Envious Moon by Thomas Greene
I confess that sometimes I forget what she looks like. This upsets me. It doesn’t last for long, though, and lately I’ve developed a trick. I anchor myself in her freckles, those lovely freckles that covered her cheeks, and then I see her eyes, and her hair, and soon all of her comes into focus. Dr. Mitchell says this is a good sign, my forgetting. It means it’s time to move on, Anthony. You’re still a young man, he says. The funny thing is that at first they spend all this time having you remember everything. Go over every detail and then suddenly they don’t want to talk about it anymore. They want you to think about the future. They’ll tell you they believe in memory but the truth is they don’t. They want you to erase all that now. It’s such a big world out there, Anthony, they say. It could all be yours again. It could all be yours.
I was born in Galilee, Rhode Island, that small spit of land jutting out into the Atlantic Ocean. My father used to say our house faced Portugal, which is where he was from. My mother, too, though they met in Galilee. My father’s name was Rodrigo and he was a fisherman. My mother’s name was Berta and for years she cooked at a small college in Westerly. I was an only child. There was one who came after me, a little sister, Marta, but she lived for less than a week. I was two when that happened so I don’t remember it. But I know it had a strong effect on both my parents. They told me later that I spent most of her one week of life just staring at her in her crib. Every year we celebrated her birthday as if she had been a normal sister, someone I had known.
We lived in a small bungalow in a neighborhood of small bungalows built by fishermen for fishermen. Houses painted bright colors but built on cinder blocks with small fenced-in yards. Almost everyone who lived in Galilee made their living from the sea and in our neighborhood everyone was also Portuguese. My earliest memories are all about the ocean. We had only a small sandy yard and so the harbor and the commercial wharves, the beaches and the inlets, the tidal streams and rivers, were my playground. My father fished on commercial boats and was often gone for as long as a month at a time during the season. My mother rose early to cook breakfast for college students. My best friend, Victor Perez, who lived one street away, and I were our own keepers. As small boys we swam in the tidal river on warm days, leaping off the bridge that crossed it. We fished off the rocky beach and by seven I could gut a fish by myself. We were from poor families and were expected to work, so we did what we could. We delivered newspapers and shoveled snow in the winter. We washed down decks of boats. Stacked wood. Dug clams out of the tidal flats and brought them in buckets down to Teagan’s Seafood. And when my father was in between trips, he’d bring the two of us out at night on his small skiff to fish for blues and stripers. He’d lean against the gunwale and roll his own cigarettes and teach us everything he knew about fishing. He liked to talk and he liked to tell stories. My father was tall and handsome with thick hair and a prominent mustache. He had a quick temper but also a quick wit and he was my hero. Victor’s too, I think. Victor’s father drank and Victor spent as little time as he could at home. He was always at my house and I considered him a brother. As did my parents. And those times on the skiff are some of my most treasured memories. I wanted to be a man like my father. Roll my own cigarettes and wear my jeans tucked into mud boots. Have strong veiny forearms and a good mustache. Piercing brown eyes. Tell stories like he did.
The summer I turned ten my father got a new job on the Mavis, a swordboat. Swordfishing was the most lucrative of the commercial fishing jobs and that was a good summer and he made good money. We ate steak on nights he returned and listened to Red Sox games on the radio. The happiest nights of my life were the nights when he came home. We never knew when to expect him because a fishing boat only returns when it is full of fish or out of fuel. But somehow I could sense when he was on land. I don’t know how to describe it and maybe it was just luck. But he was never able to surprise us. I’d stand in the front yard and watch the street and think, he’s going to turn the corner now. It was like I was willing him to be there. And on those moments when I was right, I’d see him in the distance in the summer heat, at first only a figure outlined against the hot day. But there was no mistaking him, his walk. I’d run out to the street to him, yelling his name and when I got close, he’d stop and wait for me. He’d hold his arms out wide and smile. I’d jump into his arms and smell his cigarettes and all the fish he had caught. His sweat. He’d hold me up and kiss my cheeks and then put me down and tell me to get my mother. And it didn’t matter how tired he was, we’d still spend hours kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the road. He’d tell me stories about life at sea. I wanted nothing more than to be on a boat with him. To learn to fish as he did and sometimes when I told him this, his mood changed. You won’t be a fisherman, Anthony, he said.
My father always took the time to tell me how proud he was of me. Especially with how I did in school. I was a straight-A student from elementary school through junior high. They put me in a college-track program. I was the only son of a fisherman in those classes. That made my father prouder than anything. He taped my report cards to the refrigerator and he told all the men he worked with how smart his Anthony was. He used to tell me how I was going to go to a big college and then leave Galilee. I didn’t like when he said this because I could not imagine leaving Galilee. He always said I was going to go to New York, and live in a big house and drive a nice car and marry a pretty woman and have kids who had a better life than I had. It should be easier for each generation, he said. That’s our job as parents. I wanted to ask him: but what if I don’t want to leave Galilee? What’s wrong with my life? What if I want nothing more than to be like you? To fish with other men and when on land to kick a soccer ball with my son and eat steaks and listen to baseball?