She Thinks Of No One
She’s always sitting at the edge of the concrete crib around the lighthouse, dangling bare feet twenty feet above the water with her heavy skirt pulled up, her legs pale with long, slate-gray, spindly hairs. Today, the sun is hot on her face and she doesn’t need anything in the world. No one thinks of her and she thinks of no one. The concrete bites into her hands as she leans on it. The water is glass and still, the wind a mere breath across the surface. Seagulls are fighting over a school of fish to the northwest of the towering light.
She’s a 63 year old widow alone on a man-made island three miles from the nearest shore anchored to a lakebed and forty-two feet of submerged riprap. Living here for eleven years has made her thick and strong, and she needs the strength to manage the work. There is the lamp of course, lighting the wick at dusk and trimming it at midnight, but there are also buckets to carry upstairs for whitewashing the floors. There’s also the battle against the waves in storms when she’s to keep windows closed, and keep sopping towels in rotation to soak up the waves as they seep through the porous concrete walls. In the aftermath, to put those towels out to dry. There are a hundred angles of the lens to polish, dead birds to sweep away, kerosene to load and unload. There are groceries which must be got from shore every three or four weeks if the tending boat doesn’t make it out to replenish her. There is the generator to pump and the pump to pump, and there are days she needs to sink herself into the water to wash the soot and ash and kerosene off her body and be able to pull herself back up the ladder in soaking underclothes.
The wind touches her legs, bends the hairs against their grain, eliciting a little pang of pleasure. She read this morning that there are ladies who use a man’s razor to remove hair from their legs these days. She wonders how she would feel the wind without the hair? Not to mention, she can almost see the blood dripping down her legs where she would inevitably cut herself. She imagines the blood thin and bright red, but memory mixes it with earth and pain and the slow, browning blood traces long lines down to her ankles and drips into the lake.
A tern riding the wind whips around the backside of the light, cutting so close to her face her eyelashes flutter. She jerks her body away from the flight path and the sudden strength of this reaction shocks her back to herself from the dripping blood. She has so few close encounters these days with any living thing. Her heart pounds in her chest.
She leans forward again, pulling her hands away from the concrete and setting them on her stomach, wiping sweat from the creases of skin folding over along her waistline. She squishes and pulls at the bulge of her stomach, pokes her finger into it like it’s dough. Her hands wander lower, where the bulge meets the mound between her legs. It’s always a question, these days, whether she still feels anything. Sometimes she does. Sometimes she doesn’t. It starts with a light brushing over the clothes, a soft hello. Is anyone home today?
Today someone is home … a gentle throb inviting her between her own legs. She pulls at the waist of her skirt and gets her hand through layers to the soft, warm flesh of her stomach. She pulls up her shirt to let the wind meet this skin as her hand sinks lower and her back arches. No one thinks of her and she thinks of herself, releasing into the pleasure of her own making.
Always after, a quiet bitterness settles in. A bitterness for how long she lived in other people’s stories, making everyone else feel okay with her tragedies, when all along there was this vast, glorious solitude inside her. The bitterness that used to eat away at her. If he dies, he dies. She brushes the bitterness away. There is no other story to live in now. There is only this crib and this light and the work.
Far off to the southwest she sees a freighter heading towards the straits. They’ll make it before dark and won’t need her or her light. They won’t think of her sitting on the crib as they pass. No one thinks of her. The freighters are automatons in her mind. She thinks nothing of their captains or boilermen. She keeps her solitude intact; thinks of no one.
Thud. She looks up and sees a sparrow falling. They’re always flying into the watchroom six stories above, as if, in sparrows, the glass of the lens awakens a primordial urge to return to paradise. It falls to the concrete beside her, and she picks up its tiny broken body by the wing, flinging it out into the water. Food for some other beast. The water settles and only then she wonders if she should have held it a minute longer. Maybe it wasn’t dead. Maybe she could have revived it. Maybe it would have liked to have another being there with it while its final moments of life drained. Her chest tightens, but it’s too late anyway. Why does she still not know what to do with death when it is right in front of her?
Where her hands push down, the concrete always pushes back with grim insistence, it leaves its mark and doesn’t let her stay that way for long. She leans back anyway, after pulling her thick skirt up above her knees so her legs hang bare over the edge of the crib, dangling above the pristine water. The sky and the lake mirror each other, a few clouds low on the western horizon that could drop an anchor straight into Milwaukee. Behind her the lighthouse looms like a disapproving husband. Go to Putney on a pig, you old goat, she tells the ghost, closing her eyes and wishing she’d had the courage to speak like that to the dead man. But she drains the lighthouse of her husband in her mind because she loves the light. She imagines his body seeping out through the walls the way the waves seep in during storms, watches his ether dispersing in the wind. Let the light be the light.
She doesn’t try to tell the truth anymore because no one needs it from her. No one asks it of her. No one thinks of her. There was a time that thought would be terrifying. Now it is medicine and intoxicant at once. She’s alone in the world and in her mind.
She’s let go of truth and the tension of keeping stories straight. She lets thoughts and memories alike be shot off at the angles of the second order lens she oversees where prisms turn a flame into a sun. She lets all the stories intermingle and coexist and no longer tries to keep them in order or accurate. She rode Zeus like a stallion on the moon one night. Her son was a towering white pine she slept beneath in a winter storm. She wandered alone across the bottom of the lake with eyes like flashlights.
Her body is changing too. She has a stomach where it used to be flat, many years ago. She tries to remember the last time anyone touched that stomach. She tries to remember when it stretched in pregnancy. She tries to remember feeling the baby, who only lived a few days, squirming on the outside of her for the first time after she pushed him out of her body. She feels the familiar sharp pang of grief rip through her chest and decides to put that thought away. Forty years have dulled nothing of that pain, but she’s learned how to forget it sometimes, how to put it somewhere it can’t touch her.
Anyone she loves or hurt is dead now, or dead to her, so what does truth matter anymore? She doesn’t need to know how anything happened or what it meant or whether she could have avoided it. She’s discarding the masks of truth and pain; her life at the end of both.
A seagull paces overhead like a vulture. Back and forth. Back and forth. Swaying in the lake shore winds like a new mother. Like a vulture or a new mother? Which is it? Is it waiting for death or life? It blots the sun, then unblots it in spastic swaying patterns that might bring on a seizure in an epileptic. Her neck aches, so she stops tracking the bird and lowers her eyes.
Thud. Boom. Shattering sounds high overhead. Death.
The seagull falls straight down to the concrete crib two feet from her and splatters in a dramatic display of feathers and blood, hollow bones crunching, and blood. Blood on her face, wet and hot bird blood on her face and her legs and her skirt. Whatever it was waiting for, it isn't anymore.
She stands up and wipes the blood from her face with her skirt, knowing it will never come out of this fabric. She knows it will never come out, so she sinks her fingers into the waistline and rips the skirt off her body. She can’t touch the blood, can’t see it every day. She found this vast solitude inside her, self-exiled here to get away from the blood and the baby who isn’t growing old in the world beside her, away from the man who beat her and made the baby inside her come out from inside and the baby was on the outside for a moment and she had to tell all the people that the baby has died but not that his own father killed him because how could she be sure but she was sure because of the blood that dripped down her legs and pooled at her ankles like a little lake of blood in the kitchen after he beat her and then the baby came too soon and he writhed and then he died a few days later but only after she fell in love with his mottled skin and the fluttering eyelashes when she blew a wind across his face and the way he turned his head towards the light of the lamp and how the concrete floor pressed back on her hands and knees when she crawled on it wailing like an animal for a week and the skirt can’t stay. The skirt has to go. The skirt and the blood have to go into the lake.
She throws the skirt in the lake.
Her chest heaves. Her breath is loud and frantic in a frozen body. The wind is light but she is bare from the waist down now like she’s never been in the open, so she feels every slight dance of it on her skin. Is anybody home? It calls her back to her exile and her solitude. No one thinks of her and she thinks of no one.
She turns to the light and goes inside for the mop and the shovel. She’ll need to clear the dead bird and whitewash the crib deck before she can check the kerosene in the generator. The lamp will need to be lit by dusk, as always. She will have to raise the wick 3/10ths of an inch after lighting. She’ll need to crank the rotation mechanism and that will take all her strength.