The Wooden Sea

To her credit, my stepdaughter said nothing but gave me a long, disgusted look. Dignity intact, she turned and left the kitchen. I heard her mother call out anxiously, “Where are you going?” Then came the sound of the front door closing. Magda was in the kitchen twenty seconds later. “What did you say to her? What did you do?”

“Blew it. I made fun of her.”

She touched her forehead. “This is ridiculous! I’m sounding exactly like my mother with my sister!”

Magda’s older sister was a teenager when she was murdered thirty years ago. A wild girl, she was notorious in Crane’s View for doing whatever she wanted. Magda said most of her childhood memories were of her mother and sister screaming at each other.

The front doorbell rang. We looked at each other. Pauline?

Why ring the bell to her own house? Maybe she’d forgotten her keys. I put down the soup ladle and went to answer it.

No one was there. I stepped out beyond the range of the porch light to have a look around. Nothing. Kids ringing the police chief’s bell and ru

Ignoring the cooking soup, I crossed the lawn to our garage and looked in. Someone was sitting in the passenger’s seat of our car. I took a few steps toward it and recognized Pauline. Before dealing with her I had to check something out. I already had my keys in hand and opened the trunk expecting I don’t know what. Nothing was there. I let out a long slow relieved breath. If that dog’s body had been there again at that moment with Pauline in the car I would’ve ... I don’t know what I would’ve. But the smell was stronger in the garage, no doubt about it.

“Pauline?”

“I want a prime-time life.” She didn’t move. Simply stared straight ahead and addressed the garage wall.

“Nothing wrong with that. Prime time is the place to be.”

“We read this line in class last semester that scared me so much; I can’t stop thinking about it. ‘How can you hide from what never goes away.’ That’s why I got this tattoo. Mom thinks it’s because I want to be like everyone else, but it’s just the opposite. I want people at school to hear about it and say ‘Her, Pauline Ostrova? That stupid little bookworm got a tattoo?’ I don’t want the person I am to be the person I’m going to be when I get older, Fra

“I rang the bell just now. I didn’t want to be alone out here. I was hoping you’d come find me.”

“That’s okay. But I wish you’d come back in the house now. Soup’s on. Remember one thing too—usually what scares you most makes you do the most work. Ghosts make you run faster than a math test.”

She didn’t move. “I’m not sorry I did it. The tattoo, I mean.”

“You don’t need to be sorry. What is it anyway?”

“None of your business.”

Life went on. We drank our soup, went to bed, rose the next morning, and walked into the future Pauline was so worried about. Old Vertue didn’t reappear, and neither did the Schiavos. The air went back to smelling like it usually does; our car started. Joh

I was surprised. To tell you the truth, Crane’s View is not much of a burg. Most people happen on it by mistake or while looking for other more picturesque Hudson Valley towns. Sometimes they stop to eat at Scrappy’s Diner or Charlie’s Pizza. Sometimes they hang around long enough afterward for a stroll around the one-block downtown while digesting their high-cholesterol meal.

I like living here because I like familiar things. I always put my shoes in the same place before going to bed; I eat the same meal for breakfast most days. When I was younger I saw enough of the world to know I was not meant to live in countries whose postage stamps picture elephants, penguins, or coluber de rusi snakes. No thanks. Like others of my generation who went to Vietnam and were traumatized by the experience, I traveled a lot before returning home. I can do without waking in the morning to the sound of a coughing camel sticking its head in my bedroom window (Kabul), or eating fresh mangoes at the outdoor market in Port Louis, Mauritius. Crane’s View is a peanut butter sandwich—very filling, very American, sweet, not very interesting. God bless it.

A few nights later the frantic little man who took up residence in my bladder around age forty woke me up, demanding the toilet—right now! Welcome to middle age. That time in life when you learn your body is not the sum of its parts but some of its parts work and some stop.

Magda was wrapped around me in a sweet familiar way. She mumbled a sexy grumble when I untangled myself from her. My first wife slept so far away from me that I had to make a longdistance call if I wanted more covers. Even waking in the middle of the night now, the first thing that came to mind was how much I loved the woman next to me. I kissed her warm cheek and stood up. The wooden floor was cold under my bare feet; one of the small sure signs fall was on the way.

Your home is always more mysterious in the middle of the night. After-midnight noises hide behind the rest of the day. The finicky way the floor creaks, the slippy, wood-sanding sound of bare feet going someplace. The fat fly unmoving on the window-pane, black against the silver-blue light from the street. You smell the cold and dust.

I walked down the hall toward the bathroom. To my surprise the light was on in there. Music was playing quietly. Getting closer I recognized Bob Marley singing “No Woman, No Cry” at two in the morning. The door was cracked open a few inches. I leaned forward and peeked in.

Pauline stood with her back to me staring at herself in the mirror. She wore enough black eye makeup to pass for a crow. She was also completely naked. My first reaction was an instinctive whoops! and a quick pull back. Which I did, but something lodged in my brain like a thrown dart. I’d seen something in there and not just my stepdaughter naked for the first time. I did not want to see Pauline naked—not once, not twice, not never—but I had to go back and look again. Luckily, she was still hypnotizing herself in the mirror and didn’t notice the Peeping Fran at the door.

There it was! In the middle of her spine, just up from the start of her ass, was the notorious tattoo. Because of its location, few people besides Pauline and her lovers would ever see the thing. It would have been a nice secret present for them if it hadn’t been what it was. About seven inches long, it was a tattoo of a feather. The feather I had found at the Schiavo house and buried—twice—with Old Vertue. The same wild colors and distinctive pattern all there beautifully rendered above the girl’s nice butt.

I stepped back and away. My alarm at seeing that image again, there, was matched by the now-serious need to piss. I would use the toilet downstairs. I was glad for a plan because I was so rattled that if I hadn’t had to go, I might just have stood frozen and not moved for an hour. The house around me was no longer cold, my hand no longer numb from my happy deep sleep. Something big and clearly unavoidable kept stepping in front of me wherever I turned now. And there was no end to the variety of ways it had of saying, Yoo-hoo! Here I am again.

I imagined Pauline walking into the very upscale “body art” parlor in the Amerling mall and looking through books picturing the hundreds of different tattoos available. Had she opened the fourth book, seen the eightieth picture and thought, “Oh that’s nice—a feather. I’ll have that one”? Or had magic intervened and forced her to like that one? Had any of it been her choice or had this thing taken charge of all our lives now?