Swimming Between Worlds

by Elaine Neil Orr

  “Where are your friends? Are they in touch?” her aunt said.

  Kate noticed a scratch on her father’s desk that she hadn’t observed before. She ran her finger across it.

  “Kate?”

  “I’m writing Janet today, my college roommate, remember? She came to Mom’s funeral.” Buxom blonde Janet had shown up in a cobalt blue dress. Kate had not intended to write but now she would have to. She ought to call James. The last time they talked, she lost her temper when he asked about her plans. “I don’t know yet. You can’t imagine what it’s like, what I have to think about, my brother, my parents.” She’d hung up precipitously.

  * * *

  • • •

  KATE WAS THIRTEEN and Brian still in elementary school that August they went to the Outer Banks for the first time and their father got caught in a riptide. They’d been shell collecting in shallow water, watching the waves draw, the shells tumbling. Kate took a handful up to their towels, leaving Brian with their father. When she looked back, they were farther out. And suddenly their father was carried away. His head went under. Kate ran to grab her brother from the surf. Their father reappeared, trying at first to swim to shore, but he couldn’t do it. He turned his head and went out with the tide. It was what they had been taught to do; in a few moments, he would begin swimming parallel with the shore and then come in with the waves.

  “He’ll be okay,” she said, Brian howling, jumping up and down like he was covered in ants. Then they were running down the beach. Their father seemed to wave to reassure them. But they lost sight of him. They searched and searched until someone got a police officer. Brian threw a fit when they tried to put him in the car, and once they were in, he scratched Kate’s arms when she tried to hold him.

  Kate’s mother was at the little white motel, sitting in bed in a summer dress, her back against the wall, and smoking, when Kate and the officer walked into the room to tell her. Her eyes went to Kate and then the officer. “Where’s Brian? Oh my God. Where’s my boy?” she demanded, not grasping that the news was of her husband. She threw the cigarette to the floor and flew at them, shaking Kate’s shoulders. “Where is he?” she cried again. “Don’t do this.” She pushed Kate aside and ran out the door. “Brian?” she called.

  Through the motel window, Kate watched her run barefoot across the gravel to the second police officer and pull Brian out of the car, Brian looking back toward Kate, his body limp.

  “Ma’am.” Kate heard the officer speak. “It’s your husband. He was carried out in a riptide.”

  Their mother pushed back her hair, still claiming Brian’s hand. “Don’t say that.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am. He’s been gone for over an hour and a half. The Coast Guard is still looking. But chances are slim.”

  “No,” she said. “He said he wouldn’t leave.”

  “Believe me, ma’am,” the officer said. “I wish I could tell you different.”

  “Kate!” she called, and Kate ran to her, grateful to be remembered. She threw herself into her mother’s arms and the three of them folded down onto a patch of grass. Kate would never forget her mother’s dirty feet, the smell of salt and grass.

  “We need you to come with us to the station,” one of the officers said. “We have to make a report.”

  Kate’s mother raised herself, never letting go of Kate and Brian, and they walked to the officers’ car and got in. The station, like the motel, was white and hot, and Kate’s legs stuck to the wooden seat. A fan hummed. Brian sucked his thumb. The officer’s desktop was littered with water stains. The next morning, one of the same officers came to the motel at five o’clock, just as the sky outside the motel window was beginning to chalk. Brian still slept. Kate heard the officer. “The body was found. We need you to ID it.”

  Her mother turned and looked Kate in the eyes. She had slept in her dress and now she slipped out in her bare feet, leaving Kate with Brian, foretelling everything, as it turned out.

  When she came back her hands shook as she lit a cigarette. Still Brian slept.

  “Mama,” Kate said. She had never called her mother that and never would again. But her daddy was gone, who had been as steady as a clock all of her life. “Why did you say he wouldn’t leave?”

  “Oh, Katie,” her mother said. “I’m in shock. Can’t you tell?”

  All Kate could tell was that her mother’s yellow dress had a tear at the waist and her feet looked battered. And she could tell that what had happened would never end, not when they were back in their house, not when the welts on her arm were gone, not when she graduated from high school, never. Her mother left the room again with her coin purse and in a little while she was back with three Coca-Colas and cherry fruit pies. She woke Brian and the three of them sat on the bed and ate their breakfast.

  Now Brian lived at the coast in the beach cabin their father had purchased long ago and worked on through the years. The cabin was his inheritance, along with stock in Reynolds Tobacco Company, while Kate had the Glade Street house and the remainder of her mother’s estate from Great-aunt Jane, who was a Hanes, rich from hosiery. Though he had barely gotten through high school, Brian was now apprenticed to a builder of sailboats and they were beautiful, glossy objects. “Come home anytime you want,” she had said when she last saw him.

  Kate dropped the last fragment of her toast in the trash can. She resented feeling she must write Janet today. The friends she depended on were Mrs. Bosson, next door, whose husband had divorced her, and Mr. Fitzgerald, who lived across the park and owned an Oldsmobile and would drive Kate anywhere.

  In the kitchen, she fixed a second piece of toast, thought of James, and added a dollop of strawberry jam. I saw one solitary strawberry flower under a hedge, Dorothy Wordsworth had written one January almost two hundred years ago. Kate suspected a moment of passion. She also knew there was steel in Dorothy Wordsworth’s backbone. She gazed onto the backyard. The first morning she woke in the house after leaving James and Atlanta, she had gotten up and gone out to greet everything. She knew where the hyacinth had been in April and the crocus, too, under the dogwood. If she raked the leaves, she could conjure again that sense of connection to this square of earth. Kate pulled her hair up and fashioned a ponytail with a rubber band, making a mental note not to get into a habit of it; split ends. Her father’s old twill coat still hung on the hall rack. She’d rescued it from the shed off the patio and wore it for chores as a kind of protective armor. Kate slipped it on over her pajamas. She had always been charmed by the privacy of the backyard, each side buffered by a tall hedge of viburnum, a four-foot fence completing the enclosure along the back where the lot met the alley. One end of the alley emptied onto Forsyth Street and the other came out onto Fourth. The alley was where Kate’s father had taught her to ride a bike. My outside girl, he’d called her.

  The old rake was still in the shed. Gloves Kate didn’t find. “Oh well,” she said, feeling safe in her father’s coat, pleased with herself in the cloistered yard. Of all the books she had read growing up, she loved The Secret Garden most. She resolved to rake the leaves out of the monkey grass. Her father had put the plugs in above the retaining wall when she was small. It was one of her earliest memories. Now the clumps were huge. The phone rang in the kitchen. But by the time Kate got to it the caller had hung up. Back in the yard she let out a sigh, thinking of James. Aunt Mildred had been distressed that Kate had left him in the lurch. “A man with a good career. A man who loves you. Why?” Because I felt an undertow, she had thought.

  The leaves were wet and heavy and there were a lot of them, more than she’d anticipated. Suddenly she was much too warm. Kate pulled herself out of her father’s coat and swung it over the picnic table. She caught a whiff of her own perspiration. Like an arrow, a moment from another time came straight through to the present: her physical education class in eighth grade, running laps around the field. As Kate completed the last lap, s
he’d stumbled to the chain-link fence near the street and held on, catching her breath. The second she lifted her head, her father drove by. He didn’t see her and she had the oddest feeling that she didn’t know him, or perhaps that he didn’t know her. She never spoke of the incident.

  A movement at the back of the yard caught her eye. A strong-looking Negro fellow was striding down the alley. Kate clutched the neck of her pajama top. Perhaps he had not heard her, as her raking had ceased, or seen her either, the young Negro fellow in a jacket, carrying a bottle of milk, his head tilted forward as if he wished to avoid contact with the world. The milk bottle gleamed like a huge opal. He must have stolen it. The fellow paused, turned, and looked across the yard at her. Kate put a hand to her mouth. What if he came in her direction? The back fence was low enough to vault. But the man merely lifted the milk bottle to his forehead. Then he pressed an arm forward as if pushing aside a tree limb and disappeared up the alley toward Fourth Street.

  Kate sensed a brief thrill of danger and mystery beyond her reach. Her high school friends had grown up with Negro women who were practically their mothers, but she had not. Her father hired white boys to help with the yard. Her parents had expressed no real philosophy about Negroes and Kate had little to go on, so that when she was a freshman in high school and overheard some older girls talking about how a white girl in Durham had been raped by a nigger, she was deeply impressed in the way she might have been to hear a shark was swimming the waters of Crystal Lake. She looked for the story in the newspaper, but in Winston-Salem there was no report of it. She had only learned about sex when she was twelve and it still seemed a remote and clinical operation. The story put her on her guard and the dark man lurked in her consciousness, an abiding danger beneath the surface of her good life. This though she hardly ever saw a Negro boy in Winston. At Agnes Scott the fear was rekindled when she and her classmates were told to travel in groups if they went downtown to Rich’s. No reference to the source of danger needed to be given. They knew.

  A squirrel jumped out of a tree and Kate yelped, taking a step back toward the door. She had never before considered how close she was to the colored world. Because, after all, Negroes didn’t pass this way. She grabbed her father’s coat from the picnic table. Inside she turned the deadbolt on the kitchen door. The Negro would turn left on Fourth and go straight until he reached Broad, where he could catch a bus to any Negro part of town. Maids waited to catch the bus all the time. She wanted a confidant. Not Aunt Mildred. Aunt Mildred would say this was just more proof of how unreasonable it was for her to be in her house alone. She could just hear her: That boy could have forced his way in and how would you have stopped him? Kate shivered and hugged herself. She would shower and dress and go to the grocery to pick up something for lunch and see if more apples had come in. She locked the door of the upstairs bath. Out of the shower, she dressed quickly. Downstairs, she reclaimed her father’s old coat, picked up her purse, and walked out the front door, pulling it tight behind her.

  She had been surprised that Tacker Hart remembered her. They hardly knew each other growing up. Two years’ age difference was a chasm then. And he was practically a god in high school. She’d first seen him back in the neighborhood three months ago at Summit Street Pharmacy, buying a new razor. He looked somehow more solid but also disheveled, his hair longer than anyone was wearing it around here. His appearance had piqued her interest because he seemed a little dangerous but still attractive, like Heathcliff.

  Getting to Hart’s was all downhill, and she half ran. This morning Tacker wasn’t at the customer service counter. His absence seemed devastating. She needed a sense of connection and she needed it right now. But she rallied herself to gather a few things for lunch—tomato soup, Saltines, and cheese. At the apples display, she stopped and held a lemony Stayman to her nose. If her order wasn’t in, she would purchase a few today.

  Kate opened a brown bag and began to fill it. About halfway through she stopped and looked out the store’s front window. Yellow leaves fell like some heavenly currency. Vaguely she remembered a story from mythology about a runner who threw down golden apples to slow his opponent in a race, a woman whom he wished to love. Kate had not particularly wished to know Tacker in high school after hearing a rumor about how the football team placed bets on who would deflower the class valedictorian, a shy girl with a slight lisp.

  The Negro seemed very far off now. Maybe Tacker had not been in on that bet. But he might have been. She had prided herself on never attending a football game in high school. She looked forward to pep rallies because she had the library all to herself. She had consumed Paradise Lost in a month of pep rallies three years after her father’s death, reading from a rare illustrated copy that couldn’t be checked out. When she had left the library to see her classmates released from the assembly, she thought she had a fair sense of the difference between heaven and hell. Hell was the average, the mediocre and predictable. It was popular. Long is the way / And hard, that out of Hell leads up to Light.

  Heading to the checkout, Kate saw that Tacker had emerged from somewhere and was ringing up a customer who had enough canned goods for a year. She observed his mobile mouth as he talked, his hay-colored hair, still wildish. She was forever looking now as if she were focusing through her camera. The woman who had worked at Hart’s forever called from the other register, “Can I help you?”

  “Oh,” Kate said. “I was going to ask him about a delivery.” She motioned toward Tacker and moved a step closer to his register as the woman with the canned goods talked on and on. Recalling the Negro, Kate tapped her foot.

  When Tacker was finally free of the canned-goods customer, Kate pressed her cart up to the register. “You’re back,” he said, his face alert and open.

  “I needed a few things for lunch.” His eyes were green like sea glass. She set her groceries on the counter and he rang them up.

  “I put in your order.” He packed her items into a small brown box, then rested a hand at his belt. He had a cut on his finger, a slice like she had once made peeling tomatoes.

  “Thanks.” She shifted her weight onto one foot, touched by the minor harm to his hand. “I was surprised you remembered me. I wasn’t a cheerleader.”

  “Good for you,” he said, grinning, cracking his knuckles. It disturbed the nobler image of him she was beginning to develop.

  “What are you doing back here? I heard you’d gone abroad.”

  For a moment his face went blank. “Yeah, sort of between things at the moment. What about you? You here for a while?”

  “For as long as I want. The house is mine now.” She felt proud of herself, felt the pride strongly enough to know she could influence him if she wished to in spite of the fact that this was the second time she had come to the store in her father’s old coat. She smoothed her hair back. “I’ve been back since summer started.”

  His face lit up. “I’m renting a house on West End,” he said, coming around from behind the counter. Kate thought he might place a hand on her shoulder or even give her a hug, but he was just moving a cart. It would behoove him to ask her if she’d like to get together.

  She slipped out the door clutching her bag. A froth of leaves lifted where the sidewalk turned. Something about Tacker was different. It both vexed and enticed her. A wind whipped up the hill and she considered how James hadn’t called in two weeks, and she calculated he might be dating someone new. She felt a stitch in her side. “Remember who you are,” she whispered.

  In the night, she dreamed of a man in a white coat at the edge of her property, a milkman. He was telling her something but she couldn’t hear his voice for the wind. She woke thinking of strawberries.

  * * *

  • • •

  IN THE MANUAL for the Brick, Kate had found a note on half a sheet of typing paper. It was folded lengthwise and acted as a bookmark. She presumed the note had been made by Dr. Lovingood, but it was typed
and she couldn’t be sure. It was a passage by László Moholy-Nagy—she’d had to look him up; a Hungarian painter and photographer.

  Thus in the photographic camera we have the most reliable aid to a beginning of objective vision. Everyone will be compelled to see that which is optically true . . .

  It was the next paragraph that mattered.

  We have—through a hundred years of photography . . . been enormously enriched. . . . We may say that we see the world with entirely different eyes. We wish to produce systematically, since it is important for life that we create new relationships.

  Kate had found the sentences wonderfully strange. Was optical truth different from other kinds of truth? Would she know something truer of her parents if she discovered old pictures she had never before seen? Would she know James differently if she had pictures of him taken when he was unaware of the camera? In their dorm room, she’d read the passage aloud to Janet. “I wonder what he means by ‘produce systematically,’” Janet had said. She was putting her hair up in a beehive. Janet was five feet nine inches tall, and the hairstyle made her even taller. “Maybe photographing the same thing over and over.”

  “Yes!” Kate said.

  “But why do that?” Janet put the last bobby pin in her hair and turned around.

  “Because there will be variations,” Kate said. “From second to second, light changes. A fly lands on the vase of flowers. Get it? The next day, a petal drops. That means truth changes.”