“It sure is cold,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s been years since we’ve had a December this cold.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Won’t you invite me in?” she said.
“Steve’s sleeping,” I said. “He works at the tool and die now. Long hours.”
Really, I didn’t want her to see your house, the cigarette haze, the walls stained yellow, the drafty rooms, the spoiled food in the fridge. Your house was heated only by the gas oven, because the electricity had been cut. I didn’t want her to see the bed I shared with you, the thin wool blanket covered in gray feathers from the parrot you let fly around the house. I didn’t want her to see the weight I’d put on while on birth control. The pickle jar I used instead of a bank and never thought to count at the end of each week. The grade report from my first semester in college detailing my 2.3 GPA, which I taped to the fridge like it was some fantastic joke, like it wasn’t wrecking me that I was failing at my long-awaited exodus from River Bend. I was so lost at school, and ashamed of how lost I was. I could no longer look anyone in the eyes, and I didn’t want my grandma to see that, either. Most of all, I didn’t want to take my gloves off, because then she would see the ring.
* * *
• • •
You lost your job at the tool and die. You said you hated it there anyway; your boss didn’t respect you, and your work was so mindless, a monkey could do it. I had gotten you to apply for financial aid at the community college, but even that wasn’t enough, so we took jobs at the roofing company working with your dad, shoveling snow. You worked with him all day, and I would join you both on weekends, driving the forty-five minutes from school.
At work, he treated you like an employee. You used to be a lot closer, you said. You used to go on fishing trips together. He tried to teach you how to hit a baseball. When you turned sixteen, he took you skydiving. Now we followed him up icy ladders, shoveled until our backs were cursing, chiseled at icicles in cold silence as slush hit our faces and melted into our collars. My toes were always numb that semester. I felt as if I were made of winter, with a fog of hair and frigid limbs, skin rimmed in ice, snow pooled in my stomach, my eyes hard marbles.
It was maybe the worst job I’d ever had, but it paid ten bucks an hour, way more than my cafeteria job. Even with a decent paycheck, you asked to borrow money. You had to repay your financial aid, since you’d failed to enroll in classes. What did you do with your financial aid, then? You said you’d spent it on the ring.
* * *
• • •
You weren’t at home, but your mother was there, bent over, scrubbing the kitchen tile. Without looking up, she told me you were visiting a friend. In your bedroom your African gray slept on top of its cage. I lay down on your bed.
“You’re really just going to wait for him?” your mother said from the doorway.
“What’s it to you?”
“Just wait for him? Like a good little puppy?”
I rolled over, showed her my back.
“Look,” she said, “I know this is none of my business.”
“You’re damn right.” I glared at her over my shoulder.
“I just don’t think you two are right for each other. And it’s not because you’re . . .” Here she ducked her head to keep from looking at me.
“Because I’m what?” I said, rolling over to face her.
“Look,” she said. “I have friends who are colored.”
“Colored,” your parrot said.
I stared her down, her gray hair, her gray clothes. Who was she? “Like you know what’s good for him?” I said.
Her eyes, tired. A yellow bruise on her left jaw. “You think you’re the only one in his life?” she said.
“He can’t even stand you,” I said. “He just feels sorry for you.”
“I’m talking about Deb, stupid.”
“Jay tame,” your parrot said.
“You know she’s pregnant again. And she’s keeping it this time.”
“That’s just a story she’s been spreading,” I said. You’d told me all about it, how Deb was obsessed with you, how she was lying to try to get you back.
“Just keep telling yourself that.” When she left, I went to your desk to check if you had emailed me. Before I had even logged in, a message came in on your ICQ: Hey babe. From a Sandra2000. I didn’t even know a Sandra. I read through your conversations. I searched your email. I don’t know what made me think to check if you had other email addresses.
You did.
You’d carried on dozens of conversations with Deb. You wrote to say that you and I had broken up. You said I’d cheated on you. You wrote to her in French, words I couldn’t understand. Je t’aime, je t’aime. In the corner, your bird was plucking its feathers, its skin raw and weeping. I spent so long straining my mind, looking for cognates with the little bit of Spanish I knew, that soon even the English words seemed foreign. I could no longer grasp ideas like desire or need. Love.
* * *
• • •
You became quiet, sullen, moody. I started visiting daily, driving an hour from school, staying the night, every night, staking my claim. I felt like since I was failing at school, there was no way I’d make good there, but if I worked hard enough, maybe I could make things work with you.
You’d leave me at your house alone, to visit friends, to go to the bar, and I’d lie shivering in your bed while your parrot plucked itself bald in its cage. When I got bored enough, mad enough, I’d rifle through your room, search your desk. I sifted through the stacks of bills: car insurance, overdue cable bill, electricity bills, phone bills, receipts for oil changes and gas stations and fast food, and three receipts for Kmart diamond solitaires, each costing $219.
Your phone bill seemed unusually high. Most of the calls listed had been placed to me, but there was one number that appeared again and again, always around four in the morning. I dialed.
“Hey, hun.” Her voice bright.
“Deb?”
“Jay tame,” your parrot said, plucking the feathers from its wings, its pink skin scabby, pimpled like lizard hide.
“It’s Eliza,” I said. “Wait, don’t hang up.”
She was silent for so long, I wondered whether she’d heard me.
“Did he tell you we’d broken up?” I said.
“What’s your game?” she said.
“Just tell me.”
“The shit you put him through,” she said.
“Please?”
“You ain’t no good for him.”
“I need to know.”
“Yeah, he told me he’d dumped your skank ass. God, Eliza. How many men do you need? How many homes do you have to wreck?”
“I never cheated—”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“But I should have,” I said.
* * *
• • •
You wouldn’t come to California for my cousin’s wedding. We’d had such a fight after I confronted you about your phone bill that by the time the wedding came around a month later, you refused. I even offered to buy your ticket, which I couldn’t really afford. I couldn’t even afford mine. You said you were terrified of flying. You’d never been on a plane. Neither had I.
We all flew out of Kalamazoo: my grandma, who loved to travel; my mother, who still wasn’t talking to me; my auntie, the groom’s mother, whom my mother wasn’t talking to, either. All for a cousin I hadn’t seen in at least a decade, not since he moved to California. I didn’t even want to go, but it was important to my grandma.
A gray day. Taxiing down the runway, the grass moving faster, slanting outside my window, followed by the lifting, the leaving behind. Misted windows and the jostling of ascent. And then, breaking through the clouds. Thin glorious sunlight. So much blue
sky, it stirred something in me, something that, with age, I might have identified as hope. At the time I named it heartbreak.
Just before I left for this trip, I received a letter from my school letting me know I was on academic probation. I’d tried so hard to get here, and I was blowing it.
Then California’s five-lane highways and taquerias and desert shrubs and dusty hills and palm trees. Michigan felt like something from my past. You should have been there with me, out in that orange grove, in the California sun. The altar adorned with a profusion of flowers, yellow, pink, pale purple. Yards and yards of red velvet aisle laid on the grass. The bride’s gown, lace, with a train so long three bridesmaids had to pop under her skirt and bustle it after the ceremony, like something in a movie. You should have let me lean my head on your shoulder and cry as the bride walked down the aisle. You should have held my hand while they said their vows. You should have caught the garter. You would have looked nice in a button-down shirt, skin slick with sunscreen.
My mother sitting next to me at the reception, but still not talking to me. My auntie in her ridiculous gown, dripping in sequins, drunk dancing with the bride’s brother. My grandma cutting tiny bites of chicken cordon bleu, chewing languorously. Sighing after each swallow. “Your cousin married money,” she whispered. “And there’s nothing wrong with that.”
* * *
• • •
But first, the bachelorette party. A karaoke club. Red walls, black chairs, chrome bar. A woman thundering into a microphone, gripping it like a lover, beneath the spinning lights of a disco ball. She was dark-skinned and lovely, her hair in braids, her makeup unapologetic. She wore tasteful sequins. She was the kind of woman I never saw back home. I hadn’t realized before how hungry I was for someone to look up to, someone who looked like me. Being around my auntie, whose life was every bit as messy as my mother’s, and my cousin, who was light enough to pass, wasn’t enough. But this? This is what I needed.
I ordered the first round, because I never seemed to get carded when buying rounds. A guy at the bar struck up a conversation. He wore a dress shirt, tight over his belly, and a loosened tie. His broad freckled face almost glowed in the dim lighting.
Why would he talk to me? I wore a baggy tank top and torn jeans because the only nice clothing I owned was my dress for the wedding. A line of sweat under my bra, down my spine, my blood too thick for California’s heat. I was the only black woman in our group, and I was ashamed that I wasn’t representing better. But he noticed me. He looked like money, like opportunity, like confidence, his face slackened by alcohol. He was talking to me, his mouth wide, the words lost beneath the karaoke. Then he palmed a wad of crumpled bills into my hand. Did he want to buy me a drink? I shook my head, but he insisted.
I took his money and retreated to my fellow bachelorettes. This was also new, this feeling of safety in a group of women. I hadn’t had any girlfriends since Deb. Once he was out of sight, I counted up ninety-three dollars. I made a point of keeping a close eye on him, telling myself that it was only to keep my distance—but part of me wanted to see if he was watching.
I didn’t even know what to order with the money. I didn’t like the margaritas we’d ordered for our first round; they were way too strong. I let the maid of honor take the reins, gave her the entire wad of cash. We drank shots with his money, me fighting not to gag. Soon, the room was spinning along with the lights.
The bride on the bathroom floor, her head resting comfortably on a public toilet seat. The maid of honor combing damp hair from the bride’s face. I held my liquor well; this made me feel powerful. I’d had so many drinks that they were beginning to taste better. I approached a barstool that was sometimes one barstool, sometimes two, sometimes one base with two seats. I crawled up onto the seats. Someone had left a pair of sunglasses on the bar, tea shades with lilac lenses. I put them on.
The bartender wouldn’t serve me. Said it was for my own good. I’d never suffered such injustice. I let him know, about the injustice, about the unholy glare of lights on chrome, about the sickly lilac lighting, about the tricky barstools. He waved over a bouncer, which got me really amped up. I told him how the singing was off-key and the drinks were watery; I let him have it. An arm slid around my waist and guided me away from the bar, and I was telling them about the bartender, the injustice, the weak drinks, expecting them to commiserate, but instead they put their face in my face, their hands in my hair. They pressed me into a corner. He pressed me—this wasn’t one of the women I came here with. His body on mine, his hands on me, that wide mouth on me, his broad freckled face had turned lilac. He was so close he looked like a cyclops; I couldn’t focus on both his eyes.
“Boy,” I said, pushing him away. “You don’t touch a black girl’s hair.”
I got his zipper down, felt him tense, then relax into me. Playing like this was something I’d never been able to do before, not even with you. I couldn’t do it sober; it brought back memories from my childhood. But with the flush of alcohol, the drone of music, the spinning lights, the space inside my head was somehow altered. For the better. I gripped him firmly in my fist, worked him until I felt him shudder, then wiped my hand on his shirt. This, too, made me feel powerful.
When I stumbled into my hotel room later that morning, my phone was already ringing. You’d been calling for hours. You wanted to know where I had been, who I was with. I’d been dancing.
You wanted to know how many drinks I’d had. I told you only two. By then, most of what we said to each other was lies. You always swore you never drank at all—not with your father as a model—though I’d seen cans of Old Milwaukee on the bottom shelf of your fridge, pushed to the back. I’d found bottles in your garbage. Sometimes your breath had the sour candy taste of liquors I couldn’t name.
When I got back from California, you wouldn’t see me for three days. Instead, we fought on the phone. You told me it was over, you were through with me, but I refused to let it end like this, so I stormed to your house.
Springtime. A cleansing. Baptism by sun. Driving in the country, windows down, wearing my lilac-tinted glasses. The weather unseasonably warm. Even though my air-conditioning never worked and the car seat riled a heat rash on the backs of my knees, in that moment, I didn’t care. The glasses colored my world in Easter shades.
When I got to your house, Deb opened the door. She leaned against the frame, one arm stretched across, her hand resting on the other side. She wore an engagement ring with a lilac stone. The same ring I wore, as if she and I were the ones bound by love. Her face was lilac. I took my glasses off; I didn’t like seeing her that way. I would never have admitted it, but Deb was lovely: gray feathers in her red hair, pale yellow sweater, thin white legs, a swollen waist stretching the fabric of her white dress. Behind her, the house was dark, smoky. The yellowed walls seemed likely to cave in on her any second.
“Steve’s not here,” she said.
“Where is he?” I said.
“I’m not his keeper,” she said. “Neither are you.”
Somewhere in the cave of a house behind her, I thought I heard your African gray squawking its bastard language, jay tame, jay tame, but as I listened, I realized the sound was more musical, more human. A wailing, squalling. An infant. Your infant.
All the fight went from me. I couldn’t face Deb, my old friend, my enemy. I couldn’t face her child. I put my glasses on again and drove to school, taking the back roads to get more out of the day. The suspension in my car was shot, and with each bump in the road, my car would bounce slowly, hypnotically, so that the ride was a continual bobbing, a gull on a lake. I passed spring fields, some of them planted, some of them tilled, some of them still overgrown with weeds and the remnants of last year’s crops. All of them were lilac. The roads that rose and fell, passing between glacial hills, were lilac. The world, an eggshell-thin lilac globe.
* * *
• • •
/> You called and asked me to see you. I agreed, because, dammit, we were ending this on my terms. After I all but flunked out of school, I needed a win.
We met at your uncle’s apartment. He lived two towns away, above a bait shop out on Robin Lake, kept a spare key duct-taped under the rain gutter. We used to meet here a lot. You thought he wouldn’t mind, and maybe he wouldn’t, but when we left you would make sure the toilet seat was up and the magazines on the kitchen table were arranged the way they’d been when we came.
Once inside, you led me to your uncle’s bed. We shed our clothes as if we were molting. You threw the blankets on the floor, nested against me, your fingers in my hair, my face pressed into your chest. Very soon you heaved yourself off me and stilled, trapping me against the wall. The tiny window unit over the bed thrummed, working so hard there was frost on the pane above it, but the room was as warm and damp as a mouth. Past you, past the sliding-glass door, the porch, I watched a storm gathering over the lake. A line of ragged clouds, as dark as oil paint. A V of birds hung above the lake, gliding, their black bodies stark silhouettes. Lightning cracked, and the birds plunged one after another into the water. The sky like an open wound. Rain curtained the houses across the lake, and then the lake, and then the shore. There was only us, in that room, in that bed, your heavy body, the smell of you all over me.
I couldn’t do this anymore. I couldn’t breathe with you. I didn’t know any better, didn’t see any other options, but for the first time in years, I was at least looking. My vision was clearing.
You called the next day, and I unplugged my phone. You sent me emails I deleted. You wrote letters I didn’t open. In my memory, your face blurred. I couldn’t remember the shape of your nose or the curve of your mouth. I only remembered your eyes, the blue of the summer sky in the half hour before sunset, when the birds are roosting and the air wavers with dying sound. That is to say, looking at you always felt like a long day, ending.
The House of Deep Water Page 18