I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (22 page)

There are sound worlds we can’t hear unless someone brings them into our register. After we’ve talked for a long time, the boy says, “I’m going to sleep for a little while, but I’ll be back.” It is so considerate—to tell me that he’s going to close his eyes, so that I don’t feel shut out. A little kindness. He listens to music—I can hear it, faraway voices. When his leg leans against mine in sleep, I’m asleep. If you live a life with another or many, maybe it’s nothing, maybe you wouldn’t even notice it. Like the leaning of a suitcase. The closest I can get to my son’s body is to touch the grass over his grave. When I wake up, the boy’s leg resting against mine brushes away years of dirt. Like a spell.

I remember the monastery near Dublin where the monks couldn’t talk all day, except while walking in a short corridor—having to say everything in those moments. And the castle in Killarney where the rich people who’d once owned the place slept sitting up in bed in case of fire, the guide said, so that smoke would have to rise higher to kill them. The boy and I slept like them. It was just a flight, city to city, but I don’t know how it’s done, how we’re carried in the sky, set down somewhere else.

At the end of the trip, I stand up fast in the aisle while the boy is still sitting, fit myself in the aisle between the others. But I hand him a book with poems for my son. He unzips his bag, packs the book, zips it back, all the while looking at my face. Something has shifted, and he looks surprised. He talks, but his voice sounds underwater. In baggage claim in Boston, I see the boy standing with his father, the father staring at me as if he would like to speak. His mouth is open.

I like to think of the book traveling with the boy, home to Australia, my voice on the other side of the world. I had a teacher who fell in love with an Australian playwright. The playwright wrote a radio drama called
I Walked into My Mother.
She sent me the tape. Aboriginal children were taken from their parents and given to white people to be raised. So the children didn’t even know their parents. One of the children walked into his mother without knowing her. As if a mother is a door.

There is something I meant to say to the boy. It has to do with the Navy’s alcohol treatment center that I attended after I gave my son away. The sailors had to do psychodramas in the cafeteria. There was a little dais, like a raised white starfish, but flat enough for chairs. “You don’t have to do it,” my counselor had said. As if my drinking was less serious since I was so young, my job not on the line. I was relieved. I watched one sailor stand on the starfish as himself, with another sailor who took on the role of his dad. What was surprising is how quickly the sailor saw his dad in the other sailor. His voice heated. How when the other sailor spoke, the son heard his father. There was yelling—the son had questions to ask. I wondered how the dad sailor answered him, standing so close, unprotected. The son still stranded, but when the other sailor reached out to him, you could see it was the father who held him. Sometimes when I see a boy who could be my son’s age, if he’d lived, I think about reincarnation again. I
think, it could be him. But with the boy from Australia it’s something else too. When he spoke to me, leaned so close, I was still stranded, but could feel something of who my son might have been. Kind, relaxed, a reader. I didn’t know how to talk to the boy when we’re back on the ground—I rush past him, as if I have somewhere to go. Worried I’ll make a misstep, and the boy or the father will think I’ve attached too much importance to a conversation in flight.

The night my son died, someone must have called the house. Did I hear the phone ring? It was May 27, 1982. I had turned twenty-one just a few days earlier. He died at 5:30 p.m. I was likely in the shower then, washing my hair. Getting ready to go over to Sophie’s. From my closet, I take a silver dress. Carry it to the living room, the break behind the easy chairs and breakfast table. Unfold the ironing board. My dad is in one of the chairs, facing the TV. When I iron, silver metal on my silver dress, no one yells. Even though it’s clear I’m going out. No one threatens me, reminds me of my curfew. My dad’s face is soft when he watches me talking while I iron out the wrinkles. He’s holding on to what I don’t know, so I can live in the world not knowing for a while. “I hope you have a good time,” he says. My parents never say that to me anymore. I’m nervous, chattering about the beach, my friend from work, her boyfriend’s band that we’re going to go hear on the pier. I’m afraid someone will stop me, and I need to go out. My dad is speaking to me kindly, as if I am another daughter. Someone who can be trusted.

My son’s burial was June 2. No one told me. It’s on the death certificate. There is a box that says, “Type of Disposition.” Underneath, someone wrote in block letters: “BURIAL.” The next box says, “Date of Disposition.” The date is written here. There
is another box that says, “Informant—Name and Address.” My uncle’s name is here. In the Relationship box is written “Father.”

With a stick of chalk, I draw a circle around you. When water is taken away, drink from the cup of my hands. When my hands are cut off, eat from my mouth. Remember, go only as far as the sky is blue.

May 27 was a Friday, and that Friday night a girl I worked with at the train car restaurant got her boyfriend Al to put me and Sophie on a guest list. An earlier night, when the girl and I had been working the hostess stand, she’d told me she’d been raped when she was younger. There were no customers just then. In the dim light of the service bar, she stood close to the wall. It seemed like the wall of her house, the window a man had climbed in. She’s a small girl, black hair to her waist, straight-backed like a chair. She spoke with no embarrassment, no shame. “I pressed charges,” she said. “He went to jail.” We wore matching outfits, black Dan-skin leotards and skirts, ballet slippers. As if we were going to class. I couldn’t imagine how she had survived that, thought it would just carve a person out. I couldn’t ask her any questions. Just listened, and then it felt weird to stop listening, greet customers. Ask, “How many for dinner?”

Sophie and I drive to Daytona, an hour’s drive. At the pier, two bands share a tiny dressing room. It’s empty at first, just us, the girl, and Al. The girl applying shiny blue eyeshadow up high on her eyelids. She says, “I’m sorry about Dave hitting on you. It really makes me mad that he’d try to pick you up, knowing you’re a friend of mine.” She looks like a tiny princess in her cloak of dark hair fringed at the ends, cobalt glitter, regal bearing. We’d passed the rest of the band in the bar on our way backstage.

“Oh, it didn’t really bother me,” I said.

“He’s just about engaged,” the girl said.

“Oh.” I envy how the girl seems to live in a world where people
behave. How she has standards for behavior and gets offended when they’re broken.

“No,” Al said. “He and Sheila broke up again last week.” The door opens, and the band files in. Dave squeezes between me and Sophie on the couch. I try to wriggle my arm out from under his.

He smiles. “What’s the matter? You aren’t afraid of me.”

I try to look bored. “No.”

“Good. I’m glad to hear that.” He hands me a quart bottle of Jim Beam. “Here.” I wish he wouldn’t look so amused, smirky. He twirls a piece of my hair. I show off, chug several swallows straight from the bottle. Hand it back. He laughs. The club’s manager opens the dressing room door and peers in. He wears flared polyester pants and a pale green T-shirt with the band’s logo on it. Thick dark hair falls to his shoulders in carefully hair-sprayed layers. “Watch that guy,” Dave whispers. “When he looks at something, he moves his entire upper body in that direction. He never moves just his head ’cause he’s afraid of messing up his hair.”

The next morning, I come to, with Dave, in a quiet house in what looks like countryside. His house, I guess. I remember a white closet. I see the tiny white swans on my hips, scars from when I was pregnant with Tommy. Windows, and outside fields and fields. It’s nothing like Orlando or Daytona. As if we’ve crossed state lines or gone to another country. I’ve never seen a place like this. A house in the center of grass, no others in sight.

I don’t call home. No one knows where I am. After two days, I come back. I don’t remember how. No one is home at my parents’ house. It’s so quiet. Air-conditioner hum. Go in my bedroom to change clothes, gather a few things up to take with me, in case there’s yelling. My gold carpet is strewn with thick pieces of pink plastic, like fingers and toes. My mom had bought thick, solid plastic shoe racks for me to match my pink canopy. The night my
son died and I disappeared, she’d gone in my room. Taken each shoe rack and ripped them to pieces. But the shoe racks weren’t rippable—even scissors wouldn’t cut through. Maybe a big knife, but it would be hard work. I don’t know how she did it with her bare hands. I don’t know my son has died. I’m terrified she can be so mad at me.

One minute I’m alone, the next my parents appear. Not mad. I can’t figure it out—I’d been gone for days, I hadn’t called, the destroyed shoe racks. My dad said, “Tommy died. Friday night.” I don’t remember screaming. We’re standing by the long kitchen counter, by the phone. My dad puts the phone book in my hands, says, “Tear it,” when he sees my hands are tearing at the air. He said, “Your mother did it with the shoe racks.”

Mark and Julia come back to our house in Orlando after my son dies. They quit their jobs, buy a travel trailer, and drive around the country. One day, they just show up our door. Spend the night. In the morning, they’re leaving secretly. I’m still in my pajamas, but I hear them. I catch them by the side door to the garage. The way they’d left with Tommy. “Didn’t you want to say good-bye to me?” I ask. Mark and Julia both said words I don’t remember. Nothing about my son. Mark leans his head down a little, as if giving in to something. It must be nice to be two people, to always have someone else there who can talk if you can’t. Mostly, we just look at each other. No one says anything to me about Tommy. Nothing at all.

Years later, I meet a woman in a writing workshop whose adopted brother had died in a car accident. She wrote that her father thought about the birth mother all the time. And the woman said, “Dad. All the time?” And he said, “Yes.” He thought about the mother showing up at his house and asking about her son. He thought about what could he say to her. Our teacher at the workshop had been concerned for the father. He said, “ALL
the time? Why doesn’t she try to get him some help?” But I was thrilled. The birth mother wasn’t invisible. She wasn’t a receptacle. I thought if this mother can matter so much, maybe I can matter. Maybe my aunt and uncle think about what they will say to me when I show up at their door.

1.

Before I see her, I drive from the beach to Orlando. I take a plane to Boston, I’m on a bus to the Cape. At 4 p.m., it’s dark out. An hour later, it could be midnight. It’s Thanksgiving 2009, and I’m going to my aunt and uncle’s house in Falmouth. On the bus, my heartbeat is so frantic, I wonder if I could have a heart attack.

Pale blue water tower—Brockton houses through trees. On the bus, the window is split with a silver bar, and I keep looking from one to the other, trying to see through the trees—
you’re in there, you’re in there. Infant
from Latin
infans
, unable to speak. The cold that comes through the glass is calming. An almost extinct language was spoken here. The bones in my face lean into it. Then it’s Rockland, then Mansfield, over the bridge—the bridge! The lights on aisles of water. The water coming toward us, and the bridge carries us, holds us. I have a postcard of Abraham being promised a son, three angels—all of it surrounded by broken red glass. The wings of the angels feathery like birds. Everyone seems to float above the ground. Over the bridge I can breathe more easily—this is near home, though still only the Upper Cape, still strange. The first town on this side is Bourne. A man on the bus says, “Twenty years ago, this was all dark road.”

I was here one other time, when I was seventeen years old. Holly, my friend from Bridgewater State College—Nicole’s roommate—stayed at the Falmouth Campground in the summer, in a trailer with her mother. A group of kids, families, came every year. She’d invited me to visit. I’d arrived at the campground before Holly, before my boyfriend, Burgess, the one who’d been acquired by proximity—her boyfriend’s best friend. I waited at a picnic table, ignored in a whispery way by dozens of kids my age, a little older. The kind of crowd that could populate “The Lottery”—a sunny day, I could imagine them lazily reaching into the green grass for rocks to stone me. Then one of Holly’s friends, Tommy, came over. The first boy I’d met whose attention wasn’t also a loneliness, no river between. He sat down at the table with me, spoke with ease and kindness. Normalcy. His hair curled like mine, but black, soft as eyelashes.

Tommy left for Martha’s Vineyard that afternoon, while I was deep in the woods with Burgess, his party late into the night. Around my neck I wore the opal Burgess gave me, swam to him in the dark lake, barely able to see him. But when Burgess went into town for more beer with his friends who were still ignoring me as if they were the original Pilgrims, then I heard the boys were back from the island. When Tommy appeared, he and I somehow separated from everyone else. The ground like an escalator down the sand path in the woods. His words inside, disappearing where trees finally met. I wanted to stay with him. But Burgess drove up in his Jeep with the unfriendly friends, said, “Get in if you’re coming.” Tommy lived in a tent with his sister and mom, where would I sleep? Sand in the wet cuffs of my jeans. I took my seat in the Jeep though Burgess would desert me that summer at a concert in Hyannis, and Holly would say, “You have to fight for him.” But he looked bleary kissing one of the Pilgrim girls. And when we were together, daylight was too realistic, like Finland, a constant documentary—
the woods always seemed on the precipice of murder, the ocean I loved went wan and scrawny. We were only good in silence at night: Clapton, drinking, and sex. A sunny-looking guy, but it didn’t shine on me. I wish I had been the girl who waved, said
I’ll get a ride
, the girl who walked into the trees.