Reasons for and Advantages of Breathing (9 page)

I
t is a reckless venture, motherhood. I know you can't hang on to them forever, but it's downright crazy when you think about it: you take such good care of them—you trim their tiny fingernails so carefully when they are babies, you make sure they drink their milk and eat their vegetables and look both ways before crossing, you minister to every scrape and bruise, and then they turn eighteen—that's it—you just turn them out into the wilderness.

My daughter left home for college last week. I am still peering in the doorway of her room when I go by, thinking I will see her, cross-legged on the bed. The dog waits for her on the front porch all afternoon. An unnatural silence hangs over the house in the evening. Last night at dinner, my husband looked up at me and said, “So what do you plan to do with yourself, now that you have all this
time
?”

Time. When I was young, I thought I had all the time in the world. Time to waste. Time to make mistakes. It never crossed my mind that I might wake up one morning and it would be gone, just like that.

When she was packing, my daughter found a box of black-and-white photographs down in the basement. I hadn't seen them since before she was born. When she brought the box upstairs and spread them out on the kitchen table—my God—it was like she had dredged up a body, a missing life. Case long since closed.

What could I do? I told her the story. There it was, after all, laid out on the table: my one spectacularly wrong turn.

 

At the age of twenty-two, I somehow got it in my head that I would be a photographer. The next Stieglitz or Evans or Arbus. I do not have a creative bone in my body, but it was the artist's life I was drawn to, or what I thought an artist's life was about—beauty, spontaneity, freedom—everything my parents' life lacked. I came up with a plan to move to the South, where I had never been and which seemed so mysterious: raw and dangerous and full of relics of a long-gone era. This mystery, I truly believed, would more than make up for my lack of talent, because any photograph I took could not help but capture it.

If only someone had given it to me straight. If only someone had been kind enough to discourage me. My parents just threw up their hands and vowed not to give me a penny. But
who needed money? I had higher pursuits. I packed up my car and drove until I got to Georgia, to a little town where, in 1984, they still had dirt roads and a crossroads jailhouse and a general store where old men sat around a checkerboard on a whiskey barrel, and down a dark hallway there were two bathrooms still marked with the faint, chilling outline of the words
WHITE
and
COLORED
.

I should have known right away that I was in over my head—should have got back in the car and driven straight home to Connecticut. Instead I rented a place, made a darkroom out of the closet, and got a job waiting tables at a dingy restaurant by a lake. The lake was one of those fake lakes they've got down there, where sometime in the 1940s the government built a dam on a river and flooded a whole town. You would never know it, to look at it. I assumed the lake was just like the lakes we have here in the north, formed perfectly naturally by the slow scrape of glaciers. But nothing was what it seemed to be, in Georgia. Nothing was what it seemed, nothing was permanent, and so much was concealed—a town under water, a rattlesnake den under a boulder—hazards that a girl like me wouldn't even know to look for.

Tommy came in to the restaurant all the time, but at first I did not notice him. He was twice my age, with a beard and a beer paunch, a leathery tan and mirrored sunglasses, just like all the other customers who came in for catfish and hush puppies or chicken-fried steak, all those dreadful things they served at that place, after a day of fishing on the lake. But Tommy wasn't a fisherman—he hated to see an animal
suffer, any animal—and one day, I went to clear his table and found the tip he had left me: five one-dollar bills, folded to look like a tiny bouquet of roses. I was charmed.

Tommy, I would learn soon enough, was famous for tricks like that. Useless tricks, party tricks. He could strike a match on his front teeth and get the cap off a beer bottle in half a dozen different ways. He could speak Pig Latin and fold a napkin to look like a dancing chicken and eat fire if he was drunk enough. He could play a guitar behind his back. The kind of skills some men spend their twenties perfecting, but promptly lose to lack of practice when they get real jobs and families. Not Tommy. Tommy hadn't held down a real job in decades, and as for a family, though he'd been married once, briefly, when he was young, he had not had anyone steady in his life since. This should have been enough of a warning. Forty-five and still living life like he was eighteen.

He was staying on a houseboat docked at the marina—that should have been the next red light. The boat wasn't even his—it belonged to a friend who let Tommy crash out there when he was low on money, and he'd been there for over a year. There was Astroturf on the deck, and below there was a galley kitchen, a tiny cave of a bedroom, mold along the edges of the carpet, and beach chairs for furniture. A leaky fuel line made the living quarters dizzying with fumes. But the first night I went out there and we motored out to the middle of the lake to watch the moon rise, in silence save for the lapping of the water, the crickets on the far shore, and the ice popping and melting in our drinks, I looked up at the
stars and curled my toes in my sandals and thought,
My God, why would anyone want to live on land?
I thought I had found it, the life I was looking for.

I remember the parties best. Oh, my, those were some parties. You would wake up in the morning and figure the earth had to have shifted on its axis. It is a wonder no one ever drowned, or burned their hands off—the fireworks! Every night like the Fourth of July. Roman candles lined up along the rail. When they sailed off hissing into the water, Tommy would smile contentedly and watch them like they held messages to be delivered to another world.

It was a real cast of characters at those parties—grizzled old bikers, Southern belles with big hair who drank like fish and cussed like sailors, a revolving pack of skinny teenage boys whose tan bodies are forever imprinted on my mind at the moment they would dive off the back, one after another, like a chorus line. How did Tommy assemble such a crew? Some of them were old friends or, like the bikers, had worked with Tommy on an odd job somewhere, but many he would have just met a day or two before: the sons and daughters of vacationing families from Atlanta whom he befriended at the gas station or the general store. And then there was me. I must have looked to all of them exactly like what I was: a wide-eyed Yankee college girl, clutching a camera to her chest, too shocked and shy to take pictures. You have got to be bolder, you know, to be behind a camera than to be in front of one.

And Tommy—Tommy would be in the middle of it all, holding court in an open Hawaiian shirt and train engineer's
cap, a beer in each hand, putting them down only to light another firework or slide another tape in the stereo. You name it, he played it, and played it loud: that music must have carried over the water all the way down to Florida.

Then right in the middle of a song—he had the attention span of a four-year-old—all of a sudden he would snap off the stereo and pick up his fiddle. He could play any instrument that was handed to him, and play it beautifully—make you want to weep it was so beautiful, especially after what you'd been listening to all night. Old hymns, folk songs that he learned from his grandfather, who was, he'd never let you forget, the grandson of a Confederate captain. Even the titles made me teary. “There Will Be Peace in the Valley.” “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies.” There was one—“Drunken Hiccups”—I must have heard him play that one a hundred times, but I never did know how it ended. He would pluck the fiddle strings to make it hiccup, and exaggerate his drawl. Everyone would sing along:

They never got to the last line, because one of his buddies would stop there and shout, “It ain't a river, Tommy! It's a goddamn lake!” And another would jab a beer can in the air and yell back gleefully, “And it ain't whiskey! It's beer! It's cheap-ass beer!” And one of the boys would do a double gainer off the back, and Tommy would lean back in his lawn
chair, pull me close with the bow, laugh, and kiss me. Oh, he was a charmer, that Tommy. And I fell for every last bit of it.

 

When people talk about the South being haunted, it's true. But it's not the places that are haunted, it's the people. They are trapped by all the stories of the past, wandering a long hallway lined with locked doors, knocking and knocking, with no one ever answering. No one ever will. That's the thing about the past. The closest you can get to it is stories, and stories don't even come close.

Everyone talked about the town at the bottom of the lake as if it was only yesterday they had been doing their grocery shopping there. Tommy could stand there all night, drinking beer and reminiscing. He was only a little boy when they built the dam, but he seemed to remember everything: the oak tree with a cannon ball from a Civil War skirmish still wedged in its trunk, the houses, the library, the hardware store. I would squint at the water and try to picture it—I never could.

The truth was that town was dead, all those old trees were dead, and the people were dead or had moved to Valdosta forty years before. All that was left was that big fake lake, with its choppy shoreline and muddy stink, the water skiers and mosquitoes big as hummingbirds, and the restaurant where I made terrible tips and the marina with numbered slips for thirty-five boats, and Tommy and me wrapped in each other's arms in slip number thirty-three, once the party had finally folded and everyone else had gone home.

 

Tommy gave me a dog that summer, a little black-and-white mutt he found abandoned in the marina parking lot and befriended with hot dogs and tuna fish. He really did want me to have it, but that dog was never mine. Never even gave me the time of day, but I didn't mind. It was something else, to watch that dog with Tommy. It was absolutely devoted to him, just glued to his hip. He taught it to shake and speak and dive with him off the side of the boat. They would both scramble up on deck, dripping wet and panting, great big grins on their faces, while I sat in the lawn chair and applauded. At night, the dog slept under the bed, as close to Tommy as we would allow. To use an expression of Tommy's, that dog thought he had hung the moon.

But every once in a while, something would come over that dog. Something would come over it, and it would not let Tommy near. It would be lying there, perfectly at peace, sound asleep in the sun on the top deck, and then Tommy would come up the ladder and it would leap to its feet, hack-les raised, baring its teeth and growling like a hell-hound. Send him crawling right back down the ladder. Poor Tommy. That just tore him up. He couldn't understand. “That dog's just crazy,” I would tell him, trying my best to comfort him. “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Don't pay any attention to it.”

But the dog wasn't crazy—it was smart. I didn't realize it at the time, but that dog could see clear into Tommy—clear through to his heart—to both the good and the dark.
Tommy couldn't fool that dog the way he was fooling everybody else.

 

Oh, everyone knew he was drinking too much.
He
knew he was drinking too much. But he knew how far he could push it—and then just at the last moment, just when it seemed he had passed the point of no return, just when his bad side started to break through, the mood swings, the yelling—he knew how to reel it back in. And when that time came—I was a woman on a mission. Clearing out all the beer bottles, sniffing out the secret stash. The parties would go dry—yes, there was plenty of other stuff going on, but no one would have a drink for a week. Tommy would be as gentle as a kitten. Then one morning he'd roll over and look at me with those eyes. “Baby, can I have some money?” How could I refuse? He would drive off and come back with three cases of beer. And it would start all over again.

He had been through all the programs. He could talk the talk. “Sure, I'm on the twelve-step program,” he would say. “At all times keep the beer cooler no farther than twelve steps away.” When he was drinking, he could make you feel like you were in on it with him. That you were pulling the big one over on somebody. That's what Tommy was too damn good at. Making everybody feel like they were on his team. And what other team would you ever want to be on?

There was a running joke at those parties. “Denial,” Tommy would say, cracking a beer with a theatrical sigh and
shaking his head. The first time I heard it, I held my breath, thinking things had taken a bad turn. I looked around. Everyone else was frozen too, faces serious. But that was just part of the act. After a minute or two of that strained silence, someone would pipe up, “What are you talking about, Tommy? De river in Egypt?” And the crowd would explode.

But it wasn't a river anymore. Hadn't been for forty years. It was a lake, a goddamn lake, and on a lake you can't really go anywhere. On a lake the best you can hope for is around and around.

 

By Labor Day, I had forgotten that the North, or anything in it, even existed. Though it was just as hot as July, the lake quieted down beautifully; the vacationers left, the retirees abandoned their boats for the season, the water skiers packed it in, the restaurant served its last hush puppy, gave me my last paycheck, and shuttered its windows and doors.

Tommy would drive me all over the county so that I could shoot rolls of film. He would pull over when he saw something he thought would make a good picture—kids playing marbles in a yard, vultures in a kudzu-covered tree, a field of rusted cars—and shoo me out with my camera. I'd stand there fussing with my light meter, framing the shot, and double-checking everything, and Tommy would hang his sunburned elbow out the window and shout, “All right already! Just press the damn shutter!” Once in a while, he would grab the camera and take the picture himself, and later, when I printed it up, I would see how good it was. After a while—it's
a shame—I got so jealous that I told him not to do it anymore. And he didn't.