Watermark

by Christy Ann Conlin

  The boat also reeks of mildew. It smells like mildew and diesel fuel and kerosene and rotting food and body odour. Bob says a real sailor smells just like that. It gives me the willies, because he’s got big plans for the boat and me, he says. Plans and dreams so detailed I know they were made long before me, not because of me or with me, and the plans will go on after me and I know this, but I hum inside my head so I don’t have to think about it. I regretted getting married the moment I started walking down the aisle.

  * * *

  It was only a few months ago that Bob suggested this new adventure, and very quickly after that, the boat had been moved and he had started work in Mission. And then he had come back into Vancouver to see me. It was a Monday night. He arrived without even a phone call. I was about to get into the bathtub as I did every evening. There was the sound of keys in the door. He came in with the mail he had picked up in the foyer and set it on the table before kissing me.

  Before his new medical job he had worked at an affluent Kitsilano clinic part-time, a clinic geared toward high-powered professionals and offering evening and weekend appointments for their jet-­setting patients. Bob had insisted on calling himself a “temp” even though the correct word was “locum.”

  He had worked in the high North, in Rankin Inlet and Churchill, before deciding he wanted to be a sailor. When he came back from his one and only sailing trip, he decided to “try out” Vancouver, where we met at a party. He didn’t pay any attention to me until he heard my last name. He worshipped my famous distant Slocum cousin. Bob proposed very quickly after he saw me in action on his sail boat. He had invited me for a sail but when the winds came up he didn’t seem to know what he was doing and so I took over without saying a word. We got married after a year and then he went back up north to make money to save for the big round-the-world sailing trip he wanted us to embark on.

  It was “sexy medicine,” he said, working with the Inuit. They appreciated him. Bob in turn appreciated the great stories he could tell at parties, how exotic they made him seem. And now this clinic outside of the city in Mission was some sort of progressive clinic, with a bunch of hippie doctors. They needed someone to fill in for them on occasional weekdays and weekends. He could start right away. It was the spice he needed. That’s how Bob described it. A bit of curry. A bit of muktuk. A taste of walrus. This would be the perfect way to bring back some excitement to our lives. We could still keep the city apartment, he said. It was a reasonable compromise. This would give Bob, and me, some adventure with like-minded people. My trips out to Mission would be a retreat from the city. I grew up in the country, so it would be perfect! I could work on my dissertation. Fantastic all around! And so he accepted the job and moved the boat.

  In the tub I wiggled my toes and made splashes. He had settled into a chair to sort through mail and read the paper and Outside magazine, which I subscribed to for research. But floating in the tub was as much time in the water as I needed at this stage in life. I had a nice bathtub caddy my mother had sent me and it was suspended over the water with a cup of herbal tea, a muffin, and a book. As long as the water didn’t get too cold, it was nirvana. A pedicure would be nice too, I thought — but I didn’t want Bob to know how much I would prefer a spa outing to a high seas adventure.

  My dissertation is on the anthropology of adventure and the ubiquitous role it plays in society and culture. I’m fascinated by adventure magazines, books, and television, by how the content is getting more and more extreme. Everyone needs an SUV now so even a trip to the grocery store will be loaded with adventure. And if you have lots of money, you can pay a Sherpa guide to haul you up Mount Everest. I read Into Thin Air in the bathtub and every frightening page made me love the easy life of the slob.

  Bob was jabbering out in the living room about how great life was shaping up. He was so happy he had decided to stay down south at the new job in Mission and not go back up north, as much as they were pestering him. Doctor shortage, you know. Just as soon as I finished my Ph.D. we could set off, he said.

  The bathwater was lukewarm now and my dissertation felt like a glacier. I felt like a walrus. And the more Bob talked, the more I felt my rolls against the hard enamel side of the tub.

  Bob came in the bathroom and so I asked him, “What about the back fat?”

  He was having a pee.

  “Like bacon, you mean?”

  “No,” I said. “Like back fat. I mean back fat. On me.”

  “Like bacon fat? On you? On your back?”

  “No. Like do I have fat on my back? Can you see it there? Do I resemble a human walrus?”

  He sighed, rolled his eyes, shook a few drips and left, calling over his shoulder, “I can’t stand women who are insecure about their bodies. Don’t go all Barbie doll on me, okay, sweetie? You’re better than that.”

  From the tub I could once more hear magazine pages turning in the living room as he called from the couch: “Will you come out and stay on the boat this weekend? I don’t have to work so I thought we could spend the time together at the marina. You still haven’t seen where she’s moored. And it’s a nice place to run. There’s a trail along the river. You can get back into shape.” He doesn’t comprehend how every single outdoor adventure I’ve undertaken has been done with this very body.

  Bob’s plan is for me to commute so we don’t have to be apart all the time. I can study on the boat. I can come whenever I want (when he invites me). Like the last place, up north above the treeline, where I sat alone while he worked, except when Martelle, his colleague, would have me for tea or take me to the greenhouse to look at flowers in a snowstorm, or when the three of us would have dinner.

  Sometimes we went for hikes with this ravishing red-headed linguist who was working with the Grey Nuns and learning Inuktitut. Deirdre spoke a pile of languages and when she was drunk, which seemed to be most of the time, the languages all mixed together and it was hard to know what she was talking about. She was always biting her nails and chewing her lips. She was from back home, too, but from the eastern part of the Valley floor. She explained to Bob that not everyone from the East Coast knew each other. And she hadn’t spent much time on the North Mountain anyway. She said it was desolate. This made me laugh because she didn’t mind the tundra and frozen ice. It seems to me that desolate is a state of mind.

  Bob was great at arranging for his eclectic colleagues and acquaintances who weren’t working to entertain his wife. He said it was a nice little ritual we had, how when he was busy he made sure I had something fun to do as well. It was nothing more than babysitting, assuaging his guilt for always changing plans at the last minute. And keeping an eye on me. As though he thought I might slip away when he wasn’t around.

  But I didn’t want to live on the boat part-time and take the bus to Mission. I dreaded it. My life was in the city. I hated sailing. Or rather, living in a boat like it was a trailer because Bob’s sole focus now was on making some money for the round-the-world voyage. Until then, he wouldn’t have time to sail. It was nothing like my life back home. My father and brothers would be ashamed of a boat tied up, the sails rotting and the engine sitting idle. It’s why I hadn’t let them meet Bob. Why we married at city hall. They struggled already to accept I was a scholar living in a big city on the Pacific side of the country. Living in a boat that didn’t even sail anymore would be anathema to them. They haven’t yet forgiven me for eloping, my mother especially, me being the only girl and all.

  This falling-apart boat has triggered all my fears. No matter how hard I try I can’t please anybody. My mechanical and carpentry skills are better than Bob’s but really quite basic. Bob doesn’t seem to understand that. I fished on a boat. I didn’t sit below. I get claustrophobic thinking about being cooped up through the winter in the Snapper. I haven’t told him that; I’ve just avoided visiting him. And the one thing I’ve realized is that I’m most attractive to Bob when I’m avoiding him.

&n
bsp; I’ve often wondered why he doesn’t just quit work and go sailing again. He has stories of sailing, but those are from seven years earlier. And there are always other people in the photos he has, people who look like swarthy seamen and were likely the ones at the helm in the storms, even though he would never admit it. They must have done the real work.

  He thinks because I’m from the East Coast I’ve got the sea in my blood — he grew up surrounded by land, so I bring authenticity to his sailing. The only goddamn way the sea will be in my blood is if we sink in your goddamn boat, my man.

  I remember getting out of the tub, wondering if I’d ever loved Bob. If a walrus like me could ever love anything other than polar cod and bivalves. I stayed in the tub so long my toes and fingers shrivelled. The water got cold and grey. On the way shivering down the hall I saw a single letter sitting on the small hall table. I asked Bob if there was any mail other than that. Silence. He turned the page. “No . . . not for you,” he replied.

  I left wet fingerprints on the envelope for me. It was from Tara back home. Good old “Back Fat.” My mother must have given her my latest address again, probably assuming Tara had matured now that she was twenty-nine years old. I didn’t open it. And I left it there until I threw it in my backpack before catching the bus out to Mission. My reckoning was, I might be able to steel myself enough to read it on my “retreat.”

  * * *

  The boat rocks gently all night long. I listen to Bob snore and pull the dirty sheets closer to me — there is a vague comfort in the smell of his stale sweat, the way he farts when he sleeps. He’s very consistent in this way. I lie there all night, just in case the boat breaks free and starts floating down the river. I’ll be able to get Bob up in time and rescue us. The perils of sailing are real, even when moored to a dock.

  I lie there breathing in the mildew and thinking about the letter from Tara shoved in my backpack. Even though I haven’t opened it, the familiar guilt gropes at me when I think about burning it with a lighter. Even when I think about putting it in the garbage I feel guilty. But that letter waits for me in the bottom of my sporty backpack like an envelope full of travelling manipulation and insecurity. Tara’s probably bought a non-refundable ticket and is planning on moving to Vancouver and wants to stay with me. It’s like she can’t leave high school behind.

  Then I think about when I was seventeen with pink cheeks standing there in a strapless bra and curled hair. Tara was helping me dress before Samuel came to get me in his father’s car. I’d put on hot-pink lipstick to go with the big taffeta Cinderella prom dress and black patent-­leather heels. I loved that dress. I remember thinking what a hot babe I was. Until Tara started talking.

  “Back fat.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve got back fat.”

  “What do you mean, back fat?”

  “Fat.”

  “Where?”

  “Idiot. On your back. You’ve got fat on your back.”

  “I do not.”

  “Yes, you do. Everyone in my family has it. All the girls. But we’ve got perky tits. Yours sag.”

  Tara hauled her sweatshirt up and they might as well have been growing off her collarbone. And she was covered in back fat. Like a walrus on a rock. But I didn’t have back fat and I said, “I don’t have back fat.”

  She smirked.

  “Sure you do. And saggy tits.”

  I was seventeen, and even if they didn’t grow out of my collarbone I know they weren’t sagging because I was only seventeen.

  Maidenform Sweet Nothings, Denim Red Bandana Black Lace Padded Push Up, Warner’s Pure Electricity Underwire, Warner’s The Real McCoy Sissy Fiberfill Pointy, Bustier by Lady Marlene, Bestform Satin Underwire, Wonderbra Hello Boys. She reeled them off like we were at a square dance. Something else I grew up doing — not that Tara would have ever been caught dead square dancing. Her father was an accountant. He had a formal education, she liked to tell me, not like my parents, who had vocational training. He would never let her go to the prom with someone like Samuel, someone who was a black guy. She wanted to know if he smelled different than a white guy. I knew she had never even kissed a boy before and she knew I knew her secret.

  So then Tara added: “And get the girdle pants. For the back fat.”

  “Girdle pants?”

  “Yeah. Slim and trim. Holds in back fat. No one will know unless they grab you really hard. My grandmother gave me her girdles. No one knows I wear them. Isn’t that great?”

  I hated her guts, but I didn’t pout that time. She could keep waiting. This is the thing about a bully — you never know how long they’ll keep waiting and plotting, when they’ll reappear and trip you just when you think you’ve found your balance.

  I grinned like I was in agreement about back fat and saggy tits and continued to smile and hate her guts all the way to the prom in the car with Samuel who asked what was bothering me. When I told him, he said I shouldn’t waste even a minute of my life with anyone who didn’t lift me up. Then he kissed me. He smelled like aftershave — vanilla and cedar. His skin was warm. I still think about that kiss. And my back fat.

  * * *

  It’s noon and Bob and I drink coffee and read the paper in a diner because there are no groceries on the boat. I’m taking the four o’clock bus back to the city to do some work because Bob has been beeped. He has to work the night shift tonight. He says he forgot, and I smile.

  But then I’m not taking the afternoon bus because it turns out there is no bus. Bob got the time wrong. We find this out after standing at the bus stop for thirty minutes in the rain. I ignore him and look in the gutter while Bob says things like this happen, I have to be a good sport. A guy drives by, slowing down as he lowers his window and yells, “The last bus went at noon and the next one goes at seven a.m. tomorrow.” The rain hits my smiling face.

  Bob makes calls at the pay phone while I sit on the curb soaking up the late-November raindrops. Picking my thumbnail, I listen to him tell me his friend Pete, a doctor who works at the clinic, will pick me up and take me to a jazz concert at the high school. Bob says he’ll feel better knowing I have some company for part of the evening. I won’t have to be alone in a new town. I can get to know the local community. And then I can go to the boat and Bob will be back to take me out for breakfast. I say nothing. It’s easier to just go with the flow. Plus I won’t be able to concentrate on my dissertation in that mildewed dirty boat anyway. Bob asks me to be positive. This is my job, being positive. The cold winter rain pelts down.

  I remember when I was seven years old, on a mandatory Sunday visit with my parents to family friends in a trailer court down in the Valley. My father sat there nervously counting my mother’s drinks while I watched her light smoke after smoke with her curled fingers. The family friends showed slides of old people. There were no other kids and the afternoon droned on and on and on until I couldn’t stand it anymore. I ran out the door and down the small street and got lost among the rectangles people called home and slid my new red coat down a white vinyl wall. In a crumpled pile on the ground, I cried and thought about my good-smelling room back home in the log house, with my neat shelves and tidy bed covered in my patchwork quilt.

  That was the first time I met Samuel. He looked out a window and saw me. I remember he held up a picture in his window, a picture of a forest. Maybe it was just a bunch of trees but I saw it as a forest. When we met later, in high school, I told him I remembered the picture. He never said a word, only smiled. When my mother found me shivering on the ground that day, he wasn’t in the window anymore. My mother said I had to be a polite girl or else or else or else. From then on, I hid in the backyard every Sunday until they stopped forcing me into the car. I always swore I wouldn’t ever go anywhere I couldn’t leave.

  * * *

  I’m sitting on the Snapper looking at all the books, but I can’t read them because I’m on guard duty. This
industrial park where Bob has the boat tied up is the perfect setting for a horror movie. I turn the transistor radio on and it’s Prince singing “1999” again. The boat rocks. A loud knock. I turn the radio off. As I stand up the lantern swings. The slightest motion rocks the Snapper. A man who must be Doctor Pete yells hello and I slide back the hatch.

  We jump into his shiny blue Mercedes and zoom off for the high school. The jazz concert is sold out so we can’t get in. He apologizes for not buying tickets in advance. He’s at least fifty and I wonder if he likes babysitting his colleague’s young wife. He’s close to my dad’s age. We go to this Chinese restaurant and I have no idea where I am except it’s some built-up sprawl of a once-small town. We pass huge churches with neon crosses, fast-food restaurants, malls which seem to repeat every mile, townhouse complexes. I could never navigate my way out of here. I’m at his mercy. He’s a nice guy, though, and we talk about herbal treatments and evangelical Christians, Nova Scotia, all the places Bob has worked and I’ve visited, and the people who look after me when Bob works, who make me tea, take me out for dinner and drinks and teach me foreign languages.

  Pete walks me back to the boat, telling me it’s dangerous down here at night and how it’s a weird and isolated place to have a sailboat. I know it’s dangerous; he doesn’t need to tell me this. The light is on in the houseboat beside the Snapper so at least I feel a bit better, though they must be in a trance as I haven’t seen a single person in or on the boat. Pete asks me if I’ve done a self-defence course. I say no but tell him I’m really confident. I’ve got padding. I’ve got back fat, I think. I’m a walrus with invisible tusks.