Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  My mother had raised me to have a good deal of reverence for my father, but Lidia had no such upbringing. She elbowed me and whispered, “Mercy!”

  My father gave her a hard look. Graham finished the first letter and moved on to the second: U.

  “For thousands of years,” my father boomed, “we have gone to sea. We have crafted vessels to usher us and we have called them by name. Our ships nurture and guide us through rough waters and stormy weather, through all peril, and so we refer to them, with great affection, as she.”

  It was hot. My father’s thick neck glistened, Frankie’s dark hair stuck to his temples, and sweat trickled between my breasts. I looked to the canal, hoping for a breeze from the bay. Directly across was a stucco manse that spanned a lot twice the size of Lidia’s. Its layers of balustrade-lined balconies and exterior staircases confused the question of its height—was it two stories, or three?

  My father caught my eye. “Do we wish to tempt the gods, Georgia?”

  “We do not,” I said.

  He went on to tell a story about a man down in Islamorada who’d believed he’d purged every mention of his boat’s old name, then found a key chain with the old name on it, and decided to chuck the key chain instead of starting over with a new christening. That year, his boat was hit by lightning, and sank. “The gods had their revenge,” my father said.

  Of all of us, only Lidia was a believer—a Catholic, to boot. My mother had been a member of the First Unitarian Church, though my father had refused to go. So she and I had gone together, and after each service—comprised, more or less, of lessons we already knew—we joined the congregation for coffee from silver urns and cookies on doilies, and I sat in the corner and watched the boys. My mother hadn’t liked to drive, so she’d taught me early, and even before I had my license would nudge me toward the driver’s side. After services, which seemed to wear her out, she would settle into the passenger seat of the hot car, roll down the window, pull her straight hair from her face, and say something like, “Another week behind us, just like that.” She’d given the impression, from time to time, of surviving her own life.

  There was a glint in my father’s eyes. He savored having an audience when he wanted one, and the invented ceremony and shadowy superstition held a certain appeal. He reached into a bag and pulled out a stack of papers. “The boat’s captain has assembled all items bearing the boat’s former name,” he said. “You’ll notice that each instance of the former name has been expunged.”

  He passed the papers to Lidia, who passed them to me. This was the boat’s title and registration, and in each square where the boat’s name had once appeared—it wasn’t painted on the boat itself—there was a smear of white liquid eraser. I passed the papers back to my father, who said, “No mention of the boat’s name remains aboard. Is that right, Captain?”

  “Not a one,” said Graham over his shoulder. He had moved on to the fourth letter: another L, the third so far. He’d selected a romantic, lilting script—not what I would have chosen, but it was coming along nicely. He had a way with straight lines and spacing, which had come in handy when hanging shelves or framed pictures at the cottage. When I glanced at the letters, each gleaming wetly, I couldn’t help but take a guess. Graham was right. The name was perfect.

  My father saw me smiling. He raised his eyebrows. “The new name will not be spoken until this ceremony is complete. You hear me, Georgia?”

  I nodded.

  “Harvey,” said Lidia, “dinner is in the oven. You have ten minutes.”

  “You can’t rush the gods, darling,” he said, but he started speaking more quickly anyway. “Oh, mighty ruler of the seas, to whom all sailors pay homage, we implore you to expunge for all time the former name of this vessel from your watery kingdom.”

  He pulled a slip of paper from his pocket—this was the last written mention of the boat’s old name, Carpe Diem—and tossed it into the canal.

  “Litterbug,” said Lidia.

  He ignored her. “To convey our gratitude, we offer this drink with the hope that it will move you to do as we request.” He took a bottle of champagne, popped the cork, and poured half into the canal. He divvied the rest into two cups and handed one to me and one to Lidia. For Graham and himself, he poured water. “Oh, great ruler of the seas! To whom all sailors pay homage! We implore you to include in your records and memory this worthy vessel, from now and for all time to be known as”—here he paused, grinning widely—“the Lullaby!”

  “Hear, hear!” I said.

  “Amen,” said Lidia.

  My father’s voice softened. “Guard her, please, with your powerful arm and trident, and ensure her safe and rapid passage through all her journeys on your realm.”

  I drank. Frankie looked up at us, hoping whatever we’d been doing was over. Graham finished the last letter and came down from the boat to admire his work. This boat, our new home, was a relic from the days of pinkie rings and white patent leather shoes, and the gold paint he’d chosen, emblazoned across the green stripe, was if not tasteful then at least fitting.

  My father snapped his fingers to get Frankie’s attention. “Son,” he said, “what you’ve witnessed here today is very important. It means your home is safe now.”

  Frankie nodded, his dark eyes wide. Safe, he signed: arms crossed against the chest, then spread, hands in fists.

  “Time to dine,” said my father, heading toward the house. At the cracked limestone steps, he extended one meaty hand toward Frankie, and Frankie took it. The way they looked in that moment, holding hands up the steps, brought my mother achingly to mind, and I had to look away.

  Coppery sunlight sliced across the surface of the canal and played in the mangroves. At the pier across the water, a gleaming white yacht rested on bright, clean lines, its windshield black as ink. If there had been a photo of that segment of the canal, it would belong on the wall of a travel agency: Come to Coral Gables! But the air was thick with no-see-ums and humidity, which made it a little difficult to breathe.

  My father’s words to Frankie lingered. What if there was something to the purging and renaming, the appeasing of gods? What if I’d missed my chance to take it seriously, and had put all I had in the world—husband, son, squalid little home—in grave danger? A houseboat was a peculiar choice for any family, but particularly for us. When I’d mentioned this, Graham had brushed me off. “Traffic, heights, water,” he said. “There’s always something.” He had the cuff now, he added, and we could put alarms on the doors and windows, if it would make me feel better. Still, since we’d arrived in Miami, I’d had the woozy, uncertain, sea-legless feeling of time moving too rapidly, of not being able to catch up with the changes in our lives. I looked to my husband, who seemed never to doubt his own decisions once they were made. If he believed everything would be fine, I could almost believe it, myself.

  Graham saw my unease. He put his arm around me and gestured to the boat. “Onward,” he said.

  “Maybe here, we’ll sleep,” I said.

  “It’s a nice thought,” he said.

  2

  MY FATHER, HARVEY WALKER HYDE Quillian—I give his full name because that’s how he was billed in every performance of his career—played guitar, banjo, piano, ukulele, and a little flute, which he didn’t pick up until he was in his fifties. To this day, he is one of the only people I’ve ever known to make a life as a musician, and for the most part that life has been good to him. People tend to think that if you don’t make it big as an artist—musician, painter, writer, what have you—you’ve failed, though if you never make a ton of money as a lawyer or contractor or teacher, no one thinks the same thing. We never had surplus cash, but the bills were always paid and I never thought of myself as one of the poor kids, though certainly we were closer to poor than to rich.

  For most of my childhood, my father worked five or six nights a week, regular gigs, and traveled two or three times a year for a month at a time. My mother worked, too, as the office manager for a
tightly wound young pediatrician named Dr. Albee Fuller. We didn’t travel much as a family, but when my father was on the road, my mother was given to spreading her wings in questionable ways. At least once a year, for example, she picked me up from school with packed luggage, and we drove straight to Government Cut and boarded a cruise ship bound for the Bahamas. My mother loved cruises, which later I came to realize was uncharacteristic of her. Normally, she had low tolerance for tackiness and strangers. She’d been raised in a swampy, unripe Miami; her father had helped build Freedom Tower, the first building in the city’s skyline. She remembered Tequestas riding on horseback down Tamiami Trail, panthers chasing bicyclists along the waterfront. She spoke of her childhood in post-pioneer Florida with a heavy dose of nostalgia, but I think cruises were exempt from her sense of hometown ruin because they did what no one else could. They took care of all the details of daily life, from cooking and cleaning to entertaining her curious, energetic, and—I realize the burden of this now—highly attentive child. On a cruise, she encouraged me to wander for hours as long as I checked in. She didn’t drink regularly at home, but on a cruise she had champagne with breakfast and a margarita with lunch, and more often than not we went straight from dinner to bed, sunburned and sapped. My father never knew about our gallivanting until he’d returned home, and I understood even at a young age that this was a way for my mother to rebel against my father’s schedule and the tight limits of his ambitions, against their shared burdens and regrets. But she wasn’t angry on cruises: she was relaxed, even flirtatious. She made friends and played cards in the sea of loungers while I lazed in the pool and ordered ice cream sandwiches from the cabana boys. Cruises are not a particularly expensive way to travel, all told, and though I know my father did a lot of teeth-gritting when he got home, and usually my mother picked up more hours at the office, I think she could have done a lot worse. I don’t plan a vacation, still, without feeling a little rebellious myself.

  I was named for my mother, though she was known as Gigi her entire life, even as an adult. When I married Graham, I kept my own last name, mostly because I couldn’t imagine no longer sharing this one basic thing with her.

  The other thing she did when my father was on the road was host house parties that lasted two or three days, attended by close friends: two gay neighbors, Bernie and Tom; her childhood friend Vivian; and a few coworkers. Often, even Dr. Fuller stopped by, looking stern and tucking his chin to his chest as he handed over an expensive-looking bottle of wine. The parties started in our backyard after work on Fridays. My mother hauled out Hula-Hoops and mixed sloe gin fizzes by the pitcher. Someone always had a radio or guitar, and they all stayed outside until after midnight, snacking on fruit and playing parlor games. Bernie and Tom were older than my mother, and I knew—how I knew it, I’m not sure—that Tom (or was it Bernie?) had been sick with some sort of cancer, and now he used a cane and coughed a great deal, as if punctuating the ends of his sentences. Vivian had a husband who worked a lot—again I’m not sure how I knew this, except that my mother wasn’t the type to send me to my room or cup my ears with her palms—and when she came for the parties, she lied to her husband about where she was going. Dr. Fuller had a wife and young children. He sipped at his drink, kept his shirt tucked into his madras shorts, stared absently at my mother when she wasn’t watching, and frowned when she caught him. I understood at the time that the adults were all being dishonest to some degree, to their spouses and children and themselves. They drank Bloody Marys in the morning and in the afternoon they dozed in our living room, then someone lit a joint and it started up again. To this day, I think of those marathon parties whenever I hear the term second wind. My father knew about the parties, and they ranked lower in sin level than the cruises did, but he didn’t ask questions beyond the minimal: “Did you enjoy yourself while I was gone? Did you finish hemming my new pants? I’ll be home for dinner—make the bayou casserole?”

  By the time Graham and I moved to Miami, my mother had been dead five years, and my father had sold our small home in South Miami to a developer who razed it to build a Spanish-style duplex. My father had long since scaled back on the traveling—hardly ever, anymore—and worked only three standing weekly gigs: one at a bar downtown, one at a hotel on South Beach, and one at a piano bar in Coconut Grove. He’d developed a reputation as a good man at the back of the band, probably because he’d given up alcohol ages back and was always on time and had a working telephone. Whenever one gig disintegrated, another rose to fill the void.

  Graham enjoyed going out and my father always had somewhere to go. My father liked to unwind from his own gigs at later shows, which often led to jam sessions at another musician’s apartment. Neither man drank, so I didn’t worry if they came in past dawn, as they often did. Graham liked live music—he’d taught himself to play a little guitar—and because of his sleep disorder, bed held no appeal. This had been true since long before we met, so I didn’t take it personally. In fact, Graham’s sleep problems and my lesser ones had brought us together in the first place: we’d met on the first day of my brief stint at the Illinois Regional Center for the Study of Sleep, which we’d dubbed Detention. I was two years out of Northwestern at the time, living with a roommate and her cat in Bucktown, working on campus as an admissions officer. I’d become disillusioned with the opaque and arbitrary nature of the admissions process, and was considering starting a college counseling business of my own. My doctor had admitted me to Detention after weeks without more than three consecutive hours of sleep, and I was there just long enough to get a diagnosis—unexplained insomnia, what they called a brown-bag diagnosis—and a prescription for sleeping pills. I left with the understanding that without pharmaceutical assistance, I might never sleep well again. I was still young enough to feel a certain tragedy in this, a black mark on the unspooling story of my life.

  Graham had checked himself into Detention—his second time—after sleepwalking across Chicago’s Cortland Street drawbridge in the middle of the night. He’d caused a fender bender. A piece ran in the Tribune, along with a grainy photograph taken by a passerby. In the photo, Graham was midstride over the yellow line, eyes open but vacant, like Bigfoot marching through woods. To the best of his knowledge, he’d been on his way to the ice cream shop on Webster Avenue for a bowl of mint chocolate chip. The doctors had asked if this was the first time something like this had happened, and he told them it was the first time he’d made it so far from home: a quarter mile, give or take. Following pressure from the dean, he’d taken a leave of absence. It hadn’t yet dawned on him that his disorder might cost him anything as important as tenure.

  While I still felt no small amount of anxiety about sleep, Graham was terrified of it. Sleep was the yardstick by which all other fears were measured, and everything else dwarfed. It’s the stuff of horror films, sleep terror, but the sleep goblins of films are imaginary. Graham’s goblins were real, and all the more alarming for their unpredictability. A month or so after being photographed on the drawbridge, shortly after we met, he was evicted from his apartment. He’d been waking his neighbors in the night, playing guitar and shouting nonsense and stomping across the floor at all hours. They’d assumed he was horribly inconsiderate or mentally ill or on drugs, or some combination. When he explained his disorder, the building manager didn’t believe him. Graham put his things in storage and stayed with an old teammate from the two seasons he’d spent playing first base for the Evansville Triplets. The friend’s name was Jackson. A week into Graham’s stay, Jackson’s wife woke to find Graham standing naked on her side of the bed. She screamed. Graham woke and fell to the floor and seized for a full minute while Jackson and his wife scrambled to hold him down. Graham came out of it with a migraine that lasted forty-eight hours. The seizures had happened twice before, he admitted. His doctor increased his medication and added a muscle relaxant.

  The night terrors lessened, and it was around this point that he stopped trying to sleep most nights, which help
ed things as well. We moved in together, and he developed the habit parasomniacs—people with disorders like his—call nesting, where he napped outside of the bedroom, as if trying to trick himself into getting some sleep. He spent only the occasional night in bed with me. I knew some spouses of parasomniacs locked their bedroom doors at night, to thwart the occasional violent attack, which happened even with parasomniacs who were unfailingly gentle when awake. But Graham had never shown any violence toward me or anyone else, awake or asleep. After we moved from our apartment in Chicago to the cottage, he hung a hammock on the back porch and stowed a sleeping bag in the basement, and these were his nests, though he used them rarely. We installed a house alarm at my insistence, because of our proximity to the water, but he liked to go walking at night and kept forgetting the code, and eventually we let it lapse into disuse. Over the years, there was the occasional incident. There was the time he woke partially undressed on the dock, preparing to take a swim. And one morning I found an ashtray of still-burning cigarettes on the dining room table. Graham had no idea how they’d gotten there; he didn’t smoke. He slept less and less. As for me, I came to rely on my nightly pill not only to get much-needed sleep, but also to shut out the fear of what might happen to Graham in the dark hours. Otherwise, being the wife of a parasomniac could come to resemble a sleep disorder in itself.

  After a night out, my father came home to draw the blinds in his bedroom and sleep heavily until early afternoon. Graham came home to shower, dress, and get on with the day. Sleeplessness was a lifestyle for Graham, a handicap with which he coped rather well. He did not doze off in meetings, did not stumble or stutter or even seem particularly bleary, aside from the dampness in his large eyes. I think the most obvious physical manifestation of Graham’s long-term lack of sleep was probably his silvery white hair, though I can’t prove the two are related. He also had the rough, lined face of an older man and bluish bruises beneath his eyes. Then again, his mother had slighter versions of those bruises and no sleep problems at all.