Then the Feelings Doctor told me everything I already knew about my daughter, everything I’d already written about her. I wished I’d given the Feelings Doctor my essay. Not because we would have wasted less time. Not because we would have reached a solution faster. I think I understand, for the time being, at least, that therapy is unable to tell me anything new about myself or my loved ones. But therapy could tell me many interesting things about a stranger. About a person I hope I’m not. It could tell me something about a woman, for example, who makes an appointment with her daughter’s therapist as an excuse to talk about her writing. What might a therapist be able to tell me about that woman? I wanted to know more about her.
Today I swam out to sea with a stranger. Since my usual swimming partner had left town, I’d put the word out—Swimmer Too Scared to Swim Alone Needs Swim Partner. I am scared to swim alone not because I might drown but because I might be attacked by a shark. Mine is an unwarranted phobia (shared by basically every person in my generation, i.e., those of us who grew up with Jaws); companionship is an illogical cure. To date, there have been no shark attacks in our harbor. Should a shark, against all statistics, appear, a friend (unless he or she is swimming with a machine gun) will be unable to save me from it. But I feel safe in knowing—before I am pulled underwater to my death by an animal, I can share a final what the fuck? moment with a sympathetic human.
This is the only protection I require.
A friend invited me to swim off her property with her sister, a woman who sees ghosts. The sister and I swam to a motorboat, then to a buoy, then to a lobster boat. We talked about the real estate coincidence that binds us. My husband and I looked at her mother’s house to buy, but instead we bought ours. Her mother looked at our house to buy, but instead she bought hers. I told the woman who was sensitive to ghosts that the reason we hadn’t bought her mother’s house was because it had—and I hoped I wasn’t insulting her by saying this—bad energy. Even my mother, not a woman who’s ever anxious about energy save the kind that can, via the cord on your coffeemaker, maybe burn your house down, agreed with me. “I think I’d kill myself if I lived in this house,” my mother said when the real estate agent was out of earshot.
The woman with whom I was swimming, however, said she hadn’t experienced any bad vibes in that house, which was strange given she was so sensitive to spiritual entities. She told me about the ghost she’d seen when she was a child, a man in an overcoat walking up the stairs in her house who was “definitely malicious.” She’d seen other ghosts as well. As we rounded the lobster boat we talked about the lodge that was for sale right in front of us. Twenty-one bedrooms for under a million dollars. Why was it such a steal? Maybe it was haunted? We fantasized about tearing down the haunted parts, like amputating a cancerous limb. Would this work? It didn’t always work with actual cancer. It hadn’t worked with the bamboo in our backyard. Our soil was poisoned by mutant cells. No matter if we killed the plants, their undead genetic material lurked underground and reappeared in strange places, like halfway up the outside wall of our barn.
We emerged from the sea and I thanked her for swimming with me and for distracting me with talk of ghosts. “Better than talking about sharks!” I said. I’d (mostly) stopped worrying about sharks this summer, which was such a massive accomplishment that I considered listing it on my CV. “Ugh!” the sister said. “Please don’t mention that!” She told me that sharks were moving northward because the water had become so warm. There’d been a shark sighting not too far from where we’d been swimming, just beyond the protective barrier of the islands.
“What kind of shark?” I asked.
“The bad kind,” she said. Then she told me who’d supposedly seen this shark, and I relaxed a little. The shark-spotter is a famed alarmist. Once she’d told us that our elm tree was sick—the little tendrils sprouting from the trunk were, according to her, signs of its imminent expiration—and that it would cost $5,000 to remove it, and that we had to do so immediately, because the next big wind would blow it over and it would crush our house. In a panic, we called a tree expert. The tree expert laughed at us. “Those tendrils mean it’s healthy,” he said. The alarmist also whipped us into a panic froth about firewood—“You’ll never get dry firewood at this time of year; the only firewood you can buy is green, and if you burn it in your stove the creosote will clog your chimney and cause a fire”—and about drinking alcohol while pregnant—“Even one sip of one drink will diminish your child’s intelligence and abilities.” I pointed out that her mother, as she’d bragged at one point, drank a martini every night while pregnant with her.
“Exactly,” she said. “Who knows what I might have been? I might have been an Olympian.”
So the fact that the alarmist had reported the bad kind of shark sighting meant that (a) she’d mistaken a porpoise for a shark, or (b) she had seen a shark but had no idea what kind of shark it was, and likely, given she was right about practically nothing, this shark was not a bad shark.
Still, I worried about this supposed shark sighting for the rest of the day. I loved swimming so much! Part of what I loved about swimming was that I was no longer scared while doing it, so every minute I was in the ocean was another pat on my back. Way to go! You are no longer such a huge scaredy-cat! I teach for the same reason. I used to be as scared of public speaking as I was of sharks. Every time I teach I get an endorphin high off the fact that I did not have a panic attack. I teach and swim in order to measure my improvement as a human. I am no longer terrified of quite so many things.
I considered how to stanch this renewed shark fear before it grew so large that I could no longer swim. I considered Googling great white shark spottings recent maine. Even if one shark had been spotted, or two, this could reassure me that the shark situation was not unusual; i.e., this new sighting was not proof of an imminent invasion I might wisely seek to evade by keeping to the land.
Also, it’s not like there had never been great white spottings off the coast of Maine. When I was a kid I used to visit a seal who lived in Rockport Harbor. I have his biography—A Seal Called Andre, piquantly described in the jacket copy as “the true story of a unique human/animal relationship”—in which there are a number of pictures, including one of a young girl in 1960s hounds-tooth pedal pushers beside a dead great white. The caption reads, “Beauty and the beast: Carol poses uneasily with the monstrous great white shark that devoured Basil.” Basil was the other seal with which the author of the book, Harry Goodridge, had a unique human/animal relationship. Harry made friends with lots of harbor seals; his semi-related hobby was harpooning great whites in order to prove the marine biologists, all of whom insisted great whites seldom swam farther north than Cape Cod, wrong. Maine was considered by these biologists no more than the “casual range” of the great white, to which Harry riposted, “I’d harpooned a dozen or more in Penobscot Bay in the course of several summers and had sighted many more. It struck me that the presence of that many man-eaters constituted more than a ‘casual’ population.” Harry’s point being that I should have been scared of sharks when I was a kid. His point probably also being that I should still be scared. However, no one to my knowledge has ever been attacked by a great white shark in Maine, and since Harry saw great whites in the 1960s, meaning they’d lived in these water for decades, these were clearly some lazy-ass sharks. I was less scared to know that there were sharks than that there weren’t. The evil was among us, but it was fine, it was all fine. We were not awaiting some future species clash, the initial trials of which might involve me.
And yet I still felt tempted to Google the sharks. Maybe a human had been attacked by a shark in Maine recently. I was not very up on the news. I barely knew who the Republican presidential candidate was. Maybe there were so many sharks now that the biologists had revised their casual range projections. I began to feel like my friend who suspected her husband of having an affair, and who had the power to satisfy her curiosity if she just dared to read his e-mail.
I just had to Google great white shark spottings recent maine. But what good would our sleuthing do either of us? She probably wouldn’t leave her husband. I probably wouldn’t stop swimming. Why bother knowing? I saw no point.
Today I heard a terrible noise. I was in my office and I was talking to a student. She’d written a story about a semi-neurotic woman trying to buy salmon at a fish shop. We were both, this student and I, cognizant of the fact that we are somewhat like this character. We are subtextual, and sub-subtextual, and sub-sub-subtextual readers of the world.
Suddenly, in the middle of our conversation, we heard the terrible noise. From somewhere on the quad, where there is always a landscape maintenance crew performing destructive acts of beautification, a vibration jostled the air. Not just the air, the buildings. The sound it produced was of a very low frequency, and nearly inaudible. It registered in my molars.
I covered my ears until it stopped.
“Wow,” I said.
“Wow,” she said.
“That was crazy,” I said.
“Yeah,” she agreed.
“What was that?” I said.
“What?” she said.
“That noise,” I said.
“What noise?” she said.
“Didn’t you hear that noise?” I said.
“No,” she said.
“You really didn’t hear that noise?” I said.
She hadn’t. We continued talking about her short story, but now I was distracted. How had she failed to hear that noise? At a different point in my life, I might have congratulated myself for hearing what she did not hear. I was so sensitive I might qualify for extrasensory perception status. I detected what no one else detected. But I am no longer at that point. Now when I see or hear something that no one else sees or hears, I worry that a part of me is failing. I am not extra-anything, I am less-something. I am reminded of my less-somethingness when I cannot find pleasurable a book or TV show that everyone else finds pleasurable, even brilliant. Am I the only person who can’t perceive the genius of this book or that TV show? I used to believe my failure was proof of a refined intellect; that I refused to see genius where lesser people, with lower genius standards, found gobs of genius. But now my failure to find the genius makes me worry that I’m missing something, not receiving something. What do all of these people understand that I don’t?
Regardless: the noise. The student suggested that maybe I had something wrong with my inner ear. This seemed plausible. I have children who yell and who cause me to yell. Who knew what frequency contusions the invisible chambers of my ear had suffered.
I made an appointment with an ear doctor. Just the act of making the appointment reassured me: something was failing, but that something could be fixed. I should have seen a doctor when I could not understand how anyone found that multi-prize-winning novel remotely good. My inner ear, it must have been my inner ear.
Then I told my husband about the terrible noise, and how I’d made an appointment with the doctor to discover why I’d heard it and my student had not.
“Interesting,” he said. “So there really was a noise?”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“The noise you heard actually existed?”
“Yes,” I said. “It actually existed.”
“You didn’t just hear it in your head?” he said.
What noise don’t you hear in your head? I wanted to ask. But his question freaked me out. I heard a noise, but had there been a noise? How many people have to hear a noise before it becomes a noise?
I promised him: there was a noise. It existed. I really did hear it, and my student really did not.
Today I visited antiques shops. I’d invited my daughter and her friend along as my shopping enablers. They did not fulfill their mandate. I found a poster I liked of a pregnant Girl Scout, circa 1969, smiling beside the slogan: Be prepared. She wore patent leather Mary Janes and kneesocks. She was kind of like Piero della Francesca’s pregnant Madonna. (I just looked up mary how old annunciation. Internet estimates put her between twelve and sixteen years old, meaning she could have been a Girl Scout Cadette or a Girl Scout Senior.) My daughter and her friend counseled me not to buy the poster. I tried to sell them on selling me on buying it. “Why do you like it?” they asked. “Because it’s so funny!” I said. They scrutinized the poster. “Why is it funny?” they asked. I didn’t know why it was funny. Because teenage pregnancy is hilarious? I bought it because I didn’t fully get the joke, and because I wasn’t certain there was meant to be a joke at all. But I liked that the Girl Scout appears to have no idea that she’s pregnant, I liked that “Be prepared” might simply refer to her stylishness and her psychotic smiling gameness, both of which, it seemed to me, were classic Girl Scout traits. And isn’t being prepared to be unprepared the best form of preparedness? If you think you’re ready for anything, you’re probably not ready at all.
Today I read the letters exchanged between a young boy and his mother in 1930. These letters are not published. They are not public domain. These letters were in an old suitcase discovered in the corner of a rental house occupied by my friends. I had no business reading these letters, is what I’m saying. I read them anyway. I read them using the same logic I use in cemeteries, when my children climb on the tombstones or stick their fingers into the engraved dates or delight over the strange names or dismantle the spooky implications of “Lost at Sea.” These people are dead and in many cases forgotten, but now they are receiving some welcome attention. As a dead person, I would very much appreciate a child climbing on my gravestone, so long as they were respectful and interested, and I can promise that my children are exactly these children. If they were terrible children who topple cracked gravestones and yell and cannot be respectful even to the living, I would probably, as a dead person, be frustrated by my inability to discipline them, but I’m assuming the dead have their ways of expressing outrage, especially on their home turf. I could drop a rock on a toe, or trip a small criminal with those wires that hold fake flower arrangements together. Regardless. I feel when I visit a cemetery as I might feel if I were ever to visit a retirement home. These are the forgotten people, and they have stories, and they just want someone to listen to them.
Such was my rationale when I read the letters I found in the suitcase. That I generated a rationale in the first place was because the people in these letters, though I’d met neither of them, did not qualify as complete strangers. They are the relatives of my good friend (it is through his family connection that my other friends are renting the house). The mother in the letters is my friend’s great-grandmother; the son is his grandfather. The suitcase in which the letters were found was already open when I discovered it in the laundry room. The letters were already spilling out of it. They were already free of their envelopes. They were already unfolding. Still, I hesitated. I had heard about the grandfather and the great-grandmother from my friend, because he often uses his family as a medium by which to practice his considerable storytelling gifts. I thought of e-mailing him to ask his permission to read these letters that described, more or less, events he’d already told me about (in his way), but this struck me as a request he’d probably agree to without my needing to ask. What became creepy was me asking in the first place. Asking would cast suspicion over my mostly innocent curiosity.
I did not e-mail him to ask his permission. Obviously I did read the letters. They were heartrending, or maybe I was just in a mood to have my heart heaved up by letters sent to and by a boy who is dead because he would be over one hundred years old now if he were not. The boy had been sent to boarding school and was, I gathered from his mother’s letters to him, miserable. His mother tried to convince him that being sent away from home was the best and most adoring thing she could do, that it would toughen him up and that in general he had to learn to be much tougher because he was not tough and, as a result, he was a bit of a disappointment. She wrote for pages exhorting him to be tougher and tougher and tougher and th
en she would slip into the third person and write, “Boo still loves his mummy, doesn’t he?”
Later that day I took my son to the cemetery. He is in a phase where he wears no clothing. He is small enough that, in a cemetery, he might be mistaken for a marble cherub sprung to life, i.e., his nakedness seemed less disrespectful than it did a fanciful extension of the graveyard aesthetic. He stood, naked, in front of the grave of the man who had been the little boy whose letters I’d just been reading (He died at age ninety-three) and who’d once been so lonely at boarding school. I took a picture of my naked son in front of the man’s grave to e-mail to his grandson, my friend. I thought he might find it touching, or funny, or I don’t know what. Like the earlier e-mail asking his permission to read his family letters, this, too, I did not send.
Today I walked across the Brooklyn Bridge with my daughter and her friend. They are both nearing nine but seem much older. These are my last years to be interesting to them. Knowing this, I try to be so exceedingly interesting that I might hold their attention longer than my natural expiration date allows. I told them, as we walked across the bridge, educational anecdotes about developing from a girl into a woman, featuring me as the protagonist. (This was my more utilitarian attempt at la tendresse Américaine.) After twenty years in this city, it seems that at nearly every Manhattan corner or monument there is an instructive girl-into-woman story I can tell. This bridge is the setting for a number of stories. I told my daughter and her friend about cross-country skiing across this bridge in a blizzard; how I was the only person, aside from a few people in cars, on this bridge. How it was so quiet, and all I could hear was the wind and the metal tips of my poles hitting the walkway under the snow. How the lesson of this story was that even when you’re in your twenties, and adrenaline-crazed, and living in a loft with lots of other adrenaline-crazy striving people, there is something edifying about being cold and alone in the city version of nature.
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