Black Water by Joyce Carol Oates

okay?
    Daddy?
    Okay?

 

    Everywhere on grayling island there
grew, run ning
low against the earth, wild rose, flowering wild rose, beautiful rosy-lavender
petals and spiny treacherous stems, sharp thorns Kelly drew her fingertips
absentmindedly against watching the men play tennis... Rosa rugosa it was, or was it Rosa virginiana .
    Wild rose, everywhere. Blooming. Festooning the dun-colored beach.
    And the fruit of the bushes, like tiny
plums, beautiful too, a blood-swollen look to them, an erotic look, these too
Kelly touched, running her fingertips over them, digging in her nails.
    Rosehips,
The Senator said. Taking pleasure in speaking of them, his grandmother steeping
them to make rosehip tea, did Kelly like rosehip tea? herbal teas were very popular today, eh? and his grandmother
had made jam, too, from the rosehips, he thought. Unless he
was confusing it with something else.
    Rosehips, or maybe currants. Huckleberries.
    In
the kitchen Buffy grimaced emptying ice cubes into a container saying,
"You and The Senator are getting along very well," with a sidelong
smile, and Kelly Kelleher smiled too, feeling her face heat, murmuring,
"Well," and there was a pause, and another barrage of ice cubes
crashing into the plastic container, then Buffy said something so very Buffylike , you never knew from which direction Buffy was
coming, was it a sly sort of joke, a nudging complicity, was it a warning, was
it that prickly sort of insult you didn't quite absorb until later, or, simply,
bluntly, a statement of fact, "Don't forget, he voted to give aid to the
Contras."

 

    K elly? kelly ? come to me.
    She could hear him, suddenly. Shouting, somewhere close overhead, tugging at the door on the
driver's side of the car, making the car rock with his strength.
    She tried to speak but water filled her
mouth, she shook her head, spat the water out, I'm here; I'm here,
help me, pulling herself up by sheer tremulous strength of her left arm, the small
compact muscle of her left arm, the shoulder, she was trembling with the
effort, how many minutes? or had it been hours? time
did not pass in this place submerged in black water except
as it was recorded in the water's gradual rising, the cruel methodical rising,
a digital watch's clicking, and would The Senator see her here?—in such
blackness?—in this trap, this pit, this coffin, whatever it was, the name for
it lost, squeezing her so small, so tight, so cramped you had to be crippled,
your spine bent back upon itself to fit into it?
    Her
head, now she was awake, was livid with pain. Splotches of
light like tumorous growths behind her eyes,
tight-impacted in her skull. It seemed that her face had lost all sensation,
she'd held her lips so pursed for so long, gasping, sucking, the air bubble
floated away teasing and cruel as a living capricious thing, bobbing and
drifting this way, and now that way, and again this way, so she strained,
sobbing with the effort, to reach it.
    I'm here. I'm here. Here!
     
    He
had dived into the black water to rescue her but he was far away, and
everything was so dark, blind. And she understood she'd offended him, and the
insult was irrevocable.
    Her
lips playfully shut against his tongue. The ease of it she'd imagined, the
banter, the mutual regard, respect, he did respect her she knew, she knew, and then reluctantly parting her lips, his fat
thrusting tongue, the hunger in him.
    The
shame of it, how desperate she'd been clutching at the man's trouser leg, at
his shoe! As he'd kicked to get free! His shoe, soaked, in
her hand.
    His
shoe!
    Oh
Kelly, her girlfriends would laugh, Buffy would shriek with laughter wiping her
eyes, —his shoe!
     
    Limping one shoe on one shoe off
fleeing on foot back along the marshland road to the highway from which they'd
turned off where there was sure to be a 7-Eleven store, a gas
station, a tavern with an outdoor telephone booth .
     
    No.
It had not happened yet. The sun blazing late in the afternoon, this long
hilarious