I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (27 page)

I don’t know if this old mill city made my son sick. How can I know? It seems ridiculous, my collecting bits of information on leukemia and potential toxins. Still, the town is poor, people get sick. It’s obvious the water quality is pretty low. But low quality and carcinogenic aren’t the same thing. The violent crime rate is 7 out of 10, with 10 being the worst. How many things can a town worry about at once? And what am I after? If children aren’t sick, why am I looking here? I’d thought that environmental hazards in this city could have caused Tommy’s leukemia. I still feel that the city made him sick, but it’s intuitive—I can’t prove it. I’d wanted to know why he died. I’d also wanted to know if I’m responsible. When I thought that after Tommy’s death other children were dying from leukemia in Brockton, it seemed a crime to be passive. Were more lives at stake? How could I be quiet? A mother would find out what killed her son. But the data doesn’t show a citywide rate much different from the rest of the state. The public health official had mentioned that there could be pockets, cancer clusters, but that they’re hard to identify. The city is starting to feel like a dead end. What I’ve always wanted is to find him.

In a photograph of children in the tenement district of Brockton in December 1940, I recognize the scene. It has the blue clarity of winter. Not a cloud in the sky. It’s where my dad lived, my grandmother, even my uncle for a while—the ghetto of Brockton.
The tenement house has long, sash windows, bracketed cornices. The roof curves like a slate slide. In front of the identical house next door (except for the one black shade instead of green, a radio in the window, and no children or dog) is a blue 1930 Model A Ford Tudor Sedan, stripped, with a blackened passenger-side door as if the car had been set on fire. There are eight small children, an adolescent boy, and maybe one grown man, plus the dog who paws the street. Bare branches spring from the ground instead of trees. No women are here. It doesn’t look as though there is anywhere to go. Just the gray porch steps, the gray street, or back inside the house, which looks abandoned, night-black. My dad grew up here. Except for the time in Wellfleet, he was mostly in this place when he was young. I don’t know why this past looks so familiar. Maybe I should get out of Brockton, let this place go.

3.

The video place is in a short strip mall; a girl sits at a desk in the corner of the room. “Did you call?” she asks. I have the tapes in a plastic bag. She takes them out, reads the black Magic Marker on the white cartridges. She stacks the numbered “First Birthday” tapes in a tower, chronologically. “These are Super 8’s,” she said. There’s a lot of crowded writing on the last tape—mention of another child—so I read the beginning to her: “It’s Plymouth Beach, five months.” She places it on top of the stack.

“I was worried the tape might be brittle,” I said. She removes the cover, exposes the thin film, holds it to her nose.

“I’m smelling it because when Super 8 goes bad, there’s a chemical reaction. There’s a tape over there that’s ruined.” She nods
toward another desk in the other corner—someone else’s tape. “Yours are good,” she said. Fifty feet on each reel is between two and a half and three and a half minutes of film. I have five tapes. I might have fifteen minutes of my son’s life. I don’t want to tell her that, but I want her to be careful.

“It’s precious to us,” I say. “It’s someone who died.” She wants to know what to write on the label she’ll put on the DVD.

“We usually just put ‘Family Memories.’” I give her the name on his birth certificate, his grave: “Thomas Edward Smith.”

“The Early Years?” she asks. Suggesting I add this. Did I not tell her this was someone who died? Maybe she thinks he died older, that he had an adult life.

“Just his name,” I say. I’m thinking of Mark and Julia, of them opening my envelope with the DVD and reading the label. “Is there any way I could get the DVD by the end of the day on Friday?” Otherwise it’ll be Monday, and I’ll be back to work. I’d have to get it before work, keep it in my purse all day, wait until I got home to see him.

“Yes, I think so. I just finished a job. I should be able to do it.”

I was thinking there would be sound on the tapes, but at home, when I call my friend, she says, “No, there’s no sound.” I was hoping I might hear his voice. I look up Super 8 mm film. It turns out there was an environmentally hazardous Super 8 with sound, developed in 1973. A magnetic strip recorded it. I don’t know if mine had sound. I’d asked my friend if I’d be able to see my son’s face on the DVD.

“Do you remember the film strips in school?” she asked.

“That kind of blinking film?”

“Yes,” she said.

4.

Each of the Super 8’s had writing on them: Plymouth Beach 5 months/ Tommy Smith & Mikie 8 months; Tommy 1st Birthday (1 of 4); Tommy 1st Birthday (2 of 4); Tommy 1st Birthday (3 of 4); Tommy 1st Birthday (4 of 4). On the way home from dropping off the tapes, I turn on the radio. There’s a tornado watch. “The storm is right over US 1 near Ponce Inlet.” I’m on US 1, driving into it, according to the radio. Then I can see it, darkness to my left, over the bridge. Covering the condo towers beside the north bridge. “In five minutes it could be out to sea,” the radio voice had said. I keep driving into it. I wonder what it would be like—if the dark sky picks me up in its hands. The next day a woman in Cocoa Beach, where the tornado did touch down, will say that it squeezed her house in and out, like an accordion.

Waiting for the video girl to call me the next day, to say I can pick up the tapes, I drive to the post office. I brake at the end of my street, at the roundabout. A car passes. I go. I never see the giant black SUV until its horn is blaring. Look out my driver’s side window to see it has just stopped from hitting me. It’s disorienting. I’m a little worried about the drive to South Daytona. The video girl left a message in the few minutes I was out. The tapes are ready. I make myself eat something, a yogurt. I go get the DVD.

The cover says “Treasured Memories” in fancy script. The DVD is labeled “Thomas Edward Smith” and underneath “Home Movies.” When the disc loads, the background is designed to look like those old film screens with the numbers counting down before the movie begins. It has a big
5
in a circle with radiating lines that come from inside the curve of the number, a kind of sun. But the numbers don’t count down—it’s decorative. Above it, in thick black letters, it reads: “A Night At The Movies.” Who thought of
that? There is no night. My son’s name appears again in a starred box, slightly off kilter with the letters lifting up to the right. And underneath, “Play Movie.” Along the right edge, and lightly scattered on the left edge, in the corners, is a charring, like sand. As if the tape were burning up. Ruin a part of the design.

My son appears, leaning back against Julia in her black bathing suit. He is standing on the sand, the water just visible in the background. He’s wearing white shorts, a short-sleeved blue shirt. He’s watching another boy—the Mikie whose name was markered on the tape, I imagine, though I don’t know who he is, or who the bearded man is who holds him. Mikie seems more retiring than Tommy, who looks ready to launch himself at Mikie, to play. And though Mikie is three months older than Tommy, he’s smaller, more tentative. There is a horrifying soundtrack playing. No one asked if I wanted music. The video girl CHOSE music for the DVD. It’s bombastic, big band. Julia holds onto Tommy while he walks around, faces the camera, smiles. He is such a big boy. Julia rubs his back while he looks at the sand. Another child, a boy of about five with straight black hair, blocks the camera, dancing in place.

The camera spans the beach. It’s August 1981. The bearded man holds his nervous baby. A big blue tarp on poles makes a tent for Julia, for the playpen. Next to it is a black truck. A slower kind of dance music plays, something from the ’30s or ’40s, and there’s a close-up of Tommy and Mikie in the playpen. Tommy is in motion, reaching for Mikie and a little off balance, hands behind him steadying him as he reaches. He’s five months old. He looks as if he’s kissing the top of Mikie’s head, holding it like a pumpkin. Tommy pulls at the collar of Mikie’s shirt. Mikie looks distressed. Someone holds a doll out to Mikie, and then to Tommy, who smiles a big smile, eyes bright. Looking up. I get so confused when he looks up—it’s like looking at myself, in him. He is sweetly chubby—his face, his arms, legs.

Julia takes him into the water. His head is resting on her shoulder, facing the shore. He’s wearing a white baseball cap. One of his arms, a hand, rests against the skin of her back. In a blurry space, I can see her fingers around his legs, keeping him safe, close to her body. She’s looking out to sea. She’s laughing. Mark is holding Mikie while the bearded man holds the hand of the older child. The water is above their knees, to their thighs. It’s a beautiful day, blue sky, sun. And then it’s over.

The light is yellow, inside the hospital. Someday this will be an ancient kingdom. Someday this will be a sea. Julia is smiling, seated facing the camera. Mark appears from a space beyond, a nurse’s station or a hallway. Beside Julia, a massive cord hangs, as if there is a giant phone on the wall beside her. My son is on her lap.

A man says that time is not a river, we don’t stop at different places. The future isn’t down below. It’s a construct, he says. We’re making it up. There’s water behind him, a river that doesn’t fall. My son is in the Floating Hospital. He’s in the Floating Children’s Cancer Center. As if the children themselves float—as if cancer makes them float.

First there was a boat in Boston Harbor in 1894 with women and sick children riding around on it. A hospital on the water because a minister thought the ocean air would help children heal. It floated for thirty-three years. When it burned, they built a building on land, called it the same name. It has a state-of-theart bone marrow transplant unit which I might have personally experienced. My marrow, the deepest part, stars in the field of his body. If there had been some increase in his health, if he’d been strong enough. “You were going to get a call,” Julia had said. “You were going to be the donor.”

We’re back where we started, in a hospital.

All the chubbiness has gone out of his face, his body. His eyes look ten times larger. If you put the picture of him at five months beside this one of him at one year, sick in the hospital, on March 17, 1982, two months and ten days before he dies, I don’t think you would have any idea that this is the same child. How is it that he still looks like me? How did I stay? As if I’d never left him. Look in his eyes. There I am.

The big band music plays briefly. Tommy puts a red lollipop in his mouth. Julia shakes his other hand hello. As Nana Smith bends down to see his face, and he looks up at her, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” plays without words. This is what I have instead of his voice. It almost looks like they can hear it too. He smiles so much, so contentedly. He’s still such a peaceful baby, like when he was born.

I hoped that by writing about Tommy, I could find him. That the writing would take me to him. But still, I’m surprised that that is what it’s doing.

I’d decided to write about his birth from memory, to begin with what had been unforgettable. But when I finally read my diary from that day, I saw that I had held him twice, not once. He’d been born at 2:13 a.m., and the nurse woke me to hold him at 9 a.m. and to feed him at 1 p.m. Twice. In my memory it is all one holding.
I talked to you very quietly, but I don’t know what I said. I think it was just my talking that was important—you knew me already.
Even then, right after, I didn’t know what words I said.

When the nurse woke me up, told me to follow her, I’d fallen instead. Fainted. I can remember it now, the smell of ammonia—smelling salts, the cold floor on my body through the cotton gown. Trying to follow the nurse and slipping away into the dark. Getting up. Swaying while I waited for my baby.
I unwrapped your white blanket, touched your fingers and toes.

For two days, I have to use ice packs on my breasts—they are so
full.
Once a doctor told me that I was made for having babies, the space between my hips a perfect house. I was made for this. The body is the hull of a ship, the place where music comes from, sun and moon, the stars are bodies, the garment that covers.

I didn’t know I could change my mind. I didn’t know I could keep you.

I’ve sent an email to Mark and Julia to see if my box arrived at Christmas. I’d checked the tracking, and my address had been undeliverable. Someone picked it up at the post office. Julia writes me right back, forwards me her original response. I see my name is spelled wrong in the email address she used. I imagine that Kelly with a “y” is happier than me, living in a house of her own. Julia said she loved the “Love a Dog” T-shirt that I sent her, that every day Mark uses the coffee mug with dog talk that I’d sent (every day), that the dogs ate the treats in two seconds.

A card comes in the mail from a friend in New York. The image on the cover is a letter of van Gogh’s written around his drawing in the center of the page. A sketch of “Wheat Field with Setting Sun.” I don’t know why I’m surprised his letter is in French, that I can only understand a few words. Somehow I’d assumed we spoke the same language. There is a place in the center of my chest where his picture reaches—it’s so direct. The words around it like a song I don’t know.

Julia is tying a low necklace on Tommy—sort of a lei, yellow flowers. He doesn’t mind, he hardly seems to feel it. She kisses him on his neck, looks at his face to see if it has made him smile, kisses him again. Looks, kisses him again. How have his eyes become so big? Wide open all the time. He has sort of a cast on one of his arms. Maybe something is being injected. His arm is stabilized with a kind of board underneath, thick white strips over it, gauze. He doesn’t seem to mind it.

I spend most of the day at the window where you are, under the
nurses’ stares. Behind the glass, all the newborns lie side by side in plastic cribs. Two babies were born the same morning as you, three others born the day after. When I feel too weak to stand anymore, I walk back to the bed. Get stronger, go back to the glass. Sometimes the nurses pull the blinds on me. It is an awful feeling, knowing you are right behind those blinds, and I can’t see you.