The Shape of Water

  His lights are fading, though, and she can’t imagine the water without them. She grabs the record player arm and drops the needle—

  —and a saxophone solo wiggles atop the orchestra’s snappy chugging. This time she’s got her eyes on the creature, and his light doesn’t only brighten this water, it electrifies it, imbues it with a turquoise glow that shines off the lab walls like liquid fire. The physical objects of table and records slide from Elisa’s awareness as she is reeled toward the pool, her skin blue by reflection, her blood blue, too, she just knows it. Wherever the creature has come from, he’s never heard music like this, a multitude of separate songs so meshed in joyful unison. The water directly around him begins changing—yellow, pink, green, purple. He’s looking into the air, habituated to sounds having a source, reaching up with a hand as if to cradle one of the invisible instruments into his hand and inspect it, sniff it for magic, taste it for miracles, before tossing it back into the sky to fly again.

  28

  THE BOY ARRIVES at the table. He’s not like his sister. He doesn’t sneak up on you. He dumps himself onto a chair, coughs without covering his mouth, clashes his silverware. Stares right at you like a man. Between throbs of pain, Strickland feels pride. Raising kids, that’s a mother’s job. Being a model of behavior, though, that’s something he can do. He smiles at Timmy. It’s the smallest movement of muscle, but one that tightens his face, which tightens his neck, which tightens his arm, which tightens his hand, which tightens his fingers. His smile flounders.

  “Does it hurt, Dad?” Timmy asks.

  The boy’s hands are soapy. He wouldn’t wash up unless Lainie forced him. That means Timmy was up to something his mother found repugnant. That’s good. Testing limits is important. He’s given up trying to explain this to Lainie. She’ll never understand that germs are the same as injuries. Both are required to build scar tissue.

  “A little.” The pills are starting to dull the blades of pain.

  Lainie joins them. Instead of food, she lights a cigarette. Strickland gives her a cursory review. He’s always liked her hair. A beehive, she calls it, a gravity-defying pod of swoops and tucks that must take some skill to maintain. But recently, coming home late from Occam tired or drugged and seeing the hairdo upon Lainie’s bed pillow, it looks like something from the jungle. A spider’s egg sac, bulging to expel a whorling fury of spiderlings. They had a solution for this in the Amazon. Gasoline and a match, unless you wanted infestation. It’s a horrific image. He loves his wife. Right now is a hard time. These visions will fade.

  Strickland picks up his knife and fork, but keeps his eyes on Lainie as she mulls her insurgent son. Will she show her fear at what the boy is becoming? Or will she try to take control over him? He finds the struggle interesting the same way he finds the asset’s survival under laboratory conditions interesting. In other words, both are futile. In the case of boy versus mother, the boy eventually will win. Boys always do.

  Lainie blows smoke from the side of her mouth and selects a tactic Strickland knows from interrogation procedure as “sidestepping.”

  “Why don’t you tell your father what you told me?”

  “Oh yeah,” Timmy says. “Guess what? We’re making a time capsule! Miss Waters says we have to put in guesses for the future.”

  “Time capsule,” Strickland repeats. “That’s a box, right? You bury it. Then dig it up.”

  “Timmy,” Lainie prods. “Ask your father what you asked me.”

  “Mom said you do future stuff at work so I should ask you what to put in there. PJ says we’ll have rocket packs. I told him we’ll have octopus boats. But I don’t want PJ to be right and me to be wrong. What do you think, Dad? You think we’ll have rocket packs or octopus boats?”

  Strickland feels all six eyes upon him. Any army man worth his bars knows the feeling. He suspends Operation Omelet, sighs through his nostrils, and looks from face, to face, to face. Timmy’s antsy expectation. Tammy’s pie-faced slackness. Lainie’s restless lip-chewing. He moves to fold his hands, thinks of the pain that will cause, and instead sets them flat on the table.

  “There will be jet packs. Yes, there will. It’s only a matter of engineering. How to maximize the propulsion. Keep the heat down. Ten years, fifteen tops. By the time you’re my age, you’ll have one. A better one than PJ has, I’ll see to it. Now, an octopus boat, I’m not sure what that is. If you mean a submersible we can explore the ocean floor with, then yes to that as well. We’re making big strides in pressure resistance and water mobility. Right now, at work, we’re doing experiments on amphibious survival.”

  “Really, Dad? Wait till I tell PJ.”

  It might be the drugs. Warm tendrils rope around his muscles, scrunching the pain like snakes scrunch field mice. It feels good to see this look of veneration on the boy’s face. To see blind admiration in the face of his little girl. Even Lainie suddenly looks good to him. She still has a fine figure. Wrapped so tightly in that apron, so crisply ironed with that expensive Westinghouse iron. He pictures the garment’s straps, knotted into a hard, tight ball at the small of her back. She deciphers his look, and he worries that her lips will twist, repulsed at him the same as she’d been at Timmy. But she doesn’t. She half-closes her eyes, what she used to do when she was feeling sexy. He takes a deep, satisfied breath and, for once, there is no retaliatory shot of pain.

  “You betcha, son. This isn’t some Communist rat hole you live in. This is America and that’s what Americans do. We do what we have to to keep our country great. That’s what your daddy does at the office. It’s what you’ll do, too, someday. Believe in the future, son, and it’ll come. Just wait and see.”

  29

  LAINIE REFUSES TO keep track of how often she’s returned to the Fells Point ports. She goes when life becomes too heavy to haul and thinks about tossing herself after it, but the water level is low from lack of rain and she’d probably just break her neck. Then where would she be? In a wheelchair, stuck in front of the television for good, shoving the Spray ’N Steam until she could stand it no longer and melted Richard’s shirt, melted the ironing board, melted herself until the whole mess was a pastel-colored puddle Richard would have to get steam-cleaned by a pro.

  She believes the lizard Timmy was torturing is called a skink. If she saw a skink on the porch, she’d broom that icky crawler into the shrubbery. If she saw one inside the house, well, she’d stomp it dead. She tries to convince herself what Timmy did is the same thing. But it’s not. Most kids are curious about death, but most kids also feel reflex shame when adults catch them poking carcasses. Timmy, though, had looked at her in irritation, like Richard does when she presses him about work. She’d had to collect her courage, and quick, before insisting that he flush that thing down the toilet, scrub his hands, and get to breakfast.

  After he’d finished, she stepped into the bathroom to make sure the skink wasn’t clawing its way back up the bowl. Then she took a minute to appraise her mirror reflection. She patted down springy hair. Pinkied her lipstick. Pulled her pearls so the largest ones rested in the hollow of her throat. Richard didn’t look closely at her these days, but if he did, would he see the secret she kept? Even Timmy, she thought, had gotten close.

  It had been after one of her dockside trances that Lainie had plodded along the anchorage before going north past Patterson Park and east on Baltimore Street. She found herself dwarfed by tall buildings, coasting between them as if by canoe. She stopped outside one of the largest buildings in sight, a black-and-gold citadel with 1920s stylings. The revolving door turned and turned, blowing in a gust that smelled of leather and ink.

  Lainie considers her morning news routine intellectual aerobics, and for that same reason she’d braved the whirling door. It spat her out onto a chessboard floor of a lobby carved from what looked like solid obsidian. Cutaway views of higher floors offered glimpses into what looked like an autonomous city. The workers here had their own post office, eateries, coffee carts, corner stores, newssta
nds, watch repair shops, security department. Modern women in smart outfits and men with briefcases crisscrossed the lobby, straight-backed with importance.

  In this self-contained world, there was no Richard Strickland. No Timmy or Tammy Strickland. No Lainie Strickland, either. She was, rather, that woman she’d left in Orlando. She wished to bathe in the sensation so she took an elevator to a small bakery to pore over the display case. She decided on something she would enjoy herself, for once. When the clerk looked at her, she said, “Lemon Butter Ring, please.” Except he hadn’t been looking at her. A man, a building regular by the looks of his shirtsleeves, said, “Gimme a Lemon Butter Ring, Jerry,” at the same time. She apologized, and the man chortled and told her to go ahead, and she insisted she oughtn’t to eat an entire butter ring by herself anyway, and he said that yes, she should, Jerry makes them better than anyone.

  The man was flirting but wasn’t overbearing about it, and besides, in this midworld she was capable of anything, and when the man complimented her voice, she pretended to be inured to such fluffery and laughed it off.

  “I’m serious,” he said. “You’ve got a strong, soothing voice. You ooze patience.”

  Beneath her costume of calmness, her heart raced.

  “Ooze,” she said. “A word every woman wants to hear.”

  The man snorted. “Say, who do you work for in this joint?”

  “Oh, no one.”

  “Ah, your husband, then. Whereabouts?”

  “No, not that, either.”

  He snapped his fingers. “Mary Kay. The girls upstairs are wild about it.”

  “I’m sorry. I just came inside to—well, I just came inside.”

  “Is that right? Hey, this may be a little forward, but any chance you’re looking for a job? I work at a little ad firm upstairs, and we’re hunting for a new receptionist. The name’s Bernie. Bernie Clay.”

  Bernie held out his hand. Before Lainie could transfer the Lemon Butter Ring so as to accept it, she understood that everything had changed. Over the following hour, she introduced herself as Elaine, not Lainie, rode alongside Bernie on a gleaming escalator, followed him through a waiting room of trendy red chairs, and sat in his office past which ambled dozens of jolly men and secretaries who threw looks her way. Not hostile, but not friendly, either, as if wondering if the woman in the beehive had what it took.

  Lainie knows she did all of this, but recalls only snippets. What she remembers in full are the rapid calculations she made regarding the schedules of her kids and husband, all of which had to be gauged before countering Bernie’s job offer, in a take-it-or-leave-it tone she couldn’t believe came out of her mouth, with her own part-time proposal—the best she could do, she said.

  She hears the thump of Timmy kicking his seat at the table, hears the tentative clink of Tammy’s spoon against her bowl. Lainie rotates her head to see her reflection in the china-cabinet glass, wondering how beehives caught on in the first place. The secretaries at Klein & Saunders all have sleeker cuts, and though Lainie has only worked with them for a couple of days, she’s begun to imagine what it would feel like if her hair, too, was styled that way.

  30

  ELISA SUSPECTS SHE’LL never again know nights of such marvel and delight. Encounters in F-1 are too wondrous to grasp undividedly. She relives them the best she can, in gasping instants, like movie scenes that belong on the Arcade’s fifty-foot screen instead of being glimpsed on Giles’s tiny TV. How the whole pool burns electric blue the instant she enters the lab. The V-shaped current of the creature gliding underwater to meet her. The eggs as smooth and warm as baby skin. The creature’s head rising from the water, his eyes rarely gold now, but softer, human colors, and twinkling, not flashing. The safety lights’ snug, orange glow, like morning in a manger. The massive, bladed weapon of the creature’s hand, signing “egg” with motions gentle enough to stroke a gosling. Facial expressions she’d forgotten she could make: lip-biting excitement reflected in metal surgical tables, big-eyed anticipation reflected in pool water, heedless grins reflected in the creature’s shining eyes. Even daily drudgeries, the frustrating preliminaries to visiting him, are bathed in his radiance. Morning eggs not plopping into her stovetop pot but capering. No more dragging her feet room to room upon waking: she’s Bojangles in the kitchen, Cagney in the bedroom. Her choice of footwear getting showier by the day, sparkling down the Arcade’s fire escape as if the railing is threaded with tinsel. Dancing across Occam’s freshly mopped floors to watch the colors of her shoes gloss like a rising sun over a lake. Zelda giggling at her vivacious mood and remarking that Elisa’s acting like she did when she met Brewster, a comment Elisa deflects while wondering, half-crazy, if that’s exactly right. The scuffed, cat-fur cardboard of LP covers, the twelve-inch square revealed to be the precise dimension of joy. The creature signing “record” before she’s halfway to the pool, standing near the ledge, torso revealed, his chest scales glittering like a drawer of jewelry. The pinching of dust from the record player needle like the wiping of a tear from her eye. Miles or Frank or Hank or Billie or Patsy or Nina or Nat or Fats or Elvis or Roy or Ray or Buddy or Jerry Lee turned into angelic choirs, their every sung word gravid with a history the creature yearns to understand. His lights, his sensational lights, a symphonic reply to the purple glow of crooners, the blue pulse of rock and roll, the dusky yellow of country, the blinking orange of jazz. The touch of his hand, rare but thrilling, when he plucks eggs from her palm. The one time she dares hold nothing at all, and still he reaches out, draws his claws softly down her wrist, curling his hand into her palm as if enjoying the pretend-egg play, and letting her close her fingers around his, for that instant making the two of them not present and past, not human and beast, but woman and man.

  31

  SEX SIGNALS IN the rain forest were flagrant. Tortured ululations, fanned ruffles, engorged genitals, fulgent colors. Lainie’s signals are just as obvious. The drop of her eyes, the pout of her lip, how she leads with her bosom. It’s a wonder the children don’t crumple their noses at the pheromones as she puts a coat atop her apron and herds them to the bus. She returns and lets the coat drop to the carpet like a movie star. She touches the banister of the stairs with a single arched finger and asks, “Do you have time?” His head is smothered in painkiller, roaring like a tornado heard from a storm cellar, and words are inaccessible. She pivots on her finger and climbs the stairs, hips swinging like the tail feathers of a sashaying macaw.

  Strickland takes his plate to the sink and shakes the omelet into the drain. He flips the switch of the garbage disposal. It’s the first they’ve owned. Blades whir like feasting piranhas. Specks of egg spatter the stainless steel. He turns it off and hears the floorboards overhead squeak and bedsprings creak. He’s been given food, is being offered sex, is suffused in warm morning sun—what else could he want? Yet he disapproves of his wife’s brazenness. He disapproves of himself, too, for the erection pressing against the sink. Seduction games belong in the Amazon, not here in this precise, planned American neighborhood. Why can’t he control himself? Why can’t he control anything?

  He’s upstairs. He can’t say how he got here. Lainie is perched on the edge of the bed. He’s sorry to see that the apron’s coarse pragmatism has been replaced by a nightgown’s sheerness. She sits with shoulders forward, knees together, one leg kicked out to the side. This pose, too, she’s learned from movies. But is the sole of any starlet’s foot so dirty? Strickland continues toward her, upbraiding himself with each step. Accepting a woman’s lure is like taking an enemy’s bait. Lainie’s cunning: She waits, a shrewd shrug persuading a strap of the nightie to slip from her shoulder. He stands before her weak and worthless.

  “I like it here,” she says.

  Discarded clothing hunches on the floor like vermin. Perfume bottles are scattered in insect chaos. The blinds are crooked as if cracked by earthquake. He does not, in fact, like it here, nor does he trust it. Everything in this city is an elaborate feint toward
civilization, a bluff regarding the safe superiority of their species.

  “Baltimore,” she clarifies. “People are nice here. None of that phony southern stuff. The kids like their big backyard. They like the school. The stores are very impressive. And you like your job. I know you don’t think about it in those terms. But a woman can tell. All those late hours. You’re dedicated. I’m sure they appreciate you. You’re going to do great there. Everything is going to be wonderful.”

  His bandaged left hand is in her hand. He can’t say how this happened, either. He hopes it’s the pills. Otherwise it’s his traitorous body flooding with the intoxicants of prospective intercourse. She settles his fingers on the slope of her breast and inhales to expand it, stretching out her neck. He examines the flawless skin and in its place sees the two puffy scars of Elisa Esposito. Elisa, Elaine. The names are so close. He finds himself tracing the imagined scars with his fingers. Lainie kittens her neck into his hand. Strickland has a pang of sorrow for her. She has no idea of the things in his head. His current thought, for example, that he’d rather like to chew her to pieces, just like the hidden piranhas in their sink.

  “Does that hurt?” She sinks his cold, sewn fingers into her hot breast, just above her heart. “Can you feel anything?”