My One Hundred Adventures Part 1

My One Hundred Adventures.

Polly Horvath.

Summer Begins.

All summers take me back to the sea. There in the long eelgra.s.s, like birds' eggs waiting to be hatched, my brothers and sister and I sit, gra.s.ses higher than our heads, arms and legs like thicker versions of the gra.s.s waving in the wind, looking up at the blue washed sky. My mother is gathering food for dinner: clams and mussels and the sharply salty greens that grow by the sh.o.r.e. It is warm enough to lie here in the little silty puddles like bathwater left in the tub after the plug has been pulled. It is the beginning of July and we have two months to live out the long, nurturing days, watching the geese and the salt.w.a.ter swans and the tides as they are today, slipping out, out, out as the moon pulls the other three seasons far away wherever it takes things. Out past the planets, far away from Ura.n.u.s and the edge of our solar system, into the brilliantly lit dark where the things we don't know about yet reside. Out past my childhood, out past the ghosts, out past the breakwater of the stars. Like the silvery lace curtains of my bedroom being drawn from my window, letting in light, so the moon gently pulls back the layers of the year, leaving the best part open and free. So summer comes to me.

"Jane, Maya, Hershel, Max," calls my mother. She always calls my name first. She is finished gathering and her baskets are heavy. We run to help her bring things back to the house. No one else lives year-round on the beach but us. A poet with no money can still live very well, my mother reminds us, and I do not know why. Who would think having to leave the ocean for most of the year is a better way to live? How could we not live well, the five of us together? I love our house. I love the bedroom I share with my sister. Our house has no upstairs like the houses of my friends. It has one floor with a kitchen that is part of a larger room, and off of this large room with its big table and rocking chairs and its soft old couch and armchair and miles of booklined shelves are three bedrooms. One for my mother, one for my brothers, one for my sister and me. "I love this house," I say to my mother often. "You cannot love it as I do," she says. "No one can ever love it as I do."

There's a big red-and-white-checked oilcloth on the kitchen table and an old wine bottle with a dripping candle in the center of it. Our bedroom has two sagging cots topped with old Pendleton blankets. My mother says there is nothing like a Pendleton blanket for keeping you warm at night. She says this especially on nights when the storms are coming in from the northeast and the house is cold and the wind is blowing through the cracks and we read books by candlelight because the electricity is out again. We love the winter because when our power goes out there are no other houses alight on this sh.o.r.e. Their occupants have all gone home until next summer. We are all alone. It is darker than dark then. You can hear the waves crash louder when it is dark. You can smell the sharper smells of the sea. Maybe the wind will take us this time, I think, as a gust shakes the foundations of the house. Maybe we will be blown apart to the many corners of the earth, and I am filled with sadness to lose the other four, but then a sharp stab of something, excitement maybe. It is the prospect of adventures to be had.

On Sundays we walk as we always do, fall, winter, spring, summer, any weather, to the little steepled church in town. We get sand in our good church shoes walking over the beach and sit on cement dividers when we get to the parking lot, dumping our shoes, as much a church ritual now as kneeling at prayer. The church is just the right size, not too large. It has two rooms, one of which is for the Sunday schoolers. We stand in the woody-smelling pews with the soft, much-opened hymnbooks and sing. But despite all this churchgoing every Sunday of every year, it isn't until this year, when I am twelve, that I have figured out I can pray. Perhaps I have had nothing to pray for until now. As if itchy and outgrown, my soul is twisting about my body, wanting something more to do this summer than the usual wading in the shallows and reading and building castles on the sh.o.r.e. I want something I know not what, which is what adventures are about. The step into the know-not-what. I want it so badly it is making me bad-tempered with Maya, who is too young to understand. She wants every summer the same, and so had I until this year. And my brothers are too young to care about anything like this for a long time. I am twisting all alone.

This week our preacher, a fat old lady named Nellie Phipps, says from her pulpit that you ought to pray all the time. Just about anything at all. It doesn't have to be sacred. And your prayers will be answered, she declares, your prayers will always be answered.

I pray for a hundred adventures. And maybe, I think, if I pray all the time unceasingly as Nellie is telling us we should, as I walk to town and help my mother shuck oysters, as I make baskets from reeds and sweep the floors or weed the vegetable garden, as I sit mooning over the movement of the wind and lying on my back, lost in the thoughtlessness of doing nothing, then there might be a response. And so I do and maybe it is because of this that it all happens.

Who would think that the universe would pay any attention to me? Who would think that someone who looks like Nellie Phipps would know?

A Stranger Comes.

My First Adventure.

The Strawberries Are Ripe.

It is at the end of a long summer day. My brothers are freckled with the sun and Maya and I have sunburned shoulders. And everyone's hair is dry and sticky with the sea. We have sand in our swimsuits and hang around outside by the picnic table as my mother goes in and out of the house, making salads and stirring the sun tea.

"Mayas were Indians," I say to Maya because she has come across her name in a book. Or thinks she has.

"Where did they live?" she asks.

"I don't know. Mexico, I think," I say. "And they had strange-looking round clay calendars. Our teacher had one she brought back from a trip to Mexico, only not a real one. She hung it in the cla.s.sroom. I don't remember anything else about the Mayas except they had gold." And then I think maybe that is the Aztecs but I don't bother to tell Maya this. I like being able to answer her questions even if I am wrong.

"I would like to have gold," says Maya. "I would make jewelry out of it."

"I think the Mayas did too," I say. "We can go to the library tomorrow and look it up."

The library in summer is the most wonderful thing because there you get books on any subject and read them each for only as long as they hold your interest, abandoning any that don't, halfway or a quarter of the way through if you like, and store up all that knowledge in the happy corners of your mind for your own self and not to show off how much you know or spit it back at your teacher on a test paper.

Mrs. Spinnaker comes out from next door. She is the only one on the beach like us without a lot of money. She has no sailboat or fancy things. She comes every year with her little black terrier, Horace, who runs to our picnic table when we are there and barks us into submission. "HORACE, you leave those children alone," she says, and stalks grumpily over, scooping him up, never acknowledging us, irritated because we have given Horace a chance to misbehave and make her wrong.

"But we don't mind, Mrs. Spinnaker," we tell her. We like Horace the way you like a familiar annoyance that spells home. He is part of our summers like the oysters and the sun tea and the sandy bare feet around the table. We wonder if Mrs. Spinnaker knows our names the way we know hers and Horace's. Does she hear our mother call us? Does she sit by her little cottage window and eavesdrop? Does she know not just our names but our characters? That Maya is afraid of things? That my mother rises in the night to write poetry? That Hershel doesn't eat the peas, as the rest of us do, right off the vine, and that Max is always seeing whales? "It's another whale," he cries, and we all nod and smile. Who knows? Maybe he does see them. Maybe there are whales the rest of us cannot see. Does Mrs. Spinnaker put her head out the side window, the window not visible from our house, so that we cannot see her looking out to sea, checking for Max's whales?

Don't worry, Mrs. Spinnaker, I want to yell to her, in case she does this and it troubles her-it's always okay to do things just in case. It's better to be fooled a hundred times than never to look. Who cares if you are fooled? And I make my one hundredth prayer.

Maybe it is a coincidence. Or maybe we never know why our prayers are answered. But anyhow, we are sitting down to dinner and I have prayed my one hundredth prayer when he shows up.

He is a tall man with s.h.a.ggy hair and bad teeth, in a suit too big for his sharp, elbowy frame. He looks like a clothes hanger. I keep staring at him thinking he is the wrong shape for his suit. That he looks old, although you can tell he isn't really, and the suit looks worn and what is he doing at our picnic table?

My mother must think he looks hungry because she invites him to sit down and eat and he does without any more preamble than that. He fills his plate with my mother's good food, the oysters and the corn bread and the salad made from the greens in our garden and the greens from the sea and says how good it all is and I think maybe he is thin because he is always hungry. And when he is done he rises, we have hardly begun our own dinners-hunger has given him an efficient way to eat-and he says, "I'd like to thank you all by taking you to a fair."

"No reason to thank us," says my mother. "You were welcome to it. You were invited."

"Not many people would have invited me," he says.

"Well, I don't know about that," says my mother. "Not Mrs. Spinnaker, perhaps," and she laughs. Then she covers her mouth with her hands as if the laugh surprises her. I think it amazes her that this man has pulled such candor out of her. "Anyhow, stay a bit if you like. Have some dessert. Our strawberries are ripe."

"Ummm," says the man. "I'd like to do that."

He settles back down into one of our Adirondack chairs by the side of the house and waits politely for all of us to finish eating. We are made self-conscious by an audience that isn't Mrs. Spinnaker.

My mother picks a big bowl of strawberries and brings out the sugar bowl and some milk to put on them. There aren't quite enough to go around, and my brothers look worried that this stranger is going to get theirs, so I eat only one and say I am full. I wonder what to do at the table, until Max stands up and says he sees a whale, and that gives me an excuse to walk down to the ocean for a better look.

When I get back we are going to the fair after all.

It doesn't take long to wash up. My mother makes us grab sweaters. Evenings grow cool when the sun goes down, she warns. Then adds, If we stay that long at the fair, as if she has been presumptuous.

"I didn't even know there was a fair in town," she says to the man as we walk along. "There hasn't been much commotion about it. No flyers or signs. I haven't heard people talking of it. Not even the children at church. Usually our minister will warn of such things. 'Children, don't go run and join the circus!' That sort of caution."

"Well, I don't believe children do that very often, if they ever did," says the man. He has a slow, lanky stride and a slow, lanky way of piecing his words together to go with it, a kind of disheveled looseness that is very calming. As if he knows holding it all together isn't very important. It does not calm my mother, though; she is under some great restrained excitement that would make the air buzz if she let any of it escape. As if she is full of little bubbles, which if she opens her mouth too much will carbonate the air all around us. I watch her carefully, expecting her to float off into the sky, carried away on the corked gaseous wonder of the evening.

"It must be a very small fair," she decides.

"It is. It is a very small fair," says the man, and that is all. We walk in silence.

When we get there we see he is right. They have set up on the park by the public beach where we seldom go, having a beach of our own. There are a Ferris wheel and a merry-go-round and something called the Octopus. None of us has ever been on rides before and I guess we wouldn't now except the man knows some of the men who run them. We don't ask how. They let us on for free.

We ride and get off and ride again. I wish he knew the men at the cotton candy stall. There is only one food stall but it sells most everything you could possibly want, cotton candy and candy apples, hot dogs and snow cones and caramel corn. I turn my head and try not to smell and try especially not to look, to betray any desire. My brothers are so busy riding, their heads in such a spin that they have no time for such thoughts, and it turns out Maya likes the rides fine but her stomach doesn't. I have to keep taking her off behind a tent where the Porta Potties are. She thinks she is going to be sick but never is.

The air goes round and round, pushed by the wind of the whirling rides, and children crying out in delight move every which way. The park is in a swirl. We are all rushing about, and I think how n.o.body smashes into anyone else although all is movement. We make eddies and channels in the air with our bodies between the rides and the movement of the rides and the movement of our breath, and all the time the ocean slaps into sh.o.r.e back and forth, back and forth, its eternal movement seeming suddenly prosaic in comparison to this froth we create on the sh.o.r.e. And I realize we are all more powerful than the sea, able to go as we wish, unlike the steady coming and going of the tide, which is powerless to change its prescribed motion.

My mother lets us stay after the sun has set. She and the man keep walking around. At one point we see them down on the public dock, just sitting, talking and watching the stars come out. Another time she is settled back against the side of a shed and he has one hand resting over her head, sort of leaning over her as he talks, and she has one foot off the ground, playing with a shoe in a way I have never seen her do before.

On one of Maya's trips to the Porta Potti we see them laughing and joking around with one of the men who run the Octopus. They get on and ride around and around and the man running the ride doesn't make them get off in between the way he does everyone else.

"Does Mama like that man?" asks Maya.

"I don't see how she can, she just met him," I say.

"I guess you can like someone you've just met," says Maya. "I do sometimes."

"Well, I guess you can," I say, "but it sure doesn't seem like Mama."

I am hungry and tired and it is time to go home. Even the boys are tired. Every star in the universe is out and it is so bright about us it almost makes us trip over our feet, blinded by ambient light, distracted by sparkles.

The man doesn't walk back to our house with us but stops by an old car parked on Main Street.

"This is mine," he says. "I guess I'll be going now."

"Well, well," says my mother, meaning nothing by it, I can tell. Just making a sound.

"Thanks for dinner," says the man.

"Thanks for the fair," says my mother.

Once he drives off we make our way back to our house through the thickness of the night. My mother makes toast that she and I eat, sitting at the kitchen table, staring in the direction of the rushing sound of the invisible sea, which keeps us company always here so that none of us is ever really alone.

My brothers and sisters are in bed, exhausted and sandy. My mother didn't even make them wash first but I suppose after such an adventure it doesn't matter. My mother does not usually have adventures either and she seems all dreamy with the memory of this one. She sits and her shoe hangs off one foot the way it did with the man and she plays with it and looks out the window again as if her past is contained there in the movement of the invisible sea. We eat more toast.

"I'm off to bed now," I say. "I wonder if we'll see that man again tomorrow."

"I don't expect we will. It isn't like him to come around more than once a century or so," she says, and smiles to herself.

As I go to bed I think what an odd thing to say about someone you don't even know. But then, he does come. He comes again in the morning and brings a bouquet of daisies and leaves it at our door with a note that says he is off now for good. And as he walks away my mother hums a little tune to herself.

"That was your father," she says, and hangs the laundry on the line, shooing away the boys, who are stirring up dust around the clean, wet clothes.

Mrs. Parks's Thrombosis.

My Second Adventure.

Later in the day I look at Max and Maya and Hershel. Does any of us look like the clothes hanger man? It doesn't feel possible to me that my brothers or sister or I could have a father. And we are all so different. Max is small and dark and Hershel and I have sandy hair. Maya is round and rosy and light. It doesn't seem to me that such a person as the clothes hanger man could have fathered us. If it were important, wouldn't my mother have mentioned it before now?

Perhaps my mother was having a poet's flight of fancy. She is always finding things on the sh.o.r.e or in the lagoon and bringing them into the house to dry, rocks and sh.e.l.ls and starfish. She sometimes brings things home from the sea that we don't recognize. Odd bits of sponge and sea life. Then she names them. And in that moment we all believe her. It is mermaid hair, seahorse halter, Persephone weed, your father.

This is always how I thought she found us. Washed up on sh.o.r.e. Carrying us home in her pockets. Jane, Maya, Max, Hershel. That she is enough in herself alone to have made us. That she has dreamt us into being.

And now I think she has found this man and decided to give us a father to view. She has found him on the rocks, aired him out, brought him into our house, and will later return him to the sea. This feels right to me and I return him happily there myself. I don't need this father, I want to say to her. I am happy with things as they are. You don't have to scrounge one from the sea to satisfy me.

I am thinking these thoughts and staring out the window when I see a woman making her way across the beach to our house. It is Mrs. Merriweather from the church. Finally she reaches our door and knocks on it and my mother answers. Mrs. Merriweather has news! She doesn't know my mother very well but they both know Mrs. Parks. Mrs. Parks has had a thrombosis!

"My heavens, when did this occur?" asks my mother, always concerned for the sick and dying. She writes them poems when there is nothing else to be done.

"n.o.body knows exactly when it occurred," says Mrs. Merriweather. She is eyeing the big plate of just-made oatmeal cookies on our kitchen table. She sits down and eats three rapidly as if afraid that at any moment we will tell her to stop.

When she speaks again it is with a full mouth. "But she noticed it early this morning when she was out with her geese."

"Those geese would cause anyone to thrombose," says my mother, sitting down and eating a cookie herself.

"They are evil birds. All birds are evil as far as I'm concerned, but geese are the most evil. Bad intentions bespeak bad hearts, and geese come at you and bite. Well, anyway, I would be happy to stay with Mrs. Parks-she's taken a notion that the thing may travel up to her brain and snap out her lights like this!" Mrs. Merriweather snaps her fingers to demonstrate.

"My, my," says my mother. She has laundry on the line, and a look at the sky tells us it might have to be taken down anytime soon, but you don't leave a neighbor to have her lights snapped out by a wandering thrombosis over a trifle like clean clothes.

"I would normally be happy to stay with her and keep watch for any unusual brain activity, but you know it's strawberry season and I've promised to drive up to Maine today with some for my sister Beatrice."

"Is she jamming?" asks my mother. "I am making strawberry jam myself this week."

"It isn't just that, my dear. I wouldn't leave Mrs. Parks for that. No, it's that I promised her berries. Their strawberries are no good up there. It's a queer dark tree-laden state. Full of old lumberjacks and bears and those dark, tart blueberries. Not like here, where our sweet little strawberries grow."

"All they have are bitter berries," agrees my mother.

Mrs. Merriweather nods, thankful that my mother understands. They are fast becoming friends. "No...flavor...a-tall," whispers Mrs. Merriweather as if to seal their friendship with a conspiracy. "Now, I don't like to be a fussbudget but even if I took the day shift with Mrs. Parks and drove up tonight like the very devil, I'm afraid those berries when I got them to her would be mush. They're already picked at their peak. You know berries. But, of course, if this is not convenient for you, what with the children..."

"The children can come with me. Or Jane can watch them here. But I think they should come. They might cheer up Mrs. Parks. Perhaps they could take turns reading to her. Or rub her feet."

Maya and Max and Hershel look a bit wild-eyed at that. We are hovering in the background, waiting for the upshot of this visit.

"I'll come back for the night shift, then, dearie. I will be late but I will be here," says Mrs. Merriweather.

"I'm sure you're one hundred percent reliable," says my mother, and shakes Mrs. Merriweather's hand, which seems at once an oddly formal and a too intimate gesture. She is overcome by emotion at the thought of Mrs. Merriweather's goodness. Of her own.

"Summer storms are so fierce," says my mother as she finds her purse. Mrs. Merriweather nods. I know my mother is thinking of the laundry again and whether or not to take it off the line before we go. Mrs. Merriweather does not know why my mother is talking about storms. Mrs. Merriweather nods and smiles all the same. My mother is doing her a great favor.

"I don't want our underwear carried out to sea," my mother goes on.

"Well, no, of course you wouldn't. Of course you wouldn't want that," says Mrs. Merriweather, hustling us all out the door. She is pa.s.sionately agreeable in her hurry to get us to Mrs. Parks's.

"No, let's leave the laundry where it is," says my mother as we start across the beach for the parking lot and Mrs. Merriweather's car. It is always a treat to get a car ride. "Let's be optimists."

"I like your att.i.tude," says Mrs. Merriweather, huffing and puffing as her feet sink, leaving deep prints in the sand.

Mrs. Parks's house is a grim, old, narrow, gray thing, as parched and slit-eyed and suspicious-looking as Mrs. Parks. I do not know Mrs. Parks well, only from church and the looks she gives me or Maya or my brothers if we wiggle too much during the service.

My mother has brought a basket of her good lettuce for Mrs. Parks. When she opens the door, I can see that she needs stronger measures of hope than even my mother's lettuce can provide.

"I'M DYING!" Mrs. Parks cries. She grabs my mother around the neck and propels her down the steps.

"Oh no!" says my mother, who has not antic.i.p.ated being sucked into such a climactic occurrence quite so early in the visit. "Oh no."

"It's only a matter of time before THE THROMBOSIS REACHES MY BRAIN!"