Authors: Joan Thomas
Finally water glinted through the trees and the woods opened to the lake, a finger lake with a tiny beach and a swimming area roped off. Three pairs of sunbathers lay on the sand. No one was swimming – the sun was warm but the air was cool, and the water would be too. Melody dropped the beach bag. She knelt and pulled two big deflated beach toys out of it, and the blond boys sprang for them. “Share with Liam,” Melody said as the three of them ran up the beach. “The pump?” she called after them, and one of the blond boys came back for it.
In spite of the cold, Melody took off her yellow shirt, spread out her towel, and lay down in her bikini. “Stay together,” she said to Sylvie and Payton without looking at them. “Don’t go outside the buoys.” She fished an
MP3
player out of her purse and stuck in earbuds and closed her eyes.
Sylvie and Payton sank back into the woods. From its edge they watched the boys blow up the two inflatable floats. One was a purple turtle and the other was a sort of Jeep or tank with a cord dangling from each end. It had a label you could read with the binoculars: Aqua-Hummer. The pump was a foot pump; Payton’s brother, Liam, took it over almost at once and worked it hard, first with his foot and then with the heel of his hand. He was skinny but he worked fiercely, leaning his whole body into the job. When both floats were inflated, he stood up in satisfaction, and in a flash the two blond boys had yanked them away and were running towards the water. Liam ran after them and tried to grab onto the floats, but they managed to kick him off. He fought them, splashed back and forth from one beach toy to the other, while Adrienne’s boys paddled vigorously away from him.
Sylvie and Payton watched for a while, and then they grew tired of his misery and stepped back into the woods. The game they fell into playing was not to be where humans expected them to be, but always to be watching. They found a spot very close to where a couple was lying and set about spying. Sylvie trained the binoculars on the woman and picked up the skull pendant hanging between her breasts. Then she swivelled towards the man just as he was rolling over, his muscles writhing like the pythons she’d seen the day before. When they stilled, she discovered a big eye tattooed between his shoulder blades.
Then Liam was back, crying across the sand and floundering through the weedy verge towards Payton. Payton froze into one of her faun poses. “They won’t share,” he wept. Angry tears smeared the dust and sand on his small face. He batted at her arm once or twice. “Payton, it’s not fair,” he cried. His little tummy went in and out as he sobbed.
Payton stood in a patch of weeds, her face remote. Sylvie was shocked by how alike the two of them were. She knew exactly who they would be at school, both of them hanging around the fringes in their own grades, with their furtive faces and their dark talents that nobody admired, and the awkward yearnings that everybody recognized and mocked.
“Listen,” she said to Liam. “Why don’t you just play with something else?”
He recoiled from Sylvie. He was old enough to be ashamed of crying in front of a strange girl. He reminded her of a famine victim in the uneven knobs of his backbone and the thin slats of his ribs, and in his knees, which were bigger around than his skinny legs. He turned back to batting at his sister, bleating, “Payton. Payton.” He was too thin to hold up his swimming trunks properly, and the crack of his ugly little butt was visible.
Sylvie suddenly loathed him as though he were her own disgusting little brother. “Fuck off and play by yourself, loser,” she said in a voice she had never before heard coming out of her chest. She reached over and swatted his butt hard with the back of her hand, and that was what finally drove him away.
With Payton silent beside her, she picked up the binoculars and turned back to her joyless spying. It was an ugly lake, long and marshy. It smelled of rotting snails and of toilets. No cottages were visible on its margins, but rickety docks had been built out into the lake. She checked out the next sunbathing couple, and she began to hate faun vision, which revealed black bristles on the woman’s legs and the birdlike dart of the woman’s eye down the page of a stupid magazine, and the man’s balls (crinkled skin with sparse and piggish hairs) nudging out one leg of his shorts, and the chewed chicken bones he had tossed towards the bush, lying now with sand sticking to them and flies crawling over them.
She lowered the binoculars and turned to look for the boys. Liam was nowhere to be seen, but Adrienne’s blond sons were towing the beach toys up onto the sand. Apparently they were leaking. The boys went looking for the pump. While they were retrieving it, Liam appeared out of nowhere at the shoreline. The blond boys spied him and ran down to chase him off. Then screams of outrage rose and the two boys pounded back to where Melody was lying motionless on her towel.
“Liam pissed on our floaters!” they shrieked. “He pissed on the Hummer and then he pissed on the turtle! He did it so we can’t play with them! He did it on purpose!”
Melody craned her head. Liam was standing at the edge of the water facing them, a small, malevolent figure with his swimming trunks pulled up crookedly and the corner of a beach toy clutched defiantly in each hand. “Oh Christ,” she yelled. “What a little shit!”
“What a shit!” the brothers cried, picking up the theme and dancing to it on the sand. “What a fucker! He’s a goddamn fucker! Do something, Melody!”
But instead of getting up and dealing with him, Melody flopped over onto her stomach. She lay absolutely still, ignoring them all. One of the brothers kicked sand at her and she ignored that too, and finally they ran back towards the water, yelling threats at Liam.
Sylvie got up helplessly and began to cut across the beach towards the path. Payton came hobbling along after her. The sun was lower now and fell in visible shafts through the trees, lighting up separate clumps of leaves on the forest floor. The trail was clammy under her feet. At a certain point she became aware that Payton was close behind her. Barefoot now, wearing ordinary footless tights. She no longer had fur; it must have been attached to the hoofs.
The clearing was silent. No one was sitting at the harvest table. Between two trees hung a hammock, and in it Adrienne’s husband lay sound asleep. No one was in the kitchen. A pot bubbled on the stove and cooking smells hung in the air. The Puffed Wheat cake sat uncovered on the counter. Sylvie snatched up a piece and shoved it hungrily into her mouth, and Payton did the same.
Then Sylvie crept soundlessly up the stairs and Payton followed. The bedroom doors were open and both bedrooms were empty. They could hear water splashing in the bathroom and the squeak of someone’s butt on the floor of the tub. Sylvie swallowed the last of the Puffed Wheat cake and turned to go back down the stairs, and just then a pure, beautiful voice lifted into the hall. “
As I went down in the river to pray
,” someone sang. “
Studyin’ about that good ole way
.” It was Adrienne. Sylvie could picture her holding up a sponge, squeezing water onto her white shoulder while she lifted her voice with the careless joy of a song-filled bird. She
finished and then she began again, singing more slowly now, her voice filled with longing. They stood listening on the stairs, clutching the smooth banister. “
Good Lord, show me the way
,” Adrienne prayed, and then her voice died out and silence filled the house.
The building Sylvie understood to be the studio was down a path that branched off the trail to the beach. A little stream ran alongside, and the mud of the path was slick and studded with rough-capped acorns that bit viciously into Sylvie’s feet. The studio was made almost entirely of glass, and it was so deep in the woods that no sunlight reflected off it. Sylvie stopped when she saw it and stepped away from the path and into the trees. From where she stood, all she could see inside was something small and white.
It was Payton who crept up, who raised her head and looked. Then she ducked, crouching below the window, and turned her small, knowing face in Sylvie’s direction. A foot, Sylvie thought. There’s a bed up against the window, and someone is bracing themselves against the glass with their foot.
Back at the beach, the sunbathers were gone. Just their outsized footprints left behind, and the immaculate impressions of their towels. Their drink cans and chip bags. Little nests of cigarette butts. Melody was lying on her side, rolled in her towel like a blanket, sound asleep with her blond hair tangled in the sand. The little boys were nowhere in sight.
It was cold now; no one would think of swimming. The wind had started to blow up waves. But two coloured shapes bobbed halfway down the narrow lake. Sylvie lifted the binoculars to her face, and after a minute a curve of purple plastic moved into the frame. It was the inflated turtle. No one was on it. Then she picked up the Aqua-Hummer; the two mattresses seemed to be tied together. And in the Hummer she made out a small human arm. It
was Liam’s. Liam, who lay with his white face propped against the edge, like a castaway who had been several weeks at sea. He was closer to the far shore than to this one. She saw his arm move, but he did not appear to be paddling.
Sylvie handed the binoculars to Payton. Gooseflesh had come out on her arms and on Payton’s too. Payton knelt beside her and lifted the binoculars to her face, which was white now, all its freckles rubbed off. With her turned-up nose and her high little cheeks, it was not a hoofed creature she resembled but a squirrel. Not a real squirrel, Sylvie saw – a Disney one. While she scanned the lake, Sylvie sat on the sand, her head bowed, not looking out at the water. Somewhere in the course of the afternoon she had lost her sandals and her horns, as well as the gift of speech. Her legs were covered with scratches and her bare feet were rimmed with mud from the path. She wrapped her arms around her rib cage and bent over them, digging her feet deep into the dirty sand.
E
VERYTHING IS EASIER WITHOUT A MOTHER, contrary to what the fairy tales say.
She came back at the end of that summer and the neighbourhood appalled her. The sun glinting off the casement windows, the red vines heavy with purple berries. Bronze flowers in their autumn mounds and the ghostly stencils of fallen leaves on the sidewalk. And on the weekend when they raked the yard, her father lurching around the elm trees carrying her mother piggyback, Liz shrieking with laughter, tossing her hair from side to side. It was sinister in the worst way: it covered its wickedness with beauty.
In her second-floor bedroom Sylvie dreamed of a little boy’s body in a sink, hands and feet tied with vines. The next night she slept on the futon in the basement, and she never moved back upstairs. It was the year she put away childish books and did not take other books up – nothing as dangerous as stories.
It was the year their dog Oscar came home from roaming the streets and crawled up the veranda steps, vomited, and died. The year she was out walking with her grandfather and he spat in front of the 7-Eleven and said, “Goddamn rug-riders.” The year she was
sitting eating buttered popcorn and saw, on their flat-screen
TV
, a sea of skeletal children in Darfur waiting on the ground for the aid trucks. The winter she started slipping out of the house in the night, walking the silent snowy streets (leaning on the railing of the Maryland Bridge and picking out the black line of open water between the snowy riverbank and the ice, thinking for one terrified minute, I’m not really here, until the cloud of her breath on the dark air reassured her). It was the year the polar ice cap shrank to its lowest size yet, the year she had Ms. Lewinski for science and they all went around putting bumper stickers on the teachers’ cars and on their parents’ cars that said:
I
’
M CHANGING THE CLIMATE. ASK ME HOW
. The year her body turned both slim and lush, the year she got sick on vodka-spiked Slurpees down by Omand’s Creek, the year of the co-ed sleepover at Jenn’s, when a boy from Kelvin squirmed onto the mattress between her and Jenn and in the dark lay a hand sweetly on her right breast. The year she discovered Value Village and never again wore clothes bought by her mother. The year she started calling her mother Liz. The year she realized a rubbery black coating had grown over her heart.
It was the year she untethered herself from Wolseley and started hanging out with the tradespeople on its edges. She got to know Iris, the hoarse-voiced woman who ran the laundromat and lived above it and dressed in clothes people left behind in the dryers. She met three brothers from Vietnam who called themselves “velo engineers,” and she sat with them on the back steps of their chop shop on Sara Avenue, chewing sunflower seeds and spitting the hulls on the ground. She made friends with Tat Sing Lee, who owned a convenience store on Portage. He had a plot in the community gardens, and in the spring she started helping him. The next year he was sick and on chemo and she did all the work while he sat on a plastic chair and told her what to do. That winter he
died, and she talked the clerk at City Hall into letting her keep the plot, even though there was a waiting list.
All through high school she gardened, as though it might save her. Her garden was a row garden – that’s all she knew. She grew carrots, beets, kale, peas, onions, and green beans, and she gave all the produce away. She never grew anything as frivolous as flowers, and she never bought bedding plants, she grew everything from seed. Sprinkling minuscule grains along a trench and then digging up the stout, firm roots in the fall – it made her feel like a wizard. Carrots were her specialty. She loved them for the tininess of the seeds and the feathery tops, and for the fact that wild carrot, also known as Queen Anne’s lace, will find garden carrots and breed with them.
She knew enough to leave the carrots to sweeten in the ground until the first frost, and then she dragged her wagon over on a Friday evening, wearing her blue hat with the fat braids. Crickets chirped from the edge of the allotment. Marigolds like knots of yellow yarn were scattered on the cleared plots, and broken tomatoes rotted here and there. She bent over her carrots, the noise of the city around her. The tops lay dead on the ground, marking the rows. She loosened the earth with her spade and then wiggled out each root. In the morning she’d carry a bag to Iris at the laundromat. A bag to Nathan and his mother, and to the Nguyen brothers. That family from Somalia who’d moved onto Spence Street – she’d given vegetables to them before. She’d leave the wagon outside their apartment building while she was inside. If hungry people came along and stole her vegetables, obviously that would be great. But if they didn’t, she’d take a bag to her grandfather, who lived on canned soup and bologna.