Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

Emily'd cut the vegetables. Carrots, zucchini, yellow summer squash swirled like square dancers in the big metal pots near her.

She watched her moving hands in the steel-top table. Above the stove was a row of smaller glass jars, like the ones her mother had used to store the vegetables and jams. She remembered how one summer a neighborhood boy had explained a trick you could do with a jar. They'd gone to her mother's garden and found a green tomato worm. It was greedily feeding on a ripening tomato, having pinched its way through the taut skin. Its head was inside the mealy meat, eating continuously. When she put her ear very close, she could hear the little thing gobbling with a sound like a sniff, and she had to flick it with one disgusted finger into the jar. She secured the top and put it on a high step by the back. Light glinted into the glass, magnified the midday sun. She watched the tomato worm do just what the boy had said it would. It twitched, spasmed, and began to melt, leaving finally only a soggy circle like mucus. Emily, afraid her mother would see, took the jar to her room, put it under the bed, and lay very still on top of the covers till the coolness hidden in them was gone.

Light was rising outside the restaurant. Objects lost their pleasant blurry bodies and took on definite edges and shapes. When Eddie was very young, she had left him in the front seat of a shopping cart, chewing on a bag of egg noodles. They had been in the frozen foods. She was bending over into the icy canister of frosted orange, dark green for apple and the pink and purple of cranberry and grape. Eddie had whined and shook the hard noodles like a rattle. There was no one in the aisle, and Emily remembered doing something crazy, swinging one leg up and then the next. She laid out on top of the cool cans, cold vapor rising around her. Looking up into the fluorescent lights, she'd seen the section markers like satellites suspended in space and she'd folded her hands over her chest like the dead. She closed her eyes and felt a fine layer of frost forming on her toes. It had been a bag boy, around Eddie's age now, who had finally touched her cheek softly and leaned over into the frozen foods as though to give her a kiss.

Eddie had told her he often dreamt about her, maybe he was dreaming of her now. Underwater, her lips set in a quiet zero, currents moving her dress, showing her body like earth under flowers. She rolled the dough into thin strips for bread, laid them on a greased pan, and put them into the old black oven. When she cracked the door open, her face flushed in the heat.

“How'd you sleep?” she asked as Eddie came in for his morning shift. He stepped into a lemon wedge of light shining through the screen door. Emily reached out to touch his forearm. He jerked away. “Okay,” he said, his eyes on his tennis shoes. He wore a sleeveless muscle shirt and gray cotton shorts.

The kitchen crowed with activity: the cook flipped pancakes, it smelled like sausage patties. An older lady sliced melon and pineapples for the breakfast fruit bowls. The waitresses clustered by the swing door.

All morning she stared at Eddie over the sinks. He glanced up through the shelves of spices. Their eyes caught, a look that held, then faltered in slow stares down to their busy hands. She wasn't sure what Eddie thought of her; she wondered how much his father had told him and if he'd heard anything on the island. Earlier seasons she'd presumed he was too young to be bothered by her affairs, but this summer he was definitely noticing and she knew it embarrassed him, made him seem shy.

She watched him rinse plates and line them into the dishwasher. He had his earphones on and his young frame swayed to the rhythm he seemed to feel like a ray of light through his body.

Each day after work, no matter whether there was a falling mist or sun so fierce the water glinted like steel, Emily swam in the ocean. Today the big June sky had dulled. The lifeguard, young, sun-bleached, a line of zinc oxide on his nose, read magazines. More tourists would show around one. A few blankets and umbrellas were scattered along the shore. A dragon kite dived and circled, wind-sound on cellophane, its tail a licking tongue.

She threw her towel down, walked into the water, and swam only when she no longer felt the coquina shells on the pads of her feet. She swam parallel to the shore. Each stroke let a million thin swords of pale green light into the water. Emily began rotating, looking out to the horizon, a double feature in blue, sky and water, then face into the sea, bubbles delicately nudging her cheek. Each stroke was something: a faceless baritone voice in the dark, the oleander berries that grew around the cottage, the smell of powder, a baby-blue scarf she used to wear in her hair, the road to the reservoir outside Nashville, Eddie's father spreading a blanket on pine needles, her dress swung over a low branch.

She somersaulted underwater remembering her first night on the island and how she sat on top of the hotel bedspread with hundreds of whitecaps speeding toward her. There had been a print of a boat wrecked against rocks over her head. She remembered lighting white emergency candles when the electricity went out near midnight. And how later she fell asleep against the headboard and woke when drops of wax slipped to her hand. Opening her eyes, she'd seen the flaming wick floating like one boat on clear water and had stared at the ceiling's large opening mouth and remembered Eddie's sleeping face and the angry one of her husband. In the morning, the storm was over and she'd gone out in the clothes she had slept in and walked all the way out to the beach.

Her love of water must have started in the womb, her baby self letting up a few giggly bubbles. Later she could remember someone letting her float in water just slightly cooler than herself. Her mother'd told her she was nearly a year old when her father had held her in the lime quarry near her grandmother's house. For a few minutes he let her splash, her mother said, before Emily had closed her eyes and tried to squirm out of his grasp. Her mother had said the way she fought was the oddest thing she'd ever seen. Not in a careless baby way but with precise determined movements. From then on she'd always had an understanding with water. She loved to swim in the winter, to be thrashing in the community pool: humidity like a jungle, and the swim teacher, an old water ballet star who still wore a lavender bathing cap with big fluttery scales like a pretty fish. After the lesson she'd returned to the cold where her wet head sent up steam. Years later, Emily and her sister Sarah had paddled a canoe up at Mountain Lake. The water was a dark and earthy green. Leaves and grass treaded and unfurled near her. She saw evergreens and the cool line of water up to them. In high school there were the long baths, the weekly lap swimming at the county's pool where she'd learned flip-turns and stroked evenly from end to end. After she married she swam in the deep water hole where the cows drank. Her husband built her a floating dock and the cows would watch her sometimes, their slow eyes on her as she butterflied and breaststroked and curled underwater.

Emily stopped a moment, treaded. With one foot, she pulled a heavy strand of seaweed from between the toes of the other. She thought of Eddie, how he hadn't said good-bye when she left the restaurant. Each night in the cottage, he turned his cheek to the pillow just as his father had. Both were lively in sleep, speaking riddles, sighing now and then. When she looked in on him, Eddie's mouth was always opened and slack. Often she got close, traced the blond hair on his chest. Daily now, she saw him shyly gaze at her. He meditated on the Gauguin posters of Tahitian women on her walls. Sometimes, flipping his head from them to her as if trying — she imagined — to push her into the South Pacific scenes. This summer his gaze fell always on her as she sunned on the beach near him, or walked from the shower.