Authors: Charlotte Bacon

Tags: #Fiction, #Short Stories (Single Author), #test

A Private State: Stories (22 page)

Page 145

early, saw her horses and guests in the ocean and turned brick red, "looking like she was on the brink of some terrorist act," Babe said later. Pea had been shamed by a long public shout while his embarrassed parents stood by on the brown-sugar sand. Anna, just an accomplice, had only been sent to bed early.

Anna looks at the sign again and gets ready to lower herself into the pool. She takes the ladder these days, like the old ladies, lowering herself gently into the water, feeling the chill tingle up her shins. As she starts her scissored backstroke, she thinks Pea had always lived this way, with something live inside him that let him break directly into things. Anna remembers him shouting from the roof of their house that there were four swallows' nests in the chimney. Then a tile skidded and he spent a month in traction, where he learned Morse code to trade dirty jokes with the veteran sharing his room. "Oh, for God's sake, Pea!" Babe would say, half-exasperated, half-pleased. He batted back and forth across the country, working odd jobs until he discovered flying. He just passed the height requirement for the Air Force and two years later died in a puff of flame a mile above the tundra. He would have loved this baby. He would have been so proud of her. With a start, she realizes she might never have kept the baby if he were still alive.

In the changing room, she is thinking about this, the baby as a signal to her brother, to his liveliness, when she feels something odd. She looks down and finds her feet are sparkling with green sequins sticking as fast as barnacles. She waves her feet and the casual jewels catch the light and glimmer. Scattered on the concrete floor, there are hundreds of the tiny things. They must have sprung loose from the costumes of the synchronized swimmers who probably just finished a meet. Anna wiggles her feet again. She's always liked the swimmers' vivid outfits, as scaled and bright as trout. She likes, too, their serious way of talking about routines with mouths full of hairpins and that they're always

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slightly out of time to the music. Thanks to them, everyone who walks through the changing room today will go home with emerald-studded feet.

Anna doesn't mind the draft. She feels the terry of the towel on her shoulders and keeps looking at her shining feet. She decides not to go to the library this afternoon; she'll let the journals rest in her carrel. Maybe she'll see Anju and ask her what the start of monsoon is like. She is sure Anju will give her sari a fierce tuck and say, "God, girl, go find out for yourself." As she walks outside into the cold air and feels the baby do its floating acrobatics, Anna thinks maybe she will. It is then her water breaks.

Page 147

Open Season

My father had three moods: warm, bake, and broil, like the dial on a stove. Because we were in honking traffic on the Jersey Turnpike heading from New York to Maryland, it was broil. He hissed, ''Watch it, Mac!" at drivers he thought crowded his lane. He jerked his legs and swore when the cat dug its claws into his trousers. He shouted at my sister and me, "Cut that out, house apes," if we shrieked as we pinched each other where it hurt most, on the flap of skin near the armpit. We rolled up our sleeves to see the marks, which were the bluish gray of fresh bruises. Our Thanksgiving blouses would hide them fine. I was ten, my sister nine; too old, my mother said, to be so nasty. New shirts, bruises that didn't show, bagpipes, these things were important to my grandparents, who lived on a high bank, what people on the Eastern Shore called a hill. From the house, you could see the river and fields of soybeans and corn, creaky and dark with geese that the men in the family would spend the weekend trying to shoot.

My father said, not to anyone really, "I
told
Wharton we should have leapt on that deal in Chicago. I must have told him twenty times." We'd heard these things about Wharton a lot lately. My mother kept knitting. From the back seat of the station wagon, I listened to the click of the needles. She could knit through anythingcar rides, blackouts, elevators frozen between floors.

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"I told that sonofabitch, 'Wharton, that's a sweet set-up. That's instant profit.' "

"Language, Tom," my mother said, and checked to see if she was on a knit or a purl.

"You're not listening," he said to her. "You didn't hear a word I just said." This part was louder.

"I heard perfectly," she said. "Don't raise your voice to me," in the same way she told us not to raise our voices.

My father spoke a lot about the office these days, more than he had when he'd gone there every day. Now, his hair poked up in short brown tufts. Mornings when he'd gone to work, it had been black and slicked down on his neck, as smooth as a wet wing.

As soon as we left the turnpike and started driving on the thinner, more dangerous roads of Delaware, I curled my hands in my lap, away from my sister's skin. It usually happened here. My father's face split with a yawn that stretched his jaw taut. I could see the wedge of his mouth, the wink of a filling in the rear-view mirror. My mother noticed it casually, the way you'd notice the tenth dead raccoon on the side of the road. Her hands kept spiraling the blue wool of some piece of clothing whose use was not yet clear. The pink dome of my father's head sank below the headrest.

We passed a sign that said "Welcome to Maryland" in script as curly as vines. My father snapped on the radio. He slapped his own face. My mother cast off. Deep in the fields, yellow squares of light shone from houses I knew were full of parents who shared the driving and bred friendly dogs.

There were no friendly dogs at my grandparents'. Instead, there was a pair of Chesapeake Bay retrievers, who had gold eyes and wavy fur that left a thin coat of oil on your hands if you touched them. They smelled like swamp. They were called Hector and Ajax.

The car swerved, as if it also felt sleepy and wanted to crawl to the shoulder. My mother said to no one in particular, "The last leg," and bent down, restrained a little by the seatbelt, to put her

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knitting in a plastic bag. The bag crackled and the cat meowed. "Almost there, pussycat," she said and patted his head hard, so that his neck bobbed up and down. My body swayed against my sister's, and hers against mine. Something fell in the back. None of us turned to see what it was.

On the radio was a commercial for Bon Ami, a cleanser used by Lola, my grandparents' cook. "Bon-n-n- A-m-e-e: you can trust it to scrub with," a woman sang, "Oh, you can trust it to scrub with." My father and I liked Lola very much. She was black and had forearms dusted gray with talcum powder. "We'll see Lola tomorrow," I said, holding the headrest with both hands.

"Lola," he said. "She's a tough bird." He seemed to wake up a little. "You'd have to be to put up with the Laird." This was what he called my grandfather, a man with a beaky nose and flaps of skin for earlobes that he tugged between lighting cigarettes.

"Enough, Tom," my mother said. The Laird was her father.

The headlights lit up the sign to my grandparents' house: it was white with black capital letters that spelled out Pendragon Farm. We would be safe from here. There was only another minute. I had chewed a hole in the back of my father's headrest. A small triangle of plastic stuck to my lip.

The drive curved through fields. The sky was turning blue-black now and there was no moon, but we could hear the geese. Their voices sounded as if they came from under water. When I pressed my face against the window, I could see their bodies in the fields like huddled lumps. The cat, his nose on the vent, started to cry. "He smells the birds," my mother said. We could all smell the birds.

A streak of brown flashed in front of the car. My father jammed on the brakes. Gravel pinged in a sharp way off the windows. "Goddamn it!" my father shouted. "Those goddamn dogs!" It was Hector and Ajax. They were free all night. They were free all day. They had a separate entrance to the Big House, a plastic flap in the kitchen door. Their paw prints painted the kitchen floor

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and Lola had to sponge up after them. One of the dogs jumped up on the car window, the short claws scratching the glass.

"Oh, it's Hector," my mother said, holding the cat, who had puffed into an orange ball. I didn't know how my mother told the dogs apart, but she could. Everyone in her family knew which was which. To me, they were just wild and ugly.

My father rolled down the window and swung at Hector, who pawed again at the door. "Goddamn dog, get down!" Hector's breath came out in steam that smelled of meat and cattails. My father hit the dog's head, hard, but Hector barked instead of whining. "Stinking dogs!" he shouted. "I'm going to kill those animals one of these days."

"They're just gun dogs," my mother said, as if it explained how Hector and Ajax behaved. Then Hector dropped from the window, yelped once, and they were gone, snapping twigs as they ran back to the woods.

At the Cottage, the house by the river where we always stayed, my father opened the car door with a big push. He stumped across the yard. The cat dashed across the grass toward the woods, a zigzagging streak of orange in the dark-blue light. Small waves slapped against the river bank. "Everyone take a bag until it's all inside," my mother said but my sister and I sat still, as if it were clear to us that the car was, after all, safer than what came next. My father whistled loudly. The sound of geese was everywhere.

"Something must have happened in Florida," my father said the next morning, his whole head inside the Baltimore
Sun
. "Some pressure system." Overnight the air had turned very warm. I was sweaty in my pajamas. All I could see of my father were his large pink hands on the gray-and-white paper. "Have you spoken to your mother?" he asked Mom. The paper didn't move.

"I'll call at 11 o'clock," my mother said, and sipped her coffee. She always called at 11:00 to see when dinner was, even though it was always at 2:00, with drinks in the library at 1:00. This was just

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the way it was. Everything planned and regular as a day at school: what you wore, who was liked, who wasn't. We weren't, I knew, but I didn't know whose fault it was, though I suspected in some way that it was mine, for being dark and pink like my father. Or maybe it was that he was angry.

My mother was angry these days, too, though nothing she said gave it away. Her spoon rang sharp against the lip of her coffee cup. Since my father stopped going to the office, she drank it without milk, thick and brown. She'd stopped wearing most of her rings because they slipped from her fingers. She fed me toast, with jam but not a lot of margarine. I was getting padded. So was my father; he'd puffed out since he wasn't working, even though there were no crackers in the cupboards. My mother called the refrigerator the "ice box" and it had an echo. She handed out Life Savers as if they were tiny, colorful bombs.

The pockets of my book bag were bumpy with bags of sour-balls. They never melted or got smashed because I ate them too fast for that. But it wasn't sweet things that were changing my shape. I didn't eat enough of them for that to happen. My body was changing everywhere, though we didn't talk about it.

My mother handed me a plate of whole-wheat toast. "Where's your sister?" she asked. My mouth was full and I pointed my finger to the ceiling. Upstairs, snipping toes off her Barbie. The hair was already cropped as close as a dead corn field.

My mother sat across from my father and picked up her knitting. The piece of clothing, whatever it was, had gotten a lot bigger overnight.

Dad was wearing his worst and oldest sweater, one he'd owned before she started knitting. He put the paper down and his eyes were crowded and dark, like a room with no lights but lots of furniture. He was very still as he watched my mother. I waited for him to do something he did every year down here, like pound his chest and say, "Love that rare air!" He didn't like it here. He didn't like the Laird, he didn't like the way we had to dress for the

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Big House, he didn't like the hunting. Usually, he talked about all this loudly or took us on a walk to skip flat stones on the river.

There was an echo between my parents, like the one in the empty refrigerator. My mother bent her head; the wool she fed on her needles was wrapped tight around her forefinger, where it bit into her skin.

The blinds were rolled all the way up. The house was smooth with gray light. I took my toast and sat on the window seat to watch the river where the current bent and folded the water into gold-brown curves, which looked warm though it wasn't.

My sister came down and was handed more cold toast. Not even looking at the plate, she asked if we could go swimming. My mother looked up from her pattern and said, "You'll have to skinny dip."

The screen door hit the jamb with a smash and my sister and I were at the edge of the river. There was a smell of burning leaves and fish, not a bad smell of fish, but a just-caught, watery smell of fish. We took our pajamas off. Our skin was so white, we could see the pink and blue stalks of our veins. In the rush to get to the water, I had forgotten the new padding on my body, the curves on my hips and chest, and they made me stare. I had never seen the newness in this bright a light, or noticed how it changed my shadow. I punched my sister in the arm and shouted, "Stop looking!" even though she probably wasn't and ran into the water, splashing up gold and gray, my shadow ripped and scattering on the river.

"Fatso!" she shouted back. I heard her wade into the water behind me. I would grab her legs under water when she got over her head.

The water was past my waist when my sister said, "What's that?" We heard a sound like the geese, but higher and with more notes to it. It was my cousin, George, on his bagpipes. George and his sister Astrid had hair that stayed parted and were good at science so their family stayed in the Big House.

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