Andrea Barrett - The Forms of Water

Lise refused to give up the wheel when they stopped at one of the Thruway plazas for gas. Delia said she was hungry but too tired to move. Roy said he needed to take a leak and so Wendy had to move after all; once she’d stepped out to let Roy by, she decided to go inside and find something to eat. She bought a bag of chips from the vending machine in the lobby, as well as a bag of M&M’s and another of pretzels. Then she went into the gift shop next door, and as smoothly as if she were still fifteen and used to doing this every day, she lifted two road maps, a white plastic mug that said I THE ADIRONDACKS,a T-shirt printed with a picture of a moose, and a toy log cabin. One by one she slipped these things into her bag, although she wanted none of them. In her mind she could still hear Christine’s acid comments about the things her uncle Henry had stolen, but his actions didn’t seem related to her in any way.

The woman at the counter had thin, dry hair, scraped back into a wispy tail and splotched with white roots. Her arms were bare and enormous. She’d looked at Wendy when Wendy walked in, but after a brief glance she’d turned back to her magazine and Wendy had realized that she was invisible. Her clothes concealed her, and her well-cut hair and her straight teeth. She looked down at her neat jeans and her blue-and-white shirt, both of which Sarah had bought for her: her jeans were unfaded and her shirt had extra buttons on the sleeve plackets and crisp pleats at the yoke. It had never occurred to her before that this cleaned-up version of herself, which her father and Sarah had manufactured, might serve as a perfect disguise.

The woman never looked at Wendy, nor did she check the mirrors hanging overhead. Wendy stuck out her tongue. The woman didn’t notice. Wendy took a Yankees sweatshirt off a pile, held it out, refolded it, and then laid it quite deliberately in her bag, on top of the rest of her loot. The woman said nothing. She looked up when Wendy walked out the door, but her face was blank and no sirens rang. Wendy realized she could have walked off with anything there. No one looked at her in the lobby either, and in the bathroom women walked past her as if she weren’t there. She looked like anyone else, she realized. Like any other middle-class girl, as safe and unthreatening as soap.

When she got back in the car she shoved the bag between her feet, and the next time Delia passed the bottle she took a modest drink. How could anything happen to a girl who looked like her? The vodka tasted like nothing but seemed to relieve the tenseness in her skin. She drank some more. Lise drove just at the speed limit through the quiet night, and Wendy laughed at the steady stream of jokes Delia and Roy exchanged. Delia was funny, she saw. Roy was funnier. Win was asleep and Wendy felt a surge of affection for him and reached behind Roy to touch Win’s shoulder. Her hand brushed Roy’s neck on its way back. Delia told a long joke about two old women and a vase of flowers, and then she yawned and stretched and leaned her head into the window and said, “I’m going to catch a few Zs, okay? So I’ll be fresh to drive.” And although Lise protested that Delia was much too drunk to drive even after a nap, Delia just said, “We’ll see,” and then closed her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Roy asked Lise. “Don’t you feel sleepy?”

“Not at all.” Lise seemed to have no intention of ever relinquishing the wheel. “I can drive all night.”

“We’ll take shifts,” Roy said firmly. “Just like you said. But if you don’t need the company now, I guess I’ll try and catch a snooze, too. Let Wendy drive when you’re tired.”

“I can drive,” Wendy said, but everyone ignored her. “I could drive right now.”

She sat very still as Roy slumped down in the seat, angled his legs away from hers, and leaned his head and shoulders back. His left shoulder was just touching her right arm. His left hip was resting against her right thigh. After a few minutes, as his breathing slowed, his head slumped over until it rested on her shoulder. A few minutes later, when she was sure he was asleep, she let her head tilt until her cheek rested on his hair. Of course Delia wanted him, everyone wanted him. His hair was surprisingly soft.

She moved slowly, imitating the sleepy movements Win made on the other side of Roy from time to time. She drew up her legs and then stretched them out next to Roy’s. Her whole right leg now lay against his left one, which was warm and solid and so delightful that she sighed, just as Delia sighed in the front seat, and let her left arm cross her body and rest against Roy’s hip. If Lise looked in the mirror, she thought, she would see only a row of tilted bodies collapsed and crushed against each other and as innocent as a tangle of puppies. Lise had turned down the radio, but the music still drowned out the soft breathing of Roy and Delia and Win and hid the sound of Wendy’s, which had quickened.

She still felt invisible. She was just Delia’s cousin, playing Delia’s game: pretending to be with Roy for Lise’s benefit. Everyone was asleep but Lise, and Lise thought she and Roy belonged together, and she let her hand stroke Roy’s thigh and her cheek rub gently against his hair, knowing this was stealing more surely than what she’d done in the store. But nothing she wanted came to her when she behaved herself, she thought. She’d bent her life into a shape it wasn’t meant to have for her mother’s benefit, and here her mother was chasing a paranoid notion over the hills.

Roy turned to her. He was still asleep, or mostly asleep, but he rolled into Wendy’s hand and drew his legs up next to hers. He slipped an arm around her and drew her against him, so that her cheek slipped down next to his and their mouths were almost touching. His touch filled her with gratitude. She had thought she might never have this, not even after she escaped from her family. She tried not to move.

She was Delia’s size and shape, and she thought that Roy, in his sleep, must be moving against her the way he moved against Delia on the mattress they shared. The car was very dark. He pushed himself gently against her hand and she let her palm press into him. His head turned, searching for her mouth, and at first she kept her lips taut and closed, so that everything might still seem to be his mistake, his desire; so that she might still plead sleepy innocence if he woke. Then he let the arm around her shoulders drop down until his hand was on her breast, and she opened her mouth until she was kissing him back, and his hand was sliding down and under the edge of her shirt and back up against her skin, and his tongue was in her mouth and then on her neck, and he was pressing and pressing against her hand until he lowered his own and unzipped his fly and moved her hand inside.

His eyes were closed, but he could not possibly still be asleep. And yet his eyes were closed, and his face looked trusting and pleased, and nothing about him indicated that he felt anything like the fear and exultation rushing through her. The sprig of mistletoe in her pocket pricked her thigh, and she thought of the powers Christine had ascribed to her twigs and seeds. Release the Spirit from the flesh, she remembered Christine saying. As if anyone would want to separate the two. Her spirit was in her flesh; her body felt completely beyond her control. Roy ran his mouth down her neck and her collarbones and she gave up then, if she had not already given up minutes before.

She wasn’t sure how long they lay like that, groping, rubbing, and she couldn’t be sure whether Roy opened his eyes when he came in her hand or the minute after, when he muttered and untangled his legs from hers and then yawned and looked up and smiled drowsily. He blinked; he focused his eyes. He whispered, “Wendy. I’m sorry, I fell asleep. I didn’t mean to get all mashed up against you. I was having a dream.”