The One True Ocean

by Sarah Beth Martin

  “Can we go there?” I asked.

  Mom whipped her head around to me. “No!” She stared at me long and hard, then she shifted in her seat and looked out the window, upset, I could tell.

  “Did her car go into the water?” I asked.

  “That’s enough!” Mom said. “How can you be such a morbid child?” Dad said nothing.

  During the drive home neither of them said a word, and I began to feel a pain creeping up from my stomach, into my chest and into my head, behind my eyes. All of this silence was painful.

  ***

  In October we cleaned out Aunt Adeline’s house. There were personal items to go through, items that Mom and Dad had to decide whether or not to keep. It had to be done by the end of the month, Mom said, because the bank would be taking the house.

  Each day that Mom went to clean the house she would come home angry. She would argue with Dad, and they’d go to bed quiet. This went on and on for weeks, until finally it was done and Mom came home in a good mood with something to tell me. We were going to move. We soon would be leaving Maine.

  It had to happen, she said. Dad would get a better job, and Mom would go to college and one day back to work. And moving away to Massachusetts would accomplish all of this, like magic.

  I begged them not to go. Dad didn’t seem to want to go either. I heard them fighting about it after I went to bed. There were quiet evenings at the supper table, suppers so quiet I could hear only gulping and chewing, the clink of stainless against china. This went on for days, until one day Mom finally won.

  Then there were strange meetings in the kitchen: men and women dressed in fine-tailored brown and navy, the shuffling of papers, the brass snap of briefcase latches. And suddenly we were moving out of our two-bedroom apartment in Cape Wood, Maine, and into a four-bedroom house more than a hundred miles away.

  Before we left, Mom took me on one last drive to the ocean. She parked the car just off the road, near where Aunt Adeline had crashed, and we walked down the Mackerel Point jetty. As we stood on the rocks, the November wind was cold on my face, and the dark ocean billowed before us—small waves without foam, just endless curves of water. Mom was holding my hand, not tugging me or dragging me somewhere, but just standing there. It was odd to me because I couldn’t remember ever just holding her hand. She whispered something into the wind, but it was lost in the roar of the sea.

  Goodbye, I think she said.

  ten

  There was a time when I only painted dead plants: dried autumn leaves gathered from the yard, the curled petals of a wilted rose that once stood on my dresser. Even imprints of plants in their most extinct form, painted from fossil photographs or paleo­botany lab samples. In a pile of old watercolors I find one of a Kauri Pine imprint, its once-green, fleshy needles now gray and flat as ferns, incorporated into 175-million-year-old Australian mudstone. The work clearly depicts the object as a fossil, with its vivid outline sloping to shadowy gouges. But embedded even in this rock there is that hint of life—rich minerals and molecules in a lustrous, sunlit metallic sheen.

  Also amongst these paintings are some living plants—the fleshy leaves of a begonia, the seductive petals of an iris, both for Nature-Made seed packets. These are more my style, plants more alive, more wet and green; flowers more colorful. There is one in the pile that appeared on a June ‘92 calendar page, a bushy, magenta-colored Sweet William—the one Mom told me was too vivid in its contrast, too stark in its color.

  “There’s too much green,” she said.

  I’m still not sure why I did the dead-plant watercolors; I haven’t done any like them again. They simply are remnants from that time—those strange months after I lost the baby, when death was a quiet preoccupation for me. When death was something vague enough, mysterious enough to call surreal. How easy it was during that painful time—to be surreal, to even add heaven and God to the mixture. For weeks I lay in my bedroom at home, praying to something, imagining the shadows on the wall were living beings that spoke to me, who told me that my baby had gone somewhere else.

  Now death has a different impact: it no longer can be ambiguous, inexplicable. There can be no dreaming about the beyond. Now death is brightly lit, without shadows and angels, without God.

  With the death of a loved one, there is a turning point when mourning ends and something else takes over. What once was relentless sorrow turns to bittersweet remembrance; what was weighty regret simply fades away. The pain grows soft over time, and the death becomes easier to reflect upon, the way a war is reflected upon long after it has ended. Aunt Adeline’s two-decade-old death does not possess the pain of recency, but it does hold a shocking revelation, a new mystery. It is a death more curious than Seth’s, perhaps more horrible. For the first time in months, though only for a few seconds, my thoughts have wandered away from Seth.

  Perhaps this war is ending.

  As I lift the pile of paintings up from the coffee table I see the top corner of the Maine Casco Herald, with MAINE, THE WAY LIFE SHOULD BE in bold advertising at the top of the page. Just below it is tiny black-and-white photograph of the Cape Wood house, empty now. Empty except for all that skin and dust from those who have lived there: Mom, Aunt Adeline, even me. A house which holds inside it my genes, and every now and then, pulls its invisible string of DNA.

  I was only nineteen when I moved to this city of Cambridge, a place filled with music and theater and colorful restaurants, of glowing nights under sidewalk lamps. Where dinner is just around the corner, and shops and galleries line the streets. The vendors call out, and there is the smell of hot sausages and peppers, the hot brick and cold granite, the burning subway. And so close to the suburbs, with all things quaint and comfortable—my family just twenty miles away.

  But living here used to mean something else. I cannot connect anymore to this city and all its distractions, to my family, to everything around me. The familiar now feels oppressive, like a weight. There no longer is the desire to explore the culture and colors of the city, the familiar faces in the suburbs. All this pavement, this perfect green grass, is dizzying.

  I need some air.

  I see Aunt Adeline’s face, hear her soft, pained voice calling to me—back to my childhood, my old life far away from this apartment—this shell of a home where Seth still creeps in. My life here all these years now feels like a dream. It has been an experiment, I think, a vacation of some sort. Temporary, not like home.

  Home is somewhere else, waiting for me.

  ***

  At one o’clock in the afternoon Mr. Robinson from the Casco Bank in Portland returns my call. He speaks in a low voice that sounds like two packs a day, telling me the house still is for sale. “Lease is an option,” he says. “With fifteen hundred down.” He coughs in-between words. “You can work on the inside if you want, but nothing structural unless it really needs it.”

  “I lived there when I was very young,” I say. “It was my aunt’s house...Adeline Winslow was her name.”

  “I remember Adeline,” he says.

  “You do?” I hold my breath.

  “Yes, I knew her.”

  I wonder how well he knew her, in what way he knew her. I never saw or heard of Aunt Adeline ever having a boyfriend, not even having good friends. I thought of her as alone, always alone.

  “She was nice,” he adds, his voice tentative, nervous sounding. “So sad about her accident.”

  “Yes,” I say, and wonder if he has read the recent article about her.

  “I met her when I was just starting out,” he says, “when I used to sell insurance. I came by the house a few times, when your grandmother was still alive.” He pauses. “So yes, I remember Adeline. And I remember your mother, of course.”

  “You remember my mother?” I ask, feeling a tinge of curiosity, excitement.

  “Not so much as Adeline. But I did see her once in a while out in the y
ard.”

  In my memories it is always difficult to distinguish Mom from Adeline. When I think back to my earliest days, with both of them in the house, the snapshots in my mind are of some dark-haired woman, some mother. But I can picture Mom, a photograph I once saw of her standing by the apple tree in front of the old house. It is one of the few photographs of Mom and me at the old house, with me just a bundle of flesh and yarn in the baby carriage.

  “The house is empty,” Mr. Robinson adds, and I gather together my thoughts. “I can give you a key, let you roam around. Are you interested?”

  “I can be there tomorrow,” I say, and I think of the old photograph again, in which Mom is wide-eyed and startled, perhaps caught off-guard. She’s a Mom that doesn’t seem like Mom—with wild hair and bare feet in the grass, a flowing cotton nightgown. A ghost before the yellow farmhouse.

  eleven

  The fall after Aunt Adeline died we moved to Westbridge, Massachusetts, into our new beige colonial in a neighborhood of other new beige colonials. The town was thick with woods but amazingly bug-free, and the town center always smelled of pizza. Westbridge was clean and pretty, with green lawns and square lots and houses with fresh paint and new, smooth glass in the windows. But the town was boring in many ways. There were no fields of overgrown grass, no shallow ponds to wade in, no jagged hills or rock formations. And no ocean to be seen.

  In my new school I had no friends. It was smack-in-the-­middle of the second grade school year, and I was named “The Girl from Maine.” I sat by myself during lunch while other kids dangled from seesaws and merry-go-rounds, or bombed each other with brick-colored balls. So I drew.

  At first I did it right on the playground, drawing some of the plants and trees that were around me, and then I’d take my drawings home and continue them there. I’d sit at the kitchen table with my colored pencils and acrylics, just like I did when I stayed at Aunt Adeline’s, creating my world of larger-than-life plants. In this world there were purple skies and bluish fields, children flying around. Mom referred to my pictures as “scary” and “unhealthy,” but Dad said I was talented. After his work days at the bank he would watch me draw, while Mom took her evening classes. Before Mom left she told Dad to make sure I did my homework. “Don’t let her dilly-dally with those drawings,” she’d say, and Dad would give me a little smile after Mom shut the door, letting me know I was allowed to do a little bit of both.

  I spent a lot of time in the backyard woods in Westbridge. It was not as lush and green as the woods in back of Aunt Adeline’s old house; it was a bare, twisty wood where many trees were dead—fire-damaged, Dad said, from years before. But I liked the way the branches and vines twisted and grew around each other, the way the dead trees split and made way for living ones, how fallen limbs magically sprouted moss. The wood was the one and only thing I loved about our new town.

  I especially missed the ocean, which, because of the skirted routes around Boston, was now a one-hour trip in any direction. Dad sometimes took me, driving us through the maze of traffic to the North Shore, where beaches were crowded and chaotic, sometimes littered. Or we’d take a more frenzied route to Cape Cod, and spend most of the trip sitting in the hot station wagon on high bridges, waiting for the traffic ahead of us to move. When we left the beach, the smell of the ocean dissipated quickly; the exhaust of cars and factories, of pavement and metal and brick quickly overcame it. And then we’d reach our neat little suburbs, where there was no salt water smell either, only grass and trees, and the confined feeling of inland.

  ***

  The house in Westbridge has changed color four times since I left for college. Sometimes Dad just paints right over the old color before it has time to peel or chip. This year the house is white and red—his unfinished project from last summer. The red is on top, appearing to spill over the white, but I really can’t remember which color is the newer one.

  It’s almost spring, time for Dad to work on the yard. Soon he’ll be out there with his trowels and bug-killers and fifty-pound bags of mulch, transforming the lawn into a spotless, perfect green. Because Dad likes a lawn without chaos. But then he has his chaos in the basement—the half-finished cars and planes on the shelves and dangling like mobiles from the ceiling. These are things Mom never would allow upstairs, even though she has her own outlet with its potential for mess: the fabric paints she keeps in a tidy case and unloads upon the kitchen table every now and then. Like Dad, her messy hobbies are kept separate, buried beneath the everyday stuff. With Mom and Dad, there’s a kind of Johnson Wax over everything.

  Lately Dad has been working on the walkway. There’s new gravel where last month it was muddy and concave, and where melted snow washed pebbles into the driveway. Still, there are sections he’s missed; mud seeps out from under my thin-­bottomed sneakers. I skip over these muddy sections—up to the front step, hoping he doesn’t see.

  Dad opens the door. “Hey, Jenna,” he says, his dark, shiny hair flawlessly parted on the side, like Cary Grant’s. Under his fuzzy wool pullover a white oxford shirt is buttoned to the top. He calls to Mom, and her holler back is tinny over the hiss of running water.

  “Can’t you see I’m busy?”

  “Forget it, Dad,” I whisper. “I’ll go in and see her.”

  Mom is in the kitchen, her hair in a loose bun, and wearing a rust-colored blouse and brown skirt. I think of how there are mostly autumn colors in her wardrobe: no blacks, only ebony browns or the darkest of purples; no whites, only ivory. These colors of nature don’t seem like Mom. Seth used to joke about it, saying she wore warm colors to make up for her coldness; but I corrected him, telling him how he was giving her too much credit, and that she recently had her “colors” done.

  The smell of chicken and tarragon fills the room, and the windows are steam-covered. From behind the counter island Mom wraps a canvas apron around her waist, then uncovers the stainless steel pot on the stove. Dad takes my jacket and leaves us alone, seeming tense, as if he knows I am about to say something important.

  “Mom,” I begin, and then stop. Suddenly I can’t say the words.

  She wipes her brow and looks up through her steam, exhaustedly, like she’s too busy to give me attention, as if any question will be insignificant. “What is it?” she asks with a sigh, and I wonder if she’ll push me out of the kitchen—but then her eyes meet mine and she stops, seeming nervous, and quickly looks away again. “Is this about the date book?” she asks, timidly. “Are you still upset?”

  “No,” I say.

  She reaches for her pepper grinder, grinds over the pot. Strands of hair slide from her bun and into her eyes, and she lifts her elbow to sweep them away with the back of her hand. Then she wipes her hands on her apron, her eyes scurrying around the room. “You have to understand,” she says. “It’s been so many years.” She turns to the cupboard, begins to rummage through spice bottles.

  “I know that,” I say. “But really—it’s not about the date book.”

  “I am sorry about that,” she says, her voice soft amongst the clinking of plastic and glass within the cupboard. “It wasn’t exactly a healthy thing to do—throwing it away.” She turns her head and looks at me. “Something a shrink would never do, that’s for sure.” I chuckle and she gives a quick smile back, and before I can speak again there is the skip of feet down the stairs on the other side of the wall, followed by a thump at the bottom.

  Elisabeth pops her head around the corner and skips into the kitchen, dressed in sneakers and sweats, her hair in a high Pebbles Flintstone ponytail. Despite the brief interlude between Mom and me, I’m relieved that my little sister has interrupted us. “How’s school?” I ask. “Still doing gymnastics?”

  “Yup.” Elisabeth lifts her leg so her foot is against the wall above the wood molding. She hops closer to the wall, pushing her foot higher, then presses in, until her torso is flat against her leg. I clap my hands, impressed.

/>   Elisabeth looks like me, auburn-haired and green-eyed, but more soft-faced and cheeky—most likely from Dad. Montigue must have had stronger facial bones, like Mom and me. Some have joked about the thirteen-year-old age difference between Elisabeth and me, as if she was one of those late-marriage accidents for Mom and Dad. They joke until they remember that I’m twenty-six and Mom forty-two, that it’s me who is the enigma of the family.

  I wonder if they also realize that Elisabeth was the fixture child, a true byproduct of Mom and Dad, to bond them like glue.

  Today Elisabeth is hyper, excited about something. She flips her long ponytail forward, over her head and in front of her face, then jumps up and down. Her feet flex up, to tiptoes, then down; she bounces, as if on springs. I put a hand on her arm to slow her down, and Elisabeth stops, and leans against me to whisper something.

  “There’s a boy at school I like,” she says. “Brian Norquist.” Suddenly her eyes seem wider, a brighter green. Boys, I think.

  “Elisabeth, did you finish your homework?” Mom interrupts. Elisabeth flashes Mom a dirty look, so quickly that Mom doesn’t see, then whips around the corner and stomps up the stairs.

  Mom still is behind the counter, a mound of green peppers on the breadboard next to her. A half-full glass of red wine stands on the counter in back of her, and I wonder if she had some of it already, if she is warmed up enough to take the news I’m about to blurt out.

  “I’m thinking of moving back to Maine,” I say.

  “Huh?”

  She must not have heard. She bends over and peeks into the stove to look at something—probably thinking about temperature, about how this oven doesn’t preheat as fast as the old one. The oven door slams and she wipes her forehead with the back of her hand. “What did you say?” she says, and takes a sip of her wine.

  “I’m moving back to Maine,” I say. “Maybe...to the old house.”