Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  A sharp pain jolts me over the next thing I see.

  She wears a white nylon puffy coat. It hangs wide open even in this cold, the two ends of the belt dangling. Silver buttons glint in the light, framing her belly, which the warm coat can’t cover. Her belly bulges with baby.

  I think two things at the same second. How could someone like you be my mother? And A baby! How dare you?

  Even though I know it’s that guy in Lowell she goes back to, I am betrayed, and she’s never been mine. I am also pulled back to a house, a room, the pungent smell of lime and garlic in fish sauce, women chopping lemongrass, stringy strands of lemongrass, long windows swollen shut by ice and an overheated, suffocating Massachusetts night.

  Women squatting, balling mounds of sticky rice for children who tear past them, laughing. I wear a tiara. I remember someone’s hands placing the tiara in my hair.

  It is my birthday party.

  This is my own memory, coming loud as a freight train. I know the rhythm of the women’s voices. The words in Khmer soften at the edges and turn to smoke. This can’t be my memory. But the tiara is as real as my ring with the tiger’s eye that Luke found. I swear I can feel the tiara on my head.

  “Stay a while,” my father calls. It stops me as I haul the truck door open.

  “No.”

  My fingers touch the soldier’s dog tags that nest in my pocket.

  When I see my mother with a new unborn child I become a child. Did she put the tiara on my head when she was only a few years older than I am now?

  I step up into the old Chevy with the “Save the Fishermen” bumper sticker on the back. My father follows me, his long legs slow and easy-does-it, even in the cold. He has something to say. I lower the window. “Dad, I need to go. Please.” My voice rises. My mother is walking toward us.

  “I told that kid I owe him one trip. When I let him go.” My father doesn’t look at me. “Said I’d take him on one more trip. Then he needed to find a new boat. He’s a brawler in town, but on board, he never missed a beat. I allowed myself to shut my eyes when he was on board. The only crew I can say that for. You’ll never see him again, Sofie.”

  I knew this was a command. The first I have ever heard from my father.

  I pull out onto the street just in time.

  STRIP MALL

  “Late,” Vincent says when I push open the door, clutching my apron and cap.

  My boss never misses the time. I check the clock. It’s five minutes after five. It could be much worse. I stash my coat, wrap my hair around my hand and pull it into a ponytail, put on the cap. Clock in. Tie on apron.

  Vincent is built low and gorilla-like. He is gruff, tattoos bursting down his arms. If customers ask, he tells them about his tattoos. He designed them himself with symbols from all the cultures he is made up of. A koi fish on his bicep for the Japanese blood, a Celtic cross for the Irish blood, a muskrat he read about in a legend for his Abenaki blood.

  “Forgive you this time, babe.”

  “Don’t call me that, Vincent. I won’t be late again.”

  “Don’t be shy about it. You’re not a California babe. But you’re a babe.”

  Jesus, he irritates me so. If it weren’t for the pay.

  The Dunkin’ Donuts is in a tiny strip mall with an Asian market that I’ve never been in. Behind it are the city’s only projects, though hardly projects compared to the ones in Lowell and other cities in the Valley. The Valley is south of us, Lowell and Lawrence on the Merrimack River’s banks where European immigrants came for jobs in the mills. Next the Hispanics and the Asians came, like my mother. Like me?

  “Hi, what can I get for you?” I ask the customer at the drive-through who is only a voice in my ear. She lists a string of drinks and a dozen chocolate frosted. I fill the box of donuts. Pour the coffees with creams and skim and sugars. Get them to the window. This will continue for hours.

  My hair is falling from my cap, and I jam it back under. The cap is beige with a tiny strip of orange around the bill and a cherry-red, orange, and white DD on the brim. I hate the cap. Vincent wears one just like it, plastering his thin hair to his head. He wears it low over eyes that are heartsick like a basset hound’s. I imagine a story of unrequited love that left his eyes so bereft.

  A girl comes in, her elbow loose around a guy’s neck and him in jeans hanging beneath his hipbones. The girl wears earrings that dangle and long hair in spirals down to the small of her back. I know this couple likes their coffee with double milk, double sugar.

  A tiny woman with pixie hair under a pink beret stares at the trays of donuts.

  “Hi, what can I get for you?”

  She comes every night. She’s waiting for the time we throw out the donuts that have been on the rack too long. “May I have one of the cream filled?” she asks, very upper class.

  “I’m sorry, that’s against the rules,” I say.

  We each say this every night. And every night when Vincent’s back is turned I put two cream filled in a paper bag for her. Vincent knows I do this.

  Mrs. Bennett goes out with her donuts, easing her way up the sidewalk and through the crush of lights at the intersection of roads to the mall. I brew more decaf. Sometimes people want that at night. When I turn I see Mrs. Tuttle, who wears sequin ducks on her sweatshirt jacket, lean her head in the door. She’s a neighbor from the Heights.

  “I know your dad’s a fisherman,” she says. “Do you have any Maine shrimp? I wonder if you’d sell me some shrimp straight from the boat. It’s my husband’s birthday. He is eighty-three tomorrow.” Wind blows her most of the way inside. “I remember when they used to sell shrimp off a truck right here on Woodbury.”

  She means northern shrimp, what the New Hampshire fishermen call them. Tiny, sweet shrimp only in these northern waters. And that’s when it comes together for me.

  Brilliant.

  “I can get you some shrimp for Mr. Tuttle’s birthday,” I say. “Whole shrimp?”

  “I don’t mind. Grew up cleaning shrimp. Ned Dickerson’s got a thing going off his boat,” Mrs. Tuttle says, “Whole shrimp. One seventy-five a pound.”

  “I can beat that,” I say. “One seventy.”

  “Dickerson’s getting a better price selling locally. It’s a lot of work. Like they’re giving out recipes and telling people how fresh tastes better than frozen.” This conversation is happening around the orders coming in through my earpiece.

  My head spins with possibilities for profit. And keeping my father home. He gets seventy-five cents a pound for the shrimp going to Gloucester. You don’t have to be good at math to figure out it’d be good to sell to Mrs. Tuttle.

  “Couldn’t do it,” Vincent says. He was doing a crossword between jobs back behind the counter. It’s all filled in, in ink, with the tiny black letters, except for one tiny block.

  “What’s the question?”

  He puts the clipboard away, slides the pen in the metal clip, and shakes his head. “Got standards,” he says. I know the standards. 1: No reference, not even Sofie. 2: No guessing. 3: In ink. Vincent should be running a country, not a donut shop.

  I mop, imagining measuring out shrimp for Mr. Tuttle’s birthday. Wash out the pots. Put on my sweater, over the shirt that says DD Oven Roasted, Gets You Running. The floor shines. The traffic has grown lighter outside. The ribbon of lights that crosses the storefront has slowed. “’Night, Vince.” I don’t look back. “Five sharp tomorrow,” he says in his way, and I don’t have to look to see his heartbroken eyes.

  Sometimes I wonder if it’s Vincent who wrote on the seawall at the beach in all-cap black letters, You were too beautiful for this world . . .

  When I step out, I instantly see him. The soldier is a silhouette, his boot on the runner of my father’s truck, knee bent. I realize later that the command my father gave never crosses my mind.

  THE ASHWORTH

  The fear is the first thing. Of the rawness of him. Of his eyes, acutely on guard and tender at the same time. He watches
me come. When I’m closer, I see the line of his lips. He takes me in, my eyes, my cheekbones, my hair.

  I stop. I slowly slide the Dunkin’ Donuts cap off my hair. His eyes soften.

  Something almost like a smile crinkles in his eyes. We are not in color, like we were when the sun splashed in the sky. We are gray beneath hooded streetlights with streaks of white headlights cutting through us.

  I start to shiver.

  First my teeth. Then my shoulders and knees. At home, maybe my mother is still talking to my father. With her big belly. With that new baby. I see her more clearly than if I’d stayed at home. I can’t picture my mother with me and Dad at the Formica table, fretting over the piles of papers—bills for fuel, bait, the new GPS, crew, boat mortgage, taxes, fish brokers, federal permits, documents for days at sea, what it cost one time Pete rammed the Karma over a rock in the channel.

  Luke and I stand with our arms crossed against the cold. The sky allows haze from the moon to seep through. The moon is waning but bright.

  “You’re cold,” Luke says, beside my father’s truck.

  “I’m scared,” I say.

  “Of me?”

  I shake my head.

  “Should I go?”

  “Jesus,” I whisper. “You better stay.”

  Then a laugh, a roaring laugh. We are nothing like we were on the beach in the snow and splotchy sunrise, when I was in shock over the gun and then lost with him. He is laughing. “Aren’t you your father’s daughter. Jesus. On the boat it’s like he’s calling up the spirits.”

  I smile. My father’s daughter. Luke drops his boot to the ground. We face each other. He is laughing, but his hand shakes until he rests it low, on his thigh.

  “Come on,” he says.

  Yes, I think. “Where?”

  “Get some food.”

  It seems natural to go. I’ve been waiting for this. We get in his car. The seat cracks with cold, and I wonder how long he’d been standing with his boot on my runner. We drive out of the streetlights of the city, heading east. We pass the cemetery and follow out the dark roads and I know where these roads are leading, toward the ocean. We follow along the road that hugs the ocean in the winter dark and can hear the waves beat on the rocks as the tide crashes in. We are silent. It’s late, and we’ve come so far, but my father will be asleep and when we come to Hampton Beach, I feel like I am the only place I could possibly be tonight. I know the beach, the strip. Rosa and I have come here all our lives to the shops and arcade along the boardwalk.

  Luke pulls into one of the diagonal parking slots. I take him in as we walk. He’s wearing a jacket that swings open over a thick, navy blue sweater, a baseball cap. He gives me a crooked smile as we walk along the strip. That’s what they call the stretch of Ocean Boulevard with the boardwalk and Blinks Fry Dough, the casino, bead shops with shells and stones from all the wide world, Jerri’s Breakfast, Ice Cream, Subs. Toe rings. On Memorial Day, in the crush of people, the police start patrolling. Break up the rowdies. Track the walkaways and reunite them with their moms.

  “No place open,” I say.

  “One place. Ways to go. I just like walking the strip.”

  We keep walking. It’s natural. Like we do this. I have school, Mrs. Bennett’s cream filled, then race down the boardwalk with the soldier. We come to the arcade where you can put a quarter in to get the mannequin fortune teller to turn her gray head and spit out your fortune on a card, arcade games, shooting gallery, bowling lanes.

  The arcade is closed. Light snow falls against the shuttered wall.

  “I want you to listen and listen tight,” I imitate the words that play on a loop in the shooting gallery. “I want you to shoot it and shoot it right,” I recite. “It’s the gunfighter in the shooting gallery.”

  “First weapon I fired when I was a kid. My friends and I used to come up from Nashua,” Luke says. “I always went for the piano player.”

  “And the piano plays jive.”

  Then we list all the animated creatures in the shooting gallery and the sounds they make when you shoot them with laser guns on their small triangle targets.

  “The bear . . .”

  “Growls,” I say.

  “The clown . . .”

  “His nose flashes.”

  I am laughing.

  It’s okay. He is okay about the bridge. And the pier. And the gun. He is okay talking about a shooting gallery everybody in the Merrimack Valley and everybody from the Seacoast over generations—the Italians, the Scots, even the Cambodians,

  everybody—knows. It’s our history.

  Luke knocks his cap down half over his eyes. “Where the hell did you come from?” he teases.

  We cross the streets, D Street, C Street, B. “I walk the strip a lot,” he says. We come to the Ashworth By the Sea. My father and I don’t come here. But I know this is where we visited that Christmas years ago, a motel room on a side street that my mother rented. I know that some fishermen’s kids work here as waiters and dishwashers in season. Luke opens the door.

  “Food here?” I say.

  We enter a dimly lit dining room with white lights strung across the ceiling like stars. We have entered a universe. I glance at this guy I am with, then around the Ashworth overlooking the seawall and the ocean. It’s a dream to come here with him to eat dinner, two people who are very nearly strangers, but I can’t remember not knowing him.

  We have our pick of tables since the only other people here are zipping their parkas and paying their bill. We sit at a window table where we hear the waves crash on the seawall. I take off my coat. Then I take off my Dunkin’ Donuts apron. I stuff it inside my coat to hide the scent of sugar and chocolate and coffee, but the smell is in my hair. Luke drops his cap on the table. Then he folds it and puts it in his pocket. I see his hands shake on the table. His eyes are green, wary, and bloodshot. His hair is dark. He plants his palms on the table. I think this is to steady them. We scan the menu and order fish and chips from the waiter.

  He gives me his crooked grin. “Found you,” he says.

  “Maybe ’cause you gave me this,” I say and slide his dog tags from my pocket. He glances at them.

  “I wanted to set your mind at ease,” he begins.

  “I’m at ease.” Like a challenge.

  I look at him through my hair that I know is blown wild.

  He shrugs.

  “You mean about the gun,” I say with an airiness I don’t feel. “I’ve seen guns. This is New Hampshire.” I laugh at my joke about a state where people come across the border to buy any kind of gun, rifle, handgun, AK-47.

  I pull my hair back off my face and glance at him. He shrugs. It occurs to me there’s no room with him to be fake.

  “Maybe it’s my mind I’m worried about,” he says. “I’ll quit obsessing over yours.”

  His eyes shift to the door, to the waiter bearing water. We hear the click of saltshakers that a busboy gathers on a tray. Is it like the click of a weapon when it’s engaged? We’re not going to talk about what he was doing with the gun. The question just sits on the table, a little groggy, while we watch each other and glance away, trying to pretend we’re not.

  The waiter is vacuuming. We are the only customers. Snow has begun to fall harder over the boulevard and into the sea. The food comes, and we dig in, famished.

  “This place haunted?” Luke says, shifting his eyes to a dark hallway where the waiter turned off the lights.

  “Oh, probably.” I press my palms to my head, laughing. “Maybe it’s the statue of the lady across the boulevard. It says, ‘Breathe soft ye winds.’ She’s asking the waves to be gentle to sailors who died at sea.”

  He eats fast. He’s cleaning up. He motions, eat, eat, at me and my plate that brims with golden fries. He eats, and I begin to tell him things. I tell him my mom is moving in.

  “Heard a few things about that,” he says, and I think of the long hours my father and he had on the boat. Did they talk about me?

  I say, “
She was sixteen when she had me. I hardly see her. When I was little I told my teacher she was a selchie, a seal woman, and she’d gone back to live in the ocean. Dad had to go and talk to the teacher.”

  Luke hoots. “A seal woman?” He lifts his chin, downing a beer. I smell the beer. I smell some scent, maybe the wool of his sweater. Some smell that is him. “You said she became a seal?”

  So I tell him the Scottish tale about the carpenter who fell in love with a woman and they had a child. But she was also a seal, and when she found her sealskin, she swam back to her seal family in the ocean.

  Luke leans in toward me, his head on his fists. His green, bleary eyes are staring at me like I’ve got something mysterious he could use. I can’t turn my eyes from his. He says, “I’d like to try on a sealskin. Get out of this skin.”

  Then I pull back. We both do. He calls for another beer. I hug my coat around myself, chilled beside the black windowpane. I say, “Since this threat of seeing my mother, I keep having these flashbacks about her.”

  His eyes narrow, like I’ve become dangerous. “Did something happen you can’t let go of?”

  “Just moments. Just smells. What about you?” I say. “I want some secrets, too.”

  He downs half the new glass of beer. He says, “Zurmat. Paktia Province.”

  I know these names. Afghanistan.

  “So you’re back, you’re not going.”

  He nods. “I think about going back, all the time.”

  “What did you do?” I say.

  A tiny squinting of his eyes. He had shaved. But I can see a shadow in the valley over his lips. “Medic,” he says. “Cordon and search missions.”

  I don’t know what that is. “I’ve seen photos of Afghanistan,” I say. I place myself in a classroom with Mr. Murray showing photos on the screen. “Mountains and valleys,” I say. “They need to irrigate the little farms.”

  His eyes shift to mine. “You’re so pure.”

  I don’t know what to say. I just nod. Then, “I need to go.”

  “I know,” he says.

  “Where do you live?” I say.