Up Through the Water

ACCLAIM FOR

UP THROUGH THE WATER:

“With
Up Through the Water
Darcey Steinke announces herself as a fine fiction writer who also has a poet's touch; this novel is remarkable for a number of things, but perhaps most of all for the originality and delicacy of its imagery, and for the intensity of its frequent lyrical moments. There's a strong and interesting story here, but the language that carries the reader is stronger still.”

—Madison Smartt Bell

“
Up Through the Water
by Darcey Steinke details one sensuous, beachy summer. . . . Like summer-island life itself,
Up Through the Water
has a meandering, languid pace. One reads this book sentence by sentence marveling at Steinke's imagistic competence . . . she has sought to portray characters looking up, out, beyond the confines of self and circumstance.”

—Marianne Gingher,
The Washington Post Book World

“The familiar materials of the novel are as fresh as a breeze off the ocean in Darcey Steinke's treatment. The book can be read in a couple of hours, but it lingers like memories.”

—William L. Tazewell,
Virginian-Pilot and Ledger-Star

“So apt that you feel the sand in your shorts by page 162 . . . filled with significant little whispers that echo as if from a shell . . . [Emily's] nature unrolls as slowly as a breeze might sway bindweed, and develops as quietly and surely as that of Raskolnikov in
Crime and Punishment
or of the antagonist of Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter.
. . . Wise swimmers will dive in here.”

—George Myers, Jr.,
The Columbus Dispatch

“A precise evocation of place . . . a gifted stylist . . . Ocracoke Island springs into sharp focus. The reader smells the sea, feels the grit of sand, almost squints against the glint of sun on water. . . . Vigorous characters that we cannot help but care about, doing interesting things in a place that is vivid and distinctive.”

—Chauncey Mabe,
Fort Lauderdale
Sun-Sentinel

“[A] poetic first novel . . . Steinke's imagery is at once vivid and delicate. . . . An intriguing debut that hints at promising work to come.”

—Publishers Weekly

“This debut novel . . . captures all the intensity of islands in summer-time. . . . Steinke writes with wonderful clarity.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“
Up Through the Water
is beautifully done, a startlingly good debut.”

—The Washingtonian

“
Up Through the Water
is a wonderful book—fresh, vital, filled with characters whom you want to remember. The writing is poetic, the images new and invigorating.”

—Ben Greer

“A novelist with a poet's eye.”

—Lex Alexander,
Greensboro News & Record

UP

THROUGH

THE WATER

OTHER BOOKS BY DARCEY STEINKE

SUICIDE BLONDE

JESUS SAVES

U P

T H R O U G H

T H E  W A T E R

DARCEY STEINKE

G R O V E  P R E S S

N E W  Y O R K

Copyright © 1989 by Darcey Steinke

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

Originally published by Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc., 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

Published simultaneously in Canada

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST GROVE PRESS EDITION

Excerpt from lyrics of “GOD BLESS AMERICA” by Irving Berlin on page 73:

© Copyright 1938, 1939 by Irving Berlin

© Copyright renewed 1965, 1966 by Irving Berlin

© Copyright assigned to Mrs. Ralph J. Bunche, Joe DiMaggio, and Theodore R. Jackson as Trustees of God Bless America Fund. Reprint by permission of Irving Berlin Music Corporation.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Steinke, Darcey.

Up through the water / Darcey Steinke.

p. cm.

ISBN 9780802193230

1. Ocracoke Island (N.C.)—Fiction. 2. Young women—Fiction.

I. Title.

PS3569.T37924 U6 2000

813’.54—dc21        00–037668

Grove Press

841 Broadway

New York, NY 10003

00 01 02 03   10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

TO

PAUL H. PHELPS, JR.

The author would like to thank Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for her good advice and encourage, ment. And also Judy Sandman, Craig Mueller, and Paul Ross Leslie for their careful attention to the book.

UP

THROUGH

THE WATER

JUNE

If you come as most do, down 17, it's around Elizabeth City that the air gets the first sting of salt and handfuls of lost and disoriented gulls circle dumpsters. Then come the ten-shack towns of Camden, Shiloh, Jarvisburg, and Point Harbor, the road between them shaded on one side by low lush woods, green so deep its nearly black, and big-leafed tobacco plants lined out on the other. Warm blond peaches and watermelon are sold from stands at dusty intervals along the road. The bridge begins at Old Point and four miles later, the car delicately balancing like a high-wire acrobat over Currituck Sound, the outer banks swing out from the coast of North Carolina like the bony curve of a woman ship. Then the long descent past Duck Beach, then Kitty Hawk where Orville and Wilbur first flew, then Kill Devil Hill where a witch that makes the fish run lives in a shack on the dunes. Down by the arcades and Dairy Queens of Nags Head, past the birdish cottages on stilts in Waves, the road flares out to Avon and Buxton, where on bad days surfers play pinball and check the water every hour for a rise. The zebra-striped lighthouse signals Hatteras and road's end. Farther still the blue smear of the Atlantic and the wait for the boat that will ferry you across to Ocracoke Island.

ONE

MERMAIDS

L
ike a
razor-thin fish she sped to the top, pushed up toward a light near the surface: a small patch inside the silvery vision of her eyelids. Even now, as close as she was, close enough to see clouds beyond the veil of water, she knew she could fall back like a rock to the dark floor. The tiny ripples of her fingertips grazed the underbelly of the sea's surface, then broke into air. There was a kind of slow opening, like sluggish hands working back an orange's peel.

They paused a moment before he rolled them both over to the night table and picked up his glowing digital watch. His jeans were slung over the bedpost; he slipped out of bed, pulled them on, and leaned forward so as not to catch himself zipping up. Emily watched him button his shirt and snub out what was left of his cigarette. He looked through the darkness toward her and said, “John Berry will be back soon.”

Emily heard Eddie through the walls of the cottage mentioning places she'd never heard of: Twin Falls, HumpBack Mountain, Dragon's Tooth. Once in a while girls’ names: Anne, Rachel, Elizabeth. She presumed he knew them from the winter months spent with his father. Eddie murmured again.

“That boy never shuts up,” the man said as he pulled his jacket on.

Earlier, at Paolo's she'd been attracted to this man's gray-blue eyes and the way he mulled over his beer. “What's it to you if he talks in his sleep?” The man didn't answer. Emily watched him move away through the kitchen, past the counter, stove, and refrigerator, around the rectangular table. Nearing the door he looked back at her briefly—she was unable to make out his expression—before the screen door rattled behind him.

She felt vibrations in the panel wall, two staggered sounds on the floor, then steps through the kitchen to the bathroom. Emily heard Eddie at the toilet, then the water flushing. He passed by her open door. In the dark he looked like a stick man, his long legs making a simple inverted V. He paused, stared in at her, and then shuffled back to his room. She heard him settle himself in bed. When he was little, she'd check on him, hold a hand over his mouth, always worry it would stay still and dry and she would look closer to see his skin, from his shoulders to where it disappeared beneath the covers, blue and cold as winter stones. But Eddie had stood there, not to see if she was breathing, but to focus his eyes on the pillow near her, to see if there was a man with her in bed.

Emily rolled over to John Berry's side. It was still warm. Half the day and night he worked the ferry traveling back and forth, to and from the cape. She would hear him arrive: thud of the car door, boots on gravel, and then his big frame in the doorway, his mammoth hands already fingering buttons on his uniform. He smelled like the water, and she let her mind see him as a wave moving toward the bed.

He knew nothing yet, suspected nothing. Emily thought—after the first time in May, with the tourist—that he would find out. She'd only spoken a few words to him in a low indecipherable language before they walked a mile down the beach and into the dunes. The winter had been long and boring—but suddenly there they were in the spring, two bodies in the shallow valley the sand dunes made, sea oats crackling around them.

Sometimes she thought it would be a relief to have John Berry find out. It would be easy. There would probably be one tense encounter, which she wouldn't have to initiate, and then he'd leave resolutely, not meandering around the way he might if she suggested separating. She could leave, but the feeling—that any kind of pattern, even a fraudulent one, was better than nothing at all—kept her on. It amazed her that he hadn't heard.

Nearly everyone had heard him at Paolo's. A couple drinks into the night he would start up about Emily and the cottage he would build on the soundside and how they would sit looking out over the water to the thin line of North Carolina, watching the light fade, birds wading long slow mechanical steps in the marshy shore.

She thought of how he slept near her, how he slung his angled arm back behind him, how his shirt would rise on his belly. The slight slope of his stomach seemed vulnerable. His cheeks and forehead were pinker, more vibrant than during the days. His eyelids curved, perfectly shaped like tiny plums.

The door yawned. John Berry's shadow moved around the rectangular table, refrigerator, stove, countertops. He came into the bedroom and threw up the sheet, making it billow for an instant. “Are you awake?”

Eddie said something.

“That kid's been smoking. I can smell it.”

She rolled away into a loose oval. He pulled his pants off, got into bed, molded his body around hers, and pressed his knees into the hollow hers made. His arm slipped through the tunnel between her neck and the mattress. Emily could hear blood traversing through his veins. His sea smell collided with her own in the air above their bed like weather fronts.

A few hours later, in the restaurant kitchen, Emily kneaded dough: warm and alive, spreading under her fingers like a man's back.

At first she had waitressed, but after a few seasons it had be, come hellish, the sneery customers, the way some people ate, her greedy fellow waitresses. And then once, after her fourth season, while explaining a particular sauce to a customer, someone else at the table burnt her with a cigarette. She'd switched to motel work, and the easy order of that had been comforting: clean linens and towels, water glasses in waxed paper bags, each mirror shining under her rag. But it was the repeating and relentless mess of the job that eventually got to her. The last switch, three years ago, was to this kitchen where she did the morning prep work.

The kitchen was still except for the occasional churn of the ice maker and the general hum from the refrigerator. It was T-shaped, with sinks and dishwashers on one end, and stoves, gas ovens, and warmers at the other. The back door was in between. The long part of the T had high shelves for spices and oils, and there were counters for preparation. She stood at one of these now. All the bulk supplies were stored up in the attic. At the foot of the T, the part nearest the dining room, were two swing doors, the big soup heater, and rows and rows of glasses.

Emily'd cut the vegetables. Carrots, zucchini, yellow summer squash swirled like square dancers in the big metal pots near her.

She watched her moving hands in the steel-top table. Above the stove was a row of smaller glass jars, like the ones her mother had used to store the vegetables and jams. She remembered how one summer a neighborhood boy had explained a trick you could do with a jar. They'd gone to her mother's garden and found a green tomato worm. It was greedily feeding on a ripening tomato, having pinched its way through the taut skin. Its head was inside the mealy meat, eating continuously. When she put her ear very close, she could hear the little thing gobbling with a sound like a sniff, and she had to flick it with one disgusted finger into the jar. She secured the top and put it on a high step by the back. Light glinted into the glass, magnified the midday sun. She watched the tomato worm do just what the boy had said it would. It twitched, spasmed, and began to melt, leaving finally only a soggy circle like mucus. Emily, afraid her mother would see, took the jar to her room, put it under the bed, and lay very still on top of the covers till the coolness hidden in them was gone.

Light was rising outside the restaurant. Objects lost their pleasant blurry bodies and took on definite edges and shapes. When Eddie was very young, she had left him in the front seat of a shopping cart, chewing on a bag of egg noodles. They had been in the frozen foods. She was bending over into the icy canister of frosted orange, dark green for apple and the pink and purple of cranberry and grape. Eddie had whined and shook the hard noodles like a rattle. There was no one in the aisle, and Emily remembered doing something crazy, swinging one leg up and then the next. She laid out on top of the cool cans, cold vapor rising around her. Looking up into the fluorescent lights, she'd seen the section markers like satellites suspended in space and she'd folded her hands over her chest like the dead. She closed her eyes and felt a fine layer of frost forming on her toes. It had been a bag boy, around Eddie's age now, who had finally touched her cheek softly and leaned over into the frozen foods as though to give her a kiss.

Eddie had told her he often dreamt about her, maybe he was dreaming of her now. Underwater, her lips set in a quiet zero, currents moving her dress, showing her body like earth under flowers. She rolled the dough into thin strips for bread, laid them on a greased pan, and put them into the old black oven. When she cracked the door open, her face flushed in the heat.

“How'd you sleep?” she asked as Eddie came in for his morning shift. He stepped into a lemon wedge of light shining through the screen door. Emily reached out to touch his forearm. He jerked away. “Okay,” he said, his eyes on his tennis shoes. He wore a sleeveless muscle shirt and gray cotton shorts.

The kitchen crowed with activity: the cook flipped pancakes, it smelled like sausage patties. An older lady sliced melon and pineapples for the breakfast fruit bowls. The waitresses clustered by the swing door.

All morning she stared at Eddie over the sinks. He glanced up through the shelves of spices. Their eyes caught, a look that held, then faltered in slow stares down to their busy hands. She wasn't sure what Eddie thought of her; she wondered how much his father had told him and if he'd heard anything on the island. Earlier seasons she'd presumed he was too young to be bothered by her affairs, but this summer he was definitely noticing and she knew it embarrassed him, made him seem shy.

She watched him rinse plates and line them into the dishwasher. He had his earphones on and his young frame swayed to the rhythm he seemed to feel like a ray of light through his body.

Each day after work, no matter whether there was a falling mist or sun so fierce the water glinted like steel, Emily swam in the ocean. Today the big June sky had dulled. The lifeguard, young, sun-bleached, a line of zinc oxide on his nose, read magazines. More tourists would show around one. A few blankets and umbrellas were scattered along the shore. A dragon kite dived and circled, wind-sound on cellophane, its tail a licking tongue.

She threw her towel down, walked into the water, and swam only when she no longer felt the coquina shells on the pads of her feet. She swam parallel to the shore. Each stroke let a million thin swords of pale green light into the water. Emily began rotating, looking out to the horizon, a double feature in blue, sky and water, then face into the sea, bubbles delicately nudging her cheek. Each stroke was something: a faceless baritone voice in the dark, the oleander berries that grew around the cottage, the smell of powder, a baby-blue scarf she used to wear in her hair, the road to the reservoir outside Nashville, Eddie's father spreading a blanket on pine needles, her dress swung over a low branch.

She somersaulted underwater remembering her first night on the island and how she sat on top of the hotel bedspread with hundreds of whitecaps speeding toward her. There had been a print of a boat wrecked against rocks over her head. She remembered lighting white emergency candles when the electricity went out near midnight. And how later she fell asleep against the headboard and woke when drops of wax slipped to her hand. Opening her eyes, she'd seen the flaming wick floating like one boat on clear water and had stared at the ceiling's large opening mouth and remembered Eddie's sleeping face and the angry one of her husband. In the morning, the storm was over and she'd gone out in the clothes she had slept in and walked all the way out to the beach.

Her love of water must have started in the womb, her baby self letting up a few giggly bubbles. Later she could remember someone letting her float in water just slightly cooler than herself. Her mother'd told her she was nearly a year old when her father had held her in the lime quarry near her grandmother's house. For a few minutes he let her splash, her mother said, before Emily had closed her eyes and tried to squirm out of his grasp. Her mother had said the way she fought was the oddest thing she'd ever seen. Not in a careless baby way but with precise determined movements. From then on she'd always had an understanding with water. She loved to swim in the winter, to be thrashing in the community pool: humidity like a jungle, and the swim teacher, an old water ballet star who still wore a lavender bathing cap with big fluttery scales like a pretty fish. After the lesson she'd returned to the cold where her wet head sent up steam. Years later, Emily and her sister Sarah had paddled a canoe up at Mountain Lake. The water was a dark and earthy green. Leaves and grass treaded and unfurled near her. She saw evergreens and the cool line of water up to them. In high school there were the long baths, the weekly lap swimming at the county's pool where she'd learned flip-turns and stroked evenly from end to end. After she married she swam in the deep water hole where the cows drank. Her husband built her a floating dock and the cows would watch her sometimes, their slow eyes on her as she butterflied and breaststroked and curled underwater.

Emily stopped a moment, treaded. With one foot, she pulled a heavy strand of seaweed from between the toes of the other. She thought of Eddie, how he hadn't said good-bye when she left the restaurant. Each night in the cottage, he turned his cheek to the pillow just as his father had. Both were lively in sleep, speaking riddles, sighing now and then. When she looked in on him, Eddie's mouth was always opened and slack. Often she got close, traced the blond hair on his chest. Daily now, she saw him shyly gaze at her. He meditated on the Gauguin posters of Tahitian women on her walls. Sometimes, flipping his head from them to her as if trying—she imagined—to push her into the South Pacific scenes. This summer his gaze fell always on her as she sunned on the beach near him, or walked from the shower.

Her strokes lengthened: She felt light in the sea, joined to the back and forth pull of the water. Coming together with strangers, dark empty bodies moving on a bed, why did she do it? She asked herself this afterward, in the mornings, sometimes even during, eyes over a muscular shoulder.