Claire Watkins: Battleborn: Stories

The apartment was different, filled with new things. New posters on the walls, framed. New books on the shelves, new CDs near the computer, new magazines on the coffee table. Georgia O’Keeffe. Tony Hillerman. Our Bodies, Ourselves . James Taylor. The Utne Reader . The Indigo Girls. Annuals, Perennials and Bulbs . Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions. Baez Sings Dylan. Cadillac Desert. The “Heart of Gold” single.

All our mother’s things. But not hers exactly, new things, uncracked book spines, unfolded pages, CDs instead of tapes. No water damage, no dust, no coffee rings, no scribblings in the margins. Things from the house where we grew up, but not from the house where we grew up. Things from Barnes & Noble and the Best Buy on Geary. It was disorienting, gave me the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap and the sky isn’t black or blue but hazy gray, and you can’t tell whether it’s five a.m. or five p.m., can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep. I got dizzy. I went to the bathroom, thought I might throw up but didn’t. I knelt at the toilet for I don’t know how long, staring at a copy of Reader’s Digest on the tank.

I rode home hard and fast, without my things but still weighed down. At my apartment the warm scent of taco meat and raw onion was heavy in the air. I wanted to call Peter, or rather I wanted to want to call him, to tell him what happened and what it meant, to let him back into me and never shut him out again. But instead I turned on Dumbo , letting the light from the TV wash over me.

I cannot watch Dumbo without crying. It’s that scene with the mother, or more specifically, the way the tears literally roll down baby Dumbo’s cheeks when they lock her up, and the way she stretches her trunk out through the iron bars and cradles Dumbo, rocks him to sleep. If I could have called Peter, this is what I would have said: If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother, wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place? Which is to say, how could the Stork bring a large-eared, sensitive and easily frightened baby elephant into this world?

When Peter came over that night, I was nearly asleep on the couch, the blue glow from the TV the only light on in the room. He sat on the edge of the couch and stroked my hair.

Have you eaten today? he said.

Tell me again, I said. About Sutro.

He sighed. Okay, little one. The currents in the bay have not significantly changed in the forty-one years since the baths burned. The beach is as sound to hold that structure as it was in 1966.

But, I said, keeping my eyes closed, you do concede that one can easily imagine it slipping into the sea.

Well, one can easily imagine anything, he said, as if that were a good thing.

Not that we’d rebuild them anyway, I said. They’d just be swallowed by the rising sea level.

Oh, yes! said Peter, kissing my head. The oceans will rise and we’ll all swim to work! I’ll pick you up for lunch and say, You swim like a duck.

He said this in an old-timey voice that very nearly made me smile.

O, I said. You’re making a game of me.

After Peter and I have sex there is some smallness in me that wants to turn to him and ask, In your professional estimation as a scientist, how long can a relationship be sustained on pity and anthropomorphism and a postcard on the fridge?

But there is such bigness in him that he would say, As long as it takes.

Were they rebuilt, the Sutro Baths would not actually slip into the sea; I know this. Peter is doing research for PG&E about wave farms, which are basically underwater wind farms where the ocean’s currents generate electricity by turning a turbine, the same way wind does, only more consistently. This is not a joke. PG&E already has twenty-one underwater windmills along the floor of the San Francisco Bay for the project’s pilot. Peter is the biologist they’ve hired to track the project’s effects on local marine life. Talk about being part of the problem. If you ask me, he is the biologist they pay to say the project has no effect on local marine life. To that he says, Can’t you let even one thing be simple and good?

I’d like to tell Gwen or Jacob or Peter even that our mother’s things look absurd here, in this foggy damp peninsula, so far from the desert. They’re out of context. The type on the magazines looks too dark, the album art too small, everything untouched by the sun. These things can’t survive here. The moisture from the sea will mold the prints, rot every page of those books.

I haven’t been to see Gwen in eight weeks. I left my wet clothes stuck to the walls of her washing machine. She has not called me in nearly as long and I have not called her. The last time we spoke she said, I’ve started reading Cadillac Desert.

And I said, What is wrong with you? When what I meant to say was, Are you okay?

Jacob will do something. He will put an end to this. He will come home and find his apartment filled to capacity with replicas from our mother’s life and he will take Gwen by the hand and say, You have got to stop this. She will cry. But he will wrap his trunklike arms around her and hold her until she stops.

These days more and more I think I should not expose my beautiful unborn niece to Dumbo . Suppose she is struck by the cruelty of those lady elephants, the ones that taunt Jumbo Junior. Suppose she wants to know whether there really are adults so mean and selfish as those lady elephants. Suppose she asks, Well, Auntie, are there?

Then I would have to say, Yes and no. There are adults in this world capable of a viciousness you would not believe. There are adults in this world who will never think of anyone except themselves. Your grandmother, for example. Yes, in this world there are adults with cold, hard hearts, little niece, but there are no more elephants.

Jacob will do nothing. He’s visited our mother’s house only twice. He doesn’t know about Baez Sings Dylan . He doesn’t know what it means for Gwen to hang O’Keeffe’s Black Iris right beside Oriental Poppies above the sofa. He doesn’t know what it means that she listens to Graceland while she works.

This is what it means:

It is late spring in Las Vegas. Or it is midwinter or early autumn or the peak of summer’s heaviest heat. Gwen and I walk home from the bus stop or our friend’s parents drop us off, or our boyfriends do, driving recklessly, or we pull our own cars into the driveway. We are four or fourteen or twenty-four. We can hear music coming over the fence from the backyard. Graceland .

Our mother stoops in the garden, prodding at the dirt, pulling weeds. She darts from hose to shovel to fertilizer, never doing much with any of them. We know some things, and no matter how old we are it feels like we’ve known them our entire lives: She will be out in the garden until after the sun goes down and we’ve made ourselves dinner and stayed up to watch Unsolved Mysteries and put ourselves to bed. She will flip the tape over every time it clicks.

When she finally goes to bed she will stay there for a long, long time, whether the next day is stinging hot or beautiful or a workday or a birthday. If we ask, and Gwen does more than I, Mom will say it is Joan Baez that’s made her cry, how she tries so hard to understand Dylan, or the cities in Cadillac Desert sapping all the moisture from the ground, or small, sweet Paul Simon convinced he’s found redemption. She has these reasons, and though we know them to be inadequate, we believe her. I’ve reason to believe we all will be received in Graceland . The truth is our mother stays in bed for reasons we won’t begin to understand until we are older, until a hole is opened in us that can’t be filled. Which is to say, until now.