Shelter in Place

by Alexander Maksik

  When I made it back to the beach the rise was fading from my blood and I staggered across the rocks, my thumb blue, blood falling down my shin, so cold I was barely able to stand. There was Tess with a red towel, furious. We were a full day in. Alone out there. Rain coming and I was, again, her invalid.

  She made us a camp beneath the trees, dressed my wounds, splinted my thumb, taped my ankle. Said again some variation of the same thing: one way or another, the high or the low, enough is enough. “Otherwise, one day I’ll be gone. And then what, Joe?”

  Still. I would not do what she asked.

  But to the point. The point is that it’s arbitrary. Just no telling. No logic here, no system. No rhyme. No reason. There’s just the waking up and the going on. The waking up and the going on. Though my father would disagree.

  That’s it. My father. That’s what I was getting to. I’ve left him out too long. He was in our new house. When Tess and I first moved in. He’d come over with a bottle of champagne. One of his gestures. One of his rituals. A housewarming. What an odd celebration. Saying come and see. Saying, look, friends and family: We have arranged our furniture in new rooms, we have hung our clothes in different closets, now we sleep in this new bed. Odd. All that moving and rearranging of objects, of ourselves. Acts of hope. Hope that from this new place, we will become better. Is it more than that? Happier maybe? That in this new place we will make things we’ve never made before? Become people we have never been? Or that we will come to know one another in ways we didn’t before? Perhaps all of those things. Mostly, though, I think, it is another prayer: if we have everything just so, if we arrange ourselves behind these walls, let us remain unaffected by ruin.

  But not my father.

  He didn’t see any of it this way. His was another vision of the world. One of order and meaning. My father, more than anyone I’ve ever known, refused the idea of grey ruin. He wanted light and hope. Demanded it. And so gave himself to ritual. For as long as I can remember. And I still see deep into my childhood. There was my father always arranging rituals, insisting on them. So much ceremony. Our dinners around his fine table. Gifts for each occasion, the celebration of each moment, the notes he wrote to us. Look at this, he said, see what good thing you’ve done? Stop for a moment and be grateful for it, be proud of yourself, look what you have built, look what you have made, what you’ve accomplished, my son, my daughter.

  “We are lucky,” he said all through our childhood. “Never forget that we are lucky.”

  And then in White Pine he began to say, “We are blessed.”

  It was the next step. The logical extension. Where better to find order? Where better to find meaning than within St. Andrew’s-by-the-Sea, that simple stone church turned Quaker meetinghouse? Andrew, patron saint of sailors and fishermen. First disciple of Christ. Killed on the cross. Tied, not nailed, and left to die. That is what I know of St. Andrew.

  We were not a religious family. There was no church in my childhood.

  My latterday father’s church-cum-meetinghouse was set on a flat stone outcropping at the north end of the main beach. Weather-beaten and twice rebuilt. A point of great pride for those parishioners. A symbol of unbreakable faith. Father, son and holy ghost. Body and blood of Christ. I couldn’t ever understand it. I still can’t. My mind goes still. Nothing breaks me faster than code and a long list of characters. But my father, he liked to believe, and he liked to pray in that simple room while the waves fell against the rocks below.

  64.

  Some time had passed, perhaps more than usual, since we’d last seen my father and one night not long after our driving out to Emerson, Tess and I went to his house for dinner. He was cooking from his favorite cookbook. He loved it because it included photographs of each ingredient the way it should be prepared for a given dish. All of it was laid out for him. He’d opened some good wine from one of those Washington wineries that now sells a single bottle for eighty bucks. Then, those places were practically unknown and he loved showing us what he’d found. Wine, another realm of ritual and order, just like the church, just like carpentry.

  They were easy together, Tess and my father, affectionate and playful. That evening I sat in the living room in the corduroy easy chair and watched them in the kitchen. It drove him crazy when anyone tried to help, but Tess wouldn’t leave him alone until he gave her a job. He took his preparation seriously—each ingredient arranged in a neat pile, or in a small ceramic ramekin. He followed recipes as if they were sacred commandments, and he was tortured by vague instructions like “to taste” or “a pinch.” Tess made fun of him relentlessly, and when he asked her to read them aloud, was always hiding things, or editing the recipes to include ridiculous additions and outsized measurements.

  I loved to watch them without me, playing in their world together. Tess laughing and my father pretending to be angry and Tess consoling him by jumping on his back and kissing his head, or tickling him when he was chopping carrots with one of his deadly Japanese knives.

  “What have you done to those peppers? That’s not a perfect square. It’s ruined, it’s all ruined.”

  He’d threaten to cut off her hand.

  This night I’m thinking of, Tess had nearly convinced him that the recipe called for some enormous amount of chili flakes. He’d measured them out and was holding the metal scoop above the simmering sauce. I was holding my breath. Tess sitting on the counter, her hands on her knees, watching, bottom lip between her teeth. He turned and narrowed his eyes at her. She broke then into her weird squeaking laugh—half gasping, half giggling. My father chased her into the living room where they squared off in front of me.

  Tess liked to box with him and she brought her fists up trying her best to keep a serious face. He took slow openhanded swings at her head and she ducked them the way he’d showed her.

  “Drop, don’t bend, drop, don’t bend.”

  Before it ended he let her punch him in the stomach.

  “Go on little girl, let’s see what you got.”

  She hit him with all her strength. Gave everything. Tess so determined.

  When she landed it, he laughed and said, “Like marble. Don’t break your hand, little girl.”

  They liked each other so much.

  Those evenings with my father, the three of us eating dinner in his warm house, the fire going, getting a little drunk, laughing, seeing the two of them together, that kind of affection, I wanted nothing more in my life.

  But then my mother was out there locked away in the cold. And no matter what joy we felt, what softness, what comfort, she was always there—a counterweight, a reminder of what existed in the world beyond our fortune.

  65.

  Tess and my father were boxing. They played their game. I sat in front of the fire and watched. We were drunk on wine. It was a nice night. We were all happy for a few hours. My mother had murdered a man. She was in prison for it. My sister Claire was in London. We hadn’t heard from her. It had been months. It was winter now. December or January. Short days. Massive storms. It was probably raining that night. The heat was out. The furnace was dead. That old monster in the basement had gone cold and still. We ate in front of the fire. We drank more wine. Then there was some kind of downturn. One of those shifts in pressure. A disturbance in the atmosphere. Laughter turns to quiet. A lull. And then my father started talking about the meetinghouse.

  We were having dinner. Three people in front of a fire. Rain outside.

  “I’ve been going to church.” He said it to the wall. “The stone one.”

  “That’s nice,” Tess said. “The one on the rock? What kind of church is that?”

  “It’s a meetinghouse, really. Quaker. It used to be Catholic.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are you going to church now? All of a sudden.”

  Tess gave me her laser look.

  “I like going,” he said. “I like sitting t
here.”

  “Are you a Quaker now?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe I am.”

  “I think it’s nice,” Tess said.

  “It is. You two should come with me sometime. It’s very peaceful.”

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “I’d love to.” Tess smiled at my father.

  Why I went sullen, why it irritated me so much that my father, who had never been even vaguely interested in religion, was now, maybe, a Quaker, I’m not sure. Because I was like him and I did not want anything else to change. Because I thought it was a weakness. Or a symbol of weakness. Or worse, madness. And one mad parent was enough. Because I wanted him the same, wanted him to be still. I was the one who would change, and I would measure that change against his constancy. That was the way of the world, its natural order. Not the other way. No version of the opposite. It was a sign of chaos, and I’d had enough of that.

  I wanted his house and the truck out front, the light on in the kitchen, him reading in the fat corduroy chair. His routine, our dinners together, all that was left of permanence, of the solidity of home.

  Everything else had been obliterated. Nothing else was steady—not Tess, not my mother, not my mind. And now my father had found God. Now my father had begun to pray. It was the last straw and the final nail. It was the piece that blew me open.

  Even now I think of it the same:

  I’m hanging onto scaffolding.

  There’s a hurricane wind.

  My body is blowing like a flag.

  My father says, “I’ve started going to church,” and I’m torn away, flung into the air, thrown into space.

  Maybe I was looking for an excuse. Maybe it could have been anything. Yoga. Veganism. Kung fu. But it was God, so God sent me spinning.

  That’s why I’ve chosen this scene, this night among so many others. Because it was when something broke in me, when I gave up on staying still, when I tried to give up on order.

  Tess and I walked home.

  Maybe the rain had stopped.

  She punched me on the shoulder. “Why are you cruel to him?”

  I didn’t answer. I didn’t know.

  “Joey.”

  I shook my head.

  “He loves you,” she said.

  “I know that.”

  “So stop it. Let him be.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t apologize to me.” She leaned the side of her head against my shoulder. It was one of her gestures that no matter what else happened always gave me a shot of joy. “Let him be,” she said again, this time with her softer voice.

  “I will,” I said.

  “Tell him.”

  “I will.”

  We walked the rest of the way home without talking.

  When we came to the house Tess sat on the porch. I went in and got the glasses of ice, our bottle of Jim Beam. I brought them out and sat next to her.

  It was a ritual I loved.

  But I had given up on ritual.

  I poured the bourbon.

  “Cheers,” she said.

  There was the sound of glass on glass, that eerie clink.

  “I’ll do whatever you want to do, Tess.”

  She looked at me.

  “What do I want to do?”

  “I don’t know. But whatever it is, I’ll do it.”

  She kissed me. Her fingers through my hair. She drew back just enough to speak. She touched the side of my face.

  “Joe, Joey, Joseph,” she whispered. “I want to go to war.”

  66.

  It won’t be a surprise to you that Tess, secretive as she was, had been searching well before my father found God. Her reconnaissance had begun alone. But being stubborn and frightened and therefore blind, it was a surprise to me. I would never learn. No matter how many times Tess revealed to me her secret lives, I would always be astonished by them.

  “Come with me,” she said.

  This was one night after dinner. My father had been over, and I, having sworn to be better, was not impatient with him. When he left I was proud of myself.

  And for that pride, Tess, she said, “You’re a stupid prick.”

  She masked it as exasperated teasing, but it was something she’d never called me before, and it wasn’t really a joke. I think of it as a measure of her building rage.

  “You’re a stupid prick, Joey. You think you deserve some kind of reward.” She patted me on the head. “Good job, Joe. You weren’t a total asshole to your sweet father. Extra cake for you.”

  She left me washing the dishes.

  “Let’s go,” she said twenty minutes later coming down the stairs in her shiny black raincoat.

  “Come with me,” Tess said and I followed her into the streets where there were living rooms flickering blue, smokers on their porches. Little orange embers ominous in the dark. See the couple on a stroll, the dog on a leash. I don’t know about now, but then when we neighbors passed each other, we said, hello, we said, nice night, lovely evening. It was that kind of town. Small enough for it.

  Yet it was an isolated and fractured place divided by distinct loyalties. A prison guard earned more than a waitress, a Walmart manager, a bartender, a secretary, or a fisherman. And the guards had the keys, meted out punishment, gave and withheld pleasure and privilege to the wives and husbands of their neighbors. That’s a different kind of currency in a town like ours. A different measure of class. And often what we gave of ourselves outside was returned inside. You want your husband to have peace, you learn the code, you go to Lester’s where you offer what you will.

  There are no pure systems.

  We went on up the hill, me and Tess, moving in and out of light—porch light, headlight, streetlight—and turned onto Vista Street where she slowed her walk and took my hand, a gesture more protective than romantic.

  A little more than halfway down the block we came to a white two-story house behind a white picket fence. A wide porch wrapped around both sides of it and seemed to continue around to the back. I say seemed because at the time we didn’t know. But I should tell you that it did do that. It continued on around to become a deck wide enough for a long table, six chairs, and a barbeque.

  It was a house like the other houses—in style and size. Perhaps a bit more polished, fresher paint, well-pruned trees. It occupied a double lot. That’s what made it distinct. The picket fence contained both the house and the lawn next to it, and on both sides those rows of pickets turned away from the street and continued on into the dark, surrounding the property where the streetlights did not reach.

  There was the house on one lot, and on the other, thick green grass, a triangle of mature oak trees and between those, a large round trampoline.

  We stopped here. Tess released my hand, and knelt to tie her boot. She took her time, but nothing moved. She stood and we walked on to the end of the street and back again. What she was waiting for, what I was meant to see, was not there.

  “I would rather show you,” she said.

  67.

  It still makes me laugh to think that the romantics among us compared our neighborhood in White Pine to North Beach. Still, it had its charm. There were streetlights on the corners. Some houses were well-kept, others less so, but nothing was derelict.

  There were student apartment blocks out by the college, a row of pretty houses up on the ridge, a few ramshackle beach cottages as well, the farms out in the valley, but aside from those places, most of us lived in The Hill.

  The oldest houses, built by missionaries and fishermen, were set back a few hundred yards from the oceanfront, just where Water Street began to rise. The neighborhood rose from there into a compact grid, block by block of small single-family homes—a combination of Victorian and Craftsman—now occupied by prison guards, and professors, fishermen, and
the families of prisoners who had a little money, and a little luck. Like us.

  There was, in those days, an unusual intermingling of the classes. Strangest of all was that the guards so often lived next door to the families of their charges. I’ve heard that it is no longer this way. They’ve started writing about the town for reasons other than reporting executions. A thing in the New York Times travel section, no less. The death knell of any good scruffy place.

  White Pine has become a resort town, where food is no longer farmed but sourced. The Owl was replaced by a wine bar serving not pizza, but flatbread. Lester’s though is still around, or was last I checked. Still serving Olympia, pizza, and PBR. Still a guard bar, I hope.

  I’d like to get back there one day. I’d like to sit with my dad in our booth and listen to the guards complain about all the newcomers and their green lawns.

  Go up there and sit in our booth, share a pitcher and a pizza. Onion, mushroom, pepperoni. Just the two of us.

  I miss him.

  It’s the simplest thing in the world isn’t it? Missing someone. It is the purest form of sadness, I think. A person gone. A person absent from you.

  Once a person, now an abstraction, now a ghost. Nothing to do about it. Not with the dead anyway. The dead are gone. Funny how true that is. How deeply true. The dead and the missing.

  I’d like to go up there with him and share a pizza. That’s all.

  And somehow knowing that it’s impossible, that I’ll never listen to him talk, it makes all of this more urgent.