It wasn’t until snorkeling in the Pacific that Louisa began to understand her marriage: the sympathy in their mutual misunderstanding, or the inexorable distance between them, or maybe, only, the magnificence of needlefish.
The fish looked illusory: the way they skimmed along like that, just below the surface of the tide pools. They appeared on the edge of vision, occupying some crafty, liminal place, like teenagers. Except: beautiful.
Louisa had never snorkeled before. She didn’t like to submit herself, physically, to significant forces: seawater, gravity, tequila. Chris, on the other hand, loved tequila. And waterskiing, and rock climbing. It would never occur to him that snorkeling should provoke the least bit of anxiety in anyone.
“It’s not scuba diving,” he said, each time she made the mistake.
“Whatever,” she’d say, shaking her head. “They sound the same.”
She was relieved that he had not suggested scuba diving. She hadn’t learned to dive when everyone else had, having only made it to Crib Two at Hidden Valley Camp in Freedom, Maine some three decades prior. She felt it was too late. Like whistling or cartwheels: diving seemed a skill for which there was a window to learn, and that window had shut.
The Big Island was a compromise. She wanted to go someplace tropical, and he wanted adventure. Everyone talked about the tide pools at Kapoho, on the Eastern side of the island, near Hilo. They had spent the morning at the farmer’s market, sampling macadamia nuts coated with coconut and wasabi, browsing the array of tropical fruits: papayas and passion fruits and, Louisa’s favorite, rambutans—like lychees, but coated in a prickly skin the color of blood. The locals reminded her of the hippies in Ocean Beach: with their long dreadlocks and slow smiles, they inhabited a time warp, with no evident interest in modern things, like cynicism and deodorant.
They stood on the sidewalk, guzzling fruit.
“Shouldn’t we take a lesson, or something?” Drops of rambutan juice drizzled down Louisa’s chin. Chris, in an unusual gesture of awareness and affection, dabbed her with a folded napkin. A busy corridor of traffic moved behind them; around them, a current of people alternately gossiped and gawked.
He was shaking his head aggressively. “We totally don’t need classes,” he said. “I’ll show you all you need to know.” Under his arm he gripped a plastic bag of equipment acquired that morning: goggles and florescent yellow fins.
Louisa gestured across the street, where a grid of booths promised bright, hanging things.
“Ugh, I need to find something for my sister,” she said. “Can we just walk through, over there? Maybe I’ll find a sarong.”
Fifteen minutes of browsing produced the most brazenly Hawaiian print she could find, dotted with leis and orchids and black-haired women with coconut shells covering their breasts.
“Don’t you think that’s kinda weird?” Chris pointed to one of the figures.
Louisa hadn’t noticed them. “What? Oh.” Her eyes settled on the long hair and leafy hula skirt in the bottom right corner. “Whatever. It’s fine. She’ll think it’s authentic.”
Chris laughed. Mocking Louisa’s sister—a real estate agent in Fresno who patronized franchise country bars and paid forty dollars for manicures—was a frequent pastime. One of the few things that brought them closer together instead of farther apart. This trip was meant to do the former: their therapist’s suggestion, embarrassingly cliché. Besides, “You should take a vacation together,” seemed little more than code for “Why don’t you have a lot of sex,” which they had tried, and which had failed.
When they reached the tide pools, Louisa hadn’t had a chance to put on her fins before scraping her left foot on a rock.
She cried out, nearly toppling over as she lifted up her leg to examine the wound.
“Careful!” Chris rushed to steady her. “What did you do? Geez, Lou.”
“I know.” They laughed. She had a remarkable habit of incurring minor injuries on a steady basis: burning herself on the tea kettle or cookie sheet, spraining her ankle while walking the dog, bumping her forehead against the side of the car door.
“Here,” he said, reaching into his backpack for the first aid kit that he insisted on bringing along everywhere, even trips to the grocery store. She would have made fun of him for it if not for how often the Band-Aids and Neosporin were needed. Deftly, he bandaged her up while she perched on a rock covered with a beige bath towel.
“Let’s get these on quick,” he said, sliding the fins onto her feet.
He showed her, patiently, how to use the goggles: how to make sure the tube pointed straight up, how to breathe only through her mouth. He futzed with the strap to make sure that it fit just so around her head.
“You ready?” He placed his hands on her shoulders and leaned in to kiss the side of her neck.
She shrugged and offered a thumbs up.
“You got this,” he said, and guided her by the hand into the first of the many connecting tide pools laid out in front of them like so many odd-shaped buckets.
Letting go of his hand, she spread her arms and slid along the water.
The transformation was instant.
One moment you were in one world: breathing air, hopping rocks, taking in the horizon and the humans. The next, you’d entered another: this one as busy and active, certainly as colorful, as the one before. Packs of angelfish with varying kinds of stripes: yellows, blues, blacks and reds. Lumpy triggerfish with scowling lips and sharp polka dots. Scaly parrotfish outlined in fantastic neon pink. Those sleek trumpetfish with long, sharp beaks. Everything moved in swift synchronicity: gliding past one another, around one another, all effortless and smooth.
This was the wonder, she thought. Not that this existed. But that you could spend so much time on the surface of it, you could live your life beside the ocean, and yet remain forever ignorant of all that happened underneath.
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Photo credit: Michael Lokner / Foter / Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)