Our boat hung on davits so it wouldn’t become home to a colony of barnacles. I lay on its deck, listening to the canal, the lapping of the sea walls, the occasional gulps under the dock, the thumps and rubbery screeches of other boats colliding into the tyres thrown over the half-waterlogged, half-scorched poles of their docks.
I smelt lighter fluid on the breath of the hot breeze hitting my face. I stared into the setting sun until I could project small suns wherever I looked. The Minsky family had arrived and Joseph was pulling in the cord of the crab trap. The first few feet were white followed by the slimy green part of the cord that usually remained beneath the waterline. That’s when whoever did the pulling was less enthusiastic.
With tongs, Joseph grabbed the first stone crab by the big claw. The second crab hooked itself onto the bottom of the trap, and he was pulling it up, upside down, by a back leg. I projected a sanguine spot onto the back of his dark curly hair, and bang, shot him. Sharon held a bucket near to the trap so Joseph could knock the third obstinately clinging crab off the grille and into it.
“De children? Where dey dis’pear?!” my mother asked, with regal offence.
As long as the three of them were having martinis, she hadn’t really cared but now it was time for dinner to be served.
“Oh, they’re taking a look at the new house, they’re not doing any harm,” answered Sharon.
A new house in Florida means one in mid-construction. It is common practice for neighbours to tour these whenever there aren’t any workers around, count the number of bedrooms and bathrooms, calculate the ratio. People generally know which state up north the owners will come from, but nothing more about them besides the real estate agency that made the sale. During the two to three odd months it takes to build the new house, the future inhabitants are subject to debate. Anyone having a chimney or a high dome ceiling installed is made fun of and probably will never fit in. A built-in bar makes potential friends. A sunken living room is taboo, since most Wachovi citizens are past their prime. After a few drinks, their hips break easily. When the owners finally move in, and shortly thereafter offer their new neighbours a tour of their house, they do not realize that the oohing and aahing imposters know their house better than they do, and were the first to use their loo.
My mother commenced the tour of her lawn. Whether Sharon and Joseph wanted it or not, they were about to get a review of every plant, tree, bud and sprout. The avocado tree, as by now everyone alive must have known, started as a pip a few years back. My mother had stuck toothpicks in it, submerged it in a cup of water and roots had sprung. The resulting lanky tree, heavy with free avocadoes, was once a brown orb, no bigger than a golf ball.
“You do de crabs, now, de barbecue, it’s a’kay,” ordered my mother as soon as she noticed me jump off the boat and land on my hands and knees on the gravel.
She was about to show Sharon and Joseph her pride and joy, a three inch high banyan tree, plucked from the famous original at the Edison Winter Home. My mother thought one day it would give her shade and liked the idea of its roots being long enough to drink from Mr. Walter’s yard instead of hers.
“Why me?” I appealed.
“B’cause already I slave all day. You, where you dis’pear all day, you?”
Sharon and Joseph could not stop themselves from smiling. Actually, Joseph had lit the barbecue, fetched the crabs and made the martinis. Sharon had brought over the potato salad, the devilled eggs and the dessert, the only sure way to have gotten any around our place, other than dried fruit. And I had set the table, which on top of my daily chores, exceeded by far hers, namely shaving her legs and painting her toenails coral pink.
“I mean, I don’t know how,” I argued, not wanting to know, either.
“Look! It so easy!” my mother hammered, “You jus’ take an’ … ”
She lifted a crab up by its weaker claw and in her impatience, broke it off while thrusting it onto its back on the red-hot grill. The six hairy legs jerked spasmodically, somewhat like an overturned beetle propels its legs against thin air.
The flames rose up around the crab. With its remaining claw, it struggled to grab onto something to pull itself away from the pain and managed to take hold of my mother’s tongs. The jointed legs agitated in a frenzy to escape when my mother squeezed the tongs this time tightly across the armoured torso, holding it securely in place over the highest flame, until the creature started to scream. I didn’t know crabs had voices. Though not loud, the cry was pathetic and shrill and sent a shiver through me.
“You see?” my mother casually asked before leaving me there with the rest of the bucket’s contents.
This one was already undergoing the transformation from life to food. Only a last leg slowly jerked its goodbye.
With the tongs, I peered into the bucket. I felt like a giant crab myself, about to pinch the next victim. The crabs’ mouths were vertical, champing nothing and spitting water like a suite of tiny panels. Their tiny eyes were propped up and leaned back and forth, begging for mercy. That was it. I grabbed hold of the plastic bucket, ran panting down to the canal and threw them back in.
“How you gettin’ ’long, Kate?” my mother inquired from the air-conditioning compressor.
The tour was coming to an end as she showed her latest aloe plant that looked like a cross between a cactus and octopus tentacle. If one broke the tip off, the extracts were said to be beneficial for healing burns. The other children had returned and were standing around me, sunburnt and mosquito bitten.
“Go and wash your hands,” Sharon ordered the children.
My mother intercepted them.
“You don’ need to go ’cross de whole house. Dip in de swimmin’ pool! Jus’ dip, dat’s ’nough.”
Everyone was sitting around the picnic table of our patio when I brought the silver dome on a platter. My mother straightened her back and lifted her chin an inch; she presided at the head of the table; on backless bench to her right, sat Joseph, Sharon, Rosa and Lucy Minsky; on the bench to her left, Tommy and Timmy Tatta, Cecilia, and the empty space for me. Tommy was busy mashing his baked potato and Timmy was picking the skin of a broken sun blister off his shoulder. Sharon and Joseph smiled at me so sweetly, that it was like a magnetic force that made the corners of my mouth yield upwards, too.
“What is it?” asked Lucy.
“Not the Easter bunny again, I hope,” I heard Rosa whisper under Sharon’s loud, “Shh!”
Sharon opened her paper napkin which my mother had cut in two; it fell apart into two squares so thin, the ceiling fan, even at the lowest speed, forced her to cross her legs to hold them in place.
“Wha’ you waitin’ for?!”
When my mother’s juices began to flow, she could become aggressive. I should have crawled under my bed, but instead I lifted the dome. One burnt stone crab lay on its back upon the silver platter.
“Where are de ot’hers?!”
“Home …” was all I managed to pronounce. I hadn’t a drop of saliva left in my mouth.
“You! Where, home?! De kitchen?” She stood up. “Do you hear me?!”
If I did, I couldn’t any more because I had just received a smack on my ear hard enough to make it ring. Lucy and Rosa lowered their heads on the table and began to cry, not because there was nothing to eat, but because I had been hit. Cecilia used to cry, too, but she was used to it by now. Their sobs gave me courage and I found myself screaming at the top of my voice, “Home in the canal!” several times on end.
This somehow calmed my mother who sat back down and let her arms hang limply off her lawn chair, as though her jewelry had really been stolen, for once. Sharon hadn’t spoken yet but looked back and forth as though she were watching a table tennis match with equal sympathy for both Chinese players. Joseph kept his eyes down on his baked potato, and poked holes in the aluminum paper.
“It doesn’t matter, Olga, ah, poor thing, I know how she feels, the little darling …”
I could tell Sharon’s words had no effect whatsoever in softening my mother. Human kindness to her was equivalent to stupidity. When volunteers came to the door to collect, my mother was already in mid-calculation: she took a walk around the block anyway, so if she could earn a few dollars a night in doing so … It is very painful for me to admit that my mother helped herself to the handsomest bills in the American Cancer Society and Multiple Sclerosis cans she toted around. Some community members put their bills in envelopes. These were opened with the steam of a consommé de homard or beef broth, one dollar put in their place, and closed. My mother said the organizations were crooks and only ten percent made it to the sick or handicapped. Like the food chain, she felt somewhere along the line, she deserved her piece of the pie.
“Should I order a pizza?” Joseph asked.
The “yeahs” of youth were forceful, though I dared not join in. I looked down at the pebble-stone floor, which even in the worst of circumstances reminded me of some sticky treat.
“Such beaut’ful crab an’ we are goin’ to eat ar’ficial, manmade pizza!” “Man-made”, was the worst insult my mother could verbalize. With it, I received a series of pinches on my neck, face, stomach and thighs, hard enough to make me scream. There was no flotilla of crabs around to defend me. That’s when Lucy sought refuge in her father’s frail, fair arms and begged to be taken back home.
Cecilia’s chin dimpled, which it always did when she tried not to cry.
“No!” protested Rosa, “If we go, she’ll kill her!”
Her father apparently agreed, for he proposed to take all of us out to the Red Lobster, where my mother could taste the “Loving Couple”, a thick, juicy filet mignon snuggling up to a lobster tail. His description was persuasive. To my relief, my mother accepted the invitation. I knew I would not be allowed to go, yet sensed that standing by Sharon and Joseph Minsky’s van before my mother ordered me into the pantry closet would reduce my sentence, especially if I wailed audibly on my way in.
Really, I didn’t care as much as they thought. I wasn’t hungry, for I’d swallowed enough of my snot and tears. Pantry closet time in my mother’s absence was based on the honour system, as though she had given us the right example in valuing such things. I went to the pantry closet for a stepladder, and brought Stag Head down from the wall. I placed him on the glass table, balancing him on his wooden plaque.
At first, Stag Head was unused to a vertical position, and even nauseous, which I suppose after so many years of looking only straight ahead across our dining room, should be expected, though this did strike me as odd for he no longer had a stomach. I put his plaque against my face and gave him a run across the house, imagining my father was chasing us with a gun. It was great fun.
Out of breath, I squatted down and held Stag Head’s neck between my knobbly knees. I stroked the hairs on his head and neck, at least down to where it had been severed. I cupped my hands over the plastic bulbs someone had exchanged for his eyes, lifting them as though they were his own eyelids. The spirit of life regained him, as did his affection for me.
When Stag Head recovered his place on the unchanging wall, I entered the closet and closed the door. Only in the darkness, can one hear one’s own breathing. Only in darkness, does one strain the eyes for light. I did, until the darkness moved, like a thousand flies. Closing my lids and opening them made no difference. Blackness lives, dances, too, like anyone knows who has long observed it.