Sea Wife Page 3

  At first, my fears were confirmed—I was a barely competent crewmember. I bumped my head on the same things every day—the companionway, the shelving over the children’s berths. There was no learning. I was a cack-handed first mate, a housewife-on-the-run, a poet who’d run out of verse. I had my Ph. but not the D. Someday, due to my inattention, I was sure I’d be hit with the boom and thrown overboard, and the best thing about drowning would be that I wouldn’t have to pump the damned head anymore. The piston stuck. You had to grease it with olive oil every couple of days.

  Everything at sea was an effort. Especially in the tropics, where equipment dried stiff or rusty or tacky after a downpour, and every crevice was clogged with salt…

  I did not know that I was becoming a sailor.

  I did not know what the sea would ask of me.

  Naysayers? Turns out they’re everywhere.

  One of the guys back in the Bocas boatyard, he used to get under my skin.

  You rename the boat? this man asked me.

  He wasn’t even the foreman, just some dude the other guys seemed to look up to, the one who considered himself big man. He had a gut, w/ skinny legs, and he wore American-style work boots, which no one else wore. Even I went around in supermini flip-flops. When the men worked, this guy would talk & talk. Literally nonstop, no one else ever taking a turn or interrupting him. It was like he was hypnotizing them w/ this endless monologue, which was only broken up by loud machinery.

  Bad luck to change the name, this guy had said to me, shaking his head.

  You think so? I said, trying to be friendly. I’ve heard that said.

  We looked up at ‘Juliet’ in her cradle, her hull red like the breast of a robin.

  Bad luck, he said again, still shaking his head.

  Well you know, I said, people rename their boats all the time.

  And you ever know what happen to those boats, my friend?

  He tapped me on the arm, even though I was right there.

  You study what happen to those boats?

  Anger twisted in my chest.

  Thanks for your concern, man, I said.

  No problem, he said.

  I really feel your love, thank you.

  No problem, he said coldly.

  I left him standing there, looking at me. Then he started up again with the talking.

  Walking up the path I heard a chorus of laughter at my back.

  Hombre muerto, someone muttered.

  * * *

  —

  We worked so hard to prepare her, to provision, to plot course, that we lost track of days. We even forgot Thanksgiving. Other cruisers in Bocas had told us we would know when we were ready.

  And suddenly, we were.

  One day, there was a palpable feeling of preparedness.

  The ocean waiting like so much road.

  We’d take our first overnight sail immediately. Two days across the Golfo de los Mosquitos to the colonial town of Portobelo. Michael didn’t relinquish the helm once. We arrived with a buoyant and slightly manic captain. We decided to stay in Portobelo and have an honest Christmas.

  Days slipped by. Petals falling on water.

  It wasn’t until January that we made our first push into San Blas, stopping first at Cayos Limones.

  San Blas is the Spanish word.

  Guna Yala is its real name.

  Nearly four hundred tiny islands: the semiautonomous homeland of the Guna.

  The Guna permitted no commerce, no buying and selling. The farther you got into the territory, the fewer traces of mankind there were. The casual tourist stayed away. Because there was only the sea. The sea and small atolls of sand and palm. You wondered if you kept sailing, would you yourself disappear; the idea was not unpleasant.

  I have a very clear memory: We were en route from Limones. Eastward into the heart of Guna Yala. Halfway across the Mayflower Channel. I was sitting with my back to the mast. Daydreaming.

  The horizon had that effect on me. The undeviating line of sea and sky emptied my mind. Scarves of thought pulled painlessly from the magic hat. You must understand, we were never fully out of sight of land—not until that final crossing. So fear, if one felt it, could be soothed by finding the shoreline, which was always there.

  Let’s face it, I was a terrible watchman. The changes in perspective entranced me. The different kinds of wind entranced me, and I kept trying to name them: questioning wind, tender wind, triumphant wind. On watch, I was only dimly aware of what was happening in the near distance, or on the boat itself.

  Suddenly Sybil was screaming.

  Mommy! Daddy! Captain Daddy! Sailboat starboard, Daddy!

  My heart dropped. She was right—a sailboat was crossing our starboard quarter at a mysteriously close distance. Where had it come from? From behind the large island to starboard, obviously. I was stunned to realize that Michael was below, while also remembering that he’d told me he was leaving the helm moments earlier. Uselessly, I beheld the boat, not much longer than us, but filling the horizon. Her almond-shaped hull was blond wood, and piles of complicated sails gave her the look of origami.

  By the time I had scrambled across the cabin top to the cockpit, Michael was already at the helm, face flushed with purpose.

  All right, crew, he said. Are we the stand-on vessel?

  Yes? I cried. No? Do you want me to look it up, Michael?

  He laughed. No, Juliet, honey. I was hoping you’d know. We’ve got to give way. Let’s see you do it.

  Is this the best time for a teaching moment, Michael?

  But he had already stepped away from the helm, and I had to lunge forward to keep the wheel from spinning.

  We are on a port tack, I said. We have to go behind.

  I turned the wheel hard, and Juliet fell off. Like a spurned woman, giving the passing ship her shoulder.

  The origami ship glided past like something from a myth. We were close enough to see the objects in the cockpit, the very cleats on the deck.

  One old man stood at the helm steering with his arm looped through the wheel. Despite the dangerous nearness of our boats, he seemed unfazed. I could have heard him if he’d spoken.

  He looked at us with a kind of ancient patience, gave us a perfunctory wave, and then was gone.

  Am I doing the right thing? Hell, I don’t know. That’s a completely different subject.

  * * *

  —

  Already, I revise the past. I make it sound like the boat was our first real point of contention. Back in Connecticut, we didn’t just argue about the boat. Michael and I had much bigger problems. We weren’t in a great place. As a couple, I mean. We didn’t see the world the same way. We fundamentally disagreed. We weren’t—how do I put this? How do I put this now?

  Never told Juliet this so maybe not such a great idea to write it down. I wouldn’t put it past her snooping. (HEY, JULIET. If you are taking the time to read this, you must be A] really, really bored, or B] confined to a hospital bed.) When I was still working at Omni, I used to sneak down to this freshwater marina near the Long Island Sound in the middle of the workday. Just to look at the boats. In my corporate uniform. Nobody ever said to me, What are you doing here? Nobody ever asked me a single personal question. Like it was the most natural thing for a guy in business wear to walk around the docks in the middle of the day asking the cruisers where they’d come from or where they were going. Then I’d go back to work w/ some B.S. about where I’d been.

  There was a boat of Canadians, a mother, father & two kids, sailing the most beautiful gaff-rigged sailboat. I’d watch them for long stretches, the kids playing w/ buckets & kayaks & mom and dad working on the boat, or just sitting on deck…

  One day an older gentleman came up to me.

  Some boat, he said.

  I know, I said.

  They live on that boat, he told me. Already been around the world once.

  Me & the old guy stood there looking at the boat in silence. I don’t think I’ve ever wanted anything so badly. I mean, until then, I’d never really envied somebody else’s life.

  People think they’re running from their problems, the man said. But those people are not running from problems. They just want different problems. They don’t want the problems of paperwork and traffic and political correctness. They want the problems of wind and weather. The problem of which way to go.

  I looked over at the guy. He had a full head of gray hair that sprouted out the sides of his MAGA baseball cap.

  Harry Borawski, he said, extending his hand. You’d be surprised how affordable a boat like that is.

  * * *

  —

  After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had—I don’t know—thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes—but at the margins. At the center, there was administration. Michael worked until six or seven p.m. All I wanted by then was a handoff for that final hour. At bath time, both kids in the tub, slippery and hairless, as I tried to keep one or the other from going under, I would whisper, Please come home, come home.

  The days were long and shadowy, but no matter how well or poorly I felt I had done as a mother, the final hour of the day was the worst. How time dragged at the end of the day. I’d kept the children alive the entire day but feared some unforeseen disaster in the last ten minutes.

  Sometimes the panic made it hard to breathe. I felt like an Irish lass caught in the fields at dusk with my apron full of potatoes. Should I drop the potatoes, save myself, and run? Or slow my progress by carrying them carefully through the dark woods?

  I could have gotten from that marina to the Long Island Sound in 8 nautical miles. And from there to Portugal in 3000 more.

  But I swear I have never once considered leaving Juliet.

  No matter how difficult she can be!

  No matter how different we are.

  I LOVE MY CRAZY WIFE.

  (There you go, Juliet, you damned snoop.)

  * * *

  —

  But now. What I wouldn’t give to expect him home at all.

  The thing is, I liked Harry Borawski. We’d sit at this picnic table that looked over the marina, paging through binders of yachts for sale, or shit-shooting, drinking plastic bottles of warm iced tea. He sold yachts, he’d sold a lot of them, but whenever I came around he never seemed to have anything to do, or he’d given up on whatever that was. He was one of those old guys w/ encyclopedic knowledge about some subjects & huge holes of ignorance about commonsensical things. Big guy, smudged—you were kind of glad for his nonexistent wife that he never married her. Sometimes you just have this previous-life connection with the oddballs. And me, I was an easy target, showing up in my tie w/ my memories of my dead dad and ‘Odille.’ For some reason I opened up to Harry. I told him things I didn’t tell other people.

  I told him about Juliet.

  I think sailing would be good for my wife, I said to him. She struggles with depression. Though she hates when I say that. She had a rocky childhood. She was fine until we had our own kids. I think having kids kicked up the past. It’s been a rough stretch of years.

  And nobody’s around to help us either, I told him. She doesn’t speak to her mother. And I’m away all the time. I’m at work or on business trips. I’m no help.

  Then Harry says to me, Some of the best sailors are women. Always have been. Some sixteen-year-old schoolgirl just sailed around the world singlehanded. The sea doesn’t care who you are.

  That’s when I first imagined that we could really do it.

  That the boat would be good for both of us. And that I could have this dream I’d been carrying around since I was 15.

  The sea doesn’t care who you are.

  Sounded good to me!

  Not everybody likes Juliet.

  I thought Juliet and the sea would get along.

  * * *

  —

  I knew a woman from the preschool who had divorced and was pretty happy about it. She told me about how she and her ex had calmly strategized their parting, how relieved they both felt. They’d worked it all out before their children were old enough to know the difference.

  One cold morning—during the year Sybil was three, before George even came along—I went so far as to see a lawyer. The office was hushed, airless. The secretary whispered my name. It felt so covert, so guilty. I stood there trembling. Sybil was at home with a babysitter. Just a girl from the block, Patty and Charlie’s middle-school girl, barely beyond babysitting herself.

  Are you OK, honey? asked the secretary.

  I thought, What in the world do we do to each other? We love in springtime and doubt in winter. We’ll blame our heavy hearts on anything.

  I’m sorry, I said.

  I ran out. I never told anyone.

  Harry talked like an Ashtabulian. That is, he saw things like the folks back home. I liked being able to talk about things I couldn’t even bring up in the break room at Omni lest some informant report back the presence of an independent thinker. It was good to talk freely & not be censored by the freegans & utopians, you just don’t know whose foot you’re going to step on. I live in fear of making an honest mistake in conversation followed by some kind of Maoist-style recrimination session. I am genuinely proud of my country & my life & do not understand the awkward silence that follows when I say so.

  I’m just a regular person. To be taken at face value. I don’t have time to read towering stacks of books before forming an opinion. Maybe the reason I mystify Juliet is because she is overthinking my position. I just want to take care of my family & I don’t want anybody taking my rights. I especially don’t want anybody taking my rights & then telling me it’s for my own good.

  I am no Rhodes scholar, but I have an ear for doublespeak. Here’s what I want to say to the other side, to the Righteous Left, to the Easily Injured and Offended: You say you want concessions/changes/social justice, but let’s admit it, you are never going to quit. Not until your moral victory is complete.

  Because that’s who you are.

  I would just like to hear you say it.

  That part of you understands public burnings.

  Convert, or die.

  * * *

  —

  Someone is coming up the stairs. In my closet, I brace myself. People keep coming to the front door, leaving things for me, trying to inquire. I’ve had to surrender my privacy. Which is not as hard as I thought. It makes me feel better to relinquish what I don’t need. Go ahead, I think, stare at me, ask me anything, take photos of my house, just don’t come inside my closet.

  An old lady enters the bedroom. She’s wearing a stiff T-shirt and cardigan and house slippers that she brought with her, on the off-chance that I’m a fastidious housekeeper. She sits on the bed and sighs. Our eyes meet through the crack between the bifold doors.

  Hey, hon, she says.

  Hi, Mom.

  It’s almost time for Sybil’s bus, she reminds me.

  You’ll walk up and get her, right?

  Sure, sure, she says, looking uncomfortable. It’s just…you might want to come on out of that closet before she gets home. It’s just a little unusual. For a child to see, that is. If you ask me, it’s a perfectly reasonable thing for you to do. But for her…

  You’re right, I say. I agree, I should come out.

  But I don’t move.

  After a moment or two, my mother says, Would you like me to leave you alone, Juliet, or—

  It’s fine, I say. In fact, stay a minute. I’d appreciate it. Thank you.

  This surprises me, that I want her near. She’s been living with me and the kids for a full month, since our return. She came the moment I called. But there is a palpable awkwardness while we try out this new intimacy.

  Don’t let anybody tell you how you should feel, my mother says, after a pause. When your daddy left, it felt like a death. I did not want to feel better. And that was my right.

  Another favorite line of poetry comes to me.

  there are so many little dyings that it doesn’t matter which of them is death

  January 27. LOG OF YACHT ‘JULIET.’ From Cayos Limones. Toward Naguargandup Cays. 09° 32.7ʹN 078° 54.0ʹW. NE wind 10–20 knots. Seas 2–4 feet. NOTES AND REMARKS: Crew has been busy this morning! During engine check the First Mate burnt her finger checking engine oil. Another small setback when Bosun spilled her Rice Krispies into the bilge.

  Today we head deeper into San Blas. Our destination is an island called Corgidup. Why Corgidup? Because Corgidup means “Pelican Island” in Guna and Sybil loves pelicans. The first amendment to the CONSTITUTION OF THE YACHT ‘JULIET,’ which is written in invisible ink on the back of the Parcheesi board, says, “All crew haveth the right to make spontaneous changes to itinerary at random.” You want to play coconut football in your underpants? You want to sit & watch ants carry tiny fractions of a leaf across a log? Well then, while aboard ‘Juliet,’ it is decreed you must do those things.

  Going to be brisk out there today. Everybody is tethered and in vests. In a minute, we will make the next leg of our incredible journey. We will head her into the wind & hoist the mainsail. Then we will feel that ancient pull.