We
seven
Courtney Santo
1. We seven are lost.
The wind pushes us off the beach and onto the promenade where we pull at the nylon edges of our jackets until their hems hang down over our shorts. Squinting through overcast refraction, we urge the cirrus clouds to hurry on their way up and over Saddle Mountain. Tourists crowd the sidewalks. There is a round of minigolf, and then the jolt of bumper cars as each big kid rides with a little kid to save a dollar.
At the arcade, we seven plug nickels into the Skee-Ball machines. That saved dollar buys twenty games. Our mother’s breath quiets in this place where we’re all accounted for. In one glance she sees us all. We are contained. How satisfying is the cascade of balls falling into place. We roll them like our father taught us—twisting our wrists to bank the wooden sphere against the side rails. Throw after throw, the ball spins solidly into the 100-point hole. None of us are so foolish as to try for 500 points by aiming for the holes set opposite each other in the two uppermost corners of the machine. Red tickets push out of the slot like scarves from a magician’s mouth. We gather them in great armfuls thinking of how we will exchange the construction paper for plastic domes that when turned inside out jump into the air as if scared of not being the way they were made.
We are counted. The youngest is missing. Her shoes, in front of the last machine, hold her place. The yellow flip-flops tell us she will be right back. On the street, we call her name. All of us have
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stuffed tickets into pockets and into the space between our shirts and our coats. What isn’t stuffed is clutched in increasingly sweaty hands.
We don’t use proper names when we are together. “You” is sufficient, but sometimes we need to be specific. We might say “the boys,” or “the girls.” We have sometimes called her “foureyes,” but mostly we call her “baby girl,” even though she is nearly five and going to kindergarten in the fall. To say her given name is to speak in tongues, and yet with her missing, we seven repeat it so many times that the word becomes the screech of the gulls overhead.
In our hearts we listen to hear if she is gone. She is not.
We put our sticky hand into that of a great big man. He is larger than our father, but he has the same smell, and the same rough hands. Our glasses make our blue eyes rounder than they are. Later, when we change pronouns, we will stop wearing glasses. The lenses become like gender: insufficient. We are fluid. Sometimes we like women. Sometimes we like men. Sometimes we look like men. Sometimes we look like women. It doesn’t matter we tell each other. It doesn’t change who we are.
We are they, and we are lost.
Mother sees the big man holding our hand. We point to her as he asks about our shoes. We’re at the beach, we say wondering how the man can’t understand the uselessness of foam and the hard plastic between our toes. He is talking to mother and exclaiming over how many children she has and how they all look the same. She thanks him, and her breath quickens, as if she’s been running. We pass baby girl the sweaty tickets, the ones we’d clenched in our fists as we called her name. There will be enough to get a box of Lemonheads and a plastic man with a parachute. Baby girl puts them in her pockets and then puts her feet in her shoes. We go
to the prize counter, taking so long to pick our treasures that the clouds move over the mountain and it becomes warm enough to go into the ocean.
2. We seven are in a movie.
Where? We pause the DVD and then use the remote’s slow play button to see clearly. There. On the screen it is 1948, and our baggy trousers are held up with suspenders. In all our scenes we wear a straw hat that shades our face. We pretend to be angry that the black man (Cuba Gooding, Jr.) is trying to be a navy diver. After filming ends, we take the hat because there are no promises about our face staying in the movie.
There, in the photo from our first wedding, is the hat. We seven are lined up and unlined, the oldest, a year out of college and the youngest just graduated from high school. It is a late summer Sunday, and the girls are zipped into homemade dresses while the boys itch in their rented tuxedos. The hat, like the new last name, becomes a vessel. In it we escape uniformity. The endless iterations of family photographs are an irritant, but later the one with all the siblings (one in a hat) will be on display in all our homes even when we no longer speak to each other.
Over time, the hat hardens and the straw, now brittle with age, springs from its weaving. It remains a thing we wish we still had when we start to make our own movies. If just to differentiate our films from all the others.
3. We seven are churched.
God is an auger. On the Sabbath, he turns, and his flighting carries away who we are to create space for who we ought to be. In the name of God, we go to Japan, France, Argentina, and Brazil. Our college years are spent in Utah and Idaho, and when we marry it is in temples. The girls are making room to become mothers.
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There is a long breath between wedding and pregnancy where we discover that God with his auger took out too much. Our husband seeks steady work, and we live in a series of apartments that are too small to take up homemaking. There is never enough money, but because we are to be mothers and not have careers, we work temporary jobs. We tutor French, we substitute teach, we become brand ambassadors. We make the best money of our lives the weekend we are paid to wander the halls at San Diego’s Comic Con in a Pikachu costume.
At five feet four inches, we are the right size to be inside the yellow suit. Our husband gets paid to be our trainer and lead us through the maze of fans. In the darkness of the suit, over the quiet hum of the fan, it comes to us that the void between marriage and motherhood is opportunity. Walking behind our husband, we stretch our arms out to accept hugs from children, from adults, and from other animations come to life. Must every act be in similitude of motherhood? The idea angers us, as does the way in which so much of our obedience has become servitude. Is a woman more than a mother?
Despite the paycheck, we are bored in the suit. We are bored by the life that will unfold now that we have married, but we are obedient even though it makes us critical of the length of other women’s skirts, of the way they spend their Sabbaths. Yet, on the cushioned pew on Sundays we still let god drill our souls. We are trying to be good. We would like to be in the best heaven. We give the church our money, our time, our children. After we have our children (three daughters) the auger stops working. It twists our ego instead of removing it and we want all that we gave up.
4. We seven are divided. We are in arbitration. It is nearly spring break, and we want
to be at the beach with our children, but instead we are in a conference room accusing each other of theft, contract violation, misrepresentation. The testimony is nothing like Law & Order There is hearsay and subjective accounts of work done and undone, of mileage tracked and mileage estimated, of money taken and money spent.
Over the next four days we tell our side of the story to the retiree who will decide who to believe. He keeps explaining to us that he isn’t a judge, and that this room isn’t a court of law. We want to tell him that we’re not business partners, we’re siblings. Instead, we talk about how the business started. We emphasize what we gave up when we moved from California to Oregon. There had been a better job in San Diego. It had benefits, a pension, overtime. Why go, then? To be our own boss, we say. We don’t tell the arbitrator about the time, as children, we got so mad that we hit each other with a can of peas. At the end of each day of testimony our body is weakened, as if all the pummeling we’d given each other as children had finally left its mark.
It took eight years for we seven to be born. At most we are fourteen months apart. Our childhoods overlap. We grew, like yew trees, branches twined, brushing over and under each other’s leaves. Our roots, growing deep to keep the ground, keep us from eroding. We roomed together in college, and spent our nights playing Rock Band. If “Snow” came on, we took the microphone because of that one time we stalked Anthony Kiedis. How good our timing was for the first lines of the Weezer song everyone loves. A loose grip on the plastic microphone both of us shouting El Scorcho! Ay Caramba!
Why elevators? It is hard to explain about our father with his almost law degree, then the years spent as an elevator mechanic, then as a state elevator inspector. There is the story of his old boss who sold his own elevator company for millions. So much money
to be made. We were to be Scrooge McDuck swimming through his pool of gold coins. Now that money is going to lawyers who are trying to explain why it is okay, sometimes, to hit your sibling with canned food. (But it isn’t buttered peas anymore because we’re adults. It’s a metaphor for business.)
Some of us pick sides. Others don’t. Mostly it is the boys against the girls. Those of us who live far away don’t talk about this division. When the retiree makes his decision, we will go back to being seven. The day after we got the goose egg on our forehead from the can of peas, we woke on the floor of our grandmother’s genealogy room and giggled about the color of the bruise before we went exploring and discovered a kitten in our grandfather’s woodpile.
The arbitration ends on a Thursday. We take our kids to the beach. We visit law schools in Texas. The future becomes uncertain. We may become sisters, we may become brothers. We may become the families we start with our spouses.
5. We seven are pregnant.
Tucson’s landscape lacks dimension. Because our childhood yard lay in the blue shadow of a mountain in a green valley cut by the Columbia river, we are mesmerized by the reds and beiges of the Sonoran desert. We track immigrants and the coyotes who move them across the border. The saguaro appear as cardboard facades. Our border patrol uniform offers security—a pension after only twenty years—and enough money to buy a house large enough to start a family.
We are nearing forty when our wife gets pregnant. Among the seven siblings, there have been eight other births, and this ninth isn’t special, except for his lineage. This child, who arrives on Christmas, will be the firstborn son of the oldest son. The line of sons stretches back more generations than we can make sense of,
even with the help of the genealogy charts our grandmother tucks into our birthday cards.
While we wait for the baby, we work on our yard. Here, in Vail, there is no grass. We landscape with drought resistant ornamentals, and with rocks of varying sizes and colors. Our wife keeps her red hair long despite the heat. It accentuates the bone structure that each day proves how gracefully she’ll age. She is, as our family says, a lot, but she is ours and we love her because she is flawed.
On Christmas we go to the hospital to watch her give birth. The boy’s arrival is heralded on the family’s social media. He is as beautiful and as alien as all newborns are. Our father, who has refused to hold any of his other grandchildren, cradles him and nearly cries. We are there and we’re not there.
We sisters visit a few weeks later. While navigating the eroding asphalt, our driver tells us how lucky we are to have missed the rain. The single road to our house floods after an inch of downpour. Often it takes hours for the ground to absorb the water. Above, the clouds are heavy with water. The sterile taupe house in the desert appears to have been waiting for our arrival. We tumble from the car, eager to see the baby and our brother. The boy looks like our side of the family. He looks like our babies.
We feel bad for the mother. How difficult it must be to have a child that looks nothing like you. She insists the boy has her own father’s chin. We agree because we have been taught to be polite. Besides, she is so beautiful. It wouldn’t be fair for the baby to look like her. We seven prefer our way of looking—one that sets itself in opposition to what surrounds it. We are so much ourselves. Which is to say we are a mongrel mix of all the European peasants who gave us strong legs, wide backs and a predisposition for putting on muscle.
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When we leave, we whisper promises we won’t keep about seeing each other more.
6. We seven are in a band.
We do vocals and stuff. For the first time, our hair grows past our shoulders. Our days begin with smoked bowls and Diamond Dallas Page yoga. Unlike the others we don’t put on weight in our thirties. We get married and divorced. The last woman we’re serious with owns a pot dispensary. We’re serious about music. It isn’t our first band.
We stream the album, Circling the Square, and we read the reviews that tell us our music is for fans of Cake, and Beck. It is not. The band, like so many others, is a child of The Grateful Dead. It is Phish, Blues Travelers, the Dave Matthews Band. The vocals say “to be forgiven we will find our own way.”
Even when we are on our own we are plural.
7. We seven are simultaneous.
The starfish have disappeared. We’ve come from Tennessee, Arizona, Illinois, California, and Washington to stand on the beach of our childhood with our kids, our parents, and our spouses. At low tide, we’d anticipated digging for razor clams, daring each other to stick a finger, a tongue, in the pastel sea anemones and pocket dozens of unbroken sand dollars. Instead, the base of Haystack Rock offers only an expanse of kelp-filled tidepools. Our father blames Fukushima. The internet tells us it is Sea Star Wasting Syndrome.
Putting our hands in our pockets and drawing up our coats against the cold, we walk the edge of the water keeping an eye out for sea glass, agates, and unbroken shells. The rock is never out of sight, no matter how far we walk. It’s unchanged—exactly as it was when we were children. Standing in the Pacific as if placed by
God himself, even though we don’t believe in God anymore. The top is covered in bird shit and green shrubbery. Even the oldest of us doesn’t remember being singular. For her there has always been at least two, and then nearly every year after that one more until we became seven.
The starfish will come back. We don’t know yet about the schism that will happen to us, how our own seven legs will waste away and fall away from the body. How we can no longer all be in the same room, let alone on the same stretch of beach. The last time we’re together is at our grandmother’s ninetieth birthday.
Like time, all of this is simultaneous. We’re always standing with the spruce trees behind us, the wet is on the rock, and the salt of the ocean and its dead sea creatures are forever washed up to shore. Family isn’t a circle. It isn’t a line. Family is all at once. The sand fleas never stop nipping as we sit at the tideline and let the waves touch our toes, and then our thighs.
We are always together, and we are always apart. We are first and we are last. We are simultaneous. The four brothers contain our father, and the three sisters contain our mother. All time is simultaneous. We contain multitudes. We contain time.