How to Breathe Underwater Read online

  “Please,” Ella said, but her mother closed her eyes again. Ella stood there for a long time watching her, but she didn’t move or speak. Finally Ella turned and went back outside.

  By the time she reached the tree castle Peter had dragged Clarie halfway across the lawn. He turned his eyes on Ella, and she stared back at him. The sound of the mantra continued unbroken from the house. Peter hoisted Clarie again under the arms and dragged her to the bushes, her bare feet bumping over the grass. Then he rolled her over until she was hidden in shadow. He pulled her dress down so it covered her thighs, and turned her head toward the fence that bordered the backyard.

  “Get some leaves and stuff,” he said. “We have to cover her.”

  Ella would not move. She took Benjamin’s hand, but he pulled away from her and wandered across the lawn, pulling up handfuls of grass. She watched the children pick up twigs, Spanish moss, leaves, anything they could find. The boy in purple overalls gathered cedar bark from a flower bed, and Peter dragged fallen branches out of the underbrush near the fence. They scattered everything they found over Clarie’s body. In five minutes they had covered her entirely.

  “Go back inside,” Peter said. “If anyone cries or says anything, I’ll kill them.”

  Ella turned to go, and that was when she saw her tooth, a tiny white pebble in the weeds. She picked it up and rubbed it clean. Then she knelt beside Clarie, clearing away moss and leaves until she found Clarie’s hand. She dropped the tooth into the palm and closed the fingers around it. A shiver spread through her chest, and she covered the hand again. Then she put her arm around Benjamin and they all went back inside. Drawn by the sound of the chanting, they wandered into the hall. All around them hung the yellow photographs, the stony men and women and children looking down at them with sad and knowing eyes. In an oval of black velvet one girl in a white dress held the string of a wooden duck, her lips open as if she were about to speak. Her eyes had the wildness of Clarie’s eyes, her legs the same bowed curve.

  At last there was a rustle from the meditation room, and the adults drifted out into the hall. They blinked at the light and rubbed their elbows and knees. Ella’s mother and father linked arms and moved toward their children. Benjamin gave a hiccup. His eyes looked strange, the pupils huge, the whites flat and dry. Their mother noticed right away. “We’d better get going,” she said to Ella’s father. “Ben’s tired.”

  She went into the foyer and pulled their shoes from the pile. Mister Kaplan followed, looking around in bewilderment, as if he could not believe people were leaving. He patted Benjamin on the head and asked Ella’s mother if she wanted to take some leftover food. Ella’s mother shook her head no. Her father thanked Mister Kaplan for his hospitality. Somewhere toward the back of the house the dog began to bark. Ella pulled Benjamin through the front door, barefoot, and her parents followed them to the car.

  All the way past the rows of live oaks, past the cemetery where the little tombs stood like grounded boats, past the low flat shotgun houses with their flaking roofs, Benjamin sat rigid on the back seat and cried without a sound. Ella felt the sobs leaving his chest in waves of hot air. She closed her eyes and followed the car in her mind down the streets that led to their house, until it seemed they had driven past their house long ago and were moving on to a place where strange beds awaited them, where they would fall asleep thinking of dark forests and wake to the lives of strangers.

  When She Is Old and I Am Famous

  There are grape leaves, like a crown, on her head. Grapes hang in her hair, and in her hands she holds the green vines. She dances with both arms in the air. On her smallest toe she wears a ring of pink shell.

  Can someone tell her, please, to go home? This is my Italy and my story. We are in a vineyard near Florence. I have just turned twenty. She is a girl, a gangly teen, and she is a model. She is famous for almost getting killed. Last year, when she was fifteen, a photographer asked her to dance on the rail of a bridge and she fell. A metal rod beneath the water pierced her chest. Water came into the wound, close to her heart, and for three weeks she was in the hospital with an infection so furious it made her chant nonsense. All the while she got thinner and more pale, until, when she emerged, they thought she might be the best model there ever was. Her hair is wavy and long and buckeye-brown, and her blue eyes have a stunned, sad look to them. She is five feet eleven inches tall and weighs one hundred and thirteen pounds. She has told me so.

  This week she is visiting from Paris, where she lives with her father, my Uncle Claude. When Claude was a young man he left college to become the darling of a great couturier, who introduced him to the sequin-and-powder world of Paris drag. Monsieur M. paraded my uncle around in black-and-white evening gowns, high-heeled pumps, and sprayed-up diva hairdos. I have seen pictures in his attic back in Fernald, Indiana, my uncle leaning over some balustrade in a cloud of pink chiffon, silk roses at his waist. One time he appeared in a couture photo spread in Vogue. All this went on for years, until I was five, when a postcard came asking us to pick him up at the Chicago airport. He came off the plane holding a squirming baby. Neither my mother nor I knew anything about his having a child, or even a female lover. Yet there she was, my infant cousin, and here she is now, in the vineyard, doing her grape-leaf dance for my friends and me.

  Aïda. That is her terrible name. Ai-ee-duh: two cries of pain and one of stupidity. The vines tighten around her body as she spins, and Joseph snaps photographs. She knows he will like it, the way the leaves cling, the way the grapes stain her white dress. We are trespassing here in a vintner’s vines, spilling the juice of his expensive grapes, and if he sees us he will surely shoot us. What an end to my tall little cousin. Between the purple stains on her chest, a darker stain spreads. Have I mentioned yet that I am fat?

  Isn’t it funny, how I’ve learned to say it? I am fat. I am not skin or muscle or gristle or bone. What I am, the part of my body that I most am, is fat. Continuous, white, lighter than water, a source of energy. No one can hold all of me at once. Does this constitute a crime? I know how to carry myself. Sometimes I feel almost graceful. But all around I hear the thin people’s bombast: Get Rid of Flabby Thighs Now! Avoid Holiday Weight-Gain Nightmares! Lose Those Last Five Pounds! What is left of a woman once her last five pounds are gone?

  I met Drew and Joseph in my drawing class in Florence. Joseph is a blond sculptor from Manhattan, and Drew is a thirty-six-year-old painter from Wisconsin. In drawing class we had neighboring easels, and Drew and I traded roll-eyed glances over Joe’s loud Walkman. We both found ourselves drawing in techno-rhythm. When we finally complained, Joe told us he’d started wearing it because Drew and I talked too much. I wish that were true. I hardly talk to anyone, even after three months in Florence.

  One evening as the three of us walked home from class we passed a billboard showing Cousin Aïda in a gray silk gown, and when I told them she was my cousin they both laughed, as if I had made some sort of clever feminist comment. I insisted that I was telling the truth. That was a mistake. They sat me down at a café and made me talk about her for half an hour. Joseph wondered whether she planned to complete her schooling or follow her career, and Drew had to know whether she suffered from eating disorders and skewed self-esteem. It would have been easier if they’d just stood in front of the billboard and drooled. At least I would have been able to anticipate their mute stupor when they actually met her.

  Aïda rolls her shoulders and lets her hair fall forward, hiding her face in shadow. They can’t take their eyes off her. Uncle Claude would scold her for removing her sun hat. I have picked it up and am wearing it now. It is gold straw and fits perfectly. What else of hers could I put on? Not even her gloves.

  “Now stand perfectly still,” Joseph says, extending his thumb and index finger as if to frame Aïda. He snaps a few pictures, then lets the camera drop. He looks as if he would like to throw a net over her. He will show these pictures to his friends back home, telling them how he slept with her between t
he grapevines. This will be a lie, I hope. “Dance again,” he says, “this time slower.”

  She rotates her hips like a Balinese dancer. “Like this?”

  “That’s it,” he says. “Nice and slow.” Surreptitiously he adjusts his shorts.

  When Drew looks at my cousin I imagine him taking notes for future paintings. In Wisconsin he works as a professional muralist, and here he is the best drawing student in our class, good even at representing the foot when it faces forward. I am hopeless at drawing the foot at any angle. My models all look like they are sliding off the page. I’ve seen photographs of Drew’s murals, twenty-foot-high paintings on the sides of elementary schools and parking structures, and his figures look as though they could step out of the wall and crush your car. He does paintings of just the feet. I can tell he’s studying Aïda’s pink toes right now. Later he will draw her, at night in his room, while his upstairs neighbor practices violin until the crack of dawn. “If she didn’t live there I’d have to hire her to live there,” he tells me. She may keep him up all night, but at least she makes him paint well.

  There are certain things I can never abide: lack of food, lack of sleep, and Aïda. But she is here in Italy on my free week because our parents thought it would be fun for us. “Aïda doesn’t get much rest,” my mother told me. “She needs time away from that business in France.”

  I told my mother that Aïda made me nervous. “Her name has an umlaut, for crying out loud.”

  “She’s your cousin,” my mother said.

  “She’s been on the covers of twelve magazines.”

  “Well, Mira”—and here her voice became sweet, almost reverent—“you are a future Michelangelo.”

  There’s no question about my mother’s faith in me. She has always believed I will succeed, never once taking into account my failure to represent the human figure. She says I have a style. That may be true, but it does not make me the next anybody. Sometimes I freeze in front of the canvas, full of the knowledge that if I keep painting, sooner or later I will fail her.

  My cousin always knew how important she was, even when she was little. Over at her house in Indiana I had to watch her eat ice-cream bars while I picked at my Sunmaid raisins. I tried to be nice because my mother had said, “Be nice.” I told her she had a pretty name, that I knew she was named after a character from a Verdi opera, which my mom and I had listened to all the way from Chicago to central Indiana. Aïda licked the chocolate from around her lips, then folded the silver wrapper.

  “I’m not named after the character,” she said. “I’m named after the entire opera.”

  The little bitch is a prodigy, a skinny Venus, a genius. She knows how to shake it. She will never be at a loss for work or money. She is a human dollar sign. Prada has made millions on her. And still her eyes remain clear and she gets enough sleep at night.

  Joseph has run out of film. “You have beautiful teeth,” he says hopelessly.

  She grins for him.

  Drew looks at me and shakes his head, and I am thankful.

  When she’s tired of the dance, Aïda untwines the vines from her body and lets them fall to the ground. She squashes a plump grape between her toes, looking into the distance. Then, as though compelled by some sign in the sky, she climbs to the top of a ridge and looks down into the valley. Joseph and Drew follow to see what she sees, and I have no choice but to follow as well. Where the vines end, the land slopes down into a bowl of dry grass. Near its center, surrounded by overgrown hedges and flower beds, the vintner’s house rises, a sprawling two-story villa with a crumbling tile roof. Aïda inhales and turns toward the three of us, her eyes steady. “That’s where my mother lives,” she announces.

  It is such an astounding lie, I cannot even bring myself to respond. Aïda’s mother was the caterer at a party Uncle Claude attended during his “wild years”; my own mother related the story to me long ago, as a cautionary tale. When Aïda was eight weeks old her mother left her with Claude, and that was that. But Aïda’s tone is earnest and forthright, and both Joseph and Drew look up, confused.

  “I thought you lived with your dad in Paris,” Joseph says. He shoots a hard glance at me, as if I’ve been concealing her whereabouts all this time.

  “She does,” I say.

  Aïda shrugs. “My mother’s family owns this whole place.”

  “Really?” Joseph says.

  “My mom and I aren’t very close,” Aïda says, and sits down. She ties a piece of grass into a knot, then tosses it down the hill. “Actually, the last time I saw her I was three.” She draws her legs up and hugs her knees, and her shoulders rise and fall as she sighs. “It’s not the kind of thing you do in Italy, tote around your bastard kid. It would have been a vergogna to the famiglia, as they say.” Aïda looks down at the stone house in the valley.

  Joseph and Drew exchange a glance, seeming to decide how to handle this moment. I find myself wordless. It’s true that Aïda’s mother didn’t want to raise her. I don’t doubt that it would have been a disgrace to her Catholic family. What baffles me is how Aïda can present this story as truth when she knows I know it’s bullshit. What does she expect will happen? Does she think I’ll pretend to believe her?

  Aïda stands and dusts her hands against her dress, then begins to make her way down the slope. Joe gives us a baffled grin, shakes his head as if ashamed of himself, and follows her.

  “Where the hell do you think you’re going?” I call to Aïda.

  She turns, and the wind lifts her hair like a pennant. Her chin is set hard. “I’m going to get something from her,” she says. “I’m not going back to France without a memento.”

  “Let’s stop this now, Aïda,” I say. “You’re not related to anyone who lives in that house.” In fact, it didn’t look as if anyone lived there at all. The garden was a snarl of overgrown bushes and the windows looked blank, like sightless eyes.

  “Go home,” she says. “Joe will come with me. And don’t pretend you’re worried. If I didn’t come back, you’d be glad.”

  She turns away and I watch her descend toward the villa, my tongue dry in my mouth.

  These past few days Aïda has been camping on my bedroom floor. Asleep she looks like a collapsed easel, something hard and angular lying where it shouldn’t. Yesterday morning I opened one eye to see her fingering the contents of a blue tin box, my private cache of condoms. When I sat up and pushed the mosquito netting aside, she shoved the box back under the bed.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “Nothing.”

  “It’s none of my business,” I said. “But if you meet a guy—”

  She gave an abbreviated ha! as if the air had been punched out of her. Then she got up and began to look for something in her suitcase. Very quietly, she said, “Of course, you’re the expert.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I said.

  She turned around and smiled with just her lips.

  “Listen, shitweed, I may not be the next Vogue cover girl, but that doesn’t mean I sleep alone every night.”

  “Whatever you say.” She shook out a teeny dress and held it against herself.

  “For God’s sake,” I said. “Do you have to be primo bitch of the whole universe?”

  She tilted her head, coy and intimate. “You know what I think, Mira? I think you’re a vibrator cowgirl. I think you’re riding the mechanical bull.”

  I had nothing to say. But something flew at her and I knew I had thrown it. She ducked. A glass candlestick broke against the wall.

  “Fucking psycho!” she shouted. “Are you trying to kill me?”

  “Get a hotel room,” I said. “You’re not staying here.”

  “Fine with me. I’ll sleep in a ditch and you can sleep alone.”

  Her tone was plain and hard, eggshell white, but for a split second her lower lip quivered. It occurred to me for the first time that she might feel shunted off, that she might see me as a kind of baby-sitter she had to abide while her father had
a break from her. Quickly I tried to replay in my mind all the names she had called me, that day and throughout our kid years, so I could shut out any thoughts that would make me feel sorry for her. “Get out of my room,” I said. She picked her way across the glass and went into the bathroom. Door click, faucet-knob squeak, and then her scream, because in my apartment there is no hot water to be had, ever, by anyone.

  Drew and I shuffle sideways down a rocky hill toward the dried-up garden. Fifty yards below, my cousin sidles along the wall of the house. I cannot imagine how she plans to enter this fortress or what she will say if someone sees her. There’s a rustle in a bank of hedges, and we see Joseph creeping along, his camera bag banging against his leg. He disappoints me. Back in New York he works in a fashion photographer’s darkroom, and he speaks of commercial photography as if it were the worst imaginable use for good chemicals and photo paper. For three months he’s photographed nothing in Florence but water and cobblestones. Today he follows Aïda as if she were leading him on a leash.

  Aïda freezes, flattening herself against the house wall. It seems she’s heard something, although there’s still no one in the garden. After a moment she moves toward a bank of curtained French doors and tries a handle. The door opens, and she disappears inside. Joseph freezes. He waits until she beckons with her hand; then he slides in and closes the door behind them. They’re gone. And I am not about to go any farther. The sun is furious and the vines too low to provide any shelter. A bag containing lunch for four people hangs heavy on my back. I am the only one who has not brought any drawing tools. It was somehow understood that I would carry the food.

  “We might as well wait here,” Drew says. “Hopefully they’ll be out soon.”

  “I hope.” The bag slides off my shoulders and falls into the dust.

  Drew reaches for the lunch. “I would have carried this for you,” he says. His eyes rest for a moment on mine, but I know he is only trying to be polite.

  There was a time when I was the one who got the attention, when my body was the one everyone admired. In junior high, where puberty was a kind of contest, you wanted to be the one with the tits out to here. I had my bra when I was nine, the first in our grade. That made me famous among my classmates. My mother, a busty woman herself, told me she was proud to see me growing up. I believed my breasts were a gift from God, and even let a few kids have an “accidental” rub at them. It wasn’t until high school, when the novelty wore off and they grew to a D-cup, that I started to see things as they really were. Bathing suits did not fit right. I spilled out of the tops of sundresses. I looked ridiculous when running or jumping. Forget cheerleading. I began smashing those breasts down with sports bras, day and night.