This night is going to be a long one.
I glance at couples talking and drinking quietly at outdoor tables nearby.
Goodbye, Mister Starfish
M. J. Rey
“They say the most unfree souls go west. It’s true, ya know, about the West; it’s part of ’em—like a blood knowledge.”
Tony paused for a moment, carefully stepped over a small tide pool, and then straddled the next, much larger one. With his left boot heel submerged and his right wedged into the exposed reef he stood straight up and scanned the horizon, and then the coastline. About fifty yards down the shore he could see Magdalena following Cosma, who had curled his little torso over another pool. It was difficult to tell from this distance, but it looked like the boy was gently poking a sea anemone and watching it shrivel.
“I remember when I first saw this beach, and these cliffs,” and then Tony nodded toward the long breakwater and the large cranes that stood several miles away. “I remember when I saw the Port of Los Angeles too. I almost went to work in the tanker trade, ya know; this place was too barbaric for me, too many dead and unfree souls.”
“You used to tell us this story when Francis and I were kids,” Marina said. She was holding her dress up while she followed Tony across the exposed reef.
“I did? God, Rinka, it’s been so long.”
Tony smiled and then lunged across a small channel, where he nearly lost his balance; at low tide, thin skeins of water, which glistened like fat, covered the smoother rocks, but Tony’s bad eyes had not noticed; he was also thinking about the stories he used to tell Marina, all those years ago.
When they were children, Marina and her brother, Francis, were Tony and Magdalena’s neighbors, and even though Francis still lived next door, before today neither Tony nor his wife had seen Marina in twenty years. Stranger still, when Marina had knocked on their door not one hour ago and told them that she had just returned home, and that Francis had sent her to collect Cosma, who was his son but the old couple’s near ward, both Tony and Magdalena seemed unsurprised to see her. And when Cosma told his “auntie Rinka” that he wanted to see the tide pools first, the four set out together, walking the half dozen blocks to the cliffs and then taking the easier, but longer, shore-bound trail. Minutes later they were picking up sea-shells, finding starfish for Cosma, and speaking in the casually disinterested tones of old friends. But that was their way, especially Tony’s.
Tony was a seventy-year-old but still tall, still agile, and still broad-shouldered man from Picuris Pueblo, a small reservation in New Mexico’s Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Tony had always enjoyed telling little Marina that when he was born his parents had not named him Tony but had given him a Tiwa-language name, and he would try to teach her the long word. Pie-ate-see-oo-uh-ah-la, he would say, exaggerating each syllable, but neither Marina nor Francis, nor even Magdalena, could ever pronounce it, and he would laugh good naturedly and then tell the children another Picuris folktale. He also used to tell them that his Tiwa name meant Deer Yellow Willows, but Tony would say this with a wry smile, as if Deer Yellow Willows was really not his name but something he had heard in a bad spaghetti western.
Marina only knew for sure that Tony had also been baptized at the Pueblo’s modest adobe church, where a priest gave him his second, Spanish Catholic name—Antonio Archuleta—and that Tony thereafter moved through the world straddling two identities, just as he now straddled the rocks and the water as if he were the Colossus of Rhodes. Straddling, in fact, had become Tony’s primary method for navigating life.
Marina watched his deft movements across the rocks. Tony’s lithe-ness betrayed his age and she was shocked by how similar he had looked when she was a child, only back then he was even taller, and even more broad shouldered. Tony’s legs were thick and he always kept a wide stance, but he had curiously narrow hips that cinched in his waist so that he looked, at least in silhouette, like a living, breathing, sheaf of wheat. His preferred outfit had remained the same too: cracked-leather cowboy boots with thin arabesques stitched into the vamps, blue jeans, a long-sleeved flannel shirt, and sometimes a bolo tie, or sometimes a cowboy hat, but usually neither.
Nothing’s changed, Marina thought, and she watched Tony’s body turn black with shadow when he walked between her and the setting sun. Only his face, which was now beset with deep wrinkles, seemed to show his age, and his eyes, which were now a little duller and a little more sunken, and his long, beautiful hair, which had turned from a sable black to a heather gray.
“When was the last time you were here?” Tony said while inspecting another pool; he felt no need to lift his gaze.
“Thirty years, at least. Not since I left for the convent.”
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”
Tony, loquacious but famously deferential, didn’t press the issue. He knew that his former babysitting charge had joined a convent when she was eighteen to escape some great trauma—the rumors told of an unplanned, and later lost, pregnancy—but when Tony had opened the door this afternoon and saw her standing there, looking aged and wan but wide smiled, and wearing a strange sundress and jean jacket, he knew all that he needed to know. Once, he had loved this woman like a daughter, and all that mattered now was that she looked happy, which made him happy.
“It’s stunning,” Marina said, “but, more than anything, I forgot the sound.”
Marina turned her ear to the ocean and listened to the water’s rhythmic pulse; gently, but steadily, sets of waves reached the half-submerged rocks and reef. First they pounded, and then they effervesced, and then she heard the clicking of pebbles as each receding wave dragged some stones offshore. Looking down the shoreline, Marina saw Magdalena corralling Cosma, who had wandered off, and behind them she saw a brace of crows playing midair. They were darting, charging, and tumbling at one another, but the two birds mostly ignored a large flock of seagulls sunning below them, who glanced annoyedly upward like overtired parents.
Marina smiled. She’d forgotten how much she loved bird-watching, but watching these particular birds, less than a mile from her childhood home, soon made Marina think about her brother, who was not an avid bird-watcher but was obsessed with the mythical phoenix, which he had taken as his unofficial emblem, and this thought then triggered a new thought about Francis’s wife, Norah, who always ridiculed and embarrassed Francis for this childlike fascination, and soon Marina’s smile vanished, although she continued to watch the flock.
There were several dozen, pure-white seagulls, and apart from their occasional upward glances they were motionless, like so many teacups scattered on the ground, and Marina then realized, as she had periodically throughout the day, that she felt happier and freer and, strangely, closer to God, than she could ever remember feeling at the convent. She watched her little teacups and she listened to the raspy barks from a sea-lion rookery one cove over, and then she heard Tony’s voice suddenly bellow.
“Cosma,” he yelled, “starfish!” and Tony raised one hand from a pool and presented a spindly, squirming, bright orange creature.
Cosma, who was now walking hand in hand with somber Magdalena, broke free and began to run toward Tony, but he stopped almost as soon as he began. The seagulls had caught his eye, and he redirected his course and charged at them as fast as his six-year-old body would allow. The birds watched this little, brazen thing bear down upon them, and then, in perfect unison, they exploded off their orange webbed feet and let the updraft along the cliffs carry them skyward. Cosma, maintaining his youthful impetuousness, then turned around and continued sprinting toward Tony, as if his half-crazed detour were the most natural thing ever, almost perfunctory.
They gathered around the strange life and Tony handed it to Cosma.
“Careful now—you be very careful with it. Don’t hold it too tightly—pretend like you’re holding an egg.”
The young boy sat mesmerized and Marina watched Cosma’s strangely mannish way. His patient gestures and his outsized pride, even his
coarse platinum hair, which stood heaped upon his head as if it were a rick of straw, seemed unusually refined. And while Cosma studied the starfish and Marina studied Cosma, Tony studied Marina, and in the raking evening light he finally saw just how much she too had aged. Strangely, Tony ultimately perceived Marina as Marina had perceived him, which is to say that while Marina’s cloistered life had paled her Balkan skin, and networks of faint wrinkles had recorded the years, Tony still saw the little girl who he, so many years ago, had helped raise.
Tony also noticed that Marina’s knees were still shapely, and her ankles too. In fact, all of Marina’s most prominent bones still appeared effortlessly feminine—the cleft of her jaw, the ridge of her brow, the back of her wrist. Tony almost gasped when Marina grabbed something atop her head—a rubber band, he thought—and her hair tumbled out. Rinka’s back, he thought.
It was only Magdalena who, unlike the others, had gracelessly entered old age. Her frame had always carried a little extra weight, but a sedentary lifestyle had not been kind. Her face was red and blustery now, like an alcoholic’s, and she looked wholly uncomfortable on the rocky beach. Magdalena’s manner was strangely noncommittal, but those who knew her well knew that she possessed one extraordinary gift: a near-limitless capacity for patience and love. Magdalena often struggled to express or harness this patience and love, but the capacity stood latent inside her. She, for instance, had a completely well meaning but slightly overbearing manner with little Cosma, as she once had had with little Marina. Magdalena was, in fact, now kneeling next to Cosma, who was holding the starfish six inches from his face.
“Why don’t you show Auntie Rinka what you learned today, Cosi? I’m sure she’d love to see.”
Tony, assuming that Marina must be lost, leaned over and whispered, “Every time we watch Cosma, Magdalena teaches him a poem,” and then Tony laughed quietly. “The boy is very … obliging … with her. It’s sweet.”
Meanwhile Magdalena had continued her prodding.
“Come now, Cosi—show your Auntie Rinka what we’ve learned.”
“Maggie!” Tony laughed. “Leave him alone—he’s having fun!”
“I—I don’t remember it,” Cosma pasted in.
His eyes had not once left the creature. Its rough skin tickled his own as it slowly writhed around his hand.
“Come on, Cosi—we practiced all afternoon.”
The boy sighed. Cosma, as young as he was, perfectly understood Magdalena’s nature. She loved him, and he loved her, and he also knew it was useless to object. Cosma looked at Tony and offered him the starfish, but his gesture, almost quixotic, was one of intense solemnity and respect, as if he were returning a crown to a regent.
“That doesn’t belong to me,” Tony said. “Go put him back in that pool over there. That’s his home.”
Cosma dutifully crouched beside the chosen pool and slipped the bony star beneath the water, and then, again with great solemnity, he stood straight up and addressed the horizon.
“Goodbye, mister starfish,” he said, “you were my friend.”
Marina thought she heard the slightest tremble in his voice. That poor child, she thought, growing up in that house …
Cosma then rejoined the adults.
“Come on now, show your auntie what we’ve learned.”
Marina decided to join the game, although she doubted that they could goad this little boy into doing anything that he had no desire to do.
“Won’t you show me what you’ve learned, Cosi?” she cooed. “I want to hear it.”
He looked half desperately to Magdalena. “I told you, I forgot it.”
“Well, do what you remember then.”
He sighed again, and then he put his arms at his sides, raised his head, and slowly closed his eyes. Tony and Magdalena had grown accustomed to Cosma’s great pride and earnestness, but it still shocked Marina. The boy, meanwhile, began to speak in a steady, rhythmic voice:
“Bred to a … ah … a harder thing than triumph, turn away, and … and laugh … laugh like a string where mad fingers play … amid the place of stone, be secret and exult—” and Cosma paused, then opened his eyes, “ah … be secret and exult … something something … that is most difficult.”
The others burst into laughter and, slowly, as Cosma came to recognize his own unintentional joke, he laughed too, while Magdalena tried to frown.
“Cosi! We practiced so much!” But secretly Magdalena enjoyed his revision.
Cosma, however, had already stopped laughing. He approached Tony, looking solemn.
“Mr. Archuleta?”
“Yes?”
“Norah says she wants to send me away,” Cosma began, calling his adopted mother by her given name—a convention Norah herself enforced. “I don’t think she likes me. I don’t think she likes Francis either. If she sends me away, can I stay with you and Mrs. Archuleta?”
Tony did not hesitate.
“You will always have a home with Francis. He loves you more than anything.”
“But what if something happens?”
“Nothing will happen, but, God forbid you do need a home, you can always stay with us—can’t he, Maggie?”
Magdalena nearly pounced on the child.
“Of course,” and she smothered him in kisses, “of course of course of course.”
“Or,” Tony continued, “you can stay with your Auntie Rinka.”
“Yes,” Marina chimed on cue, “you can stay with me,” and she too knelt before him.
Strangely, Cosma did not appear upset, more curious in a bored kind of way, like when a child asks why the sky is blue, or why the ocean is blue, or why the sky is blue because the ocean is blue. Marina could see that Cosma, like all those blessed with a natural stoicism, could not understand their concern.
“But, Mr. Archuleta, why is Norah so mean to Francis? I mean, she’s mean to me because she doesn’t want me. She told me so. But why’s she so mean to Francis? Is it ’cause he wanted me?”
For the first time all afternoon Cosma showed his age. Collectively the other three wondered if they should tell Cosma that he already knew the answer: Norah was mean to Francis for the same reason she was mean to him—because she didn’t want him.
Tony was about to speak when an egret landed several yards away. He then knelt beside the others.
“You see that egret?”
“Yes.”
“Well, think about that egret for a moment.”
“OK.”
“Now think about mister starfish.”
“OK.”
“Now, what makes them different?”
Cosma paused.
“One lives in the water and the other lives in the air?”
“That’s right, Cosi. You see, where I come from we believe that our home was placed in the exact middle of the world, and the rest of the world extends from this middle place in all six directions,” and Tony placed one finger in a nearby tide pool. He began to trace a cruciform shape as he spoke.
“There is the North, the South, the East, and the West. But there is also the down,” and Tony drew his finger into the pool. “My people have a word for it, but in English we call it the nadir. And there is also the up,” and Tony raised his finger shoulder-high, as if he were about to bless someone, “and the up we call the zenith. My people believe that all creatures belong to a direction, just as the egret belongs to the zenith and the starfish belongs to the nadir.
“And, Cosma, it’s the same with us: there are zenith people and there are nadir people. Francis is a zenith—he lives in the sky, he is hollow boned and light and belongs above the rest. Norah is a nadir—she lives in the underneath,” and Tony glanced meaningfully at the others, “she belongs below the others, she is dense and strong.”
“So, Francis is the egret and Norah is the starfish?”
“Yes. And this is why they don’t always get along. One is the air and the other is the water—they move in opposite directions. It has nothing to do with you; it�
��s not your fault.”
“Oh. Well, OK,” Cosma said rather cheerfully.
Marina and Tony stood up, proud of their proxy parenting, when Cosma silently untwined himself from Magdalena’s arms and, without hesitation, ran directly at the egret and unleashed a high-pitched, wild scream. The bird wheeled itself around, tore into the air, and began flying out to sea. Magdalena was the first to recover her speech.
“Cosma—why?—why in the world did you just do that?”
The boy walked back.
“I’m saving Francis,” he announced with perfect nonchalance, and then continued, “I’m hungry. Can we please go home now and have something to eat?”
Moments later the four were walking toward the switchback trail that led up the shore’s steep cliffs when Marina felt compelled to stop. She turned and faced the ocean one last time. Again she heard the caws and the barks and the effervescence and the clicks, and for a second she thought she saw the egret, silhouetted by the sun. It was heading west over the white-capped sea.
Four Poems
Elizabeth Robinson
RITUAL
Friendship is ritual as
ritual is a form of loyalty.
As ritual is intimate recall and information, also
a form of loyalty.
Encyclopedic even.
Where loyalty is much like scholarship.
Which requires initiation until the intricacies
of practice and performance
dwindle into familiarity.
Pleasure even.
Friendship is absurdity,
marking the absurdities
of time. Birthday,
holiday, the rituals
of mortality. Ritual is
a form of loyalty, that is,
commitment, that
circumvents
mortality, operating
through the meaning
of ritual rather than of time.
Friendship was circular
that way, intent on
conflating the terms
of itself. Intent on
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