Weeping Underwater Looks a Lot Like Laughter (29 page)

“Maybe
now
she’s harsh. She’s got to be, George. She’s living in the lion’s den. Don’t you know that any woman with an ounce of ambition has got to turn herself into a man, a trash-talking slimeball of a man, if she’s ever going to win any respect? Her tenderness, her natural aversion to violence, her willingness to talk things out—all her best womanly qualities gotta go right out the window.”

Emily was walking faster now, taking long strides, shaking her head and waving her hands. She booted our plastic bottle into the ditch. “It’s like that girl wrestler from Winterset. She had to turn into a complete jerk just so the guys wouldn’t forfeit, so they’d at least take her seriously and walk onto the mat and give her a chance. But men, well, they have all sorts of options. They just typically choose to be hypocrite slimeballs. On the road to success, that’s the fastest, easiest way.”

I stopped, caught by a cramp that forced me to bend over and clutch my stomach. “This hypocrite slimeball’s got half a T-Bone working itself into a cramp.”

Emily bent over just the same. The way she held her side let me know she’d had a cramp, too, but wasn’t planning to mention it. “You were saying?” I asked.

“Nothing. I’ve been reading too many newspapers recently. I should stop. This world can sure put me in a foul mood.”

A truck zoomed down the road, kicking up gravel that scattered over the ice. We decided to turn back. On the way Emily informed me more gently about the latest international happenings: Kofi Annan, the new UN secretary-general, protease inhibitors for AIDS patients, even details of the Hutu refugees returning to Rwanda. I could see the new Emily Schell arriving confidently at Hollywood’s doorstep, armed with all the political and karmic righteousness she’d need to pound her way in. We stopped near a frozen pond to watch the sun winking over the horizon.

“That girl wrestler,” she said. “She was pretty good, right?”

“She didn’t get a lot of matches, but yeah, she was tough. She beat one of Valley’s best guys four or five times. Never pinned him though. They always went at it the full six minutes.”

“Did they become friends or anything like that?”

“I don’t know. There were all sorts of jokes about them, but I don’t think they ever saw each other anywhere except the tournaments.”

Emily nodded, looking impressed, like she wished she’d been a wrestler in high school. She gave the setting sun a wave goodbye. I threw my arm over her shoulder and we kept on.

“You know, George, if you were running for office, I might even vote. But only if you grew a curlicue mustache.”

I thought about my Cuban mustache, which reminded me of Thomas Staniszewski and the question of whether it was right to ask Emily about her sister’s operation. Emily sensed I’d moved onto more serious thoughts and kept turning to me, waiting for me to spit it out. “I think you should vote for Smitty’s guy,” I finally said. “Martin O’Toole. Maybe he’ll bring just the change we’re looking for.”

Emily smirked, knowing I’d evaded whatever other question I’d been considering. “Just to clarify, George. If you ran for office, I said I’d vote, but I didn’t say I’d vote for
you
.”

“I wouldn’t vote for me, either.”

Thirty-eight

That night a local cable channel was showing Alfred Hitch-cock’s
Notorious
with Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and enough melodramatic one-liners to keep Emily pumping her fists like a child conquering level after level of a new video game designed just for her. She was so mesmerized by the opening sequence that she lowered the TV to the floor and lay in front of it, propping up on her elbows with her long piano fingers fanned out over her cheeks so that the black-and-white images flickered scene by scene across her face. She cheered and hissed, mimicking the grotesque expressions of the Nazi scientists as they crept their way nose to nose with the lens and the audience. We agreed that the plot didn’t entirely make sense, but that didn’t matter; it was enough to appreciate Grant’s hard paralytic kisses with Bergman (the most convincing Hollywood beauty of all time, against whom today’s leading ladies frump and slouch and melt like the Wicked Witch). The snow was beginning to pile up again as we crawled into bed and fell asleep.

At some point in the night we woke and made love without a word. When we finally spoke our voices were slow and extraneous, like we’d floated above ourselves to untangle a mystical web, beginning with the branch still tapping at the window, issuing messages from the far side of consciousness.

“Can I ask you a question about Katie?” I said, kicking up a static spark as my knee jerked under the sheets. Emily’s eyes widened and she nodded, like it was in the interest of safety to say yes. “How much did she know about us?” I asked.

“She obviously knew something,” she said, pulling the covers over her bare chest. “But she didn’t know we were meeting up before school. I never told her about the night of the movie premiere or our mornings before school.”

“Because she would’ve been jealous, or because you just didn’t?”

“I don’t know. I wasn’t trying to deliberately keep it from her, but everyone at school was asking me so many questions, like it was their automatic right to know all the details. Whenever I could avoid talking about it, I kept it to myself.”

“What about your parents?”

“My mom knew something, but I’m sure my dad didn’t know. He always thought we were just pals. I mean, when you think about it, for most of the time he was right. But as far as Katie goes, well, I have to admit that I wasn’t really looking forward to sharing all the details.”

I scratched the back of my neck, my telltale sign of nervousness that only Emily recognized and commented on. But she didn’t say anything this time and only smirked and pushed out of bed to crack the window open. On returning she sat up and lit a cigarette, changing the subject for a moment to explain that since ninety percent of the theater department smoked, she’d been inhaling a pack a day anyway. We passed the cigarette. I never asked whether her parents had made gestures toward forgiving me, but she sensed my anxiety and ended up finding her own way to the subject.

“The important thing is that you were always good to my sister. Even my mom can’t deny that. Everybody tiptoed around Katie because she was sick, but you treated her like a regular kid. I mean, Jesus, it wasn’t a big mystery why she talked about you morning, noon, and night.”

At this point in the smoky dark Katie grew closer and more real than ever. I swore I felt her wind-up laughter echoing through the mattress, flattering me in the same sonorous way that she always had, so effortlessly and matchlessly that for months I’d forced myself to forget it. I started sobbing, caught in such an overwhelming storm that attempting to stop it would’ve only rendered it louder and more ludicrous, as absurd as the twisted faces of the cinematized Nazis. Emily wrapped her knees around my waist and her arms around my neck as her cigarette smoked in the ashtray. It took a long time to breathe normally. I tried to explain myself but my voice wasn’t ready and instantly filled with all the emotions that feed on themselves and force you backward.

“I don’t understand,” I finally said, steadying myself, but still sucking air. “I just want to know exactly what happened.”

“Come on, George. She unbuckled it while you were swimming to shore. She put the rod down, unbuckled the life vest, and we didn’t notice. Why would we?”

“Even if it fell off, she could’ve grabbed it and stayed afloat.”

Emily put her cigarette out and moved the ashtray to the bed stand. She waved a hand though the lingering smoke. “She was weak that day. You might not have noticed, but I did. She was always trying to look strong around you, but every step she was struggling. She knew she was weak and she panicked. You can’t panic like that. That’s what really did it. Panic.”

“How do you know?”

“Trust me. However much you’ve cried about it, turned it over in your head, I’ve cried twice as much. And my parents, they’ve never stopped crying.”

“They don’t even know the truth,” I said. “They still think she wasn’t even wearing a life jacket.”

“No one knows the
truth
, George, and knowing that she was wearing the jacket wouldn’t make it easier. Just please do me a favor and don’t let me fall asleep for the rest of the night. I’ve gotta go home tomorrow, so let’s just keep practicing what we’ve been practicing and not sleep at all. Are you tired?”

“No.”

“Good. Now give me a hug.”

I pulled her close, squeezing her as she dried my face with the back of her hand. In some ways I felt my breathing never returned to normal the whole night, even at three a.m. when she promised to try every position we could come up with if I pledged not to fall asleep, no matter what. She didn’t seem to understand my repugnance at the idea of sneaking around our whole lives, my need for her parents to realize the true limits of my negligence. But I didn’t explain this. I didn’t want to appear selfish and make an even bigger fool of myself than I already had. I needed Emily to understand this point on her own.

“I thought you were gone for good,” I said.

“I guess that’s just not how the story goes.”

“Any idea how it ends?”

A minute later Emily brought her Spanish textbook to bed. I kissed her everywhere, snooping around her ankles and knees while she sat back in bed with her book propped up on her chest so I couldn’t see her face. She taught me adverbs that meant “slowly” and “softly” and verbs that meant “to ignore” and “to behave.” By dawn she was standing with a blanket draped over her shoulders, studying herself in the mirror while leaning against the closet, her hair thrown over to one side like a juvenile delinquent, the work of my combing hands after our last round. I was there, too, in the reflection, sitting on the bed in the lower right corner, the morning light casting long vertical shadows through the blinds. Emily was stronger than before, stur dier, and when she stood on her tiptoes her stomach flexed and her hips swelled with courage. She looked at herself and then at my reflection as I scratched my chest. The heater cranked and hissed. It was snowing again and the branch commenced its tapping routine against the window. She came back to bed. We guided ourselves in pleasure and hope all morning and into the afternoon, and each time I clasped her feet at the dire peak.

Thirty-nine

As I noted when first introducing him, my father served in the Vietnam War, an experience that most of its veterans either speak unreservedly about or never speak about, and my dad is one of the latter. I mention this now because over the course of the year in question he seemed to have adopted the burden of my stress to such an extent that we all noticed him transgress in his ability to separate himself from the memories of his losses, which included, in the most tangible terms, his older brother. Though Zach and I knew few details of his tour beyond what we gleaned from offhand remarks every few years (like when he told us, during a reality show competition in sleep deprivation, how easy it was to stay awake those three days he’d spent trapped on a mountainside as Victor Charlie tunneled in and fired from every unseen angle his delirious mind could fathom), after Katie’s death I had the impression that he felt closer to me, as though I understood something of his experience that my mom and brother never could.

While we never had a conversation about the deaths he’d presumably caused or witnessed, that December he set up an artificial Christmas tree he’d won in an office raffle, then woke the next morning with the decision to stop shaving for the first time since his service days, when in a short-lived exhibition of solidarity his platoon gave up the razor to become the only band of bearded warriors in the war. He told me all about it during halftime of a Bears-Packers game after I’d noticed him anxiously eyeballing the tree’s shiny plastic branches, many of which twisted under the weight of ornaments into sideways angles not found in nature. Over time this glare became so filled with contempt that I swore he was expecting an assault rifle to peep through the branches for a quick round of jungle-loving potshots. But while splitting a six-pack of Old Milwaukee, he ended up describing the Christmas he spent in Da Nang, which was highlighted by a surprise visit from the most famous actor to ever play Tarzan at the unfortunate moment when half the soldiers in his tent were sitting on the edge of their cots, crouched over their knees, sniffling along to an Andy Wil liams Christmas album. Even more significant than their visit with Tarzan was the following day’s encounter with an elderly Vietnamese with a thin white beard and a trained elephant. As a Christmas present the man offered each soldier in my dad’s platoon a free elephant ride, promising it would ensure their protection from evil wherever they may roam—which of course ended with their decision to superstitiously quit shaving. A while later, after our conversation had already veered off course and my dad was beginning to relax, he even went so far as to tell me that he fell in love with my mom when he was eighteen, one year before he shipped out, and was perfectly content that she was the first and last lover he would ever know.

This father-son heart-to-heart wasn’t the only surprise that Christmas. A few days later we ended up hosting a dinner in honor of Zach’s new girlfriend (now his wife, for whom at the time he’d sworn off all relations with Gordo’s waitresses that he typically banged for a few weeks while doing his best to avoid being spotted with them in public). Zach originally met Rachel two years previously on a secluded retreat called “Teens Encounter Christ,” where he and a group of fellow seniors from around the state sat Indian style around candles crying and hugging and spiritually bonding over their most incestuous secrets. Who knows what lies Zach spun about his catastrophic childhood or the psychological ill effects of the Holiday Inn murder, but apparently he’d made enough of an impression on Rachel that out of nowhere two years later she called to inform him that she was now living in Des Moines, doing an internship at Wells Fargo while attending part-time classes at Grand View College. When she showed up for dinner with a homemade cake in the shape of a shamrock, topped with a frosted leprechaunesque Santa Claus, my mom nearly burst into tears.