BOAT by Julie Esther Fisher
The water licks at the shore, the rowboat bobs, and inside, watching my mother’s head fallen back as if in languor, I bob with the boat from side to side. My mother’s eyes stare mistily at the empty sky, the sky filled with stars, her eyes lifeless, the moon catching the white of her left eye. At that, I try not to look, though it’s impossible. The scene is so beautiful: the moon, orange and astonishing, chills the water to an icy black. I try not to look at my mother’s left eye, but I can’t. She’s seeing something. I can’t ask her anymore what it is, but we can wait together, cold as we are, alone finally in this boat, and I know she’ll tell me eventually. The shore is a smudge of dark shapes now in the distance. We’ve all night, my mother and I.
It is as if my mother is just reclining languidly in this boat, an evening out in Brighton, reclining now as the boat laps here and there, staring up at the stars, and will soon say: You know, sweetie, I sometimes think . . .
Her mouth hangs open. It is the instant before speech. How can the scene be so filled with beauty? How can it be about the postures of languor? How can the movement be the gentle licking of water, lapping of boat, bobbing of head, the moon, the stars, the eye glinting white, when under cover of dark, with a pillow – I’ve just silenced my mother?
A puff of blue breath – then silence.
It looks, now, like nothing more than sleep.
Let me tell you the way her eyes looked the instant before I killed her: clear, deep, dredged with gratitude. It’s not a murder story, not a story of stalking. Mother is stoic. There was no fight. We’ve been together these many hours in a boat.
It’s ten o’clock, a late October night, and the moon is suspended high in the sky. Mother would say: Moons don’t do that, darling – suspend – and laugh a little curly-lipped laugh before her face would plunge again into – what? – the beauty of abject despair? Moons don’t do that, she’d say, but can she speak to me now? Will she open her mouth and speak?
In the distance, I can see the twinkling lights of the Brighton shoreline. My father Clifford will be combing the boardwalk, holding the leash of the white dog, old now, rasping for breath, no longer straining at the leash. The poor sniffless dog will look blindly out into the black lapping space, the ground that suddenly glistens unevenly before it. My father will have called the police by now. The Brighton Constabulary, Scotland Yard. They tell him: I’m sorry, Mr. James. Your wife’s been missing – how long did you say? – three hours now? Since seven o’clock, he says. Seven, dammit. If you knew her . . . I’m sorry, Sir, I’m afraid she’s not a missing person until she’s been gone twenty-four hours.
I’m looking right at her now and wishing she’d just let her hair be grey. Out and out grey. Instead of this unnatural sort of yellow-tinged streaking she’s had done.
You have beautiful hair, Rose, I tell her.
She doesn’t make any sound now, but I hear her.
It’s thin, she says. So terribly thin.
I ask her if she remembers a wig she had once; she kept it in an enormous hat box of shiny light blue and white. A cylindrical shape, its two halves came apart, and inside was this long wavy hairpiece.
Hard not to romanticize things now? I ask her.
She seems to be looking at the moon.
I suppose so, she says. I was just thinking . . .
If I’d known I was going to do this – I say.
No, no, it’s OK, she says.
Is it hard not to romanticize now? I say.
She looks at the moon and opens her mouth. I see her here in this boat, head back, mouth open, she and the moon both, and she says:
Well, you know what he is. I’ve accepted him.
With his titfers? I reproach.
Don’t, she says. You have never accepted him.
His silly titfers –Herringbone,
my mother says.
And his stupid garters . . .
His legs, she says. It’s his legs, the way they are. Their shape. She looks at me. He can’t keep them up, she says. They fall down. She laughs.
I know this about him. The beautiful sway of his calf, the lovely silky sock, the black sock, the elegant foot sleeping in the Bally shoe.
* * *
In the hotel lobby, a woman with high hair at reception watches my father. He’s got the telephone receiver in his hand and is searching his pockets for change. He keeps switching it from ear to ear, hunching up the left shoulder, then the right, cramming it in between, trying to wedge it there. One by one he turns his pockets out, the contents falling around his Bally shoes.
“Yeah police?” says my father. “What kind of useless country
is this?”
“American,” the woman remarks to her manager. “And in a tizz.”
* * *
Of course, he’s got the white dog with him, the dog who is a West Highland terrier, whose name, eleven years ago, was briefly to have been MacTavish, and for whom my father purchased a tartan leash. He tried calling her that, but I, just seven then, knew she’d not come to it, she was no MacTavish – this paw-digging, soil-grunting, black-nosed strainer at the leash, and she snapped the tartan just to prove it. She’d not come to that name, or anything like it, though in the park, my mother and I tried all: MacTavish, Mac, Tavvy, Ricky Ticky Tavy . . . I named her Kristie. The dog liked it. She came to Kristie.
A woman at the bus stop once told me what I’d named my white dog, who this Kristie was, this John Kristie. Where he lived in London, what he had done, what his methods had been. Coming out of the park with the dog, I had been staring at the Cadbury’s Roses ad under the glass. It was grey, no bus came, conversation was better than nothing, rush hour coming on, and she’d peered up Sloane Street and said: “Oh, what I wouldn’t give for a nice cuppa,” and looked suddenly at me. “I live all the way out in Clapham,” she said. “Right beyond the junction. Know it, do you? Ever been there?” I shook my head. “Where do you live then?” the woman said, and followed my finger to where it pointed, across Sloane Street to a high turret on the corner of Sloane and Pont. “Isn’t that veddy posh then,” the woman said. “Like chocolates, do you?” She unlatched her purse, put her hand inside and there was crinkling. “Here. Have a choccy.” It was wrapped in pink silver foil, a Cadbury’s Rose. I unwrapped it, slipped it in my mouth. It was good, soft, filled with something liquidy.
“Anyway,” the woman said. “This Kristie . . . Used to be he’d strangle his victims, then make off with their heads. He was our biggest mass murderer,” she said, “was John Kristie. Still, I expect you didn’t know that when you named your little dog. Such gruesome murders,” she said, and shook her head. “Do you like it then?” she said, looking down at me. “Your choccy?”
* * *
In the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, my father paces in a pattern before the last telephone on the left. The fake Wilton carpet beneath his shoes is faded, and he paces its vulgar fleur de lis, pausing at the apex to glance at the stubborn silent phone. He’s waiting for a call back from Scotland Yard – some guy Mulligan – who tells him the same thing.
“What do you mean, my wife’s not missing?” my father says. “She’s not with me, is she?”
He is advised to wait in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, or to take a room. We were to rendezvous there for dinner, the three of us. My mother and I went out to look at the pavilion shining under the stars. Just for a minute. We never came back. Wait there in the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, or take a room, the police say. “I expect you’ll find they’ve just gone for a jaunt.” My father waits. Paces the fleur de lis. “If we’ve anything to report to you,” this Mulligan says, “we know where to find you.”
Twelve-o- three.
The woman at reception slouches in her chair. She has a pallid English face, shabby and fortyish, and you know by looking at her what this reception desk signifies in her life – this tawdry mock oak desk piled with papers and memos and keys, the faded carpet beneath her sensible brown shoes.
* * *
Earlier today we visited Beachy Head, the highest chalk cliff in Britain. I first learned of it in geography class, studying the late Cretaceous period. The chalk formed when the area was under the sea. Its soaring majesty reminds me that what was once submerged can live to rise. My mother was a ballet dancer in youth. Now, her lamb-white sneakers keep pace with my father’s black Bally shoes, all four picking their way through the tussocks of scrubby grass on this headland. While walking at Beachy Head, one looks down, I discover, more than up.
Every now and then, chunks of chalk tumble into the sea. These crumbling margins seem to dare us to the edge of something. A few sections are fenced off. But the highest point on the cliff is unprotected. Even now in off season, people brave the wind, clicking cameras. We pass a Saint Bernard who strains at the leash to get a whiff of the white dog. My father lowers her to let it have its way.
Chalk, I learned in class, is created in layers. Like families, it is subject to erosion, failure, collapse. Waves batter the lower layers. And just like that, a headland can fall away. Above us, white as chalk themselves, seagulls rise screaming.
What they don’t teach you in geography class is what a stellar spot this is for flight of another kind. Twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year, good Samaritans patrol the area. My father, on the prowl for titbits, wanders off to chat with one of them.
A few minutes later I can feel him approaching from behind, like a wave coming from the wrong direction. He puts his head on my shoulder.
Here, he says. Take her.
He hands me the dog, and I tuck her under my arm just like he does, watch her sniff the wind, squirming a little in new arms.
I wonder if my mother notices. She seems to know that what he says to me is none of her business. I feel her falling away from us. A stiff wind blows her tears sideways.
* * *
I just wanted a night with you, I tell my mother. I wanted, in the end, just one night. A simple black night under a moon and stars, remembering that only certain stars are useful in the art of celestial navigation. Others may not even have names. They may be just SMCX1 or R136a: numbers, irrelevancies in the sky.
I expect we’ll be washed up at Beachy Head, I say. You hear how they are, bodies, washed up at Beachy Head.
In truth, I’d never heard this before.
It’s OK, my mother says. The dog will sniff us out . . . She laughs.
The dog can’t smell much anymore, I tell her. She won’t be able to detect us.
I look at my mother.
I remember when you told me this, Ma: that only when I crept into your bed did it ever smell sweet. You said that, do you remember?
I said that? she asks.
Yes, you did. And I believed you.
So you think we will be, she says, washed up at Beachy Head?
I shrug.
You know, I was going to put you in the boat alone, I say, and send you off into the ocean. That’s really what I was going to do. But then
I realized, if I let you go alone –
You wouldn’t, would you?
No. He’d plunge in and drag you back.
I know what she will say to this. I could say the words for her.
I tied the rope around my own neck. Tried to end things, all by myself. It was your father who saved me.
The incident she is referring to happened before I was born. At least that is the story they both tell. But lying, I overhear my father tell my mother that night, is part of the healing process. I am not lying now when I tell you that I was in fact alive, seven years so, when certain teeth – those of his knife – bit into our lives by saving her.
Rose! Rose!
My father’s cries rip through my dream. In I toddle, enchanted by its lingerings, to the eerie blue of her face. The dancer – how she must have quivered with indignation at the graceless plunge!
Get up, Rosie! Come to me!
Down on the floor, she will not look at him.
Later, when she tucks me in, she croaks that everything is going to be OK. Her tears sprinkle my neck. The next morning I wake to a tartan leash coiled at the foot of my bed. I spy the white dog – a tiny bundle – peeping up at me from the floor.
When in later dreams I see her swinging, it is always from that tartan leash. All of which goes to prove: tethering has to be right. Get it wrong, a creature never will come to its name.
You’re hurting, my mother says now. And I hold myself responsible for your troubles. I always wanted to protect you – wanted to but –
You couldn’t, right?
I didn’t know how, she says.
So you just didn’t, right?
I wasn’t capable, sweetie. Wasn’t strong like you. God knows I tried, but I was . . .
Her words drift.
What, Mother – missing?
For a moment everything is still.
You’re angry, she says. I don’t blame you, but we’re still a family, aren’t we?
That is the question the doctor is trying to help me figure out. He is round and fluffy, and amuses me for precisely fifty minutes twice a week.
I only wish we’d found him earlier, my mother says, so you didn’t have to delay college.
It’s only a year, I tell her, keeping to myself the many precious things the doctor teaches me.
You’re right, she says. You’re getting better every day. It’ll all be worth it in the end.
I feel badly for the doctor, all the work he has put into me.
Just before I leave him for this trip, he says, Remember. Things will go better if you get out of your head.
I joke that I can’t do it alone. I need John Kristie.
We laugh.
Only you can decide, he says, suddenly serious, to get back into the swim of things.
I just want my dog back, I simper from the door, surprised, not knowing I even felt that way.
* * *
Like an old miser, my father sits in a counting house that is my mother’s beauty. She exists for him as some sort of icon – chisel-featured, pinch-nosed, exquisite, strong yet frail – a child – a woman – a tunicked wife, mother, a woman in bed with Christian Dior nightgowns, a woman of jewelry boxes, shining earrings, bracelets, a woman of Jewish ancestry – his feeder – the woman he comes back to – the woman to end all women. He’ll be thinking, by now, of that commodity of which he is so richly in possession.
* * *
In the lobby of the Victoria Hotel, pacing the fleur de lis, he thinks of my mother’s beauty while waiting for the phone to ring. His eyes are riveted there. That damn Mulligan. Detective Chief Inspector. My father has never held anything particular against the Irish, but being a man always on the prowl, he finds himself strangely comforted by the ethnic stereotype of the dim-witted Irishman. He has one of his own now, in this guy who so ignorantly placates him. Gone for a jaunt, my foot! Shouldn’t he know what’s happened to his wife, when it’s his own flesh and blood that’s brought it about?
On the right point of the fleur de lis, he stops, suddenly aware of being watched. He looks over toward reception. She is sitting there, the woman – her hair piled high, cemented into place – trying to look mysterious. This, given her looks, he classifies instantly as a mistake. She doesn’t have the kind of face that can manage mystery.
In her attempt, the woman at first lowers her eyes and idly shifts some papers around on her desk. Then, raising her head, her eyes meet his and coolly, he peruses her.
He sees that she isn’t exactly repellent, but that in a few years, she almost certainly will be. She wears too much eye shadow, a lurid blue arc drawn in abruptly beneath her eyebrows. The eyebrows themselves are severely tweezed, as if she’s hollowed out the undersides to create a permanently interrogative expression. Looking at her face, he sees the entreaty, the loneliness. She, he is certain, is a beggar of men.
He looks at the woman; she looks back.
Aren’t you going to say something? her eyebrows inquire. I might allow you to speak to me . . .
A coquette too! Oh, but he’d missed that!
Walking to the desk, he stops on the other side. He tucks the old white dog under his arm, kisses her forehead.
“Give me a room,” he says.
“Any luck?” she asks.
She leans toward him, wraps the fingers of both hands around his side of the desk.
“Big bed, TV, shower,” he says.
“I mean,” she says, “with your wife.”
* * *
A few days ago, in the doctor’s waiting room, I flip through Mariners Quarterly, imagining the doctor himself into the sexy glossies of yachts and schooners. My eyes light on a particular ad in the classifieds at the back. I’m eager to tell him about it.
The doctor is a sailor, although it is comical to imagine his round fluffy body trimming the jib or pulling in the sail enough to prevent luffing. He knows about all things nautical, from wind tunnel tests for aerodynamics, to medieval flaws in hull design.
I tell him about the ad. Is it just for sea-faring souls, I ask, or can regular old people be buried at sea?
In the ocean cemetery, he replies, the king, the clown, the prince and the peasant are all alike, undistinguishable. (Always fair, he attributes the words.)
He replies with such easy authority, I wonder if he is trying to slip something by me, talking about something more important even than death, on which, of necessity, given the ragged state his newest client was in, we dwelt at some length in our first few sessions.
Kings, clowns, princes, peasants. I long to know which he thinks we are, but am too chicken to ask.
Instead, I’m blue today, I confess to him, which unleashes yet more nauticalia.
Apparently, what I’m feeling was originally a sailing term. Mourning sailors would fly blue flags if they lost their captain.
I remember the session before this one when, discussing the upcoming trip, I made another confession. I’m scared to death of the sea, I told him. My parents don’t know. You’re the first person I’m telling.
That’s what all this is for, he said. We’ll make a sailor out of
you yet.
I wonder if my feeling blue today means it must somehow already have happened, even though here he is, not lost at all, sitting right across from me.
* * *
Lying on top of his too-small bed in Room 407, my father hears a knock on the door.
“I thought,” says this voice, opening the door, “you might like a cup of tea.”
She appears.
“I brought it up by myself because I thought, at a time like this – “
“Jesus, I thought you were Scotland Yard. Or at least my daughter telling me what she’s done with my wife.”
“Scotland Yard? Why ever would I be Scotland Yard?” She laughs. “And I’m certainly not your daughter . . .”
The white dog, sleeping next to him, raises her head, blinks. My father doesn’t get up.
“Anyway, we have our own police,” the woman says acerbically, “down here in Brighton.” Entering the room, she closes the door. “Being American, perhaps you wouldn’t know that . . . ”
He smiles.
“Being English,” he says, “you should’ve known, we don’t drink tea.”
He doesn’t move. She stands there.
“I didn’t realize, you’ve a daughter then? I thought it was only your wife that’s missing.”
“It is my wife. My daughter’s not missing. She always knows exactly where she is.”
“You don’t want it, then?” the woman says, holding the tea out at arm’s length.
My father rolls on to his side, surveys her.
“I’m deciding that as we speak.”
“Well I haven’t got all night.”
The white dog grunts out of a dream. Walking to the edge of the bed, the woman holds out the cup of tea, and raising itself, the dog comes sniffing.
“What’s his name?” she asks.
“Clifford James.”
She looks at my father skeptically, her head to one side. “That’s your name. You wrote that in the register.”
“You asked the dog what my name was,” he says. “You looked at the dog and said: ‘What’s his name?’ ”
“Do you want this?” she says, holding up the tea, “or not.”
My father raises himself on an elbow.
“Yes, I want this,” he says. “I want this badly.”
He looks at the woman from the lobby desk with a certain crass shame.
“I know I’m not beautiful,” she says.
“No – ”
“But beauty’s so much to live up to.” She approaches the bed. “Don’t you think?”
He stands up.
“Is she beautiful? Your wife?”
He runs a finger across her cheek.
“I don’t like you,” he says.
“Nor I you.”
They kiss.
* * *
Can I give you a kiss, Ma?
I have the rope, thick and oily, by my feet, attached to the boat by a knot I now unfasten.
I’m frightened, my mother says.
Don’t be, I tell her. I’ll look after us. I’m a sailor now. The kings, the clowns, the princes and the peasants – they’re all here waiting for us.
There’s no wind. I lean over and kiss her. I put my lips to her cheek, feel her face moving with the boat. I wrap the rope around her ankles and tell her it’s going to be OK. I tie the rope to my ankles too.
Water slaps the sides of the boat. Mercy bobs us. Our objections, if we have any, creak in our throats. Tonight it is calm. The stealth of erosion is undetectable. Down here at sea level, miles away, I am still thinking of Beachy Head. I wonder who might be on the cliff right now, about to write their obituary in chalk.
Julie Esther Fisher’s stories have appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, New World Writing, William and Mary Review, Other Voices, Alaska Quarterly Review, and in the anthology Stories That Need to Be Told (Tulip Tree Publishing, 2022).