Episode 9: Homesick
Alessandra, Ralph, and Barbara's Breakfast Bar
“It takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow.”
Alessandra, aged sixteen and one quarter, is giving a speech to the mostly-white-haired Board of the Junior Foreign Aide Brigade, hoping to convince them to award her membership in the JFAB.
As she presents her well-rehearsed speech, she thinks with more than a smidge of smugness: Thus spake Alessandra. (A budding nihilist, she’d misunderstood Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra as a call to, rather than a warning against, a philosophy of nothingness. She is well on her way to driving her parents crazy with her philosophizing, but when they complain, she shoots back with, “To make the individual uncomfortable, that is my task,” and other exasperating Nietzsche-isms.)
Alessandra is a homegrown islander, and so, although love and creature comforts have been available to her in moderate supply from the day she first graced this earth, she’s spent almost the whole of her childhood longing with every fiber of her being to get away. The Junior Foreign Aide Brigade seems as good an escape plan as any.
In her speech to the JFAB, Alessandra compares herself to a flower, a flower that needs more to thrive than the humble sun and soil and rain of Looser Island. She details her plans to shuck off the familiar and mundane, travel someplace wild and remote and untamed, meet eccentric and perhaps even dangerous people, and never return. She wants, she says, to “shake the dust of this crummy little town,” hoping the reference to the Frank Capra movie will not be lost on the Board.
Looser Island, she tells the Board members, is too tame for her wildflower soul. “Because it takes more than sunshine, soil, and rain to make a flower grow,” she repeats, and then she sits down to anemic applause.
Two weeks later, the Board’s decision is announced.
Alessandra has not been invited to be a member of the JFAB.
Instead, the Board has chosen a simpering, wilting-wallflower a year above Alessandra whose name must henceforth never be mentioned in Alessandra’s household.
The event only confirms, in Alessandra’s mind, the utter lack of sophistication and discernment of her island cohort.
Alessandra is an Italian version of Alexandra, a name that means Defender of Mankind.
Alessandra’s mother was a first generation immigrant from Italy, estranged from her own father for marrying an American and then moving to America. The grief of that estrangement had never abated, and she’d been glad to call on her heritage in naming her daughter. Of course, she’d imagined a foreshortened version of the name in everyday conversation, something like Allie or Sandy or Lessie.
Alessandra is . . . a bit much, literally and figuratively.
Alessandra, don’t let the dog eat that dead jellyfish! (But he wants to.)
Alessandra, you may not wear your fairy wings to school, Ella, I mean Ms. Bjorkin, will make you take them off in class. (No she won’t. She likes fairies.)
Alessandra, take this bag of food over to Mrs. Prewitt. The ferry workers are on strike and the Apple Cart’s had no deliveries of food for a week. (In a minute. I’m almost done with A Horse and His Boy.) You’ve read that a hundred times already. (I know.)
Alessandra, were you in the village earlier? Forming a human chain to block the county workers from cutting down that tree by the picnic tables? (Yes.) But the tree is diseased. They have to cut it down. (Is that what you’ll do to me if I get sick? Chop me down and throw me away?)
Oh for the love of . . . . Sigh.
Somehow, the person of Alessandra precluded foreshortening the name of Alessandra (or any other aspect of her character), and so Alessandra she remained, four full syllables of passion, enthusiasm, and determination.
Practically from the beginning she was, or saw herself as, larger than life. When she learned the meaning of her name she was ridiculously pleased, and assumed saving humankind was her destiny.
A destiny that could only be fulfilled if she could get off the damn island.
Having learned her lesson with the JFAB—don’t tell a bunch of people who love the island you want them to help you escape the island—her application, two years later, for the island’s college scholarship included an essay that outlined the revolutionary role of the small town (or small island) ethos, which she described as a gentle blend of humility and perseverance.
She had personally never experienced notable humility or perseverance among the islanders, and privately believed if Looser Island exemplified the best hope for the world, humanity was doomed.
Alessandra suspected the people reviewing her application would smile with nostalgia at her words. She was right, though when she won the scholarship she was a little ashamed at the blatant manipulation, and felt she had been scholarshipped on false pretenses.
But she had to get away somehow, didn’t she?
To assuage her guilt at the success of her Machiavellian scheme, she studied hard in college, declaring herself now pre-med, now pre-law, and finally settling on education, thinking vaguely that she might like to work with children.
She had always admired her third- and fourth-grade teacher, Ella Bjorkin, and the two had formed a sort of friendship, a loosely mentor-mentee relationship, as she reached adulthood. Maybe that’s how she’d save the world? By teaching?
Upon graduating, unsure what to do with a degree in elementary education but no real propensity for working in the classroom, she joined a non-profit organization called Change Now!, and was sent to a tiny Central American town to help transmogrify the economy by growing corn for ethanol. (The project seemed in keeping with her destiny, until she discovered that the plan was much like bringing cane toads to Australia to control the pests: out with the old problems, in with the new.)
She’d been at her two year post for a little over a year when she realized Change Now! was a mistake.
Oh, she loved the sound of the language. Spanish flowed from her almost without trying, as if the verbs and vowels ran in her blood. (And who knows? Maybe they did. Maybe her Italian genes created a biological link to all Romance languages.)
And she loved the arid cliffs and the brightly painted adobe and the loud, sometimes off-key singing of the people in her pueblo.
But she couldn’t ignore a growing sense of dissatisfaction, a sense that she’d fled south, across the continents, to escape the stifling smallness of home only to land in a Spanish-speaking, desert-cliffed, adobe-dotted version of Looser Island.
The moment of truth (as she later described it to postmistress Jenny) was this:
There was, like, the local patriarch. I guess that should have been my first clue. Fuck the patriarchy, right? I mean, not him personally. He was all right. But he was kind of the village’s, I don’t know, unofficial law enforcement? His name was Arturo.
So one day Arturo’s yelling at this kid. I mean, not really a kid but, like, a teenager. I think his name was Ramon. The kid’s name. And here’s Arturo shaking his finger in the kid’s face, and looking all disappointed. He’s kind of making that sound with his tongue, you know? That parents always make when you’ve disappointed them?
And he goes on and on, and it’s all “What would your madre think, if she were still alive?” You know, rhetorical questions. “This is not how she raised you,” he says. “If you don’t have anything better to do than bother the chickens then I will surely find something for you to do, you won’t like it so much, es verdad.”
And that’s when I just kind of . . . knew. It was time to go.
That night, after the Arturo/Ramon incident, Alessandra wrote in her journal: Arturo is just another incarnation of Sheriff Tom, paternalistic and ordinary and banal.
As she wrote, memories flooded her brain, an inexorable tide of events small and large, with Sheriff Tom at their center.
. . . Scolding a local kid for knocking over mailboxes.
. . . Threatening to issue a citation to Cherry for allowing Pretty Boy to do his business outside the Community Center and failing to dispose of said business afterward. Even though there was a dog poop receptacle right there.
. . . Defending Seth, Jenny’s developmentally-delayed son, after an obnoxious tourist yelled at him.
That last one, the Seth-memory, tugged at her, asked her, slyly, if she was really sure everything about Looser Island was a thing to be shucked off? She closed her eyes against the bright desert sunshine and let the memory take her.
Alessandra is waiting to walk onto the ferry so she can join a protest on the mainland. (The alternative is driving on, which entails waiting in a long line of cars, which in turn entails a very real risk of finally reaching the front of the line only to discover the ferry is full and there won’t be another along for several hours.)
The point of the protest has since been lost in the annals of Looser Island history. Probably something to do with whales.
She is a senior in high school, and she is hoping some of her classmates will join her. Even if they don’t, Alessandra will march. Fighting injustice is in her blood, she believes.
While she waits for the next ferry to arrive, she looks down from her perch in the waiting area, and sees Seth standing on the loading dock.
Over the years, Alessandra had developed a protective affection for the slow and gentle soul. She knows he works part-time directing traffic onto and off the ferry, and he is on duty today.
Even from her vantage point in the waiting area she can see that from his posture that Seth is proud of his official ferry-worker vest and walkie talkie. When he looks up, she waves at him, and he waves back, enthusiastically, apparently forgetting for the moment what he is supposed to be doing, which enrages one of the motorists waiting for his turn to board.
Alessandra watches as a large man in an oversized land yacht whose license plate declared him to be from Texas shouts, “Son, I been all over this continent, and I ain’t never seen anyone as slow as you. Would you hurry it the hell up so we can get offa this goddamned island?”
Sheriff Tom often stationed himself at the ferry landing, ready to step in if tempers flared over cancellations, delays, line-cutters, and the other travails of travel to and from the island. He is here today and, having observed the interchange, hurries over to talk to the tourist.
Instead of backing down, the tourist says Sorry but and then continues abusing Seth.
More quiet advice from the sheriff, more invective from the tourist. Finally, the sheriff issues a citation. Though there isn’t an official ordinance against being a boorish ass, there is a law prohibiting harassing ferry workers, and Sheriff Tom brings the full force of the law to bear.
Alessandra watches as the tourist takes the citation and angrily tosses it onto the seat of his massive vehicle. After she’s boarded the ferry, and the driver and his passenger have gone to the upper deck, she clambers gracelessly onto the Winnebago’s running board and peers in the window at the ticket, which is lying face up on the seat. Three hundred and fifty dollars, a significant sum for a Looser Island citation.
A few weeks later, while checking out at the Apple Cart, one of the other islanders tells Lauren about incident, and Alessandra, standing behind the storyteller, volunteers what she knows about the amount of the citation. Lauren laughs, a cross between a shout and a guffaw. “Bet we’ll never see that money,” she says, brushing her hair out of her eyes with her fingers running straight up her forehead and then bunching her bangs in her fist, before letting them go again, so it looks momentarily like she is tearing her hair out.
Alessandra has seen that gesture a thousand times, a thousand times a thousand, growing up on the island. She isn’t sure there is any other way to brush one’s hair out of one’s eyes.
Which is why she decides now, suddenly, as if it is an emergency, that she has to leave, move out of the pueblo, quit Change Now!, the whole shebang: who wants to be limited to only one way of moving one’s hair out of one’s eyes?
“I hate the thought that you may see me as a caricature,” Alessandra wrote to Ella, shortly after the Arturo/Ramon incident. “Nothing more than a stereotype. The restless young adult, rebel without a cause, never satisfied no matter how far I roam. But really, I just couldn’t be there any more, and now I find I can’t be here any more. The myopia, the narrow little lives of the people—it’s stifling.”
Ella wrote back with uncharacteristic acerbity. “If you want to avoid being branded a stereotype, you might want to refrain from putting a label on the rest of us. I grew up in Seattle and lived for a while in New York City and San Francisco. I don’t think I’m any more ‘myopic’ than the next woman. Out of all the places I could have lived, I chose Looser Island. My dear, you might consider that.”
Alessandra was embarrassed that she’d insulted her friend, disgusted with Ella’s apology for Looser Island (of course she had to justify her decision), and angry at the insinuation that she, Alessandra, was just too immature to recognize a good thing when she saw it.
Notwithstanding Ella’s parochial wisdom, Alessandra was determined to try something different. She understood her need for change not as she comprehended Nietzsche or calculus, but in that depths-of-your-gut kind of knowing: it was time to leave.
As soon as she’d completed her stint with Change Now! she escaped, leaving behind not only the hideous, oversized spiders and scorpions of all sizes but also Arturo and Ramon and all the others who had welcomed her.
She told herself she wouldn’t miss any of it, she was perfectly clear that she was doing what she had to do. She even dredged up another Nietzsche quote: Now I am nimble, now I fly, now I see myself under myself, now a god dances within me. (Though the application of this particular quote to her own situation was somewhat vague.)
And then she moved to Brooklyn.
On Looser Island, the ubiquitous cry of the seagulls forms a background so pervasive the islanders don’t even hear it. Sheep bleat, dogs bark, and occasionally the breathy whine of old bike brakes splits the air as someone tries to avoid a pothole. But the overwhelming sensation on the island is the absence of sound.
In Brooklyn, the taxi horns sound a bit like seagulls. Exceptionally loud seagulls. Seagulls that never sleep. There are no sheep, but there are dogs, and people who talk seemingly all through the night. Only at dawn is there a brief intimation of peace.
Here at last Alessandra is sure she’s found the Something Different she craves.
She meets a man named Tim who is angry all the time, even when they make love. She believes he’s angry with humanity, for being so full of hate, for misinterpreting the message of godly love, for polluting the earth, for lusting after material wealth and worldly success as if it mattered. She assumes he is going to take action—that he will become a preacher, or write a great novel, or start a movement of some sort. She loves her version of Tim, and when she realizes he is just irritable and petty, it breaks her heart.
Some people scoff at young love, believing young hearts will easily mend, but Alessandra feels something snap within her when she sees this man spit on compassion and laughter and dancing in the rain, though he’s always had enough to eat, always had friends and a job and a family that loved or at least tolerated him, and she knows it can never be mended, this thing that is broken in her.
So she returns to Looser Island.
It’s just temporary, of course. She could never live on the island again. But when you are broken and hurting, nothing is needed so much as the bed you slept in as a child, where all was known and safe.
She revels in the slightly musty smell of the sheets (everything is always slightly damp on Looser Island, therefore everything is always musty), and the faded high school certificates still pinned to the bulletin board in her room. She feels comforted and cared for, waking up to find that someone else has already made the coffee.
Sometimes that’s all you need: for someone else to have made the coffee before you wake.
What was meant to be a respite of a few days turns into a few weeks, while Alessandra plots her return to what she thinks of as the real world.
June arrives, that heady month of graduations and new beginnings, when the sun teases with the promise of summer but then in a kind of meteorological just kidding the rain returns, gleefully drenching all and sundry.
At the end of the first week in June, a notice goes up on the bulletin board at the Apple Cart.
The Flower Shack owner Deborah Latourette passed away after a long and brave battle with cancer. A Celebration of Life will be held in January.
(Why January? Who knows? Must be the only time her children can get away, some islanders speculate.)
Shortly thereafter there’s a sign in the window of The Flower Shack, notifying the world that the building is for sale. It was The Flower Shack for as long as anybody could remember, but before that it was a restaurant, and Deborah Latourette had never removed the trappings of the restaurant trade, including a huge commercial stove, oven, dishwasher, walk-in pantry, and cooler. The For Sale sign says the estate is willing to bring it up to code, and haul the chairs and tables out of storage, if anyone is interested in running it as a restaurant.
The following Saturday, Alessandra is sitting outside the shuttered building, listening to the seagulls and trying to remember or trying to forget the feeling of Tim’s fingers on the inside of her thigh.
She’s known since early adolescence that she is bi, and she wonders, bitterly, whether it’s time to find a female partner and give up on men entirely. She’s just about decided that’s the solution when a Dachshund appears, seemingly out of nowhere, and begins licking her sandaled foot.
“Is that your dog?” a man asks. He also appears to have come out of nowhere, though that may be an illusion, since Alessandra was so deeply engaged with her thoughts until a dog’s kisses brought her back to the present.
“No,” she says, smiling because the dog’s tongue is rough and warm on her skin. He has sand on his nose, and it tickles.
“Huh. Well, he seems to have adopted you. I’m Cody, and I just bought this place.” He gestures at the building formerly known as The Flower Shack. “I’m . . . reconverting it, I guess you’d say, turning it back into a restaurant. Looking for staff. Because I’m going back to Seattle.” And then he says, “Would you like to work here? Run the place?”
This is such an utterly surprising question the only thing Alessandra can think to say is, “I’m only home, I mean here, for a little while.” She resists the urge to add recovering from hideously broken dreams in New York City.
“Well, then you could work it for a little while,” he says. “I’d just want you to give me a heads up a couple of weeks before you decided to leave, so I could come back and find a replacement.”
The whole interchange is so surreal, and so unlikely, Alessandra wonders if she’s dreaming, or maybe still getting over the night of magic mushrooms she’d enjoyed with a few friends recently. He seems real, but who buys a commercial building on a remote island where he doesn’t even live, and hires the first person he meets to run the business?
The man bends down, leaning over from the waist like a runner stretching for a marathon, and pats the dog’s smooth head. “I think the dog is lost,” he says, and it sounds like a benediction.
Alessandra wants to protest, but he’s right—about the dog, at least. Alessandra knows every dog on the island, and this one does not belong here, not unless he’s a brand new pet. She looks at the dog-bone-shaped tag hanging from his collar: Ralph, it says.
“He probably belongs to a visitor,” she says. “I can post some signs, and take care of him until his owner shows up.”
More furiously affectionate sandy dog-kisses. Ralph approves of the plan.
“Can you cook?” Cody asks, apparently having already lost interest in Ralph’s fate.
“Sure,” Alessandra says, though that’s a lie. Like many of the island’s youth, she had a brief stint at the Dog House Café as a teenager, but she was never allowed any closer to the kitchen than was necessary to retrieve orders.
“Can you make change, and keep at least basic books? I mean, can you track expenses and revenues?”
“I have a college degree,” Alessandra says stiffly. Though she can’t think, at the moment, what good a working knowledge of Kant and the Montessori theory will do in running a restaurant.
“Great,” Cody says. “You’re hired.”
They exchange contact information and then Cody leaves, promising to send everything Alessandra will need to run the restaurant.
Afterward, Alessandra realizes she could not pick Cody out of a crowd. He was so arrogant, so non-descriptly Seattle Cocky (another Alessandra-label). She couldn’t even say if he was tall or short, thin or fat, handsome or homely. Maybe he wasn’t real at all, merely a ghost or a vision or a dream?
But no, in less than a week a credit card and instructions arrive in the mail. The instructions are sparse: basic expectations regarding record-keeping and accounting, a note that the restaurant will be shut down if in any quarter profits fall below a certain amount (how great the faith of a “foreigner,” which in this case means a non-Looser-Islander), a statement about what her salary will be, and banking information.
And that is that. Alessandra’s course has been set by a perfect stranger.
For a while, at least.
Next time - Episode 10: Homesick, in which Alessandra learns (you guessed it) there’s no place like home.
Wonderful, as always!