Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,20
13 years. Sure, the details are different. Now the sneakers light up, and we celebrate “winter” instead of “Christmas,” but it’s basically the same thing. You know, sit in a circle, stand in a row. Indoor voices. I understand—it’s civil society. I don’t really have a problem with circles or rows. It’s just—
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I remember studying my mother’s body. I remember a deep, worshipful attentiveness toward all the parts of her, from her soft décolletage down to her painted toenails, which were like candies. I remember her closet, as I’ve said, touching the silks and smelling the wools. I remember waiting for her to call for me, from the bottom of the stairs, turning my name to four syllables, as I’ve heard certain birds do with a single tone, just for the pleasure of it:
Ju-lee-eh-et.
Strange, to have been so familiar with her voice. And then not to hear it at all for many years.
Out here, the sea is the kids’ school. Any single reef in Guna Yala can teach them more than I learned in 13 years of science class. Take the fish alone (and fish, there are mind-blowing varieties), more different species, they say, than all the other vertebrates combined. They mill & weave around these coral heads. Syb & I watch them underwater, then we look through our Audubon Field Guide, checking off what we saw/bragging/making shit up.
The fish have bizarrely human attributes like big noses, or sad eyes, or grumpy frowns, big, little, skinny, humpbacked…it’s like you’re walking through Westfarms Mall on a Sunday, but it’s underwater and everybody’s a fish. The color combinations themselves are endless, I might even say gratuitous. Blues, reds, yellows, periwinkles & flashes of silver.
Like people, some fish prefer to move around by themselves & others move in groups. Walls of blue tang pass by like a drawn curtain, while a single suffering flounder scuttles below. Others just mob, sticking together but at odd angles. Discoveries abound! We never seem to crack the code.
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My parents were muted people with moderate expectations. Even their arguments, in the long, slow buildup to their separation, never reached a full passion. Their hobbies were ordinary, like gardening and watching quiz shows. But every once in a while, when I was little, they used to have these big parties. Folks would emerge from the woodwork—coworkers, and parents of kids I knew—and they’d all get ritually drunk.
I would sit under the table and pretend I was too good for it all. But secretly I loved it when an upside-down face would lift the hem of the tablecloth and exclaim, Juliet, O Juliet! Wherefore art thou Juliet? I remember their collective roar. Anyone who laughed like grown-ups laughed, like harlots and farmhands, did not deserve an honest answer.
However. I could always hear my parents’ voices rising above the din. Not only because they were my parents and I was hopelessly attached to them, but because I believed they stood guard.
I felt mothered under the table.
Which is why it’s so awful that he found me there.
Lionfish are an invasive species, but you’ve got to give them respect. They can kill you by just brushing your skin. I met a guy in Limones who described it to me. He was free diving & he grabbed hold of a reef to pull himself down, which you’re not supposed to, it was just a temporary lapse in judgment. Next thing this guy knows, there is this huge lionfish shaking its poison pajamas in his face. As it swims away he realizes he’s just been sideswiped by one of the most venomous creatures in existence. He realizes that he’s got to get back to his boat before he has a reaction, but the hull of his boat just looks so damned far away, in another world, a world which he starts feeling nostalgic about, remembering how sunny and full of laughter it was, which terrifies him because he’s already thinking like a dead man. Somehow he gets to the boat by pulling himself underwater along the rode. His wife & another cruiser in the anchorage drag him aboard & the last thing he remembers is the squelch of his shorts on the settee and him thinking, Damn it,