Up Through the Water

by Darcey Steinke

  Her love of water must have started in the womb, her baby self letting up a few giggly bubbles. Later she could remember someone letting her float in water just slightly cooler than herself. Her mother'd told her she was nearly a year old when her father had held her in the lime quarry near her grandmother's house. For a few minutes he let her splash, her mother said, before Emily had closed her eyes and tried to squirm out of his grasp. Her mother had said the way she fought was the oddest thing she'd ever seen. Not in a careless baby way but with precise determined movements. From then on she'd always had an understanding with water. She loved to swim in the winter, to be thrashing in the community pool: humidity like a jungle, and the swim teacher, an old water ballet star who still wore a lavender bathing cap with big fluttery scales like a pretty fish. After the lesson she'd returned to the cold where her wet head sent up steam. Years later, Emily and her sister Sarah had paddled a canoe up at Mountain Lake. The water was a dark and earthy green. Leaves and grass treaded and unfurled near her. She saw evergreens and the cool line of water up to them. In high school there were the long baths, the weekly lap swimming at the county's pool where she'd learned flip-turns and stroked evenly from end to end. After she married she swam in the deep water hole where the cows drank. Her husband built her a floating dock and the cows would watch her sometimes, their slow eyes on her as she butterflied and breaststroked and curled underwater.

  Emily stopped a moment, treaded. With one foot, she pulled a heavy strand of seaweed from between the toes of the other. She thought of Eddie, how he hadn't said good-bye when she left the restaurant. Each night in the cottage, he turned his cheek to the pillow just as his father had. Both were lively in sleep, speaking riddles, sighing now and then. When she looked in on him, Eddie's mouth was always opened and slack. Often she got close, traced the blond hair on his chest. Daily now, she saw him shyly gaze at her. He meditated on the Gauguin posters of Tahitian women on her walls. Sometimes, flipping his head from them to her as if trying—she imagined—to push her into the South Pacific scenes. This summer his gaze fell always on her as she sunned on the beach near him, or walked from the shower.

  Her strokes lengthened: She felt light in the sea, joined to the back and forth pull of the water. Coming together with strangers, dark empty bodies moving on a bed, why did she do it? She asked herself this afterward, in the mornings, sometimes even during, eyes over a muscular shoulder.

  Emily swam away from jellyfish, clear floating flowers. She liked her limbs to ache, to nearly buckle with fatigue. She curved underwater, but before she could pull up, a current took her out a few yards. Below the surface she writhed, her hair floated and framed her face. Emily saw a grainy rush of green water, her legs kicked out, and her arms threw punches. John Berry would find out. She swallowed a little water, then came up choking. The sun beat on her hair. She calmed herself and swam on, thinking of the strokes and feeling a firmness inside her body as hard and real as stone.

  Dusk. The air was smoky, shadowed with a charcoal pencil. Leaving the beach, she walked in her yellow bathing suit, towel around her head like a turban, up the island road. Dust billowed up from the asphalt in vaulting see-through clouds. Cars passed on their way to the ferry, loaded down with Styrofoam surfboards, mini-sailboats, and beach chairs strapped to the roofs. In worn thongs she found her way over the rocks on the side of the road.

  Up ahead, John Berry's truck pulled out from Paolo's lot. She saw it like a child's matchbox car. She would sit beside him in his truck jacked up just enough to see both the soundside and the rolling waves of the beach. Emily might put her head on his lap so John Berry could stroke her hair like he did, his calloused fingertips moving over her face. Way down the beach road, beyond the gas station, beyond the campground, they would park, John Berry's headlights pointed out over the water showing a straight line of lively sea. They would swim together in the ocean, strokes like water ballet girls in perfect sync.

  He was ranting the engine, driving fast. Emily focused on his face, his eyes bolting forward, his lips pressed. The truck slammed to a stop a few yards from her.

  “I can't believe you!” he yelled.

  “What—” she said, but before she could say more she saw the bottle sail from the window, arching up slightly before hitting the fence post near her. It splintered high like water; shards of glass cut her lip, cheek, and chin. Quick blood dripped from her jawbone. She was strangely aware of the sand stuck to the back of her calves and the icy ache at her temple. She saw the small orange sand flowers in microscopic detail at her feet and the sun over the beach sinking into the water. When she looked up, John Berry's truck was way down the island road, its back lights smoldering in a smoke trail that swung back like a gray snake.

  His Walkman on, Eddie stood before the metal sink of steamy water. He was mesmerized by the waitresses running in and out of the hot kitchen. They sweated and bitched, picked up trays of Chicken Charles and Seafood Newburg. The backs of their blouses had a white line of wetness down to their skirts. He watched their bodies as they reached for corkscrews, bent for ice, and stole frosting from cakes with one finger. When no one was looking, he sang into the movable water spout. Grabbed it and sneered lyrics from the music. Eddie was letting the dishes soak, having a cigarette, listening to the messy guitar riff pulsating in his ear, and thinking about the fifteen-year-old island girl he'd met on the beach, the one with a body like a real woman.

  “Quit the rock star stuff, and get on those soup bowls,” the cook said.

  Eddie plunged the stacked bowls, crusted with clam chowder, into mountains of bubbles and warm water. This was the day he did the double shift, working from eleven when his mother left till late. “How does it look out there?” he asked the busboy, a skinny kid who ran headlong into the kitchen with the heavy trays. The busboy didn't answer right away; he set down a tray with a thud, then picked through it, looking for a leftover piece of fish or a fragment of cake. Eddie looked disapprovingly at him. The busboy was the only person with a job more disgusting than his own, and besides, Eddie only drank the wine that was left in bottles, carafes, or glasses. Even now he was light-headed, his feet not seeming to rest on the linoleum at all. “Two tables,” the busboy said finally, through a mouthful of pink shrimp.

  “Thank God,” the cook said, and smirked suggestively toward Eddie. He knew that he was worth looking at with his honey-colored tan and hair lightened by the sun. On the beach older tourist women often watched him from under their straw hats. But it was the cook, between sautéing scallops and checking baked fish, who watched inconspicuously as Eddie sang into the water spout. He'd heard the cook liked young boys, and already Neal had suggested a beach ride in his car. He described it all for Eddie: on a blanket under a full moon, passing the champagne bottle back and forth, the calming swish of water around them.

  The bubbles tickled Eddie's fingers. He thought how he and the island girl were meeting on Wednesday at Paolo's. She had brown hair, a little like the hair of the one waitress he liked. The waitress was a college girl, tan as wheat bread, who teased him, said he was a punk rocker, and in leaning to pick up an ashtray or a cream pitcher, sometimes pressed her chest to his. For a moment he pictured being with her on the beach under the stars. They'd sip beer and kiss wetly in the roar of the waves.

  He dropped a plate.

  Quickly taking up a broom, Neal said, “Get your mind off that waitress; she's got herself a college boyfriend.” As he swept up the scattered pieces, Eddie saw that he had on black eyeliner. Never on the beach, but sometimes at the island bar, Neal appeared in drag; gold false eyelashes, a silver tear pasted right below his left eye, and earrings that he said once belonged to his mother.

  Eddie brushed the white ceramic pieces into the dustpan. He hadn't worked before, and already he could tell it would add a pleasant hang-dog quality to the personality of the summer. His mother had gotten him the job, and yesterday, when he'd come into the restaurant, he overheard her talking to herself while rolling
dough into strips: “This one is John Berry,” a shortish, thick strip; “This is Daniel,” a slightly longer, bent piece; “And this is that tourist who was here last week from Georgia,” a thinnish strip like a hot dog.

  The owner stumbled in to pick up the petty cash. A fly landed on his sweaty brow, and he picked up the swatter and went after a group of flies by the back door. He swung carelessly, did pirouettes, and finally tried to grab each waitress by the waist as she ran into the kitchen.

  “Drunk again,” Eddie's waitress whispered in his ear. She shook her head.

  Rejected by the girls, he reached for a fly in a spot of old ketchup high on the wall, leaped up, and swung, knocking down a stack of clean dishes.

  “Fuck!” Eddie said, hearing the crash and taking off his headphones.

  “What did you say?” the owner said.

  Eddie was silent. The owner reeled, his belly spilling over his belted jeans. The busboy and Neal watched from their sections of the kitchen.

  “What!” the owner screamed right in Eddie's face; his cigarette-liquor breath made Eddie wince.

  “Fuck!” he said louder.

  “That's probably what your mother is doing right now,” the owner said, grinning, spit catching in his beard. After a minute he got the rum for the cakes down from the shelf and left, bent over like a troll, through the back screen door.

  Eddie pulled on his blue rubber gloves and put his hands in the warm water.

  The cook came over and said, “He's just an old brute.”

  “I know,” Eddie said, looking at the wall, concentrating as if some message might appear there in the dull paint.

  “Some people have nothing in the way of manners or respectability, and they don't want you to have any either.”

  Eddie wanted to respond, but he knew that if he opened his mouth, he would start to cry. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his black T-shirt. Down in the water, his hands felt only the steak knives. It was 100 degrees plus on his side of the kitchen. The metal dishwasher was doing champagne glasses and ice buckets; steam rose from the cracks. The noise and heat that encased him were suddenly soothing, and Eddie's back relaxed.

  In Tennessee things were different. His father had a little farm and a new wife. She was small—perfectly formed, but tiny. She canned vegetables: tomatoes floating easily in round jars, peaches in syrup aging to a deep orange. She made wheat bread in even-sized loaves. His father did a bit of farming, but mostly he rented out equipment: yellow tractors and reaping machines. He wore a John Deere baseball cap. Eddie's stepmother taught Sunday school and baked ferociously for church sales. Life with them was easy. They came to his wrestling matches and sat quietly in the bleachers while he struggled on the mat. Afterward, they took him for french fries. Eddie's life had seasons like the two halves of an apple: the calm months with his father and the summer ones here on the island.

  The waitress pushed the swing door into the kitchen. “Sorry about that,” she said, walking to him.

  “It doesn't matter,” Eddie said. “He was drunk.” If she touched him, Eddie would cry. He felt like the schoolboy who falls at recess whose mother later asks about the bruise on his knee.

  “Some stuff should be left alone,” she said.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling a flutter in his throat, something rising from his stomach like a gray luna moth.

  The cook yelled, “Order up, sugar.” The waitress turned from the sinks. Eddie watched her gather the entrées on a tray, put a piece of parsley on each, carefully hoist it up to her shoulder, and make her way out the doors to the dining room.

  “He should be shot for doing a thing like that to you,” the cook said above the whir of fans and dishwashers.

  Eddie thought of his mom, tanned dark like an Indian. Sometimes she taught windsurfing on the sound. She screamed instructions at tourists from a little rowboat. Eddie would be riding his bike around the island inlet to the small game room at Paolo's and he would hear her voice faintly over the water. “Terrific. You have it. Maybe steer more with your hands. Lean to the left. You have it. Just go now. Go.” Eddie liked the thin lines around his mother's eyes and the fine hairs he could see all over her face in certain light. She knew things about living, about how to live. Eddie liked the posters in her cottage of brown women with fruit baskets on their heads or others with red flowers in their hair. They were round and soft, not like real girls. He saw the scenes warm up and move, his mother among the tropical women. There was one poster over the toilet that he didn't like. Young girls near his own age, but in front of them was this guy with a rust, nearly red beard, and eyes as clear as tap water. Each time Eddie peed into his mother's beige toilet he tried staredowns, gazing into the guy's eyes, waiting for him to blink or flinch.

  Eddie walked out to the back porch to have a cigarette, trying to figure out where his mother might be now. The first night spent in her house was always awkward: he tossed and turned, unused to the sand grains which inevitably gathered in the sheets, bothered by the night sounds of katydids and the strong wind off the water. But worse was the fact that she slept, or didn't sleep, in the next room. This season he knew right off when he saw her at the bus station that she was somehow different from before: more restless and flittering. Over a seltzer and lemon at a restaurant, as Eddie told her about the year's happenings in Tennessee, they'd watched the pink beach heather dropping from the glass vase on the table. She brushed the yellow rind with her fingertip and Eddie realized then how much he'd missed her. He'd wanted to tell her how on the bus he watched the wet highway throw up a shine and how with his eyes closed he'd listened to the tires treading in the rain. He wanted to explain how just after midnight, a reading light a few rows back clicked on and he'd seen his outline in the bus window. Two things would happen this summer—his glassy self spoke—you will tell your mother what you think she should do. The lips paused and then smiled—and you will get laid. Now, in Tennessee this would be impossible, for a face to tell you how to act. But in the summer on Ocracoke, things were uneven, malleable, even magic. The reading light went out, the image vanished, and he'd thought of this till the swoosh of the bus wipers sent him again into sleep.

  He watched the heat lightning—some flashes, other times thin veins spidering down from the sky. Yesterday at dinnertime he'd been quiet. His mother had told him, “You're a grown man. You should know how life works. I didn't raise you in the dark.” She expected him to be tolerant of her ways and he tried to be. But sometimes he felt confused and he knew that then he seemed disapproving.

  The moon was edging higher in the already star-bright sky. He'd always thought that his mother was moon and his father sun. Tennessee was the day: definite and bright. His father spoke straight. Chores. School. Wrestling. The island was night: blued with darkness, charged with a wavering mystery below his moon of a mother. Every year was just one day. The long day, always troubled with dreams of the island night. Then summer when at the most incoherent times he held on to Tennessee days.

  He was waiting for Neal to bring him the soup pots and baking pans, and heard him putting some into the sink now. He flicked his cigarette into the matted grass behind the restaurant and shivered. Early June, with its blue days and chilly, two-blanket nights, was always his favorite time on the island. There was a feeling of something forming—things coming together so the summer could begin.

  As he entered the kitchen, the waitresses were perched on counters greedily counting their tips; each had a jar with her name on it.

  Eddie's favorite waitress went out to the cooler to get jugs of wine to restock the shelf. As he swung open the door, he saw her sitting on two cardboard boxes of crab legs. The cold was a dream. He saw her nude in a block of ice, her body pale and taut, arms outstretched, eyes sleepy. Among the canned pineapples and cold seafood, Eddie knew this was his chance. He could take her, they would lie down, heads resting on the linen tablecloths full of lettuce.

  But she wouldn't look at him and he reached for the handle.
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  “No,” she said, stay, it's just that I have to work again in the morning, and I'm so sick of asking people how they want their eggs.”

  Eddie didn't know how to answer her.

  She handed him two large jugs of red wine and she carried two white. “Let's get out of here,” she said turning, making a figure eight with her hips.

  They were all in the front seat of the white Dodge Dart, upholstery spilling out, crumbling like old pieces of cake on the floor. Green light from the radio. The waitress's shoulders pressed against Eddie.

  “I want to see the moon,” the waitress said. “Let's stop at the dock.”

  Neal laughed. “Honey, if the moon is what you want . . .”

  As they slowed to a stop, gravel squeezed against the tires. Eddie got out and leaned against the right front headlight. The moon was a capital O in the carbon-paper sky. The waitress sat on the hood, knees to her chest. Her eyes were closed: They were dark and slightly sunken like a blind person's.

  “How can you stand it all year?” she asked the cook, who lounged on the front seat, legs hanging out the window.

  “You get used to it,” he said, a cigarette dangling from his bottom lip.

  “You could get used to living in mud,” Eddie said. He lobbed gravel from the parking lot into the sea.

  The water glittered. Tourist sailboats rocked. He followed a sea gull, just a thin line like a hair on paper.

  “This island isn't different from anywhere else,” Neal said. “We move around as much as anybody. It's the small things really.”

  Eddie examined the slack skin of his fingertips; his hands were like an old person's. “The hazards of dishwashing,” he said, holding them up, pressing the air flat against his palms.