The Living, The Dead, and Those at Sea by Cary Holladay
There are three groups of people—the living, the dead, and those at sea.
-attributed to Anacharsis, c. 6th century B.C.
My landlady, Magda, was a ventriloquist. She threw her voice with eerie precision from a closet or a floor lamp or my shoulder blades. She claimed she’d been born with the gift, a goddess with many tongues, yet still she needed to practice for the children’s parties and magic shows which, along with my rent, provided her income. She could make a cake talk or a balloon fart. Because of a harsh grin that distorted her face when she was excited, I expected her to be involved in something dreadful: a birthday child to disappear and be found demised. I imagined Magda running across a room and throwing herself out a third-story window.
During the time I lived at her house, I was nineteen and married, but possibly, probably, a widow. My twenty-year-old husband, Andrew, had set out on a solo voyage. I’d had no word from him, and his boat had been found deserted and drifting. Two weeks before his departure, we’d been married at a courthouse, to his wealthy parents’ displeasure. Andrew had found us the room at Magda’s. My parents had died, but thanks to Magda and my friend Valerie, an art student, I didn’t feel alone. I had a job at a bakery, making and selling the birthday cakes for the children’s parties where Magda entertained.
“So we wait,” Magda said. “Together we wait for your man to come home.”
One day she said, “They need somebody to serve the drinks. Come on.”
I thought she meant I’d offer hot chocolate or root beer to kids, but as it turned out, this party was for grownups, and it was held at my in-laws’ house. Magda made men’s crotches talk and women’s breasts tell jokes, her voice by turns screechy, as if she’d inhaled helium, or deep, as I imagined Neptune’s would be. Glittering guests thronged the hallways, bankers and businessmen and the owners of fancy restaurants where tourists ate. They asked for gin rickeys and brandy alexanders. My father-in-law, Kurt, popped up beside the bar where I was chopping limes, Kurt with his baleful, brooding eyes.
“You,” he said.
There was no more way to talk to him than to a woodchuck.
Magda worked the crowd to a pitch, her voice bouncing off the walls where portraits hung in gilt frames. She spoke from sculptures and fireplaces. I kept pouring drinks. Kurt jostled my elbow like a shark bumping a raft.
“I’m sorry,” Magda said when we got home, at dawn. She shook and moaned, as if being torn apart inside. “Sorry about all of that. I have the feeling I’m you when you’re older.”
“It’s all right.” I hugged her. She felt as soft as a punched pillow, the voices inside like clumps of stuffing.
The sun rose over the harbor. There was no time to sleep before I ran down the street to mix flour and butter and chocolate at the bakery. I didn’t know how there could be so much sugar, sacks upon sacks in the storage room. Little bottles of extracts were lined up on a shelf, vanilla, almond, lemon, and coconut. I still see them, in my dreams, and the oven as big as a cave. Always there was the temptation to climb inside and let it snap shut on thoughts of breakfast wraps and the beloved maritime standard of gingerbread with blueberry sauce. I felt crazy, because maybe Andrew was starving and desperate out in the ocean or on some rocky island. Every morning, I put on a clean apron and sold crullers and strudel and listened for the ping of the timer.
***
“Long ago,” Magda said, “women went to sea and men stayed home. Girls grew up on schooners and battleships, ten-year-olds with crows’ feet and skin as hard as sails”— Magda herself, I inferred, hauling nets and seines. “These modern kids,” she said. “No guts. They should be made to pick oakum. It sounds easy, but it’ll make your fingers bleed. You stuff it in the cracks of a ship and pour pitch, and it makes a seal.”
This is all written down in a journal I kept back then. When winter came, there were heavy snows. Snow … snow … snow, my diary says, and it seems to me that diaries are ventriloquists, younger selves popping out to say how it was. And doesn’t ventriloquism have many forms? Monologuists, hogging a conversation, cutting you off if you so much as gather breath to speak: if they could, they’d say your replies too, the uh-huhs and oh my’s you’re bludgeoned into. And what of comebacks you think of, too late? That is ventriloquism, though a rejoinder may be separated by years from an insult.
Magda was crude: the bathroom was the shitter. The coals of her resentment were easily stirred by the usual things—hatred of the rich, and a grudging admiration that extended to their offspring. Here, my little one, holding out a beribboned package from which a jack-in-the-box sprang out, gibbering. She never worked without a contract drawn up by a lawyer whose office overlooked green waves that crushed boulders to powder.
***
Room to Let, her sign had said. Those were the last days of the old times, when boarders and lodgers abounded: traveling salesmen, laborers, surveyors, and lumbermen on the move like migratory birds, legions of earthbound sailors.
In her youth, Magda had worked as a census taker. Among the boarders she noted were millworkers age twelve and thirteen, girls deafened by looms and sending their money home; schoolmarms; an occasional adventuress, calling herself a tourist. I pictured Magda on a doorstep, dusk falling, confronting an impatient head of household, maybe a woman with so many children she couldn’t remember how old they were. Magda would make a guess, her fingers—scarred by oakum?—raw as she twirled her pencil. A train hurtled by with a load of timber, close and loud. Magda smelled frying fish and boiling beans. Your name, please. All civilizations have done this. Cesar Augustus, in the Bible.
O lonesome bride—said a voice in my head—paint your face for other men. Room to Let. With kitchen privileges. Just clean up afterward, Magda had said.
“I was a boarder myself,” she said, drawing me toward a window and pointing at an empty house across the street. “I lived on the top floor. A nice place, but then the owners died, and now it’s falling down. It feels funny to look over at my window, like my younger self is looking back.”
“But the census,” I said, wanting more.
“Sometimes, people would invite me in, and I got to stand by a fire or a stove and get warm. At some houses, nobody answered. For months, I’d go back. People died, and I found them by the smell. I was beautiful,” she said. “I’d knock on a door, and people could hardly believe it. Like I was an angel. Sometimes they’d have a baby they hadn’t named, and they’d ask me to think up a name. I loved that.”
She was combing my hair and braiding it, her fingers tugging and flying.
“Your man’s gone and left you no money,” she said, “and his parents won’t give you anything. It happens. There.”
The braid was finished, hanging down my back.
“I still have the key to my room across the street,” she said. She took it out of her pocket, a filigreed key on a piece of wire. “You’re already me,” she said.
“What did you name the census babies?” I said.
“Henry! Always Henry, for boys. It’s the only name a boy or man will ever need. For girls, the fanciest I could think of. Maribelle, Suzette, and Jacinda, for my mother.”
“How old are they now? Do you see them?”
“I don’t think they’re here anymore. Things happened.”
“Do you have children?” I said, amazed I’d never thought to ask.
“You,” she said.
Which scared me.
***
By the time Andrew was sixteen, he’d told me, he owned every style of tux. Shawl collars were best because they never went out of style. His parents had given him his sailboat. He didn’t want me along on his adventure. By himself, he would visit ports, hike through jungles, climb mountains. His parents offered money for his travels.
But I turned it down, he said. I’ll live off fish I catch. On land, I’ll work for food.
Doing what? I said.
Paint myself gold and be a statue, he said. People go nuts over human statues. I’ll go to a town square, hold a pose and not even blink, and money’ll pile up at my feet. I’ll write you, he said. When I’m back, it’ll be your turn. You can take the boat and go anywhere you want.
Alone on the ocean? I said. Why would I want to do that?
Start with rivers, he said.
He took me to see the boat, a creation of teak, titanium, computers. He led me into the handsome cabin and down a set of steps to the very bottom. On the floor was a viewing pane as big as a king-sized mattress, the thick glass absolutely clear. Andrew flicked a switch. Luminous beams angled into the murk. Eels writhed and flashed like knives.
Let’s go for a sail, I said, but he said no, he’d spotted a rat on board, and he didn’t want to go out until he’d gotten rid of it. Brand new, he said, and already Rattus Rattus.
When his boat was found, empty, the Coast Guard notified his parents. His mother told me when she ran into me at the grocery store. Then she picked out a bag of oranges and sped away, her slingback heels snapping.
Thirty years later, I think the produce aisle was as good a place as any for her to have delivered her news. I registered the smell of grapefruit and cranberries, the oranges she grabbed like a looter. I ran after her, shouting, knocking into plates of cheese samples, but she eluded me, swirling through the store like a bug flushed down a toilet.
***
“One day,” Magda said, “you’ll find me on my back with my feet sticking up in the air. A dead bird.”
***
“Oh, we should do that!” my friend Valerie said when I told her about Andrew’s plan to be a golden statue. “I can’t believe we haven’t thought of it. I’ll get the paint.”
I was elated to have an artist for a friend. Valerie could take scrap metal and dry leaves and make a sculpture better than the ones in galleries. She lived at home with her parents and a little brother, Ben, who was as lively as a squirrel. When I went to their house, he shadowed us. She adored him.
“I want to be a statue, too,” Ben said.
Valerie hugged him. “When you’re older, I promise,” she said. “But we have to figure something out,” she said to me. “Two statues is the wrong number. It’s like, never use just two of the same kind of flower in a vase. It’s like having two eyeballs looking at you. Use one or some other odd number.” She thought a moment. “Would your cool landlady be interested?”
An hour later, the three of us stood at Magda’s mirror, holding cans of gold spray paint.
“Me first,” Magda said and stripped off her clothes. Her skin hung in long folds. “I’m melted.”
“Close your eyes,” I said.
Valerie and I shook the cans until the metal balls rattled. As we sprayed, the room filled with fumes. I opened windows. The cans emptied fast, none left for Valerie and me.
Magda’s hair was golden agony. She raised her arms. “You missed my pits.”
“We didn’t think this through,” I said. “You can’t go out in public naked.”
“She won’t be,” Valerie said.
Valerie went out in the yard, in the snow, and came back with clippings from the hedge. She lashed them to a shawl of Magda’s and draped it over her. Magda beamed, turning around and looking over her shoulder. Valerie drove us to the harbor, where tourists were gulping lobster rolls in glassed-in patios. The manager objected and marched us out. We stood on the marina wondering what to do. Snow fell on our hair and on the yachts and catamarans in the slips. I recognized Andrew’s boat, refurbished, new canvas stretched over its decks.
“Unlucky ship,” Magda said. “Don’t ever go out on it.”
“I’ve got a bad feeling,” Valerie burst out. “I need to get home. Right now!”
We bumbled into her car and careened back to her house. An icicle had fallen off the roof and buried its lethal spike in Ben’s head.
***
When I was a child, my father entertained me with stories about two mice. He made them up and named them Buffalo and Bill. They had adventures, and at the end something awful would happen, and they’d die. For the next story, my father resurrected them. Life started all over for Buffalo and Bill. They were alive; they were there in my father’s dancing eyes and gesturing hands. They ran under a fence. A fox gave chase and gobbled them up. I laughed and cried. It meant there’d be another story.
***
“People got flustered,” Magda said. “Name, age, place of birth, occupation, others in the household. They had to stop and think.”
“Another census is coming up,” I said, thinking I would like the surprise of seeing who answered my knock: what better way to enter so many lives?
“Everything is different now,” Magda said. “Back then, all the news was down at the docks. You’d have been down there begging for word.”
I felt accused. “I’ve called the Coast Guard so many times.”
“You have to wait seven years to have him declared.” She tilted her head as if recalling something. “Sometimes a man was lonely, and I . . .The job didn’t pay much, and I . . .”
“I understand.”
“No, dear heart, you don’t,” she said.
***
In grief, Valerie became beautiful, developing a glow I have since observed in others who are bereaved, her skin like moonlight. Lissome and somber, she sat at a tiny table in the bakery, eating misshapen muffins I gave her for free. Police came in for doughnuts and coffee, and men bought bear’s claws for their wives, and they fell in love with her. One by one, reporters and sympathizers shared her table. Sunlight streamed in and fired her hair. The icicle—the icicle—everybody wanted to know about the celestial spear that had dispatched Ben, one icicle among the many hanging thick and daggerlike, monster teeth on the edge of her family’s roof, a squat house full of shouts and trouble. Valerie opened up. She talked about Ben’s skill with kites, his delight in birds and animals and the woods, but she wouldn’t talk about the icicle, though she’d been the one who found him, and she didn’t tell them about being down at the marina and knowing something was wrong. She kept that a secret. Only Magda and I knew how she’d left the docks, frantic and prescient . . . I eavesdropped, thinking what I could tell her enthusiasts; with a few words, I could take over the story … The more she held back, the more ardently her suitors courted her. Reporters took down every word she said. As soon as they left, they played their tapes. I heard Valerie’s recorded voice as I dumped coffee grounds out back, her faltering tones growing into song. Journalists pressed buttons and unleashed Valerie’s voice in an alley where cats twined among the shadows, and out on the sidewalks where the world blustered on. Archived, Valerie’s voice caroled from trees and streetlights; a sentence she started in a trash bin was finished in the sky. I felt I would never get away from ventriloquism, and the story, I realized, the story that people were caught up in, the story was changing from the death of a child into something I didn’t understand, but Valerie’s beauty was part of it, the light in her eyes like January clouds. I watched a reporter sweep crumbs from Valerie’s table into his hand and slip them into his pocket, and still he was unaware of the thing I thought was most important—that somehow she’d known—but the men, sensing a marvel, were caught by Valerie herself.
“Talk to her,” Valerie told her admirers as I poured their coffee. “Talk to my friend here. Her husband is missing, lost at sea. Get the word out.”
“Don’t!” I said, when Valerie and I were alone for a moment. “You’re only making it worse.”
***
“You’re jealous,” Magda said. “So what if she collects a few hearts? I tell you that girl’s a saint. You want some attention?” Magda grabbed a sofa cushion and threw it at me. “Stick this under your clothes and go tell Andrew’s parents, ‘Pay up or you’ll never see your grandchild.’”
“There’s no baby. I wish there was.”
“Valerie’s brother died. You may only have been jilted.”
She was laughing, showing her teeth. I felt like a plane with a bomb strapped on, tilting my wings at her.
“You old whore,” I said.
The mirth sagged out of her face. “All right,” she said. “The census job didn’t pay enough to live on. Men had money.”
“I didn’t mean it.” I reached for her hand, but she batted me away.
“You were my favorite person,” she said, tears spurting from her eyes. “Ever since you moved in, my favorite person. I’d have left you my house. I’d have left you everything.”
“It was a horrible thing to say. I’m sorry.”
“Sure you are. Now you won’t get it.”
***
I hadn’t given up. Andrew might have been rescued by another ship. He might be in Copenhagen or Naples or a Pacific archipelago, among people who were now his friends. One night I went to the marina, peeled the canvas from the deck of his boat, and sat there watching the stars come out. Sailing’s easier than driving, he used to say. He had the type of car with doors that opened like wings. He could spend as much as he wanted, as long as he made notations in his checkbook so his seagull-eyed mother would know what it was for. This vessel should be mine, I thought. Take it out and look for a faraway sparkle, a golden statue on a torrid street.
***
With one reporter or another, Valerie would leave the bakery—a flame with one of her moths. Slowly, Valerie and a man would push back their chairs and rise, and the bell above the door tinkled as they stepped out on the sidewalk, where dreams lived, each jangle fanning the soreness in my heart. Her grief was perfect and unmatched, a warrior’s torch. Baleful Kurt showed up: even he could not resist. Radiant, straight-mouthed, she sat opposite him, their coffee cups smoking like a sacrifice, and I was scared for her.
“Don’t,” I whispered in her ear as I leaned down to serve the pavlova I’d learned to make, a dazzling pavlova with layers of meringue and whipped cream and fruit, cherries and kiwi and strawberries, cream and more cream, a cumulonimbus of sugar and cream.
I took a dish of pavlova home to Magda, but she had not forgiven me.
“Go,” she said, and handed me the key to the house where she used to live.
I carried my things across the street and went inside. The house was cold and still. Strips of paper unfurled from the walls, a pattern of dancers in tricorn hats and twirling skirts, the image repeated from ceiling to floor in an ever-descending minuet. Upstairs, I found an iron bed Magda might have slept in, clothed in thin sheets. I rubbed dust from a windowpane. Down the street, Valerie and Kurt left the bakery and glided toward the docks, his step bold and hers anything but lightsome. They reached the water, their figures the size of the wallpaper dancers, yet I saw them clearly as he led her to Andrew’s boat.
Kurt stepped aboard with Valerie’s hand in his. I knew he would show her the teakwood decks, the sails made in Portugal, the navigation system like a brain, the shining kitchen where they could brew espresso mid-ocean. Kurt swung a rope away from a piling, and the boat trembled. An inch of silver water opened between its hull and the dock. Go to hull! a voice said from the corner of my room, laughing—Magda’s voice. The boat slid out to sea as if sheathed in glass, free and puttering through harbor traffic, weaving past the reliable tugs and trawlers, and now suddenly quite far away and chopping up a wake I followed with my telescoping eye.
By now they’d be laughing, Kurt would have taken Valerie in his arms, she’d call him my chief petty officer, but the wind was getting colder, the boat was plunging out to the open sea, and soon she wouldn’t know where she was.
You’ll never see them again, said the voice in my head. Andrew is gone, and you will only ever be a bakery girl. Lick sugar from your palm and pretend it’s a lover’s kiss. You’re already old. Pinch the skin on the back of your hand. See how it sticks?
By now, Valerie and Kurt were down in the lowest chamber of the boat, crouching naked at the viewing pane, inches of glass separating them from the deeps. Kurt switched on the underwater lights, and the ocean glowed like an art gallery. Octopi shimmied past, tentacles churning, with the smartest eyes Valerie had ever seen, in big blobby heads. Creatures she didn’t recognize fanned out their fins and rays. Her skin prickled.
What—what are they? she asked.
Kurt didn’t answer, just nuzzled her neck and palmed her breasts. She shivered, her head spinning from martinis. Shouldn’t they go topside, so he could steer? She smelled something burning—their steaks, up on the grill. Beneath the glass, something gaped open, a brilliant yawning blood-red throat as big as a subway entrance and crammed with teeth. The mouth snapped shut. Valerie scrambled out of Kurt’s arms. Laughing, he stepped out on the glass, lay down, and pressed his whole naked billionaire’s body against it, splayed out and sprawling, his arms showing tan lines, his back a little flabby.
Don’t! she said.
The boat lurched, there was a cracking sound, and Kurt sat up, rubbing his head. The glass glistened. Valerie reached out and touched it. It was wet and seeping. She watched in fascination as a puddle welled beside Kurt’s snowy ass.
Get up, she said, backing away. Plug it, quick!
The glass fell away like broken ice, turning end over end. Seawater surged up in its place, gurgling, overflowing the pit. Kurt hollered and flailed, on his back and helplessly surfing the flood. Valerie ran to where she thought the stairs were, but the rushing ocean knocked her down and choked her screams.
Cary Holladay’s most recent volume of fiction is Brides in the Sky: Stories and a Novella (Swallow Press / Ohio UP). Her awards include an O. Henry Prize and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts.
10 May 2024
Leave a Reply