Then the part that should trouble her the most but doesn’t. No explanation of a life is complete without an explanation of the life’s end, and in this regard, everyone did their level best. A carefully worded informational placard in the trademarked font, a photo of the immediate aftermath. The image is out of focus, the action framed at a slippery diagonal, a huge train engine looming in the background. There’s the wreckage of an old black Buick, emergency personnel and onlookers, a body laid out on a stretcher. She remembers how slyly she stole one of the tourists’ cameras, how expertly she lined it all up, how decisively she pressed the button even though her hands were shaking. It was not her fault, she recalls repeating to herself. It was not murder. She simply sent him out for more booze and he never came back. She had nothing to do with how the Buick stalled on the tracks. She had nothing to do with the train conductor: a weepy, tongue-tied fool who, having seen the obstruction, had neither the time nor the inclination to stop.
“So. You made it back alive.”
Does Arthur understand? He must. He once suggested that, when Ricketts’s body flew through the windshield, it probably looked like a fish-meal sack full of cats.
“Word traveled, then?” she asks.
He nods.
She cringes and closes her eyes. The crew of the squid boat will likely tell this story for years to come: how they noticed her buoyancy was incorrect the second she hit the water, how one of them was able to dive down and retrieve her before she got too deep. Usually, she doesn’t feel like she’s seventy-three years old; not even close. But as they hoisted her back onto the deck of the boat, her body limp and brittle in their arms, her weight belt jammed with too many weights, her BCD underinflated, she felt like the smallest, most decrepit soul in existence. She was too embarrassed to let them take her to the hospital. Instead, she made them drive her home, and now, if she’s thinking of her long-ago accident in the tide pools and the brief convalescence that followed, it’s not in the spirit of forcing parallels. Not in the least.
“You know it’s the same one, right? The train engine at the playground?”
She nods. Of course she knows. They’ve joked about it—darkly, nervously—for years. What he doesn’t know is that she’s never found it funny. She used to go there, not all that long ago, and watch the action in secret. She would watch the kids climb to the top of the same Del Monte Express engine that killed Ricketts. She would watch them laugh and fall and howl, and she knew that if she had ever had her own daughter, she wouldn’t have been craven and she wouldn’t have been foolish. She would have let her daughter climb all the way to the top and hit the big bell with the edge of a quarter. And when her daughter fell from the engine’s tallest point, which she doubtlessly would have—because there is, after all, a symmetry to these things that makes them worth pondering in the first place—there would have been nothing in the way of hindsight or regret. They would have simply held each other and cried, shocked by their sudden reacquaintance with the type of thing that, as the old saying goes, should have only made them stronger.
“There are those who still think it was planned. That he did it on purpose.”
“That’s insane,” she snaps. “He wasn’t that kind of man.”
“And you aren’t that kind of woman.”
“You’re right. I’m even worse.”
“Oh, Margot.”
“I’m going home.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because we’ve arranged a little something. In your honor.”
“Right now?”
“No. Tonight. Just after closing.”
“What is it?”
“The Mola release.”
She stares at him. He shrugs and smiles.
“You told us to surprise you.”
To pass the time until closing, she indulges in an old habit. She explores the town on foot.
First, she drives her truck to the head of the bike trail, to a little parking lot within spitting distance of the Naval Postgraduate School, the former site of the Hotel Del Monte. She gets out of the truck and inhales. There are eucalyptus trees here—planted long ago by a foreign-born boatbuilder who mistook them for teak—and it smells just like the menthol in Ricketts’s lab.
Then she begins to walk down the bike trail in the direction of the Row, in the direction of the aquarium. Back in the late 1980s, when the aquarium was still brand-new, the bike trail was laid directly over the old railroad tracks, and she can almost feel the steel ribs beneath her feet. She walks past the dunes and the beach, joggers and in-line skaters swerving around her without pause or complaint. When she reaches the adobe plaza above the wharf, she makes a point of visiting the bocce courts. The elder Agnellis, who still control this part of town, play here every day, rain or shine, and they bid her a polite “Good morning” as she passes.
From the wharf, she climbs the hill. She sold the small white house shortly after deciding to stay in Monterey for the duration. She has, however, continued to keep tabs, spying on its residents through the window near the bougainvillea. For a while, aquarists lived here: aquarists who descended the hill much like the cannery workers before them. These days, however, it’s a vacation rental property. Seashells and wicker, everything upholstered in sturdy, beachy pastels. On the walls, there are whitewashed pieces of driftwood painted with chatty, unambiguous demands: LIVE, LAUGH, LOVE.
Then, finally, she returns to the bike trail and visits the site of Ricketts’s demise. Other than the aquarium, this is the only place in town that truly matters to her, so she lobbied hard to ensure a certain look. The railroad crossing sign still stands, even though the railroad itself is long gone. There is a commemorative bust of Ricketts himself, sculpted by a local artist of known mediocrity. The bust looks nothing like him, and she feels absolutely nothing when she looks at it. The same is true of the lab. Since Ricketts’s passing, it has been meticulously preserved despite a number of functional incarnations. First, it was a boarded-up monument to Steinbeck’s loss. Then it was a men’s literary club founded on the principle that great poetry can be written and read only in the absence of wives. These days, it’s owned by the city and is open to visitors only twice a year. She’s never made the mistake of joining the tour groups and going inside. She’s happy just to watch them as they enter and exit: young people with a penchant for polar fleece who have discovered his works and have become fanatic as a result, their faces alight with the eternal blood sport of disappointment versus rapture.
Back at the aquarium, there is still another hour to kill. So she reads a little Steinbeck. She has all of his books, except Cannery Row, hidden in the same desk drawer as the liquor bottle. She starts with her favorite: The Grapes of Wrath. A few pages here and there, just enough to get a taste of its angry beauty. Then she moves on to the ones she hates: Of Mice and Men, Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley. East of Eden, she’s not surprised to discover, still offends and flatters her in a personal way: the succubus with the head wound, the photographs of the brothel, the corruption of the virtuous man. Finally, she peruses the book she’s never known how to categorize: a retelling of the Arthurian legends, published eight years posthumously. It’s a weird, childish, late-in-the-game offering, the players whittled-down archetypes who, despite their weaponry and armor and blustery shows of monarchical fealty, have no choice but to abandon themselves to love’s predictable pitfalls. It’s also, in her opinion, Steinbeck’s most autobiographical work. There is no reason why this should be the case. The characters are not of his own invention, nor are the stories, but there it is regardless: a man writing about himself with the deluded, self-destructive certainty of an oil baron who’s convinced the biggest payload is in his own backyard.
Then again, maybe it was. All these lofty motivations, but it’s usually so much simpler than the creator will ever admit. Her father and the Chinese girl. Herself and Ricketts. Jean-Paul Sartre, she learned recently, became a philosopher for the sole purpose
of seducing women.
“You know, I’ve never read any of that stuff. Not a single page.”
Arthur, his hair a coppery white nest, is standing in the doorway and bouncing on his toes like a boy.
“Why not?” She closes the book and puts it away.
“I didn’t like how he acted when Doc died. Breaking into the lab and burning everything controversial. It wasn’t right.”
She thinks of her old sketchbooks, the ones permanently lost to fire. Not right, but not wrong. The same could be said for Steinbeck’s plans to improve Cannery Row after the canneries shut down. Scatter it with fake sardine heads, he had quipped. Bring in some actresses to play hookers, pump in the smells of fish meal and sewage. None of this happened, of course. Something hopeful and monumental and sincere happened instead. And this, finally, is how she knows she’s won, because what is an aquarium except a gigantic heart? Fluid coming in and fluid going out, fluid passing through multiple chambers and then returning to the larger body with new offerings in tow?
“Is it time?” she asks.
“Sure is.”
By the time they get to the top of the tank, the other aquarists have already arrived.
The volume of water is outrageous, the drones of the chilling and heating units unearthly. There are glaring halogen lights overhead, just like the ones the squid boats use to draw their catch to the surface. It’s endless and shimmering and spooky, and she’s hit with the urge to jump: an urge so strong, she has to remind herself she’s too old to indulge in something so lamely symbolic. So she leans back from the railing. She cannot see what this water contains, and for a moment, there’s a terrible suspicion. Empty, she tells herself, scanning the depths. Completely empty. But then she sees the familiar shape: a fish that doesn’t resemble a fish so much as it does a massive severed head.
“I’m the Mola. M-o-l-a, Mola,” Arthur sings happily. “You know. Like the banjo player’s song.”
She smiles at him and so do the other aquarists, who for the next minute or two do absolutely nothing. They just watch the fish’s blunt circumnavigation, its rectangular dorsal and pelvic fins windshield-wiping through the water in awkward inverse. It moves behind the horizontal curtain of the water’s surface very slowly, very carefully, an almost prehistoric stupidity in its eyes, an unshakable ignorance of its own place in the world and how that has or hasn’t changed as a result of its captivity.
“All right,” Arthur announces. “Let’s go.”
The aquarists spring into action. First, they usher the Mola out of the big tank and into a small outdoor holding tank via a gated underwater tunnel. Then, they drain the holding tank, a process that commands the better part of a half hour. When the water becomes too shallow for the Mola to remain vertical, one of the aquarists helps it flip onto its side and there is a brief murmur from the crowd, an expression of either recognition or sympathy. The body of the fish is a massive disk, a gigantic communion wafer, fins moving gently and without any visible signs of panic or displeasure. Its upturned eye is a ping-pong ball, its skin a crust of white, its forehead heavy and round and, from a certain angle, reminiscent of the top half of a human profile.
Then, with a sound that reverberates beneath their feet, the pipes are sealed shut. Two aquarists clad in wet suits descend a retractable ladder, step into the water, and position themselves on either side of the fish. One of them guides the sling—an expanse of blue tarp within a ring of PVC tubing—into the holding tank and the Mola immediately complies, situating itself calmly, voluntarily, in the exact center of the sling’s perfect circle. A measurement is taken. Two hundred seventy-five kilograms. More than six hundred pounds.
And when the helicopter appears, she lets out an audible gasp because it is, in fact, a surprise.
“The fellows at the Naval Postgraduate School were happy to arrange things,” Arthur explains. “Delighted, in fact.”
The vehicle slides over the rooftops and into full view. All faces are upturned now, the sound growing, the column of air above the deck shuddering, the helicopter commencing its descent with the impassive self-assurance of a prehistoric bird, alarming and efficient. The Mola, however, remains indifferent. It simply rolls its eyes, flaps its pectorals. A cable drops from the helicopter’s belly. The cable is secured to the sling. The last aquarist, a young woman who has cared for this fish since the beginning, makes her approach. She is holding a plastic bin in her hand. In the bin is a single prawn, a final offering that the Mola consumes with what seems like gratitude. When it is done eating, it spits some water from its lips: a sigh made visible in liquid form. Then it begins its labored, surreal ascent: a strange dot in a machine-loud sky, an insect in blue amber flying over the aquarium’s roof and toward the mouth of the bay. Suddenly, some cold feet, some second thoughts, some of which she’s certain the aquarists share. Say what you will about captivity—that it’s involuntary and unnatural and inhumane—but at least it’s cozy. Such awful things happening in the wild: sea lions approaching in a dark and swirling horde, tearing off fins and tossing them back and forth like Frisbees, not consuming what they remove but, rather, enjoying it on a level deeper and more necessary than food.
Either way, it’s too late now. The sling hits the water. The Mola swims away. Tino rolls out a cooler full of beer, opens one, and hands it to her.
“To Margot,” he says, lifting his bottle in stone-faced tribute.
“To Margot,” the aquarists repeat.
She blushes and pretends to take a sip. How well she’s taught them, she thinks, how much they’ve grown. Grown men and women, some of them with children of their own, children in the throes of familiar, formative tortures. Tonight, though, they just want a beer. A nice time. A chance to bid farewell to something they no longer have to care for. Tonight, the bay is vast and the sky is even vaster, and if they’re lucky, they’ll go home and dream. They’ll dream of swimming in a warm, small space. Of being blind to everything save light and dark. Of hearing someone else’s heartbeat. Of breathing through a pair of tiny, fleeting gills: the same ones that, as bean-sized creatures in the aquariums of our mothers’ wombs, we all once had.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Julie Barer and The Book Group, for their vision and tirelessness; Ginny Smith and Penguin Press, for their faith and expertise; the Monterey Bay Aquarium, for letting me inside; Williams College and NYU, for not kicking me out; Joel Elmore, Matthew Flaming, and Abby Durden, for their talent; Jim Shepard, for his generosity; Allison Lorentzen, for opening doors; Heather Lazare, for her enthusiasm; Bill Priest, for convincing me I could get paid for this sort of thing; Christine Duncan and Fatima Chaves, for the time and space; the Benitez family, for their hospitality in the Philippines; George and Jacquie McClelland, for their patience and support; Brynn Hatton, for her artistry; Carol Hatton, for her immortal grace; Dave Hatton, for being the anti-Anders; Hazel and Agnes McClelland, for being my children; Geordie McClelland, for being my husband.
Small portions of this novel’s text were adapted from or inspired by the following sources: Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward W. Ricketts, edited by Katharine A. Rodger, The University of Alabama Press, 2002; Breaking Through: Essays, Journals and Travelogues of Edward F. Ricketts, edited by Katharine A. Rodger, University of California Press, 2006; Cannery Row, John Steinbeck, The Viking Press, 1945; A Fascination for Fish: Adventures of an Underwater Pioneer, David C. Powell, University of California Press, 2001.
These sources were also indispensable to my research efforts: Between Pacific Tides, Edward F. Ricketts, Jack Calvin, and Joel W. Hedgpeth, Stanford University Press, 1939; The Log from the Sea of Cortez, John Steinbeck, The Viking Press, 1941; Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell, Eric Enno Tamm, Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2004; Shaping the Shoreline: Fisheries and Tourism on the Monterey Coast, Connie Y. Chiang, University of Washington Press, 2008; Working Days: The
Journals of “The Grapes of Wrath,” edited by Robert DeMott, Viking Penguin, 1989; Beyond Cannery Row: Sicilian Women, Immigration, and Community in Monterey, California, 1915–99, Carol Lynn McKibben, University of Illinois Press, 2006; The Death and Life of Monterey Bay: A Story of Revival, Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka, Island Press, 2011; Storied Land: Community and Memory in Monterey, John Walton, University of California Press, 2001; Octopus and Squid: The Soft Intelligence, Jacques-Yves Cousteau and Philippe Diolé, Doubleday, 1973.
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