by Lori Weber
They stop off at the tackle shop, where Mitchell pulls a Pepsi out of the cooler. “Hey, Rand, want anything?” he asks.
“No thanks,” she calls back. Miranda is twirling the postcard rack. She hasn’t written to her parents yet, but she did give her friend Shannon a note to take back to them. She’d come to Fort Lauderdale with Shannon on spring break to celebrate their final year of high school. She hadn’t planned to stay; it’s just the way things worked out. Her one-week trip to the beach had led her to Mitchell. Her note was short and to the point, simply stating that she’d met someone who loved her and had decided to stay. Never mind that she had only three months of high school left and had already been accepted to three different universities. She told them not to bother trying to change her mind because they wouldn’t be able to. Mitchell wanted to add his two cents’ worth to the note, so he’d scribbled a few lines at the bottom: Don’t worry about your daughter. She’s in good hands. The note included Mitchell’s address, but no phone number. Her own cell had run out of money and she hadn’t reloaded it.
Miranda can understand why they haven’t called, but it perplexes her that they haven’t come to take her home, forcibly, like her father once did from a party. He had pulled her right out of a slow dance with Robby Bent, who stood back amazed, and then at the last minute had called out, “Hey, don’t forget to drop me your glass slipper.”
“Hey, Mitch,” the man behind the cash calls over.
“Hey, Bob,” Mitchell calls back, tipping his Pepsi.
“Seen the picture yet?” Bob asks.
“Nope.” Mitchell saunters over to the billboard near the door. His shorts are frayed, and Miranda has an urge to cut off the dangling threads.
“Hey, c’mere, Rand,” he calls over.
Miranda stops twirling the postcard rack and joins him. There she is, in a five by seven colored shot, clutching a giant kingfish upside down by the tail. She’s holding it at arm’s length because the fish was still alive and squirming to be set free. She had caught it minutes earlier, all by herself, much to her own and everyone else’s amazement.
Miranda doesn’t know what to say. She can’t believe that’s her. It must be trick photography, the kind the tabloids are famous for, where they take two famous actors and merge them together in suggestive poses. For a second, Miranda thinks about sending the picture home to her parents. They could add it to their Miranda-book, which held pictures of all her landmarks: standing in her blue uniforms on the first day of school; sitting at a grand piano at her first music recital; middle school graduation.
Mitchell puts his arm around her and rotates her to face Bob.
“Ain’t she su’um? That’s the darndest looking fish I seen in a long time,” he says.
“Whad’y’all do with the money?” Bob asks Miranda.
“We spent it, what d’ya think,” Mitchell answers, cracking up. Miranda pats her back pocket, making sure the wad is secure. She remembers the fight they had over the hundred and fifty dollars. Mitchell wanted to spend it on better fishing gear and Miranda had a hard time not giving in. After all, she was used to people telling her what to do with her own money. She had won a graduation prize of five hundred dollars in middle school and wanted to spend it on a new bike, but her father had insisted she upgrade her computer. In the end, she’d given in. It seemed easier.
“Well, you buyin’ one of those or not, girl?” Bob asks. Miranda didn’t even realize that she’d begun to twirl the postcard rack again.
“Oh, sorry, I’ll take this one, please.” She chooses one of the beach at night — a gold sun sifting through purple clouds, black palm trees silhouetted against orange and scarlet water.
“Who’s ’at for?” Mitchell asks.
“Home,” she replies, not looking at him. Mitchell has told her more than once that this is now her home. She’s tried to think of Fort Lauderdale that way, but can’t. Home is where the heart is, they say, and her heart isn’t here. It isn’t anywhere, as far as she can tell. She didn’t leave it behind in Toronto, except perhaps with Cordelia. Miranda’s eyes are drawn to the dead starfish under Bob’s glass counter. She sees her heart stuffed and laid out on display the same way, awaiting a new owner.
Down on the beach, Miranda spreads out her metallic blanket, a present from Mitchell. He said it would guarantee an all-round even tan, as well as a sand-free trip home. Mitchell always says anybody looking for Miranda could just follow the trail of sand she traipses into the house. Miranda pictures her parents crouched over, magnifying glasses in hand, following the sand right up Mitchell’s front steps, past his parents on the porch, and into their bedroom. Progressive or not, she knows they’d be outraged to find her and Mitchell in the same bed. But where else could she stay? Her vacation money had run out. Shannon had urged her to come back, but she hadn’t listened.
“You hardly know him. You can’t do this. What about school?” Shannon pleaded.
“I’ll be okay. Don’t worry,” Miranda replied. Frankly, she likes the fact that nobody in Mitchell’s family gives a hoot about education. Mitchell has no career goals. He plans to fish and do odd jobs in between, if he has to. It’s what all the men in his family do, apart from joining the army. Miranda knows what her parents would say about slack plans like that.
Miranda can see Mitchell way above her, setting up his tackle box. He’s hoping to catch some baby sharks to sell at the Deep C Souvenir Shop. Tourists pay ten dollars to watch them float around in a large tank in the store’s basement. Mitchell took Miranda a couple of weeks ago and pointed out the two he’d caught. When she asked how he could tell, he said you always recognized something you’d caught yourself. To Miranda, they all looked the same, and she only got a glimpse of their teeth once, when someone tapped the glass and they thought it meant food was coming.
Miranda doesn’t want to take off her clothes right away. Her skin is burned and starting to blister under the band of her black bikini. Mitchell told her she was crazy for buying black, but she explained that she never would’ve bought black if she’d known she’d be staying so long.
“Hey, Ra,” Mitchell calls from the pier, waving his T-shirt. The skin on his chest is red and wrinkled, like it’s been deep-fried. “How come ya still got your clothes on? This is the best sun of the day.”
Miranda reluctantly pulls off her T-shirt, then kicks off her shorts. She soaks her skin with sunscreen, thinking how Mitchell will tell her later that only wimps use it. “It just gyps you out of a tan.” Miranda’s mother once pointed out that the word gyp was actually an insult to gypsies, who had an unfair reputation as thieves and cheats, but there’d be absolutely no point in explaining that to Mitchell.
Miranda fixes her eyes on the waves beating insistently against the far legs of the pier, as though they’re trying to topple the wooden structure. She pictures Mitchell sliding, tackle box and all, into the ocean, like a Titanic victim. She’s not sure how she’d feel about that. She’s not at all sure what her feelings for Mitchell are. He’s an alternative to going home, that’s all. She hasn’t agreed to marry him. Nobody she knows gets married at eighteen, but down here it’s not unusual. Lots of Mitchell’s friends and cousins are married already. “It’s my time,” he has told her. “And you’re it,” as though they’re just playing a game of tag.
They had met at an all-night beach party that she’d gone to with Shannon. Miranda was sleeping outside, curled up in a cluster of couch grass beside some wooden steps. According to Mitchell, he spent the night sitting on the stairs, keeping watch over her. He said only southern men were gentlemen, and since most of the teenagers vacationing on the beach in March were northerners, she was lucky he was there.
In the morning, Mitchell showed her how to dig for sharks’ teeth. You had to walk backwards, hunched over, digging delicately in the sand among the pebbles and bits of broken shell. She’s been collecting sharks’ teeth ever since and has almost a whole jar full. She takes the jar out of her straw bag and holds it up to
the sun. If she turns the glass a certain way the sun glints off the black surfaces of the teeth, making them gleam. It amazes Miranda to think of all that raw power, now bottled up and harmless.
The noon sun is strong and Miranda can feel her skin bubble. She could fry an egg on her belly. She makes a visor of her hand and looks up at Mitchell, who has moved to the far end of the pier and is sitting on the middle railing, his chin resting on the top beam, as if he’s stuck in a guillotine. While he’s occupied, Miranda jumps up and scoops her beach gear into her straw bag, blanket and all. If Mitchell sees her he’ll want to know where she’s going. He doesn’t like to let her out of his sight. Sometimes she can feel his eyes boring holes into her, stronger than the sun’s rays.
She walks away from the pier, letting the salty water wash over her feet. When she looks back over her shoulder, she catches Mitchell hauling his rod over his head, ready to cast out. She steps backwards, landing squat in a kid’s sandcastle. “Sorry,” she mutters, then runs on.
Further north the beach is more crowded. The flashing sign of the arcade, the landmark that separates north from south, is just ahead. Miranda cuts through it and emerges onto Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard. There, she continues north, passing the bar where she danced barefoot a few months ago, dodging broken bottles.
It occurs to Miranda that if she keeps walking, she’ll eventually cross into Georgia, then South and North Carolina, then Virginia, then up through Pennsylvania, New York, and finally into Canada. She could sleep on the beach down here, and maybe as far as Virginia, but no further than that. And what would her homecoming be like? Her parents must be furious. They had it all planned: her graduation, then enrolment into a Liberal Arts program. It was what they wanted her to study, because it could lead to so many interesting career paths. But Miranda’s favorite subject was biology. She had a talent for it. The sight of frogs and mice waiting to be dissected never bothered her. She didn’t even mind the fetal pigs that sent so many of her classmates gagging to the bathroom. Dissecting thrilled her. She couldn’t wait to pin the specimen to her cutting board and explore.
Miranda keeps walking, putting more distance between herself and the busy, touristy part of town. On impulse, she turns into a motel with a large CLOSED sign in the office window. At the back, she finds an oval pool filled with green water and hundreds of dead bugs, their wings spread, floating on its surface. She stretches out in a lawn chair made of woven strips of plastic, most of them broken, and wonders if Mitchell has discovered she’s gone yet. She also wonders what would happen if she pried open one of the windows and squatted inside for a while. Would Mitchell send out a search party? Would he eventually find her? And if her parents did come down, would they find Mitchell and work with him to locate her? Her parents have probably decided to make her suffer for a while before coming to get her. They probably thought this would be a good chance for her to think about her future and to practice her decision-making skills. These skills were her father’s forte. He made huge decisions at work all the time and he made all the decisions around the house too, for everyone. He had even decided that Miranda shouldn’t take this trip in the first place.
“You have too much school work to do. And you’ll be spending all your saved money.”
“But I’m almost eighteen, Dad. I’ll be eighteen in a month. Legal, remember?”
“Legal? What does that mean. You’re still too young to go to another country alone. Anything could happen.”
She watched her father’s mouth open and close as he lectured her, but tuned out the sound. She concentrated instead on her mother, who was standing behind him, her arms folded across her chest. Why didn’t her mother come to her defence, like she did for all her disadvantaged clients? And hadn’t she been young once too? Why couldn’t she be like Shannon’s mother who had just said that the trip sounded like great fun?
Miranda fixed her eyes on her tarantula paperweight. It had been a present from her mother for her fifteenth birthday. The furry spider sat in a glass bubble filled with formaldehyde, its bulging eyes watching the three of them. Miranda kept looking from the spider to her mother. She was convinced that her mother wanted her father to stop talking as much as she did, but she just didn’t have the nerve to shut him up. Suddenly, Miranda picked up the paperweight — it fit into her fist like a hardball — and hurled it across the room, smashing it against the wall behind her bed.
Her father finally stopped shouting. All three of them stood and watched the glass flying off in splinters and the thick yellowish liquid oozing down the wall. Then they stared at the brown beast lying, belly-up, on her pillow.
Miranda’s mother was the first to stir. She crossed the landing to the bathroom and grabbed a handful of tissue. Then she scooped up the spider, supporting the whole mess with her other hand, as if it were a baby’s head. Miranda followed her back to the bathroom where the two of them stood over the toilet bowl, watching the furry creature spin around and around, until it flushed out of sight forever. Even though they didn’t speak, Miranda felt it was their deepest moment of understanding ever.
Miranda left the next day while her parents were at work. She waited until they were out of the house, packed a suitcase, and went to stay at Shannon’s until the flight left that evening. Her mother would have come home around five to find her gone. It would have fallen on her mother’s shoulders to tell her father, who always came home later, that Miranda had disobeyed him. That wouldn’t have been easy. And it couldn’t be easy for her mother now, not knowing anything about Miranda’s new life, except what Shannon could tell her.
Miranda walks tentatively to the edge of the pool. A rancid odor rises, released by the heat of the sun. It’s not the clean water of their pool at home, so carefully filtered and purified with chlorine and other chemicals, but Miranda lifts her arms over her head and dives in anyway, separating the mass of bugs. Deep underwater, she keeps her eyes closed as her hands reach for the edge. She swims back and forth, north and south, again and again in the dirty water, coming up only when she needs air. Every time she emerges, she thinks she should stop, but a voice in her head tells her she hasn’t done enough yet. She should stay in the dirty water a while longer. After so many laps, she becomes disoriented and loses track of which direction she’s swimming, north or south. Which way will she be facing when she stops? A tiny voice in her head tells her it could make a difference.
Finally, when her arms and legs are dead tired, Miranda emerges, dragging herself up against the side of the pool. Ahead of her is North Fort Lauderdale Beach Boulevard stretching toward Georgia. Miranda exhales, feeling the stale air leave her body. She shakes herself off and pats as much dirty water off her skin as she can. When she combs her hair a few dead bugs stick to the teeth. She pulls her shorts and T-shirt over her wet bathing suit and grabs her straw bag. She can feel the heavy jar of sharks’ teeth banging against her knee. Impulsively, she pulls it out and unscrews the lid. Then she bends down and, walking backwards, spills the black teeth in a trail that leads from the pool to the front gate. She saves only a few, to turn into earrings for Cordelia.
When she reaches the pier, Mitchell is loading his tackle gear into the Camaro.
“Hey Miranda, where ya bin?” he asks. She can tell he’s annoyed.
“Nowhere, just walking.”
“I caught two sharks. Wanna see them?” She doesn’t really, but nods. Mitchell opens the trunk to show her two tiny sharks, no more than a foot long, lying tranquil in a cooler filled with sea water.
“I gotta go up and get the rest of my stuff. Stay here. I’ll be back in a minute.”
Miranda stares down at the baby sharks. As far as she knows they’re too young to be separated from their mothers. For the first time in weeks Miranda can picture her own mother clearly, sitting on her antique chair in the sunporch, trying to read but putting the book down every few seconds and sighing.
She watches Mitchell walk away in his cut-off jeans and bare feet. Her parents’ imagin
ary words are right. In twenty or thirty years Mitchell will still be doing this, fishing out a piecemeal living, hoping for souvenir sales and prize money.
She lifts the cooler, which is heavier than she thought it would be, and stumbles with it to the ocean. The foamy water rolls out to lick her toes. She wades in up to her knees. Then she tips the cooler and releases the sharks into the ocean. A voice in her head tells her that marine biology might be neat. It’s something she could look into.
She walks back to Mitchell slowly. He’s staring at the empty trunk, his mouth and eyes open wide, a finger scratching his sandy curls. She knows she’ll never be able to explain why she did it.
She takes a deep breath and pats the prize money rolled up in her jeans pocket. Hopefully, it will cover the cost of a bus ticket home.
OUT OF THE WOODS
Today, I’m accompanying my mom to my grandmother’s apartment. I have to do this often because my mom has agoraphobia. I look the word up in the dictionary whenever I need to remind myself that her condition is real. According to Webster’s, agora is the ancient Greek word for market. So, technically, agoraphobia is a fear of markets. With my mom, this fear extends to all public places. I end up having to take her out a lot, as though she’s the child and I’m the mother.
We take a long bus ride up the expressway that connects the north and south ends of the city. My mom’s pretty good on this route now, but she still needs me there for support, especially when we pass the tall glass buildings in the business district. For some reason, she does better around stone and brick. I think it’s the way the sky and clouds are reflected on the glass buildings’ walls, like giant mirrors. I can see her shrinking, as though she’s looking for a place to hide, when we pass them.