by Mark Slouka
“Of course not. Regular dressing okay?”
“I said leave it alone!”
“So what did Colby say about—”
“Daaaad!”
“Goddamn it.” Paul Mazzola threw down the red-checkered dishtowel and stepped into the living room. “Tommy?” he called. “Get your butt in here. What the hell’s gotten into them lately?” he said to his wife over his shoulder.
“It’s that new school,” said Alice Mazzola. “I don’t like it.”
After a pause, a little boy, perhaps seven years old, stepped out of the back room. Behind him, his younger sister, her straw-blond hair cut in rough bangs, peered out through a crack in the door, watching to see what would develop. “You too,” said Paul Mazzola. Barefoot, overalled, she stepped out behind her brother.
Paul Mazzola looked at his children. Tommy scratched his left arm and was still. Nina, also known as Peanut, picked her nose.
“I’m sorry,” said Tommy.
“I don’t want to hear you talking like that to your sister, young man,” said Paul Mazzola, sounding suspiciously like his own father.
“Or anyone else,” called Alice, from the kitchen.
“Or anyone else,” said Paul Mazzola. “And as for you, I want you to stop pushing your brother’s buttons. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“Sure?”
“Yes.”
“Then wash your hands and come to dinner.”
Only at rare times did he sense it in its entirety, and even then only briefly, as though a love so great, so overwhelming, could only reveal itself in glimpses, could only be seen, like the sun, through some earthly, filtering medium or screen. Often as not, that medium, Paul Mazzola had noticed, consisted of the hands and ears and ribs and knees and knuckles of his children. Nothing more. Like a bumpkin in a museum, suddenly smitten by art, he could feel quite overwhelmed at times by the skin under their chins or the warm, stale breath of their sleeping, and it helped enormously to live with someone who not only shared his infatuation but who seemed equally incapable of expressing it, who could only stare (at what they’d made, after all) and, struck dumb, shake her head. In short, Paul and Alice Mazzola loved their children the way most of the world’s parents love theirs.
Paul Mazzola, halfway through his chicken and rice, had barely tasted a thing. “So anyway,” he said, punctuating with his fork, “Colby said to talk to this woman—”
“What’s her name again?”
“Fiedler. Stop it. Colby told me, pretty much straight out, that he thought she’d be able to get us the loan. Pull in your chair. Seems he knows this couple in town, Sipka or Sitka or something, who—”
A forkful of rice, en route to Tommy’s mouth, showered into his lap. Alice Mazzola leaned over the table and pushed her son’s plate against his chest. “How many times do I have to tell you to pull your plate closer?”
“I don’t know,” said Tommy.
“Well, I don’t know either.”
“Know what?” said Nina, who hadn’t touched her food.
“What?”
“When I grow up I’m gonna have two girls and zero boys.”
“How do you know?” asked her mother. “I’m going to talk to my belly.”
Paul Mazzola looked at his daughter, at the tangle of straw-blond hair, the stubborn jut of her little chin. She was sitting on her ankles. “Well don’t worry about talking to your belly anytime soon,” he said. “Eat your food, Peanut.” Then, to Tommy: “Is that a fishing lure?”
“Yeah.”
“Do fishing lures belong on the dinner table?”
“No.”
“Why are you messing with fishing lures when you’re supposed to be eating your dinner?”
“I don’t know.”
“Stop.”
Paul Mazzola turned to his wife. “So anyway—”
“Know what?” said Nina.
“What do you say when you interrupt?” said her mother.
“Excuse me.”
Alice Mazzola sighed. “What?”
“Know what Chop-Chop says?” Chop-Chop, an imaginary baby snapping turtle, had only recently made an appearance in the family circle.
“No. What?”
“Chop-Chop says I’m old enough to go swimming.”
“Not without your water wings,” said Paul.
“But Chop-Chop—”
“And never without Mommy or Daddy,” said Alice.
“But Chop-Chop says.” In her eyes, her voice, the downturn of her mouth, the first sign of tears began to appear.
Paul Mazzola put down his knife and fork. “Look, I don’t care what Chop-Chop says. We’ve been through this before.” The eyes began to swim. The mouth set.
“She’s going to cry,” announced Tommy.
“No, I’m not,” yelled his sister.
“Until you learn how to swim, young lady, no going out on the dock without me or Daddy,” said Alice. “And that’s final. You understand?” Silence.
“Nina?” said Paul Mazzola.
Almost imperceptibly, his daughter’s tousled little head nodded ascent. After a moment, Paul Mazzola turned his attention back to his dinner. Outside the window, the lake lay still as water in a pot. On the opposite shore, beneath a sky still bruised from last night’s storm, the trees had begun to blur together. “Think we’ll ever be able to complete a sentence around here?” he asked his wife.
“Can I go to my room?” asked Nina.
Alice looked at her daughter. If stubborness were a more generally recognized talent, she thought, her daughter would have the makings of a prodigy. “I doubt it,” she said to her husband. “Okay,” she said to the thirty-eight-pound little girl with the inverted knuckles and the stickers on her overalls—her breath, her life, the unacknowledged axis of her soul. “Go ahead.”
Twenty minutes later, Paul Mazzola watched the water rinse the bits of rice and chicken off his daughter’s plate, revealing a small wooden house with an apple tree, then a car, then a small, running dog with a red tongue. “At five percent down, I figure we’d be looking at six, six-fifty a month,” he said, scrubbing the plate with a soapy brush. “That new line of fly-fishing stuff has been doin’ pretty well. I figure if I take in a bit of overtime, we could do that.”
“You think we can make the down payment?” said Alice, returning salad dressing and ketchup and leftovers to the refrigerator. “Where’s Tommy?”
“On the veranda, I think.” Paul Mazzola looked through the small wooden window connecting the kitchen to the cabin’s screened-in porch. “He’s doing a puzzle. I think we could,” he continued, after a pause. “We’re almost there already.”
Alice was wiping down the counter. “Let’s talk to that Fiedler woman tomorrow, then. I can drop the kids off at—” Wiping the stove in small, tight circles, Alice Mazzola suddenly stopped. “Hey, Tommy,” she called, and for the rest of his life, Paul Mazzola would recall the precise quality of her voice at that instant, the moment’s sudden metamorphosis into nightmare. “Where’s your sister?”
“She’s with Chop-Chop,” said Tommy.
Though the thought surged through them both at precisely the same time, Paul Mazzola, an athletic man, was three steps behind at the door. Someone was screaming something, the sound high-pitched, terrified, like an animal fighting for its life. He realized it was coming from his own mouth. Ahead of him, the door through which his wife had passed was suddenly open. Unable to breathe, the adrenaline pounding in his chest, Paul Mazzola hurtled around the edge of the cabin just in time to see his wife, fully dressed and without a moment’s hesitation, arc off the end of the dock into the silent water, and before the darkness of the lake crashed up to meet him, he still had time to wonder how, without any sign or mark, she could have known.
Six feet down, reaching through the sedimented dark as surely as though following some new umbilical, Alice Mazzola’s hand closed on her daughter’s forearm, half buried in the soft, annealing mud. There was
no time to think, no time for the heart to seize and cramp. In the next instant, it seemed, she had her daughter’s small head cradled in her hands and her own mouth over hers and was breathing, breathing, pumping the palm-sized rib cage, then breathing again into that incomprehensible stillness, and Paul Mazzola, kneeling beside them, could hear himself saying, over and over again, “Oh Jesus, oh please, oh my god, please, oh god, please, give her back,” and nothing happening and his wife breathing and pumping and breathing again and the darkness coming down and then suddenly the little body shuddered and vomitted up a gush of water smooth with algae and flecked with bits of rice, and as Alice Mazzola gathered up her soaking, heaving daughter in her arms, crying now, the silent spheres—unseen, unheard—adjusted, and momentarily came to balance.
the offering—a sketch
The evening I returned to the lake after thirty years elsewhere, I went out on the canoe, dazed with memories and the babble of ghosts, and caught three bass—sleek, clean fish, vibrant with life—and put them on a metal stringer that rattled against the side like a chain being dragged up some subterranean staircase, thinking to show them off on my return.
Making my way along that familiar shore, past trees still carrying in their flesh the six or eight or tenpenny nails of my childhood swings and forts, I felt strangely lost. I’d been expecting something, I suppose, some small reciprocal recognition, but all my years spent living here, and all my memories of it since, had earned me nothing. No signal, no sign. The blackberry bushes braided like wire over the narrow water to the swamp didn’t loosen at my approach, nor did the turtles, on seeing my canoe, plunge any less desperately off the blackened joints of logs. Everywhere I looked, the water stretched green and thick as soup stock, littered with the wings and legs of mayflies and moths, blown out of the greenery. Back in the thickets, beyond the edge of loosestrife, something moved heavily and was still, waiting for me to pass.
Twenty minutes later, when the landscape suddenly darkened around me, leached of color, I looked up and saw that a black cloud, rimmed with silver, had risen straight overhead. I started for home, the storm growling at my back, and halfway across the lake, turning to the strange hissing behind me, saw the squall line, ruler straight, move across the waters, obliterating first the mirrored line of swamp with its purple fringe, then the doubled, dying birch along the eastern shore, yellow in August, then the very face of the storm itself.
I arrived home late, the rainwater in the bottom of the canoe sloshing up my legs with each stroke of the paddle, and walked up through the dripping woods to the cottage. I left the three bass on their stringer, fanning quietly beneath the surface, the dark-olive line of their backs clearly visible under the calm beneath the shoreline trees. After dinner, the time I’d planned to take the children down to see my catch, the rain started up again and we sat on the screened-in porch listening to it and to the sound of the geese coming in low over the trees, and it wasn’t until the kids were asleep and we’d climbed into bed that I remembered them there, and picking up a flashlight, walked naked through the dark to the dock beneath the trees. I could see even before I pulled up the stringer that he was dead, the whiteness of his belly shining up through the dark (this the big one, the three-pounder that had smashed my lure by a fallen tree, then leaped once, twice, high into the humid air as though hoping to escape to some other, kinder medium), but it wasn’t until I’d hauled the chain so strangely light onto the wood that I saw the marbled, staring eyes, the severed body trailing innards, the pink-white meat exposed along the back. A huge bite from underneath, deep into the gill plates, had nearly cut him off the stringer’s links—he hung in the flashlight’s beam by a few small bones and a pearly strip of flesh—and suddenly quite cold I released the other two, unharmed, then took what was left of him off the chain and threw it far over the water.
It sank into the dark, my penance, my unintended offering, and the moon, bobbing in an open patch of sky, wavered briefly as though touched from below and was still.
