Beautiful Days

by Joyce Carol Oates

  As Becca stared in fascinated horror she saw the girl’s tongue protrude as she poured maple syrup onto her plate . . . Fortunately Becca was sitting in such a position that she couldn’t see the girl and her family at their table in another part of the dining room.

  She’d noticed that others in the dining room watched the obese family too. The father in striped sports shirt, Bermuda trousers, Birkenstocks and socks attracted attention not for his clothes but for his complaints to the head waiter about something that had displeased him, and his curt, cutting remarks to his family. Particularly young people, teenagers, followed the obese girl with appalled eyes . . . She had to be aware of people staring at her, Becca thought. Poor thing!

  Later, to Becca’s dismay, the obese girl rudely cut in front of her to grab a life vest from one of the bins, as passengers queued up in preparation for a trip to the islands.

  The life vests were bright orange. The obese girl in bib-overalls was an extraordinary spectacle tying her life vest carefully in place over her large sloping breasts; quickly Becca looked away, chilled as the girl’s tongue emerged wetly from her mouth.

  The girl had to be mentally retarded. Mentally “disabled.” There had to be some sort of neurological deficit to account for such a bizarre habit.

  Becca secured a life vest for herself, and one for Max. She saw how the girl’s father and brother were also pushing to the bins, with a pretense of not noticing how they shouldered others aside; only the mother stood apart, with her affable, silly half-smile. (Becca took care not to look too pointedly at the mother for fear the woman would greet her happily and try to strike up a conversation like one trying to start a fire with two dull damp sticks.)

  Then, Becca’s anxiety that the freak-family would turn up in their dinghy, that turned out to be unwarranted.

  It was a windy humid day in the Gulf of Chiriquí. The open boat rocked, pitched and bucked in choppy waves of the hue of Coca-Cola. The Indian guide assured them there was no danger—“No sharks, sí? Just hold tight.”

  Was this a joke? Most of the passengers laughed, nervously.

  The previous day, returning in the dinghy to the ship from the islands, the boy who operated the outboard motor had spoken excitedly in Spanish to the guide, pointing—about thirty feet away were a half-dozen fins slicing the surface of the water.

  “Just baby sharks. No worry!”—the guide bared his teeth in a smile.

  And was this a joke? Were the fins those of other, less dangerous fish? The wife saw bafflement in her fellow passengers’ faces though everyone laughed as if the guide had said something witty.

  The guide’s name was—(neither the wife nor the husband chose to acknowledge this painful coincidence, refraining from exchanging a glance)—“Jorge.” He was of medium height, compactly built, with smooth dark-stained skin and shrewd eyes; he wore a khaki-colored shirt and khaki shorts and it wasn’t difficult to imagine a bandolier of cartridges slung across his chest and in his powerful-looking hands a rifle.

  Jorge had told the group that he was of Guna Indian descent and that he was from the Guna Yala archipelago which, unfortunately, they would not be visiting on their tour.

  The wife thought—He is a descendant of the Spanish holocaust survivors.

  She’d been appalled reading of the “aggressive colonization” of this part of the New World by Spanish invaders. Sixteenth-century conquistadors had looted treasure in Bolivia and Peru and brought it to Panama to be shipped to Spain and along the way they’d practiced what would be called in a later era “genocide”—slaughtering directly or in some way causing to die most of the indigenous tribes of Central America. She was familiar with the ugly history of the European colonization of North America and its genocidal wars against the native population but the Spanish conquest seemed to have been worse—more widespread, more brutal and in the zeal of its Roman Catholic mission more “religious.” With so ugly a past it was no wonder that ravaged countries like Panama focused now on fashionable global “ecotourism.”

  And very expensive tours these were, the wife had discovered. For part of their mission was to preserve the ecology and environment of the tourist places.

  Each of the Bocca Brava dinghies was named for an island creature—Howler Monkey, Sea Turtle, Sea Lion, Boobie, Albatross, Dolphin. Each of the dinghies was marked with a cartoon likeness of one of these. The Needhams had been assigned the Howler Monkey dinghy which was comprised mostly of couples not unlike themselves—middle-aged, Caucasian, clearly educated and well-to-do, “fit.” There was an older, retired couple, and there was a biracial couple with very well-behaved young children. Everyone was friendly with the possible exception of the tall lanky-limbed reticent Max who seemed oblivious of his companions, fussing with his camera lenses or staring into the distance as Jorge lectured the group on the evolutionary history of the islands.

  The wife was embarrassed by the husband’s aloofness. Fortunately, no one on the Bocca Brava knew who they were.

  Please excuse him—my husband doesn’t mean to be rude. He is in mourning for his daughter who was the only person in the world he loved without qualification.

  Perhaps this wasn’t altogether true. Perhaps the husband had often been angry with the daughter, disappointed and frustrated. He would not have confided in the wife.

  Please excuse my husband. He is in mourning for his own lost life.

  Onshore, the husband gradually drifted away from the group. It wasn’t that he wasn’t interested in what the guide had to say, he’d explained to Becca, but that the questions and comments of others in the group exasperated him. He’d been spoiled by decades of teaching at MIT where students were not likely to ask uninformed questions of Professor Needham.

  The wife stared after the husband with eyes that ached from the white-rayed tropical sun even when the sky was overcast. She felt a pang of hurt, that the husband was no longer her companion and friend.

  The cloud-layered tropical sky and the churning sea surface were indeed beautiful but the island was an astonishingly ugly place comprised of immense, grotesquely shaped lava-rocks that produced a sensation of vertigo in the wife’s brain.

  Dislocated. Prone to thinking—But why am I here? Am I so desperate? What is this place?

  In precise English the Indian guide was describing the history of the lava islands that had been formed by volcanic eruptions many thousands of years ago. The surrounding waters were rich with nutrients but only a relatively few lizard and reptile species had managed to establish themselves on the volcanic islands—“It is estimated that as many as ninety-nine percent of species have become extinct.” The wife didn’t know if the guide meant only just species of animals on this island or in the Gulf of Chiriquí generally—or all species, globally?

  The great drama of nature scarcely involved humankind at all. The great drama was evolution in which human effort—“civilization”—was but recent, and fleeting. There should have been a grim satisfaction in the knowledge that the primitive creatures of these islands—lizards, snakes, sea turtles, crabs, insects, iguanas—shorebirds perched on rocks amid pyramids of whitish droppings—would outlive Homo sapiens; but of course, there was not.

  The wife thought—Each of us thinks, I will be spared! I am someone, something special.

  Even thinking such a thought, the thinker is seduced, and deceived.

  “Take care, señora!”

  Sharply Jorge called to her, as she’d been about to step onto a foot-long lizard with a serrated back and a flicking tongue that so mimicked the lava-rocks in both the texture and color of its skin you could barely discern it.

  Peering up at the hillside, the wife saw that the terrain was alive with such creatures, virtually invisible. Most of them were immobile as sculptures but if you looked closely you could see—life . . .

  “I’m sorry, Jorge! He is so beautifully camouflaged.”

  It was a curious thing to say—Beautifully camouflaged.

  “Yes, señora. It is why
he is still with us.”

  The wife laughed uncertainly.

  The ecotour guides were not ordinary tour guides but individuals with educational backgrounds in biology, ecology, and marine life. The husband had been impressed with Jorge, he’d said. Though he had not ever uttered the name—“Jorge.”

  The wife wondered if Jorge was thinking bemusedly—It is why some of us are still here, señora. And why we will outlive you.

  “ARE YOU HAPPY WE’VE COME? I am.”

  How pathetic, the wife’s brave announcement! As if embarrassed for her the husband avoided the yearning eyes in the mirror above the bureau and murmured a vague gracious assent.

  “The islands are beautiful. Fascinating. Each in its own way . . .”

  Weakly the wife’s voice trailed off. She had never been an articulate person and now following the daughter’s death she heard her voice often from a little distance as if her skull were empty, and the sounds echoing within.

  It was true that the Panamanian islands were very beautiful to her. Each day’s excursions left her exhausted like one who has tried to see, to hear, to smell and to taste too much.

  This is your last chance. When you return from this, it will all be over.

  She’d wondered what accidents commonly befell tourists. The dinghy landings on the islands were unexpectedly arduous, even younger and more able-bodied passengers had to take care stepping from the boat into a rocky surf. And climbing down into the dinghy from the Boca Brava, on the outside of the ship, required coordination and concentration.

  She’d wanted to ask Jorge if there were occasionally “accidents” in the islands. A careless tourist touching one of the venomous creatures, a sudden sting or bite, an allergic reaction, cardiac arrest . . . Attacked by a stingray or a shark while snorkeling . . .

  And the Boca Brava, like all cruise ships vessels of possible contagion. Susceptible to epidemics of flu, dysentery, pneumonia, salmonella, norovirus.

  The wife smiled to think how astonished the husband would be if she told him not to bother shipping her body home, if something happened to her. Whatever is usually done with a body in circumstances like these—that would be all right with me. Really.

  In their cabin in the Boca Brava the wife and the husband were rediscovering the physical awkwardness that precedes intimacy. Once the cabin door was shut behind them, and had to be shut firmly in order not to swing back open, the wife felt the mild panic she’d felt as a young girl when she found herself alone—by accident, or by design—with someone male. It was a kind of sexual claustrophobia, a sudden powerful wish to escape.

  Awkward and embarrassing, to use the single, so very small lavatory close beside the bed. The sink was small as the sink in an airplane lavatory and the toilet had to be flushed several times to be effective. The shower was a narrow stall behind translucent strips of plastic. The husband, six feet two inches in bare feet, had to crouch in the narrow space and invariably left a puddle of water on the floor which the wife sopped up with a towel thinking—Tears! Cold tears.

  This was a new intimacy in the marriage, the wife thought. The intimacy of the unspoken, forbidden. The intimacy of physical closeness like that of conjoined twins. Yet it was not an emotional intimacy.

  Nights in the cabin, in the uncomfortably low, lumpy bed that appeared to be just slightly smaller than a double bed, were as arduous as days spent hiking on the islands. The ship’s engines seemed louder in the night—ceaselessly humming, vibrating like a great shuddering lung. And the ceaseless rocking motion of the ship was much more noticeable at night, like a great heartbeat you could not not acknowledge. Like most of the ship the cabin was fiercely air-conditioned. The wife had managed to shut vents in the ceiling to deflect some of the air currents directly over the bed but still the air was very cold and though you took shelter beneath bedclothes you were susceptible to thinking unwanted thoughts—Mortuary. Cold meat. In the tropics.

  The wife was aware of the husband beside her with his back to her stiff and unyielding as if he did not dare sleep—not so long as she was awake. Of course, she did not dare acknowledge the husband’s wakefulness; she did not dare touch him, as she’d touched him that last time, and been rebuffed. But each night she did wait for him to speak to her, or turn to her—possibly, this could happen. Becca? Are you awake? I’ve been thinking—we should talk . . . Sleep came suddenly, like the flash of a shark’s fins; yet, like the flash of a shark’s fins, sleep was fleeting. Alternately shivering and sweating through the prim flannel nightgown like the nightwear of an Amish wife the wife slept and woke and slept and woke again with a mouth so parched it was painful for her to swallow—but she did not want to disturb the husband (who was asleep by this time, breathing audibly, a nighttime sound that might be mistaken for sobbing) by slipping from the bed, though it was not a bed one could adroitly “slip from”—(rather more, you would be cantilevering yourself upward, with considerable strain to the knees)—entering the dwarf-bathroom and pouring bottled water into a cup from which to drink. (Of course, they dared not drink the ship’s tap water. Only bottled water was safe for the tourist-passengers of the Boca Brava.) Near morning there came sleep heavy as those leaden vests you are obliged to wear when being X-rayed and sometimes this heavy sleep induced a headache in the wife who had been taking ibuprofen in secret since the start of the trip, as much as she dared along with motion-sickness and anti-diarrhea medication. And in the morning pulling open the blinds covering the windows that comprised most of the outer wall of the cabin the wife would exclaim, “My God! How beautiful!”—for invariably, this was true.

  Streaks of the most exquisite color in the eastern sky, and the vast sea of “waves”—a phenomenon so profound, it can scarcely be registered by the human brain.

  And in the distance, the shore—the “isthmus”—emerging out of mist.

  Already the equatorial sun had begun to ascend. You had to have faith that it would not expand to fill the entire sky in a fiery blinding glare that consumed all things.

  The wife was touched, the husband had come to stand beside her. It was as if—(the wife told herself, knowing she must be kind to herself in this vulnerable phase of her life)—the husband was accepting from her a gift of the beauty and strangeness of the tropical place to which she’d brought them.

  “Yes. It is beautiful.” The husband spoke haltingly, as if unsure what his words meant.

  “So hard to believe, it’s ‘December.’ Only think what ‘June’ would be like!”—the wife spoke eagerly.

  Better to have remained silent but the wife could not resist such remarks in mimicry of the romantic days of their early love—the young, naïve wife, the older, informed husband.

  But to speak of “December” had been a mistake. The wife had failed to realize what “December” would mean to the husband.

  The birthday of the slain daughter was this very day. It was to pass unacknowledged—that was their (tacit) agreement. The wife felt a wave of faintness, she had made such a stupid blunder.

  She was thinking not of the birthday but of the death-day. The birthday had been erased by the death-day. And—(it was the damned air-conditioning in the cabin, that could not be modified)—she was thinking of that terrible morning weeks ago when in a trance of horror they’d driven to Newark, New Jersey, to the county mortuary to identify the daughter’s body. It came back to the wife now in a rush—the shock of such a small body.

  The mission was to identify, and claim. Arrange for the “remains” to be brought to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to what is called a funeral parlor.

  What a quaint term! Why, the wife wondered, is such a place a parlor?

  She laughed. The sound was ghastly, like the prelude to a coughing fit.

  “Becca? What’s wrong?”

  Quickly the wife said, “Nothing.” Though she was so cold, her teeth had begun to chatter.

  They were about to leave the cabin. The wife felt faintly nauseated at the prospect of breakfast—(at home, the wife
rarely ate breakfast and never such a large breakfast)—but it was not possible to skip a meal on the ship for reserves of strength were needed for the strenuous hikes.

  “Max, did you try to contact her?—Daphne’s mother?”

  It was a sudden and impulsive question. Like a poison toad it leapt from the wife’s mouth without warning.

  “Did I ‘try to contact her’—no. I did not.”

  The husband stared at the wife as one might stare at a person who has suddenly reached out inappropriately to touch him. His face that had softened with commiseration had tightened and his voice was flat and unyielding.

  The wife had no clear idea how to interpret these words and so stood awkwardly smiling at the husband like one confronted with a riddle.

  “I only meant—if—if you’d had any idea where she might be, or could contact her—somehow . . . If”—the wife stammered, and swallowed, and pressed blindly onward—“if she was still alive, she would want to know about . . .” The wife’s voice trailed off for she could not bring herself to say her daughter’s death.

  “That woman has not been alive to any of us for some time, Becca. And now, I think we should change the subject.”

  “Even if you hate her, if she’s alive she should know. Even if Daphne hated her, she should know.”

  But Max had turned away, and left the cabin firmly shutting the door behind him. His face had turned ashen and his voice had begun to shake and Becca knew it would be unwise to follow him too quickly.

  In the first months of knowing Max Needham she’d been given to assume that his young daughter’s mother was no longer living, though neither Max nor any of his friends had told her so, directly. She had even wondered if Daphne’s mother had killed herself in some way that involved the child as a witness, but of course no one would speak about this to her. Yet now, seeing how Max had regarded her with a look of loathing, she had the unsettling idea that perhaps he was lying after all, and his first wife was still alive.