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They are crouching in the bath-like waters of the Albemarle Sound when
the dog stands up on two legs and begins to walk. A white bird lands on
the glassy surface in the distance, and spotting it touch down, the dog
simply rears up and stands. ‘Look!’ she squeals,’ look at the dog!’
He turns and grins. Madly almost. And begins to laugh. He twists to get a better hold of their daughter, and not wanting him to take his eyes off the dog for a moment because who knows how long the dog will continue to walk, she says again more forcefully, ‘LOOK.’
Five, six, seven seconds pass as the dog sloshes through the water on his hind legs toward the pier and the most concentric circle made by the fowl on the surface.
She’s seen another dog do this, her family dog growing up. Murphy, a short statured and wiry haired terrier had a knack for circus like tricks.
‘He also understands English,’ her mother had once said.
They were driving to Pittsburg to visit her brother. She must have been in high school. Her brother and sister-in-law were still newlyweds, and work and school had taken them a few states away. From Chicago, the jeep had rattled along the busy interstates for hundreds of miles, and Murphy sat unperturbed on the console. When they began to exit the off ramp, it was as if the dog knew they were nearing their destination. As the car curved around the circular ramp, the dog slowly lifted his front paws off the console and sat, on his behind with his front paws facing outward. They had screamed in glee, her mother and she amazed that the dog was stable enough to steady himself against the hard plastic and without restraints.
‘He’s walking!’ she says, narrating the scene when no narration is necessary. Their infant daughter laughs, and just as soon as he had walked, the dog descends back into the water, leaving her and her husband to wonder if such a sight had just happened or if they were seeing things. Odd biblical visions.
The dog turns and groans toward the shore.
‘He’s worried about her,’ her husband says, nodding his chin toward the beach where the little dog sits shivering surveying her owners but unwilling to step in the water again. When they had brought her out and let her swim, the elderly dog paddled ferociously back toward her, toward the safety of her embrace, leaving deep red scratches on her arms as she tried to climb up and out.
They had laughed again at the frantic dog’s instinctive paddling, even though in her heart she wondered if the dog were slightly afraid. What if she has a heart attack, she worried, and then tried to replace that worry with the thought that perhaps swimming in the sound was on the elderly dog’s bucket list.
A ridiculous thought, as though dogs could have a bucket list.
********************
She is reading a book about a couple, one in which tiny scenes are played out between a forty year something courtship when she is hit with the realization that someday she too will grow old. Or more frightening, so will he.
They had attended an unfamiliar church near the beach. The floors were made of concrete, slightly angling into valleys with drains. She points it out to her husband,
‘The floor is concrete and there are water drains,’ she whispers to him. ‘For the hurricanes,’ she adds. And it makes her shiver, to be in a place where nature has such power. The observation is both humbling and fascinating. The way that church should be, she supposes.
‘Most humans only live up to 1/10 of their potential,’ the priest bellows from the stage. ‘Imagine what you could do if you didn’t hide your talents,’ he furthers.
It is an odd sermon for a Catholic church, she thinks. Too touchy and feel-good. But of that, she can’t be sure. Though she has been to hundreds of Catholic services throughout her life, she rarely listens to the homilies. Even when she makes a concerted effort, she usually ends up drifting off about five minutes into the speech. Imagine what she could do if she listened more, she thinks, but then again, she’s always felt that those homilies didn’t apply to her. She just didn’t feel the same way everyone else did, and most of the time in church she spent secretly stealing glances at individuals within the congregation and wondered what they had that made this homily so applicable to them?
What was she missing? It wasn’t that she wholly unreligious, or spiritual, but she just couldn’t feel whatever it was that she was supposed to feel. The only times she ever cried in church were when the family with the child with Downs Syndrome shuffled in before her, late with faces that read apologetic smiles. When the girl glanced around she would study her face, amazed at the light that seemed to radiate from within. But she didn’t want the girl to think she was staring at her in a way that would make her uncomfortable, so she always looked away before getting caught.
The truth was, there was something in that little girl that made her feel the way that church was supposed to make one feel, or so she thought. Illuminated somehow. She felt called to take her hand and be her friend, but even doing that designated the girl as other and that made her feel ashamed. So she wept. Her husband grabbed her hand, worried that something was wrong, but she flicked it away, smiled, and quickly dried her tears. She hated to appear vulnerable in a public place: weak, uncontrolled. But when she looked back and watched the girl grab her brother’s hand, she felt comforted. The little girl seemed to realize her gifts. Maybe that’s what the old priest was rambling about. There was something miraculous about her lightness.
She was afraid to say that she was a ‘spiritual’ person, because she had once heard someone, a man, make fun of women for calling themselves ‘spiritual.’ It pained her that she cared so much to shape her own worldview by the casual toss-off observation of someone whom she couldn’t remember. But that had been it. She had cared too much what others thought. Carried it with her, shaping her, until she couldn’t quite recall what it was that she believed in the first place.
When she was a little girl, her parish priest often showed up to service drunk. Once, she recalls, a classmate of hers, a girl named Louise, had lost her father. To Cancer? Or maybe a heart attack. She remembers Louise and her two sisters sitting in the front pew, holding hands. Louise’s mother’s hair was gray, so different from her own mother, who often looked young and radiant, though tragedy had struck her too. But she was not so in the midst. Well, her mother was always in the midst, she supposes, just not the hazy fog that prevents the car from driving straight. Her mother, she figured, had simply grown used to the fog, had remembered the curve of the road, the stops, the turns by rote now.
‘Louisa, over here, her father just died,’ the priest had said in front of the pulpit.
So casually, as though he was pointing to the produce section of a grocery store and sighing, ‘well, we’re out of lemons.’
They stopped going to church for a while after that, or maybe for a long time. Her mother, angry with the priest, had decided. It was just as well, because she no longer had to feign sick before Sunday services.
The priest entered rehab, she later heard, but she didn’t care too much about him to follow up and dismissed the news as he so often had, acknowledging that maybe there were too many lemons running the church anyway.
These are the things she thinks about when she’s supposed to be thinking about something else, when she’s secretly studying other faces and wondering if their priest had ever shown up drunk, or worse. Maybe it wouldn’t matter to them, but for her, it mattered. It always did.
But her husband is a reverent Catholic, and so she agreed to go some twenty years later. Every Sunday she sits in the pew next to him, imagining what the others are hearing and why she doesn’t hear it and never thinking that she too will grow old.
Maybe then she’ll listen.
But for now, she stretches her youth.
********************
They had arrived at the beach bungalow around one, weary, tense. It wasn’t how vacations were supposed to start, but didn’t they always? The travel? The traffic?
‘You can never relax,’ she had teased him, half accusingly.
‘I know. I told you that,’ he said, matching her tone.
It was another one of those compromises she was unwilling to accept- she knows they both thought. She wasn’t so cliché as to think she could change him, she knew she could.
But not in the way a woman wants to change a man, but in the way one wants to help them realize that they are finally safe.
*********************
She had wanted to go to the beach so much so that when they woke and she had to wait over an hour to organize everything, she grew impatient. She was impatient when it came to things like the ocean. She could never be too close, too soon.
They wound their way around streets that revealed dunes and majestic houses.
‘We’ll go the National Seashore,’ he had said optimistically.
But twenty minutes later she had looked at a map and realized that the seashore destination was nearly forty minutes away.
She had told him that and he felt defensive. Sometimes she wished she didn’t do such things, letting her mouth run with such a tone, because she was sure all he heard was the unintended criticism.
But was almost impossible to control her when she heard the ocean.
********************
Sharks. Rip Tides. Everything was an excuse, as she stood dipping her toes into the foam left behind from breaking waves. Once he had accused her of living in fear too much, but she knew she was right to be afraid. The water was very dangerous; she understood its siren call on a genetic level.
Instead, he runs toward the ocean and dives head first into a wave. She watches him bob and disappear. He looks like a dolphin, the way his muscular body cuts through the watery wall, swallowed by the ocean, resurfacing moments later in fantastic show.
He grabs her hand and pulls her in toward the depths.
‘I don’t want to get caught in a rip tide!’ she shouts, remembering the park ranger who had lead the to the beach.
‘There’s no swimming today,’ she warned agreeably. ‘Well, not within the life guard zones, other than that, it’s at your own risk.’
She smiled. ‘Please be careful.’
Her husband hadn’t listened like she had because she understood what the waters could and would do, and when he resurfaced he shouted to the shore he shouted, ‘there’s a strong current!’
‘I know!’ she yells back, hoping her voice will carry over the deafening boom, and even when he grabs her hand and she yells that she was afraid of sharks he answers, ‘You know, you’d love it if you saw one!’
And she has to admit, he is right.
‘Only if I lived to tell!’ she returns.
‘You’ll only live to tell if you try it!’ he answers before diving beneath the surface of another wave.
She wades out, tries to replicate his dive, but standing between the shore and the wave, unable to move before it breaks, she is picked up and thrown onto the ocean floor. Powerless, careening through haze, her legs splayed in such a fashion that she can’t tell up from down. She smacks her arm against the sand until hours pass and eventually the water pulls back, leaving her gasping for air on the wet beach like a piece of mangled driftwood.
She laughs, shrieks! Because she feels so full of life even as a piece of mangled driftwood and only in the way one can only do when realizing they have no control.
She thinks she’s been standing in that place too often in life, the place too far from the safety of the shore or the crest. That place where the wave breaks and you are sent hurling.
Maybe we’d use more than 1/10th of our potential, she thinks, if we weren’t always standing at the breaking point, paralyzed and unwilling to go forward but too proud and ashamed to step back.
********************
When they pick up the bikes from the shop and strap her daughter in the infant seat, she asks if her husband would ride behind her, if only for a while. It doesn’t seem sturdy, the single plastic strap that holds her daughter into the seat.
‘Will you watch her?’ she begs. ‘Is she OK?’ she asks no less than five times within one block.
‘Would you like to switch with me so you can watch her,’ her asks?
‘No,’ she responds, because she doesn’t want her out of arms reach. If she hits a bump and her bike goes careening over the hill, she wants to be able to stop it. To reach out and grab her child in some acrobatic feat of her own scraped knees and a bruised head. She wouldn’t care, because she’d be safe.
She peddles three miles with her daughter’s feet kicking at her from behind, all the while imagining scenarios in which she’d be called to sacrifice herself to the gods of asphalt all to prevent her daughter from any bruises. She obsesses about it so much so that it isn’t until the trail heads over a small stream that she feels like she is in the low country. Off in the distance, a cricket chips. Or maybe it is a frog.
When she sees a rusted airboat lying dilapidated against a stream not deep enough to support it, the weeds curling over the sides she says to her husband, ‘I like it here better than the beach.’ But really it is because everything feels hidden, covered, undiscovered. Even the air, cloying and heavy, seems to obscure tiny treasures. She wonders why she feels so at home, when the only home she’d ever known had been on the Midwestern praries.
Maybe because on the prairie with all its openness and views for miles takes more effort to hide the family secrets, whereas here the ground and vegetation is softer, more forgiving, padding any sort of misstep or fall.
********************
She reads until her eyes burn and leans her head against the chair and closes her eyes. When she opens them, she is staring at the stars.
The heavens, she thinks, people have always looked toward the heavens. Even when they didn’t want to, there must be some biological function where the neck, weary, descends back so that one can only look up. For answers.
She meets an elderly woman on the street walking a tiny daschund, his cord made of fabric remnants. The elderly woman asked about her daughter’s name, and when she reveals it to the woman, her eyes seem to sparkle.
‘That is a saint’s name,’ the elderly woman says. ‘The saint of light, of luz.’
‘Yes,’ she says.
When she shortens her daughter’s name, it comes out as luz, luz. ‘Light, light!’ Which is fitting. She is light.
The elderly woman introduces herself, in broken English.
‘I am Prudencia,’ she says, rolling the r’s so that it sounds even more exotic. But she thinks only of the Beatles song, and the entire time the elderly woman talks, all she can hear is
‘Dear Prudence, open up your eyes
Dear Prudence, see the sunny skies
The wind is low the birds will sing
That you are part of everything
Dear Prudence, won't you open up your eyes?’
‘My husband has been gone for three years now,’ she says, rolling the r’s on the three. ‘He was a gringo, but he was a good gringo,’ she says with a smile. And then she begins to cry.
She wraps her arms around the elderly woman and thinks what a funny picture they must make. Two women, two drastically different points in life, strangers, standing in the street with their arms wrapped around one another.
‘My husband was a good man,’ she says calling her dog. She points to the make shift chain and says, ‘I do alterations. I am the best!’ she exclaims, breaking from the hug.
Twenty minutes later, the two women disengage, the elderly woman walking taller, taller than before, as if she were wrapped in water, preventing her fall, tiny particles holding her up because she sees something, something worth walking toward.
Later that week, she sees the elderly woman sitting in the last pew of the beach church.
She looks illuminated. And she wonders if she too has recognized her talents, or at least 4/10th of them.
She asks this question about Dear Prudence as she stares at the sky and wonders if Prudence also looks up, seeking answers. Wondering if she made him feel safe?
Did he make her feel safe?
It seems that way as she exits church. Taller somehow, but unafraid of walking forward, happy to look back, but mostly unconcerned about the asphalt beneath.
