TO ABHOR THE SEA

I went into the back yard to record this, it was very early, and cold, and spider-webby. I have a lot of shade in my back yard, and it’s filled with hostas, usually this is the time of year they bloom into little purple drops of loveliness all over the yard, but this year, we have deer, a mother and her polka-dot fawn who have rendered my hostas down to sticks of celery like at the grocery store. There are walnuts that come crashing down, big as apples, I gathered them one year but they’re not the eating kind, they were awful, so I leave them for the squirrels and to roll my ankles on once in a while.

I don’t have a middle name and every once in a while I think I might give myself one, haven’t yet, but the one I think of is Sea, and so there you have it, a shite introduction to this short story about the sea. Not crazy about the title tho… once a title establishes itself, and they seem to come without my participation, I consider the story either blessed by it or stuck with it. In this case, it leans toward stuck, but I am too stubborn to change it. I know this title makes it seem like I tried too hard but it’s the opposite – I left it alone – it’s called anti-editing and I’m a pro.

Thanks for being here.

You could sit and look past her, through the dark room and into the triangle of space where the curtains fluttered open, and you could see, in the shape of a sailboat, the sea.

I don’t know how many times I heard her say she hated the sea. I knew it had taken three of her sons, but to hate the sea, what I loved most, was incomprehensible.

The sea was all we had.

On my father’s fiftieth birthday, we – my parents, my brother Charles, and I – had come to her house uninvited, obliged. They dreaded it but I didn't. There was something about that sailboat view. She was not grandmotherly, not happy to see us, but resigned herself to our company and there we sat in the grey afternoon.

I abhor the sea, she said.

It was a new word for me, never heard it before and seldom since – she didn’t whisper it; it was more of a hiss– and then I got it, I understood, I accepted the carbonized version of hate she had for the sea.

One would not use the word beside to describe the proximity of her house to the sea, but against. The sea roared and the house roared back. When we drove around the final bend from which it was visible, it often wasn’t, there was a kind of felt in the atmosphere, each time we were suddenly beneath a compact grey residue, look what the storm dragged in.

The house itself was simple geometry, 90 degree angles of Irish concrete which wasn’t concrete at all, but a dried mixture of peat and pebble and a salty organic slew from the shoreline. If you looked at the outside walls carefully you could see little shells, sticks and pebbles – it was a masterpiece of discovery like looking into the night sky and always seeing something more – there were bubbly empty snakes and ladders of air where seaweed had decomposed.

The same view was available on the inside but in a form of braille, subdued beneath a layer of paint.

Charles once saw the fossil of a seahorse, he swore it, he said it was a perfect thing like the brass sculpture of a hummingbird our mother had on her dresser, the details excruciatingly organized, but when he tried to show me, he couldn’t find it.

For the rest of our childhoods he searched the sea-facing side of that eroding house in a quiet frenzy, I thought he was nuts, I noticed my mother’s worry vein pulsed as she told him again and again to come inside, but he never did. He later became an archeologist and pretended to search for history, but we all knew the intimate curl he was really after.

Through the triangle of light available from the curtain gap one could see in the Atlantic all the light in the world. There were clement days, but even then, the shadows.

I paced in the small thick room to give the sailboat motion and one day, in its shape, a man appeared, as if he’d climbed aboard. I moved closer, peeled the curtains up and away, everyone shied from the light, there were gasps, and then we all watched him.

He was not the old man and the sea one might expect, he was a young man, stooping, he didn’t notice the house or the growing triangle at first, but he soon stood up straight and faced us, hands pressed for a moment against his thighs, he took his hat in his hand and waved with it, I pressed my cold palm to the window and there was a pause, a moment of infusion that felt impossibly long. When I released my hand he made his way, slowly slowly slowly down the rocky shore.

My grandmother said nothing but I knew in my heart that she thought it was the ghost of her sons.

My father later, much later, decades later, said he thought so, too.

Our visits were different after that.

I’m not saying the weather changed, those coastal cavities in Ireland’s north have a way of catching storms and holding them tight, this effect is reciprocal, there is no such thing as change unless in the form of erosion, again reciprocal, but as I said things were different after that. My grandmother's curtains were not open as you might expect me to say, but gone.

Gave her hope my father said on the way home.

I turned and said to his eyes, big and crowded in the rearview, What do you mean? Hope for what? Her sons to come back?

No. Probably not.

What then? Hope for what?

But he didn’t answer, he adjusted the mirror, and I did not ask again.

So it’s become like a multiple choice in my head the various forms of hope.

The other day I was there again, the house is less geometrical now, it’s been decades, and time has allowed curvature into the mix. The cloud so persistent in my youth was there yet not there, worn and frayed and see-through.

I walked along the beach, I looked at the house, not through but at the window, it reflected the sea my grandmother had abhorred until she grew to love it again – and for a moment or forever – I was the man from that day, stooped and searching through the rocks.

I suppose archeology runs in the family. Charlie searches for his seahorse, my grandmother for her sons, I don’t search for anything that has identity, I just search.