Up Through the Water

by Darcey Steinke

  “No,” Lila said, sitting up. “But it seems like you could've caught it and slammed it back at his truck.”

  “It wasn't a movie,” Emily said, watching the old man grow smaller as he floated on his back beyond the waves. “Imagine if you were riding your bike and your father drove up. You'd take a step forward, wouldn't you? And then what if he threw a Coke bottle hard as he could at your face?”

  Lila was quiet. “It's horrible to imagine,” she said finally.

  “Why do you care about this?” Emily asked.

  “I can't help thinking about it, is all,” Lila said.

  Emily lay back and let the sun ease her. She wanted to explain that more and more often now she thought of John Berry; she liked the way he loved her. You could tell he did by the way he breathed, and by the way his skin prickled when he held her. John Berry slept curled up, his face marked with the light sweat of sleep. He was more instinctual than most men. His moods swayed with warm weather, with heat, the seasons.

  Emily saw the old man throw his arms up as if cheering. At first she thought he was motioning to his wife about some sort of sea life, maybe dolphin beyond the wake. But then his head dunked under, and when he came up, his hands waved frantically.

  “I think that man's in trouble.”

  Lila stood up, shielded the sun from her eyes.

  Emily started to run up the beach. Her feet pounded the wet sand. The man's hands fluttered madly now and his sharpening face was flushed and contorted. His wife waded out, holding up her yellow shift from the water; she pointed to him and yelled.

  Emily told Lila to stay with the woman and then ran into the surf. Her body rippled under a wave; she flicked her feet like fins and pulled herself forward with breaststrokes. She saw the man just beyond the wake and thought of her own aging parents. Her heart beat fast; she could feel her hips and ribs pressing down the water. She rose to the surface and swam quickly to him. He grabbed her, strangling his arms around her like a lover. She let out a chain of silver bubbles.

  She wedged her foot against his stomach and pushed hard—his bathing suit went down to his knees and floated gracefully off. She scooted up quickly for air, grabbed him across the shoulder, and settled her other hand on the loose skin of his waist.

  They started moving slowly, and after a few yards, the man said weakly, “Underwater you looked like a mermaid.”

  Emily swam hard, concentrating on the flat of green to be crossed and the beige beach and blue sky beyond it.

  Lila emerged from a wave, swam to them, and took the man's other arm. “I can carry him,” Emily said.

  “But he's heavy,” Lila said.

  They tugged at the man from each side. Emily thought Lila was purposely swimming too fast and she saw her looking down through the water at the man's body, squinting her eyes to make out the edges of his genitals. Emily swam hard. “Hold your breath,” she said each time a wave rose over them.

  Their feet touched a sandbank and they moved into shallow water. “Are you okay to stand?” Emily said.

  They helped him up the beach. She guessed he was seventy or so and she could tell he was embarrassed. His wife ran to him and wrapped a moss-green towel around his waist. He pulled from them. “I'm fine now,” he said and staggered toward his blanket.

  Emily lay on her stomach, letting the sun ease and loosen her muscles. She was trying to even her breath and figure out why she felt annoyed at Lila: because she had told her to stay on shore, because she could have been drowned and then everyone would have said it was Emily's fault. She thought how young Lila looked in her bathing suit. Her cheek pressed to the sand, flushed, as she watched the ghost crabs tickle out of holes, then, like tiny race cars, speed back in.

  “I'm sorry,” Lila said. “If I did anything wrong.”

  Emily sat up. “I don't know,” she said. “I just wanted to save that man myself.”

  Lila laughed. “Maybe another will go down.”

  “Yeah, maybe all the men on the island will go out there and I'll save each and every one.” She didn't wait for Lila to answer, but got up, walked to the water's edge, and scanned the long line where sea and sky met. He probably loves this girl, Emily thought.

  “Want to walk down to the kettle,” Lila yelled to her.

  “I'll take you in the car to get a soda first,” Emily said. As she turned and made her way back, she saw Lila looking strangely at her. “You know,” she said. “You must be a weird mother to have.”

  Emily smiled. “You don't have to tell me that.”

  Lila tipped the Coke can to her lips, then let it bump her thigh as she walked. She was watching Emily move, the way you could nearly see her joints work. The skin on her chest and shoulders was patch-brown and slightly wrinkled. I'll look like that, Lila kept thinking, and it was just as surprising as when, years earlier, leaning over her cousin's bathing suit, she'd seen her breasts, pink nipples, like the world's most delicate embroidery.

  Sometimes it would occur to Lila that she was more interested in Emily than Eddie. Lila would try to think the way Emily did—about men mostly and always about water. To Lila, Emily's mind was like a light source always shaded, a sheet slung over the window, a towel draped over a lamp.

  “Do you like having a kid and all that?” Lila said.

  “Sometimes it's good,” Emily said. She reached down and poked at shells. “What do you think?”

  Lila said, “I wouldn't want to be like my mom or do the things some ladies do.”

  Emily tied a calico scallop shell to the strings of her bikini. “You don't have such clear ideas of what you like and don't after a while.”

  “I hope I always will.”

  “I hope you do,” said Emily. Birds pattered in front of them, always flying up a few feet before they passed.

  From the corners of her eyes, Lila watched the little tummy that seemed to rest on the elastic of Emily's bathing suit bottoms.

  “I think I see a beached fish up there,” Emily said. “It looks like a shark.”

  “I see it,” Lila said. She wasn't nervous about being with Eddie's mother now, just a little strained.

  They both jogged toward where it lay skewed on the sand.

  Lila thought of a time she'd walked with her parents on the beach. It was one of those memories before her fourth birthday when everything came to her as sensation: the wind trying to push her to the wet sand, the waves chasing her, the shells she wanted but was too slow to get before the white water took them back into the sea.

  The shark was four feet long and solid like a huge piece of rubber. Its mouth had little sand bugs running in and out, and one eye gazed to the sky.

  “Let's roll it over,” Emily said, using a piece of driftwood to poke its belly.

  “Why?” Lila said. “It's dead.”

  “Help me.” Emily put down the Coke can and pushed against the fish. Lila snuggled her can in the sand and helped Emily heave.

  “Eddie used to want to take these beached fish home,” Emily said as the fish flopped over, showing a white stomach and pale blue sex parts.

  “Think it died of old age?” Lila said.

  “I guess so,” Emily said. “Do you love my son?”

  Lila didn't speak for a few seconds and then said, “I think so.” She kicked the shark softly, little taps with the smooth pad of her sale. “What kills me is that life slips off them.”

  “Yeah,” Emily said, kicking the shark hard with her toes. Lila raised a foot, stood on the carcass, and offered a hand to Emily. They balanced together on top of the shark. Lila saw that its right eye was filled with sand. She put her toe near it, and a few grains brushed and drizzled from the bottom lip of the eye over the gray-blue skin.

  EIGHTEEN

  EARRING

  Emily cut the peaches she had soaked in warm water. The skins pulled off easily as a wet bathing suit and she sliced them paper-thin. Holding one in front of the kitchen window, she saw pale orange veins, then laid it over the others which over-lapped sl
ightly like fallen dominoes. Each time she touched it, the angel food cake gave off tiny confectionery sugar puffs. The sound track from Camelot was on the record player.

  She ate another fig from the white bowl. Above all other fruit, Emily loved the ass-shaped fig. The flushed purple-green skin and the inside tentacles, sea-like and sweet. And there was that grainy way it made your tongue feel if you ate too many. She picked them carefully from the tree in the backyard near the fence. Squeezing them just enough to know exactly how ripe they would be.

  She hummed the songs with the record and thought of Lancelot and the thin, girlish way she'd always envisioned him. She had a theory that all men were either like the beautiful boyish Lancelot or like Arthur, burly and earthy. The crab bisque steamed dreamily on the stove and the cobia, surrounded by green pepper and mushrooms, was baking slowly in the oven.

  Birdflower was coming over and Eddie had invited Lila to dinner. A family occasion, she thought, turning the cake slowly around and admiring it as if she were in front of a mirror in a new skirt. After dinner she had promised to pierce Eddie's ear.

  It was August. Soon the cold would be in the late night air and then begin inching its way hourly into the day. Eddie would leave in a week and she would settle back into herself, go into the hibernation that happened to all the island people after the tourist season. It was a gradual seclusion, much like the way the sea edges back to itself at low tide.

  Again it would be phone calls, crackling and tentative, Emily telling him island gossip and relaying seasonal scenery details: the snow on the beach, the first spring rustle of young sea oats, the joebells budding near the cottage.

  “In Camelot,” Emily sang in a high, tinkling voice. “Do, do, do, do,” she hummed into the bisque, then wiped her hands, leaving a mark like angel wings on her dark shorts.

  At the table, she imagined each person in the place set for them. Birdflower, his clean hair held back by a piece of leather, on her right. Eddie on her left in his jeans and black T-shirt. Lila near him, her fingers woven through his under the table. Emily's eyes clicked to the next spot. She had set one too many places and leaned over the table to sweep up the silverware. John Berry tipped her chin. “What about me?” he said and held his plate up for more.

  The needle was hiccuping against the end groove. She removed the record, walked to the bathroom, and pulled off her shirt. Adjusting the nozzle, she tugged her shorts off. Tan lines made her body into a geometrical sculpture. Emily poured shampoo into her hand to suds her scalp. She put her face under and felt the bubbles run out of her hair like a long veil down her back.

  There was a hand moving past the shower curtain through the falling water, resting on her hip, then sloping slowly up the curve of her breast. Emily leaned into the hand that went to her collarbone, her neck. The curtain split and Birdflower pulled her head out of the water. His lips tasted of warm sun and tobacco.

  She rinsed carefully, sticking her rear into the stream, arching her back, moving so every part got water.

  “Get us a drink,” Emily yelled. Water beat on the small of her back. She heard the clink of ice, the gulp-gulp of pouring gin, and a knife on the wood block slicing a lime. She turned off the water and pulled a towel into the steamy stall. He handed her a drink and sat on the toilet cover.

  “Have you thought about it anymore?” Birdflower asked, mixing his drink with a finger.

  Emily let the ice rest against her teeth and took a long drink. She set the glass on the soap dish and swung her hair down in front of her. “Not really,” she said, moving the towel over her hair.

  “Goddamnit,” Birdflower said, standing up, filling the small space of the bathroom. “You go on and on never promising, never setting anything straight.”

  Emily swung her hair back over her head and reached for her glass. From the kitchen the fish smell moved in and around the bathroom.

  He paced in half steps in front of the sink.

  “I don't owe you anything,” she said.

  Birdflower rested his hand awkwardly on a wicker shelf which held powder and perfumes.

  “Sit down.” With her fingers she worked the leather knot out of his hair.

  He held his hands to her hips and pulled her closer, ran his tongue lightly in tiny circles around the fine hairs of her lower stomach. He kissed the curly hair between her legs, each time pulling her closer, moving his tongue back into the soft folds. Emily reached a hand out to steady herself. The room felt as if it were filling with water. She knew only the swirling steam and that one wet place. There was a sudden click in the kitchen as the timer rang out.

  Emily sleepily opened her eyes. Birdflower stood. She saw a vine moving in his irises, circling to a wreath around his dark pupils, growing even as they stood, straight profiles in the medicine cabinet mirror, shoulder to shoulder, breath to breath, in the tiny bathroom.

  “Should we say grace?” Emily asked.

  “Sure,” Lila said. “I'll do it.” She paused, lowered her head, and quickly chanted, “Rub-a-dub-dub, thanks for the grub, yeaaaaah God!”

  Birdflower laughed.

  “What?” she said, lifting her hands. “I bet he has a great sense of humor.”

  “He'd have to,” Birdflower said. “If he looks down on all this.” Emily poured wine from a tall thin bottle with nuns whispering on the label. “You guys get one glass, okay?” Emily looked over the fish and cold pasta salad with shrimp and black olives. “You think you might go to Tennessee this winter for a visit?” Emily said to Lila.

  “I might,” Lila said.

  “Your mother may come up to my little house in Michigan this winter for a couple months.”

  “Nothing's been decided,” Emily said. The light in the room was fading. Shadows aged every object. She watched Eddie number the items above the white porcelain sink. He seemed to count the petals of the bluebells in a mason jar on the window ledge.

  “So,” Emily said. “It's been quite a summer.”

  Lila said, “They're not much different, one from another.”

  “I don't know,” Eddie said. “To me each one seems to have a personality.”

  Birdflower nodded. “I'll agree with that,” he said, reaching for more fish. “But I guess you'd know better than any of us, Lila.”

  “Even heaven would get boring after so long,” Eddie said.

  “This isn't heaven,” Lila said. “It's not even close.”

  “A place is what you make of it,” Emily said. She got up, walked to the fridge, and got another bottle of wine.

  “Yeah,” Eddie said. “Dad's wife has this corny plaque in the bathroom—'Bloom where you are planted.’’

  Lila laughed, “That'd be great if we were sea oats.”

  Emily uncorked the bottle and poured more wine for Birdflower and herself.

  Birdflower and Lila rocked on the porch swing, angel food cake and peaches balanced in their laps. Emily stood above Eddie, who sat straight against the back of a wooden chair. “Your father will throw a fit,” Emily said, holding an ice cube to his ear.

  “Good cake,” Eddie said, bringing a forkful up to his mouth.

  Birdflower set his plate on the floor and grabbed the guitar leaning against the house. He put his ear close and tuned each string.

  Eddie said, “Come on.” Emily looked at the top of his head and tried to tell herself this was no different from bandaging his cuts when he was a boy. Emily thought of her fingers slowly moving a straight pin forward. The drops of blood that would gather around the needle and the steadiness of her hand as she waited to see the silver tip from the back side rise out of her son's skin.

  Lila said, “Get it over with fast—that's the best way.”

  “Will you hold the flashlight,” Emily said to Lila.

  “Maybe we should do this inside,” Eddie said, the breeze moving the long hair around his neck.

  Lila picked up the flashlight and shined it on Eddie's ear.

  Emily pressed hard on the ice, let it drop to the porch
, and rocked the alcohol bottle back. She dabbed his ear and the point of the pin.

  “Hurry,” Birdflower said. “Before the numbing wears off.”

  Fireflies blinked in the front yard. Emily moved her hand closer; the flashlight made her look like a haunted torturess. She inserted the tip of the pin just as a truck's lights blinked over the porch.

  “That's him,” Eddie said, jerking his head. Blood quickly gathered on Emily's thumb and forefinger.

  “He's not stopping,” Lila said, watching the truck rock down the sand road.

  Eddie said, “I can't feel anything. Is it done?”

  “You moved away,” Emily said, pulling the pin back and holding the cotton to his ear. “You're bleeding.”

  “It doesn't hurt at all; all I can feel are your fingers,” Eddie said, just as the high beams of the truck turned again and blinked toward them.

  Lila focused the flashlight on Emily's face. “I bet he's going to drive past here all night.”

  NINETEEN

  SUMMER ROOMS

  Emily gave Lila a chunk of cake for her parents, and after bandaging Eddie's ear, told him he could stay out till 2 A.M. John Berry kept circling. Each time the truck turned, Birdflower looked into the lights. He wanted to protect Emily and would fight if he had to. Finally, she asked him to go. He got up and started pacing. The porch floorboards creaked and she urged him again. “Okay,” he said, grabbing his jacket. “I won't stick around if you don't want me.” Outside on the walk, he looked meanly over his shoulder and muttered, “I hope you get what you deserve.”

  She sat down on a porch chair and tried to lock eyes with the truck's lights. It was like looking into the sun. It has to happen, she thought. Between two people, things could be bad for months, even years, but there was always one thing that signaled the end, that made any future connection impossible. Sometimes it was violence or burlesquing an earlier time, an encounter that meant something and was important to the beginning of the relationship. For some reason, the bottle wasn't enough.