ELVIS, MY FATHER - By Donna Williams. It was the big house, on Bell Street in Preston. My cousins and some of the local kids would later call it a mansion and perhaps it probably was by Preston standards. The sheds in the back yard had now been knocked down on the large suburban house block. The diggers had gouged a huge 30 foot and up to six feet deep sloping hole in the ground in the shape of a kidney bean with cut in mud steps leading in from the shallow end. The mud disappeared under wet cement as big men with bare arms barrowed it into the hole. Trowels smoothed it up the sides of the hole and had I ever seen a cake being iced perhaps Id have said it was like a cake being iced in reverse. But it would be another two years before I could fluently understand sentences and another four years before I would be anything more than echolalic. The light went in, an eye stuck into the wall of the what was now a giants, clean empty bathtub. Pool paint turned the cement a pale blue. A tiled rim, a pebbled surround, and it was like a big bathtub waiting for water. A shallow puddle formed in the deep end. My seven year old body rode dwarfed the tricycle Id had since I was four as I sped down the sloping soil into the puddle at the bottom. Then back up to the top to start again, and again, and again, as the puddle became dirtier and I became wetter. Johnny was still bombed out on Valium. Hed be kept that way until he could hold a cup and avoid the baby bottles, or turned his back on an offer of the sparkling sweet Brenenay it was hidden in. One day he would, walk and then run fast enough to escape his two siblings obediently holding him down as his mother plied him with more Basil Pills or gained enough functional speech to be understood and, if he even remembered, to one day tell. But more likely by the time he could tell, like the rest of us, he wouldnt. Such was the family culture. The biggest bathtub in the world filled with clean crystalline water from the hose. Up and up, and up it rose, higher than my head, higher than my world. Finally, it shimmered with diamonds of sunlight caught upon the water. I plunged myself in and disappeared under the surface. I swam like a dolphin the length of the bottom. Then threw myself this way and that, feeling the weight of the water holding me, giving way. Johnny was toddling now and I saw him fly, flung by the arm into the pool and landing with a splash. He submerged. I saved him. Again she threw him, again and again. And I kept fetching him. I laid on my back, floating, staring up into the sky. Then under the water, blowing air out of my nose staring up through the glassy surface of the water. I had made it, I was here, untouchable in a world under glass. Johnny was walking. He snuggled with the Great Dane, Prince Waldo Carne on a rug outside the back door under the pergola. Bottle in his hands, he drank the Brenenay and swung between sleep and hyperactivity and more sleep and more hyperactivity. Blue turned to grey, sun turned to rain, day turned to night. The eye glowed warm and emanating within the cold water. Johnny was three, running, an escape artist, now with his own tricycle. He threw Thumbelina into the pool. The wound up toy baby doll would move like a baby drowning gently under the surface of the water, settling to the bottom. Id rescue the doll, over and over and over. Johnny was in the pool with me now. Clad in yellow floaties on each arm, he was three. I was nine and Jack was the crazy second hand car dealer and fence who came home late most nights in a house that never cooked dinner. On weekends he was the guy I saw through the bars of my attic bedroom, mowing the front lawn. I was in the back yard, in the chlorinated pool. The water filter sucked in water sending it back out through jets, cleaned of debris but likely not urine or the variety of child bugs Id probably graced the pool with. It was a blue sky day. Jack had been to the fish point with a net and a bucket. He strode to the pool with the bucket full of gold fish and set them all free. They swam around me and I dived under, swimming free with the fish. Then he jumped in. I dont know if any fish went through the filter. But with a net he caught them up again, one after the other, back into the bucket and into the pond. Youd never know when that mood was going to take him again. But it did, again, and again, and again. And Jack and I would swim, free with the fish.
Posted on: Fri, 26 Sep 2014 01:13:26 +0000