The Upside Down Ocean
Sedona moved to Phoenix a few months ago. November was a week away, and it was still ninety degrees outside, but the worst of it was over. The nights were cooler, and long-time residents told her that the city came to life during the fall.
"The birds sing louder, flowers bloom, insects fly again, and people get out of their air-conditioned pods," explained Mrs. Willey, her neighbor who was always outside watering her garden. "Life is good when the temperature drops to eighty and then thank-you-Lord, seventy. You'll see."
"I hope so," grumbled Sedona. "Before moving here, I heard that it stayed green all year. Green? Everything is brown. There's green-brown, red-brown, beige-brown, orange-brown, and just plain brown—except for dog shit. That turns white real quick. If there's moisture, the sidewalks and air suck it up right before my very eyes."
Mrs. Willey laughed. "Well, you did move to the desert. Our water is a lot harder to find, but it is far more precious, even with its nasty taste."
All through her childhood, Sedona heard about the wonders of Arizona. "Its canyons are a maze that leads to heaven's beach," her mother used to say.
"Maze? Heaven has a maze?" Sedona would whisper. "If working your way through a maze leads to heaven, then I'll actually have a chance in hell of finding it." Sedona was a whiz at figuring out geometrical puzzles and anything that needed logical thinking. Her mother, on the other hand, couldn't find her way through a maze even if she had the map to it in her hands.
"Sedona, honey, you're always so serious," her mama would say while sitting on the fire escape (or front stoop, or bed, or wherever it was she decided to take her hourly hit). "Come sit with me and look at the sky. It's so gray and dull here, but back home when the sun hunkers down, it covers itself with bright pinks and purples, and then the sky turns to an intense blue, not black."
"Whatever," was usually Sedona's reply, and then she'd go back to working on her schoolwork, which was all that mattered to her. Education was her maze, one that would lead her to anywhere but her mother.
Every now and then she'd test her mother by adding, "Why in hell don't you move back to Arizona, then?" Her mother, who had moved to New York—with a pack of musicians—before Sedona was born, never answered; she'd just inhale, hold, stare, and then exhale.
Sedona decided that she was simply a by-product of her mother's earlier years—when the men and drugs were memorable, but the birth control was not.
"When it rains back home, the sky talks to you—it commands your attention," Mama would slur from the kitchen whenever they had a bad thunderstorm. "It doesn't spit temper tantrums at you. It opens up and the lightning spreads through the sky, like a crack in a windshield."
"And did this sky tell you to pack up everything and move to where you'd live with roaches and bums?" Sedona once asked.
"Who says there are no roaches in Arizona?" replied her mother. "You're so bitter. You're just like my mother."
"I'm not," said Sedona. "I just wish you'd grow up and get a real job so that we could live someplace nicer—like Arizona maybe."
"It's plenty nice here," said her mother. "I make okay money. You know I do. Look at you. You're fed. You have a bed. You go to school. Be a kid, damn it, and quit trying to be my mother. Don't tell me to grow up. You kid down!"
Sedona was born with strawberry-blonde hair, which darkened to copper as she aged. Her eyes were wide and almond-shaped; one eye was blue and the other green (even her mother's ovaries couldn't make up their minds on anything, so there she was, bi-colored). Her mother named her after a town in Arizona where the cliffs were red and the waters crisp and clean and the air magically pure. This was allegedly a spiritual place where artists, psychics, and resort managers thrived.
"Sedona, it is the most amazing place on earth," she told her daughter. "I named you after the prettiest thing I could think of."
A week after she moved to Phoenix, Sedona visited the place that bore her name, and she fell to her knees crying. Her mother saw so much magic in rocks and earth, but could not manage to find it within herself. Had her mother not preached of this world to her, Sedona would have missed the layers of color embedded in the sand. She would not have heard the air whispering its secrets in a language she did not yet understand. Pebbles dug into her flesh as the salt from her tears merged with the earth. Sedona was home, and her mother was gone.
She'd died last year. No matter how hard she tried, Sedona did not cry at the funeral. She was the only relative to attend—no one from Arizona ever called or visited them in New York (in fact, Sedona didn't even know if there were any relatives). The only thing Mama ever said about her heritage was that her own mother was dead. "Sedona, my dear," she said one morning before inhaling her coffee and cigarettes, "you come from a long line of bitches. A bunch of useless, angry, dead bitches. I did you a favor by raising you out here."
The sun and heat surrounded her, almost smothering her as she continued to cry. It was only 9 a.m., but the temperature was rising quickly. A tourist father, with a camera tapping his chest and a hiking map in hand, left his young family to ask Sedona if she was okay.
"Can I get you some water?" he said. "You really shouldn't be out here without water. You dry up real quick. It is not good for you."
She looked up at him with her one green eye and one blue eye—all cloudy and pink from her tears. "No. I have some in the car, thank you."
"Are you alright? Can we help you with anything?"
She got up, dusting off her dry, scaly knees. "I'm sorry. I must look so stupid. I miss my mother. She died, and she loved it here so much. I'm okay now. Thank you."
"Oh," said the man, obviously not knowing how to comfort a grieving child—not even an adult one. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay," she said and smiled. "It feels good."
Sedona decided that she needed to move to Phoenix after the affair. The affair? What a joke. It wasn't even romantic. It was a few sessions in her apartment—a few bottles of wine, cartons of take-out food, and sex. At the time, that worked for Sedona. It was all premeditated and organized. She understood that. She had a good job, a place of her own, and a man to sometimes feel good with.
What she didn't understand was her first missed period. How could that be? She used birth control. But, despite all her planning and precautions, she found herself pregnant with a married man's child. She liked dating married men because there was never the hope of love or permanence. There'd be time for that, but not now. She wasn't ready for permanence, or love.
That all changed when her body flooded her thinking with emotions and yearnings she forgot she ever had. She wanted a friend, a sister, a mother—someone to trust and hold her and kiss her forehead while she cried. Something she'd stopped wanting right about the time her body first began releasing its eggs.
And, now, here she was hugging the toilet while thinking of love and warmth and the meaning of life. She blamed it on hormones and two missed periods. That would mess up any woman. Even one who didn't cry at her mother's death.
She did what she knew how to do—she laid out a plan and followed it. She quit calling her lover, and she scheduled an abortion. It was just a simple procedure—one that hundreds, maybe millions, of women did every day.
Dreams of sunflowers and soft breezes haunted her. She'd wake from these dreams wet with sweat and tears. One night she woke up humming a song her mother used to sing to her. Oh my god, she thought, Mama used to sing. I forgot she sang.
The night before the abortion, she talked to her baby—no, she reminded herself, it was not yet a baby. It was a fetus. A nothing, and yet she wanted it to be more than nothing. She said she was sorry, but now was not a good time to be born. One had to pick the right parents, the right location, the right home. She didn't want any child growing into what she became, and then she cried some more because she realized that she did not like who she'd worked so hard to become.
She remembered that when she was too young for school, her mother would tell her stories about the stars. Mama said the lights in the sky were souls waiting to be born. Sedona blushed at the silliness of this childhood tale, but she whispered to her fetus that she was merely returning it to the sky so that it could find a better mother, a better home, and for a moment she believed that was exactly what she was doing.
The abortion was too simple and quick a process. She didn't think it should be that easy. Hours later she learned how much "simple" had eroded her old self. Everything, including the routine act of peeing, stripped away the world she thought she knew. She'd feel the clots and clumps trickle out of her body and into the water—the remnants of her pregnancy resembling nothing more than red and brown mud swirling away from her.
"So, what kind of flowers are those anyway?" asked Sedona. "I see them everywhere."
"They're oleander," said Mrs. Willey. "They're more of a pest than a flower, to be honest with you. Once they latch in they don't let go. Their roots go very deep in search of water—they will strangle your other plants if you let them. They're also poisonous. Eating just one leaf or flower could kill a child."
"Why grow them then?"
"Because they're tough, and in their own way they're pretty," said Mrs. Willey. "They come in all sorts of colors, not just pink like these. We live on a harsh and unforgiving land. When something like this flourishes, you learn to respect it. So, we water our weeds instead of killing them."
Sedona studied the tall, skinny plants with their faded blossoms. She imagined her mother as a child playing among their roots.
"Could I have some of the flowers to liven up my living room?" Sedona asked.
"This is a first. Most people avoid touching the bushes. Some say they get headaches just walking by them, but that's ridiculous," said Mrs. Willey as she cut a bouquet. "You have to eat it to feel its venom."
"Thank you," said Sedona, holding back tears. "You know I have to admit their leaves are actually quite green."
Mrs. Willey laughed. "I never really noticed before, but you're right. Here you go. Just put them in a regular old glass of water; they'll be happy."
Sedona instinctively leaned her face toward the petals. "They don't have much of a smell, do they?"
"Well that's because they're survivalists," joked Mrs. Willey. "If they waste too much energy smelling good, all the birds and butterflies will come eat their blossoms—better to put more of a focus on rooting than poisoning, don't you think?"
"Really?"
"Oh, honey I don't know," she said. "I'm an old lady. I'm supposed to sound like I know what plants do. Maybe they're just lazy and don't want to perfume themselves. You decide and go enjoy your oleander."
Sedona laughed and then surprised her neighbor by giving her a big hug. "Thank you," she said while smudging her tears on the woman's blouse.
Sedona put her flowers in a plastic water pitcher and brought them out to her balcony. She plopped onto an old, rickety lounge chair and watched the day surrender.
Neon pinks lit up the sky. The sun hovered behind a rock mountain, looking for where it would rest for the evening. It was going to be a gorgeous sunset. "I wish you could see this," she said to no one.
A plane puttered across the horizon, leaving streams of scratched air in its wake. Sunlight rays bobbed in and out of the clouds.
Oh, Mama, she thought, there is no maze to heaven. It's all right there before our very eyes. It's just upside down. All you needed to do was take a deep breath and look up, Mama. Look up. Heaven's waters were always right there. "Did you always know that all I needed to do was move to the desert to learn how to swim?"
And then she closed her eyes and waited for the blue to set in so that she could sing to the stars.
Copyright 2006 by Bettina Tison Bennett
Bettina writes:
