Lark and Termite

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  “OK.” He mouths the word like he can’t talk or even whisper. Just the shape of a sound on his lips and he clinches his teeth. Now that he knows I’ll do it I can see the feeling come on him full blown, into his eyes, into his breathing and the tawny flush of his face.

  “Don’t touch me with your hands,” I tell him, but he doesn’t have to. Just the force of him moving toward me backs us into my room and against the wall. I can see the flecks of dirt across his chest. A gleam of blond hairs and sweat fills the space my eyes can see and his nipples are hard and tiny. It’s so long since I’ve been this close to the smell and feel of him. He flattens his palms on either side of the wall at my head and keeps his hands still to promise he will. I put my mouth on him, and the brown nub of his nipple fits between my teeth like a little stone. I pull on the other and touch and roll it under my fingers, and the sounds he makes seem to start inside me. There’s a measure of time we have before he can’t hear me or listen to me anymore. He reaches down to pull the laundry basket, piled with all the clothes and sheets I haven’t folded, over behind us, and his face moves down my chest and belly, along the bone of my hip, and he nudges me back onto the basket. He arches over me and I get my shirt off and push my forehead hard against him through his jeans, then I put my hand inside the button and feel for the zipper, pull his pants down, close my eyes. I feel him hard and silken in my mouth, and in my hands, and against my face and in my hair. He’s pushing and pushing at me, all over me, not fast, on and on. I hold him at the hollow of my neck and then I raise my arms all along the line of his torso. The blunt head of him moves its tear of wet across my ribs and my breasts and finds the hollow under my arm, and that’s how he comes, and on my neck and my chest, with me holding him so I feel the pulsing as it moves through him.

  “Do that to me,” he says, “do that to me, Lark.” He sinks to his knees and lies across me and we slide down on the towels and T-shirts and sheets that have spilled. It’s easy now, like no time has gone by without this, and I put my hand on the cleft of his buttocks and touch the secret fur, push my finger just inside, like I own his body, like he would own mine if he ever got inside me. If he got inside me I would never get away.

  I told Solly I wouldn’t leave. We wouldn’t need to leave, I said, we never had. Once, years ago, water got knee deep in the basement and rose in the yard to the kitchen door, and we stayed right here. We’ll see, Solly said. I packed food, rain slickers, boots. Solly helped me empty the bureaus, gather the winter coats, strip the beds and linen closet, pile everything in the attic. He got Termite’s fat upholstered chair up those narrow pull-down stairs, tilting and turning it on his shoulders. We brought up jugs of water, my transistor radio, flashlights, candles and oil lamps, even Nonie’s safe-deposit box. He’d signed on to help Civil Defense evacuate and they were opening shelters as well as the Armory, some of the churches. They were saying the water could rise fast, especially near the river. Before he left, he grabbed me hard by the shoulders to make sure I was paying attention. “When the water gets to the back stoop,” he said, “get into the attic. Don’t wait, and stay there all night, even if the house doesn’t flood.” I told him we liked the attic, we’d camp out. “If it’s bad,” he told me, “I’ll be back for you in a boat, and we won’t be taking anything out that attic window but you and Termite. You be ready.”

  I’m in the kitchen, making peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches on the Wonder bread Termite likes, when the power cuts off. In the silence, the storm is louder. It’s afternoon, but the light in the house is pearl gray. There’s a sound to the rain, a rush and pressure, and I can’t see through it to tell how high the water in the alley is rising. The roads between here and downtown will flood. Nonie won’t get home tonight, but I’ll manage. I’ve got cans of baked beans and Vienna sausage up there, jugs of water, cheese, the cold chicken from the restaurant.

  I have Termite sitting where I can watch him, propped with pillows on the living room couch. The windows are open a crack so he can hear the rain. He’s got his hands up but his fingers are nearly motionless, like the air is so heavy he can’t move them. I’m putting the sandwiches in a plastic bag, and I see him sit up straight and go still. He can’t do that, and he doesn’t. It’s not like he’s scared: he’s waiting, expectant, and what’s coming is now. I turn to the window, and suddenly, like a magic trick, the rain deepens and darkens. The wind changes direction and crashes a wall of rain flat against the house like a breaking wave. Wind hurls the rain and sucks it back, and just for an instant I see the surface of the flood. The water is murky, moving like a shallow lake. There’s no alley, no yards, and the little fence between the houses is gone. It’s like we’re on a boat in a bowl someone is squeezing. The water is coming up so fast that I can see it rise. Termite hears it coming.

  “We’re going upstairs, Termite.” I’m across the room, slamming windows shut as I pass. They bang like gunshots and I pick Termite up, not too fast, but quickly, water pooling at my feet. The flood is in the house, almost warm, like a summer puddle deep enough to splash through, and we’re up the stairs.

  It’s nearly dark in the attic, with the glimmer of the one window under the eaves. Solly put Termite’s chair there, turned to the rectangular view, but I don’t look. I put Termite in his chair with the bag of sandwiches in his lap and the flashlight in his hands. It’s a long metal flashlight with some weight to it, like mechanics use, and he likes it. He holds on to it tight and I turn it on, aimed at the stairs. “I’m getting a few more things,” I tell him. “You’ll see me there, coming and going.”

  I don’t hear him answer because I’m moving down the steep ladder stairs in the dim light. I’m thinking about what’s irreplaceable. What we’ll need if everything is gone.

  I grab an empty bureau drawer in my room and throw in my notebooks, my pencils, the drawings from my wall, drooping off their tape in the damp. The skirts and blouses, nylons and underwear, the one good cardigan and pair of heels Miss Barker says an executive secretary might need, are already upstairs. I don’t care about anything else. The seashells in their trays on my desk can float away, back to water, and the postcard Main Streets tacked to my walls can pull apart. It’s not my room anymore, it hasn’t been for a while. The novelty pitchers I collected can fill, sink their doll-sized dream scenes and souvenir words. I’ve got to find Termite’s moon-faced favorite, though, his moon-man doodad, and here it is, centered on his table like some miniature royal ornament. Maybe Solly put it there when he stripped the bed—Solly would remember it, he would know. If the phone worked, I could call Nonie. She’d tell me to get the first-aid kit from under the sink, the jewelry box with her pearls, the salt box with the wooden lid where she keeps household cash. I fill the drawer, splashing room to room, shove it across the floor at the top of the attic steps, and remember what Stamble said: smithereens. I need to get the wheelchair he gave us. My boots feel clammy when I pull them onto my bare feet, but I remember floods are poison, full of what’s burst and broken. That’s why Termite can’t stay here. Maybe we can’t be here anymore and something came to say so.

  Downstairs the sound of the rain is calmer, steady, like the flood has come in and hushed the storm. It’s quiet and strange. Water stands evenly in every room, a foot deep up the legs of chairs, opaque and still as a mirror. I open the door to the deep closet where we keep the wheelchairs, both of them now. A piece of the vacuum cleaner floats out around my ankles. Then a hat and some gloves. I leave the heavy old chair where it is and pull the new one out by the handles. It’s folded up and the flood is only midway up the wheels. It pulls through the water like a ship or a toy, and I push it up the attic steps on its big thin wheels. It glints like a creature and tick ticks across the attic floor in the thin space left—an aisle that leads to the window. I move it over near Termite’s chair and set it just opposite, angled toward the window like his. Then I open it, lock the seat in place with the levers on the wheels. “I’ll sit here,” I tell him. “We’ll have supper
and watch the rain.”

  He doesn’t say anything and I wonder if he’s scared. The beam of the flashlight pours past us to the space above the steps. I leave it lie and lean over Termite, press my face to the attic window. It’s not day or night. The water moves like a shallow river between the houses, level with the sills of first-floor windows. I see an old wooden doghouse float by, bobbing its peaked board roof, dragging a length of thick rope with a collar still attached. Something about the boxy shape and floating rope reminds me of Termite’s wagon. I should have thought, should have got it up the stairs, had Solly help me. I know we’re leaving here, I can feel it. Maybe we’ll stay with Elise in her little house until we know where to go, but he’s got to have his chair, and the wagon, big and heavy as it is. They’re all he knows about where he is.

  “I guess you’d like to have your wagon up here, wouldn’t you, Termite. I think I’ll go and get it.”

  Think I’ll go, think I’ll go, he says, quiet, like he’s not convinced.

  “You take your moon man,” I tell him, “and give me the flashlight.”

  I move his hands, each finger, until he closes his palms around the little moon-faced pitcher, and I stand at the top of the attic steps, play the beam of the flashlight down across the water. The flood has made the third step and looks black in the light, scary, like oil or paint. I switch the flashlight off, and move closer. There’s nothing to do but step in. Water fills my boots and rises midthigh. The flood has come in all at once, cool now, the color of coffee with milk. I’m standing in Termite’s room. His bed, a metal cot with fold-up legs, turns just slightly, floating like a raft. The thick plastic mattress is still dry and the water bears it along like a special platform. I move through to the living room, where I left the wagon. The door to the basement stands open, moving with the flood. I think about the basement underwater: the empty space where the boxes sat, the workbench, Termite’s newsprint drawings disintegrating on the clothesline. I tell myself the house has a granite foundation: it will hold, even if it fills. Nothing else matters: the water will decide. The marooned piano in the living room has shifted to the left, water stirring almost to the keyboard, and the piano bench is upside down. Sheet music circles on the water, silent, open pages, weighted and wet. I train the beam of the flashlight over the words. “Meet Me in St. Louis” drifts by, and “My Funny Valentine.”

  Termite’s wagon is partway onto the back of the couch. The metal handle sticks up like a long neck with a skinny head, gleaming its wedge-shaped face. The wagon is tilted out of the water, but it will fill if I try to pull it away, and I’ll never get it up the steps. My boots are like weights, but I get in position to balance the wagon and give the couch a shove. It moves, like a sodden, heavy boat, and nearly lurches backward, but I hold it steady and push. There are no doors in my path. I can float the couch through the archway into my room, through Termite’s room to the attic stairs, then angle it and pull the wagon off, up the last five or six steps. Nick Tucci made the arches wide. I think about him plastering those arches when Termite was two or three: Nick made space for the flood, for the brown muck of a river he said he doesn’t like. I know Nick was in high school with my mother. He’s the only one who ever mentions her to me, like she’s a secret we share, but we don’t. You remember her mother, Nonie told him, when she thought I couldn’t hear.

  I was a child and Nick would throw me over his shoulder like he did his sons, hold me in his lap, teach me fingerplays and silly songs. I’d beg him to take me to work with him, night shift at the plant, and sometimes he did—Nonie must have needed a babysitter. He’d find me a soft chair to sit in by the wall, put earplugs in my ears, and tell me not to move. I could feel the wrapper slamming bales so hard the big room jumped, and it was like Nick made the sound. The pounding lulled me to sleep. He broke walls with a sledgehammer the summer he made a room for Termite. We kids cheered while Nonie took Termite into the yard, not to breathe the dust. Solly and I smeared each other with chalky powder, ran in and out of the gaping holes Nick smoothed and shaped. Nick used to call me his girl but I got older and he stopped. You remind me of someone, he started saying. Lark is nothing like her, Nonie told him, and I tried hard not to be. I could pour myself into Termite and it was never enough, he needed me all the time. But I was like my mother with Solly, all along. We were children, doing those things, and I remember thinking about Nick. Like those nights at the plant, sitting in the near dark with my ears stopped up. I could feel the wham of the wrapper pounding through the floor into my feet, through the seat of the chair into my hips. I thought about Nick, pressed hard against a wall with a woman whose face I couldn’t see, like I knew what had happened to him with someone else.

  The rain has lessened. The sound now is like the flowing of a stream, light and high and constant. Parts of Winfield flood worse than here—Nick will be with the men, taking people out of houses and off the tops of cars. He’ll be asking Solly where the hell I am, and where’s Junior? Solly will say we’re fine, and we are. I’m moving the couch, edging it along the wall in the mud-colored water, but I keep slipping in the wobbly boots. Carefully, I step out of them, reach down, find them in the murk, and empty them into the flood. I feel the floor under my feet, throw the boots on the couch, balance the fat length of it along the wall, through the arch into my room. My bed is underwater. The tall headboard stands above the dark reflection of the flood, and I see something move past it. The water ripples, ripples again in a long streak, and I look away. That cat, I think, that feral alley cat that’s dirty orange and sits and watches Termite, that slinks away at the rail yard. I don’t want it in the attic with us. I’ll pull the steps up, as soon as I manage the wagon. The steps seal tight, to hold the heat in winter. They’re fitted with a plywood rectangle on the back, layered over with the same pale blue bead board as Termite’s ceiling. They fit so tight you wouldn’t notice them from below, except for the wooden handgrip that’s broad as the steps, and the cord that dangles from it. The steps are not much wider than the wagon. I feel the couch nudge them, blind and blunt. It’s getting dark. I’ve got the flashlight in one hand.

  “I’m coming up, Termite.” I move around the couch, feel my way onto the submerged lower steps. I can just reach the handle of the wagon. It pulls easily over the back of the couch, but I’m pulling dead weight at a steep angle when I move farther up the narrow opening of the attic steps. I put the flashlight on the top step and hold the wagon in place, arched up on its front wheels like some awkward reptile emerging from a pool. I pull it up one step, and two, then the couch spins away and dips into the water. The weight of the wagon lurches back and pulls me forward so fast that I’m in the water before I can brace myself. I hear the wagon thud to a lower step as I fall, but the wheels lodge tight. The flood is higher, nearly to my chest, deep enough to swim through. I keep my head out of the water and remember those sandwiches in Termite’s lap. If something happens, he’ll have enough to eat until someone comes for him. He wouldn’t, though; he wouldn’t eat. I feel for the steps and pull myself all the way up, careful and quiet, not a sound or move to jostle the wagon, and the wheels stay locked.

  I’m wet through and I smell of the flood, a smell of ruined fruit and dank motor oil. I angle the beam of the heavy flashlight so I can see the wagon just below me, then I sit on the attic floor, grip the ladder steps with my ankles, legs spread, and pull the wagon toward me. I’m pulling it up, locking the wheels higher step by step, and I see the water ripple below me in long glides. They’re rats. I see their eyes glisten in the light, and one of them leaps onto the back of the wagon, feeling its way fast along the wooden edge toward me. I scream, feel the flashlight in my hand, and throw it hard. The rat plops back into the water, then I’m scrambling in a panic, pulling the wagon up fast in the dark. I get it just behind me and realize they’ll be up the steps. I see motion in the water, grab for the rope handles of the attic ladder, pull hard to angle the steps out of the flood, midway to the ceiling. The shape hangs
in the dark, too high, too high for rats to jump. I look for any movement, slam the wood hard with my fists. The wobbling scuttle rats make is so different from the streak of a mouse. I wish for that alley cat, that filthy vicious cat that eats what it catches, and I wish for a hammer or a gun. The steps will latch tight. I pull off my dress that smells of slime and rot and drop it into the water, then I look down before I close us in, count the long glides across the flooded space. There are three of them, or four. Smooth torpedo lines that shine and search, dark little bullet heads. The rats from the river and the Polish Town dump are swimming out of the flood.

  Wooden houses, Nonie always says—about reckless people, risky ideas. I light the kerosene lamps anyway, and the fat, thick candles that won’t fall over. Light to shine through the window, for Solly to see in case he needs to come before daybreak, putt-putting toward us in a Civil Defense motorboat. The flood is all over me, dark soil lifted from Polish Town field and drowned creatures floated from the river, so I twist up my stinking hair and wrap myself in a white bedspread like a girl stepping out of a bath. I pull the wagon over and turn it upside down, with the handle folded inside so it’s level. A table for candles and oil lamps, and I set the food out, baked beans in cans and the cold chicken on wax paper, open the sandwiches on our laps. “Here’s our picnic,” I tell Termite. “See how nice the lights look? And we have a bed for you to sleep in. It’s cooler now. The flood has taken the heat.”

  He turns his head toward the window, like we’re discussing it.

  Everything tastes better than it really could, like fairy-tale food. We’re sitting in our chairs, him in his upholstered nest, me in Stamble’s wheelchair, knees touching, two ladies at a tea party beside a dark window. I try to rub the dirty glass clear, but all we see is the reflection of two kerosene lamps, wide-lipped forms side by side, and a separate nimbus for each candle flame.