Sweet Water (14 page)

T
he most difficult thing to explain is that the little things take over. Life keeps going along at the same pace, minute following minute like soldiers in a parade. When the phone rang and it was Horace in the hospital in Athens—I don’t know why they called him first; some nurse must have known him—I didn’t suspect anything. In the split second after he told me, I could hear a laugh track on TV. I hung up the phone and ran a finger along the mantelpiece in the living room and looked at my finger and saw dust, and then I ran my hand flat along the mantel and wiped it on my blouse. I looked at the sofa and the pillows were misshapen, so I plumped them up, punching each one lightly and then patting it down. I went around the room straightening pictures on the wall, moving the throw rugs with my feet. Horace was on his way to get me, since I didn’t know how to drive. All I had to do was wait. I went into the bathroom and got the Comet and a sponge from under the sink and poured the blue lumpy powder over everything: the faucet, the taps, the toilet bowl, making the water like a swimming pool. I ran a little water and scrubbed the sink with the sponge until the powder became a paste that I smeared all over the basin and the fixtures. I got down on my knees and scrubbed the inside of the tub in diminishing circles until the porcelain had a toothpaste-blue design. I rubbed the chrome spout until it shone. Then I ran water in the sink and splashed it all over, cutting through the Comet, wiping the grit down the drain. When I had finished I caught a glimpse of myself in the
mirror above the sink, but I didn’t look at my face; I concentrated on the streaks on the mirror.

When Horace came he found me down on the bathroom floor, scouring the tile with a toothbrush. His eyes were wild and he looked stricken. His wiry hair was coiled in uncombed clumps.

“Ma! What are you doing?” He took my elbow and hauled me up to my feet.

I didn’t want to go with him. All I wanted to do was clean. I wanted to tear the house apart and put it back together; I had an urge to wax the floor under the piano and polish every bit of silver. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was get in that car and drive fifteen miles to the hospital to see the broken corpse of my daughter and the helpless terror on Amory’s face. I just didn’t want to see it.

“You’ve got to come, Ma,” said Horace. “Kathy and Elaine and Larry are all over there already.” He wiped a smudge of powder off my face.

“But there’s nothing I can do,” I said.

“Daddy needs you.”

“No, he doesn’t.”

Horace just stood there for a moment, stumped. I remember thinking at the time that if I was raising him again there were a lot of things I’d do differently.

“We’re all in shock, Ma,” he said finally. “It’s natural.”

“None of this is natural,” I snapped.

He bundled me into the car, and I was silent. I could see that his heart was torn up, probably as much if not more for his daddy as for his sister, whom he’d never quite understood.

I was thinking then that evil breeds evil, that you tell yourself you can get away with a little indiscretion and then another and you’re in control of what you’re doing, and then you find yourself lying a little bit, changing the hours here and there, playing with time. But time keeps marching along, and you can’t mess with it, and after a while you start to trip up because the pace never slows and you’ve pretended that it
did, or that it sped up when really it was tick-tick-tick, the same full hour at the same time it was yesterday. And so you lie and you lie and you get out of sync and pretty soon you’re marching to your own beat, which has no connection to anyone else’s, and then all those people you were trying to convince they were crazy come to realize that you’re the crazy one, you’re off beat. And you can’t get back in line in time. It keeps on going, and it crushes you.

I wanted to explain all this to Horace, but he was gripping the steering wheel like he thought it might try to escape, and his bottom lip was white where he was chewing it. There was a spot of blood on the corner where he had bitten through.

“Just forget about the house,” he was saying. “Nobody’s going to notice the damn house. There’s a lot more important things to think about.”

In truth I had already forgotten about it. Now I was noticing that the inside of Horace’s truck was a pigsty, and if he was going to be driving people around, it could use a good vacuuming. But I kept my mouth shut. I didn’t want to push him too far.

S
tanding naked after a shower in the robin’s-egg blue bathroom, at the old mirrored cabinet that had been painted with the wall so many times it had become the wall, I inspected the lines on my face.

I’m growing old, I thought, and there’s no one around to see it.

Aside from running errands, I hadn’t been out since I left the bar five nights before. Now it was Thursday, and I was getting ready for work. It was strange to be so alone.

Living on my own in that big old house, I was starting to feel trapped in a world within myself I couldn’t share with anyone. Some days I sang or hummed just to hear the sound of a human voice. Blue barked. But mostly I’d begun listening to voices that came from somewhere inside, voices I heard in New York only in the dead of night, voices that whispered,
What are you doing? Where are you going? Why are you here?

My routines and expectations had already adjusted to the new pace of my life. Time, which seemed so elusive in New York, now presented itself to me in great stretches. I was aimless; I dawdled; I slept late. I finished
Jane Eyre,
took baths, started a journal in a spiral notebook. I read the local paper, which was delivered to the box at the end of the drive, and I was even beginning to recognize names. I no longer felt compelled to know what was going on in the rest of the world; current events seemed entirely abstract, as removed from my life as if they were happening on Mars.

In the mornings I worked around the house, painting, stripping
furniture, cutting the grass with the hand mower I’d found in the basement. By early afternoon I’d usually be in the dining room with all the windows open, working into the evening. The loneliest time, I found, was around five o’clock, when silvery shadows fell across chairs, the potter’s wheel, the glass-fronted cabinet. I was haunted by the shadows; they seemed restless, expectant. They seemed to me like ghosts.

Standing at the mirror in the bathroom, I found a crease beneath my left eye—not a wrinkle, a crease. I grimaced and the crease rose; I pulled the skin taut over my cheekbone and it disappeared. Around my mouth I spied another and traced it with my finger. One on my forehead, narrow and straight across, I could only see in a certain light.

In some ways I liked how I was aging: how bones were becoming visible on my upper chest, like an excavation, how my fingers and wrists had thinned, how my collarbone joined an uneven ridge of shoulders, the serious line under my eye. I turned around and looked back into the mirror. I arched and hugged myself, stroking my waist as if my hands were someone else’s. My palms glided up my sides and touched a weighty curve of breast, spread fingers over erect nipples. Sunlight hit my shoulder, and I turned again and touched my collarbone, running a fingernail down to the hollow between my breasts, down to my abdomen and up again, over my chin, into my mouth, startling myself.

After the last exam before winter break in my junior year of college, I had found myself drinking gin and tonic—mostly gin—in the attic apartment of a friend from class. The gin helped me see everything with incredible clarity: a narrow slice of lime clinging to ice cubes in my glass; orange light hanging in ridges in an opaque cold gray sky outside the window, like a Japanese lantern; the footprints my shoes made when I came in out of the snow, slowly disappearing on the rug by the door.

We’d first met because people told us we looked so much alike. But before that night I had never even imagined kissing her, or feeling
her soft stomach beneath her sweater, or unbuckling the belt of her jeans. We touched each other like mirror images, and it was breathtakingly easy. “This is so normal it’s weird,” she whispered, stroking my face.

As I studied my reflection I thought about her hands, about the familiarity of her touch, the sureness of her fingers. Sometimes, living by myself, I felt like two people—one acting, the other responding. Sometimes I felt connected to the land and the passing of time the way I felt connected to my friend that night: hills into valleys, shapeless nights into formless days.

I dried off and took my floral cotton robe from the hook behind the bathroom door. I’d have to hurry; it was getting late. Bending over, I towel-dried my hair, combing my fingers through it, shaking out the tangles. When I rose, my face in the mirror was flushed and clean. At a distance it was hard to see any lines at all.

    I parked the station wagon on the road in front of her house. When I pushed the doorbell I could hear it ringing inside as if the house were a hollow cave. I rang three times before she answered.

“Hello, Clyde,” I said, summoning a smile as she opened the screen. I held out a loaf of bread, still warm. “I brought you this.”

“Hello, Cassandra.” Her voice was soft. She took the bread from me and squeezed it lightly. “Fresh, how nice. You made it?” She turned to go inside, and I held the door, hesitating. “Come in, come in,” she said.

“Thank you.” I followed her into the kitchen. “I’m sorry I haven’t called, I’ve been so busy trying to get the house put together—and I haven’t even thanked you for all the stuff you sent over with Alice, all those beans and tomatoes, they’re gorgeous. But anyway, I was thinking about you and I wondered—well, I just wanted to check in and find out how you’re doing.”

“Oh, same as always, just fine.” She set the bread on the counter. “I canned those vegetables last month.”

“You know, I’d love to learn how to can,” I said.

She raised her eyebrows. “My goodness, Cassandra, you’re turning into quite a country girl, aren’t you?”

I laughed awkwardly. “Um, did I tell you I’ve started working a few nights a week? It’s a place Alice told me about, the Blue Moon.”

She shrugged. “I’ve never heard of it.”

“It’s a restaurant.” I found myself nervous, skittish, flailing against her reticence like a moth trapped in a jar. “Well, actually, it’s—it’s a bar. Terrific people. And pretty good money. Not great, but reasonable.”

“Well. That’s good, I guess.” She clasped her hands. “Can I get you anything? Soda? Some lemonade?”

“Oh, no, I—I don’t want to interrupt whatever you’re doing.”

She took a jar of lemonade out of the refrigerator and poured me a glass.

“Well, okay, I’ll have some lemonade. That’d be nice,” I said as she handed it to me. “Clyde, is there—I was wondering, I’m on my way into town, is there anything I can do for you while I’m there?”

“I don’t believe so.”

“You’re—you’ve got everything you need?”

“Yes. Cassandra, listen—”

I gulped the lemonade and put the glass on the table.

“I’m glad you stopped by. I was meaning to call you.”

She moved to the sink. The counter stood between us like a wall. She looked at the linoleum for a moment, and then she said, “How are you doing in that house?”

“I like it very much, it’s—” I had to restrain myself from gushing. “It must have been a good house to raise a family in.”

Her mouth formed a brittle smile. “I suppose it needs a deal of work.”

“Not much, not really,” I said. “It’s such a sturdy old house. Solid.”

“Yes.” Shadows of words paced around me, advancing, retreating. She stood very still. I watched her hands as they worried over objects on the counter. “That bread smells nice, Cassandra,” she said finally. “You really made it?”

I nodded.

“That’s very industrious of you. You must have a lot of time on your hands.”

“I guess I do,” I said, drawing a deep breath. “Are you sure you don’t need anything from town?”

“No, I’m just fine. I’ve got some time on my hands myself.”

“Really? Well, I was wondering if you might want to come over and visit one of these days. I’d love to repay you for—”

“You don’t need to repay me.”

“I didn’t mean that. What I meant was that I’d like to have you over—if you’d like to come.”

“Oh.” She seemed unsettled. “That’s very kind of you, Cassandra, but I don’t think so. No, I don’t think so,” she repeated, shaking her head.

When I left the house I felt like I was leaving worlds untouched. There was a weight of unsaid words between us. As I got in my car and drove away, I had the peculiar sense of being trapped in someone else’s story, a story I didn’t understand and could participate in only as a bystander, a passerby.

S
o he left her the house and he left her the land and he knew exactly what he was doing. He hid that box and didn’t say a word about it for twenty-four years, not a word to anyone. He knew that if he said anything all of it would come out: that he’d been messing around with Bryce all that time, that while the men he employed were toiling away in the mill he was meeting their wives for car rides, for picnics, for romance in his office with the blinds shut. They would not have been pleased to hear it. But he knew that there’s not much you can do to punish a dead man, so he hid the box and waited.

And now she’s living down there on that land that used to be mine. I raised three children in the rooms I’ve heard she fills with junk from garage sales, I sliced and pared and baked in the room she covers with newspaper and knickknacks. Ellen was conceived and born in the bed Cassandra calls her own. She was born crying a tinny cry, six pounds two ounces, red and wrinkled and dark-haired like an Oriental. There were complications, and we had to rush to the hospital. The bloodstains on the mattress never came out. I nursed her and bathed her and changed her in that bedroom with the drafty windows on two sides and the soft pine floors.

Nobody’s lived in that house for years, and with good reason. It always had too many windows, and now half of them are broken, screens rusted and torn. The floor creaks, the plumbing drips. I guess she thinks it’s romantic, I don’t know. Young people think they want to hold on to the past, but the past they’re holding on to is nothing like the
life we lived. The house was always needing work, and the land was wild. In winter the chill came in through the windows and under the doors, and the children got sick. The yard was mud when it wasn’t ice, and I worried that the gas stove in the kitchen would kill us all in our sleep, by fumes or explosion.

I have no romantic notions of the past. If I could have lived then the way I do now, I’d have done it in a minute. It wasn’t the past to us, it was just the best life we knew how to make.

But now she comes down here digging in the past like it holds some kind of answer, playing the part he gambled she’d take. She’s there by herself in the house on the hill, exploring the attic and the cellar, shoveling up the earth to plant flowers, searching under the porch for where her dog took her shoe, replacing rotten floorboards.

In her own sweet time she’s getting closer and closer. In her own sweet time she’s going to find it.