Shanti said that the play the night before had been a good example of comedy. There was nothing tragic. All had ended well.
For a long while Lizzy did not answer. Then she said that
the play was a black-and-white tale. “Not a bad one,” she said generously. “But still, its goal was to teach.”
“Of course,” Shanti said. “What else?”
They were on their stomachs, side by side. Lizzy was wearing a bright blue bikini and Shanti wore her black one-piece. Everett saw their bums and their backs and the angle of their necks as they lifted their heads to speak. The string of Lizzy’s top was untied. Lately, she had seemed to him impatient with the younger boys, who were at that moment down by the water’s edge, building a dam out of stones.
A voice entered Everett’s head, soft and low. “I want to see the Lookout. Would you take me up there?”
Dee Dee was standing beside him. He saw her feet and ankles, and looking up he had an elongated image of her: thick legs, crotch, round stomach, barely formed breasts, the bottom of her chin. She walked off to the edge of the bush and looked back at him and he rose and followed her. The sun hit his shoulders, Shanti’s voice poked away at the hot air, and he heard Fish squeal with delight at something.
The Lookout was about a mile into the bush. A narrow trail led up to the top of a large rock that overlooked the camp to the north. To the south, far off, you could see the roofs of the larger buildings in town. Sometimes the children went up to the Lookout to watch birds and chase squirrels, or in the evening their father led them there to study the constellations. Dee Dee had heard of it, but had not yet been there.
For a while, Dee Dee walked ahead of him on the path. As Everett followed he was aware of her shape and how unlike
her sister she was. And then, as if she knew Everett’s thoughts, she said that her sister was boring. “She thinks she’s always right.”
“Maybe she is right,” Everett said.
“You just like her,” Dee Dee said.
“I don’t,” Everett said.
Dee Dee stopped and turned to face Everett. She grinned. “Really? Then why are you always watching her?” She had her hands at her sides. She was carrying licorice strings in a paper bag. Her small mouth and the round slope of her bare shoulders. She was barefoot and wore shorts over her black bathing suit. He shrugged and pushed past her and led the rest of the way, walking quickly, forcing Dee Dee to run.
“Hey,” she called out, but he ignored her. The path narrowed and the branches of the bushes scraped his arms. Mosquitoes flew up and came to rest on his neck and back. He slapped at them and kept going.
When he reached the Lookout, he turned and saw Dee Dee coming up the trail. When she finally caught up to him she was breathing heavily and her voice was panicky. “You pig,” she said. Her arms were scratched and the left side of her face was bloody from where a branch must have caught her below the eye.
He reached out and touched the scrape on her cheek, showing her the blood. She licked her fingers and rubbed at her face, then sat down and rested her chin on her knees. Everett sat beside her. He said that he had hated the Retreat from day one. He hated the mosquitoes in his ears at night, and the lousy food, and the long days of nothing. He said
that she was lucky because she would be climbing into her bus soon and leaving.
“Yeah?” Dee Dee said. “To go where? To another nowhere place.” She said that she couldn’t wait till she was eighteen and then she would leave home. She turned to study Everett and said, “Shanti couldn’t care less about you. She laughs at you. Says you smell like shit. She has a boyfriend back home. He’s twenty-six. An actor. That’s why we’re travelling. To get Shanti away from Bryson.”
Everett’s chest felt hollow. He didn’t speak.
“Anyway, she’s terribly dull,” Dee Dee said. “Not to mention frigid.”
Everett lifted his gaze and studied Dee Dee’s mouth. She was chewing her licorice and still talking.
“She won’t put out. Not even for Bryson. She’s
saving
herself.” She grinned, lifted an end of the licorice, and reached it out towards Everett’s mouth. “Here,” she said.
He took it. Dee Dee’s mouth approached. Curious, he watched her gobble up the red line of licorice and then she was there, at his mouth, and she was kissing him. Her small mouth had suddenly opened and was offering him her tongue. The sun was bright behind her. She pulled away and stood and hoisted him up so that he was facing her. She slipped her shorts down and her bathing suit sideways and took his hand and put it at her crotch. “Put your finger inside me.”
He was helpless, so she guided him. They stood face to face. Dee Dee watched his eyes but did not kiss him again. She pushed against his hand and closed her eyes. Her eyelids trembled. The muscles moved on her face, and then, without
warning, she said, “Okay,” and she took his hand away and readjusted her clothing. He tried to kiss her, not because he desired her, but out of obligation. She turned her face away and stepped backwards, tilting her head as if to consider what she saw.
“Nice,” she said. “You’re very nice.”
Walking back down towards the pond and the other children, Everett heard Dee Dee’s footsteps behind him and her quick short gulps of air. The human body was a veil with holes and he had put his finger into one of Dee Dee’s holes. He hadn’t hurt her. She was still behind him, talking now and then, chewing on the last of the licorice, complaining about the bugs and the heat. On her face was the scratch, another hole of sorts. He was ashamed. He wanted to turn and tell Dee Dee that he was sorry, but it wouldn’t be clear what exactly he was sorry for. She had asked him to help. She had taken his finger and put it inside her and he had not felt anything erotic. It had all just evolved as an experiment of sorts, as if they were conducting research. So, this is it, he had thought at one point, and then realized that it wasn’t, not really, because he himself didn’t have an erection, nor did he feel the possibility of one. Dee Dee’s lightheartedness was so different from his own distressing view of the event. He might have been a carrot, or a cucumber. She hadn’t needed him, really, though she had called him very nice. But this, too, seemed wrong.
Coming down into the clearing that would soon offer a view of the pond, Everett heard shouting and then the sound of a voice calling, “Fish. Fish. Fish.” A game, he thought at
first, and then, because the voice was piercing and panicky, he imagined that Fish had been hurt, or had committed some innocent crime. Crime ran in the family. And then, entering the field of grass, he saw Lizzy near the water’s edge. She was on her knees, pummelling a shape beneath her and then calling out. Standing off to the side was Shanti. William was running across the rocks and through the trees towards the camp.
A shimmer of heat, like a false wave seen on the highway in summer, had settled over the scene. Everett walked into and through that gauzy lake. Fish was on his back. Lizzy had her mouth on his. And then she pushed his chest, and blew into his mouth again. Everett found himself beside Lizzy, looking down at Fish’s dead body. He was dead because Everett had finger-fucked Dee Dee. And now Dee Dee was over there, holding her skinny sister’s hand. Dee Dee’s fat, pale face. The crotch of her shorts, slightly twisted, her chubby thighs. Everett shivered. “Fish,” he whispered. “Breathe, Fish.” And his little brother opened his eyes and from his mouth flowed water, a soup of snot and brine and the dark pond itself. Fish coughed and spat and sucked for air and spat some more and then he sat up and said Lizzy’s name and she took him and he pushed himself against her chest.
T
here was a time when Mrs. Byrd had been happier, light-hearted and carefree, but when Fish was born, she descended into darkness and she gave Fish over to Lizzy, who was too young to say, No, this is not mine. And she went away, sometimes for long periods, and when she finally returned she could not remember the children’s birthdays or where the salt shaker was kept. And yet briefly the gloom would lift for a while, and during this momentary drift from sadness, the mother held and cared for her baby, and Lizzy was for a time set free.
There had been, in the first two years, a woman called Minny who came in to care for Fish during the days when Lizzy was at school. Minny was large and old and she wore sensible tan shoes and she suffered from pitting edema. She was constantly pressing a fat thumb against the dough of her flesh and showing the children how the imprint remained. She was from some foreign place where greasy soup was made in large vats. Fish did not like her, he wanted Lizzy, or his mother, but Mrs. Byrd had disappeared. She had been, in their father’s words, vacuumed up by the black dogs, and she came out of her bedroom only intermittently to view the state of the kitchen, or to stick her pale face into the den where the
children had gathered to watch TV after school. Her wan pretty head, her grey eyes, her hair gone limp because she no longer bathed properly. Everett often curled up beside his mother and read while she slept. And when she woke, he silently combed her hair.
Their father’s work was a short walk from the house. He came home for lunch and attempted to get Mrs. Byrd to eat. She sat with him at the kitchen table and studied the food on her plate, and then pushed it away. He tucked her up in bed before he left again, telling her to sleep, and that when she woke the world would certainly be a brighter place.
And then, one evening, when Lizzy was caring for Fish, offering him sliced pear at the kitchen table, her mother returned from a night out. She’d gone with a friend to a talk given by a doctor of philosophy and religion. Lizzy heard her enter the house, and she knew, by the tenor of her mother’s voice and the way she sashayed into the kitchen, that something large had taken place. Her mother lived for big things, and when she found them, she became giddy and breathless. Mrs. Byrd stooped to kiss Fish’s head, and then Lizzy’s cheek, and she said that the Doctor had been absolutely amazing.
“Amazing,” she said again.
Lizzy could smell her mother, a mix of cigarette smoke and perfume and the outside air.
“That man. He talked about, about” – and here her hands moved around as if seeking to gather a spirit from the air – “he talked about being mortal and about how I belong to myself and I am nobody else’s.” She paused and grimaced slightly,
perhaps for Lizzy, who couldn’t help looking skeptical, and her mother said, “I’m okay. I am.” She pinched Fish’s cheek and squealed, “Who’s your mummy?” Fish squinted and chewed thoughtfully, as if an answer was required. But she was already gone, into the next room where Lizzy could hear her talking and talking to her father and she thought about how long it had been since her mother had been like this.
That night, from her own bed, Lizzy heard her parents whispering and then it was quiet, and then her mother’s voice called out. At first Lizzy thought that her mother might be asking for her to come help with something and she started to get up, and as she put her feet to the floor, her mother let out a sharp yelp and then a series of cries and Lizzy crawled back into bed and pushed the heel of her hand against the hard bone of her crotch.
And then again, in the middle of the night, her mother’s cries startled her, pulling her up from a dream in which she was using Fish as a top, spinning him round and round, and he was squealing with delight, and when she woke she heard the squeals next door and realized that her mother and father were having sex once again. In the morning, her father made scrambled eggs for everyone and sang “Summertime,” and when he came to the line about the mama being good-looking, he swung about and grinned and pointed the spatula at Lizzy, who shook her head and turned away.
The day Fish almost drowned, her mother had come running down the path to the pond, calling Fish’s name, but by the time she got there, Fish was already looking about, cradled by Lizzy. Her mother was wild, violent. She clamped
Lizzy’s wrists and cried out, “What happened?” Lizzy began to explain but her mother scooped Fish up and held him to her chest. William, slower than his mother, had arrived in her wake and was standing off to the side, surprised that Fish was alive. Lizzy was faced with her mother’s bewilderment, her rage, as she stooped and hissed at her, “What were you
thinking?”
And then she turned and walked up the trail, and Lizzy saw her mother’s back and Fish’s small wet head, his chin resting on her shoulder.
That evening, after supper, her father took William and Everett into town for ice cream. Lizzy went to her parents’ cabin. She found her mother and Fish lying on the bed and Fish was sleeping, his head resting against his mother’s underarm. Her other arm, with a cast, lay across her stomach, making her look vulnerable, off balance. Lizzy stood in the doorway and said, “Is he all right?”
Her mother turned slightly, as if to determine the distance between herself and her daughter. She said, “Close the screen door. The mosquitoes.”
“It was awful, Mum. He wouldn’t breathe. And I did everything I’d been taught, the clearing of the pathway, the pumping of the chest, but it all seemed so hopeless. I didn’t think it would work.”
“William said he was dead. He came running up into the Hall and said that Fish had drowned. So, until the moment I got there, I believed that Fish
was
dead. Imagine that, Lizzy. Imagine how I must have felt.” She sat up, shifting Fish away from her. “What were you doing, Lizzy? What was going on out there?”
Lizzy said that she had been talking to Shanti. They had been arguing about the play, about comedy and tragedy. She said the word
tragedy
and she stopped, knowing that there was no reasonable excuse that her mother would accept. “Maybe once, you could try to imagine
my
feelings. I didn’t
try
to drown him.”
“No, but today, by the water, he was yours. You took him there. He’s four years old, and he nearly drowned. On your watch.”
A lamp glowed by the bedside table. In its light, she saw her mother’s elongated neck, sharp nose, the shadow of breast and nipple.
“My
watch? You take him next time, then. He’s
your
child, not mine. Instead of talking to that stupid Doctor,
you
can take care of Fish. And what about Dad? I can see what’s happening.” She was crying, and she only knew this because she felt the tears on her face. She wiped at them with her hand and abruptly turned and left. Her mother called after her several times, but Lizzy kept going, out into the dim light of the clearing towards her own cabin.