“Don’t mess with your eye,” I say. He reaches down and touches his penis.
We turn off the light and stay quiet. Trying to get comfortable in my mother’s house, my body jumps twice on the edge of sleep.
Sometime during the night, we both wake. The old moon has moved while we were sleeping and now at the window it looks like a white hole for escape. Julien makes a noise in the dark, secretly fooling with his eye, and I think I see a shadow slip out of his nose.
On the table nearest me are the flowers from my mother’s garden. The flowers have opened wider. They are bigger—black, huge, primeval blooms.
“Maybe flowers do belong outside,” I say.
Julien sits up in bed.
“What’s the matter, love?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I can’t stay asleep.”
I prop myself up, pillow raised against the headboard, my silky pajamas so close my breasts feel heavy, dream-filled.
“Is it your stomach?” I ask.
“I feel so different from the way I feel at home,” he says. “The noise and light is different.” He comes to me, bringing his own sheet. “At home we have all our stuff, all our friends. I feel so empty. I think my soul upsets my stomach.” He is rubbing his chest.
“That’s not your stomach. That’s where your heart is,” I say.
He rolls on top of me and I think that it is his weight that keeps me pinned to life. Without him, I would be right back where I came from, back home, not safe.
So many emotions, loose as live breath in the room, thrust, push, vibrations of feeling and thought. Our wedding floats through my head, sticks and stays. The reception. The raindrops, huge, pendulant, falling slowly through the trees into the groom’s yard. The strong rain. Stop, start. Afterward we are all barefoot in fancy dress. Everyone on the thick, matted wet yard. Too excited. The grass felt like cold glass. And the dog barking, too excited. And the groom’s father went over and hurt the dog to stop it.
One young man, younger than we, playing the sounds of ten instruments by pulling stops from an electronic keyboard. The music was vibrating, and sweet, and scary because the electronic system had gotten wet and dangerous to play.
Breathing in Julien’s breath like it’s his emotions, I almost hold my nose. During the thrusts from him and me, by mistake I call my mother’s name. I scream it. It had rolled around in my head; he made it roll out of my mouth. I screamed for my mother who could make things happen, make this prickly adulthood disappear. Sex; what I wanted when I got it became something that terrified me, as it did her. In wanting to be so unlike, I proved to myself that I was like. My mother was powerful; she could make me like her. My mother could work magic. After all, she had made my father disappear.
Julien chased me along in sex play, I ran ahead, and he finished last. He came with his lip up and squinting like he’d gotten the seat in the sun.
I felt as if I were the winner, but was losing blood. Actually it was just transparent juice. But Julien beat me to the bathroom.
My mother has the clear voice of morning. She calls, “The sun’s coming up. If you two want to see anything today, you’d better get out of that room.”
My mother is looking at day coming from the other side of the island. She is in her flowered robe and the light has struck the top of her head.
I ease in, barefoot down the hall carpet. I walk in dew left from my dog’s paws.
“Your dog stayed with me last night,” she tells me, as if to prove what I love is easy for her to win over. “She’s out now. In and out.”
Over at the one windowpane in the kitchen, I look for my dog. But I can see only down the cliff, the window glass seems to be holding back the ocean. I shift to opening some cabinet doors, looking for a cup. On plates in the cabinets, fruit and tomatoes ripen. Mother always puts them away for the night—ripening fruit. She is afraid of night—and mice. I once saw a small jumping mouse, sitting, licking something on its feet, nesting in a broken conch shell on the stairs. I never told on it. I remember my mother saying she was afraid of my father only at night. It was then that he was the strongest. It seemed the dark made his nose look longer and his hairline recede, and it scared her.
“You’d better eat if you’re coming with me.”
My dog comes in from the yard. She is covered with pollen and doesn’t want to be petted.
I decide to have a banana and a cup of coffee.
Julien calls from the hall and I go to get him. “Why didn’t you wait for me?” he asks. “I’ve been sick this morning. I threw up a little piece of your mother’s cake.”
“I ate the cake. You didn’t have any.”
My mother has fixed Julien a huge breakfast, without asking. Julien is trying hard to be pleased. He has eaten too much on his washy stomach and is embarrassed. My dog lets out wind, and no one mentions it. I close my eyes and try not to laugh, my head aswim with glee.
Julien and I shower and talk through the warm steam and dress in our bright vacation clothes.
In the car, carrying a thermos of water for the dog, I ask, “What are we off to see?”
My mother says, “Your father.”
Julien wants to go back and take another look in the mirror; we won’t let him. “I never saw you so worried about your appearance,” I tell him. A Polaroid camera stretches his pocket.
We sit in the back; my mother drives with the dog up front. “See how your dog takes to me when I don’t even like dogs?”
We come around the elbow of land from the ocean to the mild river side. Julien practices his smile on me, and against the glass of a restaurant window we pass walking now. I haven’t seen my father in so long that I’m scared.
We find him in the boathouse. He seems to be blushing, but I know it is his circulation. My mother believes that he can shut down his valves and go unconscious as you talk to him.
“Well, how-de-do,” he says. He is not a conversationalist. He looks like a worn-out, hurt man who tells funny stories on himself.
My mother introduces Julien and then she asks Avery questions and he tries to guess the right answers. The water rocks in the slow slap of the tide leaving. My mother is not interested in the answers. She needs only to keep asking questions to feel in control.
Avery takes it all under the hood of a joke, but it does take its toll on him. He snaps his head around directly to me, for the first time. “How about you—are you still shaking your hands?”
“Oh,” I say, extending my right hand to him to shake before I realize the intent is to hurt.
“I’m wrong,” he says. “The word wasn’t shake. It was sling your hands. We’d say, ‘Where’s she gone, off to sling her hands?’” He has caught my mother’s attention and he and she are enjoying the joke.
I say to Julien, “I used to play pretend. I used to sling my hands in the walled-in patio in a little rhythm to talk to myself by. I used to play pretend till I was exhausted. Like I can dance now till I’m anemic.” Now Julien laughs with me, not knowing but not wanting me to be alone.
My father makes a small face at Julien. Julien must have taken it to be friendly because he makes a small, friendly face back.
Above our heads, light reflected from the water spins and revolves on the steep arch of wood, a cradle upside down over us. My parents’ voices carry up and away. The terrible smell of sea broth is running like thick rich cloth through my nostrils.
Avery leads us outside to the restaurant, politely nudging us ahead of him. “Do you still have my dog?” he asks me.
“No,” I say. “I have my dog now. Our dog died. Remember?” But he has lied so much about everything, trying to guess the right answers to the right questions, that he has ruined his memory. He couldn’t remember his dog was dead. I, who wanted to stop the conversation, continued it. “You remember, Daddy, you used to shout commands right after our dog did anything. If he rolled over, you’d yell, ‘Roll over,’ quickly. Same thing if he barked or ran. It made everyone laugh, the trick dog who
did everything before he was told. That dog died years ago. You told me you took him on the front seat of the car with you to the vet’s. He was so weak and cold and sick. You said, ‘The vet gave him a shot, but the shot didn’t make him get better.’ The shot was to kill him, Daddy. You knew that.” My pulse beat in my throat.
“Please, just stop your carrying on, now.”
My truth made him slip farther from me.
Then he and Julien discussed all the things Julien didn’t know about—boats, fish, cars, tools. Julien was a professional.
In the restaurant, at the round white table, everyone had the same Sea Platter except Avery, who had an egg-salad sandwich, though he was anxious about the mayonnaise because it goes bad so easily. My father took the rings of crust from his egg-salad sandwich; he saved the crusts.
“You still have your small appetite, Avery,” said my mother. “One of the things I continue to admire about you.” I felt that my vacation was going faster. My mother reminisced. I held my saliva. My father remembered what he did like; she remembered what she didn’t like. He stayed safely a few sentences behind her.
My mother says, “You used to be attracted to businesses that had shut down. One night you left the car with me in it and went across the parking lot of a closed drive-in and reached for a broken metal sign and it fell on you. I was trying to protect you and as it hit you I screamed, ‘Goddamn you.’ And you pretended the sign hadn’t hurt.”
“What an odd thing for a woman to scream who is trying to protect him,” I say.
“He always liked to read what was written on signs that had fallen over,” says my mother.
“Why don’t we get together more often?” I ask my father.
“I never think I feel good enough to see you,” my father says.
“He hides,” says my mother. “He doesn’t want Eulene to see him lying down. He thinks he’s sick when he’s only drunk. He drinks as seriously as if he were taking medicine.”
Julien works at a mayonnaise spot on his shirt with his napkin and drinking water.
“Physically, things are looking up,” my father says. “I have a heck of a lot of possibilities.” His sea-colored eyes rise to meet mine. He is ready to leave.
Outside, he stops a minute under the running clouds. “You were always pretty,” he says to me. “But too picky. There were too many things you wouldn’t try or do. You couldn’t sing. You never learned to swim. You liked to be alone.”
“That’s not true,” I say. “I was alone. I loved things. I loved candy. I loved you best, Daddy.”
“That’s not nice,” he says. “I think you should love your mother best.”
He detours to one of the open boat slips where huge gulls are riding the water. He scatters his crusts and says the big gray gulls are so beautiful. Then he throws the last of the crusts and hits a gull on the head.
“Why did you do that?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I was just trying to figure the gulls out.” He draws his shoulders together, chilly. “It’s so hard for me to pee anymore,” he says. “If I don’t pee today, I think I’ll kill myself. I wake up in the night listening for noises that would make me want to pee and trying to remember when I pee-peed last.”
Julien is now taking a Polaroid shot. My mother stays at the edge of the picture. She and Avery hang around each other for a minute. Avery sucks in his cheeks and says, “Two people married and in love, but we never believed in each other.”
My mother says, “You don’t fool me. You’re so lonely that you’d say anything—even ‘I still love you.’”
Julien covers the mayonnaise spot with his left hand and gives my father his right for shaking good-bye. The Polaroid sways on a strap from his neck.
My father squints at me, I can’t see in his eyes, and says, “I think you’re the only one who’s never hurt me. But you live in such inaccessible places.”
“I live in the city. They have maps, Daddy.” I feel I should have taken the luncheon napkin with me and wiped my heart.
Julien stands at my shoulder. “Come see her dog in the car,” he says quietly.
“Don’t want to,” my father says. “My dog is dead.”
Inside the car, the dog’s head is hidden under the seat where it is cool. I think I hear Avery call back. I turn. He is far away. I see him bend and look intently at the ground. It is my mother’s voice that says, “I hope he hasn’t found anything. He keeps finding things and sending them to me in a box by mail. It’s embarrassing to open the box. Sometimes it’s an old watch. Sometimes a barrette. Once a broken chain.”
We get in the car and the dog gets on the seat. The air is sticky. The clouds in the sky are made of wet, gray clay. My mother gives the dog water in the cap of the thermos.
Disappointment is around Julien’s mouth. He shows the Polaroid. “His hair is still dark but his face has turned gray,” he says as we ride away.
Then my mother is crying, her tongue clicking.
Julien sits forward, fascinated by my mother’s crying. His hand is open, but there is no way to help her.
“Why would he eat mayonnaise?” says my mother, rounding a curb tear-blind, skinning the tires against concrete. “He eats mayonnaise when it could kill him. He picks up things off the ground. He never gets over a dead dog.” Her throat and nose roar with tears.
“Why are you angry about that now?” I ask. “I thought you hated Daddy.”
“Because,” she says, “I used to care.”
By the time she gets us back to the cottage she’s stone-calm and talking about swimming when the weather lifts.
In the kitchen, the dog drinks from its pan. While Julien blows up a rubber float for my mother, I put beach trousers on over my bathing suit. When the float is taut, we carry it down to the water.
The approach to the beach is abrupt. We walk down ribs of sand left by wind and erosion. Now we are on planks that shift and make a kind of stairs that I had been down last night. At the bottom, I think I see my own footprints coming to meet me.
The beach is full of stones. I bend in my trousers and pick up smooth pebbles, eggs, nut-shapes, sharp tips, swirls, and curdles—shapes water has ridden into rock.
They call me, impatiently. I stand straight too fast, eyes closed against them. Light flickers red through my eyelids.
“The ocean looks dirty,” my mother says. She is gazing around slit-eyed in the glare. A few kids, looking very little because they are far away, are running in circles.
“Dirty. Because of the kids,” I say. “When I was little I couldn’t control it either.” Thinking I could have helped my chilly father. A simple little cure. It’s the sudden feel of lukewarm ocean water he needs. “Feeling all that water in my bathing suit, I always peed.”
“Who cares about kids?” my mother says. “I mean fish, crabs, clams, turtles—they all do their stuff in the water.”
Julien must have tried to swallow a laugh. I think I see spray fly out of his mouth when my mother winks at him. Julien is getting too juicy with my mother’s good nature. Mother’s awakening to like Julien now simply ruins him for me.
I walk sideways to the humped water. I don’t want to be with them, but I’m afraid I would get lost without them.
“Where are you going?” asks my mother.
“To look for shells.”
“They’re all broken.”
There is little walking space between the step-off of the ocean shelf and the slipping cliffs of hot sand. I glance at the few people at the beach. Everyone seems to be at the water’s edge waiting to go in.
The full trousers I wear pop with the wind. My hair rises with sea wind and makes me a sun umbrella. I find a stone with a deep crease in it. It feels so good in my hand. I keep it and will hide how much I care for it. Incoming ocean is choking the narrow beach. I walk back with one foot in the water, a sloppy, slurping sound. I am laughing until I see Julien and my mother laughing at me.
“I knew you wouldn’t find any good shells,”
Julien says.
“I collected a stone,” I say.
“You don’t have to worry about finding shells. I know that you brought a seashell from the city back to the beach with you in your case. You can take it out. You don’t have to hide it. You hide such simple things, Eulene, that it turns them into the grotesque.”
“I remember,” says my mother, “Eulene as a child trying to learn to hide emotions and endure hurts. Well, you got poison ivy and hid it. You let poison ivy go and it got all the way up into your boopsey.”
“I did not,” I say. “I wouldn’t do it. Oh, all right, I did.”
We are all smiling and laughing with each other. I give the stone in my hand a squeeze.
“You just hide things and lie to try to keep your privacy,” says Julien, understanding me.
“We haven’t been in the water yet,” I say. “Such a large body of water.”
He has our book out, using his finger for a page marker. He peeks back into it and says, “I’m at a good part,” and sets it on the float. He takes my hand and a small nerve in my body runs loose.
Julien leans against me and we watch my mother slit the slick top of the water and plunge in. “I wouldn’t dare get in with her,” he says. She splashes so much a cluster of wet bubbles grows around her. Then she’s caught the bottom with her feet and is walking back up the underwater shelf. In and out, quick as a drowning. Back on the beach, the sun turns liquid on her. Her hair looks glass.
I wait at the wet hem of the ocean.
When Julien is in the water, I shed my cotton trousers without looking down and hurry into the water. My mother calls, “Eulene? What have you done to your legs? They’re worse than mine.”
Salt water fills my bathing suit. The underwater rocks are so slick I almost fall. I have to swim. I sink to my neck, up to my mouth. My hair spreads out, floats around me. I look for the line of sky to hang onto. “There’s no horizon,” I try to say. I spit out sea water. The ocean moves in and out in respiration. I relax and float, tethered onto the very edge of relaxation.
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