Fiction
Flood
The town I live in is shaped like a crescent moon. Set against the rising cleft of a narrow valley, it’s straddled to the southeast by rolling copper-beech hills and to the northwest by the tail end of a snow-peaked mountain range. The town’s long sloping perimeter is always speckled with elk and reindeer spoor, and shabby trailer parks are scattered beside the worked-out quarries. Where the town veers in upon itself is a vast gorge—sickle-shaped from calcified shale and marbled grainstone—rimmed by an underground sea centuries gone. It’s gray-white, and not entirely unlike the open mouth of a snake swallowing a rat.
Water was there, once. It was there when I was a little girl. Families picnicked on red cedar tables, swimmers who could hold their breath dove beneath a wooden float for aquamarine pebbles, and teenagers lost their innocence there, clasped to each other on the burnished surfaces of the flat-faced boulders. A year before my father left us, he carried me into the cold water, deeper than I would ever have gone on my own. I sat pinned to his muscular shoulders, and he swirled me around like a blouse in a washing machine, until the water frothed.
Then—on purpose or accidentally, I'll never know—he let me go, and I sank to the stippled bottom like a heavy stone, my limbs flailing. When he pulled me up, he brushed the wet hair from my eyes with his tapered fingers and said, "Buoyancy, dove. We need to teach you how to swim."
When I tell Noah to stop wandering in those woods, he says I should stop nagging him so much. His face is pinched when he talks like this.
"It's not a big deal," he insists. "Why won't you stop bothering me?" he wants to know. "None of the other guys' wives make such a big deal about it."
So I ask him about the "other guys," and he shuts right up. He goes back to his laptop and ignores my folded arms.
He stops telling me when he goes out, but I always know when he does. He clomps in before the sun rises, and slides into bed, smelling faintly of pot. When I wake up, I find his hiking boots propped up against the mudroom door, caked with red clay and ashes. He is nonchalant about it, and when I ask him where he's been, he flicks a breadcrumb from his lip with his tongue and comments about the recession.
On a Wednesday, I follow his well-beaten path. He is at work, and I take our spotted greyhound, Marietta, with me. She usually accompanies him on his outings. As soon as she sees the leash, her sleek body trembles with excitement. I shutter the blinds and lock the kitchen door behind me. I follow the heavy meandering tracks that Noah has left on the driveway. His dark footprints lead out into the street and end at the edge of the cul-de-sac, twin compass needles pointing toward the woods.
The trail pretty much dies at that point, not that it matters. Marietta knows this place. She sniffs the ground and tugs at her leash; we stumble through the hemlock and cottonwood stands, my low-cut sneakers damp with the moisture from the moldering leaves and soft decaying underbrush. The wetness out here is strange, and the smell of decomposition permeates everything. It's rained more in the last few months than it has in years—when wells ran dry—and the people and animals are all confused by the water. Except for Marietta; she revels in the muck and puddles.
I can see places where the dirt has been kicked up, and where heavy male bodies have sat on rotting timber. Marietta drags me another quarter mile, until the willows open up. There is a muddy clearing and a still-damp black fire pit. A green tarp half-covers a rusty utility trailer.
Marietta pulls me to the trailer and gets up on her hind legs, nails scrabbling on the dented vinyl, a high-pitched whine in her throat. I flip the tarp up and find a bag of dog treats wedged down into a damp corner. I pull one out and toss it to Marietta. While I continue to look, she lolls in the mud and gnaws on it happily.
I shove aside lighters and beer cans, Playboy magazines warped and wavy from moisture. No fresh weed, but they wouldn't leave that here—would they? In any case, I find blunts and cigarette butts mashed in the dirt. I feel strange standing in that clearing. I try to imagine my husband sitting around a fire, flipping to Miss July and surveying her magnificent tits and coyly uncrossed legs. The image of my paunchy husband is replaced with one of him as a teenaged boy, gangly and long-haired and bitterly shy, acne pits scarring his unshaved cheeks, a painful mix of desire and premature ejaculations. I love and hate the image; it burns in my throat.
I feel a low rumble in my stomach, and Marietta, treat devoured, looks at me with wide, imploring eyes, begging for another. I cover the trailer and leave, then follow our footprints back to Whitman Street. When I get home, I scrub my sneakers with a steel wool pad. The water runs red and bleeds down the drain.
***
Noah is not the only husband who is sneaking out into the woods. At least three other wives have noticed their husbands' late night excursions. This includes Margie, who takes a swimming class with me at the Y. None of them have seen the clearing, though, and I keep this secret to myself. "Bishop just rolls into bed around four in the morning, without a word." Margie adjusts the pale periwinkle straps of her faded one-piece and fiddles with her silver crucifix. She is like me, and has somehow reached adulthood without ever learning how to swim.
When I was seven, a neighbor girl drowned in the reedy shallows of the s-shaped, aboveground lake that fed the county reservoir. Her mother found her drifting only feet from the shore, her bruised body bumping up against an outcropping of weathered quartz, in rhythm with the gentle lapping of the water. Her soaked blonde hair was spread out around her head like a sunburst; the mother’s screams could be heard from the far end of the beach.
The girl's name is lost to me, but not the memory of that summer. The violent thunderstorms that had rolled in over the lake from the south and splintered the afternoon heat had all but petered out, and by late August, the vegetation that engulfed the shoreline had gone bone dry. The water level had dropped by at least four feet, leaving strange, striated grooves in the thick grainstone walls. By the time I’d entered middle school, the lake was gone altogether.
After my father left, my fear of drowning had crystallized into terror, and I refused swimming lessons well into adulthood. Margie had been sickly and feverish most of her childhood, and also missed those years of water education. While most mothers woke up early in July and drove their wiry, tanned children to local swimming pools to paddle around in the greenish-blue water, Margie's simply kept hers at home.
I'm not always sure why we take the class—the lake is a memory, after all, and neither of us can afford a backyard pool—but for me there's something right about being in the water, especially after all those years of abstinence. I'm not sure how Margie feels about it though, or why she even does it. She's quiet most of the time.
"Does he leave red clay on the rug?" I ask, my hands gripping the edge of the worn pool deck bench.
"He takes his off in the garage." Margie rolls the pills of the cloth in between her fingers. She looks at me with half-closed eyes and chews her cuticles. "He hasn't touched me in a long time." Margie says this matter-of-factly, and the words don't echo in the huge, hollow room.
"Anne and Charlotte think their guys are going out there, too."
Our instructor, a slab of orange hair lying across his freckled forehead, springs up. "All right, ladies, we're going to practice correct water entrance, and then the freestyle stroke. Remember, with freestyle it's six strokes, and then breathe. Sound good?"
I unwrap the blue towel from my body and slosh through the tepid puddles, sliding over the diamond-patterned tiles. When the whistle blows, I leap into the water. The rush of chlorine stings my eyes.
***
I awaken one night to the sound of the front door slamming. I roll over and stare at the glowing digital numbers on my clock radio: 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. The numbers burn into the back of my skull.
As everything comes into sharper focus, I can hear the sound of thunder moving away, trace rumbles that get fainter before slowly dissolving into the low murmur of Marietta's snoring. I flip the quilt off me and walk to the window. I pull it open and inhale deeply. The familiar smell of leaf dust stirred by sudden rainfall saturates the ozone-scented air. Marietta raises her head to look at me, her wiry tail thumping on the faded quilt.
I walk out of the bedroom and to the spiral staircase. I can hear dishes and cutlery being banged around in the kitchen.
"Noah?" I call.
There is no answer.
I pad down the stairs in my bare feet and walk through the darkened living room. In the kitchen, Noah is standing in front of the cupboard, a single cone of yellow light shining down from the hood of the six-burner stove. He is pulling out plates and bowls, and dropping them onto the counter.
"Noah?" My voice cracks slightly. He spins around, and a paisley print dish is pressed against his chest. He looks at me strangely—not at me but through me, as though he's focusing on the cheap metal picture frame directly behind my head.
"Noah, what's wrong?" He has a vacant look on his face, his pitted skin almost translucent, his small ears as pink as a baby rabbit's. He slips and drops the dish. It hits the linoleum with a loud clatter and spins like a child's top.
"Goddamn it," he says.
I take a step away from the wall and toward my husband. He twitches and backs up, filthy blue jeans pressing up against the counter. My hands shake; I clasp them together tightly and squeeze.
"God what?"
"A voice. God's voice. God."
"Where?"
"In—" he pauses and surveys my face— "the woods," he finishes lamely.
I get close enough to smell the sour beer on his breath. "Have you been drinking?"
He opens up the pantry and begins to pull things out. Canned peas. Applesauce. A box of shredded wheat. A giant can of yams the size of my head that I don't remember buying.
"Noah?"
"No."
I rub my temples. Low cylinders of tuna fish, albacore packed in water. Tins of boned sardines and mackerel. A tall bottle of extra-virgin olive oil.
"What are you doing?" Wild rice with dried cranberries. Brown sugar. Baking soda.
"God says that everything is ending."
Watching him, I stop moving at the table. Baby food—pureed squash and spinach—that I've forgotten to get rid of. Grape jelly. My throat tightens.
"Everything?" My voice sounds strangled.
"The world. The world is too wicked, he's ending it, stopping it, rewinding it."
"Restarting it?" I say stupidly.
I watch the growing pile. Peanuts. Pistachios. Dried pineapple. Uneeda biscuits. I'm allergic to peanuts; they give me hives and make my lips swell. Why are they in the cupboard? Who bought them? "The world is ending and you're taking lime Jell-O mix?" I say.
He turns around and glares at me, steps past me into the darkness. I see the glow of the streetlight when he opens the front door, the thin streaks of lavender morning light working their way across the sky. I turn back to the kitchen and stare at the gaping hole of the open pantry. It is black and yawning, and I gingerly place my fingers inside. I can make out shapes in the shadows, and I tug a can into the light. Lychees in light syrup.
I go upstairs and crawl back into my bed. It's Noah's grandmother's bed, a four-poster with pear-shaped, black-walnut newels. I lay down with the clock still blinking. 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. Marietta sets her sleek head in the crook of my arm.
"You promised," I whisper to the dark. "You promised you wouldn't end it again."
I close my eyes. There are bright starbursts behind my eyelids, shifting colors and negative impressions of the furniture around me. I fall asleep.
Noah doesn't come back.
***
I awaken to the slow, grinding sounds of construction machinery. They seem faint and far away. I try to sleep through them, but the rumble of heavy wheels is punctuated with loud beeps. Dull and foggy with sleep, I lay still and listen. Through the hazy gauze of the pleated curtain, I see the scoop of a bulldozer rise and dump a load of earth. By the time I am certain it is really a bulldozer, it is reaching down for another shovelful. I run outside, a threadbare terrycloth robe wrapped around my body.
"Noah!" I scream, and he steps out from behind the bulldozer and scrutinizes me. The hole that has been scooped out of our backyard is big enough for two swimming pools, and almost twice as deep.
"Noah, are you out of your fucking mind?" I run barefoot though the loamy earth. "You could have hit a gas line or a water main! Holy shit."
He ignores me. The man behind the wheel of the bulldozer opens the door to his perch. He has a large stomach, and a roll of blubber rubs against the bottom of the steering wheel. He’s wearing a helmet and has the stub of an unlit cigar in his mouth.
"We didn't hit anything, lady," he shouts. "You'll be enjoying your new pool before you know it."
I stare at him, uncomprehending. Can't he see this hole is far too big for a pool?
I grab Noah's arm. "Did you get this approved by anyone?" I’m hissing through my clenched teeth. "Why aren't you at work?"
Noah shrugs out of my grip. "I quit."
I sit down in the grass and rip up tiny clumps of dandelions, tossing them behind me. "You quit? Did you stop to think where we're going to get money from? How could you do something crazy like this?"
"It doesn't matter," he says, turning back to the hole in our yard. "The world is ending. It doesn't matter." He looks up behind me, and I turn around to see Bishop walking toward us. He motions behind him, and I can see the trailer from the woods hooked up to his Chevy pickup in our driveway, stacked with sheets of lumber.
"Hello, Bishop," I say.
He avoids my eyes.
"Spencer and Victor will be over later," he says to Noah, who merely nods.
They walk off without a word, and I stand, dirt and weeds clinging in patches to the backs of my bare legs. The bulldozer is still. I reach and touch the shovel, and pull off a piece of caked earth. It is thick and soft. I crumble it between my fingers.
At the Y, we learn about treading water. We swim to the middle of the deep blue diving well and scissor our legs, our arms skimming the surface of the water. Margie and I tread next to one another. Charlotte, our neighbor who lives on the corner of Whitman and Third, treads with us. She talks about her daughter, Sylvia, who is eight and taking a swimming class in her age group.
"She wanted to learn, so I figured I should too," Charlotte beams. "She's one of the fastest swimmers in the class. A natural backstroker, the instructor says. She’s going to join a swim team."
Anne Reston, another woman on our street, sits quietly on the side of the pool. Our conversation rises and falls with the volume of the rest of the room, but I watch her kick the water and look at the entrance frequently. Two years ago, her daughter was born with a number of birth defects and died, after multiple surgeries, six months later.
"What's wrong with Anne?" I ask.
Charlotte sighs. "She isn't doing well. Spencer left her last night."
We all inhale sharply, dipping low into the water; our chins arch upward so that we can continue to breathe. It would be easy to imagine us all drowning here.
"How awful," I say. Then, “I never could warm up to him. There was always something off about him.”
Later, in the locker room, I ask Anne if she wants to have dinner with Noah and me tonight. Her face and eyes looks puffy but she says yes, and then drifts into the darkest corner to change.
***
I come home from the Y to find Noah underneath the car. The hood is propped up, and I stand at his feet until he wiggles out from his spot. He rolls over before he stands up. His back is filthy from the asphalt.
I stare at the dirty car parts that are littered around the driveway. I don't know much about cars, but I suspect that the parts on the ground are needed for the car to run. I tell him as much.
"I need these parts for the shelter," he says.
I pick up a thick coil from the grass and turn it over in my hand. My fingers turn black with grease. The oil pan is overturned in the azaleas .
"You know, when the world ends and you're gone, I'll need a car to get around. How can I use it if you're taking it apart?"
He sits up and curls his sweaty lip. "It's my damn car." His voice is white hot and sharp. "I bought it."
I open my mouth to speak, but anger ropes around my windpipe, and I close it again, pressing my lips together until they hurt. I walk past him and into the house; toss my swimming bag onto the couch. I string my suit up to dry.
Anne comes for dinner. We stand in the kitchen and talk while I slice a cucumber into translucent, watery wheels, ignoring the piles of canned goods that my husband has pulled out of the cupboards and placed sporadically around the room. I am amazed by how much food is in this kitchen, more than I'd ever suspected would fit into the shallow cupboards.
We both pick at the blackened catfish fillets I fried with scallions in an iron skillet. I apologize for Noah and I ask Anne about Spencer.
"I don't know what happened," she says. "I mean, he's been acting strange for a while now, but I assumed it was just job stress. Work and layoffs at the factory and—well, you know." Her brown eyes begin to mist. "I miss him already, and it hasn’t even been a full day."
I stroke her hand and reassure her that this will all get better. I even swear it, and wonder what’s wrong with me. She’s better off without him, and I know it.
Anne smiles and thanks me for dinner. "I'll see you tomorrow," she says, scraping the chair along the floor. I watch her thin silhouette vanish through the screen door, her outline swallowed by the setting sun.
Noah comes in two hours later. I am sitting at the kitchen table, eating from a can of Spaghetti-Os with a soupspoon. The catfish fillets are sitting in the sink, uneaten. He leans against the fridge for a long time, opens it.
"My swimming class graduation is tomorrow," I say.
He doesn't answer. I twist around in my chair. His narrow face is eerily pierced by the shining fluorescent bulb of the fridge. I feel the cold from the open door drift over me. He starts moving things around on the shelves, as if he’s looking for something.
"Darling," I say, softly, "close the fridge."
He does. The light vanishes; the kitchen is quiet and still.
"They actually have graduation ceremonies for that sort of thing?" he asks, incredulous. He opens the fridge again, then closes it without looking inside.
I bristle slightly. "We just show everyone what we've learned and they give us a certificate. It's nothing big or special." I swallow, hard. "After this, we can advance to the next class."
Noah stares at me, and then shakes his head as if discouraging hovering insects. "Wait, what swimming class is this?"
"The one I'm taking with Margie. Beginning Swimming for Adults."
"Can't she give you a ride?"
"No." I think of the phone call earlier that day, Margie's voice so wrung and spent I could almost see her frantically rubbing her crucifix. "Apparently, Bishop has dismantled their car, too."
He puts down the can opener he's been fiddling with. "Fine, I'll go with you." He walks past me and out of the kitchen. He's at the base of the stairs when he speaks again. "Why on earth are you taking a swimming class, anyway? You hate the water."
I don't answer; I can't. He pauses as though I am actually responding, and then continues up the stairs and into our bedroom. His heavy footsteps creak above my head.
***
Because the car is in pieces, we take the number 38 bus to the Y. Margie sits behind me with Bishop. Noah sits next to me, wearing dungarees and scuffed boots and an engineer's cap. He rubs his knees.
"How long will this take?" He has been anxious since we left.
"An hour," I say, almost defiantly. I clutch my swimming bag to my chest, as if I’m afraid he’s going to take it away.
The bus stops two blocks away from the building, in front of a 7-11. Noah turns around and looks at Bishop.
"I need some smokes," he mumbles. "We'll just meet you inside."
He and Bishop stand up and get off. I turn back and look out my window. In the reflection of the glass, their figures step into the road, and the cars pass through them like they are ghosts.
For the ceremony, we swim two laps and tread water. I stand by the side of the pool and concentrate on the gentle slapping sound of the water.
When the instructor blows the whistle I dive in. The bubbles trail me like jet exhaust, fishtailing through the clouds. Six strokes, breathe. Six strokes, breathe.
As I swim, a kind of calm washes over me. For a moment, I am completely weightless, and I can hear a soft sound, the muffled impression of music waffling through the chlorinated water. It is gentle and feminine, and every cell of mine seems to reach toward it. My molecules constrict and then become enormous, as though inhaling breaths themselves. I swallow water and cough a few times when I surface for air.
I end my two laps, crawl out of the pool, and wipe water out of my eyes. The instructor invites any friends or family members to come and stand with me as I receive my certificate. It is thin and poorly printed, but my name is on it. I leave damp fingerprints on it, and the paper curls.
Noah does not come up. I scan the deck; he is not in the audience.
Alone, I feel both naked and invisible. I begin to shake from down beneath my ribs, and I can't take a full breath all the way in. My instructor holds both my hands as I stand there quivering. No camera flashes go off. I then situate myself with the rest of my class. Margie comes up and stands alone, too.
We get home an hour later. Margie and I part ways in front of her house. When I get to mine, I find Noah in the backyard, hammering. A brief glow from the end of his cigarette illuminates his face. I can see that the shelter—well, whatever it is that he's building—is almost done. He says nothing about missing the ceremony at the pool.
Inside, Marietta is moving quickly back and forth and emitting a high-pitched whimper. I feed her slices of cubed chicken breast, and take her for a walk, trying to stroke her silky head as we walk up and down the empty street. She pulls away from my hand and whines.
I come home and slip out of my jeans, look at my still-flat stomach in front of the bell-shaped mirror. I wonder what Noah would think if I wasn't here when he came home, if the bedding was cold and an empty teacup was floating in a pool of dishwater at the bottom of the stainless steel sink. What if I left him the way my father left me and my mother? No letter, no telephone call, just gone forever, like the pretty little girl who'd drowned that long-ago summer. I take a shower, pull on one of Noah's v-necked undershirts, and go to sleep.
Noah comes in later, and crawls under the quilt in his clothes. He smells like silt. My hair and skin are still damp. I listen to him sigh and turn. The bed shifts and creaks. I lean over to touch him, my fingers dancing lightly on his arm. He pulls away, and after a few minutes, his breathing steadies. He's already asleep.
The clock blinks through my eyelids: 12:00. 12:00. 12:00.
***
I wake up early the next morning, and walk Marietta to the open-air farmer's market. I buy a few Granny Smith apples and twist them up tightly in a plastic bag. I walk home, put the apples on the counter, and go lay back down next to Noah.
An hour later, I wake because he is up and moving around the bedroom urgently, throwing clothes in a laundry bag.
"Noah?"
"It's today," he says. "Soon, so soon. Oh God, too soon."
I watch him from the bed. He grabs the laundry bag and leaves the room.
In the kitchen, Marietta is going mad. She runs in circles, occasionally breaking from her erratic orbit to run to the back door. She barks frantically and snarls at the glass.
I follow Noah out back, the plastic bag of apples in my hand. The sky is dark with ominous thunderclouds, and a heavy gust rustles the shade trees. The air is dense and electric, and the fine hairs all over my body go erect. Noah pulls open the hatch of the shelter with a groan and throws the bag down. He comes over to me and grabs my arms, more contact than he's had with my body in months.
"Please come with me," he says.
I open up the bag and pull out a firm green apple. I take his hand from my left arm and spread it open. I press the fruit down into his palm. His fingers close around it. I kiss them.
"For the new world," I whisper. "For the new world, a perfect apple."
He raises the apple to his mouth and takes a tiny bite. At the taste, his eyes begin to water.
"I'm sorry," he says.
I don't answer him. I don't even know how.
As I walk away, he begins to cry. I can hear his sobs as I walk into the house. I change into my navy blue swimsuit. It smells sour with chlorine. The clock blinks 12:00.
I go outside to the front porch to sit in my caned chair. It is the chair that my mother gave to me when Noah and I were first married. It is the only piece of furniture that is entirely mine.
The sky is purple now, and I can hear Noah's voice above the wind. I hear him calling for me, and for Marietta. She looks at me with her large brown eyes and remains at my feet, laying her long head in my lap. After a while, I cannot hear him anymore.
The wind becomes more violent. Across the road, Anne gets into her car in the driveway and sits there. Paper from a tipped trashcan swirls over the pavement, and the ancient tulip poplars sway. Next door, Margie sits on her cement steps in an orange sundress, her crucifix against her lips, her pale mouth moving. On the corner, Charlotte lays down on her lawn, Sylvia in her arms. They curl up together, a pair of soft pink commas upon the ground.
I rub my gold wedding ring and think of Noah's steadfast wife, patient and stalwart. Did she step onto the ark and not look back? I close my eyes.
No. They pulled her onto the ark. She screamed and wept. She didn't want to leave her beautiful, sinful world behind.
I press my unpainted fingernails into the soft stained wood of the chair and leave little crescent moons. I swear I can hear the empty house behind me, pulling in air, releasing it. The mailbox bends to the left. I take in a long, languorous breath. Six strokes before I breathe. Six strokes before I breathe.
Like a mottled flower, the memory opens to me, and I see the body of the little drowned girl pulled from the lake all those years ago, her bloated belly filled with minnows and algae and her skinny arms spread like she was flying, black pupils staring and reflecting the glaring white summer sky. I hum a few bars of a song I can't name, and let the girl and Noah's wife and the ark all blow out of my mind, scattering like goose-down in the onrushing gale.
The roiling thunderheads are dense as granite against the obsidian sky. Marietta whimpers high and then low. Leaves whip up and down the street, writhing snakelike in the wind. Lightning strikes Margie's house. Sylvia wails, and there is no echo. I take a bite of my apple, and the juice is sweet in my mouth. I exhale.
The clouds open up.
