Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,16
corals, snails, & urchins. Massive orange brains of sponges, or ones that look like red reaching fingers. Urchins of every color. Did you know that urchins appear immobile, but they are actually slowly scraping rocks with their teeth? All of it is alive, gnawing away, gnawing at life.
* * *
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Time passed. Disappeared. We stayed in the lee of Salar and lost track of the days. Gradually our provisions dwindled, but for some reason, we didn’t worry. We moved from fresh to canned. Spamghetti. Potatoes roasted over a beach bonfire at sunset, a dish the children considered the height of luxury. Michael and Sybil snorkeled ever farther. They created lists of all the marine life they’d seen. They’d sit and develop theories and trade bottle caps. Michael tied a knife to a stick and spent entire days trying to spearfish.
And what did I do? I began to read again.
At first I just read the soggy paperbacks I’d idly picked up in Portobelo. A couple of British mysteries. A biography of Vasco da Gama. And then one day I dragged my research books out of a locker, where they sat behind Sybil’s collection of exoskeletons. The book jackets were as familiar as faces. The pages were covered with my own handwriting.
I’ve always been a reader, ever since I was a child. But after I dropped out of the graduate program, I didn’t touch a book for months. Opening a book was connected to a sense of disappointment. The fact that I refused to read left me exposed when George was born. Without my books, I had nothing to interpret but the baby, who wanted a mother, not a poet. My only other text was myself and my creeping despair—a condition resistant to cerebral analysis, since the depressed brain functions as a kind of double agent, appearing rational and faithful but secretly working for the enemy.
Listen, when I worked at Omni, I never really saw the kids. Which, to be honest, was OK with me. I’m just trying to be honest. When I got home from work, I just wanted to sit around & watch some kind of ball move around some kind of field. I couldn’t really handle their problems & I know I couldn’t handle Juliet. I was a carbon copy of my dad, or at least what I remembered of him, doing my part, earning a living, trying not to yell etc. etc.
What did I do today? Today, February something-or-other? I sat in the middle of the ocean, miles off the coast of Panama, trading bottle caps w/ my daughter. She wanted my Jarrito. No, I said, I’ll give you my Stag. I have a million Stags, she said, spilling them onto the sand. I want your Jarrito! I hold the precious orange bottle cap to the sky. And I was like, NEVER (wicked laughter)!
I don’t know. People were so worried about the kids out here. And maybe they’re right. Maybe they know something I don’t know. But let me ask you, When was the last time your dad spent an entire morning listening to you?
* * *
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I could never give it a name, my condition. I would have said, “I’m depressed,” if that had felt sufficient. But I felt more than depressed. I felt that I was depression. A swallowed woman. Besides, Michael was right—I hated jargon in any form. “Inner child.” “Support system.” I’d rather not speak at all if I had to use those words.
I could only tolerate the way the poets described sadness.
Anne Sexton, confessional poet of the 1960s, was incapacitated by spells of depression, which started after she had children. She loved her children, but care of them drove her to the brink of madness. Motherhood made her feel “unreal.” Nobody was prepared to talk about a mother’s depression. In 1956, Sexton learned to write sonnets from a TV program. She conned her way into a poetry class, during which she furtively used her high-heeled shoe as an ash tray.
Not long after, she wrote a poem called “The Double Image.”
Ugly angels spoke to me. The blame,
I heard them say, was mine. They tattled
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