I said, I need to see the dark silhouettes of blue and gray whales moving like submarines through the sea.
He said only, Oh, little one, which is what he always says these days.
Instead, Peter took some personal days and we left that weekend for the Oregon coast, our first whale-watching trip. It was the second trip to Oregon on which I felt the saltwater spray of the adolescent humpback and on which Peter refused to make me a Punnett square. For the third trip I borrowed Peter’s car and went alone, though he said, I can get the time off, and meant it. I have not made things easy for him.
I saw no whales in the Oregon sea. I missed my sister. I hadn’t seen Gwen since we got back from Vegas, two months before, and I was sick over it. And yet as I drove toward the city I didn’t want to go home, didn’t want to see her. I took my time unpacking, folding clean clothes neatly. I didn’t call Peter to say I was back, that I was okay. I slowly rode my bike out to Gwen’s apartment.
I buzzed and buzzed. There was no answer. From the street I saw that the apartment was lit, though the shades were drawn. I could see Gwen’s silhouette moving from the living room to the kitchen and back, so I used my key and let myself in. Inside the apartment, I came down the hallway and found Gwen wiping the kitchen counter with a sponge. Graceland blared from an old CD player on the counter.
Oh, she said, startled. She turned the music down. I must not have heard you buzz.
This was her way of saying, I hope you aren’t abusing your key.
After a bit she nodded to the CD player. Mom used to play this, she said.
I remember, I said. All the time.
Gwen isn’t a music lover. She probably hasn’t listened to anything besides NPR since her senior year of high school. Once, we rented a car and drove to Santa Cruz and I made her listen to Common and she complained the whole way there. And here she was with Paul Simon. I thought, if you were a musical hermit and your older sister had been recommending you new bands and burning you CDs since you were in the sixth grade, why would you suddenly, after all these years, run out and pick up Paul Simon? Which is to say, of all things to listen to she picks that?
But I didn’t say anything and she went on wiping the counter, standing on her tiptoes to reach the center of the wide island. I picked up a tangerine from the fruit bowl and started peeling it with my thumbnail. I watched how she turned her body to avoid pressing her large belly against the edge of the counter.
I often think about my unborn future beautiful niece. I have plans to buy her nongendered, nonbranded toys: books where the girl characters are smart and adventurous and independent, chemistry sets, plastic models of all the great land mammals, extinct and not. I will read her Rudyard Kipling and show her Dumbo. I hope being a beauty will not be as lonely as they say it is. I am not sure our family can handle much more loneliness.
Finally I asked Gwen, Can we turn this down?
I moved away from Vegas when I was eighteen, so I’ve been flying there for nearly ten years. In these years I have formulated a theory that all flights into Las Vegas are purposely orchestrated to be as festively stupid as they are to make the idea of traveling to the city for any other reason than to gamble seem hopelessly, painfully bleak. Gwen’s and my flight was no exception. As the plane ascended, the flight attendants flung packets of peanuts down the aisle, gravity pulling them toward the tail, and a voice over the intercom urged us to grab them as they slid past.
It said: Ladies and gentlemen, you’ll find your return flight to San Francisco to be a bit more crowded. The voice said this though the flight was full.
It said: Weight restrictions on this Boeing 757 allow more passengers on return flights from Las Vegas, as their pocketbooks are significantly lighter. And the passengers chuckled and munched their peanuts and they were happy happy happy. And I’ll tell you I envied them. Because this was the voice’s way of saying, We’re going to drop you off in this city and it will take you by your ankles, turn you upside down and shake everything from you. And this was something my sister and I had to learn for ourselves.
As we taxied at McCarran International, the voice came over the PA. again. Pick up as many peanut wrappers from the floor and seats around you as you can, it said. They will bring you luck!
The woman in the aisle seat next to us leaned forward against her seat belt, reaching eagerly for a wrapper. Without taking her eyes from the woman, Gwen said, Do you ever dream about Mom?
No, I said. Not really. Not any more than I dream about anyone else.
The last time I rode from the Mission up the hill to Sunset—to Gwen’s—I rode with bags strapped to my back. Because her place has a washer and dryer and mine doesn’t, I often abuse my key privileges to do laundry while she and Jacob are at work. That day, I put my things in the washer and went upstairs to wait for the cycle to finish.
The apartment was different, filled with new things. New posters on the walls, framed. New books on the shelves, new CDs near the computer, new magazines on the coffee table. Georgia O’Keeffe. Tony Hillerman. Our Bodies, Ourselves. James Taylor. The Utne Reader. The Indigo Girls. Annuals, Perennials and Bulbs. Albert Einstein’s Ideas and Opinions. Baez Sings Dylan. Cadillac Desert. The “Heart of Gold” single.
All our mother’s things. But not hers exactly, new things, uncracked book spines, unfolded pages, CDs instead of tapes. No water damage, no dust, no coffee rings, no scribblings in the margins. Things from the house where we grew up, but not from the house where we grew up. Things from Barnes & Noble and the Best Buy on Geary. It was disorienting, gave me the feeling you get when you wake up from a nap and the sky isn’t black or blue but hazy gray, and you can’t tell whether it’s five a.m. or five p.m., can’t tell how long you’ve been asleep. I got dizzy. I went to the bathroom, thought I might throw up but didn’t. I knelt at the toilet for I don’t know how long, staring at a copy of Reader’s Digest on the tank.
I rode home hard and fast, without my things but still weighed down. At my apartment the warm scent of taco meat and raw onion was heavy in the air. I wanted to call Peter, or rather I wanted to want to call him, to tell him what happened and what it meant, to let him back into me and never shut him out again. But instead I turned on Dumbo, letting the light from the TV wash over me.
I cannot watch Dumbo without crying. It’s that scene with the mother, or more specifically, the way the tears literally roll down baby Dumbo’s cheeks when they lock her up, and the way she stretches her trunk out through the iron bars and cradles Dumbo, rocks him to sleep. If I could have called Peter, this is what I would have said: If you were the Stork and you were delivering little baby Dumbo and you had to maneuver his bundle between iron bars to lower him down to his mother, wouldn’t you think twice about delivering him in the first place? Which is to say, how could the Stork bring a large-eared, sensitive and easily frightened baby elephant into this world?
When Peter came over that night, I was nearly asleep on the couch, the blue glow from the TV the only light on in the room. He sat on the edge of the couch and stroked my hair.