She has kept them all alive, but not herself, she is barely breathing. Her artwork is nothing but a block of unmolded clay drying out in their basement. She is arid, cracked, parched. They are sucking every last bit of moisture she has left. She thought she was drowning, but she sees now it is worse, slower, a long and brutal desiccation.
The anger builds in her, but the understanding that she isn’t what he wants is stronger and brings up the tears she is sick of showing him. She is remembering how to do this, what should come next. But none of it is what she wants, only what she says, because she needs a script now, instructions, a booklet explaining how to assemble a family without a husband. The kids are at the quarry and will be back soon. She wants this settled before then. She can’t stand when the kids leave their clothes in their duffel bags all summer. She can’t stand waiting when a friend is late for lunch. She can’t stand watching a sick animal die and has, as a farm girl, simply shot the thing dead. A mercy killing, but more for herself than the groundhog in a trap or the lamb who is slow to walk. The idea of recovery seems too dim, too slight a chance, too crushing a potential disappointment. So she will do what needs to be done.
“Stay for dinner tonight. We’ll talk to the kids afterward, then in the morning you should go.” This seems simple. Clean. Efficient.
“You don’t want to talk about this.” It is a statement, resigned, something he says to the water, to the house, not to her.
“I don’t know what this means,” he begins, but can’t continue. The young man has been on the boat before. Many times. The other women are an effort to keep the young man away, to prove to them both that this is not the way of things. He has never brought him in the house. They are simply moored together on the edge of his life, where he wants them to stay.
He looks at her, and she at the house. He wishes he could put an arm around her. He wishes he could take it all back and have her be the one in the cabin. His love for her is as crushing as her disdain for him. He saw her once swim naked off the dock, when she thought she was alone. She was fire then. Since their littlest was born she has reverted to some frozen time before they settled into each other. They sleep without touching, a thin sheet spread over them like an altar cloth. He follows her gaze to the house. It looks like a hymnal left out in the rain, he thinks, flaked and swollen.
It is almost five, and she wants to start making dinner. She stands to leave. He watches her pull her dinghy alongside the boat and step in. She looks up at him, her face just over the edge of the deck, her chin suddenly knotted like a walnut and the tears coming. She pushes off. He calls after her, but she rows hard away from the sloop. He pulls in the Little Devil, untucking the oars and sliding them into the locks, pushes off, and he rows after her. The wind has died; the water is glassy in the evening calm. She stops rowing and turns around. He stops and lets his dinghy drift toward her. Two boats drift in the water, one after the other, like mated birds, together but separate.
“I want to stay,” he says quietly. Oars in, he is at the mercy of the wind, but there is none.
“You’re fucking men. You don’t get to stay.” This is much louder and, on the smooth water, flies clearly to the porch, where Tom stands, having beaten his sisters home by a good ten minutes. He watches his parents, two fools in boats, in what seems to be a slow-motion dinghy race, ending apparently in the demise of his family. Tom stands behind a pillar where he can see without being observed, and listens.
“One man,” his father calls over the water.
“Of course, the All-American.” Her husband loves her even more as she shambles about in the dinghy, kneeling at the stern, gesticulating, causing the boat to slap and slosh in the water. Lucky her oars have rubber stops; they hang unattended in the water, limp hands floating in a tub.
“The National,” he says, correcting her. “Sit still. You’ll end up headfirst in the drink. We’ve had one scare this summer; we don’t need another.”
“Jesus, Bob, I’m not a ten-year-old; I can swim.”
Libby’s accident had changed things for them briefly. Brought husband and wife together in a way they hadn’t been since she was born. Their fear and their relief had injected the first week of that summer with romance. A profound appreciation ran through them both. Libby had survived, and they had too. The night after her accident they stayed up together on their small screened-in porch off their bedroom, drinking lemonade and discussing their impending middle age. Her feet rested in his lap, and he held on to her big toe as he talked. She laughed as he explained the correlation between his growing bald spot and his increasing belly. They talked about their first apartment. The neighbor who drove a bus and woke them up every morning at 3:45, so that most mornings at 3:50 they ended up making love. He told her he wanted to chew on her toes.
They came together on the blanketed floor of that porch as the stern lights blinked and the halyards clinked. But that was more than a month ago, and now they drift as they have for the last ten years. They drift, but he is always behind, always chasing her. Here at least she faces him; he’s not sure when the last time she turned her face to him was. There was the night on the porch. She let him pull her to him. But she never draws him close, never comes to him of her own accord. She demands and she delegates, she gives him lists not looks. He waits for her to come to bed, and then she accuses him of sleeping on top of the covers, of not even joining her in their bed. But he would rather float above their bed, a cloud at the edge of her perpetual storm, than to be banished to the empty, clear sky. He would rather burn in the hearth of her rage than drown in the emptiness of life without her.
“We aren’t telling the kids anything,” he says. “I’ll go, but we are not making any final decisions now. I’ll go sailing. I’ll leave for a few weeks, if that is what you want. But I will not end our marriage in one afternoon.”
“I don’t think it’s just been this afternoon, Bob. I’m sure the All-American has been here before.”
Tom feels sick, like when, during a recent driving lesson, he ran over the neighbor’s cat. Why do cats sleep under cars? Don’t they know? He stops watching them, and he sits down in a chair, but their words go on, floating in on the wind like so much pollen choking the gutters and covering the rocks with a yellow film. Disgust. Betrayal. Truth. Love. Why. I don’t know. Germinate. Like briars around an ancient castle, trapping some in, keeping the rest out.