LESLEY BANNATYNE
Lesley Bannatyne is a freelance journalist and the author of several books on Halloween.
SALT (AUGUST 7, 2015)
“Iron Maiden? I loved that CD,” the plumber told her, running his finger across the spines of Deb’s CD collection.
The clanging of her bathroom pipes was escalating, and she imagined them exploding, shooting shrapnel up through the floorboards.
“Won’t they burst with all that banging?”
“No,” Bergeron said. “It’s just air. Pipe hammer, that’s all. Old pipes do it.”
“Should I fix it?”
“No, you’ll be fine.”
“I can turn off the water upstairs?”
“Yeah.”
She ran up the stairs, reached into the flaking cast iron bathtub and wrenched the faucet to the left. She felt the hardware crack, and the water kept running. She torqued it harder and the faucet crumbled in her hand. Horrified, she watched the water gush, stronger and harder with every second. She backed away from the tub and yelled downstairs to the plumber.
“Hal! Help!”
The water turned the rusty color of dried blood and it splashed against the bottom of the tub sending the spray up at Deb.
“Hal!!!”
Hal called upstairs to her, excited. “You have an MaXXX CD here!” He squinted at the back of the CD case. “I was IN this band.”
Deb raced full speed toward the stairs, front of her t-shirt soaked with cold water. She met Hal coming up the stairs toward her.
“I’m the guitarist!” he said, nodding his head, showing all his teeth. “I played guitar for MaXXX—look!”
He held the CD out to her.
She glared at him, the CD, back at him.
He pointed at the CD cover. “See? That’s me.”
She could hear something dripping. The kitchen, she thought, it’s coming through the kitchen ceiling.
Hal held the CD a few inches from her face. “I was IN this band.”
All she saw was the faint, feather-like scar stretched all the way through from Hal’s elbow to the webbing between his ring finger and his pinky. She opened her own hand and showed him the broken pieces of faucet.
“Like a bizarro world ‘Gift of the Magi,’” Astrid told Deb on the phone the next day. “You gave him a broken pipe, but he’s really a rock guitarist. He handed you a CD, but you really needed a plumber.”
“You should see this,” Deb said, looking up at acoustic tile ceiling. “He had to saw through the ceiling to get to the pipe.”
“So, are you going to go out with him?”
“I don’t know. He told me his new band was playing at Barefoot Bob’s this Saturday, like he wanted me to come by.”
Deb could feel Astrid rolling her eyes. “Okay, I’ll come with you.”
Deb clicked off the phone and stared at the shreds of ceiling tile strewn across the brick-pattern linoleum floor. The last contractor she dated was a glazier—Dennis—who left a break-up note on her counter, and, by way of apology, a frozen rack of lamb. She’d burned his bathrobe in the sink.
She surveyed the kitchen’s clutter of crayon drawings from the ESL kids she’d taught for three decades, her collections of coasters, red ceramic hearts. She reminded herself of her goal to get rid of ten things a day, ten of anything—even golf pencils—and of the promise she’d made to herself: that if she didn’t love it, need it, or couldn’t live without it, she wouldn’t bring it home.
Astrid turned her Civic around in the short incline of Deb’s crushed clamshell drive and tapped the horn twice.
“I love the leopard clogs!” Deb said as she popped into the car. “No, really. I like how they match your glasses.”
Astrid smirked. She shoved a Bangles CD in the player and drove her dented red Honda 20 miles over the speed limit through Deb’s neighborhood of tiny, packed-together capes and onto Quincy Shore Drive towards Wollaston Beach. It was humid, and the moon fuzzed out in the sky over Boston harbor. When they pulled into Bob’s lot, the bar was softly lit from within, like one of Deb’s favorite Cape Hoppers. The air was delicious: fry oil, salt, seaweed, and cigarettes.
It was early August, but the walls of Barefoot Bob’s were still draped with Christmas lights and the bottles behind the bar sparkled in the light from a tiny mirror ball left over from New Year’s Eve.
“That’s him?” Astrid said, checking out the band’s guitarist, then the name painted on the bass drum. “They’re called MudShark?”
“I guess,” Deb said. “Yeah, he’s the one with the jacket.”
“Nice fringe,” Astrid smiled. “He’s short. I like that.” She dug a ten out of her purse. “A cross between Mel Gibson and Li’l Abner. I’ll get you a Seven.”
Deb watched Hal nod his head to “Brown Sugar” and slide through Keith Richard’s part like he was born to do it. Pointed boots, hair cut close to his head, wiry. She caught his eye and waved; his face lit up.
“Hello, Mr. Great Balls of Fire,” Astrid murmured, handing Deb a drink and raising up on her toes to get a good look at the band. “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“I’m getting a married vibe.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“The eyes. He’s checking the room. Trying to look casual, but making a sweep of who’s here, who might say something.”
When the band took a break, Hal slid forward to sit on the edge of the stage. Astrid caught Deb’s eye, raised an eyebrow, and waved goodbye.
Later, in his truck, Deb asked him right out if he was married and Hal had said he wasn’t, not at the moment. Then he’d asked her what the ocean meant to her, and they’d talked about how it seemed to make everything epic, and how time kept buckling in on itself when you thought about it too much. About all the dead horseshoe crabs, and how is it that mussels can find each other to mate. He told her he’d once thought he was so invincible, so on top of the world, that he’d tried to karate chop a glass coffee table in two with the edge of his right hand and he sliced the tendons in his arm so he couldn’t tour with the band. She told him about Mom and the long cancer, and how she’d moved back home to take care of her, and about all her married brothers and how, except for the time she and Astrid lived in Paris for a summer, she’d never traveled anywhere away from here. And then she’d cried a little because she thought he’d get tired of her because of that. When the first yolky rays of morning sun hit the sand they made love, in the truck, with the seagulls screaming outside.
Hal drove her home after, and on the way, Deb thought about how golden it all was, the overgrown forsythia hedges and peeling garages, the old men in red trucker’s hats out walking their dogs, all soaked in that brilliant sideways light of early morning. Everything felt so hopeful, and Deb nearly wept again.
When he dropped her off, Deb checked her phone. Only one text, from Astrid: “Just sayin.”
For the next few days, Deb felt luxurious, even sexy. She shaved her legs. Standing underneath the pristine ceiling that Hal had patched expertly together, she couldn’t help but smile. For as long as it lasts, she thought, knocking on the glassy Formica of her countertops. She’d lived in this house longer than she’d lived anywhere else—if you counted the years growing up and the years since Mom died—and everything that mattered to her had happened in these rooms, in this town that she knew better than any place on earth. That wasn’t always her plan. There was a job waiting for her in San Diego once, and she was going to take it after Mom died and she could sell the house. But Mom died, and her ESL kids needed her that spring, and she didn’t go. Instead, she taught, and filled the shelves with more art books and seashells, exotic cactus plants and paper cranes. She planted hostas in the back and fixed the roof. You have to choose a place and make your life happen there.
When Hal hadn’t called by day four, her thoughts grew black.
Astrid let herself in Deb’s kitchen door and kicked off her flip-flops. “Don’t sit in the dark,” she said, hitting the wall switch the small kitchen table where Deb sat idly picking at a plate of toast crusts. “Oh good,” Astrid said, taking a bottle from its brown paper sheath. “You’ve eaten.” She rummaged through the cabinet for two short glasses, cracked the seal of the Tequila bottle and poured them each a shot. “Turn that fan higher?”
“I’m not looking for a husband, for God’s sake. I was sure we had a connection, that’s all. How could I have been so off?” Deb swallowed a shot, quick, like the movies. “I thought for sure he’d call the next day,” she said, surprised by the anger rolling around in her chest.
“Well,” Astrid said, “people are shape shifters. Chameleons. Forget him.”
“So where does it go?”
“What go?”
“Whatever two people have? It’s there, then it’s gone, so where?”
Astrid laughed once, loud and short. “It evaporates like sweat. No, even better, we bleed it out over the laundry and rugs when we move in together. It pools up in our socks.”
“I think we throw it away,” Deb said. “We do it on purpose.”
“And I think what you call love, I call curiosity. Or terror. God, this heat.” Astrid shook out a bandana and tied it like a sweatband around her head.
“But still, people try,” Deb said. “You know how he got that scar? Put his hand through a glass coffee table in a hotel room, right before MaXXX went out on tour. They replaced him. He missed it, the big time. They got famous, and he missed it.”
“Don’t even think it,” Astrid said.
“What am I thinking?”
“That you’re the same as him. Get your purse. We’re going over there right now and find out what’s what. The bar can’t be any hotter than this kitchen.”
The Christmas lights were still there, but someone had pinned lit-up pink flamingos across the row of well gin. Barefoot Bob’s was packed with regulars.
Deb went straight to the bathroom to check her face. “Sheesh,” she said, out loud. Her hair was falling out of her bun and the worn elastic straps of her sports bra drooped over her shoulders. She shook her hair out – mousy under the awful fluorescents – God, did she really look like she had a mustache? She tipped her face so she couldn’t see the wrinkles feathered above her lips. The vibrations of the bass guitar shook the metal stall door, and she pushed her hand against it for quiet while she mopped the sweat off her face.
Hal looked surprised to see Deb. He was windmilling like Townshend, and he hammed it up for her. Astrid snorted and poked Deb in the ribs. But Deb was fixed on Hal, on the scar along his arm, on the fringe, on the soft brown eyes, the short, graying hair. She liked him, she did.
When the band took a break, Hal leapt off the stage and disappeared into the kitchen.
“It’s too hot,” Astrid said. “If we’re going to stay, I’ve got to go dunk my head in the sink, okay? I’ll come find you.”
Deb nodded.
Hal emerged from the kitchen with a soda water.
“Deb! Hey, how you doing?” he said, squeezing her upper arm. She moved to hug him and he tightened his hand. A tiny, sharp-featured brunette slammed through the kitchen doors with two slices of lemon. She dropped one into Hal’s soda water.
“Deb,” Hal said, “this is Carrie, my wife. Carrie, my friend, Deb.” The women nodded at each other, then each surveyed the room behind the other’s head. “Nice to meet you,” Deb mouthed, pointing towards the door as if to say she was, what, just leaving? Heading to the bar? She grabbed her purse to her gut and ran out into the parking lot, then dodged the cars zooming up Quincy Shore Drive and kept running until she felt the cold, dead, low tide sand sinking under her feet.
Deb walked out of her flip-flops and over the muddy flats into the water, then kept going, up to her shins, her knees. Low tide. The muffled clang of warning buoys bobbed on the tide far away, but here in the shallows there was no wind, no waves. The dark hulk of a barge sat miles out, motionless and heavy. She listened to the cars passing by behind her, to their radios fading in and out. So many moon hours she’d spent, back then, standing in the warm shallows and feeling a yearning so raw it was like her chest was split open and her sides pinned back. Her whole body was agape, wanting something to happen to her, wanting something so big she couldn’t name it. It was a joke with Astrid back then, that summer they moved to Paris to be au pairs. “Je veux, je veux, je veux,” they’d chant from the Pont Neuf, for all to hear. “I want, I want, I want.” Back then, when they were desperate to know what they were meant to be, when they were sure there was something they were meant to be.
Deb lowered herself into the water, warmer than the air, and let it float her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the salt. It was her bedrock, this salt, here, this Quincy Bay salt, from where she was born, and where all that she had earned, and built, and planted, and loved, was. She floated, buoyed by place. It’s not where you are, it’s who you are, Astrid announced when they finally ran out of money and had to come home from France.
“Deb!” Hal called, and she could see him, a speck on the beach, walking toward the water’s
edge. He rolled up his pant legs and stepped into the water. “Hey, wait a minute.” He splashed, tugging his pants higher, walking out to her.
“Forget it,” Deb said, listening to her voice skip along the water.
He waded carefully, rolling his pant legs higher with every few steps. “Okay, listen,” Hal said softly when he got close to her. “I’m sorry.”
Deb dipped down in the water and kicked her legs to splash him.
“Come on, Deb. Don’t.”
She stared at him, floating in the shallow water, submerged up to her nose. Then she stood and locked eyes with the plumber. “Yeah?” Deb tugged the hem of her wet t-shirt and pulled it over her head. She balled it up and threw it far out into the bay. She yanked her bra over her head and lobbed it over her head. “Let’s swim, Hal.”
She could see thoughts racing through his head. She backed up into the deeper water, facing Hall, naked from the waist up. Hal glanced quickly at the shore, then back at Deb. “Ok, ok. Just give me a second,” he said.
Hal slogged back to the shore, gingerly unbuttoned his band shirt and kicked off of his pants.
Deb floated, letting the ocean soak her hair. When she stood up she could see Hal, naked, working his way back across the shallows towards her. Behind him she spotted a small figure standing, vigilant, on the shore. Astrid.
“Hey,” he said, when he reached her.
“He.”
The water was dark underneath them and Deb thought of other summer nights, when she was a kid, when the bay water phosphoresced, like it was lit up from within by a million tiny sparklers.
Hal floated, watching Deb kick up froths of seawater. “Deb, I gotta get back,” he said, spitting. “We’ve got another set. And I’m getting kind of cold.”
Deb treaded, eye-to-eye with Hal. His nose was running, his eyes squinting against the stinging salt. Drops of water stuck to his eyelashes like lice.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry. Really, I am.” He reached out to take her hand. She touched bottom, once, twice, then kicked her legs to jettison away from Hal. She felt weightless in the water, so she kept going, towards shore, kicking and stroking until she could stand up. She splashed through the shallows, bare feet grazing sharp broken shells, and ran across the cold beach sand.
Hal watched her, up to his chest in water.
“Seriously?” Astrid said, whipping off her bandana and giving it to Deb to cover her chest.
They ran to the car in the parking lot, jumped into the Civic, and pulled out onto Shore Drive.
“Carrie,” Deb told Astrid. “His wife’s name is Carrie.” Deb tried to spread the cloth out wider to cover her breasts.
“Try these,” Astrid said. She pushed a wadded bundle of clothes at Deb.
Deb peeled a shirt from the wad. “You stole his clothes?”
“I did,” Astrid said.
And they both laughed like they’d been laughing since the 8th grade, so hard that Deb made Astrid stop the car so she wouldn’t pee herself.
Then Bruce came on the radio, “Pink Cadillac,” and Astrid turned it up, and Deb put her feet up on the dashboard as Astrid steered the car around corners, through corridors of buildings they’d both known all their lives. Deb watched the houses slide by, imagining she could see inside the paneled living rooms, see the chipped souvenir cups, the peeling vinyl flooring.
The Civic slid down Bayview, left on Billings, right on Royal. The streetlights caught the longest dent on the side of the car, reflecting it like a racing stripe, and at the very same moment, both Astrid and Deb rolled down their windows and leaned their heads out to dry their hair.
copyright 2014
The clanging of her bathroom pipes was escalating, and she imagined them exploding, shooting shrapnel up through the floorboards.
“Won’t they burst with all that banging?”
“No,” Bergeron said. “It’s just air. Pipe hammer, that’s all. Old pipes do it.”
“Should I fix it?”
“No, you’ll be fine.”
“I can turn off the water upstairs?”
“Yeah.”
She ran up the stairs, reached into the flaking cast iron bathtub and wrenched the faucet to the left. She felt the hardware crack, and the water kept running. She torqued it harder and the faucet crumbled in her hand. Horrified, she watched the water gush, stronger and harder with every second. She backed away from the tub and yelled downstairs to the plumber.
“Hal! Help!”
The water turned the rusty color of dried blood and it splashed against the bottom of the tub sending the spray up at Deb.
“Hal!!!”
Hal called upstairs to her, excited. “You have an MaXXX CD here!” He squinted at the back of the CD case. “I was IN this band.”
Deb raced full speed toward the stairs, front of her t-shirt soaked with cold water. She met Hal coming up the stairs toward her.
“I’m the guitarist!” he said, nodding his head, showing all his teeth. “I played guitar for MaXXX—look!”
He held the CD out to her.
She glared at him, the CD, back at him.
He pointed at the CD cover. “See? That’s me.”
She could hear something dripping. The kitchen, she thought, it’s coming through the kitchen ceiling.
Hal held the CD a few inches from her face. “I was IN this band.”
All she saw was the faint, feather-like scar stretched all the way through from Hal’s elbow to the webbing between his ring finger and his pinky. She opened her own hand and showed him the broken pieces of faucet.
“Like a bizarro world ‘Gift of the Magi,’” Astrid told Deb on the phone the next day. “You gave him a broken pipe, but he’s really a rock guitarist. He handed you a CD, but you really needed a plumber.”
“You should see this,” Deb said, looking up at acoustic tile ceiling. “He had to saw through the ceiling to get to the pipe.”
“So, are you going to go out with him?”
“I don’t know. He told me his new band was playing at Barefoot Bob’s this Saturday, like he wanted me to come by.”
Deb could feel Astrid rolling her eyes. “Okay, I’ll come with you.”
Deb clicked off the phone and stared at the shreds of ceiling tile strewn across the brick-pattern linoleum floor. The last contractor she dated was a glazier—Dennis—who left a break-up note on her counter, and, by way of apology, a frozen rack of lamb. She’d burned his bathrobe in the sink.
She surveyed the kitchen’s clutter of crayon drawings from the ESL kids she’d taught for three decades, her collections of coasters, red ceramic hearts. She reminded herself of her goal to get rid of ten things a day, ten of anything—even golf pencils—and of the promise she’d made to herself: that if she didn’t love it, need it, or couldn’t live without it, she wouldn’t bring it home.
Astrid turned her Civic around in the short incline of Deb’s crushed clamshell drive and tapped the horn twice.
“I love the leopard clogs!” Deb said as she popped into the car. “No, really. I like how they match your glasses.”
Astrid smirked. She shoved a Bangles CD in the player and drove her dented red Honda 20 miles over the speed limit through Deb’s neighborhood of tiny, packed-together capes and onto Quincy Shore Drive towards Wollaston Beach. It was humid, and the moon fuzzed out in the sky over Boston harbor. When they pulled into Bob’s lot, the bar was softly lit from within, like one of Deb’s favorite Cape Hoppers. The air was delicious: fry oil, salt, seaweed, and cigarettes.
It was early August, but the walls of Barefoot Bob’s were still draped with Christmas lights and the bottles behind the bar sparkled in the light from a tiny mirror ball left over from New Year’s Eve.
“That’s him?” Astrid said, checking out the band’s guitarist, then the name painted on the bass drum. “They’re called MudShark?”
“I guess,” Deb said. “Yeah, he’s the one with the jacket.”
“Nice fringe,” Astrid smiled. “He’s short. I like that.” She dug a ten out of her purse. “A cross between Mel Gibson and Li’l Abner. I’ll get you a Seven.”
Deb watched Hal nod his head to “Brown Sugar” and slide through Keith Richard’s part like he was born to do it. Pointed boots, hair cut close to his head, wiry. She caught his eye and waved; his face lit up.
“Hello, Mr. Great Balls of Fire,” Astrid murmured, handing Deb a drink and raising up on her toes to get a good look at the band. “Uh-oh.”
“What?”
“I’m getting a married vibe.”
“How could you possibly know that?”
“The eyes. He’s checking the room. Trying to look casual, but making a sweep of who’s here, who might say something.”
When the band took a break, Hal slid forward to sit on the edge of the stage. Astrid caught Deb’s eye, raised an eyebrow, and waved goodbye.
Later, in his truck, Deb asked him right out if he was married and Hal had said he wasn’t, not at the moment. Then he’d asked her what the ocean meant to her, and they’d talked about how it seemed to make everything epic, and how time kept buckling in on itself when you thought about it too much. About all the dead horseshoe crabs, and how is it that mussels can find each other to mate. He told her he’d once thought he was so invincible, so on top of the world, that he’d tried to karate chop a glass coffee table in two with the edge of his right hand and he sliced the tendons in his arm so he couldn’t tour with the band. She told him about Mom and the long cancer, and how she’d moved back home to take care of her, and about all her married brothers and how, except for the time she and Astrid lived in Paris for a summer, she’d never traveled anywhere away from here. And then she’d cried a little because she thought he’d get tired of her because of that. When the first yolky rays of morning sun hit the sand they made love, in the truck, with the seagulls screaming outside.
Hal drove her home after, and on the way, Deb thought about how golden it all was, the overgrown forsythia hedges and peeling garages, the old men in red trucker’s hats out walking their dogs, all soaked in that brilliant sideways light of early morning. Everything felt so hopeful, and Deb nearly wept again.
When he dropped her off, Deb checked her phone. Only one text, from Astrid: “Just sayin.”
For the next few days, Deb felt luxurious, even sexy. She shaved her legs. Standing underneath the pristine ceiling that Hal had patched expertly together, she couldn’t help but smile. For as long as it lasts, she thought, knocking on the glassy Formica of her countertops. She’d lived in this house longer than she’d lived anywhere else—if you counted the years growing up and the years since Mom died—and everything that mattered to her had happened in these rooms, in this town that she knew better than any place on earth. That wasn’t always her plan. There was a job waiting for her in San Diego once, and she was going to take it after Mom died and she could sell the house. But Mom died, and her ESL kids needed her that spring, and she didn’t go. Instead, she taught, and filled the shelves with more art books and seashells, exotic cactus plants and paper cranes. She planted hostas in the back and fixed the roof. You have to choose a place and make your life happen there.
When Hal hadn’t called by day four, her thoughts grew black.
Astrid let herself in Deb’s kitchen door and kicked off her flip-flops. “Don’t sit in the dark,” she said, hitting the wall switch the small kitchen table where Deb sat idly picking at a plate of toast crusts. “Oh good,” Astrid said, taking a bottle from its brown paper sheath. “You’ve eaten.” She rummaged through the cabinet for two short glasses, cracked the seal of the Tequila bottle and poured them each a shot. “Turn that fan higher?”
“I’m not looking for a husband, for God’s sake. I was sure we had a connection, that’s all. How could I have been so off?” Deb swallowed a shot, quick, like the movies. “I thought for sure he’d call the next day,” she said, surprised by the anger rolling around in her chest.
“Well,” Astrid said, “people are shape shifters. Chameleons. Forget him.”
“So where does it go?”
“What go?”
“Whatever two people have? It’s there, then it’s gone, so where?”
Astrid laughed once, loud and short. “It evaporates like sweat. No, even better, we bleed it out over the laundry and rugs when we move in together. It pools up in our socks.”
“I think we throw it away,” Deb said. “We do it on purpose.”
“And I think what you call love, I call curiosity. Or terror. God, this heat.” Astrid shook out a bandana and tied it like a sweatband around her head.
“But still, people try,” Deb said. “You know how he got that scar? Put his hand through a glass coffee table in a hotel room, right before MaXXX went out on tour. They replaced him. He missed it, the big time. They got famous, and he missed it.”
“Don’t even think it,” Astrid said.
“What am I thinking?”
“That you’re the same as him. Get your purse. We’re going over there right now and find out what’s what. The bar can’t be any hotter than this kitchen.”
The Christmas lights were still there, but someone had pinned lit-up pink flamingos across the row of well gin. Barefoot Bob’s was packed with regulars.
Deb went straight to the bathroom to check her face. “Sheesh,” she said, out loud. Her hair was falling out of her bun and the worn elastic straps of her sports bra drooped over her shoulders. She shook her hair out – mousy under the awful fluorescents – God, did she really look like she had a mustache? She tipped her face so she couldn’t see the wrinkles feathered above her lips. The vibrations of the bass guitar shook the metal stall door, and she pushed her hand against it for quiet while she mopped the sweat off her face.
Hal looked surprised to see Deb. He was windmilling like Townshend, and he hammed it up for her. Astrid snorted and poked Deb in the ribs. But Deb was fixed on Hal, on the scar along his arm, on the fringe, on the soft brown eyes, the short, graying hair. She liked him, she did.
When the band took a break, Hal leapt off the stage and disappeared into the kitchen.
“It’s too hot,” Astrid said. “If we’re going to stay, I’ve got to go dunk my head in the sink, okay? I’ll come find you.”
Deb nodded.
Hal emerged from the kitchen with a soda water.
“Deb! Hey, how you doing?” he said, squeezing her upper arm. She moved to hug him and he tightened his hand. A tiny, sharp-featured brunette slammed through the kitchen doors with two slices of lemon. She dropped one into Hal’s soda water.
“Deb,” Hal said, “this is Carrie, my wife. Carrie, my friend, Deb.” The women nodded at each other, then each surveyed the room behind the other’s head. “Nice to meet you,” Deb mouthed, pointing towards the door as if to say she was, what, just leaving? Heading to the bar? She grabbed her purse to her gut and ran out into the parking lot, then dodged the cars zooming up Quincy Shore Drive and kept running until she felt the cold, dead, low tide sand sinking under her feet.
Deb walked out of her flip-flops and over the muddy flats into the water, then kept going, up to her shins, her knees. Low tide. The muffled clang of warning buoys bobbed on the tide far away, but here in the shallows there was no wind, no waves. The dark hulk of a barge sat miles out, motionless and heavy. She listened to the cars passing by behind her, to their radios fading in and out. So many moon hours she’d spent, back then, standing in the warm shallows and feeling a yearning so raw it was like her chest was split open and her sides pinned back. Her whole body was agape, wanting something to happen to her, wanting something so big she couldn’t name it. It was a joke with Astrid back then, that summer they moved to Paris to be au pairs. “Je veux, je veux, je veux,” they’d chant from the Pont Neuf, for all to hear. “I want, I want, I want.” Back then, when they were desperate to know what they were meant to be, when they were sure there was something they were meant to be.
Deb lowered herself into the water, warmer than the air, and let it float her. She closed her eyes and breathed in the salt. It was her bedrock, this salt, here, this Quincy Bay salt, from where she was born, and where all that she had earned, and built, and planted, and loved, was. She floated, buoyed by place. It’s not where you are, it’s who you are, Astrid announced when they finally ran out of money and had to come home from France.
“Deb!” Hal called, and she could see him, a speck on the beach, walking toward the water’s
edge. He rolled up his pant legs and stepped into the water. “Hey, wait a minute.” He splashed, tugging his pants higher, walking out to her.
“Forget it,” Deb said, listening to her voice skip along the water.
He waded carefully, rolling his pant legs higher with every few steps. “Okay, listen,” Hal said softly when he got close to her. “I’m sorry.”
Deb dipped down in the water and kicked her legs to splash him.
“Come on, Deb. Don’t.”
She stared at him, floating in the shallow water, submerged up to her nose. Then she stood and locked eyes with the plumber. “Yeah?” Deb tugged the hem of her wet t-shirt and pulled it over her head. She balled it up and threw it far out into the bay. She yanked her bra over her head and lobbed it over her head. “Let’s swim, Hal.”
She could see thoughts racing through his head. She backed up into the deeper water, facing Hall, naked from the waist up. Hal glanced quickly at the shore, then back at Deb. “Ok, ok. Just give me a second,” he said.
Hal slogged back to the shore, gingerly unbuttoned his band shirt and kicked off of his pants.
Deb floated, letting the ocean soak her hair. When she stood up she could see Hal, naked, working his way back across the shallows towards her. Behind him she spotted a small figure standing, vigilant, on the shore. Astrid.
“Hey,” he said, when he reached her.
“He.”
The water was dark underneath them and Deb thought of other summer nights, when she was a kid, when the bay water phosphoresced, like it was lit up from within by a million tiny sparklers.
Hal floated, watching Deb kick up froths of seawater. “Deb, I gotta get back,” he said, spitting. “We’ve got another set. And I’m getting kind of cold.”
Deb treaded, eye-to-eye with Hal. His nose was running, his eyes squinting against the stinging salt. Drops of water stuck to his eyelashes like lice.
“Listen,” he said. “I’m sorry. Really, I am.” He reached out to take her hand. She touched bottom, once, twice, then kicked her legs to jettison away from Hal. She felt weightless in the water, so she kept going, towards shore, kicking and stroking until she could stand up. She splashed through the shallows, bare feet grazing sharp broken shells, and ran across the cold beach sand.
Hal watched her, up to his chest in water.
“Seriously?” Astrid said, whipping off her bandana and giving it to Deb to cover her chest.
They ran to the car in the parking lot, jumped into the Civic, and pulled out onto Shore Drive.
“Carrie,” Deb told Astrid. “His wife’s name is Carrie.” Deb tried to spread the cloth out wider to cover her breasts.
“Try these,” Astrid said. She pushed a wadded bundle of clothes at Deb.
Deb peeled a shirt from the wad. “You stole his clothes?”
“I did,” Astrid said.
And they both laughed like they’d been laughing since the 8th grade, so hard that Deb made Astrid stop the car so she wouldn’t pee herself.
Then Bruce came on the radio, “Pink Cadillac,” and Astrid turned it up, and Deb put her feet up on the dashboard as Astrid steered the car around corners, through corridors of buildings they’d both known all their lives. Deb watched the houses slide by, imagining she could see inside the paneled living rooms, see the chipped souvenir cups, the peeling vinyl flooring.
The Civic slid down Bayview, left on Billings, right on Royal. The streetlights caught the longest dent on the side of the car, reflecting it like a racing stripe, and at the very same moment, both Astrid and Deb rolled down their windows and leaned their heads out to dry their hair.
copyright 2014