Chapter 6 — Downward Tide29
@solena.rising
“Woke up slow today. No alarm, no agenda, just water sounds and a warmth I didn’t want to leave yet. I used to think rest was something you earn. It’s something you allow, loves. So I’m allowing it. I’m letting this place hold me a little longer. More soon.”
I woke up warm, and this time I didn’t move.
We had traveled again in the night, both of us, the pillows gone south, the wall a rumor, and I came up out of sleep by degrees into the geography of it.
Her back against my chest. My arm under hers.
My hand flat on her stomach where her shirt had ridden up, skin on skin, palm rising and falling with her, and I had no memory of putting it there and no plan for taking it back.
I should have moved. The previous morning I had moved, eventually, heroically, and spent the whole day being congratulated by nobody for it.
This morning my body declined to file the paperwork.
She was warm. She fit. I was hard against her and lying very still about it, and the room got slowly lighter while I did the one thing I have ever reliably done, which was nothing, mid-stride, one foot in the air.
And she didn’t move either.
That’s the part I kept turning over while I didn’t move.
Asleep people breathe like tide, long and even and unsupervised.
Hers had an edge to it. A too-evenness. The sound of someone doing breathing rather than having it, with a small held catch at the top of every third or fourth inhale, like a word getting swallowed before it could spend itself.
Her hand lay over my knuckles where they rested on her bare stomach.
At some point it tightened, very slightly, possibly in sleep.
Possibly.
We lay like that for a long time, neither of us moving, both of us pretending to be furniture, the whole bed humming like a struck glass, and I honestly could not tell you how it would have ended, because what ended it was the door.
Three bright knocks. “Pleasant tides! Saltflow at ten, new pairs!”
We came apart like a fire drill. I have never seen two people exit an embrace at that speed without an air bag involved. She was in the bathroom with the water running before my feet hit the floor, and her “morning!” through the door was pitched for an audience of forty.
Neither of us said anything about it. We were, by now, professionals.
Breakfast was very polite.
“Could you pass the honey,” my mother said.
“Of course. Anything else?”
“Not at this time.”
“Wonderful.”
We sat side by side passing things with the courtesy of rival diplomats at a signing, and the older couple across the table watched us with their hands knotted together and their eyes damp.
“Twenty years married,” the woman said to her husband, fondly, nodding at us, “and you’d think they met yesterday.”
“Ha,” I said.
The table could not stop talking about the Sitting.
Whitecap had heard you weep all the way through it.
Pearl had heard there was no talking allowed, ever, at any point, and seemed to be planning her survival around that.
The older woman pressed her hand to her chest and said it would live in us forever.
“But what is it?” I said. “What happens? Mechanically?”
“You’ll feel it,” said Whitecap, misty already.
“That’s not a mechanism.”
“You’ll feel it,” said Pearl, with the hollow conviction of a hostage.
Don sat down across from us with his bowl, watched the honey go up and down the table twice, and stirred.
“You two are being incredibly polite this morning,” he said. “It’s upsetting.”
“We’re fine,” I said.
“Mm.” He ate for a while.
Then, without looking up, conversational as weather, “What did you do, fake being a couple to get in?”
The honey stopped. Somewhere a fork sang against a bowl. My mother’s smile stayed exactly where it was, nailed up, load-bearing, and I leaned across the table with my heart in my ears.
“Don.”
He looked at me, pleasant as a Sunday, and drew two fingers across his lips, sealing them. Then he went back to his bowl.
“Relax,” he said. “I’ve got my own ulterior motive.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means I’m having a lovely retreat,” said Don, and ate his breakfast.
After, while my mother filmed the fruit, I texted Andre, my one friend from film school, a man who answered texts whenever it eventually occurred to him.
This place is unbelievable. Call me. It went green and sat there.
Nothing came back, which was normal. Andre was weather, not a person you scheduled.
Saltflow took place where the sand met the sea, which turned out to be a poetic way of saying in it.
I want to describe the walk down honestly without losing the thread of the narrative, so I’ll be brief.
Coral led the way in athletic clothing that had clearly come out of an engineering department, white and fitted and absolutely committed to its work, and beside her went my mother in leggings and a crop top I had never seen before and would now never stop having seen.
The two of them walked ahead of me down the boardwalk talking about engagement rates, and I walked behind carrying both our towels and looking at the horizon, the boards, the gulls, a fixed succession of approved objects, while the morning’s hand lay flat on my memory the way it had lain flat on her stomach.
“Tides!” Coral arranged us in a line in the shallows, ankle deep, facing the open sea. “The studio yoga of the surface world is practiced on a floor. Floors lie to you. The sea tells the truth. We flow with the tide, and the tide corrects us.”
The tide corrected us immediately and continuously.
We began with Drifting Crane, which is tree pose for people the ocean has a grudge against. You stand on one leg, raise your arms, find your center, and then a wave arrives at your standing knee with the full authority of the moon behind it and you sit down in the Atlantic in front of your loved ones.
Whitecap went over like a felled monument.
The linen couple went down together, holding hands, devoted to the last. Coral alone stood through it, one-legged, serene, riding each surge at the knee like she’d grown there, chirping adjustments at the casualties.
“Anchored Warrior!” she called. “Sink your roots! Let it pass through you!”
“It’s passing through me,” said Don, from the water.
Low Tide Fold was worse. Low Tide Fold asks you to hinge forward and surrender your crown to the sea, which means presenting the back of your head to incoming waves on a schedule you cannot see.
The sea took attendance. I came up from my third baptism with my ears full and my dignity archived, and that was when the set wave came in, taller than its colleagues, and got everyone to the ribs, and the class changed.
Here is a fact about soaked cotton that everybody knows and nobody plans for.
It resigns. It gives up all its secrets at once and clings to what it was hired to conceal, and suddenly the line of women holding Anchored Warrior in the surf had been redrawn in wet fabric, and there was nowhere safe to land an eye in either direction.
My mother’s crop top had gone to glass. The white cotton soaked through and quit, and there were her breasts under it, plain as the morning, the cold water having made its argument about her nipples, dark and tight against the wet fabric.
Gooseflesh climbed the pale of her stomach.
A drop ran from her collarbone and took a long route down, and I followed it the whole way before I caught myself.
Forty thousand people would have lost their minds.
She’d have lost hers, if she’d known, the brand did not do nipples, the brand did soft focus and good intentions.
I should have been the one to tell her, hey, you’re showing, cover up.
That was the job. That was the decent, sexless, son-shaped thing to do.
I knew the words and I did not say them, and the not-saying sat warm and low in me and curdled into something I had no clean name for, because it was horror and it was hunger wearing the same wet shirt.
I had pointed a light at this woman every day for a year and filed her under do not look, and the sea had just deleted the file.
The other direction was no refuge. Coral’s engineered white had surrendered too, confessing things I had even less right to see.
I looked at the horizon. I looked at Whitecap, a bearded rock, the one safe coastline in the panorama.
I looked at the sea, and the sea, with the timing it had been displaying all morning, knocked me down again, which was honestly the kindest thing anything had done for me in days.
“Match the water, Squid!” Coral called, radiant, dripping, while I surfaced. “Stop fighting it!”
“I’m not fighting it.”
“You’re fighting everything!” she said, delighted, like a diagnosis, and flowed on.
Between poses I drifted up the line to Don, who stood streaming in a t-shirt gone transparent over a body that had also given up its secrets, all of them pleasant enough, none of them my business.
“The motive,” I said, under the surf. “What is it?”
“Pry harder, Squid.”
“You can’t just say a thing like that at breakfast and then eat.”
“I can,” he said, settling into Drifting Crane with surprising balance. “I’ve been practicing my whole life.”
The wave took him anyway. The sea was the only honest instructor on that beach, and it flunked us all equally, and for about half an hour, between the falling and the salt and Whitecap surfacing each time like a breaching whale with his fists up, I forgot to be anything but a man laughing in the ocean.
My mother was laughing too, flat on her back in six inches of foam, mascara gone, brand gone, the Mom laugh, the foghorn, audible over the waves.
Her crop top had given up entirely now, shoved half askew by the surf, one breast nearly free of it, and she didn’t notice or didn’t care, head back, throat working, happier than I’d seen her in a year, and the wanting and the wrongness ran together in me until I couldn’t tell them apart.
I stayed in the deeper water, where it reached my waist, and I am not going to explain why, except that the sea was hiding something for me, and I let it.
Coral watched over all of it like a shepherd, ankle deep and bone dry in spirit, the only one of us the sea hadn’t humbled.
The soaked white had gone to nothing on her.
It clung in a long unbroken line from her collarbone to her hips, the small high curve of her breasts plain through it, nipples drawn tight in the cold she didn’t seem to feel, a flat brown stomach, the dip of her navel, the twin lines of muscle running down into the waistband of leggings that had given up the same secrets the rest had.
Twenty-five years old and built like the recruitment poster, water sheeting off her, braid dark and heavy down her spine, head tipped back to the sun.
Not a goosebump on her. Smiling like the cold was a thing that happened to other people.
And if you’d taken a photograph of that minute, of her dripping and lit and certain in the surf while the rest of us drowned around her, you’d have signed whatever she put in front of you.
The class dissolved into casualties. We dripped up onto the sand, wrung out, salted, half of us bleeding dignity, the linen couple still holding hands, Pearl wearing the thousand-yard calm of a woman who had survived something.
Don stood beside me with his hands on his hips, breathing, t-shirt see-through, eyes on the sea like it owed him a statement.
Coral clapped twice, bright as struck crystal, not visibly tired, her braid still somehow architectural.
“Beautiful flow, tides! Dry off, eat light.” She beamed down the line of us, and her eyes did their sweep, and they snagged, just for a second, on me and on my mother, and her smile went up a candle. “The Sitting is at four. Pleasant tides!”