Around
BERMUDA TRIANGLES

Relationships never get less complicated as they get older. Right from the beginning, even our basic triangle has triangles. Somebody is always pointing in an opposite direction. The tugs on each point come in circles, and go around and around, never getting resolved, until they get lost somewhere in the background for a few days, a month, a year, or five. But there's always an angle that needs to be righted. And always someone who feels wronged. The First Triangle is the most obvious:

Configuration #1: The Captain, Me, My Daughter Reconfiguration #2: Me, My Daughter, The Captain Reconfiguration #3: My Daughter, Me, The Captain Reconfiguration #4: My Daughter, The Captain, Me

She loves him, sort of, but she loves me more. He loves me sort of. He loves her, sort of. But he loves himself more. I love her, but not with him. I love him, but not with her. I would love to love all of them together, but he won't take us on as a whole, only in parts.

The Cape House
WHITE GLOVES
       There is a rambling, authentic, two-story Cape barn behind the now restored Cape house, which lists to the left in good weather. The antique, weathered shingled barn has seen better days. The Captain uses the bottom half of the barn for storage for oversize sails that don't fit the boat, old oars, a wooden Cape dory with dry rot, black plastic trash barrel bags filled with empty tonic-water cans, and bottles needing to be recycled or taken to the dump. Sundry half-gallon tins of expensive white, marine oil-based paint, the kind that makes the boat's cabin surfaces slick white, and tall cans of high-gloss, white enamel spray paint line the splattered shelves.
       The second half of the ground level, devoted to the Captain's unheated, uninsulated workshop, is lit by one dangling naked lightbulb. Inside is an electric radial-arm-saw, a long workbench table supported by four sawhorses, odd lots of paint thinner, dozens of different-sized screw drivers, drill bits, wrenches, putty knives, hammers, hand saws and fragments of wood left over from various building projects he is always in the middle of.
       The second floor of the barn is more intriguing.
       With barn boards askew like teeth knocked out in a nine-round fight, the aged walls hold a room and a loft area together by sheer willpower.
       The second floor of the barn is entered up a tilty, plank-wide, barn board staircase located at the deep end of the garage area. The narrow stairs twist up like an arthritic finger past a small broken, four-paned glass window that gives a dusty view of the back brambles and weedy mound of a vegetable garden gone to seed. "I'll garden when I'm seventy," he says.
       The stairs exit directly into the first chamber, a large, grime-coated, many-windowed room with unsanded wide pine-board floors that once held the secret recipe for rose-hip preserves. Hundreds of cobwebbed, empty glass mason jars still nestle in rusty rimmed, wooden keg-sized barrels that look desperate enough to fling themselves over Niagara Falls.
       The best part of this room is the secret trapdoor in the floorboards.
       The story that comes with the house claims the original owner's eight-year-old daughter falls through the trap door down to the garage level and lands on her head on the concrete foundation, making her slow-witted for the rest of her life; or she dies. I can't remember. But I make sure the Captain makes sure the trapdoor is nailed safely shut because my daughter is just about the same age as the daughter of legend and probably as curious. We tell her the story often in hopes of curbing her appetite for trouble. She is also aware of the ghost that floats around and haunts the place, and her fear keeps her on her toes.
       On good days, my daughter and her weekend Cape friends use the upper floor of the barn for a clubhouse, a theater, hide-and-seek, and animal husbandry. The girls know the bottom rooms belong to the Captain and are off-limits. They respect this.
       There is safety in numbers. So when the girls are duking it out in the barn, fighting over who gets the lead role in a play they are concocting, the Captain and I are across the lawn in the newly renovated house, breathing sighs of relief upstairs in the master bedroom.
       There is nothing better than a one-hour Sunday-afternoon nap after cracking the crossword puzzle. Especially if the Captain joins me.
       My daughter doesn't believe in naps. She likes to keep moving. She is annoyed with these weekend siestas. She feels left out, at loose ends. She is not the kind of child who can entertain herself by kicking off her sneakers and curling up on her bed reading my favorite childhood book, Magic by the Lake.
       She wants the magic now.
       It's obvious there's going to be trouble.
       Even though we are having a nap, I am awake to all possibilities. Lying flat on his back on his half of the bed, the Captain looks like his eyes are closed, but his fingers are crossed.
       First comes the knock on the door, then the burst into the room.
       "Did you take your shoes off downstairs?" he asks without a pause, flicking his eyes open like a light switch.
       "Yes. See?" She is bouncing on all ten toes. "The girls went home. They don't want to play with me anymore."
       There is a well-rehearsed whine to her voice. She stretches her full, juicy lips even wider than her Chiclet-sized white teeth.
       "Can you play on your own, then, and give us an hour for a nap?" I plead. "Then later, we'll take a bike ride to the beach."
       It seems I am always begging her for sleep.
       "Can I paint?" She is hopeful. She runs the teeth of her pink, plastic headband back and forth through the crown of her sunny locks she won't let be cut since the age of two.
       "Ask the Captain."
       "Well? Please, can I paint something in the barn?"
       She is now dancing with the door to the master bedroom, swinging it back and forth on its brass hinges. "Well, can I?"
       The Captain is suspicious. His eyebrows rise.
       "Like what?" he asks.
       She is not too sure.
       "Please, can I?"
       "Okay." He relents uneasily.
       "But just don't paint the barn." His voice is fatherly but firm.
       I am hoping this creative moment will endure the hour. I like it that she wants to paint. I leave a whole rainbow of tempera watercolors up in her barn clubhouse for theater production sets. This is the first time she expresses an interest in using them without me art-directing.
       "Have fun." I add. "We'll be awake in an hour."
       "And remember what I said." The Captain underscores his position by propping his hands up behind his head to give her a last look. "Just don't paint the barn."
       She disappears.
       This is what she does in the hour:
       It is getting darker inside the barn because the late afternoon sun is fading across the sky. The one dangling lightbulb in the Captain's workshop is casting a spooky shadow on the walls. The planking that outlines the aged pine doors in the workroom and up the stairs between the second-story inner chamber and the loft is dark, stained with two hundred years of time.
       My daughter thinks it is time to brighten up the place. She doesn't have to look too far for a solution. Her eyes light on the row of white enamel spray-paint cans sitting on the shelf in the Captain's storage room. White is bright.
       She uncaps a brand-new can of oil-based, high-gloss white paint, shakes the can up and down to the beat of the steel ball rattling inside.
       She stops shaking.
       The balls settle.
       Then she lets it rip.
       With a steady aim, she spray paints the doorways, the thresholds, the sills, the wood bordering the doors. She is thinking this is not the actual barn. This is only the molding around the doors.
       When the can is empty, she stops, stands back, and surveys the results.
       My daughter is impressed with her work. Her teeth flash a self-congratulatory smile as white as the shiny paint on the woodwork.
       "Oh, it looks so much better," she thinks out loud with supreme satisfaction.
       She finishes the project with one last solid spurt. Oil paint dribbles from the nozzle onto her hands and feels sticky. She rubs her fingers with a spotty rag, but it doesn't budge the color. Studying the smeared effect, she decides she doesn't like the white polka-dot splatters on her skin. It looks unfinished.
       She rectifies the problem by spraying both hands from the tips of her ten chewed fingernails up the entire length of her forearms until the skin is completely saturated with paint.
       "White gloves!" she exclaims out loud, delighted with herself.
       Admiring her debutante-formal, up-to-her elbows, shiny, skintight white gloves, she prances around the gloomy barn with glow-in-the-dark hands looking for applause, because if she claps for herself, she'll stick.
       But the audience is sleeping.
       The hour passes quickly. She knows it's time to clean up.
       Her white hands stick to the plastic cap of the can.
       Her fingers stick to her hair when she scratches her head.
       She thinks to scrub clean with soap and water, but the only sink is in the kitchen bathroom in the main house.
       Holding her hands up in front of her, she exits the barn.
       She crosses the lawn to the back door.
       With her white gloves on, she opens the natural pine French doors to the kitchen. She grasps the outside brass handle, enters the kitchen, and pulls the doors shut behind her. She doesn't forget to kick off her sneakers on the hooked rug before trotting to the bathroom door. Her white-gloved fingers wrap around the bathroom doorknob. She moves to the sink, twists on the brushed steel faucets, digs into the white porcelain soap dish. She settles her gloved hands into the corner sink basin to soak but quickly discovers oil and water don't mix. Dripping wet, the gloves move over to the washer/dryer machines to reach for a fluffy clean navy-blue bath towel, then to the inside bathroom doorknob to get out.
       Just about now she realizes white gloves don't wash off. It's as if she'd been born with them on.
       She looks at the kitchen clock. It is almost an hour later, but not quite.
       High-gloss-oil-paint fingertips print their signature throughout the Captain's new/old house, tracking through the kitchen, living room, hallway, fingerprinting the polished oak banister as she pulls herself upstairs to knock once more on the master bedroom door.
       "Captain? Mom?" she calls behind the door.
       Through my half nap, I sense trouble.
       I tap the Captain on his shoulder and release him from a snore.
       "Yes? " he answers, at once wide-awake.
       "The paint won't come off my hands." Her voice is muffled through the closed door, but the intent knocks through.
       As if caught dozing through his ship watch, the Captain leaps up, pulls the bedroom door open wide, and catches her midswipe at the doorknob. She holds her shiny white-gloved hands up like Cinderella at the ball with the clock just striking midnight.
       "I can't get the paint off," she tells him.
       I think he knows this.
       He is very calm, very still. Controlled. He doesn't raise his voice (I do). He doesn't shout (I do). He simply marches her back downstairs to the front-hall closet, where he keeps indoor tools, telephone books, and hardware, and pulls a gallon of turpentine down from the overhead shelf.
       The two of them are missing for another hour.
       When they surface, her hands are scrubbed a raw red and smell like the devil soaked in kerosene.
       When I dare descend to help make dinner, I never see a white paint spot, a finger mark, an unexplained streak of white anywhere in the house. All telltale signs are wiped clean with rags dipped in paint thinner.
       But a visit to the barn is more illuminating.
       It takes days for the oily white paint to dry around the damp barn doors and sills.
       It takes years for my like-me daughter to confide she didn't mean to do it even though she did it.
       She tells me she is like a magnet. She just can't help herself. The forces are too great. Because the Captain said not to, she just had to.
       My daughter doesn't like to be left out.
       I understand her perfectly.