A Veil of Water By Amy Boesky It is cold out. We are standing outside on the lawn, which is stiff and crunching under out boots. My aunt is crying. No one asks why. My aunt is a big woman, and the tears seem silly. It is as solemn and inappropriate as if a man were crying. My brother is tired, there are circles under his eyes, and the circles look artificial like dark makeup on his thin face. I am reminded of Halloween. Last year I was a ballerina. My aunt says it is time to come inside, out of the cold. We sit down at the kitchen table. My aunt s house is smaller than ours, and noisier. She has three sons, my cousins. We can hear them making odd sounds in the other rooms, the other rooms of their house. The heat makes my fingers tingle. My cousins are named Jamie, Bob, and Eddie. None of them is kind to me. On other days they have tormented me, pulling my hair, making mean jokes about my dress. (Usually I wear blue jeans, like my brother, but when we come to visit, my mother tells me to wear a dress.) There is lace on the collar and it is scratching my neck. Today we sit alone at the table, my aunt, my brother, myself. My aunt makes hot chocolate and pours it into plastic cups. She forgets to put marshmallows in it. Joshua, who is my brother and older than me, drinks his. I don t. My aunt leans back in her chair, and the chair sways back with her. She looks huge and somehow blurred. She stretches her arms out to me, offering me something. I stare at her and wait for something to become clear. I am tired. I can feel the floor moving uncertainly beneath my feet. My uncle come in the room. He is a huge man, his stomach shakes when he walks. He puts his arms around me and I am entirely hidden, a part of nothing. We re going to sleep now, princess, he says to me, into my ear. His voice is too strong to hear all at once. Then I m up in the air, floundering, the floor is a million miles away. Just hold on! my uncle booms. I clutch at his shirt with hysterical fingers. I can smell pipe tobacco on him, on his neck and collar. My legs grab at the empty air, kicking for support. We bump our way up the short stairway. He lays me down on a bed that is too big for me, and I squirm away into the wide expanse of blanket. He does not undress me. He turns the lights out, and he closes the door behind him. A minute later he pushes the door open a little. The light from the hall slips fuzzily through the crack. I sleep. I am dreaming about a bird, a big black bird that is somehow familiar to me, and somehow terrible. In my sleep I am exhausted and not frightened. Then a door opens, and a light turns on, and I wake in terror to see my aunt leaning over me, unfastening the buttons on my dress. I cry out, jerking away from her. Her hands are cold. She reaches for me again, and I scream at her. I can feel the rush of the wings near me. She moves away, and the light is gone, and I am alone in the darkness. 1
When I wake again I am utterly drained, as if I had walked for hours in my sleep. I am lying in a tangle of rumpled sheets, still in my navy dress. My tights had slid down low on My legs. My shoes are gone. I feel stiff and bleary-eyed, as if I had cried in my sleep. I have no clear idea where I am, or what I am doing here. Joshua is next to me in bed, asleep, breathing hard through his mouth. There is spittle on his cheek. He is wearing pajamas, but they are not his. The pajamas are light blue with little brown footballs on them. I decide they are Eddie s, and I inch away from him, feeling betrayed. I m not certain where I am. I don t remember anything that happened yesterday, or before that. I help my aunt with the breakfast dishes. She has red blotches on her face. All my life I wanted a daughter, she says. Her voice sounds the way Joshua s does when he has done something very bad. She does not look at me. We are alone in the kitchen and the heat of the water rises up at us, eager for escape. My aunt says she is worried about me. She wants me to see the doctor. She says she is afraid I am sick, but I can tell from the way she said it that she doesn t really believe it. I nod at her anyway. I know there is nothing wrong with me. My aunt talks to me about school. She said that she has called my teacher, and she understands that it will take me a while to adjust. She waits for me to say something but I don t. I listen to her talk and I wipe the steaming dishes with a yellow towel. After breakfast I sit on the couch and watch TV. There are two cartoons, Bugs Bunny and another one I don t recognize. In the cartoons the animals and people are always getting hurt, but in the next scene they are better again. After the cartoons there are game shows. Sometimes the dog comes and rubs slowly against the sides of my legs. My mother never wanted a dog. She told Joshua they make muddy messes. My aunt comes in and sits down next to me. I want to talk to you about what happened, she says. There is something in her voice that I don t like. What happened? Nothing happened, I say stubbornly. I don t know what she s talking about. My uncle comes home from work in the middle of the day. We re going out, he says to me. I nod at him. My head feels light and funny, like a helium balloon bobbing at the end of a piece of limp yarn. He takes me by the hand and we walk together. It is snowing, and the motion of the whiteness is so fast and constant it is as if the sky were turning inside out. Inside my mittens my fingers are numbed with cold. We take the bus. My boots leak snow, and two small puddles form under my feet. I read the ads over my head, and my uncle smokes a pipe. When the bus stops we get off again. I trip a little on the second step, but my uncle catches me. We walk for a long time. This snow is in my face. When I breathe the air dragons out of my mouth in a pale white fume, like pipe smoke. My uncle held my hand so tightly it hurts. Am I walking too fast? 2
he asks me, and his voice is high up and lost in the whiteness. I m not used to holding hands with a girl. We are inside a building now, and we are wet and tired of walking. My uncle shakes the snow from his glove and takes some loose coins from his pocket. He hands them to the lady behind the desk and she gives him two paper tickets, one pink and one yellow. We are in the aquarium. I have been here before. My uncle leads me by the hand and we walked slowly from glass to glass. Inside the tiny aqua squares the fish are swimming awkwardly, their bubble faces pushing out at us. My uncle stoops, putting his face against the glass. He blows his face out at the fish, and they dart away, terrified. I used to come here, he says. His voice is low. When I was growing up, your father used to take me here almost every Sunday. There was something magic here, some magic that was only here when he was. We keep walking. There is something aching at the back of my throat. I remember how our parents used to tease him, he says. He looks down at me. Then he laughs. His voice is not happy, but the laughter is in it, and the sadness too. I never knew a man with that much color inside of him. I blink. The air is alive, pushing me back. Sometimes he would say stories I say brokenly. My uncle looks down at me, waiting. Sometimes he would make stories, I say lamely. He would make stories up about the fish which one was the father, and which one was his little girl. Sometimes A week ago, or two weeks ago, or more, my father had stood here next to me, and I had pressed my nose to the glass while he laughed. I used to think that fish could hear his voice. Look, they re dancing for you now, my father would say, and when I looked I could see that he was right. I want to tell my uncle this now, but there is something else he is waiting to hear. I stare at him, and now he looks different; I am seeing him through a veil of water, he bubbles before me brokenly, like a fish. I am crying. He holds me, holds me with both his arms. I am not trying very hard, but I am crying. We leave soon. There is no reason to stay. We walked outside awkwardly, bumping into each other and into other people, and my eyes are blinded with my tears. The world looks different suddenly. I am seeing it through the water, and it will never look the same again. Responding to the Story Directions: for full credit, answer each of the questions below in their entirety some questions have multiple parts to them. 3
1. What has happened to the characters in this story? Once you have determined that, do you believe that the narrator s behavior and reactions are understandable? Explain. (RL 4, 5) 2. What clues are there about the ages of the narrator and her brother? (RL 1,4) Exploring the Author s Craft 1. Another story with a bird as a symbol What does the big black bird symbolize? How are the cartoons the narrator watches symbolic? (RL 4, 5) 2. A motif is an idea, element, incident, or object that recurs in a literary word. What is the motif in A Veil of Water? Is it appropriate to the story? Discuss. (RL 4, 5) 4
Writing Workshop Amy Boesky, who wrote this story as a senior in high school, hadn t experienced a death close to her when she wrote A Veil of Water. Your job now as a budding writer is to create a similarly believable and compelling first-person narrative. Imagine your circumstances exactly ten years from now. Write a diary entry that conveys where you are and what you have done on that day. (W3) 5
Extra Educational Opportunity! In any medium you wish, illustrate a moment in this story that you find especially gripping or dramatic. 6