like, is this guy crazy? Then he pastes a smile on his face and says, “‘My goodness. Who wouldn’t be happy in a lovely new home like this?’”
Ginny laughed. “How often do you talk to him?”
I shrugged.
She looked at me, I looked away.
“You don’t talk to him?” she asked. “Paul, does your dad even know where you are?”
“I sent him a postcard when I got here. He knows I’m fine.”
“Fine?” she said. “I’m sure your dad does not think you’re fine. Jesus, Paul. You love him. He’s been through hell, losing your mom. And you refuse to talk to him?”
“I’m not refusing to talk to him,” I said, and kept walking.
“Okay,” Ginny said. “Let me get this straight. You sent him one crappy postcard nearly two months ago. You haven’t called him; he has no idea how to get in touch with you. What would your name for that be?”
“I know I need to call him, okay? I’m just not ready.”
She grabbed my arm, made me stop and look at her. “Don’t you think it’s time to stop acting like a guilty little kid who ran away from home? Listen, you need to call your father—now—and tell him you’re not, I don’t know, dead or robbing grocery stores to be able to eat. I mean it.”
“Okay, okay,” I said. “I’ll call him.”
“Tonight,” she said.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll call him tonight.”
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