Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  “I’m not a fucking crippled old woman,” she says.

  My mother is still beautiful. Sometimes, people say we are sisters, and when it happens, I feel like maybe I’m dying. She’s kept her hair long and dyed dark brown, her skin is mysteriously nice and tan, from some kind of lineage we’ve never found, and her clothes fall well against her in all the right ways. She loves cheap jewelry, and she laces herself with fake shine, though she doesn’t need it, because somehow, despite the horror of her unmotherliness, she is bright from within. Yes, from the fucking inside.

  Today, my mother looks perfect, in cutoff jeans and a pink T-shirt. I’m wearing a sweater practically made of dog hair and my fingers reek deeply of fish guts. My skin is always beaten by wind and sun, and my shoulders are too big, my torso too short. But my hair is long and dark, like hers.

  “Please just let me drive,” I say.

  She shouts that someone is leaving up ahead, and I speed to the empty space. I hate speeding. Before I can turn off the engine, my mother is on the curb and directing the tail of my truck into the spot. She is the kind of woman who gets out of a moving vehicle.

  “You’re a little far from the curb,” she shouts.

  I tell her to pay the meter, but she claims she’s got no cash, no coins, nothing. It must be a big purse full of lipsticks, smokes, and gum. I take deep breaths, but my mother is there to disrupt those, too. She loops her arm in mine, like we are some kind of woven-together mess, and she prances me to the tailor. Already, I’m dreading the whale, the wedding, my mother, how the island people will talk of my mother and her coming back again, and their guessing game of how long she will stay. They will take bets. And where is Liam?

  Here, in this small blue-carpeted room lined with dry cleaning and sewing machines, they have known me for years. Don and Sujin own the bait shop near the harbor, where they have let me squeeze living worms into Styrofoam cups. They have also bought up a ton of Western Shore vacation homes and spend most of their time traveling and sending their kids to college with all their money. My father has rented their garages and apartments over all the years. They know my mother—know her absences, too.

  My mother is on her best behavior when Don unlocks the door. She’s instantly charming, and Don smiles at the sight of her. Everyone does. Don must not suspect we are high, though as I glance to my mother, I see that her eyes have been licked with pink glaze. She won’t let go of my arm, even when she kisses Sujin on the cheeks—left then right—and Sujin giggles. I smile, too. What else can I do?

  Don appears with a dress in a bag, zipped up like there’s a second body of mine in there, and my mother seems elated. She unleashes me from her grip and focuses on Sujin, telling her how lovely the store is, how wonderful the island is for a wedding, and how profoundly lovely Sujin looks after all these years. Says, Koreans don’t age. My mother grasps Sujin’s forearms with her hands and keeps up with her compliments. Worse, Sujin is blushing. My mother says lovely again. She is high as fuck.

  “You know I sell Marine Nutrition creams, the overnight ones, that are truly the best,” my mother says. “Made from real jellyfish.”

  My mother pulls the tubes and lubes from her purse, rubs the creams on Sujin’s hands, her arms, and massages them into her skin.

  “You look lovely, really,” my mother says again.

  My mother winks at me while I’m holding the body bag.

  Don was always loyal to my father. He tries to disentangle Sujin from my mother, insists that she help me get into the dress, or get the dress out of the bag, or do something away from my insane mother and her sea creams. He can tell by my series of uncomfortable expressions that I need my mother far, far away.

  “You two could be sisters,” he says. And he winks.

  When I appear from behind the curtain, everyone’s face goes white and then pink and then red, and there is some kind of electric burst of emotion. Sujin’s hands, so soft now, hold mine, and my mother runs to hug me. Don claps his hands together a few times and says I’m beautiful, that my father would say so. When I look in the mirror, I see a woman wearing a dress, and it might not be me. I wish that I wasn’t so high. I wish for Liam and our life away from things like my mother, and my dead father, and reminders of things which we don’t want to be reminded of. Liam would tell me that the dress is perfect, even if I feel stupid.

  There are grizzly bears in Alaska that will eat a beached humpback whale. It’s the only time they’ll share a meal. The only time they will not fight over food. The only time they are peaceful among one another—so full, resting in the shallows of the cool Pacific Ocean after their feast. My mother tells me this while we’re in the drive-thru sandwich shop, the only drive-thru on Winter Island. She doesn’t stop talking, my mother, because she’s nervous I might speak up, say the things I want to say, like, Why are you here? Please go away. She keeps talking until there’s no room to say anything.

  I pay the woman the heaps of found change in my mother’s never-ending purse, after all. My mother shouts a joke that we can’t afford to pay in dollar bills through the driver’s-side window. The sandwiches are wrapped in paper and stuffed in long paper bags, and my mother lays them across her lap.

  “They’re hot,” she says.

  “I told you we got hot sandwiches,” I say.

  “But I didn’t realize they were hot,” she says.

  We are familiar with the front seats of cars. My mother and I have spent many years sitting together, strapped in, wheels beneath our feet, trapped in a metal box that goes fast. The only escape are the windows, the breeze, and the real-life sounds that trickle into the body of these cars, and then there’s no real escape at all. It feels like the rising heat of the meat on her lap is taking over. We are in a box of hot pastrami, and I want to pull over. She says not to roll down the windows so the dress doesn’t blow out; she says the dress will smell like pastrami if we don’t roll down the windows.

  “You’re awfully quiet,” she says.

  She says it every time.

  “What do you want to talk about?” I say.

  “I shouldn’t have to tell you what to talk about. You should just want to talk to your mother,” she says.

  So I bring up the sandwiches. Liam would tell me to tell her to fuck off. Or tell me to drop her off somewhere and tell her to not bother again unless she’s going to be decent. I tell her I’m mad that she thought she was getting a cold sandwich when I had already explained that the sandwiches are hot. I keep going, keep driving, keep talking about those pastramis on her lap. The dress in the bag sways from the small hook in the nearly nonexistent back cab of the truck.

  She’s quiet. She keeps adjusting the sandwiches and shifting them as they get hot against her skin. She gazes out the window. This is not about sandwiches.

  “I guess that’s a start,” she says.

  We stop at that park that overlooks the entirety of the sunlit harbor, and we sprawl out on a filthy picnic table covered in white gull shit. It’s windy. We need sweaters. We don’t have them, but I have a beach towel in the truck bed. It smells like seaweed and fish. And now pastrami.

  I ask my mother if she wants to protect her ass from splinters and shit, or if she’d rather wrap herself in the towel. She takes our sandwiches and plops down on a patch of lawn, her bare legs already stuck to the half-dead grass, and wraps the towel around her shoulders. Then she opens the rest of the dirty blue towel like a wing, and motions for me to get in.

  I say I’m not cold, and we eat the hot sandwiches on the lawn, where I’m surely getting eaten by grass fleas and breaking out in some kind of rash. She swoops open her wings again and finally, I crowd into the side of her body. She’s quiet when she eats, so I eat slowly and hope she follows.

  It’s easy to forget about the whale here, and for a moment I free myself of the thought that Liam is gone. The sandwiches are good. The wind turns to breeze. My mother and I are in a blue blanket under blue sky near big blue sea. Only for a moment can I let mys
elf be swallowed by the romance of my mother and a wedding and true love, and a father who made me feel loved. And a mother, too, who says she loves me. I desperately want to tell her, or someone, that even though I’m getting married in a few days, I’m not sure I know how to make love last forever. Or at all.

  I want to talk about my father. About how my life didn’t turn out the way I thought it would, the fact that I wasn’t sure how it was supposed to turn out, that I’m bound to a rock in the sea, that I might not know how to be in love, that I might not know what love is. That my mother, and my father, and the storms, the mountains, the mainland, my own mothering—that it might have ruined everything. I want to talk about Liam. About our most-of-the-time happiness, how I’m afraid I’ll lose him someday, too, because I don’t know what it’s like to keep things. My mother is still eating. She keeps on with the silence, and I’m so pained by the nothingness between us, the momentary peace, that I have to break it, because sometimes I don’t know what else to do but break things. To find the chaos.

  “Dad used to bring me up here after school,” I say.

  “There’s not one inch of this island that your father didn’t know,” she says.

  She talks about the wedding. Will there be flowers? How many people? Did we hire people? The dogs will be in the wedding, too? Why not a church? And more. She’s put so much value on something I never cared about, and for a moment, it’s easy to play along; it’s easier than talking about the things that broke us.

  The things that broke us: the harshness of the earth, and love.

  I ask my mother how many men she’s loved. She says she can’t keep track. She asks how many men I’ve loved. I say one. She laughs like a maniac, and she opens her arms, her wings, and wind hits us in the chest.

  She tells me I’m sweet and begs me to tell her how I met Liam, and how I knew he was, as she’s kept saying, the one. She tells me I’m so tough but so soft, and I hate that she calls me soft, so I unravel myself out of her grip and stretch out on the grass. My life is everyone else telling me who I am or how I feel.

  There are birds waiting for food and pecking the grass for nearby leftovers. She swats them away. She tells me to calm down, that she’s only kidding, and musters up this: I’m happy for you. She begs me again to tell her how I met Liam.

  “On the docks,” I say.

  “Oh, come on. There’s more to it,” she says.

  “He was really funny, and he asked me for a drink, and then we walked on the beach, and, I don’t know, we’ve just been together ever since,” I say.

  She talks flowers again.

  I meet Liam under end-of-summer light. He appears, disheveled, from a boat that wandered into the wrong harbor with urgency, full of fresh fish. He’s the one who shouts the tuna count from the bow. We say that if that boat’s engine hadn’t failed, he would be dead, or would be farther south like he had charted, would be another’s and a great unknown.

  He stays at Otto House for at least a week and waits for the engine parts from the mainland. I drop off flyers in the lobby for the Sea Institute’s summer camp, and peeking above a newspaper is his messy blond hair.

  Rook is behind the front desk, and she’d said something about a beautiful man who washed up with all that hair, and he’s sitting right there, and he’s totally fuckable. She’d said she was going to invite him out and that he’s quiet. She’d said he was perfect for me.

  He folds his newspaper the wrong way, a new line making a new, wrong half, and before he leaves, Rook shouts to him, and he approaches the desk. Everything like we are sixteen again. She says something like, This is Evie. She’s just moved back here, and she’s a native, and she loves giving tours of the island. Twenty bucks.

  We sort it out, that I don’t want his money but that somehow he wants the tour, and he asks if that little boy running around is my kid or hers. Hers, I say. And mine.

  I take Liam out for hours in a golf cart, even to the Old Institute, and I tell him that my father is dead, that I once thought I was a seal, that I’ve never really been in love, that I’m bound to the island forever. I say almost everything, and that I hoped that he’d get his engine parts, get back to fishing, find his life back on the mainland. But he says, I like it here. Says he always wanted to be a fisherman. Always wondered about islands.

  We are exactly one year and three days apart, and we try to figure out if soon we will be twenty-seven at the same time, but we cannot do the math. And his eyes are the kind that see into me, through me, around me, and he knows me. I tell myself there is no explanation for this feeling. I tell myself that it’s biology. Or desperation. Cabin fever.

  I keep saying these things when he moves his things into my bungalow on Ferry Lands. When we get the dogs. When we plant a garden. When he writes me poetry. When Tommy moves in because Rook’s gone again. And he just keeps loving me. For no reason except that he does. And I don’t ask, because I’m afraid to really know, and afraid it might not be real.

  I can never say how much I love him. Not even to myself, because I’m always waiting for him to leave. When he makes himself go cross-eyed after telling a joke—there are so many good jokes—or when he says he’d live on the highest mountain with me or the smallest island, I just can’t say it. Because how could I know how to say those kinds of things?

  I’ve been living my life hoping that the blue wings of a mother mean true love. I spend my waking hours looking for answers in the patterns of sea creatures who cannot speak. Liam is the first to tell me that he inconsolably loves me. And, perhaps it’s some kind of tidal pull, or the light side of the moon, or that the sun is a fucking hot star, but there’s no one I could ever love more.

  Even without reason.

  Autumn

  For the first decade of our marriage, Liam lives most of his life at sea, staring at sunsets and catching fish for cash. When he returns each season, we must start again. We curiously examine one another’s faces, against the wind and the lines, against the sinking and the sagging. We rush together, exhausted by loneliness and months of fear that love will never return, only to meet again, our bodies sighing in relief. We continue on.

  The woods are still, and the nighttime temperatures dwindle, and the trees shed their leaves. There is a smell this time of year as everything starts to dry up, and sometimes we dry up, too. We are intertwined in our bed, and sometimes, one of us is slumped over, asleep in a chair, and the other reading on a couch. I often worry that he loves the time on the boat more than he loves me.

  When his ship is late, I scan the horizon from the top of the lighthouse, with the roundness of binoculars suctioned to each eyeball, watching boats teetering into the harbor, all of them carrying everyone else’s husbands and not mine. Those storms, the ones that come to pass, make me feel as if the moment of pouring-down rain or insufferable wind will break the windows. Will break my heart. And I wait. I feed the dogs. Tommy needs help with his science-fair project, so Rook passes him to me, and she drinks wine and sits on the front porch. There is the putting of seeds in dirt and the waiting for them to grow into something that gives air. Then he arrives, his hands colder than before, and before he showers, he kisses my face and he says the things I want to hear: Oh, how I’ve missed you.

  For a stretch of the season, he’s home, and we busy ourselves with our hands: We make food, pick and prune, run our fingers alongside the parts of our bodies that peek from our clothes. We make love, we sing with fake-microphone hands, and, sometimes, we cry with our faces pressed up against our palms.

  Then we make the terrible kind of mistakes. We disobey our own rules.

  “I’ll never do it again,” he says.

  “But how could you tell me?” I say.

  “It was just a mistake,” he says. “Only a few times,” he says.

  But I’m not angry that he’s touched another woman with the same hands that rest upon my hip in the night, the hands that scrub my back in the shower. I’m angry that he’s told me and broken his vow to
keep me away from that kind of hurt. We said, What happens to us while we are away does not belong to us. Because we never agreed to be faithful, but we did agree to keep each other from ruin.

  And then, “Do you love her?”

  He must have at least loved her at low tide, when he was off living life as another person. I, too, have lived many lives, and when he’s away, I am a full-time researcher for the Sea Institute, I am a part-time lecturer, I am a part-time mother to Rook’s child, a part-time daughter, friend, drinker, sinner, griever, and now, a woman with new hobbies.

  When he goes, I can be whoever I want to be, and I have slept with others, too. But in his great returns, we have always learned to find ourselves together again. So when he tells me there’s a woman off the coast of San Francisco who has hair radiant like the sun and twin daughters and a husband who’d vanished at sea, I can’t piece it all together enough to understand why he’s betrayed me by sharing this other life. It hurts too much. Our life can be confined to this island, its happiness and sadness. Now, the disruption of betrayal.

  “You are selfish to tell me this,” I say.

  “I thought you’d want to know,” he says.

  “What for?” I say. “Because you want me to divorce you?”

  He tells me the things that have hurt him: He says I never really need him. That I don’t let him need me. That I’m harsh like the wind and I say things that make him think that I might never really love him, or perhaps it’s that I don’t say anything at all. Says he’s felt lonely, and we try to decipher the difference between lonely and alone. Sometimes, he wishes things were simple, he says, but I think what he means is that he wishes I was easier to love.

  Except, I explain after we are drunk, that he is the one holding back, that he is the one who wants to be with a boat, and another woman, and another life. I tell him that he can’t deal with himself, with all of his past pain that has so slowly revealed itself over time until we are here and we are both lonely.

  He’s not the kind of person to believe in a lifetime of grief, or that the loss of people and things makes him susceptible to ache. He is the kind of person who says he’s better now because of that past. Says things like: I have to keep moving. And I’m drunk, and I scream that I can’t fix his heart if he doesn’t believe his is beating.