--IF YOU ARE TIRED OF EVERYTHING YOU POSSESS,
IMAGINE ALL YOU’VE LOST
Sea Creatures
They frightened me.
My husband snickered when I shared this,
reminding me again without directly saying so how fragile and needy I could be,
like my mother, who killed herself by jumping out of a speeding car.
But they did scare me, these twin
girls, not yet six, glaring dull-eyed each visit, sitting too silent and close
to one another as to appear attached, Siamese, a pair of well-dressed puppets
or morbid dolls.
They were our counselor’s daughters,
Christina Chin’s girls, and they materialized at all of our own daughter’s
functions because, I supposed, David invited them, which would be his way of
staying connected to Christina, with whom he was having an affair.
“But they never speak. They just sit there looking angry and bored.”
“Listen to you,” David said to
me. “You’re not even making sense. It’s impossible to be bored and angry at the
same time.”
I almost laughed. This was me
he was speaking to, the one he had sex with.
Bored and angry were a pair of emotions I always felt during the act,
they being as compatible as pain and suffering.
If he would ever open his ears, his eyes, he might learn.
Audrey, our girl, liked to pretend she
was a mermaid. Naturally I encouraged
this fantasy while David was appalled.
“Christina agrees with me,” he said.
“She says it’s different than just having imaginary friends.”
“I thought we agreed we couldn’t afford
to see Christina anymore?”
“I’m not paying her. She’s a friend.”
And he had the nerve to call me
paranoid.
Nevertheless, I believed there were
fringe benefits to fantasy. For Audrey,
it meant she became a fantastic swimmer, fearless, more lithe and adept than
girls or boys twice her age.
We threw her a pool party on her seventh
birthday. Because she was so focused on
her swimming, Audrey had but a few friends, and therefore the twins stuck out
among the few attending children.
No worries. I watched her dive and applauded the tiny
water explosions--none bigger than a floral bouquet-- that would make Olympians
envious. Not only that, but my Audrey
was lean and long and could hold her breath for an eternity.
Across the pool, David and Christina
chatted. They were friends now, so they
no longer needed to conceal themselves.
Their laughter had a hollowed-out sound as it boomed up to the
rafters. They stood by the gift
table. He looked handsome and happy,
younger. When we were first dating,
David wrote me poetry. Sometimes they
were little bits of the sweetest words and phrases, folded up like
origami. He was afraid to give me the
piece about Mother entitled, “Fragile,” but he must have known it would make me
love him like no other.
My horoscope said this was going to be a
year of discovery. I remained alert and
aware, but so far nothing. David thought
horoscopes were trivial if not skittering the edge of satanic. I’d never known a more confident man. The thing David believed in most was
certainty.
However, he didn’t like my scrap book of
news stories. He said it was creepy to
collect other people’s bad news, meaning the hundreds of car crash clippings. He tolerated my doll collection even though it
had grown so vast, especially of late, that he made me move them to an upstairs
coat closet. When I explained that they
weren’t all for me, he pointed out that Audrey was past doll age already, that
she had never liked playing with them in the first place.
Last Tuesday an odd thing happened. Out of the blue, David said, “Sometimes you
really worry me.” I couldn’t tell if it
was part of a ruse, the beginning of the end he and Christina had hatched for
us. I was beginning to feel a momentum
shift. Perhaps it had something to do
with my horoscope.
Now I took in the girls. Christina’s twins looked like morose mini-versions
of her. They had big moon faces and
black eyes. Their skin was the color of
mayonnaise left out of the fridge too long.
At the end of the pool they sat in lawn
chairs butted up arm to arm. Neither one
seemed surprised when I approached.
“Aren’t you girls going to swim?” I
asked, even though they wore matching red dresses, white tights and shiny
patent shoes.
I couldn’t get them to look at me, to
acknowledge me. Something in the pool
had their eye and they studied it with the bland interest of an alligator.
“Did you know your mother is sleeping
with my husband?”
I had no idea how those words got out,
but once they were I felt a streak of pleasure as I had not experienced since
puberty.
“She is,” I said. “Right now they’re over there plotting how to
destroy me. Pretty soon you’ll be moving
to our house and you’ll have—“
Each girl raised a hand at the same
time, in a slow, stilted motion similar to a railroad barrier rising before an
approaching train. Their finger pointed.
I don’t know why I hadn’t heard the
screams until now, but as my ears tuned in it was apparent I’d come in
mid-action. And, oh my God!
What was that? David in the water, fully-dressed, Audrey in
his arms.
I would have dived in, but David moved
so swiftly, as if he were a sea creature himself, as if he’d planned this part,
too. But how could he?
My husband followed the pattern I’d seen
on hundreds of television shows, the nose pinch and mouth blows, the chest
thumps. In between, he managed, “You
said you were going to keep an eye on her while I organized the presents,” and that’s
when I knew it was a setup.
When I looked at Audrey, I saw how
little she resembled me and I wondered if that evening in the hospital had been
invented, a mirage. I waited for her
eyes to flutter open, for a spewing fountain of chlorinated water, but none
came. This part of the story was
finished.
They have a pool here. They’d never let me, but even if they would I
don’t care to swim. My favorite is
watching. There’s a certain glee in
hearing the maw of voices and cannonball splashes, to be assured that life goes
on.
Christina’s twins come all the time. They sit in the same place, in the same
lounge chairs, dressed in their tomato red dresses. I’ve been here all these years and the girls
keep coming, never swimming, never speaking, never aging.
