Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  Actually, the Ghost wasn’t really forty-four feet long. Years after the boat was sold, Brother looked it up in the Alaska registry of vessels, and they learned the sailboat only measured twenty-eight feet. Their father had inexplicably added sixteen feet to the length. As a child, though, forty-four was the number Girl took as fact as solidly as she knew her address or age. As a child, forty-four feet was the length of her yard back home, almost, or as big as a floating Winnebago. Girl told everyone, “My dad has a forty-four-foot yacht,” which they probably didn’t believe. Some of the kids thought Girl had made up her father entirely. What kid in suburban New York has a father who lives in Alaska, let alone one who purportedly owned a plane and a boat? Even Girl recognized the incredulity of it.

  After they cleared Seward’s harbor Dad gave Girl the helm and went below decks to unpack. Girl was outside alone in the cockpit, her eyes focused on an island on the horizon. Steering was easy—Girl just kept her eyes on a landmark, and the boat seemed to follow her gaze. The Ghost’s bow sliced silently through the waves when under sail or with a soft, steady chuffing if the diesel motor was engaged, as it was that day. Girl liked using the inboard motor, even though clouds of diesel exhaust sometimes blew forward. She didn’t mind the smell. It was the scent of adventure.

  Father and Brother were below decks playing cribbage in the cabin where the wooden walls glowed golden with old brass trimmings and there was an abundance of cubbyholes and hidden cabinets. The porthole windows were oval, not round, but their glass could swing open to let in the salty air that turned the brass fittings green.

  “Brother, Dad, come quick! Porpoises!” Girl was first to see the dolphin pod surround their boat, and it was like they had come just to see her. Brother’s head popped out the companionway door, quickly followed by the rest of him.

  “Here, Girl, I’ll take the helm. You can go look,” Father said when he emerged, and Girl scurried around the boom to the foredeck, Brother racing up the other side to join her.

  “Five of them, Dad!” Girl called, the wind carrying her voice back to the cockpit.

  Girl climbed around the sail bags hanging from the stays on the bowsprit so she was at the foremost point on the ship. The bowsprit was narrow, maybe two feet wide, with a metal railing. Here Girl could lean over and watch the dolphins play in the wake of the bow. They crisscrossed under the boat, swimming alongside, their gray dorsal fins coming out of the water when they rose to take a breath. If Girl could get down to water level she would touch them, if only her arms were a little longer. Girl sat on the hammock-like sail bag that hung from the stays, rocking back and forth until the dolphins tired of the boat and swam away.

  “Move over, Girl, give me a turn!” Brother wanted her spot, but Girl was there first. Even though Father always sided with Brother, he wouldn’t tolerate any shoving on the boat, so there wasn’t much Brother could do about it. Girl hated the way Brother always walked around with his two front teeth sticking out, and how he never let her play Star Wars with him, at least not very often, and how he never let her pick what they watched on TV back home. He smelled like farts and dirty socks but Father still loved him best—his only son. Well, this time Girl had beat him to the bow and she wasn’t giving in.

  “I was here first!” Girl said, and stuck her tongue out for good measure. He gave up and left Girl alone, just the way she liked it.

  The bow cut through the waves and the sea splashed her face when they hit a swell. The waters of Prince William Sound were an opaque jade green, without any light or warmth. It wasn’t pretty and didn’t hint at mermaid songs or submerged forgotten cities like the turquoise beaches they had seen in Mexico with Mother and Stepmother. Girl didn’t hold it against the water, though. Like her, it had the misfortune to be the kind of water that was strong but not beautiful. Girl bobbed and traveled the currents of childhood unable to steer her own course or choose her own ocean, and she understood that the surrounding sea didn’t get to choose either. It was an ugly body of water bullied by winds and pulled by moon tides, reactive and unable to pretend any form of deliberation. Dad said it was the vegetation on the bottom of the ocean that gave water its hue, and this was another way the sea and Girl understood each other—both of them colored by what was below their surfaces.

  They anchored overnight in Sunny Cove, her least favorite place. It always rained there, in spite of its name, and today was no exception, so they decided not to go ashore. That night after dinner, as they did every night, Girl and Brother folded up the solitary leg on the table and latched the wooden tabletop into its position on the wall. After they were snuggled into their sleeping bags, Father pressed the play button on the cassette deck mounted over Brother’s bunk and went forward to his cabin. They were listening to The Hobbit on tape, and the narrator’s voice filled her dreams with dwarves and magic and vast rooms of treasure.

  Girl liked the way the boat rocked when they slept in their narrow bunks. After the first week they no longer bothered stringing up the hammock sides meant to keep the children in their beds at night. Their bodies had melded into the constant pendulum of the sea that rolled the boat cradle-like from side to side, and falling out of her bunk was no longer a danger. Besides, first thing in the morning the beds needed to revert to the benches they sat on for meals, and it was faster to reassemble the small cabin if they didn’t string up the hammocks. As it was, bedding had to be stowed in the secret cabinets behind the cushions along with their pajamas, books, and teddy bears. They dressed quickly and went out into the cockpit, where Dad was already. Dad always woke up super early.

  “Good morning, Girl!” Dad hugged her too hard, his wool shirt scratching her cheek as he crushed her to his chest. Girl pulled away and sat down to eat a granola bar in her favorite corner of the cockpit, leaning against the cabin. There was something different about the air over Prince William Sound. It was clearer but colder, and the light itself was lacking in the familiar warmth of New York’s summer skies. The Alaskan sun never set from June until early August, only dimming slightly from 2:00 a.m. until the sun rose again at 4:00 a.m. But the sunlight wasn’t yellow, it was a whiter sun that didn’t heat the air or hurt your eyes. July and August on the boat were mainly in the high sixties where you were neither warm nor cold, and the air was indistinguishable from your skin.

  “Well, the weather report is good today. We’ll have a good stiff wind at our backs, so I thought we’d raise the sails and go like a striped ape.” Father always said stripe-ed like it was two syllables instead of one. Girl sighed. She really didn’t like to sail. It was too much work. Girl preferred motoring along lazily, but Dad had to get to Cordova to do a clinic, and they had only a few days to get there.

  Cordova was a small fishing village that could only be reached by boat or small plane. No roads connected it to anything else. The town was so small that they didn’t have a pediatrician, only emergency medical technicians and nurses in their small clinic. Once a month Dad would sail down and see all the kids in town. If Juli wasn’t around, Girl acted as his assistant, calling to confirm appointments and writing down everyone’s height and weight in their charts. Dad, as the visiting doctor, was treated as royalty, and the hospital staff and parents of his patients treated her with respect. No one questioned a ten-year-old medical assistant—Girl was Dr. Lillibridge’s daughter, so therefore cut from a different cloth than the village children.

  Brother and Girl went forward to haul up the anchor. They inserted the metal rod into its slot and took turns pushing the lever back and forth to run the manual winch. It was hard work and the weight of the metal, spade-like anchor tired out their arms quickly, so it forced Brother and Girl to cooperate. They were both skinny kids, neither of them close to one hundred pounds, so they didn’t have enough mass to be able to throw their weight into it, but summers on the boat were making the children wiry. Living onboard forced a transient truce between them, their constant competition held mostly at bay until they reached land, though they could n
ever eradicate it entirely. After they weighed anchor and entered the open water, Dad cut the engine. Brother and Girl stood on the roof of the cabin by the mast. They unzipped the blue sail bag and freed the mainsail.

  “Okay, hoist the mainsail!” Dad called, and Brother loosed the halyard from the cleat on the blond varnished mast. He and Girl alternated pulling on the line hand over hand to raise the sail, then Girl tied it off in a locking figure eight on the cleat. Dad adjusted tension on the lines with the cockpit winch, and they were underway. The boat was silent now, cutting through the water at ten knots. It heeled to the right, so the starboard gunwale was only a foot from the water, the port side rising like a wall. It was fun to climb around on the tilted deck, and especially to go below where navigating the cabin was like a crazy carnival house. Outside you always had to be ready for Father to yell Ready about! Hard a lee! Which meant the boom was coming across the deck at head level as they tacked back and forth on alternating diagonal paths across the water. The old joke—Why do they call it a boom? Because that’s the sound it makes when it hits your head!—was true.

  They were never entirely out of sight of land, but the horizon showed mountains and glaciers, not cities or even fishing villages. They skittered around islands too small to merit human habitation, but large enough to contain hundreds of untold adventures. Every evening they would choose a different harbor to anchor in overnight. The beaches were composed of small, gravelly rocks that hurt your feet, and the islands themselves seemed soilless, built on large stones that were less boulder than mountaintops poking up from the ocean floor. The island foundation was visible around the beaches with rock walls rising twenty feet high or more like exposed bones of a mammoth creature big enough for the whole world to reside on its back. The boulders begged to be climbed and always had gentle paths covered in soft moss that were easy to traverse with sneakers or bare feet. The woods covering the solid rock were lush green—pine and spruce evergreens, but smaller and stunted from living so close to the Arctic Circle. Tiny fairy pools formed in depressions on the rock high above sea level, fed with rainwater and rimmed with tiny saplings as big as Girl’s hand. Girl was sure there was magic there just beyond the periphery, and if she could stay long enough she could join it and learn its secrets. The beauty of this place was that there were no other people there, and the islands were rarely marked with names on the nautical map, so they could claim these islands as their own and call them whatever they wished. The naming made them theirs more authentically than legal titles and without the need of lenders or mortgages. The small harbors were always good for a dog-faced seal or a few otters, and black-and-white puffins bobbed on the waves everywhere they went.

  Girl played her wooden recorder on the foredeck for the orcas and blue whales to hear. She didn’t think they minded her lack of musical training, but they never answered back, either. Every day or two they would spot a bald eagle flying overhead, but they never meant as much to Girl as the furry sea creatures she longed to pet. Eagles were good for bragging about, as grown-ups seemed to be in awe of them, and Girl recognized their ability to enhance a story, so she always included them when asked about Alaska—but the truth was that they did not evoke that “untouched wilderness” feeling as much as an orca breeching or otter floating by on its back, a clam held in its furry paws. Grown-ups always asked her to describe Alaska to them, and Girl developed a scripted response that included wild animal sightings and the size of fish she caught, which was all grown-ups really cared about. Girl couldn’t tell them how it felt to be in Alaska, because she didn’t really have words for it. It didn’t occur to her that everyone didn’t get to do stuff like this, or that one day she would look back on this time with longing. When Girl returned to the boat docks at Seward fifteen years later, the harbor was filled with cruise ships and the souvenir shops had sprung up shoulder to shoulder on the narrow village streets. Alaska stopped being the Last Frontier when Girl wasn’t looking. By the time she returned and noticed, it was irrevocably inhabited and industrialized, but instead of producing cars or garments, the industry destroying the wilderness was tourism. All of that was yet to come, though.

  Girl was reading a book in the sunshine, leaning back against the wall of the cabin while Father steered. Brother was reading too, on the other side of the cockpit, but he was reading a Star Wars book and hers was about John Paul Jones and old sea battles. The wind carried a whiff of ammonia.

  “We must be near a sea lion island,” Girl said.

  “I think it’s that rock,” Father said, pointing to a tiny speck out in the distance. Father was farsighted and decades of scanning the waves had honed his vision to be considerably sharper than Girl’s.

  “How far away are they?”

  “A few miles, I expect,” Father said.

  Pretty soon the wind brought the baritone barks of the animals to the Ghost, though they were still too far away to visually differentiate from the rock they occupied.

  As they approached the island, Girl climbed around the sail to the foredeck. The stench of ammonia and animal feces was overpowering, but Girl liked sea lions anyway. They looked like big, huggable dogs. The creatures lay shoulder to shoulder, squirming on top of each other like a writhing heap of worms, but loud, barking worms that shat on each other with undignified abandon. Their rank smell made her glad when their island receded into the distance.

  One night the waves broke hard against the sides of the Ghost, clouds thick and angry enough to block the light from the skies. Alaska summers were never dark, but Girl didn’t notice the significance at the time. Girl lived most of the year in the predictable light patterns of New York, so she had forgotten than night didn’t render you blind here. Years later, Girl realized that the darkness of the storm meant that it had been a big one.

  Brother was below deck, sleeping, or trying to, even though Father had said they needed to alternate standing watch with him all night. They had a brass bosun’s clock that chimed off the day into four-hour watches, but they had never used it to run shifts. Instead, they took turns at the helm based on tiredness or boredom. Now, though, Father said that they needed to stand watches all night through the storm. They were the only crew he had, and it didn’t matter how young they were. He had trained the children from the kids who cried in frustration trying to fight down the sails into small, hardened sailors who could scuttle around the deck like a pirate’s trained monkeys. They would rise to the challenge. Brother and Girl didn’t like the idea of staying up all night, but Father said it was too rough to anchor and not safe for one person to pilot the boat all alone. Girl either volunteered to take the first shift or was ordered to. Father had softer expectations for Brother and he was always allowed to choose first when they divvied up chores or dinner. Father had been raised in a house of women with a domineering mother and two older sisters. His father had been off fighting in World War II for much of his childhood, leaving Father the only male. Father had sired four children, but Brother was the boy he had longed for his whole life. It didn’t matter that Girl was braver, or faster with the right answer, or willing to eat dog biscuits to amuse him. No matter how hard Girl tried, Girl could never be his second son. She didn’t see then that Brother spent most of the year in a house with two lesbian parents and a competitive, bossy sister, and that maybe he needed to be cherished just for being who he was—a boy. Maybe Father was trying to save Brother from growing up just like he had. All Girl knew back then was that there was never enough time and attention from any of their parents to go around, and with her father Girl could never be good enough to merit his full affection, just because she was born female.

  Taking first shift in the storm gave her Father’s undivided attention, though, so Girl didn’t mind. Girl sat curled up in the cockpit watching Father pilot the boat in his black survival suit, worn in case he went overboard into the glacier-filled sea. Girl wanted a suit of her own, but Father said they only came in grown-up sizes, and it wasn’t like Girl was ever in danger of
going overboard. The detachable autopilot was overwhelmed by the power of the storm, so he couldn’t let go of the tiller even for a minute. Girl wore the lifejacket Father had apologetically handed her. They both knew Girl didn’t need it, but it was officially the right thing to do when the wind whipped your hair in wet twig-like branches across cheeks red from the cold rain. Girl sat back under the protection of the canvas canopy of the dodger, cozy in the light streaming up from below decks. Girl was there to hold vigil. The rain and wind made talking impossible, and besides, Father had asked for company, not help, and Girl got to be the one he relied on. Under his black wool captain’s cap the rain coursed down Father’s cheeks and overflowed his beard, but he didn’t bother to wipe his face. Although he later commended her for her lack of fear, Girl knew it wasn’t about being afraid. It was that Girl got to be the chosen son. Girl got to be the strong one, the most-loved one, the one he could count on. Girl was a child not afforded the luxury of naiveté or innocence, and she knew that he had gotten in over his head with this storm and needed someone to help him muster the strength to get them all out. Years later, Father described that night on the Ghost as the most afraid he ever had been, but Girl never believed him. Father could do anything, and he would never have let the children come to harm.