Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  A WEEK AFTER WE ARRIVED, just after dawn, Graham took off for work on his bicycle, a band of reflective tape around one pant leg and panniers packed with a change of clothes. I got up to see him off, then through the little window in the houseboat’s galley watched Lidia’s twice-weekly prayer group assemble on the lawn. She brought out tea and muffins and they talked and held hands. Like Lidia, these women wore chunky gold jewelry and sheer scarves and brightly colored, draping blouses, wide-legged pants or layered skirts. They were the kind of women who looked like their lives, inner and outer, were composed in a way that mine had never been. As I stood barefoot on the galley’s patch of faded linoleum, wearing a tank top and Bermuda shorts, I both admired and resented them. I was a person who was usually able to ignore the inherent competition of life, the how-far-have-you-come and how-much-have-you-got. But I’d lost my business and my husband had lost his job, and I’d moved back to my hometown after almost two decades away, which has a way of bringing to bear the passage of time.

  The Rosenstiel job had rescued us. I don’t mean to be dramatic, but this is how it felt at the time. The position, or one like it, had been out there for years, a vague possibility brought up every so often by Graham’s old friend Larry Birnbaum, who was tenured at Rosenstiel. Not until Graham faced extinction at Northwestern and we’d been shunned in Round Lake had the idea grown legs. Graham had a Ph.D. from McGill in marine physics and a master’s degree in computer science, and it was because of the latter degree that he’d been rushed through Rosenstiel’s hiring process and dropped onto this team, which had lost a key member to Scripps in San Diego. I knew of Rosenstiel, though I’d never been enrolled at the University of Miami. In high school, I’d had a boyfriend who took classes there, and on Thursdays and Fridays, if you parked on the sandy street outside Rosenstiel and walked down a corridor lined with stuffed sharks baring their menacing teeth, you’d find yourself in a tiny bar that served beer on tap and had one of the best sunset views in South Florida.

  But the truth was—and we’d stopped acknowledging this after the decision was made—Graham had never much liked my hometown. This had wounded my pride at the start of our marriage, especially since I’d adopted his hometown—moreover, his entire region of the country—as my own. Miami was too hot, too crowded, too bicycle-unfriendly. There were no gentle green hills, no farmsteads, no midwesterners (there were tons of them up the coast, especially on the Gulf, but in Miami the midwesterner remained a breed apart). He felt like the city had a lot going on but nothing to do. During a visit, my father’s shows might be the only things to lure him out of the air-conditioning. He liked the idea of a multicultural city but was intimidated by the chore of learning a new language. On this point, he made a complete reversal the day after we arrived. He bought language tapes and started spending his night hours listening to them on bulbous headphones. He even subscribed—ambitious, I thought, but that was his way—to El Nuevo Herald, using Lidia’s address.

  I no longer had a job beyond taking care of Frankie, and I found that with Lidia around, this was less than all-consuming. It’s a testament to the pull of family that although we’d never before lived in the same city, Frankie treated Lidia and my father—we all called them Mimi and Papi—like he treated me and Graham, with no suspicion or shyness and with a powerful sense of entitlement to their adoration. He assumed that, inasmuch as he was a prince, they were among his minions.

  So I found myself partly absorbed by nesting—organizing, sprucing, and, frustratingly, getting rid of things we’d transported from Illinois but now had no room for—and partly adrift. My business had disintegrated a year earlier, but still I had the feeling during idle hours that I’d forgotten some vital phone call or meeting. I found myself spending a lot of time in Lidia’s backyard, setting up obstacle courses for Frankie with the sprinklers and the patio furniture, using a stopwatch to time him as he ran laps. Lidia’s next-door neighbor, Mr. Genovese, dotted his lawn with meticulously pruned fruit trees and topiary shrubs, each a different shape or animal—cylinder, rectangle, oval, rabbit, squirrel, manatee—and though I had little landscaping experience, this inspired me to do a little upkeep in Lidia’s overgrown bushes. I took to rooting through her unwieldy begonias and ferns with a pair of old clippers while my father and Frankie tossed a beach ball and paddled around on floats in the pool.

  It was after Lidia found me in her hedges the third time—I’d been overzealous, and things were looking bare and asymmetrical—that she mentioned her plan. “There’s a job for you, if you want it,” she said.

  I wiped my hands on my shorts. She stood between me and the sun, her rusted brown hair glowing a little around the edges, as if on fire. “What kind of job?”

  “You need something to do. Take Frankie along.”

  Lidia, who kept busy every moment, paying work or no, was retired after having been a flight attendant for Pan Am for twenty-five years and working at a bank for another fifteen.

  I vacillated. I could tell Lidia I could run my own life, thank you very much, or I could take the outstretched hand and whatever it offered. Lidia had never been anything but kind to me.

  “All right,” I said.

  “It’s maybe a little odd.”

  “Just tell me.”

  “It’s a personal assistant thing,” she said. “You have a problem carrying water?”

  “Whose personal assistant?”

  She pursed her lips. It seemed that she’d concocted a whole plan without any notion of how to convey it. “You’ll take my boat,” she said.

  “Your boat? Where am I going?” I said.

  “Stiltsville,” she said. Then my father called from the backyard, using the voice that meant he needed all of her attention immediately, and she backed away. Before she was out of sight, she said, “If you’re up for it, you can start Monday.”

  WINE LOOSENED LIDIA’S TONGUE. LATER that night, in the creaky chaise lounges we’d pulled from her garage onto the Lullaby’s roof deck, with Frankie asleep in his little bunk and Graham and my father out at a gig, she described the situation.

  “Errand girl?” I said, after she started to explain.

  “You’re too proud? At the most, it’s a few hours a day, three days a week.”

  What she told me was this: her old friend Vivian Hicks, who had Alzheimer’s and lived in a rest home in Kissimmee, had asked her during a lucid spell more than a year earlier to find someone reliable to take care of her husband. There was already a young man doing her husband’s shopping and running supplies out to the stilt house, but Vivian didn’t trust him.

  Vivian didn’t have lucid spells anymore. “She was always forgetting that he wasn’t her husband anymore, really,” said Lidia, waving a hand to acknowledge a longer story that she wasn’t going to tell. “She would think he was still living in their house, but he’s been at Stiltsville for—dios mio—ten years or so.”

  “The hermit,” I said. I thought of my mother’s second-wind parties all those years before, where Vivian had always shown up alone. Once, my mother had mentioned that Vivian’s husband had left her to live full-time at their stilt house. People, including my mother, started referring to him as the hermit. This was as much of the story as I recalled. “Vivian was a friend of my mother’s.”

  “Of course,” she said. “They all know each other.”

  I knew what she meant. There were circles of women in South Florida, and my mother, having grown up in the area herself, was at least distantly attached to several of these circles. If you didn’t know someone well, you at least knew her by name. My mother’s reputation in these circles was good—this was my understanding, formed over decades—but my father’s was considerably less so. There’s a segment of society that easily forgives a working mother her modest income—how much could my mother have made as the keeper of Dr. Fuller’s calendar and inventory?—but does not do the same for a working father. To many, my father, with his traveling and late-sleeping and unclassifiable income sources,
was a decidedly unenviable husband. I’m sure there were times, especially in the later years, when my mother agreed.

  “I did find someone right after she asked me to,” said Lidia. “The son of a friend of a friend. But he quit a few months ago.” I gave her a look, and she added, “Not for any awful reason, I promise.”

  Lidia’s blue eyes were a little glassy, her cheeks high in color. She was one of these women who had never had a manicure or needed one. Her nails were white-tipped and grew naturally in a squarish shape. Her thick dark hair winged out in a wide, feathery bob—a style, I gleaned from old photos, she’d been wearing for decades. She wore chunky cork platform sandals every day of the week, even with her swimsuit while lying beside her pool, a wide-brimmed hat over her hair and a muslin cloth over her legs. She was attractive, if slightly outmoded. More attractive than my mother in some ways, less so in others. Where my mother had been slim-shouldered and large-breasted, wide-bottomed and thin-ankled—floral in shape, like a tulip—Lidia was a little plump but vigorous and strong. She had curvy calves beneath her culottes, round hips and high breasts, shoulders and biceps that resembled plump fruit. Her skin was sun-darkened and freckled at the collar of her blouse. My mother’s skin had been ivory, unblemished, her thin hair ash-blond, her nose narrow and long in a way that on a man is considered potent, but on a woman is perhaps sexy but not very pretty. My mother had hated her nose. Lidia’s nose bloomed at the tip, like a new bud. She wore very red lipstick almost all the time.

  “I think my mother said he went crazy,” I said to Lidia. “Is that right?”

  She raised her eyebrows. “I doubt your mom used the word crazy.”

  Lidia had known my mother, too, but barely. I’d gone to school with Lidia’s son, Roberto, who was now a real estate agent in California. He had five young kids—their names were, I promise, particularly impossible to recall—and didn’t visit often. He wanted Lidia to move to Fresno. She’d told me this in a way that communicated that the prospect was not only unfeasible but appalling. When she spoke of Roberto and his family, she didn’t try to hide her sadness, which was something I liked about her.

  “I can’t remember what word she used,” I said, thinking that it was true that it would have been unlike her. My mother had been something of an armchair psychologist. She’d told me she thought a neighbor who talked a lot and left trash on our lawn was a narcissist, that her estranged brother, who lived in Key Largo, was a depressive. Where she got this information—surely not from the pediatric office—I don’t know. She had antennae for that kind of thing, as people do. But her self-training on the subject would have kept her from using the word crazy. Not only was it unkind, but it was also unspecific.

  “What’s wrong with him, exactly?” I said to Lidia.

  “If you don’t count living alone in the middle of the bay,” she said, “nothing.”

  “Is it safe to take Frankie?”

  “Would I recommend it if it wasn’t?”

  “You’re sure?”

  She didn’t have much patience for reassurance. “Look, run a few errands and take him some supplies. Put it on your credit card and keep the receipts. His lawyer handles the money. Give it a week. You don’t want the job, I’ll find someone else.”

  I was too old to take on a second mother, but the way she treated me, in this instance and in others, smacked of maternal doublespeak, as if circling around what she really wanted to tell me, which was to buck up. My own mother had danced around the truth enough for me to recognize the behavior. One afternoon at the start of my mother’s long illness, I’d visited for the weekend, and she’d needled me into helping her sort something—photographs? silver? I don’t recall. I’d recently spent my time in Detention and was dizzy with thoughts of Graham. I took a break from the sorting to show her a photograph of him. “He looks like a silent-film star,” she said, staring closely. “You said he doesn’t drive?” In the photo, Graham leaned against the passenger door of a shiny black sedan, a cornfield in the background. His hair was a slightly muddier white. He had given me the photo for just this purpose, to show my mother, but I remember thinking that it took a certain kind of man to give a girl a photo that was so obviously taken by another woman. Instead of saying this outright, my mother added that he seemed mighty self-assured, which in her book was a mixed bag.

  Spoons. We’d been sorting my mother’s collection of antique spoons.

  LIDIA TAUGHT ME TO DRIVE the Zodiac that same night, after another several inches of wine for us both. I was nervous leaving Frankie alone, even while he slept. I locked the Lullaby’s sliding doors and goaded Lidia into leaning over the hedges and asking her neighbor, Zola Genovese, who was sitting on her own back deck, to keep an eye on the Lullaby until we returned. Zola said it was her pleasure, then made a point to reassure me that she, too, had driven herself mad with worry when her kids were young.

  The moonshine off the water had the soft blue glow of a night-light in a dark room. I reminded Lidia that we needed to hurry, but she just shushed me and gestured for me to follow her to the far end of the pier, where the Zodiac rested. She stepped aboard. “There’s nothing to it,” she said, handing me a key attached to a bright yellow float.

  She showed me how to check the fuel level and lower the engine and prime the choke. The engine roared into the night and Lidia shushed again, then laughed. She’s fun, I thought. She told me to throw the stern and bow lines into the well, and I dropped down onto the boat’s gunwale as we pulled away. We swapped places and she barked instructions over the engine noise: how to ease forward on the throttle, how to shift into neutral and reverse. We headed toward the bay. I reminded her again that I didn’t want to go too far, but she just kept issuing instructions. We practiced turning around and slowing and reversing, and then suddenly we were at the start of the canal, where it opens to spit out the bay, and while Lidia explained the channel markers—the Zodiac had very little draw, she said, so I would have to really load it down to run aground—I marveled at the canopy of star-salted night, the dark open water spotted by whitecaps, the indistinct indigo horizon. Then Lidia leaned against the boat’s two-seater bench and refused to answer any more questions. It was up to me to navigate back up the canal, leaving the bay at our backs. I eased up to the pier and cut the engine, and the still, silent darkness pooled around us. Over the hedges, Zola Genovese waved good night and went into her house.

  Inside the Lullaby, Frankie slept with one arm flung over the side of the bunk, his face open to the room, lips as bright as bougainvillea blossoms. The bedsheet was twisted around his legs as if he’d tossed and turned. I had the thought—it skipped through my mind and dissolved—that I couldn’t believe I had left Miami in the first place.

  3

  GRAHAM’S ILLNESS ANNOUNCED ITSELF THE summer he was eleven years old. One night after his family arrived home to the cottage after a long day at the state fair, Graham and his sister, who was nine, bathed and got into bed, and their mother looked in on them and encouraged each child to share a favorite moment from the trip. His sister’s—he could hear her voice through the wall between their rooms—was the crayon-colored Ferris wheel, which had stalled when they’d reached the top and swayed a little in the high winds, giving them all a thrill. Graham told his mother that his favorite had been the rifle range, where he’d won a giant lollipop.

  In actuality, though, his favorite had been the haunted house. His father had taken him against his mother’s wishes, while she and Lauren were taking another turn on the Ferris wheel. Just inside, Graham and his father had been ushered with a large group into an airless black room, and the lights had dimmed. He’d thought for a moment that there had been some kind of mistake, but then a deep, echoey voice came from overhead, narrating a history of the house and the robber baron who’d owned it, telling how the baron and his wife had been slaughtered by Indians and now haunted the rooms, headless. The door they’d come through was a seamless wall. There was no discernible way out. Graham felt gho
st-fingers on the back of his neck.

  He went to sleep that night thinking of the crowded room, the old-fashioned portraits on the wall, and the handsome striped wallpaper. He was worn out from the trip and fell quickly into a heavy sleep. In his experience, even at that young age, there were half a dozen types of sleep, and this was a seductive, serpentine sleep, bent on smothering. He startled breathlessly awake after an hour or so, and something pushed him to rise to his feet. There he stood in his pajamas in the dark. He was middream, still, though he didn’t realize it. In his dream, he stood alone in that suffocating haunted house. The lights had gone off. This had been done deliberately, he understood, to scare him. They knew he was afraid of the dark. He took a few tentative steps, hands out, and touched the wall. He felt his way along the wall, and within a few steps his fingers met the square edge of a frame: a portrait. He continued to edge around the room, bumping into a second frame.

  On Graham’s birthday the year before, his father had handed down to him two of his own cherished possessions: framed prints, one from the 1933 Chicago Fair, and one from the 1948 summer Olympics in London, where his father had watched from the stands as right-handed Hungarian pistol-shooter Károly Takács, whose hand had been destroyed by a grenade, won the gold medal using his left hand. Because Graham’s birthday was in the summer, the prints came to hang in Graham’s bedroom at the cottage, instead of in the apartment in Chicago.

  Graham’s eyes were open in the dark, but he could see nothing, not even shadows. On a night with a moon, the surface of the lake outside his window doubled the light, but on this night there was no moon, no starlight. His heart beat fast. He told himself to stay calm. Distantly, he heard the call of a loon. Some summers were thick with them. When he was fifteen they would disappear entirely for years, but by the time we lived there they’d returned, though he would swear the numbers had thinned.