Calypso

by David Sedaris

  “Horrible, brutal things, foxes,” they say. “Once one gets into the henhouse it’ll kill everything in sight, just for the hell of it.”

  The charge was repeated in the comments section of a YouTube video I watched one night about a vixen named Tammy that was hit by a car and healed by a veterinarian, who later released her back into the wild. “I know how much people love to save wildlife, but how would you feel if a fox killed your chickens or turkey?” someone named Pat Stokes asked.

  To this a man responded, “My chickens are cunts.”

  I don’t know if this made him pro-fox or if he was just stating the facts.

  If I had to bad-mouth Carol, my one complaint would be her sense of humor. “You are so-o-o-o-o serious,” I often tell her. I’d add that she never grows any more comfortable in my presence. She seems to me very English in her awkwardness.

  “Then stop making her uncomfortable,” Hugh says. He thinks that, instead of feeding her on the patio outside my office, I should leave her food in the field and let her eat it on her own time.

  The first problem with that suggestion is slugs. I thought I knew them from my youth in Raleigh, but the slugs of North America are nothing compared to their British cousins. They’re like walruses in Sussex—long and fat from eating everything Hugh tries to grow that the rabbits and deer happen to miss. I’ve seen them feast on the viscous bodies of their stepped-on relatives, so when something decent is presented, pork shoulder, say, or a fresh lamb kidney, they go wild. And we must have—no exaggeration—at least twelve million slugs on our two-acre property. Galveston the hedgehog keeps their numbers down, as do two toads, Lane and Courtney, but it’s a losing battle.

  The second problem with throwing food into the pasture is one of perception. It would allow Carol to feel, if not like a huntress, then at least like a successful scavenger—Look what I found, she’d think. This as opposed to, Look what David gave me.

  I insist that Carol eat in my presence for the same reason I wait for the coffee shop employee to turn back in my direction before putting a tip in his basket. I want to be acknowledged as a generous provider. This is about me, not them.

  I don’t need Hugh to point out how ridiculous this is. Wild animals do not give a damn about our little feelings. They’re incapable of it. “I love you, I love you, I love you,” we say.

  What they hear is senseless noise. It’s like us trying to discern emotion in the hum of a hair dryer or the chortle of an engine as it fails to turn over. That’s the drawback but also the glory of creatures that were never domesticated. Nothing feels better than being singled out by something that at best should fear you and at worst would like to eat you. I think of the people I’ve known over the years who’ve found a baby raccoon or possum and brought it home to raise it. When young, the animals were sweet. Then one day they became moody and violent, like human teenagers but with claws and sharp, pointy teeth. It was their wildness reclaiming them. After the change it was back into their cages, their heartsick owners—jailers now—watching as they tore at the bars, never tiring of it, thinking only of escape.

  But wait, we tell ourselves, always wanting to project, to anthropomorphize, to turn the story in our favor. But what about this: One night in late September, as I was walking home in the dark from the neighboring village, I felt a presence next to me. A dog? I wondered. But the footsteps I heard were daintier, and I wasn’t near any houses. I keep a flashlight in my backpack, so I turned it on, and there was Carol. “Is this where you are when I call for you at two in the morning?” I asked.

  There was a canopy of leaves over my head. Once I moved beyond it, the moon lit my path, so I turned off the flashlight. I’d expected Carol to be gone by that point, but for the next half mile, all the way home, she walked with me, sometimes by my side and sometimes a few steps ahead, leading the way. No cars approached or passed. The road was ours, and we marched right down the center of it, all the way to the front of the house and through the garden gate to the kitchen door.

  I didn’t know it then, but this would be the last time I would see Carol. Foxes are like gang members. They can’t go wherever they like. That next patch of land is someone else’s territory, so chances are she was killed somehow. If she’d been hit by a car I’d have seen her body by the side of the road, but maybe she dragged herself off into the woods and died there. She could have been poisoned, which happens. Hunters pay good money to bag the pheasant that are released here every fall. These are birds that, honestly, you have to work not to kill. The landowners want to protect their investments, which means keeping down the predators. “That’s likely what happened to Carol,” Hugh says. I know this makes sense, but I refuse to hear it.

  She’s just taking a little break, I think. Trying to establish her independence, which is normal for someone her age. I still call for her when I step into the yard at night. Still look into the shadows for some hint of movement, waiting to change my tone from the voice you use when summoning someone, to the less plaintive and much more preferable one you use to welcome them back home.

  The One(s) Who Got Away

  It was a Friday night in mid-July, around nine o’clock, and Hugh and I were at the dinner table, eating this spaghetti he makes with sausage in it. We’d been together for almost three decades, and for some reason I’d waited until this moment to ask how many people he’d slept with before we became a couple.

  Hugh looked at the ceiling, which is crisscrossed with beams and, to my great consternation, spiderwebs. I’m vigilant, really I am, but out in the country there’s no keeping up with them.

  “So?” I said.

  “I’m thinking,” he told me.

  I used to know how many people I’d slept with. After meeting Hugh, though, I took myself off the market, and the figure faded from memory. If I were to slog through all my old diaries I could certainly retrieve it. Twenty-eight? Thirty? Do I include those early gropings? They felt significant at the time, but do they qualify as sex if you never took your clothes off or actually touched anything with your bare hands? I wanted to ask Hugh, but he was too busy counting. “Thirty-two, thirty-three…”

  I put down my fork. “You’re not finished yet?”

  “Shhh,” he said. “You’re making me lose track.”

  It shouldn’t have surprised me. When you look like Hugh, all you have to do is leave the house and people will approach you, especially gay men, the dogs. His handsomeness was never my personal opinion—rather, like the roundness of the earth, it is something society generally agrees upon. Without my face to use as bait, I had to work a lot harder than he did. There are times, I’ll admit, when I had to beg. That said, some of Hugh’s earlier choices seemed poorly thought-out to me, especially once AIDS came along.

  “Thirty-five…thirty-six.”

  Every man ticked off on his fingers was someone I’d been compared to at one point or another, not overtly—he’s anything but cruel—but surely it happened. Someone kissed better than I did. Someone had more stamina, a more seductive voice. Bigger muscles. I’m confident enough to compete against a dozen of his exes, but he was moving on to the population of a small town.

  “Thirty-eight, thirty-nine…”

  By what miracle had neither of us contracted AIDS? How had we gotten away? I don’t just mean later, when people knew to be safe, but back in the days when it didn’t have a name and no one understood how it spread. One of the men Hugh had lived with—a professor he had his first year of college—had died of it in the late eighties, and surely there were others, on both my side and his. Yet for some reason we’d escaped, had prospered, even. Now here we were, the shadows lengthening, our spaghetti growing cold, as he hit the half-hundred mark, then blithely sailed beyond it.

  Whore.

  Sorry

  When she was young, my sister-in-law, Kathy, had a kitten named Snowy. “She was white, of course,” she said one evening over the Sorry! board at our house on Emerald Isle. I’ve never been much for games, but this
one I can play all night. Half of it is luck, and the rest is ruthlessness. You have to be cold, so my niece, Madelyn, who is twelve and has a heart made of frozen concrete, usually wins.

  “She was just the prettiest thing,” Kathy continued, watching as I shuffled the deck for another round. “Then she swallowed a fishhook.”

  I set the cards in the center of the board. “Yikes.”

  “Tell me about it,” Kathy said. “It didn’t seem like there was any way to fix her, so my mom told my brother to hold her down.” She took a sip of her bourbon. “Then she shot her in the head.”

  Maddy, who had no doubt heard this story before, gathered the bright plastic pawns in her hands and turned to her mother, asking, “What color do you want?”

  Kathy considered her options and sighed. “I’ll go with the red.”

  Whenever I doubt the wisdom of buying a beach house, all I have to do is play a round of Sorry! and it all seems worth it. For starters, it’s the only time Madelyn will really talk. Wiping the floor with everyone around her eases what is otherwise a crippling shyness and brings her fully to life. Ask her a question on the beach, and the most you’re likely to get is a shrug. At the board, on the other hand, she’ll tell you anything, is chatty, almost. Before getting the Sea Section, I didn’t have much contact with my brother’s family. I’d see them in Raleigh when I passed through town every other year. I’d send cards and letters, but that was about it. Were it not for Sorry! I’d never have known that Kathy’s mother shot a kitten in the head. Now that’s a sister-in-law, I thought. She drew a one, and I watched as she moved the first of her four pawns from the starting position. Then she whispered softly to me and her daughter, “I will destroy the both of you.”

  We usually play Sorry! in the living room on the east side of the house while sitting on the floor around the coffee table. Getting a game together is the easiest thing in the world. Only four at a time can play, but there will often be others on the sidelines, coaching—Paul, for instance. When his daughter’s at the board he’ll take a knee and lean in. “C’mon, baby, go for the throat. Just like Daddy taught you.”

  It’s hard to get ahead in this game without occasionally sending a fellow player back to start. “Sorry,” you say, sincerely at first, and then in a way that means “I’m sorry you’re the sort of person who deserves this.” Madelyn will take any opportunity to screw someone over. She’s like her grandmother shooting a kitten in the head—heartless. The Christmas that Paul brought his family to Sussex, she presented me with a Sorry! game of my own, and though we pulled it out a dozen or so times, it never felt urgent, the way it does at the beach. After they left, I played only once, with a friend of Hugh’s named Candy. “You sort of need the sound of waves in order to get in the proper mood,” I said, putting the board away after I had crushed her.

  Another thing I love about the beach is sitting in the sun, mainly for the lazy kind of talk it generates. A person can say anything with lotion on, and I’m more than willing to listen. Most people, myself included, have moved on to sunblock, but not my sister Gretchen, who is outdoors a lot and usually arrives at the start of our vacation the burnished chestnut of a well-worn saddle. This is a woman who tans the spaces between her fingers, who lies on the beach with her mouth open so she can darken the front of her uvula. She’s starting to look like one of those dolls made from a dried apple, not that it bothers her any. My sister is one of the few women I know who doesn’t dye her hair or bemoan the fact that she’s getting older. She embraces her impending decrepitude.

  Gretchen’s birthday falls in early August, and the year she turned fifty-five, we celebrated it together on Emerald Isle. Paul, Kathy, and Madelyn were there briefly, as was Hugh; his mother, Joan; and his sister, Ann, who is my age and has three grown children. She and Hugh could be twins, that’s how alike they look, both tall and slender with big teeth, just shy of Kennedy-size. Their mother is a lot smaller, and wispy. Joan is eighty-three now, pale as a lightbulb, with white hair cut bluntly at her jawline. She recently replaced her wire-rimmed glasses. The new ones have heavy black frames and lend her a studious, almost owlish demeanor, which is fitting, as she’s always got her nose in a book. The writers she prefers are long dead and were on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is seven hundred pages long and the author photo is an engraving, it’s either hers or Hugh’s.

  One of the differences between his family and my own is the way we’ll listen to a story. It’s hard to finish more than a few sentences at a time when talking to his mother, who likes to interrupt either to accuse you of exaggerating—“Oh, now, that’s not true”—or to defend the person you’re talking about, someone, most often, she has never met. A stranger could hit me across the face with a sawed-off table leg, then kick me until my spinal column snapped, and still Joan would say, “Well, I’m sure he meant well.”

  My family, on the other hand, is always happy to hear about how horrible someone is. You could wake any of my sisters from a sound sleep, say, “You won’t believe what this asshole said to me once in 1979,” and have her full attention. Not Joan, though. Or her daughter either. Tell Ann that you want the renters two doors down—the ones who blast country music from their boom box and howl, “Yeee-ha!” every two minutes—to die, and she’ll say, “You should never wish ill on people. That’s bad karma!”

  Around the Hamricks, you can’t even denigrate sharks, which were on everyone’s mind in the summer of 2015. By the time we arrived, they had attacked eight swimmers, most of them in shallow water. People were canceling their vacation rentals, and it got even worse after two kids, one aged twelve and the other sixteen, had their arms bitten off.

  “Yes, well, the sharks didn’t eat those arms,” Hugh said when I brought it up. To him this somehow made it better, though I didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, it made it worse. Why dismember young people for no reason?

  “Besides,” Hugh said, “I go out far when I swim.”

  “Right, but in order to get to where it’s deep you sort of have to pass through the shallow part.”

  “But I can do that quickly,” he argued. “Anyway, sharks don’t want me. They want fish.”

  It was clear I was wasting my breath. I said to Gretchen, “I just pray they get his left arm instead of his right one. That way he can still kind of cook.”

  You can issue all the warnings you like, but nothing will keep a Hamrick out of the ocean. She’s frail, Hugh’s mother, a bit wobbly now, yet twice a day her children would lead her beyond the waves, one at each elbow, steadying her until they reached the calm water. Then they’d let go, and the three of them would swim for an hour at a time.

  Gretchen and I watched them from the shore one afternoon, me gessoed with sunblock, and her glistening with what may have been bacon fat. The sight of Joan backstroking off into the distance made us think of our own mother. She would wade knee-deep in the ocean if she were fishing, but we never saw her go any farther. Even at the country club the most she’d do is stick her feet in the kiddie pool. She didn’t know how to swim. No one ever taught her. “Plus,” said Gretchen, “she didn’t want to get her hair wet.”

  Time spent underwater would have been less time our mother had to observe people and discuss their shortcomings in a group setting. She even did it to us, her own children. “You won’t believe what Lisa’s done this time,” she’d whisper to me in the kitchen or living room, her cigarette stalled an inch from her mouth while this much more important business took place. Being her confidant made me feel special: only she and I could truly understand how stupid the people in my family were. The downside, I discovered, was that no one was safe. It was hurtful the first few times her criticism got back to me. (“I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with that Raquel Welch poster.”) Then I realized that it didn’t mean anything. Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.” An hour later you could decide that it w
as the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.

  Try explaining that to a Hamrick, though. “After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”

  Now I stood and waved to him out in the water. As I sat back down, Gretchen reached for her iPod and told me about a group of teenagers she recently ran into at the grocery store near her house. “They were fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, laughing and pushing each other—just awful, right? So I went over and told them to shut up.”

  I took off my shirt and balled it up for use as a pillow. “Wow.”

  “I know it,” Gretchen said. “Normally I wouldn’t have gotten involved. Then, of course, they wound up behind me in line, still loud and obnoxious, and almost like there was someone else inhabiting my body, I turned around and said, ‘Did I not tell you to shut the fuck up?’”

  “Then what happened?” I asked.

  She lit a cigarette and shrugged. “They shut the fuck up.”

  That night at the Sorry! board, Kathy told me that she and Madelyn had stopped by the pier earlier in the day and watched as people fed the sharks. “There must have been ten of them, some as long as five feet,” she said.

  “Are you hearing this?” I called to Hugh. He was sitting on the porch with his mother and sister, no doubt recalling the time they chased a hippo from their tennis court back when they lived in the Congo. God, those Hamricks can reminisce. “Kathy saw twenty-five sharks, some of them twelve feet long, at the pier this afternoon.”