Playground, page 10
She had no answer that an engineer could grasp. Her father’s world was tensile strengths and rates of flow and mean time between failures. He was a creature of scientific rationalism, too moral to suspect what Evie had discovered: eager young girls required camouflage.
“Evolution, Papa.” Survival of the most devious. “Tout le monde le fait.” Everyone does it.
Worse subterfuge was yet to come. In her last year of high school, Evie got an Anglophone girlfriend to rewrite her substandard English personal statement for her application to Duke’s undergraduate program. The heavily edited letter suggested a level of competence Evie didn’t have. But she would have perjured herself again and again, to get into one of the best schools on the continent to offer comprehensive courses in ocean studies. That simple cheat made possible her whole life. How could it not be almost moral?
Her parents couldn’t grasp how the timid kid who chewed her lips and fretted her cardigans to spaghetti had become a felon of self-assertion in a few short years. But to Evie, the metamorphosis felt as simple as breathing. Taciturnity was just desire that hadn’t yet blossomed. The world of dry land never offered Evelyne Beaulieu a single thing worth her zeal. The ocean merited breaking all the rules.
She had found the secret of liberty and of life: disguise yourself and do what you need to. And all she needed was to dive.
DUKE UNIVERSITY ACCEPTED Evelyne Beaulieu in 1953, the first woman ever admitted into ocean studies. She survived four years of classes in Durham and three summer field research trips through ever-more-inventive feats of camouflage. She hid her extensive diving experience, refrained from challenging any of her professors’ many errors, and laughed along with her male cohort’s Cro-Magnon jokes. It wasn’t hard to pretend to be what the Americans called a good sport.
Four years of fake naïveté came easily to a six-foot-tall, awkward, carrot-haired girl with a walloping French Canadian accent and errors in idiom that sent the locals into hysterics. She drew her strength from the coast and lived on ocean time. For four short years, Evelyne Beaulieu stood on the edge of the North American continent, feeling the great wave of her future curling over her and knocking her into the sand. And she rose from the froth howling, wanting more.
The safest way forward was to keep to the group. That’s why they called it schooling. She made friends in the program—diving partners and topside pal-arounds. Boys to study with. Boys with whom to share field notes, grievances, and an occasional beer. Sometimes she missed women so intensely it surprised her. But most weeks she had too little free time to notice the loss.
Her ocean mania ripened into competence. Competence became knowledge, and knowledge—she marveled at this—made a handful of her fellow students fall for her. Certain kinds of scientific young men would always feel drawn to smart extraterrestrials. She doubted that her appearance in a swimsuit could be to blame. Yet somehow she grew into a woman who made her pals nervous and left some of them mumbling little bursts of deniable longing. She grew adept at not hearing—a protective adaptation all its own.
On holidays when she could get away, she explored the coast, sometimes accompanied by one admirer or another, more often alone. One long weekend, she rented a car and ventured out to the barrier islands at Hatteras, where she fell hopelessly in love with Ocracoke. Combing its beaches from noon to sunset made her feel the aimless joy she’d felt years before, diving off Biscayne with her father.
She walked for hours across the sedge-fringed shore, transfixed by the thought of a world after humans. The beach sank from high briar-covered dunes, past pockets of tidal pools, down into a glorious foreshore riddled with burrowing invertebrates and scoured by more kinds of shorebirds than she could name. At the bottom of the long, shallow run, fine sand churned in the breakers. The salt air tickled her lungs, and the wide expanse of wild shore, mile after unbroken mile, felt like a summons from her designer.
A place so concentrated with theaters of crazed production called out for some vow. Her sense of urgency didn’t fade when she returned to Durham. Thoughts of Ocracoke helped her through the gauntlet of junior year when a semester too crammed with chemistry and physics left her on the brink of dropping out. School had turned pointless. She just wanted to dive—to be in and among the flocks of shorebirds and shoals of fish that turned and wheeled together as if they were a single life, which she believed they were.
She sat in a lecture on physical geography with seventy other students as the professor mocked Wegener’s theory of continental drift. “It’s a pretty thought, but nothing more than romantic moonshine.”
Beaulieu raised her hand, shocking even herself. The man refused to see her. She was on her feet before she realized. Questions came out of her, stunning the room. What about the newly discovered undersea mountains in the middle of the Atlantic? The odd zebra stripes of magnetic reversal in rock so different from continental crust?
Through her twenty seconds of objections, the professor stood frozen onstage at the bottom of the auditorium bowl. At last, he grasped the fact that someone was interrupting him. “Young lady, there is no force on Earth strong enough to move continents around. Any intelligent high school boy can tell you that.”
“Holmes,” she said. “Magma cells.”
The professor flicked his ear and frowned. “You have some kind of accent.”
The whole hall came awake. A sympathetic soul in Beaulieu’s row shouted, “Convection cells! In the mantle!”
A cement smile set across the professor’s face. He shook his head in pity. “Oceanography is a science. And science requires evidence. As do exam answers in this course. Now, if you’ll allow me to continue?”
THE AUTUMN BEFORE EVIE’S graduation was a maelstrom. She took an overload of classes and suffered proportionately. But by then her studies focused on marine life, so four or five hours of sleep were enough to carry her.
One course in epipelagic and coastal life culminated in a final project requiring the students to measure intertidal zonation on a sandy depositional shore. That meant performing a species inventory for each bounded region from the lowest tide to the highest. The task would take a pair of researchers two full days.
Her partner for the project was Bart Mannis. Everyone in the program called him Limpet. He owned a 1952 Buick Special in good condition, looked like a well-kept beatnik, had a way of saying “maybe” to almost everything, and exuded a pleasant brackish scent that got brinier the longer he was out in the field. By all accounts, the man knew his snails.
He and Evie had gotten along fine on prior group expeditions. They enjoyed a rapport free from rivalry or expectation. Limpet was that rare boy with nothing to prove except a mad enthusiasm for things that excreted their own shells. Evie herself might even have chosen him for a final project partner if the instructor hadn’t selected him for her.
They had their pick of the entire North Carolina coast. Limpet had ideas for a spot, some of them even useful. But Beaulieu was sitting on an agony of possibility. The choice tormented her. She could keep her magic Ocracoke to herself, or she could surrender her secret to this man and spend two full days surveying a place that made her feel as if she, too, were another littoral creature on a migration pattern longer than her own brain could grasp.
She took the measure of her assigned partner. Limpet was compliant. He knew how to do a species blitz. He even seemed a little in awe of her. And he could identify gastropods that to her were stony blurs. Above all, he owned a reliable ride.
The fellow would have to be initiated. She grabbed him by his button-down collar and swore him to secrecy. “If you tell anyone about this place, I will gut you with an oyster shucker.”
“Don’t want that, E.B. Really don’t want that.”
Maybe something about the boy’s practicality appealed to her as well.
Had they kissed already, before that Halloween adventure? Yes, she would decide, seven decades later, diving off her hidden seamount in the Tuamotus. They must have kissed at least once, and then some. But surely nothing contractual. Nothing that committed her.
She took him to her stretch of wandering barrier island. The gray-blue, moody grandeur of the place survived Limpet’s presence. He spun in place in the swash zone for a long time, muttering, “Oh, yes.” The boy was no slouch in the perception department.
All that Saturday, they lay on their bellies with trowels, a stack of graded sieves, two 20x triplet loupes, calipers, a tally counter, a slide rule, three field texts, and battered notebooks. Centimeter by centimeter, they worked their way up toward the backshore, staying just above the advancing tide. The surf made it hard to hear each other, and neither one of them felt like talking. They counted every species of lichen on the action-painted rocks. A ghost crab shook its one large indignant claw at them. Limpet turned up half a leathery loggerhead eggshell. It fell to Beaulieu to identify a curling pair of polychaete worms. Going on noon, they pushed their luck in one rich spot and wound up getting lapped in a surge of waves. They only laughed and went on counting.
Throughout the morning, she came across caches of skates’ eggs. Something about those weird black horned pillows moved her—the future calling. Limpet found her holding one, lost in a reverie.
“Mermaid’s purses.”
Beaulieu stared at him.
“That’s what we called them, growing up.”
And though he hadn’t invented the name, although it was in fact quite common, Evelyne’s eyes pinned him with admiration. Bart Mannis. Bart Mannis, that stranger who had washed up on this beach with her. Her field lab partner. The oddest thing on this beach.
She turned her head in both directions. The shore ran forever, leaving her in the dead center of a globe-sized paperweight. Bliss was so simple. Just hold still and look.
Their work that afternoon walked backward through the morning’s footsteps. They remeasured the zones that high tide flooded and low tide laid bare again. Evie lay coated in seaweed and wet sand. She scraped herself bloody on the edges of broken bivalves, a clicker in one hand and a loupe in the other, counting off creatures neither entirely of land nor water, beings that had to reinvent themselves four times a day.
A few paces upward onto the continent or downward into the ocean, and the mix of inhabitants changed. Five distinct communities spread themselves across twenty meters of beach within a one-meter vertical rise. Five different worlds hitched a ride on the barrier island as that makeshift sandbar itself migrated back and forth between land and sea through the run of centuries.
They camped on the dunes in a gap in the thorny smilax. The sky cleared and spilled out stars. Every breath smelled of silica and iodine. Their fire on the beach was less than minuscule, and its curl of smoke rose into a night too enormous to say. A hunter’s moon pulled at the willing water, crashing it against the edge of the continent, and the pulse of that liquid piston was better than any song.
There was so much to life, too much, more than Beaulieu could do justice to, more than any living thing could guess at or merit. She loved it all, even humans, for without the miracle of human consciousness, love for such a world would be just one more of a billion unnamed impulses.
She wondered, in the dark, after their fire was out and they had retired to their tents, if Limpet might come tap on her canvas tent flap, and she was grateful that night to all the uncountable tiny and tidal gods of the coast that he didn’t.
THE NEXT DAY they were mostly quiet on their drive back to Durham. Something had changed between them after the night’s fire on Ocracoke, some shift toward intimacy she wasn’t ready for.
His eyes on the road, Limpet asked, “Do you have a life philosophy?”
“Life philosophy?” The phrase felt like a contradiction in terms.
“Words you live by.”
She didn’t live by words. She lived by life. But the question was sweet, and she did her best. She fed him that classic bit of Quebecoise wisdom.
“Attache ta tuque et lache pas la patate!”
“Meaning?”
“Put on your little beanie cap and don’t release the potato.”
Bart Mannis laughed so hard he almost ran them off the highway. But the meaning was clear, wasn’t it? Hold on tight and keep going. Just keep going. Like any good creature of the tides.
IN HER LAST SEMESTER AT DUKE, Evelyne applied to the Scientific Diving Program at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. They wrote back in March. We regret to inform you that we are unable to grant you admission to our graduate program for next fall. . . .
Rejected. The letter made no sense. It wasn’t possible: no one in her graduating class had a CV to match hers. Two days passed with Evie in a zombie state, unable to get off the sofa of her Durham apartment.
She wrote to the director of admissions and requested an appeal. A letter came back offering her a twenty-minute in-person interview in which to make her case. Should we not hear from you within ten days, we will consider the matter closed.
Powerful men were playing a game with her, sure that she had no countermove. And they were right. She lay on the upper bunk of her shared bedroom, weeping into a wadded-up Blue Devils sweatshirt so her midwestern home economics roommate wouldn’t hear. She pictured herself returning to Quebec and enduring years of abuse as her mother lectured her about hubris and realistic expectations.
Out of disaster, a plan arose. At last she roused herself and put on her prettiest blouse and culottes. Then she walked two miles down Chapel Hill Road to Bart Mannis’s house. The man with the 1952 Buick Special in excellent condition.
It was after ten o’clock at night when she arrived, but Bart was happy to be roused from bed. She knew he would be.
“How would you like to see the surf come in from the west?” She gave the question a little grin, as if there might be other new things to see, along the way, if he was lucky. “San Diego and back, over spring break. I pay for everything.”
Her friend stood dumbfounded in his tiny sitting room. He looked her up and down, trying to diagnose this sudden onset of French Canadian lunacy. The only other time he’d ever seen her reckless was on a dive off Diamond Shoals looking at shipwrecks when she almost ran her tank.
“You couldn’t have called ahead?”
“Écoute. . . . Listen. I know how crazy. . . .”
She showed him her rejection letter along with the follow-up offering her twenty minutes of appeal. Limpet winced. He himself had the luxury of choosing between staying on at Duke to study marine chemistry and heading up to get a degree in physical oceanography at Woods Hole. And his GPA at Duke was a quarter point below hers.
He looked up, head shaking. “This isn’t right. You’re one of the best of our cohort. The best diver of any of us. They don’t even say why they rejected you!”
She held his gaze, trying to make desperation look like determination. “I’d like to find out.”
His own eyes declared, Five thousand miles. A whole week of your life wasted on the longest of long shots. You’ve gone off the deep end. But out loud he only said, “I really, really like tall girls.”
THE TRIP MEANT THREE DAYS of nonstop driving. Everything Evie needed fit in one small duffel bag. They brought sandwiches, cookies, and water in a huge thermos. They read out loud to each other from The Silent World, although they’d already read that book four and a half times between the two of them. Every other chapter, Bart badgered her again to tell him about the author. His voice was reverent, as if Evie had a hotline to one of the saints.
“I told you, I only met him three times, when I was a child.”
“Yes, but what was he like?”
“Câlice! What do you want? He was kind and smiled a lot and he said he would have become an aviator if he hadn’t gotten into a bad car crash. And he had a fantastic French nose.”
She knew what the great man was doing for the oceans. She didn’t mind that Cousteau was being called the inventor of the aqualung, even if M. Gagnan and M. Commeinhes and men like her father had done the work. But for writers about the ocean, there was an American woman whom Evie loved more.
She had proposed The Sea Around Us, way back in Alabama. Bart demurred. She tried again in the middle of the journey when she was back riding shotgun. “Come on, man. You’ll love it. It will get us through the rest of Texas.”
The title alone made Bart grimace. “Isn’t that for children?”
“Children? Your hero Cousteau is the biggest child on the planet!”
“Somebody’s crabby. Maybe you should take a nap.”
The man exasperated her. Maybe she hated him.
They said little on the long haul from Amarillo to Tucumcari. But by the time they got through the Sonoran Desert, they were giving each other shoulder rubs again. Drunk with sleep deprivation, he made plans. “Let’s visit each other next year. No matter . . . what happens.”
Then the Pacific lay all in front of them, a third of the world.
From the rocks along La Jolla Cove beneath the Scripps campus they watched the water retreat down the nearshore. The back of Evie’s throat tasted of kelp and fog. Even her first glimpse of the planet’s greatest ocean—the surf’s relentless growl, four billion years old—wasn’t enough to lift her hopes, which ebbed faster than any tide. She had put herself and her best friend through days of crazy stress and expense to make a twenty-minute pointless point.
“You’re right,” she told Bart. But, sitting next to her on the barnacled rocks, he was too brain-dead from the trip to ask her what he was right about.
Nights of sleeping in the car had not improved what 1957 Madison Avenue would have referred to as her sex appeal. She sink-showered in a woman’s bathroom in the original Scripps Building and changed into the belted silk shirtdress that had hung from the backseat clothes clip for the last several days.
“Is it okay?” she asked Bart.
The man was congenitally unable to lie. “I’m sorry, E.B. You look like barracuda food.”
