Fine, she tells him. Fine.
And because she can’t go back to his lab, she does the next best thing. She goes back to the aquarium. Specifically, to the food room. Everything here emits light, everything echoes loudly. There’s a metal scale hanging from the ceiling like a huge, hard piece of mechanical fruit. The walls and floor are covered in large, white, hose-downable tiles; the radio on the windowsill is tuned just a few millimeters shy of the ideal frequency. When she opens the walk-in freezer, it belches white mist: a transient fog that surrounds her as she retrieves a cardboard box and wrestles it to the countertop. She removes a knife from the magnetic strip above the sink and cuts the box open. The squid inside are long dead, long cold, and only a fraction of the size of the ones on the beach. But they’ll do just fine.
And as she begins, it’s like listening to music she once knew by heart but hasn’t heard in ages. The head comes off with a quick, easy tug. Then she jabs her finger into the notch below the neck and sweeps side to side, separating the respiratory tract from the internal walls of the mantle, and then—pop!—those two dark, squishy eyes, a pseudoskull the size of a hazelnut, the whole thing coming free with an explosion of lace and slime, the squid’s guts trailing behind the head like the veil on a demented bride. The dull, satisfying snap of severed connective tissue, a vibration in her fingertips. Then a bulge beneath the skin as the livers rise and emerge at the busted lip of the body cavity: two mercury-dipped ovals, their silverness so dirty and organic that it takes her breath away to see the reflection of her own fingers on their surface. This silverness, she knows, will break. It will break and stain the cutting board with something that approximates the color and texture of old menstrual blood. First, however, there’s a brief and wondrous pause, the fluid inside held back by the temporary inertia of its own viscosity, and then a small tear in the silver, and then a tiny hole, and then there she is. Younger, angrier, smarter. Nothing in front, nothing behind, and for the first time in her life since before his death, she’s balanced on the edge of his fast-melting world.
5
1940
THEY CHECKED OUT OF THE HOTEL DEL MONTE WITHOUT delay, their belongings loaded once more into the rented Packard, their departure just as unexplained and unheralded as their arrival.
To be honest, she had hoped for more of a scene. She had hoped her father would dole out a shard or two of his icy wrath, berating the hotel staff as to their many recent shortcomings: their failure to protect her, to retrieve him, to delegate her medical care to someone other than a man who mummified sharks for what barely passed as a living. But just as on the ride from the train station, just as on the preceding transpacific crossing, he said nothing as they drove away from the hotel and toward the property he had spent the prior day evaluating and acquiring: a small white house on a hill that overlooked Ocean View Avenue, a street the locals referred to as Cannery Row.
As was their custom, they brought in their trunks first. Then they assessed the structure, studying the place from the outside in, Anders nodding with the dour, crisp satisfaction he offered in lieu of compliments. It was, without question, a perfect fit: as decrepit as the place in Manila but without the extraneous square footage. In fact, it was little more than a shack, the external walls pale and flaking, the windows on either side of the front door looking blankly onto the street like a simpleton’s pair of wide-set eyes. The gable roof was yellow black with lichen and rot. Inside, there were four squalid, diminutive, half-furnished living spaces—a sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom, and a kitchen—all of which featured the same faded botanical-print wallpaper, the same forest of black green mildew unfurling from each damp corner. The house’s only favorable characteristic, to her mind at least, was the large bougainvillea bush to the left of the front stoop: a knotty, dark-leaved, pink-flowered behemoth that looked outstandingly capable of annexing not only the house itself, but the entire street on which it sat.
When his evaluation was complete, her father returned to the kitchen. She followed and watched from the doorway as he removed a coffee mug from the cabinet and attempted to fill it with water.
“You have to wait a minute for it to run clear,” she said.
He stepped away from the sink, brown water still flowing, and continued to take inventory of everything except her. Linoleum flooring, ornately dimpled and green with grime. A can of hardened bacon grease on the windowsill above the sink, the delights of which had not escaped the notice of nearly a hundred swarming ants. She had seen this type of behavior before: his impenetrable remoteness that stretched and lingered, his victim twisting in the wind. The difference now was that the victim was her.
“There’s only one bedroom,” he announced. “You’ll sleep on a straw pallet in the sitting room. Like you did in Indonesia.”
“The straw pallet gave me a backache.”
“We’ll get a sofa, then.”
She knit her brows, which made the stitches pull and burn. She touched her forehead and winced, but his disinterest remained immaculate.
“I need to know why we’ve come here,” she said finally.
When their eyes met, it was like a match striking.
“Then do something to earn it.”
He turned away from her and toward the open tap. He squinted at the water, filled his mug, and then emptied it in one noiseless, perfectly efficient swallow. She went outside and sat down on the porch next to the bougainvillea. Her earlier show of discomfort hadn’t been entirely feigned. Her skull ached, her eye sockets throbbed. She hadn’t eaten in well over a day, and her gut felt like the sort of hole in which one could find dinosaur bones or Roman ruins. Worst of all, she could sense the prelude to her body’s monthly rebellion, a riot of pinches and aches echoing in her lower abdomen: a feeling that reminded her of the Philippines, but not the good parts.
When she looked down the hill, however, the feeling disappeared. From this house, she couldn’t quite see the same tide pools in which she had taken her fall, but she could see the bay that had facilitated it. She could see how its blue black water became blue green in certain pockets close to shore. Most of all, she could see the shore itself, the rocks like scar tissue from the most violent meetings of ocean and land, the juncture crowded with human designs and animal ones: canneries, cottages, cormorants’ rookeries, rats’ nests. The biologist was out there, somewhere in or near the water, somewhere on the lip of that infinite black meniscus, and for the first time since leaving the lab, she allowed herself to remember it in detail. It was getting late, but she wasn’t sleepy. So she waited on the porch until the kitchen light had been turned off and her father had gone to bed. Inside, she unrolled her pallet, her body abuzz, her underclothes lined with folded sheets of cotton wool in preparation for blood. And when she awoke to find the cotton wool unstained, she read it as a sign from the universe that even though her father was determined to exclude her, he was too late. She had already been let in.
For the next week, mornings and afternoons that were unremarkable and long, a bit of wind in the evenings and then a silence so deep she could hear the advance and retreat of each individual wave.
To her father, it must have seemed like inertia, inexcusable and indulgent, but she knew she was doing important work, almost as important as the work she had once done at his side. She had been considering it obsessively, and had come to the following conclusions. Her time with the biologist had been more than just a drunken tryst, but that didn’t mean she could act on it. For one thing, there was no strategy in place. For another, she knew it looked hackneyed and girlish—the accident, the forced rehabilitation, the unlikely romance—even though it felt unique and vital, and she wasn’t sure how to manage the resulting dissonance. So she did the only thing she could do while conditions were still unstable: mimicking Anders’s stoicism and using it to silently engineer her return to the lab. The landscape seemed important in this regard, so she studied it closely. Soon she could recognize the trees by their shadows alone: Monterey oa
ks with their thuggish forearms; Monterey pines with needles she preferred to think of as syringes on account of how long and meaningful they looked once they fell to the ground. Off-black trees against an off-white sky, the crookedness of the cypresses, the vertiginous intensity of the redwoods. Occasionally, the head wound would reassert itself and she would feel a bit ill, as if she had eaten something on the verge of rotting; but she endured without complaint, watching her father descend the hill at sunrise and climb it at dusk.
The only interruption to this stasis was when the cannery whistles blew. For some reason, the sound allowed her to relax a bit, to unclench her jaw. From her perch on the hill, it could all be witnessed from above: the sardine boats skirting the land, the gulls descending, her neighbors spilling onto the streets as if spit out by their own homes. At first, she expected all of them to look like Arthur, but they didn’t. The cannery workers in her neighborhood were entirely Italian, almost entirely women, denizens of that peculiar socioeconomic territory of the ascendant middle class. The husbands, she soon learned, had jobs on the boats, catching the fish the wives put into cans, and the circularity of this arrangement fascinated her. What was it like, she wondered, when both husband and wife came together at nightfall and began to move behind their windows? Was it clean inside their houses? Did they eat their dinners together? Did they share the same beds? Did the beds smell ineradicably of fish? When they had their festivals—processions that guided life-size plaster saints through the streets—did they feel better in the aftermath, did they feel as if something had been addressed or solved? Or did they feel the way she always did during moments of supposed import: holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, none of them signifying anything except the unfortunate human desire to kick the can of meaning further and further down an endless road?
The most important ideas, though, didn’t come to her on the porch. They arrived at night and they had nothing to do with the cannery workers or her father. Stretched out on the straw pallet, she would indulge in the gory, exhilarating specifics. She would stare at the walls, using their pocks and fissures to map out what had been taken from her, what had been given, the biologist’s body on top of hers, her mouth on his neck, her freedom so complete that she felt as though, if he moved aside, she would float up to the ceiling and stay there until someone found a gun and shot her down. She could no longer be patient, she told herself, she could no longer wait. But then the sun would rise and her father would remind her—not in words, of course, but in actions—that she would get what she wanted only by pretending not to want it. Keep calm, keep watchful, keep ready for the proper moment to take her aim and tighten her grip.
Then, one day, the moment was at hand. At first, the signs were subtle. In the morning, a doctor came to remove her stitches, utter a few stock phrases of reassurance, and then leave her with nothing but an aching head and a vial of disinfectant. Around lunchtime, someone from the rental company reclaimed the Packard, which had been sitting unused on the street since their departure from the hotel. That afternoon, the arrival of the promised sofa: a claw-footed, button-tufted, horsehair monstrosity. That night, when the water grew black against the sky, her father’s shape appeared at the base of the hill a few minutes later than usual. He looked the same as ever, at least in terms of attire: the three-piece cheviot suit, the striped necktie, the polished brogues, the same Surrey collar that she, too, had long favored. In his hands, however, was a bag of groceries and on his face an almost theatrical contentment.
When he reached the house, she stood and followed him inside.
“Get out the good china,” he said, placing the groceries on the kitchen counter.
“We have good china?”
“We do indeed. It came with the sofa.” The broadness of his smile shocked her.
“Why?”
“Because I just bought the largest cannery in town.”
As they prepared dinner, he was unusually animated, as lively as the night was still.
“And the biggest question of all is how anyone fails to see it!” He stopped midchop and looked up at her with big, sharp eyes, the diameters of which were increased nearly twofold as a result of his eyeglasses. “Time was, you could sell one otter pelt—just one—to a member of the Chinese aristocracy and earn enough to buy a house. So they all swooped in: Spaniards, Russians, Bostonians, all of them convinced the supply would never dwindle, which of course it did. But did they turn their sights in a new direction? Seek out an alternative to self-inflicted feast and famine? No! No, indeed! When the otters were gone, they went for the whales: a man named Davenport blazing the trail, only to be throttled at his own game by the Portuguese, who ran the show until—in a surprise to end all surprises—the whales disappeared, too. And we could talk about the abalones, but I’d hate to sound tiresome.”
Here, he fell silent, but not peacefully so. There was effort involved in this version of muteness, and he was taking it out on the squid: the beheading, the disembowelment, the slicing into rings. He enjoyed kitchen work, butchery in particular, viscerally and without any shame regarding the perceived gender reversal, and tonight it seemed especially significant. The resumption of a ritual. A possible sign that their mutual antipathy was at an end.
She scooped up the squid rings, dumped them into the hot skillet, and waited for the white flesh to start popping.
“The abalones,” she prompted after the proper interval had passed. “What about them?”
His knife was working again, ripping through a foreign cluster of herbs, rocking and flashing against the wooden board. “It was the local Chinese who reaped the rewards first, who created the overseas market. Then, before they knew it, their big-city cousins had come to town: thousands of San Franciscans with better fishing methods and bigger boats and more secure connections to the homeland. When the abalones were gone, the visitors from the north ended up rich. The locals, needless to say, did not. They had to start fishing for squid instead.”
He smiled at the squid in the skillet as if they had done him a personal favor, then smothered them with a handful of minced greenery. She hadn’t expected it to feel this good—this return to business as usual—but it did. Her father’s sudden enthusiasm was sweeping away any former notions of patience, payback, or restraint. Just like the burned sketchbooks, she thought with a shiver: the catharses that were always so final until, at a certain point, they weren’t.
“And what about the squid? Did they disappear, too?”
“No. The bay is still full of them, but that’s not the point. The point is that, for centuries now, people have been doing the same damn thing. Breaking the bay, waiting for it to fix itself, and then breaking it again. And I’m certain there’s a better way.”
He reached across her to give the skillet a little shake.
“And what way is that?”
Instead of answering, he took a tiny jar from his vest pocket, opened it, and dosed its contents into his palm.
“Smell,” he said.
She paused. This was the most conciliatory gesture he had made in months, and something about it worried her. But then she bent over his hand and inhaled. Hot, musky, semisweet. As specific and strange as the unknown herbs.
“What is it?”
“Chinese five-spice powder. Try to guess all five.”
Guess, she remembered telling the biologist. Guess how old. She closed her eyes and took another sniff.
“One: cinnamon. Two: cloves …”
“Star anise, fennel seed, and Szechuan pepper.”
“I was just about to say that.”
“No,” he teased. “You weren’t.”
The powder hit the pan, its smells unifying and then exploding.
“Quick,” he said. “The plates.”
She opened the nearest cabinet and withdrew two pieces of the good china, which had been placed there without her knowledge, as if in deliberate secret.
“Cook it for too long,” he said, easing the squid out of the skillet, “and it
turns to rubber.”
“I know.”
And then the rebirth of another tradition: dinner on foot. For as long as she could remember, they had eaten like this, as if in readiness for fight or flight, their legs shifting beneath them as they chewed, her father’s enjoyment of the meal’s creation vastly exceeding his enjoyment of the meal itself. When they were done, she put down her fork and looked at him. He didn’t resemble the biologist, not one bit. But in a moment like this, when the turmoil within him had been temporarily silenced, when something had been successfully planned, executed, and consumed, the similarity was both unsettling and undeniable.
“So,” she said. “Have I earned it?”
He folded his napkin into quarters and placed it neatly on the countertop.
“Earned what?”
“An explanation.”
“A lucrative opportunity. Nothing more.”
“From what I’ve heard, the sardine game isn’t so lucrative these days.” In her mouth, the biologist’s words seemed precious and oddly shaped. “Most of them are already in cans.”
“For one thing, it’s not a game. For another, it’s not the sardines that interest me.”
“Then what does?”
He lifted his chin, the tendons in his neck jutting forth like buttresses. So it wasn’t over, she told herself. Not yet.
“I thought you were no longer interested in my affairs,” he protested, head tilted in reclamation of his earlier disdain.
“I thought you had deemed me unworthy,” she replied, mirroring his stance.
“Not unworthy. Just in profound need of correction.”
“Correction made.”
“In that case, fire away.”
Her pulse skipped. This was a game: one they had played countless times before.
“The sellers?” she asked.
Monterey Bay Page 5
