Calamity and Other Stories

by Daphne Kalotay

  Annie closed her eyes to find the lines. This was the anthology from her freshman-year English course back at Bryn Mawr, the print small and uninviting, the paper so thin it often ripped just from the turning of a page. Ah, there it was. Annie opened her eyes and read aloud:

  “They f lee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themselves in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change.”

  She stopped there, and looked Ben in the eye. This poor vain man—he probably had more to lose, even, than she did. After all, he had known what real power felt like, and now it was drifting away. Crow’s-feet, some white in his hair, love handles at his waist . . . Was that all it took for him to finally become, like Annie herself, new and improved?

  Annie looked at the regiment of bottles lined up on her bureau. She wondered if Ben might want that revitalizing cream. She could offer to sell it to him for a reduced price. But now it was Ben who closed his eyes and spoke:

  “I knew a woman, lovely in her bones, When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them; Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one: The shapes a bright container can contain! Of her choice virtues only gods should speak, Or English poets who grew up on Greek (I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)”

  Ben stopped. He opened his eyes. His jaw was tight and square, and he seemed to be challenging Annie, as if this were some sort of duel.

  He had always liked poetry—had used it to seduce Annie on their first date—yet it shocked her to think he still had a stash of lines ready to offer. And ones as generous as this, ones she had never heard before.

  Annie told him, “I’m impressed.” Really what she meant was, That was sweet of you.

  “And if I didn’t know your little secret,” Ben said, “I’d be impressed, too.” With his forefinger, he gave her a tap on the top of her head.

  Annie decided to shift onto her stomach, to give Ben a good view of her broad rump. When he said nothing, she asked, “So— when do you go back to Chicago?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon.”

  He didn’t sound regretful, but he didn’t sound anxious, either. Annie searched his face, to see if he was eager to leave. While he was in the shower, singing, she had supposed she wanted him to go as soon as possible, but now that he was next to her again, his skin so fresh and moist and clean, it seemed a shame to have brought him all the way back here and not even had very good sex.

  Plus, she wouldn’t see him again for a long, long time. Probably forever.

  This didn’t seem sad. Annie almost sat up with the shock of it. She wondered if she could trust her own feelings. She wondered if she would think back on this day years and years from now, or if it would melt away into the atmosphere like so many other days.

  She made a decision, and she told herself: Memorize this.

  Annie looked at Ben and took a photograph with her eyes. Then she moved across his body and straddled him firmly. “Are you sure you live in Chicago? You don’t just live right over on that island there?”

  Ben said, “You know I don’t,” and Annie said, “Well, then, in that case we’d better give this one more try.”

  All Life’s Grandeur

  The summer I turned thirteen, my father fell in love. At least, that was what I thought; later I learned he and Shirley had already spent two years sleeping together in various hotel rooms, dodging their spouses and sons and early-morning checkouts. But that summer, freshly divorced, they lay on the veranda of the little cottage massaging cocoa oil into each other’s shoulders, interspersing conversation with kisses on the neck and earlobes.

  My mother was off at her parents’ house, “recovering.” In fact she was taking pills, lying on the living room floor all day with her head under the coffee table. That’s what they told us later. I was focused on my own problems: my body doing things I’d not expected. My voice had finally stabilized in a new, lower register, but the hair on my legs kept growing. And then there were the frequent, boisterous erections. Though the temperature was at least eighty degrees every day, and though no one came to visit us—we knew nobody in that summer town—I always wore jeans around the cottage, removing them only when I decided to enter the frigid river.

  I was thin and flat-footed, arches limp as dead trout. When I came shivering out of the water, my footprints left oval splashes on the dock. The wood was dry and splintered. Neglect had loosed the giant nails that held it together, inched them out like rusty mushrooms. You had to be careful not to trip on them or step between the planks; some of the gaps could swallow your ankle whole. Others were narrower, filled with spiders and purple-topped weeds.

  To one side of the dock, a bay had formed, with sand soft as mud. It felt like a silk pillow when I waded there, bending down to catch guppies in my hands. Where the water ended, the ground was dark and mossy, with frogs that sat there and never blinked. To the other side of the dock, the shoreline was pebbles, the kind that call for rubber soles. Some nights Dad and Shirley would build bonfires there, and I’d hear Shirley say how she wished her Geoff were with us; she was sure we would get along. In blatant inconsideration, she had named her son Geoff, too. At least his was spelled with a “J.” He was only eight and lived with his dad in Schenectady.

  I just left the two of them alone. I read mysteries and swam, and worried about my body. In yellow swim trunks, I would wrap a long towel around my waist to walk to the dock. My father laughed at me, and Shirley said, “Oh, honey.”

  I was lying on the dock one afternoon in early July, sun-drying after a swim, when a stranger caught me towel-less. “How much’ll you give for these worms?”

  I quickly covered myself. A few feet away was a suntanned girl, her wispy brown hair pulled back in a plastic clip. She was still skinny the way little kids are, legs like sticks, over which she wore denim shorts with turtle patches on the pockets. Her flip-flops were orange and her tank suit green, her bony shoulders poking out from the straps. She seemed a whole world younger than the girls in seventh grade, who wore eyeshadow and sometimes bras. “Your dad said I’d find you down here,” she told me. “He said you might be interested.”

  “In what?”

  “Worms. You fish, don’t you? I’ve seen you fishing from the dock, and in your canoe. I live up there.” She pointed vaguely upstream. “Hanlam’s Bay. See that little gray house by the communal dock? Next to the one with the motorboat. That’s where I live. With the grass and trees up top. We’re neighbors.” She tilted her head and squinted at me. “So how about it? You want some worms?”

  As she well knew, worms were a hot commodity in that summer haven. The only place to buy any was Arno’s Live Bait, which entailed a trip into town and a venture into the dark, raw-smelling rowhouse that was Arno’s home and business. I’d never actually seen Arno, and possibly he no longer existed, for the enterprise appeared to be entirely in the hands of his descendants. There were innumerable Arno juniors: picking their noses out on the stoop, swatting flies on the front porch, playing tag in the living room, or watching TV in the kitchen, where one of them would open an enormous refrigerator to fetch you your half-price maggots. All had the same pale freckles, thin brown hair, and sweaty faces and appeared to never leave their crowded home. They were their own gang, and I had never liked dealing with them. This girl seemed to know it. “Where’d you get yours?” I asked her.

  “It’s a secret.”

  I let out a bored breath. “How much you want for them?”

  The girl held her head up high and said, “They’re free if you’ll take me out in your canoe.”

  From the veranda above, my father stood with Shirley, hands around each other’s waists, nodding down at me.

  That was how it started. I think it wasn’t until we were already out in the boat, spearing plump earthworms on hooks, that we thought to ask each other’s names. Hers was
Valerie. We sat there under the four-o’clock sun and guided our fishing rods patiently.

  “How old are you?” I asked.

  “Eleven.”

  I wanted to tell Valerie that I had entered a world to which she was not yet privy, one where you had to change classrooms and teachers for each subject, and clothes for gym. Some kids smoked in the bathrooms, and my best friend, Mack, had even procured a few Playboys, which had been passed around covertly and scrutinized reverently.

  But with her flat chest and narrow hips Valerie did not even seem worthy of such information. I just sighed and tried to look dissatisfied.

  “A boy drowned right about here,” Valerie said. She shrugged a shoulder and managed to look somehow embarrassed. “He got caught in the seaweed. There’s parts out here where it’s like an underground jungle, a whole underwater tropical rain forest, and if you get caught in it, the weeds grab your legs and hold you under.” Valerie’s pale eyes shot me a challenging look. “That’s why my mom won’t let me swim out here.”

  “I can swim wherever I want.”

  “Well, fine, you may be allowed to swim wherever you want, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.” Valerie gave a little huff. “Why do you keep that towel wrapped around your legs?”

  I’d heard it on commercials: “Sensitive skin.”

  Valerie showed up at the cottage every day, and Dad and Shirley were always there to smile and nod and make sure that I joined her. Here I was, ready for my first summer romance, saddled with an eleven-year-old who for all I knew still believed in Santa Claus. Though my romantic fantasies were embarrassingly ignorant (even after what I’d learned in science class, the most I could imagine was a prolonged kiss, unaware of the fact that tongues were involved), they made no allowances for preteens. I pictured myself with some big-breasted girl, walking hand in hand to buy ice cream, licking from each other’s cones.

  Instead I had scrawny Valerie. We swam, canoed, and played cards on the old dock, which Valerie preferred to the communal one she and her neighbors shared in Hanlam’s Bay. She showed me the cool, shady area behind her parents’ place where she dug for worms, and we went fishing regularly. This was way out in the middle of nowhere, don’t forget; there weren’t any other kids my age nearby. If I were back home, Mack and I would have been riding our bikes to the pool, or playing Atari, or exploring the tunnels under the library without our mothers’ knowing. I took opportunities to remind Valerie of this. I made sure she understood that our friendship would never have occurred had my father not met Shirley, my mother not—after threatening to use a razor blade on herself— been sent off to her parents, and I not been dragged to some small cottage where I knew no one.

  At least twice a week we rode our bikes into town to see a movie at the Ascott Theatre, a dilapidated establishment that appeared to be owned by a grim-looking man and his dog. The dog, a Doberman, wore a spiked collar and barked at anyone who entered the premises, which explained the low turnout. That and the fact that the movies weren’t current; they were old ones, sometimes classics but most of the time just old. You needed a car to get to the multiplex, three towns over.

  In the lobby of the theater was a brown card table, on top of which sat a fishbowl. Propped against it was a scrawled notice that asked patrons to place their business cards in the bowl. WIN A THOUSAND BUCKS, read a separate, menacing sign below. No “dollars” and no exclamation point—more like an order that the grim man and the angry dog were there to ensure. “Winner selected end of August,” a lowercase jotting concluded. Even then I didn’t understand how they could be giving away a thousand dollars when the theater was in such bad shape. The red vinyl seats had huge holes in them, and the screen was missing a curtain on one side.

  The fishbowl was nearly empty in early July, but a week later a few business cards had been added. Valerie and I checked up on the bowl every time we went to the theater. Valerie would pick out a card to see who went there besides us. She usually made fun of whoever’s card it was. “Charles Lampert, Chiropractor. Just call him Mr. Backcracker. That’s what a chiropractor does; they have you lie down, and then they sit on you, to crack your back. Good old fat Charles Lampert.” She tossed the card back in the bowl.

  “Get your prissy hands outta there.” That was what the grim man usually said. Other times he was sparring with his Doberman and didn’t notice.

  “One day that man’s dog is going to die and he’ll have no one left to play with,” Valerie said once when we were sitting in the dark expanse of the theater, waiting out a technical failure. “He’ll be stuck in this place all alone.” She put a handful of popcorn in her mouth and munched. “I bet that’s what the thousand bucks is for. I bet there’s a condition if you win it: you have to promise to be that man’s friend when his dog dies, to hang out here with him and wear that leather collar with the studs. Only then do you get the money.”

  I don’t remember what I said back, because I was preoccupied with the sudden realization that I smelled. I had only recently begun to wash my underarms, and sometimes I forgot to put on deodorant. This was the first time I’d noticed just how powerfully my own body’s secretions could make themselves known to the world at large. I sat there wondering if Valerie could smell me, or if she was trying to ignore it. This just made me sweat even more. My mistake seemed enormous, unforgivable. I had not yet considered the subtle grades of difference between embarrassment, shame, and guilt.

  On the way back from the movies, we would spy on Arno’s Live Bait. It was my idea: now that I had no reason to see them, I sought them out. Valerie would oblige me halfheartedly while I went up to the bushes behind the rowhouse, right up to the kitchen window, to watch what was going on there. The one big sister, older than the rest, was usually taking money from customers and passing them grubby plastic containers from the giant refrigerator. This big girl was pale, fat, and slow-moving, always in bare feet, shorts, and a stained T-shirt, gently scolding one or another of her younger siblings, and watching whichever soap opera was on television. One day, as I watched her haul herself out of a chair to help a customer, I realized that she was pregnant. Her protruding belly was not just fat—it was full of another life altogether. I found this fact horrifying and immediately suggested we leave. Valerie, as always, seemed relieved; when it came to the Arnos, the only thing she showed much enthusiasm for was throwing mini-firecrackers at their house—those little ones that make a “bang” sound when they hit. She took some from her pocket and, as we went on our way, aimed them against the side wall.

  Part of the reason I was so disgusted by the pregnant girl was the thought of what was occurring to her body, and part of it had to do with the day, a week or so earlier, that I’d come home to hear my father having sex with Shirley. I had said goodbye to Valerie after returning from town, and when I got back to our little cottage, Dad and Shirley were not on the veranda like normal. When I went inside I heard moaning sounds I recognized from movies (not the ones we saw at the Ascott). I quickly went back out to the dock, where I sat and thought of my mother. This same thing had gone on between him and her, too—my mother, who had in the past year cried more tears than I thought it possible to even possess. Everything seemed utterly wrong. What if Shirley got pregnant, like the Arno sister? In school the previous year, we had been shown film strips emphasizing that all upcoming changes in a girl’s body were for the ultimate purpose of pregnancy and childbirth. These were fuzzy recordings meant to debunk sexual myths and provide necessary factual information, and for months afterward Mack and I had repeated, inexhaustibly, some of our favorite lines: “In some primitive cultures, the menstruating female is thought to turn milk sour.” “As each egg matures, it BURSTS from the ovary.” “Fat is deposited on the hips, and nipples stand out.” These phrases never failed to make us collapse in laughter. Now, though, I just felt queasy. Valerie’s wispy shape would change soon, too, I found myself thinking. We had been shown the film strips separately from the girls, and as a result I could never look
at girls the same again.

  Valerie went into Reed’s grocery across the street to buy her Fireballs, but I told her I’d wait outside. Instead I found myself going back to the Arnos’ window, for one more glimpse at the pregnant sister. I peeked my head over the sill to find her staring back at me.

  “Where’s Val?” the sister asked in a surprisingly soft voice.

  I froze.

  “She okay?” the sister went on. “Is she doing all right?”

  “Sure,” I said. “She’s fine.”

  “You tell her we miss her,” the girl said. “I was never close with her, but I always liked her. You can tell her I said that.”

  “Okay,” I said, turning away. I ran across to the grocery, where Valerie was waiting in line. She was holding a plastic pack of big red candy FireBalls, but she opened her front pocket discreetly to make sure I saw she had stolen three packs of chewing gum.

  “Getting a Charleston Chew?” she asked innocently.

  My face flared red with guilt that wasn’t even mine. The flatchested pipsqueak—I could have turned her in right there. But I wasn’t yet ready to enter, or even to acknowledge, the world of betrayal. It sufficed to keep secret the conversation I had just had.

  After the afternoon that I walked in on Dad and Shirley, I tried to convince Valerie to let us spend less time at my place and more at hers—a one-story house with a porch behind it that looked onto a small grassy area. The house was bigger and sturdier than our rented cottage, since Valerie’s family lived there year-round. They didn’t have a lot of money, Valerie often reminded me. She said this was because her father was a poet.

  I had never met a poet before. After knowing Valerie’s father, I was under the impression, for years to come, that poets were unconditionally cheerful people. “Hey-hey!” he always greeted us, swooping Valerie up in his arms. “Still a lightweight,” he would say, putting her back down and pretending to be disappointed. “You’ve gotta put some meat on your bones.”