I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (14 page)

I keep having to shade my eyes. Ray’s T-shirt is soaked. He walks back to the bench, the open backpack, takes out the whole bag. When he pours it all out over the edge of the pier, five-hundred feet down, Mike’s bones lift up. Phosphorescent. Like the rings around a planet. What is the prayer? Should I be saying a prayer? Maybe Ray and I together make one. The surfers, the corner men, we all watch the glow above the water. It sinks like a river in the ocean. ’Bye, sweetheart, I say inside my auditorium. “Mary said that’s not him,” I tell Ray. Ray says, “Mike always wore this world lightly.” He looks out over the ocean, the horizon. “I like how it opens out,” Ray says. It’s hard to turn away. He hugs me good-bye so many times it’s as though we’re never leaving.

In Florida, especially in August, rain falls like a bucket dumped; it falls out of a sunny sky. You can walk in and out of rain. Humidity a sheen on skin, hair. The watery air smothering, so real rain is a relief. The way it announces itself in the dirt first, dim earth, and then the air smells like stones. The stones love rain too, wake up from their sleep. It’s 1986. At work, I’m back at the busy Winter Park store. I guess the owner thinks I can take it. I’m twenty-four. On my lunch breaks I need a break from the constant talking, the customers and their health problems. Everyone talking about their bodies. People ask me to read their eyes, their faces. Help them do a fast or lose weight or stop sneezing. Sleep, lots of people weren’t sleeping. The people with serious diseases scared me—cancer, MS. I had books, indices, but no medical training. “What should I eat?” they asked. One woman just talks about her elusive doctor boyfriend, the gifts she buys him. And her colon. She finds me hiding down one of the aisles, straightening the rows of bottles. People were always giving up coffee, as if it were stealing or arson. “It drains your adrenal glands,” said a woman who never seemed to age. Customers would confess to eating sugar, dairy. I’d say, “It’s okay.” All the listening makes me dizzy—I forget to breathe. They range up and down the vitamin aisle, asking, “What’s good for me?” Sometimes I’d sit in the
circle of stones in front of the store, stare at the yellow flowers, their hallelujah.

The health food store is separate from the rest of the shopping center. It’s along a perpendicular strip. I have to cross the wide parking lot to go inside the mall. Get away completely. I’d stopped going to Broadway so much for meetings, because some people had started to say, “Hope you’ll open up tonight.” “We know you have some interesting things to say.” I found a new meeting in a little green house just down the street from the Winter Park store. They don’t care if I talk or not. It’s a relief to just sit there and listen.

Two years sober, I got my own apartment. The nice one. Lived alone. The quiet helped, the door that I could shut and lock. I’d moved in with my counselor first, the women who’d run the Navy alcohol treatment program. She’d turned her home into a kind of halfway house for recovering women. She lived there, her teenage daughter, me, and two other women. The first time I went over her house, it was for dinner. Lasagna with meat. I was so nervous, I didn’t tell her I was vegetarian. Just ate it. Once I was out of my parents’ house, in the care of another, my relationship with my parents began to improve. I think they started to trust that I would live. And not living with them eased their attempts to control me. They didn’t see me as an adult, but I stopped being a child and began a kind of perpetual late adolescence.

At work, on my lunch break, I often walked across the tar toward the quiet of the mall. Something heavy fell off of me, like a tire off a car. I didn’t know it was there until I felt the lightness afterward. Nights, in the room at the green house, I could close my eyes while I held someone’s hand, and I’d see my hand in a room of light. Even though I’d been sober more than two years, I kept forgetting that this was my extra life. That I’d died in 1983, so in this life, I could do anything. Sometimes in traffic,
the light would remind me. Not the traffic lights or sun. I’d have my hands on the wheel, and it would feel like my car didn’t have a roof, as if it was a convertible, and light would fall on me, in columns like rain, or a hand touching me. Well-being. Peace. Normally, I shook a lot, a kind of low-level vibrating, a nervous humming. I weighed so little, coworkers, customers thought I was anorexic. Approached me with questions as if they were intervening. “I wanted to feed you hamburgers,” one customer said. I ate, but sometimes felt so terrorized, the food would hurt. I couldn’t calm down. Meetings helped and the light in the car. When heavy things started falling off of me, I didn’t know I’d been carrying them. Didn’t know what they were.

All my boyfriends come from the Winter Park store, one after the other. It was easy for them to talk to me—I’m in the store every day. Cheerful, bagging their groceries. So familiar, they think they know me. One of the Winter Park ex-boyfriends, a beautiful man, is in line to be rung up. I’m at the other register, my back to him. He says, “There are freckles on Kelle’s back—it must be summer.” He says it as though he misses me. “I’m going to France for the summer,” he says. An architect, he’s going to build something. By that time, I’ve lost my apartment and am living with strangers I’ve found in the newspaper, in a three-bedroom house. But I want to live alone. I know I’m being manipulative, that I’m a bad tenant, a risk, but I say, “I could house-sit for you. I could take care of your cat.”

“Okay,” he says. I’m shocked he’s agreed. I’m a terrible housekeeper. But he hasn’t really known me that long. He’s never lived with me. We’d broken up because I fell in love with another customer at the store, a man who made stained glass. When we were going out, the architect had said, “I want to make a commitment to you.” It had felt so planned, as if our relationship was a house he was building. When he asked what I felt, I kept reaching into
an empty room. He was beautiful. But meticulous, cautious. I wanted to mess things up. Once when we were together, he’d forgotten to take out the trash. We were already in bed, falling asleep. “I’ll do it,” I said. Throwing off the sheet. I walked down the stairs, to the deck, dragged the trash can through the grass, under the trees, to the curb. I could see him at the window, watching me naked on the street.

His place is a tree house, three stories up, but only wide enough for one person to live here. He designed it. I’m supposed to pay the utilities and a modest rent. The upstairs I call the Cathedral of Trees because the ceiling is churchy, the walls all windows surrounded by trees. Under the kitchen counter, I come across his will—nothing for me—just my name listed under “People to Notify.” Find $236.13 in coins in a giant Tupperware. I borrow it until the ex-boyfriend comes home. Roll them out and get groceries for a few weeks. It’s fine at first, but when I get down to the dime rolls, the cashiers started rolling their eyes. They won’t take the pennies. The ex-boyfriend doesn’t like the Van Morrison song I put on his answering machine. “It’s getting louder every time I call,” he said. His cat sleeps on my chest. I accidently spill purple grape juice on his couch cushion. The toaster catches fire, and two firemen come by.

But mostly it’s quiet. It’s the first time I’ve been solitary in a long time. My grandfather had died that year. I have his rocking chair at the architect’s house. Laura from work helps me haul it in. Sometimes I miss my grandfather so badly, I can’t stop crying. There’s no one there to stop me. It goes on for hours. I need to touch something my grandfather has touched, sit on the floor with my face in his chair, arms around the arms. Brown upholstery scratchy on my face.

My grandfather came to me in a dream right after he’d died. Still
in the hospital—we stood on the stairs together. He was desolate—but not for me. He was calling for Nana. But I showed up, wearing her apron with all the fruit, orange slices, cherries, lemons on the cloth. I was all he had. He was so tall, he had to lean far down to put his head on my shoulder, crying for her. I told Nana. I said,
he’s looking for you.

I hold onto his rocking chair, rock it until it’s a boat. When I get up from the chair, to wash my face, I forgot myself, as if my body is a coastline. Forgot to forget my soul. I go into the bathroom with the wall of glass, stand there for a long time, and see someone else in the mirror.

Later, I see paintings of it—neophytes looking for their souls. In each painting, a Japanese girl wraps herself in a piece of silk. Sometimes only a band, like a tie around her waist. And the girl leans, her body swirling like a fish or a wave, into a hand mirror, looking for her soul. But I didn’t know how to look, the day I see the woman in the right side of the mirror. Not held there, but the glass is the place I can see her.

She looks exactly like the me I’d wanted to be—eyes, mouth. But beautiful, the fear gone. She said, “I’ve been with you always. Long before now. I’ll be here long after.” She is a companion in the way that you are a companion to yourself. “I’ll always stay,” she said. I don’t know how she talks to me—words more than voice. But she’s my soul. I’m not alone. Ever.

When the architect comes home, angry at the state of things, he says I have to leave. A girl at the Orlando store said I can move in with her old roommate, a painter. A two-bedroom apartment. At night, the new roommate cooks something in his bedroom next door to mine. It smells purple. Sometimes he screams as if he’s being tortured. In the morning, there’s no explanation. He stands next to me in the small kitchen, pouring orange juice in a
glass. Sometimes his son stays over, in the room with the screaming. When his mother shows up, I want to say, “Listen, there’s something wrong. The air smells purple. I don’t know if it’s safe.” I don’t know why the girl from work never mentioned anything strange.

My roommate gets a job painting at one of the topless bars, Circus Circus or the Booby Trap. I think he’s painting scenery—it’s unclear. Guys from the bar start showing up at the apartment. One makes my roommate give him a key. I find a new place to live on the road to school. I’m still working on my B.A. in English at UCF in Orlando. The apartment is cheap. No closet. But there’s a pool. When I tell my roommate that I’m leaving, the guy from the bar shows up at our place with a girl named Kelly. “She’s going to sleep in your room,” my roommate said. Replacing me with someone else with my name. She’s a dancer from out of town; she’s going to work at the bar. In the days before I leave, I go into the bathroom across the hall, the one I share with my roommate. I can’t remember if I look for the woman in the mirror, or if she just appears. I know I have to be willing to see her. She’s there in the glass.

I see her more than once there, for briefer amounts of time than the first time. But now, her face is my face. As though she’s always here, if I’m not afraid to look. When I see her, I know that no one is ever lost. Tommy isn’t lost. Neither is my grandfather. For the first time, I’m grateful for being alive, as an everyday thing. Not just in flashes. I thought I had to become someone I would be willing to approve of, love. I didn’t know I was her already.

I see her one more time, when a coworker leaves the state and lets me rent her condo on a lake. Quiet. It’s funny, these were the condos where Bill used to live—right across the parking lot is his old door. The bathroom has a big glass mirror. I tape poems
around all the edges, but there’s a clear space. When I see the woman in the mirror, I almost tip over. A small window behind me. Two floors up. When I see her, I can’t remember what year it is. Basics, I can’t remember basics. Where I live. The floor slants. I look outside at a street sign to get my balance. I look away.

1.

I’m living alone in the cheap, closetless apartment on Alafaya Trail. Sometimes after work, I get a six-pack of nonalcoholic beer. I know I shouldn’t drink something that tastes like alcohol. That “nonalcoholic” doesn’t mean no alcohol, just a very low percentage. I know people in meetings who’ve gotten drunk on cold medicine, mouthwash. It’s dangerous for me. In these early days, there’s still something self-destructive that won’t let go completely. Soon I’ll run into one of my brother’s old girlfriends in a meeting, and she’ll ask me if it’s okay for her to drink nonalcoholic wine, to bring it to a party. It gives me pause. I’m so used to only considering myself. I say yes, I think it’s okay. Though it nags me even as I’m telling her this, as if there is a part of me that would take back every word. When I don’t see her at that meeting again, or any other, the regret I feel is sickening. She’d been brand new, someone who trusted me to be truthful.

That night after work, I skip my meeting, sit on the barstool in the kitchen drinking a couple bottles down fast. Read lines from Merwin’s poems taped to the refrigerator. I’d found a photo of Merwin in a book from 1968. He’s young, in a flannel shirt, leaning on an old truck. One of his fingers is balanced on the other,
making a circle that rests on the engine grate. It’s sunny, but it must be cold; his sleeves are buttoned to the wrist, trees bent in the wind. Like a farmer, I’d thought, standing in the bright grass with leaves blowing behind him, seeming to fill the bed of his pickup. I find lines from Merwin in Denis Johnson’s
The Stars at Noon
and retype them on my typewriter, tape them up. I’d never been to the poet’s island, though my mother had. I lived on a smaller one as a child, and when my mother came back from the volcano, so happy, with a straw bag clasped with gold and a white muumuu, I knew it was a place I’d never go, like the island of flowers.

In the big, gold chair I took from my parents’ house, I read Merwin’s poems, instead of just the lines taped around the house like instructions. It’s the chair I sat in when I held my son for a few minutes, before my relatives took him away. The last time I saw him. He was four days old. Sometimes my next-door neighbor beats his girlfriend. When I come home from the store, up the stairs, I often have to pass his corridor of friends leaning on the rail, spilling out his front door. My neighbor has a deep scar under his eye. He usually tries to bar my way, inviting me in. I always refuse, so they don’t like me. When I swim in the pool, they yell obscenities my way. In my apartment, I can hear the girlfriend screaming,
Hit me again. Go ahead.
And he does, even though his friends are still there. Her head bangs on the wall behind me.