Night Swim

by Jessica Keener

“Giselle ain’t going to like it, Tony,” another boy shouted.

  “I don’t want to get you in trouble.” I slipped my hand out of his and wrapped both arms around my books.

  “I’ll take care of this. I’m going to walk you girls home. You wait for me outside the gym.”

  “It was wrong what they did,” Sophie said, also removing her hand.

  “The blond girl wore a metal bracelet on her wrist,” I said.

  “Yeah, yeah, I know her,” he said.

  “Who is she?”

  “Leave it to me,” he said, and I knew he didn’t want me to probe for more.

  When we reached the playground, one of the cheerleaders, a girl with long legs and pretty mouth called to him. “Anthony. Come over here!”

  “Wait here,” he said, loping across the pavement to greet her. He kissed her once, then again, longer. The cheerleader stood with a knee bent, her arms crossed, which she uncrossed during the second kiss. I turned away, disappointed. I didn’t know he had a girlfriend. Margaret hadn’t told me.

  “Must be Giselle,” Sophie said.

  I shrugged, still not wanting to look. I heard the clacking of his cleats coming towards me. “Hey!” He stopped beside me and touched my chin. “So, you care?”

  “I don’t like to watch people kissing.”

  Giselle had already walked away with her friends to the far side of the playground and was crossing the street. “What are you worrying about her for? We’re breaking up.” He looked at me with sleepy, violet blue eyes.

  “Doesn’t look that way.”

  “Tony, man, you coming? Enough with the girls!” someone yelled from the gym door.

  He dashed up the steps and at the top he turned around. “Stay right there.” He went inside.

  Sophie and I stood at the bottom of the stairs waiting. The playground grew silent and vacant. The sky, too, looked indifferent to our dilemma, trapped in an empty schoolyard. A few cars remained in the lot — probably the coach’s car and the janitor’s. If the blond girl came back, they would have to cross the empty lot and by then Sophie and I could run inside and get the football coach.

  Sophie made half-hearted pliés and stretches. I leaned against the iron rail. An occasional car passed on the street. The sky dulled to a frying pan gray. It was getting late. Ten minutes went by.

  “He won’t desert us, will he?” I asked.

  “No,” Sophie said. She scuffed one foot back and forth, sweeping it up, pointing her loafer.

  “I wish he would hurry.”

  The heavy metal doors opened. Anthony came out in street clothes, black pants and a Varsity jacket in school colors. His name had been sewn on the back. He had combed his hair off his forehead.

  “Let’s go, girls. I need a cigarette.”

  “You’ll get kicked off the team.”

  “Oh, so you do care.” He hurried across to the sidewalk, outside the school boundary and handed me a matchbook.

  “Light it for me, Sarah.”

  I shook my head. “Not here. The coach will see you.”

  “He’s inside. Come on, Sarah, light me up.”

  “I won’t.” I scowled, feeling both embarrassed and manipulated. I owed him something but I grew stubborn.

  “Do it further down the street,” Sophie said.

  I pointed to a large, leafy elm tree. “At the corner there.”

  I ran ahead and stopped behind a tree trunk. Anthony sauntered over with Sophie, who looked grateful to him that we were not walking alone. Well, so was I. When he walked up to me again and put his cigarette between his lips, I struck a match, but the match head crumbled and failed to light. He leaned closer, testing me, his shoes almost touching mine, his cigarette dangling from his mouth. I worked on another match and this time it lit. The flame made a sucking sound as the dry papers crinkled under the heat. The smoked smelled sweet. I wanted to take a drag.

  “I’ll have some,” I said.

  “I think you like me.”

  He handed me the cigarette and I took a short, awkward puff. I could feel myself flushing again from embarrassment. I handed the cigarette to Sophie but she didn’t want it. So, I handed it back to him.

  “Show me the way, girls.”

  As it darkened outside, I walked between Anthony and Sophie, who talked about her upcoming dance performance for the “Nutcracker Suite.” I was glad for her chatter. I was too nervous to talk. I kept thinking about Anthony and Giselle. He had a girlfriend. I was alone. I had to seek protection. That was what mattered. The sky lowered and touched the trees. We walked through the town and headed for the hilly neighborhoods where Sophie and I both lived. A black Cadillac slowed and stopped beside us. The electric window slid down. A plump, pretty-faced woman with a bun in her hair turned to me.

  “Hello, Sarah dear,” my aunt said.

  I walked over to the car and leaned in to give her a perfunctory kiss. She looked over at Anthony and Sophie and started to say something but changed her mind. “Everything okay?”

  “Fine. We’re just walking home.” Saying the obvious sounded silly but it was true, almost. And I didn’t want my aunt or anyone in my family to know I had been called a kike, or suspect my interest in Anthony, or see how dejected I felt that he had a girlfriend.

  “Send everyone my love.” The window closed and she drove away, the tires barely making a sound. The car bounced smoothly over the next hill.

  “Nice Jew canoe.”

  “Jew canoe?” I turned to face him, all my thwarted desire turned to effrontery and discomfort. “That’s my aunt’s car. Why did you say that?”

  He put up his hands. “Didn’t mean anything. It’s just an expression. Okay? Jeez. Girl’s got a temper.”

  “No, she doesn’t,” Sophie said. “It’s not a nice thing to say, like your friends calling us kikes. Haven’t we had enough of this today?”

  “Hey, hey, hey, turn it down. I like Jews. Okay?” He flicked his cigarette toward the curb and made slow circles in the street.

  “It’s not right,” Sophie said.

  “Are you girls going to forgive me or what?”

  “Just don’t say that again. Ever,” I said.

  He walked up to me and stood so close, I smelled his cologne and the smoke on his breath, and his clean sweat. “I won’t. I promise. Okay?”

  We stopped at Sophie’s house first, a white Colonial with blue shutters. She ran up a flagstone path to a side door and waved good-bye. Inside, her pretty mother awaited her. Her surgeon father would be coming home late. But Sophie’s family was a two-parent family. Complete. I wondered if her father could have cured Mother’s bent fingers.

  I didn’t like that thought. It hurt and it made it hard to breathe and I didn’t want Anthony to notice. But he too had grown pensive in the dark as we walked down the hill and back up another, toward my house. Street lamps lit our way. It was that time at dusk when people put the lights on and haven’t yet pulled down their shades. I could see clearly into strangers’ expensively furnished rooms. Crystal chandeliers. Fancy, flowered wallpapered walls.

  “Pretty rich neighborhood you live in,” he finally said, lighting up another cigarette and curling it into his palm. “You’re lucky.”

  “It’s not what you think,” I said.

  He nodded and I believe he gleaned my thoughts about Mother because he lifted his left hand and touched my hair.

  “I’d kiss you but I have a girlfriend,” he said. He didn’t smile when he said this. He didn’t joke. I stopped at the end of my street. I wanted to kiss him too. But I looked away. I didn’t want him to know.

  “This is it.” I pointed to my side of the street.

  “Which one is yours?”

  I pointed to my house. The downstairs lights were on. Robert’s room was lit up, the dining room windows and the round, white ball glowing coldly. Mother’s room was dark, a cavity of pain that Anthony couldn’t see. I looked down at my feet, pushing away tears.

  “You okay?”

&nb
sp; “I feel safe, now. Thanks.”

  He nodded and turned. “See you at school.”

  I watched him walk off. I watched him until he reached the bottom of the hill and then he blended in with the dark, like someone stepping into the wilderness.

  3

  Chapter Thirteen

  Amorphous

  My youngest brother came into this world bearing the unseeable of unseeables: faith. He came into the world with knowing. From birth Elliot rode the emotional currents that stirred up our household. He did this instinctively and innocently, as if each swell in the familial sea were a natural occurrence. He didn’t know any other way. I guess none of us did. But he was more accepting.

  His entrance into life deepened Mother’s reticence. If I was used to her retreats, whether in the garden, or on the phone, or at the club, after Elliot her absence became customary. We were entities whose biological threads connected to something amorphous, which we called Mother. So, instead, Elliot tied himself to his dreams and imaginary friends.

  Love was something distant that retired to a room on the second floor.

  Mother was beautifully ethereal and because of that Elliot sought that which he could hold in his hands — tactile things, touch. So it was that he first came to love miniature toy animals. He embraced them. He entrusted them with his emotional survival. To these things he grew attached.

  He coveted any kind of replica. He collected small china elephants, dogs, tigers, sea lions that came inside cereal packages. He ferreted them out of tea boxes. In this imagined world he tended to injuries and set his second family on his windowsill for repair. He understood explicitly that living beings needed sun and air, wind and rain. They needed tending to. They needed love.

  The amazing thing about his animals — and the numbers grew so that Dora complained and said it was impossible to dust his room — was their ability to listen. A mere glance on his part and all his animals knew his feelings. A slight tilt in his arm, an unsuspecting nod and they figured things out. Elliot told me his animals could do this. They knew him best. But as I saw it, they expressed his ability to intuit and emote.

  He felt things. At the same time he did not feel compelled to verbalize what he felt or saw the way Robert did. With Robert, words were not necessarily transports of emotion but detached observations, descriptions of actions and things. Definitions kept Robert in control. “The reason why they have shiva is because shiva means seven in Hebrew and that’s why shiva lasts for seven days.”

  He didn’t take the meaning beyond that.

  In our house that roiled with shouts and protests, Elliot understood the value of remaining quiet, unperturbed and imperturbable. In our house, voices tangled like sewing thread at the back of the drawer. To avoid the squabbles that formed into tiny, ever-tightening knots, he retreated too, but unlike Mother who moved through the house edgily nudging and pushing to her destination of remoteness, Elliot exuded softness. He was putty in the family’s hands. He slackened the rope and in so doing, released tension around him. In this way Elliot eluded Father’s incisive glare, and appeared nonplussed by Robert’s inexhaustible outrage: “I don’t like all those people looking at me. Tell them to leave me alone.”

  It’s why I liked to sit with Elliot in the afternoon, after school, after Mother died. He turned to his toys as a way to communicate the angst he sensed in me. When he explained the relationships between his ceramic elephants, or the history of a lion’s chipped foot, it was as if he were reciting. I relaxed. I felt safe again, or normalized to some extent.

  “It doesn’t hurt him,” he explained to me, turning the glazed lion in the sunlight. “He’s learned to walk just fine. He doesn’t even notice it anymore.”

  “How do you know?”

  “He told me.”

  His animals heard him, every note and chord in his body’s internal harmonic gathering. It might be that he didn’t like the way Father spoke to Peter. It might be that he didn’t see the sense in Robert’s needling and insouciance — Robert’s ability to create barriers on the smallest scale — not letting Elliot touch his fish tank, for instance. Nevertheless, Elliot absorbed these insults and sponged them out somehow in his psychic conversations with toy animals.

  “The cows stand in the field and watch because they understand better than the others,” Elliot said.

  It might have been easy to think that Elliot didn’t notice unruly behavior precisely because it was all he had known. But I knew that wasn’t so. He simply chose to ignore certain aspects of others’ personalities. Robert treated Elliot poorly whenever Elliot came in to look at his fish. The fishbowl was a magnet for Elliot. It held a transcendent light that captured a silence and intensity that Elliot identified with. Robert, wholly caught up in the concrete details of fish and tank, fish food and filter missed the nuances behind what Elliot saw and barked at him to go away, or not touch the glass. But as harsh as Robert sounded, Elliot understood this about his older brother and eluded his ragged edge. He still chose to touch the glass upon every visit to Robert’s room, knowing each time that Robert would launch into silly protests but that’s just what they were: silly, inconsequential. In this way, Elliot possessed weight, self-knowledge, and a natural understanding of the multiple ways other people responded to the same stimulus.

  So it was that Elliot also had a way of accepting Mother’s death, albeit, not without a sage’s wisdom and sad face. He accepted the illogicality of it. In his nine-year-old mind that had matured emotionally beyond the clumsiness of his body, he said that God was like clay and that all things on earth came in different shapes — including Mother — and that Mother had simply been remolded, but still remained a part of us. He was certain of this.

  “Mother visits me after school,” he said.

  I sat on the floor of his room, next to the window-sill, and watched him line up a group of dogs and cats in a circle. He alternated cat, dog, cat, dog. I didn’t know what to say to this. What he said scared but comforted me.

  “How?”

  “She came with the wind.”

  “That’s beautiful, Elliot.”

  “You don’t believe me.”

  I didn’t know if I did but I felt her puzzling silence, her complexly muted presence, an unspoken puzzle I had not solved.

  “Yes and no. I don’t know. It’s confusing.”

  If these vespers, these harbingers of changing weather added up to some kind of ghostlike substance, then I did believe. But I doubted. Doubt obscured me. The question mark would remain. Yet sitting next to Elliot calmed me. If he could manage so could I.

  What I began to learn, though, is that the question mark — my mother — stayed with me, followed me wherever I went. She floated inside, a buoy without a boat.

  ~~~~~

  With each school day I was pushed along by an invisible contract, a Code of Avoidance, an uneasy social rule that said I would be better served by silence. No one said anything about Mother, and neither did I, as if I had been sent out to space where sound didn’t travel. I heard nothing in the darkness; saw only hints of distant lights, darker reflections in Sophie’s eyes, a flicker of tension in Mr. Giles’ shoulders; a determination on Margaret’s part to share a cigarette.

  If no one talked about it, then the tragedy would go away, and that would help me deal, as if this silent code had the power to remold Mother, and me. It did in a way. For it governed every conversation. It defined the way some kids looked away from me or turned nervously when they saw me walking down the hall. I lived inside a capsule, a massive, unspoken bubble of mutedness, until I grew so accustomed to it, I hid inside it.

  With Mother gone, Father seceded from the daily machinations of home, letting Dora take over despite the financial strain that paying her full-time put on his finances, or so he said. He dropped the country club, in the name of saving money, but I believed it was more than that. He never cared about it. The club was Mother’s domain; moreover, the family business was flailing under Uncle Max. It see
med it wouldn’t last.

  And, what did six o’clock really mean anymore without Mother descending the stairs to greet him, without her implacable face reflecting his? We started to eat in the kitchen, lining up on our bar stools, Father standing by the window eating distractedly, dropping food like pieces of him falling apart.

  Robert and Elliot still walked to school together. Peter still came home later each day, caught up in the gyrations of his last year in high school, his band, his impending graduation in the spring. The day after Anthony walked me home and the day after that and more days following, he became remote. So, I studied harder to block out what hurt. I practiced piano, marching through scales, stamping out thoughts, thinking musically so as not to think of anything else. Harmonies guarded me from a wandering ache.

  ~~~~~

  Then one afternoon in the spring I came home from school and found Father and Miss Delgarno drinking tall glasses of vodka in the den.

  “Sarah,” she said, standing up too quickly as if she were sitting on a pincushion full of prickly guilt.

  “What are you doing here?” I said.

  I surveyed her face. She was the sort of woman who overdid her makeup. Her lipstick had a greasy look to it, not the soft, powdered touch that Mother had mastered. Miss Delgarno’s miniskirt was a kneecap too short and as I stood in the den wondering what I thought about all this — I didn’t want to be a fool — I watched her tug at her hem, then cross her knees as if that would make up for its poor design, its awkward stitching, not at all tailored and fitting as the clothes Mother chose. Miss Delgarno was much younger, too, trying too hard to be hip.

  “I’ve asked Sherry to join us for dinner,” Father said.

  I nodded. Mother had a way of phrasing her outfits, layering silk tops with colorful scarves, or a pin that offset the square look of a three-piece suit so that the lapel danced with glints of gold. Not Miss Delgarno. She was messy. Her large smile, overly solicitous.

  “Can you sit with us for a moment?” she asked.

  “Sit where?” I said, looking around the room. She had taken up Mother’s chair and the couch, though empty, looked miles away from the chairs by the window. I had no intention of making her feel at ease. And I didn’t like her use of “us.” What was she doing here?