by Karen Brown
He threw it down on the bed with the shorts. Then he stood in front of me and untucked my blouse. I tried to stop him, but he grabbed my hands and set them aside and I let them dangle, loose and surrendered. Then he undid the buttons, his fingers thick and awkward. The room was dim, and he missed one, so that when he went to take the blouse off the button ripped from the shirt. It flew across the room and pinged against something. “Jesus,” I said.
Paul chuckled. “He’s all around you.”
Beyond the room we heard the voices of people pouring drinks in the kitchen, the Formica counter with its myriad of bottles now a makeshift bar. The voices were garrulous and loud, often full of laughter, lured from their sadness by the liquor. They came into the room, and left the room, like the noise of humming insects. Paul unzipped my skirt and we watched it slip to the floor. I stepped out of it in my pumps.
“What about shoes?” I asked.
But he leaned in with his mouth and the room, with its shadows, and its shiny satin quilt, seemed to drop away like the sides of a magician’s box. I felt his mouth slide down my neck to my breasts. I imagined that beneath the wooden floorboards the lake water slapped against the house’s pilings, the fish slunk in the murk, shrewd and ancient.
“You spiked my drink,” I said. The voices in the house, on the deck, became a ringing of bells. My own voice was far off, somewhere below that sound. I thought it was funny that he had done this to me. We kissed for a very long time. We fell back onto the bed. But, it was as if we had forgotten what else we might be doing. The kissing seemed to be all we could manage, and it went on and on and I wanted it to stop. I felt a bit panicked that someone would come in, and worse than their recognizing me in his grandmother’s clothes was the worry that I would be caught naked in her bed.
“This is my bedroom now,” he said. “If I want, this will be my bed.”
We looked at each other, our faces barely readable in the dark.
“If I want, I can raise a whole little family here,” he said.
“One day, maybe you can.”
Outside on the deck the voices had diminished, and we heard the sputtering sound of a boat’s motor.
“It’s Frank,” Paul said.
He sat up and told me to dress. “I want to take the boat out,” he said. He left me in the room, in the dark. The satin bedcover slid against my skin. I wouldn’t let myself think about what he had said about the house, and the family. He hadn’t really meant it, anyway. I sat up, slowly, and found the clothes at the foot of the bed. The shorts hung along my hips, and their looseness was comforting. The T-shirt smelled of the little sachets his grandmother kept in the drawers. I found a small lamp on the bedside table, and I pulled open the closet door to look at the shoes. There were some navy blue sneakers new in the box, and though they were a half-size too small, I put them on. I went out through the kitchen to the back deck. A group gathered at the end of the dock where a white motorboat churned up the lake. Paul was there, waiting. He grabbed my arm and pulled me in.
“Remember my wife?” he said. Frank, a burly teenager with black eyes, raised an eyebrow. It was cool now near the water. The lake smelled of algae, and I thought I heard the mud sucking at the pilings. I found it difficult to stand upright. I kept listing against Paul’s arm. Around us the cousins, all girls, seemed to retreat, their long hair blowing, their arms around their waists, hiding their breasts.
“Nice shoes,” Frank said. I remembered then that he was sarcastic and hard to like. It was terrible to be wearing their dead grandmother’s clothes.
“Paul gave them to me,” I said. I wiggled my toes against the canvas.
Paul looked down, confused. Then he laughed. He tipped his head all the way back and teetered on his bad leg toward the edge of the dock. Frank reached forward and grabbed the front of his shirt. “Oh, man,” he said, clucking his tongue. He looked at us for a few long moments. “I can’t take you two out,” he said.
“What are you talking about?” Paul said. He stepped forward and pointed his finger at Frank’s chest. “I’ll take the boat myself.”
“I don’t really want to go,” I said. I held on to Paul’s hand, but he shrugged my hand away. I wanted to go back to the bed in the cool, dry air and lie down. Paul limped over to the side of the boat and swung a leg in, and Frank had no choice but to join him. I stood on the dock with the remaining female cousins, all dark-eyed, with bright mouths, like gypsies.
“What about the wife?” Frank said, and Paul told him to bring me onboard. He was happy now that he’d gotten his way. I saw the lit end of his cigarette, a tiny beacon, and so I allowed myself to be helped into the boat. Frank gripped my wrist, and I leaned into his chest. His shirtfront smelled of cologne and I wondered if he had a girlfriend, and if he’d graduated high school yet, and a few other things that occurred to me being up against him. I think he wondered, too, because he pushed me, roughly, into the remaining seat and ran his hands through his dark hair before making his announcement.
“You pretty much know,” he said, “that if one of you goes over in the dark you can forget about being saved.”
I laughed, a small, childish sound that surprised me, and he looked at me, his eyebrows drawn together. I felt a little guilty about making him be the parent. His cousins threw the lines into the boat, and Frank moved quickly, gathering them and positioning himself behind the wheel. We moved away from the dock slowly, and then he eased the throttle and we moved faster over the water, which parted greenish black and sprayed up along the sides. The wind filled my nose and mouth. I felt I couldn’t catch my breath. I looked over at Paul, but I couldn’t see much with my hair flying over my face. Frank stood, his own hair blown straight back, the wind pulling at his dress shirt like a sail.
I knew, from Lena, that this had been Paul’s father’s boat, that when they visited him here, before he married his second wife, he would take them out for rides. Lena said she went only twice. She was afraid, she said. Her father went too fast. He stopped at the center of the lake and let the boat roll and dip, and told them he ran out of gas. Once, he slipped off the bow and hid from them in the water, and they had panicked, thinking he had drowned. She told me all of this the last time we were here, when Paul had wished he could take out the boat. But it was winter, and the docks along the lakeshore shone with colored Christmas lights, and the lake was frozen over. Paul had still been using crutches at the time, and he was in more pain, but he hadn’t yet started abusing the painkillers and he had been different, softer and thoughtful. I had never been with anyone who almost died before, and during that time, while I waited to hear and cried for him in my bedroom, I’d felt chosen, and special, and obligated.
I felt none of that now. The black lake and the dark, moonless night blended. I saw the rim of lake house lights, blinking and distant. Paul sat with his arm thrown over the seat back, watching me. I didn’t know what he wanted anymore. Frank slowed the boat and we went along, closer to one of the docks. This was his friend’s house, the place where we had the party months ago. Frank hit the horn, and a door opened, and a boy sauntered out along the dock in what looked like pajama bottoms and no shirt.
“What?” he called, throwing his arms up.
“I’ve got Paulie and his wife,” Frank said.
The boy seemed familiar—the set of his bony shoulders, the sound of his voice. I remembered then that he and I had gone into a bathroom together in the house behind him. There had been a Virgin Mary nightlight and a little dish of scented soaps. The sink was pale blue porcelain with a rusty mark where the water dripped. I had kissed him, and maybe more had happened, but I didn’t want to remember it now. The boy on the dock laughed. His voice was musical off the lake.
“Do they want to use the bathroom?” he asked.
Paul snorted. He looked at me. “Do you?”
You never knew what he was thinking. You wanted to believe you did, and for a while that would work. The night became sharp and fixed with stars. I glanced at
Frank, and he was looking down at his shoes.
“No?” Paul asked. He was grinning, widely, unnaturally. I couldn’t imagine when he found out, maybe the next morning when I woke him up from the couch, or the day after that, or just now. There was no real culpability. It didn’t matter what I’d done if he didn’t care. I listened to the boat’s motor rumble. And then Frank waved an arm and turned the boat around. The lights of the houses grew small and wavering. Paul wanted Frank to stop out on the center of the lake. We bobbed there on the surface, the air stilled and silent. A dog’s bark came across the water.
“We should take her to Hippie Hollow,” Paul said. Frank smiled. He pulled out a cigarette and offered us each one from his pack. Then he lit them for us, the lighter hot near my face. I didn’t want to smoke, but I had nothing to do with my hands.
“What is that?” I asked. Neither of them looked at me.
When Paul wouldn’t answer Frank did. “It’s the nude beach,” he said. “On the other side of the lake.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Old people go there mostly,” Frank said. He shrugged, and I think he felt a little sorry for me.
“This is my boat now,” Paul said.
“It was always yours,” Frank said. He shook his head. “You just never wanted it.”
Paul smoked quietly. “I wonder why.”
The boat bobbled and dipped. The water sloshed against its sides.
“It’s an old one, a pain to keep up,” Frank told him.
“A lot of things I don’t understand,” Paul said. “And then some, well, suddenly I do.” He nodded his head. He stood, unsteadily, and flicked his cigarette overboard. Frank turned back to the wheel and we started off again. I watched Paul go to the side and sit on the edge. I can’t say if I saw his face or his expression in the dark, just the slow, purposeful leaning back, and his body rolling off. I screamed his name. Frank immediately slowed, as if he knew without looking. He handed me a flashlight and idled low, turning the boat around. The flashlight’s beam trembled over the surface, choppy from the wake. We saw him within minutes, heard his arms beating against the water. Frank swore at him over the side. I heard the tension and fear in his voice, and I stayed back and did as I was told: hold the wheel right, keep the throttle low. Frank took off his shirt and went in to get him. I lost sight of them for a moment and my heart whipped up in my chest, and then Frank’s arm hooked over the side. There was a ski platform on back, and he brought Paul around and dragged him up on that.
They got back into the boat and lay out on the deck and their bodies steamed. Paul was laughing. He pulled himself upright, his clothes sodden with lake water. He took out his wet cigarettes and put one in his mouth and tried to light it, the water dripping from his shirtsleeve, the flame jumping up and down from his laughing. I felt the cramps in my abdomen sharpen and I put my shaking hands there, as if they could stop what had already begun to happen. The engine stalled out. Around us the water was an invisible slapping force. No one said anything, and finally Paul stopped laughing, and in the quiet you could hear Frank’s heavy, sorrowful-sounding breaths.
destiny
Marianne is named after a song by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons. I named her myself—her father doesn’t even know we’re alive. He’s probably still driving his pearl-white Chevelle down some turnpike every night, plugging in eight-track tapes of the Raspberries, who sing out the open car windows, “Please go all the way,” to any teenage girls within earshot.
I’ve vowed that I will not let Marianne be fooled like I was. I’ve been trying to set an example—staying chaste, uninvolved—but sometimes I find myself imagining Marianne years from now, at fifteen: brown hair streaming under violet street lights, a silver charm bracelet jingling on her wrist, staring up at someone’s face, or at the moon . . . and I ache with jealousy, with a mysterious excitement that has nothing to do with my life in the past. I’m fooling myself, of course. I already know that Marianne is the only thing I can love and not pay for, ultimately, with my soul.
We have lived in Florida for two years—one with James Copper, the makeup instructor I met at modeling school in Massachusetts, and one on our own. I’m still not used to this damp heat, this thick air, but Marianne doesn’t care that her clothes stick to her skin. I’ve even taken her with me, job hunting, in my old Chevy Impala that has no air-conditioning. A few months ago, on the way home, the Impala died in the middle of an intersection. Marianne cried, “Go Mommy go,” scattering her crayons as she climbed from the backseat to the front to tug on my arm. Other cars screeched and swerved to avoid hitting us, and finally three men in white clothes came from nowhere and pushed the car into a Sears parking lot. It was a hot day and their white shirts were wet. Marianne kissed the top of my arm as we watched the men disappear down the sidewalk, wiping their foreheads with the backs of their hands.
At first, we didn’t get out of the car. I was thinking about the photographer I’d just seen, who’d examined my proof sheets with a magnifying glass and said, “There’s something about the mouth . . .”—as if it weren’t my mouth in the picture, as if I weren’t sitting there on the low couch in front of him, with my knees jutting, pointed and thin, out from under a tight, black skirt. I looked at my mouth in the rearview mirror. Then Marianne whispered something in my ear, pointing to a display of bright metal swing sets assembled on the concrete in front of Sears.
We had to walk home. Heat rose off car bumpers and the glare of sidewalks. Cars flew past and blew the heat up my skirt. I am not living, I remember thinking. The living thing inside of me has left, and I am just a shell of a person walking down a street, holding a little girl whose legs dangle to the knobs of my knees, who takes my face in her two small hands and says, “Ask me ‘Who do you love?’ ”Her hair was sticking to the side of her face. I pushed her head down on my shoulder and kept walking, past the tire place where the men stopped working to whistle at me. I wanted to scream These legs hurt and There is something about this mouth, but I didn’t. I was a shell of a person. Yet the bones of the child pressed into my arms, warm and real, unbearably small, achingly beautiful.
Finally, we reached our house—almost hidden in the shade of the neighbor’s trees—a tiny building with reddish-brown paint peeling off all four walls. The sky hung over our heads, dismal, gray and weighted with rain. Inside, the smell of old wood and mold was familiar, oddly consoling. Milk stood congealed in a bowl outside the back door. Marianne brought it in and dumped it in the sink. She was very quiet, staring out the door at the bare backyard, the one lean tree and the railroad track.
“It would fit right there,” she said.
I wanted to tell her that those swing sets are cheap, that they have to be cemented into the ground or they come up and tip, that the metal bends and the screws fall out. Instead I said, “I used to have one of those.”
“With two swings?” she asked. “With two swings and a slide? Tell me.”
So I told her about the swing set in Massachusetts that I got one year for Christmas, all set up in the garage on the gray cement, just like at Sears.
“When are we going there?” she wanted to know. We are always half-packed, ready to go somewhere. The living room is lined with cardboard boxes. We just dig things out as we need them: clothes, hairbrushes, electric rollers.
“We’ve already been there,” I began—then stopped, my voice lost under the sudden slap of rain on the roof. I stood at the door and watched it blur weeds and leaves into bright green smears. Behind me, game-show contestants screamed on the television, and Marianne lay curled in a ball on the couch with one finger in her mouth.
For the first two years of Marianne’s life we lived with my mother in the house where I grew up. She is a divorced woman possessed by a lingering sadness that makes her mouth sag. The sadness hangs about her body, smelling of Chanel No. 5. In the late afternoon, sitting at the white iron table in the damp shade of the backyard, she drank Manhattans from a large tumbler with a red PGA insignia o
n it. I always thought this glass belonged to my father, a man I created who played golf and wore sweaters that smelled of tobacco. Now I think it could have belonged to some other woman’s husband who left it on the counter one day. The neighbors always strolled across our lawn with drinks in their hands. I would hear them below my window while I changed Marianne: low voices laughing, and ice cubes banging against the sides of heavy glasses.
The rain didn’t last long. Once it stopped, Marianne and I sat outside in one of the dripping lawn chairs someone had left here long ago. The woven plastic slats are worn through, and sometimes lizards slide out from under the armrests. We just sat and watched the railroad track steam. Our neighbor’s trees were dense and shiny with rain, reminding me of my mother’s giant, green umbrella and her hallway tile floor that was like ice under my bare feet, even in summer.
My mother loved Marianne. When she kissed her good night, she would clutch the crib rail and sway down until her mouth was right by Marianne’s tiny ear. Her lipstick brushed Marianne’s face and she would whisper to her, sometimes calling her my name by mistake. “I love you, Roxanna,” she would say—the only time I have ever heard her say those words. The memory made me uneasy, wavering in and out like the noise of insects in the trees around us. When Marianne insisted that the noise is made by spiders, weaving webs with machines, I couldn’t help laughing. She pinched my arm and gritted her teeth. It’s all right for her to hate me, I thought. I’m prepared for it. I have secured a soft wall around me, waiting. It is normal: all daughters hate their mothers.
I told this to Janine, my friend from across the street who had joined us in the backyard. She stood in front of me, shaking her head, her hands on her hips.
“Who says?” she wanted to know.
“James Copper,” I said.
“Oh”—she smiled and rolled her eyes—“the makeup guy. Why would you believe him?”
“Why not?”