Ship Fever

by Andrea Barrett

  Bianca said, “I’ll show you something fun,” and pushed herself up from the muddy bank.

  Back into our wet clothes, back across the dark lawn, back through the narrow window and into Rose’s laboratory. Rose’s lab, not Bianca’s; Rose’s name was on the door and on all the papers and awards. Both of us knew this to be unfair; the name was only half a name.

  Bianca rummaged in the pack and found some chocolates, which she and Rose shared. Then she led Rose into the lab and swiftly arranged tubing and glassware into an elaborate array. She spread a white cloth over the bench and set down a handful of mushrooms.

  “Where did you get those?” Rose asked.

  “Out there,” Bianca said, pointing towards the creek. “From the trees.”

  Rose could not remember gathering any mushrooms, nor any time when Bianca might have slipped away and gathered them herself. She sat on the floor with her back against the spectrophotometer and watched, half in a dream, as Bianca took over the lab.

  What was Bianca saying? A long stream of words, only some of which made sense. “I’m losing you,” Bianca said. And then something about how she believed she could see our futures and that they looked like this: Rose would grow drier, thinner, sharper, more famous; Rose would win prizes and buy a small house of her own, in which every room would be cool and clean. Bianca would drift from state to state: Wyoming, Idaho, Maine, Hawaii; panic, detachment, elation. Most of what she said that night would not come true, but she believed it and feared it. In one important way her fear was justified.

  As Bianca spoke she minced the mushrooms very fine, ground them in a mortar and soaked them in water and then in ethanol. She squeezed and extracted, strained and heated, stirred and cooled. Then she set up a fractionating column and let the vapor from the distilling flask rise gently through the wisps of glass wool. Fluid dripped into the receiving flasks, a drop or two at a time. One fraction, quite aromatic, was as clear and bright as rubies.

  Fire, water, earth, and air, she mumbled while Rose listened. Cinnabar, hartshorn, verdigris, tartar. Cinnabar, she reminded Rose, was once called dragon’s blood and was thought to be the blood of a serpent crushed to death by a dying elephant. She pipetted a sample of ruby fluid and released it on her tongue: bitter, she said. So bitter. Musky, alkaline, faintly salt. “Outlaw pharmaceuticals,” she said. “Every biochemist’s province.”

  Rose closed her eyes; when she opened them again she saw bundles of herbs and retorts. The athanor, the furnace of transmutation, was shaped like a giant egg. Suky said, Would you girls like to go for a sail? and Bianca said to Rose, “Did you hear that?” It was not possible that her sister could deny it.

  “Mom?” Rose said. Suddenly our mother seemed to be speaking inside her head.

  Bianca nodded, relieved. When school was out and the weather was good, she and Rose had sometimes sailed Suky’s small green Comet and tried to make sense of the sheets and lines. The wind, bouncing off the hills, had come from all directions at once and made the sailing difficult.

  A bubble rose slowly in one of the flasks and broke with a sigh. A few minutes later we heard our great-aunt Agnes say, Dear, could you rub my back? I have this pain in my side. Rose shifted on the floor and moved her hand along her ribs. “That was strange,” she said.

  “I don’t know,” Bianca said, almost absentmindedly. “I hear Aunt Agnes all the time. I think this is almost done.”

  Bianca removed her clothes for the second time that night and sat cross-legged and naked on the floor, not far from sleepy Rose. She tore a tiny strip from a piece of filter paper and held it, hardly more than a hair, to the corner of Rose’s eye. Rose tried not to blink. A bit of moisture crept up the paper and turned it dark. Bianca dropped the paper into the flask and then added a bead of her own saliva.

  She was talking, still. Rose tried to concentrate on her words. In Hilo, Bianca said, she had swum the harbor in the dead of night, secretly boarding the boat where she lived alone and illegally. In Alaska she had had visions in a tent by a lake so wild she saw no one for weeks at a stretch.

  “All of it’s slipping away,” she said. “Do you know what I mean?” Rose nodded, although most days Bianca’s life seemed utterly foreign to her. “All the people I meet now, they’re like radios that only get two or three stations while the news from the rest of the universe slips by. No one’s listening. I can’t stand it.”

  “That’s not what I’m like,” Rose said. “That’s only part of me.”

  But Bianca shook her head. Rose would see this evening as an aberration, she declared; come morning, she’d be ashamed of herself. The world was spinning in such a way that soon everything that had once seemed important would be declared an error or a dream. All Bianca wanted to do was to keep her sister in touch with a part of the world she persistently denied.

  The rest of that night is mostly lost to us now, but we remember a handful of things. Sometime before dawn we either did or didn’t call our father, waking him to beg him not to sell the winery. But why would we have done this, if we did it? Rose would not have wanted to echo the phone call Bianca claimed to have made the night before, and even if she’d forgotten that, the winery was not a place we ever visited. Nonetheless, Rose believes that Bianca woke her after a brief, shared nap; that we made this call; that during it our father invited us to his wedding and we both said we were busy that day. Childish, childish. Rose is still ashamed of this, but Bianca claims that Rose dreamed the entire conversation. It’s true, though, that neither of us took part in the festivities.

  The next morning, Rose woke after eight with a stiff neck and a numb foot. Bianca was nowhere to be seen. Rose, hungover and tired, believed that Bianca might be seducing a janitor in a closet or making a fool of herself in the cafeteria or driving back to Vermont by way of Labrador. She always had a tendency to believe the worst of Bianca. But Bianca’s pack was still on the floor and the office was strewn with bottles and damp shoes and half-smoked joints.

  Quickly, guiltily, Rose disposed of the evidence. She flung open the window, praying that the sweet, heavy odor might dissipate before anyone dropped by. In the mud below the window she saw deep footprints, which led away from the building and into the grass and looked exactly as if two people had leapt from the lab and escaped.

  When Bianca walked through the door, her hair brushed and her clothes changed and her hands full of paper bags from the fake-French bakery down the street, Rose couldn’t keep from leaping on her. “How did you get out?” she said. “How’d you get back in? Did you sleep?”

  “Explain the obscure by the more obscure,” Bianca said. “The unknown by the more unknown.”

  There was a time when Rose would have understood exactly what she meant. Suky had taught us a secret technique, which had to do with water and the faces of the dead and could not be talked about. Nor could it be explored alone—we’d both tried it separately and failed. When we were young, though, and together, we had made it work.

  Bianca set her offerings on the desk: steaming coffee and rolls and butter and jam. From another bag she pulled two new wineglasses, still with price tags on their feet, and a bottle of organic cranberry-raspberry juice. She poured juice into the glasses, disappeared into the lab with them, and returned.

  “Cheers,” Bianca said, holding one out to Rose and raising the other to her lips.

  Ruby fluid: magic potion; we knew better than that. Rose has never acknowledged that she knew what Bianca added to the glasses. But she did know, as she also knew what it was meant to do: fuse our vision back together, the way Suky had fused our names. But we didn’t call on Suky that day, because Rose continued to resist the idea as if it, not the potion, were poison. And so nothing changed between us, although we were reminded of how much we loved each other.

  We stop here, usually, or actually a little before this: If one of us is telling tales to a stranger we stop with the raised glasses and the toast. As we do with our history, we try to maintain a light tone when we tal
k about that night. We try to make it sound like a tale of youthful excess, pharmaceutical madness; a last gasp from the seventies. The sort of escapade someone older and wiser can look back on with a smile.

  Time passed. Lots of things happened to both of us, some important and some not. We met now and then, when Bianca passed through Boston on the tail end of some journey, but after that night we met casually, mimicking the interaction of any pair of sisters. Mostly we talked on the phone.

  Our lives continued like this for almost a decade, until our father got sick and we went to Hammondsport to see him. During the time of his dying we saw each other intensely, intently, but where it counted we were as separate as stones and it seemed clearer than ever that the ruby fluid had failed us.

  A year after that, though, we returned to Hammondsport for the first anniversary of our father’s death. What happened then is not a part of our history. We swore we’d never tell anyone and still can hardly mention it between us.

  [3. Speaking with Suky]

  You said, “Look down into the water. A hole will open if you spin the surface with your hand or a stick, and you will see what you need at the base of the hole.” We’re sure that’s what you said. Under clear skies, on a hot day, in a greenpainted Comet with natural trim, during a summer when we were still children and you were still around. We spun the water beside the boat with an extra paddle, twirling and twirling until a vortex formed. Looking down, into the hole that seemed to lead to the bottom of the lake, we saw grandpa Leo’s face.

  And today?

  Today we spun the water and found you.

  Why did you wait so long?

  It’s only been a year. It took us that long to get ready. We were drowning in memories of the last time we’d seen our father.

  When we met here that time, we slept downstairs on a large piece of furniture not quite either sofa or bed. The upholstery was smooth to the touch, except for the spots where the dogs had shredded it. There were arms and backs and edges, which made it like a sofa; then big stretches of ambiguous flatness the size of a bed. We were sleeping there, in the basement, because there was no other place for us. Your house—his house, our house—was gone, and the acres of vines and the stone buildings, the casks, the vats, and all the equipment, all the wine. We had never seen the place our father had rented after his wife had made him sell our house. Both of us lived elsewhere, with other men.

  We had never shared a bed with each other, and except for a night in a lab in Boston we had not slept in the same room since we were little girls. We felt uncomfortable lying next to each other and so we moved until we were lying head to foot and foot to head, toes near each other’s ears. In that position, with the glass doors letting in moonlight and shadows and the sound of the water at the edge of the lawn, we rested and talked. The painting of you had been moved from the living room in the old house to the hallway between the half-finished basement room and the extra toilet.

  Who has it now?

  The painting?

  The painting.

  We don’t know. It’s gone. We had rushed to Hammondsport after his phone calls to find him alone except for the two huge dogs in a filthy and uncomfortable house. The dogs followed our father everywhere. They slept on his bed, laid their heads on his knees, looked at him imploringly. He was weak and could no longer walk them, but although they were frantic with restlessness they would not leave his side. They growled and lunged at us at first, and even after several days they leapt from our father’s bed and barked each time we moved from room to room or even from chair to chair. At night we willed ourselves not to stir and wake them. In the mornings we watched as our father groomed them with the last of his energy. One had white hair, very long, which flew out with the strokes of the comb. The other had hair that was shorter and brown. Our father’s arms and legs had grown very thin but his middle bulged from the tumors in his liver.

  And what has happened to these dogs?

  The dogs are gone; it’s a long story and you don’t want to know. On the first night we were home we fed them biscuits and then rubbed a chicken with oil and garlic and herbs and roasted it in a hot oven for an hour and forty-five minutes. Our father’s hands began to shake as the smell filled the house. “I have no appetite,” he said, but this turned out not to be true. He had no energy with which to cook or shop, and the foods he managed to make for himself were in no way appetizing. His wife was there but not there, present but absent; she had taken a job and an apartment in Syracuse and came home only on weekends then. As there was no one around to cook for him, he had convinced himself that the feeling he felt wasn’t hunger. But when we sat him down and placed the food in front of him water came into his eyes and his mouth. His head was hardly higher than the surface of the table. When he lifted his fork he was so anxious to greet the food that his neck craned and his mouth thrust forward. He ate very fast, smearing his mouth with fat and dropping fragments onto his shirt. His irises were pale blue against a field of yellow shot with red. His hands were heavily wrinkled, dry-skinned, swollen, and discolored. Earlier, one of the dogs had rested a paw on his forearm and left behind a trail of bruises.

  What did he look like?

  Didn’t we just say? Dry, pale, shrunken, shriveled. Not the way you remember him. The top of his head came below the chin of one of us, below the nose of the other. His hair was thin and gray and the skin on his forehead was mottled. When he walked his legs were unsteady and splayed. His hands shook until he’d had the first two or three drinks of the day. After they steadied, he cut apples in half and tossed them at the dogs, who adored them. The dogs also liked grapes, he said, but in July, when we visited him, the grapes here were only wishes.

  Were you frightened?

  Not frightened, exactly. Years ago, when Aunt Agnes was sick, we had taken turns nursing her. Our father wasn’t around very much; the winery was flourishing and he was busy becoming rich. During the time when we were alone with her, we had learned about the relentless disintegration of the body. Perhaps you’re familiar with this—the drying and thinning of the skin, until the slightest blow or scratch leaves blood behind. The rubbing together of fleshless bones, the sores and bruises and rashes and welts, the loosening teeth and the bleeding gums, the clumps of hair coming out in the comb, and the alternating waves of hunger and nausea. All of this was familiar to us; none of what was happening to our father was unexpected. Although we were, of course, surprised that he was still drinking so heavily. And the first night we stayed in the house, before we became used to it, we were surprised to find the two huge dogs in bed with him, their heads on pillows and their paws thrown across his body.

  Tell me what you left behind.

  Men. Several men, for one of us; for the other a lover with jet-black hair and narrow feet, who had ended a long dry spell in Boston like a flow of cool water. The skin over this man’s ankles was pale and so thin that the blue veins were visible, and this seemed lovely until the day we had to bathe our father’s feet and saw the same veins over the ankle, beneath the dry and fragile skin. Our father wore baggy boxer shorts that gaped at the fly when he bent to pat one of the dogs or pick up a bone or a brush. He had always done this, but we had not lived with him for many years and had forgotten how disturbing it was. The men with whom we share our beds wear narrow pants that cling closely to their bodies.

  And what did she leave?

  The wife?

  Her.

  She took off so fast she left half of what she owned behind. We weren’t sorry to see her go. There had been several women since your departure and she was the worst of them. We disliked her voice, which was affected and loud. She left behind a blue hassock embroidered with swans, several sets of expensive sheets, a cabinet full of cosmetics, and a refrigerator full of food. She had cooked for our father; all of them did.

  She’d begged him to sell the house and the winery, so they could be free to travel. It was time, she said. After half a century of being tied to that piece of land. W
e think she also hoped, in the back of her mind, that by freeing himself of the property he might free himself from you. For a while he kept your portrait over their bed in the rented house, although she objected. After their first trip, to the Grand Canyon, she came home and moved your portrait to the basement. The second trip, the one to Bordeaux, went badly as well. What could she have been thinking? That the chateaux and the acres of vines on the stony soil would not remind our father of what he’d given up for her? It was then, we think, around this time, that she realized the house and the land and the vines had been a large part of what had attracted her to him. She was forty-five and on good days looked younger. She bought some clothes and went off to Syracuse and found a job, from which she returned to the rented house on weekends. Halfway present, halfway absent. In her absence, our father seemed unable to feed himself.

  Where did the money go?

  We don’t know. Grapes were down, and so was the price of land, and he didn’t get what he should have for the property. Then there were trips, and bad investments; probably she took the rest. Who can say? When we arrived, we cleaned out the refrigerator. We found a red enamel pot containing the remnants of a barley mushroom casserole, part of a pork roast gone slimy and slick, four half-empty cartons of milk, liquefied broccoli, rotten lettuce, three-quarters of a red pepper, a container of instant pancake batter, old bacon, stale bread, moldy cheese, dead fruit. On the porch were large boxes full of old vegetables, which our father said had come from the produce stall in the village and would otherwise have been thrown out. Much of the money had disappeared in the year before he got sick, but he refused to talk about this with us. On the porch, where we sat for an hour in the warm sun while our father was taking a nap, we looked at the lake and the fallen trees and the expensive lawn furniture now rusted and worn, and one of us said to the other, “This is a different way of being poor.”