by Joan Connor
The sharp-bladed seagrass on the bank paper-cuts my calves. The lines fill with blood. A mosquito whines. I rub my legs and scan the treeline for the peaked roofs Marsh’s story raised in my imagination. I scout for a suggestion of a road or path, but see only scrub-growth, hardhack. If there are any houses here, they must be interior, so I follow my chest’s thrust into the brush. The scrub yields barely, scratching, thrashing. But after several yards, a way reveals itself, not a path, but a swath where the puckerbrush hunches closer to the ground than the surrounding bushes. Raspberry and blackberry suckers, clumps of daisies, spiking thistles. I follow the lower growth through its twists, water seeking a stream bed. A path is not a straight line.
“Love is not a straight line.” That was your line. At dinner parties, you liked to talk of love, diverting the conversation from its natural course through politics and politesse. “Let us talk of love,” you said, crossing your fork and knife, hexing all other topics. Your wife, marginal as a footnote, stared at her empty plate. We traveled in the same circles.
The first time you made love to me you said I had a fleeting quality, reflected sunlight, flitting over the walls of an upstairs bedroom. Men are drawn to that fluttery quality, you explained. Men cannot bear not to try to catch that restless independence in their hands, to hold it still, to pin it down. Flattered, I didn’t realize that you were labeling me, insubstantial. Later, revising, you said, Men and women are not intended to love each other; this is why they keep attempting it. As I felt your love ebbing, I wrote you a letter of recrimination. When I told you about it, you advised me not to mail it. There are only two stories, you, my teacher, said, worth writing and reading: love and death. At the time, I thought they were disparate stories.
My hip bangs into the first house without realizing it. The pain foreshadows a bruise. A stack of wood crouches in the weeds. But then I trace the pitch, note the few fluttering shingles. A roof. Only a roof, no house, no windows. Did the house sink into the clay? Did a storm rip off the roof and gravity place it here? I rub my hip and push on, grass whipping my legs. There must be other houses.
By this afternoon, my son will be in another house. My husband is taking him away from me for the first time. While I must learn to bear the absence, I cannot bear the separating. “Nouns,” you said in class, “oppose the activation of a participle, verbs which long to become gerunds.” Screaming is a scream, is a rising pitch and a fall. A roof. A love affair. A plot. A life. You between my legs, all a rising pitch and a fall, or some other diagram.
You said the most difficult task posed by love was to convince itself it existed, that after the rising pitch, love wasn’t just inertia or habituation. Like a baby doll, you cried real tears.You said you didn’t know what love meant, that people assign “love” different meanings. I said love was not a meaning; it conferred meaning; love was a feeling. Have you felt it, you demanded. And I didn’t answer. The answer was, Yes. But only once, for certain.
My legs are crusted with blood. I’m grateful not to be home while my husband is packing my son’s dinosaur-figured underpants, his blue jeans with the holey knees, his finger-painted tee shirts. I’m grateful to be away from our summer house with the realtor’s sign hammered into the lawn. The sun heats me irritably. I doubt the existence of houses here, of windows longing for rocks to obliterate their panes.
But second, a plot. Assume a plot is not a story. A plot has a shape, a guided shape. Assume a story assumes no shape, but reveals itself like life, like a walk on an unknown island, that it encompasses the promise of surprise. Don’t confuse story with chronology or action. A story is not a walk revealed step by step, chronologically in time. A plot is only a shape superimposed on a story. Plots construct themselves; stories reveal themselves. I’m following a path that’s not a path but might have been a path once, a natural clearing where someone blazed before me.
Assume we are sitting again at the table where, eight years ago before I bore my son, you, after making love to me, were pouring a glass of burgundy for my husband who did not yet know I was going to leave him, that I did not yet know you would leave me. Assume you were talking about love, gesticulating in your buffalo plaid shirt as you knocked over my goblet and my husband rose, amused by your passionate performance, to find the dishrag to sop up your clumsiness. Assume that, even then, I was doubting my long-held belief that love was a hedge against death. Assume that, even then, I knew that love was ineffectual, knew that loving was impossible while we lived, because the self like a rabbit would always stroke a paw ahead of the following fox until the fox, realizing he would drown or eat, would open his jaws and drown. Assume all that; I cannot attest to it. But I can attest to this; I knew love in a moment, and that was not the moment.
The moment I knew love surprised me like the house rising before me now as I walk down a path which is not a path but a natural memory of a past where people, I assume, once beat down a walkway in order to get from here to there, from the fisherman husband arriving home, exhausted with his haul for the day, to these collapsed houses where the fisherman’s wife fed him anything but fish, perhaps the steak from the cows who’d dehydrated, lapping up seawater which made them taste like fish. Assume anything. Assume the wedding gown my mother wore which I wore on the day I assumed that my marriage would last fitted me with a bodice beaded with words. Assume my wedding vow ran from me, words seeking a stream bed. Spring water.
When my waters broke, I was still untutored in love. I’d carried the moon in my belly for months, irritated as it tugged my body and moods into unnatural shapes. The labor was long. I was so busy with my pain that I did not recognize my screaming. With a bloody yank the doctor pulled not a moon from me but my son. My hospital gown opened at the front. He placed my son on my chest, and, as the squirmy squalling thing urinated on me, I tried to hug him back inside. I hadn’t foreseen feeling this, not this. My legs crusty with blood, I knew love in a moment, rising forever like a blue and rimless bowl to contain the sky.
This morning I realized that it is not the moment of pain which hurts; it’s losing the moment of pain which hurts, the pain that can shock you into knowing you’re alive. I can’t recall the pain of birth. I can only recall that I felt it. I’ll never feel it again. Each pain is unique. Even the pain I avoid, the pain of dinosaur-figured underpants stuffed in a suitcase. Love, you said, stubbing your cigarette in the open palm of my hand, is testing what others will endure for you. Your cigarette wasn’t lit.You smoked Kools, I think. Details, you advised me, make the story.
The house now stands before me. It has an entrance but no door, windows but no panes. How does one break windows which have no glass? It’s badly beaten by weather and time, wood shingles and clapboards stripped here and there, revealing the skeletal structure beneath, barn boards and plaster crumbling through the ribs of lath. Now I know what the summer house does while I’m away. I used to think it ceased to exist, that I resurrected it each spring when I removed the dust shrouds, tossed mothballs in the bin, swept up the mouse sign. What becomes of former lovers? Do they dream of us dreaming of them? Do we wander in like stray thoughts now and then? Once they spill us out of the blue bowl of their preference, do we slide away, cease to be that person whom they’ve loved? Is it a small death somehow, and between lovers, a limbo, until the next lover, divine, conjures from the void of self some other person whom he needs to love? Will my son think of me while he’s away? How often? Will he miss me?
I enter the doorway that has no door, and immediately I know this was once a beautiful house. In spite of the litter, raccoon scat and aluminum cans, the ceilings arch high. The second floor has dropped onto the first like a hasty lover, pressing as close as surfaces allow. The staircase crazily ascends into air. Tentatively, I test the boards, slip my thongs on my feet and crunch across the glass-glittered floor. I peek through a door at a room that is a hill. An etiolated tree roots in the parlor floor. Before you closed it, I thought love was a door without a door. I hadn’t yet con
sidered staircases and trees although these, too, might pose possibilities. Only this morning I learned how much can be packed into a departing suitcase. Anything’s possible.
I place my hands on a sill of the window and lean out, imagining the air the fisherman’s wife inhaled while she planned the evening meal for her husband who’d be returning any minute now. On the floor between my feet I spot something, round, a crinkle of latex. A condom. The fisherman and his wife move out, and someone replaces them. Douglas Marsh, only he is younger than himself, about sixteen, and his shoulder obscures the face of the girl with the silvery giggle who tugs down her blouse beneath him. When he shifts, sliding his hand inside her blouse again, I glimpse her face, and it is a perfect face, softened by youth, a face that doesn’t know how young it is. They laugh, tussling as they make love. When he kisses her, I open like her mouth to his tongue. A shaft of sunlight shifts through the unglazed window, and her thighs sparkle with the broken glass embedded there. Her legs part, unhinging like halves of a shell. There’s a tentative moment, a moment flashing like light, when she pulls instinctively back, afraid. “No,” she says. And she’s wringing her skirt in her hands, feeling the island isolating itself with the reversing tide, the water that could enisle her here with the night. “Yes,” he coaxes. “Yes,” she answers. I shut my eyes. I listen to the dry floorboards drinking the wetness that spills from them, the wood grain swelling. When I open my eyes, the couple has left. A fallen nest unravels in the corner where they lay. And I know by the angle of light that the tide will begin to reverse itself, first in surreptitious trickles, then in a surging swash. I know that I, too, need to be leaving.
I haven’t smashed a single window, but the whole world’s flooded in. I wish I’d had a minute to tell the beautiful girl that she needed to be wary of that beauty, because everything beautiful is placed here to be broken. Beauty, like a hinged jewel-box, a blue shell, a rimless bowl, begs for carelessness, or cruelty, begs for fracture. But I didn’t want to intrude.
At four in the afternoon, I am alone. I toss a shard of glass through a window frame from a house that cannot seal the world outside or in. I close no door behind me. My tide walk, still incomplete. Can you answer me now, my second person? Can you answer this letter I will never mail to you, if love is not a straight line, if love like this sentence is conditional, then . . . if . . . then . . . love . . . then. . . .
Halfbaby
HALFBABY’S ALWAYS BEEN HALFBABY like she came with the name. Maybe the island midwife gave her the name, she doesn’t recollect clearly, fully, but she’s Halfbaby just like Rockmother is Rockmother. But Rockmother didn’t come with her name. The midwife named her Rockmother when Halfbaby was born. Halfbaby thinks it’s because she stands up to things like the rocks do on the shore on the weather side of the island. Rockmother’s birth name was Ruth. The island people call her Rockmother, though, the name as tight to her as a barnacle. It’s a funny name because Rockmother is all lap. She has a lap even when she walks. She has a lap until she sits down; then her flesh settles and her flowered dresses tent down to her ankles, ankles as thick and white as birch trees.
Halfbaby was born here in the house. Some island people go to the mainland to be birthed, but Halfbaby’s never been there. She thinks of the mainland like limbo, the place where babies float while they wait to be born. More women go over on the ferry now that the midwife’s dead, but not Halfbaby; she stays put.
She lives with Rockmother at the three corners near the back cove, next to the marsh farm where the three sisters live: Poppy, Rose, and Lily. They didn’t come with their names; their mother gave them to them a long time ago, before the midwife, before Halfbaby. The sisters’ mother loved flowers and the flowers tumble all around the farmhouse in unruly beds now that the sisters forget to weed.
Halfbaby loves the three sisters. They are as old as the umbrella tree on the sandy hook, all in their eighties at least, and they forget things, daily things like weather and eating and where they are and who’s dead and alive, but they never forget that they are ladies. They all dress before leaving the house, always hats and gloves, and black button up coats, and the trim little lace-up heels that they store in the attic to cure the leather, to make it last. Halfbaby bets those shoes are in their eighties, too. One of the sisters, Halfbaby’s not sure which one, married a Cole boy at the East end of the island, but she got homesick—even though it’s only five miles one tip of the island to the other—and moved back to the farm.
Before she moved back, she dropped a son on the Cole boy, and the boy moved in for a while, not too long ago, in Halfbaby’s time. Halfbaby isn’t sure how old she is; she thinks that she might be twenty, might be thirty, in there somewhere, all the years feel the same, time moving like light and shadow, like tide, like snow, here, then gone. But the Cole boy moved in with the sisters in Halfbaby’s time, and he built gates on the doors with latches on the outside to keep the three sisters from wandering out of the farmhouse, to keep the sisters out of his gear.
He wasn’t mean. He was trying to protect the sisters, keep them from wandering to places that weren’t there any longer. Keep them from that baffled look they got when they arrived at some place that wasn’t there with that straggle-haired bewilderment: Where is the store? The farm? Where is the place that I am standing in? Where is the world? What was I about to do, here in this place that isn’t here?
He tried to keep them from that. He tried to keep them in place, in time, and out of his tools. He was an electrician.
But you might as well try to keep lightning out of the sky. The sisters just kept getting out, getting tangled up in the coils of wire, banging into the spools. And he gave up. He was a good boy for coming home, but he just gave up. He moved to the mainland, and disappeared as far as Halfbaby knew, disappeared among all the impatient unborn across the bay.
Rockmother didn’t like him, but Rockmother doesn’t have much use for men anyhow. She says she’s more comfortable around the women. When Halfbaby asks her about her father, Rockmother just snorts. She says her father was a rooster and that makes Halfbaby laugh because then Halfbaby would be half rock, half rooster. She can feel the rock in her when she crosses the salt marsh and stands on the shore, feeling the outcrop beneath her feet as she watches the wind whip the whitecaps up like egg whites. But she feels no rooster in her; she’s got nothing to crow about. Rockmother tells her that.
The sisters used to keep roosters, hens too, there in the yard. There’d be piles of eggs in the juniper bush, at the base of the elm, surprising places, and the ones the raccoons didn’t get would cook in the sun, smell awful if they cracked. But the chickens wandered off, and the sisters didn’t miss the eggs. No chickens now. But as Halfbaby squints through the flyspecked glass she thinks that she can still make them out, scratching in the driveway, walking that comical walk like their two ends are headed different ways only to have them bump back in the middle. It makes her laugh as she cracks the egg against the rim of the yellowware bowl, the one with the blue stripe, and Rockmother startles, stares needles at her. “What you laughing at? You gone simple again? People who laugh at nothing, they got places for them.”
Limbo. Mainland. A place for people like that. But Halfbaby doesn’t turn around. She feels the needles in the back of her neck, but they don’t hurt. They stitch time. She thinks that she can hear Rockmother’s laps settling comfortably down onto her thighs, unfolding like dough over where her bedrock lap should be. That’s what morning sounds like, quiet enough to hear what you cannot see, Rockmother’s fat oozing, the yolk dripping out of the shell, the long-gone chickens scratching in the sisters’ dirt yard. Halfbaby carries a lot of time in her; she has a gift. She’s not simple, but she sees beyond sometimes.
Rockmother wants corn fritters this morning, fritters with maple syrup, and Halfbaby’s reaching for the whisk when she sees the twin yolks nestling in the bowl. “Double yolk,” she says. “That’s good luck. Rose told me double yolks bring double good. It’s an
omen.”
Rockmother grumbles. “I don’t know about omens, but we can use the luck.”
And Halfbaby cracks the second egg, and that one’s double too. Double double. Never seen a triple, no yolks like the three sisters. She doesn’t tell Rockmother about the second egg, but she’s happy. And she whistles as she scoops some flour in her hands, lets it sift down through her fingers onto the yolks, cozy in the bowl. She heats the fat on the cook stove and listens to Rockmother creak on the rocker with the stubby legs. Rockmother likes that chair because it leans forward to catch her weight, and the legs are short. She can tilt in and out, wait for her body to catch up with her when she raises or lowers herself. She grunts a little as she rocks. Halfbaby drops some water onto the fat to test if it’s hot enough. The water spits. She scrapes some corn off last night’s ears into the bowl, then spoons the batter into the fat and listens to it hiss as it plumps up, rises as it fries. Rockmother loves breakfast. Halfbaby is always careful with breakfast because she knows that it readies Rockmother for the day. She can be sloppy with lunch, serve leftovers or sandwiches, but breakfast matters. When the fritter is just as gold as August corn, Halfbaby dips the slotted spoon, rescues the fritters. “There,” she says, setting the plate, the pretty morning plate, blue depression glass, on the daisy sprinkled oilcloth of the table. She waits for Rockmother’s body to shift. “There,” she says again and arranges four flitches of bacon neat as star points around the centered fritters, pooling amber in the syrup. Mornings are good.