Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

Lets ride a gull's wing. First in the direction of an August moon, then rounding back attracted by movement somewhere in the valley between dunes. It's a nude couple on a white sheet that whips up and molds around them. The man lets his hand rest on her stomach and watches for falling stars; the sleeping woman dreams of the sheet lifting, floating them over the water as if they were some great bird. The man pulls her close. From this vantage, high over the water, the moon is ahead, and the embracing couple hold light like a lantern.

L ila imagined being inside of herself, watching her tiny baby opening its mouth to the size of a grain of sand, then wider like a penny, a quarter, a rubber ball, a Frisbee, Hula-Hoop — Lila felt her hands go up and a pull at her fingertips. The mouth still opening, the swamp ponds, the round inlet, and then the whole night sky as she watched her feet disappear into the baby's mouth.

“I'm still talking to you,” her father said as she held her fork, peas quivering, in front of her mouth. “Don't get your heart all sick over that boy.”

Lila chewed and watched her father push his chair back. Her father looked like a piece of beef jerky from being the focal point of the sun on his boat for so long. His skin was hard and thick, especially on his forehead and at the top of his shoulders. He was skinny, too, and Lila attributed this to drinking whiskey and waking so early every day of his life.

“You tell her,” he said to Lila's mother, who stood scraping a plate into the garbage, her housedress moving about her knees.

“No use,” she said, not looking up. “Love is blind.”

“And deaf too,” Lila's father said.

Lila watched a thin version of her father's face in the knife by her plate and phrased the way she would tell Eddie tonight. They would sit on his stoop in the light of the porch lantern and she would say it right out, each word solid as apples lined up on a kitchen counter.

“You meeting him tonight?” her father asked, getting up. He spun a toothpick between his teeth.

Lila nodded her head and said in a French accent, “Of course, Papa.”

He shook his head and moved to the screen door. “It's not all as great as it seems now from your angle,” he said.

“I'll be the judge of that,” she yelled after him. She heard him settle himself in a porch rocker.

Alone at the table, Lila sipped milk from a beer mug. She was five days late. In the bathroom, twenty times a day, she would kneel on the cool blue tiles, make promises, and ask for favors. “I'll become a nun,” was the latest. “I swear I will,” she'd whisper to the toilet seat, clenching the shag lid cover with both hands. Lila pushed the pork chop bones around and made a cross. She saw herself like Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. In black robes, her head bowed to the rail, she would hear the voices of children chanting in a low, holy way behind her. Then a sound like the pump of birds’ wings and she would turn her head to the stained glass window, to the blue sky above that, and thank him for taking it back.

Lila's mother came from the sink and put her fingers in Lila's hair. “You look tired. Why don't you go lay down?” she said. Lila thought maybe she'd go with him to Tennessee, move right into his room — sleep curled around him in between football sheets. Every day her belly would balloon until her stomach was between them like a hard, round basketball. When her time came, she would know and rise early to walk through his father's field of seedlings.

“I remember my first one,” her mother was saying. “His name was Dean. He scooped ice cream at the stand they used to have up near the beach road.” Lila watched her mother's body expand with breath. Her face was still flushed from leaning over the dinner pots and her hair was sloppily knotted at the back of her head. “He told me about the lizards and cactus they had in New Mexico.”

“What happened?” Lila said, hard-pressed to believe her mother had ever had a teenage boyfriend.

“Not much,” her mother said, moving back to the sink's running water. “After the summer I got a few letters talking about the desert, but he never invited me.”

“You wouldn't have gone anyway,” Lila said.

“Who knows,” her mother said.

There was a thought: She could hitchhike West, a cigarette dangling from her bottom lip, red bandanna around her neck, always resting in the shade of a big cactus, using the tumbleweeds for a bed. Maybe get a job in one of those gas stations two hundred miles from nowhere. She could walk out into the desert and have her baby in the warm sand.

Lila set her plate near the sink where her mother was rinsing dishes. She walked down the hallway and flopped across the bed. The white furniture still held light in the early dusk. She stared dreamily at the map above her bed, blurred her eyes, then closed them so the shapes of the map were emblazoned on her inner eyelids. There were places where no one would find her, Borneo, Madagascar, Sudan. After it was all over she would come home, her sack of trinkets jingling on her back and her hair shortish like the lady explorers’ she'd seen in books.

Lila heard her father humming on the porch and her mother opening cupboards to put away dishes. Maybe she would stay with her parents and hide it. Always wear big blouses, and eat doughnuts and brownies in front of them. She would only whisper to Birdflower. Then he'd help her carry the frozen beef patty boxes. He'd rub her ankles. She'd go alone to a spot on the point, wedge herself into a crevice, grab onto the big rocks, and push till the baby slid out and plopped into a saltwater pool with grayish-blue starfish cleaving to the bottom. The baby would breathe in water, smiling from under the surface at her, and swirl through the narrow mouth of the pool out to sea.

Her mother and father were whispering about her on the porch. They always had ideas on what she should be doing. Lila remembered when her mother told her to pay attention to the dark McKin boy, to Jacob Whitney, the son of the coast guard captain, and to thin Matt Lumly, because she would have to choose from these. Her mother said to notice their temperaments, how they handled the few dollars their parents gave them. Lila stared. “Do you really think I would marry one of those idiots,” she said. Her mother started to cry. But Lila didn't care. No one would force her to marry a stupid fishy island boy.

Lila hung her head over the edge of the bed. She could still hear her parents on the porch. A tiny beige arm stuck out from under the white ruffle of the bedspread. She smacked the doll under the bed, rolled over on her back, and watched the shifting willow leaves speckle shadows over the room's walls.

Things women did stayed with them. Like having abortions, like losing their virginity, like Eddie's mother: no one on the island forgot the things she did. Even Lila would sometimes look at her on the beach in her bikini and imagine the men she'd been with standing around her.

Lila went to the closet and picked out a blouse to wear, one she had ordered from a catalogue. The blouse had real gold threads running through it that glittered in the darkening room. She put her hands to her waist and stuck out her chest to admire her lean body. She ballooned her stomach, then contorted it all out and arched her back. “That's what you'll look like,” she said out loud into her twinkling blouse. “Like a fat old cow.” Lila made her face look serious. She saluted her image. “Good luck,” she said, then ran out of the house, speeding in a line to her bike leaning against the porch.

“Be back by eleven,” her father yelled after her.