Linda and Dinah hang sheets, the breeze billowing the fabric like sails. Skyla has been asked to help, too, but instead ducks in and out of the rows, making a game out of dodging the cloth. Dinah holds the fabric while Linda stretches up to pin it and Skyla limbos underneath, her long hair brushing the ground. When she straightens, she gathers her hair over her shoulder, holding it like a pet as she picks grass from it. Skyla looks so much like their mother, too, Linda realizes, with dishwater-blond hair and light brown eyes—just like Linda. Unlike Linda, though, Skyla has inherited Paula’s slenderness.
“I didn’t get to hang laundry in Texas,” Linda says. Somehow, she can’t keep from referencing the life she just abandoned, even though her family’s default mode is to ignore uncomfortable situations. She watches Dinah stiffen.
“I don’t see why we don’t just use the dryer,” Skyla says.
“It’s cheaper,” Dinah says.
“And greener,” Linda adds. “The HOA in our subdivision said clotheslines portrayed a ‘certain class of people.’”
“What’s an HOA?” Skyla asks.
“It stands for Horribly Oppressive Asshats,” Linda says.
Dinah sighs. “Homeowners’ association. We don’t have them in the country, and we seem to do just fine.” She didn’t like that Linda married Nathan. She disapproved of his perfectly pressed trousers, his gelled hair, his manicured hands, his fancy car. Grandma Dinah considers anything not manufactured in Michigan to be too fancy. But Dinah most disapproved of his branch of real estate: rural development. He would have to live somewhere that doesn’t allow clotheslines.
Skyla has disappeared again behind the sheets. Only her silhouette is visible to Linda, and from the angle of the sun, which is still low, it seems as if Skyla is well over six feet tall. Come to think of it, Linda notices that Skyla is a lot taller than when Linda last saw her. In Linda’s mind, Skyla was still a ten-year-old child. She was never able to replace her memory of family with the reality; even when she last visited two years ago, Linda had been surprised to see a woman in Skyla. And Skyla has gone a little feral in Linda’s absence, not wild like a normal teenager, but independent in the way of children who’ve raised themselves. Skyla seems, in some ways, girlish and vulnerable, and, in other ways, mature beyond her years. She dodges around the fabric not with childish agility, but with a kind of strength Linda hasn’t seen in her before.
“You could be helping, you know,” Dinah says, in that tone of voice that implies that ever since Skyla turned sixteen, she’s gotten too big for her britches.
Skyla peeks her head around the sheet. She plucks a towel from the basket, flops it over the line, and sticks a clothespin on it. When she bends for the next towel, Dinah reaches up and straightens the one Skyla just did.
Linda finds her own blouse in the basket, the one she had been wearing yesterday. It’s been mostly de-furred in the wash, although a few of Arthur’s gray hairs still cling to the fabric. And as she stretches up to pin the blouse on the line, she finds herself fighting back tears. Her cat is gone, and these hairs clinging to her blouse are among the few reminders she has of him, of Texas, of her marriage. To see this blouse clean somehow makes everything seem final.
“What’s PRW?” Skyla pulls a monogrammed towel from a basket of bedding. She glances at Linda out of the corner of her eye in a way that makes it apparent she has seen Linda’s distress and is offering a distraction.
Linda and Dinah both look away.
“Period-Ruined White?” Skyla says.
The towels are stained, but from rubbed-off makeup and drying the dogs, washing them with colored clothes and taking them on trips to the beach. The sheets are from Jared’s bed. As teens, they were allowed to pass any bouts of illness downstairs in their dad’s room, while their dad slept on the couch. Grandma Dinah always said this made it easier on her, saved her from going up and down the steps to take their temperature and bring them juice, but really, she wanted them to feel they weren’t alone. There were people who loved them, right nearby. The poor things had been abandoned, first by their biological father, then by their mother. When Paula left, Jared sold his house and moved himself, his son, and his girls—he still referred to them as “his girls,” even though they were Paula’s—to his mother’s farm. Grandma Dinah said she was glad for the company and extra hands, yet as much as she claimed they were no burden, the girls weighed on her. She could often be caught giving Linda or Paige sidelong glances, just staring for a time, as if trying to figure them out, until finally, she’d shake her head; clearly she didn’t like what she’d gleaned.
Now Linda understood it must have been hard for her, to have in her house two young women who were no blood relation.
How many times had Linda sweated out a fever on these sheets? How many bowls of chicken soup had she eaten on them? They are yellowed with age, frayed at the edges from wear. Beige sheets would have fared better.
“Purity Really Wrecked?” Skyla says.
“They were a wedding present,” Dinah says, as if that ends the conversation.
“Parental Responsibility Waived,” Linda says.
“That’s enough,” Dinah says.
“Paula—what? What was Mom’s middle name?” Skyla asks.
“Ruthless,” Linda says.
“Ruth,” Dinah says.
“Who leaves home without taking her towels?” Skyla says. Her eyes dart to Linda before fixing back on the laundry basket.
“Maybe she was in a hurry,” Linda says.
“In a hurry to start her life in Vegas.” Skyla is forever building stories based on family gossip: Their mother always wanted to go to Vegas. Skyla talks about the absence with a nonchalance that’s possible only because she can’t remember their mother enough to miss her.
Linda remembers, though. She’s come to hold up her stepfather, Jared, as a saint. He stuck around when Paula left, continued to care for his stepdaughters, Linda and Paige; he moved in with his mother to give all of his children more stability. He’s a good guy, the only dad they’ve ever known. And who does that? Who leaves a good guy?
“Your phone was vibrating this morning,” Dinah tells Linda.
She left her phone in her room, which means Dinah has been up there. Maybe she saw it when she was gathering laundry. Or maybe she was going through Linda’s few possessions.
“I think you should talk to him,” Dinah says. “Whatever the problem, it’s not worth walking away.”
But Linda doesn’t want to. The last message he left, he’d told her, “The house feels bereft without you.” He didn’t say that he missed her, or that he loved her. She was beginning to realize that what he missed were all the ways in which she took care of him. She’d turned the ringer off after that. He didn’t need her back. He could afford to hire a housekeeper.
“You never even liked him,” Skyla reminds Dinah. And it’s true. But Linda knows Dinah fears, above all else, that Linda and Paige—and someday Skyla—will follow in their mother’s footsteps, making their own families and then breaking them. Linda’s return is proof.
The truth is, Linda walked away from Nathan a long time ago. Maybe even before the wedding. She married him because he was the first man to ask her to, and because it was what you did when you were in your midtwenties. Even in the beginning, she wasn’t really invested in him. Something in the way he smelled, she couldn’t abide. It wasn’t like he had poor hygiene or wore too much aftershave. It was more like he invaded her senses. It was all she could smell when she was in the house. Their bedroom was potent with him, a scent she couldn’t name, but it reminded her of lounging in the sun with Paige when they were girls, of lying in the yard on a picnic blanket, giggling and smelling her sister’s head next to her own, the perfume of shampoo, yes, but also something else, something more personal. A smell like family. Nathan smelled like her sister.
“How is school going?�
�� Dinah asks.
“Fine. Mandy and I got detention for sitting on the tables at lunch.”
Dinah raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t scold Skyla. She’s always been most lenient with Skyla, and Linda often wonders whether it’s because Skyla is blood, or because Dinah has lost the strength to argue. Skyla reaches for another towel and a handful of clothespins.
“I bet Mom’s a showgirl or a bartender,” Skyla continues, unfazed. “Or she cleans hotel rooms.” Even as her list deteriorates in glamour, she still speaks with a sense of wonder. Linda suspects this is less Skyla envisioning their mother, and more Skyla imagining her own future.
“Maybe she deals blackjack,” Linda says.
“She probably has at least half a dozen boyfriends,” Skyla says.
“And she makes them do her bidding,” Linda says. She’s always considered her mother to be heartless, but today, she’s not quite feeling it. While coming to terms with her own divorce, she has begun to understand her mother, at least a little.
Dinah says, “I hope you two wouldn’t talk that way if your father were here.”
“Is he working late, or at the bar?” Linda asks. “Or has he up and left for Vegas, too?”
“I bet they bring her flowers,” Skyla says. “And chocolates. Lingerie.”
“Lordy!” Dinah mutters through a mouthful of clothespins.
A breeze picks up, and the sheets engulf Skyla for a moment. She fights her way back out of them, only to disappear again, running down the rows, angling her body to avoid the fabric. Linda knows it’s only a matter of time before her youngest sister takes off, too. The only question is whether she’ll manage to stay out once she leaves, or whether she’ll come back like Linda, with a broken-down car and a failed marriage, an extra fifteen pounds and a giant gap in her résumé. Acquired experience that doesn’t seem to inform her current life in any way. She watches Skyla dodge the blowing sheets, now visible, now hidden, the sunlight casting an elongated shadow on the fabric, showing only the ghost of the girl Linda once knew.
* * *
• • •
River Bend is so fanatic about football that even off-season skirmishes are well attended. And so, in late July, Linda makes her way to the high school football stadium to see the varsity play against the junior varsity, because what else is there to do in River Bend on a Friday night? She’s spent the past few alone in her bedroom.
Linda worries about being spotted, about running into people she should remember. She worries for nothing—Linda Williams no longer looks like the girl she was in high school. As a teenager, she’d been athletic, her body thick with muscle, her hair as long as Skyla’s. She’d been busy with 4-H and school clubs. Now her hair is chin-length, and she no longer bleaches it. Her face has grown dark in the Texas sun, with lines around her mouth and eyes. When she was younger, lipstick and perfume and dress shoes were reserved for special occasions. Somewhere over the past few years, though, she developed a love of makeup she never knew before, and now she feels naked leaving the house without at least concealer and mascara. As she seats herself in the metal stands, she spots a few people who look familiar, but only vaguely so.
It’s hot by Michigan standards. The spectators are dressed in tee shirts, tank tops, shorts, sandals, tennis shoes with no socks. Linda wears jeans and an old flannel shirt. She feels strange, out in public in such casual clothes; people dressed in Houston. Around the third down, a warm drizzle settles in, soaking the players, muddying their jerseys. The ball keeps sliding out of the boys’ hands. Even the cheerleaders are halfhearted in their shouts, their voices going rough, their shoes slick with rain. They kick up their legs, giggling as they almost fall, and make a kind of game out of seeing who will be the first to slip. Linda had wanted to be a cheerleader in high school, but didn’t have the guts to try out. Not that she thought she wouldn’t make it, but Grandma Dinah was always so dismissive of anything too girly. If it wouldn’t put food on the table, or at least win ribbons at the county fair, it wasn’t worth doing.
The stands begin emptying before halftime. Even though the evening is still warm, Linda is cold in the rain, having not yet acclimated to the Midwest. She’s miserable, thinks of leaving. Everyone knows how the game will end. But by halftime, when the band takes the field, neither team has scored.
This is what she really came for, the nostalgia of seeing her half sister in the same heavy wool uniforms Linda had marched in. She easily spots Skyla, her hair wet on her face, the plume on her helmet looking like a soaked rodent. Skyla’s gloves have the fingers cut out so she can grip her piccolo. Linda remembers those days, marching in the same uniform whether it was eighty degrees or twenty. Shivering in the stands because the band director wouldn’t let you wear a coat. Nearly passing out from heat exhaustion during the Memorial Day parade. It could always be worse.
Linda has a terrible time spotting her cousins, though. She can’t even remember what instruments they play. The formation of the band brings Skyla close to the bleachers, and Linda fumbles in her pocket to find her phone. She wishes she were sitting closer; the zoom on her phone’s camera isn’t great. She knows the photo won’t turn out well, but still she tries. The damp makes it impossible for the fingerprint reader to register, and as she tries to input the passcode, the phone slips from her hands and falls below the bleachers. And Ernest DeWitt, who’d been sitting near the top of the stands, climbs down.
“I got it,” he says, with a hand on her shoulder. And what a funny thing, to have a man she’s known all her life, and yet barely knows at all, climb down to retrieve her phone.
He limps his way back up the bleachers, and Linda wonders whether the change in weather makes his joints hurt. Grandma Dinah can foretell a cold front by the feel of her knees. But Ernest DeWitt isn’t as old as Dinah. His hands are warm as he passes Linda the phone. He sits next to her.
“It still work?” he asks, and she sees the screen is cracked.
“Ah, hell,” she says without conviction. Part of her hopes the phone is dead, that it will no longer receive calls.
“Game’s a wash,” Ernest says. “And you look like you’re cold.”
“I’m fine,” she replies, but Ernest offers her his poncho anyway. It’s the sort of gesture Linda’s husband, Nathan, would never have thought to make. She’s been back a month, and Nathan still calls her daily. At first she would talk to him, hoping maybe a little distance had let her gather her thoughts. When Nathan was in law school, they had spent every night on the phone. Something in the way his voice hummed in her ear made her nostalgic. It was like he was inside her head. She liked having him contained there. On the phone, maybe she would remember what it was that had first attracted her to him, and then she could figure out what he’d done to drive her away. Only it wasn’t anything he had or hadn’t done. They simply didn’t want the same life.
The stands are all but empty now. Linda burrows deeper into Ernest’s poncho—army surplus, stiff green canvas, a hood that crinkles around her head so that she can’t make out the brass instruments anymore, only the rhythmic pounding of the percussion section. Neither can she hear Ernest talking, so she lowers the hood and lets her hair get wet. When she continues to shiver, he slips an arm around her.
She forgets all about her sister on the field.
Back at Ernest’s house, he offers her a mug of coffee with whiskey in it. Brash, cheap coffee that punches its way down her throat, cut with too much booze. They sit together on his couch. She’s ashamed to find that she’s grown accustomed to expensive coffee, to the extent that she no longer finds Grandma Dinah’s palatable. Ernest’s is even worse.
“This is strong enough to stand a duck in,” she says, and immediately wishes she hadn’t. She doesn’t even know what that means really, but growing up, Grandma Dinah said it so often she can’t not repeat it.
“Not a whiskey drinker?” He’s sitting very close to her now.
She tries to think of something to say. She did her share of drinking in the suburbs; there wasn’t much else to do, and she wants to let him know this, wants to impress him for some reason, although there is nothing particularly impressive about a thirty-two-year-old bragging about drinking. What she wants most is to let him know she’s changed. She’s no longer the awkward twentysomething she was when she left here six years ago. She wants him to understand the heat that’s building in her stomach and spreading through her whole body, but she doesn’t even understand it. She’s never felt this before, not even with her husband.
She takes another sip and tries to smile. Ernest has lines around his eyes, etchings in wood. When he smiles back at her, his teeth are impossibly bright, uneven, a strange combination. His eyes are pale blue, almost silver. She can’t think. She sets her coffee down and leans in to kiss him. He pulls back.
She leans in again, and again he pulls back.
“I’d rather take my time with you,” he says. His voice is low, almost a growl, but his eyes are, once again, laughing.
Only that won’t do. These moments that are close, but not close enough, are too much. They make Linda feel like her skin is blistering, like her face has ants crawling on it. She never could linger in the in-betweens. She leans back into the cushions of his couch and pulls him against her by his belt. He takes both her hands in one of his to still her.
“Where’s the fire?” he says. His lips look serious, but his eyes are still creased at the corners. She supposes he’s past the age of urgency. He touches his thumb to her chin, and she kisses his hand. He leans in, almost touching his lips to hers, and then pauses en route, hovering until she jerks her head forward. And then she’s moving all at once, pulling his belt off, tugging her jeans down, burrowing her hands under his shirt to push him against the couch, straddling his lap. Too soon, it’s over.
The House of Deep Water Page 3