Sweet Water Read online

  He licked his spoon. “Me. I’m what you have to lose.”

  “Oh, Drew.”

  “Really,” he said. “Not to mention the Met, Central Park, the Staten Island Ferry.”

  “I’ve never even been on the Staten Island Ferry.”

  “But that’s just it! You know it’s there.”

  “I’ll call you,” I said. “I’ll write.”

  “You won’t write. You never write. Where are all those friends you had in high school? In college? You never bothered to stay in touch, so you lost them. It’s out of sight, out of mind with you, Cassie. I’ve been there, I know.”

  “My coffee’s cold.” I brought the mug to the counter and poured myself another cup. “How many high school friends do you still talk to? We go through life meeting people and exchanging addresses; it’s not the same as friendship.”

  “Thanks for clearing that up for me.”

  “Oh, stop it, Drew. You’re so boring when you’re peevish.”

  “When I’m peevish?” he said. “Peevish? Where on earth did that word come from?” We both started laughing.

  “Well, you are,” I said. “Peevish. You are.” I sat down at the table. “My ice cream is soup.”

  “Forget the ice cream. Let’s go out for a drink,” he said. “I could use one.” I nodded and pushed the ice cream away. He looked at his watch. “I doubt you’d be able to find a bar open in Tennessee at this hour, Cassie. Just one more thing to think about.”

  “Without you there, Drew, I probably won’t need one.”

  “Rising Sun Gallery.”

  “Could I speak to Adam, please?”

  “May I ask who’s calling?”

  “Veronica, it’s Cassie.”

  “Oh, hello, Cassie.” Her voice was dry and polite. “Hang on, will you?” She put the phone down. After a few minutes she picked it up again. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid he’s in meeting right now. Can I have him return your call?”

  “Um …”

  “Oh, just a second,” Veronica said.

  “Hi,” said Adam briskly. “I’m running. I’ve got an appointment across town five minutes ago.”

  “I thought you were in a meeting.”

  “Veronica’s started screening my calls. It’s amazing how much more I get done.”

  I laughed. “Start acting like a bureaucrat and maybe you’ll turn into one.”

  “Thanks for the warning. Well? Is there something you need?”

  “No,” I said. I looked around my apartment stacked with boxes. “I’m just getting ready to leave, is all. I wanted to say goodbye.”

  “Well. Goodbye.”

  “How is everything going?”

  “Fine,” he said. “Great.”

  “Great. Me too.”

  “Great. Look, the cab’s out front. Give Veronica your address and we’ll put you on the mailing list. West Virginia, isn’t it?”

  I sucked in my breath. “Tennessee.”

  “And leave a number so she can reach you if she needs to. She’s redoing the files.”

  “Fine. I’ll leave a number.”

  “Have a nice trip.”

  “Have a nice life.” The words were out of my mouth before I even thought about them.

  For a long moment there was silence. Then he said, “Is that what you called to say?”

  “I guess it is. Isn’t that funny? I didn’t know it, but I guess that is what I called to say.”

  “Funny,” he said. “Here’s Veronica.”

  “Hello,” said Veronica after a bit of shuffling.

  “I don’t have an address and I don’t have a number.”

  “You can send them when you’re settled. No hurry, I’ve got things pretty well under control. There’s not much to it, really. I can’t imagine what I’d need to ask.”

  “Neither can I, Veronica,” I said.

  They read the will out loud, all of us sitting there in straight chairs in the magistrate’s office, and from the moment they spoke her name I knew there would be trouble. Whatever else he was, he was not a frivolous man. Nor was he especially thoughtful. If he’d really cared about the girl he could have contacted her, sent her a letter or some money, but there was nothing before this. He never mentioned her, not once.

  And he knew that Horace or Elaine or I would have razed that house the minute we got our hands on it. We would have torn it down and built over and around it so fast that there’d be nothing left of it, nothing to remind us of then except some knickknacks and a few curling photographs of smiling, blue-eyed children with dogs.

  I left on a Saturday at the end of July. Earlier in the week I had taken a train to Hoboken to buy a 1979 Chevy wagon with 110,000 miles on it from a man who barely spoke English. Before I paid him I took a test drive around the block. I liked the loose, rangy feel, thick vinyl seats, and solid frame, the power steering and two-tone imitationwood and metallic-green exterior. Though I knew nothing about transmissions or engines, the car felt strong and sturdy, and instinctively I trusted it. I gave the man seven hundred dollars in cash and drove it back to Brooklyn.

  Maneuvering the large, broad car down Brooklyn’s streets, I felt like a ship captain navigating through icebergs. The steering wheel, padded with fur, slipped easily through my fingers as I dodged kamikaze taxis and nosed around corners. From this vantage point the city was barely familiar; I scanned street signs as if they were foreign menus. By the time I got back to my apartment on Seventh Avenue I was a nervous wreck.

  On Saturday morning, Drew helped me pile the station wagon to the rafters with clothing and books and a small potter’s wheel. We tied my futon mattress and a dismantled bookcase to the roof rack with twine, then covered the entire bundle with a piece of tarp.

  He stood back when we were finished, his hand under his chin, and surveyed the mass before us. “I can’t decide whether it looks more like an undergraduate art project or some very large, pregnant insect with eggs on its back.”

  “It’s an art student’s rendition of a large, pregnant insect,” I said, tightening a piece of twine.

  “Ah, yes, even better.” He looked around. “Is that everything?”

  “I think so. Thank you, Drew.”

  “Now, don’t be silly and run out of gas or anything. Check the oil, or whatever it is that people who drive are always telling each other to do. Don’t pick up strays or hitchhikers. You’ve got that map AAA sent you?”

  “Yeah, did you see it? They planned the whole trip. If I get lost now I deserve to live in New York for the rest of my life.”

  I gave him a hug around his middle, kissed him on the cheek, and wedged myself into the driver’s seat.

  He leaned through the window and put his hand on mine. “You’re going to go stark raving mad down there. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Didn’t you hear, we won the war? And for good reason. They’re absolute lunatics.”

  “Stop. I’ll be fine.”

  “I worry, so kill me.” He kissed me on the forehead. “God protect you. Shalom. I’ll send you the gossip.”

  “Tell Adam—”

  “The slides are in the office. Yes, yes. He’ll manage.”

  The car smelled of hot vinyl and clean clothes and, faintly, the apple Drew had packed along with a sandwich and Oreos for my lunch. The air was thick and humid. I drove slowly through Brooklyn to the bridge, my hands glued to the steering wheel and my face as close to the windshield as possible. Sweat trickled between my thighs, down my cheeks, into the hollow of my throat. The car rode low to the ground; every time I hit a pothole the bottom scraped against the asphalt.

  Stuck in traffic as I crossed the bridge into Manhattan, I looked back at Brooklyn’s humbler, red-brick skyline, the leafy trees lining the Promenade above the East River. During the four years I lived there I was in three different apartments, counting my college roommate’s floor when I first arrived. Brooklyn became my neighborhood, the place I left each morning, walking the five blocks to the F train, and returned to, often by
taxi, at night. After a year and a half in my ground-floor apartment on Seventh Avenue I had even gotten to know some of my neighbors: Jai, the Pakistani grocer on the corner; Mrs. Marray, the Irishwoman who ran the dry cleaner’s next door.

  But much as I wanted it to be my home, Brooklyn was also a place that could never be familiar, never be safe. I learned to live defensively, not to go out alone or ride the subway after a certain hour. I learned that I always had to be guarded, aware, alert. And I found that something in me almost grew comfortable living with danger, with the peculiar challenge of conquering my fear.

  Now, as I sat in my car on the bridge, stifled by fumes from the Mack truck in front of me, Brooklyn looked peaceful and clean. People who lived near the Promenade—men in running shorts, women with strollers—were emerging from the side streets to eat lunch by the water. I could see them on benches, spreading napkins, drinking through straws from bottles of fruit juice, laughing in the midday sun. All at once I felt a great relief not to be one of them anymore, not to wear nylons in August, buy salads by the ounce at the deli, fight the crowds in the subway after work.

  It was hard to believe leaving could be so easy.

  After crossing lower Manhattan in fits and starts—“My grandmother drives better than you, and she’s dead,” one trucker leaned out of his window to yell into mine—I found myself stuck at the lip of the Holland Tunnel for nearly an hour while they cleared the debris of an accident inside. I edged my car into a tight spot to let police and an ambulance through, and then a tow truck. The ambulance blasted a high, abrupt siren that echoed and was swallowed as it disappeared into the darkness.

  The hot smells of tar and exhaust were overpowering. There was no way to turn around; I was too far in. Eventually traffic began to shift, and cars moved like turtles into the dank, metallic light. As I passed the scene of the accident I could see pieces of taillight, shattered glass, slick patches I imagined were blood.

  I emerged from the tunnel into New Jersey, weaving past Jersey City, Newark, and Somerville on Route 78, through toxic smells and dense, yellow, low-hanging clouds. Factories clung to the edge of the landscape like faraway nightmarish kingdoms.

  Somewhere near Annandale I became aware of a car tailgating me. When the driver realized I’d noticed him he accelerated, pulling just ahead of me in the left lane and then sliding over to the right, forcing me to slam on my brakes. I eased out of my lane to pass him. Out of the corner of my eye I could see him staring at me as he accelerated to match my speed. He was wearing black sunglasses. I was starting to panic. I slowed to forty miles an hour and got in behind him. He slowed further, and I laid on the horn. He got into the passing lane, then slowed and moved behind me again.

  I scrawled his plate number on a napkin, my heart racing. After a few minutes the car swung out beside me, and I looked over at him. His hair was ash brown and curly. He had large white teeth.

  “I’m calling the police,” I shouted.

  “C’mon, baby. Loosen up.”

  “Get the fuck away from me.” I held up the napkin with the number on it.

  His smile faded, and he said something nasty I couldn’t quite hear. Then he zoomed ahead, darting in and out of traffic until I couldn’t see him anymore.

  I leaned back against the vinyl, catching my breath. With my right hand I pushed the clasp of the glove compartment, and it dropped open, its contents spilling onto the floor. I scrounged for a pack of Marlboro Lights I’d found there when I bought the car, and pulled back the cellophane tab with my teeth.

  I thought about the man in Hoboken, who had propositioned me while selling me the car; I thought about the muggers who knocked me down on Seventh Avenue one night. Every time something like this happened I had to readjust, to steel myself, to make myself brave. People had told me they thought I was brave for leaving, brave for striking out on my own, but I didn’t see it that way at all. Bravery is something else entirely: a hardening, a defense. It has little to do with choice, with hope. It has little to do with desire.

  Near the border of Pennsylvania the landscape began to open and close up again, like a flexing fist. Trees and foliage faded into gravel pits and gutted buildings. Just before Bethlehem I stubbed out a cigarette and stopped for gas. As I got out of the car I was struck by the dullness of the sky, the way color seemed to have drained from people’s faces, roadside signs, even stray dogs and cats milling around the station. It was early afternoon, heavy and humid. I still felt a little wobbly, and I was covered with a film of grime and exhaust fumes.

  After paying for the gas I set off again. The car smelled like someone had thrown a party in it the night before. Trying to keep my eyes on the road, I reached over to the passenger’s side and rolled down the window. In the back seat a stray piece of paper danced on top of a pile of boxes; I could hear a loose end of the tarpaulin flapping against the top of the car. I turned on the radio, but I could barely hear the music through the static; then I remembered that I had pushed in the antenna to make room for the roof rack.

  Flipping the radio off, I listened to the sounds of the car: the full-throttle engine, the rustling paper and the slap of the tarp on the roof, the old springs of my seat when I moved around, the dull roar of other cars on the highway, as they passed me, like jets landing.

  I drove through the smog of Allentown, past Fogelsville, Lenhartsville, Virginville. I began ticking off the miles to Harris-burg—fifty, nineteen, six—and then started from zero again, counting the miles to Maryland. Slicing through the narrow chunk of West Virginia in less than an hour, I crossed the border into Virginia as the light faded from the sky.

  The sun and the low, jagged clouds surrounding it looked like a signal fire raging across the tops of the trees that shaded the highway. A warm breeze, cooled by the speed of the car, brushed my face and lifted my hair softly, like fingertips. I was tired.

  Sunday morning I crossed the border into Tennessee, and everything turned blue. Highway 81 cut through lush blue-green valleys, stretching like a runaway Christmas ribbon over wide swaths of gently sloping rises and falls.

  The night before, the landscape had been cluttered with small, miserable houses hunched against the highway, dirty convenience stores surrounded by litter and debris, groups of restless teenagers looking for action on a Saturday night. There had been none of this expansiveness, this possibility of hills continuing for hundreds of miles beyond the road, far out of sight. I’d never imagined land so generous, land that yielded up such clear streams, muddied brown rivers, primeval valleys. And all of it—gray and heather and green-brown—blended into something shadowed and somehow blue.

  I’d set out early, 6:30 a.m. I had toast and canned juice at a diner in Mint Spring, Virginia, just outside Staunton, where I spent the night. At breakfast I bought a local paper and tried to make sense of the headlines. My search for national news led me to page four, where I discovered tantalizing tidbits, AP releases. I found myself voraciously reading Parade magazine and the syndicated humorists just to connect with something I could recognize.

  For several hours, as I was driving through Virginia, a dense gray fog had blanketed the lowlands. The air smelled of dew and juniper and fresh grass, with a crispness that melted as the fog slowly began to lift. I drove with the windows down: all I could see out the front still waited to be metamorphosed into the new day. It was an odd sensation; I felt like I was driving into the past.

  I thought about the warning Drew had given me before I left.

  “You’re not going to some fairy kingdom, Cassie,” he said. “It’s not Oz. There won’t be Munchkins. And you’ll still be you, with the same paranoias and neuroses you’ve got now. All that stuff doesn’t just go away.”

  I laughed. “Oh, Drew, I know that. I don’t have any illusions.”

  “Of course you do,” he said. “You wouldn’t be doing this if you didn’t.”

  As the hours went by, the sun climbed, unseen, in a haze of milky white clouds. Outside Bristol, Tennessee, and ag
ain near Fall Branch, I passed churches full of people. The strains of their singing wafted across the highway like music from a muffled radio.

  Just beyond Knoxville on Highway 75 the split the road made between ridges had become more extreme, deepening and then rising. The station wagon seemed to be diving and surfacing in and out of the soft Tennessee earth. It rode smoothly, gaining momentum on the sharp falls and coasting halfway up the next rise before the big push to the top.

  The afternoon breeze on my face was tepid, like bathwater. I read the billboards, which were garish, almost surreal, framed as they were against the long expanse of sky and the lush countryside: CRAZY ED’S FIREWORKS AND RESTAURANT, AFFORDABLE DENTURES—FULL SET $149—LENOIR CITY. Suddenly my heart leapt and my stomach hollowed: SWEETWATER—16 miles.

  Ahead on the side of the road I could make out a small green highway sign framed in white: EXIT 62—SWEETWATER, with an arrow pointing to the right. Switching on the blinker, I ascended the curving exit ramp, turned over a bridge at the top, and found myself in front of the famed Dinner Bell Restaurant I’d been reading about over the last several miles of billboards. The Dinner Bell turned out to be not only a restaurant but also a general store and gas station. A large sign across the top of the building boasted GOOD “OLE TIME” COUNTRY COOKIN. I pulled in, filled the car with gas, and went inside to pay.

  As I entered, something seemed odd to me, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It took me a moment to realize what it was: everybody was dressed up. The women were in fancy attire, pearls and pastels; the men were wearing ties. Most of them would have come from church. All at once I felt conspicuous in my old shorts and T-shirt.

  The gift shop was crammed with merchandise. Country hams hung from hooks; bumper stickers, hard candy, ceramic figurines, tourist moccasins, and key chains covered the walls and shelves. Rag rugs, also for sale, covered the spongy blue linoleum floor. A fern-topped bar separated the gift shop from the restaurant, but it couldn’t contain the smell of fried chicken, which permeated the whole building.