Skyla kicks Paige in the shoulder. “What? He’s literally a million years old.”
“He’s not that old,” Linda says quietly.
“Bet he’s twice as old as Dad,” Skyla says.
“Dad’s older than you think,” Paige says.
“Bet his daughter’s older than you,” Skyla adds.
“Eliza DeWitt? She’s about the same age,” Linda says. This is a lie, and they all know it. Eliza babysat Linda when Linda was a girl.
“Linda DeWitt,” Skyla says. “Gross.”
“What are you going to do?” Paige finally looks up from her lap. Her sister is hurting, she knows. Paige has been butt-hurt that Linda didn’t tell her she was leaving her husband, that she hasn’t taken the time to visit, didn’t tell Paige when she found out she was pregnant. But now that she thinks about it, Paige could have taken the time to visit, too. She will take the time, she decides. She’ll be there for Linda. She gets up from the floor and picks her way around Barbies and magazines to hug Linda.
This sets Linda off crying again. She’s missed her sisters over the past few years; she’d failed to realize they were no longer children. They, too, have grown into women. As much as Linda has, at any rate. As much as anyone ever does.
* * *
• • •
Ernest DeWitt isn’t exactly what Linda likes. First of all, if she were honest with herself, he’s far too old for her, a fact she has a hard time reconciling with his looks. His body is thick, his arms still strong, although his skin has lost its resilience. He has broad shoulders that, though they show signs of having once been sturdy, are now bony, tan, and freckled. His hair is more salt than pepper. His eyes aren’t as clear as a young man’s, and the skin around them pouches. There’s gravel in his voice, a car crunching along a dirt road. She doesn’t know how to explain: It isn’t the physical fact of him. It’s something in the calm she feels when she’s with him, an unburdening, a resting. He makes her whole body feel like a sunny, grassy field. He smells like a grassy field. Like laundry hung to dry. Like a warm breeze gathering in the disused corners of her body, places that have been dark and stale a long time.
“Maybe you have daddy issues,” Paige says the next week, while she and Linda are having coffee at the Hudson House. True to her resolution, Paige has been calling Linda every couple of days to check in. Linda even visited Paige, Diane, and Sage in Kalamazoo, brought a bottle of rosé and a bucket of colorful plastic dinosaurs from the dollar store. Diane threw out both as soon as Linda left; she was worried about phosphates in the wine, and synthetic materials in the toys.
“Maybe you have mommy issues,” Linda says, pointing her mug of cocoa at Paige.
Paige curls her lip and thinks how right Linda is. Ever since Diane had Sage, Paige has felt like she needs to catch up, to spit out a kid of her own to prove she really is an adult. She sighs. Suppresses. She doesn’t want to lay all this on Linda right now.
“I don’t even understand what women see in men,” Paige says instead. “They’re awful. Like that man they arrested at the beginning of the summer. Thurber. You never hear of women doing stuff like that.”
Linda shakes her head. “What about Gilmer’s sister? She’s not blameless.” She feels herself getting annoyed. The Thurber business is awful, but she doesn’t understand why everyone has to keep bringing it up.
“At least tell me Ernest is good to you,” Paige says now. “Because he’d better treat you like a queen.”
They both know from town gossip that Ernest DeWitt is experienced, the word always spoken as if it were dirty. Linda recalls women at church shaking their heads, making chicken noises at the sight of Ernest DeWitt’s latest tramp. At times, he’s gone around with single mothers and women from the trailer park, or women who were knocked up in high school, and on at least one occasion, with another man’s wife. It’s disgraceful. Thinking back, though, Linda now recalls another tone to those voices: a note of longing. Those biddies were bored, Linda thinks. Bored and scared, wanting the romance, but terrified of the impact.
There’s another thing, an unspoken thing, and that’s the matter of Ernest’s ex-wife—a black woman. As if River Bend were still stuck in the sixties.
Even as she thinks this, she knows she won’t yet tell her grandma or stepdad about Ernest. It’s all too much: leaving Nathan, getting pregnant. She’d been careful in Texas, so strict with her birth control—in part, she thinks now, because somehow she knew she was going to leave Nathan. And maybe this is okay, now, with Ernest, because he feels right in a way that Nathan never did. Maybe this will all work out, she thinks, but she doesn’t yet know.
And so she sneaks around with Ernest, visits him in the middle of the day, goes to his house through the alleyway, knocks on the back door. In his yard, she can slip into the shadow of the old mulberry tree, which deposits her onto the stoop. She feels much more comfortable here than standing on his front porch, the western-facing facade of his house bright in the sunlight, framed by the small yard that drops off onto Main Street. She always knocks on his back door softly—there’s no doorbell—and even with the lightest of touches, he answers quickly, as if he’s been waiting for her.
Linda soon learns that experience is anything but a dirty word. Ernest loves her lingeringly, and when they’re together, she’s the sole focus of his attention. He loves her in the daylight, with the blankets off the bed. He loves her completely nude, and takes his time in a way that makes her feel treasured, so different from the distracted pawing she grew used to with Nathan. Ernest’s love makes her question the wisdom of virginity, of saving yourself for marriage, of entering into a lifelong union with someone who barely knows himself, and doesn’t know you at all.
And when the sun comes in through the thin curtains of Ernest’s bedroom windows, when she uncurls from his side and tells him—two weeks after admitting it to her sisters, her heart beating behind her eardrums—that she’s pregnant, he kisses her collarbone, the space between her breasts, her still-flat belly, then pulls on his shorts and goes down to the kitchen to make her an omelet. He isn’t a good cook. He hacks at vegetables with a dull knife, cooks them in too much butter until they’re overdone, layers slices of American cheese on top of eggs that are still a little runny. And he brings her that god-awful coffee. But Linda loves the food he makes for her, because the gesture is so novel.
“Eat up,” he says. “I want my boy to come out big and strong.” His boy, he thinks. He’ll get things right this time, with this child. In the back of his mind, though, he wonders how Elizabeth will respond. He’s spent so long convincing her to move back home, and now she’s coming in mid-September. Maybe he won’t tell her about this development just yet.
“What makes you think it’s a boy?” Linda asks. She’s so relieved by his response that she’s giddy.
He doesn’t answer, just winks.
“I shouldn’t be drinking coffee anymore,” she says, but drinks it anyway.
Back in his bed after the sun sets, Ernest loves her so well she almost wishes she could loan him out. Every woman should experience this at least once. He loves her so that, afterward, it takes her a moment to remember where she is, who she is, and she stretches on his sheets, her arms over her head, her abdominal muscles pulled lean, her brain quiet, her body the warmest it has ever been.
* * *
• • •
At the end of August, a postcard from Paula is delivered to the farm, addressed to “The Williams Girls.” As if Paula can’t remember each of their names. Which, Linda figures, might be true. She’s had no contact with them for fourteen years.
“Her handwriting isn’t very feminine,” Paige says, always one to nitpick in hopes of keeping her feelings at bay. She’s more like Paula than she knows. She’d dropped by the farm today to visit her sisters, and then Linda sprang the card on her.
“And her spelling kind of suck
s,” Linda says.
The sisters huddle together on Grandma’s couch to read it, Linda in the middle, holding the postcard because Paige and Skyla seem reluctant to touch it.
“How close is Utah to Vegas?” Skyla says.
“You don’t know where Utah is?” Paige says.
“I know where Utah is,” Skyla says. Paige is always on Skyla’s case about her grades, bemoaning her general lack of knowledge about the world. As if Paige were so wise.
“Who does that?” Linda says. “Who sends a postcard out of the blue? It’s just, random.”
On the front is a picture of Arches National Park, that blue-blue sky behind those red-orange rocks. The back says, “Thinking of you all.”
“It’s kind of shitty of her,” Paige says.
“She’s thinking of us,” Skyla says.
“She wants something, more like,” Paige says.
“New theory,” Skyla says. “Mom is a secret agent. She’s been surveilling the house. How else would she know we’re all here to receive her postcard?”
“A secret agent in Utah?” Paige says.
“Isn’t that where Area Fifty-Six is?” Skyla asks.
“You mean Area Fifty-One?”
“Maybe she wants to reconnect?” Linda says.
“Yes. But,” Paige says, “a postcard has no return address.”
Still, it’s a starting point. A much narrower search than somewhere in the world, or maybe still in the U.S.
Skyla gets online and accesses public records, telephone listings, newspapers of local towns. The sisters gather close, trying to see her phone. She finds a Paula Williams named in a newspaper clipping, an interview asking residents about a drought around Moab. This Paula Williams is quoted as saying, “So we can’t water our lawns. No skin off my nuts.”
“That’s Mom,” Paige says. “That’s so Mom.”
Elizabeth DeWitt
7
A lady from the school visits the house to talk to my mom. They’re worried because the babysitter sent me to school in a diaper.
“Your seven-year-old should be potty trained,” the lady tells my mom.
“What do you mean?” my mom says. “Of course she’s potty trained.”
“Why was she in a diaper?” the lady asks.
“Why was she what?” my mom says.
When the lady has gone, my mom asks me if it’s true. When I tell her yes, she doesn’t believe me. She checks my butt and finds it covered in diaper rash. After that, I don’t have to go to the babysitter’s anymore. My life before quickly blurs—the house, the babysitter, the girl child, the man child, the other Beth, even Mikey. They become like something dropped over the side of a boat, sunken to the murky bottom of the lake.
BALANCING
The air surging through the window is sweet and dusty, vibrating with heat. Ninety degrees outside, not bad for the end of August. Paula can’t bring herself to turn on the air conditioner. She stretches in bed, her back damp with sweat, and listens to the coffeepot gurgling in the kitchen—Jorge making breakfast. There’s the pop of a tube of crescent rolls, the slide of a cookie sheet into the oven. They have nothing to do, nowhere to go. Last night, they had a fight: Paula wanted a quiet night at home, but Jorge wanted to go out. She had to remember that was the danger of dating a guy twelve years her junior; his stamina for social events, hikes, even sex, is so much greater than hers. In the end, he went without her, and she went to bed angry.
She’s glad he’s making breakfast, that he brings two cups of coffee back to bed with him. Both of them have the weekend off work—a rarity, since Paula works in a restaurant that’s always busy in the summer. Labor Day is next week, marking the end of the tourist season. It can’t come fast enough. But today is a day of rest, and the time opens before them like a wide canyon. They negotiate their options while crescent rolls rise in the oven.
“We could fix the porch,” Jorge says, curling next to her. His body is hot, but it’s a nice feeling. In the backyard, they have a stack of lumber salvaged from a friend’s house before it was torn down; their own porch needs to be ripped out and replaced, the lumber sanded and varnished, a project that’s been on their list for months.
“We can work on that separately any old time,” Paula says. “We don’t both have to be here for it.”
“We keep putting it off.”
Paula sighs, stretches. Yawns. She’s worked twelve days straight. She just wants to take it easy. She runs her fingers through his hair. “We could take Lola for a hike? Or drive down to the reservoir?”
He smiles, but only with one side of his mouth. He’s always so busy doing, making, repairing, improving. She wants him to take a moment and just be with her. To feel the hot dry air pushing in through the open window. To smell the dust and yellow grass.
He touches his nose to hers. “Whatever you want.”
* * *
• • •
Jorge lets her drive. She likes to lose herself in the altitude, the juniper shrubs and mounds of shale. In her truck, she has an altimeter salvaged out of an old Cessna fixed to the dashboard with Velcro. She tracks the correlation between its movements and the pressure in her ears. Even after fourteen years here, she still feels dizzy from the elevation changes. She pushes the accelerator and waits for the lag before she downshifts. She also notices a slight wobble, a rear tire off balance, but can’t tell if it’s the driver’s or passenger’s side. In the pickup bed, Lola gambols from one end to the other, her tongue lolling out, as she tries to figure out which side smells better. The truck climbs out of the shadows of the sheer cliffs bordering the road.
Jorge drums on his knees. Paula can barely hear the rhythm over the roar of wind through open windows. Ahead of them, the road appears to drop off into pure blue, but as she crests the hill, the downside reveals itself, a long, dark slither of road. Her engine startles a crow, and it takes flight, clutching part of a dead animal in its beak, the red meat of which is exposed, a bit of backbone dangling. A piece of raw flesh flops back onto the road.
At the reservoir, Jorge is restless. The fish aren’t biting, but the buffalo gnats are. There are too many boats out, all cruising around in aimless circles, making waves that slide up the boat launch, lap the pier. Every time a boat passes, Lola barks and leaps up like she’s headed into the water, and Paula has to grab her by her collar. Dogs aren’t allowed in the reservoir.
“Maybe you’re right,” Paula says after an hour. “Maybe we should build that porch.”
“We came all this way,” Jorge says, skewering a worm on his hook.
But it’s no use. Neither of them wants to be here. Even Lola is antsy, running up and down the pier, snapping her teeth at clouds of gnats. Jorge casts and reels, casts and reels, a mechanical motion. A father and his young son come down the pier with fishing poles, but at the sight of Lola, barking and snapping at seemingly nothing, the son turns his blond head into his father’s leg and cries. Lola is an eighty-pound golden retriever, a bit pudgy, but hardly a monster. The father tries for a few minutes to convince his son that it’s fine, the dog won’t hurt him, but the son is having none of it.
“Nothing’s biting anyway,” Paula calls after him.
Jorge reels, reaches the pole back, casts again. He’s quieter than usual, his movements jerky. Paula worries he’s angry with her, about the porch, about the fight last night. She puts a hand on his arm.
“What’s up?” she says.
He reels. “Nothing.” He isn’t even twitching the rod like he felt a nibble.
“No, really.”
“Everything’s fine.”
In her heart, she feels this is it: the end of something lovely. She should have expected it. He’s breaking up with her. She stares at the pier, its rotting wood, the end slimy with algae.
Paula steels herself for the news. In her mind, too, she begin
s calculating. She’ll have to find a new place to live; there’s no way she’ll be able to afford the mortgage, unless she can swing a second job. Cooking down at the café is nice—relaxing even, in its own harried way—but they need her for so many hours. And hell, she’s forty-eight. How much longer can she keep up twelve-hour shifts? Can she really manage a whole other job on top of that?
Beneath this is an issue Paula doesn’t want to think about. She won’t date again. She doesn’t want to start over. She told herself this was it, that moving to Utah was a new leaf. And then she went and attached herself to a man twelve years her junior. Twelve years! Almost young enough that she could be his mother, at least in River Bend. She knows his leaving is her fault entirely. She isn’t a romantic woman; she rarely says that she loves him, she doesn’t like to hug and kiss unless it’s going to lead somewhere. When they first started dating six years ago, Jorge was always trying to hold her hand at the store, kiss her neck in restaurants. It took her nearly a year to break him of this habit. Maybe she should have indulged him a little.
He reels his line in all the way, until the hook catches on the eyelet at the end of the rod. Then he sets the pole down on the pier. He sighs. His hands are shaking as he reaches into his pocket.
“This is stupid,” he says. “I’m stupid. I wanted to do this last night. But then you wouldn’t come out with me, so I thought, Why not today? I imagined us building the deck, hopefully finishing by dinner. Maybe grilling out. And when the sun was going down . . .” He pulls a little velvet box from his pocket.
Paula stares at it. Now she’s stupid. His hands shake as he fumbles with the box, and before he can pry it fully open, the box snaps shut and pops out of his hands. It splashes into the reservoir.
“Shit,” he says. The box floats on the water. He reaches over the edge, but the box bobs under the pier. “¡Carajo!” he says, and dives in after it.
The House of Deep Water Page 5