We Are Water

“Oh, right. You’re just the perfect husband, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m the imperfect husband. But I think you’ve got it ass-backward as far as who’s been ignoring who.”

“Oh, really? Gee, Dr. Oh, I’m so sorry for ‘projecting,’ as you put it. And for having a career of my own.”

It was April. I had just done our taxes. “Yeah, speaking of careers, you know how much I contributed to our income this past year? Sixty-two grand. And you know how much you made? A whopping seven hundred dollars. So I think you’d better thank your lucky stars instead of bitching about my career.”

“Oh, you’re right as usual, Dr. Oh. Thanks so much for throwing that in my face and helping me see the light.” And with that, she lifted the lid of our top-loading washing machine and slammed it down. Lifted it again and slammed it. Lifted, slammed. Thanks in part to “Annie Oh’s Angry Art,” we had just entered the thrust-and-parry phase of our marriage.

Over the next several days, each of us accused the other of myriad slights and failures, large and small. The fighting exhausted us both, and our lives were already pretty exhausting. She began giving me the single-syllable treatment. “Good day today?” “Yup.” “Want to get a sitter this weekend? Go see a movie or something?” “Nah.” In the midst of that uneasy near-silence, I reread that Connecticut magazine article and came upon a couple of paragraphs I’d missed the first time. She’d told the reporter that, once upon a time, another artist had lived on the grounds of the house where we lived—a black laborer who’d taken up painting—and that she’d discovered one of his “compositions” that had been left behind. I knew the one she was talking about: a crazy-looking circus scene we’d found when we were cleaning out the attic. To my mind, it was strictly amateur, not to mention a little freaky-looking, and I’d wanted to throw it out along with the other junk up there. But Annie had said not to. It had “spoken to her,” she told that reporter, which was news to me, and when she set up her studio in the basement, she’d brought it down there for inspiration. (Oh, she’d set up that work space? So much for the work I’d done for her down there.) In the article, she said she might even have “seen” this would-be artist, who was long dead by the time we moved in. Had seen him twice, in fact. Once out back in the yard—a big, muscular guy in overalls looking up at her as she stood at one of the upstairs windows—and another time down in her studio. Both times, she said, he’d looked right at her, nodded, and then faded away. It hadn’t scared her to see him, she said; it had reassured her. Oh great, I remember thinking. Now she was seeing ghosts? Then how come I’d never heard about this? No, I figured, she wasn’t seeing people that weren’t there, except maybe in a dream she’d had. More likely, she had told the writer that because, hey, who doesn’t love a good ghost story? It wasn’t like Annie to fabricate stuff like that, but since she’d become an artist, she’d exhibited all kinds of new behaviors. And so I didn’t challenge her on it. “Annie Oh’s Angry Art” had already caused problems for us. I let it drop.

I finally got us a referral to a marriage counselor, despite Annie’s suspicion that the deck would be stacked in my favor because she’d be the only person in the room who wasn’t a therapist. I hired us a sitter for Tuesday evenings. (Katie had been my student coordinator for Date Rape Awareness Week.) And so for the next several weeks, Annie and I drove to Glastonbury to see Suzanne in her office full of philodendrons and ferns and hand-thrown clay pots that she had made, glazed, and fired in her wood-stoked kiln. She gave us one of those pots at the end of our first session—an imperfect one. A piece had broken off and been glued back on. “My point is this,” Suzanne said, passing her finger over the crack. “This is where the pot is strongest now: at the place where it had been broken.”

“How was tango class tonight?” Katie would ask when we returned home from our marriage counseling sessions. I’d invented our tango lessons so that I didn’t have to tell her we were trying to fix our marriage.

“Great. How were the kids?”

“Super good! They’re such cuties. And you know, I think it’s super cool that you guys are learning the tango. I wish my parents weren’t such fuddy-duddies about stuff like that. Get out of their comfort zone? Forget it. They’d rather just sit there watching TV.”

Whether or not we were doing the tango up there in Glastonbury, we were definitely out of our comfort zone. But it was worth it. We did repair things. For quite a while, actually. Becoming less accusatory of each other lessened the tension. We practiced better teamwork with the twins and the house stuff, better listening skills, worked on more open communication. Hey, I’m a psychologist; it’s not like I didn’t already know a lot of these strategies. But knowing how to advise others in dealing with their shit doesn’t necessarily mean you’re going to tackle your own without having to check in with a third party once a week. And besides, my patients range in age from eighteen to about twenty-one, twenty-two. Their relationships are more about managing the drama than maintaining a marriage. Suzanne likened the latter to servicing a car you love and want to last. Listen to the engine, rotate the tires, check the oil. Things got better for us intimacy-wise, too. I became more patient. She became more communicative about what she wanted. She had more orgasms than she’d ever had before, and damn if I didn’t enjoy giving them to her … I mean, it wasn’t happily ever after, not by any stretch. She was still distant sometimes, both in our bed and out of it, and I still overdid it sometimes, work schedule-wise. But it definitely got better. Our “tango lessons” went from once a week to once a month, and then to once every three months. Marriage as car maintenance: I was a little put off by the metaphor at first, but as it turned out, Suzanne knew her stuff. Things were much better for Annie and me. And then she got pregnant again and they weren’t …

“Their skin is covered with small toothlike scales, so they’d be virtually unaware that they’re being embedded,” Dr. Skelly is telling the Mad Hatter. “These tags use satellite technology, so that lets us—”

“Like a GPS system?” the Mad Hatter asks.

“Uh-huh. Pretty much. If we get lucky and the tags stay embedded, we should be able to track the animals’ migratory behavior. Which would be fantastic! In other parts of the world, great whites have been tracked successfully, so there’s a good deal known about their migration patterns. But that’s not the case here in the northern Atlantic. Great whites in these waters have always been a bit of a mystery.”

“Well, Dr. Tracy Skelly, thanks for a fascinating discussion. And good luck tracking those great whites. Time once again to check on news, weather, and traffic. But stay tuned, fellas, because when we … two of the self-described ‘guidettes’ who will … in MTV’s latest … Jersey Shore, debuting next …” Mercifully, the Mad Hatter is finally fading away.

Chapter Three

Annie Oh

I’m goin’ to the market now, Miz Anna. Anything else you need?”

“What?”

“At the market. Anything else that ain’t on your list?”

“No, I guess not. Maybe a pack of cigarettes.”

“Marlboro Lights?”

“Yes, please. Do you have enough money? Here, let me get my purse and give you another twenty just in case. You can keep the change.”

Last month, Viveca reprimanded me for giving Minnie an extra hundred dollars. “Sweetheart, once you start that, they start expecting it,” she said, as if I were a child who didn’t know better. As if Minnie were a dog I got caught feeding scraps to under the table. I kept my mouth shut, but I was pissed. I’m pissed so often lately. It’s nerves, I guess. It’s not that I’m not committed to Viveca. I am. But I’ve already been a bride. And I’m just not comfortable about being married back in Three Rivers … But okay, I’ll get through it. It’s one weekend, that’s all, and I’ll have some time with my daughters in the house where they grew up; I’m looking forward to that. And once we return from Greece, I’ll go back to my studio and Viveca will go back to her gallery and her various charity fund-raising initiatives and things will return to normal.

I’ve slipped Minnie more money since Viveca’s reprimand—hundreds by now probably, although I haven’t kept track. “Our little secret,” I say whenever I press the tens and twenties into her calloused hand and squeeze.

Minnie’s more guarded about her personal life than Hector is, but she’s been opening up little by little, more so since Viveca’s been away and I’ve been staying home instead of going to the studio. We’ve started eating our lunch together, Minnie and me, in Viveca’s study because there’s a little TV in there and Minnie likes to watch The Jerry Springer Show. I’m not sure why, because day after day, it reinforces the worst stereotypes. All the black men on Jerry Springer are dim-witted dogs who cheat on their women. And when Jerry brings out the brazen women these men have been cheating with, the betrayed wives rush them, slapping and punching, yanking off their wigs while the mostly white audience cheers them on. Minnie shakes her head and chuckles and thinks these fights are funny. Doesn’t she realize how racist it is? That it’s staged? I’m at a loss to understand what it is about Springer that appeals to her so much. But hey, I sit there, eating my yogurt and watching it with her.

Minnie smokes at our apartment, which Viveca would be furious about if she knew. But she’s discreet. When she goes into the spare bedroom for a cigarette break, she sits in front of the open window and blows the smoke through the screen. When I walked in and caught her that time, her eyes narrowed—looked more defiant than apologetic—and she said, “You gon’ tell Missuz I been rippin’ smokes?” I told her I wouldn’t and smiled. Asked her to please call me Annie. I thought she’d be pleased by my overture, but she just nodded, not smiling back. She hasn’t called me Annie yet. To Minnie, I’m still Miz Anna, the woman who’s going to marry Missuz.

Since Viveca’s been gone, I’ve been smoking, too. The first couple of times, I bummed cigarettes from Minnie. Then I went down to the market on the corner, the one with the ATM, and bought myself a pack from that effeminate Korean cashier with the bad attitude and the Velveeta-dyed hair. He wears women’s tops and pants some days—size zero, I’m guessing, because he has the narrowest waist I’ve ever seen. He’s over-the-top hostile—resentful when you go up to the counter and dare to interrupt his magazine reading because you want to buy something. He sighs long-sufferingly, slaps his magazine down on the counter, and rings you up with a roll of his eyes. The other day, I got so fed up with his bad attitude that, when he went to give me my change, I grabbed his wrist, looked him in the eye, and told him that whoever or whatever he was so angry about, he didn’t have to take it out on his customers. I watched his expression change from defiance to fear. He was suddenly a scared and miserable little boy, and I knew that, somewhere, in some way, somebody had abused him. I felt bad and looked away—looked down at the counter, at Oprah’s beaming face on the cover of O magazine. He’d dropped my change when I grabbed his wrist and there were dimes on Oprah’s boobs. They looked like pasties. When I looked back up at him, his mask was back on and he looked as ornery as ever. But it was too late. I’d already seen his fear. I can use it if I need to. It’s part of what makes me powerful: I can sometimes figure out what other people’s vulnerabilities are without revealing any of my own. It’s something I learned from my family, I guess; we O’Days were talented secret keepers.

For the last week or so, I’ve been buying two packs at a time: Marlboro Lights for me and Newports for Minnie. On the Today show, that Dr. Nancy person keeps harping on the dangers of smoking. Her and her cushy doctor’s life, her little brown bangs. She reminds me of those beautifully dressed girls from high school—the ones whose mothers let them borrow their credit cards and buy whatever they wanted at the Westwick Mall where I worked. That was my first real job, not counting babysitting; I’d scoop, weigh, and bag people’s mixed nuts, dried fruits, jelly candies, and deluxe jumbo cashews at a kiosk called Jo-Jo’s Nut Shack. My customers were fat people, mostly, who watched the scale to make sure I wasn’t shortchanging them. I’d keep one eye on what I was shoveling onto the scale and the other on those girls from my school who strolled by with their bags and packages. I recognized them, but they didn’t recognize me or even look my way. I hadn’t had a mother in eight years, let alone a borrowed credit card to buy things with. What did any of those girls know about having to wear used clothes from Love Me Two Times or the Salvation Army store? And what does Dr. Nancy know about what someone like Minnie is up against? That day I caught her smoking? I sat on the bed next to her, lifted the window I was facing, took a cigarette out of her pack, and lit up. And the two of us sat there, inhaling and blowing smoke through our respective screens, tapping ash into the plastic cap of the Febreze can that Minnie uses for an ashtray. Neither of us spoke until we’d each started second cigarettes. That was when she told me about her ten-year-old son, Africa. She’s a single mother. It’s been three years since Africa’s father left, she says, and he’s never paid her one single dime for child support.

Minnie drinks on the job, too. She doesn’t know I know. The other night, I dropped an egg on the kitchen floor, and when I went into the cleaning closet to get something to wipe it up, I found a gallon jug of Carlo Rossi Paisano wine hidden at the bottom of a box of rags, mop heads, and vacuum cleaner attachments. It was half full. And when I checked it the following night after she left to go home, it was only a quarter full. The night after that, there was a new jug—Carlo Rossi burgundy this time. She had finished the other bottle and drunk three or four inches’ worth from the new one. Well, as long as she gets her work done and Viveca doesn’t find out, let her drink. Maybe I have Carlo Rossi to thank for the fact that she’s been more open lately. Maybe it’s not so much that she’s begun to trust me as it is because she’s buzzed.

Minnie has medical expenses because of Africa’s asthma, and she’s trying to save enough to relocate to an apartment where there’s no mold. She’d like to get her teeth fixed, too, she told me, so she can find herself another boyfriend. Africa’s father got remarried, she says. “His new wifey LaRue gonna have triplets is what LaRue’s cousin told me on the low,” she said. “Darnell don’t even know ’bout them babies yet, but I do. Well, he in for a big surprise. Serve him right. That man loves his sleep better than anything ’cept hisself—lookin’ at the mirror all the time so he can see how pretty he is. I hope them three babies all get colic and keep him up nights. He won’t look so pretty then. He be runnin’ away from that mirror.” She chuckled at the thought of Darnell’s sleep deprivation in the same way she chuckles when the black women fight each other on Jerry Springer. Then she snuffed out her cigarette, stood, and said she didn’t suspect “Missuz’s furniture gonna dust itself.” I admire Minnie’s flinty bitterness, and the fact that, whenever I give her extra cash, she takes it without acting beholden or even grateful. “Our little secret”: it’s like a contract between the two of us.

Minnie and her boy live in Newark. Africa’s sickly but “sweet as sugar.” For the past two years, she’s paid a Spanish boy down the hall to babysit Africa in the morning “but he growin’ hisself a mustache and gettin’ some attitude lately.” Puberty’s apparently made him less dependable. “He spoze to show up befo’ I leave for work. Fix Africa his breffest, make sure he gots his homework and his inhaler, then walk him to school. But half the time, I gotta go befo’ he come so I don’t miss my bus, and then I gotta call and call his cell phone to see if he there yet so Africa don’t have to walk hisself to school and do his work all mornin’ long with nothin’ in his stomach until hot lunch. I probly gon’ have to fire Oswaldo’s ass pretty soon, but I ain’t done it yet.”

Yesterday Minnie told me she has two grown sons by another man. Twins, Ronald and Donald. Donald is doing time in upstate New York—for what she didn’t say and I didn’t ask. “But Ronald never been no trouble. He come outa me first, thass why. It’s the second twin thass always the trouble chile.” Ronald is married and works at the Friendly’s ice cream plant in Wilbraham, Massachusetts, Minnie told me. “I keep axin’ him to come visit us an’ bring his kids so I can see my gran’babies. But he ain’t come yet. Thass okay, though. I understand. He busy.” When I told Minnie that I have twins, too—a daughter who runs a soup kitchen in San Francisco and a son who’s stationed at Fort Hood—she nodded indifferently. And when I told her that, when I was a kid, I had worked at a Friendly’s restaurant, she had no reaction at all. Minnie likes me well enough—not only because of the extra money I give her, I like to think—but she doesn’t seem to entertain the possibility that she and I have anything in common.

Well, why would she? She’s poor; I’m not. She’s black; I’m white. Minnie says her commute takes her almost two hours either way. After she catches an early bus out of Newark, she transfers twice, then takes the ferry from Hoboken into Manhattan. At the South Ferry station, she catches the Lexington Avenue local up to the Spring Street stop, then walks over to our apartment on Elizabeth. The trip in reverse takes longer, she says. Some nights she doesn’t return home until eight o’clock or later. My walk from our apartment to my studio space at the artists’ collective on Bleecker takes ten minutes when I don’t stop along the way, collecting sidewalk discards that I might incorporate into my art. (On trash collection day, that ten-minute walk sometimes takes me an hour or more, depending on what people have thrown out. A few weeks ago, I had such a good haul that I had to grab an abandoned shopping cart and wheel my treasures to the studio. I was going to leave the cart on the sidewalk out front, but then I lugged that up to my workplace, too.) One night when she got home, Minnie said, she put the key in the lock, opened the door, and smelled chocolate. The Spanish kid, who’s not supposed to leave Africa by himself, had done just that. Left to his own devices, Africa had gotten the bright idea to take a bath in cocoa. “He run hot water, then dump this whole big can of Swiss Miss that I got cheap at the flea market because of the gone-by date.” Minnie was headachy and dog tired, she said, and when she saw Africa sitting in all that chocolate bathwater, she beat him silly, splashing cocoa every which way. “He cryin’ so hard, he give hisself a asthma ’tack and I say, ‘Where your inhaler at?’ And he go, while he wheezin’ away, he go, ‘It in school, Mama.’ And so we end up at the emergency for two, three hour. After we get home, I put him to bed and start cleanin’ up all that mess. Seem like no mo’ than a few hours go by before I had to wake up, let Oswaldo in cuz he be bangin’ on the door—on time for once. By the time I got ready, I had to run to catch that bus.”

That’s another thing Minnie doesn’t know we have in common: that I used to hit my boy, too. Andrew, the second-born of my twins. Poor, sweet Andrew, who looked so beautiful when he slept. Who, despite those wallopings, always kept my tirades from his father. His sisters did, too. Why was that? I wonder. Were they being protective of me? Were they afraid that, if they told, I might turn my anger on them, too? Or that I’d be taken away—carted off by the authorities the way I was when I was a little girl? No, that was my fear, not theirs … Of the three kids, Andrew’s the one with the most O’Day in him. This? Oh, yeah, I fell off my bike and bumped my head on the sidewalk, Dad … Me and Jay Jay were horsing around over at his house. It’s just a black and blue mark, Dad. It’s no big deal. If I hadn’t known where those battle scars really came from, I might have believed him, too.

I didn’t want Andrew to enlist; I begged him not to. Every night before I go to bed, I get down on my knees, make the sign of the cross, and ask Jesus to please, please spare Andrew from being deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. Sometimes I get scared that God or karma or whoever or whatever’s in charge of retribution will pay me back for the way I singled him out. Or because I walked away from my marriage. It amuses Viveca, I think, to see me praying; she doesn’t believe in God. “What is it you’re praying for?” she asked me one night, and I kept it vague. “World peace,” I said. But mostly what I beg God for is my son’s safety. Please, I pray, let me die if I have to, but spare my son. Let Andrew not have to go to either of those places and be killed.

Okay, I tell myself. If you’re not going into work again today, then do something else. It’s after eleven already. Go down to the lobby and get the mail. Check your e-mail.

Viveca’s two-day-old message is titled Mykonos! I click on it. “Here’s the villa where we’ll be staying,” it says. “Have a look.” In defiance, I decide not to open the attachment—those pictures she wants me to see … Our apartment, our housekeeper. What’s hers, Viveca often reminds me, is mine now, too. Nevertheless, while she’s away, I’m supposed to sign that prenup agreement her lawyer has drawn up. When it was hand delivered by way of messenger from Attorney Philip Liebmann’s Sixth Avenue office, Viveca said, “I told Phil it wasn’t necessary, but he was insistent. Got a little snippy with me in fact. I’ve known Phil since I was a child; he was my father’s lawyer and his tennis buddy. He feels paternal toward me, that’s all. But, sweetheart, it’s just a boring legal formality that’s going to make an overly protective old man happy. Don’t read any more into it than that. What’s mine is yours. You know that.”

Chapter Four

Orion Oh

She didn’t just walk out on me one day; she migrated to Manhattan in stages. Day trips into the city to meet with gallery owners or important collectors turned into overnights. And after she won that NEA grant, those overnights turned into four-day work weeks because she used the money to rent studio space at a building in SoHo—a place that was owned and operated by some artists’ cooperative that Viveca had connections with.

“You’ve worked successfully at home all these years,” I reminded her. “Why do you suddenly need to make art in New York?” Because she wanted to come up from the basement and be in the company of other artists instead of our washer and dryer, she said. Because in New York she’d be able to get on the subway and, fifteen minutes later, be standing in front of some masterpiece at the Met or MoMA, or walking into some gallery in Brooklyn to see a show by some up-and-coming artist that everyone was talking about. “Sweetie, I just want to try it,” she told me. “It’s an experiment. It’s only for a year.”

“I don’t know. I just don’t want us to turn into one of those long-distance-marriage couples,” I told her. “Look what happened to Jeff and Ginny’s marriage when they tried it.” For one thing, she said, she took exception to the term “long-distance” when you could get from Three Rivers to Manhattan or vice versa in under three hours. And for another, she wanted to remind me that it was Jeff’s infidelity, not the geographical distance between him and Ginny, that ended their marriage. I considered making the point that being a workaholic was a kind of infidelity, too, but I held my tongue. How many times, when the kids were younger and she was housebound with them, had she leveled that same criticism at me?

“And this is something you really, really want?” I said. “Something you think is going to fuel your work?”