Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  He leans his head on my shoulder and dips a French fry into my ketchup, and everything smells like trees and grease. He tells me he loves me, more than anything could ever love anything, that he’s sorry for hiding for so long in the light and the dark, and he checks the back to make sure the air-conditioning unit is still secure for the ride.

  We have been cracked open again. Maybe for a second time, we are in love.

  “I think we can make it back for the seven a.m. ferry,” he says.

  • Whales evolved because they had to.

  My roses need to be in the ground for a few months before the first fall frost. They must establish themselves before it gets cold. Before they go dormant. Liam and I sweat while working on the garden planters that line the house. He offers much of his time to repair what the spring storm damaged. It’s the longest he’s been home, and there is a list of things to fix. The porch steps, the broken windows above the garage, the bleached coral from the too-warm waters, and us. Everything, slowly, is being mended.

  We talk of donating Ferry Lands to the public, or selling it to rich men, or moving to the top of a mountain, or trying to do it all underwater. But we keep moving and working and fishing and mapping and living so that we don’t make any decisions with consequences. We work on our house, our flowers, ourselves, and we continue to sweat. The machine that makes the new, cool air, helps. We sleep soundly.

  Liam isn’t bothered when I work through the night, and he attends the fundraising events for the Sea Institute throughout the summer. He wears the same cheap suit each time, and I rotate through a series of dresses my mother has given to me over the years. He says I look beautiful, though I take off the heels on the way there and the way home. Some nights, we rent hourly motel rooms on seedy blocks in Los Angeles, and other nights, we are perfect parents and have dinner with Rook and Tommy.

  It feels like there is so much change, but nothing has changed at all. I live a few blocks from the house where I was born, and some mornings, we walk by, dog leashes tied to our hands, and Liam asks me all the questions that have no answers. Some mornings, there are answers, and we talk for hours.

  His fishing money lasts us for a few months. We spend most of our days locked in our bedroom, touching, working, reading, or sleeping. It’s the only space that is cool enough to keep us calm. We do the rest of everything in the darkness, because it’s the stillness of dark that is most comfortable. We keep the lights low, the oven off. We eat cold salads and other things from the fridge. Sometimes we suck on ice cubes. The dogs are restless, and they are panting, and they spend most of their time nestled in dirty towel piles on the bathroom floor.

  • Humpbacks are nothing like their ancestors, except for their wild energy to endure.

  One night, I tell Liam that I don’t want him to go. That I want him to take only the local charters. Or to clean the bottoms of boats. That we don’t need that much money. That we aren’t obligated to buy Tommy backpacks and shoes anymore. That I’d eat from the garden each night and sleep under a moon if it meant he’d stay with me. I’m not sure I say it as articulately as I imagine, because I really want to say: I’m ready now to love you forever, even though I’d already promised that.

  In the morning, he makes me say it again. Then, in the afternoon, too. He wants to hear it, again and again, until it’s become a funny poem that he says when he makes scrambled eggs for dinner. Then, it becomes a song. So loud that everything can hear.

  Saturday

  My mother convinces me that we must celebrate my upcoming wedding. We must talk about womanhood with strangers or women, in bars, on this island, amid the late-night island heat. It’s better than being alone with her; it’s better than talking about being a woman with just my mother under fluorescent kitchen lights.

  It’s Creedence Night at The Wharf. The vacationers love it. There’s a live band doing all the CCR covers, and the lead singer—he’s from the mainland—actually looks a little like John Fogerty, but taller and more handsome. There are a lot of rough-skinned women here, all the old fake boobies, too, and we are all wearing our best. My mother has convinced me to wear her lipstick, and it’s blending into a mess.

  She pulls a chintzy white veil from her purse, and it’s attached to a headband—the kind of thing you buy at Party City, and she combs it right into my hair. She tells me I look beautiful. She tells me I should have worn a shorter dress to Creedence Night. We’re crowding in front of the mirrors in the bathroom, and she’s reapplying lipstick. She reapplies mine. Says she wishes she had lips like mine.

  Other women pile in. Though it’s still early, people have been drinking all day. Some came from LA just to see this fake John Fogerty. Some, just to get away. There’s a woman in a mirror next to us, and she’s wasted, the toppling-over kind of drunk, and she asks when I’m getting married. My mother tells her everything, and I slip out and find my way to the bar.

  My mother finds me, and her new friends parade me around the room, and my mother buys shots for me. An entire group of women who are out to celebrate a recent divorce shriek with joy. We suck the small cups dry, and my whole body burns. My mother, she’s on fire.

  The divorced women offer us barstools at their high-top table, and my mother sits at the head. She tells stories about her divorces. She says, Sometimes love doesn’t last. She tells them that she’s happy without anyone. A woman chimes in with something like, You have your beautiful daughter, and this is when she does the thing where she pretends we are close. That I am loved. The more shots, the more doting she becomes, the more I think I am loved. It’s so easy to fall for it because I want it to be real so bad.

  The women follow her to the dance floor and spread out, and begin to bounce and shake. They are careful to hold their dick-strawed drinks in one hand. Careful to laugh together. To sing along with the chorus. Over the dense weight of the booming sound, they comment on her body, her swaying, in the foggy bar light; they tell her she is beautiful. A woman whispers to me that I’m lucky to have a mother like mine.

  My mother holds her drink to the ceiling, and she’s made eye contact with Fake John Fogerty, and he raises a beer, too, and she gets everyone to chant Fuck divorce!

  I’m bobbing alongside my mother and these strange women and we are dancing. I’m drinking beer as fast as I can. We keep moving, and my mother wiggles her way to the front of the small crowd and sways beneath Fake John Fogerty’s feet. He dedicates a song to her, and she screams to correct him, that, no, it’s her beautiful daughter who is getting married, and we must toast to her. She forces my hand into the air, and there are more strangers who cheer and tug on my veil. Fake John Fogerty wishes me a lifetime of happiness from the microphone and takes a giant swig of beer.

  We keep drinking. This is what I know to do. My mother ends up at another table, some divorcées follow, and one woman fans her like a real dead queen. She convinces the women to buy us more shots. We fulfill our duty and drink.

  “Oh, divorces can be nasty, but they can also be the best thing that will ever happen to you,” she says to one stranger.

  Next there are blow-job shots. They’re too sweet, and I fear the worst: I’m going to be falling-down hammered with my mother if we continue at this pace. It feels like she wants this, and with all the Creedence and the drums, I might want it, too. She’s holding my hand. She’s fixing my veil. She’s shouting to strangers, My daughter is getting married! My beautiful daughter! My only daughter! And people—at least plenty of men—think we are sisters. My mother says we must keep dancing.

  The Creedence Clearwater Revival cover band is getting louder. They are generous with smiles. The bar is vast, and the standing-only pit below the stage is littered with bodies, hard and soft. Like a wave, we are all moving together. My mother is eyeing this Fake John Fogerty guy, and I can’t admit that I’m smitten with the drummer. He’s drilling another heartbeat into my chest. We dance.

  My mother is throwing her hands in the air, kicking her feet, and she’s a wondr
ous creature. She’s telling the divorced women that she once gave herself whiplash at a Van Halen show—and still managed to get backstage—and still managed to meet David Lee Roth. She claims that Sammy Hagar was much, much better.

  I don’t feel lonely when I’m with my mother. But when she’s gone, I don’t feel lonely, either. I can’t explain it to her—that whether she’s there or not, she’s accidentally always with me. Even when I hate her. Even when I love her. She’s just here. And now, I feel her next to me, like I do when she’s gone. It’s a terrifying feeling to love a woman like my mother, and all those years my father spent saying nothing about it must have been miserable. I keep drinking. I keep getting sentimental. I keep letting her hold my hand.

  She’s locked on to Fake John Fogerty. I slip away to the patio and smoke borrowed cigarettes with people I don’t know. There are so many people stumbling in the streets, in full-vacation mode, their faces oily and burned. They are without sweaters, something they always forget, and the women are shivering, huddled together, hands cupped around the ends of cigarettes with lighters. Even heavy with the dreadful summer crowds, the island feels like home, like I am the keeper of magic here. Even on this patio, where I smoke with three practically teenage boys and they tell me they like my lipstick and my veil. They tell me they are college boys from LA. They ask me about weed.

  “We’re looking for Winter Wonderland,” they say.

  I’m drunk enough to say it: “That’s my weed.”

  And it’s all gone. I sold the name for cash to bail my father out of jail. We had to pay his debts and clean up the pieces of our lives that he ruined so long ago. I don’t do weed anymore. I don’t deal drugs. Now there’s a company in Japan who makes a weekly cartoon called Winter Wonderland, with a gnome who grows magic mushrooms on a dark and stormy island near California. I hear it’s a hit there. We got enough cash to pay everyone off. To keep us from being killed. I don’t know where to get it, raw and wild and organic, because it doesn’t grow here anymore, I want to say. And: I don’t have my father anymore, or a heart. I’m getting married. To a man who shouldn’t love me. But he does. And what if he leaves me someday? And: I’m wasted.

  “You’d have better luck on the mainland,” I say.

  “It grows wild here, and mushrooms, too,” they say.

  Certainly everything is wild here, and I tell them about the abandoned north, about the once-overgrown forest, about the weather, about it all, until nothing makes sense.

  “There were gnomes, they say, until the storms came,” I say.

  They laugh. I’m old to them. They think I’m just a vacationer like them. They think I must have kids, a job, a family, a life. I am all of those things and none of them at once—looking for magic, just like them, and still looking for my mother, who’s evaporating under the bar lights. She’s talking to Fake John Fogerty on his break, and her hand is practically on the crotch of his leather pants.

  The divorced women are going to another bar, and they beg us to come. My mother is suddenly missing somewhere in the back, and I know what she’s doing and I don’t want to know what she’s doing, and I say we will meet them later. I rush through the swinging kitchen doors and run up the stairway to the roof.

  I’ve been on this roof many times, before this place was The Wharf, when my father and I ate free food from the kitchen and lay on beach towels and did homework just for the view. In spring, this was the place to see the great whale migrations.

  I stand on top of a rusted chair on the roof, and I stare at the sea. I look for the lighthouse. For Liam. For a boat. For a whale. For something to come into the harbor. For an answer.

  “Congratulations,” a man says.

  The drummer. He’s smoking a cigarette. He asks if I want one. I’m about to puke, and I can’t decide what’s right, so I take one and gag. He helps me off the chair, saying he’s worried I’m a little too drunk to be on a roof, or a chair on top of a roof.

  “What are you looking for?” he asks.

  “I’m not sure,” I say.

  I’m fiddling with my veil, and it smells like smoke now.

  “When’s the wedding?” he asks.

  “A few days,” I say.

  “Lucky guy,” he says.

  The drummer tells me about how he became a guy in a CCR cover band. He’s a composer, or at least he wants to be, and he tells me about the life he wishes he had. There is sorrow in his eyes, and for a moment, he says he loves a girl who doesn’t love him back, and I tell him that the man I love might be lost at sea, that my father is buried out there, too, and that my mother is probably fucking Fake John Fogerty in the bus outside.

  “What a disaster,” he says.

  He leans in to kiss me, and for a second, I let it happen. Not because I love him, or could love him, but because of biology. See, there is biology to sex and companionship and kissing, but there is no biology to missing and loving. While his mouth meets mine, I keep my eyes open, and I look back to the sea. I talk through his attempts to kiss me, and I tell him that we must get back. That I must rescue my mother. That I must rescue myself.

  My mother is not as disheveled as I’d imagined. As I’d hoped, so I could yell and scream at her and tell her she’s terrible and unfair. She pulls me from the kitchen doors, and there are more shots. Someone is crying. My veil is ripped. She dances with just me in front of the band again and is twirling me around with my fingertips locked with hers. She whispers in my ear: Don’t worry, baby. Your Liam will be home.

  My mother thinks she can smell the dead whale on the ride back. We drape our arms and lean our heads outside the cab windows, and the whale is indeed still here. I puke in the kitchen sink; my mother, in the bathroom. We sleep on the couches that face each other, our arms curled under our chins in the same exact way.

  Hail

  It came at night, sometimes without any rain or warning. A sudden chill and then the pounding of ice that sounded like sand dumped on the roof. It came with force, and it just kept coming. Rook sat in her hot tub as ice fell from the sky, piercing the tops of our heads. We were hot on the bottom and cold on top.

  The winter that Rook got a hot tub was the winter lived in water. The hot tub was sturdy, on a deck in her enormous backyard that overlooked the Pacific Ocean. She loved to tell people about her house, designed by her famous architect father; he’d imported the tiles from around the world. Rook’s stepmother designed their estate gardens after Versailles. The cacophonous hail on that roof was a musical every time.

  Her mother hated the hot tub and regretted allowing the eyesore on her property. Hot tubs were for the trashy kind of people. And horny teens. But for the first time in her life, Rook got an A, and she was allowed one gift—anything she wanted. Of course she wanted a hot tub, one with all the fancy jets and bucket seats and neon sex lights. Of course Rook wanted to smoke cigarettes and be touched by guys from the beach in that tub with intermittent hailstorms swirling overhead.

  Her parents tucked it behind tall trees and concealed a giant tub of water behind lattice walls of night-blooming jasmine. Maybe they didn’t care that Rook was having sex, or maybe they did, but they surely let it happen all the time.

  We lived as prunes for an entire winter. We bought bags of sour candy and packs of Camels and soaked in bubbled scalding water until we couldn’t take it anymore. Until the hail made us bleed. For hours, we’d listen to Snoop Dogg and talk about how fun it was to show our tits to strangers. There were hours of stupid existential conversations. We said we wanted to be wild, but I never meant it the way she did. We promised to love each other forever, no matter what.

  “My cousin said he can get us into a show in LA,” she said.

  “My dad would never let me go to the mainland for that,” I said.

  “Don’t tell him,” she said.

  We planned it for weeks, and I told Dad that I’d stay at Rook’s for the weekend. She knew a guy with a boat that could get us to the mainland without taking the ferry, without bei
ng spotted, without the weather shutting things down. Her cousin would pick us up at the harbor, and we’d stay with him for a few nights. Easy.

  Dad and I had a burger at our favorite spot. We talked about Rook’s new hot tub, the recent flurry of garibaldi, the flurries in the sky, whether or not everyone eventually gets chicken pox. It was seamless. He was drunk when he dropped me off. He didn’t know her parents had been in France for three weeks.

  “Don’t piss her parents off and sneak out,” he said.

  Rook popped out, bikini only, and waved to Dad.

  We drank champagne and danced sopping wet to music videos on the TV. Clinked our glasses together and sat in the hot tub until the sky raged. We dressed up, and we recorded our own music video. When we were coming down and exhausted, she said we could go to the mainland in the late afternoon the next day. She was finally eighteen, and joked that she’d take care of us if anything happened.

  “I’m glad we’re friends,” I said.

  “Forever,” she said.

  We sat close on the couch. I thought of all the people who have been left behind, about the lonely people my father warned me about. I adored Rook’s nose, because it was perfect. I admired her capacity to be able to shove all her emotions into some small box hidden in her body, until she was cool and clear and calm all the time. I was reeling. And wondering. And waiting.

  Half-asleep, she asked me if I’d ever been left behind. Sometimes, I thought but couldn’t say. I couldn’t tell her because there were more pressing things, like: I had never had good sex. What if my father left me too? What if I never found love? What kind of cheese did I like best?

  “You should really sleep with an older man,” she said then. “They treat you good.”

  “I need dry clothes and bed,” I said.

  I followed her down all the halls and into the bathroom with all the mirrors.

  I sensed that Rook had left me behind. While she was standing in the tub and shaving her legs and bikini line and arms, I had rifled through her vanity, spraying all her perfumes, and found a pair of my father’s socks, with the hole in the right toe, and I knew she had decided to abandon me for him. Also: a birthday card for her written in his handwriting, signed, Love you always. Maybe I knew it before, but I’d been so good at believing bad things weren’t so bad.