Anna Noyes: Goodnight, Beautiful Women

Jack had come running in one afternoon while she was shelling peas at the kitchen table and said, “I got rid of the silverware last night. I dumped it in the quarry. It’s giving us something. It has a bad energy.” She kept on shelling peas until a few rolled off the table. That night when she went to make lamb for dinner all the knives were gone. The tool for basting and the grate to let the juices drip down from the meat, gone. Jack was in the shower. As he toweled off she hugged him from behind, pressed her chest against his back for warmth.

“I don’t know what’s happening to me,” he said, and she kissed his ear.

“That’s OK. I know you,” Joni said. “I have always known you, I will always know you.”

“But something’s gotten into me. Something in this house has turned. It’s toxic. I don’t know why I feel this way.”

Joni put her hand to his chest, over his port-wine stain, a pink flush that had been there since birth. She thought about the white star inside her belly button, plus all the stories she had told him, vignettes to equal her life, to take him back to the very beginning. How the caul stayed intact during her mother’s labor, and she was born inside the watery sack. Joni had told him all her stories worth telling. She had been known.

That night she looked out the window to see Jack standing at the edge of the quarry, skipping their white dish set, a wedding present from her sister, across the water. The plates glowed as they skimmed the surface, giant flat stones. Her sister splurged for the whole set, the salad plates, dessert plates, china teacups that felt too frail in Joni’s hands. Off it went.

The next day she had driven to the grocery store and walked up and down the home wares aisle. She bought plastic utensils, paper plates, and Dixie cups; a candle for the kitchen that was supposed to smell like apple pie, and one for the bedroom that smelled like fresh laundry, how homes were supposed to smell. When she got back there was a gap next to the stove. Their refrigerator was gone. In its place, an outline of dust balls and two words from the magnetic poetry that had been up on its door for years. She knew the sentence-long poems by heart. Tall teacher who dug winter, Jack had written for her. Slow world, color came in pools of green. Four o’clock and white morning glow. Fat balloon cat. Wet dream. She’s sad and crackly .

Joni got in bed. Outside Jack was dragging a sculpture toward the quarry on a blanket. The glass-smooth granite caught the light where he’d worn it down. She did nothing to stop him. She watched him haul sculptures from his studio to the quarry, dumping all of his work into the water, until the sun went down.

“Something here is making me sick,” he told her when he came inside, and Joni pretended she was sleeping. When he cried noiselessly, covering his head with the pillow that smelled like him, she did not hold him. And when she fell asleep, she dreamed that Jack turned into a creature that lived in the water. He broke the surface, came at her across the lawn, and she took a pistol from behind her back. Her bullets made his body dance.

When she’d started awake, the empty space beside her vibrated with Jack’s absence, present but invisible, like unstirred phosphorescence. She couldn’t look because she knew he was outside waiting for her, watching from the other side of the window screen. Watching her run a hand through her hair, rub the inside corners of her eyes, check the numbers on the clock. She heard his splashing steps into the water, knew without looking about the wake he left through the yellow surface scum. Then she did look out the window, to see what she had known she would, the last of his head before he dipped below.

Perhaps they could get the divers back to search for him again. They could find his body. Joni could grieve under the comforter and preheat the oven for meals for one. She’d sit up in bed to eat. The quarry would be covered with wet yellow leaves. The quarry would freeze over. She would plant green beans in the spring, and eat them topped with salt, pepper, and thick pats of butter.

Maybe the poison was already inside him the night they met, at a friend’s wedding. Jack stole a case of pink champagne from the caterer’s truck. He was filled with the tiny bubbles by the time he found her in the kitchen. She was sitting on the counter, surrounded by buckets of lobster shells, eating a lime. She told him her feet were bruised from so much dancing, and he got down on his knees and slipped off one grass-stained shoe, and then the other. She made him drink some milk. They danced in the kitchen. His hand crushed the Baby’s Breath tucked behind her ear. She moved him inside her hips and they kissed in the coat closet against the crash of wire hangers. In the bed she pushed his briefs down with her feet. He undressed her for hours. He just couldn’t get his fingers around the buttons.

Maybe whatever it was that took Jack was already there, incubating.

Joni gets out of bed. It’s three in the morning. She pulls the sheet up neatly to the pillow, tucks it back. Opens the door. No one is out there waiting for her. The granite is cold on her bare feet. She lifts the nightgown over her head and leaves it folded on the rock. Tests the water with her toe. As she wades out over the shallow outcropping, the stone underfoot grows slick with algae. She is up to her hips now, and she crouches down, letting her feet teeter on the ledge before pushing off into deep water. She is a bad swimmer, not sure and straight or with a sense of breath, but moving with just enough effort to stay afloat, and she swims out, trying to ignore the plunge beneath her. The house is glowing in her periphery, and she sees a pale woman inside, the flash of red hair moving through the bedroom. A blur that’s gone when she stares. The fear is tangible, pulsating, radiant on her skin.

Deep down, the soft world of the quarry stirs. The only noise underwater is the churning of Joni’s legs, keeping her afloat. And then she is on her back, a bright cutout against the surface: strong arms and legs, full hips, long neck, hair tangled and weightless. The water’s many hands swim up and hold her, pressing her body to the sky.

At O’Connor’s store today everyone, even the Coffee Brandy crowd in the back room, especially them, seemed to know Dad was dead. In a place like Treelaw, you can’t keep anything to yourself. Dollie O’Connor leaned over the counter to make her loud, phlegmy apologies, then peered down at my kid to say, “I hope you have it better than your folks, little lady. Don’t you throw out your life like Granddad did.” Kimmy’s three and just learning it’s polite to shake hands, so she stuck out her hand, red from the Fla-Vor-Ice we shared in the car.

“Isn’t she cunning?” said Dollie. She said it like the words were something sour to spit out. Kimmy hid her face in my skirt, her breath hot against my leg. I was thinking all babies are mouth breathers. I was thinking too that Dollie is a cunt. Everyone knows about the six-inch scar she gave her ex-boyfriend when she pushed him into scrap metal, and that there’s only one bruised peach for sale because she spent the store money on pills. It’s no secret Dollie snuck by a neighbor’s trailer when her boyfriend was sleeping around and killed all the neighbor’s chickens and a pig.

But I didn’t feel the need to air this out in the middle of the store. Dollie totaled me up and I was short, so instead of making any kind of scene I put Kimmy’s whoopie pie back, thinking a skinny kid’s got enough problems, then changed my mind and had Dollie strike the charge for Drill’s Roulette Riches scratch card. The register went haywire and spit out a long, white slip, and that’s when the bell above the door dinged and Mandy walked in. I knew her before she looked up — dirty blonde curls, circles under her eyes just like Grace, long legs. When she spotted me I looked quickly away so we had a chance to pretend we didn’t recognize each other. I could feel heat move from my cheeks to my ears and my right eye starting to wander like it did when I lied.