Molly Prentiss
Patterns That Ripple to the Edge
Dad said while we were eating melons: we are made of sixty percent water and that’s the truth. I pinched my skin. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t understand how all that water stayed in there, how our bodies stayed so hard, how we didn’t become puddles on sidewalks, why we didn’t leak. I contemplated as I ate, my face sticky with the melon sugar, and stared at the swimming pool. Then I saw Jake diving in the deep end and my body got as hot as the cement where my feet stood. And when Dad glanced over under his bifocals: what a shame. I mean shameful. I mean that I should have become a puddle right then and I should have sank into the cement. Instead I pulled my goggles over my eyes and dove into the water, too, throwing the rind of my melon like people throw salt over the shoulder for good luck. My body made of water in the body of water. Finally. My hands and feet and chest and whole body. Finally. Jake was doing the backstroke like a windmill across the pool. The gardenias had fallen and it was late summer and Jake and I swam toward each other through petals.
Dad had gone inside now, and the pool became a secret. “Mermen,” I said loudly, kicking in circles to stay afloat. This was a code that that we shared between us. Jake stopped the backstroke, perked, and flipped over in the water. I saw his legs go together – clenched tight – and he dove downward, flapped his fins. I became a merman, too and we circled around each other. We let our bare chests touch: as soft as the gardenia petals. My goggles were suction cups for seeing. The dream was to have enough air to stay under forever. One went under water and held their breath until they couldn’t anymore, and that’s when the other one went down to save him; it was mouth on mouth for survival. The color was perfect, an aquarium green, like someone had caught us in nets and transplanted us, taken us to the safest new environment. We were tropical fish. We were figurines in a bathtub. We were sharks and minnows. Under the water the whole sky was a kite. The surface was mirror for both the sky and for our figurine bodies. Jake. Come over closer. Be my merman. Okay.
Jake died at age twenty three. It was snowing in Barcelona. I was in the bath when I got the phone call from America, because they didn’t use showers over there, just baths. I picked up the phone with a wet hand. Dad’s voice came through – so familiar, so sheltered in bifocals, so distant open Los Angeles sun-filled, filtering into the terrified white of this porcelain bathroom in Spain. Your friend, he said, the swimmer. Car wreck, he said with his dry mouth under his long nose under his bifocals. The water started draining from the tub, all on its own, until I was so cold that my penis hurt, until my whole vision was white and my white body froze in the white bath and the white telephone froze and Dad’s white voice froze. It froze in time. It would always be that frozen white moment. I spent the night in the bath. I woke to frozen time. I put clothes on, hailed a taxi to the airport, and not one minute passed as I made my way home.
The plane ride was an in-between space where nothing made sense. I ordered ginger ale and my back scratched the seat. At one point I saw Jake’s body swimming alongside the airplane. He was doing freestyle, his arms making a series of temporary triangles. I picked up the boxy airplane phone to call him. I called his number in California. Do you remember me, I said, because it had been so long since we’d seen each other. Do you remember when we got older? I looked through the tiny window that was both a square and a circle. I saw the outline shape of his windmill arms. The lady next to me in the airplane turned her head to look at me. Her perfume was gardenia. I grew angry. Jake, I said into the telephone, did you reciprocate? The phone was attached to the seat in front of me with a thick cord. Jake! Did you reciprocate? I was crying now and it was because of the thick cord that wouldn’t let me get the phone close enough and it was because of the gardenia perfume and it was because out the window, Jake was mocking me with his boyish swimming. Jake, it wasn’t like everybody said. Two boys can love each other. I watched him outside the window, laughing as he dove through the clouds. Jake why are you fucking swimming like that? Why didn’t you grow up ever? Then the airplane phone cut out and there was no signal. The lady with the perfume touched my leg with glossy painted fingernails. Fingernails so glossy they looked wet.
Jake’s funeral was on top of a hill like the graves in movies. It was on Benedict Canyon Drive and things were youthful again, at home in Los Angeles with the nice weather. The sun mocked me like a commercial. The sky was a net. My father came to the funeral, too, and his bifocals slid over his nose when he looked down.
Later I became older. Physically: my long nose grew longer and I needed glasses like my father. Mentally: I couldn’t stay in Los Angeles any longer. I moved back to Barcelona and the wide avenues. It was a fine city, and I worked at the aquarium, which was a fine job. Looking into the glass brought reflections. There were millions of things happening under the surface that you didn’t realize until you were looking through the glass at the organisms. I learned each fish by heart, knew its patterns, how it moved. I was particularly close with a clown fish, who swam in confused circles. I often felt I was doing the same sort of swimming that he was, and he made me laugh. The sad part was that the fish were always dying. When a fish died you went in with a net and pulled it out. Sometimes it was my job to fish them out, and other times I was just a simple guard. Please stay away from the tanks, I told the smaller children, please keep away from the glass.
And then Vincent came around and he painted houses. What a nice job to have, I thought when I met Vincent on my neighbor’s terrace, his overalls splattered white. It really was a nice job to have. You could see your progress happening right there on the wall. Vincent always had a brown face. The sun kept him cheerful. Be careful about skin cancer, I said, because I was always afraid of death again. We fell in love and he started coming around more often. Vincent slept always slept in letter shapes, a G or a lower case I and by the end of the week he could spell a whole word. While he slept I often couldn’t, and I’d step out onto the terrace to make some calls. I called Jake’s number that I knew by heart, but Jake was very hard to hear. He was crackly and out of breath and still a very small boy. So I’d call my father next, hoping to talk a bit, but he was always asleep. He had his bifocals on his chest, I knew, and he had the light on. My mother would take his bifocals off of his chest and set them on the bedside table. My mother would turn off the light. My mother would pull the blanket up to his chin, just like she had done for me when I was young in Los Angeles.
For Christmas, Vincent and I visited my parents in Los Angeles. My father was getting old. He had these gray hairs shooting out of his face and eyebrows. Holy shit you are getting old, I said. We were eating cantaloupe, which made my father entirely happy. How on earth could someone get so old and stay happy? When had I been as happy as my father was now, eating cantaloupe by the pool while his hairs grew longer? I looked into the aqua marine pool and Jake was there, wearing his red swim trunks. He was splashing at me, pushing me away. No, not that time. That time when Jake and I lay on the tile floor and looked at the ceiling for hours, watching the reflections of the pool water dance like dancers on the white paint. The reflections were like sequins or merman scales and never got boring. And then my father came home – he was younger then – and told us to get off the dirty floor it was time to learn how to drive. We were too young, but we went anyways. I had a haircut so my hair couldn’t blow with the top down, but Jake’s long hair followed him like waves as the air lifted it from his young back for freedom’s sake. Maybe that was like my father’s melon, I thought as I stared at the pool, a time when I did not think about anything else but what was in front of me.
What’s in front of me? My father and mother sitting silently together by the pool. There is no need for talking. My father talks to me because he has to teach me. My mother and father have run out of things to teach each other. Vincent and I talk over the silence and the champagne. Vincent says pass the bowl of melon, please. I say Sure and pass it gladly. We share things. We pull the shirts off our bodies to swim. We move around each other and the water makes patterns that ripple to the edge. I let my feet slide together like merman fins, but only for a second. It is important to be in the present. It is very important to be grateful for the here and now. Later things will be different and I will miss this time at this moment with my father and mother watching Vincent and me swim in silence. My father’s eyes watering through the bifocals and my mother adjusting her white hat.
Later we are driving away from my parent’s house, whistling through the canyon, Vincent tells me: you are damaged goods. Your first love has died and now you are damaged goods. It is as if he is suddenly realizing something that he should have seen all along. But he is saying it in a funny way. A kind way. His mouth open. His hand in his hair. My own hair is long now, and blows freely. I tell him: Damaged goods are fruits and dented cans. He says: That’s right, you are both of those things. Ripe like a fruit and a can-do attitude! He laughs, and you can hear his accent living inside the cave of his mouth. Vincent has a very good sense of humor. Not like most French guys. I met a guy in France who talked like Vincent but was not so smart. He did not like to talk in the mornings. He did not like to swim. With Vincent I swim out to the dock. We drive so fast that our eyes water. When I think about time moving so quickly I try to think about the water that circles around and around the world.
It has been two weeks back in Barcelona. Vincent and I have had two weeks worth of coffee, he has painted two weeks worth of houses, and I have taught two weeks worth of worthless lessons at the American school. And now back to Los Angeles. It is my father: heart stopped beating during his afternoon swim, and he was taken to Good Samaritan hospital in his swim shorts. He needs quadruple bypass surgery. My mother is there. He will be okay, my mother says frantically into the telephone, He has got to be okay. My mother’s voice freezes and lingers. Time freezes and lingers. I get into bed with Vincent for one hour’s worth of frozen time before I catch a new flight home in what seems like a new life since Jake. My back scratches a new seat and I stare out a new square circle window. But it is also the same seat – patterned blue and stiff backed – the same window – a tiny portal where you can see the triangle wing of the plane – and there is the same woman next to me, same gardenia perfume, her bifocals pinched between her wet fingernails. I want to use the airplane phone to call my mother, but I do not want to feel the tug of its cord, attached to the seat in front of me.
I arrive and take a taxi from LAX to Good Samaritan. It is the middle of the night. My father is asleep when I arrive and the fish tank in the hospital room is glowing blue in an unnatural way. My father looks ivory colored and old. He wakes. The surgery has happened. He breathes, he speaks. We have a conversation with the fish tank purring behind us.
You know I have heard Barcelona’s a fine town, he says. His voice is crusty, crinkling, cough-like.
It is, I say. There are wide, wide avenues that lead to the water.
What else? My father says. You know, I’ve never been?
Lots more, I say. There’s my friend Roman. He plays music on the streets. There are lots of musicians on the streets. They sell chestnuts in winter. Vincent and I have a terrace. A small one, but we drink coffee and watch the neighborhood in the mornings. You’d like it, Dad.
Oh, yes. I’d like it.
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My father nods his head and smiles half way because he likes to imagine the place I live. He drifts in and out of sleep.
Lucy is the nurse. She is fresh faced and blond, and brings him things that will do him well. She brings him juice and fruit and oatmeal in the mornings. She tells him jokes and they flirt in a young nurse old patient kind of way. My mother sits in the hospital room for many hours a day and makes harsh eyes at Lucy when she changes the IV. Even though she knows Lucy is harmless and has a boyfriend named Chad who comes to pick her up from work in a convertible. Even though Lucy is half the woman that she is. Even though Lucy will never know my father like she does, the intricacies of a thirty-year marriage, the nights spent with her back to him or the nights spent making love to him. My mother sits stiff-backed and watches Lucy’s blonde hair and blonde laugh bounce around the room like a new kind of reflection.
My father tells Lucy: You know I taught this kid here to drive? He pats my shoulder with his hand that has a needle taped to the skin. It feels like a paper hand, like all the water is gone from inside of it. Goddamned kid couldn’t get the gears right at first. But his friend Jake… Then my father pauses in a painful way and changes the subject to silence. He strokes his left eyebrow, following the long hairs away from his face. Finally he tells Lucy, You know my son here has a fine life abroad. He is a teacher, he says, and then more quietly, He teaches people things. Lucy smiles one of the smiles you do when you’re not quite sure whether to smile or to let your eyebrows fall together with worry. She seems to know something that the rest of us do not, and there is a glimmer of concert – or is it guilt? – in the way she moves around the room, fixing things up for my father.
Lucy is there when Vincent arrives at the hospital. Vincent holds my father’s paper hand and Lucy watches on. My father’s oldness rubs off on Vincent, and I notice the spot at the top of Vincent’s head where the hair is not growing in anymore. Probably the hairs are tired of growing in and falling out and having to grow in again. Probably my father’s eyebrows are tired of staying short and neat, and now they are revolting. Vincent tells my father about the job he is finishing, a big modern house in a very rich area of the city with the wide avenues, a house as blue and square as a pillbox. There is something about being in the hospital room that makes my penis hurt again, that nagging tug, and I think of the graves in movies and I think of Jake’s grave. I take my cell phone out to the hall and call Jake’s number. But this time the phone operator say something unnatural and stiff – this number is no longer in service. So I hang up the phone but I talk to Jake anyway, letting my back slide down the wall, holding the silent receiver to my ear. I tell Jake the stories of home and explain the hospital smell and the fear about dying and also tell him new jokes I learned like the one about the farmer who is outstanding in his field that Vincent thinks is funny because his English is bad. And then I listen closely for Jake’s young laugh.
Three weeks pass and my father looks worse with a paler face and paler eyes. But Vincent’s accent makes my father laugh even when he is not telling a joke, so my father laughs a lot. The worse he looks the more jokes we make and the more often we leave to find empty corridors or bathroom stalls for minutes to ourselves. My father’s friend Randall who is a bachelor with cigars comes by the hospital and gets drunk with my father when Lucy is not watching. Lucy faithfully brings tea when my father is drunk. She does not say anything about the drinking although he smells of whiskey, which is how my mother starts to trust Lucy and even secretly love her. My mother does not trust the hospital food so she brings my father her salmon sunsets and leafy salads and melon because he loves melon, of course. She drives back and forth from the hospital in my father’s car, the same convertible I learned to drive in, and she always goes alone. She lets the wind blow through her hair and swerves through the canyon. She never cries at the hospital. Lucy notices this and sometimes stays late to watch through my father’s window, hoping my mother might cry when my father falls asleep. But this never happens, and Lucy leaves while my mother stays.
My father complains that the fish tank keeps him awake at night, but he will not let them move him to another room. He likes the fish tank, he says, because it reminds him of the pool at home. Lucy feeds the fish daily and my father likes to watch her dribble the flakes onto the mirrored surface. Randall comes back every week to drink with my father and one day Lucy comes in to feed the fish and finds my father holding the whiskey bottle as if it were a trophy. She does not scold them because she understands about limited time. My father watches her with his drunk eyes while she floats about the room. He tells her come close, Lucy, come close. And she comes to him, standing like a white doll at the side of his bed, fluttering her face lightly, allowing her cheeks to redden. My father touches Lucy’s hand and he touches her face. He looks up at her swimming eyes and tells her with all the sincerity the alcohol allows, that he loves her more than any woman in this terrible world. He loves her with every part of his weak heart. And Lucy holds her hand in front of her face and sniffs, her eyes water and cloud, and I love you too, she says, because it is what she must say to a dying man and also because at that moment she does love him a little bit, she can love everyone, she thinks, everyone all at once. There is still room left in her body made of water for more love and so she will keep giving it and letting it in until she cannot find any place for it anymore. There is room for this now, Lucy will think as she feeds my father a handful of pills and kisses him on his wet, hot cheek.
Author Bio
Molly Prentiss lives and writes in San Francisco, where she is currently pursuing her MFA in Creative writing at the California College of the Arts. She has been published in La Petit Zine, Glossolalia Flash Fiction Review, The Plaid Review, Saveur Magazine, and is soon to be featured in Miracle Monacle, The City Reader and OneDedCow. She is the editor of a zine titled Bummer City and a co-director of an arts and writing collective called factorycompany. Molly also enjoys working in visual art, and both her writings and drawings can be found at: mollyprentiss.blogspot.com.
