Sam checked inside the shorts again and sighed, to let me know that the scorpion was still there. “We’re going to have to use water,” he said, and I followed as he carried the shorts down to the ocean. He balanced on a boulder, leaned out, and dropped them into a shallow place.
I clambered up onto the boulder beside him, feeling its roughness, like super-tough sandpaper, against my hands.
“I hate to do this,” he said. “It’s wrong to kill them. They have more right to this place than we do.”
The fabric of the shorts turned from blue to black and sunk under the surface of the water. A bedraggled scorpion emerged from the folds. Sam thrust the stick in its path, so it could climb to safety. “Here, please,” he said to it. On one last island of dry fabric, the scorpion stood its ground, threatening Sam’s stick with its whip of tail. It was a tiny clenched fist of a being, all anger and swagger. The island under its feet darkened and sunk and water welled in, and the scorpion melted, as witches are supposed to do, though it didn’t entirely disappear. A soft yellow rind remained, bobbing on the surface of the water like a bit of egg, a crumb, a curd, something stuck to the edge of a plate that comes off in the sink. And then what was left of the scorpion tumbled away and it was gone.
Off Season
Our family may not be prettier than yours. We may not be smarter. But we do know how to avoid traffic jams. “You’d have to be a lunatic to get on the Pike after 3 o’clock,” my mother used to say to me, when I was too young to understand the word “lunatic.” But I took her meaning. There were people out there pushing and shoving to get to the same place at the same time. We would not be among them.
My mother has a theory: eccentricity is efficient. When I was about eight years old, she hoisted a Turkish flag onto the antenna of the family station wagon. “This way, when we park in the mall, I’ll always be able to find the car,” she explained. “Who else is going to have a Turkish flag?” And so, for several years, my family traveled around like some rogue embassy, the sickle-moon of a faraway nation fluttering above as we drove, motorcade style, on a mission to find a new set of bed sheets.
Years later, I sprawled across a beanbag chair in my high-school library, studying People magazine. Eleven kids—about my age—had been smothered at a Who concert. As I examined each of their photos, lined up yearbook-style on the glossy pages, I was gripped by an uncharitable disdain for those kids. I might be an oddball, some might say a geek, but at least I wouldn’t have been caught dead in a stadium-rock hall in Ohio, wearing feathered hair and designer jeans. Those kids had in fact been caught dead in just such circumstances. And that seemed like the real tragedy.
At the time, of course, I thought I had developed such opinions on my own. But now it’s clear to me that my devotion to the uncrowded and off-season, the underground and the strange, derived from my mother’s obsession with traffic. Always, always avoid the crowds.
A decade ago, my father lay in a rented hospital bed in my parent’s house, dying. My mother and sister and I took care of him, circling around the room fetching Chopin CDs or hand lotion or morphine—anything to mute his pain. It was late November, that stretch of days that dangles between Thanksgiving and Christmas. Even if your father isn’t dying, it’s easy to feel awful in that ditch between the holidays, with the frayed leaves eddying around your feet. It’s A Wonderful Life plays round-the-clock on cable, mocking you with repeated visions of Jimmy Stewart cocooned by his brood of devoted children. Psychiatrists’ schedules fill up. Everyone is convinced that everyone else is going home to a happy family.
That year, it seemed I was always driving to the grocery store to fetch cans of protein drink, which was all that Dad could keep down. “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” echoed down the produce aisles. Signs wished the shoppers happy holidays and joy to the world. The food itself seemed like just more gaudy holiday decoration—the dollops of turkey and the confetti-ed cookies and the cranberry sauce, which would roll out of its can like a giant ruby. Dad would never, ever get to eat any of this stuff again.
He died in early December. While other people were decorating their trees, we shopped for a headstone. After the funeral, we sprawled in the living room too tired to put away the cheese plates. “Girls,” my mother said to us, “let’s not have Christmas this year.” We’d always been fuzzy about holidays, moving around dates to suit our needs, but I had no idea that you could cancel Christmas entirely. My mother did know this. That is her genius. She never seemed so brave to me as at that moment when she—wearing slippers and a sweatshirt, pale, exhausted—decided we didn’t have to do what other families did. At that moment, she hoisted a flag over us more exotic and beautiful than the Turkish moon. The three of us, she seemed to say, would become a little country all our own. No apologies. No regrets. No rush hour.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Pagan Kennedy is the author of ten books in a variety of genres—from cultural history to biography to the novel. A regular contributor to the Boston Globe, she has published articles in dozens of magazines and newspapers, including several sections of the New York Times. A biography titled Black Livingstone made the New York Times Notable list and earned Massachusetts Book Award honors. Her most recent novel, Confessions of a Memory Eater, was featured in Entertainment Weekly as an “EW pick.” Another novel, Spinsters, was short-listed for the Orange Prize. She also has been the recipient of a Barnes and Noble Discover Award, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Fiction, and a Smithsonian Fellowship for science writing.
www.pagankennedy.net
www.dangerousjoy.com
The Dangerous Joy of Dr. Sex and Other True Stories Page 16