Excerpt, the beginning, Crossing the Rainbow Bridge

Chapter One

Art and morals are one.  Their essence is the same. The essence of both of them is love.  Love is the perception of individuals.  Love is the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real.  Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.  Iris Murdoch

     The piercing sound of the macaw screaming next door woke her.  She lay in her bed in the half state between waking and dreaming, not quite ready to give up on the dream, one in which she had been swimming, her body weightless in the calm warm Gulf.  The pace of the swimming had been exaggerated in the dream so that she had been moving through the warm waters of the open Gulf unnaturally fast.  It wasn’t until a few days later when she recalled the dream that she realized that it hadn’t been her at all, or rather it was her but it was her metamorphosed as a dolphin which reminded her of the time that Ben had told her that everyone in your dreams was really just yourself. With the bird’s next soliloquy she gave it up though and sat up in bed.

Like its owner, Amelia, the bird was prone to intermittent nightly bouts of insomnia.  Sara could picture the two of them next door, sleepless, anxious, and she herself, now wide awake along with them.  Her room was warm and moist.   She had meant to shut the window last night before she had gone to bed, trying to block out the sound of Amelia and Pedro’s arguing but it hadn’t worked. The steady exchange of shouting in Spanish and broken English, coming in steady intervals from next door and across the yard.  The ambiguous problem with living in such close quarters with your neighbors is that you could never fully escape all the family issues that arose, like  Amelia and Pedro’s nightly rows. If you accepted their friendliness which had always been genuine from the start then you also had to accept the other side to it, which was this. At night after several hours of making the rounds of the local dives, their arguments would begin and usually end over the same thing, Pedro’s over familiarity with the cocktail waitresses.  Sara and her family learned to do what everyone else did, ignore it or pretend to ignore until the next morning when she heard the good natured morning exchange between Pedro and her father.  The exuberance of emotion, both good and bad, always bemused Sara, so unlike the display by her own, where sometimes on Sunday morning no one spoke until the afternoon.  She and Ben would tiptoe around their house fixing their breakfasts, reading, not speaking much. Her mother, of course, most likely would be outside in her garden which was technically called a yard in Key West, having gone out to sneak a morning cigarette and stayed, distracted no doubt by the unexpected budding of one of her orchids.

But last night there had been a different dimension to the Perez’s arguing when she had heard Amelia crying.  He can’t go.  She had been yelling, Do you know what they will do to him? She figured they were arguing about Tico being drafted. So she kept her window open partly by habit, having found a voyeuristic satisfaction in the sounds of their nightly exchanges, so different from the muted exchanges of her own family but also because she felt an unexpected sense of worry for Amelia. Normally, though she shut it before going to bed so that she wouldn’t wake up like she had just now, half-drenched in her own sweat. She hoped for a breeze this morning because sometimes they got lucky.  But the season had changed and the small current of air passing through the window was lackluster, a teaser and an impending reminder that March, unlike in other parts of the country as her mother often complained, was only the beginning of the summer in Key West.

Black and white photographs of ballerinas posed in positions one through four posted on her wall mocked her early morning lethargy.  Right foot forward, left foot out, they commanded.  Plie. Up. Down. Their arms in delicate synergy, leg and toes extended beyond ligament’s reason, their bodies exuded an impossible energy. She had stopped dancing the year they had moved from North Carolina.  She wasn't sure who was more relieved; she, who had grown two inches the summer before, or Miss Irene, the graying instructor, whose broken English barely concealed her annoyance at Sara's growing body. No, Sara, your legs like this.  Not the ostrich but the crane. 

That was the first year she had stayed overnight on his ship. The room had been cramped and hot, and the bed, a narrow cot suspended against a steel lined wall, had made her feel vulnerable and exposed. The whole ship, but especially this room for some reason had reeked of the same oil her father used to clean his guns. But whereas that smell reminded her of her father, like the other ones, his aftershave, for example, the smell in the ship had only made her queasy. She had lain awake for hours conjuring up all kinds of unimaginable disasters that might occur.  One of her father’s men, who had been cooped up too long might suddenly go crazy on them and start shooting them all in the head. Or, worse, someone might forget to douse his cigarette and a fire would start and ravage them all before they had a chance to get out. She would never be able to find her way out of the maze of identical steel lined rooms and would be stuck, forgotten about in the tiny room.  She had lain awake all night and was so exhausted the next day that she slept through her mother’s weekly Saturday brunch with her girlfriends.  That had been the last time she had stayed on board and the first time she realized she was claustrophobic.   That year, the year they had come to Key West Lenny’s was selling ground beef for seventy-five cents a pound outside Stock Island and grouper was $2.50, a fact her mother couldn’t get over so she bought fish every day for a month until they begged her to make a roast beef.  But it’s so cheap, she had said, and fresh.  We could never get this back home.

Her mother had enrolled her in the all-girls Catholic school, which she knew she was going to hate the minute she had stepped inside and saw how  the fairness of her skin, light and freckled, contrasted so much with the other girls.  For weeks they called her names they thought she didn’t understand.  Flaca. Chico.  She was only able to understand them because she always had a knack for picking up languages. Their torture continued until one day after school when she had challenged the biggest and fattest of them to a game of tetherball.  After she beat Margarita, a chunky pock-marked girl they had left her alone, but she didn’t have any other friends. She was used to it having been to ten different schools trying not to think about the endless round of almost friends made each year, the promising exchange of numbers and the sad but familiar shock to hear Mrs. Bishop announce once again that so and so’s father had just been transferred back to San Diego and what a shame it was really, to lose such a fine student.  She wondered if all the good students had left, what the teachers thought of the ones remaining, the ones whose fathers (like hers) were stationed long-term.  What would they announce about her if she left?   Since she rarely spoke in class she imagined it would be a brief eulogy.  Her seat on the fourth row from the door, fifth seat back, would remain empty, her absence unnoticed for the most part.  Would she miss the sight of Mr. Murray’s body in perpetual motion, his back to them as he diagrammed endlessly across the face of the chalkboard, pausing only long enough for a hurried wipe of sweat across his brow; his body taut with the unexpressed anticipation at offering to the bored room how the Druids had nothing to do with Stonehenge at all?

From  her bedroom she had an open view of the yard.  A line of laundry hung from an elbow-shaped branch of a gumbo-limbo tree, its reddish brown trunk covered in gray moss and the twists of a vanilla orchid vine. A sound coming from her brother’s bedroom caused her to shift her weight in the bed.  He was listening to BTO.    She looked out the window to see her mother kneeling next to the tree scooping something off the grass. 

The tree reminded her of the one in Tennessee.  They had called the black walnut tree the old man because of the texture of its trunk,  black and wrinkled, that reeked of a moldy pungency.  Years later when she thought of that time she couldn't remember what their house had looked like, only that it had set at the top of a rolling hill of bright green that faced the uneven peaks of Lookout mountain. But she never forgot the smell from the walnuts that were stored in a shed next to the tree.  She and Ben had used them as ammunition. There were always too many to use so that most of them ended up rotted, stinking up the shed until her mother would find someone to shovel them out. She tried to imagine the house, but the memories were elusive, leaving her with only the vaguest idea of what it might have looked like.  She thought she remembered how unhappy her mother had been, and decided she must have been missing her father.   The memories tricked her sometimes.  On her tenth birthday Aunt Faye had given her an album of black and white pictures she had found at a flea market, hoping to encourage her interest in photography.  Her memories were like those anonymous faces fixated toward her, their steady gaze flat with emotion, peering out at her from the center of curling yellowed edges.   At first she thought she recognized some of the people, a long-lost aunt a hundred years deceased, but the more closely she looked at their features and faces, she knew they were strangers.  Like her memories, or her dreams, they were only familiar-looking, as real or as imagined as she would allow them to be.