Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

Outside their door, the pink motel sign came on with a neon click and buzz. ‘'I'm sorry,” Birdflower said. “I'll flush it all if you want.” He put the key in Emily's palm.

She thought of the dusty ride and the ache in the back of her thighs. “I'm taking a bath. Why don't you go get some beer?”

She left Birdflower sitting on the orange-flowered bedspread drawing lines around a blossom. “No more,” she heard him say as the water beat into the motel tub.

“I like bottles,” she yelled, unzipping her jeans, yanking them off by the bottom and testing the water with a long first toe. She pulled her T-shirt off.

Emily settled into the bath, her nipples, belly, and knees floating above water like islands. The island's own well water was too rich in iron for soaking. It stained her skin and left her hair tinted red. Steam rose and water rocked against her hips. She remembered failed vacations from her marriage. The trip would turn as reasonlessly as wind drifts over water: a bad dinner, a flat tire, or a forgotten hairbrush and the whole thing would be ruined. It was harder for them because they lived a vacation.

She turned over on her stomach and thought of the first trip she'd ever taken with Daniel, how she'd wanted it to go well. It was just over the border that she'd mentioned flowers and he'd looked oddly at her, and asked where he was supposed to get them. She'd smudged daisies with her pinky over the window. He pulled over and they looked in the brush on the side of the road. She found two tattered daisies. He found a few fisted morning glories that looked like tissue paper when he held out his hand. Soon after, he had taken a flashlight and gone into the woods. She waited in the car thinking of the irises on the dark side of her parents’ house and the big silky petaled magnolia in the backyard. He returned with nothing and they drove on toward the town they had heard of with the judge who would marry you for five dollars.

The door clicked. “Me,” Birdflower said. A bag rustled and then there was a little gasp from a twist-off beer. Birdflower walked into the bathroom and put a green bottle near her on the tub's edge. He sat across the paper banner of the closed toilet seat. Emily tipped her beer up.

Birdflower looked at his beer, then let his eyes slowly peruse her body. “I want this to be good,” he said. “I've been thinking about it every other minute for days.”

“Have you ever noticed when you're off, it's always like you're a silver minnow in a plastic cup or something?” she said, water lapping back and forth from her toes to her neck.

“We're in the same cup,” he said as he moved to sit on the ledge. He kissed her and with a finger drew a line on her neck up to her ear. His hand moved over her wet hair, which separated and dripped at the shoulders.

Emily thought, I'll stay with you as long as I can.

He sat on the bed watching Emily put lotion on her newly shaven legs. She had on a calico sundress and different leather sandals than usual. He was dressed up too, white shirt, open paisley vest, and his jeans were the newer of the two pair he owned. He drank the last beer. It was weird that just two months ago on his birth, day in May he had been so alone. He'd woken early and smoked a joint in bed, watching the tip blend with the rising sun out his window. He made a cake, this year devil's food, sometimes angel: a tradition his mother had started, depending on the behavior of the year. Later, after a quiet day of meditation on his life's odometer turning over, he had dinner and a slice of his cake. When he had finished, pushed his plate forward, and sat back to light a cigarette, he felt that something would have to happen very soon.

“Ready?” she said.

“To hit the town with you,” Birdflower said.

When they got in the van, Emily brushed sand off the seat as though she'd never seen the stuff. He saw them at some low-ceilinged, red-lighted club, fishbowl drinks in front of them with mermaid swizzle sticks. They were quiet and he started thinking about the little house on Lake Michigan his father had left him. A friend had told him a small village had grown up at water's edge. Lately he envisioned them in the back of some bakery there. Her chopping nuts for bread, him pouring batter into muffin tins. He'd told her this a few days ago. She was not as enthusiastic as he had hoped. That scared him. He knew she was like a plant and he worried that if he brought her up there, to the frozen ground, it'd be all over. She might get limp and start asking for water and before you knew it, one morning he would wake up to find a pile of dry leaves next to him in bed. On Ocracoke the cold was different. It blew off the sea instead of moving up from the earth the way it did in the upper peninsula. Last year he'd seen the winter ocean. He'd been stoned and drunk and decided around four in the afternoon to borrow a speedboat and take a look. The water was navy-black and the moving whitecaps reminded him of an old guy's fingertips coming together and then apart, as though the ocean was wringing its hands. Even the few coal-black fish that jumped were shivering: their breath making tiny puffs over the water.

They chose the place because it was red-barn color and had a chain of pink elephants across one side. The bouncer took their money. “Have you seen stuff like this before?” He turned the bill up so that Lincoln eyeballed Emily's breasts.

“Yeah, man. She's seen it all,” Birdtlower said.

The air conditioner hummed and bubbled, filtered and cooled the place as though it was underwater. They let their eyes focus on the wood tables. Birdflower watched the light and movement of the blinking Busch river, the neon Budweiser clocks, and the giant can of Michelob lit on the far wall. As if each had accidentally floated there, lone men scattered the bar. They chose a table and Birdflower left Emily fingering candle wax at the back.

“Piña Coladas are the only faggy drinks we serve,” the bartender said. With his thick fingers he poured powder into a silver shaker. Birdflower looked to a shallow pool in front of the bar. He threw down ten bucks. “You keep fish in that center thing?”

“That there,” the bartender said, “is for mud wrestling.”

Birdflower saw the sheen off the smooth mud. “Big guys?”

The bartender set the drinks down, each with a half-opened paper umbrella. “No,” he said. “Girls. Real live girls.”

On their way to this place, the full moon had sometimes seemed to race the car, other times falling back beyond the trees. It reminded her of the things she'd said, in June, she'd try to figure out. During the varied phases she had thought some. But it was hard for Emily to yank herself into thinking like that. Her life worked by brief exchanges. It was a twisting, swerving thing that formed in a familiar but always somewhat remarkable way. The moon had appeared then, and she realized this: No man could save you from any other man. Birdflower was no solution, as she'd been trying to convince herself, for her fear of John Berry.

Birdflower came back with the drinks and sat down. A couple squeezed into the table near them. Emily sucked her straw. The woman was fat, had on blue bell-bottoms and a shirt tied at the midriff with a white tube top underneath. When she saw women like this, so obviously confident with themselves but so different from herself, Emily tried to figure out where she fit in the long arch of females. She saw it like some kind of rainbow, spread not with thin color but with millions of different women. She looked down at her knees, the rough scar like a wild berry on her right and the burn from the lowest rack of the restaurant stove on the left.

Her eyes caught two women in small red bikinis coming out a door near the bar along with a big striped referee penguin walking behind.