Playing House (27 page)

And, comforted but still uncomfortable, I, and we, continued to dig. The sun swelled hotter, higher, as the days went by, and on the solstice our sun was pierced on its pointed peak, spinning and spinning madly, this fire-star, our
raison d’etre
. They say to never stare into the sun, but I did. I stared straight into its blackened stove-belly and saw for minutes afterwards dark shapes dance before my eyes. I posed no questions. I got no answers.

Meanwhile, we dug ourselves in and, paradoxically, out to a depth of five feet, ice-cold lemonade cracking the thick glassine thirst that coated our throats, proving relief was possible.

“I want ten feet,” my husband said, eyeing the modest hole. “If we’re going to make a pond, I want it deep enough so I can do cannonballs without worrying about my ass.”

This seemed reasonable to me, so we hired a yellow machine with a steel claw, and the machine gnawed out another five feet, so at the end we had a crater that descended deep into the earth, the tapered sides taupe colored, at night the hole so impenetrably dark, so utterly mysterious one could almost imagine the tiny flickering lights of China deep in the deepest distance, a world beyond our world.

Ponds, like breasts, are not meant to be made. They are meant to simply occur. When one makes a thing like a pond or for that matter a breast, one must resort, unless incredibly lucky, to unnatural interventions; in the case of breast-making, saline implants or chunks of fine flesh culled from a chunky bottom; in the case of ponds, plastic liners or concrete, some way to hold the water. We’d resigned ourselves to a liner, all twenty-five hundred pounds of Firestone nontoxic rubber.

It was July then, and the rains resumed, and our pond-making stalled while we were pelted. The rain came down like a temper, a tantrum, beating its billions of fists against the hoods of cars, the roofs of houses. Tears of rain snaked their way beneath the loosened slates, slid down the walls, so the walls wept while I watched; I practiced watching.
How do walls weep? Why do walls weep? Can walls weep? Do weeping walls stop weeping?
I might have had such crazy questions if I had succumbed to my mind’s inclinations; but I did not succumb. I watched the rain. I waited it out, and, in the waiting, my body began to rain right along with the world. I rained droplets, sweated drops, the humidity coating me, its hand across my mouth.

I detest clichés, but then again, there’s a reason why certain phrases have attained immortality as clichés. I cannot think of a better way of saying that when you let something go, it frequently comes back to you. I let go of the search for understanding my bad luck, and in doing that, I also let go of the hope embedded in that search: that, by understanding, I might come to control my fortune, which I would swiftly reverse once I figured out the stick shift. I let the wheel go, watched Good Luck and Bad Luck disappear into their separate mists, lost sight of them completely in the rain, and then the rain stopped. The clouds cleared. They cleared swiftly, dramatically, like a stage set or a movie; we went from black to stunning blue, the day emerging at once wet and crisp, the trees dripping jewels, the flowers drunk on drinking, their heads lolling with dizzy delight, rivulets etched into our earth, showing us which way the rain ran, downhill, of course, heading, all water, straight for our yet-to-be-pond. We had ordered the liner, and right this minute it was en route, rolled like a massive scroll, a Torah made of rubber, on some truck, halfway between Minnesota and Massachusetts. Understand, the liner was key and, therefore, even though it ensured a synthetic wetland, we couldn’t wait to receive it. Our pond depended upon it. The liner would at once contain and seal the pond, allowing it to exist while ensuring its fraudulent nature. Unnaturally sealed up, our pond would require expensive aeration systems and flashy pumps that would circulate the water 24/7, sending a no-no message to mosquitoes seeking stagnant fluids in which to hatch their larvae.

And now, after rain, with only a few days left
before
the shipment was to arrive, we followed the water’s path to our half-made pond. We weren’t going to see if it held water; we assumed it would not. We were going to see if the pounding rainfall had destroyed the plant shelves we had so carefully sculpted.

I think we heard it before we saw it, the sound of
plop plop plop
. Ben says he heard gurgling, not plopping, but I don’t see how that’s possible. I heard plopping, and then, peering over the sculpted lip of our hole, I saw emerald frogs arcing from bank to bank, missing by long shots, falling into what could be called a massive puddle or could be called a . . . a . . .
pond
, for the hole was holding water, against all odds, against all rules, because dirt in New England does not hold water, but, well, this dirt did. “Clay,” an aquascape contractor, told us a few days later, when he came out to see our little miracle, our piece of great good luck, the liner shipment cancelled, $12K returned to our account. “You’ve got clay here it seems,” the pond professional said, grabbing a chunk of the saturated stuff and letting it ooze through his fist. “You know,” he said, “you’re really, really lucky. You won’t need a liner. Pond people would kill to have your soil.”

I started to laugh then, because I knew no one would kill to have my soil. Of this I was positive.

Still, there are times when clocks stop and awareness of the terrible temporary nature of your world gets suspended in some liminal, summer-like state, so your life hangs like a long afternoon in a perfect mid-July, the roses rose-red, their mouths yawning wide as if in perpetual surprise, or sleepiness. And that was what our sudden luck was like. We didn’t ponder its temporary nature; we just enjoyed it. The kids whooped with delight, stripped off their clothes, and went racing down the embankment, skidding, stumbling, finally belly flopping into the half-filled crater, muddy and foggy but delightfully cool and totally ours. All day the kids played in the pond we’d made, caught frogs, pried stones from the field and let them cannonball down deep into the deepest part. The children emerged from the murky water at sunset, sun-baked and flaking mud; we hosed them down outside, brown giving way to a deeper brown, the bodies of my estivating progeny.

I woke early the next morning to a sound. A step. Something emerging from the forest that lined our land. I don’t know how I could have heard her, for she was too far away, but I swear I heard her step, her delicate cloven foot landing lightly on the still soaking leaves, coming closer, closer, while I slipped out of bed to watch at the window. The doe seemed to be of suede, with a fine shapely head and ears at once triangular and furred. Her long neck arced out, lowered her head like a lever, and I saw her drink the accumulated rain our whole pond held, for her, and us.

I believed something was over, had passed then. I felt I had climbed to the top of a steep spiral staircase and now I stood looking down at the vortex of steel from the final landing.

That afternoon, Benjamin took the kids for ice cream, and I planned to try the pond out for myself.

Where we live: on thirty-eight acres forty-eight miles from Boston, MA, but forty-eight worlds apart. Our town is tiny, rural, the streets astir with horses and cars in equal number. At rush hour, carts roll down the road, pulled by geldings with black blinders siding their angular faces, and every morning the sun rises from behind the mountain, first its rays snaking upward and then at last the yolk of yellow yanked suddenly into the sky, as if pulled on a chain, or some string, held in the hand of god. And every night that same sun sets in reverse order, first the yolk, aflame now, streaming salmon pinks and hemorrhage-red from its bruised body, that yolk drops down abruptly behind the stony ridge, leaving its rays to linger aimlessly, until, one by one, they fizzle out almost audibly, and the darkness is a-chirp with crickets and other creatures.

Where we live, a neighbor can be eight acres away.

I walk around naked where we live. When it’s warm, I do this, despite my weight, because of my weight, I do this and revel in my privilege.

Thus, I stripped to my skin and, without even the screen of sun lotion, walked down the dirt path to the pond, which looked so peaceful, like a huge cup of tea on an earthen saucer. Dragonflies glinted above it, snacking on mosquitoes, and way down at the bottom, frogs skimmed the water, their back legs flung behind their goopy bodies, clowns, every one.

Now I made my way down the embankment we had made, surprised at how steep it actually was. We had tried to dig the sides to no more than a slope of twenty degrees, but this could not have been twenty degrees. Gravity put both his hands on my back and pushed me, so my cautious walk turned into a stumble, and then a slip, and then before I could say
catchascatchcan
, I went lickety-split into the pond, sliding to my destination on my bare ass, cool clay caking my palms and parts.

And then I was in, swimming around, pedaling in the water, flinging my legs like the frogs, breast stroking back and forth with them. Delightful. Five days of heavy rains had not managed to fill ’er up to ten feet. I’d say our pond was filled to four feet ten inches, maximum. I know this because when I finally stood up, I, at five feet, could stand with my head above water, stand, that is, in the center, the deepest point of the pond, which is where I stood now, with my head above water, and then I walked forward, towards the embankment, our steep-sloped shore, having had my fill, ready to get out, standing for a second in the shallow end to admire what we’d made, the water calm and lapping. I stood, water at my ankles. I stood for no more than maybe five seconds, gathering myself to get out.

And that is when it happened. Not slowly; it happened suddenly, as though a rug had been pulled, because suddenly I was sinking, the muddy bottom collapsing out from under me, my flailing feet searching for water but instead stuck in sucking mud, and I could not stop the sucking. I’ve never felt anything comparable. I had never known the earth was capable of collapsing in this manner; my standing spot was having a nervous breakdown of some sort, melting down into some substance all ooze and excrement, some voracious devilish substance gobbling me up, or down; down, I went, not even thinking to scream.

I was, then, sunk to my knees, my thighs; it happened fast. I recall feeling in a flash how hot and heavy the afternoon sun was on my head, like a hand, pushing me down, this image in a flash of a flash, and then disappeared, just darkness, and now the mud was at my midpoint. I kept going.

My life did not roll before my eyes.

I did not process my regrets, or my loves, or my luck, for that matter.

I lost all thought; I shed my status as a noun and became pure verb, at one with the plot I was quite literally sucked into. I was going down, and I needed to find a way up, and out; but I was no match for the mud. My muscles were irrelevant in the mud. I could not quite grasp this fact at first, because I have always thought that, if caught in a natural disaster, your muscles would save you or sink you; it was all about strength, was it not? And yet here, no matter how hard I strained and clawed, it made not one whit of difference; I was clawing at mush, at mash; clawing at cloud, pushing against emptiness, each tiny, solid center my feet seemed to find collapsing still further inward.

A long time passed. This I know. So perhaps my struggles
did
do me some good, did slow the sinking; the sun was far westward when the mud crept past my neck and pressed up against my pursed lips, clasping my whole head just below my flaring nostrils. “Where the fuck is my family,” I thought, and then, in a flare of rage, “This is one hell of an ice-cream cone they’re all eating.”

Now, the mud was in my mouth.

Up my nose.

I started choking, spitting, but whenever I spat, the more mud was in my mouth. I could still breathe. I could breathe well enough to weep, and weep I then did, and my tears merged with the mud and made it still muddier. And once again, then, I saw that, quite literally, there was nothing I could do. There was simply no way out. No amount of understanding, or struggle, would crack the code of quicksand, which this essentially was, and I was tired. So very tired.

I tried once more to thrash my way upward, and then exhaustion captured me completely, and I slumped in my mud and tasted its taste: drenched darkness, thick salt, shredded plant. I tasted it all: the earth, the depth, the darkness, the minerals, the fire, the water, the loam the clay the seeds the salt the weeping the wanting the living the dying; I tasted it all because I was forced to. I slumped in my mud and sampled the whole world.

I didn’t know that if you are ever caught in quicksand, rule one is
not
to struggle. I stopped struggling because I could not continue.

And once I stopped, the mud stopped with me. In fact, it was as though the entire earth just came to a quiet halt, with me. I hung there, entombed, suspended between here and there, then and now, with nothing sucking; just stopped. Dangling in density, utterly liminal, still weeping.

But even in tears I took note of how stopping had helped. Once I stopped, so too did the sinking. I’d like to know why this is, but I have not had the time to look into it.

And then, after minutes or hours, mosquitoes still nibbling on my scalp, the suspension transformed itself into an ever-so-slight upward lift. I felt it, a tectonic shift, a northward shrug, the earth in all its layers quite literally lifting me out of my mess.

Now I stayed very still, afraid to even wriggle my toes, because clearly there was a connection between the stillness in my body and the upward movement of the world. I was in mud, but miles beneath my feet the tectonic plates held me aloft, ground their gears, and then urged me skyward, so eventually my mouth emerged, my neck, my shoulders, my breasts, black moguls, my belly, black balloon; I rose in increments standing still, doing nothing. I rose, or, rather, the earth rose me, rewarded me, and once my stomach was out, I flung my whole self forward, clung to the embankment, hauled myself high and higher still, the pond’s lip just inches away now. And only then did I allow myself these images: phoenix, swan, mermaid, rising from her own excessive froth, finding her land legs, ecstatic not because of talent, and surely not because of luck (but then again precisely because of luck, her gifts sometimes gaudy, sometimes simple, she favors the prepared, perhaps, but, as far as I’m concerned, everything I get, both good and bad, yes, everything I get starts to go as soon as I feel it on my fingers . . . .).