Chapter 4 — Tide-Gazing.17
@solena.rising
“No alarm this morning. Just light on the water and a body that remembered what rest is. I slept like the woman I was at twenty and woke up like somebody had forgiven me. Day two, and I already don’t recognize myself.
And yes, loves, I packed the good lingerie for me.
Nobody else. Wear the nice things. Be your own occasion. ”
That photograph took fifty minutes. I know because I was awake for forty-five of them.
I woke up flat on the floor of paradise with my spine filed under previous owner, and I was still negotiating with my lower back about the terms of sitting up when I understood two things in the wrong order.
The first was that the doors to the terrace were open and the morning was coming in low and gold.
The second was that my mother was standing in the middle of it in her underwear, taking pictures of herself.
I want to lodge a complaint about the staging.
She had found the one column of early sun like a woman who locates light by sonar, and she was working in it, one knee bent, back arched just enough to mean nothing provable, phone high, chin tipped.
And she had, in fact, packed the good lingerie.
Black, edged in lace, straps doing quiet engineering work, the kind of good that does not end up in a suitcase by accident.
Good, it turned out, also meant sheer. The sun was behind her and the lace was mostly suggestion, and where the black ran thinnest I could just make out the color of one nipple, a shade darker than the rest of her, a fact I had now learned and could not give back.
I lay there wondering, with my one operational corner of brain, whether the room had done it, the salt lamps and the moon stripe and the bed turned down like a promise, whether all that staging had coaxed out Solena’s frisky side.
It was easier to wonder about Solena. Solena was a brand.
Brands run promotions. She rolled a shoulder back a centimeter at a time, hunting the angle.
Then she reached back without breaking the pose and fixed the lace edge of her panties, two small tugs, settling it perfectly along the curve of her ass, the way you’d straighten a picture you had to look at every day.
My eyes, which I had instructed to close, did not close.
I’d like to say I looked away. My back had other plans.
The floor had spent the night quietly disassembling me, and now I lay flat as evidence, pinned, while my mother arched against the sun and took forty versions of the same photograph, and the only muscle in my body still taking orders was apparently whichever one holds the eyes open.
She turned the phone to check a shot, and for half a second the screen showed me to her, a man on the floor with his eyes open.
I shut them with the speed of the guilty.
When I risked it again she was back in the light, posing, and if she’d seen me she had decided, generously or otherwise, to keep it.
“Oh good, you’re up,” she said, to the room. “How’s the floor?”
“Firm. Committed.”
“Mm.” She scrolled through fifty of herself without looking at me. “Breakfast.”
Breakfast was on a long terrace over the water, and everything was a bowl. My mother had decided, somewhere between the underwear and the door, that nothing whatsoever had happened last night, and that the way to prove it was to be the most affectionate woman on the island.
She threaded her arm through mine in the buffet line.
She put things in my bowl, little spoonfuls, like a bird provisioning.
She said babe four times before I’d found us seats, each one pitched to carry.
When a couple from the naming smiled at us across the long table she leaned her head on my shoulder and left it there, warm through my shirt, and I sat with my spoon in the air like a man being burgled.
I had stopped calling her anything at all. Every sentence I aimed at her now was engineered to need no name. It’s a harder way to talk than you’d think.
“Babe,” she said. “You have to try the green one.”
“I have a green one.”
“Try mine.”
She held her spoon to my mouth, and her eyes dared me, and three other couples were watching us be us, and I ate from my mother’s spoon while she wiped a fleck from my jaw with her thumb, proving to everyone how fine we were.
The thumb stayed half a second past done.
The tension that was supposed to be getting proven away climbed a ladder and pulled it up after itself.
A seafoam card sat propped against the fruit bowl with our names on it. Solena & Squid. Tide Table at midmorning. Tide-Gazing before noon.
“Pleasant tides!” said Coral, materializing over my left shoulder the way she did.
She had the off-white on again, pressed and spotless at eight in the morning, and the dewy, bottomless rest of a woman who has never once lain awake asking the ceiling questions.
Younger than me, which I kept having to re-realize.
Twenty-five at the outside, braid over one shoulder, teeth like a row of good news, smelling of sunscreen and certainty, running our days like she’d been issued them at birth.
She beamed down at the card like it was a birth announcement. “Oh, you two got the Reader. People wait seasons for the Reader.”
“What does she read,” I said.
“Everything, Squid.” She squeezed my shoulder and was gone, and my mother mouthed the Reader at me with her eyes enormous, already sold.
The walk up was the kind of thing brochures lie about, except nothing here seemed to be lying.
The path climbed through terraced gardens with actual food growing in them, beans on strings, fat tomatoes, a wheelbarrow with one rusted lip, and the morning had that washed island warmth where the breeze keeps editing the heat before it can mean anything.
Nets dried over a stone wall. Somewhere a goat said something rude.
None of it was for us, was the feeling. The island just went about its business being beautiful, the way it must have for a thousand years, and my mother walked through it glowing like she’d been admitted somewhere.
It made me feel strange, and I couldn’t have told you why. The best I can put it is a thing film school left me with, which is that real places never look this much like themselves. I filed it with the other things I wasn’t looking at closely and kept climbing.
The Reader worked out of a low stone hut up the hill, dark after all that sun, smelling of wax and brine. She was old in the way driftwood is old, polished down to grain, and she sat behind a table of charts weighted with shells and did not greet us so much as permit us.
She took my mother’s hands and turned them over like pages.
“You came a long way to be seen,” she said.
My mother laughed, the social one. “I came for the retreat, actually.”
“Mm.” The Reader pressed a thumb into her palm like she was checking fruit. “You spend yourself on people you will never meet.”
“I share things. It’s my work. I have a community.”
“Every day you pour out. Every day they drink. And every day you wake up empty and call it a career.”
My mother stopped laughing. “It’s a job. Every job has days.”
“How many of the days?”
A silence I had never heard from her before.
“Most of them,” she said.
The Reader traced something on the chart with one knuckle. “Most people would crumble under it. The responsibility of earning love from so many. It eats the ones who weren’t built for it.”
“And me?” my mother said. It came out small.
She looked up. “You were built for it. It’s all over your water.”
My mother made a sound like she’d been hit somewhere soft.
I sat there doing the math on it, because somebody had to.
You could pour that reading over anyone with a phone.
You spend yourself on people you’ll never meet described every cashier alive.
But the old woman had aimed it like she’d read the comments, like she’d seen the folder of deleted ones, and my mother’s eyes were standing full of water she was too proud to blink loose, and the worst part of watching a cold reading land on someone you love is the part where it’s also true.
The chart came rolled, tied with seafoam ribbon. A gift, the Reader said. There was a small card tucked into the ribbon about stewardship being welcome, and the suggested stewardship had a comma in it.
Then the old woman looked at me.
“Hands.”
“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m with her.”
She kept her palms open on the table with the patience of something geological, and I heard myself sigh, and I gave her my hands like a man surrendering luggage at customs.
She turned them over and frowned at them a while.
“You don’t pour,” she said.
“Sorry?”
“Hers goes out and out, to everyone.” She pressed a thumb into the middle of my palm, hard, like she was pinning something down.
“Yours doesn’t go anywhere. Stopped in the middle.
A man mid-stride with one foot in the air.
You have been holding that step a long time.
It’s tiring, holding a step nobody will let you finish. ”
I had a joke ready. It didn’t come.
“And you look at one thing every day,” she said, “and tell yourself it’s something else.”
The hut was very quiet. My heart was doing something I declined to name, in keeping with my policy.
I took my hands back, or started to. She held on one second longer, reading me like fine print.
“Hm,” she said.
“What does hm mean?” I said, and hated how fast I said it.
“It means hm,” said the Reader, and let me go.
We had an hour to kill before the next thing on the card, and the island provided, the way it kept doing.
Below the hut a wooden deck hung out over the water with a row of low loungers and a pitcher of something cold with cucumber in it, and we took two, and for a while nobody performed anything.
It was warm. The water threw light around.
My back forgave me one vertebra at a time.
My mother unrolled her chart against her knees like a girl with a magazine quiz.