Open Water (2 page)

Holly Temple watched Rennie hopscotch in Willis’s crew socks. Rennie’s silhouette bounced across the lace panels from one window to the next. Holly couldn’t figure it out. She decided that her windows faced someone’s sickroom. A nurse was dancing before her charge, perhaps indulging her patient’s final request for the evening.

Holly had just moved into one side of an oceanfront duplex. The duplex was really a single-story cottage halved by some extra Sheetrock and carpentry. The house next door was a weather-beaten two-story with a third-floor garret, part Greek Revival and part Victorian. The turn-of-the-century house had seven-foot-high windows dressed with lace curtains; tattered antique cloth hung in loose tails. Large velvet sofas, their furred backs against the windows, looked bleached by many seasons. Big wavy privet and boxwood, wild and unmanicured, cinched the ground floor. Its airy front porch looked over the water, same as Holly’s, but it had more height, and Holly suspected it had the better view.

She had not yet unpacked her things. She still felt anesthetized from having been forced to start over. The duplex looked west, over First Beach. The water was smooth until it hit the shore, where it churned and spread
out like sugar lace. Holly stepped up to the window and let her breath cloud the pane. She moved back and watched the mist crawl off the glass. She rubbed the window with the cuff of her Angora sweater, leaving a few blue hairs sticking to the glass.

Her divorce had just come through.

Holly was pleased to have the divorce. She wasn’t happy about the charge of arson.

One week after her husband, Jensen, had left her, Holly went over to his new apartment. He invited her inside, then he decided he didn’t want to talk. He went to his job and left her standing in his tidy new living room. The telephone started ringing. Holly saw the red light bloom on his answering machine and she waited to hear the caller. It was Sarojini, her husband’s new Hindu love connection. Sarojini, again. Her husband had met his Eastern item when she was buying up three Carvel franchises in Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Jensen took the exotic visitor around for site inspections. Holly remembered that she herself had left several embarrassing messages for Jensen on the machine. She had begged him to reconsider. She had even held the telephone receiver to the Panasonic while it played an old seventies classic, “You Are the Magnet, I Am Steel.”

Holly jerked the answering machine loose from the telephone jack in the middle of Sarojini’s lilting message. She walked outside her husband’s apartment and shoved the answering machine into the trunk of her Toyota. She picked up an empty coffee can from the backseat. She looked for new russet coils of dog shit, but the smouldering coals in a neighbor’s backyard grill caught her eye. She scooped them up and went upstairs to the strange apartment. She deposited the red nuggets, fiery eggs of charcoal
dead center on the quilted surface of her husband’s double bed. For half a day she watched the bed smoldering. She called her husband at his Carvel Ice Cream franchise.

“Just one thing,” she said.

“And what’s that?”

“Guess what I’m doing? I’m burning the bed.”

“Holly, I’m real busy. I’m taking a delivery. I don’t need this—”

“You better get your ass off ice and drive right over here. It’s smoking.”

He didn’t believe her.

“It’s starting to smell funny. I bet I’m not supposed to breathe these fumes,” she told him.

If he had believed her, she might have doused the bedding, but she waited. She dialed her mother’s number in New Jersey where her mother had moved with her new husband. The telephone kept ringing. Holly wanted someone to acknowledge her gravest moment: she was moving from a stale, familiar loneliness into a
fresh
state of loneliness; its virgin landscape was electrifying. It didn’t require a witness, after all. Holly sat on the edge of the mattress and watched the sheet’s floral pattern curl in ashy petals, then the ticking charred and the fumes increased. She fanned the blaze to hurry it along. She started to cough and opened the window.

The fire department arrived in time to shove the mattress onto the fire escape, where it burst into flames, fully involved. In minutes the bed was consumed, the batting disappeared leaving only the meticulously knotted springs. Holly stared at the grid of wire and imagined their love-making sifting through, like sand and soul.

Before the police took her down to the station to record her explanation, Holly picked up some familiar kitchen utensils Jensen had lifted from her. She recognized the salt
and pepper shakers, two halves of a ceramic house which when shoved together made a complete cottage, the chimney perforated with tiny holes to deliver the spices. She shoved the shakers into her purse.

At the station house, even the matron wouldn’t take her side of it; she told Holly that “female hysteria,” “PMS,” or “whatever she wanted to call it,” wasn’t an excuse for arson. The senior officer explained the severity of her actions. Because Holly had set fire to a furnished apartment in an
occupied
dwelling, Holly could be charged with arson in the first degree. Holly set the blaze but did not leave the scene; this might have meaning in court.

“What meaning?” Holly said.

“That detail could go either way,” the officer told her.

The officer wanted to know about her husband’s insurance. “Jewish Lightning. Italian Lightning. In East Providence it’s Lisbon Lightning. The what-have-you. It’s an insurance scam.”

“I’ve heard of that, but we don’t pay insurance,” Holly told him. “They don’t sell insurance for people like Jensen and me—”

“Sure they do. It’s common to have insurance for personal property. You don’t have to be a homeowner. People can insure their possessions.”

“I’m saying,” Holly said, “they don’t insure everything. Do they?” She rolled her gaze over the abrupt shelf of her breast and down the tight valley of her lap; she crossed her legs and rotated her white ankle. Her small foot, in its braided leather pump, was an irresistible attraction and the officers waited for her to drop her foot and cross her ankles again. The matron filled in the lines, telling the sergeant, “She gets married. Her husband turns out to be a textbook case. She goes berserk.”

“Textbook?” He had to run it through his mind. There were a million different textbook cases. “Give me the example.”

“Gash hound,” the matron said.

The violence of those two words surprised Holly. Then she wasn’t surprised. “That’s right,” Holly spoke directly. “What insurance policy do they have for that?”

She wasn’t getting a lot of sympathy. They arranged the answering machine and the salt-shaker house on the table and tagged them. This was too much for Holly. She started crying.

After a short course of psychiatric evaluation ordered by the Superior Court for the County of Newport, Holly’s charge was reduced to “malicious burning.” She would face trial before a judge. Her court date would run almost concurrent with her divorce proceedings.

The
Newport Daily News
ran a story about her:
SPURNED WIFE IGNITES THE NEST
.

She still had six more months of probation. Her probation terms involved biweekly sessions with her probation officer, Dr. Kline, a psychiatric social worker. All winter, Holly had been out of work, collecting unemployment. If it weren’t for her courthouse visits, her life would have had no external structure. Holly’s regular job was during the tourist season, when she worked changeover Saturdays at Neptune’s Hide-A-Way, where she cleaned summer cottages. The tiny beach cottages were named after perennial flowers: Hollyhock, Cosmos, Zinnia, Larkspur, a string of two-room efficiencies, eleven all in all, where Holly had worked summers her whole adult life. Five months a year, she took charge of the eleven units, cleaning and setting up for the
new clients each weekend. Between changeovers, she went into the cottages to add soap and towels or to ration out complimentary packets of sugar and nondairy creamer. She found surprises. A jar of pee in the freezer. Somebody’s pregnancy test abandoned. She found a set of glossy-red car doors. It was difficult to make up the beds with car doors in them. Doors often appeared in the rooms when people stripped down their four-wheel-drive vehicles before riding the back shore.

Holly worked changeover Saturdays in almost the same way people attended to their sabbath rituals. The tiny chapel-white clapboard cottages, in a zigzag line to the sea, were like pristine grottoes which Holly kept straight. Every autumn, when she closed up the shacks and Salvatore removed the screens from the windows, storing the hand-painted flower signs, Holly felt vulnerable and melancholy. When the string was boarded up, her duties suspended, she couldn’t stop thinking of the place. She pictured the salt cellars where she had left them in pairs, the neat stacks of cobalt Fiestaware plates, the green iron stains ringing the drains in the tiny porcelain sinks, the striped Hudson Bay blankets folded at the foot of each bed. In the winter months, she felt a little lost and guilty, as if closed off from her house of worship.

Her husband, Jensen, had often stopped in at the units on changeover days, wanting something. She didn’t like to rough up the bedclothes that she had already smoothed. “I’m not doing these sheets twice because of you,” Holly told him. Neptune’s was one place where she had the authority to turn him away.

In February, her unemployment insurance ran out and Social Services located a position for Holly at a local prep school. She was hired as a kitchen assistant at Saint George’s School. When Holly started her new cooking job, she tried
to think that she had everything in control; she had her divorce and a decent employment future. She told her co-worker, Robin, “I’m single again. I lived to talk about it.”

Robin told her, “Congratulations. When it happened to me, I started singing in the shower. Are you singing yet?”

Holly couldn’t say if she felt free enough or lost enough. She knew that she would have to feel unabashedly free or perilously lost to encourage a breakthrough. When her marriage deteriorated there had been corresponding environmental signs in the apartment house where she had lived with Jensen. She watched lines of sweet ants scroll across the kitchen counter and onto the pantry doors, a disturbing message in a pulsing script. Silverfish twisted in the porcelain sink like tiny bouncing drops of mercury. Then, on the day she received the official court document, Holly came home to her building after work to find that where there had once been a grassy front lawn, there was no lawn. It was a gaping pit. A sinkhole. Heavy asphalt crusts were turned over in scalloped rows around a circular trench, a breathtaking saucer. The hole seemed to be expanding as she watched.

The sinkhole had torn open the street, gouging a wide trench in the building’s foundation. A bearing wall was tilting. Newport public works crews arranged fluorescent red sawhorses at each corner of the lot. The DOT trucks pulled to the curb and men unloaded a backhoe. Blue lights surged on and off in a pleasing split-second unison. A police officer explained to Holly that it wasn’t an actual geological sinkhole, it was a
bubble.
A water main had erupted underground and pumped enough water into the sandy loam until the street collapsed, the asphalt erupted in a jagged funnel.

Her apartment house was condemned.

Holly’s landlord came out of the building and handed
Holly a padlock still in its plastic blister. “This lock goes on the U-bolt as soon as you get your suitcase,” he told her.

“Please don’t tell me this. How long do I have to be out?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. They say it’s the whole infrastructure. It depends on insurance. When they get moving on a claim, we’ll be okay. Just pray they don’t decide that it’s an act of God. An act of God won’t bring a dime.”

“An act of God?” Holly enjoyed the sound of it. It implied an absolute finality. Perhaps the moment she had torched her love pallet it had been an act of God. Holly telephoned her friend Robin at Saint George’s and made arrangements to sleep on Robin’s foldout sofa as long as she brought her own linens. The officer permitted Holly to go inside her apartment to get some clothes and toiletries. She tugged her Wamsutta loose from the mattress and walked with an armful of bedding down the stairs and across the front courtyard. The sheet snagged on the turf and her toe caught in the elastic hem. The sheets’ private floral pattern splashed open and the city workers turned their faces in the opposite direction. She balled up the linens and shoved them into the passenger seat of her Toyota. She went back inside and took her good dresses on pink satin hangers. Why she bothered with the dresses she didn’t understand. The party dresses looked quite homely in the harsh sunlight, and the city workers rested on their forks and shovels to gawk at them. She went inside again and walked through the apartment, careful to choose her steps on the precarious flooring. Yet the floor didn’t feel any different. She knew that sometimes there were warning signs, bridges might heave and wobble before collapse, otherwise there’s no hint and structural integrity gives way all at once.