Red Atlantic by Dominique Sinagra

Red Atlantic

BY DOMINIQUE SINAGRA ILLUSTRATED BY CECILE GENEVIER

No one in my family was meant to be born. My father had been married before he met my mother to a woman named Sandy. We saw her on occasion standing on the curb in front of East Gloucester Variety Store smoking cigarettes. “Hey Sandy, how ya doin’?” “Hi Joey, How’s it goin’?” Sandy and my father tried to have children but couldn’t. My father had all the appropriate tests and was deemed infertile by doctors. My mother hadn’t been in Gloucester long when she met my father. She went there one day for no reason at all, just one day she decided to go for a drive. She drove north from Boston on Route 128 in her blue Jetta her father bought her. Route 128 stretches all the way from Florida, up the East Coast of the United States, until finally finishing in Gloucester.

Gloucester is at the tip of Cape Ann and juts into the Atlantic Ocean. Cape Ann is the point just above Cape Cod. It has been home to fishing families since the 1600’s and boasts being America’s oldest Seaport. My mother drove over the Annisquam River; a salt water river that is more a canal than a river that cuts Gloucester off from the mainland, creating a man-made island.

“What is this place?” my mother thought as she drove east through the city passing the boats bobbing in the harbor like head nodding in agreement. A few weeks later she moved into a cinderblock building on Rocky Neck over looking the railways,

where they hauled boats up to mend leaks, do paint jobs, and scrape the barnacles off their hulls. My mother had spent the last decade in Manhattan, trying to be an actress. She did a lot of waitressing and a lot of auditioning and got a few roles in soap operas. When she turned 30 she decided she no longer wanted to live that life and packed up and headed north, to New England where she grew up. She spent the summer painting her parents’ house in Rhode Island and letting her legs grow brown.

Her roommate in the cinderblock building, overlooking the railways, was a Gloucester girl. The type who has never been to Boston even though it was only 45 minutes away and let alone New York, forget about it! Her roommate said my mother was a space cadet for all her acting and journalling, but other than that they got along just fine. One cold January night, my mother’s roommate opened the window and yelled down to the street below. “Hey! Joe come up here!”

My father grew up in Gloucester. His mother, Pat, had him when she was 18. He was the oldest of five kids. Pat had wanted five boys because everyone knows boys are easier than girls, but instead she got three boys and two girls. Vicky, my father’s younger sister, died in a car accident when I was six months old. She and a friend were leaving a bar and pulled out into oncoming traffic. Vicky wasn’t wearing her seat and went through the windshield. Her friend, was wearing her seatbelt and lived.

My father and his five brothers and sisters grew up on Portaguee Hill, named for all the Portuguese who lived there. Portaguee Hill looked down on the harbor through the frame two blue domed steeples of Our Lady of Good Voyage Church, where a statue of the Virgin Mary held a ship in the crook of her arm like it was the Holy Infant. My father grew up in a green house with vinyl sides that slouched over the pavement and always had its shutters closed.

My mother’s roommate invited my father up to say hi and have a beer. He came up the stairs and stood in the living room holding a trash bag of scallops and a trash bag of shrimp. “Choose one,” he said. My mother chose shrimp.

A few months later my mother discovered she was pregnant with me. At the time, my father was skippering a dragger called the Barbara Jean that he kept tied to the wharf at the railways, next to the Italian Princess, the Midnight Sun and the Vincie N. He went out ten days at a time fishing for cod on George’s Bank, off Nova Scotia.

Towards the end of my mother’s pregnancy, my parents moved into a brown duplex behind the Colonial Inn and up the hill from Rocky Neck. On a freezing night, just before Christmas, the Italian Princess, the Midnight Sun and the Vincie N rubbed against each other and groaned, their ties tightened and pulled, frozen and rigid. Sea smoke rose out of the harbor like souls of lost fisherman and my mother ran up and down the hallway trying to get away from labour pains. My father was downstairs watching the Discovery Channel.

When my head was free from my mother’s body, I was still for a moment and looked around, eyes wide. My father, who had been hiding under a pillow, had to be nudged by the midwife and told a daughter had been born. We lived together in the brown duplex behind the Colonial Inn for six years. My parents bought a twenty-foot long sail-boat they named the ‘Thunder Road’ after the Bruce Springsteen song.

“Screen door slams, Mary’s dress waves Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays…”

The Thunder Road was held by a cradle of stilts, two on each side, in front of the brown duplex. Her sails were kept in a canvas bag in a cupboard under the stairs. Her mast was balanced on saw-horses along the side of the house. My parents were going to fix the Thunder Road up and sail around The Cape and maybe even down the coast. Outside our brown duplex tiny little berries grew from white blossoms and red ants munched them and I believed fairies lived in and amongst them. Inside, our house was always a mess and the fairies wouldn’t come inside unless it was clean. The brown carpet in the brown duplex was never vacuumed and there was stuff everywhere. Toys, my father’s fisherman boots, my mother’s clothes covered the floor. It was impossible to walk across the room without stepping on something.

Bits of onion peels, and shrimp tails were on the kitchen floor. The table was covered with my father’s drawing and dirty plates from many meals ago. The sink was always

overflowing with more pots and pans and plates and grease formed a layer on the top of the undrained water.

We had a dog named Fonzi and three cats, Sophie, Delilah and Elliot. We had a cockatiel named Homer and two goldfish. Fonzi, was always scratching until his skin bled. Elliot was missing his tail because a motorcycle hit him and his tail got caught in the spokes. Delilah once went missing for a week, and my father said a coyote must have got her. But she came back eventually, with her mouth all torn up. Her flea collar must have gotten caught on a bush and got stuck in her mouth as she tried to get it off, until she broke free. Sophie, was black with green eyes and once drank anti-freeze and was never quite right after that. Homer talked to himself. “Hi, Homer.” “Pretty bird.”

My mother worked as a Kindergarten assistant at the Cape Ann Waldorf School. The Cape Ann Waldorf School frowned on television and plastic toys. Once my mother and father got in a huge fight over a jack-in-the-box my father bought from a bargain bin. My mother made him throw it away. Instead, she gave me cloth dolls and wooden blocks and read books to me. My mother wore long skirts to work and her long dark hair in a braid. My father still wasn’t fishing then and I stayed home with him. He’d lie on the couch and sketch boats and let me watch Sesame Street. “Don’t you tell Mommy.” But when my mother got home I always told her I watched Big Bird. “For God’s sake, Joe!” “What? What’s the matter? It’s just big bird!”

Then my mother would go upstairs to take a nap and he’d look at me and say, “Rat fink.” Ever since my mother got over the pains of my labour she had wanted another baby. But miracles usually happen only once. Years went by and my mother continued to pine for another baby. Instead, we bought a new boat; a 65-foot eastern rig. He bought her from someone in New Bedford and I remember looking at her tied to the wharf. “That’s a nice boat.”

Eastern rigs are fishing boats with the pilothouse in the stern, originally made from the hulls of the schooners when engines were replacing sails. Eastern rigs usually pull nets along their sides. The boat’s name was The Gale. My father painted The Gale green and black and steered her north from New Bedford to Gloucester Harbor. He hired some guys as his crew and said he was nervous as hell to take her out fishing. He used The Gale to fish for slime eels or hag fish. Slime eels are long pink fish at the bottom of the Atlantic. They have eyes but are nearly blind because there’s nothing to see down there. They use smell to find carcasses of dead creatures from above that sank to the bottom of the sea. The body of a whale would make an excellent feast for slime eels and they’d inhabit it and eat until there was nothing left but bones. If my father squeezed the head of a slime eel yellow teeth appeared.

My father made traps from 55-gallon drum barrels in the front yard, under the watchful bow of the Thunder Road. He cut round holes into the sides and put in plastic cones and inside he put bait. The slime eels could swim in but not out. When the eels felt threatened they produced white slime from their bodies, so the barrels were filled with sticky slime and seawater when hauled on deck. My father sold the slime eels he caught on the Gale to Koreans and they made shoes and bags and lipstick cases out of their skins. My father was beginning to make pretty good money selling the slime eels to the Koreans. I remember going down to the wharf and shoving my hands in the barrels of eels and pulling two handfuls out. There was a guy named Dan who was 6'5" and scared to death of them and I’d chase him all over the dock, holding my hands out laughing. The Koreans gave me a $20 bill when I saw them. “To buy a cookie.”

My mother opened a savings account for me at Cape Ann Savings Bank, into which I deposited my cookie money. When I was six, my mother discovered she was pregnant, again. It turns out miracles can happen more than once! My mother said she was going to have a home birth because she wanted complete control and I could be there if I wanted. My mother said it might be a scary but she thought I could handle it. I asked why would it be scary and she said because “mommy will be in a lot of pain.”

I said she could hold my hand and squeeze it as much as it hurt. She said she might

hurt my hand and I said I didn’t mind. My mother showed me videos of births. There was a lot of howling, groaning and moaning and I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to film themselves looking like that, but then there was a little baby all covered with gook on the mother’s chest and I thought that might be worth documenting.

My mother took me with her to the midwife’s for the first check up. My mother lay down on a bed and lifted her shirt. The midwife lathered it with some blue jelly that mother said was cold. Then pressed some contraption with a speaker against my mother. Some sounds came out of the speaker like the sounds my father described when he was standing in the engine room of the Gale. Then out of the ocean inside my mother was a thump-thump. It must have been a fish. “Do you hear the baby’s heartbeat?” “Yes.”

A woman pregnant with a daughter carries three generations in her body. She has herself, her child in her growing belly, and not long into gestation the unborn develops eggs, waiting for someday down the line to be fertilized. On February 26th, 1996, I was woken up in the middle of the night. “The new baby is coming,” my father said. “The fish?” “Yes, get up.”

I went down the brown carpeted stairs and walked over the linoleum floor that was peeling up around the edges. My mother called the midwife and she was on her way. My mother decided the best thing to do while waiting for the midwife or the baby, which ever came first, was to vacuum and cook a pot of chilli. My mother bent over the vacuum while she had a contraction and then carried on trying to suck all the dirt up from the carpet, which was a losing battle.

The midwife arrived with her assistant just after 6 AM. In between contractions my mother made everyone tea and coffee and was the best host she’s ever been. The midwife checked for the fish’s heartbeat and said it was strong and it seemed the ocean inside my mother was creating great waves to throw the out and onto land. “What happens next?” my mother said to the midwife.

“Nothing. It can be romantic.” Upstairs in my parent’s bedroom where the fish was going to be born, my mother had laid a big green tarp and a shower curtain over the futon bed and covered it with plastic sheets and covered those with old cotton sheets.

My mother walked up and down the hallway groaning because the waves in her ocean were becoming stronger and more frequent, crashing against her shores. The midwife turned up the heat in the room so the fish wouldn’t get too big a shock when it was born from warm waters. It was hot in my pyjamas so I took them off and just wore my pink underwear. My mother came to the bed heaving and wailing, her face all red and her dark hair in her face. I was going to catch the fish in a white blanket and put a tiny little cap over its head. I’d been looking forward to it for 9 months. But when I got up from my place at the bottom of the bed to get the blanket on the other side of the room, I looked back to see the fish had already been born along with a whole lot of red ocean.

The midwife was rubbing the fish with blankets and someone handed me some scissors to cut the umbilical cord, but I wasn’t strong enough and someone else had to help me. The cord was pinkish and thick with blue running through it.

The great red ocean was still pouring out of my mother even after the Fish had been placed on her chest. The red waters were soaking the old cotton sheets and through to the green shower curtain and the tarp, which was protecting the mattress. The midwife administered a shot into the vein on my mother’s arm. But ocean kept coming, like the surge of a high tide when the moon is full, onto the beach. My mother didn’t seem to notice the Atlantic was coming out of her and just looked around at the ceiling.

Then the midwife wiped the hair out of my mother’s face and held her by the arm and said, “Emily! Emily, look at me. Emily you have to stop bleeding now.”

Eventually, she did stop bleeding, but not before the red Atlantic soaked through the sheets and into the bed. The midwife said my mother should eat lots of iron to make up for the blood loss.

COMMENTARY

I was inspired specifically by a number of female writers and artists that we explored over the course of the module, namely Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath’s confessionals, as well as, Angela Carter’s exploration of the bloody side of life through fairy-tales. I was closely inspired by Frida Kahlo’s painting, “My Birth.” In this piece I write from a fairly autobiographical point of view, describing real life events of my parents coming together, my conception and birth and then my sister’s birth. As I said, in the story, none of us were meant to be born. My father was never meant to be able to have children, according to doctors, but over 10 years he and my mother ended up with 3 children, before their divorce.

The tone of this piece is very personal and I think revealing, not dissimilar to Plath and Sexton’s work. It is also all set in New England where the two poets lived and worked. Although, I was writing from a child’s perspective, but still a female child’s perspective. I feel much of the critics of the confessional poetry were by men who wished to overlook the female experience, especially that of the housewife at that time. By writing about my childhood and my mother, our life, and her birth of my sister and my relationship to it, I hope to be giving voice to a very common experience of birth that is often overlooked or called taboo.

I decided to specifically focus on a home birth, one away from doctors and the Western medical system, and one with a midwife – also one where a child was allowed to be and describing it through a romantic, poetic child perspective. A perspective that I think is unique for the subject. I also want to focus on blood and try to, in my own way, recreate the Frida Kahlo, “My Birth” painting with words. In an effort to keep with the ocean theme of the story and the world of the piece, I didn’t call the blood during the birth, blood, instead I called it the Red Atlantic. I think it makes sense that a child would believe an ocean could exist inside their mothers’ womb – to a child one probably does, certainly to an infant! Although, I wanted to use a poetic voice and description, I didn’t want to shy away from the grotesque, primal nature of birth and wanted to be sure to make it very clear to the reader what was happening.

I was also inspired by outside reading, “Angela’s Ashes” by Frank McCourt. McCourt balances a grave story and circumstances with a humorous child’s voice. This voice worked very well and is one I tried to emulate.