Among Other Things, I've Taken Up Smoking Page 4

  When I opened the door they all took off their hats, even though it was freezing. I wondered if they had been told ahead of time to do that, or if those were policemen’s rules. A fisherman would have kept his on. “Wanted to be sure you and your dad were alright,” Chief Nichols said to me.

  I heard my father, pushing his chair back. All the men shifted their feet and coughed, white clouds of breath tearing away from their faces.

  “What’s this?” my father said, from behind me, his eyes landing on the chief.

  “Morning, Mr. Donnal. Haven’t seen Miranda coming across for school and we wanted to make sure you were alright,” Chief Nichols said, polite.

  “Well, we haven’t really got the weather for crossing, have we?” my father answered, cheerfully enough. I saw his eyes flickering down to the beach, the boat on the shore. He was wearing his slippers, and his hair was standing on end; he’d been pulling at it all morning.

  “Think we could come inside?” said the chief.

  “Doubt I have too much choice,” my father replied, smiling again, standing back and gesturing for me to do the same.

  I recognized one of them, Dan MacPherson’s brother John, whom Julie had once said she wanted to marry, just because he was going to the Coast Guard Academy. It occurred to me that my father had never met anyone like John MacPherson, though Mr. Blackwell would have known him—Mr. Blackwell would have known them all.

  My father remained by the door, leaving it open; he looked smaller with so many men in the house, and I wished someone would sit down. Their big boots tracked in puddles of sandy snow. I busied myself putting a kettle on, as if we were all about to have tea.

  The chief took off his gloves. “Don’t mean to disturb you, Mr. Donnal,” he said, tucking the gloves carefully into his hat as if he were building a nest, “but the school board feels that you’re putting Miranda’s education at risk.”

  “The school board?” my father repeated.

  “Miranda’s missed several months of school.”

  My father looked at him. “My daughter has been helping me to translate Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” he said.

  The chief glanced down at his hat. The open door was against everyone’s instincts. The other men were watching him. “Well, we went ahead and cleared a path for you, Mr. Donnal,” he said, “so Miranda’ll be able to come over in the morning.”

  “I’m certain my daughter will do whatever she likes,” my father replied, his eyes twinkling, as if we’d won.

  They all looked toward me and I felt my stomach turning. A pimple had broken out at the corner of my mouth that morning and I bit my lower lip, as if I could cover it up. Even the Coast Guard men knew I had never made a decision in my life.

  Chief Nichols gave me a nod. As they all walked out I had the curious feeling that I should want to marry them too. They could rescue me, I thought, as they put their hats back on. I should rush after them, I thought, as I watched them walk in a soldierly line down to the beach. The kettle whistled and my father and I both rushed to turn it off.

  That night I made a pie with a jar of blueberry preserves, the way I did when we finished a lengthy section. But we could hardly eat it.

  “I think you need a new sweater,” I said finally, when we were cleaning up, pointing out how the hem of his was unraveling.

  “Perhaps I do,” he said, glancing down at it.

  “I’ll get you one,” I said, and he nodded gratefully: Both of us knew he was giving me permission to go to school in the morning. The next morning I went into the shed before the sun was up and rummaged around for fresh spark plugs, drained the treated fuel, and remounted the engine. With my father’s help the boat slid easily down the frozen sand into the water. The whole bay had already begun to break apart into big fatty chunks.

  Mr. Blackwell came down to the dock to meet me, holding his coffee in both hands like a candle. For a minute I was angry, but more for my father’s sake than for my own. I tied up the boat without saying anything.

  “I’m getting my father a new sweater today,” I said, when it seemed like he was just going to let me go.

  “That’ll be a nice present,” he said.

  He didn’t ask me to have coffee, though. Nobody at school asked me where I’d been either. Julie said it didn’t make that much difference, with Christmas in between, but she and Donna Morrissey were wearing the same eyeliner, and at the end of the day they left together, striding off in the direction of the gym. I picked out a red wool sweater for my father at Friedlander’s, and the saleswoman wrapped it in tissue and put it in a box that was too big for my knapsack.

  On the way out of the harbor it got splashed, and I was going to move it closer, but I was concentrating on the ice, and I let it fall instead into the bilge. The box opened and the sweater fell out, still folded in its tissue paper. I didn’t stop the boat. When I got into the channel where the broken path had widened with the tide I turned to drive past the red channel marker and into the bay.

  Before the bay froze I’d tried to tell Julie the story of Phaethon, who asked to drive his father’s chariot because someone at school had asked for proof that he was the son of the sun god. He went all the way to his father’s palace to get permission, and he could have asked for anything, but he wanted to drive the chariot, pulled across the sky by a team of fiery winged horses that only his father could control.

  “Why did he ask for that?” Julie had said, disdainful.

  “Boys like to drive things,” I’d answered with a shrug, and she’d laughed.

  “You like to drive things too,” she’d said.

  When I got into the bay I kept going, straight out. The wind cut at my face. There were still big patches of ice to avoid, but they were easy to spot; I didn’t know where I was going, but I wasn’t scared. Phaethon had gotten what he wanted, and despite his father’s protests he’d taken the reins of the chariot and rode into the sky. The horses had panicked at his unfamiliar weight and gone wild—he’d scorched the earth, and eventually Jove had had to throw one of his lightning bolts straight into the burning mess to prevent any more damage.

  I slowed the boat and cut the engine. All around me the ice flowed silently out of the bay. The water was dark and viscous, the afternoon sun hard and flat.

  “I would have asked for something gold from the palace,” Julie had said, fiddling dreamily with the bracelet she always wore, “so I could take it home and show everybody.”

  “But how would they know it was from a god?” I’d asked.

  “They could just tell. It would have jewels.”

  “He wanted to prove it, though,” I’d pushed.

  She’d looked annoyed. “What would you ask for then?”

  I didn’t know, of course. In the stories I typed for my father everyone was always making mistakes; there was no easy answer. Nothing Phaethon could have asked for would have satisfied him. In Ovid greed and pride and lust were as inevitable as mortality.

  In the weeks before the bay froze my father and I had had a kind of rhythm—I was spelling words before he said them, and pausing only when he breathed. There was a luxurious absence in my head, the way I felt when I was drawing, or just imagining things, picturing the horses, the chariot flailing across the sky. I looked out at the bay, knowing I should turn on the engine and go home. The cold had seeped into my clothes and begun to settle in me. The boat had begun to pull with the current. Finally I leaned forward and picked up his sweater, put it back in the box. The wool was machine knit and smooth, and I brushed off the water it had touched in the bilge and folded it back into the box. I knew we wouldn’t get our rhythm back. I would go home and make supper, and in the morning I’d go back to school, as if it was nothing to leave him behind, when it had seemed at last that we had gotten used to being alone together.

  6

  By the summer before ninth grade I never went into town unless I was going to school or shopping for supplies. On the days my father came with me, if Mr. Blackwell was on the do
ck, my father simply walked right past him. The first time it happened Mr. Blackwell seemed startled, but the next time his eyes were flint.

  When school started Julie had become best friends with Donna Morrissey, and the two of them were going to all the basketball games. Shead High School was in the Maine Boys Basketball Championship. Sometimes I went with them. After the games everybody went to the parking lot where they stood around and smoked cigarettes. Julie usually invited me to come along but she always seemed relieved when I mumbled something about going home to cook supper, or getting back before dark. She and Donna had bought bras together, on one of their shopping trips in Bangor; she had showed hers to me in the bathroom.

  Occasionally I would see Mrs. Peabody, and she would ask after my father. One day that spring she caught us in town and somehow, before we knew it, we had agreed to go on a family day trip out to Wolf Island. The Peabodys had a big white motorboat moored in Deep Cove. My father said we could cancel if it was bad weather, but the day we had arranged to meet them was bright as summer.

  Julie gave me a lukewarm greeting as we got into the boat—to signify that it was my fault she was spending Saturday with her family. I had worn jeans, the way I did when Mr. Blackwell used to let me go fishing with him, and my father had worn his trusted foul-weather gear, but Julie and her mother were in shorts as if they were going for a cruise. Mrs. Peabody rushed over to kiss my father on the cheek, and my father, stiff and confused, kissed her again on the other cheek in the French manner, which she attempted, flushing, to reciprocate, just as my father backed away, nearly falling out of the boat. Everyone was relieved when Mr. Peabody shook my father’s hand and showed him his fishing gear.

  Julie’s brother cast us off us from the mooring. He was excited, as if it was a treat for him to see his father, and as Mr. Peabody started the motor they shouted various commands back and forth. My father sat carefully in one of the swiveling plastic chairs, looking back at our wake as we left the harbor and Mr. Peabody accelerated up to full speed. Mr. Peabody shouted a few things to him and he turned his chair and pulled a smile onto his face.

  Julie asked me to put sun lotion on her, and then lay down beside me on the deck, the skin on her arms and legs goose-pimpling in the breeze as we sped into the bay. I sat beside her in my jeans, holding my knees. My father was giving me less to type, but I kept the stories in my head for longer and retold them to myself when I was sitting in the back of class, or going back and forth to school. I looked out at the bay past Julie’s shining legs and thought of Salmacis and Hermaphroditus.

  Salmacis was a nymph, but unlike all the other nymphs who roamed hunting through the woods and streams, she was “the only naiad unknown to the fleet-footed Diana,” because she would not pick up a bow, and preferred instead to “bathe her lovely limbs” in her favorite pool, comb her hair, and study her reflection. Hermaphroditus, named after his father, Hermes, messenger of the gods, and his mother, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, was a young deity who had inherited both his mother’s physical passion and his father’s restless sense of adventure. He loved the world as if it were his mistress, doting on the tiniest blooming woodland flower every bit as much as the highest temple spire.

  When Hermaphroditus comes upon Salmacis’s favorite pool he is so struck by its beauty that he fails to notice Salmacis, lingering as usual by her reflection. The minute she looks up, she falls in love with him. She pauses to primp—fixing her watery hair, adjusting her flowing garment—and then she approaches him to ask for a kiss. Hermaphroditus is terrified. He has been admiring other things. He tells her he is leaving but she persuades him to stay, telling him she’ll go instead, and then she hides behind a bush and waits for another chance at him.

  Julie got up to go get something warmer, and I closed my eyes, imagining Salmacis turning back to the pool as soon as he thinks she is gone. The pool is quiet, and it doesn’t take long before he is stepping from one rock to another, noticing the way the sunlight dips in through the clear water to magnify the pebbles on the bottom. When he strips off his clothing and walks in, the cool water tickles his calves, then his thighs, before he dives. “I have won! He is mine!” Salmacis cries as soon as she sees the splash, diving in after him, like the hunter she is supposed to be. Hermaphroditus feels her latching on. He struggles to free himself, but she wraps her legs around him and won’t let go. He can’t pry her off—she pulls at him, needy as a whirlpool. He feels he might drown. He twists in confusion, trying to find her—trying to find her mouth. He kisses her to appease her. Her hands hunt all over his back, she presses against him in the water, and he presses into her, but still she cries out for the gods to make them closer. The gods answer: their bodies begin to condense, her soft breasts melting into his hard chest, their legs twining together, until Hermaphroditus cries out, surrendering, and they are one body, neither a woman nor a man.

  “You okay?” Julie asked, handing me her glass of lemonade and sitting back down beside me. She had a blanket wrapped around her, and her hair was streaming back in the wind. I took a sip and passed the lemonade back when she was settled.

  We could see our destination already, a small cove like the one in front of our house, and we tied the boat to a stump on shore. Julie’s mother got lunch out of the cooler, still packing and unpacking things. Mr. Peabody offered my father a beer and when he declined all they had was lemonade, which I knew would be too sweet for him. I also knew he didn’t like eating in the sun, and I watched nervously as he accepted his ham sandwich, which I was sure he didn’t like either. Julie was telling me how she was on a diet and wouldn’t have any brownies, when I heard Mrs. Peabody say brightly, “You and Miranda ought to get out more, Peter.”

  I looked over at him and saw the spark of impatience in his eyes that he’d had ever since he quit drinking. “Is that right?” he said to her.

  “We all wonder what you’re doing over there, all by yourselves.”

  “I’m sure you do, Alice,” he said with a condescending smile, “but it can’t be nearly as exciting as what you imagine.”

  She laughed uncertainly, avoiding his eye, and then took a sip of lemonade. “Well, we do like going out in the boat,” she said, looking around the shores of the cove with false contentment. “But I guess you two are out on the ocean all the time.”

  “Not if I can avoid it.”

  He hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings I don’t think, but he’d said it sharply, and she blushed.

  “He gets seasick,” I interceded from across the cockpit.

  My father took a sip of the lemonade and winced, and Mrs. Peabody got up quickly to put things back into the cooler. I felt for a minute like I hated her, and Julie too. All of them.

  On the way back Julie went up into the bow and I stayed beside my father. I put my hand out over the side to feel the cold coming up from the water. Mr. Blackwell had once described for me the way that molecules of cold air rising up from the bay combined with molecules of hot air rolling off the land and formed the thick banks of fog the island was shrouded in every morning and evening. I’d always wondered, though, about the place where the two met: whether it was the cold that surrendered to warm, or the air that surrendered to the water. It seemed to me there must have been a place, a moment of pause, before they were either.

  I put my hand on my father’s knee. He was staring out at our wake again, watching the island recede, and I knew he wished we were already home.

  “We’ll be home soon,” I said close to his ear.

  He looked at me with surprise, as if that wasn’t what he was thinking at all.

  7

  He started drinking again a few months after that, one night when I’d made nothing but navy bean soup. We had fresh bread to go with it, but for years I wondered if he would have had that glass of whiskey if I’d served a better supper. He’d poured it just before he sat down, in one of the heavy whiskey glasses he always got out for Mr. Blackwell. It seemed to have gotten there on its own, the bronze light of the
liquor half filling the glass, like an unanticipated guest. We were both mindful of it, almost polite, and when he finally took a sip, it was without ceremony, as if that way I might not notice. He closed his eyes, just briefly, and when he opened them again he was the same.

  I don’t know what kind of change I was expecting. I went to school every day and he went slower on the manuscript, and on the rare afternoons he had something for me to type I could finish it in a few minutes. Sometimes he would put a hand on the back of my chair, lean over to see how far I had gotten, and I would shiver at the smell of liquor on his breath. But other times I would wander over to him, ask the spelling of a word I couldn’t make out, and when he pulled me in close to frown at whatever page I held he was nothing but himself, concentrating.

  Shead basketball team got into the championship again senior year, and without Julie to keep me company I got in the habit of drawing between classes and then during classes. Mostly I drew flowers, filling the margins of my textbooks with patterns of ivy and blossoms. The only plant I could really draw without actually looking at it was a tree. I drew them with and without leaves; I drew them with knots in their trunks and crags in their branches and with roots cutting across the mossy ground. When summer came around again I started taking a thermos of coffee with me to go out and sketch wildflowers before my father woke up. That July when the meadow on the south side of the island flooded with purple towers of lupine I spent nearly a week there, trying to translate the purple and blue into black and white. Some of the stalks were dark to the tip, and others were faint, almost white at the top, and bloomed fat and velvety in the middle. I drew one stalk after another, the splay of leaves at the bottom, the pairs of ascending petals, cupping themselves, the pods before they broke, the burnt look they got when they began to die. In the night when I had trouble sleeping I went down to the living room and drew my hands: open palms, fists, lone fingers. My father said it was all the coffee, but I felt restless in a way I hadn’t before.