Inspired by Sonnet 147
Brittany Cavallaro
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
The uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as madmen’s are,
At random from the truth vainly express’d;
For I have sworn thee fair and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
—SONNET 147
They drove down to Big Sur, down the California 1 from Marin. Sophie was eighteen then, a young eighteen; she counted horse farms out the window. Michael agreed to pull over halfway down the road to Pfeiffer Beach. Sophie fed a dapple gray her lunch, a comforting memory from one of her favorite childhood novels—The Secret Garden, maybe, or Little House on the Prairie. He leaned against the hood of his car, taking pictures of her with his father’s camera. She knew better than to look straight into the lens. Instead, she let her dark hair fall in front of her face, biting her lip as she stretched to pat the horse’s whispering nose.
Michael had met her at boarding school at the start of her final year. She had escaped her Minnesotan hometown with a scholarship, something he had guessed from the way she carried a purse to class, by her thin legs in knee-high socks, by the long braids she coiled around her head. When she spoke, her words were full of soft r’s and long o’s that hung sweetly in the air, and that voice and those braids left him with the confused sense that she was some sort of milkmaid, some mountain girl who’d found herself by accident in his Borges seminar. Though his friends made fun of her hick accent, he took every possible chance to ask her the time or what she thought of that night’s reading just to hear the strange cadence of her answer as she nervously crossed her legs.
He took her to California for the first time that winter during the long January between semesters. He had always had a girlfriend, and so his mother paid little attention to Sophie, even in the mornings when she would pour orange juice in sock feet, one of Michael’s shirts falling down to her knees. They kept to themselves in his downstairs bedroom, though they always had the house to themselves, as Michael’s mother was sequestered in her office on the top floor. At night, Sophie would look out at the lights from the bay spilling over each other down the cliffs to the sea. Michael was amazed that she hadn’t seen the Pacific before. He bought her pastries from the market down the street, a camel coat from an upscale store in San Francisco. He found her one night in one of the dozen chairs around his dining room table, and when he brought her back to bed, she asked quietly why they had so many seats for just two people.
His bed, too, was oversize, untidy, the sheets stirred up like foam under the silky coverlet. She scuttled away from him at night, her legs kicking uselessly in the immensity of the covers; even though he slept soundly on the far side of the mattress, Sophie couldn’t put her limbs to rest. One morning, her body exhausted, she woke to both his hands moving under her shirt, soft and skittish like birds. She stood up in a rush and walked quickly to the sliding door to the garden. Through the window, she watched Michael move fitfully in bed, then slower, slower, his face finally slack in sleep. He hadn’t once glanced after her.
She turned away from the house and, ignoring the ocean below, sat straight down in the daylilies. Her mother hadn’t wanted her to take the week off from work to come to California: Sophie who never sulked about long weeks of waiting tables in her family’s restaurant when she was home; who let her mother dress her in old German school uniforms, tall stockings, loafers; who wore one-piece swimsuits to the beach and wide hats in the sun; who never made the ten-minute drive into the Twin Cities on a Friday or Saturday night; who never touched even a neighborhood boy. Sophie who had won the money to come across the country to school. Sophie who escaped.
She went inside once Michael heaved himself up off the bed. He stood stretching in the center of the room, his feet buried in the soft chenille rug. He said nothing about that morning as Sophie slipped past him into his bathroom. As she stripped to take a shower, she could feel the heat from her body warming the cold tiles, clouding the full-length mirror behind her. This damp, rolling landscape, the fog, the open palm of the sky. At home, her family was all still in snow boots. Some mornings, after her mother came in from checking the mail, she broke the ice out of her hair in little sharp pearls.
Sophie set the taps to cold and stepped in all at once. Then she kept herself still for a long moment in the freezing water. All at once, she felt a welling in her mouth, the sudden desire to spit. She parted her lips and let a long bloom of blood spread down her chin and to the floor. Sophie touched her face with both hands and took them away warm and stringed with red. Outside, she heard Michael singing along to the radio. She stood with her mouth open.
They had planned the trip to Big Sur for this weekend, the last three days before they flew back East. Michael packed the car the night before with a picnic basket and cooler, three suitcases, his father’s camera on its leather strap. That morning, Sophie hurried out before him, wedging herself between the luggage in the back seat; when Michael came outside, she said that she needed to nap, that she hadn’t slept well the night before. As he pulled onto the 101, she pulled a tissue from her jacket pocket, winding it into a paper worm. She stuffed it between her lower lip and teeth to staunch the blood. In the shower, she had examined her tongue, the roof of her mouth, had explored the landscape of her throat until she gagged under her desperate fingers. She still bled, more slowly now, in long cords that crept out the sides of her mouth, but she couldn’t find the source of the bleeding. Now, in Michael’s car, it kept her from speaking as he tried to make small talk to ease that morning’s tension. She answered his questions with syllables instead of words, the blood hissing and pooling and hissing again with every sibilant sound she made.
Michael fell into silence in the seat in front of her as he searched for a radio station. Now and then, he tried to point out a town, a rock face; he took a hairpin turn quickly and waited for her to squeal. He stopped finally at a gas station in Monterey, intent on reassuring her face-to-face, but she ran past him into the convenience store and paid for cotton balls at the self-checkout. In the restroom, she spat hard, then pulled the balls apart and nestled them against her gums. She hesitated, then glanced in the mirror. Static from the car seat had pulled long, crackling hairs from her braids. No trace of blood showed on her mouth. She walked outside to the parking lot.
He had the fuel nozzle locked tightly into his car. He touched her face. “Are you okay? I can’t tell if you’re asleep or awake back there.”
She nodded, ducking her head so he couldn’t see the bulge of gauze in her mouth.
“We don’t have to talk,” he said, “but will you just come sleep in the front seat?”
“Okay,” she whispered, and the tension went out of his shoulders.
The rest of the drive wound through forests and breaks in forests, through pockets of towns in roadside pullouts, wound past stretches of cliff, massive arches crumbling in the water, rocks broken and mossy, licked by the surf. Sophie distracted herself by searching for signs of civilization: general stores and grade schools, station wagons strapped down with surfboards, farms for alpaca and for horses. In Minnesota, her family’s land backed up next to that of an elderly couple who kept ponies for their grandchildren. On walks in the summer, Sophie would sometimes stop to hold an apple over the fence for Granger or Sally, but both would stand suspiciously on the other side of the paddock, Sally flicking her dirty, white tail.
But the horses on the road to Pfeiffer Beach took her carrot sticks and even bits of her turkey sandwich. She had asked Michael to pull over, a tissue against her nose and mouth as if she were about to sneeze, but he was so engrossed in driving down the dirt road that he didn’t notice the flecks of blood she caught against her teeth. He snapped photos of her, hands cupped in offering to the horses’ quick lips, her shoulders wrapped in his gray sweater for warmth. He snuck up behind her and undid her braids with quick hands and snapped photos of her hair whipping loose against her face and neck, against the lens of his camera. He framed her leaning against the split-rail fence and snapped her again, now her hand to her lips, now his lips against her cheek as he held the camera high in the air to take the picture.
“We can get to the beach from here,” he said, hoisting his backpack from the trunk. “It’s just a minute’s walk. We can have a quick lunch and then check into the hotel.”
She caught her knapsack when he tossed it to her. Two dunes and a negotiation through bramble and grass and they found themselves feet from the water. Farther down the beach, two boys ran shirtless into the surf. Shivering, Michael pulled up the hood of his sweatshirt and sat down next to the smoking remains of a firepit. “I’m going to get this thing started,” he said, pulling matches from his bag. “You can go back to the horses if you want to.”
She nodded and turned away.
“Sophie,” he said, straightening. “Sophie, look at me.” When she didn’t speak, he groaned, and through her lashes she could see him drag his hands down his face. “God,” he said. “Right now, I don’t even think you like me, and I—I do so much for you. So much, Sophie. Don’t you know that?”
She shook her head.
“I can’t sleep sometimes, thinking about you,” he said, stepping forward. “Sophie. Look at me.”
And with that, he moved as though to kiss her, but she shied away on her long legs. He reached for her with both hands, but she turned to run, the same way she had run the first time he had chased her, across the long lawn at school on an October morning until he caught her in a thicket of trees and kissed her over and over, chastely, his lips pressed gratefully to hers. She did not want his mouth near hers, not today, not with all this mysterious blood pouring down her chin, faster now, thick and tin-sweet, blood he did not seem to see as he backed her against the fence, prying her mouth open with his.