Livy sent Kirsten her address at the inn but the only letter she got back was disappointingly short. A horoscope that Kirsten had annotated and a few updates. Cheyenne was living at Neighborsbane; Essex was doing okay at boot camp. A week later she got a letter from Essex. It was also short but came with a picture of him. With his new crew cut he looked like a bouncer.
Dear Livy,
I have found perfect working socialism and it is called the Armed Forces. You get food and a place to live, health care, education. I’m getting that root canal I’ve needed for years. Boot camp is beyond words. They actually make you do all those stupid things you see in movies. Sometimes I don’t feel the way I’m supposed to about it. They make you care about things by holding other people hostage, though. It turns out you do all sorts of things for other people you would never do if it was just you.
Don’t lose a finger or an eye (I don’t know how to end letters).
Love, Essex—also, I have a bank account and get regular deposits. They give you ten days between boot camp and training. I’m going to go home and buy something for Kirsten. I’m not sure what. What do you want?
I want money, I want a job, I want to come home with something…Livy folded the letter and put it in her back pocket. Thinking of Essex made her think of Cheyenne. She felt a twinge of guilt.
The next afternoon she found a necklace in the lining of her jacket that must have slipped down through a hole in her pocket. The necklace was one of Cheyenne’s favorites. Livy had taken it to sell in an emergency. She held it up, a Chinese jade pendant on a 24-karat-gold chain with two fixed gold beads to accentuate the collarbone. Livy went to see if she could find a pawnshop of any kind but still couldn’t make herself sell it. She pushed the necklace back down through the hole into the lining and sewed it up. After all the money her sister had cost her, they were even.
* * *
—
Weeks passed. Ferries stopped running. The season changed. Finally, the crab fleet amassed. The Eliana came but the captain offered them a single job that they could split for a flat fee at greenhorn pay. Take it or leave it. Having no alternatives, they signed on.
On the day before departure, the docks changed. Livy could see the electricity running between people. Their eyes sharp and sharklike, they moved faster. It was contagious. Whatever this crab season would be, it was about to happen. She and Michael climbed the hills of subarctic grassland above the old Russian Orthodox church. They found wild ponies standing in a few inches of snow, already fallen. The water and sky were every gradation of blue, passing through shades but arriving nowhere. Michael told her about a forest of drunken trees. Drunk? Drunk. Leaning. He wanted to go into the church on the way back. It reminded him of his mom and being a kid. Livy agreed but didn’t really want to go. In the seat next to him, she waited out the service, ignoring what she could. This is where they send them out, fishermen, like they did before electricity, like they did before radio, out through these white painted timbers, out into the ocean. Out like Essex. To wherever.
32 The Crocodile and the Clock
KIRSTEN SAT before the oncologist, shifting back and forth in time.
The closest she’d ever come to death was her pregnancy. Her labor had not gone well. At thirty-nine weeks she woke up in a wet bed at dawn and called Margaret. While she was on the phone, Ann drank castor oil and started walking loops around the block. By the time Margaret arrived, Ann was in labor as well. Ann delivered quickly, but Kirsten was not progressing. Margaret raised the possibility of transferring her to a hospital but Kirsten begged her to wait. At thirty hours, Margaret gave her a tiny injection of morphine to allow her to rest. She woke up disoriented, in hard labor.
It was not so different—loss of appetite, cramps, nausea. You think something is wrong but then you think, no, it’s always like this, pains, moods, things come and go. They run tests and say…You’re pregnant. You have swallowed a watch. Now the crocodile will always be able to find you. Then later, you don’t eat like you used to and get nauseous. There are ghost pains—but isn’t it always something? The stress of scrappy living, hormonal changes. You’re fifty-two. What do you expect? They run tests and come back and say…We have found a clock inside you. But it’s the windup kind.
* * *
—
“You shouldn’t feel like you did something wrong,” said the oncologist. “Stomach cancer is often undetected until stage three or four. It’s like ovarian. What we have to do now is begin treatment.”
“I don’t want to rush into surgery.”
“You’re not a candidate. Have you spoken with your children?”
Kirsten heard the light clicking of her own teeth as her jaw trembled and wondered if it was audible outside her head or only visible.
“You’re free to do what you want,” said the oncologist, “but in your case I think aggressive treatment is the only real option.”
“This from the people who brought you floating wombs, Lysol douches, cigarettes for pregnancy weight, and episiotomies,” said Kirsten.
“It’s your choice.”
“Not really it isn’t.”
A fat tear ran down her cheekbone.
* * *
—
As a teenager Kirsten had pranced into Margaret’s office and announced she was not terminating her pregnancy. Margaret did not crown her with praise or throw her a party.
“Women died so you could have a choice,” she said.
Puffed up like an affronted pheasant, Kirsten said, “I made a choice.”
“The hell you did. A real choice has three questions: What the fuck am I going to do, and who are these bastards I’m talking to, and is this bullshit even real? Which of these have you asked?”
As an adult she knew how to ask those questions, but no matter how she asked them, the choices looked no better.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #1: Do rounds of chemo and radiation and hope it works for a while.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #2: Go to Mexico for experimental treatment. Consort with rich people afraid of death. Start a blog.
SHITTY FUCKING OPTION #3: Do nothing.
* * *
—
Kirsten had seen stars in total blackness once. She’d been twenty-one. She was driving across the desert her first night away from the girls and there it was, the galaxy, uncountable specks of dust moving in circles lighting the dark. She drove under the canopy, vacillating between an awareness of brilliance and sorrow—because she hadn’t known magic was real until she saw this, because she’d never really been anywhere and now probably never would.
Two years. Two years. Two years of Cheyenne awake while Livy slept. One sick then both sick. One bleeding because the other knocked her down. She’d learned to parent with stomach flu, with fevers and food poisoning. Two years. Two years of never going to the bathroom alone, showering with the curtain open so she could hear what was going on. She’d learned not to scream at them in the grocery store when she couldn’t keep them from running through the aisles. And she’d learned not to cry when all the other mothers looked at her like she was trash and made comments about controlling her children. At night after she put them to bed she’d walk into the living room stunned by the day. She’d sit in a chair and sob. She’d made the wrong decision. On everything. Everything—her deep independence and love of autonomy, her night-owl ways and desire for solitude, her dreams of travel—it was all gone. She couldn’t stand a single thing about her life anymore. She hated being a mother. But she loved her girls.
She was in a metaphysical bookstore—because it didn’t take a genius to know she was more than materially fucked and symbolically fucked but archetypally fucked on a grand scale—trying to speed-read a book on tarot when Cheyenne pulled a whole row of books off the bottom shelf and Livy ran out the door.
A young woman in the Feminine Mysteries
aisle ran out, snatched Livy up, and brought the furious eighteen-month-old back to Kirsten, who already had Cheyenne by the arm. After passing the flushed and kicking Livy back to Kirsten, the woman cleaned up the aisle, putting the books back. Then a miracle happened. She offered to watch the girls so Kirsten could finish reading the chapter on tarot. An act of kindness so powerful it broke her life in two. Kirsten before that, Kirsten after.
A month later she and the young woman dedicated themselves to the Goddess, and for Kirsten’s twenty-first birthday the women of her newly minted coven took her kids for the weekend, filled her tank with gas, and sent her to a hot spring in the desert.
Driving across a desert free of light pollution, liberated for two nights from motherhood, Kirsten searched for her planets but couldn’t tell them from planes. The constellations had also been easier to see on paper. The only things she recognized were the Big Dipper and the North Star. Propelling herself toward a nameless star at the top of her windshield, counting up the miles behind her, she tried to outrun motherhood. Hitting 110 miles per hour on the freeway, the car rattled, breaking apart in the atmosphere. Holding the wheel her arms shook; burning up in the waves of gravity, battered by planetary tides, shards of a life, violence of light, she was never going to get there.
* * *
—
Option #3 it was.
33 Hathor
CHEYENNE WALKED UP to the ticket kiosk in the basement parking garage and tapped on the bulletproof glass. Kirsten slid the window open.
“I got a message you have something for me,” said Cheyenne.
“Wait in the locker room. I have to clock out.”
Kirsten pointed to a door in the corner of the garage.
Cheyenne found the lockers but didn’t sit. She was still angry. She’d come ready to let Kirsten have it. Seeing her in the kiosk, though, in such an anonymous position, was unsettling. She also had no idea what was coming or what her mother wanted to give her.
* * *
—
The locker room had gray tile walls and a hamper. There were three OSHA posters and a sink without a hot-water handle. It reminded Cheyenne of the women’s changing area at the public pool where Kirsten made them take swim lessons in grade school so they wouldn’t drown if they fell off the ferry deck. Coming home reeking of chlorine, deaf from screaming kids and lifeguard whistles, with hunger headaches, their hair stiff from chemicals, eyes burning, they’d burst into the apartment where, instead of beans and rice or mac and cheese, Kirsten would have vegetarian lasagna or shepherd’s pie with mushrooms waiting. They would devour it, skip homework, and go to sleep. She could see Kirsten as she was then. Long hair, horselike muscles, wildly alert—she wanted that Kirsten.
The door opened and Kirsten came in. She sat on the bench and unbuttoned her fake–cop uniform shirt. Underneath was a cheap white bra with light brown stains at the armpits. Her belly was a series of gentle rolls. She seemed to have lost weight, which gave Cheyenne a prick of concern because Kirsten didn’t diet. Diets were a form of violence used to keep women self-obsessed and small. But then Kirsten also didn’t work as a wage slave.
“You gave her my address,” said Cheyenne. “Which means you had hers all along.”
“Whose?”
“Oh don’t be cute about it.”
“Do you remember what you said when you first brought Essex home?” Kirsten asked. “You said, I don’t want him but he needs to go somewhere. I cried like crazy. You were seventeen. Do you know why I cried? It was the first time I knew that I was a good mother. First, because you couldn’t leave an eleven-year-old on the street with no one. And—don’t look at me like that—second, because you brought him to me.”
Kirsten dialed the combination on her locker.
“How much have you talked to Ann?” Kirsten asked.
Cheyenne looked at an OSHA poster. She had written a letter but nothing came back.
“She had a choice in what happened,” said Kirsten.
“Are you saying someone can’t regret a decision they made? ’Cause I sure as fuck do.”
Kirsten reached in her locker and took out a packet of letters. She set them on the bench.
“This is every letter I have from Ann. Not one missing. Look and you’ll get answers.”
Cheyenne felt anger come through her skin. “Why don’t you just tell me?”
“They’re not my questions,” said Kirsten. She pulled out her keys and worked the Toyota key off the ring. She put the key on top of the letters and slid them toward Cheyenne. “Do what you want. Go.” Kirsten’s eyes teared up.
“Don’t do that,” said Cheyenne, “don’t you dare. None of this ever had to be secret. You made your own bed. I don’t feel sorry for you. What’s happening now between Livy and me is your fault. Essex joining the marines is your fault.”
“How the hell is Essex joining the marines my fault?” said Kirsten.
“You want him to be what he’s not. He’s never living up to his potential. None of us are. I’m sick of being told I have something exceptional in me or that Livy does or Essex. It’s such bullshit. I can’t just work in an office. Essex can’t just drive a cab. Livy can’t just paint a fucking boat. It all has to be part of some stupid story line about our path and manifesting some agenda. You know, I met a lot of people who believed that shit back East and they’re different from us. You know how? They’re rich.”
Cheyenne remembered that whenever she intervened on a conversation with something astute, Jackson’s friends acted like she was a fish that suddenly began to speak. They marveled. They listened. Then they congratulated themselves on discovering a talking fish. Kirsten didn’t witness it. Jackson missed it because he was it. And it’s not like there was a manual for all the rules either. You can’t say “black.” You can’t call someone a Mexican. Don’t ask how much something costs or what someone makes at their job. If you find a bargain, keep it to yourself unless it comes from a thrift store, then brag. The part she never mastered was how to talk about her life. She wasn’t an up-and-coming lawyer or filmmaker or founder of an NGO. She wasn’t an academic. Tell me about yourself. She hated the question because it was not a question. It was a command: Present an entertaining (short) monkey dance about your life, a sentence or two to relieve the listener of having to think about you—Dana is a brilliant surgeon who fell in love with a woman who works with rescue horses and now writes children’s books and lives with her in Texas…Robbie is a genius mechanic who can fix or build anything (you really should get his number), who’s rehabbing this spooky, haunted house into a bed-and-breakfast a few miles from our summer cabin—a vocation, connected to an aspiration, connected to a place. She couldn’t do it.
Cheyenne shook her head and folded her arms. “You know I’m not sure what you thought you were teaching us but it’s not helping.”
Kirsten stood up fast and yelled in a sharp voice, “I am not going to apologize for thinking the three of you have possibilities. For thinking what you have inside you may be of some use in the world and suggesting you get off your ass and figure out what that is. And I’m not going to buy into the Man’s rules about who can be someone and who can’t.” She lowered her voice. “This is just a transition time.”
“See?” Cheyenne shouted. “That’s how you undermine every moment. It’s never enough to just be somewhere doing something lame without any fucking reason. No, we’re all supposed to be dragging some rock of karma up a mountain at the same time.” Her voice cut out because her larynx clenched and she couldn’t get air and a sob burned up through her throat. “I don’t think I’ve ever felt free in my life. That’s why Essex isn’t here. Because he thinks it isn’t good enough to just be alive. You’re going to kill him and I will never ever forgive you.”
Kirsten turned the color of ash. Tears left claw marks on her cheeks. Splotches of red appeared on her pale ches
t and arms. “That is not true. That’s not true. Don’t say that.”
Cheyenne snatched the letters and the key and left.
Halfway across the parking garage, it occurred to her that the sound of their fight would have rung loudly in the building, amplified by the tile and tin of the locker room, and further by the concrete hallway and the shape of the parking garage. Everyone within two hundred yards would have heard them yell. Security guards. Clerks in the office. Patients. Doctors walking to their cars. So why had no one come to see what was going on? Or was it just that the sound of two women screaming didn’t scare anyone?
* * *
—
Cheyenne had $326 dollars of her rent and bill money. She could sleep in the car. If she drove south then across, most nights would be warm. At the co-op she bought a nine-pound vat of peanut butter and in a proud moment of thrift, passed on the tampons. She would roll her own. Without a word to her landlord, the next morning she put her keys on the floor of her room and drove away from Neighborsbane. Fuck me if I ever see it again. The girls’ karma is their own. If they’re meant to find me they will. Anger at Kirsten choked her.
She drove east through Snoqualmie Pass. Blades of sunlight cut between ridges, blinding her on the curves. Radio stations dipped in and out. The Toyota sounded like a cheap hair dryer as it gained elevation. At lunch Cheyenne pulled into a Dairy Queen. Queen? For a moment she imagined the great lover Hathor, her cow’s head looming, drunk, over the grill, dreaming of bloodbaths and rivers of beer. But the girl who made her milk shake was not Hathor. She was a teenager who wrote tickets in backward-slanting round script.
The Great Offshore Grounds Page 16
