Excerpt: “Anniversary”

Danny won’t put his face in the water.  The other Flippers are doing their bobs, popping in and out of the water like corks.  The mothers of these children, cheerful women with permed hair and pedicures, are the good mothers.  They are married to the fathers of these children and they have chosen well—their men aren’t the leaving kind.  Since the birth of their Little Flippers they’ve enrolled them in a series of self-improvement classes, beginning with parent-infant swimming lessons and moving up to parent-tot.  Now the children are fish, little fish who also play Suzuki violin, leap across the high school auditorium every spring in hundred-dollar costumes, kick a soccer ball with alarming enthusiasm, perform somersaults on gymnastic mats, know the French words for good night and cat.

This is what Danny is up against:  children who have been raised by professionals.  His mother, on the other hand, is given to clandestine weeping in the grocery store.  She has been known to abandon her cart altogether.

The women’s voices rise and fall as they talk to their toddlers but I can’t make out the words.  Where was I, what was I doing, when these women were dunking their newborns underwater like Baptists at the river?  Hoping Aaron wouldn’t leave me, which he has now done.  Waiting for my milk to come in, umbilical cords to fall off, nipples to heal, babies to sleep.  So much of it is about fatigue.  Do you have the energy to live your life, or don’t you?  It isn’t because fathers leave or mothers can’t reach across a dinner table to still those drumming fingers and say, Where?  Where are you going?  It’s just whether or not you can keep your own head above water.

Audrey, who at two already seems filled with the rage of the disenfranchised, is at this moment floating in her inner tube, murmuring about birds, her eyes closed like a blues singer.  Jessica has fallen asleep in the carrier, her mouth still working the pacifier.  From here I can see the playground where I have spent hundreds of bored hours.  Three teenage girls swing high.  One of them has a loud laugh.  A woman reads a magazine on a bench, her sons—twins—crashing their yellow Tonka trucks into each other.  The clouds are almost absurd in their perfect white puffiness, drifting across large skies.  Audrey abandons her inner tube and starts filling and dumping an old Cool Whip container.   Jessica sleeps.  I need to look over at Danny.  I know he needs me to.

I dreamed that Thomas came to pick me up in his red VW bug.  He looked straight ahead as I got into the car.  He was wearing his fringe coat, his hair hiding one eye.  Right away I could see that something was wrong.  Something in his face.  He was dead, of course.  He was driving, but he was dead.  He let me get out of the car, but not before he had turned that distorted, pale face to me, as if to say, See?  Do you get it now?  He drove off, calling out Bye!  Bye! in this jaunty way that didn’t go with what had come before.  I woke up to the car backfiring, small explosive bursts.

I turn.  Danny is watching me.  He’s been watching me this whole time.  His hair ruffles in the breeze, his brown eyes are glossy and beseeching even through the goggles.  He holds his arm against his bony chest.  We’re maybe twenty yards from each other.  I call out to him, “Okay, Danny.  I’m coming.”  I am trying to sound like someone who can get through the day.  He doesn’t care if I’m mad or crazy, as long as he is freed from the terrible water, from the tyranny of his peers with their sleek bobbing heads.  Gretchen shrugs as he climbs the ladder.

It’s just the day that it is, always this day.

“Come back and try again tomorrow, Dan the man,” Gretchen says, for my benefit.  I wrap a towel around his fragile shoulders, and even Audrey gets out of the pool fast when I ask her to in this voice.  I avoid the stares of the other mothers.  It’s a small town, I’ll have to face them somewhere—the store, the park, in line at McDonald’s—but not now.