Circle View by Brad Barkley Page B

joint. He shows us the stub.
    Seven of us are in the class. We have to go around the room and introduce ourselves. Jay and Tim, two pimply boy scouts, sit slumped against the back wall. Next to me grins a young couple, Pete and Marie, camping enthusiasts, they say. Jimbo, an aging-hippie mountain climber, and Robin, my age, strawberry blond and a macramé artist, sit on either side of me. All have some reason to be there, a purposeful interest in knots.
    â€œI’m Charlotte,” I say, “Rowlings—like the baseball.” Easy as that I bring my old name out of mothballs, as if being called after a baseball gives me some connection with sports and knot tying, some reason for being in a yellow room at the Y while my husband gambles away his paycheck.
    Wolf hands out a xerox page with drawings of all the knots we have to learn: dove hitch, carrick bend, Turk’s head—a page full. Wolf paces the room in cowboy boots, lectures us with his brick-hard accent. He tells us—stopping to pound the desk—that knots are best learned by untying them, that yanking a hitch gives life to a rope, that good knots are part of a universal design (he whispers this, and points to spider webs in corners of the room).
    I cut down an old clothesline strung between two oaks in the backyard, and fill it with blackwall hitches, cat’s paws, figure-eights. My drape cords soon hang with bowlines and timber hitches. I knot lamp cords (“Go ahead,” Ray tells me, “fry your butt.”), shoestrings, loose strands of my own long hair. Ray’s friends ask him when he’s going to jerk a knot in my tail. I ignore them and keep practicing my knots, tying the house together. Wolf, in our third meeting, explains that knots have purpose, each its own job to do. He teaches us sailing knots, how lanyards pass through deadeyes to extend shrouds. The ocean devours what is not secured, he says, and I shiver to think of Alex out on rough seas without me to rope everything down.
    Saturday, I go for my tooth. Alex first fills a cavity that has shown up on the X-ray. He wears a blue work shirt, jeans, boat shoes, and no lab coat. He rolls up his sleeves as he starts to work, showing arms dusted with bleached hair. Again, as the cement sets, we talk.
    â€œI wanted to show you something,” he says, then reaches in his pocket and hands me a photo of two hazy white shapes, one large and one small, floating beneath the surface of slate-colored water.
    â€œBeluga whales,” Alex says. “Spotted them in the North Atlantic, near Nova Scotia. They must’ve separated from the herd. Nearly fell overboard taking the picture.” A corner of the blue deck of his sailboat cuts into the side of the picture. On it is tangled a fraying rope, lying in a heap. Beyond that, the ocean foams, bitten all over with whitecaps. Seeing that rough water and nothing but a frayed, tangled rope makes my heart skip. But the whales are beautiful, the pair of them, drifting like clouds just under the water. I want to see one for myself, and tell him so. He laughs, his voice lifts: “Maybe I should take you with me sometime,” he says.
    â€œI know knots,” I tell him, and tie a quick, tiny bowline in a length of dental floss. He laughs again; a real laugh, shot up out of surprise, not mired in menace like the laughs of Ray and his cohorts. I see how easy it would be to bring Alex along, something I haven’t practiced in ten years, how readily I might lean forward in the vinyl chair, touch the wrinkled corners of his eyes, and kiss him. Then the trickle of Baptist in me warms my face.
    â€œYou have any kids?” I ask. “A wife?”
    He turns dentist on me then—checks my chart, holds X-rays to the light, adjusts the water flow swirling in the spit basin. As he works he gives me his story, how his marriage came unglued after his son, James, died at fourteen months with a heart defect. Alex tells me