by K. L. Cook
“I decided to walk,” she said. “It was pretty out. Mr. Letig’s going to bring it over tomorrow.”
“Everything go okay?” he asked, a worried crinkle in his forehead.
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re shaking.”
He was right. She was shaking. She hadn’t realized it. She crossed her arms and rubbed her hands over her shoulders. “It’s a little cold.”
“Seems warm to me. You feeling okay?”
“I’m just tired.”
He pushed his glasses up. “Listen to this,” he said and thumbed back through his book.
“I’m really tired, Dad,” she said.
He held his hand out. “Come here and let me see if you have a fever.”
“I’m fine,” she said, stepping around him. “I just want to go to bed.”
“Well, okay, then,” he said, shrugging. “See you in the morning.”
“G’night,” she said.
“Love you,” he said by rote, his head already back in his book.
11
Easter Again
A month passed without her seeing the Letig family. It was a busy month. Spring break was over, and the rush and daily chores of school and home left the weeks short on leisure. Classes were behind because of the winter snows, the principal said, so the students had to attend school three successive Saturdays so that the summer break would not be compromised. At Easter, Laura’s family visited Aunt Velma near Amarillo, as usual, but Velma was not in good health, and Laura felt irritable and distracted while she was on the farm for the long weekend.
Aunt Velma had suffered a small stroke, which had put her in the hospital for a week. She was home now, insistent on doing her work, but there was a slur to her speech, a cobweb of spittle at the corners of her mouth, and she limped slightly. Her arms twitched oddly, and vases and other fragile items were endangered and had to be moved. Aunt Velma had somehow managed to cook a huge meal for them (fried chicken, potato salad, cucumbers in a sour cream sauce), but there were no trips into Amarillo, no movies at the Paladian Theater, no nothing. Everybody just stuck on the farm.
Women from the church had been staying at the house, caring for Velma, but Mr. Tate said they wouldn’t be needed while he and the kids were there, and he assumed, as usual, that Laura would just do the work. She was enlisted to help her aunt with her baths, to escort her to the toilet. She resented these tasks. Aunt Velma didn’t really want the help, though she needed it. Laura wanted the old Aunt Velma back. This woman seemed like a frail, weathered, half-addled version of herself.
Part of Laura’s irritation had to do with the woman’s body. Aunt Velma liked to wear long work dresses or long-sleeved shirts, so her skin had never been that exposed. It shocked Laura to see her naked in the bathroom. Her skin was the color of cottage cheese, with a curdled texture and bruises (from falling) of varying shades—purple, blue, yellowish green. Never a skinny woman, she’d always been thick but robust. Now she seemed fat, and in her nakedness the exposed wrinkles and wattled flesh turned Laura’s lips down and made her squint. Velma’s gray hair floating in the tub of water, the unhealthy folds of flesh…Laura tried to look away, but the image stayed as a negative in her mind. She could taste the sneer on her lips, and she did not like this in herself. It felt sad and unseemly and at times sickening in a way that made her lose her appetite.
It wasn’t her aunt’s fault, she knew. She loved Aunt Velma, she did, but she grew weary, just in their short stay here, of having to remind herself of that fact. The whole farm seemed to be indicative of Velma’s age, ill health, and inattention. Gray sheets of paint over the barn were splintering. Everywhere she turned, it smelled like manure—dog crap, cow crap, chicken crap, pig crap. Inside the house, it didn’t smell much better. She was used to Aunt Velma’s house exuding a freshly baked cobbler or fried okra smell. Now it reeked of Mentholatum. Dust, like a layer of sheep’s wool, clung to the furniture, and she kept pulling, in frantic swipes, spiderwebs from her face. Even the beds and couches and chairs seemed to be full of dust. She tossed her copy of Julius Caesar onto the living room couch, and a cloud rose above it.
She helped her aunt and kept her mouth shut. But her father told her twice, “Quit that frowning. She can’t help it.”
At one point, Aunt Velma slipped in the tub and pulled Laura in with her. Both of them screamed, and her father and Manny were suddenly there, opening the door, and helping Laura out of the water. The sight of the naked woman, her breasts sagging and chewed-looking, the folds of fat, the frail ugliness exposed to her father and brother, made Laura turn away in an angry spasm of embarrassment. Once her father saw the situation, he dismissed her brother, but not before Manny’s face contorted in disgust, and he looked at Laura as if she were to blame, not just for the fall but for this moment of shameful exposure. She had the fierce, sudden impulse to slap him. As if this was what a woman was. As if this was what it all amounted to.
She can’t help it, you idiot, she wanted to spit.
And so, alone, in a room upstairs, or downstairs in the wooden rocker, which didn’t seem to be a breeding ground for dust and dirt, she found herself alternately angry, contemplative, ashamed, and sleepy. She tried to do her homework—a geology report and geometry worksheets and reading the interminable Julius Caesar, which had a good enough plot, but half the time she didn’t know what in the world they were saying. She tried to read it aloud as Mrs. McFarland had instructed them to do—ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum, ta-dum—but she lost all track of the meaning when she did that. And soon enough she would be staring out the window, wishing she were back in Charnelle, sitting with Marlene and Debbie at their favorite table on the far end of the school cafeteria at lunch, or making fun of Dean Compson with them at 4-D’s, or walking with an excited dread down the Letigs’ street on her way to school, hoping she might catch a glimpse of him leaving in his pickup.
She had been trying to decide whether she ever wanted to see John Letig again. That Saturday night, several weeks ago, after she got home from his house and the trestle, she started to go to bed, but her two younger brothers were in the room, and all she could smell on herself was him, that pungent, smoky smell. She touched her stomach, and she could still feel him there like a scar. She grabbed fresh underwear and a nightgown, darted to the bathroom, and scrubbed herself in soapy water. Rinsing afterward, she resolved that this was it; it wasn’t worth it. She’d had her little thrill, and so had he, but that was it. No real damage had been done, nobody knew, nothing terrible had happened. She’d kissed other boys anyway, and felt them against her at dances, and this wasn’t that different. If it stopped now, then everything would be all right. Besides, what had happened at his house that night spooked her. She had tried to slow him down, to stop him, but she hadn’t, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to. She wasn’t sure of anything. It all felt too out of control. Be done with him. She could almost hear Gloria say those words. And what if her father found out, or Manny, who seemed to suspect her of everything? It could be terrible. She remembered how angry her father was when Gloria eloped with Jerome. It was good they were both out of the country by the time he found out, or he would have gone after Jerome; he was that enraged.
She’d been working over this problem for weeks. The Monday after spring break she was glad to be back at school, where her friends were, and where she could be the unassuming girl she’d been a week and a half before, nonchalant with the boys—ordinary, really. But by midweek she began thinking of him again. In geology, as they were making a topography map out of oatmeal paste, she closed her eyes for just a second and felt again the sensation of being lifted in the dark, his heavy presence on top of her, her anxious excitement. Other times she would close her eyes and would see him with a sash of snow on his shoulder, or licking the droplets of beer off his blond mustache, or the way, when she had asked him what he wanted to eat, he smiled and said—not in a lurid manner, there was something openly lovely about his expression—“Whatever you
’re making.” But then she would forget him again, and the thought of them together seemed foreign, more like an incoherent dream than a memory, and her own yearning felt remote, like it belonged to someone else.
And so the weeks between spring break and Easter had gone like that, back and forth between what she felt she ought to do and what she, well…felt.
Here at the farm, in the musty sickness of Aunt Velma’s house, she had wanted to drift back to those memories, but suddenly everything associated with the body seemed ugly and bruised, dusty and foul-smelling. And the old woman’s body struck Laura as a contorted image of her own, a malignant trick with a fractured mirror.
Best to be done with it. And she finally started to believe it. Under the covers at night, she drifted off to sleep with the self-satisfaction of a sinner determined to sin no more. And the next day it was as if what had happened with John hadn’t happened. She didn’t even think about it.
On Easter Sunday, Aunt Velma didn’t feel well enough to go to church, which was a relief to everyone, though no one said so. Mr. Tate said they needed to be getting back to Charnelle. He arranged for one of Velma’s neighbors to check on the farm, and he called the woman from church to tell her they were leaving soon and that Aunt Velma needed someone to look in on her.
That morning, before breakfast, Laura found an old photograph album, the exposed binding lined in dust. She wiped it with a cloth and flipped through it. Her family didn’t own a camera. Strangely, they had no family pictures. The only one she remembered was the framed one of her parents’ wedding day, and her mother had taken that. Aunt Velma came in, sat down beside her, and began to narrate the story of the pictures. There were Velma and Uncle Unser, not long before he died, with his scissored hands. There were Velma’s old mother and father, not long before they died. Uncle Unser’s brother and his wife.
In the middle of the book, there was a stunning photograph of a couple standing by a large expanse of water. Laura didn’t recognize them. A handsome young man, smiling, wearing one of those full-bodied men’s bathing suits, his hair slicked back, a pencil-thin mustache like Clark Gable’s. His skin pale but muscled. Beside him was a beautiful, dark-haired woman in a long, body-hugging swim dress, her figure as shapely as old Life photos of Lana Turner or Betty Grable. The woman’s head was thrown back in high-spirited laughter.
“Who’s that?” Laura asked.
Aunt Velma peered at the photograph, rolled her tongue around as if she had something mealy in her mouth that she wasn’t sure she liked.
“Hmmm. Who is that?” she echoed and ran her hand shakily over the photograph, rested her crooked index finger on the man’s body. She laughed suddenly. “Oh, yes, that’s Unser and me. Ha! Right before we got married. In Mobile. No, no, no. Corpus Christi. Imagine that.”
“Really,” Laura said, surprised, taking the photograph from her. She studied it. Yes, she could see them buried deeply inside the faces, though not the bodies, of those people. It was bewildering.
“You were beautiful,” Laura breathed and handed back the photograph. She wondered if that was the right thing to say. It seemed faintly like an accusation. And now look what you’ve become! Wasn’t that the implication? But how to correct it? Best to say nothing more.
Aunt Velma just held the photograph close to her eyes again for a long time. She ran her fingers lovingly over the man’s body and then the woman’s, and shook her head and smiled to herself. Laura felt that Velma was remembering a private moment. It was as if Laura wasn’t even there.
12
Lake Meredith
In mid-May, a few weeks before school was out, Anne Letig had to go to Borger for several days because her mother had sprained her ankle. She took the boys with her. Laura heard about this from her father when he got home from work. The phone rang later that evening, and when Manny picked up the receiver, he shook his head and returned it to the cradle.
“Who was it?” Laura asked.
“Hung up.”
The next morning she left early for school, walked by the Letig house, saw his truck there, and knocked nervously on the door. The street was busy with activity—people opening their doors, kids in and out of houses. When he answered, wearing his undershirt, his hair floppy and wet-looking, he raised his eyebrows and smiled.
“Come in.” She shook her head. An old man across the street was out front with gardening shears. “Okay,” he said.
“Did you call last night?” she asked.
“I hoped you’d know it was me. Wait here.”
He disappeared into the house. She stood, fidgeting, on the porch. She smiled at the man across the street. He smiled back. After a few minutes, John returned with an old maroon sweater in his hand. Mrs. Letig’s.
“Here, take this.”
“Why?”
“So Grampa over there thinks you have a reason for being here. There’s a note inside. Tell me thank you and that you’re sorry for the inconvenience.”
She felt confused. “What?”
“Just say loudly, ‘Thank you’ and ‘Sorry.’”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Louder,” he whispered.
“Thanks. Sorry for the inconvenience.”
“Tell your father I said thanks too,” he said normally.
“I will.”
He winked at her. “Bye, now,” he said, and shut the door. She turned and put the sweater in her satchel. A piece of paper fell out, and she reached down, grabbed it, and walked quickly, but not too quickly, along the street. She wanted to run. When she had gone a block, she unfolded the note.
TELL YOUR FATHER YOUR SLEEPING OVER WITH A FRIEND ON FRIDAY AND SATURDAY. SOMEBODY HE WONT WONDER ABOUT. BRING CAMPING CLOTHES. BRING BATHING SUIT. LAKE MEREDITH. COME TO MY HOUSE THROUGH THE ALLEY. TEAR THIS INTO SMALL PIECES AND FLUSH IT DOWN THE TOILET!
He had not signed it, not even his looping initials. She read it again, noting the misspelling of “you’re” and the lack of apostrophe in “won’t.” She clutched the note tightly. She walked to school, went into a stall in the bathroom, and peeled the note from her sweaty palm. She read it again. And again. Two girls came into the bathroom, chattering. She waited until they left. She wanted to save the note, his handwriting. But she slowly tore it into small pieces. The ripping seemed to thunder in the bathroom. She made sure that no sentence could be read, and then the pieces fluttered from her hand into the water and floated there, the blue ink fattening on the pages. She flushed and watched it swirl away. Evidence. Gone.
Once, when she was twelve, she, Manny, and Gloria swam across a huge stretch of Lake Meredith. “Come on!” Gloria had shouted, and Laura and Manny dove in after her.
They just kept going and going. Laura expected they would turn back, but then they were halfway across the lake, and Gloria and Manny were ahead of her. Laura was a good swimmer, but every year the lake had to be dragged for bodies because two or three people would try to swim it and would cramp up or get hit by a boat or caught in the currents. She remembered worrying, as she thrashed after her brother and sister, if something horrible like that might happen to them, but she just kept on swimming, staying as close to them as she possibly could.
They waited for her at one point, treading water near the middle, and when she reached them, Gloria asked, “You okay?”
She nodded, sputtering water from her mouth.
“Too late to turn back now,” Gloria said, smiling. “Pace yourself. I’ll keep an eye on you.”
And then they were off again, this time in a slower rhythm so she wouldn’t fall too far behind. Her arms felt heavier and heavier. Twice boats whizzed by, maybe fifty feet from them, not head-clunking distance, but swimming through the wakes was hard, and a coughing fit seized her once when she swallowed water. Every few yards she would stop and see how far she had to go. Her legs felt so weary. She saw Gloria ahead, on her back, facing the sky. She turned over like her sister did, blinked water from her eyes, squinted into the glare of the sun, and floated
, scissor-kicking so she’d make some progress. She finally got her wind back and turned over, but the shore still seemed too far away.
Her mother had once told her that drowning was the best way to die. Not nearly as awful as it seemed. Actually quite pleasant. It was a long time ago. They were at Lake Meredith then, too. Rich wasn’t born yet, and Gene was only a toddler, playing in the sand under an umbrella. Manny and Gloria were chicken-fighting with two friends in the water, and her father was fishing. Laura and her mother were in the shallows so they could keep an eye on Gene. Her mother lay on her back, her blond hair fanning out in the water like a painting of a dead woman Laura had once seen in an art book—just the pretty, barely wrinkled mask of her face floating above the surface, her eyes closed to the sun, her arms outstretched.
“Your lungs just fill up,” her mother said. “You think it’s amazing that you’re breathing water, and then you’re dead.”
The thought terrified Laura, both then and now. Her choking earlier had panicked her. She didn’t want to breathe water; she didn’t want to drown. Each time it sloshed into her mouth, she spit it out immediately, fearing that she might lose the ability to distinguish water from air, and then she’d go under. It wasn’t much farther, not much more, and finally she just closed her eyes and mindlessly windmilled until she paddled past the point where she could stand up.
When she opened her eyes again, Gloria and Manny were there beside her, the water just above their kneecaps, each of them with an arm hooked under hers. They heaved her to a standing position. Laura’s legs were rubbery, unable to support her body. Gloria and Manny helped her to the bank, where they all collapsed and lay staring into the sky, now overcast. Or was it almost night? Had it taken them all day to swim across the lake? She felt like she might throw up.