When I think of those months abroad, I think of those early days in Cairo. I think of my mother alone. Waiting.
The work of love is in building a shared story, and in letting the differences in perception rest easily aside one another. My parents couldn’t do it. In the story of our voyage, the Captain remembers the happy parts. My mother remembers the hard.
I understood early that love was a mission to heal one’s own heart. We are attracted to the people who can open our wounds. And lovers want their healing to also be love’s happy ending. But our healing is never dependent on love’s success. Sometimes you have to break your own heart to mend it.
A year after we returned home, my parents sat us down in our living room and told us they were separating.
2
In the years after they separated, the Captain often accused me of borrowing my mother’s perspective. In one fight during my adolescent years I said that he had abandoned us. He glowered at me. That’s your mother talking, he said.
I kept a diary at twelve years old. In the early years after my body’s abrupt transformation, it functioned as a catalog of the men I let touch me. Frankie. Tony. Shawn. Tammy’s cousin. Tammy’s cousin’s friend. First base. Second base. Third base. I told no one but that book.
There were no words for why. Their hands lifted me out of something. They touched me and I didn’t fear being left. I didn’t think of anything. It seemed that I could compel the attention of any older man. I did not connect this fleeting empowerment to the Captain’s leaving and my own failure to compel him near until much later. It did not occur to him, either, when he read that diary.
How could you? he asked me. I had no answer. I could not look at him. I could not bear being seen. But it still hurt when he stopped looking. Though a clumsy child, I was a scrupulous keeper of secrets. And I had left my diary on the floor of his car.
Fear of abandonment begets abandonment. I gave myself away to solve the pain of his leaving and in doing so performed my own abandonment. The Captain stepped away from that hurt. And on we went.
I shaved my head. I dropped out of high school. I moved out at two weeks shy of my seventeenth birthday. All of it confounded him. Frustrated him. It is difficult to be so perfectly hurt and not feel it was intended. And I was only getting started.
One job description for a professional dominatrix is to be worshiped. For three years, men paid to press their cheeks against my feet. They pleaded to smell my armpits. They bowed their foreheads to the floor and begged for my touch. They wanted my violence and tenderness in equal amounts. They craved my fury. They wanted schoolgirl uniforms and baby talk. They wanted mean teenager. These were splintered pieces that for a time felt like everything.
I have also been worshiped by lovers. I craved that glazed gaze of the lovesick. The dreamy focus of lovers squinting through their own reflection. Worship intoxicates probably because it mimics parental love. And this is the love we are socialized to seek. The worshipper projects perfection onto their beloved as a parent does his child. To both the child and the beloved this worship feels complete. It feels like the safety we long for. For the child it often is. But what feels unconditional to the beloved is far from it. To be seen as perfect makes you feel perfect. And for people like my mother and me, whose psyches are ever preoccupied with the danger of being abandoned, it has a loud call. But it is a source of self-esteem wholly dependent on the external mirror of the lover.
I’ll take care of you, they say. I would do anything for you. I would die without you. What other promises did my mother hear? I will take you places. I will always love you. They are always the magic words, the ones we most crave to hear.
Worship is the white whale. The thing we believe will fill our heart’s belly for good. Nothing can. And the ones we most believe in are the ones that break us. Worship always begets mutual betrayal. The worshipful lover is Pygmalion—the woman he loves is his own creation. And when she proves to be someone other than this she becomes his Eliza Doolittle. My mother may never forgive the Captain for failing to take care of her, and he may never forgive her for breaking the mold.
He was relentless, my mother said. The husband of our neighbor. Your father was always gone. I nodded. I was so alone. She couldn’t see me in my bedroom in Brooklyn with the phone cord wrapped around my fingers. My head ached. My hands damp. I had spent the weekend shooting heroin. I had always seen her as Penelope. The faithful wife, long-suffering, abandoned by her husband for his personal glory. My story flickered as its parts shifted. I just gave in, she said.
In the days that we waited for the Captain in Egypt, my mother took us to a papyrus museum. The aquatic and flowering Cyperus papyrus was most known for its paper. It was also used to make boats. Sailors wove its strong reeds into sails, mats, and rope.
My schoolteachers had sent me abroad with a small blue notebook. I was supposed to record accounts of my adventures in it. A child’s log book.
In the papyrus museum gift shop my mother purchased a scroll bearing an inked prayer. Twenty-five years later, it is rolled in her attic amid our childhood drawings and tiny shoes. She has forgotten its meaning. I imagine her prayers in those days—God, bring him home. God, take care of my children. God, let it all work out. Every prayer is answered, I think, though not often in the ways we imagine.
I left the world of worship and quit heroin. Then I wrote a book about it. It was still a conversation that I only knew how to have on paper. It was the best way I found to understand it. To be less alone in it.
To my surprise, the scene in the book that most hurt the Captain does not take place in the dungeon. It recounts a brunch I shared with him and my abuela. He remembered this brunch as a hallmark in the renaissance of our relationship. The book revealed to him that the night previous I had relapsed on a drug binge. I had faked my way through the meal. Numb and ravaged, I chattered about college and pushed my food around my plate. I vomited in a public trashcan after they left. I had squashed my despair and congratulated myself for having maintained my façade of precocious daughter and granddaughter.
The Captain had been so proud of our closeness and his righting of the wrongs done him as a son. My book robbed him of that. We did not speak for three months after I sent him the manuscript. In our first conversation he compared my memoir to a pie in the face. I can’t believe how wrong I was about our relationship, he said. About who I am as a father. His brow furrowed in dismay and anger.
The book wasn’t about you, I said. It was about me. I still did not know how to explain that I had made those choices out of self-preservation. To avoid hurt instead of provoke it.
The Captain still loves my mother. And he may never forgive her betrayal. She destroyed his story of their marriage. Or revealed the ways in which it was already broken.
I was indignant when he accused me of borrowing my mother’s words. Now I can see that he was right. My mother’s and my experience overlapped in principle ways and I identified more with her version of their story. How could I not? She was the one I relied on all those years. I was privy to her story as it unfolded. I knew it was true.
Today I know that my Captain’s story was also true. But he was halfway across the world when he lived it. He told us the stories of his childhood and he told us his stories of the sea. He never explained how these parts of him were connected.
We are more alike than I ever thought. My stories are containers into which I pour myself and the indigestible parts of my experience. In them, I become a woman who can look at things. Who knows what to do next and how. A ship is also a story.
My father and I both still need our containers. Once filled, they carry more of us than our lovers can bear, than we can. And sometimes they carry us away. I wonder if he has learned, as I have, how the things that save us can cost us.
I know this with absolute certainty: If a beloved asked me to choose between her and the story my life is built upon, I would likely make the same choice he did.
Three
years after my book’s publication, he and I spent a weekend in a cabin on the beach of the Quileute Indian Reservation—La Push—the furthest northwest point of this country. He brought his guitar and I brought my notebooks. He played the songs that he’d sung me as a child. I had never noticed how apt these anthems were. James Taylor’s “Sweet Baby James,” which tells of a song that they sing when they take to the highway / a song that they sing when they take to the sea. Jackson Browne’s “Jamaica Say You Will,” a love song to the daughter of a captain on the rolling seas.
On our last morning I went for a run by the water. Great antlers of driftwood lay scattered across the beach. I thought about our story as waves lapped that dark sand.
The Captain loves to tell people how as a toddler, with a book opened in my tiny hands, I would back into the knees of anyone sitting and command, Wead! He repeated my favorite stories with endless patience. The Story of Ferdinand. Frog and Toad. The Lone Ranger for the duration of a six-hour car trip, until my mother couldn’t take it anymore.
Children learn through repetition. They appreciate the predictable. But I don’t think I will be the kind of parent who can share in that pleasure, not like the Captain did. Few can. He still delights in stories that are all hero and rescue and happy ending. From him, I learned my love for the movies, the glory of telling well a very long joke, and that our life was a happy ending to the hard story of his childhood. But when my story departed from his, I ruined his happy ending. In this way, perhaps every father is a Pygmalion.
I returned to our cabin and asked him to sit down.
I’m sorry, I told him. I’m so sorry that I hurt you. I listed the ways I knew I had. The Captain, my true father, with his kind face and curly hair, thanked me. He shook his head. It hurt so much, he said. I had thought we were close. I thought I’d been a good father to you. He frowned. It felt like you did it to hurt me.
I didn’t, I said.
He nodded. His face creased deeper.
My father was a monster, he said. We warned you both about drinking, about drugs. We tried to do everything right. And it didn’t work. He stood and walked to the sink. He began washing our breakfast dishes. He spoke more about his own father. I listened to the stories I had heard so many years before and I finally understood. He had looked at me and seen his own ghosts. His own failure. He hadn’t blamed me for hurting myself. He had blamed me for the death of his story.
He scrubbed and spoke and I watched the scissor of his arms in their flannel shirt. I stood up and went to him. I wrapped my arms around his waist and lay my cheek against the soft back of his shirt. He went quiet. He stopped washing and folded his hands over my hands.
Since then, we have made some peace over the differences between our stories. He asked me to check with him before I publish anything that concerns events that he might remember. I can’t promise you that, I said. Maybe he understood. As time passes, he seems more able to accept that my memories don’t erase his. They are simply different. And I have become able to cherish his stories as I did when I was a little girl.
I used to think of our family’s voyage as my parents’ last effort to save their marriage. But it was much more than that. It was the last chapter of our family together. It was extraordinary. Maybe it has been easier all these years to look at the hard parts because they make sense of our ending. When I remember the good, I must remember how it broke my heart to lose it. But it is worth it to remember how fiercely I was loved and all that I was given. My Captain, my father, teller of bedtime stories and singer of songs, he taught me this. Of our story, I wouldn’t change a thing.
When he reads this he will blanch at my inaccuracies. And it’s true that his memory is better than mine. It can’t be easy to have a daughter who is a writer. But there is no one true version of any story. Some parts we share and some are ours alone. Here is mine. And there is my family, waving from the shore.
ABANDON ME
And if longing seizes you for sailing the stormy seas,
when the Pleiades flee mighty Orion
and plunge into the misty deep
and all the gusty winds are raging,
then do not keep your ship on the wine-dark sea
but, as I bid you, remember to work the land.
—Hesiod, Works and Days
1
Every story begins with an unraveling. This story starts with a kiss. Her mouth the soft nail on which my life snagged, and tore open.
That afternoon, we swam together in a lake named Pleiad. My father, the Captain, had pointed out this constellation to me as a little girl. Formed over one hundred million years, it is the star cluster most visible to the human eye, and its name derives from the Greek πλεῖν, “to sail” because seamen relied on it, as “the season of navigation began with their heliacal rising.”
The seven sisters were daughters of Atlas and handmaidens to the huntress Artemis. In one story, after their father is sentenced to carry the heavens, they kill themselves out of grief. Zeus transforms them into stars—catasterism—to immortalize them. Other stories tell of Orion’s desirous pursuit of the sisters, and Zeus’s catasterism as a rescue. We call them the seven sisters, though only six are visible. Merope, the youngest sister, fell in love with the hunter.
Near the end of an academic conference, four of us followed a trail across the shoulder of a mountain to this rock bowl filled with water. We were not sisters, but strangers. No horny Orion chased us through those woods, or across the sky. I just drove us up the mountain and parked under some trees. Something was chasing me, though, some mad hunter, my own hot heart. I was out of love with someone, out of my mind in that coldest, most sane, most lonely way. I didn’t want to go home.
When I’d left New York ten days earlier, I’d decided not to cheat. It was an exit I’d used before and didn’t want to again. I closed a door in me and it worked. At the lake, I did not want her, but I noticed that long body when she peeled off her clothes on the ridge of that rock. Seeing her neck for the first time, I wondered how it would feel under my tongue, about the taste of that neck. Just curious.
Hair seal-black and slick, she watched me from the water. Eyes dark embers, hands slender rudders, turning. I did not notice her hands: long fingers pulling her T-shirt over those broad shoulders, touching the water as she waded into it. I did not imagine her fingers closed around my throat, my hip, my wrists; driving inside me deeper than words, leaving me dumb, mouth hung open, eyes wet, body shaking stupid and soft.
I didn’t mean to lose myself. And I never planned to find my father. Of all the things that happened in the two years after that swim, the only thing that felt like a choice was her. I must have known that she could lead me to it all.
When did I decide? Not at the lake. Not on the drive back down the mountain. That night. In a crowded bar, she leaned over me, hair silking against my bare shoulder. She hooked one finger through my belt loop and pulled my hips’ string, and they wound—they touched hers and kept going. I must have known then that I could leave it up to her. That she would insist.
I have to go, I said. I cannot kiss your mouth, I meant. I cannot stop my hips this rocking toward you. She nodded. I did not go. I closed my hand around her knee, and bared my teeth. A smile is a grimace is a yielding is a glimpse inside—the mouth’s soft muscles, opening. Help me, I thought.
Those few moments before our mouths met: faces touching, breath everywhere as our bodies tipped, hands soft with giving in, mouths even softer.
In the shower before sleep, I soaped between my legs—so swollen and wet, it shocked me. I could not wash it away. Under the hot water, I traced the life I had left in New York: the home I was headed back to, the woman who loved and needed me. I tried to remember the solid thing I’d been only hours before. It was already blurry. It was dissolving like a dream from which I’d just woken.
The next morning, she wrote me: What was that poem about “the face that launch’d a thousand ships”? And burnt “the topless towers o
f Ilium”? I can’t remember, but like that kiss, yours took something from me, or gave me something. I’ll never stop thinking of it.
I knew almost nothing about her, only that she was of Chilean descent—part indigenous, part Spanish—and had the gravity of a planet. She occupied her body and the space she moved through with a certainty I suddenly did not feel in myself. She was an anchor, and I, Andromeda, I tied myself to her that night. Not in the usual way.
2
The next day, I met my half sister for the first time. I felt no mounted tension, just an impulse, a tug in a certain direction that I heeded. I had known for two years that my half sister lived in Vermont. She knew about me, too. We had never met, but after that swim in the lake, I wrote to my sister—I am passing through. Can I see you?
My adoptive father, the sea captain, always encouraged me to find my siblings. Just think, he’d say, there’s people out there who look like you! He never encouraged me to reunite with Jon, my biological father whom I’d met only once. But I didn’t wonder—my connection to Jon was scientific, a quirk of nature’s mechanics.
Though we are not biologically related, the Captain and I look alike. My (half) brother and I look strikingly alike. The older I get, the more my mother’s face emerges in the mirror. But I had never seen a mouth like mine. I have always noticed strangers with green eyes and olive skin, felt a recognition pass between us. We are estranged members of the same tribe. Everyone recognizes their small ears on the bank teller, their wide feet in the locker room, their hips switching across the street. Don’t they?
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