Veronica Wasson

Tide Pools

I was born on an island you haven’t heard of.

The shoreline was rocky, the beaches were rocky.

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I liked to collect the smooth clear stones that I found near the tide pools.

I went to the local school. It was a cinder block building like the apartment I lived in.

My mother was a mathematician. She had wild ideas about things.

My father was a poet for the newspaper. He smelled of tobacco, dark coffee, and cognac. His tweed jacket was frayed at the cuffs.

My best friend was Jules. We smoked behind the school near the clay track, where the runners ran their laps, as if in orbit.

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The dominant color of my childhood was gray. But a lustrous gray, like a seagull’s wing.

As winter approached the cold breeze flapped through clothing, hair, and flags.

Jules liked to watch the boys as they made their orbits. We watched them from a distance, holding our cigarettes with chapped fingers.

The mist from our breaths was as visible as our thoughts.

When the boys ran their breaths were like stallions and their feet flew over the clay.

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I looked at my mother’s notebooks and saw the formulas like calligraphy. She wrote in blue ink with a fountain pen. The formulas flowed trembling from the nib.

I didn’t bother to look at my father’s notebooks because his poems appeared in the newspaper. It was a Leftist paper and the headlines declaimed revolution in 48 point.

Jules had ambition to be a poet and a journalist. She spoke glowingly of wildcat strikes. I had no thoughts for my future. It seemed a faraway thing.

We traded a diary back and forth. I would write an entry at night before I went to bed, and the next day give it to Jules, who wrote the subsequent entry. We felt and thought as one person. I took my cues from her taste in things.

Jules went on a fast. A kind of hunger strike, maintained for two days. On the third morning she ate a piece of toast. I was glad, because I hadn’t followed suit and it felt like a separation. As if Jules had traveled somewhere distant while I stayed behind.

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I never wanted to be like my mother. Her wildness.

I wanted my father’s dark and penetrating eyes. In fact I take after him.

Over the years, lovers have remarked on my dark eyes. One told me they excited him. Another said that frankly speaking I was ugly, it was my eyes, I looked tired all the time.

When Jules was killed my heart felt empty. I let the letter fall to the floor. A single sheet of notepaper in her brother’s angular handwriting.

My husband rested his hand on my shoulder. He is a kind man. At one time I adored him.

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The boys at the school were undifferentiated. In groups they ate lunch, congregated at the lockers, orbited the track. Some were handsome. Some were ugly in a handsome sort of way.

I swore a pact with Jules never to marry. We would travel the world. She for journalism, and me for … But I felt too lethargic to make up my mind. Any career seemed about the same.

I liked the boys who were ugly in a handsome sort of way more than I liked the boys who were handsome. Like my collection of pebbles, cherished only by me.

The ocean of our island was not inviting. Not like a tropical isle, or so I picture them. Our sea was the sea that makes everything cold and everything as gray as bleached bones. Its wet chill pervaded the apartment, the school, the village.

I liked to watch the tide pools. The pulsations of the waters. A miniature world. An inversion – island of water within a sea of rock.

I made the daily walk from apartment to school. From one island to another.

The teachers wrote on chalkboards. Equations, conjugations, dates in history. The smell of chalk dust settled on them.

I carried a satchel with my books. The math book was green, grammar pink, history blue. The subjects became imbued with these colors by association. Grammar will be forever that particular shade of salmon pink.

My wool stockings itched.

I spread my schoolwork on the kitchen table with its stained and peeling linoleum. The tiny microwave, the carved wooden clock, the fading postcard stuck to the refrigerator by a magnet. 

The clock ticked slower than you can imagine. It ticked slower and slower until night fell. A fluorescent bulb and past the window darkness.

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My father mislaid money. He lent it freely, always bought a round, always spotted a friend who was short. The rest went to books. They lay about everywhere in the apartment, strewn on every surface. He dropped cigarette ashes onto the pages, left rings of coffee on the covers. For him I wanted to be a sentence, with an interesting verb, an arresting image. I wanted to be lyrical.

Mother’s wildness was more like a rotting floorboard, liable any second to give way.

Seated at my vanity I brushed out my hair. I longed to have perfumes and cold creams.

When I found spotting on my underwear I panicked and threw them away. I knew about the body but it had seemed theoretical.

I still played with dolls long after I was too old for them. They were a shard of childhood that secretly I kept alive.

Jules wanted to be a war correspondent. It was her fervor for poetry. The shouted slogan. The fraternal bond.

My father placed a record onto our old turntable. The music crackled. He danced with my mother, twirling around the living room. My mother laughed, out of breath. They sat down heavily. My father lifted the arm from the record.

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In winter the sun stayed close to the line of the sea, reluctant to venture higher. It glowed softly white like the breast of a gull.

At school the boys flocked together. The girls huddled in knots of friendship. The boys were the oars, straining onward. We were the ropes, secured to the dock.

The newspapers contained timelines, names of opposing parties, survivors, and advertisements for all the latest. Their crisp pages rattled like dry leaves.

Jules went to visit her grandmother and I had to pass the time on my own, fill it up with something. A boy was the easiest choice. One of the handsome ones, against all my principles. The wave in his hair, his expressive hands, his easy and elegant clothes.

We walked on the beach as the fishing boats came in.

The seagulls watched the boats. The men gathered the nets. The waves sprayed foam against the shining sand. The sun skimmed the water.

Jules came back healthy and cynical, with new mannerisms and new poets on her tongue.

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I have my mother’s temperament. I cloak it in passivity but there is a residuum of stubbornness, even now. My husband knows to step around it. Like a piece of furniture you can’t get rid of, that sits waiting for you to bark your shin.

The handsome boy kissed my hands, my face, my breasts, his lashes wet, leaving streaks of tears. He wept because he had fallen in love with someone else. We parted as strangers but I carried the marks of his fingers on my thighs.

As a widower my father has adjusted to a pleasant routine. In the morning the newspaper and coffee. Lunch at the cafe near the square where the statue of the President glowers at pigeons, street urchins, and men playing chess. 

His friends get together to drink wine and sing the maudlin old songs.

〰

Clouds sailed along as if under their own power. They left the palest transparency in their wake.

I wanted to feel deep within myself. I sensed a vibration inside me like the ringing of a bell. A clear tone at the threshold of hearing. Each crash of the surf seemed to carry it farther away.

In the evenings my mother graded assignments. A mug of tea sat beside the stack of exercise books. Her reading glasses sat squarishly on her nose like an optical instrument. She tsked to herself perhaps unaware that she did this. 

I curled on the sofa under a crocheted blanket. I carried the echoes of the sea into the apartment. I carried the pale transparency in my wake.

〰

We sat on my bed. My room enclosed us.

Jules gave me a sweater. I gave her a music box. 

I pulled the sweater over my head, smoothed out the front with my palms. 

She turned the key to start the mechanism, listening. 

〰

On the beach I found a shell as pink as the flesh of an ear. It spiraled into itself. Enclosing perhaps a tiny creature.

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My mother did housework without seeming to notice. Objects were dusted, clothes laundered. I carried to school the lunches she packed. I left my belongings here and there, my dishes in the sink. I put my feet on the coffee table. Today I run the vacuum cleaner, steer it around the furniture. 

The polish chipped from my nails. I chewed my cuticles and the end of my ballpoint pen. 

I looked closely in the mirror at my upper lip. The fine hairs the women’s magazines warned of beside ads for depilatory cream.

I wrote a school assignment on the interpretation of a certain poem. The ink smudged and left ghosts of letters on the fleshy part of my palm. 

I heard the ghost of a poem more than I heard the poem.

〰

Behind the apartment building was a small courtyard. Weeds grew among the broken bottles and smashed beer cans. It was a good place to smoke a cigarette.

In late afternoon the sunlight tilted down the wall. The shadow moved across the concrete.

Fluttering wings of mayflies by the thousands. Or the crazy flapping of a solitary bat in the deepening indigo.

The stars emerged as daylight drained away. Hard cold points of light that wavered in the atmosphere where a jet etched—slowly, like the slow finger of god—a line across the sky.

I took a last puff and flicked away the butt. I turned my back and went inside.

〰

I sit in the terminal at my gate. I listen to the announcements. I’ve got my carry-on. I’m ready to board. 

The big jet plane rises heavily into the air. The fuselage shudders. I grip the armrests. Flung across the sky. The island is a mesh of lights, a dwindling shape in a sea of black.

Hours later, dawn blazes across the waters.

I close my eyes and try to sleep. I almost succeed.