A mythology ravels and then it unravels.
—Louis Aragon
I AM ON THE BEACH IN FRONT of the Neesawquague Shores Beach Club in Rhode Island, but the beach itself is deserted. Or deserted the way it can be late on a weekday when only a few stragglers remain. It’s late in the season, too, possibly August.
THE BEACH CLUB HAS A LONG BOARDWALK PAVILION. It has cabanas and a dining room and even a small ballroom, for the season’s big dances. Built in the 1920s when this whole peninsula was first developed by a so-called visionary mogul as a hopefully ritzy resort (winding two-lanes along the high golden cliffs, the dreamy, movie-inspired concepts for the summer places, some Tudor and some Mediterranean and some Colonial), yes, built in the 1920s, the beach club faces the surfed crescent of a beach on one side of the peninsula, which rises like Gibraltar, and it seems to exist in essential colors: the white for the buildings that are the pavilion, the black for the planks of the boardwalk proper, and the red for what could be the miles of ship-style pipe railings.
I suppose I am about eleven years old, and somehow I have been poking around at the far end of the wide beach. I am heading back now to find my mother. She herself likes to linger like this, late in the day. It seems I told my mother I just wanted to take a walk down to the splashed rocks with their blankets of barnacles at that far end of the beach, look for what are maybe tiny fiddler crabs in the pools there—you crack open a nacreous blue mussel to its orange innards, plunk it in the pool, and they come scurrying out from hiding.
“OK, you take a walk and I’ll continue reading,” my mother has told me, “and when you come back, we’ll take our dip.”
My mother, a good swimmer, always refers to a swim as just that, “a dip.”
And even though I am only eleven (possibly twelve), I already seem to have the insight of somebody much older and much more troubled, a middle-aged man like I am today. Even at that age I already seem to see myself here in a room an Arizona city removed from everything that was the first important years of my life, with the computer screen glowing and writing something like, “I am on the beach in front of the Neesawquague Shores Beach Club.” I suppose the whole idea of my being on the beach and looking for my mother is tricky.
Which is to say, I also already have a sense that to return from those rocks to my mother, now long deceased, could mean some difficulty, and it could prove, to use that word again, tricky indeed.
But I have left my mother sitting in her low-slung canvas beach chair. She is still relatively young and so beautiful, wearing a wide-brimmed white beach hat and a white beach jacket over her bathing suit, lipstick, too. She is reading a French novel, and she has also stuffed into her white beach bag, I know, the worn French dictionary I myself will take to Harvard a half dozen or so years later, because that’s the way my mother is. If the other women who were sitting with her in a semicircle of beach chairs earlier in the day gossip or thumb through women’s magazines, for my mother the best part of the day is after they have gone, when the beach has emptied out this way, and she can read. During the week my father stays up at our house in Providence, seeing that his law firm doesn’t close for July and August, and I guess my sisters are off for dinner or stay-overs with friends at other houses in Neesawquague Shores. So there’s no need for me and my mother to hurry back home. It is very much so just my mother and me.
We will have something like BLTs for dinner, with a lot of mayonnaise and, especially, a lot of sliced fat Rhode Island tomatoes, the way I like BLTs.
Nevertheless, I’m nervous about that swim with her.
BUT MAYBE I HAVEN’T SAID ENOUGH about what I just mentioned, now that I think of it, the dictionary, a French-to-French one. I mean, it is just like my mother to take it to the beach.
I still have it, of course. One of my sisters got it when she mustered the courage during boarding school to forgo for one season those dances at the beach club (and the boys in their British sport cars, all moonily hanging around our own house and pretending to be admiring their golf clubs or talking about Dartmouth or talking about Brown, all pining after my sisters, each a beauty in her own way), true, she decided to spend a summer studying in France. The dictionary is really more of a compact, one-volume dictionary/encyclopedia for students in France, hardbound with an orange-brown cover, glossy like you would get on a kids’ storybook, and a yellow band on the front with black letters within:
NOUVEAU LAROUSSE ÉLÉMENTAIRE
It’s about the size of the kind of world almanac of facts they used to sell in supermarkets, and looking at it now I see that it was printed in 1959. And the title page does tout it as more than an ordinary dictionary, saying right under the title, “Un dictionnaire sans exemples est un squelette.” I know that squelette can translate as “outline” but also literally as “skeleton.” Nice. The dictionary promises “43 700 articles” and “1 700 illustrations en noir,” plus “19 planches hors texte en couleurs.” My mother was a librarian before she married, and she loved books, the challenge of them, the wonder, and she loved having a dictionary that was entirely in French for her reading of something like Flaubert’s wild vision of ancient Carthage, Salammbô, let’s say. She would read her favorite French novels over and over. There was no pretension to it, and, in fact, my mother would always wait until all the other bridge-club types had left before she took out her reading that way.
I would like to say that thumbing through the dictionary now I find specks of sand, sparkling with mica like some heavenly (metaphysical?) dust, but if such was there from those afternoons on the beach, it is long gone. The endpapers of the dictionary are great, both sets in full color, and the front set giving a history of the automobile in pictures, and the back set offering the same for the airplane. All with the usual pro-Gallic slant that was the essence of the haughty Republic in a time like 1959. The automobile spread begins with a depiction of a guy in a red jacket and tricornered Parisian hat driving a wagon powered by some sort of steam (1682), and then, after more inserts, it progresses to an open-topped yellow bone-shaker driven by a guy in goggles beside his fashionable lady friend in front of the Petit Palais exhibition hall (1900), and then right up to one of those sleek rocket-shaped Citroëns with no driver visible inside the silver sedan that has mirroring silver windows (1959). The airplane spread begins with some French soldiers in kepis in the middle of a field gazing at a parked white bat-wing contraption with propellers (1896), and then . . . but why go on, except to add that the spread ends with an oversize tin can of a contraption with a needle nose, looking as absurd as the earlier big bat-wing contraption, not quite any real satellite but perhaps a far-fetched French conception of one floating in a lurid pink sky (1959). To see either display you would be convinced that outside of France there was little that mattered in the development of these modes of transportation, and just when I am thinking there is nothing whatsoever on railways, probably because by that time in history, 1959, railways obviously had been eclipsed by the other two, do I notice small black-ink handwriting along the outer edge of the airplane endpapers; there are numbers with slashes:
#58/ 3:50
#103/ 4:45
It is my own handwriting. And after thinking and thinking, I conclude that it must have been the schedule times of the late Friday-afternoon trains that I would sometimes take while at Harvard from South Station in Boston down to Providence, using the old, thoroughly decrepit New York, New Haven, and Hartford line. The association is strange, and, as said, just when I was telling myself trains don’t merit the endpaper treatment in the dictionary’s history of transportation, I almost receive a message about trains, or that one railway line in particular. I used that dictionary for French lit classes all through college.
But what I am writing here is really not about the dictionary. This is about when I am walking back from the rocks at the far end of the beach, to take a late afternoon swim with my mother. And I am very nervous about that.
WHAT AM I WEARING?
Me, a bony kid and always tall for my age, I am wearing swim trunks with a pattern of chess pieces, black on white. I have let the trunks’ tie strings dangle outside like limp spaghetti strands because I have seen the bronzed lifeguards do exactly that, and lifeguards are to be emulated; I myself am surely tanned nut brown this late in the season. The sand has cooled after the heat of day and I move softly over it, nearly moon-walking, and there are low waves on that crescent of the beach, a quarter mile across; they make for measured phalanxes, not heavy surf but good rolling surf, nevertheless, the kind you can get a long ride on. Indeed, they crest in blue arcs veined with foam, spewing spray at the top, then slap, one after another, to spread in layers like molten glass and eventually lap and ultimately expire up on the shore, where the wet sand is amber, not the powdery white it is here, much higher up.
I know if I do swim with my mother, I will ride some of the waves, while she will head farther out, beyond them, to where the surface is glassy in the stillness of the late afternoon doused with thick honey sunshine; she will float, do her slow backstroke, and float some more. I know that even though I am nervous about taking this swim, apprehensive, it has nothing to do with any fear of the water. I have always been completely at home in the wet, never resorting to gradual immersion but always just stomping my way in, taking that first dive into it with determination, to frog-leg a few pumps under the shampoo greenness of it, bob up, look around, and tell myself what I always do once the first contact of what should be the cold of a plunge is accomplished, “Boy, this is warm.” To ride a wave takes some expertise, I realize, and though I can’t bodysurf like maybe the muscular lifeguards do when the waves are truly big two or three times a year, after a storm, when the lifeguards themselves set up the snapping red pennants for the swimming area and they catch the crests that then break high and very far out, I am good at knowing when to jump into a smaller roller that is closer in, catch it right at the peak of its rise and before the collapse, to keep my arms outstretched like Superman, and, with the roar of it thumping in my ears, get that feeling, the fine assurance, that you have caught it, that you are skimming along the top rather than plowing through the water, to airily glide. Still, I know there might be none of that for me for the time being, because what I am fearing is that this swim with my mother this particular day could be dangerous on another level, a level that I at eleven or twelve am not supposed to know about.
I see my mother beyond one of the empty white lifeguard stands. I look up to the clock above the ballroom entrance on the beach club’s pavilion and notice that it is past six. My mother is reading, turning the pages slowly, but I don’t think she has even removed the dictionary from her beach bag, probably not hitting a word yet that she wants to check the meaning of; her French is very good. I do see a few other people here and there, packing up and leaving. There are no crew boys from the Umbrella House to help with such chores this late in the day, and a man and his wife, quite old, wrestle with a large canvas umbrella as if taking down a complicated boat sail, finally coaxing it to folding; a young mother with some very young kids has all of the tin pails and shovels and those little tin sand sifters gathered, and with the kids in tow she reaches the steps to the boardwalk pavilion at about the same time as the old couple. At the opposite end of the beach, toward the peninsula of Neesawquague Shores and where you can see our own house almost out at the Point, a man in what looks like a yachting getup is walking a skittish brown-and-white setter; another man, bald and flabby in his swim trunks, is at the water’s edge, about to go in. And outside of them, the beach is definitely deserted now, and I tell myself I want it always to be like this: me in the chessboard swim trunks with my breathing from the chest a little tight—nicely so and what I’ve heard grown-ups call “the saltwater blues”—after my couple of swims already that day with my pals, and my mother sitting there with her white hat and white beach jacket. The sunshine has lost its glare of morning and then midday, and now is softened, that oozing honey of it that does prompt surreally long shadows from the little Towers of Babylon that are the lifeguard stands (my sisters used to joke about how when they were younger and had a crush on this lifeguard or that, they would look forward to a splinter in the foot picked up on the boardwalk, because it meant approaching one of those bronze specimens when you yourself were twelve or fourteen and having him take the white first-aid kit from the storage compartment built into the stand, while you sat there and he cradled your foot and manfully probed for the thing with tweezers to try to find and remove it, if it actually were there, for him to finally dab the wound with antiseptic mercurochrome, wonderfully stinging, before applying a white cloth band-aid, my sisters always laughed about that), yes, the sunshine that renders all the colors truer than true and almost in too-clear focus, not just the white, black, and red of the beach club, but the golden cliffs of the peninsula rising there, the cap of green atop the cliffs and the dots of the houses, some pastels, yellow or pink, and the sky cloudless and so blue that you think somebody is putting you on. That’s what I want—to be on my way, closer but never any closer, safe and not having to confront this business of the swim with my mother.
But my mother spots me. She waves arcingly, slowly, the book in the other hand resting on the lap of her flower-print bathing suit.
THE DICTIONARY IS IN HER BEACH BAG, I know. The same dictionary I am holding here all these years later, today, when my mother has been dead so long.
I look up some words in that dictionary now as I sit here at my desk.
appréhension n. f. Crainte vague, mal définie; avoir de l’appréhension.
—Syn. Angoisse, crainte, inquiétude, peur. —Contr. Confiance, sérenité, tranquilité.
Vague fear, all right. And how about those painful synonyms supplied—anguish, inquietude, fear—while the antonyms soothingly whisper just the opposite.
regret n. m. Chagrin causé par la mort d’une personne: la perte de cet ami m’a laissé un grand regret. Déplaisir d’avoir perdu un bien qu’on possédait ou de n’avoir pu obtenir celui qu’on desirait.
Interesting, that first definition of the word, more like grief in English, but the second different, displeasure at losing what one once had or—this is more exact—not having gotten what one desired. But how is anybody to know what he or she desires, until after you don’t get it? The word has a built-in conundrum, a contradictory flaw.
tristesse n. f. Êtat naturel ou accidental de chagrin, de mélancolie: sombrer dans a tristesse.
Simple enough, a state either of the natural or the accidental variety, yet it comes down to the same thing, melancholy, and saying “sombrer in sadness” isn’t redundant, because sombrer means sinking and not merely the English word somber, it gets at the throbbing ache of it, the sinking into sadness, which also does entail, when you think of it, a lot of the previously cited anguish and apprehension, too.
I go back to the title page and look at the address of Librairie Larousse given as “Paris VI,” and “13 à 21, rue Montparnasse et boulevard Raspail, 114.”
Hell, am I ever stalling. I mean, I’m killing time with the dictionary, and there is my mother beckoning me on the beach. She now places the novel on the spread towel beside the chair and stands up, lifting off the floppy beach hat and letting it drop to the chair; she takes off the white beach jacket and begins looking in the beach bag for her bathing cap, I suspect. I spot the dictionary, its orange-brown cover, which she lifts out as she probes deeper for the cap in the white woven-straw bag, and I want to shout out to her something like:
“That’s the dictionary I’m now holding in my hand!”
Or:
“Do you remember that dictionary! Do you remember how Veronica got it in France one summer, how we all used it over the years, how I took it to college! I have it, I have it still!”
But I don’t shout that, and I watch as my mother simply puts it back in the bag, now that she has found within the pink rubber cap with puffy rubber flowers decorating it. She is smiling in the sunshine, in the aforementioned stillness of it all, a late afternoon in front of the Neesawquague Shores Beach Club. It is 1957 or 1958, I know, but that leads to the larger question.
How can it be 1957 or 1958, when I was eleven and twelve, respectively, but I have that dictionary right here on my desk beside the computer and it says it was published in 1959? And, to skew the chronology more, didn’t my sister go to study in France the summer before Kennedy was elected, in 1960?
I want to shout to my mother (which seems to remind me now of some very well known short story where there is a similar scenario, the title escaping me? intertextualité française?), I need to tell her, “Something’s wrong, something’s terribly wrong!”
But I don’t.
I WONDER WHY MY SISTERS are off with friends. My three sisters.
My oldest sister, the quietly assured and poised one, who will play the harp at the posh Order of the Sacred Heart women’s college in the New York suburb, who will marry a fine young man from Yale and he will go on to distinguish himself at a New York law firm, they will have five children, though he will die of cancer before fifty; my oldest sister is gone from the beach. The middle sister who is a true beauty, something in the cascading mahogany hair and wide white smile, the mile-high cheekbones and the large pale-blue eyes, all tracing back to somewhere in the Irish ancestry on my mother’s side, who will get thrown out of the same Order of the Sacred Heart college, though to her it won’t matter, her career is already beginning, first her landing acting jobs in New York, then the several films as a legitimate starlet in Hollywood, a succession of marriages in the course of it, but that is what is to be expected of a legitimate starlet, as she herself will later concede; she, my middle sister, is gone from the beach. My youngest sister, the brainy one, who will constantly astonish us with her own precociousness (we used to joke that all we needed for her to do was invent and patent “one little thing,” put all of us on easy street forever), and she will attend Brown because my mother herself eventually gives up on her belief that the Order of the Scared Heart is the only training for a young woman (characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald novels attend Sacred Heart schools, why, even characters in Henry James novels attend Sacred Heart schools, all the Kennedy girls received such an education, of course), my youngest sister who will go on to law school and then teaching law at Stanford, married to a history professor there, and while unable to have kids themselves, they will “adopt” many of their students during troubled times in the students’ own lives, an ever-changing family of sorts that she will eventually say she has always been grateful for; my youngest sister, she, too, is gone from the beach.
And as explained, during the week my father stays up at our house in Providence. He is not a fan of the shore, and even on weekends he seems half out of place there, his idea of casual wear simply meaning his suit trousers and one of his white dress shirts with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, thin-soled summer wingtips (have I already used such details about our family summer house in a short story I have written about other people? have I foolishly squandered all the details of my life elsewhere?); he usually seems to be waiting to return to his work at the firm, also the continual good fight of state politics and his post on the Democratic state committee. He built the summer place only because he’d always promised my mother, who loves the ocean, who loves to swim, that he would give her a summer place one day. And though as a young attorney starting out in the Depression he couldn’t manage to do that, right after the war he bought up the land far out on the Point, the scrubgrowth lots thick with bayberry and wild rose and bounding rabbits; he made good on the pledge, building the sprawling one-story place that has such big picture windows that let into our lives the hugeness of what might be called the Essential Sea, where at night the bell buoys out there softly clank, the scanning green beam from Beavertail Lighthouse over on Jamestown Island floods through the rooms like some spilled grace, to maybe make our dreaming easier, to maybe make our dreaming that much more marvelous indeed. In Providence now for the entire week, my father is gone from the beach as well. Again, that leaves only my mother and me to linger, to not be in a hurry whatsoever, because there is nothing we have to get back to.
There will be the slow walk along the shore, then up the right-of-way path, with me carrying my mother’s beach chair. At the house we will take turns using the outdoor shower.
FOR DINNER MY MOTHER WILL MAKE US BLTS, the bacon crisply frying.
WE WILL HAVE COFFEE MILK WITH THE SANDWICHES, maybe potato chips, too. We will have a slice of cake for desert. The rectangular cakes in boxes are bought from the “bakery men” who come in their small panel trucks to Neesawquague Shores, wearing uniforms with bow ties, to stroll up to the door with their hoop-handled trays and show the housewives their wares (many of the housewives do not drive, my mother included)—the Cushman’s Bakery man in his black-and-white truck on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings, the Arnold’s Bakery man in his maroon truck on Tuesday and Thursday. They are like the Hood milkman, whose truck with its jangling glass bottles can be heard in the sunny summer mornings coming around the narrow, lumpy asphalt road there at the Point, or like the Loutitt Laundry man, who brings back in his truck my father’s white shirts, wrapped and comfortably starched “medium.” Sometimes Neesawquague Shores seems like its own distinct territory, even a separate and blessed kingdom, supplied by friendly outsiders who visit but then politely and understandingly leave, to let us get on with our lucky lives entirely on our own. The coffee milk will be just right, and I will stir into mine too much syrup to make it more than just right.
AND MY MOTHER WILL MAKE US BLTS, the bacon crisply frying in the big, bright kitchen with its museum of streamlined white appliances.
BUT I ALREADY SAID THAT, DIDN’T I, about her making the BLTs.
“BILLY, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN?” my mother says to me on the beach.
I am standing beside her now. Some gulls hover above, pleasantly cawing; the air is salty, fragrant.
“I told you, I went down to the rocks. I fooled around there some. I was looking for crabs. They’re fiddler crabs, I guess.”
“Crabs? For bait? Is somebody taking you fishing, Ray’s dad?”
“No, just to fool around with them, look at them, see them come out from under the rocks and ledges in the pools. Tiny green ones. Why do they call them fiddler crabs?”
About to lift the bathing cap up to her head, my mother stops, thinks about my question for a second or two. Her hair is still dark and her own features, the high cheekbones, are those of my middle sister, the true beauty.
“Well, it would seem they’re called fiddler crabs because they have only one claw. Yes, they have only that one large claw, the poor little things, so it looks like they’re, well, playing away at a fiddle all the time.”
I want to talk with my mother about metaphor, but I realize that at eleven or twelve I know nothing about metaphor. Still, just their being called fiddler crabs is a metaphor, the representation of one thing in terms of another thing so that you will see the first thing better. But is that the trap of metaphor, and in seeing the first thing supposedly better, in making the association between the A and the B of it, is the inherent sense of the original thing, the actuality and substantiality of it, merely sacrificed to the airy pleasure of the mind jump, like the rush you get from a chrome nail puzzle untangled (metaphor describing metaphor), so that in the end you have only the words, representations themselves, and you realize that you missed the actuality and the substantiality—the living? But, of course, I don’t have any of that knowledge then, or those questions, and when my mother offers the easy explanation concerning the name fiddler crab, which I myself probably knew but forgot, I only say:
“Oh yeah, that’s right.”
“Are you ready for our dip?”
She says that cheerily, and with an utterance that simple, that routine, there is so much love in her eyes, so much happiness. She tugs the cap onto her head, dark pink, with the lighter pink flowers blossoming all around it, tucking her curls under the edges; it matches her white bathing suit that has the pink flower print on it. As she continues tucking the curls at the edges, she says she lost track of time.
“I was reading. I was reading my book. Did you notice what time it was when you came by the club?”
“It’s pretty late, almost half past six by now, I think.”
“But we don’t care, do we?” she says, still smiling, her lipstick very red, her teeth very even and white. “We don’t care, because tonight it’s just us.”
Yet I don’t answer that. I only say:
“Fiddler crab. That’s perfect when you think of it, Mom. I mean, just the way they move around, the way that they bounce around, really, and that one claw seems to be bouncing, too, like some guy is really playing something and is really excited about what he is playing on a fiddle, like a jig.” Then I wonder about that, asking her, “A jig would be something you play on a fiddle, right?”
“Certainly, a lovely Irish jig.”
I nod. I am also fingering something in the back pocket of the swim trunks with their black-on-white chess-pieces patterning—a splatter of knights, rooks, pawns—and somewhere there is also a matching cabana-suit jacket lined with white terry cloth to wear with the trunks, to make a set. But at age eleven, or twelve, even if I in past summers wore without protest both a cabana suit’s trunks and the jacket always lined with terry cloth, did so for years, this season I have refused to do it, thinking the jacket looks “fruity.” Fruity is a big word that summer, the same summer that my older sisters are listening to Kingston Trio albums and there are exciting quiz shows on TV with studio accessories like “isolation booths” for the contestants, and fruity is the exact opposite of cool, the latter surely my all-time-favorite word that summer. I finger the back pocket again, and I remember that my best friend, Ray Rogers, has given me a baseball card. The card is nothing valuable like a Ted Williams or a Jimmy Piersall, but possibly one of that overweight right-handed pitcher, Awful Ike Delock of the beloved Red Sox, meaning that at least it is a Red Sox card, vaguely worthwhile.
“What’s that?” my mother asks me.
“I almost forgot. A card, a baseball card Ray gave me. He had an extra. It’s only Ike Delock.”
“And what’s wrong with Mr. Delock?”
“He’s awful lately is what he is.”
“You can put it in my bag.”
“Good.”
I look at the card—jowly, bulb-nosed Awful Ike with his scrunched blue cap bearing the red B pulled low—and I walk over the sand to the beach bag next to the wood-framed chair. I open up the mouth of the straw bag. I want to find a safe place for the card, deciding that I will slip it inside the front cover of the French-to-French dictionary—the sight of which suddenly frightens me more than anything, makes me more scared than ever. Does my mother have any idea how that dictionary will someday end up with me in a room in an apartment in Arizona, that I will thumb through it and look for words to try to define how nothing did turn out the way I thought it would in my life, then how I will go back to typing on the black plastic keys of my computer, writing what I am writing here? Does my mother have any idea how the dictionary itself with all its definitions could almost be a metaphor for, or more exactly a perfect icon for, everything that did go wrong in my life? Or, how possibly everything in life is just airy insubstantiality, as attested to by the patent contradiction that if it isn’t even 1959 yet, when the dictionary was published according to the title page, how can I as a kid be about to slip a baseball card under its front cover, meaning that nothing but nothing means anything, all as invisible as forgotten oxygen itself, all vanished before we even have a chance to define it as what we commonly and with naïve smugness call reality? Does my mother know all this? Well, does she? But I myself don’t know then, at that age, any of that complexity suggested by the presence of the French dictionary either, and I simply put away the card for safekeeping. I decide not to place it within the dictionary’s cover, but just flat beside it, then I look up to her, smiling myself, repeating for some reason:
“Fiddler crab.”
“What?”
“Fiddler crab,” I say. “That’s a really, really good word for them, or two good words for them.”
“You like words,” my mother says, obviously not realizing the irony in that, how words will lead me to all of this convolution, the years and years of substituting for reality the syllables that become the words that become the sentences that become the paragraphs that become the writing that can only suggest reality, until for me there is no sense of my own failed marriage, my own dear three daughters I never see enough of there in faraway Seattle, in short, all the ongoing sadness I feel lately. “You’ve always liked words.”
She says that and appears to be very appreciative of such a quality in me, and, after all, what other than that would a loving mother once a librarian wish to see in her only son?
“Yeah. I never thought of that, but I guess I do.”
“Ready?” she asks.
“Ready?” I answer her question with a question.
“For our dip.”
“Yeah.”
But I know I am lying.
AT THE WATER’S EDGE SHE WALKS IN SLOWLY, reaching down to scoop up handfuls of wet and massage it on her arms, smiling, looking at me.
“Come on, Billy, the water is fine.”
Which is not what I want to hear from her. I want to hear her kindness spoken from the heart, I want her to tell me soothing things there against the backdrop of the ocean’s enormity—a long, red-hulled freighter moving but not moving out on the horizon—I want her to tell me things that always had such necessary understanding, even if I know she often fought her own sadnesses in life. For my mother there was depression that came in dim bouts. And even at the summer house it would cause her—when the fog set in, the horn moaning over at Beavertail Light—to stay in her bedroom for days, and if any of us kids, or even our father, went in to try to talk to her, she only whispered to any of us, blankly, “I can’t help it, ever since I was a girl, the fog has always frightened me so.” It was like the O’Neill play. But she would always eventually come out of it, manage to keep a brave face for us kids and my father, and now all I want to hear is for her to tell me that to see my own sadness as a grown man breaks her heart, that she only wanted the best for me. I want her to tell me how proud she was I did so well at Harvard, how proud she was when I dedicated my first novel (it garnered better reviews than the others, won a prize) to her and my father. I want her to say how even she detected a problem when I first brought Alison, golden-haired and elegantly tall, to spend weekends at the summer place when I was at Harvard and Alison was at Wellesley, yes, tell me that she, my mother, sensed that Alison wasn’t the right one for me, that Alison had come from too much money out there in Lake Forest, with her father the shipping-company magnate he was—Alison would always expect more from a husband than anything that could be offered by the young aspiring writer I was, longing to be Joyce, especially longing to be Borges, my unapproachable heroes. I want her to tell me that the failure of the marriage wasn’t my fault, and granting that I did render everything rotten with the affairs with my female grad students over the years, it was not right how Alison herself in time turned utterly cold, utterly mocking of me and my failure to do anything truly significant with literature, “a broken-down creative writing teacher at a second-rate Arizona college, that’s a major laugh,” to quote her, and I want my mother to tell me . . . But she isn’t telling me anything. She is up to her waist now. No plunging in for her, she leans back against the surface to let the water gently catch her like that, cushioning, and she floats on her back for a while, her legs outstretched and her toes bobbing above the smooth blue beyond the waves now. Which is before she starts a slow backstroke, soon rolling over to begin sidestroking and then the overhand crawling out and away from me, her pink bathing cap bobbing.
This is totally unexpected, and here I am, an eleven-year-old kid, maybe twelve, and my mother is abandoning me! Doesn’t the bald guy at the end of the beach who is toweling himself dry now after his own swim see it! Doesn’t the other party in the goofy yachting getup who is walking the edgy brown-and-white setter on a leash at the other end of the beach see it! Here I am, having been so apprehensive of having to face this moment of taking a late afternoon swim with my mother, and now my mother doesn’t even wait for me to take that swim with her, and she is slowly moving away from me, a deliberate flapping kick as she strokes, heading out farther and farther! No, I am not about to go into the water at this stage, but I do shout to her from the shore.
First, the things that any eleven-year-old would shout:
“Don’t leave me!”
And:
“Mom!”
Then other things, cupping my hands, my face reddened in what is becoming my absolute anger, close to rage:
“It’s this goddamn obsession with words that did it to me! This whole missing of the real at the expense of the goddamn unreal!”
She’s farther out now, smaller to my sight and heading toward the horizon, going back to, returning with full conviction to, what is surely the Horizon of the Dead, where she rightfully belongs, of course. Nevertheless, I keep at it, the shouting:
“You’re to blame, you know! You’re the one who got me like this! I mean, what other kid had a mother who read goddamn Flaubert on the beach!”
But I catch myself on that, know I shouldn’t have said it as soon as I do say it.
I have always loved, and will always love, my kind, selfless mother so.
EXHAUSTED FROM THE YELLING, drained, heartbroken myself, I look at the computer, the monitor glowing with (how did that line go?) the syllables that become the words that become the sentences that become the paragraphs that become, as always, the writing before me, the machine lowly humming. The ceiling fan chugs. I assure myself that if nothing else I have committed some of it to prose, in a room in an apartment in Arizona. I glance around for the dictionary, the orange-brown volume with its band of yellow bearing the black titling, Nouveau Larousse Éleméntaire, and I pick it up again while sitting at my desk here, opening randomly, hitting on page 511. I spot a small illustration beside a fine-print definition, showing a seated man in a tux, the bust of him, as seen from across the top of the grand piano he is playing, and on the piano rests a little pyramid with a waving arm:
métronome n. m. Instrument employé pour indiquer les divers degrés de vitesse du mouvement musical.
I like the idea of that, the diverse, or various, degrees of speed. It’s one of those words that in any language you hear so often that you forget the innate beauty of it, in this case the solidly hollow tick-tocking knock contained therein.
I flip a couple of pages, and my eye snags on another small sketch illustration of two towers rising above domed roofs of an old city, puffy clouds in the sky:
minaret n. m. Tour d’une mosquée, du haut de laquelle, chez les musulmans, le muezzin appelle le peuple à la prière.
I look some more at the detail of the illustration, which is labeled “Minarets” in the scripted plural, the one on the left a square block like those I myself have seen in fine Tunisian cities such as handsome Tunis or, better, perfectly preserved ancient Kairouan out toward the Sahara in Tunisia, the “Fourth Holiest City in Islam,” the other on the right cylindrical and slimmer, airier, of the Ottoman variety, possibly.
“Minaret.” I whisper the word, try it on my palate.
I keep thumbing through the dictionary now, letting my eye snag on random definitions. I like doing that.
I keep doing that.
AND MY MOTHER IN HER FLOWER-PRINT BATHING SUIT and pink bathing cap keeps swimming farther out, to the enormous sparkling ocean, very, very blue.