Wood and Strings
By Christina Kapp
In the morning, I open our bedroom window to watch the tide, each wave clawing the land like a creature of the deep. My husband rushes in, slamming a toe into the old chest jettying out from the foot of our bed.
“It will get too hot,” he says, collapsing on the chest.
I close the window. My husband likes clear delineations of space.
“You should put on a show. Like you used to,” he says, slapping the top of the chest with one hand while rubbing his injured foot with the other.
The marionettes in the chest were a wedding gift. The gesture had been surprising, although even as a young woman with girlhood still bubbling in my wake, I understood that a wife has to perform. In our tiny first apartment, I hung the puppets on a clothesline strung from our wardrobe to a curtain rod and in the evenings I made up stories that the puppets acted out—love plots with wooden faces clicking together, mysteries involving tiptoeing and hiding behind chair legs, parties full of high-kick dances and drunkenness. My friends thought my puppeteering a strange foreplay, but I got good at moving the puppets’ jerky limbs. My husband would applaud and tell me how much he loved me. Bravo, bravo!
We had children right away and I manipulated them until I couldn’t. Did I put on shows for them? Perform for birthday parties? First they were too young, with the magic ability to snarl everything from puppet strings to careers. Then they were too old, preferring power cords and the tethers of Wiis and Xboxes. When we moved to a bigger house, we packed the puppets in a wooden chest—a hope chest, my mother would have said, but I never called it that—for safekeeping, which is another word for forgetting. There they remained wrapped in tissue and boxes, but even in stillness they had aged, their strings stiffening from disuse, their particular etiquette deemed old-fashioned and irrelevant.
“Why don’t we make a frittata?” I say to my husband. Food always distracts. He complains that his toenail is going to turn black and fall off.
On this island, we play the role of retired couple although technically I am not old enough for the label. We walk the path along the beach. We load our trunk with groceries at Pathmark once a week and hurry home to stock the perishables in our fridge. Sometimes we drive to Kahului for the dentist, the doctor, Jiffy Lube, or a dinner out somewhere. Then we come home to this place where we can keep the windows closed, sleep with the air conditioner chilly against our cheeks. Every morning I slice pineapple and mango to make sure we have enough fiber in our diet. Once a week I stand at the rim of the Pacific with a handful of grey-haired ladies for a hula lesson from one of the local girls. Occasionally I appease my husband by letting him watch. When the lesson is over, he complements my ability to mirror the movements of my arms and legs with the instructor.
“So much better than those other women,” he always says. “You could be a professional.”
“Still just a girl,” I reply. “At heart, anyway.”
He pats my butt and smiles like my relative youth is a conspiracy, a secret accomplishment he is too modest to say out loud.
Twice a week my husband goes out on a Hobie Cat with a scruffy, over-tanned sailing instructor in reflective sunglasses named Chet. Sailing the Pacific is why we came to live on this island. He claims he carried the dream of being a sailor all the way from New York to London to Washington and back to New York again before we came here. At first, we took lessons together, Chet barking orders to trim the sails, come about. I followed the instructions dictated by Chet’s pointer finger and smoker’s rasp, but found the experience unsettling—crawling across a floating trampoline to release a line at the demand of a man whose eyes I had never seen wasn’t what I imagined when my husband had daydreamed about sailing into his golden years.
“Can’t we go out in a regular boat?” I asked, but my husband said Chet said Hobies were ideal for learning sailing skills. They also could be launched from the beach near our condo, so my husband went off by himself in the early mornings before the sun got too strong and the tradewinds kicked up.
“Chet always asks for you,” he says every time he returns. “We like it when you’re there.”
But sailing is his dream, not mine.
This island is a volcano, and I promise my husband I will take out the marionettes again if he will come with me to the summit to watch the sunrise. He dislikes long car trips, so he sleeps in the passenger seat as I navigate the switchbacks in the dark, the engine grinding against the incline, headlights sliding over bare rock, dry grasses. When we arrive and park next to the busses full of tourists wrapped in hotel bedspreads against the cold, we zip up the old winter coats I’d pulled out of storage and stand at the edge of the crater. The stars disappear and the sky warms to violet, then pink and gold. My husband’s knuckles turn white as he points his phone at spots on the horizon, a compass app calculating the direction and distance from here to the places we have already been—our empty nester condo, our center-stair colonial littered with lacrosse sticks and Legos, our fourth-floor walkup, and the old shop in London where as a student I had giggled as a salesman showed me how to make a wooden puppet dance. My future husband had stood in the shop’s doorway and watched, amused, as the salesman stood behind me, reaching around to layer my hand between his and the crossbar, tipping both my body and the puppet’s from side to side as we walked. I noticed him watching, his torso leaning against the weight of his attaché case. Briefly, our eyes met. I blushed. He smiled. When I left the store, he approached me on the sidewalk and asked if I would be interested in lunch. I was taken in by the tug of the light around his eyes, the way his case looked heavy enough to contain a whole life.
This is an old story.
As the sun blooms on the horizon, we walk the rim of the crater to the head of the Sliding Sands Trail and look down into the moony landscape below. We take photos and try not to mention our inability to accurately capture the red of the rocks, the blue of the new day’s sky, the vastness of the cloudless horizon. When the sun rises high enough that my hatless husband worries about sunscreen, we head back to the car, having decided that the joy of going down the trail would not be worth the struggle of coming back up again.
Back at home, we sit at the kitchen island and eat the pot roast I’d put in the slow cooker at two am. He scrolls through his photos of me posing at the edge. One with hands on my hips, one with both hands stretched out to the sky. His favorite was the one of me doing a kick jump that held me suspended in mid-air.
“Look at that,” he says, showing me the photo. “Still got it.”
I agree. I’ve still got it.
After I clean the dishes, after the sun goes down, I find my husband on the bed, one limp marionette hanging over his fingers, two others flailed out on the bedspread as if they had leapt from an unseen building. He holds the girl puppet out to me, her strings and crossbar dragging across his lap. The puppet wore lederhosen and had yellow yarn hair braided into pigtails, a bright pink spot painted on each cheek. The skin on my husband’s hands is speckled like the embroidery on her skirt. His finger winds around her neck, letting her head fall back. Upside down her red lips look clenched, the eyehooks pinching into her temples and hands an outrageous cruelty.
“You used to make them dance for me,” my husband says. He runs his fingers through the curls of strings to straighten them, and the puppet awkwardly kicks up a leg, ensnared like a sea lion caught in a net.
“They’ve been in there a long time,” I say, taking the puppet from him and reaching for the tissue to wrap her back up, slide her back into her box. He reaches for my waist and pulls my lips to his.
I put the doll down. I know this performance well. Even so, I worry about the marionettes, the sound of their wooden heads and limbs clacking together at the end of the bed, their bodies loosened from their wrappings, these few separated from the others, all of them tortured by time, transported across a globe to this island where they do not belong.
“I’m not a young woman anymore,” I say into the darkness.
My husband does not respond.
Later, with the moon spying through the window, I gather the wooden dolls from the bed. I put them back in the chest and close the lid.
Marriage—like life—is a slow atrophy of limbs.
In the morning when my husband goes to meet Chet, I open the chest and unwrap the marionettes from their boxes. I hold the head of the girl marionette in the palm of my hand like an infant, feeling its wooden weight, running my fingers over its tangled strings. In marriage and in sailing, the key to a smooth ride is knowing when to make necessary repairs. My husband is still learning, so now it is left to me. I open the windows to let the sea breeze in and begin, cutting the doll’s strings with a knife one by one, liberating these stiff, eternally smiling bodies from their tethers and setting them free.
THE END
Author Bio: Christina Kapp teaches at Rutgers University—Newark and The Writers Circle Workshops in New Jersey. Her writing has appeared in numerous publications including The Forge Literary Magazine, Passages North, and The MacGuffin, and her fiction has been nominated for Best of the Net and Pushcart Prizes. She welcomes you to follow her on X (Twitter) @ChristinaKapp, Instagram @christinakapp_ and visit her website: www.christinakapp.com.