“You know, I thought I remembered something the other day.”
The memory is a blur. Her mother is not herself (or perhaps some truer version of herself, waiting inside to come out). Red wine, sharpand specific. Viola is outside, her legs covered in hungry red rash, tear-taste and streaky face. She had been hiding. “There was a man there,” she says. “I couldn’t get her attention. My legs itched so hard I thought they would fall off.” Yes, her mother was shouting, red-faced, something about a pair of shoes. She describes it to him: the nausea at receiving more anger than a small body could bear, her mother pulling her arm, hard, into the car—the memory contains the feeling of a sore socket.Don’t tell anyone, she kept saying.Don’t tell anyone.
It disturbs them both, the warp of it.
“Are you sure that happened?” he asks.
“Maybe not.”
Maybe not.Maybe just a scene from a film. Maybe multiple memories collapsed in an uncontrolled explosion.Stop trying, she tells herself.You can’t force it.
“Why do you think you’re so afraid of her?”
“I’m not afraid of her…”
But isn’t she? How is it possible for a person to be both devoted and devious, known and unfathomable? To both love and abandon her family? Around them the water is coming up fast. A tall wave licks at the bottom of his towel, claws steadily toward the dunes.
“Are we going to get stranded?” she asks. She is trying to sound casual. She is too old to be anxious about something like this, but her heart will not stop hammering in her chest.
“I’ve ordered a shark to come and pick us up,” he says, smiling. “Shuber. Very popular around here.”
“Ha ha.” The rising tide is constricting her windpipe.
“Viola, the reason I’m asking is that, you know, if we are to go public, she’s liable to come up.”
It would be very embarrassing if she stopped breathing. More embarrassing than getting caught in a riptide, or eaten by a shark, to die from just thinking about the numerous ways that she could die. Have you seen bodies that have been in water? Pale and puffed up like porpoises. She is having trouble breathing now, and Orson is asking her if she isokay, and there is barely enough room to shake her head no. Her neck is white-hot, and breath thin and gasping, he is pulling her to his chest, not understanding that she is going to die because she can’t breathe, because she is mortified that she can’t breathe, because the tide is rising, and at the bottom is her mother’s body, rotting away; she is wearing a dress made out of seaweed and her hair is made out of seaweed and her eyes are giant barnacles and she is reaching out her arms and dragging her down.
1994
Her sister’s house, a Thursday afternoon, the radio, kids rolling around on her lawn. Viola, in a blue dress, curls sprouting out of her head. Sebastian in green hand-me-down overalls from a friend of Sadie’s, a little stain on the back of the pants.
In the kitchen, Sadie is pouring a glass of red. “You joining?”
“Just a splash,” Susan says, because she’s driving, but Sadie knows she wants it desperately. The travel is hurting her. Being away from her children is hurting her. Being with them—in such short, smothering bursts—needing to let Al have his own time, trying to undo everything his mother has done during the week, it hurts her. Three years of their faces rising and falling as she passes back and forth through the door. They have stopped running to greet her. Viola, a creature of ritual, wants only Daddy at bedtime.
Has she left it too late?
She rifles through Sadie’s refrigerator, tops up sippy cups with watered-down orange juice. Sadie has agreed to film Susan today, an audition for a major feature that her agent put her up for.They’d be stupid not to want you, Orson said. The director was a big Academy type and the way everyone talked about him intimidated her. Like there were right and wrong methods. But she liked the role: a young mother in a psychological horror film whose baby is kidnapped by her deranged neighbor. If she got it, it would be intense. It would mean she couldn’t come back for some time.
They sit on the back patio as Sebastian explains to his sister why his blocks have to stack on top of hers, frustrated that his logic is unconvincing.You’re not listening, he says, with an exhausted emphasis thatsounds like his father. They’ve tried to shield the children from their arguments, but maybe their hearing is improving. Or maybe they’ve gotten louder.
“Shall we just get this out of the way?” Susan asks, collecting the camcorder from her bag. “Maybe we could run it a bit first.”
Sadie rolls her eyes. “Don’t people get paid to do this for you now?”
“Not really. Please, it will be fun!”
Sadie relents and reads back the lines in the gravelly voice of a man. It keeps making Susan laugh. Susan’s character is harsh, a woman on the verge of a breakdown, and her raised voice is agitating the children. Sebastian is pulling Viola’s hair and she is screaming, which ruins at least two takes. Again, now with a different kind of frustration in her voice, the character growing dimensions, mastering her drunkenness. Harness the anger, the sense of loss, all the conflict she feels when she looks at her husband’s face.
Don’t tell anyone, the most difficult line, difficult not to look down at Viola, who keeps returning (so intent now!) pulling at her fingertips, picking up the ashtray on the table and asking what it is.
“Don’t even need this out,” Sadie says, placing it out of reach. “Gave up smoking for Lent.”
“Shit,” Susan says. “Lent!”
“It only started today. You could give up… coffee.”
“Or like, everything in my life.”
