most beautiful place I’d ever seen.
“Joe!” I called. “Can we go in?”
Joe didn’t answer, just pulled off his shirt and jumped from the bank into the water. I stripped off my sundress and tiptoed across the sand. My feet, ankles, knees, thighs entered the water, and the cold advanced with an excruciating certainty that was lovely and painful all at once. Beyond the narrow strip of sand, the bottom of the pond was thick with mud and slime. I felt it squirt between my toes, my feet sinking deeper with each step. The cold clutched at my hips, my stomach, my bare chest, and it was only then I remembered that I could not swim.
My feet lost their grip on the slippery bottom. My head slid under smoothly, silently. My mind registered only surprise: at the cold, at the heavy silence, at the quality of the underwater light—green and glancing gold—and the fine algae that drifted like mossy snowflakes in the water. I waved my arms, and the algae spun crazily, an explosion of green particles unburdened by gravity. In the distance I made out the bulging eyes and long, spiked mustache of a catfish.
I wanted to stay here. It was beautiful and strange in a way that the gray house and our new life were not. That life was only strange, only coarse and dirty. Underwater in the pond was the first time I felt wonder.
And then Joe’s strong hand gripped my shoulder and he hauled me up out of the gold and out of the wonder. I inhaled, and the cold water invaded me. I thought I’d swallowed a minnow, a whole school of minnows, and their sharp silver bodies cut deeply into the interior spaces of my nose and chest.
“Fiona!” Joe cried. I coughed and sputtered as Joe pulled me onto the grass. I lay on the bank heaving and then vomited in one satisfying, emptying gasp.
The look on Joe’s face was terrible. “Fi, are you okay? I’m so sorry. This was so stupid. So stupid. Noni never taught you to swim, did she?” He hit his forehead with his hand.
“I’m okay.” My voice was a rough croak. I cleared it and repeated, “Joe, I’m okay.” It felt odd, me reassuring Joe who so often reassured me. The pain in my chest expanded at the sight of my brother in such distress. “Joe, you saved me,” I said.
Joe had already started to grow into himself. In one short season, he’d become a standout on his Little League team. His hands were huge, his feet huge, too, his shoulders skinny and boyish but broad, his waist narrow. He was shaped like a kite trailing streamers of pond water as he stood above me. He looked at me with his dark blue eyes and slicked-back hair, and his face transformed into a sort of relief.
“Save you?” he said. “I guess I did.” And Joe smiled.
* * *
THAT SUMMER JOE taught me how to swim. Every day we walked to the pond with towels and swimsuits and sandwiches. We started slowly, Joe’s hands on the small of my back, my arms circling, legs kicking up a flurry of water as I struggled to suspend myself. It took one week, and then I was floating on my back without assistance, my arms outstretched like the points of a star, hair spread around me.
“Next, dog-paddle,” Joe directed, and I knew that he was proud of me. I was not a quick study. I did not take easily to physical activity and was disposed to fall back on complaints of a sprained ankle, a shortness of breath.
One of the many miracles of the pond was that here, in the water, my physical self disappeared. The feeling was delicious. As I tilted my head back atop the surface of the water, a cold rushing filled my ears and I became weightless. This was a sensation I would remember some twenty years later, when I at last would lose the weight that since childhood had circled my body like a sleeping python. Unencumbered is the word I would use in poems to describe it. And also: Untethered. Unrestricted. Expansive. Free. I felt it first in the pond with Joe beside me in the water.
Renee soon turned suspicious. “Where are you guys going?” she asked one morning. She walked to Joe and sniffed his hair. “You smell fishy,” she said.
Renee and Caroline spent their days primarily indoors in front of the fan, where it was cool. They braided each other’s hair and made papier-mâché bowls and beads and masks by wrapping gluey strips of newspaper around the various items they wished to replicate. When they were tired of making things, they watched The Brady Bunch or The A-Team on rerun or sometimes a program that showed a man painting oil landscapes, his voice so calm that it stupefied them. They learned from this man nothing about painting, only that it was possible to spend your entire day in a sort of daze, half awake, half asleep, and at the end of it to feel jumpy and restless but entirely worn out from heat and boredom.
Renee sniffed Joe’s hair again. “Take us,” she said.
Joe and I led our sisters down the road, down the steep hill, along the bank of the brook through the woods until we reached the pond. The day was very hot, and the mere sight of the dark water cooled me off. The rushing sound operated as a hush on us all. Maples and slender birches arched over the pond. The current was weak and nearly invisible. Over the dam the water spilled like a silver cloth pulled through a wringer.
Renee let out a whistle. “Awesome,” she said.
Immediately I resented the presence of my sisters. This was our place, mine and Joe’s, and their intrusion altered the feel of it. Caroline wore a bikini and spread her towel in a sprinkling of sun. Renee began to patrol the bank in search of frogs. Yesterday I’d seen a large one, a bullfrog with a call like a rock dropping down a well, but I didn’t tell Renee. I let her search.
“Fi, let’s practice swimming,” said Joe. I scowled at him, but he lifted his eyebrows, and his face said, This is still our place. We can share with the others, it doesn’t change what we have found.
And so I relented. I let Joe place me into the water, stomach down. His hands buoyed me up, and I kicked my legs, circled my arms. I didn’t swim that day or the next, but it happened soon, that perfect moment when my body stopped being mere weight and became like the water itself: fluid, joyful, effortless. It was Joe who made this happen, Joe who clapped the loudest as I swam from bank to bank.
Over the course of that summer, Caroline and I developed a game. Inside the gray house, we rarely played together, but outside at the pond the rules shifted, expectations changed. She and I would scour the brook for water-rough pieces of broken glass or other strange treasures. The rocky bottom was full of odd detritus, perhaps castoffs from the old furniture mill or wayward bits from the town dump. Once we found a large silver spoon, then a crusty broken bicycle chain, then a small green bottle. We would arrange these treasures carefully and make up elaborate stories about their provenance and the lengths to which their previous owners would go to reclaim them. Before the Pause, Noni raised us on fairy tales and fantastic stories. Princesses and queens, mothers and trolls, a dashing prince, salvation, and a perfect everlasting love. The pond offered the perfect backdrop for magical possibility.
For weeks Caroline and I discussed the owner of the spoon, a wily queen from a distant, frozen place who became angry at her daughter and threw the spoon at the poor girl. The daughter ducked, and the spoon sailed over her defenseless head, across nations, oceans, time, and landed here in our brook.
“And then the daughter disappeared,” Caroline said solemnly. “The queen believes the girl’s spirit is hidden inside the spoon. She searches, but she can’t find it. The queen vows to search forever. Until her dying day.”
We gazed into the tarnished silver of the great spoon’s bowl and saw the barest dull reflection of our own faces staring back.
* * *
IT
