How to Breathe Underwater (22 page)

Dale set them down on the grass.

Carney took some long nails from the box and nailed the two-by-fours together in the shape of a cross. The two-by-fours were grayed and weatherstained from lying out behind the shed, and the cross they made looked to me like the real thing. It seemed heavy, too, when Carney lifted it. She set it against Dale’s shoulder and let the tail drag in the grass. Dale gave us a grave and tragic look, and then he turned his eyes upward.

“Okay,” she said. “Now, Dale, you’ve just been condemned to die. You have to drag this cross to the middle of the field, toward that little hill. But you’re not going to get there right away. You’re just going to take ten steps and then fall. That’s the first Station.”

Dale took ten steps, dragging the cross through the grass. He rounded his shoulders and shuffled his feet. When he fell it seemed like he was exhausted already.

“Now go stand by him,” Carney whispered to me. “Try to cry.”

I knew I was a better actor than Dale. I was the one who’d been raised on Shakespeare and Chekhov and Ionesco, after all. I tried to envision the Virgin Mary on Carney’s prayer cards and devotional candles, her folded white hands and her sad, forbearing look. I took slow steps and fell onto my knees beside Dale, hunching and hunching my shoulders. I knew crying seemed more real when you didn’t make any sound at all.

“Now, Jonah, this is where you come in,” Carney said. “You’re going to be Simon. Simon helps carry the cross.”

Jonah ran through the grass and put one fat hand on the cross. Dale gave a sigh of relief, as if to let Jonah think he was really helping. Together the three of us took twenty more steps toward the hill.

“Great,” Carney said. “Now Veronica wipes the face of Jesus.” She made her way across the pasture and stood beside Dale. “Look at me,” she said. He looked at her. I could tell the cross was getting heavy for him now, for real; his shoulder was trembling, and sweat had begun to bead on his forehead. Beside him, Carney wore an expression of anguish. In her Communion dress she might have been an angel of mercy. She lifted the top layer of her dress and brought it toward Dale’s face. At first he pulled away, but then he closed his eyes and let her wipe his forehead. Something seemed to change in Carney’s features as she did it. The hardness around her mouth softened, and she glanced back toward the house as if she’d just thought about her parents, or about Dale’s mother. But the softness vanished as quickly as it had come. She shook her skirt straight and gave Dale a little push.

“Now you fall again,” she said. “Come on. We’re waiting.”

Dale dropped to his knees. The cross tumbled off his shoulder and lay half hidden in the grass. He took off his glasses and tucked them into his shirt pocket.

“It’s time for you to say your line to the women,” Carney said. “Eleanor and Patty, come on over here. Both of you, you have to cry.” She got them into place, and then she bent to Dale’s ear. “Now, Dale, say, ‘Cry not for me but for your sins and those of your children, for they are the cause of my suffering.’ ”

Dale stretched out his hand toward Patty and Eleanor’s heads. He didn’t say anything, but the gesture seemed like enough.

“Fine,” Carney said. “Now pick up the cross and take it over to that little hill. Go on. You have to fall down one more time. It’s the last time you fall, so make it good.”

Dale squared his shoulders. He lifted the cross and dragged it to the hill, and then he sprawled in the grass, arms splayed at his sides. I knew this was my cue to lament, and so I ran to him and made a low moaning sound. It came out more dramatic than I’d intended. Dale got up and took the spade from Jonah, then dug a hole in the soft earth, upturning clumps of grass and stones until he could reach in almost to his elbow. He dragged the cross up the little rise, stood it in the hole, and packed dirt around its base. All at once I understood that this was where Carney had meant to bring us: to the crucifixion, where we would tie Dale up and leave him out here all alone in the field. Carney smiled her cold mean smile at Dale. I would rather have died than have her look at me that way, but Dale didn’t notice. He kept packing dirt around the cross until it stood upright and stable.

“There,” he said, getting to his feet. He stepped back against the cross and raised his arms. His eyes turned upward in dramatic imitation of martyrdom.

“Okay,” Carney said, leaning close to me. “Tie him up.”

“Me?” I said.

“Go on,” she said. I stood there looking at the rope in Eleanor’s hands. I thought of lynchings, of the photographs I’d seen in the textbooks for my father’s classes—black men hanging from bridges, white men in cone hats standing around and cheering. I thought of my mother pointing out the WHITE and COLORED signs beneath the paint, and of how much more humane I’d felt than all the people eating at that restaurant. I thought of the words my mother and I had read at our own seder:
You shall not oppress a stranger, for you
know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been
strangers in the land of Egypt.
Then I thought of what it would be like to live in Iberville Parish if Carney were no longer my friend. I thought of what things would be like at school, and after school, and how there would be nothing to protect me from being up against a cross myself, waiting to be tied.

I was the one who took the rope from Eleanor. I tied it around Dale’s ankles so he couldn’t move, then wrapped it around his body, all the way up to his arms, and knotted it tight against the tendons of his wrists. We didn’t have a crown of thorns, so I took the wreath from Carney’s head and set it on Dale’s.

“There,” Carney said. “Done.”

We all stood and looked at him. It would have been the perfect time to run away and leave him there. The afternoon sun came down hot on the backs of our necks, and the bees shot past, humming. Dale moved his wrists a little. I’d tied them so tight his hands must have been going numb.

“Okay,” he said. “Now get me down.”

“No,” Carney said. “That’s not how the game goes.”

“Come on, Carney,” I said. “You just said we were done.”

“No, we’re not,” she said. “You know what comes next. You helped me learn it.”

I might have argued with her then. I might have untied Dale myself. If I had, the whole thing might have remained a secret. We might have all gone back to the house and eaten lunch. In all likelihood I would have forgotten about Dale Fortunot, and my mother would have forgotten about him too. She never would have sent the article from the
Times.
I wouldn’t have found myself wondering what Dale might have been trying to find in Israel, the place where the real crucifixion had happened. I would never have known about Dale’s wife, or about their son, Samuel, who would now grow up without a father. And I wouldn’t have been looking at that P.S., wondering what my mother had meant to write.
Maybe you’ll
teach your own child better than I taught you,
she might have written, in her dramatic way.

But I did not argue, and I did not untie Dale. “Jesus dies on the cross,” I said. “That’s the next Station.”

Carney took Dale’s glasses from his shirt pocket and threw them far away into the weeds. Then she picked up a stick from the ground and poked him in the ribs, hard enough to make him cry out.

“Stop it!” he said. “Get me down now!”

“No,” Carney said. “Jesus dies on the cross. He
dies.
”

The heat and the smell of grass and the distant sounds of the party seemed to fall away as I watched Dale wrestle against the ropes. Carney jabbed him in the belly and legs with that stick, and when he started to cry she told him to shut up. Patty and Jonah and Eleanor just stared. The sun beat down. Bees swung around Dale, darting toward his face and hands. Carney raised the stick and whipped his bare forearms. He began to shriek, a harsh, high-pitched sound that hurt my ears.

I grabbed Carney’s arm, certain that someone would hear us. Carney looked back toward the house. I thought she might be ready to stop, ready to untie Dale and go eat lunch beneath the chinaberry tree. But there was a noise behind us, and I turned. Aunt Marian stood at the break in the hedge. Her face was white above the blue of her dress, her hands pressed to her mouth. She was shouting something I couldn’t understand, shouting so the men and women came running, and then they were all coming across the grass.

Acknowledgments

Heartfelt thanks to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Wallace Stegner/ Truman Capote Fellowship at Stanford, the Marsh McCall Lectureship, and the San Francisco Foundation, without whose generosity this collection would never have come to be.

I am grateful for the patience, time, and insight of my mentors: Edgar Rosenberg, Dan McCall, and Lamar Herrin at Cornell; Frank Conroy, James Alan McPherson, Marilynne Robinson, and Thom Jones at Iowa; and John L’Heureux, Elizabeth Tallent, and Tobias Wolff at Stanford.

Infinite thanks to Aaron Cohen, David Meeker, Peter Rudy, Doug Powell, and Nathan Englander, who were there from the beginning; to Adam Johnson, Stephanie Harrell, ZZ Packer, Angela Pneuman, Ed Schwarzchild, Malinda McCollum, Doug Dorst, Katharine Noel, Lysley Tenorio, and Gabrielle Calvocoressi, incredible readers and friends; and to Matthew Brown, Nancy Laist, Jonathan Flinker, and Jennifer White Doom, who helped me through the worst times and celebrated with me at the best.

Thanks to the editors who took a chance on me: J. D. McClatchy, George Plimpton, Don Lee, Tamara Straus, and Michael Ray. And to Dana Goodyear, who quietly got my stories into the right hands.

Great volumes of thanks to Kim Witherspoon, Maria Massie, and Alexis Hurley at Witherspoon Associates, whose unfailing belief and expertise helped me bring this collection into reality.

I am endlessly grateful to have found in Jordan Pavlin a wise, insightful editor and friend. Thanks also to Emily Owens and Sophie Fels at Knopf for their tireless help and good humor.

Love and thanks to my family, the Orringers, Tibors, and Hartys. Thanks to my father, who taught me how to write; to Linda, for her support and strength; to my brother and sister, Daniel and Amy Orringer, king and queen of my heart.

And finally to Ryan Harty, best reader and best friend, whose care is in every page of this collection, and whose love is my breath and life.

In memory of my mother, Agnes Tibor Orringer.

Julie Orringer

How to Breathe Underwater

Julie Orringer is a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Cornell University and was a Stegner Fellow in the Creative Writing Program at Stanford. Her stories have appeared in
The Paris Review
,
The Yale Review
,
Ploughshares
,
Zoetrope: All-Story
,
The Pushcart Prize Anthology
, and
The Best American Non-Required Reading, 2004.
She lives in San Francisco.

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2005

Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following magazines, where these stories first appeared:
The Yale Review
, “What We Save” and “The Isabel Fish”;
The Paris Review
, “When She Is Old and I Am Famous” and “Note to Sixth-Grade Self”;
Ploughshares
, “Pilgrims”; and
Zoetrope:
All-Story
, “The Smoothest Way Is Full of Stones.” “When She Is Old and I Am Famous” also appeared in the 2001
Pushcart Prize Anthology.
“Pilgrims” also appeared in
Best New American Voices 2001
, edited by Charles Baxter; in
New Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, 2002
; and in the 2003
Pushcart Prize Anthology.