Stiltsville: A Novel (34 page)

“I go down with the ship?” I said.

He pointed at the line I’d tied. “What if the line didn’t hold? What if you dropped it? What if the current’s too fast, and the boat drifts, and you’re standing on the dock?”

He was irritated—not at my mistake, I knew, but at his inability to help with the docking. “Those things didn’t happen,” I said.

“But they might have, Frances. You’re the captain, so you have to think of these things.”

“All right,” I said. “But you’re here—you could just start the engine and turn around.”

He looked at me, and his scowl softened. His shoulders slumped and he wiped his face with his right hand, his stronger hand. “But what if I’m not?”

And I suppose this was approximately when I started to make plans. Nothing concrete, nothing deliberate—but I have always been a person who thinks of contingencies, and though I hated to do it, it came naturally. I thought of living alone in the big house, maybe traveling a little with Marse or Margo, but every mental picture of life in Miami without Dennis was so repulsive to me that I felt physically ill. If Bette had still been living in the area, it might have been different. But I realized that afternoon that when Dennis died I would leave Miami, and possibly never come back.

L
ola, the physical therapist, came twice a week at first, to help Dennis with exercises that would slow the degeneration of his muscles. She laid mats on the back deck and they wore sunglasses while they worked. She was an elfin woman with short dark hair and small, bony hands, and she wore black stretch pants and button-down shirts that looked like they were made for men and made her seem dwarfed, almost neutered. I’d mentioned this to Dennis once—I’d said, “Why doesn’t she wear clothes that show that she has breasts?” and he’d said, “Oh, she definitely has breasts.” I’d raised my eyebrows at him. “Don’t be jealous,” he’d said. “When you help me exercise, I look down your shirt, too.” Eventually, Lola came three times weekly, then four times, and then she was cleared by our insurance to come two hours a day, five days a week.

When Margo picked me up for our first water aerobics class, Stuart jumped out of the driver’s seat as I stepped out to meet them. I shaded my eyes as he came toward me in that hyperactive way of his, scaling the stone steps in front of the house in one long leap. “Where’s Dennis?” he said as he went past me, slowing briefly to kiss my cheek.

“Out back with the therapist,” I said, and as he entered the dark house, I heard him singing “
Lola, L-O-L-A Lola
. . .”

Margo put the car into reverse before I’d even shut the passenger door. “What’s the matter?” I said.

“Nothing.” Her hair was in a ponytail, which was one of the ways I loved it best. She looked like a girl who was about to ride a horse—something she hadn’t done in her lifetime, except once at summer camp when she was ten years old.

“Don’t speed,” I said as we pulled out of the driveway onto the street.

“I’m not. Do you have everything? Do you have your cap?”

I patted the bag I’d brought with me. “I’m a little nervous, I admit.”

“Don’t be. You’re very coordinated.”

At the health club, we rinsed off in the showers and changed into our swimsuits in the locker room, and when we got to the pool there was already a group formed in the shallow end. A few of the ladies—not all of them were older, as I’d suspected they would be—acknowledged Margo with a nod or a quick hello, but mostly they were busy stretching. When Margo was in the water, she pulled each knee to her chest and bounced on the balls of her feet. “You’ll want to warm up,” she said.

In tennis, when I wanted to warm up, I hit serves or rallied with myself against the backboard. Here, in a warm pool with barely four feet between me and several other women, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. But I followed her lead and started by bouncing on the balls of my feet, then bringing each knee to my chest, one and then the other, until I did feel a bit winded. The instructor, who arrived in a flurry just as the clock struck the hour, wore a yellow Speedo and tiny mesh slippers. She was a small, compact girl with crooked teeth and thin, straight hair. “Let’s line up,” she said authoritatively, and around me, the ladies began to swish into position, forming two lines. Margo pulled my elbow and we moved deeper, toward the back of the group. Already, my arms were tiring from the constant motion of maneuvering in the water.

Margo raised her hand. “Cynthia?” she said to the instructor, who stood above us on the pool deck. “This is my mother. She’s new.”

Cynthia looked over the crowd at me and squinted. “Welcome,” she said. “Try to keep up, but if you can’t, take a breather and start again.” She clapped her hands once, then stooped at the edge of the pool and swung down into the water. “We’ll start with some quick tummy tucks,” she said, and the rest of the ninety-minute class played out like a manic version of follow the leader: Cynthia demonstrated with her strong, calculated movements, the women in the row in front of me followed with slightly less sharp motions, and I followed them, sloppily and quickly out of breath. Near the end—the class consisted of a circuit of quick exercises, each emphasizing one muscle group, none lasting more than five minutes or so—Cynthia’s tone changed, and she went to the edge of the pool to change the music. She told us to close our eyes. The music sounded Indian in flavor, a slow-running piccolo and some plucky instrument I couldn’t name, like a fiddle but more refined. “Concentrate on your breathing,” Cynthia said.

I opened my eyes shortly after closing them, realizing that I wasn’t at all prepared for whatever was starting now, whether this was another exercise or simply an ending ritual. Cynthia looked at me as she spoke. “Feel your feet against the smooth cement of the pool,” she said. “Feel your belly in the warm water. Feel your strong legs and arms being supported by the warm water as it surrounds you and lifts you up.” She glanced around the group, then her eyes settled back on me. “You’re unconcerned about the past, unconcerned about what is to come. All you feel is the warm water and the beat of your heart.”

I closed my eyes for the final moments, wherein Cynthia instructed us to breathe deeply, five counts in and five counts out. Then she told us to hold our breath and submerge, which she said would steel us for the week to come, and when we came up again we would be rejuvenated.

On the ride home, I rolled down the window and felt the sunlight on my arm. Through the canopies of the banyans along Bird Road, the light scattered into dozens of warm spires. At the house, we found Dennis and Stuart on the back deck with Lola. Dennis’s wheelchair was not with them. This was something I’d noticed about Lola’s sessions with Dennis: she discouraged him from using the chair. For moving around, she helped him stand, supported him while he shuffled forward, then helped him sit again. It made me think I was allowing him to depend too much on the chair. If he could still walk, even slowly, even gracelessly, shouldn’t he? But to me he seemed so much more comfortable in the chair, so much less helpless.

They were laughing at something as we stepped onto the deck, and Stuart stopped in mid-sentence and looked behind me at Margo. I realized from his slightly spooked expression that they’d had an argument earlier that morning. “Does anyone want to go for a swim?” I said. I was thinking, really, that I’d had enough of swimming for the day and there were half a dozen things that needed to be done: laundry to be folded, prescriptions to be filled, groceries to be bought. But the sunlight was warm on the wood of the deck and the day was bright and clear, and the morning’s exercise had given me a free, relaxed feeling.

Lola told Dennis she could show him exercises he could do in the water, and asked me if I had a spare suit she could borrow. Margo said she had one, then gestured for Lola to follow her inside. By the time I’d helped Dennis change and rolled him outside again—we came around the front, because we hadn’t yet gotten around to installing a ramp off the back deck—Stuart was doing handstands in the shallow end and the women were watching him. Lola supported Dennis while he went down the pool steps, but once the water was up to his chest, she let go and stood a few yards away. “Swim to me,” she said. It reminded me of being at Stiltsville when Margo was a little girl, when Dennis taught her to swim at low tide. He would back up, let her swim to him, then back up again, until she was red-faced and sputtering and begging to be held.

Dennis was a good student. I don’t know if it was Lola, or the humility that came with the disease, or both, but he did as he was told. “Swim to me,” she repeated, and he did. They made it all the way to the deep end, and then she let him hold on to the side for a few minutes while he caught his breath. After they crossed the pool again, Lola led Dennis to the steps and he sat in the shallow water, squinting in the sun. I sat next to him. “What did you think of that?” I said.

He nodded. “Hard,” he said. “Feels good.”

Lola asked me if we had any bottles of water. “The big kind, half gallons.”

I nodded and stood up to get them, but Stuart beat me to it. He hoisted himself over the side of the pool and went inside—without using a towel, I noticed, but I didn’t say anything—then emerged with two gallon bottles of water. Lola took them and motioned for Dennis to stand again, which he did, shakily. She put one bottle in his left hand and one in his right. The second one dropped and she dove under and fished it out, then handed it to him again. She put her small hand around his to help him grip. When he had them both tightly in hand, she led him to deeper water, then said, “Do what I do.” She raised both hands above her head, slowly, then lowered them until they were beside her ears. He mimicked her, equally slowly, and I noticed the water in the bottles shaking. This is why we have a therapist, I thought. Because if I were to help Dennis with these exercises, I would have stopped the first time his arms shook. I would not have been able to stand the sight of my husband wobbling in the water. As it was, I had to look away.

As if she knew what I was thinking, Lola called out to me. “You see this? He should do this every other day. On land or in water, but water is best. More stable.”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to tire him out,” I said, and Dennis looked over at me. It was my tone, I suppose: snappish.

“He’s not too tired,” she said. “Are you too tired?”

“No.” He smiled at me. “Not tired.” He lifted the bottles over his head.

Early the next morning, Stuart showed up at our doorstep. This was his new thing: early morning runs from their house to ours. When I opened the door, he said, “Is the captain awake?”

“He’s in the kitchen,” I said, and Stuart bounded past me down the hallway. From the living room, where I was straightening up, I could hear Stuart’s horsey laugh and Dennis’s brief pauseless sentences, but I couldn’t make out what they were saying. The phone rang, and it was Marse, confirming dinner plans for that Friday night, with Paul, and even as I was saying I looked forward to it, my stomach tightened. I could not imagine a situation in which Dennis could socialize normally, or even close to normally, with an old friend. After I hung up, the doorbell rang again. Stuart went past me up the stairs—getting a swimsuit, he said—as I went to answer it. It was Gloria. “I bought a pie,” she said, and handed me a white box with a cellophane lid. “It’s lemon chiffon. Very soft.”

I thanked her and invited her in. We stood in the foyer.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” she said. “I was doing the shopping, and then I just bought this pie and drove over.” She looked around as she spoke. The cutout in the entranceway, where she’d once kept a marble bust that she’d inherited from her parents, was littered with mail and keys.

“You’re welcome anytime,” I said, and because she looked so lost and out of place, standing in the foyer of what used to be her home, I meant it.

“I don’t want to intrude,” she said.

“No, no. Stuart’s here. I think he and Dennis are going to swim.”

“I could make lemonade,” she said. “I bought lemons.” She put up a finger and slipped back out the door. Her car trunk slammed, and then she appeared again with a bag of lemons. “Grady likes them in his water,” she said.

“I have to get to work in a little bit,” I said.

Gloria looked disappointed. “It’s Saturday.”

“It’s only until one, and then I’ll be home.” This was a four-hour shift that I took twice a month, at time-and-a-half pay. It was a sleepy shift with only one doctor working. The few patients were worried mothers and their toddlers, or the occasional case of chicken pox or spontaneous diarrhea. It had occurred to me that I might have to give up working altogether, but then, as Stuart rushed down the stairs wearing swim trunks, waving hello to Gloria as he passed, I realized that this might not be necessary. For better or worse, our lives, Dennis’s and mine, had opened up in a way they never had before. From this point forward, our door would never really be closed. It was not even eight in the morning, and already we had guests. Lola was due at eleven. Grady would stop by at some point, I knew, to watch a home building show with Dennis or to check on the boat engines. Marse would rush by on her way somewhere and end up canceling her plans and staying for dinner, which we would fashion from the delivery food that had already started to arrive in tightly packed boxes. My privacy wasn’t a priority anymore. I knew, even before the tide was under way, that I had no choice but to ride it out.

T
hat Friday night, Marse arrived with Paul while I was in the kitchen, arranging a plate of vegetables and hummus, and Dennis was in the guest room getting dressed. I had decided to cook, not because the delivery food wasn’t good—it was—but because it wasn’t special. It was green beans and manicotti and mushroom lasagna and steamed spinach, and no matter what I did to arrange it prettily on a plate, it always looked to me like it had come from a box. Instead, I’d grilled salmon and asparagus outside while Dennis looked on, giving me directions, and we’d argued over whether the salmon was overcooked. He’d told me I was incapable of taking directions, and I’d told him I couldn’t read his mind, and he’d said it would be a hell of a lot easier if I could. We’d ended up laughing.