back to contents

I met Theresa four years ago in a sophomore ethics class, which my advisor, a large bloodshot guy who acted like he was mad at someone, told me I ought to take. Theresa pretty much owned the class, spouting off words like universalizability and categorical imperative, while I figured my best shot was just to keep a low profile in the back.   She wore a lot of ruffles, shoulder pads, and buttons up to here, which somehow made her head seem smaller than it was, and a pair of oversized glasses didn’t help.  I thought she looked like Jiminy Cricket.

One day the instructor invited everyone to his house the following weekend for a review and social hour, significant others welcome.  After class, Theresa asked me for a ride.  I told her I was sorry, but that my truck had just last week blown a gasket, and that it would be a while before I had a ride anywhere myself.  She was standing right in front of me, and the part of her head behind her glasses looked like it was missing some chunks.  “In that case,” she said, “I’ll take you.”  She gave me directions to her apartment, just two blocks from campus.  Then, “So it’s a date,” she said, and was out of the room before I had a chance to think.

To tell the truth, my stepdad had recommended against coming to the university.  He’d said there were some good programs at the community college.  But I wanted the real thing, I said.  I was going to major in business, join a fraternity, make connections.  Just remember, he’d said finally, this turns out to be a rabbit trail, you know the way home.

Friday afternoon, I walked the two blocks to Theresa’s duplex, where she handed me an iced tea at the door.  “Come on in,” she said.  “You can meet Sonny.”  I followed her down the hall to the bathroom, where Sonny sat in a tub full of water, wearing swimming trunks and holding a caulking gun.  “Sonny, this is Buck,” she said, then ran off down the hall, saying she had to check something on the stove.

“Sit,” Sonny said, nodding at the commode.  It was missing a lid.   Then, “Buck,” he said.  He squirted a little of the caulk into the water, caught it, and rubbed it between his fingers.  “There’re more than one ways to caulk a bathtub.”  He turned to face me.  “But there’s only one right one.”

“Filling it with water and sitting in it,” I said.

“Preciselimiento!”  he said.  “And do you know why that is?”

“You got me on that one,” I said.

“Think about it.”

I wondered which would feel creepier, wearing swimming trunks in the bathtub or doing home repairs naked.  I finally said, “I’m trying,” shaking my head.

“What are you trying?” Theresa walked in and said.  I started to get up but had to sit back down when I realized that for both of us to stand, we’d be practically touching each other.

“I was just giving Buck some advice on home repair,” Sonny said. 

“Oh, great.  Tell him about the time you poured three bottles of Janitor in a Drum down the drain because you mixed the name up with Liquid Plumber.” She laughed, but Sonny didn’t, so I didn’t know what to do.  Theresa grabbed my sleeve and pulled me out of the bathroom and into the den across the hall.

“And this is my sister,” Theresa said.  “Ginny, this is Buck.”  The only light in the room came from the adjoining kitchen and from a tiny TV set with a rabbit ears antenna, and it wasn’t until my eyes adjusted that I saw the girl on the couch, huddled inside a long flannel robe, watching some PBS show for kids.  Theresa turned on the light, and I caught just a glimpse of the girl’s eyes, like bits of turquoise, and the pupils ran all the way down to the whites, like old timey keyholes.  “Sit down and finish your tea,” Theresa said.  “We’ll be ready in a bit.”   Again, she was off.  Ginny reached up and turned off the light.

“So Ginny, do you go to school?” I said, taking a seat.  She shook her head.   I gave it a minute.  Then, “Do you live here?” I said.

“I suppose,” she said.  After a minute, there seemed nothing for it but to just look at all the junk in the den, which was cluttered enough to make moving around in the near dark a bad idea.  It was mostly old stuff—a couple of trunks about to fall apart, a cabinet full of dishes too fancy to use, a horn which I later learned was from a Pakistani taxicab.  

I was holding a small round object, feeling its light weight and rough surface, when Theresa walked in, turned the light back on, and said, “That’s a shrunken head.”  I threw it across the room.  “Not really,” she said, laughing.  “Look, it’s just an apple preserved with cloves.  I did it as an eighth-grade science project.  We were studying mummies.”  She had her usual dark slacks, padding, buttons everywhere.  Ginny continued to watch TV until Theresa turned it off.  “Ginny, I made some ham salad for a sandwich, and some beans are on the warmer,” she said, lifting a strand of her sister’s hair.  “You’re going to have to wash this tomorrow.  Now, when you get hungry, you can make a sandwich yourself, and be sure to put the salad back in the refrigerator.”  Ginny nodded.  I wanted another look at her eyes before we left, but her head was down.  There was an odd silence, while Theresa continued to look at her sister.  Then, “Buck, you about ready to boogey?’

On the drive across town, Sonny and Theresa had a little spat that had something to do with downshifting, a stolen raincoat, and the personal hygiene of someone named Luke.  Theresa won, but the only way I could tell was that Sonny said, “Okay, you win.”

Mainly, Theresa wanted to talk about me, so I told her I would probably go straight through for an MBA, then take a job at one of my stepdad’s operations in Wiggins.  When Theresa asked what Wiggins was like, I told her that they had a factory, but that I couldn’t remember what they made.

“I’m glad you came with us,” she said.

I had a hard time following the review.  I kept thinking of Ginny huddled on that couch, those spooky eyes staring at the little TV.  During the social hour, I caught Sonny alone and pressed for details about her.

“She’s got her problems,” he said.  “Who doesn’t?”  He put a deviled egg in his mouth and drank punch behind it.  “I wonder if anyone would mind if I watched the Saints and Oilers,” he said.  “Did you see a set anywhere?”

On the way home, we stopped at a cemetery that had a lake and a view of the sunset.  A bunch of thermals were building up in the south, and to the west, finger clouds stretched across a yellow sky.  It was early November, the time of year when, in the evenings, the light seems to come from the ground itself, in this case, a bunch of knolls surrounding the lake and dotted with identical marble plaques for the tombstones.  There was a pier extending a hundred feet or so into the lake, and a man sat fishing from the end.

“He’s there every time we come here,” Theresa said.  “I’ve never seen him catch a fish.”

“There aren’t any,” Sonny said. “They never stocked it.”

“There most certainly are fish,” Theresa said.  “There’ve always been fish in there.  Even before there was a cemetery, there were fish in the lake.”

Sonny turned his head, looking off somewhere – nowhere – and began to drum his fingers on the steering wheel.  I figured I’d try to change the subject.

“What do you do, Sonny?” I said.  “I mean do you go to school, or work or what?”

He turned to look at me, and I noticed Theresa was starting to laugh.  “I’m a teacher,” he said.  “At the high school.”

“Substitute teacher,” Theresa said.

“I’m certified English.  There are some openings coming up after Christmas.”  He rolled down the window. 

“You can throw a brick and hit an English teacher,” Theresa said.

“I intend to factor into things,” Sonny said.

“Help mold the future.”  This was Theresa.

“Listen,” Sonny said.  “Laugh, all right?  There are people I have given new direction.” 

Theresa turned around to face me.  “Let me tell you about high school students,” she said.

“Oh, God,” Sonny said.

“Because I just so happened to’ve hoed that very row.  They are ugly, noisy, messy, and for the most part, dumb.”  Sonny opened the door and got out.  Theresa continued, only louder.  “They are vain and clueless as to how they come across.  They are completely self-absorbed, yet incapable of conducting themselves according to anything.  Their humor remains on the level of farting and booger jokes, to call their music primitive would be an insult to primitive people, and they don’t have the attention span to read their own name. The closest they have to a sense of responsibility is the ability to make lame excuses.”

Sonny began pounding on the roof of the car.  “Are you finished in there?”  he said.  “Because when you’ve finished, I by God have a little something to add.”

“No,” Theresa said.  “They are shallow, conniving, dangerously impulsive, petty, boring, cocky, inarticulate, whiny, oily, and disrespectful.”

Sonny got back in the car.  The three of us must have sat there for a full minute in silence, the two of them staring at where the yellow was just going to orange along the horizon.  I noticed that the man on the pier had begun to remove his clothes.

Then, “There are not now, have never been, and likely never will be any goddamn fish in the lake,” Sonny said.

That’s when the guy on the pier did a belly flop.

After that weekend, Theresa and I started having lunch together on campus.  Mostly, she would ask questions about me, so I told her all about my family—how I’d never known my real father and how my mother had been the one to raise me, even though my stepdad had supported us and had been around for most of my life.  Once Theresa asked me flat out if I’d had many relationships with girls.  I said yes, then took it back.

One afternoon, Theresa called me over for a talk.  When I arrived, the door was open, and she shouted for me to come in the den.  She was alone on the couch, a drink in her hand, a bottle of vodka on the table in front of her.  “Sit,” she said.  I took a chair and watched her sort of gaze about the room for a moment.  Then, “The house is dark,” she said.  The words were slow,  too careful, like the liquor had taken hold.  “I’ve got lamps everywhere,” she said.  “Sometimes I’ll turn on every light in the house at noon just to see what all I’ve got here, and it’s like everything’s got a film over it.”

“May be the color of the walls,” I said.  “I’ve heard colors can make a difference.” I resisted looking at my watch.  I had a paper due.

“Buck, Sonny’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Walked.  Split.  Taken leave.” She drained her glass and poured another.  “Said I just wore him down.”  She was crying now.  “Said I chewed him up and spit him out,” she said.  “Gnawed my way to the bone.”

What do you say to a remark like that?  I didn’t know who to feel worse for.  I’d only met Sonny that once.  He seemed nice enough, and I thought I saw a little of what he was talking about.  Still, I felt sorry for her.

“What can I do?” I said.

She looked at me a long time, till the tears stopped.  Then, “Buck, close your eyes,” she said.  “I want you to imagine I’m a young girl—shy, pretty, maybe who doesn’t know much.”  I felt a little silly, but I did as she asked.  “Now, when you open your eyes, I want you to kiss me one time and then leave.  I won’t be seeing you for a while—maybe a week—but we’re going to be very close friends.  Do you understand?”

“Yes,” I said.  When I kissed her, her eyes were closed, and she was crying again, and that’s the way I left her.

Theresa missed a week of school, and then was back to practically take over the class, going on about the spiritually masturbatory character of epistemological reductionism, or some such rantings, completely losing the rest of us in the process.

She began to have me over for dinner, always leaving me alone with Ginny while Theresa cooked.  I learned to talk to Ginny by asking very simple questions.

“Ginny,” I said once, “did you go anywhere today?”

“The zoo,” she said.

“What’s your favorite animal?” I said.

She shrugged.

“I like the elephants,” I said.  “Have you ever seen them rock back and forth from one leg to another?  I have an uncle who does that.”  That was the first time I ever saw Ginny smile.

The first night I stayed over, we were watching television and I dozed off on the couch.  When I awoke, Theresa was gone.  Ginny sat with her back to me, watching a movie.  Usually, she was not as pretty as she could be.  Her hair was never right, she always had two or three pimples, and her mouth would stay screwed up from chewing her lips.  But in the dim blue light from the television, she was the kind of pretty that girls are when you’re only a kid and you’ve just begun to notice, and it’s like there’s something there that you know you’ll never have, but you’ll die if you don’t, and you don’t even know what it is.  I didn’t move, for how long, I don’t know.  Finally, she got up and covered me with a blanket, and I thought she’d hear my heart pounding before she left the room, turning off the set on her way out.

The two of us began to spend more time together–shopping, visiting the zoo and such—although conversation was hardly a spark between us. “Ginny, do you like field peas?”  I’d say at the grocery.

“Field peas are good,” she’d say.

I went with her to pick out clothes for school—Theresa had decided to enroll her part-time the next semester.  “What kind of clothes do you want?” I said.

“Yellow,” she said.

One day we were at the K-Mart, picking out bath towels.  Totally out of the blue, she said, “My father drank.”  I spun around to face her.  Her eyes were closed.  “He hit my mother and Theresa.  He did other things to me.”

We both just stood there for a minute, holding bath towels.  “Ginny, I’m sorry,” I said.

My grades that semester weren’t that hot. I’ll be honest—they never had been.  When my report arrived over semester break, my stepdad sat down with me.

“Buck,” he said, “maybe we should talk vo tech.”

I was afraid of this.  “I’d like to hang in there a little longer,” I said.  “Try to pull up my average.”

He lit a cigarette, rubbed his eyes. “We’ll give it another semester,” he said.  “But there’s nothing ignoble about learning a marketable skill.”  He said that.  He said “ignoble.”  “I’m thinking welding,” he said.

When school started back, I spent more time studying in the dorm.  Ginny signed up for her first semester, and Theresa stayed busy writing her senior thesis.  I still went over for supper on Wednesday nights.  Weekends, the three of us would go to flea markets or just take long rides.

We drove to the coast one Saturday when it was still cold and the beaches were empty.  Ginny walked out on a rock pile that formed part of a small craft harbor, while Theresa and I sat on the beach.  “Buck, look at her,” Theresa said.

I watched as Ginny stood on the rocks, throwing bits of shell into the wind.  Theresa watched me.

Then, “There’s this guy—Ron—who wants to marry me.  He’s a plumber in Biloxi.  Loaded.”

A couple of gulls began to hover over Ginny as she tossed them peanuts from a cellophane bag.  “What are you going to do?” I said.

“Buck, what are you going to do?”

I shook my head, lost.  She took my face in both hands.  She held me so close that I felt her breath on me. “Ginny,” she said. “What are you going to do about goddamned Ginny?”

I called home that night and heard just what I expected.  If I got married, the funds stopped.  This would mean dropping out of school, full-time at least.  Graduate school was out of the question.

Theresa said she would see us through a couple of months.  She was leaving for the coast soon after the semester ended, and Ginny and I would stay on in the apartment.  The day after commencement, the three of us drove to Livingston, Alabama, where seventeen was legal age, and Ginny and I were married.

I got a job at Sears, selling paint, and kept taking classes part-time at night.  It’s been four years, and I’m about to complete a major in business.

Ginny is still hard to figure.  Sometimes she goes to bed for days, just sleeping and watching television.  On the other hand, she’s still in school part-time and seems to like it.  One of her history professors, a tiny bent-over woman about a hundred years old, has taken an interest in her and deserves a lot of credit.

We sleep in separate rooms.  Sometimes I don’t think I can stand it, but I know I couldn’t do anything that would hurt her, and she says things are about to change if I’ll just hold her when she asks and be patient.

Today we are traveling to the coast.  It’s August, and the highway is blinding.  When we get to the beach, the sunlight is white on the water.  The town of Biloxi, still reeling from Hurricane Katrina, is too hot even to look at.

Ron greets us at the door of their town house, about a block from the beach.  We shake hands for a long time.  I like Ron a lot, though sometimes he’s nice to the point of overdoing it.  “Come in,” he says laughing, almost giddy at the sight of us.  “Let me take your bags.”  He grabs them, looks around, and then sets them down where he stands.  “I’ll get you a beer.” We sit as he goes to the kitchen and returns with three bottles of Mexican.  “Theresa will be down in a minute,” he says.

“Ron,” we hear through the ceiling.  “Tell Ginny to come up.”  Ginny rises and leaves the room, her beer untouched.

“So, Buck.” Ron hits his leg, looks around, I imagine, for something he can do for me.  Then, “Have you ever thrown a mullet net?” he says.

“No,” I say.

He runs to the closet and pulls out a tangle of twine, rope, and chain.  “I got it from a man who used to make them for Theresa’s father,” he says.  “Theresa showed me how to throw it, but I haven’t had anybody to go with me.” He spreads the net out on the floor and explains the shape and how it acts to capture fish as the chain sinks to form a bag at the bottom.  I am shown how to gather the hand line and net for a throw.

He stands in the middle of the living room, ready for a cast, when Ginny and Theresa appear on the stairs.  Ginny is wearing a pair of dark green slacks and a padded blouse that Theresa has bought her.  Theresa holds an empty wine glass.

“Theresa, I thought Buck and I could go mulleting tomorrow,” Ron says.

“You did?” she says, imitating his voice, which I have to say sounds a little silly with excitement.  “Maybe you can make a day of it,” she says.

At supper, Theresa piles her plate with Ron’s crab meat au gratin and doesn’t eat a bite.  She drinks wine and tries to sing a new song she’s heard on the radio, starting over every time she messes up.

Ron says, “Some guys at work say the mullet are running right around the commercial harbor.”

“Ron, I’m trying to sing.”  Then, “Ron, get me some wine?” Theresa says.

I start to get up, but Ron is in the kitchen before I’m out of my chair.  He pours her wine while Theresa goes to the bathroom.

Later in the living room, “I hope we have an early fall,” I say.  “I’m really tired of the heat.”

Ron nods his head, laughing.  “Yea,” he says.

“What’s funny?” Theresa says.  Ginny takes my hand on the couch.  “I said, What’s funny?  Why are you always laughing when nothing’s funny?”

“Theresa, there’s nothing wrong with it,” Ginny says.

Theresa fires her a look. “Who the hell are you to tell me what  there’s nothing wrong with?” Theresa says.  She’s starting to breathe fast.  I’m getting sort of scared.  Then, “Maybe I should have let you dissolve,” she says.  “Maybe there would have been nothing wrong with that.”

Then something happens.  Theresa stares into thin air, like at a ghost, and makes a sound like someone screaming, only from far, far off.  Next she goes to blubbering, and Ginny runs to her.

“Ron, help me,” Ginny says.  “We’ve got to get her to bed.” She and Ron each take an arm, and the three of them disappear up the stairs.

I need something, maybe some air.  On impulse, I grab Ron’s net, leave a note on the coffee table, and head for the beach.

At the water’s edge, I try to remember how Ron gathered the net for a cast.  The waves, I know, are small and only a few yards out, but hearing the dull rushing sounds in the dark, I imagine the whole Gulf of Mexico trying to swallow me.  The wind has begun to pick up from the south, and thunderheads flicker in the distance.

Then, through a blowing partial cloud cover, the moonlight flashes on Ginny, who walks towards me across the beach.  She takes the net, gathering it for a cast.  “Come on,” she says, entering the water.  I follow.  When we are waist deep, the moon disappears completely, and Ginny is lost from sight.

“Ginny!” I scream.

“Here.” The voice is from nowhere—from the dark.  I spin around in the water, near panic, till she takes my arm.  “It’s all right,” she says.  “I won’t lose you.”  I follow in her wake until we are chest deep.  “Listen,” she says.  All around us are popping sounds.  There is a rush of air, and a spray hits my face.  A large white circle forms and disappears on the surface.

“Take the line,” Ginny says.  The rope jerks around in my hands while Ginny puts her arms around my waist.  She kisses me.  “You’re afraid because it’s dark,” she says.

“Yes,” I say.

She nuzzles my neck.  “The darkness doesn’t matter,” she says.  “You couldn’t see what’s down there anyway.”

She dives, then comes up spewing water from her mouth like a fountain.  She dives again.  Water pushes against my legs as she swims in circles around me, and I haul in line, scared to the point of tears, laughing like a fool, wondering what in God’s name I’ve got here.