explode. Happens to someone you know means it’s getting that much closer.”
“You didn’t know Michelle, not really.”
“She was the sister of a friend of mine. She got blown up. When I felt like it was going to happen to me, I thought of her. So that means I’m thinking of you. I’m thinking before you go off and conquer the world you’re gonna come find me. Next thing I know you’re knocking at my door.”
“I didn’t knock. I didn’t get the chance.”
“I knew you were there.”
“When did you get to be such a spooky little thing?”
“If you need ’em to survive you’ll grow eyes in the back of your head. I read that in a book. Got any tapes?”
Annie lifted her elbow off the armrest, which swung open to reveal a compartment. She knew her father kept things in there.
“Tracy Chapman?” Patty groaned. “We gotta listen to ‘Revolution’ all the way to the Gulf?”
“Is that where we’re going?” Annie said.
Twelve miles due south was a small lake where they used to go with groups of friends, and Annie drove them there. Midafternoon, it was still heavy and hot, and the coolness coming off the water never quite made it up to where they sat in the flickering shade of a poplar tree. But there was grass there, and Patty unfurled a small blanket where she set out water and juice and a jar of applesauce and an extra Pamper and some swabs. It turned out Lizzie could walk, and she stumbled around their patch of grass in veering headlong rushes that reminded Annie of drunken boys who would never accept a steadying hand and who were always going to kick somebody’s ass. Soon Patty had reached her limit. She said, “Watch her a minute, Legs, will you? I gotta cool off.”
Patty stripped off her jeans, panties, undershirt—she wore no bra— and stepped out of her sandals. It was too hot for fishermen, and what had once been a small sand beach was now just mud. The water level was down and the surface filmed with algae, which gave off a dank, clinging smell. Annie watched Patty wade out into it, so white, so boyishly bony and so small and sagging in the breasts that Annie almost cried out in protest. Patty went under, and her little unendearing daughter suddenly sat down at Annie’s side and appeared to be staring out at the water with her. Patty came back up, her whiteness a stark pallor, like something you see at the back of a cave, and little Lizzie began to smile with her mouth wide open and to wave her hands and coo. She appeared to be calling out to her mother. Ma-ma-ma something, sitting like a little sultan robed in her baby fat. Her mother waved back and stepped up onto the mud. Except for some heaviness in the thighs, Patty was all bone.
Annie didn’t even see the yellows and greens and the dark dot of that daisy tattoo. Had Lizzie taken that too?
“She likes you,” Patty said. “You like your aunt Annie, don’t you? She’ll never sit still for me like that.”
Aunt Annie told the truth. “I don’t know why.”
No sooner had Patty sat back down beside her friend than Lizzie rolled to her feet and began to waddle away. Patty caught up with her. They went down to the water and Patty coaxed her far enough in to get her feet wet. They squished mud together. They picked up objects from the shore. Patty taught her words, “stone,” “leaf,” and then Annie heard “crawdad,” and watched Patty touch the crawdad shell she’d picked up, lightly, to Lizzie’s skin. At Lizzie’s age Annie would have screamed bloody murder, but Lizzie began a sputtering laugh. Patty touched herself with it, then touched her daughter’s fat little leg. She inched the shell up the leg, and Lizzie never stopped laughing. Patty was laughing too, and before it was over she’d touched them both all over their bodies. It was like some curious—and crazy—initiation, as strange a thing as Annie had seen, and when Patty held the crawdad shell up to Annie to see if she’d like a touch too, Annie screamed, “You bring that thing up here and I’m gone!”
Patty laughed and threw the shell in the water. Lizzie, of course, began to cry. Even after Patty had fed her daughter the applesauce and given her some more orange juice, even after she’d coaxed her to take a nap there on the blanket, in the shade of the tree, Annie could still smell the crawdad on her friend’s fingers, and over both the mother’s and the daughter’s skin. It was that smell of shell death, an emptiness that had once housed life and never would again.
She lay back herself. She dreamed of Michelle, or of a sister self, who was stalking her around an empty house. The house was like her father’s except that the sunporch off the living room seemed to open out onto some vista like the lake. Her sleep was light. As her sister drove her from room to room—“You can’t stay here. He’s gone, don’t you see! This is house-breaking, this is a crime!”—Michelle’s ultimate objective seemed to be to drive Annie into the lake. But Annie would not go out there. She tried to say the word, “I have ‘proprietary’ rights,” but it was as if she were a child and two syllables were as far as she could string her sounds. At the door to the sunporch she turned to make her stand, and it was not Michelle she saw hounding her out of doors, it was the fat little toddler Lizzie, swollen to a truly destructive size. She was making a wreck of the house, and as Annie reached out to fend her off, it was the smell that drove her back. She complained, “Where’s her mother, she needs her Pamper changed,” but that wasn’t the smell she smelled.
Annie woke up, the dream slow to wear off, still upset with her friend for letting her smelly daughter run amok.
But it was Patty who got in the first word. “What are they afraid of, Legs? If they’re afraid we’re gonna fuck around on ’em I could understand it, because we will. But say we don’t. Say we’re as faithful as the six o’clock news. They got us where they want us and they’re still scared shitless. Why is that?”
Annie had been dreaming her dream and Patty had lain there entertaining her thoughts. Somehow it came to the same thing. Annie closed her eyes again. “Men?” she murmured.
“No, not men. Gorillas. Of course, men. Take Brian,” Patty went on, slipping back into her ruminative tone that was strictly for show. “When he catches up with me, if he doesn’t have a gun or a knife in his hand or something about ten times the size of his dick he’s gonna stand there and holler and not do a goddamn thing. I’m like, let him blow out, and he’ll turn around and leave and hate himself until he begins to build up steam again. What’s your opinion on that?”
“My opinion is that women get beaten to death every day and some men like using their fists. Maybe it gives them a satisfying sense of contact, I don’t know. These women are called ‘battered women,’ and they’re the ones who’re scared. I’d be scared. I’d go the police.”
“No, you wouldn’t, Legs. No one’s gonna lay a hand on you.”
Annie was up on an elbow now. She found Patty up on her elbow, three, four feet away. She remembered sleepovers they’d had. They’d shared a double bed—most often in Annie’s house—and had lain like this, gossiping sometimes ’til dawn.
“Probably not his kid anyway,” Patty confided.
Annie let out a savvy, mock-incredulous, half-guffawing laugh. “Then who is the father?”
“One of four,” Patty replied.
The three or four feet separating them suddenly seemed like inches to Annie. She lay back and closed her eyes.
“You don’t believe me,” Patty stated
