I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (17 page)

The Shoe Museum is across the street from the mall, but in a dangerous, zigzaggy way that disturbs my parents. As we cross the road, my mom says my dad’s name over and over in an escalating tone, without actually giving him any instructions. I shouldn’t have dragged them here, but here we are. As we are greeted by the Shoe Museum director, I see why the place is closed for tours in the summer. It’s July, and it seems as if it is at least a 120 degrees inside. No air-conditioning. No windows open. I have a few sips
of water left in a bottle in my purse, but I get claustrophobic almost immediately. It’s as though someone already breathed all the oxygen out of the air. They have no staff, only the director, a volunteer, who has opened the museum just for me.

The Shoe Museum director was the vice president of sales for Knapp Shoes and worked there for twenty-seven years. He’s very tall. He shows me the lasts, each different shoe (and size) needing a new wooden last to shape the uppers and the soles on. I hold the red wood in my hand. There are lasts for the Duke Bill Shoe (1875), the Up-Swing Needle Toe Shoe (1885) with a toe like a scythe, the Ralston Shoe (1910) with seven pearl buttons in a Victorian arc, the Needle Toe Shoe (1880), lots more. He shows me the tiny decorative shoes, china shoes, celebrity shoes. He holds an ex-president’s running shoe in the palm of his hand.

When he guides me upstairs to see old clothing that I have no interest in, the heat increases, rising to baking temperature in the attic. I wonder how he can continue to speak. I’m drenched. I’ve emptied the water bottle on my tongue. He is opening drawers full of scattered photos, pointing to outfits on hangers in a back room. “This isn’t the ideal way to preserve things,” he says, and I decide to bolt. I’m so thirsty, whatever I say to him sounds cottony. He follows me back downstairs. At the front door, leaving, it’s my last chance to ask him what he knows. “Can you tell me about the skins for the shoes? Where the tanning took place?” A VP of sales—does he know where I’m going? He says that very few skins came from Brockton, though there were factories for all of the other auxiliary items, the lasts, etcetera. He says most of the skins came from Wisconsin, and Connecticut, I think, but not here. He’s emphatic about that. When we shake hands, and he smiles, for the first time, I don’t know what to say to him. He has two hearing aids, and as I go out the door, he says, “Where are you from again?”

On one of the summer trips back from the cemetery, I’d leaned over the front seat, like a child, rested my head between my parents, and told them the story of the kids with leukemia in Woburn. I told them about the toxic substance, trichloroethylene (TCE), found in the water. My dad said, “That’s copy machine cleaner.” He remembered it from the Navy. He’d been a storekeeper. I said, “TCE was used in tanneries. The lawyer said the tannery dumped TCE, and it went in the groundwater.” My dad was quiet. He said, “All those shoes.” We were all quiet. I hadn’t thought it out before. A tannery treated skins, the skins made shoes. Brockton is the city of shoes. For hundreds of years. That’s all my dad said, except, “I couldn’t stand it if that kid died because we …” He said that. It still bugs me, the “we.”

In 1969, two blind Siamese cats jump from one Formica counter to another in her kitchen. Nana Smith keeps every item in her house in exactly the same place, so the Siamese can find their way. She turns a key, peels a ham out of a tin, a pink body. “I like ham for Christmas,” she says. I’m used to cooked food, an oven. The ham looks like something you’d eat during war or famine—meat that won’t spoil. She has eyes like the blind Siamese, but bigger, blue glare, eyes that exclaim
what are doing what are doing, what’s going on, what what!!
She’s got the cats’ restraint too. The Siamese want company; Nana Smith wants love.

In 1972, her second husband is in the living room, in a wheelchair, watching TV with his back to us. Sitting on the couch, we watch his back, but don’t have a clear view of the TV show. He’d been hit by a car on his way to the mailbox. Tiring of us, he wheels down the dark hallway which seems like a way out, a mysterious road, but probably leads to a tiny bedroom, more quiet. He never spoke to me, never looked me in the face. Now he shares a gravestone with my son, is in fact buried beside him. They share the same name. The man in the wheelchair is the father of my uncle, my son’s adoptive father.

In 1977, when we live on a military base in southern Spain, Mom’s already bought a bottle of Dry Sack for Nana Smith as a
Christmas present. The bottle so uniformly dark it could be ink inside or blood. My brother and I aren’t allowed to drink, but we’d gone to the bodegas on a tour, with Mom. We drank the tiny sample bottles of sherry in the cellars we visited, no drinking age here, and Mom didn’t stop us. I felt her go with the flow. My dad looked at Nana’s Dry Sack. “She can’t drink. Why give her that?”

My mom says, “We always do it. She likes it.” My dad shakes his head. “Then, what do we get her? What does she like?” My parents bought her a porcelain sailor boy, a Lladró figurine. A boy with downcast eyes and white pants that look like thick white tights, who carries a ship at his hip.

In 1979, Nana Smith lives on Howland Street when I am in my first year of college at Bridgewater State College, my parents overseas. She has me over, and opens the door to her bedroom. It’s all pink. Familiar, like my pink canopy bed at home, but overwhelmingly girly. “Here’s a light for you,” she says, switching on a table lamp. The edge of shade, bedding, curtains—everything in the room—feels lacy. She says, “I never wear foundation. It ruins your skin.” I don’t know where she sleeps.

While I’m at Bridgewater, my aunt Julia and uncle Mark, who will adopt my son in two and a half years, take me out to dinner with Nana. In the restaurant, she orders a Shirley Temple. Puts her fingers in the watery grenadine, pulls out a cherry. “I can have a drink,” she says. “One drink. I had one drink the other day.” She’s trying to convince my aunt and uncle she can handle a real drink.

After my son died, Nana came to Florida for a visit. She asked me why no one in our house talks about him. “I’d go crazy if I didn’t talk about him,” she said. The hallway is very narrow, and I can breathe the powder on her face. “I have a picture of him in my wallet. He looks just like you,” she said. She opens her purse and shows me the two babies, one photo in black-and-white, flip, Tommy in color. Me and my son. “Here, you take them,” she said.
Turning out the bathroom light, she said, “If you fall in love again, go on the pill.”

In 1986, Nana sends me a gift: two black Siamese cat sculptures with green eyes. I lost one or broke it or threw it away. The other is at the foot of my bed. Once I was kind to her, thoughtful of her love for pretty things. The way she’d save the bag that held what you’d given her. Hang it from the back of her bathroom door. I’d gone to the mall, and in The Limited, a store where I thought almost exclusively of myself, I had twenty dollars. I bought Nana Smith a silver necklace with a pendant. I saw her wear it once, bright on her chest, on her sweater. Her sisters were circling her in the house. I could tell that she knew that it meant she was loved. Years later, when she dies, her jewelry is found in the cardboard Limited box with the black top. Emptied of the necklace.

In 1998, after my grandmother on the Cape dies, I visit Nana in a massive, low-income building in Brockton, in her LEGO like apartment. I want her to act like a grandmother. I want her to say, “I’m sorry your nana died,” and touch my hair. She brings two dresses out of her closet, says, “I bought them from a catalog.” She’s pleased with herself. The dresses look like triangles. “Are you mad at me?” she asks.

Soon, Nana starts refusing everything—food, TV, conversation, books. Soon she’ll run away and then be kicked out of this assisted living home. She’ll retreat completely into herself in a mental hospital, die two weeks before I arrive. But in the home, I’ve brought her a photo found in an attic in Ireland, of Nana Smith and my dad, as a baby. And another photo of her just married to Ben Groom and pregnant with Frank O’Connor’s son (my dad), and nobody knows this but her, not the men, not her half sister, Anne, who knows everything. She wears a beret, and looks slightly drunk but delicate. Ben behind her, not looking at the
camera, as if he can’t believe his luck, what he’s done. She looks wild, as though she is a quiet animal in clothes. She leans one way, he another, so that the house behind them seems to tip. “It’s you,” I say.

After she dies, I drive to Rockland to find her grave. I don’t know this city, the streets intravenous. The only familiarity is a drugstore chain. “Where is Holy Family?” I ask the cashier at the CVS store. She doesn’t know. The man in green pants in the aisle doesn’t know.

The cashier says, “My dad will know.” She takes out her cell phone. I follow her out into the parking lot while she talks. It’s empty, a gray arena where something used to happen. It turns out Nana’s cemetery is nearby—it’s like one big roundabout. Inside the cemetery gate, I call my dad.

“I’m here,” I say. “Where do I go?” I can tell he’s surprised that I’ve found the cemetery, that I’m near his mother. I can hear that he is surprised to have a daughter who will find his mother. Who brings her flowers.

Once I saw an animal, a llama, just after she gave birth. I’d happened on her, in a clearing of a nearly deserted safari park where the animals come toward you in your car, as if they’re departing Noah’s Ark: camels, elk, wildebeests, pigs, deer, buffalo. Everyone hungry. There aren’t enough visitors with white buckets of feed to hold out their open windows. The animals swarm us, flies on their hides. Dark eye after dark eye pressed to the window I refuse to roll down. But my friend in the backseat is interested in migration, the way things come toward us. He takes picture after picture—the ostrich stretching his iridescent blue neck behind my own, blinking so fast he seems not to blink. The fawns with their blond eyelashes lifting their heads up, toward us, too small to see. I turn around in my seat to see the black nose of a buffalo wet against my
friend’s knuckles. “Or,” he asks, “is migration when they go away? Should I photograph them coming or going?”

He’s the one who first saw the mother and her baby. The back of the mother llama bright red with blood from the birth we’d missed by seconds. But she is casual, still standing. The baby mostly bones and loose flesh, like a bird the way it lifts its front legs and falls. Lifts from the back and falls. Flesh like wings spread out on the ground. A small crying sound from the baby is the only noise. Once or twice, the mother bends her head to the baby. Then she sits down, close by, and lets the baby struggle. When it’s time for us to move on, I’m sorry to leave before the baby can stand. Before that struggle ends. But a woman in a van in front of us had stopped as well. She leans out of a window, as if from a house. Her shirt pink. She’s transfixed by the llama baby’s effort to stand, but as we pass, I meet her eye. She smiles at me like a mother, as though she recognizes me.

In the Rockland cemetery, I take a few turns marked by other stones, other deaths, and I’m there. “I’m here,” I say. I leave a mum on her stone, cream-colored like a wedding dress, and pink flowers above her grave grass, like a little trellis, tell her, “I’m not mad.” I tell her she was perfect, which isn’t true. I mean, I’m sorry that I punished her for resembling me. Afraid the pattern of her helpless life was bred into my genes. Her childishness and passivity. Both of us unmarried, pregnant teenagers. Nana apparently never telling my dad’s father she was pregnant. Marrying another man instead. Her secrecy. Her selfishness in abandoning her kids to the orphanage and to relatives. If she’s selfish, am I selfish too? I never asked her why she left her children. It seemed as though she couldn’t grow up. As if she’d been hurt so much as a child—mother dead, father discarding her—she stayed a child, trying to find someone to take care of her. I used to walk around the lake at night, look at the light in the houses, wish someone would take
me in. It reminds me of Nana telling my dad at seventeen years old that he needed to support her and the rest of the family. I wish she could have grown up. I would like to have known who she was under all that fear. She’s been dead a year, Nana. Grass grown over, but her name’s not carved into the stone. The only way to know she’s here is to remember her.

The shoe is a kind of body. It has an anatomy. Throat, tongue. Vamp, a feather line, shank, heel, welt. The welt has a flesh side into which the sewing goes. A last is the model made for every shoe, every size, like a wooden foot. A puppet foot. At night, I’d run beside the city of shoes, the city where I was born. I wore my first pair of running shoes, bought by my grandmother. Before that I had shin splints, a burning that lifted only when I ran again, in my tennis shoes, so thin I could feel the sidewalk on my soles, tiny pebbles. At school I limped from class to class.

But in my running shoes, in my first year of college, I ran until I ran out of breath. Years before, Rocky Marciano, the undefeated champion boxer, had run a few miles away, in 1950s Brockton, in black boots. Black leather training shoes made on a Muson Military last. They look like war boots. Size 10.5. Heavy, double leather soles. He ran 750 miles in those shoes. Eight-inch blucher pattern with a straight tip: a high shoe with laces over the tongue, modeled after a half boot. To the shins. Open throat. The Rock from Brockton.

I’d leave at midnight to run, a girl in my dorm warning me once against it. When another girl teased her for sounding parental, she said, “Someone has to be a mother.” I wanted quiet, darkness. I’d run past a factory and look up at the dark windows, feel
the charge of someone looking out or bent over a table at a task, someone gone. The dust of their being there. Like when they dig up the ground and find city after city, one layer on top of another. Time right in front of me, inside the brick and the air, the soul of the world.

The day my son was born was the same day that Rocky began his professional career as a boxer. Thirty-four years later. I’m not saying my life’s tied to his, not saying my son’s life is tied. But we intersect like a body, something stitched together. Once, Rocky almost drove over my father’s foot with his car, coming to a halt at the drugstore in Brockton. My father, a child then, jumped back. Rocky said something: “Hey, kid.” Rocky died in a plane crash in Iowa. He was retired, hosting a weekly boxing show. Going home to his wife for his forty-sixth birthday party. But he’s buried near me now—Forest Lawn Memorial Cemetery in Fort Lauderdale, Florida—a ride slightly south on the map.