dog island

It was the kind of room one of my students might have described as ‘ambient,’ ‘loaded,’ or even ‘modeled’  There was an unsettling feel about it, as if Beth and I were about to step onto the set of some daytime soap opera.  The drapes were drawn midway and pinched against the walls with a small cord of rope giving a slight glimpse to the sliding glass doors and the beach sky, cloudless and blue.  The carpet was plush and new, it still had that ubiquitous factory smell and the bed, invitingly king sized a lavish nest for us both had its pillows arranged at the headboard in an alternating pattern so that they looked much like a child’s pinwheel.  The room was without fault, a blend of soft and hard, inviting but also a reminder that it was not home.  

  “It’s perfect,” she said.  And I had to agree.  These were the types of things Beth loved, the feeling of change, the thrill of excitement from something different.  She was the kind of woman her coworkers would describe as a genuinely sweet and dutiful, but timid and astoundingly distant.  These same would later boast to me at office christmas parties that Beth’s charm and ability to be liked by everyone were the envy of the workplace.  But these were not Beth’s friends.  Truthfully, Beth never made friends and as much as I wanted to believe her coworkers and what they repeatedly told me, I found it impossible to see Beth in the unusual light under which they saw her.  To me, Beth was the reserved, shy woman, the lonesome big kid, friendless and seemingly without life.  There was once I caught her at the sink while she did the dishes and as the water flowed, filling the sink and overflowing with suds, Beth stared out the window, relaxed and collected and not moving for the longest time.  
She stepped from the bright, cigarette smell of the hallway and into the room.

I stayed at the threshold, a pair of weekend bags filled with our clothes and watched the silhouette of her arm swing across the wall searching for a light switch.  I was having a hard time thinking and took a moment to breathe.  My doctor was relating it to stress at work but I knew it had more to do with the separation Beth and I were fighting.
She found a lamp near a desk and light filled into the four corners.  She let out a tiny gasp and raced to the king-sized bed, allowing herself to fall onto the blankets.  “God,” she said.  “It feels so good.”  She moved her arms back and forth like a child in the snow and then turned onto her stomach and buried her face into a pillow.  I could hear her breathing in the capsule of down feathers and when she pulled away she exhaled slowly.
I placed our bags on a writing desk near the bed.  I walked to the tall drapes across the room and opened the sliding doors.  Stepping onto the room’s tiny balcony I felt the euphoria of the ocean air, the salt breeze stinging my face.   The white sand below us, the water so blue it was green.  The people on the beach miles away.

Pacifico Beach is the name given to the stretch of eggshell sand kissing the Gulf of Mexico.  Everything else, the two points and the coast that face inland, are referred to as Dog Beach after the island of the same name.  No one knows who named Dog Island, or why.  And my guess, which comes from living along the Florida coast most of my life, is from years of folklore and myth, mixed perhaps with a history book or two I might have checked out at the library when I was twelve.  Dog Island is the small, thimble-shaped sister of King George Island, which on the map looks something like Cuba.  Stories say that when the when King George Island was named by English colonists the founder wished to name the neighboring island after the King’s dog, a pet he very much adored and treated as kin.  But the townspeople failed to recall the animal’s name, having been away from the motherland for nearly a decade (and not wishing to unbury
Beth and I come to surf.  Neither one of us are very athletic.  She used to tell me that I had two left feet and that this was one of the reasons I never danced with her.  This might have been part of it, but I always blamed the car accident I had when I was sixteen.  I’d folded my little, red Honda into the back of a parked dump truck after a night of huffing glue on a friend’s back porch.  When I came to, the left side of my head had split just behind my ear and blood was coming out in a pretty heavy stream.  Doctor’s didn’t give me any of that ‘you’re lucky to be alive’ talk, mostly because the injuries I had were cosmetic.  The hair behind my ear parts funny now, so I try to keep it cut short.  And every once in a while I get a little bit of vertigo, usually a lightheadedness that leaves soon after it arrives.  And sometimes I loose my balance.  But that goes pretty quickly too.  I think something got knocked around in my skull when I hit that truck.  The fluids stirred up or a tube got bent.  Ever since it’s kept me from seeing in a straight line.
Beth and I had been together for nine months, still newlyweds if you asked me--at least if you judged the short time we’d been married.  But if you looked at us, I mean actually looked, at our actions as a couple, you’d probably say we were about to enter our platinum years.  There wasn’t much spark left in our eyes I’ll admit, but we did have a good time once in a while.  And god I loved her.  I mean, when I first saw her, I just knew she was the one.  I guess it’s the same way a cop can spot a pickpocket in a crowded mall or a fisherman can isolate that perfect shady patch of river.  I knew she was about the best thing a guy like me could find, and who would have known that when I proposed, right there at the gas station, as she was filling up her brother’s truck, and I had just paid to have the headlights replaced on my crinkled, red car, who would have known that she was living with her brother to get away from her parents in Ebro County and that she had been praying every night for someone, anyone, to come and take her away.  I didn’t know (at the time?) what she was hiding from or for—still don’t if I’m going to be openly honest, and I have so far so why stop now--it’s something we’ve never talked about.  But it was like something spectactular touched me.  If I was a man of faith I might say the hadn of god came to rest on my shoulder.  The cold, thick engine oil on the cement seeped through the knee of my blue jeans just as she said yes and it was almost like a metaphor of love all thick and wet, not all that clean but essential for things to operate.  I knew right then we were meant to be because these kinds of things don’t happen on chance.  Things happen for a reason.
I’d gotten us a good room at the hotel on Pacifico Beach.  Probably the best view in the whole damn place.  It’d better be at least, I spent a fortune on it.  We didn’t have a plan for the weekend, except for the one reason we were here.  But that I kept pushing it to the back of my mind.  I’d promised her a second try and that’s about the best I could do.  She wanted a kid so bad, but I just didn’t have it in me.  Or if I did, we didn’t have the money to do it the way the people on South Beach get it done, which is to have it sucked out and injected, like I’m some kind of fuel pump.  Either way, that’s not right.  It’s not natural.
Beth undid the clasp for the balcony door and stepped onto the little patio.  “Come on,” she said to me, never turning from the golden view stretched before us.  We stood at the rail feeling the sea breeze on our faces.  “This reminds me,” I started to say, but Beth, always sharper and more quick, beat me to it.
“…of eighth grade,” she said.  “Daddy used to take me to the beaches on the weekends I stayed with him.  Before he and mom got back together.”
I recognized the look of xxxxxxx in her expression; it’s the kind of look people get around the holidays when they’re alone.  It’s a hollowness laid over by an attempt of hiding.  Beth’s eyebrows were pinched slightly and there was sadness in her eyes from the painful realization that a memory is a moment lost that can never be regained.
“Daddy would throw a towel onto the sand and sit for hours reading while my brother and me ran up and down the shore.  He had to be the most patient person I ever knew.  He was happy enough lying there all day while we screamed and splashed water at each other.  I think that in the long of things, he just wanted to see us happy.  He must have known that our weekends with him were a big relief from mom, who never did much.  She’d go out at night with her friends right after work, and so Johnny and me never heard from her.  Except for a few scribbled notes stuck to the fridge.”
We sat down in a pair of patio chairs.  Beth kicked off her sandals and propped her feet against the rail.  The pink nails of her toes in two perfect lines, glistening like a little row of sea shells.
“But the beach wasn’t nearly as pretty as this.  We lived closer to the east coast, so Daddy always took us to the Atlantic.  Which is an ugly ocean.  Most large bodies of water are.  It’s not as nice and protected like the gulf and it’s filled with all kinds of garbage that you can’t see because the water’s so cold and turbid.  I remember once Johnny was chasing a crab through the water while I was sitting with Dad.  He must have been only knee-deep running the best he could, like a man with lead shoes or something.  Then all of a sudden he just howls.  I mean lets out a terrific scream and when we look over we seem him hopping on his right foot.  The other he’s got above the water and between his hands and even from where we were we could see the blood.  Daddy took off running and when he reached Johnny he didn’t even seem to stop to pick him up.  He just snatched him, raced up the beach and to the car.  He had a kit in the trunk, one left over I think from his army days because it was a green, metal box and the hinges were all rusted.  He put Johnny in the front seat with his leg dripping water and blood hanging out the door.  Just as I came up the boardwalk leading to where the cars park, Daddy was mumbling something about the peroxide bottle being empty.  They used to put it in clear bottles, but over time light can break it down and it evaporates or something.  Which is why it’s sold in those brown bottles these days.  But Daddy didn’t explain this to me then.  He just tossed the bottle to the ground and pulled a different one from the box.  He unscrewed the cap, held the bottle in one hand and Johnny’s foot just above the ankle in his other.  He told my brother how bad it was going to hurt, but I don’t think Johnny fully understood him until he emptied that entire bottle of rubbing alcohol into the cut running along the arch of his foot.  I thought for sure Johnny was going to kick dad, but his hand was pretty firmly clamped around his leg.  He wailed and flung his arms around the inside of the car like a madman.  You’d have thought they were amputating his foot.  And after about five minutes, long after dad ran out of alcohol, Johnny finally calmed down.”
Beth got quiet then and from the corner of my eye I could see that she was still telling the rest of the story in her mind.  I pulled a pack of cigarettes from the pocket of my shorts and stared at a black speck in the horizon.  It was so far away I couldn’t tell if it was a boat or a buoy.  It might have been a surfer, washed into the gulf and stranded.  I lit a cigarette for Beth and then one for me.  “Do you know what he stepped on?” I said.
She shook her head as she blew smoke from her nose.  It made a small veil in front of her face before fading and slipping over the balcony.  “Dad went looking for it so he could decide whether or not Johnny needed to get a shot or something.  But he never found it.  Probably a glass bottle or some scrap metal.  We took him to the emergency room anyways and the nurses there said dad did a pretty good job of dressing him up considering the gauze pads and bandages from the first aid kit were like 20 years old.”
Beth stopped again, but this time she wasn’t thinking about the story as much trying not to.  She got a different kind of sad look on her face one that she tried to hide by taking a last, fierce drag off the stub of her cigarette and then tossing it over the edge.
“What is it honey,” I said, turning my chair so that I was facing her now.
She reached for the pack of smokes in my lap, took out another and lit.  It went into her lungs all wrong and she cleared her throat.  That’s when I knew something was wrong.  You never really think about it, but an act as habitual and common as smoking even takes some attention.  When you’re mind is elsewhere you muck it up without even realizing.
“It just seems that all the bad things were always happening to Johnny.”  And here she really let herself go.  She pulled her feet from the balcony and placed her elbows onto her knees so that her face could rest in her hands.  I watched the cigarette burned dangerously close to her long hair and pulled it form her fingers tossing it onto the patio.
“He never asked for these things to happen.  He didn’t deserve what he got.  I mean what did he ever do?”  
She rubbed her eyes dry with the back of her hands and breathed.  “You know, I still can’t stand the smell of rubbing alcohol?” she said, laughing slightly as though she had given the punch line of a joke even she wasn’t certain was funny.  “When we lived in Jackson, just after mom and dad got back together, Johnny started taking baths in rubbing alcohol.  At first I thought the smell was from a tub cleaner someone was using or a disinfectant for the toilets.  But over time it grew stronger.  At first it was real faint, you know, like when someone in your neighborhood is grilling outside and you can smell it five houses down.  And it smells good even if you don’t know what they’re cooking.  I’d go into the bathroom Johnny and I shared right after he was done and I began noticing the smell.  Real faint in the beginning, but it got a lot stronger.  To where I even noticed the smell on him during the day.  And then I found the empty bottles.  He kept them in a garbage bad under a pile of clothes in the back of his closet.  At night he would creep out the kitchen door and down the street to throw them in someone else’s trash.”
“Mom was touching him,” she said.  “Had been for years.  Thing is, no one knew, not even dad, and the only reason I know is because Johnny told me everything after I found the bottles.  Said he was afraid it might happen to me too if mom found out I knew.”
Beth picked at her fingers, scrapping the remnants of a cranberry polish from her nails.  The story had caused her body to slouch in the chair, but in telling it she seemed a little relaxed too, as though exhausted from the telling.  “Isn’t that a horrible story?”


“Don’t you even care?” Beth asked.  She slapped a flat hand against her thigh and it shook the adipose gathered there.  
“No, of course I do.  I just.  I just didn’t expect to be hearing this now.  I mean, while we’re trying to…”
“What?  You think I timed this?  You think I wanted to talk about my brother?  I didn’t expect it either, Thomas.  It’s just looking at that damn water.”  She threw a hand over the rail.  “And seeing it again.  And how it’s so full of things, but we miss most of them because they’re hidden by the surface.  I mean, that’s how I feel.”
The knocking had grown louder and neither of us could ignore it any longer.  I went to the door and let the man from room service inside.  I’d prearranged for a light meal to be order soon after our arrival, some fruit and Tom Collins I thought would be a refreshing way to start a day on the beach.  But I hadn’t expected us to begin arguing so quickly.
The man wheeled a chrome cart near the bed and set out two large trays, uncovering them with a mild flourish.  The tension between Beth and me was obvious, with her stiff posture in the patio chair and my rush to pay the man.  I saw his eyes dart between us and around the room, looking for something that would lend to the reason of our argument.  What, I wondered, was he looking for?  A broken vase, an upturned suitcase, a phone number scrawled onto a scrap of paper.  There was nothing like this to be found; our arguments never stemmed into the physical.Rather than reprimand the man for his obvious nosiness, I tipped him generously.
I walked to the sliding door.  “Come get something to eat,” I said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“It doesn’t matter, you should eat.”
“Can you tell me some more things I need to be doing?” Beth said.  She spoke through a clenched jaw and stared over the balcony.
“Listen,” I said, dropping to me knee.  “For us to get through this, we’ve both got to let certain things pass.  I’m trying and what I need is some help.”     “So I’m not trying.  Is that what you’re saying.”     “No, I’m not saying that.”     “Then what?  What are you saying?  That I don’t care?  That I don’t listen?  You’re the one that’s not listening.  You’re the one that doesn’t care.”  She had turned to face me and was looking straight into my eyes.  This was an act I couldn’t stand, an invading feeling that was belittling, treating me like I was a kid.  She knew this, but kept doing it.
“Look.  What can I say?  Whatever I do say, it’s not the right thing.  You’ll just turn it back onto me.  Just like I always do.”  And I stood up, turning into the cold air of the room.  I grabbed my Tom Collins on my way to the door, shutting it softly to reiterate the point that I could be the one to forget.
I didn’t know where I would go.  For a few moments I was angry enough to hop into the car and head home.  Stay a few nights with friends and see how long it would take Beth to track me down.  The room was paid through the weekend and Beth was the kind of woman who in anger will stay put.  I’d left for work once after an argument and when I returned at night, she was still on the couch, never bothering to call her own boss to say she wasn’t coming.
After walking through the hotel’s halls for a while I cooled off and began feeling lonely.  The inside of the hotel was deserted.  Everyone was outside and the few people I passed in the hallway were coming or going to the pool.  I walked by a young girl, her skin a marshmallow complexion and her shoulders crisp and sunburned.  Her younger brother trudged alongside her, a cheap, blue diving mask prematurely strapped across his head.  The glass was fogged but I could see his excited, eager eyes, white and bulging like a frog’s.
The Tom Collins began sweating in my hands once I stepped outside.  I had left my sandals on the balcony and although my shorts were heavy cotton, I could cast off my polo and be comfortable with finding a spot along the pool.  I grabbed a hotel towel from a small kiosk in the shade and asked the bartender to start me a tab, pointing through the crowd of bodies to a pair of empty chairs.
The sun felt good, but different from the way I’d experienced it on the balcony.  There was no breeze by the pool, or when it came it was broken and sloppily distributed by the people milling about.  The bodies of the swimmers and bathers gave off more heat and the water from the great, lagoon pool reflected the sun making it nearly intolerable without sunglasses.  I padded my pockets in search of mine and realized that I had not only left them in the hotel room, but I had also forgotten my cigarettes.
I sweated by the pool allowing the bar’s waiter to replenish my drinks.  The alcohol and the sun made me dizzy.  I kept my eyes shut, only opening them when I heard the waiter arrive.  It was less than ten minutes when I felt the sun burning my skin and a woman took the empty chair next me.  Before sitting, she removed a pack of Virginia Slims from her beach bag and lit one.  I turned to her, hesitant in asking for a spare; she was a primped woman, perhaps a few years older than me.  Her hair was in a tight bun and contained carefully beneath a wide-brim, straw hat.  Thick, black, sunglasses gave her round face a symmetrical look, one that suggested homogeny and class.  She wore a one-piece yellow swimsuit that was tastefully cut across her hips.  From her waist the yellow fabric split in two and swept vertically, cupping a set of ample bosoms before coming to a bow neatly tied behind her neck.
She was a woman so strangely misplaced.  Among the crowds of bikini clad teens and skimpy swimsuits, it was as though she had stepped off a movie set, from a film noir shoot and stayed in costume as she milled about.  
“Miss,” I said, loud enough to be heard over the swimming children but hopefully not enough to startle her.  She turned her head in the manner of an owl and tilted her chin down to her chest.  Her glasses slid from the bridge of her nose guided by the slight dampness of her sweating face.     “Could I get a cigarette off of you, please?”  I asked.
The woman continued to stare at me, not moving except for the subtle motions of her breathing.  “I’m sorry?” she said, pushing her glasses into place now that she seemed satisfied with taking me in.     “I hate to bother you, but I left my cigarettes in my hotel and was wondering if I could have one of yours.”
The woman kept looking at me as though I were the one strangely dressed.  She tugged at the stomach of her suit, creating a pocket of air too cool her sweating stomach.  Puffing at her long cigarette she turned away from me and said, “You don’t look like a smoker to me.”

I was then that I placed her.  She was an exact replica of a cigarette advertisement, the kind from the 1950s.  Lately companies had been reviving their image using the retro-fashioned woman in a tight one piece bathing suit and heels.  The women were generally fair skinned and blond and they often twirled an umbrella or parasol over their shoulder while holding a long-stemmed cigarette in their free hand.  I glanced at the woman across from me and noted that she too was fair skinned.  And although she lacked a parasol her feet were clad in a pair of leather, high heeled sandals that laced up her ankle and partway up her calf.
“How can you be so sure?” I said, partly amused and mildly offended.  I had taken the habit when I was 17 and although I wasn’t a chain-smoker by any means, I was, sad to say, very likely on my way.
“Because,” she said, and it was here that I first noticed her accent.  The English was strong but porous.  “Will a soldier forget his gun when at war?  Do mothers not remember her child when she leave the playground?”  The woman gave a smile that was both cynical and charming.  It was the smile a father must assume on prom night when giving his teenage son the difficult but necessary advice.  “In this world there are smokers, and there are those who simply smoke.”  She pulled at the butt of her cigarette drawing smoke into her mouth as though teasing me.
I laughed at this.  I probably laughed a lot louder than I should have, but what the woman had just said mixed with the heat and the gin in my belly made the entire situation beyond ridiculous.
“Well,” I said.  “That’s certainly one way of seeing the world,” and I turned in my chair so that I was again facing the pool.
But after a few seconds with my shut eyes seeing only the red backs of their lids and hearing the sound of water and swimmers, I heard the woman twisting in her seat.  “It’s not about seeing the world, sir.  It’s about not being somebody you are not.”
When I opened my eyes, her thin arm was extended to me as though she had been holding it there all this time.  I took it in my sweaty palm and hers felt as I imagined, cool and well sculpted, like a hand that had spent its whole life inside a silk glove.  
“Celeste,” she said and I responded by telling her my name.
The waiter returned and brought me another Tom Collins.  I motioned to Celeste and the man took her order before again leaving us alone.
The cigarette Celeste gave me was a nice bookend to the drinks and I was staring into the waterfall across the pool when I noticed a young couple trying to climb the island formations in the center.  They were having difficulty reaching the top; with each step their footing slipped on the wet rocks and a few times they came close to toppling over each other.  The man led the way, holding the young woman’s hand and steadying her each time she lost her balance.  I wondered what they were trying to reach.
“You don’t seem like the pool-loving type,” Celeste said, sipping from the drink the waiter brought her.  “What I mean to say is, well, you look uncomfortable.”
“How do you mean?” I asked her.
“Well, you’re not relaxing.  You’re tense, stiff.  Most of the men out here are wearing swim trunks and you’ve got on a pair of chinos/cargo shorts.  And it seems like you left your room in an awful hurry, forgetting your sunglasses and your cigarettes.  I’d say you look as though you walked out the wrong door of your hotel room, stumbled across the pool and had no other option than to sit beside it.”
I did my best to smile at her.  Under normal circumstances her easy face and the alcohol would have made me grin like an idiot, but her words were too sharp.  And there was a hint of contempt in her voice that I couldn’t determine as her usual tone or specifically tweaked for me.



























I knew she didn’t really want to talk about her brother and what had happened to him.  Her telling me that story was more like therapy for her.  But it wasn’t going to fix our problem and since neither one of us knew how, we’d invented ways of avoiding it.  I’d suggested coming here for the weekend, renting the penthouse room, really live it up like it was a second honeymoon or something.  And she chose to tell me about her brother.

















We laughed some, making jokes about the sunbathers and swimmers we could see around the pool below.  And it felt good, laughing there in the sun.  It felt like old times, when we first got married and Beth was so much more alive.  That was just before money became an issue and long before this idea of bringing a child into our house ever came up.  
For a twenty-two year old I had a pretty decent job as a stockroom manager at an Albertson’s Grocery down on Anacostia, but I had nothing to get me ready for married life.  With most of my money going into my rent, frozen dinners and still trying to get my banged up Honda into decent shape, Beth coming to live in my small apartment put a financial freeze on life as I had known it.  We took out a one-time government loan married couples are allowed, bought a cramped two bedroom about an hour north of Orlando and I transferred to an Albertson’s on International Drive in the Disney District.  My pay was a little more, but so were the rent and the interest on our loan.  I began working a few nights a week at another grocery store across the street, bagging and bringing in the shopping carts mostly, and Beth began working as a day care aid just to pass her lonely time.
I think it was being around all those kids that gave her the idea.  She’d come home before me and start making these small preparations for my arrival.  At first they were pretty subtle, and nice I’ll admit.  Once she made me dinner, I mean a real dinner too not a nuked plastic tray.  And she let me eat while watching the games.  I was never much of a sports fan so instead I watched the money games: Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, and sometimes a little Love Connection just for shits and grins.  But I guess once she realized I wasn’t taking her bait, she started getting real obvious.  I’d come home and find her sitting naked at the kitchen table, her thin legs tossed over one arm of the chair and her back resting against the other.  Her crossed thighs hid her groin area and she kept a bony hand across her breasts in a teasing pose.  It wasn’t the image she was going for probably, but she reminded me of sunscreen ad I once saw in a magazine.  And if I wasn’t always so damned tired I probably would have appreciated what she was doing.  I probably would have tried a little harder and maybe I could have overcome my problem.




There wasn’t anything I could have done then.  My greatest fault has always been in not being able to console her.  It made me uncomfortable, nervous and sick even.  Growing up I was usually left home alone and forced to grin through my own mistakes and accidents; nobody had been there to teach me how to care.
Sitting in a white plastic chair, seventy feet above the earth, my wife cried about something that happened when she was twelve and to keep my mind from trying to  I was still trying to figure out how I was going to pay off the weekend I was charging to my credit card.  “Hey,” I said.  “What are you talking about?”