Toby Olson - Seaview

He turned the shower off and let the water run from his body, down through his creases. He waited while he drained, and then he stepped out of the stall, took a towel from the rack, and began to dry himself. He rubbed each muscle that he could identify individually, dabbing at his chest and his angular face. When he was finished and while he was splashing cologne on his inner thighs, he heard her voice, whining he would have called it, from the other room.

“Come on, Daddy, come on.” She sounded bored and a little flat. It was as if her voice and its performance could make the desire real, the request urgent and sincere, though it was incapable of that.

He reached up and took the watch cap from its place and put it on. Then he hung his thick chain and medallion around his neck. Then he soaked his towel in the sink and rang it out into a wet, thick rope; he tested it by slapping it into his leg. Then he checked to see how he looked in the mirror. He was fine, he thought, if a little uninteresting. He was getting older, he thought, but most of him was hard and firm.

“Time enough,” he said softly, “time enough.” And then he turned from the mirror and went in to her. It was dark in the room, and he could not see her very well. But he knew she was ready and waiting. Outside, the sad and injured walnut trees, as if from a kind of instinct, reached out and fought against their peace.

BORN MELINDA PRADA IN THE WARM AUGUST, SHE GREW up on a young sandspit of land that pushed into the Atlantic like the fragile arm of a young boy. The arm might have been diseased, at least a mutation or birth defect; it lacked fingers, a positive hinged and mobile elbow; it seemed eaten away in some places, one of them an inlet where Melinda lived. The name was pronounced pray-da , the slight pathetic anglicizing of the Portuguese that the women had accepted and the men had forced, historically. For the women had changed their names anyway, but the men had work to do among Yankee fishermen and thought to become Americans, against their skin color and language. It could not have been a young girl’s arm, with its welcoming or slight defiance, because it was a public gesture in the sea, and there was no public act for women to perform. And yet the calm and yielding, but resilient nature of the spit was surely feminine and not to be controlled, and this was the geological irony, confronted and not solved: there was no manipulation of the spit possible to good ends. There was, as with the women, a fragile working relationship.

She was an only child, to her father’s chagrin (her mother’s pleasure), and she came to his dragger and to the sea when she was twelve years old, at the same time as boys came to her. Her father knew his sources were circuitous. They shamed him, and he made no mention of the following passage when he found it, even put the book away out of eyeshot. Every returning New Bedford whaler brought home a few bravas , or black Portuguese, among its crew. These Cape Verde savages — a cross between exiled Portuguese criminals and the aborigines of the Islands — began to drift into Mashpee and marry into the hybrid of Indian and African Negro that they found there. This vicious mixture caused what Mr. Pocknet called “a drift of disgust against Mashpee”. When the other boats came zigzag in to see, at first her father hid her (as he had hid the book) below decks, but this was futile, since news traveled among the fishermen, who were like old folks with nothing to do when it came to rumor. She was revealed, and she was good enough at the nets to become quickly integrated. And, though not approved of, she was his daughter and was accepted as an oddity.

On the way in from the Georges Bank she used watercolors sometimes, oils occasionally, and pastels, and she wrote stories. The boys saw she could do all this well and the dragging too, and they could see their own dim, secret wishes for the joining of tenderness, sensitivity and strength in it, and they feared and shunned her. Her stories were sea stories and like her painting, very clear and comprehensive and tough. She saw the way the water came in against the boat, the way it looked at a distance, the colors in the various cloud covers and the light in them. She had insight into the lives around her, and what she wrote affected those who read it. She took up with girls then, who knew their places and were full grown and integrated. And when she was sixteen and her parents drowned, ironically, on a pleasure cruise to Boston, she took up with an older woman, an artist in the town at the Cape’s end, who taught her things about technique and taught her to mourn her parents properly, and loved her and let her go with grace when she was eighteen, and she went to art school in Boston.

There had been some women there, but the times were not right for it, and she was thwarted, and when this happened she turned more intensely to her studies and her art. She wrote stories and sold them to magazines, and her water colors were a success in small galleries, and she knew she was on to things important.

She quit the writing after a while, making a choice for the visual. There had been men there too, usually older ones whom she had come out to a bit, but they had learned to fear her intelligence and skill, though more slowly than the younger ones, and things hadn’t worked out. She finished school and went to work, teaching young children art. She kept the circle around her own art very tight, knowing what she was doing, and then she found that she was twenty-three years old.

That year she met Allen and went out with him. She slept with him, cooked for him on occasion; they had long talks, and she discovered no shocks to her expectations. She was smarter than he was, and he balked at this like the rest, conventionally, but she was older now, and he was younger than he was, and before too long, in away that she did not understand (and she liked that she did not understand it), she found out a familiar quality in him. Her way of loving him became unintimidating to him when she found it out, and they had married and lived good and reasonable years together. Then she had been introduced to the cancer.

This was the past Allen had put together from what she had told him and from his own romance of it. He felt she had no secrets in the way he did, but she did have a few. There was the closed circle in which her art stood; he was shown the product openly, and he thought he understood intention and process through it, but he had no sense of her strength manifest there. He took the clarity he saw as a kind of openness and transparency, but that was not it. And when the cancer started, and he saw some depths in her revealed, he saw them as feminine depths, that is, to him, depths of gentle sensitivity and attunement. He did not see that what they were were instances of clarity, certainty, and a steel-hardness of character. They joined anew in the occasion of the cancer. She found his weakness and childishness, and it endeared him to her. He saw what he thought was the bud in her unfold into certain womanhood, not realizing that it was a purer power, and neuter.

“IT’S LIKE A WEB,” SHE SAID, “OR A NET. BUT IT’S A CIRCLE. There is no up and down to it; it’s in and out. Think of all of those sticks making it up as being people. If you were a disconnected stick lying on the table beside it, you’d feel, possibly, lonely. No. There’d be no place for loneliness then; you’d just be disconnected. You’d be very still. If you push one of those sticks, one on the other side will move. They’ll all move a little, like people, each in its own way, but because you pushed one of them. The one on the other side could be a person out of your past, or somebody that you don’t know very well, or somebody you do know well, but he’s far away right now. I don’t mean mind control or telepathy. When you push that stick the other one doesn’t move the moment you push it; it takes a while. I mean that things you do always change the fabric or net or web you are in.