On Such a Full Sea (31 page)

Betty, clearly, had no such conception, instantly agreeing to Fan’s request with the idea that it was a classic look, clean and simple, and she even went so far as to have all of Fan’s furniture covered in the same flat white, if knocked down with the slightest touch of gray so everything wouldn’t be so severe and polar, which turned out to be absolutely right. Fan was at once her au pair, her incredibly capable and independent helper, her sweet little sister, and Betty was now comfortable enough with her to ask more questions about Reg, what he looked like, what he enjoyed eating, his favorite pastimes, all, of course, so she could get a feel for what it would be like when he was here on the “block.” They were in her soon-to-be bedroom suite, surrounded as if in snow. Betty was also naturally curious as to how they’d met, what she and Reg liked to do together, even mischievously inquiring, as a close girlfriend might, about the more romantic details, such as whether he was a good kisser. Fan had never really talked about such things before, but we know she felt comfortable enough with Betty, too, and perhaps slightly dazzled by the woman’s openness and obviously generous heart, that she found herself divulging how Reg had her sit on his right whenever possible because of the small, hairy mole on his left cheek that he was terribly self-conscious about, even with her.

Oh, he sounds so sweet! Betty cried, and soon they were giggling about Oliver and how he couldn’t walk by a mirror without furtively checking the state of his biceps or abs with his new toning regimen of weight lifting and swimming, the latter of which he started up again after taking Josey for her first swim lessons and deciding to do laps while she was being coached. In fact, Betty went on and told Fan how strange it was to have him around all the time, to be reminded of certain of his habits and traits, like his secret vanity, or his addiction to sour jellies and iced coffee, which apparently he steadily fed himself with during his hours at the medical center and lab, and had seriously cut back on now, though who could tell.

It seems it is nice for you, too, Fan observed.

Of course you’ve noticed, Betty said, smiling. It’s been not just nice but wonderful. Maybe you think it’s funny that I’m calling him Liwei, but for me everything feels different. He’s still Oliver through and through, I know, but now he really spends time with Josey and wants to bathe the twins every day and for the first time I think since we were in school we’re watching movies together again in bed at night, with popcorn and wine. We’re not even having to talk that much if you know what I mean, she said, her eyes twinkling. We’re having fun, even stupid fun. Some real joy. We still argue plenty and he drives me crazy with how he has to think everything through a dozen squared times but I guess that’s gotten us where we are. Right? This is truly the place we should be.

Fan did not demur, nor try to judge whether Betty wholly meant what she said or was more hoping she was. It didn’t matter, because, as we know, it is “where we are” that should make all the difference, whether we believe we belong there or not, and as such is the ground on which we will try our best not to feel trapped, or limited, or choose those paths that merely assuage our fears. By this standard, Betty was alive, and so was her Liwei, and Fan could finally now believe that in the near course of time Reg’s whereabouts would be revealed; for she was only human, too, we have to remember, simply a girl with a love who was lost, and if the iron ordeals she endured these past months had made her batten down her longing, in the comfort and relative calm of Betty’s Lane that ache had begun to bristle, steadily untwine.

With the project nearing completion and their having far less to manage, they took short excursions during the day. When Josey returned from preschool just past midday, they all climbed into the Cheungs’ buslike new van and went to town to lunch and shop or visit the children’s museum or zoo before heading to their newly joined private fitness club where Oliver and Josey swam in the full indoor pool while on the deck Fan watched the twins along with one helper, the strapped-in babies loving the sounds and splashing of the water. The club had set up several treadmills in a connecting room with a waist-high wall, to afford an open view so parents could watch their children swim, and Betty slowly walked on one of these while she caught up on some of her evening programs.

This is just how they were situated one Saturday afternoon, Fan passing a rattle back and forth with one of the twins, the helper, Pinah, engaging the other, Josey paddling somewhat frantically in the nearest lane toward the swim instructor, though making her way across the pool, with Oliver motoring back and forth in a far lane, when several groups of men in warm-ups and swimming caps with goggles strapped to their foreheads walked out to the deck. Among them was Vik Upendra, Fan recognizing him immediately even with his back turned, for his extra-long limbs and the way he wildly flapped his arms to loosen them, rather than shaking them like the others did. Apparently, they would later learn, there were seasonal club league swim meets, this being the autumn competition for under-forty men. At this point Betty had also seen him, as she was no longer paying attention to her treadmill screen, and when Vik finally turned and saw Betty, Fan could see the instant falter in his face, like any boy excited for a day’s swim but who had arrived to a completely drained pool. His arms, which had been stretched high, dropped down slowly and he began to walk toward her, keeping his eyes on her, even as she was minutely shaking her head and looking down at her screen, not wanting to meet his eyes. But Vik stood directly in front of her, and although Fan couldn’t hear him for the din of the indoor pool and the whining jogging machines, she could see very clearly that in so many words he was telling her that he still loved her and that she was doing all she could not to tell him the same.

On the other side of the pool, Oliver was still swimming and would have kept his head in the water for many more laps, but he must have noticed all the new adult swimmers crowding; he didn’t make his turn. He hung on to the wall instead, still wearing his dark goggles, his gaze settling immediately on Vik and his wife. He just watched them talk, or Vik talk. There was nothing else for him to do. Finally Betty begged him to please stop doing this now and Vik, seeing there was nowhere to go, relented. He walked to Fan on the near side of the pool.

How are you? he said, his pleasing face all broken into parts.

I’m fine, Fan said, her own chest heavy. I hope you will be, too.

Thank you, he answered. Then he slowly walked to the far end with a dignified deliberateness. When he reached the last two lanes, he donned his goggles and then dove into the pool in the next-to-last lane. He smoothly swam the length, freestyle, heading toward where Oliver was now treading at the wall, and when he got there, he didn’t stop or slow but made a flip turn and reversed, kicking hard away. Oliver followed him in his own lane, by the half point catching up to Vik. They kept pace with each other for the rest of the length, their speed more steady than anything else, as if they wanted to be going side by side, as if the eyeing each other were building up their strength.

Then, near the wall, Oliver swam beneath the lane divider and into Vik’s lane, and when they both flipped and turned, they were still neck and neck, but now flying. The commotion and sight of two swimmers racing in the same lane was now drawing the pool’s attention, such that people were collecting along the four sides to watch them go, crowding and leaning over one another, including Fan and Pinah the helper, so they could see these two, the long man and the short man, the gliding strides and the pistons, their arms sometimes tangling or even striking the other on the shoulder, the cap, the torsos jostling and pushing each other against the divider, riding up over it. There was a race to win but neither knew how long the race was, they just kept eating up lengths until Vik, longer and more fit for having been swimming all these years, began to pull away, one length becoming two, becoming three, until it was no longer a race anymore, Vik flipping and turning against a straggling Oliver and then turning again, clearly keen on reaching and lapping him.

By this time Betty was shouting for Oliver to stop, to get out of the pool. When Oliver saw Vik closing, he made a furious kick, perhaps for propulsion, but it caught Vik in the nose and instantly bloodied him. There was a guffaw from the spectators, both swimmers now treading in the pinking water. Vik held his face and saw the blood and then fell upon Oliver, the people around now yelling, Betty screaming, with some of the spectators so riled they either stepped in or jumped in themselves or were pushed in from behind, so that others might see the swimmers fighting, though lifeguards and some swim team members had already jumped in and separated Vik and Oliver.

Fan couldn’t see any more for the bigger people blocking her view, but she did notice Pinah through the scrum, or rather she saw the pinned dark hair of Pinah’s head, suspended a foot below the surface of the water. Her arms flanked wide. Fan jumped in and crouched at the bottom and then shot them both up with a fierce boost of her legs, the plumpish woman much heavier than Fan would have ever thought. Some people on the deck pulled Pinah out and a lifeguard started working on her, Fan watching from the water as she caught her breath at the pool ladder. Luckily the guard got Pinah to cough and hack and start to breathe again quickly, as she’d been under for only a few seconds.

Fan climbed out quickly, panicking for a second, but saw the twins still secured in their bouncers, if now crying. But she didn’t want to pick them up for how soaked she was, her loose sweatpants and T-shirt now clinging to her. Then she saw a toweled, totally spent Oliver being hugged by Betty at the other end of the pool. Betty was fiercely whispering to him, perhaps beseeching him. Whether he was, in fact, listening to her, Fan could not tell. All she knew was that he was staring at her with the deadest eyes, the hollow of the feeling making her instinctively pull the wet fabric from her belly.

Look at the fish.

Our best B-Mor primes. Look at the eyes, luminous and clear. Even on ice, the scales are tiled tight to one another, the points of the fins unbroken, unclipped. Peel forward the gills and see the darkest cherry red, as if there’s blood hotly pushing through its robust, meaty body. The mouth is closed but not clamped in any grimace, saying instead this with a tranquil set of jaw:

We are in good order.

Take us up.

We are ready to be chosen.

And choose them they do. For the rumors are done. Any remnants of the months-long scare about the wholesomeness of our fish are now very few, to be found in only the most phobic quarters, such as those flats and villas where they parse every morsel and sip and likely never enjoyed them anyway. The rest, however, are back at the fish shops all across the Association, queuing as before and with their unyielding Charter scrutiny selecting the ones they deem the brightest, finest, the most pure. They have absolute confidence in their ability to discern and analyze and perhaps well they should, given where they are. They fully believe in themselves, and it doesn’t matter if our fish are of unsurpassed quality, virtually identical in size and composition, and raised in such a way as to make it almost impossible, if not ridiculous, to try to choose among them. And yet they do, studying the displays like they were buying gemstones, and while there are no jostling scrums like at a special clearance or sale in B-Mor, when someone else picks the very one they’ve identified as theirs, the one they’d determined was destined to best nourish and block any rogue unknittings in their cells, they can’t help but get there just a bit earlier the next time.

The result has been a heady rise in the price per kilo of #1 primes, enough, in fact, to get us near the record levels reached during the last big boom, when it seemed no Charter could go for more than a couple of days without a fillet on his plate. All the facility tanks are full again with every stage of them, from specks of fry to the stoutest matureds, the concrete floor of the grow houses tickling the feet with the constant vibrato of the filter pumps running around the clock, the air heavier, moister (though it truly can’t be, given how engineered everything is) with the enriched quality of the reprocessed effluent dripping onto the plant beds. These are growing as dense as ever, so that you can hardly see a coworker weeding directly on the other side, merely hearing the threshing of his gloved hands against the stalks.

And from all this flush being there’s a scent that is at once off-putting and sweetly alluring, too, whiffs of faint rot and newest life columned together and vented through the roof so that the surrounding households of B-Mor must be dreaming of every earthly hunger, of filling themselves with whatever goodness may be at hand. Or are their lights burning later, sometimes into the wee hours of the morning, to feed newly roused desires?

The rest of us have no such wafts carrying across our paths, and yet here we are in the mall-going throng, like everyone else pursuing our day’s own trivial ends but feeling drawn in, too, by the wider pitch and tow. There’s no specialness or majesty in this, there’s nothing different from what has gone on here since the originals set themselves up, we descendants doing what we should be doing, workday or free-day, in the households or in the parks, contracting ourselves for best use and the welfare of the run of times to come. Nobody knows the future. So when we chat on the stoops, say, before the evening chill finally drives us in, of the lady on the next block who attempted to circumvent the usual regulations and produce her own designer line of fashion slippers in her attic using a platoon of counties peddlers as cheap labor, or of the man who was caught sitting at night—totally unclothed—high up in one of the largest trees in the park because he simply wanted, he said, a better view of the stars, we rib one another and chuckle and maybe even argue about the state of our settlement, though with no more of those uneasy skips or pauses, no more throaty, dire tones. We speak and abide one another and then we go in.

For what is there to worry about now? With the relative quiet prevailing, the directorate, or some other body, we can’t be sure, has reversed some of the more disheartening measures of recent times, foremost being restrictions on health clinic visits, which are still limited (as they should be, given the realities of the times) but at a more reasonable frequency, and the qualification for Charter promotion (back up to 2 percent), as well as certain smaller things that indeed make a difference day to day, such as suddenly better pricing for our own excellent produce and fish. There’s even talk of the schools using more of our goods in preparing the children’s
bento
lunches, rather than random broccoli and potatoes of vaguest origins and from suppliers long unnamed and unknown, though this remains to be seen.

Finally there has been an unprecedented round of new, if modest, public works as well, something they’re promoting as Keep It Up, which has employed at very decent pay small armies of recently retired folks and unemployed younger people, who are now sweeping the streets and sidewalks, clipping shrubberies in the parks, power washing and then painting faded or graffiti-tagged buildings and walls, as well as a hundred other sundry projects meant to bring up the luster of our good place. You see them on their snack breaks, maybe a group of eight or ten of them sitting on the picnic benches near the noodle and kebab stands, all wearing the same asparagus green jumpsuits with lighter green caps (inevitably one of the youths sporting it sideways) and while not talking much as they eat (they wouldn’t know one another), older and younger at least joking or sharing a taste of this or that with enough ease and good feeling to suggest that they’re in this together, communing as they labor, this enduring snapshot of what makes us who we are.

And if you put all of this together, if you collect these happenings and projects and promotions, you would have to say that they comprise again the typical habit of our lives here in B-Mor before this period of disturbance, which, from really anyone’s perspective now, would appear to have passed. It’s like a dream irrepressibly vivid and captivating when it was happening but now nearly impossible to remember, not just its details but the very fact of it. We just slept through it is the sensation. Rested the whole of our night. Of course, there are some who must know we did not make passage serenely in a void. Some of us still tap our fingers to the rhythms of those street-filling chants, or can see, when no one else can, the shape of the signs still ghosted in our minds, now blotted by layers of clean fresh paint. It’s not common, not at all, but every once in a while someone will rise up from a chair in an eatery or tea shop or step from the movie theater line and face the blithe crowd with half-open arms and without having to utter a word say to all: So what is this?

What is this?

What is this?

Naturally, nobody will acknowledge her. Everyone becomes a wall. And the person, solo in a room, sits back down. The act and moment are gone.

And yet it happens that some of us, like spies in a perilous land, will meet a certain gaze; and once we do, that recognition can soften the most wary eye and make us want to exchange all kinds of notations again, even the more improbable tales and rumors, to report everything we know of our Fan, who we’re sure can somehow hear us a little better now. It’s not that we can ever help her or lend her more courage. We simply wish her to know that we are here, and not unsatisfactory, and that in this regard she can please pay us no great mind.

For it was important that Fan keep everything out in front of her. After the scuffle at the fitness center pool, they all went back to Betty’s Lane, and while there was a certain heightened state in the new household—this coinciding with their move from the trailer into one of the new houses—with Oliver and Betty perfectly okay as they all breakfasted at the huge kitchen table, at least until, say, Josey or someone else would make some innocent comment, or after nothing was said at all, when Oliver would abruptly rise and retreat to his study. For a few seconds nothing would happen and then Betty would trail after him, and because of the particular acoustics of the center stairwell shafting the house top to bottom, you could hear them even behind the closed study door rasping at each other, Oliver usually the aggrieved party and Betty the remorseful, though midstream their roles would often switch, and switch back. Josey and the babies, of course, paid little or no attention, preoccupied as they were by screens and toys, the helpers trying anything they could to coax them to eat.

Soon enough Oliver and Betty would return to the table, both looking a bit abraded, and resume whatever they had been doing, usually Oliver checking the markets and Betty reviewing her to-do lists for the day, which included calling her parents, who hadn’t quite yet moved in, as they had gone on a thirty-day cruise with other older Charters, this one around Cape Horn; they logged in every other day, waving and blowing kisses to Josey and the babies from the windswept balcony of their stateroom. Otherwise there were few incursions from the outside world, this pattern of Oliver and Betty repeating itself daily, their ascents and descents, until one morning Betty didn’t follow him, and he didn’t return, at least not until after the dishes were cleared, the lessened tension and casual regard they had for each other surely signaling a calmed new stage. But this more orderly state was somewhat unsettling, too, as are most accommodations in matters of the heart, and if Fan didn’t exactly think their marriage was in jeopardy, she did wonder if some other thing or element had now lodged itself between them, their desire for happiness nourishing a fast-growing buffer all around it so that it would hardly be noticed. Fan was still quite young and her love for Reg was unsullied and the only thing giving her self-pause was that on the night before he vanished she had decided on her own to invite risking the condition she was in now. Yes, it was youth’s first passion, yes, as Reg might dorkishly croon, they were “burnin’ like wildfire,” but in truth
Fan made the cold decision in that moment to invite a part of her beloved Reg forever, whether he might wish her to or not. Why did she? Nothing was threatening their future. Again we are sure it was out of love, only love, that she’d told him not to worry. And if there was any secondary reason to be with him again, perhaps it was her hope that she could simply show herself to him, and thus tell him what she’d done.

And which, Oliver informed her and Betty one day on returning from a meeting with a prominent village friend, might happen quite soon, for there’d been a breakthrough lead: Reg was indeed being “studied” at a directorate research facility, one in fact very close to B-Mor. He asked Fan if she knew why he would be examined like this, and of course, Fan had no idea. She truly could have no idea, and never did. Reg was special but no doubt mostly, if not only, to her. In any case Oliver was optimistic, describing how the pharmacorp was applying pressure on their behalf, using its considerable leverage with certain directorate members so that they would allow him a visitation, if not his outright release.

Betty took this news as excitedly as Fan did, promptly taking her the next day, as the best big sister might, to the boutiques in the village to find just the right outfit for the visit. Unlike Miss Cathy, however, Betty didn’t have a preconceived (and squarely daft) conception of what Fan should wear, pretty much liking everything the salesladies brought out for Fan to model, from the designer-jeans-and-blouse look to something more sophisticated, such as a smart cocktail dress, and nixing them (as long as Fan agreed) simply because they didn’t quite fit the bill of a reunion with one’s beau. They tried to figure out what each outfit would say to him on first glance, the bright yellow sundress declaring,
I’m very happy!
or the knee-length cashmere sweater dress murmuring,
I’ve longed for you,
or the more formal lacy white gown announcing,
We shall never part again
. Fan made sure to ask for sizes that would be loose-fitting and comfortable, saying she disliked snug clothing. It was all good fun and Fan found herself giggling along with Betty as she popped out from behind the changing curtain, but in the end Fan chose the outfit that she felt most comfortable in, a set of athletic stretch pants and top and zip-up jacket, all in matte black.

You look great, Betty said, if with eyebrows slightly raised. Very sleek. But why so dark and serious?

Fan explained that this was the closest thing to how Reg most often saw her, which was when she’d just climbed out of the tanks.

Ah, I see, Betty nodded. You want him to feel he’s at home.

Yes, Fan said, although that wasn’t quite right. For really she wanted him to think,
Here’s my Fan
.

They each got a pair of black athletic slip-ons (Betty decided to get the same outfit as Fan, in her size), and afterward they had to stop at the fitness center before going home to empty Betty’s locker. The Cheungs had decided to quit the club, not to blame it for what had happened but simply to get past the unpleasant memory and association. They weren’t going to join another club; given all the new space they had, they were now planning instead to put a swimming pool in the basement of one of the houses.