by Karen Brown
Now, outside of the boat’s hull a car horn sounded, and then, clearly, one of Joseph’s friends called out, his voice carrying around the side of the house from the driveway. Annie remembered her car was still there, that her keys were in her jacket pocket. At the little house Annie and her husband rented, miles of narrow-ribboned, snow-covered asphalt away, her infant daughter cried, her tiny face red, her small hands balled at the end of her gown’s sleeves. She did not cry for Annie, or for anything she could understand, but for the sake of crying, an urge. Annie read that in a book she’d been given by one of her high school friends at the baby shower her mother hosted. All of the cheerleaders and twirlers had sat in a circle, while Annie in her bulky body tore pastel-colored paper from gifts she could not, at the time, fathom having a need for.
Joseph took one of her hands in his, carefully. “I don’t think we can die in a yacht in a snowstorm,” he said, his voice low.
Through the portholes the sky was gray with burden, and out of it the snow tumbled, delicate and dizzying. Annie heard his friend call out again, the voice closer now, rounding the side of the house, and she looked at Joseph, waiting for him to respond. He raised a finger to her lips. He slid his hand down around her neck, and pressed his thumb to the base of her throat. The things she hadn’t said swelled up now, under the pressure of his thumb. She leaned forward until their mouths touched, the words readying themselves, graceful as breath.
on the lake
It was spring when his grandmother died, the funeral nearly an hour’s drive in the light rain, with trees budding bright against their wet black limbs all along Route 44, through Avon, Canton, and New Hartford, and Paul insisting we listen to Clapton, and his sister telling childhood stories of their father, who died five years before in a murder-suicide involving his second wife. I wore a gray wool skirt and the light rain beaded up on the front of it. The waistband was too tight, and I worried about being pregnant, alternately believing and disbelieving it. We went first to the funeral home, where I sat in a semicircle of folding chairs with his family, and people came and cried on me. My hands were taken and enfolded in the small, dry, withered hands of old women, the fleshy hands of middle-aged men, who leaned their faces close to mine, showing me their moles, and cracked lips. “You poor, poor thing,” they said. I didn’t know any of them, and their tears wet the shoulder of my blouse, the lank strands of my hair. I had only met Paul’s grandmother once, when he took me to her house for dinner, and she sat tired and depleted in a chair at the table, watching everyone eat the food she’d spent all day preparing—steaming plates of gnocchi alla sorrentina. I remembered her gray hair looking like she set it the night before in pink foam rollers, her quick, assessing eyes, her ashen face. Lying out she looked almost the same, save for the eyes, which were closed, and unable to judge me where I stood, young and alive, peering into her casket. Hers was the first dead body I ever saw.
Paul knew I didn’t want to go, that I did it for him. I made him understand this the day before in his basement bedroom. It had already begun to rain and the new spring grass grew against the window and gave the room a greenish tinge. He had asked me to come over on my lunch break to have sex. He didn’t say as much, but that was all we did together at the time, and I didn’t mind the sex simply because I understood he wanted it with me, and no one else. There was something to that, I thought. I took my clothes off and folded each piece and set everything on the top of his bureau. I stood on the floor’s cold cement. He lay on the bed watching me.
“I can’t really see it,” he said. He looked at my stomach, his eyes squinched.
I put both of my hands there. “It would only be two months.”
I had already told him that I wouldn’t have it, but every day or so he tried to change my mind. I found this endearing. He was still not working from his motorcycle accident and he spent most of his day on painkillers in his basement room, watching television. People came by in the evenings to visit him. I don’t think he ever really got dressed. He was able to climb the stairs, though, for food, and if he’d backed off the Demerol he might have even been able to work at something, but he knew that, and it made this stretched-out period of recuperation that much more heady. We were both eighteen. His sister, Lena, was two years older, and her room was next door to Paul’s, just a small bed pushed up under the basement stairs. She had gotten married after high school and then divorced. Paul’s mother told them both they had to sleep in the basement, maybe as a kind of punishment for not making good choices, but I thought it was more likely for not being the kind of children she’d always wanted.
Paul was still very boyish. He grinned a lot and cracked jokes, and people thought he was funny. When I first met him I was a senior, and before we’d had sex we’d stay out all night in his car, just listening to the radio and reading the newspaper under the dim map light. Sometimes, I’d do my homework. We both had that in common, a resistance to going home. Now, he stared at me with heavy-lidded eyes.
“I’m not staying late today,” I warned him. I jumped onto the bed and slid on top of him, careful of his left leg. His hands stayed by his sides. He made a kind of grunt and smiled.
“You got the day off tomorrow, right?” he asked.
I didn’t answer. I buried my face against his shoulder. His hands lay inert on the bedcover. “You’re going to do something, right?” I asked him. He took his time with his hands, the fingers moving in slow motion up the backs of my legs and down again.
“I can’t go without you,” he said.
“I’ve never been to a funeral,” I told him.
“What are you afraid of?” he said. He laughed then, and I felt his chest move up and down. “There’s a party after. We’ll see Frank and everyone.”
The night I met his grandmother we went out with Paul’s cousins to someone’s house on Highland Lake, where there was a lot of shag carpeting and a low ceiling and a point in the night where I stopped remembering anything.
“You had fun that night,” he said.
“That was different,” I told him. I wanted to say there wasn’t a body involved, but I didn’t. It was the body, really, that frightened me. But he thought I meant the baby.
He was quiet then. His hands fell away.
“You’re my girlfriend,” he said.
And I guessed I was. I thought how it was almost nice, to belong to someone else. I didn’t know if I loved him, but I had found I could pretend I did, easily, and even enjoy my own pretending. I worked in an office complex down the street, and I almost liked that, too—showing up each day at a regular time, wearing a skirt and blouse and nice shoes. I sensed, though, even then, that none of this would last, that inside of me existed a moment, timed and inevitable, when I would abandon all of it.
The funeral was in St. Joseph’s Church, and the burial in the old cemetery behind it on the hill. The whole thing ended at three o’clock, when the rain stopped and was replaced with a sodden, muggy thickness. The town, a small one surrounding the lake, reached its peak years ago in the manufacture of clock parts. Unlike nearby Riverton, where the Hitchcock Chair Factory was, it was now tired and drained of any real industry. The houses, built along steeply graded roads, seemed forlorn, with their peaked roofs, and mailboxes leaning over the asphalt, and TV antennas dripping and glistening in the weak spring sunlight. I was hot in my skirt. In the church I’d held on to my Mass card so tightly it had gotten damp. I had forgotten when to kneel and stand. I felt vacant and unforgiven after, though I’d said my own confession and penance sitting there in the pew. I had been too long sealed off in Paul’s subterranean room.
During the service Lena’s mascara ran. Now, she sniffled behind the wheel of the car. Paul never cried. He kept his face down, and there were creases between his eyes, as if he pinched everything in. It was seductive, all of this sorrow. I had never felt so joined in mutual sadness. Even Clapton sang mournfully from the car stereo.
“Holy shit, turn that off already,” Lena shriek
ed. She was a tiny woman with wild dark hair. Paul looked entirely different, pale, freckled, and blue-eyed. His mother told me, once, as we drank wine out by her newly constructed concrete pool, that when they brought Paul to her as a newborn she’d insisted he wasn’t hers. She sipped her wine and laughed. Her name was Lisanne. Her face was small, surrounded by the same wild hair as her daughter. I didn’t tell her that except for the hair and the coloring she and Paul looked exactly alike. This was just after the accident last summer, when they thought he wouldn’t make it, and then he did. Paul was still in the hospital. She invited me to her house for dinner, and we sat outside by her pool, the grass newly planted around its perimeter, and pots of pansies nodding and fluttering. I had never had wine with an adult before. Usually, we stole bottles from our parents and drank them out in the woods, passing the bottle back and forth. That evening, we drank from Lisanne’s old wedding crystal. It was the glasses that prompted her to reminisce about Paul’s father. She divorced him when Paul was a toddler. Back then, she told me, it wasn’t very acceptable.
“I had to move in with my mother,” she said. “I was about your age, with these two kids. But anything was better than the alternative.”
She shook her head, slowly, from side to side. I could tell she’d had a lot to drink, but I liked her, and it only made her nicer, more accessible. She told me how Paul’s father used to come home at night and wake her up and accuse her of sleeping with someone else.
“And the look on his face,” she said. She widened her eyes. “If I wore lipstick, he asked me who I was wearing it for. He was a crazy man. Well, obviously. Thank God I left when I did.”
I didn’t ask many questions then. It was probably a failing of mine, this refusal to inquire further. She had assumed I knew the story, but of course at the time I did not. Paul never talked about his father. He did let me take a sport coat, a wide-wale green corduroy I found in his basement closet, which I wore that whole fall and winter, but I never asked whom it belonged to. And then one night when Paul had fallen asleep I heard Lena come in, and I went out to sit with her on her bed. Sometimes she’d mentioned things, like her half brother, who was six years old, and his aunt and uncle, who were raising him now, and I’d wonder. That night she had come from spending the day with them and she was subdued and tired from the drive, but she wanted to talk, she said, so I sat there on the edge of her bed. It was winter, and the furnace kept kicking on. In the little laundry room I could see Lisanne’s bras and panties swaying on a line.
“I just don’t know how he could do it,” she said. She looked up at me, her hair spread out on her pillow. “He was my father, and I still can’t believe it.”
I smiled, weakly, hoping to seem comforting.
“He doesn’t ever talk about it, does he?” she asked me, her eyes moving to Paul’s closed bedroom door. I shook my head, slowly, realizing she would now tell me the story. Some things I’d rather not have known, and this was one of them.
As we drove to Paul and Lena’s grandmother’s house, up and down the little paved hills toward the lake, Lena pointed out the house where her father last lived, tapping her nail on the window glass as we passed, and it was one of the older houses, with a front porch where a family might have sat on summer evenings and listened to the crickets, or talked about their day at work, or watched spring rain dampen and brighten their lawn, and yet all I could imagine was some blood-spattered wood-paneled family room, with lamps overturned onto predictable shag carpeting, and a one-year-old asleep in a back bedroom.
The grandmother’s house, I remembered, was a cottage on stilts. There’d been a dock, and a boat tied up. Their grandfather had died years before. Everyone assumed the house would be willed to the daughter, their aunt, who lived nearby in town. But the news had come, before the funeral, that the grandmother had wanted the house to go to her son, and after his death, one she always had trouble accepting, she had given it to the next male descendant. So, the house went to Paul. No one seemed to be angry, or question it.
“Oh, the house, the house,” they all said, patting him on the back. Their eyes were wet, their noses red. Paul shrugged. What did he want with his dead grandmother’s house? he said in the car. Lena hit him when he said it, and he cringed.
“Daddy grew up in that house,” she said.
Paul had the window down and he lit a cigarette, and the ash blew into the backseat onto my lap. Normally, he was only quiet when he couldn’t think of something funny to say. I saw him slump toward the passenger door, and he rode that way until we reached the house, a tiny place painted dark green with white trim. It had a small scraggly hedge and a gravel driveway that curved through a meadow of sorts that used to be the front lawn, blooming with tiny violet and white flowers. Two of the shutters were missing. The front door was propped open and the dark interior was lit yellow from a living room lamp. Overhead the sky was white with clouds. “This is a cute house,” I said, and both of them ignored me. Around us came the sound of car doors closing, one after the other.
We filed inside with everyone else. It smelled of basil and wet metal window screens and, faintly, of closed-off cedar closets. Others had already arrived, and they pushed in close, and some, including Paul and I, squeezed past to spill out onto the deck in back and the dock that extended over the lake, its surface glassy and black. Near the muddy shore little yellow buttercups bloomed in the grasses. Paul looked out over the water. He wore his heavy-framed sunglasses and smoked another cigarette. I knew he’d taken more than his usual dose of pills, that he had brought extra in a baggie in his pants pocket. He was too quiet, too removed. We sat down onto a sofa glider, its vinyl cushion covered with a mildewed print of flowers. Paul put his arm across my shoulders and leaned into my blouse. My legs were damp under my wool skirt. I felt the wearying ache in my abdomen that had lately begun to make me uncomfortable, one I could not attribute to the tight skirt. The idea of a baby stretching out its forming limbs was troubling, and I tried my hardest not to imagine it. Lena flitted from group to group, enveloped by the men’s shirtsleeves, the women’s long, veiny arms and jangling bracelets. We sat apart from everyone, pushing the sofa glider back and forth on its runners, making a rusty squeak.
Occasionally Lena brought someone over to us, and Paul would glance up and nod and listen to their reverie about how his grandfather was the first on the lake to purchase lightning rods for the house, or how his grandmother knew all the words to every song of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s My Fair Lady. One of the aunts brought us vodka tonics with small pieces of floating limes. I sipped mine, the glass smelling of the aging kitchen shelf paper. Then Lena came back around with another old man on her arm.
“This is Mr. Capra,” she said. “The neighbor.”
The man, balding, wearing an ill-fitting brown suit, began his story. I felt Paul’s inward groan.
“Every Friday after school your father would mow the lawn down short as could be for the bocce games. He’d wear a white T-shirt and his school slacks, a slim, good-looking boy.”
Mr. Capra’s drink sloshed a little as he spoke. Lena grinned, holding his arm.
“Everyone from the neighborhood played,” she said.
“Oh, it was a variety of people,” the man continued. “Your father was the champ.”
Paul’s smile was too wide. “Oh, yessiree,” he said.
I saw the man’s wistful expression darken. Lena gave Paul a sharp glance and led Mr. Capra away. I got up to use the bathroom and when I got back Paul handed me my glass. “Drink up,” he said. He slumped over and closed his eyes. I nudged him with my elbow.
“Don’t go to sleep.”
The sun set, a branching of light bands across the black water. I drank my drink. The air was still thick and buzzing now with newborn flies. No one seemed to pay any attention to me, and then a man approached, one I’d heard everyone call Sammy, whose shirt, marked with sweat, seemed unbearably tight across his chest.
“What do you want to eat, sweethear
t?” he asked me. He squatted down in front of me. His eyes were earnest and sweet. He couldn’t convince me to eat anything. I wasn’t feeling well, I said. Paul had fallen asleep beside me and no one seemed to think it strange. Sammy shifted his weight to stand. He put one of his big hands on my knee, under the hem of my skirt, and squeezed it, and I couldn’t tell if he was still kind, or if there was something else he wanted me to understand. He stepped away, and I watched his glowing shirt move through the dusk into the house. I shoved Paul off my shoulder, and he sat upright. His eyes remained closed.
“Where’d you go?” he asked. The words slurred.
“I want to change my clothes,” I told him. “I’m sweaty.”
He stood up then, his bad leg buckling, and took my hand, and we threaded our way back inside, through the tiny living room crowded with people, photos of the dead relatives, crocheted doilies, and overflowing ceramic ashtrays, through the kitchen with its table of foil-covered dishes, to a bedroom at the back of the house. The cool darkness smelled of lilac and talcum. The bed had a satiny green cover. Paul opened the bureau drawers, one at a time, and sorted through the contents.
“I’m not wearing your grandmother’s clothes,” I said.
On the wall hung a crucifix, and stuck into the rim of the bureau mirror were a dozen Mass cards, all with the same flowery script, and various aspects of Jesus’s face. “Who will wear them?” he asked me. “My aunt is too fat.”
He held up a pair of khaki Bermuda shorts. “We’ll just give this stuff away,” he said. “And then you can buy it for a quarter at the Goodwill store.” He tossed the shorts onto the bed and dug around some more until he found a pink souvenir T-shirt from Hawaii.
“Hey,” he said. “I gave this to her.”
We both looked at the T-shirt, creased from its long stay in the drawer.
