Either the Beginning or the End of the World

by Terry Farish

  I lift a tote of shrimp I could have taken to Atlantic Co. I lift it up the porch steps, over the door sill, then slide it across the floor and into the kitchen. One batch at a time, I drop the shrimp in my pot of boiling water. One minute.

  A car pulls up in the street. In the full light of day I see a maroon car, Luke’s car, with the rust of New Hampshire winters eating into the fenders. He’s not in camouflage; he’s in jeans and a navy fisherman’s sweater. He is coming toward my door. I rub my hands dry and watch him. His walk is deliberate. He turns to glance at a kid up the street, the neighbor’s cat that streaks by.

  He knocks. My hands are red and wet. Pilot is barking. I am wearing leggings and a ribbed shirt. My hair is up in a clip. My body’s tender on the first day of my period.

  I open the door.

  Pilot leaps into his arms. She never forgets someone who has given her food. Luke comes down to his knees for her. I see Luke’s bowed head of dark hair.

  “My father’s not here.” I back up to keep from touching his hair.

  “I need to talk to him,” he says. “Find out when he’s planning to fish.”

  “He is fishing.”

  “Did he say how long?” He looks up.

  “Till supper. Maybe.”

  He lifts his hands from my dog’s ears, slowly stands.

  “Are you good at processing shrimp?” I say.

  “Teach me.”

  Lines from Rosa’s love song almost spill out of me. I cover my mouth to keep me from laughing and manage to open the door all the way without tripping on Pilot.

  He comes in.

  Has he ever seen a kitchen as small as this one? We work over the mound of shrimp in the kitchen sink, ready.

  “Flip it over,” I say. “Open the shell. Pull out the meat. It’s a three-step process.”

  I glance at his face. The past is in his face. I see that he hasn’t slept. He turns his exhausted eyes to me.

  “Just be careful of these.” I touch the long needle tail of the shrimp he is holding.

  “You got to pop the head,” I say. “Like this.”

  I hold a shrimp so he can see my finger slide down the line from the shrimp’s head to the tip of the sharp tail. I twist the tail to expose the eatable flesh. Then pull the flesh out of the head and shell that encases it. I drop the curve of meat into the basin. I drop the crusty outside—eyes and all—into the trash bin.

  Luke gets it in a heartbeat.

  Open, twist, pull. We work.

  I am aware of his hands. They are large and careful, manipulating something so small. There is something about what we are doing that feels sacred. An image of my grandmother comes into my brain. When I was little, I remember seeing her lift her hands, palms touching, and bowing to a fish. She said something in her strange, bad English. Something about giving respect.

  The work with our hands—Luke’s and mine—is as regular as breathing. I turn a shrimp in my hand. I begin to pull open the peel and a stream of water spews into my face and Luke’s face.

  “Ahh, it peed,” I burst out laughing. “Ahhhhh.” Luke wipes the wet from my face with the heel of his hand, holding the carapace in the other. I am laughing. Pilot yelps, waiting for a shrimp to drop.

  “You must be a great cook,” Luke says. “You’re cooking for a banquet.”

  I don’t say yes, I don’t say no. I don’t say it’s illegal what I’m planning to do with these shrimp. I say, “I don’t know what it is about you, but when I’m with you, I wonder what it would be like to be a Cambodian girl. Things about my mother’s culture. Maybe because you’re so different from my life. I’ve always been my father’s girl.”

  “You’re an enigmatic girl.” He studies me. “Your mother who’s coming. She’s Cambodian?”

  “She’s crazy.” I shrug. “She’s not anything to me.”

  Pilot catches a shrimp and runs with a pink tail hanging from her mouth.

  “Out,” I yell at her. “Out.”

  I want to talk about the gun. Where’s the gun? I hope you have gotten rid of the gun.

  I remember a story. My grandmother and her friend sit together in the dusk. They talk in Khmer. When I was little I must have understood some Khmer. It’s a story tucked deep inside me; it’s hard to find and let into my head. I don’t remember the story now, but I smell the hot peppers my grandmother was pressing with a mortar at dusk. Her story scared me so much-—or maybe it was her own grief as she told the story—the smell of the peppers reminds me: be very afraid.

  “One trip,” Luke says, “I was banged up from an incident the night before. Had two black eyes. Reeked the hell of beer. Your dad must have thought he was taking on bad luck. Found a new guy.”

  I look over at the circle around his eye, close to the maroon color of his car. I want to touch his check. Suddenly a deep sadness takes me over, and I want to tell him to quit drinking his life away. And I barely know him. I can’t stop this wave of sorrow that wants to take me over and I’m so scared it’s not about him but it’s about my mother ’cause I just met him. How can it be about him? I just want . . . I don’t even know what I want. I want to go back to being my father and me.

  “Look,” I say. “Thanks. Thanks for helping.” I wipe my hands on the checkered towel around my waist.

  He pauses. I’m flaking on him, as Rosa would say. He knows it. My face must have closed down to him. “You want me to tell my father to give you a call?”

  He looks at me like I kicked him in the gut. Shakes his head. “Keep him out of it,” he says.

  He’s at the door, shoving his arms in his jacket sleeves.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “My father told me you were the only crew he’d had on board he trusted enough for him to get some sleep.”

  He nods, his face stony.

  I think of my father and Luke as both soldiers and being there for each other. But Luke is down the front steps.

  I say, “He runs a tight boat.” I don’t say my father told me I’d never see him again.

  My dog is blocking Luke’s escape. She leaps and dances in his path as he tries to get to his car. She bows down in play between him and the car’s door.

  Already I’m second-guessing and plotting how I could see him again, even while he’s trying to tell Pilot to get in, go home, to me. We won’t see each other at school. We’re not going to my spring dance in my high school gym with Daniel and the cross-country team. I’m not going to invite him here for my father’s fried chicken and potatoes. I say finally, “Which cottage is yours?”

  “Five,” he says almost under his breath. Then looks at me one last time, shaking his head, like what the hell was he thinking? Like, what do you expect meeting some high school girl under a bridge?

  I sing Rosa’s melody to myself slow as the setting sun, just the way I take in the last few drops of gin I find in the cupboard. My father never said don’t drink. He should have. I simply ache, like the Spanish dancer in the song. I sit on the floor, letting the drops of gin burn my throat, and it feels like a shadow is beside me, a weight dragging me.

  With this weight I go back to the bin of shrimp. Open, twist, pull. Discard the tiny carapace. Keep my father home.

  MR. MURRAY’S FEAR

  Mr. Murray continues to bring order to my morning. 7:30 a.m. He is always at his desk. We have regular assignments every week. I know if I am not there that day, he is, and he’ll know I’m not there. Mr. Murray’s and my days don’t hinge on the wind in the birches or the government.

  My head spins a little while I sit in his class Monday morning.

  “You need to get in your assignments,” he says before other students have come.

  “Yes, I will.”

  “Before I’m gone.”

  “Are you going, too? Everybody’s leaving.”

  “Who else is leaving?”

  “My father’s going fishing in Virginia.”

  “I’m only going to see my new grandson.”

  “When’s that?”

/>   “End of the week.”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “About getting the assignments in.”

  “Why not?” he says.

  It was nice to stop thinking for a while, with the gin. I haven’t done my assignments all week. I just look at him.

  Mr. Murray gazes at me briefly, this man with vast curiosity about the world.

  My father said that Mr. Murray’s wife left him for a job in the city. She wanted more than he had to offer: a sweet smile, an appreciation for her walk, a good sentence. Mr. Murray writes a column for the newspaper. He never remarried, and my father said sometimes you can’t account for who you fall in love with.

  Later, during my study hall, I go to Mr. Murray’s room and write one assignment. I think I might want to talk to him, but I don’t. I just hang out there and work. Mr. Murray must wonder why I’m there.

  I am still thinking about fear, after that night by the stove when my father and I talked.

  Before I leave I drop a paper on his desk. It’s a poem we read in English: “For My Young Friends Who Are Afraid.”

  I like it, quite a lot, but don’t know how to use it right now, for my father and me. Maybe Mr. Murray will.

  AT HIGH TIDE

  I make a new sign. The last one got snowed on when Rosa and I sold the shrimp I cleaned Sunday.

  Sweet Northern Shrimp

  Fresh Caught

  $1.50/pound Whole

  $6.50/pound Cleaned Ready to Eat

  I had cleaned a few more from yesterday’s haul. I sell one last time while my father is fishing. Tomorrow I’ll give him the money to prove this will work. We’re okay.

  Last thing before work, Pilot and I run down to my beach. I remember my father singing in his warbly voice as I run. I squeeze my eyes shut at the sun on the beach. I have this thought of me swimming in the sea like a seal. I pretend I can breathe under water and I can dive and glide through the waves. The idea takes my breath away since it is like dying to me—to go in the sea. The sun makes long shadows. My legs look like stilts as we run with the sun over my shoulder.

  - - -

  Vincent is melancholy tonight, more so than usual. He is silent as a large cat, galumphing up and down, picking donuts for customers. I ring them in at the register. Then fill the containers of sugar, skim, milk, cream.

  “Where you from?” I say to try to shift the sullen mood of the place.

  “Nowhere,” he says, “Got some family in Salisbury.”

  “Nice beach,” I say.

  “Used to be,” he says. “My grandmother used to go hear bands play in the oceanside joints.” This seems to devastate him to tell it today, how the bands played, from the way his eyes droop.

  I myself am euphoric! After I’m out of here, I’m driving myself to an oceanside joint. Rye Cottages. Number five. January has stretched long and cold, and now it’s time.

  My shift hangs on and on, the rhythm of the work taking on a life of its own. You’re invisible unless you forget the three sugars. I get through it by singing. I pretend Rosa is here, and I sing.

  - - -

  I drive the dark roads toward the ocean and the horseshoe of cottages. I know where they are and take the left turn just past Rye Harbor, just past the breakwater that waves crash over at high tide. It is just high tide now. I drive around the curve of cabins. It is not hard to find number five.

  He didn’t invite me.

  “Not a good idea,” Luke says at the door. I feel the heat of the wood fire on my frozen cheeks.

  I say, “I just got off work.” As if that explains it.

  He steps back from the door. He leaves a space, that’s all. His step is loose, his shoulders seem like one is hitched up, one down. He is a little drunk.

  “Last time I got off work, you were standing at my truck.” I don’t leave the door. I had changed my shirt in the bathroom at work and now stand with my boots feeling like they are pinned to the floor, my body off balance. “That’s why I came.”

  His eyes focus on me for only a second. I can’t read him. I glance around the room, unsure who he is.

  Luke has nothing. A duffel. A beat-up phone on a charger by the bed. A book, maybe from the slim shelf of books for the rental. The book is in his hand. On the Road. He is preoccupied. I see a square of cardboard and a black pen, tubes of paint. He has been painting, but he moves the picture before I can see. I continue to look around the cottage. Chipped ivory crockery, so old it has veins, is stacked on open shelves. From the next cottage we hear a baby cry.

  He lifts his hands to his hips. “You want coffee?” he says. He doesn’t look at me, but gestures toward the kitchen, which is that shelf of plates, a stove, a small humming refrigerator.

  I laugh. “I’m a coffee bean already.”

  Maybe against his will, he gives me his crooked smile. The black hair falls down his forehead.

  “I’ve read Kerouac,” I say. I stay by the door, but I feel my boots release from the floor and my body drawn into his room.

  Luke pours himself a cup of coffee. It smells scarred and burned. The baby next door grows more unhappy. “Somebody crossed him,” Luke says about the wails.

  “We should get that kid a floppy-eared rabbit to play with.”

  Luke strides from the bed to the back door, facing the ocean, back and forth. I take in the dark and beyond, the ocean. He says, “Not sleeping. Can’t remember when I slept. Hey, you hungry?”

  Now he keeps talking.

  “Not hungry,” I say.

  But he searches the cupboards. He finds tubs of peanut butter and leftover condiments from takeout dinners. “What do I have? Juice. Can’t remember the kind.” He finally pauses.

  “Jeeze,” he says. This word comes out in one long breath. “Sit down.” Besides the bed there are kitchen chairs, a small drop-leaf table. I sit on one of the chairs. He spins a chair around, mounts it backwards, and sits facing me. “I’m going to look at you a while.” He inhales, like he is breathing in my hair and my body. “Oh, Christ,” he whispers.

  The back of his chair is between us. I drop my arms. I take him in with my eyes.

  I throw my head back. Exhale. Even the baby is silent for a beat.

  “What are you doing here?” he whispers.

  The answer is so simple. I don’t hesitate to say it. “I want to be with you.”

  Then he’s up, and he nearly throws the chair. “Your father won’t even let me fish with him. Let alone . . .” I don’t move. He says, “No. Besides. This place is for the walking dead.”

  I ignore this. “We can,” I say. “I can come back here. We can hang out.”

  His face is distorted with pain.

  “You’re a kid,” he blasts out, but it’s as if he’s blasting himself.

  “I know a lot,” I say.

  “In Afghanistan they give girls like nine to old men.”

  “I’m seventeen in February. You’re barely what, twenty?”

  “Old man. Twenty-two,” he says.

  He lifts his head. “You should get out of here.”

  “My mother was sixteen.”

  “You told me,” he says.

  “My father. I am everything to him. I wish I weren’t bad.”

  “You don’t know what bad is. You’re a child.”

  He comes down from his rage. He kneels. He places his hands on my shoulders. I close my eyes. I take in his smell of paint and beer and coffee and skin.

  A charge runs through my body. His hands are warm and very big against the bones of my shoulders and back. “You must have dreams. What do you want to be?”

  I laugh, opening my eyes. “I’m not six. Like, do you want to be a cowboy? I’m already it. I’m a businesswoman.”

  But Luke is back to pacing this space. He has lost interest. What can he say to a schoolgirl?

  “What are you going to do now?” I say.

  “What is this, the golden hour?”

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “After a trauma, like an exp
losive in your chest, the first hour, the golden time when you have a chance to save somebody. Your only chance.”

  “No,” I say.

  I stand up in the tiny room that is kitchen, living room, bedroom. Where is the gun?

  What I say is, “You need music in here.”

  “I don’t speak the same language,” he says.

  “As who?”

  “As any fuckin’ person in this country. Move on, Sofie. Go out with the girlfriends. Or the boyfriends. You got a trail of them.”

  “We do,” I say. “Speak the same language.” I don’t know why I know this. I lean against the counter, I hope provocatively. Luke steps away from me. He opens the cottage door. The footprints I left on the path when I came are covered with snow.

  His outstretched arm grazes my shoulder. Rests.

  “The family’s trying to hook me up with this Odyssey project, some mountain at the end of the world. A vet thing. My family wants the guy I used to be back.”

  “Odyssey,” I repeat.

  He drops his arm. His face turns dark. But his eyes don’t turn away. “The old guy’s gone.”

  NO RETURN

  The light is on. Not like my father. He never makes it this late. He crashes by eight or nine. But then he never leaves a room with a light on. What could we begin to have to talk about? Tell him, don’t make me sneak any more shrimp? I’ll just take it, okay, ’cause selling your shrimp is my last chance to keep you home.

  When I see the light on, a part of me feels a reprieve and it’s joyous. My father and me. We could go back to the way we used to be. Before all the things that have started spinning. For one brief second, I would be so happy to go back to just my father and me. And Luke? I don’t know.

  Snow blows into my jacket and chills my neck. I open the door.

  “Where are you selling these?” Grim lines cut into my father’s face.

  “What, Dad?”

  He hauls up a sign I’d made, Sweet Northern Shrimp.

  “I sold every one,” I tell him. “It was an experiment.” I keep talking under his grim gaze, hoping it will turn when he understands. “I processed one of the totes. I wanted to see if I could sell them. I undercut Atlantic and sold them all.”