“There are fish that sleep leaning against rocks,” Clara said in her unwavering voice, clear and strong like a trumpet. She took Irene’s hands and placed them on the pool’s edge, then sat down next to them, dangling her legs in the water. Irene readjusted herself so her hands lightly touched Clara’s strong thighs.
“There are fish that blow a bubble of mucus around themselves like a canopy bed. Then there are fish like sharks that sleep with their eyes open and just keep swimming all night.” Clara smiled, and this made Irene want Clara to like her even more.
“Have you seen fish sleep?” Irene asked, sure that Clara had seen everything there was to see underwater. Clara’s thick calves moved back and forth in the water like paddles. Clara didn’t seem like the sort of woman who had children, maybe because the fish needed so much of her attention. That was one of the other things Irene admired about Clara — her fish focus.
“Yes,” Clara said. “I’ve seen them sleep.” She didn’t explain, and Irene enjoyed the mystery.
“Do you know that if you were to study one cell of a shark’s skin under a microscope, you would see that it was the exact same shape as a shark’s tooth?” Clara let Irene consider this and stood and walked over to retrieve the pool net leaning against the side of the motel. Clara skimmed fallen leaves and twigs from the pool’s surface. Irene thought this was a very competent thing to do. She looked over to see George digging in a big bag of pistachios he’d bought at a roadside stand, fingers stained red from eating them all day. She’d tried the pistachio nuts, which sounded so good when her father cracked them between his teeth, but they didn’t taste as good as they sounded, and her father’s red fingers made Irene sad.
“The exact same shape?” George called over.
“Yes, the exact same shape,” Clara said. Irene appreciated that Clara looked at her when she said this, as if she understood that this was knowledge meant for Irene alone. Irene found a twig and pushed it toward Clara’s net.
A map marking the route from their home in Brooklyn to Graceland lay like a crumpled napkin across one arm of George’s chair. He’d left it outside the first night, and in the morning, when Irene came down to the pool, she retrieved it from where it had blown into the spindly legs of a patio table, folded it up, and put it under the leg of the chair. George would pull it out and look at it from time to time, and then, at the end of the day, put it back under the chair’s leg.
Myra loved maps. She’d made her own map of all the buried bones in Brooklyn, the bones in the recently discovered African-American graveyards and the bones buried under the monument in the park near their apartment dedicated to the prison ship martyrs. “Tortured, without water, sleeping in their own feces,” Myra had begun one night as a bedtime story. “Myra,” George called from the other room. “What are feces?” Irene asked. “Shit,” Myra whispered, giggling. “But it’s not funny. The British forced the American prisoners of war to sleep in their own shit.” Myra nuzzled her face into Irene’s neck. “My little girl. My little girl of living bones.” “Myra,” George said firmly, standing in the hall outside the door, and Irene knew her mother was in trouble again.
“Are you different from spending most of your life underwater?” Irene asked Clara.
“I’m partially deaf in both ears,” Clara said. “From the constant change in pressure.” She leaned the pool net against one of the yellow and orange chairs.
Irene considered this. “But are you different? Like the way your hurt leg doesn’t bother you in the water.” She watched carefully as Clara ran a palm over her sun-bleached hair, dry and stiff from so much time spent in ocean water, gathering the loose pieces into a barrette shaped like a claw.
“No, not different.” Clara smiled a smile unlike the one she’d offered before. This one said she needed to return to the motel office. Irene was proud she knew Clara’s code, thrilled that they could communicate without words. “Altered,” Clara said.
Though Irene had never heard the word used in this way before, she knew that Clara meant exactly the way Irene felt when she dove to the bottom of the pool, closed her eyes, and made the difference between the liquid on the inside of her body and the outside go away. She was a saltwater baby again, a natural part of the underwater world.
Irene looked over to George. His magazine lay across his lap, and he wasn’t even pretending to read anymore. He stared out at the mountains in the distance. It seemed rare these days that where George looked and what he was thinking went together, so Irene knew he wasn’t thinking about the mountains. “Your mother is a beautiful woman,” George had said to Irene while looking at Myra one night when they went out to dinner before Myra didn’t like to leave the house at night.
“What are you reading about?” Irene yelled, partly to catch his attention and partly because, suddenly, she wanted to catch him in a lie.
Clara looked at George, shielding her eyes with a big hand to her forehead, as if she were saluting. Irene thought she saw shiny scales sparkle on the part of Clara’s stomach exposed by her T-shirt riding up.
“I’m taking a quiz on how to be a better wife,” he said. Clara laughed in a girlish way that didn’t fit her large, fish self. Her laugh was like the girlish laugh of the waitress in a roadside diner who was sugar sweet to Irene, bending down as if she were an infant instead of the scuba diver in training she would soon become.
“Come swim,” Irene said, even though her father never did.
“Don’t know how,” George said, but Irene had seen him when she was small and just learning to move her body through the water. He used strokes the size of Irene’s body, diving under Myra’s legs and swimming through, coming up spouting water like a whale.
“God appreciates the truth, you know,” Irene said, imitating the silky voice of the Bible lady she and George had heard on the radio the other day in the car.
“Ha, ha!” George shouted, bursting from his chair and startling the dogs. “That’s my girl!”
“See you later,” Clara said, ducking into the motel office, Dolly and Emmy Lou at her heels.
George sat back down and looked out at the mountains again.
Irene and George had listened to a Bible show—“for fun,” George said. “You don’t hear this kind of thing on radio stations in New York”—as they crossed from Virginia into Tennessee. Irene thought the Bible lady’s southern voice was luxurious, but she didn’t say that to George. The lady talked about the difference between lies and the truth and how God appreciates the truth. Even though Irene knew George was listening to the show as a joke, that he didn’t believe in God because he relied on the beauty of science to hold him in awe, she couldn’t help thinking that she too appreciated the truth. Irene thought there was truth — maybe a kind of truth, not the whole truth and nothing but, but a little bit of truth — in the passages Myra secretly read to her from the Song of Songs, Myra’s favorite part of the Bible.
For, lo, behold, the winter is past.
The rain is over and it is gone;
The flowers appear on the earth; the time of the singing of the birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land;
The fig-tree putteth forth her green figs, and the vines with the tender grape give a good smell.
Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.
Irene saw that these beautiful words went so deep they made Myra cry, but Myra called it weeping, the kind of crying that cleansed you and made you good again.
Irene floated on her back with her ears underneath the surface of the water and said words that felt spoken inside her head. “Sky,” she said because she was looking that way. “Irene,” and it sounded as if someone else was talking to her. She swam along the bottom, listening past the gurgling of the pool drain to her first memory, the beginning of her life in water.