The Sea of Light (38 page)

“Fennelsworth. Barbara Johnson Fennelsworth,” I said, figuring that he ought to at least know from the beginning what it was he’d be getting into. But I smiled, to soften the blow. “In other words, Barbara.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Barbara. Felipe Delgado,
a tu ordenes.
That is Spanish. It means, ‘at your service.’”

“You’re Spanish?”

“My family’s from Cuba. Personally, I consider myself to be completely American—”

And I smiled. I remember. But turned away, so that he would not see.

“—And, as I was saying, enterprise is the heart of the American system. It’s why my father brought us here to America—for enterprise—”

“Oh,” I said—disappointed for the first time, though not the last—“I thought you’d have said: for
freedom.”

He grinned handsomely. “Forgive me, beautiful one, but this is the century of machines. I think that, in
human
language, anyway, there’s not much difference between those words any more. Freedom and enterprise are the same thing.”

“You’re crazy, Felipe.”

“Phil. Call me Phil—my American name.”

“Fine. Phil, you’re crazy.”

“Not at all, Barbara. I’m a man of the future.”

Thinking what I thought then, I could feel myself blush. His eyes were coal-dark. I imagined them to be Latin,
mestizo
of some sort, with the exotic African danger around nose and lips. Magical. Dominant.

Which, after all, was everything I thought I wanted.

The white collegiate surroundings seemed to spin away then, for a moment. I held his gaze until, embarrassed, we both grinned, and broke, and the pale, pale party came back into focus. But we already had the look of lovers.

*

Life is full of storms.

Sometimes it comes in unexpected forms. Sunshine, for instance; or the Everglades. I would spill into Miami with him, months later, as if entering a nightmare. Multicolored blinking downtown lights mesmerized me. There was traffic wherever you turned. Heat steamed toward the relentless sun. Lawns were gravel and plastic flamingos, lonely palm trees drooping toward pavement. Jellyfish washed up on beaches to die. I felt cracked inside, instantly, in a way I had never experienced before: riven through with odors of salt and fungus, mosquito venom, plant poison, dripping reptilian fangs. The tropics. Life. Rot of the universe.

It was in a horrid Miami motel room, then—before meeting the wretched remnants of his refugee family—where everything happened. It had come to this—out of deference for my parents’ alarm and disgust; I had made him wait that long. Months and months. It had driven us both half mad.

In this motel room, with cracked shades drawn against the heat, cold water in the bath, cigarette holes riddling the bed quilt, he bowed half naked to brush my knuckles with his lips, kissed my arm to the elbow, glanced up once for confirmation, and I shut my eyes. Then opened myself to him as if we were the last two people on earth. As if survival of the species depended on us, on us alone. In the midst of discomfort, passion, horror. Sun and sea and unforeseen life. And the male-female rot of the universe.

Out of all that came my daughter.

*

It is our girl Maria’s day off today, so I cook alone. It’s all for the best, really—she does fairly well with ordinary dinners and cleanup, but I like to oversee important or special occasions. Potatoes steam. Ham and turkey broil. Gravy smells sift through the air.

*

Babe was born just past sunrise on the first day of August. The previous few days had shattered records for heat; this one did, too. Outside, the sun scorched leaves and grass. People’s shoe soles stuck to the sidewalks.

Immediately, she began to scream. The doctor whacked her some more. An obstetrical nurse sponged the tiny, flailing body of my blood and tissue, and placed it between my breasts. I say
it
instead of
her
because, aside from their genitals, infants really do seem entirely androgynous. So, I think, do swimmers in the water. But that is another story. I remember the remains of tied-off umbilical cord wagging in the air, almost phallic, like a miniature flag. I touched one sweating finger to a tiny cheek that was still silky wet, and sighed with deep exhaustion. It was the hardest thing I had ever done. I had not done it alone.

I believe that, in the waiting room, my husband was gulping down coffee, blinking up at pale ceiling lights. Someone must have gone in there to tell him that his first child was a daughter. I don’t know if he was disappointed. The next time I saw him, I noticed that he’d spilled coffee on his shirt. Our daughter was big. Healthy. Perfect. He leaned over us both, smiling, and his eyes lit with tears.

It struck me, over the next few days, how immediately maternity ward nurses come to know an infant’s distinguishing features and characteristics. They can pick one out by name from rows of seemingly identical babies. My daughter was tagged right away as a screamer, an attention-getter of epic proportions.
There she goes again,
they’d say,
yelling. There goes the Delgado kid.
She really was louder than the others; I imagined her howls to be a combination of rage and celebration; but perhaps those feelings were more clearly my own, at the time.

Still, her tiny face turned scarlet. Her little hands pounded the air. And, when she slept, it was the sleep of the righteous.

She seemed so ruddy, dark-skinned, boisterous and without shame. I named her Mildred, after my only hero. The nickname
Babe
just seemed to apply immediately.

My husband was a little upset. He’d wanted his daughter named Teresa Maria, after a favorite aunt of his who had remained in Havana. But I stood firm. I told him he could name his
next
daughter Teresa Maria. This one would be none other than Babe.

*

I fill a pot with water. Set it on the stove to boil. In a strainer, the string beans wait: fresh-cut, washed, pale green, symmetrical.

*

Babe grew up splashing through the water off the eastern Massachusetts shoreline. She was a healthy child, and—as long as she got plenty of attention—her smites lit up the universe. She was big-boned, stocky like my husband’s side of the family, and walked early. For a while, she even held a reign of terror at nursery school, collecting every building block in the place and organizing all the other children into a kind of slave colony; she then forced them to build a palace according to her specifications. One of the teachers called me in for special consultation on the matter.

I confronted Babe later with a kind of dread. As often as not, during these confrontations, my daughter would win out. Even now, when she protested tearfully that she had made the others build her palace for their own good, I could see her point: She had simply wanted them to have a beautiful place to play with, instead of the wretchedly ordinary little hovels they usually built when left to their own devices.

“Yes, honey, but you can’t make people do something just because you think it’s good for them.”

“Why not?”

“Because it isn’t right.”

“Why not?”

“Because it is
never
right to make someone else afraid.” I didn’t quite know if I believed this myself, but it sounded good at the time—firm, authoritative, absolute.

“Why not?”

I could feel myself losing control. The truth of the matter is that I was certainly not going to engage in any dialogue about beauty and terror with a four-year-old. So I spanked her.

The blows were few and light. Still, she sobbed; and, afterwards, I remember suffering days of self-loathing—I remember feeling, at the time, that if I ever again did anything to fracture my daughter’s pride, it would be my own end as well.

But this was a feeling, not a truth. Like all such feelings, it would pass.

*

The water’s boiling. I turn it to low, add a pinch of salt. Slowly, delicately, stir the string beans in. I check the ham—bubbling brown sugar—and baste the turkey; steam beads across my face with the effort of lifting, of reorganizing heavy, heated pans, on different racks, in the oven.

*

“Señorita de mi corazón!”

Every night when he got home from work, my husband would toss her in the air. He’d twirl her in circles like an airplane, dangle her upside down, faithfully play bucking bronco while Babe perched astride him, digging in her imaginary spurs. I was probably a little jealous. I adored them both to distraction. But things were not the way I had imagined. The country, too, was becoming strange to me; much of what I had grown up expecting—all the old traditions—had been smashed utterly over the course of a decade: now all sorts of people were mixing and mingling. And, I suppose, I myself was part of the brand-new stew.

But something about it stank to high heaven.

What I had once thought of as fine and preservable—part of which was, I believed, enduring love—became diluted and faded among the hedges and lawns and ugly gravel driveways of an appallingly
nouveau riche
suburbia, where no one was ever really well-to-do enough, and nothing was ever really pretty enough, to compete with the America I had once known. We did well, I suppose, according to the new classless, race-less standards of the day.

Which, I told myself, was what I had really wanted.

But it seemed, sometimes, that life was spinning along too quickly for me to
seize it. And I was pregnant again.

*

Wearing a white maternity sundress as big as a pup tent I taught Babe to swim one day when stillness gripped the summer shoreline and the water surface was rippled only by an occasional swell.

I did this by supporting her gently against the roundness of my abdomen—which resembled a hidden beach ball—while my hands locked around her naked belly. I then urged her to paddle rhythmically with her arms, to gently kick. Remembering that, since the age of one, she had enjoyed splashing through shallows, had screamed in ecstasy at the sight of whitecaps, gloried in a roll across the wet sand. She’d always been drawn to oceans, ponds, the rain, sidewalk puddles. Several pairs of shoes had been ruined by this enthusiasm. But I was determined that she learn to float, too, as well as kick up a fuss. It seemed important.

Her response was typical.

“No.”

“Yes,” I said. “Now move your arms.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Well, you have to.”

“Why?”

“Because you have to be able to swim.”

“Why?”

“Because,” I sighed, “water kills fire.”

When I let her go, I was riveted by terror. Sun ricocheted off the liquid mirror, blinding me, sudden swells rose with the breeze and pushed me back toward shore. I opened my eyes and saw my child paddling furiously, several feet away. The smooth dark face was compressed with effort. White froth spun around her little kicking feet. Each tiny hand cupped whirlpools beneath the surface. I beat back every urge to lumber screaming through the water, lift her up and hold her safely in both arms. A wave crested and I almost panicked; then calmed down when I saw Babe’s head riding above the crest. Her lips sucked air in a fury of strain and triumph. My eyes filled. As of that moment, I knew, I was no longer my daughter’s protector. Helplessly, I watched her swim.

*

The ham is nearly done. The string beans are not. A sugary vegetable smell mixes in the air with a smell of rising bread, dripping meat. From far away I hear the doors, and feet, and suitcases. Not my husband, but my daughter. I can hear the sound of my children’s voices—chuckles of sarcasm and delight; the young, husky tones. Squeals as Teresa runs for her. A loud
humphh!,
and hug, as she is lifted in her arms. I stay where I am, and stir.

*

Jack’s birth was, for Babe, a calamity. But Roberto’s was much worse. Suddenly, just as things were calming a little, there was another new wailing monkey-like creature at home, consuming everyone’s attention.

My daughter sulked with the forlorn contempt of dethroned royalty. She’d just entered second grade, and vented her rage in tantrums that sent other children shrieking. I was notified of this matter by yet another teacher; another consultation was requested.

“Here.” I threw the notice at my husband, who was home on a rare vacation day. Roberto howled from his crib. In my arms, Jack screamed. Formula boiled over on the stove.
“You
go for a change,
señor.
I’ll meet you there later.”

Babe’s second-grade teacher was a Mrs. Monahan. A reasonably pretty fair-haired thing, about my age. I am sure that, for these behavioral conferences, she was used to facing mothers. So I imagine that, when my husband walked into the empty classroom, dressed in casual sweater and sports jacket, half-apologetic smile spread over his darkly handsome face, she was momentarily flustered. But, it seems, they got along almost immediately. I imagine that her advice was simple and direct.

It must, I imagine, have gone something like this:

“Mr. Delgado, your daughter is charming and bright. I think she needs some healthy outlet for her competitive instincts. She needs to learn how to be fair to others. And she’ll be just fine.” Perhaps she paused then. It wag late afternoon. Dull gold afternoon light must have streaked the chalk-clouded blackboard. For a moment, perhaps, she might have seen the yearning that flickered in his eyes. She might have said, softly, “I hope there’s no problem at home?”