Bodies of Water (19 page)

“What happened?” I said, sitting down next to him. “What was that all about?”

Frankie shook his head. “He’s crazy,” he said. “A worthless drunk.”

“Did he hit you?” I asked, peering at Frankie’s long, sad face. It didn’t look as though Ted had touched him.

“Nah,” he said. “But he’s awful rough with that woman. A man shouldn’t touch a woman like that.”

I bristled. “What is he so angry about?” I asked, trying not to think about what might happen after Ted got Eva back inside their house.

Frankie laughed. “I think he thinks Eva was flirting with me.”

I almost laughed too, but the laughter bubbled up in my throat and then caught short, making me lose my breath. “That’s ridiculous,” I said.

“I know,” Frankie said. “As if she’s flirting with
anyone
anymore.”

My eyes widened. Frankie knew about the surgery apparently. Ted must have given him the details. And I was suddenly so filled with disgust. So angry at him, at Ted, at the world, I thought I might burst into flames.

“I’m going over there,” I said. “He’s going to hurt her. I need to get Eva the hell out of that house.”

“You’re not going anywhere,” Frankie said, pounding his fist against the table, and I realized that he was just as drunk as Ted was. Not as violent maybe, not as crazy, but just as goddamned drunk. “You realize this is your fault, don’t you?” he hissed.

I caught my breath and held it, waiting for the accusation. Waiting for him to say that he knew what had been going on between me and Eva, that he
knew
. I dreamed myself admitting for the first time to anyone other than myself that I was in love with Eva. That whatever the world thought, whatever my husband thought, that I wanted only one thing in the world, and that was Eva.

“If you’d just keep your mouths shut, if you girls just did as we say, then none of this would have to happen. Everyone would be happy. Everything would be fine and dandy. It used to be a woman respected her husband.”

He didn’t know
. He wasn’t talking about me and Eva. He was, as always, oblivious. And for a moment, I was actually disappointed that it hadn’t finally come out into the open, that my secret was still safe, still imprisoned inside me as I was inside this house and as Eva was inside her own.

“Go to bed, Frankie,” I said, sitting down, shaking my head sadly. “You’ve got to work in the morning.”

Frankie grumbled and finished off the last swig of wine in his cup before lumbering up the stairs. After I heard the creak of the bed frame accepting his weight, I quietly went upstairs and told the girls to get on their pajamas, to brush their teeth, to get in bed.

“What about the fireworks?” Mouse asked.

“Next year,” I said. “I promise. And maybe we can shoot off some of our own when we get to camp.”

Vermont
. It was only a month away, but it felt as far away as someone else’s dream. Untouchable and private.

On my way back down the stairs, I peeked into our bedroom to confirm that Frankie had, indeed, passed out and then made my way to the front door. I sat on the porch in the porch swing, but I was too afraid to make it move, not wanting to cause any disturbance in the odd peace that had descended on the neighborhood. It was a deceptive peace though; this I knew. Because faintly, faintly, I could hear the sounds of explosions: the crackle and hiss of fireworks in the high school’s football field, followed by the
oohs
and
aahs
of the crowd and behind the Wilsons’ closed door, Ted’s fuse hissing and curling. The loud crack of his detonation and the soft sounds of Eva, crying. Of Donna and Sally and Rose, and even little Johnny, awestruck at the display.

W
hen the plane starts its slow descent into Pittsburgh, I realize that Hugh and I will be parting ways in just a few minutes. I think about him heading off to meet his Internet girlfriend in Hoboken. I picture her waiting for him at baggage claim, her expectancy and hope matching his as they meet for the first time. Will she be disappointed? Will he? His face is so full of boyish optimism, I could cry. At what point does this go away? This belief that the world is a good place, that love is yours for the asking? The taking?

When I met Lou, I had already lost this optimism; after Eva, I believed that love (real love) was a dangerous thing, and I wanted nothing to do with it again. But Lou was tenacious. Persistent and patient. And finally, she convinced me that love could be a quiet, easy thing. Ours was a predictable kind of love. A safe love. She was my friend first, and everything else was an afterthought. We were never secretive about our relationship, but people still assumed we were simply companions. There was never fire between us, only slow-glowing embers keeping the hearth of our home warm. I know this decision to see Johnny would pain her. It would have confirmed that even after all these years, after a lifetime, Eva still possessed me. Obsessed me. That I’d never ever truly let go.

My ears ache and my stomach plummets as the plane tilts toward the earth. I hate this part. I long for distraction.

“Chewing gum?” I ask Hugh, holding out the pack I bought at the airport.

He shakes his head.

“I hope I have time to get a bite before my next flight,” he says nervously. “I’m starving. I thought they were supposed to give you snacks.”

“I think that’s what these are.” I gesture to the packet of peanuts on my tray.

A flight attendant leans over and says, “Can you please raise your tray? We’re going to be landing soon.”

“Would you like my peanuts?” I ask, offering him the little foil packet and putting the plastic tray back up. I hand the flight attendant my empty plastic cup and napkin.

“Thanks,” he says, and tears into them with his teeth, emptying the packet directly into his mouth with one shake.

“What’s her name?” I ask him as the wheels lower loudly from the belly of the plane and we hurl, finally, toward the earth. His face is ghostly and pale; I am trying hard to distract him. Trying to distract myself.

“Who?” he asks, not looking at me, staring instead down the corridor between the seats. I can tell he’s trying to see if he is the only one panicking.

“Your girl,” I say, smiling and reaching for his hand.

He turns to me again at this, and color suddenly returns to his face. “Marcy,” he says, smiling.

Marcy,
I think. The name conjures bright blue eyes and a ponytail. A fresh-faced girl in blue jeans. Pink cheeks. I imagine she’s a little pudgy. Young.

“Marcy,” I say, repeating her name. I know the power of incantation to soothe. I understand the magical potency of a name. I realize that sometimes, the only thing in the world that can save the day is the recitation and repetition.

“Marcy.” He nods.

Shamelessly, we hold hands as the plane touches the ground, keeps rushing forward, and finally comes to a stop at the gate. Outside the sky is a breathless blue.

“Welcome to Pittsburgh,” the captain says over the loudspeaker.

“Certainly was a pleasure meeting you,” Hugh says, releasing my hand, suddenly seeming a little embarrassed.

“Good luck,” I say.

“You too,” he says, and stands up, with a great amount of difficulty, from his seat, struggling to get his bag from the overhead bin. His sweatshirt rises, revealing the flaccid pouch of his belly. It makes me feel embarrassed for him, as though I’ve seen him naked. He is so vulnerable. I worry for him.

“Y’all have a nice time with your sister,” he says when he finally wrestles the bag free. There are peanut crumbs all over the seat.

I nod and smile.

And then he is gone in the crowd of people, rushing toward his future, while I am falling backward, into my past.

A
fter the Fourth of July debacle, I fully expected that Ted would forbid Eva to come to Vermont as planned. I expected that she would come to me and tell me that she would have to stay behind again this year. I mourned her loss again and imagined another stay in Vermont haunted by what should have been. But he must have felt badly about that night. He must have realized the next day when he saw the evidence of his drunken anger written all over her skin that he was in no position to deny her any happiness she might request.

I didn’t see her for three days. For three whole days she didn’t answer the telephone, and when I went to their front door, one of the children (usually Donna) would apologize and say that her mother wasn’t feeling well and had asked not to see any visitors. At first, I feared that Ted himself had made the leap in logic that I’d wrongly suspected with Frankie. That somehow his jealous rage had turned from Frankie toward me. I lived in fear that Ted was somehow smarter than Frankie, that he had finally put two and two together. But by the third day, when Ted waved sheepishly at me as I worked in the flower bed in our front yard, those fears were dispelled.

He was dressed in a suit, wearing a hat. “Interview!” he hollered at me.

“What’s that?” I asked.

“A second interview,” he hollered again. Ridiculously. “At Prudential! I think they’re going to offer me the job!”

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say to him.

He nodded at me, and his was the face of a man filled with regret, with shame. I’d never seen him look even one bit repentant before, but his head hung low that morning, and I knew I had to see her again. It wasn’t Ted keeping me away from Eva, but Eva herself.

Donna answered the door, and I said, “Hi, sweetheart, listen, I have something very important I need to talk to your mom about. It’s about the cookie sales this year.” I knew Girl Scout business was something that Donna could not argue against. And there was no refuting the imperative nature of the annual cookie sale, and so, despite whatever Eva had instructed her to do, she reluctantly motioned for me to go upstairs.

Eva was in her room, sitting in the window seat, reading. When she turned toward me, I was startled by what I saw. Her face looked distorted, half of it bruised, soft like rotten fruit, the skin discolored and swollen. She raised her shoulders in a shrug, as if to ask how this could have happened. As if
I
had any sort of explanation for this.

“Oh, my God, Eva,” I said, dropping to my knees at her feet and resting my head in her lap. “What has he done to you?”

But I didn’t really want to hear. I didn’t want to envision what had transpired between them that had resulted in this. Because imagining it would somehow make this violence, this cruelty part of this world, part of reality. And I wasn’t sure I could live in a world where something like this was possible.

“Ted thinks they’re going to offer him the job,” she said.

“This is his second interview. Of course, it means a pay cut, but work is work.”

“We need to leave,” I said, the words ones I hadn’t dared say out loud since New York. “We’ll take the children and go somewhere. We’ll start over.”

I expected when I looked up at her that she would be smiling sadly, shaking her head at me, that she would continue rambling on about Ted’s possible new job, but instead she was nodding. Her eyes were closed, dreaming our escape.

Ted did get that job, and he started the very next day. But instead of carpooling into the city with Frankie, he took the Caddie, ensuring that Eva remained trapped inside that house, quite literally immobile. And every single day, for the rest of the month, Ted arrived home at exactly five thirty, bearing an armload of flowers. The flowers were dying all over that room. Eva refused to touch them, to smell them, to look at them, or, when they died, to throw their stinking corpses away. The room smelled like fermentation, like rot.

I was so worried about leaving her for Vermont. The idea of even a couple of weeks away from her was unendurable, but Eva had promised that she and the kids would arrive in two weeks, that Ted had no choice now but to let her go; after what he had done, there was almost nothing, save her freedom, that he could deny her.

Ted and Frankie appeared to have patched up whatever tears that night had made in the fabric of their friendship as well. I suppose Ted had to have realized, probably in the hazy achy afterglow of his hangover the next morning, that he’d been insane to think that Eva was flirting with Frankie. For one thing, Frankie was fiercely loyal. Anyone who knew him for five minutes knew this. He was stubbornly faithful to his family, his friends. And he and Ted were, for all intents and purposes,
friends
. And lucky for Ted, Frankie was a forgiving man (with other men anyway). He wasn’t one to hold a grudge. “Water under the bridge,” he claimed. So much water. So many bridges.

 

Those two weeks waiting for Eva at the lake passed so slowly. I felt as though we were swimming through molasses, each day like a thousand days. Mosquitoes, grass stains, the lake. All of it was like some sort of photograph, the moment frozen, unmoving.

The girls were so independent now; they barely needed me for anything anymore. I could have spent the entire day in my nightclothes if I’d wanted. I could have stayed in bed. Chessy loved to cook, and her greatest pleasure was getting up early and making breakfast for herself and her sister. By the time I came down from the sleeping loft, my coffee would be percolating, and the kitchen would smell like vanilla and cinnamon. Something about watching her move around the kitchen like this made me terribly sad though, as if the only thing I’d managed to teach her were these domesticities, about how to reside within the four walls of a kitchen. Her happiness killed me a little bit, but what could I do? What could I say that wouldn’t destroy her?

Mouse, on the other hand, couldn’t wait to get outside, to get into the lake, into the woods, into trouble. At nine, she was still just a little girl, a wild little girl who didn’t know how to use a spatula or an egg timer. She knew only the feeling of sun on her shoulders and the cold shock of the lake at dawn. I clung to Mouse’s innocence, her beautiful refusal to fit into the world of adults. I watched her from the grassy shore of the lake and wished she could be like this forever. That it wasn’t too late to save her.

I slept. To pass the time, I lay down on the daybed on the sleeping porch each afternoon after lunch and slept the hours away. Like a child waiting for Santa Claus on Christmas Eve, I relied on sleep to bring the morning faster. And I read, slipping into the worlds offered by my books and lingering there. Gussy brought me armloads from the library in Quimby and I devoured them. I couldn’t get enough; I was so hungry for escape. But still, time limped.

My fuse was short and burning those last few days. Gussy came once during the final days before Eva’s arrival, and found me in the kitchen yelling at the girls. I hated my own impatience with them; I hated my temper, but it was as though I had no control over my frustration. I felt more like Frankie than myself: snapping at them over the smallest things. This morning it was over a neglected syrup spill that had run off the table and onto the seat in the breakfast nook, into which I had sat. We had to wash all of our clothes by hand at camp, and hang them to dry on the clotheslines that were stretched between several trees in the backyard. I was down to my very last pair of clean shorts, and it was raining, making clean, dry clothes impossible.

Gussy pulled her car up onto the grass just as I was shooing the girls outside, despite the drizzle, cursing my sticky bottom and scrubbing at the gooey mess on my behind. The girls ran to her, clung to her, and I felt the way Frankie must sometimes feel when the girls ran to me, seeking solace from him in my arms. It felt awful to be on this end of things.

One thing I admired about Eva was her ability, despite the chaos of four children, to never lose her patience. I’d watch her clean up broken plates, wipe up spill after spill, placidly sit and somehow manage an adult conversation as Rose crawled all over her lap, tugging at her sleeves, and Johnny wreaked his usual havoc in the other room. She was a good mother, a
natural
mother. When I felt myself igniting, that crack and sizzle after something lit me on fire, I tried to think of what Eva would do. But I could never, ever seem to find the calm reserves she had: the patience. It was her best attribute with her children, though her worst when it came to Ted.

Seeing Gussy struggling with something in the trunk of the car, I gave up on the syrup, opened up the screen door, and rushed outside to help her. “Go
play!
” I said, again, to Chessy and Mouse, who were now under Gussy’s feet instead of my own.

I looked at her and rolled my eyes, threw up my hands in surrender to another lost battle in this endless war of motherhood. Gussy had two daughters, Nancy and Debbie, as well, but they were older than my own. I wished sometimes that we had started our families at the same time. She always seemed to be the first to experience things in life, making her always older, always wiser than I. But I didn’t want a mentor; I wanted a friend to share the experience with. I suppose this was one thing that drew me so strongly to Eva. I never felt Eva judging me, never felt her condescension. She never shook her head knowingly at me or comforted me that the kids would “grow out of it.”

“Take these?” Gussy said, handing me a box overflowing with curtains I recognized from her house: red gingham ones that made me think of picnics.“I thought we could replace those tired ones in the kitchen.”

I took the box, which was heavier than I expected.

“Oh, I brought some of Mom’s cookbooks too. You must be sick to death of cooking the same old things every night.”

There had been no cookbooks at camp: just a couple of Gussy’s recipes for macaroni salad and hamburger pie handwritten on index cards and stuck with push pins into the insides of the cupboards. I used the lack of a cookbook as an excuse not to cook, making sandwiches most nights, burgers and hot dogs and grilled cheese on others. When Eva had been here before, she’d taken over the kitchen, and I had been grateful for the real food that she somehow managed to coax from thin air.

“Come in,” I said. “Sorry, it’s a bit of a mess. One of the girls spilled syrup all over the table.”

It was always a little strange staying at camp. Gussy and Frank owned the cabin but acted like guests when they came to visit. And while I should have appreciated their efforts, I couldn’t help but feel a little irritated. The idea of knocking on your own door seemed ridiculous to me, but still she knocked. This was my retreat, but it
belonged
to them. And somehow instead of feeling as though my privacy was being respected, I felt like she was calling even more attention to the fact that the camp was not mine, that it was simply on loan. Even after all these years, I always felt a little snag of irritation each time Gussy asked permission to use her own bathroom.

“I can get that,” Gussy said. “Just use a little vinegar. Here, like this,” she said, opening up the cupboard and grabbing a bottle of white vinegar from inside. And once again, I was the inexperienced little sister at the mercy of her much wiser, older sibling.

I sat down in the kitchen nook, exasperated, and relinquished any sense of equality I had had. The playing field had never been level between us. She would always know more, have more, be better at most things than I was.

“When do the Wilsons get here?” she asked, finishing and sitting down across from me in the nook.

“On Saturday. Frankie’s bringing them up with him when he comes to visit.”

The last time Eva was there, Gussy had given us even more room than normal, only coming once to visit, at my invitation. She and Eva had gotten along so well, I’d even felt a little bristle of that childhood jealousy. My friends had always looked up to Gussy, loved when she paid them any attention.

“She was sick,” I said, not wanting to gossip, but also knowing that Gussy would notice. Gussy was nothing if not attentive. That’s what people loved about her, what, in fact, I loved about her. She paid attention to people. She noticed the little things. She listened when you talked to her.

“With what?” she asked.

“Cancer,” I said. “In her breast. She had both of them removed.”

“Oh, goodness,” Gussy said.“How terrible. Is she okay now?”

My mind flashed on the image of her sitting in her window, her ravaged face, the pulpy cheek that had endured Ted’s wrath. I nodded, but Gussy eyed me suspiciously. She always knew when something was wrong; there was no keeping secrets from Gussy.

“Her husband drinks,” I said.

“
Your
husband drinks,” she said, laughing, and then as though in apology, “That’s what husbands do. Even Frank drinks.” This was true. Her Frank had a single highball every night after dinner. One cocktail. I’d never seen his eyes grow glassy, his voice deepen and bellow with drink. I’d never seen his knees falter. His hands shake.