The Other Side of Water
by Dominic Preziosi
(Continued)
Now he pulls a cloth from the pocket of his jeans and presses it to his eye as he walks. They’re not going to see one of his tanks today. Instead, he’s taking her to the aquarium, like he used to, like he’s been promising, so she can see the Beluga whales. There’s a trio that greets people when they walk in, the knobs on the tops of their heads like miners’ helmets. Her father has explained to her the special glass used to hold back the water, and how its thickness is responsible for the waviness of the pane, but she’s pretty much the opposite of him in that she’s only interested in the fish. She doesn’t care about the tank.
"No subway this time, Little Miss," he says when they’re halfway down the block. He points a key, and she hears an electronic chirp. Taillights on the raised back of a silver sports car blink on and off.
"This one?"
"Your chariot awaits," he says. He opens the passenger door for her and then goes around to his side. After putting on her seatbelt, she takes a look around. It seems new except for the smell of old cigarette smoke. She doesn’t know anything about cars, but she knows this is a lot nicer than his last one.
"Things are going all right," he says, as if he’s waiting for her to ask. "Figured I’d go for a little upgrade. Figured I’d pimp my ride."
The front seat is low. She feels like she’s a hundred feet down and looking up at daylight. At the intersection, her father turns the rearview toward him and leans in for a closer look. "Damn allergies," he says, and then he puts the cloth back to his eye. "I should probably get some stuff from the doctor. The what-is-it. Antihistamine."
"Yeah," she answers, playing along. Everything looks strange through the blue tint of the windows. It’s quiet too, the way she imagines the inside of a diving capsule would be. She feels like she could close her eyes and sink to the ocean floor, a trillion gallons separating her from breathable air. "Yeah," she says again. "You probably should."
He’s never liked that she takes the subway. Not even for school.
"So how does he suggest you get there?" her mother always asks. "By limo?"
"He just wants me to be safe."
"Like he knows about safe. Nothing bad’s happened, has it?"
"No," she says.
"You’d tell me?"
"Yes."
"Isn’t safe," her mother says, shaking her head.
Joanna doesn’t mind the subway too much. She usually rides with her friends, the other girls who go to her school. She sees kids from other schools, too, kids she’s begun to recognize even if she doesn’t know them. Lately there’s this girl about her own age—a Packer girl, or maybe St. Ann’s, but probably Packer. She’s always in the same seat and every day that Joanna sees her, she’s putting on lipstick. She wears small glasses with dark frames and her hair is pulled back tight against the sides of her head, so that her whole perfectly beautiful face can be seen. When the girl’s done, she closes the tube, smoothes her skirt, and takes out a book. She does it like no one is watching, like she’s alone in her bedroom.
Joanna, though, is always watching. She can’t help it. Sometimes after seeing the girl, she can’t stop thinking about her. That’s when she comes home and tells her mother to pull her out of Bishop Coughlin and put her somewhere else, public, private—like Packer or St. Ann’s. Anywhere, as long as it’s someplace else.
"This again?" her mother laughs. "Like it just happens, just like that? You think you’re special, you can just leave one school and show up at another?"
She’s not really sure she wants to go somewhere else. Sometimes she thinks she does, sometimes she doesn’t really care either way. When her friends are being idiots, though, she thinks about the girl and the way she does her lipstick, the way she reads her book. What would it be like to go to school with her—to talk to her? But she doesn’t want to interrupt her in the middle of what she’s doing. She doesn’t want the girl to think she’s weird or anything. So she ends up watching, even though she’s trying to pretend that she’s not.
"See this place?" Her father leans across the front seat and points out her window. They’re on Ocean Avenue, passing a line of large, ornate houses. "You’ll never guess what they did over the summer."
"Who?"
"Who? The people who live there."
"What did they do?"
"They did this wedding—Christmas in July. Everyone dressed up in old-fashioned clothing, Christmas trees everywhere, people singing ’Deck the Halls,’ a fire in the fireplace. You name it. It was like, what, Tiny Tim or something."
" ’A Christmas Carol.’"
"Yeah." He shakes his head. "They had snow, too. Don’t know where they got it. Must have rented a snow-making machine, right?"
"Probably," she says, wondering about this.
"Hey. I ask you because you’re the smart one."
"Not really." She smiles. Once she asked him about how they built tunnels that go underwater, and he laughed before telling her how it was done, that they actually go beneath the river bed. "Not about that stuff."
"Anyway, there’s these mountains of snow, mountains, in the driveway, the front yard, everywhere. And even though it was melting, it was snow. In July."