by Kelly Link
“I’m close,” she said.
“Close to what? What else could you have to forget?” I slammed my hands on the counter. Her bowl of salt shook.
We stood in silence until she said, “I love you, but I wish I remembered how to say it the other way.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
The tears on her face looked almost milky white.
“There was a way I used to say it. I don’t remember the words. I used to say it to someone,” she said. “Do you remember?”
“No, Popo,” I said. “I don’t.”
When she takes care of Katie, she does not put her down. Katie’s skin is soft underneath her fingertips and she wonders how much sadness this little body can take. She smells just like Anne did when she was a baby, but looks so different. There are only traces of Anne and it makes Katie harder to hold on to. She is half-ghost. If she puts Katie down, she will disappear, and she will not be able to find her again. She holds on to her because this is not a thing she can let go of.
By the end, her pickling process had picked up speed. Everything I loved became smaller and smaller until she started to break apart in my hands and fall through my permanently wrinkled fingertips. Seven years after my mom died, she finished dissolving.
My memory was shaky. Most of the water in my body was salt. I no longer had difficulty forgetting; it came easily with or without a jar. Remembering was harder.
As I packed up her home, I looked for all the places that Popo had put herself to rest. I walked through each room, sat on each chair, picked up each knickknack, ran my fingers over every book’s spine. I went through all of her drawers, her closets. I took every lid off every box. Jars were hidden everywhere.
She was right. There hadn’t been enough jars in the city to hold everything she needed to put away. She had started to fill milk jugs and ice cream pints. Even her shampoo bottles and toothpaste tubes had memories stuffed inside them.
I laid them out in her living room. They took up every inch of the floor. I balanced them on top of each other. They sank between couch cushions. One or two rolled behind the television. I played a childhood game to choose one: My mother said to pick the very best one and that is—
Like the others, its contents blurred in the murky liquid. I wanted to say that it looked familiar, but of course it didn’t. I pulled on the lid, but my hands kept slipping. I was too weak, or the jar was too strong, or whatever was inside didn’t want to be taken back.
I threw it against the wall. The glass shattered, the liquid dripped to the floor, and the memory clung to the paint. Its smell surprised me—orange peels and baby powder. Popo was holding my mother’s head in her lap, pushing her hair back with her hands, cooing to her softly. The memory played in a loop, but each time something was slightly different. Sometimes Popo’s shirt was a different color; sometimes my mother’s head rested on her shoulder; sometimes my mother looked older or younger. I couldn’t pick it up entirely; it kept slipping out of my hands.
One by one, I opened the rest of them. Some smelled rancid, like death. These were ones of her travels from China, her first few years living in San Francisco, my mother’s sickness and funeral. Many smelled like the ocean, like Gung Gung’s seawater breath, like the smells that made up her heartbreak. The ones of me smelled like vanilla yogurt and strawberries.
The floor was wet. I lay down in the mess and let my clothes soak it all up. If my mother and Popo had been there, I would have told them this: (1) I still long for things I cannot have. (2) I am not split in two, but I am still living between things. (3) We are drowning in all this saltwater.
______________
Laura Chow Reeve is a writer living in Jacksonville, Florida. She has an MA in Asian American Studies from UCLA and a BA from Bryn
Mawr College. She is a VONA alumna.
Editor’s Note
Ben Shattuck’s “Edwin Chase of Nantucket” was originally selected by our guest editor, Paul Harding, who described it as having captured “that weather-swept island and the souls who lived on it” in the late eighteenth century. What we love about this piece is the way it conjures the isolation and remoteness of island life, a world of birds, sea, sky, and salt marsh, sealed off from the rest of the world. Shattuck’s islanders are people who live with little and yet make much of what they have. He captures at once the richness—“of quinces, apples, dried cherries, pears, a side of dried venison”; “the smell of rain like wet stone, and of the marsh. Bits of quahogs and seaweed spread over the sandbar, which would soon sink under the incoming tide”—and the deprivation of island life in a period quite remote from our own. At once sweet and salty, it is a lyrical, evocative story, a bit mysterious, strange and yet strangely familiar, as all the very best stories are.
Christina Thompson, editor
Harvard Review
Edwin Chase of Nantucket
Ben Shattuck
When my father and I were younger, he taught me how to count the days in a month. Put your fists up like this, he said, side by side. January is the first knuckle, the peak. February, the valley. The peak has more days. The valley, less. January has thirty-one. February, twenty-eight. And so on. Down to double-knuckled summer. I must have been ten or eleven when he showed me that, a few years after we’d moved to Nantucket. I lay in bed that night, searching for other timepieces. I touched twenty-four ribs. The daily hours. Eyes, nostrils, mouth, and ears that made seven. The week. There might be moon phases down my spine; days between the equinox and solstice somewhere in my feet. I could be made of three hundred and sixty-five bones.
May is a knuckle. I know that without counting because on the thirty-first, 1796, a man and a young pregnant woman—carrying between them nothing but a satchel of clothes, two sketchbooks, bottles of turpentine, paints, and brushes—arrived unexpectedly to our farm on Coskata. I was twenty when they came.
It had been raining all morning. Puddles held in sand. Winter had been long, April ended in a blizzard, and snow still lay in ditches and in the house’s shadow. So much of my day then was shaped by the sky—the way a cloud gathered itself up and fell in rain or snow or sleet. Nantucket starts and ends with weather. Which way the wind was blowing and why. What clouds meant.
This was over a year since Dad died. He had left in the morning to cut ice from the Pinkhams’ pond. The blocks he carted home sometimes held duck feathers, hairs of green winter growth, a brown and bent rush. As if the ice were inscribing itself with feathers and stems. The evening he disappeared, I found his coat folded in the grass beside the pond. I took it home, told my mother, Laurel, that he’d probably gone on one of his walks, and then we went to bed. It wasn’t until I crossed the pond the next day that I found him, out in the center, facedown, under the ice. His shirt had ridden up over his head, so that when I stood over him it seemed that wind was blowing across his back, or that he was undressing. One shoe was missing. I retrieved the saw. Cut him out. His gray hair was thick with ice. The skin on his face looked tauter. So much was still there, but more missing: his deep voice; his quietness; his limp from the leg broken twice over in the war. I sat on the ice with him for most of the evening before bringing him home on Sadie’s back. I couldn’t figure out how he’d gotten all the way out to there and under the ice.
When Will and Rivkah came—though I didn’t know their names then—Laurel and I were by the shed rubbing oil on Sadie. Her fleas had been bad that winter. I should have kept her stall cleaner. Before fleas it was thrush—the bottoms of her hooves smothered with white rot. All horses’ maladies are poetry, Dad said, like bog spavin or seedy toe. Our old horse, Julius, had moon blindness. Both corneas dyed milk-blue. We led him through the dunes and along the beach for exercise on our evening walks because he was scared into laziness by his cloudy eyes.
Sadie stepped back and turned her head when she saw them. That’s the way it always is—an animal noticing first. Gulls c
rowd in the sheep pasture before a gale; songbirds fly into the chimney. I try to think of the day before they came—if our cow was giving bad milk.
They were in the middle of the sand road that nobody used. We were ten miles to Nantucket town, and the only building beyond our house was the lighthouse, a mile away at the end of the point. Nobody came to our house. The only prints on the path were made by me, Laurel, mice, and the birds. The punctuation of our solitude—commas and periods in the footsteps of animals, the pauses between us and town.
“Who’s that?” I said to Laurel.
“What?” she said, looking up at me. She used the back of her wrist to brush her hair from her forehead. Oil dripped from her fingers.
She was thirty-seven then. That makes her seventeen when I was born. My father had been much older—somewhere in his late thirties. The bones in her face were severe in a way that might have been ugly. A straight nose, thin lips, narrow face, deep eye sockets. But it happened that everything was placed well, beautifully even, and she could easily have remarried if we weren’t all those miles from town. Two suitors did ride to our farm. One was John Throat, the butcher, whom I met twice a year at the end of Coatue. He came for Laurel cleaner than usual, with a bundle of meat tied to his horse. My mother was polite, fixed him tea, and then asked him to leave. Since then, each time I walk a hog down Coatue to meet him, neither of us mentions his visit. The other suitor was Uncle Amos, who stayed for two nights in the upstairs storage room. On the third day he told us at breakfast that he’d been mistaken in coming, apologized, and left. I haven’t seen him since.
“Behind you,” I said to her then. “Down the road.”
She turned.
“Oh,” she said, stepping back. “Yes.” She touched her hairline. “Or—no.”
“What?”
“I thought it was—but no, there are two. So I suppose not.”
“Suppose not what?”
“Nothing,” she said. “It’s not Paul?” She turned back to Sadie, and poured another ladleful of oil. “And Maggie?”
Paul Pinkham was the keeper of the Great Point Lighthouse, that mile north. He lived there with his mute wife, Sarah, and their daughter, Maggie—a few years older than I and to whom I was engaged. Paul had white hair and a beard bigger than his head that you could see from a long way off. And he wouldn’t have been walking like that, the way these two were separated.
“No,” I said. “And that’s not Maggie behind him.”
Laurel turned again. Put her hand up to her forehead to block the sun.
“I don’t know, Edwin. I guess we just have to wait and see.”
In those minutes of watching the two hobble forward through the wet sand, there were the sounds of gulls screeching, of the wind passing over our house and the dune grass, and of the sea feeling the land, saying to it with each wave, Here you are, here you are, here you are.
Our house was a sacrifice to the wind. The wind rattled the fireboards and casements at night. The wind threw sand on the windows and guided it through the siding, no matter how many times I resealed it. Sand came down the chimney. Pooled on the hearthstone. Snaked over the floorboards. Banked up on all sides of the house. Collected at the feet of the table. It came in on my clothes, in my hair, under my fingernails, and filled my bed. I dug it out of my eyes before I fell asleep. My shoes were shovels. I swept the house every day, and still. “At least we won’t need to dig the graves,” Laurel would say, “when we’re buried here.”
Dad left us for the war from 1780 through 1783, when I was seven. He came home more wordless, disappeared for long walks, swept the house in the middle of the night, talked to himself. He pried up floorboards by the chimney and front door and put hexes under them—one of his shoes by the chimney, an eel spear by the door. He took off his hair, eyebrows, and eyelashes one morning shave. Laurel drew on eyebrows with charcoal. Then there was the pond. Then me and Laurel living alone beside the Pinkhams. Then me, every summer, mucking out marsh mud to better the soil in the hotbeds for our vegetables, loading the ground with seeds, and scything marsh hay and piling it on the staddles. Me, asking Laurel if she was sick, and her saying “It’s nothing.” My life then was comfortable, I think. Secure. I would have enough tea for a few cups a day. I would marry Maggie. I would see John Throat a few times a year. I would help Paul Pinkham paint the lighthouse every few years. My mother might get sicker, though maybe not. My father would continue to not come back from the pond. Sadie would get fleas again. The sheep would lamb. The seals would continue to stare at us from the waves. This might last another sixty years.
I saw that Will, almost at the fence, held his boots. Plodding through the sand. On his shoulder it looked like he was carrying a small, dark sack. A cat. A brown cat with its tail crossing his neck.
“Should I get the gun?” I asked Laurel.
She was breathing hard. She smiled to herself. Coughed.
“No. I know who it is.”
She untied her apron, wiped her hands, and draped it over her shoulder. She tucked her hair behind her ears. That was a habit of hers—
always touching her hair, brushing her fingers across her forehead.
The cat’s tail batted Will’s chest. He opened the gate, walked through, dropped his boots, shrugged off his satchel.
“Jesus,” he said. “You live at the end of the world. My legs feel like they’ve been beaten.”
He lifted the cat from his shoulder, and put it on the sand. “I was going to quit three miles back.” He waved behind himself, toward Rivkah. “But I was too thirsty.”
He smiled, cocked his head to the side. “Hello, Laurel.”
I stepped around Sadie.
“Look what I found,” he said, pointing to the cat rubbing itself on my mother’s leg. “For you. Whatever’s the opposite of a welcome gift. She’s that.”
“You’re here,” Laurel said, folding her arms.
“I am,” he said. He threw his arms up. “Sorry.”
She stepped forward and hugged him. He shelved his head on her shoulder. They parted.
“This is Edwin?” he said, looking at me.
Sadie shifted, and I avoided her hooves.
“Yes,” Laurel said. “Edwin, this is Will.”
He squinted. Blond hair. A thin beard. Blue eyes. He smiled, and long, crescent dimples appeared.
“I haven’t seen you since you were this big,” he said. He sank his palm close to the ground.
“Three,” Laurel said.
“Is that so?” he said. “You look like your mother. More than your father.”
“Who are you?” I asked.
Will looked at Laurel, and when she didn’t say anything, he said, “A friend of your mother’s.”
Laurel touched her hairline. “Yes,” she said.
The gate clapped shut. We all turned.
“Finally,” Will said.
Rivkah’s pregnancy came first. Her dress swept over her legs. Her coat parted over her stomach. Her steps were heavy and short.
“Who?” Laurel said.
“Rivkah Seixas,” Will said.
She didn’t come to us, but sat in the sand by the fence. She touched her stomach.
“Not what you think,” Will said. “Or who you think. Not mine.”
Long, black hair covered her face and shoulders like the wing of a great bird.
“Who is she?” Laurel asked.
“She’s from Newport,” Will said. “A patron’s daughter. I’ll explain later.”
Rivkah put her elbows on her knees. She was heaving.
“Is she sick?” Laurel said.
“Just tired, I imagine,” Will said. “From the long march.”
“Why didn’t you get her a carriage from town?” Laurel said.
“Why did Silas build a farm about near Portugal?” he said.
&
nbsp; I hadn’t heard my father’s name spoken aloud since Paul Pinkham would come around the house asking for him. With my mother, it was “your father.” To hear it was like seeing him suddenly.
“You’re from Newport?” I asked.
“Edwin,” Laurel said, “could you get some water for the girl?”
“No,” Will said. “She’s from Newport. I was painting her family portrait last fall. She found me as I was on my way here. I’m sorry, Laurel.”
She hesitated. “I’m glad you’re here,” she finally said.
“Good,” Will said. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Any food with that water? We haven’t eaten in some time.”
“Of course we do,” Laurel said.
“Or, if you have milk,” he said, “that would be better.”
When the English occupied the island, they first stole our sheep. Laurel was afraid they’d take more from the house, and so one day she and I went out beside the marsh and buried our silverware, dishware, and the little paper money we had. I felt like gathering everything up and burying it then, when I walked inside for water. Like going to my room for the poetry books, into the kitchen for the pans. The two chairs angled toward each other by the fire where Laurel and I sat every night.
I filled two cups from a jug of our cow’s milk, went outside, and put one in the sand beside Rivkah.
She didn’t look up. Her thumbs were making circles over blisters on the tops of her feet. Embarrassed, I turned away. Yellow puffs of wood dust were falling from the edge of the barn roof. One of the carpenter wasps kicked away sawdust as it dug farther. They were everywhere that spring. Digging hundreds of round holes in the barn and house, and I didn’t know how to get rid of them. Laurel had suggested smoking them out. I’d nearly burned the barn down when I held flaming grass under the roof line.
“Thanks,” Will said when I handed him his cup, and gulped down the milk that our cow had made from dead grass.
“Darling,” Laurel said. “Why don’t you get us a duck? I’ve seen teals landing in the marsh all week.”