“Tell me,” he says.
His soothing, analytical voice. Dr. David Chapman speaking. Who is still ready to end his romance with this beautiful young woman who sits on a green bench wearing pale blue that fades into a paler gray mist, but who listens, anyway. Her eyes, he sees, are brimming with tears.
“Oh dear,” she says, and falls silent.
He is afraid he will lose her in the shifting mist. But no, she begins speaking again in a voice as soft as the fog itself, a rolling haze enveloping her as she sinks yet another time into an embracing cloud of memory. Now there is mist of quite another sort, a hot wet mist that fills a remembered steamy bathroom long ago...
“I’m wrapped in a big white towel in a room full of steam,” she says.
...toweling herself dry before a mirror clouded with steam, wiping a portion of the mirror clear with one edge of the towel, seeing her own shining, thirteen-year-old reflection in the glass.
“Everything in the mirror, everything in the room is soft and hazy, and there’s music playing somewhere far below, somewhere out of sight, drifting, floating. It’s the beginning of August, and there’s a full moon, and the night is soft and hot and misty...”
Eleven-year-old Bess is in the tub across the room, Kate can see her reflection in the big irregular circle she’s cleared on the mirror. Her sister is smiling. Luxuriating in a sea of suds, only her face and her toes showing, upswept red hair spilling in ringlets onto her brow, she moves her head idly in time to the sweet strains of music floating upstairs from the living room below.
— Gently...
— Sweetly...
It is a Sunday night. The Playhouse is dark tonight, which is why Kate is home at ten o’clock, preparing for bed. Fee the Fair has gone to a movie with a woman the girls call the USS Hawaii because she weighs two thousand pounds and always wears muu muus. Kate’s father is downstairs listening to his old records.
— Ever so...
— Discreetly...
The faucet over the sink needs a new washer. It drips intermittently against the white porcelain as counterpoint to the lovely lyrics flooding the house.
— Open...
— Secret...
— Doors.
Lean and bony Kate stands in front of the misted bathroom mirror, drying herself in the large white puffy towel. Bess, precociously budding at the age of eleven, sits up in the tub and begins soaping herself.
— Gently...
— Sweetly...
— Ever so...
The bathroom door opens.
— Completely...
Kate’s father appears suddenly in the door frame, an odd little smile on his face. He is wearing a green robe over white pajamas, the robe belted at the waist, no slippers.
“Good evening, ladies,” he says.
Bess says, “Oops!” and immediately slides under the suds, only her head showing from the neck up. Kate hugs the towel to her and says, “Daa-aad, we’re in here.”
“So I see, so I see,” her father says.
Kate suddenly smells alcohol on his breath.
— Tell me...
— I’ll be
— Yours.
“Come on, Dad,” she says playfully, wondering what the hell’s the matter with him, can’t he see they’re in here? But of course he can see they’re in here, he knew they were in here when he opened the door and walked in. The funny little smile is still on his face.
“Just wanted to check,” he says. “Make sure you weren’t drowning or anything. Hello, Bessie,” he says, waggling his fingers at her. “How’s my little darlin’?”
“Fine, Dad.”
She, too, looks puzzled. She has sunk even lower under the suds. The water just covers her chin. Her green eyes are wide above the white foam.
“Dad, we have to get dressed now,” Kate suggests gently.
“I used to change your diapers,” he says. “Powdered your little behinds, too.”
“Why don’t you go down and listen to your music?” Kate suggests gently.
“No, I’ll be going to sleep now,” he says.
“Goodnight, Dad,” Bess immediately chirps from the tub.
“Goodnight, Dad,” Kate says at once.
“Where’s my goodnight kiss?” he asks. “No goodnight kiss?” And takes a step toward her. She is still clutching the towel tightly to her, her knuckles just under her chin, the towel cascading to just below her knees.
— Here with a kiss...
— In the mist, on the shore...
He leans into her and cups her chin in his hand and kisses her full on the mouth.
— Sip from my lips...
— And whisper...
— I adore you.
And kisses her again.
Kate is terrified. But she is excited, too. She can feel her father’s hardness under his robe and pajamas, feel him stiff and probing through the thick towel shaking in her hands. “So tender,” he says, and reaches behind her and pulls her to him, and she feels his huge hand spread wide on one naked buttock and suddenly he yanks the towel away with his free hand and she is standing naked and trembling before him.
— Gently...
— Sweetly...
“Dad, no,” she says, “please.”
“Shhh, Katie, darlin’,” he says.
— More and more...
— Completely...
“Please, no, Dad,” she says, because now she can see him huge and purple and throbbing in the opening of the robe, “Shhh, Katie, shhh,” and she tries to hold him away but he is pressing her naked against the sink, lunging at her below, until at last she turns sidewards to deflect his thrust with her hip, and slips out of his grasp.
— Take me...
— Make me...
— Yours.
Huddling against the wall with the narrow window high above it, moonlight yellow in the blackness outside, she cowers in fear against the towels on the rack below the window and all she can think to whisper into the suffocating steam-filled room is, “Do it to her.”
Downstairs, the music in the living room soars to a crescendo and ends abruptly.
The house is still except for the dripping of the water faucet in the bathroom sink.
“As you wish, Katie,” he says, absolving himself of all guilt, the dutiful father merely following his favorite daughter’s instructions. He actually makes a courtly drunken bow to her, and then turns away and walks rather jauntily to where Bess lies wide-eyed in the tub. The suds are dissipating. Patches of her tanned body show through the tattering white.
“Any sharks in here?” he asks playfully. “Anything going to bite me in here?” and thrusts both hands into the water, reaching under the suds for her, soaking his robe to the elbows. She tries to slip away from him, darting like a fish as he searches for purchase under the foam, saying, “Daddy, please,” and “Daddy, stop,” water splashing everywhere until finally he gets a firm handhold between her legs and yanks her out of the suds slippery and wet and squirming and struggling and kicking and bursting into tears and sobbing, “Help me, Kate, don’t let him!” but Kate does nothing.
She is the one, after all, who made the single wish impossible to retract, and he is doing now to Bessie what he would have done to Kate herself had she not suggested otherwise. As she watches in fear and loathing and shame and excitement, a thin trickle of urine runs down the inside of her leg.