Barren Island
Page 37
“I’ll leave that up to you,” he replied.
He never said anything to our parents about his life with Tyson, which was probably for the best. I confess that it took me some getting used to, longer than it should have, but I did. I miss them so much now. It is terrible to be one of the last ones alive.
Sofia, who I worried was gone from my life after Barren Shoal, got a job in the gift wrapping department at Lord & Taylor on 5th Avenue, right around the corner from my studio. Pretty soon she was the manager, then the manager of customer complaints. After two years she had heard enough whining, so she quit. She found work as a scent tester for a French perfume company that relocated to New York following the war. Imagine Sofia making what was left of this world smell beautiful.
She got married soon after to a scent salesman named Peter, had kids, and moved to a nice house in New Jersey. We saw less of one another after that, but visited by phone every week. We even took all our children one Sunday to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gray and Lois and Noah and Tyson came too. We did, indeed, see “Still Life with a Glass and Oysters.” Only in a painting can a lemon last so long.
When her little one started school, Sofia got a job in one of the big new factories that sprang up along Route 3. The whole bunch of them made artificial flavors. If she had been a little younger—given her penchant for chemistry—she might have been one of those kids mixing up LSD in the basement. Which, it turns out, her middle one did, which is why she moved the whole family to her father’s village in Greece: to keep the middle son out of jail and the older boy out of Vietnam. After the junta in ’67, things got hard for them; when the colonels were overthrown, things got better. They could travel again and she and Peter went on vacations with Walker and me to France and to China. We finally got to see the Forbidden City and the Great Wall and all those places that we talked about when we were little girls making the scrapbook for our Odyssey Project. How about that.
Ray, I learned from Yorgos, married Marie Dowd. I expected to run into them one day, what with all those Dowds roaming New York. I never did. Yorgos said that Ray was wounded on Normandy and had an ugly “S-shaped” scar on his forehead. It was no surprise that Ray lied about the scar, just like he lied about so much else. It was probably easy to persuade everyone that a 5 was actually an S. People like Ray lie whenever it suits them, until the truth completely disappears.
I did, however, run into Miss Doctor Finn while Sofia was still working at Lord & Taylor. She told me that Miss Finn had died of typhoid in a concentration camp. That was a terrible blow.
I visit Sofia and Peter for a few weeks every year, my visits longer now that I am alone. I never imagined I would survive after Walker died, but here I am. Sofia comes to America every year to see her children, who all moved back. It made no sense to stay in Greece, what with the draft dodger amnesty and the statute of limitations, never mind the lack of opportunity. We speak more now than ever. I know that this cannot go on forever, but I am too busy reckoning with this day, and all the days that came before it, to become terrified by the days that are still to come.
I like to row on days like this. My kids bought me an inflatable boat and a small air compressor that I keep in the car. I plug the compressor into the cigarette lighter and in less than ten minutes I am in the water. Some people say I am too old, but it is silly to insist that I not do what I can do. I fish a little, or at least pretend to. I do not have the patience I once had; baiting a line gets harder with creeping arthritis. I bring a portable radio and listen to NPR or, on Saturdays, the opera. It is sponsored now by a different oil company, the same one that helped destroy the salt marshes around Barren Shoal.
As it turns out, no one—not one single person I have ever met who did not live there—has ever heard of Barren Shoal without my telling them. My children, I suspect, will handle this differently when the telling is left to them alone. For the time being, at least, we still speak about it amongst ourselves. It is a reference point for all that has happened to us since.
I have a sextant in my living room, a beautiful one made from brass and polished mahogany just like the runabout that brought Lois and Gray to Barren Shoal. My kids gave me the sextant too, the year after they bought me the inflatable boat. They like to think it would matter, somehow, if I could find the exact site of Barren Shoal. They think that finding it among the channels and beaches of Jamaica Bay would somehow make a difference.
Precisely the difference they are looking for is a notion they cannot explain. I suppose that measuring the coordinates might be useful to someone who has never been there, who needs more help in remembering than I do. But not me.
As for you, ask what you want. Had you been there, the way you are supposed to be everywhere, I would not be telling this now. You would know.
Carol Zoref is a fiction writer and essayist. She teaches at Sarah Lawrence College and New York University. She lives in New York City.