Portion of the Sea (13 page)

So I opened Ava’s journal, eager for words of advice from the president of the unladylike club. I may have felt a year older, sitting in the limo listening to the car horns bemoaning the tempers of the drivers, but Ava truly was a year older.

I was stunned to discover it had been an entire year since our president’s previous entry.

IX
SANIBEL ISLAND

1891

Ava

According to my mother, a girl is like an island in that she is constantly changing with time. And elements such as sunlight, wind and tides are constantly at work, altering her. When I asked her how a girl becomes a woman, she said it’s a process consisting of waves, gentle ripples, crashing surf and shifting sands. It’s the coming together of small things over time that creates a woman
.

I KNEW THE SEASONS
on Sanibel had fully revolved, and it was spring once more when I awoke to the sound of alligators bellowing in the swamp outside my window. I first heard their sound last spring when we first arrived, and it was a sound I’d never forget.

“Why are they making all that noise? What are those gators doing out there?” I pulled the pillow off my face and called out from my bed to Dahlia and Abigail, who were up before dawn doing laundry.

“Alligator noises are none of a young lady’s business,” my mother replied from the other room. “Ava, get out of bed. There’s work to be done.”

“They’re mating, aren’t they?” I asked, kicking the blanket down off my body and past my toes. “Why do they mate?”

Dahlia poked her head in my room. “It’s how they make baby gators,” she murmured.

“I knew that, Grandmalia, but how exactly do they do it?”

“I think you better get your mind off that and think about something else.”

“How can I think of anything else when all I hear are those gators mating out in the swamp? What else should I think about?”

“How about Little Ben?”

“Benjamin Harrison? The president? Why on earth would a girl want to think about anything or anyone political? I’m not interested in any of that. I do want to know more about mating.”

“It’s not for me to tell you.”

“Why? Why won’t anyone ever tell me anything I want to know? Oh come on, Grandmalia, tell me how babies get made.”

I didn’t know my daddy had been standing outside the door, listening, but he made his presence known by clearing his voice loudly, and when I saw his shadow on the wall outside my door it looked like the spooky branches of a swamp tree. He staggered into my room like a creature and said in an eerie tone, “You hear all those roaring bellows and splashing head slaps out there?”

“Yes,” I said, reminding myself why I never ask my daddy any life questions in the first place.

“It’s the fellows courting the females with nose-taps, nudges, and shoves. That’s all there is to it, dear,” he said with moody eyes.

“That’s disgusting,” I said.

“It sure is and it’s exactly why I’m warning you to stay clear of boys. They’re disgusting. That’s all you need to know, coconut.”

“Yes, sir,” I replied, disappointed in our stagnant conversation.

“You think maybe you’ve got too much time on your hands, Ava?”

“Hardly any.”

“Okay, because I could always add to your chores.”

“More chores?” I asked. “Unless you want to create an eighth day of the week, Daddy, my seven days are already full with nothing but chores. Look at me,” I said, wiping the tears from my face. “I’m fretful, frazzled, and fraught with tension as it is, and I’m starting school in the fall. If I take on more work, I’ll die.”

“No additional chores, then. But you better pull yourself together and get out of bed. I’ve got to get going myself.”

“Where are you going this morning?” I asked him.

“To the bay to catch us something good. I’ll be back soon.”

“Bye.”

“Bye, blossom.”

I once again sat up in bed and touched my feet to the wooden floor but collapsed back down again. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, other than I dreaded Mondays. I couldn’t tell my mother how I loathed doing laundry on Mondays, because a lady ought to joyfully fulfill her womanly role as keeper of the house and I didn’t want to be chastised, but it saddened me to think we spent at least forty-four hours a week making meals and cleaning up after them and another seven hours each week cleaning and doing laundry. It’s great for those who enjoy that sort of thing, but I didn’t enjoy it. I was different, and it was burdening to me to be so different, but I couldn’t help it.

“Don’t let that sun rise before you, dear,” Abigail said as she walked into my room with a vase of flowers. She had been walking with a bounce ever since we arrived on the island and more so once Stewart had started bringing flowers home to her on a daily basis.

No sooner had she set the vase on my bureau then Dahlia came following after with a broom. “When Abigail was a little girl, around your age, Ava, fifteen, sixteen, she’d pick me flowers,” Dahlia said slamming the broom down on escaping bugs. “But I told her the flowers had to stay out on the porch.” She tossed the broom aside and started stomping the bugs with her feet instead. I frowned.

“Don’t make that face or it’ll freeze like that. You look like a dented coconut,” she said as she stopped her bug smashing and sat down at the end of my bed and began rubbing my toes. “You should be up by now.
What’s going on this morning?”

“I’m not sure,” I said, pulling my knees to my chest. “My body aches. I feel no cheerfulness left in me. I hope it’s not tuberculosis.”

“Lord,” my mother said as she pulled the sheets from around us and off the bed. “Could it be, Mother?”

“No,” Dahlia insisted. “She’s been working too hard. For over a year now that child has been beset by long days of labor. She’s exhausted, mentally and physically. No wonder her bones are aching.”

“She just turned fifteen,” added Abigail. “She’s still growing into a young lady. They’re growing pains. That’s what she’s feeling. Haven’t you noticed? She’s growing like a sea oat, and those legs of hers are tall and long like a wood stork.”

“Should you send for a doctor?” I asked.

“No. You don’t need any doctor,” said Dahlia, turning to look at my mother. “I’ll tell you what she needs. She needs time off to be a girl before she turns into a lady.”

“Should we have her stay in bed today?”

Dahlia stood up and walked over to the window and looked out. “If that’s what she wants to do. I think she should do whatever she wants today.”

“I think I agree with you for once, Mother,” said Abigail. “I don’t know why I didn’t think of it myself. I’ll bet any day now she’ll become a young woman, and that alone deserves a break, doesn’t it?”

X

I GOT DRESSED IN
my black puffed sleeve wool bathing costume and walked out the door of the small, palmetto-thatched house we erected with the help of our neighbors just one year ago. I felt like I was walking away from Monday itself. To me, president of the unladylike club, all the never-ending housework over the last year had become absolute drudgery.

I passed our garden, where the tomatoes would grow, and walked past clumps of palmetto trees and then through rows of citrus trees. Our crops had proven successful, and we had been sending them to the mainland aboard steamships. It was the first time I had ever walked away from it all long enough to feel any pride.

Beginning the morning after Stewart returned to us with the tarpon he had caught, we marched around the island of wild, untouched beauty six days in search of our land, and when we found it I had wanted to shout and blow trumpets, but there had never been any time for that. We laid claim to a 160-acre tract not far from the Gulf of Mexico and started work immediately.

When Dahlia told me to do whatever I wanted today, the only thing I could think of was walking out to the beach to hop over waves, as slight as they were on this side of the state. There, maybe, I could get a different look at the sunrise. I no longer liked sunrises and dreaded them representing the start of chores. But this morning, I wanted the sunrise to mean something other than time to start laundry on Mondays, ironing and
mending on Tuesdays, baking on Wednesdays, and deep household cleaning on Fridays. And now I wanted to remember why I ever thought the sunrise was beautiful in the first place, which I did, a long time ago.

While rounding Sanibel’s eastern end, I noticed plovers, least terns, and black skimmers nesting directly in the sand, which they do in the spring, and an ibis was flaunting its iridescent pink bill and legs. I stopped walking and listened carefully, for I thought I heard the Spirit of God hovering over me, subtle as the first signs of spring in Florida. I’m sure the Spirit of God was with me year-round, not only in the spring, but I’ve been too busy to stop and listen for it.

I felt blessed with a sense of worth and dignity as I glanced up at the horizon. The sun had already woken and was making its way up, faithfully and dutifully, as always, never skipping out a day here or there, and I wondered how that sun did it. Even on rainy days, there it went, hiding behind clouds but still getting up to make the world more beautiful.

If I could spend my days writing, I’d rise up faithfully each morning as well. I envied the sun for doing its one significant task, for lighting up the world and making it more beautiful. I wanted to write of a beautiful world.

I sat down a moment in the sand and yanked off my lace-up bathing slippers, then my long black stockings and, finally, the fancy cap I had over my hair. I felt free and naughty, for the sun was now touching parts of me that I knew it shouldn’t be touching. As I glanced out at the bay, which looked like a bucket of blue-green paint, I spotted my daddy sailing about. I hoped he was too far out to see that my ankles and feet were naked and exposed. I stood up and continued to walk, watching the bay for his boat, but then I looked down, which was a good thing, or I’d have stumbled over some boy as if he were a piece of driftwood.

“What are you doing?” I asked the boy. He was down on his knees in the sand, kneeling over a half-dead pelican.

He glanced up. “Fidgeting with the bird,” he answered. “It’s injured. A fishing line.”

“Need my help?”

“No,” he said, struggling to hold it down.

“Sure looks like you do.”

“Maybe I’d want your help if you weren’t a girl,” he said.

“That type.”

“What?” he asked. “What type?”

I wasn’t going to waste time telling him he’s the typical boy who doesn’t think a girl is of help except with household chores.” Look, my daddy’s out in the bay. I can signal for him to come help, but by then your bird might die a slow torturous death. Or, I can help right here and now. What’s it going to be?”

“Get down and restrain him. Hold his wings against his body.”

I tossed my wired sun hat on the ground. I hadn’t ever helped a bird before, or any boy, especially one I did not know, a stranger boy, but it’s not to say I have never done the work of a man. If I weren’t wearing a clumsy dress and bloomers trimmed with ribbons and bows, he’d see the wonderfully unladylike muscles on my arms, shoulders, and back that prove I’ve done more physical labor than most boys, maybe more than this one, although he had an impressively solid build himself, I might add objectively.