by Julia Glass
“What I need is a good long nap,” I say. “Then dinner. I have a craving for greasy nachos; sorry, Zip. A margarita, big and salty. Otis Redding.”
Louisa says to Zip, “I like the way Clem always knows what she wants.”
Louisa’s so smart about some things, so gullible about others. And a master of double-edged praise—both sides sharp as those Japanese knives.
She never lets me forget this one ridiculous summer: the summer after she’d graduated from Harvard, the summer after I found out I didn’t get in, that I’d be shipping out to Michigan instead (deep down I was glad). She was commuting to a job at the art museum in Providence, but she’d flipped for this guy up the road who restored vintage motorcycles. I didn’t notice. Honest. In general, I ignored her. We had so little in common. (That’s still mostly true, except for family, which sometimes—like right now—looms a little too large.)
I was a lifeguard at the beach club. Evenings, I volunteered at the bird sanctuary: pinned wings, fed displaced nestlings. I’d learned to ride a unicycle and rode it to both of my jobs because they were near. Some mornings, Louisa would pass me in her frumpy little Dodge; she’d wave without looking, then head for the highway, hands on the wheel at ten and two.
When Louisa’s car broke down, the motorcycle man came by with his tools. They were drinking beer on the porch when I soared around the corner on my single wheel, holding a cardboard box. “Are you crazy? Poor thing,” said Louisa after peering down into the box. The box held a baby osprey. The motorcycle man—Mike was his name—asked a million questions that night about birds, but the osprey wasn’t the magnet. There’s something about unicycles, I learned: the subtle way you swivel your hips to stay balanced.
After two weeks of my polishing chrome in his garage, of his helping me feed that ravenous osprey, I invited Mike to our family’s Fourth of July cookout. Louisa had this fabulous dress: blue silk, low neck, tight hips—on me, outrageously short. I’d borrowed it before, so I figured she wouldn’t care. So there we were dancing, Mike and me, not even close or romantic, just flinging ourselves around and laughing, when Louisa comes right over and throws her wine in my face. How was I to know that, weeks before, she’d taken Mike to her museum, come back to tour his collection, crept home from his house at dawn, certain this was true love? He hadn’t told me, nor had she, but all Louisa saw was revenge. She screamed at me the next morning that it wasn’t her fault if Harvard didn’t take me. I laughed at her and said, “You think I’m getting back at you for better SAT scores? How big is your universe?” Needlessly cruel, okay, but my hair still smelled like wine.
“He has such beautiful skin. I couldn’t stop staring.”
“Yeah, well, no booze, no butts, and if you can believe it, no caffeine. That’ll do it.”
“Or genes. I’m convinced more and more these things are genes,” Louisa says.
“The Gospel According to Mom.”
Louisa flinches. “I’m admiring his complexion, Clem. I’m not asking if he’s up for stud.”
We are sitting in Jorge’s Cocina, a café out on a wharf. Half a mile down the coast, the aquarium looks like a ship that yearns toward open sea. Sometimes I stop here after work and watch the sea lions below. They lurk around the barnacled pilings or sun on the rocks, their Goodyear hides gleaming blue and cinnamon brown. Call down and they squint up, their noses pointing out precisely you, sniffing you out long distance, benignly condescending. Throw them something to eat, they chortle and bark. I throw down chum I swipe from the otter station, a ziplock Baggie stuffed in my knapsack before I leave work. And if I’ve been writing, sifting through stats on the poaching up north, I look at these guys and feel better, just a little. I like to think they’re safe here, protected by tourism kitsch. They tolerate heckling, broken bottles, plastic debris, they eat Mallomars and Slim Jims, but nobody’s out to shoot them. The best I can wish for them is safety.
“Does he have a sense of humor? I can’t tell,” Louisa’s saying. “Maybe not—but he seems almost wise. He knew so much about me.”
“Excuse me,” I say, “but do you think I never mention your existence?”
“Inner things, things about who I am at the core.”
“Let me guess. He gave you that book. Wow, Lou, this is so not you.”
Zip carries around extra copies of the book that changed his life. It’s called Inner Aura: Gem of Nine Facets. Not a stupid book, pretty eloquent in fact, but it’s one of those if-you-don’t-go-Zen-you’ll-never-get-your-shit-together sermons that tempt me because they’re so sure and then bug me because they’re so naïve. I tried yoga once, but every time I looked in the mirror and saw myself as a spandex pretzel, I thought, Who’s this meant to fool? I’m anything but pure. When we argue, I tell Zip the human race is evolving apart, not together. There are many paths, okay, but they do not lead to one truth. And unless you lose a few million brain cells en route, they do not lead to some all-infusing serenity. Serenity is one thing we’re always leaving behind. We watch it recede as fast as an oil truck crossing Nevada. Nothing but a cloud of dust.
“You’re right,” says Louisa. “I never go for these packaged wisdoms, but I felt as if he really cared about helping me.”
“Unlike Hugh.”
“That’s not the point.” She looks hurt.
“So what did Zip prescribe? He likes to prescribe.”
“Well, he says I need camping.”
“Oh Lou.” Now I’m cracking up. “You? Camp?”
“He says,” she continues, defying my ridicule, “that the only cure for city living—which he says is deeply toxic, and who can disagree with that?—the only cure is sleeping outdoors whenever you can. Roofs compress the spirit, he says. So do mattresses. Marriage, he says, is like an old carpet. No matter how beautiful or priceless, no matter how familiar, it needs airing out, needs to rest from being trampled on. He says I did the right thing by coming here.”
I am thinking that Zip should run for governor. “You’re right that he cares, Lou, but the trouble with Zip is that to him everyone is a problem waiting for a solution. His solution. The solution.”
“Everyone has problems, Clem. He’s trying to help. But you—I suppose you don’t have problems.”
“Oh, by the score,” I say. “Please. But nobody else has the solutions that suit me. Certainly not in some list of noble platitudes.”
Our skillet of fajitas arrives, lots of fussy little dishes on the side. Right away, Louisa takes most of the sour cream. She does that when we share something, takes the bigger half. Like she’s letting me know she deserves more because she came first.
“Don’t you like the guy?” she says.
“Yes, sure!” I say, nearly choking on my first bite. “But sometimes I wonder if it’s possible to move him, to catch him off guard. He’s like a cat. Everything that happens he’s already seen. He’s one step ahead of the world every minute.”
“Have you noticed,” says Louisa, “how everything he says starts with a noun? For instance, when I was describing how I yell at Hugh and Hugh says nothing—but in this utterly blank way that only enrages me more—Zip said, ‘Self-awareness. Focus more on yourselves than on each other.’ Like that.”
“Zip’s a noun kind of guy. Very concrete. That’s what I mean. He has no doubts. It’s admirable, but it’s also a little creepy.”
“That’s certainly not our problem,” Louisa says morosely.
“Listen,” I warn her. “Don’t drag me down, okay?” Because I feel it begin to happen, the air starting to thin.
For a while we just eat, glancing out the window, as if each of us were alone. There’s no moon, so the ocean looks dark and dense, like moss. I like to picture the life underneath. I’ve been to Alaska, to the Amazon—I’ve seen and heard wildness, true wildness—but under the ocean moves me the most, because it’s so strange, so out of time. In Barrow, I got to listen to whales, the crazy-fabulous sounds they make, calling to one another as they swim along, staying in t
ouch as they migrate north. It sounded like a jungle or a space-age orchestra. Listen to that for hours on end and human voices, when you hear them again, sound pointless.
When I go to work at the aquarium, when I dive down into the kelp forest that’s fed by the bay, by its tides, I love that moment when the water takes the weight of the tank, how I feel the cold but it’s somewhere else, benignly removed from my skin. The wet suit holds me tight all over, dependable as the ideal mate. It deflects the bite of the world, fills me with a fearless cocaine shimmer. Everything I see sways to the sound of my breath—swarming bubbles, schools of flashing fish—and I hear just how alive I am.
I fantasize about sneaking into the aquarium at night, diving down among the sleepy creatures—the petticoated cuttlefish; the nurse sharks; the rays, soft as velour. During the day, when I come bearing food, the sharks and the rays are the most aggressive, nudging and skimming my body over and over. But in the night world I long for, we are equals. We drift together between rocking ribbons of seaweed, no one watching, no one asking questions. No crises to solve, no talk of any kind. Everything drugged and blue as a dream, under the skin of the sea.
“Time for music,” I say. I head for the jukebox, but I decide against Otis. Too risky; too sad. “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long” is what I almost always play. Zip likes it, too. The one time I dragged him here, we put it on, closed our eyes, and held hands, just sitting at the bar. It felt intense the way it feels intense locking eyes with a tiger. (Zip’s an intensity artist, one reason I can’t let him go.) So tonight I pick Bob Marley.
“Lively Up Yourself.” “Love Is the Only Law.” For Louisa I punch in “Respect,” dependable, wise Aretha. Because of the numbers, it’s already playing when I get back. Louisa’s smiling, a nice reward.
“Corny,” I say. “But true, right?” I’m not referring to Hugh, but she takes it that way.
“Well, the issue’s not respect.” She dips into my guacamole, having finished hers. “It’s more like … apathy. The other night we were walking home after a movie. It was the first really warm night. We were walking by the planetarium and the park. You could smell the new leaves, rainy without the rain, you know? And I thought about …” She plays with her silverware.
“What? Thought about what?”
“The future. Us, our future. I was in a great mood, and I wanted to talk about it, like where would we be in five years? Would we have children? What would we be doing? You know.”
I could say, In fact, no, I do not, but I nod.
“I tell him how maybe it’s time to start thinking about a baby. I ask if he wants to stay in the city forever. I tell him I’ve been thinking about our moving up to New England, maybe Boston if I could get a museum job—just thinking. He walks along, not a single word. I’m doing one of my monologues, but he could nod or smile or look at me, something. For all I know, he’s planning tomorrow’s lesson, thinking about Bronson Alcott or the Bay of Pigs while I’m talking to the air. So I stop. Just stop. And of course he walks on a ways before he notices I’ve stopped. ‘Where are you?’ I say when he turns around. ‘I’m right here,’ he says in that bland voice I hate. I ask him what he thinks about the things I’ve said. He says, ‘Sounds good to me.’ I say, ‘What, which things, what sounds good?’ He just looks at me, oblivious and fearful at the same time. I say, ‘I guess I’m asking, what do you want from life?’ We’ve been married one whole year and we’ve never had this kind of conversation and I’m horrified. It’s my fault, too, I realize. But do you know what he says?”
“What?”
“ ‘To be comfortable.’ That’s it! What he wants out of life!”
“That doesn’t seem like an unreasonable goal,” I say. “A more honest answer than most.”
“But it’s so aimless!”
“What are you, full of a million aims?”
“And when we went home,” Louisa says, “I lost it. I cried and cried. Hugh went into the bedroom and read. Read. He got up in the morning, shaved, read the paper, and went to work.“ She looks down at her empty plate. “And to think I was thinking about getting pregnant.”
“You wouldn’t be so stupid,” I say. I’m feeling irritated because some idiot’s Neil Diamond appears to have bumped my Bob Marley. Actually, Louisa probably should have a baby. For Louisa, that makes sense.
“It would be, wouldn’t it, things the way they are,” she says sadly.
“Well, if you want to talk rationally about having babies, no time would be a good time.” I can’t seem to shut up.
Louisa rolls her eyes. “Oh, right, the world’s too awful a place to inflict on a child. Spare me.”
“No, not exactly. It’s more like, sometimes I think, people are too awful to inflict more of them on the world.” This leaves Louisa speechless, which is rare. “And say you did have a kid. If it’s a girl, she’ll grow up to despise her mother no matter what, because that’s what daughters do. A boy? He could end up gay, get AIDS, and die. Break your heart, either way.”
Louisa gasps. “What a horrid thing to say, what’s the matter with you? They’re going to cure AIDS, they’re getting nearer all the time.”
“No, they won’t—and it’s so incredibly tragic. I’m not a bigot. Listen. No one’s ever cured a virus. The media’s full of treacherous wishful hogwash. A vaccine, maybe, but who’d take it?” I explain carefully and coldly how a virus works, how this one mutates like nothing they’ve ever seen. Bob Marley kicks in at last with “Lively Up Yourself.” Louisa looks both appalled and demoralized, and it’s all my fault. How can I laugh at Zip? At least he knows how to console. I say, “Hey. Do like the man says.”
Now she’s almost in tears. “You are an utter nihilist.”
“I’d rather be pleasantly surprised than fatally disappointed.” And then I do shut up. As always, too late.
For the next three days, we hardly see each other. I’m buried in the library—disciplined by Louisa’s mere presence—and two nights I’m on at the clinic. I haven’t asked how long she plans to stay, and she hasn’t said.
She sits on my couch, drinks mug after mug of Zip’s mint tea, and reads a bunch of books she’s supposed to review. I realize now why her suitcase weighed so much.
Tuesday night when I get back, she’s on the phone. Zip’s out, running his soup kitchen. Louisa smiles quickly when I walk in, turns her back, and lowers her voice. She murmurs, “Yes, I will, I know, I promise. I have to go but yes, of course, I will, don’t worry, me too, I will, soon,” things like that, so I know it’s Hugh and I’m glad, but when she gets off, she looks sheepish, as if jilting him would please me. She asks how things went at the clinic.
“This Rottweiler swallowed a tennis ball. That caused a little excitement. One of those neon pink ones.” I describe the owner’s hysteria, the surgery, tell her all about Rottweilers’ oral compulsions, about the things I’ve seen emerge almost unscathed from their stomachs: balls of tinfoil, rubber spatulas, spiky toy dinosaurs, a pair of fuzzy dice. Last month we x-rayed a dog who’d been vomiting for days and wouldn’t eat. We saw a long straight line all the way from the esophagus down to the upper intestinal tract, a total mystery. What we removed was the rubber-coated telephone antenna from the owner’s Jaguar, nearly as good as new (as was the dog after surgery). I took the antenna into the waiting room and waved it in the guy’s face. “Missing something?” He wasn’t amused.
Louisa nods at the phone, which blinks double time. “Guess who,” she says. “First, to say she’s certain he’s here. Second, she’s decided to forget the police. She had an argument with a desk sergeant in Carmel who she describes as an ‘animal-rights fundamentalist.’ ”
“You didn’t pick up?”
“I don’t want her knowing I’m here. How do I explain?”
“Say you’re reviewing a show for your magazine! You’re the creative one. I hate dealing with this all alone.”
“You took it on. I’d have refused.”
“Easy for you to say.
” I sigh. It’s ten o’clock here, too late to call back. I see, too, that any hope I had for my sister’s willing help was a delusion. Though Louisa, I’ll admit, sees the harshest side of our mother. Because she’s too smart? Because she interrupted something? I don’t know. But I know this: when Louisa got into Harvard, how proud was our mother? The first words out of her mouth were “Cambridge? Hotbed of political heretics and whining overgrown hippies. If you ask my opinion, it ought to be designated a nuclear-waste dump. Drown the bastards in PCBs.” When Louisa became engaged, she said, “Now don’t you let that boy down. The ring alone must have cost him a fortune!” Louisa never challenges these insults. She’s been hearing them forever, I guess.
“I have an idea,” I say. “Let’s go for a drive.”
“At this hour? Where?”
“We’ll look for the hound truck,” I say, pleased at my ingenuity.
Part of me wonders what the hell Tighty could possibly be thinking—and part of me is shaking its head like a parent, muttering, Great. Just great. He’s fucking up all over again.
Tighty is fifty, almost a decade younger than Mom. He doesn’t rate as a lost soul—he’s not quite derailed—but his bitterness, his sense of never having found a way to make an upper-class living, comes across loud and clear. He dropped out of Yale in the late fifties and liquidated his fledgling trust fund to travel around the world. Batiked and bearded, he returned to Rhode Island to find that his father was divorcing his mother, selling the family homestead, and heading south in pursuit of an equestrian debutante fresh out of Vassar. He spent half of Tighty’s would-be inheritance roping her into a three-year marriage. Poor, bewildered Tighty took a job at the local stable in our hometown and stayed there till it closed ten years later. Enter my mother, May Jardine. She had just revived Figtree Domain and needed a chaperon for the hunt’s forty foxhounds. Tighty happily seized the job, which didn’t pay much though it gave him a small but classy place to live: the carriage house next to the kennels.