Andrea Barrett: The Forms of Water

Wiloma had heard those tales so many times that she almost knew them by heart, but she never thought about them anymore. The detox team had pulled them out by the roots, disarmed them so they’d never haunt her again. When her uncle had mentioned the land, she’d been able to let the pictures he’d called up roll right past her.

It’ll be yours when I go, he’d said. Yours and Henry’s. She’d smiled at him and ignored his words and focused her healing energies on his chest. And now Waldo had crept up behind her with this, using Wendy to prick her unprotected flank. He knew the kids came home and told her what went on at his house; sometimes he said things to them that he was afraid to say to her face, knowing the message would reach her. But she wasn’t sure what he thought he’d gain by prying at this part of her past.

“I’ve got to go to work at noon,” Wendy said. “Want me to do anything before I go?”

“Maybe clean up your room? I want the house to look nice for Grunkie tomorrow.”

Wendy nodded and left. Below her, Wiloma heard Win humming. All day long his head bobbed to the signals of the Walkman his father had given him. He mowed the lawn with it clipped to the back of his pants and fell asleep at night with the tiny black pads still shooting messages into his brain. He was sixteen, he was going through a phase. He hummed with no sense that his humming was tuneless. Sometimes Wiloma dreamed of slipping one of her Life in the Spirit seminar tapes into his machine when he was asleep.

She gathered herself together and visualized her list for the day. Vacuum the living room, she thought. Wash the windows. Buy groceries. Go to the dentist — she knew she shouldn’t, but a filling had fallen out and she couldn’t pray it back into place. Last night, while she’d been lecturing, her whole left jaw had ached. She had looked into the window behind her group and seen her face, twisted with pain, reflected back to her. Her mirrored image had so resembled her brother’s unhappy face that she’d thought for a minute that he was there.

Don’t think about Henry, she ordered herself. Don’t think about Waldo. Don’t think about Uncle Brendan’s land.

She pictured each of these thoughts as a virus, crystalline and threatening, and then she surrounded each virus with the clouds of red and green particles that were her mental antibodies. She saw each thought sink into darkness, rendered harmless by the healing powers of her mind.

FOR TWO WEEKS, WENDY AND WIN HAD BEEN HALFHEARTEDLY trying to get the yard back into some sort of shape for Grunkie, whose new room overlooked the entire unkempt length. Win had mowed the grass three times; she’d weeded the flowerbeds and trimmed the shrubs. Both of them had worked to move the matted drifts of old leaves toward the fence at the rear of the lot, and neither of them had said much about how furious they were. Another person to take care of, another person to whom they’d have to lie. The heap of leaves was already enormous.

All that smiling, Wendy thought now, as she left her mother and bypassed her messy room and fled to the waiting pile of leaves. The pallid compliments she’d offered on Grunkie’s new room, the way she’d left the Church motto untouched when what she really wanted was to tear the linen in half and then scream at her mother, Don’t bring him here! Don’t we have enough trouble without him? Can’t you leave him alone? — her lies had made her face feel as stiff and deceitful as a Chinese mask.

She seized the pitchfork with relief and attacked the compacted leaves on the ground. As she lofted them to the top of the pile, she heard Harmon Bayer working on the other side of the fence. Snip, she heard. Harmon was edging the grass along his neat beds of ivy. Snip, snip, snip, and then a sneeze, a snuffle, and a wheeze. Harmon had allergies and his breathing was almost as loud as the sound of his shears. She wished him swollen eyes and a streaming nose. Harmon had built the ugly six-foot barrier between their yards, where once there had been only a knee-high hedge as porous as a sieve. When the Silverstons had lived in Harmon’s house, Wendy and Win and the Silverston children had flowed through the hedge like water.

Wendy paused and dropped her lower jaw and stretched her mouth until her face began to relax. Then she attacked the leaves again and tossed wads of them over her shoulder. She was rewarded with the pleasure of hearing the snips subside and the wheezes increase on the other side of the fence. Harmon, she knew, was acutely aware of her but would never acknowledge her presence. She whacked leaves against the boards and remembered how Harmon had bought the Silverstons’ house during her freshman year in high school, not long after her father had left them to marry Sarah and her mother had started flirting with bizarre religions.

The yard had been beautiful up until then — a long row of roses trained on a trellis, smooth beds of myrtle around the silver maple, shrubs and ferns and rhododendrons and clumps of iris and daylilies. The lawn had stretched like a piece of velour from the flowerbeds back to the low hedge. Then her father had taken her and Win for a stroll by the lake and sliced their lives in two.

They’d been walking. The wind had been blowing. The waves had rolled gently on brown sand scattered with roots and weeds. They’d been chatting about everyday things and then her father had said, “I have to tell you something important,” and had severed the sinew and bone of their lives so cleanly that she’d felt no pain at first. He’d gone on talking, heaping one sentence on another until his message was clear, but only weeks later, after he’d packed and moved and introduced them to Sarah, had she understood that the first words of his first sentence held the shape of the rest of her life.

She bent down to pick the twigs and leaves from the myrtle on her side of the fence, thinking of that horrible time when her father had first left and her mother had drifted so far away. She and Win had turned wild almost overnight, drinking and smoking and slinking around as if they’d been possessed. They’d become expert at cheating and lying and hiding, and for a while they’d occupied themselves by setting fires. That stack of old wood by the lake, Wendy thought, remembering the pale, unstoppable flames. And then she remembered the clothes she and Win had stolen, and the notebooks and records and cigarettes, and the way everything they did had seemed to flow past their mother like smoke. They’d found her sitting cross-legged on her narrow bed one day, poring over a pamphlet that had come to her in the mail.

“What is this?” Wendy remembered asking. She could still hear the words that signaled her mother’s seduction by the Church of the New Reason.

“It’s a way to make sense of things,” her mother had said. “Nothing exists external to our Spirits. Things are thoughts. The world is made up of our ideas. So if we change our ideas, we change the world — I’m working on changing my ideas. I’m reprogramming myself.”

“But what’s the point?” Win had asked.

“The point,” their mother had said, “is that there has to be something to life besides missing your father and raising you. I hate the way I feel. Our family’s falling apart. And there’s nothing I can do about any of it.”

Wendy and Win had redoubled their efforts to be bad, as if this might somehow bring their mother back to earth. But the extent of her self-deception was amazing. They told her the teachers who sent home angry notes were insane, that the clothes that appeared in the absence of money were gifts, that it had been Wendy’s girlfriend’s mother who had pierced Wendy’s ears four times.