by John Barth
The what?
Says Peter We could write the rest ourselves: All the clues are right there in Act One. It’s you know what.
What?
Old hat. Want to take a dinghy ride? Stretch muscles?
We do, taking turns on the oars, round about both arms of Dun Cove, which now remind us of fallopian tubes. Few or no nettles, but the afternoon’s too raw to make the water inviting. Though she does not herself invent stories, black-bereted Katherine has told enough of them to agree with Peter, once she thinks about it, that in Act Two those two young females—Floaters, ova, whatever they are—must encounter the “Swimmers,” no doubt including the heavily foreshadowed “Mister Right,” and be menaced by them, if not by him, or at least perceive themselves so to be.
Says Kath He’ll look like you. I wish we were in bed with you right now.
Says Peter Yup. Then the screws will have to be put to May’s and June’s separate preconceptions, excuse the expression. That’s why that Right and Left business was established. Each of them will find that her education was a half truth. June is openminded, but May won’t come off her opinions easily. How does he know? Because that’s what second acts are for. Maybe Mister Right will have a few things to learn, too—such as that fertilization normally takes place above the Confluence, not below it. But that’s show biz.
Katherine bets May will be jealous, the way May Jump was.
You bet she will. Do human ova ever survive menstruation, by the way?
Not that Katherine ever heard of: Superfetation works the other way. But she guesses anything is possible; anyhow, it seems okay as a working premise. And remember, we’re only assuming they’re human ova. Maybe they’re sea urchins? In any case, Peter declares, Act Two must end with Mister Right and May’s rivalry exacerbated, June’s sentiments painfully divided, and the threat to all hands sharply escalated by some new turn of events. . . .
Pleads Kate Stop! You’ll spoil the story. How do you know all that?
Freshman Dramaturgy, in Pete’s opinion. So’s the script, doesn’t she think?
Is he sure he didn’t write it?
Says P Please. He is by nature a narrator, not a dramatizer. He cannot deny that should he ever presume to playwrighthood, his efforts might not be superior to SEX EDUCATION: Play; but he denies the presumption. That denial brings us back both to our sloop and to the main question: All extraordinary coincidences aside, what kind of oddball would put a playscript, finished or unfinished, into a plastic canister along with a worn-out hat and float it off on the tide? If he hopes some agent or producer will come across it, he’s casting his seed upon the wrong waters; he’d be better off on Long Island Sound than on Chesapeake Bay.
Kate declares she sure never thought of her eggs as being little women, much less self-contained white-water rafters with individual personalities. The idea gives her the heeb-jeebs. What she mainly remembers about her first menstruation was feeling like an unsuccessful chicken: It would’ve been more satisfying to lay the thing and cluck over it than to bleed it out and not even see it. Wait: She now also recalls searching for it, in vain, in those early Kotexes. Her mother had been amused, her first-form girlfriends disgusted, but she hadn’t cared: The thing was after all hers, and she was simply curious.
And unabashed, says proud Pete, and unsqueamish: That’s our Katydid.
Anyhow, I enjoyed the whole business.
Of course you did.
Growing tits and fur and connecting with the moon and the tides—terrific. Brother Willy, she reports, and his bosom buddy Porter Baldwin, Jr., had been first-class pains in her behind, snooping and teasing. Yech.
Enjoy each stage, quotes smiling Peter. We are back aboard. In fact she had a sort of Ms. R, Katherine reminds him: one of those wonderful high school English teacher ladies who are forty when they’re twenty and no more than forty-five when they reach sixty: a woman of unusual skill, wisdom, firmness, patience, and industry, without children or living spouse, whom generations of Deniston girls stood in classroom awe of and affectionately mocked among themselves as an old maid, while she did more for their minds and characters than most of their parents and subsequent college faculties combined, with an individual concern for her charges that would put to shame any doctor, lawyer, or psychiatrist Kate has ever known, in a profession without the rewards of rank, riches, fame, or community prestige: a profession that one enters as a high school English teacher and retires from, forty years later, a high school English teacher. Irma Shorter and Katherine Sherritt and many another had loved Mrs. Florence Halsey as one would adore a personal god, with a love that deepened as the decades taught them how much they’d learned from her—and that love was Florence Halsey’s chief reward. Near eighty now and confined to an Easton nursing home—her health had failed promptly upon her retirement from the Deniston School for Girls—Florence Halsey has, for attending family, the half-dozen ex-students of various ages who both revere her and reside in the area; for posterity, hundreds of others scattered about the world; for immortality, neither more nor less than any first-class teacher ever has: the words (spoken by her former students to their own students, spouses, children, friends) “Mrs. Halsey used to tell us . . .”
What Mrs. Halsey used to tell us was a lot less dippy than Enjoy each stage, Katherine Sherritt declares. Mrs. Halsey used to tell us stuff like Always give your adversary credit for at least as much common sense as you yourself have. And Remember, girls, that the opposite of reason is not emotion; it is unreason. And the opposite of emotion is not reason; it is frigidity on the one hand and sentimentality on the other. Florence Halsey’s sayings were not old hat.
Peter’s glowing, both because he finds Mrs. Halsey’s obiter dicta congenial and wise and because we’re making love again down in Story’s cabin, Kate wearing only her beret trouvé. Whatever its shortcomings as dramatic literature, Act I of SEX EDUCATION: Play has managed after all to rouse us. The languor of our passion—it is that kind of afternoon; we are in that kind of humor—seems to calm the children, Body and Soul, as if Pete’s slow motions were fatherly caresses. When at last he ejaculates, K sighs I hope there’s no Mister Right in that batch, now that school’s closed for the season.
Over dinner we ask So are we going sailing tomorrow, or home? That partial comedy remains much in our minds: the work of some not-untalented amateur, we have decided, who either whimsically thus abandoned it with a symbol of his self-criticism or made a copy and whimsically thus launched the original as a waterborne offering to the muse: a simulacrum of its principals, those Floaters. We are duly awed by the odds against any sperm’s connecting with any egg; the grossly improbable coincidence of life itself—which nevertheless contrived to come to pass in the case of each of us, and which we have contrived to perpetrate at least for another chapter. Toward dusk there is a final small thundershower, with distant lightning bolts such as may have catalyzed the first living cells in the primordial molecular soup. Even as its thunder rumbles oceanward, the sky clears: new crescent moon, bright stars; the promise of a calm night and a breezy fine morning as the high moves into Maryland.
Maybe it’s the weather change, or our lazy lovemaking followed by the weather change. Or maybe it’s the story of our lives thus far with its slowly building impasse, culminating in today’s crisis, broken by the whopping coincidence of a manuscript-in-a-bottle, revealed to be a more whopping coincidence yet and followed by a certain amount of reflection, by satisfying though awkward sex, by a good dinner, and by the weather change. In any case, it seems to us just now that though the apocalypse might possibly arrive before the end of this sentence, we have just now no problems that we can do anything about. If fate still has us in its jaws, it is not at the moment swallowing us headfirst. It makes sense, just now, to us, right here, to enjoy the evening and think not of the morrow until it come. Kate radios those tidings to Nopoint Point. We have a nightcap ale—just a sip for her—and go to bed early.
Tell Prid
e and Prejudice a bedtime story, their mother insists from forward to aft. You have to do that every night now until they’re born. New rule.
ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WERE TWO LOCKED CASKETS,
Peter replies instantly from the quarterberth—one of those occasions that astonish Katherine and sometimes him too, as if the muse, surprised, speaks before she knows what she’s saying. Not burial caskets; treasure caskets. Uh. Each of which contained . . . the key to the other.
DAY 2:
DUN COVE TO
MADISON BAY
Even when we’re sailing, it’s K.S.S. who usually dreams our better dreams. Early this morning she has a jim-dandy:
THE CONTAINER AND THE THING CONTAINED.
After our bread-and-coffee breakfast (decaf for Kate), we ran out of Dun Cove and down Harris Creek on the promised high, north-northwest by north at twenty plus, a blue Canadian air that cleared our souls and, once we were under way, so recommitted us to our undestinationed voyage that it went without saying, when we reached the place of yesterday’s impasse, that we would not even enter Knapps Narrows to reprovision, but run on whither the wind might list, out of the Great Choptank, into Chesapeake Bay—there had to be a can of something aboard for lunch, and who needed ice on so brisk a morning?—down to wherever, where supplies were bound to be.
Wherever turned out to be Madison Bay, in the Little Choptank: twenty miles of splendid southing back toward Story’s launching place. We considered running on through the afternoon, down to Hoopers Island, Shoal Point, Sagamore Flats, to say hello to Peter’s boyhood if not to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency; but feeling the wind weaken after tide-turn, we decided instead upon the Little Choptank, next river system below our own, which however we had somehow never gotten around to sailing together. P recalled there being a little Coast Guard Search-and-Rescue station there on shallow Madison Bay, on that river’s south shore, and a working watermen’s wharf, and some sort of crab-and-oyster restaurant, perhaps with an ice machine, maybe a small grocery store as well. Who knew?
Those are Dorchester County waters. The land lies low; soybean farms and pine woods begin giving way to salt marsh. Houses are few, frame, plain: Millionaires are scarce down here. The anchorages, though innumerable and snug enough, are for the most part shallow, full of unmarked shoals, and often loud with mosquitoes from Easter to Thanksgiving. Cruising yachts are not abundant.
We did well to heed that flagging breeze. The first ten miles of the day we sailed in two hours; the second ten took nearly four. At half past two, in mid-Little Choptank, our breeze failed entirely, and we crept with the sculling oar into Madison Bay: a wide creek, really, walled by loblolly pines; maybe a mile long, half that across; seven feet mean low water at its deepest, most of it two to four. There were the low white workboats; the USCG S&R; the restaurant-crabhouse, bigger than Peter had remembered; a small working marina that he had forgotten, with fuel dock and haul-out lift. Ice machines. Freshwater hoses, hooray. And, anchored off to one side about halfway in, away from the wharves and the channel traffic, the oddest-looking vessel we had ever seen in Chesapeake waters.
That is saying much. Halfway along the intracoastal thoroughfare from Massachusetts to Florida, our Bay floats every sort of traffic except the deepest-draft supertankers. In a few hours’ daysail, you may pass a nuclear submarine, a four-masted square-rigger, a Windsurfer, a Texas Tower under tow, a Chinese junk converted for cruising, a syndicated million-dollar “maxi” racing machine, a kid in a kayak, a Monrovian freighter bound for Sri Lanka, an oyster-dredging skipjack built in 1889 and still working, a round-the-world cruiser manned by one young woman, a drug-running superspeedboat, a hydraulic clammer, a U.S. Navy rowing shell, a fishing charter boat packed with half a hundred black gentlemen anglers, a ten-Brownie war canoe, a Russian Caribbean cruise ship, an air boat, a flying boat, a hydrofoil, a Hovercraft, a missile frigate, a water-skier, a paraglider, and a man bent upon walking from Annapolis to St. Michaels in Styrofoam pontoon-shoes of his own design. All those we’ve seen, and more, over the summers, from Story’s cockpit, but we had never before seen . . .
A weathered black hull with a bank of rowing ports, its transverse bow thrust forward at the waterline as if for ramming, its high stern curved and curling like an outsized Venetian gondola’s, with no visible rudder. A single short mast amidships with squaresail or settee-sail brailed to its yard. No name board, no registration numbers. No flag or burgee. No tender. No sign of anyone aboard.
Well, now, said we to ourselves: We Americans are a stunt-happy, replica-crazy folk, and we are not alone. Following the likes of Thor Heyerdahl, men and women in recent decades have sailed from just about everywhere to just about anywhere in faithful replicas of just about everything, from balsa rafts and bulrush dhows to Baltimore clippers and carracks of St. Brendan’s bullhide. More often than not, they have gotten where they were going. So why not a Homerical swart ship in Madison Bay, in the Little Choptank, in Katherine Sherritt’s predawn dream?
That dream, inspired by our play-in-a-canister, was in fact about sperms and eggs. It imaged the ovum as a sort of Penelope, beset by spermatozoic suitors until rescued by her Odysseus, who has, so to speak, the key to her casket. As in Homer’s poem, that key is neither a figurative phallus, such as a literal key, nor a figurative key, such as her husband’s literal phallus. It is the answer to an intimate marital question rich in sexual suggestion: the secret construction of the couple’s immovable marriage-bed, its stout chief post a living olive-trunk. The dream-scene then changed to Chesapeake Bay: Penelope/Katherine was one of those white-water Floaters in that “television play,” about to be carried under by the horde of suitors clinging to her envelope like shipwrecked sailors. When Peter/Odysseus turns his key in her lock, she sheds that envelope like a buster crab its shell, leaving them to drown, and floats off in her true husband’s embrace, at once (so spoke the voice-off narrator in her dream) the Container and the Thing Contained.
Now, in Madison Bay, we understand that we have done righter than we knew to undertake this aimless, unlikely voyage at this delicate juncture in our lives. What we actually do this Tuesday is much as was just recounted as if dreamed, except that over breakfast, while our heirs do their a.m. aquabatics, we listen to the morning news. Some of the truth begins to emerge about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, theretofore characterized as a revolution in that country, and we hear of the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that novel life-forms created by the gene splicers may be patented.
That latter item reminds bereted Katherine of her dream. For our entertainment she recounts it, objecting however that it makes her and her eggs into passive little patsies—Sleeping Beauties waiting for Prince Charming’s wake-up call—whereas in biological/historical fact both ova and ovulator are assertive, even aggressive actors in our life’s story.
Says Peter Dreams are dumb and tells us now his less fantastic one, inspired in part like hers by that SEX EDUCATION script and his twin-casket bedtime story, but mainly by the fact that one early morning at age twelve or thirteen he set out alone in his crabbing skiff on the Honga River, behind Middle Hoopers Island, with what he took to be basic survival gear, resolved not to touch his oars but to drift like Huckleberry Finn whithersoever the tide might fetch him.
Is each of these dreams, we mildly wonder, a casket containing the other’s key? We decide we’ll see. As aforenarrated, we set out, our souls cleared in Harris Creek by the fresh blue breeze. Off Knapps Narrows we understand that we shall neither turn Nopoint Pointward nor pause to reprovision, but carry on simply south. Pete radios that tiding home. We pour second coffee from the breakfast Thermos and feel the breeze falter. Pro-visionless, we skip lunch, turn into the Little Choptank at four knots, sail up it at three, at two, at one. Finally we scull into tree-flanked Madison Bay, named for the author of The Federalist and fourth president of our republic. And we espy that black . . . Phaeacian 35?
Indeed, mighty curious, we scull marv
eling right around it. Half the size, maybe, of those in Homer’s catalogue? We are not classicists; cannot even say for sure that the lines are ancient Greek: They seem so, but we may be being cued by Kathy’s dream. In any case, the vessel is as above described. On closer inspection, all but one of those pairs of rowing ports turn out to be cabin ports. The spars are varnished wood; the standing rigging is tarred rope, not stainless cable. Deadeyes instead of turnbuckles; belaying pins instead of cleats; no winches in sight. Even the blocks have varnished wooden cheeks—but sharp-eyed Peter notes that their sheaves are molded nylon, and that the running rigging is not laid hemp but braided Dacron, like ours. There’s even a VHF antenna on the stubby mast.
We halloo; get no reply. Well, now.
With no breeze to sail by, and the waters down here already too nettled for swimming, we’ve time on our hands. Let’s see what’s to be found and learned ashore. We scull in, tie up at the bulkhead near the restaurant, take on water, ice, and what simple provision K can charm the restaurant kitchen lady into selling us: enough for one day’s makeshift meals. We’ll anchor in Madison Bay this afternoon and dinghy in for dinner this evening at the restaurant, where the fare will be homely but the seafood strictly fresh. The few folks about are clearly local: three red-eyed, grizzled watermen of various ages, drinking Budweiser at the bar; a gaunt, fiftyish barmaid like a surviving Andrews Sister with wrinkled neck, high-piled bleached hair, rhinestoned pointy eyeglasses, twang-voweled speech. We perch on bar stools, split unevenly a National Premium beer, and ask about the odd craft anchored yonder.
Demands one of our barmates, a younger fellow with shoulder-length hair and a John Deere cap, She’s a pisser now, ain’t she? Must of sailed in last night; she was parked there at five this morning when he went out. Never saw neither person aboard of her.