Dancing on Coral

by Glenda Adams

  “Leave me alone.” Lark could not move, imprisoned in the Captain’s arms.

  “Such to-do,” said the Captain. With the help of the two officers, he dragged her across the deck, handed her down the ladder. “She shall remain in her cabin.” As she was being maneuvered along the gangway to her cabin, Lark glimpsed Paul, ducking into the galley.

  “Is this drugged?” she asked, when he brought her crackers and soup. She was sitting on her bed, looking away from him. “Why didn’t you do anything?” she asked. “Why didn’t you help me? Why do you let them keep me a prisoner in my cabin?”

  “I was in the galley getting lunch,” said Paul. “And the Captain says you’re sick, from all that sun.”

  Lark beckoned him to her. “It was an accident.”

  Paul frowned, not comprehending. Lark pulled out the sheet and bedspread and showed him the rather insignificant burns. “I didn’t mean to.”

  “Take it easy,” was all that Paul Crouch said.

  “They said once that I had a sense of impending doom,” said Lark.

  “It would be hard not to have a sense of impending doom on this ship,” said Paul Crouch. “It was just one of Donna Bird’s jokes, that list of names.”

  Many days passed, and while Lark remained in her cabin, out of the sun, away from the company of the officers and Paul Crouch, the Avis Maris had sailed into winter. Lark had lost her feverishness but still thought of the two boxes in the hold and of Donna’s list of names with their hidden warnings. She went on deck in the dawn as they passed through the Strait of Juan de Fuca into Puget Sound. Dozens of little fishing boats were already out, tossing in the winter waters. It was still possible, she thought as she hugged her inadequate sweater and Windbreaker around her, that the Avis Maris was the delivery system for a bomb that was contained in those boxes and intended for New York.

  “And this is warm, mild.” The Captain was standing beside her. “Wait until you spend Christmas in Chicago, and New Year in New York.” He blew through his lips, making a sound to indicate the degree of cold and rubbing his hands together. “I am like a passenger now. Like you. We have the pilot on board. He is in charge. I can have some entertainment, like on the Queens. Ha.” He pointed all around. “You see, America. In New York you see the same, only it is a big bridge and the Statue of Liberty standing on her island. That is the joke I told you in the beginning. She cannot sit down. Perhaps she could lie down, if she got tired.” He laughed a few short bursts, and stopped. “It is good this bad journey is finishing. The end is soon. I must go below.” And he left Lark at the rail.

  The end is soon. Lark looked after him. The end. And below were those two boxes, lying side by side, surely transformed by now. Lark watched the little fishing boats toiling, taking on dimension and detail and color in the new light. She could now distinguish one boat from another and sometimes, if the craft was close enough, its skipper and crew. Then she remembered that the Captain had mentioned the pilot.

  On the bridge the pilot was standing at the wheel. Mr. Blut, dressed in blue serge with gold trim ready for shore, was off to one side sorting through charts.

  “Good morning,” said the pilot to Lark. This was her second American. “A good voyage?”

  Lark stood close beside him. “In the hold,” she whispered, “there is something strange, something not right.” She swiveled her eyes toward Mr. Blut, whose legs were planted on the periphery of her vision. The toe of one shiny black shoe was tapping. “Two boxes, like coffins, possibly bombs.”

  “Hmm?” said the pilot, half listening, smiling, not really trying to comprehend. “Boxes, you say? Coffins?”

  “Coffins?” came a booming, blustering voice. The Captain had entered. “Ha, ha. There are no coffins, just cargo.”

  “But he said there were coffins in the hold,” said Lark. She had nothing to lose now.

  “Exactly,” cried the Captain. “No bodies, and no coffins. It was a joke.” He shook his head at the pilot. “That one,” indicating Lark, “does not understand a joke. She has no humor.”

  “Ah-ha,” responded the pilot. He nodded at the Captain.

  Lark stepped away from them.

  “She has been very ill. Too much sun. Far too much sun. All the time she lies in the sun.” The Captain tapped the side of his head, and again Lark watched the little indentations left behind by his finger.

  “I’ve been sick?” Lark asked, at the same time deciding that she should disembark just as rapidly as possible. “Yes, that’s it.” She backed away from the pilot and the Captain, toward the door.

  “She is a land lover,” the Captain joked after her.

  “Not a sailor at all.” Mr. Fischer had appeared at the door, causing Lark to jump and turn around. He stepped aside to let her pass. “Women on board, bad news.”

  “We hope you will be very happy in our country,” said the pilot.

  “She will be happy,” said the Captain. “She is a land lover, not a sailor at all.”

  Lark stood on the main deck, with her luggage at the spot where the gangplank would be lowered. She now reasoned that if she left the ship her premonition about the bomb would be false. The ship would not blow up, as long as she was not on it thinking her thoughts. The gangplank was lowered, but she was not allowed to disembark. A port official had to board first.

  “You are wanted in the dining room,” said Paul Crouch, who had slipped up beside her and slipped away again, quietly and quickly, after delivering the message.

  An immigration official in white shirt and navy pants had set up a card table at which he sat awaiting her, the only passenger. The Captain appeared to be explaining the absence of the second passenger.

  The immigration official stood up when Lark entered. He leant over the table, his arm outstretched. At first Lark thought he wanted her to hand something over, her passport perhaps, but he seized Lark’s hand and shook it. “Welcome to the United States of America,” he said. He shook her hand vigorously again. “We are a friendly nation. Be open, frank. Don’t hold back.”

  The third American. He, too, sounded like all the men in all the Hollywood movies she had ever seen. “Thank you,” she said.

  He motioned to her to sit at the chair in front of the card table while he examined her documents. Lark looked around. The Captain stayed close by, standing over them.

  The formalities over, Lark dashed down the gangplank onto the wharf, then quickly turned and, looking up, saw Paul Crouch leaning on the rail of her deck. He gave her a slight nod.

  While the taxi driver loaded her luggage into the trunk and onto the seat next to him, Lark looked back at the ship. Paul Crouch was still there, leaning and smoking. He threw his cigarette away and acknowledged her departure by moving his wrist and lifting his fingers slightly.

  As they drove away she looked anxiously back in the direction of the wharf. “Just take me to a train station,” she said to the driver.

  “We don’t use trains much, anymore. Buses are what we use. Greyhound.”

  Lark said the train station would be fine.

  “Greyhound would be cheaper,” said the driver. “Ninety-nine days for ninety-nine dollars. Dollar a day. And faster than a train.”

  “The train station will be fine.”

  “Are you sure you’re old enough to be traveling alone? You look like a runaway to me.”

  The train station was deserted. The ticket window was closed. Lark placed her bags on a bench near a telephone. With Henry Watter’s leather coin pouch looped over her wrist, she prepared to telephone Tom in New York.

  “Operator?” she said, again mimicking the movies, “I want to call long distance.” She opened her address book and gave Tom’s telephone number.

  “I got off in Tacoma,” she told Tom, suddenly aware that she had traversed the largest ocean, changed hemispheres, passed from summer to winter, and endured a great deal in three weeks. “The ship changed its route. It needs repair. It ran aground.”

  Tom did not seem terri
bly surprised to be hearing this news. “No wonder the Germans lost the war,” he joked, not at all curious. It was as if she lived around the corner and he had seen her just the other day. And Tom never asked questions. Lark could not recall Tom’s ever having asked a question, about anything. And she was glad, otherwise he would ask about Donna Bird and want to know her whereabouts. “It’ll cost you money,” he said, “leaving the ship on the west coast, traveling across the country.”

  “It’s a good opportunity to see America. I don’t have much luggage.”

  “So, Larkie, now you have gotten your feet wet in the big, bad world, thanks to active transport.”

  Lark paused. She wanted to tell him about the mad Captain, and about the coffins and her attempt to destroy the ship. “Active transport?”

  “The cell uses energy to transport materials through the plasma membrane. It’s all part of our drive to return to the unicellular condition—remember?”

  “I’ve been at sea for weeks. Out of touch.”

  “Most theorists, Darwin, et cetera, would have us believe that we are driven to develop and become more and more complex. But the reverse is, in fact, true. We are just following a very round-about route toward simplicity. Einstein recognized it.”

  The operator interrupted, asking Lark to deposit more coins. As they clinked into their slots, Tom continued. “And so, you are here. The membrane, the U.S.A. in this case, has folded in, forming a pocket, which fills with fluid and particles from the surroundings, in this case you and that ship.”

  “I don’t know what you mean. I’ve been at sea.”

  But Tom went straight on. “The membrane then closes over the pocket and releases the particles, poof, into the cell. And so, you are here, in the cell. Fin, fine, Ende.”

  Lark let a few seconds pass, to make sure Tom had stopped talking. “This sounds very silly, I know, but how hard is it to make a bomb, a big bomb that would destroy buildings?”

  “Ah-ha, exactly, you’re catching on. That’s why we’re on our way to blowing up the planet. It’s a deep, unacknowledged need—the satisfaction of returning to the single cell state.”

  Lark leant against the wall of the phone booth, more confused than ever about the Avis Maris and the bomb that Donna Bird had insisted was in the hold. At least she had begun to try to tell Tom, and if he had deflected her confession, well, it must mean that what she had to say was not really important.

  “So I’ll be seeing you,” said Tom. “Take care. Have fun.”

  But Lark was not ready to relinquish her connection to Tom and be left standing in a phone booth alone in a deserted train station. To keep him talking to her, she asked a question. “Don’t you want to know about Donna Bird?” She would have to tell him sooner or later, and if she did it now, on the telephone, he would not be able to see her face and detect her dissembling. He waited for her to explain. “She stayed behind. On an island. To educate the people there.” That sounded entirely plausible. In fact, Lark liked the sound of it very much. She went on. “Like Sylvia Ashton-Warner and the Maoris. They needed her more than Manhattan does. She was helping them put on plays and appreciate their own culture.”

  “She’s an original,” said Tom. “But damn. I rented an apartment for the two of you. Now you’ll have to manage the rent on your own.”

  “I shall be there in two weeks or so,” Lark said, although he had not asked. “I’ll let you know exactly when.”

  “It’s a great apartment,” Tom said.

  She hung up. From her address book fluttered the piece of paper on which she had copied the address and phone number of Solomon Blank when she had visited his mother in Sydney before she left. Then the phone rang, which was surprising to Lark, since it was a public telephone. When she answered it, it was the operator telling her the final cost of her New York call and directing her to drop the coins into the box.

  Lark, who still held a fistful of coins and the slip of paper, telephoned the Blank household in Champaign-Urbana. “I hope you are sitting down,” she said, when Solomon picked up the phone. “This is a voice from the past.”

  III

  Solomon was at the train station in Chicago to meet Lark. She saw him pacing up and down the platform, peering in through the smoked glass of the cars, trying to locate her. He was wearing a sheepskin hat, rather like the hats that Russians wore in Hollywood movies, and a sheepskin overcoat that almost reached the ground. There was a sad look about him, weighed down, almost obliterated by his clothing. As she stood in the aisle waiting to alight, Lark was able to watch Solomon swiveling his head, looking anxiously at each emerging passenger. Then, as Lark climbed down the metal stairs to the platform, he was there beaming up at her, holding his arms out to give her a hug. He held her close for several seconds, pressed against his coat, much longer than she would have expected from a newlywed husband. He held his cheek against her hair and breathed in. Then he held her from him and looked at her, shaking his head in disbelief, before embracing her again.

  “Amanda insisted that I come,” he said. “She said that it would be terrible not to see an old friend who has come so far and that she could manage quite well on her own for an afternoon and an evening. And if she had an old college friend passing through, she would certainly expect me to allow her to go and see her, or him, as the case may be. She told me to come.” He held Lark from him again to look at her. “I drove for hours to get here, over icy roads and through sleet and snow flurries, and then I was here early and your train was late.” He was extremely pleased to see her, and he stood looking into her face, rubbing his hands on her arms, along her jacket. “I think you’ll be needing warmer clothing.”

  “I’ll buy something in New York suitable for the Northern Hemisphere.”

  “But I wanted to walk you along the Lakefront, to show you how handsome Chicago is. I love the lake, although it doesn’t much resemble our ocean, or our beach, or our rocks.”

  “I’m glad to be away from them,” said Lark.

  “You’ll see, after a while, that you’ll need to be near the water, too. I often drive in to Chicago just to walk along the shore of the lake, although right now it’s all white, covered with ice. And since we had a blizzard last week, everything is also covered with snow. You can hardly tell there’s a lake there. It looks like a field.” He looked at Lark, then down at his coat. “Perhaps we can wrap this around us both. It’s pretty large.” He pulled the front of the coat away from him, to show how large it was and how little space he took up inside it. “You can’t get by without the proper clothing in this part of the country. We were lucky—at home there was no need for a complete new wardrobe in winter, no heating bills; you should see what Amanda and I pay to heat our house.” He let go of his coat and it fell back against his body, drooping to the ground. “This belonged to Amanda’s father. He was enormous.” He patted his coat again. “Amanda takes after him.” He picked up Lark’s bags and carried them to his dark green station wagon. “I’ve rented you a room in this motel. It’s cheap. I could stay over, too, if you wanted me to. I’m sure Amanda would understand.”

  They drove through the snowy streets, Solomon turning to Lark often and grinning. He patted her arm, then pulled her closer to him. “It’s been a long time. Put your head on my shoulder. Come on.” And he placed one arm along the back of the seat and around Lark’s shoulders, drawing her closer.

  The motel was a few miles from the center of the city, a two-story blond-brick building among car lots and supermarkets.

  “It’s cheap. I checked you in already,” said Solomon. “And it won’t matter, once we’re inside, where we are. We can just talk and talk.”

  Solomon took Lark’s bag and a small duffel bag of his own, and led her past the desk clerk and a cardboard placard propped on an easel in the lobby announcing that the motel was the venue for the reunion of the Children of the American Revolution. Stuck up at various points were arrows and little cards announcing CAR This Way. Solomon flung open the door to the
room. Two full-size beds separated by a narrow table took up most of the space. On the bed closest to the window was spread a towel, and on the towel sat, a little unsteadily, a bottle of champagne, two glasses from the bathroom, and a packet of Cheddar cheese and crackers.

  “To celebrate,” announced Solomon.

  Beyond the window came the sound of water splashing and children shrieking. Solomon walked over and pulled back the curtains. “Your view, madame.”

  The glass of the windows was steamed over, dripping with condensation. Instead of looking out over whatever terrain the outskirts of Chicago might offer, the window looked in over the motel swimming pool. Dozens of Children of the American Revolution, all of them remarkably chubby, were shouting and climbing up the ladder to the diving board from which they plummeted in quick succession, sending water over the edge of the pool across the tiles where the parents of the revolutionary children sat talking, apparently contentedly, on the green carpeting. The shouts and splashes of the children echoed and reverberated under the fiberglass dome that enclosed the pool and the courtyard. Sleet was falling outside, rattling on the dome like gravel. On the window Solomon wrote with his finger, “Welcome to the U.S.A.,” then opened the champagne.

  Solomon gave Lark to understand as they talked, sitting together on the second bed, that he was extremely happy with his research on Renaissance drama and with his lovely wife. Perhaps it had only been his overwhelming outer clothing that had given him that dejected, powerless look at the train station.

  “Amanda is very creative,” Solomon told Lark. “She makes paper. At the moment she sells stationery for a local printer, but she is really a gifted artist. When I get my tenure and my textbook makes me a millionaire,” he smiled weakly and looked up at the ceiling—“just joking—I’ll set her up in her own studio and she can just make her paper.” He put his arm around Lark and kissed the top of her head.

  Lark leaned neither away from him nor toward him. “Your mother said you were planning to have four children. She said you have their bedrooms all ready, and their names, too.”