Battleborn: Stories (22 page)

All our mother’s things. But not hers exactly, new things, uncracked book spines, unfolded pages, CDs instead of tapes. No water damage, no dust, no coffee rings, no scribblings in the margins. Things from the house where we grew up, but not from the house where we grew up. Things from Barnes & Noble and the Best Buy on Geary. It was disorienting, gave me the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap and the sky isn’t black or blue but hazy gray, and you can’t tell whether it’s five a.m. or five p.m., can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep. I got dizzy. I went to the bathroom, thought I might throw up but didn’t. I knelt at the toilet for I don’t know how long, staring at a copy of
Reader’s Digest
on the tank.

I rode home hard and fast, without my things but still weighed down. At my apartment the warm scent of taco meat and raw onion was heavy in the air. I wanted to call Peter, or rather I wanted to want to call him, to tell him what happened and what it meant, to let him back into me and never shut him out again. But instead I turned on
Dumbo
, letting the light from the TV wash over me.

I cannot watch
Dumbo
without crying. It’s that scene with the mother, or more specifically, the way the tears literally roll down baby Dumbo’s cheeks when they lock her up, and the way she stretches her trunk out through the iron bars and cradles Dumbo, rocks him to sleep. If I could have called Peter, this is what I would have said: If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother, wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place? Which is to say, how could the Stork bring a large-eared, sensitive and easily frightened baby elephant into this world?

When Peter came over that night, I was nearly asleep on the couch, the blue glow from the TV the only light on in the room. He sat on the edge of the couch and stroked my hair.

Have you eaten today? he said.

Tell me again, I said. About Sutro.

He sighed. Okay, little one. The currents in the bay have not significantly changed in the forty-one years since the baths burned. The beach is as sound to hold that structure as it was in 1966.

But, I said, keeping my eyes closed, you do concede that one can easily
imagine
it slipping into the sea.

Well, one can easily
imagine
anything, he said, as if that were a good thing.

Not that we’d rebuild them anyway, I said. They’d just be swallowed by the rising sea level.

Oh, yes! said Peter, kissing my head. The oceans will rise and we’ll all swim to work! I’ll pick you up for lunch and say, You swim like a duck.

He said this in an old-timey voice that very nearly made me smile.

O, I said. You’re making a game of me.

After Peter and I have sex there is some smallness in me that wants to turn to him and ask, In your professional estimation as a scientist, how long can a relationship be sustained on pity and anthropomorphism and a postcard on the fridge?

But there is such bigness in him that he would say, As long as it takes.

Were they rebuilt, the Sutro Baths would not actually slip into the sea; I know this. Peter is doing research for PG&E about wave farms, which are basically underwater wind farms where the ocean’s currents generate electricity by turning a turbine, the same way wind does, only more consistently. This is not a joke. PG&E already has twenty-one underwater windmills along the floor of the San Francisco Bay for the project’s pilot. Peter is the biologist they’ve hired to track the project’s effects on local marine life. Talk about being part of the problem. If you ask me, he is the biologist they pay to say the project has no effect on local marine life. To that he says, Can’t you let even one thing be simple and good?

I’d like to tell Gwen or Jacob or Peter even that our mother’s things look absurd here, in this foggy damp peninsula, so far from the desert. They’re out of context. The type on the magazines looks too dark, the album art too small, everything untouched by the sun. These things can’t survive here. The moisture from the sea will mold the prints, rot every page of those books.

I haven’t been to see Gwen in eight weeks. I left my wet clothes stuck to the walls of her washing machine. She has not called me in nearly as long and I have not called her. The last time we spoke she said, I’ve started reading
Cadillac Desert.

And I said, What is
wrong
with you? When what I meant to say was, Are you okay?

Jacob will do something. He will put an end to this. He will come home and find his apartment filled to capacity with replicas from our mother’s life and he will take Gwen by the hand and say, You have got to stop this. She will cry. But he will wrap his trunklike arms around her and hold her until she stops.

These days more and more I think I should not expose my beautiful unborn niece to
Dumbo
. Suppose she is struck by the cruelty of those lady elephants, the ones that taunt Jumbo Junior. Suppose she wants to know whether there really are adults so mean and selfish as those lady elephants. Suppose she asks, Well, Auntie, are there?

Then I would have to say, Yes and no. There are adults in this world capable of a viciousness you would not believe. There are adults in this world who will never think of anyone except themselves. Your grandmother, for example. Yes, in this world there are adults with cold, hard hearts, little niece, but there are no more elephants.

Jacob will do nothing. He’s visited our mother’s house only twice. He doesn’t know about
Baez Sings Dylan
. He doesn’t know what it means for Gwen to hang O’Keeffe’s
Black Iris
right beside
Oriental Poppies
above the sofa. He doesn’t know what it means that she listens to
Graceland
while she works.

This is what it means:

It is late spring in Las Vegas. Or it is midwinter or early autumn or the peak of summer’s heaviest heat. Gwen and I walk home from the bus stop or our friend’s parents drop us off, or our boyfriends do, driving recklessly, or we pull our own cars into the driveway. We are four or fourteen or twenty-four. We can hear music coming over the fence from the backyard.
Graceland
.

Our mother stoops in the garden, prodding at the dirt, pulling weeds. She darts from hose to shovel to fertilizer, never doing much with any of them. We know some things, and no matter how old we are it feels like we’ve known them our entire lives: She will be out in the garden until after the sun goes down and we’ve made ourselves dinner and stayed up to watch
Unsolved Mysteries
and put ourselves to bed. She will flip the tape over every time it clicks.

When she finally goes to bed she will stay there for a long, long time, whether the next day is stinging hot or beautiful or a workday or a birthday. If we ask, and Gwen does more than I, Mom will say it is Joan Baez that’s made her cry, how she tries so hard to understand Dylan, or the cities in
Cadillac Desert
sapping all the moisture from the ground, or small, sweet Paul Simon convinced he’s found redemption. She has these reasons, and though we know them to be inadequate, we believe her.
I’ve reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland
. The truth is our mother stays in bed for reasons we won’t begin to understand until we are older, until a hole is opened in us that can’t be filled. Which is to say, until now.

I am the only one who knows what it means, this compiling. I am the only one in Gwen’s life who can see what she’s doing. We have no one else—our father is long dead; he died when Gwen was a baby, like Jumbo Senior. We are alone and I cannot believe how long it’s taken me to realize this. I am the only one who can say, This has got to stop. You have to quit this and go back to normal and have a baby, a daughter, a beautiful daughter who won’t have to worry about her mother, who will be loved and never alone.

I do dream about our mother. Always in these dreams her death is a big misunderstanding. In these dreams she has won a stay at the Sands and simply forgot to call; she has been laughing and whirling around the roulette tables, and she comes back to her house on Stanford Lane wearing a plastic visor and a new bright white T-shirt.
I Got Lucky at the Sands!
And she’s brought us prime rib from the buffet, wrapped in tinfoil, and her plants are wilted and their soil is bone dry but none of them are dead.

Always in these dreams we have a great laugh about this misunderstanding and I am never mad that my mother didn’t call, just grateful that she is alive and that the confusion is cleared up. And then, when I wake, all that grace is gone.

But—and this is what I would have told Gwen when she asked me on that airplane, were I not a coward—in these dreams our mother looks and smells and sounds and feels just like she did, in a way I can’t re-create when I am awake. Which is to say, in my dreams she is alive in a way I cannot remember her ever being. And these dreams are a blessing, or as close to a blessing as it gets anymore. And for that at least, I am grateful. G-R-A-T-E-F-U-L. Grateful.

Gwen wasn’t a cowardly kid, just very small. She used to say everything twice, once aloud and then a second time, whispered it quietly to herself. She did this with everything she ever said. Said she was recording it in her mental journal. Even then you could tell that though she was born later, she was much older than me.

This morning, I woke before my alarm went off and I lay there thinking about the grizzly, how before the city there used to be grizzlies on this peninsula. How Peter told me that on our first date. About what other magic he could give me if I let him. I took a long ride around the city, trying to imagine grizzly bears loafing through eucalyptus groves. I rode to the Sutro Baths.

They’ve put signs up at the baths. They say, S
WIM AT
Y
OUR
O
WN
R
ISK
or C
AUTION:
S
TRONG
C
URRENTS
or some other euphemism for L
OOK
O
UT!
A
B
OY AND
H
IS
S
TEPFATHER
W
ERE
D
RAGGED
O
UT TO
S
EA
H
ERE AND
T
HEIR
B
ODIES
W
ERE
N
EVER
F
OUND (
W
E
S
USPECT
S
HARKS) AND
I
T
C
OULD
H
APPEN TO
Y
OU;
I
T
C
OULD
H
APPEN TO
A
NY OF
U
S
. The signs have a picture, an illustration of a stick swimmer being swept out by a squiggly current, his stick arm in the air. I think they should put these signs up everywhere, not just at the beaches but throughout the entire city, call this what it is.

I rode hard from the Mission through Castro up to Golden Gate, then back down Lincoln to Baker Beach, through the Presidio to the wharf and back. Pumping up hills, hurtling down them. I wanted to get away from here, and for a moment I thought I felt my feet pushing me far from here to Canada, following the humpback’s route. Putting distance between me and her. But that’s all wrong. This city is a peninsula, seven miles by seven miles, and I just ricocheted from one edge to the other. I was never more than seven miles from anything.

I rode to Gwen’s. She wasn’t in the apartment. But then, I hadn’t expected her to be. I kept climbing the stairs past her floor, and here I am. I step out onto the roof. Great deep planters line the roof deck full of ice plant and bird-of-paradise. I don’t want her to be up here, but she is. She sits on a deck chair with her short legs stretched out in front of her, big tortoiseshell sunglasses over her eyes, her hands on her stomach.

And there’s a thousand things I want to tell her—about the Sutro boy and the whales I never saw, about Peter’s turbines turning and turning down in the bay without ever rousing anything, about all the great land mammals—and I want to say them all so bad I could say them twice, once to her and once to me, two thousand ways total to say, I know you’re slipping out to sea; please don’t go. Don’t leave me on land by myself.

Instead I say, Have you watched
Dumbo
lately?

Gwen looks up to me, lifts her sunglasses from her eyes. And right away I can tell she’s been crying. No, she says.

I was thinking, I say. If we call Dumbo Dumbo, aren’t we, you know . . .

A part of the problem? she says.

And maybe it’s that her stomach has gotten so big in the months since I last saw her, or that I can see the ocean from up here, but she just looks so
small
. She looks like she did when we were kids. She looks like a child.

Yeah, I say. We ought to call him Jumbo. Jumbo Junior.

Okay, she says, Jumbo Junior. And then, so brave for someone so small, she says, Catie, are you okay?

I watch the sun dipping down into the water. From here I can make out the dark shapes of whales like submarines down in the sea, hear their songs. They sing James Taylor; they sing Paul Simon. I see the drowned boy on his stepfather’s shoulders in 1951, wading in the freshwater pool at the Sutro Baths, his wide-hipped mother waving from the tiers above. I see tall Jacob spinning the roulette table at the Sands. I see Peter out on the savanna with the African white rhino, rubbing ointment on its stump, encouraging the horn to grow back. O! You swim like a duck, he says. I see Jumbo Junior and my beautiful long-legged unborn niece swayed to sleep by his mother’s great gray trunk.

Acknowledgments

Thank you:

Christopher Coake, my mentor, pep talker, and friend. This book exists in large part because you took me aside and said it could.

Nicole Aragi, for your vision and your vigor.

John Freeman, my fairy godfather, for picking up what I was putting down.

The MFA program at the Ohio State University and my extraordinary teachers there: Michelle “Do Better” Herman, Erin “The Good Is the Enemy of the Great” McGraw and Lee K. “Let Us Not Get in the Habit of Excusing Poorly Executed Art” Abbott. Thanks also to Henri Cole, Kathy Fagan, Andrew Hudgins and Lee Martin for your wisdom and support, and to Kelli Fickle, for looking after everyone.

My top-notch professors at the University of Nevada, Reno, especially Michael Branch, David Fenimore, Justin Gifford, Gailmarie Pahmier, Hugh Shapiro and Elizabeth Swingrover.

Percival Everett, Sue Miller, Padgett Powell and Christine Schutt for advice and encouragement.

My editors, Rebecca Saletan and Ellah Allfrey, for believing in this book, and for making it better. Jynne Martin for all the sage and all the good vibes that came along with it. Elaine Trevorrow and Yuka Igarashi, wondrous helpers. Christie Hauser, the Sir David Attenborough of publishing.

The magazine editors who first put these stories out into the world: Aaron Burch and Elizabeth Ellen, John Irwin, Kathryn Harrison and Robert Arnold, Patrick Ryan, James Thomas and D. Seth Horton, Scott Dickensheets, Hannah Tinti and Maribeth Batcha, Lorin Stein and David Wallace-Wells, Caleb Cage, Jill Patterson and Jonathan Bohr Heinen, Conor Broughan and Jessica Jacobs, Susan Burmeister-Brown and Linda Swanson-Davies.

The Ohio State University Presidential Fellowship and the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, for financial support. My exceptional colleagues at the Sewanee Young Writers’ Conference and Bucknell University.
The Journal
. My students. Peter Harrison, ever-hospitable dreamer. Kirsten Chen and Lumans. Every single person at Riverhead.

Reno, especially Nicole and Justice Mañha, Seth Lagana, Mallory Moore, Andrei, Jonathan Purtill, Jeff Griffin, Curtis Bradley Vickers and Jessica Seidl, Ben Rogers, Sundance Books, the Boyntons, the Laxalts and the Urzas.

Pahrump, especially Jesse Ray and the Tungs: Ryan, Jason, TJ and Jan.

Columbus, especially the Go Big Tuesdays: Alex Streiff, Bill Riley, Clayton Adam Clark and the Hammer. Special thanks to my friend G. Robert Urza, Nevada royalty, for taking it out and chopping it up, and for always talking me down. Isaac Anderson, Kim Brauer, Michael Brennan, Catie Crabtree, Brad Freeman (who supplied the best line in this book), Ben and Lily Glass, Holly Goddard-Jones, Donald Ray Pollock, Samara Rafert and Pablo Tanguay. And the best damn band in the land: Cami Freeman, Gina Ventre, David Macey, Dr. Jess Love, Andrew Brogdon, Maria Caruso, K. C. Wolfe, Christina LaRose, Elizabeth Ansfield, Jenny McKeel, Ken Nichols and the Albers: Mike, Julie, Natalie and Willy.

Beth and Annie, my dearest friends. Tri-tri’s forever.

My family, who never made art less than essential: Aaron, Aunt Mo and Uncle Jack. Ron Daniels and the whole Daniels clan. For all their insanity and all their love, the Watkinses: Al and Vaye, Uncle John, Auntie Jane, Aunt Lynn and Uncle Chris, Ben, Shannon, Lea, Luke, Eli, Jos, Paulie, Zanna, Char, Kai and Una.

Mary Lou Orlando-Frehler, toughest lady in the West, for the thrift stores, Zion, the doilies crocheted with obscenities, Caesar’s Palace, the cowboy boots, the turquoise and sterling silver, long johns, ponchos, Willie Nelson, Wet ’n’ Wild, the hats and hats and hats for winter. For everything.

Nic Baker and the tender, spazzy, virtuoso bean, Delilah Claire.

Derek Palacio. Thank you for having me. Thank you for being.

My sisters, Lise and Gaylynn, whose love goes everywhere with me. This book is you.