“What brings you round?” Linda asks.
“I wanted to see if Ernest is free this weekend. The salmon are running.”
“Well, come on in. Can I get you coffee? A beer?”
“A beer sounds good.” And they go into the house together, talking, catching up. Steve seems to have forgotten Beth entirely, but then that’s always how it was with him: Once he speaks a lie, he slips into it as if it were reality. He said he’d come to see Ernest, and now that’s what he’s here for. Never mind that he’s left Beth holding the door.
Steve Brody has a talent, which is the ability to look into a woman’s eyes and see her damage. It looks to him like a tiny silent version of the woman, crouching inside her iris. The position of the tiny woman dictates how he will react; for instance, if the tiny woman was bunched, ready to spring, Steve knew enough to move on. If, however, the tiny woman was hugging her knees to her chest, or if she was teetering, or if she was trying to sneak away—if any of these were the tiny woman’s position, well, now, these were the women Steve liked best. The hugging woman was in need of comfort. The teetering woman needed support. The sneaking woman needed to be seen and acknowledged. And once you could determine what a woman needed, you could give it to her, even while taking everything else: her time and money, her breath and sweat, her love, her mind, her youth.
The problem with Beth was that, over the years, she has gone from a hugger to something else entirely. Her tiny woman is silently drowning, curled inside a pool of warm water. Steve doesn’t know how to work her, and he needs to know how. He needs to have her, to scoop her up and apply her to his life like a balm. This new Beth unnerves him, so that he begins to doubt himself.
He doesn’t like doubting himself.
* * *
• • •
As soon as Linda has delivered Steve faithfully to Ernest, she rounds on Beth.
“You have no right to keep my family from this house.”
Beth wants to blame Linda’s outbursts on pregnancy hormones, but part of her thinks Linda would be just as unbearable if she weren’t pregnant. “I didn’t realize anyone else was home.”
“Bullshit,” Linda says, her face reddening.
“I keep forgetting you don’t have a job, or somewhere to be.”
“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Linda has her hands on her belly, which is just beginning to show. She arches her back, thrusting her belly forward. As her body has expanded, she’s developed the habit of wielding it like a weapon.
“Nothing.”
“I’m still looking for a job,” Linda says. And while it’s true that she has put in a few job applications around town—at the flower shop, at the dollar store—she hasn’t been as proactive about finding employment as she should be. She mentioned this to Ernest, and he told her not to worry about it; she should focus on growing him a healthy boy.
“It’s just, I’ve had a job since I was fifteen,” Beth says. “But it’s not for everyone.”
“You mean like warming up food down at the Hudson House?”
“Better than being a financial drain on someone else’s family.”
“In case you hadn’t noticed,” Linda says, “I’m pregnant.”
“That’s not an exemption.”
“And frankly, it’s none of your business. Ernest wants me here. He wants me to take it easy.”
For a moment, Beth imagines how her future will look: working multiple jobs to support this household, Linda never so much as changing a diaper or warming a bottle. Beth’s father will still be tinkering with cars for cash, but it’s not enough. Ernest may be okay with Linda not working, but he’s sleeping with her, so he’s well compensated.
“It must be nice,” Beth says without generosity, “to be so well taken care of.”
When Beth was a child, after her parents divorced, her father didn’t pay child support. It wasn’t that Ernest DeWitt didn’t want to, but more that he couldn’t. Beth remembers visiting him when she was a teenager. There would be only beer and bologna in the fridge, no toilet paper in either bathroom. There were times when he would have no electricity. Beth has no doubt that now, if she weren’t here, he would be unable to support Linda or her baby. And Beth knows that if she stays here, she will always be the breadwinner.
And just like a child who’s jealous of another’s toy, Beth wants to bring Linda down to her level.
The next morning, driving down Main Street, when Beth passes Steve in his truck, she doesn’t avert her gaze. She stares at him. He’s never had a problem reading her—he always had a knack for interpreting her moods—but today, he comes up short. Steve sits stationary, waiting for her to pass so he can turn into his driveway. Beth is moving in the opposite direction—the wrong direction, he thinks. Her house, the grocery store two towns over, the restaurant where she works, all are behind her. As she passes, she slows, turning her neck to watch him. Her face is utterly blank, her shoulders slumped, both hands on the wheel, and her eyes meet his for long enough to unnerve him. Once she’s gone, he hits the gas, and his truck lurches into his driveway so quickly he almost hits Hannah, who is crouched down in the dusty gravel, trying to pull her kitten out from a gap under the house.
* * *
• • •
The first time Beth meets Steve, it’s in a motel on the highway, like the most clichéd of love affairs. They pay cash, or rather, he pays cash, and she feels more guilty about letting him pay than she feels about sleeping with him. She’s driven by his house regularly since moving back home: It’s as small and dingy as ever, the grass patchy and baked, the paint peeling, the gutters falling off, the sidewalk cracked. How many kids does he have living at home? Three? How do they all fit? She can’t afford a motel, but she knows he can’t, either. How irresponsible, she thinks.
The scratchy bedspread is patterned with all the same colors as bodily excretions, the motel itself part of the punishment for her transgression. In the sex, she thought she’d find him again, rediscover the Steve she’d had so much trouble leaving behind, but he isn’t there. This is some other Steve she’s never met, a Steve who takes his time, takes forever. She’d wanted a quick deal, over and done, but it seems like hours that she’s in that motel room, staring at the piss-yellow ceiling and its water stains, breathing that old-cigarette air, kissing his old-cigarette mouth. He huffs out dust on top of her, prods her with his dick, and the whole time all she can think is, I deserve this.
And so she keeps meeting him at the motel room he can’t afford, or meeting him between paydays on the dusty country road north of town to screw on a blanket in the back of his pickup, as if they’re teenagers again. But they’re not teenagers; her back can attest to that: It knots up from the grinding it receives against that blanketed pickup bed. I am trash, she now realizes. I’m the kind of trash my mother always worried I’d be. This thought makes her keep going, not even making love, but fucking. He’s never made love to her. All those years of fucking. She’d always been trash. And every time they fuck, that girl inside her, Eliza DeWitt, ebbs closer to the surface. Eliza’s attachment to Steve was never broken; her relationship with him kept her here, in River Bend, all these years. This is another reason Beth can’t sleep at night: Since moving home, Eliza has been screaming from the dark well inside her. In there, Steve married Eliza instead of Deb. Eliza lives in that dirty shoebox of a house with him and too many kids and too many pets.
Sometimes Beth falls overboard into those darker places, and the person who surfaces into this world is Eliza. And why not? Eliza is nicer, having long ago accepted that this is all her life will ever be. No use fighting it. Eliza has the docility, the complacency, that comes from having lost hope. And when Eliza takes the lead, dripping wet and pruney from the time she spent underwater, she goes about Beth’s life, cooking at the Hudson House, watching television at home, shopping at the dollar store, attending football games to see
Dan march.
Dan and Jeanette welcome Eliza, ask no questions of her, although after a week, they talk between the two of them about how they hope she’ll stay. Even Ernest spends more time in the house when Eliza is there, because she’s a joy to him. Eliza never went to college—Steve talked her out of it—and so she doesn’t have to struggle to remember how to relate to her father. Eliza doesn’t really want to talk about the state of the country, about gender politics and the glass ceiling, about that topic most shunned in the Midwest: racism. Eliza isn’t hyperaware of the ways her father is privileged, the ways in which she is not. She never went out and paid tuition and got her own kind of privilege as a countermeasure. No, Eliza had none of this, or if she did, these thoughts are submerged now with Beth.
In the meantime, Beth sleeps until she is stronger, floating in the amniotic waters, relieved by the respite, while Eliza enjoys the chance to stretch. And as Eliza sits in amiable silence with Ernest, and drinks canned beer on a Saturday afternoon, and watches the game on TV, she rather wishes Beth would stay submerged. Beth only makes a mess of things anyway. Eliza goes to motel rooms with Steve, and makes pot roast for dinner, and never thinks about the factory farms Beth drove by on her way home to Michigan, and the miles of stink, and the brown muddy pens with so many bodies crammed in together. She doesn’t consider the carbon footprint of new potatoes in October. She’s even almost pleasant with Linda—a fact that does not escape Linda’s notice, does not fail to raise Linda’s suspicion. And when Ernest comments on the change, Eliza looks mildly surprised, having forgotten how it was that she used to act.
After two weeks of this, Ernest is optimistic, although cautiously so: He’s known his daughter too long to feel entirely comfortable. Jeanette moves back into the bedroom with Eliza. Dan seems happier. For a time, the DeWitt household is rather peaceful.
That is, until Beth manages to claw her way back to the surface, disoriented—disappointed—by the direction in which Eliza has taken them.
Steve never notices any change in Beth, for while he’s accepted her new name, in his mind, Beth is no deeper than the outermost surface of her skin.
* * *
• • •
Ernest’s house is overdue for remodeling. He should have expected the demands of an aging house, but dealing with a flooded basement hadn’t really been on today’s to-do list. It’s already the end of October. He’d intended to clean out the garage back in September, before his daughter arrived, to get Linda’s car out of the driveway so there would be room for Beth’s. He also wanted to clear space in the bedroom closet and dresser, so that Linda could unpack the rest of her belongings.
Instead, Ernest is ankle deep in cold water, which smells strongly of rust from the old pipes. He goes outside to shut off the water to the house, then calls Steve to come take a look. Steve is finishing a job across town, but he says he’ll be over right after. Ernest sloshes his way to the pipe, confirms that, yes, it is shot, and, no, there is no easy fix.
While he waits, he hauls a few boxes out of the basement—keepsakes Gretchen left behind that he hasn’t thought about in years—and stacks them on the coffee table. There’s an entire box full of Beth’s baby clothes—tiny shoes and stained onesies and sundresses and blankets. He wonders if Gretchen even knows she kept them. She’d been reluctant to throw anything out, and would probably be considered a hoarder nowadays. There’s a box of yellowing photos from one of their few Christmases spent together as a family. The sickly tree, the meager offering of presents beneath it. The photos are water damaged, and Ernest suspects the pipe has been leaking for a long time. One box is nearly empty. This is the one he most wants to rescue.
The bottom of it is sodden and sagging; he has a rough time carrying it up to the living room without its contents falling out. Inside are little gifts Gretchen had given him: a button-down shirt, now stained, and a framed photo of them at a church picnic. Set beside this is a lump wrapped in newspaper. He opens it. Inside is a pink tea set, the lid a little scuffed, but in good overall condition. The pot is printed with flowers and butterflies, curling ivy that spells out “Tea for Two.” Two cups, both with flowers adorning their insides. He got this set for Beth’s fourth birthday—the last birthday she had before he and Gretchen divorced. He’d seen it in the window of the flower shop downtown and brought it home, gave it to her without even wrapping it. She’d loved it. She sat him down and served him “tea” in it, which was really just warm Kool-Aid, the orange food dye a cloying contrast to the pink porcelain. Gretchen came home in the middle of the tea party.
She’d walked into the house, the kitchen, quietly, as she was apt to do in those days. She was always trying to sneak up on Ernest to catch him cheating on her; she thought if she caught him in the act, she’d have leverage in the divorce. But on this day, she’d only seen Ernest spending time with his daughter. This innocence seemed to make her even madder. She’d said with vinegar in her voice, “Isn’t that sweet?” And Beth had been startled so badly she dropped her cup, spilling Kool-Aid on her dress and chipping the saucer. Then she’d started to cry.
All Gretchen said was, “What were you thinking, buying her something so breakable?”
He knows he should throw out all these keepsakes—the clothes, the photos, the tea set. If Linda should come in and find him sitting on the couch holding on to these things, how would that look? Still, he can’t bring himself to do it. He packs the items away again and carries the sodden box up to the attic. The tea set he fishes back out, still unsure whether he’ll give it to Beth or put it in the trash. He feels very tired. He should sell this house, he knows it. He has no desire to keep up with it anymore; it’s been ages since it’s been cleaned properly, though Linda has been talking about sprucing the place up, fixing the broken cupboard door, re-grouting the tub, replacing the upstairs toilet seat that scooches sideways when you sit down. She threatens to go through his clothes, too, and bag up the pants that he never wears, the shirts that have holes in them. The woman is out to overhaul his life.
On his way back downstairs, he has to catch himself. His entire body feels wrong. He grips the railing, which is loose, and wonders if it will hold. There’s an immense throbbing behind his left eye, and then the room tilts and the tea set goes banging down the stairs, his body slumping after it. He spends some time on the floor at the bottom.
He feels himself expanding, like he could burst out of his skin, out of the house.
He doesn’t know how long he’s been down, but this is the second time in as many months that he’s found himself on the floor. He can’t see straight, and realizes his glasses have been knocked off. When he tries reaching for them, his right arm feels weak, tingly. He hears his back door open.
“Ernest? Hello?” It’s Steve, tromping through the house with his work boots on. “Shit. You all right?”
Ernest fumbles with his glasses. “Yeah. Just slipped on the damn stairs,” he says.
Steve offers him a hand, pulls him up from the ground.
“You don’t look right,” Steve says. “You sure you’re okay?” His eyes seem to focus on Ernest’s mouth.
“I banged my head pretty good is all.” He gathers the tea set, now cracked. One of the cups is divorced of its handle. The other cup is oddly intact.
Steve leads him into the dining room, drops him into a chair. “You want some ice or something?”
“I’m fine,” Ernest says. “Seriously. Fine.”
Steve looks him up and down.
“Only, don’t tell Linda.” It’s stupid, and Ernest knows it. His mother died from a stroke when she was younger than he is now. But if Ernest is going out, he’s going out quietly. He’s had enough women worrying over him in his life, and Linda has certainly been through her share of heartache already.
“Don’t tell me what?”
He looks up to find her standing in the doorway to the kitchen, a bag of groceries sl
ung over her shoulder.
“What’d you do to your glasses? They’re all crooked.”
“Me and Ernest were roughhousing,” Steve says, without missing a beat.
“You two are like children,” Linda says. She never even thinks to question it, but when Beth enters the kitchen and hears the story, there is a shudder and a whisper from Eliza, who’s had plenty of practice being deceived. But Beth doesn’t say anything. She knows better than to call Steve out on a lie. Instead, she keeps an eye on him, lingering by the basement stairs while he fixes the pipe, and showing him to the door afterward. Whatever has actually happened, she doesn’t want him to use it as an excuse to linger here. Once he is gone, she turns her attention to her father, watching him for any sign of change, but life in the DeWitt household carries on as usual.
* * *
• • •
Beth is watching television one night, the first time all week she’s had the living room to herself. Whatever happened to her father last week has slowed him down; he’s been spending more time sitting on the couch the past few days. But tonight, he is out in the garage, working. Dan is at band practice, and Jeanette is upstairs doing her homework. Beth flips through the channels, not really paying attention, until a news story catches her. Gilmer Thurber and his sister went on trial today. The screen shows a house, the Thurber house, sitting dark and empty in the October gloom. The shot switches to a reporter outside the county courthouse. In the background, Gilmer is led inside in handcuffs.
Seeing him again causes Beth’s brain to grow fur. She grips the remote so tight it creaks. Too many memories crow at her; she shoves them down into the well with Eliza. Let her sort them out.
She changes the channel, but all of the local stations are covering this story. She turns the television off and sits in silence. The news is nothing but violence and depravity these days. She tries to remember a time when it was different, when the world was less messed up, but she can’t. She just wants to sit in silence and not think. But she can’t sit in silence; upstairs, she hears Linda talking, a low buzz that vibrates the ceiling. Jeanette laughs, and before Beth can think about it, she’s on her way up the stairs. She finds Jeanette and Linda in the master bedroom, Linda’s bedroom, bent before the old mahogany vanity. They each have an eyeliner pencil in one hand, an index finger pulling down their lower eyelid. Beth watches her daughter watching Linda apply makeup. Linda’s hair is curled, thick from prenatal vitamins. She’s having trouble seeing the mirror, careful not to lean her bump of a belly against the vanity. Jeanette runs the pencil along her own eyelid, her eyes flicking back and forth between her reflection and Linda’s.
The House of Deep Water Page 14