Catherine Parnell
Embouchure
There comes a moment when there’s nothing left to say, although if you asked Margaret, she’d tell you that’s nonsense. So, when eleven-year-old Trina clammed up and didn’t speak for an entire month in early summer, we wondered why. Margaret, older by a year and with questionable wisdom, swore she’d get Trina to talk and she had plenty of opportunities to do just that. Each attempt met with dusky quiet. Lips sealed, Trina chummed around with us, doing as we did, and soon enough, we learned to read her deep-set eyes, her sharp chin, her tanned shoulders – even the flick of her step as she walked. We tracked her thin arms as they torqued through the water, her back straight or turned, knees locked or bent in a soft push against the undulating waves, searching for meaning. Standing on our smooth rock shores, her hands soared about her body like a dragonfly seeking a place to land or a conductor leading her orchestra. Which only made sense because it was the summer of the harmonica – the craze fired through school and we all had one.
We must have driven our parents mad as one by one, we followed Trina’s lead. Our chatter became monosyllabic with infusions of manners. Yes, please. No, thank you. Our harmonicas said the rest. For day’s end, Margaret mastered the Guide version of “Taps” and she heralded respectable daybreak with a riff of Beatles refrains. No doubt it was obscene noise as it echoed over the waters in our quiet bays, but to their credit, our parents said nothing. They were concerned about Trina.
It was an act of solidarity, that silence, even though we didn’t know why such quiet until the day we overheard Trina’s mother in conversation with Margaret’s mother – both were costume designers for the opera and they were rehashing the season’s series. One opera that spring was Strauss’ Daphne, Op. 82, “Bucolic Tragedy in One Act,” which Margaret and Trina had seen, all done up in their opera evening clothes – dark velvets and gloves, patent leather shoes and black tights, hairbands tight on their scalps. We’d envied them the chance to be out although to hear them talk – and Trina had been in throes of high-pitched excitement for days after the evening out – there’s been something ominous about the night. The city, which we knew well, had felt ghostly, Margaret said, as if something ghastly died. The foggy odor of charred rubber and oily exhaust, and garbage, a terrible rush of sensory filth after the glory of the night. Haloed and intermittent light threw sickly beams on the pavement as they all walked back to the car, their skirts swishing like dry leaves in a wind. Margaret told of Trina’s scarf, how she’d twisted it into a crown about her golden hair. She’d looked like a goddess.
She fancies herself an actress, Trina’s mother said as we played jacks on the verandah. We turned our heads away, pretending their conversation was of no matter to us. Margaret’s mother clicked her knitting needles furiously, uttering in a voice like her daughter’s, Nonsense. It’s a cry for attention and you must ignore her. But her father, Trina’s mother said. The needle clicking stopped for a moment followed by one word. Hush.
Like a line of sugar ants, we stood up and walked away, down to the water for a swim. In the heat-stippled air, Margaret waved her harmonica at Trina and broke her silence. Your father hasn’t been here this summer, she said. Trina’s eyes flashed but she didn’t speak. Where is he? asked Margaret. It’s not like he’s dead or something.
Trina dove into the water and with furious strokes, plowed through the water to the raft. With that wily sense children have, we looked at Margaret as if to say, Don’t you get it?
Margaret, for once, caught on as she flushed silvery crimson. Adults were of another world, speaking a foreign language, and in our world of play, there was no room for grown-up cares. But Trina brought them to us and like puzzled puppies, we cocked our heads, understanding the nuanced tone but not knowing what to do.
Except we knew no-nonsense Margaret was wrong. Sometimes there is nothing left to say, except to sit in silence and wait for the moment your lips close on vowels and consonants, and sound rings out. The trick is finding the right note in the plaintive major scale that says sorry.
Out of the Pure White
During breakup, blocks of ice get shoved inland. High water and other floes push the oversized ice cubes through the melting lake and up the rocky shore. Left at the end of their furrowed scrapes, the stranded blocks melt in the sun. Boulders can be pushed inland, too, and at the end of their scrape-trenches, there they are as proof. But that was many, many millennia ago, so many years in the past that we are certain our boulders have always been here. It is only when the season begins, and the last of the ice splinters and our boats pound through the choppy water that we nod to the great icy world that came before us. If we shiver, and we do, it is because the spray of memory rises in our wake, and early summer wind pushes against our faces. And as we have in the past, we begin again.
It had been a hard winter that year, so many changes, so much bad news. The world judged us in ways we never anticipated, or perhaps our upbringing crashed against the rocky shore of reality. City life teemed with bias and rules that fractured our confidence and in high school we wrote letters to one another questioning who were we, really. Oh, we knew exactly who we were, but save our beloved bays, there seemed to be no place for us. The other life masked us and inside we felt fraudulent, unable to fit in without pretense. But not Margaret. We met up at an art gallery one winter afternoon after school, all of us in our uniforms, and in she trounced wearing steel-toe boots, frayed jeans, and a black turtleneck. Fall cottage clothes, and a thrill ran through us as she was turned away. She stood out front, blowing smoke rings in the frosty air and when told to move off, she sauntered away, flipping the bird at the outraged staff.
Googie said what we all thought: Let’s get out of here.
That was the winter the Dean’s son Finn ran away. Such a thing went too far, but there it was – Finn, gone, the Dean, sorrowed, his wife, spitting mad. Our parents informed us that under no circumstance were we to communicate with Finn. He was trouble. A deep sense of righteousness flooded through us. We’d been proven right. The summers of Finn’s taunting and picking at us had been like the air raid early warning systems heralding something that had the power to destroy us. But more than one of us wondered – why? Running from what? It plagued us all winter and into the summer, and we shared theories, none of which fit what faced us. We did not like Finn, not in the least, but he was ours to dislike, and in his absence, our gaze turned inward and we began to dislike ourselves.
And Margaret. She’d spent the winter studying psychology, Freud of all things. She then worked her way through psychologist Horney’s neurotic needs that challenged Freud and took great pleasure in assigning each of us a need and a neurotic counterpart. We preferred Finn’s pinches and name-calling to being told we were compliant, or detached in our relationships. She was, she proudly announced, aggressive in her style of relating to others.
Tell us something we don’t already know, we thought.
As summer unfurled, we were told to do our level best to be good and to help the Dean and his wife. Compliant, Margaret sneered. But our early idolatry – even Margaret’s – hadn’t waned, which is to say the Dean held us in his sway and we’d have done anything for him. And we’d always loved his wife, Jenny, a woman who banged away at her typewriter, cranking out a weekly piece for the city newspaper. No honorifics, she told us, just Jenny – a thrill to us, used as we were to titles and propriety. Once a week, she sent her opinion column down to the city and once a week, a new assignment came with copies of the paper from the week before. We never knew what to expect and it wasn’t until years later that we understood the meaning behind her pseudonym, J.D. Rye. We simply gloried in the idea that we were part of the secret, that we knew who she really was. We were sorely mistaken, and it was that summer that we learned you can’t know another until you know yourself, never mind Margaret’s stabs at knowledge.
Our minds, however, were on how we’d hide our feelings about Finn from the Dean and Jenny. We hadn’t forgotten the way he’d chopped the Seaflea to bits, the way he called Ellie monkeybutt. We hadn’t forgotten how small he made us feel. And we ached to shut Margaret up, any way we could, and spending time at the Dean’s cottage suited us.
So there we were one June afternoon, crammed in Margaret’s outboard, on our way to the Dean’s cottage. The sky above cupped the sun in a goblet of blue-white cloud. Anything was possible. One of us said, High this year, and pointed to the telltale water lines on the rocks. The channel marker bobbed, the boat veered and turned and we lifted our faces to the sun, exclaiming Finally. Relief coursed through us as we thought how much safer it was here than in the city where we struggled with wanting to be liked. Compliant, sneered Margaret. Our mothers said wanting to be liked showed weakness of character and led to temptations we might not be able to resist. We didn’t ask. We didn’t need to. They were all thinking Finn but we were thinking about how to sneak the vodka each of us stole from poorly managed shops in our city neighborhoods to our weekly parties. Liter bottles of clear truth serum. Aggressive, nodded Margaret happily.
Margaret cut the motor and sat up on the transom, away from the gas tank. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her back pocket, tapped the pack on her knee, and like magic, one popped out. She offered the pack around, but we shook our heads. Suit yourself, she said, and she lit up. Not a cough came out of her, just a thin steam of smoke, and finally Googie said, All right, you silly sod, give me one. The two of them smoked their cigarettes down to the filter, then tossed them in the lake.
Oh, said Ellie, that’s bad.
Shut the fuck up, said Margaret. She slipped off the transom and started the motor, and before we could shut our gaping mouths, the Dean’s cottage was in sight. One of us turned to look at Margaret, who winked like an evil cartoon character, one eye baldly askew as it looked to the future, the other stuck like an electric garage door that doesn’t know to go up or down.
We docked and whistled for the Dean’s dog Squiggers, a cross between a wild animal and a husky. Wolf, we thought, but the cur had tin-blue eyes that seemed to cut through everything in its path. It didn’t mind us, never had, but that year it got down low in front of Margaret and howled. She backed up like she’d been caught stealing penny candy. How’s that for aggressive, one of us whispered. Down boy, said another.
Funny, said the Dean, as he came out of the workshop. That’s how he greeted Finn. Margaret patted her back pocket, looked the Dean all straight and wouldn’t-butter-melt in her dirty mouth, said how sorry we all were about Finn. The Dean stared back at her as he ruffled Ellie’s hair, and said Is that right? He troubled you so, now didn’t he?
He was just maturing, said Ellie, primly. This cut the Dean right up and he laughed so hard he started choking and had to sit down right there in the Grove. Jenny must have seen from the verandah and she came rushing down and we parted like the Red Sea to let her through. The veins on the Dean’s thin face were popping out and the white scar from where the war-time prop plane conked him near jumped off his neck. Squiggers belly-crawled over to the Dean and licked his hand. It’s all right, boy, he said. It’ll be all right. He flung a stick and Squiggers loped away.
Got a surprise for you all, said the Dean, and we looked to the side, half expecting Finn to appear. Follow on, motioned the Dean, swinging his arm, and we tromped after him. Out back behind the outhouse we went, down the path that seemed wider and flatter than in years past. Ahead of us, a blue-tarped shape. Guess, said the Dean, go on, give it a try.
One of us said boat. Don’t be daft, said Margaret. A boat would be down by the water. Just tell us, she said, and it was the touch of snootiness in her voice that had the Dean glancing her way a second time that afternoon. He shook his head at her – we saw it cross your heart we did – and rolled back that bright blue tarp, revealing a tractor with front-end bucket.
Blue Jesus, said Margaret. How?
Brought it here by barge, said the Dean. What’d you think, it flew here? Ellie gasped, said later she’d never heard the Dean use that sharp tone, said we should have known, said we might have understood if we’d just paid attention. But our attention was on the building supplies stacked next to the tractor.
And that was our project that summer, building a shed for the tractor. Jenny even wrote a column about us titled “The Next Generation.” We were the women who could do anything, she wrote, the ones who held no truck with foppish falsehood. Women who’d not be imprisoned by the weakness of pretending to be something they were not. Muscled women who knew themselves. Educated women who knew a trap when they saw one.
But we didn’t, not really. We just liked knowing we could do something – and that shed was rock-hard proof. One afternoon after we’d put the last of the stain on it, we gathered our tools and walked down the path to the workshop. Angry voices erupted from the verandah and we stood stock still, sweat puddling beneath our eyes.
Don’t you be putting too much on them like you did with Finn, the Dean told Jenny. Look what happened with him.
Blue Jesus, muttered Margaret. So he thinks it’s her fucking fault. It’s always the mother, isn’t it?
We moved down to the Grove and put our tools away, left the brushes to soak in turpentine. We felt the Dean and Jenny watching us and without warning, anger rushed through us, all of us, all at once, as if we felt a secret without knowing what it was. We’d been compliant, too complaint. Our heat steamed the air around us, and we hated one another, hated the bay, hated being pulled about like witless children. The fast spreading light of late morning rays revealed the formless dark spot we hadn’t known existed. We hated ourselves.
Favor, said the Dean, as he headed our way. He coughed, rubbed the scar on his neck a little. Maybe you – you all that is – would stay here with Squiggers for a night? Jenny and I need to go to the city, and yes, I checked with your parents.
Our spines tingled. Alone? At the Dean’s?
Plenty of beds, he said, and this was true enough. Bring your own food, though, he said, as if we needed to be told how supplies were carefully allotted by each cottager to avoid any unnecessary trips to the harbor. And two days later we watched the Dean and Jenny pull out in their boat, leaving us with Squiggers. Margaret lit up a cigarette and pulled out her bottle of vodka. By the time night fell we’d found Finn’s guitar and sang like banshees to what might have been music. Ellie didn’t have a drop, and she skittered around, picking up cigarette butts and mopping up spills, reminding us to keep the screen shut because mosquitoes, you know. Squiggers eyed us from his corner.
We decided to go for a swim to sober up before the next round. Off the dock we dove and dove, our skin like silk in the star-lit depths. We treaded water, our arms up in the air, somersaulted and flipped, washed away our angst. Margaret crawled out first, sat naked on the dock, sibylline and mysterious, smoking a cigarette. That red-tipped glow in the dark, the smoke rising in the still air seemed a thing of beauty. She stood up and flicked the butt through the air, and it arced like a wand, illuminating our wickedness. Chilled with something we cannot name to this day, although it may have been a warning, we ran up the path to the cottage. Huddled under blankets, we listened as Margaret told us Finn’s story. How she knew we never found out. He’d robbed a series of houses and been picked up, jailed. He’d called the Dean and Jenny to bail him out, but they’d refused.
That a parent might turn away from a child unmoored us, shattered all we’d held dear. We vowed to go our own way and never look back. We looked to Margaret for approval, but she was passed out. Blue Jesus, whispered Ellie. What a mess.
We didn’t go back to the Dean’s cottage after that. He’d become the enemy and we saw what we’d failed to notice before – how strict and straight he was, how punishing he was in his affection, how if he’d been our father we’d have smashed the Seaflea too. We thought, with all the arrogance of the young, that we knew all there was to know.
We didn’t know one of the houses Finn robbed was his own, that he’d stolen the Dean and Jenny’s bank books and had emptied one of the smaller accounts before he’d been caught, spent all the money on drugs. We didn’t know he’d nearly OD’d and had spent days in the hospital, that jail was safer for him than the streets where he’d score more drugs.
We didn’t know that parents don’t have all the answers, that it’s not a matter of being compliant, detached, or aggressive. We didn’t know we were about to throw away the one good thing we had, the one way of being that granted us freedom. What would it have changed if we did? Nothing.
When summer ended it was with great relief that we left the bays. As our boats headed past the club dock, the Dean waved. Fuck you, yelled Margaret. Sound carries over water, so we know he heard. He just kept waving, like we were on an ocean liner headed through mad waters across the pond. We didn’t wave back. Boulders we were, about to be jostled by an icy world. We did not know we would not return for many years, that our exile had begun. That if we wanted to come home, we would need to grow up.
Catherine Parnell
Catherine Parnell is an editor, educator and co-founder of MicroLit and Birch Bark Editing. She’s the Director of Publicity for Arrowsmith Press. Her publications include the memoir The Kingdom of His Will, as well as stories, essays, and reviews and interviews in Funicular, Litro, Heavy Feather Review, Mud Season Review (story and interview) Switch, Emerge (ELJ), Cult, Orca, Grande Dame, West Trade Review, Tenderly, Cleaver, Free State Review, Barnhouse, The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, The Southampton Review, The Baltimore Review, and other literary magazines. For more information, please visit her website, https://catherineparnell.com/