To Be Sung Underwater

by Tom McNeal

  Then everything began to stop, as first one of the ball boys, then the boy at the baseline, and then Malcolm himself turned toward Judith. It was Malcolm’s expression that broke first with recognition. “Huzza-huzza,” he said. “It’s you.” His tone was droll, but his smile seemed a little brighter than usual. He turned to the boys. “Hey, compadres. This is my amiga.” Then, looking back at Judith: “My muy delectable amiga.”

  The boys circled Judith when she stepped onto the court. “You’re Mr. Malcolm’s wife?” one of them said.

  Judith said no.

  “You’re his girlfriend?”

  Judith laughed and looked toward Malcolm, who said, “Well?”

  “Yes,” Judith heard herself say. “His girlfriend.”

  “He’s nice,” the smallest boy said. “You should marry him.”

  Judith smiled at the boy. “You think?”

  “He gave Eduardo the tennis racket and the shoes.”

  These words caught Judith by surprise—they seemed to hover suspended for a few extended moments—and she felt something go out to that little boy, and to Eduardo, and most of all to Malcolm, whose nonchalance seemed genuine.

  “He was playing with a badminton racket, for Chrissake. I thought I’d see what he could do with the proper equipment.”

  “He’s going to teach us, too,” one of the younger boys said. “We’re going to be Pancho Gonzales.”

  Malcolm, smiling his thin smile, said he didn’t see any reason why not. Then, glancing at his watch, he said, “Yikes. So that’s why you’re here.” He turned from Judith to the boys. “Okay, kiddos, gather them up.”

  But at once the boy with the new racket and white shoes said, “Ten more, okay, Mr. Malcolm? Just ten more?” and when Malcolm glanced uncertainly at Judith, she nodded and said, “Sure. Why not?”

  It hadn’t been that night, or even the next, that she’d first slept with Malcolm Whitman in his slender bed, but it was soon thereafter. And what had happened to those sweet boys? Over the next few years, Malcolm had taught all three of them, and she remembered with pleasure the solid repetitive thwock as they delivered one solid backhand and forehand after another. Where did they go? What had they grown into? Were they as different from their younger selves as she and Malcolm were from theirs? Malcolm had received one handwritten letter from the oldest boy, saying he’d made the freshman tennis team, but after that, nothing.

  Judith looked at her watch—it was nearly 3 A.M.—and returned to bed. Malcolm didn’t stir, but the thought of him and those boys on the tennis court had done its work. Her spirits loosened and released her to sleep.

  She awakened two hours later with Malcolm’s arm slung over her shoulder, as limp as something dead. His face lay close. His skin seemed coarse and porous, and his breath was stale. Judith pushed his arm away, slid from the bed, and went to the window. The hills were silhouetted now, and the first hints of sun tinted the predawn gray with a faint pink that as she watched grew pinker.

  “You okay?” Malcolm’s voice from behind her, a little groggy.

  She turned. He was still in bed. “Mmm.”

  “Were you up in the night?”

  Judith nodded. “I’d promised to kiss Milla after I got home. And then I was awake.”

  He said, “You were cross last night.”

  “I was nonplussed last night. I don’t know why. But it’s come and gone.” She looked out the window. “The sunrise really is lovely, if I can change the subject.”

  “What it really is is early,” Malcolm said.

  He flipped on his light and sat on the edge of the bed, taking his bearings. He didn’t have to say he was going to the gym—today was Wednesday, and Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays were gym days. Malcolm’s day would be filled with meetings from 7:15 this morning until the seven o’clock loan committee meeting tonight. Judith knew this because during her nocturnal wanderings she’d gone to the study, opened his briefcase, and flipped through his daybook. She’d also noted that his Thursday and Friday were just as tightly planned. Though she knew if time were needed with Miss Metcalf, time would be found.

  “I had funny dreams,” she said.

  Malcolm had eased into a calf stretch. “I love funny dreams,” he said. “There’s something about being awakened by one’s own laughter.”

  She gave him a look.

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She remembered only one of the dreams, and all she remembered of it was a landscape that seemed green and English, and a rampant stream of small rattlesnakes that came wriggling out from under the wet hedges, across the wet lawns, and onto the wet stone walks. Malcolm, young and handsome, amused others by calling the snakes vipers. No one feared them. Parents called for their children to come out and play with them, and why not? The little rattlesnakes had no rattles. Only Judith realized they were actually rattlesnakes.

  “That’s because it was your dream,” Malcolm said. He’d finished his stretching and was gathering his gear. “When it’s your dream, you get to make even the smallest decisions.”

  Judith thanked him for his insights.

  “Not at all,” Malcolm said. His keys jingled as he waved.

  After he was gone, Judith glanced back through the window. Already the luminous pink was giving way to a dull yellow. A minute or so passed, and then, as she stared distractedly out, Malcolm’s black Jaguar came into view between houses, soundless, dreamlike, disappearing again. From one of her sitting locations during the night, she had calculated that she was now the same age her father had been when he’d given up his teaching job in Vermont for a lesser position in Nebraska, where he’d begun to garden and bake bread and take photographs of ramshackle buildings and drive at night on country roads without headlights.

  6

  Upon returning from her summer in Nebraska, everything in Vermont seemed odd and unfamiliar to the fifteen-year-old Judith. Her girlfriends seemed younger than when she’d left them, and her mother had collected a new set of friends from the community theater group she’d joined in Judith’s absence. These men and women dropped by nearly every night in twos and threes, bearing wine that her mother poured into jelly jars. As the evening wore on, the group seemed to move through predictable phases, from expectant to exuberant to mildly coarse.

  There was a man named Jonathan, tall with a drooping mustache, who wore a western-style leather coat with plackets and sleeves trimmed in dangling leather strips. He spoke in a rolling voice and enforced his remarks with sweeping gestures that made the leather fringe dance. This generally drew an approving look or laugh from Judith’s mother. It wasn’t just Judith’s and her mother’s friends who seemed foreign, though. Judith realized that her room didn’t feel like her room, or her bed her bed, or really, when she thought about it, her life her life. She couldn’t keep herself from thinking about Nebraska. She confessed this to her friend Annalisa Williams, who stared at her for a few seconds and then said, “I refuse to take this seriously.” But Nebraska was where Judith’s mind kept drifting. Nebraska was where her father grew tomatoes and baked bread and kept a gun in his glove compartment, it was where teenagers put roofs on barns and installed appliances in basements, and it was where she’d driven a car down dirt roads and drunk coffee and refinished furniture and learned what to expect next in La Traviata, and it was where a brown-armed roofer had called her dangerous. It was where, without really meaning to, she’d gotten one foot into adulthood.

  She waited almost a month for these feelings to subside, but when they didn’t, she told her mother one night out of the blue that she wanted to go back to Rufus Sage. Her mother made a soft sound of surprise—Judith would always associate it with the movie image of a bird shot in flight. “Oh, Judy, no,” she said, and Judith thought her mother’s wounded feelings might make her change her mind, but they didn’t. Nor did the other arguments her mother made in succeeding days—the better schools in Vermont, the lifelong home and neighbors and friends she would be leaving. The appeal that might
’ve worked—that she needed Judith, would be lost without her—was the one appeal she wouldn’t make. Judith’s mother had embraced a freer course for herself, and she wouldn’t keep her daughter from doing the same, however misguided she believed her daughter’s thinking might be.

  So in late October Judith was saying good-bye to friends. The night before she was to leave, her mother made chicken enchiladas, Judith’s favorite. It was an attempt to brighten the evening, but her mother kept failing at conversation and at last fell silent. She cut her enchilada into bites she didn’t eat. Finally she said, “Once when you were little, too little to remember, we visited a second cousin of your father’s on his farm in Pennsylvania. This second cousin’s name was Wynn, and he had a colt—at least I called it a colt, but Cousin Wynn kept telling me it was actually a filly—whose mother had died. Wynn had bottle-fed the colt, who decided Wynn was her mother. The little horse followed Wynn everywhere. For entertainment, Wynn liked to get on a bicycle and let visitors watch the colt trotting along behind him. Wynn and your father and everybody else just about laughed themselves sick over it. But when I saw that colt running after a man on a bicycle, my heart sank.” She stood and took her plate to the sink. She was wearing a loose flannel shirt, borrowed, Judith knew, from Jonathan, and a long denim skirt with rainbow trim at the hem. When she turned, she laid her eyes softly on Judith. “To me, Professor Howard Toomey looked like the sun and the moon and the stars. To you, he looks like a father. But sooner or later you’ll see he’s just a man on a bicycle.”

  When Judith deplaned in Rapid City and followed the other passengers into the small, sleepy terminal, she spotted her father standing off to the side, his hands in the pockets of a camel-hair coat she recognized—her mother had found it for him at a Junior League sale the year before the separation. A navy blue scarf was draped around his thick neck and tucked into the lapels of the coat. He looked to her like an old-time prizefighter, one of the successful ones.

  He gave her a long hug, then stood back, grinning. His eyes were bright. “Well, well,” he said. “Aren’t you a tonic for the troops.”

  She grinned. “And aren’t you the dashingest man on the premises.”

  Her father scanned the half-empty building and said something about the lack of stiff competition, then fished coins from his pocket and pointed Judith toward a row of pay phones. “I promised your mother you’d call as soon as you’d landed.”

  Her mother answered on the first ring.

  “Hi, Mom. I’m here, and I’m fine. Dad’s wearing that Burberry coat you bought him.”

  “And you’re okay?” her mother said. “The flight was okay?”

  “It was fine, but kind of bumpy. I sat next to a woman who’d never flown before. She kept nibbling saltines and every few minutes she would say, ‘You think they’re fixin’ to set down yet?’ ” Judith expected a laugh from her mother, but didn’t get one. She turned to look out the plate-glass window at gray skies and ridges of sooty snow ranging over brown grass.

  In a sudden rush her mother was saying, “Oh, Judy, sweetie, I already miss you so much,” and Judith said, “I miss you, too, Mom,” and at that very moment she did, but thirty minutes later, moving south on Highway 385 alongside her father, with the heater churning and snow patches on each side of the highway set off prettily by the beige fields and behind it all a soundtrack of Don Giovanni, Judith felt herself shedding weight she hadn’t known she carried. A highway sign for Mount Rushmore—Borglum Blasting Movie Every 2 Minutes!—made her want to laugh. That night, lying under her quilt on her bird’s-eye maple bed, she thought one word: happy.

  Around town, Judith felt a pleasant fly-on-the-wall anonymity, but at school other students seemed to regard her not only as strange but as deaf. “Where’d she come from?” she heard a girl say in an unlowered voice, and someone else said, “How come she dresses like that?” (Before her move, Judith had decided on a modified North Woods look: loose Levi’s, square-toed Frye boots, and a rotation of crew-necked sweaters.)

  Teachers praised her for work she knew to be routine, and one or two boys tried to get her attention, but it was hard to take them seriously with their Captain Kangaroo bangs. (She began thinking of them as roo do’s, and sometime during this period she had a frightening dream in which these bangs, when parted, revealed a third eye, a premise she used for a submission rejected by the school literary magazine, The Harvest of Words.) She didn’t want to ask about Patrick Guest—and who would she have asked if she’d wanted to?—but she kept a lookout for him. Her thought was to befriend him so he could play a protective role in discouraging unwanted inquiries from other boys, but she never saw him. One day a boy wearing a letterman’s jacket introduced himself and asked if she was a foreign exchange student. Judith looked at him a second or two and said, “Yah, dawt iss me.”

  “Where from?” the boy said.

  “Vermont,” she said, and for the next few seconds the boy regarded her as if she were a dog whose nip hadn’t quite broken skin. This wasn’t Judith’s only occasion to establish aloofness, and by staying beyond the currents of activity and keeping her eyes impassive and her thoughts more or less to herself, she was soon regarded more as an unwanted furnishing of the school than as a member of the tribe.

  Throughout her earlier school years, Judith had always had one particular friend whose subordination to her vision of the world was so subtle that neither of them had to acknowledge it as subordination at all. In Middlebury, this had been Annalisa Williams, and before that Heather Lowe. Later, in Los Angeles, it would be Lucy Meynke. In Rufus Sage, it was a girl who one day approached Judith as she was walking away from school and said, “Do you know Patrick Guest?”

  The girl had lustrous red hair that fell below her shoulder blades, but the narrowness of her chin and a slight yellowish cast to her eyes thwarted any notions of real beauty. Judith said, “Who?”

  “Patrick Guest.” A pause. “He said he put a washing machine in your basement.” Another pause. “He said the basement is where your room is.”

  There was a calculated note of provocation in the girl’s voice, as if she hoped to prompt from Judith a revealing response, a strategy Judith recognized because she sometimes used it herself. “It’s true my room’s in the basement,” she said, “but I have a wall between me and the chained sex slaves, if that’s what you’re wondering about.”

  This pleased the redheaded girl—her lips relaxed into a smile.

  Judith said, “I don’t really know Patrick Guest, though. I talked to him while he was putting in the washing machine is all.”

  The girl nodded. “Well, he said to tell you he moved to Woolcott.” When Judith looked at her blankly, the girl said, “Southeast part of the state.”

  She and the red-haired girl were moving now along the coarse concrete sidewalk on Seventh Street. “Do you know his address?” Judith said.

  The girl gave Judith a look with mischief in it. “How come you want it?”

  Judith said she was thinking of writing him a one-line postcard asking him about his Jim-getting dog.

  “His what?” asked the red-haired girl, and Judith told her about Mrs. Guest and the whole “Git Jim” story, during which the red-haired girl laughed at all the right places. Then she said, “Just put his name on the postcard and the town. He’ll get it. It’s not that big a town.”

  At the corner of Seventh and King Streets, the girls’ paths diverged. As they separated, Judith said, “What’s your name?” and the girl came to a full stop and turned back around.

  “Deena Schmidt,” she said, and broke into a smile that suddenly broadened her face, and made it seem prettier.

  That night, Judith wrote a postcard that said, You should not have moved. What’ll I do now if my appliance needs attention? (Mrs. Vastine, her English teacher, a pretty woman whose luminous blue eyes were often brimming with fun, had just introduced the class to double-entendre, and Judith was trying her hand.) She addressed it Patrick Guest, Woolcott, Ne
braska, and when she dropped it in the mailbox the next morning on the way to school, it felt like a message in a bottle.

  Ten days later she received a return letter written on lined notebook paper. Dear Judith, it said. I’m glad you wrote me. That washing machine’s pretty good so it shouldn’t need fixing, but if it does, I’d call Jerry at Western Auto or Marv’s LP in Crawford. We’re in Woolcott because we sold the farm or I should say the bank did because by then it wasn’t ours anymore. I’m glad you wrote because I wanted to let you know I was hoping you’d come back to live here because I had decided if you did I would ask you to a movie or something, not that you would have, I just wanted you to know. Yours sincerely, Patrick Guest. P.S. My address is 242 Adams Avenue.