by Abby Frucht
And does not come up.
And still does not come up.
Stevie tosses a rock in the water, while at the center of the reservoir the person in the inner tube has spun slowly around and now lies with her head to the north, her toes to the south.
She’s pregnant, I see now, in a bright yellow swimsuit. Her bathing cap is spectacular; white with giant yellow anemones.
Still Daniel has not come up.
I know the terrain; there’s the glass studded, rocky bottom, and then a ring, perhaps twenty feet wide, of aquatic plants whose soft leafy tops just barely break the surface of the water, and then, in the center, the deep black water that is the bull’s eye that everyone swims for, where the mud underfoot is silty, fine, and cool.
I scan the leaf-pocked surface of the weedy zone for signs of turbulence. None. And no Daniel. Perhaps he cut his foot on a shard of glass, sat down suddenly on a rock on the other side of some bushes, where I’ll see him if I walk to the edge of the water.
I take a look.
There’s the rock, no Daniel, just a beer bottle browning itself in the sun.
“Oh, no,” I say sharply, aloud, recalling suddenly one of the plans we had made-to ride our bicycles to Bloomingham, stop at the God’s eye store, buy some sticks of beef jerky and eat them for dinner on the bank of the river underneath the rusting trestle. For dessert we’d buy ice cream sandwiches, take them back to the same spot and sit until sunset. We’ll do it tomorrow, I think, and call Stevie to my lap to tell him about it. He has never had an ice cream sandwich before. He wants one now. He begins to cry. I count the fingers of one of his hands, then make a spider that crawls up his arm. He grins, and we invent a game with pebbles and an old, sodden shoe. Perhaps Daniel is surfacing only for brief, quick breaths before diving back under. Perhaps he’s floating on his back with just his nose in the air.
Perhaps he’s found a breathing straw.
Perhaps his stroke blends invisibly with the stroke of the swimming shadows.
No shadows, however.
The water dances with sparks. When I close my eyes, black spots throb under the lids in a sea of orange, and when I open them again, the pregnant woman on the inner tube has spun full circle, her head to the south, her toes dangling to the north.
“Oh, no,” I say again. “Oh, no. Oh, no,” and pull Stevie to me and hold him close.
“Where’s Daddy?” he asks. No words, just his usual squeal.
“Right here,” answers Daniel,
He is lying on our blanket, his wet head at rest on the box of mint toothpicks, the rest of him naked and glistening. His eyes have that stern gaze they get when he knows he should be diplomatic.
“There are a couple of things I have a feeling you might be interested in knowing about,” my scientist begins.
“No,” I say with fury, “there are no things I have a feeling I might be interested in knowing about.”
With this I make my way around the bushes at the water’s edge and take a seat on a rock from where I can’t see him and he can’t see me. I can’t remember having ever been angry at Daniel before.
Exasperated, yes.
Frustrated, yes.
Impatient, yes.
Defiant, yes.
But angry?
No.
Never in so married a fashion.
How domestic it feels. I could be sitting in our kitchen, gazing through the window at the blue jay in the pine tree while listening to the clatter of Daniel’s fingers on the keys of his computer, every flurry of the keys making me angrier and angrier just because he’s who he is, just because he is my husband, just because I love him and am stuck with him forever-just as now his restful silence on the other side of the bushes adds new dimension to this unfamiliar emotion, feeds it and feeds it, until I can’t move a muscle, until I can’t so much as blink but just stare at the woman in the inner tube who continues to spin, but languidly now as if to linger over each new point of the compass. Round-bellied, she is staring at the sky. Perhaps she is angry at her husband, too. I stare past her at the far, rocky bank of the reservoir until she sits up straight and starts waving at me. She appears to be waving goodbye. The yellow flower on her swim cap bobs like a cheerleader’s pom-pom, and at once I know what Daniel wanted to tell me.
THE WATER is silky and warm, and the satin dress billows as I walk gingerly among bottle shards and pop tops to the edge of the ring of water weeds. There I float on my back and am carried along as if on gentle, upraised fingers, the tops of the plants just teasing the small of my back.
And then what I’ll ask Emily when I reach her, although she won’t remember right away where it was we left off, on that pinnacle of desire we were talking about. Here in the water she won’t smell so familiarly of jasmine, but of the wedge of lemon perched on the rim of the drink floating beside her in its own miniature inner tube.
I didn’t jump off it, if that’s what you mean, she might answer after a moment. In fact I never came down at all, really. I settled into the desire as it settled into me. It’s all right, you just have to get used to it. Don’t tamper with it, and never let it get away, and don’t overindulge. Just live with your desire, tend it, make a place for it, the way they used to have to carry their fires around. Keep it hot, keep it flaming, but don’t get burned. Eventually I went home to Buzzy. Next day I was pregnant.
I’m pregnant, too, I’ll tell her.
She’ll lift her drink in a gesture of cheers, tell me she already knows, offer a sip from the curlicue straw. The straw is blue tinted glass and seems to have its own fruity, cool flavor.
I didn’t know I was pregnant until Daniel told me, I’ll tell her. I mean, until he was going to tell me. I mean, until after he was going to tell me but he didn’t. He didn’t tell me it was you out here, either. I didn’t let him. I didn’t know that I was pregnant until I saw that it was you. I mean, I didn’t know that I knew it. I thought it was licorice. Dr. Kirshner said–
The ring of water weeds has ended; the very center of the reservoir is deep and black, as inviting as a mirror. With the palms of both hand I touch the silt at the bottom, somersault, open my eyes, look up through dark water at the heavy round shape of the inner tube as I glide underneath it, holding on for as long as I can just to anticipate the sound of Emily’s voice.
But having broken through the surface of the water I find I’ve come up short; blinking water from my eyes I see not Emily in her bathing cap but my son and husband on their blanket in the distance, playing with stones and the ancient shoe.
How small they appear, how isolated, waiting patiently for me.
And when I’ve turned toward the inner tube, Emily isn’t on it. In her place is Arnie Junior, clicking his tongue, his massive beak open and raised toward the sky. At the base of his throat, a single red feather curls away from the others, quivering in the air. His black belly gleams. Around the pupils of his eyes are two bright, narrow rings of the purest yellow.
When he cocks his head, I can see that his beak is as thin-walled, as translucent, as a shell. He’s not looking at me, but I know that he knows I am here.
“Hello, Arnie Junior,” I say.
Arnie Junior bows.
Just next to the inner tube floats the drink in a tall glass, placidly bobbing. There’s no curlicue straw, but a stirrer in the shape of a palm tree. I lift the glass, take a sip. It’s beer and lemonade, a cooling-off drink, only this one is warm, the beer nearly flat, the lemonade cooked to a syrup. Arnie Junior’s head swivels. The tongue-clicking intensifies, reaches a high pitch, purrs, then slows, lapses, stops altogether. Arnie Junior yawns, but the yawn makes no sound. I balance the drink in place on its miniature inner tube, and give it a gentle push. It drifts past like a boat. I’m hungry and cold. Daniel has stood on the blanket and has started dressing Stevie; first the red T-shirt, then the gym shorts, then the hat.
“How long are you going to stay here?” I ask Arnie Junior, meaning not the town and not the reservoir but
the inner tube itself. Two-footed, he hops along on the circumference.
Twice he goes round.
Three times.
Four.
Then he stops, reaching with his beak for the strap of my dress. He takes a seed pearl in his beak, and bites. The two halves of the strap slip off of my shoulder.
Then he bites the other side.
Daniel, on shore, is dressing himself; first the shorts, then the sneakers, then the shirt. I imagine the smell of his skin underneath it, musky and warm, and his nipples, taut from the breeze, just now beginning to soften. Dressed, he and Stevie step just to the edge of the water. I know he is squinting, and he knows I am squinting at him. We both know we are formulating another plan. Arnie Junior sharpens his beak, scraping it this way and that on the rim of the floating glass. With the point of the beak he reaches into the glass to withdraw a wedge of lemon. When I swim back to shore, Daniel will dry me with the corners of the blanket, then dress me in its folds, wrapping them over my new, round belly.
I’ll step into my thongs, take Stevie by one hand, Daniel by the other.
Under his arm, Daniel will carry the toothpick box.
Such is our plan.
How simple it is. How enticing. We both know that the other is smiling, having come up with it.
