Breathing Water (19 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: Breathing Water
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When we pulled into my driveway, I opened the door and jumped down out of the cab. I could feel the blow of the hard ground in my knees. He helped me unload the wood and tar paper. He handed me the crinkled brown paper bag of nails like a gift.
“Thank you,” I said.
“You're welcome.”
We stood in front of the camp not speaking for a forever-moment.
“Well, I should get back to the house,” he said.
“Me too,” I said. “I mean, back to the camp. I've got a tree house to build.”
He stretched his arms over his head. “Let me know if you need any help.”
“I will,” I said.
“Well then.” He smiled and got into the truck. My heart sank. I couldn't think of a single thing to say.
“Hey,” he said and leaned across the huge expanse of the truck's front seat and rolled down the passenger's window. “I've got more Swiss chard and zucchini than I know what to do with. You want to come over for dinner tonight?”
“Sure,” I said, heart rising to the surface again, bobbing. A pulsing buoy.
“Sure.” He smiled. “It'll have to be a late dinner. I have some work to do. Come on over at nine or so. If you like.”
“I like,” I said. “See you at nine.”
 
I looked at everything I had brought with me to wear and hated it all. Moth-eaten sweaters. Torn jeans. Dingy T-shirts and thermal underwear. When Maggie got home from the diner she opened up her closet doors and said, “Have at it. And good luck. You'll swim in most of it.”
Alice sat on her mother's bed, dressing and undressing her headless Barbie.
I pulled dresses out of her closet and pulled them over my head. They were all at least six inches too long. The shoulders hung wrong. I felt like a kid playing dress up.
“What do you think, Alice?” I asked in one particularly ridiculous purple dress.
Her face scrunched up and she pointed to her pile of Barbie clothes.
“Those are probably a little
too
small.” I sighed.
“Wait a minute,” Maggie said. “I may have something.” She disappeared into the other room and came back with something black. As it unfolded from her hands, my heart jumped. “I found it in my grandmother's closet a long time ago. I thought it would be fun for Alice to play dress-up with.”
The dress was beautiful. It looked as though it was from the twenties or thirties, black beaded sleeves and a thin layer of black lace spilling like night across my knees when I tried it on. Alice clapped her hands together and Maggie nodded. “Yep.”
“You can borrow it if you promise to let me meet him.”
“Fine,” I said. “Soon.”
 
I felt silly walking down this country road, dressed like this. I had to walk slowly in Maggie's shoes. They were two sizes too big; I had stuffed cotton in the toes to make them fit. I was glad when I arrived at his door without bumping into anyone on the way.
The door was still propped open, but now I could see the inside of his house illuminated by several lamps glowing green and pink and blue from stained glass shades. I knocked.
“Come in,” he said. I stepped into the room and saw that it was much bigger than it looked that afternoon. There was a big blue couch against one wall, a coffee table under a mountain of books. A worktable with rolls and rolls of butcher paper and jars of tempura: red, blue, and yellow. The floor was covered in newspaper. There were piles of sawdust like anthills underneath the table.
“I'm in the kitchen,” he said, and I followed the scent of sweet tomatoes to the kitchen entrance. “Give me a hand?” he asked. He was leaning over the tiny stove, stirring something.
“Okay,” I said.
When he turned around, I felt ridiculous in this dress.
“Wow,” he said.
My hands fluttered around the beads at my hips.
“You look so pretty.”
The steam coming from the pot on the stove, the heat of the fire spreading to my ears was almost stifling. I was sure I was turning as red as the tomato sauce.
“Go out there. I don't want you anywhere near this mess, dressed like that,” he said. “Go on, scoot. I'll bring you something to drink as soon as I calm this thing down.”
I stumbled in my oversized shoes back into the living room. I stood there awkwardly until I saw the shelves. All along one wall of the room were floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with boxes. Boxes of every shape, size, and color. In each box was a small world. Like my butterfly box, each of these boxes could have been an illusion. Wings suspended in air. Shells in an ocean made of green glass. There were worlds made of paper cutouts, layer upon layer making dimensions you could only dream. An antique perfume dispenser from some long-gone hotel bathroom labeled
HOPE, REQUITED LOVE, PURE AND UTTER JOY
. When I pressed the lever that said HOPE, purple sand spilled into my hands like slivers of violets or grains of tonight's sky.
“I'm afraid this is not going so well,” he said, startling me.
“Are you sure you don't want some help?”
“Not so sure,” he said. “I've got an apron. If you don't mind.”
I returned to the kitchen, and he was leaning into the oven now, trying to retrieve a lasagna that had fallen off the back of the oven rack onto the orange coils of the electric stove. “I think I can save some of it,” he said, turning to look at me from the mess that was our dinner. “Grab that bowl.”
I pulled an apron over my head to protect Maggie's dress and reached for a big silver bowl on the small counter, holding it for him as he scooped big messy spoonfuls of lasagna from the wreckage. Soon there was enough to make a meal and he sent me back into the living room. “Get comfortable, Effie,” he said. “Take off your shoes. Please.” He smiled, pointing at my feet. A bit of cotton was sticking out from one of my shoes.
While he finished in the kitchen, I hurried out of my shoes and stuffed the cotton back into the toes. “I put a table in the backyard,” he said. “Not much room inside.”
I opened the door to the backyard and saw that he had put a small round table near a window that illuminated the makeshift tablecloth. When I looked closely at the table, I could see the paint-stiffened spots. A drop cloth. A canvas of spills. He had arranged two chipped china plates and the silverware was all there, but wrong. Fork and knife on the left. Lonely spoon on the right of each plate. One fat candle. One thin, stuck into an old wine bottle.
“I never promised it'd be intact,” he said, stepping out into the backyard with the bowl of lasagna and a Tupperware container of salad. “I've only got one bowl,” he explained, motioning to the Tupperware.
I sat down in the chair and realized that it was so short that my chin was practically resting on the table. He laughed when he saw me. “The Quimby phonebook isn't thick enough to make much of a difference. How about a pillow?”
The lasagna noodles were blackened and stiff. The cheese was brown at the edges and stringy. But the sauce was sweet. The lettuce and Swiss chard were greener than earth itself. I piled vegetables onto my plate, helped myself to seconds and thirds of the lasagna until I felt like I would burst through the seams of this delicate dress.
“Easy there, truck driver,” Devin said, handing me a paper towel to wipe the bright red sauce from my chin.
“I'm sorry,” I said, my mouth filled with his garden. “It's so good.”
“I'm not much of a cook.
Obviously.
My mama and sisters never let me into the kitchen. I'm not sure how they expected me to woo a girl without learning how to cook.”
I felt
woo
like a thousand butterfly kisses on my bare arms. I looked at him, waiting to hear it again. He rested his elbows on the edge of the table and looked at me.
“You grew up in Virginia?” I asked.
“Um-hum. Until I was thirteen. Then we had to move to the city because my dad got a job working for the Smithsonian. He's a preparator.”
“What's that?”
“It's sort of like a curator's assistant. The curator makes the plans, and the preparator puts the displays together.”
I thought of the Quimby museum with its ancient displays and untended artifacts.
“What does your mother do?” I asked. I had stopped eating. Suddenly full, sated.
“She's a mom. Seven children,” he said. “I was number two.”
“Wow. My mother almost went crazy just raising me and Colette,” I said. I folded up my soiled paper towel and laid it across my plate. “She had to come up here sometimes to get away from us. Even in the middle of winter, she'd drive up here. I remember I loved that. It was like a vacation for us too. My dad would play Mom for a week. He'd let us do all sorts of stuff Mom wouldn't. Like sledding on the garage roof. Eating dinner at midnight. Skipping school to go ice skating.” I hadn't thought about my mother's vacations for years.
“My mama should have had a lake of her own,” Devin said, pouring me another glass of wine. “Maybe her own ocean.”
“Are you close to your brothers and sisters?”
“Yeh.” He nodded.
I thought about Colette, about how much I wanted to adore her, to look up to her. But she had ruined that for me a long time ago.
 
I was a bit drunk when I walked away from the Hansel and Gretel house, thinking I should have brought breadcrumbs to find my way back home. I carried the enormous shoes, and stepped carefully to avoid the sharp pebbles and stones lurking in the darkness. When I got back to the camp, I lay down on the daybed and stared at the ceiling. I felt so full I was ready to hibernate. I could sleep and sleep and sleep with all that was inside of me at that moment.
 
Maggie and Alice came with me to the library to return the mountain of books that had been accumulating at Magoo's bedside. He was strong enough now to make himself breakfast (to slice peaches, to pour the thin skim milk his doctor has mandated), but he still needed me to make the trips into town for his weekly fix of history. Today the load was particularly burdensome: World War I and World War II. Alice pulled most of the books in her Radio Flyer wagon, along with every baby doll she owned, while Maggie and I struggled with our own armloads. We must have looked like a strange parade walking down Main Street on this hot hazy summer afternoon.
The
clack clack
of Alice's cowboy boots stopped at the steps to the library. She relinquished the wagon to Maggie, who slowly dragged it up the steps. She was red and wheezing by the time we got to the door. Mrs. LaCroix, the Wednesday / Thursday librarian, greeted us at the heavy wooden door.
“Mr. Tucker certainly has you working,” she said. She took the wagon handle and pulled it to the front desk. Her hips probably used to sway, I thought. But now they were lumpy under the stretched polyester roses of her dress, and she waddled away from us, chattering all the while. As she started to lift the books out of the wagon, Alice tended to her dolls, smoothing synthetic curls, peeking into the backs of imaginary diapers.
“Would you mind doing me a favor?” Mrs. LaCroix asked.
“Not at all,” I said and rested my own books on the counter.
“My Aunt Bethany lives up to the lake. She doesn't come into town much, but she loves the books on tape.
Cataracts.
” She shook her head. “Would you mind dropping some off to her house?”
“No problem,” I said. “Which camp does she live in?”
“You know where the Foresters used to live?”
I nodded.
“Next camp down. The one with the dwarves out front.”
I thought of the eyesore that Gussy complained about each and every summer. The yard looked more and more like a miniature golf course than a yard: lawn jockeys, devilish dwarves, elaborate butterflies stuck to the house midflight.
“I know the one.” I smiled. “I'll drop them off on my way home.”
Maggie had found a seat at one of the long wooden tables near the cold fireplace. In the winter, when I was a child, Grampa would bring me to the library on days that school was canceled because of too much ice and snow, and I would sit on the floor in front of the fire until my cheeks glowed red as embers while he wandered through the rows and rows of books.
“Whatcha reading?” I asked. She had one of the enormous ancient yellow newspapers spread out like a map in front of her.
“Things were easier then, you know? I mean, look.” She motioned to one of the old-fashioned ads. “Hair cream, whatever that is, thirteen cents. This girdle thing is only a buck.”
“It looks cruel,” I said, staring at the illustrated woman smiling despite the contraption turning her body into an hourglass, or a dumbbell.

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