Something Rather than Nothing

If I could squint just a little harder into the horizon, I would see something. Pirates, mermaids, or an undiscovered coastline replete with naked natives and a spring of eternal youth. The ocean does not belong to us in such a final way. Land is conquerable, knowable. You don’t envision wood nymphs in the crepe myrtles or sorcerers behind the 7-11, at least not with any real sense of conviction. The known is too pervasive to leave room for the unknown.

But looking out upon the sea, the unknown scrapes against the known and the impossible is no longer a solid black line. All lines in the sand disappear eventually. Some in mere seconds.

It’s getting warmer. The early dawn clouds are burning off and the sun whitewashes some of the possibility. Beachgoers with umbrellas and kites and ordinary purposes start to descend. It’s not as easy now to see the shipwrecked sirens almost out of reach of your trembling eye. The seagulls see them too and they cry to me as they fly overhead. I run my hand along the longboard next to me and wonder how long it would take to paddle out to them. A very long time in earthly hours, but once you pass the breaking point of the waves, not very long at all. I walk out into the waves carrying my board. A few feet out from the shore, the bottom drops off and I look back at the beach. It looks very far away now. I put my board down on the water and start paddling. The feeling of the shore behind me fades and I remember I owe my sister a call. I don’t ordinarily paddle out for this long, and I begin to find a methodical, purposeful rhythm. Without a wave to catch, each stroke seems to have more inherent purpose.

When I arrive, they aren’t as pretty as I hoped. Somehow, they have all the trappings of beauty and maybe they are beautiful, but they aren’t pretty. There’s two of them, and there should be three. They also aren’t shipwrecked. They lounge languidly on the deck looking both becoming and adversarial.

There isn’t anything wrong with my sister, except I don’t want to talk to her, which might lead you to conclude that there must be something wrong with either her or me. My sister takes help and validation as her sustenance. She is older by twenty-two months but happily cast herself into the role of the younger sibling. She’s barely five feet tall and probably still wears her short blonde hair in two pigtail braids. I haven’t seen her in three years. She separated from her husband recently, which is why I owe her a call. She thinks someone is remotely accessing the camera in her home security system because the recording light illuminates seemingly on its own volition.

She has a watercolor palette with 48 colors and somehow she can’t find the right shade of a color she isn’t sure exists. The night she left me the voicemail, she spent forty-eight minutes staring at the palette trying to decide where the unknown color would go, as if that would help her visualize it, or name it. On the voicemail, she amends her statement and says she doesn’t know for sure if it was 48 minutes because the clock on her stove seems to be keeping its own irregular time, despite her neighbor’s multiple attempts to set it. A minute is not a minute, she says. She needs help with the clock, with the color, and of course with the errant security system. And, she wants to know if she should dye her hair black.

I’m still straddling my surfboard, contemplating the sirens. The shore looks very far away and that is a relief. Is relief the absence of fear? There is a baby on the surfboard with me. He lays on his back, not yet able to roll over or lift his head. He is naked and his skin is raw, untouched. The sirens beckon to me. They want him. I paddle closer. They reach out their arms. I could pick him up and hand imr to them, but I don’t want to touch him. The surfboard bobs with the gentle waves and the sun is so bright. I look up. There are no clouds in view and the sun is so hot that it finally burns hotter than my fear. The sirens are dancing and there is no music. Their arms and legs seem to move disjointedly, almost like marionettes. They twirl around and around and begin to laugh. The laughter becomes their music and rings out across the expanse of ocean. Wind catches their sail and propels the boat farther away from us. They do not look back and the sun compels me to stare upwards again. I let it fill me and suddenly I am laughing too. When I look back down, the baby has slipped off the surfboard.

I start paddling in, and miraculously there is a wave. I catch it, shakily stand up on my board, and ride it to shore. I glide past the jubilant kids and the locals with tans and the people who are afraid of everything in bucket hats and long sleeves, and suddenly life is tangible again, it’s bustling, it’s loud and it’s still so bright. My towel and shoes are still where I left them. I pull my phone out of my shoe and I have a few missed calls from Marin. There’s a voicemail, so I play it.

“Don’t get in the water,” she says, sounding more resolute than normal. “Don’t surf. I had a dream”. I look back out at the water. I want a respite from the sun, so I stretch out face down on my towel and close my eyes.

Sleep envelopes me almost instantly, but at first my body fights it, yanking me in and out of whatever preposterous situation my subconscious has created. But now, I’m in a wood paneled room and the room has an amber glow and I cannot see the light source. I’m sitting at a small bar, and there are liquor bottles on the shelves behind the bar, but no bartender, or cash register, or other bar stools. I am occupying the only one. I look around the room, but it is too dim to see past my immediate surroundings. I stand up and walk behind the bar and pour myself a glass of Mezcal. As I sit back down at the bar, I notice a corner of the room is now illuminated. There is a couple sitting on a Victorian loveseat, which faces away from me towards the wall. The woman is blonde and the man is wearing a suit. The suit jacket is unbuttoned and has the most impressive brass buttons. I know this without seeing it. They are deeply engaged in conversation but the silence is still undisturbed in the room. The Mezcal tastes smokier than it should and the taste lingers in my throat, my nose and my eyes. Now it’s smokey in the room - I can see it in the air but when I breathe in a puff of gray air, the breath clears the smoke from my lungs and I close my eyes and I’m in a meadow. The couple is in the meadow with me, still arranged facing each other on the Victorian armchair. I can tell from the woman’s eyes that she loves the man. The skin on the sides of her eyes crinkle and when she looks at him I can feel the gleam of devotion. I can see every line on her face, every tiny blemish. It occurs to me that I should not be able to see this woman in such detail since they are sitting a good ways away, and somehow the meadow is just as dim as the room. This time, I can see the lamp. It’s sitting in the middle of the meadow casting its amber light. I can only see the back of the man’s head. But the woman’s face. It grows in magnitude and the tiny blemishes become pockmarked craters and jagged crevices and it’s no longer a face at all. I feel a tear slide down my own face, but it isn’t a tear; it’s Mezcal. A woman appears next to me. Her hair is long and wild and she is wearing a flowing brown dress. She hands me another glass of Mezcal. Instead of drinking it, I flick my wrist and splash it on her. The liquor hits her dress and it slowly burns off in patches. The woman doesn’t react until she is entirely naked and then she laughs and laughs and it reverberates through me just like the laughter of the sirens.

I wake up, just in time. Not in time for anything important, because there isn’t much life currently requires of me. No, I woke just in time because I didn’t want to experience what the dream held next for me. I roll over onto my back and the sun drills into my eyelids.

We are in Woonsocket, Rhode Island and I am 7 and my sister is 9. We are buying pastries at Juliana’s Bakery and our father won’t allow us to buy as many as we want, but it’s still our favorite part of the day. That is the only way I remember my father’s mother -- bringing a box of cannolis and eclairs to the dim house she had lived in since she was 20, and we always brought too many, because we were never sure how many of my father’s adult siblings would be there. Mostly we wouldn’t see them anyway; they somehow had each carved out their own private space in the tiny house. I couldn’t tell you the floor plan even back then; we never made it past the kitchen. As far as I could tell, that is where our father’s mother spent all of her days, languishing in her own fat. We didn’t like her because she was fat and had a wart on her wrinkled fat face that grew long hairs. That was cruel of us, but children don’t yet know they are cruel.

In the pastry shop my sister asks if we will have to give Grandma a kiss. It is a once-a-year occurrence and so distasteful to us, that we have started protesting well in advance.

Our father doesn’t answer her, so my sister asks again. “Do we have to?” I get the feeling he doesn’t enjoy this day either, but unlike us children, he understands obligation.

When she asks a third time, my father only says her name. “Marin.”

In the car, my father slaps Marin across the face when she asks a fourth time.

She cries instantly and we ride in silence to Grandma’s.

Our father was not a typically violent person. I don’t know much about him, but I do know that. He would taste the pasta as our step-mother cooked it, so he could tell her when to take it off for the perfect al dente.

“The time on the box doesn’t matter”, he would say and blow on the hot noodle hanging in delicate balance on his fork. That is how we knew he was Italian - the pasta and the pastries.

Grandma always seemed to enjoy the pastries and it was important to our father to bring them. I wondered (as soon as I was old enough to start wondering about this kind of thing, but not yet old enough to understand guilt) why she didn’t just get these pastries herself. After all, she was only a few New England street blocks away from the bakery, whereas we lived in West Virginia where the closest thing to an Italian Bakery was the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Marin stops crying by the time we pull up in front of the lichen green clapboard house. We stand on the concrete stoop under the dingy yellow plastic awning and cold moisture starts falling from the sky.

Grandma yells, “Come in,” because of course she cannot get up from the recliner in the kitchen (can she?). Our father and the pastries go first, then me, then Marin.

I deliver my kiss, and then Marin. I can tell she is holding her breath. I think I held mine.

Our father talks about traffic, Marin’s performance in school, the ambiguous precipitation. Grandma eats a cannoli and she has white cream mixing with the dark hairs on her upper lip. I try not to look at her bare feet. They are engorged and not flesh-colored. I don’t want to look at the hairs on her upper lip or chin either, so I stare around the kitchen.

“I was so proud of Willow for not having that abortion,” Grandma says and she is talking to me.

“Ma,” our father says.

Willow, of course, is our mother.

That abortion, is me.

I call my sister.

“Finally,” she answers the phone.

I start to tell her I’ve been busy, but I can lie to most people except for her. She’s unconcerned. She knows how I am.

“Can you please come help me with this security system? And I need motion lights. It’s so dark.”

I also know how she is and I know I don’t want to fly to Raleigh, but I will.

So I say, “okay,” and she knows I mean it.

“Oh,” she says. “I think the color is somewhere between green and orange.”

“I’ll book my flight tonight,” I say.

We hang up and I close my eyes, trying to come up with something besides mud when you mix orange and green. I frown because it’s impossible, but then I’m in a sun-spotted forest, with orange sunset streaming through the pines and glinting off the pine needles bedding the ground. And for a fleeting moment, I have the possibility of the color but I can’t grasp it, and the harder I try, the more it slips away. Now, I frown because I’m frustrated with my sister. It’ll be a hell of a visit.