Battleborn: Stories

by Claire Vaye Watkins

In the third grade I won a spelling bee with the word grateful. When she was alive, my mom often told the story of how she felt when I won. She told it as this funny anecdote about how she and the other parents would let out a little cheer each time their child passed a round, and how each round there were fewer and fewer cheers, and how gradually, as I advanced, she became alienated from every other parent in the gymnasium. I cannot remember her even being there.

  When I returned from Vegas, the bar where I work gave me time off, paid. Though I wanted to work, needed the tips, I took the time. Peter said we could do whatever I wanted, but the only thing I could think of was to go to the zoo, which we did. After that I wasted my days. Slept in. Watched Law & Order marathons and Dumbo. Napped. Waited for Peter to get off work. When he came home we ordered vegan Chinese, and on one of these nights I asked Peter to take me out on the bay in his research vessel, though I knew this was not allowed.

  I said, I need to see the dark silhouettes of blue and gray whales moving like submarines through the sea.

  He said only, Oh, little one, which is what he always says these days.

  Instead, Peter took some personal days and we left that weekend for the Oregon coast, our first whale-watching trip. It was the second trip to Oregon on which I felt the saltwater spray of the adolescent humpback and on which Peter refused to make me a Punnett square. For the third trip I borrowed Peter’s car and went alone, though he said, I can get the time off, and meant it. I have not made things easy for him.

  I saw no whales in the Oregon sea. I missed my sister. I hadn’t seen Gwen since we got back from Vegas, two months before, and I was sick over it. And yet as I drove toward the city I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to see her. I took my time unpacking, folding clean clothes neatly. I didn’t call Peter to say I was back, that I was okay. I slowly rode my bike out to Gwen’s apartment.

  I buzzed and buzzed. There was no answer. From the street I saw that the apartment was lit, though the shades were drawn. I could see Gwen’s silhouette moving from the living room to the kitchen and back, so I used my key and let myself in. Inside the apartment, I came down the hallway and found Gwen wiping the kitchen counter with a sponge. Graceland blared from an old CD player on the counter.

  Oh, she said, startled. She turned the music down. I must not have heard you buzz.

  This was her way of saying, I hope you aren’t abusing your key.

  After a bit she nodded to the CD player. Mom used to play this, she said.

  I remember, I said. All the time.

  Gwen isn’t a music lover. She probably hasn’t listened to anything besides NPR since her senior year of high school. Once, we rented a car and drove to Santa Cruz and I made her listen to Common and she complained the whole way there. And here she was with Paul Simon. I thought, if you were a musical hermit and your older sister had been recommending you new bands and burning you CDs since you were in the sixth grade, why would you suddenly, after all these years, run out and pick up Paul Simon? Which is to say, of all things to listen to she picks that?

  But I didn’t say anything and she went on wiping the counter, standing on her tiptoes to reach the center of the wide island. I picked up a tangerine from the fruit bowl and started peeling it with my thumbnail. I watched how she turned her body to avoid pressing her large belly against the edge of the counter.

  I often think about my unborn future beautiful niece. I have plans to buy her nongendered, nonbranded toys: books where the girl characters are smart and adventurous and independent, chemistry sets, plastic models of all the great land mammals, extinct and not. I will read her Rudyard Kipling and show her Dumbo. I hope being a beauty will not be as lonely as they say it is. I am not sure our family can handle much more loneliness.

  Finally I asked Gwen, Can we turn this down?

  • • •

  I moved away from Vegas when I was eighteen, so I’ve been flying there for nearly ten years. In these years I have formulated a theory that all flights into Las Vegas are purposely orchestrated to be as festively stupid as they are to make the idea of traveling to the city for any other reason than to gamble seem hopelessly, painfully bleak. Gwen’s and my flight was no exception. As the plane ascended, the flight attendants flung packets of peanuts down the aisle, gravity pulling them toward the tail, and a voice over the intercom urged us to grab them as they slid past.

  It said: Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll find your return flight to San Francisco to be a bit more crowded. The voice said this though the flight was full.

  It said: Weight restrictions on this Boeing 757 allow more passengers on return flights from Las Vegas, as their pocketbooks are significantly lighter. And the passengers chuckled and munched their peanuts and they were happy happy happy. And I’ll tell you I envied them. Because this was the voice’s way of saying, We’re going to drop you off in this city and it will take you by your ankles, turn you upside down and shake everything from you. And this was something my sister and I had to learn for ourselves.

  As we taxied at McCarran International, the voice came over the PA. again. Pick up as many peanut wrappers from the floor and seats around you as you can, it said. They will bring you luck!

  The woman in the aisle seat next to us leaned forward against her seat belt, reaching eagerly for a wrapper. Without taking her eyes from the woman, Gwen said, Do you ever dream about Mom?

  No, I said. Not really. Not any more than I dream about anyone else.

  • • •

  The last time I rode from the Mission up the hill to Sunset—to Gwen’s—I rode with bags strapped to my back. Because her place has a washer and dryer and mine doesn’t, I often abuse my key privileges to do laundry while she and Jacob are at work. That day, I put my things in the washer and went upstairs to wait for the cycle to finish.

  The apartment was different, filled with new things. New posters on the walls, framed. New books on the shelves, new CDs near the computer, new magazines on the coffee table. Georgia O’Keeffe. Tony Hillerman. Our Bodies, Ourselves. James Taylor. The Utne Reader. The Indigo Girls. Annuals, Perennials and Bulbs. Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions. Baez Sings Dylan. Cadillac Desert. The “Heart of Gold” single.

  All our mother’s things. But not hers exactly, new things, uncracked book spines, unfolded pages, CDs instead of tapes. No water damage, no dust, no coffee rings, no scribblings in the margins. Things from the house where we grew up, but not from the house where we grew up. Things from Barnes & Noble and the Best Buy on Geary. It was disorienting, gave me the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap and the sky isn’t black or blue but hazy gray, and you can’t tell whether it’s five a.m. or five p.m., can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep. I got dizzy. I went to the bathroom, thought I might throw up but didn’t. I knelt at the toilet for I don’t know how long, staring at a copy of Reader’s Digest on the tank.

  I rode home hard and fast, without my things but still weighed down. At my apartment the warm scent of taco meat and raw onion was heavy in the air. I wanted to call Peter, or rather I wanted to want to call him, to tell him what happened and what it meant, to let him back into me and never shut him out again. But instead I turned on Dumbo, letting the light from the TV wash over me.

  I cannot watch Dumbo without crying. It’s that scene with the mother, or more specifically, the way the tears literally roll down baby Dumbo’s cheeks when they lock her up, and the way she stretches her trunk out through the iron bars and cradles Dumbo, rocks him to sleep. If I could have called Peter, this is what I would have said: If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother, wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place? Which is to say, how could the Stork bring a large-eared, sensitive and easily frightened baby elephant into this world?

  When Peter came over that n
ight, I was nearly asleep on the couch, the blue glow from the TV the only light on in the room. He sat on the edge of the couch and stroked my hair.

  Have you eaten today? he said.

  Tell me again, I said. About Sutro.

  He sighed. Okay, little one. The currents in the bay have not significantly changed in the forty-one years since the baths burned. The beach is as sound to hold that structure as it was in 1966.

  But, I said, keeping my eyes closed, you do concede that one can easily imagine it slipping into the sea.

  Well, one can easily imagine anything, he said, as if that were a good thing.

  Not that we’d rebuild them anyway, I said. They’d just be swallowed by the rising sea level.

  Oh, yes! said Peter, kissing my head. The oceans will rise and we’ll all swim to work! I’ll pick you up for lunch and say, You swim like a duck.

  He said this in an old-timey voice that very nearly made me smile.

  O, I said. You’re making a game of me.

  After Peter and I have sex there is some smallness in me that wants to turn to him and ask, In your professional estimation as a scientist, how long can a relationship be sustained on pity and anthropomorphism and a postcard on the fridge?

  But there is such bigness in him that he would say, As long as it takes.

  Were they rebuilt, the Sutro Baths would not actually slip into the sea; I know this. Peter is doing research for PG&E about wave farms, which are basically underwater wind farms where the ocean’s currents generate electricity by turning a turbine, the same way wind does, only more consistently. This is not a joke. PG&E already has twenty-one underwater windmills along the floor of the San Francisco Bay for the project’s pilot. Peter is the biologist they’ve hired to track the project’s effects on local marine life. Talk about being part of the problem. If you ask me, he is the biologist they pay to say the project has no effect on local marine life. To that he says, Can’t you let even one thing be simple and good?

  I’d like to tell Gwen or Jacob or Peter even that our mother’s things look absurd here, in this foggy damp peninsula, so far from the desert. They’re out of context. The type on the magazines looks too dark, the album art too small, everything untouched by the sun. These things can’t survive here. The moisture from the sea will mold the prints, rot every page of those books.

  I haven’t been to see Gwen in eight weeks. I left my wet clothes stuck to the walls of her washing machine. She has not called me in nearly as long and I have not called her. The last time we spoke she said, I’ve started reading Cadillac Desert.

  And I said, What is wrong with you? When what I meant to say was, Are you okay?

  Jacob will do something. He will put an end to this. He will come home and find his apartment filled to capacity with replicas from our mother’s life and he will take Gwen by the hand and say, You have got to stop this. She will cry. But he will wrap his trunklike arms around her and hold her until she stops.

  These days more and more I think I should not expose my beautiful unborn niece to Dumbo. Suppose she is struck by the cruelty of those lady elephants, the ones that taunt Jumbo Junior. Suppose she wants to know whether there really are adults so mean and selfish as those lady elephants. Suppose she asks, Well, Auntie, are there?

  Then I would have to say, Yes and no. There are adults in this world capable of a viciousness you would not believe. There are adults in this world who will never think of anyone except themselves. Your grandmother, for example. Yes, in this world there are adults with cold, hard hearts, little niece, but there are no more elephants.

  Jacob will do nothing. He’s visited our mother’s house only twice. He doesn’t know about Baez Sings Dylan. He doesn’t know what it means for Gwen to hang O’Keeffe’s Black Iris right beside Oriental Poppies above the sofa. He doesn’t know what it means that she listens to Graceland while she works.

  This is what it means:

  It is late spring in Las Vegas. Or it is midwinter or early autumn or the peak of summer’s heaviest heat. Gwen and I walk home from the bus stop or our friend’s parents drop us off, or our boyfriends do, driving recklessly, or we pull our own cars into the driveway. We are four or fourteen or twenty-four. We can hear music coming over the fence from the backyard. Graceland.

  Our mother stoops in the garden, prodding at the dirt, pulling weeds. She darts from hose to shovel to fertilizer, never doing much with any of them. We know some things, and no matter how old we are it feels like we’ve known them our entire lives: She will be out in the garden until after the sun goes down and we’ve made ourselves dinner and stayed up to watch Unsolved Mysteries and put ourselves to bed. She will flip the tape over every time it clicks.

  When she finally goes to bed she will stay there for a long, long time, whether the next day is stinging hot or beautiful or a workday or a birthday. If we ask, and Gwen does more than I, Mom will say it is Joan Baez that’s made her cry, how she tries so hard to understand Dylan, or the cities in Cadillac Desert sapping all the moisture from the ground, or small, sweet Paul Simon convinced he’s found redemption. She has these reasons, and though we know them to be inadequate, we believe her. I’ve reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland. The truth is our mother stays in bed for reasons we won’t begin to understand until we are older, until a hole is opened in us that can’t be filled. Which is to say, until now.

  I am the only one who knows what it means, this compiling. I am the only one in Gwen’s life who can see what she’s doing. We have no one else—our father is long dead; he died when Gwen was a baby, like Jumbo Senior. We are alone and I cannot believe how long it’s taken me to realize this. I am the only one who can say, This has got to stop. You have to quit this and go back to normal and have a baby, a daughter, a beautiful daughter who won’t have to worry about her mother, who will be loved and never alone.

  I do dream about our mother. Always in these dreams her death is a big misunderstanding. In these dreams she has won a stay at the Sands and simply forgot to call; she has been laughing and whirling around the roulette tables, and she comes back to her house on Stanford Lane wearing a plastic visor and a new bright white T-shirt. I Got Lucky at the Sands! And she’s brought us prime rib from the buffet, wrapped in tinfoil, and her plants are wilted and their soil is bone dry but none of them are dead.

  Always in these dreams we have a great laugh about this misunderstanding and I am never mad that my mother didn’t call, just grateful that she is alive and that the confusion is cleared up. And then, when I wake, all that grace is gone.

  But—and this is what I would have told Gwen when she asked me on that airplane, were I not a coward—in these dreams our mother looks and smells and sounds and feels just like she did, in a way I can’t re-create when I am awake. Which is to say, in my dreams she is alive in a way I cannot remember her ever being. And these dreams are a blessing, or as close to a blessing as it gets anymore. And for that at least, I am grateful. G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L. Grateful.

  Gwen wasn’t a cowardly kid, just very small. She used to say everything twice, once aloud and then a second time, whispered it quietly to herself. She did this with everything she ever said. Said she was recording it in her mental journal. Even then you could tell that though she was born later, she was much older than me.

  This morning, I woke before my alarm went off and I lay there thinking about the grizzly, how before the city there used to be grizzlies on this peninsula. How Peter told me that on our first date. About what other magic he could give me if I let him. I took a long ride around the city, trying to imagine grizzly bears loafing through eucalyptus groves. I rode to the Sutro Baths.

  They’ve put signs up at the baths. They say, SWIM AT YOUR OWN RISK or CAUTION: STRONG CURRENTS or some other euphemism for LOOK OUT! A BOY AND HIS STEPFATHER WERE DRAGGED OUT TO SEA HERE AND THEIR BODIES WERE NEVER FOUND (WE SUSPECT SHARKS) AND
IT COULD HAPPEN TO YOU; IT COULD HAPPEN TO ANY OF US. The signs have a picture, an illustration of a stick swimmer being swept out by a squiggly current, his stick arm in the air. I think they should put these signs up everywhere, not just at the beaches but throughout the entire city, call this what it is.

  I rode hard from the Mission through Castro up to Golden Gate, then back down Lincoln to Baker Beach, through the Presidio to the wharf and back. Pumping up hills, hurtling down them. I wanted to get away from here, and for a moment I thought I felt my feet pushing me far from here to Canada, following the humpback’s route. Putting distance between me and her. But that’s all wrong. This city is a peninsula, seven miles by seven miles, and I just ricocheted from one edge to the other. I was never more than seven miles from anything.

  I rode to Gwen’s. She wasn’t in the apartment. But then, I hadn’t expected her to be. I kept climbing the stairs past her floor, and here I am. I step out onto the roof. Great deep planters line the roof deck full of ice plant and bird-of-paradise. I don’t want her to be up here, but she is. She sits on a deck chair with her short legs stretched out in front of her, big tortoiseshell sunglasses over her eyes, her hands on her stomach.

  And there’s a thousand things I want to tell her—about the Sutro boy and the whales I never saw, about Peter’s turbines turning and turning down in the bay without ever rousing anything, about all the great land mammals—and I want to say them all so bad I could say them twice, once to her and once to me, two thousand ways total to say, I know you’re slipping out to sea; please don’t go. Don’t leave me on land by myself.

  Instead I say, Have you watched Dumbo lately?

  Gwen looks up to me, lifts her sunglasses from her eyes. And right away I can tell she’s been crying. No, she says.

  I was thinking, I say. If we call Dumbo Dumbo, aren’t we, you know . . .

  A part of the problem? she says.

  And maybe it’s that her stomach has gotten so big in the months since I last saw her, or that I can see the ocean from up here, but she just looks so small. She looks like she did when we were kids. She looks like a child.