41

A basket of fresh pears. He put them on the breakfast table, kissed Catherine’s forehead. “Good morning, darling.” Then to me, “Doll, how are you today?”

“You’re all bright and chipper,” said Catherine, her eyes the color of the pears.

She picked one up.

“I love pears when they’re hard. I never liked a soft pear. Ern likes his mushy. I love hard pears, hard apples, hard peaches, but you can’t hardly ever find a decent hard peach.”

Ernest opened the newspaper and I brought out the bread, jam, and olives.

That’s how I remember it, anyhow.

42

I stare at the ocean, holding sand in my fist. Catherine and I are two beached whales, fattened from milk and soda crackers. I let the sand run through my fists. On the biggest hill one can see the church fortress. Built some other treacherous century when they were perpetually fearing invaders from the sea. Military or religious? Anyway, when its military uses were done, they’d worship. Pristine gray stone. Its uses gray. Ambiguous. In its doorways, you’d not know whether to expect a priest or a soldier. Let Catherine describe it architecturally. To me, everything is gothic.

“Do you think we’re at the center of it?” Catherine asks.

“Of what?”

“The world.”

I shrug and smile. I have always felt at the edges of it. Postcards are easier than worlds. But even there, picture me the sleepy face in the margin, half in shadows, but always watching.

“Do you feel like you’re in the center?” I ask.

“You always feel like you’re in the center wherever you are,” she says.

Then let it be true for some of us.

Catherine is sitting on a large dry log and I’m sitting on a hill of sand.

“Do you ever think you’ll go back to your husband, your Lantis?” she asks.

“No, I don’t think so.”

In one of the African countries they have a saying: Can you look the crocodile in the face? The crocodile is your own past. Right now I can only look at the crocodile from the corners of my eyes.

“But think is not sure,” she says.

Catherine struggles up a hill of sand. She’s wearing yellow cotton shorts and a yellow sweatshirt. The muscles in the backs of her legs are bulging. I imagine from the front that her chin is rippling. It’s going double.

A seagull squawks. Catherine turns suddenly and watches.

“I wish I were a seabird,” she says.

We stand staring.

“But everyone wants to be free,” she says. “But some birds are flightless, too, like the ostrich, or the emu of Australia. Some birds are as earthbound as we are.”

At home, we sit in two peacock chairs. She is making a rug out of scraps of colored material and I sit listening to the radio.

“Basque homeland and liberty . . . they are getting hungry and will soon come down from their camps in the hills . . . it is an almost impossible task to wipe out terrorists completely . . . violence has flared up once again . . . no convincing explanation for any of this . . . many people are perplexed . . . they’ve grown used to having things their own way.”