by Ann Claycomb
Some of the women drowned themselves. But drowning would be either giving up or madness, the kind of madness we’ve now apparently decided I don’t suffer. It would be nice to think that if I just walked out into the sea and waited for my lungs to fill, that some magic might take pity on me. But it won’t. Too easy, doesn’t work that way.
Others used the knife. I think they must have been the stronger ones. When I can’t stand it anymore, I’m going to use the knife too. I don’t want anyone—Harry, my father, the witches—to think that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I died hoping for anything but death.
I TRY TO run away.
Florida again? California? Europe? I have a dozen itineraries stored on travel websites. I slip out of bed in the middle of the night and pull one up—a resort in Bali where the rooms are built over the water so tropical fish swim right under your feet—and click through picture after picture, the colors as vivid and false as a backdrop.
Some nights I stare until my eyes burn. Behind me, Harry is a small huddled lump in the bed. We bounce off each other all day, barely speaking, me glaring when I catch a worried look, getting her back with a snide comment about “her” opera. I have to go as far away as I can—all the way to Bali—to come back to her, to crave the warm, flowery smell of her body, to put my arms around her and feel relief at rediscovering her. In bed, in the abrupt darkness that falls when I turn off the computer, Harry is softer and lighter than I remember or expect. I pretend that she is still asleep, though I know she isn’t. I just want our dream selves to find each other.
One night, she kisses me, pulls back.
“Are you all right?” she asks.
And I ask in return, my hands in her hair, “Where is the knife?”
I just want to know. I want to know where it is, so I can picture it there, safely shut in its box. But now of course, instead of wherever it was, it is here, in the bed, between us.
“My God, Kathleen,” Harry says. Her voice breaks. She fumbles in the darkness, pulling on her clothes. I know she can’t sleep with me now and I start to cry. I cry until my throat hurts, until I gag, until Harry has to turn on the light and sit and rock me. I cry until we are both so exhausted that we fall asleep, but when I wake up in the morning she is gone.
I TRY TO think about things I will miss.
I watch my father at the piano, a single off-center frown line appearing between his eyes. I will miss his hands, the sureness in them and the grace. The first time I saw a professional concert pianist I was startled by how ugly her hands were, the knuckles swollen and the backs of her hands seething with veins. I thought every pianist had beautiful hands, because Robin does.
I will miss his frown line. I used to stand on his lap and order him to frown so I could run my finger down that line. I will miss his trick of raising only one eyebrow, a trick I inherited from him. Does that make me human after all?
I walk through the house and make lists of things. I will miss my blue washed silk dress, which is so soft it almost doesn’t hurt to wear. It was the first thing I paid for with money I earned singing. I will miss the view from Robin’s studio in the fall, when the birch trees turn red. I will miss Tae’s spicy scallops with orange peel.
I lie on my bed and think of more: I will miss Puccini and Mozart and Offenbach. I will miss Tom and Carianne. I will miss hearing Harry sing. I will miss singing. I will miss applause and the smell of roses, the cold fresh scent of them when they are first thrust into my arms.
I TRY TO go without water. And while I am doing this last idiotic experiment, I am finally saved, from myself anyway.
I plan the no-water thing carefully. I go a whole day without showering or drinking water or washing my hands. I use hand sanitizer in the bathroom instead of soap. It’s the kind that has little antibiotic “beads” in it and as it dries I can feel these like grains of sand on my palms. I have trouble sleeping that night. My feet hurt and my scalp itches and the skin on my hands feels too tight. The next morning I braid my hair and pin it up so it won’t rub on my neck, put on an old sundress, nothing else. I stay in my room until I know Tae has left for rehearsal, so I don’t have to eat breakfast or go near the sink. I go out to the living room and turn on the TV. From downstairs I can hear the piano, a fragment of melody that sounds like water running, and I turn the TV up. There’s nothing on that I want to watch, but I watch all morning. I pace the room, kneading the soles of my feet into the carpet and inviting the pain, then flopping down on the sofa and pointing my toes in the air to feel the stabbing change to a throb when my weight is off my feet.
When I can’t stand the TV anymore, I turn it off and hear Harry singing something with the rhythm of a prayer or a plea, an incantatory melodic line that starts in her bottom register and rises to the top. She sounds like a swimmer surfacing from deep water, her voice breaking on the last words, which I think are little sister. But I am covering my ears, one hand still holding the TV remote, so I can’t be sure.
I flee back to my room, put the first disc of Tristan and Isolde in the CD player. I don’t even have to go to the bathroom. My mouth hurts horribly and it feels as if I’d bled into it and the blood had somehow dried on my teeth and tongue.
Harry has her suitcase out, half-filled because classes start next week. I can’t think about anything but water. Even Wagner isn’t drowning out the music I heard this morning, which, now that it is playing in my head, is not just water running but water receding, or maybe water being left behind. The Little Mermaid leaves the sea behind, doesn’t she, when she staggers out onto the beach on her new legs? I wonder if that’s what my father was playing, that moment in the opera. If so, it was good. He got it right. I should tell him.
But I don’t. I pull out my suitcase and start throwing things into it, then just at it. I think about ransacking Harry’s suitcase just to mess up her neat piles, but she’ll think I was searching for the knife. Maybe I am. I put my hands over my face. My fingers are cold and I feel dirty.
When Harry opens the door, I jerk my hands away, grab for something to fold so I’ll seem busy. But she isn’t coming to check on me. She holds out her cell phone.
“Tom,” she says. “He says if you think you can get away from him by just not returning his calls, you should try harder.” She makes her “Tom is so annoying” face, but she’s trying not to smile and without thinking I smile back at her. Trust Tom—and the familiarity of our responses to him—to ease the sharp edges between us.
I take the phone and talk to Tom. He has been singing all summer and his voice fizzes in my ear. We set up a dinner date back in Boston. I walk into the bathroom while we talk and catch sight of myself in the mirror. I am hollowed out, my hair several shades darker than usual because it’s dirty and pulled back so tight.
“I saw our master class diva at a fund-raiser a few weeks ago,” Tom is saying. “As soon as I introduced myself as a conservatory student she asked about you.”
“Shut up.”
“She did! Wanted to know if you’d died lately, stabbed yourself, been burned alive, you know, the usual cheerful soprano bullshit.”
“Fuck you,” I say, but I am smiling. “What did you tell her?”
“I said you were committed to singing only roles with happy endings, that you weren’t into all that heavy shit.”
“Tom,” I say warningly. My reflection is trying not to laugh. If only he knew.
He sighs. “I may have suggested that you were auditioning to sing voice-over for an upcoming Disney movie.”
“You know this means you’re buying dinner.”
He is gleeful. “It will be worth it. You should have seen the expression on her face.”
I close Harry’s phone carefully, go look for her to give it back. I stop halfway down the stairs to my father’s studio and sit on the step. The staircase is open and I can see the two of them, Robin standing by the window while Harry types something furiously on her laptop.
“Can you play the prince’s part agai
n?” she asks, without looking up from the screen.
Robin goes to the piano and plays. “But it wouldn’t be the piano,” he says. “It would be the string section there.”
“I know,” Harry says. “That’s okay. I just needed to hear it.”
I almost ask him to play it again. The sound is yearning, though it doesn’t make me think of water at all. It makes me miss Robin and Harry, though they’re sitting right there, makes me miss them back weeks and weeks, all the days I spent shutting them out.
I think about Tom’s mockery of the diva, about the difference between choosing a tragic ending and choosing not to choose one. There is a difference, isn’t there? For a moment, talking to Tom, I knew—remembered—that there is a difference. I don’t believe there’s a happy ending here, and I’ve been so angry at Harry and my father for trying to make me believe that there is. But maybe they haven’t. The music they’re writing—the mermaid leaving the sea behind, the prince longing for her, her sisters pleading with the witches to help her—maybe Robin and Harry are just choosing someone else’s tragic ending over mine. Watching them through the stair railings, I can feel how hard it will be to come back to them, like struggling to shore after swimming out as far as I can go. I’ve forgotten to conserve my strength for the way back. I am tired just contemplating it, and also abruptly too dizzy to move. Whose stupid idea was it to go without water for two days? That’s not tragic, that’s just pathetic. I get up, holding on to the banister, and my father hears me and comes quickly to the foot of the stairs.
“Are you all right?”
I nod. “I brought Harry her phone.”
Robin comes up a few steps to take it from me and I back away.
“I’m smelly,” I say. “I need to take a shower.”
He takes me in, nods gravely. “Are you going to?”
“Yes.”
He starts to say “Good” and then stops. “Well,” he says, “enjoy it. We’ll be wrapping up here in a little while.”
I want to say that it sounds beautiful so far, from what I’ve heard. I want to say I’m sorry, that I think I understand now what he’s trying to do. But it hurts to talk, I’m so thirsty, and I can’t get the words out. I go up the stairs to the kitchen, drink three glasses of cold water in a row, gasping in relief between swallows, then take a fourth glass to my bathroom and start the shower. I step under the spray and start to cry as the water pours over me, tearless sobs of relief that I don’t even try to stifle as I soak my hair and shampoo it, lather soap to wash my poor feet. I tip my head back and let more water trickle into my mouth, even though my stomach hurts from having drunk so much water so fast.
I know what I can do to try to tell Robin and Harry that I’m going to be okay, that I’ve gotten over myself. I’ll ask if we can go out to dinner. Someplace ridiculous, with a big list of flavored margaritas and food that’s terrible for you, like breaded zucchini and coconut fried shrimp. There’s nothing tragic about going out to dinner at a restaurant like that, and you can’t give up on life and eat something called a zucchini zircle all in the same night.
SO WE GO to dinner, my clean hair soft and damp across my shoulders, and I tell them that I’ve heard a little of what they’re working on. I expect Harry to jump on this, insist that I listen to everything, but she seems flustered.
“You heard the music, is all,” she says. “It’s gorgeous! The lyrics are . . .” She shrugs, more self-conscious than I’ve ever seen her. “It’s really hard to get it right.”
“Harry,” I ask, “have you ever listened to operatic lyrics?”
“I know, I know, most of them are better off not translated. But I can’t just deliberately write something that sounds stupid.”
“For the record,” Robin puts in from behind his menu, “I keep trying to tell Harry how much of an improvement she is on my previous librettist, but she won’t listen.”
“That’s because his previous librettist was Nathaniel Hawthorne.” Harry snorts, though she is amused. “And among other things, he’s dead. I certainly hope I’m an improvement over him.”
“But you love Hawthorne,” I say.
“True,” she says. “But I’m not going to write your—this—story in language like that, so formal and removed. I want it to feel more . . .”
More what? I want to ask. But our appetizers have arrived, in big baskets lined with grease-splotched paper. We are all starving, which is my fault; it’s as though no one else has been allowing themselves the things I’ve been scorning: food, drink, laughter, touch. I find Harry’s hand under the table and run my fingertips across her palm, making her shiver.
“Stop that,” she murmurs, then she reverses the gesture and I shiver too. I can’t remember the last time that happened, when I felt, in a touch, the same thing Harry felt.
I do not have to choose the tragic ending. I am choosing not to choose it.
When we go to bed that night, I reach for Harry right away. We both cry, silently, having to kiss away tears, but we do not talk about the crying or stop making love, not even when Harry fumbles for a Kleenex from the box on the nightstand. I keep moving beneath her, my hands on her hips and my mouth on the cord in her neck, a touch that always makes her shudder. She blows her nose and then tips her head back, gasping, grips my shoulders tight. Later, she sinks down beside me and wipes my wet face with the edge of the sheet.
“Go to sleep,” she murmurs. “You’re so tired.”
“I have to start packing tomorrow,” I say.
“That’s true.”
I feel her waiting in the darkness. I nestle closer, glad that I can, that I want to.
“I hate packing,” I say.
“I know.”
“And I’m so bad at it.”
“You are. You’re the worst packer I’ve ever met.”
“Could you help me?”
I can feel her mouth shaping a smile against my shoulder. “Go to sleep.”
“But I can’t now. I’m worried about packing.”
She bites me gently. “I’ll pack for you.”
“Really?”
“Really. Now shut up and go to sleep.”
IT IS THE first night in weeks when I do not dream of the sea or, if I do, I don’t remember it. It is all sweetness and light for a while after that, long enough to get us packed and back to Boston. Robin tries hard for casual as he sees us off. He is, after all, coming up in only a few weeks to keep working with Harry. Then he’ll make several trips up this semester while they finish the opera. He may even rent a place in Boston next semester when it goes into rehearsals and performances. So there is nothing to worry about. He’ll see us both often enough to keep an eye on me. Still he hugs me hard before I get into the car, cups one hand across the back of my head and kisses my hair lightly before he lets me go. It’s how he used to send me off when I was little, when it was just the two of us against the world.
I pull back, smile brightly at him. He gives me a little shake, his hand on the back of my neck.
“Quit it, Kathleen,” he says. “I know you’re hanging by a thread.”
“It’s a strong thread, though,” I say. “More like a thin rope, how’s that?”
“I love you,” he says. “Can you use that to strengthen the rope?”
I fling myself back against him. He used to hold my feet under the water for hours even when he didn’t know why it helped. Now he’s writing an opera for me and I know that he doesn’t think that will help either. It’s just all he can think of to do.
“I love you too, Daddy,” I whisper. “That doubles the rope, triples it even.”
I slide into the passenger seat and watch Robin as Harry backs down the driveway. Tae goes to stand beside him and he puts his arm around her, but he does not take his eyes off the car. Just before we turn the corner out of sight, he raises his hand to wave goodbye and I wave back, though I’m not sure he sees.
Harry and I listen to terrible music in the car because I insist on controlling th
e playlist and only playing one-hit wonders. By the time we hit Connecticut she is threatening to pull over and make me walk the rest of the way.
There is a bad moment back in the apartment in Boston. I am in the bathroom putting things away when I hear Harry in the bedroom, an indrawn breath as if she’s cut herself and tried not to cry out. I stick my head around the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” She turns quickly, throws a T-shirt over the suitcase, but I still catch sight of the knife box.
“Did you cut yourself on it?”
“No.” She shakes her head. “No, it’s fine. It’s closed. I’ll put it away.”
But she is white. She goes back to unpacking, unpacks around the huddle of cloth hiding the box. I watch her a minute before I guess.
“Did you try to leave it with Robin?”
“I did leave it with him,” she says. “We agreed that I would. I put it on the table in the studio this morning.”
“They said it would follow me.”
“I know!” she snaps. “I’m the one who asked, remember? I hoped that maybe Robin, since he’d had a connection to your mother and to you—I thought it might work to leave it with him.” She snatches the shirt off and glares defiantly at the box. “And I guess I wasn’t quite prepared for the whole ‘mysterious box popping up where you least expect it’ routine.”
I don’t want to think about the implications of the knife migrating from Robin’s studio to Harry’s suitcase—my suitcase, actually, those are my clothes she’s unpacking. All my attempts to fend off tragedy fall a little flat in the face of such magic. If the knife can follow me, then there’s really no escape.
But, I remind myself, they told us that this would happen. Nothing’s changed, no new threat has appeared. Same knife, same curse, different day.
“You know where you should put it,” I say, “if you really don’t want me to find it?”
“Where?”
“In with the cookbooks. I’ll never check there.”
Harry doesn’t laugh, but her face relaxes fractionally. “Very funny.”
Score one for those of us hanging on by threads.