Stories and News

Northwest Review Defunct

2012-01-06T22:03:00.000-08:00

Northwest Review, the great literary magazine of the Pacific Northwest, is now defunct. The link. This editors at this magazine kindly published three of my stories over the years; these are linked in the list at right. Back issues may be available as described at the website. My stories are included in Volume 29, #2 (1991), Volume 31, #3 (1993, the William Stafford issue), and Volume 41, #2 (2003).

ACCEPTANCE: SILK ROAD

2011-12-18T08:00:00.000-08:00

Silk Road, the literary magazine of Pacific University's MFA program, is picking up my short story, "Horses." Stay tuned.

NEW STORY AVAILABLE

2011-12-18T07:56:00.000-08:00

"Maybe I Want to Tell You" is now available in The Fourth River, fall 2011, #8. To order a copy, click on the link!

THE NEW COUNTRY DOCTOR

2011-05-04T07:31:00.000-07:00

This story was originally published in Ars Medica, spring 2008 (volume 4, number 2). To order a copy, click on the link.

I hear a knock at the back door of the priory. A single knock, just as I’m perfecting a new sleight of hand with my waxed Maverick cards. The Cardeeni Single: another trick I’ll never use. Sliding the top card into the deck with my thumb, I am startled by the knock, but do I flinch? Hell no. I turn down the lamp—the nurses and the translator are sleeping in the next room—and I fan out my cards on the fine teak table that the prior left behind. Overhead, fat raindrops rattle the tin roof as palm trees loosen their rain, and I think of my grandpa’s empty old house with the chestnut tree over the porch. I imagine my dad sitting there, dazzling me with his card tricks. His shaky hands. The rain. Now he has sold the old place to pay his debts. That’s what he said in his last letter. I have no place to go home.

The person knocks on the door again.

I stuff the deck of playing cards in the pocket of my shirt.

My dad said cards were for indolent rogues. But he always winked and showed me a new trick. He kept a deck in his doctor bag.

You know, a knock during daytime is nothing. A mother bringing her son for an exam. Listen to the boy’s breath, do a little hocus pocus with your nickel-plated gadgets, dispense a few aspirin. Sometimes the knock is a patient bearing eggs or fruit. But at night, a knock is always bad. I sleep in my boots. The nurses are not willing to leave the abbey, and it falls to me to run through the rain and stumble in the mud toward who knows what. I set a broken arm here, I watch malaria back away from a hut there. I’ve cradled a wailing baby and sung lullabies my grandpa must have sung to me. I’ve held a cup to the mouth of a dying partisan as he cried out in Portuguese for the Blessed Virgin. I never can tell which side of the fight these guys are on, which color bandana is which, but I do know when life has faded from warm to cold. In the morning, I often lose my way back to the abbey, footprints erased by rain.

The knock persists, and I open the door.

A pretty girl drips rain on the porch. She is wearing a man’s loose shirt. She uses her fingers to comb the rain from her hair, which is so long it hangs to her ankles. The girl has pox marks on her face, old scars tight and shiny like the skin on pudding. That’s what salves and prayer get you. But she is pretty, especially as she combs her hair, separating each blue-black strand fine as flax. The girl might not know how pretty she is. I’ve encountered entire villages without mirrors.

I offer her a chair at the teak table, and I pour two cups of tea. She coils her hair in her lap and sits. She does not take the tea. She abruptly stands. She tugs my hand.

“Please, my brother hurts badly.”

Shit.

* * *

I am a doctor, and I am proud to say my father was a doctor, as was his father before him, and his father too. One of my ancestors was a Cherokee healer named Leaves. The story goes that his herbs and roots poisoned the wife of a Tennessee judge, and he fled to California and changed his name to Jones to throw off the law. That’s what I was told, and I believed that my ancestor was without honor, but when I was ten my dad revealed more of the story of Leaves. He said the judge’s wife had a bloody gurgle in her lungs that did not respond to the balms Leaves rubbed on her chest. She begged for something to end her pain, and when she clutched Leaves’ wrist he understood what she was asking. He gave her something, all right. My dad said Leaves never practiced healing again. I listened to that story, and I imagined the desperate woman’s fingers digging deep into my own wrist. I could not have gone through with it. Nevertheless, I grew up proud of the story and what it said about my family. A little mercy in this world was a good thing. I knew I would become a doctor.

* * *

The road is mud. My boots sink in and stick. I hold the girl’s hand and let her guide me to the village.

“You can cure him?”

“Of course I can. I’m a doctor.”

No point in worrying the girl. We still have an hour of walking. If death is taking shape on his putty face, I don’t want to know about it yet. I want the girl to sing me a song in her fluttery dialect. She is skinny, and that long loose shirt fits like a dress, and her hair swings around her ankles. There is something bulging under her shirt, but in the rainy season you see that everywhere. A satchel of food. A bandana in green or red. You hope it’s not a gun. Maybe it’s a set of papers. You can still move around the countryside pretty easily if you have papers, if you are bringing help, and especially if you come with a cross in your pocket. The girl leads me past hamlets we’ve inoculated against smallpox. It is good Catholic magic: a bloody jab in the arm keeps you safe. We are doing good work, and it will make for good stories someday. The villagers insist on paying us, and I take what they offer. Fresh fruit, a bottle of honey wine. But you have to be careful. These are not modest gifts, and not intended that way. The parish priests in their rags scowl at you.

Plodding through the mud, I wonder, What would this girl give to me? Is she a partisan? Am I in trouble? What are the colors on her bandana? Blood is the common color everyone shares. I grip her hand tighter; it is too dark to see colors. There is no choice but to trust the girl. My thumb slides across the pockmarks on the back of her hand.

* * *

My grandpa used to let me hold his gold pocketwatch, fat as an oyster, with a caduceus engraved on the lid and a distilled version of the Hippocratic Oath on the reverse: refuse no one, and do no harm. During Prohibition, he had done a thriving business in patent medicines, and the watch was his retirement gift to himself. With a flourish of one hand, he could open the lid, set the watch hands, wind the spring, and click it shut. A surgeon’s dexterity. Or a huckster’s. He handed down the watch to my dad, and my dad promised that if I went to medical school, he would give the watch to me. By the time I showed an inclination, my dad had gotten into some trouble and pawned the watch to pay a debt. It was only a watch, I guess.

* * *

We reach the hamlet and enter a tin shack. Everyone is wearing a bandana over their face, and that would be enough to set me on edge, but their muffled voices greet me courteously. They offer me a seat and a cup of honey wine. Everyone is introduced. A family. Catholic ornaments lean out from the wall. Eyes glance at my little black bag of spells. I show them my shiny American tools, my Portuguese dictionary, and a rosary, and with these talismans we declare the distance between us, and it is not so far. My hands shake a little. Their eyes follow. If I could juggle my instruments, like a parlor trick, it would come off well. Something slips from my bag with a thud. It’s my dad’s book of cures. They gave it to him at the end of medical school. Use this and don’t come back. Rusty copper darts mark the pages he considered important.

“Is that a Bible?”

“Sure it is.”

I wonder about the masks. Are they trying to protect themselves from the germ? Maybe they’re partisans? I’m not supposed to care. The church says we move freely only because we don’t care. I think of the pockmarks on the girl’s face. I tug her hand. “Tell them it does no good.”

“What?”

“The masks. They do no good against the variola virus.”

“Maybe they just don’t want you to know who they are.”

“Why don’t you wear one on your face?”

“This isn’t my face.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Nothing.”

“Where’s your priest?”

“Gone.”

I set down my cup of honey wine. I drank too much. But my hands are steady as iron. “I’m ready.”

The girl takes my hand.

* * *

My father was in the war. Fresh out of medical school he was sent to Italy, and he was stationed in field hospitals at Anzio and Naples when it was really bad. He never spoke of it, but he must have felt helpless, and maybe that was the start of it all. I imagine that if a guy was hurting, my dad gave him a jab of morphine, fuck the dosage, and if someone was bleeding, he stuck his hand on the hole and tried to hold back the blood oozing between his fingers. He picked shards of shrapnel like seeds from the flesh of a pomegranate. He wrapped gunshot wounds that leaked like wet sand along a riverbank. With his fingers pinching off arteries, he stopped a man’s dying even as the man begged him to help it along. He must have known when a soldier’s life was out of his hands, and sometimes he just stood over a dying man and read aloud from his fat book of cures. Maybe they drank whiskey together until the soldier died and my dad had to drink alone.

He learned how to play cards in the army. He learned the probabilities. He learned how to hustle. But whatever he learned, he didn't learn it very well.

* * *

In the back of the hut, the boy lies on a cot, beside a picture of the Virgin, a crucifix, an incense tray, and a jar of cheap syrup whose only effect is to sweeten your tongue. Even in the darkness, I can see the boy is hurting, and smallpox is bubbling on his skin, and he will die painfully. I order everyone out of the room. Except the girl, her pretty pockmarked face allows her to stay.

“Please,” the girl says in Portuguese, “tell him he will not die. Tell him you’ve seen death and it is not him. Tomorrow he will awaken and wear his skin like clean silk.”

“I cannot help him.” I gather my magic bag. “We have to quarantine this village. You know, we make a ring around it. Everybody gets the vaccine.”

“Please. He hurts terribly.”

The girl touches to the boy on his forehead. His skin jiggles like scrambled eggs.

* * *

When I was eleven years old, I came down with whooping cough. The rattle was in my chest. My father came into my room with a steaming bowl, a remedy he said was handed down from Leaves. I didn’t like the sound of that. He opened his black bag and took out his thick meaty book of cures, and he held the book over my chest and read from it as though incanting spells. He rubbed the remedy onto my chest. I closed my eyes and concentrated on my breathing, doing my best to focus on each breath, in spite of the mumbo jumbo uttered over me. I told myself I got better because I was strong. Still, I was quarantined out of school for two months, and to help me pass the time my father taught me more card tricks. The Bedazzler. The Jack in the Bedroom. Five Aces. Even then, his hands had begun to shake. My hands smelled sweet like juniper berries.

* * *

The boy’s skin is a bubbling stew. I pull back the girl’s hands. He is my patient now. I lay out his limbs so the sores are not touching. I give him water. I sing lullabies. We pray. The girl slides the boy’s rosary beads, and you can hear the steady click click of the beads through her fingers. I want to go home. I am twenty-nine, and I want to go home. I don’t want to consider anyone’s else’s pain anymore. But there’s nothing to go home to.

I take out my deck of cards.

“Pick a card.”

“What are you doing?” The girl frowns. The clicking stops.

“Just tell him to pick a card.”

The girl takes a card and shows it to the boy.

I place the card back in the deck, shuffle. I split the deck in two. “Is this your card?” He nods. It’s the right card. I did the trick just right.

I do the Mongolian Clock, and The Stray Dog, and Schmidt’s Magic Ace. It’s a real show. The pretty girl watches me doing the tricks, and her face wrinkles up to where the pock marks are like kneaded bread, and she’s not pretty at all. Then her face relaxes and she begins to understand. She leaves the room. I finish off Dig Your Own Hole, put the cards in the chest pocket of my shirt. I pick up my coat.

* * *

You know what my father told me? All morning, we were sitting on the porch near the sound of rain. I was doing a trick called Gypsy’s Bluff. I must have been about fourteen. My father had been out all night—some lady with cancer—I imagined my father’s fat book of cures suspended helplessly above her. Now he watched my work. My shuffle. My cut. My deal. His hands had become too shaky to play cards anymore. I was not in a hurry, and I worked with method and care. The rain was heavy in the trees, and the first chestnut fronds of the season were snapping loose and dropping from the weight of the rain. My father said, “You’ve got good hands.”

“Yeah?”

“Do you know why you’ll need those hands?”

“So I can be a doctor?”

“Do you know, someday, what you will have to do with your hands?”

“No.”

“With a pillow and your own goddamn hands!”

“I don’t understand!”

The porch was perched too high, and my father stepped off the porch and into the yard as though stepping off the edge of a raft and into the sea. The yellow chestnut fronds were piling on the lawn, glistening with rain, and he waded through them and kicked them around.

* * *

Standing in the rain outside the hut, I do not wear my coat. I want to feel something, the wet night air bathing my arms. In two years, I have learned five species of crickets by their sounds, and when they fall silent I listen to the beating of my heart. I become aware of my skin against the cold, the tug of the cards in my pocket, and I wish for my coat, but it is gone. I left my coat behind, wadded in a ball, beside the boy’s cot.

Morning blues the sky. I hear the earliest birds. I need to get back to the abbey. This month was supposed to be the end of the campaign. A few of the nurses are entering a holy order, but most of them are gabbing about the boys waiting for them back home. They gaggle about summer dresses in the latest American magazines, and they elbow for space in front of the priory’s only mirror. They won’t want to hear about this one.

The girl comes out of the hut and squats beside me. Her hair in a coil hangs from her wrist.

“I’m very sorry,” I say. “We have to quarantine the village.”

“You cannot do this. Everyone will flee before you can stop them.” She stands and moves in front of me.

I say, “We are not partisans. We are with the church. All we care about is the virus.”

She steps closer. “I am so sorry.” From beneath her shirt, she pulls out a small pistol, and before I can move, she aims her steady hand and fires.

The bullet knocks me on my back, but I know I am alive. A jackhammer has struck my chest, but as certainly as I can see the shaky blue sky I am alive.

The girl is screaming. She kneels next to me. Her hair hangs in my face, it piles on the ground, it tangles in her hands, tangles in mine, everywhere.

Later, I find that the bullet has struck my deck of cards and stopped there. And I thought those damn things would never be useful. I try to roll away, but I’m too stunned to move. My breath is a gasp. “Holy fuck!”

“I am so sorry. Mother Mary, it is a miracle!”

I touch the girl’s pockmarked face. She is so pretty.

“It is a miracle. I am so sorry.” She looks down. She crosses herself. “Mother Mary, Mother Mary...” She puts her hands on my chest and crosses me. My own hands shake too much to do much of anything.

* * *

I remember the night my grandpa fell off the tall porch. He was laughing at a joke, and he tipped his chair back and went over. He hit his head badly, and I set him back in his chair and waited for my dad. He never did come home that night, and not because of a medical call. It was I who picked the pebbles from my grandpa’s forehead. I daubed at the blood and the crust of pearly fluid. I threaded a needle, and I sewed my first stitches at an age when other boys were tightening the knots on their baseball gloves to play catch with their dads. I never played catch with my dad. In every way, he was a failure. I don't blame him for this. I have said it before: a little mercy in this world is a good thing.

* * *

I am lying in the hut. The girl is sitting next to me and holding my hand. The boy’s body is gone. The girl lights a candle beside the Virgin.

“Sing for me.” I lie back and close my eyes. “Fuck, sing for me.”

“I don’t—we don’t sing right now.” The scars on her face squirm.

“Then tell me the happiest story you know.”

“My family doesn’t have any happy stories. Listen, if we tell a story it’s only to get rid of it. We tell a story to put it away, far far away.”

“Then I will tell you a story about my family. There was a man. His name was Leaves...”

IVORY

2011-03-15T07:34:00.000-07:00

Originally published in The Keynon Review, spring 2010 (Volume 32, Number 2). To order a copy, click on the link.

Susan, feigning sleep, felt the car swerve, a change so abrupt that she gave up the privacy of closing her eyes. Jim was driving with one hand again, the other hand across the back of Susan’s seat. Usually he stroked her hair, cupping his fingers where her hair curled under at the neck. Not today. Susan and Jim had had a fight. She had shut him out. She had even plucked the earpiece from her cochlear implant and clamped her fingers around it, small and lost in her fist. She turned away from Jim, her hair sliding over her cheek. The spruce forest sloped away, and Susan saw the Quihwa village and the bay and, farther, the Pacific Ocean simmering under the grey sky. She looked down. A logging truck was crawling to the switchback, a single giant tree lashed to its bed, thick chains cutting into the bark. The truck shuddered and blew a cloud of black.

Susan frowned, and with her free hand she signed to Jim, Slow down.

Jim might have said, “Okay.”

He eased the car around the switchback. The logging truck inched by.

Susan set down her earpiece and took Jim’s money clip from the console. She picked at the edge of the bills with her fingernails. Pink nail polish. Green paper. Susan and Jim had come to buy a whale skeleton to hang from the ceiling of their great room. A bird in a cage. The money smelled like perfume.

Susan spoke. “Are you sure this is legal?”

“For the thousandth ______________.” Jim was facing the road.

“Indians are up on this stuff, you know.”

Jim turned to Susan. “It’s perfectly legal.”

“Watch the road, sweetie.”

“_________________ grey area, but there’s plenty of room for inter______.”

“You can’t do it if it’s illegal. I won’t let you. Kenny is too nice, and Lydia too.” Susan had helped Lydia show her baskets at the gallery in Seattle. She hefted the thick stack of bills. “Besides, it’s not even us.”

“Sure it’s us, honey. It’s us.”

“What the fuck is us, Jim?”

Jim said something, but Susan missed it.

“I’m sorry.”

She began counting the stiff 100 dollar bills, peeling each back from the gold money clip with her pink fingernail. She had bought the clip for Jim when he made junior partner.

Susan shifted in her seat. It had been a stupid fight—it always was. She was willing to try talking again. “And Indians have this thing about being generous. You should not exploit that.” She set down the money clip, took up her little earpiece, and tried to put it back behind her ear. She tilted her head and watched herself in the visor mirror. She smoothed her hair over the earpiece. She wore a one-carat diamond solitaire in platinum, and a Rolex, and beneath her pale blue rain slicker she wore a pink cashmere turtleneck from Nordstrom, nothing fancy, but tilting her head she felt aware of the sweater’s incomparable softness. Jim wore his Peterman jacket. Should they have dressed up more to show respect, or dressed down not to show off? She never knew.

The earpiece slipped off. Susan looked down for it. Stupid thing. Never worked right anyway. She looked at Jim and said, “They’re just poor Indians. You should offer them enough.”

Jim said, “Let’s see what they want first.”

“You should offer more than that, though.”

They came to the street one block off the water. Grey cottages floated in eddies of weeds and blackberry vines. Fishing boats tilted on sawhorses. Jim turned into a bumpy gravel driveway and stopped. He took Susan’s hand in a gesture probably meant to be conciliatory. Susan felt the weight of Jim’s hand, and the heavy grey sky, and the slumping grass and weeds, and she looked down. Her robin’s-egg-blue rain slicker. The cuff of her soft pink sweater. Her pale hands, her pink nails. Forget the fucking earpiece. Jim kissed her. His lips on her cheek phrased “I love you.” She tugged her hand free and signed it back. In college Jim had said she was sexy when she signed. It was crass, but she liked it. Nowadays, I love you was just another figure loosened from her hands, and when Jim took her hands in that strong firm way, she didn’t always tug free.

Jim said, “We got us a few minutes.”

“Speak grammatically,” Susan said. She signed it for emphasis. It’s not funny when you do that. To end the conversation, she turned to the visor mirror and smoothed her hair again.

“Trust me. I’m an attorney. I speak exquisite grammar when it matters.”

Susan’s hand slid from her hair. Right.

Jim picked her earpiece off the floor. “Looking for this?”

“I’m fine.”

“Just take it.”

“It doesn’t work anyway.”

“Since when? We paid 60 K for that.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t like it. It’s stupid.”

Jim put it in Susan's hand, closed her fingers, clenched them tight.

“I’ll get by, silly. I can understand.”

“Can you understand this?” He turned in his seat and kissed her long and slow and hard. He caressed her cheek, then slid his hands to the back of her neck. She let him take her arms and pull her close. All the while, that little earpiece floated in her fist, so small she couldn’t feel it anymore. Jim unzipped her blue rain slicker. His hand pressed hard through her soft pink sweater.

“Jim.”

“Don’t worry, the windshield is tinted.” He pressed harder. He guided Susan’s hand to his crotch. At first she didn’t unclench her fingers.

Susan had read that whales gritted their teeth to send out their songs. She had seen this demonstrated on an oscilloscope on Jacques Cousteau when she was a kid. She wondered whether she could feel sounds if she were floating deep in the water. Words pressing against her skin.

* * *

They walked past a trawler named The Linda Lou. Green mildew spread on the hull, and blackberries had found a grip. Leaning against the garage were the pale rib bones of a whale, and hanging from the eaves were the vertebrae, all in a row, strung on a sagging cable. Other bones lay in piles, overtaken by blackberries, their pale color resigned to a yellow grey.

Susan rubbed a cool raindrop into the pale skin on the back of her hand. Another raindrop plinked in the same spot. She let it slide off. The earpiece in her fist felt cold.

“Their Jeep’s gone,” Jim said. “And I don’t know whose car that is.”

“I wish I had some gum. You could at least supply some minty gum.”

“Looks like Bremerton plates.”

Two years ago, Jim’s firm had done work for the tribe, something about fishing rights, and that’s what had started it all. Overnight trips from Seattle. Face time on the local news. A potlatch when the case was won. A row of Lydia’s beautiful baskets at their house in Queen Anne. Now Jim occupied an office in the downtown building, and he wore Allen Edmunds shoes like the other guys. He drove a Lexus, and he would take it through the carwash, first thing, when they got back. He bought Susan the Rolex. They sent the girls to Lakeside. He worked longer hours, including Saturdays, and this trip to the ocean was a treat for them. Time together. Walks on the beach. Bed and breakfast. Jime called it "sex and scones." Simple. Simple except the whale.

Susan’s toe caught on a whale bone. It was more stout than she expected. Bones lay everywhere, strewn about like bottles after a drunken party. Susan took back the comparison because it was in bad taste, but the yard really was trashy, all those bones lying about.

Jim’s hand took hers. He tried to give her the money clip, but she wouldn’t open her fist.

“I don’t want that thing.” She pulled her hands up to her chest and turned away.

“Settle down, honey. Your slicker is getting all squeaky.”

“No.”

“I know you. ________________ need a role.”

“Jim.”

He tucked the money clip under her arm. “Don’t touch the bones. Don’t. There might be some female taboo. And if they don’t bring up legal, don’t say nothing.”

“You did it again! Speak grammatically!” Her arms were crossed and she scowled at him. The money clip pressed against her chest.

“Smile, girl.” He kissed her. She felt his lips phrase, “because you are so pretty in pink.”

The door opened as she whispered on the skin of his cheek, “I’m not your bitch.” She didn’t mean it. She felt bad about it. She wondered if he understood.

It smelled like cinnamon inside. Kenny smiled broadly and welcomed them in. He wore a plaid shirt and dark jeans. Susan smelled coffee now, and wood from a fire. She stood tightly against Jim’s side, her cheek resting against his arm, the fingers of her free hand tangled in his, her other arm pinning the money clip to her chest. The dining room table was set with a lace cloth, ironed stiff and smooth. They’ve made fancy for us, she thought. But maybe they do this all the time.

“It’s lovely,” Susan said. She looked around. “Where’s Lydia?”

“Grandkids.”

Jim led Susan by her arm to the living room. On the wall, Susan took in everything meant to be beautiful: photos of children in school, children in pow-wow regalia, in their Sunday best, in Mickey Mouse hats at Disneyland; one photo showed a young man in a Marine Corps uniform, and another showed older men on the open water.

“_________ Susan,” Kenny said, “__________ always lovely.”

She smiled. The room was clean and bright. Beyond Kenny’s shoulder, the kitchen was upside down. Stripped to the bare studs.

Kenny shrugged. “________________________ cabinets at the Home Depot in Port Angeles. But ___________ fishery closed down, we don’t _________.”

“It’ll open up,” Jim said. “You know, we’re remodeling too. The kitchen, the great room, the foyer.”

“So I’ve heard.”

Jim and Kenny shook hands.

Kenny winked at Susan. “I don’t even know what a foyer is.”

Susan smiled politely.

Kenny looked around. “____________________ drink or eat? ______________ _____________________ very often.”

Susan shook her head. Her earpiece was still in her hand. The money was clamped beneath her arm. She tried lifting the earpiece to her ear, then brought it back down and kept it in her fist. “No, thank you.” She took off her rain slicker, folded it over the money clip, and smoothed her hair.

“I don’t need anything either, thanks,” Jim said. He was watching Susan. Susan knew that look. Pink cashmere. The sweater hugged her body and gave her a nice shape. She turned her shoulder and looked back at him. A tease.

“________________________ something,” said Kenny.

“Maybe a glass of water. My mouth is sticky.” Susan looked at Jim again, but he didn’t react.

Jim said, “Kenny, you didn’t have to set a table for us.”

Kenny looked down. He mumbled. It was probably just a family dinner. Susan could tell he was thinking about it. Thinking.

“But we can’t stay,” she blurted. “Our girls are with the nanny, and we have to get back.”

She couldn’t tell if Kenny heard. Jim and Kenny drifted into the kitchen, and their faces were laughing. Susan sat on the edge of the sofa. She held her earpiece and her slicker. The money clip made the slicker bulge.

Kenny brought a glass of water and a package wrapped in white butcher paper from the kitchen. Even across the room, the package smelled like hickory smoke. He gave the water glass to Susan. Susan watched the package wave back and forth in his hand. He rubbed his thumb across his fingers. Money? Kenny handed Susan the package. Cold white paper. Susan set it on her knees, tapped it with her fingertips. Hickory smoke.

“What is it?” She drank some water.

“Susan, come on,” said Jim.

Kenny said, “It’s alright, Susan. Anyway, Jim, with fuel so high, I doubt we’ll go out again even if it does open up. All you Seattle people, you’ll see how is. Thirty dollars per pound, you’ll see how it is.”

“It’ll open up,” said Jim.

“Is this salmon?” Susan asked.

Jim said, “Jesus, Susan.”

A man came in from the back. He smiled at Jim and Kenny, and at Susan. He was missing some teeth, but his gums were clean and pink. He wore a clean plaid shirt and jeans. He was wiping his hands on a rag, and he tossed the rag into the kitchen. There was a Marines tattoo on his forearm, Semper Fi, The words right there in his skin.

“This is my son, Bobby. He’s over from Bremerton. His wife, Allison, she’s gone with Grandma. Allison, she’s a looker. Pretty like you, Susan, if I can say that.”

Susan smiled. She looked down at all the things gathering in her lap.

Jim moved forward, then back, shaking Bobby’s hand.

Bobby said, “My dad says you’re buying some whale bones.”

His tongue pressed against his gums.

Kenny said something funny and elbowed Bobby. She saw the word pretty and the word Allison.

“________________________,” said Jim.

Susan looked at the television. She looked at Bobby tapping his fingers on his clean jeans. She followed Bobby’s eyes to Kenny.

Kenny said, “He met her at a field hospital in Kuwait and ____________.”

“Ain’t legal buying whale bones, but you already know that,” said Bobby.

Jim said, “Neither is killing whales, last time I checked. But don’t worry. There’s legal, and then there’s litigable.”

“And there’s Indian.”

Bobby and Jim smiled at each other.

Kenny said, “_______ Allison like a daughter.”

Love?

Bobby continued, “The Chinook fishery’s closed. Lotta Indians looking for work. Some ain’t looking no more.”

Bobby was here to make it hard. Susan understood that now. Kenny didn’t want to sell, and Bobby would see to it. She knew it. Bobby was his out.

She must have projected something anxious, because Jim turned. He spread his arm wide. “Come here, honey,” he said.

“That’s all right.” Susan laid her slicker as a pad under the cold package of salmon. She held her water glass against her sweater. She wanted to meet this Allison and her pretty girls. She wanted to see Lydia. She tucked back her hair. Jim watched her. She liked that. She stood up. Cradling her slicker and the money clip and the salmon and the water glass and the cochlear earpiece, she walked over to him. He put his arm around her. She leaned into his touch. It felt good. A solid kind of loving. The whale deal would fall through, but Jim would still be have her. Jim was watching her, but he turned back to the men. Susan looked away, at the gray sky out the tiny window, and the faces fell silent a long time. Jim’s arm was firm around her.

Kenny and Bobby stepped into the kitchen. Shadows moving around. She smelled cinnamon. The TV flickered, a face selling pretty jewelry.

Susan made her click signal and Jim turned. She adjusted her bundle to one arm and quickly signed, “No.”

He signed back, “Hush.”

“No!” She felt the word on her fingers. “No!” She straightened her soft pink shoulders. She shook her head. “No.” She smoothed her hair.

Jim watched her a long moment. She looked at Jim. His arm around her began to rock her slightly, slowly, and she allowed this. She tightened her lips. She did not raise her hand again.

Kenny came back with a bone, solid as a baseball bat. The three men gathered around it. Susan kept losing their faces. She could not take her eyes off the smooth yellow bone. Jim spoke a few times. Susan felt his ribs resonate with it. Each man reached out and tapped the bone.

“What is it?” she asked, but she didn’t look for the answer.

Kenny was handing it to her. She cradled it in her free arm. It was heavy, and her arms were already full, she had to hold the bone close to her chest. She wanted Jim to take it. She looked up. He didn’t seem to notice. It was heavy.

“You have a price in mind?” asked Jim.

“I don’t know about that stuff,” said Kenny.

“_________ ten thousand?”

Heavy.

Kenny and Bobby didn’t say anything, but Susan could tell the price floored them. Susan saw their hands shift. Was it too much? If they thought Jim was good for ten grand, maybe they figured he was good for more. Jim already gave a lot of money to their daughters' school on Lake Washington. He did pro bono work for the deaf community and for the gallery. He did less of that now, junior partner Lexus boy, but still... He probably was good for more.

Jim said, “With the fishery closed, we want to be fair.”

“And quiet,” said Bobby.

“Every__________ quiet,” said Kenny.

“______________ honor the culture.”

Bobby laughed. “Ten thousand dollars buys a lot of culture. You sure you can fit all this culture in your nice car?”

“It’s a big car.”

Susan wanted to say, It’s really heavy.

“What’re you gonna do with it?”

“We have this big room. The whale is going to hang from the rafters. We have this artist ready. I mean, Susan says she has this artist. Anyway, the girls are excited to see this.”

“They pretty as their mom?”

“Kenny!” Susan. Pink. Heavy.

“I got two granddaughters. Prettier than anything. I guess I can do ten thousand.”

“Are you sure?”

Kenny looked at Bobby. “We could sell the sperm whale for higher.”

Bobby didn’t say anything.

“Too big,” said Jim.

“It’s a small one. A female.”

“______________” Jim said.

“We could finish the remodel.” said Kenny. “Fuel the boat. More money would do both.”

“I don’t know.”

Kenny looked sad. “Two daughters. Pretty as their mom.”

“Thank you, Kenny.”

“We should just give you the bones. Keep it above board.” Kenny’s arms relaxed.

Bobby tensed up.

Susan’s shoulders ached, her elbows were tight against her sides. The whale bone was really heavy. The salmon was heavy. The money clip was heavy. The glass of water was tilting. The slicker was slipping loose. She couldn’t feel the little earpiece anymore.

“We want to pay you. We want what’s right.”

“I don’t know. Anyone else got a whale? Dale, he’s got one.”

Jim said, “The thing is, I want one with a good story.”

Bobby looked down.

“I can ___________________________. What kind of story do you want to hear?”

Bobby put his hands in his pockets and stepped back a little.

Kenny laughted and said, “You lawyers! Your whole job is making up stories. Susan, you like stories?”

“I don’t read very much, really. It’s kind of hard to explain.” Her load slipped, the water spilled down her sweater, and she reached to grab the salmon. It was too much. Everything was cradled against her belly and sliding down. She wanted to hear the story about the whale bone. All of the story. She shifted the whole load to grab the salmon. She opened her fist. The little earpiece was gone.

“Oh no.”

“What?”

“Nothing. I lost something. Jim. The earpiece.”

“What!”

“I don’t know. I dropped it somewhere.” She looked around at her feet.

“It costs—”

The salmon and the slicker and the money and glass and the bone felt really heavy. Susan looked up at Jim. Her eyes began to water.

“You need to find it,” Jim said.

“I know that, Jim.”

“Retrace your steps. Go outside. Think. Think hard. Think.”

“Just stop it.”

She made one trip up and down the carpet from the front door to the television.

“Aren’t you going to help me, Jim?”

Bobby said, “I’ll help you. You guys are busy telling your stupid stories.” He went outside, left the door open behind him.

Susan was searching Jim’s face when he said, “You’ll find it. Just go.”

Kenny ran into another room and came back with one of Lydia’s baskets. He put Susan’s things in there and gave it back to her. “Keep it.”

“Kenny.”

“Really. You’re like Little Bo Peep.”

Jim said, “I think it was Little Red Riding Hood who had the basket.”

“Bobby,” Kenny turned to the open door. “You got kids. Was it Bo Peep or Little Red had the basket?” He looked at Susan. “I don't know. Somebody girl pretty as you had a basket.”

Jim said, “So what about them bones out there by the trawler? What’s their story?”

Did he just say them bones?

“_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________”

Susan carried her basket out the door with both hands. She wanted to cry, but she wouldn’t, not until later, when no one could hear the funny moaning sound she had been told she made. She didn’t know about that, but she knew enough to keep her crying a private thing. My heart is broken, she thought, but to think such a thing was to say it. She mouthed the words. She wondered if anyone heard, but she couldn’t tell. She stood on the yard and closed her eyes.

For twenty minutes she shuffled around the weedy yard in her pink cashmere sweater under the grey sky. No earpiece. She stepped around the whale bones. A story? Sometimes Susan wanted Jim to think exactly the same things as her. She wanted her name to be on his lips, and nothing else, his hands speechless, all tied up with hers.

Bobby stepped up. Susan looked.

“You’re from Seattle.”

“Yes.”

“City girl.”

“I suppose.”

“You can’t hear me.”

“I can hear you.”

“No, you can’t. Not really.”

“That’s not nice. That’s really not nice at all.”

“I’m sorry. So what do you do with yourself, with a nanny and stuff?”

“I’m an art dealer.”

She felt him sizing her up. She bit her lip.

“No, you aren’t.”

“What?”

“Not really. You work part time in a gallery. I reckon you volunteer.”

She started to cry.

Bobby watched her cry. She must have been moaning. He frowned. He said, “Follow me.”

She followed. They went around some outbuildings and came to a heap in the berries. Bobby yanked the berrries aside and uncovered a long string of vertebrae on a rusted cable. He kicked off the mud, leaving a footprint on one blade of the spine. An ancient crack split the vertebra down the middle.

Bobby looked at Susan so directly she felt an obligation to look back. “Tell you a story. After high school I went straight to Kuwait. Med-Evac chopper. Not much action in ‘91, not compared to now, but there was enough. I seen things. Enough. Met a nice Indian girl in an aid station, anyway. So I come back a family man, and I start trawling because what else... One night on the water, thump, we hit something hard. I’m thinking it’s a log boom. The boat is banged up real bad, and we radio in, but in the morning there she was in the water, a sperm whale banged up bad as us, just floating there in the pitch and roll. The whale was taking long slow breaths. You could tell it’s awake because of the eye. The body listed, and that greasy eye shone above the water… Slow sad blinks. It didn’t move. And neither did we. So what the hell we do? Just leave it to die? Kill it? Some of the guys got down the shotgun, but I took it from them and put it back. I didn’t like to think about that sort of thing. And then the whale was crying. It cried and cried. I knew it was crying. I don’t know how. I guess it was crying, anyway. You can hear whale sounds, and what makes one sound any different? I just knew it was despair. Confusion and despair. But what could I do? Pat it on the back? Nothing. I was on my own journey then, and ever since, and has anyone reached out to me? Do you know what that’s like, city girl?”

Susan faced down. She brought her eyes up.

“And then it was gone. Must have perked up or just sunk away. We got the boat fixed, and I was relieved beyond compare. But a couple hours later we saw it again. The same whale. I tell you, in life, you do what you have to. You get by. You feed your family. You know how it is. You got girls at home, right. These are poor times, and the devil comes knocking twice you don’t leave him out in the cold. So there was this whale, and we had to make a calculation. I didn’t want nothing to do with killing no more, but I didn’t want it on no one else’s hands either. That’s what I say.”

Susan could see his tongue flipping around searching for words.

“Some stories you don’t tell.”

Susan looked at the crack in the bones. She looked at Bobby.

“This story,” he said. “You can hear?”

Susan shook her head. Her smooth hair slid across her cheek.

“But you got all of it.”

She nodded.

“That is a gift from god. That is a blessing. Your children too?”

Susan didn’t move. Bobby reached and touched her chin. She nodded.

“But they can do this thing that you can do.”

She nodded.

“It is a blessing.”

“Can you show me back to my car please?”

“Sure. You bet.”

On the way around the house, Susan tripped on another bone.

Bobby caught her by the arm. His clean hands on her pink sweater.

Susan felt the words burst from her mouth, “My heart is broken.”

“What?”

“That’s all.” She pointed to all the silent things around them. The log trucks climbing the hill, the gulls circling the bay, the cables dangling from the garage. She held her palm to the wind that pushed her hair in her face. She let her hair stick to her wet skin.

He frowned and shook his head. “I don’t understand you at all.”

“I don’t understand you either. The point is that you try.”

“Yes.”

“Okay. I want you to do something.” She set down the basket and took out the heavy whale bone. She handed it to Bobby. She turned her head, pulled her hair to one side, and pointed to the place behind her ear. “Hit me with the bone, right here.” She took Bobby’s hand and pressed his fingers to her skull. “Feel that? Right there. Smack it hard.”

“I’m not going to hit you.”

She was crying. She fought to make a voice. “Listen. There’s ten thousand dollars in the basket. Here’s my watch. Here’s my rain slicker. Oh, and here’s some fucking salmon. So hit me.”

Bobby worked his lips against the gap in his teeth. He thought for a long time, looked at Susan like he was sizing her up, and said “What about that diamond ring? Like I said, these are poor times.”

“It doesn’t come off, asshole, and that’s fine because I want to remember that my heart is broken. Now do it, please.” Susan closed her eyes.

* * *

She met Jim by the car. Her head was bent forward, her smooth hair was in her face, and she was leaning her weight against the door. She looked up. She waved to Kenny, who stood on his steps. Kind of blurry. Bobby had gone out back. She couldn’t see him. Everything was too bright, and she squinted to see anything at all.

Jim took her hands. “It fell through. One more visit should do it.” Jim looked glad. He kissed her. “Let’s go home.” He hugged her, and she let herself be pulled in tight. He kissed her again.

“What’s wrong, babe?”

“Nothing. I don’t know.”

“Did you find it?”

“No, Jim. I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“You sweater’s muddy.”

“I guess.”

Bobby came running.

Jim said, “He found something!”

Bobby handed a small object to Susan. She closed her fist around it. She knew what it was.

“Your earpiece.” Jim tried to open her hand.

“It’s nothing.” She put her hands behind her back.

“Let me see.” He reached around. His strong hands took it.

It was the cochlear bone of a whale, yellow and hard, spiraling like a seashell.

“What the fuck.”

“It’s mine. Give it back.”

“This is so bad.”

“No it isn’t. I’m not bad.”

“What’s this about?”

“I want to go home. I really want to go home.”

“What’s going on?”

“Maybe there’s a story, Jimmy, a whole whopping story. A real doozie.”

“Where’s my money?”

“I’m not telling.”

Jim opened his mouth to say something, then paused. He handed the cochlea back to Susan and got in the car. “_________ for nothing.”

Susan got in. She gripped the spiral knot of bone tightly in her pale fist. The car was climbing the turns when she began to feel sick to her stomach. She clenched her hands against her gut. Her soft pink sweater. Somewhere through the long spruce forest, she leaned against the leather seat and closed her eyes. Don’t fall asleep. That’s what they always warned about. Stay the fuck awake. Tell yourself a story. Mouth it on your lips. It was good to have something you could never share. How did that story go? Like this: ___________.

SANIBEL'S JOURNAL

2011-03-03T07:45:00.000-08:00

Originally published in The Healing Muse, 2006 (Volume 6). To order a copy, click on the link

It is hard to find anymore, but I used to know a beach where the grass and wildflowers gave way to dunes, where bony limbs of driftwood bleached in the sun, and where, on a sandy escarpment, a few cottages safely perched and faced the sea. It was Indian country, and I need to say that while everyone here was friendly to me, they were also intensely private. I don't even know what tribe they were—if they spoke an indigenous language, I never heard it—and in any case the language must be extinct by now. The privacy of these people gave them plenty of time for fixing gillnets and weaving baskets, but near as I could tell, these were silent chores without stories to bide the time. Mainly, these people chronicled their lives by this: twice per day the waves etched fine designs in the sand—swirls, ripples, streaks, moguls, terraces, grooves—and twice per day the waves erased the designs and began again. The Indians claimed it was a form of writing; if one studied long enough, one read in these designs the effect of a billion variables. If there was a typhoon in another part of the world, if a piece of the continental shelf sheared off, if a choral reef died, if a fisherman in another village changed his floats from green to blue, the story showed up here. I was a graduate student at the time (I had come to the beach to study shoreline morphology), and I suggested that what the people described was more akin to mathematics than literature, but they insisted, no, they read the patterns in the sand as though reading stories in a book.

I need to stress that to an outsider such as myself this so-called wave writing was totally illegible, and when I inquired, no one would teach me how to read it. The people gladly pointed out intricacies in the streaks left by a receding tide, precision in the spacing of grains of sand after a windstorm, order where I saw chaos in the turbulent waves—all subtleties that an outsider would miss—but about the meaning of these texts they said nothing. They stalled. They smiled blandly. They looked away. Of course I respected their privacy—perhaps they took me for a tourist who had strayed through the maze of dunes—but I suspected they were withholding something written in the sand, and I grew impatient for a reading. Merely to gaze at these beautiful patterns was as unsatisfying as to delve no further than the cover of a novel. As a scientist, I relied on verifiable data—photographs, theodolite readings, satellite images—anything less rigorous I treated with skepticism. When I set down my pen and clipboard and traced the sand with my fingers as the residents were doing, for all I knew I was reading the sand in the wrong direction.

In one of these cottages lived a young woman named Sanibel. Like everyone else here, Sanibel studied the beach twice per day. I had seen her walking along the edge of the tide as though searching for something she had lost. Her long black hair hung loosely around her face and neck, and I had never gotten a good look at her face. People told me she was dyslexic and she stammered—the results of a hearing difficulty as a child. As she searched for a word, people warned, she would grab your arm as though she were afraid you might wander off. Sometimes, when the words did not come to her, she would let go of your arm, inconsolable and silent, and the release of her grip, that sudden loss of warmth and hope and language, gave the impression that Sanibel had resigned herself to a nameless despair. Her grip left red marks on your skin, which faded slowly enough for you to wonder about the girl. Most people had expected Sanibel to run away as a teenager. What kept Sanibel here, they suggested, was that she liked more than anything to read the sand. And she kept a record. With her pencil and journal, she would transcribe patterns from the beach into her wobbly script so that she could read them later, at her slow pace, after they had washed away. She was the only person who wrote anything down, and she was regarded as a sort of archivist. She smiled often, although with her hair hiding her face you wondered whether she was being sly. Her eyes were atypically blue, and there was a rumor that her eyes changed color from blue to gray to green.

I first met Sanibel during a dinner at one of the cottages. She was about my age—maybe the women were hoping to fix us up—I don’t know. On this particular evening, I was alarmed at my day’s findings: a strand of data suggested the beach was disappearing. In a year, I calculated, the cottages would wash into the sea. Of course, I did not feel light-hearted or social. Perhaps Sanibel felt similarly burdened; after the evening’s small-talk began, she and I found ourselves alone by the woodstove, an eddy of silence in a noisy room. I asked her about her journal. She formed a word on her lips, and she tugged at my arm and frowned with concentration. This effort seemed to discourage her, and the desired word slipped away. She continued to grip my arm, and I took this to be her point. I did not try to pry my arm from her grip. During the meal, Sanibel did not speak again. She was in contrast with everyone else at the table, who spoke voluminously about the sand, the wind, the waves, the beautiful script, but in whose ramblings the very point of the writing—surely these people understood that their cottages were eroding away—this essential message was ignored as if it were not even there, or avoided as if it was. As people spoke, I watched Sanibel across the table for a sign. What was her story? What did her journal say? What was she capable of sharing at all? Her long hair masked her face.

The next time I saw Sanibel, she was standing knee-deep in the warm ocean, her back to the waves. She had been reading the erosion in the escarpment that undercut her cottage, and she had stepped back to study the work as a whole. I sloshed out to where she stood. I had seen similar undercutting along other sections of the escarpment. From this perspective, the swirls in the sand resembled an angry wave in a Japanese print. I asked Sanibel what they said, but she did not answer. I was wading back to shore when she caught up with me and tugged my wrist. “Um, listen to me. There is a right way to ask.”

Several nights later, a storm washed a fisherman’s ragged net on the beach. I found it in the morning among seafoam and broken mussel shells where the high tide had left its print the night before. Knotted into the net were a dozen glass floats—handblown, irregular globes of wet, sparkling glass. Some of them were broken. One or two still bobbed in the surf. They glinted a color between green and blue.

The net drew everyone’s interest that morning. From up and down the beach people left their section of sand to gather and read the story as eagerly as you might read the lead story of a newspaper. They examined the glass floats, argued over their exact color, and studied the different knots that held the net together. Exactly how these fragments of discussion came together to weave a coherent narrative I did not comprehend.

I stepped into a circle of people passing a fragment of net around. “Tell me what it says.” I was impatient, and I should have known better, but I went from face to face. “Tell me.” As people turned away from me, I grabbed them by the arms. “Hey.” They brushed me off. I may as well have been invisible. The people drifted up and down the beach, and by midmorning the remains of the fisherman’s net had washed back to sea.

A few hours later, I found Sanibel sitting on a warm slab of driftwood in the sun. Her journal lay open in her lap, and she was wrestling a line of text from her pencil, fingers tense, face bent to her task, her hair spilling onto the page. When she looked up, I saw that she was smiling. Her eyes were the color of those glass floats. She had scribbled some wavy patterns on the page; I could not make sense of them.

“It’s just a joke,” she said. She crossed it out.

I sat beside her on the driftwood.

For the entire afternoon, as our shadows lengthened across the sand, I waited for Sanibel to tell me about her journal. I looked directly into her eyes. This was not easy; I was distracted by their indeterminate color and the wind tossing her hair in the way. She took my wrist and held tighter than I would have liked.

“This is how you ask.”

She spoke slowly, deliberately, but without a stammer, shaping each word as carefully as a jeweler would cut a gem. She told me that the glass floats on the beach were from a particular village in Japan. They had come across the sea, borne by a storm. In recent years, there had been a lot of storms. In fact, the storms were gnawing the shore away. Some day soon, all the cottages would be gone. Perhaps I already knew this?

Before I could respond with my scientific data, Sanibel continued, this time with a burst of words. She let go of my wrist and waved her hand towards the beach. It was all for show, she said, this fascination with the writing in the sand. It was style, not substance. It was surface, not depth. Without irony the residents read in the sand a forecast of their beach’s destruction, yet they gushed over the delicate black striations of manganese and iron embellishing the sandy script. Those hard ridges that formed in the dense, wet sand? Threats, relentlessly pounded by an angry sea. The sinewy trails that remained after the tidewater drained from the beach? Unmistakable warnings. But you would not know it, the way people talked. What washed on the beach was, for them, the emptiest of blandishment. Goodspeak. With her bare foot, Sanibel stroked the smooth sand at our feet, on which old text was still visible, and suggested that this superficial motion was as insightful as reading, and as worthless, if you didn’t care what it said.

Sanibel told me that reading had always been hard for her. Some of the sand etchings were too complex to sort out, some too large to grasp, others too miniscule to notice. Some of them were nothing but the random action of wave and wind, and she could not read any order in them at all. Sanibel had been ten years old before she understood that the patterns in the sand were a character set, a sort of alphabet; after learning to read the sand, Sanibel began her journal. Over the years, as the waves rinsed the sand away, more pages of text were exposed. Sanibel recorded what she could. She captured a story about a blue whale, stories about lovers, stories about surfing. She uncovered an oil spoil that the industry did not publicize. One day, she found a story about a grassfire, during which the elk and the bear came down to the sea. And she discovered that the beach was eroding away forever. All this she wrote in her journal, thin, whispery expressions of joy but mostly sorrow.

She drew four wobbly figures for me. “This means Sanibel. I have a story about a girl named Sanibel. A long time ago”—at this moment her voiced faltered, and I saw she had begun to cry—“there were no stories, no etchings in the sand. The beach, like people’s imaginations, was as smooth and unblemished as your skin when you were a child. Well, the man who owned the largest cottage hired a young artist to write some things in the sand. He was going to host a potlatch, and he wanted a record of everything the people had accomplished here, great letters in fancy curly-cue script which the people could follow like a path through a maze. No one had ever written down a story, mind you, but the job paid well, and the artist took it. He hired two apprentices, teenage boys who argued with each other but who worked hard if he kept them apart. The artist sectioned the beach in thirds and assigned a different part of the story to each of them, keeping the middle section for himself. The work was going well. I need to say that the rich man had a daughter named Sanibel. She was the same age as the two apprentices. She was pretty, with long black hair and eyes of an unusual blue which people could not place. And she was deaf. During the etching of the sand, Sanibel would walk down to the beach to watch the young artist and his assistants work. The two boys vied for her attention, but Sanibel spent more time with the artist. ‘Blue, Sanibel. Your eyes are blue today.’ He would rest his hand on her shoulder and whisper into her long black hair. Sanibel remained still and smiled at this information. Blue. She sensed the pressure of his lips against her ear, and the soft exhalation of air as he whispered. Blue. She turned her face towards his, and their cheeks brushed. Every day, they drifted within each other’s touch, and every day the artist pronounced the color of her eyes, and every day Sanibel mouthed the words back to herself silently. Nobody knows those words anymore. Maybe they were lupine, cerulean, azure. I don't know. The artist made her a small bark journal in which to keep the words. Well, the story in the sand was nearly done, and the potlatch was only a few days off, when Sanibel’s father approached the artist with a new commission: he wanted the artist to tattoo the story onto his daughter’s skin. She would walk around the feast and serve roast boar to the guests while they admired the beautiful, sinewy letters on her arms, her back, her belly, her legs. The father brought Sanibel down to the beach and made her disrobe. The artist was supposed to ink the words into her unblemished skin, and she was to be completely covered with the story by morning. The father departed. The artist and the terrified girl sat together on the sand. They were both ashamed, and he handed her her clothes to put on. After a long silence, the artist held Sanibel. He whispered words of blue to her, touching her cheek, her forehead, her hair. ‘Your eyes are the color of a river stone... pastel blue, the sky in a painting... my mother's sugar bowl, when I was a child... robin’s egg... slate... zinc... medicine bottle...’ The artist and Sanibel fell asleep on the beach, the girl nestled in his protective arms, his face buried in her long hair. That is how the two assistants found them the next morning. The father was furious. He sent the artist away, and the assistants were able to complete the task on Sanibel’s body. They wrote meaningless, random blocks of letters, undressing her, fighting over parts of her, completing the text while Sanibel stood naked, confused, humiliated and hurting. Then, the night before the feast, a freak high tide erased all of the writing on the sand. The beach has been shrinking ever since. This is not made up. You can still put the pieces of the story together. It’s not the kind of thing that just rinses off. When the artist whispered those words to that poor girl, that was the last time anyone meant anything they were saying.”

Sanibel looked away. She gulped and began to stammer. She gripped my wrist again. “Um, maybe the sand-writing upsets people too much, but I think people are so taken with the designs, they don’t even remember in which direction to read anymore. But I’ve also seen people absorbed in the receding tide as though captivated by a good novel. You want to find out what is right and wrong in the world, but you don’t always want to talk about it. Now leave me alone, please.”

The sun was low over the shimmering water by the time Sanibel finished. With my free hand, I ran my fingers through her hair; it was like running them through soft sand.

“Please.” Sanibel looked at me, her eyes full of tears. I decided her eyes were the color and depth of the sky.

TALKING HANDS, BLUE EYES

2011-02-09T07:41:00.000-08:00

Originally published in Alaska Quarterly Review, fall/winter 2003 (21: 1-2).

He was not sure which question frightened him more. Would he tell her? Would she listen? Yet, as he sat by himself in the bustling cafe (on the Indian side) and waited for his cousin to finish her shift, he felt confident that he knew the answer to either question, and he formed the sign for yes (right hand extended, fingers closed except the index finger, poised, then delicately dropped, captured by the thumb). He was worried enough to feel sweat on his palms, and he foresaw a failure not of words—he had abandoned them long ago—but of the very silence he wanted to convey. Would she, by his measured silence, discern his capacity for anguish, and for joy?

He drank his coffee too fast. He caught her eyes as she worked the aisle, topping off mugs for the other customers. He pointed at his mug. She shook her head.

He considered her his closest friend. He was not sure that she felt the same way. But she knew how to sign, and he felt a tangible bond to her, a firm grip on a happiness he struggled to conceptualize because, he was certain, it lacked a sign. He would find one. Never would he entrust that idea to slippery words again.

He listened to the chatter in the cafe—the gossip of Crow women, the lewd jokes of truckers, the money worries of ranchers, the small talk that filled uneasy spans of silence. He listened to people hemmed by their words, and he imagined himself free of it. He imagined himself wordlessly negotiating the tab with his cousin, pictured the single sign that would suffice—good trade (left hand touching right hand, fingers closed, knuckles meeting, then pulling apart as though tightening a rope, firming a bond)—and he felt in his heart the good knowing that would pass between himself and her, that the meal was good, that the price was fair, that this black-haired boy and this pretty, black-haired girl could share in this simple knowing. He felt his jaw firming up. Why, he asked himself, had he ever bothered to talk when he could so readily avail himself of the precise locutions of his hands?

He watched her carry a plate of fries and soda-pop to a table of Crow girls from school (scheming about boys), watched her banter with her uncles in their regular booth (teasing her), watched her polish the squeaky glass case by the register, the case where the owner let her sell a few pieces of her quillwork to tourists (“Is this genuine? Did you make this yourself?”). The owner had asked for forty percent; she had argued him down to twenty-five. To argue (right hand closed, in front of mouth, tip of index finger under thumb; hand moving forward, thumb releasing index finger in a flicking gesture—people spitting words at each other in this aggressive way). He watched her fix her hair in the little mirror behind the register, smooth her smock, and scurry around the end of the counter to take a fresh order. She was seventeen.

He would take her into his confidence.

He tipped back his coffee mug for the last drop and turned to his book, a reprint of William P. Clark’s The Indian Sign Language. Inside, he found a good sign. Joy (bring the right hand away from the heart, fluttering). The old men used that sign when they passed each other in front of the grocery in Crow Agency, so familiar to each other that they had nothing left to say but joy. The boys on the high-school basketball team from Lodge Grass used that sign before a game; it was the last thing they said to each other before setting to the task of demolishing the other team. We share joy, we know that we do, and since the joy is in the knowing, let us speak no further of it. He would use that sign, and she would understand.

She came to his table and wrote something on his check.

He lifted his coffee mug, and with his other hand he pressed open the book, his finger marking the spot for joy.

“Cousin, you can’t take up this booth all night.” She placed his check on the table and turned. She wore a quillwork clasp, flat and perfect, in her shiny black hair.

* * *

She would only sign with him when they were alone. One afternoon last summer, he had been unloading bags of feed from her uncle’s pickup (he had just earned his driver’s license), and she came out to the barn with glasses of lemonade, and they sat on the tailgate and signed until their older cousins saw them and teased! He put his hands in his pockets. He worked the rest of the afternoon angry and alone. The teasing seemed a pathetic flaw in the language. He would have welcomed anyone to join in the signs; she was the only one who had offered. But even she had wandered off with the other cousins, to tease them back, and to gather porcupine quills.

* * *

He stacked his cup and spoon on the saucer and closed his book. Paid without speaking and left the cafe. He would hitch back to Crow Agency—would walk mostly. He would walk because hardly any cars strayed down the old road since the interstate highway had been built. He would walk because most people had stopped picking up the sixteen-year old boy who had stopped talking a long time ago.

He walked about two miles of road, and the lights of the diner faded behind him, and the lights of the Crow housing tract glowed on the skyline ahead. He tucked the book of signs under his arm and stuck his hands in his pockets for warmth. The hum of a motor came up from behind. A pickup pulled up. It was her. She leaned over and shoved open the passenger door. She was wearing her orange high-school cheerleader jacket over her pink waitress smock. He shook his head.

Cousin, get in. I’ll take you home.

* * *

One Saturday afternoon in November, when his act seemed to him less a way of reaching and more a withdrawal, he put down his book of signs and left his parents’ boxy reservation bungalow. He exited through the back door, hurdled the barbed-wire fence at the edge of the housing tract, and cut across the grassland. After he had walked about a mile, the fences stopped hemming his thoughts, and the rolling grasslands seemed to extend without boundary. He began to sign. He winced at the irony: there was no one to sign to. But it was good practice, for speed and precision (he had been teased for stuttering), but also for automaticity, a mingling of thought and gesture that he held vital.

As he practiced, he considered how to explain his silence to others. How to clarify his intent by declaring nothing at all. He thought about teachers and cousins and friends. He thought about white people. He did not want to seem superior or aloof, which silence often said. He anticipated ridicule. His act smacked of elitism and contradiction: how would these arcane signs bring him closer to anyone? He needed an accomplice. He needed his cousin.

He pondered what he would actually say to her.

School would be his largest obstacle. Not because he never saw the girl (though that was true: she sat with her girlfriends on the bus, took advanced art classes, studied in the library, cheered for the basketball team, flirted with boys and preened with girls), but because speaking was integral to school life. He hated speaking, stammering, knotting his fingers, staring at his hands. In speech class, he had heard his voice on tape: he sounded ugly and ashamed. Speaking set up distance. His awkward, fumbling words imparted a shade of meaning: Listen, I am to anxious to speak openly. By his deprecations he obscured his message, as a child might stash a toy when an adult approached to inquire. His speech was effective only when he was silent, when his silence said, What I feel is too sacred to be spoken—maybe we could just touch. But that was not the sort of message anyone heard, because who was listening for that sort of thing?

Across the hills, a slow Montana sunset seeped red and orange across the southwest sky. Hands in his pockets, the boy turned for home, retracing his steps through the flattened grass. Sundown (both hands out, fingers pointed upward, palms facing; let the hands collapse together, emptying the space where once you held the day within your hands.

* * *

He had learned signing from an elder. He was thirteen when it started. A picnic by the river. His friends had run off to chase a porcupine through the brush and gather the quills for the girls. The old man shuffled up to him and gestured to a picnic bench. The boy assented to this; he did not feel singled out; he understood that it was his day to learn, and that on another day it would be a different child, a different lesson. He sat with the old man and listened.

The elder spoke English poorly, and the boy spoke Crow equally bad. At a loss for words, the elder retreated to the eloquence of his practiced, arthritic hands. He spoke not at all, just motioned this way and that, while around them people talked and drank soda-pop, and off a ways the children yelled as they threw a towel over a porcupine to snag its quills. The silence between the elder and the boy lent an immediacy to the boy’s grasp of the signs. Like this sign (hand at his side, fingers open, fluttering). He never learned what it meant. He only knew how to use it, to face his cousin (for she too had been taken aside one day and guided through the signs) and say There is something satisfying in seeing you, when I turn your way, or when you turn my way. He couldn’t say what it meant. He only knew it was good.

He borrowed the William Clark lexicon from the library in Billings, and he studied the old people at picnics and basketball games. He renounced small talk, the numbing, conformist banter that occupied the space between himself and his family, his friends, his teachers. He sensed, in the newfound silence, a vastness and calm, a truth worth keeping unbroken. And, though he would not have thought so at the time, he withdrew.

* * *

She was a year older, a cousin by marriage. She may have had a little white in her, because she was very small and had luminous blue eyes, traits for which she was endlessly teased. He and she were the youngest children in a family of aunties and uncles and cousins who, for sixteen years, had meddled and teased and precisely planned their marriage and the names of their children, and placed bets on the color of their children’s eyes. He felt smothered and determined. But he liked her, and he wondered how to let her know without seeming to have bent to his family’s wishes.

She waitressed, made good grades, led cheers at the basketball games, wove flattened porcupine quills into pretty designs, and extended to him her kindness, her patience, and bits of her limited time. Early one evening, she gave him an hour, and they played pool at the billiard hall in town.

It was before eight o’clock (when the manager would kick out the high-schoolers and start selling beer). Fifty cents per game. One dollar for a soda-pop. Business (busy-ness, frantic effort). He replaced that notion with a simple crossing of index fingers, exchange, goods passing from one person to the other.

She reminded him that they could only play for an hour, and they shot pool without speaking further. The clack of billiard balls gave him something to hold onto, and he might have ran the table if, on his final shot, he had not been distracted by seeing her in his sightline. Her hand rested on the edge of the felt; she wore a quilled bracelet, so loose that it had slipped halfway off her hand; when she raised her arm to drink from her soda-pop, the bracelet slid to her elbow. He wore a quilled belt-buckle that she had made for him last Christmas. Um, here, my auntie wants me to give this to you. Gift (right hand, palm open, extended from your chest). Receive (right hand, palm open and cupped, brought toward your chest). Her equivocal words aside, he could not remember feeling more grateful for anything.

Clack! He fired and missed.

Her quilled bracelet slipped back down her hand when she leaned over to shoot.

He walked her out to her pickup. She allowed him to put his arm around her. She signed, It’s nice to be with you because you’re quiet and I don’t have to say anything. In response, the most he dared to say, he told her he wanted to look into her eyes without looking away, and that this would be enough. Substantive talk, meaningful talk of gravity and depth (right hand in front of mouth, palm upward, cupped as though to water, then extended outward, an offering of words; cupped hand returned to mouth, taking in the other person’s words as though sipping water, sustenance).

Trust (fingers upward, palm outward, so that even the Great Spirit could see there was no blood on his hand). That was a good sign. She would know he was incapable of guile. He placed his palm against hers.

He had learned that there were no lies (two fingers flicked away from your mouth, talking with two tongues), that lying was inconceivable, that every construction on their hands must speak the truth. He felt the press of her palm against his.

Cousin, I have to go. But thank you (knuckles together, pulled taught, firming the bond).

* * *

His friends at school lost patience with him. They shrugged and shook their heads and walked away. He became a loner. Touched. Stay away from him. He endured taunts as he walked down the hall: a white student would raise his palm and say How! like one of those Hollywood Indians. The student would laugh and high-five his friends.

* * *

For as long as stories went back, the Indians of the Plains had communicated with signs. It was a language of preference, not disability. Precise, complete, and effective, the signs were common to all the tribes. Enemies who otherwise killed each other would lay down their knives to sign. It was the language of killers who had chosen not to kill for a day. When enemies charged each other, counted coup, when they lacerated each other’s bodies, stole each other’s children, torched each other’s grasslands, called each other dogs and snakes, he surmised they had been speaking aloud. When they traded tobacco, quills, ponies, when they gathered pipestone, when they reunited children with their families, he surmised that the negotiations had passed in signs. The signs made for trust; enemies could talk to each other for a few hours. Nowadays, on the reservation, people still used the signs when quiet was called for. The signs made him proud to be Crow.

* * *

One day at school, a group of white boys from town jumped him in the bathroom, took his lexicon, and dumped it in the toilet. To take (a kind of grabbing motion). He considered it not an act of intimidation—for it only strengthened his resolve—nor of racism—for his purpose would not be distracted by smallmindedness—but an act of censorship. In this aspect, though, the boys failed; doubled over on the tile floor, he flipped them off as they were leaving the bathroom.

* * *

He baffled his teachers. His grades fell. He relished discarding the useless jargon they wanted him to employ.

“We have some concerns about your progress.”

He let those words go, finding no equivalents for them. He couldn’t translate them if he wanted to, and he didn’t want to.

“Please,” they said, “you need to talk.”

Don’t ask me to do that. The symbols stumbled in his hands as if tangled in the strings of a marionette.

In the principal’s office, seated at the conference table, wedged among a council of adults (his teachers, his parents, a school psychologist, all fixed upright in their chairs) he was given a chance to explain himself. He began with the sign for trust.

“Oh for goodness sake!”

“Will you sit up, please?”

“We’re here for your benefit, you know.”

His appeal was dismissed. His reticence hardened, and his purpose and conviction clarified.

* * *

He consented to remedial study with the girl, after school, before she went to her cheerleading practice. Together they sat in the library and labored through his assignments, finding ways to modernize the signs, building, from an ancient lexicon of animals and plants and the passing of seasons, picturesque analogs for technology and science and math. They rendered abstractions as tangible as stones. Perpendicular: as a prairie falcon turns. Exemplary: a good arrow chosen from many. Commitment: palms touching, with trust.

Mostly, though, he delighted at how simply he could render meaning: yes. The motion was as delicate as the light decent of his index finger into a bowl of water. Plop! At the cafe, he had once seen two tourists communicating in the sign language of the deaf: how frantic and rushed they seemed. The effort merely to watch had exhausted him. What he and the girl elaborated was subtle, deliberate, and intuitive. As often as not, they completed each other’s thoughts. Soon, the slightest turn of his hand conveyed the finest notion, as a simple ribbon might secure an elegant gift. Good (right hand, open palm downward, extended from the chest). It meant You and I know this is level with our hearts. It implied, more than anything else, complicity, a bond he was keen to retain.

One frozen winter afternoon, he chose to walk home after studying. She had even kissed him lightly on the cheek before heading to practice! He was pleased with his silence. He wanted a sign for how far he had come. He was pondering how to put together the ideas of casting away and something new blossoming in its place; he saw an early lupine forcing itself from the cold earth, and he nodded at this. Blue flower in winter. It was an elegant solution. (His grasp of the elusive meaning was securely enunciated in the firm snatch of his hand, insight captured from the air like a stray aspen leaf on the wind).

* * *

In his bedroom, he kept things spare. To keep his focus. Aside from his bed and lamp and dresser, he kept books and photocopies from the library in Billings. Garrick Mallery’s 1880 monograph to the Bureau of American Ethnology (strange signs he had never seen on the reservation—he wondered whether Mallery’s informants were pulling his leg). The reprint of Captain Clark’s definitive 1884 lexicon (before it was stolen at school). Tomkins’s 1928 guide for Boy Scouts and camp counselors. He was ambivalent about using books by and for white men, but they were comprehensive, and he wished to be as thorough. Besides, the silent knowing that passed between himself and the girl wasn’t in any of the books. It was safe. Any Indian would understand that.

* * *

By the end of his junior year, his silence was consummate. He was tolerated by teachers and classmates and cousins. Indulged, ignored. His signs took on the gentleness and grace of tai chi. He studied with the girl in the library after school, played billiards with her on Saturdays, labored with her at her uncle’s farm, and he delighted in the effortlessness with which clear thought became expression, as if thought and expression were the same, gesture becoming its own intent. The boy and the girl had not spoken a word to each other in nine months, and maybe it was because of their silence that, one day, she signed to him that she was happy. He knew that he was.

He turned seventeen. He met her at the diner, and during a break in her shift she scooted beside him in the booth. She brought him chocolate cake. He touched her shoulder and expressed remorse at ever having tried to speak at all. Before, words had been like bricks, a wall between them. Now, with his hands, he was taking the wall down, gesture by gesture, each brick coming down. Across the wall he began to see her face, her striking blue eyes. He wondered why it had taken so long to come to this.

Her eyes followed his hands as he carved the shapes of his feelings, describing them in arcs before her face. He molded meaning with his hands, as a potter shapes a mound of clay into a bowl, which he gave to her, palm open, a gift.

The signs made for a critical honesty, and his feelings flourished unencumbered. Before, he had crammed his feelings into prefabricated words. The words had loomed over him like dialogue balloons in a comic strip, reducing the grace of his life to silliness. Not anymore. He left the meanings open: This could mean many things, and if we are truly friends we already know what it means: embrace. He gave the sign to her this way, bringing his hands to his chest, imagining how it would feel to hold her. Listen, I want to hold you, let me draw you near. She understood. The simplest gestures sufficed. They sat together in the café without speaking. The silence between them became the sign, and the less he spoke the more articulate he became. He called it gesture speech. It was the gesture speech in the sense of physical motion (which, with an added increment of effort, would be dancing), but also in the sense of giving away a part of himself. The language assumed a touching vulnerability. He signed to her I’m doing this for you. You know that. He watched her reply, her index finger poised, and the delicate drop.

Um, cousin, I want to show you something. She unfolded a letter. She had won a scholarship to the Indian art academy in Santa Fe. She would be gone for a year. She did not look at him. He did not eat his chocolate cake.

* * *

He worked for her uncle that summer, shifting horses among the different fields, trying not to think about the letter and the ending it implied. She turned eighteen. She took extra hours at the diner and saved the money for Santa Fe. Some evenings during August, when the first flocks of geese touched down in the brown grass, he lingered at her uncle’s farm and waited for her to return from work. They sat on the hood of her pickup and soaked up the warmth as the engine creaked and cooled. One night, she signed to him a bawdy story about two lovers. There was no sign for shame. There didn’t need to be.

He said nothing. Stay, don’t go, just sit with me here: punctuating the remark with his right hand in a fist, brought down with a forcefulness that startled him.

A trio of cousins gaggled up from the river. They carried a beach towel studded with porcupine quills. They plucked the quills from the towel, waved them towards the boy and the girl, and laughed. But quills hurt if you held them long, so they threw them in the grass. The boy hopped down from the pickup, retrieved the quills one by one, gripping them like straws.

“Baby Blues Eyes, we’re going into town. Come with us!”

“It’s after eight o’clock,” the girl said.

“Like they ever check for ID. Come on! You too, Little Cousin.”

The boy said nothing.

“Little Cousin, have you lost your voice? Why are you so depressed? Come with us!” They tugged his arm.

He waved his hand as though brushing away a wasp. No.

They whispered to the girl and pointed at the boy. They clambered into one of the uncle’s cars and drove towards town.

He was glad they were gone. He felt at peace in the silence that he and the girl shared as easily as bread. He stepped towards her and brushed her arm. Into her left hand he carefully placed the sheaf of porcupine quills. He closed her warm fingers around them.

She hopped off the hood and took the quills inside. When she came back out, she was wearing bluejeans and a white blouse. She was brushing her hair. At first he did not understand that she was going into town. The long strokes of the brush through her shiny hair caught his eye and distracted him from the sign that, if he had seen it, would have felt like betrayal.

Doubt, uncertainty (right hand to heart, two fingers open, wrist twisting back and forth). Cousin, I am of two hearts. She abandoned the signs and spoke. “I don’t know, it does sound kinda fun. They’re our cousins, after all. Besides, I’m leaving in a week. Come with us, Cousin! We can shoot pool.”

He saw what was happening, and he forgave her immediately. Signing was a language of openness and trust and generosity, yet he had used it to forge an exclusive, proprietary bond. He felt possessive and ashamed. He imagined her in Santa Fe. No one would know the signs there. Gallery owners and dealers, deft in the sly jargon of commerce, would jostle words to get a piece of her (a blue-eyed Indian girl!) There would be fine-printed contracts to sign. Adrift and alone, she would miss her family on the reservation, and she would try to call on the phone. Would he be too proud to speak to her?

Flailing for the right word, he tried to sign an apology, but she took his hands into hers and gripped them firmly. Hush. He allowed this, realizing that in his hands he could hold meaning no more than smoke. It was a language to be discarded because it could not properly express why it had failed, and it had failed because there was no sign for capturing her, because capturing her was impossible. He closed his eyes, and exactly in this blackness and pain saw how easy, how necessary, discarding the signs would be.

He knew that she understood when she, sensing the tension leave his hands, let go. He watched her drive into town.

* * *

Across the billiard hall he saw her white-bloused figure leaning over a table. She was lining up a shot. Her black hair spilled onto the green felt surface. She wore a bracelet of shiny porcupine quills dyed pink and yellow, and the bracelet slid down her hand. As he walked to the rack and selected a cue, he imagined her working at a bench, her fingers pressing flat the quills, twisting and knotting them into colorful patterns for bracelets, buckles, hair clasps, pendants, and a dozen other pieces of jewelry. He wondered if she considered these movements a kind of conversation. As she looked up from the pool table and met his eyes and smiled, he realized that he had never asked.

Review of "Sanibel's Journal" in The Healing Muse

2010-12-23T07:12:00.000-08:00

The Healing Muse

Volume 6 Number 1

Fall 2006

Annual

While storytellers have long known the power of story to heal, The Healing Muse gives this activity a new venue and readers a taste of what narrative medicine—a way of educating physicians, nurses, and other providers that uses storytelling and active listening to focus on the humanity of patient and caregiver—might mean. Through fiction, poetry, essays, and photographs these authors (medical students, physicians, poets, patients) and photographers “explore the connections between medicine and healing, science and art.” For example, poets wrote of “the dizzing fall into anethesia’s small death” (Heather Yando, “So Many Masks”), the torture of mammography (Barbara Lefcowitz, “I Think About Chagall”), and life amidst decay (Susan Cowger, “The Dead Shall Rise”). I was also moved by several of the prose pieces, including Jan Huber’s “Otsego,” about her physical and mental journey while her son struggled to regain his mental health; Thomas Gibbs’s recollection, “The Bruising,” about coping with a patient’s death; and Evan Williams’s strangely compelling short fiction “Sanibel’s Journey.” Though we might like to think that we live the life of the mind, our bodies have much to do with our health, both physical and mental, and this collection gives this unity its due. [The Healing Muse, Center for Bioethics and Humanities, SUNY Upstate Medical University, 725 Irving Ave., Suite 406, Syracuse, NY 13210. Single issue $10. www.thehealingmuse.org]
—Reviewed by Jeanne M. Lesinski

THE ARCHIPELAGO

2010-12-19T09:57:00.000-08:00

Originally published in Ecotone (2006, Volume 2, Number 1). Back issues sold out.

A thousand miles from the mainland, the islands of a nameless archipelago dot the blue tarpaulin sea. Barren, crumbling, clinging to the curve of the earth, the islands are the only defined points on a watery plain as vacant and forlorn as the sky. Cargo ships chugging across the sea leave wakes of foam, and the wakes crisscross like pick-up-sticks, but older, purposeless currents dissolve these lines. Across the sky, jet-trails repeat this behavior: the perfect lines, the breaking apart. Clouds of fish drift below, clouds of rain drift above. Sheens of oil slide through. A melting iceberg strays from the south. A fishing net tears loose from who knows where. Nothing holds fast, not even the islands of the archipelago. They are old and chalky, crumbling into the sea. Most have eroded to fewer than a hundred yards wide, and the lowest ones are submerged during storms. Someday, the islands of the archipelago will wash away.

The best navigational charts put the number of islands at about two hundred. The shorelines are sheer cliffs, jagged and white as bergs, crowded with puffins, cormorants, and gulls. Every island lies within sight of several more, and no island is separated from another by more than two hops. On a map, if you pinned down segments of string linking the islands, you would describe a network more entwined than the strands of a spider web. But understand this: if you tried to pull the string into a knot, the tangled connections would amount to nothing more than a simple loop. It would be as if the archipelago were not even there.

A long time ago, a people settled the archipelago. Where they originated, why they abandoned their old lives, and where they thought they were going, are unknown, but at some time they boarded rafts, drifted across the sea, and washed up on the islands. The people dwelled in caves they carved into the mealy cliffs. Here began a harsh, new way of life. Simply put, there was no way to leave.

Tourists, mariners, archeologists, and relic hunters have explored the caves and found simple gear for fishing: sinewy nets, fishtraps, crab cages. The caves have yielded ivory knitting needles and spinning bobbins, and even a crude sort of loom strung across four ribs of a bow whale. Evidently, the people gathered flax from a red flower that grows on the rocky humps of the islands, and from this flax they made a variety of strong, scarlet-colored ropes. Samples have been found of twine and string, woven cord, braided ropes, and several gauges of spun thread. The walls of the caves display faded, peeling frescoes, scenes of tan men casting fishing lines, women braiding each other’s hair, and children swinging from a rope over blue water turned milky from the dissolving cliffs. The frescoes also depict instructions for tying dozens of knots. Bowlines, hitches, bends, loops, and shanks: their knots are similar to our own. Indeed, it is a convenient assumption that the instructions describe a knot's assembly; the intent may have been to describe how to take a knot apart. How to become free. There is no way to be sure.

The layout of each cave is a marvel, a maze, as intricately hollowed out as an island can bear without caving in. Maybe, in the early days, the caves were simple, but to make space for the growing population, they became more complex, allowing more space for frescoes, more twists and turns to confuse intruders. Of course, a resident would have found the passages familiar and comforting: each cave simplifies to a loop. Keep your hand on the left wall as you walk, and trace the frescoes with your fingertips. Do not let go. You will trace the entire cave and return to your starting place relieved and assured.

A few expertly lashed rafts have been found, although there are no trees on the islands. You have to assume that the people kept the best rafts from their flotilla and salvaged boards from the rafts that were no longer serviceable. The frescoes do not show it, but you can imagine the people traveling locally on these rafts, island to island, sharing technology, food, and stories, stitching back and forth like guppies in an aquarium. The islands in the center of the archipelago would have seen the most traffic, and their frescoes, in fact, do depict people grown fat from puffin eggs, lounging in the sun at the mouth of their caves, lacing string designs between their fat fingers. The people on the peripheral islands may have lived in hunger and hopelessness and fought among themselves for puffin meat. The frescoes show nothing like that, but of course there would have been no dignity in recording those things.

Travel from one island to another must have been risky. The rafts were small and fragile. They lacked propulsion such as sails or oars, and they lacked rudders to control their drift. There was no telling which island the current would take you to, and no guarantee of return. Whether the current kept you within the archipelago or spat you onto the open sea was pure chance. If the current took you out of the archipelago, you were doomed. If, several days later, the current took you back in, you had a good story.

As much as anyone can determine from the evidence, the people of the archipelago lived meager, primitive lives. Their rafts were flimsy, their fishing gear simple. No weapons, no kitchen utensils (not even a cookfire), no religious artifacts, and no toys have been found. One fresco depicts a storyteller delighting a group of children with a loop of string laced around his fingers in the outline of a seabird—like cat’s cradle—but that is all. Only in the making of rope and the tying of knots did the people show any ingenuity. Indeed, you can infer from the frescoes that knots were their central, organizing device. A midwife ties a knot around an umbilical cord. Children learn a new knot, a new braid, and a new rope trick every year. A set of knots for boys, a set of knots for girls. A priest binds two wrists together during a wedding. A family tugs at a loaf of braided seaweed. A criminal dangles from a hangman’s noose. A crowd lashes rocks to a dead man and heaves his body from a cliff.

Samples of knotted rope have even been found that are too elaborate to have any practical use, and may suggest advanced mathematical reasoning. The ropes were left in a garbage pile—fish bones, shells, frayed nets, as though the makers did not consider the knots to be worth anything. And it is true: such sophisticated ropework had no application to these people’s simple lives. It begs the question, still unanswered: what did the people who left those knots value? What did they not throw away?

Of all the relics that people have found, perhaps the most remarkable are the talking-ropes. With scores of knots at their disposal, these people had the makings of an alphabet, the knots functioning like letters of print. Such ropes have been found in some of the caves. The longer ropes may record sagas, the shorter ones proverbs, lists, or data. A rope, dragged across your palm, reads like Braille. Snapped like a lariat, it releases a prayer. A few relic hunters, before they knew what they had, untied some of the ropes, abrogating their stories. Of course, no one can break the code, for may not be alphabetic, but contextual, nuanced. A bowline could stand for strength, a figure-eight knot for a matrix, a square knot for healing. Put those three in order, and so on. That’s not enough for a story, but maybe an experienced teller could have woven a tale from it. It befalls you only to imagine what these people might have said as they wandered their caves, clambered to the brushy slopes above, cast fishing lines into the sea, and combed, braided, knitted, wove, spun, tied.

On one island, where the cave had collapsed, an archeologist unearthed an especially long talking-rope. From the type of knots, he determined that it had been tied by a teenage boy, and from a periodicity in the patterns, he surmised that it might have been a diary. A lot of speculation has grown around what this boy might have recorded. Maybe one day, the boy practiced a rope trick to impress a girl; another day, he went fishing; or he worried about the tall waves lapping at the entrance to his family’s cave; he was hungry and his parents boarded a raft to beg food from another island, but never returned. The final twenty or so knots are looser than the others. Towards the end, they are slack. The last several feet are blank, with no knots at all.

Anyone is free to speculate about these things.

The islands being so steep and bare, the people’s fascination with knots is unsurprising. Knots held things in place, kept supplies from blowing away, kept children from falling over a cliff. Maybe that is what knots symbolized: security, purchase, a hold on reality. On the other hand, maybe the people felt tied to this place unwillingly, bound to this barren, crumbling archipelago, despairing of ever getting away. Maybe the knots were a tether, a leash, a curse.

What happened to these people? How did the culture end? Was there a collapse of the fishery? A storm? A war? A diaspora doomed to fail? There are a thousand theories, but the key, usually ignored, may be a single knot. The frescoes on several of the walls depict a ball of rope, writhing, hopelessly tangled, with a hundred little elbow joints bending this way and that in the mesh. Loose strands protrude in all directions, and at the end of each strand a small brown hand reaches. The knot’s meaning is unclear. It also appears in fishing tackle, in the braids of children’s hair, at the tips of lariats, and in fanciful string designs you could lace through your fingers. It could symbolize unity, community, trust, strength, sustenance, pleasure, the circle of life. In this people’s language of knots, maybe they spelled the name of God right there in their hands. Why, then, this: with a little coaxing, kneading, and prying, the sacred knot undoes itself. Easy. Let it slip from your fingers, and you are left with an empty loop, the unpronounceable truth.

Here is what some researchers believe. Once per year, a good climber tied a long rope to his waist and spidered across the cliffs. Playing out the rope, the people measured the dwindling circumference of their crumbling island homes. A knot in the rope marked the annual erosion. Every year, as the rope shortened, people saw what was happening, and they decided to leave before the islands completely dissolved. They undid everything they had done there. They weren’t tied to this place at all. They crowded onto the last of their rafts, lashed their few possessions fast, and floated away. Maybe a few rafts made it to the edges of the archipelago, caught the ocean current, and broke free. Who knows where those people ended up? The rest of the rafts drifted from island to island, powerless to escape the narrow straits, the confining waters, the net of islands. A raft would squeeze between two islands toward a promising gap of blue sea, but another chalky bluff would loom in its path. Again and again, the currents guided the rafts teasingly to the edge of the archipelago, then back to the familiar, agonizing center. The routes of the rafts intertwined in a knot, increasingly and desperately tangled. Eventually the people depleted their supplies and accepted whatever island the waves marooned their raft upon. They would never leave.

The tangled, sacred knot took its final, perfect, bewildering form.

The story overlooks one basic point: the knot is easy to untie. A child can undo it. Just so, there must have been an easy way off the islands, but these people never figured it out. It has something to do with this image from the frescoes: radiating from the knot are strands of loose rope, wriggling like the rays of the sun in a child’s drawing. At the tip of each squirming strand, a little hand gropes from the knot. A hundred little hands. If you have ever tried to untie a difficult knot, you know that pulling from so many directions only tightens the knot into a firm, dense, unworkable stone. You should press the strands inward: working the knot loose this way, kneading the hardness like dough, it opens. You expose the heart of the knot, the core, the shiny red flax that gleams.

THE RIFT

2010-12-01T07:58:00.000-08:00

Originally published in You Are Here, the Journal of Creative Geography, 2006.

My name is Charlotte. I am fourteen years old. I live in the Rift. My hobbies are collecting rocks and gems, playing with my dog, and writing letters. I would like penpals my own age, please.

My name is Clayton. I was fourteen, and I lived in the Rift too. I was sitting at the kitchen table, eating a snack before starting my chores, when I found this item on the kids’ page of a farm magazine, wedged between an article on irrigation pumps and recipes for leek soup and apple pie. I already had a dozen penpals, but I was pleased to make room for one more. Not because I dreamed of life beyond the Rift. No, a good letter contained a life within its margins: I liked to drag my finger along the tightly cobbled words and feel a voice come to life at the top of the sheet, blacken the sheet with its hopes and longings, and end itself at the bottom. Maybe the girl, Charlotte, felt the same.

Across a narrow gully from my family’s orchard lived Tomoko. She was also fourteen. She lived in a house too delicate for this country—paper walls, cedar roof, slender beams jutting over a cliff. The house clung to the rock like a bird’s nest. That afternoon, as I worked the terraced slopes of our orchard, refitting stones that had loosened and slipped, Tomoko dragged her music stand to her deck and practiced her flute. I stopped to listen. The melody seemed to wander, untethered to a home note, like a leaf on a swirl of wind, unsure where to set itself down. I stole a long look at Tomoko—white sweater, plaid skirt, straight black pony tail. We could have chatted across the gully in normal voices, but when she glanced up from her music stand, I looked down at the rock in my hands. It had squirmed loose from the terrace. I would have to jam it back.

The sounds in the Rift flowed around me: water gurgled in the earth, stones clattered down the slopes, and arpeggios from Tomoko’s flute floated across the gully. I had given up locating any restful place in her song, and I let her music, like a ribbony flock of bats, stream into the graying sky. At this moment, a pear fell from a branch, rolled in a circle, and stayed on its ledge. I thought about the penpal, Charlotte, and I decided to write her.

The sun dropped behind the black cliffs, and the long twilight began. My chores were over, and I walked down the terraces toward home. It was hard to see the way, but I counted my steps and turns from memory. I thought about the penpal, Charlotte. I did not care whether she was pretty or plain. I wondered about her voice, the sound of her words on paper. Aware of a silence welling around me, I looked across the gully to where Tomoko had stood on her deck. She had gone inside. Her silhouette slid along the papery wall of a lighted room. Skirt, sweater, ponytail. She was putting her flute in its case. The light went out.

* * *

The Rift was a hundred miles long and a mile deep, a great crack in the plateau in the eastern part of the state. Many of the families in the Rift were Japanese; the Rift had swallowed the hopes of prospectors and ranchers and sugarbeet farmers and anyone else who had tried to plant a dream on the crumbling slopes, but when our immigrant grandparents tried this place, they found the conditions perfect for growing a delectable variety of pear. There was a trickle of water, a skin of fertile soil, and a breeze that felt like breath.

My family’s orchard was a thousand terraces, cobbled from a million grumbling stones. The terraces held back soil, water, pear trees, and an urge to settle, slouch, and fail. It was care never-ending. Canyon walls would shift, and you listened for the terraces to react. In the middle of the orchard, our house leaned on wooden posts that twisted and strained under their load. We ate suppers in silence. A dribble of pebbles we knew to ignore, likewise the gasps and hisses of sand, but a loud pop was an alarm, and we would flee the house and get to work. Bulging stones, we hammered back. Broken stones, we pried loose and gave to the drop, the shattering clack, the silence.

As a child, I never played marbles.

My sky was a strip of blue, a slit of milky stars.

I spoke few words, good words with long gaps between them. Words were hard to fit together; brittle stones gave me less trouble.

Like any child who grew up in the Rift, I kept a roster of penpals, and I wrote in a slim vocabulary that was colors and sounds and textures and smells. No word for joy. I kept my letters in a cedar box, the habit of one born on steep slopes in windy canyons, who needed the things he loved to stay where they were. Growing up among rocks that ached and popped and cried to wrestle free and fall, I believed that the box where I stored my letters was the one solid thing in my life, and I believed that writing to this girl from the Rift, I would be sounding the walls of my world, not for a way out but for an echo home.

* * *

That night, I sat at the kitchen table and wrote to Charlotte. I filled the sheet edge to edge with words. Thrashing water, caught in a slough, dragged to a terrace, fed to a tree: did she know those sounds? Lichen, yellow flowers, morning sky, evening sky: did those colors seep into her thoughts? My word for hard was rock, and soft was skin. What were hers? Did she sleep snug between grumbling canyon walls, or did she sleep afraid? Was she bothered by the stray odors of pinyon and sage that spilled from the plateau into the canyon and muddied the air like radio static?

Charlotte, you may want penpals from Florida and California, but same as you I live in the Rift. I know the sound of a stone flung against the opposite wall, ricocheted, rattling to the bottom. When the stone hits the dry creekbed it is a rain of shards.

* * *

A winter passed. I did not hear from Charlotte. I forgot about her. One Saturday, late in spring, Tomoko and I climbed to the bottom of the canyon. It was a safe time to go; rocks that had sprung loose during the freeze had already done their tumble and shatter. At the bottom, we found a swirl of stale air we had been inhaling and exhaling all our lives. We set up a picnic blanket among the remains of rocks, some that I recognized from the orchard, some dashed to smithereens. Lichens and pale flowers perched where the sun could reach them, but except for a slice of direct sun at midday, we sat in the shade of canyon walls. Tomoko spent the afternoon gathering a fist of green pebbles, which she trickled into a pile, scooped up, and trickled into a pile again. The pebbles plinked together with a bell-like sound. I saw no purpose to it.

“Let’s go home, Tomoko.”

Earth twisted into night before we were halfway home. In the darkness, our feet slipped on shards as noisy and brittle as glass.

“I want to tell you something,” she said. “At night, I can’t sleep. I can’t think.”

“What is there to think about? Just listen, and think about what you hear.”

“I think about running away. My sister ran away. When I get older, I am going to find her.”

Most of this story I already knew. Tomoko described her sister’s fearfulness, how she used to hide in her blankets in the morning, then trudge into their orchard weeping and covering her ears to block out the canyon noise. She would test every footstep to make sure it was safe. At night, she read slim books, dreamed in slender fits of sleep, and when she began listening to her dreams, that was the end: one morning she was gone. A gate was found open at the top of the canyon road. I did not understand, but I believed Tomoko did not either. In the silences given to us to hear the clatter of stones, there was no suggestion that we listen to anything else.

“I am going to find her.”

“You don’t know where to look.”

“Not down here.”

As we neared the top of the canyon, we did not speak. The wind was its own talk: fruity scent of Tomoko’s shampoo, earthy scent of lichen, odor of iron water that seeped from cracks in the cliffs, wispy perfume from yellow flowers that threaded the cracks to get the water. During a gust of wind that spoke of a rockfall spilling in a faraway canyon, I heard a nearer sound. Sniffling. Tomoko was crying. Wisps of her hair clung to the wet tracks on her face. I took her hand.

“This is hard for me.” She pulled her hand back.

“Don’t say anything. Just listen.”

“That is the hard part.”

As Tomoko spoke, I clung to the silences between words that, to me, felt empty as sky. In the canyons, I had learned to listen well—to dodge rockfalls, to fix a broken terrace—but also to hear lulling home notes in a breeze that threaded the canyons and left them ringing. Apparently, Tomoko did not feel this way, and when I took her hand again, she gripped back, smiled at me, then walked down the homeward path, mushy gravel underfoot, her voice humming her restless song.

“Tomoko!”

“What?”

“Count your steps. You’ll get lost. You’ll fall.”

“Silly boy.”

As I lay in bed, I considered: she had gripped my hand, but she had also pulled her hand away. I thought of her warm skin, her long hair, and her breasts outlined beneath her sweater. Then I thought about her music, the green pebbles she had stacked purposelessly, the silence she said was hard, and I knew these mattered too, but I didn’t know how. Sleep clouded my thinking, but I knew, as I lay within the murmuring walls of my bedroom, that as Tomoko and I grew closer, I was becoming more alone.

* * *

A rumpled letter arrived in the mailbox.

I read the letter walking switchbacks home. It came with a photo of a Japanese girl and her dog. The text was dense, the margins narrow. The handwriting was pressed into the page so deeply I could have read it blind.

Thank you for writing to me, Clayton. My name is Charlotte. If you live in the Rift, I am nothing new to you, a voice you already hear. Like you, I know the difference between copper and iron on my tongue. In the flesh of a pear I can taste how far into the strata the roots have dug for water. I can split open a geode as cleanly as a coconut and chip out the sparkling flesh inside. Clapping my hands, I can mimic the sound a rock makes, pinched loose during a freeze and tumbling from the notch where it will never fit again.

There was only so much to say about the narrow sky, the echoing rockfall, and the strata whose sequence in the rock was solid and unchanging; by the time I reached home, Charlotte’s words had begun to repeat themselves. But that did not matter. I knew those words. Absorbed in the letter, I walked past my house and had to scramble back.

I should not confess this. I chip at the terraced walls of our orchard. I pick at them with a mallet, and I polish the promising stones that I find. My lapidary machine grinds through the night, and by morning the rocks that had seemed muted gleam and glimmer brightly. There is a liquid texture to a finished stone. It glistens like water, and when I set it on my palm and roll it around I imagine it pouring away. I can mail you some rocks that I polished. Maybe you already have them. Maybe you know their era and formation, but maybe reciting these facts calms you. If not, toss them over the edge. The point is that I’m reaching to you.

A wind throbbed down the Rift. From the thousand terraces, the twisting canyons, the crush of detail I itemized in my sleep (because tomorrow it would shift and urge itself at me again), I wondered how to sift her voice, a gem from a fist of gravel. The edges of the Rift were fractured with brittle clefts, and the clefts glowed with kerosene lamps—farmers working late, shoring burst terraces. Charlotte was fifty miles away. I could not see that far, but gripping her letter, I did not have to.

Words were hard for me, but blank paper was worse, and in the questions that I forced into ink and sent to Charlotte, I came close to spelling out a longing. Had we met? Did we share a common friend?

She said no. On your orchard, water weeps from the walls. A single flower, lodged in a crack, is enough to pry a rock from the cliff and send it hurtling down. You find, tracing the rock with your fingers, veins of gold, slick and thin and sharp as wire...

I replied. Your house is cobbled from porphyry; you sleep cocooned in purple stone, and you breathe air old and familiar and tasting of juniper...

You live deep in the canyon, where days are short, and you burn coal in smudge pots to thaw the trees. The smoke hovers, too heavy to float away...

Your canyon is a maze. You lose yourself there, for hours exploring the terraces; by nightfall the darkness is inky in your hands but you are still going, until the terrace thins to a ledge over steep nothing. No matter. Knowing where the world ends, you don’t have to stay awake at night worrying...

You hear the loud ache of the canyon walls. It is your world closing in on itself, a surrender, a yearning of rock for the bottom.

Charlotte, our letters echo other. I forget who sounded the first note.

I read the letters in bed at night, again and again, and after I had memorized every note, I folded the letters and stored them safely in the soundless cedar box.

I was sixteen. My dad was paying me to move water among the terraces, flooding the highest levels first, spilling water to the next, the smooth blanket of murmuring water slithering down until, at the deepest levels of our orchard, only a drizzle survived to wet the soil.

Some afternoons, while your neighbor’s flute song uncoils like smoke, you follow a meandering path among the terraces and seek stones tired of their role. They do not jam back, and you let them go. The stones and soil spill to the next terrace down, and you try to stop the creeping damage there. If you succeed, what flows to the bottom of the canyon is a trickle of pebbles in a dry river bed.

After my work, I would visit Tomoko in the orchard, but as I listened to her stories, my head was turned away.

“She was a disgrace to my mom and dad. They burned her dresses, but some of her things they set before me. A flute. A calligraphy set. A telescope for stars. Have you ever seen what lies in the night sky, Clayton?”

Her voice was a whisper. I was listening for something else. A rockfall. A gust of wind.

Her father goes away on trips, and he brings home thundereggs and amethyst, little crystal palaces which she puts on a narrow cedar shelf against a milky paper screen.

Tomoko gathered another pile of pebbles, and as she spread them with her palm, she spoke of stars hidden beyond canyon walls. She gave them names in Japanese—the few she knew. She promised millions more. “Late at night they twist into view. We can go see them, Clayton. We can take your dad’s truck, bring the telescope, climb out of the Rift, and see...”

Your friend wants you to leave the Rift. She says, “Why is this so bad? To see the sea of stars, and in the morning feel the sunlight on the plateau?” Of course, you and I know what will be lost: the good hum in the earth, the layers of warm rock that shelter us. Clayton, as you gaze at stars, notice the blank spaces you lack words for, the stars too numerous to name.

“You have your driver’s license, yes?”

I am sad for her. The path of your friend’s words and the path of a rock are the same. She will never leave the Rift. As a rock tumbles down, her moment of awareness will not be a sweet sound but a hard fall.

“My parents want me to stay. I am the only daughter they have left...” Tomoko began to cry. Between tears, she listed her obligations. Study hard. Honor her mother and father. Marry a good boy. One by one she threw her pebbles over the edge.

She doesn’t know herself. Her words for colors are the names of rocks. Her hands, like ours, reach for walls to hold. Canyon smells are locked in her nose. She talks too much, too long, yet the soft plunk of a pear, dropped from a tree, still makes her flinch. I believe her longings are all wrong: a flute can play a wrong note.

“I play the flute because I am sad.”

Your friend needs to accept the words the wind supplies in her ear. She needs to taste canyon in her mouth after she drinks. She needs to sample the echo of her voice and be content with what the cliffs give back to her. The details that barrage her to distraction are the very things that make her alive.

“You’re not listening to me!”

Nobody in the Rift feels joy.

“Clayton!”

It is time for us to meet.

Tomoko pulled her hands away.

I told Tomoko that I wanted to be alone.

“No one wants to be alone,” she said and crunched down her gravel path. Before she disappeared I heard not her song, but sobs, and between them, numbers. She was counting her steps.

* * *

Charlotte, my dad is loaning me the truck. Do your parents need me to do some work for them?

My mother packed coppery rocks and foil-wrapped pears as gifts, and I left early in the morning. Charlotte’s orchard was fifty miles as the crow flies, but the road through the Rift was all twisting canyons, knife ridges, and switchbacks. Day fell into shadowless twilight before I reached the end: a house of jumbled purple stone, clinging to a slope more crumbly than ours. I shook hands with Charlotte’s parents. They were older than I expected. Her mother spoke only Japanese. Her father walked with a cane. Brown spots on their hands.

“Charlotte doesn’t talk much, but you’re all she talks about when she does. She’s down in the orchard. This way.”

We counted our steps, up and down terraces that slumped with the weight of watery soil and trees that sagged with unpicked fruit.

Charlotte’s dog was pacing back and forth, yelping and whining. A mallet lay on the ground, and beside the mallet, a stone that had slipped from the wall. On top of the stone, a half-eaten pear was turning brown.

Peering over the slender ledge, I could just pick out, tumbled deep into the canyon, a small broken body, arms outstretched, its fall arrested by a slough that carried water to an orchard far away.

I had borrowed the truck to stay one night, but I stayed for seven days. Long enough to help Charlotte’s father build a cedar box, dangle it from a rope into the canyon, load her curled body inside, and drag the box—banged and scratched and splintered—a hundred terraces to their home. Charlotte. At night, as I lay on her bed that smelled like lavender, I gripped the little box where she had kept my letters, and I remembered lifting her body, curled in a ball, as though she were sleeping. Eyes closed, lips just touching. Lulled to sleep. What had she seen and heard and tasted in her final moments, and had those things comforted her? I wanted those things to comfort me.

My last letter to Charlotte: When I imagine your voice all I hear is murmuring water, gushing wind, and exclamations of shattering stone...

* * *

I was at the kitchen table, sorting through Charlotte’s letters, trying to understand, when I heard the meandering notes of Tomoko’s flute. I set down the letters, went outside, and listened. The oldest notes of Tomoko’s melody still echoed around the canyon, refusing to give up, and to these she added new layers of melody, until the air swirled with restless music. Through the darkness, I picked my way up and down the terraces, across the gulch to Tomoko’s home, counting steps in a route I had memorized long ago.

Tomoko stood on her deck. She saw me and let a breathy note expire.

“I wasn’t sure you’d come.”

“Your song never settles. I don’t understand.”

“My song is melancholy. I am setting the feeling free. Listen.”

* * *

I turned seventeen. For long parts of the day, I could put Charlotte out of my mind, settling into the rhythms of work on the terraces, stifling the groans of rock, plugging trickles of water scheming to burst free.

There came a weekend when Tomoko’s parents went on a trip to town. Tomoko and I lay on their bed, listened to the squeaky paper house around us, and studied each other’s eyes across the distance.

“That day when you were fixing terraces, that day when I went out on the deck and played my flute...”

“Yes.”

“I only did it to watch you. I got dressed up. I wanted you to notice me. I was sad when you looked away.”

“I noticed you.”

“I thought you didn’t like me.”

I kissed her.

“Clayton, I want to show you something.”

Tomoko led me to an opaque paper panel and slid it open to reveal an atrium bedded with green rocks as smooth and rounded as eggs. From this bed grew a vine maple that meandered towards a slit of blue sky. The rocks were from a riverbed, and they lay in a jumble as though spilled and tumbled by the current.

“The rocks,” I said. “There is no order to them.”

“That’s not true. I carefully placed them.”

“It doesn’t look like it.”

“Well, I placed them to look that way. Now you are the one who needs to listen.”

* * *

One evening, I worked later than I had meant to. I found myself in an unfamiliar canyon, its contours rumpled with odd terraces, some wide enough to support a grove of pear trees, a level space in my thinking, others no wider than a few cabbages would need, a footprint on the way somewhere else. All my life, I had learned to get around by memorizing my path, the order of steps and turns, winding among pear trees, up and down terraces, words and numbers mumbled under my breath. On this day, the sequence frayed in my thoughts. The lay of the terraces seemed to shift. I hurried on. The wind was strange to me, and the sage and pollen that spilled into the Rift displaced the mix of smells I was used to. I tried to put the static out of my mind and focus on the lay of the terraces, on finding my way home at the end of the day.

I was startled by a falcon tearing through the sky after a flock of rockdoves. Flapping, snapping wings. A dozen echoes. I lost count of my steps and tried to turn back, but the terraces had become a maze. I grew dizzy and sat on the wet soil far from the edge, gripped a fruit tree, and felt the canyon sway.

The rule, if you were lost, was to climb down. The land would simplify to broken rock and stunted trees. You would be calmed by the warmth of the earth around you. Hungry for this comfort, I let go of the fruit tree, shuffled to the edge, and began the long descent into the heart of the Rift.

The sky drained of light, the canyon walls narrowed. The crisp echoes of my footsteps assured me that I was nearing the bottom. I was ready to stow the evening’s panic in a place where it would not bother me again, when I rolled my foot on a fallen pear and slipped from a slender edge.

My body smacked the next terrace with a mushy thud. Wet gravel stuck to my face. I tasted blood.

You taste the canyon in your mouth.

I thought of Charlotte falling, leaving the warmth of stone, falling for so long, then meeting the hardness again. Her body had been curled into sleep, but she would never awaken, and the question of whether she had been comforted in those last moments did not matter anymore. The Rift, which had seemed so warm and safe and sheltering against the empty sky, was just a press of smothering detail: fluttering birds, clattering rock, drip of water, hiss of wind, grit in my mouth. I added my voice to the noise. “I want out.”

Surrounded by the groans of walls ready to burst, I climbed. I closed my eyes, listened only to my breath, smelled only my sweat, touched rocks only to spring to the next. By early morning, the walls in the upper canyon abandoned me, and I stood on the plateau. The sky widened to stars I had not cataloged before. The wind across the plateau was a blanket of odors thickly woven, and I could not separate the strands. It was new information, undifferentiated background noise. It did not have to fit, and I saw for the first time that neither did I.

I lay beneath the roof of sky—stars I let spin namelessly. I wanted to hear Tomoko’s flute song that never settled and longed to float away. I imagined that I could see, far below me, her paper house flicker and glow. Her silky silhouette against a paper wall. And though I knew that Tomoko’s heart held a deep and hollow sadness, I imagined this space could equally fill with joy.

I stumbled home by late morning and slept through the day. I dreamed that bits of canyon crumbled and left gaps of widening blue.

* * *

Tomoko and I live on an older street in town, among narrow brick buildings, beneath cracks of sky slashed with trolley lines and fire escapes. Each morning, we lie in bed and soak up the sun on our faces, sweat and oil gleaming on our skin. I turn to the wall and see the world that will tower around us for the day.

The air outside is a swirl of cigarette smoke and leaves and bits of trash. Odors that, as children, we had ignored as background noise surround us now, and out of habit we list them on our fingers with the same attention we used to note the smells in the canyon, but instead of twisted juniper and slippery rock it is steam from the puddled pavement, odors of greasy cooking.

We are still careful where we set things. When Tomoko lays her flute on the music stand, her hand hovers until she’s sure the flute won’t roll away. Hands skimming brick, windows, mirrors, our bodies, the thick air.

At night, the rumble of trucks, the roar of planes, and the wail of sirens leave us embracing. We could go back to the Rift whenever we want to, but we stay in each other’s arms because we choose to, and that is the point.

My parents write and tell me the Rift is closing up. The rocks that tumble down are boulder-sized. I imagine Tomoko and me walking the edge of a cliff once jagged, now rounded and softened. I listen for echoes long faded, hear only a silence that I equate with Charlotte’s voice, and I understand that all those years of rumble and clatter and hiss just masked that silence. I will never go back.

We will find Tomoko’s sister one day. She must live in the old part of town, where air stagnates in canyon-like alleys. She sits on her fire escape and chats in Japanese with neighbors across the alley. Tomoko and I live in the same neighborhood. You can only untether yourself so far.

Sometimes I read Charlotte’s letters. They are brittle and brown, and they flake and tear when I unfold them. First, I carefully pile the items that slide out on their own: swatches of fabric, dried lavender, poems, photos, drawings of her little dog. A lock of shiny black hair. Then I breathe the scent of paper and trace the tilt of her letters and the smudges of her fingerprints. I follow her description of a canyon wren, whose fluttery cascades of song come close to confirming a kind of joy but also restless sorrow. Then I fold the letters up. I will never throw them away. They belong in their stack, in order, in their little cedar box, with me. I slip them under the bed. Although Charlotte gave herself to the Rift, I am exactly where I belong.

WINDSOCK

2010-11-04T06:52:00.001-07:00

This story originally appeared in Northwest Review, 1993 (volume 31, number 3). Out of print and defunct. It was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

The remarkable thing about my family’s house was that it stood at all. My grandfather, a fisherman, was twenty-eight and unadvised when he sank the stout, freshly tarred posts into the quiet water along the leeward shore of the bay and assembled, haphazardly, our charming house upon them. Four months later, on an afternoon when the breeze flattened the bay like a hand smoothing a linen sheet, my grandfather hurried to the widow’s roost to fasten a weathervane atop his work: a confusion of stairways and landings, hallways and rooms—one found more order in a labyrinth. Each room opened to a balcony, laced in gothic trim my grandfather had spooled on a lathe. A fire-escape elbowed this way and that. Atop the house, a widow’s roost overlooked the shimmering bay. My grandfather must have astonished himself.

He must have become dejected when he set his screwdriver upon the flat, redwood deck of the widow’s roost only to watch it roll off the deck and plop into the bay. Kersplash. His beautiful house had already begun to slouch, and with each passing year it leaned more tantalizingly toward the water.

There is a story about when my grandfather presented the house to his skeptical bride. While touring its innards they became separated, then lost, then ill-disposed when reunited in the kitchen. This did not surprise me. The routes from room to room were roundabout, zigzagging, up and down flights of stairs. When I was only six years old, my grandfather beckoned me to his bedside, cupped his hand to my ear, and whispered about a secret door that lead to a mezzanine, roomy and furnished with a stove, beside which lay a dowry chest of silver coins. Years later, my grandparents long deceased, I discovered lost passages, and I fancied others awaited me, but the mezzanine eluded my explorations.

The house reminded me of a wedding cake, frilly, towering, and precarious. But the analogy bore no scrutiny: my grandparents’ marriage had been unenviable and staid. My grandfather became a widower and died of cancer, painfully and drawn out, in a room on the bottom floor near the back of the house (perhaps the house leaned over the bay in an effort to distance itself from that event); as I recall, the door to that room would eventually be blocked by a chest of drawers. In subsequent generations, the men of this family—my brothers, my father, his brothers, their sons—became fisherman and named their boats for women, but they remained devoted to the sea. Their boats departed early and came home late. My parents slept in separate beds in separate rooms on separate floors. A narrow widow’s roost capped the roof, the weathervane festooned with a colorful windsock, sewn by me, which I changed regularly as one waters a potted flower to keep it alive.

By the time I was a girl of ten it was clear to me that the rest of my family resented my grandfather for our ill-built house. A meal at our table did not pass without a round of grumbling about the latest beam to sag, the latest door to spring its jamb. It did not help that the dining room was buried in the deepest part of the house, a kind of grotto, the floorboards rough and splintery, the table stout and thick. The men hunched over their plates and chewed their fish and chips. I sat in a wicker chair at a corner of the table, scooted back from the edge to where the lamp cast only the faintest glow. We would listen to the shifting of the house above. The cocoa in my white mug rippled from it. The lamp swayed.

It is his fault, they would say, my grandfather’s doings: the confounding layout of rooms, the stairs too narrow for anyone’s feet but mine, the spindly trim to scrape and paint each summer, the posts and beams to tar, the creak of the timbers during a storm, the pop and groan of the timbers on a blistering day, and the tremors whenever the house decided to settle nearer the water. The rest of my family dwelled in that house not blessedly, but sadly cursed.

I dwelled there blessedly.

As a child I slept in a blue bed in the corner of my mother’s angular but cozy bedroom on the third floor. One night, I listened to a magical story about a bird, read to me from a book of myths. I forget who among the men of this house extended to me the kindness of reading this story; whomever he was, he returned to the darkened rooms below, resumed his broodings on the sea, and made no more visits to the sunlit rooms upstairs. Of the story, I offer a summary: a pretty woman named Alcyone was walking along the storm-torn shore when she came upon the body of her lover, a fisherman, cast there by the waves. Distraught, she hurled herself into the sea. She was turned into a grey-blue bird, a kingfisher. The bird flew away, calmed the sea with a stroke of its wing, and weaved its little nest upon the quieted water. The kingfisher was believed to bode tranquility.

After the story, I brushed my hair, kissed the back of my hand, and fell asleep full of the tale. There was a kingfisher who liked to perch on our dock and fluff its down. Grey-blue, alert, pretty, it would utter a rattling cry, plop into the water as abruptly as a stone, and burst out again. It’s feathers were made of wax, that’s what the story said. It had never occurred to me to dream of a bird, but so it was, and in the morning I dressed and clambered downstairs to the bay-window overlooking the dock. The kingfisher was at the dock again, preened and fluffed in the rain. As I admired the bird, I concluded that tranquility meant spending my days alone in the house upon the bay. That I was familiar with the pattern pleased me. The house, the dock, were nearly deserted. I heard the shuddering motors of the fishing boats fading across the bay, and my mother washing dishes in the scullery downstairs. She had left an egg and a slice of toast for me, gone cold. I shivered beside the window, but the sun from the window felt warm on my face, and I closed my eyes awhile.

There I was, curled into the window nook, wrapped in a blanket, and nibbling at my egg and toast, content. As Alcyone awaited her lover’s boat’s return, she, like me, must have been alone. It baffled me that Alcyone flung herself into the sea. It seemed to me—and I speak as one who passed her childhood quietly and alone in a creaky white house alongside the murmur of the water, who hemmed sails as well as dresses, and who learned more knots than she hoped to avail herself of—well, I keenly recognized the waiting that Alcyone endured, but not her grief. I pictured her bathing in a chalk-white house upon a barren seashore, preening herself as carefully as a bird, selecting a different perfume each day, a dress for the morning, a different dress for afternoon, and strolling along the shore alone. Alone. She would never have it so perfect again.

There was the brilliance of our white house peeling in the sun, and there were shadows I could scarcely discern: my relations peopled my childhood anonymously. It was not their practice to meet my gaze, and in vain I try to recall a glint in anyone’s eyes. My brothers hid their faces behind their beards, behind the tidal charts, columns of tiny number raised to their eyes. I remember an uncle’s scowl as he pondered a broken bilge pump in his oily hands. To this day I knot my hands in fists when I recall their muffled arguments drifting like smoke from the deepest rooms of the house. It was a cold, steely, cloudless evening when, from the window of my mother’s room, I spied my father standing on a balcony at the far end of the house, his eyes intent upon the uninterrupted skyline. He was drumming his fingers on the rail. Well, I wrapped in a sweater, climbed to the widow’s roost, stood on tiptoes and gazed out: I never saw what this man saw. I dismissed his contemplation of the sea as a stance, an affectation, a failure at the kind of introspection that so charmed me.

In vain I sought my mother’s eyes as well. I passed more days with her, yet her shadow was the slightest of all. She awakened and went below before I even stirred, and she tucked herself in bed long after I had shut my eyes. I can see myself as a child, dutifully staring at the patterns on the wallpaper while my mother washed my face and spoke disparagingly of my slight appetite. She said I was a pale ghost of a child. Later in the day we’d sit together in a sunlit nook, a length of line on our hands, my eyes focused on the knots fumbling on my fingers. So distant did she seem, I might not have recognized my mother in a crowded room, nor did I feel any obligation to. This did not sadden me.

The men’s fishing boats were always off-limits to me, as were their toil and their weariness. I did not realize it at the time, but on those sunny afternoons in my tenth year, when my mother had cut my pliant hair to a ribboned bob, and I had climbed out to the widow’s roost, dangled my legs over the edge of the roof, and idly practiced my knots upon the rail, to the men piloting their boats toward home I must have seemed self-absorbed. Yet they did not hold this against me. In fact, I was not given a care. As often as not, my mother had me shushed and stowed in the upper part of the house when the men nosed their boats against the mooring piles. I was bored. I taught myself to sew and enjoyed it more than anything. Bent to a task, my wings of hair around my face. I asked for my little blue bed to be moved to a nook at the far end of the third floor hall. With only a single, tiny window beyond my reach, the nook may have been a closet at one time. I saw granting this move not as an act of my mother’s generosity, but simply a lack of anyone’s interest but my own. In like manner my grandmother’s sewing machine became mine.

I would sit beneath my rainstreaked window, laying out a pattern for a signal flag or a windsock—the boats were out, the men begrudging the squall—and my thoughts would lodge in a recurring dream. In this dream I was older, standing on the widow’s roost in a stiff wind during a bright day. I was wearing a gauzy white dress, and it was as though I were floating. The bay was calm. I was squinting into the sun, tying a windsock to the weathervane, when the house emitted a pop, shifted beneath me, and sent a ripple down the length of the dock. The kingfisher, keeping vigil at the end of the dock, sounded its rattling alarm and flew away. Suddenly the house was floating with me. It was collapsing, first the pilings beneath the water, then the first floor, then the next, each floor absorbing the shock in a gentle crumpling of wood and clinking of glass until, with a gentle kersplash, the third floor met the bay, the windows caved in from the press of the water, and the momentum of my beautiful house crashing down escorted me gracefully to the surface of the bay.

I dwelled in introspection, the house my interior terrain, its collapse a sign of something untenable in my thoughts. Untenable. This did not matter, and I was not afraid. Sitting at my sewing machine, I rehearsed the dream each day—embellishing it with blue china plates slipping from the cabinets, a flurry of sleepy bats scattering from beneath the eaves, a gush of wind lifting my hair—and then returned to sewing for awhile.

It occurred to no one but me to adorn this crumbling house with a windsock. The perils of the sea distracted the men from the suggestion that their lives might be more graceful. They had boats to tend, and nets to repair; there was the rain, the fog, the tide. The men awoke in darkness, departed sleepily and dour, and arrived home late and weary, solemn, shaken. In my twelfth year came a storm that smashed window panes and nudged the house off-kilter by another two degrees. Come nightfall, one of our boats did not return. My mother dressed me in black—I even sewed a black, silken windsock for the weathervane—but in the morning the surviving boats went out to fish, and no one spoke a word of remorse. I smoothed and tucked the windsock and my dress away. It was then, sliding shut the dresser drawer, that I sensed my own not-mattering. I sensed, as well, the attrition emptying our beautiful house. I wandered the airy rooms for an entire afternoon. At one point I paused on a staircase and gripped the banister. I felt uprooted, floating in a silence as spacious as the sky.

Perhaps inspired by my recurring dream—I must have been thirteen at the time and caught up in imaging myself a certain way—I decided that I would sew a white dress. In the evening I wound down the narrow, squeaky stairs to the kitchen (my mother, heating coffee, did not look up), then down the clunky stairs to the dining room below. A page of dress patterns, torn from a mail-order catalog, fluttered in my hand.

This bottom floor was level with the dock and smelled of burning rope and brine. The walls had never been finished. The beams bowed with the weight of the house above. I stepped around the piles of rope and fire-fighting tools. The shiny black stove was glowing orange, and the men were discussing the sinking house; lately the water had been heard lapping at the floor during high tide. I approached circle of men around the stove, tugged my father’s sleeve, and held out the page. Hastily and without comment he gave me some coins from his pocket. I scampered upstairs and counted the money: it was enough to purchase a pattern and a length of white cotton organdy.

The finished dress came out well and flattering; I knew what I was doing. But I was not surprised when my hard work elicited no praise or admiration. This lack of attention did not bother me, for I extended as little in return. Boats and nets and fish and knots did not interest me. If I vamped about the house in my dress, it was for the reflections in the rippled windowpanes. An unbridgeable rift divided my family and myself. The house may as well have split in two and drifted apart. Thanks to our house’s interior complexity, I was able to dwell apart from my family, untouched by their dreariness. I conducted myself as though entirely alone. I am sure they forgot about me as well.

So it went. I turned fifteen years old, indulged in solitude, and pleased. My mother was baffled by me. She sat me in the bay window and reviewed the knots expected of me; I invented ways to work them into my hair. Beside my sewing machine she lefts patterns for signal flags I was to sew; I made windsocks for the widow’s roost instead. She excused me from the scullery, the men excused me from mending their nets and lines. My dismissal came without rancor, for who resents the loss of one who’s useless anyway? It made me a ghost, and it felt amazing. A sense of mattering slipped from my life as a dress, loosed from my shoulders, would slip, gather at my ankles, and I needed merely to lift my feet to step out of it entirely, ending another day.

The house continued to loosen its hold beneath me. For days I lay on my bed and listened. The boards, which were fitted as uniquely as sticks in a nest, sprung loose as easily; lengths of lacey trim peeled off and splashed into the bay. The men were gone, plying their boats through a soupy fog, on the day when a smoldering coil of rope caught fire below; I sealed off the lower floors to suffocate the flames, opened the upstairs windows to ventilate the smoke, only to be drenched by a fog as thick as rain. For the next four days, the house did not so much burn as steam and hiss, then like a cooked and softened yam settled nearer to the bay.

It became the men’s intention—the usual grumbling during supper had turned strategic and urgent—to slide a raft of logs beneath the house, dislodge the house from its pilings, and float it upon the raft. They wanted to tow it to the windward shore of the bay, more barren than our own, await the highest tide, and beach the house—maroon it there.

I gave some thought to this. The windward shore was a plain of rounded pebbles, red and orange, with slight, foamy waves that slapped the pebbles about on the tide. I pictured myself on the widow’s walk in my white dress, feeling the swell of the tide that lifted our house, then set it back upon the pebbly shore. Piece by piece I assembled the uncertain image—the smooth red stones that I would cup in my hand, the orange ones I would arrange upon my window sill—but my imaginings were interrupted by the blast of a horn. It was one of the boats, nudging up to the dock, towing logs from which to build the raft. The men stood on the dock. One of them studied a diagram. They were smiling; I had never seen that before.

I have said my relations were shadows; it was never more so than the night I was lifted from my bed and led from my room. The house was suffused with a blue and watery light. A hand stroked my hair, and another led me down a flight of stairs so familiar that I could have walked them blind except that the uncertain nature of this trip, plus the grogginess of sleep, caused me to doubt myself. I had been taken off-guard, and I gripped my guide’s hand; it was my critical error and the last thing I remember. I awoke in a small blue room, without windows, in a cement house without any creak or sway. I was wearing one of my mother’s nightgowns. I heard birds I had never heard before. I heard a car whiz by. A telephone rang.

Shall I close by saying I lived out my life in a black dress in a town at the edge of this limpid bay? That my relations died, one by one, never having lived? That the sale of their boats fetched a large sum? No. My thoughts forever lingered in my grandfather’s white house, or what remained of it, exiled at the windward side of the bay beyond the rim of the horizon. Whatever passed since that singular defeat at the end of my childhood was illusory, and to speak of the subsequent years would invest them with meaning, which I refuse to do.

About that defeat: the morning after I was taken from the house, on the rise of the tide, my relations dislodged the house from its pilings, lashed it to their strongest boat, and tugged it across the open water. At the slightest jostle, the house would shed a length of clapboard siding, a shingle from the roof, a spool from the rail. The windows were the next to go, the tension upon the house forcing joints askew, popping panes of glass like muffins from a tin. The men in their urgency increased the throttle; the rain of whitewashed boards and glass increased as well. By the time the men reached the windward shore, the house had scattered itself across the bay. They beached the house upon the next high tide. All that remained of the house was a shell of twisted posts and beams, splayed under the weight of the rafters, themselves drooping over the water like the wings of a haggard bird.

It was more than I could bear. One evening, when the tide withdrew from the bay and the hiss of the cars thinned from the road beside my blue room, I stole to the dock, unhitched a dory, and rowed along the leeward shore. As I tugged the oars I scanned the shore for any debris that might have snagged in driftwood or lodged in the sand. I salvaged such pieces, waterlogged, drifting the eddies of the stagnant bay, when I found them. A shingle from beneath the eaves, a spool from a railing. I most wanted to find the weathervane. A drizzle of rain splattered the water as I leaned over the wale of my dory and spied a door panel, white still, wet and swollen. I remembered this door. It was to a linen cabinet on the second floor. I had stored the fabric for my windsocks there. I had touched it, opened it a thousand times, and reached inside.

steam

2010-09-24T07:52:00.000-07:00

originally printed in alimentum, summer 2007 (number 4).
To order a copy, click on the link.

gyoza
         “mother, megan’s not eating.”
         “she’ll eat, katie.”
         “can i have her sticker?”
         “she’ll eat it. besides, she’s the birthday girl.”
         megan grips her chopsticks in her fist and gazes at her plate. she feels the stares of her family. her shoulders slump. while everyone else kneeling at the table has taken up their chopsticks and dug in, megan has not even unwrapped the skinny chopsticks from their tight red paper cuff. megan wants to eat her sticker. she slides the cuff from the chopsticks without tearing so she can put it back if something happens to change her mind.
         megan wants that sweet ginger taste on her tongue. get that boy’s taste out of her mouth.
         the sticker, a flap of dough folded around a wad of cabbage and pork, lies on a plate smaller than the airy circle you could make between your fingers. just one sticker, and bits of light green celery and pale jicama, doused with a sweet clear broth on a porcelain plate small enough for a doll. megan finds this funny because, in fact, she has brought a doll to the restaurant. the doll is tucked against her ribs, safe and warm. the plate even comes with a matching doll-sized bowl, which holds a puddle of soy sauce so thin megan can make out the bowl’s pretty pink design through the liquid. the rest of the black lacquer tray is empty. all that space, all that quiet.
         it’s not really called a sticker; that’s a family name for it. megan called them stickers when she was three and their chef had cooked them for the new year feast. fourteen years later, the name has stuck. gyoza. the word rolls around thick and uncomfortable in her mouth. sticker.
         she sets down the chopsticks, and they rattle on the smooth tabletop.
         “see, mother, megan’s not eating.”
         “katie, no.”
         “is she going back to the hospital?”
         megan watches everyone in her family look away. megan’s father lays his fat hand on katie’s arm, and katie leans against him and frowns. the puffy sleeve of her dress is crushed against her father’s shoulder.
         megan’s brother stephen makes small talk. “the restaurant sure is nice.” megan likes to sit next to him because when he lifts his chopsticks to eat his sticker, his blue shirt crinkles. stephen is slender, with smooth skin and pressed clothes and a good smell like a girl. she wants to give her sticker to him, fatten him up a little.
         “when is she going to open her presents?” katie asks. four small boxes are stacked like children’s blocks beside megan’s plate. pink wrapping paper. blue wrapping paper. red tissue paper. something shiny like foil.
         megan feels as if this fuss should be for someone else. who is this megan girl? she looks around. all the diners are kneeling solemnly at their low square tables, and in place of talking they lift cups of steaming tea to their mouths. the room has paper walls that glow with alabaster light, and above each table a round lantern hovers like a moon, the paper stretched tight on a metal frame. on the far wall, there is a door you have to stoop through to get out. no alabaster glow from this wall.
         a pretty waitress floats from table to table. she is tall and skinny and wears a red silk kimono with a wide black sash wrapped tightly around her waist, and wooden sandals that wobble back and forth, forcing her to take narrow steps. megan can see it is hard for her to bend down to the tables, but she is graceful as she does this, slowly and smoothly collapsing her legs beneath her. the waitress comes to their table, kneels, and takes their lacquer trays away. she sees megan’s untouched plate, then she looks megan in the eyes too long. her kimono brushes megan’s arm. she is that close, and she smells like chanel. she is so pretty. megan wants a kimono with a red sash that goes around the middle tight, with that boxy part in back.
         it is important to want something.
         “can i have megan’s ice cream if she doesn’t eat it?”
         “she’ll eat it. just wait. dessert doesn’t come for a long time.”
         megan wanted that sticker, but she is glad it is gone because she doesn’t have to think about it anymore. ice cream does sound divine.

jasmine tea
         steam. sweet smell of flowers. megan inhales the cloud from her cup. her lips rest on the warm china rim, and she inhales again. she wishes kissing a boy felt like this. she wishes tasting that boy was like tasting steam. the tea is too hot to drink, but that cup of tea has become her one warm thing.
         in her short little dress, her legs are goose-pimpled. she spreads her red napkin over her bare cold legs. she brings her tea cup to her face.
         “she doesn’t dress like this at school, does she?”
         “no mother, sometimes she wears the plaid jumper.”
         “god, not the jumper!”
         “what’s wrong with the jumper? i wear the jumper too.”
         “you’re nine years old, katie.”
         “ten, mother.”
         megan has brought her doll to the restaurant, and she holds it against her ribs with her elbow. she got the idea from tashiko, a cousin in japan with whom she chats online. they send each other text messages on their cellphone screens. tiny boxy pictures. tashiko says that in japan it is stylish for a teenager to have a doll, and bobbed hair, and a little white cardigan, blue dress, ankle sox and mary janes. but this is santa barbara. people stare. men twice her age stare. the girls at the school stare. megan does not mind because they are not staring at the real her.
         across the table, megan’s mother lifts her cup of jasmine tea, her beautiful hand, clear nail finish, strong diamond, ruby bracelet. red mouth. “megan and katie,” her mother’s voice floats light and thin, and megan knows it will be a speech. “we are happy to have you back from school safe and sound. stephen, back from kyoto, welcome. we have many accomplishments to celebrate: stephen, junior partner; katie, the recital; megan, the s.a.t. scores.” her mother sets down her cup and claps, but there is no sound from her perfect beautiful hands. she lifts her steaming cup again. “i have my own announcement: it’s been five years, and my doctor says i’m free and clear.”
         “now that is worth celebrating!” megan’s father claps loudly, fat gusts of air crushed between his palms. people at the other tables pause their busy chopsticks and turn to watch.
         “oh, and i have a show at the gallery. it’s getting a write-up in the times.” her mother sets down her cup and lifts her napkin to daub her clinique lips. she is the most beautiful woman megan has ever seen. megan is afraid of being caught gazing at her mother, and she looks away. her father is still clapping. his suit looks tight in a scary, heart-attack way. he slurps his tea. nearer to megan, stephen’s fine blue shirt crinkles. katie is wearing a red velvet dress, her shiny black hair in a french braid with a large golden bow. she looks like a christmas present. she is staring at their mother over the top of her teacup. she is guzzling her tea, and megan is certain that soon katie will have to pee. megan is probably the only one who notices this. she takes katie to pee every night.
         the teak table is smooth as nail polish, with edges rounded soft. megan’s hand grips the warm teacup, but the table has kept some of the warmth where the cup was sitting. small wet ring. the ring begins to separate into drops. megan breathes her tea. her lips on the cup would leave a wet pink mark if she drank some.
         flowers.

boy
         the boy calls her pretty! megan and katie have been boarding with his family in san francisco for three years, and just like that, on the day they’re flying back to santa barbara for megan’s birthday, he plunks down on megan’s bed so forcefully that her plastic suitcase bounces and slides off the edge. megan is lying against her pillow and reading the last chapter in the sheltering sky, cramming, marking words she desperately wants to remember, and this boy reaches his hand, lifts her bobbed hair from her cheek, and calls her pretty. he smells like oranges, and megan likes that. he blows on her cheek. he is that close. megan sets down her book.
         “why don’t you ever eat?”
         “i eat.”
         “maybe it’s because our cook sucks!” the boy says the last three words loud enough for anyone in the house to hear.
         “she doesn’t suck. don’t say mean things like that.” megan pulls up her legs, flattens her little skirt over her thighs, and wraps her arms around her shins. she rests her head on her knees, turns her face, and studies the boy. her hair slides across her face.
         “you always dress like a little girl.” the boy looks her down and up.
         “i’m not a little girl.” megan tucks back her smooth black hair. she likes the boy’s pretty face.
         he takes her hand. she squeezes back.

teriyaki
         the meat is coming. the pretty waitress brings a wide tray, her arms spread like wings. to clear a space for the tray, megan scoots against her brother. this makes her feel small. she touches his crinkly shirt, and now she collapses into his sleeve, and his arm feels more muscular than she remembered it to be, and he is not a boy anymore, he is a man and has probably been a man for ten years.
         the table has a grill in the middle. the waitress sets down strips of beef, raw, clean bright red meat, and strips of green squash and yellow squash. kneeling perfectly in her tight kimono and wobbly sandals, the waitress grills these items for megan’s family and passes them around on slippery orange lacquer plates.
         megan knows these foods. they are the foods she eats when her grandparents visit. last year, tashiko came too. tashiko in america! tashiko in golden sunny california, and she stays with megan and katie in san francisco at their host family’s house. there’s this one night, tashiko and megan get dressed for an evening out, putting on blue eye-shadow and smoking clove cigarettes by the open window, and tashiko says she wants american foods: cheeseburger, pizza, food court at a mall. megan thinks tashiko would prefer a traditional japanese place, but tashiko says that is a fairy tale. she says “i want a hamburger and american milkshake and supersize fries. extra ketchup.” tashiko stands before the mirror and cups her tummy under her cardigan and blouse. she shows megan how to stand knock-kneed and slouch her back and make her little-girl tummy bulge. megan barely eats anything that week and loses another three ounces.
         now megan’s father is watching the pretty waitress toss bits of squash and meat over the flame. he is slurping his tea and glancing back for the bartender to bring a martini, fuck the menu. he doesn’t fit this table. mere children should sit here. megan’s mother fits here. she is wearing a velvet dress identical to katie’s. they are a set from nordstrom. today megan’s father picked up katie and megan at the airport, drove katie home, and while katie and her mother shopped for those dresses, he took megan for a drive in the hills. it was raining, and the car went fast in the hissing rain. this is what they do when she comes home. long drives in the porsche. her father waves his hand at real estate as if he could make homes appear, and happy people to live in them. he plays jazz and discusses the lineups on famous be-bop tunes. megan can spot charlie parker and bud powell in just a few notes, and a few notes is good, because man those guys play a ton of notes. her father does the talking, leaves her room for small words. he has sent her books to read, paul bowles, gertrude stein, john cheever, and he always tells her what they mean. he uses big words and makes her repeat them, words that earn stellar scores on her s.a.t. exam. finally, at the top of laurel canyon, they turn the car around, and as he lectures about colleges, she watches the rain skim past her window and she is hungry because the airplane meal was disgusting, and there was that boy, and she can’t get his taste out of her mouth. she takes her daddy’s right hand. he drives too fast. she sees a flash of blue at the upper edge of her vision, and she looks up. it is her reflection in the visor mirror. girl in a blue rain slicker, wisp of bobbed hair in her mouth. she watches herself for several minutes, long enough to hear embraceable you, charlie parker, circa 1948, max roach on drums. the mirror makes her seem small and stuck behind glass.
         the strips of meat are tender and soft, bright red like a pretty girl’s lips. megan picks up a strip with her chopsticks, and it dangles before her face, dripping juice on her plate and casting a shadow on the table. her hands are as lovely as her mother’s. she won’t eat it. she wants to take a bite, but everyone is watching! everyone watches everything she does. the pretty waitress is watching too, but megan can see a telling curve in the waitress’s bony shoulders: the waitress is tired, and she does not watch for long. she frowns and turns away.

rice cake
         grains of rice stick to the tips of her chopsticks. megan picks at the perfect dome of rice in the bowl, and it comes apart in sticky steamy clumps. she pours soy sauce on the rice, and it disappears inside the clump. go on, knock it into clumps. balance the grains on the tips of your chopsticks. you’re faking it. toy with it long enough, it will seem you have been eating.
         “megan, i filled out some applications for you. the scripps application is done, and middlebury and amherst are still to do. the essays were a bit weak, you left so much out, i took some liberties... i want you to have a look at them. remember the galapagos? you didn’t say anything about that. or london or prague.”
         what were her s.a.t. scores again? she does not remember. the proctor makes her put away her doll. she sees the proctor glaring at her. she hides behind the wings of her bobbed hair, chews on her pencil. she has not eaten anything, feels just a raw emptiness, one thing, just one thing. the next question. the next neat bubbled anwer. the next.
         megan keeps two diaries, one for her mom to sneak into, words megan doesn’t digest—thank you gertrude stein—and another diary in her mind, whose few words she can sort as slowly as grains of rice. if she uses too many syllables, she consumes fewer the next day.
         “mother, they want to use me again.” her sister’s voice brings her back. her sister models for a high-end children’s clothing store in san francisco. they want to use her again. that’s nice.
         megan crumbles the rice, sorts the clumps on her plate, makes the rice seem eaten. no one objects, but only because they too are pretending. megan knows they don’t believe her, no one is fooling anyone, but this is how they talk to each other. when you have broken each other’s hearts, you talk this way.

strange fruit
         “what the hell is this?”
         “stephen!”
         leaning over her plate, megan feels the aroma at once, not so much a swirl of steam as a cloud of perfume that makes her cheeks flush. the bright pink fruit on her plate seems to be breathing, and when she presses the tender mushy skin, it springs back. it is colder than she expects. slender in the middle, like a waist, widening towards a spine, rounded shoulders gleaming in the moon-lamp light.
         “how do you eat it?” megan asks no one.
         “well, you sure can’t use a chopstick.” megan’s brother stabs it, his chopstick like a spear.
         megan feels stephen’s muscles tense in his arm and along his side. suddenly she doesn’t like leaning against him. when she was little she told everyone he was her boyfriend.
         “what the hell do we do?” her dad says. “get the waitress.”
         the waitress comes wobbling back. she is too skinny, megan sees it now. her pelvis opens around her hips, her skinny hips, and you can see an edge of bone. she stops next to megan and kneels, and all those lovely shapes fold together and her spine stretches out, curving just like that beautiful fruit on their plates, and she shows them how to pick out the juicy seeds inside, pink and red like rubies. the fruit deflates with each probe, giving off a sweet smell with every sigh.
         “oh, my god, this is heaven,” megan’s mother says. her chopsticks tremble a little.
         megan could eat this, could pull out seeds and burst them on her tongue, suck out the juice, set the pulp in a little china bowl. she could do this, except she remembers (with a pain that makes her cry) the boy all soft and tender in her mouth; she remembers looking up at his belly rising and falling, and then he is hard and he comes, mushy little pearls. she does not know what to do with the pearls on her tongue, she has never done this before, and she swallows them, feels her tongue sticky and salty. now the strange fruit’s smooth silky smell wraps around her face. she wishes she had a silk veil to hide inside and cry exact tears, little jewels all her own.
         when the plate goes away messy and stained, the collapsed fruit is still gasping in a puddle of juice, and there is something disgraceful about it. megan looks down, and she fingers the lace of her dress, but from the edge of her eye she is really watching the fruit being taken away. the waitress stares at her, knowing, sad, and maybe even angry. all this from a proper nesei girl who knows better than to meet eyes but does so anyway, who even touches megan’s shoulder and megan’s smooth black hair as if to say you poor girl, you missed happiness, you won’t get another chance.
         what does she know! megan wads the hem of her dress in a fist.

ice cream
         her green-tea ice cream comes with a candle and a sprig of mint bent too close to the flame. everyone sings. megan’s little sister claps and helps megan blow out the candle. megan forgets to wish for anything. when she was fifteen and in the hospital, megan wished for her sister. the doctor had megan sitting in this hospital bed, awake every night for three months, staring at gray hills too far way and wondering where katie could be and who would take care of her while megan was gone. she wished she were back in san francisco, where her sister used to sneak down the hall of the house too large-and-stone for happiness, and slip into megan’s bed. they would lie beneath that ceiling too high and hold on, keep each other from floating away. they would not speak in such moments—the gap of years and pain too great. megan would hold katie and kiss her the gentle way megan wants to be kissed. the college brochures are stuffed under her bed. the room is decorated with pictures she made for her photography class: flat, carefully processed four by fives, but the teacher complains they are bland. there’s photographs of her room, her bed, her soft sweaters folded in their drawers. when katie is soundly asleep, megan sneaks down to the servant’s door and smokes. she is not the only one—there are cigarette butts from the boy—but she never sees him, never sees his secret body in the dark. she looks up. blue morning light reflects off the trees. she looks at her hands and realizes it reflects off her skin as well. her breath is shallow and quick. she sneaks upstairs and dreams small dreams. in the morning, katie practices her violin while megan chats with tashiko online. sustenance of small words.
         megan’s ice cream melts to a pool of pale green. the mint leaf sinks into the green goo. katie watches with a frown. stephen shrugs. megan’s mother looks like she wants to shake megan hard, the way she did one day a year ago, leaving marks on megan’s arms. looks like she wants to weep. her father is drunk and doesn’t notice. stephen wisely looks away.

swallow
         the boy lies on megan’s bed and moans with pleasure. megan runs into the bathroom, her mary janes clicking on the tile floor. she finds a way to swallow without tasting a single thing, just that sticky salty after-feeling she tries to rinse away. she trudges back all knock-kneed and the boy takes her by the wrist and pulls her close. she does not want to touch him anymore, his crotch jutting out, his pants undone. she wishes he were soft and hairless like a girl. her legs feel cold in her short blue dress and ankle socks. she curls against the boy because he is the only warm thing.

gifts
         megan pulls at the bows, tears the crispy papers, lifts the lids off stiff and scented boxes. she feels everyone watching her, and she is glad for the task, an excuse to look down from their eyes. gift number one: another novel from her dad. annie proulx? how do you even pronounce that? he’ll tell her soon enough. next, a snowglobe from stephen, with a little white house and a plastic pine tree in front. you can’t touch it. if you try, your fingers bump against the glass. a picture frame from katie (one of her book shots in there). a sketchpad: her mother always gives her a sketchpad, and megan likes to draw on them, but this is a little tablet because she dreams those little dreams. in the hospital she draws a cottage with flowers in pots along the sidewalk and a little girl in the window. she adds details, shades of light and dark, tiny marks with her pen. dense blue penstrokes, pressing deep enough to feel, to cover the things she doesn’t like.
         “i never know what you want, honey.”
         the hospital has a garden for walking. there is a pool with cold water trickling from a creek, thin and slick on white stone. the pool is a deep cold blue, the sweetest blue she has ever seen. the nearest megan has ever come to wanting anything is wanting that blue. she texts tashiko, and tashiko texts back that you can have it easy. the right kind of makeup, clothes. just close your eyes, open them again and pretend it is all true. tashiko mails her the doll.
         all her life megan has been told to want something. she gets a large amount of money to spend each birthday, and last year she gives it to p.e.t.a., all of it, and enrages her parents. this year, she wants to visit japan and see the sights around the big city. she wants to go to clubs with tashiko and smoke together and order those rice bowls and deep fried tiny things you just hold in front of your face and breathe in all that steam.

breakfast?
         her father and katie and stephen are heading for the little door. her mother reaches across the table and takes her hand.
         “just take a bite.”
         her perfect lipstick still.
         megan wants to be a good girl and eat that rice. her perfect thinking is knotting up. the food smells delicious, the lightness of ginger and jasmine and sesame oil in her nose. maybe just one bite of rice. this bite of rice, not that. she takes a bite. she hides it under her tongue, swallows her spit. her mother cups her hand around megan’s bobbed hair.
         tomorrow is their special breakfast. she and her mother will go to a cafe where the air smells like cinnamon and coffee and sausage and egg. megan will order tea and a fruit bowl, and she’ll pick at the grapes and balls of melon. The fruit is top-notch, organic, local, heirloom, beautiful as art. her mother will take megan’s hand. “tell me your secrets. tell me.” the girl with blue eyeshadow will blink. she’ll watch her mother chewing toast with too much jam. chewing is the one time her mother is not pretty. fact is, megan has no secrets. she has nothing. she’ll pull her hand away. their knees will touch under the table, and as they almost hold hands beside cups of tea that cool, megan will cry. or her mom will cry. someone cries. a napkin with lipstick on it. a napkin moist with tears.

can i box that up for you
         megan carries her gifts and her doll against her belly. she trudges toward the low door. the rice under her tongue is softening and swelling. suddenly, she feels a hand on her arm. her brother pulls her behind an alabaster moonlit shade.
         “how did you do it?”
         “what?”
         “there is no way you gained five pounds since christmas.”
         “i did too.”
         “no you didn’t. how did you fake it? i know you better than anyone.”
         “no you don’t. you got out. you went far away.” she is mumbling through the rice, and a thread of saliva oozes from her mouth. keep your lips closed and stay pretty.
         “you don’t even want to get out.” stephen takes the snowglobe and shakes it in front of megan’s face, close enough that she can smell his salty hands. the snow is swirling around the perfect little house. “this is you.”
         “no it’s not.”
         he is waving it around.
         “leave me alone.” the rice in megan’s mouth is pure mush and spit. she needs to spit it out. she grabs the snowglobe and runs through the nearest door, but it is the wrong door. it is the kitchen.
         steam.
         two sensei chefs talk loudly in words megan never learned. the skinny waitress is assembling another wide tray of meat and squash. she looks at megan with almost a smile, and megan, standing little-girl knock-kneed with her arms full of presents, understands tell that the waitress is not surprised.
         “you want something.”
         “i don’t want anything.” a drop of saliva slides down her chin.
         “yes you do.” the waitress puts her fingers on megan’s face and strokes her skin. she presses megan’s jaw. megan begins to chew. the waitress nods, and megan moves the rice to the back of her mouth. the hands on her face are warm. she swallows. she is crying. she tastes salty tears. like a baby bird, she opens her mouth for another bite, and the waitress gives her one. she sticks her bony fingers in megan’s mouth. megan sucks the rice grains off them. the waitress feeds her five morsels of rice.
         the waitress takes megan’s snowglobe, unscrews the base, and dumps out the water and the artificial snow. she packs the dome with rice, tight, dense, hard and heavy. she hands the snowglobe back to megan’s overloaded arms, tucks it into her cardigan. When she kisses megan on the lips, it is the way megan wants to be kissed, tender and sweet as jelly.
         tonight, megan will lie in the stiff bed in her bedroom. she is only here a few nights per year. tucked into those sheets that smell like her mother’s detergent, she will open the snowglobe and sort the bits of rice. she will study each one until she can tell them apart. the sticky ones on the end of her fingers will clump together. she likes to touch them. her hands are clean. a few grains she lays aside and spells out letters of a poem. something short she can text to tashiko. a sexy way to kneel in front of a boy. a new icky flavor in her mouth. how to taste as little as possible. how to taste nothing at all.

LEAF ON THE WATER

2010-09-19T09:16:00.001-07:00

Originally published in The Fourth River (#2)

My brother was ten years older than me, and my memory is that he was strong as a bear. After wrestling the river all day, he would walk up the sandy beach, drop his shovels, and catch me leaping from the balcony into his wet arms. He smelled like gold, as everything did around here, the clouds of mist that lay on the water like tired old dogs, the yellow smoke from the maples we burned for heat, the sparkling dust I was always combing from my hair. Even after the accident, when I could no longer leap to meet my brother, and the house became a box with no way out, my brother would climb the stairs to the kitchen, wrap his arms around me, lift my weight from my wheelchair, and rock me, and still he smelled like gold. During the wildfires that blackened the mountain forever, my brother scooped me from my bed, carried me out of the house and into the smoke, and he stood in river up to his waist while I dangled from his arms. Our dad made it out of the house, our mother did not. I remember tipping back my head and gazing at my brother’s face, his eyes absorbed in river's twists and turns that wanted to pull us away. My hair trailed in the sparkling current. My brother was the strongest boy I knew, and I admired this above all else, and I curled into his chest, his muscles like thick currents of dark water. That’s what I want to say: riding in his arms was like floating on a smooth fast river that wanted to carry me away. So you see, despite my useless legs, I trusted that my life would never be hard, and that my brother would take me away from this place someday. He gave me a secret name, Leaf, and he was Water.

At night, he dressed me in my nightgown, lay me on my bed, and told me stories. He told me about the ocean, about blue burning skies and white sands and kindly waves that lifted you up and set you down again; he told me these things because I begged for them. We didn't know whether the stories were true—like the sullen river beside our house, neither of us had been to the ocean—but like the river, I wanted the ocean more than anything. After the stories, I would kiss his cheek, and he said my kisses were sweet and soft as those slices of peach our mom used to can. If this tenderness and devotion were hard for my brother, he did not say, but I know he spoke with his eyes locked on the river beyond my window. He still carried the blame for that warm day on the water: he was supposed to be watching me, and then I was caught in the current and carried over the falls. But he knew I had forgiven him. He was right, too: every night, with my head against his heart and my legs arranged neatly and stiffly like a doll’s, I forgave my brother again and again. Kisses on his cheek. Peaches.

My brother told me bedtime stories, and in the pauses when we should have heard the whispering river we heard our dad on the river bank, hammering the rusty machines that sorted gold from slag. He was a shadow limping among muscular iron, dragging a come-along and a chain over his bent shoulder. I am sure we both heard the man weeping. Was it the pain in his back? Was it the pain of being away from the river, away from the current shuddering against his thighs as he probed the brown water for the only thing he loved? He would labor on the bank all night to be ready for day, the cold light on the river again.

The river tumbled from the mountain, thick and brown, and through the twists and batterings of the canyon, it gave up its gold. Anyone who made his living from the river called it a gift. What was left on the river’s bottom was a gift in the same way an elk shed its antlers once a year and nudged them into the brush, sharp points in the leaves. I used to wheel onto the porch and watch my dad and my brother wading past their hips in the thick cold brown. Far above them, draped in clouds, the mountain slumped from the rain; it was crumbling and washing away, and gold diggers were hastening it down. It was the slow bringing down of an elephant with tiny spears. At night, my dad and my brother laid down their tired shovels in the same pile, but that was where their likeness ended. My dad stayed outside with the rusted machinery, assembling his failures around him, while my brother found enough strength to lift me and carry me floating through the house like a heron, my skinny legs dangling behind.

By the time I was fourteen, I was able to stand on my own and lean my hip against the table as I cut deer meat and bread for the day’s lunches. I could see my reflection in the steel cabinet doors. My long hair. My mom’s diamond face. And because I had always known trust, I trusted my dad when, one morning, I saw him appear beside my reflection, felt him floating behind me as I sliced the meat and slid the pieces onto a cold plate. His thigh pressed against my hip. He carried me to his bed, and he was weeping, and he asked me to sing to him. My brother was asleep. The deer meat lay on the counter all morning.

My brother found me crying in the closet where I had dragged myself. He could see the muddy fingerprints on my body, and he knew, and he went into my dad’s room and cracked him over the head with a shovel. It took three days for my dad to awaken, and when he did he was hungry. I was making a good soup in the kitchen, and there was a bowl of apples on the counter, but he walked right by. Stood in the doorway with a gun in his arms, pee crusted onto his jeans, and a bloody towel around his head. The doorway let the sound of the river into the house like a stray dog, and I hoped I wouldn't hear the rumble of my brother's truck up the gravel drive. I leaned against the stove and stirred up carrots from the bottom of the soup. With the rattle of the spoon, my dad’s shoulders flinched. He looked towards me, but now he was too absorbed in his anger to see me, as when he looked at the river and saw only the glittering sediment below, not the pretty water shimmering and rippling and running. My carrots settled back to the bottom.

I heard my brother late that night. As I lay in bed, I propped myself on my elbow and listened to him empty the pantry, paw through the tool shed, and grab jackets and boots from the mud room. I heard his footsteps as he ran down the porch stairs. His truck grinding through its gears as it crossed the low part of the river, splashing like a bear. The river slid back into its banks, grumbling to sleep, and I lay down.

I didn’t see my brother for months, but I knew he was on the river, and I could tell when he had come through the house at night for supplies. I always left out food for him, and sometimes it was gone. Maybe it was a bear. I don’t know. He sent me letters packed with dust, and you could tell by the heft of the letters he was on a good part of the river. I pictured him slogging through the water, the same water that slid past our house. The brown water pushed on his body like a dozen strong hands. The brown water stuck to his clothes. He was missing all the good things happening in my life. I was doing well in my correspondence school. I was learning to put myself to bed, to tell my own stories, to dream on my own, although the sensations of walking or running, or just the warm bath-water on my legs—even in dreams these things were lost to me. Leaning against the porch railing, eyes closed, I learned to hear in the water a keening note, a longing for a place far away. I called the ocean’s name, and my voice echoed back; like the river, my voice sounded restless and ready and sure of itself, but sad. I understood this as the one great longing in my life.

One morning, my brother was standing on the kitchen porch, his palm skimming rainwater off the railing. As I wheeled myself out to him, he handed me gold in a mason jar. It was the best stuff I had ever seen. Nuggets like raisins. I looked up, saw the outline of his arms beneath his jacket, muscles tense and tight. I wanted him to carry me. His fingertips lifted the hood of my coat. My hair: he wanted to know what I had done with my hair. I looked down. The jar of gold felt heavy in my lap.

The river ran thick and black that evening. The mountain swam in gray clouds. Even the highest slopes, where you expected snow, it was only rain. The topsoil dissolved from the banks like crumbs rinsed from a dinner plate. Plants clung to scrubby outcroppings because every gully was awash, thick torrents meeting in one great braid of brown water. Falling out of the water, tumbling, swept along the riverbed like grit on the kitchen floor: gold.

He was in the house. He grabbed a clatter of tools. Hauled them to the river. My dad ran after him. I watched from the porch, expecting a fight, but instead they waded into the river together, sluicing through the mud, getting the good stuff before it washed downstream. Their shoulders brushed a dozen times, but not their fists. In the morning, the river was down again, and it slid silently past, dark brown, simmering with resentment. Machinery lay beached like tree stumps. He was gone. My dad bent over the machines and wept. This wasn’t settled. Gold: gristly nuggets, hard little wads in his fist.

At my request, my dad moved my things to a room on the second floor. A view downriver to the next teasing bend. Gladly I would drag myself upstairs for this. I lay on my bed and listened at night, and I knew the sounds. The water hissed and rattled, groaned and popped, gurgled and schemed. Then I heard this: a creaking on the floorboards. My dad came in the morning. Thick red scar on his temple. He sat on my bed and asked me to brush my hair. I was not afraid anymore. I was not afraid because I knew a different hunger consumed him now. His skin hung from his body like an old coat. He was so tired he could not clench his fat swollen fingers. I pitied him. He had so little to show for himself, tons of rock sifted for nothing, and he must have known his time was growing shorter than the mountain’s. Twenty years for a powder so fine you could rub it on your cheeks and forget about it. He would never be done, the mountain would never lie in the neat rows of tailings he dreamed of. All he had were a few mason jars on a shelf, splitting apart from the shimmering weight inside. He was tired, and very hungry, but not for me anymore. I brushed my hair as he had asked, released sparkling dust into the air. He gathered the gold dust that fell to the floor, fine as flour, lost in the lines and grooves of his hand.

I still set out sandwiches of deer meat and white bread for my brother. Mayonnaise and black pepper, in a white paper wrapper, folded the same way so many times I could do it in the dark. The same leaden heft to the bundle of meat and bread. More and more often, the sandwiches were still there in the morning. That’s how I came to realize that my brother's life, my father’s life, and mine, would never change. The big strike would never come. I settled into my disappointment, a life of little days and long nights, my hands spreading cool mayonnaise on plain white bread, my hip leaning against the counter. I stopped looking upriver for my brother, or downriver for the ocean. I would never see the ocean. The ocean was a sound in a box.

One year, a drought made the river shallow and clattering. On my crutches I picked my way to the edge of the river and cried for my abandonment. Dry leaves, their brown edges curled inwards, bobbed like little boats in the shallow pools. I waded in. In the middle of the flow I found a green pool. It measured to my hips. I let go of my crutches and watched them drift away. I began to sway.

His voice sounded tired. “You can’t swim. You’re going to drown, and your body will wash up somewhere.”

“Like it did the first time...” I leaned back, felt myself falling.

His arms came around me. I remembered. They smelled like gold.

“Let me go.” I didn’t mean it.

He lifted me and set me on the water’s surface as gingerly as a pie crust, as though I might tear apart. I felt his hands leave my body, felt their warmth replaced by cold water against my trembling skin. I was floating on my own.

“Let me go. Walk away from me.” I didn’t mean a word.

“Stroke the water like this.”

I turned my head to watch him, and my wet hair stuck to my mouth. I waved my arms, feeling surfaces of water under my wings, and the motion of my arms spun me farther into the flow. When I reached the current at the lip of the pool, I began to go under, and then his hands were lifting my broken body from the water as they did so long ago.

He stayed with me the entire evening. We sat on my bed. He brought me gold. A golden bowl. A ring. A spoon. A bell. These things I gathered on my blanket, clutter, noisy as empty tin cans.

“Stay. Please stay. You don’t have to hit it big. You just have to come home.”

“When I have enough to send you away from here.”

“No one hits it big. You just dig deeper. You just become like him.”

“Goodbye, Leaf.”

“Take me with you.”

“Good-bye. He’s coming.”

I don’t know how they passed each other in the same house that night, ponderous bear shapes, every footstep a firm thud on the floor, but they kept apart, knowing perhaps that in collision there would be heat and pain.

The last time I saw my brother, I was leaning against the windowsill above the river. Bats skimmed the water, in and out of the mist. I had taken off my clothes. My leg braces. You don’t have to understand what I was about to do: I threw my leg braces out the window, and they sank beneath the water quick as stones. Of course I would need them to get around the house, but I didn’t care. I wasn’t going anywhere. Why pretend that I ever would? I heard the creaking of boards. My brother’s footsteps. I did not cover my body, just let his bear arms lift me and lay me on my bed. His wet hands. This was not so easy anymore; his muscles were not what they used to be. He removed a jar of gold dust and painted it on me. It was not nakedness or shame but patience and trust, feeling his fingers daubing on my skin, golden streaks down my arms and legs. A sparkle of gold dust on my eyelids. My chest slowly rising and falling. He covered me with a white sheet, and the sheet stuck to my wet golden skin.

As I drifted asleep, he told me stories that helped me remember running, swimming, and climbing trees. I dreamed he carried me to a place where I could hear the ocean waves and feel the warm wind in my heavy golden hair. Then he tumbled me on the hot bright sand, and he said he could carry me no closer to the water. I would have to do that on my own. He said the sand was made from rocks that had been beaten down by life. I cried and cried and waited for the waves to find me.

I awoke to the sound of bears thrashing in the river. It was my brother and my dad, and they were finally having it out. Hip deep. Backs humped, not with the pull of a chain but with anger and fatigue. My dad gripped a shovel, and he swung it at my brother, but my brother ducked and lunged. The shovel caught him on top of his spine, and my brother stumbled forward, into my dad’s hips, and together they fell into the muddy water. Their punches and blows sounded softer than I expected: wet fists, cold fingers, muscles worn out by life, but this meeting was the one moment either man had lived for, and now they were too tired to stop what never should have started. They rolled over and over, deeper into the flow, until the brown water enveloped them without comment. I never saw my dad again. My brother’s body floated up, gold dust seeping from his pockets like tea, his great bear arms wrapped around nothing.

A mist that smelled like gold gathered over the water, little clouds that bled at the edges until they blended together, seamless and silky.

Later that morning, I washed my shiny gold skin in the bathtub and let the water drain away until I was shivering. In the bottom of the tub, silky sparkling swirls of gold settled beneath my legs. They weren’t going anywhere.

TUMBLE ME LIKE A SHELL IN SHALLOW WAVES

2010-09-08T08:04:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Witness, 2007 (Volume 21).

Anything good in my life I’ve had to wait for, but I’ve been glad to do it. My dad taught me how to use the saw and polisher when I was eight years old, and if you give me any plain rock, I can, in time, find something beautiful buried inside. I am sixteen now, and I have carried home a thousand rocks from the wandering edge of the tide. I am not strong—these are small rocks, eggs, clutched to my belly, gathered one or two per week. They decorate every windowsill, every shelf, they spill from weary baskets on the floor. My mom, Kimberly, says that I have found all the good colors but one. It is a Yurok Indian word, and she says it doesn’t translate, but she’ll know it when she sees it. When she touches it. She is always touching the rocks, pressing them to her lips, setting them down again, and I see the sadness welling in her eyes when the colors are wrong. Keep looking, her eyes tell me. They beg me.

Couple months ago, I brought home a Yurok dictionary the school librarian was tossing out because no one read it, just scrawled their names, and worse, on the spine. I have memorized a thousand words I hope to use someday, but I have not found the word Kimberly wants.

Another thing I am waiting for: I have not dreamed, not ever. My dreams go into the rock tumbler. Hard solid things: that’s as close as I get to dreaming. While the tumbler squats in the garage and churns, I find a window that overlooks the beach, and I wait. I read from the dictionary while Kimberly combs her fingers through my hair because she cannot think of anything else to soften her sadness. What is the word for what I feel? Patience? I read my dictionary as I wait for the tumbler to reveal the glistening heart of a stone; like the braid Kimberly is putting in my hair, it is a process that takes time.

My dad has three days off from the mill, too long, and he is ready to be angry about something. Anything. He looks up from a fifth mug of coffee, and he sees Kimberly wearing her nightgown so late in the morning, braiding my hair and whispering words to herself the way she does, the sunlight warming her back, the soft blue silk nightgown from the catalog that costs too much, too blue, her brown skin, her thin hands, which he snatches by their wrists, Kimberly looks so pretty and sad, and boys don’t braid their hair like that, god-damnit, and I escape through the kitchen door and down the plunging wooden stairs that lead to the beach. I’ve never seen what happens next.

A fogbank is dragging in, and the air is so muffled I hear only my feet down the slippery steps. My face is damp. The whiteness surrounds me, so bright that I close my eyes. I take the steps blindly, and I land on the sand with a thud that jolts my spine.

I walk the wet edge of the tide and search for rocks. Agates, porphyry, jasper if I’m lucky. A Japanese glass float, smashed to bits. The fog is so thick I can barely see my feet, and I have never felt so alone, but that’s how I want to be. I suppose I might get toppled by a wave and never see it coming, but I doubt it; the ocean offers weak little waves that slap at my feet and slide up the sand, whispering. The air is so quiet I can hear words in my head, but I don’t listen.

I find a black rock in the sand. With my toe, I flip it over: jagged and sharp as glass, swollen on the bottom, as though it had been struck a single blow. The skin of the rock is young and shiny; it hasn’t been in the water long enough to be worn down by the waves. I shift the other stones I have found, making room in my palm for this sharp and mysterious thing, and I return to the house.

Kimberly likes it out here on the spit, away from town. She likes it because she has a fear of people’s eyes. They study her, a rare specimen, a lovely thing, and she doesn’t like it. I mean, she studies me every morning when I brush my hair for school, but that is different, a different look, just watching me, lost in a sadness all her own. She says in high school boys fell in love with her with just a glance, and it was a nuisance to have boys do that, a nuisance because she would fall in love back. She’s away from that now. And with Nana gone, there’s no one out here worrying after her the way folks like to do. No one, that is, except for me and my dad, and she knows I won’t say anything, and whatever my dad has to say is without care. My dad is probably yelling at her right now, as I climb the steps to the house, but she doesn’t listen to his words. She closes her eyes, dreams of me, I know she does.

The fact is that Kimberly does not know who my real dad is. The man I call my dad, he is just the one who stayed. When you are sixteen and pregnant and your tough old nana wants to know who’s ass to kick, and there is this one guy who sticks around, that counts for something. When you are sixteen and skinny as a boy except for the bulge in your belly, I guess it means something that someone falls in love with you, and he has a little Yurok in his light brown skin, and he says he wants to make things work.

My hands clutch four rocks.

Kimberly is still sitting in the alcove. The stairs from the beach end beneath her window, and I can see her slender back, how head bowed. Her gown has loosened, but she hasn’t moved, as though she were waiting for my braid to be placed back in her hands. Kimberly says she used to sit in this window, drumming her belly and whispering Yurok words to me, the few she knew and some she made up, whispering so Nana wouldn’t hear.

I walk into the room, and Kimberly looks at me as if she wished I were someone else, but it is a loving look and really it is herself that she wishes were someone else.

“What are you doing?” I ask.

“I’m trying to remember a word.”

“Which one?” I sit beside her and tumble rocks in her lap, the blue silk of her lap.

“It’s nothing. I used to know it. I used to speak it all the time. When I told stories.”

“What were your stories like?”

“Like me. Like I was. Like I never was.”

“How long did you stay in school?”

“I did good in school. I always liked to tell stories.” She touches one rough stone and then another. The rocks leave grains of sand in her lap.

Kimberly says a long time ago this was Yurok land, both sides of the bay, redwoods all of it, and tourists parked their Model T’s along the road and bought baskets from the old women who spread out blankets and put their baskets upon them. That was way before our time, but she says Nana told her it was true as day. Kimberly always tells me this story like it belongs to someone else, and, fact is, it does. It may as well belong to no one because the redwoods are gone. We pretty much ignore the low hills behind the house, a mess of scrubby pines all yellowish green in the sun. The rocks in Kimberly’s lap, that's what interests us now. Kimberly’s hair covers her face.

“What’s this one?” She holds the black rock, glossy and sharp-edged as a chunk from a broken dinner plate. “I’ve never seen this before.”

Kimberly still has a few baskets that Nana wove, and she keeps them full of my polished rocks. Over the years, the baskets have settled around the lumpy forms inside them. Take out the rocks, and what’s left is a basket flimsy as a rag. That’s what I used to think a basket was, soft and supple, laden with rocks to give it strength, a loose sack anchored in place with colors that glistened in certain angles of sun. Kimberly says Nana was going to teach her how to weave them. Nana always promised she would teach Kimberly to make the empty sacks. But instead Nana made Kimberly go to school and do her homework and speak English around the house, and there were no English words for weaving baskets that were quite as good.

I take my haul of rocks, and I find my dad in the garage, wrestling a dull blade from the saw. He doesn’t look up from his work. Give him credit for this much: he knew enough to buy the saw and the polisher. He helped me put them together when they were a scatter of pieces on the concrete floor. But forget about putting together a conversation with him. His words are the names of minerals and semiprecious stones, things you would write on tiny labels if you put rocks in a specimen file. He knows the vulnerability of a rock in his hands, and that it calls for care, and that too many words only get your hopes up. Sometimes you open the tumbler, thinking you’ll have something precious, but it is all shards the size of breakfast cereal.

The rock collection is our one thing together. The singing saw. The tenderness in my dad’s hands, guiding a piece of jasper into the teeth of the blade: I have seen him touch my mom’s face like that. Her eyes closed. I know she is dreaming of me.

My dad sets down the saw and looks at the black rock I found. The deepest black. “Obsidian,” he says at once. He shows me the page in the rock-and-gem book. Glassy and brittle, the rock will probably break apart in the polisher. We stand side by side, and I feel the warmth of his arm touching mine.

“Put it in.”

These days I pick the roughest stones I can find, the kind that chew up blades and tumble for days without softening, but my dad does not complain. He recites their names. Aventurine. Tiger Eye. The rocks slip and slide apart, wearing each other down as best they can. The rocks are all we have, and the words for them, their detached names, and none of those words are “Where did all this go wrong?”

He sorts the rest of my take. “That’s porphyry ... That’s jasper ... Is that a ruby? Wait.” He takes up a dull hard crystal and looks closer. We have never found a ruby. Not this time either.

“Just put it in the tumbler.” His gravel voice.

When you have so many things you need to say to each other, you switch on the machine, drown out your voices, make it pointless to try.

At four in the afternoon, my dad drives to the mill. The tumbler rattles in the garage, young tough rocks, and the machine is at its angriest. Kimberly and I leave the noise behind, descend the stairs, and walk along the beach. Following my old footprints, I show her where I found the black obsidian, but there isn’t any more of it. We find three milky shells worth keeping, but we leave them tumbling in the surf.

It was Kimberly who first taught me what to look for, what to stuff in the pockets of my blue raincoat, what to leave behind. These were lessons without words. It was the way she touched the rocks, her head bent forward, black hair slipping off her shoulders. She would turn the rocks over and over, handling them gingerly as eggs, setting them down again. That was key: set down the best rocks, take home whatever had a roughness to it. You lived life the hard way, but you coaxed tenderness where-ever you could.

There are three spots along the beach where Kimberly likes to stop, linger, let the wind whip her hair back from her face, and I stand apart from her and wait, hands around my ribs for warmth. When Kimberly was ten years old, a whale washed upon the beach. Kimberly, Nana, and their neighbors cut it up quietly, working through the night, carving it to the bone, hauling off the slippery blubber, divvying the ivory teeth like gold coins after a heist. They wasted nothing, left only a patch of red sand on the beach that lasted for days. It was a horrible, bloody, smelly job, but they did it. They burned whale oil in their stoves that winter. Kimberly always comes back to that spot, kicks the sand around, trying to uncover something.

The second place she stops is where a red boulder washed up during a storm. The boulder was as large as the whale, and just like the whale they cut it up too, saws and sledge hammers and sweat, and it mostly came apart under their blows, crumbled into gravel. I don’t believe that story, but Kimberly still comes back, looking for pieces, and she claims she has found them, dark blood-clots of stone, tiny as flecks of fingernail.

The third place is where the spit ends and the bay enters the sea. A bridge connects to the mainland. She always walks that far, and I let her go, a tiny figure in a blue raincoat, trudging down the beach, walking a straight line through waves thrashing at her knees.

The bridge across the mouth of the bay is narrow. One car at a time. I was too young to remember, but Nana was taking her baskets to sell in town. Commerce, that was her word for a load of baskets. Profit. What were the Yurok words for gross and net? Kimberly didn’t know. Nana was never a good driver, and her truck went over the side of the bridge into the water. For five days, Kimberly found Nana’s baskets washed up on the beach or bobbing on the tide like Japanese floats. She took them home, loaded the baskets with rocks, pinned them down, and they have never moved. Since then, Kimberly refuses to leave the spit, she just walks this far and turns around, living the same life over and over again.

From time to time, myrtlewood stumps float downriver and spin off the bridge pilings, bob into the ocean, and wash on the beach, their roots writhing like wild hair. I wander among them and wait for Kimberly to return from the end of the spit. On some of the stumps, the roots still grip rocks, and I climb the stumps, curious to see what was important enough to hold onto. It must be good alluvial soil upriver, and I pick out gabbros, granites, pinks, whites and blacks, salt and pepper, dense enough to polish smooth as marble. Kimberly has a photograph of me, skinny kid in t-shirt and blue-jeans, climbing a stump, my long black hair swinging forward, and I am tucking it back from my face. You would probably think it is a girl in the picture, but I don’t mind; you have to understand something larger that the picture fits inside. Kimberly keeps it in a drawer with some old government papers with surveyor measurements and Nana's name on the bottom. She likes that photograph of me the most, and she never talks about it because it means so much to her, but I know she dreams it again and again. When we walk the beach and I say she is looking for something she has lost, that thing is me. She meets me now beside the stumps, she tucks my hair back from the wind, and I allow her this touch. I am thinking that at some time, later in my life, I will give anything to get that touch back, but I also know this means that at some time in my life I will have walked away from her.

One night I did run away, and my dad let me run. It was raining, and there were elk prints in the mud along the road. I ran through the darkness, the ocean on my right. The gravel of the road—reds and greens and grays imported from who knows where—squished noisily under my feet with a million displaced voices. I walked far, I counted the white reflectors until I heard my dad’s truck behind me, and even after climbing into the cab I made him keep going, keep driving, and we counted the reflectors together, numbers piling up, filling a space we were afraid of, because this kind of talking was easier than what we were driving away from. And then we turned around. I know how many reflectors it is to the narrow bridge and back.

Some nights Kimberly and dad fight, and I find broken china on the kitchen floor, and I polish the pieces into soft numb glossy forms that feel warm against my skin and slide manageably on my palm. I always set these on the kitchen table for Kimberly and my dad as I prepare to leave for school. White and blue. Some afternoons, when I run into the kitchen for a snack, the pieces have rolled off the table and broken on the floor. You can see their sharp and tender hearts again.

When I got my driver’s license, I demanded a set of keys to the truck. I could flee and never look back, any time I wanted, fly across that bridge forever, but I have always come back. You see, there are mornings when Kimberly awakens from dreaming, and her heart is sick and sad, but her mind is clear; we both know the feeling won’t last, but she touches my face, and I want that. She picks up one of my polished stones and rolls it in her palm, and when it comes back to me it is warm with her touch. I want that.

I have seen both my mom and my dad touch my rocks in turn. If you have ever touched a softened smooth rock you know the pleasure of this, and if you have a thousand rocks to choose from, dazzling white, flecked with blues, pinks, metallic sheens, then you have experienced something even more desired, this warmth on your skin, this one here, this pink one, the one you found because it was warmer than the rest, and it was warmer than the rest because someone you love had found it before you. You hope to find it warm tomorrow.

It is evening, and Kimberly sits with me as I read, while out in the garage the tumbler wears the black rock down. Kimberly asks about school for the coming week, but I do not answer this question because it means nothing to me. Then I hear a change in her voice, a longing and sweetness she uses only for me, and only in Yurok. “Nicky, it’s you and me always... I was only sixteen when I had you... When you were little you were pretty as a girl...” Her sparse words trail into silence. The ocean waves. I don’t say anything, just listen. How long can Kimberly and I keep this silence between us? The pink fog rolling across the water, pelicans spearing the fog, how can I put those images into words?

Kimberly’s lips touch my hair, then I feel the cold on my back as Kimberly stands. She leads me into the bathroom, faces the mirror, studies her face and mine. We both have straight, shiny black hair and dark eyes. She stares at the mirror longer than usual before she turns out the light, and when I see our black outlines, I feel a pain that, I believe, should not be mine.

She kisses me and says it won’t be long until I’m alone. That’s what I want isn’t it? Walking the spit alone? Be patient, she whispers. My dad works graveyard at the mill, and he zooms across that narrow bridge in the dark, the same bridge the schoolbus scrapes as it wobbles across during the day. The golden bear statues that guard each side of the bridge are tarnished green, one of them bent when Nana crashed her truck, the other one waiting. Waiting. The concrete is crumbling away from the rebar like meat from a stew bone. Stumps of myrtlewood pile against the bridge like wrecked cars. It is only a matter of time, some night, too tired, too fast, his truck will fly from the road, crunch in a heap where it lands, the hardness of rock, the softness of water, it doesn’t matter, he cannot fly, he was never meant to fly.

“That doesn’t make me alone,” I say. “What about you?”

I slide in front of her and look at the darkened mirror. Kimberly pulls my hair back from my face. We look identical. Kimberly might not be the only person taking long looks in the mirror at both ends of the day, but she is the only person desperate to find something, and this makes her the only person to fail. She lets go of my hair, and it falls into my eyes.

* * *

The bleary red numbers on the bathroom clock say one a.m. Curled on the mat on the floor, I am awakened by the low notes of waves pounding the beach, wind shuddering the house. I am alone. The door is open, and the wind and rain are angry in the house. The rock polisher in the garage is raging. I follow Kimberly’s steps to the beach and across the sand. I find her in the surf, deeper than I have ever gone, stumbling and rolling, knocked about by the waves. She lets me take her hand. It is hard to guide her; she tries to stand, stumbles to her knees again, and waves wash over us, tumble us around. I try to lift her up, and her hands grip my arms, and she is sobbing. Then I feel a hardness against her: pockets packed with my polished rocks. All the best rocks, the loveliest ones, pulling her down. I dig them from her pockets, set them in the water, more rocks, and more, until we can stand. Rocks I had collected and polished into beautiful things, now I set free for the tide to tumble around again.

In the bathroom, Kimberly and I strip our clothes, shedding wetness like a layer of skin. It is dark, and we are shivering cold. The house full of rocks creaks in the wind.

“Where is my nightgown? I can’t find it.”

My foot touches the liquid of her silk nightgown and I reach down to hand it to her. Her hands pause, I feel them in the darkness, and she lifts the nightgown over my head and guides my arms to the sleeves. She runs her hands through my wet hair.

It doesn’t matter to me. It only matters what it says about her.

She cups my face in her hands. She smoothes my hair. “There’s a Yurok word for you. For what you are. I can’t remember it, though.”

“There’s no word for me.”

“Pretty.”

“There’s no word for me.” I am hugging my ribs in the thin nightgown, impatient for the word and wishing I could form the word in my mouth, on my lips. But impatience has never gotten me anything, and I let my arms become still at my sides.

The moonlight finds a gap in the clouds as we sit in the window. Light and fine, the blue silk gown pulls on my skin as delicately as smoke. Kimberly sleeps beside me, covered with a blanket, dreaming of me, I just know she is, and I curl beside her, solid and heavy against her belly. Someday I will pay for this. I will carry this memory inside. I won’t talk. Don’t get me wrong: I have no trouble expressing my feelings, but try to understand: it is wordless what I feel. The pain in my life doesn’t play out that way. You have to look deeper and you have to just know, without words, when you’ve found something fine.

Nestled against Kimberly, wearing her blue nightgown, for the first time in my life I dream. I dream about a storm, waves strong enough to flip logs, tossing myrtlewood stumps like plastic floats. In the morning I walk along a low tide, and the sunlight reveals what the waves at night have done. Crabs, tossed far up the beach by the waves, scurry back to the water, but the water’s too far, and the crabs dry in the sun. Seagulls, terns, and crows neatly flip the crabs over to peck out their soft bellies.

By sunrise Kimberly and I are still curled together, and I slip loose, pad into the garage, and switch off the machine. The black rock is a perfect, gleaming egg. It rolls in a tight circle in my palm, the way an egg must roll to stay in its nest and keep from breaking. It is the most beautiful thing I have ever made. I grip it tightly in my hand. Press it to the blue silk on my belly. I do not want to show this one to anybody. Perfect, seamless black.

Kimberly has followed me into the garage. She hugs me. I squirm out of her arms. I have something all my own. The obsidian egg. My black pearl. Worth waiting for. I rub it on my cheek as I have seen Kimberly rub stones a thousand times. I bend my head forward, let my black hair slide off my shoulders.

“That is the very color.” Kimberly blinks, yawns, rubs her arms.

“What is the word?” I clench the rock so tightly that if it were an egg it would crush.

“I don’t remember. I’m sorry.”

“I’ll wait for you.” I rest my head on Kimberly’s shoulder, and I set the rock on the counter. As Kimberly holds me tight, I begin to cry, or does she begin to cry, I can’t be sure, we are both crying, and we watch the black rock wobble to the edge. Don’t fall.

THE GREAT BLACK SHAPE IN THE WATER

2010-09-03T07:30:00.000-07:00

Originally published in Natural Bridge, spring 2007 (Number 17). In the magazine, an interview with the author accompanies the story.

I never understood why my mom did not fight back. She was strong as ten Quihwa men, this at a time when feats of strength earned you the same regard money and looks get you nowadays. My dad was strong too, but unlike my mom he had never lifted a whale. He knew how to use his hands, sure enough. Before he got his own boat, he hired onto some Finn’s trawler out of Port Angeles, and being the only Indian he learned to make a pretty good fist. I seen him punch through the ice on our cistern, a private show of anger that didn’t earn him nothing in my book. My mom would never do that, and maybe that was the difference between them. I don’t know: I was only twelve years old, and I heard their fights muffled through a wall. I was too young to know there might be other stories not told.

What I know is this: one night many years ago, the waves left a California grey whale on the beach, a great heaving lump of black on the wet sand. We could see it from our porch in the morning, and a dozen families rang their bells calling everyone down. The men were already out on their boats, and it fell to the women, children, and elders to lift the darn thing. It was like trying to lift a mountain off the earth itself. A woman named Lois went to get a shotgun. But that’s when my mom lumbered down the road and onto the beach. She paced the whale off, scowled at the skeptical faces watching hers, and with a roar louder than the ocean waves she hoisted that whale’s tail-flukes over her shoulder. We all stepped in and pulled then, and the whale inched across the sand. We sang men’s songs and found strength in our backs we didn’t know we had. Still, my mom was the one who got the whale into the waves that day—what good are fifty cowards to one brave heart—and by sundown when the men brought in their boats, the story had my mom toting that whale all by herself. She was walking tall. She swaggered her big hips, and she pushed up her sleeves to show off her biceps like a man. Some folks said she tied Lois’s shotgun into a pretzel. Children danced around her. She lifted me and my sister over her head, one laughing girl in each meaty hand, and we stuck out our arms, fluttered our fingers, and pretended to be birds.

A good Quihwa child memorized a hundred stories: trees who spoke, ravens who played tricks, men who chased whales in slender boats that skimmed the water like pelicans. My sister Lizzie and I learned these stories without writing them down, and the story of our mom and the whale entered that lore. But in the summer of 1942, the world swelled so large we needed the newspaper to keep track of all the stories. There were German words, like wehrmacht, hard on our tongues. There were words from the south Pacific, queer syllables that jumped around in our mouths and made us laugh. Manila rhymed with vanilla. So many stories, I persuaded my mom to run the generator so I could listen to the radio while she braided my hair. Gasoline was rationed, and my mom said I was asking a lot. She said it would be cheaper to burn the perfume she kept in the square bottle on her dresser, but I reminded her that my dad had broken that bottle during a fight. I had heard it hit the wall. Ever since, the house had smelled like roses. We listened to the radio.

Lizzie’s boyfriend, Billy, kept a siphon beneath the seat of his truck. The three of us used to drive around, and because I was small enough to crawl under a city-slicker’s car, I learned the taste of petrol. I learned to accept dirt on the hem of my skirt. We helped ourselves to scrap metal too. After a storm, Lizzie, Billy, and I used to run down to the beach to pry cleats off the stray Weyerhaeuser log booms, the cleats thick as fingerbones. We found rusty cables twisted around themselves. We found pop bottles pitted by sand. We sold it all to a junkman who came over from Port Angeles, and we always got a good price. Still, when I wanted a new dress pattern from the Sears catalog, my mom laid the cut-out against two lengths of red cloth—two, not one—and my sister and I got the same dress, mine loose, hers tight, her body showing some pretty nice curves. Lizzie was pleased. She had already spent a dollar on a mail-order kit to set her straight black hair in a permanent wave. She was trying to hold Billy’s gaze which, if you ever seen his sweet brown eyes, was not so easy. She permed her hair in the washtub behind the house, daubed a little cherry red on her lips, and got a whipping for it. I kept my hair long and braided stiffly down my back.

Because of the war, the Weyerhaeuser Company wanted extra saws in the woods. They were hiring Quihwa men, and the pay was too good to pass up. I never did learn how this aided the war effort, but that’s what the company said, and our men pulled in their boats and disappeared into the woods. In a few weeks, the forests looked like the battlefields in Life magazine. There was no salmon on your table anymore, but every two or three days the men brought home money for corned beef, snow-white lard, sugar and coffee, and hams that you opened with a key. It made the women fat. Some men brought liquor if they had a weakness for that, and smokes, and stories they wouldn’t tell. Then, before the smell of your dad’s laundry was familiar again, he was gone for another hitch. They left their guns—so we could protect ourselves from “the Japs,” but we were poor Indians and we didn’t fancy our village much of a prize. If the Japanese ever stormed the Olympic peninsula, we hoped they brought their rain slicks. Still, in the attic of every house was a heavy bell, tethered to a rope that dangled into the kitchen from a hole in the ceiling. Emergencies only. My sister and I were forbidden to touch that rope. The trouble was, my mom would never touch it either, and whenever my dad came back from the woods, his truck bouncing down the gravel road, I imagined that bell ringing shrill and loud, metal striking hard on metal, beating out its lonely note again and again.

My mom and I liked to walk down the road to the beach to watch for submarines. The tides were lower than anyone could recall, and we would walk out a mile and splash our feet in a million shallow pools. The mighty sea had become a small thing you searched for, like a silver dollar fallen from your pocket. The tidepools were clicking with black mussels, and I waded to my thighs in these pools, my dress knotted around my waist in a way my mom said was too finicky. We were out so far, you couldn’t see the houses of the village anymore, and you no longer heard the log trucks jake-braking as they barreled out of the hills. It did not occur to me that my mom went onto the beach to get far away. She waded into the pools after me, and I leaned against her chest, her great bear arms around me, her back turned to the slope of the world. She said my name, “Sylvie, Sylvie,” again and again.

At night we would start up the generator, pull down the blackout curtains, and listen to the radio stations out of Seattle. I remember the battle of Midway; four Japanese carriers were sunk, and you already sensed the war had turned. Lizzie and I huddled around that radio, our mom’s arms pulling us close. It reminded me of a time when my sister and I were younger and we sat in our mom’s lap and listened to crazy stories about her relations; she was half Seminole, half white, and she had fled here with her mom at age ten because, her mom had said, the Olympics were as far from Florida as you could get and still be near the sea. There must have been more to that story. I never heard. In the summer of 1942, we listened to the radio dramas after the news, and it was like my mom’s old story time again, only instead of Uncle Jack fighting an alligator it was Phillip Marlow fighting crime. When you were twelve years old, and love meant feeling safe from everything in the world that could harm you, those times in my mom’s arms were as good as it ever got.

Around July fourth, the men came home flush with cash, and we had a potlatch on the beach to celebrate the good times. My dad brought a company pickup with a dual axle, and we took it onto the sand. After a few beers, he bet he could drive that truck all the way out to the tidewater. My sister and I piled into the back. My mom rode in the cab. The tide was so low, driving into the tidal pools was like driving into a canyon. We drove over mussel beds that crunched under the wheels. We saw coral formations that never should have seen the sun or breathed the air. Of course the truck got stuck—the rocks were too slick—and the wheels slipped into separate pools and crowned the axle. Nothing was going to pry that truck loose, and Lizzie and I had to run back for help. The bells in the village rang. When people made it out to the truck, my dad was fighting the wheel, and my mom was up to her thighs in the water, pushing against the tailgate. “You lifted a goddamned whale,” my dad cried. She did lift that truck a little. She got the bumper onto her hip, and she was turning the truck around, but the waves were already coming in, and I saw her pain as she slipped, then stumbled to her knees, those waves rolling over her mighty shoulders, slow and smooth and slick. My dad stayed in the truck, sulking I guess, until the waves rose to the side panels and the truck began to take water into its bed. My mom, drenched and shivering, led us home. My sister ran off to a girlfriend’s house for the night; that’s where she said she was going, anyway. I decided that if the sea could swallow an entire truck, if the sea kept this kind of secret, it kept a thousand more.

Pride had a way of working itself into shame. That night, my mom lay in bed and gazed at the wall. As we waited for my dad to come home, I rubbed menthol and grease on my mom’s back. She rolled cigarettes, the tiniest most delicate things, and sucked them down to embers that trickled off the edge of the bed. By midnight, I retreated to my room and listened to the fight through the wall. By one a.m., it was my dad’s voice cooing and promising in the old tongue never to do it again. By three a.m., when my mom climbed onto the mattress I normally shared with Lizzie, she knew better than to tell me stories, because stories were supposed to tell the truth of the world, and only one truth needed to be told. I had heard enough. My mom held me. She didn’t have to say nothing.

My dad was gone by morning, and with the silence in the house, we breathed again. Lizzie was back. She was sitting by the radio, trying to suck down a smoke and hold a pose like Greta Garbo. Must have got the smokes from Billy. I sat on my bed, and my mom braided my hair, maybe an excuse to turn me away from her bruised face. But I loved those strong fingers pulling on my scalp. It was a Quihwa custom: braiding gave me a sense of who I was, but it easily came undone, so I liked it tight, and it took awhile. Of course, my mom let me listen to the radio, something to fill the silence so we didn’t have to come up with words.

I am old now, and I have seen that there are many ways for a woman to be strong, but growing up in that house beside the raging ocean, those strong ways were never taught to me. Instead I learned about shame. My mom should have fought back, or she should have told me why she didn’t fight at all. 1942 was a bad year not to feel strong. There was the war. There was this, too: I would soon find blood on the seat of my skirt. And this: by July, the logs were deeper in the woods, like skittish salmon that hide in the dark pools of a stream. My dad was gone for two, three weeks a hitch, and when he came home there was a hard, dense, solid sound to his fists. My sister would sneak out to be with Billy, while my mom kept me safe from my dad simply by getting in his way. If I dropped a jar of jam, my mom would hide me behind her back and take the whipping. Here is what I want to say: 1942 was a bad year because my mom decided to die. She would lie in bed, her battered face turned away from me. I would climb the mountain of her back and try to kiss her face, but she raised her hands. I caught glimpses of her eyes, swollen shut. I tried to crawl into her arms, that warm safe place, and listen to her stories, but she pushed me out of bed, my unbraided hair all loose and long. That was how I walked into the sun each day. Or, when the sky was gray, I walked into a soggy rain. People knew: without them braids, I walked into the world ashamed.

Her dying became clear to me one morning late in July when we heard the bells again. This early in the morning, it had to be something good, maybe even a submarine. My mom, her face buried in her blankets, yelled at Lizzie to put down her goddamn lipstick, take me to the beach, and see what the racket was. The tide would be out, so take a knife and a pail for mussels, and stay away from that goddamn Billy.

As we walked down the road, Lizzie shoved her pail into my hands, smoothed her red dress, and shook loose her wavy hair. When I reached the sand, Lizzie was not beside me anymore. She was heading toward a pickup on the beach. Billy. I yelled Lizzie’s name. She glared and brought her fingertip to her lips, hush, then inclined her fist toward me. She knew I wouldn’t tell. One time I did tell: they were kissing on the beach, and they climbed into the bed of the pickup and threw clothing out while I played in the sand. I could hear them laughing in there, then it was quiet for a long time, and when I told my mom about that quiet part, Lizzie got a whipping. Next day, Lizzie hit me in the back so hard that I fell and cut my face. She made me lie about how I’d fallen on a rock. It was a betrayal. I didn’t know what they were doing in the truck. I didn’t know I’d done anything wrong.

Billy was eighteen, and with a siphon under the seat he drove his dad’s pickup everywhere. He didn’t have permission, but his dad was up in the woods with the other men, and I do believe he would have whipped Billy if he had known. Fact is, Billy was a strong boy, and he should have been out there felling trees, but Lizzie was a real catch and I guess he didn’t want to lose her. Well, maybe he was strong, but my mom could take him, and he knew it. He never came closer than the end of the road.

My sister ran to Billy, who leaned against the side of the truck the way he must have seen Clark Gable do in a movie. Lizzie rested her hand on her hip when she stood next to him. I walked onto the sand, swinging two pails.

The tide was way out again, leaking from one pool to the next. I wandered until the slope of the beach dropped away, until I felt like I was standing in the belly of the sea. Farther out, I saw a crowd of people at the water’s fraying edge, and I headed for them. It took five minutes for the dots to become the fat shapes of women who lived along the road.

“We found another whale...”

“Sylvie, where’s your mom...”

“That’s a lovely dress...”

“What are you gonna do with them pails, dig a sandcastle?” Maribel was two years older than me, and she could punch hard.

I pushed through the crowd and looked. There was the whale, stuck in a large pool, its gleaming back just showing above the water.

“Sylvie, go get your mom.”

I stood and watched. The sun was bright on the whale’s back. I thought of the Japanese floats we often found washed up on the shore. My sister and I saved them, the most beautiful things, gleaming balls of light and air and magic. Hold one up to the sun, stare through it without pain.

We tried to roll the whale, but it was like trying to roll a boxcar, and the whale sighed and settled deeper into the sandy bottom. The sun was on our backs, and the skin of the whale was hot and steaming. As we stood in water up to our waists and heaved as one, we sang good old songs. We made a mighty voice like a man’s, but the whale just rocked against our hips: I remember my hands pushing with all the other children’s hands, as though pressing a rock, the side of a mountain. The sun was casting stumpy noontime shadows when the women ceased rocking the whale, just stood along its side, shoulder to shoulder, those squat legs, wet cotton dresses, braids hanging limp and tired down their backs. These were strong hands; they cut wood and wrung water from clothes. But they were not men’s hands, hard hands that could summon anger when it was needed most. Except Billy in that pickup arching spray across the sand, all the men were gone.

Boys and girls smaller than me beat on the whale with sticks. A boy climbed up the whale’s back and slid down. The big girl named Maribel shoved me, and I fell into the pool. “Your mama’s not coming! You—”

I didn’t hear what she said after that. She shoved my head under the water. I felt the cold, tasted the salt, then my skin brushed the smooth side of the whale. As I became used to the thick underwater noise, I heard my heartbeat, clipped and rapid, like a marble bouncing on a hard floor. I had often heard that sound at home, at night, when I was afraid. Then I heard a heartbeat beyond my own. The heart inside the whale. The throbbing beat of a drum. When Maribel let me up for air, my hair was wet and stuck to my back. Her fist took up my hair. I was afraid.

Everyone looked at me. The tide wrapped around our hips, the surf creeping closer. Farther up the beach, gulls picked apart crabs. Billy had parked his pickup on the sand. He and Lizzie were in there, but you couldn’t see them.

I said, “What about Billy?”

“Billie’s a wimp.”

“He has a pickup.”

“That pretty boy’s truck can’t pull nothing. Besides, I seen Sylvie’s mom lift the back of a truck.”

“I ain’t seen it, but I heard about it.”

My mother lay in bed hiding her black eyes, angry at the evil of the world.

* * *

When I was nine, I had a fight with my dad. We were all seated for dinner, and I announced that we weren’t real Indians, on account of my mom being only half, and my dad, well, he had no relations, which, if you are Quihwa, is pretty much everything. Maribel had teased me, see. She had told me my braids didn’t mean nothing. Well, my dad slammed down his fork and came around the table fast, but I was faster, and I ran out the door and down to the beach. I ran into surf too strong, and I was carried out by the waves of a thick ocean. The water, like sure arms, bore me away, and I cried without hope of being heard, but then it was my mom’s arms around me, lifting me back. She held me above her head and waded back to shore. Louder than the roar of the sea, her booming voice told me about the Spanish influenza of 1919, of fishing accidents, alcohol, boarding schools, tribes with only three or four sad old women left and no one to share their stories. She told me names that you respected best with silence, and she told me everything else that made being Indian so rare and fine. When we reached the house, well, that was when I saw my dad sulking at the cistern, punching the ice away.

* * *

We lifted and heaved and rocked the whale back and forth. We sang songs until the rocking became a new song, but a tide was rolling in, smooth fast water spilling into the pool. Children couldn’t touch the bottom, and they waved their arms and kicked their legs and ran for the safety of the sand.

I twisted the water from my hair.

“Get your goddamned mom.”

“She can’t come. She fell. Hurt herself real bad.”

“She been falling a lot lately. Always seems to land on her face.”

We didn’t sing anymore. We listened to the whale’s breathing, slow as gusts of wind that spend themselves and leave silence in the air. The heavy sun crawled across the sky. My hands, all our hands, lay on the whale's skin, and it was smooth skin with no barnacles, clean patches of warm black. We stood in water up to our chests and looked at each other, defeated, none of us beautiful except my sister, a silhouette far up the beach, leaning against the pickup and fluffing loose her wavy hair.

One of the women put her arms around me, but I wanted my mom, and I began to cry. I shook her loose. I was the first to cry, but soon there were others. Did I tell you that my mother, when she held me, smelled like green leaves, she smelled like wood and tasted like salt? I swore if I had a child, I would hold her that way, let my child rub her mouth on my arm, her warm breath on my skin.

The water rose to our necks. The bigger waves rolled in and lifted us. They pushed the whale around too hard. When the tide rose with a surge, the whale lifted and thrashed, and we had to swim to get out of the way. The waves shook and roared. People trudged out of the water and back towards home. The whale thrashed a few more times and settled down. It would never get out of the pool. The whale knew.

“Sometimes they wash on the beach to die.”

I wandered up the sand apart from everyone else, wet in my dress. Soon there was only sea and a warm wind that pelted my face with prickly sand. My hair became dry and loose as grass. I told myself my mom would braid it back, slicken it with wax and braid it back tight and shiny and heavy down my spine, but in truth she hadn’t done that for a long time.

Maribel jumped me on the road home. From behind a cedar tree she stepped out and dragged me back. “You go tell your fat mama she was too late.” She slapped me. “And you won’t rat on me, you won’t rat a word, because everyone knows why your mama didn’t come. Everyone knows. What are you gonna do? You can’t do anything.” Maribel threw me to the ground and sat on my back. She pulled back my arms, yanked back my loose hair, and stuffed sand in my mouth. “Not a word.” I turned my head and managed to bite her arm. Maribel screamed and let me go. “You run, Sylvie, you run! You go tell your fat mama she was too late.”

I did run. I ran up the road to my mom thinking only of the time she had bent her back to the angry sea to save me. She had taken on the waves, she held me and made me cough up salt water, she had breathed her air into my mouth. She had covered me up and taken the blows.

My mom lay in the bed, buried under blankets, heaving slowly, sleeping in the mid-day dark of the blackout shades.

I shook her shoulder and said, “Maribel beat me up.”

She said, “Get away from me.”

“But Mom!”

“You want help? Run away. You can’t fight and win against such hands. I got cousins in Florida, and that’s where you go. Take Lizzie, and you both run!”

I stood by her bed and cried and cried. My mom could not read or write, but she made me memorize the names of her Seminole cousins. As I recited the order of highways and towns, good places to sleep the night, restaurants where an Indian could beg like a dog, I persuaded myself this was only a game to fill the emptiness my mom would never fill with the right words. I would never go to Florida. It was just another story. We started the generator and listened to the radio. We listened to the news of the war, listened to the crime serials, listened to the music of the big bands. Something to fill the space. We ate canned ham. I climbed into bed, lay against my mom, and did I tell her the story of everything she had missed today in her shame? No, I told my big strong mom how I loved her, and I braided her hair as she had braided mine. I wrapped my skinny arms around her, sang the good songs from the radio where the words are chosen for you. I would someday find the words, as I am finding them now, far enough away, but not that day, not yet, I decided, and I congratulated myself on being twelve years wise.

“Where’s Lizzie?”

“Out with Billy, I’d guess.”

“What were the bells for, anyway?”

“Mama, do you remember that time I fell off Dad's boat and you pulled me back by my braid...”

That’s where the story might end. I awoke in my own bed, beside my sister Lizzie, close enough to smell Billy’s smokes in her hair. She was still wearing her red dress. Lizzie was the prettiest girl I had ever seen. If I had known she would be the only warm touch I would feel for many years, I would have put my arm around her sleeping skin and guarded her from anyone who would take her from me. Time was doing that on its own, I guess. The radio was telling news of battles far away. My mom was snoring; you could hear it through the wall. I stroked my sister’s wavy hair.

The story could have ended there, simply because my mom was not a vengeful person. She had always believed she was strong enough to take any pain, and when she learned that she was not so strong, she had become ashamed. The end. But shame is a weak thing, and vengeance is a weak thing too, and maybe they belong together. From up and down the beach, I heard bells ring that morning, insistent as crows, and I knew my mom had done something in the night. I left Lizzie in bed, sleeping off another Billy night, and I slipped out the door, pausing only to notice that the rope which hung from our emergency bell had been cut and allowed to fall to the kitchen floor.

On the beach, the women and elders and children of the village were standing in scattered groups. Broken sand-dollars. They found the whale gone. Well, not gone. Rib bones were piled neatly as cordwood. The blubber was cut into strips and stacked. Buckets held ambergris. A hundred seagulls picked over the entrails, piled off to the side. It was the work of ten men.

We were left to imagine. My mom must have poured water over the whale’s dying. She said the right prayers. The kick of the shotgun must have punched at her shoulder and the blast must have shaken her eardrums. Even at night, she must have seen the warmth leave the whale’s body, and she could tell in other ways, the shape settling, cooling, cold when she pressed her cheek to listen for a heartbeat that wasn’t there. She knew what to do. She cut it up that whale, she said those prayers and cut it up and sang loud, not to drown out the bad feelings, but to feel strength in her chest, the pride that made her sing louder, bolder, Hear me, I have done something fine! She made short work of it, the blubber, the scrim, left just a little blood on the sand. My mom was so strong, she lifted the rib bones over her shoulder and carried them two at a time.

It took the whole village to start fires and roll out the rusty vats to cook the blubber down. Smelly nasty work, oil separating from flesh. The smudgy smoke turned your skin gray. There was no dignity to it, but none was deserved. The women poured ambergris into little jars and stored them away on pantry shelves, to be passed around like honey at Christmas. They could light their homes and watch the shame illuminated on their faces.

Lizzie and Billy came down and began loading the jawbones into the pickup. These would bring a good price. I said, “Mom’s sending us to Florida,” and I recited the details of our trip as they were told to me. Lizzie sweetened on the idea when I took Billy’s hand, stood real close to him, and smiled up at his face the way I had seen Lizzie do a hundred times. “Billy’s gonna take us.”

Billy frowned.

I opened the truck door, reached under the seat, and pulled out the siphon. Billy smiled. Oh, he had pretty eyes when he smiled.

* * *

We were Seminole Indians for eight weeks. Long enough for Billy to get Lizzie in trouble. I never did meet an uncle strong enough to fight an alligator, but you know what happens to a story over time. In the mornings, while Billy and Lizzie slept in the truck, I would unwrap my arms from my ribs and walk down the road to that silky Florida water. The surf barely covered my toes, but it was warm and blue while the Pacific was cold and grey, and I felt myself called deeper into something I did not understand. I pulled up the hem of my skirt and sloshed past my knees in the lapping waves.

When we came home to Washington, my mom and dad were already buried in cedar boxes. It was impossible to know how it happened. Who pointed the gun at whom. Maybe my mom shot him, then shot herself, another bloody mess for someone else to clean. Or maybe it was the other way around. It didn’t matter. It was not the sort of thing anyone with dignity delved into. I have said too much, even now.

Billy shipped off to the south Pacific, and we never did learn what happened to him. Lizzie lost the baby. After the war, there was a ton of money kicking around, and they built a new high school in Port Angeles. In classrooms more crowded than our entire village, I learned what it meant “to pass,” and I wore my hair in a ponytail like a good bobby-soxer. A little white in a girl’s skin masked a lot of secrets. I worked in the school library, shelving other people’s stories, and I carried the books against my chest so the boys wouldn’t look at me. My body grew up, but not my heart.

I can tell this story now because everyone I have mentioned is gone. My little band of Quihwa does not exist, the bloodlines having run too thin for the government’s liking. There is no way you can verify any of my story. In 1942 there was a greater war for the world to fight, and what was left on our beach has long ago rinsed away. But I do wish to be believed. I hear it a lot: “You don’t look like an Indian.” Well, I have a secret, a way of braiding my still-black hair, which I can undo and hide any time. I can also put the braid together again strong and shiny, tight enough to pull on my eyebrows.

You have to understand the secrecy of my story. We were people who kept words to ourselves like stones in the pockets of our skirts. We spoke a language only books understand anymore. And we were just women, the keepers of private stories—the men’s voices were in the trees, silenced by saws. But there was also this: on that July day, I don’t mind saying now, I was ashamed: a whale lay gasping on the beach as my mother lay hiding in a blanket, ashamed to show her eyes. She could have left any time. She could have taken us far far away. She knew it. She couldn’t say it ever, but I am saying it now. I spit the sand from my mouth. This is my way to be strong.