Bodies of Water (14 page)

The band started playing Nina Simone’s “Forbidden Fruit,” and Dot came over to Eva from the barstool where she had been perched like an odd little bird.

“May I have this dance?” she asked, and Eva smiled, curtseying playfully. “Of course.” I felt my back stiffen despite myself.

The song was a clear favorite among this crowd, and the dance floor filled quickly. From the bar, I watched Dot and Eva dance, and it took every ounce of self-control I had not to march up to her and cut in, to claim what was mine. But Eva was
not
mine. Could never be mine. The realization of this hit me in the chest like a fist. I was near tears with frustration and anger when the band started to play Coltrane’s “My Shining Hour,” and Eva came over to me, breathless. She collapsed against me, closing her eyes dreamily. “Dance with me, Billie?” she asked, and my heart quickened.

Frankie liked to dance. He was a terrific dancer, but he always made me feel clumsy. He knew how to lead, but I failed to follow. At our wedding, I’d felt like an oaf on the dance floor. He’d get frustrated sometimes and simply find another partner to dance with.

“If she won’t, I will,” Dot said, winking at Eva and looking at her in a way that made my spine tingle.

I couldn’t bear the thought of Eva dancing with her, and so I relented. “I’m a really terrible dancer,” I said, shaking my head apologetically. When we had danced in her living room, there was no audience, no one to see me stumble along.

“Just follow me,” she said. “It’s a nice, slow song. You just need to hold on.” She pulled me gently by the hand to the dance floor and stopped, positioning my hands around her waist. I felt myself blushing, though no one was paying any attention to us.

She pressed her body into mine and leaned her head against my chest, humming the music into me. My entire body vibrated with the music and her breaths. I could have stayed like this, our bodies pressed together, held together by the music, forever. But the song came to an end, and there was only stillness, the cacophony of the crowd filling in the empty space the music had made. But instead of pulling apart, she looked up at me.

When she kissed me, my instinct was to pull away. Our kisses had been private things, all of them illicit, stolen. The idea of kissing her, of touching her mouth with my own, in front of all of these people was almost more than I could take.

I remember the light in the bar was a sort of green, an absinthe green, our skin painted in verdant light as though we were standing in the forest, the sunlight shining through the trees, dappling us. When she kissed me again, I pretended that we weren’t in an alleyway bar in New York City in January, but rather deep in the cool woods in Vermont in June.

Dot finally left us alone after a while, finding another girl to dance with for the rest of the evening and then disappearing with her. Eva and I both drank too much that night, stumbling out of the bar at three a.m., brazenly holding hands as we navigated the slippery streets, emboldened by the acceptance we’d found inside that absinthe-colored night.

My head was spinning from the liquor and the lights. The air smelled like a thousand things. It was a carnival of sensations, and I couldn’t get enough of it. Enough of her.

“We could move here,” I said.

“What’s that?” she asked, laughing and pulling my hand to cross the street when the light changed.

When we reached the other side, I was breathless. “We could live here.
Together
.” And the word hung between us, pulsing and humming like the neon sign for the pizzeria we stood next to. The light from inside the all-night shop was bright, and suddenly I could see that Eva’s mascara had smudged under her eyes, that the hem of her dress had come down. I felt my throat grow thick. I just needed her to say yes. To share this dream with me. But she didn’t speak. Instead, she took my face in her hands and kissed me. Right there on the street. In front of the couple who sat eating pizza in the pizzeria window. In front of the taxicabs and hobos and sailors on leave. And, for a moment, I knew it was possible that we
could
leave. That there was a chance for us.

I don’t remember how we got back to Dot’s apartment, and I barely remember changing into my pajamas and crawling into bed. I don’t think I moved all night, and in the morning, we were woken by the sound of a rooster, and I was delirious, momentarily transported to my childhood bed. It turned out instead to be Dot’s neighbor, a crazy man who lived three stories up from her basement apartment, who cock-a-doodle-dooed at the crack of dawn each morning and was answered with a resounding and collective
Shut up, already!
by the neighbors and anyone who might be out at this ungodly hour walking on the street.

Hungover and bleary-eyed, we got dressed and walked down the street to a small diner for breakfast. We hadn’t spoken about our conversation in front of the pizza shop. I wondered if I had only dreamed it. Wished it.

The waitress brought us our food, and I peered at Eva’s face, looking for confirmation that we had actually spoken those words. About running away. But instead, Eva distractedly dug through her purse for coins and said, “I need to go call Ted.”

I felt like I might throw up as she put her coat back on and disappeared outside to the pay phone. I stared at the pancake I’d ordered but couldn’t bring the fork to my mouth.

She came back inside smiling sadly. “Rose has a fever and has been throwing up. He wants me to come home.”

“Now?” I said, feeling the earth falling out from under my unsteady feet. I’d dreamed all night about the way it felt to be held in her arms. The way the music held us together, the way she smelled. “Can’t Mary take care of her?”

“She’s been crying for me. Sounds like the flu. I told him we’d catch the five o’clock train.”

“Fine,” I said, angry at her. Angry at Ted. Angry even at Rose, for getting sick. I felt like a rotten, spoiled child who hadn’t gotten her way. I felt like a fool. I blinked hard and looked away from her out the window at the quiet street, my heart broken, and hated myself for being so selfish. Her baby was sick. What was wrong with me?

“We can still go to the museum,” she said, reaching across the table for my hand. A man sitting next to us in a booth glared at me, and I pulled my hand away.

 

I was still queasy when we finally made our way to the museum a few hours later and Eva raced up the wide marble steps. I followed behind her, almost having to run in order to keep up. She carried a map of the museum in her hand but didn’t seem to need it. Finally, we reached Eva’s destination and I was breathless, bending over at the waist to catch my breath. I still felt miserably hungover.

“Look,” she said, touching my arm softly, and I stood up.

All around us were the mobiles I’d only ever seen in the books Eva checked out for me at the library. Suspended from the ceiling, they hung like living, breathing things. The colors were bright, alive against the stark whiteness of the walls.

We didn’t speak as we moved about the room, peering up at these incredible kinetic sculptures, like strange and beautiful birds watching over us from above. And when I looked at Eva again, she was crying. But this time, instead of hiding her tears or brushing them away, she allowed them to travel down her cheeks, smudging her makeup, making tracks through her blush.

I went to her, and suddenly I didn’t care who was watching: the stuffy guard standing in the doorway; the young man with a mustache, his hands on his hips; the elderly woman and her squeaky shoes. I put my arm around her shoulders, pulled her close, and let her cry.

A
half hour before the flight to Pittsburgh is set to depart, we are herded onto the plane by a cheery attendant in a crisp blue suit and heels. Her lipstick has smeared across her front tooth, and something about this makes me uneasy. Something about all of this is unsettling. She takes my boarding pass from me and asks if I need any assistance making my way down the long, fluorescent-lit jet bridge to the plane. I shake my head. “I’m fine, thank you.”

I shuffle along with the other passengers, thinking again that I could still simply turn around now. Go back. I can almost feel my body pushing against the flow of other bodies, swimming upstream back to the gate and then back to my happy life at the beach. But then I am standing at the entrance of the plane, and there are two more attendants waiting with their smiles and good cheer at the doorway. One of them takes my boarding pass and gestures, grandly, I think, toward my seat, which is just beyond the wall that separates first class from coach.

The air buzzes and hums, and my hands tremble as I take the pass back and study the seat number:
7A
. And as I cross the threshold, into the airplane’s galley, I realize that this is it. There are no more chances to change my mind. There’s no turning back now. In a mere four hours I’ll be in Pittsburgh, and then by five o’clock I’ll be in Burlington. Gussy will be there waiting. We’ll make the long drive from Burlington to Quimby, arriving just in time for a late supper. I can picture Gussy’s kitchen, smell the chicken and dumplings. She’ll have made up the bed in the guest bedroom with her sunflower sheets. She’ll have bought the maple candies I like and left them on the nightstand with a stack of books she thinks I might enjoy. I will sleep well. And then we will go to the lake, and on Sunday Johnny will arrive.

I am glad to have checked my suitcase, as I watch the other travelers struggle to stuff their belongings into the tiny overhead compartments. I have only my purse to worry about, and it fits nicely in my lap. The seat next to me is vacant until the plane is nearly ready to taxi down the runway. But just as I reach to put my purse in the empty seat, to lift the armrest that juts up uncomfortably in the middle, a large young man comes rushing down the narrow corridor, huffing and puffing and heaving his bag overhead. He’s got a wide, familiar face. Red and sweaty. I am afraid to look directly at him, convinced for a moment that he is who he appeared to be when I first glanced up, thinking this is like some terrible nightmare. That Ted is not dead at all and has somehow found me,
followed
me here. Perhaps he has been following me for years. But as he plops himself down into the seat, struggling to get the seat belt across his wide lap, I ignore my trembling hands and heart and steal a longer glance.

It is not Ted at all.
Of course not
. I haven’t completely lost my mind. For one thing, he’s probably only about twenty years old. And while he does resemble Ted, this man’s eyes are a crystal blue, not the lightless black eyes of Ted Wilson. And while Ted was large and muscular, this man is soft. Overweight. He smiles at me when he is finally able to adjust the seat belt to fit him, and he says softly, “They say if you can’t buckle the seat belt, you gotta pay for two tickets.” He has an accent, something sweet, Southern.

“Here,” I say, lifting the armrest to give him a few more inches.

“Thank you,” he says, and we are suddenly coconspirators.

“I missed my alarm, barely made it to the gate in time,” he says. When he smiles, his eyes crinkle a little at the corners. “Where y’all headed? Pittsburgh?”

I shake my head. “Burlington.”

“Where’s that at?”

“Vermont,” I say.

He smells like cinnamon buns, and I’m starting to think the reason he’s late is not his alarm but a stop at the Cinnabon shop.

“That the state near Washington, DC?”

I shake my head. “That’s Virginia.”

“That’s right,” he says, smacking his leg with a meaty palm. “Where the maple syrup comes from. I’m Hugh, by the way.”

“Billie,” I say. “And how about you? Where are you headed?”

“Going to see my girlfriend,” he says.

“That’s nice. You live in different states?”

“Well, we ain’t never really met yet. But we been talking on-line for about six months now.”

“Oh,” I say. “That must be very exciting.”

He nods and smiles. “Hey, would you mind switching seats? I’d love to be able to look out the window.”

“Sure,” I say. But just as he starts to unbuckle himself again, an attendant comes over and says that we need to remain seated. That the flight is about to take off in just a few moments.

“We can switch once we get up in the air,” I say, and he shrugs.

“I’m fine. Soon as I can turn on my laptop, I’ll show you a picture.”

“Of?” I say.

“My girl,” he says.

I like this kid. People in love are almost always nice to be around, and this one is head over heels. Never mind that it’s all a fantasy; there’s something delightful about his hope, his trust that he’s on his way to meet the love of his life.

“What y’all doing in Vermont?” he asks.

And for just a quick second I imagine saying,
Do you want to hear a real love story?
And for the smallest of moments, I think I could tell him. I could share my own story with him. That it would keep him rapt, at the edge of his uncomfortable seat, for the next four hours. That he might even shed a tear at the end. But, somehow, I know better. While some things change, most things stay exactly the same. My love story, our love story, is one most people don’t want to hear. Even now, all these years later. I am not ashamed, not anymore, but it might bring all that crimson color back to his cheeks. Might even send him seeking another seat next to some other little old lady. And so instead I just fiddle with my purse and say, “I’m going to see my sister.”

The engine roars, and the floor beneath my feet vibrates. I feel my heart fly to my throat, and I make an involuntary gasping sound. I smile apologetically at him.

“I haven’t flown in a really long time,” I say.

“Well, I ain’t never flown before,” he says. “So this will be a real adventure.”

W
e came home from New York and returned to our lives, to our lies. But something had shifted while we were away. We had dipped our toes into the vast and terrifying and thrilling possibility of life without Frankie and Ted. And while they knew nothing, or seemed to know nothing,
we
did. We had felt our bodies become weightless, light, buoyed by the mere prospect of freedom. But though this realization brought with it the vague sense of hope, the reality was that while we were gone, nothing here had changed. It was winter. It was bitter cold. There were home fires to be tended, children to be fed, and husbands to be answered to and appeased.

Ted was being sent out on the road less and less. Eva told me she worried that he was losing clients, that his drinking was interfering with his work. She said he came home at night smelling as though he’d not only had a couple of cocktails with lunch but possibly several more throughout the rest of the day. Some days he skipped work altogether, opting to stay home with Eva instead.

“Isn’t he worried about getting fired?” I asked.

“You’d think,” she said. “But he gets his head wrapped around something and he can’t let go. I think it’s this weather. It makes him crazy.”

“What do you mean?” I asked, though I was afraid to hear her answer. Since we had returned from New York, I felt like I was waiting for someone (Frankie, Ted, even Chessy) to unravel the fabrication. It had been too simple, too easy.

Eva shrugged.

We were at her house, sitting together in the living room folding laundry. Rose played with a shape sorter on the floor between us. As we picked through the pile of underthings, I was careful to select only Eva’s and the children’s, leaving Ted’s shorts and undershirts to her.

“He’s got these crazy ideas,” she said. She plucked a pair of faded plaid boxers from the pile. She held them up, and, in doing so, conjured Ted. He hung between us, as he always did. “He’s so suspicious.”

“Of us?” I asked, feeling my heart rising in my throat and beating there, as though I’d swallowed a bird.

“No,” she said, laughing. “Of
me
. Of the whole world.”

 

On the days that Ted stayed home, nursing a hangover and hovering over Eva, I didn’t even dare to call her. Frankie would honk his horn, his signal in case Ted needed a ride, and Eva would open their door and wave Frankie away. This was also her signal to me (she knew I was watching from the window), and with that simple gesture, I could feel the weight of winter crushing me. I knew I had to figure out a way to see her, especially if Ted was going to keep stealing entire days from us. We needed to come up with a solution, some way to be together, some excuse that wouldn’t make him suspicious. Something that would buy us time alone.

And then two days later, when I was at DeMoulas shopping, and the man with the cardboard box approached me, it was as though someone had sent him with the answer. The man was grinning a wide, goofy grin. He must have known just by looking at me that I’d be an easy mark. Chessy and Mouse were with me, and they squealed giddily as they peered into the box.

“Only three left. People have been snatching them up like hotcakes,” the man said. I detected an accent in his voice. Irish, maybe.

Inside there was a ratty blue blanket and three wriggling golden puppies.

“They’re so
small,
” I said, my hand reaching into the box as if it had a mind of its own.

“I found them out by the creek this morning. Looks like somebody dumped them off. I can hardly believe they’re alive; it’s so cold out. My guess is they’re only a few weeks old.”

“Are they yellow labs?” I asked, bringing one puppy up to my face and smelling her sweet puppy smell, burying my nose in her warm body. I’d grown up with yellow labs, sisters named Florence and Nightingale, the only two animals allowed in our house. On a farm, animals were seen as commodities, as our livelihood, not as pets. But my father had a soft spot for dogs, and so Flo and Night slept at our hearth, curled around each other.

“Goldens, I think. Maybe mixed with something else. Pretty little things. And goldens make a good family dog,” he said, nodding at the girls. “My own pup is a golden retriever. Best dog I ever had.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I know. They’re good with children.”

“Please, Mom?” Mouse asked, taking off her mittens and touching one puppy’s tiny paws with her fingers. The paw wasn’t much bigger than her thumb.

“You know Daddy can’t have a dog,” I said. Frankie had terrible allergies to all animals: dogs and cats and horses and rabbits. When we went to the county fair, he had to stay home because one time he nearly threw his back out sneezing in the 4-H barn. Once, Mouse brought home a stray kitten and smuggled it into her room, and his eyes swelled up so tight, he could see only enough to make his way to her room and ferret the poor kitten out. I thought it was funny that a farm girl like me had wound up with someone who couldn’t be within a half mile of a horse without getting sick.

“Oh,”
Chessy lamented, reaching in and taking the puppy from me. I helped her cup her in her hand, and she held her close, cooing into her fur.

And then it struck me. “Maybe we could bring her to the Wilsons,” I said. “That way you’d get to see her all the time. It would be like she belonged to all of us.”

“Oh, please, Mom. Pretty, pretty please?” Mouse said, tugging at my shirt and the puppy’s tail.

“Listen,” I said, bending down to their level and whispering, making them feel, I knew, as though they were part of a very important secret. “Mr. Wilson might not be happy about this. So we’re going to have to make up a little story about where we found her.”

“A
lie?
” Chessy asked.

“No,”
I said. Francesca couldn’t tolerate untruths of any sort. Little white lies might as well have been the deepest betrayals as far as she was concerned. When she learned the truth about Santa Claus, she didn’t speak to us for nearly a week. And it was only after a threat of spanking that she agreed to keep the secret from her younger sister.

“Otherwise, we have to leave the puppy here,” I said.

She looked as though she were weighing the options and then somewhat reluctantly said, “Okay.”

Chessy was given the task of carrying the puppy home. I carried the grocery bags, and Mouse tagged along behind, skipping and playing hopscotch on the sidewalk. When we finally got back to our street, I took the puppy from Chessy and sent the girls inside.

“When do we get to play with her?” Mouse pouted.

“Be patient,” I said. “And remember what I told you.
We
found the puppy down by the creek. And if we left her there, she would have died. It’s too cold outside for a new puppy.”

“That’s almost the truth,” Chessy said, comforting herself.

“It is,” I said. “And this way, Mr. Wilson won’t have any choice but to keep her.”

The girls disappeared inside the house, and I held the puppy, warm and sleeping, inside my winter coat, against my chest, as I walked across the street. I could feel the puppy breathing in hot little bursts against the cotton of my blouse as I rang the doorbell.

“Hi,” Eva said, smiling at me in that way that said a billion things without saying a single word. It took her a few moments before she realized what was peeking out through my buttons. “Oh, my goodness,” she said, her eyes widening as she saw the puppy’s tiny nose and tiny sleepy eyes. I unbuttoned my coat and Eva took her and held her like an infant, cradled her. “Is this for me?”

I nodded.

“What’s her name, Billie?”

“Calder,” I said, smiling. “Her name is Calder.”

 

And so began our nightly walks. Every night after dinner, Eva and Calder and I would convene in the middle of the street and walk for an hour or more. We walked along the creek that ran behind our house; we walked through town, the puppy tagging along at Eva’s side. We walked to the elementary school playground, vacant in the evenings. And as winter finally passed and spring arrived, the nights growing warmer, we walked for longer, sometimes arriving back at home just in time to get the children to bed. Calder, exhausted from the walk and so thirsty, drank from puddles or the dripping faucet she found at the side of our house.

We could pretend on those walks that we were alone in the world. That Frankie did not exist, that Ted was not waiting for Eva with questions and demands. Of course, we were
not
alone, not ever truly alone, as we walked through town, the illuminated rooms like eyes in the night, in sight of any of those moving silhouettes inside. But in those twilight hours, we
felt
as though we were the only two people left on earth. As we walked farther away from town, through pastures and empty parks and forests, we whispered our secrets into each other’s hair, and, when twilight acquiesced to evening and only the watchful eyes of the stars peered down at us, we sometimes dared to touch. And we comforted ourselves by talking about the summer, about the lake.

 

If not for these nightly walks, our nightly talks, and Vermont, if not for the prospect of those two weeks together in August, I might not have made it through the rest of that winter and spring of 1962. It was the promise of the water, the moon, and Eva that sustained me. Whenever I felt like I might not be able to take another moment inside my house, inside my
life,
I had only to assure myself that soon enough we would be free again.

Then one evening in early June, when summer no longer felt quite so far away, Frankie came home with a bed frame. It was an old, iron bed frame, the kind we had at the lake. He had strapped it to the roof of the Studebaker and was busy untying it, gleeful, as though it were a Christmas tree instead of another piece of junk.

“What’s that for, Frankie?” I asked. “We already have enough beds.”

“It’s for Theresa,” he said. “She’s going to be spending the summer with us.”

It felt like a sinkhole had opened up underneath my feet.

“Excuse me?” I said.

Theresa was Frankie’s baby sister. She’d gotten engaged on Valentine’s Day; her wedding was just weeks away. We’d received the fancy invitation a month ago, with its scented paper and calligraphy.

“What happened?” I asked.

“She got a letter from Joe yesterday, says he’s calling the wedding off. He took off with some other girl to Nevada or some other godforsaken place.”

My first reaction should have been sympathy. Poor little Theresa. Her life, while only twenty-two years, had been a series of disappointments. Her first boyfriend was killed in a car accident. And now this. But it wasn’t sympathy I felt.

“We’ll set her up in the basement for now, and then she’ll go up to Vermont with you in August,” Frankie said. “Help her clear her head.”

“No,” I said, shaking my head. “There isn’t any room.”

“Sure there is,” he said. “You can make room for Eva and her kids, you can’t make room for my sister?”

“That’s what I mean. When Eva and the kids come, there won’t be any room.” I could feel my voice breaking, my whole
body
breaking.

“Well, maybe this year the Wilsons don’t come for a visit.” Frankie shrugged and hoisted the headboard onto his shoulder.

Tears welled up in my eyes, and I didn’t bother wiping them away. “Frankie, Eva and I have been looking forward to this.” But then I realized that he didn’t care about disappointing me, wasn’t concerned with my plans. Desperate, I hoped he might at least care about the children’s disappointment. “Chessy and Mouse have been talking about this for months. You can’t take that away from them.”

Frankie leaned the headboard up against the house and came back for the footboard. “Theresa is my
sister,
” he said. “Which makes her your sister too. She’s coming with you to Vermont, and you can tell the Wilsons they can come another time.”

With Frankie, there was no arguing. No changing his mind. He was a small man, but he was like a big brick wall when it came to things like this. Impenetrable.

That night, I refused to speak to him. I made his dinner, moving about the kitchen angrily, slamming pots and pans, having my own private temper tantrum, raging as I stirred and fried and boiled. I refused to eat as well, sitting with an empty plate before me. The girls knew something was wrong.

“Aren’t you hungry, Mama?” Mouse asked. I couldn’t look at her or else I knew I would break down.

“I’ve lost my appetite,” I said.

And Frankie dealt with my anger the way he dealt with everything. He drank. And as the level of wine in the jug got lower and lower, his voice raised higher and higher. “How would you girls feel if your Auntie T comes to stay with us this summer?”

“Really?”
Francesca asked, beaming. She adored Theresa. She looked up to her, more like a big sister than an aunt. “What about Joe? What about the wedding? I’m going to be a flower girl.”

I waited to see how Frankie would handle this.

“Joe’s an asshole,” he said.

“Frankie,”
I admonished. It was the first word I’d spoken all night.

“Sorry,” he said, though I knew he wasn’t. “Joey’s a
philanderer
. Do you know what that is, girls?”

“I mean it, Frankie. None of this concerns them.”

But I had effectively made myself invisible, and so Frankie couldn’t see me anymore. I looked down at my hands to make sure I was, indeed, present still, that I hadn’t simply vanished.

“He’s run off with another girl. He’s a cheat. A scumbag.
Cazzaro!
” Frankie said, his face red, the wine in his glass sloshing. “Found himself a
puttana
. Broke your auntie’s heart.”

“Stop it, Frankie!” I said, slamming my fist down on the table.