"But I could never do that,” says Grams. “I could never leave the rest of you behind."
* * * *
Perhaps it is a little late to be bringing up the submarine. Not quite cricket, not exactly Chekhovian of me. There is no doubt that the submarine looms very large in my family lore. It was designed and built by my great-grandfather—not my grandmother's father, but her husband's. In my defense, let me just add that it's really a very small submarine, very unimposing, a one-person affair, no more than fourteen feet long.
And it's not as if the submarine were on the mantelpiece. No, sadly, the submarine lies sunk in the furry scum of Lake Emily. Lake Emily is a small body of water, a pond, really, with an oily surface and no fish more interesting than perch. It occupies the northwest corner of the Gutierrez property about fifty miles north of my grandmother's house.
For the longest time the submarine was in my grandmother's garage. I've been inside it often, and it's not all that thrilling. It had a stale, metallic smell. Here is my objection to submarines and space travel: not enough windows. What difference does it make if you're in outer space, or underwater, or wherever, if you can't feel, or hear, or see, or smell it? You might as well be locked in a closet. But my grandmother tells me it's too dark to see under the water anyway. “The fall is the lovely part,” she says. “The water goes from blue to gray to black, as if you're out in space, falling through the stars."
Maria Gutierrez and the Great Unknown took the sub out one day to see how hard she would be to handle, and, having forgotten to tighten two screws in the bottom, filled her up immediately with water and ran her aground. They learned a lot in the process, however, and the Great Unknown was all for hoisting her up, drying her out, and taking her straight to Scotland. Grams was not opposed to this project, but she had been working with the World Hunger people, and cranes and divers would have to be organized, and she hadn't gotten around to it. Besides, she wanted the Great Unknown to work out for a while first. She was not sure he was physically fit enough. Like her, he was in his sixties. We thought. The submarine was built for a younger man.
Although my great-grandfather spent the latter half of his life convinced he was being stalked by the Fenians, it was a point of honor in my family to consider him a genius. The party line was that he was one of those nineteenth-century men who were masters of many fields, sort of like the explorer Richard Burton. Genius and madness have a particular affinity for each other, my father says, which doesn't mean that there's not a whole lot of madness and only modest amounts of genius in the world. My great-grandfather had little formal education, but a wonderfully prehensile mind. He was a tolerable musician, a decent artist in the pen-drawing school, and spectacularly good with gadgets. One day, no one remembers why, he played the violin for eight straight hours. In doing this, he strained a nerve in his left hand from which it took him some weeks to recover. This lack of music brought about a period of frustration and general twitchiness that just about drove his wife crazy. “Go take a walk,” she told him. “Learn to ride a bicycle."
The bicycle is a wonderfully designed machine. My great-grandfather had been enchanted with them from the very start. Riding them was a different matter. He came back with a sprained ankle and had to be put to bed. The situation reached crisis proportions.
But one morning, when his wife took him his breakfast, she found him calm and clear-eyed, scribbling away on the inside covers of several books. “Are you aware that most of the world is underwater?” he asked her. “What mountains we have never climbed. What caves we have never explored. What jungles!” The year was 1910. My great-grandfather had suddenly noticed that women were about to get the vote. When that happened, he believed, they would embark on a devastating national shopping spree. In anticipation, he was looking to get out of paying his taxes. The first tax-time after women got the vote he planned to spend safely underwater.
The big surprise was that he actually built her. He started with a thirty-inch model he could maneuver through the rain barrel. It was propelled by a spring and the insides of a pocket watch. The fourteen-foot version used a bicycle chain and pedals. Pitch and direction were controlled by levers in the nose. These were adjusted by hand. To propel the boat took all four limbs. It took strength and coordination. It took practice. She was merely a prototype. My great-grandfather was a family man; the final submarine was supposed to be large enough to hold his wife and son. This early model he called the New Day, in honor of Day, the tragic inventor of an early sub.
Day's version was much like an ordinary boat, only it had an airtight chamber inside. Day occupied the chamber and then his associates sank the boat by piling more than thirty tons of stones on it. It worked like a dream. But the same associates were less zealous in raising the craft. Day was sealed tight in his chamber and could only be brought up by removing the stones, which were now under several yards of water. This required divers and continuous effort. Somehow, there was a miscommunication between the associates. Each thought the other was organizing the ascent; each had private and pressing business elsewhere. Day was never recovered. It was a story and name that made my great-grandmother very nervous.
Great-grandfather worked with the New Day every weekend in the Passaic River. He grounded her three times before he made the crossing. The locals began to plan picnics with roast corn and sack races around his field trials. He would emerge from the craft to cheers and toasts. It was, undoubtedly, a happy time for him. But at the end of the last trial run, he told his wife he had seen a man watching him with binoculars from behind a tree. He came home upset, agitated. A week later, the New Day disappeared. “So the Fenians have her at last,” he said calmly. “And a very bad day indeed to the man who tries her out."
Another week passed, and then he disappeared himself. Because of the timing, his family believed that his talk of losing the submarine had been a ruse, and that he had finally taken the New Day down. “Those underwater mountains,” Grams told me her mother-in-law said to her once, years later. “You'd have to climb them downwards.” It was the sort of thing you might say if you'd given it a whole lot of thought. She waited a long time for him to surface.
I'll tell you what I think. A submarine can't have been cheap and he had a fiddler's salary. Where did he get the money to build the New Day? No one in the family knows, but it's my belief that the paranoid delusions which began to haunt him were neither paranoid nor delusionary. “Went over the edge” was the way the family finally chose to explain it, but “sleeps with the fishes” is the phrase that comes to my mind.
Years later, after he was declared dead, and his wife had also died, and also his son, my grandmother received a letter from an attorney. His client was a man in upstate New York, one James Fortis, who had known my great-grandfather. One night my great-grandfather had come to him and asked that he hide the New Day in his barn, to prevent her, he said, from falling into the wrong hands. He made Mr. Fortis swear never to speak of it, since those who wanted the boat were cunning, relentless, and well connected. He would be back for her soon, my great-grandfather had said, and had gone in a hurry, looking right and left.
Out of friendship, Mr. Fortis had agreed, and had kept the secret, although the years dragged on and the space taken up by the submarine, according to the letter, could have held four additional cows. But now Mr. Fortis was an elderly man with medical expenses. He was selling the farm, and he wished to be rid of the submarine. His attorney had determined that the sub belonged to Grams. Included in the letter was a bill for thirty-five years of storage. In addition, the sub had to be shipped all the way across the country. It took a chunk of change.
Grams moved her car out of the garage and the submarine in. “A person with a submarine will never lack for friends,” she was fond of telling me, and, of course, someday the submarine was to be mine.
* * * *
I wonder sometimes about my grandmother as a young woman, and when I think it through, the Betty Crocker stuff seems just as
remarkable as the Betty Friedan. She was a war widow with a young child. That Betty Crocker my father remembers, she must have been made with guilt, smoke, and mirrors. Grams never remarried, although even in her sixties there were opportunities. I see now that my grandmother must have spent her whole life desperately in love with a dead man.
One of the times I asked about my grandfather, Grams showed me a map. It was made of nylon, mostly white, but printed with a grid and a number of curving red arrows. Along the base of the grid were the words Map of the Marianas Islands. And if you looked closely, you might actually be able to find the islands, green flea specks in the enormous expanse of white ocean.
So it was, in fact, a map of air and water. It had been commissioned by the War Department, which gave it to pilots during the war in the Pacific. The theory was that if a pilot was shot down, he could calculate his last known position, catch the nearest current, and float to land. The War Department, having the same map, would know where to look for him. It gave me a sense of vertigo, trying to imagine what it would be like, falling into that featureless landscape with nothing to secure you but that featureless map.
At the time of my extractions, while I lay on her couch and wrapped myself into her afghan, and a phantom bird pecked rhythmically into the sorest part of my jaw, Grams was already suffering from the first signs of Alzheimer's. I don't know if she knew this; certainly she was far too cunning to be caught at it. Three years later it was unmistakable. She got lost on the way to the corner market, and she couldn't remember my mother's name. “Eleanor,” Dad reminded her. “Ellie. Why did you always tell people Ellie was much too good for me?” Growing up as he did, with only the two of them, many things were tangled between them. He was hastily trying to settle what he could in those lucid moments before she disappeared.
"I was being charmingly modest,” she said.
I was off at college now and paying little attention. She moved in with my parents for a while, and then Dad called to tell me Grams had gone into a home. Not only did this move break her heart, it also emptied her bank accounts. Her house would have to be sold. Angel2 was staying on with my father and mother and was no happier about it than Grams. It was a short phone call with a number of silences.
The next time I talked to my father he seemed better. “They've prescribed a pill for paranoia,” he told me. “But she's too suspicious to take it.” The nurses were in an uproar. My father was obviously charmed.
By the time I got to see her it was Christmas break. I'd come home, and Dad and I had gone over together. By now she was taking her medications. “She's being a good girl today,” the nurse told us. “She's being an angel."
Grams was wearing a robe printed with little yellow flowers although she had never been a little-yellow-flower kind of person. Her hair stuck out around her ears as if no one had brushed it. I gave her a box of chocolate turtles to which she was indifferent. She didn't seem to know I was there. Perhaps I was not the person she loved best in the world, after all. I was content at this time to give up the honor to my father. “How are you?” Grams asked him.
"I'm good."
"And how are your father and mother?"
"My father's fine,” said Dad. “But we're a little worried about Mom."
The whole time we were there, we could hear another woman down the hall. “Help me, please. Help me, please,” she sobbed in a continuous rhythmical plea.
"That goes on all the time,” my father told me. “Like she was frozen in some moment of torment.” His eyes were cracked with red, and glassy. “At least that's not Mom.” When we got back in the car to drive home, he mentioned the sobbing woman again. “I just keep thinking, what if it's something simple? What if she just needs her socks pulled up or a glass of water or something? What if it was something we could fix, but she's forgotten how to say it?"
My father had joined the Food Not Bombs people. When we went back to the house, there were stacks of pamphlets in the living room. Angel2 lay in the sunshine on top of one and raised her head crossly at the disturbance. “Now we see the real danger of this three-strikes nonsense,” my father said. “Now that they want to make it a felony to feed people.” He pitched his voice to match that of the Wicked Witch of the West. “What a world, what a world."
The Great Unknown had also gone to the nursing home to visit with my grandmother, and afterward he dropped by the house to see me as well. He was calling himself Carroll Leary now. “Where's the submarine?” he asked me, almost immediately, so I was cautious when I answered; it occurred to me that Leary was an Irish name and that Carroll had always been extremely interested in the New Day. It would be so like Grams to play bridge with the IRA. I just said she was in storage, and that she was mine now.
In fact, she was right where he left her, back in the mud on the floor of Lake Emily. Grams was able to keep her, because she was a hidden asset, and she's mine, all right, any time I can raise the money to raise her. “I hope you handle it as gracefully as your grandmother always did. She didn't choose it, you know. She married into it,” said Carroll. He gave me a look. Don't ask me what kind of look. I could never read him. “It's an enormous responsibility, owning a submarine,” he said.
My father joined us. “It's an enormous lack of responsibility,” he argued. “When you have a boat, you don't need a plan"—but I know what my grandmother would want. Someday I'll hoist her up, take her down, join Greenpeace. When I get older, say around menopause, I'll become a pirate, harry the shipping lanes along the coast. When I'm really old, I'll settle in the Marianas Islands.
That night I slept again in my old bedroom in my parents’ house. I hadn't been there for a while, and I woke once during the night, completely disoriented. It was so dark, even though I'd been sleeping, even though my night vision was fully engaged, I couldn't see. The first thing you need to know is where you are. I had to imagine shapes around me; I had to make up a context. I closed my eyes and went on imagining. I made myself hear voices around me, hushed so as not to wake me, and hands stroking my hair, straightening my blankets. The bed began to rock, like a boat, like a cradle. Then I got lucky; I was home. I fell asleep again, and it was a slow, sweet descent.
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Halfway People
Thunder, wind, and waves. You in your cradle. You've never heard these noises before, and they are making you cry.
Here, child. Let me wrap you in a blanket and my arms, take you to the big chair by the fire, and tell you a story. My father's too old and deaf to hear and you too young to understand. If you were older or he younger, I couldn't tell it, this story so dangerous that tomorrow I must forget it entirely and make up another.
But a story never told is also a danger, particularly to the people in it. So here, tonight, while I remember.
It starts with a girl named Maura, which is my name, too.
* * * *
In the winter, Maura lives by the sea. In the summer, she doesn't. In the summer, she and her father rent two shabby rooms inland and she walks every morning to the coast, where she spends the day washing and changing bedding, sweeping the sand off the floors, scouring and dusting. She does this for many summer visitors, including the ones who live in her house. Her father works at a big hotel on the point. He wears a blue uniform, opens the heavy front door for guests and closes it behind them. At night, Maura and her father walk on tired feet back to their rooms. Sometimes it's hard for Maura to remember that this was ever different.
But when she was little, she lived by the sea in all seasons. It was a lonely coast then, a place of rocky cliffs, forests, wild winds, and beaches of coarse sand. Maura could play from morning to night and never see another person, only gulls and dolphins and seals. Her father was a fisherman.
Then a doctor who lived in the capital began to recommend the sea air to his wealthy patients. A businessman built the hotel and shipped in finer sand. Pleasure boats with colored sails filled the fishing berths. The coast became fashionable, though
nothing could be done about the winds.
One day the landlord came to tell Maura's father that he'd rented out their home to a wealthy friend. It was just for two weeks and for so much money, he could only say yes. The landlord said it would happen this once, and they could move right back when the two weeks were over.
But the next year he took it for the entire summer and then for every summer after that. The winter rent was also raised.
Maura's mother was still alive then. Maura's mother loved their house by the ocean. The inland summers made her pale and thin. She sat for hours at the window watching the sky for the southward migrations, the turn of the season. Sometimes she cried and couldn't say why.
Even when winter came, she was unhappy. She felt the lingering presence of the summer guests, their sorrows and troubles as chilled spaces she passed through in the halls and doorways. When she sat in her chair, the back of her neck was always cold; her fingers fretted and she couldn't stay still.
But Maura liked the bits of clues the summer people left behind—a strange spoon in a drawer, a half-eaten jar of jam on a shelf, the ashes of papers in the fireplace. She made up stories from them of different lives in different places. Lives worthy of stories.
The summer people brought gossip from the court and tales from even farther away. A woman had grown a pumpkin as big as a carriage in her garden, hollowed it out, and slept there, which for some reason couldn't be allowed so now there was a law against sleeping in pumpkins. A new country had been found where the people had hair all over their bodies and ran about on their hands and feet like dogs, but were very musical. A child had been born in the east who could look at anyone and know how they would die, which frightened his neighbors so much, they'd killed him, as he'd always known they would. A new island had risen in the south, made of something too solid to be water and too liquid to be earth. The king had a son.
* * * *
The summer Maura turned nine years old, her mother was all bone and eyes and bloody coughing. One night, her mother came to her bed and kissed her. “Keep warm,” she whispered, in a voice so soft Maura was never certain she hadn't dreamed it. Then Maura's mother walked from the boarding house in her nightgown and was never seen again. Now it was Maura's father who grew thin and pale.
What I Didn't See and Other Stories Page 13
