Uncertain Ground

by Carolyn Osborn

  I brushed his hands away when he started unbuttoning my shirt.

  “I’m not going to be the only one naked,” I said.

  “I want to look at you … just to look.”

  “Not with all your clothes on.”

  “Why not?” He pulled me up to him by both hands.

  “It’s unfair somehow.”

  “There’s nothing fair about this.”

  “I know.” I twisted away from him. “I can’t get near a bed with you. Come on.”

  He left me standing at the foot of the bed, sat down on it, groaned, stood up, walked over to me and said, “I’m going to hate myself for this the rest of my life. This is the most perverse thing I’ve ever—”

  Perhaps it was. I didn’t know. I wasn’t even sure what he meant.

  We kissed until our mouths were dry, our lips bruised. His hands moved over my back, down my arms lightly, slowly.

  Abruptly, using both hands on his chest, I pushed myself away.

  He reached toward me, but I was close enough to the door to turn and run out of the room. Hardly seeing, without thinking, I fled across the street to the seawall. I could hear Tony calling my name as I rushed down the cement steps to the beach to face the dark water. Tears ran down my cheeks. I didn’t want him to see me crying, to guess how much I wanted to turn back and run toward him.

  Without speaking, he followed me. We must have walked along the beach silently for a quarter of a mile until I recognized a stairway on the seawall, took it, took the street directly across the boulevard and kept walking toward the Mclean house.

  Tony turned away when he saw the direction I’d chosen, and started toward the motel. Above his head I watched the ship sailing, the three rippled lines of pink, blue and white neon sea blinking in the night sky.

  In the final block before reaching the house, I thought, “At least I still have my clothes on.” I was glad I did even if I would have been glad to have had them off earlier. Then I remembered all the names boys called girls who wouldn’t give in. “Pricktease” came to mind most often. He was right. There was nothing fair about it.

  The next day he came by so early he had to talk to Aunt Bertha while I left the breakfast table to run upstairs and dress. I’d thought I would never see him again, that he’d leave without a word. Had he realized, perhaps, that I felt as miserable as he did?

  From the bathroom window I could see Emmett outside inspecting the convertible’s motor. Heavier, a little taller, obviously darker, his shaggy hair growing straight over the back of his neck, he gestured toward the engine, touching it here and there, almost patting it. I’d watched Kenyon act the same way when he looked at a friend’s new car.

  Tony, his light hair catching the sun, reached beyond him to close the hood with a pleased look on his face.

  Emmett laughed.

  I had tried to keep them apart. When Tony arrived I got him away from the house before I even had to introduce him to Emmett. Now they turned to lounge against the convertible’s side next to the curb as if they were two old friends. They both liked fast cars. Emmett had already been warned against hot-rodding around Galveston in Bertha’s well-known Chrysler. By the time I joined them Emmett was offering to take Tony to some of the places he knew.

  “What do you like, five card stud, draw—?”

  “I don’t gamble.” Tony put his arm around me and drew me close.

  I almost jumped. His moods changed so quickly I couldn’t gauge them. Was he here because he’d forgiven me, or because he just couldn’t decide what he wanted to do next?

  “There’s a game going on around Galveston nearly anytime if you change your mind,” Emmett offered again.

  Tony shook his head. “I don’t like losing money on dogs, horses, or cards. The odds are always rigged against you. The house always gets paid.”

  Emmett grinned. “I don’t figure to win all the time. Ask Celia.”

  Tony pulled me tighter against his side.

  “He loses pretty often,” I said.

  “Yeah. Well … by the time we go home, I could even be ahead.” Emmett laughed as if he was laughing at himself.

  “Or behind,” Tony said quietly but his contempt could be heard.

  I wasn’t sure Emmett had noticed.

  He shrugged and stepped back a little, so I could see his face more clearly. His expression was amiable, too amiable, too calm. His eyes met mine. He gave me a quick sideways glance indicating I was to move.

  I didn’t believe he’d hit him, but I wasn’t altogether certain. Tony was tall but slight, and he was a guest, someone who’d just come to get me at our aunt’s house. Clearly Emmett wanted me to stand aside. Standing as close as I could to Tony, I waited. It was so quiet I could hear a little breeze shuffling through the palm leaves.

  Tony started opening the door on my side. “Come on,” he said.

  Emmett, his back to us, stalked toward the west porch door.

  “Your cousin—” he complained as we drove off. His mood had veered once more. Now he was angry and wanted to be soothed.

  I saw the question in his eyes and answered before he asked. “We barely manage to get along.”

  “I bet. Women are crazy about cowboys.”

  “Oh, God, Tony!” Since he’d gone to school in Colorado, a state so western I thought he’d understand. Surely I didn’t have to tell him there was a cowboy of some sort on every street corner in Leon.

  He went on talking about Emmett, my sexy cousin, living in the same house and going everywhere with me. By the time we got to the seawall, he’d convinced himself he was jealous of Emmett. He refused to understand me.

  Tony turned right on the boulevard and followed the seawall discovering, as he drove, the road down the west side of the island. Luis lived in one of the few beach houses out there. The rest of that end of the island was taken up by the country club, a skeet club, a few family camps—wooden houses on stilts with screened-in sleeping porches—and farms. The first one we drove by, a dairy farm reeking of manure, was the most noticeable. Another held Laffite’s Grove, a clump of trees on slightly higher ground, one of the sites where Laffite’s treasure was supposedly buried. Luis had told Emmett about it the first day they met in the beer joint on the beach. Emmett announced he would dig there immediately, then got too drunk to do anything. When he’d sobered up the next day Uncle Mowrey, finding him in the garage looking for a shovel, told him Laffite’s Grove had been dug up often enough already. And it was on private land.

  I wondered if Tony and I might pass Luis driving in from his house to town. Not likely. And even if we did Tony would never guess I was far more interested in Luis than Emmett. We drove by the little road leading off to Luis’ place so fast no one could have possibly recognized me in sunglasses, a scarf knotted under by chin, wrapped around my neck, and tied behind my head again. I had stuck it in the glove box earlier that summer. When I first saw that piece of white silk again I remembered wearing it nearly every time we went out while I was in Colorado and was foolishly pleased simply because Tony still carried my scarf around.

  “Watch this,” he commanded. Flooring the gas pedal, he pointed to the speedometer. When it hit 110, the land merged into a blur and I began shouting at him to slow down. I knew that road, and we were coming to the end of it. Not so far in front of us was nothing but sand and a sheet of bay water.

  “It’ll do 120,” he shouted as if I couldn’t read a speedometer.

  I slid down further into the seat and shouted back. “Who cares?”

  “I do.”

  “I don’t. Stop it, Tony.” I screamed against the wind.

  He slowed the car. “I’m going to give the damn car back to my parents. I just wanted to show you what it could do.”

  I unwound the white scarf and stuck it back in the glove compartment without saying anything. I hated the avid look on his face.

  “Chicken.”

  “That’s me.”

  “Mad?”

  “Listen! I’
m scared of lots of things, of seas too high, water too rough, jellyfish, people who drive too fast! I have a right to be scared!” I shouted at him, at anyone nearby.

  “Okay, okay, Celia. What else is there to do here beside playing poker with your cousin?”

  I ignored his sneer and talked him into wading in the surf with me. He had already adamantly refused to swim in the Gulf. “It’s dirty,” he kept saying.

  I looked at him standing on the shore, his pants legs rolled up, a city boy unhappy outdoors.

  “It’s only sand. The slope is so gentle the waves stir it up as they come in and deposit it again when the tide is higher. Look, the last little wave is clear.”

  “It’s looks dirty.” There was a petulant tone to his voice. His face was flushed with heat and sun. Just briefly in the harsh light, I saw him as a truculent little boy digging his heels in the sand and refusing to get wet mainly because some adult, his mother or his father most likely, wanted him to. It seemed he couldn’t finish growing up, and as much as I hoped he might someday, I couldn’t believe it would happen anytime soon.

  He trudged over the sand to his car to reach in the back seat for a bottle of Scotch he’d left there in a sack. He held it out toward me.

  I shook my head. I didn’t want a drink. It was eleven in the morning on a clear, bright day. I’d had enough to drink the day before. Tony was never far from a bottle of something.

  I couldn’t truly understand him, nor could I help him. He wasn’t helping me. When I went off to college— really some years before that—I’d sworn not to marry before finishing. I’d seen enough girls staying home with babies. No one I knew went on to college after a shotgun wedding. Abortions were illegal; they only took place in stories. And in every one of them I’d read, the girls bled to death or died of a terrible infection. Most of all, I didn’t want to have to marry anyone. Continually pulled between wanting Tony and worry over getting caught, my stomach remained in a coil. I still couldn’t eat much; I could hardly sleep at all. Both nights he’d been there I had tried the couch and the floor.

  Later that afternoon he drove me back to the house. The two of us sat in his car under the palm tree looking at each other.

  “You never loved me,” he said, his voice bitter, his face taut.

  All I could say was, “I did.”

  Chapter Nine

  In the mornings Emmett slept later and later. I became the restless one. I’d avoided seeing Luis when Tony was in town and now found myself usually on my own. Perhaps Luis had discovered someone else to spend time with; perhaps he’d begun to paint all day. For the first time in years, I had whole days to myself. I began to leave the house early for exploratory walks in the neighborhood before the sun got too hot. Going east I paused to stare through the dark windows of small Italian grocery stores where dim lights showed rows of vegetables—zucchini, tomatoes, lettuce—with stalks of yellowing bananas swaying over them. Young mothers were out pushing their babies in strollers. An old man carrying a newspaper in a neat roll under one arm must have been hurrying home to read it. For a block or so I was followed by various stray dogs who invariably deserted me for familiar whistles. In the afternoons I sometimes found refuge in the Rosenberg, Galveston’s library. It had a faint sweet smell of old wood mixed with floor wax and the same sort of furniture polish used by all the libraries I’d known in all the places I’d ever lived.

  I checked out Kon-Tiki and From Here to Eternity and read them together alternating between the voyage and the tragedy mixing fact with fiction, delight with doom. In the library I found old pictures of people walking through the city on boards ten feet high in the air. “The Raising of Galveston,” a large caption read. Too low, always in danger of flooding, the whole city had been raised. Houses, even churches, divided into sections behind dikes, were jacked up, so everyone moved on high boardwalks to enter their homes. In the old sepia-toned pictures the walkways looked so narrow that the little stick figures of people suspended on them seemed in danger of falling every moment. I could see the wavering lines of sewers, water, and gas raised also.

  “But what made the ground rise?” I had to ask Uncle Mowrey.

  “It was all part of a plan. They dredged wet sand from the harbor’s channel, moved it through canals cut through the island, then pumped it out on land. Water from the sand drained away. The island rose.”

  To me it was almost magical. How did they, I wondered, ever get everyone to agree to suspend their houses, their whole lives like that?

  “They didn’t have to,” said Mowrey. The 1900 storm did it … built the seawall, raised the city too.” Abruptly he fell into silence again. He liked passing on bits of information, but I found I had to ask precise questions.

  It must have been something more, I thought, something more than the storm … people’s stubbornness, pride … a will to resist that made them search for a way. Of course their homes were there, and so were their livelihoods. I’d seen hundreds of people move during the war. That was different; those were temporary shifts, or so most of them believed, so I had believed when the war began. Those who’d stayed in Galveston after the storm— Weren’t many of them immigrants, people who had already chosen to make one great move? Had they simply decided, once they were settled, to stay put? Whatever their reasons, they had been determined to live on higher ground.

  I’d walk carrying my library books to and from the Mclean’s looking for signs of the raising but never found any. The landscape had been completely replaced. All the trees had died in the sand they pumped in. New trees and gardens grew on soil hauled from the mainland. So here was Galveston, once an island with only three trees on it, now covered with acres of greenery.

  Always I was drawn back to the seawall across Broadway past the Church of the Sacred Heart, past the Bishop’s Palace and Lucas Terraces with its shell-shaped window boxes, past the little cottages raised high on piers to the sometimes brown-gray, sometimes gray-green Gulf. The part of the beach that lay parallel to the Mcleans’ was lined with souvenir shops and hung with swags of net holding dried starfish. Giant conch shells collected, I supposed, from remote islands lay stacked in curling heaps around steps and doors. These were particularly beautiful. Perhaps I thought so because they were familiar. A conch shell stood gathering dust on top of a bookcase on the landing of the stairs at Grandmother Henderson’s house. My father showed me how to hold it to my ear and listen for the sea’s roar. On clear days the heaps of conches with their pink and orange spirals shimmered. I watched children holding them to their ears, recognized the smiles coming to their faces while their parents waited silently, delighting in passing on an old secret.

  My own parents had given that secret to me. What else had I been taught? Don’t take candy from strangers, don’t get into cars with strangers, don’t be afraid of policemen— So many don’ts. So many instructions, all of them parts of an old set of cautions handed down every generation the same way Mother Goose rhymes were repeated and the gift of the sea sounding conch was given.

  Mother taught me the nursery rhymes, gave me a A Child’s Garden of Verses, read the Greek myths to me as well as the fairy tales; she’d shown me how to tie Kenyon’s shoes and zip up his jacket, how to make a bed and set a table. She’d shown me how to ride a bicycle too since my father was in the army by the time I got one. What about all the things I couldn’t remember being taught like how to hold a knife and fork or to dress myself? So much forgotten.…

  Kenyon had just as many lessons too. What was keeping him so unhappy for so long? Was it my father’s disciplined rule, his demand for obedience and grades, not even good grades anymore just passing grades, that drove Kenyon to sullen withdrawal and near failure? How odd that my father could accommodate any amount of eccentricity in his friends but couldn’t allow the least deviation in his son. Yet he spent time with him, taught Kenyon to hunt, took him on fishing trips to the mountains, found him summer jobs, worried about him all the time.

  Kenyon was smart enough
and strangely patient with animals. He’d found a crow with a lame leg, bound it up, trained it to light on his arm, but once it was well, he wouldn’t return the bird to the cage he’d built. The raccoon he wanted to tame used the toilet bowls to wash his paws in. Mother couldn’t stand that. He taught our father’s bird-dog how to shake hands and to fetch the evening newspaper. The bird flew off, the raccoon went back to the river bank, the bird-dog, chasing the paper which landed in the street, was run over. Kenyon joined the track team, the only team he was ever on. He was good at running. He’d outrun the cops who came after him for flinging horse apples from the roof at people leaving the football stadium in Leon.

  There was no knowing the sources of his wildness. Emmett could be just as wild … just as self-destructive, and in contrast to my father, Uncle Estes, like a lot of farmers and ranchers during the war, never left home. Boys would be boys, he must have said that or something like it as he rode off to check the cattle.

  Neither he nor my father could talk about their feelings. My father tended to anesthetize his with alcohol. Estes took the distant path. Amiable, detached, he was there, and he wasn’t there. In that family Earlene was the one with feelings on the surface. Among the Chandlers, women cried and carried on all they pleased. They sorrowed with you and for you, and they comforted. Aunt Bertha, I guessed, was waiting, knowing she’d be needed.

  Luis, except for his worry about his father, seemed more carefree. Certainly he was calmer than Emmett or my brother.

  When I told him so, he laughed.

  “No, I’ve just got a different set of problems.”

  I’d begun to sense he was right, but—other than his father’s prolonged mourning—I couldn’t understand what they were, nor could I ask outright. It was too bold a question, too prying. I dawdled along the beach holding my sandals in my hand sighing over things that couldn’t be said. There were mysteries everyone carried with them, and whatever Luis’s were, they remained his.