Second Skin (7 page)

And so, fresh from the wartime capital of the world, we became her unwitting lodgers, Cassandra and I, Cassandra with her pretended mothering of Pixie, I with my recent and terrifying secret knowledge about Fernandez. Already the fall winds were gathering and every morning from my bedroom window I watched a single hungry bird hang itself on the wet rising wind and, battered and crescent-shaped and angry, submit itself endlessly to the first raw gloom of day in the hopes of spying from on high some flash of food in the dirty undulating trough of a wave. And every morning I stood blowing on my fingers and watching the tom and ragged bird until it flapped away on the ragged wings of its discouragement, blowing, shivering, smiling to think that here even the birds were mere prowlers in the mist and wind, mere vagrants in the empty back lots of that low sky.

Briefly then our new home. White clapboard house, peeling paint, abandoned wasp’s nest under the eaves, loose shingles, fungus-like green sludge scattered across the roof. Widow’s house, needy but respectable. In front a veranda—the old green settee filled with mice, heap of rotted canvas and rusted springs—and
a naked chestnut tree with incurable disease and also two fat black Labrador retrievers chained to a little peeling kennel. Protection for the poor widow, culprits who heaped the bare front yard with the black fingers of their manure. And in the rear the widow’s little untended victory garden—a few dead vines, a few small humps in the frost—and, barely upright and half-leaning against a weed-grown shed, the long-abandoned wreck of a hot rod—orange, blue, white, no tires, no glass in the windows, big number five on the crumpled hood—the kind of hopeless incongruity to be found behind the houses of young island widows. Our new home then, and with its cracked masonry, warped beams, sway-backed floors and tiny old fusty fireplaces packed with the rank odor of urine and white ash, it was just as I had dreamed it, was exactly as I had seen it and even smelled and tasted it during all my exotic hot nights at sea when I suffered each separate moment of my personal contribution to the obscene annals of naval history. This house then, and every bit the old freezing white skeleton I had been hoping for. So on my rickety pine bureau I propped my photograph of the U.S.S.
Starfish
and flung the flight bag in the bottom drawer and hung my uniform in the closet which contained three little seagoing chests made of bone and brass and dried-out cracked turkey skin. Propped up the picture, hung away the spotted uniform, admired the way I looked in a black and white checked shirt and dark blue thick woolen trousers. Ready for gales, ready for black rocks. Everything in order and as I had expected, even to the identical white bowls and pitchers and washstands in Cassandra’s room and mine, even to the marble sink, lion claws on the tub and long metal flush chain in the john. Of course I could not have anticipated the black brassiere that dangled as large and stark as an albatross from the tin shower curtain pole. I stared at it a long moment— this first sign of the enemy—and then shut the old heavily varnished ill-fitting door. There was a tap leaking on the other side.

Of all those mornings, darkening, growing colder, dragging us down to winter, I remember most clearly our first in the
widow’s house, because that was the dawn of my first encounter with Miranda. Dead brown rotten world, heartless dawn. Innocence and distraction at half past five in the morning.

I awoke in my strange bed in my strange room in the old white worm-eaten house and heard Pixie crying her fierce little nearly inaudible cry and looked about me at the bare sprawling shadows of monastic antiquity and shuddered, smiled, felt my cold hands and my cold feet crawling between the camphor-ridden sheets. It was still dark, as black as the somber mood of some Lutheran hymn, the flat pillow was filled with horsehair and the blanket against my cheek was of the thin faded stuff with which they drape old ladies’ shoulders in this cold country. And the wind, the black wind was rising off the iron flanks of the Atlantic and driving its burden of frozen spray through the abandoned fields of frost, across the green jetties, over the gray roofs of collapsing barns, driving its weight and hoary spray between the little stunted apple trees that bordered the widow’s house and smashing the last of the dead apples against my side of the house. From somewhere nearby I could hear the tongue swinging about tonelessly in the bell hung up in the steeple of the Lutheran church, and the oval mirror was swaying on my wall, the gulls were groaning above me and Pixie was still awake and crying.

Stiff new black and white checked shirt of the lumberjack, dark blue woolen trousers—heavy, warm, woven of tiny silken hairs—my white navy shoes. I fumbled in the darkness and for a moment stood at my front bedroom window—silhouettes of bending and suffering larch trees, in the distance white caps of hectic needlepoint—for a moment stood at my rear window and watched the high weeds beating against the screaming shadow of the hot rod. And then I felt my way down to the cold kitchen and fixed a day’s supply of baby bottles of milk for poor Pixie.

A lone fat shivering prowler in that whitewashed kitchen, I lit the wood in the stove and found the baby bottles standing in a row like little lighthouses where Cassandra had hastily stood them on the thick blond pine kitchen table the night before, found them standing between an antique coffee grinder—silver-plated
handle, black beans in the drawer—and a photography magazine tossed open to a glossy full-page picture of a naked woman. It was five forty-five by Miranda’s old tin clock and noiselessly, listening to the stove, the black wind, the clatter of the apples against the window, I took the bottles to the aluminum sink, primed the old farmhouse pump—yellow iron belly and slack iron idiot lip—discovered a pot in a cupboard along with a case, a full case, of Old Grand-Dad whiskey, and filled the pot and set it on the stove. Then I plucked the nipples from the bottles and washed the bottles, washed the nipples—sweet scummy rubber and pinprick holes that shot fine thin streams of artesian well water into the sink under the pressure of my raw cold thumb—punched two slits in a tin can of evaporated milk—slip of the opener, blood running in the stream of the pump, fingers holding tight to the wrist and teeth catching and holding a comer of loose lip, grimacing and shaking away the blood—and as large as I was ran noiselessly back and forth between the sink and stove until the milk for Pixie’s little curdling stomach was safely bottled and the bottles were lined up white and rattling in the widow’s rectangular snowy refrigerator. I wiped the table, wiped out the sink, dried and put away the pot, returned the cursed opener to its place among bright knives and glass swizzle sticks, paused for a quick look at a photograph of a young white-faced soldier hung on the wall next to half a dozen old-fashioned hot plate holders. The photograph was signed “Don” and the thin face was so young and white that I knew even from the photograph itself that Don was dead. Squeezing my fingers I tiptoed back upstairs, leaned in the doorway and smiled at Cassandra’s outstretched neatly blanketed body and at her clothes bundled on a spindly ladderback rocking chair that faintly moved in the wind. I leaned and smiled, sucked the finger. Pixie had fallen back to sleep, of course, in the hooded dark wooden cradle that sat on the cold floor at the foot of Cassandra’s little four-poster bed.

And so I was awake, dressed, was free in this sleeping house and had forgotten the signs—the black brassiere, the naked woman, the full case of Old Grand-Dad—and I could think of
nothing but the wind and the shore and a set of black oilskins,cracked sou’wester and long black coat, which I had seen in an entryway off the kitchen. Back down I went to the kitchen and yanked open the door, dressed myself swiftly in the sardine captain’s outfit and was shocked to find a lipstick in the pocket. Carefully I let myself out into the first white smears and streaks of that approaching day.

I tried to catch my breath, I socked my hands into the rising and flapping skirts of the coat, I smiled in a sudden flurry of little tears like diamonds, thinking of Cassandra safe through winter days and of a game of Mah Jongg through all the winter nights, and put down my head and made off for the distinct sound of crashing water. From the very first I walked with my light and swinging step and my chin high, walked away from the house ready to meet all my island world, walked actually with a bounce despite the wind, the crazy interference of the black rubber coat, the weight of my poor cold slobbering white navy shoes drenched in a crunchy puddle which I failed to see behind the kennel of the sleeping Labradors. The larch trees with their broken backs, the enormous black sky streaked with fistfuls of congealed fat, the abandoned Poor House that looked like a barn, the great brown dripping box of the Lutheran church bereft of sour souls, bereft of the hymn singers with poke bonnets and sunken and accusing horse faces and dreary choruses, a few weather-beaten cottages unlighted and tight to the dawn and filled, I could see at a glance, with the marvelous dry morality of calico and beans and lard, and then a privy, a blackened pile of tin cans, and even a rooster, a single live rooster strutting in a patch of weeds and losing his broken feathers, clutching his wattles, every moment or two trying to crow into the wind, trying to grub up the head of a worm with one of his snubbed-off claws, cankerous little bloodshot rooster pecking away at the dawn in the empty yard of some dead fisherman. … Oh, it was all spread before me and all mine, this strange island of bitter wind and blighted blueberries and empty nests.

I took deep breaths, battling the stupid coat, and I swung down a path of wet nettles, breathed it all in. Breathed in the
salt, the scent of frozen weeds, the briny female odor of ripe periwinkles, the stench from the heads of blue-eyed decapitated fish. And the pine trees. The pine trees were bleeding, freely giving off that rich green fragrance which as a child I had but faintly smelled in the mortuary on Christmas mornings. Just ahead of me, just beyond the growths of crippled pine and still in darkness lay the shore, the erupted coast, and suddenly I the only-born, the happy stranger, the one man awake and walking this pitch-black seminal dawn—suddenly I wanted to fling out my arms and sweep together secret cove and Crooked Finger Rock and family burial mounds of poor fishermen, sweep it all together and give it life, my life. Pitching through brier patches, laughing and stumbling under the dripping pines, I hurried on.

And wet, rubbery, exuberant, I emerged into a clearing and stopped short, opened my eyes wide. I saw only a listing handmade jetty and a fisherman’s hut with boarded-up windows, a staved-in dory and a tin chimney that gave off a thin stream of smoke. But beside the dory—gray ribs, rusted oarlock—there was a boy’s bicycle propped upside down with its front wheel missing and a clot of black seaweed caught in the sprocket. And though there were days and days to pass before I met the boy— his name was Bub—and met also his fishing father and no-good brother—Captain Red and Jomo—still I felt that I knew the place and had seen that bicycle racing in my own dreams. I could only stop and stare at the useless bicycle and at two squat gasoline pumps pimpled with the droppings of departed gulls and wet with the cold mist, those two pumps once bearing the insignia of some mainland oil company but standing now before the hut and sagging jetty as ludicrous signs of the bold and careless enterprise of that outpost beside the sea. I knew intuidvely that I had stumbled upon the crafty makeshift world of another widower. But how could I know that Captain Red’s boat, the
Peter Poor
, lay invisible and waiting only fifty yards from shore in its dark anchorage? How could I know that we, Cassandra and I, would sail away for our sickening afternoon on that very boat, the
Peter Poor
, how know about the violence of that sea or about the old man’s naked passion? But if I had known, if I had seen
it all in my glimpse of Jomo’s pumps and Bub’s useless bicycle and the old man’s smoke, would I have faltered, turned back, fled in some other direction? No. I think not. Surely I would have been too proud, too innocent, too trusting to turn back in another direction.

So I was careful to make no noise, careful not to disturb this first intact and impoverished and somehow illicit vision of the widower’s overgrown outstation in the collapsing dawn, and staring at bleached slabs of porous wood and rusted nailheads I restrained my impulse to cup hands against the wind and cry out a cheery hello. And I merely waved to no one at all, expecting no wave in return, and gathered my rubber skirts and swept down the path to the beach.

Overhead the dawn was beginning to possess the sky, squadrons of gray geese lumbered through the blackness, and I was walking on pebbles, balancing and rolling forward on the ocean’s cast-up marbles, or wet and cold was struggling across stray balustrades of shale. At my shoulder was the hump of the shore itself—tree roots, hollows of pubic moss, dead violets—underfoot the beach—tricky curvatures of stone, slush of ground shells, waterspouts, sudden clefts and crevices, pools that reflected bright eyes, big smile, foolish hat. Far in the distance I could see the cold white thumb of the condemned lighthouse.

But time, the white monster, had already gripped this edge of the island in two bright claws, had already begun to haul itself out of an ugly sea, and the undeniable day was upon me. I slipped, the coat blew wide, and for some reason I fell back and found myself staring up at a gray sky, gray scudding clouds, a thick palpable reality of air in which only the barometer and a few weak signals of distress could survive. An inhuman daytime sky. And directly overhead I saw the bird, the gray-brown hungry body and crescent wings. He was hovering and I could see the irritable way he fended off the wind and maintained his position and I knew that he would return again and again to this same spot. And against the chopping and spilling of the black water I saw the lighthouse. It was not safely in the distance as I had thought, but was upon me. Black missing tooth for a door,
faint sea-discolorations rising the height of the white tower, broken glass in its empty head, a bit of white cloth caught up in the broken glass and waving, the whole condemned weight of it was there within shouting distance despite the wind and sea. I could even make out the tufts of high grass bent and beating against its base, and even through the black doorless entrance way I could feel the rank skin-prickling texture of the darkness packed inside that forbidden white tower, and must have known even then that I could not escape the lighthouse, could do nothing to prevent my having at last to enter that wind-whistling place and having to feel my way to the topmost iron rung of its abandoned stair.