Playground, page 18
A wave broke a few feet below them and soaked them in several inches of surge. They bolted up, both laughing now. When they sobered, she said, “It’s not a large deal.”
Her lightness intoxicated him all over again. She must have been preparing for this, readying and reconciling herself to capitulation for a long time.
“I mean: think about it.” She drew his hand over her flat belly, as provocative a gesture as he could remember her ever making. “It’s quite cool, really. For nine months, I will be the host of a sea creature!”
TWO, IN FACT. She defended her dissertation while eight months pregnant. Then came the twins. A boy Danny and a girl Dora. She held them, one in the crook of each arm, two red, squalling, wild things, their heads not yet recovered from crowning. She had never felt such overwhelming awe, not even underwater. As for Bart, the press of amazement against his chest threatened to kill him.
The twins were like divergent species: hair, size, body shape, temperament—yin and yang, different enough that more than one grandparent wondered if the hospital had been playing games. Almost from the start, the boy liked building things. The Beaulieu engineering gene seemed to have skipped a generation. Danny craved Lincoln Logs, Erector sets, toys that bewildered both his parents. Within a few years, he was building what he called Base Stations. He remembered them all, and numbered them, and even months later he could describe Base Station Thirteen.
The girl was haunted and withdrawn. Dora wanted only to be read stories. By four, she started to invent them. Suppose the moon went down into a mouse hole to have a look around. Suppose Gramma’s false teeth fell into the telephone and came out the other end and bit your earlobe.
Separate, these two small sovereign nations astonished Evelyne, and together they blew her mind. Their emotions pulsed like the skin colors of a flamboyant squid. She had no idea that land-based creatures could be so interesting.
Early on, she showed them how to love the sea. But neither of her children loved the same sea she did. Danny stood on the edge of the Tijuana Slough, gazing westward into the vast Pacific with wild surmise. He was building things: boats that could reach invisible islands, outposts on giant pylons rising above the waves, cities in bubble domes colonizing the coral-encrusted ocean bottom. Dora would sit on a rock exposed by low tide, cocking her head left and right, listening to the sound of the waves and the gulls and the sea lions, entranced by the symphony. “What are they saying, Mama? What does it mean?”
Bart was spectacular with them both. There were times, in fact, when Evie envied the strength of his connection, especially with Dora. Of course, he spent so much more time with them both. When they did things as a family now, she sometimes felt like a visiting aunt.
All four of them prowled the tide pools in La Jolla Cove. The children clung to their father’s bare legs. She told them, “Did you know that the two of you were conceived in a tide pool?”
“Evelyne!” Bart scolded. “Don’t tell them that!”
“Why not?”
“You know why not. It isn’t true.”
“It is!”
“What’s ‘conceived’?” the little engineer demanded.
She tipped her head toward her husband. He stammered, “It means what happens to make you get born.”
The boy giggled. The girl looked solemn and amazed.
They sat on the edge of a pool large enough to house both children—four giants peering down through the heavens into another world. The children pointed to every living thing they could see, and their parents named them and told them something odd about each creature. Then Danny found something out of place: a glass bottle, no bigger than Evelyne’s hand, invisible except for the slight warping of light around the tapered neck. The boy reached to pick it up. His mother swooped in to stop his hand, fiercely enough to startle the child into tears. He looked to his father for explanation and redress. His father took his hand.
Evie apologized. “Oh, honey. I didn’t mean to frighten you. But no one can touch it. Look! There are things living inside!”
The boy stopped crying and peered into the transparent cave. Across the underside of the invisible glass wall hung the twisting tubes of annelid worms. Barnacles clamped to the curved outside, floating mystically above the living pool. Three tiny urchins, like spiny black half marbles, crept across the bottle’s base. A colony of hydrae polyps budded in chains around the opening.
The bottle had dropped by godly accident into the pool, and life, which never stopped toying with possible next moves, had exploited the miraculous hiding place dozens of times. The more the family looked, the more settlers they saw inside the glass flask. Stems of living sponges, a bright russet color. Wafer-thin crabs no wider across than the girl’s two fingers. Grassy mats of algae, sedentary colonies of moss animals, a pair of crustaceans, and a gastropod whose name only Limpet knew.
Danny was thrilled. “It’s a whole city!”
Dora stared at the aquarium inside the aquarium on the edge of the largest aquarium on the planet. The girl shook her head, transfixed by an idea. “I wish I could live there.”
“Terrific,” the father said. “My two mermaids.”
OCEANOGRAPHY FLOURISHED IN THOSE YEARS, when the Great Society collided with the Cold War and money flowed into all the sciences. Strange projects that the government deemed worth paying for sprang up with each new season. In the year that the land-based world exploded—in Prague, in Paris, in D.C., across Indochina, in Memphis, in department stores in Frankfurt, in a hotel kitchen in L.A., in the streets of Chicago, in the streets of Mexico City, on an atoll in French Polynesia—the year of the first picture of the whole Earth, Evelyne learned of a project ripped out of her own dreams. The General Electric Company Space Division and Seabees from the United States Navy’s Amphibious Construction Battalion were combining to construct a live-in underwater laboratory on the seabed of Great Lameshur Bay, off St. John, in the U.S. Virgin Islands. The Tektite lab would study the viability of saturation diving.
Simply hearing about the project transported Evelyne twenty-two years into the past, back to the night that her father threw her into the Air Liquide test pool in Montreal with a prototype aqualung strapped to her back. The future that she’d envisioned so clearly that night had been decades in coming. But now it was finally here.
Some years earlier, in 1963, when Captain Cousteau built Starfish House, a settlement for five people situated four hundred feet down in the Red Sea, she had dreamed of taking part. She ached for a chance to work in the portable submerged dwellings being toyed with throughout the mid-sixties. In 1965, she watched in agony from Scripps Pier as three teams of male divers lived underwater in Sealab II for fifteen-day shifts, two hundred feet below the surface in La Jolla Undersea Canyon. Her exclusion from that project was the most painful moment of her life, including giving birth to twins. She would not miss out on another chance.
A notice on a bulletin board at Scripps solicited research proposals for the Tektite project. She wrote up one that involved protracted close study of the relations between coral polyps and the fish that fed on them. It was a quantitative study that could only be done by saturation diving, with the researcher in the water for long periods.
Evelyne did not tell her husband about her application. So she could not go cry on Limpet’s shoulder when she was rejected. She had nine hundred documented hours of diving experience and underwater research to her name. Yet, the project’s gatekeepers turned her down. She wrote to the organizers in the Department of the Interior, asking why. The explanation came, phrased as if it were self-explanatory. Men and women could not live stably together in close quarters, underwater, for two months at a time.
The claim was true, as far as it went. After all, men and women could not live stably on dry land, with no constraints on their mobility. But the truth did not keep Evelyne Beaulieu Mannis from wanting to take all the men in the Department of the Interior and put them on a leaking raft in the middle of the equatorial calms. She wrote back to thank them for their consideration and let it go at that.
She returned to the business of raising the twins, teaching adjunct classes throughout Southern California, converting her thesis into articles, collating, curating, and publishing her years of research findings from the RV Ione, giving talks and attending conferences, cooking and cleaning house for a family of four, and diving whenever the chance arose. She had no time left over for any but the most casual bitterness. Underwater research habitats would continue to proliferate. In a few years, she reasoned, scientists and even civilians would be living in seabed communities across the world.
When the second letter from the Tektite gatekeepers arrived two months later, it blindsided her. The Department of the Interior, with funding from NASA (who were studying scientific teams working in confined environments), were manning the missions for Tektite II, to be run the following year. Would Dr. Mannis be interested in participating in a two-week, all-female mission, under the direction of visiting Harvard research fellow Dr. Sylvia Earle?
Evelyne had learned, years ago, to convey such news to her husband with her euphoria converted into contrition. And still, he took the announcement hard. There would be two weeks of training, two weeks of underwater life, and a few days of various kinds of decompression afterward.
“Your children are four years old, and you want to abandon them for more than a month?”
“Not abandon. You’ll be—”
“Do you have any idea how long that is for a young child to be without a mother? They’ll forget who you are.”
“We can speak by phone, right up until I submerge. And again as soon as I surface.”
“At three dollars a minute? The bill will cost more than they’re paying you.”
But Evelyne heard awe in her husband’s voice. She simply had to stay remorseful until he gave in. Bart Mannis, too, had given his life to the ocean. Some part of him revered the idea of being married to one of the first five women since the evolution of Homo sapiens to live underwater. And he loved his two four-year-olds so fiercely that even the chaos of a month alone with them would be something to savor.
Bart fretted for some days, shaken by the course their lives had taken. Evie proffered her reassurances and begged his forgiveness and his blessing. In time, he gave both. Danny buzzed with all the excitement of a child too young to understand what was happening. His mother was going to live in a town under the sea. Dora hugged herself, in tears. She made her mother promise again and again to come home as soon as possible.
At the last minute, one of the project managers balked at the idea of letting mothers of small children on the project. But Evie and Dr. Earle, the guilty parties, pointed out that several of the male divers were also fathers. That argument alone might not have carried the day, but it was too late to replan a mission already under way. And so, in the summer of 1970, Evelyne Beaulieu Mannis found herself lifting off from San Diego International, letting loose a silent but delirious victory whoop from her seat over the wing of a Boeing 727 as she headed back east.
SHE MET HER THREE fellow scientists and the crew’s engineer in Chicago for a series of orientations. One of them she knew from the grad program at Scripps. With all of them, Evelyne felt instantly at ease. She would have welcomed any as a friend. There was no posturing or jockeying for status, as there had always been on the all-male research ships she’d worked on. Just simple, mutual respect and shared curiosity, a love of everything marine that soon turned into affection for one another. From the start, they were a working team.
They flew from Chicago to the Virgin Islands. From outside, the team’s new home looked like a shotgun wedding between two small oil refinery silos on the roof of a warehouse. But inside, the Tektite Hilton looked like the heaven of Evelyne’s dreams. Forty-three feet down in the crystalline Caribbean, the deluxe accommodation delighted her. The bunk beds were as comfortable as any she’d slept in. The temperature and humidity controls worked better than those in her own home. There was a workbench with a good microscope and other essential lab instruments, a sink with running water, a private toilet, and a glorious shower that ran both hot and cold. The vibrant main chamber of the complex boasted General Electric’s finest space-saving appliances: refrigerator, range, television, and even a state-of-the-art tape deck. The freezer was filled with prepared meals.
But the area of the town house that thrilled Evie the most was the lower level of the second tower. The pressure of the room kept the water at bay, so she could open a hatch in the floor onto the azure Caribbean, step through the portal, and be swimming with the fishes fifty feet below the surface as easily as if she’d stepped out to sit in her La Jolla backyard.
The crew were to have no face-to-face contact with any other humans for the duration of the mission. That suited Evelyne. She had spent so many hours of her life in aquariums, studying the fish who swam in their constrained homes. Now she and her brilliant colleagues were the aquarium captives, while the fish of the reef swam past the Hilton all day long and peered in the windows at this most curious sight. NASA, too, was peering in on closed-circuit cameras, studying them for every change brought on by their extreme confinement. The space program was eager to study how the women would bear up in long durations under challenging conditions. This was the part of the project that Evelyne couldn’t comprehend. Why would you use the sea to plan for space trips? This was the voyage.
The press dubbed the crews of the other Tektite missions aquanauts. But for the crew of Mission Six, reporters came up with aquabelles, aquababes, aquanettes, and aquanaughties. The journalists did not report that the crew of Mission Six consistently outperformed their male colleagues in almost every metric, from the quality and quantity of their underwater research to the ease of their close-quarters cooperation. If an all-male NASA were really looking for proof that women could do research and perform well in space, they had the data on every day of that two-week adventure.
Brilliant new rebreathers allowed Mission Six to enjoy much longer, quieter dives. Evelyne suited up, stepped into a hole in the floor of the apartment’s foyer, and found herself treading on the continental shelf, meeting the neighbors up close and personal for many hours at a time.
Two weeks of life in one submerged spot, and the blurry mass of surrounding organisms separated out into individual personalities. Together each evening in their snug home, the five humans watched the changing of the guard as the morning troupe of animals gave way to the night shift. They watched a triggerfish and a squirrelfish exchange a well-hidden bed at dawn. They had frequent visits from an extraordinary green moray that they all called Puff, and a gang of five inseparable gray angelfish who only ever appeared together. They learned to tell one fish from the other, and they named each one of the five fish after themselves, according to their personalities.
For the first time, Evelyne was inside the endless creation of the sea. On one outing with two of her crewmates, she discovered a cluster of vertically swimming garden eels who had made camp near the structure’s effluent pipes. Even the sides of the habitat were being colonized by whole ecosystems built around Porifera and segmented worms. She learned when the longsnout butterflyfish would show up to peer in the windows. She delighted in the bonanza of night-feeding tarpon and amberjack, who feasted on the buffet of fingerlings hypnotized by the Tektite’s lights.
She swam at night, in waters full of bioluminescent plankton. The sea sparkled like silent fireworks whenever she flicked a limb. She swiped her hand in front of her face, igniting a living candle.
The days passed in a bliss of research. Often the team logged ten or twelve hours of diving a day. She didn’t have to endure long periods of decompression after each dive. There would be just one day-long decompression at the end of the adventure. For the first time in her life, Evie did not need a diving stopwatch. She could go another hundred feet deeper with impunity. No long and slow descents and ascents. No forced evacuations back to the surface when a tank emptied, just as the fish were doing something extraordinary. She could come and go all day, a full-time resident, albeit one with an elaborate shell.
The crew acclimated to the cramped quarters and grew fond of each other’s foibles. The five of them felt as if they were back in grad school, sharing a one-room apartment. They lived in harmony, partly enforced by knowing that NASA scientists were eavesdropping. But after a week, they forgot all about their minders. They became a pod of colonists exploring a beautiful new planet.
In two weeks, Evie and her colleagues did research that would have taken several months of conventional diving to perform. She documented the interactions between two hundred species of fish, corals, and plants, including a few not previously known to the region. By the end of the run, the rest of the group was ready to surface. But Evelyne wanted only to go on living in the Tektite for as long as she could.
The five of them surfaced to discover that they were world celebrities. The noise and swarm of terrestrial life gave Evie vertigo. She stood frozen in front of banks of microphones that picked up every fault in her stuttering English and relayed them to millions of listeners. She made terrified appearances on national television and even coughed out a few words to Congress. She suffered through a ticker-tape parade down State Street in Chicago, where the five aquababes became honorary city citizens. The lightning storm of flashbulbs at out-of-control press conferences—Did you bring a hair dryer down there? Were there any catfights?—reduced her to a timid, lip-chewing twelve-year-old again.
But they had taken the next step in the unfolding adventures of humankind. The thought gave her power. With each new press conference, she grew bolder in preaching the gospel of the oceans. Becoming a part of them would give the troubled race of men something to aspire toward. Once people witnessed the abundance of underwater life, once they lived there, they would ache to take care of the place like it was their home.
