 The
Segull
Rhea DeRose-Weiss
The seagull peers in my direction, first out of one eye and then the
other, turning his shrewd head from side to side. I look around to see
if there is someone else who he might be giving the eye, but there is no
one. I do believe this seagull is in love with me. It’s possible that he
is actually considering an attack—it’s a fine line, sometimes—but I
prefer to call it love. I prefer to believe he is admiring my avian
bones, the swanlike curve of my neck; he is longing to touch feather to
that stretch of naked skin. I stare back with what is intended to be an
encouraging look but is probably imperceptible behind my fashionably
oversized sunglasses. His feet are a translucent pink, almost delicate
in contrast to his surly demeanor. The little red mark on the bottom of
his beak makes it look like he has been sipping Kool-Aid. A surly
Kool-Aid sipper with delicate feet; I like him already. But one mustn’t
appear smitten too soon, so I coyly look out at the water. I’m sitting
on the stone steps above the little strip of beach along the San
Francisco bay, between Fisherman’s Wharf and Fort Mason. Because it’s
Memorial Day I am free from the stifling confines of my office but not
sure quite what to do with myself. I haven’t done much exploring of the
city on my own since I moved here almost three years ago. In fact I
spent most of the last three years with my ex-boyfriend the poet, but
since we broke up over a month ago he isn’t speaking to me at this point
in time. Since then I’ve decided to become one of those women who goes
out and does things on her own. I am trying to learn how not to feel
lonely in a crowd. But there is something particularly lonely about a
holiday after you have recently broken up with someone—even an
innocuous, decidedly unromantic holiday like Memorial Day.
I am surrounded by people—people walking, people riding bikes, people
lolling in the sun. On the beach, children dig in the sand with large,
brightly colored spoons, and in the water, swimmers, slick like seals in
black wetsuits, move in seemingly nonsensical loops. The braver ones
wade out with nothing between them and the icy cold except bathing
suits, swim caps, and goggles. Farther out there are sailboats and
barges, and beyond that, the abandoned shell of Alcatraz, and the regal
arc of the Golden Gate bridge. It’s a warm day for San Francisco, one of
the few that jump out at the end of the summer like party guests from
behind furniture: Surprise!
I turn back to my feathered admirer, who is still giving me the
hairy eyeball. Perhaps, I think, he is a man trapped in the body of a
seagull. Perhaps he is trying to communicate something to me with his
intense bird stares—a longing to transcend his form, a desire to be
known and understood as more than a seagull—a bird that is, after all,
merely one of many common scavengers flocking to the California coast.
When I was maybe nine or ten my father bought me a copy of the
book Jonathan Livingston Seagull. I obstinately refused to appreciate
its philosophical value, as was the case with all the books my father
bought me as a child, but it did instill in me a sense of the seagull as
a majestic being.
My ex-boyfriend the poet despised seagulls. “The pigeons of the
sea,” he called them. “Mean and dirty animals. Even Gary Snyder didn’t
like them, and he was a nature lover if there ever was one.”
My ex-boyfriend the poet had a penchant for the California Beats,
who I never much cared for. A lot of verbal masturbation, if you ask me.
But I didn’t argue with him: we had enough to fight about without adding
seagulls or Gary Snyder to the list. We argued about how to pit an
avocado and whether intelligence was based on nature or nurture. We
argued about the girls he’d slept with during our first break up, whose
identities I discovered one by one, in various unpleasant ways, after we
got back together. We argued about how much I drank; we argued about how
much he drank. We argued about who needed therapy and who was
emotionally unavailable. We argued things that had happened months ago,
years ago. We argued about who had said what five minutes ago. We built
fortresses out of petty resentments and irrational jealousies; we
pronounced our hatred over the walls. We went to bed furious and then
clung to each other in the morning, whispering apologies in the
baptismal light.
Nearby a dark-haired woman in red shorts has begun running up and
down the stone steps. Her daughter, a prettier, effortlessly slender
version of the woman, sits down nearby and begins to speak casually into
her cell phone in a language I can’t quite make out from where I sit.
I’ve been reading this book lately about being present in the moment
rather than dwelling on the past or obsessing about the future. I wonder
who is more present in this moment, the running woman or her daughter.
Obviously it should be the woman running—in tune with her body, her mind
uncluttered by other people, other places. But what if she is thinking
about the fat on her thighs and the disdain that wrinkles around her
husband’s mouth and how much she will have to run to eradicate the
knowledge that her marriage has died a boring and predictable death? And
maybe her daughter is telling her friend on the phone about the ripples
in the water, the way the floating loons disappear beneath the surface
to catch a fish and appear again, like a sleight of hand, twenty feet
away.
There were moments with my ex-boyfriend the poet when we would
consider the future, not as something ominous looming in the distance,
but as something to lean into together, a warm and hopeful wind.
Sometimes, in the apologetic light of morning, my ex-boyfriend the poet
would talk about having a baby. As if that could hold us together, turn
us into the sort of normal, balanced people who are capable of raising a
child. We could barely take care of ourselves. But there were moments, I
admit, split seconds, when I entertained the fantasy. After all, who
doesn’t want to believe that she could change herself, change her life,
just like that? Who doesn’t want to believe in ‘through thick and thin,
for better or for worse, in sickness and in health’?
Perhaps I was just looking in the wrong direction. Perhaps my
seagull has come to rescue me from the quotidian human plight. Perhaps
he will hold me safe in the ardent warmth of his great wings. It’s not
unheard of, the love between a woman and a bird. Take for example,
“Thumbelina”: one of my favorite stories as a child. Of course,
Thumbelina was very small and could fly on the back of her beloved
swallow. I, although unusually petite, am of human size and would have
to learn to fly on my own. But just the other night I dreamt that I
could fly. Usually in flying dreams I start off on the ground and take
big leaps into the air but don’t go very high: even asleep I’m afraid of
heights. But the other night I was soaring at cloud level over vast
landscapes. My mother told me about a book she read recently: the
author was a woman who, like me, was single and closing in on thirty,
and so she vowed to say yes to every man who asked her out for an entire
year. In the end, of course, she got married. The lesson here is that
one should be open to possibility. The problem for me, however, is not
choosiness. I am not a woman who gets asked out a lot, period. I am a
woman who smiles too little and ends up hugging the bar at last call,
disheartedly eyeing her prospects.
When I was fifteen my father left—the freewheeling musician type,
he was never quite cut out for the responsibilities of family life. My
sister, who was only twelve at the time of the divorce, tells me that
afterward our mother didn’t get out of bed for days at a time. Oddly, I
can’t remember, although I do recall standing outside her door one
night, listening to her sob. Now when I ask my mother if she wants to
get remarried she says, “Why? I’ve already had kids, what would I do
with a husband?”
My avian love has been joined by another gull and is momentarily
distracted from his pursuit. Or perhaps they’re discussing his chances
with me. Maybe the second one is giving him emotional support: “She
obviously digs you. Go for it, man!” Unless he is one of those
misogynist, frat-ish companions: “C’mon, let’s go. You can’t be serious
about that chick, she’s like, landlocked and shit. C’mon dude, bros
before hoes.”
It must be the latter, because there they go, off into the sky,
flapping their awkward, unfathomable wings. But he isn’t the first, he
won’t be the last. It probably wouldn’t have worked, anyway. We might
have been soul mates—social misfits with hearts full of longing—but
physicality is not so easily overcome. Now that I think of it,
Thumbelina did not marry her swallow. He left her in a flower where she
met a small prince who had arms the right size to hold her through the
night.
With my ex-boyfriend the poet, what it finally came down to was
this: I no longer wanted him to touch me. The arguments about avocados
and past lovers became irrelevant. The petty resentments and irrational
jealousies sifted through our fingers like sand.
Out in the distance people continue to swim their nonsensical
loops. They call to each other every now and then, with indecipherable
staccato syllables. From where I sit, it sounds like a game of Marco
Polo—one in which the boundaries keep shifting, and finding each other
is no longer the point.
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