Portion of the Sea

by Christine Lemmon

  “You need this,” I tried insisting as I held her head back and poured water into her mouth. “You’ve got to drink it, Mama.”

  And the first day she let it dribble down her chin; I tossed the water onto the floor, not caring that I broke the glass. “Mama,” I cried. “Remember that glistening pathway? The one made by the moon on top of the water? The one you said those mother turtles followed?”

  She stared through me.

  “I need you to walk that glistening pathway or at least take a couple of steps. Please, you’ve got to do whatever you can to pull yourself out of this and survive.”

  But when she stayed in the crumpled-up position, her condition had gone too far and she was too weak to go for any walk or to take any strengthening measures of her own. I knew then she had already taken her final glistening walk, and it was years ago when she uprooted our family and moved us to Florida, despite our extended kin thinking she was nuts for moving us to a place far away and one that we had never been to before. Now that we were back, I think she made the decision not to go for any more glistening walks.

  “I don’t know what to do,” I said one day when I was buying wheat in town. “I’ve got a plant that’s dying.”

  “Water it,” said the woman after handing me my change.

  “I’ve given it water. Three to four times a day or more.”

  “Too much water. Try sunshine.”

  I shook my head. “That once helped, but not any more.”

  “Have you tried talking to it?”

  “It doesn’t talk back.”

  “Of course it doesn’t. Plants don’t talk, but they still hear.”

  So that day I returned home with the wheat and sat down on the end of my mama’s bed and began to talk. I thought I noticed her eyes opening wider, and they were the color of mine as I told her all about the boy I loved on the island and how we’d meet up in the moonlight, like two owls wanting to love without any interference from daylight or people. I told her all about our walks to school and the tracks we left behind in the mudflats and how he was a boy who prayed and who cared for animals and believed in my dreams. I continued to tell her how my heart had leaped over the side of the boat the day we left and I watched it sink.

  She liked my story, I think, for it was the first time in weeks that she sat up in bed and placed her feet on the ground, as if she were about to stand on her own. And then I told her why I thought the Lord put the moon up in the sky. It was so that even in the dark of night there would be some light and somewhere it would be glistening down on earth. And there would be no excuse. The glistening pathway would always be there, and it’s up to us to go out and walk it. I waited for my mama’s reaction, for her to conjure up in her mind a simple step she might take, but just as I thought she was about to stand, she fell onto the floor instead.

  I cupped her in my arms and caressed her pale soft skin.

  “No, Mama. Don’t leave me. Please don’t go,” I cried.

  “Ava,” she uttered. “Your soul.”

  “What did you say, Mama? What about my soul?”

  “Listen to it.”

  “But what does it sound like?”

  She took a slow breath in and said, “The sea,” then let it out like the tide.

  “What if I can’t hear it?”

  “I see it,” she said, her voice trailing off.

  “My soul, Mama? You see my soul?”

  “No. I see Heaven. I think.”

  “What does it look like? You’ve got to tell me.”

  She closed her eyes and never got to tell me. I could only imagine.

  Hours later the men tried taking her from me, and I cried and screamed and kicked. And soon I stopped kicking, but I screamed in my sleep for weeks, and when that ended, I cried night after night for months on end.

  At first, Dahlia would hear my cries, and she’d sit beside my bed, holding my hand. “Those damn winters,” she’d say. “They killed her, you know.” We both needed something to blame, and winter was the easiest. The season lasted long, like our sorrow, and I could kick the snow and let the ice knock me down to my face giving me a reason to lie there cold and crying and feeling sorry for myself.

  But when spring came and we both still felt upset over my mama’s death, we knew winter wasn’t truly to blame. There had been something else. It was as if Abigail’s mind went through seasons of sickness.

  I had hoped that with the arrival of spring I might pick myself up again and get on with my life, doing all that I wanted to do. But I wasn’t ready when the flowers started blooming.

  XXXI

  LYDIA

  RAIN WAS A GOOD THING. If it hadn’t started to rain, I’d have gone on reading. Instead, I glanced at my watch, threw Ava’s journal into my briefcase, and took off, sprinting faster than any Chicago bus or earthly man or Florida panther. And when I collapsed into my chair at work, I was heavily panting and didn’t catch my breath until I finished writing my first obituary. It read like this:

  Abigail Blake Witherton, 51, of Kentucky, died Sunday, June 24, 1896 in the arms of her daughter, Ava. The damn winters killed her.

  She was born and raised in Kentucky where she worked on the turkey farms. She and her husband, Stewart J. Witherton, later moved their family to Sanibel Island, where they lived amidst the flowers and worked the land before returning to Kentucky. The flowers of Sanibel brought her pleasure, as did the white sugar sands. Abigail’s soul is now soaring, not in an earthly paradise, but across the everlasting kingdom of God where the periwinkles bloom year-round into eternity.

  She was the daughter of Milton and Dahlia Blake.

  I didn’t turn the above obituary in, but it served as a good warm-up activity, I thought, as I folded it tightly and stuffed it deep inside the seashell I had placed on my desk for good luck. I would keep Abigail’s obituary there inside the seashell on my desk to remind me of the significance of my job.

  I was glad to have a job, my own job and my own desk with a seashell on it and a telephone just for my use. Things were going well now, and I was close to doing what I wanted with my life.

  I wrote and turned in several obituaries, and when lunchtime came around, I decided to spend it with Ava. I didn’t yet know anyone else, and I felt like being with her, so I opened her journal and continued to read.

  Ava

  Abigail was survived by a mother: Dahlia, who day-by-day was losing more of her mind; a husband: Stewart, who, after a short stint rolling cigars in Key West, regained a portion of his mind and returned to his family and turkey farm; a brother: Henry, who, after losing his own wife just two months prior, was walking around grief-stricken and despondent; three nieces: Violet, Lilly and Rose, ages 12, 14, and 16, and who, after losing their mother, and now facing a distant father, were like raging wildflowers, nasty but with good reason, closing their petals on anyone who came too close; and finally, Abigail was survived by a daughter: Ava, a girl who once was full of dreams. But now, in the wake of losing her own mother and her aunt, her dreams were pushed aside, for she has been given three nasty flowers to care for.

  Those three girls were craftier than any wild beasts roaming the earth. And they hated me. They were out to get me for the simple fact that I wasn’t their mother and they wanted their mother. I think I understood, for at twenty years old, I wanted mine, too. But no one gave me any pity, for I was now an adult, and since there were no men calling for me, the care and responsibility of those three girls fell into my lap.

  At first, I naturally tried churning them into ladies, for that’s what a mother does, and I remember my own mama passionately trying to turn me into a lady, but the girls didn’t like it at all. If I tried being sweet to them, they accused me of handling them like babies. If I told them I didn’t like their behavior, they thought I was being judgmental. If I tried giving them my opinion on things, they swore I was ruling their lives and telling them what to do. If I tried asking them questions out of interest regarding boys or anything at all, they t
hought I was being nosy and invading their privacy. If I tried telling them anything about myself when I was their age, they looked at me, bored, as if I was comparing my life to theirs or lecturing and preaching in some way. In reality, I was only trying to relate. And it felt like yesterday when I was their age. Years are only big to young girls. To older girls years are nothing.

  They made me feel like twenty going on one hundred. And those girls made me feel like a bossy, judgmental, opinionated old spinster, which I wasn’t. I was the opposite of it all, but that is how those girls wanted to view me, and I could say nothing pleasing to them and nothing that wouldn’t offend them. I didn’t want those girls changing who I was or how I felt about myself, but they were starting to do it to me. They were starting to make me self-conscious of everything I said and asked and how I communicated, and I had never been one to worry about my own words before. Those girls were changing me, and they were changing the way I would have been there for them had they not been sensitive to me in the first place.

  “I think you ladies could use fresh air. Your faces are pale,” I said one afternoon. “How about we go outdoors and let the sun shine down upon us. I’ll bet you didn’t know that being outdoors is my favorite thing.”

  “And why would we listen to anything you said?” Rose had the sharpest tongue.

  And Violet’s words were like digesting a poisonous flower petal. “Men don’t like you and women say you’re heartless; so, I agree with Rose. Why should we emulate you in any way?”

  “I’m not wanting you to emulate me. Be your own selves. Each of you has your own uniqueness. Identifying and feeling comfortable with yourselves is what a true lady is all about.”

  I walked outside and insisted that the three of them follow me. We walked alongside the house, and I knew that my father and their father were far out working in the field and wouldn’t be able to see us. I took hold of the handlebars of my bicycle that had been leaning against the house, and I hopped onto it and rode a short distance from the girls, then circled slowly around and returned. They and everyone had been whispering about the way I purchased the bicycle from a mail-order catalog and rode off on it every day.

  When Stewart had returned from Key West, he had made only a little money off his cigar rolling, but he gave a lump of that money to me. I was free to do whatever I wanted with it; so, I bought a bicycle. No woman in our family had ever owned one before, and I viewed it as a means of personal freedom. I could ride off for hours on my own and travel farther and faster than by foot. I liked the independence that it brought me. And I often wondered what Jaden would think if he saw the tracks my bicycle was leaving behind.

  “Here,” I said to Rose. “Your turn. Give it a try.”

  “Bicycles were not made for women,” she said.

  “Maybe not,” I admitted. “But women are adapting. I’m not the only woman in the world riding a bicycle, you know. They are becoming popular.”

  “My father says it’s not healthy for delicate, fragile ladies to trust themselves on such a contraption,” little Violet mumbled. “And it takes up too much concentration.”

  “And that it’s not safe. What if your dress gets caught in it?” added Lilly.

  “Then you fall down,” I said. “And then you get back up again. It’s okay for women to do that, to fall down from time to time.”

  I noticed a look in Rose’s eyes. It was the look a girl gets when she wants desperately to try a new thing but she is afraid she might fail and disappoint or embarrass herself in front of a laughing world or, worse, be judged by that same world. But then her hands reached out, and she took hold of the handlebars and slowly, as I held the bike steady, she climbed on.

  “Now take it slow,” I said. “I’ll hold on. I won’t let go.”

  Together, with me briskly walking beside her, we went a good fifteen yards, and I was just about ready to shout a loud “hooray,” when she shouted louder, “Let go! I don’t need your help.”

  “Dear,” I insisted. “I think you do. This takes practice.”

  “Stop treating me like a little girl,” she said. “I don’t want your help!”

  And so I let go, regrettably and two seconds later a heavy wind caught her skirt and wound it around her pedal, and her upper body dashed over the front end of the bike, sending her down into a puddle of muddy water, and a second later the bike landed on top of her.

  I rushed down onto my hands and knees beside her in the puddle, pushing my bicycle to the side and then wiping the blood on her chin and nose with the sleeve of my own dress. “Rose,” I cried. “Are you okay?”

  Her sisters were there too, and they were holding her hands and rubbing her cheeks. She was crying, and her face was full of mud, and when she opened her eyes and looked at me, I feared she was a demon-possessed pig ready to yank my soul out from me.

  “Look what you’ve done!” she shouted. “My mama always told us you were unladylike, even as a little girl, and now I believe her. She was right.”

  “Leave us alone,” cried Lilly, as she pulled her sister up from the mud, and together the three girls hobbled into the house.

  I pulled my bike up and tried straightening the dented handlebars the best I could. The girls didn’t talk to me the rest of the evening, and their father scorned me for urging his daughter to try such a thing.

  “Bicycle riding is a bad idea for women,” he said. “Don’t you ever let her try that again, do you understand?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  And that night, I felt guilt-stricken for having ruined her dress, so I stayed up all night long, turning sturdy, heavy, upholstered curtains into dresses for all three girls. I put a catalog I had gotten in the mail in front of me and tried to create the stylish hourglass silhouette by stitching stockings to the buttock, hip, bosom, and sleeve areas to exaggerate the desired wasp-waisted effect. And as I worked, visions of the girls and me dressed like ladies danced in my head.

  “We don’t like those dresses that you made for us. They look like curtains,” they said the next morning.

  “Yes, they were curtains yesterday,” I said, sleep-deprived. “But today, they’re dresses. It’s my way of making amends for what happened to Rose’s dress yesterday.”

  “They look like what a man would make if a man ever tried to sew.” Rose’s words always pricked me like thorns.

  “That’s a generalized statement, and it’s not fair to men,” I said. “There are male fashion designers, you know.”

  “We’re not going to wear ugly dresses that you’ve made out of curtains. Our mama could turn curtains into ball gowns. She was good at sewing, but these? They look like tarp we’d use to cover the turkeys during a freeze. Why’d you put stockings inside them?”

  “To give you ladies the appearance, the illusion of hourglass silhouettes. The boys will go wild over you. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”

  At first, they looked disgusted, but then they started laughing, and soon we were all laughing, and I felt proud, for maybe they no longer viewed me as old and judgmental, and hopefully we were bonding. Two months went by before Rose started wearing the dress, and I suspected there might be a boy she was after.

  And then one day my bicycle was missing for at least four hours, and so was she. I was horribly worried for her safety and ran through the town, searching for bike tracks and looking near every mud puddle out of fear she had fallen and drowned. I wanted desperately to tell my father and her father, but that would be disastrous. I would wind up being the tattletale, the one who allegedly thrives on getting Rose into trouble, rather than the one who was concerned with teaching her never to disappear like that again. Yes, everything I did was viewed as bad with regard to those girls, and it wasn’t fair that I was given the job of looking after them, yet I was given no authority or respect in terms of guiding, instructing, or disciplining them. It was too much to bear, and it was ruining the life I had envisioned for myself and the person I wanted to be.

  I said nothing to
Rose when she returned four hours later with my bicycle. I smiled at her, dumb as a happy rock. That’s what they wanted me to be, a happy rock they could hop over, stand on, and blame when they tripped and fell down.

  “Why don’t the four of us go for a walk? There’s a full moon out and everything looks beautiful under a full moon,” I suggested one evening after dinner. The men had drunk beer and were already asleep for the night, and Dahlia too was asleep and snoring, and there was nothing I craved more than good nighttime air. “What are you all staring at me for?”

  I asked. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  They were giving me the same look I remember their mother, my aunt, once giving me when I was little and I started to cry as she cut into the Thanksgiving turkey one year. “I don’t want any turkey. I can’t possibly eat old Rickety Tickety Turkey,” I cried. “I liked him. He was the wisest of turkeys and good at giving speeches. He started them all with riddles. It’s why no one ever slept during his speeches.”

  “You’re weird,” my Aunt Agatha said. “Abigail, you better watch Ava. She’s got a weird imagination. It’s ruining our feast today, but what’s it capable of next?”

  “She views the world differently, that’s all,” my mama had said to her sister. “She’s a creative child. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

  My mother was right. She understood me like that. And if she were around today, she’d know I had no interest in judging the girls or doing anything to make them hate me. She’d know my mind preferred other things, like standing out under the moon and thinking up stories I might write.

  So as the girls and I stood alongside the dirty pond out back, I tried talking to them on a deeper level. “What dreams do you girls have for your lives?”

  As I waited for them to answer, I noticed that even in a mud puddle one might catch a glimpse of the moon glistening across the water. “That my mama will come back,” Violet said a moment later.