The Floating Woman
What made you happy? You made others happy, I know.
If I had deliberately caused you pain I would never have forgiven myself. I would have understood. Do whatever you want to me; it doesn’t matter now. Was that what you wanted to tell everyone? Even Gladys? Your body that couldn’t defend itself.
You always said you wanted to know what made me happy. Now I think what made me happy was the sensation of expansiveness. That place I went to, it’s a housing development now, with a display house like a big dollhouse. But there used to be a little woodland there owned by a man who kept sheep. As soon as I was there I felt like my soul was stretching out of my body and covering the place. That was so long ago, but I felt that I wasn’t just this little kid anymore but this spirit, this soul that was large and sealed itself over the place like a Tupperware lid. You’ll laugh at me, but we had Tupperware to think about as a new thing in our house back then. I loved the sound of water passing over pebbles and falling in a lingering way down toward the creek where boys had made a dam. Once, I was cutting stalks of tiger lilies on the other shore of the creek and my mother was with me and I thanked the trees I thanked the sky I thanked the stream; I did what I did when I was alone, saying my prayers to everything around me until my mother slapped my face and said, “What’s wrong with you.”
Darling, I’ve felt close to you always, even after you left us. I’ve felt this way most in moments resembling this one, after I plow into the lake and turn over on my back and float, and dog paddle and float, thinking this is the suspension between worlds, that I’m neither here nor there. I’m resting in the memory of a life where somehow both of us resisted our shame; shame for being so wrong so often and so overly earnest, both of us, even you. We were so besotted with Gladys, always planning for her. And now despite our interferences and fretting, she has her happiness in Jeff and their little boy. The regret of my life: that you weren’t around for that baby. The trustfulness of small children, you would have wanted to see that again. And the easy forgiveness of that little guy when their dog knocks him over.
So many sensations speed through me but from a distance, as if my mind could close in on itself, which is why I need to think of you. . . . Forgive me. Forgive me, everyone. I haven’t forgiven everyone, though, that’s for sure. When my aunt said “Stop pitying yourself” a week after our baby died. . . . Oh, I couldn’t trust her anymore. I know she thought she was helping me, but I never trusted her again after that. It was as if she poured acid on my heart. If you can’t weep when the most awful happens, when can you? My aunt’s dead now and I still feel angry at her. Isn’t that awful? And other times until we had Gladys I don’t think I knew any forgiveness at all. Gladys and I were having one of our front-lawn picnics and she rested her head against my knee and turned and looked at me with that little round dimpled baby face of hers and I thought, Thank you, God, for her. Thank you for everyone I love.
And there was the time when I learned that I had been freed, that my body was my own again, and Dr. Chulamu smiled, and I walked out of his office as if I were on strings and drove to the track at the high school. It was summer, and I was wearing my regular work shoes but it didn’t matter. I just kept running thinking I am not dying and I am made of air and I didn’t stop until my knees buckled and I went down and said “Thank you thank you, life, thank you, I’ll live better,” and when I got home and walked through the front door you said “You are so impetuous, no one can stop you. Think of the millions of women who aren’t so lucky.”
And then the time that our daughter did not get married and you weren’t alive to influence her. The boy was on his way to becoming a monster and already he wanted to stop her from seeing her friends, and the night before the wedding I couldn’t sleep and suddenly she burst into my bedroom and said, “This cannot continue,” and she and I drove out of town to avoid the more violent people from his side of the family. They were bullies; bullies make for more bullies, and for a month Gladys (why did you give her such a little old woman’s name, her groom-not-to-be complained once TO MY FACE), Gladys stayed with your sister in Washington and I thought, You would be proud of us, you would be proud. . . .
Last night I watched Pal Joey. I misremembered everything. I thought it ended badly but it didn’t. Do you remember Bruce, who named his baby Ragnar after Ernest Borgnine in The Vikings? Ragnar throws himself to the dogs. But Valhalla waits. Because he dies with his sword. He’s torn to death by wolves. Initially, they thought he’d drowned in the fjord. It’s kind of a toss-up: drown in the fjord or jump into a pit of wolves. Oh honey.
And do you remember the Christmas display? Three flaking wise men; one rubber baby; a camel; three sheep; a goat; that outsized Frosty the Snowman; a gingerbread man; and those lights you put up that ran around the house like a frenetic rash? Everything’s out in the garage now at this time of the year—and I’m afraid to tell you, at every time of the year—like a sad little migrant camp. And the dentist who used to live next door and complained about our Christmas lights and the music that came out of Frosty and the dentist used his leaf blower so much all the time that you called him Horatio Fucking Leafblower? Do you remember?
Do you remember when Gladys didn’t get to be the jewel in the parish priest’s feast day crown? I forgot to mend her red jumper, which would have been perfect for the play, the perfect red for the ruby for the parish priest’s crown. Did you know—I don’t know if you remember—do you know that she wore that red jumper for the audition, with worn spots in the corduroy and the strap broken and the chief nun looked at her in that perfect red, the color of open heart surgery, and she turned to the little Schneider girl who happened to be wearing a dark but citrusy orange with tiny polka dots like some kind of thrush disease on a lily, and the nun said that the Schneider girl made a better ruby than Gladys did?
That was around the time when you were flirting with that Australian woman and I was sick at heart, and then you came inside from examining the sink hole in the back yard and whispered to me that you found a condom on Frosty’s nose—hideous neighborhood kids—and you scraped the condom off with a stick. The condom must have looked like a little flag of surrender for a mouse, and after you washed your hands you took Gladys in your arms and told her and me that you wouldn’t want your daughter parading in red like some South Seas maiden in a hula ceremony before a syphilitic missionary and Gladys thank god didn’t even know what you meant but she stopped crying. And that night in bed when you brought up the issue of the Frosty condom again I turned over and said, “So, Frosty’s in love,” and I think that did it for the Australian woman. I mean, would she ever have said that? I could feel the air going right out of your desire for that woman at that very moment. So Frosty’s in love.
When one is in a terrible situation the mind must pause, the mind must relax, and as you always advised me: just feel, darling, just concentrate on sensations, let your mind rest and then there’s hope, the mind finds a way. Why couldn’t you have followed your own advice?
It’s funny how I remember things. The tiny delicate-looking man in the bar in Malaysia — when we were always traveling somewhere after the baby died and before Gladys came along. That man approached us with such friendliness and courtesy. He was wandering around in the bar wearing a brown suit. How good to see fellow countrymen, he said in that courtly way. His accent was British. I laughed and told him we weren’t his countrymen. “Ah, so I’m among the formerly colonized,” he said. “Excuse me, but how good to meet you!” And there it was: that elaborate courtesy that we liked so much, but ebullience too, a lightness in his nature like a man used to meeting new people and being welcomed. We were on our second scotch when some people arrived and took the next table over. They were British, too, and said, “He’s playing you for drinks.” We looked at our charming new friend. What had we been talking about? His adventures in Kuala Lumpur, I think, and he transformed instantly, cowering, sinking lower at the table. “You here, sponging again,” someone at the next table sneered to him. And for the first time I really saw the brown suit that the man at our table was wearing and how it was frayed at the cuffs and dirty. His jacket was too small and heavy and buttoned up despite the humid weather.
But you. You ordered the man at our table another drink and said, loudly, “What a gift you’ve got, man, for a story. My wife’s hair is standing on end!” Which was a joke because I was always washing my hair right before bed and when I woke up in the morning my hair had these funny cowlicks. And then we were both laughing, and we made sure to laugh at every joke our new friend told us because even if he was sponging from us he was our guest and one of the things we hated most was to see someone made to feel ashamed.
I know Everett is usually up early too and takes the boat out and he’ll see me out here, far out, but here, and he’s made of curiosity. . . . Unforgivable of me. . . .
I thought that you would never forgive me for so many of my failings—but then, yes, I learned that you would, because one day after we had been married eleven years I turned to you and said, “You are my happiness,” and while you hated sentimentality you held your tongue and I saw your neck blush and the blush soak up over your cheeks and I thought, Oh my that I can make you feel this way. I had no idea because we had taken some wrong turns, but there you were, the whole opinionated breadth of you.
And later, after you weren’t with us anymore, I thought I will reach you again, dear, on the other shore, and I thought you would laugh at me; you didn’t believe that we had a life after this life, but then you could be so wrong sometimes. If you could talk to me now and I could hear you I know what you would say: Think straight, Dorothy. Think. You don’t swim well, so why have you done this? You shouldn’t have been so absent-minded. You have to take account of your limitations. People will think you killed yourself. Don’t give them the pleasure. Gladys will be sickened and crazy and confused. What were you thinking, just getting up in the morning and walking out into the water and flopping over onto your back and floating and floating and telling yourself little stories?
But you can’t struggle now. Try for shore for a while, dog paddle in that hilarious way you dog paddle, and then before you get tired lie on your back and keep on floating. Keep calm. Remember what I told you when you were punishing yourself so long ago. You said, “I can’t help but feel guilty; all the things I haven’t done, all the suffering and sadness I haven’t stopped when I could have stopped it.”
“Do you think you’re God?” I asked.
“No,” you said. “I don’t think I’m God. I just feel so guilty for all I haven’t done to help people.”
“God’s the one who should feel guilty.”
I’ll say it to you again: God’s the one who should feel guilty. Lie back now. Don’t be afraid. Fear never helped us at all.
The indignity for Gladys, but she knows me, our Gladys. She has forgiven us, even for giving her such an awful name. They call her Glad, that’s what her friends call her. And it fits her.
I think of Gladys when she was hardly more than a baby maybe a three-and-a-half-year-old and we were splashing about together in the bathtub and I was a young mother and wasn’t yet grateful for being young, although I was grateful for Gladys. She kept babbling about something and then she cried out in this suddenly mature voice, “Do you think heaven is this nice?”
Did you teach her to say that? I’ve had my heaven, you used to say, a joke after a decent meal. Your one bit of hyperbole. You left the other hyperboles to me.
Even now I want to tell myself that you’re waking up Everett. You’re interceding, bending over that old man’s face, his wet old mouth, making him wake. It will be good for him, thinking he’s saving me. It will be good for me, thinking I’m saved. It is odd, I suppose, to think that it will be good for you too. Given your skepticism, given that you must have thought no one again will ever reach you.
Copyright © 2008 by Lee Upton
