All of a sudden I was so hot that I could not bear my clothes, could hardly bear my own skin. I stood up and shucked off my shorts and T-shirt and panties and bra, and hit the water in a flat, clumsy racing dive. I knew that it was deep here off this bank, dark and murky in its depths, undercutting the bank. I had lain here for hours at a time before, watching for the huge, lazy catfish that hung suspended there sometimes, seemingly trapped in the still, particulate layers of sunlit water before the thick darkness started. The river closed over me with a shock of coldness that stopped my breath for a moment. Our cold May still lived here, in the water.
I opened my eyes underwater. It was like looking through heavy scrim. The water tasted of mud and fish, an oddly clean taste. I could see the layers of sunlight above me, and in them, the steadily pumping legs of the dogs. They had joined me in the water.
I gave a lazy kick and my head broke the surface. The sun was warm on it and on my shoulders, though the cold still claimed the lower part of me. It was a wonderful feeling, both exhilarating and silkily indolent. I was a good swimmer, and my long bones seemed to float me effortlessly. I had won meets in high school, and been a lifeguard two years running at our community pool during my summer vacations from college. I loved the water. It is like a second element to me.
I turned over and did a fast, easy crawl out into the middle, where the current was stronger, and then turned over and churned back to the bank in a back stroke. The dogs were trailing along behind me, their sleek, wet skulls beautiful, their healthy teeth shining in their twin grins. But they were beginning to breathe heavily, and I did not want them to go far from shore. For a time the three of us paddled mindlessly in the pool of sunlight near the bank, lost in pure sensory pleasure. Once or twice I porpoise-dove down into the darkness and came up trailing bubbles, for the sheer joy of it.
“I’m forever blowing bubbles,” I sang to the dogs.
Samson looked over my shoulder and stiffened, treading water. He gave a low, breathy woof. I turned.
One of the rats was swimming toward us, his wet head barely breaking the surface. He swam steadily and strongly, looking directly at me with his glittering eyes. I trod water, too, watching him in disbelief. I had never heard that rats swam unless they had to. Certainly not straight toward people and dogs. Could he be rabid? A waterborne rabid rat. Under the spurt of alarm, I thought of President Jimmy Carter and the swimming rabbit that the press had made so much of. The banzai bunny, I thought they had called it.
“Shoo!” I shouted, splashing water at the rat. “Go on back!”
The dogs headed purposefully for the swimming rat, ears flattened, eyes intently focused.
“Get out of here before you get retrieved,” I shouted, and splashed again, and the rat turned and made smoothly for the bank. He scurried up it and torqued off into the undergrowth. The dogs, bored and tired, abandoned the chase and dropped down on the bank and regarded me alertly, panting. Still I did not come out of the water. It simply felt too good.
“We could start our own theme park, make some bucks,” I told Samson and Delilah around a mouthful of brown-tasting river water. “Forget the dolphins. Welcome to Rat World. Come swim with the rats.”
This struck me as so funny that I began to laugh aloud, and swallowed water, and floundered out and up the bank and flopped naked in the sun beside them, laughing and coughing. I don’t remember ever feeling quite the same kind of suspended well being as I did that afternoon. Only when the big bronze bell that we kept in the kitchen sounded did I remember where I was, and that we were going out to Pom’s fund-raiser in less than two hours and I had just ruined my hair. And that Mommee was in some sort of uproar again. That was what the bell meant. Ina rang it whenever Mommee had a spell and I was not at hand. Mommee would not calm down, these days, for anyone but Pom or me. Usually that meant me.
“Shit,” I said drearily, and climbed to my feet and dragged my dry clothes on over my wet body and started for the house. “This has got to stop.”
I had only recently come to feel this. Or rather, I suppose that I had felt it for some time and had not let the feeling form itself into a thought, much less one I would voice to Pom. But Mommee’s slide into senility had accelerated rapidly this summer, as if controlled somehow by the strange weather, and few days recently had gone by without alarms and tears and craziness, and such increasing disorientation that I dared not, now, leave her alone at all. Once she had wandered out onto the verandah while I was taking a shower and headed for the river, stumping along at a good clip in her flowered duster, her gilt-blond wig riding high and goofily on her head. Ina had caught her more than halfway to the water. Another time she had turned on all the stove burners and pulled out empty saucepans and set them on the burners. Finally the stink of burning metal brought me at a run; I had thought she was asleep in her room. She usually was, at that time of day. The very next day she had taken my gardening shears and gone out into the back garden and cut the heads off every single one of the antique roses I had coaxed lovingly into showy profusion there. I found her strewing the petals from my murdered Love, Honor, and Cherishes on the grass, humming and mumbling. When I cried out in horror she began to wail and made for the river again. I don’t think I was very gentle with her when I caught her and marched her back to her room.
Since then I was beginning to have distinctly mutinous thoughts about Mommee. I was beginning to frame eloquent arguments for live-in help with her or even a good nursing home; I went about muttering them under my breath often, tasting the validity of them. I did not know what it was going to take to sway Pom, but I knew, now, that I needed to try. Even when I cringed with guilt, even when I knew that it was not her fault, that she would not have chosen dementia, I knew it. No one in the house with Mommee had any sort of life. Glynn had taken to staying at school late to work on her painting or in her locked room reading and listening to music when she was at home. She had stopped having her friends over after school almost a year ago. She was as agreeable and industrious as ever, but there was something haunted and strained about her face this summer. It seemed thinner, finer-boned, sharp-edged, almost as if her lovely skull had shrunk. She no longer laughed.
This frightened me thoroughly. She had had such a near brush with anorexia when she was thirteen that I had taken her to our family doctor, and, on his advice, to a therapist who specialized in eating disorders. Because she was so young, and a gymnast to boot, he had been hesitant to say that she had clinical anorexia, but her thinness was truly alarming to me. After six months in therapy she began to eat more and gained some of the weight back, but her delicate exuberance did not really return, and she became a child of silence, secretive and obedient and as severely, chastely loving as an effigy on a medieval tomb.
I had told my fears about her to Pom only a week before, when her classes at Westminster were over and she had not yet left for summer camp. She would not do that until early July. She had spent a great deal of time since school ended with this friend or that, spending nights at their homes. And the new thinness, if it really was that, hurt my heart. It was hard to tell about the thinness. Glynn wore long cotton granny skirts and bulky, loose tops all that spring. But so did all her friends.
“If she’s started that again, I don’t know what we’ll do,” I said to Pom. “She’s sixteen. She’s too old for me to control her meals. She never eats them here anymore, anyway. Darling, it just can’t be good for her to have Mommee here. She never brings anybody home anymore. She never gets any of our attention. She doesn’t come up to talk to me before bed like she used to.”
“She’s growing up,” Pom said. “It’s natural that she’s spending time out with her friends. It’s natural for her to have secrets, to stay in her room by herself. It’s what teenagers do. Don’t you remember those years when we thought Chip and Jeff would never come out again? Besides, she doesn’t look thin to me. She’s tall and slender just like you. She’s beautiful. We’re lucky. Pretty soon it’ll be boys she�
��s out with, and not girls, and then you really will have something to worry about. And you know Mommee adores her, Merritt. Lighten up. She’s a good kid.”
“That’s what worries me,” I said. “She is a good kid. She’s the best kid I’ve ever seen. She’s too good. It’s the good-little-girl thing; it’s the classic pattern for anorexia. And Mommee may have adored her once, but she doesn’t even know who she is half the time now. She had a screaming fit when Glynn went into her room the other day. Pom, listen. We can’t go on like this. I’ve got to have some help with Mommee. It’s Glynn I’m worried about now. If you won’t consider a nursing home, at least let me get someone in—”
He was silent for a long time and then he looked at me, and there was real pain in his blue eyes.
“What’s changed?” he said. “Why is it that you could handle all this last year, or last month, and now you can’t? You have Ina three days a week, and you can have her full time any time you want her. The boys are long gone. Glynn will be at camp most of the summer, and she’s going to visit that friend of hers in Highlands for the rest of it. What do you want to do that you can’t do now? Mommee’s just a frail, sick little old lady. How much longer can she live? I just need you right now. It won’t be too long before she’s gone and you’ll have all the time in the world.”
I had no reply. Put that way he was right. It did not seem that Mommee could last much longer; the fury of the dementia seemed to be eating her alive. And it had been I who had suggested she come to us when she was unable to stay in her house any longer. His pain at the thought of a nursing home had been too much for me to bear. But she had not been so bad then, and Glynn had seemed so much better…
I answered him now, though, stamping along the path toward the house and the clamoring of the bell. I did not speak the words aloud, but they were full and whole in my mind.
What do I want to do? Who knows what I want to do? Maybe I want to go back to work and own my own agency and win Clios. Maybe I want to take off with Crisscross and go to Cancún. Maybe I want to raise Siamese cats, or buy a llama. Or go sit on a mountaintop in India and find myself. I want to take one quiet pee that Mommee doesn’t shriek for me. I want to come into the house with a load of groceries and not have Ina stalk around after me telling me what the old lady did wrong that day. I want to walk into my own guest bathroom and not smell shitty adult diapers. I want my daughter to come home after school and bring her friends like she used to do. I want her to stop drifting around like a ghost; I want her to stop studying and get into some adolescent mischief. I want to hear her laugh. Of course she’s a good, responsible child, but she’s also a lovely young woman and my best friend when she’s not under siege, and I want her back. I want you to come home and make love to me before dinner like you used to, without having Mommee scrabbling and kicking at the door. Do you even realize that you hardly ever eat dinner with us anymore? Do you think I just love these intimate, stimulating little dinners alone with Mommee? You try wiping stringbean purée off her chin after every bite. When you say, “We take care of our own,” you mean me, Bubba.
The bell accelerated its angry summons and stopped, and I broke into a lope and hit the searing-hot flagstones of the verandah and leaped like a gazelle over them into the dim, cool kitchen. It was empty, but I could hear voices from the living room, Mommee’s the high, thin wail of a scolded child, Ina’s the exaggerated crispness of an exasperated adult. The air of the empty kitchen still rang with the percussion of the bell.
Halfway into town, stuck in the malodorous traffic that seemed forever clotted on the old ferry roads around the river, Pom noticed my hair.
“What did you do to it?” he said, studying me through his wire-rimmed sunglasses. “You don’t look like yourself. It’s nice, though. Exotic.”
“Tondelayo, that’s me,” I said.
What I had done to it, after taking the scissors away from Mommee before she decimated the other drapes in her room and getting her into a bath and coaxing one of her tranquilizers down her and waiting until she nodded off, was to pull the wild tangle of air-dried frizz straight back behind my ears and slick it down with so much gel that it looked shellacked. Then I coiled it swiftly into a high bun and gelled that, too. I skinned into a white linen halter and long black wrap skirt with a slit in it, cinched a red patent belt around my waist, added red high-heeled sandals that I had worn once and vowed never to wear again, and slashed bloodred lipstick over my mouth. Hearing the crunch of Pom’s Cherokee on the driveway and the light, waspish tap of its horn, I grabbed long gold earrings and a massive gold bangle bracelet he had given me last Christmas and flew down the stairs without my bag, any makeup but the lipstick, or a wrap. On my way through the kitchen I grabbed his blue blazer, which was hanging from the pot rack still swathed in dry cleaner’s wrap, and the striped tie he had requested. On my teetering way down the verandah steps I impulsively snatched a huge red hibiscus blossom from the bush beside the walk and stuck it into my hair behind my ear. I knew the gel would hold it like superglue. Cookie, the pretty coffee-skinned nurse from the clinic whom Pom had inveigled into staying with Mommee because her regular sitter’s car wouldn’t start, grinned at me and said, “Uh-huh!” as we passed.
“Uh-huh yourself,” I grinned back. I liked the tough, flirtatious Cookie. “Call me if she gets out of hand. We’re at the Driving Club.”
“That’ll be the day, honey,” she said. “I took a knife away from a two-hundred-pound crackhead today. You mama-in-law gon’ look like Mother Teresa after that.”
“You wish. See you before midnight. Got your jammies?”
She held up a bulging tote and I laughed and got into the Cherokee and laid the blazer and tie on the backseat and Pom gunned out of the driveway, spurting gravel. As usual, he was late to his own party.
As we turned into the driveway of the Driving Club he looked over to study me again.
“I feel like I’ve run off with another woman,” he said.
“And how does that feel? Does it do things for you?”
“It could. It definitely could. You look Eurasian, or something. Like that woman in the William Holden movie. Is it true what they say about Oriental women?”
“There’s only one way to find out,” I said, and leered.
Just before we stopped the car under the portico, I pulled down the sun visor mirror and looked at myself. I had hardly even glanced at my reflection before I left the house. A strange, carved face looked back at me. The gel had lacquered my streaked brown hair to a shining tortoise shell color, and without the softening bangs that I had always considered necessary for an angular face my sharp cheek and brow bones and tilted nose stood out as in bas relief. Without makeup the coppery freckles ran together over my cheeks and the bridge of my nose, making me look as though I had been long in the sun, or did indeed have the golden blood of the East in my veins. The red lipstick and the hibiscus blossom looked barbaric. I smiled theatrically. My teeth flashed stark white in my face.
When I got out of the car I felt the reckless blood of that alien half-caste warm my face and chest. For a moment I wanted to prowl, to stalk like a jungle cat, to growl low in my throat. I took an experimental prowling step and the high red heels wobbled so that I stumbled.
“You okay, Mrs. Fowler?” said Clem, who parked cars. He reached out to steady me.
“I thought you said you’d never wear those shoes again,” Pom said.
“I said a lot of things,” I sighed, abandoning Tondelayo and tripping cautiously into the Driving Club on Pom’s arm.
This was perhaps the ninth or tenth clinic gala we had attended. Both of us could predict the course of the evening down to the air kisses on the way in and the slightly tipsy mouth ones on the way out. Compared to some of the other fund-raisers in town, this one was simple, even modest. Pom did not think the huge flowered and gilded and costumed balls and galas that benefited most of the city’s good causes were seemly for a charity clinic, and he had the aging sixties’
radical’s contempt for privileged pleasure and play in the name of underprivileged pain. So he would allow seated dinners for perhaps a hundred couples at this club or that, or a private home, with simple floral centerpieces and candles and perhaps a combo for dancing afterward, but that was all. In the beginning he had not even allowed that, insisting that the fund-raiser be catered drinks and a few peanuts and pretzels at the clinic. I had finally disabused him of that.
“You’re asking some of the richest and most influential people in Atlanta and the South to part with a very considerable amount of money,” I said. “You’ve got to give them more than bad scotch and peanuts down in the projects. What’s next, pork rinds at Juvenile Hall? You can show them what the clinic is all about another way; have slides at the party or tours beforehand, or buses with drinks and hors d’oeuvres on board, or something. I don’t mean you’ve got to give the auxiliary free rein; I agree, you’d end up with a bacchanalia or worse if Betty Burton had her way. But at least a good club or a pretty home, and live music, and really good food.”
He had considered my words, and when the aforementioned Betty Burton, who was that year’s auxiliary president, told him in exasperation that several of last year’s attending wives had told her that they had been accosted by homeless persons on their way into the clinic and they would never go down into that part of town again, he capitulated.
“Okay,” he said. “All right. All those spoiled ex-debs ought to have to work down there, or better yet, spend a week or two in the shelters. But have at it. Just don’t let Betty and her merry band do anything silly. The first Night in the Seraglio or Gone With the Wind hoo haw will be the last.”
And because Pom was popular with his peers and considered something of an urban saint by the Atlanta news media, the clinic dinner parties were a great success. Only a hundred couples came, admittedly, but they were, as Betty burbled, the select hundred couples in the city. I have always thought that the clinic dinners were popular because the gilded hundred were weary in the extreme of Nights in the Seraglio, and grateful to sit down and listen to the music they had been young to, and chat with the friends they had grown up with, and drink good liquor and eat good food and go home early.
Fault Lines Page 6
