How to Breathe Underwater

by Julie Orringer

  “Nine-fifteen,” Helena’s mother said, looking at her watch. She craned her neck to check the length of the line, the tendons pulling beneath her skin. Helena worried that her mother would get heat exhaustion or something worse, standing in that line. The last time they’d all gone out together— it was to a street art fair where Maya Kearn had displayed her Wheelchair Nudes, along with a couple of Helena’s own collages—her mother had been walking along, holding Margot’s hand, when she suddenly turned pale and pitched forward onto the sidewalk. She knelt there holding her belly, silent and gray-faced, while Helena’s father pushed back onlookers with his long arms, his cool physician’s voice edging into panic as he told Helena to call EMS. The ambulance moved tar-slow through the masses of people; that was how it seemed to Helena as she knelt next to her mother, holding the ends of her head kerchief away from her face as she coughed and dry-heaved. That time the CAT scans had revealed that the breast cancer had moved to her abdomen and into her ovaries, causing them to swell and finally burst, and the doctors performed emergency surgery. Helena’s mother woke to learn that she’d had a hysterectomy. “Your father fainted to the floor when he saw the scans,” she told Helena as she drifted back from anesthesia. Helena’s father was an oncologist.

  Later, as her mother slept, Helena asked her father if he had really fainted.

  “The rumors are true,” he said quietly, adjusting the blanket over Helena’s mother’s feet.

  “How bad is it?” Helena asked.

  “We’ll see.” He folded his arms across his chest and looked at his wife. Her chest rose and fell, and her skin looked paper-thin in the fluorescent hospital light.

  Helena wanted her father to be powerful, to speak with conviction about new things they could try. She’d seen videotapes of cancer cells multiplying and extruding into healthy tissues, and she imagined that taking place now, within her mother’s body. She wanted her father to reach in and put a stop to it. But he sat down in a vinyl chair beside the bed, his hands limp at his sides, a thin man exhausted from worry. Helena looked at her mother asleep on the bed, her arms bruised from blood draws and injections, and felt as if her own chest were being crushed to a tiny knot.

  When they reached the front of the line, Helena’s mother had to root around in her straw shoulder bag for the special convention coupons. Helena heard the children behind them whispering, and she thought she heard one of them say wig. She turned around and met the eyes of a dough-faced redheaded boy. His mouth opened dumbly as Helena threw him her Killing Stare. Finally Helena’s mother unloaded the contents of her bag onto the ticket counter. There was the suntan lotion, her checkbook, the makeup compact, a hairbrush, and a square black velvet box with a gold clasp, which Helena had never seen before. Helena picked up the box and turned it over in her hands.

  “That’s not for you,” her mother said, and took it away.

  “Is that a present?” Margot asked.

  Helena’s mother shook her head, continuing to pile things onto the counter until she found the vouchers in their crumpled envelope. Then she paid the ticket man, swept everything back into her bag, and at last they entered the park.

  Helena’s mother walked ahead of her daughters, her back narrow beneath a white cotton shirt, her brown highlighted hair blowing in the hot breeze. Margot and Helena almost had to jog to keep with her as she wove through the mass of Hawaiian-shirted parents and sweaty sunburned kids. The air smelled of funnel cakes and French fries and Copper-tone, and underneath it all was the green mildewy smell of Orlando, the thick tropical humidity you had to work hard to breathe. Helena’s arms and legs, bare for the first time after three months of Michigan winter, felt naked and spindly.

  “There they are,” her mother said, turning back toward her daughters. She licked her thumb and wiped a tiny orange stain from Margot’s cheek. To Helena she said, “Stand up straight.” Helena pulled her shoulders back until her mother turned away.

  The Sewalds were not hard to recognize—a tall bronzed family in colorful clothes, standing near the stone ledge in front of the landscaped Mickey Mouse head. They seemed comfortable there, a natural part of the music and bright paint of the park. Helena’s mother raised her chin and touched her hair as she headed toward them. Brian Sewald looked just as he did in his Christmas photograph—like someone who played a lot of golf. He wore gold-rimmed glasses and a red-and-white-striped polo shirt, and his skin was so tan and smooth it looked polished. When he saw Helena’s mother he opened his arms and walked toward her. He embraced her and kissed her forehead. Nora Sewald flashed a gummy smile, then came forward and kissed Margot, mashing her little glasses askew. To Helena she gave a cold fluttering pat on the back. The last time they’d seen the Sewalds, Helena, five years old, had spilled grape juice on Nora’s linen tablecloth. Helena’s mother had offered to clean it for her, but Nora had said sharply, “No. Just leave it for the maid.”

  Nora may have been Tropicana Queen two years in a row, but Helena’s mother was a pediatrician and had tutored Nora’s husband. Helena had gotten the sense, even at that disastrous lunch, that her mother made Nora feel uninteresting and slow.

  “Well, now,” Brian Sewald said, holding Helena’s mother at arm’s length. His eyes traveled slowly from her highlighted wig to her sharp collarbone to her thin chest. “How’s Nancy-Nancy?” He waited for her to say something, but she just raised the corner of her mouth in an unhappy half smile. After a moment he blinked hard and turned away.

  “You’re tall,” Margot said, looking up at Brian.

  “That’s what I’m told,” he said. He scruffed Margot’s bangs and tweaked the ear of her Mickey Mouse hat. Then he turned to Helena. “Look at you,” he said, reaching forward to squeeze her arm. “You’ve become a real lady.” She smiled to be polite, then stepped away, crossing her arms over her small new breasts.

  “Your sons have grown too,” Helena’s mother said brightly.

  Nora Sewald leaned close to Helena’s mother. “Don’t tell them they look big,” she whispered. “They’re trying to lose weight for wrestling.” She held Helena’s mother’s shoulders in her hands and stood behind her. “This is Daddy’s friend,” she said slowly to the boys. “Louis, Jeremy, you remember her, don’t you? They remember you, Nancy. They’re shy.”

  The twins nodded to Helena’s mother, then looked at Margot and Helena. Helena pulled her sister in front of her. “This is Margot,” she said. “She wasn’t born last time we saw you.”

  The twins muttered a greeting.

  “Which one’s who?” Margot said.

  “Louis is the one with the faggy earring,” one of them said. He pointed to a tiny silver hoop in his brother’s left earlobe. Louis mock-punched Jeremy in the gut.

  “Nice touch, huh?” Brian came over to lay a hand on Louis’s shoulder. “I look away for one minute, and they’re putting holes in themselves.” Brian shook his head, and Louis glanced at Helena. She smiled a little and rolled her eyes.

  A ponytailed Disney photographer approached them and asked if they would like to have their picture taken with the beautifully landscaped Mickey Mouse head behind them. The Mickey Mouse head, she told them, consisted of forty different kinds of vegetation from all over the world, including three varieties of fern that were now extinct in the rain forests but preserved here by the careful hands of Disney landscapers.

  “We want a picture, don’t we?” Brian Sewald said to Helena’s mother.

  “Maybe just the kids,” Helena’s mother said.

  “Oh, nonsense,” Nora said, and touched Nancy’s hair. “Everything looks fine.” Nora’s own hair hung glossy and dark, chin length, and her skin shone pink with health. She linked arms with Helena’s mother and faced the photographer.

  The Sewald boys stood behind Nora, and Helena’s mother held Margot’s hand. Helena found herself standing between Brian Sewald and her mother.

  “On three, now,” the photographer said, stepping back with the camera ready.

  Just th
en Helena’s mother began to cough, wet and deep in her chest. She bent at the waist and held her hand in front of her mouth, her shoulders jerking. After a few moments she gasped for breath and wiped her eyes.

  The photographer lowered her camera and waited. Helena’s mother’s eyes were still tearing, and her face had flushed red. She coughed again and shook the hair out of her face, one hand open on her chest. Shuddering a little, she began to breathe slowly and deeply. Helena fished a tissue from her pocket and wiped the circles of mascara from beneath her mother’s eyes.

  “Don’t fuss with that,” her mother said, straightening her shirt.

  “Is she all right?” Nora asked. “Are you all right, hon?”

  “I’m fine,” Helena’s mother said, but her eyes flicked nervously toward Brian before she looked at the photographer and smiled.

  While the adults took Margot to see the Enchanted Tiki Birds, Jeremy and Louis and Helena went to buy ice cream. The twins walked ahead of Helena, their hands thrust deep into the pockets of their baggy shorts. Jeremy had a biker-style wallet, and Louis kept trying to pull its chain. When he caught the chain, his brother would slap him on the head. After one particularly hard slap, Louis dropped back to walk with Helena.

  “We heard your mom’s sick,” he said.

  Jeremy glared back at Louis. “Shut up, fuckhead.”

  “What?” Louis said.

  “You have to ignore Louis,” Jeremy told Helena. “He’s completely stoned. Both of us, actually. We smoked up before we came here.”

  “That’s why we need ice cream,” Louis explained.

  “It’s okay,” Helena said. It was better they talk about it. She got so tired of her school friends trying to act as if everything was normal when it clearly wasn’t. People noticed wherever they went. At the grocery store, strangers helped Helena and her mother load bags into the car; on the monorail that morning, a healthy Swedish woman stood so Helena’s mother could sit down.

  “I hear people take pot pills for cancer,” Louis said. “Pure lab cannabis.”

  “My mom doesn’t take that,” Helena said.

  “How long has she been sick?” Louis asked.

  “A long time. Five years.”

  “Five years? Shit, I couldn’t stand it. I’d shoot myself.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” Jeremy said. “You wouldn’t have the balls.”

  “I would too.”

  “No you wouldn’t.”

  They paused at an ice-cream cart and bought chocolate-covered bananas. The vendor, a Hispanic girl with icy orange lipstick, smiled at Jeremy and Louis and gave them extra napkins. They took their bananas over to a wooden bench and peeled off the wrappers.

  “Our parents went to prom together,” Jeremy said.

  Helena bit off the tip of her banana and crunched the chocolate. “I know,” she said. “We have a picture of them. Your dad wore a stupid frilly tux.”

  Louis gave Helena a tilted smile, his teeth full of chocolate. “Hey, do you think he got any action?” he asked. “You think they did the old bing-bang?”

  “Jesus, Louis,” Jeremy said. “Can you shut the fuck up?”

  Helena wanted to smack the chocolate-covered banana right out of Louis’s hand and grind it into the asphalt with her heel. Not that she hadn’t wondered whether her mother and Brian had ever done it. Most recently she’d thought of it when the Sewalds’ holiday photo had arrived—there was something about the way her mother had stared at that picture, and at Brian in particular. She knew her mother and Brian had gone steady all summer after the prom. They’d probably had plenty of opportunities.

  One night, not long before this vacation, Helena dug up her mother’s pink high school album. Her mother had pasted various scraps onto the black pages: a pair of lace gloves, the gilt-edged prom invitation, and, nestled between sheets of green tissue, the three gardenias Brian had given her. In the prom photograph she and Brian stood in a gazebo, rain slanting through the palms behind them. Her mother wore an airy-looking bell of white chiffon, and the gardenias were nestled into her dark curls. She was pinning Brian’s boutonniere onto his lapel. His eyes were upturned and his mouth was open, as if he were laughing, and he had one hand on her mother’s waist. “He looks like he’s going to bite her,” Margot had said when Helena showed her the picture.

  Helena imagined the two of them later that night in Brian’s car, her mother’s dress damp with rain, the gardenias wilted in her hair. Did he try to kiss her, to touch her legs, her breasts? Helena’s friend Fisher, a tall thin boy who built remote-control airplanes, had French-kissed her in his garage once and touched her through her shirt. His fingers had looked clean but smelled like plane-engine oil, and they’d felt warm on her breasts. Afterward his eyes were wet, grateful.

  Helena finished her banana and held the sticky wrapper between her thumb and forefinger. “I think we should get back,” she said. “They’ll be done soon.”

  Louis took the wrapper from Helena and flicked it into a bush. “You know we live in Dade County,” he said. “That’s where Jim Morrison whipped his dick out and got arrested for it.” He cackled loudly.

  Helena felt a surprising twinge of anger. “We live in Detroit, where Joe Louis is from,” she said. “Joe Louis kicks Jim Morrison’s skinny ass.”

  “Whoa,” Jeremy said. “Watch out.”

  Louis weighed his half-eaten banana in his hand for a moment, then drew his arm back and lofted it far over the bushes. After a moment they heard a dull metallic thud.

  “Goodbye to that,” he said.

  Margot emerged from the Tiki Room holding a souvenir plush parrot and singing the Tiki Room song: All the birds sing words and the flowers bloom, in the Tiki-Tiki-Tiki-Tiki-Tiki Room. She ran to Helena and the twins, who were waiting near the exit.

  “There was a volcano out the window,” she said, “but it was a fake.” She sniffed loudly. “I’m allergic to this air. I need my nose spray.”

  Nora and Brian came out arm in arm, and Helena’s mother followed.

  “I thought it was fun,” Nora Sewald said. “I liked those birds.”

  “They didn’t seem as real as they have other times,” Helena’s mother said. “You could hear their beaks clicking.” She brushed a few strands of hair out of her eyes and placed one hand against the side of her head, steadying her wig.

  They all walked together toward a fountain near the center of the park. Parents and children sat all around it, resting from the heat. The fountain itself was an amazing thing. Pink stone fish spat water toward a plaster Cinderella, skirting her in a dome of spray. Nora held Brian’s hand and looked up at Cinderella, and the twins grinned into the sun, wholesome-looking in their stoned daze. Helena’s mother, eyes dark underneath, cheeks sharp-boned, rummaged in her bag for Margot’s nasal inhaler. Margot sniffed miserably and rubbed a hand under her nose. Watching them, Brian dropped his wife’s hand and sat down on the fountain’s edge.

  Nora sat next to her husband and unfolded a map of all the different “lands.” Their thighs met and she rested a hand on his knee. Helena’s mother moved closer to the Sewalds, leaning over Brian’s shoulder to look at the map.

  “Tomorrowland’s closest,” she said. As she pointed, her arm grazed Brian’s shoulder.

  “Sounds fine to me,” Brian said. He kept his eyes down and his hands folded in his lap.

  “We should do whatever you’re up for, Nancy,” Nora said.

  Helena’s mother looked at the map again. “We could start with the Carousel of Progress and move on to the Astro Orbiter, and then maybe have lunch.”

  Nora raised her eyebrows. “That’s a lot of walking.”

  “Not really,” Helena’s mother said. “It’s all close together.”

  “You and I could drink a lemonade while Brian takes the kids on the rides.”

  “If I want to rest, I’ll rest,” Helena’s mother said. Helena could hear the strain in her voice. She was glad when Brian glanced sharply at Nora and said, “Nancy knows wha
t she can and can’t do.”

  Nora looked like she meant to say something more, but then she slapped her knees and stood. She went over to her sons, who were tossing an empty Coke can back and forth between them. “What are you doing?” she said. “That’s trash.”

  Louis gave a thin cold laugh that made Helena wince. When he set the can down on the fountain’s edge, three dazed bees crawled from its mouth and danced in circles, their wings gummed with soda.

  Nora’s eyes grew wide. “Get away from that! God!”

  “Hey,” Brian said. “Who wants to go to Tomorrowland?”

  “Me,” said Margot.

  “Well, let’s not stand around all day here, then.” He offered a hand to Helena’s mother, and she got to her feet, lifting her yellow straw bag onto her shoulder. Nora didn’t wait for them. She took her sons’ arms and began to walk, her steps clipped and quick between the twins’ loping strides.

  Helena saw how difficult it was for her mother to keep up as they walked from ride to ride. The lines of her mouth were drawn tight, and one arm was folded against her chest as if to protect her scars. The things cancer had taken from her, it seemed, were beginning to compete in size and mass with what remained. Some time ago Helena had constructed a small collage of her mother as the invisible woman—the woman-becoming-more-and-more-invisible—one outline of her on the right side, filled with everything she had now, and another outline on the left side, with everything she’d lost: colored wool for hair, shellacked hazelnuts for breasts, millet lymph nodes, glass-bead ovaries, pumpkin-seed uterus. This was what dying meant, Helena thought—everything that had been you, leaving. Late that night, Maya had come into the studio to find Helena just finishing, gluing the last seeds to the blue paper. She wheeled over to the table to look at Helena’s work. “What’s happening there?” she asked.

  It would be a series, Helena explained, the woman on the left finally claiming the one on the right, outline and all, until in place of her mother there was blank blue paper.