by Dawn Davies
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About the Author
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With love and gratitude to Dann B. Davies
PUBLICATION CREDITS AND AWARDS FOR THIS MANUSCRIPT
“Three Places.” Published as “Don’t Like It Too Much.” River Styx, July 2014.
“Three Places.” Published as “Don’t Like It Too Much.” Best American Essays “Notable Essay,” 2015. Edited by Ariel Levy.
“Keeping the Faith.” Chautauqua, June 2016.
“Games I Play.” Published as “Sheep to the Cyclops.” Ninth Letter, Spring 2015.
“Games I Play.” Nominated for a Pushcart Award, 2015.
“Pie.” Fourth Genre (with second companion craft essay, “Secrecy, Privacy and Creative Nonfiction”), August 2015.
“Pie.” Nominated for a Pushcart Award, 2015.
“Fear of Falling.” HerStories Anthology, Summer 2015.
“Kicking the Snakes.” New Plains Review, Summer 2015.
“Two Views of a Secret.” Saw Palm, February 2015.
“King of the World.” The Missouri Review, Winter 2016.
“King of the World.” Best American Essays “Notable Essay,” 2016. Edited by Jonathan Franzen.
“Mothers of Sparta.” Finalist in the SLS Disquiet Competition, 2015.
“Mothers of Sparta.” Won the 2016 Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize in Creative Nonfiction.
“Four Animals.” Blood and Thunder: Musings on the Art of Medicine, Fall 2015.
NIGHT SWIM
It is a moonless night, dark and rare, and the heat is oppressive, the kind of heat where a deep breath leaves you unsatisfied, suspicious that there was nothing life-giving at all in what you’ve inhaled, and you are left air-hungry, wet at the pits, forehead greasy with sweat, wishing for the night to be over, for your daughters to exhaust their energy, to cool their dense, hot centers enough to sleep for one more night in this summer that seems to stretch into your future like a planetary ring full of debris, circling forever around something it can’t escape. It is thickly hot and you hate it.
You sit beside the pool in a plastic chair, dipping the soles of your feet in the water that is the temperature of spit, fanning your face with your own damp hand, which doesn’t help. Back in the yard, your corked-up dog cannot contain his glee and shrieks several times into the sky, warding off something no one can see, and your daughters burst like rays from the cool of the house, drop their towels on the deck, and leap to cannonball into the pool, one like the other, although you can discern subtleties in their silhouettes, how the one crooks her elbow a certain way, how the other curves her back like so, how their hair billows from their heads in differently weighted undulations.
They whoop and cry out into the night, like whistling rockets, arms flailing until they disappear underwater, the force of the waves spreading to the walls of the pool and back.
The water swells over the edge of the brick coping and spreads darkly at your bare feet like a shadow. A bloom of chlorine hits your nose before your daughters erupt to the surface, shouting, shiny diamonds of light reflecting off the lace of wet on their brown arms and necks and faces. They glow, not like reflections of suns and stars, but like stars themselves. The light coming off them is their own.
“My God,” you say, without meaning to. They turn and you are startled to see a dusking of their future faces, their grown-up faces, faces that will be shaped by struggle and pain and loss, expressions that will take up residence once they taste the dirt that life feeds them, the profiles that will be theirs once they have given birth. Changed faces. Grown faces, soft, umbral curves replaced by shadows and lines and angles. You lock eyes briefly and they are gone, ignis fatuus, and your little girls are there again.
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” you blurt out.
“What?” they say.
“Nothing,” you say. “Don’t move.” And you step inside to get the camera. You can’t control any of this, but you will try to capture it, this light, this heat of them, their dual stars Castor and Pollux disappearing, shape-shifting again until they are babies in your arms, then they are women, then they are children enjoying a night swim. You begin taking photographs in the dark.
One of them pushes up out of the pool, the weight of the water pulling her curls down her back in shy, reluctant tendrils as she plucks the bathing suit elastic out of her butt crack and walks away without looking back at you, her tiny scapulae protruding like wings before she turns and smiles, but the smile is not for you, it is nothing but a by-product of her joy, the untethered joy she is still young enough to feel, the joy that comes from leaping off the edge of something into another thing that will catch her, soften the blow, cool her body, temper the flame of youth and the disconnect with future things.
And she sprints and leaps into the sky, untethers from the force field that holds her to you, and she is twenty-one, flying a midnight plane to France to meet her French boyfriend, a man you have not yet met, and she no longer feels the need to call you and tell you where she will be and what time she will be home, because her home is no longer your home and she has entered another orbit. For the rest of your days you won’t know exactly where she is on the map, and you won’t know what she is thinking, and her shattering smile, and the fake disdain and subtle wrinkling of her nose will be for someone else, and you can only hope you taught her well.
She twists in the air and lands back in the pool, bobbing in the fractal-lit water, laughing and saying, “Did you see me, Mom? Did you see me jump?” Her sister claps and shouts, slaps the water with the heels of her hands, then climbs out of the pool for her own turn.
“Watch me, Mom!” she says, and launches herself into the air like a comet, her angular momentum vector glowing in visible lines, and she is grasping lovelorn rescue dogs like clouds, pulling them toward her heart, teaching them to be good, and just when she begins to love them, letting them go to a home she has chosen, this daughter who heals and is healed by Sirius the dog star, this heart of your heart, this woman with the easy laugh, who rotates midair and looks straight at you, and in her fall back to Earth you see the weight in her eyes, the practical shrug of her shoulder, the opening of the hand, the letting go. The woman becomes a child again.
They both come up from underwater, heaving in big breaths, and they bump heads and swim toward you for comfort. You rub their temples and kiss the bumps away, and when they shrug you off, one swims toward a broken engagement, a broken heart, a discarded gown, tear-swept eyes, situational depression, and the other to an ER gurney, fevers, chronic pain, Lyme disease, and you see, in a turn of their thin shoulders, that you will not be able to fix anything in their lives, that there will be no Band-Aid or mother’s embrace for what they will one day endure. There is so little to control in life.
“Put your faces down in the water and then come up slowly. I want to take a picture,” you say.
“You’re crazy,” they say.
“I know. Just do it.” And they swim to the edge of the pool and ob
ey. They feel the gravity of the moment, the gravitational pull toward you that they have recently begun to fight. They slide underwater, then emerge, eyes locked on the camera lens, rippled turquoise and sky-colored water pulling them back, the expectation of the future blanking their faces, infinity circling their gaze past yours, and as you click two simple photos, paper fossils that will one day remind you how they once walked the Earth, you realize you have taken everything for granted. Your time with them. Their brief speck of time as children, the soft faces that turn to you as if you are the sun, the fact that time seems to move so slowly when in fact it is whipping past you at one thousand miles per hour and why you haven’t flown off into space is beyond your comprehension. They will never stay yours, for they weren’t yours to begin with. One day they will leave you, shoot off into the sky, and take their place in a bigger constellation. And it’s your job to let it go.
Let it go. Let it go.
It’s gone.
THREE PLACES
Here’s one: It’s the woods behind an affordable, thin-walled townhouse complex in northeast Virginia. You can call to mind everything—the thick trees, the rolling hills, the galloping creek that is so large across the widest part that it secretly thinks it might be a river, and it gets cocky like that, prancing around, showing some white water, making you want to strip down to your undershirt and day-of-the-week panties and jump in. You are not allowed to swim in the creek but you do, and you fib to your parents about this, because you know nothing will make you stop, until that one day you are squatting in the water, breathless from the smack of the cold on your skin, and you leap out to avoid a copperhead swimming straight for the center of your chest.
The water is surrounded by high, rocky ledges that crumble when you step on them, and you find silver veins of clay when you dig in just the right places. You climb the ledges and explore the necklace of wet caves with a cautious excitement, because in the depths could be a sleeping colony of bats that might dive straight for your face and suck out all of your blood, or a bear waiting to tear you up, or a hobo who pops out and tries to roast you on a spit. You shiver when you see that the caves are empty, and you clap and make small, shrill chirps in various directions to test out the dark echo. You sit down and feel the absence of warmth and light, and the dripping silence, and dare yourself to stay as long as you can, which is less than two minutes, because your imagination is fruitful, and the thought of bats and bears and hobos makes it feel like something is crawling up your spine and into your brain. You panic and hurl yourself back down the ledges, skidding on your tailbone, grateful that you have cheated death again.
The rocky terrain leads up into a wide field, and beyond that, a flat pine-bottom woods. All of your free time is spent here, running barefoot, scrounging wood for your tree house and damming the creek during dry spells, climbing the rocks, and stalking deer: small, placid, white-tailed things that toy with you. It is your dream to catch one and keep it as a pet.
During the school year, you ride the bus to a public school that allows you to work ahead in the self-governed learning packets that are all the rage. You are clever and you know it, and it sets you apart. Each semester you race through your packets, finishing weeks ahead of the other students, with the singular goal of spending as much time as possible in the reading corner, sprawled out in a beanbag, gobbling up novels and fairy tales. The lunch ladies serve delicious grits with cheese and ham steaks on Wednesdays, so you buy school lunch on this day only, tucking two quarters into the pointed corner seam of your jumper pocket. The teachers tease their hair big and wear polyester dresses, and their thick, nylon-clad thighs rub together when they walk. You adore them. They call you Doll-Baby, or Honey Pot, and treat you like a pet.
Picture your small hand, sliding into an icy, clear stream. You are creeping up on the neck of a crawdaddy, carefully, almost surgically in precision, aiming for the place behind his neck where you know his eyeballs can’t register. You nab him before he knows what hit him, leaving behind an empty swirl of mud and decaying leaves in the pocket of brown rocks where he once rested. Your coat sleeve is wet to the elbow and cold, but you hand him, perfect, startled, blue as lapis, to your friend Danielle, who puts him in a mason jar full of creek water. Danielle’s crooked front teeth make her look like she belongs on the short school bus, but this is not true. She is clever and bold and reckless and free from the desire to please the grown-ups in her life. Indeed, six weeks before, you became blood sisters, the way ten-year-olds are supposed to, behind the Slocums’ aluminum shed, using a needle she goaded you to liberate from your mother’s sewing kit that you are never supposed to touch. This is not the first glimpse of the rascal in you, and you know it. First the swimming and the fibbing and now this, but no matter—on this day your love for life causes a tickling in your body that can only be alleviated by tearing across a wide field until your legs and lungs burn.
When the sun starts to shine sideways and your hands are stiff with cold, you head home, exhausted and dirty, your stomach empty and gnarling. You smell the beginning of the fire in your neighbor’s fireplace, a crisp, sharp, empty smell that reminds you that you do not want to be alone outside after the sun goes down. There could be bats and bears and hobos, after all. You see the light in your living room window and you think about spaghetti and meatballs and Charlie’s Angels, and a hot bath and your twin bed with the yellow gingham pillowcase and matching curtains. You burst into the house and stop short because your parents are sitting at the dining room table, waiting for you with a cautious look on their faces. Dagnabbit, you think, because you know what’s about to happen. You have been through this before, five times, in fact, and had hoped to be done with it.
“We have some exciting news,” they start, but you already know by the looks on their faces, the hopeful, falsely confident perk of the eyebrows, the folded hands, exactly what they are going to say. “Daddy got a promotion,” your mother starts, but you already know what this means: You are moving again. You should have known. Your happiness should have told you. As soon as you get used to the things in a place, as soon as you find your footing, as soon as you give yourself permission to like it, it is time to go.
“We just got here,” you say. “It feels like we just got here.”
“Don’t worry,” they tell you. “You’ll love New York. We promise.”
* * *
You drive until you are two hours from the Canadian border, so far north that you expect to see sled dogs. Your heart is bitter. You feel what hate is like, not the hating of people, per se, but the hating of impotence. The hating that comes when you can’t do anything to stop anything from happening. You let this bitterness and hatred take over a part of you, even though Sunday school has taught you about forgiveness and people doing the best they can with what they have.
You do not want to be here. You dislike cold and New York is the coldest place you have ever been. People talk differently and everyone is white. But the house is bigger than your old one in Virginia. You note the wall-to-wall carpeting and the fireplace in the family room, which the real estate agent calls the “den,” and the quarter-acre yard. There is also a pine tree that has a natural saddle where you can read a Trixie Belden mystery, and a stone fence that houses an elusive chipmunk, but none of it matters. You are the new girl again.
You develop coping skills for this, thoughtful self-talk that reminds you that you are okay, that this, too, will pass, but these skills do not always help you feel better, so almost unconsciously, you include in your social repertoire protective actions, such as looking deferentially away from people when they speak to you, not raising your hand in class, not sitting in the middle or the back of the school bus, and not volunteering anything out loud, ever, lest they call you a hillbilly in front of the cute Irish boy, Kelly Moynihan, who gives you the sympathetic eyebrow in the lunch line. Your caution has erased most of your public self. In Virginia, you were an eye-batting Southern girl, and now you must become something else
. Your confidence has been washed again, in hot water with bluing, and you are now a clean, pale cloth doll. You have yet to figure out what kind of personality you must develop to make people like you in this part of the country. With every move, it becomes more of a puzzle.
This school is different, you discover. Teachers are gruff and harried and unsympathetic and when you complain about it to your mother, she says, “It’s just how they are up here,” but this does not make you feel better. She misses her friends, too, she says, as if this is supposed to make you feel better, but all you think is Shut up, because if it were up to you, you would be watching cartoons with Danielle back in Virginia, and fibbing about swimming in the creek, so don’t tell you about wishing things could be the way they were.
One winter day, when it is too cold to go outside for recess, you stand alone at the window, feeling sorry for yourself. You cry just enough for the snot to start flowing in your nose. You press your head against the cold glass and let the snot run down, then sniff it back up just before it drips. You repeat this absentmindedly, making a game out of it, wondering why you have no friends. You notice that there is a yardstick’s worth of snow piled on top of the picnic tables in the recess area and there is no sign that it will stop snowing. The sky is a dark, slate gray, the color of the slate in Virginia that you used to break off and skip into the creek. You wonder how you are going to get home. You imagine a buckled pack of sled dogs, heaving their way across the snow-covered playground with you behind them, holding on for dear life.
“Indoor hotball!” Mr. Solenski announces, and you think, Step aside. Your heart is pounding because you can play this game. You love this game. You are a champion. You take your place, hands out, knees bent, and stand prepared. A girl throws the red rubber ball to a weak, fat boy with big hips, whose knees bend in sideways and touch together, and you know you can take him down, so when the ball comes to you, you whip it at the fat boy and he drops it and is out. You pick off student after student, playing easily, yet humbly, gaining confidence with each out, saying cautiously, “Tough luck,” to the players who drop the ball. “Tough luck” in Virginia is an expression of sympathy, but in upstate New York, it is a taunt, and every time you say it, you are rubbing the face of the person who dropped the ball straight into their own ineptitude. You do not know this. You win the game, but the other students show you their backs. They do this for months.