Do you have a number for me at home, he says.
I don’t, I say.
Here, he says, and writes it out on a slip from his pocket. Later, at my dorm, I lie on my bed looking at the number. It was a receipt he wrote on. $10.00, Japanese beetle, trap and bait. Augusta Hardware.
19
Around this time is when I start to throw up for what at first seems like surprising or unlikely reasons. At first, on the day in question, a day I spend in a sea kayak with Tom, I think that it is seasickness, even though I’ve never had travel sickness of any kind.
We are in Bar Harbor, today, sea kayaking. Tom has developed, since the stone-house episode, into something of a junior geologist. The sea kayak was a birthday present for him, and we’ve been practicing in it a few times a week. September is on us now up here, and we feel, as our paddles pluck at the waves, the chill wind off the sea, the cold front coming up just after the warm morning. We are out in the water off Burnt Porcupine Island, a tiny drop of stone spiny with spruce pines, and Tom navigates us to the edge of the shore through the bright-colored sea kayaks of the tours passing by, with their friendly instructors announcing loudly to speed up or slow down. We let them pass. We idle in the water in front of an enormous egg-shaped granite boulder, sitting, without a friend, among shattered sandstone and silt-stone at the top of a short stone beach.
Glacial erratics is when a boulder or rock of a very different era or climate is carried for great distances by a glacier and set down far away, where it remains, Tom says. And so it looks out of place. He indicates the near shore. I look.
The glacial erratic.
It looks very out of place, I say,
I try to imagine the area, covered in an ice blanket thirty stories tall and as long as the coast, shaving down the mountains, pushing the rocks into each other, like when the guys at the ice cream shop pound the toppings into the ice cream. Glaciers, carrying these boulders along on their underside like the pebbles that stick to my feet when I walk the beach. Thus preoccupied, we don’t notice, behind us, the Cat.
The Cat is a jet-propelled catamaran-style ferry built in Transylvania that can make the Bar Harbor — Nova Scotia passage in two and a half hours, half the time of the boat it replaced. The
Cat blows out of the harbor and the waves come out of its wake like water sprites cut loose to make mayhem. We almost don’t notice in time.
Fuck, Tom says, and he whips his oar into the water to shove us around. Get the stern facing the wave!
And too late I turn as he turns, too late as the kayak follows the wave up on its side. It doesn’t turn us all the way over, exactly, but the weight of the boat follows and then we are under. Here in the blue light of the water, I see Tom’s golden hair like kelp. I pull at my splash skirt, tug it free, and break the water, spitting. I wait to see Tom join me and he does, he spits, he says, Fucking assholes.
We aren’t far from the shore, and so we right the kayak and pull it in to shore. The water, even in summer, is the temperature of an ice cube melting in your shirt. The stones of the beach warm us as we walk up and lie down on them to dry off. Their dark color catches the heat better than white sand.
And then I feel the air catch that peculiar hardness, as if Mr. Zhe floated on a beam out of sight, waiting to take shape in front of me. And my stomach rises and tightens. I throw up.
Oh, man, Tom says. Are you all right?
Yes, I say, and I spit the rest out. Seawater.
I ask Mr. Zhe about glacial erratics on the first day of school. I’ve waited to ask him. We stand outside the pool, waiting to go in for practice. It’s forty minutes beforehand, and I know he gets there that early. I pretend I have the time wrong. I pretend he believes me. I’ve lately begun to feel he knows what I am thinking.
Oh sure, he says. Cool stuff. And he leaps the fence running the edge of campus. The grass there is from when this was old cow fields, and enormous rosebushes grow here and there in the middle, unruly giants. Mr. Zhe has taken cuttings from them, he tells me, for his garden at home, and is excited that he may have found some old roses. Among the fields in the roses are a few of these giant rocks.
This one is gray and ribbed with marble, it looks like, or quartz. This, he says, is a glacial erratic from Ellsworth. It’s old. But see here, how smooth it is? It was rubbed down. But here, and he points to places where the rock looks punched open, these are called shatter marks.
Chatter marks? I ask.
Shatter, he says. Where another rock pressed against the larger one with such force that they both broke as the glacier moved. The smaller one would have powdered, and here is where it shattered. The larger one looks like it’s been shot.
I like chatter marks better. Where the small stone was trying to talk to the big one, but because they were so close to each other, in the rub of the glacier, the small one exploded, trying to talk.
I’m having a reception on Labor Day, he says. An open house. I’ll tell the rest of the team. But Bridey and I will need some help and it would be great if you could, you know. Come by early. How’s that sound?
Fine, I say.
We’ll be expecting everyone at around three, so if you can be there at one, that’ll be great, he says, rubbing his hand along the shatter marks. And here the sun catches on him, coming through the trees. Gilt. Guilt. Gild. In my medieval lit books, it says that gilt first meant, blooded. And here in the sunset, he looks red, almost bloody. Not blood spilled, but the essence of blood, the red heat, the transaction of all life. A gas passing from one color to the next, blue to red, even the act of breathing a certain alchemy, sure of itself and its result.
I’ll be there at one, I say. I could bring my tarot cards, read fortunes in the tent.
He blinks and says, You know how to do that?
Sure, I say.
That’d be terrific, he says. And he pats the rock like a dog.
It’s not so much like a crush: I don’t do anagrams of his name. I don’t write our names together, on trees, in bathrooms, a heart drawn around it like a fence: Fee and Warden, forever love. I make sure there is no trace of what I am thinking. No paper (except me) for someone to find, no drawings of his face or poems, only the worn photograph from the night at the stone chapel, of someone he had once cherished and tried to give up. Fire, the fortune-teller had said. Fire clings to what it burns. No weight to it, just color, light, heat. Indeed.
The fire was inside me, though, the paper boy lit up like a paper lantern.
The practice is over too soon. I swim clumsily, I know. Mr. Zhe says little about it. I catch him watching me, a feeling not unlike sunlight falling on me, a warmth as particular as it is gentle, and for its gentleness, not unnoticeable, not unable to create, in me, a feeling like I am going to throw up. And after the practice, I do.
I stand in the stall and my stomach, mostly empty, throws whatever it finds into the bowl, which I flush repeatedly to cover the sound.
I lose weight. Everyone notices. At meals, the team jokes that I am vanishing. I am turning flat. I throw up a couple of times a week after practice. The paper boy. And in this state my grandparents demand and receive another visit.
You look thin, dear, my grandmother says, as she hugs me. And I can feel your shoulder blades. That’s bad. It means you’re near turning into an angel. She searches first my left and then my right eye, as if that’s where it will show.
In their home, the air is stuffy, fans everywhere try to cool the turgid air. I watch one in particular, where the blades, in their turning, create a shine not unlike sun crossing water.