Sweet Water Read online

  “And none of your children had twins either.”

  “No, none of my children,” she said. “You might.”

  I laughed. “If I ever have children.”

  “You will,” she said, turning the pages of the album. “You’re not the type not to.”

  I nodded. Then, suddenly wanting to know, I asked, “What do you mean?”

  She tucked the scalloped edge of a photograph back into its black, wedge-shaped sleeve. “Some people think, no matter what happens, that the world is a good place and folks are basically decent. If something isn’t right, they think they can fix it. You’re like that, I can tell.”

  “You think so?” I said doubtfully.

  “Your mother was that way too.”

  “Are you?”

  “No.” I watched her fingers bend the thick cardboard corner of a page. “I should never have had children.”

  I looked down, strangely uneasy. Her breath was loud and uneven.

  “Maybe you’re wrong about yourself,” I said. “Maybe you only started feeling this way after everything that happened.”

  Clyde studied me for a long time. “I was never what you’d call an optimist,” she said. “I never thought I could change the world.”

  “Where did my mother get it from, then?”

  She shut the album. “Not from me,” she said. “Not from me and not from Amory. It was something she was born with.” She was very still for a moment. Then she hoisted herself to her feet, the album sliding off her lap onto the floor, spilling photographs. “You want all the answers,” she blurted. “Well, I don’t have any answers. Ask somebody else, because I don’t know.”

  “Clyde—” I started to get up, but she’d already left the room, closing the door behind her. I sank back on my heels. I wanted to go after her, but I didn’t have any idea what to say.

  Slowly I began picking up the photographs and placing them, like puzzle pieces, back in the album where they belonged. As I found the space for the final picture, the phone rang and I heard her answer it in the kitchen. After a minute, she came back down the hall. “It’s for you,” she said through the door.

  “Thank you, Clyde.” I reached over to the nightstand and picked up.

  “Cassie, this is Alice. How’s it going?”

  “Fine.” I tried to sound cheerful.

  “Uh-huh. How’s Clyde?”

  “Fine. Just fine.”

  “You got in an argument,” Alice said matter-of-factly.

  I sighed. “Not exactly an argument. A disagreement. No, not even that. I’m not sure what it was. All I know is something I said upset her and she left the room.” I got up from the floor and sat on the bed.

  Alice laughed. “Well, don’t take it personally. It happens to the best of us. Look, I’m calling because I’m packing Eric off for a few days with his daddy and I am as free as a kite. I’m going into town this afternoon, and I thought you might like to come along. There’s not much to see, but it beats sitting around looking at the marigolds and trying not to start a disagreement.”

  “I’d love that,” I said gratefully.

  “I’ll pick you up around two. Don’t do anything desperate before I get there.”

  Hanging up the phone, I sat back against the headboard. I looked around the room at things I hadn’t noticed earlier: the beige walls, needlepointed pictures of dogs and flowers, a hooked rug covering part of the green shag carpet. In the mirror above the dresser I saw a pale, freckled girl in baggy shorts and a faded T-shirt, dirty-blond hair pulled back in a ponytail, sitting against pink pillow shams on a floral bedspread with a matching ruffled bedskirt.

  I could hear the tinny hum of the television in the living room. I reached down for the box of photos Clyde said were odds and ends. The pictures were jumbled together in no apparent order: old black-and-whites with scalloped borders, orange-tinted Polaroids, glossy color prints with the dates in small digital numbers on the front. I thumbed through them slowly, a collection of outtakes from funerals and birthday parties and especially weddings: Horace and Kathy’s, Elaine and Larry’s, a young, pink-faced Chester standing proudly in a maroon tuxedo beside his redheaded, flower-bedecked bride. A few photos later, I found an older, balder Chester in a gray suit, another bride on his arm. I stumbled across a picture from my parents’ wedding—my father, handsome and beardless, clowning beside my mother, elegant and slender in a simple white satin dress. (“Before the revolution,” Dad said of that clean-cut couple from long ago.)

  I searched hungrily for snapshots of my mother. Growing up, I had pored over my dad’s few photographs of her until they were dog-eared and tattered. Now, sifting through the box, I found her everywhere: sitting on the hood of a car with Horace, as a bridesmaid in Elaine’s wedding, as a young girl in a crisp white blouse on the steps of a church. I separated her pictures from the rest and put them in order. There was one of her at three or four, in Clyde’s young, firm arms; one at about ten, in a studio portrait of the family. I saw her laughing, dancing, musing, frowning. Here she wore pigtails, there pearls. And through all those years of posing for photographs—with Horace, Elaine, her parents, even my father—my mother was often the only one looking straight into the camera.

  Near the end of the pile I found a color photo of my mother, my father, and me. Her hair was short, pixieish, above her ears; my dad’s was long and uneven. The two of them were thin, almost gaunt. She was wearing that same lime-green dress. His arm was around her waist; she held me between them. They stood in front of a white Volkswagen bus on a crowded urban street. I must have been about two.

  Holding the picture up to the light, I studied the faces. I was pale, my mother was dark; we looked nothing alike. But there was something about the tilt of the chin, mouths parted as if to ask a question, something behind the eyes—a level, inquisitive stare—that linked us unmistakably. The snapshot blurred before my eyes, and our faces ran together. I felt my hands shaking, as if of their own volition. I sat watching them as they shook, as the photo slipped from my fingers, as my fingers moved up to touch my face.

  Sitting there on Clyde’s bed, pictures scattered all around me, I heard a light rapping at the door. I shook my head to clear it, gathered up the pictures, and tossed them back into the box. “Come in.”

  Clyde opened the door a crack.

  “Come in, it’s fine,” I said, rising. “It’s your room. I was only … sitting here.”

  She stood wedged in the doorway, her hand on the knob. “What did Alice want?”

  “Oh, she’s going to show me the downtown this afternoon.” “I see,” she said. She started to shut the door, then hesitated. “You all right?”

  “I’m all right.” I smiled. “Thanks for asking.”

  The years have turned me irritable, and all she can see is that stretching between us—the irritableness of the years. I was young once, I want to say, I was young once and I know how you feel. But I don’t say anything, and when I get up I’m stiff from sitting, and my stiffness enrages me.

  She came all the way from New York City looking for something she says she’s been missing all her life, something she says we take for granted. She came down here all sophisticated but wanting what we have instead, and it’s hard to figure out. Wanting it both ways. I think she can’t quite believe this is the stock she’s from.

  I want to tell her about her grandfather, about how people came from all around to see him play the piano when he was young. People used to say his fingers had wings. I want to tell her about when Ellen won the county spelling bee and her name was in the paper along with the word—“effluvium.” I want to ask her what she likes to read, what she’s thinking about when she looks off in the distance, but there’s too much space between us.

  She talks to me like I’m old. Who can blame her? I act old. But her careful pity irritates me. It’s not her fault. She doesn’t know anything. But if she’s here she’s going to figure it out. How many pieces do you need to put the puzzle together? I want
to ask her. How can you sit there looking at me with that blank smile and not know anything? My old face is a cage and my feelings are roaming around inside it, waiting. Waiting for her to get too close.

  So I hold back. I don’t want to hurt her. What’s she ever done to me? I keep my mouth shut, and the silence between us confuses her, makes her want to leave. I was young once; I had those feelings. I want to tell her, but if I tell her I’ll have to tell her everything.

  I’m afraid I’ll die with all of it inside me and lost forever. But there are so many ways to tell this story. I wouldn’t know how to begin.

  Alice drove recklessly over the serpentine back roads of Sweetwater. She talked as fast as she drove, and as the jeep squealed around corners, I held on tight to the strap above the door, my head bobbing in response.

  “Mother is about to drive me up a wall. You know about Troy and me being adopted, right? Well, you know that little tantrum she threw with Chester last night? She’s got it in her head that Troy’s off looking for his real mother and that’s why he won’t come home. Troy told her about some family reunion he’d seen on Oprah a few months back—you know, where the kid sees the mother for the first time in thirty years and everybody’s bawling—just to rattle her, I’m sure. He loves to do that. Anyway, now she’s just obsessed about it. Absolutely obsessed.”

  “Do you think he is looking for his mother?” “Lord, no. When all’s said and done, both of us know we were pretty damn lucky to land where we did. Let’s face it, our real mothers are probably white-trash illiterates living up in the hills.” She shook her head. “Still, Mother can be a handful. One time Horace told me this story about when she was little and somebody gave her a bunch of newborn chicks to take care of. Well, she started hugging those chicks so hard she strangled ‘em. All of ‘em. Literally loved them to death. Sometimes, I hate to say it, but I know just what those chickens must’ve felt like.”

  We were behind a slow-moving cement truck. Alice kept accelerating and trying to pass, only to duck back into the lane to avoid oncoming cars.

  “I swear, I am going to move away from this place as soon as I get up the money. Have you been to Atlanta? I take Eric down there every now and then to see Troy and Ralph, and we have a good old time. Now, that’s a city! Mother doesn’t like it. She thinks it’s a bad influence on Eric, and she thinks Ralph’s a bad influence for sure, but lordy, I tell you, at least in Atlanta a girl can go out and have fun without everybody in the universe calling up the papers to report it!”

  “Ralph is Horace and Kathy’s other kid, right?”

  “Right.”

  “How’s he a bad influence?”

  Alice sighed. “Ralph came out of the closet last year, and some people around here are having a little trouble with it. Not that it wasn’t perfectly obvious before, but you know how folks are. They believe what they want to believe until the truth hits them in the face.” She flashed her brights and honked at the truck driver until he pulled onto the gravel shoulder to let her by.

  “So anyway, Saturday I had a date, got all dolled up, hired a baby-sitter, the whole nine yards. This one was special—a banker from Knoxville I met when I was up there this summer. So we’re just out having a nice time, a few drinks, dancing, get back to my house around one—not early, maybe, but no all-nighter either. We send the baby-sitter home, and then—well, you know how it is, late and all. I don’t want to turn him out in the middle of the night, so he leaves Sunday morning around five. Eric doesn’t have the slightest idea he’s been there.

  “Wouldn’t you know it, who should call at seven a.m. but my dear mother, sniffing at the trail before it’s barely even light out. How she pieced it all together I don’t know, but I’ll tell you one thing: this town’s too damn small. How old am I, fourteen? Twenty-nine, for Jesus’ sake! I said, ‘Mother, my business is my business, and I’d appreciate you leaving it alone,’ and she goes off on this tirade about how ‘your father has built a loyal congregation through years of righteous living and sacrifices, and I’ll be durned if you’re going to jeopardize that by acting like a tramp.’ A tramp. I said, ‘Mother, give me a break. It’s a free country and I am an adult, and furthermore nothing happened.’ Which it didn’t, that’s what’s so aggravating about the whole thing. And she says, ‘It doesn’t matter if you two stayed up all night eating cookies and playing Scrabble, I could care less. What matters is what it looks like.’ And it’s true, that’s what matters to all her so-called friends, so that’s what matters to her.”

  We came to a screeching halt behind a line of cars stopped at a train crossing. Alice slapped the dashboard in exasperation.

  “Are we in a hurry?” I asked.

  She looked over at me. “I suppose not,” she said. “I just don’t like waiting. It makes me feel like I’m dead or something.”

  We watched the train go by, the rhythm of its passage humming against our feet. It was a cargo train, black and old, chugging northward so slowly I could see the motion of the wheels as they turned. A person hiding in one of those cars, I was thinking, could jump off and roll without fear of being injured, like in the movies. They could roll off and wander into town, dust-covered and anonymous, and if anyone asked what they were doing there, they could say they were just passing through.

  “You should thank your lucky stars you don’t have a mother around to meddle in your business,” Alice resumed. “I mean—oh lordy, what am I saying?” She clapped her hand to her forehead. “I’m sorry, Cassie, forgive me.”

  “Oh, it’s okay,” I said.

  She smiled, then reached over and patted my knee. “Sometimes I’m as sensitive as a hard-boiled egg. But honestly, think of all the headaches you avoided. No matter how strict or irritable a daddy can be, he won’t drive you up a wall, because men aren’t nosy like that. And you can always tell him he has no idea what it’s like to be female. That gets them every time.”

  The last car of the train rumbled past, and Alice beeped at the driver ahead of us to get moving. When we were back on the road she asked, “What does your daddy do?”

  “He owns a restaurant outside Boston. Grasshopper’s.”

  “That’s a funny name. What’s it like?”

  “Oh, salads and pastas and whole-grain bread, that kind of place.”

  “Is your dad remarried?”

  “No, but he might as well be. He’s been living with somebody for years—Susan. They’re about to have a baby.”

  “So if you don’t mind my asking, why don’t they just tie the knot?”

  I looked out at the retail stores and garages we were passing as we approached town. “I asked him the same thing once. He was kind of evasive. He gave me all that stuff about marriage being a legal technicality that doesn’t mean much to them, but I don’t know. Before Susan came along, when I was little, he told me he’d never marry again.”

  “Because of your mother?”

  I shrugged. “I think it’s taken him a long time to get over her. I don’t even know if he’s over her yet. He’s not very good at expressing his feelings.”

  “Have you ever met a man who was?” Alice laughed. “Well, don’t tell Mother about them living together. It’ll just confirm her worst suspicions.”

  At a four-way stop we turned left on Main Street, which took us straight into town: a three-block strip of buildings and a small public park, virtually deserted. A faded flag on a pole in the park fluttered limply in the breeze. The windows of the tallest buildings, three or four stories high, were dark and empty; half the storefronts were boarded up, handwritten FOR LEASE signs taped against dusty windows.

  “This used to be a real nice place to shop, but there’s not much left of it,” Alice said, laboriously parallel-parking in front of the hardware store.

  “Alice, there are spaces open all down the street,” I said.

  “I know. I just don’t like to see cars all straggled out. Three in a row looks like a crowd.” She turned off the engine and opened her door. “The mall fini
shed it off down here. Let’s face it, when you can choose from fourteen restaurants in the Food Court, not many folks are going to come downtown to eat at the Eagle.” She slammed the door behind her. “People think, why go to the post office when you can get stamps at the checkout counter?”

  “Why do you still come?”

  “I don’t know.” She sighed. “Even Mother gave it up. You can’t ever get what you need, you have to run all over the place to find stuff. And the crazies have taken over the park.”

  “The crazies?”

  “From the mental home down the road. Out on furlough or whatever. It seems like there are more of them every day. I have to admit it makes me nervous having that place so close by, with Eric and all. Granddaddy used to call it the contagious hospital. Like being crazy was a sickness you could catch.”

  I looked at her. “That’s William Carlos Williams.”

  “What?”

  “He’s a poet. My mother’s favorite poet. ‘Contagious hospital’ is from one of his poems.”

  “Oh, well, that just figures,” Alice said. “Bless his heart, I don’t think Granddaddy ever had an original idea in his life.”

  As we walked along Main Street, Alice pointed out the park, the post office straight ahead, the spire of City Hall one block over. We went into a small dry-cleaning shop, and she picked up two blouses. “I guess I still come down here because nobody else does,” she said, bending over the counter to write out a check. “You know what I mean. Like you moving into that old house nobody else wanted.” She straightened up, putting the cap back on the pen.

  Alice needed toothpaste, so we stepped into a drugstore on the corner and then went into a used-book store in the middle of the next block. As we left, a short, round, gray-haired woman was coming in.

  “Alice Burns!” she said.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Ford,” said Alice. “This is my cousin Cassandra.”

  Mrs. Ford grasped my hand between hers and peered at me. “Spitting image of Amory. Very pleased to meet you.”