My sister, Gwen, says it’s not so bad, living in a world where the largest land mammal is the grizzly bear. Largest carnivorous land mammal, I say. Okay, she says. Our mother killed herself six months ago, and Gwen thinks I should start letting myself be comforted by the natural world. She says when I feel anxious I should ride my bicycle down to Ocean Beach and stand on the ruins of the Sutro Baths and look out at the water and imagine the dark silhouettes of blue and gray whales moving like submarines through the sea. She says I should be more like Peter, on his little research vessel out on the bay, dipping his measurement tools into the water, listening. She says if I let myself, I’ll be comforted by my smallness. But then, she has always been braver than I.
I don’t tell Gwen that I have tried this. When I got back from Las Vegas, from scattering our mom’s ashes on the red sandstone foothills of Mount Charleston, Peter took me to the San Francisco Zoo. I saw the western lowland gorillas and the giant anteater. I cried and cried on a bench outside the Asian white rhino exhibit after seeing the marks in the enclosure where the rhino had worn his horn down to a stump, scraping it against concrete sculpted to look like mud. It was foggy at the zoo, and Peter sat silent beside me while I cried, his large hand on the small of my back, light as the fog mist on my skin. People walking by probably thought he’d broken my heart, when it is likely the other way around. We sat like that for a long time before he said, What’s wrong?
Just the same old thing, I said.
And he said finally, Ecosystems are complex things, Catie.
I have tried taking comfort in my smallness. I went whale watching off the coast of Oregon three times that month and never saw more than the drops of saltwater spray on my slicker from what they later told me was an adolescent humpback breaching about seventy-five yards off the opposite side of the boat. I don’t tell my sister any of this. I don’t tell her that I can’t go to the Sutro Baths anymore because I can’t stop thinking of the drowned boy and his drowned stepfather, whom I read about in the paper. The boy was walking along the rocks and slipped in. He kept his head above water, calling to his parents. His stepfather went in after him and both were dragged out to sea. They never found their bodies. The article didn’t mention it but there must have been a wife, a mother standing on the shore, watching her whole life slip toward the horizon. I don’t tell my sister that I can’t look out at the sea without imagining it filled with the waterlogged corpses of boys and polar bears.
I have seen old photos of the Sutro Baths from before it burned in 1966. It looks like it was a wonderful place, a giant glass-and-iron dome housing seven indoor swimming pools—six saltwater and one fresh—right at the edge of the sea. I even have a replica postcard on my refrigerator with a wide-hipped girl in a swim cap wading in the water and waving to the camera. It reads, I met her at the Sutro Baths. I said, “You swim like a duck.” She said, “O! You’re making a game of me!”
The photographs show great tall slides shooting swimmers out into the water, young men standing on one another’s shoulders, diving from the tiers above, piling as many people on the giant slides as can fit. But the beach has changed since those photos; the sea level seems higher, the beach narrower. If you go to the ruins now and envision, as I have, the great dome of glass and iron rising from the cement foundations of the seven pools, all that’s left, you can easily imagine the entire structure slipping into the sea.
I fear someday soon people will be the largest animals on the planet. Imagine living without the African elephant or the humpback to remind us of our scale, our relative size. What a place this would be without anything of such great weight and girth. When I explain this to him, Peter touches my hair lightly and says, You know what, little one? As a species we are getting larger. But we still seem so small.
My sister, for instance, is very small, like me. When new people stand close to me for the first time they often say, Oh, Catie, I didn’t realize you were so small. Sometimes they rest their elbows on my shoulder, or my head. I find this extremely obnoxious. But Gwen is smaller still; the crown of her head could nestle in my armpit. I admit that I sometimes rest my elbow on her shoulder, especially when we have not seen each other for a long time. One of the things I liked immediately about Peter was that he never leaned on me as though I were a walking stick.
Last November, my sister married a very tall, very wonderful man named Jacob, who I suspect never treats her like a walking stick. They have a big apartment in the Sunset District with a garage and a little rooftop garden. These things are not easy to come by. For example, I have a crumbling studio above a taqueria in the Mission. There are brown water stains dotting the ceiling, and both of my windows open to the view of my neighbor’s windows, so close I can lean out and press my fingertips to the sills.
When I first moved in, about two years ago, when Peter and I had just started dating, we painted my apartment together. Now, that memory baffles me. Or rather what baffles me is who we were then, the way we stood in the aisle at the hardware store, side by side, our fingers moving delicately over color samples. As though the perfect shade of pumpkin-colored paint would make the hot water run longer, the thick smell of carne and cilantro lighter, the neighborhood better. As though it would do anything for anyone.
Jacob, my brother-in-law, is six-four. He has long ropy limbs and can pick Gwen up like the elephants in Dumbo pick up poles with their trunks when they are assembling the circus tent. Do you remember that scene from Dumbo? Well, Jacob can hug Gwen like that and he often does. My heart is warmed by tall, ropy Jacob. I beamed at their wedding. Jacob and Gwen are having their first baby soon, and I hope Jacob’s tall genes do not go to waste. I hope they average each other out, at the very least. On our second whale-watching trip Peter and I sat on a narrow wooden bench inside the boat, wet and cold. Peter worked halfheartedly at a crossword puzzle. I asked him to do a Punnett square to see if Jacob and Gwen will average each other out at the very least.
He said, Catie, Punnett squares are not tarot cards. It is when he says things like this that I am reminded that Peter once knew me better than anyone in the world, very briefly, and that one day he could again.
Though they haven’t been told the sex of the baby, I have a feeling that Gwen will have a daughter and that she will be beautiful. She will be tall and thin and lithe like Jacob, with Gwen’s great big brown eyes. They will average each other out and I will be grateful.
In the third grade I won a spelling bee with the word grateful. When she was alive, my mom often told the story of how she felt when I won. She told it as this funny anecdote about how she and the other parents would let out a little cheer each time their child passed a round, and how each round there were fewer and fewer cheers, and how gradually, as I advanced, she became alienated from every other parent in the gymnasium. I cannot remember her even being there.
When I returned from Vegas, the bar where I work gave me time off, paid. Though I wanted to work, needed the tips, I took the time. Peter said we could do whatever I wanted, but the only thing I could think of was to go to the zoo, which we did. After that I wasted my days. Slept in. Watched Law & Order marathons and Dumbo. Napped. Waited for Peter to get off work. When he came home we ordered vegan Chinese, and on one of these nights I asked Peter to take me out on the bay in his research vessel, though I knew this was not allowed.