Vertigo (9 page)

My daughter is dressed for one of the many occasions she imagines could happen to her in tight jeans, bangles, a lace scarf, and a t-shirt with a picture of a fashion model that says, WE GOT THE LOOK. I dressed like that once: hoop earrings, off-the-shoulder sweatshirt, leggings.

I cannot drive so we must take the bus between cities. The bus takes us through the outsides of cities, through yellow new estates of family-shaped houses. The people there have jobs you could put in a children’s book. I’d always hoped to end up in one of these places where no one has ever been old.

The bus takes us through the market towns where the old people live, and where the property is prettier and less expensive than in the city we have left, or the city we are traveling to. Once I would have wanted to explore each shop on each high street, to discover local features even in the chain stores. I’d have wanted especially to investigate the charity shops, knowing that, among the second-hand pleated skirts and polyester blouses I would find … what? I would have visited once a week, twice, perhaps every lunch break from my children’s book job, before I went home to my house on the new estate on the frayed outskirts of town. I would have visited the shops inconspicuously. I would not have talked to the women behind the tills. They would not have known where I came from. Each time I arrived, they would have beamed at a fresh customer.

I would buy nothing, but I would not lose hope.

As it is I have packed wrongly. I know that now. I should have brought tights (it’s cold). I should not have brought the new trousers that don’t fit. I didn’t bring anything else.

The bus enters a large town (or a small city) scattered with sponge-on-stick model trees. Sunset: the trees blur at the edges, change color. From a distance they are solid, square: from close up, a net of branches.

The driver pulls up the shade with the plastic window revealing the whole road ahead, the game of framing gone. And my daughter, who has been sleeping on my shoulder, wakes up. She shifts and—vast, monumental in sleep—becomes tiny in movement.

I can see my mother and father waiting at the bus stop. They are very small. My mother is wearing a pastel blouse and pastel slacks and pastel canvas shoes. Her shades are mint, peach, lemon, blueberry, cream. She is dressed as she would like to see her granddaughter dressed: edibly. Still she looks formal, arranged, neat. She cannot shake it.

I cannot hear what she says to my father. She says, “Forty-five, and she still has to take the bus.”

The bus stops and out get the sort of people who travel by bus between cities: students, old people—mainly women—and the middle-aged who cannot afford the train and who have never grown old enough to drive. Out we get, and away we go, the young, the old, and the failed girls.

There is now very little in my mind.

On the beach in front of the village, which is no more than a stony strip, there are some adults but no children, who are all on the sandy beach opposite, and a graveled path on a sliproad that leads to the hotel. I am wearing only a bikini, but I want to see the hotel. I had not considered that I would have to wear a bikini while walking from the beach to the hotel. I am too old to look good in a bikini and I have not, across the years, paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini for me to look good in a bikini. But, even when young, I never paid enough attention to looking good in a bikini so age is perhaps not the most important factor. I must walk through the streets as though neither age nor attention paid are factors, as this is a holiday village and it is quite normal for women who do not look good in bikinis to walk through its streets. Why should I be any exception?

I also have no shoes. The tarmac is a warm body beneath my feet.

The hotel is beautiful, even more beautiful up close than it was from far away. It is white and on its facade its name, which is the name of the village, is a dusty blue. There are three rows of windows on the front, on each, shutters, the same faded blue as the sign I could read from the beach across the estuary, within each, white lace curtains, and along each storey a blue ironwork balcony that spans all three windows.

The menu of the hotel restaurant is exactly what it should be: not cheap enough to be disappointing, not expensive enough to be intimidating. And there are ways round:
menu du jour, prix fixe
. I cannot see the food or smell the food but, reading the menu, I know that the food will be good.

There is no one on the streets. It’s like lunchtime, except it isn’t lunchtime. I’m not sure what time it is or how long it took me to swim the channel. It is colder than it was on the other side of the estuary. In the harbor in front of the hotel, boats blink white: a
défi
—a challenge—to the ocean, which is dark. It is beginning to get dark—no, it’s not getting dark yet, it just feels like it might soon.

From the jetty I can see the beach on the other side of the bay, which the sun still hits, but I cannot see what you are doing. I cannot see what the children are doing. On your beach, sometimes you choose to pay attention to the children, and feel worthy, and sometimes you choose to read a book, and feel interested, or engaged, or intelligent, or whatever, but, whichever you are doing, I know you will be having fun, because you do not worry that the children might be neglected. You never have to make the choice to neglect the children. For you to read your book is not to neglect the children because you know that if you do not pay attention to the children I will. I have the choice to pay attention to the children, which I may or may not find—but must give the pretence of finding—fun, or else the whole concept of fun, and the holiday itself, tips over. Or I have the choice to read a book. But I know that if I do not play with the children, you will not play with them, not unless you really find it fun. My choice to read my book necessarily involves the worry of the possibility of neglecting the children. While you read your book with the attention your lack of worry affords, information enters your brain making you more interested, or interesting, engaged or engaging, and intelligent, and so you become less like me, who, not lacking the worry about neglecting the children, does not become any of these. I can no longer see, from across the bay, which of these two things you have chosen to do. And this is why I swam the estuary.

The children are, in any case, now getting too old to receive the kind of attention you are not willing to give them. They are losing their last childish things, their shoes and clothes have become bigger until they are barely distinguishable from ours. We had more children—more than one I mean—to preserve this childishness, and also so as not to have to spend so much time together. Had we liked each other less we’d have had four, five. There’s nothing like love’s dilution to keep things in proportion.

At the end of the jetty, on my side of the estuary, a band is playing. Only children are dancing. The adults stare at the band as though music is something they had forgotten. It must be dispiriting to perform like this, afternoon after afternoon. One man nods the tune to his partner. She fails to pick it up. There are stalls selling snacks, and other things, but no urgency in the queue for anything. Everyone has enough money, more than enough money for food, and no one is hungry.

There are hidden patterns in everything. I should be looking at the waitresses who come from somewhere else and who are not here for a holiday, for whom being here is only a step to being elsewhere. But I am not one of the waitresses. I am one of the holidaymakers, and, though my compatriots in fun disgust me I must not dismiss their feelings as unworthy by refusing to stay onside.

All holidays are nightmares: you save up all year and what do you find at the other end but someone else’s house with all their own particular domestic nasties? They think you can’t see where they haven’t dusted; they think you can’t see the cracked tiles, the moldstains on the wall behind the fridge. Not able to afford an anti-home, a hotel, we make do with a para-home, with someone else’s cast-off furniture, with the unfashionable crockery, the cheap fill-ins from IKEA. By “they,” of course, I mean “I.” We too have built an edifice from which no one wants anything but escape. It will fade, like the hotel, and people will wonder why we ever chose to build there. It will outlast us, likely, though there have been instances of women standing in the ruins of their former homes, strangely triumphant. We could abandon ours, but we’re still mortgaged to it, and by the time it’s paid we may have nowhere else to live, or any means by which to move on.

As an alternative, we look forward to the trapped repetition of shore, the unfamiliar house, the road between. Again and again we will flog fun from that exchange, or something we’re willing to call fun, after which we will begin to hurtle toward something else—the Christmas holiday, the Easter holiday—never any rest. When we arrive we will find they add velocity to whatever drives us forward.

It’s September next week, and summer’s already turned its back. Already, the weather’s stopped being accountable. There will be few more beautiful afternoons when we can turn outside from the spaces we have made, spaces that have become unbearable. Summer is a platform from which to think about the fall. In summer, some men see more of their families than they do all year, others stay in town with colleagues, with women who cannot leave town … Sometimes, often, you do not holiday with us, or you leave early … work … How have I lived those times you left? In abeyance. I thought it would be freedom, without you: it is not. The thing that I have with you is pegged to different parts of my body. When I move, when you move, one of them tugs, and others slacken so I don’t feel I am tied in those places, though I am.

In one month it will no longer feel like summer, and I do not want to go into the dark again.

I go back into the sea because there is nothing else to do. Or, there is, but I do not do it. When I reach the harbor there is a sign. It says, do not bathe, and do not swim the channel
à cause des
something,
des courants
etcetera,
à cause des bateaux
. I did not see a sign like this on the other side of the estuary. There is a ferry, though it doesn’t go for hours. I have no money, but if I wait, if I tell the boatman my situation, I might persuade him to take me …The light of the lighthouse blinks, then the lights on the boats, one by one. I look out from under eyelids puffed by salt-water. I have seen harbors before—in Nice, in Marseilles—but none so narrow as this one, so difficult to get into or out of. I walk back to the beach and walk in to the sea. It is my choice.

Shall I tell you what it is like to drown? It is very calm and quiet. I step over from the blue to the ink-colored water. I cannot see beneath me. I had never been afraid of the sea, had not understood people who were. That was because I had only seen its surface and had seen things that float on it, like boats, and seagulls. The surface of the sea is round when viewed at eye level, like the horizon, like the earth. It tips, flat as a plate, each time I do, both hemispheres reorienting around me whatever my angle. The two hemispheres are unequal. The lower hemisphere is cold. I do not know what goes on there. It is vast, and in it is 90% of my body, which is kicking.

In the hemisphere above, in which things seem more varied—the sky, the land, the buildings, the people on the beach—is my head. Having made myself so very available I’m virtually concave, will I sink or swim? Depends which way up you place me. Pretend it’s fiction. Pretend you are drowning. Or pretend not to be drowning, because maybe you are. Though it’s difficult to tell, the outcome will be identical.

I say “you.” Of course I mean “me.”

Far away, a small motor-boat turns in my direction and although it is a very small boat and very far away I am unable to see anything above the underside of its prow which prompts the idea that there is no reason anyone on the boat could see my small dark head which I can hardly get above the level of the waves. Though the boat is small, it is big enough to kill me, if it does not see me. I tread water, going neither forward nor back … then there are a few moments.

There is the moment I think I will stop and wave so that the boat, steering toward me, is less likely to kill me, inattentively. But I do not, because I have already thought this will not work, and this thought has cost me some energy. Instead, I continue, for a moment, to tread water, knowing that though this may prevent me from going forward into the path of the boat, I will lose more energy. Then—partly because it is less risky, and partly because I cannot stop myself—I shout in a small voice: no! no!

The boat turns toward the shore. As my life now concerns only the circle of water around me, these moments recede quickly into the past. The boat turns toward the shore and the danger is years away. I was not the same person then, or I am not now. In front of me is the same struggle for life. The thing to do is to pretend the entirety of under-the-water is not happening, or is happening to someone else, or that—no—that the context in which it is happening is entirely different, or that each movement made cannot be made otherwise, or—even better—to put it out of my mind, to find it boring.

But if I died
…

The salt meniscus that curves under my bottom lip: if it were to curve over, if it were to become what is inside as well as outside me. And that is all it is a matter of. The thought of drowning used to smell of chlorine. Now it smells of salt. Each death is specific. And the fear during death is nothing like the fear of death at other times. My fear is of this specific death.

I can see the people on the beach who are lying with their toes toward the water. They are not very far away, but they are not looking in the right direction to see my head. On my head is my mouth, which is above the water-line, and with which I could call to alert someone on the beach to my drowning. But my mouth is connected to my lungs, which, being below the water line, are cold, and so constricted by the weight of water as to make the action of shouting difficult. If I stopped swimming to tread water enough to raise my head, if I inflated my lungs enough to call to them, I would no longer be able to pull against the current, and then the shouting would not be loud enough, not in the right language, and do no good, and, even if they are good people, and attentive, they may not be able to act in time. If I drown, whose fault will it be? The fault of the waves, the lack of a sign, the fear inspired by the sign, lack of sufficient muscle? Does it matter whose fault it is? But there is not much time to regret other people, their actions or inactions. Isn’t drowning itself enough for one day?