I’m not sure when we set our hearts on it—late at night in the stopped white clock of a Midwest winter, perhaps, while snow laughed around the house. The wind that flew over to us from Kansas always seemed angry that it no longer had a sea to beat around, to whip up, to form. It must have sent into our ears the thought of going there. Key West in my memory was faint gold, ink-outlined, and had an overspilling treasure chest open at the middle of it, as if it were drawn on a kidskin map I had carried folded in my pocket since forever. We talked about it for a year, not really believing it would happen, but then I sold my book and bought three tickets and told my mother she would sit next to the window on the way.
“Oh!” She clasped her hands over the travel guide we were perusing, with its glossy pictures of lighthouses and men in go-go shorts. “The only time I’ve ever seen the tropics is when I went on the Republican Cruise.”
Oh my god, I had almost forgotten about the Republican Cruise. Soon after I ran away with Jason, my father took it into his head that my mother deserved a holiday—on a neoconservative ocean liner. The featured speaker was to be a woman who once wrote a whole book defending the internment of the Japanese during World War II. The food, we are left to assume, was the flesh of the poor, grilled to order. Shortly before they were set to depart, however, Mom took to her bed, pale and fighting for air.
It was not that my mother seemed physically indestructible. She frequently reminded us that she could be killed by so little as a bite of apple, because what was a healthy snack to others was a lethal poison to her. She did seem indomitable, though, powering through life on caffeine and a desire to mother the world, never held back by her limited body. It was stunning to see her felled, breathless, struggling as if she were on top of a mountain, subjected by doctors to dozens of baffled tests. It turned out to be histoplasmosis, also known as Darling’s disease, which is caused by a fungus that lives in bird and bat droppings and mostly attacks the lungs. She was exposed while cleaning out the barns and attics at the old family farm with her usual terrifying thoroughness. “Imagine,” she said, on receiving the diagnosis, “that the whole time I was scrubbing, I was also breathing toxic spores.”
When I came back to visit her in the hospital, I kept sending my glance up to the ceiling, to make sure there were no cracks in the plaster. A world without Karen was not really imaginable. How would the rest of us remember to be careful? Where would alertness go, where discernment, where extreme pleasure in the colored silks and cottons of existence? Where the ability to choose the best peach, would it be returned to the tree? Where would the 20/20 vision and the red hair go? Would they be released out to the wild again—back out to the crispness of the view, and the wind that wanted something to run its hands through? No, it was not really to be thought of, so we spoke of other things. Sitting at her bedside, one hand on each thigh, my father said worriedly, “I just hope you’re well enough to go on the Republican Cruise.”
“Don’t worry about me, Greg,” she croaked, raising barely one whitecapped wave in the sheet. The lack of feistiness was what really concerned us. When my mother cannot summon the strength to contradict, argue, or shout medical acronyms at you, the situation is serious. Gradually, however, her old self began to stir and grow strong, and soon she was back to interrupting everything we said with the joyful, life-affirming word NO. She recovered just in the nick of time, though she was never able to gasp as deeply as she had before, and sailed the Republican seas with my father at her side.
Later she would look back and reflect, “I was so lucky to get one really rare, deadly illness in my life—AND I got to make puns about it, since it was the batshit disease.”
“Maybe one day you’ll get an illness so rare they’ll name it after you,” I said.
She searched the horizon dreamily. “That would be nice.”
• • •
THE NIGHT BEFORE HER BIRTHDAY, we pack our suitcases and speed to Kansas City and sleep over at the rectory in the upstairs room—a necessity, since we’ll need to wake at the break of dawn in order to catch our flight. I despise the dawn more than any other time, and wish that I were able to “break it” once and for all, but when the alarm rings I actually tumble out of bed in my eagerness to rise up and start walking around the clock. The year has been long. I feel like a single particle standing in the middle of my own ghost, I resemble a log of haunted cookie dough, and I need to be cured of myself. Mom and Jason, when I greet them downstairs, look just the same, pale and expectant and munching tropical nut mixes to get themselves in the mood. “Have a good time, baby!” my father calls out cheerfully as we leave. “Protect your mother from the lesbians!”
As if. That would be against my code. Besides, she’s not in any danger. If my mother took the Gay Inkblot Test, all she would see is roadkill.
On the plane, my mother studies the safety card for a long time—perhaps too long. She lavishes especial attention on a picture of a baby wearing a life preserver, thrashing its fat helpless arms. She sets her lips in a determined line. That cartoon baby isn’t going to drown if SHE has anything to say about it, and when she gets it back on land, she’s going to make it lose weight. In the row in front of us, a man opens up a book called Bait for Satan and settles into his reading with a contented sigh. Satan will not bite his worm today. My mother sits next to the window for the whole flight, gazing down raptly, waiting, waiting, and then tragedy strikes: the first glimpse of the warm and glittering gulf makes her realize she has to go to the bathroom. “Welcome to my life,” she says, lurching down the aisle—not sarcastic at all, as if she really is welcoming us to it.
• • •
THE BEACH HOUSE is very near the ocean, and decorated in all the shades of feminine hygiene. A picture of a phantasmagoric grouper, arching his back in salty ecstasy and pinning us with one sequin eye, fills almost one entire wall. It satisfies all our desires, our hopes, our fantasies—all except the soap.
“Do NOT use the soap in here,” my mother says, hunched insanely at the kitchen sink. “It has torn apart my hands.”
We orient ourselves at once to the fish market and the wine shop. The shy realization comes to us that we are allowed to eat outside, and after that we plan picnics on the porch every night, with oranges and crackers and conch ceviche. “Can you recommend something?” my mother asks the man at the wine shop counter, with an air of conspiracy. “Something crisp and not too sweet. My palate has changed somewhat over the years—Veuve Clicquot tastes like shit to me now.” We carry all our purchases home past the boatyards, where the sails are as white and pointed as a pine forest cut out of paper, and past the performance artists who balance upside down on unicycles and spit fire.
“Why is it so free,” my mother wonders.
“It’s the southernmost point of the United States,” I tell her. “We’re on the verge of escaping our borders and pitching headfirst into the sea. It’s why people come here to write novels and be gay.”
When she calls up my father the second evening and tells him how scented the breeze is and how succulent the seafood, his voice turns hard-edged. He is already missing that unifying force that keeps his life sound, sweet, and together; that spirit at work in his universe like a god of love. “You’re not making me feel very good right now,” he snaps across space and time, and she hastens to hang up the phone, her cheeks reddened and her eyes very bright. Something in her face falls, and Jason and I busy ourselves building it back up again with jokes, just as my brothers and sisters and I did when we were young. Scooting closer to her on the couch, putting my head on her shoulder, I am visited by the same minor despair I have felt so often before. “I can only write down what you say,” I tell my father silently, tired of editing him with such childlike vigilance, of choosing only the quotes that show his brightest side. “Please, give me something. Be a human being.”
“You know how he is,” my mother says, almost to herself. “He likes me to
be there.”
• • •
WE WALK MILE AFTER MILE on lengthening legs, as if released from cages. Jason and my mother have convinced themselves that there is an Ernest Hemingway look-alike convention in town this week, and they can’t be talked out of it. “Look at all the men with big white beards!” they gesture frantically as we pass the overflowing bars on Duval Street.
“I think that’s just because they’re old,” I say, with tact. And possibly drunk as well, and asking women to call them Papa. Still, in this beating sun, it’s good to think about the nearly stupid genius of Hemingway, who had the moral sound of a man who had memorized the Bible. When I see him, I do not see him at any of his masculine tasks—not shooting elephants or skinning leopards or running with the black lathering bulls. I picture him with an airy crystal box in front of him, the shape of a pulpit or a coffin, and all his books emerging through that, and coming out the rectangle that books should be.
One jumbo Hemingway, rollicking down the middle of the sidewalk, nearly sends me crashing into a store window. Straightening myself against the glass, I behold a T-shirt printed with a yellow dog licking his own rectum, underlined with the legend I CAN’T BELIEVE IT’S NOT BUTTER! Who says all the great writers are dead? My mother scans the various T-shirt slogans with fierce distaste, recalling the PLEASE BLOW ME debacle of yesteryear and wishing for her scissors. Another Hemingway sashays by and gives me an exaggerated, painful-looking wink, as if a fishing hook just flew into his open eye.
“Why not a Wallace Stevens look-alike convention? Why not a hundred lesbians dressed as Elizabeth Bishop?” I grumble. But no, it’s Hemingway who’s everywhere, dogging our steps, smiling back at us from every grizzled head. In the gift shop of the treasure museum, among the blurred pewter pieces of eight and fake emeralds with cool blue fire at their hearts, I pick up a book of Hemingway quotes about writing—displayed between a book of Hemingway quotes about fishing and a book of Hemingway quotes about big-game hunting; apparently the man never uttered anything but quotes—and read:
Forget your personal tragedy. We are all bitched from the start and you especially have to be hurt like hell before you can write seriously.
I laugh out loud. Bitched from the start. Good old Hemingway. The old motherbitching tit-sucker of a she-bastard, or whatever the hell he would say.
“This is what happens when the president makes cigars legal,” my mother says, shaking her head at yet another Hemingway as he shoulders past us, not dead at all, put back together by that firm restoring wind from off the sea. I do not tell her that Hemingway smoked a pipe, not cigars. I also do not tell her that he learned to write those bold declarative sentences at The Kansas City Star.
Better to visit a writer’s house or a writer’s grave? I have always wondered. I have no idea where Hemingway is buried (in a bear’s stomach, maybe?), but the house is here: terraced, fanned by palms, overrun by six-toed cats. The walls are white space and the windows let the air in and the guides set down one true sentence after another. People crowd up the stairs to his study and snap identical pictures of the place the thinking happened; there has never been a room so haunted by the specter of a human head. When we walk out through the iron gates, we see a woman across the street selling drilled coconuts under the shade of an umbrella. They cost four dollars apiece, and we buy two of them, not realizing that they’re bottomless and we won’t reach the end of them no matter how much we drink of their light, astringent juice. As we take our first sips from red straws, the woman tells us that coconut water is the “universal donor, and is used for blood transfusions in times of war!” Improbable, but of course it turns out to be true.
• • •
WHEN WE LIVED in the Sailfish Capital of the World, Jason and I used to drive down to the Keys whenever we could scratch together the money, once every year or so. Those were some of the first vacations we ever took alone. Next to the sea we were submerged, and what we said in the middle of the night did not matter, it was just breathing half turned into language, silvery bubbles that wobbled up through the depths. It was liminal, it felt liminal—we washed in and out between two states, back and forth through an arch of marble, slow-moving flesh, mermaid hair, hips that went with the waves. Now, in the middle of the night, I listen to the quiet roar and think how Jason once called long hair “mermaid disease,” and smile. A rain sketches softly down. I love the water.
• • •
ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, we drive to the beach. My mother never swims, so I bring along one of the romance novels from the vacation house, called If He’s Dangerous. A man who might be dangerous, but you won’t know whether he is or not unless you read the book? It’s written to order for her. She regards the nearly nude Scotsman on the cover with disgust, and then her phone rings. She picks it up and purpose floods back into her face; someone needs her.
“Listen, Christi. Listen to me,” she says after a long minute. “Do you know how many kids don’t want to be potty-trained because they’re afraid of pooping snakes?” Another minute. “More than you could ever guess.” Laughing, Jason and I escape toward the white and musical line of the tide.
The light on the water is insubstantial as phosphenes. It recalls the pressure of fingertips on closed eyelids, and the appearance of the bright and ordered components of the universe, which turn and whirl and fit their teeth into each other. About a hundred feet out, there is a loose assembly of people standing on an island of piled-up coral. When they’re not upright they’re on all fours, peering down into the tide pools. Jason and I swim to join them, and find that they’re mostly children, clambering over the rocks like monkeys. Their instincts radiate out from their bodies. They do not fall, they do not slip. They are balanced by their vanished tails.
The leader is a teenager in a bright swimsuit, with reddish-brown hair straggling down her neck like kelp. She put on mascara this morning and now her eyes are ringed with it. She greets me with her hands on her hips.
“You have a long arm,” she observes. “Can you reach down between the rocks and grab those goggles?”
I’m gratified she noticed—my long arms are my one beauty. After a short hesitation, I squat hulkingly on the jagged gray edge of the island and reach down until I feel my fingertips brush something man-made.
“Hey!” I say, and offer them back to the boy who lost them.
“Hey!” he answers, happy.
“I am from Toronto,” the girl tells me, “and those kids over there are from Hershey, Pennsylvania.” The boy whose goggles I rescued informs me that the whole town smells like cocoa beans when the wind is up. Savannah used to smell of paper being pressed, a much redder smell than you might expect, a smell like canned blood.
It is unexpected, but we don’t fall either. Perhaps we are met halfway by the large secret brains mounded here and there on the rocks, glowing with their green ideas. Certainly there are brains in nature. Certainly sometimes they reach out and do our thinking for us. We clamber as nimbly as the children. The dead coral stamps pink symbols on the palms of our hands and the soles of our feet. Great gray fans spread out in it, and small single-chambered personalities. Each floweret represents a breath. I am working out a way to describe the living black and moss and jade of the reef underwater, like a sea turtle’s back. If I were experimental, I would write the story by listing one unbelievable color after another: blue, blue, blue, pink and gold and bronze for flesh, a lemon-yellow twist, a deep rich darkening into black, and then the white of the moon pouring down.
“If you look down there, you can see a crab,” the girl announces, and sure enough, the tip of the crab’s claw is pointing at us like a ruby solitaire. She shows us spiny purple urchins and fish striped with tigerish yellow, and tells us there was even a rumor of stingrays earlier. “Give me your hand,” she says, and helps me toward her, and her hand feels smooth and strong and porous. I see at once that she belongs to the tribe of Interested P
eople. She has no self-consciousness; there are facts to find out.
“Where are you from?” she asks me, frank sunlight on her face, but that’s a question I haven’t been able to answer all week long.
On the beach is a long line of girls flipping themselves from heads to tails like doubloons. My mother used to call them “sun worshippers,” and I took that literally—I believed to a ripe old age that sun worshipping was still a religion. My mother kneels next to them in her flowered swimsuit, taking picture after picture of the sea. What she wants is to be left alone to take one thousand pictures of a beautiful thing, and then, to round out her happiness, one unflattering shot of her child’s ass.
“My mom is over there too,” the girl says, waving a vague hand toward the pine-protected stretch of sand, as if it’s the land that’s shifting, inconstant, and slippery, and not the sea. Why aren’t you on the beach getting a tan? I want to ask her, but I wouldn’t have been either. I’d have been out here too, with the rocks and the things that become rocks, out in the mindless liquid center of a minute, between the back and forth of the breeze, between the immediate and the longing for permanence, the gulls and the hot stones, the feathers that want to become fossils.
The girl stands very straight at the top of the pile and surveys everything around her with the fresh completeness of a discoverer, who has just felt the right key slide into her lock, the last piece pressed into her jigsaw. She stands and speaks with the sunlight fearlessly. Her ear, tilted up to it, is transparent. She bends toward the water, to get a closer look at some flashing silver school, and I watch her all the while in silence. Part of what you have to figure out in this life is, Who would I be if I hadn’t been frightened? What hurt me, and what would I be if it hadn’t?
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