That Thing With Feathers
by Sacha Moore
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3, 4 |
part 3
“I don’t know...” Gloria said to Tabitha when they were seated at their sticky kitchen table, early Saturday morning.
“You don’t know about what? Doug?”
“Yes. No. He’s still wonderful, but there is something...”
“He got awfully quiet after I saw that figure. I screamed because I thought it might’ve been a ghost. He certainly acted as if I’d seen a ghost.”
“That would bother me, too, though. No, that’s not it exactly.”
“Do you think someone’s stalking him?”
“He said he thought it might be a crazy girl from his kids’ boarding school who became obsessed with one of his sons and was looking for the boy at Doug’s.”
“Oh,” Tabitha said, but she thought it impossible she would ever care that much to be haunted by someone or, in turn, to haunt him.
Gloria continued verbalizing her misgivings. “He’s kind, generous, warm, interested—”
“Interesting.”
“Interesting. But—”
“Is he too uppity for you?” Tabith asked.
“Just a touch hoity-toity what all that region of the grape stuff. Wine is wine as far as I’m concerned. It either tastes good or it doesn’t. No, but that’s not really it either.”
“Do you think it could be that he’s actually classier than some of your other boyfriends? Is that why it feels a little weird?”
“Maybe that’s it.”
“Please, Mom, don’t give up so soon. This is the first guy you’ve dated that I actually like.”
“Oh, you liked Marty.”
“Come on. Not really.”
“You liked him in the beginning.”
“Maybe. I only remember not liking him at the end, after I broke my leg when you dragged me skiing with you guys and he acted as if I ruined his weekend.”
“Marty did turn out to be a bit selfish.”
“A bit? Doug seems super-generous. And he pays attention.”
“He certainly pays attention to you,” her mom said.
Tabitha blushed. But Gloria was at the sink and didn’t see her, thankfully. It was nice having someone pay attention. Was there something wrong with that? It felt kind of buzzy, not at all like when that gross Matt Volpe kept following her around, wanting to see what she was drawing, asking her too many personal questions.
“Do you think you’ll continue to see him?”
“Oh.” Gloria threw the dishtowel into the sink. “I suppose. I don’t see why not.”
Tabitha was relieved. She didn’t want her mom to toss out what seemed like the first decent guy in forever because she had some annoying undefinable unease. Tabitha wondered if it was his refinement that bothered her mom. Gloria had occasionally dated men who had means, but there was often a hint of crassness that went along with it: their expensive car reeked of a fancy cologne, and their hair was blow-dried. Not this time, though. Doug exuded an understated wealth, and that was something else entirely. Tabitha tried not to let herself think this, but at times she couldn’t help it. If things between her mom and Doug worked out, her life might actually resemble Emily’s. For the first time in a long time, Tabitha felt a twinge of excitement. And hope.
Gloria seemed more at ease after the next couple of dates with Doug, more open with him, more trusting. To Tabitha he remained pleasant, though the intensity of his initial energy was dialed back a bit. Still, the times he came to the house to pick up her mom, he and Tabitha would talk about old movies she had seen, or where she was thinking about going to college. They were relatively short interactions, which was fine, especially if Gloria was the least bit wary that Doug might be paying too much attention to her.
Tabitha, for a change, wanted this relationship to work. She was very interested in Doug’s world, and her mom was the access point. A few weeks later, Gloria announced that Doug had invited both of them to go sailing with him that weekend.
“Doug has a boat?” Tabitha asked, wide-eyed.
“Doug has a yacht,” Gloria said emphatically, then she rolled her eyes. “I was corrected. A few too many times, if you ask me.” Tabitha was flattered that he would include her and looked forward to the trip. This was a trip she could imagine Emily’s family taking. Maybe they had a boat — whoops — a yacht. Emily’s family certainly had friends with yachts and of course living near the water, they were familiar with the sailing culture.
Sailing was sun-chapped and wind-kissed, full of nautical charts and compasses and cardinal directions. It was a way people used to know the world that folks shopping at Target and reading best-sellers on their Kindles were cut off from now. Doug seemed to have a respect for things that were old, classic, if not timeless. But wait. What actually was timeless if you went back far enough? The Gingko tree?
Doug and Gloria picked up Tabitha early from school the following Friday. She was thrilled. Many people her age would bristle at the prospect of spending a weekend with their parents but that was something you could disdain only if you had it. Doug drove an Audi. Like his home, it was immaculate. Unlike Gloria’s Chevy Impala, which smelled of a treacly perfume and was forever rife with tissues, make-up, receipts, paper coffee cups, chaos.
Doug’s car smelled faintly of musk with undertones of a woodsy smoke and hints of taut masculinity. It drove quietly, owning the backroads of Fairfield County, confident in the moneyed towns until it arrived at the Greenwich Yacht Club.
Tabitha was tickled by all the names of the sailboats — like Three Dog Night and Her Majesty. “They’re kind of ridiculous, sort of like horse names,” Tabitha noted. Gloria chuckled. Doug frowned. Doug’s yacht was called Serenity, which was one of the less pretentious names. It was a thirty-foot wooden sailboat with a tiny little bathroom and a tiny little kitchen.
Doug took to preparing the boat to sail and told Tabitha and her mother to relax, he had everything under control. Tabitha listened to the clang of the ropes on the metal poles, the lapping of the water, the squawking of the seagulls and the bite of the salt in the air.
“What do you think?” she asked her mother. Gloria didn’t look entirely comfortable. “I’m not sure, honey, I think the water makes me nervous. I think boats make me nervous.”
Tabitha pointed out that her mother had never been on a boat, so why assume a negative experience. “Now you sound like me,” Gloria said and laughed.
Just then Doug called to them and they hopped aboard. Doug’s hand was warm and firm as he lifted Tabitha into the yacht. Tabitha was excited, and as they motored out of their slip, Tabitha felt the oncoming freedom of the open water. This was the life she had never had. It did, in fact, exist. Doug was at the helm, and before long started calling out to them to untie or pull on or — as Gloria seemed to be good at doing — bat at various ropes. There was enough of a breeze to keep it interesting but not enough that it became too interesting.
Tabitha enjoyed losing herself in her thoughts; she liked being on the water. There was certain serenity to it, as if this was a place you could come and it would invariably offer sanctity, for those for whom sailing was their spirituality.
Tabitha looked over at her mother whose face was frozen in a tip-lipped grimace. She could tell her mother was not enjoying herself but doing her best not to show it, for Doug’s sake.
Tabitha sensed that Doug truly loved sailing. Once they were underway for a while, Doug asked Tabitha if she would like to take the helm. He stood behind her and she felt his rough but assured male energy, and it felt really, really nice. Was this what was missing in her life, she wondered. Up until this point she had never really experienced male energy that she actually liked, barring unwitting crushes in middle school that she had resolved to stop engaging in come high-school.
Doug pointed at a buoy in the distance and told her to steer towards it while he went down below. He emerged with gifts as well as three beers. “They say,” Doug said, “a sailor’s second favorite thing to do is sail.” He handed Tabitha what looked to be a book, wrapped in tissue paper.
“Oooooo... oh, Doug, this is... wow... this is amazing,” Gloria cooed, taking out the silver bracelet encrusted with semi-precious stones. Then suddenly Gloria seemed to be gulping for air. “Oh my God, I think I’m going to be sick.” And she stood up and made, perhaps, a nominal effort to turn her face toward the water, but most of her sick was on the boat. Oh no, oh no, oh no, Tabitha said to herself.
But Doug was absolutely gallant. He told Gloria it was okay. They would turn around, get back to land. He did not seem the least bit angry, as Tabitha feared he might. Or give off a sense that their mini-getaway was inevitably ruined by this snafu. Gloria’s retching didn’t seem to faze him. He suggested Gloria might want to go below and lie down, that he had something he could give her, that everything would be all right. She so wanted to believe when they told you everything would be all right. Would it? Or did her burgeoning hope need to be quashed, as it always did?
While Doug and her mother were downstairs, Tabitha opened up his gift to her. It was Here is New York by E.B. White. He suspected her dream, and she was touched by his accurate intuition. Inside he wrote, “May all your dreams come true. I know they will. Always, Doug.” A little sappy but also a little, what was the word she was searching for? Intimate? Yes, that’s it. Maybe he was a little too keyed into her. It was odd after never feeling all that interesting except to herself and her few, mostly female, friends. And now this strange older male attention. She was flattered but confused. Why was Doug intriguing to her, and why did she feel a certain degree of comfort and understanding with him, yet boys her own age forever remained hapless enigmas?
Doug came back up with his second bottle of beer, telling Tabitha they were going to turn the boat around. He explained how she would have to duck under the mainsail. “I’m going to say, ‘Ready about?’ You’re going to answer, ‘Ready’. And then I’m going to say, ‘Hard alee’.”
Tabitha smiled. “That sounds awesome.” Tabitha felt right at home: on the water, sailing, sitting at the helm. She wished her mother did, too, but her mom’s true comfort zone was, sigh, more pedestrian: bowling, singles bars, Hallmark stores.
“You’re a natural,” Doug told her. He said his sons loved sailing and that one rowed varsity crew at Groton, neither of which Tabitha had never heard of: Groton or crew. “Why do your kids go to boarding school?” Tabitha asked.
Doug said in large part because he did when he was their age but also because the tension between him and his ex-wife was unpleasant enough that it was almost a relief for his kids not to be around them.
Tabitha liked that he leveled with her, that he was willing to answer her questions honestly. She was tempted to ask him about his divorce but thought she might be stepping out of her place.
Copyright © 2018 by Sacha Moore
