Open Water (9 page)

W
ydette died when Willis was thirteen. Driving home from Horseneck Beach, Willis still wore a white crescent of zinc oxide across the bridge of his nose, imitating the lifeguards. He had spent most of the day with Wydette exploring the salt marsh. Wydette had seen a kingfisher there for the past three seasons. The bird liked to perch on sagging cables along the beach road. The kingfisher had a big scruff of feathers, a beautiful crest like a hatchet, an ivory neck ring, and a strong beak like the blades of Wydette’s sewing shears.

Wydette had left Cuba as a young girl. She was naturalized in Florida at the age of eighteen, the same year she was named runner-up to Miss Jacksonville. At the beach, Wydette wore a sarong bathing suit, tropic island style, like the one she had worn in the beauty pageant. The suit left a distinct tan line, straight as a carpenter’s level across her cleavage.

Willis’s father, Lester, preferred to stay put under an umbrella. He had a Coleman cooler with a six-pack of beer all for himself and a six-pack of White Rock ginger ale for the rebound.

On the drive home from the beach, Lester stopped in
Fall River to buy drinks and sandwiches. Wydette ordered a sausage and pepper grinder and Willis and Lester chose chili dogs with transparent confetti flecks of onion. In the car, his parents started arguing, insulting one another. Wydette told Lester that she wanted to learn how to water-ski. She wasn’t really serious and Lester knew she was teasing him. He didn’t like her habit of making idle plans just to bargain with him. Lester criticized her, and instead of barking back she giggled with each of his comments about her. She ate her grinder, tugging loose a long strip of green pepper and eating it with her fingers. She encouraged bad table manners and Willis exhaled air through his straw. His iced coffee bubbled over the waxed-paper cup and stained the fabric upholstery. Together, they laughed until his father started swearing and punching the seat between them. Then, with the car going fifty, Lester reached over and took Wydette’s throat with one hand. He shook her. The car swerved onto the gravel shoulder and he had to let her go and take the wheel again. He looked better, relieved just to have throttled her once; it was a release, and his anger had crested. But Wydette had swallowed something whole, a wedge of sausage, and she was choking. Willis leaned over the front seat to pound his mother’s back. Her eyes looked pinched, then wide with fear. She could not tell him what to do, her voice was on the other side of the obstruction.

Lester pulled the car over to the shoulder and lifted his wife out of the passenger seat. He held her upside down at the waist and drummed her back with the heel of his hand; he bounced her over his bended knee until her dark bangs swept the littered asphalt. Finally, Lester ran out into the moving traffic. He tried to make the cars stop, as if stopping random vehicles could reverse his situation. Speeding cars screeched and sideswiped the inside guardrail. Lester came
back to his wife and son. He lifted Wydette upside down once again. She choked to death despite the force of gravity. The force of gravity, that monumental natural law, could not save her, how could Willis? Wydette’s face changed, its color deepened, and Willis had to look away.

The winter following Wydette’s death, Willis discovered a ship’s figurehead from the nineteenth century at the Whaling Museum in New Bedford. The sculpture’s origin was a mystery, nor did they know from which ship she was salvaged. The figurehead was known simply as the “White Lady,” because she wore a snowy gown under a blue apron. Every Saturday afternoon Willis took the bus to New Bedford and paid student admission to go inside the museum, through the arching whalebones at the entrance, past the harpoons and the baleen corsets. He loitered for an hour near the subject of his erotic nightmares. The “White Lady” looked like Wydette. She was beautiful, an evocative wooden bust of a gargantuan woman. The figure was nine feet tall with full skirt draperies swirling around her legs, a blue bodice, and white diamond-shaped stomacher. She wore a large red stone brooch at her bust, a bracelet and two matching necklaces. Her hair was deep brown, and cascaded down to her waist but was bound at the top with a white crownlike headpiece. Like all classic figureheads, she kept her right hand over her bosom, her left hand down at her side. The sculpture stared over Willis. Her maternal gaze was both tolerant and lovingly chastising. For almost a century her face had watched the rough sea and remained sweetly forgiving. He couldn’t take his eyes off her. Although the original paint was checked and alligatored, she had the honeyed skin and dark corona of a familiar beauty.
The figurehead looked like Wydette as Wydette looked at her viewing.

All winter the White Lady was his fixation. He wanted to place the palms of his hands on her rough wood cheeks, and with the raw, sensitive pads of his fingertips feel the weathered grain, the notched recesses of her mysterious eyes, her full lips. He couldn’t stand around in the museum very long without imagining knocking the figurehead from its permanent station. He looked so agitated, pacing back and forth, that finally the museum guides escorted him out of the building. When he came back inside, he stole an assortment of souvenirs from the gift shop. Humpback whale stamp pads, ships in tiny thumb-sized bottles. In the end, the museum director had contacted the high school in Newport to discuss Willis’s student profile. On the advice of the assistant principal, Willis was refused any further admittance to the museum.

That same winter, Willis’s father met Rennie at her souvenir shop on Bowen’s Wharf. He was hired to fix a sliding glass door that kept jumping its track, and in just three months he and Willis were living at Easton Way. Lester and Rennie signed marriage papers at the courthouse, but there wasn’t a ceremony.

It didn’t seem to bother Lester that Rennie’s first two husbands had gone down at sea. In fact, Lester had a perverse interest in the deaths of Rennie’s two husbands. He had lost his wife for no readable purpose; it was no different from the inexplicable seas and boiler eruptions that took Rennie’s husbands.

Willis saw Lester trying to shake his guilt about Wydette. Willis didn’t think that his father deserved even a tiny snatch of peace, not even a smidgen, nor a fleck. For months he gave his father the cold shoulder, never letting up. He lost his mother and disowned Lester.

When Willis and his father moved into Rennie’s big house above First Beach, Willis took the third-floor bedroom which had its own bath. An old clawfoot tub faced the bathroom window. The bathroom window was actually a full-sized storm door which framed a picture of the cold Atlantic, the rough surf breaking its green shingles on the shore. Rennie had a practical intuition about her new stepson. One night, Willis stood up from the tub, naked and dripping wet; he wanted to exit the tepid bath, exit the humid room. He wanted to go right through that storm door. Bathwater wasn’t enough. Soap was no use. Its lather was acrid, like white dung. He wanted the wet sea. He rattled the handle on the storm, but Rennie had nailed the door shut.

He sat down again in the tepid water. His guilt expanded like an apron of fungus; it ringed him with layers of cold truffles. He spent hours. Rennie claimed that it was the best seat in the house, and sometimes Willis had to let her use the tub. Her lavender bath salts scented the hall long after she was finished.

Rennie didn’t tolerate Willis’s obsessive nature or recognize his sickness. When Willis became agitated, she punched his shoulder and said, “Fiddle-faddle.” Such a tenderness in fool words startled Willis. Then, if Willis felt like an argument, Rennie too quickly conceded his point. She liked to derail him. She told him, quite simply, “Touché.” She bowed at the waist. She was closing it off before he could build up his case.

Lester’s heart attack occurred in the car, during a freak Easter snow squall. Willis and Lester were driving home late from a boat show at the Boston Garden. They were on empty stomachs. Heavy snowflakes fell on the windshield
and collected like curls of white butter, mounding up in a solid mass. The wipers were working hard but they couldn’t fling the heavy snow. Lester pulled to the side of the road. He waited in the driver’s seat.

“What are we doing?” Willis said.

Lester looked at the white windshield as if he saw a face in the storm. He seemed to recognize this face but didn’t necessarily wish to greet it.

“Why are we stopping? Here?” Willis said. Lester looked ready to answer Willis, but he cupped his shoulder in the palm of his hand and hunched forward in pain. It must have been a terrible crushing sensation in his chest, but worse than the sensation was the recognition. Lester knew what it meant to him, what it meant to his son.

After it was over, Willis sat next to his father for several minutes. Willis tried to reconstruct events; he thought of the cabin cruisers in the Boston Garden. His father perished at this unexpected place, at an absurd moment, while they were tuned to the “Sports Huddle” on WHDH. For a long time, Willis sat listening to the voice of Eddie Andelman discussing Stanley Cup finalists. At last, Willis went around to the driver’s side and he shoved his father’s body out from behind the wheel. It was difficult to get him over on the passenger side, he was a big man. He was a dead man. When Willis stepped back into the car, the heavy snow sucked his shoes right off his feet. He explored the icy pedals through his wet socks. Willis thought of Lester joining up with Wydette. It wasn’t until then that he started screaming. He yelled to Wydette, “Look out! Look out! Look out!”

He rode along the shoulder, testing the feel of it. He didn’t yet have his driver’s license. When he stepped on the brake, the car fishtailed on the fresh snow. He worked
into the traffic and kept driving until he saw a road sign, a blue square with a large, iridescent
H.
Willis believed that the sign had appeared out of nowhere to help him deliver Lester directly to Hell. Willis followed the blue signs; he recited what Wydette used to say, her polite, hypnotic formula:
H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks, H—E—two sticks.

He kept spelling the word until he steered into the emergency entrance of a hospital in North Attleboro. Attendants took his father from the car. They pulled Willis into the bright reception area where they pressed him down into a wheelchair. He wasn’t wearing any shoes. What had happened to his shoes? they asked him. An attendant started to write on a chart. They asked him, “Are you under the influence of alcohol? In the past twenty-four hours, have you inhaled or ingested cocaine? Phencyclidine? Dust? Son, you can tell me, have you been using dust?”

“He looks dusty,” another paramedic said.

Dust.
He knew what they were talking about. Willis had spent time with Lester at Narragansett Park. Back at the horse barns, they had watched a groom administer tranquilizers to a race horse. The pills were the size of golf balls. Before investing his money, Lester was researching the colt’s condition; he was asking about the horse’s knee.

Its injured knee was the size of a grapefruit.

The groom joked with Willis. “You have a mortar and pestle at home? Here. Grind one of these and you’ve got yourself an unbelievable buzz.” Then the nurses were shaking him. Willis wasn’t answering their questions. He was laughing with tears. The tears felt like hot wax and he wiped them away with the backs of his knuckles.