Stay (13 page)

it,” I said. We walked. “Nope, that’s not it. That place has indoor

plumbing,” I said.

My father gave me a look. “I’m expecting your best,” he said.

I was two steps behind him, dragging the way I used to when I

was a kid and didn’t want to go somewhere. “How often do you

get to have dinner with an esteemed poet? I’m talking National

Book Award.”

He waited for me to catch up. “Fine,” I said. I saw the

* 96 *

Stay

shack up ahead at the same time he did. Maybe my mind

moved over a bit when I did, the way a mind can when you get

more information. Because Annabelle Aurora had lit the place

up for our welcome. Candles big and small lined the railing of

the small deck and the steps to the front door, and there were

candles on the windowsills and on pieces of driftwood and set

upon rocks out front. Little flickering lights were everywhere.

Firefly magic.

“It’s beautiful,” I said.

“One of the hardest tasks as a human being is knowing when

to keep an open mind,” my father said. “And when not to.”

I took that hit. I had it coming. Annabelle Aurora emerged

from her door and took my father up into a great hug. “Bobby.

Look at you!” she said. “My eyes are so happy right this minute.

So happy.” She took my hands. “Clara. We meet again.”

Annabelle Aurora’s stern mouth had relaxed into a smile and

her eyes were glittery. She wore a long caftan of a bright magenta.

“This is beautiful,” Dad said. He felt the fabric with his fingers.

“India,” she said. “Come in, come in.”

It was not at all what I had imagined. I pictured cat food

bowls and the smell of tomato soup and a couch with worrisome

stains. But the house was clean and warm, with wood paneling

and tiny paintings and books in piles used as end tables. It was

a cozy, sheltered cave, and it smelled like garlic and wine. From

inside, mostly what you saw was the sea out before you. The light-

house. The sun resting on the horizon.

They chatted while she steamed the mussels and tossed the

“grittle and snips,” the edible plantings she found on the beach,

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Deb Caletti

into a salad. She unfolded a little table and set it out on the deck.

She draped a cloth over the top.

“So pretty,” I said. The cloth was blue and soft, swoops of

shapes. It looked more like something you’d wear than spill

food on.

“Thailand,” she said.

We brought out the dishes. Melted butter to dip the mus-

sels in, warm baked bread, the mysterious salad. The sun

dipped, and the lights from the candles lit the night like earth

stars. Dad and Annabelle Aurora talked books and old friends,

though Annabelle remembered to include me.
Did you know

your father almost failed my class?
she would ask. Or,
Have you

ever been to New York in the winter? Well, your father hadn’t

either.
We laughed and they drank wine. The salad was strange

and tasted like grass and herbs and seaweed. Annabelle told

us how she tried to live mostly from the land. She was worried

about the mark she’d made in this life. What was wasted. She

could manage to eat and survive with most everything from

her garden and the beach.

“No more capers in cut glass jars?” my father said. She leaned

over and pinched his arm. We watched the candles flicker.

“Did you hear that Daniella Morgan married that violinist?”

she asked.

“I heard,” he said.

“She was in our class,” Annabelle Aurora explained. “Your

father followed her around like a puppy. And . . . what was

her name?
Summer of the Gray Swan
? That story. I haven’t

forgotten it.”

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“You haven’t forgotten her name, either, you old bitch,” my

father said. Annabelle laughed. “You have a mind like a steel trap.”

“Listen to us and our clichés,” she said. “Someone should

pummel us with a red pencil. Fiona Husted.”

My father looked down at his bread.

“She dumped him,” Annabelle said to me. “And then she

became very successful.”

“She regretted it,” he said. “Not the success, of course.”

“Ha!”

“I know she did.” His voice was quiet.

“Yes, well,” Annabelle Aurora said. She poured more wine. I

thought about my mother, then. The thought came suddenly, a

memory, maybe, sparked by this conversation, that name,
Fiona

Husted
. A door slamming—the night she’d had a “mood” when

Annabelle visited for dinner. These kinds of stories, maybe, were

funny for only a while. Maybe after a while they just made you

feel bad. I wondered about the rocky territory of love and security,

the ways a known person can suddenly seem unknown enough to

threaten our sense of safety. Past loves were never past, Christian

had said, and I had argued, that was stupid. We could never be part

of every corner of a person’s life, and you just lived with that. You

didn’t go delving around in those corners in ways that made you

feel weird. That was just asking for trouble. You had to separate

the real threats from the ones that lived only in your imagination.

“Ah. All in the sordid past,” my father said.

“Still,” Annabelle said. “You should maybe start living again.

Fiona Husted never married.”

He was looking at her, and she was looking at him, and they

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Deb Caletti

were saying things that only they understood. “ ‘Love’s tangled

branches’ ” he quoted again.16*

“It was a different time in my life. And yours.”

“ ‘Deep scratches on bare arms to those who risk passing . . .’ ”

“ ‘To those who
brave
passing,’ smart-ass.” She threw her

napkin at him. It was sort of flirtatious.17*

I helped Annabelle cut thick slices of raspberry pie. We came

inside. It was getting cold, and there were mosquitoes. Annabelle

started to yawn. Her old eyes looked tired. My father noticed, too,

and we cleared the dishes and got ready to leave. He went outside

to fold up the table for her.

Annabelle Aurora took my hands. Hers were small and

warm, but she gripped me tightly. “Adrienne Rich wrote about

this, what you’re doing,” she said to me. “Primitive tribes send

their women away ‘to go down into herself, to introvert, in order

to evoke her instincts and intuitions.’18* Yes? You, here? Think of

it as a natural process. You find yourself by finding your instinct.

By listening. By seeing what
is
.”

“Dad told you why we’re here,” I said.

“Well, we all come to the ends of the earth for our own rea-

sons,” she said. She shrugged, as if to say it were a simple matter

16 Annabelle Aurora, Green Pastures, Selected Poems.

17 If she’d slept with him or something, I didn’t want to know. She hadn’t always been

that old. Still. I’d die.

18 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born. I’d insert the proper footnote form here, but that’s

one of those things I never could get to stick in my mind. Footnote form, roman numer-

als, common denominators. Trash bin of the brain.

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of fact.

“What are your reasons?” I asked.

“To lick my wounds. By the time a person’s my age, they have

quite a number of those, I suppose.”

Dad returned. Annabelle dropped my hands and hugged him

good-bye. “Annabelle, it was lovely,” he said.

And it
had
been lovely. My father and I trudged back up

the narrow piece of sand that was all that was left of the beach

now that the tide had come in. We climbed our way back up the

steep slope. My father reached the top and held his hand out to

me. The lighthouse shot out its intermittent beam in that deep

darkness. Sylvie Genovese’s own lights were out. You could only

hear the intermittent
chshsh
of waves unfurling on sand and the

threep threep
of crickets. The sea was endless-dark except for the

glowing tips of the waves in the moonlight.

We were quiet. My father was deep in his own thoughts. And

I was thinking about the women of primitive tribes and a hun-

dred drowned sailors and closing my eyes in my bed at the ends

of the earth.

* 101 *

I was not a girl who felt so free and comfortable with

my own body that it was easy for me to share it. I was shy. In my

bathing suit, I was shy. I remember being scared to start middle

school because we thought we were going to have to take show-

ers in P.E. That was the rumor. The image I had was straight out

of a prison movie. Naked, exposed me, huddled, arms clutching

for cover, as the other girls stood under the water, free and fear-

less. I still have dreams about that—some sleep-brain P.E. class

where I can’t find the hook I left my clothes on. In the dream I

am Holocaust thin, as if even my usual protective fat has left me

to fend for myself. Of course, they never made us take showers.

Still, I am not one of those women you see in gym locker rooms

strutting around with their bare droopy breasts and pocked

thighs. They don’t even seem to know it might be a good idea to

Stay

undress in the bathroom stall. Then again, who’s the one with

the problem.

I was self-conscious when Dylan Ricks first kissed me, when

he touched me. To me, my body seemed only good enough,

something you’d buy if it were 60 percent off, but not at full

price. I didn’t know what men liked in a body. From what I could

tell, it wasn’t what I had. We were told to be thin, but it seemed to

me it was girls who wanted that, not boys. Boys liked breasts and

asses and thin girls didn’t have those. I was neither thin enough

to be admired by girls, nor lush enough to be admired by boys,

so my body just seemed . . . serviceable. A toaster. A bicycle. A

thing capable enough, I guessed, of carrying my spirit around. I

couldn’t understand the worth it might have to Dylan. Dylan had

said I was inhibited, but I wasn’t inhibited, I was sixteen.

When I first leaned in to kiss Christian on those bleachers,

the momentum of the night picked me up and set me down

into another way of being. A new person in your life gives the

rest of it a chance to be new, too. Your life can be whatever you

want it to, from there on out. I leaned in and kissed and that is

who I was to him, not shy, but bold. Not inhibited, but brave.

I was that to him and so I kept being that. It was what I thought

he wanted and what he was attracted to, and yet it was this, this

exact thing I wasn’t even really, that made him the most insecure.

I got to the point, later, where I didn’t know who I was. I didn’t

know which one of those people was me. I just couldn’t tell.

We didn’t make love often after that time in the car, but when we

did, there was an intensity that made me feel too much—I was

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Deb Caletti

glass, transparent and breakable. It bound us closer together.

It was the one thing we alone had with each other, with no one

else, and to me that made it feel like it was brick set tight against

more brick, another layer to our own private wall, but that’s not

how Christian saw it. For him, it was as if he’d had a nice object,

a painting, say, or some vase, and then he suddenly found out

it was rare and valuable, so valuable it made him nervous. He

needed to guard it. He needed to make sure no one would steal

it. It was perfect, so he also needed to make sure it stayed perfect,

with the help of his constant, small corrections. When summer

came and I started my bookstore job again, he’d ask too many

questions about who came in. He worried about my coworker,

Mark, even though Mark was a graduate student and had a girl-

friend. I learned what not to say.

My father noticed. Christian and he always stayed their polite

distance, but Dad would catch me in the hall sometimes, stop me

on the way to my room.
What’s with all his questions, C. P.?,
he’d

ask.
You in jail or something? You the princess in the tower?
I’d get

pissed, and he’d back off. He learned what not to say, too.

Still, if it was just
that
all the time, just insecurities and jeal-

ousies, I would have left. It wasn’t just that all the time. Not at all.

We went swimming a lot that summer. He’d come by Armchair

Books when I was done working, and we’d head across the street

to Greenlake. We’d lay our towels out on the dock; our hair

slicked back, that clean, tired, swimming happiness just soaking

up the late afternoon sun. We sometimes laughed so hard, my

stomach hurt. We would drive. We’d ride the ferries back and

forth from Seattle to the islands just to feel the strong wind on