Swimming (8 page)

The list of possibilities remains vague.
Maybe the pizza face … I don’t know. You might have been set up. That Kelly Hill hates your guts
.

She rubs her neck, clears her throat.
Where’d she get the cunt chip?

I’m still surprised at the turn events have taken.
I don’t know
.

It’s good
. Her red lids are almost spilling.

I try to make her feel better by averting my eyes.
Are you kidding? It’s better than good; it’s great
.

What are you doing in there?
Bron’s awake and shouting.

I jump.
Nothing
.

Come here
.

She’s quiet for a minute, studying me, then she changes her mind and looks out the window. I watch her struggle, watch the words escape.
Do people ask about me?

I look out the window with her.
Like everyone
.

She looks at me.
Like who?

I still look out the window.
Ummmm, Emmett, that cello guy. And Mandy asked about you yesterday and Troy wanted to know when you were coming back. Joy asked if you wanted some more music and Augusta said she was going to stop by tomorrow. Lauren said tell your sister I said Hi and that Joeanna chick with the big mouth said Hi and Mazie said Hi and Maxwell Grant said Where’s your hot sister?

She’s still looking at me.
Hot
.

The window holds a square of glass in each eye.
You don’t look so bad
.

She doesn’t care about the window, but looks anyway.
Depends on how you define bad
.

The window darkens.
Don’t start debater stuff
.

She’s looking at me again.
Then we’d get nowhere
.

The window sits still, boring a hole in the flat sky.
Why are you so mean to me all the time?

She’s looking at me harder.
Why do you think? I’d be interested in hearing your theory. Go on
.

There’s a jet up there. I can’t see it, but it leaves a big trail.
Shut up
.

She’s looking at me harder.
You shut up
.

The trail is dissipating into blue. The window watches poker-faced.
I will
.

She’s decided to examine her hand.
You never say anything anyway … I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say one real thing
.

I look at her.
Shut up
.

She’s looking through her hand as though it were transparent.
It squeaks
.

Come on, Bron … please
. Things are gurgling inside.

She’s looking through her hand as if it were diamond.
Not one real thing. In all these years
.

I can’t take it anymore.
I never had my period
.

She drops her hand.
What?

I never had my period
, I repeat, exploding.

What?
She’s so quiet now, I can barely hear her voice.

I lied. Okay? I lied. I’m not … I’m still … I lied. I’m not … There’s something seriously wrong …
My convulsions are serious and steady, rhythmic and pure.

She grabs my hand and pulls me toward her.
You poor retard; it’s okay, it’s okay. Listen to me … Listen … Stop crying and listen. There’s nothing wrong with you. Some people don’t get it until later. Stop crying, Boo, Jesus … listen, listen. Don’t worry, you’ve been … you’ve been … you poor little …
Then she detonates. I feel her heart beating against her rib cage like a slim-hinged bird flapping at a closed window, her body a sack of burning sticks. Our breath mingles out into whimpers that quiet as the window lets go of the sun and watches it fall. Then we both calm down and play checkers without cheating.

She knows things.
Some people don’t get it until they’re eighteen. It’s rare, but it definitely happens
.

Once, when I get there Sister Fergus is with her, standing by her bed, leaning in close. Bron nods
yes
, shakes her head
no
, nods
yes
again. Fergus stands up, puts a hand on her forehead, blesses her:
In the name of the Father, the Son, the Holy Ghost
.

This makes me suspicious. I interrogate my mother later while she’s standing at her sink.

What was Fergus doing in Bron’s room?

She’s wiping a cotton ball carefully around one eye.
Visiting
.

Her eye becomes naked, smaller.
Fergus doesn’t visit …

She puts lotion on another cotton ball and starts attacking the other eye.
I’m sure Sister Fergus wanted to talk to your sister about her education
.

Now she has two small eyes surrounded with rings of real-colored skin.
Bron said she doesn’t want to think about school
.

Sister Fergus has convinced her to start
. She’s massaging cream into her face, is becoming uglier by the second.

She blessed her
, I say.

Her fingers stop swirling.
Sister Fergus did not bless her
.

I look at myself in her mirror, wondering if I look as bad as she does. I don’t, but I’m so tall I’m sloping sideways like a huge mountain. I’m not going to back down.
I know what I saw
.

Hark How the Bells

The wind was high last night, pulling flakes of snow into crazy patterns as they fell. I stared at them from my pillow a long time before I fell asleep because I know. I woke up early this morning anyway because I know. Outside the sun’s burning off the white snow because it doesn’t. I stand in the kitchen squeezing half of a grapefruit hard over an empty glass, watching a car snake its way down the driveway, but I ignore it because I know perfectly well what’s sitting inside. Mom and Leonard walk into the kitchen. Leonard is holding himself still like a drunk who doesn’t want to be discovered. Someone let the air out of Mom’s face.

I don’t say:
I know
. Instead I shout:
I couldn’t find the plastic juicer thing
.

Mom puts a bag I won’t look at down on the table and says:
She’s gone
, then has a new type of nervous breakdown that involves long moments spent catching her breath. I look at my father, who takes the option of not looking back. He’s standing at the sink looking at all the snow that has accumulated in the bird feeder overnight.

The only other dead person I know is Kent the dead sledder. He’d run his sled out into the street on a busy Saturday. He had red hair and sloping teeth, chased us on our way home from school, vaguely threatening with a budding pre-masculine violence that was erased from the universal mind once he was dead. At first he was
poor eleven-year-old Kent
, then he was
Kent the dead boy
, then he was
Kent the dead sledder
, then he was
the dead sledding kid
, then his parents moved and he was
the boy who didn’t listen
until they built a fence that protected the hills from the highway and he disappeared into the air forever like a shiny bubble that had been popped.

Leonard turns toward me, says:
Let your sisters get some sleep while they can
, then disappears as Mom falls up the stairs. My feet carry me around the house from one room to the next, my brain conjuring things. It’s darkly unpleasant everywhere I go, but I keep going back, hoping. I feel the immense power of the dead, as if someone’s flipped a switch and now I can see what’s been making the shadows. I can hear Bron saying things to me in a high-tech debater voice and I can smell her hair conditioner and that lemon stuff she sprayed herself with when she wanted to make an impression. I don’t know what to do; my insides feel thick and dark and muddy like hollows.

Bron says:
I’m dead now, can you believe it? Look at my bed; it looks dead too, don’t you think? Like it died too, can you believe it? I knew I was never going to go to Columbia and I was right
.

I say:
No, no. I can’t believe it. I thought I did, but that wasn’t real
.

And she says:
Me too! Exactly! You don’t believe it until it happens. The rest is just projected thought
.

I leave, walk around the house passing rooms I do not enter, until I find a spot on the floor behind the piano. Manny walks into the room, looks around, heads for me. He puts his face in my face, shiny eyes pooling. He puts a dirty paw on my lap, shiny mouth drooling. I rub the tangled fur and claws, caress the gnarly patches he’s ground in with use. He starts breathing deeply, becomes quiet and calm.

I hear them getting up, but stay where I am. I hear them wandering into the kitchen, but stay where I am. I hear cries and whimpers as Manny pricks up his ears and is gone. I am aware of the horribleness of my person.

The nuns show up, the station wagon with five of them in it, one of them for one of us. I always get Aloysius. Leonard is in and out all day long, walking round and round as though everything were
extremely urgent
and it would be greatly upsetting should he be stopped. We stay away. Aloysius wears tortoiseshell glasses that take up half her face. She has a twitch; her left eyebrow trembles up, pulling one of her ears and one side of her glasses up while the other half of her face falls. I get irritated until she pulls out a package of salted caramels from her pockets and we eat them. I suck on mine; she chews on hers.

We lie on our beds for three days, bolted down by invisible bolts. Dot and Roxanne visit me. Then I visit them. We look out the window at the zillion flakes of individual snow heading slowly toward the ground as casseroles arrive from all four corners of Glenwood and Leonard moves so fast all we see is a blur. On the third morning, Leonard knocks on the door, walks in, nods at us, says:
Good morning, girls
, opens her closet, pulls out a pair of good jeans, her nicest sweater, makes to leave, pauses, looks at me, requests a pair of socks. I won’t open her drawer, so I open mine, give him a pair of the light blue anklets Lilly stole at Woolworth’s, and he thanks me and leaves.

The drive to the church passes in silence. Mom is sheathed in black, bent in two, her chin to her chest, her elbows to her knees, her body curling over Bron’s winter coat. Father Tim meets us at the door, his white face covered in the pink dots of the closely shaved. Fergus and Augusta appear, speaking in the warm, rhythmic tones of waves rolling in ocean, pry Mom’s fingers from Bron’s coat, draping it gently over the pew. They escort Leonard and Mom to the secret room behind the pulpit, and all is quiet. I sit in the front pew next to Roxanne and Dot. We wait. People file in, then settle, breathing softly in and out, in and out, in cadence, their souls smothered in skin. I won’t look at the candles, the flowers, the pulpit, the box. I want to amass everyone and everything, the entire church, gather it together, knead it with both hands.

Bron’s still talking.
And my coat, my coat looks dead too. When I was looking at it this morning it was like someone smothered it. I can’t believe I never noticed that damn coat
.

I answer her in my head, telepathically, get the coat twirling around with no one inside, which means:
I agree with you. That coat looked okay before, but look at it now
.

Both Fathers officiate. Father Tim mentions the cello playing, the French club, the promising future.

Father Tod speaks about peace, lambs, golden rays, abundance, the pure of heart, dust, dirt, earth, mud, sun, God, angels, war, tragedy, sorrow, Christmas, faith, hope, and the endless foreverness of time that exists for the most superior pure kind of beings who confess their sins, know true atonement. Then he sits down and looks stern.

Father Tim lights candles, drinks wine, chanting Latin, his Adam’s apple sinking down then lifting up, swooping his robes around the place with a
whoosh
, a sincere marbly owl. He is one of those priests who are never bored. He concentrates hard and wakes people up with a modulating voice, unlike Father Tod, who mumbles, frowns, sighs when he loses his place.

I make my eyes into two fat O’s and aim them at Roxanne, who looks back.
What?

My brows answer back, puzzled.
Can’t you see?

The Glenwood Junior cello players are present; sitting behind cellos with their knees splayed, dressed up in different shades of dark, aligned like the smudge of a hand on a window. The cello tune they choose turns out to be brain-blastingly hollow. Bron usually sat next to the oily boy with the short pants. She called him
oily boy
but I know his name is James.

Mother pinches my arm hard with her fangs and I put my face forward. I am wearing my dressy dress from the year before, but it’s too tight and my neck is sticking out of it like a giraffe’s, my movements physically restricted by cloth, so when people hug me, I jolt like Frankenstein. I explain:
My dress is too tight
and they look at me as though I were speaking Chinese, so I stop.

Sister Joy plays the organ. The sound reverberates along my spine. Hopeful angels glide up toward God’s pearly feet. Up and up and up they go, zooming like gliders in an air without glitch. Clouds thin into wisps, disappear into nothing. Time ticks metallic ticks, chalice clinks on marble, nail from flesh cuts through wood, cello string taut under padded thumb.

Bron’s class is back for Christmas vacation, weeping friends and enemies alike, sitting together with their heads bowed, their parents behind them in Christmas scarves, ties, earrings, and shawls. Leonard’s team is here; the bearded doctoral candidates I’ve always seen in jeans and flannel, dressed up in corduroy and tweed. They clear their throats and do things with their eyes that involve shifting, rolling, squinting, the long unnatural blink. Astronomer Gerald pinches the bridge of his nose with his thumb and index finger, squeezing both of his eyes shut. I watch him until my mother’s fangs bite into my arm like a dog.

Dr. Bob is sitting behind us with a dry-eyed Linda, the nice nurse, and the uncontrollably weeping Sheila, the awful one.

Leonard looks like someone folded him up and seated him with strict orders:
Don’t move
. Dot follows the ceremony by heart with her lips. She feels me looking. Her face seizes; her look is tender and damaged, suffering and sad. My dress is crushing my rib cage, pulling tight at my armpits, cutting off the circulation that leads to my brain.
Quit looking at me with those goddamn cow eyes
, I clench, and she turns her face away.

Roxanne disappears into Roxanne. I close my eyes and she surges out of the darkness swinging one fist. She has a fixed steady stare that waters readily into blank, says:
You can’t make me go up there
to no one in particular. One of Leonard’s hands tells her to do as she likes.

My legs straighten; my feet start to move. Bron’s face has been emptied like a puppet without hand. I genuflect, make a sign of the cross and, for the first time in my life, a good poem:
O empty God You Vast Wastrel O warty moon O fritter
. The French say
vide
like
weed with
a v. Her turtle-neck gleams with a million silver sparkles. I look at her face and something snaps into place and clarifies; it’s factual, hideous, mathematic, luminous.

The Dolphins are five pews behind with Coach Stan and his wife, Emily. They try to catch me urgently with their eyes, but I am uncatchable and will remain that way until I get caught.

The incense holder swings from Father Tim’s skinny hands, puffing clouds of frankincense and cinnabar. My eyes wizen into squint. My throat constricts. I want out.

Mom has a series of nervous breakdowns, one right after the other. They make her eyes fade into her head and her hand veins stand out. She wears an unfortunate hat I’ve never seen before with a veil she pulls down, which turns the face I know into the face I don’t.

We are seated under the Stations of the Cross. I’m sitting under …
and Jesus fell hard for the third time that day
. He’s struggling on the ground, wounded and gentle, but determined and strong, his face as white as milk.

Everyone thinks the funeral lovely. They shake Leonard’s hand and peer through Mom’s veil a moment before looking away. I stand behind them like a lurking tin hulk, breathing shallowly in my tight dress.

The ride to the cemetery is silent. Some guy is pulling his dog on a walk. It begins to snow, the invisible wet kind you can’t see. Father Timothy’s cheeks turn pink; his fine hair stratifies. He looks like a kid dressed up as a priest. Faces stall like old cars. It’s cold. I look at the tip of Leonard’s shoes, black with black stitching. I study the middle of Leonard’s shoes, black with black shoelace. I study the back of Leonard’s shoes, black with black heel. I find an edge of sock, black. Pants, black. Jacket, black; shirt cuffs a bright, blinding white. My feet follow his blackness, thus I am absorbed when we leave her there in the cold dirt, stiff hands folded up the way dead people are supposed to sleep.

Eventually everyone freezes up; freezes in different ways, at different times, for different reasons. Some people live through war, then freeze in a checkout lane that lasts one minute too long; some people freeze when they see themselves for the first time and thaw only when they’re dying; some people freeze and don’t know it, wonder what’s wrong; some people freeze, thaw out, freeze again; some people freeze once and remain frozen forever. Being human is awful.

Only the nuns with the lowest voices can sing the O Loneliness song.
O
—low—
Lone—
low—
li
—lower—
ness
—lowest. It starts in the lower abdomen and travels up along the spine. It is a song whose strength reposes in repetition and simplicity—two words, four notes—nuns in dress black, wimpled and cowled, a cappella.