Calypso(39)

One of the differences between his family and my own is the way we’ll listen to a story. It’s hard to finish more than a few sentences at a time when talking to his mother, who likes to interrupt either to accuse you of exaggerating—“Oh, now, that’s not true”—or to defend the person you’re talking about, someone, most often, she has never met. A stranger could hit me across the face with a sawed-off table leg, then kick me until my spinal column snapped, and still Joan would say, “Well, I’m sure he meant well.”

My family, on the other hand, is always happy to hear about how horrible someone is. You could wake any of my sisters from a sound sleep, say, “You won’t believe what this asshole said to me once in 1979,” and have her full attention. Not Joan, though. Or her daughter either. Tell Ann that you want the renters two doors down—the ones who blast country music from their boom box and howl, “Yeee-ha!” every two minutes—to die, and she’ll say, “You should never wish ill on people. That’s bad karma!”

Around the Hamricks, you can’t even denigrate sharks, which were on everyone’s mind in the summer of 2015. By the time we arrived, they had attacked eight swimmers, most of them in shallow water. People were canceling their vacation rentals, and it got even worse after two kids, one aged twelve and the other sixteen, had their arms bitten off.

“Yes, well, the sharks didn’t eat those arms,” Hugh said when I brought it up. To him this somehow made it better, though I didn’t see it that way at all. In fact, it made it worse. Why dismember young people for no reason?

“Besides,” Hugh said, “I go out far when I swim.”

“Right, but in order to get to where it’s deep you sort of have to pass through the shallow part.”

“But I can do that quickly,” he argued. “Anyway, sharks don’t want me. They want fish.”

It was clear I was wasting my breath. I said to Gretchen, “I just pray they get his left arm instead of his right one. That way he can still kind of cook.”



You can issue all the warnings you like, but nothing will keep a Hamrick out of the ocean. She’s frail, Hugh’s mother, a bit wobbly now, yet twice a day her children would lead her beyond the waves, one at each elbow, steadying her until they reached the calm water. Then they’d let go, and the three of them would swim for an hour at a time.

Gretchen and I watched them from the shore one afternoon, me gessoed with sunblock, and her glistening with what may have been bacon fat. The sight of Joan backstroking off into the distance made us think of our own mother. She would wade knee-deep in the ocean if she were fishing, but we never saw her go any farther. Even at the country club the most she’d do is stick her feet in the kiddie pool. She didn’t know how to swim. No one ever taught her. “Plus,” said Gretchen, “she didn’t want to get her hair wet.”

Time spent underwater would have been less time our mother had to observe people and discuss their shortcomings in a group setting. She even did it to us, her own children. “You won’t believe what Lisa’s done this time,” she’d whisper to me in the kitchen or living room, her cigarette stalled an inch from her mouth while this much more important business took place. Being her confidant made me feel special: only she and I could truly understand how stupid the people in my family were. The downside, I discovered, was that no one was safe. It was hurtful the first few times her criticism got back to me. (“I don’t know who he thinks he’s fooling with that Raquel Welch poster.”) Then I realized that it didn’t mean anything. Opinions constantly shifted and evolved, were fluid the same way thoughts were. Ten minutes into The Exorcist you might say, “This is boring.” An hour later you could decide that it was the best thing you’d ever seen, and it was no different with people. The villain at three in the afternoon might be the hero by sunset. It was all just storytelling.

Try explaining that to a Hamrick, though. “After I die, and you read something bad about yourself in my diary, do yourself a favor and keep reading,” I often say to Hugh. “I promise that on the next page you’ll find something flattering. Or maybe the page after that.”

Now I stood and waved to him out in the water. As I sat back down, Gretchen reached for her iPod and told me about a group of teenagers she recently ran into at the grocery store near her house. “They were fourteen, maybe fifteen years old, laughing and pushing each other—just awful, right? So I went over and told them to shut up.”

I took off my shirt and balled it up for use as a pillow. “Wow.”

“I know it,” Gretchen said. “Normally I wouldn’t have gotten involved. Then, of course, they wound up behind me in line, still loud and obnoxious, and almost like there was someone else inhabiting my body, I turned around and said, ‘Did I not tell you to shut the fuck up?’”

“Then what happened?” I asked.

She lit a cigarette and shrugged. “They shut the fuck up.”



That night at the Sorry! board, Kathy told me that she and Madelyn had stopped by the pier earlier in the day and watched as people fed the sharks. “There must have been ten of them, some as long as five feet,” she said.

“Are you hearing this?” I called to Hugh. He was sitting on the porch with his mother and sister, no doubt recalling the time they chased a hippo from their tennis court back when they lived in the Congo. God, those Hamricks can reminisce. “Kathy saw twenty-five sharks, some of them twelve feet long, at the pier this afternoon.”