Fact of Life, by Alison Barker
Six months into therapy, Marla wanted to know: just what is a person supposed to say when their friends ask, why don’t you two live together yet? And it’s eight in the morning, and you’re gripping the metal handhold of the T car with one hand, and you’re wincing as hot Dunkin’ Donuts coffee drips over your fingers and up the sleeve of your coat. Then the underground passageway fills with squealing brakes as the train lurches so you have to strain when you say:
Taryn is just not ready yet. I’m giving her the time she needs.
Marla met Taryn in front of a dusty collectibles stand at the flea market in Dorchester on Cottage Street. On that chilly autumn morning, Taryn held an aluminum travel mug of coffee. Taryn was self-contained: snug windbreaker and tight-fitting, thin wale corduroys. Her nest of straw-colored hair was cut in an asymmetrical bob and careless tangle of ringlets framed her wide, perfect face.
They both reached with their free hands for the same vintage timer, a stainless steel egg that glittered brightly in a wooden nest stuffed with plastic Easter grass. Marla touched the smooth curve of its shell just as Taryn grabbed the edge of the nest. Marla’s knuckly hand grazed her long, serpentine fingers. Taryn snorted drily and held her beautiful hands up as if in surrender. Marla’s pulse quickened as her thoughts stretched and curled out toward her, and their rather short chase was on.
From that day on, the egg ticked its certain, metallic click from the center of Marla’s kitchen table, delicately chipping away time, as long as Marla or Taryn thought to wind it while they waited for delivery men to bring them pad thai from New Asia or late-night pizza from Bertucci’s. Sometimes Marla liked to bring it into the bathroom and listen to its pulse as she sat in a warm bath.
Taryn wore hiking boots that thudded across Marla’s hardwood floors, in an uncalculated way that inspired trust in Marla. Her ex, Anne, had made small, calculated sounds right before she left Marla for a man named Greg. Her once uncontrollable giggle turned brittle and shrill. She threw her head back and looked down her nose at Marla when she made her new laugh-sound, like a crack in a glass vase blown too thin. Weeks after Anne left, Marla drank hard cider and cried in front of Anne and Greg (fiancé), in the back hallway of a mutual friend’s housewarming party in Egleston Square. She asked Anne Why? This provoked the fiancé to retrieve Anne’s coat and hurry them out the door, as if Marla were some noisy contagion.
Marla wanted to hear more sounds from Taryn—specifically the word us instead of me being at the top of the list—but also I love you and even more intricate tessellations, We will vacation on the Cape when our children are little. A year into their relationship, Marla wanted to follow a plan: move-in together-get-engaged-then-married-procure-a-donor (Marla would be the mom) and-participate-in-rotating-backyard-springtime-potlucks (Massachusetts-weather permitting).
Taryn was the stick in the mud. She stalled. She liked her dingy basement studio, with assorted cast-offs from previous sets she helped design, and she wasn’t sure about parenthood, and certainly didn’t see the need to rush a commitment. What’s wrong with the way we are?
Often, Marla wanted to cuddle, but Taryn’s arms and legs fell asleep almost every night, a nerve condition on account of her abnormally long neck, according to one specialist. Marla had to be careful so her body didn’t obstruct Taryn’s circulation. They used a body pillow between them in bed so Marla wouldn’t accidentally roll onto an arm or a leg, cutting off Taryn’s sense of feeling. It took months for Marla to teach herself to stop migrating over the pillow onto Taryn’s side of the bed in her sleep.
On a recommendation from a couple whose commitment ceremony they attended in Jamaica Plain, Marla and Taryn started seeing a couples’ counselor once a week at the Cambridge Family Services Center.
The couples’ counselor gave them an assignment: draw your relationship, she said. Marla nodded eagerly; she loved being on assignment. Taryn sighed and got to work. The fingernail clipping sounds of the clock scraped away the seconds. A few moments later, the counselor held up two doodles, each in blue ink on extra napkins from the Ethiopian restaurant down the street. Little red, yellow and green flags printed on the corners of the napkins fluttered in the counselor’s hands.
Taryn: A spiral with a dark gorge at its center where the paper tore a little.
Marla: A small box with bars. Behind the bars, two stick figures held hands.
The doodle exercise ended in disastrous squabbling. A week later, the counselor said oh, I have just the thing, and bent over to rummage in a worn leather satchel until her scarves fell from her shoulders and her gray curls tangled in her eyes. She straightened up, and with reddened cheeks, waved a glossy brochure.
Marla and Taryn looked at their cure: a Sierra Club brochure, advertising an observation trip to Little Cumberland Island, where baby sea turtle hatchlings made their way from sandy nests to the wide open sea. Marla’s heart beat faster. Something about their tiny bodies thumped inside her.
Taryn (blond wisps falling out of her barrette against her perfect cheekbone) said she wasn’t sure—if they were endangered, why did people walk around near the nests? Marla (shorter, darker, stronger) stated the case: they needed to be a part of something outside themselves—together—to take this relationship to the next level, to fortify what they had started. Then poof—a plane engine, a rental car door slam and a sputtering motorboat later, there they were, in the dank ruins of an abandoned mansion on an island off the coast of Georgia, paying the Sierra Club to witness endangered babies taking their first tottering steps.
The motor sputtered while Duke, their Sierra Club tour guide, reported facts (wild turkeys and armadillos called the place home; none of the twenty owners of Little Cumberland have spent any time on their land since the 1960’s; mansions built decades ago were crumbling into themselves). The sun ached behind heavy woolen clouds, heating the still air and increasing the marshy smell, which Marla said reminded her of warm piss.
Taryn, partially hidden in her orange life vest, nodded intently at Duke and smiled so wide that her mouth became a gaping hole when she spoke. Marla could tell that Duke was one of those guys who pretended to be unfettered yet purchased a lot of gear at overpriced outdoor equipment outfitters.
The two women lay on the floor of the old rented mansion’s living room. Floor-to-ceiling glass windows held the island’s dark chaos from entering, but only so much. An alligator’s eye shone now and then through scraggles of Spanish moss that hung limply from tree branches over the dilapidated pool. How old was the alligator when he first climbed into the pool? And did he—or she—know how to climb out? Has another alligator ever joined? Marla didn’t want to think about it, but Taryn vibrated with questions. She clawed at Marla’s clothes and kissed her neck. Taryn had grown sure-footed and alert since their arrival. She snarled in between kisses, I’m a hungry alligator, I’m ravenous, This alligator’s going to eat you.
Taryn pushed her way in between Marla’s legs and ate at her, first prying her open a little with her mouth, nosing into her labia, hands squeezing thighs, hips, pressing into her belly.
“Animal,” sighed Marla.
Taryn darted her tongue into Marla’s wet, creased space, then slowed the movement, being sure to run it roughly up over the length of the lips and on top of her clit. Covering territory.
“Make circles,” Marla demanded. “Stay there.” Taryn grunted and shook her head. Up and down, side-to-side, she rifled Marla unpredictably, until Marla begged. Taryn felt her hands up under Marla’s butt and settled her mouth squarely to suck and press, press, press into her until Marla felt a something like a beginning and she came with a shriek and a small burst of tears.
“I could watch the alligator all night,” Taryn said, and she scooted Marla in her sleeping bag closer to the glass. “I’m so glad we’re here.”
The next night was the midnight ride to the beach. Marla found herself sitting in the back of Duke’s jeep with a woman and her husband from Florida, who said they were fervent believers in eco-tourism. They had brought their son, who kicked at the back of the driver’s seat. The family had gathered news about the oil spill in the Gulf from their battery-powered radio, and they peppered Marla with facts. The rupture couldn’t be stopped with the latest device they lowered down there, but BP was pouring chemicals all around to break up the oil. Sea turtles were washing up dead on the Bolivar Peninsula down there near the leak. Marla racked her brain for something hopeful to say about that, but she couldn’t finish her thoughts, distracted by the fact that they weren’t driving on an actual road.
Taryn sat right up front in the passenger seat, front row to the nothingness ahead of them. While he drove over the uneven sand path toward the beach, Duke counted the babies’ predators on fingers of both hands: sea gull, raccoon, ghost crab, fox, wild dog, horse, hog, alligator, car. Barring these obstacles and obtrusive artificial lights, the babies’ brains set tiny magnetic compasses to keep the great, deep, gaping water at the forefront of their destinies. Duke swerved around stumps from felled trees based on the shadows they made in the headlights.
Marla tried to get her mind off of Duke’s tanned lips that faded into his cheeks, and his crooked smile. She tapped the boy on the shoulder and asked him questions about college and his favorite animals, but he didn’t want or know how to answer most of them, and so they sat in silence.
They parked, and the group scattered onto the dark beach. Contrary to Marla’s expectations, woods and shore on an undeveloped island were not quiet. The screeches, the loud pops and whimpers, all of it worsened into a garbled riot after the sun set.
Marla stared at the curve of her girlfriend’s neck against the star-reflecting water. A thought—rather, an image—paddled into Marla’s mind. A ticking egg.
And then, a crack-pop sound. Like a rip in the seam of the night. Despite her commitment to the process, Marla felt for her flashlight. She pointed it at the ground, saw the damage she had made, then immediately fumbled to extinguish it.
Duke called out, “Like I told you, no flashlights.”
A gaping pocket in the airtight night hung over Marla’s head after that: the skeeow sound that the herons made, the crazy scraping sounds of a million bugs, the heavy, sick, thumping of the wild turkey’s mating call—or was it the armadillo who made that sound, and the turkeys that grunted?
Indeed, a crack-and-a-pop stood apart from the white noise of the island night, distinct as a dry snort, or a staccato cackle, or a tense footstep on a creaky wooden floorboard.
The husband and wife coached small groups of babies by shooing them around a patch of seaweed. “Come on, champ,” the husband was singing to one.
Loggerhead sea turtles’ shells could stretch almost a meter wide. If. In all the right circumstances.
While Taryn turned languidly to admire the moon, Marla squatted down and scooped up these refugees, these doomed little fighters. She carried an armful to the water, more careful this about where she stepped. The crack-pop sound rang in her ears.
“Marla, that’s not really how we keep a low profile here,” said Duke.
“You can’t save all of them,” the wife chimed.
They were light as a pencil, but more intricate than a cell phone. Marla wanted to be able to stay with each of them through the most terrifying of all facts she read that day: that the first year in the water, baby sea turtles ride shallow currents, hunting bits in seaweed, gaining strength and bulk to carry them deeper into the worlds where they belong. But that was only probably what they did. Scientists weren’t sure and that’s why they called it the Lost Year. She dropped all but one into the surf, and the water swallowed them whole. Marla choked on a sob and trembled when she realized her right hand gripped too tightly around her last hatchling. Its flippers slowed their stroke. Its eyes were supposed to be its strongest, but the round bulges in its little head hadn’t kept it from soldiering frantically away from the sea, toward the pine forest where foxes waited.
“Marla, we’re here just to observe.” Duke’s easygoing lilt had sharpened into marching orders. “The turtles know what they’re doing.”
Marla whispered to the tottering shell in her hand. Tough shit. It was something her mother used to say, a talisman of sorts. The baby rocked back and forth. Tough shit, Marla repeated the phrase over and over barely audible to anyone but the turtle.
Marla wondered how Duke could focus on this well-protected hatching site when the coast of Texas could be washing up tens of oil-coated females at this very minute. Instead, here they stumbled, useless interlopers, poking at a turtle here, stroking one there, and making observations about its flipper looking like a tiny spatula (the son) or its shape and size suggesting a happy hour slider (the husband). The space above the water—wherever the horizon was—pressed in over Marla; this body with no form was suffocating to think about.
This one, she convinced herself, would make it all the way past the shallow water. She held it up in the moonlight. Its brain would detect both the angle and intensity of the earth’s magnetic field to leave the dangers of the shoreline and eat and eat until it could survive the dangers of the deep. She envisioned it pulling its growing bulk deeper through the leagues of depths. And it would learn to flatten crabs with its jaws powerful as a closed-fist punch.
Marla placed it on the sand. It paddled away from the booms of crashing waves, not toward them. She picked it up and turned it to face the water’s edge, just a few yards away. She refused to leave until the turtle entered the edge of the water, and until she watched the undertow pull the dark smudge of an infant into the start of something underwater and invisible.
As the group picked their way back across the open beach to the Jeep, Taryn gasped and cried out—she had found the dead baby. The boy poked at the line across its back like a stiff, cellophane bakery container where pressure had sliced it in half, and turned it over to reveal its white underside—like a cupcake—a perfect match with the sand. The oval head lay to the side out of the shell. The wife rubbed Taryn’s shoulder. Duke reassured everyone that tragedies were a part of the process. The husband agreed and acted like he had expected that all along. Marla felt guilt and a little bit of anger that a possibility had been extinguished: this crack-and-a-pop, this rip in the darkness, had loosened something in her that made sense.
Inside the Jeep, Taryn bent her head awkwardly to rest on Marla’s shoulder and sobbed squeakily, girlishly, as if trying to contain her moment of weakness from spilling onto everyone else in the Jeep. “That poor little creature,” Taryn whispered. Marla shrugged and inched away from her impatiently.
Taryn squeezed Marla’s hand and brushed her earlobe with her lips. It was Taryn’s turn to be inconsolable. “What’s wrong?” Taryn kept her face close to Marla’s ear so as not to be heard by the other passengers.
But Marla stayed silent and let Taryn sniffle restlessly. Duke parked and the tourists opened the doors of the Jeep and entered the maddening orchestra of insects and other unseen forces.
Under the interior light of his vehicle, Duke paused before shutting his door, and turned to look at Marla before she stepped into the night. Their eyes met and she knew he recognized the difference between a turtle killed in the wild, and one who had been pummeled underfoot by a woman, resolute, even in the dark.
