I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (18 page)

A shoe is mapped. The bottom has an inner sole, a filling like granulated cork. A welt’s a narrow strip of leather sewn to the rib. A sandal has a runner. The sole (leather, pure rubber, resin rubber, or plastic) and heel (nailed or stuck, Cuban, Louis, or wedge), heel lifts, top piece (the walking surface of a heel), toe puff: a reproduction of the toe of the last. Stiffener, shank (metal or wood to reinforce the waist), sock (inserted into the completed shoe with the maker’s name), and eyelets. Hobnail shoes had a short nail hammered into the sole for durability. Sometimes, the nails were placed in a pattern, sometimes the nails spelled words to be left in the ground as a shoe print. A message you could leave behind.

I was seventeen when I went to Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts, after spending almost my whole life on other coasts. But I’d lived the first year of my life in the town next door, Whitman. When I was born, I came home to the apartment, steep
second-story, gray. A salesman had come to the door and sold my mom a stroller that converted into a high chair, and a carriage, and a child’s Formica and chrome table. All in one. She said that when I rode in it, I was the Queen of the Neighborhood. There was a tiny bathroom with no bath. A galvanized tub in the bedroom. On a map, Bridgewater and Whitman are connected by seams with the city next door, Brockton. I was born in Brockton, and my son is buried there. Sewn together.

In 1900, there were ninety shoe factories in Brockton. The Charles A. Eaton Company was in operation then, a shoe factory on Centre Street. It’s just been converted into lofts. I want to get in. But there’s no parking, the building right on the street. I get a machine when I call the sales office. I’d stroll around it, but it’s not a strolling kind of place, few pedestrians. No stores.
The Boston Phoenix
called the city of my birth
a violence-prone, run-down hole
. There’s a plaza I drive through, lost, a white square. Plazas remind me of the women in Argentina who held placards with photos of their missing children, abducted, disappeared under the military dictatorship between 1976 and 1983. The Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. Now in that Buenos Aires plaza, there is a white shawl painted on the ground.

Centre Street takes me to Cary, where I’m hoping to find Calvary, my son’s cemetery with its name spelled out in white stones on a hill. It’s the first time I’ve tried to find it by myself. But I’ve turned too soon, into St. Patrick’s, where only two men walk, two children. One man says, “No one’s been buried here for fifty years.” I feel as though I’ve woken in the future. Driving down Centre Street again, lost, I stop at a pink and brown Dunkin’ Donuts, but the cashier doesn’t know Cary Street, doesn’t live here. I’ve never been able to find my way. Drinking coffee in the parking lot, a circle of air around me, no other cars. It feels like an abandoned land. There’s a blue cross on a building to my right, a hospital,
Brockton Hospital. Where I was born. When I first saw the world outside, I saw this: Centre Street.

I find the grave without flowers. My child in my arms and then, my arms empty. I sit at his grave, his body under the grass in my hands. I talk to him as I did the day he was born. In the rocking chair, before the nurses knew he’d be adopted, after they’d made the beautiful mistake of giving him to me. I can still feel the weight of him. His calm in my arms.

When he died from leukemia, I would think about breast-feeding. That if I’d breast-fed him, he’d have had the natural protection it gives. That it would have given him protection against this city where he died. A city of shoes for two hundred years. What did that do to the water quality?

I don’t know what was in the water when my son was born, lived here, and died. I don’t know if my decision to give him away killed him. Before he was born, I remember looking forward to getting in shape. Then I was bleeding in the shower at the hospital—a shower room at night, the nurses at their stations near small circles of yellow light, my uterus not contracting though I kneaded it with my knuckles. I could hardly stand, naked, blood everywhere. This is how my great-grandmother died, childbirth, in Rockland—another town next door to Brockton. Her name so close to mine, Nelly. Afterward, her children were strewn apart. Nana Smith became a kind of slave, forever lost and childlike, giving her own children away, as I did mine. When I handed my son over, he cried the whole way out. I heard him in the garage, a shoe box attached to the house. I heard him in the car. I hadn’t known my arms would feel stripped down the insides, where our bodies had touched on the outside.

Once I met a woman from another country who came to Florida: Ana. Years before, her brother had died, disappeared on a cruise ship here. She rode a bus to Miami with her video camera.
When she returned to my town, she played images of ships in port, a nightclub with people passing by. She was looking for her brother. Ana had come to say good-bye. I’d never met her brother, but in the face of a boy walking by the camera, the red square of light, I saw the absence of him. I saw how much the evidence meant. The solidity of things, the air where he’d walked.

I need to know the parts of the body to make a shoe, how it’s sewn together. The elementary shoe has three basic parts: the vamp, quarters, and topline. All shoes fall into seven basic types: moccasin, sandal, mule, clog, boot, pump, and oxford. But the fashion wears me down—the silk damask, the French pump. What did the poor wear, the working class? The dead? Coffined in their dress shoes? Who wears rosettes? Men’s embroidered velvet shoes? I need the basics. What did my son wear? Did you save a lock of his hair? Is there a baby book of first things? I can’t ask my relatives these questions. I take three photos of an abandoned shoe factory on Church Street in Rockland. Beautiful red brick, hundreds of small windows laid out like cards, broken where something was thrown. The windows in the factory could be a calendar with a square for each day, the size of a postage stamp already cut, so all you have to do is lift it up to see inside. You could walk right in. I can’t hold anything tangible: the blue sleepers I bought him, a rattle, a toy, anything he touched, except me. When I look in the mirror I see him in my face. But I’m not here to say good-bye. I did that once. I’m here to say hello. I’m here for evidence. The first shoe that was just a braid of grass. Leaves people wore on their feet. The shoes that are magical in stories and supposed to bring luck.

A little more than a year before I get pregnant, when I’m in my first year of college in Massachusetts, my aunt Julia and uncle Mark take me to a party with relatives I don’t know. It’s the fall of 1978. I keep hearing people say that I’m my father’s girl. It’s strange and comforting to be identified that way, a girl belonging to someone. I walk between their bodies like shadows wearing color. I feel like a facsimile, carry a glass in my hand. “Hello,” I say to strangers who are related to me somehow, who look for my father in my face. I’m living in a shared dorm room on a hill. Bridgewater is a teacher’s college that began in 1840, in one room of the town hall basement. My roommate from Salem disapproves of my clothing. Her shirts are long-sleeved, buttoned high; even through her thick sweaters, she sweats dark circles. She throws her arms behind her head, cradles her skull. Lonesome for Salem, she lasts only one semester. I imagine her town full of witches, dark hair.

I do not want to become a teacher. But my mother graduated from this school, and my family is still living in Spain, so this school seemed a safe choice. A thin, dark-haired woman speaks to me at the party. I have to look down. If we’re related, I don’t know how. She works in social services, and tells me about an off-campus suicide prevention hotline training class. It’s an eightweek
course that certifies participants to work the hotline in town. I’ve been thinking of calling the Samaritans myself, the hotline in Boston. But I could go to this class instead. I can learn from both the expert and the sick how not to kill myself.

A few days later, I wander into the building that houses the hotline, ready to sign up for the class. It’s like a barn, high-ceilinged with lots of open space. There’s a desk, table, but little other furniture. A strange man with wolf hair signs me up and asks me out. He buys me wine that is too sweet, like alcoholic Kool-Aid. One night we are in a room with a bed, a quilt. He has the stomach of a beer drinker and heavy eater. An old man. But he’s young and confident that I am attracted to him, though I’m both repelled and drawn to him in a weird, somnolent way. I detach myself from the magnetic pull of revulsion and passivity—and I can hear him behind me, confused at my walking away on the wood floor.

When I show up for the actual suicide class, it’s in a cafeteria. Kitchen closed for the night. We all face front and listen. Each week we role-play with a partner. I turn my chair and face a social worker in training. The other students are here for college credit and see me as a volunteer, someone here simply because of an interest in helping others. The first night, I meet Nicole. When I tell her that I’m seventeen, she says, “If you need someone to buy for you, I can.” This is great news. I hate standing outside the liquor store in the dark with my money in my hand, trying to hand it to strangers, to convince someone to buy a bottle for me. “Do you want to get high?” Nicole asks. Of course, of course I do. She lives in Wood Dorm, with a girl who’s being kicked out of school in a few days. A promising group. The room is full of smoke. It’s relaxing. Three girls share this tiny room. I’ll meet Holly, the third girl, the next time I visit. She’s beautiful with sleepy, kind eyes. Holly finds friendly roommates for me to live with in her dorm, loans
me her clothes, sets me up with her boyfriend’s best friend. There’s no meanness in her.

The room has a bunk bed, one twin. Nicole’s hair is red, messy. She’s a little overweight, but bigger-boned than me. At meals, she eats with her head close to her plate as if she can’t see her food. Her glasses are so thick they make her eyes look blurry, far away. She’s twenty-one. Sometimes she loses her mind—throwing everything in the room up in the air. All her belongings, all her roommates’ things. Anything left out flies to a new place. Holly’s even-keeled. When she comes home after one of Nicole’s fits, it’s the only time she raises her voice. I think the rooms are too small, all that sitting there looking at each other like animals in a zoo.

It’s snowing when I leave Nicole’s room that first night. Snow lands in my hair. I’m happy to have a friend, a source for alcohol, place of welcome where I can get high. I’m the only person walking on the long road through the campus, up the high hill to my dorm. The police car behind me is at odds with my fog. I ignore it, keep walking. “Hello,” the cop says, driving along beside me. “Would you like a ride?”

“No,” I say. I know that I must smell like pot, that I have been enveloped in it, my hair full of smoky molecules. The cop insists. The night is cold and late. I sit in the backseat like a mild criminal, but he could be a kind cabdriver. The car’s warmth quilt-like, and I forget to be on edge. I don’t know how things work here. What the real crimes are. The Bridgewater Correctional Complex, a state prison, is nearby. The prisoners and the students both housed in multistoried buildings. When I go running down the hill at night, the great winding hill that leads to town, and look up at the rise on the other side, I imagine the prisoners. I think one is out there in the dark with me. Our bodies try to get away.

In addition to the prison and the college, the town has a Friendly’s restaurant, Dunkin’ Donuts, a record store that smells purple,
liquor store, convenience store, and a clothing shop. Everyone seems to dress the same: muted and neat in their square-edged pants and shirts. After eight weeks, I complete the suicide prevention hotline course. I’ve missed a couple of classes, but the instructor hands me a printed certificate. I could frame it. I don’t know much about preventing suicide. Nicole is going to sign up to work the crisis hotline. It’s not just for suicide—there is a Rolodex of referral information for other things like birth control, pregnancy. But suicide gets handled in-house. You have to work the hotline in pairs. So Nicole asks if I want to pair with her.

On our hotline night, we stop at the liquor store. Nicole buys a bottle of Kahlúa. In the convenience store, she buys milk. Nicole has the key to the hotline building. It’s just us in the barnlike rooms. We walk upstairs. Set up our drinks. “Go buy us subs at the store,” Nicole says. So I do. I’ve never bought a sub before.

The person behind the counter asks, “What do you want on it?” I don’t know.

I say, “Nothing.” Unwrapping her sandwich, Nicole is disgusted.

“What? Nothing? Haven’t you ever gotten a sub before?” She eats her cheese and meat sandwich dry. In Spain there was a snack shop on the base that sold hoagies. I realize a hoagie is a sub. America feels confusing. It feels fast after Spain, the buildings higher. One night Nicole and I are on duty, and it’s still early, the phone rings. I’m just starting to get drunk. We take turns answering the phone. It’s my turn, so Nicole nods at me. All I’ve done so far is flip the Rolodex, give out phone numbers in a helpful tone of voice. On the phone, a man says, “Who are you?” He tells me that he’s going to kill himself unless he can come to the hotline house to talk to me. He sounds a little bit like he’s flirting. As though he wants to go out on a date with me. A talking-about-suicide date.

I fling the phone at Nicole, the professional, the counselor-to-be. She smirks at me. She knows I can’t handle the mentally ill. Later, she’ll laugh at my cracking, the panicked black receiver in the air between us. But she catches it, and her voice is cool and clinical. She sounds like a nurse. Nicole knows how to save a life. I eat my sub. Drink my Black Russian. I can’t hold the class material in my head. I need a bulleted list, concrete instructions. Maybe I should have raised my hand. Asked a question. I was so worried that my real reason for being in the class would be discovered, I said almost nothing. Simply talking to a stranger, in person or on the phone, was so anxiety-producing, it took almost all my wherewithal just to see or hear them.