And She Was Read online

  Cindy Dyson

  And She Was

  Dedicated to Mark,

  for all the right reasons

  Contents

  “And She Was”

  World was Moving

  Hear the Breathing

  This Way and That

  Famine

  Making Sure

  A Neighbor’s House

  Take a Minute

  Touching Ground

  Pestilence

  Open Up her Eyes

  Taking Off her Dress

  Drifting Through

  Chaos

  No Time to Think

  What She’s Done

  Doubt About It

  War

  Looking at Herself

  What to Tell

  Like a Movie

  Forgiveness

  A Pleasant Elevation

  Diaspora

  In all Directions

  Missing Enough

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Praise

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  “And She Was”

  by Talking Heads, 1986

  And she was lying in the grass

  And she could hear the highway breathing

  And she could see a nearby factory

  She’s making sure she is not dreaming

  See the lights of a neighbor’s house

  Now she’s starting to rise

  Take a minute to concentrate

  And she opens up her eyes

  The world was moving, she was right there with it (and she was)

  The world was moving she was floating above it (and she was)

  And she was drifting through the backyard

  And she was taking off her dress

  And she was moving very slowly

  Rising up above the earth

  Moving into the universe

  Drifting this way and that

  Not touching ground at all

  Up above the yard

  She was glad about it…no doubt about it

  She isn’t sure where she’s gone

  No time to think about what to tell them

  No time to think about what she’s done

  And she was looking at herself

  And things were looking like a movie

  She had a pleasant elevation

  She’s moving out in all directions

  Joining the world of missing persons (and she was)

  Missing enough to feel alright (and she was)

  SPRING 1741; SPRING 1961

  world was moving

  I felt the edge slip sometimes. When I was there. Nothing obvious, just the disquieting feeling that something had come loose, something had shifted and reassembled itself beneath me. There are places like that. Places that fall apart and re-form right under your boots. Places that can remake you. I think now it’s because these places themselves are still undone, still being formed.

  The Pacific plate began its slow plunge under the American plate, revealing the red meat of the earth. Along the wound, volcanoes rose like cysts, spewing molten rock into cool water, creating the Aleutian chain seventy million years ago. Strewn like stepping-stones, the 1,400-mile island chain arched from the Alaskan Peninsula to the doorstep of Siberia. And then the winds began, so persistent, so fierce, the islands became the Birthplace of the Wind and the Cradle of Storms. The winds erode from above; the Bering Sea and the Pacific Ocean wear from below.

  These islands are at once being born and dying. The battle of fire and water is old and living. Both will keep killing. And keep giving life. This is the edge, the slip. They are, like us, unfinished. People do not possess such places but are possessed by them. I felt it when I was there. I imagine the Aleut people have been feeling it for thousands of years.

  And I believe some of them still remember the power that lurks in this land. When I first heard their story, I felt as if the wind were lifting a veil, revealing something I already knew. And some part of my brain stepped back from the edge of extinction and smiled. Their story takes a shape our instincts recognize. The whisper under a shout. And in my mind, I’m standing again on a cliff overlooking that siren ocean, feeling the wind press into my lungs. And I, too, remember.

  It blows over the beach below on this sunny, cold afternoon long ago and into the face of Tekuxia as she stands among the rocks and sand. She and thirty others from her village have gathered here at Tumgax’s request. Another vision has come to him.

  “Something is coming,” Tumgax says, leaning forward to peer into each person’s eyes. “The wind will bring newcomers from beyond the sea, and everything will change.”

  Tekuxia shudders when the shaman tells of these visions. Her children whimper with nightmares after such talk. But she listens well.

  And she believes.

  “Last night I journeyed again to where the spirits talk.” Tumgax turns his face to search past the breakers, past the towering rocks guarding the village cove, toward the open ocean. “These newcomers will bring new ways. The People will take up their ideas, their clothing, their lives. Until no one remembers who we were.”

  Tekuxia shivers under the cold sun. The villagers know there exist people much different from themselves. Twice in her thirty-seven years, parts of a whale-size boat have come to rest on the beach. The bits of iron, holding water-soaked wood together, were quickly stripped and hammered into knives and awls, their blades wearing much better than stone. And she has heard the tales of a people to the west, beyond the last island. But these tales have grown so old that they now sound like myths serving only to warn the young men not to venture too far from home.

  “When they come,” Tumgax continues, “we will welcome them. We will embrace their God and their toion and everything will change.”

  As the gathering breaks, Tekuxia scoops up her little girl and holds her close, feeling the dark shiny hair under her cheek. Tekuxia does not fear for herself; she feels certain her generation will pass before the change. But Aya. Aya will see it all. She sets the girl down and kneels in front of her.

  “Aya, you must remember what I am going to tell you. Say you will.”

  The girl looks up, surprised by her mother’s urgent tone.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  “These hands,” Tekuxia says, turning the sand-caked palms upward in her own, “in them you hold your fate, and in no one’s hands but your own does your future rest. Do you understand?”

  Aya understands only the strange desperation in her mother’s voice, only the first notions of fear. But she nods.

  “Yes, Mama.”

  In the years to come, Aya will listen to her mother repeat this strange ceremony, the turning up of her palms and the heavy words. But she will not come to understand them until her mother is long gone and the change has blown down upon her like a williwaw.

  Hurl yourself forward 220 years and fly inland to another girl learning at her mother’s side. My mother’s legacy of wisdom was no less insistent, no less burdened by a maternal instinct to warn her daughter of what she fears.

  “Brandy,” she says, buttoning up her blouse, but not too far, as I gaze into the depths of her cleavage, “you always want to take up the hem some on a store-bought dress. At least two inches. Got that?”

  “Yes, Mama.”

  Two inches. Two inches.

  The water bed sloshes with the rhythm as I repeat the words in a whisper, scared to forget anything even then.

  “And,” my mother says, bending forward at the waist to invert her blond curls and burden them with spray, “this Aqua Net is the best shit on the market.”

  Aqua Net. Aqua Net.

  She takes my face between her two hands as she passes by me
for the door. “Such a pretty girl,” she says, and I squint to see past the barriers of black-clumped lashes. I squint to see into the wreck of my mother’s eyes. She throws her customary parting over her shoulder as she leaves. “Be bad enough so they call you good.” The smell of perfume and hair spray and a protean dampness lingers in the room.

  Of course, my mother passes on more of her hard-earned wisdom. I learn about padded bras, and perfume samplers, lying down to zip up tight jeans. And I believed as a five-year-old, as a fifteen-year-old, as a twenty-five-year-old, that a short skirt and the right hair spray are a girl’s sword and talisman.

  And as a thirty-one-year-old, when the wind blew me into the Aleutians in 1986, that’s all I had.

  JULY 5, 1986

  hear the breathing

  I am blond, and that’s where most of my problems started. Not just the problems of the moment, but yesterday’s and last year’s and a lifetime’s. I had let my hair get away with too much. I saw it now reflected in the dark window, those feathers of light surrounding the oval of my face. I could see the ferry’s lounge behind me, striped with orange glow. And I could see right through myself, into the black ocean, rolling like a great wind-billowed tarp. The split worlds met here at my image on thin, cold glass. For a moment, I felt as if that reflection were as real as me.

  The ferry had followed a string of islands, simply called the Chain, for three days. I’d rented a cabin, but mostly I’d been sitting here watching. I’d seen the Fourth of July fireworks showering over the water at King Cove when we stopped to unload and reload. I’d seen the piers of Cold Bay, False Pass, Akutan. With each stop the passenger list dwindled, until now it was only me and a group of about twenty guys, heading for the fishing grounds. Tonight we would arrive at the end of the line, Unalaska Island.

  Even on such a big boat, heaves of water had made me sick, not enough to embarrass myself by throwing up, but enough to tinge the excitement with greenish-yellow edges. I sipped carefully at a whiskey sour and focused past myself into the blackness.

  Dutch Harbor appeared suddenly beyond my reflection as the ferry rounded an invisible point. I watched the lights get closer. All two of them. The ferry terminal was a scrap of light, echoed over the water and hushed everywhere else by mountain black. It looked like a last stand against the night. An outpost of civilization, surrounded but fighting.

  At that moment of first seeing, I was afraid of it, this tiny island in the midst of so much nothing. I wanted to stay in this lounge, let the ferry disgorge its last passengers and turn back to the real world with me safely on board. And if I’d had something to go back to, I probably would have done just that. The fear was a premonition, the barest inkling that this place would take something from me, something that would change everything. I was wrong, as it turned out. It wasn’t what the island would take, but what I would take, what I would steal.

  I smoothed on fresh lipstick, finger combed my hair, and swallowed hard. I wasn’t sure why I’d come. A rush of hazy thinking, involving, of course, a cute guy with curly hair and no long-range goals.

  Of course, I was following a man. Women just don’t come out here on their own.

  Not women like me anyway.

  It was near morning when the ferry docked, still dark. I grabbed my duffel bag, zipped up my jacket, and hustled down the gangplank right into his arms. I knew I looked good walking through pools of shadow and light on the dock in my tight jeans, pale suede boots, and jacket. I sucked in the ocean-dock smells of dead fish, wet air, and diesel. Smells near the ocean feel ancient to me, like all earth’s history is in that smell. It’s entirely right, entirely mysterious. He smelled the same way—his gray-green oilskin coat, his mud-caked boots, his salt-stiff hair.

  We kissed. I could feel his desire to make this reunion more than it was, feel him try to make it one of those cinematic kisses you’d expect when two lovers meet by the sea after a long separation.

  “I missed you,” he said, soulful, honest.

  The wind blew, snapping my pant legs against my boots and Thad’s oilskin against his legs. I felt flimsy and ill prepared in that wind, the way it rushed at me and over me. But at the same time it carried an undertone, a trailing hint that it shouldn’t feel this way, that I wasn’t living up to its potential.

  A sudden irritation flashed through me. “I can’t wait to get you to the hotel room,” I murmured, refusing his interpretation of this script, of me.

  He smiled and kissed me again.

  Thad checked us into the HiTide, which is the upscale hotel on the island. It has its own bar. Room 114 was covered in paneling. Burgundy flowers amid green trees draped the bedspread, and the same print, reversed into a perverse forest of burgundy trees and green flowers, dressed a child-size window. The stiff fabric shuffled rather than flounced in the drafts from the air vent underneath.

  He unbuttoned my jeans as he kneeled in front of me, his breath warm and moist against my abdomen as he exhaled, suddenly cool as he inhaled.

  “I missed you,” he murmured, peeking up at me from between my tits.

  He had that way about him of charging his gaze with meaning, taking his time, touching with intention. I laughed and stepped back, erecting a barrier with my eyes. I rocked my hips down through the jeans, slowly, hands caressing my thighs.

  “Just watch,” I said. I had to be lightly aggressive, formidably coy until his arousal overcame this tendency toward significance. I could not tolerate significance.

  “Come here,” he said.

  I shook my head and pulled off my shirt, letting it drag my hair across my face. Then I slid my hand into my panties, a sigh slipping through my teeth.

  As he approached this time, I didn’t need to push him away. His eyes closed, hands fumbled, groped for my crotch. I’d won. I’d enforced my rule so well he didn’t know there were any. The victory freed a hot melt of arousal. He didn’t speak as I pressed his mouth to my nipple, didn’t open his eyes as our genitals collided, then mine gave way.

  Thad was beautiful and energetic, as always. I faked the second orgasm, just to keep up with him. As I lay in the warm glow, I watched him through pretend-closed eyes until he fell to sleep, cheeks still flushed. I’d just come eight hundred miles over the Bering Sea to be with him, and I didn’t know why.

  I couldn’t relax, lying right next to so much contentment, so I dressed, grabbed my jacket, and walked into the dim corridor. Outside, from the mountains to the east, asterisks of light flared in the valleys, sending streaks of color across the hills. I watched three huskies sitting on protruding bumps of a steep hillside across from the motel. Their ruffs stood up in the breeze. They each looked unwaveringly toward the ocean. I followed their gaze and let the wind smooth over my face until my ears crusted with cold, until the last radiating rings of my orgasm dissipated. Then, prompted by something I couldn’t sense, the huskies bounded simultaneously down the hill, silent and smooth. They loped around a curving dirt road out of sight.

  The light had spread over the island now, and I turned to survey my new home. The parking lot was half filled with trucks and rust-splotched vans. The HiTide stretched rectangular and flat along a dirt road, its double glass doors smudged with handprints and dog snuffles. Two ashtrays flanked the doors, and the wind dashed a steady stream of butts over their sides. I walked the row of trucks and vans, the little white and brown pilgrims skittering along with me. Below the hotel, water lapped at muddy shores. Tall grasses grew where they could. I could see the blackened stumps of forgotten pilings jutting here and there. The wheelhouse of a submerged fishing boat lay a few feet offshore. To the north stretched the road I’d traveled earlier, a potholed two-lane flanked by immense canneries, Quonset huts and prefab metal buildings offering prop repair, diving services, welding, web patching. The town seemed to exist outside of time. Nothing—not the utilitarian buildings, the signs, the vehicles—spoke of any certain year. Or any decade for that matter. It was 1986, but I got the disconcerting feeling that this pl
ace had looked the same ten years ago and would look the same ten years from now.

  Toward the south, the road looped around a bay, crossed water, and disappeared between two hills. Another hill, grass covered with bending fireweed below outcrops of weathered rock, rose in front of the hotel. But everywhere else it was mountains. Deceptively soft with sunrise green at the bases, stretching to fog-streaked rock at the tops. Mountain upon mountain as far as I could see. And eagles. I spotted six right by the HiTide, perched on poles or cliffs or flying low over the water, seagulls scattering from their paths.

  The steady wind only intensified the illusion of silence—until the whine of a truck engine separated itself from the rush. I turned to see a pale green, rust-spotted king cab round the bend, spewing arches of gravel behind each tire. It skidded to a stop. The passenger door was flung open.

  “Get the fuck out.” The driver, a man with his baseball cap pulled low on his forehead, shoved someone out the open door. He floored the gas, making a clumsy start on the loose gravel. The passenger door flopped several times before the truck’s momentum slammed it shut.