How to Breathe Underwater (18 page)

“Don’t fuss with that,” her mother said, straightening her shirt.

“Is she all right?” Nora asked. “Are you all right, hon?”

“I’m fine,” Helena’s mother said, but her eyes flicked nervously toward Brian before she looked at the photographer and smiled.

While the adults took Margot to see the Enchanted Tiki Birds, Jeremy and Louis and Helena went to buy ice cream. The twins walked ahead of Helena, their hands thrust deep into the pockets of their baggy shorts. Jeremy had a biker-style wallet, and Louis kept trying to pull its chain. When he caught the chain, his brother would slap him on the head. After one particularly hard slap, Louis dropped back to walk with Helena.

“We heard your mom’s sick,” he said.

Jeremy glared back at Louis. “Shut up, fuckhead.”

“What?” Louis said.

“You have to ignore Louis,” Jeremy told Helena. “He’s completely stoned. Both of us, actually. We smoked up before we came here.”

“That’s why we need ice cream,” Louis explained.

“It’s okay,” Helena said. It was better they talk about it. She got so tired of her school friends trying to act as if everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t. People noticed wherever they went. At the grocery store, strangers helped Helena and her mother load bags into the car; on the monorail that morning, a healthy Swedish woman stood so Helena’s mother could sit down.

“I hear people take pot pills for cancer,” Louis said. “Pure lab cannabis.”

“My mom doesn’t take that,” Helena said.

“How long has she been sick?” Louis asked.

“A long time. Five years.”

“Five
years
? Shit, I couldn’t stand it. I’d shoot myself.”

“No you wouldn’t,” Jeremy said. “You wouldn’t have the balls.”

“I would too.”

“No you wouldn’t.”

They paused at an ice-cream cart and bought chocolate-covered bananas. The vendor, a Hispanic girl with icy orange lipstick, smiled at Jeremy and Louis and gave them extra napkins. They took their bananas over to a wooden bench and peeled off the wrappers.

“Our parents went to prom together,” Jeremy said.

Helena bit off the tip of her banana and crunched the chocolate. “I know,” she said. “We have a picture of them. Your dad wore a stupid frilly tux.”

Louis gave Helena a tilted smile, his teeth full of chocolate. “Hey, do you think he got any action?” he asked. “You think they did the old bing-bang?”

“Jesus, Louis,” Jeremy said. “Can you shut the fuck up?”

Helena wanted to smack the chocolate-covered banana right out of Louis’s hand and grind it into the asphalt with her heel. Not that she hadn’t wondered whether her mother and Brian had ever done it. Most recently she’d thought of it when the Sewalds’ holiday photo had arrived—there was something about the way her mother had stared at that picture, and at Brian in particular. She knew her mother and Brian had gone steady all summer after the prom. They’d probably had plenty of opportunities.

One night, not long before this vacation, Helena dug up her mother’s pink high school album. Her mother had pasted various scraps onto the black pages: a pair of lace gloves, the gilt-edged prom invitation, and, nestled between sheets of green tissue, the three gardenias Brian had given her. In the prom photograph she and Brian stood in a gazebo, rain slanting through the palms behind them. Her mother wore an airy-looking bell of white chiffon, and the gardenias were nestled into her dark curls. She was pinning Brian’s boutonniere onto his lapel. His eyes were upturned and his mouth was open, as if he were laughing, and he had one hand on her mother’s waist. “He looks like he’s going to bite her,” Margot had said when Helena showed her the picture.

Helena imagined the two of them later that night in Brian’s car, her mother’s dress damp with rain, the gardenias wilted in her hair. Did he try to kiss her, to touch her legs, her breasts? Helena’s friend Fisher, a tall thin boy who built remote-control airplanes, had French-kissed her in his garage once and touched her through her shirt. His fingers had looked clean but smelled like plane-engine oil, and they’d felt warm on her breasts. Afterward his eyes were wet, grateful.

Helena finished her banana and held the sticky wrapper between her thumb and forefinger. “I think we should get back,” she said. “They’ll be done soon.”

Louis took the wrapper from Helena and flicked it into a bush. “You know we live in Dade County,” he said. “That’s where Jim Morrison whipped his dick out and got arrested for it.” He cackled loudly.

Helena felt a surprising twinge of anger. “We live in Detroit, where Joe Louis is from,” she said. “Joe Louis kicks Jim Morrison’s skinny ass.”

“Whoa,” Jeremy said. “Watch out.”

Louis weighed his half-eaten banana in his hand for a moment, then drew his arm back and lofted it far over the bushes. After a moment they heard a dull metallic thud.

“Goodbye to that,” he said.

Margot emerged from the Tiki Room holding a souvenir plush parrot and singing the Tiki Room song:
All the
birds sing words and the flowers bloom, in the Tiki-Tiki-Tiki-Tiki-Tiki Room.
She ran to Helena and the twins, who were waiting near the exit.

“There was a volcano out the window,” she said, “but it was a fake.” She sniffed loudly. “I’m allergic to this air. I need my nose spray.”

Nora and Brian came out arm in arm, and Helena’s mother followed.

“I thought it was fun,” Nora Sewald said. “I liked those birds.”

“They didn’t seem as real as they have other times,” Helena’s mother said. “You could hear their beaks clicking.” She brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes and placed one hand against the side of her head, steadying her wig.

They all walked together toward a fountain near the center of the park. Parents and children sat all around it, resting from the heat. The fountain itself was an amazing thing. Pink stone fish spat water toward a plaster Cinderella, skirting her in a dome of spray. Nora held Brian’s hand and looked up at Cinderella, and the twins grinned into the sun, wholesome-looking in their stoned daze. Helena’s mother, eyes dark underneath, cheeks sharp-boned, rummaged in her bag for Margot’s nasal inhaler. Margot sniffed miserably and rubbed a hand under her nose. Watching them, Brian dropped his wife’s hand and sat down on the fountain’s edge.

Nora sat next to her husband and unfolded a map of all the different “lands.” Their thighs met and she rested a hand on his knee. Helena’s mother moved closer to the Sewalds, leaning over Brian’s shoulder to look at the map.

“Tomorrowland’s closest,” she said. As she pointed, her arm grazed Brian’s shoulder.

“Sounds fine to me,” Brian said. He kept his eyes down and his hands folded in his lap.

“We should do whatever you’re up for, Nancy,” Nora said.

Helena’s mother looked at the map again. “We could start with the Carousel of Progress and move on to the Astro Orbiter, and then maybe have lunch.”

Nora raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of walking.”

“Not really,” Helena’s mother said. “It’s all close together.”

“You and I could drink a lemonade while Brian takes the kids on the rides.”

“If I want to rest, I’ll rest,” Helena’s mother said. Helena could hear the strain in her voice. She was glad when Brian glanced sharply at Nora and said, “Nancy knows what she can and can’t do.”

Nora looked like she meant to say something more, but then she slapped her knees and stood. She went over to her sons, who were tossing an empty Coke can back and forth between them. “What are you doing?” she said. “That’s trash.”

Louis gave a thin cold laugh that made Helena wince. When he set the can down on the fountain’s edge, three dazed bees crawled from its mouth and danced in circles, their wings gummed with soda.

Nora’s eyes grew wide. “Get away from that! God!”

“Hey,” Brian said. “Who wants to go to Tomorrowland?”

“Me,” said Margot.

“Well, let’s not stand around all day here, then.” He offered a hand to Helena’s mother, and she got to her feet, lifting her yellow straw bag onto her shoulder. Nora didn’t wait for them. She took her sons’ arms and began to walk, her steps clipped and quick between the twins’ loping strides.

Helena saw how difficult it was for her mother to keep up as they walked from ride to ride. The lines of her mouth were drawn tight, and one arm was folded against her chest as if to protect her scars. The things cancer had taken from her, it seemed, were beginning to compete in size and mass with what remained. Some time ago Helena had constructed a small collage of her mother as the invisible woman—the woman-becoming-more-and-more-invisible—one outline of her on the right side, filled with everything she had now, and another outline on the left side, with everything she’d lost: colored wool for hair, shellacked hazelnuts for breasts, millet lymph nodes, glass-bead ovaries, pumpkin-seed uterus. This was what dying meant, Helena thought—everything that had been you, leaving. Late that night, Maya had come into the studio to find Helena just finishing, gluing the last seeds to the blue paper. She wheeled over to the table to look at Helena’s work. “What’s happening there?” she asked.

It would be a series, Helena explained, the woman on the left finally claiming the one on the right, outline and all, until in place of her mother there was blank blue paper.

Maya held the collage for a few moments, frowning. “Hmm,” she said. “This would seem to suggest that a woman’s just a bunch of organs.”

Helena was surprised, hurt. She’d wanted to please Maya, to show her she could say something new and complicated about illness, as Maya had with her Wheelchair Nudes— women sitting in their chairs in groups of two or three, wearing their scars without shame. “I thought you’d like it,” she said.

Maya touched Helena’s knee. “This is your
mother
we’re talking about,” she said, her voice patient and slow, and Helena had wanted to cry.

By the time they’d toured the Carousel of Progress and ridden the Astro Orbiter and eaten lunch, Helena’s mother’s shoulders were sagging and the circles beneath her eyes had darkened to violet gray. She sat at the restaurant table picking at the bun of her chicken sandwich, her wig drooping in the humidity.

“Are you all right?” Helena asked her. “Can I get you more lemonade or something?”

Helena’s mother let out a sigh. “I’m fine, honey,” she said.

Beside her, the twins sprawled in their chairs, drumming their sneakers against the tiled floor. Nora sipped her lemonade and looked out at the white peaks and antennae of Tomorrowland. But Brian sat watching Helena’s mother, his own sandwich unfinished in its plastic basket.

“Maybe you and I should sit out awhile,” he said. “Nora can go on ahead with the kids.”

“That’s right,” Nora said. “You take a break, Nancy.”

Helena’s mother didn’t seem to have the strength to argue. Instead she sat back in her chair and said, “I think it’s the heat. I’m not used to it anymore.”

“Why don’t I take the kids to Space Mountain?” Nora said. “That’ll give you two time to catch up.” She stood and took Margot’s hand. Margot looked anxiously at her mother, then at Nora, as if she wasn’t sure what she was supposed to want to do. Helena wasn’t sure herself. She didn’t like the thought of leaving her mother alone with Brian.

“Go on,” Helena’s mother said. “We’ll be right here.”

“That’s right,” Brian said. “We’re going to sit here in the shade. I think I may have gotten a little too much sun myself.” He raked a few strands of hair across his bare scalp and then quickly pushed them aside, as if embarrassed by the act.

Space Mountain was housed in a complex structure of interconnected cones, white metal jutting like an iceberg into the Florida sky. Sunlight glinted from the high ridges, and shadows hung ghostly blue in the valleys. Nora steered Margot and the twins through a black arching doorway twenty feet high. Helena followed them into a long tunnel where they waited with other parents and children, watching projections of stars and planets and listening to synthesized space music.

“It’s just like I remembered it,” Helena said, to no one in particular.

“You should ride with me,” Louis said. He reached over and pinched her waist, and she swatted his hand away, moving toward Margot and Nora.

“How’re the allergies?” she asked Margot.

“Bad,” Margot said, lifting her glasses to rub her eyes. “I’m all itchy.”

“Don’t rub,” Helena said, holding Margot against her. “You’ll make it worse.”

Nora gave Helena and Margot her tight, gummy smile. “You must be a big help to your mom, Helena,” she said. “It must be terrible for Margot. But you’re so much older. You must be like a little mother to her yourself.”

Helena felt words coming to her, a polite response. Then she looked at Margot, who was still rubbing her eyes, and something contracted in her chest, a kind of visceral fear. “Margot has a mother,” she said, her voice hollow in the tunnel.

Nora stopped smiling. “I didn’t mean otherwise,” she said. She inspected her fingernails for a moment, then met Helena’s gaze. “You must be proud of your mom,” she said. “Both your parents. It’s lucky they’re doctors. They’ll get her the best treatment possible.”

Helena nodded, and said yes, that was lucky. But she wasn’t sure how lucky it was. She’d seen her mother turn pale as she palpated some growth beneath her own skin or examined the tracery of veins in her arm. Other husbands wouldn’t pass out when they saw their wives’ CAT scans. Other women wouldn’t understand how sick they were.

In a few minutes they reached the front of the line. The place was rigged up like a high-tech loading dock, with curved plastic tubes and machinery tangled across the far wall. Whooshing fluty music filled the boarding area, and a woman’s voice instructed them that their mission would commence in three minutes. An orange light flared from a tunnel as a set of three cars rolled forward onto the loading platform. The cars were made of sparkly black plastic, with foam-covered safety bars and working headlights. Two people could ride in each car.

“Margot has to ride with an adult,” Nora said. “That’s me, I suppose.”

Jeremy climbed into the car behind his mother’s, and Louis took the one behind Jeremy’s. Helena slid in next to Jeremy, who didn’t look at her. She was glad they were finally getting on the ride. The thought that Brian Sewald and her mother had been alone together all this time made her uneasy.