Space

by Jesse Lee Kercheval

  A Realtor, a fiercely tanned woman with dark cat’s-eye sunglasses, met us at the model house, a pale yellow one with a sea horse by the door. Carol and I raced through the rooms. “Hey, our bathroom has two sinks,” she called. “No more sharing.” The walls inside were stucco, too, and felt rough when I brushed against one. A glint of light caught my eye, and I looked up.

  “Wow, look,” I said to Carol. The stuccoed ceiling glittered as if stars were mixed with the plaster, or at least bits of mica. Carol wrinkled her nose.

  “Tacky,” she said.

  The floors were something the Realtor called terrazzo. It looked like marble, with chips of gold and silver dreaming away below the polished surface. It reminded me of a story a girl at school told, about how her goldfish got caught by a freeze in their pond and stayed that way all winter and then thawed out in the spring, good as new.

  I ran through the open sliding-glass door into the backyard. Here the lawn sloped down to a canal about as wide as the driveway. A powerboat went by, and a brown wake washed the edge of the grass. Across the canal, at what could be our neighbors’, a sailboat was tied to a dock. The sound of the rope clanging against the mast was exactly the same sound the flagpole had made all year outside my fourth-grade classroom. I wondered if our dogs would like it here. I wondered if dachshunds could swim. Our cat, Lucky, wouldn’t be keen about being surrounded by so much water. The Realtor came out with my parents.

  “It’s awfully small,” my mother was saying. She was thinking of our house in Maryland, which was two stories and had a full basement.

  “That’s because you’re from up North,” the woman said, taking her sunglasses off long enough to wipe them with a tissue. She had white ovals around her eyes. “Everyone thinks that about Florida houses at first. You have to realize, here you do most of your living outside.” My mother pushed her own sunglasses up with one finger. She looked doubtful. It wasn’t even noon, and already the sun was so hot that the canal was steaming. My father took the Realtor’s card.

  On the way back to the Holiday Inn, my father talked about getting a paper, calling another Realtor or two. “Let’s sleep on it, Ed,” my mother said. So instead, we went to the beach.

  I had never been to a beach before, but I had grown up seeing all the world’s oceans on TV and in National Geographic. I thought I knew what the Atlantic would be like. Then I walked with Carol out the rear door of the Holiday Inn, crossed the hot wooden boardwalk hopping on one foot, and as far as I could see there was only hard tan sand and ocean. Water stretched to the horizon and out of sight on either side, too. For the first time, I knew the meaning of the word endless. The waves were different than I thought they would be. I imagined splashes, like in a pool. Long swells started at the edge of the horizon and rolled toward me like moving hills. I couldn’t take my eyes off them.

  “Cowabunga,” Carol said, quoting Snoopy, and ran for the water.

  I followed her, stood an inch in the surf. I felt dizzy with the idea that each wave had started in England or in France where I was born or in whatever place was on the other side of all that long, lonely ocean and had come all this way to end here, breaking into white foam on my toes.

  My father rented an already inflated inflatable raft from a stand on the beach and took us out. Carol and I couldn’t really swim. We had just dog-paddled a little in the swimming pool at the officer’s club my father still belonged to outside D.C. It was always so full of people you could walk across it without getting wet. Our skills weren’t up to an ocean. My father’s barely were. He had been on the swim team when he was at West Point, and my mother complained that when he was restless at night he still swam in his sleep, but I had never seen him do more than a couple of slow laps.

  My mother stayed on the beach, fully dressed, a towel draped over her head. She never went in the water. She waved. Carol and I clung to the raft as my father sidestroked into the waves, dragging us along on our raft with one hand. A wave crested right in front of us, slapped us full in the face. I heard Carol shriek, but I was too amazed.

  The water was really salty. I mean, I knew the water in the ocean was saltwater, but I had thought of it as something very dilute, like the few grains of sugar my mother put in her coffee. This stung my eyes and made the inside of my nose burn like crazy. I licked my lips. It was like licking a potato chip, that salty. “Hang on,” my father said, stroking away. Another wave got us, and Carol gave up, went splashing back to the beach to join my mother under her towel. She should have stayed. Dad towed me out beyond the surf, and we floated there, rising and falling on the swells.

  “This is the life, eh?” he said, floating on his back, wiggling his toes. He was still wearing his prescription sunglasses. Back home, he never went in the pool without them. After a while, we saw my mother standing up. She waved her arm back and forth over her head. We both understood perfectly that she wanted us to come in and get out of the water, but we didn’t. For a good long while, we ignored her, like we were both adults and knew better. Then Carol began hopping around, too. “They’ll spook the lifeguard,” Dad said, angry. We ignored them a second longer, then my father sighed, resigned. “We’d better head in.”

  We were about halfway when a wave caught him from the side and swept his sunglasses off. “Goddamn it, those cost me thirty bucks,” he said, letting go of the raft and diving for them.

  The next wave took hold of the raft and spun me forward, high on the crest. I hung on, surfing along. Then the curl caught the nose of the raft and pulled it under and me with it. Suddenly I was on the bottom. I felt coarse sand, broken shells. I heard the strange underwater sound of my skin scraping along the ocean floor. I tried kicking my legs, but my muscles were nothing compared to the pull of the undertow, sucking me out to sea with the other trash.

  In a moment, I knew, I would be drowning. In front of my eyes I saw a newspaper with the front-page headline NONSWIMMER DROWNS. Below that, a picture of what was left of my family: Mom, Dad, Carol. I felt cheated. I was supposed to see my whole life flash in front of my eyes. Everyone knew that. Could it be that at nine I hadn’t had enough of one yet?

  Then it was over. The surge of the next wave pulled me up out of the undertow, spun me over and over until I found myself sitting in about a foot of water. I stood up. My bathing suit bottom was full of wet, heavy sand. “Oh, there you are,” my father said. He had his sunglasses in his hand.

  AT DINNER, THE waitress looked at me, took a step back, and said, “Boy, did you get some sun!” She looked from me to Carol, who was white as wax by comparison.

  My mother pressed her finger to my nose. “Good Lord,” she said, “you’re blistered.”

  Tucked into bed coated with Noxema, I felt the surf rising and falling, as if the bed were the raft and sleep another ocean. My mother’s voice drifted in from the next room. “Well, all right,” she was saying, “but you’ll have to break the news to the girls. They don’t seem so crazy about Florida.”

  “Jesse is,” my father said. “I can tell.”

  Lying there, close to sleep, even I wasn’t sure which parent was right, which one wrong.

  That night, it turned out, Carol and I had the same dream. Except hers was more like a nightmare. We both dreamed that we were with our parents, driving over the causeway to Cocoa Beach, but this time when we reached the top, the other half of the bridge really wasn’t there. In my dream, we hit the water, but we didn’t sink. The tires caught hold, and we drove down the river as if the Plymouth were a powerboat. We cruised into a canal and pulled up at the dock of our new yellow house.

  In Carol’s dream, the car sank under the water, down so deep in the mud at the bottom that we couldn’t get the doors open or roll down the windows. We didn’t drown though. We were just stuck there, like we were on a family vacation somewhere where there was nothing to see, and we were taking forever to get there.

  THE NEXT NIGHT we went to Dr. Henry’s house for dinner to celebrate my father’s accepting his new job.
It turned out they lived in the neighborhood where we had seen the yellow model house. We even passed it, sprinklers spinning in the twilight. Even though I pointed, my parents didn’t so much as glance at it. Wherever we were going to live, I had the feeling it wasn’t going to look like that. The Henrys’ house was turquoise with a white porpoise by the front door. Mrs. Henry let us in. She had silvery blond hair and wore a short white skirt like she was about to or had just played some tennis. Even compared to the other Floridians we had seen, she was incredibly tanned. She kissed first my mother, then Carol, then me. She took my father’s hand. Her silver bracelets slid together with a delicate click.

  “We’re so happy to have you here,” she said. She had a slight Southern accent.

  “We’re just so happy to be here,” my father answered her, with a pretty thick fake one. Mrs. Henry laughed.

  My mother was wearing a gray knit suit with a scalloped neckline, the kind of thing she would have worn at work for an especially important meeting. Even then, she had trouble with her feet, and so had on black lace-up shoes. She looked like Mrs. Henry’s mother, and maybe she was old enough for that to be possible. She had dressed Carol and me for the occasion in the usual white blouses and matching plaid, except that we were wearing skirts this time instead of shorts.

  “Don’t you girls look nice,” Mrs. Henry said, smiling first at Carol, then me. Carol frowned, so I answered.

  “Thank you, Mrs. Henry.”

  “Lucille,” she said. “Everybody calls me Lucille.”

  Dr. Henry was dressed in white, too, a short-sleeved shirt open at the neck. He had brown hair and soft brown eyes, a long nose. He looked awfully young to be my father’s boss. He also looked a lot like the half-grown puppy that followed him to the door, a beagle introduced as Max. My father relaxed when he saw Dr. Henry’s shirt was unbuttoned. My mother had wanted him to wear a tie, but my father had decided against it. No one in Florida wears one, he’d said. It seemed that he was right.

  “So who wants a drink?” Dr. Henry asked my father as soon as we were inside. He had fixed a frozen drink—he called it a daiquiri—and poured one for my father. He filled another glass from the blender, held it up. “You, Mary?” Dr. Henry asked. My mother, as a bourbon drinker, had a low opinion of sweet mixed drinks, but she nodded and took the glass from Dr. Henry. My father smiled at her, happy she was trying.

  Mrs. Henry appeared with some Hawaiian Punch for Carol and me. She had put orange slices in the glasses and added little paper parasols. Carol rolled her eyes. Tacky. I ignored Carol, smiled, and said, “Hawaiian Punch is my favorite. Thanks so much, Mrs. Henry.” Mrs. Henry laughed a wonderful hoarse laugh and clinked her bracelets.

  “Lucille,” she said, touching me lightly on the head. She was smoking now, not Winstons like my mother smoked but some brand that smelled pleasantly mentholated, like Noxema. She put a parasol in my father’s glass and said something I didn’t catch. My father laughed. He was having a good time, and it occurred to me that he was flattered by Mrs. Henry’s attention, that we both were.

  Mrs. Henry clapped her hands. “We’re having red snapper” she announced. “I hope everyone likes it.” There was a slight silence, and I suspected I was not the only one in the room who had no idea what a snapper was.

  “Fish is fine,” my mother said, and she was right, fish it was. Fresh, with an eye and a tail and everything.

  Mrs. Henry served our plates. Carol did not say gross, but I could hear her thinking it. “This much?” Mrs. Henry asked me, holding up an adult-size serving. I nodded, taking the portion as a sign of respect.

  At home we had fish sticks sometimes or frozen sole. It was not my favorite food but fell under the general heading of not bad. I took a bite of the snapper. I blinked. Red snapper was simply the best nondessert thing I had ever tasted in my life, a food beyond my experience with food. It was not fishy and was so light that by comparison every meat I’d known before was as heavy and greasy as pot roast. I swallowed.

  Mrs. Henry was watching me. She raised her neat blond eyebrows. So?

  “It’s wonderful,” I said. “Really wonderful. I love it.” Carol shot me a look, but for once she was in no position to tell me like was the right word, that you cannot love things that can’t love you back. I did love it. Loved the idea of a world full of fruits and vegetables and fish I didn’t know existed, didn’t even have names for. I couldn’t wait to live in Florida, to eat a new food a day.

  “It’s wonderful, Lucille,” my father said. “You’ll have to give Mary the recipe.”

  “It’s so simple,” Mrs. Henry said, laying two tanned fingers on my mother’s wrist. “But you have to get a really fresh fish.”

  “I imagine so,” my mother said.

  After dinner, Dr. Henry volunteered to make the coffee. He and my father, the man who never drank coffee, went into the kitchen to consult on this. My mother shook her head. For the first time all evening, she and Mrs. Henry were in on a joke together, and the joke was men. My mother lit first her own, then Mrs. Henry’s cigarette.

  Mom stood looking at Mrs. Henry’s white bamboo living-room set. “Maybe I shouldn’t bother to move my old furniture down. It’s all cherry,” my mother said, softly. “So dark.” She inhaled deeply and then let the smoke trickle out through her nose, as if this were serious and she was asking Mrs. Henry for her best advice.

  “It’s so hard to know what …” Mrs. Henry started to say.

  Max interrupted. He was standing with his front legs up on the back door, barking to go out. To me, he looked tall for a beagle, but then all dogs look tall after you’ve been around dachshunds. “Excuse me a minute, Mary,” Mrs. Henry said to my mother. She flipped a switch and outside floodlights came on. “Keep me company?” Mrs. Henry asked me as she opened the sliding-glass door. I nodded. Carol, standing close to our mother, frowned at me as if my acceptance were some kind of betrayal. I followed Mrs. Henry out.

  Where the model house had a backyard, the Henrys’ had a pool. The turquoise water glowed in the humid night. Max ran out of the light into the night. “Max!” I called and started after him.

  “Don’t worry,” Mrs. Henry said. “The yard’s fenced. Has to be for the pool.” She stood next to me, smoking. We listened to Max moving somewhere in the darkness, to the whine of mosquitoes hovering inches from our ears. Mrs. Henry let out a long sigh of menthol smoke, and the mosquitoes retreated. It was really quite a big pool, almost as big as the one at the officer’s club at home, or rather, I corrected myself, back in Maryland where we used to live. At the far end was a pile of life jackets and Styrofoam floats.

  “I teach swimming here in the summer,” Mrs. Henry said. “Do you know how to swim?” I thought about how I had almost drowned, about the rough ocean floor, and it seemed strange to be here, breathing.

  “No,” I said. “Not really.”

  “It’s a waste to live in Florida and not swim,” she said. “Would you like to take lessons?”

  Lessons. Of course, I thought, standing in the hot, thick night. To live in Florida, you needed lessons. I nodded.

  “Good,” Mrs. Henry said. She leaned down and kissed the top of my head, breathing smoke into my hair like a warm and mentholated blessing.

  3

  There are parts of a person that can never be in a photograph. A picture cannot catch the way someone moves or sounds. When people did something odd, my mother was apt to say, To each his own, said the old lady as she kissed the cow. When faced with some sign of trouble, she’d sigh, shake her head, and say, We’re only born to suffer and die. Strange as it sounds, this always cheered her up. After all, if we are only born to suffer and die, by comparison this day’s trials are minor league. My mother didn’t go to church, but the Calvinism of her ancestors was in her bones like damp. She had a strong sense of impending doom, and though I don’t believe we are sinners in the hands of an angry God, I find I do, too.

  Not all of her sayings were quite so dire. When confronted with
Jell-O, she would make a face and say, You put it in your mouth, and then what do you do? When she cooked dinner, she sometimes sang a song whose refrain was “I didn’t know the gun was loaded, and I’ll never ever do it again.”

  The saying of hers that ruled our lives more than any other was: Don’t talk about people, talk about things. Compared to her comments on the consistency of Jell-O, it is not a particularly pithy saying. After years of teaching English, I can’t read the word things without wanting to circle it in red and write Inherently Vague in the margin. But I knew then and know now what she meant.

  She meant she wasn’t interested in gossip, that it was better to take the long view, to talk about history, about the events on the evening news that would be history, to start every sentence with a polite “Did you see the article in Time about…” She meant if you had to talk about what was important in your own life, talk about it as if it were already history, with a certain dry and dispassionate distance. Events of the day were interesting or instructive, never heartbreaking or joyous or unbearable.

  She meant that you should keep some distance from life, particularly your own life, that the world was divided into public and private spheres, and even our own dinner table was public. An Irish Catholic friend who taught for a while in Utah once told me that when, in the course of lecturing on Hamlet or Moby Dick, she wandered into some territory her Mormon students found offensive, they would simply look at the ceiling until she gave up and moved on to something else. Only then would they bring their eyes down to meet hers and warm her with their smiles.

  My mother did the same thing. If I started into some confession, some betrayal of emotion that struck her as altogether too personal, I knew it without her saying a word. Her smile would shut off as if she had suddenly left her body, the table, me. I imagined her floating near the ceiling, fingers in her spirit ears, humming The Stars and Stripes Forever to keep from hearing a word I said. Only when I stopped, my story dying away without a middle or an end, would she drift down and rejoin her still-seated body, smile, and ask me what I wanted for dessert.