The Turtle
by A. J. Bermudez
When Emin gets old (although old is a bit reductive, she thinks), she moves into a slightly smaller apartment on Prince Street, just two blocks from the old place (old, there it is again, she’s a hypocrite) on Mott. She keeps most of the things from the old place, although they don’t fit, not like they’re supposed to. The Fruin sculpture with the stitched-together dime bags doesn’t get the right light; the Klee looks crowded so close to the wall. The clothes fill the closet, although Emin’s gotten rid of almost all of Ada’s––except, unsentimentally, the few things that look good on Emin, things she’d borrowed when Ada was alive and now, she supposes, she’ll borrow in perpetuity.
She feels almost smug describing this to her therapist, that in Ada’s absence she’s begun carrying around two lives in one life. She is the small apartment.
But the therapist thinks she’s talking about commoditization, persons as things, and completely misses the point.
“Maybe I’m saying it wrong,” Emin suggests.
“You do refer to a number of things by the names of their creators.”
Emin leaves with the feeling that she’s been misunderstood, and also that her therapist does not understand art.
Back at the apartment, Emin slips out of her Choos, feeling self-conscious about not just calling them shoes, although she’d kill for someone to reference her work by just her last name, and for someone else to know what they were talking about. She looks around the compact, cluttered topography of the apartment: stacks of coffee table books too heavy to resituate; shelves of trinkets Ada found in medinas and souks, garishly lit from above by panels of recessed lighting; the plum-colored hassock that’s been tripped over more times than it’s been sat on. She makes coffee in the half-size French press (she insists on coffee, even in private, even though she secretly loves tea) as a protest against time, a refusal to willfully embrace every detail of the caricature of the old woman she feels herself becoming. Even the half-size press she only fills halfway, drinking less and less coffee each day, feeling time like a putty knife scraping off her tolerance in shavings.
She returns to the living room, clutching her small mug, surveying the scene. The project for today is to sell the turtle. She has finally decided to part with it, despite the fact that she feels tremendous guilt about this. She’s hated the thing forever. She’s also loved the thing forever. Sometimes, she knows, you love something because you see that someone you love loves it.
The turtle is brutally ugly: a convex mass roughly the size of a dessert plate, ostensibly crystal but with thick, sulfur-cloud smudges of yellowed glass. Two small rubies for eyes, not even symmetrically positioned, and a little notched cone for the tail. Its neck cranes upward, cocked slightly toward some invisible sun. The artist carved his initials in blunt, ham-fisted strokes on the underbelly, which tells you everything you need to know about his aesthetic sensibilities.
Emin is not one of these old women who doesn’t know her way around the internet, and she’s set up a Craigslist page to sell the turtle. She keeps the description brief: Objet d’art. A turtle, believed crystal with minor gemstones. $20.
She’s of course dabbled with the idea of simply throwing the turtle away, or donating it, but she’s seen the way people treat things that are free. Unsightliness notwithstanding, she would like the turtle to go to a good home.
Within the hour, three respondents have emailed to inquire about the turtle.
The first is a young woman, new to the city, who can tell from the post that the owner of the turtle is a sensitive and compassionate soul, and who would like to meet for a coffee and to see if they have a “conection.” A photo of the young woman, taken from a sheer cliff of an angle, plummeting toward a lip-gloss pout and shelf-bra tank top, is included.
The second is simple: Would u take 5$?
The third is slightly more elaborate, composed and punctuated in a way Emin feels she can trust: Hello. If the turtle is still available, I would like to come by and see it. Please let me know a time convenient to you. Thank you. Best, Arthur
Emin writes back with the suggestion of a time that afternoon and the address of a coffee shop on Mulberry. Arthur agrees.
At a quarter to three, Emin sits at a low table near the doorway. The coffee shop has almost no decor beyond a profusion of plants, which the owner rotates in and out of the sunlight of the glass storefront. Emin watches the time, the door. The turtle sits on the surface of the table beside her half-decaffeinated espresso.
When Arthur arrives, Emin is stunned that he matches her imagination almost exactly. Sweater, tapered slacks, glasses with stylishly understated frames in pale green. He gives a little wave, raising his palm stiffly but congenially, all the fingers pressed together, then orders an espresso and joins her at the table.
“I’m Arthur,” he says, shaking her hand with the same stiff fingers and a surprising degree of warmth.
“Emin.”
“This must be the turtle,” he says, taking a seat.
“Yes,” Emin says, unsure what else to say. The turtle, she feels, speaks for itself.
As a gesture of meeting Arthur halfway, Emin sets the turtle midway on the table between them. Its face angles upward toward Arthur, away from the hand-painted, pinstriped hulk of its shell, with all the splendor of a meteorite in the hood of a car.
“Bit odd, isn’t it?” Arthur says.
“Yes,” Emin agrees, then quickly adds, “although I think the photos were accurate.”
“Oh, they were.” Arthur reaches toward the turtle, then hesitates. “May I?”
“Of course.”
Arthur lifts the turtle from the table with almost reverential care. His hand is just about the size of the shell, and he palms it with the elegant fascination of an athlete trying on a glove. “My stepson is crazy for turtles.”
“Ah.” Emin thinks of her own stepchild, Wilder, who had a thing for birds into their late teens. Although Emin had only caught the tail-end of the phase, it had delighted her. All a person had to do to impress them was to give them a bird object of any kind.
“His birthday’s on Friday. I think he’ll like the turtle.”
Emin could leave it at that, say “Great!” and exchange the turtle for the folded twenty that’s already tucked between Arthur’s index and middle fingers, but instead she says, “When I married my Ada, I did everything to get her kid to like me. Which was stupid, we got along fine, but just the same. Ada told me they loved birds, so I bought a figurine of a warbler. They loved it, kept moving it around from the mantel to the windowsill to the table, like a centerpiece. It was badly painted––yellow flecks kept chipping off all over the apartment, you’d have to pick them off your feet when you showered––and the colors were in the wrong places; it was like the artist had never seen a warbler, but. That was their favorite thing. For a time.”
Arthur nods, already gliding the bill from between his fingers, and Emin feels an unexpected panic. She wants to have another coffee (although it will obliterate her odds at a good night’s sleep), to tell Arthur about the aquarium on Columbus where the turtles clamber from the water toward the overhead light and jockey for position on the platform with their tiny, gnarled flippers. The spot on the west side of the lake, entirely different but equally good for turtle-sighting, where they nestle in actinomorphic clusters on a half-submerged rock when the waterline is low. She’d like to hear more about this stepson, to say more about Ada, her talent for finding the ugliest thing in any gift shop from Phoenix to Cairo. She wants to ask Arthur what type of gift wrap he plans on using. To make sure he knows a turtle can live for 200 years, 250 maybe. She feels a surge of desire to attend the stepson’s birthday party––crazy, she knows––and to see the look on his face when he opens the gift.
But Arthur is already on his feet, smiling with real gratitude. “Thank you again for the turtle,” he says. “Charles’ll love it.” Arthur shakes Emin’s hand, then turns, sidesteps a sprawling fern just inside the doorway, and is gone.
Although she does not remember beginning to cry, Emin looks down to see that the back of her hand is wet. She rolls the last of the faintly sour, lemon-peel grit of the espresso taste between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She has already paid, so she simply heads for the door, as Arthur has, tucking the twenty into her pocket.
On the walk home, she takes the long way past the cemetery and the old apartment on Mott. She looks up to the second-floor fire escape, the long window that could never stay clean, behind which Ada’s treasures used to cut a jagged silhouette against the overhead light.
When she returns to her apartment on Prince, she stands just inside the doorway, the way Wilder does when they visit (more often than one might visit one’s mother’s widow, which Emin appreciates), and looks over the apartment and its contents like the diaspora of a former life.
Emin has only twice, to her credit, googled comforting quotes about grief. She felt goofy doing it, but she likes the one about a loved one living on through the living.
She really wishes she’d had the chance to tell Arthur a little bit more about turtles, although she herself is admittedly no expert. Just a thing or two Charles might enjoy. One turtle, for instance, was born during the American revolution and died during Watergate. Can you imagine? Emin was thrilled and in no small part horrified to learn that a turtle could be nearly as old as a country.
She imagines Charles in a striped blue shirt, greedily eyeing a cake in the shape of a turtle. (How old is he? She should have asked.) She wonders what other turtles are in his collection. He must have figurines, no doubt, and stuffed ones; clothing and a blanket, most likely; perhaps a nightlight. She imagines him hauling out all his turtles for display at the party, dragging them to the brink of a suburban swimming pool and gently tossing them in.
She pictures the turtle, Ada’s turtle, at the bottom of the pool, first to arrive on account of its ridiculous weight, between a Leonardo action figure and a slow-sinking plush Squirtle.
Tomorrow, she decides, she’ll sell the Fruin. She’ll either contact the dealer (reasonable but a chore), or Tom (whose email she’s thrilled to find is still saliently posted on his website), or cut the thing into its original little pieces, unstitching the individual dime bags––some with pressed white powder still inside––from one another, and return them to the park where the artist originally found them. She imagines a whole contingent of young people, tatted and wild-haired, marveling at this ancient drug-peddler fumbling for baggies of heroin like ketchup packets in her handbag. Maybe, just to be funny, she’ll use the Judith Lieber––a rhinestone purse shaped like a stack of pancakes, a gift from Ada on the heels of a fight about who makes breakfast and who gets to eat it––a last hurrah before, inevitably, the Judith Lieber itself goes the way of the turtle and the Fruin.
If she makes it as far as the North Woods on her walk, she’ll sit on one of the rocks that juts toward the water and watch for red-eared sliders, although she herself prefers the box turtles. She was recently shocked to hear about people releasing their pet turtles into the lake. The water must, she thinks, be lousy now with Western Painteds, Chinese Softshells, and that other kind––what was it called? Something with “musk” in the name. Ada would know.
If, after peddling a few of the Fruin bags (or not), she still hasn’t sighted a turtle, there’s always the shop on Columbus. A raft of turtles beneath the beatific terrarium light. The certain comfort of a small thing contained.
She feels almost smug describing this to her therapist, that in Ada’s absence she’s begun carrying around two lives in one life. She is the small apartment.
But the therapist thinks she’s talking about commoditization, persons as things, and completely misses the point.
“Maybe I’m saying it wrong,” Emin suggests.
“You do refer to a number of things by the names of their creators.”
Emin leaves with the feeling that she’s been misunderstood, and also that her therapist does not understand art.
Back at the apartment, Emin slips out of her Choos, feeling self-conscious about not just calling them shoes, although she’d kill for someone to reference her work by just her last name, and for someone else to know what they were talking about. She looks around the compact, cluttered topography of the apartment: stacks of coffee table books too heavy to resituate; shelves of trinkets Ada found in medinas and souks, garishly lit from above by panels of recessed lighting; the plum-colored hassock that’s been tripped over more times than it’s been sat on. She makes coffee in the half-size French press (she insists on coffee, even in private, even though she secretly loves tea) as a protest against time, a refusal to willfully embrace every detail of the caricature of the old woman she feels herself becoming. Even the half-size press she only fills halfway, drinking less and less coffee each day, feeling time like a putty knife scraping off her tolerance in shavings.
She returns to the living room, clutching her small mug, surveying the scene. The project for today is to sell the turtle. She has finally decided to part with it, despite the fact that she feels tremendous guilt about this. She’s hated the thing forever. She’s also loved the thing forever. Sometimes, she knows, you love something because you see that someone you love loves it.
The turtle is brutally ugly: a convex mass roughly the size of a dessert plate, ostensibly crystal but with thick, sulfur-cloud smudges of yellowed glass. Two small rubies for eyes, not even symmetrically positioned, and a little notched cone for the tail. Its neck cranes upward, cocked slightly toward some invisible sun. The artist carved his initials in blunt, ham-fisted strokes on the underbelly, which tells you everything you need to know about his aesthetic sensibilities.
Emin is not one of these old women who doesn’t know her way around the internet, and she’s set up a Craigslist page to sell the turtle. She keeps the description brief: Objet d’art. A turtle, believed crystal with minor gemstones. $20.
She’s of course dabbled with the idea of simply throwing the turtle away, or donating it, but she’s seen the way people treat things that are free. Unsightliness notwithstanding, she would like the turtle to go to a good home.
Within the hour, three respondents have emailed to inquire about the turtle.
The first is a young woman, new to the city, who can tell from the post that the owner of the turtle is a sensitive and compassionate soul, and who would like to meet for a coffee and to see if they have a “conection.” A photo of the young woman, taken from a sheer cliff of an angle, plummeting toward a lip-gloss pout and shelf-bra tank top, is included.
The second is simple: Would u take 5$?
The third is slightly more elaborate, composed and punctuated in a way Emin feels she can trust: Hello. If the turtle is still available, I would like to come by and see it. Please let me know a time convenient to you. Thank you. Best, Arthur
Emin writes back with the suggestion of a time that afternoon and the address of a coffee shop on Mulberry. Arthur agrees.
At a quarter to three, Emin sits at a low table near the doorway. The coffee shop has almost no decor beyond a profusion of plants, which the owner rotates in and out of the sunlight of the glass storefront. Emin watches the time, the door. The turtle sits on the surface of the table beside her half-decaffeinated espresso.
When Arthur arrives, Emin is stunned that he matches her imagination almost exactly. Sweater, tapered slacks, glasses with stylishly understated frames in pale green. He gives a little wave, raising his palm stiffly but congenially, all the fingers pressed together, then orders an espresso and joins her at the table.
“I’m Arthur,” he says, shaking her hand with the same stiff fingers and a surprising degree of warmth.
“Emin.”
“This must be the turtle,” he says, taking a seat.
“Yes,” Emin says, unsure what else to say. The turtle, she feels, speaks for itself.
As a gesture of meeting Arthur halfway, Emin sets the turtle midway on the table between them. Its face angles upward toward Arthur, away from the hand-painted, pinstriped hulk of its shell, with all the splendor of a meteorite in the hood of a car.
“Bit odd, isn’t it?” Arthur says.
“Yes,” Emin agrees, then quickly adds, “although I think the photos were accurate.”
“Oh, they were.” Arthur reaches toward the turtle, then hesitates. “May I?”
“Of course.”
Arthur lifts the turtle from the table with almost reverential care. His hand is just about the size of the shell, and he palms it with the elegant fascination of an athlete trying on a glove. “My stepson is crazy for turtles.”
“Ah.” Emin thinks of her own stepchild, Wilder, who had a thing for birds into their late teens. Although Emin had only caught the tail-end of the phase, it had delighted her. All a person had to do to impress them was to give them a bird object of any kind.
“His birthday’s on Friday. I think he’ll like the turtle.”
Emin could leave it at that, say “Great!” and exchange the turtle for the folded twenty that’s already tucked between Arthur’s index and middle fingers, but instead she says, “When I married my Ada, I did everything to get her kid to like me. Which was stupid, we got along fine, but just the same. Ada told me they loved birds, so I bought a figurine of a warbler. They loved it, kept moving it around from the mantel to the windowsill to the table, like a centerpiece. It was badly painted––yellow flecks kept chipping off all over the apartment, you’d have to pick them off your feet when you showered––and the colors were in the wrong places; it was like the artist had never seen a warbler, but. That was their favorite thing. For a time.”
Arthur nods, already gliding the bill from between his fingers, and Emin feels an unexpected panic. She wants to have another coffee (although it will obliterate her odds at a good night’s sleep), to tell Arthur about the aquarium on Columbus where the turtles clamber from the water toward the overhead light and jockey for position on the platform with their tiny, gnarled flippers. The spot on the west side of the lake, entirely different but equally good for turtle-sighting, where they nestle in actinomorphic clusters on a half-submerged rock when the waterline is low. She’d like to hear more about this stepson, to say more about Ada, her talent for finding the ugliest thing in any gift shop from Phoenix to Cairo. She wants to ask Arthur what type of gift wrap he plans on using. To make sure he knows a turtle can live for 200 years, 250 maybe. She feels a surge of desire to attend the stepson’s birthday party––crazy, she knows––and to see the look on his face when he opens the gift.
But Arthur is already on his feet, smiling with real gratitude. “Thank you again for the turtle,” he says. “Charles’ll love it.” Arthur shakes Emin’s hand, then turns, sidesteps a sprawling fern just inside the doorway, and is gone.
Although she does not remember beginning to cry, Emin looks down to see that the back of her hand is wet. She rolls the last of the faintly sour, lemon-peel grit of the espresso taste between her tongue and the roof of her mouth. She has already paid, so she simply heads for the door, as Arthur has, tucking the twenty into her pocket.
On the walk home, she takes the long way past the cemetery and the old apartment on Mott. She looks up to the second-floor fire escape, the long window that could never stay clean, behind which Ada’s treasures used to cut a jagged silhouette against the overhead light.
When she returns to her apartment on Prince, she stands just inside the doorway, the way Wilder does when they visit (more often than one might visit one’s mother’s widow, which Emin appreciates), and looks over the apartment and its contents like the diaspora of a former life.
Emin has only twice, to her credit, googled comforting quotes about grief. She felt goofy doing it, but she likes the one about a loved one living on through the living.
She really wishes she’d had the chance to tell Arthur a little bit more about turtles, although she herself is admittedly no expert. Just a thing or two Charles might enjoy. One turtle, for instance, was born during the American revolution and died during Watergate. Can you imagine? Emin was thrilled and in no small part horrified to learn that a turtle could be nearly as old as a country.
She imagines Charles in a striped blue shirt, greedily eyeing a cake in the shape of a turtle. (How old is he? She should have asked.) She wonders what other turtles are in his collection. He must have figurines, no doubt, and stuffed ones; clothing and a blanket, most likely; perhaps a nightlight. She imagines him hauling out all his turtles for display at the party, dragging them to the brink of a suburban swimming pool and gently tossing them in.
She pictures the turtle, Ada’s turtle, at the bottom of the pool, first to arrive on account of its ridiculous weight, between a Leonardo action figure and a slow-sinking plush Squirtle.
Tomorrow, she decides, she’ll sell the Fruin. She’ll either contact the dealer (reasonable but a chore), or Tom (whose email she’s thrilled to find is still saliently posted on his website), or cut the thing into its original little pieces, unstitching the individual dime bags––some with pressed white powder still inside––from one another, and return them to the park where the artist originally found them. She imagines a whole contingent of young people, tatted and wild-haired, marveling at this ancient drug-peddler fumbling for baggies of heroin like ketchup packets in her handbag. Maybe, just to be funny, she’ll use the Judith Lieber––a rhinestone purse shaped like a stack of pancakes, a gift from Ada on the heels of a fight about who makes breakfast and who gets to eat it––a last hurrah before, inevitably, the Judith Lieber itself goes the way of the turtle and the Fruin.
If she makes it as far as the North Woods on her walk, she’ll sit on one of the rocks that juts toward the water and watch for red-eared sliders, although she herself prefers the box turtles. She was recently shocked to hear about people releasing their pet turtles into the lake. The water must, she thinks, be lousy now with Western Painteds, Chinese Softshells, and that other kind––what was it called? Something with “musk” in the name. Ada would know.
If, after peddling a few of the Fruin bags (or not), she still hasn’t sighted a turtle, there’s always the shop on Columbus. A raft of turtles beneath the beatific terrarium light. The certain comfort of a small thing contained.