The Tides

by Melanie Tem

  Rolling his head back and forth on the pillow to generate momentum, he braced himself - thought as if he were bracing himself, although of course his body made no such motion - gathered his meager breath under him, and shouted, 'You are drunk!' It came out a whisper, rasping in his throat.

  Jenny brought her face very close to his, and Alex thought she had the aspect nearly of a stranger. Even though the pupils of her eyes were dilated and the muscles around her mouth slackened by drink, there was a purposeful meanness about her that he had never seen before. This was somewhat alarming, but more than anything else, it interested him. It had been quite some time since he'd actually been interested by Jenny, and he did not welcome this complication, for if it persisted it would require a change in the strategy he'd already devised. If he could have drawn back he would have, simply to give himself a little time.

  Jenny closed her eyes and brought her mouth down on his again. Pressing hard, she opened her lips, which opened his; Alex was attentive to the fact that, although he didn't actively resist, he also had not initiated this erotic and aggressive act, and that was a most unusual dynamic between them. He felt her teeth against his, then her tongue in the cavity of his mouth, and, for just a moment,

  He thought he would choke. He managed to spit out, 'Jenny, no,' but she acted as if he hadn't addressed her, and that was unlike her, too. The kiss, the assault, went on and on, and Alex found himself fantasizing that this was some other woman kissing him, a stranger, some other woman fondling him and whispering his name.

  'It was while Faye and I were still friends,' Billie was saying, looking past Marshall in much the same way he was looking past her. 'Or I was still under her spell, not that I was ever really Faye's friend. Not that anybody was. It was before it ever entered my mind that there'd be anything between you and me.' She smiled and shifted her gaze to him to say, fondly, 'Imagine that,' but he didn't acknowledge that there was anything between them now. Hurt, Billie looked away from him again and went on with her story.

  'I had no idea she was pregnant. Nobody did. Well, maybe you did, but nobody else. She didn't show. She kept herself belted and corseted or she wore those loose flowing filmy things she always wore, and you couldn't tell. And you'd certainly never think of Faye with a baby. You'd never think of her as a mother.' Billie gave a short, harsh laugh to show how ludicrous the idea was even now.

  'I hadn't heard from her for a while. That wasn't unusual. The other person always had to take the initiative with Faye, always had to be the one to extend themselves, unless she wanted something. I missed her. I wanted to see her. Don't ask me why. When I went for so long without seeing her, I missed her. Like she was some kind of a drug, not that I know anything about drugs. But I knew about Faye. So I went over to her house.' Billie glanced sideways at her husband. 'Your house.' Marshall was quiet, but his eyes were open. She'd have kept on talking even if he'd fallen asleep. If truth be told, she wished he had, so she wouldn't even have to pretend she was talking to him.

  'When I knocked on the door she didn't answer, but it wasn't locked and it swung open, almost like she'd left it open for me. Faye did that to everybody, remember? She made you think you were special to her and she was thinking about you when she wasn't, not for a second. Anyway, I called her name and then I let myself in. Don't ask me why. I always thought maybe I shouldn't have done that, maybe it was rude, but at the time I really thought she wanted me to. I could hear her in the kitchen - remember how the kitchen was a straight shot from the front door, through the dining room? She was singing, like she did.'

  Marshall, who'd been aware of his wife's waxing and waning voice like waves on the other side of the belljar that enclosed him, suddenly broke free into singing. He heard Faye's singing both in his memory and now, and he closed his eyes and held his breath and let it wash deliciously over him, knowing he would drown.

  Jenny Booth walked around to the head of the bed where Alex couldn't see her. Because he'd taught her not to do that, Alex understood that either she fully intended it to be disrespectful or she was simply being flagrantly, disrespectfully careless. 'I had a few drinks after work, if that's what you mean. Hell, a few beers.'

  'You gave me your word you'd stay dry. That's the only reason I took you back. I should have known.'

  'Well, Jesus Christ, I have reason to drink, don't I? What else have I got in my life?'

  'Your children, for one thing,' he said severely. 'Our children, Jenny.'

  'Oh, please. Don't throw the kids up to me. What do you do for them? You don't even pay child support.'

  'I've explained to you that as long as you're drinking, their money goes into a trust account for them. I will not support your filthy habit, and if you have enough money to drink you obviously don't need me to help you support the children.'

  Jenny snorted. 'You pitiful little bastard. You think you know everything, and you don't know shit, you know that?'

  Her grammar and sentence structure were ludicrous enough almost to make him laugh, but he focused on indignation. 'Get out of here. I will not tolerate a drunk in my presence. I must be very careful'

  'Flat on your back, helpless, can't do a goddamn thing for yourself, can't even take a piss by yourself, and you're telling me to get out? You're a vegetable, Alex, look at yourself!'

  No one had ever said such things to him before, least of all his own wife, though of course people thought them routinely. Alex was hurt and offended, but only mildly; predominantly, he was on the alert. Jenny was different. Jenny, whose salient characteristic he knew to be predictability. Jenny, whom he could count on never to have an original thought in her head. Jenny, utterly malleable and flat.

  She was not herself. It was not just the alcohol, either; sadly, he'd seen her drunk more than a few times before. A peculiar animation had hold of her, a brittle and dangerous playfulness, a self-confidence that alarmed him.

  She was smiling. Her eyes sparkled. She leaned over him in a proprietary way. 'Come on, baby,' she cooed.Baby? 'Let's you and me stop fighting and have ourselves a little fun. Know what I mean?' Her hand dropped full on his penis; amazed, he watched it land, then flex and stretch, like a five-legged insect. Even more astonishing was the fact that, although of course he didn't feel its tickling and massaging, its sheer unexpectedness stirred in him what he'd come to identify as sexual arousal, a most unwelcome response under the present circumstances.

  Alex was silent for a few moments, working to regain his equilibrium and wondering that he had ever lost it. His mind seemed oddly fuzzy, and meticulously he reviewed what he had eaten and drunk in the past twenty-four hours, what medications he had taken. There was the matter of the constipation, a chronic problem more serious this time than usual, perhaps well on its way to an impaction, and the strong dose of castor oil he had taken this morning that ought to have had an effect by now.

  But that hardly seemed sufficient to account for his disturbing mental condition, which he would describe as a mixture of susceptibility and malaise, shot through with erotic desire such as he had not experienced in years. Whatever the cause, he could not allow himself—which was to say, his mind, what he sometimes thought of as his soul—to be compromised.

  At last he said, very calmly, 'Please leave, Jenny. You are not welcome here.'

  But she had collapsed against him and didn't reply. He rasped a few variations of the ineffectual command and then, for the time being, surrendered to circumstances beyond his control, a strategy which he had learned to regard as another way of regaining control.

  Billie said, 'I walked up beside her, and I said, ''Hi, Faye, I hope you don't mind, I was in the neighborhood," or something silly like that, and she said, "Hi, Billie," just like she'd been expecting me although I'm sure no thought of me ever entered her pretty little head, and I saw she was giving a baby a bath in a basin on a red oilcloth. I can still remember how the sun came through the window on that bright red oilcloth.

  'I looked at her and I looked at the baby. I remembe
r thinking what pretty hands she had, covered with water and soapsuds like that. The soapsuds looked like those scarves she always used to like, remember? Pink and lavender and sort of bubbly. The baby was just a tiny little thing—I didn't know a thing about babies but I thought it was probably just a few days old.'

  Billie paused and took a deep breath. 'Then I realized something awful was going on. She was trying to'

  Marshall erupted, 'Shut up! You just shut up! I don't have to listen to your nonsense! I don't even know you! Who do you think you are? You just shut up!' and when she stubbornly tried to finish the story she'd been waiting so long to tell he just talked right over her.

  'My eyebrows itch,' Alex said suddenly, then said it again. 'My eyebrows itch.' It was not a ploy, but it might well have been.

  Jenny stirred. 'What?'

  'Oh, my eyebrows itch!'

  'Your eyebrows itch?'

  Alex nodded frantically and twitched the muscles under his brows as hard as he could, which had no effect on the ferocious itching. He did not believe he had ever before experienced any visceral sensation like this. It was quite as though someone were drawing the tips of long fingernails back and forth across one eyebrow and then the other, skimming the surface of the flesh and the hair follicles, leaving trails of itching he could not reach.

  Without moving her face from his neck, Jenny rummaged in the drawer of the bedside stand and finally found the tube of cream. She squirted some into her palm and spread it across Alex's eyebrows; not watching what she was doing, she came perilously close to the corner of his left eye. As she massaged the cream into the thin dry skin, he relaxed unwillingly but undeniably in her arms. 'Thank you,' he whispered. Jenny brushed the sandy hair out of his eyes. It occurred to him that she might have tickled his eyebrows herself, purposely, to humiliate him, to demonstrate the extent of his dependence on her. But such a theory made little sense; surely he would have noticed. In his situation, it was crucial to resist the temptations of paranoia, which were sometimes considerable.

  She lay on top of him, her breath hot against his neck. He couldn't precisely smell the alcohol from this angle, but he could feel it, adhering to his skin and to the cilia of his lungs where he was forced to breathe it in. She turned her face into his pillow and he realized with horror that she meant to fall asleep in his bed.

  He wanted her to leave. Failing that, he wanted her to make love with him. Recognizing the jeopardy he was in, Alex seemed unable and—far more dismaying—unwilling to extricate himself from it.

  Billie said—directly to her husband this time, bringing her face close to his, 'I never told you. I never told anybody. After a while I didn't know what I saw. But I know now. She was playing with that baby, some awful game, dunking her under that soapy water and then pulling her out and then dunking her under again. I saw her do it twice with my own eyes. At first I figured she was just, you know, toying with her, the way Faye toyed with all of us, being mean, showing she could do anything she wanted to. But now I think she was going to drown her.'

  Marshall's eyes bugged out and his hands reached for her, to hold her or to hurt her or both. But he was tied in his chair and he couldn't reach her unless she made a move to close the distance between them, and she didn't.

  'By the time I gathered my wits about me—but honestly, Marshall, I don't know to this day what I would have done, because this was Faye, you know, and Faye could convince anybody of anything, she could sell ice to the Eskimos, she could make a person believe the sky was yellow when you could see with your own eyes it was blues—he'd picked that baby up out of the sink and handed her to me, naked and crying and wet and covered with all those pretty soap bubbles, and she just walked out of the house. Remember? You came home and found me with Rebecca, me who knew nothing about babies, who'd hardly ever even held one before, and that was the last time we saw Faye. Remember?'

  Marshall bolted out of his chair. Billie shrieked. The strings of the Posey he'd somehow managed to untie floated raggedly behind him like strips of toilet paper stuck to somebody's shoes.

  Jenny's breaths had become shallow, roughened by snores at beginning and end. Her flesh exuded the stench and slime of fermented grain. Alex forced himself to inhale as deep a breath as possible, and wet and pursed his lips to whistle for Abby. As he did so, he caught the sudden strong odor and taste of roses, and a firm pressure came over his mouth, like a hand being laid there to silence him.

  Then, though he did not will it, his body—an ally after all these years of learning to live within the casing of it that others regarded as unresponsive and all but dead—came through with a daring rescue as if of its own volition. Warmth and wetness formed under his hips and between the fronts of Jenny's thighs, and the room reeked with another sharper odor. Knowing at once what it was, and incredulous, Alex nearly laughed.

  Blearily Jenny struggled off the bed and stood away, staring, as a semi-liquid stream of feces cascaded between Alex's legs and feet. The bodily event created no sound, only the yellow-brown stream across bedclothes and flesh and the yellow-brown pool forming on the white floor. 'The castor oil,' Alex breathed. 'It's finally working.'

  The torrent went on for several minutes; there was no way to stop it. It seemed impossible that anyone could hold so much. Alex lay with his eyes closed and his hands limp at his sides, legs spread where Jenny had shoved them in her haste to get away from him and the assault of his excrement. He simply waited on the overflowing bed. When he could, he began to whistle.

  Rebecca and Naomi Murphy were making their way down the long main hallway. Rebecca was thinking unhappily that the spray of gladioli at the central nurses' station gave the place a somber, funereal air - probably had, in fact, been recycled from a funeral, whether or not of a person known to anyone at The Tides—when she heard Alex's whistle and, simultaneously, saw her father coming. Carrying his walker with all four legs well off the floor, leaning forward at an alarming angle and trailing the ties of the restraint, he was virtually running.

  Rebecca started toward him, thinking to catch him when he fell, as he surely would. But he raised his walker like a chair against an attacking beast, and she saw how wild his eyes were, how red and hollow his gaping mouth.

  'Get out of my way! Get the hell out of my way!' he wheezed. 'I have to find my daughter!'

  'Dad,' she started to say, 'Dad, I'm your daughter, I'm Rebecca,' but her assurances of alleged facts obviously contradicted by his own senses only made him more frantic.

  Afraid to frighten him more than he already was—curiously reluctant to intrude into an experience so private; he was her father, after all, and entitled to his own private madness, as she was entitled not to be presented with it—Rebecca looked around for help. Someone was behind him; her first reaction was relief that she wouldn't have to handle this. She received a few quick impressions—a small figure, female, wearing something pale purple and dark gray, moving somehow both rapidly and languidly; someone she knew—but then she looked past him again and saw that no one was there.

  'Excuse me,' she said to Naomi, who had paused in front of the grinning and glassy-eyed Paul, whether out of discomfort or interest Rebecca hadn't yet discerned.

  She had taken her eyes away from her father only for an instant. When she turned back to him now, there seemed to be a pastel aura behind him, lavender and pink and buttercup yellow. Even with the shadows that shot through it, the lowering slant as if of light from a deep hole, it would not have been sinister except that it was clearly in pursuit of her father, who was clearly fleeing.

  Rebecca was well aware of the visual distortions that the shiny waxed white floors, white walls, and fluorescent lights could generate. But this was more organized than that, more definite, and gave the impression of having intent, mischievous if not malevolent. It didn't fade as she stared at it, squinted, shielded her eyes, but swirled and seemed on the brink of coalescing into a recognizable form, which Rebecca, suddenly, did not want to recognize.

  She whir
led, which put her between her father and the shimmering apparition, and saw with relief that her mother was there, sturdy and of considerable bulk, hands on the bars of the walker next to his hands, holding it down on the floor the way it was supposed to be. 'For goodness' sake, Marshall, get ahold of yourself. This is ridiculous,' Billie Emig declared, and Rebecca felt herself relax at her mother's familiar no-nonsense tone. She started to turn back to Naomi Murphy, who had moved close to the wall and placed a hand on the handrail, not exactly huddling but obviously intending to stay out of everyone's way, a strategy at which she was accomplished.

  Then Rebecca's father stiffened and screamed. His voice was hoarse and not very loud, but the sound he made was definitely a scream, and the smallness of it sent shivers through Rebecca. She did not want discourse with her father's demons. Marshall let go of his walker and gave a clumsy little sideways leap, then collapsed.