by Marge Piercy
“But your father, wasn’t he still alive? Had he left you?”
“No. He was the quiet kind of alcoholic who goes along for years and once in a while he has a stupid accident and gets fired, but mostly he manages. He wasn’t a noisy drunk, he didn’t beat anybody up. He was just quietly drunk almost all the time. He liked to be oblivious, that was how he coped. But he couldn’t cope with four kids. The school started complaining because we were missing a lot and the social workers descended like flies. We were managing. I mean, we were used to managing. We made our own meals. We used to put a lot of jam in the oatmeal and cook it up that way for breakfast—two cups water, one cup oatmeal and one cup jam. We had hot dogs and TV dinners and fish sticks. Gourmet cooks we weren’t, Les.” He put his hand on her knee, demanding her attention. “We’d wash the silverware and put it all in a pile on the table in the middle and everybody’d take what they wanted. We each got one sheet to roll up in. Things like that bothered the social worker pests. That we didn’t make the beds. Everybody got a sheet and a blanket and we slept in our rolls. We were into cowboys. We called it our bedroll. Even the little kids could manage to roll up their bedroll and unroll it at night.”
They were pursuing Jefferson along the river in Wyandotte, past the North Works of old Wyandotte Chemical (now BASF), past the trim rows of the turn of the century houses, dark-stained brick-red, past the new condominiums on the river, past the South Works, where the air began to be painted with stench, where the old houses were wooden and run down and closer together, downriver. They rolled up the windows. Politely she pried his hand off her knee. “That’s the foot that works the accelerator, Bernie.”
“See, we took care of the old man, instead of him taking care of us. We were dirty and shabby but we got ourselves fed and dressed and pretty much we managed to attend school. When we got colds or flu, we took care of each other. Every night we made some kind of supper and in the morning breakfast, and we ate everything on the floor by the TV set. Every few days when we ran out of plates we did the dishes. Once a week we’d put all the garbage out. The neighbors were bugged by us too.… I think basically all the adults around were freaked out that we were obviously managing. I think they really hated that we didn’t need them. It made us outlaws.”
They had passed Grosse Isle, where the comfortable houses stared back at the industrial shore, and he was getting more and more excited. He ran the window down again and leaned out. A flat landscape. Between the road and the river a maze of small waterways ran, some called brooks, some, rivers, some called simply drains. Nothing was elegant here. The houses were plain, the marinas places where working-class families kept a small motor-boat Occasional farms appeared, but the factories and mills dominated the landscape still, the twin stacks of the Enrico Fermi Nuclear Power Plant sticking up over the marshes to the south like blind spires of a warped cathedral. She realized that the river had given way to the other lake, Erie. Occasionally, crossing one of the railroads that carved up the flatlands, she caught a glimpse of it looking soft and blue under the balmy sky, although she knew it was dead as a beaker of sulphuric acid. It had been killed before she was born, when her own lake, Michigan, had only been beginning to die.
“Okay! Yes. Turn here!” He sat forward, his hands spread white-knuckled on the dashboard. “I left here a ratty desperate punk. Raw, stupid, illiterate. Right again. There.”
Past wooden houses, a stream where men were fishing with poles and square nets. “For catching suckers. Trashy fish that feed along the bottom.” He smiled at her and she smiled back. “Why am I so happy?” he asked her.
“Happiness is basically irrational.”
“Is unhappiness irrational too?”
“No!” She laughed.
“I do think you believe that. That misery is natural.”
“They separated you? Your family?”
“Into foster homes. At first I was with my little brother Mike. After I got into trouble, we were never together again. I wasn’t allowed to see him.”
“Do you know where they are? Do you ever see them?” They were bouncing along a dirt washboard road now.
“I have a fantasy of tracking them all down. Finding them. Collecting them. I was never back here till now. Somehow I want to be more … accomplished, successful. I want to show up in a car like this one, money in my pocket. Then I’ll collect them all and we’ll live together. Sure, it’s pure bullshit fantasy. Probably we’d have nothing to say to each other. But, Les, the fantasy is strong.” He leaned forward, grabbing her arm. “Park! Park here. Come on. We have to get out. We have to go on foot.”
Obediently she found a fairly dry clay patch where she could get off the road without getting into the wetter-looking clay slough beyond. She locked the car and tied her workshirt around her waist. The sun was warm on her body through the Gertrude Stein tee shirt. The air felt thick and damp. It was obviously chemical, but after the city it had an odor of something natural—green and growing things, waters in which something lived. Sniffing, looking sharply ahead, Bernie strode back and forth impatiently. Then he darted ahead down a path along a stream edge that seemed raised a little between the marsh and the stream itself. It ran too straight to be natural. At some point the drain had been dredged and straightened and the banks heaped up. The only obstacles they came to were smaller creeks feeding in, which they had to leap across, unless there was a board for a bridge someone had left there. Sometimes she followed Bernie’s thin impatient back across a half-rotted plank. Sometimes he jumped the creek and plunged on without looking to see if she followed.
As they came out on a gravel road, Bernie turned right, trotting. She caught up and they jogged side by side. They crossed a small bridge and he struck off again through a woody field. How green it was. In spite of the rusty garbage, the aluminum beer cans, the broken glass that underlay the weeds, how green it was. Everything was leafed out already. She was trotting behind him in a delirium at running outside, movement in the free air, at being among green and wet and growing creatures. A debased landscape but still a living one. Once or twice she leapt high in the air behind him.
It was flat country. Winding waterways, small houses, little flat bridges, train tracks, junkyards and dusty stores, aging gas stations where they worked on aging trucks, reeds and cattails, marshy mazes, scum and bubbles, oaks and poplars. Along the road’s edge viburnum was blooming in flat white sprays. Not like her own lakeshore, near Ludington. That was all hill and dune, scrub pine and blueberry. There no factories stood, but the busy tourists came in the summer and left the boarded-up motels and restaurants and miniature golf and petting farms by the side of the road empty and stark the rest of the year. Yet something was familiar. Rivers flowing to a lake you could not see across, whose storms were a fact of life. The sense of being marginal places, the margin of an inland sea, the margin of the economy where unemployment was normal.
He stopped so suddenly as they came out of the weeds on a broken stretch of sidewalk bordering a narrow asphalt road that she would have run full tilt into him if her reflexes had been duller. “It’s gone,” he said.
Ahead of them was a burned-out bowling alley. KEEP OUT, the signs said. The fire had gutted it some time ago, a year, two years. The scorched wood was weathering.
“I can’t believe it. That was my house. I lived there.”
“In the bowling alley?”
“There wasn’t any bowling alley! There was a house. A gray house all stuck together. It looked like a farmhouse even if it wasn’t, all those sheds added on. A lean-to on one side, a room stuck on the back. Then came the Framing’s house, then us, then Stosenko’s. They’re all gone.”
“Riverview Family Bowling,” she read off what remained of the facade. “Well, they sure had a real fire.”
“Was it real? Probably they went broke in this godfor-saken shithole and set it on fire for the insurance.” He clutched himself across his chest, standing first on one foot and then on the other.
; “You wanted terribly to see the house?”
“But it’s not here. Maybe it never was.” He turned and grasped her by the upper arms. “Maybe I made it all up. I’ve lied so much. You know how much I lie. How can I tell any more? Maybe I come from San Diego and I don’t remember. Maybe my mother didn’t die and I don’t remember. Maybe she’s alive in New Jersey. Maybe I’m the one who’s dead.”
She let him shake her for a moment. Then she unpeeled his hands and held them together steadily, meeting his gaze and trying to calm him. “It was torn down. The bowling alley is probably a few years old. You haven’t been here for six, seven years, right?”
He leaned on her. “But it never occurred to me it wouldn’t be here. There’s nothing, not even a foundation. Even the alder tree, the poplar. There aren’t even the trees. Not the bushes, the ground, nothing.”
“Let’s go. Other things will be here. Other things you remember. Come on, show me around. Keep walking.” She pried him along, dragging him away from the wreck of MVERVIEW FAMILY BOWLING.
He did not speak till they had passed several small ramshackle houses, one with a boat a man was caulking on a Saturday late morning. “You’re right, there’s got to be something.” He stopped in front of a vacant lot. In the yard to the right a big brown dog barked at them, straining at a chain pegged in the ground. To the left stood a grocery whose windows were clogged with old soft drink advertisements and the posters from last year’s church bazaars and rummage sales. Each building was surrounded by a little wooden and cement block dike. Flooding? “Yes, this way.” Again he was off, bolting like a rabbit for cover into the thickets, on a path that led kitty-corner between the house and the store and disappeared into scrubby growth.
They came out of the bushes on a rickety dock. Just off it a rowboat had sunk. One still floating was padlocked by a rusty chain to a corner of the dock. “Look! This is still here. Wait.”
He knelt and with his pocketknife started working on the padlock. Nervously she looked around but saw no one. The dog had stopped barking, out of sight back on the road. She could hear the distant whine of traffic on the highway and the mew of gulls going over.
“I’m sure you can find a can to bail with,” he said without looking up.
She had plenty of choice on the shore. When she brought a paint can back, he had the locks off and he was already in the rowboat fitting the oars into the oarlocks. “Take off your shoes and bring mine with you as you climb in.”
His sneakers were on the dock. Giving him the paint can, she sat down on the edge of the wobbly dock and took off her own boots, handed them over too, and then stepped with a great lurch down into the boat. “Isn’t this technically piracy?”
“When they catch us, they can hang us. It’ll take them a while to float the sister ship to this one.” He pointed over the bow to the sunken boat. “We don’t have to bring it back here. It belongs to the guy who owns the grocery store. I’m sure it’s the same jerk. What other loser would buy a sink like that? I hate him. He wouldn’t give us credit. He was a shit. He called us drunken Canucks behind our backs and charged ten cents more on everything. I’m glad to swipe his boat.… He used to shoot birds in the marsh. Ducks, I guess. We used to always be scared he would shoot us too. When we were out on the water and we saw him, we used to hide. Mostly it was a game. I don’t remember him ever actually taking a shot at us. But he was the enemy.”
“See, now it’s real to you.” She would never steal a rowboat, but she could not help enjoying enormously that he did, involving her without choice. She worked so hard to be respectable, to get the scholarship, to get the assistantship, to get the fellowship, to get and keep the job, it was a relief to be loosed into chaos and mischief.
“Ah, Les, I could make him up too. But, yeah, I’m happy again. Out here things have to be the way they were. Nothing that couldn’t thrive in pure pollution was alive when I was a kid, so it’s not like I would come back and posture and say, Jesus, look at them bottles and cans, wow, what ecological destruction. This place has been a big garbage can for sixty years.”
She sat in the bow being ferried, and that felt odd. “Don’t you want me to row? Come on, let me. Then you can look around better.”
“I want to row first. I’ll let you, don’t worry. You have to keep up the bailing, this thing leaks like crazy and it wouldn’t be fun to sink. The bottom here is muck. I mean you really sink in it. We had sicknesses all the time, probably from hanging around on the water so much. It’s like swimming in shit. So bail! I’ll let you have your turn, never fear, because I’ll get tired. I’m not in such wonderful shape as you are and I’m bound to feel this unusually healthy exercise and start groaning and complaining. Then you can take over, soon enough, soon enough, my dear, and then you can row until you give out, probably never, but now bail away.… Didn’t I let you drive this morning? Just because it was your boss’s car. Old George. I wonder about him. Are you sure he never tried to ball you?… I don’t believe in the altruistic motives of men, none of us have any.… We’re almost into the maze. I love this area, a watery jungle. I love it later in the year when the reeds grow up and hide you. All mazy and lost, streams and backwaters of the Huron. We’ll probably get lost. Why not? Why shouldn’t we lose ourselves?… I stole a book once called The Floating World from the pad of a university type who picked me up for sex. It was about Japanese society in the eighteenth century, and I was terribly disappointed. All painters and prostitutes and nothing at all to do with water and boats.… This is my floating world. Can you imagine how weird it is out here when the wind blows hard and the sky and water are iron gray and everything shooshes and moans?… Or when the fog comes in thick and yellow, warm almost, muffling everything, magnifying sounds.… It’s hot out here. I think I’ll take off my shirt.”
She reclined in the bow, bailing, sometimes trailing her arm in the water. The cold water slid to and fro in the boat, lapping at her bare feet. She would have liked to take off her shirt also, but she was not wearing anything under it. She was annoyed that she could not do so in front of him, but she could not. She rolled up her jeans, and the sun lay on her skin warm and palpable. She felt as if she could lick it off, she could drink it slowly like orange-pineapple juice. Everything in her was slowing. Yes, she had been running for days, for weeks, for years. She had been running all the way from her sandy windswept house in Ludington. She had been running since the day at sixteen when she had fallen in lust for Penny. She had been running since Miss Greening had saved her from her class fate by involving her in school and then in college plans. She wanted to lie down under the sun among the reeds in a floating world and be baked and lolled and lulled and lullabyed into oblivion.
“When we’re happy, I boil over, I bubble. You sprawl. You get still like a cat in the sun.”
She nodded, smiling.
“Do me one favor. Take off that wretched rubber band and let your red, red hair loose. It would be so splendid in the sun.”
“If you and Honor don’t stop picking on me about my hair, I’ll cut it all off. I’ll shave my head.”
“Ah, that would be exciting,” he crooned. “Ascetic and sensual at once. People would always be wanting to finger your scalp.”
“I can’t win.” After a few minutes she took off the rubber band. He rowed slowly, and sometimes the current carried them onward almost without rowing. Other times they were held in a backwater, and if he stopped and rested the oars they drifted so gradually they appeared to remain still. Once or twice he backed them into a dead end where the boat could not penetrate the reeds. She lost all sense of orientation. The sun felt hot and she was drowsy and calm. The sun licked her arms and legs, hot and a little caustic. She could not even regret Honor was not with them. She felt a pang of guilt at how thoroughly she had forgotten how the day had begun; but she could not imagine Honor sitting happily in the rowboat with water sloshing to and fro, she could not quite imagine it. No, she was freed from everyone here, from ceaseless lonely wan
ting, from Val, from George, from her department, from Honor. She was free as a dirty gull circling over the reeds. Her eyes half closed. They closed completely. Warm and lapping. Water world.
eleven
They hit with a crunch and she woke. For a moment consciousness hurt. She was startled, her head full of bees. Her eyes itched.
“You were sleeping.” He raised her by the armpits. “Wake up. We’ve arrived!”
She stumbled from the rowboat onto a low clay shore where he had grounded the boat. To moor it he wound the rusty chain around a sapling. “Where are we? Where have we arrived?” She looked around for houses.
“I found my island. I’d about given it up.”
“Island?” It was brushy and low, only a couple of feet higher than the water.
“Gaudalcanal. Come on.” He led off through the alders.
“Where are you going?”
“Follow me. And the path.”
“What path?” But she followed his thin back. He had his jacket slung over his shoulders and hers as well. “Wait. My feet have turned tender. Let me put my shoes on.” She went back to the boat for them. “What did you call it? Guadalcanal? Name of a battle in World War Two, Pacific theater. Yes. Solomon Islands. Coconuts and gold.… See, how lucky to have a historian along.”
“My old man fought there. The family story was that he got malaria fighting in the jungle on Guadalcanal and that’s how come he started drinking. It was romantic-sounding, the place where Papa started to drink. So that’s what we named this island.”