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“O, water-boy, where are you hiding?”
(Popular Song, 1940’s)
It began one white-hot summer day. Emily Dickinson’s slender body rose against the sky. They all had elderly and ill parents. “It seems, in such a case,” Deirdre told Rochelle, “that God delays.”
The same morning a boy came calling, James. He worked for a company in the seaside town, Pure & Pristine Water. His job was to deliver units for home or office use: chiller and the three gallon jugs of purified water which stood, upside-down in their blue translucent bottles. upside-down. His purpose in life as water, its delivery.
When he rang the bell in the small white-washed apartment house on Surf Avenue, and announced himself, “Pure & Pristine Water, James,” she thought she heard, “Pure & Pristine water, exchange.”
“I want rental,” she answered back, “not exchange.”
It was going to be a summer in which they needed water: dogs were already panting in the shade, children had begun sewing air with clouds of bubbles blown from a bubble pipe. Sun would soon seek out all things, leaving scant shelter. It would seek, not save earthly things.
“I have enough,” Deirdre hummed under her breath, her favorite Bach. I have enough, I have my Saviour.
Polio was around the bend: the anniversary was July 2. It had been nearly fifty years.
Deirdre’s friend, the Welsh writer, Megan, lived up the street. A survivor of the Blitz, she’d woken feeling “her ribcage was on fire.” Having searched everywhere for the fever thermometer, she found none, even rummaging thru the First Aid box.
“The buzz of a bumble-bee woke me at six-thirty,” she told Deirdre. Having read Emily Dickinson for the first time this year, age sixty-six, she concluded, “she absolutely had a lover—whether the lover knew or not.”
For Deirdre, summer was contagion. In her childhood waves of polio had rocked the country like turbulent polluted waters. The very air had crackled and burned. It felt like strips of fire pasted to the skin. The mother and two children could go nowhere. Epidemics of infantile paralysis had swept across towns and cities like a herd of buffalo; raged like forest fire, had crossed the skies like clouds of locusts.
“You’re early,” the woman, Deirdre, said to James. It was night inside this day of hers. It was Bloomsday, too, for she had been reading James Joyce.
She hadn’t had time to grab the pearl earrings from the dresser top, an heirloom from her mother. She didn’t feel put together till she had her earrings on.
She looked at the azure glass bottles holding the water, “How much do those things weigh?”
“Forty-five to fifty pounds.”
She eyed the three blue casks.
“I can’t lift them.”
“I appreciate your telling me that,” he said. “Are you sure you want a chiller?”
“Yes, isn’t that a chiller?”
“It’s a chiller and purifier. We offer a lighter affair, a processor coupled with the municipal water system.”
“Yet that’s precisely where there’s been trouble lately: the municipal system. Look at Walkerton. Why would I want a processor hooked up with the city system?
“We remove particles from water down to the size of one micron. Is there a place we can plug it in?” he said, keeping the possible deal moving.
“Probably behind the fridge. I don’t especially want the fridge moved.”
“I appreciate your telling me that. We’re here to please the client. Let me look along this wall. Here?” he beamed, rolling the unit to the right of the kitchen door.
“It would crowd me. I hate clutter,” she said.
“We do have lighter units. Can I use your phone?” he asked, reaching for the cordless on the kitchen table, dialing. He phoned headquarters to ask about that tabletop they sold to London Drugs in Sydney. “Oh, was it Pharmasave? I’m at a client’s who thinks she’d like a lighter model. Any more of those around?” he lay out his business card, and a brochure on how impure and unsafe our water is,
She thought of running herself a glass of water since she hadn’t had her breakfast but she decided to wait.
“I’m beginning to feel stuck,” she said.
“Let me tell you (before I leave) some additional benefits of our product: our water re-hydrates your body. Your body is almost seventy percent water.”
By now, she was sick-thirsty.
“Why don’t you wheel it out and let me think it over?” she smiled, “My partner probably wouldn’t have liked it anyway.”
“I appreciate your telling me . . .”
The three blue water cards on the table looked like ice itself, pure and simple.
Both sky and earth were the color of water. That pale. She began thinking about the fire in Rochelle’s ribs spreading.
Deirdre’s special friend was an older Irish woman up the street; a survivor of London’s Blitz, a woman with magic Deirdre had two legs she couldn’t move, Rochelle a paralyzed arm. “We use what we have,” said the older woman, Her front curtain, which faced the Avenue, was closed all day because of traffic noise (a bus run)—and brightness which came in from over the sea “It’s because the sun’s been bleaching’ the flowers on the chair upholstery,” she told Deirdre.
Deirdre got a boy to help her at the market-- (O so much more wanted than the water boy!)
By now it was a steamy hot summer day.
. . .It would be nice to be a child again: her eleventh summer. To throw off everything and go skinny-dipping in a body of icy mountain water that frozen and purified one.
She had thought about the body of water as she turned the key in its brass lock and took a Bluebird taxi into town.
She thought about how cool the pictures on the Pure & Pristine brochures made her feel. When she got home, that would be the first thing she saw (right next to James’ calling card.)
Water, the opposite of her disease
Strawberries, raspberries, grapes, nectarines, two tins of Old South juice in the red shopping cart. Returning down hill home she looked up to Rochelle's window in noon heat to see the drapes in fact drawn. It might have been a funeral parlor rather than an author’s room.
She came home to an e-mail from Britain, from Bavaria. Britta asked was it true Rochelle shuddered still when she heard the German tongue? With Britta she’d talk about how life flows on like a river.
Milk being delivered during war time. Britta spoke of a painting of a street after bombing, only half a man’s house left. Wearing a hat, head down, the man walks on a dark cobblestone street. Flickering candle light plays from an odd window of a bombed out house. Some light comes thru dark clouds. Eerie and moving like a photograph of a London milkman stepping off shards of glass, bomb parts. to deliver milk where the address had been blown off.
We go on, each carrying our own cross of memory.
Before turning the key in the slot, Deirdre does two things: she decides to buy that Netsuke: ivory from the eighteenth century, about two inches high, a woman, young, holding a water jug. It is (she thinks) my anniversary in two weeks. Half a century. The netsuke symbolizing water, life: it isn’t so bad not to walk: waist-high, you are close to small children, grasses, and animals. Perhaps you’re more daring, and sporty.
(O netsuke-woman, the river ran outside my hospital window. Some nights only the red sun sinking into water redeemed day.)
She takes lunches at Newton Fountain, built around a fountain. Deirdre can watch small children running around sewing the sky with clouds of bubbles blown from a pipe.
Why did I give the water boy so hard a time?
In the bath, Deirdre runs a mix of hot and cold water, then only hot remembering the agony of being bathed in Hubbard tanks after polio, then the difficulties of a bath at home.
We are all unforgiving and unforgiven children.
I survived. But my closest friend, a girl my namesake, died. She was the only one allowed to visit me: the other mothers thought polio was contagious after the acute phase. She died in the ambulance to the hospital because the ambulance driver couldn’t cut the whole in the windpipe, do a trach.
Pristine.
Health, looked at one way is a summertime dream.
Summer will pass, as it always does, like a dream under glass. Children filling the atmosphere with balloons, with shouts and colors. This too will darken to ash.
“You have the capacity to make dreams come true,” Britta says.
Perhaps it’s necessary for a person who’s disabled to leave the bosom of the family. There is always guilt Despite Mother’s Herculean effort to turn the turreted bedroom in the City into a gym: parallel bars, exercise mat, black medicine ball. The water-like reflections of the glass in which I checked out my fait. Just as well I live in exile. What if that blackfly hadn’t settled on that water glass that early July evening?
O Water Boy! is it enough to simply turn the tap and run the risks?
It’s a strange world, a resplendent sky. Where new comets appear every day while astronomers take to the rooftops with instruments of Galileo’s design, the ailing Galileo, who designed brilliantly, who suffered in the spirit and the flesh mightily.
After she turns out the light on her side of the bed, Deirdre hums that tune which haunted, darkened her childhood when she heard the original “Water Boy” wander into the hills behind Los Angeles where they’d stayed all summer to avoid the great polio epidemic of 1948. “Water Boy,” it ran in its minor mode, “Where are you hiding?” (Where am I hiding? You, Britta? Simone and Rochelle? Who is sheltering us l—or is no one? I think of the unpoured water from the carved jug, of the ivory flute of the netsuke woman plays. . .)
That water-pure summer I was eleven . . .if only I could have one hour of it unscrolled back again. Night to day. Doom.
Deirdre smiles back in the dark.
“For me, it wasn’t much of a day,” Sweetpea says.
It was a bad day for the water boy, too She recalls this morning, pure and simple Soon she would be in the arms of Morpehus, sleep’s fields like an iced pond: peaceful as a lake in wintertime. Saviour, slake our thirst: saviour in the simple, the under-stated, shines, O water boy.)
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