Open Water

by Maria Flook

  Rennie said, “Just the worst.”

  “They call it a ‘queer sea,’ when it gets like that,” Willis said. “Lots of freakers. One right after another.”

  Rennie saw that Willis thought it was colorful. It was as good as a campfire story. She didn’t mind his enthusiasm; it was in homage to Bill Hopkins.

  Willis said, “Captain Alberelli tells how the night came on like a ‘blotter,’ it sucked up any shore lights. They were in a blackout, taking some devastating hits. Waves from nowhere. The Teresa Eve was getting the same. The seas were eight to ten feet, but it was a head tide, and the sea was building a good top off of that. They had towed five hundred bushel at least, maybe seven hundred—”

  Rennie couldn’t keep quiet and said, “That was just too many tons of scallops.” She could never erase her picture of those scallops. All colors—iris, cinnabar, agate, rose-pink. Layers of little calcite fans spilled in a wide apron around the hull. A team took Polaroid photographs of the wreck. She was sitting in the middle of their haul, like a house cat on a big calico rug.

  “Those screams,” Willis said. “The Karen and Marcy steamed in and slowed up, just six knots or so, just to listen. They heard cries—”

  “It might have been one voice. Just one.”

  “They couldn’t agree on it. Some of the crew said there was more than one, but then it just stopped.”

  When Willis enlisted, he had hoped to wrangle some time in Newport. He wrote on his dream sheet that he wanted the Construction Battalion Unit, where he could do his hitch building piers or grouting the swimming pools on base. Instead, he was assigned to a military K-mart in Norfolk. After several months, his petty thefts became sloppy.

  Willis was sent to the brig, where he underwent three weeks of psychological review. A psychiatrist said his obsessive-compulsive disorder probably resulted from the violent deaths of both his parents and the fact that Willis had spent the remainder of his youth with a woman known as the “Kiss of Death.” The psychiatrist wrote in his report that Willis’s childhood “echoed with mortalities and sensational events.” Lester’s impulsive attack on Wydette was the kernel of his neurosis. That scene on the highway continued to rock Willis with waves of adrenaline, an uncontrollable jolt which jellied his nerves, and he never reached the zenith of his imagination to cap it.

  Willis’s obsessive thoughts seemed centered around his worry that, like Lester’s outburst, his moral fiber might snap at any given moment. His vigilance was ongoing and exhausting. Minor tasks and daily chores seemed land-mined. When he cleaned the mess hall floors, sweeping the linoleum in peaceful half-circles, he saw himself charging at a plate-glass window with the broom handle. He walked past the petty officer’s desk and saw a coffee cup on the corner of the blotter. Why not flick it off? Of course, the black coffee would arc across the white charts. In a crowded elevator he imagined uttering vulgarities—what if he recited the few most graphic facets of a woman’s perplexing sum total? He was in a constant state of anxiety. In order to face each day he had to increase, by a degree, the level of his self-imposed austerity.

  Like other new recruits, Willis was assigned to some KP for lengthy stretches. During one assignment, Willis became unnaturally concerned with the meat slicer. He was required to slice ham and other giant logs of processed meats, adjusting the blade so the meat slices were the correct thickness—not too thick, but not so thin that they were hard to peel from the stack. The physical sensation of pushing the slicer handle at the right speed and rhythm, watching the meat shave and drop to the wax paper gave Willis a sick stomach. It had nothing to do with the salty meats, it was something else. He began to guesstimate how many slices he could get. He looked at the big clock on the kitchen wall and he worked against times he set up for himself. The routine became something he fretted about all morning before he got on the job, and the mathematical calculations resonated long after he was through with his shift. If he wasn’t satisfied with the count, he shaved the meat extra thin to get the figure he was after. He shaved a water-cured ham in micro-thin slices. The meat fell like bright red feathers, unsuitable for sandwiches, and it had to be scooped up and dropped in a kettle for bean soup. Willis was way ahead with the sandwich meats and they told him not to prepare any more. Willis went against orders and walked into the lockers, finding the pressed turkeys.

  The psychiatrist explained to Willis that this exaggerated interest in repetitive routine was physiological. For example, nesting birds repeat the same activity, returning with twigs in a monotonous parade back and forth until the nest is complete; this was a survival technique directed by brain chemicals. For Willis, it might be similar. His agenda of petty larcenies wasn’t carried out for financial gain but to conflict directly with an inherent, self-invented peril. His crime sprees put Willis in a position of “false duress,” in which he sought outside scrutiny by military and municipal authorities just to override his own nervous agendas and self-appraisals.

  Other military staff argued with that assessment. Willis was an operator, they said. He was just another psychoceramic con man. “A recruit carries on like this just to go home on disability. These punks are taking up needed space. They’re mud on our wheels.”

  The therapist told Willis that he needed to address the deaths of his parents with a healthy attitude. “Your parents are safely dead. They can’t harm you now,” the therapist reassured Willis.

  On the morning of his discharge, Willis discovered that someone had stolen a laminated photograph of Wydette. She was standing in line with other pageant contestants, her satin sash drawn in a taut, evocative diagonal from her left shoulder to her right hip. The snapshot was sealed in a flexible magnetic binding that adhered to metal surfaces. He displayed it on well-lighted bulletin boards beside office notices and movie fliers, attaching it to door frames, pipes, file cases, latrine mirrors. When he couldn’t find Wydette’s photograph, he spent an extra day on base looking for it. He wasn’t getting any cooperation and they told him he had to be off base by eighteen hundred hours. He refused. He popped a petty officer who was trying to get him to relax, forget about his keepsake, opening a two-inch cut across the fellow’s eyebrow. Willis was already discharged, banished, and they didn’t pursue charges. Instead, the quartermaster assigned a guard to take Willis around on his search until six o’clock. By that time, two teams of men were looking for the laminated picture. After everything that Willis had been through during his months in the service, including his incarceration and piss-poor psychiatric counseling, he couldn’t understand the mean prank. Willis looked around the mess at the men he knew by name and all the new recruits that had just come on. One of them had the photograph.

  It was dark when the MPs drove him to the gate and let him off with his two canvas duffels and a cardboard box of vile magazines, playing cards, nicotine-stained dominoes, and Wrigley’s TenPacks he might have left behind for the others if not for what had happened. He was woozy after having drunk a half-bottle of Maker’s Mark all by himself instead of handing it off. He stood at the entrance of the base and looked north. Willis had missed his connections and was expected to walk to the bus terminal or hitch his way. The jeep turned around and drove back onto the base.

  The jeep came back.

  The driver had been watching Willis in the rearview to see if he was moving off government property as ordered.

  Willis was whirling around, his right arm extended. He hit one of the six-foot-high concrete posts at the entrance. He struck the post with the flat side of his forearm, the way a cook lops off the top of a carrot, except that the post wasn’t acting like a carrot. Willis dropped to the ground. The driver flicked the high beams. It looked bad. Willis was down on his side, pivoting off his left hip, writhing in a circle through an inch of slush. He was seriously hurt. The driver put him back in the vehicle and drove him to the hospital.

  Willis spent two days in the Navy Hospital having his arm set and reset. He didn’t like the sensation of the cast cinching his m
uscles and he had a panic reaction. A physician’s assistant sedated him and strapped him to the hospital bed using plush, quilted belts with Velcro closures. On the third day he was released to Rennie, who had flown down to Virginia to take him home to Newport. The intern gave her a doctor’s name at the Navy Hospital in Newport. Willis should get some further evaluation. They gave Willis an embossed insurance card which would be valid at any New England base if further treatment was needed. Rennie pushed the card into her wallet. Willis could see that she didn’t accept any advice. “The Navy doesn’t know what to do with its resources,” she said.

  The analgesic pills they offered for his broken wrist didn’t work for his pain, but he took them hoping they might untangle the knots he felt behind his eyes. His daily tension was almost audile, like a constant vibration, a humming. He couldn’t ignore its pulsing, tinny echo. It was like the threatening din of a distant marching band when it walks in place, honing its crescendo, before turning a corner onto the main avenue.

  Chapter Six

  Holly was lying sideways across her bed, just the balls of her feet on the floor. She heard the surf drag a cloak of pebbles back and forth across the sand, a nauseating suction. She felt the tight bale wire of a hangover slicing into her temple. At shorter and shorter intervals, a bird was making a racket outside. Holly hoped it would find somewhere else.

  The night before, Holly had started early at the YMCA. She took an exercise class and finished off in the steam room with the other ladies. She listened to someone’s story: a husband had lung trouble from working twenty years in the local yacht-building industry where he sprayed fiberglass without wearing a proper mask. The women commiserated and let their towels drop to their waists. Holly, too, peeled open her soggy towel, letting the hot mist penetrate her skin. She was pink as fruit.

  She showered, shaving her legs in the shower stall; she nicked herself and the soap swirled pink as it circled the drain. She toweled off and massaged her legs using a tall squeeze bottle of cheap lotion scented with imitation White Shoulders. She was reeking.

  She liked walking Newport’s Pineapple Dream section.

  A “pineapple dream” was a horrid sweet concoction that packed a wallop. The pineapple was a symbol of the colonial shipping trade, and the local bars invented different versions of the mixed drink. Holly never touched it, but Holly liked visiting at least a few different bars. She went on foot. When she walked into the Old Colony, two or three men noticed she wasn’t with Jensen and they called her name. A regular dipso sliced off the last syllable and she didn’t want to sit with him. Again and again, he tried to get her attention. “Hey, Hol? Hol? Hol—” Her name, severed like that, made her feel wary. Anywhere else it might have made her feel at home.

  Earlier that winter, Holly had fallen for a barfly named Kim. If she couldn’t find him in the bars, she walked the sidewalks waiting for him to drive up beside her. His old Pontiac was missing a headlight and she watched the streets for this telltale sign. He edged along the curb, idling the car, before swinging the passenger door open for her. They made love in an old house on Hammond Street where he was keeping house with a few local dropouts. It was a bare mattress. The ticking was stained. He centered her hips over the deep rusty flowers, their broad scalloped petals in perpetual bloom. He fucked her or he fucked her mouth. His cum tasted like the sea and it tasted like nails. After a few months Kim left town.

  Last night, Holly went with a fellow who took her to his place in old Navy housing. His wife was out of town. His wife was gone, but her things were strewn around. Before they could make love, Holly had to remove a jeweled sewing box from the center of the double bed. Holly admired the sewing box before putting it on the end table, out of harm’s way. The man made love to her; he tucked his forehead against the hollow of her throat and she turned her face away. She studied the diminutive masterpiece, its tiny drawers and glossy shellacked shelves where spools of thread were lined up in colorful gradations, the silver thimbles tilted on tiny wooden dowels.

  What was the name of that street? Commodore Perry Boulevard?

  Holly heard the storm door rattle. She pushed herself up from the bed. The room spun a half-circle and ratcheted backward until again it was level. She grabbed her robe from the floor. Nicole Fennessey had come over to Holly’s side of the duplex, carrying a large square of glass. She said she wanted to fix a broken pane in Holly’s bedroom, and she walked right through the house into the back room before Holly had a chance to make the bed or straighten up. Nicole was tall, willowy, with a rope of fine blond hair dangling down her spine. Nicole showed Holly the tiny stencil marks on the glass, the letters “TG” at every corner. Tempered glass. Holly tried to focus on the tiny stamp.

  “I don’t scrimp on important things,” Nicole said. “Now, tell me about this fire you had over here. Rennie said it was a conflagration. If you want to burn trash, we share that barrel out in front—”

  “It wasn’t my fire,” Holly said. Dizzy, she sat down on the bed. “Did Rennie tell you I started that fire?”

  Nicole was holding a special cutting blade in one hand and a rubber-tipped hammer in the other. She tapped the rubber hammer against her chin while she was looking at Holly. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here, but my job keeps me on call.”

  “You work at the hospital?”

  “I’m a massage therapist at Newport Jai Alai and I have private clients all around town. I’m gone all hours. I can’t be here to referee the neighborhood.”

  “I guess not,” Holly said. Holly’s lips felt swollen and tingling, like a pincushion.

  “At least you can’t call me a slumlord. I keep my property in good condition,” Nicole told Holly. “But what happened to you? Did I wake you up?”

  Holly nodded. Nicole seemed on the defensive and she described her busy schedule to Holly. “Massage therapy is a combination expertise. It’s an important alternative. There’s the mental-health industry, but they forget about the body. They talk and talk and never lay a finger on the patient. Actually, I’m like a psychiatrist. I’m an educated ear. My job is mostly listening. Even if they don’t say anything, you listen to that. The silence. I’m kind of a transcriptionist with my hands.”

  Holly had been in the house only a few weeks, but she had watched Nicole coming and going at odd hours, her long blond braid swinging like a silk pendulum. Sometimes Holly heard the telephone ring.

  She heard it right through the wall.

  Within minutes after the first jangle, Nicole left the house, carrying a large flat leather portfolio just like an artist might use to transport drawings. Nicole told Holly that the portfolio was actually a lightweight massage table with collapsible legs and imitation leather veneer.

  “I take my table to every job,” Nicole said. “Otherwise they think they can get me into their bedrooms where they recline on their Perfect Sleepers. If they try something I fold up the table. I break the legs down, crunch, crunch, crunch. I’m out of there before anything happens. My business is portable. I take my table, my bottle warmer—that’s for the Egyptian oil. Ointment goes right in my pocket to keep warm.”

  “Egyptian oil?”

  “Yeah, it’s basically just baby oil with some sassafras.”

  Nicole stood on a chair and tried to remove the top grille from Holly’s bedroom window. Nicole was still wearing her nightgown, a satiny sack that outlined her hips and buttocks each time she reached up with her arms. Holly wondered if Nicole was aware of how she looked. Holly remembered what her husband Jensen used to say to her; he often said that she looked “ripe.” Then Holly realized that she was always thinking too much about sex. Anything could make her think of sex. She looked away. Even the silver finger loops of a scissors left out on her dresser. Everything in the book had either curves or erect lines. Egyptian oil had an erotic ring.

  Nicole asked Holly for a table knife to scrape away the old caulk and Holly handed one up. Nicole maneuvered the little window onto the bed. Holly wanted to ask Nicole if she
had a particular mate, or if she was, like Holly, single. Except for the matter of sex, a solitary existence was attractive to Holly after years of being paired up with a heel. Being single might be thought of as a pursuit, not a default. She had read about the success of celibate career professionals in a woman’s magazine. Women can become their own erotic guides. The article joked about masturbation in double entendres; the writer invented terrible puns, such as: “In a pinch,” women can “singlehandedly—”

  What was so newsbreaking about that? Just the other weekend, Holly had masturbated in a dressing room at Sears. She had noticed a middle-aged salesclerk in the appliance department. He had a small mole on the left side of his chin. A beauty mark of some distinction. A tiny maroon button half hidden by salt and pepper stubble. It looked undeniably erotic.

  Holly said, “Are you raising those kids alone?”

  “Do you see a father figure waltzing around?”

  “It must be difficult.”

  With the window removed, Holly listened to the little bird, its bright program.

  Nicole told her, “Don’t feel funny about it. It’s the American way.”

  Holly said, “After being married, it’s hard to reinvent yourself.”

  Nicole dropped the hammer to her side and peered at Holly. “You do look a little shaky.”

  “Shit, does it show?”

  Nicole looked at her. “You feel that bad, do you?”

  Holly straightened up. “Really, I’m fine. My ex-husband, he’s not even stateside, so that’s a relief.”

  Nicole took the rubber hammer, tapped a pane loose from the frame, and collected the broken glass in her palm. Then she measured the windowpane and marked the new piece of glass. She scored the glass with the special knife and tapped it gently with the rubber hammer, making a clean break along the scored edge. When she was finished, she rested the new pane inside the frame and puttied the edges. Holly couldn’t help admiring the way Nicole handled a man’s job.