I had to use most of my might to get her up and off the floor of the boat. Naked, Grandmalia probably weighed a ton, but her new dress and its bustles and nipped waist and yards of heavy fabric and lace added a good thirty pounds to her. It was the heaviest dress she ever wore, and my mother and I were wearing ones just like it. We had an independent seamstress make them for us for the day we arrived on the island. It was the day we had all been waiting for, and my mother wanted to make a good first impression.
The boat had reached halfway across the bay by the time I returned to my bench, sat down, and caught my breath. I had to write about the angelic birds. I had to write about everything, for there was nothing I loved more than to write. But the sun, now larger and higher, was bringing the water to life, and I couldn’t reel my eyes in. They wanted to float forever in that water that God so carefully gathered into one place—the bay. It was green over there and blue over here! Turquoise surrounding the island! And in spots, the crests were glistening in silver as if Thomas Edison himself had turned on the switch to his electricity, setting light to the Gulf of Mexico. The water was a color I had never known water to be.
The pond behind our farm in Kentucky when we left had been a muddy color, and the lake on the way to town, a crap-like brown. The stream behind the school was rust-colored while the river that rolled past the cemetery, a clear gray. I thought the clear gray-like was nice-looking water.
But the San Carlos Bay surrounding us now sparkled like a sea of crystal, and it was clearer than any bath I had ever drawn for myself. I hadn’t even drunk anything so clean, except maybe a sip of gin once, but just thirsting for the water around the boat made me feel tipsier than any sips of gin ever did. And this water was teeming with living creatures and they were doing what God had originally told them to do, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas.”
“They say Sanibel is a winterless paradise,” Abigail muttered softly while squeezing my hand, “and that I will never have to hide from winter again.”
“I think it might be true, Mama. I think it might truly be a paradise.”
Lydia
When the boat touched the dock at Punta Rassa, I turned off the flashlight and closed the journal, still feeling a little shame for reading someone’s diary, as if I was a vulture, one of those birds that pick away at a carcass and then fly off with a piece of it.
I was also disappointed. I didn’t want to be leaving. I’d rather be her, a girl arriving at the island, than me, a girl leaving, and I’d much rather be on a boatload of women than one of men. Ava, her mother, and grandmother were much better company than my father who had already stepped off the boat without offering me any help.
I handed the flashlight to the captain and then glanced back across the bay toward the island that earlier was so green it looked as if chlorophyll had rained down upon it but which now I could no longer see. It had vanished into night. I thought about the boatload of women arriving to a place they had never seen and hoping it would meet their expectations.
“Yes,” I whispered as I clutched Ava’s journal to my chest. “I don’t know about any paradise, but it is indeed utopia, same thing, I think. Your mother’s eyes won’t be disappointed.”
I wished they could hear my reassuring whisper echoing across water and time, but I don’t think they needed to. They already believed in a paradise before ever seeing it. Some people have such a way of doing that—of believing in things they cannot see.
My father was like that. He was a man of faith. He was faithful he’d be a millionaire within two years and CEO of the bank in five and that his investments would quadruple by the time he’s fifty. No one could tell him otherwise. His faith was too strong, and we all feared his kind of faith.
“Lydia,” I heard him call out. “I waited long enough to get off that island, and now I’m waiting for you. What are you doing daydreaming at a time like this?”
“Sorry, sir,” I said, hopping off the boat to catch up with him. He was already climbing into yet another limousine, not bothering to give me a hand. I said nothing as I climbed into the backseat. I knew that when work was on his mind, my words bothered him like pestering mosquitoes. It’s when work wasn’t on his mind that I became his part-time job. He was training me to become a well-adjusted American woman, future wife of someone wealthy and important.
As the car headed down a dark road, I watched the bay out my right window. I thought about my own life and feared that it was ending before ever getting started. That doesn’t mean I felt as if I were about to die, not this young, but that the kind of life I envisioned for myself was ending right there—going no further than a vision. It got me to thinking that maybe that girl Ava, the one who kept the journal, knew some secret truths about life. After all, she had both a mother and grandmother to pass such information on to her. And maybe it was true what she had written in her journal, that a girl is as hearty as a perennial flower and as deep as the sea and all she must do is reach into her innermost depths and there she will find a new beginning.
I didn’t know what lay deep within me. I never went there before. I knew my outer layer—the clothes I wore, my hairstyles, the miniscule amount of makeup that I painted onto my face. And I knew my surface layer just under my skin—I knew boys gave me hives, and my father made me cry when he missed dinners and holidays. And sitting in a quiet church made me laugh with nervousness. I didn’t go often, only when I slept over at a friend’s house, but something about the quietness of it made my body shake from trying to hold in an uncontrollable burst of laughter. Maybe because I was playing a role that wasn’t me, pretending I was a churchgoing girl and knew what to do when in reality my father and I never went. I knew my surface well. I was like any girl my age, wanting to fit in and be liked and hide anything about myself that might not be accepted.
If I were to dive deep within myself, I’m not sure I’d find much, I decided when I could no longer see the bay out my window. And when I noticed myself yawning uncontrollably, I scooted across the leathery backseat and rested my head on my father’s shoulder.
V
THE NEXT MORNING I could hardly wait to read more of the journal. But our morning was rushed, and I sat too close to my father to read it on the plane. It wasn’t until we landed at the airport in Chicago and I climbed into the backseat of the limo that I felt secure opening it up. Our usual driver was still on his vacation, like we were supposed to be on ours. My father and the temporary driver got along fine and once they engaged in conversation, I knew my reading would go unnoticed.
I had at least a half hour before my windows would come to life with the familiar sounds and sights of the windy city, so I opened the journal and began to read where I had left off the night before.
Ava
I stared straight ahead at the island looming before us, hoping it would meet our expectations up close. My mother had her hands clenched together as if she were praying, but her eyes were fantasizing instead.
She did her best to be a godly woman. When she turned sad in the winter, she believed it was Satan taking hold of her and she viewed our exodus out of Kentucky as spiritual. After all, it was a traveling minister in the general store talking about a “healing paradise” that prompted our journey in the first place. Abigail had overheard him describing Sanibel to a group of people, and that day she returned home so obsessed she could talk of nothing but her desire to find this island for months on end. My father and I agreed that finding it and moving there might be our only chance at salvaging her wilting spirit.
“Do you think we’ll find any flowers on the island? I need flowers,” Abigail said, her eyes blowing ahead with the spring breeze.
The boat captain’s eyes skipped over to my mama. “Do you know what the name ‘La Florida’ means?” he asked.
“No sir, we don’t,” she answered.
“It means ‘feast of flowers.’ The Spanish conquistador Juan Ponce de Leon came up with it for a reason. You’ll find lots
of flowers on the island.”
“Now isn’t that something. I heard Sanibel was nothing but a remote island of fishermen, farmers, and smudge pots,” Dahlia said from her seat at the front of the boat.
I whipped Dahlia with my eyes. I didn’t want anything negative shooting from her mouth. I then looked back at Abigail. Her eyes told me she liked what the captain had said about there being lots of flowers.
“I believe the captain,” Abigail whispered in my ear. “Men always know the world far better than a lady, and a proper lady knows when to be silent.” She was reviewing a truth she already taught me the day Stewart announced we were moving to Florida.
“Are you sure you’ll be able to find the state of Florida, Daddy?” I had asked that day. “You’ve never been out of the state of Kentucky.”
He didn’t answer, but my mama did. It was then that she first lectured to me that men know the world far better than any woman.
“We’ll find you flowers, Mama,” I said, giving her hand a solid squeeze.
And as the island grew larger before us, my heart pounded and my knees felt weak, for the sun was bringing out its brilliance and it looked as if the island had been dropped right out of Heaven. The sight of it all made me definitely know—not that I ever doubted—that there really is a Lord God Almighty. And before stepping foot onto the green fertile land flowing with coconut milk, I knew I had a decision to make. I could either collapse in grief on behalf of my father’s absence, or I could find courage and become the leader amongst us three women.
I hadn’t ever been the leader of any people before, just turkeys back on the farm, and that was challenging enough. They were far-roaming turkeys and so it was my job to lead the adventurous birds back to warmth and food. If it weren’t for me building the temporary fences that I did, they’d have wandered straight through the cornfields and wouldn’t have returned in time to be killed for the holidays.
My father, Stewart Witherton, liked holidays, and he liked winter. If asked, I don’t think he wanted to leave behind our home and farm in Kentucky and move to Florida’s little known West Coast. But his wife, when in her down days, had a beckoning way of luring him as if he were a spiny Florida lobster without any claws for fighting back. After Abigail had heard the traveling minister proclaim this island in Florida a healing paradise, he had no choice but to seek it out. I knew he was terrified that he might not ever find such an island. My father wasn’t the type to believe in anything he couldn’t see. When I had asked him if anyone in his line of ancestors had ever been to paradise, he looked at me blankly and said, “My great uncle Abraham. He’s the only one to my knowledge. And he didn’t bother to leave me a map.”
“It’s in the Bible, Daddy. The map to paradise is in the Bible.”
“He didn’t leave me any Bible, either.”
I knew it scared Stewart that he might never make it to Heaven nor find Florida, let alone some remote island off its west coast. But he didn’t have a choice. Abigail grabbed him by the head one cold night, pulling, twisting in an effort to dislodge him. I watched, horrified from the doorway as she took the broomstick and tickled him in the gut and then tapped him on the ass. The next morning he started to pack, and the morning after that we left on our pursuit of the Promised Land.
It pained me horribly to think of Stewart still out there, like a turkey let loose in the open range for the first time with no one to lead him back to safety. Getting pushed out of his homeland, and then wandering through Kentucky, Georgia, Tennessee, and Florida for forty days, he had suffered enough. And now it didn’t feel right to me, arriving in the Promised Land without him, and I could only hope he was still alive.
It sounded like we were knocking at the gates of Heaven as the boat bumped into the lighthouse dock at the eastern most tip of the island. I felt like jumping up from the bench and shouting, “Holy, holy, holy!” at the multitudes of palm trees standing before us, royal and magnificent. Faith had me believing there was a Heaven in the spiritual, invisible sense, but now I also believed in Heaven on Earth, and I wanted to clap my hands at the sight of it.
As the captain tied the boat to the post, I tied my long black hair into a hanging knot and knew in my heart there was no going back. I only hoped that the island would accept me as a newly arriving songbird, but I knew at times I have a loud chirp for such a petite bird, a chirp that some think is slanted, opinionated, and way too unladylike coming from a mouth as prim-looking as mine. Until I open it and the space between my two front teeth shows. It’s the space that everyone blames for my outspokenness, and although my parents don’t really believe it, they use it, too. Whenever I say things that embarrass them, they’re the first to tell people, “It’s that space between her two front teeth. Things just slip out of it, and she can’t help it. We don’t know what to do about it.”
And my eyes get me in trouble, too, for they’re big and brown and strong as the color of coffee, and, like my mother’s, they tell anything my tiny peach-colored lips forget to say.
I stood up and then glanced upward at the sky and spotted a flock of bright pink birds that were flying in long, strung-out diagonal lines. “Flamingoes?” I asked the captain.
“Nope. Easy to confuse them,” he said. “Until you look up close at their bills. Roseate Spoonbills.”
Lydia
We had just entered the city, I noticed as I looked up from Ava’s journal. “Roseate Spoonbills,” I remarked. “That’s what those birds were.”
My father was punching numbers into his calculator, so I knew he wasn’t paying me any attention. “Roseate Spoonbills,” I said again, this timelooking into the mirror at the driver. “They were amazing.”
The limo driver turned his rearview mirror so he could talk directly to me. “No, I don’t think so, Ma’am,” he matter-of-factly said. “Those were pigeons. I know for a fact. They just pooped all over my window.”
“I know what pigeons look like,” I said to his eyes in the mirror. “I’ve lived in Chicago all my life. I was talking about the bright pink birds that I saw when I …”
“Bright pink birds are called flamingoes,” he said interrupting me. “And if you think you just saw flamingoes, then I must have made a wrong turn and we’re at the zoo.”
“I saw the pink birds running wild at …”
“Ma’am, they don’t run wild in the city. I don’t know what you claim you saw back there,” he said, this time with a gleam in his eye for agitating me. “It might have been that old lady’s hat. Damn, did that thing stick out in the crowd or what?”
I sighed heavily like the spring wind outside my window. Then I returned to my reading in hopes I might learn more of the birds I had seen on Sanibel.
Ava
“I didn’t know such birds existed on Earth,” I peeped to the boat captain.
“They’re stunning.”
“Just don’t go hunting them down for their pink plumage,” he said.
“Sir,” I stated, “pink is my favorite color, but let me tell you, I wouldn’t do such a thing.”
“Ladies are doing anything for those pink hats. And over in St. Augustine, they’re making fans out of their wings. It doesn’t make any sense to me. Their feather color fades rapidly so the hats only have a limited lifespan. I guess the ladies don’t care. They’re the reason why the Roseate Spoonbills have been driven to the brink of extinction.”
“Criminal,” I said, shaking my head as the birds disappeared over trees. “There should be laws against that sort of thing, the poor birds, living in danger for their beauty. Women like that make me wish I were a man.”
“Ava,” my mother scolded me. “A lady knows when to add to the conversation with her gentle views, and she knows when to be silent.”
I cast my eyes toward the east so no one would see them ornery; then, I reeled them back toward the captain who was lifting our belongings off the boat. My mother then handed him the name of the place where Stewart had arranged for us to stay.
“I�
�ll see to it that your boxes are there and waiting for you, Ma’am,” he told her.
“Thank you,” chirped Abigail.
“I can do it myself,” Dahlia with her nose in the air told the captain when he offered her a hand off the boat. “I don’t need the help of a man. My son-in-law was supposed to be here with us but he’s not worth a plugged nickel. Us women can manage fine on our own.”
“Ava,” my mother turned and called on me as a teacher does in the classroom when she wants a student to fill in the blanks.
“I know, Mama,” I answered. “A lady never fails to be polite and accept help from a man.”
“That’s right,” Abigail said as she hopped onto the dock. “I guess I’m not doing as poor of a job raising you as I had feared.”
Lydia
Ava’s words continued, but I stopped reading as the limousine pulled up alongside the curb outside the bank headquarters where my father’s office was located.
“See to it she gets home safely and her bags are brought in,” Lloyd ordered the driver.
“I don’t need the help of a man,” I blurted out. “I can carry my bags myself.”
“Lydia,” snapped Lloyd. “Apologize for what you’ve said.”
Sorry, sir.
He closed the door and disappeared into the skyscraper.
I didn’t know why I said what I did. I didn’t mean to be rude, but I had always felt passive and lazy as I watched our hired help do absolutely everything for me. I didn’t think it was so bad of Ava’s grandmother, Dahlia, wanting to step off the boat herself, without any help from a man.
Portion of the Sea Page 4