PART III – THE STABLES
The Water Is So Wide
Before we moved up north, my memories of summers past were mid-Atlantic: sugared candied orange and lime, and ice pop grape; softly rounded and coconut lotion-infused. We bought our roasted nuts in white paper bags; we stained our sneakers a winey burgundy from picking mulberries in the lane. Now once again up north, out on the porch this bright New England summer morning, it was all saline breezes and kelpy stench. As usually happens when you’re unmoored from your foundation and set adrift, sensations are heightened and become prophetic. Jay was back from Europe and we were spending a long weekend at my mother’s summer rental on the Connecticut coast. You could travel the extremes of atmosphere simply by opening the screen door and sticking your head back in the cool restfulness of the shadowed house, the smell of browned butter from the earlier pancakes—eaten with cherry jam and powdered sugar while still half-naked from just getting out of bed—permeating the premises. Outside, the sand and salt would scrub you raw.
“Want more coffee? We should start thinking about heading out.”
“Sure," Jay said, staring out to sea.
I reflected on the maleness of him sitting there: the foot up on the railing, flat and broad, so different from the curvy arch and polished seashell toes of mine; the bare chest, the folds and gap of his boxers. The pistons pumping, driving to succeed or crash. I was chagrined at having gotten used to the proximity of it after being so long unaccustomed only to lose it again. This was the furthest point we would go in our relationship. Now we would turn and go our separate ways.
Why had we come together yet again, this time, I wondered. How many women had he casually had by now, as his fame grew? How many models/actresses, by definition the seemingly inevitable choice to showcase achievement; beauties who floated like oil above the mere waters of ordinary womanhood. But my irritation was not with them, or Jay, only with myself. The gap in question here was not quantitative. He had taken the wheel of his race car, driving through reality with relish. Charmingly so, and a tad recklessly, perhaps? Yes, certainly. I was still play acting in my uncle’s barn. The strangeness I felt with him was a measure of the distance between us in strength of will.
Did we have all the time left in the world? Were we still talking about forever, I thought as I squinted out at the water, the wind from the Sound whipping my hair about my face. So many pirates, pilgrims had left these local ports seeking profit or redemption. There were always ships at sea, some vessel to be spied on the horizon. I felt unable to move on dry land. I was eager to set sail.
* * *
Back in New York, I found a box of old stuff my mother had set aside in anticipation of my eventual departure. It contained the usual assortment of memorabilia: concert tickets and baseball game stubs, a playbill from my high school production of Camelot—my role as “Second Lady-in-Waiting” duly noted. Another thing in there was an old datebook, and as I flipped through the pages, I stopped on September 18. “Aunt Jean” was inked diagonally across the page. Her birthday. Images of my aunt, reserved and meticulous, sent me into a reverie. Her practicality would cut through the sloppy thinking that shrouded and thickened my mind. A clue might be provided, perhaps a key. 'That’s what I need,’ I said to myself, ‘more Aunt Jean and less Uncle Henry.’ I hunted around for pen and paper and sat down to write to her.
My aunt, Jean Ronnell, was a nurse with Medicine Nonsectarian, part of the International Refugee Council, and had spent the better part of the last five years in the Balkans. The family worried about her, but she seemed to be okay. Mom got a letter from her about a year ago, and I was always afraid that one day we would . . . get another.
I wrote asking for advice, and surprisingly, we struck up a long-distance correspondence, as much as was possible with someone a world away, in more ways than one. A stealth campaign was mounted to bypass Mom and coordinate with Aunt Jean. There was work to do if I was serious, otherwise I was not to waste her time. Mom caught wind of the shift in loyalties, and chided me every time I went to the Post Office.
“You always go overboard on things. You’re more comfortable with these do-gooders than with people actually good at what they do. You string along Jay . . ."
“I don’t string along Jay.”
She waved her hand back and forth dismissively in front of her face as if brushing away an insect. “Don’t tax me, hon.”
Months passed, and just after I had given up hope and was beginning to take these jabs to heart, endurance all but gone, an aerogramme arrived from Croatia from my aunt with the name of a small organization that was working there, in the city of Split, ostensibly with the UN humanitarian relief mission in loose association with Medicine Nonsectarian. Its mission was to find and rescue the herd of Lipizzaner horses that had been seized from the Lipik stables up north after that stud farm was burnt down by a grenade attack at the beginning of the armed conflict following the breakup of Yugoslavia. She could not meet me, but could make the necessary referrals, and could arrange to have someone pick me up at the Zagreb airport and take me to where I needed to go. She said to think long and hard about this; although there were numerous organizations and press on the ground, it was dangerous—she knew of at least one fatal shooting of an aid worker. Once there, returning was not an easy given, and this was not a solution to boredom or an alternative to shopping. She couldn’t stop herself from including that dig. Must be in the DNA.
This didn’t go over well with Mom.
“Horses! Now it’s horses?” My sister loves this. She loves it!” We were standing in the dining room of our apartment, and I was trying, making a stab at, explaining my intentions. Mom threw up her hands at me. “She eggs you on.”
“No she doesn’t.”
“Like hell she doesn’t. Your stupid shelter cats and dogs, and now horses . . . it’s like the Bremen musicians! You just need the chicken!”
Rooster, Mom. It was a rooster. And a donkey. I had to get out. At one time, my mother surely was capable of higher feeling, and, truth be told, I could sense concern for my welfare within this current outburst, so perhaps my mother did have vestigial grace somewhere in her soul.
After she left the room, I turned around one of the dining chairs so it faced the window, and sank down on it. The light in the room was vacant and still, that horrible anxious hour of 3PM. I refolded my aunt’s letter and sat with my head down in silence, slapping the flimsy paper again and again against my palm, making a vow to myself to set full sail ahead even if I had to power the sails with my own breath.
Image: Aerogramme. Source: Photograph by J. Weigley