Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

The edges of these cities and towns are abrupt, and between them lies more space than she ever imagined. The sky is so enormous that sometimes, as she waits for a ride for the better part of a day on a road that stretches from nowhere to nowhere for miles, she can see mountains — Cascades, Tetons, Absarokas — floating in the distance like a promise. Everything seems promising here, even the men who pick her up in their cars and trucks and warn her that she ought to be more careful. They look nothing like the men she knew at home. They remind her how easily she could be hurt, but none of them have hurt her. When they ask her where she’s from, she makes up stories.

“Michigan,” she says. “Just outside Lansing.” Or San Diego, Arizona, Baton Rouge. In bars she tells similar stories to the men with whom she dances, and once in a while — on four occasions now — she has let a man bring her home. Twice, when she found work and a man she liked in the same town, she has shared a roof for a couple of weeks. She has yet to want anyone as fiercely as she wanted Roy, but she has almost stopped hearing the echo of Christine’s voice.

Tonight she’s in a bar just outside Spokane, watching couples dance to a raucous band. Stephen, the out-of-work carpenter sitting next to her, was leaning against the wall when she first walked in. One of his legs was bent, the sole of his work boot pressed against the paneling. His hands were jammed into the pockets of his jeans, and the sleeves of his shirt were rolled halfway up his forearms. He was staring moodily at the spinning dancers, tapping his earthbound foot to the beat, and when she strolled up and asked him to dance, he said yes immediately. On the dance floor he led her firmly through a two-step, which she’d begun to learn in other towns in other states. His open palm, pressed against her back, was dry and strong.

After the dance he smiled down at her and said, “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“No,” she said, and she touched his bare forearm. “Would you like a beer?”

For a minute she thought she might lose him, that she’d moved too quickly or misjudged the loneliness and longing she thought she saw on his face, but then he smiled and shrugged and said, “You surely can.” Now they’re sitting knee to knee on a pair of stools at one end of the bar. He started buying, after the first round; a pitcher of beer sits between them and she keeps his glass filled. He was married once, he tells her. He is twenty-eight. His two little girls are in Boise with their mother.

When he mentions his daughters his face clouds, and Wendy does something she has learned to do in the past few months, which almost always works. “Do you have any pictures?” she asks.

He reaches for his wallet. Inside, in plastic sleeves, are stiff school portraits of a gap-toothed girl with blond hair and glasses and an older girl with a brown ponytail. “The little one’s Dora. She’s in first grade this year. Nancy’s in third.”

“They’re gorgeous. Beautiful girls.”

He smiles at her then, smiles at the pictures, smiles back at her. “So are you,” he says lightly.

She lowers her eyes. She knows she isn’t beautiful; she is only young. As young as her mother was when she met Wendy’s father; younger than Sarah was when Wendy’s father fell in love with her; younger, even, than the women her uncle used to chase. When she thinks of how nearly she missed understanding what this gives her, she closes her eyes for a second and then sips at her beer. The beer flowers inside her, loosening her joints and her brain.

Stephen slips the wallet back into his pocket. “Where are you from?” he asks. One finger lightly strokes the soft flesh below her elbow.

“Here and there. I’ve been traveling for a while.” Below the bar his knee just touches her thigh, and soon he is telling her about the cabin he has in the woods twenty miles away. How snug it is when it snows; how his woodstove heats the whole place; how beautiful it is at dawn.

“I love it up there,” he says. “If I didn’t have that place, I’d go crazy.”

“You’re lucky. Having a place like that.” The dim light shadows his face, carving it into hollows and planes. In the morning it may only turn out to be another face, but right now it is everything she thinks she wants.

“What about you?” he says. “Where are you staying?”

“I don’t know. I just got into town this afternoon.” She gives him the slow smile she has learned only recently, and his hand tightens on her arm. She knows he believes he’s been hit by luck. For a second they hover on that fine edge from which the evening may fall either way, and Wendy thinks of all the times since Delia’s wedding when she’s been similarly poised.

The wedding was held in a rented garden at the art museum: very pretty, very subdued. Lise — not Wendy — was Delia’s maid of honor, and when Wendy kissed Delia and wished her luck, Delia looked at her feet. After the ceremony, Wendy wandered over to the pond by herself. The ducks that dotted the sleek surface were feeding on something invisible, upending themselves so abruptly that their heads turned without transition into fat, pointed tails. The sight transfixed her, and she found herself muttering, “Heads. Tails. Heads. Tails,” like a gambler gone mad with a quarter. Her mother’s life, Delia’s life. The life her great-grandparents had led more than half a century ago. She could choose, she saw. She could live any way she wanted or in several different ways, carving her life into sharp, separate parts the way her great-uncle had. Massachusetts, China, Manitoba; Coreopsis and then St. Benedict’s. He had moved a lot for someone meant to be bound to a single place. She moved from the pond to the hedge to the gate, from the gate to her house to the road.

Stephen splits the remains of the pitcher between their glasses. It is well past midnight; the dance floor is densely crowded. Couples lean into each other down the bar and along the walls, pursuing the delicate negotiations that will bring this Saturday night to the close they all want but haven’t dared hope for. In the bathrooms, she knows, men are checking their wallets for the rubbers they think they remember putting in there a week or a month ago. Women are adjusting their underwear and consulting with their friends. The pay phones near the door are busy; there are parents and spouses being deceived, baby-sitters being begged to stay until morning. Within this desperate last-minute whirl, Wendy feels perfectly at home.

Home is what you dream of, she remembers her mother saying. What everyone does. But you have to learn that your only true home is in the Spirit. Of all her mother’s mottoes this now seems the most false: that the body is nothing, the body is dust, the world is made up of our ideas. Stephen leans over and cups her chin in his fingers and kisses her lightly. His cabin will be spare, she knows, clean and dark except for the glow from his woodburning stove. Stephen will be considerate. Her home, she thinks, is in her body, from which she learns everything.

When Stephen whispers, “Would you … do you think … I have this cabin and if you need a place to stay … do you want to come home with me?” she forces herself to hesitate for a minute, as if all that has happened between them has been his idea. He’s forgotten that she first asked him to dance, that she touched him first, that she bought the first drink. She looks into the mirror behind the bar, as if she is weighing his invitation. She waits until he strokes her fingers with his. Then she says, “Well, I guess.”

At the door, Stephen wraps his scarf around her neck. “It’s cold out,” he says. He smiles at the size of her backpack and sets it aside as he helps her dress. The backpack holds everything she owns, clothes and shoes and a few books, the sprig of mistletoe she stole from Christine and the list of rules she once kept in her closet. The list reminds her of Grunkie, who lived by so many rules they formed a Rule.