He announces that he’s going for a swim at the pool, and would Lila mind packing up his lunch, he’ll eat it at work?
She can’t believe it. “You’re going swimming? Today, just like that?”
“The pool is practically empty.”
“Do you even own a swimsuit?” Lila asks.
“I believe I do,” he says.
Norval goes up to the bedroom and rummages in his bureau drawers. He finds a swimsuit, an old-fashioned, eighties-style suit with long legs and bright yellow and pink splotches, reminiscent of the Miami Vice days.
When he carries it downstairs she takes one look and says, “Oh my God, you’re not going to wear that. You’ll humiliate Rachelle from here to next week.”
“I don’t think the style of my suit matters.”
A look crosses Lila’s face. “You’re not doing this on purpose, are you, to punish Rachelle over last night? Because there’s no need. She spent the night at Kristen’s. Everything is fine.”
“I’m not going to punish Rachelle by going swimming,” he says.
“Because that would be childish, Norval, even for you.”
“Even for me? What in the world is that supposed to mean? I just feel like going for a swim. You’re the one who’s always telling me I need exercise.”
Lila hands him an insulated nylon lunch bag and says, “Well, that’s a switch.”
“And I hardly think that I, the hard-working bread-winner of this family, deserve to be called childish. You have no idea what I have to put up with every day, Lila.”
“Okay,” she says. “I’m sorry. Good for you. I commend you, Norval. Just don’t embarrass Rachelle. What are you taking for a towel?”
“What should I take?” Norval asks.
Lila shakes her head and goes to find him a towel. She returns with a proper beach towel. “It doesn’t match your suit,” she says as she hands it to him.
“Is that required?” he asks. “Will it work better if it matches?”
“We don’t own a towel the same colour as that suit,” Lila says. “Thank God.”
Before Norval leaves, she says, “I made arrangements for the wedding party hairstyles this morning. You have to make these arrangements well ahead of time.”
He waits for what he knows is coming.
“I’m counting on you, Norval, to take care of the church business,” Lila says.
“Not to worry,” Norval says. “I will be so invigorated after my swim that I will march over to the church and put God’s House in order.”
By the time he gets back to the pool the Dolsons and the adult swimmers have gone, and he’s amazed to find the pool is empty. He can see Rachelle standing in the shade, leafing through a magazine. She’s pulled a sleeveless orange T-shirt on over her bikini, lifeguard written on the front. Norval goes to the pool entrance and gets out his wallet to pay the girl at the ticket window.
“Slow day, eh,” Norval says to the girl as he hands her a five-dollar bill.
“No kids allowed in the pool at noon,” she says by way of explanation. “And also, you have to get out of the pool if we get a storm. It’s a rule. No one in the water if there’s lightning. You won’t get your money back, just so’s you know.”
The sky is blue, like every other day this summer, and there’s not a cloud in sight.
“I’ll take my chances,” Norval says. “But thanks for the warning.”
When Norval comes out of the change room onto the pool deck, Rachelle looks up from her magazine.
“Holy crap,” she says, staring at his suit. “What are you doing here?”
“What do you think?” Norval asks, dropping his towel on the cement.
“Can you even swim?” Rachelle asks. “Because if you can’t, you have to go in the shallow end. You have to be able to swim two widths to go in the deep end.”
“Believe me,” Norval says. “I can swim.”
He goes to the edge of the pool and wonders if he still can. He thinks about diving in but then changes his mind and lowers himself carefully into the blue water. He doesn’t want his daughter to have to rescue him. She comes to the edge of the pool and watches him. The water is surprisingly cold.
“Don’t watch too closely,” Norval says, treading water and trying to catch his breath. “I’m not an Olympic swimmer or anything like that.”
“That bathing suit is almost ugly enough to be cool,” Rachelle says.
“Tell your mother that.”
“I can’t believe she let you out of the house with it.”
Norval strikes out across the width of the pool with a stroke he used to call the Australian crawl. He wonders if they still call it that. He makes it across, but then he has to stop for a rest. He hangs on to the cement lip, breathing hard.
“Can you make it back?” Rachelle shouts. “Maybe move to the shallow end.”
Norval strikes out again and struggles back to where Rachelle is still standing.
“That wasn’t very impressive, was it,” she says. “We offer a stroke improvement class for seniors. Maybe you should take that.”
“Can I stay in the deep end or not?” Norval asks between gasps.
“I guess so.”
“Go back to your magazine, then.”
“Oh sure,” Rachelle says. “And you’ll drown and it will be my fault.” She climbs up into the chair under the umbrella.
Norval rolls over onto his back and floats. He hears the girl from the ticket window call to Rachelle, but he can’t hear what she’s saying.
Rachelle says, “Wait ’til this guy’s finished. He won’t last long.”
Norval swims a few more laps. He closes his eyes and feels the water on his body, remembers the feeling of buoyancy. He realizes that Lila is probably right, he should do something more to keep himself in shape. He swims back and forth, trying to remember how to breathe properly, and thinks about the strange reality that his irresponsible daughter is at this moment guarding his life. He remembers the time he once saved hers, when he found her hanging from the swing set in the backyard, the string ties on her sweatshirt caught somehow in the chains. He’d got there just in time. She was already turning blue. He’d sawn the swing set into pieces with a hacksaw after that, and taken it to the dump. He can still feel sick at the thought of how close they came to losing her. He felt no satisfaction in the knowledge that he’d saved her life, only terror that he might not have.
The pleasurable in life, he thinks, is never without a flip side. Sadly.
This water, that feels so good.
Vengeance
Lynn’s been angry all morning and anyone with sense is staying out of her way. Angry, as in, If I get my hands on this flirty little bitch Joni, she’ll soon see who she’s up against. All through the lunch-hour rush she’s sharp with Haley and she even has to apologize to the poor girl for making her cry over a broken cup. Lynn herself breaks a plate in the kitchen by slapping it down on the counter so hard it slides right off the other side and onto the ceramic tile floor.
When the restaurant clears and Lynn finally has time to sit by herself at a table and have a bite to eat, she thinks about how, lately, she’s been letting herself go. She was conscientious for years about doing her yoga every night, no matter how tired she was, but for . . . what? six months now? a year? . . . she’s given up on keeping in shape. And the funny thing is, she feels more self-absorbed now that she’s given up than she did when she was trying. When she gets up in the morning and looks in the bathroom mirror she sees lines and wrinkles. When she walks past the full-length mirror in the bedroom she sees a thick body without a waist. When she looks in the mirror in the washroom at the Oasis, she sees hair that is streaked with grey and badly in need of styling. And as she works away at whatever she’s doing, she puts all these glimpses of herself together into a picture of a thoroughly unattractive middle-aged woman who will never again get a compliment on her appearance, unless it’s from another middle-aged woman who understands the meaning of rela
tive. Even her daughters have noticed her declining appearance. The last time Leanne was home, she urged Lynn to join her on a spa weekend. “You look like you need one,” Leanne said. As if someone who owns a restaurant can leave for the weekend, just like that.
Lynn wishes she’d appreciated her looks more when she still had them. She keeps coming back to that little slip of paper in her pocket, and to the thought that Hank hadn’t appreciated her looks when she was young either, because if he had, what had he been doing sleeping with someone else? Is it possible that she’s wasted herself on Hank? If she’d held out that time she left him, might she have done better? Might she have met a man who was positively bowled over by her, who thought she was Helen of Troy? Well, it’s too late for that now.
By the time Lynn finishes her lunch she doesn’t know if she’s depressed or angry, and if she is angry, whether she’s mad at Hank or herself, and if she’s depressed, what she’s depressed about. Not just the slip of paper from Hank’s pocket, because the concern with her loss of looks predates its discovery. Even so, all morning long, every fifteen minutes if she could manage it, she’d gone to the phone and dialled the number on the piece of paper and then hung up. She knows her behaviour is crazy. Maybe she just wants to torment this Joni person for daring to give her husband a phone number, and for daring to be young (she has to be young: the handwriting, the loopy little circle above the i). She can just see her: Joni with her little waist and perky breasts. She hopes she has unattractive calves. Lynn used to have good, well-shaped legs.
She can’t stop herself, she keeps thinking about those years when she was at her most attractive, and they were the same years that Hank was still travelling the amateur rodeo circuit with his buddies. He was no longer a regular weekend warrior and, yes, he stayed home when there was crop to put in, hay to take off, calves to ship, an event to attend with Lynn and the girls. But she knew where his heart was, where he’d rather be if he hadn’t accepted the role of family man. Heaven to Hank was a weekend of rodeo and coming home late on Sunday night to all the benefits of marriage: Lynn’s good cooking, the adoration of his children, clean laundry and, of course, sex. The truth is, she hated those years. She was always tired from being both homemaker and Hank’s hired hand. She worried that he’d get hurt, and then where would they be? Or that he’d cave to the temptation of the rodeo groupies, of which there was no shortage, and she knew what cowboy church was for on Sunday morning. Even after Hank swore off booze and promised that rodeo for him was a good ride and a lot of hanging around the chutes with the other cowboys, the marriage was clouded by suspicion and resentment.
Until that August when Dana was eight years old and got sick with meningitis and almost died. Hank pretty much sat by her bedside until she got better, and after she was well again, Lynn had taken both girls and left for a while, went to her parents’ place. She couldn’t even tell Hank why, what was wrong, what he could do to fix things. When Lynn did go back, not too long before Christmas, she still couldn’t explain what had caused her to leave, but Hank seemed to understand. And Lynn herself had been truly regretful when she walked back into their house and saw the look of relief on his face. Instead of thinking about Hank’s weekend absences and the dalliance that had hung over their marriage for so long, she’d thought what her unhappiness had done to him. For the first time, she recognized that her own dissatisfaction with married life was not entirely Hank’s fault.
And then that same year, both of Hank’s travelling partners got married, one at Christmas and the other in the spring, and although no announcement was made, they all gave up rodeo for good and settled down to being plain old-fashioned mixed farmers with wives and children. Hank bought another quarter-section of cultivated land, and leased another of pasture so he could expand his operation. He loved his girls. Lynn believed that he loved her—that he had never stopped loving her. The night with the rodeo girl faded into a memory in the same league as high school. The threat of another woman never again reared its head.
Until today.
Lynn gathers her lunch plate and coffee cup and takes them to the kitchen, where Haley is pretty much hiding from her.
“Don’t worry,” Lynn says to her. “I’m over it. You can sweep under the tables now. Please.”
Haley grabs the broom and dustpan and hurries for the door, not believing that Lynn is over whatever was bothering her. And as Haley leaves the kitchen, Lynn stares after her, at her tiny waist and her skin-tight jeans, and thinks about how her own daughters are grown up and don’t need her any more, and once again how she’s let herself go. She can just hear the snobby town women like Lila Birch: Lynn Trass has sure let herself go, hasn’t she, too bad, she used to be quite attractive. Women like Lila go to fitness classes in fancy outfits and have treadmills in their basements. Well, who but the banker’s wife and the doctor’s wife have got time and money for that?
Obviously, she’s not over it. She goes once again to the pay phone and dials Joni’s number, lets it ring until a girlish voice says hello, and then she hangs up.
It doesn’t make her feel good to do this. It just makes her feel older, and more depressed about being older. And then this makes her want to dial the number again, and this time the voice says, “Who is this? I can trace the call, you know. If you call again, that’s what I’m going to do.”
Lynn slams the phone down. They can’t trace calls from a pay phone, can they? She thinks about how embarrassing it would be to get caught. But she’s not giving up, she’s not done with young Joni yet. She’s got a cell phone out in the car for emergencies and she’s pretty sure you can’t trace cell phone calls.
She goes to the door of the restaurant and yells to Haley, “I’ll be right back. Everything okay in there?”
“No problem,” says Haley, who thinks Lynn is acting pretty strange today, all these trips to the foyer. She followed her once and peeked through the glass door to see where she was going, and saw that she was dropping a quarter in the pay phone. Now she watches as Lynn goes to her car. She almost expects her to get in and drive away, go on some mysterious errand, but Lynn doesn’t, she gets something from the car and then walks back toward the restaurant, so Haley ducks behind the counter and makes like she’s interested in what’s under the glass. Not gum and candy bars like you might expect, but Hank’s barbed-wire collection. improved 2-point twisted, Haley reads on a card next to one of the samples of wire. Twisted is right, she thinks, and then, I come from a town where people collect barbed wire.
As Lynn comes through the restaurant door, Haley notices that she’s tracking a piece of yellow paper under her shoe, a flyer of some kind, and it drops right next to where Haley is standing, so she bends over and picks it up.
“‘The end is near,’” Haley reads out loud.
“What’s that?” Lynn asks.
“‘The end is near,’” Haley says, holding out the flyer. “That’s what it says.”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Lynn says. “Throw it out.”
Haley does. Then she goes to the washroom, and when she comes back she says to Lynn, “Do you think I have too much body fat?”
Lynn just about chokes. “You can’t be serious,” she says.
“I don’t know,” Haley says. “That’s why I’m asking. Those athlete girls—the really competitive ones—have no body fat. They don’t even have periods, I read, because they don’t have any body fat.”
“You’re not fat,” Lynn says in exasperation. She’d like to shoot the girl. Wait thirty years, she thinks, and then you’ll know for sure what body fat is. No periods and a whole lot of body fat. Just you wait.
“Anyway, I guess I’ll go now,” Haley says. “Seth is picking me up. See you tomorrow.”
Lynn watches as Haley goes outside and stands in front of the restaurant, waiting for her ride.
Haley’s replacement is late. Lynn schedules the girls so they overlap by fifteen minutes just to make sure she’s not stuck on her own, especially for the supper h
our. She’d better call now and make sure her next girl is coming—she thinks Rosemary is scheduled until closing, an extra-long shift. On second thought, there’s another call she should make first, while she’s alone. She gets out the cell phone and dials Joni’s number, but this time a voice tells her that the number is unavailable. So Joni has her phone turned off. Well, Lynn thinks, that won’t last long since phones are like oxygen to girls these days. She calls Rosemary’s home number and is told by her mother that her boyfriend picked her up half an hour ago. Rosemary’s mother wonders if something has happened.
Lynn assures her that nothing has happened. Kids, she says, they have no sense of time.
Ten minutes later Rosemary walks in the door. “Here I am,” she announces cheerily.
As though the whole world has been waiting for her.
“Call your mother, Rosemary,” Lynn says. “Let her know you’re here.”
Lynn sticks the cell phone in her apron pocket, wondering if she’s going crazy.
Somewhere Else
Shiloh Dolson is standing on the highway with his thumb out. This is a change in plan, but after he’d gone back to the schoolyard for his backpack and then returned to the swimming pool, his mother was gone. He’d checked the parking lot for her car and it wasn’t there. He thought about walking up Main Street again looking for her, but instead he walked to the western edge of Juliet with some vague notion of going to the highway construction site where his father is working.
But cars keep passing him by. He’s about to give up when, finally, a couple in a half-ton stop and a woman opens the passenger door for Shiloh to hop in. He likes the fact that she slides over on the bench seat to make room, and doesn’t expect him to get in the middle, like a kid. He puts his backpack on his knee, noticing that the seat behind them is stuffed with suitcases and boxes. The radio dial is set on the local station, a program called The Trading Post that Shiloh’s mother sometimes listens to. A man named Ernie is trying to sell an old black-and-white television. The picture doesn’t work, he’s saying, but the sound comes in clear as a bell.
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