by Thea Lim
She slid to the end of the sofa to see the record spines. Norberto talked about how he’d lay out the store. It was important that the cash register be near the front door. He visited a Kmart once that had a cash register near the back, and the flow of the place was all wrong.
“Where will you live when you have your store? Will you still live out here?”
“Heck no. I’ll live above the store. I’m gonna have running water, and a duvet.”
The records were in alphabetical order, even to the second letter: Joni Mitchell before the Monkees. One album had its spine to the wall.
“This is the wrong way.” She tried to figure how to flip it without disturbing the plastic.
“Marta’s favorite band. Toto. Don’t like seeing it.” He sighed. “You know what I like thinking about? All the songs that didn’t get written. Or the movies. Everything that was planned for production, then—whoosh—never happened. Musicians on the verge of making the song of a generation, who never got to. Boz Scaggs. Marvin Gaye. Could he have made a comeback?”
“You like thinking about that?”
“Not ‘like.’ But I like having the records. I like imagining all those follow-ups are still coming. It’s still 1980. There’s still time.”
She remembered how excited he’d been for the Mel Gibson movie, how he had tried to talk to her about it.
“Maybe there is,” she said. “It’s not over yet.”
The woodstove pinged as the fire died inside. She rubbed the permanent cuts on her fingertips, where splinters of plate and glass had slipped under the skin.
“Let’s go for a walk on the beach,” he said. “It’s what lovebirds like us do. Am I right?”
“Ha! Ha!” Polly said.
He took her hand to help her cross the boot-sucking mud between the house and the shed. He discussed how he’d prolonged the life of their galoshes by rubbing them with animal fat.
On dry land, she took back her hand. But he said, “D’you think we should try to get physically comfortable with each other?” He reached for her hand again.
They passed the leavings of a chicken-wire fence, long downed by the wind. He talked about its removal: it would be an undertaking; it ran all the way to Crystal Beach Road. Polly tried to imagine he was someone or something else, that his hand was an empty glove or a magazine. She imagined her hand was not part of her body. There was a smarting in her chest, like when you try to stop coughing, and instead you choke.
“Okay,” he said. “I counted to 120. That’s probably enough.” He took his hand back.
They scattered, yards apart, the only two people on miles of beach. The sea smell could be unbearable: salt choked, fish flesh. But tonight smelled like the inside of a shell. The moves of the tide hypnotized. She was startled to find Norberto beside her.
“Marta and me always meant to get up and watch the sunrise. But there was always something else to do. And the sunrise is right here, you think. There’ll always be another one.”
“If I get another day off, we could watch the sunrise, if you like.”
“Tomorrow you and me will go to me and Marta’s favorite place. Re-create a moment. Then Monday we’ll sign the marriage papers. You booked the afternoon off, right?”
“Yes. The foreman will let me do one extra hour every day after, until I make it up.”
There was nothing on the horizon. Only the flat line of forever. There should be birds.
“After the signing, we wait six weeks, then we file an application for family support.”
“But how will you prove there’s a baby when there’s no baby?”
He paused awhile.
“There are people you can hire to help with the whole process. Like a fixer. They tell you how long to wait, they help you with the papers, they supply you with what you need.”
“How did you find this fixer?”
“He found me. Friend of a friend. He figured me a perfect candidate for this scheme.”
She wished she hadn’t asked. She should’ve known he hadn’t cooked this up himself.
“But it’s a good deal. Most fixers take a percentage. He takes a lump sum.”
“How do you know most fixers take a percentage?”
“Because he told me.” He turned stormy the instant the words came out and he heard how naive he sounded.
Polly said nothing. If they stopped talking now, they could forget this conversation, and things could still turn out all right.
“Try this,” he said. He put his hands on her shoulders. She tried not to cringe.
“Step forward. Stop.” The tide pooled around her boots. She moved out of its march.
“No. Don’t move.” He stepped away sideways, right leg behind left leg, like a dance.
“What are you doing?” she called.
“Don’t look at me. Look forward. What do you see?”
She wanted to go inside and pretend to sleep, so she could be alone.
“What are you talking about?”
“What do you see in your peripheral? No, don’t move your head. Just look forward.”
“I don’t see anything. Only water.” They had to shout over the noise of the surf.
“Exactly. If you get close enough to the water, you can’t see behind you. You can pretend you’re on a beach, anywhere. Somewhere else.”
The sky had gone dull. Polly let her eyes blur sky and water and ground. She could feel Norberto’s beady gaze on her, so she held her eyes to the horizon to satisfy him.
But he was right. She could have been anywhere.
There was a time when Polly and her mother went to Canada every summer, to a cottage on the lake. Her mother would sit on the deck with her friend while Polly played in the water with the other kids, but they were rowdy and someone would always get kicked in the face. So Polly would swim alone to where the buoys marked the point of Go No Further, nothing there except the sun bejeweling the waves. But the best was when her mother would swim out to her with a black rubber tube. “Get on,” she would say. “I’m a taxicab: Where do you want to go?”
Polly let the world behind fade. She let an image form slowly, working from background to foreground. She replaced Norberto’s house and its spindly stilts with sunshine, then jagged woods, then the green-glass cabin, then the stripy deckchairs. Only then did she imagine her mother in a polka-dot swimsuit, holding the tube overhead, tiptoeing across the pebbled bank, coming to get her. Her mother’s skin and her mother’s voice, and the rocking of the lake.
But Polly couldn’t keep the pieces together. If she got the body right, the muscles and the freckles on her legs, she couldn’t see her face. If she held on to the face, the body disappeared.
She whirled around. There, still, was the house on stilts. There, still, was Norberto, timidly off to the side.
“What happened?” he said.
“It didn’t really work,” she said thickly.
He squeezed her shoulder. That was the moment when she stopped, once and for all, being afraid of him.
She asked him what he had imagined.
“The same place. But a different time,” he said. “I guess that makes it a different place.”
* * *
The next evening, after work, they met on the Galveston side of the Bolivar Roads, to catch the motorboat back together. On hot days the sky pressed down like a chloroformed cloth, but today it was high and clear, its colors crisped by the breeze.
Norberto led Polly down a dirt path cut between the towering fields, following the shoreline. A hill appeared, a curious-looking thing. The ground didn’t slope up to make a base; it looked airlifted from elsewhere. It was not a hill at all. It was a broad two-story building, with overgrown shrubs and ivies and grasses growing like ankle-length hair.
“Battery Kimble,” Norberto said. “World War One gun fort. Covered with dirt, for camouflage.”
Forgotten by the forces that had put it there, the fort was enjoying a second life as a garden. Beyond, the sea began withou
t warning. The earth was a fishbowl filled with dirty water. When Norberto reached where the sea began, he stepped right off the edge, jumping down to an algae-slick platform, then stepping from it to a rowboat.
“Come on,” he said. “Before we lose the light.”
She got into the boat and it wobbled and tipped, but she managed to sit. All the twigs in the sea had gathered here. Norberto dragged the oars through the thick stew and the boat set off, the two of them face-to-face, cutting east, parallel to the coast.
“You can’t go south,” he said. “That would fling us into the sea.”
The world spread out to her left and the water spread out to her right.
“Thar she blows,” Norberto said, pointing behind. “The pearl of the South.”
She twisted around and gazed back at Galveston, at the eastern end, where the land doubled back in a blunt edge to meet the northern coast. The tip was dotted with palm-leaf roofs and white sand, trucked in from who-knew-where. Through the sea haze, it was a rotten brown.
“Under normal conditions, it would take decades to build up an island this much. But we got it done at cut rate, in four years, thanks to the Journeymen.”
Polly thought of the people on the buses and the split-open skin of their hands, and Cookie looking for her son. Frank had never portered parts, or climbed a truck to secure a bundle of rebar the length of a man, under the beat of the sun. He was in Buffalo by 1993, filing a search for her. But what could’ve taken you away?
“We can stop here.” Norberto threw a line that arced perfectly through the air and hooked itself onto a crooked post, one that appeared to have no purpose until he tossed the rope.
“This is Marta’s place?” They bobbed along at the end of the rope.
“Yup.”
The sun was slipping and the sky was every kind of blue, the water eerily calm for a sea.
“If I’d asked her to marry me, I would have done it here. She used to say, ‘This is the end of America.’ Even though Galveston is right there.”
“You weren’t married?”
“No.” He swallowed. “There was no one to marry us. I wish we were married. She might not have left. The paperwork might have slowed her down.”
“Were you going to have a baby?”
“I really thought so. I thought he would be big by now—1999.”
She could almost feel the quickening of tears in his chest. She asked another question to help him quell it.
“So, what’s our story? How did we meet?”
“How do you want us to have met?”
“On the buses?”
“No, I didn’t start work there until ’87. Before ’81, I was in Socorro.”
“Socorro? Is that in New Mexico? Okay. We were high school sweethearts.”
“But you were in Buffalo.”
“But they don’t know that.”
“Don’t they?”
“They never asked. Family history, mental health, vaccines, but not where I was from. They don’t care about that.”
“Huh. Okay, we were next-door neighbors. We grew up together.”
“We used to talk over the fence.”
“Yeah. Over my little brothers’ bunny hutch.”
“We got separated. You went to the corps. I decided to time travel.”
“When I picked you up from Houston, I couldn’t believe it was you.”
“What was I wearing the first time you saw me?”
“I saw your reflection in the bus window first. Little face. Your old green coat.”
“What did I wear on our first date?”
“Wrangler jeans, with a crease. I wanted to know how you got that crease in.”
“Where did we meet up?”
“At the stump, next to the old water tower. What was I wearing?”
“Navy jacket. Curly hair.”
“What did we do?”
“We went to the park. You brought beer in a plastic bag, and when you hugged me, you almost clocked me in the head.”
Norberto laughed. “That sounds like a bad first date.”
“No. It was nice.”
“No beer. I woulda been too young.”
Every now and then, the current would tug the boat and the rope would tauten and sing.
“I got you something,” he said.
“What’s that?”
He took something, a box, out of his pocket. “Catch?”
She envisioned it sailing into the Gulf. “Hand it over.”
They leaned in gingerly. He dropped the ring box in her hand. It held a band of gold.
“I found it in Marta’s suitcase. I think it was her mother’s. Didn’t know she had anything worth money in there. Anyways, I thought you should wear it. You know, so it looks legitimate.”
She didn’t know what to say. She put it on. She had to work it over her knuckle.
“My mom told me once that all the gold in jewelry is recycled,” Norberto said.
“Meaning?”
“Jewelers get gold in sheets, and they hammer them into rings. But, to make the sheets, a supplier melts down old jewelry. So all the gold in the world is just circulating, going from one person to another. The first person to wear that gold in your ring died a thousand years ago.”
“Creepy.”
“But then nobody really owns the gold, right? It belongs to the universe. Makes me feel better about being broke.”
“You could say that about water too.”
“Obviously water belongs to the universe.”
“No, all the water in the world is just circulating. Maybe you’ve met this water before.”
“I see. Like that water, there. Maybe I drank that when I was five.”
“Or this water.” Polly cupped some in her hand. “Maybe Marta used it to wash her hair.” Had she crossed a line? But Norberto simply leaned over and took some water in his own hand. He examined the shimmer closely.
“Maybe Frank Marino peed this,” he said.
“Gross.” She dumped her water. “Now it’s gone. Can’t even mark the spot where it fell.”
She had done this before. As she was forming the last words of her sentence, she realized she had done this specific thing already, spoken of the unmarkability of water—but with Frank. Now she was doing it with someone else.
She was stricken. She had betrayed Frank and she didn’t even know, until it was done. She stared at the hull of the boat, the fiberglass formed in a pattern like ice makes on glass.
But what could she do? She looked up. She kept laughing in the evening light, which is what people do when monstrous epiphanies surface in their minds. You cannot put life on hold to have a moment of grief, so every second, half the people in the world are split in two. This is what they mean by life goes on, and the worst is that you go on along with it too.
* * *
Polly put on the ugly dress with purple flowers. Norberto dressed up too, in a white short-sleeved shirt just long enough to tuck into his cargo pants. “Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t find one with long sleeves, I can’t get to the trunk on the bottom.” She could see his puny nipples through the fabric, and she felt such a dreadful tenderness for him that she thought she might be sick.
The signing office turned out to be in the building that was shaped like a ship, at the end of the Strand. They followed the signs until they were in a tight corridor, only two bodies wide, with brown walls and brown carpet. All of the doors had the TimeRaiser logo on them. “TimeRaiser does the contracts for government services,” Norberto explained.
The agent said, “If it’s only the two of you, we can do it right here. If you have guests, then we’ll go to the boardroom.” They were in a windowless office only big enough for a desk and two chairs. She wondered if they should have brought guests, to make it look more real.
“No,” Norberto said. “This will be fine.”
And Polly realized they were really going to marry each other. She dug her nails into the bouquet they’d picked as they
waited for the motorboat, until green blood showed on the stems.
“I don’t have the right forms. I’ll be back.” The agent had to squeeze to get out the door.
Norberto turned and looked at her like he was readying to give a pep talk, but she said, “I’m fine.” She patted his hand. “Neither of us thought getting married would be like this.”
She meant for him to laugh, but he only said, low and very serious, “It means nothing, it’s not for real,” as if she might be thinking otherwise.
She nodded and then disappointment for the way her wedding day turned out came over her like a spasm of pain, and she squeezed her eyes shut.
Yesterday as they floated in the Gulf, she had asked him what memory he wanted to re-create. Marta used to sing to him—“Georgy Porgy” by Toto—but the only words he could remember went, “I’m not the only one that holds you, I never ever should have told you / You’re my only world.” He stopped speaking. He pulled the oars into the boat and pressed his knees together and balled his hands in his lap and knit his shoulders. Every muscle a blockade against the sadness and the tears. She had tried to comfort him as best she could, telling him that, the next day, he could pretend he was marrying Marta, he could even call her Marta, they would say it was a pet name. It would be almost, just like, marrying Marta. The sun was in Polly’s eyes, and then he was weeping so violently that the boat shuddered, and she was afraid that if she stood up to put an arm around him, they would flip. He could only say, “In my mind, I am always in this boat with her. Time ended here and everything that’s happened since, I can’t believe it’s real.”
The agent banged the door open against their chairs and they jumped and they clutched each other’s hands like schoolchildren. They agreed to the terms and signed the paper. The agent said, “Do you want to kiss each other?”
He watched them put their lips together, very carefully.
“Best of luck,” he said to them, shaking their hands with both of his own. “Really.”
On the motorboat home, Norberto planted himself starboard and leaned out as far as he could without riling the boatman.
“When you were in the rowboat, what could you see? Tell me when we reach the place where what we see is exactly what you saw from the rowboat.”