Fiction
A Revised Story
by Carol Smallwood
I
Rain began hitting the lake: when found I'd be clean and rain would keep me company. Alewives would come to spawn in spring from the Atlantic; I'd hear ice cracking heralding the end of winter. No longer invisible, what wonders wouldn't I see--the lake was formed only 10,000 years ago over molten rock. To become part of it would make more sense than stuffed in a coffin where Aunt Hester would see I'd be in Sunday clothes murmuring through thin lips, "Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!" while Uncle Walt would poke someone saying, "I got a wife who'd bleach the hell out of the robes of God Almighty."
II
People moved slowly in the heat at Little Chicago Park--seagulls weren't even flying in air so hazy you couldn't tell where the horizon ended and the lake began. The same smell of hot tar drifted from the dock filled with kids doing belly smackers and the train tracks as when I was a child. People from Chicago had come on the trains begun in the 1880's and built the Victorian cottages with gingerbread porches circling the lake and the two-story cottages were still painted in pastel colors as if the owners wanted to believe it was Florida instead of the Midwest.
Uncle Walt, who'd raised me, was at his favorite picnic table under a large maple by the main path to the dock. "God, it's hotter'n hell," his eyes zeroing approaching girls as if flushed-out rabbits. "Bathing suits now don't leave much to the imagination, do they?"
Aunt Hester, his wife, holding a pie in midair asked, "What'd you say, dear? but Uncle Walt was getting another beer.
"Look at your children, Lily" said Aunt Hester, "they're having such a good time. When I saw their teachers at church, they said Mark knows some times tables and Jenny all her colors." Her glass eye looked faded in the sun, and light eyelashes encouraged a look of Cyclops in Mark's book of myths. Like at home, she was carefully brushing crumbs on the picnic table in an exact triangle like the marriage counselor put on the board when I said Cal and Uncle Walt kept saying I should be a better wife: 1. Please me 2. Try harder 3. Frustration.
I watched Mark and Jenny on the beach until a loud slam made me jump--it was Uncle Walt, the engineer, testing the picnic table. "Its too damn bad Cal couldn't come today. He's a good, hard working husband."
At the beach when I was helping the kids dig moats and build sandcastles among the dead alewives washed ashore, Jenny asked, "Why did those fish die?" Mark asked, "Why are they called alewives?" but didn't wait to hear me say that every spring, alewives ascend rivers and streams to spawn in freshwater lakes, and that after hatching the young grew into adults before returning to the sea. I didn't know if adults did this more than once; before coming to the picnic, I'd returned those to the lake that Cal had on the deck at home.
A fallen pine twig to my nose couldn't mask the fish smell even if all that was left of the alewives were skeletons; I stuck the twig upright in the sand hoping it would live like in one of the fairy tale books of the kids, and tried to find a cloud in the haze to carry me away to some far away land.
"Will Daddy be home when we get back?" Mark asked in a tone that made me think he hadn't forgotten Cal shoving me around when dinner wasn't ready.
"Maybe," I said, trying to see a motorboat in the haze.
The inability to determine where the water stopped and the sky began spurred such uncertainty that I drew an imaginary horizon and then became afraid everything would disappear if I looked away. The lapping waves, warm sand giving way underfoot and filling with water, the lulling breeze was calming till Mark brought me some shells and whispered, "Daddy has a girlfriend."
I whispered to muffle the clang as from some metal door, "Why do you think so?"
But he wouldn't say anymore and looked afraid when Jenny began marching as in a parade chanting: "Right is Wrong; Wrong is Right." When she'd starting doing that at home, she explained it by saying, "What's up is coming down and what's down is going up."
"When are we going to eat?" asked Mark. There were no sunrays to be seen that sometimes stretched ladders to the sky. I left a pebble made smooth after millions of years for a door on the sandcastle and a fallen white feather as a flag, and with feet dragging in the sand returned to the picnic table, trying not to notice husbands hovering over sizzling hamburgers, or how far the train tracks went before they telescoped and disappeared. Trains no longer ran but the tracks were still there.
The clank of horseshoes, thump of kids landing from slides, the patterns leaves made when the sun escaped the haze were very familiar but today was also as indeterminate as the horizon.
J.D., a young colleague of Uncle Walt's at Seiko Engineering, walked up to our table, put his arm around Uncle Walt, and rumpled his reddish hair, saying, "What's new, you sly old devil? Hot enough for you? Joyce and I were scouting for tables when I spotted you." J.D. dressed for success like Uncle Walt and there was something in him hinting of brimstone as if a match had been struck. Uncle Walt had gotten him on the Nicolet City Chamber of Commerce Board saying J.D. reminded him of himself when younger.
When a couple stopped to talk with Uncle Walt, J.D. asked me, "How's the happy wife?"
I asked, "How's Joyce?"
Looking around as if in a play, he commented, "Ah, my dear, the wagons have circled."
"What'd you mean?" I asked, though I had a good idea because Cal had told him about my marriage counseling. J.D. merely grinned and said, "My dear, I see you're enjoying the solid front of family respectability" leering at my shirt buttons with his amused air. "How's it feel to be in the bosom of your family? You sure Cal's with a patient? I heard--" but just then another couple joined them.
A few nights ago J.D. and his wife had come to play Scrabble and he'd grinned the same grin as if he knew something that justified his increasing attentions; he'd brought an article on the Equal Rights Amendment he knew I was hoping would pass that increased Cal's sneer.
After the Scrabble tiles had been set up, J.D. asked Cal, "So, how's that efficient receptionist of yours?" but Cal was busy with Scrabble words relating to the most recent time he slowed the car to point out on the road a smashed animal telling the kids, "See what happened when things go where they don't belong." After Cal gathered speed again, Mark and Jenny sat closer to one another; I bit my mouth and the reopened gash made the metallic taste of warm blood strong.
A great anger rose against Cal who knew I didn't want to make the kids more afraid but my fear was increasing every time I saw something smashed on the road--fear the animal may be in pain unable to get away and dreaded going anywhere. Growing up without parents had given me a strong desire for a family unit which was reinforced by the church saying it was the wife's duty to keep it together. Uncle Walt had told me to marry well and I saw it as a way of repaying him for the "sacrifices" he'd made raising me.
No, it couldn't be true what my best friend said over coffee, "Cal's out to break you."
I'd replied, "How could he ever do something like that to anyone much less a wife? How can you destroy the closest person to you?" but she just looked at me in a way I didn't understand and didn't answer. It was inconceivable, unthinkable--if she was right, then everything turned upside down. It had to be something I was doing wrong like Cal and Uncle Walt said.
III
The bells of the Heart of the Immaculate Conception tolled slowly as the last of the congregation arrived. The narrow stained glass windows with Biblical scenes of angels and shepherds had witnessed countless funerals since Victorian times. Mark and Jenny stared at dust motes dancing in a ray of sun by a fluted Gothic pillar.
Cal's secretary asked Cal, "Is it true Lily was killed when she slipped on your deck?"
"She always had her head in the clouds," and Cal added through a cloud of cigarette smoke, "those fish must've tipped out of the pail by my tackle box."
or
Cal's secretary said, "I'm so sorry for your loss, Lily. It's so tragic that Cal slipped on your deck."
"He always kept bait on the deck," said Lily through a black veil, "the deck must've been wet and slippery."
or
Cal's secretary said, "It doesn't seem possible Lily's gone," with a pat on J.D.'s arm after pushing back her hair. "Cal's devasted of course she slipped on their deck."
"Of course," J.D. replied with a grin.
or
Cal's secretary said to Cal and Lily, "Things will never be the same without J.D. Imagine him slipping on your deck like that," adding after a long sigh, "It's good we never know what's ahead of us isn't it?"