Ellen works her hand into her purse, grips the pill bottle tucked into the side pocket. It seems that something must be sacrificed soon: the head or the hearth, God or the soul, James or Ellen, and it is Ellen who does not fit, who is always unsatisfied, ungrateful, unhappy. Dear God, please, she begins, but she doesn’t know what to ask for. She feels the way she did when she was a child waking up after one of her dreams, not knowing which of the twisted paths to take, the voices of the men fading in the distance.
Amy’s swimming suit is an old one from last summer and it pinches her beneath the arms, rides up in the back to expose her hips. It is green with bright yellow flowers; a frill of material hangs from the waist. When she steps into the water, it floats up in a babyish way until Amy holds it down with her hands. She is older than all the other kids, and some of them are looking at her curiously. Herbert is talking with his friend from school; he pretends not to know Amy, and Amy pretends not to know him.
The teacher is a teenage boy. He says his name is John and they should just go ahead and call him that. All the kids look at one another—did he really think they would call him mister? But everyone watches when he executes a perfect backflip off the diving board. He pops back to the surface, plunges forward, porpoiselike, swims over to where they’re waiting in the shallow end, and tells them that, if they work hard, they’ll be able to do the same thing someday.
Right now, though, they have to put their faces into the water and blow bubbles. Amy turns her back to John so he won’t see she is keeping her face dry except for her chin. Herbert has his entire head beneath the water. When he comes up, John makes an example of him, asking can anyone else go all the way under too? Amy creeps behind John, staying carefully out of his line of vision. The other kids don’t notice because they are underwater most of the time, practicing holding their breath. Some of the mothers in the bleachers notice, but they just point and laugh.
A girl jerks her head out of the water and coughs; Amy’s stomach shrinks into a small, hard ball. The water smells bitter, and it sucks at her chest, pushes against her stomach and hips. She cannot imagine surrendering to it, arms beating like awkward wings, feet thrashing. Solid objects waver and dance; things in water are not the way they seem. Amy is careful to test the bottom of the pool with her toe before she steps all the way down. At any moment, the concrete could give way and send her plummeting to a pit filled with beasts. At any moment, the water might turn to a boiling bath of oil. In the basement Amy has found old books of her grandmother’s about the lives of the saints, and on rainy days she re-reads her favorite parts: Saint Martina, who bled milk after the emperor stripped her naked and slashed her body with knives; Saint Fausta, who endured one thousand nails hammered into her skull; Saint Euphemia, whose limbs were ripped from her body, whose feet were severed the way Amy’s feet look severed, distant, far off under the water.
“Okay!” John says. “I think you’re ready to swim. What do you think about that?”
They all look at one another, dripping, uneasy.
“We’ll start with the dead man’s float,” John says. “And our volunteer to go first will be the girl who still hasn’t put her head in the water.”
John looks at Amy. Amy looks at John. A few of the kids titter. The water tickles in Amy’s armpits, swells against the hollow between her shoulder blades.
“Swimming doesn’t interest me,” Amy says with as much disdain as she can muster. She keeps her hands at her sides, holding the skirt of her swimming suit in place.
John smiles at the other kids and says, “How come do you think a big girl like her is afraid of water?”
“I’m not afraid of water. I’m just not interested in swimming.”
He ignores her. “To do the dead man’s float,” he explains to the class, “you have to be perfectly relaxed. Take a deep breath and the water will hold you up, like this…” He glides into a float, his long thin body stretching. He stays that way until the kids start to whisper to each other. Maybe he is unconscious. Maybe he died right in front of them and they didn’t even know it. They all jump when John finally pops up out of the water, slicking his hair back, grinning.
“Now you,” he points to Amy. “What’s your name?”
Amy doesn’t answer.
“Amy Grier,” one of the mothers calls.
“Amy is going to be my volunteer. She’s going to relax and fall forward into the water, and I’m going to hold her up.”
But Amy is weaving through the other kids toward the steps.
“Get back here,” John says. “You and me have the whole summer to go yet.”
The mothers in the bleachers are laughing, and so are the kids in the pool.
Amy stops. “What do I have to do to pass this class, so I don’t have to come anymore?” she says. “I mean, what does everybody have to do at the end of it?”
“Dive,” John says smugly.
Amy gets out of the pool. A few of the kids yell fraidy cat and girl; she feels as though she is watching herself from somewhere far away. All of this is her mother’s fault, and if Amy dies that will be her mother’s fault too. She walks to the deep end of the pool, climbs up the steps to the diving board. She imagines the funeral, her mother dressed in black, weeping over the coffin in which Amy lies, dead, astonishingly beautiful. Abruptly, Christ appears above her, his feet moving gingerly over the air, as all of Amy’s relatives and friends and everyone she’s ever known bow down in front of her body. Christ opens His shirt, exposing his Sacred Heart the way he did for Saint Margaret, only now, because of Amy, everyone can see it, everyone can see how much Christ grieves just for her. The mothers are calling to her, clattering down from the bleachers, but Amy pretends they are cries of anguish from the mourners.
“Hey! Stop!” John yells, climbing out of the water. The last thing Amy sees is his shadow gliding toward her along the concrete. She closes her eyes, fills her lungs with air, lifts her arms, and pitches forward.
The shock of it, the coldness, and the hollow, watery sound stiffen her body and she glides until her clenched fists scrape the bottom. She opens her eyes and sees the liquid yellow surface above. What if her mother doesn’t come to her funeral? What if nobody cares that she is dead? Men will fish her body out of the pool with a hook. What should we do with her? they say, and when no one claims her, they bury her by the edge of the pool, in unconsecrated soil, where her mother will never come to visit and Christ will never find her. The sudden bullet shape of John hurtles through the water; Amy thrashes her legs and, miraculously, she lifts away from him. She moves her arms, keeping rhythm, until she feels cool air against the top of her head, and then she lifts her chin to breathe, scraping her forehead against the pool wall.
“What a stupid thing to do,” John shouts from the middle of the pool. “Get back to the shallows and stay there.”
She struggles up out of the pool, her legs and arms shaking wildly. She is not dead. She is not dead. A group of mothers comes down from the bleachers saying, Sh, Sweetheart, you’re okay. One of them tries to wrap her in a sweet-smelling towel, but Amy walks away, kicking her legs out proudly until she reaches the locker room. The mother follows, sitting down beside her on the low wooden bench in front of the lockers and this time when she slips the towel over Amy’s shoulders, Amy holds it against herself. “Did you see me swim?” she asks the mother, closing her eyes so it can be Ellen who is stroking her wet hair and calling her sweetheart, baby, love.
Ellen finds James asleep on the patio, stretched out in a lawn chair, a dish towel draped over his head so the top, where the hair is thin, won’t burn. Next door, the Muellers are watering their lawn. Mr. Mueller wields the nozzle, calling directions to Mrs. Mueller, who trots behind him lugging coils of hose. The hose moves between them like a living thing until Mrs. Mueller drops it and stands, arms akimbo. Mr. Mueller whirls, brandishing the nozzle angrily, and then he sees Ellen watching. With his chin, he indicates the house to Mrs. Mueller. She goes inside, and he follo
ws her, flinging the nozzle to the ground.
Now that the weather is warm, their fights trickle through the open windows, more a fragrance than a sound at first, subtle, then slowly building. It’s the night fights that disturb Ellen the most. The voices remind her of a strange, atonal opera, the sort of thing she sometimes hears on public radio. She takes a sleeping pill and lies down in the middle of the empty bed, imagining James in some far-off motel room, and wonders if he’s thinking of her even as she knows he’s not. He will be sleeping soundly, the television buzzing at the foot of the bed, his knees curled to his chest so that his body takes up as little space as possible. Ellen spreads her legs, spreads her arms, invading the space that would belong to James if he were here. She tries to breathe deeply, tries to relax, until the angry music of the argument fades.
One morning in spring, Mrs. Mueller came to the door clutching a paper bag beneath her arm.
“Keep this for me, will you please?” she said to Ellen. She spoke as if she were afraid that somebody else might hear. “I’m leaving him, and these were my mother’s things, her jewelry and some old pictures. I can’t have them with me until I know where I’m going. I don’t want to carry anything of value.”
“Of course I’ll keep them for you,” Ellen said. “Let me know when you get settled and I’ll send them on.”
But Mrs. Mueller was gone only three days. She came by to retrieve her things early in the summer, and though she waves at Ellen from her yard, they have not spoken since. When Ellen told James about it, he simply shrugged. “She learned what it’s like out in the real world,” he said. “Makes things look pretty good where she’s at.”
His face was smug, certain, right; the expression he’s wearing now. Ellen sits down on the patio floor, feeling the rough concrete bite the bare backs of her thighs. She says, “James,” but he doesn’t move. She can tell he is awake. His eyes skitter beneath his lids, and his Adam’s apple bobs once. In the harsh sunlight, she can see every pore of his skin.
“James, where is our money?”
He sits up abruptly. “What?”
“I went to the bank. We have almost nothing—”
“What were you doing at the bank?”
“It’s my bank.”
“Where are the kids?”
“Swimming. What did you do with it?”
“Well,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I invested it.”
“Uninvest it.”
“I can’t. Not for eighteen months. But the interest—”
“You mean we’re going to live here for another year and a half?”
James clears his throat. “We’ll talk about this some more when you calm down.” He closes his eyes.
The ground spins away from Ellen and she remembers her father’s death, because the feeling then was oddly the same. He’d fallen from a wagon and landed wrong; still he walked back to the house unassisted and nobody thought it was serious. Ellen had crawled up beside him on the bed, and she remembers playing with his fingers as she drifted off to sleep. She woke up, confused, in Miriam and Ketty’s bed, and ran downstairs just in time to see the coroner and another man she did not know lift her father’s body onto a hard, flat stretcher. Daddy looked the same, but, in fact, he was different. He had changed as soon as she’d closed her eyes. She clung to her mother during the funeral, howling with what everyone thought was grief, but what she knows now was rage.
And now that same fury floods her body, fresh and sharp, only there is no one to run to, no place to hide. She stands up, breathing hard, trying not to look at the soft, pale stretch of James’s throat as he lies in the warm sunshine waiting for her to give up and go away. Cool-headed James, patient James, serene beneath his flickering eyelids. Whatever the storm, he will wait it out; he knows he is right as simply as he knows that Ellen is wrong.
Ungrateful. All he does for you.
The hearth and the home.
Sacrifice.
Ellen’s anger is like a fire, spreading in gusts, licking at larger and larger things. She walks over to the Muellers’ and picks up the hose. It is long, cold, serpentine. She drags it until she stands only several feet away from James, pulls the trigger on the nozzle. James shrieks, topples out of his chair as the water slaps his face, knocks the towel from his head. He writhes beneath the stream, which she aims against his chest and tender belly, the notch between his legs. She is silent, deliberate, her mind closed to everything but the water and just beyond it where a faint rainbow wavers delicately above the grass.
James whips in through the back door, slams it. Ellen hears him shoot the lock, hollering from inside the house…Crazy!…Childish!…She aims the water at the door, at the windows, moving the stream over the brick walls, and it comes to her what she is doing, what she has been doing. She is writing her name in wet block letters six feet tall.
14
What James sees isn’t land or water or sky, just the long, gentle tongue of the road swallowing him into the horizon. Sometimes, on the rural highways, he stops to urinate behind a clump of trees, inhaling the familiar, tangy odor of his piss with satisfaction as it darkens the bark. Walking back to the car, the sun hot against the sunburnt part in his hair, he lifts his arms to catch the breeze and remembers other warm Julys when he was working in the fields with his father and Mitch, not riding in shirtsleeves in a company car with the windows rolled all the way down. Back then, they wore coveralls and hats and long-sleeved shirts. The more you sweat, the cooler you feel. Once he fainted and came to upside down, carried over Mitch’s shoulder, his face bouncing hard against the seat of Mitch’s pants. When he kicked, Mitch’s steely fingers tightened on his thighs, and James vomited helplessly onto his heels, leaving a wet trail through the pale new leaves of the corn.
In the car again, slipping easily onto the road, he remembers his first job, when he was ten, working for his father, walking milk to the row of summer cottages along the lake two miles away. The cottages were made of good fieldstone, the porches decorated with flowers planted in wooden barrels or hanging from the gutters in clay pots. James smelled white flour biscuits, smoked ham, apple pie, and his stomach felt small and hard inside him. “Milk today, ma’am?” he said shyly at each door; the children of the rich summer people put out their tongues while their mothers pressed the cool coins, one by one, into the palm of his hand.
Look out none of them Chicago ladies grab you, Fritz teased, poking at the fly of James’s coveralls. I hear them city gals are wildcats for a skinny little bastard like you.
But James admired the women at the cottages. They spoke of the weather in low, soft voices as he ladled milk into the sleek mouths of the pitchers they placed beside him on the porch. When their children pinched their noses at the manure on James’s boots, the women shooed them inside and apologized sweetly. At home, Mary-Margaret pressed him for details: What did the women say? What did they wear? Once, she put on her Sunday dress and walked along with him, carrying her shoes in her hand so they wouldn’t be dirty when they reached the first neat cottage. But though she peered eagerly past the screens into the high-ceilinged kitchens, none of the summer women suggested she come inside, and when they got home Fritz pinched the soft insides of her arms, bending her backward across the kitchen table into the leftover breakfast dishes, into the pork skillet shining with lard. Putting on airs, he’d spat. What we got here’s good enough for the likes of a she-devil like you.
James still has the dollar Fritz gave him at the end of the summer. He keeps it in a jewelry box with two pairs of cuff links, a broken watch, and his birth certificate. Every now and then, he shows it to Amy and Herbert, wanting them to understand that the value of a dollar goes beyond what it can buy. The true value of a dollar lies in its potential. He calls them out of their bedroom, or up from the basement where they play behind the sump pump, and makes them sit, side by side, on the couch. Their pointed chins are like Ellen’s pointed chin. Their spindly legs churn the air. They giggle and nudge their
sharp elbows against each other; he is careful not to look into their faces, afraid of what he might find there.
“Even at your age, I knew the value of savings,” he says, pacing the length of the living room, and then he tells them the story of Rockefeller picking up the pennies his son would have left on the floor. Five pennies make a nickel, ten pennies a dime; one hundred pennies make a dollar just like the one James has saved so carefully. There were many times when he could have spent it. There were many times when he almost gave in and told Mitch where it was hidden away. But each night, he lay awake thinking about that dollar and how it was just a beginning, how the following year he’d have another dollar, and the year after that, another.
“It’s dollars that pay for college educations,” he explains to the children. “It’s dollars that pad you a nest egg for retirement, or pay up doctors’ bills if something goes wrong.”
But the children stare at him with blank ghost eyes. They are not interested in the value of a dollar. They are not interested in the safety that a dollar can buy, even though James believes this safety is the secret of the rich, the key to the smooth serenity he remembers in the faces of the summer women. The rich can buy whatever they need. The rich are never afraid the way James is afraid. “Listen to me,” he says, “you’re not listening,” and he tells the children as much as he can remember about the summer people, their calm politeness, the clean, slender fingers of the women who shook his hand.
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