The Water Cure(18)
My body, up until now, has been just a thing that bled. A thing with vast reserves of pain. A strange instrument that I don’t always understand. But something kicks in, triggered by the looking. I believe it to be an instinct, not yet sure whether it qualifies to have the word survival in front of it.
Now or never, I tell my reflection in the mirror, wearing a dress dug out from Sky’s wardrobe, inches above my knees and too tight. I walk slowly across the edge of the pool to be sure that the men will notice my approach, trying something out.
When I reach my recliner I lie on my stomach and look up surreptitiously behind my sunglasses, across the shimmering water, to where Llew rests. As I watch him he pushes his own glasses up and winks at me, before lowering them again. I bury my face in my arms. Mother has set up her recliner at the head of the pool, next to the lifeguard’s chair, drawing the line at sitting in the chair itself. She can still survey both sides of the pool, male and female. A scarf elegant around her head, skin streaked with oil.
The grand finale: I sit up, pull the dress over my head and stand for a few seconds in just my swimsuit, pretending to inspect the sky above the fringe of the forest. Heart hammering, waiting for someone to find me out, for something to strike me down, I lose my nerve anyway and cannonball into the water. Sky wails at the sudden break in the silence, Grace moving to comfort her, so when I rise to the surface they are staring baldly at me, arms around each other.
After dinner when we are on the shore as usual, under the darkening air, pouring salt on to the boundary lines, Mother slaps me in front of my sisters. Once with the back of the hand, the rings she wears on every finger catching my ear, and then with the palm for good measure. I raise my fists to hit back and scream as loudly as I can, and at once the hands of my sisters cover my face, my mouth.
‘You said no touching!’ I shout. ‘You didn’t say anything about eye contact. What else am I not allowed to look at?’
‘Don’t cause a scene,’ Mother tells me, as if she hadn’t been the one to hit me first. ‘Come with me.’
She walks back towards the house but stops before the shingle, sitting on the damp sand and indicating that we should join her. She takes our hands, even mine, though I have to share with Sky, my hand piled on the top as an afterthought. The lights of the house and the pool shine a way off.
‘I know what it’s like to be a young woman,’ she tells us. ‘I know all about what can destroy you.’
We wait for her to tell us more.
‘It’s natural, what you’re feeling,’ she says, addressing me specifically this time. ‘It’s natural to want to look.’
Grace laughs, a short laugh.
‘Stop it, Grace,’ Mother tells her. She squeezes our hands tighter. The men are somewhere inside, I don’t know where. In our corridors, breathing our air. Sitting in our furniture, leaving their trace.
‘You need a love therapy,’ she tells us. She lets go of our hands. ‘I put the Welcome Book in Grace’s room. I’ll come and knock for you when the hour is up.’
As well as the book, Mother has left scarves in Grace’s room, thin and silken fabric that falls into large squares when we shake them out. These are to cover your body, a note says. Put these on when you are sunbathing. My sisters gripe, and it’s true, it is undeniably my fault. We lie on the carpet to try them out. They are big enough to cover us from our head to our toes. I pull mine down, claustrophobic. Grace and Sky look like cocoons, only the motion of their breath, a twitch of the arm, suggesting they are alive at all.
After we tire of the scarves, we climb up on the bed and Grace begins to read mournfully from the Welcome Book, reason after reason after reason. Testament of how men hurt women. Testament of the old world. We have heard them all before, many times, but still I close my eyes against them, against the unease and gravity of their prophecy. Sky fidgets, trying to find a comfortable position, but there is no comfortable way to listen. We shudder when we think of how some of the women looked when they came to us. Like they had been bled out, their skin limp. Eyes watering involuntarily, hair thinning.
I became allergic to my husband. He refused to acknowledge how sick he was making me. He told me I was making it up, that it wasn’t possible, even when I coughed up blood, when my hair stopped up the plughole. He held me through the night and by dawn my skin was hard and red where he had touched me. And the rest of it. Leave me alone, I pleaded, can’t you do without. He bought me steroid lotion and a gauze mask that did nothing, left me breathing shallowly in the bed every morning.
‘Horrible!’ Grace says when she has read half a dozen or more. She closes her eyes for a second, exhales very slowly and deeply. It is an unusual reaction from her and I am shaken, more by this than by the words themselves. The Welcome Book is largely too abstract to scare me much, though I am certainly sad for the women and their pain, dimly aware somewhere that this pain is the tradition to which I belong.
Afterwards, we discuss first impressions of the men. Loud. Oily. Grace screws up her face in disgust. We are all comparing them to King, our only reference point, our yardstick for safe manhood. They are all shorter than him, I point out. Positive, no? Less air taken up by their bodies. Sweat always dampening the hair at their temples. I don’t mention the feel of Llew’s arm next to mine, watching the easy spread of his hands playing piano, but I am thinking it, I am thinking it and I am appalled at myself. Sky joins in with the word friendly, and Grace bristles.