There was a time when King Solomon, the wisest of men, could not tell day from night. The Queen of Sheba tricked him into believing that night went on forever by hanging above his bed a black tapestry woven with diamond stars and pearl planets. When Solomon awoke in the morning he thought it was still night, and slept on.
If I could have made a magical tapestry like Sheba’s, I would have used it to soothe my father into believing all was as well: it would have depicted night on the Pacific Ocean—waves gently rolling, the moon offering guidance from the bridge of his supply ship.
I liked my father best in the deepest of night when he lulled me to sleep, narrating the weather or describing the constellations. But a few hours later I, his somnambulist child, suddenly appeared at the thresh- old of his bedroom. Once a somnambulist himself, he knew not to rouse me from my sleepwalker’s twilight. He closely followed me, his flashlight pointed to the floor. My episodes of sleepwalking were always followed by bouts of amnesia. But if there was a recurring dream to attach to my somnambulism, it was likely the one where I jumped from the top of the basement stairs, waking up before I cracked my head open on the squares of yellow-beige-red flooring.
A form of sleepwalking continued for my father and me throughout my adolescence. We tiptoed around each other, careful not to startle one another. Afraid to rouse the other from our entrenched places. Afraid to disturb each other’s dreams.
On blue-black nights when my asthmatic coughing shook the house, my father was a sentry at my bedroom window, gazing out into the expansive night. What did he see? All that was out there were the unmown fields that belonged to the local college. But he stood at attention in his mismatched pajamas, a posture he affected so that he could still graze a chart at 5 foot, 7, the minimum height for an officer. I understood that he had never really left the bridge of his supply ship. The war was always with him.
On winter nights my father filled the glass bowl of my humidifier every hour to keep it whistling like a teakettle. My bedroom, smelling of Ben-Gay, was as humid as my mother’s Havana. But with all my father’s directions and warnings about staying warm and hydrated and still under my bedcovers, I was panicked that I would never catch the breath trapped in my mentholated chest.
My father the lieutenant commander said he fished dead bodies half eaten by sharks out of the Pacific. He saw General MacArthur wading ashore in the Philippines. The horizon was my father’s blank screen, and it served as a gateway to adventure, to daydreaming, to peace. I felt that he missed his former life of excitement, of participating in something important like running guns and butter in the war. But there was always the adrenaline rush of tracking weather.
My father believed that sailors lived and died according to how well prepared they were for the weather, a belief that colored the seasons of my childhood. On summer nights, Dad stood on the porch to observe lightning and listen for thunder. He paced during storms like a distracted maestro, doing a somnambulist-like loop through the kitchen, living room and dining room, and shouting out emergency rules as lightning cracked the sky and lit the world the color of steel. “No telephone, no television. No one in the shower! If we have to, we go directly to the car. A car with its rubber tires is the safest place to be during an electrical storm. In the event of a tornado warning we shelter in the basement.”
I was that little girl who worried. I lived in dread of lightning strik- ing the house as Dad rushed us outside to sit inside the ’65 Malibu. The car never moved an inch on the driveway. On those wind-howling nights, full of electricity, he belted us three kids together in the backseat; the silver buckle pressed against my belly, making it as hard to breathe as if I were having one of my asthma attacks.
But I was sure Solomon’s imaginary tapestry would keep us safe in the eternal night. In the hours that contracted as I roamed the house entombed in sleep, the tapestry unfurled over my father and me, wield- ing its divine magic as he kept watch over me.
