Sweet Water

  It took me years to figure out that I was the one who had been trapped: a naive girl pinned like a butterfly to a dance hall wall in the cool insistent darkness of midnight. I hadn’t wanted children; I hadn’t even wanted marriage. But it was easier for me to live the lie he built to cover his tracks than to face the possibility that I had married a man with wants and needs as basic as a dog’s.

  Amory had a delicate disposition. Sensitive eyes. Fickle fingers and restless lips. He used to stride around town in a cream-colored suit, white shirt, and spats. He wore a dove-gray hat and tipped it at every opportunity. His blond hair gleamed under the hat, and his eyes shone as blue as the lining of oyster shells. He would take little Horace when he went to do errands in town, just to give women an excuse to come up and talk. “Smile at the ladies,” he told his son. “Smile at the ladies and they’ll smile right back.”

  After Bryce Davies there were others: Leonore Greenwood, May Ford, sixteen-year-old Anna Parker. They came into my life like insects through a screen; as soon as I thought I’d gotten rid of one, another appeared to take her place. I saw his imprint on women I didn’t even know. He left negatives of himself all over town. Women smiled at me on the street in that way that says, I know what you know. I know what he does. They would smile, and they’d keep walking.

  One day Daddy got wind of what was going on, and I never heard precisely what was said, but for a while after that Amory’s only mistress was the Sweetwater mill. He threw himself into his work with more ardor, more passion, than he had bestowed on any lover. That was even worse, in a way, because he felt no guilt in his unfaithfulness. He didn’t have to choose between us.

  As the years passed he established a routine for himself. During the days work consumed him; nights, he gave himself to whiskey; he fit women in the cracks. I was left to fend for myself, to flirt with the pediatrician, the butcher, to while away long afternoons talking to Bible salesmen and Fuller Brush men, anyone who’d listen. We’d sit on the porch in midsummer, Bibles or brushes spread around our feet. I’d serve minted iced tea and fresh, warm pound cake as the mockingbird sang in the bushes and the children played in the yard. Sweating in squeaky black shoes, wiping their faces with limp white handkerchiefs, these men would sit straight and awkward on their chairs, making pathetic small talk that always reverted to the merchandise. I didn’t care what we talked about. I was grateful for any conversation at all.

  In the end I stopped caring if he cared. I stopped worrying about whether he’d like me in the white dress or the blue, my hair up or down, whether he’d prefer chicken to meat loaf. I stopped staying awake for him at night. At dinner parties I waited dispassionately for him to embarrass me: he’d get drunk, pinch the pretty ones under the table, insult the ones he didn’t desire, tell dirty jokes. I expected it. I steeled myself against it. Grasping the slipping center of attention, he’d play out-of-tune pianos, badly, his hands shaking with drink. He’d play songs nobody remembered, including himself; he’d plunk around trying to recall scraps of melodies while people lit cigarettes and whispered under their breath, nodding toward him and rolling their eyes. I would stand back against the wall, sipping Jim Beam and soda, a little more each time, acting like I didn’t know him, like it didn’t faze me at all. A smile for armor, alcohol as a shield. He almost made a drunk out of me too.

  Sometimes he would take me in my sleep and I’d wake to the reek of whiskey, his figure hunched in concentration above me, pawing beneath my nightgown with rough hands, fumbling at the material. But by that time he was masked, emasculated; and I, who had lived a lie of marriage for so many years, felt liberated in my hatred for him. For so long everybody had seen but me; and then I saw it too, though it didn’t make any difference; and finally I knew all the stories and there was nothing he could do. In those last twenty-four years he was mine completely, and I didn’t want him. I wanted him to know that, the way he made me know for so many years. I wanted him to learn the truth. I wanted him to suffer into it.

  I woke in my bed at midmorning to the throbbing growl of a lawn mower outside my window. Sitting up, I fumbled for the shade pull above the bed and raised the shade slowly, letting in a widening slice of bright light. Outside, a shirtless teenage boy with a bandanna over his head was pushing the mower back and forth from the edge of the lawn to the side of the house. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses and a Walkman. After a moment he noticed me and waved. Suddenly modest, I lifted my hand in return and pulled the shade back down.

  I got out of bed and made it up in a few short motions, smoothing the covers and fluffing the pillows. I found a wrinkled cotton robe in my suitcase and put it on. The clock beside my bed said ten-thirty. I was ashamed it was so late; Clyde would have been up for hours.

  A note on the kitchen table said, “Doing errands. Back around 11. Coffee’s made.” Except for the distant whir of the mower and the soft hum of the refrigerator, the house was still. The countertop was warm, the room brilliant with sunshine. “Used to be my favorite place,” Clyde had said. Used to be. I wondered what she meant by that.

  I poured myself a cup of coffee and stood at the kitchen sink to drink it, looking out at the street. My car, dented, low to the ground, filled with books and dirtied by the drive, looked as out of place in these pristine surroundings as a rusty old can. Across the street, a gray-haired woman wearing thick gardening gloves and wielding a trowel was planting flowers around a bush in her front yard. I watched a plane overhead leave a disappearing trail of white across the sky.

  I tried to remember the last time I had been in Sweetwater: the day of my mother’s funeral, twenty-four years earlier. It had been a fine, sunny day, the kind of day you might expect for Easter or a wedding. We all stood on a ridge in a cemetery laid out like a golf course, surrounded by bright, artificial-looking flowers arranged into hearts and horseshoes, staring at a shiny silver box covered with pink carnations under a festive tent. My father and Clyde were crying; I couldn’t recall if my grandfather was even there. I wore a blue dress, one I hated, with scratchy lace at the neck. I remembered wanting to dance.

  Finishing my coffee, I turned from the window and opened the refrigerator. I found a jug of orange juice and searched the cabinets for a glass, then took my juice and wandered through the house, stopping to look at photos of my cousins in the living room and a large one of my grandparents in the hall. I wondered how recently it had been taken; my grandfather looked old and tired, and his smile was feeble. He was wearing a white shirt and a stiff tie and silver-framed glasses. Clyde sat in front of him in a blue-and-white blouse, hands folded in her lap, her smile opaque. “Grandmother,” I whispered, tasting that strange word like metal. “Clyde,” I said. “Clyde.” The hard consonants stuck in my throat.

  In her room the bed was so neatly made that I wondered for a moment if she actually slept there. On the mirrored dresser facing the bed sat a hinged frame containing hand-colored pictures of my mother, Horace, and Elaine: high school graduation, I guessed. In her picture Elaine wore black cat’s-eye glasses; her teased hair spun away from her head like cotton candy. Horace had a large, square jaw, small, pale eyes, and a football player’s crew cut. My mother was slighter than the other two. Her long, dark hair fell behind her shoulders. Her eyes were dark and serious. I searched the face, younger than my own; I picked up the frame and looked closely into her eyes.

  “I see you found the juice.”

  Startled, I set the frame awkwardly on the dresser, and it collapsed. Clyde, standing in the doorway wearing pale blue, looked like a soft white cloud.

  “There’s leftover ham, and I can fry you up an egg if you like,” she said. She turned around and headed down the hall. “Of course, I ate hours ago,” she called back, “but you Yankees must be on a different schedule.”

  I propped up the frame and followed her down the hall to the kitchen, where she was taking a carton of eggs out of the fridge.

  “I don’t want you to go to any trouble,” I said. “I’m not all that
hungry.”

  Clyde paused and straightened. Then she shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  “But if you’ve already started—”

  “Are you hungry or not?”

  “I’m a little hungry,” I admitted.

  “Well, all right, then.” She set a frying pan on the stove. “You go on and get dressed. This’ll be ready in five minutes.”

  I hesitated. “Clyde … there’s something I’ve been wondering about. Yesterday you said this used to be your favorite place, and I … I was just wondering why it isn’t anymore.”

  She looked at me as if trying to decide what to tell me. Finally she walked over to the sink. “This is where I found him. Right here.” She pointed to the floor. “I had to throw away all the clothes I was wearing that day. Blood all over them.”

  “Amory?”

  She nodded. “I guess if I’d tried I could’ve gotten the blood out, but who’d have wanted to? I threw away everything, even my underwear.”

  I looked down at the floor, as if it might yield some clues.

  “I asked Horace about putting in a new floor. He said he thought that would be a waste of money, since this one’s only four years old. I didn’t argue with him, I just cleaned it up real good. But every time I come in here it’s like I’m stepping over that body to get to the sink. It’s like I’m slipping in that blood.”

  We stood there in silence for a moment, looking at the linoleum. “You should have a new floor if you want one,” I said in a quavery voice. “You shouldn’t have to live with that.”

  “No, Horace is right,” Clyde said. “Some things you just got to live with and get over. If he put a new floor in here, it would be like I wanted to pretend it never happened. But it did happen, and a new floor won’t make me forget it.”

  The cuckoo clock shrilled suddenly. Clyde picked a couple of eggs out of the carton and cracked them into a bowl. “Well, you go on and get ready,” she said, beating the eggs with a whisk.

  “I’m—I’m sorry, Clyde.”

  She just nodded. She didn’t look at me.

  I went down the hall to my bedroom. I shut the door and leaned back against it, noticing the stuccoed pattern on the ceiling. I wasn’t hungry anymore. I didn’t know what to think.

  I wondered what she thought of me, what she thought I was thinking. I’d expected that this might be awkward; I had braced myself for indifference or mistrust. But I was unprepared for this stiffly polite standoff between us, the strange assumption of intimacy, the seemingly kind gestures devoid of any warmth.

  Hearing the whistle of a kettle, I went into the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face. I bent down and threw my hair over my head, brushing it quickly with firm, hard strokes. As I searched through my suitcase I realized that almost every piece of clothing I had was paint-spattered or ink-stained. Nothing seemed to match. I put on a Martha’s Vineyard T-shirt and a pair of men’s shorts and returned to the kitchen.

  Clyde was lifting ham out of the frying pan onto a paper towel, her back to me. Leaning on the counter between the kitchen and the table, I watched her silently. When she turned around I saw that her apron had a cartoon of a gray-haired, smiling woman in a rocking chair above the words WORLD’S BEST GRANDMOTHER.

  Clyde set down her spatula and wiped her fingers on the apron. “Hungry yet?” She handed me a plate of ham, eggs, and toast. After getting jam and margarine from the fridge, she followed me to the table. As we sat down, a loud noise suddenly blasted in. I looked out at the boy pushing the mower. He grinned and waved.

  “Jimmy Battesin. That boy’s headed for trouble,” Clyde muttered.

  “What do you mean?”

  She picked up the salt shaker and poured salt on the table in a little pile, then flattened it out with her finger. “Oh, he’s got big dreams. Nothing to hang them on. Never been anywhere in his life but thinks he’s something special.”

  Outside, the mower sputtered and died. Jimmy fiddled with it for a moment and then came up to the window, wiping sweat from his forehead and yanking off his earphones. “The reserve tank’s out of gas, Miz Clyde.”

  “There’s more in the shed,” she said. She turned to face him. “Jimmy, this is my granddaughter Cassandra from up north.”

  He smiled at me with renewed interest. “So you’re the one,” he said. “New Jersey. We seen the plates.”

  “Hi,” I said.

  He took his sunglasses off and squinted in at us. “Must seem real quiet down here.”

  “Not as quiet as I thought it would be. Those crickets are loud.”

  He laughed. “Gone into town yet? No crickets there. It’s real quiet.”

  “Almost done with the mowing?” Clyde asked.

  He stepped back from the window and put on his sunglasses. I could see the two of us reflected in them, small. “Almost. Got to get that gas. Nice to meet you,” he said, nodding at me. He put the earphones back on and went around the side of the house.

  Clyde sighed.

  “He doesn’t seem so bad,” I said.

  “If you don’t mind paying somebody to do a job and then holding their hand while they do it.”

  I ate in silence for a while, forcing the food down. When I finished, I got up to clear my plate.

  “Don’t bother with that,” Clyde said. “You run along and get dressed.”

  “I am dressed,” I said.

  The present was wrapped in tissue paper. I watched as she slowly peeled off each layer, smoothed it, and placed it in a neat, square pile on the table. When she was finished she looked at the bowl, turning it around.

  “You didn’t have to get me anything,” Clyde said. She touched the smooth blue glaze inside. She turned it over and read the bottom. “C. Simon.” She looked up. “You made this.”

  I nodded.

  “Is this what you do for a living?”

  “No. Not yet,” I said, laughing a little. “Maybe someday. I need to work at it.”

  “Oh.”

  “That’s part of why I came down here.”

  She ran both hands around the outside. “What is it, a fruit bowl?”

  “Sure, it can be. It can be whatever you want.”

  “Can it go in the dishwasher?”

  “I—I don’t think so.” Carefully, she set the bowl on the table. “It’s a little rustic for your taste,” I apologized. “You don’t have to display it. You could just use it for salads or …” I tried to think of other uses.

  “I like it.” She started to fold up the tissue paper. “Blue was your mother’s favorite color, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Mine’s yellow, but blue is second.” She flattened the paper with her hand. “The couch in the living room is blue.”

  “I saw that.”

  “Maybe we can find a place for it in there.”

  “You could put potpourri in it or something,” I said.

  She got up and put the tissue paper away in a drawer. “That’s what Elaine would do. She’s got the stuff all over her house. I tell her it smells like cheap perfume, but she doesn’t listen to me.”

  “Well, you could put cards in it, then.”

  She crossed her arms and looked at me. “Do I have to put something in it? Why can’t I just leave it as it is?”

  “You’re right,” I said. “I don’t know why, but I always think I have to fill things up.”

  “I used to feel that way. Now I guess I like things empty.”

  “I’d really like to get out and see the house soon.” I finished drying the frying pan and put it away. “You could just point me in the right direction.”

  “I could, but it wouldn’t help you any. Horace has the only key.”

  “Maybe I’ll give him a call.”

  “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “He’s awfully busy. I’d hate to bother him when he’s got so much to do.”

  I felt my face flush. “Then what do you suggest?”

  Clyde brushed salt and crumbs off the table into her hand. She
wiped the plastic fruit and pushed in the chairs. “He’ll call when he’s ready. He knows you’re here. You just take a day or so to get situated and look around town a little bit. That old place isn’t going anywhere.”

  Taking a deep breath, I turned toward the window. I considered phoning Horace anyway.

  “I’ve got some pictures that might interest you,” she said to my back.

  I didn’t respond.

  She started down the hall. “Maybe some other time.”

  “No, wait,” I said, resigned. “Photographs?”

  “Back here.”

  I followed her to her bedroom, and we knelt on the wide space of carpet between the dresser and the bed. Clyde opened the bottom drawer of the dresser. It was full of brown albums stacked on top of each other and a blue box of snapshots. She pulled out the albums and started to shut the drawer.

  “What about that box?” I asked.

  “Oh, it’s just odds and ends.”

  “If you don’t mind, I’d love to see them.”

  She took out the box too, then handed me the top album. I blew on the cover and wiped the dust off with my hand. I looked at her.

  “Go ahead,” she said.

  The first few pages contained sepia-toned portraits in different sizes, people alone and together, expressionless in stiff clothing. I didn’t recognize any of them. I turned the pages, not wanting to ask, and Clyde, sitting beside me, didn’t volunteer. On the third page I found her features in the face of a young girl.

  “This is you?”

  She pointed to the woman holding her. “My mother. Elvira Whitfield. I was five.” She tapped another photograph lightly with a ridged yellow fingernail. “My brother Thomas. He was seven years older than me. Died of asthma at the age of twenty-one.” She squinted at the picture for a moment. “I had a twin, you know,” she said abruptly. “Died at birth.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Apparently they’re hereditary. My mother was a twin. I always thought I might have some of my own.”