Sea Creatures

by Susanna Daniel

  She possessed an emphatic, even-handed girlishness. In casual conversation, she mentioned people from her high school years with such regularity that you’d think she was in her twenties instead of her fifties. And at their wedding, she’d worn a tea-length peach taffeta dress that reminded me of an old-fashioned prom gown. She’d looked radiant.

  “Do you sing?” I said over the music.

  “Not a note. I know your mother had a good voice.”

  “She couldn’t carry a tune,” I said.

  This was true. My mother had loved to sing, especially while playing the piano, but she’d had a painfully bad voice. It was something you got used to. Or, rather, it was something you were never not used to, if she was your mother.

  “That’s not what your father told me,” said Lidia.

  “Nevertheless,” I said.

  It irritated me that my father had told this particular lie. It was just like him, an unreservedly judgmental person, to refrain from speaking ill of the deceased, as if this could erase all prior unkindness and jigger history into a rosier light. I was defensive of my mother’s inarguably bad voice. Who but me was willing to keep straight the facts of her life?

  My father noticed us watching him and blew a kiss.

  “Charmer!” said Lidia.

  It’s striking, the difference between one part of life and another. The man we watched perform was both my father and not my father. Lidia’s husband, yes, but not my mother’s. A second marriage was a different animal entirely from a first one. The mortgage, the raising of children, the deciding where to live and for how long—this was in the past. There should be another word for a second marriage like theirs, which was as distinct from the first as retirement from work.

  Beside me, Graham was focusing intently on the band. Whatever I might have labeled his mood—grumpy at best, malicious at worst—there was nothing I could do to snap him out of it. So quickly, I knew, his work had started inspiring as much anxiety as energy and enthusiasm. There was a project in the late stages, a new way of studying extreme weather, and he’d been tossed into the thick of it. He’d been given a research fellowship, but his salary came out of two separate grants, including one from the U.S. Office of Naval Research, which named his position as associate scientist. He was making more than he’d ever made at Northwestern. Larry—this was Graham’s old friend from McGill, who had gone out of his way to help Graham get the fellowship—had said that after the next round of grants came through at the end of the following summer, Graham had a good chance of being hired on the tenure track. This made me nervous—the carrot of tenure had been, for us, a dangerous one—but it excited Graham. He thought he’d earned it.

  I leaned forward to kiss his cheek. He didn’t move at first, but then his cheek nudged my lips, a gesture toward harmony.

  Frankie tugged at my sleeve. Milk, please, he signed.

  Milk was the object of a small, daily tug-of-war: he always wanted more, I always wanted him to have less, or else he wouldn’t eat enough.

  This time, before I could manage to reach into my bag, Graham turned, saying, “Wait.” To Frankie, he said, “Milk. Can you say milk?”

  Frankie rocked up onto his knees. Lidia and I looked between them. Frankie believed—I could see it in his face—that he was being asked to repeat himself more nicely, as I’d asked him to do no fewer than one thousand times. (I’d realized fast that there is a nice way to sign, and a not-nice way.) But this time, he’d asked nicely in the first place.

  He faced his father and made the signs again: one hand opening and closing, thumb extended, then the same hand rubbing his chest in little circles, driving home the magic word. He wasn’t typically defiant, my son—if anything, he was supplicant, sometimes desperately so. With Frankie, it was a matter of reading his body language and expression more than anything else. Maybe with another child, a verbal child, Graham wouldn’t have gotten it so wrong. When you ask yourself if someone might have what my mother had called a taste for parenting, you might as well ask if that person has a taste for subtlety, that close cousin of compassion.

  Frankie’s little Thermos was in my bag. It would have taken a blink for Graham to pull it out, but instead he said again, “Can you say milk, Frankie?”

  Frankie’s hands dropped to his sides. He sat on his rump, his feet tucked beneath him. He picked up a crayon, drew a line, put it down again. The air grew thin.

  I pulled the Thermos from my bag and set it in front of him, and Graham crossed his arms and turned back to watching the band. The waitress stumbled over his legs and shot him a glare, which he ignored.

  The set was in full swing, the lead singer sweating over a cluster of dancers. I caught a whiff of cigarette smoke, which I took as a cue—an excuse, really—to leave. I leaned in to Graham, making my voice as lighthearted as possible. “Do you want to go when we go?”

  “Let’s finish the set.” He brought his hand to his chest and rubbed in a circle. “Please.”

  A wave of fury rose inside me. I blinked it back. It wasn’t unlike Graham to push, with what I considered a certain brutishness, the issue of Frankie’s talking. But it was unlike him to be snide. Frankie watched us, then stared down at his lap.

  Graham grit his teeth a little and his eyes jumped from the band to the table and back. I glared at the back of his head. Finally, he turned to me, his mouth tight. “All right. I’m sorry, okay?”

  I gathered our things. The set ended, and my father made his way over and lifted Frankie into his arms. “You’re leaving?” he said. To Graham, he said, “You, too, amigo?”

  “You look so handsome up there, mi amor,” said Lidia.

  “It’s just a little smoky,” I said to my father.

  He shrugged. “It’s not everyone’s cup of tea.”

  I wanted to say: There are things in the world that have nothing to do with you. I bit my tongue.

  “I’ve got an early morning,” said Graham. This made no sense, knowing Graham, but he was making an effort.

  By the time we’d made our way to the car, the band had started up again, and from the distance the music was clearer and more melodic, with breathing room between the instruments. We lingered before getting in the car—I was trying to decide on the best route home—and above us a streetlamp buzzed on, though there was only the slightest tinge of evening in the air. Graham sat on the trunk of the car and pulled Frankie up beside him. My eye caught the pale, tender swell of Graham’s collarbone. The warm evening sunlight gave his hair a silver-gold sheen. Every time I hardened my heart to him, something softened it again. He’d said he was sorry, and I believed him.

  To Frankie, he said, “I just wish you would talk to us, buddy.”

  Frankie leaned into his shoulder, scraping at a scar on his knee. Graham pulled him close.

  “He will,” I said to Graham. I’d said it so many times by that point, the words had lost all promise.

  Graham swung himself to the ground and lifted Frankie, then settled him into his car seat. As he came back around to me—I was a few feet away, digging in my bag for keys—a sharp popping noise came from above. I ducked instinctively, then looked up. Along the trunk of my car were curved fragments of glass, and above us the bulb of the streetlamp was gone—why this happened, I have no idea—and in its casing remained only a single threatening shard. Graham stared down at his hand. Lightly embedded in his palm was a spear of moon-colored glass.

  “My God,” I said.

  He pulled the glass from his flesh. There was a thin bloody thread left behind in his palm. He said, “Sometimes I don’t know why you love me.”

  “Just be nice,” I said. “That’s all I want.”

  He shook his head absently, like this wasn’t the right answer. He said, “Do you ever feel like nothing will be good again?”

  THE LAST TIME GRAHAM AND I argued about whether to have a child had not been terribly different from the previous times, except that he’d finally allowed me to change his mind. I was just home fro
m a baby shower I’d thrown with two friends from college. The head hostess, my old roommate Sara Brink, mother to ten-month-old twins, came up with the idea that we hostesses should fashion baby bumps from throw pillows, to wear under our clothes. As the only one from our group who had never been pregnant—the other hostess, Meg Pritchard, was expecting her first—I didn’t want to do it. But I was wary of being the grown child, the one for whom the others must bend, so I went along. I put on the bump when I got to the restaurant and didn’t look at myself in the mirror. I didn’t know, then, what awaited me along the path to Frankie, but maybe I had a premonition, because it was impossible for me to foresee pregnancy as a happy time. At best I saw it as a rite of passage—unpleasant but satisfying. I intended to do it only once. This was something I’d said again and again to Graham, who didn’t wholly believe me. He believed pregnancy and babies were some sort of addiction, and while he could vaguely stomach the idea of having one, more than one was unimaginable. The reasons he gave never varied: his age, his still-tenuous career, his sleep. This should have been a clue to me of his seriousness, even as my motley counterarguments scattered over us like buckshot.

  I drove home from the shower without removing the pillow beneath my clothes. Graham was on the back deck. I stood in front of him until he noticed the bump.

  “I’m pregnant,” I said.

  His eyebrows came together. “What’s wrong?”

  “I want a baby.”

  He frowned, but he didn’t look irritated; he looked resigned.

  I said, “No, that’s not true. I don’t care about having a baby. I want to be a mother.”

  It occurred to me, standing there in blotted makeup, that I should call my mother and share with her this morsel of gratitude, which was just occurring to me in that moment: that I wanted to have a baby because I’d so loved having her for a mother, that the two things were inextricable. It had been almost a year since her diagnosis and I’d visited six times. Air travel alone was eating at our savings, not to mention the time spent without paying clients. The possibility of making my mother a grandmother before she died—these were not the explicit terms of her illness yet, but the writing was on the wall—was so seductive, so galvanic, that the alternative seemed monstrous.

  Graham closed his book. “I don’t know if I can keep having this conversation.”

  “Please,” I said. I kneeled. It had rained that morning and the wood of the deck was cool and smelled like a forest. “Please.”

  He sighed. “Sometimes I think it would be something. Me, a father?”

  Could I picture it, even then? Could I imagine him having the patience or flexibility or focus? Did I realize these traits would be paramount? We seemed equally unlikely parents to me—this was my greatest miscalculation. Most people have children and part of them expands, another part contracts. We call this growth. We call it reordering priorities. I probably shouldn’t admit it, but in my head I liken becoming a parent to cancer, maybe because one changed my life on the heels of the change brought by the other: it’s this small thing inside you that swells as the baby grows, until it takes over. You can sort of remember what it was like before—maybe you vaguely recall a certain uncluttered pattern to your days and conversations and thoughts—but that ease of existence you once felt, that personal comfort, no longer matters.

  I believed at the time that my inability to picture us as parents was a failure of imagination. We needed faith, I thought.

  “I can see it,” I lied.

  He stood and put a palm squarely on my head. “I hate making you unhappy.”

  “Then don’t.”

  His mouth was a thin line. “Damned if I do, damned if I don’t.” He took my hand, and pulled me inside to our bedroom.

  7

  SALLY LIVED IN A LARGE, shoddily built home with high ceilings and leaky windows, a formal foyer and a screened pool and a Jacuzzi tub as large as the Lullaby’s main berth. Between her house and the tightly wedged houses of her neighbors was an umbilical knot of roaring air conditioners. Frankie and I arrived for dinner two weeks after I started working at Stiltsville, and the moment we stepped into her chilly foyer, Sally handed me the number of her pediatrician. I’d asked for it on the phone earlier that week, but she’d been called away before digging it up. I’d never mentioned Frankie’s speech problem to her, at least not in a way that was anything but offhand and unconcerned. I’d never wanted to have that conversation.

  “She’s sort of a ballbuster,” Sally said as I slipped the paper into my bag. “Just ignore that part.”

  The walls of Sally’s house had the chalky, overly smooth look of new construction covered in gray primer—they’d never been painted. At knee height, next to a hall tree heaped with clothes and books and beach towels, the wall was covered in concentric circles of lavender crayon.

  She caught me glancing. “We’re pretty shabby here,” she said. “Forgive us.”

  I waved a hand. “I know a bit about shabby.”

  A shriek came from the living room. “Chaos,” she said. She took the bottle of wine I’d brought and smoothed down her butter-colored sheath dress with one hand. She was the kind of mom who wore dresses, even if her only plans included hanging around the house with her kids, maybe hitting the grocery store.

  Frankie peeked out from behind me, and Sally issued a squeal and pulled him into her arms, offering him juice, asking if he wanted a cup with a straw or a cup with dinosaurs on it. I followed them deeper into the house. It was a boisterous house, and not only because of the boys who dashed around the sunken living room, but also because of Sally’s high-pitched outbursts, her generosity of spirit. I felt a pang of envy: I would never have a boisterous home. I’d been in other such homes, back in Illinois. There was crayon on the walls of those homes, too, and unfolded laundry heaped on sagging armchairs, and, out of sight, a maze of messy bedrooms and bathrooms. These houses wore me out. I wasn’t fastidious, but I liked things to mostly be in their places, and with so many kids and so much space, these homes often reminded me of dollhouses that had been shaken like snow globes, leaving coloring books on the kitchen floor, exercise equipment in the entryway, a tricycle in the living room, a stack of mail on the coffee table. Big families made great neighbors, I’d noticed; strange kids stepped through the back door at all hours, then their parents came with a six-pack and requested help moving heavy furniture, or offered use of the pool or trampoline—and this, too, inspired in me that simultaneous discomfort and envy. I didn’t like it about myself, but even as I wished I were the type of person who presided over this kind of casual, friendly, open home, I wanted people to call first. Whenever Lidia rang the cowbell at the Lullaby, I felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck, even if I wasn’t at all unhappy to see her.

  I was inflexible—this was the crux of it. And to have a big family, to have crayon marks on the never-painted walls, one needed to be flexible. It was something my mother had told me once, though I can no longer recall the context. “Georgia, if there were one thing I would want for you, it’s that you’d just go with the flow,” she’d said. This was before I’d had Frankie, but I’d filed away not only the comment itself, but also what went unspoken: we want more for our children than they manage to become. By the time I moved back to Miami, I’d gotten a taste of this wanting more, myself.

  All three of Sally’s boys were home. She’d said on the phone that the older two had been in camps in the morning, baseball for one and basketball for another, and the third had been in preschool. That afternoon they had clearly spent a while wreaking havoc in the house. Sally wouldn’t be the type to structure the hours. She wouldn’t guide them toward an activity or participate in one with them. She would grab a book and camp out in a comfortable chair where all the kids were in her sightline, and at four o’clock she would pour her first glass of wine.

  The kids had made a fort from the cushions of the sectional sofa. One boy, red-haired and freckled like Sally, with her husband Stanley’s puggish
nose, sprang up from beneath a cushion. “Who are you?” he said loudly.

  “Manners,” said Sally.

  I gave the boy my name—I had only ever met the oldest, and that was when he was just a baby—and told him I was an old friend of his mom’s. Before I could introduce Frankie, the boy ducked back into his fort. It rumbled. The youngest boy was at the dining table, which filled an open space off the living room, adjacent to the swinging door to the kitchen. The boy—also red-haired—was quietly coloring. Sheets of paper littered his end of the table. He didn’t look up.

  Sally handed me a glass of wine. “This is the part of the day when we do whatever we want,” she said. She stooped beside Frankie and looked at him frankly. “What do you want to do?”

  Frankie pointed at the dining table.

  “Go on,” she said, swatting his rump. “Carson! Share your colors!”

  Carson watched Frankie climb onto a chair, then pushed a few sheets of paper and a plastic container of crayons his way. Frankie got to work.

  “And what do you want to do?” said Sally to me.

  “I love your home,” I said.

  She led me to a pair of loungers just beyond the living room’s sliding glass doors. The air conditioner was on, but still she left the doors open and closed only the screens. The house gusted mouthfuls of cold air against my bare arms and moist cheeks.

  “Stanley’s picking up Chinese food,” Sally said, tucking her legs beneath her. I could see Frankie through the screens, his dark head beside Carson’s coppery one. The older boys whooped and one whined for his mother. She didn’t seem to hear him. “Oh, I’ve got to tell you—you remember that cunt, Alice Ferguson?”