The Forms of Water by Andrea Barrett

Author:Andrea Barrett [Barrett, Andrea]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-00-739687-0
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 1993-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

20

THE EVENING HAD PASSED SO SMOOTHLY, AND IT HAD BEEN so nice to have the house to themselves and not to think about what their families were up to, that Wendy had let time slip and slide and high-step past her without telling Delia what had happened. Sometime after eleven, though, in the living room littered with cartons of grapefruit juice and vodka bottles and pizza boxes, Delia said, “So where’d your mother go, anyway? One of her weird retreats?”

Wendy had almost forgotten how strange her story was. Casually, almost flippantly, she explained about Grunkie’s disappearance and her mother’s reaction to it, and her father’s reaction to her mother’s reaction, and her mother’s suspicions that Henry had actually stolen Grunkie away. Wendy’s embroidered bag leaned against her chair with the rag dolls showing at the top, and as she spoke she took the dolls from the bag and manipulated them like puppets. The story, backed by the dolls’ gestures, seemed almost funny. She said, he said, I said; she said he said; I said to her; rumors, guesses, speculations. She was not prepared for Delia’s response.

“My father did what?” she said, and it took Wendy a minute to realize that Delia might see the story from a different perspective, evidence of one more link in the endless chain of her father’s recent fuck-ups. She forgot, sometimes, that Delia took her father’s escapades so hard. She’d had less than a year to get used to them, and she felt guilty about the way he’d ended up. Lise and Kitty had shed Henry like snakes, but Delia still seemed tied to him by a tag of obligation or love, like the string of flesh left behind by a pulled tooth.

“This whole thing’s probably in my mother’s head,” Wendy said soothingly. “You know how she gets. All anyone really knows is that your father and Grunkie left St. Benedict’s together in this van they borrowed. Mom and Dad both think they went to Massachusetts, so that’s where they’ve gone to look for them.”

Delia bent over until her head met her knees. “Asshole. Asshole, asshole, asshole.”

“Your father?” Roy said. He rested his hand on the back of Delia’s neck.

“Of course my father.” She sighed and lifted her head and stretched her arms behind her back. “He’s such a jerk—after all he’s done to us, after all he’s done to his family, you’d think he’d give it a rest. But no—he has to take a helpless old man from a nursing home, fuck up everyone’s lives again ….”

“We don’t know that,” Wendy said. “We don’t know what happened at all. I’m only telling you what my mother said.”

Win, who had finally agreed to stay home, had been playing with the Nintendo paraphernalia Waldo had loaned him. The television bleeped and flickered as a helicopter exploded again and again and was miraculously resurrected. Now he set down the controls and drifted toward Delia. “What’s going on?” he asked. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem,” Delia said, “the problem

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