Goodnight, Beautiful Women, page 2
“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said, and she kissed his ear.
“That’s OK. I know you,” Joni said. “I have always known you, I will always know you.”
“But something’s gotten into me. Something in this house has turned. It’s toxic. I don’t know why I feel this way.”
Joni put her hand to his chest, over his port-wine stain, a pink flush that had been there since birth. She thought about the white star inside her belly button, plus all the stories she had told him, vignettes to equal her life, to take him back to the very beginning. How the caul stayed intact during her mother’s labor, and she was born inside the watery sack. Joni had told him all her stories worth telling. She had been known.
That night she looked out the window to see Jack standing at the edge of the quarry, skipping their white dish set, a wedding present from her sister, across the water. The plates glowed as they skimmed the surface, giant flat stones. Her sister splurged for the whole set, the salad plates, dessert plates, china teacups that felt too frail in Joni’s hands. Off it went.
The next day she had driven to the grocery store and walked up and down the home wares aisle. She bought plastic utensils, paper plates, and Dixie cups; a candle for the kitchen that was supposed to smell like apple pie, and one for the bedroom that smelled like fresh laundry, how homes were supposed to smell. When she got back there was a gap next to the stove. Their refrigerator was gone. In its place, an outline of dust balls and two words from the magnetic poetry that had been up on its door for years. She knew the sentence-long poems by heart. Tall teacher who dug winter, Jack had written for her. Slow world, color came in pools of green. Four o’clock and white morning glow. Fat balloon cat. Wet dream. She’s sad and crackly.
Joni got in bed. Outside Jack was dragging a sculpture toward the quarry on a blanket. The glass-smooth granite caught the light where he’d worn it down. She did nothing to stop him. She watched him haul sculptures from his studio to the quarry, dumping all of his work into the water, until the sun went down.
“Something here is making me sick,” he told her when he came inside, and Joni pretended she was sleeping. When he cried noiselessly, covering his head with the pillow that smelled like him, she did not hold him. And when she fell asleep, she dreamed that Jack turned into a creature that lived in the water. He broke the surface, came at her across the lawn, and she took a pistol from behind her back. Her bullets made his body dance.
When she’d started awake, the empty space beside her vibrated with Jack’s absence, present but invisible, like unstirred phosphorescence. She couldn’t look because she knew he was outside waiting for her, watching from the other side of the window screen. Watching her run a hand through her hair, rub the inside corners of her eyes, check the numbers on the clock. She heard his splashing steps into the water, knew without looking about the wake he left through the yellow surface scum. Then she did look out the window, to see what she had known she would, the last of his head before he dipped below.
Perhaps they could get the divers back to search for him again. They could find his body. Joni could grieve under the comforter and preheat the oven for meals for one. She’d sit up in bed to eat. The quarry would be covered with wet yellow leaves. The quarry would freeze over. She would plant green beans in the spring, and eat them topped with salt, pepper, and thick pats of butter.
Maybe the poison was already inside him the night they met, at a friend’s wedding. Jack stole a case of pink champagne from the caterer’s truck. He was filled with the tiny bubbles by the time he found her in the kitchen. She was sitting on the counter, surrounded by buckets of lobster shells, eating a lime. She told him her feet were bruised from so much dancing, and he got down on his knees and slipped off one grass-stained shoe, and then the other. She made him drink some milk. They danced in the kitchen. His hand crushed the Baby’s Breath tucked behind her ear. She moved him inside her hips and they kissed in the coat closet against the crash of wire hangers. In the bed she pushed his briefs down with her feet. He undressed her for hours. He just couldn’t get his fingers around the buttons.
Maybe whatever it was that took Jack was already there, incubating.
Joni gets out of bed. It’s three in the morning. She pulls the sheet up neatly to the pillow, tucks it back. Opens the door. No one is out there waiting for her. The granite is cold on her bare feet. She lifts the nightgown over her head and leaves it folded on the rock. Tests the water with her toe. As she wades out over the shallow outcropping, the stone underfoot grows slick with algae. She is up to her hips now, and she crouches down, letting her feet teeter on the ledge before pushing off into deep water. She is a bad swimmer, not sure and straight or with a sense of breath, but moving with just enough effort to stay afloat, and she swims out, trying to ignore the plunge beneath her. The house is glowing in her periphery, and she sees a pale woman inside, the flash of red hair moving through the bedroom. A blur that’s gone when she stares. The fear is tangible, pulsating, radiant on her skin.
Deep down, the soft world of the quarry stirs. The only noise underwater is the churning of Joni’s legs, keeping her afloat. And then she is on her back, a bright cutout against the surface: strong arms and legs, full hips, long neck, hair tangled and weightless. The water’s many hands swim up and hold her, pressing her body to the sky.
Treelaw
At O’Connor’s store today everyone, even the Coffee Brandy crowd in the back room, especially them, seemed to know Dad was dead. In a place like Treelaw, you can’t keep anything to yourself. Dollie O’Connor leaned over the counter to make her loud, phlegmy apologies, then peered down at my kid to say, “I hope you have it better than your folks, little lady. Don’t you throw out your life like Granddad did.” Kimmy’s three and just learning it’s polite to shake hands, so she stuck out her hand, red from the Fla-Vor-Ice we shared in the car.
“Isn’t she cunning?” said Dollie. She said it like the words were something sour to spit out. Kimmy hid her face in my skirt, her breath hot against my leg. I was thinking all babies are mouth breathers. I was thinking too that Dollie is a cunt. Everyone knows about the six-inch scar she gave her ex-boyfriend when she pushed him into scrap metal, and that there’s only one bruised peach for sale because she spent the store money on pills. It’s no secret Dollie snuck by a neighbor’s trailer when her boyfriend was sleeping around and killed all the neighbor’s chickens and a pig.
But I didn’t feel the need to air this out in the middle of the store. Dollie totaled me up and I was short, so instead of making any kind of scene I put Kimmy’s whoopie pie back, thinking a skinny kid’s got enough problems, then changed my mind and had Dollie strike the charge for Drill’s Roulette Riches scratch card. The register went haywire and spit out a long, white slip, and that’s when the bell above the door dinged and Mandy walked in. I knew her before she looked up—dirty blonde curls, circles under her eyes just like Grace, long legs. When she spotted me I looked quickly away so we had a chance to pretend we didn’t recognize each other. I could feel heat move from my cheeks to my ears and my right eye starting to wander like it did when I lied.
“Hey,” she said softly, and I thought, This is it, she’ll call me out in front of Dollie and the line crowding behind me, in front of Kimmy who has her mouth full of whoopie pie. But Mandy just put her arms around me.
“I’m so sorry about your dad,” she said against my neck.
There wasn’t a thing I could think that would be good enough to say.
“How’s life?” I said. “How’s your mom?”
“Oh, you know, school. Mom’s OK. Not great.” She pulled back to look at me, and she looked at me long and hard.
Balancing my bag on one arm, I grabbed Kimmy’s sticky hand. “Hey, meet my kid. Kimmy, say hi to Mandy.” She stared at Mandy from behind my legs and didn’t say anything or smile.
“She looks just like you,” Mandy said.
A part of me was happy because Kimmy was mine and loved me and would forget Mandy as soon as we got out of the store.
“Well, I’ll let you two go,” Mandy said. “You’re my family. You’re both my family, no matter what.”
“Bye,” said Kimmy.
I told her she was a good, polite girl. She clung to my legs as we backed out the door, so synchronized we didn’t trip.
As soon as we were outside Kimmy started crying, but she didn’t seem to know why.
I once saw a birth on television where the mom labored in a bath, and all her friends and her mom were around her. The baby was born underwater, calm, and it floated and held its breath right off. That’s how I pictured Kimmy being born, Grace and Mandy with me, even though of course it couldn’t be like that.
Kimmy was born with just Drill at the hospital. He spent the labor flipping through this Toyota engine manual to see if he couldn’t fix up that free car he’d got down in Augusta, and wouldn’t the baby like a new car. The drugs made my vision blurry, and when they put her on my chest I couldn’t focus on her face.
How I was conceived, Dad always said, was my mom got caught smuggling pills from Canada. He told me she quit her birth control soon after so the judge might pity the pregnant lady. I wanted to know her better than just this story and used to steal her photo from Dad’s drawer. It was black and white. In it she was leaning back against a tree. She wore a cropped shirt that showed her belly button. She was stabbed in prison, and she died from the wound. I wondered where on her body, and why. In the picture she had nice teeth.
Dad said he took the picture, but I don’t believe it, the way she’s looking at the camera. My guess is she hated him. My guess is she was looking at me, even if she didn’t know it. Like she knew I’d spend all night lying with my dog on the carpet that Dad’s shuffling had worn down to something hard and slippery, looking back at her.
Dad was a wormer his whole life. He was also a sternman, and between seasons lay in bed, a bowl of thawed clams on his belly for snacking, another bowl on his legs for the shells.
We lived together on the street Dad grew up on, the same street where three of his sisters lived. Two of them wouldn’t talk to Dad, and the aunt that stayed friendly told me he only saved me from foster care for the welfare checks, but anyways he stopped getting money when I was nine and didn’t send me back into care, so that couldn’t have been the whole truth. That’s how it’s always been in this town, people saying shitty things to try and turn normal people into monsters. Dad only touched me twice. Both times he was gentle and looked bewildered, like my body wasn’t the one he expected, but it was too late, too embarrassing for us both, to turn back.
The first time I ever talked to Grace she didn’t ask why I was calling so late on a school night, just said, “Hold on, sweetie,” and woke Mandy up. Mandy and me did show choir at school together. I felt like I had to say something big so I told her Dad punched out all the windows in the boathouse, which he had done, just not that night, but the field was still shiny with glass so the story seemed real enough.
Before Grace and Mandy pulled into Dad’s drive they cut their headlights. I sprinted to the car and Mandy and I sank low in the backseat and shrieked, full of the thrill of the kidnapping. We peeked at the bonfire going in Fulton’s lot, sparks hissing off a burning couch, and I recognized my cousin swaying topless by the fire.
The streets in Alma were quiet and moonlit. Their house stood all by itself at the end of a paved drive, with lawns on either side. The path to their doorstep was lined with lamps that ran off stored-up sunshine. Behind the house waves crashed on the beach. In Treelaw I’d have to walk two miles to the wharf if I wanted the water. The rooms were bright with lamps and vases of cut flowers and furniture that looked like it should be roped off, like it wasn’t safe to touch. Their two white cats rubbed against my sneakers. My bed was tucked under the slanted ceiling in Mandy’s bedroom. It was like sleeping in a boat’s cabin, and I could stay as long as I needed. Bronze and gold animal figurines lined the windowsill that looked out on the ocean. I rearranged them.
I remember Grace giving her name to the Alma pool attendant, then saying “and my daughters,” each time me thinking they’d catch her in the lie. I stood behind Mandy, with her pale hair and bikini same as Grace, in my gym shorts and T-shirt, trying to hide my face.
Mandy and I dedicated love songs over the radio to boys from school. My voice, when it played through the speakers, sounded like a stranger’s—husky and shy and older. I wanted to block my ears. We practiced slow dancing with each other.
At night, with Grace, we often walked down the wide, empty road to the lamplight at the end of the pier and watched the water for bloodworms, which Mandy and Grace thought were eels, and I didn’t tell them the difference. My dad called the worms dimes, because they sold at ten cents each, barely worth him bending down for. I pictured the worms as dimes, silver and quick, hard to tell apart from the light on the water.
It didn’t take two trips home to empty out my half of the dresser and pack my deodorant and eye makeup and slippers into a garbage bag. Dad had piled beaver hides all over my bed. He was saving up to sew himself a blanket. The beavers still had their heads.
“I’m going to find myself a nice, plump blonde once I get that blanket made,” he said. “Cuddle up for the winter.” He eyed Grace, who waited in the car with her engine idling. “She’d do,” he said. “She want to come inside?” I tried to laugh with him. I thought maybe he would ask me to stay, but he didn’t. He joked he was eating better, without someone else to feed.
When there was nothing left of mine at home I made up excuses for Grace to drive me back: a diary that didn’t exist, a favorite pillow. I found him curled up on the floor. Down the front of his shirt was a white, watery stain.
“There she is,” he said, covering the stain with his hand. “Whoops.”
He wrapped three fried pike in a napkin for me to share with Grace and Mandy. I thought of Grace eating around the eyes and tail fins and threw the fish into the brush, hiding the warm, oily napkin in my pocket.
Scotty Snotty brought lice back to school, and Mandy was the next person to get them, because he put his hat on her head during recess. We had to take baths together so Grace could shampoo our hair with medicine and set the timer for how long they took to die. After we were toweled off, but before the bathwater drained, we snuck back to look at the dead lice floating on top of the water. It was horrible but we had to see. The shampoo and combing left our hair shiny and soft, but then a week later she’d catch us scratching. Grace worked her way through all the shampoo brands. Eventually she said maybe it was me bringing them back each time I paid a visit to my dad.
I was homesick every day. But I didn’t want to go back home, to the bathroom mirror covered in toothpaste splatter and the woods behind the house full of camouflaged traps and bleached bones, and the middle-of-the-night infomercials—the “Set It and Forget It” chicken rotisserie and the knife that cut through a can like it was butter.
I stole Nicorette from Dad’s bedroom and let Mandy pop four pieces into her mouth, thinking she was chewing regular gum. It made her throw up.
Why do I do what I do? When I was little I’d wake up in the night and pee in the wicker wastebasket in the living room. I did this for months. The house was thick with the smell, and Dad blamed it on the dog. I knew he was thinking of getting rid of our dog, and I did it again, and he got rid of her. I really don’t know why, I just did it because.
I began calling my dad at bedtime and begging him to come for me. When he finally came, Mandy and I could hear his truck’s muffler from a mile away. The cats sprung from their chairs to hide under the bed. I met him in the dark drive with my garbage bag of clothes. Grace had kept my clothes neatly stacked in Mandy’s dresser, smelling of ocean mist detergent.
I scrubbed the dishes piled high in Dad’s sink, but rings still stained the coffee mugs, and the pot always held the black outline of rice grains where the rice had burned. When I called Mandy, Grace answered. “This is too hard,” she said. “We love you, but you know it’s been too hard.” I hung up and went over to my cousin’s and did whippits until my lips were numb.
All I can remember of the poem I slipped under Mandy’s locker door is that it started “If there is a thing called love” and talked about her being like my sister. Mandy never wrote me back, but she wasn’t mean about it.
Instead of school, I snaked the sink drain, wiped the black fur off the top of the ceiling-fan blades, cleaned the boathouse of old bait, and hosed down the cement where blood from field dressing deer had stained. I liked the sound of dirt sucking into the vacuum. I found pills stashed in a Folgers can beneath Dad’s bed, and a rusted tackle box full of hooks, and with them another picture of Mom. She had her back to the camera, but I knew it was her from her long hair, as thick and wavy as a pelt. I tucked the picture into my pillowcase so I could feel its scalloped edge on my cheek.
It turned out Drill Kane was looking for a helper. My dad warned me about Drill—said as a teenager he stole lobsters from another man’s trap, and when they’d fished together Drill hadn’t tied the bait barrels down snug, and choppy waves sent them sliding overboard. He had my dad’s type of weatherworn face but was fifteen years younger, with blond curls that got him picked on.
At the wharf Drill looked me over, circling, squeezing my biceps. He was shorter than me but he strutted like a bantam. The numbers 207 were tattooed across his throat, and I touched the area code with my fingertips. “That hurt?” I asked, but he just swallowed against my fingers. Drill dressed me in his old oil gear and it fit fine, but his boots and gloves made me look six years old.
“You’ll do,” Drill said. He bought me a new pair of boots that were still too big, so if I got caught on a trap it would drag the boot underwater instead of me. She was a beauty, Drill bragged, twenty-eight feet long, fiberglass, a John Deere engine he put in himself. Her name was the Theresa, after Drill’s scabby-faced ex-girlfriend, but these days she’s called the Kimberly Rose.
