From
Dust
a collection of short stories, 2017
“Jessica Dog had Drowned”
The house was large. Its backyard fell down a steep grade to the eaten away shore of a lake, a lake which froze over in winter and one year sucked down the neighbor's Jessica dog. She used to run into our yard with her fur slicked down from swimming and chase us as we ran around, my brothers and I. Her owner was a middle-aged man who had had a family, but then lived alone. He sat out in a lawn chair under a rickety wooden awning that had begun to separate, light dashing through long, ever widening spaces. He had a collection of bouncy balls and as we played they appeared as if spat down from the sun and we shielded our eyes looking for their trajectory. We picked them out underneath long grasses and took them into the house. My brothers in their room made a structure out of them which was always bouncing away from a too eager foot sounding upon the carpet or a knee gone awry. I did nothing with them. I would find them in corners, at the bottom of drawers, sometimes under covers.
My brothers were given the sunrise though a grand deciduous tree blocked it from them, a white oak I think it was. My view on the opposite side of the house was clear. The sunset would present itself in full glory through the window; it fell with a sharpness I have never been able to imitate into my room and burned the pale, worn expanse of the carpet, made warm and full of life the bland white tones of the walls. The light stroked my dolls' cheeks, as if caressing them, their unblinking eyes. Last of all it pranced upon the lake and gleamed over its heaving, pregnant, black surface and then it was always as I turned away that it flashed and disappeared behind the dark row of trees on the far side, the left behind things still pulsing from its glance of heat.
In spring the grasses lengthened around the lake shore and by summer began to nod down. And then as the summer waned, the sun in its weakening, lazy scan broke the thin ice that froze over the grasses in the morning. Geese circled the long yard. They dove, pecked at the ground, they skidded across the lake. My mother shouted, running down the stairs from the patio. They were always relieving themselves on the lawn.
Inside were the still, silent things. A room buried with toys, the little table, where, when the television was off, I began to write. On sketchbook paper with a pencil. A girl yearned to ascend a mountain. Somehow, there was no light. She found herself in negative space, an underground. She found a rope ladder. There was a tunnel. It was just a dream. Beside the play room was the kitchen, of cool, scuffed linoleum. My mother avoided talking of the mice in the cabinet. Only when it could no longer be denied and we were making a big deal did she smile a little.
“Mice,” she affirmed. “They come and go. It's always worse in the winter.”
The basement was terrifying. A long wooden stair descended. There were deep shelves where darkness crept along an unseen wall, thick with dust, the dim health of insects. My mother went down without a care. She was down there putting away things. As the weather warmed, the acrid, oily smell of paint and flash of her paint stick, testing the color.
My father came and went. There were the days of his presence when certain things condemned us, and there were the days he was gone when we could do no wrong. We ate too much ice-cream and ran screaming around the house, unquelled. My mother stretched lazily—was most herself.
In October my father would give the lawn its last mow of the year before the temperature really dropped, and then fall asleep in his chair. A small fire licked the iron frame before the mouth of the chimney, was almost a ruse, this iron frame with its thinness, its decorative spaces, but which mutely managed to absorb a desperately high heat. I yearned to touch it and a shrill snap of a voice stayed my hand. It was my mother, bent over the ironing board. When dinner was ready we woke my father up and all sat together on the covered side of the patio. Things which flew in the night sought the warmth of our house. Moths swooped around the table, waved about the mosquito-repelling candles, and as we finished our food sailed out to the open deck and hovered about the lantern light which made pronounced the slats in the grey wood, the sheen of the round glass edge of the table. There were low-slung shadows which fell and then swept away from the deck, bats circling the house.
Somehow it is all hastily put together. We started swimming too late in the season; we had missed the frigid, breaking surface of the water, the awakening, darting schools of fish. My mother instilled in us early the fear of spiders under the watery, floating dock, the tale of Jessica dog. We stood on the crest of the yard. The lake heaved its large, grey body. My brothers were having friends over and we were taken somewhere else, to a chlorinated pool inside a building. My father had already grown restless. There was talk of another job, a move more into town where we could be in a neighborhood, where it was easier to see people, to talk things out. We were all swayed by decimation, by the temptation and sweet tumult of sudden change, which out of impatience, an easy misunderstanding, steps over, defies Nature's gradualness. In the new neighborhood of close knit houses and smaller yards, of windows which glance into the blank surfaces of one another, Nature was patted down and kept collared. Certain trees were pulled because of their vicinity, because of a whim, and others planted, just so. We took the wild house, yes, with the spruces that bowed before the doors, but the lake was gone. It was a small yard which ended at a line of thinly spaced trees. A road swerved by the house, led down a ways to a golf course, a country club. My father rode his golf cart; he rested a glass of pale vodka and Rosa's lime that had been mixed with a chilled plastic stirring stick on his knee. I lay on the carpet in the house and the heat of the sun suffocated me as it cut lines through a series of closed doors, through the reimagined air formed by air-conditioning. I had seen my new room and its muted complacency, its dark tones. In the morning the white curtains would pale, glimmer in new light, but then sway under a day of blue shadows. I was not to stay long in there anyway, but to walk down the road and socialize. At the country club pool I laid out, having grown a little older. The other girls whispered and congregated. It was at this house, in this neighborhood, that my parents' marriage disintegrated. Bills were no longer paid, and a procession of ants invaded the house, up through the vents, marching through the tangled expanse of the carpets. A storm ripped a hole through the roof one day and afterwards rainwater was to trickle down into the second floor and make a pool of such breadth that it reached the first and made of the shorn carpet, the brightly lit hallways, little, moving streams. By then I had already moved to the city where all was talking, all was statement, but then one was in danger of talking the soul all out. I had tired of the talking. I succumbed to silence here; stricken, I began to watch the neighbors. There was across an alleyway in a building opposite an overweight Eastern European woman who, every day, out of her second floor window set a bird in a cage to dangle in the sky from a clothesline.
In spring is when the lake always broke. A fine, needle-making rain would fall and the lake's grey pallor be broken up. The bats scattered, the returning geese. I could see from my towered window the darkening of the beach. Without shoes I ran down the stairs, through the kitchen, and out the door. The screen door banged and I moved across the wet, clinging grass to the blackening shore. The lake was silver-crusted; it circled, gleamed like nausea. I spread my arms out. The rain had soaked my clothes and matted them down against my child's body. The wet, crushed pebbles of the beach clung to my feet, and the lake heaved, taking in the new water. Jessica dog had drowned that past winter and it was her body that would rise with the thaw. The rain pattered mutely against the great body of the water, like a drowned out singing voice. I leaned forward to hear better and it lapped, surrounded my bare toes.
“Alice!”
I turned, wiping my long, wet hair out of the way, and saw my mother, darting down the patio stairs in her sweater. The lights were on in the house, wavering like fire through the flicks of rain.
“Alice!”
Her face was pulled back in anger. I was swooped up and then set to my feet. My hand was squeezed; I was dragged back up the hill. I looked back, but the lake had lost its density. It had knitted itself closed.
She took me into the dank basement. The hanging down ceiling bulb swung upon our entry with the slamming of the door. She pulled my shirt over my head, had me step out of my shorts, and then grabbed an old, holey towel, which lay upon the chair, and rubbed my shoulders and my hair.
“What is wrong with you? You'll get sick doing that!”
No sunset came that day. The sky darkened without spectacle. My mother yanked me upstairs. My brothers were in the play room before the television, playing video games. I saw my father cross to the other television in the living room with his drink, and my mother hurry back to her cooking. The kitchen was in disarray. She picked up her glass of wine at the counter. I went to the window where the husky dog was thumping her long-haired tail. Droplets as I turned my arm over fell to the floor. "Ah damn it," my mother muttered, with an oven mitt on. The dog's tail made a low, nervous thump. The rain pressed gently like unhurried hands against the windows, the locked doors of the house.