Breathing Water, page 18
“How about that one?” I said, selecting a spot in the center of the dirt lot.
“Are you sure?” He looked at me, intent.
“Positive.” I nodded.
He backed into the space so that the bed of the truck was facing the enormous white screen in the distance. He opened the door for me and helped me down out of the truck. We climbed into the back, where he had created a virtual living room with an air mattress and thick army blankets. As I got settled, plumping pillows, and pulling the black wool coat around me, Devin struggled with the microphone.
“It’s supposed to hook onto the window,” I said. I got out of the truck and rolled the window down, attaching the microphone to the inside of the truck so that the microphone faced outward. “There.”
“Perfect,” he said. He fiddled with the knob and found the station that had been lulling me to sleep every night this summer. The reception was full of static. The horns of old music filtered through the mute of this metal box.
A few cars arrived, shining their headlights across our laps. The popcorn was gone before the first movie started.
“I’m going to get some french fries,” Devin said, licking the salt from his fingers as the previews flashed blue across the screen. “Want anything?”
“Um-hum.” I nodded. “A hot dog and an Orange Crush.” I hadn’t had an Orange Crush, in the ten-ounce glass bottles they still had here, since before I could drive to the drive-in myself.
When he was gone, I stared at the screen, at the ramshackle playground beneath it. Seesaw, merry-go-round, and monkey bars. Colette and I were never allowed to play there when we were small. My mother was afraid of tetanus, as well as of the hot dogs at the snack bar.
He handed me the hot dog, smothered in onions and mustard. The first bite was like breaking skin, but the insides were hot and sweet.
“Come here,” he said, wiping roughly at my cheek. “Where’d you learn your manners, anyway?”
“You try to eat this thing without making a mess,” I said.
“No, thanks,” he said. “I’ll stick with these.” The french fries smelled hot and familiar. I wanted one.
“Can I?” I asked.
“I suppose.” He frowned playfully as I grabbed four or five of the hot french fries and stuffed them into my mouth.
“Thank you,” I said and crumpled the mustard-stained napkins into a tidy ball.
“I’ve been thinking about the book you gave me,” he said, plumping a big pillow and putting it behind his head. He leaned back and turned to look at me.
“Really?” I asked.
“It’s strange. I mean, there’s no way you could know, but in D.C., I spent every Saturday wandering around the Smithsonian. I mean all day. I’d ride the Metro in with my dad, he’d give me a dollar or something for lunch, and then he’d set me loose. And the exhibit I loved the most was the miniature exhibit. Some days that was the only place I went all day. My friends would have teased me something fierce if they’d known I was spending my weekends hanging around looking at dollhouses, so I always went by myself. Told them I had to help my dad or something.”
He shrugged. “But there was something so peaceful about it. You know, I felt so big there. Standing over all those small things . . . nothing could hurt me there, you know? I was looking down on the entire world. Little streetlamps and windows, doorways too small to fit your fist through. I felt like God there.” He looked straight ahead at the movie.
I nodded.
“That’s why I make the boxes, I think. I mean, I’ve tried to paint, sculpt. All that stuff you go through to find what it is you do best. But I keep coming back to them. They take me back, you know? Give me that Saturday feeling of a dollar in my pocket and the whole world at my feet. In my hands.”
His hands were like dark birds in his lap.
“I do that too,” I said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I’ll read the same books twenty times looking for that too. Books let you do that, you know what I mean? You can go back to the same place over and over. Maybe the first time you read a book you were lying in a hammock in the spring. But you can pick up that book in the middle of December on a bus to San Francisco and you’ll be back there again. It’s like making your own déjà vu.”
He nodded. “I guess that’s why I do a lot of things I do. Even building things, working on houses. I do it because I remember the way pine smelled the first time I took a saw to a board, the feel of a hammer in my hand.”
“Is that why you come to Gormlaith?” I asked. I could not figure out why he would want to return here again and again. People here can be unforgiving, cruel to strangers like Devin.
“Partly.” He nodded. “Every summer when I arrive I’m looking for the exact shade of blue I saw the first time. In the mornings I wake up because the birds are predictable. Because I know that when I fill the basket in the percolator with coffee that it will smell like morning. I know the way the sun will feel when I sit in the window.”
“That’s nice.” I nodded. “Having a routine. Being able to count on something.”
“But it’s more than that. By coming to Gormlaith, it’s better than just remembering. Your books, my boxes. That’s just imagination. Nostalgia. Some places you can’t ever return to except in your head. But Gormlaith will always be here. That’s nice.”
I shivered.
“Are you cold?” he asked.
“A little,” I said and his raven hand flew out and landed tentatively on my shoulder.
“The best thing though is when you find a new one.”
“A new what?” I asked. His arm had created a warm half circle around me.
“A new feeling. Like the way the sky looks from the back of a pickup truck at a drive-in movie in late summer. Like now. It’s original. And we can come back whenever we want to.”
The sound went out of the microphone during the beginning of the second movie. No static, no anything.
“There’s no sound,” I said.
“That’s okay,” he said. “Let’s make it up.”
“What do you mean?”
“My brother and I used to do this with the TV. Turn the sound down and make it up. You be that girl with the big hair. I’ll be the mean old lady.”
I looked at him.
“Here, I’ll go first. Damn, my skin itches. I wanna scratch so bad I can barely stand it. I might kill somebody if I can’t scratch myself soon. See? Now you.” He laughed.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Oh, come on, play with me,” he pleaded.
I shook my head. “Let’s just listen,” I said.
“Okay,” he said. “I can listen.” He leaned toward me, slowly, and pressed his ear against my head. “It’s so quiet I can almost hear what you’re thinking.”
“Yeh?” I asked. “What am I thinking?”
“You’re thinking about something sad,” he said.
“I am?”
“Yep.”
I looked at him and wondered how he could hear my recollections. Of Max and me and the games we played at movies, not so different at all from the one Devin played with his brother. How he could hear my thought that at one time everything was normal, that Max wasn’t always a monster. Wasn’t always so full of hate.
“And now you’re thinking about Chinese food,” he said, nodding.
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Actually, I heard your stomach growl,” he said. “What do you say? There’s that twenty-four hour place at the mall in St. Johnsbury. It’s a long drive, but I could really go for a big bucket of beef and broccoli.”
“Just a couple minutes longer?” I asked.
“Sure,” he said and pulled his pipe out of his pocket.
The smoke swirled around me in my grandfather’s coat and up into the night sky. There was something new and something old here. Longing for something gone and the anticipation of something I had never felt, intertwined. Silent lovers on the screen intertwined, breasts and thighs as large as trees. Quiet as wind.
It began to rain Sunday morning. The rain fingers tapped their secrets on the roof just above my head. The sky through filmy curtains was dark like night. I raised my hand and touched the rough wood of the ceiling over my bed and felt the tap-tapping. Insistent and certain.
All I wanted this morning was a Sunday paper from a city I didn’t live in and warm bagels with thick cream cheese. I hurried out of bed and pulled on my softest sweater and jeans. I ran a brush through my tangled hair and noticed that it was now touching the waistband of my jeans. I pulled it up and fastened it with the silver moon barrette.
The Bug sputtered and coughed and roared. I drove all the way to the bakery in Quimby, where I got a half-dozen bagels, still hot and smelling of yeast. At the Shop-N-Save I bought bright red smoked salmon and cream cheese. A thick Sunday Burlington Free Press and real cream for coffee.
The dirt road had turned into a river of mud by the time I got back to Gormlaith. There would be no trips into town again until the sun returned. I liked this feeling of being trapped. I drove past the Foresters’ and noticed that the dock was under water; the pale red of the wood surfaced and disappeared again. No one had painted it since the Foresters had lived there. I pulled into Devin’s driveway and covered my head with my sweater before I opened the door to the storm.
“Get in here,” he said. “You’ll catch your death out there!”
“Okay, Mom.” I laughed and handed him the wet paper bag with the steaming bagels inside.
I took off my sweater and sat down on his overstuffed couch. He brought a cutting board and plates and knives into the living room and cleared a place on the coffee table for breakfast. “Effie, the patron saint of Sunday mornings.” He laughed.
He brought two mugs of bitter coffee and sat down next to me on the couch.
“I didn’t know if you would be awake,” I said. It was only eight-thirty.
“I get up early usually.”
“Your studio light was on. Did I interrupt you?”
“No, I work in the afternoons, but I like to have a few hours to get to know the day.” He took a plump salt bagel from the bag and split it open with his hands. A burst of steam escaped from the bread.
“What are you working on now?” I asked, cutting into a cinnamon raisin bagel.
“Another box. I’ve been working on it all summer. I’m just having a hard time finishing it.”
“How come?”
“I dunno. Sometimes that happens. Usually I just wait it out and it comes together. I can be patient.”
“Can I see it when you’re done?” I asked, spreading cream cheese on the bagel.
“Of course,” he said, peeling a thin sliver of salmon from the package.
“Great.”
“Cheers,” he said and touched his bagel to mine.
“Cheers,” I said. The cream cheese was sweet and messy. The raisins were plump and hot inside. I swallowed the creamy coffee and I felt warm.
“I need to do something about the garden,” he said, reaching for another bagel. “I’m not quite sure what to do with all that food. It’s like a vegetable jungle out there.”
“Can you freeze it?”
“My studio in New York is about the size of a freezer. Why do you think I had to bring all this stuff with me?” he said, motioning to the rows and rows of boxes.
“Maybe Gussy can keep it for you. I think there’s a freezer in the shed. Grampa used to fish.”
“I’ll figure something out. Maybe invite all the neighborhood animals over for a feast.”
“I’ll talk to Gussy,” I said, wiping the corners of my mouth.
Devin finished his second bagel, stretched, patted his stomach. “You are going to be the death of me,” he said, “you keep feeding me like this. Damn.”
I drank the last few drops of sweet, now cold coffee and set my cup down. “Will you be back next summer?” I asked.
“Oh, yeh. This is home now. Summer home anyway. You?”
“I don’t know,” I said, my heart quickening. “I mean, I haven’t thought much about it.”
“Are you going back to Seattle?” he asked.
“No, no.” I shook my head. Seattle seemed as far away now as a dream. A liquid memory. “Too much rain.” I smirked.
Suddenly the clouds split open and an opaque blue sky emerged. Sun struggled through the murky sky and found us looking through a box of objects Devin had been collecting for his boxes. There were gum ball–machine rubber balls, Cracker Jack prizes. I pulled out a handful of jacks. “Do you play?” I asked.
“My little sister’s,” he said. “She could play all day long. I never had the patience for it.”
The cracked window of the studio let in the sun, and I shielded my eyes.
He pulled something else from the box. “Fool’s gold,” he said, gently touching the surface of the rock.
I touched the rock and squinted. “The sun is out. Let’s go outside.” I opened up the door and stepped onto the wet grass. The garden was shimmering in the new light. Every leaf was sparkling, speckled with pure shimmering light.
Devin pointed to a metal bucket accidentally left at the edge of the garden. “I was going to start picking the beans before it started raining. I hate picking beans. My mama used to send me and my brothers out to the garden when all we wanted to do was play baseball.”
“It’s full of rain,” I said.“Guess you’ll have to wait ’til it dries up.”
“Guess so,” he said.
Suddenly the sky rumbled and the clouds closed around the sun like a fist.
“Fool’s gold,” I said, motioning to the disappearing sun.
“Let’s get inside,” he said. “I have an idea.” He grabbed the bucket of rain and carried it to the door of the cabin. It sloshed and spilled.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“You’ll see.”
Inside, I sat on the couch, curling my knees under me while Devin disappeared into the garage. He came back with an armload of firewood.
“Oh, let me help,” I said. “I can make a great fire.”
“Go for it,” he said and dropped the wood on the floor.
I went through the motions, my grandfather’s hands helping me build the pyramid of twisted newspaper and kindling inside the woodstove, igniting the careful construction. And then the fire was roaring inside, and the room smelled of wood and flames.
Devin lifted the bucket of rain up and set it on top of the woodstove. Soon the water was hissing and steaming. “Don’t want it too hot,” he said, checking the water with a careful finger. “Just warm.”
I watched him watching the rain, listened to the rain tapping secrets on his roof.
“I have a present for you,” he said when the water was warm.
“Again?” I asked.
“I’ll be right back,” he said and disappeared into the closet. He came out with a thick white towel. “Here.”
I took the towel from him and looked for an explanation.
“Come with me,” he said and led me toward the door. “You have to do this outside,” he said apologetically.
I stepped out into the misty morning air and shivered.
“Now sit down on the bottom step here,” he said. He went back into the house and came out with the bucket.
“Ready?” he asked.
I nodded.
He sat on the step behind me, circling my body with his legs. And then his fingers were prying loose the silver barrette. He set it down on the step next to him and said, “Okay, now I need you to bend over at your waist.” He stood up and I put my head between my knees.
The water was warm as he poured it slowly onto my hair. I could feel it seeping into the tangles, warm on my neck and scalp. When my hair was completely wet, I could see his dark hands disappear into the ends of my hair. His fingers were tentative, cautiously working the lemon-smelling soap into the ends. Slowly, his hands moved toward my head, making quiet circles. When his fingers touched my scalp, I shivered. My eyes grew heavy, and I concentrated on the calluses of his fingers and the soapy circles they made in my hair. I could have stayed like this forever.
“Okay, this may be a little colder than before,” he said, and I felt the warm rain coming again. I opened my eyes and watched the soap swirl onto the grass beneath my feet. And his hands were working so slowly, so gently, coaxing the soap from my hair. His hands were making prisms of light, glass bubbles from my hair. Finally, when the water ran clear, turned from glass into rain again, he twisted my hair, wringing out the rain. And then the towel was enclosing me, soft and warm on my head. He wrapped the towel like a turban; when I sat up my head was heavy.
His hands were wet. He reached to adjust the towel that was leaning with the weight of my hair. He left his hands on the sides of my head and crouched down, facing me, and peered into my face. Curious.
I caught my breath.
His hands moved slowly down from the sides of the towel, pressing against my temples, my ears. The sound of rain and birds and the lake were muffled by the darkness and thickness and warmth of his hands pressed against my ears. I closed my eyes.
And his hands found the sharp bones of my face. Lingered at the bones beneath my eyes, grazed the straight short plane of my nose, the sharp corners of my jaw.
I could smell the incense sweetness of him, the breath of him not so familiar this close, new and stronger. Less subtle than before. And then I could taste the sweet incense of him. The thick, dark, sweet incense of him. And soon I was not sure if it was his lips or the kiss of rain saved and warmed by fire. Or just his hands, dark birds, that were redefining my lips, softening the angles, the sharp edges of me.
Late Summer, 1991
She was always there.
My head is pounding, my heart is pounding, my feet are pounding against the sharp ground as I run to the night water. She knows that I am coming. She expects me now. When I reach the edge of the water, I will see her floating under the moon or moonless sky. When I walk down the red dock, away from land and solid ground, she will feel me, feel the way the water yields and responds to my weight. Then she will paddle slowly toward me, motioning with her small hand for me to join her. Then I will lower myself into the water, roll onto my back, let the water hold me. And knowing that she is there will be enough to make me feel not so alone.
