Swimming Sweet Arrow: A Novel

by Gibbon, Maureen

  “What you should do is knock it off. I do not want a baby.”

  “When are you going to believe I’m serious?”

  “Oh, I know you’re serious,” I said. “But I’m serious, too. I’m not ready for a baby.”

  “When do you think you will be ready?”

  “I don’t know. But a long time from now.”

  I waited awhile there at the sink, putting cream on my face, and then I went, “Maybe some people shouldn’t ever be ready. Take my old man. He probably never should have had kids. When my mom got pregnant with me, you know what he did? He didn’t take a shower for three weeks. He was mad at her for getting pregnant. As if she did it herself.”

  “Well, your dad’s crazy.”

  “What about your dad? You said yourself he never wanted any of you.”

  “You can’t judge us by them,” Del said. “Besides, I’ll do a damn sight better than my dad did. He never stopped drinking. I’m already a step ahead.”

  Then, because I could not stand the thought of getting preached at some more, and because I didn’t even know how to talk to Del these days, I said, “I had a funny dream last night.”

  I told Del my dream of the owl, the dream I had after I fucked Kevin Keel, which I hadn’t told anyone, but which I still hadn’t forgotten. I was lying by saying I had the dream the night before, but everything else I said about the dream was true: how I’d heard the beating of wings and saw the striped markings, how the bird flew close to me and brushed my hair back with one wing.

  At the end I said, “When the owl brushed its wing over my face, the whole thing felt real. I mean, I could really feel feathers against my face. It made me happy. Comforted, you know? And that was the dream. It was something.”

  Del looked at me a long time after I finished, and I couldn’t read his face. He looked half surprised and half mad, but when he started to talk, I realized it wasn’t anger at all that I was seeing.

  “The Holy Spirit comes in different forms, Vangie. It’s the sign you’ve been waiting for.”

  He said it in that calm Christ-voice that made me crazy.

  “How do you know it’s the Holy Spirit?” I said.

  “It had wings, it came down upon your head. What else could it be?”

  “A bird. Maybe the dream was just about a bird,” I said. I wanted to go on and tell him the truth about when I had the dream and how it had nothing at all to do with church or being born again, but if I confessed to one lie, it might make my other lies harder to uphold. So I said nothing, not about when I really had my dream, not about my scar, and not about Kevin Keel.

  “Why are you rejecting Him, Vangie? Isn’t this the sign you’ve been waiting for?”

  “The only sign I’m waiting for is when you’re going to get tired of the whole thing.”

  “What whole thing?”

  “This whole God thing. The going to church, the testifying, all that Bible study stuff.”

  “I can’t believe you,” Del said, shaking his head.

  “Well believe me. My dream was about a bird.”

  “Anyone else would be happy to get a sign from the Holy Spirit.”

  “I’m happy I dreamed about a bird. How’s that?”

  “Fucking-A, Vangie. Why can’t you just accept it?”

  He hadn’t gotten mad about all the Sundays I bitched about having to get up early, and he hadn’t gotten mad about me refusing to testify, but me dreaming about an owl and calling it a bird instead of the Holy Spirit made him angry.

  “You accept it for me,” I said. “You’re the religious expert around here.”

  “You don’t understand what I went through.”

  I said, “You never told me what you went through. All I know is what I went through.”

  And that comment was enough to end the fight, because in treatment they’d worked Del over good about how he had to make amends to those he’d harmed. But the only thing I needed anyone to make any amends for was something I did. I was the one who fucked Kevin Keel. Me. I might have gone to Kevin Keel because I was hurt and angry about Del, but it was still my choosing and my action. I had to make amends to myself for that.

  “I go to church because I love you,” 1 said. “Isn’t that enough?”

  Del shook his head some more at me, but he was calmed down and talked again in his Christ-voice.

  “Vangie, all I remember from that day they found me was the rain pouring down in my face,” he said. “I was lost.”

  “And now you’re found?”

  “I’m trying. I know you don’t understand yet, but one day you will.”

  “Maybe,” I told him, but in my heart I doubted it. The main mystery I was trying to understand was the mystery of me, Vangie, and I knew I could never learn what I needed to know in a church.

  That night when we went to bed, I slept backed up against Del the way I always did, but neither of us reached for the other. All the God talk killed the desire to screw, which was a first. That more than anything convinced me of the power of religion.

  I wanted nothing to do with it.

  25

  THE next morning I was glad to leave the house and go to the orchard to load up. Glad to leave Del. I didn’t know what to do about the baby thing or the religion thing anymore, and it all made me wonder where Del and I were headed. If Del couldn’t be with me when he was drinking and I couldn’t be with him when he was praising God, where did that leave us?

  The whole fight was still on my mind at the farmers market, and I felt unsettled and grumpy. On my way back to my stand after going to the toilet, I did something that made the day even blacker, and I did it just by stopping by the jewelry stand to look at the bits of feldspar and rose. It was my luck that a little girl was getting her ears pierced then, and even though I knew I should not stay to watch, once I saw what was happening, I couldn’t leave.

  The little girl hollered when her mom put her on the high stool, and she hollered as the woman who ran the booth swabbed her ears with alcohol, and she continued to holler as the woman got out her piercing gun. When the needle went into the first ear, quick like a bite, the girl squealed higher and harder, and she kept up that high, keen sound as the woman did the second ear. At the end, the little girl’s eyes looked glassy because she was crying so much, and her ears were bright red from the tops down to the buds where the earrings were. That’s all those lobes were, buds, because the girl was only two or so. When the lady held a mirror up so the little girl could see, the kid didn’t even look. She just hid in her mother’s neck.

  The whole thing made me sick, because I thought the stand was probably dirty, and I didn’t like the fat woman doing the piercing, with her fat arms and the rolls of her belly straining at the front of her dress. I hated the mother because I thought if you had a kid, you should wait until she asked to have her ears pierced, because then she’d know the pain was for something. At two or three, this kid couldn’t know. She had to get those bits of metal in her ears because her mom wanted them.

  But I was never going to have a kid, so the whole thing was beside the point. Even thinking it was beside the point. Yet there I was, thinking it, and that made me feel even blacker. I did not ever want to grow up if it meant taking the side of people like that fat woman or the little girl’s mom. I had a job, I paid rent, I wanted no one to tell me what to do ?— but that was all I wanted of adulthood. I did not want it to be up to me to change diapers or cook meals from the four food groups or get someone’s ears pierced. I did not want to take care of anyone but me.

  Maybe it was the black mood I was in, and maybe it was because I didn’t want to go home and get preached at, but all I could think was how much I wanted to go get stoned with June. I missed her, and I was beginning to see that even if I still felt embarrassed about telling her I wanted to be her boyfriend, feeling stupid or uncomfortable was still better than the blankness of not talking to her. That feeling just grew during the day, so after work I called her. It was the first time I’d
dialed her number since the day she told me about the picture of Ray and Luke.

  “Long time no see,” she said when she heard me. “No hear, either. How’s it hanging?”

  “It’s about hung,” I said, and she laughed. I could hear in her voice that she was hurt because we hadn’t been speaking, but she was not so hurt that she would not talk to me.

  “Things are that good, huh?”

  “Things are that good,” I said.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Everything. It’s a long story.”

  “I’ll listen.”

  “Can I come out?” I said. “Are you busy?”

  “Everyone’s gone. Come on.”

  “Do you have any weed?”

  She laughed then and said, “I always have weed.”

  Just hearing her say that and hearing her voice—a little husky, a little loose-sounding—made me feel better. Whatever else was going on, whatever had happened between the two of us, I knew we would be able to sit at the kitchen table, get high, and laugh. There was something easygoing in June, and that fast I knew how much and how bad I missed her.

  Out at the house, it was the same scene with the dogs as the other time, with them almost knocking me down, so Lucky and Pearl got locked up again. When June and I went into the kitchen, I saw that she’d been rolling joints.

  “This is for us to smoke now,” she said, pointing to the water bong with her chin. “And these are for you to take with.” She pushed three joints toward me then, over the tabletop.

  “How much do I owe you?”

  “A dollar.”

  “For three joints? You’re crazy.”

  “It’s for you,” June said. That’s when I knew it was a gift and not a transaction, and that we had forgiven each other for whatever happened.

  “I see you’re wearing that,” I said then, because when June pushed the joints toward me, I saw she had on the ring Ray gave her.

  “I wear it most of the time now.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “It means it’s easier for everyone if I wear it.”

  “That’s all?”

  “That’s all,” she said, holding the smoke in. “What about you? Does Del ever talk about putting a ring on your finger?”

  The question seemed strange to me. Even if I had a ring from Del, it would be nothing like her taking a ring from Ray at the same time she was screwing Luke. We couldn’t just be two girls sitting around talking about when we might get married.

  “Mostly Del talks about knocking me up.”

  “Are you going to do it?”

  “Get pregnant? Jesus Christ, no.” And that seemed strange to me, too, that I’d even have to say that to June. I said, “A baby doesn’t interest me at all.”

  “It might interest me if I was with the right person. I might want a baby then.”

  That surprised me. It didn’t seem at all like her. But I didn’t say, Well, who’s the right person, or How are you going to be able to tell whose baby it is? I wasn’t there to fight or preach. So instead I went, “Well, I wish you luck with all of that. With choosing, I mean.”

  “The choice is made,” she said. “You know that, don’t you, Vangie?”

  I didn’t know how the choice could be made when she was still in the house with the two of them, but I nodded. I knew she wanted me to. She waited a few seconds before she said the next thing.

  “It felt good when it started. Now it just seems complicated. The lies are getting more complicated. But I don’t lie to you, Vangie, and I never did. At least not for long.”

  I said, “No, you didn’t lie for long.”

  “The next time you see me, things aren’t going to be like this.”

  She looked around the room when she said that, and I thought that’s what she meant: that the three of them weren’t going to be living in that house much longer, that she was going to make a move. She didn’t say that, but I was sure she meant that.

  She passed the bong back to me then, and that’s when I looked past the ring and saw her fingers. Each one was bitten down to the quick of the nail. They looked like baby fingers, all pink and without even the thinnest thread of white nail showing. When I saw that, I knew I had no idea, really, of how things were with her.

  “You know more about me than anyone, Vangie,” she said then.

  “More than Luke?”

  “Probably. You know different things about me, Vangie. You know me longer, too.”

  I could tell by the way she kept saying my name that she was high, high, high.

  “You know me pretty well, too,” I said.

  We stopped talking then, and June filled the bong a second time. The ticking of the clock and the whirring of the refrigerator seemed loud, the way they always did when I was stoned. To keep from staring at June’s fingers as she packed in the pot, I studied the kitchen table. Along with salt and pepper shakers and a napkin holder that I remembered us making in seventh grade shop class, two bottles of Jim Beam were out on the table. There were a few glasses with the whiskey, and it looked like it was just where the three of them kept it. Handy-like.

  “Do you know what’s funny?” June said then.

  “What?” I said. “What’s funny?”

  “It’s funny you and I never kissed. I thought so many times when we were talking, Vangie, that we’d kiss. But we never did.”

  I looked at her after she said that, and she looked like herself, but she also looked like a stranger. She was someone I loved and did not know at all. It was the way my mother looked to me right before she left, and the way Del looked when he came home from treatment. Strangers all the more strange because I loved them.

  “I didn’t know you thought about that,” I said.

  “Didn’t you ever think about it?”

  It was the first time in a long time that I wanted to tell the truth, or what I knew of the truth.

  “No,” I said. “Or if I did think of it, I didn’t know it.”

  “It’s all right,” she said. “It doesn’t hurt my feelings if you didn’t think about it.”

  We sat there, not talking, and I felt the same way I felt the night I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend—even though she was the one who spoke, who said words that couldn’t be taken back. I thought we would go on sitting there, not talking, but June said the next thing. Took the next chance.

  “Do you want to kiss now?” she said.

  I didn’t answer, but I didn’t move when she got up from the chair or when she smoothed a piece of my hair back from my face.

  “Hey friend,” she said. Then we were kissing.

  It was not like any kiss I ever had. There was no insistence in it, no next step. Her mouth tasted cloudy. When June made a small noise into the kiss, I did, too.

  “It’s hard,” she said when she pulled away. “Both of us wanting to be the girl.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. If there had been a time to kiss, it was the night I told her I wanted to be her boyfriend. But I had backed up a million miles from that place. I could not keep letting her touch me.

  “Do you ever think about leaving, Vangie? Going someplace else and starting over?”

  “All the time.”

  She told me again that the next time I saw her, things would be different, even though she really did love Ray. Then she told me about the kind thing Ray had done for her. I was hardly there and could hardly hear the things she was saying, but I made myself listen.

  When her allergies were bad at the end of the summer and her eyes burned and itched, Ray would make her lie down on the bed, and he’d put his mouth over each of her eyes. He’d lick gently at each lid, at the little bit of red rim, and at the eyeball itself.

  “He said that his mom used to do it for him when he was little, whenever he got something in his eye. He said it always made him feel better.”

  “And that’s why you love him.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” she said. �
��But what you said before? About how it can’t go on? I know it. I keep meaning to leave. And I don’t.”

  And even though I was hardly there in the room with her anymore, I made myself say, “You can leave anytime you want to.”

  I said it, but I didn’t believe it. I believed things were the way they were with Ray and Luke because June wanted them to be that way. She was right in the middle, at the center, and she didn’t want to swim to shore. Just as I was thinking that, Luke walked in.

  “What’s this?” he said when he came into the room. From the way he looked at me, I knew he was trying to read my face, but I pulled that door closed. He stood watching us awhile, then he walked toward the table and reached for one of the bottles of Jim Beam.

  “Guess I’ll join the party,” he said, but I was already pushing back from the table.

  “Stay,” June said to me. “My two favorite people. I want you two to be friends.”

  I said, “Luke already is my friend.”

  “I always tell him you’re like a sister to me, Vangie. No, I tell him we’re closer than sisters. I told him you know everything.”

  “I don’t know everything.”

  “You know everything about us,” June said, and even though she was talking to me, she was looking at Luke when she said it. I could tell from the way her arm shifted that she was touching him under the table. Rubbing his thigh and cock.

  “I bet you hear more than you ever wanted to,” I said to Luke.

  “No. But I hear a lot. See a lot, too.”

  When he said that, his face went cold, and I knew I wasn’t the only one in the room who could shut the door tight on what was inside.

  “You’ve been a stranger out here,” he said then. “Have a drink?”

  He was reaching for another glass, but he wasn’t asking me to stay. It was all a sign that I should keep on moving and become the stranger he just called me. I wondered when he’d come home and how long he’d been standing outside the kitchen, looking in at June and me. Long enough to see our kiss and all that sisterly affection was my guess. I stood up.

  “It’s good night for me,” I said.