Sweet Water

  “So the feet must be huge.”

  “Yeah. I haven’t done them yet. I’m a little afraid of feet.”

  “I can model for you. My feet are really weird.”

  “Are they thirty inches long?”

  He laughed. “How tall will these things be?”

  “About six feet.”

  He ran his fingertips down the front of the torso with the head on it. “This one’s female.”

  “How’d you figure that out, Sherlock?”

  He grabbed the waistband of my shorts and kissed me. “Nothing gets by me.” He held my face in his hands. “I can’t believe you do this stuff. I love it.”

  “Why?”

  “Why? Because it’s completely foreign to me. It’s a part of you I can’t touch.”

  “I don’t know, it might be the part you can touch most easily.”

  “No,” he said, shaking his head. “You can use what you are—even what we do—and turn it into something else. So maybe I could be in it, or a part of it, but I’ll never get close enough to touch it or find out for myself how it works. That’s what I love about it,” he said. “The mystery. The transformation.”

  “You’ve thought about this.”

  He shrugged. “It’s the same with music. If you can take what you are, what you know, and use it to express what you feel, not what you think—and not in some obvious way, but in a way that’s yours alone—then you have something. Something real.”

  “But the thinking is a part of it too.” I went into the kitchen. “It can’t just stop. Otherwise you’d end up with sentimental garbage, whether you wanted to or not.” I opened the refrigerator. “You want a beer?”

  “Sure.” After a moment he said, “But the thinking has to come later.”

  “You can’t say that so absolutely.” Coming back into the room, I handed him a beer and kept one for myself. “You can’t separate thinking and feeling into distinct categories. They’re always connected.”

  “So you knew exactly what you wanted when you did this.” He gestured toward the torso.

  “I knew I wanted to do three women. Generations.”

  “And the shape and the size and the texture—all of that you already knew?”

  I moved some rags off a windowsill and sat down. “I had an idea.”

  “And when your hands started working …”

  “But I’m talking about before.”

  “Unh-unh. We’re talking about the whole process.”

  I tossed a rag at him. “When my hands started working, it’s true, I didn’t think much anymore.”

  He sipped his beer and looked around the room. “Who are these people, Cassandra?”

  “Don’t you know you’re not supposed to ask that? Or I’m not supposed to answer.”

  “So who are they?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe they’re ghosts.”

  “How close were you to Amory?” I asked. We had gone out on the porch to watch the sun set.

  “Not very. I don’t think anybody was.” He took another sip of beer. “He was waiting to die for a long time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You could see it in his eyes. They were dull-looking, glazed over. Like he didn’t care about anything.”

  “Always?”

  “When I knew him. I guess he was different before.”

  “Before …”

  “You know—the accident.”

  Blue came racing around the side of the house, wagging his tail. “Have you ever heard of”—I patted the porch, and Blue came and sat beside me—“a woman named Bryce Davies?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “How do you know about that?”

  “I don’t know much. She was a friend of Clyde’s.”

  He nodded.

  “They went swimming, and she drowned.”

  He set his beer on the step.

  “She was … she was having an affair with Amory—”

  “Wait, hold on. Where’d you hear that from?”

  “I just heard it, Troy,” I said. “What does it matter where?”

  “It matters. People say things—”

  “Well, if you must know, I heard it from May Ford.”

  “Hmm.” He ran his hands through his hair. “Listen, Cassie, May Ford is notorious—”

  “I know, I know. I didn’t believe her at all, at first. But then I asked Clyde about it, and she acted really strange, like I’d found out some big secret she’s been trying to keep. She thought I’d gotten hold of some box that has something to do with it.”

  “A box?”

  “She said, ‘I know it’s in that house somewhere.’” I stroked Blue absently, remembering. ‘“It wasn’t his to give.’”

  “His?” Troy said. “Who’s he?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Amory?”

  “Who else could it be?” Blue rubbed his shoulder against me and fell against my leg. I burrowed my fingers into his fur.

  “Wait,” Troy said softly. “Wait, wait, wait.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. I just remembered something.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I … I don’t know. This might be crazy.”

  I put my hand on his knee. “Tell me.”

  He looked at me for a moment, a long gaze. “This is what everybody was afraid of, you know.”

  I felt the skin on the back of my neck prickle. “What do you mean?”

  “That you might start poking around.”

  “And find what?”

  “Cassie, there’s a lot of stuff … there’s a lot of stuff you don’t understand.” He sighed. “I’m not sure that it does much good to go digging around in the past.”

  “But I didn’t go digging around. All this just bubbled up.”

  “Okay. But maybe now it’d be best to let it go.”

  “Aren’t you interested in finding out what happened? Isn’t anybody interested?”

  He stood up and tucked in his shirt.

  “What are you all hiding?”

  He averted his eyes. “I’ve got to leave.” I listened as he went inside to get his jacket, his shoes. The air was soft and dark. He came back to the porch.

  “What if she did drown that woman like everybody thinks? What if he did smash up the car on purpose? It’s not going to bring your mother back, Cassie. It’s over. There’s nothing you can do to change it.”

  From where I sat I could see into the darkened dining room. The clay pieces on the floor looked like a gathering of grotesques and misfits. One of the heads, its face tilted toward the kitchen, seemed to be watching me.

  Suddenly I felt almost unbearably sad. I imagined myself shrouded like the old women I had seen in Greece, dressed in mourning for the rest of their lives, wearing black like armor.

  “It’s not over,” I said quietly. He came and drew me up and put his arms around me, and I leaned into him, gathering warmth from his embrace. “It’s not over for me.”

  As soon as he left I began searching for the box. I started downstairs, in the hall closet, tapping behind coat hangers, then I got down on my hands and knees and cleared away the tools and umbrellas on the floor. Crawling around inside the closet, rapping on the wood with my knuckles, I felt like a third-rate detective in a B movie: I didn’t really know what I was looking for, I didn’t know where to look, and I wasn’t even sure what a hollow sound sounded like.

  I moved on to the living room and peered up the fireplace, tapped around the baseboard, then navigated around the heads and limbs on the dining room floor. After checking the kitchen cabinets, I went upstairs to look in the bedrooms. I was in my mother’s room when I heard the bump and clatter of Troy’s jeep up the drive.

  He got out, slamming the door behind him, and knocked on the screen. Blue started barking from the landing.

  “Shush, Blue. Come in,” I yelled down.

  He followed my voice upstairs and came into the bedroom. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. ?
??This is probably stupid, but …” He rubbed his chin with his hand. “I know about this hiding place. Granddaddy showed it to me when I was little. He said he made it when he built the house, so he’d have a place that was private, that was all his own.”

  “I wonder why he told you.”

  He shrugged. “Beats me. Maybe he just wanted somebody to know. Maybe he was tired of keeping it secret.”

  “Where is it?”

  “I’ve never told anybody. He asked me not to.”

  I just stood there.

  “To hell with it,” he said. “Let’s find that box.”

  The basement was dark and cool and dusty. Troy turned on the light, and the single bulb swayed back and forth over our heads, rattling against the chain. We groped around in the dimness, finding an old wooden crate. He climbed up on it and began moving his hands along the low ceiling.

  Our breathing and the rapping of his knuckles were the only sounds in the stillness. Blue sat at the top of the stairs, watching us quietly, thumping his tail whenever I looked in his direction. As Troy finished with each section he got down and moved the crate. “I don’t know,” he muttered, “maybe I’m crazy. Maybe I dreamed this.”

  As he tapped across the ceiling, I stood on the cool, hard-packed floor in my bare feet, holding my arms against my chest.

  “I can’t find it,” he said.

  “Are you sure it was in the basement?”

  “I’m going to try again.” He started in the far corner, above a row of shelves. He moved slowly, knocking and scratching and listening for hollow spaces. He got down and put the crate in the far left corner and climbed up on it again. Blue whined and pawed the floor. I could just make out Troy’s face, his eyes narrowed and his mouth open in concentration.

  All at once he stopped tapping. His fingers pushed at the ceiling, his nails scrabbling at rough wood. He shoved hard with the heel of his hand, and a board gave way, leaving a hole about two feet long and six inches wide. I went over to him as he reached inside and felt the space, and after a few seconds I saw his body tense. “There’s something here.”

  He pulled out a pile of rags and handed it down to me. I sifted through the mildewed pieces—a skirt, a blouse, and a bra—and bundled them under one arm. When I looked up again he was standing on tiptoe, reaching as far as he could into the hole. I could hear something solid scrape against the inside of the ceiling as he drew his arm out.

  The box was long and narrow. It was heavy, made of dark, smooth wood. I held it to my chest, wiping the dust off. Blue was whining again.

  As Troy replaced the board, I turned and went up the stairs, stroking the dog on the head to calm him when I got to the top.

  I set the box and the bundle of clothing on the table in the kitchen, flipped on the overhead light, and sat in one of the folding chairs I’d bought at a church sale. Inspecting the box, I found that it was scratched and moldy, the latch mangled and the lock broken.

  Troy came up and went to the sink to wash his hands. “So,” he said, shaking the water off and wiping his palms on his jeans. “What’ve you found?”

  “I haven’t looked yet. Thanks a lot for helping me with this. I mean it.”

  He waited.

  “Troy … I think I need to do this alone.” There was an awkward silence. “Sorry. I just—”

  “It’s okay.” He disappeared into the dining room and came back, putting on his jacket. “Let me know what you find.”

  “I will,” I said. “I’ll let you know.” “I’ll be at the motel.”

  I nodded. “Don’t … just don’t tell anybody else, okay? This is our secret.” “Okay.”

  He came to the table and took my hand, looking into my eyes. “Are you sure it’s worth it, Cassie? Are you sure you want to know?” Memory believes before knowing remembers. “I have to,” I said. “I have to know.”

  part

  five

  It was late spring or early spring; at any rate, it was springtime. I’m not one to remember dates. The air was warm and smelled of growing things: honeysuckle, daffodils, the first harvest of strawberries. Some afternoons it was already so warm that there wasn’t much to do but sit on the porch swing or take a rest with the shades drawn upstairs. The kids were grown and out of the house, and Amory’s days were long. His hours were unpredictable; I had to take chances with dinner, keep it hot on the stove or sometimes whip it up in a hurry when I heard his truck at the end of the long drive. I usually ate alone.

  Afternoons tossed the sun across the sky like a slow-moving ball. I swept and dusted, taught myself tunes on the piano, read stories in magazines and books from the library, sometimes several at once. I needlepointed, worked in the garden with Jeb Gregory or his daughter Lattie. I still hadn’t learned to drive—Amory said he didn’t want me to, that one of us driving was enough, that it made him nervous to think what kind of trouble I could get myself into with a car. Back then, when I listened to him and paid real close attention, I could almost always convince myself that he was right. So I didn’t drive, and I didn’t go anywhere unless Jeb took me into town fora few hours or I got a ride from one of my friends from the book circle or the other clubs I’d joined to keep from dying of boredom.

  Forty-nine seemed old then, but I was so young. If I’d listened to my body instead of my husband, maybe I wouldn’t have been stuck all those years in that house I hated on its island of land. I had never been anywhere on my own, not by car or by bus or by train. I had never flown. So I sat in that house year after year and resented him for leaving when he left in the morning and hated him more when he returned home at night—for thinking of home as a place you return to when you feel like it and not one you never leave.

  It got so that when I saw him coming up the walk I’d know which vice he’d indulged in, and sometimes which were in the works. By the time I had hold of his suit jacket I knew by the smell where he’d been, where he’d be going back to when he told me he had business after dinner or an out-of-town company guest to entertain. I couldn’t complain about the business, could I? What was it that put food on our table, clothes on our backs? What was it that put the rabbit-fur coat in the closet in the hall? If you want to move up in this world you got to make sacrifices, honey, he’d say if I complained. You got to go that extra mile.

  I wanted to believe him, I really did. I wanted nothing more than to look into his eyes and have him look into mine when he told me where he’d been. Instead, he’d start to act annoyed and talk to me as if I were an unreasonable child. His speeches were perfectly patient and perfectly timed, so that if I was still objecting by the time he was ready to leave, he’d don his hat and stand in the door and say, “I have tried to be a reasonable man and a good provider, and I don’t know what more could possibly be expected of me. “And then he’d be gone.

  I could live with the drinking; and a little poker, as vices go, was pretty tame. Nobody around here was willing to bet enough to get him in real trouble. The woody smell of tobacco was almost a comfort, since it meant he’d been in the company of men; he himself had an aversion to cigars. But there were other smells, perfume the least of them, that tied my stomach into knots. I can’t even remember feeling jealous, though I’m certain there was a time when I did. But every time he lied he strangled one more part of my love for him, and after a while it wasn’t that I didn’t want them to have him; in fact, it would have been a whole lot easier if one of them had taken him off my hands for good. What made me so furious was the thought of him sliding his hand up some woman’s leg and unbuckling a garter while I nursed Ellen through scarlet fever, or the thought of him in some pay-by-the-hour motel room, unclasping a brassiere while I picked his laundry off the floor.

  I never sent a letter to Bryce, or to any of the others I found out about. I wrote them all and kept the letters locked up in a box. At first I didn’t send them because I almost couldn’t believe it. These were my dearest friends. They had children the ages of my own, husbands who kissed my cheek at company b
arbecues. We’d gather for bridge and talk about fabrics and recipes and where we’d go if we ever got the chance: Paris, Morocco, New York. What would they want with my husband? And then, as time went on, I didn’t send the letters fora hundred reasons: because I knew that if I stopped one affair he’d just start another; because I came to the miserable conclusion that it was a small town and I needed all the friends I could get; because I was a coward. There’s a way people have of living with lies when the truth is too painful to confront.

  So I put my best face forward, smiling and gracious on the outside, the hatred locked up in a box. And I would probably have continued that way indefinitely if I hadn’t discovered in his breast pocket, long after I’d stopped looking, a single hairpin, its head made of mother-of-pearl.

  I sat on the bed with the small volume in my hands. The binding was cracked, the red cover faded. The tiny lock on the leather flap had rusted; gilded page corners were two decades smooth. The key was lost or missing. “Diary” was scrawled across the cover in gold script.

  Since Troy left I’d been going through the contents of the box, folded newspaper clippings and letters mostly, a few photographs. I hadn’t read anything yet. I was taking my time. I came across a black-and-white photograph of my parents, smooth-faced and smiling, leaning together awkwardly on a couch, holding a baby wrapped in a blanket between them—me. I studied the picture. When my mother died she was exactly my age. She had married, given birth; she left a legacy. What did I have to show for my years? Who would be left to remember?

  As I held a sharp pair of scissors in one hand and the diary in the other, I imagined my mother holding it, anticipating what to say, how to make sense of her life. The act of cutting the flap felt momentous; scissors sliced through leather with a decisive snap. When I opened the book the musty pages stood up in stiff sections. On the frontispiece “Diary” was printed again, in black script, with “1959” in wide-spaced, tiny block numerals at the bottom. In watery blue ink my mother had written, “Ellen Iris Clyde, 1959–1962.” And in another, darker ink: “Ellen Clyde Simon, 1962—.”