The Salted Air

by Thom Conroy

  I close the book and move it away from me on the desk. For the first time in weeks, I begin to cry. It’s a full-on weeping. How long it goes on I don’t know. I cry until I’m unable, and then I dial my mother in Swallsborough, Pennsylvania. On the fourth ring, I calculate that is probably about 7 a.m. there.

  ‘Hello?’

  The sound of my mother’s voice cracks me all over again. Before I have said a word, my mother calms me and tells me she loves me and asks me what’s wrong, as I knew she would. I tell her everything, only leaving out the bit about Bruce, and when I’m done I am relieved. I feel hollow, and so very light.

  ‘Are you going to make it?’ she says.

  ‘Thanks to you. I think I just needed someone to listen.’

  ‘You sure you didn’t hurt yourself?’

  ‘I’m fine.’ I look at my dress crumpled on the desk beside the phone, and I laugh. ‘Can’t say the same for my dress.’

  ‘Your father should come home.’ My mother’s tone is suddenly peremptory. She is no longer offering comfort. She is casting judgement.

  ‘I’m going to get him,’ I say. ‘See what he’s up to.’

  My mother sighs into the phone. She’s got to get to work and she’s running late. I apologise, and she says it’s not as if she wasn’t running late before I called. I tell her to get going or she’ll be fired.

  ‘You talk like that would be a bad thing.’

  After this comment I lean back in the chair and rest my father’s ludicrously archaic Maltese Falcon-style phone on my shoulder. That quickly, the balance of comfort has shifted and I’m the one offering instead of accepting.

  This is one thing I love about my mother. That she is also my sister.

  THE REMEMBERED BLOSSOM

  Sometimes on Saturday nights I would beg my parents to take down the cardboard box they had carried across the sea with their old journals in it. These were the tattered and handled-smooth notebooks of their youth, composed in that endless and impossible era before I arrived. Reluctantly, they would comply, setting the dusty box on the floor for me while they attempted to go about their business, doing dishes or reading a book.

  On the floor, I would spread out the notebooks before me. I could read at five, and from that moment on I understood what I had on my hands. These notebooks were missing parts of the whole, secret panels that opened into the delights of the old, dark world. And I cannot deny that they revealed people with less on their minds, people with time to elaborate and scribble in the margins. There were diagrams in these books as well, sketches of gardens and houses, fantastic places. It was not long before both my parents were beside me on the floor, pointing, turning pages, eyeing each other up like prizes they had forgotten.

  I remember one night coming across a diagram my father had drawn of a mimosa tree blooming. It was rendered in coloured pencil and remarkably precise detail. I remember how the green sacs of the flower bases split, releasing their bundles of brilliant pink hairs. One by one, these hairs unfolded into tendrils, and the tendrils fanned out and elongated until the flower was in place, a pink tuft of fuzz I have only ever seen drawn in pencil. I can still hear my father’s voice talking us through each diagram. He would never have said it, but he was proud of himself — not of his skill in drawing, but of the fact that he had thought to observe this blooming of this flower, that of all the things he might have recorded in the world, he had known this one would be important.

  A VAST AND WELCOMING PLAIN

  When I’m tucked up in my sleeping bag on the sofa in the back room of my father’s office and sinking steadily into a sleep that feels like stepping onto a vast and welcoming plain — a highland plateau, say, sprinkled with edelweiss and tussock, but windless, with a tang of warmth left on the stones in the late afternoon — as I’m stepping into this realm and readying myself to sprint into its depth and be lost, hopelessly lost, my mobile summons me.

  ‘Hello? Djuna? Are you all right? Did I wake you before? I’m sorry if I woke you.’

  ‘Joanne?’

  ‘Did I wake you?’

  ‘Not quite. Not exactly.’

  ‘I didn’t know who to call. I’ll hang up, I’m sorry. I bet I woke everyone.’

  I turn on my back, settle into the warmth that, for a moment, rekindles the vista of edelweiss. ‘Everyone?’ I say.

  ‘Your friend? The one you’re staying with.’

  ‘No, she—’

  ‘We can talk tomorrow. I wanted to apologise for calling before. I’m glad we didn’t talk before. Bruce had just gone to bed — I was pretty upset. I’m better now, though. I’m feeling better. Just get back to sleep. Go back to sleep. I’m sorry I woke you, I really am. I wanted to tell you that. Earlier — I’m so glad we didn’t talk … I was really fucking upset.’

  ‘We can talk now, if you like.’

  There’s a loud sigh in the phone, like Joanne is having to talk down a well-intentioned child. ‘No, not now. Do you have any idea what time it is?’

  ‘I haven’t looked.’

  ‘Go to sleep, Djuna. But come for breakfast. Bruce has to meet with a client at ten.’

  We say goodbye and I snuggle back into my bag, looking for mountain air and tussock, but waiting there is Bruce. Like a predator in my sleeping bag, his hands which, half-asleep, become mine.

  IT COULD BE FUN

  Last night, Joanne explains to me the next morning, Bruce and she fought loudly enough to wake Ella. Which, it turns out, is not unusual. She tells me that Ella woke to what she thought was a nightmare. But the two of them putting their daughter back to sleep pacified them both. Pacified them enough that they soon found themselves moving into make-up sex. Undressed and aroused, one of them said something — Joanne doesn’t remember who — and the fighting began anew. They were in bed in their underwear, screaming, when Ella came in a second time.

  ‘Can you believe it,’ Joanne says. ‘I mean who fights on the cusp of make-up sex?’

  A good question, but how do you reply to such a question when the mere posing of it, let alone the information intended as background, incites in you, at one and the same time and all with equal power, jealousy, self-loathing, contempt, pity and shame? Now there can be no argument: I must tell her everything.

  Joanne looks at me, says my name. ‘Are you okay? Did you hear me?’

  My mouth is open, and it seems I’m about to speak, but before I do, Ella runs into the room, giddy with news. ‘Post!’ she says. She lays a rates envelope and a flier for carpet cleaner on the table between us with exaggerated care, Her Majesty’s courier completing a royal mission.

  A little while later, Ella is out of the room again and I can feel the conversation lumbering toward some inauspicious outcome. It’s bumbling through pauses and small talk the way a coasting train might sneak to the edge of a forest. I don’t know what lies on the other side of the trees, but I can sense that it’s something grand and vaguely disturbing, a chain of snowy mountains or a colossal rift in the ground.

  Joanne is at the sink, cleaning our breakfast dishes, and I’m standing beside her with a damp tea towel in my hand, when the toilet door closes in the hall. This, it seems, is the cue Joanne was waiting for. She turns away from the sink, her face looking strained and ruined. The train, it seems, has left the forest.

  ‘Take Ella with you,’ she says. It’s not a request, but not exactly a command. Something between a plea and a statement of fact.

  ‘With me? To the Cape?’

  ‘She needs it, the time away,’ Joanne says. Then she puts down the cup in her hands and clenches each of my upper arms with her strong, wet fingers. ‘God, I need it. Bruce needs it,’ she says. ‘You won’t be too long, will you?’

  I tell Joanne I’m not sure. The fact is I want Ella with me, and I know this the moment Joanne suggests it, but it seems as if there must be some haggling involved, some give and take required to legitimise the whole transaction. So I say, ‘What about school?’

  ‘Summer holidays for ano
ther two and a half weeks. Her school starts late.’ Obviously, she’s given this some thought. ‘And anyway, what if she missed a week or two of school — wouldn’t it be worth it if Bruce and I righted things between us?’

  I am about to simply agree, but something about Joanne’s wet hands clasping my arms throws me off. I also find myself taken aback by the ease with which Joanne believes she and Bruce can simply right things, and so I find myself making another objection I don’t mean. I say, ‘But Ella hardly knows me. What would she say?’

  ‘She’d love it. She’d—’

  Now Joanne lets go of me and smiles, as if I’ve missed out on an exquisite joke. That quickly, I think maybe I have. Maybe she hasn’t meant a word of this after all.

  ‘Sorry, forget I said anything … it’s all ridiculous. Mad, really.’

  ‘It’s not ridiculous. I didn’t say that—’

  ‘You didn’t have to.’ Joanne shakes her head, the idea is dismissed, and something about this gesture rubs me the wrong way. There is in it the implication that I’m not up to the task.

  I say, ‘I didn’t mean I wouldn’t consider it.’

  The toilet flushes now and Joanne turns to the hallway. She says, ‘Please, forget it. I’m not myself lately … I don’t know what I’m saying half the time, I really don’t.’

  ‘You just caught me off-guard.’

  ‘Just forget it.’

  ‘No, it could be fun.’

  Ella enters the room. ‘What could be?’

  CHILDHOOD(S)

  The high point of Ella’s first day of travel with me occurs beside Lake Taupo. She and I are eating ice creams on the black gravel of the shore in the full sun. One half of the lake is shimmering and boat-dappled; only the most subtle lining of green keeps it from being sky. The other half is a shield of mist that hides the far shore.

  ‘I think this must be the sea,’ Ella says.

  ‘No, it’s a lake,’ I say. ‘There’s a storm front coming, though. We should get going or we’re going to be squashed by the rain.’

  Ella makes a face. It’s meant to be disparaging, but with a sheen of chocolate around her lips, the effect is muted. ‘Why do you talk funny?’

  ‘Me? Talk funny?’

  Ella intends nothing, I know, but this little question is a pinprick. This little question, one I’ve heard for years on end, takes me back, opens my childhood, crosses the bridge I keep thinking I’ve left behind.

  ‘My parents were American. Are American, I guess. I didn’t think you could notice my accent any more.’

  I’m settling in for a long conversation on identity. I’m ready to answer questions, take on nationalist-inflected queries, but Ella shrugs and eats another mouthful of ice cream. That’s it. From pal to immigrant and back to pal in two bites of triple chocolate. This, it comes to me, is part of why I adore her.

  AN OLD DAD

  To remember Harvey is to enter the realm of un-sense. Nothing computes, nothing is possible. Everything was lies — or worse: it was less than lies, not even lies, because a depressed person is incapable of telling a good, honest lie. But one thing that really, really doesn’t make any sense is that Harvey and I wanted children. We had talked about it, and were in complete agreement. We both wanted to be parents. No doubt about it.

  ‘And it has to be soon,’ Harvey said. ‘I don’t want to be one of those fifty-year-old dads with a toddler everyone thinks is his granddaughter.’

  I still remember Harvey saying this. We were up in the bush, at his favourite spot way out in the Tararuas, not far down the track from a waterfall he was taking me to see. Harvey was ahead of me on the track and he turned around to tell me this.

  I shouldn’t indulge in memory this way, but I can’t help myself … I remember what he was wearing. A brown tee-shirt with a dog’s face on it. It was a child’s shirt, which is what made it funny. I remember the woven necklace he wore around his neck, frayed and worn smooth and out of some era before me, out of the era of his former girlfriend, Christine. The one before her, maybe.

  I also remember this phrase in his mouth on the morning I found him in our flat. I remember touching his cold and obviously dead face and, as I touched it, returning to what he had said.

  ‘I don’t want to be one of those fifty-year-old dads with a toddler everyone thinks is his granddaughter.’

  We never made it to the waterfall on that day when Harvey told me he didn’t want to be an old dad. I didn’t make it to the waterfall until about ten months later, as part of a group of about thirty trampers, including Mr and Mrs Wells, Bruce, Joanne and Ella, who were heading up to the waterfall to scatter Harvey’s ashes.

  I remember it now with Ella sitting in the back seat for safety, her little face looking satisfied in the rear-view.

  OUT OF THE FIRMAMENT

  At 10.30 that night I’m in a motel bed with Ella, who is still sobbing into my shoulder, although she’s been on and off the phone with her parents twice, and, between each call, calm and nearly asleep. Just as the day seems at last to be ending, she calls out for her mum again. We talk with Joanne and Bruce, and for the third time Ella is almost asleep when she turns to me lying beside her and says, ‘I’m scared.’

  I make the mistake of asking what she is scared of instead of just stroking back her hair and shushing her as a parent would, and the result is this latest bout of crying, which even I intuit is not entirely authentic. On the other hand, it is not entirely feigned.

  ‘Take me home.’

  I pull her close to me. ‘It’s okay. You’re okay.’

  ‘I’m scared with you.’

  ‘No, I’m here. Aunt Djuna will take care of you’.

  ‘You’re not my aunt.’

  Now we’re ringing her parents again. Bruce answers this time.

  I say, ‘She’s upset again.’

  ‘It’s okay,’ Bruce says, ‘let me talk to her. After I get off the line with her, just lie her down. Do you have a light on?’

  ‘She says she needs it.’

  ‘No, turn off the light.’

  ‘She complains.’

  Bruce says something to Joanne. It’s quiet bed talk. Then he speaks to me in nearly the same tone, as if both of us were in bed with him at once. The thought hardens me, cuts my frustration and worry with revulsion, shifts my frustration from one subject to the other.

  ‘Just turn off the light and stroke her forehead,’ Bruce says. ‘Works every time.’

  ‘Does it? Does it work every time?’

  ‘Sure fire.’

  Sniffing, Ella reaches out for the phone, but I turn away from her and keep it. I’m grasping it as tightly as you would a sledgehammer. Into the receiver, I say, ‘You know all about it, is that right? Getting her to do just what you want?’

  There is a silence now, with a rising sharpness to it, and I’m sure that Bruce understands what I’m talking about. He says, ‘Can I talk to Ella?’

  ‘We’re in bed, Ella and I.’

  My mind is humming, and I’m moving towards something, something impossible and very inconvenient for everyone involved. ‘Don’t you think that’s strange? Or don’t you think about it? Is that what you do? Is that—’

  ‘Give it to me,’ Ella says.

  ‘The line is dead.’ I hand over the phone, and Ella listens. A moment later it rings, and she says, ‘Hello?’ She looks at me, her lips trembling, with delight or sadness I cannot say.

  ‘Mum,’ she says. ‘I’m scared here with Aunty Djuna. I want you.’

  Twenty minutes later, Ella is asleep. It was simple. I took Bruce’s advice and everything was easy. I followed his instructions and let her holler a bit about being in the dark. The next thing I knew, her breath was easing. Her little snore cooed in my ear. Now I’m on a picnic bench outside the motel room, wishing I was a smoker because I feel so much like a cigarette. At least I think I do. I’ve never smoked, not even when I was dating Toby, my first boyfriend in high school who sneaked cigarettes behind the property manager�
��s shed and came into maths stinking of ash.

  Toby. The name is like a drop of cold water on my irritation. The thought of him is deeply comic. I haven’t seen him in years, a decade, I guess, but I can still remember the smell of him — a ripe mix of sweat, oily hair, unwashed clothes, cigarette smoke, and cheap, cheap cologne as sweet as any teenage girl’s perfume. It may, in fact, have been a teenage girl’s perfume. Even my single sexual encounter with Toby was comical.

  Toby’s uncle Wiremu lived out in a back section behind Otaki, and we were at Wiremu’s place one night when it happened. Wiremu and his mates had gone out to the pub, and Toby and I were in the lounge kissing and petting when Toby asked if I wanted to do it.

  That phrase — ‘do it’ — made me laugh. I could tell I had offended him, but he pressed on. Did I want to? I said I didn’t know, which was true. So he said he’d show me something that would help me decide, and with that he undid his pants, kicked them off, and then slid off his underwear. And he was right — he did help me decide. The sour stink that came off his penis made me gag, and I remember telling him to hurry and put his clothes back on. But then I felt bad for him and I told him he could touch me. He tried his best to get me off, but it was hopeless. Even with my hand to guide him, it was no use.

  This little reverie has made me nostalgic for that era, that borderline zone, where the child stumbles into the adult, and so I ring my father. Hearing his voice will be the final antidote to my pointless frustration with Bruce.

  His phone rings six times. I get his voice mail, try again, get his voice mail, try a third time, and hang up without leaving a message. I don’t want him to call me back later, I want to talk to him now. I know my mother would say that I, like all the members of my generation, am accustomed to instant gratification. But, no, she wouldn’t say that. Oddly, my parents have never made a point of emphasising my age. I can hear my father now: I don’t want to hold your youth against you. If anything, your youth is your strength.