Chapter 4 — Tide-Gazing.17 #2
“’Your channel runs spring,’” she read. “’A giver’s current, moon-led, drawn to open water.’”
“It says that about everyone.”
“It cannot say that about everyone, it’s drawn from my water.”
“It’s a horoscope with a ribbon.”
“’Those near you anchor in your wake,’” she read on, louder, over me. “’Guard against the neap.’ What’s a neap?”
“It’s a real tide. It’s the one where nothing happens.”
“Oh my God.” She lowered the chart and looked at me with delight breaking all over her face. “That’s you. You’re the neap.”
“I’m not the neap.”
“’Guard against the neap,’” she said, tapping the paper. “It’s literally in writing.”
I let her have it, because her laugh had come all the way back.
The Mom laugh, the foghorn, the one the kitchen used to be full of.
She rolled the chart up and held it to her chest and watched the water, and the laugh settled into something quieter that I didn’t poke at.
Most of them, she’d said in the hut, like a stone dropped down a well. I was still listening to it land.
“Thank you for coming,” she said, to the horizon. “I know you didn’t want to.”
“The food’s free.”
“Mm.” She nudged my lounger with her foot. “Anyway, she pegged you. One foot in the air. That’s so you it’s insulting.”
“I’m very restful.”
“And the other thing.” She turned her head against the lounger, grinning, sun all over her. “What is it you look at every day, Sean?”
I looked at the water and did not look at anything else.
“Pleasant tides!” Coral, materializing at the foot of the deck with a clipboard she didn’t need. “It’s time, you two. The pavilion likes you early.”
The question stayed where she’d left it, which was in the air.
Tide-Gazing happened in an open pavilion before noon, six couples on flat cushions, and Coral at the front in her off-white, glowing like the concept of morning.
“Knees together,” she said. “Yours to yours. Hands on your own thighs. We don’t touch in this practice.
We look.” She beamed around the pavilion.
“Nobody looks anymore. We glance. We check. But the tide doesn’t check.
Find your partner’s eyes and stay. You don’t have to do anything. The looking does it.”
My mother arranged herself opposite me and smoothed her skirt. I sat down across from her and left a careful inch between our knees, because some part of me had already done the math on that inch without being asked.
“Closer, Squid,” Coral said, passing behind me. “Knees.”
I closed the inch.
I want to be clear about my position going in, which was that this was the silliest thing I had ever been formally instructed to do, and I had filled out the questionnaire.
You don’t stare at a person for twenty minutes.
There’s nowhere to put it. I didn’t know what to do with my face, or my hands, which had become enormous, and my mother was wearing her camera face, bright and shallow and fully armored, and I thought, fine.
I had survived her spoon. I could survive her face.
Her knees were warm. I noticed it the way you notice a dripping tap, once and then constantly.
Two small points of contact, kneecap to kneecap through a summer skirt, and within a minute they were the loudest thing in the pavilion, a low steady heat with a pulse in it somewhere, hers or mine, and every other part of me had been instructed to ignore it and was not succeeding.
Nobody looks at anybody. That’s the thing I learned in that pavilion.
Eye contact in the world is rationed in half-seconds, and there’s a reason, and the reason is that past the ration something starts to pour.
I knew her face better than any face on earth.
I had aimed light at it most mornings for a year.
I could have drawn it. And four minutes into looking at it I understood I had never once actually looked, because the looking was doing something the knowing never had, loosening a thread low in my chest and pulling it out of me hand over hand.
“Breathe together,” Coral said somewhere, faraway, serene. “If something rises, let it rise. It’s just the tide coming in.”
Something rose.
I want to address this carefully, because it has no place in the record.
A man sits knee to knee with his mother in a sunlit pavilion, two minutes into a breathing exercise, and something rises, and the something is not the tide.
I declined it. I declined it at every level available to me.
My cock was not a fact. I unfactualized it.
It existed the way a noise downstairs exists at three in the morning, acknowledged by no one, investigated by no one, survived by lying very still.
I breathed, as instructed, and thought about the ferry schedule, about the realtor Phil, about the cold side of a pillow, anything on earth without a pulse in it.
The tide could mind its own business.
The camera face lasted six minutes. I watched it go.
It went the way it went in the kitchen when she thought no one was filming, the brightness shutting off from the inside, and then it was just Deb looking at me, my mother, and her eyes weren’t shallow at all.
They were dark, and they kept getting darker.
Her breath had synced itself to mine without either of us deciding, and then it shortened, and mine followed it down, and a flush was climbing out of the neck of her dress and up her throat, slow, like dawn doing something it shouldn’t.
Her knees pressed half a degree harder into mine, or mine into hers, nobody confessed.
My eyes dropped. I had kept them where they belonged for fifteen minutes and then I just looked, the way I had been not-looking for two days.
Her mouth. The line of her throat and the flush going down it, into the neckline of the dress.
Her breasts rose and fell with her breathing, faster now, and I knew what was under the cotton, I had known since this morning, the color of one nipple through sheer black lace, and knowing it did nothing helpful.
I wanted my hands where my eyes were. The thought arrived whole, in plain language, and for one full second I did not manage to be ashamed of it.
My cock was a fact now. It had won its appeal.
When I looked back up, she was watching me do it.
She had seen all of it, the mouth, the throat, the slow trip down, and she didn’t call it and she didn’t laugh, and her lips had come apart a little, and that was somehow the most explicit thing in the pavilion.
Having been caught, I did not look away.
Neither did she. Whatever this was, we were both doing it.
I don’t know what my face did. I know hers answered it.
“And seal it,” Coral said.
Around us, five couples leaned in and kissed like it was nothing, like it was a stretch at the end of a workout.
We had a cover to keep. That’s the sentence I have.
We leaned in, both of us, on the count nobody counted, and my mother kissed me, or I kissed her, the grammar has never been settled, and it was supposed to be the airport kind and it was not the airport kind.
It was warm and certain and it lasted one beat past the end of every other kiss in that pavilion, one entire beat, and neither of us was the one who pulled away first because there is no first when it finally happens at the same time.
She made a small sound. I have decided, for my own protection, not to describe it.
“Beautiful,” Coral said to the room, to all of us, to nobody. “The tide sees you.”
We walked out into the noon glare four feet apart.
“Lunch?” said my mother, to the horizon.
“Lunch,” I said, to a different part of it.
Neither of us mentioned it. We were getting very good at that.