__________
T h e
T e r m i n i
They lay on the warm rocks at Santa Croce near Amalfi and watched the wooden fishing boats sputter past them, the put-put-put of their engines drifting softly on the crystalline air like snores. Behind them cliffs rose vertically from the beach, and above the cliffs the craggy mountainsides were dotted by lemon groves and pale stucco villas. Along the cliffs grew bundles of purple bougainveilla which looked from the beach like shocks of pink and purple fur, or like fireworks whose brilliant explosions were caught in that balanced moment before dispersing. Ahead lay the Mediterranean, pale blue, and the day's light rested on the surface with the same narcotic dullness as the distant sounds of boats, of voices, of the waves curling endlessly onto the beach.
On the train ride to Salerno from Naples, Mag watched Jason chatter with the Italian children with a creeping embarrassment that approached what she considered a shared humiliation, as if his every action was a reflection of her own being. He had made up his own language and spoke the vowel-filled words with a queer lisp! The children were in hysterics; Adults stared at him with that blank Italian horror as if he were mimicking their beautiful language for fun. She felt at times that Jason's limited capacity for anything beyond the most remedial patterns of thought was also some reflection on her own intelligence, at least her inability to have a brother who did not remind her at times of an idiot, and this made her chest hurt. She felt sullied by his apparent stupidity, and imagined that it was some inexplicable and odious trait, perhaps even genetic, or the result or culmination of some series of events that she'd long ago forgotten but which she still enveloped, like a rock or a piece of sidewalk swallowed up by tree flesh, that would never disappear, only become further hidden beneath layers of her own device.
"The first thing I knowed was," Jason began, pitching a blue rock at a bird wandering clumsily down the beach, "was there's 4 knuckles emerging very quickly from the bathroom door about nose high. Biggest, reddest knuckles I've ever seen. I had time to say, Aw."
He paused and looked at her.
"Then I'm on the ground, then I'm in the air. Then I'm on the ground, then I'm in the air. From the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom then, finally, I'm bomping down the brick steps into the backyard like a kid on his ass. At the bottom I had time finally to pull out my knife."
"Oh for God's sake," she muttered. Her voice quivered in a manner that surprised her in its fierceness. "A knife."
"'Look mister,' I said, 'You don't quit throwin me around I'm gonna have to stick you.' I didn't want to stab him--he still scared me to death--but I didn't not know what else to do and also I was tired of being thrown around and feeling my head bouncing off every surface on the inside and outside of Shannon's house, formica, the commode, the refrigerator and whatnot. Well, he proved wiser than he looked. He left.
"Shannon said she knew him before, and that he was crazy. The next day we called cousin Tom, just to close the deal. He met us that afternoon on the dock at Meemaw's pond and we got married. Just like that."
"Mother was heartbroken."
Jason snorted. "I didn't get married for mother."
"And where is Shannon now?"
"In Deltaville," he answered. "Where in hell'dyou think?"
"Waiting for you?" she asked.
"Of course, waiting for me."
"Alone?"
"Alone," he said. "She better damn well be alone."
When Mag was younger she remembers standing on the pier at Gloucester Banks where the light has no such subtlety as at Amalfi and where the water that summer lay for months a viscous, murky green, and her mother said to her as she tightened the rusted hasp of the styrofoam egg pressing into the small of Mag's arched back, "Maggie, we are born into disorder and spend our lives attempting trying to convince ourselves otherwise; We are taught to seek a progression of ease from our earliest conscious moments."
It had only been three months since her father had died and since that afternoon she has recognized that her mother was trying in her own way to become her father in his absence, perhaps to convince the child that she didn't really need her father anyway. Regardless, it was the type of thing he would've said, without provocation or reason, to a table full of guests at Thanksgiving, or during a toast for a wedded cousin, or at her bedside in the black of night, the faintly rotten smell of bourbon drifting from his open mouth like the foul exhaust of the machine that ground incessantly inside him. As she listens to the water breaking along the arc of blue-gray rocks in a whisper that disappears down the beach, she thinks wistfully, "Children sense inconsistencies in their parent's behavior, and are scared, yet they soon begin to follow a similar pattern." And we are doomed to do so, she almost says aloud. They are so close all of the time and it is impossible not to become them, the oppressed becoming the oppressors.
"Oooh! Ah! O!" Jason grunts, dancing clumsily over the hot pebbles, carrying two glasses of beer. There is a long wooden hutch at the bottom of the stairs that climb down the cliff like a thick and knotted wisteria vine and though the wooden structure is not yet completely built the bar at one end is open. Espresso, panini, birra is painted in blue script along it. "These Italians really know how to live!" yelled Jason. "They got it all; Beer, coffee, ham sandwiches. And at the beach!" He really was very excited. He paused and Mag counted to herself. "What's a panini, though?" he asked. Mag did not answer him and only noted with dismay that he'd mispronounced it on purpose.
All morning long men have been unloading pieces of the hutch from a cave in the side of the cliffs. They are all wearing brief style bathing suits and are as brown as pecans. Even the old men with silver hair are wearing the small bathing suits. Their voices echo joyously beneath the cliffs as they lift and hammer the sections into place.
"I don't know about these stupid rocks."
"A lot of Mediterranean beaches have them," Mag said helpfully.
"And?" he said.
"That's supposed to make them okay, I guess."
"Just give me good old sand."
Out on the horizon the hydrofoil from Capri settled into the water like a duck landing, returning to Amalfi. It was noiseless. Minutes later it's wake rolled onto the beach. In the surf in front of them two older couples were struggling with their skiff as it rolled in the wake of the hydrofoil.
"Look at that old lady's titties," said Jason. "She's got to be, what? How old you reckon?"
Mag sighed. She wanted to yell at her brother but she knew that he was right to notice the woman's fitness. The woman was 60 or older and yet her beautifully tanned chest appeared both fleshy and firm, as if beneath her brown skin there were two perfectly shaped pieces of soft fruit. The notion gave Mag a sexual thrill which embarrassed her.
One man and one woman struggled with the boat as the second man crouched in the back of it attempting to start the engine. Mag could see thick chunks of paint rubbing off the hull onto the rocks on the beach. The voices of the men and women were rising in a call and response clamor, full of answered grunts and moans as they tried to push the boat away from the rocks, that also made Mag's blood rise in an erotic fashion. At times she felt there was a current along this shore, some energy in the atmosphere, that lent even the most banal events an air of the illicit, and she wondered if Jason noticed it as well.
Jason said, "I told you about Shannon's father's boat?"
Mag did not want him to know how much she enjoyed drinking the cold glass of beer. With each sip she sunk further into the rocks and felt minutes away from a nap, though at the same time she felt pleasantly alert.
"I seem to remember this episode," she answered.
"We'd noticed that the beers in the galley were getting warm, and Shannon's mom's fancy frozen dinners are unfreezing, the one's she gets specially made by that b.o.-having chef who runs that froufrou restaurant downtown near the office, so Shannon runs on deck to start the engine, to charge the batteries and all. So it rumbles on and Shannon bounds back down the little wooden ladder and we're sitting in the galley, well on our way to being pretty damn drunk. It's about 2 or 3 in the morning by this time."
"I'm not sure I want to hear this story again," she interrupts.
"Well, I look out that little porthole next to my head and I think, 'I must be pretty damn drunk, because those lights on shore appear to be moving.' Shannon and Block are sitting next to me, right? We're the only people on the boat, see, and it's supposed to be anchored at Fishing Bay, so you can imagine those moving lights are a pretty disturbing sight. Just when I turned my head and was about to say, 'Uhhh, Shannon...' I'll be damned if all of a sudden there's things falling all over the place, including Shannon, books, beers, bongs, the works. The jolt was just..." Jason paused, shaking his head, looking out at the hydrofoil cruising past, "Well it was just gigantic."
"I've had enough," she said, attempting to put the glass of beer down in the uneven rocks. "Please Jason, no more of your hilarious stories." Her voice had risen shrilly and the pleasant sensation she bathed in just seconds before had turned abruptly into a sour and panicky flush.
"Shannon had knocked it into gear, you know."
She finished her beer in a pinched gulp. "Please, Jason, I don't want you to speak anymore."
"Alright,' he said calmly. "Don't get yourself in an uproar. Let's go for a swim."
"No," she said. "I just want to lie here." She let her head fall back and she closed her eyes, though she was embarrassed that they continued to jerk under her eyelids. It was suddenly such an unnatural act that she wondered why she'd done it, and instead she felt suddenly like she would rather jump up and sprint down the beach screaming or else go help the men move the sections of the hutch. But she had put her head back to sleep and so she thought she should accept her lot. The urge to nap had left her and she grew more anxious; She did not want her brother to know that she was faking her desire for sleep. It was times like these when she seemed completely unable to adopt the effortless cool that so defined the behavior of people like her brother and, she was loathe to admit, his new wife.
"You don't like Shannon, do you?"
"Am I supposed to be attracted by y'all's restlessness?" she asked, her eyes still closed. She was very upset that Shannon's father had recently bought a hunting lodge in Alaska and that Jason and Shannon would move there upon returning to Richmond in a month.
"Is that your answer?"
"I don't like Shannon," she said, lifting her head and staring at the horizon. "I wonder if she's good for you. She's a spoiled brat."
"When I ran on deck there was an old man in his grippies dog-paddling in the bay. We t-boned his boat."
"That's terrible," she said. "It's really not funny."
"Well, we thought it was goddam hilarious."
"You're sick, spoiled, irresponsible brats. Your nomadism would be impossible if it wasn't for her daddy's money."
"He thought it was hilarious, too."
"You ought to be ashamed. It's pathetic, really."
"This is it, Mag!" Jason spread his arms and gestured towards the sea, towards Sicily, over to Capri, to Algeria and Libya and Morocco, to North Africa...."No more, no less. Be cold, be hot, but never be lukewarm." He touched her arm and said, "Tepid."
"We have different philosophies." It hurt her feelings to say this.
"Look, Mag, up and moving from one place to the next is attractive to some people because it offers them the illusion of rebirth, clean slates, the chance to do what is impossible: Begin again, with new eyes, new circumstances."
"Like a child might," she said. "A newborn. Even you said it offers only an illusion."
"Right."
"Perhaps moving is entirely unpleasant to others for the exact same reasons."
"Stay in Richmond, then," he said. "Become a spectacle. You've got a choice."
"But I want you to be near me," she said, her voice limned with the faintest ripples of sadness or fear. "I can never trust that you'll do what you say. You say you'll be there for me." She began to weep silently into her towel. "These last few months have been terrible."
"I think they've been goddam spectacular."
He jumped up and jogged towards the bar, and Mag watched the muscles of his back move under his brown skin. An image came to her without warning and she shuddered; Her arm, extended, plunging a knife between the perfect muscles of his broad back.
Their flat atop an ancient building along the Via Cavour overlooked a market, beyond which lay a park filled with people who appeared unsettled, disturbed. Even the old men playing chess in the shade had about them an air of omen, the legacy of wars, the body language of soldiers. Men and women slept in the bushes. Gypsy children paraded through the park with the unnatural confidence of miniature adults. In the yard of the park there lay small mounds of ash-colored soil; Jason kicked a pile and immediately the disturbed soil seethed with activity, roiling from within as countless ants hurried to replace that which had been removed, crawling aimlessly but with such ferocity of purpose Mag thought it impossible to look at them and not imagine some horrible rending noise.
At the market they walked among sun-baked vats of salted fish, enormous filets curled under their desiccating vests of salt-crust, skinned goats hanging from ankle joints and staring hellishly out at them with surprised eyes, large ribbed carcasses run through with glistening gristle and the yellow-white of bones; Also gorgeous tomatoes, huge bunches of fragrant basil, lumps of rust-red tenderloin, trays of silver calamari scattered shiny and wormlike as innards. The intense clatter of fragrances, some dancing close to the edge of rot, filled Mag's nostrils and she felt injected with a dizzying nausea. Walking among the thronging and mesmerizing chants of the sellers speaking a language that sounded to Mag like nothing less than an unending chorus of exchanged spells of magic, she knew that her legs were turning into wood. An overwhelming sense of despair, of unnamed loss, enveloped her like the heat of the sun and permeated her, invaded her like a smell or an unwanted lover.
"The Italians," said Jason, "Are not like you and I."
"Who is?" she asked. She could almost hear her legs creaking.
At the end of the month they prepared to fly back to Richmond. The flat their mother had rented for them while their Uncle's trial was taking place had grown filthy, and with a matronly horror Mag knew that she must be the one to begin to clean it. She asked Jason to help her, to shake the carpets out on the verandah overlooking the Via Cavour, to dispose of all the dead ferns now hanging from their porch, and to empty the trashcans in the kitchen, which all reeked of rotten produce and the offal of meat. After returning from the market with an armful of cleaning supplies Mag stretched out on the bed they shared and fell into a troubled and restless sleep. When she awoke her face was oily with the sweat of her disturbing dreams. Jason called to her from the living room.
"I'm sorry, what did you say?" she asked.
"In reference to what?"
"You said you used something to clean the clump of candle wax off the carpet."
"Right, I did say that."
"So?"
"So what's your question?"
"Well, what did you say you used to clean the wax off the carpet." "I didn't."
There was a pause.
"What'd you use then," she yelled impatiently, rising from the bed.
"Oven cleaner," he answered calmly.
"You sprayed oven cleaner on the carpet."
"I sprayed oven cleaner on the carpet and the wax came right off."
"Why, Jason?" She walked into the room and found Jason bent over a foaming part of the carpet. It looked like he'd emptied an entire canister of shaving cream onto the floor. She breathed and said, "Why did you spray oven cleaner on it?"
"Because it's all soap." He pointed to the empty containers scattered across the room. "Of varying degrees of soapness."
By that afternoon they finished cleaning but there was a leprosal blotch in the carpet where the oven cleaner had leached out the core of the fibers in the Persian oriental and left them limp and colorless. When she bent down to rub it the carpet disintegrated.
"That's it," she spat.
"It solved the issue of candle wax," Jason said.
"Let's go catch the train."
They packed their suitcases and left the building, fleeing into the streets with a careless air. They walked down the Via Cavour, Mag always a few steps ahead. Soon they approached the Termini station, and boarded the train to the airport.
The light was brilliant and the day hot. From the train she could see the scurf of unceasing smog resting squarely on the city like a beret. The distinctive smell of European air, she thought. Diesel, asphalt, garlic, tobacco, body. Wild poppies grew along the traintracks and nodded at them as they passed. There was a soft yellow light that spilled along the hillsides and over the African-looking pines grouped in graceful clusters like herds of giraffes, casting long, oblique shadows across the brown grass. On top of the buildings they passed stood innumerable clusters of TV antennae, tangled and confused as seaweed lying in clumps on a beach. Then out the window appeared nameless ruins, a nameless wall unbound from any history but which, Mag thought, must've once protected the Romans from invading Huns or whatnot. And now it hulked in the shadows of countless apartment buildings, the chaotic shadows of the antennae scoring it with the shapes of crucifixes. History is a peculiar device for inventing purpose, she thought, when people so quickly forget purposes.
Jason snored next to her, the magazine in his lap open to a page featuring a glistening and naked Italian beauty. Mag was again fascinated by the woman's form and again she was embarrassed, even humiliated by her inability to take her eyes off the woman's body. Everyone is so beautiful here, she thought. Men, women, children. Even Jason admitted that he'd never seen so many fine looking men there, so many fascinating faces and wonderful noses, broad shoulders and huge hands. Soon she got up and went to the bathroom and studied her brown face in the mirror and fingered the dull gray hairs that had begun to tangle themselves among the rest. Mag did not mind the gray hairs really but minded instead the notion that there were changes occurring that she could not foresee. The gray hairs had seemingly appeared out of nowhere; they did not grow. Events were unfolding without her knowledge, without her permission. The train picked up speed. Supporting herself against the wall she repeated what she decided she would soon say to Jason: "The difficulties you will face in the upcoming years will arrive like ceaseless waves upon a beach and no amount of moving or starting over will give them cease."
As she repeated this, staring at her eyes in the mirror, at her brown eyes which grew more round as they filled with tears, Mag reached a state where she became entranced by the repetition of her words and the sound of the train rolling over the tracks, its gentle sway causing the silver tears collecting along the bottom of her eyelids to gather and ripple like mercury. She had not yet eaten anything and still felt queer from her strange nap. It was impossible for her to imagine leaving Jason, impossible for her to know what to do after she got off the train, but she had, like Jason and Shannon, learned the value of large amounts of currency and knew how to exploit the good fortune she held in her neck wallet, which hung between her breasts like a warm amulet. Then she knew it would be better if she said nothing at all. Her gesture would be more powerful, hold more magic. Mag touched the wallet with a sigh. She knew that this, more than anything else, allowed her the freedom to leave any train at any station in any city in the world with the confidence that within an hour she would be safe, if not comfortable, and preferably both.
As she stepped off the train she quickly stood behind a pillar and watched it as it picked up speed out of the station. Jason's face passed, staring out the window, fixed on a point above and behind her, his jaw slack from yawning. Immediately she was filled with a palpable fear, mingled with a burning jealousy, and she wondered if she was doing this for her own good, if she had made the right choice, or if it was some preadolescent gesture to remind Jason how important she was in the scheme of his life, and how much worse his life would be without her in it. She muttered a stricken "Oh!" and hurried for the train but an attendant in a blue suit yelled at her in Italian. She held her face in her hands and watched the train leaving with it's precious cargo, and in her chest there grew a ponderous sense of doom as she thought, He is all I have left. She hoped to God he'd get off at the next station and spend the following hours, days, months looking feverishly for his older sister, chasing her from one European palace to the next. It was a delicious image and filled her with a Romantic longing. She wondered if the feeling the image elicited in her meant that she was truly sick, or if it was just shame.
Presently a well-dressed young man approached her. She combed her hair with her fingers and brushed her skirt down. He wore a linen suit which draped loosely over his lithe frame as if some type of shroud, or kaftan, and it was only when he stood eagerly next to her that she noticed he was unshaven, he smelled of dust and decay and finally that he wore no shoes. His feet were chapped and, she noted with sudden horror, were bleeding. He removed his glasses and said, "Italiana?"
"I don't speak Italian," she said. "Parlo un poco d'Italiano."
"Pui," he answered. "Signora, per favore, buy me a meal, please. My money"--he touched his pockets--"they take. Am a dentist from Atrani, please. No pelicolo." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "No dangerous."
"Then where are your shoes?"
"In the land of money, thieves steal money. In the land of shoes...."
He shrugged in a manner that made Mag laugh.
"I am hungry, too." She suddenly felt brave and her voice was rich with confidence. The man had a kind voice which Mag sensed was the result of a cultured upbringing, and he appeared truly harmless.
They went from the subdued but enveloping light of afternoon into a local cafe that was as dark as a cave. Mag wanted to tell this man her story. On the walls of the cafe hung colorful posters, but the walls and the floor and the bar itself were all sepia-toned and musty. They ate ham, cheese and bread, in a disappointed silence. They finished, having exchanged but few hand gestures and vocal noises. Mag imagined they looked like apes, their hands in the air, cooing and grunting. She pulled some lira out of a hidden pocket in her sleeve and put it on the table. Presently the man began to weep openly, his body wracked by uncontrollable sobs.
"Scuse," he said. "No myself." He put his sunglasses back on and stared at Mag.
"It is the feeling of violation," he said. "I am no crazy."
"I am," she said with a chuckle.
"Lost?" he asked.
"Si," she answered, then quickly said, "No. Not lost. Not lost."
"A caro is lost."
"How do you know?"
The man laughed. "Everyone knows. Everyone has lost. It is an easy guess." They sat for a few moments across from one another and in the man's lenses Mag could see her reflection. Behind the lenses she imagined that the man's eyes were beginning to burn.
"I am sorry you are unhappy," Mag said. "Have you called the police?"
He shrugged his shoulders.
"What exactly is the matter?"
"Exactly," he said.
A strange smile played upon his lips and for the first time Mag sensed that her facade of ironic separation might betray her growing fear. The corners of his brown mouth were drawn down in a cocky scowl. She attempted to communicate with him but her every word was met by a sinister and stubborn silence. Under the table her hands began to shake. She looked around them but they were alone. Even the ancient bartender wiping down the counter with a white towel had disappeared. "What is the matter?" she asked, but the man did not move. His jaw dropped and a puny and pathetic whistling came from his nose, the snore of a child. Soon she reached over to the man and brushed his cheek. Then she pulled off his glasses and beneath them his eyes twitched against some dream, forever looking into the distance.
Then she knew she had imagined it all. Her attempt to imitate her brother's reckless adoption of circumstance had failed. She tried to gain control of the circumstance but events had not occurred as she wished, and suddenly she wanted to wake the man and take him somewhere and go to a concert or a ruin just so she could say to Jason when they next met, You will not believe what happened to me! The man's face suddenly had the serenity of someone stumbling across sleep after searching for it for days. Without his glasses his face was pleasant, almost boyish, and she had the inexplicable urge to reach up and touch it again, so she did.
She got up and walked into the light of afternoon. It was impossible for her not to think of her brother. When she spoke to her mother next they would surely have a lot to talk about and Mag wondered if her Uncle would have to go to jail or if he would just have to pay some money, and she wondered with another chill of delicious excitement whether or not Jason was still on the train. Perhaps he is eating lunch at a cafe with a beautiful Italian girl, or sharing a bottle of wine, or sleeping in a field, resting, or running across a plain looking for me, asking ancient farmers tending grapes or artichokes or olives if they'd seen a beautiful woman who looks a lot like him.
Across the square there was a white stucco church and as Mag stood there the enormous doors opened and a cluster of ancient people wandered purposelessly out of the yaw created by the open doors. They had the hung shoulders and blank eyes of people enveloped in despair. Behind them she could see the nuns and lit candles above a bier. She remembered the night of their father's funeral when they lay in their bed, when the atmosphere was heavy and the curtains hung on their rods without stirring. As a child Mag was never able to comprehend the wails of her mother downstairs, followed by shrieks of hysterical laughter, the clomping of dancing feet, the sharp ting of crystal. She only turned her head and saw the curtains lift inwards like two billowing arms and allowed the strange noises to dissipate in the blank cavern of her imagination. She and Jason lay in bed as children do, limbs entwined, the blue light of midnight infusing the room with the glow of pearl dust.
"You forgot to turn off the lights."
Jason was clearly sound asleep and yet his voice was pitched at conversational volume. She was frightened.
"Mother turned them off."
He sighed in response. "Turn them off," he said. "Please. Cut out the lights." He disentangled his arms from her limbs and rolled over, muttering.
"Okay," she said.
Afterwards she could not sleep. She rubbed the goosebumps which stood out on her arms and legs like the raised part of some smooth bark. On the table next to them whirred an old gun-barrel grey fan, the type she remembers seeing on the top of their grandfather's desk. He was a tobacco inspector and had, like their father, died under strange circumstances on his 40th birthday. The night had grown cool. As she pushed Jason's body out of her way he reached out in his sleep with a thin, acorn-brown arm and brushed her back, an unconscious animal gesture that feels to this day painfully of an unrequited love she has never known.
Even in the hot sun of that nameless square she shivers as she remembers these sensations; The room had grown cold; She looked around for clothes, for warmth. She reached up to turn off the fan as if in a dream. Her movements in that deeply blue room were as deliberate and slow as if she were floating beneath the sea. Standing there she wants to lift her arm. The noises downstairs had quit and an exhausted silence filled the house. The blades of the fan spun and she watched a small reflection of herself glittering on the cone shaped hub where the blades met, as if mesmerized. Her hand hung in the air between her and the fan and it wasn't until the hard metal blade bit into her outstretched finger that she awoke fully, the light around her still blue.
As Mag stands in the pure heat of the sun she remembers perfectly that it was the sound of her finger hitting the blade that really frightened her, and not the immediate sensation of being struck, but as soon as the sound left her ears she felt the numb throbbing and with each pulse of her heart she awoke more fully. Even as she stands, numbly lifting her finger to her mouth, she can feel the strange dawning of something that is far more malleable than truth but which strikes her with a similar inexorable force. Suddenly Jason seemed so far away, the light suddenly threatening and ominous. "I've done it this time," she thought. Before she cried she put her finger in her mouth and her lips were immediately wet with blood. "I've really done it this time."
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