Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  The driver turned and looked at me and, once I smiled, we were off through the city in the direction of our estate. I continued to read.

  Ava

  “C’mon, Grandmalia. It’s your turn,” I said. “You can do it. Step off the boat. Onto the dock.”

  I noticed Abigail standing impatiently on the dock with her hands on her hips. We ladies had arrived to Punta Gorda by train, and we then took a steamer into Fort Myers. We did it all without any glitches. And it was a long trip. I wasn’t going to allow Dahlia to accidentally slip and kill herself now nor waste any more time.

  I put my arms out like a bed, ready to catch her, should she fall back. She had a big belly, so big we couldn’t afford to have the seamstress make her a corset. It was that belly that made it so tough for her to see the ground where she was stepping, but she refused to blame anything on it. Instead, she blamed her large nose. No one disagreed about it resembling the beak of a hawk, and we tried telling her that hawks can still see past their beaks.

  I could hear Abigail tapping her shoe on the dock, and it sounded like the tick tock of a clock. “C’mon, Mother. Step off the boat. We haven’t all day. I’d like to find flowers.”

  Dahlia’s eyes glided across her nose and landed on me. I shrugged my shoulder, hoping to nudge her round black eyes away from me.

  “Oh stop with the rude look, Ava. Your mother and you were spared.”

  I rolled my eyes, knowing she was about to start talking about her nose again.

  There were only a dozen stories Dahlia liked to tell and she repeatedly told them in a revolving manner like the revolving beacon of the lighthouse. And just as ships sixteen miles at sea can spot when the wick of the lantern is lit, I could recognize which story and which part of the story Dahlia was about to tell next by the tone of her voice.

  “I got this nose from my grandmother, Myrtle, her name was. She was the fourth baby in her family.”

  “I know, Grandmalia. Time to get off the boat.”

  “Myrtle got it from her great-grandmother, also the fourth in the family.

  You better be concerned for your fourth baby some day because this nose shows on all the fourths of the family, you know. At least it’s not as big as that beak over there, is it?” Dahlia pointed to a white bird with a long, curved orange-red beak and matching legs, wading in the shallow water.

  “That bird is beautiful—big beak and all,” I said. “And so are you, Grandmalia.”

  “My nose is the reason I stopped having babies after Abby, my third,” she mumbled, and I knew her story was ending.

  Lydia

  I closed the journal as the elaborate wrought-iron gates to our estate electronically opened. Then I ran my fingers alongside the contours of my nose. It was a small nose, like my father’s, but unlike his mine had an upward tilt at the end that would send a downhill skier into back summersaults in the air. I had seen photographs of my mother and her mother, but neither had a tilt at the tip of their noses. I wondered the origins of my nose and whether the shape of it came from a great aunt on my mother’s side or a not so great uncle on my father’s side.

  “Where did you get your nose?” I asked the driver as he opened the back door for me.

  “I was born with it,” he answered, wiping his nostrils with his fingers as if mention of his nose meant it had to be checked and cleaned. “Why? Do they sell noses at Marshall Fields? Do they have a nose department?” He pulled out a handkerchief from his back pocket and blew. “Is that where you got your nose?”

  I stopped and rubbed its contours once more. “I don’t know,” I said, wishing I had some matriarchs in the family to make such connections for me. Women do that. I’ve heard them. ‘She’s got her Aunt Nannie’s sense of humor,’ they’ll say or ‘You just laughed just like your grandmother,’ or ‘I know, she’s got my strong will, all right,’ or when a young girl throws a tantrum in public, ‘You have your father’s temper.’

  When I saw the driver lift my luggage from the trunk, I put my arm over his and stopped him. “I can do it myself,” I insisted, looking up at the stately steps leading into our mansion.

  “Fine,” he said. “Have a good day.”

  I should have let someone help me, I thought an hour later. After dragging my luggage inside and upstairs by myself, with the housekeepers watching, I landed on my bed like a bird, exhausted after migrating across hemispheres, and I was ravenous, but not for food. Instead, I opened Ava’s journal, hungry for more tidbits about nature and the island. I wanted desperately to be there, not here inside my sterile bedroom, where I felt alone, pampered, and disconnected from the outdoor world.

  Ava

  “Mother,” moaned Abigail. “Take my hand, please. And Ava,” she said to me, “Get ready to catch your grandmother, should she fall back.”

  I still held my arms out like a bed behind her. But just as Dahlia did her little shuffle, and then worked up the proper momentum needed to step up and off the boat, she glanced back at me and started one of her stories.

  “I remember when Abby was around your age, Ava, fourteen or fifteen,” she said.

  “Come on, Grandmalia, now is not the time for your story about the bugs. Step onto the dock.”

  She kicked off the floor of the boat with one leg, which would have been enough power to make it to the dock, but instead she arched around, flopping back down to where she started and said to me, “Some day I’ll be dead, and you’ll regret that impatience, young lady.”

  She reached out for Abigail’s arms and once more looked ready to jump. “As I was trying to say, Abby used to gather a fistful of pink flowers for me every …”

  Her foot missed and landed in the gap between the boat and the dock. “Damn,” my mother screamed, then grabbed onto a ruffle on Dahlia’s dress and pulled her safely onto the dock. And then she immediately followed up with, “I didn’t mean that word I said just a moment ago, Ava. A lady ought to be even-tempered, for anything else is unsightly.”

  I smiled, glad that my mother was feeling well enough to care about my upbringing. “Hallelujah,” I shouted jumping off the boat and putting my arm around my Grandmalia. “We’re here!”

  My mother also put an arm around Dahlia, and the three of us, connected by arms, took our first steps down the long T-shaped dock.

  “You only liked the pink flowers, remember that, Abby? Pink was your favorite color back then,” said Dahlia, continuing her same story from before.

  My mother began to laugh, and I recognized the sound from years before when her laughing was the cockle-doodle-do of the rooster that started our days and the crackled pop of the fire that ended them. I didn’t want it to end, so I chimed in, for the greater the number, the longer the laughter is sustained, and to my surprise Dahlia also joined in. I felt as if my old life and the order of things back home had passed away and a new life was about to begin.

  “This is going to be a new start for us all,” I declared as we took our first steps onto the white silken sand at Point Ybel, the easternmost tip of Sanibel. I wanted desperately to believe in something upon entering the Promised Land.

  We stopped just before taking our first steps off the wood and onto the sand, probably to say our own personal thanks to the Lord for getting us here alive. We all have our theories as to why it took us so long to get to Florida. If you ask Abigail in a good mood, she’d tell you my father lacked faith and courage and feared that an island this good might not exist. And if you ask her in a dark mood, she’d tell you her husband has the curiosity of a lobster and would stop the train just to watch a turtle cross the tracks. Enough excuses. We were here now and had no more time to waste.

  “What are you ladies waiting for?” the boat captain asked us as he passed by. “Surely you must be eager to start your searching for seashells. They’re the best in the entire Western Hemisphere and possibly the world, you know.”

  “Oh no, sir,” I said. “We have more important things to do. We’re here to claim land.”

 
; “Whatever suits you, Ma’am,” he said and continued onward.

  His claim about the seashells had to be true, for there were shells of every imaginable color and shape, and I hardly wanted to step, for fear of shattering any. I thought Abigail had bent down to pick one up, but instead she was licking her finger, dipping it into the sand, and then putting it into her mouth.

  “My God, Mother!” I exclaimed. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “It’s white as sugar,” she said, spitting the sand out of her mouth. “I just thought maybe …”

  “No, Mama, it’s only sand.”

  “Abby meant well, but those flowers were loaded with bugs,” said Dahlia, continuing her story from before. I wanted to ring her neck for rambling irrelevantly at a time like this. “I’d keep ‘em anyway, give ’em a good shake, then put ’em in a vase that stayed outside on the front porch.”

  My mother stood up and stepped over to me. “Do I do that, too?” She whispered in my ear. “Do I tell the same old stories over and over again?”

  “No.”

  “Good, because I think she’s losing her mind. I’m not losing mine, am I, Ava?”

  “Of course not, Mama,” I lied. I couldn’t tell my own mother that I thought Dahlia was just getting old, but that she was losing her mind. Anyone who eats sand, even sand that’s white as sugar, is surely losing her mind. I couldn’t tell her that. I didn’t want to accept it myself.

  “That’s good because if Dahlia goes mad, and if I lose my mind, then odds are surely against you, Ava,” Abigail said into my ear. “It would only be a matter of time before you lost your mind, too.”

  “You’re not losing your mind,” I insisted.

  Lydia

  I rested the journal on my chest when the housekeepers came knocking for the third time at my door. “I’m fine,” I said. “There’s nothing wrong. I’m tired from our trip. And I’ve got reading to do before school tomorrow.”

  A second later, I could hear two of them mumbling in the hallway so I softly folded the corner of the page I was reading and tiptoed over to listen.

  “Her mind isn’t right today.”

  “She’s acting crazy.”

  “What do you think it is?”

  “I don’t know. She’s never behaved like this before.”

  I didn’t bother defending myself. If they wanted to think I was crazy for a day, fine. Nothing I had ever done before warranted the diagnosis, but now, just because I wanted to be alone in my room and unsocial for a day, they’re declaring me insane. I felt bad for Abigail. She didn’t present as crazy. I didn’t think it was nice of her daughter to treat her so. Ava should have been grateful she had a mother, and if she were to ask me, I’d tell her that Dahlia was the nutty one.

  I returned to my bed and picked up where I left off.

  Ava

  We had just taken a couple steps when Dahlia started up again. “I told Abby,” she said, “she was around your age, Ava—fourteen or fifteen—that flowers don’t like being inside. That’s how I kept the bugs out of the house, you know.”

  Dahlia stood close, spearing me with her eyes so I couldn’t get away, yet there was nothing that my eyes craved more than the freedom to climb the royal palms and soar through the sky along with the birds. Her stop-everything-you’re-doing-and-look-at-me stories had partially been to blame for it taking us so long to arrive here in the first place. I hadn’t minded them on the train because at least we were still moving forward. It was every time we got off the train that her stories stopped us like boulders in our path.

  If we were ever going to explore this island of seashells and to claim a piece of it for ourselves, then I had to rise forth as leader, shutting Dahlia up and keeping my mother’s spirits up at the same time.

  VI

  LYDIA

  COME MORNING, I FRANTICALLY searched around my bed for the journal. I looked everywhere, on the floor, the table beside my bed, the space between the wall and the bed and down near my toe area. At last I discovered it safely beneath my pillow, and I applauded myself for having slipped it there without thought. I couldn’t afford to carelessly fall asleep reading it and risk my father or someone finding it.

  Lloyd had come home from work way past midnight and was gone again when I left for school. Waiting outside for me was the same interim limousine driver from the day before, and he looked as glad to see me, as I was to see him, so I decided to stir things up a bit. I told him to drop me off at the nearest Chicago Transit Authority bus stop.

  “Limousines bore me—they add to my feeling lonely, passive, sheltered and disconnected from the real world,” I told him, expecting a debate. Instead, he drove directly to the nearest stop and let me out.

  Fifteen minutes later, I found myself sitting on a metro bus, and it was going slow as a tortoise, which would never get me to school on time. In fact, if I didn’t rise forth as a leader, like Ava felt she had to do, no one on the bus would ever get anywhere they wanted to go. So I made my way up the aisle and said to the driver, “Why are you taking Michigan Avenue? Why not try one street over?”

  “Because I’m the driver and you’re the passenger,” he said. “If you want to be the driver, then get a car.”

  “I don’t need a car. I could walk faster than any car and especially this bus,” I said, returning to my seat.

  I loved Chicago. But today I didn’t feel like being in any city. I wanted to be on my vacation, where instead of looking up at skyscrapers, I could see the towering lighthouse. Because we left earlier than we had planned, I never had the chance to see the lighthouse up close, and going to Sanibel and not seeing such a landmark was like going to Paris and skipping the Eiffel Tower.

  I was in a Sanibel-sort-of-mood, and so I unzipped my school bag and pulled out Ava’s journal. I opened and began reading like a girl diving into an ocean and drowning out the sounds and sites on the surface.

  Ava

  We passed the lighthouse, a towering throne before us with its slender, inner cylinder braced twenty feet off the ground by an iron column supported by a pyramid-shaped frame of latticed wrought iron. Its curtains up top were closed. The boat captain had told us that the keeper already made his daily trip to the top to extinguish the flame, trim the wick, polish the lens, wind the clockworks, and draw the curtains to guard against the damaging rays of the sun. The curtains wouldn’t open, and the lamp wouldn’t be lit again until this afternoon.

  As we trekked toward the interior of the island, I was glad to discover it less densely wooded than I had feared it might be. We walked into late afternoon, following cart tracks to a narrow road blooming profusely with periwinkles. I felt as if my eyes had been sealed shut all my life and they were opened for the first time, witnessing miracles I had never known possible.

  Dahlia had tears of delight streaming down her cheeks and dripping into her mouth, which was curved upward into a broad grin. “I hope mybeloved Milton is in a place as Heavenly as this,” she said, her voice cracking.

  “I thought you said Granddaddy didn’t believe in Heaven,” I said.

  “He didn’t, but everyone in his family did, his grandparents, his parents, his brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles and maybe they all begged God in all his goodness to let him in anyway.”

  “Why didn’t He embrace God if everyone in his family did?”

  “We’re talking about faith. It’s not like a pair of trousers you can hand down in a family,” she said. “You can still hand it down, but it doesn’t mean the next person is going to wear it.”

  Abigail collapsed onto the flower-coated ground, weeping in hysteria. “Oh how sweet could this be?” she moaned, rolling from her back onto her stomach, looking as if she had swigged a bottle of spirits. I didn’t dare say anything, but all I could think was, is that any way for a lady to behave?

  “Look, each flower has five petals,” she cried. “None of them have four. And they’re perfect little pinwheel patterns. Oh, how my thoughts are spinning with jubilation.�
�� Then she stopped and looked at me. “The flowers aren’t spinning, are they?”

  “No, Mama, just your mind, I think.” I was worried. I had watched melancholy wilt her to the ground in the dark winter months, but this was the opposite.

  “Maybe it’s her corset,” I said to Dahlia. Everyone knew that corsets caused blood to flow to a woman’s head, thus putting pressure on her nervous system, causing a personality change. But no one cared, and everyone wore the darn things anyway. Hers must have added a solid twenty pounds of pressure on her internal organs, which could be tolerable if she weren’t rolling around in the ground.

  “Mama,” I said. “You ought to stop rolling on the ground like that. You could fracture a rib or collapse a lung or displace your liver.”

  But then I stopped scolding her because I’d rather see her gay like a pig in mud than down in the ground like a worm. In a way, her behavior was like a miracle. And she couldn’t help herself. I don’t think she wanted to be rollicking in the dirt with that new dress on but something—the Holy Spirit maybe, the new corset probably, spring in the air for sure, or those flowers possibly—had taken hold of her.

  I bent down and gave the flowers a closer look. They looked wild, ready to snap off and conquer the earth had they not been attached to their long, creeping, arching stems. There were multitudes of them. The vibrancy of their shiny dark-green leaves suddenly made me aware and grateful for my youth, beauty, and health. I felt alive and strong and ready to do great things. I knew Abigail was feeling the medicinal benefits, but I feared she had downed a dose bigger than she could handle.

  I stood up to find two men with their sons around my age and younger standing nearby, their mouths hanging open as they gazed at my mother rolling around on the ground, stroking the petals with her fingertips, then tickling her own neck with their stems.