Sea Wife - Amity Gaige Page 0,5

say to these people but didn’t), some of you won’t even let your kid climb a tree w/out first taking a tree-climbing class & wearing a harness. So I’m just not going to listen to you.

Secondly, I think there’s something wrong with the line of thought that it’s reasonable to defer your modest dream for several decades. What are we, characters in a Greek myth? Waiting for the eagle who comes to eat our liver every day because in a Greek myth, that’s normal?

I knew my mom and my sister would miss us while we were gone. I get that. It’s a lot to ask. But there were other people who hardly knew us, strangers who wouldn’t miss us at all, who seemed offended by our decision to try out life at sea. It’s like they were thinking, What’s wrong w/ highways & parking lots & elbow pads & Christmas caroling? What’s wrong w/ us?

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On Michael’s side of the bed: a framed photo of Sybil. Age three, crooked pigtails, ambrosial. Even in my dark days, during my worst blues, I loved studying my daughter’s face. Even now, I never tire of staring. Look at that nose, I often think—so damned cute, so wee. Sybil’s face is heart-shaped, wide at the temples, with a small, emphatic chin. The truth is, it’s her father’s face. Distantly Finnish, midwestern, wide open and friendly. You can almost sense the ball fields and the Coca-Cola and the square dances that it took to produce that kind of a face.

Me, I’m the dun-eyed child of upstate New York, a plain split-level house and a messy divorce, as well as a couple other things I’d rather not talk about. My father’s people—a tribe of hard-bitten Irish depressives—culled their numbers with committed lifelong cigarette smoking. My mother’s mother was a tyrannical lady from San Juan by whom I was awed the few times I saw her. My mother used to say that she was treated like a human clothespin as a child: Stand there, hold that.

In short, when Sybil was born, I was relieved that she took after Michael’s side of the family. I was relieved that she didn’t look like me.

It’s sad, though, I realize, to be relieved that your kid doesn’t look like you.

Listen, sometimes I don’t know whether something is “sad” or not.

I mean, sad poems or songs make me feel better. I think—yes, that is precisely how I feel. Then I feel better.

But others seem dispirited by the news sad poems deliver.

I used to have to check with Michael.

Was that a “sad” movie? I would ask him, leaving the theater. Is this a “sad” song? I mean, according to you.

Yes! he’d say, laughing. According to anybody.

If ever there was a method for squaring dreams w/ reality, it’s buying a boat. Especially a boat you’ve never seen. But what a boat! She’s a 1988 CSY 44 Walkover. Center cockpit. Two berths & a saloon. Larger-than-king-size bed in the aft master cabin. Perfect split berth for the kids forward. Huge fridge, three-burner stove. Very roomy. Fiberglass, mostly. No wood laminate, just wood for the bulkheads and the interior furniture. A horizon-pointing bowsprit for me, wood carvings in the bulkheads for my poet wife. We had to buy her w/out seeing her. Of course we would have preferred to buy something nearby. But the fact that she was in Panama made her 20 grand cheaper. I had already scoured the marinas from Westport to Larchmont. We don’t have that kind of $$. I paid for her outright. 60 grand. The payout from Dad’s life insurance. Our nest egg. (Talk about poetry.) OK, technically I didn’t have the full amount. But I solved that, w/ just a little creativity.

We got down here in September, but after 2 weeks in Bocas del Toro, she still wasn’t even in the water. Her hull needed a scraping, followed by 3 new coats of paint. Juliet spent days hanging out with the kids outside of the supermini eating fried yucca, waiting to practice her Spanish w/ someone. Eventually she got sick of this & took the kids to sit at the marina bar & let them