Translation

Abstract

Translation Dana Liebelson (bio) Hannah didn’t realize her father was a person who needed to be married, like a philopatric sea animal, until after the divorce. “He’s a nurse shark,” her mother explained. “No matter what, they always go back to the Dry Tortugas.” Hannah didn’t know what her mother meant, but she suspected her father now preferred his waters shallow and warm. He remarried quickly to a woman from LA, who he met on a Jewish dating site, trading Idaho Falls for a house in Hollywood Hills. His new wife, like him, had family in Brooklyn, tracing back to Poland. Hannah, because of her mother’s adventurous nature, was the first person in her father’s family to grow up in Idaho, a state where the total population of Jews had increased by only 125 in the last hundred years, she’d read online. Hannah’s mother was inclined to disperse, to drive, backpack, raft, and skydive. Hannah often pictured her suspended above white-capped mountains, veiny hands outstretched, smile wide, like she never wanted to land. Hannah stood alone on the top deck of the ferry groaning to Bainbridge Island. A pall of mist hung over the shrinking skyline. She squinted, trying to recapture the thrill she had felt here as a child, spindrift salting her face with strange musk. She smoothed out her hair, blown straight in a salon—an expensive ritual she performed for Kayla, who, unlike Hannah’s mother, noticed her hair. Hannah was twenty-three and her new stepmother, Kayla, was forty-four, with a son Hannah’s age named Max. He had recently become engaged to his girlfriend, a pop violinist from Israel, and Hannah’s father was flying her parents in from Tel Aviv to meet the family. They would amass in a vacation home Hannah’s father rented on Puget Sound, in Washington, where Hannah had last gone four years ago with her parents. By choosing a place once beloved by her mother, Hannah imagined that her father, for the first time since his new marriage, was sending her a message in their secret language: he missed who he used to be. “Try to get along with Kayla,” was what Hannah’s father actually said. “I’m going to do my best not to speak at all,” Hannah said. [End Page 83] “That isn’t what I meant,” her father said. She knew that it was. She slumped against the turquoise railing of the ferry, the paint weathered from prior storms. She was tired from the early flight to Seattle. The flight and rental car had been hard for her financially, but she didn’t tell her father because she hadn’t wanted to give Kayla a possible excuse to uninvite her. An old woman with a labyrinthine face joined Hannah at the railing. She wore a translucent rain slicker over her clothing like she was a spindly seabird trapped in a plastic bag. She appeared to be the only other person without a family in tow. She resembled Hannah’s Polish American grandmother. Hannah’s great-grandmother had left Poland before the Second World War, though she didn’t know more. “It smells like skunk,” Hannah offered when the wind shifted. “There are no skunks left in Washington,” the old woman said, her eyes fixed on the water. “That can’t be true,” Hannah said. “The orcas have fire retardants in their fat. The sea stars are dissolving into goo. The sound is warmer and more saline than it used to be, steeped with microplastics. The oysters make people ill.” Hannah dug her fingernails into the railing. Her mother raised similar environmental concerns. The old woman added primly, “You are smelling marijuana.” Hannah had a container of yuzu-flavored weed gummies in her suitcase, but that wasn’t the odor. She remembered striped skunks dancing on dirt roads when she was a kid. Back then, her father— whose father owned a pushcart selling pickles—had just started his craft brewing business in Idaho. With no money to spare, they had camped on the beach. Her father found mystical trees warped in the waves on the way from...