Cockroaches of the Sea

(For Robby)

Steph didn't tell her brother Alan about her walks. Why should she! He would try to make her feel ashamed, and she would end up feeling anxious. Not because he'd convince her that what she'd been doing was wrong--he wouldn't--but because she'd feel the distance between them. Alan would never have the patience to understand it all.

Alan moved back from the South several months ago, in the middle of summer. He said that the two of them, he and Steph, should promise to get together at least once a week. It was the first time in over 20 years that they lived in the same town. He'd gone to medical school in Atlanta, began his practice there. He always hated the cockroaches, but found that they could be vacuumed up, and the bag discarded without ever having to touch them. One night, though, Alan woke from a dream about a little girl in a pink dress who was tickling his ear with a branch of cherry blossoms. He turned on the light, he'd told Steph, because the tickling continued even when he was awake. When he pulled a cockroach from his ear and screamed like a little girl in a pink dress, he'd had enough. He bought a condo in Boston's South End and took a position in a Cambridge hospital.

"It's a pay cut, but I'm planning on simplifying my life while I'm here," Alan said over dinner during their first time out together.

Steph looked across the table at her brother. He put aloe around his eyes at bedtime. He went to the barber every two weeks to trim his thick dark hair, and checked daily between two mirrors with an electric razor in hand for hair growth on his nape. They'd been born within minutes of each other, but Steph thought that she looked much older. Much older.

"Hello quiet New England nights at home in my slippers. Goodbye humidity, thank Christ," Alan said.

"Hello steamy winter nights, goodbye pajamas," Steph added.

"No way. I'm taking a break. Try this," Alan said, offering a forkful of scallop and spinach. He had chosen the place, a bistro that served "creative cuisine," kept their lights dim and hung abstract art painted in bright colors.

"I'm full," Steph said. Alan shrugged and ate. The truth was, she was afraid her brother would wipe the fork off with a napkin after she'd taken a bite. He hadn't done something like that in years, but she remembered now how as a kid, when they were nine or ten, he would refuse to drink from her glass, saying simply, "germs." Not so long before then, when they were five, they would hold each other by the shoulders, faces close, and let the tips of their tongues touch, giggling at the idea of it. Alan's tongue tasted like metal.

Outside the restaurant, Alan walked slowly to the car, hands in the pockets of his khakis. He looked up at the stars. "This feels so right," he said to his sister. "I'm glad I'm back."

***

Steph began this past spring to take walks late at night, to clear her head before bed. Her relationship with Graham, a marine biologist and vegan, had ended a few months earlier. Steph usually ended up in the wealthy area, several blocks from her own neighborhood. She liked to look at the landscaping, the flower arrangements, for ideas on how she might fix up her own house one day. Steph would never admit to Alan that she wanted to plant hydrangeas that complemented the color of her windowpanes and door, or rose bushes and French tulips of her own--he'd tease her about being extravagant. She'd lived with her parents until about 10 years ago, and whenever Alan came home for a visit, he'd push Steph to rent a place in the city, telling her, be young. "Paying rent is like throwing money in the toilet," she'd tell him. In her late 20's, Steph bought the two-bedroom ranch she lived in alone.

On one of these walks, Steph approached a house whose flower garden extended to the sidewalk. Tulip beds, irises, dark-orange flowers that grew on long stems. The house had pillars. She suddenly envisioned herself walking over the irises, cutting the tulips in half with shears. Once beside the garden, Steph surprised herself when she bent down, tightened her fist around a stem--as if it around the neck of a chicken, she later thought - and pulled. She dropped the flower onto the sidewalk. She continued walking the entire time, looking back only once, and in light cast from a streetlamp, noticed the stringy white roots at the base of the stem, and the orange flower, open, with a dark center that looked at her like an eye.

During the days that followed, Steph played a game: she tried to convince herself that this incident had not really happened. When she considered that it might just have been a dream, her daily routine, house, job, the Boston suburb she lived in--her little life, she referred to it in her mind - seemed enviable, interesting. When she stopped fooling herself, Steph imagined that there was a mole on her cheek that sprouted numerous, dark hairs; or that she had just given a business presentation, and discovered that the middle buttons of her blouse were undone, and her bra plainly visible all along.

***

Steph worked as an Indexer at Porter's, a publishing company that specialized in technical books. She read manuscripts on new computer programs, texts that promised "sleek coding infrastructure" or whose titles were packed with acronyms - and created indexes for them. As an English major in college, she'd dreamed about working for a big publishing house, where her originality and talent would be noticed. During an interview years ago for an Administrative Assistant position at Cartae Press, Inc., the petite and fashionable woman interviewing Steph was called away for a moment, leaving her clipboard behind. Steph saw that the woman had written "frumpy" across the bottom of her resume.

Steph felt that she was respected at Porter's. She worked long hours, some weekends, and had even lost vacation days a few times when she didn't use them before the end of the year. Once, at the beginning, a manager took her to lunch: "We don't want anyone dying here," he told her. Now they didn't seem to notice so much, and she felt comfortable closing her office door for hours at a time. The privacy let her concentrate the way she needed to when looking through every chapter, section, paragraph, every figure and table for a possible index entry; but it also gave her occasion to close her eyes and really feel the classical music she liked to listen to.

***

Steph and Alan went to a seafood restaurant one Friday night in late September. They sat in a booth. Steph closed the menu, and leaned her back against the wall. She counted the handles on the helm that hung opposite her.

"You're not supposed to put your feet up," the waitress said when she came to take their order.

"You run a tight ship here," Steph said putting her feet back on the floor. The waitress didn't laugh. She was about 17, short, and pregnant. Steph took her paper napkin and wiped the seat.

When the waitress left to put their order in, Steph tapped her stomach. "Daddy," she said to Alan.

"Captain Shrimp," Alan said nodding in the direction of a fat man with large glasses, standing behind the cash register.

Once their food arrived, Alan tucked in the collar of his dress shirt, and tied a plastic bib around his neck. "I can't get enough of this stuff," he said. He'd ordered two lobsters and some clam chowder. "Catfish is the South's one and only answer to seafood. Catfish Creole, black beans and catfish, catfish-chip cookies. Who the fuck wants to eat catfish?"

"Graham told me that catfish fart," Steph said.

Alan looked at her confused, or maybe annoyed, as he sucked on a lobster leg.

"Did I ever tell you what I told him that time we went snorkeling in Rockport?" Steph salted her french fries with a mermaid shaker that had a crack around mid-fin. She could feel the dried super-glue, rough and irregular among the pattern of smooth scales.

"Oh my God! Did I tell you what Brad said the other day?" Alan asked. Brad was a nurse at the hospital where Alan worked. Alan had asked him out recently. "He told me that my ass looked beautiful in my scrubs. See - I knew he'd been checking me out!"

Steph pulled the belly off of a clam. "So I wanted seafood after we snorkeled," she said. "Graham said, ‘You can eat seafood after seeing them all in their natural habitat?'"

"Pa-lease," Alan said. "No wonder you dumped him."

"So I told him, ‘I didn't see any fried haddock down there.'"

Alan slapped the table and laughed with his mouth open, full of food.

"Pig," Steph told her brother.

Steph called the waitress over. "Do you want something?" she asked. Steph thought of one or two abstract ways to answer this question. The girl raised her eyebrows. She had an orange stain around her top lip, from soda or kool-aid. As kids, Steph and Alan would go to the corner store and ask for chocolate bars in the way they'd heard them advertised on television. She thought now of ordering her dessert exactly as it was described on the menu, but decided against it. "A piece of blueberry pie," Steph said.

They waited a long time for the bill. Alan looked like Louis XIV, slumped in his booth with all the empty dishes that the waitress had ignored before him. He used his toothpick to poke at the lobster pieces spread out over his dinner plate. "See sis," he said, "twins are together through it all."

"Those two met for the first time in the boiling pot," Steph said.

Alan got his wallet out. Steph put money on the table for a tip.

"Why are you leaving so much?" Alan asked. "She sucked."

"Oppression of women."

"Don't start, Stephanie," Alan said, pointing at Steph with his credit card as he walked past her to the cash register.

***

The night Steph moved on to flowerpots, she had been thinking about Graham. She walked by a house with several steps leading up to a porch. On the bottom step was a medium sized clay flowerpot with impatiens flowing over. The house was three stories and painted a deep, glossy maroon, with black shutters--she'd noticed it before. It had a fenced in backyard, and a viewing tower. Steph had peeked between the fence pickets once, and seen a water fountain constructed from artfully arranged rocks, a few trees with fruit she didn't recognize, and some toys.

She crossed the street and looked at the house from a distance. The porch was lit, but no lights were on inside. She continued on for several blocks, remembering how Graham sometimes took little, noisy bites of whatever he was eating before committing it fully to his mouth. For a long time, Steph didn't let on that this behavior stood out to her, and would watch only if she thought he wouldn't notice. He would be tilting his fork or spoon to look at the food from a slightly different angle, or studying oatmeal or hummus as if he'd never seen it before. After a while, she grew resentful, feeling that she had to ignore this behavior, that it would be rude of her to acknowledge it.

Steph crossed the street again, and headed back towards the house with the impatiens.

Steph talked to Graham about his habit one Saturday in the car. He was eating a chocolate bar as he drove--dark chocolate, made without dairy. Graham was bald on the top of his head, and pudgy, his flannel shirt tucked tightly into dark brown corduroys, so that his rounded stomach was noticeable. They were on their way to New Hampshire for a fall hike.

When Steph reached the house, she walked the short distance from the sidewalk to the bottom step. She imagined that the owners didn't give much thought to life. Nothing had ever interfered with their belief that a little charm and attention to detail yielded beautiful things. The pot was heavier than she'd anticipated. She reached over the impatiens (she saw now that there were several varieties), flattening them with her forearm as she curled her fingers under the back rim of the pot, squatted and pulled. She jumped back as the impatiens were falling, almost falling herself. Steph heard the flowerpot break, and watched soil spill over the pavement, over the flowers. She felt something--satisfaction? She shook her foot to clean her sneaker. She headed towards her house, quickly for the first few blocks, looking back occasionally. Eventually, she slowed down, and wondered why she hadn't yet fixed up her house.

"You're not so perfect yourself, you know," Graham had said.

"I don't claim to be perfect, Graham. I just get annoyed."

Graham looked at her and then back at the road. "Sometimes, sometimes you stink." He looked at Steph to see her reaction.

"That's ridiculous," she'd said.

"Your breath, or your underarms."

"You're just trying to be mean." Steph looked out the window then, to watch the colorful leaves pass by, and to hide the tears from Graham. Finally, she had to blow her nose. Graham looked quickly and then began to hum. A few days later, he brought her a gift: 14 karat gold earrings, shaped like little fish.

***

"I'm off tomorrow. Come out with me and Brad," Alan said over the phone one night in early October. "Thursdays at Thong are supposed to be great."

They picked her up in Alan's jeep, the top off.

"It's cold out, Al," Steph said to her brother.

"I brought you a blanket."

Steph saw a quilt neatly folded beside her in the back seat. Brad turned around and offered his hand. He must have been 15 years younger than them. His hair was very short and styled into disarray. He was wearing a black t-shirt, and Steph could see a band, vines or knives, tattooed around his thick upper left arm. "It's so nice to meet you. Ally has told me so much about you," he said rubbing the back of her brother's head.

"He used to tell everyone about the triplet that died."

Brad looked from Steph to Alan. "I bet prenatal care in those days really sucked."

"Ignore the woman behind the quilt," Alan said. "Her compulsions are overtaking her."

Steph wondered whether she should get a tattoo - a thermos or maybe a mitten on her shoulder blade.

"I knew she was lying," Brad said waving a hand at Steph. "No one that serious is telling the truth."

At Thong they had a drink not far from the dance floor, against a wall with a long mirror. Brad ran his fingers through Steph's hair. "Look at this gray! I didn't think twins could be so different."

"Hormones," Alan said before taking a sip of his scotch.

Brad stood facing the wall, and tilted his head down a bit, looking up at his own hair in the mirror. "Honey, if it were hormones, I'd be gray at 23, with all the cows I've eaten."

"Brad's a Texas boy," Alan said grabbing Brad by the hips and pulling him closer. "That's why we get along so well--we're both Southerners at heart." Steph looked past her brother to the dance floor. An older man was putting some money in a dancer's jockstrap. The dancer was doing a backbend on the speaker.

"Baby, we need to work on this," Brad said pinching Alan's stomach.

"Brad's mother used to make him sing Hard Candy Christmas for guests, because he sounded like Dolly Parton when he was little," Alan said.

The old man had gotten up on the speaker with the dancer, and was waving to someone in the crowd.

Brad rolled his eyes as he sipped from his straw. "Enough reminiscing, time for another round," he said. He looked at himself sideways in the mirror.

"I got it," Alan said, getting up from his stool and reaching into his pocket. They watched Brad make his way through the crowd to the bar, and Alan smoothed the front and then back of his pants with his palms now that he was standing. Steph recognized this as something that she did too.

"Nice boy," she said.

"Isn't he! I'm so glad you like him," Alan said. "I knew you two would get along well."

During their third drink, a song came on that Alan liked. "Oh my God, we have to dance!" he said, grabbing his sister's hand, then leading her onto the dance floor. Alan dipped his sister, and twirled her. Steph squatted and let hair fall over her face as she moved her head to the music. Alan clapped his hands and laughed with his head back. Steph stopped for a moment and saw that her brother's upturned face looked at first red and then blue in the light of the disco ball.

"It seemed like you were having a great time out there," someone said to Steph as she walked out of the women's room. Steph saw a girl, around Brad's age, waiting in the bathroom line. She was chubby, and was smiling.

"My brother would disown me if I didn't dance to Madonna."

"That bad, huh?" the girl laughed. She pushed hair behind both ears. Steph pushed some of her own hair behind an ear. "Well, I better go see what he's up to," Steph said.

"Have a fantastic night," the girl said, still smiling at Steph.

When Steph, Alan, and Brad were getting ready to leave, the girl approached Steph. "Hey, I just wanted to give you my number in case you ever wanted to have coffee," she said, handing her a matchbook. She'd written her name and a number on the inside cover.

"Look at you! I always hoped you'd be a lesbian," Alan said after the girl left.

"Yucky," Brad said.

"Why?" Steph asked her brother.

"I don't know--I guess then we'd be even more alike," he said.

On the ride home, Steph lifted her arms, and let the air run through her fingers. She felt as if her brother were not taking her home, to some final destination, but as if he were driving her towards a set of experiences that she hadn't yet had. She'd felt this sort of thing before, when she visited a small costal town in Florida. She had been on vacation in Atlanta, and Alan was on call for several days straight. Steph rented a car, and drove the six hours to a bed and breakfast she'd read about in a travel guide. It struck her on the way there that no one she'd encounter would know her. Once in the town, she found herself leaning over and starting a conversation with people at a nearby table in a restaurant; helping a couple with directions, and accepting their invitation to coffee; braiding her hair into pigtails. It seemed that she could become a different version of herself in this place.

When they got to her house, Steph kissed her brother on the cheek. Brad stepped outside and opened her car door. "Bye Ranger," she said to him.

At Porter's the next day, Steph put her head down on her desk for a short rest. She heard music, hard rock, louder than it should be at work. She knew where it was coming from--a programmer with a goatee and braided bracelets, a technical cowboy, the younger brother of a manager. She wrote an email.

Could you please put headphones on? Your music is disruptive to my work. I've asked you this before. Frankly, your arrogance is unprofessional.

A few minutes later, he was at her door. Steph kept one hand on the doorknob, and the other on the doorpost, to make sure that he wouldn't walk into her office.

"Some of us like to have fun every once in a while," he said. "You don't need to make us miserable too."

That night, later than usual, Steph went on her walk. She didn't feel like going all the way to her favorite neighborhood, so she stopped a few blocks from it, in an area with smaller houses, and trees or shrubs in the front yards instead of flower gardens. She noticed one house in particular because it was more unkempt than the rest, with overgrown and uneven hedges up against the house. Steph thought that this house probably did not have a security light. She also saw a small, lone shrub. From its placement, in the middle of the lawn, it had likely been something worth admiring at one point. Now, it was haggard, sparse in places where before there had surely been branches.

Steph sometimes fantasized about getting caught. For some reason, she felt that something good would come of it.

Steph put her gloves on, and then took them off again. She kicked some leaves off the sidewalk. In case someone was watching her, she folded her arms, and looked down the street, then at her watch. She turned toward the house again. If she was wrong, and a security light did come on, she would tell them she been playing with a ring - no, she had been taking a snug ring off her finger, had lost control of it, and it had landed somewhere on this property.

She kneeled on the grass in front of the shrub. The lawn remained dark. She snapped a branch off. It did not give as easily as she'd anticipated. She had to twist it around several times before it finally detached, without much noise. It smelled like cut grass. She looked around. She broke off another one, and then another. She looked up and saw a statue of the Virgin Mary in the corner of the lawn. Steph then noticed something move in the window--or did she? She got up quickly. The windows had shades drawn over them. She hunched over, still watching the windows, and pulled at the base of the shrub. She wanted to see it uprooted, to leave it broken and defeated lying beside the space that had sustained it--she thought this would make a nice foil. It wouldn't budge. Then finally, there was snapping, the loosening of roots.

A light went on in the house.

Steph was very still for a few moments. She remembered a news special about a housewife from South Carolina who had murdered her husband. No one knew why. The program showed pictures of the woman before the incident; a real southern belle. She had been an involved and loving mother to the couple's three children. The reporter tried to interview the woman from her bunk bed in the Columbia Prison for Women. They showed her, balding, heavy, sticking her tongue out at the camera, hiding herself under a sheet.

Once Steph reached the sidewalk, she thought she heard the siren of a police car in the distance. She started running down a street that was perpendicular to this one, but was uncertain that she could get home this way. She forced herself to walk. She took her hat off, put it in her pocket. She took her jacket off, folded it over her arm. Steph was running again. As she turned left onto another street, she could see that all lights were off at the house with the nearly destroyed, but still upright shrub.

When Steph got home, she began to pack, enough clothes for a few days: two sweaters, pants, underwear, sneakers, toiletries, some jewelry. Steph saw the matchbook on her dresser, beside the earrings and necklace she'd worn the night before. She ripped off the cover and tore it into several pieces. She packed a book and a notebook. She'd leave tomorrow for Maine, to one of those quaint coastal towns where she could walk on the beach or sit in a cafe. Maybe she would even call in sick on Monday. Maybe she'd quit her job and move to Maine.

She and Graham had been grocery shopping the last time they'd been together, earlier this year. They were going to make spaghetti for dinner. It was winter and Steph was wearing a gray wool coat with a belt of the same material that she tied loosely in front. It was a new purchase, she'd visited the department store many times to see if the coat would go on sale, until it finally did and she let herself buy it.

Graham showed Steph a package of soy meat. "Soy is good for everything," he told her. "Cancer, constipation, high cholesterol." Steph was holding a few items, and shifted them in her arms as he spoke. She said nothing, which seemed to make him more excited. He waved the package very close to her, so that she had to turn her face away, afraid it would hit her on the cheek. "It might even help your eczema!" Steph wanted ground beef for her spaghetti, and started to walk towards the meat section. "Wait!" Graham yelled. She was pulled back quickly--Graham had grabbed her coat belt--so that she dropped the yogurt, the pickles. "You fucking vegan fruitcake," Steph said to Graham. They both looked down at the yogurt, which had escaped its container like a dialogue balloon from a comic strip; yet this oval contained pickle chips instead of words. "Disgusting," Graham said. One end of Steph's coat belt dragged on the supermarket floor. Steph saw that Graham had torn the seam from one of the loops that normally held the belt around her waist. The belt passed through yogurt as Steph lifted it up.

When they paid for their food, Graham was engaging with the checkout clerk, laughing loud and often. On the way home, he told Steph, "If you're going to be in this mood all night, I'm not coming over." He dropped her off and left. Several days later, she called him.

"I don't think we should see each other any more," she said.

"I agree," he said, and then added, "Anything else?" as if he were talking to one of his students.

"You're fat," she'd told him.

Steph awoke late the next morning. She had fallen asleep after dawn, unable to stop thinking about the southern belle that she'd remembered the night before.

Alan called. "Let's go to dinner tonight," he said.

She had been looking at a map when the phone rang, trying to figure out the best route to Maine.

"Hellooo!"

"Okay," Steph said.

"You look like shit," Alan said to Steph in her hallway, when he came to pick her up. "Are you sick?"

"I don't know," she said.

He frowned. It was easy for Steph to forget that her brother was a doctor, but she thought of it now as he looked over her head at nothing in particular, as he felt along her neck and under her jawbone using cool fingers that surely would know illness if they encountered it.

They went back to the fancy bistro. Steph ordered a baked lobster dish, and Alan ordered salmon.

"Brad's out with his cousin tonight," Alan said. "From Dallas."

"They should be making you chicken fried steak," Steph said.

"I can't get enough of that boy." Alan went on. "Have you ever felt that way? Like you just can't be satisfied, no matter how much you see of someone?"

Steph adjusted the napkin on her lap. "No," she said.

They had just begun eating when Steph saw Brad, in the section of the dining room elevated several feet from the rest, in a corner against the wall at a table for two, under a Miro. He was stroking his cousin's forearm, feeding him dessert.

"What?" Alan asked, turning around without waiting for an answer. He got right up. Steph watched her brother walk to the low wall that separated the main level from the elevated section of the dining room. He stood, hands on hips, solid, not far from Brad's table. It took Brad a moment to notice Alan, but then the double take came, and after that, Brad was shaking his head in disbelief, hand to forehead. Steph heard her brother now, whispering loudly to Brad, hissing really, and watched as he poked his finger wildly in the air, and Brad pointed back down at him, saying something in return. Brad put a finger to his mouth to quiet Alan, and began speaking to his date. Alan stood quietly now, looking up at them. He was a boy again, as if before a children's figure that hands out treats. Steph imagined Winnie or Mickey telling her brother, No more for you, Alan. We're all out. Alan folded his arms. He was a man, searching for an abnormality in the x-ray of his patient.

Brad got up and walked away from Alan, across the width of the dining room to the small stairwell, the man following. Steph watched her brother look on from the corner. When Brad approached, she stared hard, long. When finally he looked at her, defiant, Steph adjusted her glasses with her middle finger.

Alan walked past her, head down, and wiped his eyes quickly with his index finger and thumb. A few minutes later, he came back, eyes red, his sideburns and the hair above his forehead wet.

"That fucking princess," Alan said. "I was taking him to Ogunquit next weekend." He pushed his food away. "You eat," he said. "Seriously."

Steph began to eat, watching her brother.

"You know what they call lobsters, don't you?" he asked her.

"What?"

"Cockroaches of the sea."

"Yum," Steph said.

"What the hell," Alan said, and took a bite of his salmon.

Steph ordered dessert, the after-dinner menu in hand. "I'll have the harvest-fresh green apples, baked in a deep dish on a light, flaky crust, drizzled with luscious imported golden caramel," she told the waiter. Alan laughed.

Steph wanted to tell her brother something--but what?

They walked back to Alan's condo, through narrow streets lined with brownstones. Steph and Alan passed small lawns that were enclosed by wrought iron fences and manicured in warmer weather.

Steph walked slowly, looking up at the sky. She spotted Orion's belt.

"Look at this," Alan said. Her brother's face was a few inches from a rose that poked out from between pickets of a fence. It was yellow, somewhat wilted, but surprisingly healthy for the season.

"I think it's a Golden Blush. They're really hearty," Alan said. "Smell - it's wonderful." Alan steadied the flower for his sister, the stem resting between his fingers. Steph was surprised at how fragrant it was.

A few steps beyond the rose bush, Steph looked back, and saw the flower swaying gently from Alan's release.

Copyright © 2003 The President and Fellows of Harvard College.
All rights reserved. Comments. Last modified Mon, Nov 3, 2003.