Lorraine and I went back to my house and I lent her a swimsuit. She changed in the bathroom and came back with the suit on under her clothes. We found a couple of old towels and a bedspread nobody ever used. We packed some food, mostly things with salt, and a couple bottles of Coke and headed off to the car. By one o'clock I was back out on the road.
Habit sat pretty much in the fork of the Panther River. You could hit it going about ten miles north or ten miles south, though everybody knew that south was better. The river pooled in a couple of places and was deep enough to swim in without touching bottom. The current was slow and there were flat banks. It was the place that you wanted to be from the first day of summer. The place you had to drive to get to.
We unloaded our stuff and spread our towels out on the grass. It was good and hot and I decided I wanted to build up a sweat before I got in the water. I pulled my shorts off and my shirt over my head and stretched out. Lorraine sat down beside me and watched the boys who were swimming in the river.
"Take your clothes off," I said. "You're going to get weird lines that way."
"I'm fine," she said.
One of the boys came out of the water, shining like a new car. He waved to me. Andy LeBlanc from my school, a year ahead of me. I waved back, thinking there was no way he would have known who I was. Then I thought that maybe he was waving just because I was a girl in a swimsuit, sitting on the bank of the river. He probably didn't even know we went to school together. For some reason that made it even better.
"You know him?" Lorraine said.
"Sort of."
Andy dove back under the water, leaving a bright wake behind him.
Lorraine hugged her knees up to her chest and shivered like she was cold, which would have been impossible. "I hate my hair," she said softly, and not especially to me.
"What are you talking about?" I reached out and took a big handful of Lorraine's hair. I pulled on it lightly and then let it go, watching it spring back into place. It was the most remarkable thing at the river. On a bright day like this, it looked like she was sitting in a spotlight.
"I want hair like yours. I hate my hair. I can never get it to lay down." Her voice was so unbelievably sad that it made me sit up and look at her. "It ruins everything," she said.
"What's wrong with you?" I said. I held my own hair out to her. It had stopped being blond. It had turned to a color the magazines called dishwater. It was straight as a poker and hung past my shoulders in a curtain of mediocrity. "Look at this. Nobody wants this hair. People spend their whole life dyeing and perming so they can have your hair and they still don't have your hair."
And then Lorraine was crying. Not hard, but it was strange to see her cry at all because for all her moods, she wasn't the kind of person you thought of as a crier. She was trying to hide it, but her face turned so red. It made her freckles stand out across the bridge of her nose. "What is wrong with you?" I said.
She wiped her nose on a corner of her towel. "I just want to go swimming," she said helplessly.
"So we'll go swimming." I wasn't getting it at all.
Lorraine watched the boys shooting up out of the water like beach balls that had been held under against their wills. They hollered out with every splash, cut upstream in straight lines. They turned and flipped, threw the water above their heads in a fountain with both hands. It was like a show just for us. Maybe it was. "I don't want to be pregnant anymore," Lorraine said. "I'd rather be you."
I looked at Lorraine, who kept her eyes ahead. I looked at her wild, brushfire hair, her pale skin, her straight nose, her narrow back. She must have been four and a half months by then. Sometimes I could see the start of a little belly when the wind blew back her dress. I thought about how she had had sex. That somebody had wanted her in that way. She had wanted, been wanted, been desired. She knew things I didn't even have words for. She kept her clothes on and her knees up. She wouldn't let them see what I knew and forgot over and over again.
"Before," she said, still watching the boys, "you should have seen me. Man, I'd have them right here, every one of them. All I ever had to do was walk around, give a couple of looks, say hey. You wouldn't believe it, the way I could make them jump." Her voice was soft, like somebody telling secrets about someone else. It was the voice you used to talk about other girls, not yourself. "They said I was good, too," she said. "I was good."
I felt like I was out in the water, not knowing how to swim. I didn't know what to say to her. I told her I was sorry. It came out sounding like I thought somebody had died.
"I made my mother sick, she worried about me so much. We fought like cats. She said this was going to happen. You're going to get in trouble one of these days, was how she'd say it." Lorraine smiled at me. "I guess this is trouble," she said.
"I guess," I said. Idiot.
"So I've decided," she said, smiling bigger now, laughing a little, "that I want to be you. That's nothing new. Everybody at Saint Elizabeth's wants to be you."
"Right."
"Of course they do. You've got good parents and a nice house and a whole flock of doting nuns. You're the queen of the show around that place. You don't make anyone feel like a freak." She leaned toward me and added in her best, dramatic whisper, "You're a virgin."
"Says you."
"Please."
I laughed. It was a sore point with me, but at that moment it sounded like a benefit. "All right," I said. "But I still can't see that being me would solve your problems."
"Other people's problems always look better than mine." She pulled the medal out from inside her shirt and dangled it in front of her chest. "Saint Theresa's problems look better than mine. Dying of something beautiful and dramatic as a young nun, that wouldn't be so bad."
"Except for the part about being dead," I said. "Don't be a fool, Lorraine. Take off your shirt and go swimming."
"That's what you'd do if you were me," she said.
"That's what you'd do," I said. "If anybody gives you trouble I'll just hold them under."
"Go on," she said. "I'll watch you."
"I don't want to go on. Come in the water with me, just—" I stopped, I wanted this to be easy. "Forget it for a little while."
"Swim," Lorraine said, her voice getting serious again. "I'm going to have a Coke."
And for some reason I got up and left her there. It seemed mean, but I was more afraid that she would think I felt sorry for her. I didn't. Sorry maybe for what had happened but not for her. Lorraine was born to land on her feet. It was written all over her.
I waded into the water. It felt all the colder because I was so hot by then. The boys parted like the Red Sea, like a school of fish I had frightened away with my hand. They swam to the other bank and watched me. Let them watch. When it was deep enough I held my breath and went under, my eyes closed tight. I swam down until I touched the bottom. I stayed down as long as my lungs would let me and imagined them all wondering where I had gone. I came back up and waved to Lorraine on the shore. I half thought she'd change her mind, come into the water with her round stomach pushing at my blue swimsuit, but she stayed where she was.
"Swim!" she shouted at me. "I want to see you doing some work out there."
When we got home it was still early. The tops of our shoulders were burned, my wet hair was matted into one giant ball from riding with the windows down, and Lorraine had gone back to normal, which is to say, whatever had surfaced for a minute at the river had slipped back under again.
"I'll come over after dinner," she said.
"Sure." I thought I should have said something else. Something like my father would say, easy and comforting. But nothing came to me. Lorraine was pregnant. What was I going to do, tell her she wasn't? I waved and walked back to my house to take a shower. There was mud up both my shins.
"You look like you've been out clearing a field," my father said to me as I came up the front stairs. He was finishing that chair he'd been working on before his accident. My mother's chair. He was putting on the last coat of varnish. The wood was redder now than it used to be. It looked good.
"Lorraine and I went swimming down at the Panther," I said.
My father put his brush down. "The two of you?" he said.
"Sure, Mom let me drive."
"You didn't go with somebody?"
"I went with Lorraine."
"With an adult. I've told you this. I don't want you swimming unless you go with an adult." I couldn't believe the way his voice went up. It was something I'd only heard him do a couple of times in my life. My father was really angry, and in a way it was more interesting than anything else, seeing as how my father never got angry.
"We're old enough to go swimming," I said. "There were lots of people there. It wasn't like I was going by myself in the middle of the night."
Then everything changed. My father could be like a movie sometimes, with everything playing out across his face. He wasn't mad at me anymore and he felt a little stupid that he'd gotten so mad in the first place. "I just hate the water," he said. "I'm acting crazy."
It was true about my father and water. He wouldn't go near it. He had to hold his breath when he drove over bridges. It was because he didn't know how to swim. "So you're crazy," I said. "The next time we go swimming you can come if you want."
He went back to his chair, and I went upstairs and stood in a hot shower until all the hot water was gone. Sometimes I felt like my father and I were locked in a battle of worrying. Maybe my mother was right. Maybe that was the way I was most like him.
It was three days before I could get my mother to agree to another driving lesson, and once she did agree, she wound up not going. We were all set, headed out the door, when Sister Bernadette came in and said there was mail for both of us. My mother and I went to the front desk and each got a thin envelope from our key boxes. Mine was from my only correspondent. Featherweight blue paper from Sylvia in Spain. My mother looked at hers for a minute, turning it over in her hands, and then slipped it in the pocket of her skirt.
"You're going to have to go without me," she said.
"I can wait until you read that," I said, opening mine with a finger underneath the flap.
"No," she said. "Not today." And just that quick she turned around and was gone, not to the kitchen, but out the front door. I went after her. Driving was not something I gave up on easily.
"Hey," I shouted from the front porch.
She was headed toward her house, the little house we used to live in together. She stopped and put her hand over her eyes, blocking out the sun to look at me. "What?"
"I want to go," I said. "Come on."
"I can't," she said, but she kept standing there, looking at me. I didn't know if she was trying to make up her mind about whether or not to come back inside or what.
"Mom?" I started to come down the stairs toward her, but she waved me off and went on.
Now I was in a bad mood. I sat down on the steps to read my letter.
Dear Cecilia,
I haven't heard from you in a long while now and stand expectant at my mailbox. I am hoping that you are robust and that your silence is not caused by illness.
I folded the paper back up and returned it to its envelope. I wasn't up to Sylvia just then.
I killed the day as best I could, reading one of my father's mystery novels and being mad at my mother for blowing me off. I wanted to skip dinner, stay at home, but by four o'clock I found myself heading back to Saint Elizabeth's to see if they needed any help. The days in summer were endless, every one of them felt like a week.
If I had money I'd turn Saint Elizabeth's back into the Hotel Louisa. All the pregnant girls in the world could still come, but I'd make it just like a hotel, with room service and elevators. I'd put a pool in the back with a big covered cabana where they could dance. They could just dance with each other if they wanted. It would be all right because who was ever around to see? My father did a good job of holding things together, but it was too much for him. It would have been too much for anybody. There should be someone there who did nothing but put in gardens. It should have been a wonderful place.
When I got to the kitchen Lorraine was there, slicing away at a stack of bell peppers. The food had changed a lot over the years. Now it was all about health, what you could eat when you were pregnant, special diets. Even the standard iced tea had been replaced by some mint decaffeinated stuff that tasted like watered-down mouthwash. Sister Evangeline was all the way over by the refrigerator now. The two of them were talking about Saint Theresa when I came in. Lorraine wanted to get it exactly right, the way saints went about solving the problems of your life.
"I've been praying a lot," Lorraine said. "I'm just wondering if it's better to stick to one saint or move around."
"Move around," I said, taking a slice of pepper. "Cover all your bases."
"Couldn't hurt," Sister Evangeline said.
"Where's Mom?"
"She's been in and out of here all day," Sister Evangeline said. "She hasn't spoken a full sentence since lunch."
"What do you want me to say?" my mother said, and we all turned and looked over at the broom closet near the pantry. There she was.
"When did you get back here?" Sister Evangeline said.
My mother stepped out into the kitchen and scared me half to death. She looked absolutely wild-eyed. "Awhile ago," she said, and locked her fingers behind her neck in a way that made her seem especially girlish.
"You've had some news," Sister Evangeline said, not asking her but telling her.
"No," she said.
"Don't lie, Rosie." Sister Evangeline sat up in her chair. She was the mother now.
"Just leave it alone," my mother said.