Gilligan's Wake: A Novel (51 page)

Since I know you were fond of her, you’ll probably be pleased to hear that my mom did rejoin the Consular Corps eventually. She served in many lands. I guess that’s about it, except to say that I hope you like Daisy. I did, both times I was privileged to know her. With old affection, G.

Whatever.

The next morning, doing my best to shake off my complete bafflement as to why I’d ever dreamed I had a roommate, much less why she had been Sukey Santoit, Girl Detective—and unable to see a smidgen of rhyme or reason in the bizarre conversation we’d had—I, Mary-Ann, flew to Los Angeles. That was my first stop on what turned out to be the vacation that never quits, and there I changed planes.

On the next leg of the trip, my seatmate on the aisle was showing some. As the Pacific appeared under the slanting wing outside my window, I got to gabbing with her about how exciting it was for me to see my second ocean’s blue for the first time; somewhat ironically, as it turned out, as she was a trashy-looking but entertaining redhead whose peculiar idea of appropriate traveling togs was a sequined white evening gown.

Guess who.

After we landed, both of us being at loose ends until nightfall and enjoying each other’s company, we set out to look for, as the sign above
the arcade on Main Street in my hometown of Russell, Kansas, used to and may still put it, Something to Do.

Guess what.

Soon after we put out to sea, just as the coastline dropped from sight, a gray and moving bulk showed up on the horizon. As it drew nearer and grew larger, Ging grabbed my as yet untanned forearm with one red-nailed, clattering-braceleted hand. “Hey, that’s a
troopship]
” she exulted, and started to whoop and wave.

“How can you tell?” I asked, peering hard, for it was still quite far away and partly veiled in mist.

Ginger gave me a look. “Mary-Ann, how the hell you think my Momma taught me to swim, and why?” she drawled. We both laughed.

It kept swelling until it loomed over us. The railing was packed with what looked like a thousand young Marines in crewcuts and combat green. They whooped and waved. We whooped and waved, and Ginger gave them a few shimmies from the
Minnow’s
little deck, in her white evening gown. It was silly, since she could see perfectly well that they were just kids—probably all of nineteen. But that was what made it fun for them and us both, since we all knew how innocent it was.

Then we sailed away this way, and they sailed away that way. Soon they were gone, and we never did find out where they’d been going.

As for us, you know where we all washed up. And yes, the island is beautiful; especially at night, when the sky unveils its stars. But we have now been here, so far as we can compute, for going on forty years.

We try to make the best of things. But it’s a downhill slide.

The reunion movies were a pack of lies. “A complete violation of the original’s artistic integrity, as incredible as that sounds” according to the newspaper article about us, apparently written by one of my old boyfriend Jean-Luc’s epigones, by which I learned of those movies’ existence. Escorted there by her pet crabs, Ging found it lying on the beach at low tide a year or two or three ago, rolled inside an empty jar of Maxwell House instant coffee.

Oddly enough, one of the men said that the accompanying photograph of the reviewer reminded him of an old student of his. He couldn’t place the name, though. Even so, when I’m done writing this, I’m going to put it all inside the jar and toss it back out to sea, and maybe it will find its way back to whoever sent it in the first place.

It did Mary-Ann Thank you

But anyway: we didn’t escape from the gosh-darn island. We didn’t return to the gosh-darn island. We never got off the gosh-darn island.

We never will get off the gosh-darn island.

We are the island. The island is us.

We have never gotten any older. Then again, we sure aren’t getting any younger.

On top of which, as we have not been united in years, the prospect of being re-united holds few charms for us here.

Needless to say, it was Ginger who was the first to figure out that we must be fictional characters of some sort. Besides having the most prior experience of this kind of thing, she’s also the smartest of us by miles. That’s one reason why I, Mary-Ann, am proud to call her my friend.

But we don’t know our purpose. We don’t know when or how our unveilings take place, which may be why, for decades now, I’ve had recurring dreams. In these, a wry-faced, dry-voiced man with salt-and-pepper hair, dressed in a suit and tie and most often holding a cigarette, steps out from behind a palm tree at twilight and delivers a caustic yet somehow genial summary of our situation, which seems to be exemplary in some way. But I don’t know who he is and can’t make out what he’s saying or reconstruct its import after I wake up, so I have no idea what the dreams signify.

Ging’s theory is that we’re some kind of refuge from the century that was just passing its two-thirds mark when we all washed up here. And yet, perhaps just because we’re available to anyone who has a mind to, we all seem to have been equipped with histories that would make
us instead, in however incomplete and veiled a way, that century’s incarnation.

Her taste for philosophical conundrums having been whetted rather than sated by decades of nothing to do, Ging often likes to speculate at length on whether we’re an incarnation that became a refuge, or a refuge that became an incarnation. But as I say, she’s a lot brainier than the rest of us, and that includes me. So she usually loses me in her logic pretty fast, and I get up and wander off and go look at the mountains for a while as she continues talking to the crabs.

You should know it’s understood between us that no offense will be taken—for all that, having been raised to be unfailingly pleasant, polite and cheerful and still remembering those lessons, I, Mary-Ann, nonetheless felt some discomfiture at wandering off to go look at the mountains during the first fifteen years or so. But we’ll all be here forever, and my old friend will happily tell her theories to the crabs, who may be an audience more insightful than her human one, until night comes and the sky unveils its stars, and we build our separate fire here up at our end of the camp.

I need to hear Ging’s voice behind me to keep looking at the mountains very long, because they frighten me; as they do all of us. Early on, the men got the bright idea of planting Old Glory on the island’s southernmost peak—to signal passing ships, they said, although even back then Ginger and I already suspected that they simply needed to have projects and ambitions to keep themselves occupied. But we were all still one group then, and so we got the flag from the boat, put it on a pole that one of the men had made, and started climbing, Ginger leading the way in her white and starry evening gown. But we never got more than a couple of hundred yards up the slope, and when we turned to go back, we soon found ourselves running.

As we don’t actually know the name of this island, assuming that it has one, we may have feared discovering that it had been done before. Or hadn’t, but would seem completely pointless once we did. In any case, whatever the true reason for our fear of the mountains may be, now we all stay near the beach. We tell ourselves the ships will be more visible to us and we to them, and they more likely to come in and pick us up, if we’re all closer to the water.

These days, however, Ging and I don’t spend a lot of time with the others. Up at our end of the camp, we tend our own fire; we keep to our separate sisterhood. While I’m frankly not sure when we began to live apart from the other five, the day the Maxwell House coffee jar washed ashore was the first time we’d all clustered in one group in ages.

Even the non-egotists among us were eager to read about ourselves, in no matter how distorted and travestied a version. But that scrap of newspaper was also the first word we’d had of the outside world, or anyway America, since 1964, the year we all washed up here.

When one of the men finally turned the page over to see what was on the flip side of the review, he couldn’t glean all that much from it, since it was mostly advertisements. There was a public notice announcing that Gang-A-Gley Pharmaceuticals was discontinuing the manufacture of its medication Laggilin, having determined that the condition it alleviated wasn’t worth curing, and an ad for summer rentals in Provincetown. An antiques store specializing in things nautical announced a vintage Royal Navy spyglass for sale, and a recently unearthed bushel of genuine PT-109 tie clips from the 1960 Kennedy campaign. From an alarmingly blue-eyed commemorative plate offered by an apparent charitable organization for emotionally disturbed watercolorists calling itself the Franklin Mint, we gathered, with sorrow, that Frank Sinatra had passed. A local car show promoted itself as featuring an authentic Duesenberg, and so on.

In fact, the only actual news item on the page was part of a story about a young woman named Parvita Singh who, despite being confined to a wheelchair, had been elected to the county board in Arlington, Virginia. There was a picture of her flashing a victory sign on election night. Crouched next to her was her beaming father, identified as a Washington, D.C., cab driver.

He was flashing a victory sign, too.

“What the hell’s going on back there, anyhow?” whichever one of the men had been reading complained. In fact, in his irritation and perplexity, he had almost started to crumple the paper up when I stopped
him. He never knew that, behind his back, Ginger and I had looked at each other—with, as I believe the saying goes, a wild surmise.

Or that the unaccustomed tears in my friend’s eyes were only prevented from dripping by the thickness of her false eyelashes, which caught them like bugs in amber.