Delicate Edible Birds: And Other Stories

Watershed

A DIVER WE KNEW ONCE TOLD US A STORY. We were at a wedding, and all night he had watched us with a curious look on his face. At last, he loomed up from the corner of the tent, already talking, drunk, breathing his winey breath into our faces. You clutched my knee under the table to keep from laughing. The diver didn’t notice, just kept on talking.

When he was young, he said, he dove to a wreck beside a deep, dark chasm. It was cold down there and in his lights the wreck seemed strange, scabbed with rust, the fish pale and shiny as they darted before him. His dive buddy was a man he had been paired with, barely an acquaintance. That far down, a diver should be wary of nitrogen narcosis, with its hallucinations, its emotional swoops, its blackouts. At one point, our friend turned to make sure everything was fine with his dive buddy, and saw him falling quietly, spread-eagled, into the abyss.

Our friend had two choices. He could watch the man disappear into the dark, knowing he had fainted and would never awaken before he died. Or, he could set off after him, risking a blackout himself, certain death for both of them. That deep, he gave himself a five percent chance of catching his buddy while he was cogent enough to bring them both to safety. He paused here in his story, looking at the dancers on the floor swaying to “Our Love Is Here to Stay.” We thought he was trying to build suspense. We cried, Well, what did you do?

The diver blinked and returned to us. Oh. Well, I just dove, he said.

The water was heavy, and just before his hands touched the other fellow’s arms, our friend began to laugh. It came from nowhere, the laughter, and though he was daring death, he couldn’t help it. He laughed so hard he almost spat out his regulator so he could laugh even harder. But he didn’t. He grabbed his buddy, inflating his buoyancy vest a little. It was only when they rose out of the chasm and into the lighter, greener waters above the wreck that he stopped laughing. He watched the other man awaken behind his mask, open his eyes, confused. As they floated at twenty feet below the surface, decompressing the nitrogen from their blood, they clutched each other. They watched the waves wrinkle and break like silk against the boat’s prow, the elegant blue of the sky beyond.

I held that guy, said the diver over the empty wine bottles, I held him so hard. On land he’d never have been a close friend. But waiting to emerge into the air, he said, I have never in my life felt a purer love for a human being. I have never loved anybody as much as I did that stupid man at that very moment.

Without another word, our friend stood and moved off. We watched each other in the candlelight and suave music, and because laughter was the only weapon we had, we laughed until the chill of his story faded, and was gone.

YOU’LL REMEMBER THIS SPRING, how, after the snow melted, the lake rose and didn’t stop rising. March was soggy with rain, April drenched. In the hills, the beaver dams broke and spread diseased water into the rain-slapped lake until it was the color of a bruise. The river couldn’t drain it fast enough, and roared thick and brown over the bridges, carrying the bloated bodies of unwary cows and deer down the current toward Harrisburg.

By June, our basement walls wept between the stones. Water seeped to ankle level, then to mid-calf. In the corner, the cardboard boxes weakened then broke apart, and when they did they spilled still-wrapped wedding gifts into the murk.

IT IS STRANGE to find myself living again in our chintzy hometown after fifteen years away. It was a tiny thing, really, that brought me back to stay: a high school friend of ours was getting married last autumn, and I was almost late for the wedding. I slid into the pew with four seconds to spare and was still so flustered throughout the benediction that I began to tear the program into tiny pieces. I may have ended up shredding a hymnal or the offertory sleeves, or even my own hem, had a man’s hand not reached over into my lap and gently took hold of both of mine, and held them still until the end of the service.

I stared at those strange hands until it was all over. I could do nothing else, and they were large, callused, with swirls of dark hair below the first and second knuckles, neat nails and pretty moons in the nail beds. Very strong, very warm. But I didn’t dare peek at their owner until the bride, beaming, swooshed back down the aisle in a cloud of lily scent and Pachelbel and lace. Then I glanced at you and had to quickly look away. You were almost too handsome, though I know now that’s not how you strike most people. What, to others, was a too-big jaw and too-ruddy cheeks, a prominent forehead, the blue shadow of a beard under freshly shaven skin (I could smell the cream you’d used), was, to me, breathtaking.

Hello, Celie, you said, grinning.

Hello, I whispered.

You cocked your head. You don’t remember me, do you?

No, I said. No.

Well, you said, and stood when everyone else did, and took my arm. Your date gave a dismayed squeal (I remember her only as a brown silk frill, some kind of gold shoe that was kicked at me after she grew drunk at the reception), but we ignored her. We walked out of the warm church and under a hail of rice that wasn’t meant for us; we went over the hard-frosted grass and through the first door we could find, the rectory, empty. You plucked a piece of rice out of my hair, and leaned me up against a stained-glass window depicting John the Baptist, baptizing. A cloud slid back outside and in the brief burst of sun, your cheek was dyed red and yellow and blue. I hid my hands behind my back to keep them from shaking.

Think hard, you said. You do know me.

Nope, I said. Nothing. We maybe went to high school together?

You gave a little grin and clicked the bridge of your four top teeth out of your mouth so that I was staring through a great gap at your pink tongue.

I was startled and drew away against the cool glass. And then I laughed, with wonder. My God, I said, it’s you. You sure have grown up, I said.

Boy, have you, you said. And like that, four front teeth in your hand, you kissed me.

YOU WERE A FRIEND so old I had forgotten about you. The little boy down the street, but a year younger than I, and my brother’s buddy. So, invisible. Still, there are family pictures you snuck into, and I was there when my brother judo-kicked you in the mouth by accident and you lost those front teeth. You were there the day of my eighth-grade cotillion, and said nothing when I came down the stairs in my royal blue satin and sparkles, just ran off to do what seventh-grade boys do behind locked doors.

I loved books like people; I liked real people less. You were wild and left clumps of mud from your soccer cleats everywhere. I sometimes tried to speak all day in perfect rhyme. I will take some flakes to break my fast, I’d say in my poetically gauzy nightgown, For that alone is a fine repast, and my siblings would groan and my father snort into his coffee, and the little neighbor boy who was always hanging around would give me a bright, shy smile.

You didn’t laugh much, but when you did it was a goosey honk you never quite lost.

My parents weren’t from this village, had four graduate degrees between them, and expected their children would do the same. My siblings — a doctor, a lawyer, an architect — left and only returned to visit. Before I came back I was a professional storyteller, a glamorous title that means a life of public libraries and wailing children and minimum wage.

Your family has been rooted in our village for six generations and though not poor, were not well-off, either. Your father is the town’s florist and a hard, mean man; he’d replace the twelfth rose of a bouquet with baby’s breath to cut costs. Your mother, a housewife who clipped coupons. You came home after two years of college to buy a snowmobile store, which turned into an ATV store in the summer.

All that time, you said, you never forgot me. There were many dates, many girlfriends — a ridiculous number — but they were never serious. Because, you said, there I was, riding along with you all that time. A leech, a lamprey, a fluke.

I went off into the world and if I ever thought of you, it was as a small child, hair sticking up everywhere, a snot-bubble in your nose, that peculiar wedge-shaped face. A brown little boy in too-short jeans. I remembered an androgynous shirt you wore then, a cheery blue with a rainbow on the front. At one end of the rainbow, a beaming sun. On the other a white cloud spilling rain down your spindly, wriggling, little-boy rib cage.

EVERY MARCH OF MY CHILDHOOD, my father would uncover the pool to reveal the greasy green water, still frigid with winter. There’d be frogs kicking toward the gutters, masses of insects, dead leaves. One year, when my mother was away for the evening and I was about seven, he gave us a dare.

Whoever can stay in the water longest gets five bucks, he said, laughing, figuring thirty seconds would be enough. We stripped down and climbed in, careful to keep our heads dry. My little brother got out immediately; cold wasn’t his thing. My older brother and sister lasted two minutes, then came out muttering retarded this, retarded that. In the end, the only ones left were you and me, and though I was a princess I was fierce. I would die before I’d be beaten by a younger boy, a boy whose nipples were turning purple, whose whole skinny body was shuddering.

I hope I would have gotten out had I known what five dollars meant to you then. To me, it was another book from the bookstore that I’d half-understand; to you, it was a birthday present for your little sister.

Twenty minutes in, my father was no longer amused and had begun to have visions of the emergency room, explaining to the mothers and his doctor colleagues why, exactly, two kids left in his care were hypothermic. He said, Enough, blinking quickly behind his thick glasses. We were both blue and quaking. But I was laughing because you went up the ladder first, and I thought that made me the winner. My father held the fiver in his hands and seemed for a second about to be Solomon, to rip the bill in two.

It’s okay, you said, still shaking under the warm towel. Celie can have it.

It’s yours, said my father, handing the bill to you. You earned it.

I began to squawk and my father said, Hush, hush, you’ll have one too, as soon as your mother gets back and I can get it from her purse. Then he gathered us both up under his arms and carried us in and dumped us unceremoniously in the shower. Don’t tell your mothers I let you do that, okay? he said, looking abashed.

Okay, we said, but when my father left, I stared angrily at you as you lost your blue and began turning pink under the warm water. I won, I said.

We both won, you said. You’ll get your money when your mom is home.

It’s my dad’s, I said. His money and my pool, and I should get it first.

You shrugged and soaped yourself, singing a little song.

I climbed out and dried off, and, seeing the wet wad of a bill on the sink, took it.

At dinner, you said nothing about the missing money. Even when you started sneezing you said nothing; even when my father dug into my mother’s purse to give me a five (the other bill wadded wetly in my underwear, imprinting my skin), you said nothing. When I took the money from my father’s hand and ran away from the table and to my room and locked my door, you didn’t come knocking, and the next time I saw you, after the fever that had kept you from school for a week subsided, you still said nothing.

Years later, I asked if you remembered this.

Of course, you said. It was one of the great traumas of my childhood.

You should’ve punched me, I said. I was such a jerk.

You were you, Celie, you said. I couldn’t have been mad. Even then, you were beyond my anger.

ONCE UPON A TIME, my life began with Once upon a time. I didn’t have a passion when I graduated from college, and I floated from profession to profession: bartender, newsletter editor, grant writer, finally a temp. I liked the anonymity of temphood, the office supplies, the interchangeability of one cubicle with the next, but was an atrocious typist and had no math skills at all. When I was kept on for a long time, it was because the workers had gotten to like me, despite my lack of ability.

One morning my temp coordinator called me about a job: a literacy fair in Cambridge sponsored by a fruit company. The afternoon storyteller had gotten sick in the hundred-degree heat and I was to fill in. I’d have to wear a banana suit all week, she said. I laughed and said, No way. She laughed and said, Forty bucks an hour; I laughed and said, Call me Banana.

The first two days were hell, the suit soggy with the morning storyteller’s sweat before I even put it on, the children whinging, my stories duds. But on the third day, magic happened: I began spinning a story and the children stopped fidgeting, their parents leaned forward in their seats, and I was able to forget the sweat streaming down the inside of the suit. The story carried me until the cool evening wind rose and the heat scaled back and the children went home, one by one, small pools of sweat where they had sat, entranced, for hours. When I took off the banana suit that evening, soaked and weak with elation, I had found what I was meant to do.

Storytelling is simple: selecting a few strands from many and weaving them into cloth. My life was retranslated, made neater. The tale of the neighbor boy and the pool became an epic of redemption: in retelling you became older, charismatic, quick, a bully; you became the robber of my shivery winnings, and I was the wounded little stoic.

AT THE WEDDING RECEPTION the day I rediscovered you, years after we had left childhood, I don’t think I ever found my table or had a bite to eat. We were at a teahouse in a private garden right on the lake, and the stalks of summer’s plants were brown and frostbitten. In the dusky fog, every dead plant seemed imbued with meaning, which I thought I could decipher if I only concentrated hard enough. We walked in the clammy dark garden, listening to the music and voices from the teahouse, sometimes talking, sometimes not. When dancing started, we came into the bright house and danced, too, my cheek only as high as your shoulder. Your date kicked her shoe at me, and was escorted away by the brother of the groom; the bride chortled and threw her pretty arms around us, squeezing us, telling us she loved us, loved us, loved us. At the end of the night, after the garter, the bouquet, the slow slipping away of the guests, we were the last ones in the teahouse, urged by the tired father of the bride to turn out the lights when we left. We laughed in the wreck of the feast, and sat down on a bench.

There are only a few moments in every life where the world becomes entirely real: that night, the lake, the fog, your face so startlingly near, crystallized in me.

You took my foot and rubbed it. So, you said. Do they have snowmobiles in Boston? Because I’m going where you are.

Oh, that would be a mistake, I said, too quickly. I’d had a thought of my tiny apartment, the marmalade cat I’d taken to help a friend, a nasty squalling beast I hated. I imagined you, hulking and strange, inserting yourself into my solitary life there.

A cloud settled over your face and your hands fell from my foot. In your scowl, I recognized the little neighbor boy, and it felt the way it did when I began to tell that first real story in the banana suit, a good weight, deep within.

You don’t understand, I said. I touched your cheek. I’m staying here, I said.

I WAS THIRTY-TWO then, thirty-three now. I’m a feminist if they’ll still have me, though from the way my friends reacted when I told them that I was staying in my little hometown it seems doubtful I’ll be welcomed back into the fold.

A friend from Boston, a tenured professor in anthropology, said, Good God, Celie. “Stand By Your Man” is only a song — you’re not supposed to take it literally.

A friend from my years in Philadelphia said, But what are you going to do in Podunkville? (I don’t know.) How many people live there? (Twelve hundred.) Do they even have a movie theater? (No.) Aren’t you going to die of boredom? (Possibly.)

A friend from my years in Wisconsin said, suspiciously, I thought you always said you didn’t believe in marriage. Catering to the hegemony, yadda yadda. Wait a second; you can’t be Celie. Who are you?

But my best friend from college was silent for a long time. She, of all of my friends, had seen the parade of sad wrecks through my life, date after bad date after bad boyfriend. She was the one who’d picked up the pieces after the musician, the investment banker, the humanitarian who was humane to everyone but me.

When at last she spoke, she said, Oh, hell.

And, after that: Hallelujah.

I AWOKE IN YOUR APARTMENT over the pizzeria to the sound of eggs cracking on a metal bowl. I called my mother so she wouldn’t worry, and whispered where I was. She let out a whoop and, delighted, said, Nice job, honey! That’s one good-looking boy.

You came back in then, holding an omelet, coffee, toast. When I bit into the omelet later, my teeth would grind against eggshells and the coffee would be harsh and overbrewed. But at that moment, it looked perfect.

I said, Let’s fly to Las Vegas and get hitched.

You deposited the tray on the bed and folded your arms, frowning. No, you said.

Oh, I said. I flushed and looked away, now doubting everything: the night before, the brilliant morning, the man standing before me in the too-small robe.

Oh, no, you said, sitting down. I’m going to build you a house, then we’ll get married. I already have the land ready to go.

You said, without any irony, Every bird needs her nest.

I felt dizzy, spun back to a time when this may have been an appropriate thing for a man to say; I wanted to protest, or at least to scoff a little. But something in me felt like a bubble popping, the fear I’d carried around under my sternum, the ugly balloon that expanded a breath with every passing year, the one in the shape of the word spinster.

So I said, Oh. Well, then, yes. A nest sounds nice.

It was my fault that I didn’t say what I should have: that I wasn’t the bird type, or maybe the nest type. To watch out, to think this over carefully, because it wouldn’t be easy.

EVEN IN THAT FIRST hot flush I knew you were human, flawed. You had false front teeth, an annoying laugh, a streak of stupidity that made you once lose a pinky toe to frostbite and another time vote for Ross Perot. You became belligerent when soused, held half-baked convictions about politics, made messes (of clothes, of facts, of women), adored cooking but cooked inedibly, and from the beginning loved too-proud, too-angry, too-mean me. And that, in the tally of flaws, was one that even your friends tried to talk you out of.

She’s a tough cookie, they warned. She’s used to things we don’t have here.

You nodded gravely, then gave your crooked smile. I’m pretty tough, too, you said. I think I can tackle tough like Celie’s any day.

WE SPENT THAT FIRST WEEK in bed. The whole world was indulgent, and we could hear the smiles in people’s voices when we called to abandon our responsibilities; the snowmobile store could be run by the boys there, my family was fine gathered in the house together without me. Stripped of almost everything, eating crackers and single-serve pudding with our fingers in the sheets, all we had left were our stories.

Mine were elaborate, and when I retold them I always changed them. Yours were simple and neat and didn’t change at all.

This is one of mine: I was out on a sailboat in Lake Tahoe with an old boyfriend. The wind died down, and as we were waiting for it to start up again, he told me that a famous diver, the one on all the documentaries, was hired to film the bottom of the lake. Nobody had ever done this before; it was too deep. The diver went down and came back up sooner than the people on the boat expected. When he hauled himself over the gunwale, he was pale and shaking and wouldn’t speak a word, but when they were at last on shore, he swore them to secrecy, then told them what he’d seen: all the victims of mob hits from the casinos, their feet in buckets of concrete, perfectly preserved by the cold down there. Dozens of them, in a tight space, no more than fifty feet by fifty. Some faces still frightened, frozen in quiet screams. Fat men in business suits, skinny men who looked like jockeys, one woman in a spangled dress, her hair shifting in the current. And this is what scared the diver the most: their hands were floating at breast-level, beseeching.

I told this story to scare you, I think, but instead you laughed. Urban legend, you said, resting your heavy head on my chest.

I believe it, I protested. When the wind rose and the boat was flying again over Lake Tahoe and the water was splashing everywhere, I screamed every time a drop hit me.

That’s your problem, you said. You have way too vivid an imagination. Now, let me tell you a real story.

Oh, goody, I said, a little smug: I was the one, after all, who once made an entire kindergarten class cry fat tears of sorrow for my own little mermaid.

You put your hand on my mouth to make me hush. Now, I saw you once in your Wisconsin phase, you said, when you came back to town for the holidays. It was Christmas Eve, Midnight Mass at the old Presbyterian church, lit up with the candles we were holding. You were with your family in front, and me and my family were in back, my cousin and me passing our traditional flask of bourbon under the hymnal. I look around, bored, and I see you there. Wearing this jacket with fur around the collar, holding the candle under your chin. One more inch and you burst into flame. So thin I could almost see through you. Then everything ends, we do the singing thing, blow out the candles, I was about to go talk to your parents and your brother, say hi to you, when you just walk by and I’m struck to stone. You looked sad, like you needed someone to just come along and make you happy. I took a good look at myself and knew I didn’t have what it took. So I let you walk away.

Oh, I said. That’s awful. Five years down the drain.

No, but, listen, you said, though I already was listening. Listen, if had I gone to say hello then, we wouldn’t be here now. Now we’re right, the timing’s right, but before we weren’t and it wasn’t. We were lucky, you said, turning your head and kissing my lowest rib, gently. Timing is everything.

In the window an icicle caught the sun and burst into a thousand shards of light on the walls. I watched it burn there, dripping. I said, Your story was better than mine.

AT THE END of that week, we emerged into the cold world blinking like newborns. In our absence, the village had been swaddled with thick snow. There was the first skim of ice stretched taut across the lake, a canvas waiting for the brush. When we crossed the crashing river, I couldn’t help myself, and said, Where a gluegold-brown marbled river, boisterously beautiful, between roots and rocks is danced and dandled, all in froth and waterblowballs, down.

You looked at me. That’s so damn pretty, you said, and, for such a tough country boy, there were tears in your eyes. That’s the prettiest thing I ever heard, you said in such a voice that I couldn’t ever tell you the words weren’t mine.

WE WENT TO BOTH Thanksgiving dinners, the early one at your mother’s, with her frozen corn and box stuffing, the later one at my house, with homegrown Brussels sprouts and orange-nutmeg cranberry sauce. I preferred your mother’s. Over dessert, we settled on late May for the wedding.

Immediately, the fights began.

In December, I scratched off the bumper sticker on your truck that endorsed the worst president in American history.

In January, when we started building the house, though you tried to stick to my eco-structure mandate, I freaked out when I saw the workmen lowering a standard septic tank into the ground.

In February, I decided I wouldn’t take your name, even though your mother sobbed over the dishes about it and your father stomped around saying that your name was as good a name as any name in the dadblasted town, and they’d been here longer than some snooty people he could name and where do I get off saying his name wasn’t good enough, he would like to know that, he would like to dadblasted know that.

In March, we almost came to blows over something you said that I wasn’t supposed to hear, a joke at the bar involving terrorists and nuclear bombs. I, who had just come into the busy place, and had been about to put my hands over your eyes and plant a kiss on the back of your neck, stalked out of the bar, your friends looking away.

In April, in the height of wedding planning, we fought once a day.

Still, there was no other valve for everything building up inside us, and we always made up beautifully. You were kind. You had a certain delicacy that, when either of us was at the point of broaching a real darkness, allowed you to suddenly capitulate. Your face would pale and you’d nod once and say, Okay. You’re right. I would stare at you, disbelieving, the horrid thing I was just about to say still crawling on my tongue.

Stupid me. Those months, I thought your capitulation was weakness. I now know it was everyday kindness.

IT WASN’T EASY to come back to a little town when I was used to cities. Our hometown is tiny and obscure, an upstate village with a cheap-looking Main Street, cracked sidewalks, public buildings of brown brick and particleboard, weathered plastic wreaths on the neighbors’ doors. Townspeople gave me befuddled looks when I said I was staying: Really? they said. I saw my stock sink in their faces. The produce manager in the grocery store snorted at me when I suggested he start up an organic section, and when I looked at the sorry state of the conventional pears he had, I understood what he meant. I couldn’t find enough space in town to walk, and when I went into the hills where the dogs are never locked up and unused to pedestrians, I was attacked by a furiously droopy basset hound. I was impatient with the Saturday night choices: the movies thirty minutes away, or television, or a bar, or a board game. I felt like a teenager again, stifled and bored, without even the possibility of babysitting and snooping around in other people’s business. I attempted to have a storytelling hour at the library, but the time ticked by and not one child came, and the librarian muttered with a sideways glance that I shouldn’t be surprised: there was a high school basketball game that afternoon, after all.

Yet, as winter dribbled into spring, I found myself paying more attention to the tiniest things: a crocus furling out of the ground, the way the two old women who sat in the diner from opening to closing greeted each other with only a wet sniff every day. Because I had nothing to do, I finally began to understand the rhythm of the village, its subtleties that I had been too impatient to recognize when I was young.

Are you happy here? my mother said once in April, pouring coffee into my cup. I don’t mean with him, she said, nodding toward the living room, where you and my father were shouting at some sports team thousands of miles away. But here?

I considered this, the bones of my hands warming against the mug. I said, slowly, I can feel the beginnings of happiness sort of seeping into me.

My mother nodded and looked out the window, though she couldn’t see anything through the downpour. She sighed and said, Oh, that damn rain.

IT HAD BEEN RAINING constantly since late February, and of course it rained at our wedding. In the receiving line, nearly everyone whispered into my ear, Rain on a bride means good luck, and kissed my cheek and went on to the buffet.

I didn’t care. I beamed. I’d had the flu for a week, but had taken nuclear doses of medicine and all night felt like I was floating. I danced and ate and drank, and when we came home to our new-smelling house, with the floors still unfinished and the walls still unpainted, you tossed aside the umbrella (we found it the next day halfway up a blue spruce), swooped me up into your arms, kicked open the door, and carried me over the threshold, to where it smelled of sawdust and plaster; you kicked the door shut behind us and carried me up the stairs and the rain on the roof was thrumming, and opened the door to the bedroom, the one room in the house you’d finished and furnished with castoffs from my parents’ house. Candles were aflame, and your florist father hadn’t held back, filling the room with ferns and lilac, lovely garlands across the walls, huge vases overflowing with greenery.

This was a surprise to you, too. You started and almost dropped me, then filled our new house with your honking laugh, populating it with an invisible skein of ducks, until I had to laugh, also, at your joy.

AND THEN, THE DENOUEMENT. One week and two days after the wedding, you were in your work clothes, crouching in the living room to put in a baseboard over the freshly painted walls. Outside it was raining, of course, but harder than it had rained for the past few months, so thickly we couldn’t see out the windows at all. I had squelched through the mud with eight sacks of groceries and had just finished putting them away in our cabinets.

My flu had redoubled: I saw the world through a feverish haze. I hadn’t slept in what felt like weeks and had reams of thank-you notes to write, never actually written. Exhausted, I put my head down on the counter and began to cry.

You heard and came in, alarmed. What? you said. What’s wrong?

I don’t know, I said. I’m just so sad here.

Here? you said, looking around with dismay. In this house?

In this whole goddamn town, I said. I’m so freaking sick of it. I hate it, I hate everything about it. Freaking small-minded people, fat stupid idiots.

You hate everything about this town, Celie?

Everything, I said, savagely. Everything. The stupid grocery store where they don’t even have portobello mushrooms. God forbid a freaking mango. God forbid an open mind. Only things they can think about here are sex and hunting and football. I hate it here.

You looked at me coldly, jaw tensed and eyes narrowed. I’m so sorry, Ms. Big-shot Storyteller. I guess it’s all my fault, you said, huh? Dragging you away from civilization?

I hated the coldness in your voice, what I took to be a sneer on your face.

Yes, it’s all your fault, I said. Hurt, I burned to hurt in turn.

And that was it, a petty quarrel when I was soaked and sick and overwhelmed.

You dropped the hammer on the ground, where it made a dent in the floor that’s still there; you went outside, leaving the door open to the wickedly driving rain. I couldn’t see the truck or hear it pull away, but I felt it. Later, I’d hear that mine had been the last car they’d let over the bridge on my trip home from the store. After me, the swollen river was too dangerous and they closed it off. I like to think I would have run after you had I remembered the policemen in the orange vests, the sacks of sand they were dragging, that I would have tried to chase down the truck, apologized. But I was sunk in my misery, my flu, my soaking clothes. When I had cried myself out, I stood and shut the door and went into the bedroom and took a long nap, only to awaken to the phone call almost exactly an hour later.

A RIDDLE: WHAT HAPPENS when a lake and a river both overflow their banks, forming a pond where the bridge should be? When an angry man drives too quickly away from his harpy wife, from the house he worked so hard to build for her, when he turns the bend and hits the water and hydroplanes? When the old red truck blasts into the stand of trees and a branch goes through the windshield, through the man’s chest; when, at the same time, his head hits first the steering wheel and then the seat back, hard? When, a half hour later, someone comes along and sees the wreck, and pulls the man from the red truck, with the branch still in his chest? When the ambulance arrives the long way, the bridge out, and wails off to the emergency room, and the doctors on staff are so worried about the stake through the lung and the loss of blood that they don’t do a CT scan for about eight hours, all the time it takes to extract the branch and bring the hysterical new wife in, and draw enough blood from the shaken family for a transfusion, for his blood type is hard to match, and there isn’t enough in the banks for him; and then, when he’s stable, they finally figure out that he is in the deepest sort of coma, a three on the Glasgow Coma Scale, no eye-opening, no response to physical stimulus or verbal cues? What happens when the doctor puts up the results of the CT scan and his eyes narrow and he looks at the ghostly vision of the brain on the screen and claps his hand over his mouth? What would be the most fitting, apt, apposite diagnosis in this set of circumstances? The punch line at the end of the joke for a man at whose wedding a little more than one week earlier it had rained and rained and rained?

The answer: Hydrocephalus, of course.

I SAT IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM with the town around me, your family (father weeping, smelling of roses), your shaken buddies pale and trying to hold it in with whispered jokes and chewing tobacco, your mother blissed out on tranquilizers, my family a protective ring around me. My father was giving me the rundown on hydrocephalus in a whisper, and I was dry and dim and stupid, but drinking it in.

There is a fluid in the brain and spinal cord, my father said, called cerebrospinal fluid, which is constantly created throughout the day. Normally, this can be flushed by the body, but when someone has a hemorrhage that bleeds into the subarachnoid part of the brain, the fluids can’t drain, and so they build up pressure in the ventricles. The pressure can cause damage. The neurosurgeon, as soon as he gets here, is going do a procedure called an endoscopic third ventriculostomy. They put a hole in the ventricle and a shunt in the hole. The shunt drains the pressure. My father paused, and looked at me.

Will he be all right? I said. Will he be the same?

My father blinked rapidly and took off his glasses. He wiped them with his sleeve, and when he put them back on, he took my hand. I don’t know, he said, looking away. It’s too soon to know.

THE NEUROSURGEON DID HIS WORK late into that first night, until the sky was just turning the viscous gray of yet another rainy day. He was a tiny man who looked the way I thought a priest should look, ashy and stern and ascetic. He took my hand in his small, cool one, and pressed it.

I’ve done my best, he said. We’ll have to wait and see.

I looked through the little porthole and into the scrub room, where the nurses were wearily taking off their paper gowns and hats and masks. You were in there, I knew, tubes perforating your wounded flesh. My hand in the doctor’s shook, and I squeezed until I could feel my fingernails press into his soft skin.

Wake him up, I said. Make him wake up.

He patted my cheek with his other little hand, and said, I wish I could, darling. When he pulled away, I could see my nail marks like little crescent moons in his skin. He flexed the hand I had gripped all the way down the hall. I hoped I had cracked those delicate bones.

THE FIRST TWO DAYS in the hospital I couldn’t eat, though people pressed food on me. I put the cups of coffee and doughnuts and apples underneath my chair, and paced some more. I liked the harsh rasp of thirst in my throat, the way that it hurt every time I swallowed. My body soured and whenever I moved the smell would rise up in a wave and wash over me.

When your parents and I were at last allowed to go into the room and see you, I took a step inside and then turned around and around and around in a little circle on the floor. Your mother pushed past me and began a dovelike sobbing, hoo-ooh-ooh, sinking into a little chair, and your father walked back out of the room.

I went over to you and took your cold, stiff hand in my own. I kneaded it, staring down at the mass of purple and red and yellow and blue that they said was my husband, at the white bandages and the tubes sucking fluids out of you, putting other fluids in. That first visit I almost said nothing, although the nurse had told us we should talk to you, that it was possible you could hear. We sat there, your mother and I, until the end of the visiting hours.

When we were asked to leave, I leaned close. You didn’t smell like yourself; you smelled of gauze and something bitter and wet. I said, Damn you, and left that ugly little present in your ear.

IN THE MIDST OF EVERYTHING, I would go outside the hospital and the world would be swollen, juicy, runneling. The sky overhead a warm wet washcloth pressed to my brow, the trees lascivious with wet. Everywhere, the smell of things awakened; the fevered ground, the upswell of mud. Down the hill was the river, the breeding carp pushing against the dam’s concrete frame.

I understood in those moments all those surreal ancient stories: water flowing upward from earth to sky, rains of blood, plagues of frogs. Abominations or miracles seemed likely in those hours. In the Canticle of the Sun, Saint Francis of Assisi praises God for water: Praised be Thou, O Lord, for sister water, he says, who is very useful, humble, precious and chaste. But I would stand there, my head bowed to the rain, eyes closed, braced between each thunk of each fat drop of rain on my skull, each a blow, hard to predict, a punishment.

AFTER FOUR DAYS, no sleep, little food, no showering, no improvement in your condition, I began to see things that didn’t exist. Rats scuttling across the floor, gray curtains flapping at the edges of my vision. Infants with your face, beard and all. Many of your friends had returned to their lives, coming to the hospital periodically with grave faces and comforting things in their hands. I paid no attention to them. I was concentrating, as if listening for music very, very far away, which if I heard it, would make everything all right.

On the evening of the fourth day, my father helped my mother sneak me into the attendings’ locker room, where there were showers. I let my mother bathe me, as if I were a little girl, and put lotions on me, and dress me. Her face was pinched and gray; she looked old, I noticed with surprise. I could have done all of this myself, but I was concentrating too hard on the impossibly distant music.

You appeared before me in the murk and cold of my mind, your dark body. Over and over again my hands grasped your arm and I began to pull you upward, airward, skyward, again.

When I was clean it was time to visit. I went in and began to tell stories. I had grown used to this changeling in the bed where my husband should have been, and told him stories he had told me. But I embroidered them, perverted them, willing him to wake up and correct me. The first time he killed a deer, a twelve-point buck. The first time he ever had sex with a girl (Jinny Palmer, on the Fairy Springs docks, in broad daylight). That crazy night in his freshman year in college when those boys did everything they could to get arrested, short of murder or rape, and were never caught.

Did I imagine the tightening of your thumb on my palm? The flicker across the face? The swallow? Did I imagine you would open your eyes and wheeze out, That’s not the way it went, not at all? Did I hope you’d be angry when you opened your eyes and say, You have the story all wrong, Celie, you have it all wrong?

I did. I do.

On the fifth night there was a commotion, running, loud beeping noises. My father was summoned from my side in the waiting room, where he and my mother were spelling each other, and he was gone for quite some time. It was very late and your family was at home, trying to sleep.

When my father came back, his face was red. Oh, honey, he said. I’m so sorry.

Just say it, I said, my voice rough with thirst.

He said, A mistake. Too much drainage. The vesicles collapsed. He’s gone. I’m so sorry.

Dead? I said, very calmly.

Oh, said my father, stricken. Oh, honey. Not entirely. But in a way, yes.

WHEN YOUR FATHER heard he roared. He stomped down the corridor, shouting, We’re suing, we’re suing the goddamned pants off this goddamned hospital, until my brother, home from Boston, slipped a tranquilizer in his iced tea and put him out for a few hours.

When your mother heard, she pulled herself up and nodded, and went out for a walk that lasted four hours. When it grew dark we sent teams out to look for her and one of your friends found her sitting on one of the boulders at the lake, shuddering in the dusky drizzle, and staring at the swollen water. She was soaked when she came back, and came over to me, lifting her hands like cold wet lumps of paper to my cheeks. She opened her mouth and everyone hushed to hear what she was about to say. But she just breathed and blinked and closed her little mouth again.

GRIEF IS becoming a stranger to oneself. It is always a surprise to see how old, how womanly, one actually is. The crow’s-feet by the eyes, the lines by the mouth, how, translucent, a woman’s temples bare their tender blue veins to the world. That gold band hanging loose, so much flesh lost over the past few days. Down the empty corridor, ringing with voices and distant sounds of the hospital, steel and mop and rubber shoe. Into the vague green room, thick with shadows that waver like seaweed in the corners.

See the strange woman look around, make sure all are assembled. On the other faces, there is more than fury and sadness. Also a fatigue, a relief. The darkened room. The quiet machines. The sheet pulled over the body that is only flesh, over the bruised face. The turning away.

I SEE YOU NOW just leaving rooms I am in. The hem of your khakis flashing beyond the door frame. The wind in the room still shifting. The smell of you, musk and clove and even the stink of your fatigue when you’ve come in from a long day outdoors, hunting or snowmobiling or cross-country skiing; all this, a moment before I turn around.

Is that you? I call, but there’s no answer. Just this house still empty of furniture. I turn to my books but can’t read. Maybe the telephone rings then and breaks the jangling quiet, or a crow flies past the window with a songbird in its beak; carrion comfort. I hold on to the tiniest of visions for as long as I can, savoring them like the aftertaste of a long-gone cup of tea.

OUR DIVER FRIEND, the one from the wreck and the falling dive buddy, changed his song. He chose an odd moment for it, at the wake, avoiding my eye over the cold cuts (funeral meats, I thought; terrible expression). He grabbed my elbow hard, whispering urgently. I let him. There was a comfort in his wine-tart breath in my ear, and I watched the window as he whispered to me. Outside, it still rained and rained.

He told the story again from the beginning: the scaly wreck, the chasm, the strange fishes. He broke off where he had before, where you and I had once thought he’d paused to build tension. Watching his buddy fall and be slowly swallowed by the dark chasm, teetering between his own life and the chance of saving another’s. Now, under the strange slow hush of Bach and conversation, the diver blinked and blinked and shifted the glass in his hand.

Instead of telling me about his decision, though, the quick flipping down into the dark maw, the laughter, catching his buddy, he said, Listen. I have to say it. I didn’t go after him.

What? I said. I heard him through the gray felt I’d thickened around myself since the phone call, the hospital.

I watched him go, he said.

What? I said, again.

By the time I saw him, he said, he was too far gone. I had to let him go.

I pulled away, my fists clenched. But your crazy laughter, I said.

He looked at me, the very whites of his eyes wine-stained.

But the love, I said.

That was all true, he said. Only after I couldn’t see him anymore. When I was just staring down into that trench, just suspended there alone.

I stared at the diver, his purple face. He was trying to tell me something, but it was too raw. A story can also be cruel. And when I remember this scene, I remember it static, my hand in mid-slap, hovering near his left ear. On his face a curious look, almost voluptuous, his cheek tilted up as if to accept the blow, eyes closed and lips nearly bent in a smile.

IN JULY, THE SUN at last came out, dried the mud, sopped the wet from the air. The bodies of water abated, and the greens were so green they filled all of us with wonder. So many different shades lived in the world that summer. For some moments, in some especially strong lights, I felt the generosity of such green as a salve, drawing the sick grief from me.

But even in those deepest greens, hiking in the hills (the maples, the ferns, the pines, the scuttling toads), I caught a memory. When my heart at last righted itself, it beat, but furiously.

Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you, it said into the lovely day.

Long ago, before I found you a second time, when I must have been in college, I was home, driving on East Lake Road. It was a cold day but the lake hadn’t yet melted and large pieces of mist flaked off the lake in pastry layers. I was listening to public radio. On one of the shows, a narrator, his voice soft but emotionless, was telling a story about Niagara Falls. There was a sound effect of roaring water — harsh, impersonal — behind his words, a strange contrast to his hush.

In one very poor town near the Falls, he said, there lived an old couple. She was dying of an old-age disease, and her husband was taking care of her. I pictured an orange afghan, a half-drunk cup of tea, a room with olive paint so peeled it was as if the walls were shrugging out of their skins. I pictured a bent old man in suspenders, hovering over a tiny woman, all bones.

The narrator continued, saying that one morning, after the woman had had a very bad night, the couple’s son stopped by on the way to a night shift. He found an empty house, no parents, everything tidy. He grew alarmed and drove to all of their places: the diner, the theater, the library, the hospital. They weren’t anywhere. He didn’t know where else to drive, and at last, to pull himself together, he drove to the Falls. It was almost dawn now; there was a pink cast at the edge of the sky. When the son climbed from the car and went to the fence at the edge of the Falls, he found two pairs of shoes polished to a brilliant shine. The tiny black shoes of his mother, the cordovans of his father, pointing, eloquently, toward the water.

The old man had taken his wife in his arms, hot, sick; he had stood there in the dark predawn with her in his arms. He looked into her old face. Then he jumped.

I had to pull my car over because of this story, because of those lonely four shoes at the annealing edge of the Falls, right where the water hesitates and seems to catch its breath before shattering downward. And, later, during that long winter when you made me come home, I thought vaguely of this story, again and again. Not because I wanted to die, of course. But because I thought I had found exactly that, someone to take me to old age, someone who could take me beyond, if it were necessary and right to do so.

There is no ending, no neatness in this story. There never really is, where water is concerned. It is wild, febrile, kind, ambiguous; it is dark and carries the mud, and it is clear and the cleanest thing. Too much of it kills us, and not enough kills us, and it is what makes us, mostly. Water is the cleverest substance, wily beyond the stretch of our mortal imaginations. And no matter where it is pent, no matter if it is air or liquid or solid, it will someday, inevitably, find its way out.