The End of the Day

by Bill Clegg

  Instead of rummaging through Dana’s closet right away, she went to the bathroom where she’d never spent much time. There must have been at least twenty towels throughout the room. The brightest white, piled in plush stacks on gray marble shelves, or hung from glass dowels fastened at each end to shiny metal mounts. The hardware in the room, along with the faucets and exposed pipes on and around the sink and bathtub, gleamed like the silver dining service Lupita’s mother would transport from the big house in a wheelbarrow a few times a year and spend weekends polishing while she listened to her beloved Amalia Mendoza on the radio. It had never occurred to Lupita to run a bath before, but the light from the window warming the colorless luxury of the room made it irresistible. In a row of what looked like glass apothecary jars on the shelf between the bathtub and sink, she found bath salts that smelled like roses and lavender and with a small wooden scoop she poured two generous helpings into the steaming water. When the bath was full she shucked her boots and pajamas and bathrobe and hid them behind the tub. She did not want her eye to land on anything from the world above the garage she’d just left. She only wanted the uninterrupted fantasy that Edgeweather occasionally provided, and as this was very likely her last time, she wanted it to be special.

  It took more than a few minutes to gradually lower herself into the fragrant water and acclimate to the heat. Once there she watched the late morning light glint off the metal and warm the marble surfaces. Though she felt tired, she resisted closing her eyes because she did not want to miss a moment or a single detail. She was a girl in a bathtub, soaking in a high, far room and no one knew.

  Dana

  After all these years, that old nerve—of being left—still spasms when touched. Her reunion with Jackie had lasted less than a few minutes. Of course it would end abruptly because of something she’d said about Floyd. It still bewilders her that a boy, of all things, would have driven them apart. And Floyd, a weakling for all his brawn—a pawn who shouldn’t have been so easily played. If he’d had any strength of character he wouldn’t have followed when she called.

  * * *

  Hey, there, she’d said, after waving to him across the Hatch Pond parking lot. Hi. She told him they were headed up the hill to Peter Beldon’s cabin where there was a campfire and a good view of the fireworks and asked if he could help. They’d over-prepared, she explained, and could use an extra set of hands. He began to shake his head and take a step back, so she hastily added. We’ll give you a six pack of beer for your trouble. And you’ll know people. Lupita… she’s up there already. You remember Lupita, right?

  Dana had seen her father fly-fish on the Housatonic and always wondered how he knew when to pull the rod to set the hook and what that moment felt like. Now she knew. C’mon, it’ll just take a minute, she could feel the barbed metal graze the inside of Floyd’s cheek. I’m sure Lupita would be happy to see a familiar face up there, even if for just a minute. She’s surrounded by college boys, the worst. A moment of silence followed, she let the line unspool a few feet, made room for the image she’d just conjured to linger until Floyd said, I guess I could lend a hand. Just need to make it quick as Jackie and the baby are back at the blanket. Hook set, she scanned the small trunk of her convertible for something to hand him. The only things she had in the car was her useless briefcase, where she’d stashed the remaining money she’d withdrawn from her trust, a few blankets, and a canvas laundry bag filled with bottles of alcohol she’d taken from the pantry at Edgeweather. She didn’t want to leave the briefcase at the house, which would reignite her mother who’d already expressed her disapproval and conveyed her father’s disappointment that she’d abandoned the summer job at the bank. I knew you’d only last a few days, she’d said after the taxi driver from the city dropped her off at Edgeweather. The words stung because Dana hadn’t at all planned to walk out on the internship so much as arrange to take a few days off. She wanted to come up for the fireworks Thursday night, take a long weekend, and go back to the city Monday. She was going to talk to her father about it after she’d made plans with Jackie. But Jackie, once again, was not picking up. She’d tried for three days in a row with no luck before she finally got her on the phone. She held back her agitation and attempted to sound disinterested when she asked what she was planning on doing for the Fourth of July. She’d barely spoken the words when Jackie interrupted to say Thanks, Dana, I’m afraid we’ve made plans. Floyd and Amy and I are having a family-only picnic at the pond. It’s Amy’s first Fourth and even though she’ll sleep through most of it, we wanted to make a day of it, start a tradition. It’s important to Floyd.

  If it hadn’t taken five calls over three days to get her on the phone. If she’d used any other phrase besides family-only. If Dana hadn’t known for almost two years by then that Floyd had fooled around with Lupita, was very possibly still fooling around with her. If none of these things were true, or had not happened, Dana could possibly have let it go and simply changed the topic, carried on with the charade of friendship they’d been playing out since their last years in high school, said goodbye and moved on. But instead she quickly excused herself, lied that someone at the bank was calling her, and without waiting for Jackie’s response hung up. She then remembered that Peter Beldon had invited her to a cookout at his family’s summer cabin in the woods above Hatch Pond. It hadn’t occurred to her to go until that moment and, before thinking it through, she picked up the phone and called the phone number at Edgeweather. It rang a few times before she heard the words, Goss residence, Lupita speaking.

  A day later, she was standing in the parking lot of the town beach at Hatch Pond where somehow she knew she would cross paths with Floyd.

  Here, she’d said to him, all business now, the plea in her voice gone. With the two blankets and the clinking sack of booze she gestured toward Floyd who nodded and took them both in hand as the clunky brown camera around his neck knocked against his sweat-stained blue T-shirt. Her hands free now, and nothing else from her car to carry, she pivoted toward Peter Beldon’s station wagon and grabbed a few towels from the front seat to perpetuate the flimsy pretense that Floyd’s help was needed. Nervously, she eyed the nearby field for Jackie and her swaddled infant before she shouted, To the cabin! Like a dog, Floyd followed.

  * * *

  A door slams downstairs and before she reacts, Dana hesitates. What am I doing? She asks herself seriously, because for a moment, like so many over the last year—a phone conversation she’s knee-deep in, a card she is writing, a shopping list she’s going over with Marcella—she has no idea what is happening, who or what she’s seeing or doing. She sits down on the top step and rushes through a list of what she knows to bring her back to the present—Wells, Edgeweather—but nothing of what has just happened and why she is where she is returns.

  Wind blows against the house and the old beams holding the place together creak loudly above Dana’s head. She’s never had a day with so many disorienting moments. The wind picks up, its whistle through the eaves and attic more ominous than when she and Jackie spent nights up here, scaring each other with ghost stories. Jackie, the name pierces her reverie. She remembers their climb up the stairs from the foyer, Jackie’s quick exit. She imagines her outside now, bundled in her thin wool coat and nightgown, making her way in all that dark.

  Lupita

  The seawater has risen, crept imperceptibly above the tops of her thighs. With each new wave a low, fast swell swarms her torso and splashes her neck, the force for a moment lifting her body, pushing her limbs up and back, nudging her a few inches further into deeper water. She grips the sand as she would bunch sheets in her fist but it is only a pantomime of holding on. She is nothing to the sea, no match for its power; the sand its shifty accomplice, changing shape beneath and around her as the water rushes in, vanishing as it retreats. The undertow has graduated stealthily from a gentle, caressing invitation to a rough command. But she does not stand. She does not leave. A rogue wave overwhelms gravity and she is up and
tumbling in the hurly-burly chaos of foam and ocean, her palms and heels flexing to brush the grainy bottom, but there is nothing.

  * * *

  After the bath, Lupita pulled a large white towel from the nearest stack, patted and rubbed her skin until it no longer dripped on the black and white tile floor. She drained the tub and wiped away any pooling evidence of her time there, folded the towel carefully, as her mother had shown her and Ada a thousand times, and placed it at the bottom of the stack.

  Without clothes on, she passed through Dana’s bedroom into one of the two long, walk-in closets where a low, wide dresser stood. She opened the middle drawer and noticed that most of what was there was completely new. Dana’s panties, bras and slips had always been delicate and fancy, mostly cotton with occasional silk pieces here and there. But everything she saw in the drawer now had a layer of detailing and ornament the others never had. Stitched bows and satin ribbons, buds folded from silk.

  Her mother did not gossip with her about the Goss family, Dana in particular, but Lupita knew she thought Dana was wild and spoiled, especially in her last few years of high school. Dana had completed a year at a women’s college, like Albertus Magnus, but not Catholic and certainly much more expensive. Lupita imagined her life there and wondered who or what had provoked the update to this little-seen part of her wardrobe. She pulled out what looked like a camisole and held it up to the light, but as she did her eye landed on something hanging from the back of the door. She could not make out its design, only that stitched upon it was an unusual amount of embroidery. When she saw the draping sash and the ripple of hem a foot from the closet floor, she realized it was a robe. Gold and red and brown stitches vivid against creamy silk draped from the hook like a glamorous waterfall. Lupita barely folded the camisole before she returned it to its place and shut the drawer. She turned back to the robe like a spellbound moth ignoring the currents of heat radiating from a porch light. Still naked, she pulled the garment from its hook and felt its weight, which was much heavier than she anticipated. She cradled the material in her arms and walked it back to Dana’s bed, laid it gently, front down, on the white coverlet, smoothed its folds and spread the enormous arms out as wide as they would reach. Lupita stepped back from the bed to take in what she saw there—a golden dragon on an ivory cloud detailed with red and brown, its tail and wings and torso twisted in flight, his face in three-quarter profile turned defiantly and with warning to whoever dared approach. The creature’s wings flared out onto the sleeves, its tail curled down a few centimeters above the hem and back up above the waist. She approached the bed and lowered her hand to feel the stitching. It must have taken miles of thread, shiny and fine, she imagined, to create the small area upon the tail where her middle and pointer finger stroked. She couldn’t help but wonder: How many hands made this one thing? How many years did it take them? She remembered something her father said about the roads in Florida, that it took hundreds of men like him and more than a year to build a stretch of road that took only a few minutes to drive. She pulled the robe at one edge and folded the dragon side down onto the bed to see the front which was mostly a sky of cream punctuated by seven very faint silhouettes of clouds stitched in silver and black thread and scattered elegantly down the chest and just below the waist. Such a gentle, unassuming first impression this made, she thought, considering what it fronted.

  She put it on. It had the heft of a long winter coat, but once her arms had slipped through the wide sleeves, and the collar had settled on her neck and shoulders, the weight was magically distributed to make the garment feel much lighter. She closed the front and tied the cream silk sash and stepped to the mirror above Dana’s vanity table. What she saw disappointed her: a childish girl playing with something finer than she was. Like she had in the ballroom downstairs when she had sneaked into the house for the first time, years ago, she felt shamed by the finer world the robe represented. Her thick dark hair, still in the loose bun she’d stuck it in when she woke up this morning, was lopsided with stray hairs flying at all angles on top and still damp along her neck from the bath. She reached behind her head and pulled the hair from its rubber band and let it fall down her back and around her shoulders. She grabbed Dana’s cheap plastic brush, the same kind she and her mother used at home, and began to tame the tangles and smooth the unruly strays. She twisted away from the mirror while she brushed her hair so that when she turned around she might have a new experience of her reflection. An ordinary girl, transformed in the dragon’s grip into a sophisticated beauty. Finally, she looked, and indeed something had changed. Not unrecognizably, but by enough degrees that she felt the sting of shame from before lighten, if not vanish. She wished Floyd could have seen her this way. It was the vision of her she would have picked for him to carry into his boring life with Jackie.

  She remembered the morning with Floyd behind the barn, the leather seats rubbing her thighs, his hands, his determined mouth. She glided back toward the bed and rolled up onto the coverlet and under the lace canopy she had rested and fantasized under alone so many times. She lay back on the pillow and remembered again when she saw Floyd in the parking lot at Trotta’s, handsome and strong, dumbstruck by the sight of her. She remembered him behind the shed, terrified and awkward and then, physically, so sure. She let her hands touch the silk, loosen the sash, and trace the hem along the front, up toward her chest to the hollow of her clavicle, which she pressed lightly and circled with her thumb. Wrapped in silk under the fine white tent of Dana’s bed, she felt for a few seconds what she came here to feel: far away. Free and alone, floating above the eggshells she walked on at home. This was the last time, but she knew that once she left Wells she’d no longer need this secret place or the escape it made possible. In a few months, she’d be gone. When she came back to see her family it would be only when she could not avoid it and for as briefly as possible.

  She understood that she would very likely never see Floyd again. Surely never kiss or touch him. Hard truths she’d accepted after Hannah told her he was marrying Jackie. It was, she recognized months after, a relief. If she’d ended up entangled with a farm boy from Wells like Floyd she would never leave. And a life here was not what she wanted. With these thoughts, the faraway feeling dwindled and the transporting reverie she’d expected, on her favorite spot, in her secret place, turned out instead to be a goodbye. To Dana’s room, Edgeweather, Floyd—the stubborn hope for him and the more enduring erotic idea of him. He was no longer what she desired, in the world or in Dana’s room.

  Lupita looked up and noticed a small cobweb in the near corner of the canopy. Fine white threads spun into what looked like a stretched cotton ball wedged between the top of the dark post and the wedding cake white lace draped on either side. Just another trespasser, she thought, and felt a sudden and overwhelming desire to leave. Impatiently, she began to wriggle out of the robe. She sat up, slid her arms out from the sleeves and let the collar slip from her shoulders and down her back. Free of the robe, she faced the mirror above the vanity. Who she saw reflected there, above her left shoulder, leaning against the inside frame of the bedroom door, stopped her breath.

  Since she was nine years old, she’d known him as Mr. Goss. Arms crossed, head tilted slightly to the right, wearing a version of what she’d always seen him wear: twill trousers and an unbuttoned, thin gray cardigan over a navy polo shirt. After a few frozen seconds during which neither moved or made a sound, Lupita’s body sprung to life and constricted into a ball, her hands flung across her chest, her legs quickly bent up toward her belly. Good morning, he said gravely, putting his hand on the doorknob, slowly beginning to pull. She grabbed for the robe to cover herself, but he abandoned the open door and rushed the bed, leaned over and ripped the garment from her hands. In a panic she lunged for it again, too late, and as she did she slipped from her precarious pose and tipped over on her side, exposed momentarily before she returned her hands to her chest and pulled her knees tightly together. As she flailed on the bed to reg
ain her composure and hide her body, he stood still and watched her, crumpled the robe, fist over fist. He swayed slightly. She wondered if he was drunk. She’d only ever met him in passing and always with her family. She tried to remember if his voice was slurred when he spoke moments before. But his voice was the voice of newscasters and congressmen, priests and presidents. She had no reference point for drunkenness besides her father and the kids at school who poured alcohol they’d stolen from their parents into bottles of Coca-Cola at football games, and none of them would be as composed as he was if they were drunk. Mostly she’d seen Mr. Goss from a distance, walking from the car to the house, or crossing the lawn to the river with fishing gear. He was like Cardinal Rutolo whom the priests and nuns at St. Margaret’s referred to all the time, someone whose whims and decisions governed nearly every facet of their day-to-day lives at school, but who visited only once or twice a year, and was rarely ever seen.

  She began to inch off the bed with the idea that she could escape to the bathroom behind her, lock the door and put on her clothes, but before she had stretched her foot to the floor, he circled the end of the bed, grabbed the wood post and flung himself with accelerated momentum around to where she was attempting to descend. He stopped to her left, and without permission put his hand on her shoulder. Shame of her nakedness and fear of consequence for being discovered in his daughter’s room had driven her panic until now, but as his clean, manicured hands squeezed the flesh just below her shoulder, much harder than he appeared to her capable of, her panic flared total and primal. As in a nightmare, she shook but could not move; was terrified but unable to speak or scream. Mr. Goss stepped directly in front of where she was crouched on both knees; his right hand reached for her other arm, skimmed the skin from her shoulder to her elbow, and moved quickly to the top of her thigh. When he spoke to her it was without anger or urgency, emotion of any identifiable kind; there was nothing but his voice, direct and plain. Stay right where you are. We are going to have a talk.