Sweet Water (13 page)

“Did you want this house, Alice?”

She opened her eyes and blinked. “I don’t know,” she said. “It sure would’ve made things easier for me and Eric.”

Her honesty surprised me. I didn’t know how to respond.

After a moment she smiled wryly. “Anyway, it wouldn’t have worked out. He’d have left it to my mother, not me, and she’d have blackmailed me for it somehow.”

“But Alice, if I had known—”

“No,” she said firmly. “I don’t want the house, Cassie.”

I climbed to my feet, brushing off the seat of my shorts. “But—”

“Now, let’s just drop it, all right? Period, the end.” She poked at a large splinter of wood on the doorframe. “Besides, the place is falling apart.”

“It’s true,” I said. “Just making it livable is costing me a fortune.”

“I was wondering about that. If you don’t mind my asking, how can you afford it?”

“I had a little money saved, but it’s running out pretty fast, a lot faster than I thought it would. I guess I didn’t add it all up. I’ve dealt with more plumbers and electricians and exterminators this week than I’ve seen in my whole life.”

“You could sell off some of the land.”

“I know, but I don’t want to do that. Not yet. I want to hang on to it for a while.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“Well, maybe I’ll look for a part-time job, fifteen or twenty hours a week.”

“Doing what?”

“It doesn’t matter. I haven’t thought about it much. Just something to make a little money.”

“Hmm.” Alice put a finger to her chin. “Have you ever wait-ressed?”

“Not really.”

“Well, that’s okay. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to serve drinks.” She snapped her fingers. “I know just the place. Nice folks, not too smarmy, good tips. You mind working at night?”

“No.”

“The Blue Moon. I heard one of their waitresses left her husband and ran off to California.” She grinned. “With a woman.”

We went out to the front porch. The puppy came bounding around the corner, and Alice reached down and picked him up. “Little boy Blue,” she said, holding him like a baby. He sniffed her face and started to lick it. “He’s got this lonely look in his eyes.”

I took him from her and held him against my chest. “Are you blue, Blue?”

Alice walked down the front steps to her car. “Wish me luck tonight. I’m trying to decide whether to wear black or white—whaddaya think?”

“You’re pretty tan. I’d say white.”

“Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.”

“If you need somebody to take care of Eric—”

She flapped her hand. “He’s got a regular baby-sitter. Thanks anyway. Of course, if it turns out Mother’s paying her to spy on me, I might have to give you a call.” She got in the car and started it. “Call your grandmother one of these days,” she yelled above the noise. She waved goodbye, turned the car around, and disappeared down the long drive to the road.

    On the slab of wood in front of me I shaped a human form out of red clay. The form was about a foot high, with arms the size of legs and legs slender, joints like elbows. The head rested in the belly. Long toes extended from the feet like fingers. The face was long and thin, and as I worked I kept checking the mirror propped in front of me: the face I was shaping was my own. I narrowed the nose with my index fingers, carving a cheekbone into the curve of a hip.

Out the dining room window I saw the field stretching in front of me like a child’s game, a coated cardboard landscape. I imagined it bedecked with life-size plastic shapes: black cows, a tall green tree with foliage like pom-poms, a yellow stile, a brick-red barn. Wiping my hands on a rag, I pulled out a pad and a piece of charcoal to
sketch the slant of the hills, the jagged line where trees met sky, a black dip of pond, stooped lone trees scattered in the foreground. I imagined the clay figure in front of me five times the size it was now, sitting out there in the field. Drawing it to scale, I placed it in the lap of a hill and put X’s where other forms would go.

I thought of the sculpture park I’d seen last summer at the Villa Orsini, the Stravinsky Fountain near the Pompidou Center in Paris, Niki de Saint-Phalle’s Tarot Garden in Tuscany, all filled with huge, fantastic creations. At the time the pieces had seemed unreasonably large, even grotesque, more strange than inspiring. But now, thinking back, I was struck by their claim to the land they populated and their hold on my imagination.

With a hunk of clay I started on a head, as large as my head. I touched the bones in my face—the jaw, the hollow of a cheek, the line of my brow—smearing my face with red clay, like war paint. I traced the curve of my lips in the mirror and then repeated the motion on the soft, formless clay. I sat on the stool in the waning light of afternoon, working with my hands until it was too dark to see.

S
he was my oldest girl, my charm. The other two were his; I don’t know where they came from, but they never had much to do with me. I named her Ellen Iris because irises were in bloom when she was born and he brought me some in the hospital—the last time, I believe, he ever brought me flowers. She was sickly and they didn’t know if she’d make it, but I knew. I knew.

I had her to myself for fifteen months before Elaine came along. By then Ellen was walking and talking. She had thick dark hair and narrow fingers. She could always tell when I was feeling bad; she’d come and pat me on the face when I was upset, and when Elaine was crying she’d waddle over to her crib and stroke her hand through the slats.

Elaine has been good to me over the years, she and Horace both. They’re good children. They didn’t move too far away; they invite me to dinner often enough so I don’t feel neglected; they call me, sometimes twice a day. And they never ask questions I might not want to answer. But they know, as they always knew, that to get Ellen back I would have done anything. I would have given up the both of them.

S
itting at a round wooden table at a midsize bar on the outskirts of town, I filled in my social security number on a job application. The place was dark and virtually deserted and smelled faintly of ammonia. Chairs were piled up around me with their legs in the air, like a little forest. Behind the bar, a man with large forearms and a well-trimmed mustache was polishing glasses and hanging them up on a rack. He was wearing a T-shirt that said
BETTER WET
and whistling a country-western tune I was startled to find I recognized.

Experience.
I thought I should put something down, so I listed Grasshopper’s. Dad had never let me work there—“This is your home,” he always said. “I don’t want my kid to feel she’s got nowhere to go just to live”—but I had certainly seen the business firsthand. Besides, I reasoned, checking out-of-state references probably wasn’t a priority at the Blue Moon.

“Where you from?” said the bartender.

I looked up. For a moment I didn’t know what to say. “Just outside of town.”

“Related to the Clyde family, by any chance?”

I nodded. I was getting used to being recognized; in Sweetwater, my face was my ID.

“But you’re not from around here,” he said matter-of-factly.

“No. New York.”

“That’s what I’d’ve guessed.” He started putting away a case of beer steins.

“Why?”

“Your accent, for one thing,” he said. “Weird shoes. No makeup. Expensive haircut, no perm.”

“You’re very observant.”

He held a stein up to the light. “Cracked.” He tossed it in the trash. “You know, it’s a funny thing—you kind of look like your cousin.”

“Which one?”

“Well, that’s what’s funny about it, ‘cause from what I understand, he’s adopted.”

“Oh, you mean Troy Burns? I haven’t met him.”

“How long you been here?”

“Almost a week.”

“Well, that explains it,” he said. “Do you know Alice?”

“Yeah, she’s the one who told me about this place. She heard you might need a waitress.”

“Maybe.” He was putting steins on pegs behind his head. “You know, Troy used to have a band that played here all the time. They were real good, so they went off to Atlanta. He’s living down there with some other relative of yours—”

“Ralph.”

“Yeah, that’s him. I got to say Troy’s braver than I am, living with a guy who’s queer as a three-dollar bill. Braver or dumber, I don’t know which. People here don’t take too kindly to the swishy types. If he wasn’t Troy’s cousin I’m sure someone would’ve kicked the shit out of him a long time ago. He’s better off in the city.”

While we were talking a tall, slim black woman came in. She was wearing a green sarong and a tank top, her thick hair pulled back with a green ribbon. “Ryan, why are you always so willing to act like a redneck at the slightest provocation?” she said, hands on hips, and turned to me. “Hi. Elizabeth Gibbons.”

“It’s Troy’s cousin, Liz,” Ryan said. “She wants a job.”

“Cassie Simon,” I said, getting up.

She put out her hand to stop me. “No need to rise. I’m not the Queen of England.”

“I’m looking for something part-time,” I said, sinking back into the chair. “I wondered if you might have any openings.”

“Maybe for a new bartender.” She glared at Ryan, who flipped a towel at her. She laughed. “Sometimes I think about firing him, but he makes a damn good drink. Where you from?”

“New Yawk,” Ryan said.

“Boston, originally. I moved to New York a few years ago.”

“I used to live in Boston. My ex still does. Where’d you live?”

I described my father’s restaurant on the crowded street in Brookline, and she said she thought she’d eaten there. She took a chair off one of the tables and sat down with me, and after a while Ryan brought over two beers and a bowl of pretzels. We stayed there talking until another bartender arrived and the staff started getting ready for happy hour.

“Why don’t you just give it a try tonight and see how things work around here?” she said as they set up the tables around us. “Saturday nights can get pretty rowdy. You might as well know what you’re in for.”

    By the end of the evening I was weaving through the crowd like a pro, dodging drunks and memorizing orders for tables of twelve. Smoke hung in the air like a fog, glasses clinked, eyes glittered in the dark. Laughter rose and evaporated and rose again, mixing with the smells of beer and sweat and tobacco and perfume. Up in front, people danced on a packed floor to the thumping rhythm of the band.

In the course of my shift I settled a quarrel between a jealous man and someone trying to pick up his girlfriend, I was propositioned by a guy wearing a wedding ring who told me I looked like Rosanna Arquette, and I made seventy-eight dollars in tips. By two in the morning, when the bar closed its door, I was exhausted. I sat at a
long table with Liz, Ryan, two other bartenders, and three waitresses, drinking beer and swapping stories. The smoke in the room had settled low, like mist hugging a riverbank.

“Congratulations,” said Liz. “I think you passed Waitressing in a Hick Bar 101 with flying colors.”

“Happy graduation,” Ryan said, raising his glass. “Not a bad place, for a redneck town, is it?”

“Not a bad place at all,” I said.

    On the way home that night, driving through the darkness, I suddenly thought about my grandfather. I saw him driving reckless and fast, my mother beside him, over a narrow back road like the one I was on. I took my foot off the accelerator and slowed down. I could imagine my mother’s white knuckles, the look of terror on her face, the stink of whiskey on his breath. I pulled to the side of the road, turned off the engine, and sat there with my eyes closed, leaning back against the seat.

Once, in college, up to my elbows in potter’s clay, working a revolving wheel with one kicking foot, I found myself sculpting my mother’s face in a simple earthenware bowl. In confusion, I formed the clay into a funneled mask that collapsed under its own weight, spilling like memory over the edges of the spinning surface.

I used to believe that my memories of her were abstract and benign, distant, cool, indistinct as a city at dawn seen from a neighboring hill. I used to think that I couldn’t miss what I’d never known—that I couldn’t mourn what I didn’t remember. But now, when I listened closely, I could hear my mother’s voice in the wind in the grasses, the patter of rain on soggy ground. When I concentrated I could smell her skin in the rich wet clay turned to mud, the sweet forsythia in the meadow. She was everywhere. All I had to do was let her in.

    In the morning, rising sore and late after my first night at the bar, I searched for the small electric potter’s wheel I’d brought from New
York. I found it in a cardboard box along with clay-flaked wooden modeling tools, a needle, a fettling knife, and several trimming tools wrapped in plastic like artifacts. I washed them in the kitchen sink, remembering the size and shape and purpose of each instrument as I scrubbed it clean. Later, forgetting that stores would be closed on a Sunday, I went out to buy clay. Driving back to the house past banks of rich red Tennessee earth, I decided to look for it on my property. I went down to the pond and scooped mud into buckets. I filled the buckets with water and carried them back to the house, Blue trotting along beside me. When the mud had melted into soup I poured it through an old window screen twice, to sift out rocks and pebbles, and set it out to dry.

On Monday I tested a slab of clay in the oven to see what temperature it fired to. I put the rest, a lump the size of a small TV, in a garbage bag. I called a professional potter named Elise, someone Liz had told me about, who said she’d be willing to let me use her kiln and recommended a clay company where I could get twenty-five-pound bags for eight dollars. She also gave me a tip about a used kickwheel, the kind with a seat and a foot pump, on sale for two hundred dollars.

“It’s a great deal,” she said. “They usually cost at least five hundred. The guy who owns it bought it as a surprise for his wife—right before she left him and moved to California. Needless to say, he wants to get rid of it.”

“This woman didn’t by any chance work at the Blue Moon, did she?”

“As a matter of fact, she did. Do you know her?”

“No, but I think I might have been hired to fill her spot.”

“Ohhh,” she said. “What a coincidence. You must have some kind of karmic connection. That settles it, you’ve got to have this wheel.”

In the afternoon I took off on a long run with Blue down the dirt drive, exploring old roads and paths cut into the meadows and woods around the house. We ran through the stiff, slanting grass, past gnarled and distorted tree trunks, up sloping hills, around
rough edges of exposed earth where the land had slid out from under itself. Standing at the top of the highest ridge, I could see only one other house in the distance.

With Blue at my side, I stretched out on my back in the grass, watching clouds in a panoramic sky bleaching into each other, filling gaps of blue, mottling and fading in and out of form. Lying there, I realized why I was no longer interested in spending weeks on a single shape, perfecting nuance, seeking understatement. I would have to be bold to compete with the broad curves of this landscape.