Drastic

by Maud Casey

  Irene rose quickly to the pool’s surface, sputtering water.

  “Careful there,” her father said.

  “I am being careful,” Irene protested. She hated it when he acted like a parent, when he pretended not to notice how well she took care of herself, causing no trouble.

  “This is a sign,” Myra had told Irene one day as they stood on the lip of the park. George had told Myra not to go into the park with the monument that housed the prison ship martyrs’ dead bones, but there it was, a sign in the form of a chewed dog’s bone right at their feet. Irene saw the logic too. “This means we are allowed to enter,” Myra said. And they did, walking slowly, swinging their feet in circles—like the metal detectors Irene saw the old men use sometimes—slowly so they could pick up any vibrations from buried bones deep underground. “Even after you die,” Myra told her, “your bones vibrate from all the living they’ve absorbed over the years.”

  When the sun began to disappear behind the mountains, Irene wrapped a towel turbanlike around her head and walked dripping toward the stairs to the room.

  “It’s her majesty, the Queen of Sheba,” George called down. He’d since moved upstairs to the balcony off their room, where he could put his feet up on a table in the shade and use the bathroom if he needed.

  Irene rolled her eyes, but she was glad he was paying attention, glad that they had each other. She realized then how much he needed her but turned her thoughts quickly instead to the motel magic. While she was swimming, the sheets on the twin beds had been replaced with new ones, the top cover turned down; the glass ashtray where her father discarded his pistachio shells replaced by a new, clean one; the thrown-around clothes stacked in a pile on the chair; and clean-smelling towels hung where the rumpled, pool-soaked ones had been.

  When they’d first walked into the motel room so neat and orderly—especially compared to their Brooklyn home piled high with Myra’s books on Brooklyn’s hidden graveyards and the Bible she hid whenever George came home—Irene couldn’t believe it. “I can’t believe that this is all ours,” she said. “I can’t believe they give you this.”

  “They’re not giving it to you,” George said, but Irene saw the way George looked at the room, saw that he saw it too, the opportunity for peace. When she saw the Bible on top of the bedside table that separated the two beds, she hid it in the drawer. It had been only recently, after Myra had left her job as a secretary at a hospital—“too many almost-bones”—and in secret, when George was in the city working as many jobs as he could as a copy editor to support them now that Myra was no longer working, that Myra had started reading to Irene from the parts of the Bible that scared Irene because they made Myra red in the face. These parts made her laugh instead of cry, which didn’t seem very cleansing to Irene.

  His eyes are as the eyes of doves by the rivers of waters, washed with milk, and fitly set.

  His cheeks are sweet as a bed of spices, as sweet flowers: his lips like lilies, dropping sweet smelling myrrh.

  Her hand slipped under her robe to rest over one breast, Myra flushed, and Irene imagined she was talking about George, but then Myra would turn to her as if the words were meant for Irene herself.

  We have a little sister, and she hath no breasts: what shall we do for our sister in the day when she will be spoken for?

  “I’m your daughter,” Irene would remind Myra, and Myra would stop laughing for a moment to consider this.

  After they’d put their bags down, George had tousled Irene’s hair and walked out on the balcony to stare at the pool. When Irene walked up beside him, though, she saw he wasn’t looking at the pool at all. He stared far out into space, to a place in the sky beyond even the mountains, a place that Irene couldn’t locate, not yet visible to her child’s eye.

  The first night Irene became suddenly shy while undressing, even with George on the porch staring out. There they were, just as she’d sometimes wished, just the two of them without Myra. Irene wondered if she’d made this come true. She shook her head, whipping her face with her hair, shaking out the thought. Had she wished for this so hard that she’d made Myra disappear? But when she asked George the night they left whether she should run back inside to wake Myra up to say good-bye, George assured her that Myra needed to sleep. Myra had wandered the house every night for a week, not sleeping, not eating because she said food crowded her mouth. Her mother needed her sleep, Irene told herself the way George had told her. Irene was just following instructions. She was a child, after all. She should do what her father told her.

  “Ready for dinner?” George appeared from off the porch like a ghost in a story Myra had read to Irene recently. “Are you talking to yourself, little one?” And Irene realized she’d been standing in her bathing suit, arguing with herself out loud in the mirror.

  “Just practicing a play I made up,” Irene said. She knew how to make herself seem appropriately childlike. She wished that it were true.

  “Maybe you’ll perform it for Clara after dinner,” George said. “Meet you downstairs, okay?”

  “Okay.” Irene waited until the door closed behind her father to give herself a solid talking-to in the mirror, one that would show she was different from her mother shaking the dog bone at herself. “I’m telling my bones to stay in my body,” she’d told Irene when, the night before Irene and George left on their trip, Irene had woken to find Myra in front of Irene’s mirror decorated with pictures of Irene’s friends, who no longer came over to the apartment. “Stay in there, bones. Hang onto that flesh. Don’t abandon the prison ship. The soldiers are coming to save you.” Irene heard them in the hall afterward—George telling Myra she was scaring Irene, scaring him, scaring her doctor, whom she refused to see like the medicine she refused to take, like the hospital she ran away from because it was full of bones, bones with no flesh, skeletons walking around, bossing her around with their rattling bones as if she couldn’t see that all they wanted was to steal her flesh, use it for their own. “Shh,” George said, “shh, honey. Come to bed, my sweet girl.”

  At exactly six o’clock George and Irene sat in their regular booth in the motel restaurant for dinner, as they had for the past two nights. The walls of the restaurant were painted ocean blue, and tiny fish swam through reeds and pink coral. Across the street was a karaoke bar whose marquee read DANCE AND SING ALONE! “That’s so sad,” Irene said the first night, and then George explained to her that alone was meant to be along, that someone had made a mistake. Still, the sign made Irene tired, and she made it a point to sit with her back to the window. Why didn’t the owners change the sign? That one letter couldn’t be so hard, Irene thought but never said.

  Harry, the waiter who looked a thousand years old, threw his arms wide open when he saw Irene. “The little lady’s arrived!” he shouted for no one, since the restaurant was always empty at this hour except for George, Irene, and Harry. Irene smiled as hard as she could so he wouldn’t ask her to turn her frown upside down the way he did last night.

  “Irene, what a beautiful name,” he said, putting his crinkly hand on her back.

  “It’s a beautiful name—she just doesn’t know it yet,” George said. Irene rolled her eyes and stuck out her tongue. She knew a lot that George didn’t even know she knew. Why did he have to embarrass her, talk about her as if she weren’t there, remind people she was a child?

  “The usual, coming right up,” Harry announced. Irene wondered where he got all his energy.

  With one finger George traced an eel on the wall. “Years ago,” he said, “I would never have thought that this would be my life, that today I would be here.”

  “Did you think you’d have me?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Of course, sweetie,” he said as if waking from a dream. “Look, what a surprise!”

  Clara walked into the restaurant followed by Dolly and Emmy Lou. The dogs lay down on the floor beside the booth, their heads resting over crossed front paws. Clara slid into the booth on Irene’s side, her hair down,
the salty sun-air washed out. Irene inhaled the fresh shampoo smell deeply. She could swear that Clara’s hair had sliver-thin strands of seaweed mixed in. She reached out and touched it without thinking, and Clara laughed, tickling Irene’s nose with the soft ends of her hair.

  “You know what my first memory was?” Clara said, looking at Irene. “My first memory, where my life really begins, is pulling into a Memphis hotel that was on fire. My parents were tired of driving, so we waited for the firemen to put it out and then stayed in a room that just missed getting burned.” Her voice lapped at Irene’s ears like gentle waves.

  “You don’t really remember all that, do you?” George said. Irene wished that she were the fish that could blow a canopy bed around itself, but she felt more like somebody’s forgotten shoes on a beach.

  “All right,” Clara said. “My parents told me most of that story. But I do remember being held in my mother’s arms so that all I could see was the black, charred wood of the burned hotel roof against the blue sky. Now that part is true.”

  It made sense to Irene that Clara began her life in fire. That’s what led her to water. It was another one of Irene’s thoughts that never made it into actual words. She felt shy with Clara, the way she did in front of someone who knew true things.

  Harry returned to the table and laid out the burgers and a cocktail to replace George’s empty glass. “Anything for you, Clara?”

  “Just visiting with Irene, Harry,” Clara said.

  “Gotcha,” Harry said. Irene saw him wink.

  “Do you sometimes say that you remember everything when actually you remember only the charred wood of the roof against the sky?” George put on the radio Bible lady’s southern accent. “Well, my friends, that is a lie. And God appreciates the truth.”

  Everyone laughed, and George continued, spurred on by the attention. “When Irene’s daddy asks her to fill the gas tank while he rests his weary self,” he began, “does Irene sometimes say that she has heatstroke when actually she plain well doesn’t feel like tending to the damn gas tank? Well, that is a lie, and you know God appreciates the truth.”

  Irene didn’t think it was funny anymore, especially the way George used her as an example in his joke, as if she were something silly and easily knowable.

  George’s face was red with the effort of imitation. Irene wished he’d stop. “Do you sometimes,” and he had to stop to catch his breath, “find yourself in a place and wonder how you got there?”

  Harry and Clara were still laughing and waiting for the end of this lie too, faces expectant like arms outstretched to catch a child, but George shook his head as if he were shaking off the words, the way Irene had shaken off her thoughts earlier. She realized this was a gesture she’d learned from him, and when she looked at his stained-red hands she wanted to tell him to wash them.

  “There’s a fish called a dorado,” Clara said, stepping in, rescuing them all. “Underwater it looks black, but once you reel it in and bring it up on board, the fish turns a greenish-blue.”

  Irene wondered if it hurt the fish to change color like that and whether it knew it was changing colors. She wondered if the fish knew it would never be the same again.

  Harry had disappeared from the table, and suddenly the lights in the restaurant went off, but George and Clara didn’t look at all surprised. In fact, George acted as if nothing had happened, smiling a huge smile. Dolly and Emmy Lou clicked their teeth and rose from where they lay, circling each other nervously. Clara put her hand over Irene’s. Maybe Irene had blown a canopy around herself and Clara, Irene thought; maybe the lights hadn’t gone out at all. They were in the protective bubble, warm and safe, living their separate fish lives.

  “Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday to you! Happy Birthday, dear Ire-eeene! Happy Birthday to you!” Their voices were like pins poking at the mucus bubble, popping it open. Harry put the cake, candles blazing, down on the table in the midst of the burger wreckage.

  Irene looked at George’s face rosy with pride for this party he’d created. “My birthday is tomorrow,” she said. She was through looking out for him.

  He stared at her the way she’d seen him stare at Myra, as if he wanted her to disappear. “Well, it’s almost tomorrow, honey,” he finally said. “A few more hours and it’s tomorrow. A few more hours after that, it’s the next day and so on and so on.” Irene saw him look at Harry and Clara to relate to this grown-up phenomenon.

  “I know how that works,” Irene said, angry at all the things he thought she didn’t understand. “I know a lot of things. And one thing I know for sure is today is not my birthday. Today is the wrong day.” She looked at Clara, hoping she would understand that they needed to leave together immediately for the coast of North Carolina where Clara could show her the ropes of the scuba diving business and they would spend half their lives underwater, away from the rest of the stupid world on land, but Clara didn’t even move to let Irene out of the booth.

  “That’s a beautiful cake, honey,” she said. “Let’s eat this one, and we’ll have another one tomorrow.”

  “I need to get out of this booth right now,” Irene said. She was tired of being her father’s daughter, and that Clara, the beautiful fish giant, would call her honey just like George had was the last straw. Dolly and Emmy Lou stood alert, opening and closing their mouths, as Irene walked out of the restaurant, leaving all of them to each other.

  “Just let her go,” she heard her father say to Clara, who had started after her. Irene thought about pushing the restaurant door open as hard as she could, giving it a good thwack, but she already knew the power of not slamming doors.

  “Harry, can we save this cake for tomorrow?” she heard her father saying.

  In the middle of the night, Irene woke where she’d thrown herself on the bed. She heard a soft splash, the splash of a tiny fish, she thought, because she was having the dream where she breathed with giant lungs underwater as she swam with a large school of fish that tickled her with their flicking tails. But there was another, louder splash that was not part of her underwater dream. She walked over to the sliding-glass window and pushed back the curtain. The pool glowed like mercury in the dark, and Clara held George with giant arms as he floated on the water’s surface, blowing bubbles into the water. Harry stood at the pool’s edge while Emmy Lou and Dolly paced, toenails clicking against the cement and their eyes on Clara. The three of them looked up and saw Irene standing behind the sliding-glass window. They motioned for her to come down.

  “She’s teaching me to use my lungs to their best capacity,” George called up.

  Irene did not yell down that she knew he already knew how to swim, that she had seen him hold his breath for what seemed like hours in contests with Myra, who always came up for air too soon. She looked at Clara’s long arms—they could still carry her far under the ocean past barnacled rocks, past the fish and seaweed visible from the surface, to water so blue it was black, to a place where there were animals no one had ever seen before.

  She looked at George and remembered a yellow afternoon on the island where she was born, Myra watching George cut the still-beating heart out of a tautog and place it in Irene’s open palm. This was not a story told to her by her parents, not one she remembered fully except for the tiny boom of a heart in her hand. Irene watched her father with his face in the water. The map, under the leg of the yellow and orange chair, rustled in the night air. In the water, George, like the dorado, was turning color. Under the pool lights he was becoming a fluorescent yellow so bright it was as if he were glowing from the inside out, his insides almost visible in the brightness. Irene slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the balcony, waiting for the tiny booming heart, the heart of her first memory, to tell her the rest of her life.

  TRESPASSING

  LUCY fingered the strands of the dead man’s hair before she sealed the envelope, sticking the prickly ends up her nose to see what the dead man must have smelled like, but the hair smelled mostly like forma
ldehyde and shampoo.

  The program didn’t return the ashes of the donor; the cremains were scattered at sea with the cremains of hundreds of other donors. Lucy was supposed to use this word—cremains—whenever she spoke to potential donors or their next of kin. Her boss, Mildred, insisted. Mildred was the sort of woman who was always insisting. So far, in the month Lucy’d been at this job, she’d used the word in conversations with cousins, grandsons, granddaughters, husbands, wives, sons, and brothers. “You do understand that we are unable to return the cremains to the family,” Lucy would say as earnestly as she could. She practiced saying it to her reflection in the sleeping computer. Cremains was a word Lucy imagined had been invented by the same clever ad guy who came up with Craisins, the snack food combination of cranberries and raisins.

  “Cremains,” Lucy whispered as Mildred gathered her purse and coat on her way out of the office to one of her alleged all-day meetings. Mildred turned quickly, hoping to catch Lucy midwhisper, but she never could. This time Lucy played dumb by neatening a stack of Instructions for the Disposition of Remains forms with concentrated intensity.

  “Cremains,” again, as Mildred put her hand on the door-knob. Mildred spun around, but Lucy coughed and began to hum like a grade school delinquent.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” Mildred reminded her. Whenever Mildred suspected Lucy of something, she lectured her on etiquette. “You always forget that part when you speak to potential donors. Read it off the cheat sheet if you have to. I know you’re a temp, Lucy, but you’re a long-term temp, and you really should practice good phone manners.”

  Lucy wasn’t very good at any of the primary duties of her job—answering the phone, filing, copying forms like the Vital Statistics sheet, delivering papers to the morgue—but she and Mildred both knew that it would be hard to replace her. There weren’t very many people willing to work in such close proximity to the dead, or almost dead. Even Mildred was looking for a transfer. Podiatry or neurosurgery, she’d told Lucy in a rare moment of intimacy that had sliced through the dull hum of the office’s fluorescent lights. The way Mildred’s face tightened after she revealed this, as if she were willing the confession back into her mouth, Lucy understood not to point out the vagueness of Mildred’s desires.