by Deb Caletti
“It’s all ours,” Finn called. He flung both arms out wide.
“We are so lucky,” I shouted back.
Our memories and the events of our lives are untidy things. We wish that we could file them away and shut the door, or we wish the opposite—that they would stay with us forever. You want to banish that remembrance of a tight hold on your ankle, a rope under a bed, the amber-colored medicine bottles of your father’s, the door your mother slams after a night of too much wine and jealousy. You want to keep close to you always that first sweet kiss, a maple leaf, that growing sense of yourself; you want to hold the sight of your dying father on that last boat trip, the calm you remember as your mother held you. Her voice.
But the images are all wild things that will do what they wish. They haunt like ghosts; they mingle, like guests at a party, with guilt and hope and revision; they pack up and leave altogether. They spin and collide, even as you anchor the rope and the sail billows on a beautiful September day. Even as he shifts the boat ever so slightly so that the sail is as full as it can be.
When that happens, though, you realize that all of it is there with you still. All of it. You remember. The remembering, and that wind, is what pushes you forward.
* It sounds familiar because you have heard of him. Crime writer, or, as the critics say, “contemporary noir.” Her Emerald Eyes, among others. Yeah, you saw the movie, too.
* Yes, this story has a dead mother. Mine. She had a sudden aneurysm when I was barely four. Died before she could even get to a hospital. Dead mothers have become a story cliché thanks to Disney movies and novel writers. All the dead mothers in books, you’d think it was a common occurrence. Even Dad’s books have them. But mine was real. She was no cliché and neither am I.
* Okay, I had actually bought something new.
* Including, you probably remember, the crazy one who tried to replicate in real life the plot of Fine Young Woman, but who thankfully was caught before anyone was hurt. If you saw my father trying to cook and talk on the phone at the same time, you’d be shocked at the power he holds over people. He’ll go around with his T-shirt inside out too, and not even notice, the little flap of a tag getting a thrilling new view of the world it didn’t ordinarily get.
*Which, by the way, I took in our backyard. If you look closely at the photo credit, you’ll see that it reads Photo by S. P. Clara, which is the name we gave me. The “S. P.” stands for Sweet Pea. Pretty good photo, right? My mother was a photographer, and Dad says I have her eye.
*Or maybe he just liked to stare down what he’d testily call the “grammatical error sanctioned by the state.” There is, of course, no apostrophe in the DONT WALK sign.
* The word “languid” is one of those words that sound perfect for what it is. Like “prickly.” Or “luminescence.” See? Words are magical that way.
** Telling people about your dead mother is always delicate. You have to be prepared for them to spill their sympathy as if it happened yesterday. One math teacher, after telling me how much she was looking forward to meeting my mother on open house night and therefore forcing me to explain, grasped me in a long, heartfelt hug after I’d told her. This is not to say I don’t feel my own grief, which can hit powerfully at unexpected times. It’s just that the telling does not automatically bring on my own upset, as people assume. I deal more with their reaction than they do with mine, and so you have to choose your timing.
* Sylvie Genovese is not the second person in this story with an accent, but the third. My mother was French, and although hers had mostly faded away, I remember her voice sounding different when she was angry or excited. Accents are funny in that they have this odd draw for us, yet we forget we have one, too. No one is without an accent, but the one you’ve got seems like oatmeal to their caviar.
* Three accents, two famous people, if you’re keeping a tally. Dad knows tons of writers, so there may be more coming. Oh, and Christian’s father was married for a short while to a woman who was married to one of the Rolling Stones, if that counts.
* My father’s own mother, Grandma Oates, was a conservative woman who lived in Iowa with her sister, my aunt Barbara. Grandma Oates made you believe it was possible for babies to be switched in hospitals.
* Even if, weirdly, he could never seem to throw anything away. In his room he kept piles of papers—old tests, schoolwork, cards, photos—and stacks of old clothes folded in his closet. Obviously, he couldn’t part with things easily. Maybe this should have been a warning sign.
* “57 Channels (And ’Nothin On),” Bruce Springsteen. From the Human Touch album, released in 1992. I just looked it up.
* A guy, Dr. Frank Tallis, wrote this book called Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness. He talked about how falling in love made you go through many of the same things as losing your mind. Not sleeping and eating, thinking obsessively about the person, deluded thoughts . . . I read it. He’s right. Think of the words: I’m crazy about you. You make me crazy. Crazy in love. Let’s just say that maybe it’s always a thin line.
* Called the bow. The back, called the stern. I knew this only in some vague way before, and might have failed the quiz if there had been one. The left is port, the right is starboard. Sailing has its own language. Colorful, too. Bowsprits and breeches, buoys and battening down hatches, language from another time. Nothing like all the icy tech words we have now—HTML and CD-ROM and CPUs—no romance. And then there’s the jib sheet and the spinnaker, the luffing and the jibing, lively, cheery words. And of course, the stays. The stays: the wire that supports the mast. Thin and hardly noticeable, but the only thing keeping the mast from toppling.
* Annabelle Aurora, Green Pastures, Selected Poems.
* If she’d slept with him or something, I didn’t want to know. She hadn’t always been that old. Still. I’d die.
** Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. I’d insert the proper footnote form here, but that’s one of those things I never could get to stick in my mind. Footnote form, roman numerals, common denominators. Trash bin of the brain.
* Jeff David Farley. Friend of my father’s. There, I told you there might be another famous person.
* We didn’t need to. You share an experience like that, and you both know you have a whole planet of connection and understanding between you. I knew more about Finn right then and he knew more about me than we could have if we’d spent six months talking nonstop.
* Shakti always said we should have a guy we wanted to keep shaving our legs for. I knew what she meant.
* My father would mention Jennifer Riley to me, because she was a real girl with a real boyfriend (who was still in jail somewhere in California). She’d tried to break it off. He used a knife. One of the synonyms for “obsession,” after all, is “to haunt.”
** Okay, I’m lame, but I still like it. Especially how Miss Spelling is a misspelling.
* Funny how we don’t call these bracelets even though they are bracelets.
* I don’t know why we insist on pain when pain is so often easy to eliminate. It’s funny the ways we try to punish ourselves when we feel we’ve committed some crime.
* Which only shows how nervous I still was. Skittish. No one cares too much about authors, unless you’re Stephen King or J. K. Rowling. My father had a lot of fans. Still, an author is not a rock star, or even a rock star’s cousin.
* Wayne Branson. The Captain Branson that is often thanked in the acknowledgment page of my father’s books. A long-time resource of his, and also his old friend. My father is the godparent to Wayne and Jody’s oldest girl. Bad choice. What my father knows about religion could be held in the ashtray of his car, along with that one cigarette he’s carried there since he quit smoking years ago.
* Dad’s, not the crab’s.
* This may seem ironic, given what I’ve described about my relationship with Christian. This is not irony. Or some discrepancy in the story. It is, instead, one of its major points.
** Leave it to Dad to tell it like it is.
* And yet, normal, too, is often a destination. A contortionist act, a yoga position. The kind where you have to put one leg over your head and balance. You can reach it. But I promise you one thing. You aren’t going to stay that way forever.
* You’re groaning at me here, I know. I would be. I would say, You should have dumped that asshole and never looked back. But if you’ve gone through a breakup, you know it’s true, don’t you? Admit it. Even if he was a creep and you are glad you’re out of there, there’s something you miss. His car, even. His mother. The way he rubbed your neck.
* Artichoke hearts and orange and yellow peppers. Onions and bubbly crust. Thick cheese that you could stretch as long as the strings of a bass. Too bad I felt too sick to eat.
* You’re groaning again. What you need to understand is how desperate he was. Here. Think of a watching a drowning kitten. Imagine walking past and doing nothing.
* I guess even death doesn’t make your relationship with your mother less complicated.
* And, you know, the ability to drive a car and go to college.
* Some people can keep going through F and G and H, and some reach their limit at A. I’m sure this ties right into mental illness somehow. You know, how soon you reach the tipping point.
* You gotta love an old-fashioned word like “quarrelsome.” Today she’d just be a bitch.
* Homecoming date, freshman year. We all gathered at Harrison’s house to take pictures in front of their fireplace. That living room was one of those suburban shrines, unused and untouched, the perfect family photos on the mantel like religious offerings to the Gods of Material Success. I’m sure no one ever usually went in there, except when Harrison’s mother made her weekly pilgrimage with the vacuum.
* PTA mothers would disapprove.
* Funny that the only two times we use the phrase “seeing someone” are when we are referring to being in a relationship or getting psychological help.
* I didn’t know what their relationship was, or had been, and I’d never know. Some secrets stay secrets.
** Only, I wouldn’t have met Finn then, would I? It’s the tricky thing about the starting-over fantasy. You’d want to keep some things, but this somehow seems like breaking the rules of that particular little head game.
* You wonder if it’s the same sound track that’s been used for years, because, I swear, from the time we watched nature films in elementary school to now, they always sound exactly the same. Those birds and those crickets were probably alive when my parents were growing up.
* You can forget that other people carry pieces of your own story around in their heads. I’ve always thought—put together all those random pieces from everyone who’s ever known you, from your parents to the guy who once sat next to you on a bus, and you’d probably see a fuller version of your life than you even did while living it.
* Still don’t.
** Seventh grade is always the year girls turn on each other.
* Okay, beets maybe.
* Everyone in this story, in my life, makes tea.
* An idiot, to ride when a storm was coming.
* That, you would like to think, was the end of that. A restraining order, you hope, would give me some sense of peace and safety. Finally, someone is doing something, here, right? But Captain Branson knew what he was talking about all along. A bundle of paper is no defense against someone’s will. Protection orders are rational documents served to irrational people, a sometimes dangerous solution to a problem there is yet no answer for. I continued to feel uneasy, although I heard nothing from Christian during that time.
As I said before, life is not a movie with expected outcomes and tidy endings. Not my life, anyway. Two months after the restraining order ended, I got a birthday card from Christian. And I do every year. It’s unsatisfying to you, isn’t it? The lack of a finish? But these kinds of situations are not often satisfying. The truth is, they can go on and on. A card, that’s all, nothing threatening. Still—always—a ghost-not-ghost who haunts my mailbox and my memories, both the good ones and the bad.
* And, yes, thank God, there were french fries again. A reason for living, right there, Mother, dear.
* Dad is a great cook, but Sylvie’s meals make his slink off in shame.
* Finn’s father, Thomas Bishop, was a Lynyrd Skynyrd fan.