I Wore the Ocean in the Shape of a Girl (19 page)

Nicole and I have a fight one night. She sits in a chair in her crowded dorm room at three in the morning, drunk and ripe for fit pitching. My closest friend at school furious with me, so I jump up. Head for the door. Nicole sees the shift immediately and says, “Don’t let Kelle out.” Nicole throws her body like some agricultural project against the wooden door—her red hay hair, milky limbs, udderlike breasts. Big as she is, she’s soft like blankets, unexercised. It isn’t hard to push her out of the way. I have the idea to throw myself in front of a car. Thinking nothing of the driver, killing or maiming a girl, a drunk minor. Once I’m outside with snow on me, I calm down. The approaching car is very slow. Everything slows down. Nicole sends my boyfriend after me. Burgess. He and I have so little conversation, so little in common. Our communication is only physical. But his hair shines; he comes after me. A town boy who puts his arms around me like snow in the snow.

1.

The summer of 2006, my parents and I go to the house of my grandmother’s half sister, Anne, in Brockton. Anne can’t talk. I noticed this on the phone, when I’d called her in 2003, asked to visit Nana Smith—the long gaps between her words, as if she were on an overseas phone call.

Now she can’t swallow very well either. The muscles in her throat have become mysteriously paralyzed. I spend the night with her alone. She had seemed the stable sister, the one I could count on to tell me about Brockton, Nana Smith, Tommy. But I waited too long, and now she can’t talk. It’s like a hideous mystery from one of those Ripley’s Believe It or Not comics. The frozen woman. Watching her pour water in the coffeemaker, her hand shaking, I start to cry. But Anne is unnervingly self-sufficient. She doesn’t complain about anything and doesn’t want tears. She lives alone with her cat, cooks, drives. You’d think she had some minor complaint. “Can I help?” I ask. She points to a cupboard, cups and saucers.

Anne must wonder why I’m here. Staying with her for the first time. She writes me a warning, in pen on yellow notepaper: “Don’t be disturbed by the way I drink coffee. Sometimes the coffee bursts
out.” Her napkin gets stained. Once she lived in Arabia, and she shows me all the charms on her bracelet: slipper and mosque, a ruin in Lebanon (“a beautiful ruin,” she writes), a pyramid, a carriage with tiny turning wheels, an oil rig—carrying the places she went on her wrist, in gold. In Arabia, Anne said, she wasn’t allowed to speak to any Arabs, men or women. I asked, “How did you buy anything?” And she said, “Brad had to buy everything.” She tried to speak to the gardener one time, and he never came back.

Anne asks if I want to go to the cemetery, Tommy’s grave, and I say yes. But she gets lost driving me there. “It’s okay,” I say. “I don’t have to go today.” We pass a woman in a shiny pink skirt to her knees, walking in a gully. I’m nervous about Anne driving, the paralysis, but it seems she drives everywhere. Takes her friend on museum trips to Boston. Anne’s doctor is concerned she’ll need a feeding tube soon. It would fit inside her, below her ribs, and then she wouldn’t be drinking or eating anything. I’m worried that everything inside her will freeze, like her throat, the drool clear and constant now, like a baby’s. What happens if her lungs freeze? Her heart?

There’s a library upstairs, and at night, we sit in big chairs surrounded by books. Tell me about my son, I want to say. How was Nana Smith with my son, watching him all day, every workday? Taking care of him. My grandmother who’d given her own children away for a time, who was given away herself by her father. Anne said my grandmother was innocent all her life. When she was pregnant with my dad, Nana Smith asked Ben Groom’s sister how the baby would come out. Ben’s sister said, “The same way it got in.”

Anne didn’t actually say it. In addition to the yellow notepad, she has a small keyboard with a lit-up screen for longer conversations. She types what she wants to say, and it appears in green letters on the two-sided screen, so that you could sit across the
table from her and read what she’s thinking. She can also press the audio button when she’s done, and an electronic voice, female, speaks for her.

Anne says that when my son died, “That’s when Gertrude started losing her memory.” What was it like for Nana Smith to be given away, her mother dead, father remarried? And for a time, Nana Smith was like a servant in their house, unwanted by the new wife. I know Nana didn’t attend her high school graduation because she didn’t have a dress. I know she worked and bought little things for Anne. Nana’s body in Holy Family Cemetery now, on Center Street in Rockland. The ground just cut, the shape of the hole for her coffin. It’s hard to think of her body in the ground. She was so pretty, her delicate face, fine nose, chin held up, her bedroom all pink. So badly married, like Queen Gertrude.

When my parents had dropped me off at Anne’s house, the front door had been open, so my parents and I walked inside. My mother and father and I sat on Anne’s couch in the darkened room. It was as if we’d entered a house where no one lived. As Anne came silently down the stairs and entered the living room, my mom said to her, “You looked like a ghost.” Maybe it was the quiet, her inability to speak.

In the library that night, she’d given me a book about one of my favorite painters. I hadn’t read it yet, but after the paralysis took over Anne’s body and she’d been placed in a facility, after my father called to say she weighed seventy pounds and was curled up in bed like a broken finger, waiting to die, only her eyes working—haunting, he said, just staring at him—I looked for her book. Inside she’d inscribed it on July 17, 2006: “Kelle, with much love and more understanding. Anne.” When I flip through the book, a photo falls out. It’s Nana Smith wearing a black coat with leopard-print collar standing next to Anne, who looks about thirty, smiling, pretty in a white sweater.

2.

At lunch, I don’t give Anne enough eye contact. She’s driven me to see Mark and Julia. We’ve met at a restaurant. After lunch, on the open porch at my aunt and uncle’s new house, I learn that Julia not only worked as a secretary for the Knapp Shoe Factory, but also for the Shoe Museum director. Julia said, “Oh, he was the boss of the managers I worked for.” She walks to the beach at the end of the road with me.

A wide beach, as though the ocean is opening. Blue metal tiles under my feet lead out into the water, over the rocks to the clear sandbar. When we have to go single file through the dune, Julia is in front of me. I can’t see her face, so I ask her, “Some time, can we talk about Tommy?” It’s the first time we’ve mentioned his name to each other since Julia took him in her arms from the house in Orlando when he was four days old. She’s quiet at first. Then she faces me, says something about not knowing if I blamed them. She says, “I had no one to talk to after he died. Mark couldn’t talk about it.” She says that it was very cloudy the day they buried my son.

“Gloomy.” After they put his body in the ground, she says, the sun came out and filled the sky. She smiles at me.

“What did he like?” I ask.

“He was too young to like things. He was just a baby,” she says. What does she think I mean? I don’t mean did he like baseball or what was his favorite TV show. Did he like blue? Did he like a song? I remember once someone said he liked Cheerios. Either Nana Smith or Dad told me that, when he went to visit Tommy at Easter, right before he died. He liked Cheerios and the petals on pink carnations. But I can’t push Julia. She’s the one who took care of him, fed him, played with him every day, watched him
die. She put his body in the ground. Had to let them cover him up and walk away. Go back home. I wonder what a person can do after that. What can ever matter? I think that any attempt at happiness—to see a movie or sing along to the radio, anything she’s been able to do—is brave. She walks beside me, puts her hand on my back. I do the same for her. It’s something a mother would do, I think. It’s a little awkward to walk like this—we’re tippy. “He’d be …” she says, calculating his age. As if she’d been keeping him somewhere, the memory of a baby, and now she can see him rising up, grown, in front of us. I can see he’s tall now, the way she’s looking up.

I asked for my son’s death certificate today. He died twenty-five years ago. It’s almost Christmas 2007. I’m living alone in a glass cabin in New Smyrna Beach, Florida. The artists’ residency center where I work closes down for a winter break. It’s the same place I came to in 1993, when I did a residency for three weeks. I’d been so happy here. So, in late 2005, I’d contacted the director, asked her about a position. She created one for me, and I’d moved to the coast in January 2006.

I’ve been renting a shared house on the ocean, and it’s noisy. The downstairs neighbors have a party almost every night. I’d been warned that it would be too much for me, but I couldn’t resist living in a house right on the beach. I could hear the ocean all night and day. Once the moon shone across the sea in a path that led right into my apartment, to me, where I slept on a futon in the living room. I thought,
who is waking me up
? It was the moon. I was so high up, that if I was seated in the living room, I couldn’t see the shore. Just the water, as if my house was a boat, and I was floating.

But it’s often hard to concentrate, and the residency center staff sympathizes, knows I need quiet to write. They’ve given me one of the artist cottages for a month, so I’ve combined my vacation time with the winter break. The cottage is surrounded by tropical
jungle. Completely secluded. The only connection with the rest of the world is a winding boardwalk that leads to my door. Signs are posted that this area is private, but sometimes people can’t help ignoring the signs. Then they see the small house, sun shading the windows. They walk up to the clear door, the floor-to-ceiling windows, cupping their hands around their eyes to peer in. Sometimes I wave. I like living so transparently in this old forest. On a preserve within another two hundred acres of preserved land. Here, there’s nothing to hide.

At my desk in the cabin, looking out a wall of glass into the green leaves, I call Brockton City Hall and ask for the certificate. From Commercial Street, the east, City Hall rises out of the trees like a medieval fortress, a round tower with a steepled building rising higher in back, like a church. I’m ready to state my relation. To say, “I’m his mother.” And something shifts in my chest as if I’m jigsawed in there, a map of the world. A continent shifted to the right, toward the center. I felt like Rocky, like a pugilist, me who’d never hit anyone with anything except the gold buckle on my pink purse when I was seven in Honolulu. And the baby, the spanking, when I was eleven. I’m ready to say, “I’m his mother,” to push in the glass doors, rifle the file cabinets. Demand this evidence.

But I’m on the phone. A clerk answers. I realize that I don’t have to feel like a liar, as though I’m fabricating my relation to my son. I realize that as facts go, my saying, “I’m his mother,” is absolutely true. But the clerk doesn’t ask who I am. She says, “It’s five dollars. Don’t send cash.” I mail her five dollars.

A few days later, the postman in Brockton stamps my envelope “Happy Holiday.” The city clerk had put the Certificate of Death inside. A yellow paper. Name: Thomas Edward Smith. Date of Death: May 27, 1982. Age—Last Birthday: 1.

There is a box next to this one that says “Under 1 Year” with
one box underneath for Months, one for Days. Next to this is another box that says “Under 1 Day” with a box for Hours, a box for Minutes. For those who lived for Minutes.

In the box, “If U.S. War Veteran Specify War,” someone has written “No.” “Immediate Cause” is in two parts: A and B. B is “Acute Myelomonocytic Leukemia.” “Interval between onset and death: 5¾ mo.” A is “Respiratory Arrest.” “Interval between onset and death: 1 min.” Hour of Death: 5:30 p.m.

The doctor, Beth Gleghorn, signed this form the day he died, her handwriting nearly unreadable. I wonder if it was sadness in her hand or if she always wrote like this. I’d like to do a handwriting analysis of Beth Gleghorn.

Place of Death: Boston. County of Death: Suffolk. Hospital: Tufts N.E. Medical Center 2299. In the Devonian Period, mountains were raised here. Fish got jaws. Large trees appeared. One minute nothing, a million years later, there are sharks and bugs and the trilobites die. The first birds flew.

When I go out for food, shopping in the grocery store, two women look at the orange juice; one says, “If I drink that I won’t get drunk.” They laugh. I meet the speaker’s eye. She says, “I never drink,” sounding drunk, tittery. Then a man says, “That’s regular coffee,” and a ponytailed man says, “I’m a regular guy.” An overweight man in a bathing suit tells me, “You should get goggles.” I have goggles. They help me breathe. I can see where I’m going.

One hand wrote in a black, felt-tip pen across the blank back side of an index card, “Adriamycin,” in very good cursive, a steady hand. Below the
n
is another hand, a red pen, younger like a high school girl’s, round: “1982.” The
9
has been corrected, an
8
hidden underneath, as if the person writing was having trouble knowing what century it was. Beneath the year, in red again: “Jan 1, 2, 3.” Below this is whiteness. Midway down the card, the emptiness is interrupted by a red line of ink separating the top from the bottom. Right beneath the line, in the same red hand: “GT.G.” The period after the first
G
forgotten. A space, then: “—pill”

Underneath this line is only a small space, and then: “2/25—”

In 2007, I put the information together as carefully as I can. This is what I know of my son’s treatment for leukemia. I know that in December 1981, he had bruises, but had not fallen. He was nine months old. I know that he got the leukemia into remission, and it went into his spine. I know that he got the spinal cancer into remission, and it went into his brain. I know that the doctor said they would give him one last treatment, but that if the bump on his head didn’t shrink, they wouldn’t do any more treatments, that it would make things worse. I think that he died in my uncle’s arms on May 27, 1982, in Children’s Hospital in Boston. But in December 2007, I received the death certificate. Twenty
five years after my son died, I learned that he died in Tufts Medical Center. Everything I knew before, I’d only overheard, guessed. I could never ask anyone directly, “Where did my son die?” I’m finally able to ask.