Monterey Bay(15)
The only interruption to this stasis was when the cannery whistles blew. For some reason, the sound allowed her to relax a bit, to unclench her jaw. From her perch on the hill, it could all be witnessed from above: the sardine boats skirting the land, the gulls descending, her neighbors spilling onto the streets as if spit out by their own homes. At first, she expected all of them to look like Arthur, but they didn’t. The cannery workers in her neighborhood were entirely Italian, almost entirely women, denizens of that peculiar socioeconomic territory of the ascendant middle class. The husbands, she soon learned, had jobs on the boats, catching the fish the wives put into cans, and the circularity of this arrangement fascinated her. What was it like, she wondered, when both husband and wife came together at nightfall and began to move behind their windows? Was it clean inside their houses? Did they eat their dinners together? Did they share the same beds? Did the beds smell ineradicably of fish? When they had their festivals—processions that guided life-size plaster saints through the streets—did they feel better in the aftermath, did they feel as if something had been addressed or solved? Or did they feel the way she always did during moments of supposed import: holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, none of them signifying anything except the unfortunate human desire to kick the can of meaning further and further down an endless road?
The most important ideas, though, didn’t come to her on the porch. They arrived at night and they had nothing to do with the cannery workers or her father. Stretched out on the straw pallet, she would indulge in the gory, exhilarating specifics. She would stare at the walls, using their pocks and fissures to map out what had been taken from her, what had been given, the biologist’s body on top of hers, her mouth on his neck, her freedom so complete that she felt as though, if he moved aside, she would float up to the ceiling and stay there until someone found a gun and shot her down. She could no longer be patient, she told herself, she could no longer wait. But then the sun would rise and her father would remind her—not in words, of course, but in actions—that she would get what she wanted only by pretending not to want it. Keep calm, keep watchful, keep ready for the proper moment to take her aim and tighten her grip.
Then, one day, the moment was at hand. At first, the signs were subtle. In the morning, a doctor came to remove her stitches, utter a few stock phrases of reassurance, and then leave her with nothing but an aching head and a vial of disinfectant. Around lunchtime, someone from the rental company reclaimed the Packard, which had been sitting unused on the street since their departure from the hotel. That afternoon, the arrival of the promised sofa: a claw-footed, button-tufted, horsehair monstrosity. That night, when the water grew black against the sky, her father’s shape appeared at the base of the hill a few minutes later than usual. He looked the same as ever, at least in terms of attire: the three-piece cheviot suit, the striped necktie, the polished brogues, the same Surrey collar that she, too, had long favored. In his hands, however, was a bag of groceries and on his face an almost theatrical contentment.
When he reached the house, she stood and followed him inside.
“Get out the good china,” he said, placing the groceries on the kitchen counter.
“We have good china?”
“We do indeed. It came with the sofa.” The broadness of his smile shocked her.
“Why?”
“Because I just bought the largest cannery in town.”
As they prepared dinner, he was unusually animated, as lively as the night was still.
“And the biggest question of all is how anyone fails to see it!” He stopped midchop and looked up at her with big, sharp eyes, the diameters of which were increased nearly twofold as a result of his eyeglasses. “Time was, you could sell one otter pelt—just one—to a member of the Chinese aristocracy and earn enough to buy a house. So they all swooped in: Spaniards, Russians, Bostonians, all of them convinced the supply would never dwindle, which of course it did. But did they turn their sights in a new direction? Seek out an alternative to self-inflicted feast and famine? No! No, indeed! When the otters were gone, they went for the whales: a man named Davenport blazing the trail, only to be throttled at his own game by the Portuguese, who ran the show until—in a surprise to end all surprises—the whales disappeared, too. And we could talk about the abalones, but I’d hate to sound tiresome.”
Here, he fell silent, but not peacefully so. There was effort involved in this version of muteness, and he was taking it out on the squid: the beheading, the disembowelment, the slicing into rings. He enjoyed kitchen work, butchery in particular, viscerally and without any shame regarding the perceived gender reversal, and tonight it seemed especially significant. The resumption of a ritual. A possible sign that their mutual antipathy was at an end.
She scooped up the squid rings, dumped them into the hot skillet, and waited for the white flesh to start popping.
“The abalones,” she prompted after the proper interval had passed. “What about them?”
His knife was working again, ripping through a foreign cluster of herbs, rocking and flashing against the wooden board. “It was the local Chinese who reaped the rewards first, who created the overseas market. Then, before they knew it, their big-city cousins had come to town: thousands of San Franciscans with better fishing methods and bigger boats and more secure connections to the homeland. When the abalones were gone, the visitors from the north ended up rich. The locals, needless to say, did not. They had to start fishing for squid instead.”