Creatures

by Crissy Van Meter

  My mother mixed drinks behind the bar, and she tossed me a key to her place, which was just up the hill and behind the restaurant parking lot. Told me to go there until she got off, if I wanted, she said. She asked me to stay for dinner, at least. She must have known that I needed her, or the idea of her, even for just one night.

  “You look like a grown woman,” she said.

  She stared.

  “Beautiful,” she said.

  My mother’s house looked just like the photos—mismatched watercolors framed in thrift-store wood, signed by her, hung all over the walls. She had an easel on the patio, a small fire pit, because she’s always loved to watch things burn, and then a wild garden—in raised boxes, in the ground, and in handmade plastic-and-PVC greenhouses. It was all unkempt.

  I opened the kitchen drawers and bathroom cupboards, and sifted through her closet. She loved paisley print, Leonard Cohen, white tea, black tea, herbal tea, cheap hairspray, and that hippie kind of toothpaste. She had a storage closet full of workout balls and light weights, yoga mats, and those long, stretchy wire things that do something to sculpt muscles. I snooped so much that I was the real kind of tired, and I read whatever I could find on her bookshelf, until I fell asleep in a low-hanging hammock out back.

  She woke me with a chilled hand on my cheek.

  “There are lots of bugs out here,” she said.

  My mother prepared dinner and assigned me the small kitchen tasks, like cutting tomatoes and cucumbers for salad and, then, peeling potatoes. She was the kind of person who was always alive, and especially in her kitchen, she had a face full of color. She did the talking—about her garden, her paintings, her art shows, the time she almost made it as a painter and poet in San Francisco or Seattle. She called me by my real name, and it was not even my name anymore—Evangeline—so it sounded like she was talking to a stranger. I hated her and still missed her, too.

  I asked her why I am Evangeline, for whom I must be named, and she says she just liked the sound, that I’m the first one she knew, and I was limp with disappointment that I was just a regular person. She sang my name and smiled.

  Her patio overlooked the slope of backyard, and I swatted bugs from my neck while we ate. The bug zapper kept electrocuting invisible alive things, and I kept flinching. She talked over the death sound, more eager to tell me about her, until a tall man appeared in the doorway, and I recognized him from the bar, the blog, the photos on the refrigerator.

  “The famous Evangeline,” he said.

  So I smiled, because there’s nothing she could have done or said that would have made anything better, and I told myself there were no answers.

  They told me about their life together. It was a whole life. And no one asked about my life, my almost-whole life. They talked into the night, even when they drove me down the hill to an empty bus stop, and they told me to come back soon. Against a settled sun and an early purple sky, I headed west. I could have evaporated before I got back to the sea, and at red lights before the freeway, I admired the fresh apples and avocados that rolled around in the bag on my lap.

  Sperm Whale

  Physeter macrocephalus

  QUESTION: Is a sperm whale vengeful?

  When your father lies to you, it will be the wave you’ve turned your back on. The one that hits you so hard that you scrape your knees on the ocean floor. The kind of wave that makes your knees bleed for a week. The kind of knees that must be attended to by tweezers, antiseptics, gauze, and tape. That kind of lie is the one that will scar your limbs and make you wonder if you’ll ever turn your back to the sea again.

  But it’s the first rule of the ocean. Never, ever turn your back to the sea. She will get you. She will roar. She will teach you a lesson. It’s in the way your father always nodded—dontturnyourmotherfuckingback—when he let you swim alone when you were small, without fins, without floaties, without anything but your skin and your suit.

  When your father becomes so desperate and lonely, isolated by every passageway of water, he’ll do terrible things. He will lie and tell you that he’s got cancer. That the doctor told him so. He will have said things like that before—separated shoulder, thrown-out back, gallstones, kidney failure, and more—because he needed you, or money, or affection, or consoling. But he’ll never say cancer until you are good and gone and barely coming back to the island. Cancer is the wave that knocks you right out of your suit, out of your skin, smashes you to the ground, and holds you down with such force that you can’t find up.

  Your father will tell you that this time—yes, really, this time—he is telling the truth. That he didn’t want to worry you while you were away, and that now he must tell you, because it might be serious. You’ll tell him that you’ll come home—the next ferry out—that your small fellowship at the Institute isn’t that big anyway, that you’ll leave your boyfriend (you don’t really love him) and you’ll put him back together again. And then he’ll say, No. He’ll say, Absolutely not. He’ll say, Just wire me five thousand dollars.

  Then you’ll know that wave is crashing right on top of you.

  You will sit, crying, on your bathroom tile floor, uncomfortably leaning against the hard rim of the tub. He’ll be on the other line, crying, too. But you’ll know he’s crying only because his desperation has taken hold; he hates asking you for things. He’d rather charm an entire island out of their money, their panties, their homes, before asking you for anything. But he will ask this one time. He’ll say cancer is fuckingexpensive. Say that with the money, he can make rent, pay his hospital fees, and make it out—just as good as new. Because that’s what the fuckingexpensive doctor tells him.

  When your Dad is an addict, he can still be a good man. He can also be a bad man. When he’s using, he’ll simply be both. On the phone, you’ll hear the bad man talking, the desperate one who needs love and money, and you’ll still hear the good one, too. His tears won’t be for the fake cancer, but for humiliation.

  You will find your mother again in the dusty mountains, to ask her a favor. You’ll explain to her, over the best garden salad you’ve ever had, that your father is still a drunk, and he pops pills, and he uses whatever he can party with, and that he’s always broke. Even though he sells weed, even though he rips off the tourists, even though he’s owned boats. He’s never got enough, because there’s never enough money to feed a man like that. You’ll tell her softly, so she can try to understand, because your charming father taught you to talk that way. She’ll smile sweetly, like maybe she knows you, and hand you an envelope of cash that she keeps hidden under a floorboard in the garden shed.

  She will touch your face, and for once, she’s not a stranger.

  “Least I can do,” she’ll say.

  For a moment, you’ll think now would be the time to tell her what she can actually do. She can come around; she can fix him. Though you know she can’t, that’s how it’s supposed to work, until she tells you no one can fix him. That that kind of love is not fixable. It’s just there—take it or leave it, good and bad.

  You’ll know you can’t say much more to her and risk her taking the money back. You’ll smile sweetly, like he taught you, and you’ll tell her you want to see her more, even if you really don’t.

  It’s the least you can do.

  When you overnight a UPS box of cash—from the weed, from your mother, from your friends, and from your night job in the cafeteria—you won’t hear from him. You’ll text over and over again. You’ll get nothing back. That wave has smashed you so hard, and now you’re sitting alone, with empty pockets, and looking at your own home from the other side of the water. It doesn’t matter where the money went, you’ll think. You just know he must have needed it more than you. That’s what your mother said; that’s what you keep telling yourself.

  He will avoid you for as long as he can, and finally, a few months later, you’ve kept calling and you’ll catch him in the lobby of Otto House, and you’ll have the front-desk girl put him on the phone. He’ll think i
t’s a hotel guest. He’ll think they need him to make them laugh. He’ll think it’s to sell weed.

  His voice will drop, and yours will raise. How can you hold back the tears?

  You won’t believe it. The treatment is working, he’ll say.

  So you’re all right, then? you’ll ask.

  Better than ever.

  It will feel like drowning, except worse, because no one actually drowns.

  Freeze

  Once, my mother appeared with hair streaked blond and bright meticulously colored-in pink lips. She said she was sorry it had been so long but blamed me for not getting the letters she’d sent to an old address. She said that when she didn’t hear back, she thought she’d come check on her baby. She couldn’t stop saying how cold it was. I told her it was a freeze, and that we were all freezing.

  All of that at the doorstep made my father and me uncomfortable, and still, I let her in, and she plopped onto the couch and asked for a vodka ice.

  She rambled on about her new project at the Sea Institute. She said it happened by chance; my mother was seating tables in Santa Monica when she befriended a regular, a research fellow who focused on the mating rituals of porpoises, and—just like that—the PhD was impressed with my mother’s intricate knowledge of land and sea. My mother said she wasn’t, like, a research person, or anything, but she helped organize files, and made spreadsheets with porpoise-mating-ritual numbers.

  “Oh, it’s your dream,” she said to me.

  I tried to conceal that I rarely dreamed—that each night I slept soundly, either stoned or buzzed, or exhausted from sorrow, or tired from thinking of boys and television and trees and snakes and monsters. I knew that dreams were just dreams and that nothing really came true, especially if you wanted it to.

  She handed me a folder, and when I opened it there were applications and forms, and signatures highlighted in yellow. She said I could work as a research assistant with this PhD person, who would help me get into the Institute program someday, or work in the oceans, or do whatever it was I had always wanted to do with all those things that lurked in the depths below.

  “You could at least try it out,” she says. “You can stay with me.”

  My father paced and paced himself right outside the door for more beer. My mother wanted to take me to dinner. Everything was so loud, and my mother, she just kept talking. About the tanks filled with sea life, about the people saving the oceans, about the cafeteria, about the little bungalow she had on the border of Venice, about how her life was somehow all put back together again, and how she really loved me. And that it was time I tried being a woman with a real woman around. Said I needed mothering. Said it was time for guidance outside of the sea and the sky.

  The worst part was, I really didn’t want to say no, so I said nothing, as some sort of secret compliance. Before my father returned, red-faced, and after my mother caught the last ferry back, I lay on the carpet and scratched my back the way I did, so hard, when I had chicken pox in kindergarten. The itch, though, it just didn’t go away.

  Why do you want to work for The Sea Institute? Please explain in a paragraph or less.

  (We call them by different names, but these waters are one. Still, we have categorized five major oceans: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. It would take fourteen years to sail these waters. Dad says someday we will do it. All 361.9 million square kilometers left to explore. But he never leaves. Also, we saw Titanic seven times in the theater. My tears were endless; my love is still boundless. Deep as that sunken ship and as dreamy as a frozen Jack crusted and attached to a limber piece of wood. Also, if I don’t go now, who will be left to bury me here?)

  It’s true that my father drank to celebrate. When he was sad. When he was unsure. When he was hurting. When he was hoping. When I told him that I was moving to the mainland with my mother. Just for a year, I promised, and I hopeful-joked that even if it was terrible, I’d have to go find out for myself. My father drank himself to sleep for a few weeks. Rook cried. Mary told me I’d always have a place at Ferry Lands, and she told me to write.

  I never told anyone that I just wanted my mother to get me, just once, just for a year, just us watching dolphins swim in see-through-walled aquariums. Because how do you ask someone to see you?

  My mother secured a two-bedroom apartment near the Sea Institute and an extra bike that I could ride to work.

  “What do you like to eat?” she asked.

  “I’ll eat anything.”

  “Can you cook?” she asked.

  “I think so.”

  My stomach was in knots for a week before I left, and I chased Rook around Winter Island. We camped in the old bat caves near Ferry Lands, and we made out with tourists and smoked spliffs. We lay atop grasses and gazed up to the sun until we were almost blind, and even then, when her fingers were interlaced in mine, she told me again and again how much she loved me and how sorry she was.

  “I have a tattoo guy on the Venice Boardwalk,” she said. “I’ll probably come out a lot to finish this sunset on my back.”

  We held hands at the going-away party Dad threw at Rocky’s Fish N Chips. It was a full day of adults getting blitzed and then a wild roundup of men who took us on boats to fish for whatever we could find. Dad put his arm around me, and pulled me close, and whispered that I could come home, even if this wasn’t a real home, anytime. That day, he puked over the side of the boat and, somehow, my legs and stomach were sturdy. Rook kissed an older man who could crush Coors cans and wore a found captain’s hat.

  The remaining days before I really left were busy with Dad keeping a steady buzz and organizing and reorganizing our things to make the house appear tidy. He made dinner with fancy sausages and steaks, and let me sip red wine. We watched every sunset, and sometimes, it felt like we were dying. We spent an afternoon at the abandoned Institute and traipsed along pungent cannabis fields that flickered green against wet soil and a backdrop of massive trees. I smoked joints and ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, and the wind whipped hair all over my face. Sometimes, Rook was there, too, like I was terminal, like I was never coming back. We spent the last mornings dunking our hands into water-filled coral holes at the tide pools. We saw Old Tropez’s headstone.

  The sun was inching away from us on my last night. My things were packed. My father had been out all day, fishing and working, he said, and we would meet for one last cheeseburger in town. It was scratched onto our wall calendar in pencil. But he never showed.

  We used to say that everything was broken most of the time: the fish tank with a slow leak; the fish, a Carnie Wilson and a Joe Montana, who died on the laminate of a living room floor. A homemade lava lamp without lava—a watery grave of a lamp with an occasional glitter fleck floating around. Still, I plugged it in and used it to illuminate one of our dining room tables. The Barbie Dreamhouse, drunkenly put together backward. All of my Kens sitting on bowlegged chairs and doors opening from the outside in. A collection of lost-and-found items from Otto House, which included holey rain jackets, twisted umbrellas, too-small shoes, and vacation hats smelling of body odor and astringent. All the trash bags had rips. The carpets were never clean.

  My father bought an always-broken pickup truck from a neighbor. He’d promised a year’s supply of Winter Wonderland in exchange for a beat-up piece of scratched red metal. At first, she hummed. We cruised the streets with the windows down and our arms slung around her sides. Even in the rain. We installed a new radio, and my father turned up the volume at red lights. My father honked at Rocky’s Fish N Chips and revved at bouncy bikini boobs roller-skating in front of Otto House. He waxed the damn thing every day. He parked her in our gravel driveway, which was so slim that we had to pull the mirrors in tight. Her wretched, rusted squeals sounded like whales passing in the night.

  My father called the truck Maybellene. Must have been the red on that truck that inspired all the Chuck Berry on the stereo. Our first car was incapable of just working, or being easy or reliable. My
father’s Maybellene suffered from heat exhaustion, from screaming brakes, from problems with the starter, among all the other things.

  We cruised on Sundays, during the lull of the season, the hunkering down in the cold. We were heading uphill the day Maybellene broke down; she just suddenly sighed and stopped altogether. I enjoyed the hill view of perfect sunset, but we had to leave her and walk home to call for help. He kicked her hard, until his feet must have bruised her tires. Until he must have broken his toes.

  “Godfuckingdamnthisgoddamnplace,” he yelled.

  Rain the whole walk home.

  We ate dinner under an awning outside 7-Eleven: warm-spun hot dogs from the case, and chips. Our favorite, anyway. My father let me have a Coke. When he was that angry, my father drank tea. Because there wasn’t enough booze to calm him. He sipped it slowly and took deep breaths.

  I arrived the next day on foot, and Maybellene was coned off by the Winter Island Police. Traffic swelled up just to pass her, tourists cursing our slow-moving task handlers. My father carried a few tools and a gallon of water. I sat on the curb and watched the Sea Institute vans piling off the island. Full of young and eager faces that I imagined to have waterproof bags full of sea treasures.

  When her engine started, my father shouted for me to jump into the moving truck. He said she couldn’t stop until we got home. He played Chuck Berry again, and the sound rattled against her metal shell. He told me to steer for him while he opened a can of Coors. I steered the whole way home, my face an infinite smile.

  He washed her that night, and he washed her even when the mainland was full of drought and we were sharing water. Even when it rained. Especially when it rained, and even when everything else was broken. Among the sea of things he could not do, there were some things he certainly did well. Not everything was broken.

  I waited for an hour. I knew he couldn’t do it, like he couldn’t do a lot of things, but I continued to sit on a wobbly bench outside the burger place until I ordered and ate alone. I tried to compartmentalize all of our little tragedies on Winter Island. I tried to focus on the onion and lettuce and meat, but I was just chewing over gulps of anger and tears. I told myself that, though he was flawed, he loved me, and as I drowned in Diet Coke, I wondered if it was enough. The restaurant began to fill with the Saturday night crowd, and I rushed out, sauce all over my face, to avoid saying any more goodbyes. It was especially cold, and I wished I’d brought my jacket for my ride home.