Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

But she routinely forgot things now, she forgot them on purpose, and if he’d stop trying to pull her back to the past, she would never think about it. But he couldn’t seem to let a minute go by without jolting her memory. “Have you been out to Coreopsis?” he asked now, pointing out the streetlights of a new development twinkling just beyond the road. “Recently, I mean.”

“No,” Wiloma told him. “I don’t want to see it.” The development slipped behind them, but not before she’d seen cars parked in front of the new homes, lights on in the new kitchens, everything Henry had hoped for Coreopsis and failed to make.

“It’d kill you,” Waldo said. “I was out that way a few months ago, looking over a building site for a new client. I drove over to the farm just out of curiosity — Jesus. What a wreck.”

You might have tried to save it, Wiloma thought, but she said nothing. Coreopsis Heights was error externalized, a knot of confusion and misplaced desire, and she had tried from the start to detach herself from it. The place was poisoned, she thought. Nothing good could rise from it. Even saying the name out loud was dangerous, but Waldo was too dense to notice.

She looked over at her ex-husband’s smooth, pink face. Once, when they were newly married, he and Henry had worked on a project together and had been as close as brothers. But then they’d soured on each other as their tastes developed and their ambitions conflicted, and after the fight they’d had six years ago, they’d almost stopped speaking. They’d trapped her in the middle, each complaining about the other and neither able to see that, although Henry dreamed in broad strokes, a community rising from an empty field where no one had seen one before, and Waldo dreamed a house at a time, this window here, this set of doors, they were other wise as alike as peas. She was aware, some of the time, that she’d chosen Waldo in part because he so resembled Henry. She’d been aware of that since Brendan had pointed it out.

They complemented each other perfectly but had been driven apart by what linked them: their constant desire to leave their signatures on the land. Me, my, mine, she thought. My house, my idea, my development, my success. Henry had never listened, not once, to Waldo’s pleas that he scale down Coreopsis Heights, build smaller houses, lay the place out in steps. When the project began to fail, Waldo had not bent an inch to save it. Henry had gone to Waldo, she knew, when the project began to collapse. Henry had begged for a loan. “I don’t have it,” Waldo had told her then. “If I could save it, I would — I know how much the place means to you. But I don’t have the cash.”

She hadn’t been able to blame him for that — anyone could see that the project was doomed — but in her heart she blamed him for much else. For not stopping Henry in the first place, for not being the man she’d married. For falling in love with someone young.

But she would not say an unpleasant word to him now; she had vowed, when she’d opened the door of this car, that they wouldn’t fight. She looked at herself in the small mirror embedded in the visor and said, “Do you think I should cut my hair?”

“I don’t know. It looks okay. You could dye it, maybe.”

She winced; her hair was very gray. “That seems so weird.”

Waldo touched the transplanted plugs on his head. “Weird? This is weird — what do you think of this? Really, I mean.”

“It looks good.” In the dim light it looked the way it had when he was young. She didn’t say how earlier, in the afternoon sun, she’d seen the plugs sticking out of his scalp like tiny trees.

“I didn’t mind being bald,” Waldo said. “But it bothered Sarah.”

Sarah again. “It’s hard. With someone so young. I met this man at a retreat last year, he was nine years younger than me ….”

“You’ve been dating?”

“Not really — he was just a friend. But I felt like something might happen between us, and for a few days I just went crazy. I was supposed to be meditating and leading some group sessions, but every free minute I was standing in front of the mirror, changing my clothes or fussing with my hair or trying different lipstick. All of a sudden I cared about how I looked. I cared a lot. And when he got involved with this twenty-five-year-old girl, I felt ridiculous. Really old.”

The girl had been unremarkable, neither beautiful nor smart, but her flesh lay over her bones like butter and she looked the same in the mornings as she did at night. Wiloma had watched them move together with a pain that felt like panic, and at night, when she paced her room, she had known in her bones something that, when she’d been younger, had been pure abstraction: that when she was sixty, eighty, when her body had betrayed her completely and left her only raddled flesh, her heart and her desires would still be adolescent.

You will always want the same things, her group leader had said, back before she’d felt the truth for herself. You’ll just stop being able to get them. The only cure is to break the cycle of wanting. She had shared that line with Brendan, one of the times he was pressing her to explain what made her church different and better than his. He’d laughed and retorted with something from one of his old saints. It is a hard matter to forgo that to which we are accustomed, he’d said. But it is harder to go against our own will. It was dark out now. She hoped he was safe. If she believed he was safe, he was.

“Sometimes,” Waldo said, “when we’re at a party, I’ll turn and see Sarah talking to some young guy and I’ll get so jealous I’ll have to sit down. Sometimes it wears me out.”

So why did you marry her? Wiloma thought. Why did you leave me for her? But these were old thoughts, the thoughts that had led her nowhere and almost cost her her children, and she put them out of her mind. On the dashboard the radar detector clucked and muttered and then cycled into its full warning hiss.

Waldo’s eyes widened and he pressed his foot gently on the brake. They’d been doing eighty, Wiloma saw. Waldo always drove too fast. Seventy-five, seventy, sixty-five. “Don’t look around,” Waldo cautioned her. “Act like nothing’s happening, like we’re just talking. Now move your hand real slowly over here and unclip the detector and slip it under your seat.”

She did as she was told, keeping her head and shoulders erect and facing forward. “Shit,” Waldo said. “If I get another speeding ticket this year I’m going to lose my license.”

She slipped the box behind her feet, and as she did she saw the state trooper tucked under the overpass at the base of the hill. His headlights came on as they passed him, and Waldo stared straight ahead with both hands clenched on the wheel. “Shit, shit, shit,” he whispered. She felt a glee that surprised her, and a desire, even more surprising, for him to step on the gas and send them shooting into the night with sirens wailing behind them. When the trooper took off after a small car that sped from behind and then passed them, she felt both relieved and disappointed.

Waldo took his right hand off the wheel and shook it several times. “That was close.”

“Pretty close,” she agreed. His face looked calm, and she was surprised when he pulled into the next rest stop and insisted on calling St. Benedict’s. “In case they’ve got any news,” he said, although she couldn’t imagine what would have changed since they’d set off. “And I want them to know we’re looking.”

She wondered if what he really wanted to do was to catch his breath away from her. He wedged himself into a phone booth, one hand crushed to his free ear to block out the cars roaring by. When he returned, he said, “It’s just what you thought.”