Susan Steinberg - Hydroplane - Fictions

But I parted the curtain.

I waited as the salesgirl looked.

My father took us to a diner in a part of town I had never seen. My brother and I rode in the back seat. The windshield wipers made a sound like something — I'll just say it — a sound like crying. At the diner I ordered toast.

The girlfriend said, Your mom was nice.

They all ordered quite a lot to eat and ate like horses.

My father told a story about something the girlfriend did. Something stupid. She stuck a fork in a plugged-in toaster. Or she dropped the phone into the tub. Or she left the iron face-down, hot, on the ironing board. He pretended to be angry when she didn't laugh. The girlfriend smacked him on the arm and called him awful.

He told her she needed new dresses.

He said, She'll send me to the poorhouse yet.

I can't explain why this bothers me still. I mean, the girlfriend's gone. The day he threw her out of the house, my father called and told my machine, I threw the bitch out.

The man at the pool held my arm. He said, I've got a good one.

He said, This girl, see, is walking through a field…

Okay.

And she's lost and scared, so she keeps on walking and, lucky for her, she sees a house with lights on, so she knocks on the door of the house and a man answers, and she says, I'm hoping you can help…

Okay.

So the man says to the girl, I'd love to help you out, and invites her inside and says she can spend the night at his house and promises he'll take her home in the morning if she…

Stop, I said.

He said, What.

I covered my ears.

Just stop, I said.

I sat in the waiting room with a magazine. A girl waited, too, on a chair near mine. She looked at me. I must have been looking at her.

I read an article on how to be more assertive. It suggested a firm handshake, eye to eye.

I heard my shrink open her door down the hall. I felt ready to talk.

First of my father throwing his girlfriend out. We would laugh our heads off over that.

And there was still the matter of my swimsuit.

And the matter, too, of the beachrobe.

My shrink came into the waiting room. I stood and said hello. This always made me feel like a kid. Like a shy kid hiding behind my mother's legs in a crowd.

The girl stood, too, and said hello.

My shrink said my name.

She said, Come with me.

We walked partway down the hall to her office.

She said, It's Tuesday.

She said, You're Wednesday.

She said, I'll see you tomorrow.

She walked me back to the waiting room.

She said to the girl waiting, I'm sorry.

The girl looked at me and went with my shrink down the hall.

She was taller than I was. Better looking.

I didn't return to see my shrink. I was tired of talking. And she would send me to the poorhouse, besides.

My father and brother once managed to pinch.

My mother laughed as I stood on the sand.

The ocean meant me and the fishes.

The hotel room meant me on the phone.

And I just stood there, frozen.

My mother said, Just tell her you're sorry.

My brother ran into the ocean.

My father said, What's got two hands and flies.

It hurt where he pinched. So I ran to the room. No, I kept on running. There was a mall nearby, and I ran into the mall in my swimsuit. I was barefoot. It was freezing in there.

I could have sunk into the field behind the house, the field just wild with tall brown grass.

The air smelled like rain. I looked at the house's black windows.

I imagined the poorhouse as looking like our house.

I once said to my shrink, How do you feel about that.

My shrink said, I feel with my hands, Ha ha.

There was a night I watched my mother fall asleep sitting up on the hotel bed, her mouth wide open, the TV flashing on her gray face. And I poked her in the arm to wake her, and she didn't move, and I poked her in the ribs, and I jumped on the bed screaming, Wake up, and my brother, building a plane on the floor, looked up, said, Quit it, and I said, Baby, and he said, I'll kill you, and went back to his plane. And I jumped on the bed wildly, screaming, Wake up, Wake up, until my father walked in, smelling of smoke and drinks and perfume and who knows what else and said, Don't jump on the bed, and my mother waked and said, Where have you been, and reached for the pen on the table beside the bed and threw the pen at my father.

I started to say to the operator, I'm disconnecting, but instead I said, I've got a good one.

This girl's walking along the beach and she's thinking…

My shrink's machine picked up.

The operator said, I'm sorry.

How she works in an office doing who knows what…

The operator said, Machine.

She disconnected.

So this girl's running along the road, and she's running from her father who has just pinched her in a place I can't divulge, and she's running from her brother who has also just pinched her and now laughs his head off in the shallowest part of the ocean, and she's running from her mother who looks gray and sick and no one's doing a damn thing about it because no one knows for sure what's wrong, and she sees a mall and decides to run inside, and there's a store in the mall that sells women's clothing, large, warm sweaters and such, and the girl, who's wearing a swimsuit — did I forget to say this — two piece, blue — and is freezing and wants nothing more at this point than to feel warm, runs into the clothing store, and a man says, Can I help you, and she says, No, and pushes her body through the tightly packed clothing hanging on a round rack and sits within the rack, yes, like in a cave, shivering, warming, imagining her mother's face, flushed, alive, in the crowd in the mall screaming her name, and the man says…

The joke ends.

I removed my beachrobe by the pool and dropped it to a chair.

The men in the pool turned to look at me.

They looked close, as if looking through holes in walls, their hands underwater, moving fast like fishes.

I said, What do you want, though I knew what they wanted.

God, who prepares one for moments like these.

The swimsuit felt like a cage.

And you want to know what the men said back.

Look. They said nothing. They turned away. They treaded water.

It wasn't lifelong, what they wanted.

So it wasn't me that they wanted.

I threw the chair into the pool. The beachrobe too. I watched them sink.

I can still hear how the men carried on.

How pathetic it was.

The men's heads bobbing in the deep end, laughing.

Gray light filtering in from winter.

And several times I looked to the roadside and saw what I thought was an animal, curled, shredded, dead, but was only a pile of straw.

And this was several times of looking at a single pile on the roadside, bright in the headlights, thinking, Don't look, thinking of guts, blood smeared on the road, bits of bone and matted fur.

And every time, when I got nearer the pile and looked, after thinking, Don't, but looked because I couldn't help looking, I found this dead shredded thing was straw piled on the roadside.

I'll mention the road signs that looked like men. Wide-shouldered men on short, splayed legs.

I'll mention the tractors, how they looked like horses, how they looked like houses, hulking on the roadside, bright in the headlights.

What all this means: it was late, dark.

What it really means: look, I can't break it down far enough to even say what straw was before it was straw.

I'll say hay.

It doesn't matter.

What matters is the road was wet for miles from rain. What matters is the tires skidded. A tire blew. The car swerved into a shallow ditch past the shoulder. And a man pulled over to help.