FICTION | Zoe Stricker The Sound of Waves

FICTION

THE SOUND OF WAVES

By Zoe Stricker

You are in the ocean.

It is unordinary for the two of you to be swimming together, and you actually comment on it. “We’ve never swum together,” you say. And it is bizarre because your current shtetl is a beach town, and she grew up in Oahu, and both of you love the feeling of tight muscles and dry eyes that swimming gives.

You take selfies with your underwater camera and laugh as you bodysurf. You swim with sea lions and dolphins and it is extraordinary, and so the day becomes that. A woman sitting on the beach yells, wanting to know if she can come in without a top. You both scream: of course! Life is to be lived! She runs in and out, shrieking and kissing her boyfriend once back on dry sand. “I feel so young and alive!” she calls out to you and your friend from her picnic. And the two of you smile together, as you are experiencing the same jeunesse adrift in an unsteady ocean.

The waves pulse up and down, creating hills, and without warning, you are sledding together, collecting sea cucumbers along the way. This inspires some majestic feelings. Yet, the waves are off-kilter—belabored breathing—and right then you sense that the imminent imbalance is not just a phenomenon of

the sea, it is somehow impending: to be cast over someone like an ether-stained blanket used for smother. The clouds darken and this day makes you feel guilty later; she could have been with her mother instead of with you, selfish you, inside of an ocean that will always be around the corner. * * *

Earlier that day, before sea swimming, your friend tells you she needs to buy a funeral dress as she drinks a bottle of wine before 2 pm You pour her glass and make idle suggestions for brands. She tells you about disturbing visits with her mother— how the most recent time she saw her, she was vomiting and in so doing, filling bags with blood. You wince, but look away so she can’t see tears in your eyes. You mumble mild comforts. She reminds herself that hospice gave her mother one to two weeks, and so she has time to order a black dress online, right?

Later that day, after sea swimming, you clean sand-stained skin and exchange graphic novels. She goes to the arcade with her boyfriend and arrives home well-past dark, giggling in the doorway. You hear a call she receives, quarter to the hour; it’s her sister and it’s urgent. You know this from half of a conversation, your friend saying, “you want me to come now? It’s an hour away.” From the rustling of things: bags being packed, brushing hands through hair, the sound of swiftness, you know her sister has told her it doesn’t matter, and in fact, she must hurry.

She leaves with her boyfriend without explanation, the smell of ocean spray wafting throughout your house. You send a text message saying to please write if she needs something. You tell your housemate, and the two of you fail to perfectly arrange her things so that she is comfortable upon return. You call friends crying. They put on a spa voice and tell you there is nothing you can do. You cancel your plans for the following day and you tell

your mother you love her. You turn your phone to its highest ringing volume and place it under your head so that you can be awakened in sleep. You imagine your friend must have been doing all of this since her mother’s first mammogram in 2006.

You hear her come in, early in the morning, before the sea lions have started barking, and the return is a surprise…it means she was not home for long. Your head swells with questions, and yes, you are tired, but her re-entry is bewildering. You want to help, but you don’t know how. Accidentally, you fall back asleep and reawaken later—anxious—immediately vigilant. You listen for noises, any mimicry of emotion, and after a few hours you hear it through the doorway: sniffles, mutterings, perhaps poems being read aloud. Blinds open, people whisper, feet touch the floor. Noses are blown and the door unlocks for tissues or toilet paper.

You wait, unmoving, unsure of what to do; anxious of what has happened but averse to asking. You can hear the waves crashing, pummeling the sand, as if outraged. She comes into the living room, her eyes distended and cerise, but you know she hasn’t been to the cove by your house where she likes to swim. She sits near you and you ask, unable to refrain, how her night was. She ignores the question. You talk about TV shows that went off the air 10 years ago, and the return of a housemate despised—incapable of relating to a world outside of her own—her narcissism angers everyone. You fear how she will handle an event so painful for another.

You search for answers, every subtlety illuminated—you ask if she wants a bagel, she replies she is not hungry. Not hungry. You note this, certain it means something, certain it means what you thought you knew, happened. You look down and there is quiet, yet it bellows at you: your friend is grieving, take

her to the ocean; say something; make her laugh, dance like a chicken, like you did as an eight-year old when your nanny’s mother died, she laughed when you did that, fill the quiet, fill it! But you don’t. You don’t know how to. Instead you wait and try to behave like an adult, even if adulthood is arbitrary in this moment. You don’t talk about what you will do today. You sit in silences but you don’t make her utter anything out loud; nothing she is unready to say. Through cracks in the door you see her boyfriend holding her, something they never really do. You watch his hand tenderize her back whilst exchanging “I love yous,” and you pretend you’re on your phone, not watchful or worried or suffering for her.

You bring up something scandalizing, that a public figure is pleading guilty to heinous crimes. You tell her this and she is there and she is not there and it is clear that she cannot hear you. She thinks you say she has died. She keeps repeating it, asking, as if a question, if she has died. You shake your head no. She realizes what has happened—that her thoughts concealed have been shared. But in seeing the salt water in your eyes she knows it is OK, she is safe; you were thinking about it, too.

Her mother’s mother died when her mother was 14. Now when her own mother is dying (or possibly dead) she is 23—it’s all the same ills. She has told you she doesn’t want children, you are curious if this is why. If she thinks putting them through cancer is to be passed down in genes, and in the same way people test for Tay-Sachs before they are married so as not to harm latent futures, you question if she is doing the science herself, calculating the potential for pain because there is no art of losing. You think about what motherhood has meant to her.

She leaves and you don’t ask where, you can’t demand anything of her right now. It is too much—inundating without

needing to be. You sit still, feeling contrite for not holding her and addressing the pain stinging the lightly-salted air. You realize you have never seen her cry before.

You open the door to her room, which incidentally is your room, too. You scan it, hoping to garner something, hoping to put assumptions to rest, and then you scold yourself, ‘you cannot be so thoughtlessly insensitive,’ you think with reproach; ‘she needs you.’ You find a shoebox-turned-package on the floor next to her mattress, positioned right next to her pillow, half-opened. With trepidation, your hands become shovels and you dig inside, intending to help, albeit intruding at the same time. You discover the box is filled with photographs and cards exclusively of and from her mother, and that is when you know. You graze through these pieces of paper, imbued with endearments, and in the final lines of one, delicately plastered with scrawl, you read:

I have always found peace and solace in the ocean; at the ocean, sand under my feet, salt air on my skin, in my lungs. You are part of the sea Zoë, visit it when you can, it will heal your heart, your soul. The sound of waves is the sound of my heart. I love you forever, Mama.