Water, 1979
When Alice came home from school (always before V V Gus), she’d find Charlotte at the kitchen table, poring over reams of paper or stacks of photos, reading torn-out articles, seemingly shocked that it was three o’clock, and she hadn’t even shed her robe. There was a clamshell with a few cigarette butts, an open window, a broken screen, and flies crawling on honey-coated spoons beside cups of half-drunk tea.
“Oh, my God, you’re home already. I haven’t had a chance to—”
“Did you walk Spin?”
“Did I… You know, I think I did. Of course I did.”
Her mother’s narrow feet were bare, bone white, the re- mains of some coral polish dotting her toenails. There was no way she’d been outside today.
Alice went running through the house, calling out, “Spin, Spin!” And the colorless walls took on shades of skin as the afternoon spring light made everything hot, hotter than the actual temperature—all that sunlight and her mother inside, all that sunlight and the stench hit her as she rounded the bend upstairs in the hallway.
Small piles of Spin’s crap dotted the area where Alice sat most often, in the narrow corridor where she liked to bounce a neon orange tennis ball off the opposite wall. She’d sit and listen for her brother August coming down the corridor, hoping that he would sit beside her, that he would maybe try to swipe the ball away. But August usually ran by and slid down the banister as he was told not to do, daring the whole structure to buckle. He was interested in explosions.
“Spin!” Alice called. There was a puddle of pee in the guest bathroom. A puddle of pee on the landing at the top of the back stairwell. A stream of yellow (mostly dry) right beside her bed.
Her father was coming home that evening from a conference in California.
Alice stood beside each spot and just looked at what Spin had done. She thought of how badly he’d needed to go, and how he must have whined and whined to deaf ears. Alice yelled out for her mother. She must have yelled for minutes, not moving at all, before Charlotte came up the back stairs, smelling of powder and smoke.
“Look,” Alice said. “Would you look!”
“That naughty—”
“No,“ Alice said, with her face burning, “it isn’t his fault. It is your fault.”
Her mother laughed and then coughed, dryly. It was too warm up here in the corridor but Alice could not move. “Oh, Jesus,” said Charlotte, with a small round yawn. “You want to calm down please?”
“It’s disgusting,” Alice said. “How would you feel if you couldn’t go out? No one keeps you inside all day, do they?”
Her mother didn’t answer.
“Why don’t you walk him?” Alice asked. “It is so easy. You are the one who said so. You said so to convince Daddy.”
“Well, love, you wanted a dog, didn’t you?”
“So.”
“Sometimes it is easy and sometimes it is not. Okay? Sometimes I lose track of time. You two sap my energies and go off to school and I lose track.”
“Sap your energies?”
Charlotte looked at her daughter, gave her a half smile that Alice knew too well. The smile was supposed to make Alice feel included in her mother’s infuriating behavior. It was the laziest gesture that Alice knew. It was a look that said, I never need to apologize, not as long as you are mine.
“That’s not normal,” Alice said hastily.
“No, I don’t suppose it is.”
“You just could walk him, that’s all. Make a schedule.”
Her mother shrugged. Then she reached out to touch the tips of her daughter’s hair. “Let me cut it,” she said.
“No,” Alice said.
Charlotte didn’t let go. Her touch should have felt cloying but it felt, instead, like relief. “You won’t even notice. I’ll give it some shape.”
“Why are you still wearing your bathrobe?”
“Don’t you like it?”
“Yeah, I like it, but shouldn’t you get dressed?”
“Getting dressed is very overrated. Sometimes, sweetheart, I feel like if I’m going to get dressed I want to seriously get dressed. You know what I mean?”
Alice was ten years old and she still couldn’t figure out what it was that her mother did with her days. Charlotte hadn’t gone anywhere since mid-January, when she’d left for a month while the children were at school, having said good-bye only in passing, as they were headed out the door. On the kitchen table Charlotte had left a folder regarding a program started by a Burmese woman and a man from Boston who imported Burmese weavings and sold them on Newbury Street. He made a killing and spread the wealth to the peasant weavers. Everybody won. The folder was accompanied by a brief note, which said, Thanks for reading, as if it were a business proposal for a deal in which her husband and children might have been prospective investors. She’d returned home with a nasty parasite and having taken up smoking again, expressing inarticulate plans about buckling down on “the project.” She didn’t talk about the project in specifics, but it involved, from what Alice could tell, a great deal of sitting around.
“The project is consuming,” her mother explained, as Alice filled buckets with disinfectant.
“I’ll be right back,” Alice said, and she went downstairs and got two mini seltzers, the kind her father drank straight from the bottle. As she climbed the stairs she couldn’t help feeling a little proud.
“Well, look at you,” Charlotte said, and Alice fluttered inside. “When did you get to be such a smarty-pants? Who taught you about cleaning stains, for heaven’s sake?”
Alice felt her cheeks burn as she shrugged and tried her best not to smile. She tried not to think about how her friend Eleanor’s mother, Mrs. Deveau (who taught her about the seltzer), had told Alice with pitying eyes that she could always tell her and Mr. Deveau anything, anything at all.
Charlotte and Alice worked together silently. Alice looked at her mother, down on all fours, and made sure she was scrubbing. Charlotte’s hands were like her own hands. They had short fingers and bitten nails and they didn’t look motherly. Her hair was amazingly thick, the exact color of a pecan, and it was all Alice could do not to touch it the way she’d touch a horse in a stall—tentatively, with love and fear and a nagging shame for pockets empty of apples and sugar, for the inability to ride.
Even though they were doing nothing more than cleaning, Alice and her mother were together and Alice didn’t want it to end. But just as she was thinking about what she could show her mother in her room or what kind of good question she could ask, Charlotte said, “Jesus, do I need a bath.” She ignored Spin, who had climbed the stairs again, now that all traces of him were gone, and she touched Alice lightly on the shoulder. Alice watched her mother walk down the corridor, her bathrobe tie trailing behind her like a fallen party streamer.
Alice stood watching the empty corridor and might not have been able to find it in her to move had Spin not begun to whine. She clipped on his leash and set out walking. There were pots of hydrangeas on the front porch and the clay inside them was cracking. The sky was white and the sun shone like a smudge of pale lipstick on a cheek. It was the end of April— warm enough to wear a T-shirt, but just barely. She wondered how far Gus had progressed.
Her brother was in the water. He’d decided to swim out farther than he’d ever gone. There were markers, he’d explained the night before, ones he’d created for himself, before the cove merged with the sound. He intended to hit the very last one and be back in time for dinner. Gus had told Alice that he’d been going farther and farther each Friday, since the last of the snow had melted. He’d bought a wet suit with money he was given for an upcoming school trip to Washington. His ability to know the ocean, to learn what he wanted to learn (instead of what he was supposed to learn according to some bogus school-time schedule) was more important—way more important. There was a man who rowed in a rowboat from Long Island to California just last year, two women who windsurfed to Lisbon. When Alice had asked why he didn’t just wait till summer, why he didn’t stay after school and swim laps in the indoor pool instead, he laughed and said, “Just don’t tell them, okay? That’s not what I need.”
What do you need? was what Alice wondered. Why would anyone want to windsurf to Lisbon? And why was it, she wondered, that this was the first thought she had: Her mother would not be worried but pleased. Alice could imagine how her eyes would shine at the thought of Gus courting danger. Alice, therefore, tried not to allow herself to be worried. Her brother, she assured herself as she threw a glance out to sea, always knew what he was doing.
She walked Spin out to the end of the long driveway and then back to the house. It was high tide and the marsh was flooded so that it looked as though the east porch always faced not reeds and birds and pattern-making sludge, but only the water. She followed the marsh down the sloping properly where Spin drank from a freshwater spring that pooled over mossy rocks. A mass of tall bamboo looked like wheat or sea grass grown to impractical proportions. To Alice’s left was where, at low tide, a beach was revealed, along with the detritus of the ocean. You never knew what you could find. Gus once found an egg carton full of golf balls, secured with duct tape. Alice found a dead cat. But now it was high tide and right up to the lawn was the gray-green sea lapping nice and easy.
Nestled right there, between the marsh and the sea, was a wooden shack painted a faded barnyard red. The paint was nearly gone, leaving the drab, salt-stained wood. What was most unusual about it was that there was a tiny fireplace that must have, at one point, gotten a good deal of use, as the chimney bore the scars of thick black smoke. When they moved into the house, when Alice was just five, everybody had plans for the place. Gus and Alice could make it into a clubhouse. Her father could house his bone collection, his jars of gelatinous substances—but Charlotte was going to make it into a poolhouse of sorts, even though they had no pool. Charlotte drew a picture of her vision—an inky, broad-stroked affair— and taped it to the refrigerator, where it continued to hang— frayed corners curling upward, a relic of another time. In the picture there was a chest of drawers, stacks of towels, an area rug on the floor. There was a fire in the fireplace, andirons and bellows. There were pictures on the wall; she’d chosen their frames. There was even a bottle of Perrier idling on a counter and a bud vase with a blue flower—by far the brightest color on the white, creamy page. It was a beautiful picture that Alice loved. It bore so little resemblance to anyplace she had ever seen. Plus, it proved something that was always hanging in the air at any adult function; it was whispered as a rumor, with the same tone that made mention of money or its lack, and of a woman’s looks. It was a phrase that smarted with sarcasm or resentment, or else as a kind of excuse: Charlotte is talented.
But talented at what? To Alice it was never exactly clear. The picture was lovely but it was a rare effort. She never claimed to be any kind of artist. She never claimed to be anything, except—when she’d had a few drinks—she’d admit to being unusually photogenic. She had been asked to audition for a New York production of The Seagull when she was a sophomore at Sarah Lawrence simply because someone had photographed her on a train, looking out the window on a foggy morning. The director had seen this photograph printed in Life magazine and had hunted her down, had telephoned the dormitory in search of her. The idea of a director (Alice pictured the low-slung chair, the resonant voice) searching for her mother: nothing but nothing could possibly be more glamorous. Whether or not Charlotte had made any impression at the audition was somehow never the point. Charlotte’s stories cut off at the precipice of meaning. Her stories weren’t so much stories as they were images—nebulous enough that they were always worth a closer, longer look.
But the poolhouse, as it was so called, sat just as empty and shabby as when the Greens moved in. Alice thought of its best and only uses: the hiding place for hide-and-seek (so obvious— no one ever thought to look!), the once or twice a summer that Alice and Gus would sleep in sleeping bags on its cold, dank boards—Alice up all night listening for creatures, on the constant lookout for claws and teeth, while Gus snored. One evening last July she opened the door to find a raccoon settling in for a still-warm meal swiped from the patio table. The raccoon had looked up with a chicken bone in its hands, as if to point out her rudeness.
Alice peeked inside. At first she saw nothing, but then she noticed a neatly folded towel and a Yoo-hoo, a Snickers bar and a sweatshirt. This was where Gus would collapse after swimming this evening. Having seen that he’d taken the trouble of purchasing his own special food for the occasion (Yoo-hoo and Snickers having never seen the inside of the Green household), of planning ahead and even bringing a towel… It was impressive. Towels for Gus were an afterthought at best, used after a swim only if someone else remembered. On cooler evenings at the beach, he’d stand beside the comfortably towel-clad, jumping up and down, smiling as his lips turned blue. Someone always offered to share. Usually that someone was Alice.
Spin looked up at Alice and Alice looked out more carefully at the water. Spin tugged her toward the dock (useless without a permit to rebuild), a dock that stood as a testament to a different kind of homeowner, a wholly other life. People at school belonged to sailing clubs and golf clubs, and sometimes it was easy to imagine what the house would have looked like if Alice’s parents cared about leisure time the way her father cared for research or the way their mother cared for pursuing her leisure elsewhere.
Now the dock was an eroded gray plank that stretched out into the distance and slid into the water. There was no permit for a mooring and so the wood endured a slow demise—gnawed by the elements year after year. The gulls enjoyed congregating and leaving their white and shiny droppings along the rickety rails. In order to walk onto the dock, you needed to bypass a mound of stones and weeds that were part of a former Indian burial ground. Of this there was no proof, but it was accepted as truth as long as their family had lived here. Once in a great while her father spoke of leveling it, at least trimming the weeds, but nothing was ever done. Alice thought it was beautiful the way the stones made patterns in the bulbous grass; she was certain the mound had powers and that it was the reason the house’s former owners had built the little shack there.
Out beyond the dock there were two boats racing, their white sails flush with wind. There was a big yellow barge inching across the horizon. She kept expecting to see Gus, to give him a wave, even if he couldn’t see her. It would have been nice to just see him at it, to get a sense of how far he was and how long it would be until he returned. But Alice couldn’t see him anywhere. When he’d told her about his swimming, she’d accepted his plan as she accepted all of Gus’s plans—fully formed and nothing to question too heavily. If he left at two, Alice thought, he would have been gone two hours already, more than two hours really, as it was nearly four-thirty. Dinner wasn’t until seven o’clock though, and Gus said he’d be back just in time for dinner.
It occurred to her that what he was doing could actually be more than a little dangerous.
She tugged Spin and set off running up her family’s lawn, under the dogwoods and over the patchy muddy grass. “Mommy!” she belted out, before she even knew exactly of what she was frightened. Alice breathed hard and Spin ran fast, and the humid air turned a notch toward chilly as the sun went behind a dense cloud. She pictured Gus waterlogged blue and everyone wondering, Why didn’t you say something?
Then she thought she heard her mother yelling back, but she realized immediately that she was yelling at her father. Her father was home! Her father was home; he was home—she could see through the window his white shirt rolled up at the sleeves, his hands on his head, his elbows bent, his fingers clutching his hair. Her father was home and he was yelling too. He looked younger somehow—he hadn’t shaved. Her father looked handsome and angry.
From what Alice could tell, listening through the glass, her father was already at a familiar refrain: “What were you thinking?”
“What do you expect?” her mother bellowed.
“Oh, that’s rich.”
“Alan, it’s unfair.”
“What’s unfair is for me to come home and find dog shit in my shoe because you insisted on getting a dog that you refuse to walk. What is unfair is that our little girl is a nervous wreck.”
“Mommy!” Alice was yelling again, but now she was at the window; now she was looking through the glass door, but not going in. She was stuck in one place and she did not want to move. They were talking about her. They were yelling. She wanted her mother to come to her, to come forward and cover her with kisses, to treat her like a baby. She wanted her father to listen closely and be impressed by her composure. But neither her father nor her mother came forward. Her father saw Alice through the window and made his face into a smile. Her mother pushed her hair off her forehead and motioned Alice to come in.
Charlotte said, “What, sweetheart, what is it?”
Alice ran to her father and threw her arms around him. He smelled like animals—all pelt and heavy musk and somehow so clean.
“Alice?”
“He’s out in the water swimming,” she said, trying to catch her breath. “He’s been planning it for weeks. He’s out there in the sound with the … the cigarette boats.” She heard her own voice and its tone increased her worry. Her voice—weak and breathless—made the idea that much more frightening.
“What do you mean, he’s been planning it?” her father asked, not gently.
“Alan—”
“Charlotte,” he said, and her name engendered silence. “Alice, why on earth didn’t you tell us? Do you know how cold the water is?”
“He has a wet suit,” she said.
She told them because she was afraid for his life, yes, but also because she was afraid that her parents would continue fighting, afraid that the conclusion would be eventually drawn that no one, when it came right down to it, knew how to keep everyone together, all in one house at one time.
On a boat, the neighbor’s boat, the Mafia neighbor’s big white speedboat, they went looking. Alice stood wrapped in a towel between her mother’s legs. Charlotte kept saying thank-you to the neighbor, and rubbing Alice’s arms and asking if she was cold. Alice wasn’t cold but she wasn’t exactly comfortable, as her mother’s coat was scratchy, but she would have sooner jumped into the water herself than risk losing those arms around her. Her affection made Alice feel thrilled and guilty as her mother was clearly angry with her father. Not only that, but she knew that when they found Gus, everyone would have more pressing issues of anger. Any affection seemed so temporary.
The Mafia neighbor was small and strong and gripped the wheel with both hands. Alice liked him. His name was Big John, even though he was short. His wife never left the house. His kids were named Anthony and Amy, and they drove fast cars, two separate ones, back and forth from the high school. Alice knew her parents weren’t friends with Big John, and it was only out of a dire emergency that her father had phoned over to their house. Her father looked in the water intensely, not saying much of anything. The water was oddly blue—not grayish or green but an eerie cobalt blue disturbed with white as the waves grew the farther out they went. Charlotte wore a too-small camel coat over her robe and a pair of tortoiseshell sunglasses even though there was barely any sun. She was smoking and she smelled like autumn—a trace of vanilla oil in her hair, Merit Ultra Lights—her mother’s bare skin when the coat fell open was warm despite the cold.
“John,” her mother said, and then louder, “John? Would you mind slowing down just a bit?”
They were creeping along, rocked intermittently by small thumping breakers. They were looking at small splashes, at buoys; they were fraught with false sightings. There were not many other boats around, but the ones that appeared were going gangbusters through the glass-blue water—Ginsu blades whirring on their big black motors—unable to detect that the still-freezing water happened to contain a boy.
“You didn’t notice he was doing this?” her father said for the eighteenth time. At this point he didn’t even look at Charlotte.
Her mother didn’t answer. She gasped, barely audibly— Alice felt the rise and fall of her mother’s bony chest against her back.
And then he was there, a few yards ahead, doing the crawl. He was gone and then he wasn’t—just like that. Alice recognized this sick understanding, the way a person could disappear and then reappear—unfair and newly possible, made somehow better than before.
There he was. There he was—a shiny black wet suit-clad body, a tawny nape of neck, and pale flashes of cupped hands— perfect.
“Gus!” Alice yelled, jumping from her mother’s lap. It occurred to her that she was fond of yelling. It had suddenly become a part of who she was: She was a girl who yelled.
Everyone was yelling. Everyone except her mother. Her mother just stood in her scratchy coat, one pale hand shielding her forehead, the other planted on her high ridge of hip.
Gus swam doggedly, slowly, in a slightly wavering line. If he heard them—and Alice was sure he heard them—he was not letting on. On he swam, even when a wave broke his stride. Big John said, “Good swimmer,” and then, “Crazy fuckin’ kid.” Her father looked annoyed, but Big John seemed to mean it as a compliment. Big John seemed a little jealous. When the yelling didn’t work, and Gus maintained his stroke, pretending they simply weren’t there, her father said, “Get closer,” and Big John got them as close as he could. What her father did then was reach over the side and try to grab hold of Gus, but it was more difficult, apparently, than he had thought; “Goddamn it,” he said. The wet suit was tight and slippery.
Unlike her husband, Charlotte didn’t seem angry. She hardly seemed riled up at all. In fact, Alice noticed that as her father tried furiously to retrieve Gus from the cold water, her mother merely tilted her face to the sun—as if the sun were a shy suitor in need of some encouragement before going in for a kiss.
“This kid,” said Big John, shaking his head.
And August kept swimming, as if he were physically unable to hear their yells or sense their frantic presence.
“Who knew he was serious,” Charlotte said, quite clearly.
Her father turned to her, saying, “What?” He was breathing hard, still not giving up on grabbing hold of Gus.
“Will you quit that,” Charlotte said. “He’ll stop if you do, trust me.”
“What do you mean, ‘Who knew he was serious’?”
Charlotte sniffed, and brought a ragged thumbnail to her teeth. “He made mention of doing this—this kind ofthing. He makes mention of a lot of things to me.”
“Ever wonder why?” her father said. He wasn’t yelling anymore. He sat on the ledge with his eyes on Gus, but in a different way, somehow. Alice stood apart from her mother. She stood wrapped in the towel, listening. She knew her father meant that Gus was trying to impress their mother. He often made this kind of remark; he had various unflattering theories about Gus’s behavior in regard to Charlotte, and Alice could rarely decide if he was right. Most of the time she was certain that Gus was trying to impress no one but himself, and she knew firsthand what a tough audience he could be. “Jesus,” her father said, with a certain degree of finality.
“You want me to keep close on him like this, or what?” John said.
The light was starting to fade, casting long shadows on deck. The blue water was no longer so blue. “That’s right, John; that’s perfect,” Charlotte said, keeping her eyes solely on her son, as if she were merely awaiting a testy reply. Her eyes said, Fm finished; I am counting to three.
But still nothing.
Charlotte took off her sunglasses and chewed on an end in apparent contemplation. She took a breath and yelled in Gus’s direction, “I am so bored!”
Big John laughed.
Gus then veered in a different direction. He veered toward the boat’s ladder, and when he stopped swimming, he didn’t waste any time getting out of the water. He climbed up on deck without any help. They all knew not to try.
“What were you thinking?” her father growled, passing Gus two towels. “Gus? Goddamn it, are you all right?”
“You did a very stupid thing,” Big John said. “A very fucking stupid thing, if you want to know the truth.”
Gus looked at Big John and said, “I’m fine,” and then to his mother: “I only had a little more to go.”
Charlotte didn’t say anything. She turned from her son, with his blue lips and bloodshot eyes—her son who was twelve years old—and she pulled Alice onto her lap. She could feel her mother’s nerves—how her skin was feverishly hot for a moment and how she clutched too hard. Gus looked at Alice with cold wet eyes and Alice looked down at her mother’s bare feet. Big John started the boat again. The sound of the motor seemed much louder than before. It was colder now that the sun was gone. It was hard to believe it had, after all, been a pleasant day—one of the mildest of the year.
Gus kept looking at Charlotte, who played with Alice’s hair for a few idle moments before settling her gaze on the water, now speeding by.
Alice wriggled out of her mother’s grasp. “I’m sorry,” she said, tapping Gus on the shoulder. “I’m sorry I told.”
He ignored her, shrugging off her finger tap. She couldn’t help thinking of that empty corridor, after her mother had walked away.
“Come, Alice,” her father said, motioning her up to the steering wheel. “Be careful, now.”
And she stood between her father and Big John, looking out from behind the wheel, all of them silently marveling at how much territory he had covered. But Alice was also watching her mother and her brother and how each of them acted unhappy but somehow didn’t look it. They stood apart on opposite sides of the small bow, but they couldn’t have looked more similar. Their stances expressed how the world was attainable; they were ready to collect their portion, whatever it happened to be.
But neither of them saw the bird.
It was Alice who gazed up at the sky. She looked up for a moment—if only to look away from her family—the way one looks for any means of escape upon realizing, not without shame, that the love they possess is too much. They know this love is unnameable just as it is unmalleable and that it will, in all likeliness, grow to define them. Alice caught a glimpse of this self-knowledge, but more than anything, she was flooded with wanting. She only knew she had to look away.
But the sky.
But the bird.
It was green and blue and yellow, big as a small dog. It was tropically attired—some flamboyant refugee from a continent away—and it was no illusion. But when Alice yelled (as she’d been wont to do), this time no sound came. She watched the bird as it flew slowly by. Her mouth was open but it was open in awe. By the time the sound came, the bird was gone and no one had seen it but her. Which was sad, when she thought about it, but sad in a way that she would later learn to identify as personal, like touching an old scar on a beloved body and hearing the answer of exactly how it got there.
In the middle of the night Alice still hadn’t slept, and she rose from bed. Gus had gone to sleep soon after they’d all wandered inside the house and silently eaten cold chicken. They always had chicken—that fact had become a family joke; it usually made her smile. But her brother had refused to even look at her, which had made it very difficult to eat the chicken, which had made it very easy to cry. She hadn’t cried. She thought of the bird, and it helped somehow. She’d asked for a Coke and she got one.
The moon streamed through her tall windows at two o’clock in the morning, casting the room in silvery dark. She could hear the train whistle far away. Their house was close enough to the station to hear the whistle perfectly and yet far enough away for the noise to sound plaintive. Leaving her room, Alice padded through the corridor—imagining riding the overnight train—past her parents’ closed door. Gus’s door was open a crack, a habit left over from when he was very little, when he was afraid of being locked in.
She didn’t hesitate. The day was over now, and she was no longer afraid of losing him, no longer afraid of his judgments. His room was warmer than hers, and he’d thrown off the covers to reveal an old Cosmos T-shirt. He was sleeping soundly. Posters of sharks were pinned to each wall. Every poster had the same black eyes staring out into the room.
It was not by any conscious design that Alice lay down stiffly beside her brother, but she was suddenly there, horizontal in his twin bed, with a wild heartbeat and a ringing in her ears. It was from the fear of sharks and the way their eyes were even darker than these darkly male-redolent surroundings. It was out of dizziness at being displaced and not tired in the middle of the night. And it was also the train shooting off to distant places, of which she had no understanding. The whistle sounded as a kind of reminder that the world was about so much more than houses and trains and the people sleeping in them. The world is without safety, was what that whistle said; the world is without end.
“August?” she said, and she hated her voice.