Eddie died. It didn’t bother me. Eddie was an old man the entire time I knew him, a relative I didn’t get to know until I was 12. “We’re going to visit your Great-Uncle Eddie and Aunt Emily in Falmouth,” my mother said one summer during a camping trip on Cape Cod, said it like we were just stopping at a gas station. The sentence served the double purpose, outlining our itinerary while also letting us know that some people named Eddie and Emily existed. And that, further, we were related. Apparently we’d visited them briefly when I was four. It didn’t ring a bell. So, on the car ride over, Mom turned to us every few minutes and offered facts without context, trying to build some hype around these people. “They lived in Okinawa for years.” “Eddie was a pilot.” It was like cramming before visiting some bizarre country: their main exports, I assumed, were hard candy, corduroy, and judgment. For my mother they were sweet relatives she hadn’t had time to visit. For me, at 12, the news registered just above neutral, as only slightly interesting. Mom may as well have been telling us about some lame, peripheral color in a box of crayons. These were burnt sienna relatives.
My parents, my two siblings, and I pulled up to Eddie and Emily’s house in our blue Caprice station wagon, a species of car that, like certain dinosaurs, had achieved absurd proportions and freakishly specialized features only then to become extinct. The car’s body, the length of a Camry tailgating a Prius, got wider at the end like an ant that had let itself go. The back space would flip up to form two more backward-facing seats, as if the designers at Chevrolet were both encouraging drivers to conceive more children and providing an actual location to do so. In this way-back area, miles from the reach of Dad’s palm, a Wild West,Lord of the Flies subculture would develop. Pinches went unpunished, thigh space was taken through eminent domain. Little things no one would miss, and sometimes socks, were slipped through the pop-out window slits as we drove. Cars behind us were given the thumbs up and then, as we got a little older, mocked for their enthusiastic replies.
We piled out of that airplane hangar of a car and crammed into the neatly decorated living room of Eddie and Emily’s Cape Cod–style house, a place full of doilies, dusted hardwood, and stiff, 1950s-looking couches. Everyone looked at everyone else pleasantly, blinking and occasionally saying words. My mother tried to kindle the conversation, poking at decades-old embers. For me, the slow conversation was nodes on a family tree morphing into real people, the way dots on a map, once visited, become real places where you can get a good burger or picture yourself living—or places you decide are only worth driving through, not worth stopping at again.
The exception to the general stillness was Emily, a slender, energetic woman flitting around the house with hospitality. The sister of a grandfather who had died years before I was born—a man I was always told I resembled—Emily kept singling me out with glances, wistfully saying her dead brother’s name out loud, and then feeding me elaborate meals. It was an arrangement we both accepted immediately. Long after everyone else got full, I kept taking her up on her offers of coffee cake and hot dogs. So we sat, me chewing and her staring, each of our hairstyles a variation on the bowl cut.
“Eddie likes fishing,” my mother said about the World War II bomber pilot staring at me. “Maybe he’ll take you fishing.”
And so, just like that, my father and I committed to waking up nauseatingly early the next morning. As an awkward, hate-filled preteen, I found fishing to be the one hobby timeless and genuine enough to keep me marginally tethered to the world, like when a felon comes out of his cell to do watercolors. I wore my best No Fear T-shirt and a bead necklace with enough black in it to still fit in with the Goth-lite look I was cultivating that summer. Eddie had flown more than 50 high-risk bombing missions over Europe and northern Africa, could play Chopin sonatas on the piano, and referred to staying in bed past 5 A.M. as sleeping in. The highlight of my year was the Vans Warped Tour. We kept our conversation to fishing.
As the outboard on the 17-foot Boston Whaler worked on the light chop, chugging us out to Vineyard Sound, the air was cool, smelling of mist and gasoline. Eddie wore mud boots, a frumpy baseball cap, and a sagging orange jacket. He looked like Walter Matthau doing an impression of Walter Matthau. As he drove, Eddie would periodically glance down at this new device called a GPS, into which he claimed to have fed coordinates. The patches of fog would clear to reveal behind them denser patches of fog. This happened several times until, finally, we came to a place that looked like all the other water we had crossed. Except now, in the distance, sat a single boat, the only object visible anywhere. Eddie looked at the boat, down at his GPS, and then back up at the boat.
“That son of a bitch is in my spot,” he said. My father and I paused, looked at each other, and laughed. Eddie, it turned out, was the man.
If that’s not what made me like him, it was his talent at fishing. “Now we’ll just drift across the top of them,” he would say, and every 10 minutes we pulled winter flounder and fluke up over the chrome guardrails and plopped them onto the boat’s gut-stained deck. Conceptually, I’d known that fluke and flounder were silly, sideways fish, perfect for supporting roles in underwater Disney movies. Up close, they looked like beastly hallucinations, angry pancakes come to life, unhappy they’d been forced to sleep on their side for the duration of their existence. Eddie clubbed one on the head, said, “He won’t be right after that” in the mock voice of a doctor breaking bad news to a family, and tossed it in the cooler. We had a great time that day, and because he was not a grandfather I was required to visit, or a friend I’d call to play street hockey with, I wouldn’t see him again for three years.
Photo: USFWS
