Bill Clegg - Did You Ever Have A Family

Pru told us that night that she’d never felt as grateful. That her answer to June’s question had been yes, but not as a commiseration, or an explanation of fatigue, as it seemed to be for June, but both as an acknowledgment of great fortune and a prayer of thanks. With Mike on the line from Tacoma, and Mimi and I huddled over her iPhone on speaker in the kitchen, Pru whispered to us, Thank you .

It’s a relief to finally find where you’re meant to be. I always thought it was Seattle. I was born there. I grew up there. I met Rebecca and lived with her there for more than fifteen years. I never questioned where I was supposed to be, but from time to time I got curious. Or maybe I was just restless for something new. I remember reading up on Provincetown, Massachusetts, in the year or so before I met Rebecca. Never got there, but it looked like a place to live. I even made a few phone calls about hotel jobs, but aside from summer business there isn’t much in the way of hotel management. Holiday Inn had been good to me, and, then, it was unimaginable to leave Seattle for a job that wasn’t with them. The nearest they had on the Cape was almost an hour from Provincetown, closer to Boston, which was no place that interested me. It always seemed to me like an East Coast Seattle but with more colleges and universities. Acres of Irish in both places, which is what I am and whom I’m from.

Few people are from where we are now. Moclips has less than two hundred year-round residents, and one way or another Cissy’s family is related to most all of them. Not that Cissy has ever told us a thing about any of them, or herself. Whatever we know about her we’ve pieced together from her sisters, who clammed up quick, or folks in Aberdeen, who are not exactly what you’d call loose-lipped, especially about one of their own to a couple of city dykes who will always — no matter how long we’re here — be outsiders. Cissy is either a mystery or the opposite. All shadow or light. Either way, she lets us know what she wants known, and the rest is none of our business. She goes her way, we go ours, and we coexist as employer and employee.

Still, every so often she’ll surprise you. Like a few months ago, when a film crew from a cable show set up cameras just down from the Moonstone. It was quite a production. They ran cords from generators in our parking lot out to the beach and parked a food truck alongside the road to feed the cast and crew. For days they filmed underwater divers walking in and out of the surf and shot footage of actresses dressed in mermaid costumes fanning their rubber tails in the waves. There were five girls, all young. Late teens, early twenties, and they stood shivering in bathrobes between takes, chain-smoking. On one of the nights things got rowdy in Room 5. The crew guys and the actresses were whooping it up, and we got calls not only from the guests in one of the two rooms not occupied by people from the TV show, but from the Sweeneys, the retired couple who live next door, who have never once complained to us. It was just past ten at night when they called. Rebecca and I were watching an episode of some British series on DVD, so I hit pause, put on my boots and coat, grabbed my flashlight, and headed for where the noise was coming from. I could smell the pot smoke long before I reached the door and hear the loud reggae music broken by the occasional burst of screaming laughter. As I approached the door, I could see the door to Room 6 open. I expected Jane to appear, but instead it was Cissy, wearing her Carhartt canvas jacket buttoned to the top and her long silver braid tucked inside. Someone who didn’t know her might have seen a tall, stern-looking man emerge from the door of one motel room and step quickly to the door of another. Cissy did not bother knocking but instead pulled out her master key and opened the door right up. I could hear her yell OUT! just the one time. Right away, the music stopped. I stepped back to the side of the building to watch. I don’t know why, but I didn’t want Cissy to see me. One by one the girls began to stumble out, some alone, others with guys from the crew. Eventually, everyone made it back to their rooms. Once Cissy was satisfied, she walked down the path toward the office, and turned left onto Pacific Avenue toward her sister’s house. Had Jane called Cissy? Or had Cissy been in Jane’s room when the racket started? I stood in the shadows of the motel building wondering whether to check in on Jane or call Cissy. Neither seemed right, so I walked toward the beach and watched the waves crash for a little while. The moon was not visible that night, so the only light came from the motel, the few houses along the beach, and farther down, where 109 cuts close to the sand, the dim and infrequent twitch of headlights. I tried to imagine how it was two hundred years ago, when only the Quinault tribe walked the beach. Cissy’s sister Pam told us that this land was where the tribe brought their teenage girls to be safe after they reached puberty and before they married. Who guarded them? I wondered. Surely not men, the very thing the girls were being protected from. I wondered, too, how many of them never married, either by bad luck or by choice. Did they have a choice then? I doubted it. Did those women stay on and help protect the younger girls? Or were they sent back to the tribe at some unmarriageable age to live out the rest of their years as spinsters?

Local legend has it that one night all the sleeping girls were swallowed by the sea. Rebecca and I have heard at least half a dozen variations on the tale — one involves a sea witch who cast a spell, another a falling star that crashed into the ocean and caused a mighty tidal wave, and one starts with a terrible fire that drove the animals from the hills into the ocean, carrying the girls with them in the stampede. But in every version of the story, the sleeping girls end up underwater, where they somehow transform into mermaids, enchanted protectors whose magic keeps the Quinault virgins from harm. No doubt some scrap of this story must have made its way to the producers making the silly television show.

I walked toward the water to make out the shape of the waves in the pitch-black night. The wind was rough and I pulled my turtleneck up above my face just below my eyes. I stood a few feet from the surf and imagined the chain-smoking actresses as real-life mermaids, gorgeous and fierce, their scales shining. Who wouldn’t want to be protected by such creatures? I thought of Penny and Rebecca, who looked after each other as kids and later, too, as adults. For most of their lives they only had each other. I always had older brothers and cousins and uncles, and even though my being gay was not anyone’s first choice (including mine, initially), after I came out in high school anyone who made fun of me or worse was swiftly dealt with by my family. After a while, because they had to, the kids in my school accepted me. I wasn’t prom queen or anything, but I was cocaptain of the field-hockey team, vice president of my senior class, and I organized a volunteer soup kitchen on the weekends my junior and senior years. What I’m saying is that I wasn’t on my own. I felt different, unsure of how to make my way romantically, but I felt safe. My family gave me that, and the older I get, the more I see how lucky I was. All but one of my brothers moved East, my parents aren’t around anymore, and I have one uncle in a nursing home in Olympia. Rebecca is my family now. She has me and I have her and it’s where we belong.

Penny didn’t have anyone the night she died. No mermaids, no Rebecca. Before that night on the beach, I had never considered just how alone Penny must have felt. How completely on her own in that danger she was. I turned back toward the Moonstone and started walking home. The only lights on now were from Room 6. Jane. Probably the most alone person I’ve ever met. I’d seen plenty of lonely travelers at the Holiday Inn in Seattle and even here, but no one like Jane, who seemed half in the world and half out of it. She has been, in the few times I’ve actually seen and spoken with her, nearly without life. Still, she has Cissy. How exactly, we do not know, but it is clear she has in her a formidable ally. I wonder if she sees it that way, is aware how far this stranger has taken her under her wing.