Drowning Lessons (23 page)

We ride out of the parking lot. While leaving I note the name of the church, just in case. Lloyd rides behind me to check my form and see when I shift gears. “Great,” he says. “That was a perfect gear change you made just then. You're a natural cyclist.”

“Twenty miles, you said.”

“Something like that.”

“You said twenty.”

“It's about twenty, give or take.”

The last twenty-mile ride we took turned out to be forty miles, after twenty of which he ditched me, leaving me to find the very longest way home. I was sore for a week. I couldn't sit and could barely walk.

“Just stay with me, okay?” I tell him.

Lloyd shakes his head. “Jesus, Edward, you want me to put it in writing? You want me to swear an oath?”

We've gone four miles when my ass starts to hurt. I can never get used to bicycle seats. As far as I'm concerned they are designed to cause maximum pain. The saddle grinds into my anus, mashing my prostate. I wave for Lloyd to pull alongside me. When he does, I tell him my butt is already sore and say I doubt I'll make ten miles, let alone twenty.

“Try,” he says.

“I am trying,” I say. “This is the result.” I point to my ass.

“It'll pass. Keep going.”

With that he pulls ahead of me. Under his black tights Lloyd's calf muscles are enormous, like a pair of boxing gloves, I think. Under his lime green jersey his distended belly hangs like a hammock. I watch him shift into high gear and pull far ahead. “Hey!” I yell. For the next three miles or so I manage to keep him in sight despite my asshole feeling as if it's going to burst into flames at any moment. My shoulders and back are sore, too, as are my arms and hands from gripping the handlebars. I keep shifting positions, trying different configurations, standing off the seat when I coast downhill, sitting sidesaddle, or something like it, though this saddle is so slim it doesn't have any sides. Hot air whistles in and out of the helmet, while high overhead white clouds float uselessly in the sky. I pass a trailer park where a lady hangs wash. I want to pull into her yard, invite myself over for lunch, romance and marry her, sire her children, anything to get off this fucking bicycle. Another long hill, this one shooting straight up like a tsunami. Halfway up I've got to pedal standing, which I don't mind since it gives my crotch a rest. But soon my legs start to give out, and I'm wobbling all over the place until all forward motion ceases and I forget I'm wearing cleats and the bike goes down and me with it, crying out as the side of my leg and my elbow break the fall.

“Goddammit!” I shout.

My leg is all scraped and filigreed with blood. My elbow is a mess, too. My body holds so many pains I can't distinguish one from the other; they all blend together along with a massive dose
of adrenaline. Lloyd is nowhere in sight. To my left a man-made pond with a dock and an aluminum rowboat, to my right a stand of sickly, scruffy trees. I have no idea where on earth I am. Oh, right. Alabama. A trailer truck passes, swirling grit into my eyes. I finish the climb by foot, then hop back on the bike and start pedaling again when I realize that the liquid drooling from my eyes is not sweat but tears. My brother has ditched me again, but that is not why I'm crying. I'm crying because he almost ditched me for good this last time. How could he do it? How could he go to sleep in that bed with his stomach full of wine and pills, knowing he might never wake up? Did he not think of me, his brother? Did he not see that it was my stomach, too, that he filled with poison? That his eternal darkness would be every bit as much mine, forever? Then to act as though nothing had happened. That's the worst part of it: that he can pretend it was nothing, that it means so little to him; that
I
mean so little. Jesus Christ, Lloyd, I want to scream, shout up at the useless clouds. You've killed me; you've killed me; you've
always
killed me. You're killing me now. You've been killing me for years. Since I was born, you've been killing me. Stop killing me, Lloyd. Please. Stop killing me. Stop killing me. Stop killing me.

A black man with a pickup truck gives me a lift into town. He drops me off near the Baptist church, and from there I pedal slowly to my brother's house. It is dusk. I've never known such exhaustion. There is something exquisite about it. I walk the last dozen yards up my brother's driveway. His Cherokee is there; a cognaccolored light burns in the snifter of his study. I walk around and let myself in through the back door. “Edward?” I hear him say. He
appears then, greeting me in a sky blue kimono, his head slicked back from the shower, grinning. “What happened?”

I walk straight past him and up the spiral staircase, steadying myself.

“Edward?” he says. “Hey, come on!” His voice climbs the stairs. “I thought you were behind me.”

In the upstairs bathroom I swallow two Advil. It occurs to me as I do so that in my medicine kit I myself have a prescription for diazepam. Among other things, Lloyd and I share insomnia, and we've both found that no other drug works as well. There are, it turns out, exactly twelve pills left in the vial. I take one, and then another. To take all twelve at once suddenly seems like not such a bad idea.

Then I think of those two psychiatrists, and of my mother, and even of Lloyd, and finally, somewhere down the line, of myself. I put the pills away.

Monday. My plane leaves at noon. Lloyd has to go to work. He asks me to come with him. He wants to show me his office. All morning I've been girding myself. I've had enough of Lloyd's bullying. At last I am going to tell him off. I'll tell him, in no uncertain terms, what a selfish bastard he's been, that I've made this visit only at our mother's request and under great duress and that I never want to see him again, ever. Kill yourself as many times as you like. Unless you look in the mirror, you won't see my face again.

We walk to campus. I am wearing Lloyd's raw-silk shirt and linen trousers: he wants me to keep them. He knows I'm angry with him; that's why he's so quiet. For once, he feels himself in
the wrong, but it's too late. I've made up my mind; I am determined. As we cross the quadrangle (still mostly deserted at this hour of morning), I'm reminded of another campus and another visit with my brother, twenty-five years ago, when he was a graduate student and I had already quit school to become a full-time bohemian. It was summer, and I had decided to hitchhike crosscountry. The campus was in Illinois, but it looked just like this one. Without asking I borrowed a pen, one of a dozen old fountain pens my brother kept in his desk drawer, my nineteen-cent Bic having sprung a leak. When he found out, Lloyd called me a “moocher” and a “libertine.” I called him a “greedy capitalist pig.” He told me to hit the road. It was near midnight. I crossed the dark and empty campus, headed for the highway with tears blurring my eyes, not sure which of us I hated or pitied more.

In his office Lloyd shows me his computer, the stacks of journals where he's published most recently, the photos in thin diploma frames capturing his meetings with important men. I wait for a lull, for a patch of calm water in his white river of self-aggrandizement; then I will strike: I will unleash the full force of my fury.

But the moment passes, or never comes. It's a quarter to ten. I need to be at the airport by eleven. My bags are in the rental car.

“I have to go,” I say.

He throws his arms around me as I stand there with my own arms hanging, not knowing what to do with them. As he holds me that way, I find myself thinking, Aw, he's not such a bad guy, while every sore muscle in my body clenches in opposition to this sentiment. He is a bad guy; he's a terrible guy; he is the worst brother in the world. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.

“It's been great having you,” he says. “I missed you.”

I nod. “I have to go,” I say.

As I'm recrossing the campus, I see her. Clarisse Dorfman. She's headed straight for me across the sunny quadrangle, a defiant look on her oval face, her long red hair barely swaying, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind me and to my right. Then it dawns on me: she thinks I'm Lloyd. As she's about to walk past me, a huge, highly scented lotuslike flower blooms under my solar plexus. I turn, smile widely, and say,

“Hey!”

She walks right past me.

“Hey!
Hey!
”

She walks faster. As she does, with a smile on my face and an élan vital greater than any I would have thought myself capable of, I yell:

“I love you, I love you, I love you!”

MY NAME IS
Mabeline Noonday Sanford Thurston (not my real name, but it will have to do), and my family tree is so old it has vines growing up it. But we're not here to talk about my family tree, ripe with the fruits of slavery and suffering though it surely is. Though the particular fruit that's me rolled far away when it fell, north to New York City, where it became a different kind of slave-fruit, the slave-fruit of a sinking ship man.

But I'm not about to discuss me. Nossir. Never talk about yourself if you don't have to, my mother always said. And I don't have to. I'm here to talk about Mr. Bishop, my employer, my master (he likes that word: like the master of a ship at sea). The Sinking Ship Man, that's what I call him and how people think of him, though they don't say it ever to his face.

No, Mr. Bishop's not his real name, any more than Mabel is mine. But if I was to do that, if I was to give you his real name, you'd be calling him like everyone else, inviting him here and there and all over the place to talk about a sunken ship.

Tea and cookies, they say, or wine and cheese, or cocktails and hors d'oeuvres. When what they're really serving up is questions. Was the ship really going faster than it should have been? Were there really not enough lifeboats? Did the band really play while the ship sank? What did the band play? Was it this song or that song? Did Captain Whatshisface really shoot himself with a revolver before going down? Questions like that that should've gone down to the bottom and rusted along with the rest of —

No: you won't get me to say the name of the ship, the T-word, a word that won't break the seal of these lips, not if ever I can help it.

“So it's cocktails at five, Mabel?”

No, it's tea at three. But what difference does it make? The Sinking Ship Man's memory is sinking along with the rest of him, and I'm sick and tired of correcting it for him. Let him think cocktails when it's tea, and tea when it's cocktails. Who cares? Long as I get him there.

“This is delightful,” he says as I squeeze him into his old suit.

“My pen,” he says. “Mabel, have you seen my pen?”

I say April is the cruelest month. I say it because that's when I spend the most time carting poor Mr. Bishop around in his wheelchair in all kinds of weather, be it rain or snow or icy winds that blow and keep on blowing. And poor Mr. Bishop so skinny in his wheelchair, the wind flapping against his toothpicky legs, blowing out whispery-thin strands of his white hair, making him rattle and tremble and shiver on top of his shaking, which he does, since he's got Parkinson's. I get him in and out of the taxi, in and out of his wheelchair, shove him back and forth and up and down sidewalks and stairs and into and out of elevators and
up and down hallways … in and out, up and down, you name it, I've pushed him there.

He was four years old when a steward handed him to his mother in a lifeboat. He remembers big funnels, the sound of the big horn, white-gloved waiters, bouillon, shuffleboard, and seagulls. He lost his father, but he never talks about that. Three years ago, when the other last survivor, a woman of ninety-five, passed away, he mutated into a celebrity. Now he's The Sinking Ship Man. All through April the phone keeps ringing; the letters keep pouring in. “Dear Mr. Bishop (not his real name): We of the (Name of Sunken Ship) Historical Society do Humbly Request Your Honorable Presence for the Such-and-Such Anniversary Commemorative Banquet Blah de Blah Yours Truly Mr. and Mrs. Pain-in-the-Rear-End Chairperson Please R.S.V.P. A.S.A.P. … p.p.s.: Could you prepare a short speech?”

I tell him, “But Mr. Bishop, it's so far away.” “But Mr. Bishop, it's a five-story walk-up.” “But Mr. Bishop, you've got six invitations already this week.” “But Mr. Bishop —” “But Mr. Bishop —”

“Mabel,” he says, “why are you always trying to stop me from going places?”

What can I say? Because you're an old man; because you're more tired than you know; because your heart's weak and your memory is bad and your shaking is getting worse so you can't eat and drink without spilling, making a mess of yourself …

“It's raining awfully hard,” I say.

“They've asked so nicely,” says he.

Like they're doing him a big favor.

“They always ask so nicely,” I wish I could say, “but they are not nice. They are
mean
. Dragging an old man out of bed to talk
about a sunken ship. And what about me?” I'd like to say also. “I'm not getting any younger. I can't push you so good anymore, can't do stairs like I used to. Some of those ramps they have for crippled persons, they're like climbing Gibraltar. Don't you see: I can't go on mountain climbing for you.”

But I keep my mouth shut. That's how I was brought up by the fruit of that vine-choked tree. To be silent, to bear witness, to obey, but not to say.

So up I get him out of bed and out of his pajamas (which are full of graham-cracker crumbs: how often do I tell him not to eat his graham crackers in bed?), slide his toothpicky legs into stockings, put on his shirt, button his collar, tie up his tie with the shrimp cocktail sauce stain on it, get him into his one and only suit, comb his whispery hair, brush his tiny teeth all stained sepia (the color of memories). All the while he's trembling like a leaf. It's the Parkinson's disease, but it's something else too. It's joy, because he's happy. Everyone's asking for him, wanting him. From now till mid-May he'll be a hero, Mr. Big Shot. Then he'll be alone again, lying in bed, eating graham crackers and Social Tea dunking biscuits.