Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  THE WRITER PETER Stark describes how winter saved him: how, at a time when his life was out of control, he was able to use its canvas to “spread out the chaos that was once my life and assemble something that I hope approaches grace.” We learn to walk by falling; we learn to relax into gravity until we dance with it. Skiing is just another way to fall, and dance. In the inhuman snows of the high mountains, there is not much more one can do; surrender is your only choice.

  A few years ago, Bruce came to the city to receive an award for some outrageously complicated rescue involving ropes and winches and a whole night in the snow, and we went to a banquet room and ate bad chicken at big round tables with police and firemen and people who run toward what most people flee.

  I’m comfortable underwater, in hospitals, in strange cities where I don’t speak the language. But I can barely swing a hammer. I don’t like being cold, and I’m scared of heights. People like my brother, my father, the men and women who speak this language of physical skill and risk sometimes seem like creatures from another time, made for battle and repair. Listening to their laconic, tech-laden slang, I can be stung by remorse, by that old, familiar wish—that I had become someone else. That I had done things differently all along.

  There is something painfully obvious about it all, this overcompensation, this hoarding of skill. We’ve both done it; we’ve collected our gold stars, become experts in our fields, worked as professional helpers—that group a therapist might say has issues. Some lessons I never seem to learn. I sent a copy of each of my books to my father. He never mentioned them, and when I finally asked, he told me he didn’t have time to read.

  One day, Bruce takes me up to the top of his mountain. He leads me away from the lift and the runs, to a line of closure ropes at the top of the steepest bowl. He skis without poles, moves like a dancer. Directly below us is a glaciated cirque, a smooth plane dropping far away, an ocean of white.

  “No way!” I say—almost shouting.

  Bruce laughs, then gets a look at my face and stops smiling. “If you start to slide, turn your feet downhill,” he says. “Dig your elbows in and keep your head down.” Then he grins and throws his arms wide, taking in the slope, the trees, the whole damned mountain. “Hey, Sis! You just have to ask yourself—what could possibly go wrong?”

  OUR MOTHER IS dead for many years when Dad dies, a few days before Christmas in the middle of a snowstorm. The day of his funeral is calm and clear, and many of the town’s firemen come in dress uniform. One stands in each corner of the room during the service, holding bells, and at the end, they ring the signal for firemen returning to the station. Then the big red ladder truck leads the hearse to the cemetery.

  We are left with four houses, two workshops, a garage, and the debris of many whiskey-laden years. Three of the houses are rentals in various states of repair, and the house where we were raised is reduced to narrow pathways through mazes of piled-up newspapers, books, clothes, laundry, and box after unlabeled box. Our sister lives in town and is the executor of the estate; she finds missing stock certificates, lost photographs, and a few hefty, long-expired checks in the detritus. But months later, Bruce and I decide it’s really our turn, and make a date to tackle the garage, the final piece.

  I drive alone down the interstate on a beautiful September day, listening to NPR for hours. I stop at gas stations and minimarts, and everywhere there are people gathered around small televisions hanging from the ceiling, over the pepperoni sticks and Slurpee machines. No one says much. I reach Bruce’s peaceful ranch house in a little town off the old highway, and we hug and sit silently in front of the television for a few more hours, watching the towers in their strange, slow, eternal fall, and we are both thinking about the firemen and neither of us says a word.

  The next day we sort through boxes. The silence is broken only now and then—“Oh, look at this!” holding up a yearbook or a battered balsa-wood airplane. We find brass knuckles, a box of Super 8 porn flicks, a bottle of mercury, ancient calipers. “Remember this?” we say. We work all day.

  Then we stand in the driveway between the house where we grew up and the little rental bungalow next door. It looks much the same, a tidy white house with a dark-green square of lawn. Behind Bruce, where we grew up, is a bed of thirsty old roses, a leaning fence, dead grass—the work of decades let go. And the crumbling chimney of our fireplace, the one he scrabbled up, screaming, when Dad chased him with the belt.

  He tells me a story.

  He was in his thirties, married, rearing three children, and living near the mountain where he was head of the ski patrol. He came down to town to help Dad paint the rental house. They prepped for a week and were ready to paint. Just as they opened the cans, the fire alarm went off. Dad dashed for his pickup and was gone without a word, the same way he had disappeared at the sound of the siren our entire lives. Bruce kept working.

  “And, by God, I did it myself. I painted the whole damned house by myself that day. And I cleaned up too. It was done when he got home.”

  What are the words for how we stand here in the midst of things? On the top of the mountain, I had lifted my borrowed goggles, and the ocher world flipped into black and white: every shade of ash and pearl and dove, a floury, glaucous place with shadows dappled and milky. Snow without beginning, without end. The whole world was glistening and silky, like a fall of tinsel lay across the land. I felt, perhaps for the first time, his vast gladness of winter. What are the words for this kind of snow, snow that is always falling, has always been falling, snow that fills our hearts and turns us into angels?

  “When he got home, he didn’t say anything. He just walked around the whole house without saying anything. He looked at every bit of it and the paint cans and the brushes. And finally he said, ‘Good job.’ And that was it.”

  Standing on this broken asphalt in a driveway I know rut by rut, I look at him. He stands up straight, holds his head back. Captain America.

  “It was the first time he ever told me I did a good job.”

  We are all riding down our lives, a few hidden rapids around the bend. Hang on tight. Sometimes we walk back home again, together.

  Conjunctions, Fall 2011

  I have been writing about, and around, and to my brother for many years. This particular essay is a response to the word kin, a themed issue of Conjunctions. I’ve told some of these stories in other ways and have many more stories to tell. He’s up in Alaska as I write this, with a bad shoulder and sore knees, catching big fish.

  Here Be Monsters

  DAN, THE YOUNG DIVEMASTER, SET US UP WITH WEIGHTS and tanks for the required checkout dive, running through the park rules as he worked. The checkout dive was one of the rules. Taking coral or spearfishing outside permitted areas was against the rules; feeding fish was most definitely against the rules.

  “Some idiot started feeding the moray eels hot dogs,” he said, swinging a tank to me. I pretended not to stumble when I caught it. “Some idiot.” He was half my age and naked except for a pair of ratty swim shorts. “They’re myopic, the eels,” he added. “They can’t tell the difference between your finger and an octopus tentacle and a hot dog. A woman had half her finger bitten off last year.” He paused. “Don’t be stuuupppid.”

  I learned to dive in chill, dim Puget Sound and promptly gave up on cold water. I had never dived in warm water or been to a subtropical island, except for Hawaii, where I went snorkeling for the first time and was seized with the need to go below, to stay down there. And Bonaire was a fever dream of a desert island, a tilting tabletop barely out of the sea. In the north, the narrow interior is scrub and cactus and tikitiki trees pointing to the southwest with the eternal wind. The arid land is filled with birds, wild donkeys, goats, and iguanas six feet long. The small towns in the center are sun scorched and still; the people are mostly African by descent, with Arawak and Spanish and Dutch and Portuguese mixed in. The south is salt flats, towering white cones lining the road beside giant loaders and pink evaporation
ponds; twinkling crystalline drifts of salt powder float across the highway like low fog. A row of tiny slave huts is protected as a memorial, the size of dog houses and hot as saunas. A large flock of pink flamingos lives in the south. They step daintily through the shallows on silly delicate legs, turning their big heads completely upside down to feed on tiny shrimp. The birds chatter constantly, cho-go-go, go-go, the sound mixing with the wind, cho-go-go! go-go, cho-go, like gossip or the mild chronic complaints of old aunts. Sometimes they fly to Venezuela, fifty miles away—the flock rising at twilight all at once like a vapor flashing flame in the last light.

  Sand and scraped sky above the waves; below, an immense work of eons. The naturalist William Beebe said of the coral reef, “No opium dream can compare.” The reef looks like the rumpled ruins of a great city, slumped boulders and bushes and pillars and branches cascading down and down, an architecture that is truly stone—the skeletons of tiny animals piled one atop another. I was a novice diver and a complete tyro on the reef. After a few days of barely coherent dives, I began to learn names: tilefish, wrasse, moon jelly, lugworm, overgrowing mat tunicate, southern sennet, whitespotted toadfish, honeycomb cowfish, porgy, the tiny scrawled filefish hiding in a gorgonian like a shivering leaf. I learned the names of things, but that is not the same as knowing the things one can name.

  On the second day, I saw my first eel. Dan pointed to a rough rock near an overhang and I paddled over in stupefied and clumsy strokes. The big head, the jaws working—a green moray, all muscle and velvet.

  FAMILY MURAENIDAE IN the order Anguilliformes. Hundreds of species of moray eels all created on the fifth day, if Genesis is to be believed. They are brown, green, ivory, gray, yellow, orange, black, and neon blue, and all these in combination: speckled, spotted, polka-dotted, striped, tessellated, piebald, brindle. A couple of the species are two-toned like saddle shoes. Morays live in every tropical and temperate sea, mostly in shallow water. They make dens in caves and crevices and holes in rocks; some live in hollowed-out burrows in the sand, mixing mucus and grains of sand into cement. They live alone, wolves sharing out the territory. The redface eel in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans is eight inches long at maturity; the slender giant moray in the Indian and the Pacific can reach twelve feet. A study in Hawaii found that up to 46 percent of the carnivorous biomass on the reef was moray.

  They are fish but don’t look like fish; they have no pectoral fins, no fishiness. Instead the dorsal fin runs the entire length of the body, fimbriated and smooth from the aerodynamic head shaped like a jet cockpit to the tapering tail. Morays are covered in mucus. The green moray is really blue. Or is it brown? Or gray? Or a funereal black? I’m not sure; sources vary. The mucus is green, or perhaps yellow; the mucus is poisonous. Or not; sources vary. These are no long-distance swimmers; they are immensely strong but slothful, like high-school boys on a Sunday afternoon. Morays are mostly nocturnal, shy, and spend much of the time curled in their dens, often with just their heads peeping out. Morays don’t see well, but they have a great sense of smell, and mostly wait for prey to wander by—lobster, octopus, fish of all kinds. Divers and snorkelers are most likely to see only the wavering head, the long sinuous body curled out of sight in a den. (Often, if you look carefully, you can see that snaky body wound round and round the rocks and coral like loose rope.) Most morays stay in exactly the same place for years—the same part of the reef, the same den. Divers recognize specific eels and tend to name the big ones.

  Sources always vary in this world. Morays are dangerous, I read in a fish guide. They are ugly, fearful beasts. Such adjectives recur again and again, in science as well as stories. My beloved Britannica says, “they can be quite vicious,” an oddly subjective entry in that careful publication. My well-worn Peterson Field Guide warns, “Before sticking your hand into a crevice, look into it carefully. A dreaded moray eel may be hiding there.”

  The mouth—that’s what scares people. The big, wide mouth and all those pointy teeth, gaping at you. Morays have small gills; breathing requires them to open and close their mouths continuously to force water through. They look contemplative, like a man working off the novocaine. Fish have a second set of teeth in pharyngeal jaws in the throat, to clench onto captured prey and pull it quickly down into the gut. Pharyngeal jaws seem odd, but they are common. Human embryos have extra jaws that fade into the skull early in development. The moray, however, is unique. They catch prey with the long, needle-sharp front teeth and then the pharyngeal jaws shoot out of the throat like a questing blind skull and bite again. The front jaws let go and the pharyngeal jaws retract, and the prey ratchets down, gone in a second or two.

  There are many videos on the internet purporting to show moray attacks. Like dreaded or vicious, like ugly, the word attack is one colored by imagination. In many of the videos, divers are making faces and showing off, darting out of reach with a scared giggle, egging each other on. One of the most well-known shows a moray biting a diver’s thumb off with a crisp pop. (If a moray bites your finger, the pharyngeal jaws won’t let go—do we think they would reconsider if they could? Do we imagine an eel listening—Let go, you shouldn’t eat that?) If the eel gets a finger, it simply bites the finger off. If the eel gets hold of something bigger—an arm, a thigh—well, there’s not much to be done. The diver gets out of the water with the eel attached until someone can smash its head in and cut the jaws off. In the case of the thumb—in every case I’ve heard of in twenty years of diving—the divers were petting eels or teasing eels or trying to coax the eel out of its den to take pictures. These are big ones, eels with names, the reliable local celebrities that tourists want to see. They are conditioned to come out of their dens to be fed. Conditioned, but not domesticated. Mostly, the divers were feeding the eels hot dogs, which look, even to my human eyes, a lot like fingers.

  ONE CAN LET go of a surprising number of concerns underwater, drifting slowly down into the blue like a pebble in honey. After the first startled moment, the inside-out reorienting of the world that comes with sinking underwater, I’m at ease; at times, I’m so relaxed I can almost nap. Since that first dive off Bonaire, I’ve seen many morays: spotted and goldentail morays, dwarf and zebra morays, and once a chestnut moray, a trick to find. Off Glover’s Atoll in Belize, I drifted down a huge boulder to a little sandy plain like a courtyard, falling without hurry through water clear as air. When I reached the sand, I looked casually to the right and saw a green moray several feet long resting under a ledge with his eye on me: Gymnothorax funebris. Green morays can reach eight feet in length and weigh up to sixty-five pounds. Gymno is bare or naked, and the word funebris means funeral, for the dark color, perhaps. Or for the fear.

  Later that day, in a cavern, my dive partner, Carol, kept gesturing vaguely at me, and when I shrugged at her—I don’t understand, what are you trying to tell me?—she grinned and shook her head. Back on the boat, I asked her what she’d meant. “A moray,” she said. “Right behind you in his den, the whole time.”

  In Roatán, off the coast of Honduras, the sand is smooth as white silk, and the foam flows along at the edge with a snake’s hiss. The little village of West End is scattered with wanderers from around the world, many sporting cherry-red sunburns. I dove one afternoon with Sergio, a six-foot-tall Spaniard twenty years younger than me. Such pairings are the stuff of diving. We took a little skiff out to the reef wall at the end of the lagoon. Everyone on the island was in siesta, it seemed; there was no one in sight, no current, just the two of us buzzing on glassine water under a hazy sky. We hooked to a mooring and slid in, to drift slowly along the coral wall with barely a kick. The tumbled stone wall was interlaced with the lilac vases and greenish lettuce leaves of sponges, the twisted pipe cleaners of wire coral, and the wavering Christmas ribbons of soft corals called knobby candelabrum and dead man’s fingers. Two huge crabs shuffled back and forth like gunfighters at high noon. A small, tight band of black margate formed a square wall to one side, turning in unison as we passed. />
  I was floating in the kind of sensuous abandon that drives time out of one’s mind altogether, hearing only my own exhalation, when something slipped into my peripheral vision. I turned to see a great green moray right beside me, glorious and iridescent. He matched my speed, watching me with a thoughtful eye. Sergio was ahead, hovering, absorbed by some small creature. His tan, lean body hung horizontally beside the wall. The moray, with what seemed a meaningful glance in my direction, slid sideways toward Sergio and parked just above him, inches behind his head, like a semi heading smoothly into a truck stop. Morays smell through two small tubes like snorkels jutting out from the snout; the eel seemed to be inhaling the scent of Sergio’s shampoo. Its huge, undulant body was as long as the man.

  I slowly sidled over, trying to get in front of Sergio, wanting to catch his attention in a quiet way. I could feel myself grimacing a little. Finally he looked up and I gestured, Come here, with just my fingertips—nothing dramatic or abrupt. He must have noticed my darting eyes, because he turned around and then leaped away. He stopped beside me and there we hung; we watched the eel and he watched us and this just went on and on for a long while. The eel was an elephantine leaf, a scarf, a nymph, a dragon. A sea monster, a dream. I longed to touch it.

  Morays are hermaphrodites, sometimes transmutating male to female, sometimes fully both genders at once—screwing willy-nilly with whatever moray or Spaniard comes along. They court when the water is warm (who doesn’t?) and they really gawp then—breathing hard, wrapping around and around each other’s long, slippery bodies like tangling fringe, like braids, like DNA. Eggs and sperm are released together, and the eels return to their anchorite dens. When the eggs hatch, endless uncountable larvae called leptocephali dissipate, a million shreds of wide ribbon—tiny fish heads on long, flat bodies. The larvae float for nearly a year. (The ocean is always a bath of barely visible infants; one swims in a snow of newborns.) The survivors of that perilous year absorb their pectoral fins and grow into elvers, which is what juvenile eels are really called, and in time each finds an empty spot and makes a den and lives for decades. They have few enemies: a couple of the biggest fishes. Bigger morays. You.