Celestial Navigation (26 page)

When Brian came he almost always offered to take us sailing, unless he had brought a girl along or a group of his friends. I was afraid he felt he
had
to offer. “Brian’s here! Brian’s here!” the children shouted when they saw his car,
and I would say, “Stop, now! Hush. I want you to stay in here with me.” They couldn’t understand that. They always crowded around the windows and cheered when he knocked. To make up for them I kept my back to the door and was slow answering and pretended to be surprised when I saw him. “Just stopped by to see what you were doing,” he would say, and usually hand me something—a little patterned rug he had been keeping in storage, towels he said were cluttering up his apartment, most often a sack of some kind of candy for the children. “How about it, kids?” he would say. “Feel like a sail?” He said he needed the help on deck. I didn’t believe him. I was afraid he felt responsible for us in some way. I didn’t want to say no to the children—what other treats did they have?—but usually I stayed home myself and kept the baby. I only went sailing twice all spring. The first time was the first sail I had had in all my life, and I didn’t think much of it. I don’t like to be
floated
to places, willy-nilly. But I stood on the deck with Rachel on one hip, pretending to enjoy myself, and he didn’t keep us out too long. The second time was unplanned. It was in July, after several days of rain. He came late one afternoon when the little ones were off playing somewhere. “I wanted to see if you’d do me a favor,” he told me. “Oh, anything!” I said. I was so glad to have
him
asking
me
for something.

“After rainy spells, if I don’t have a chance to get down here myself, would you row out to the boat and dry my sails for me?”

“Do what?”

“Come out; I’ll show you.”

So we left the baby with Darcy and pulled the dinghy out of the weeds in front of the house, and he showed me how to row. Well,
that
much I more or less knew already, having been to Girl Scout camp on a muddy pond the summer I was ten. But then we reached the ketch and I felt so clumsy. I
hated that clambering up the side, wondering if I might kick the dinghy out from under me or tip Brian into the water when he offered me his hand. Up on deck I shook myself out and smoothed my skirt down and gave a little laugh. “Well!” I said. “Now tell me what to do.” He taught me how to unfurl the sails and run them up. It didn’t look hard. “Let them stay awhile, an afternoon or so,” he said. “Bring the kids if you want.” Then he said, “Let’s take her out, shall we?”

“You mean right now?”

“Why not?”

“But it’s—now it’s almost
evening,”
I said.

“We won’t be long.”

“All right,” I said. I was getting nervous. I felt fairly sure that he wanted to talk about Jeremy. Why else take me away from the children, and suggest a sail in that artificial voice that meant it wasn’t so spur-of-the-moment after all? I wondered if Jeremy had fallen ill, or died, or found somebody else. I felt my hands growing cold, but I didn’t tell Brian to break the news because I was too scared. I just sat there freezing to death on a warm summer afternoon, and Brian started the motor and steered us slowly out past the other moored boats.

When we reached open water he cut the engine. The quiet rolled down over us like a bolt of silk. I could hear water lapping, ropes creaking, Brian doing something complicated to tighten the sails. Oh, everything was so unfamiliar! I felt that this entire scene was foreign and bizarre, some trumped-up substitute for the world where Jeremy lived. Every move that Brian made, even the tone of his voice and the way his beard ruffled and parted in the wind, was
makeshift;
nothing like Jeremy at all. When he came to sit down beside me the sheen in the unknown fabric of his shirt made me want to go home. He laid an arm across my back and his hand rested on my shoulder—a big, wiry hand, as unlike Jeremy’s as a hand can
get. Now, I thought, is when he will say it. They shield you and brace you before they tell you, as if the blow they are about to deal is a physical one. I knew all about it. (Don’t ask me how.) I swallowed and waited, and hoped that he wouldn’t feel me shudder when he started talking.

Only he didn’t. He didn’t talk at all. First I thought he was waiting for me to prepare myself, and then I thought he was having trouble finding the words. And then, when the silence had gone on for several minutes, I gave him a sidelong glance and saw him sitting perfectly relaxed in the orange light, one hand loose on the tiller and his eyes on the mainsail. He wasn’t looking for words at all.

Well! I was too surprised to be angry. Where were all those thin blondes that came visiting at the gallery or sauntering down to his dinghy in their crisp white bellbottoms? Or was he, perhaps, just laying an arm around me out of bachelor’s habit? I am not the type to jump to conclusions. I moved away, rising to peer off the stern of the boat as if I had seen something interesting. “Come here and sit with me, Mary,” Brian said. I was afraid I might laugh. He seemed so sure of himself, giving directions that way—it was a tone I wasn’t used to. It didn’t seem to have anything to do with me. I stayed where I was, staring at the streamers of the sunset in the water and fighting back the laughter and the tears that were swelling in my eyes. “Well,” said Brian finally. “Shall we head back?”

Going home, he used the motor all the way. Then when he had tied the boat to the mooring again he furled and bound the sails in silence. I wondered if he were angry. The only friend I had nowadays. And with all that I
owed
him! There suddenly seemed to be so many complications to life, so many tangles and knots and unexpected traps, that I felt too tired to hold my head up. I dropped like a stone into his dinghy, pretending not to notice the hand he held out to me. I sat
slumped over with my elbows on my knees while he rowed us ashore. Then as we touched land, as I was stepping past him while he steadied the dinghy, he said, “Mary.”

The sun had set by now. In the twilight his voice seemed closer than it was, a little furry behind the beard. Whatever he was planning to say, I didn’t want to hear it. I spun around and smiled, giving him a good brisk handshake. “I certainly do thank you for the boat ride!” I said. “And I’ll be sure to tend to those sails, Brian, if we happen to have a rainy spell.”

But he held onto my hand and looked straight into my eyes, not smiling back. “Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you,” he said. And after a minute: “Good night, Mary.”

That’s what they say in soap operas: Don’t worry, I’m not going to rush you. The romantic, masterful hero with the steady gaze. People don’t say it for
real
. There are no heroes in real life.

I went back into the house and found the children grouped around Rachel, who was standing. Not unsupported, of course—she had two fistfuls of the couch cover—but it was the first time she had managed it and they were all excited. “Come watch,” they told me. “Sit, Rachel. Sit down. Show Mom how you do it.” They uncurled each of her fingers and tried to fold her up, but she wouldn’t bend. She stiffened her legs, refusing to return to her old floor-level existence. I had forgotten how desperately babies struggle to be vertical. Always up, away, out of laps and arms and playpens. Why, in no time she was going to wean herself! All my children lost interest in nursing once they could walk. They took off out the door one day to join the others, leaving me babyless, and for a few months I would feel a little lost until I found out I was pregnant again. Only now, it wasn’t going to be that way. I hadn’t considered that before. I stood staring at Rachel, my very last baby, while she fought off all those grubby little hands that were trying to reseat her. “Look, Rachel,” they
said, “we just want you to show Mom. Sit a minute, Rachel.”

For the first time, then, I knew that Jeremy was not going to ask us back.

Now it was deep summer, and the air under the tin roof was so hot that we spent most of our time outside. I bought the younger children an inflatable wading pool. They stayed entire days in it, splashing around in their underpants, but Darcy was too old for that kind of thing and she had trouble amusing herself. I would find her sitting in the scrubby brown grass, under the glaring sun, frowning at the river. She was so
serious
. “Why don’t you take a walk, honey?” I said. “Pick us some flowers for the dinner table.” Then she would look straight at me, narrowly, as if she were trying to figure something out. I thought probably she wanted to ask what we were doing here. She was old enough, after all, to see how strange it was. She had been yanked out of a school she loved; she had been separated from Jeremy without even telling him goodbye, and in some ways she was closer to Jeremy than any of the others were. But it was the others who asked the questions—when would they see him, and what was he doing that kept him so busy, and could they bring him back a present of some kind? Darcy kept quiet. “Why don’t you head over to the boatyard and see what’s going on?” I asked her. But if she did she took Rachel with her, as if she couldn’t imagine doing anything purely for her own enjoyment. She set the baby on her little sharp hip and walked off tilted, with her head lowered, plodding along on dusty bare feet. The knobs on the back of her neck showed and her legs were all polka-dotted with mosquito bite scabs.

Coming here was the most selfish thing I have ever done.

In the evenings I heated kettles of water on the hot plate and sponged off the little ones. Then I dressed them in fresh
underwear—I hadn’t brought anything so inessential as pajamas—and sent them to bed. Darcy sat up reading movie magazines borrowed from the steelworker’s daughter. The whole house had the sharp smell of insect spray. Moths were pattering against the sagging screens and I felt as if I were coated with a thin layer of plastic, I was so salty and sweaty. It was the hardest time of day for me. “I believe I might go for a walk,” I would tell Darcy. “Will you keep an ear out for the baby?” Then I would step into the dark and go down to the water’s edge, and slip the dinghy from its tangle of weeds. All alone I would row out to the ketch—me! so landbound! It was the only place I could get free of the cramped feeling, those masses of hot little bodies tossing in a tiny cube of space, sticking to the red vinyl mats. To escape from that I was even willing to cross the black water and make the climb from the dinghy to the deck, trusting my weight to this mysterious object that somehow managed to keep itself upright fifteen feet above solid earth.

Now there were fat little orange life vests heaped all over the deck—six of them. Brian had brought them out one Saturday, laying them before me one by one like an Indian warrior laying skins before his maiden’s tent. Five would have been bad enough, but six! That implied we would be here until Rachel was old enough to sail too. “Oh, Brian,” I said. “Well, I—that’s very nice of you but I really think the regular life preservers were fine, it’s not as if they go with you all that—” You would never have guessed how often I pictured five of my children drowning simultaneously. At the moment all that worried me was Brian, his brown eyes so gentle and amused above the beard—so
confident
.

Jeremy’s eyes were blue. Brown eyes didn’t seem right any more.

In the Gothic novels Guy used to buy me the heroine was always marrying for convenience or money or safety from
some danger, and when she was proposed to she took pains to make that clear. “I must be honest, Sir Brent, I do not love you.”

“Oh, I understand that perfectly, my dear.” Then later, of course, she did begin loving him, and everything ended happily. I wish I had been honest. I accepted Jeremy because it was all I could think of to do at the time, and although I believe he knew that we never discussed it in so many words. I was trying to be so
delicate
with him. My first mistake. One day he said, “Mary, do you love me?” He said, “I need to know, do you?” And I said, “Yes, Jeremy. Of course I do.” Well, I did have a sort of fond feeling. When he brought me that first bouquet of chicory and poison ivy my heart went right out to him, but not in that way. Then after we had been together a while it seemed as if something crept up on me without noticing, and one morning I watched him stooping to fumble with Darcy’s broken shoelace and the love just came pouring over me. Only by then, of course, there was no way to tell him. He thought I had been loving him for months already. Was that why things went wrong?

For we never got it straightened out. When I tried to show how I felt it seemed I flooded him, washed him several feet distant from me, left him bewildered and dismayed. Sometimes I wondered, could it be that he was happier when I didn’t love him back? It seemed all I could do was give him things and do him favors, and make him see how much he needed me. The more he depended on me the easier I felt. In fact I depended on his dependency, we were two dominoes leaning against each other, but did Jeremy ever realize that?

Once he made a piece showing a white cottage with a picket fence and roses on trellises, set on a green hill. At first you might think it was a calendar picture. The hill was so green, the cottage so white. “Oh!” I said when I saw it. “Well, it’s very—it’s not exactly
like
you, Jeremy, is it?” Then I
came closer, and something disturbed me. I mean, it was
too
green and white, and the sky was too blue. The hill was too perfect a semicircle, and the pickets of the fence marched across the paper like gradations on a ruler. I felt that he had twisted something, and yet I couldn’t say what. I felt that in some way he was insulting me, or protesting against me. Yet I don’t think he knew that he was. “Jeremy—” I said, and turned to look at him, but I found him punching red paper circles to make perfect flowers, and I could tell from his frown that that was all he was thinking about.

He has no sense of humor but I never understood why that should be important. He has always been either too much removed from us (shut away in body and in spirit, cutting burlap) or too much with us (smack underfoot from dawn to dark, when other men are busy in some office). And I won’t try to convince anyone that he is handsome. Nor that he has what they call “personality”—watch some visiting neighbor woman stammer when he fixes her with his worktime gaze, as if he were wondering why she doesn’t leave when in fact he is not even aware that she is there. On top of that we are separated by years and years, although with Jeremy that never mattered as much as it might have with someone else. He is not really a product of his time. When I was a toddler, for instance, other men his age were fighting World War II, but Jeremy wasn’t. I don’t have any proof he even knew about the war—not that one, or the one we are going through now. Nothing outside touches him. Sometimes he seems younger than I am, as if
events
are what age people. I remember when his sisters came to meet me. We were having tea in the parlor and they were discussing dead friends and relatives. I couldn’t take my eyes off them. They were so old! They had that reverence for the past—forever returning to skate back around its edges, peering down, fascinated by its cold and pallid face
beneath two feet of water. Repeating all they said in that doddery, old-lady way. (Jeremy did that too but I had never noticed before.) I looked from one to another. I felt like a very small girl at a tea party with three ancient relatives. I began to be shy and tongue-tied. What was I doing here? How could I have anything to do with this elderly man? But when they left he stood hugging himself at the door with his face all forlorn and I felt he was a two-year-old in need of comfort. “There now,” I told him, “won’t you come back in? Have another cup of tea.” And I laid my hand on his soft limp home-clipped hair and pressed my cheek against his, and felt far older than he would ever be.