Good Things

Katie Lynn Johnston

She’d been a child. And she recalled herself a pirate baring teeth, loping across blue sands and porch steps, a hand over one eye, a finger hooked — A sailor! A sailor! Ezzie would cry and Dottie bleat. But when the men came for her, it was not as a girl, but as a woman and, standing before her now, with their heads like paperweights and their eyes hidden behind the shade of their spectacles, not glittering like gold but rather that rotten sheen hidden in the cavities of her brother’s teeth, Eve thought there was nothing more horrible and couldn’t stop crying.

“There, there,” one of the lawyers said and patted her little hand as though it were a rabid dog’s head. His eyes were cold, pallored — and she remembered seeing the other lawyers in the woods, peering over hedges, from behind trees, their tweed pants hiked up around their knees, hairy legs exposed, hugging their briefcases to their stomachs, staring out into the light at other girls — the grown sons of goldfish-swallowers and war heroes; animals. “It is, after all, a daughter’s duty. Or”—he looked at his compatriot and smiled—“something.”

It was a sad many days. Eve cried and cried until she forgot she was crying. The salt got into the hardwood floors, the cat drowned in her tears, and the house began to smell so much of the ocean that Eve’s mother went out to the beach for the first time since her youngest son’s drowning and was determined to float out to sea to find his body. She crafted a raft out of driftwood and seaweed and, floating out in her good dress, she looked — through Eve’s tears — like a split cherry.

“There she goes,” Eve’s father said, standing on the beach with her, his hand resting on her shoulder, watching as his wife drifted farther and farther into the blue seam of the horizon. “For the fifth time this century.”

When they returned to the house, Eve collapsed in the living room for three days and three nights, draped over her mother’s big red armchair, and cried even while she was sleeping. It was a silent, still sort of cry — mousey. She’d snivel and tremble and open her mouth as though she meant to call out, though no sound ever came. The tears curled out from between the corners of her eyes in an endless stream and rushed down her plump ruddy cheeks, catching the sunlight or the moonlight or the flashing of firelight as they fell to the floor as heavy as a wet sheet. Her nose felt like sandpaper — her blouse glittered with trails of snot. She thought that she must be the saddest girl in the whole world and that made her cry even more furiously. There were the papers on the coffee table — the ones her father had signed. She saw the halting lines of her own name, the unknown, confident hand of a man’s name sprawled beneath her own.

Her husband-to-be.

Someone she did not know.

She could just see herself standing before the altar in a wedding dress that was too big, that hung around her like vines on a tree, the lace too itchy, the veil too heavy, tears pouring from her eyes. And she could see the boy. The boy before her, who was not a boy but a man, standing tall and mean and ugly. Her husband-to-be would lick his lips and called her pretty. So young and so pretty. And she knew she would age in an instant then, as soon as his fingers crept over hers, as soon as his mouth covered hers, age like paper, turning yellow, wrinkled, all the time crying and crying with her children on one hip and laundry the other, while her husband sat there and contemplated life and bad poetry, telling her, One of these days, you’ve got to stop crying.

It was the cellar that flooded first. Vegetables, canned fruits, barrels of her father’s half-drunk beer floating around on the surface of her tears. Before long, the armchair was floating — and her other brothers were practicing their strokes, swimming around on their backs as gracefully as rotting fruit. They gurgled tears in their mouths and pretended to be cherubs in a spring. They all looked the same, like her mother, face plastered upon face with the same olive-green skin and dark hair as straight as a pin. Eve looked like her mother just as well, and she remembered how different her youngest brother had looked from the rest, how little even he looked like their blond father who was too big and too strong and too pale to be noteworthy. There were no pictures of their father on the walls, no trace of his existence except the liquor floating in the cellar and the smell of beer that was always on his breath as it wafted across rooms, through walls and floors and ceilings, settling under your nose as warm as dried laundry. Eve remembered the smell it would leave on her cheek when he tucked her in at night, the stubble of his chin, how big her parents had seemed then, how mighty, the veil of her mother’s hair as she bent down to kiss her good-night. She recalled the creeks and swamps and riverbeds she had trudged through with her brothers as children, mud between their toes, dirt around their throats. She pictured leeches in candy bowls — and it was only once the arrangements had been made and everything was finalized and she saw, from behind one of the lawyers’ egg-white heads, Olivia’s face peeking in from the window, that her tears finally stopped, and her father was able to pay for the damages for the flooding.

“She’s not crying,” one lawyer said to the other, astonished. They were standing around the kitchen table where they had propped Eve up like a doll on a wooden chair, her swollen eyes making her look much younger, much smaller. They were knee-deep in the water and their trousers stuck around their chicken legs like plastic wrap. “We should tell the other family.”

The reflection of the yellow wallpaper in the kitchen bounced and danced in the water around their legs. The lawyers were sweating, although the tears were cold, and they dabbed at their brows with starched white hankies. “We could be done with all this by Monday,” the other whispered. They both stared straight ahead at Eve and her father, Olivia peeking in behind their backs. She had a beautiful, mischievous, boyish little face, Olivia, the sort of thing that would ruin lives — and, as she looked in through the window, the yellow and red and purple tulips from the window-box falling around her brown eyes, Eve knew everything would be alright.

“And the wedding?” Eve’s father asked. The lawyers looked at one another as though the question hadn’t crossed their minds. “When is the wedding?” Her father held one thumb against his suspenders, sparse gray hair peeking out from the neck of his Henley. “We’ll have to fetch a dress and flowers, and I’ll have to send a boatman out for my wife.” He had not blinked since his son had drowned all those years ago, and so looked always as though he were sleeping — his eyes just open enough so that you could see, between each blond eyelash, a dull white sheen. He had his big hand on Eve’s shoulder if not protectively, then proprietorially — his other children swimming around the table legs and their feet.

“Tomorrow,” one lawyer muttered.

“Yes, Sunday,” said the other.

“We’ll call the churchmen this evening.”

Later, as they walked through the woods to the beach, Olivia looked at her and said, “He must be ugly,” solemnly, sweetly, so that it seemed somehow a compliment that he should want Eve. The soft crunch of dry leaves sounded underfoot. Olivia was fiddling with something in the pocket of her feed sack dress, the pink and white flowers patterned around her body seeming as though they were perpetually falling from a far-off tree.

Eve nodded and said, “Yes, yes, he must be ugly. But my family needs the money.”

Olivia looked down at her feet.

The woods were like churches here — dense, dark, one piled high atop the other, steeples stretching out into the sky, covering it, letting only speckles of light onto the path; crosses here, there, shadowed, staring down at them with stained-glass eyes. They walked, their fingers brushing against one another’s, if only accidentally — and each bare touch made Eve feel dizzy. The air smelled of rain and autumn and decay, the blithe dusty sugar of abandoned attics in November, and from the edge of the greenery, the twinkling eyes of the lawyers who lived in the trees followed their feet, their glances blinding yellow and sickly. Eve had felt them looking at her ever since she was little. Taking her apart. Feeling her in their hands. Holding her upside down and watching as her skirt fell down around her eyes. They were thinking always, so loudly, what they might do to her, what they might have done to her, and she wondered if her mother had felt it, too — if her father had turned his wife-to-be over and over in his mind like a dropped candy.

“Do you remember” — Olivia took off running, careening down the forest trail, arms out-stretched, an airplane, a fairy — “how we used to play out here?” She barreled back toward Eve,  blew out between closed lips like a fighter plane, brown shoes slamming against the dirt path. “When we were little?”

Eve did remember. She remembered lying on the cold damp earth, a mummy risen from his tomb, arms held out limply before her, eyes closed, staggering across the forest floor, dragging her feet, moaning, groaning, a smile peeking at her lips as she heard Dottie squeal and Ezzie scream. She remembered feeling bark at the tips of her fingers, every nook and knot becoming a part of her, and how each twig and leaf and rock beneath her bare feet became an extension of her body. She remembered Dottie’s and Ezzie’s and Olivia’s hands as they slipped around her waist while she stood there blindly, their voices guiding her one way and then the other. Friends who had, she thought, been with her forever — would be with her forever, but now she felt uncertainty. She tried to remember Olivia’s gaze as it fell against her; when — out of the darkness — her hand would reach out, clasp her wrist, and pull her back to the living. You got me, she’d say, smiling, the world shining in her eyes, every tree reflected, every fracture of light, Eve’s plain face and brown hair warped into something beautiful. You got me, she’d whisper — and then Eve would see over her shoulder the black creeping treeline, the spidery lace fingers of naked branches, the yellow eyes of men as they watched them hungrily.

Eve shook her head and the memories fell from her ears. “No. I don’t remember.”

“Oh, c’mon. You do.” Olivia was breathing heavily and her cheeks were flushed. “I know you do. Don’t lie.” She grinned like it had happened yesterday, like she did not fear Eve had forgotten it all.

Eve shrugged. Smiled. When they were kids, Olivia had always won the game. Real games, pretend games, imaginary games that rose from the dreamy black pits of their heads, where they would forget for an hour or two that they were real living things. She would win. She would always win. But now, Eve thought, the game was over — done. Olivia lost and so had she, and the only victor that could ever be stood tall, faceless, pillared between the sexes. She looked down at her and Olivia’s hands, the empty space between them, so close and so far — and she remembered putting worms in her pockets, feeling the wings of fireflies flitting against her skin. But now it was so quiet. But now it was so still. And here she stood, a woman of fifteen.

“Here,” Olivia handed her a blue candy heart. Eve popped it into her mouth. It tasted like lint. “It’s the last one I have from February.”

She felt the indentation of each letter against her tongue — K-I-S-S-M-E — and sucked the candy into her cheek. She felt like crying.

“I had so many,” Olivia said, absentmindedly. “I gave them back to the girls who had given them to me.”

The trees were beginning to part, the branches giving way to clear white light, storm clouds forming on the horizon like curdling milk in a jug — the eyes of men dimming away to nothing.

“They didn’t even notice.”

Dottie and Ezzie had gone out to the water as if blown by the wind. The waves met their skin and exalted in every plush edge and corner, rushing through their fingertips, their lips, each bare part of themselves shining out like mother of pearl.

Olivia and Eve stood there, above them on the sand dune, watching them, the trees crowning their heads, and Ezzie and Dottie glanced back at them, chirping in glee.

The beach was full of bodies — resting under umbrellas that flipped inside out in the wind, lounging on pink and blue towels as pale as their skin. Their figures were all covered in the same navy blue, a white band around their hips, another running around their necks. They were reading, sunbathing under storm clouds, children choking on metal shovels and sand. Moving, bustling, seeming even to breathe too loudly, too excitedly. Dottie and Ezzie stood, the only still things against the raging gray waves and sky. The wind howled bitterly, and again Eve felt like crying. But her eyes had dried up, had given up, and she wondered if her mother had made it out to sea.

“Do you want to go swimming?” Olivia asked.

“Not really.”

Eve and Olivia both stripped off their clothes anyway and buried them in the sand beneath their feet. It would storm. Eve could tell by the sky, the clouds, the wind as it bit at her skin. “Good day for the beach,” she heard someone say. Kites and towels and hot dog buns were blown across the sand violently. “I’ve never seen the sky so pretty.” There were children, so many children, some just there, floating out into the black tumult of the lake, while everyone sat around smiling. Eve could hear both Dottie and Ezzie squeal as the water reached their toes and then their ankles and their thighs, rising up to their bare waists only to fall again, leaving them goose-pimpled, smiling. She could see every follicle of hair on their skin, risen, sharp, each soft curve as it fell into the corners of their legs, the dimples at their lower backs. Their arms would float up into the air as the water did, peaks of underarm hair and loose skin. Children and mothers and fathers and daughters were laughing, and she wished they were crying. That they would cry for her. It was going to storm and here they were living, fabric ripped off umbrellas, sand blown into their eyes, a baby — not even crying — tumbling away in the howl of the wind like a tumbleweed.

Eve and Olivia plopped down on to the sand.

“Couldn’t you just run away?” Olivia asked. She was looking at Eve intently, her knees pulled into her chest so the hallowed lines of her ribs shone out like a night sky. “It’s like this’s the last day of your life.” She looked back at the shore. Ezzie and Dottie were walking toward them now across the beach, moving as if invisibly around the clothed people.

And what then? Eve wanted to say, what then? But she only hissed, “Don’t tell them anything,” and wrapped her arms around her body.

Ezzie and Dottie stood before them, water dripping down the curves of their waists.

“Are you going to go swimming?” Ezzie asked, her voice tinkling. Her long brown hair was piled upon her head — Dottie’s hair plastered across her cheeks. Eve noticed suddenly that Dottie was holding her hand — just their pinkies looped together like the stems of cherries. An umbrella was ripped out of the sand behind them and went tumbling across the beach, knocking down bodies.

“I don’t think so,” Olivia said before Eve could say anything.

“Should we get something to eat then?” Dottie asked, glancing at Ezzie. “We could sneak into your family’s orchard.” Between their bare legs, Eve saw the water begin to rise into a monstrous wave. A child carried over on a yellow raft by her mother was set on the lake and pushed out to drift.

“Sure.” Olivia stood up and pulled her clothes out from the sand. She hurried to get dressed. The other two looked down at Eve.

“Aren’t you coming?”

Olivia had always been told she was ugly.

Her mother poked and prodded at her face even when she was a baby — “If only a smaller nose or bigger lips; if only the forehead were shorter and the cheeks more defined.” If only she had been a boy, her mother said over and over and over. “You would’ve made such a handsome boy,” gazing down at her from dark stairways. A boy — and then when girls would leave notes in her shoes at school with curlicue letters and candy and baked sweets, stacks of love letters rolled into her socks, it would not seem such a curse, such a malady. Olivia would hear her mother cry into pillows, into the pockets of her apron, in her sleep — a black distance spreading out between them — could haves, should haves — and Olivia would stand in front of the mirror in her bedroom, poking at her cheeks. Should’ve been a boy, a boy. Ugly.

But Eve thought she was alright — Olivia, standing there now in the apple orchard above her, the red trees shimmering behind her head, the sun beginning to set, making her gold, golden, the color of amber left alone a million years — and she, Olivia, bit into the apple like a masterpiece, juice spurting, gilded — and Eve, lying there, just watching. She was flat on her back beneath a tree, in the shade of the trees, her arms behind her head, looking up at Olivia and the sky. The clouds were beginning to fall away now, turning orange, a crisp white. She knew somewhere far off, Ezzie and Dottie were doing things that should not be seen — and felt almost like she could hear their breathing, panting, see them now encapsulated in a mess of white cotton and grass stains, becoming one body.

“Why’re you looking at me like that?” Olivia asked, grinning, and Eve glanced back across the row of trees. Crickets were chirping. And she spotted, behind the trunks, the flat eyes of men, peeping at them. Olivia threw the core of her apple over her shoulder. It had already browned, and it was as though Olivia could not see them, the lawyers who had sniffed after them since they were three. “What’re you thinking?”

It was too warm suddenly for the end of September — the chill had gone out of the day and with it, too, some semblance of what would happen on Sunday. Most of the fruit in the orchard had rotted, smelling sour and sweet, turning to black mush beneath their feet, decaying on the trees and falling from branches, piece by piece — and the rot of it, the sheer end of it made Eve sick.

“Where d’you think they went off to?” Eve said.

“They’ve probably gone somewhere with better pickings.”

The dull gray of day burned into the color of apricots and the eyes of tabby cats.

“Probably.”

 “You should eat something.”

Olivia reached up, her hand disappearing into the shrouded brown and red branches of the tree. Her skirt rose. The white dough of her thighs. Eve looked away.

“Here.” She handed Eve the apple and held an invisible one in her own hand, biting into it with an extravagant smile, as if reminding Eve how to eat. The apple was smooth — perfect, not a blemish, a sunset of red and green. Eve ran her hand over it. Had an urge to shine it against the fabric of her dress like she’d seen her mother do. Suddenly, she was starving. She bit into it ardently. The juice mulled, too sweet, too flat, settling against her tongue like bile. Olivia was smiling — so beautiful, so proud, looking at Eve now in such a way that Eve knew Olivia could feel it, too, had always felt it, a pull, a want, something more hidden between their lives, hidden now in the space that separated them, the air they breathed. But now it was too late. And in the pale yellow meat of the apple, she saw a headless worm squirming—and felt its head writhing against the inside of her cheek.

The skeleton of her youngest brother was set up in her mother’s big red armchair as if hanging from the branches of a tree. He had been licked clean — no signs of living — but looked almost as though he were still breathing, the stark white of his ribs seeming to rise and fall against the red brocade fabric of the chair. His head was adorned with flowers and beads, and his brothers were gathered around his feet, having outgrown him, but looking up at him all the same as though he were telling a story. He had such a small little body. So white and so clean. But the house was molding. The tears had been pumped out of the rooms, and everything was starting to turn a dull fuzzy green, creeping over doorways and windowpanes, nestling in the corners of picture frames. Monstrous plants had begun to sprout in the backyard from all the watering — tall black vines that encircled themselves endlessly — and Eve’s mother was sitting in the little yellow kitchen, her head in her hands, crying.

Upstairs, Eve couldn’t hear her mother. She looked out from the sole window in her room at the yard, the intricate twisting trees, everything she had ever known stretching out below her feet. She knew nothing outside of this world. It had never existed to her and, now, she thought, it never would. It could only be the trees and the beach, a shack which would steadily fill with babies — she would live in the folds of laundry, in the snap of cabbage leaves, in the moments when she would stand out under the night sky, knowing already that she had lost the best years of her life.

Eve took a step forward and the floorboards creaked. She thought she saw the eyes of the lawyers, glowing yellow, watching her from the trees — but then thought herself silly. It was over. It was done. It had all been arranged. The moon had risen into the sky, full, pearly white — the day was finished, “the last day of her life.” She could hear the wind blowing through the trees — hear in the distance, she thought, the waves crashing against the shore, groping for her brother’s body. The world seemed black and white; all ending.

Olivia was lying in Eve’s bed behind her — the flowers on her body finally still — and was full of color; sturdy. She was not sleeping, but she lay so still, her eyes soft, unfocused, so it seemed to Eve that she might be. She thought about tiptoeing over to her, about waking her, about pulling her back to life, kissing her and touching her, to feel something, if only accidentally. She remembered the delicate lines of Dottie’s and Ezzie’s fingers as they came together, the soft lines of their skin. Eve saw her reflection in the window glass, saw Olivia’s slim frame over her shoulder against the dark empty trees, her body curled in on itself, her hands stretched out, reaching to the edge of the twin-sized bed — sleeping, but not sleeping — color pulsing from her, spreading from her. For the first time, Eve felt unseen. She felt alone, she felt solitary, and there was a joy in it that she had not known, a sweetness to it that stung like an unripe berry. She did not hear the snap of cabbage leaves, she did not remember the dull white of a wedding-to-be, the boy who was not a boy and had never been, the black and white of an ending, the impossible victor who stood between her and she. Eve felt only, saw only: color silence trees. And she threw open the window, sticking her head out into the crisp night air as if it was the first time she had ever breathed.

She was gasping, and it tasted delicious, brief.

“Evie,” Olivia said, drowsily. She peered at her from under the guise of sleep. “What’re you doing?”

Eve glanced back at her, panting, smiling abjectly, solemnly. She pushed her hair out of her eyes, still leaning against the window — and Olivia burned, a living light. “Just thinking about the wedding.”