Darcey Steinke - Up Through the Water

“Some people have nothing in the way of manners or respectability, and they don't want you to have any either.”

Eddie wanted to respond, but he knew that if he opened his mouth, he would start to cry. He wiped his face on the sleeve of his black T-shirt. Down in the water, his hands felt only the steak knives. It was 100 degrees plus on his side of the kitchen. The metal dishwasher was doing champagne glasses and ice buckets; steam rose from the cracks. The noise and heat that encased him were suddenly soothing, and Eddie's back relaxed.

In Tennessee things were different. His father had a little farm and a new wife. She was small — perfectly formed, but tiny. She canned vegetables: tomatoes floating easily in round jars, peaches in syrup aging to a deep orange. She made wheat bread in even-sized loaves. His father did a bit of farming, but mostly he rented out equipment: yellow tractors and reaping machines. He wore a John Deere baseball cap. Eddie's stepmother taught Sunday school and baked ferociously for church sales. Life with them was easy. They came to his wrestling matches and sat quietly in the bleachers while he struggled on the mat. Afterward, they took him for french fries. Eddie's life had seasons like the two halves of an apple: the calm months with his father and the summer ones here on the island.

The waitress pushed the swing door into the kitchen. “Sorry about that,” she said, walking to him.

“It doesn't matter,” Eddie said. “He was drunk.” If she touched him, Eddie would cry. He felt like the schoolboy who falls at recess whose mother later asks about the bruise on his knee.

“Some stuff should be left alone,” she said.

“Yeah,” Eddie said, feeling a flutter in his throat, something rising from his stomach like a gray luna moth.

The cook yelled, “Order up, sugar.” The waitress turned from the sinks. Eddie watched her gather the entrées on a tray, put a piece of parsley on each, carefully hoist it up to her shoulder, and make her way out the doors to the dining room.

“He should be shot for doing a thing like that to you,” the cook said above the whir of fans and dishwashers.

Eddie thought of his mom, tanned dark like an Indian. Sometimes she taught windsurfing on the sound. She screamed instructions at tourists from a little rowboat. Eddie would be riding his bike around the island inlet to the small game room at Paolo's and he would hear her voice faintly over the water. “Terrific. You have it. Maybe steer more with your hands. Lean to the left. You have it. Just go now. Go.” Eddie liked the thin lines around his mother's eyes and the fine hairs he could see all over her face in certain light. She knew things about living, about how to live. Eddie liked the posters in her cottage of brown women with fruit baskets on their heads or others with red flowers in their hair. They were round and soft, not like real girls. He saw the scenes warm up and move, his mother among the tropical women. There was one poster over the toilet that he didn't like. Young girls near his own age, but in front of them was this guy with a rust, nearly red beard, and eyes as clear as tap water. Each time Eddie peed into his mother's beige toilet he tried staredowns, gazing into the guy's eyes, waiting for him to blink or flinch.

Eddie walked out to the back porch to have a cigarette, trying to figure out where his mother might be now. The first night spent in her house was always awkward: he tossed and turned, unused to the sand grains which inevitably gathered in the sheets, bothered by the night sounds of katydids and the strong wind off the water. But worse was the fact that she slept, or didn't sleep, in the next room. This season he knew right off when he saw her at the bus station that she was somehow different from before: more restless and flittering. Over a seltzer and lemon at a restaurant, as Eddie told her about the year's happenings in Tennessee, they'd watched the pink beach heather dropping from the glass vase on the table. She brushed the yellow rind with her fingertip and Eddie realized then how much he'd missed her. He'd wanted to tell her how on the bus he watched the wet highway throw up a shine and how with his eyes closed he'd listened to the tires treading in the rain. He wanted to explain how just after midnight, a reading light a few rows back clicked on and he'd seen his outline in the bus window. Two things would happen this summer — his glassy self spoke — you will tell your mother what you think she should do. The lips paused and then smiled — and you will get laid. Now, in Tennessee this would be impossible, for a face to tell you how to act. But in the summer on Ocracoke, things were uneven, malleable, even magic. The reading light went out, the image vanished, and he'd thought of this till the swoosh of the bus wipers sent him again into sleep.

He watched the heat lightning — some flashes, other times thin veins spidering down from the sky. Yesterday at dinnertime he'd been quiet. His mother had told him, “You're a grown man. You should know how life works. I didn't raise you in the dark.” She expected him to be tolerant of her ways and he tried to be. But sometimes he felt confused and he knew that then he seemed disapproving.

The moon was edging higher in the already star-bright sky. He'd always thought that his mother was moon and his father sun. Tennessee was the day: definite and bright. His father spoke straight. Chores. School. Wrestling. The island was night: blued with darkness, charged with a wavering mystery below his moon of a mother. Every year was just one day. The long day, always troubled with dreams of the island night. Then summer when at the most incoherent times he held on to Tennessee days.

He was waiting for Neal to bring him the soup pots and baking pans, and heard him putting some into the sink now. He flicked his cigarette into the matted grass behind the restaurant and shivered. Early June, with its blue days and chilly, two-blanket nights, was always his favorite time on the island. There was a feeling of something forming — things coming together so the summer could begin.

As he entered the kitchen, the waitresses were perched on counters greedily counting their tips; each had a jar with her name on it.

Eddie's favorite waitress went out to the cooler to get jugs of wine to restock the shelf. As he swung open the door, he saw her sitting on two cardboard boxes of crab legs. The cold was a dream. He saw her nude in a block of ice, her body pale and taut, arms outstretched, eyes sleepy. Among the canned pineapples and cold seafood, Eddie knew this was his chance. He could take her, they would lie down, heads resting on the linen tablecloths full of lettuce.

But she wouldn't look at him and he reached for the handle.

“No,” she said, stay, it's just that I have to work again in the morning, and I'm so sick of asking people how they want their eggs.”

Eddie didn't know how to answer her.

She handed him two large jugs of red wine and she carried two white. “Let's get out of here,” she said turning, making a figure eight with her hips.

They were all in the front seat of the white Dodge Dart, upholstery spilling out, crumbling like old pieces of cake on the floor. Green light from the radio. The waitress's shoulders pressed against Eddie.

“I want to see the moon,” the waitress said. “Let's stop at the dock.”

Neal laughed. “Honey, if the moon is what you want. .”

As they slowed to a stop, gravel squeezed against the tires. Eddie got out and leaned against the right front headlight. The moon was a capital O in the carbon-paper sky. The waitress sat on the hood, knees to her chest. Her eyes were closed: They were dark and slightly sunken like a blind person's.

“How can you stand it all year?” she asked the cook, who lounged on the front seat, legs hanging out the window.