I need you is both a true and ridiculous thing to say to a beloved. I would die without you is never true, though I said it to her, and I meant it. I believed that without her love I would cease to exist. Love is a form of madness, but like all forms of madness, there is logic in its underpinnings, a reason why the melodrama of telenovelas appeals to us, a reason we believe in the value of diamonds. We cannot see ourselves and so depend on the mirror, and sometimes we mistake it for the conjurer. Even in the pixelated window of her vision, I could see myself most clearly. Of course I wanted something to hold onto—I could not hold onto myself.
On our second Valentine’s Day, I flew across those 2,500 miles to her. As I descended into her desert, the sky bluer and bigger than it ever is back east, I thought how similar it is to the sea—the wildness, the near infinity of each. I thought of how a wild thing can become known, can become home. I don’t remember what she gave me. I only remember the fight we had, her flashing eyes and empty mouth. How I stopped waiting for her to say something I could believe in and simply pressed myself against her.
I delighted in my pretty things, as I worshiped the exquisite aspects of our love, but I still treasure the wunderkammer, my memory theater. It reflects more than myself. It is a portrait of its giver, and our love. It is not easy to be seen, no matter how we crave it. It is not easy to look hard at the ones we love. It is always a little gruesome, as love is: full of contradictions and impossible promises. Gift-giving is just a rehearsal. Desires met, a suggestion that it might be safe to need someone. My own need never felt like a pretty thing, though she wanted it. It is a curious thing to give someone. And sometimes a frightening thing to receive. Wanting something does not mean it will suit us.
GIRL AT A WINDOW
The daughter of a captain on the rolling seas
She would stare across the water from the trees
—Jackson Browne, “Jamaica Say You Will”
1
Our first week in Cairo, Egypt, a man grabbed my mother’s ass with both hands. She was hailing a cab in a thunderstorm. My four-year-old brother clung to her neck while eight-year-old me clutched her cotton jumpsuit. Rain slapped our clenched faces.
The Sahara stretched below us and those hot drops painted the desert red, wilted the men’s kaffiyeh scarves like hibiscus petals around their solemn faces. American? No, you are Egyptian! they said to my brother and me. They shook their hands at our faces, which were dark as those of the local children.
It was 1988 and a more liberal Egypt than shortly thereafter or today, but still my mother covered herself from head to toe. As a woman traveling alone with two children there was nothing she could do but turn in the pelting rain and meet the gaze of the man whose two hands had clenched her like a sack of corn.
When I think of our weeks in Egypt and the subsequent voyage on the Captain’s ship, I think of this moment first. It is so vivid: the rain, my helpless mother, the grip of that stranger’s hands. And I do not even remember it. I did not even know that it happened until years later when I was told the story.
The cargo hatches were stuffed with corn. Sacks of it, filling the Captain’s ship, the SS Leslie Lykes. A steel behemoth two football fields long, with a crew of thirty-six men. She also carried a hatch full of missiles and bombs. After discharging the dangerous cargo in Muscat, Oman, he would steer the Leslie north, through the Red Sea and Suez Canal, to meet us in Alexandria.
We had not seen him in four months. Our arms were still sore from vaccinations. We dropped our beloved dog off at a friend’s house and flew out of Boston at dinnertime. It was winter and already dark.
As we began our descent into Paris early the next morning, my brother had only just fallen asleep—his dark lashes fluttering in the dim cabin lights. My mother took us each by hand as we debarked the plane and moved into the airport, blinking at its scrim of cigarette smoke and illegible syllables. He began to cry. He cried so hard that she had to carry him as she navigated the foreign signage. You? she tells me. You were yourself. You were fine.
There was a clear before and after, my mother explains when I first ask her about our time abroad. The before consisted of us three waiting for the ship to reach port in Alexandria. We landed at the Cairo airport—like a cinderblock in the middle of the desert—all the flight’s luggage dumped in a massive pile on the asphalt, swarmed by eager men, Lady I help you lady I help you lady I help you.
The Leslie was scheduled to reach Alexandria a week after we arrived in Cairo. My mother was supposed to call the Captain’s agent to coordinate our travel there. A hotel employee helped her use the phone. The number he had given her was dead.
It was terrible, she tells me. I had no one to help me. Two little kids, all our luggage, and I couldn’t even read the signs. But after a few days more in Cairo, she got us to Alexandria. She checked us into a hotel and prayed he would find us. We had no way of knowing if the ship was delayed, she tells me. It was delayed for nearly a week.
My mother’s father abandoned them when she was four. My grandmother supported her two daughters working as a secretary at Rutgers and doing typing for academics on the side. During summer breaks my mother lived for stints with relatives in nearby towns. She cooked herself dinners at five years old. She developed the mix of self-sufficiency and hunger for romance that I have come to recognize in myself.
I loved my mother’s story as I loved my fairy tales. It had suffering and a happy ending. I always wanted a baby girl, she told me. And then you came. My mother wanted to be a different kind of parent. She wanted a husband who wouldn’t leave. She wanted love to heal the wounds of her past.
Eyes always widened when I told people that my father was a sea captain. Do those still exist? they asked. The time of sea captains had passed. The industry of sea merchants is now even further gone. That work has been outsourced and replaced. The lives that once existed in its orbit, of which we were among the last, are relegated to romantic history.
A century before us, the wives of Nantucket and Cape Cod whalers lived in close-knit communities on the same land. They were their husbands’ true partners. They managed finances, ran households, raised children, and operated within a woman-run home economy of traded services and goods. The sea wife was, in the words of novelist Amy Brill, “a sun-weathered, calloused, shrewd businesswoman with intellectual and physical desires on par with her seagoing husband.” Both written evidence and artifact attest to the popularity of the “he’s-at-home,” an early ceramic dildo. Instead of a recurrent abandonment, this absence of husbands seems a grant of freedom comparable to the entrance of women to industrial fields during World War II.
My mother had no bustling network of fellow sea wives. She was alone in her experience, isolated with two young children in a rural area far from the place she had grown up. She only had us. And she did not own a dildo. I would have come across it in my occasional snooping through her bedroom. I did find letters from the Captain in her jewelry box. His tidy script covered opaque pages with descriptions of the things he saw overseas and the minor dramas among crewmen. He asked about us and told her he loved her. These letters disappointed me. I suspect her as well. The only news we wanted was of his return.
The life of a sea captain’s wife is lonely. My mother must have known this when she married him. But the loneliness she had known before him was of a different kind. The Captain would take care of us.
But what does it mean to be taken care of? Material security. Adoration. Until we obtain these, they seem the objects of our desire. But these concepts of care are false fronts. They are colorful screens we rip through as soon as we reach them. We really want the undoing of our earliest wounds and sometimes, in our attempts to correct the errors of our childhoods, we choose the exact thing we hope to avoid. We recognize a chance for love’s redemption and run toward it. We hope for a different ending.
The Captain has an accurate but selective memory. When I ask him about those first weeks in Egypt he does not mention the d
ead phone number. His memories of that time barely overlap with my mother’s, though they are even richer in detail. He recounts our trip to the ancient city of Luxor. Eighty-thousand slaves, he tells me, lived in Luxor to support and keep rebuilding that holy city for the gods. He bought us tickets to a sound and light show and we walked through Luxor’s enormous stone buildings: 110-foot high walls and gates, statues of pharaohs and beasts, every object there four to six thousand years old. The show ended in a stone amphitheater with an enormous reflecting pool in which we saw the stars, whose names he had already taught me.
My abuelo didn’t abandon his family. But they would have been better off if he had. He crashed cars. He passed out with his face in full plates of arroz con pollo. When my youngest uncle, at the age of six, asked my abuelo why he didn’t stop drinking, my abuelo began to choke him. My father, his older brother, and my abuela leapt onto him like furious satos, screaming for him to stop. They feared he might kill his youngest son, and perhaps he would have.
While he waited to grow big enough to fight his father, the Captain did his homework. He became a Life Scout. He went to church. He won wrestling matches and graduated from the Maritime Academy. He became a leader and a follower of rules. There was a right way to do everything on ships. It was a life that made sense. It was a solution to the chaos from which he came and the ways it still tormented him.
The Captain had also dreamed of being a parent, of fatherhood as a way to correct the crimes of his own father. We listened to the terrible parables of his childhood and understood that we, his children and wife, would never suffer that way.
Toward the end of many three-month voyages, he would call my mother and tell her he had accepted another assignment. Two more months. Sometimes, he’d call again after the two months were up. One more month. At thirty-three (my age, when I began writing this essay), he would be among the youngest captains in the company’s history and one of only two Puerto Rican ones.
A uniform changes a man. The first week after his returns he seemed more captain than father. Once when he returned with a beard, I sobbed, unable to recognize him. Then, he would soften. He wrote me songs on his guitar, read bedtime stories, and coached our baseball teams. Then, he’d leave again. As time passed, it was not so much he who changed at sea but we who changed back home. It no longer seemed worth telling him about my favorite books. By the time he understood the new landscape of my interests, he was gone again.
The Captain never spoke directly to us about what his job meant. Maybe we would not have understood if he had. I don’t know if he ever explained to my mother exactly how he needed the sea and the self he became upon it. Maybe he didn’t have those words. No one explained to us that marriage was an agreement they’d made, that each of their expectations had been disappointed. All we knew was our empty home. Our mother’s despair.
If he loved us, if he really loved us, where was he?
I loved Salvador Dalí’s surrealist landscapes as a teenager. My favorite painting was his most realist, “Girl at a Window,” which features a woman with her elbows resting on an open window’s sill as she stares out over a bay. The image described both my actual experience of a life characterized by waiting and the romantic vision of the sea wife, which, as I aged, offered some comfort, too. A sea daughter is also a kind of Penelope. My tendency toward nautical and sea images as an adult writer reflects this same dialectic attachment: to my real experience and to the romance that softened it. It is a quality the Captain and I share. We build theaters of our memories, and in that partial darkness we find a story that makes sense of their pain.
The easiest stories to romanticize were the ones he brought back from sea. Tell us about when you broke Bill Skye out of the Algerian prison! we demanded. The Captain’s brow lowered. That was not a good time. But we knew that he didn’t mind telling us the story. It had a good ending. Tell us about the pirates! we begged. And again his face darkened. Pirates are not what you see in the movies, he’d remind us. We already knew. Cartoonish renditions of sea robbers offended him nearly as much as Catholic Bible interpretations. They were both dangerous fairy tales.
In 1987, the Captain was First Mate on the SS Allison Lykes. Recent pirate attacks on merchant liners had his crew of 36 alert as they ran the west coast of South America and dropped the hook five miles outside Guayaquil, Ecuador. Shortly before dawn the next morning, forty men in canoes flung their grappling hooks over the deck and climbed aboard, machetes dangling from their belts.
The Allison’s crew had only radios and the element of surprise to their advantage. The Captain led the deck department of fifteen men in an attack armed only with two flare guns, a shotgun holding blank shells, pipe stanchions, and steel cones. They rushed the pirates, screaming and hurling steel. The ship’s whistle blared and flares glowed the dark red. The pirates panicked and jumped overboard. Only a few pools of crimson blood on the deck remained after they fled in their canoes.
The story was meant to impose upon us the gravity of real danger and puncture the silly image of bearded villains with hooks for hands. It still dazzled. The Captain was a magnificent storyteller. He was a real-life hero. I think he appreciated these stories as much as we did—however perilous, his troubles at sea were simpler than those at home, and his role in them was always clear.
What is a ship but a small steel world over which my captain was king? My mother was a land whose laws defied him.
My mother barely mentions the Valley of the Kings when I ask about our time in Egypt. She better remembers the cab driver who ferried us all around Alexandria—Farouck. He was very young, she tells me. Very cute.
My mother rarely wore makeup and never painted her nails or wore heels. It didn’t matter. Men stared at her everywhere. They flirted with her from behind counters and tollbooth windows. College boyfriends still called on her birthday. She didn’t court this attention, but I don’t think she minded it. I know the power of being wanted. It is balm for the fear of being left.
She went alone one day to visit a site that none of us were interested in. I felt so grown up, she tells me. And I was so young. Thirty-three. Your age. The cabby charmed her. He was funny, she says. I thought, what if I just lived here and married this cabby? Her voice grows lighter. I do that whenever I travel. Just think, what would it be like to live here and marry a local cabby? We both laugh. Do you know what I mean? she asks. I do.
I also wonder. I have peered into the orange-lit apartment windows on the train ride home through my city. In foreign cities. I have fallen in momentary love with strangers. Maybe it is simple curiosity. Maybe it is a symptom of disappointment or fear of disappointment. A hope that somewhere else might be the truer life or love you have hoped for.
My mother relates to the world through a permeable membrane. She can imagine herself in a different life and has recast herself many times. As I have. It is a way to move through the world driven equally by hope and fear. We who fear abandonment are often the most capable of leaving. We build lives out of moveable pieces. Out of ourselves. It is a creative way to live, both variable and resilient, if sometimes lonely. The Captain built a life out of systems and stories that featured him in a fixed role: captain, hero, father, husband. He would not have left my mother for the same reason he could not leave his ship: he would have lost himself.
My mother burst into tears as the Captain’s agent strode through the hotel lobby in Alexandria. We were taken care of after he found us, she says. The ship arrived two days later. I hadn’t seen him in months is all she says of their reunion.
The Captain spun her around the kitchen when he was home. Look how beautiful your mother is! She blushed happily and so did we. He worshiped her. Worship is a tricky gift. It is a love meant for gods, not humans. We idolize our objects of worship and no human can meet those expectations.
I woke one night and listened to them fight in the room above mine. He had just returned home after months at sea. They shouted in pitches I’d never heard and the sou
nds tore from their mouths. I sat up in my bed. The ceiling thudded as if something heavy had fallen or been thrown. They soon came downstairs to my room to explain. They did not tell me that my mother had slept with another man. They did not tell me that this was not what either of them had expected.
After the affair, we moved to a different Cape Cod town. From the harbor of our new town we could see the murky scrawls of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard against the horizon. They agreed on a new story: they were starting over. And the voyage was a part of it.
We left Alexandria and saw the winding souks of the casbah in Tangier. We drank sweet mint tea out of gleaming samovars and ate decadent pressed nougat. We sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar to Casablanca. We passed the volcanic cone of Madeira Island and porpoises and flying fish leapt in our wake at its foot. The ship’s bosun built my brother and me a “sandbox” filled with loose corn from the cargo holds. I played cards every morning in the mess hall with Rosemary, the Chief Engineer’s wife and only other woman on the ship besides my mother.
While we waited for the Leslie, we spent three days at the pyramids of Giza. Then, the Great Sphinx. My mother still has one of the photographs on her mantel. She holds my brother in her lap and the pyramids sprawl behind them like a photo backdrop at a state fair. Though my brother remembers the basement smell of the pyramid’s inner tomb better than any other detail of the trip, they are just stories to me now, corroborated by the plastic baggie of crumbled stone (circa 2560 B.C.) that my mother collected from the base of the Great Pyramid.
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