Vinegar Hill (16 page)

Perhaps it's best that she stays in at night. She hears stories about groups of teenage boys, about men who get drunk at the Sunburst by the waterfront and follow young women home. Just two weeks ago, a young girl hitchhiking south of town was raped. Who knows what might have happened to Ellen, had she been walking alone that night? But right now it's broad daylight, almost noon, and she decides to take a walk down to the lake. She loops her purse strap over her shoulder and sets out at a brisk pace; after two blocks, though, she is dizzy, out of breath, and she looks for a place to sit down. The sun glares off her glasses, burns the tip of her nose. A group of boys flash past on skateboards, and their colorful T-shirts and sneakers look sinister. “Shit, lady, move it,” one of them says. Across the street, the doors of the bank open toward her like welcoming arms, and she can feel how it will be inside even before she gets there, the coolness of the tiled floors, the sedate blue colors, the hushed adult voices.

She goes in and sits self-consciously in one of the chairs that line the wall, listening as the tellers talk softly with one another. The dizziness fades, leaving her forehead and temples slick with sweat. She looks in her purse for a tissue, and beneath it she finds the checkbook which she meant to return to James. The check she wrote was number 221, but there's no record of the check before it.

Well, she's at the bank, she might as well find out the amount of that check so she can figure the new balance. Won't he be surprised, smug James, when she returns the updated checkbook. She walks up to the tellers somewhat nervously. Banks, like churches, make her vaguely uncertain with the unspoken rules and private gestures she associates with solemn occasions.

“I'd like a balance on my account,” she says, “and the amount of the last check to clear.”

While the teller looks up the ledger, Ellen studies the paintings on the walls. Geometric shapes mostly: blue circles, yellow squares. Meaningless. Non-threatening. So different from working in a classroom decorated with anguished tempera paintings, twisted clay pots, clumsy poems labeled
LOVE
or
HATE
. Alone at her desk, Ellen studies these frail reconstructions of her students' lives—a lost pet, an angry parent, a distant older sibling. It's too easy to find pieces of her own portrait here in a mother's scold, a daughter's rigid stance. How wonderful it must be to handle money instead of people, to be responsible for balances and quotas rather than wishes and rages and dreams.

The teller scribbles on a slip of paper, passes it to Ellen, ten months' worth of savings. Six hundred dollars and seven cents.

Six hundred dollars?

“Excuse me,” Ellen says. “There should be over six thousand dollars in this account.”

“Let's see,” the teller says. Ellen stares at blue circles. Bright yellow squares. Breathes in the clean, cool air; traces a finger along the smooth countertop. “The balance is correct,” the teller says. “Two weeks ago,
here
”—she points to the ledger—“a withdrawal was made for six thousand dollars. Check number two hundred twenty.”

Ellen tucks the checkbook back into her purse and walks out of the bank into the bright sunshine. She feels dizzy, hollow, as though she's had the wind knocked out of her, and she sits down on the curb, watching the traffic straggle past. Their money,
her
money, gone. If she tells her mother, Mom will say,
It's not your place to worry about money
or
He probably had a good reason
. Her sisters will say,
Well, men know more about that kind of stuff anyway
. Father Bork will remind her that just as God is the head of the
Church, the man is the head of the woman, and that Ellen should place her trust in James.
You are the hearth and the home
, he had said.
When the fire burns out in the hearth, the family dies
.

Ellen works her hand into her purse, grips the pill bottle tucked into the side pocket. It seems that something must be sacrificed soon: the head or the hearth, God or the soul, James or Ellen, and it is Ellen who does not fit, who is always unsatisfied, ungrateful, unhappy.
Dear God, please
, she begins, but she doesn't know what to ask for. She feels the way she did when she was a child waking up after one of her dreams, not knowing which of the twisted paths to take, the voices of the men fading in the distance.

 

Amy's swimming suit is an old one from last summer and it pinches her beneath the arms, rides up in the back to expose her hips. It is green with bright yellow flowers; a frill of material hangs from the waist. When she steps into the water, it floats up in a babyish way until Amy holds it down with her hands. She is older than all the other kids, and some of them are looking at her curiously. Herbert is talking with his friend from school; he pretends not to know Amy, and Amy pretends not to know him.

The teacher is a teenage boy. He says his name is John and they should just go ahead and call him that. All the kids look at one another—did he really think they would call him
mister
? But everyone watches when he executes a perfect backflip off the diving board. He pops back to the surface, plunges forward, porpoiselike, swims over to where they're waiting in the shallow end, and tells them that, if they work hard, they'll be able to do the same thing someday.

Right now, though, they have to put their faces into the water and blow bubbles. Amy turns her back to John so he won't see she is keeping her face dry except for her chin. Herbert has his entire head beneath the water. When he comes up, John makes an exam
ple of him, asking can anyone else go all the way under too? Amy creeps behind John, staying carefully out of his line of vision. The other kids don't notice because they are underwater most of the time, practicing holding their breath. Some of the mothers in the bleachers notice, but they just point and laugh.

A girl jerks her head out of the water and coughs; Amy's stomach shrinks into a small, hard ball. The water smells bitter, and it sucks at her chest, pushes against her stomach and hips. She cannot imagine surrendering to it, arms beating like awkward wings, feet thrashing. Solid objects waver and dance; things in water are not the way they seem. Amy is careful to test the bottom of the pool with her toe before she steps all the way down. At any moment, the concrete could give way and send her plummeting to a pit filled with beasts. At any moment, the water might turn to a boiling bath of oil. In the basement Amy has found old books of her grandmother's about the lives of the saints, and on rainy days she re-reads her favorite parts: Saint Martina, who bled milk after the emperor stripped her naked and slashed her body with knives; Saint Fausta, who endured one thousand nails hammered into her skull; Saint Euphemia, whose limbs were ripped from her body, whose feet were severed the way Amy's feet look severed, distant, far off under the water.

“Okay!” John says. “I think you're ready to swim. What do you think about that?”

They all look at one another, dripping, uneasy.

“We'll start with the dead man's float,” John says. “And our volunteer to go first will be the girl who still hasn't put her head in the water.”

John looks at Amy. Amy looks at John. A few of the kids titter. The water tickles in Amy's armpits, swells against the hollow between her shoulder blades.

“Swimming doesn't interest me,” Amy says with as much disdain
as she can muster. She keeps her hands at her sides, holding the skirt of her swimming suit in place.

John smiles at the other kids and says, “How come do you think a big girl like her is afraid of water?”

“I'm not afraid of water. I'm just not
interested
in swimming.”

He ignores her. “To do the dead man's float,” he explains to the class, “you have to be perfectly relaxed. Take a deep breath and the water will hold you up, like this…” He glides into a float, his long thin body stretching. He stays that way until the kids start to whisper to each other. Maybe he is unconscious. Maybe he died right in front of them and they didn't even know it. They all jump when John finally pops up out of the water, slicking his hair back, grinning.

“Now you,” he points to Amy. “What's your name?”

Amy doesn't answer.

“Amy Grier,” one of the mothers calls.

“Amy is going to be my volunteer. She's going to relax and fall forward into the water, and I'm going to hold her up.”

But Amy is weaving through the other kids toward the steps.

“Get back here,” John says. “You and me have the whole summer to go yet.”

The mothers in the bleachers are laughing, and so are the kids in the pool.

Amy stops. “What do I have to do to pass this class, so I don't have to come anymore?” she says. “I mean, what does everybody have to do at the end of it?”

“Dive,” John says smugly.

Amy gets out of the pool. A few of the kids yell
fraidy cat
and
girl;
she feels as though she is watching herself from somewhere far away. All of this is her mother's fault, and if Amy dies that will be her mother's fault too. She walks to the deep end of the pool, climbs up the steps to the diving board. She imagines the funeral,
her mother dressed in black, weeping over the coffin in which Amy lies, dead, astonishingly beautiful. Abruptly, Christ appears above her, his feet moving gingerly over the air, as all of Amy's relatives and friends and everyone she's ever known bow down in front of her body. Christ opens His shirt, exposing his Sacred Heart the way he did for Saint Margaret, only now, because of Amy, everyone can see it, everyone can see how much Christ grieves just for her. The mothers are calling to her, clattering down from the bleachers, but Amy pretends they are cries of anguish from the mourners.

“Hey! Stop!” John yells, climbing out of the water. The last thing Amy sees is his shadow gliding toward her along the concrete. She closes her eyes, fills her lungs with air, lifts her arms, and pitches forward.

The shock of it, the coldness, and the hollow, watery sound stiffen her body and she glides until her clenched fists scrape the bottom. She opens her eyes and sees the liquid yellow surface above. What if her mother doesn't come to her funeral? What if nobody cares that she is dead? Men will fish her body out of the pool with a hook. What should we do with her? they say, and when no one claims her, they bury her by the edge of the pool, in unconsecrated soil, where her mother will never come to visit and Christ will never find her. The sudden bullet shape of John hurtles through the water; Amy thrashes her legs and, miraculously, she lifts away from him. She moves her arms, keeping rhythm, until she feels cool air against the top of her head, and then she lifts her chin to breathe, scraping her forehead against the pool wall.

“What a stupid thing to do,” John shouts from the middle of the pool. “Get back to the shallows and stay there.”

She struggles up out of the pool, her legs and arms shaking wildly. She is not dead. She is not dead. A group of mothers comes down from the bleachers saying,
Sh, Sweetheart, you're okay
. One
of them tries to wrap her in a sweet-smelling towel, but Amy walks away, kicking her legs out proudly until she reaches the locker room. The mother follows, sitting down beside her on the low wooden bench in front of the lockers and this time when she slips the towel over Amy's shoulders, Amy holds it against herself. “Did you see me swim?” she asks the mother, closing her eyes so it can be Ellen who is stroking her wet hair and calling her
sweetheart, baby, love
.

 

Ellen finds James asleep on the patio, stretched out in a lawn chair, a dish towel draped over his head so the top, where the hair is thin, won't burn. Next door, the Muellers are watering their lawn. Mr. Mueller wields the nozzle, calling directions to Mrs. Mueller, who trots behind him lugging coils of hose. The hose moves between them like a living thing until Mrs. Mueller drops it and stands, arms akimbo. Mr. Mueller whirls, brandishing the nozzle angrily, and then he sees Ellen watching. With his chin, he indicates the house to Mrs. Mueller. She goes inside, and he follows her, flinging the nozzle to the ground.

Now that the weather is warm, their fights trickle through the open windows, more a fragrance than a sound at first, subtle, then slowly building. It's the night fights that disturb Ellen the most. The voices remind her of a strange, atonal opera, the sort of thing she sometimes hears on public radio. She takes a sleeping pill and lies down in the middle of the empty bed, imagining James in some far-off motel room, and wonders if he's thinking of her even as she knows he's not. He will be sleeping soundly, the television buzzing at the foot of the bed, his knees curled to his chest so that his body takes up as little space as possible. Ellen spreads her legs, spreads her arms, invading the space that would belong to James if he were here. She tries to breathe deeply, tries to relax, until the angry music of the argument fades.

One morning in spring, Mrs. Mueller came to the door clutching a paper bag beneath her arm.

“Keep this for me, will you please?” she said to Ellen. She spoke as if she were afraid that somebody else might hear. “I'm leaving him, and these were my mother's things, her jewelry and some old pictures. I can't have them with me until I know where I'm going. I don't want to carry anything of value.”

“Of course I'll keep them for you,” Ellen said. “Let me know when you get settled and I'll send them on.”

But Mrs. Mueller was gone only three days. She came by to retrieve her things early in the summer, and though she waves at Ellen from her yard, they have not spoken since. When Ellen told James about it, he simply shrugged. “She learned what it's like out in the real world,” he said. “Makes things look pretty good where she's at.”