Once, my mother appeared with hair streaked blond and bright meticulously colored-in pink lips. She said she was sorry it had been so long but blamed me for not getting the letters she’d sent to an old address. She said that when she didn’t hear back, she thought she’d come check on her baby. She couldn’t stop saying how cold it was. I told her it was a freeze, and that we were all freezing.
All of that at the doorstep made my father and me uncomfortable, and still, I let her in, and she plopped onto the couch and asked for a vodka ice.
She rambled on about her new project at the Sea Institute. She said it happened by chance; my mother was seating tables in Santa Monica when she befriended a regular, a research fellow who focused on the mating rituals of porpoises, and—just like that—the PhD was impressed with my mother’s intricate knowledge of land and sea. My mother said she wasn’t, like, a research person, or anything, but she helped organize files, and made spreadsheets with porpoise-mating-ritual numbers.
“Oh, it’s your dream,” she said to me.
I tried to conceal that I rarely dreamed—that each night I slept soundly, either stoned or buzzed, or exhausted from sorrow, or tired from thinking of boys and television and trees and snakes and monsters. I knew that dreams were just dreams and that nothing really came true, especially if you wanted it to.
She handed me a folder, and when I opened it there were applications and forms, and signatures highlighted in yellow. She said I could work as a research assistant with this PhD person, who would help me get into the Institute program someday, or work in the oceans, or do whatever it was I had always wanted to do with all those things that lurked in the depths below.
“You could at least try it out,” she says. “You can stay with me.”
My father paced and paced himself right outside the door for more beer. My mother wanted to take me to dinner. Everything was so loud, and my mother, she just kept talking. About the tanks filled with sea life, about the people saving the oceans, about the cafeteria, about the little bungalow she had on the border of Venice, about how her life was somehow all put back together again, and how she really loved me. And that it was time I tried being a woman with a real woman around. Said I needed mothering. Said it was time for guidance outside of the sea and the sky.
The worst part was, I really didn’t want to say no, so I said nothing, as some sort of secret compliance. Before my father returned, red-faced, and after my mother caught the last ferry back, I lay on the carpet and scratched my back the way I did, so hard, when I had chicken pox in kindergarten. The itch, though, it just didn’t go away.
Why do you want to work for The Sea Institute? Please explain in a paragraph or less.
(We call them by different names, but these waters are one. Still, we have categorized five major oceans: Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Southern, and Arctic. It would take fourteen years to sail these waters. Dad says someday we will do it. All 361.9 million square kilometers left to explore. But he never leaves. Also, we saw Titanic seven times in the theater. My tears were endless; my love is still boundless. Deep as that sunken ship and as dreamy as a frozen Jack crusted and attached to a limber piece of wood. Also, if I don’t go now, who will be left to bury me here?)
It’s true that my father drank to celebrate. When he was sad. When he was unsure. When he was hurting. When he was hoping. When I told him that I was moving to the mainland with my mother. Just for a year, I promised, and I hopeful-joked that even if it was terrible, I’d have to go find out for myself. My father drank himself to sleep for a few weeks. Rook cried. Mary told me I’d always have a place at Ferry Lands, and she told me to write.
I never told anyone that I just wanted my mother to get me, just once, just for a year, just us watching dolphins swim in see-through-walled aquariums. Because how do you ask someone to see you?
My mother secured a two-bedroom apartment near the Sea Institute and an extra bike that I could ride to work.
“What do you like to eat?” she asked.
“I’ll eat anything.”
“Can you cook?” she asked.
“I think so.”
My stomach was in knots for a week before I left, and I chased Rook around Winter Island. We camped in the old bat caves near Ferry Lands, and we made out with tourists and smoked spliffs. We lay atop grasses and gazed up to the sun until we were almost blind, and even then, when her fingers were interlaced in mine, she told me again and again how much she loved me and how sorry she was.
“I have a tattoo guy on the Venice Boardwalk,” she said. “I’ll probably come out a lot to finish this sunset on my back.”
We held hands at the going-away party Dad threw at Rocky’s Fish N Chips. It was a full day of adults getting blitzed and then a wild roundup of men who took us on boats to fish for whatever we could find. Dad put his arm around me, and pulled me close, and whispered that I could come home, even if this wasn’t a real home, anytime. That day, he puked over the side of the boat and, somehow, my legs and stomach were sturdy. Rook kissed an older man who could crush Coors cans and wore a found captain’s hat.
The remaining days before I really left were busy with Dad keeping a steady buzz and organizing and reorganizing our things to make the house appear tidy. He made dinner with fancy sausages and steaks, and let me sip red wine. We watched every sunset, and sometimes, it felt like we were dying. We spent an afternoon at the abandoned Institute and traipsed along pungent cannabis fields that flickered green against wet soil and a backdrop of massive trees. I smoked joints and ate grilled-cheese sandwiches, and the wind whipped hair all over my face. Sometimes, Rook was there, too, like I was terminal, like I was never coming back. We spent the last mornings dunking our hands into water-filled coral holes at the tide pools. We saw Old Tropez’s headstone.
The sun was inching away from us on my last night. My things were packed. My father had been out all day, fishing and working, he said, and we would meet for one last cheeseburger in town. It was scratched onto our wall calendar in pencil. But he never showed.
We used to say that everything was broken most of the time: the fish tank with a slow leak; the fish, a Carnie Wilson and a Joe Montana, who died on the laminate of a living room floor. A homemade lava lamp without lava—a watery grave of a lamp with an occasional glitter fleck floating around. Still, I plugged it in and used it to illuminate one of our dining room tables. The Barbie Dreamhouse, drunkenly put together backward. All of my Kens sitting on bowlegged chairs and doors opening from the outside in. A collection of lost-and-found items from Otto House, which included holey rain jackets, twisted umbrellas, too-small shoes, and vacation hats smelling of body odor and astringent. All the trash bags had rips. The carpets were never clean.
My father bought an always-broken pickup truck from a neighbor. He’d promised a year’s supply of Winter Wonderland in exchange for a beat-up piece of scratched red metal. At first, she hummed. We cruised the streets with the windows down and our arms slung around her sides. Even in the rain. We installed a new radio, and my father turned up the volume at red lights. My father honked at Rocky’s Fish N Chips and revved at bouncy bikini boobs roller-skating in front of Otto House. He waxed the damn thing every day. He parked her in our gravel driveway, which was so slim that we had to pull the mirrors in tight. Her wretched, rusted squeals sounded like whales passing in the night.
My father called the truck Maybellene. Must have been the red on that truck that inspired all the Chuck Berry on the stereo. Our first car was incapable of just working, or being easy or reliable. My father’s Maybellene suffered from heat exhaustion, from screaming brakes, from problems with the starter, among all the other things.
We cruised on Sundays, during the lull of the season, the hunkering down in the cold. We were heading uphill the day Maybellene broke down; she just suddenly sighed and stopped altogether. I enjoyed the hill view of perfect sunset, but we had to leave her and walk home to call for help. He kicked her hard, until his feet must have bruised her tires. Until he must have broken his toes.
“Godfuckingdamnthisgoddamnplace,” he yelled.
Rain the whole walk home.
We ate dinner under an awning outside 7-Eleven: warm-spun hot dogs from the case, and chips. Our favorite, anyway. My father let me have a Coke. When he was that angry, my father drank tea. Because there wasn’t enough booze to calm him. He sipped it slowly and took deep breaths.
I arrived the next day on foot, and Maybellene was coned off by the Winter Island Police. Traffic swelled up just to pass her, tourists cursing our slow-moving task handlers. My father carried a few tools and a gallon of water. I sat on the curb and watched the Sea Institute vans piling off the island. Full of young and eager faces that I imagined to have waterproof bags full of sea treasures.
When her engine started, my father shouted for me to jump into the moving truck. He said she couldn’t stop until we got home. He played Chuck Berry again, and the sound rattled against her metal shell. He told me to steer for him while he opened a can of Coors. I steered the whole way home, my face an infinite smile.
He washed her that night, and he washed her even when the mainland was full of drought and we were sharing water. Even when it rained. Especially when it rained, and even when everything else was broken. Among the sea of things he could not do, there were some things he certainly did well. Not everything was broken.
I waited for an hour. I knew he couldn’t do it, like he couldn’t do a lot of things, but I continued to sit on a wobbly bench outside the burger place until I ordered and ate alone. I tried to compartmentalize all of our little tragedies on Winter Island. I tried to focus on the onion and lettuce and meat, but I was just chewing over gulps of anger and tears. I told myself that, though he was flawed, he loved me, and as I drowned in Diet Coke, I wondered if it was enough. The restaurant began to fill with the Saturday night crowd, and I rushed out, sauce all over my face, to avoid saying any more goodbyes. It was especially cold, and I wished I’d brought my jacket for my ride home.
My father always said not to look for him. But I rode slowly, peering into the yellow light of every bar on my way home. I told myself so many things: he was home, he was asleep, he was sorry, he was busy saving a dolphin tangled in a fishing line, he loved me, he really, really did. But in the dim glow of a bar window, he was sipping a beer, with a few men around him roaring with laughter. I thought of marching in there, of scratching his face off, of really getting loud and telling him how terrible he was, but there was a worse problem: I wasn’t sure I felt that way.
He was using his hands to tell a story. More laughter. His face was red. Maybe he was talking about me. I sat on the seawall, close enough to him that if I yelled he might have heard me, and watched fog turn the streetlight orange. I smoked a cigarette that Rook had stashed in my bag and decided there was nothing to do but to forgive him. There was no other way to keep him. There was no other way to love him. It just had to be full of disappointment and love.
Maybe it was just too hard for us, the leavings, so I headed out on that last ferry without saying goodbye but knowing forever where to find him. There was a gray snake of smoke coming from the chimney at Ferry Lands, and I ached only a little.