The Restitching of Time
Published: August, 2003
In my kayak, I follow the movement of shrimp boats going up the estuary against the current, the sprightly spray bouncing off their white wooden bows. There is another movement; the uplifting of tears circumnavigating my eyelids. For years these unsolicited tears have surfaced, usually when I am alone near or on the water. Is it sadness or joy? This is an ordinary morning yet I feel young again reflecting on my journey out to the Atlantic Ocean and back through Beaufort Inlet. A friend once told me, "After 50, we spend most of our time in a reclamation project. Going back, returning to life’s ruptures, finding new ways of understanding, mending, healing..."
Now it’s late afternoon, near sunset and I am remembering when I was sixteen. The music to the story "Skeleton Woman" is playing on my small CD player. The sounds of guitar, flute, and piano surround me. "Skeleton Woman" is the story of a teenage Inuit who made the mistake of falling in love with someone outside her village. Her father disapproves and he throws her off a cliff into the cold whitecapped sea. She sinks and drifts, sinks and drifts. Her flesh becomes the food for the denizens of the deep. Her flesh is eaten away as she becomes the Skeleton Woman, swept out to the ocean and brought back in by the tides. Back and forth, death dreaming life.
In my sixteenth year, on one fine fall Saturday, I drove my girlfriend, Julie Finn, to a beach on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan. She had become increasingly moody, silent, pulling away from me. I was confused. Whatever I knew of love in my sixteenth year, I had given it all to her. My basketball coach had noticed my lack of focus that winter as I broke and drove past a defending player, missing the lay-up. "You gotta give that damn Finn girl up!" he bellowed as we headed into the locker room for half-time.
Julie and I slid down the long sand dune toward the lake. As we rested at the bottom, I noticed a woman and a man in a sleeping bag, tucked into the dune, sleeping. Such freedom stunned me. I couldn’t imagine an overnight with Julie, as images of her parents came to my mind.
"I want to go for a walk," she barely looked at me, as she brushed her blond hair away from her face, adding, "Alone, if you don’t mind. I’ll be back in time for lunch."
I looked at my watch. Ten o’clock. "What was I supposed to do?" I asked myself. I fought against challenging her, demanding to know what was going on. I turned and walked south, kicking at driftwood, digging my heels in the sand.
The music and the story shift. The flute sounds like a piccolo, a violin picks up the beat. A young man, a stranger in a kayak, floats into the bay. He is whistling while he fishes. If not lost, he is waiting for the chance to catch a big fish and take it home, a hero. He throws his net to the left of the bow, then to the right. Empty. The tide turns and takes him back out to sea. He throws his net to the right one last time and pulls. The net resists. He’s caught something and he pulls harder, right hand over left, right hand over left. The net comes spilling into his dory while he peers into the frigid water attempting to see what he has caught.
All of a sudden, he spots his catch. A woman with a celadon skull and shiny white bones, "A skeleton," he whispers. He stands and frantically paddles his kayak toward shore. Soon he becomes entrapped in the net while the skeleton woman hangs off the gunnels of his boat. She begins to breathe, then moan.
My thin shoulders slumped as I walked along that beach in early October. I wasn’t even keeping watch for freighters bound for Chicago. The bristling whitecaps breaking on the beach didn’t interest me. This was a forlorn love. Our months together were like keeping a glorious earthbreaking secret. My heart pounded when I saw her. When she held my hand, I felt known. This was different than making the basketball team or being elected class president. I felt a deep, down tug. I was wanted, cherished.
After school let out that June, we fell even deeper. Her parents were out of the house for a few hours.We stripped off our clothes after swimming in her pool and brought our naked bodies filled with salt and kisses into her bedroom. This was my first glimpse of her flesh. Her tenderness surprised me. Strong tears spurted soaking my cheeks.
Finally, through the fog hovering over the beach, I saw her and stopped my pacing. I had thrown the towel on the sand, spread out the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, potato chips, carrots, apple, and chocolate chip cookies, the Seven-ups and Pepsis. Her image blurred in the background of sun and mist. She wasn’t walking, not even strolling. Hers was a slow thoughtful scuffle as if she were working something out. As she came closer, my arms opened, wanting an embrace, some reassurance. She took my hands in hers, "There’s something I’ve been hiding from you."
I tried to look into her blue eyes, but she seemed to be focusing on some indelible scribble on my gray sweatshirt.
"I’m pregnant, Bill."
I heard "Bill." A name she rarely used. I heard it, like a small black dot at the end of a sentence, a finality.
"Pregnant." I felt as if I was sucked up into a whirlwind. I tried to reach for that word, "pregnant," and bring it back down to me so I could hold onto it. My stomach lurched; I was named, convicted. Our hands loosened. I looked west toward the rolling whitecaps.
The music turns somber and slows. The young man has reached a fishing hut, dragging the skeleton woman behind him. After untangling the net, he tires and falls asleep. Tears drip from the corner of his eye. She drinks his tears and slowly comes back to life. He awakens, heartbeat slowed, fear subsiding, while she softly chants a lullaby. She stretches and leans into his body. They fall asleep and dream, interwoven.
We stepped back from each other. I sought the comfort of distance. I opened the sodas, put out the napkins and silverware, acting as if I hadn’t heard her. I noticed she hadn’t taken off her sweater. She remained standing, hugging her waist.
Sandwiches untouched, a few potato chips munched, we sipped our sodas and watched in silence as the sun burned off the fog and mist. Then the temperature dropped, the wind picked up, and the sun again disappeared into a glazed hollow of light.
"How do you know you’re pregnant?"
She looked straight into my eyes. "I’ve missed two periods, that’s how."
"What are we going to do?" The only words I could utter.
"Let’s go," she said, turning away from me.
"For a walk?" I asked hopefully, trying to find a way back.
"I don’t feel so good, let’s go home."
We stayed apart as I folded the beachtowel and she piled the leftovers into the basket. The couple in the sleeping bag had left. By the time we reached the ridge of the dune, Lake Michigan lay hidden beneath a blanket of fog. The wind was barren, cold.
Our parents forced the news out of us after Christmas. Julie skipped gym, went to see a doctor without her mother and was caught throwing up in her bathroom. Her father called mine at midnight. My father, stepmother, and I drove to her house on top of crunching snow into the stillness of a long night.
They negotiated our futures as we watched, not speaking. Julie was to "go away." We were told not to see each other again, and we promised to keep "the secret."
When the fisherman and the skeleton woman wake up, they eat fish, some bread and drink some water. She wraps his bear skin around her flesh. The man hands her a paddle and she poles the dory out into the deep water as he throws the net over the starboard. The tide is going out carrying them away from her father and the village that exiled her.
Reprise. The music picks up with the beginning chords, the swirl, the flattening of the water, then the breeze crosses over, creating ripples. The violin, a guitar, and a piano provide a soft, lush backdrop.
Julie returned after six months, her lean body bereft of the stomach pouch. I felt as if I had gone mute and had lived on an island in self-imposed silence. My dad never asked me how I was doing, whether I missed Julie. Even worse, I had kept "the secret." I had told no one, not my best friend, nor my priest, nor the basketball coach, nor my favorite teacher. Late at night when my parents were asleep, I’d scream or cry into my pillow, sometimes both. I, too, had something yanked out of me, alive. Not a baby, but the luscious gift of being the beloved.
Julie returned to school.in the spring. Alone in the hall, between classes, I asked her.
"Oh, it was a boy. Or maybe a girl. I was drugged. They took the baby away immediately. I don’t remember much. I read books, watched T.V., (a pause); Bill, it’s over with now. We’ve got to go on." She closed the door of her locker and walked away.
The summer separated us. I went to my job at a grocery store on a northern Michigan lake. She left town for a few weeks to visit an aunt in California. We never talked again. We never returned to my dream, sleeping interwoven along the dunes of Lake Michigan.
When I turned 50, I walked the docks of Portland, Oregon, inspecting the wooden kayaks, rowing shells, and sailboats. I met a woman from far away. We sipped wine, laughed, walked along the Kalamette River and later fell on the mattress on my floor. We had to separate at the end of the week. She flew back to the western shore of Lake Michigan. I flew back to the banks of my farmhouse along a white water river. I didn’t how to return to her. Or when.
Three years later, I roped my green canoe on top of my truck and drove northeast, over the Smoky Mountains, along the Ohio River, and then a straight dash north to Chicago. I rang her buzzer. She ran down the three flights of stairs, armed with a picnic basket. We drove to the southside harbor. All the sailboats were still in dry storage on this warm spring day. Green buds were appearing on the maples and oaks along the harbor drive. We pushed my green canoe into the calm waters of Lake Michigan and paddled out the channel. She turned around on her seat. Her lips parted, her smile blazed. I felt beholden. As if I had just been welcomed home. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized I had been in a self-imposed exile.
What matters most is that I remember. I paddle the deep waters of Beaufort Inlet, day by day building trust in my capacity to become one with the water of tears. I am able to caress the memory of being sixteen, experience a patch of shame, and when the paddle slips through the water, experience the tears of relinquishment. The faraway woman along the western shore of Lake Michigan and I are together. We have paddled and sailed into unknown waters. We have anchored and been rocked to sleep. Mystery or destiny? We wouldn’t be together if I hadn’t been exiled at sixteen.
I’m attracted to bays, harbors, and islands. Those in between places, mediating the assault of cascading waves and terrible winds. Whenever I paddle out the creek into the inlet, I believe something is being resewn back into my life that had been lost. After the age of sixteen, I became afraid of my own deep longings, surges, and instincts. All I could do then was to wrap my arms around myself, holding the secret of a pregnancy, a birth, and a lost love.
In paddling, I pull the water back to me, even the unwelcome image of a teenage father, a pregnant love, and an unseen baby. When tears verge on my eyelids, I know it is a sign of restitching. Some piece of sadness, raw and still beautiful, resurfaced and asked for my attention. The breach remains. The teenage mother did what she had to do. I keep paddling, sweeping the water around me while the vessel moves me forward.
The flute goes on alone. Eerie, like the call of a loon at dusk. A breeze riffles the water, the pelicans are gliding smoothly along the creek towards Pivers Island. It is enough to follow slowly in my kayak. The water drips from the paddle, I turn the blade sideways, stretch and pull, stretch and pull.
