Sweet Water Read online

  “Oh, sure, but those were rented. These pests I own.”

  “I see,” he said. “The ants. Tell me about the ants.”

  “There’s all this old furniture here,” I told Drew. “An old couch, a couple of musty beds, a few tables and chairs.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Just throw it all out and go to Ikea.”

  “No, no, you don’t understand,” I said. “This is great stuff. Ikea is pretend furniture, particleboard. This is real wood.”

  “Oh, real wood,” he said.

  “Yes, it’s amazing, Drew, really amazing. All this stuff I’ve never paid any attention to before, like furniture. I’ve even been getting up at the crack of dawn to go to yard sales.”

  “Yard sales.”

  “You wouldn’t believe the things people throw out. Yesterday I bought this great old chest of drawers with about ten layers of paint on it for ten dollars. I’m going to strip it. I got the turpentine and paint thinner and everything. I want to refinish all the furniture in the house.”

  He clicked his tongue.

  “What?”

  “This is only the first step, Cassie. Next you’ll be making your own bread. Then you’ll start wearing bonnets.”

  “Funny you should mention that. I bought some yeast yesterday,” I said. “Good night, John-Boy.”

  “Good night, Mary Ellen.”

  Truth. You want the truth? The truth is I was born on October 14, 1917, in a house with huge white columns and a ten-foot-high front door, on a wide, tree-lined street in Chattanooga, Tennessee. They didn’t tell me until my wedding day that I’d had an identical twin who died at birth. She and Ellen float around me like shadows. The truth is I married not for love but to get away from my father, whose raging possessiveness almost destroyed me. The truth is that when Ellen died my world exploded into a thousand jagged pieces; and I let Cassandra and her father crawl on their own bloodied knees back to the North, leaving us to lick our wounds and snarl at each other.

  Nothing I’ve ever thought I had or cared for has really been my own, even when it seemed that the love I had to give must be enough to claim it. And I know that covetousness is a sin, but there are worse sins I can think of: betrayal, for one, lying, theft. Time after time, in a pattern that became sickeningly familiar, the illusions I had were shattered. It took me years to recognize that the truth can be as brittle, as deceptive, as colored glass.

  When my mother was in labor with me the birthing was so difficult, the story goes, that the midwife wouldn’t tell my daddy anything except to get out of the house for the afternoon and come back when it was over. In a state of nervous agitation Daddy roamed the streets of Chattanooga, drinking from a whiskey flask and smoking one cigar after another, wandering in and out of boutiques scattered down Market Street. Somewhere along the way he went into a china shop and bought a figurine, a tiny deer, and then, in the excitement of returning home to a healthy newborn baby (even if it was a girl), promptly forgot all about it. Not until days later, going through the pockets of his coat in search of something else, did he find the object, still wrapped in tissue. He put it on the mantelpiece above the fireplace in my room, and every year after that on my birthday he brought home another glass animal to add to my collection. In the end I had seventeen figurines in all.

  When I was growing up in Chattanooga the town was bustling with the railroad and industry, and people walked with a sense of purpose. Now parts of it are gutted and blank, like the burned-out center of a piece of paper when you hold a match too close: jagged, curling edges, that charred smell that goes up into your nose and gets behind your eyes. But then, when I walked along the street with Daddy, the air was crisp even on the hottest days and all the men smiled and tipped their hats and looked me right in the eye and said, “Hello, Miss Constance. It’s a fine day,” and I smiled shyly and swayed behind Daddy’s big gray-suited form. He tipped his hat to them in return and squeezed my hand as if he was proud of me for being pretty and inspiring comment.

  And the only place I wanted to be then was with my daddy, walking down those hot friendly streets on his lunch hour, stopping every so often to talk to someone of importance who wanted a minute of his time. They all seemed to want a minute of his time. And I, who had his time and his heart whenever I wanted them, grew up knowing that he would give me wholly and unconditionally what others begged for piece by piece, getting a little or none at all, depending on Daddy’s whims.

  But eventually Daddy’s whims came to claim me. I found out what it was like to be ignored on the street, or worse, simply acknowledged. As I grew, shedding plain frocks for full skirts and blouses, he changed too, as if he didn’t know how to treat me. As if I were a stranger inhabiting his house. He started hitting me: one time he slapped my face for staying out past nine; another time he left a welt on my neck for sharing a soda with a boy he didn’t think was good enough.

  Once when I was high school he came home from work at six o’clock and demanded to know where I was. “She’s gone for a walk with some friends,” my mother told him, and when he pressed her—“What friends? What friends?”—my mother said, “Nice boys, Charles. She’ll be home safe and sound, don’t you worry.” He sat in his study waiting for me for four hours, refusing food or company, waiting with his hands clenched on the leather blotter on his mahogany desk while the weak white southwestern light drained from the windows into dusk into darkness.

  When I got home my mother met me in the hallway, white-lipped, and dug into my arm with her long bony fingers, whispering “Your father is in the study,” looking into my eyes like she was the one in trouble, like she wanted me to save her from what was coming. She was a wickless candle to me, dripping the thinnest kind of wax. She could no more stand up for herself or anyone else than she could spark a flame. I felt such contempt for her meekness that I almost welcomed my father’s brutality. At least it was something I could feel.

  When I opened the door to the study I could sense the heat of my father across the room in the darkness, a solid black bulk amid the dim outlines of furniture. I saw or imagined that I could see the whiteness of his knuckles, like teeth in a skull, sitting on the desk. When he spoke it was as if the desk spoke; the voice was deep and level, and seemed too large to have come from a man, even a man as substantial as my father.

  “Where have you been, Constance Whitfield?” he asked, but it wasn’t really a question or even—the usual tone—an accusation. This time the words seemed merely the wrapping for his rage. He spoke my name like he’d never heard it before, like a judge, enunciating the syllables clearly and decisively, as if they spelled out my crime.

  What could I tell him? I had been down by the tracks with Willy Hughes and Sam Allen, who was Jewish and whose banker father Daddy hated with a passion. We had been sitting by the tracks, that’s all, mashing pennies under trains when they came by, and not thinking about the time, and telling jokes. To tell the truth, I had known in the back of my brain somewhere that I should leave, and I watched the sun drop, pale and tired, behind Lookout Mountain with a sinking feeling of my own. But the air was fresh, and Willy and Sam made me laugh, and the longer I stayed out the more invincible I felt, so that by the time we all picked up to go I thought that maybe Daddy would be able to see the fresh air on my cheeks and the sparkle in my eyes and he would understand.

  He didn’t see a thing except that I was late and disheveled, and there was something about me that didn’t seem to care. I don’t think he was worried, even; I don’t think he had ever thought about the possibility of danger, the way Mama might have done. For him the only danger was that I was out with a boy in the darkness, and not even a boy who hurt me: his greatest suspicion and creeping fear was that I was out with a boy who touched me and I liked it.

  “Where have you been, Constance Whitfield?” he asked again, and then he leapt at me across the desk, sending papers and pens and his gilt-edged blotter and a paperweight in the shape of a Confederate soldier flying to the floor. When the
blow came, the back of his hand across my cheek, it didn’t surprise me. I had been expecting it. He stood there, shaken and trembling, and asked me again where I’d been, and still I didn’t answer, and he hit me again and again, the flat of his open hand on my other cheek and across my nose. A thin trickle of blood ran from my nose into my mouth, and the taste was thick and metallic-sweet. I bent forward and let the blood drip onto my cotton dress, staining it with scarlet streaks; I shook my head a little to further the blotchy proof of his abuse. I didn’t say anything and I wasn’t crying, and before I left the room I told him that I had received notification that day from the Chattanooga Teachers College and that I would matriculate in the fall and live in the dormitory with the other young ladies in the program.

  He stood with his shoulders hunched forward and his hands on the desktop like a bear on its hind legs, his great head swaying back and forth, and it was crazy but even as my face stung and blood spattered my dress I wanted to reach out to him because it seemed as if he was the one who was hurt. I was beyond him now, and he knew it; he could hit me, but it wouldn’t stop me from growing up, and it wouldn’t stop me from leaving. But I didn’t reach out to him, and when I left the room he was still standing there, motionless.

  Mama was waiting and met me with a gasp, her hand over her mouth, and then hurried me into the kitchen, where she sat me down at the table and sponged the drying blood off my face and neck. We heard the door to Daddy’s study open and close and then the front door open and close and neither of us said a word. There didn’t seem to be anything to say.

  Later that night, it must have been two or three, I was woken by the slam of the front door and sat bolt upright in my bed, my heart pumping faster than the train. The sound of Daddy’s drunken jagged steps and labored breathing as he made his way upstairs, crashing into the banister and cursing to himself, scared me in a way that his anger never had. I heard my doorknob rattle and then the door was flung open, banging against a dresser, and Daddy staggered in. In the light from the hallway I could see sweat beading on his forehead and mustache, and I could almost see the bourbon thick around him like a glow.

  “Constance, your name is a blasphemy,” he said. “It’s a lie. A joke.” He laughed and wiped his face with his forearm, stepping back and steadying himself. “You used to be a good girl. You’d come to the office and everyone would say that Charles Whitfield’s daughter was a beauty—do you remember?—and she adored him, everybody said.”

  He was talking to himself now, pacing my room in the darkness, running his hand aimlessly along the wall until he settled on my collection of colored-glass figurines on the mantelpiece, picking them up one by one and squinting at them against the feeble hall light. “And now they’re all talking behind my back, you know. They’re all saying that he can’t control his own daughter, that she’s as wild as a cat in the woods, and they’re all laughing. At me.” He spit the words out and swayed drunkenly against the mantelpiece, into my figurines, sweeping them over the edge in a horrifying, cascading crash.

  They shattered on top of one another, delicate hind legs of deer and horses’ necks severed in a terrible tinkling. I cried out, but it happened so fast that my cry only echoed the crash. At first he stood stunned, and then, groaning, covered his face with his hands. He bent slowly to examine the glass remains. After a moment he got up and careened out of the room, slamming the door so hard that the drawers of my dresser rattled and the pile of glass shifted and caved in.

  I wonder sometimes why I never screamed or tried to hit him, why I just took it silently while my own rage accumulated like sand in an hourglass. I sat in my bed on that hot night with the covers pulled up around my shoulders, my teeth chattering, trying to keep warm. Early the next morning I swept up the pretty glass and found a single figure intact: the one I’d received on my eighth birthday, a brown dancing bear with sturdy neck and haunches. Reindeer and horses near the front of the mantel must have broken its fall. Holding it up to the strong morning sun, I watched how the light brought out different colors.

  I set the lone figure back on the mantel and stroked its head with the tip of my finger and slowly pushed it to the edge and over. It was larger and heavier than the other pieces, so when it broke, shards flew across the room, under the bed, between cracks in the floor.

  For months afterward I was reminded of that night each time I encountered a fragment of the bear, each time my foot grazed a piece of it.

  “Let’s face it,” Horace said. “These old houses might look romantic, but what they are is one big pain in the behind.”

  It was Saturday. Dropping by with some brushes and rollers, Horace had found me in the kitchen cooking on a hot plate because a gas leak discovered two days before still hadn’t been traced.

  “I’ll tell you what,” he said in a confidential tone. He took off his baseball cap. “Why don’t you cut your losses and let me rent you a real nice place over at Forest Lakes Village, dirt cheap?”

  “I’m fine,” I said, stirring canned soup with a plastic spoon. “Really. As soon as the gas is hooked up I’ll be all set.”

  He nodded absently and then shook his head, scrutinizing the sink. “Looks like it’s sprung a leak. We’ll have to get somebody over here to fix it soon as—”

  “Horace, I’m going to fix it. I bought some caulking stuff today.” With the bottom of my T-shirt I wiped dust out of a mug and poured soup into it. “I can’t believe you haven’t noticed how much work I’ve done. I’ve been at it for three days! Can’t you see a difference?”

  “All I see is an old firetrap of a house and a girl with more brains than sense.”

  “Is that a compliment? Look, you can stop worrying about me. I really like it here. I like the trouble. That’s what I came down here for.”

  He sighed and assumed a pained expression. “Well, frankly, Cassandra,it’s not that simple. Elaine is worried to death. She says, and rightly so, ‘What if she falls down the stairs and hits her head or breaks her leg and nobody finds her for a week?’ She feels responsible. Hell, we all do.”

  I put my hand on his arm. “You are sweet, Horace. But I’m not your responsibility. I lived by myself for years in New York, which is a lot more treacherous than this place, I can tell you.” I leaned back against the counter, blowing into my soup. “And anyway, I’m getting a dog. I saw an ad in the paper for black Lab puppies. I’ll train it to run to Elaine if anything happens to me.”

  Horace put his cap on backward and headed for the door. “I’ll never understand why some people need to make life harder for themselves than it has to be,” he muttered under his breath.

  The eight-week-old pups were being sold for fifteen dollars each. The moment I laid eyes on them I knew which one I wanted. Most of them were asleep, nestled together in a heap in the pen, but one, wide-eyed, was staring at me through the wire, pushing his dark, wet nose up to my outstretched hand and wagging the tip of his tail. His coat was so black it was iridescent, like the body of a fly: so black it was blue.

  Once I had him home I sat cross-legged in my spartan living room, surrounded by boxes, watching him explore. I’d carefully cleaned up the poison and disinfectants; the floor was so shiny that the bare light bulb in the ceiling socket was almost perfectly reflected.

  The dog pawed at the spot of light until I flicked off the switch. “Come here, Blue,” I said. I patted the floor and he came trotting over. I leaned my head forward and he sniffed, licking my nose, my eyelashes, my lips. I closed my eyes, the puppy’s muzzle next to my chin, his hot breath on my face. I had never owned a dog before. In fact, now that I thought about it, I’d never really owned anything. I opened my eyes and looked at him. So far it seemed pretty easy.

  * * *

  Late Sunday morning I was upstairs in the bedroom when I heard a knock on the screen door. “Who is it?” I yelled, balancing my paint roller on the edge of the tray. I went out into the hall and leaned over the banister.

  “It’s just me,” Alice called. “I
brought over some stuff I thought you might could use.” She surveyed the dark hallway, the scattered drop cloths and paint cans. “Decorating, I see.”

  “Starting to,” I said. “Come on in.”

  With her arms full of bags, she pulled open the screen door. “When I was married to Chet he wanted all the walls in the house to be white—eggshell, to be precise. So as soon as he left I went through and painted every room a different color. I loved those little sample squares. Avocado, honeysuckle, seafoam.” She laughed. “Some worked and some didn’t, but anything was better than white.” She disappeared into the kitchen and set her bags on the table. “Hey, nice color in here! Tangerine! Really livens the place up.”

  “I was thinking about robin’s-egg blue for the bathroom,” I said, coming down the stairs. “I bought a pint to see what it’s like.”

  Alice started unpacking jars of food and putting them on the counter. “I tried that one. It’s darker than you’d think, and brighter. Kind of what it looks like on cloudless afternoons. Good bathroom color.” She held up a mason jar of green beans. “Where d’you want these?”

  “You didn’t have to do that.”

  “I didn’t do anything. All this is from Clyde. She told me to tell you she would’ve called but she doesn’t have the number. In other words,” she said dryly, “she wants to know why you haven’t been in touch since you left.”

  “Oh, I’ve been meaning to. I’ve been so busy.”

  “I know. That’s what I told her.” She took out a bag of apples. “But all it takes is a simple gesture. I’m not telling you what to do, just suggesting.”

  “To be honest, Alice, I didn’t really think she’d care.”

  She shined an apple on her T-shirt. “You never know with her, do you? She’s a tough old bird. Lord, it’s no surprise Mother turned out as neurotic as she did. My policy is to give her a call every now and then, just to be on the safe side.” She bit into the apple. “The banker called me again,” she said abruptly, grinning. “Hal. He’s taking me out tonight to the fanciest restaurant in Knoxville. I think he’s in love.” She peered into a bag. “You want a pear?”