The Last True Poets of the Sea

by Julia Drake

  “The opposite.”

  She tugged my hips toward hers with my belt loops until our mouths met again. I’d never kissed anyone before her in my life. I’d never had a conversation like this. I could feel the muscles in her calves tighten where she was stretching up tall enough to meet me, her hands were moving, I should move my hands, too, why hadn’t I moved them, touching neck, earlobe, chest, stomach.

  I could kiss her neck, it occurred to me.

  Liv tucked her face against my collarbone, Marine Mingle between us, our bodies mashed potatoes together, sweet potatoes, the kind with marshmallows on top. She was so soft, she thought she was all edge but she wasn’t and neither was I.

  “I didn’t know…” I said at last. I kissed her forehead, left cheek, her right temple; her skin was soft, her cheek cold.

  “I didn’t know!” she said. “Not until you came here. Or I knew, but I didn’t know. I still don’t. Even when I thought, it was impossible, that you could think of me.…”

  I could rest my chin on her scalp and I loved that, I wished I were even taller, a giantess, so I could put her in my pocket and take her wherever I went. I wanted to tell her all sorts of big things—all these thoughts about time and history and scope and bees that swim, my body was Fresnel-lensing again, light beaming and refracting and rainbowing….

  “You should really wash this sweatshirt,” she said into my chest.

  I giggled and she looked up at me. I hadn’t ever seen her from this angle.

  “If we go inside, will it be over?” she asked.

  “It’s not a spell,” I said.

  “Promise?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  The South American coast from Peru to Chile experiences a yearly period of coastal upwelling. Colder, nutrient-rich waters suddenly rush to the ocean’s surface, and with that comes an overabundance of fish in search of food. Who knows what this actually looks like, but when I read about it in the Lyric Aquarium information packet, I imagined schools of fish filling the waters, creating a silver bridge from sand to horizon. A phenomenon that transformed the dark, cold sea into a walkway near solid and sparkling. A rare sort of aquatic alchemy.

  Side by side. On the couch. Her body against mine and mine against hers. Hands on ribs, stomachs, up in hair. I squeezed her earlobe just because I could. Kissing like that for days. Hours. Minutes. Who knew? Fresnel lenses don’t tell time.

  Her dress rode up. I put my hand on the outside of her bare thigh and she spoke.

  “I’ve never had sex,” she said, frank, soft, scared.

  “We don’t have to have sex.”

  “But you have, right?”

  I nodded and my nose grazed hers.

  “Both people?”

  “Yes.” I felt like crying, scared and happy, like in the instant before I set foot onstage.

  “Do you care that I haven’t?”

  I shook my head no. “We don’t have to,” I said again, but I wanted to. With us, it was right. I knew that. She knew that. And still, part of me wished this moment between us could stay perfect and set, like sea fossils in the desert long after the water had gone.

  Her breath mixed with mine. We weren’t fossils. We were changing, alive, and I wanted her.

  “I…I want to. With you. If you do?” she said.

  Her mouth on mine was so warm I shivered. I dipped my hand under her dress, traced the comma of her hamstring to the edge of her cotton underwear, and she made a throaty noise I’d hear in my dreams for years to come. Did I want to? I wanted to. It wasn’t a question.

  “It’s okay,” she whispered.

  I was too nervous. She was real. She had edges. I propped my fingertips on her stomach, my hand tented like a little four-legged creature. Then, slowly, I flattened my hand against her skin, a deer splayed on ice.

  Her breathing quickened. God, I was so nervous. Why was I so nervous?

  I wasn’t ginger. I was trembling but deliberate. I imagined my hand sinking through her skin, every cell on my hand touching every part of her ribs. I marveled at the sturdiness of her rib cage and the strength of her breath. Her heart was frantic and her skin was cold. My middle finger skimmed her bra’s cloth and wire edge. I opened my eyes, and her lash line was purple, like tattooed eyeliner. I slipped two fingers beneath the bridge of her bra and kept them there, feeling for her pulse between her breasts.

  She put her hand under my shirt and laid her palm flat on my heart. Eight limbs between us, two hearts each beating in their own rhythm, and her eyes warm and constant as pilot lights. She smiled and, so gently, took my hand and guided it back down.

  “Now, please?” she asked, so very polite.

  At one point, someone stifled a yawn. Me too, the other one said.

  “I’ve got to go home,” Liv said. Her hair had fallen out of the braids and was sticking every which way, matted in the back. The next time I’d see her it’d be brushed and rebraided, all evidence of what happened between us undone with a shower and a comb. We weren’t fossils, but we had memories, and we had each other.

  “This happened, right?” I asked, sitting up beside her.

  “I think so. No. I know so.”

  “Maybe that’s why people give each other love tokens. It’s, like, proof.”

  She touched my face. “Is it okay if we don’t—if we don’t tell anyone here?”

  I thought of her parents and Felix. That man who’d yelled at me from the car window. We could do what she wanted. This was her home.

  “Could I tell Sam? Not in graphic detail, but just about you?”

  She ran her fingers over my UFO tattoo, considering.

  “You can tell Sam,” she said finally.

  “Okay,” I said. “But we can—we can do this again, right?”

  She kissed me. She kissed me.

  “This happened. It will happen again.” She looked at her watch. “I’m picking you up in six hours to go look for this wreck, so you’re stuck with me all weekend anyway.”

  As soon as she walked out the door, time shifted. Second hands eked their way around the clock. My entire life revolved around waiting: waiting for it to be morning so then I could see Liv again. To kiss. To kiss, and kiss, and kiss, and kiss.

  I couldn’t sleep. Possessed by an inner effervescence, I cleaned the shit out of my grandmother’s house. I organized the attic. I did laundry. I scrubbed toilets and sinks and showers. I swept. I busted out the mop. As I cleaned, Liv was a scrim that came down over everything, a show always playing on the wet curve of my eyeballs, a contact nestled up close to my pupils, my irises.

  “Jesus Christ, are you on drugs?” Toby asked, lurching into the kitchen at 4:00 a.m. on his way to the bakery.

  “Not anymore!”

  This was better than drugs. Every object I touched felt new and old all at once. I felt connected to everything: I was bathing in this collective well of love and history, like I’d invented this feeling, or discovered it. But this this this was much bigger than me, too, much bigger than Liv, much bigger than humans. When I’d folded T-shirts, I felt not the fabric but the original cotton blooms that had been harvested to make them; when I’d shined the surface of the dining room table, I understood its former life as a tree, saw the forest it grew up in, felt the waxy greenness of its summertime leaves.

  “I know I’m absent at best, but I really didn’t peg you for a speed freak,” Toby said.

  “I just mopped! Careful!”

  “What are you doing awake? Where did you even find a mop?” He put his hand to my forehead. “Are you feeling okay?”

  I shook him off. I hadn’t felt this good in a long, long time.

  After he left, I worked on the puzzle. All that was left was a cornfield, blue sky, the gingham of Dorothy’s dress—the hard parts that everyone left for last. There were just the edges of each piece left to guide me, no pictures to give me clues, but I knew I could do this. I could do the hard parts.

  Around 7:00 a.m., the doorbell rang. Liv. She
was back, I knew it. She couldn’t wait to see me either. I was going to open the door, and I was going to grab her. I wanted to pull her braid across my mouth. I wanted to pull her black dress over her head. I wanted to press my body against hers. I swung the door open, my heart leaping from my chest.

  It was Sam.

  PORTRAIT OF A FAMILY

  The year is Wild. This is a Family.

  Every day, the Parents wake up at 5:00 a.m. The Mother spends all day cutting open sick children, tinkering with their parts, and sewing them back together. Sometimes, despite all her herculean efforts, she must report to their completely strung-out parents that she did her best, but little Marcus/Chloe/Roberto didn’t have the strength to pull through. Her job is truly the stuff of nightmares. The Father does something complex with numbers and taxes and businesses. The Daughter imagines an abacus, though she doesn’t really know, because she’s never asked. Instead of “Dad,” she and the Son sometimes call him the “Finance Department,” which can’t feel good. The Father has so much paper in his office that when she was little, the Daughter used to worry that he’d be crushed in an office avalanche.

  Both the Mother and the Father average a fourteen-hour day. All this so they can live with their family in a fancy-ass apartment on the Upper West Side and send their offspring, their complete lemons of children, to private school. The Son was always…complicated, but the Daughter actually used to be okay. The worst she did was sing, very loudly, at the dinner table. Once she demanded their presence at her one-woman-revival of My Fair Lady, which she staged in their living room.

  Now, though, the Daughter is sixteen and a force to be reckoned with. She looks about twenty-five. She stays out late. There are boys. There are girls. She scares her parents. They look at her like they can’t believe they made her. Is she actually theirs? The Son they understand: he is wasting away in front of them. There is a physical manifestation of a murkier mental problem. He’s in desperate need of treatment, medication, doctors. But the Daughter? They’re at a loss. She scares them so much they stop asking questions altogether. They know something is wrong, but it’s also easier not to know what time she came home and what she got up to over the weekend.

  One day, though, the Parents get a call. The Daughter has been caught smoking weed in the middle of the day a block away from school grounds. The school has no choice but to suspend her. The Son, it should be noted, frequently hides in an unused school closet because the lights are too fluorescent and the voices are too loud and the world is becoming such a horrible place that all he can do is not eat and read. For him this is more or less standard behavior, plus he’s still acing his classes. The Daughter’s suspension, however, is a real breaking point. They can no longer ignore the brewing catastrophe.

  So the Parents come up with a plan. The spring before the Son’s suicide attempt, they all take an expensive vacation to Spain to “rebuild the family.” Days, they sightsee, bake in the heat, and struggle with the language barrier. Nights, the Daughter smokes hashish and drinks rioja with the young Spanish hotelier from the front desk while the Son reads alone in their room. The Son doesn’t ask her to stay, but the Daughter notes he doesn’t fall asleep until she returns.

  The Son is having a bad time in Spain. He hates potatoes and mayonnaise, cannot stand the vastness of cathedrals, finds the language abrasive and loud. He cannot take the sun and the heat. He doesn’t understand why there’s no water in this city. At a particularly grim lunch at an outdoor café, where flies keep landing on his anemic salad of iceberg lettuce, tuna, and mayonnaise-slathered tomato, the Mother admits that maybe she didn’t think this trip through. The Father reminds everyone they’re descended from the survivor of a shipwreck and they’re in Spain, for Christ’s sake, can’t we all just have a good time? The Son, obviously guilt-ridden, takes a bite of a tomato and gags. The Daughter fantasizes about the waiter fingering her in the bathroom.

  The Parents persevere. They must. They see Guernica. They take the high-speed train to Granada and tour the Alhambra, forcing the children to pose with stone lions. The temperature drops, rare for this time of year, but the cold snap is a welcome relief for the foreigners. They catch a flamenco show in a cave, and after, the Father sweetly embarrasses himself trying to re-create the moves. He pulls the Daughter into the street for a dance, and she lets him. This, though small, turns out to be the beginning.

  After that night, the Son asks for plain white rice: the first food he’s requested in months. The family winds up eating in a lot of grimy Chinese joints as a result, and the three-way lost-in-translation farce that invariably ensues is enough to make all of them laugh, plus the servers, all at the same time, so much so that the Father weeps a little bit and props his glasses on his forehead. The Daughter remembers, oh yeah, Dad is human—we all are. That night, the Daughter stays in with her brother. They perfect their Jacques Cousteau impressions. The brother admits he missed her this past year. The Daughter says, yeah, I know. They work on crossword puzzles. They finish two Saturdays and an acrostic.

  The next night, the four of them take a good family photograph at the top of San Nicolas at sunset, the orange light bouncing off the Alhambra, making it glow from within like a lantern. The Daughter has learned that Granada means grenade, yes, but also pomegranate. She loves this fact: this city feels ripe and red and mythical as the fruit itself. Hippies play homemade instruments, and the Daughter and her brother dance a tango to the music of wood flutes. The Parents kiss, a long one. It’s working, everyone thinks, but is too scared to say aloud. That’s how tenuous and unbelievable the whole thing feels: their happy family floats cautiously, like a shimmering soap bubble.

  And maybe, maybe, the trip to Spain would have worked, were it not for the Table Incident.

  After the photograph, the family heads to dinner. It’s still early by Spanish standards—ten p.m. The restaurant is empty. The Son can’t figure out what to order. The Daughter is bothered by the quiet. The Mother wants to know if she’s okay. I’m fine, the Daughter snaps. They’ll be heading home in a few days: their return to New York looms over her.

  The Mother says she has a question.

  Uh-oh, the Father says.

  The Mother, in a gesture of goodwill and advice straight out of parenting books, asks the Daughter whether she might like to, when they get back to the city, take a visit to the Son’s expensive therapist. They haven’t talked about the suspension, not really, but the Mother thinks the therapist might be a good place to start.

  The Daughter grows resistant, but not mean. Not yet. The Mother soldiers on, undeterred by the Daughter’s terse, one-word answers. The Mother has been buoyed by the familial closeness of the last few days. She thinks now she has an opportunity to reach her daughter. It’s just been so nice to see you smile these past few days, she says. I cannot remember the last time you smiled. The Mother has left her small patients dying on the other side of the world so she can be here, with her miserable, fucked-up family in this empty restaurant, too early, with her Daughter who never smiles and her Son who never eats. The Mother is obviously at her wit’s end, huge bags under her eyes, mascara flaking her cheekbones like freckles on a corpse.

  Even though the Daughter thinks privately that therapy would do her a lot of good, she can’t swallow the Mother’s kindness. She misses the rush of New York City. She wants to get high. She wants to have sex. She doesn’t want to go to therapy. She doesn’t want to get better, because getting better would mean there’s something wrong with her.

  So she spits back: just because I’m a slut doesn’t mean I’m unhappy.

  The Mother, of course, starts to cry.

  The Daughter glances at her brother, looping his spoon through his soup, his other hand clenched in a fist. She cannot remember the last time he ate a full meal. His veins are blue and his cheeks are gaunt. His blond hair is falling out, but his arms have grown downy. The Daughter is suddenly furious. She is so tired of this, so tired of eyeing his plate and seeing how many
bites he takes, of the constant monitoring, so angry to have eaten in so many Chinese restaurants when there are mountains of jamón ibérico and goat cheese and honey and paella to be inhaled. How hard is it, really, to suck down some fucking gazpacho?

  The shipwreck gene roils in her stomach. The Daughter looks her Mother in the eye.

  Besides, the Daughter says, Sam’s been in therapy since birth, and look at how well he’s doing.

  The Son stops playing with his food. He puts the dripping spoon on the table, leaving an archipelago of stains behind. He stands up. He walks across the restaurant, gets down on his hands and knees, and crawls beneath another table. He disappears entirely from view. The waiters glance at each other nervously. The tablecloth flutters, then goes still. Curtain.

  The Father congratulates the Daughter on making half the family cry. He’d join in, he says, if he weren’t so dehydrated. He signals for the bill.

  Thanks, Finance, the Daughter says.

  The Daughter knows she must change. More than anyone else, more than the rest of the family combined, she is disgusted with the person she has become. She knows it’s not hard to say a kind a word. To say, Thanks, Mom, I think you’re right, and I appreciate your noticing. She knows when she and the brother get back to the room, she should crawl under the covers with him, hold his hand, and tell him that things will get better, that she’s there for him, she promises.

  Instead, when they return to the hotel, the Daughter sneaks out with the guy from the front desk. His name is Elio, and in his seamy apartment there is a black futon and three heavy, stoned roommates and a huge burgundy wall hanging, ripped across the center to reveal a beige stucco wall behind. By the Daughter’s feet sits a pearl-gray cat with an ear that’s being eaten away by some kind of fungus. A naked patch behind the cat’s ear is furless and scabbed. The Daughter contemplates this patch on the ear, points it out to Elio. Elio says the cat’s just a street cat, no big deal. They smoke.