How to Breathe Underwater

by Julie Orringer

  The first time I heard his name, Carney and I were sitting in her room rehearsing her saints. I remember some of them still—Saint Agnes, the patron saint of girls; Anthony the Abbot, saint of pets; Jude, the saint of hopeless cases— those mysterious holy men and women to whom you could turn with achingly specific needs, an opportunity Judaism did not afford me. I’d been taught to believe in a God who was everywhere and nowhere, a still small voice. That God seemed at once too grand and insubstantial to understand my problems. My parents had separated, and it looked like they weren’t getting back together; soon afterward my mother had exiled us to Iberville Parish, where she had taken a job teaching high school drama. I was nine years old then, toward the end of third grade, and Carney was the same age. This must have been a few weeks before her Communion. We knelt on cushions in Carney’s pink-wallpapered room, near her little shrine: prayer cards and images of the Virgin and rosary beads and a white Bible with Carney’s name engraved in gold, set up on a carved footstool in the corner. Downstairs, her mother was making her a white tea-length organza dress with a satin sash. We could hear the thrum of the sewing machine and the groan of floorboards as Carney’s mother moved from machine to cutting table. She was tall and queenly, probably the fattest woman I’d ever known. She smelled of lilac soap and wore tiny pastel house slippers and spoke with a deep Iberville Parish accent. Even when she wasn’t home I could feel her presence in every room of the house.

  “My godparents gave me a Saint Veronica prayer card,” Carney said. “Look.” She handed me a gilt-edged card that showed Jesus in rags, carrying the cross on his shoulder. A beautiful woman next to him held a cloth printed with a ghostly image of his face. Saint Veronica was Carney’s saint. In a few days she’d take Veronica as her middle name.

  “You should wear your hair like hers,” I said. “Your mother could make two braids and join them in back.”

  “I’m not supposed to look like her,” Carney said, “I’m supposed to be like her.”

  “How?”

  “I’m supposed to be selfless and kind and full of compassion.” She frowned, leaning the prayer card against a white candle. “She’s an okay saint. I wish I’d gotten a martyr, though.”

  “I like the name Veronica,” I said.

  “I know, but still,” Carney said. “A martyr would have been so perfect.”

  Carney was the kind of girl who craved drama—a girl, in other words, after my own heart. She made up games in which we got to be people like Marie Antoinette or Joan of Arc, people who died in flames or battle or terrible pain. In other games we were mistreated orphans who became suddenly, gloriously rich and exacted revenge upon our oppressors. Girls at school respected Carney and wanted to be chosen for her games. People who’d angered her might come to school and find themselves shunned, invisible to everyone but the teacher. I considered myself lucky to be her best friend. She seemed a little awed by the fact that I’d come from New Orleans, a city she’d heard to be full of sinners and mansions and fancy restaurants. I pretended bored familiarity with all of the above, and faux-reluctantly devised games in which we went to Mardi Gras balls and dined at Galatoire’s. Lately, though, Carney hadn’t been interested in playing those kinds of games. She’d been sunk in the serious business of Communion preparation, a business that had required her to learn such things as the order of the Sacraments, the Stations of the Cross, the Holy Year and Fast Days, the Hail Mary and the Our Father.

  Watching her, I was weak with jealousy. I wanted godparents and prayer cards and a shrine in my room. I wanted to carry a candle and wear a wreath. I wanted a white organza dress with a satin sash, and I wanted a new name, the name of an ancient and virtuous woman who’d protect me. I felt in need of protection. My mother and I didn’t even go to synagogue anymore, because there was no synagogue in Iberville Parish. We must have been the only Jews within a fifty-mile radius.

  I heard the sewing machine go silent downstairs, and the familiar creak and groan as Carney’s mother crossed the living room. Her pink house slippers clicked as she made her way up the stairs. By the time she came through the doorway of Carney’s room she was out of breath. The Communion dress was draped over one arm, and in her hand she held a box of pins.

  “Time to pin your hem,” she said to Carney. “Out of those clothes.”

  Turning her back to me, Carney shucked off her gingham shirt and jeans. Her mother lifted the Communion dress over her head and buttoned the ten pearlized buttons. When Carney’s mother knelt to pin the hem, her hair fell forward to reveal the creamy sweep of her neck. I loved watching her work. Her nails were lacquered pink, and her hair was done in hot-rollered curls that hung over her shoulders like ripe plums. Her deep, rocking accent always lulled me into an admiring trance. My own mother spoke with a sharp accent from New York. I’d heard her students making fun of her in Pearson’s Dairy, after school.

  “Your Aunt Marian called this morning,” Carney’s mother said, pulling a length of hem between her fingers. “I never thought she’d come, but she says she will. She’s bringing Dale, too, and you’d better be cordial.”

  “My cousin Dale?” Carney said. “The love child?”

  “Your cousin Dale,” Carney’s mother said, her mouth going small and stern. “Your blood cousin, whom you will respect.”

  “I’ll respect him, but I won’t play with him,” Carney said.

  Carney’s mother sat back on her heels. “I’ll not tolerate that tone,” she said.

  “It’s my Communion party,” Carney said. “I shouldn’t have to play with him if I don’t want to.”

  Her mother took her by the shoulders and looked square into her eyes. “That is quite enough,” she said, her voice low and full of warning. “Now, I can finish this dress, or you can take Communion in your underdrawers.”

  Carney dropped her chin, chastened, but I experienced a frisson of private pleasure. In the presence of Carney’s mother, I was often rewarded with antique-sounding words like underdrawers.

  “And I’ll not tolerate talk about Aunt Marian either,” she said. “I suppose she’s not the best Catholic, but may the Lord strike me down before I judge her. I can’t say what I would have done in her position.” She released Carney’s shoulders, her forehead creased, as if considering what she would have done. I glanced at Carney for a clue as to what this was all about, but she shook her head and gave me a look that suggested she’d explain later.

  Carney’s mother finished pinning the hem and stepped back to check her work. Stiff little organza sleeves rose from Carney’s shoulders like wings. The bell of her skirt floated around her legs, and the white satin sash trailed its streamers to below her knees. She looked ready to ascend to heaven. Her mother picked up a brush from the dresser and smoothed Carney’s hair.

  “You’ll pass for a good child, anyway,” she said. “I suppose that’s the best we can do for now.”

  “She knows all her saints,” I said, wanting her mother to believe I wasn’t a bad influence. I’d gotten the sense that she didn’t quite approve of the fact that I was Jewish. It was important to remain in her good graces, though. I’d been coming to Carney’s every day after school, an arrangement that seemed precarious.

  Carney’s mother gave me a skeptical look. “All her saints?”

  “All of them,” I said. “Backwards and forwards.”

  “Well, that’s something, at least,” she said, but her tone was less than reassuring. She untied Carney’s sash and unbuttoned the pearlized buttons. Carney stepped out of the dress and stood on the rug in her underdrawers. Her mother draped the dress over her arm and gathered her pins, but at the door frame she turned back and glanced around the room—at the dark rolltop desk, the carved bureau, the tall windows. She seemed to be remembering something. I knew this had been Aunt Marian’s room, the room she’d had when she and Carney’s mother lived here as little girls. Carney had shown me where she’d written her name in crayon on the wall behind the bureau: Marian Beatrice Fortunot. I
wondered if Carney’s mother would say something more about her sister, but she just turned and rustled out into the hall, muttering something to herself. We heard the click of her pink house slippers all the way down the stairs.

  “So Dale’s a love child,” I said, once the thrum of the sewing machine had started up again. I tried to sound as if I knew what I was talking about, though I had only the vaguest idea of what a love child might be.

  Carney finished buttoning her gingham blouse. She leaned close to me and whispered, “That’s right. He’s an actual dictionary-definition bastard. And half black. His daddy got my Aunt Marian in trouble and then went off to college up north.”

  “Your cousin’s black?” I said. It hardly seemed possible.

  “Black as night.”

  “Not if he’s only half black.”

  “I don’t know, actually,” she admitted. “I’ve never met him. My grandfather didn’t want him around. He didn’t even want to see Aunt Marian. They hated each other, him and her. He tried to make her go to a Home, where she’d have her baby and then someone would adopt it. But she ran off to Biloxi and had it on her own. My grandfather just wanted to kill her. He wouldn’t let her back in the house. He’s dead now, though. He died in December. My mother said he had a drinking man’s liver.”

  “Why didn’t your mom ever take you to visit Dale?” I asked. “Wouldn’t she want you to meet him?”

  “I don’t think she approves of him either. No one ever talks about it.”

  “Well, they’ll talk about it now, with him coming and all.”

  Carney narrowed her eyes. “I don’t see why he has to come,” she said. “I don’t want everyone looking at him and talking about him the whole time. It’s my party.”

  “They’ll still pay attention to you,” I said, though I could see where they might be distracted. White people in Iberville Parish, particularly Carney’s parents and their friends, had old-fashioned ideas about black people, ideas that seemed ignorant and provincial to me. My own parents had black professor friends from Manhattan, men with names like Ishaq and Lumumba, women who wore African head wraps and wrote poetry. Some of these people had come from New York to give guest lectures in my father’s history classes at the university. But here in Iberville Parish, I’d heard white men call grown-up black men “boy.” The black kids at our school didn’t play with the white kids, and there were no black teachers at all. Close by, there were actual plantations that slaves had built with their own hands. And in town there was a restaurant with two separate entrance doors, one on either side of its brick façade. The words WHITE and COLORED were painted over now, but you could still see the red letters like ghosts beneath the paint. That restaurant was much closer to our house than Pearson’s, but we never went there for dinner. When I walked by and saw people eating there I couldn’t help feeling as if they must hate my mother and me as well. We were Jewish, not black, but we were outsiders all the same. They found little ways to remind us. At school last week we’d had to go around and tell how our families were celebrating Easter, and when we got to me the teacher had said, “Oh, y’all don’t even celebrate Easter, do you?” The other kids stared. I was relieved to be able to say I was celebrating it at Carney’s house, an answer that seemed to satisfy everyone.

  The rest of that afternoon, as Carney and I finished up the saints and then played out back with her little brother and sisters, I kept thinking about Dale. For Carney’s sake I wanted to be indignant about his daring to show up at her Communion, but for Dale’s sake I was worried about how the guests would act. What I felt most, though, was a thrilling sense of dread. It was the way I used to feel in New Orleans when a hurricane warning had been issued. After we’d taped the windows and brought the garden furniture inside, I’d sit in my room and look out at the darkening street, willing the storm to come.

  Lamb of God,

  You take away the sins of the world.

  Have mercy, have mercy on us.

  That was the song I was singing that evening as my mother and I walked from the high school to Pearson’s for dinner. I didn’t realize I was singing until my mother stopped on a street corner and looked at me as if goldfish were dropping from my mouth.

  “What’s that song?” she said.

  “What song?”

  “The one you were just singing.”

  “ ‘Lamb of God,’ ” I said, and my face went hot. I’d been singing a song about Christ. Carney had taught me the song because it was what everyone would sing while she and the other kids received Communion. It had seemed all right to learn it, because it didn’t actually contain the word Jesus or Christ, but I’d never meant to sing it in front of my mother. She was giving me a hard look, her arms crossed over her chest.

  “You’re not turning Catholic on me now, are you?” she said.

  “No,” I said, indignant.

  But she seemed thoughtful as we walked on toward Pearson’s, and I worried again that I’d somehow jeopardized my afternoons with Carney. I didn’t want to go back to doing my homework in the auditorium while my mother directed drama practice. Though the high school girls fascinated me, with their eye shadow and their bone-straight hair and their whispered bathroom gossip, I hated to see them snickering at my mother. It wasn’t just the way she spoke. She wore crocheted berets and batik dresses and talked with her hands too much. When we’d lived in New Orleans it had never occurred to me to be embarrassed of her, but here in Iberville Parish I saw how people looked at her, and it made me want us both to disappear. What made it worse was that she seemed not to notice or care. Years would pass before I could admire her for that.

  At Pearson’s neither of us felt much like eating. It was Passover, so we couldn’t even order the things we’d usually have. My mother had cottage cheese on a lettuce leaf, and I had a baked potato. I was thinking about the Communion and about Dale. I suppose my mother was thinking about my father. I still got to visit him twice a month, at his small brick house on Park Street in Old Metairie. Sometimes we cooked and sometimes we went to the Audubon Zoo and other times we just sat by the river, watching the barges haul their cargo toward the delta. My mother never saw him at all now, though. On the first night of Passover we’d always had a family seder, just the three of us at home, even when my mother and father could hardly bear to be in the same room together. This year my mother and I had a tiny seder together in the room we called the breakfast nook. We had both pretended to have a good time, but afterward I went to my room and lay in the dark and my mother took a long bath, the only thing that made her feel better when she was depressed. Now she ate tiny bites of cottage cheese and talked about Twelfth Night, the play she was directing. She’d wanted to do Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, but the superintendent of schools had asked her if she was crazy.

  “They keep doing their lines with English accents,” she said, shaking pepper onto her cottage cheese. “ ‘Foh-tune fohbid my outside have not chahm’d her.’ I’ve told them fifty times it sounds absurd, but they won’t stop doing it.”

  “It is an English play,” I said.

  “Whose side are you on, anyway?” my mother said. She twisted in the booth, looking for the waitress. The waitress was standing by the jukebox, talking to a tall boy in a red cap. They both laughed. My mother sighed and turned back to the table. She pushed at her cottage cheese with a fork. I watched her, trying to think of something I could say to distract her.

  “Carney has a cousin who’s a love child,” I said.

  “Oh?” My mother raised an eyebrow. “A love child, eh?”

  “His dad was black,” I said. “I don’t think his parents ever got married.”

  “Oh,” my mother said. “And what do you make of that?”

  “I don’t know. I feel bad for him, I guess. Carney’s supposed to meet him for the first time this weekend. He and his mom are coming to the Communion.”

  “You feel bad for him?” my mother said. “Do you think he needs your pity?”

  �
�I don’t feel bad for him because he’s black,” I said.

  “Is he black?” she said. “Why not white, if he has one parent of each color?”

  I knew my mother didn’t expect an answer. I looked at the salt shaker with its tiny holes, the napkin dispenser with its waxy napkins.

  “It’s his mother you should feel bad for,” my mother said. “Imagine what she must have gone through, raising a child all by herself.”

  I heard the accusation in her tone, the reminder that she too was now raising a child by herself. I couldn’t understand what had happened, why she’d gotten mad at me. I’d just been trying to make conversation. There was more I’d wanted to say, too, questions I wanted to ask, but now we weren’t talking. It made me angry at all three of them, my mother and Aunt Marian and Dale.

  We finished our dinner in silence, and my mother paid the bill. As we walked home I was thinking how strange it was that some people were Catholics and others were Jews, that some were prejudiced and others not. I wondered how it could be that people could love God and hate one another. I thought myself highly original for recognizing that paradox, and I felt proud of my own indignation. I knew the word hypocrisy, could almost feel it, salty and crackling, on my tongue. When we got home my mother took a bath. I lay in my room with the light off, feeling like a traveler in a strange and unforgiving land.

  That Easter Sunday, for the first and only time in my life, I went to church with my mother. The church was St. John the Evangelist, and it was Carney’s First Communion day. Outside, my mother explained that we were there as guests, that we should act just as if we were at synagogue. If I had questions, she said, I should make a mental list and ask her later. We should be quiet and respect the prayers of others. I nodded, half listening, anxious to get inside that mysterious building and see what would happen at the Communion. I was so excited I’d almost forgotten about Dale.