Up Through the Water

by Darcey Steinke

  John Berry stood above the deck, his beige windbreaker making an empty rustle. He watched them talk. In the solitude of swishing wind and water he rehearsed his speech to her. Lines he'd written on scraps of paper for a month formed themselves on his lips.

  A light in the van went on and the hippie got out and walked starboard like a drunken Indian against the wind. John Berry bolted to the deck, passed a line of orange preservers on the white wall, and paused at the van's door.

  She saw not what she expected—Birdflower back to draw her into the big pink sky—but John Berry, and her hands went up to cover her face from the memory of the bottle and the glass spindrift. He got in and she pressed her body against the door. Through her fingers she saw him in long fractures.

  ‘'I'm sorry,” he said.

  She lowered her hand. Seeing the cuts, he reached to her temple and brushed the tiny speckled ones shaped like seeds. She flinched, and he took his hands back and rested his forehead—rough hair everywhere—on the wheel. “I want to come home,” he whispered. Wind sputtered through the windows.

  “Well, you can't.” She heard her voice reverberate off the front window, the floor, and the bucket seats.

  “Please,” he said.

  She shook her head. “Too much has happened.”

  “Bullshit,” he said.

  “Get out,” she said in a tired voice.

  He placed a hand on her face. With his fingertips he stroked the curve of her neck, and made her ease and press against his hand. “Let me come back,” John Berry said.

  Emily didn't answer. His hand firmed around her neck, and he said it again slowly. She rolled her head.

  “I might kill you,” he said and opened the door, all the time thinking, What is this? what now? "Those scars,” he said. “One for every man.”

  Birdflower watched John Berry run from the van into the metal archway and down into the bowels of the boat. He saw Emily's startled face through the glass and knew he should give her a moment. John Berry's rounded shoulders had looked like his own. It was as though he had watched himself scurry away. Her past lives moved and changed, spit out stories, made her wild some days and quiet some nights. The curtains which somehow delineated past and present would part and from the backstage of her life a player would come to add some scattered scene.

  Birdflower opened the van door. His hands moved across the eternity of the front seat. Their fingers meshed and she pulled him back in.

  * * *

  John Berry's ears rang. It was the way he thought atom bombs would sound: a falling hiss then a long tone signaling the end. Behind his temples he felt a red ache which sent thin spears of color to his eyelids. He kept forgetting if he loved her or hated her. Ahead, the van circled Silver Lake inlet and rattled out of sight. They're going to the long-hair's house. John Berry slowed. “Let ‘em,” he said. “Let ‘em get stoned and eat wheat crackers.”

  He flipped the wheel and headed down the sand road, thinking up confrontations. She never spoke, just came in and stood there with the corners of her mouth set and her hands dangling as if weightless and blown against her thighs.

  In her driveway he turned off the engine and left the truck. The air smelled early. The screen door banged behind him. Everything was as it had been. He moved through the house, stopping at each doorway. He paused at her bedroom. Through the branches of a hunchback cedar, leaf-light moved on the pillow and the bed made with a crazy quilt: thunder-shaped patches of red flannel and heart-like pieces of men's dress pants. The same posters of black girls with flowers in their hair and palm trees and huts behind them. He rested on the bed. Collected in a box near the door were his razor, belt buckle, and flashlight. He thought of her quite casually picking up something of his—maybe the ivory-handled brush—and begin to move the bristles through her hair, but the handle would heat up as she realized it was his, and she'd drop it and kick it over to the box, get a rag, and carefully, holding it away from her body, put it in.

  On the bed he found the way he liked to sleep best, one arm behind her head and the other snuggled under her waist. He scanned the room from his cheek-flat position. His blue pants, a pair he had trouble getting into, were slung over the chair. The hippie wears them, he thought. He sat up, went to the dresser, and began dumping drawers. He saw her, in the doorway, then on the bed. With one hand he whipped across the dresser, spraying her perfume, hair combs, and creams against the wall. He thought he saw her face in the mirror and her image moving in photos stuck along the edge. Her lips were telling him things she didn't know, listing his secrets, his crazy thoughts. Faster, her voice high now, hissing into a sound like rushing water. With his teeth he tore a hole the size of his fist between the legs of her pants.

  “Hey,” Eddie said from the doorway. “What are you doing?”

  “I came to get my stuff,” John Berry said.

  “You gave my mother scars.”

  “And you better believe she gave some to me.”

  “You could have killed her,” Eddie said.

  John Berry pulled the quilt off the bed and stuffed it into the pillowcase. “Get out of my way,” he said as he threw the bag over his shoulder.

  “You're a prick,” Eddie said.

  At first impulse John Berry held a hand up to slap him, but he saw Eddie was shaking and he moved around the boy. The bright light from the door gave them both grainy auras, made their movements seem blurry and slow. He walked out of the house, one foot on the shaded cement steps, then the other on the next, and out across the yard. He climbed inside his truck and started the engine.

  “She's better than all of you,” Eddie screamed from the porch.

  As John Berry turned from the loose sand driveway onto the gravel road, he watched the boy in the rearview mirror. Eddie was leaning against the cottage, sliding down like a water drop on glass, his arms wrapped around himself.

  Feeling sorry now, John Berry pushed the horn and raised his hand. He waved, waited, but Eddie would not look up. He felt angry at Eddie. His face reddened, he pressed the gas pedal and spun out, throwing up pebbles into the morning sky.

  TWELVE

  THE VEGETABLE TRUCK

  It was too early in the day for mosquitoes, but Emily could see the rain puddles quivering irregularly with the laying and hatching and hovering of them. All night it had rained, at one point so hard she'd been sure water would puddle around Birdflower's door, and she'd gotten up heavily, still tired from the drive back from Norfolk, and stuffed rags underneath the edges. The mosquitoes sometimes got so bad after a storm that the park service sprayed. A ranger drove around a truck that shot out intermittent streams of pink smoke that settled on everything and smelled like a mix of perfume and ash.

  She walked up the beach road, toward the spot where the vegetable truck parked. She wanted strawberries, had wanted them for months. Each week the man promised he'd have some next time, and would try selling her blueberries or bruised raspberries. Once even a stray bag of cranberries. Emily leaned up against the farthest end of the pony pen, near the road. She put a leg behind her on a rung. Haze was burning off the highway and she could see triangles of sun on the water at the horizon.

  The vegetable man always reminded her of Daniel. To her he looked like the actor in the movies who was always the leading man's best friend, the one with more integrity and sensitivity than the lead, just a bit sloppier and more vulnerable.

  Daniel had stayed in bed late on the weekends and drank wine with her. Once he made her a necklace out of tobacco seeds and he always dried some rose petals from the front bushes for her bath. He said that it was only because of her that he could farm, that otherwise he would have been a teacher or a minister.

  She half believed someday it would be Daniel asking her if she wanted green grapes or red ones. Maybe that was why she was always the first, able to choose the loveliest of everything. Though sometimes, self-conscious of the island women whispering around her, she'd intentionally buy bruised peaches, browned bananas, lettuc
e that would soon be worthless. She knew what they were saying, in their patterned housedresses and awkward hairdos. That she was a poor mother and untrue to the people who were stupid enough to love her. The kinder ones might say she was confused, scattered, that she had been disillusioned early, and that this life was the best she could manage.

  Every few years there'd be a guy who thought he could really figure her out. “You seem like a person who's been hurt badly,” he'd say. And she told him, no, she'd just come to the conclusion sooner than most, that absolute happiness wasn't possible. The husband, baby, house formula didn't figure and she'd decided that if she couldn't be happy she'd at least do what she wanted. Emily would further explain that absolute despair wasn't possible. They'd always relent for a while before telling her she seemed distant. Not distant physically, they never meant that. They just couldn't understand her lack of interest in their educated intellects, in their world travels. She could count the Indo-China stories she'd heard, Malaysia with a French girl who wore her hair short and had a pair of little round John Lennon glasses. The tattered children in Costa Rica, the way when you were robbed in Latin America they even took your half bar of soap, and how in Berlin the Germans yelled at you to get back if you attempted to cross before the red walking man changed to green. She remembered how she would block them out by listening to her irises knock thickly against the house.

  The ferry horn sounded, and minutes later, the vegetable truck appeared, small and blurry up the highway. It looked good beating back the telephone poles. Today there would be strawberries and she would walk back with them along the beach, stopping at a stretch across from Sugar Creek. There the water swung up in a half ellipse and smoothed the sand to a curve as fine as skin. These highs and lows reminded her of the hip, thigh, and stomach of some contorted giant. And she would sit there, snuggled into that lovely passage between groin and upper thigh, and eat her strawberries, cut them thin as petals with the pocket knife she carried and lay each slowly on her tongue.

  THIRTEEN

  NUDE MOON

  Pouring rain. Emily held a newspaper over her head. It sagged at the edges like a nun's habit and gray ran off in lines down her fingers. As she walked barefoot back from the beach through deep puddles, sand stuck to her ankles in delicate, lace-like patterns. In the drier inner landscape of her mind, Emily thought about lies. Rain shook the leaves. She had always lied easily, switched fact for fiction, embroidered stories with her own thread. It wasn't really lying though, just her physical knowledge of cycles; a vague familiarity with events that had yet to happen. She believed in omens and often waited before doing things for signs of weather. It was important to recognize an indigo sky, the few clouds at noon collecting into definable shapes, or the late afternoon mist, which reminded her of time, lapse film of seeds sprouting and most specifically that moment when seedlings threw off the dust on their new leaves and grew toward the sky.

  Emily let the paper fall to the porch. Through the rain she saw the beach towels and bathing suits soaked on the line outside and water pounding down from the gutters. In the kitchen she turned the spigot on, bent down, and drank. Water blown through the screen door had gathered in puddles around the floor.

  He had been here. She looked into the bedroom. Below the windows, rain dripped into drawers dumped out and scattered.

  “Eddie,” she called, then ran to his empty room. She walked quickly back to her bed. A car lumbered past. She pressed her spine against the wooden headboard, drew her knees to her chest.

  Evening was coming on fast. The rain beat a hectic rhythm on the roof. Shadows of water melted and moved like a lava lamp over the walls. She ran her tongue over a childhood scar on her knee. It tasted oddly tinny and the tissue was pinker, the color of cooked salmon and slightly raised like braille.

  She lifted her head and looked around the room. In her closet, a triangle was torn from the crotch of a pair of pants. Emily carefully walked over and turned on the overhead light. It made each scattered object impossibly real. Flipping the light off, she stood in the doorway and watched the shifting shadows.

  “Mom,” Eddie yelled from the kitchen.

  Emily moved toward him. “What did he say to you?”

  “Nothing,” Eddie said. He placed a hand on Emily's back. He hummed from deep in his stomach to try to calm her.

  “Tell me what he said.”

  “I don't want to talk about it,” Eddie said, moving his hand up and into her hair. Emily pulled away. “Tell me.”

  He shook his head. Emily saw the deep circles under his eyes and that he hadn't changed clothes since yesterday.

  “I don't know. Crazy stuff.”

  “What was that?” Emily thought she heard a hand on the door and a breath against the screen.

  “Wind,” Eddie said.

  She covered her eyes with a hand.

  “You know, with my friends it's their mothers that worry about them,” he said.

  “I worry about you,” Emily said.

  “Then why do you do shit like this?”

  “You know I didn't do this.” She motioned to the tattered room.

  Eddie stared at her. She saw that he was shaking, and she reached for him, but he slipped away and walked to his room. She heard the door shut, then lock behind him.

  Emily went to the door and cupped a hand to listen. “Come out,” she said. “I want to talk to you.”

  “No, I won't,” he said.

  Emily went into her bedroom and lay in the dark. She heard muted sounds through the wall. Quiet, she said, quiet. And then carefully she began to plan. No matter how boyish their lips looked in the hot sun at the beach, or how bad the feeling got of wanting a stranger, from now on she would choose only one. Every day she'd pick a Bible verse. Start now, her mind stomped out. From near the bed she picked up the Bible and flipped through, trying to find her fate in the rice-paper pages. He turneth the rivers into a wilderness, and the water springs into dry ground.

  Eddie opened the door and walked to the bed, brushed hair away from her face, took the Bible from her hands and set it on the side table. “You pushed him too far,” he said, his voice as clear and deep in the dark as a lover's.

  Emily turned from the image of herself in the bar mirror. “You alone?” the tourist said, his hairy hand resting on the bar, on one of his fingers a square ring with a too-big-to-be-a-diamond stone in the center.

  “I'm waiting for someone,” she said and walked to the bath, room. She'd stopped at Paolo's for a drink on her way to Birdflower's. The light and chatter from the bar had drawn her over. In the stall she leaned forward, not letting her thighs touch the seat. She rinsed her hands in the sink and ran her wet fingers through her hair.

  She came out, sat down, and watched a few couples dance drunken and awkward. There was a man with white blond hair sitting alone. She posed her hips forward so he could see better and slowed her eyes, let them take in all but him, looked at him as though he was any other detail, then gazed back to the dancers. Quickly, he was up and coming to her. Lanky build, narrow hips, awkward swagger. He smiled in an offhand way and asked her name. She told him and then he asked if she was married.

  “I was,” she said. “But it turned out bad.”

  The man's arm brushed her shoulder. She backed from him, nearly dropping her beer, and walked barefoot out of the bar.

  The rain was light but steady. She walked along the road on the broken yellow line. It was as if some giant needle had seamed up the soundside and the beach, and carefully, heel to toe, she followed the stitches toward the murky signpost.

  Usually she tried not to think about that night she left Daniel. But it was impossible now. Slowly, as the seasons change, as snow gathers on the highest Tennessee mountains, a restlessness had come over her. A hurried feeling in talking to Daniel and even sometimes a carelessness in handling Eddie. It seemed as if the floor of the house began to tilt backwards. Now it was obvious that she should have told him, that maybe together they could have
figured it out. But instead she started to go to Nashville on Saturdays. She made up excuses about shopping, about doctor appointments, about lunches with old friends from high school. She found bars: the Blue Note, the 1000 Club, one called Dover's. It never took more than an hour for her to pull some man over. She'd start a careless conversation with them, let her knee slant toward theirs, and listen to their stories. She fell into them gradually. The first few Saturdays she'd left the bar early, insisting that she had to get out to her parents’ house in the country. Then after a month of teasing, of trying to figure out what was happening and if it could be remedied by simple attention, a shy man had come along. He was like the blond children in Christmas pictures. Drunkenly they undressed each other as slates of sunset fell through the hotel blinds.

  This became her way then. There were moments of remorse: while bathing Eddie, she caught her eyes in the medicine chest and thought, How can I do this? Once, sorting through old photographs of her wedding, her stomach had clenched and she'd felt dizzy. Often on Mondays she'd swear to herself that this weekend she would not go. But on Saturdays she would drive to Nashville.

  It was unclear who had finally told Daniel. He accused her and immediately she admitted—not to all, but to one man. She created him by combining all her favorite qualities from each. One's fragile scent of mint and wool, another's chest, one's lovely pale body hair, the fingerlet curls from another, one's pondish-green eyes, and another's cowboy thinness. It did seem, even to her then, like a single man.

  Daniel had silently taken the bottle down from a high shelf. “Do you love him?” he said. “That's all I want to know.”

  Emily tried to answer honestly, to piece together all those afternoons. The details slipped away like water into the ground and Emily felt as if she too was somehow evaporating. Yes, she said. Not because it was true, but because she knew it would give her a foothold in whatever came next.