So Fey: Queer Fairy Fiction

by Christopher Barzak

  "Uh," someone said.

  She sat up too fast. Head swimming, she stared at a square, blurry shape, which resolved itself slowly into a person. Joe. "Shit," she said. He stared at her in blank astonishment, a picnic basket dangling from one hand. "Hello," she said. "You startled me." She had not seen or talked to another person in two months, and she honestly couldn't say that she felt like she had missed out on anything.

  "You're, uh, pregnant."

  She quelled any number of possible rude replies. "Yes."

  He sat down upon a stone. "Well." He looked around himself rather desperately. "Nice camp. Neat." Silence. "I expected to hear from you by now about supplies, so I thought I'd better check on you."

  "I'm doing fine."

  "Uh." His gaze skittered around her gravid shape, managing to avoid direct eye contact. "Shouldn't you, uh, be seeing a doctor?"

  "Do I look sick to you?"

  "I never heard of a pregnant woman camping before."

  "Back on the mainland, it's all the rage," she said, before she could stop herself.

  Joe gazed at her, humorless and dull as a used hubcap. "You should have told me."

  "I didn't think it was anyone's business but mine."

  "But I'm the one who gave you a ride out here."

  Margie could not quite follow the logic of this statement. Maybe Joe's assumption of responsibility for her welfare was like some peoples' for their invited houseguests. Though Margie had invited herself to Skerry Island, she couldn't have gotten here without him. So now he felt like whatever happened to her would be his fault. She needed an excuse for being here that had nothing to do with him.

  "Actually, I'm doing some research," she said. "It's for a novel about a pregnant woman who gets stranded on an island. My doctor said it was OK."

  Joe looked skeptical.

  "Besides, this is my last chance to be alone for at least eighteen years. I'll be an old woman by then."

  Joe raised his eyebrows. "And the father?"

  "A syringe."

  "A what?" Some people, Margie supposed, might not understand the mechanics of donor insemination, but Joe looked not so much puzzled as sickened. "Fine," he said, backing away. "You want to be alone, that's fine with me. Just do me a favor and stay away from the water. No one who ever fell into the ocean has gotten out alive."

  He stalked away, still carrying his basket. Belatedly, Margie realized that the basket must have contained a picnic lunch that Joe had planned to share with her: fried chicken, maybe, and chocolate chip cookies. The man had lived alone for twenty years, and Margie surely was the only marriageable woman to come his way for some time. No wonder he had been so disconcerted.

  Low tide that day came right on the cusp of the late sunset, and she stood there, vaguely worried, as the red sky turned a deep, translucent blue which slowly darkened to black. Her pink bucket was empty, and the tide had long since turned.

  Surely the ocean, so kind until now, wasn't jealous? She abruptly shouted, "I don't want him, or his fried chicken! I sent him away, didn't I?" She stopped, feeling much more foolish than she had when she asked for potatoes the first time. The waves crashed, startlingly close, for in the darkness, the danger of the rising tide had crept up on her unobserved. "The hell with you," she muttered, not sure who she was talking to. She turned toward the safety of the shore.

  The bitter ocean mugged her from behind. Off-balanced, Margie went down, and the water sucked her away from the stability of shore. She thrashed herself up to her knees, but now another looming black wave fell onto her, like a shower of black crockery. She breathed water, and envisioned herself battered to death upon the rocks, and no one but she would know it was a lover's quarrel. Another cold wave loomed. She struggled feebly, but the stones rolled underfoot like marbles. Then, a new force jerked her forward, out of the crashing waves' grasp, and again, out of the writhing water and onto stones, like a sack of wet laundry. She lay on her back, coughing, retching, with the stars starting to come out overhead in a sky of midnight blue.

  "The ocean will not give you up so easily. Get on your feet now. You're not yet safely on dry land."

  She rolled onto her side, and the same hand that had jerked her out of the ocean's grasp hauled her briskly to her feet and supported her as she walked away from the water's writhing edge. Safely out of the range of the tide, she collapsed onto a boulder, still gasping, starting to shiver now in her soaking wet clothes and the chill wind of evening. Her eyes burned with salt but through the haze and twilight she thought she saw another woman, utterly naked but carrying some kind of heavy clothing under her arm, stride through the shallow, starlit water and bend over to pick something up. She came back and the thing in her hand resolved itself into Margie's pink bucket.

  "You'd better get those wet clothes off," the woman said. "That wind's not so cold, but it's cold enough to give you hypothermia if you're not careful." She tossed the bucket and her own armload of wet clothes onto the rocks, safely out of the ocean's reach. Self-conscious, Margie took off her shirt and pants. "Come on," the woman said, and helped her up. "I'll come back for our things."

  Margie went with her, shivering, her knees rubbery from shock. She could not tell where they were going, and even though she though she knew this shoreline pretty well, soon she had entered in an unfamiliar place, starlit and filled with the shapes of great, looming stones, with the trees sighing nearby as the wind flowed through like the tide, and the sound of the crashing waves far enough away that Margie's fear began to ease. A door creaked open, a lantern was lit, and she found herself indoors, sitting in a chair crudely cobbled together out of driftwood, wrapped in a Hudson Bay blanket. The naked woman knelt before a rusty old wood-burning stove and blew energetically on the tinder within until it burst into flame. And then she was gone, leaving Margie alone in the faint, warm light of the crudely furnished shack. Its walls seemed to be made of rimed planks salvaged from the sea, with the gaps and knotholes filled with mud and grass. The cushions on the furniture were handmade, with bits of the grass that stuffed them poking through the seams. Blankets lay unfolded in one corner; the bed appeared to be the floor, where an unlikely pile of oriental carpets lay several layers deep. An open doorway led to a dark second room, which seemed to be for storage; Margie could see cardboard cartons, and clothing hanging from hooks.

  On one wall, near the stove, an Olympic gold medal hung from a nail, its ribbon faded with age.

  The door opened, and the woman came in, hauling a tangle of wet clothing and what seemed to be a substantial wetsuit, which she hung in the storeroom. Calmer, warmer, Margie took a good look at her this time as she pulled on a worn pair of jeans and a faded flannel shirt. She had a swimmer's big shoulders, and had a layer of fat to insulate her from the cold water. Her hair was already starting to dry, and in the firelight it seemed almost red, but her eyes were dark, almost black. She turned and looked at Margie, as though she felt her stare. She had to be forty years old, or close to it, and her face had the closed-off look of one who had lived long enough to lose all her trust of the world.

  "Abigail Macauley?" said Margie in disbelief.

  The woman gazed at her for a moment, then glanced at the gold medal. "I never could figure out what to do with that thing. For God's sake, don't call me Abby, like they kept doing on T.V. It's Gayle."

  "It's not every day a pregnant woman gets rescued from the sea by an Olympic gold-medal swimmer."

  "I suppose not." Having finished buttoning her shirt, she added wood to fire, which started to put forth a welcome warmth, and put on a pot of water to boil. "Some tea will warm you up."

  "I've been here two months and never realized I had a neighbor."

  "I rinsed your clothes with fresh water." Gayle hung Margie's clothes by the stove to dry.

  "You swim in that ocean? Even in a wetsuit--"

  Gayle smiled suddenly. Her crow's feet pleated like the folds in a paper fan. "I'm no more crazy than you are," she said.

  Margi
e eased herself back into the grass-musty, crackly cushions of the driftwood chair. The scratchy, stiff blanket smelled salty as the sea. The sea really did love her, Margie thought, sleepy in the aftermath of having almost drowned. After weeks of giving her everything she needed, it had tried to kill her in a jealous rage, but then had regretted it and sent instead this island hermit, rising up out of the wave to save her life.

  I am insane, Margie thought, waking up a little.

  Gayle's kitchen included an ice chest, a small but sturdy table, and a wooden box of kitchenware. Waiting for the water to boil, she took a knife from the box and opened the ice chest to remove a mackerel. Dumbstruck, Margie watched her filet the mackerel with one brisk swipe of the knife. Gayle turned the fish over and did it again, then tossed the remains out the door for the seagulls. She poured the water for tea and brought Margie a cup with the teabag still in it--peppermint, the same brand the sea had given her last week.

  Margie said, "Do you swim all the way to land for supplies?"

  "Now who would sell groceries to a naked woman carrying a wetsuit?" Gayle seemed utterly serious. "I've got a boat over at the harbor."

  Gayle was accustomed to silence, of course, and as she rolled the filets in cornmeal and sliced some peaches while the fish fried, Margie felt no pressure to engage in idle talk. There was a question she had to ask, but she had a feeling the answer would not be simple, and perhaps there would be no answer at all, but just a reproving look from a woman who clearly placed great value on her privacy. Once, that woman had been a slightly fat girl with big shoulders who swam to fame on television one hot summer's day between Margie's sophomore and junior years in college, twenty-three years ago. If Margie let go of her assumptions about how the world worked, their meeting like this began to seem too inevitable, not the result of a mysterious accident, but a choreography. Margie was comfortable in this chair; to be handed a plate of hot food that she had neither gathered nor cooked was a great luxury. She did not want to risk losing this sudden comfort by asking paranoid questions.

  So she finally said, "Thank you for helping me."

  Gayle managed to seem preoccupied with her food, but when she looked up she was still a little flushed. She didn't pretend like she thought Margie was referring to saving her from drowning. "You looked a bit hungry," she said. "But it seemed like you wanted to be alone."

  They never directly mentioned the subject of the food from the sea, but that was because Margie thought she knew everything she needed to know: that Gayle had and would continue to feed her, and that she would not otherwise interfere or intervene with Margie's life. When Margie's fear lifted, as she sat eating the mackerel filet, she realized how afraid she had been, for much longer than just two months, how, in fact, it had been out of fear that she got herself pregnant in the first place. Now she knew that she would not die of hunger, or give birth alone.

  Gayle offered Margie another slice of bread, and gave her a shirt and socks to wear, and asked if she should buy Margie some larger maternity clothes the next time she took her boat to the mainland. By eleven o'clock, she had heard with apparent equanimity the entire story of Margie's secret madness, and had commented, as though it were only common sense, "I guess your baby wants to be born here."

  About herself she volunteered nothing, and it seemed only courteous not to inquire how a champion whose face had once appeared on cereal boxes had wound up in a cobbled-together shack on an island so remote it didn't appear on auto club maps. But when Margie cautiously mentioned Joe's visit to her campsite that day, Gayle's occasionally expressive face hardened. "Joe's the kind of man who'd strip off and incinerate his own skin if he thought it would make him more like everybody else."

  Years, perhaps even a lifetime of bad blood, lay behind that bitter declaration. In Somerville, a city of apartments, people stayed for a few years, and if anything irritated them, they simply moved on. Margie had forgotten what hatred was like. She managed to say, "Well, I hardly know him, of course, but he just struck me as being rather dull."

  "Yes," Gayle said venemously. "Exactly. Pathologically ordinary, that's Joe."

  "Is he the reason you don't live with the others, by the harbor?"

  Gayle said after a moment, "No, I can deal with Joe. But I'm just too queer for the island folks. I don't belong with them anymore."

  ---

  The mattress of layered oriental rugs was much more comfortable than Margie's air mattress, which lately she had found difficult to inflate, since the breathlessness of late pregnancy had set in. She awoke at dawn and went out to pee in the rocks, and as soon as she got a good look at the shoreline she knew exactly where her own camp lay in relation to Gayle's. But she felt no desire to rush back to the increasingly awkward cook fire, the tent she could just barely crawl into, the sleeping bag she could no longer zip up. She stood in the cold wind, thinking, but she did not have to think for very long. The shack was all but invisible even in plain sight. A simple comfort waited behind its camouflage. Margie went back inside, and shut the door.

  Gayle stirred among the blankets, with her red-brown hair in a tangle and her shirt rucked up to her armpits. Margie put her hands on bare skin and stroked up to Gayle's lush, flannel-framed breasts. Gayle caught her breath and mumbled, her words thick with sleep, "You don't know what you're--"

  "Oh god, your skin!"

  "My skin?" she repeated, groggy and strangely startled.

  Her skin smelled like the ocean, but she was warm and soft and quickly ceased her incoherent protests. Her hair had seaweed in it, and her whole body tasted of salt. Margie tasted the length and breadth of her. Between them, the infant rested peacefully in its little sea.

  ---

  That day, Gayle helped Margie to collapse her tent and pack away her camping gear, and Margie moved into the shack. Neither one of them had ever lived with another person, but Margie found she could put up with almost anything if that meant she could lie on the cushions of the simple driftwood bench with her feet up. The energy of early pregnancy had evaporated, and Margie found the smallest effort exhausting. Gayle went to the mainland and returned with desperately needed larger-sized maternity clothing and some ice cream, which had stayed firm in the ice chest on the long journey from the grocery store, and a fresh supply of batteries for the radio, and a half dozen more classics in paperback. She wouldn't take Margie's money.

  Gayle spent almost every day from dawn to dark making her solitary living from the sea. She gave her catch to the bread-baking woman's husband, who, during the mackerel run daily hauled everyone's fish to the mainland in his big boat, in exchange for a portion of the take. Sometimes, though, when Margie woke up in the morning, Gayle's wetsuit would be gone, and Margie knew that Gayle was in the sea, not on it.

  On one of those days, Margie awoke from a long nap to the bizarre sensation of the baby practicing a flutter-kick against her ribs. The small, windowless room was faintly lit by a red light, which seeped in between the boards. The battery-powered radio murmured news of a world so distant Margie could hardly make any sense of it. Margie got awkwardly and heavily to her feet and opened the door. The loud crashing of the waves told her it was high tide. There was a chill in the air, and when she glanced over at the nearby woods, she saw a hint of red among the leaves of the sugar maples. Was that just the red sunlight, or was autumn already so close? What was the date? What had she done with her watch?

  The waves crashed. In the moment of silence that followed, Margie thought she heard a voice calling. She started hastily down the narrow path. Gayle was not usually so late on the days she went swimming. There was another silence, and she heard the voice again, calling, "Margie!" But it was not Gayle's voice. More slowly and more carefully now, for the pregnancy had utterly confounded her sense of balance, Margie made her way down to the shore. At a distance, a square figure wandered the rocks, shouting her name.

  "Joe!" she yelled. "What the hell is the matter?"

  He heard her, and turned, and hurried towa
rd her. "Thank God," he said. "Your tent was gone and--I didn't know what to think."

  "I moved my camp," she said. "I told you, I need to be alone." He looked at her, taking in her dramatic shape, her backward tilt, her legs, straddled like a sailor's upon an unreliable deck. "How far along are you, anyway?"

  Margie gazed at him, baffled. He had become as incomprehensible as the radio news. "How far along what?"

  "How many months? When are you due?"

  "What? Oh." After a bit of effort, she managed to get her hands into her pockets. She should have brought her jacket out with her; she was standing in a cold wind. "I've kind of lost track, I guess." Then she realized how strange that would sound to someone who was accustomed to pregnant women brooding over every week of development, hauling ultrasound pictures around to show their relatives, reading baby books and pasting yellow duckies on the bedroom wall.

  Joe's face was suffused with hectic light. "You can't have your baby on the island."

  "Why not? You were born here, weren't you?"

  He looked at her blankly for a moment, as if her simple question were too convoluted for him to answer. Then he said, seriously, "There's things an outsider don't know about this place."

  "Such as what?" she asked impatiently. Joe reminded her of nothing so much as a sixteen-year-old trying to explain why cruising around all night had been more important than writing an overdue paper on Hamlet.

  "The seals."

  The waves thundered suddenly, close by, and wind-carried spray chilled Margie's skin. Gayle had told her that the seals never come ashore on Skerry Island because they remembered having been hunted long ago. Gayle often made statements that suggested she had a rather eccentric view of the world, but Margie was hardly in a position to criticize. Joe, on the other hand, was the last person she would have expected to turn superstitious. Margie said, "In evolutionary terms, seals are just dogs that learned to swim."