by Joan Connor
Lily has a look like Halfbaby knows from the inside, like she’s happy to be there but she isn’t certain where she is. She has a can in her hands in her coated lap. The sisters always bring gifts when they call, but they forget that they have them.
“Now what is this,” Lily says. She stares at the can of evaporated milk in her hands. “Did you give me this?” she asks.
“No,” Halfbaby says, “you brought it.”
“Then,” Lily says and she sets the can on the table.
Halfbaby smiles and says, “Thank you.”
Halfbaby does not know how much time elapses before Lily starts visiting. When she does, it’s like she’s wound like a clock, a story that must tick out. She is talking about Rose and the Cole boy. “So many babies then. That spring. Strange weather, like the weather itself gone shack-wacky, wanted to break out—hail and sun. Omens like Ruth’s baby, born about the same time as Rose’s. Ruth’s baby, the two-sided one, she was going to cut it down to size herself, tried to. Blood everywhere. But it wasn’t murder. No sin. She was trying to clean it up.”
Lily is rocking although she isn’t in a rocking chair. Memory swings her pendulum. “Cold, though, to cut your own child. The midwife said she was like a rock.”
Rock. Halfbaby is listening and not listening, the way snow is there and melting at the same time. She shivers. She is cold or frightened.
“But the mainland doctor, he cleaned it up. Throwed half the baby away. The other half growed up fine. They say so. Who knows anything at all. I saw a two-headed cow once until one of the cows moved. I know a boy raised, whose sister was actually his mother and made him uncle to himself . Who knows the truth?” She nods; her pale blue eyes clot with pearls.
Halfbaby is there and not there. She wonders if Lily can see through the pearls. She is very still: Rockbaby now. But Halfbaby knows the truth. She wants to ask about names, but she knows that you don’t name what you throw away, just what you keep: Halfbaby. But no matter how she cut it, they were two with the same name: Halfbaby. Halfbabies.
Lily is staring at the can of evaporated milk, her eyes wide, the pupils are round and large like Black-eyed Su-sans; the black-blues rolling with the pearls. Her breath is coming in shallow pants. Her eyes are spooked like a horse’s, roll white and wary like she’s waiting for that can of condensed milk to do something any second, unlatch the gates and let time come stampeding in or out. She is lost again and Halfbaby will have to help her get her bearings, map out the walk home to the farm next door.
Halfbaby says her name several times: Lily, Lily, Lily. Lily stares at Halfbaby like she stared at the can; she doesn’t know how they got there. She doesn’t know what they will do next.
But Halfbaby knows: the can will be a can. Halfbaby will be Halfbaby. Halfbaby knows: WHERE is the place that I am standing in. WHERE is always the place. Not a question.
When Lily is gone, Halfbaby is happy because she can rock in the rocker and know what she knows. Not the Cole boy way of knowing, the other way of knowing—knowing what you already know—if you can just get still enough to listen. Rocking and drifting in a bright blue boat.
Rockmother, savage with pain. Savage with killing and birthing. Which half, mother, do you keep as you make your correction? Rock. Mother. Which half do you love, Halfbaby? Which half hate? Until the doctor crosses from the mainland to fix it, but too late to heal. He saves half.
Halfbaby divides time. Not like numbers. Time divides. Time divides itself. It’s not counting. But she knows what counts. Count’s another word that means twice at once.
She doesn’t feel that something is missing; more that she is what is missed, that out there her half-sister-self looks for her. Halfbaby understands now that what she sees is what her sister-self sees for her while she is looking, looking for her—restless in some place that she cannot imagine, mainland, some vast place, foggy with souls impatient for bodies. Mainland. There.
Here is island and rock and Halfbaby waiting to be found by her self-sister who isn’t dead because she was only half always and half rocks here. A thought waiting to occur. A blue boat in the reeds. A boot mucked deep in the mud.
What does it mean to have half your sight adrift? But Halfbaby somehow has bone-knowledge, blood-sureness that we all have shadow selves, slipping moorings. She just isn’t sure, isn’t absolutely sure which half she is. The half who’s gone or half who’s here. Everywhere we grope in attics for our absences. Time slides. Mice fill corners with chewed wedding dresses. Chimney sparrows nest in eaves of time, nests woven from other nests, something old, something new. And Halfbaby knows, too, why her world is man-less. She was born married. Like Rockmother read in her book of Ruth:
Intreat me not to leave thee: for whither thou goest, I will go: and where thou lodgest, I will lodge. Where thou diest, will I die, and there will I be buried.
Ruth a twice word, too—a name and a name for sorrow and mourning and pity. Ruth. Ruthless. Rockmother.
And Halfbaby knows that she is already dead and already alive. Buried aboveground with one eye cocked here, one there, time collapsing like a telescope between them. Halfbaby knows what she has always half-known, that half of her is out there waiting in a blue boat on the sea, the limbo sea of the unborn for Halfbaby to join her. She rocks. She’s in no hurry. She knows where she is now, time running a seam between her and her. And when Rockmother comes home with her packages and parcels, tinned goods and flour bags, and dried fruit, she will find Halfbaby rocking backward before Rockmother became rock, before the midwife named her; before the doctor slit Wholebaby’s world; before blood; before time, rocking—Halfbaby but holy, her cock-eyed eyes; and Halfbaby wholly there.
A twin reflection sliding wavery over the water, dappling time. To find. To be found.
Blue boat. Blue boat.
The Fox
THE MAN AND WOMAN stand barefooted among the debris washed ashore. They shout at each over the swashy surf. Overnight, tropical storm Diana whirled in and laundered the sky to a cool beach-glass blue. The surf strains; the winds whip with Diana’s residual agitation. The man is shouting, “Horseshoe crab,” and pointing.
“Horseshoe crab,” she repeats, but she’s distracted by a whelk half buried in the sand. She digs it out with her toes.
They are trying to fall in love. But she finds it gets more difficult as one gets older. Experience makes optimism harder; time makes it more necessary. She returns to him and they hold hands, grinning, their hair salt-stiffened, their skin sand-glittered, trying to be as hopeful and airy as this wind-swept day hung out starchy clean for them. She squeezes his hand once and releases it. She stoops for a wet, black stone which cradles flat in her palm, fitted smooth and hard. Wishing-stones, her late father called them. She skips the rock into the surf and resumes her search for the funky little beach treasures, starfish, whelks, crab pincers with their alluring but sad mortal smell, fishy, like sex just past desire’s pitch. She bundles her finds into her discarded over shirt, adds them to the collection of razor clam shells, angel wings. Oh, she wishes she had angel wings, could fly, riding the currents, playful like the gulls. But, at forty, always a past year or two throbs a note dark and deep in the staff reminding her, these remaining years are grace notes.
She fashions a handle out of the sleeves of her faded striped shirt and swings the bundle, tries to look carefree. But he isn’t watching her. He’s hoarding his own fortune of driftwood, small wedges bored with holes in random runic designs straining to signify like sandpipers’ scritchy hieroglyphs on the hard wet band of beach, the I CHING not cast but scattered like pick-up sticks. Everywhere, the mystery of meaning, but no decoder ring. She wishes he would look up at her, but his head remains lowered. He scoops the pieces of wood into the pouchy pockets of his shorts.
She sashays for her own benefit then, smirking at herself, at the cynicism she can’t suppress, feeling as if she’s newsprinted on the day: DIVORCED FEMALE 40ish seeks beachcomber for laughter, sun, surf and possible com
mitment. And she falters, wondering why she has come out here to Assateague with him. Why bother at all? Why risk it? Wondering if she really has the energy to begin again.
Then he looks up at her, his face, a wonder, sun and wind-buzzed, ruddy. Her hope perks. She remembers his skin, salty to her tongue, the thick mat of his hair tangled like eel grass in her fingers, the bud of his penis in her mouth, his catching breath. But afterwards, her damp thighs drying to him, cementing them together, she felt his sadness notated a beat beneath her happiness. After love-making, she always felt her most fully alive, most purposeful. She transcended, rounded, wombing the world with a sigh. But men dipped into a following sadness. Lying with him, she couldn’t bear his quiet, his regret that something, some white liquid fire had been stolen from him, that, rat-like, the darkness nibbled at the edges of this perfectly cut wedge of time. Of course, he had said none of this. What he had said was, “I could really go for a sandwich.You hungry?”
She slings her bundle over her shoulder and splashes out into the water. It ruffles around her calves. He sloshes after her, bearing his horseshoe crab shell. The undertow, like desire, like Diana’s greed, sucks the sand from beneath her soles, and she shifts to keep her stance. He reaches her and extends the carapace like a bowl. She stares into it. Fill me, fill me, the shell urges, but she cannot hear it for the waves, for the wind which is knotting cat’s paws in her hair. She rattles through the jumble of shells and finds the whelk, raises it to her lips and blows the low whistle out of the whorls. He touches her cheek lightly, his fingertips daubing her skin with the wet-dry saltwater.
“Look,” he says, and he flips the shell over and rubs the encrusted spiny back with his fingertip, the carapace studded with cabochons of abalone, barnacles. “Some of them live to be one hundred and fifty years old.”
“Not this one,” she says.
“Who’s to say?” He shrugs. He tests his finger against the spindle of the telson. “Would you like it?” he asks.
“No thanks.” She suppresses a shudder at the horny, over-inhabited look of the shell. It’s dead history, a souvenir helmet from a short-lived war. She presses the whelk shell hard into the hardness of his chest and kisses him, sudden and wet, and hopes as she pulls away from him he will be smiling. He is, but his brow creases, too.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s walk.” And he tugs her, leading her from the roiling breaking water.
They stroll and talk desultorily. She tells him about the train ride down from Newark, about the man who came to their car pleading for money. “Can you help me, please? I’ve got $12. I just need another $7.80 to get home. Please. Anyone?”—how most people, she included, ignored him. Then a hand fluttering a dollar bill above a headrest down the aisle shamed her. She fished a bill from her wallet, but the panhandler had worked his way to the rear of the car. He didn’t return and take her dollar. She’d felt cheated.
“Probably he works the station to score drugs,” the man says.
“Perhaps,” she says. “But then all the more reason for him to get home.”
He mocks her innocence. “Don’t you get it? He wasn’t going home.” He snickers, but he squeezes her hand, clearly touched. “How have you survived to middle age as a naif?” he asks her.
“By being cynical,” she says and pokes him in his love-handled side. At forty, she knows the rhythm of courtship, a scansion of gesture, repartee. Beauty sags downward from the eye of the beholder to the mouth of the bespeaker. “Besides,” she adds, “for whatever reason, he needed the dollar more than I did.”
But she’s lost his attention again. “Shipwreck,” he says, pointing down the beach to a thick black line scrawled across the white sand. As they approach the wreck, its mossy, waterlogged hulk, they see the near side’s flat like a pier but the far side is ribbed like a boat. They walk around it, curious, rubbing rust stains with their fingers, palming the salt-bit, creosoted timbers, the corroded iron rings, the chipped cleats.
“A pier,” she supposes.
“But the curve,” he says.
“A barge?” she asks.
“A barge,” he repeats, this possibility settling in him. Then something distracts him again. She never seems to hold his interest long enough.
“Come,” he says, pulling on her hand. “I saw something. Maybe it’s one of the wild horses. But it looked smaller. A raccoon? There,” he says pointing at the crest of a dune. “There.”
She stares toward the slatted sand fence, sees only the fence and the banking sand. But she follows his insistence across the beach. As they leave the peopled area for the fenced-back area, she notices fewer shells, ghost crabs barely visible, protectively colored, betraying themselves only by their scuttle among the rubbish beyond the tide’s reach: plastic milk jugs, forks, squishes of plastic wrap. The waste, the audacity of the waste, she thinks, angry, until she breasts the dune and sees what he’s seen—a fox lapping at a hollowed pool concealed from the beach. Head bent, tongue flicking.
They stand very still, gazing.
“He’s drinking long,” the man says.
“It mustn’t be brackish. Rain water from Diana?” she says.
“Yes. I guess that’s it.” He smiles at her. “Let’s get closer.”
“Move slowly,” she says. “We don’t want to startle him.” As they descend the dune, their heels catch and skid through the sand. But the fox doesn’t shy; he keeps drinking. She thinks at any minute he will spook, scent them, hear them with his long rabbity ears and hightail over the dunes. But he only drinks. Lap, lap, lap—they approach close enough to hear him, no, her, she corrects herself. Once, the fox’s head yaws, just acknowledging them; then she resumes lapping, tail high, not curled, ears taut and alert but not bent in mistrust. They come within three feet of the fence and stop. The fox keeps drinking.
“We’re downwind,” she whispers. “She can’t smell us but she should hear us. Deaf?” But, no, the fox jerks her head up as the woman whispers.
The man clutches her hand and presses it tightly against his hip. “Maybe she’s so used to people, she’s tame.”
The comment reminds her of a story. “Once with my first husband, Clinton, I saw a yearling deer like that. Our foundling. We were driving up my parents’ dirt road in Vermont when we spotted the deer. We parked. The deer stared. We opened our doors. The deer stayed. We neared her, close enough to stroke her muzzle. She never shied. It made us sad. We knew, untutored in people as she was, she’d be bagged in the next deer season. We had to shoo her off, flailing our arms, hollering.”
“Hush,” he says, and she realizes he hasn’t been listening to one of her favorite stories, that he’s been attending only to the fox. So she, too, attends to the fox who, head lowered, is trotting, sniffing along the urine-spritzed boundaries of her territory. She’s contouring the fence perfectly, geometrically.
As the fox trots by, but two feet before them, the woman sees the fox’s right eye, blinkered shut with pus. Her left eye, true, roves over their bare feet. Then the fox pivots, militarily precise, through a hole snapped into the slats in the fence segment before them. Neither harried nor tentative, she paws a nest in the southern, sunlit sand and curls into it.
The fox admits their presence, craning her neck, fixing them with her good eye before she flips onto her back and squiggles, a moment of pure animal happiness the woman envies. Then the fox rolls back onto her stomach and snouts in the sand. The woman reflects on the adjectives usually applied to foxes: sly, shrewd, cunning. All imply duplicity. But this fox appears sincere and composed.
“Come,” the man says. “I think we can get closer.”
She hesitates behind him as he approaches the fence. “We don’t want to rush it. We don’t want her to run off, spoil it. . . .”
But he steps up to the corner of the fence and balances his forearms on the red slats.
She expects the fence, a flimsy roll of laths wired together, to bend under the weight. She can’t imagine that its insubstantial stri
ps actually manage to tame the storm-hurled sands, but apparently they do or the rangers wouldn’t bother with them.
He turns to her. “Come,” he says again. “Please.”
The fox rises, shakes herself before nesting again, her head on her paws facing them, neither afraid nor overly curious, merely aware.
Carefully, the woman advances, rests her arm on the fence beside his, slides her hand into his. She realizes she’s grinning, that her mouth aches from grinning. She stares into the fox’s good eye.
“How old is she, do you think?” he asks.
The woman considers. Up close, the coat is ragged, ratty not glossy as she’d expected. “She’s small,” the woman says. “But females often are. She might be young, an abandoned pup.” But she speculates without conviction. The fox could be any age. As she pants, her rib cage protrudes, grooving her sides as if death were pressing its skeletal way out of her body. But the fox’s face points young and sharp, and the woman withdraws into a moment of conscious awe at getting this close to an animal usually so stealthy, so secretive, one who skirts the furtive darkness.
His hand pulls hers again, teasing, urging her forward. “Let’s go behind the fence.” He tugs, presses, always ulterior.
“No,” she says, fearful that surely now the fox will bolt. But he leads her, and they inch their way to the end of the sand fence, corner it. Inside with the fox, he says, “Sit. Sit slowly.” And she eases herself cross-legged to the ground, nestling her bundle in her lap. The fox lifts her head.