I See You Everywhere by Julia Glass
“For how much?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said, waving a hand, “enough to convince the postal service it’s too valuable to lose.”
After the bank, Lucy said she was too tired to shop for music. I took her home for a nap and went by the sanctuary. When I finished cleaning cages, I drove to the record store on my own. Later, after dinner, I brought the boom box out on the porch. We listened to song after song after song. Bob Marley was in the middle of “Exodus”—I love how he sings it Exey-duss, taking that lofty word away from the Bible—when suddenly I got it. My cousin Gaia was Lucy’s great-granddaughter. What did this change? Everything and nothing.
I looked over at Lucy, to express to her what I felt more than what I had learned, but she was asleep again. Her body was getting ready to sleep for good. A few weeks later, before the rest of the clan arrived to divvy up the other spoils, Dad and I managed to get ourselves into a canoe without tipping over, to scatter her ashes on Lake Champlain. I had this image of Lucy flitting weightless over the water, that gold hippie sash like a peacock’s tail: Lucy, up there, invisible, finding out what it’s like to kiss the sky.
WE STRETCHED A WORN CHENILLE BEDSPREAD on a rock beside the gorge, weighed down the corners with six-packs of beer and Coke and a basket of sandwiches (cucumber and chicken between fat slices of Aunt Lucy’s sourdough-prune). Except for the surrounding birch trees—which made me achingly homesick for everything northern, everything dependent on frost—the place made me think of somewhere southwestern: along a twisting sinew of river, slabs of rock leaned every which way, like a band of precarious drunks. The river flowed down a shadowy corridor, some twelve feet wide, with lichen-stained walls. A few people had arrived just before us, so the road leading in was a tunnel of dust, dust that now coated my skin and hair, since I’d ridden in the back of the pickup to be with Ralph’s dogs, Tuck and Moe. Along the way, brand-new NO TRESPASSING signs leaned out from the encroaching woods. My backside, thanks to the potholes, felt like it had been shot full of novocaine.
Bodies, half clothed or naked, sprawled on the rocks, soaking up sun. Because of the restless geology here, privacy was easy to come by; as we zigzagged toward Clem’s favorite spot, we passed a sudden crevice where a lean brown couple were making love.
Only two or three people were swimming. On my stomach, leaning over the steep drop beside us, I could just touch the surface of the water if I stretched. “Jesus!” I said, electrified by the chill.
Clem had already helped herself to a sandwich. “Oh, you’ll go in. It’s too hot not to.” As if to prove her point, Tuck and Moe plunged, side by side, splashing us all. They panted as they swam, noses tilted toward the sky.
“Oh Christ,” said Ralph. He took off his shirt and dove in.
“What’s the matter?” I asked.
“There’s a waterfall down there, around that corner,” said Clem. She sounded nonchalant. “We go through this routine every time, but usually they wait till we go in.”
Hector walked the edge of the river, abreast of Ralph and the dogs, who floated down in tandem, cradled on a lazy current. The four of them slipped out of sight where the river made one of its many sharp turns.
Clem saw my anxiety (she always does). “Relax. Farther down, it’s not so steep. Hector pulls them out. Ralph gets to push.” She laughed. “Hard to believe they once worked for a living, those goofy dogs.”
Clem pulled her sunglasses down off her head, over her eyes. She unclasped the top of her bikini, tossed it aside, and lay back on the bedspread. “Cancer, come’n get me.”
Her breasts are smaller than mine, but tight and golden, like our father’s skin—the Basque in the woodpile, he likes to say. Her nipples are darker, too, a startling purple. I realized that she was significantly older than the sister I’d been determined I would leave behind for good; older than I wanted her to be. She was nicer, which I struggled not to see, but also less relaxed. Above her glasses, I saw the first hint of lines at the peak of her nose.
“Have you thought about the jewelry?” I said.
She raised her head, looked at me, then lay back down. “Not really. It’s all in a big leather box we drove to the bank. I didn’t ask to open it; that seemed rude.”
“Rude never stopped you before,” I said, though I found myself speaking lightly.
“Well, yeah, touché, Miss Manners,” said Clem. “But you know, family jewels don’t exactly fit the life I picture for myself. I mean, rubies on the Outer Banks? Hatpins on Kilimanjaro?”
“When do you plan to be on Kilimanjaro?” I was saying when I heard a loud “Heads up!” Ralph’s voice, followed by whooping laughter and a lash of ice water. The dogs arrived ahead of the men and shook themselves all over our small encampment.
“Pigs, you pigs! You boorish Eskimo pigs! Shit!” Clem was on her feet in an instant, clutching a towel.
“Watch your language, missy.” Ralph took Clem’s towel and wrapped it around her from behind, squeezed her tight in his muscular arms.
“Scrub me down, hot stuff,” she said, and twisted inside the towel to face him. Then she pushed him back, threw the towel over his head, and dove past him straight into the river. In the water, her skin turned blue as moonlit snow. The dark bottom of her bathing suit split her body in two. Before she arched back to the surface, I saw the soles of her feet, the dust rising quickly in a cloud, their pallor reflecting the sun.
“She’s an athlete, I’ve always been jealous of that,” I said.
“Strong swimmer,” said Hector. “But crazy, too. I saw her go off that rock. Her and Ralph. Me? No way.” He looked upstream toward the site of the fatal dive.
Clem broke the surface. “Yahoo! It’s fuckin’ polar down there!”
“Make room,” called Ralph, and he dove in again. Hector bent over and untied his sneakers. He set them aside symmetrically paired, then took off his T-shirt, folded it into a square, and laid it on top of the sneakers. If Clem and Ralph made one logical couple, Hector and I would fall together sensibly as well: careful, circumspect. But who was I fooling? I was alone.
“Come on in,” said Hector, smiling warmly at me, and then all three of them were in the river, heads bobbing on the surface. Even the dogs had deserted me, still on land but roving their way upstream, hunting for untended food.
Clem was treading water next to Ralph. “C’mon, you overeducated pseudo-bohemian pondscum,” she called out.
This was exactly the sort of moment with her that made me feel so small. “Maybe later,” I said. “I think I’ll read for a little. I don’t think I’m hot enough yet.”
“Suit yourself,” said Clem. She swam after the men, who now sat on a ledge just above the waterline, their legs submerged to the knee.
I lay on my stomach and pretended to read, but I was looking down at the water. Though I’d grown up near the ocean, I had never liked going in over my head. I had seen the rock bottom of the river when I leaned over the ledge, yet I knew that depth is always an illusion; those rocks could have been six or twenty feet down. But come on, I told myself. Here, in front of these two charming, brainy men and my charming, invincible sister, was I really going to lie on this rock by myself, reading Mrs. Dalloway?
They talked and laughed. About me, perhaps. I couldn’t hear a word because of the hidden waterfall, its steady hiss. Clem gestured wildly, arms waving overhead. Hector smiled at her antics. What story could I have told with such fervor?
I stripped to my bathing suit and sat on the edge. I hate diving because my ears always fill up with water, and this dive was steep. I turned around on all fours and felt for toeholds in the face of the rock. Halfway down, I slipped, scraping my right shin, but I was in the water—which was so cold that my lungs turned to stone. I gasped and clung to the wall beside me. The surface of the river was calm, but my knees were gripped in a taut undertow. I took a deep breath, let go of the rock, and swam as hard as I could. Without lifting my head, I knew I was going nowhere, my stroke too weak to m
“Hey, you. No big deal, what did I say?” Clem had spotted me. She was grinning. “Come on up here. Fantastic or what?”
I was kicking like crazy, but my upper body was caged in frigid fear. “Where did you take swimming lessons?” I heard my sister call out in jest. “Oh, that’s right. Dad taught you.”
My mouth would not form a single word. I saw vaguely that Ralph was frowning, saying something to Clem. She stood up on the ledge and shouted, “You all right?”
All I could do was shake my head. I was still grappling at the rock when I heard her voice again, directly above me. She stood on the edge of the gorge four feet over my head. Then she was kneeling, her dark wet hair hanging down around her face. I could not see her expression. She said, in a low, deliberate voice, the voice of a teacher, “Swim to the middle of the river.”
“No,” I managed to gasp. “No.”
“Swim to the middle, Louisa,” she said again, just as calmly, though her voice was louder. “The current is strongest at the edge, where you are.”
“Can’t be,” I forced out. I felt as if I were wearing a medieval corset. My right shin, where I’d scraped it, throbbed with an icy fire. Christ, I thought, all because of a stupid piece of jewelry and an adolescent grudge, I might die. Actually die. I thought, absurdly, of the clear “picture” Clem had mentioned about the life before her. I had no such picture of mine.
“Do what I’m telling you. Now, Louisa.” Later, I would remember this moment with exceptional clarity, how her voice betrayed not a hint of panic. Tuck stood beside her, looking down at me with his eerie ice-blue eyes, smiling and panting. I wondered if I was about to suffer the humiliating relief of being rescued by a dog. I wondered how he would do it, what part of me he would grab in his jaws.
I pushed away with my right foot and hurled myself, more than swam, toward the middle. She had been right. The water unshackled me as I left the edge. The middle of the river, a fissure of noon sun, was placid and warmer, and after treading water for a moment to let my muscles find their purpose, I swam slowly upstream. Clem walked with me, the way Hector had walked beside Ralph and the dogs, and then she climbed down where the ledge came closest to the water, where I had watched her telling her antic story, and she reached out to reel me in. As soon as I was sitting beside her, I started to sob.
“I always knew you were a weakling,” Clem said, rubbing my back with a towel, “but hey.”
I wept into the towel, bent over my lap. Weeping was my only language.
“Seriously,” she said, “the current is strong. We’ve been swimming here for two months. I kind of forgot to warn you, I guess. But you’re okay. Aren’t you?”
By the time we returned to our picnic, the dogs had staked out the lion’s share of the bedspread, and Hector was picking apart his sandwich to give them each a bite of chicken. Ralph put an arm around my shoulders and handed me an open beer. “To immortality,” he said.
I sat next to Moe. His hot fur felt glorious against my thigh. When I stroked his neck, he twisted away from Hector and licked my face with abandon.
“Oh my. He’s in love,” said Hector. “He doesn’t do that with everyone.”
That’s when I lost it again, crying uncontrollably and shaking. I saw Clem not knowing what to do. I wanted to be mad at her all over again, for putting me in this shameful spot, but I couldn’t get back there because I had done what she told me to do, and she had been right. Against all instincts, I’d swum to the middle.
“Hey you, you’re okay. You really are,” she said to me, but she sounded less certain in her chiding. Hector wrapped a second towel around my shoulders. I was thinking how if she wanted the cameo, I’d have to let her claim it now, and then I remembered what she said about hatpins on Kilimanjaro.
Kilimanjaro? And it dawned on me: This was the first time in three years I had an urgent question to ask her, a question to which I really wanted the answer.
Now Is Not the Time
1983
About the only thing we had in common that summer was solitude. Or so I was led to believe. Mine was a solitude of retreat and longing, fraught with wishes and sighs—but Clem’s I imagined as sure and intrepid, a flight from everything soft about civilization. I was copyediting ruminations on art. Clem was counting seals. As usual, we exchanged letters. We communicate best by mail. On the phone, we argue. In person, we tend to become sarcastic. Our letters, though, have a touch of romantic collusion.
I had fled my fourth-floor walk-up in Brooklyn to house-sit for Mars and Leah Katz. I hardly knew these people—they were friends of friends, jetting off to romp in the lavender fields of Provence—but I was desperately glad to slip into their easy, aesthetically cushioned life. The Katzes’ house, a small Victorian with fuchsias lining the verandah, sits snug on a hill near Long Island Sound in one of those Connecticut enclaves whose elegance is tainted only by the hourly hurtle—distant yet always within earshot—of the trains to Grand Central Station.
From the master bedroom in the turret, I could see a good stretch of sawtooth coast, a boat-specked horizon, and the chocolate haze over New York City. Until recently, Mars was the chef at a famous restaurant in New Canaan. Leah writes gardening books. They were on a two-month sabbatical and had left me a beach pass, a three-speed bike, and ten pages of instructions: she for her lush thirsty flowers, he for his hutches of rabbits, pheasants, and quail. My only regret about leaving the city was that I had fallen in love.
So there I was, sitting plush, while Clem, explorer that she is and always will be, made do in a Quonset hut on the coast of Labrador, someplace so desolate it did not merit so much as a flea dot in my cinder block of an atlas. Her mail went to a post office twenty miles away; a fisherman named Spider brought it up by boat, twice a week or so. He brought groceries as well; in general, he was paid to keep an eye on Clem. But the dangers were nil, she wrote. Her routine was placid, the climate benign. Nothing like the time she’d spent in Barrow: three months of hellish cold, predatory bears, fracturing ice floes, drunks with tempers and knives. There she had packed a shotgun. Here, she packed a logbook, a tuna-fish sandwich, a pair of binoculars, and a tube of Bain de Soleil. Out on the water, the seals made excellent companions. At first because they were curious, and then because it amused them, they followed Clem’s boat. Friendly, loud, demanding, they yammered at her all day long. Before you know it, you’re talking back. You say what you have to say. They say what they have to say. Nobody contradicts anybody, nobody gets political. Nobody has any THEORIES. Peace! They have a fine sense of humor, these guys, they even do impersonations. This one bull, I kid you not, does over-the-hill Frank Sinatra. But try to reach out and touch him—vamoose, right down under. Do you know about selkies? Half woman, half seal. I get it now, how the Irish believe in that myth. It’s the look in their eyes, like they KNOW you.
Clem was paid by an international wildlife commission whose name I could never quite remember. Systematically, she was to roam her assigned stretch of coast—on foot; by jeep; in some unobtrusive jalopy of a boat—and tally the various species, both living and dead. An epidemic had struck, killing them off by the hundreds. Clem’s mentor, Kurt, is a marine pathologist at Woods Hole, one of those dashing bearded types you’re always seeing on Nova, valiantly rescuing lost baby whales. Having isolated the virus, he was collaborating on a vaccine. He’d persuaded someone in Washington to foot the bill for inoculation trials. To me, all this fuss seemed bizarre, even improper (money to vaccinate seals? what about cancer? what about children starving all over the world?), but I’d met Kurt, so I saw it all clearly … Kurt, on his high scientific steed, writes to Ted Kennedy, explains how all this arctic seal decimation will have a domino effect, threatening the lobster crops of Maine
How Clem saw such beauty in all that tundra, how she could live there and keep her wits about her, I couldn’t imagine. And how she could abandon Luke—another mystery. Clem’s boyfriend was one I’d have kept in my sights. He was smart, tender, strong. A little moody, but how close can you come to perfection? Luke had been devoted to Clem for over three years, since their sophomore year in college. He had begun to talk about marriage. She didn’t want to lose him, she told me, so she answered his proposal with a speech that went something like this: “Sure I love you, don’t be absurd, but I won’t know if this is really it for years. Maybe not till I’m forty. If I live that long. It’s only fair to warn you.” Privately, she worried about Luke’s ingrained Catholicism, never mind that he went to Mass only when he stayed with his parents. Once they inject you with all that superstition, practically straight into your marrow, you are theirs for life. Antibodies to common sense, Clem wrote to me after they’d been going out together for a year. Listen to this. Luke told me he grew up thinking that if the communion wafer touched his teeth, he’d get struck down dead by a holy thunderbolt. Is that sick or what? They tell you this stuff when you’re five years old!