I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (4 page)

Sometimes the future comes to me in a dream. Or I take a trip forward at night. I don’t know how it works. One night in 1989, I go into tomorrow, and I’m on the stairs at the Winter Park health food store with a girl. Her long blond hair between her shoulder blades. I face her, but can’t see her face. Outside the dream, I’ve been working here and at the downtown Orlando store for six years. The store, restaurant, and storeroom are below. From the high point of the stairs you can look down on everyone. At the top of the stairs is the bathroom, and to the right, a glass-fronted office where Mrs. Collins, a former beauty queen who’d gained an enormous amount of weight sits under her white gold crown of hair, braided and wound in a tower. From this height, she would look down on not only the storeroom but the entire store, even the customers pushing the glass door open. Her breasts are so large they are like a shelf for figurines. When she says my name, she replaces the first short “e” with an “a” stretched out for several beats, “Kaaa-Lee.” Within the dream, I see she’s not there, the glass empty. It must be a weekend. The girl on the stairs lifts her knee, twists it, to show me the cut on her sole, the blood. I help her to the bathroom, but I don’t remember the soap and water, just her hair, her bloody foot, helping, and the spot where we stand.

The next day, John the cook comes in. John, who made millet
mashed potatoes for me, my favorite, who circled me when someone I loved had died, not speaking, just keeping an eye on me at the order desk. John, who once gave me $300 to fly home for a funeral. His mother, Lola, the baker, said the money was John’s, John said it was hers. So, Lola said, they decided to give it to me. The day after the dream, John comes into the store with his always tied-back hair, loose, between his shoulder blades. He’s been surfing. He lifts his foot, shows me the cut on the sole, the blood.

My vision is fine in dreams or traveling at night, but I don’t always know what I’m looking at. Like a blind person who is suddenly given a chance to see. The world is clear, but I don’t know the words for it. Evelyn at the downtown store is psychic. I told Evelyn that when I was a child, I’d turn into a book of Lifesavers, a library of rolled candy, becoming very small and very large, like an accordion. The expansion was frightening and thrilling on my back in bed or on the floor, feeling as if I was going to fall off, that I’d need to pull back before I dispersed. Before I went in all directions at once. Evelyn said that I’d been expanding my psychic powers. As a child, I called it Big Book, Little Book, told no one. I’d always pull back, but wondered where I’d go if I didn’t. Sometimes, Evelyn and I worked together with Karen, who said she had psychic powers, that instead of having been a book of Lifesavers, she’d been a TV that went from tiny to large and back again. Evelyn said that being together made our power more powerful, fizzing like rain on wires, electrified.

When I was nineteen, after I’d given my son away, months flew by. There was a new year coming, and I went to a party at Sophie’s apartment, danced in heels, and fell down tiny steps, broke the bone down the center of my foot. A man with silver hair carried me to his car, drove me home, and brought me inside in his arms, to the easy chair, my very unhappy parents. I lay in the recliner. My dad brought me an ice pack and a quilt; my mom was too mad
to approach me. “We’ll go to the emergency room tomorrow,” he said. Tiredly, he went back to bed. Every hour, my dad got up to put fresh ice in the bag. The next day, the doctor put me in the hospital, scheduled surgery for the following day. He was going to put two pins in my foot.

That’s when the strange feelings started.

At four in the morning, a nurse came in to prep my foot for surgery, painted it with bright orange antiseptic. It hung limply. I hadn’t been sleeping when the nurse came in. I wasn’t able to because I was terrified, and the feeling had been growing steadily all night. I knew it was crazy, but I was sure I was going to die. I wanted to tell someone and have them reassure me that I was being foolish. It felt like a hard truth, like a rock. I kept quiet.

Two nurses came in and lifted me onto a rolling bed, pushed me upstairs to surgery. My doctor came in smiling. I wanted to say good-bye to someone, anyone. He put a plastic band with a picture of Christ on my left wrist. I smiled back at the doctor. When he walked away, I held the picture.

The surgery went fine. When I woke up, I saw a heavy white cast from knee to toe. I was alive. I didn’t understand. The rock was still inside me. Every night in the hospital it got bigger and sharper. I felt I had to concentrate on my breathing to keep breathing. I would force air in and out, afraid if I stopped, I’d never get any more. During the day, it was easier. When I got home from the hospital, I’d lie down on my canopy bed at night, under my pink, nubby bedspread, old voile, and close my eyes on the white wall. But as soon as I closed my eyes, my heart beat too fast, panicking. I was afraid if I slept in the dark I would die. So, in the living room, I sat all night in front of the TV, very close so as not to wake anyone, and the people on TV kept me company with their talk, their problems. I slept when my bedroom was full of light. This went on for days, until one day I closed my eyes in the light,
and my heart beat too fast again. I couldn’t sleep at all. It seemed time to tell someone.

It’s New Year’s Day, the new year after I gave up Tommy, my father and brother are watching TV, a sports game. Phyllis George is talking, and I’m thinking how lucky she is, to get to live. A few minutes before, I’d tried to tell my family I was dying, but my dad had said, “What?” and watched the TV. I don’t know how I phrased it. I may have said I thought I would die from sleeping. It was hard to be coherent. To talk in a bright, bright world of edge and fact. I’m afraid to tell it straight, afraid they’ll think I’ve lost my mind.

The phone rings. My dad breaks away from the football game to answer it. He leans against the breakfast bar. I’m halfway listening. In the bits of conversation, I hear Mark’s name, Julia’s. My dad’s voice breaks. He holds his hand to the side of his head, then his forehead. I stare at him. It sounds as though they’re telling him that someone they know in Massachusetts is hurt or sick. I tell myself it’s probably his mother’s husband—her second or third. He’s old. I don’t know him, but he’d been hit by a car years ago and has been an invalid ever since. I hope it isn’t his mother, Nana Smith. There are so many relatives on my dad’s side that I don’t know. It could be any of them.

My dad hangs up the phone. He bends his head and closes his eyes. He opens his mouth to speak and closes it again. After a few moments, he looks at the square, white clock on the wall. It’s beside the phone.

He said, “That little kid has leukemia.” What little kid? A niece, a nephew I don’t know? Who? Internal questions to keep my fear down. I stare at my father. He offers no more information. I think, it’s not my child, it’s not Tommy. He’s healthy. He’s so healthy, and he’s just a baby. Let it be anyone else’s. I don’t ask out loud.

Maybe my body, my dream, my traveling soul doesn’t know
the difference between my son and me. It can see us clearly, like John the cook and the girl in the dream, but it thinks we’re the same. In our baby pictures, we are the same child, one black-and-white, one color. Maybe my soul holds up the two pictures, travels between the two babies. But it wasn’t a dream, I wasn’t asleep. The rock in my chest told me he was dying when I was awake. Maybe it was my son’s soul that traveled to me to give me the news, without even the word for Mom,
Ma
, he could say,
Ma.

It’s 1982, the year my son dies, and I sit in a circle with fifteen alcoholic sailors. We’re living together for six weeks in the U.S. Navy’s alcohol treatment program. I’d been enrolled at the university, but I’ve dropped all my classes. The sailors are here because their jobs are on the line. I’m in because I’m still young enough to be considered a military dependent. Everything is the washed-out color of the moon, pale and silvery: walls, ceiling, chairs. The sailors don’t have to wear their uniforms. Most wear jeans or tan pants. All of them have planed hair, like landing fields. They’re all in their twenties to early thirties. When I went into treatment, I know that I lived in a room with a door that opened, but in memory, I see myself behind bars, floor to ceiling. A moon-colored jail.

We’re in group therapy. The counselor sitting at the top of our circle has a woven basket in her lap, lots of torn paper, some pens. “I want you to write down the worst thing you’ve ever done,” she says. Even the sailors are scared of the counselor—they call her The Mother of God. She’s tall and confident, dark-haired with a big smile, lots of teeth. Her direct stare scrapes at our veneer, our fashioning. Not unkindly. On the first day, she’d laughed in recognition as I’d materialized before her, calling me a sexual child.

The sailors and I are like plates of glass surrounding her. “Write it down, fold your paper, and put it in the basket. No names.” No one wants to rehash the worst, to write it down. I hold my piece of paper. It seems too small. The size of a note passed in school.

In group, on my note, I write down the worst thing I’ve ever done—slapping that baby I cared for in sixth grade. I fold my paper. When the basket is passed to me, the crosshatch in my hands, I drop it in, hand the basket to the man to my right. When the basket reaches the counselor, she sends it around again, each person reaching in to read a note. The first note read aloud describes a nightmare-like scene. I can see it as if it were a movie. A group of adolescent boys hanging another boy, not to kill him, just to terrorize. “Who wrote this one?” the counselor asks. One of the colorless young sailors raises his hand. His hair is sandy. He talks, and I can see the one boy trussed, the way one would tie up an animal before cooking, his head covered, a strong sharp pull around his neck, air below his feet. And then they cut him down. But the boy has died of fear.

“We were under eighteen, so we weren’t charged as adults,” the sailor says. No one tried for murder.

I don’t know what the counselor says to this sailor, what the purpose of this exercise might be, breaking everyone’s anonymity. But the basket is passed again. A sailor reads, “I forced my younger brother to give me blow jobs.” Everyone flinches.

“Who wrote this?” the counselor asks. My boyfriend raises his hand. I met him here. He’s married. But I don’t plan on keeping him forever, I just need to touch him so I can stay connected to things. He’s short, like a toy sailor. On bus rides to recovery meetings off-base, we sit in the back with a blanket over our knees, whispering, making the other sailors jealous. At night, we time the rounds of the security guard, make out at the front desk. The wood hard on my back like an instruction. But this confession is
news. When my boyfriend talks about his note in group, he’s a shadow in a house; his brother is another shadow. It makes my stomach tight. He cries. I’m disengaging, as if he’s a stranger crying on TV. His brother in the hinterland. Afterward, I’ll kiss his criminal mouth.

The basket keeps going. Four men have raped. When my note is read, I’ll identify myself. Not that I need to. My note says something like, “I started babysitting when I was eleven years old, and when the baby cried and wouldn’t sleep, I slapped him.” “That can’t be the worst thing,” someone says. The entire circle seems to accuse me of lying. I can’t tell them how much I wanted the power to hit someone defenseless, how I loved to comfort. I want to say that I wished the child wouldn’t cry and sometimes I wished he would. That I was afraid because I liked to shake him and ask insistently, “Do you hear me?” That I’m scared that I wanted to punish and to console him. That I felt needed. The sailors don’t think my crime is serious enough. In a way, it’s a relief—maybe my crime isn’t so bad? But it’s too much to explain—the sailors, the counselor—I can’t justify to them why this is the worst thing.

I’m still unable to follow the track of what I’d done and don’t yet understand the connection between this act and losing my son. I don’t understand what I lost because I was afraid that I had a child-abusing gene, that I was programmed in my DNA to raise my hand to hurt another. Afraid of myself. So, I gave Tommy away to people I trusted. In group, I don’t see this track; don’t understand that I’ve already been punished.

On my first day in the treatment center, I’d had to see the treatment center doctor. He’d held up the underside of my left arm, scraped raw with keys. A long red raggedness near the city of my wrist, the blue rivers under the surface. As if I’d been trying to unlock myself. “Do you know this is crazy?” the doctor asks. Ribbons in a neat box on each of his shoulders. Black vees on his
lower sleeves like birds in flight. I smile at him. It doesn’t strike me as crazy; the pain had been a way out when I was locked inside. I’d been at home, my parents’ house, the night before I’d checked into the treatment center. No alcohol. There was no way I could go out drinking that night.

When I get out of treatment, I’ll come back to this multistory building, I’ll ride the elevator up to this floor into my recovery—it’s called the Dry Dock meeting. But before that, before I get out of treatment, my boyfriend will graduate, and I’ll choose another one: Jason. When Jason first feels my eyes on him, standing in front of me in the bus aisle, he makes the sign of the cross. As if I’m a vampire. He backs away from me. He’s levelheaded, dark-haired, mature. He’s a higher rank than most of the sailors, used to giving orders. I don’t like the way he smells, though—a bitterness comes out of his pores, like the oil of a poisonous plant. When he gets a pass to leave treatment for the weekend, he drinks. But he has to return to us. I find him sitting alone in a dark stairwell of the center. Chastened, but not ruined, broken. I don’t remember ever kissing him, but by the end of the month, we’re engaged. He says, “No wife of mine is going to wear three earrings in one ear.” He says, “You can’t meet my friends in those pants.” I find it ridiculous that he thinks he can command me, but his certainty is reassuring. I go along with it, let him control me.