Violation

by Sallie Tisdale

  The Roman aristocracy loved morays; they farmed them as livestock and kept them as pets in elaborate ponds. Now and then, a master fed his less obedient slaves to the eels, presumably in pieces; human blood was thought to fatten a moray nicely. Delicious or not, it’s always a bad idea to eat an alpha predator. A bit like unprotected sex—when you eat the top of the food chain, you eat every link. A wee dinoflagellate (Gambierdiscus toxicus, a microalga that feeds on dead coral) produces a neurotoxin called cinguatoxin, becoming more concentrated in each successive species. It’s possible to get ciguatera from herbivorous fish, and little guys like snapper, but the alpha predators bank it like gold. The toxin is a nasty one—almost everyone who eats a fish with cinguatoxin will get sick. Victims vomit and suffer diarrhea; their lips and fingers go numb; cold sensations switch with hot; they feel profound weakness and pain in the teeth and pain on urinating and arrhythmias and respiratory failure. The symptoms last for months and you can pass the toxin to others through sexual activity and pregnancy. King Henry I of England may have died of ciguatera; he collapsed after gorging on eels. At one Filipino banquet featuring a large yellow margin moray, fifty-seven people got sick; ten went into comas; two died.

  WEEKS OF WIND and rain lashing the sea kept us land bound on Cat Island. Carol made hats out of sticks and wrack. I restlessly walked the same path several times a day. One morning I found a perfect set of frog legs lying on the path. They had been nipped off at the waist. An hour later, they were boiling with brown ants. By afternoon, the ants had dug a hole beside the path, and tugged the legs halfway in; they were bowed, as though swimming into the earth. By morning, there was only skeleton; long, slender toe bones pointed to the angry sky.

  The world is a strange place, for all of us—strange to me, strange to frogs, to ants, to eels. Strangely full of all those others, who are utterly unlike us, who look and act insensibly. If they are thoughtful, these are thoughts that have nothing to do with me; if the glance is meaningful, there is no way for me to know the meaning. But we do insist that we know what it is, that it is familiar in some crucial way.

  Everyone wants the familiar. (Yes, people often say the opposite, that they crave the new and long for adventure and novelty. They really don’t. What we call adventure is the process of meeting the new and turning it into the known as fast as possible. We want to name the unnamed and touch the untouched so that they are no longer unnamed and untouched. No longer strange. Then we can go tell people all about what we’ve found.) Perhaps it is always most difficult with the sea, to which so many are drawn as though by a piper, and where none of us belong. No shared fundament in the sea; coral and sponge and fish are a wonder to me, but there is nothing of me there.

  Ah, we long for commonality. The idea that an animal is simply out of reach, forever opaque, is not to be tolerated. The unknown makes sociopaths of us all, turning animals into objects to meet our needs, affirm us, befriend us. So one imparts motive, emotion, even morals to an animal. And one sees what one expects to see. Perhaps a vicious sea monster. Perhaps a puppy who takes a biscuit from your hand. In both cases, one will be wrong.

  Since that first trip to Bonaire, I’ve seen a lot of fish feeding. The point is a good photograph, an exciting moment—a good tip at the end of the dive. Hot dogs are used because they don’t fall apart; frozen peas sink nicely in the sunny water. Cheez Whiz is quite popular—people find it amusing to squirt a can of Cheez Whiz underwater and stir a school of damselfish into frenzy. As a species, we are easily amused. Besides the nice tip, fish feeding gives us control. It bounds the boundless. We’ve interacted, we’ve made a connection. Whether the damselfish or stingray or moray eel feels the same way is not at issue here (though people are remarkably quick to ascribe motives like pleasure or play or, God knows, affection to the behavior of a carnivore chasing a sausage). The last thing we want to admit is that they may be indifferent to us. We tiny, fragile mammals, stunned by the danger of the world; we press our fear against the vast, improbable gestalt of the sea.

  I like to dive at night; the reef is wide awake, softened and kinetic with a million little bodies. Slipping into black water is always a little spooky, a reminder: my legs dangling out of sight above the primeval deep. At night I carry only a little light and cover a smaller territory, so I can focus on one thing at a time. The stalk eye of a conch slowly turns as it hauls its great shell across the sand. Coral polyps dance like hands hauling in a net. Carol’s fairy light bobs in the distance. A red snapping shrimp rises up to a boxer’s stance when my light passes by. A basket star unfurls itself into a burnt-orange tumbleweed. And at the edge of my little circle of light, a moray slides across the ivory sand and is gone into the dark.

  On one night dive, with a group too big for me, too much the herd, the divemaster led us to a moray’s den, the young green eel’s head caught in a dozen headlamps like a startled deer. It turned from side to side, trying to watch all of us at once. A German man with a big video camera kept darting in, trying to get a good close-up of the eel’s face; finally, he took the camera and started bashing the eel on the head. I felt myself retract far deeper than the eel could go, retreat all the way out of the human species. Bite him, I thought. What are you waiting for? He had fingers to spare. But I also knew it would likely be the death of the eel. Finally the divemaster pulled the man away, and we ascended to a rocking sea. The sky was close and thick with stars; there was sheet lightning all across the horizon, silent, huge. In that moment I wanted never to speak to a person again.

  Some time later, I was back on Roatán. Carol and I dove through a splendid set of winding, narrow coral canyons separated by rivers of sand. The day was bright and wide beams of sunlight shone down on the reef. We flew through the wonderland, this solid chunk of long time. We finned slowly up one canyon, around, and down the next, back and forth, watching the abundant schools of blue tang and sergeant majors like flocks of butterflies. I stopped to watch a glorious queen triggerfish hovering shyly in the distance. Then I turned around and saw a huge green moray hanging there, a single poised muscle a few feet away.

  We hung eye to eye. He was more than five feet long, a dusky, piney green that seemed to shimmer in the light. For a half hour the eel stayed near us: flowing straight along the reef an inch off the coral, matching every curve; sliding over low ridges like, well, water; slipping sideways in and out of thin breaks and reappearing around a turn as though waiting. I felt blessed—not by some imagined connection, not by recognition or a meeting of minds, but by the strange that will remain forever strange and by its strangeness tell me who I am. We found ourselves fifty feet down at the base of a straight ridge, Carol and me and the big green eel, and then it spun around and swam straight up the coral mountain toward the bright sky and was gone.

  Conjunctions, Fall 2013

  Conjunctions did a themed issue on animals, and I found myself thinking about how easily we anthropomorphize other species. Perhaps it’s a trait of the human animal to think other animals share human traits. I’m drawn to alpha predators and to strangeness, and morays are certainly both. People endlessly try to make them more familiar; I like them as they are, inexplicable and outside my ken.

  The Indigo City

  ON THE WALLS OF THE LITTLE HOUSE WHERE I GREW UP hung three images. Above the television in pride of place, a nocturnal cityscape in wavering shimmers of blue and green and purple, prone to a slight jiggle if you bumped it. On the wall above the dining table, an amateur watercolor of a pioneer cabin painted by my grandmother. On the wall of my parents’ cramped bedroom, a studio portrait of my brother and sister and me in Sunday clothes, with wide, false smiles.

  I grew up in a small logging and ranching town in the mountains of northern California, a Gold Rush town of three thousand people surrounded by rolling hills. I was used to wide streets, small stores, big trucks, bigger skies. One movie screen, one library, one small history museum. One elementary school, where my mother taught, and one high school, where my father ta
ught. We all rose at the same time to get ready for school, and I hitched a ride with a parent or walked with friends along the same blocks, past the same houses, every day. We ate dinner at six each evening, around the big white Formica table: canned peas and dry roast beef and slices of Wonder bread. The only radio station we could reliably get in the valley played country and western music, though my parents’ record collection was dominated by Percy Faith and Don Ho. More often, we ate to the rhythm of the television news. Then Dad fell asleep on the couch, Mom did the dishes, and the kids watched The Wonderful World of Disney or Lost in Space.

  My mother was the first person in her family to get a college degree—five years of normal school and an elementary education certificate. I didn’t know she had taken a minor degree in Spanish until I found her textbooks after she died; I never heard her speak a word of it. I sometimes wondered, in the brutal way children consider their parents, why she had settled for so little—teaching fifth grade, cooking and dishes and laundry, evenings with a novel and a cigarette. Her own mother had been a farm girl and then a truck driver and then a truck driver’s wife. But instead of our spare walls, my grandmother’s house was a paint-by-numbers gallery—mostly rural and bucolic scenes of hayricks and carriages, dogs trotting alongside. She spent a year on the Famous Writers correspondence course and had the certificate to prove it. I didn’t belong with these people; I was an exile—misunderstood but destined, like falsely adopted royalty. I thought precocity was a kind of ticket, a promise of something; I had little enough patience for the long wait of childhood and its endless ordinary days.

  My mother’s novels were what she bought with her long days of work; she was a great reader, and I became one, too, as soon as letters formed shapes I could recognize. Our yearning (and did she yearn? I only imagine so; she never complained) was spent in the elsewhere of books. I leafed for hours through her mysterious library, the dense novels and works of history with no pictures, each with her name inside in careful penmanship. A salesman knocked on the door once, trailing a suitcase of World Book Encyclopedias; I wanted them like food, and to my shock, she bought a complete set. My father built a bookcase, and they displayed it like treasure in the living room, beneath the indigo city—volume after volume of slick pages, photographs, charts, maps, and a fascinating overlay of human anatomy: bones, muscles, nerves, and genitals. The hallway was lined with Reader’s Digest Condensed Books, which came every month in a plain brown package, like secrets. I loved books dense with print, their unambiguous intent to take me away. In my half-reveries, working my way through the sentences of Marjorie Morningstar and The Durable Fire, flipping the overlay back and forth, I always had one eye on the watery, rippled city above the television and its opaque buildings reflected in a dreamy dark river. How she decided on that particular piece of hotel decor, I do not know. I suspect it came from Silverman’s Furniture and went with the new drapes.

  Art was a man’s name at our house. My mother taught the lower-grade music classes. I started lessons at eight, plinking away at the upright she’d bought secondhand and inexplicably painted light blue. I made lanyards and pine-needle baskets at Girl Scout camp, crayon scratch drawings and clay ashtrays in school. I was intrigued by paint-by-number, the possibilities; even better was the sedative painting instructor on television, his voice like pudding as he magically produced sunny skies, trees, twilit mountain peaks in just half an hour.

  I talked my mother into sending me to a private class. The studio was on Miner Street, an avenue of tall, narrow, pioneer-era buildings, up a dim flight of stairs above Don’s Sporting Goods. The big room had soft wooden floors a century old, a dozen easels in a half-circle. The teacher was a big, dark man with a brooding, gentle manner; he would point us at the inevitable vase and bowl of fruit and walk quietly behind us for a few hours, leaning in to make suggestions. I took to it all at once, the dusty floor and the smells of linseed oil and fixative, the romance of belonging. I loved the rustling silence of the class at work—a few housewives, a couple of teenagers, and this oddly confident ten-year-old throwing herself into the lessons. We drew boxes and apples and flowers, graduating over several weeks from pencil to charcoal to chalk and paint.

  At the end of every class, the teacher would stand up abruptly, clap his hands once, and say, “All right! Now spend the rest of your time doing whatever you want!” I always grabbed for the tubes of cobalt blue and olive green and smeared them about on the canvas, trying to make my own magic city in the mist.

  Usually I walked home from art class. I did not think my mother was sophisticated enough to be in the studio, with her red lipstick and sad purse and old-lady scarf tied below her chin. But sometimes she picked me up and stayed to chat a little, teacher to teacher, while I wandered around the studio, running my finger along the backs of the cheap plastic chairs on which we perched. I liked to examine the day’s uncertain drawings on hunks of torn butcher paper taped up casually on the easels, and the proudly displayed paintings of bouquets and mountain scenes hung on the walls. How did he get there, my dark art teacher, to that little town in the mountains? I have no idea. But I knew I wasn’t the only refugee stranded there.

  “I know she likes it here,” I heard him say one day. “But. Well, you know.” Mom murmured something. “Well, she is determined,” he answered.

  “What did he say?” I asked her on the way home. She cleared her throat. My mother was often reluctant to answer my questions, many of them stimulated by advertisements in the back of magazines she never thought I would read, but she always told me the truth.

  “Well,” she said. “Well, he thought that maybe I, maybe we, should think about something else. Maybe we should save the money for the class. Do you know what I mean?”

  I swallowed something that day, a loss without words; I never went back to class. Instead I decided to focus on my study of piano, as I was wont to describe it even at the age of ten—if my rote lessons could be called a study, with a large, laconic German man who wore bow ties and walked to our house with the slow dignity of the educated tramp. Another refugee. I could do no more than read the notes to the tick of the metronome, but I constantly asked him to give me harder pieces to play. I’d discovered Satie and his deceptive simplicity, a fateful error for the amateur pianist.

  I read my way through three shelves of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books and then whatever I could find at the Carnegie Library, from a biography of Carl Sandburg and an encyclopedia of historical costume to Pierre Boulle’s Planet of the Apes. With Sandburg, I started reading adult poetry instead of the insipid anthologies at school (Robert Louis Stevenson: “A birdie with a yellow bill / Hopped upon my window sill, / Cocked his shining eye and said: / ‘Ain’t you ‘shamed, you sleepy-head!’”—awful stuff). I began to copy lines in my own quote book—the special wisdom of Robert Frost and Richard Brautigan, guru advice.

  I was dreaming of dark cities and university and basement cafes where I would read my poetry (“it is day / beloved listen / I hear the singers / coming winging / on the cobblestones coming singing”). I felt pressure forcing me up from this house, this town, up and out; it had to be art—the siren call of talent waiting to surface. One summer I took a photography class. We spent hours over fine plates of Steichen and Weston and Arbus, talking about contrast and shadow and unexpected detail. But my own photographs were dull and predictable. If I accidentally captured any effect, like graininess or a portrait with half the face cut off, I would print them immediately. When the class ended and I ran out of film, I put the camera away, vowing to save money for a better one.

  To no one’s surprise, I joined drama club as soon as I got to high school. I was cast as the Maid, the Bystander, the Pedestrian, and finally the assistant stage manager, but I was undeterred. I entered the Shakespeare competition, choosing Lady Macbeth’s monologue—“Come to my woman’s breasts, and take my milk for gall, you murdering ministers …” I recited this in a growl, my face pinched with something like angst, or a bad o
yster. I loved saying the word breasts out loud and always leaned hardest on that great word gall, which said so much about the world’s vexations. By the age of fourteen, I had a lot of sympathy for Lady Macbeth.

  My own native iconoclasm, my ceaseless overreaching, made any direct route to success impossible; I shot myself off course like a North Korean rocket. I dropped the sad German piano teacher one day, never bought more film, didn’t take the art elective, and spent a lot of hours sitting in the park with unemployed men who rode motorcycles. I read what I wanted, studied what I wanted, went to class when I couldn’t find a way out of it, and wrote manifestos explaining why I would not be turning in the assignments I found insulting and small. I got through two years of high school with only two arrests and several court-mandated visits to a psychologist. Then I walked away, walked clean out, and with the psychologist’s help, talked myself into the little college over the snowy mountain pass.

  College—a state college, a football school, but to me the height of culture. I was finally with my people. I didn’t take art classes. I took philosophy, semantics, bacteriology, sailing, religious studies, and one class of art history—the golden mean and Un Chien Andalou and what exactly was the difference between Impressionism and Expressionism. This was fine art, and I was glad my mother had spurned the dusty studio after all. What could he have known, upstairs from the sporting-goods store? I loved Seurat; I was drawn to pointillism the way I was drawn to Erik Satie. Seurat’s dots of light, the wild splatters of Pollock, and the easy crayon colors of Klee: such art, mere spots and lines, seemed possible. This, I thought, this I could do—if I wanted to try. (I never tried.) Instead I had obsessive infatuations and read like crazy: Kurt Vonnegut and T.S. Eliot and Sigrid Unset, Dorothy Parker and Tolstoy and Kant and Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wallace Stevens, who thought that “… to have put there / A few sounds of meaning, a momentary end / To the complication, is good, is a good.” I copied that, and many other lines, not always with understanding. I pored over the slick reproductions in library books I couldn’t afford, Modern Art in America and Picture History of World Art. Now and then I wandered across fragments of the shimmering city and all it implied. “Above all else, do not mistake me for someone else,” wrote Nietzsche—or so I wrote in my book of quotes.