Previously published in Natural Bridge
Erosion
2008
Marty the shoes guy assures me he likes it rough. So hit me! I demand, straddling him on a table in the K-Mart stock room stacked with boxes of New Balance athletic shoes, size baby all the way up to a gargantuan 14 E, Big Foot on steroids. A tower of boxes slides to the floor. I’ve just slammed three shots of Jose Cuervo from a bottle Marty hid behind some desert boots, and apparently I’ll have to prove I’m serious. So I do it, haul off and slug his begging-for-a-shave chin and for a moment he looks surprised—I’d like to think because I’ve got a good arm, trained as it was from having to defend my autistic cousin when we were kids. Marty’s face the color of a condom flushes a splotchy, lipsticky-red. Then he punches me back in the cheek, kapow and we’re off, me popping him in the mouth, his hands squeezing my neck until I’m coughing, gagging, and it progresses from there, him ripping my shirt off, which I told him he could do, the buttons I said (I can sew those back on) not the fabric. We’re in retail for chrissake and nobody’s buying these days, and I don’t have the kind of bank account that says sure, go ahead and trash a silk blouse for fifteen minutes of break-time fun. I wanna tear the whore’s clothes off! he slurs, like this is supposed to be seductive, chomping down on my earlobe. We’re play-acting, Marty calling me his whore and he’s my dog; not exactly Shakespeare but what can you expect after two more shots of gold and no script?
Later at home after surveying the damage in the bathroom mirror, spaghetti sauce colored cheek, bite marks on my ear, the collar of finger-shaped bruises around my neck, a confetti of black and blue and yellowy-green marks up and down my arms, I tell Jake I had a bike accident to explain it all, the bruises, torn shirt, the post-Tequila despair. And he buys it, or anyway doesn’t question me. Decent of him, since we don’t own bikes, which meant I had to invent another story to support the original: that I borrowed a bike from a coworker. Tequila does this, fuzzying my brain so I can’t even contrive a logical lie. We’re not the biking type, Jake and me, skinny as popsicles, their holier than thou attitudes taking up half the road even after the town goes and chalks in a special little lane just for them. Plus I look a horror in spandex. Spandex demands no hips and I’ve got childbearing ones, wasted on me since it seems I will never have a child.
That’s what I was thinking when Marty invited me to have sex with him on our break. Better for you than candy bars or a smoke, he winked, like I was some kind of a health-nut and this the deal breaker. We’re the late shift, Tuesday night, deadest of the week, nobody around. Made a mental calculation of the time of the month ovulation-wise, figured if Marty got me pregnant then I’d know for certain it was Jake’s fault. Cuervo-fueled thinking but there it was.
You do realize they have medical procedures for this kind of thing? Kandi, our co-worker sniffed, rolling her eyes when I told her my plan, asking her to keep a watch out. They’d probably do a blood test, Nora, and your husband whacks off in a Dixie-cup. But she was in favor of it anyway, said women should be free as men to have meaningless hookups they’d regret in the morning.
But let’s get down to the nitty gritty. When Marty hit me I liked it. Even more than I liked hitting him. I liked hitting him because he’s an idiot who deserves for someone to pop him every time he opens his mouth, but getting hit, the sting of another’s flesh against mine, there’s something personal in it. Take last week when I stapled my finger accidentally to a scowling lady’s receipt for her bullets sized push-up bra. Blood sluicing all over her package, I paged Kandi in Women’s Sportswear to key up the register for a duplicate copy, but secretly I was in to it, the slickness of that blood coupled with the sting of metal in finger-tip flesh. It’s concrete. A change in the physicality of things when you can’t change anything else.
I’ve got what you could call a retail history. Sold shoes at Payless, linens at Sears, home goods at Kohl’s, cosmetics at Bradley’s right before they went bankrupt, stock girl at JC Penney’s, wallets and belts at Wal-Mart, jewelry, and prior to this K-Mart lingerie gig I was a floater at the Dollar Store, where Julie the manager catches me lurking among the analgesics, stuffing a bottle of Ibuprofen into my jacket. I had a headache that wouldn’t quit and figured I was owed the pain killers, since being there as “service” to the whiners and bitchers who slunk in looking for the ultimate cheap laundry soap, and why if it says Dollar Store does Tide sell for 5.99? caused the throbbing in the first place. I was invited to leave on a permanent basis but not before I pilfered a jar of cocktail peanuts, popping off the plastic lid, yanking back the foil and snaking a handful into my mouth.
After my mother left it was cherries, not the fresh kind, maraschinos, the dye-covered ones that reportedly cause cancer and I’d pinch a jar from Giant where I bagged groceries, slip it into my backpack and on the bus home grab a front seat all to myself, twist open the lid and love would happen on my tongue, down my throat, my teeth stained red with the cancerous evidence. When my autistic cousin was with me I’d give him half, but mostly he liked olives, sticking them on his fingers so it looked like he had fat black fingernails, and on days when the bus stopped at the after-school program for the special kids, I’d make sure to lift him a can of these too.
Once a languid size Two, Extra Long “associate” I worked with at Kohl’s told me how when she stood really still people thought she was a mannequin. She liked to startle them, she said, by blinking. She liked to just stand there and inhale the crisp scent of new clothing. Not me. I prefer food, the greasier smelling the better. Anyway, they don’t make mannequins squat and sullen. You’re smart enough, my father told me, when I complained about the serial store jobs during one of our weekly phone calls, but you have no gumption. Gumption gets the good work, he said. What I wanted was a baby.
Snapshot: the year before this one, 2007, the last year when the silence between Jake and me wasn’t loaded with suspicion: Whose fault is it? Whose problem is it? Whose body is failing? That year the little yellow house we rented for a week every June on Hunting Island, South Carolina still looked out over a big enough beach, summer leisure in the air and everyone’s lives still whole. Jake and me in the futon-bed on the screened in porch, our last good sex, ocean rocking outside, and it wasn’t about baby-making, what became a clocked and calendar relegated duty. It was love.
I watched this show on NOVA once where some scientist said that bodies in space keep moving away from each other, and that for unknown reasons the pace of this has been accelerating. Dark Energy is thought to cause this, he said, though scientists don’t know exactly what that is, this unexplained force that draws things away from each other faster and faster.
2009
There’s a moment when the glob of sun on the horizon seems like it could go either way, rise into daylight or abandon us, the way it hangs like a question mark just above the sea. Her house glows in its weird light, shimmering into the plate glass window where I’ve seen her, white hair knotted on the top of her head, the window sill filled with shells and ceramic sculptures of gulls perched on driftwood stands. Lottie Stein. A Jewish name, my mother would’ve pointed out, the chosen ones, she’d always add. I never got that. A bevy of travails from the Bible on throughout the rest of recorded history. If this was what being chosen meant, I’d vote for slipping under the radar. Apparently my mother never felt chosen, not even by my father who married her when she got pregnant with my sister, and so she chose to leave us.
At one point Lottie Stein’s house was painted an egg-yolk gold, Jake told me, to emulate the sun he figured. Jake’s like that, proposing theory as fact, as if saying it makes it so. Like how he justifies his job: Transition Man, he calls himself, for IBM. I’ve started feeling like the enemy just being married to him, even though all he really did was not get fired. So now he’s doing the firing, out-sourcing the work to places like India and the Philippines where they pay the workers eight bucks a day, while IBM shuts down its Endicott, New York operations. Somebody has to survive, Jake said. Besides, he said, it’s what makes it possible for us to come here. Hunting Island, where Jake used to summer as a child, a barrier island with such extreme erosion accelerated by global warming and pollution that scientists have determined it will disappear in 120 years. I got that straight off a pamphlet from the State Park headquarters. They built groins along their state beaches to hold on to at least some of the sand, but where the houses are the people are on their own. Jake is the only guy I know whose childhood involved using the noun summer as a verb, an action, a way of life. Don’t worry, we’ll always land on our feet, Jake told me, after I lost the Dollar Store job. He was blessed with good ones, feet that never had to climb a hill every morning, watching for a mother to come back. Just because you’re looking for her doesn’t mean you’ll find her, my father warned. Jake was born into a family that argued about which movie to go to on “Family Day.”
Lottie Stein. Wasn’t Lot some biblical character, the one whose wife was turned into a pillar of salt just for being curious and looking back? She’s got staying power, Jake said. Her house surrounded by the ocean at high tide, waves lashing the pylons as they come roaring in and she’s inside. I think Jake would like to rescue Lottie, those storms in the fall with the big waves, like the hurricane that stalled off the coast and fifteen foot waves smashed the island for three days wiping out the little yellow house we used to rent; all that was left was its deck and the webbed chair I put on it to lounge in the sun, a cold one in the cup holder, watching the dolphins cruise by. Soon the deck too will go and the only sign that a home was there will be its septic system, a concrete block in the sand.
Lottie Stein has been on Hunting Island since Jake started coming as a child, same old woman refusing to leave. He wants to sail in like a hero when the waves bring down her house and bear Lottie to dry land, since even her own son couldn’t get her to move, attaching a retractable ladder that could be hauled up during high tide then let down again during low so she could go out and get food. She’s got a generator for her lights and a portable compost potty—the comforts of home, the realtor we rent from told us.
Jake is always trying to save something, right down to the ants on the drain board, rescuing the ones that fall into the dishwater by dropping in the dishcloth like a lifeboat so they can crawl on it, attracted by their tiny struggle, that something smaller than the half moon on his pinky fingernail could want life this badly, hoisting their segmented little heads above the water like miniature buoys. The positive spin, he calls his way of looking at the world; the way he still pretends any month it could happen, our child, despite the hysterical pregnancy, our doctor labeled it in a whispered conversation to Jake, but I heard all right, my uterus a balloon, nothing in it but air. Every monthly bleed another small death.
Snapshot: 2009, another house wiped out in a storm surge, only a blue canvas chair and a Formica table remain. Somebody sat at that table, vase of peonies on it or a bowl of fruit, the newspaper, a cup of morning coffee. House next to it gone, four pylons poking up in the sand, smattering of wires, a broken pipe, the fleshy leg of a doll.
Each time we come back here the sea has taken more: shrubbery, trees, sheds, porches, sinks, toilets, bathtubs, recliners, coffee tables, sofas, bunk beds, linen chests, kitchenettes, whole houses, ransacked. We come in June, the minute school is over and the girl I work with at the Bon Ton, my job this year, can cover for me. She’s one of the lucky ones; most of the high schoolers waste their summers, or spend their summers wasted, since mostly these days there are no jobs in upstate New York. Jake knows about this. At first “downsized” from IBM he hit the road selling Semiconductors out of the trunk of his Chevy Cavalier; we’ll get by he said, and we did. Then IBM invites him back, the Transition Man. One of the people he fired was that poor woman whose daughter a few months later disappears from the IBM parking lot. Kidnapped, I think, they don’t just walk away having a mother who loves them, that’s something, isn’t it? The boy she was with said she just uppedandgone from the deserted lot. Mid-afternoon, that parking lot should’ve been full.
Neither of us felt like shopping today and so we are stuck with the remains of the refrigerator, partly ours, the rest from a history of previous renters. First I tear into the pretzels and when these are done I plunder the tortilla chips. After a while it’s not enough to have them plain despite the salty tang, a salsa is in order and of course there’s no fresh tomatoes so forget the homemade—a jar of almost empty Verde hot! it warns but it’ll do if I mix it with a little catsup, have to hold the bottle down and squeeze it with pliers to get the humidity-gelled goop at the bottom out. When this is gone I tackle the Smart Balance, because Jake accused me of buying two of them—two! he said—like why do we even need one? Slather it on the chips and if they break just stuff them in my mouth by the handfuls, after which whatever isn’t nailed down in the fridge with the rest of our bottle of Chardonnay. Nothing for me, thanks, Jake says, shooting me his injured look.
Later we’ll pretend, as we have every evening since arriving, that I am going to look for some other kind of work on Craigslist, my hours at the Bon Ton slashed almost to the point of no return. You have two years toward a college degree, Jake said, so go for something besides retail. That’s an example of positive spin. I say I dropped out after two years of college, though neither description guarantees a job. And since there’s no Wi-Fi on the island this involves driving to the Beaufort library, stuffed to the gills, having to leave my jeans unbuttoned. Last week before school was officially out for the summer, Anna Drew, one of the remedial girls the Bon Ton hires at minimum wage, poked her dyed tomato-red head into the squirrel hole of a break room where I sat at the lunch table sobbing. She studied me while I tried to snuffle it up, cough into a handkerchief, pretend, I don’t know, allergies?
You get splotches on your neck when you cry, she observed. My mom does too. Is that an older woman’s thing?
Who said I was crying? I snapped. And then in an uncharacteristic display of honesty (I’m sure it would be described that way but I mean really, she’s an eleventh grader, she’ll forget in two minutes since it’s not about her, and anyway it’s not even true): Fine, OK, I’m thinking about leaving my husband, I told her. What is truth anyway? Do I tell her I’m empty and dried-up as the Mojave, so even though I don’t know for sure why I cry, this is probably why I cry? That it’s Jake who should leave me, get with someone who can fulfill her evolutionary role and bear him Jake junior?
You could blog it, she shrugged, didn’t even miss a beat. There’s this website that lets you post the minute to minute of personal tragedies, and if you get enough hits they might even pay you.
I’m going to go cull the racks, I told her, which is retail-speak for ferreting through the racks of size-segregated clothing searching for anything that’s been put back in the wrong category, a Medium masquerading in the Smalls, heaven forbid. Or worse, a Petite hanging out with the Big Girls, the ones with Xs on their tags.
Instead of a job-search I waddle down to the beach. The misshapen moon looks like a glob of moisturizer through a spray of clouds, the tide low and the night dark enough where I can walk out in front of Lottie’s house and stare into her window without her seeing me. What could I say anyway that would make a potential employer consider me over the never-ending parade of Anna Drews waiting in the wings, younger, more malleable, productive and fruitful? I’m the coral reefs dying, glaciers melting, pollution, global warming, the planet’s bad news.
Removing my spyglasses from their case I attempt to peer inside, which is a little daunting, involving tiptoes and a stork’s sense of balance. Since erosion has ferreted away so much sand Lottie’s one story home is now a second story with the inner workings exposed, twisted pipes, dangling wires, clumps of insulation, like having your organs turned inside out, the pylons holding it up are the bones. Towering a foot over me that Extra Long “associate” I worked with, destined for a life imitating mannequins, might manage this easier.
Battered by waves the sand is swept into the St. Helena current and deposited across the sound on the rich peoples beaches of Fripp Island, where they vote to do nothing about the erosion on Hunting since it’s improving their coast. Because of this erosion there are mutations on the island now, years of inbreeding, a shrinking of what land the animals had to share. An Australian-looking creature was spotted lounging in the dirt road accessible only to golf carts now, the asphalt having been washed away by the sea, chunks of it peppering the sand, shells and sludge where once there were cars. The thing just sat there, humpbacked and kangaroo-like with teeth. A black raccoon, the park ranger called it, a cover-up Jake thinks. Black raccoons, an albino one, mangy deer their numbers so burdensome they’ll walk right up for a handout, skinny as rats. Pelicans cruising long beaked as pterodactyls, the black shadows of their wings on the sand as they patrol the coast, kamikaze dives into the sea. In the end the ocean will win and everything is perishable except honey. I learned that from Jake. Although honeybees are also disappearing. Colony Collapse Disorder, he said.
Last night curling up together in bed (he reaches for me but we don’t do it anymore, it became too much about defeat), Jake speculated if humans finally cause their own extinction and only birds and insects are left, would birds evolve into dinosaurs again and eventually people? Or would it stop right there, the birds and the bugs, wiser this time around, knowing the planet was doomed if we took over again.
So much for the positive spin, I whispered, as he drifted off to sleep. Still, I can’t imagine waking up next to anyone but Jake. What does sex mean in the long haul? I want a more practiced intimacy, like the older couple Jake and I saw in a hospital elevator after visiting Jake’s brother, who was recovering from a car accident and a broken femur. He was pushing her in a wheelchair and she was haggard looking but sort of beautiful too, a kind of dignity in the way she sat, shoulder blades snake-thin but straight. She probably just had chemo; he kept handing her that pink kidney-shaped vomit-bowl hospitals use. She’d do this unapologetically, handing the bowl back to her husband who emptied its contents into a bigger container. Then they’d do it again, like some strange dance, his eyes locked into hers, waiting for her cue.
I watch Lottie through her window now and in its reflection I imagine the waves rising and I see she isn’t afraid. Photos of her family line the wall behind where she sits, knitting maybe? Why do we always picture old ladies knitting? What if she’s reading—Moby Dick, Jake might think it, the right fit for this. The black raccoon curled up in a tree in her yard, the mangy young buck she feeds apples to, broccoli leftovers from her own dinner, food brought up the ladder at low tide, cooked later with the ocean surging around her house. Maybe this evening the mangy one brought along his pregnant friend, a doe about to have her fawn, and Lottie slips back into the kitchen for another apple. The waves rising, roaring, thrashing, chewing up the sand then spitting it out into the St. Helena current, bearing the contents from gutted houses hunched over in the moonlight like ghosts: dishes from one, linens, a bed frame, chairs and tables off decks that once held court over a golden beach, refrigerators, microwaves, coolers, sunscreen, mosquito repellant, hoses where once there were gardens, all making their way to the St. Helena sound, every tide going higher as glaciers melt, the sea warms, polar bears disappear, or maybe one washes up on this island someday, little bump in the ocean, returned to its state when no people lived on it and they came from the mainland to kill its animals, Hunting Island. Would they take him out too, this last polar bear?
I see her, white hair glowing in the moonlight, floating out with the current the way a leaf does, like how I used to imagine my bed would, sailing away, first alone, then with Jake, then alone again, or maybe with Jake. Maybe we’ll make it to the Heaven of the Lost, where the missing go, like the girl who disappeared from the IBM parking lot, and our babies who might’ve been, tiny eggs like perfect bubbles, untouched, unbroken, their DNA uncharted, their histories clean.
Jam the buckle from the spyglasses case into the palm of my hand; in the morning there will be a heart-shaped wound.
2010
Jake and I hike up a hill in our neighborhood to watch some meteor shower he read about, but the sky just keeps getting brighter and one by one the stars wink out. I figured it was something celestial but Jake says no, it’s the damn halogen lights they shine on the high school football field, illuminating the night. I snuggle closer to him, stare up like there’s something to see, the distant roar of the cars and trucks from the highway constant as a tide. I think about having sex with him, just for the hell of it, ask him to rough me up a little, or maybe I could hit him to get us started. But that’s not who Jake is and it’s not who we are together. I like the ocean better anyway, I tell Jake. The sky can be kind of empty.
During my junior year of high school my father sent me to live with my sister in Portland, Maine, an ocean city, said there’d be more opportunities for me there—my mother would not be coming back, and me climbing that hill to look for her just reminded him of what he had lost. I knew after a week of doing it I would not see her blueberry colored Honda round that curve below on its approach, but somehow felt if I stopped pretending it was possible, the thing that was breaking apart in my dad would shatter; so not to lose both parents, I kept climbing that hill. I stole my mother’s jewelry before I left, what she didn’t pack and take with her. Probably he would’ve given it to me if I asked. Split half of it with Lauren; to my knowledge neither of us has ever worn it.
Lauren had a new baby and a friend with a withered arm, who also had a new baby, plus a toddler. I wanted to know what happened to her arm and my sister frowned. You don’t ask things like that, Nora, but probably her mother took Thalidomide for morning sickness when she was pregnant. It mutated their babies’ limbs, she said. Her friend’s baby came down with meningitis and she asked Lauren to take care of the older child so she could stay in the hospital with the sick one. Lauren said of course, but then she’s terrified to let the little girl come near her baby for fear she might have it too. One night the child cried and cried and Lauren shut her own bedroom door, her and her husband and their baby inside, so I went to the little girl and held her, her hot little body against mine; I hugged her and whispered things to her and when she finally fell asleep I curled up beside her.
Snapshot: Hunting, 2010—this house was once on the other side of the road, but when all those other houses washed away it became beachfront, a taxable yard flowing down to the sand. Then the road cracks apart in a raging storm and it’s 180 degrees of oceanfront, yard gone and in its place lashed together trees and sandbags.
On April 20 the Deepwater Horizon explodes, killing eleven workers and creating the worst oil spill in United States history. Pictures of the dying marshes, poisoned sea life, green and great blue herons slathered in oil, dolphins smothered to death, breathing it in through their blowholes, drives me to tears; seeing those quivering, tar-slicked pelicans I want to do serious damage to the people responsible for this. But, who am I kidding. I seem to only know how to damage myself. Maybe my father was right about me lacking gumption.
I do it all the time now, pins in my extremities, razors working the soft flesh at my hips, Jake’s lighter tanning the tender parts of my underarms. He started smoking again; where’s the positive spin in this? He had stopped when we read that smoking affects a man’s sperm count, but then we found out the problem wasn’t him. He can control it, he says, a quarter pack a day. The sad thing about this is he will.
Struck up a conversation with a clown at a rest stop off Route 81, just one of those needful whims. I was headed to South Carolina. He was on his way to some kid’s birthday and drunk as a skunk at his fate, he said, having to make a living as someone else’s entertainment. After he left in his VW with a mechanical clown head on the roof I imagined what it would be like if he stayed. A tryst in the woods behind the bathrooms? Would he have tried to make me laugh? Something about having a nose light up, snorting honk honk as he goes down on you…. And thinking about this did make me laugh, hysteria more like it, I couldn’t stop and it was knifing my sides, straddling my chest, my eyes going all teary as I imagined the clown gazing amorously at me, his eyes with their spikes of fire-engine red painted lashes. Hit me, hit me, hit me.
Jobless now, except for the envelopes I address at home, stuffing them with flyers for the self-employed man up the street so he can do more essential things, like figure out who owes him what, I slipped away early to Hunting this year, before Jake, to what will be the last time in this house, the last time for the house, the ocean crashing up against the barrier wall of dead palmetto palms they bulldozed into a pile and lashed together with cables, along with the 10,000 sandbags to hold the water back, high tide hammering at the door you used to walk out of. A door to nowhere now, minus the steps that led down to the yard, minus the yard. The hurricane season starts soon and they predict one of the worst ever. I take the serrated knife the owner of the house left to chop vegetables for the ravenous deer, work it into the flesh above my left knee, a ragged, messy wound (note to self: must use paring knife next time!), twisting the roll of paper towels into a tourniquet around it so the blood doesn’t stain the linoleum floor. Hurting oneself is both habit-forming and sustaining. Imagine jars of honey in empty pantries, what’s left when the sea takes everything else.
Sizzle of the waves over sandbags. Buzz of cicadas in the almost–dead redbud, what’s left of the yard, a little grassy nub surrounded by sand. Spanish moss hangs from this tree, and a loan prickly-pear cactus still growing in the salt water killed pine in front of it. The house next door is empty now, with the front porch washed away; just a door leading down into dirt, kids toys, buckets, and a plastic rake strewn across the back like someone will be coming home. And the battered shells of the rest of the houses, the ones that are waiting to be washed out to sea, stand in a row like a brigade of broken soldiers. In one when the wind blows you can see the ceiling fan on the screened-in porch spinning lazily, as if it’s got somebody left inside to cool.
At low tide I walk on the sand to where a bunch of clams washed up like they beached themselves. I think of whales doing this when something isn’t right, and I think how the sea here must be poisoned, the remains of all those houses, septics, household chemicals, all manner of plastics and that which will never biodegrade, and yet it looks so perfect on the surface, shining and serene. No one can tell what damage lurks. I dig out a shell from where it was mostly buried under the sand, a whelk, its whorled and peaked shape, salmon colored and smooth as metal on the inside. The animal lived out its life and left this, the proof.
Later, after strolling down the remains of the dirt road I yank out a tick burrowing into my ankle, imagine in three days the bulls-eye rash of Lyme disease, the aches and chills, wanting only to sleep, waves battering against the bedroom wall the way they must’ve before Lottie’s house finally broke in half. Less than a month ago, the realtor said when she handed me the key to our rental. They had a last Mother’s Day celebration in it, the son, daughter, their families, and then they brought Lottie to one of their own homes. Days later, not even a storm, just a full moon tide, pylons weakened from repeated thrashings of the waves, it cracks in half, the front toppling into the sea. You can still see Lottie’s white quilt, the realtor said, on the part remaining, hanging like a flag of surrender.
For the rest of the week I feed the deer that come in a herd to chew on the small bit of grass remaining in the yard. Put out a big pail of fresh water and they drink it dry every night, after munching on the apples, lettuce, even sauerkraut, when I had nothing left to give them. Most have the mange now.
Jake calls me from home. You’ll never guess what happened, he says. A sinkhole opened up in our driveway! It’s huge, almost swallowed the Chevy. Went to bed and we have a driveway, wake up to a hole. He tells me the contractor he brought over to evaluate it just shrugged. What do you expect? The contractor said. Your house is close to the Susquehanna. There’s only a thin layer of soil here and under it is sand. Always shifting, he told Jake, wants to find its way back to the river. Maybe there’s something in us all, I think, that makes us return to the water. Come down here, I plead. Never mind the sinkhole.
It’s just that I don’t want to be the person who fantasizes a love affair with a clown so heartsick at his own life he can’t face it sober. I want to be the old couple in the hospital elevator, with someone who loves me when I’m throwing up. We’ll spend our days like we always do, walking the beach, when there is one at low tide, commenting on the skeletal remains of the houses, his memories of summers spent in them. And then Jake and I will return to upstate New York, where he will continue to work for an IBM that isn’t even there anymore. In 120 years the ocean will swallow what’s left of Hunting Island, Lottie’s half of a house with its quilt hanging like a flag—but not surrender, she held on, after all. Over the week I’ll take more snapshots and maybe these too will disappear; if no one is there to witness did any of it even exist? Maybe the pelicans brought back from the brink of extinction from DDT, if they aren’t wiped out from the oil spill, will still dive-bomb the ocean for fish. With any luck, there will be fish.
I have an image that comes to me sometimes, a memory I think, or did I dream it? Our family at a beach somewhere, maybe the New Jersey shore where occasionally we would drive for the day, the water a more steely color than it is off Hunting, colder, but still the Atlantic, its hidden depths. My mother is with us and she’s holding me in the ocean, teaching me to float, her slim hands clutching the small of my back as she stretches me out, her head with its pale hair cut short and spiky like a boy’s, looming over me. I’m scared, and keep trying to grab her shoulders. No, she says. Hold out your arms like you’re flying and let the water bear you. Watch, she says. I’ll show you. And she lets go.
Jaimee Wriston Colbert is the author of Wild Things, a new linked story collection from BkMk Press, 2016; Shark Girls, from Livingston Press in November, 2009; a linked stories collection, Dream Lives of Butterflies, which won the gold medal in the 2008 Independent Publisher Awards; a novel in stories, Climbing the God Tree, winner of the Willa Cather Fiction Prize; and the story collection Sex, Salvation, and the Automobile, winner of the Zephyr Publishing Prize. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals, including The Gettysburg Review, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Tampa Review, Connecticut Review and New Letters, broadcast on “Selected Shorts,” archived in “New Letters on the Air,” and anthologized. Three recent stories won the Jane’s Stories National Short Story Award; the Isotope Editors’ Fiction Prize; and the Ian MacMillan Fiction Prize.