I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (10 page)

That summer on the Cape, when someone would notice me standing in the grass, speak just to me, I came into focus. Materialized. Someone used to call me cloud girl. Someone called me ocean girl. Summers, I spent hours in the sea every day, voices calling me in to dry off, to eat something, go home. When I let go, the ocean carries me. Floating on my back, I listen to its quiet, blue voice. Underwater, no one can reach me.

I didn’t speak much in adult company. Unless someone spoke to me, I didn’t seem to exist in that world. My responses were always a stumble, but I was so glad to be spoken to directly, to appear in between disappearing.

Even as an adult, even sober, I often feel invisible. In 1999, when I get a job working for an opera company, I meet Pauline at a morning get-together for people who work at Central Florida arts organizations. She’s leaning on the back of an auditorium seat and laughing. Her face is bright, there’s a crowd around her. When it’s time to pair up on a task, Pauline sees me. I can feel myself appearing before her, becoming more solid. She chooses me.

She invites me to the place where she works—a center for grieving children. It’s selfish and secret, really, my going to visit. I want to know how to grieve.

The center is a three-story house with lots of wood-floored rooms. The offices seem as though they’re in bedrooms of the house, as if you could take a nap in between typing. Pauline introduces me to the staff; then the two of us go into what would have been the living room—now a reception area. She’s going to play a video to show me what the grief sessions are like. It’s quiet. We’re sitting on two separate couches, the TV screen to my right, against the glass wall.

It’s only children in the video, in a circle. The camera focuses on one child talking. Then another child. Before I sat down to watch, I’d been shaking hands, smiling, I’d been a colleague and an arts professional—“I’m interested in volunteering,” I’d said. The director had smiled, a short woman with a meticulous hairstyle piled high, her suit a pastel casing—she reminded me of Easter candy. There is period of training required to volunteer. It seems manageable to me.

But sitting alone with Pauline, I hear the first child in the video begin to speak about the person she loves who died. When the
child speaks in a calm, slow voice, I know she knows the person isn’t coming back. That the only thing left to do is to sit in the circle and talk. I imagine what must have come before that—the blow that quieted her. Her words erase all the architecture I’ve arranged inside. Without my realizing it. So that when the second child speaks, I can’t lean against a wall, find a room to hide inside. Pauline sees it coming, reaches for the tissues. But I’m pulling them out of the box like endless white scarves in a magic trick. The living room is like a roundabout—I can’t see where to go. I would run to the bathroom, the front door, but I’m revolving. My face hot and red, everything blurs. I just want to leave, to never see this place again, nor Pauline who now sits on the edge of her couch. But she doesn’t try to make me stop, and her quiet waiting gives my breathing time to regulate, shame burning less.

“Would you like to see other rooms?” Pauline asks. I appreciate that she acts as though I’m calm enough to walk around. Pauline continues the tour. We walk through one of the doorless doors into a room of dress-up clothes, sand trays, toys. She said that the volunteers are taught to notice what the child is doing and say it out loud. Things like, I see you’re wearing a purple hat, or I see you’re playing with two cowboys. She said it’s what a child wants most, that noticing. I don’t know if Pauline told me this story or if it was in the video: a boy filling plastic cups until they brim with water in a tub, using great care, as if he’s carrying hot coffee across a crowded room, scrutinizing drops, watching the fill and pour, over and over. Someone could say something like, “You’re filling up the orange cup.” He had scalded his baby sister in a bathtub. But now I can’t remember the sister, not if she lived or died. I can only see the boy trying to get it right and save her. In the room I see an empty bathtub, but there wasn’t one there. In the room I see the boy.

When Pauline walks me to my car, I lean against it for a second, steady myself on a familiar object. She asks if I’ll come to her
house for dinner, with her and her husband and her husband’s brother. Later I’ll tell her, “I couldn’t believe you’d ask me to your house after I broke down like that.”

“That’s when I decided I liked you,” she said.

Her noticing. In 2009, working at the artists-in-residence center, I see a child dancing alone in the amphitheater. She’s asking, “Are you watching, are you watching?” Not moving again until her father standing nearby nods yes.

El Paso is where I begin to speak up for myself. Cut off from the coast, from a beach within walking distance, I’m lonelier than I’ve ever been. Here, someone will demand to hear from me and won’t back off. In the square yellowed rooms of the military hospital on the base. A couch for waiting our turn. Some ailment I can’t recall. Army all around. My mother sits beside me with her index cards penciled with things she doesn’t want to forget. On the hospital wall is a poster for birth control. A thrill—that here I can leave childhood soon, be free. But I’m only in eighth grade. I imagine sex as a kind of marriage, a whiteness.

Called by my last name, “Groom,” and my mother and I stand, walk into an office. I am south of the doctor, or north. The doctor in the middle, my mother facing him. I am in another quadrant. Once a poet said she thought it was strange we had two eyes, a mouth. I know what she meant, the mouth could be a wound, a petal cut open. The dark a kind of bleeding.

The doctor asked what was wrong with me, and my mother tells him. He asks me, “How do you feel?” and my mother answers him again. I remember his turning to face me, to look in my face, his saying, “No, I want to hear it from Kelle.” If I could play an instrument, I would breathe into it for him, the mouthpiece on my lips, embouchure. The mouth of a river.

I wanted to tell him that someone else always did everything better than me. My mother especially. I wasn’t allowed to use the
kitchen or cook; I never washed a dish; the washer and dryer were off limits; I never cleaned anything. I lacked most practical living skills. White index cards with instructions littered the house, like “Do Not Touch” scotch-taped to the air conditioner. School was mine, books. Silence. I look at the doctor, his face that I can’t remember—the warm color, he wasn’t old. Sitting on his round silver seat, having rolled it to face me, skating to me. I feel thrilled again. That isn’t what he meant. My voice so far back, so unexercised.

I don’t know if I tell him anything, some stumbling awkward collection of words, or if I defer to my mother. But he’d asked me, my voice is the one he wants, irreplaceable. Inarticulate. It didn’t matter, the definition of who is best, who is most competent—whatever that is, it isn’t me. Right then, skill doesn’t determine who gets to talk. “I want to hear it from Kelle.” A spiraling inside my chest, low, below my heart, and upward, a dust storm, some energy headed toward my throat, my mouth.

He’s a military doctor, efficient, detached, fairly cold. I feel like something on a slide, a slab, when he looks at my body. But he knows it’s wrong to have another speak for me, at fourteen. At least he knows I have information about myself.

I don’t want to talk about them, all their talking around me, my circling down into a book in my lap. Going into that world, with the whirl of my family around me. The yellow pencil on the round kitchen table. And I don’t feel I have the power to pick it up. Sitting in the chair staring at it, unable to reach out. As if someone else has to hand it to me. The pencil could be across a river. I could be a cloud. An indicator for silence. Here are the cloud forests: a dinner at a long table with the family I saw during the summers. Lining each side. Someone speaks to me directly, asks a question from the other side of the table. The surprise of it opening my mouth. But no words come out. It’s different being asked
to speak if I’m unaccompanied—even if I stumble, I can’t abdicate completely. But here I’m surrounded. A relative says, “Kelle doesn’t like to talk; we talk for her.” And she answers the person’s question. There is a little laughter, as if this was cute, rather than a sickness. The person’s question is probably if I like school or how old I am, and those are questions others can answer. But when another person speaks for me, it isn’t just relief I feel, it’s a falling backward into darkness, as if I’m a portrait, and they’re the living.

After Tommy died, when I was trying not to drink and failing, I starting going to a new meeting at a church in a quiet neighborhood, St. Richard’s. A big meeting with lots of people my age, young. Afterward, outside on a sidewalk or road, I walk with someone older who teaches some kind of class. He said, “You have no social skills.” He said it like “You have no clothes.” I want to protest. I think he means that I can acquire them, like learning to multiply, divide. But he looks at me like the El Paso doctor did, like something on a slide. The coldness makes it impossible to ask him a question, to ask for help. I have the sense that it would involve ropes and climbing, group activities with everyone clamoring for notice, to be seen. Competition. When I go back to drinking again, I can speak. The fear unlocked. When I drink, I need people and don’t hide it—it feels as if I’m joining the living, speaking. In El Paso, there are sky islands in the mountains above the desert—so isolated they make their own world. We drive out of there in snow, a camper chained to the back of the station wagon—three days looking out the window at other cars, highway, the caverns I’d never seen—and when we get to Florida, fling the doors open on another military base, it’s warm. We’re near the sea. I can breathe again. All I want to do is get into the ocean. I’m thirsty for the salt. It’s like coming back from an alien planet where even the main attractions are underground like graves—stalactites, water made of rock.

In July 1965, I was the flower girl at the wedding of my mother’s brother on the Cape. I had just turned four. My mother drove me to Boston and bought me a beautiful blue dress that touched the floor, spilling out in waves; I wore the ocean in the shape of a girl. When I walked alone down the church aisle, my dress carried me. It was like coming home to the ocean after those months in the desert—I felt like myself. Everyone turned to see. What Pauline had said a child wants most. It means I’m here.

When the doctor in El Paso had turned to me when I was fourteen years old, asked me to speak, I’d started to realize that my voice could matter in the world of adults. That I didn’t have to be powerless and dependent. An energy had spiraled up, but it wasn’t something I knew how to do on my own. I felt amorphous, like a cloud or the ocean. At home, in school, with relatives, my passivity seemed a good thing. I was no trouble. But five years later, when I’m pregnant, I won’t tell anyone my fears about hurting my son; when he’s dying, I won’t be able to call my aunt and uncle and ask to see him, or even ask if I can go to the funeral. Even later, when I’m researching the city where my son lived, concerned about environmental hazards and any possible link to his leukemia, I’ll be quiet in my asking. Almost apologetic. In El Paso, for the first time, I had tried to speak up for myself.

Sometimes I wonder if it wasn’t a city that killed my son, or even my giving him away. I wonder if what killed him was my silence. All that falling backward into myself, unable to face anger, annoyance. Unable to try. Here, take it, my voice, my life, my child, here, take it.

My family moved from El Paso to a Florida beach town in 1975. I enrolled at the junior high. Luckily, a few kids my age lived on the base. A little circle of girls to hang out with.

It was still warm enough in the dark to swim naked in the ocean. A ravenous sea bird looks no different at night. No moon. There would be reports at school, but who cared. We were in the water. In daylight, someone is always trying to catch and tie you, rope circling overhead. A wave folds back on my chest like a lapel. I’m small enough to be held in the hand of the ocean, so the ocean holds me. Laughter just a way to orient ourselves in the dark, a jubilant echolocation. No one had yet aimed a knife at me, diagrammed an entrance. My grandmother said the salt water could heal anything. I never went so far that I couldn’t come back, the ocean full of crosses. Beneath the waves there is only one song.

We live on a barrier island, surrounded by river and ocean, floating—the only way off is a bridge. Some nights we stand beside the baseball diamond built between our streets. The yellow vapor lights make the field like day. The boring game, the boys in uniforms. The stadium is something to climb, boards wobbly. Below, the women’s bathroom is a cave engraved with drawings. Four girls and a bottle. A boy must have given it to us, someone’s older boyfriend. It’s just beer, but I’ve never had alcohol. I’m
afraid of losing control. So when it’s my turn, I pretend, hold the bottle between my lips, lean back, and block the bitter liquid with my tongue. “You just took a sip,” someone says, suspicious that I’m not participating equally in the beer drinking. It’s supposed to be exciting. I think I take the bottle back just to please whoever spoke. Lean back, block. I’m afraid if I don’t watch out, I’ll climb to the top of a house, jump off. Die in an aerial display. I know what happened to the girl in
Go Ask Alice
. But I don’t know the difference between acid and alcohol—I don’t know what anything can do.

In French class, Sharee chooses me as her friend. She gives me Victor Hugo’s poem, the easy one, in a competition for ninth graders, held at a university on another coast. She takes the harder one, for tenth graders, lets me get the ribbon. We are
l’école numéro huit.
Together, we climb a statue of a man, fling our arms out. Sometimes we just sit in the grass at night. Once when it’s getting dark, she says, “Your teeth are so white.” Next door is a boy we don’t like much. Not actively, he just loiters on the periphery in too-short running shorts, falling into view like some kind of pale shellfish. He has a party one night, the boys with motorcycles invited. They are all brothers, ranging from men in their twenties to boys younger than me. The night of the party, Sharee has to babysit at a neighbor’s house. I keep her company there.