Breathing Water (23 page)

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Authors: T. Greenwood

Tags: #General Fiction

BOOK: Breathing Water
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August 1994
M
rs. Olsen stared through the milky veils past me toward the forest.
“I finished them books on tape you brought three days ago.”
“I'm sorry, I've been very busy. I'm delivering to a couple more people now,” I said. This morning the library had sent me away with an entire box of books to bring to three different people at Gormlaith. As I was lugging the heavy box down the library steps, Mr. Woods came running after me.
“For your troubles, Effie,” he said, pressing a twenty-dollar bill into my hand. “You've been so generous.”
“Oh, no,” I said, shaking my head. I felt like I did when Colette and I shared a paper route and some of the old ladies would try to give us money for bringing their papers up difficult stairs or past vicious dogs.
“Please.” He smiled.
I had been running around all morning. Books for Magoo. Books on tape for Mrs. Olsen. Food for the frogs. I found an old book of Grampa's about reptiles and amphibians and went to Hudson's looking for something to feed them.
Bait,
was what the pimply sales boy suggested.
We got lots of bait.
Then to the lumberyard with the list of materials in Devin's handwriting for the tree house. I handed it to the man and he nodded, smiling, chewing on a thick wad of tobacco, spitting on the ground next to my feet. “Ayup. This is a tall order, ya know. A tall order.”
“Can you come in for a while,” Mrs. Olsen said, “to help me with the tape recorder?”
“For a minute,” I said. I wanted to get to work on the tree house that afternoon.
Inside the cats were sleeping. It was the strangest thing. Sunlight streamed through in hot pools onto the floor and the arms of chairs and tabletops. And in each and every spot of sun was a cat.
I tried to imagine what it must have been like when a man lived here. When Mr. Olsen must have come home from work and thrown his coat across the back of a chair. Before Mrs. Olsen couldn't see. Before he started bringing his girlfriends home with him. When there was the smell of a man's cologne and sweat and breath in this air. I thought now, as the smell of litter boxes and musty heat began to overwhelm and burn in my nose, that maybe after he died she couldn't bare the absence of his smell. Maybe she even missed the scent of the women he brought home. Unbearable, the way the scent of him disappeared after time. Even the clothes she couldn't bear to take out of his drawers must have faded after a while. And so perhaps at first she filled the house with flowers to replace the smell of him. Perhaps she even sprayed the air with a bit of his cologne. But in the end she must have chosen the cats. Because they, at least, were alive.
Every time I went to Mrs. Olsen's house now, she would sit down on the ratty couch as I put the first tape in the tape recorder. And as the voice crackled and began each story, I would watch her close her eyes. There were usually two tapes for a book, sometimes three. I knew that she listened all the way through because she complained often about the endings.
Too sad,
she'd say.
Cheap,
as if I were somehow at fault for the contents. She didn't need me to flip the tape for her, or to find the second one. I think she liked having someone there with her. A real voice before the recorded one. I left her sitting upright on the couch, her eyes closed, and a cat on the spot of sunlight on her lap.
 
The water was choppy. A lone canoe in the center of the lake bobbed and drifted with the current. When I got to the camp I could see Gussy's car in the driveway as well as a car I didn't recognize. I pulled in behind the car, noticing Connecticut plates.
I didn't know anybody in Connecticut. I walked into the kitchen tentatively, as if I didn't live here. “Gussy?”
I heard voices above me, the ceiling creaking. I walked to the stairs and looked up, “Gussy?”
“Oh, hi, honey.” Her voice floated down to me. “We'll be right down.”
“Okay,” I said, wondering who was in my bedroom.
Gussy led the way down the stairs. Following her was a man wearing a flannel shirt so new it was still creased from being folded inside a package. Behind him was a small woman with perfectly straight blond hair, sharp features like a bird's, and brand-new hiking boots.
“Effie, these are the Kings. From
Connecticut,”
Gussy said as if that explained everything.
I stared at her outstretched hand.
“They're interested in the camp,” Gussy said.
“Oh,” I said, my throat thick.
“Effie is my granddaughter.” Gussy smiled and touched my shoulder. “She's living here for the summer.”
“Oh, how nice,” the bird woman said. “Where do you normally live?”
I looked to Gussy for an answer. She looked at her hands, busying themselves with the Formica top of the kitchen table.
“I just moved home from Seattle,” I said.
“Oh, I love Seattle,” the woman squawked and bobbed her head.“We used to go sailing on Lake Washington every summer.”
I hated her.
“Can we take a look at the plumbing?” the man asked.
 
I busied myself with the books for Magoo and the groceries I had picked up on my way back to Gormlaith. After everything was put away, I went outside and sat on a lawn chair in front of the camp and watched them. The woman walked on the man's heels. The man ignored her. He motioned vaguely to things like the roof, the forest surrounding the camp, the lake. I couldn't hear their voices but I could imagine them.
We plan to put a sun room on, a ]acuzzi maybe. Of course we'll have to build a larger dock. We've got jet skis. A power boat. Our daughter will be with us too. She's a sophomore at Boston College. Pre-law. Or Political Science. Gawd, we never know what it'll be next. She changes majors like she changes shoes.
And I pictured her, thin and pale, perched on the edge of the dock like a bird herself. Wishing she were back in Boston. Wishing her mother didn't talk so loudly.
When they drove away in their silver car, I found Gussy inside inspecting the windows.
“We could really use some new windows,” she said, leaning down to look at the warped windowsill.
“Gussy, I don't want them to live here.”
“Honey, I can't keep this place up. And they were just looking. I've had about a zillion calls. It doesn't mean they're going to buy it.”
Tears were welling up in the corners of my eyes, hot and thick.
“It's okay, Effie,” she said, offering me the warm circle of her arms.
“It's not okay,” I said, shaking my head hard. “Nothing about this is okay.”
 
The graveyard where my grandfather is buried is next to Quimby High. I expected the school to be deserted now, but the football field was dotted with field hockey players. Knee pads and sticks, listless girls stretching their skinny legs, lounging on the grass, dreaming, perhaps, of anyplace but here. It was still too hot for summer to be coming to an end. The first few weeks of school, they knew, would be torturous. The arms and legs, no matter how much they ran and swang and stretched, would still belong to summer.
I parked in the cafeteria parking lot rather than trying to maneuver the Bug through the hilly cemetery. I locked my door and smiled at two red-faced girls who had escaped from the athletic field and were leaning against the brick wall of the cafeteria in their plaid skirts, smoking, their hockey sticks discarded on the grass. I thought of all of the generations of field hockey players, the girls summer after summer who traded in their cutoffs for kilts. Tess and I were not these kinds of girls. We were not legends here. We were not even ghosts in the halls.
The gate to the cemetery swung open without resistance, its spring sprung long ago. I closed it gently behind me. The cemetery was the first thing they built in Quimby. Before houses and roads, shops or churches, the settlers of this town needed to take care of their dead. From the stones it seemed that most of the dead were infants and mothers. Most of the babies didn't even have names. They were lined up and numbered next to their mothers, most younger than me.
Tess and I would escape here. We weren't running from field hockey practice or cheerleading practice or anything in particular for that matter. But when school let out for the day, this was the first place we came. Mostly just to linger a while before we had to go home. But sometimes to find others like us who were dead.
At fifteen, we found a girl, Mary Elizabeth Miller, loving daughter. Child of God. And perched above her name was a stone angel that looked blind, her eyes the same gray stone as her wings and hands. At seventeen we found Katherine Blake, loving mother and wife. Next to her were twin babies without names.
I grazed the granite stones with my fingertips as I went to where I had been told my grandfather was resting. But when I got to the spot that Gussy had described, I couldn't find him anywhere. I walked the crooked rows of stones, stepping over the crumbling monuments, trying to find him. Desperate and certain that I had looked at every stone, I saw a small granite block that was glossy and new. I was alarmed when I peered at the cutout words and could see my face reflected in the polished stone.
I was also alarmed to find that I was not the only visitor Grampa had had recently. There were bunches of freshly cut daisies in jelly jars, jelly jars from my grandmother's cupboard, lined up neatly in front of the stone. And next to the jelly jars was what appeared to be a dominoes game in progress, the familiar ivory pieces aligned according to the rules I only vaguely remembered. Magoo.
When I pulled the pipe from my pocket, it seemed that he was not alone. That there were conversations still to be had. Dominoes games to be played still, if only in Magoo's imagination. I set the pipe down on the stone and sat down in the tall grass.
When Grampa died, Gussy threw the party he had requested reluctantly. He did not want a funeral. He did want guests, music, people dancing and drinking. She must not have known how to do this. She had buried her parents, her best friend. She understood the rhythm of gathering the clothes, of choosing words, of nodding and hugging and tears. But true to his wish, she did none of that at all. She ordered a hundred blue balloons, cheese and fruit plates, and champagne. She called his friends from the Quimby Pipers and sent invitations to the party to celebrate the life of my grandfather.
She insisted, though, on this stone. Because balloons set free over the lake and the music and dancing did not give her a place to go back to to cry when she needed it. It didn't give her a place to set her best daisies. And below his name, she insisted,
True.
A word uttered between them once so long ago they might not have remembered when it began at all. And muttered again so many times that it grew to mean more between them than
mine,
or
stay,
or
love.
In the distance I could hear the field hockey coach's whistle and the hot breath of running girls. When I lay down and pressed my ear to the ground, I could hear the sound of their feet like hooves. I listened for something beyond the pounding, but there was nothing to hear. And when I whispered into the grass, I was certain that my words were lost in the pounding of their feet.
 
I kept the key to the safe deposit box in a locket my sister gave me when she went away to college. I knew she would have liked for me to put a picture of her inside (a small one from the photo booth at McCarthy's drugstore), but instead I left it empty, waiting for the right thing to hide inside. When Gussy gave me the key, I thought immediately of the locket, the funny silver heart that lay twisted in a jewelry box I rarely opened.
“There's not much in there, honey,” she had said. “But he wanted you to have it. And, of course the money, and the books. Whenever you want them, you can have them.”
The cold silver of the necklace felt strange on my chest underneath my shirt. It hit the bone between my breasts as I walked from my car across the street to the bank. The teller looked annoyed when I told her that I would like to open my safe deposit box. She found the file and the twin key and motioned for me to follow her down the stairs.
Together, we fit the keys and turned, pulling the long metal box from the wall.
“You can take it in there if you like. Press that buzzer when you're ready to come up.”
“Thanks,” I said and took the box from her. It was heavy. I had to struggle to keep my wrists from folding in on themselves.
There was a small table in the room. A lock on the door and a hard wooden chair. I set the box on the table and shook the pain from my wrists.
Inside the box were some savings bonds, a bundle of letters with names I didn't recognize on the return address. There was a sock filled with old coins. I poured them out onto the table and sorted them by size. They were mostly pennies, wheat pennies grown green with age. Some of them looked foreign.
Some coins,
Gussy had said.
Nothing terribly valuable.You might be able to get a little something for them. He seemed to think they were some sort of treasure just because they were so old.
There were also some documents rolled and held together with a rubber band that crumbled when I started to slip it off the end. I scooped the coins into my hand and poured them back into the sock, knotting the end tightly and putting it back in the box. I put the savings bonds back too and unrolled the papers.

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