Anne Siddons - Fault Lines

“I’m forever blowing bubbles,” I sang to the dogs.

Samson looked over my shoulder and stiffened, treading water. He gave a low, breathy woof . I turned.

One of the rats was swimming toward us, his wet head barely breaking the surface. He swam steadily and strongly, looking directly at me with his glittering eyes. I trod water, too, watching him in disbelief. I had never heard that rats swam unless they had to. Certainly not straight toward people and dogs. Could he be rabid? A waterborne rabid rat. Under the spurt of alarm, I thought of President Jimmy Carter and the swimming rabbit that the press had made so much of. The banzai bunny, I thought they had called it.

“Shoo!” I shouted, splashing water at the rat. “Go on back!”

The dogs headed purposefully for the swimming rat, ears flattened, eyes intently focused.

“Get out of here before you get retrieved,” I shouted, and splashed again, and the rat turned and made smoothly for the bank. He scurried up it and torqued off into the undergrowth. The dogs, bored and tired, abandoned the chase and dropped down on the bank and regarded me alertly, panting. Still I did not come out of the water. It simply felt too good.

“We could start our own theme park, make some bucks,” I told Samson and Delilah around a mouthful of brown-tasting river water. “Forget the dolphins. Welcome to Rat World. Come swim with the rats.”

This struck me as so funny that I began to laugh aloud, and swallowed water, and floundered out and up the bank and flopped naked in the sun beside them, laughing and coughing. I don’t remember ever feeling quite the same kind of suspended well being as I did that afternoon. Only when the big bronze bell that we kept in the kitchen sounded did I remember where I was, and that we were going out to Pom’s fund-raiser in less than two hours and I had just ruined my hair. And that Mommee was in some sort of uproar again. That was what the bell meant. Ina rang it whenever Mommee had a spell and I was not at hand. Mommee would not calm down, these days, for anyone but Pom or me. Usually that meant me.

“Shit,” I said drearily, and climbed to my feet and dragged my dry clothes on over my wet body and started for the house. “This has got to stop.”

I had only recently come to feel this. Or rather, I suppose that I had felt it for some time and had not let the feeling form itself into a thought, much less one I would voice to Pom. But Mommee’s slide into senility had accelerated rapidly this summer, as if controlled somehow by the strange weather, and few days recently had gone by without alarms and tears and craziness, and such increasing disorientation that I dared not, now, leave her alone at all. Once she had wandered out onto the verandah while I was taking a shower and headed for the river, stumping along at a good clip in her flowered duster, her gilt-blond wig riding high and goofily on her head. Ina had caught her more than halfway to the water. Another time she had turned on all the stove burners and pulled out empty saucepans and set them on the burners. Finally the stink of burning metal brought me at a run; I had thought she was asleep in her room. She usually was, at that time of day. The very next day she had taken my gardening shears and gone out into the back garden and cut the heads off every single one of the antique roses I had coaxed lovingly into showy profusion there. I found her strewing the petals from my murdered Love, Honor, and Cherishes on the grass, humming and mumbling. When I cried out in horror she began to wail and made for the river again. I don’t think I was very gentle with her when I caught her and marched her back to her room.

Since then I was beginning to have distinctly mutinous thoughts about Mommee. I was beginning to frame eloquent arguments for live-in help with her or even a good nursing home; I went about muttering them under my breath often, tasting the validity of them. I did not know what it was going to take to sway Pom, but I knew, now, that I needed to try. Even when I cringed with guilt, even when I knew that it was not her fault, that she would not have chosen dementia, I knew it. No one in the house with Mommee had any sort of life. Glynn had taken to staying at school late to work on her painting or in her locked room reading and listening to music when she was at home. She had stopped having her friends over after school almost a year ago. She was as agreeable and industrious as ever, but there was something haunted and strained about her face this summer. It seemed thinner, finer-boned, sharp-edged, almost as if her lovely skull had shrunk. She no longer laughed.

This frightened me thoroughly. She had had such a near brush with anorexia when she was thirteen that I had taken her to our family doctor, and, on his advice, to a therapist who specialized in eating disorders. Because she was so young, and a gymnast to boot, he had been hesitant to say that she had clinical anorexia, but her thinness was truly alarming to me. After six months in therapy she began to eat more and gained some of the weight back, but her delicate exuberance did not really return, and she became a child of silence, secretive and obedient and as severely, chastely loving as an effigy on a medieval tomb.

I had told my fears about her to Pom only a week before, when her classes at Westminster were over and she had not yet left for summer camp. She would not do that until early July. She had spent a great deal of time since school ended with this friend or that, spending nights at their homes. And the new thinness, if it really was that, hurt my heart. It was hard to tell about the thinness. Glynn wore long cotton granny skirts and bulky, loose tops all that spring. But so did all her friends.

“If she’s started that again, I don’t know what we’ll do,” I said to Pom. “She’s sixteen. She’s too old for me to control her meals. She never eats them here anymore, anyway. Darling, it just can’t be good for her to have Mommee here. She never brings anybody home anymore. She never gets any of our attention. She doesn’t come up to talk to me before bed like she used to.”

“She’s growing up,” Pom said. “It’s natural that she’s spending time out with her friends. It’s natural for her to have secrets, to stay in her room by herself. It’s what teenagers do. Don’t you remember those years when we thought Chip and Jeff would never come out again? Besides, she doesn’t look thin to me. She’s tall and slender just like you. She’s beautiful. We’re lucky. Pretty soon it’ll be boys she’s out with, and not girls, and then you really will have something to worry about. And you know Mommee adores her, Merritt. Lighten up. She’s a good kid.”

“That’s what worries me,” I said. “She is a good kid. She’s the best kid I’ve ever seen. She’s too good. It’s the good-little-girl thing; it’s the classic pattern for anorexia. And Mommee may have adored her once, but she doesn’t even know who she is half the time now. She had a screaming fit when Glynn went into her room the other day. Pom, listen. We can’t go on like this. I’ve got to have some help with Mommee. It’s Glynn I’m worried about now. If you won’t consider a nursing home, at least let me get someone in—”

He was silent for a long time and then he looked at me, and there was real pain in his blue eyes.

“What’s changed?” he said. “Why is it that you could handle all this last year, or last month, and now you can’t? You have Ina three days a week, and you can have her full time any time you want her. The boys are long gone. Glynn will be at camp most of the summer, and she’s going to visit that friend of hers in Highlands for the rest of it. What do you want to do that you can’t do now? Mommee’s just a frail, sick little old lady. How much longer can she live? I just need you right now. It won’t be too long before she’s gone and you’ll have all the time in the world.”