Niagra Falls
Cailin Barrett-Bressack
Chapter 2
Niagara Falls, 1958
John has waited impatiently for their wedding night since he’d seen Anna in church in a home-sewn dress with a broken seam that puckered when she knelt to pray, exposing the un-tanned skin at the curve of her waist. He knelt in his pew and spoke to God under his breath, thanking him for creating such a gentle curve, and for making her skin so soft in the candlelight, and John prayed until his knuckles whitened against each other that one day he would press his lips against that skin.
Now, eight months later, she is his wife and he sits next to her in the used station wagon bought from his uncle (below market price, a wedding present) that they’ve used to drive to their honeymoon at The Niagara Inn. Anne is still wearing the green sateen sheath dress she’d worn at the altar, and the pillbox hat with a hint of veil still occluding her eye. She’s been carrying her bouquet for 7 hours in the car, as if route I-290 is one long church aisle.
She takes off the hat and veil as John shuts the engine off. It’s nearly 10pm and dark in the parking lot except for the porch light at the Inn. It’s quiet and she wonders if she should speak to fill the space. On the drive up she’d spoken about highway speeds and gas prices. Before the wedding she’d spoken to him about suit colors and reception appetizers, and when they were dating she’d planned their dinners and during the dinners she planned the movies they would see afterwards. Now they are married and Anna is uncharacteristically quiet because all that’s left to plan or talk about is the rest of their lives.
She allows her left hand to leave the bouquet, to touch the curve of muscle on the inside of his arm. John is 20 years old–– long, lanky, skinny-build but with broad shoulders from helping his uncle deliver blocks of ice. He has warm brown eyes and dark leather skin and when he chooses to speak each word seems labored over. People think he is a good listener, but when they think he is listening, he is really just boiling down the next words that he plans to say.
In the dark of the car John feels Anna’s small hand on his arm and chews on the words for just a moment before he says, “let’s go”.
The honeymoon suite is cramped and dim, and the light from the bedside lamp is oddly green. Anna’s father is paying for the trip out of the settlement. Anna’s sister died a year ago of a ruptured spleen after being hit by a cross-Brooklyn B35 bus, awarding her parents a five-figure settlement from the city of New York. The hotel in Niagara Falls is $17 a night for a room with a king-sized bed and a view of the side parking lot.
When they get to their room Anna calls the front desk to ask for a vase. They’d had a small church wedding that morning with immediate family. The bouquet flowers––yellow begonias–– were picked from her mother’s front walk.
“I’m not sure we have a spare vase readily available,” the desk clerk responds.
“Never waste good flowers,” she tells him sternly, and the desk clerk doesn’t know whether to say Okay or Thank you in response. He has a bellhop bring up a clear milk bottle from the kitchen.
“Just fine,” Anna says, but doesn’t tip. She holds the bottle with loose fingers and seems lightly nauseas. Anna does not like being associated with garbage, but she hates wastefulness more. She sets the bottle on the bathroom counter.
Anna has never stayed at a hotel and she doesn’t trust the cleaning staff. She wipes the drawers inside and out and washes the bottle in the bathroom sink with hand soap. She puts her flowers in it with an aspirin in the water to keep them fresh. When all else feels clean she takes out the fresh, white cotton sheets she’d bought and laundered at home.
“A gift,” she says to John as she re-makes the bed, “from your wife.”
John moves to her and kisses her. He is not thinking about the sheets but about the bone-white skin at her waist and, less consciously, about stability. They had kissed before while they were dating, at dusk on her family’s front porch under yellow street lamps, but that kiss said goodnight and this kiss is urgent. She feels ownership in the way he slips his tongue in her mouth, his hand anchored at her hip.
She turned seventeen three weeks ago and she learned what sex is three nights ago. Went from being so sheltered, only knowing that sex was something that would ruin her life, to having her mother pulling her into the bedroom and telling her everything but the actual mechanics. Her mother told her that John would lay on top of her and the rest would come naturally, and that she would bleed but that God is watching and that it is bad luck not to sleep with your husband on your wedding night. So in the green-tinged light of the honeymoon suite she sets her jaw and brings her hand to the side zipper on her dress, trying to heed her mother’s advice.
But she only can unzip about two inches before her hands start to go numb, and she stops. She looks up at his face. He looks like he is listening but really he is holding his breath.
What she is thinking is: please, just undo my dress for me, because I am scared of handing you this part of myself, and I’d rather you just reach out and take it.
What Anna says instead is: “John, I am tired and need to unpack.”
“Okay,” John says, and his brain is too short-circuited to be hurt right away. His heart is beating hard against his ribs and he sits in the chair by the small writing desk to breathe. Anna’s hands do not fumble as she rezips those top two inches.
He breathes and he watches her unpack their clothes from their suitcases, and he watches the tender way she fingers the collars to life, smoothes the wrinkles against the polyester bed covers with the flat of her hand, refolds his slacks–– there is love there, in the way she does these things for him. He does not remember ever before feeling cared for like this, though this would not have been his first time having sex.
He slept with another woman, a married woman, on his ice delivery route. She had department store bras and matching silk underwear. He’d placed the block of ice in the icebox in her kitchen, just chipped off the larger block in the truck. She was home alone and led him to the dining room. The circulation in his hands is bad from being cold every day since fifth grade when he dropped out of school to help with the ice route, and the woman’s hands were so warm with August that they seemed to condensate against his. They’d had sex with him seated in a stiff wooden chair at her family kitchen table, with her leaning back and bracing herself against the edge of the tabletop behind her. There was a chocolate cake on the table and when she leaned back too far, her hair would trail lines through the thick icing. She called out her husband’s name to nobody and when they were done, he left. John wants to make Anna crave him in that way––like she would a dense slice of chocolate cake.
Anna finishes cleaning and pulls the blankets down to the new sheets, and fluffs John’s pillow. She changes into a cotton nightgown in the bathroom and comes into the dark room and John is already in bed. It is bad luck not to have sex on your wedding night and so she does not sleep, just lies on her back and feels the oddity of having a man in the bed next to her, breathing, and she wonders if I do not sleep, will the bad luck never come?
She gets up before him and changes in the bathroom–– another green dress (home-sewn, always), this one buttoned down the front and belted tightly in the middle. John is sleeping and his face looks different. She likes it better when he is sleeping; she can pretend that everything has gone to plan and that she is the kind of woman who he would dream about. What John is actually dreaming out: shimmering blocks of blue-white ice.
She has been acutely aware since they drove away from the wedding reception yesterday afternoon that they have never been alone together. Her mother had insisted on a chaperone for every date for eight months. Aunt Bunny sat the next table over with a book in a restaurant or two rows behind them in the theater. Now they are actually alone, and she wants to kiss his wide unlined forehead to wake him up, like in the movies. She wants to understand the feeling that causes men to follow women into the night, shouting for them, and causes women to faint. She feels love but it is based off of having approved of him and feeling humbled by him. She wishes she knew what kind John feels. And if she were the kind of person who’d let her train of thought go off the rails, she would wonder what causes different kinds of love in different people, but she doesn’t— she places her hand on John’s arm through the white sheet and says, “good morning, maybe breakfast downstairs?”
After coffee and toast in the lobby where Anna will not speak to the other couples––why are they so concerned with our business?, she says–– John drives them to the falls and uses their “honeymoon passes” from the Inn to get free tickets for the Maid of the Mist. They can already hear the falls from down the road and the air grows cooler and humid as they approach. Neither of them has ever been on a boat that isn’t the Staten Island Ferry. They are given blue plastic ponchos on the gangplank that Anna holds.
The boat tour guide begins to talk over the loudspeaker about the history of Niagara. The six million cubic feet of water crossing its edge every minute, 60 tons of salt eroded with it. As they get closer to the falls, the mist grows into more of a drenching, wind-whipped rain.
“The ponchos,” John says.
“No,” Anna replies, “The other people wearing them look like bags of trash.” John turns from her and the water drenches his hair, his mustache, pasting his starched white shirt to his chest like a wet plaster cast. Anna faces the water with some sort of pride.
The tour guide goes on to describe those who went over the falls in barrels––Annie Edson Taylor in 1901. She used an airtight wooden barrel with its inside air pressure compressed to 30 p.s.i. using a bicycle pump. She wound up beaten and concussed, but the first to come out alive.
They look out at the falls and Anna says, “how crazy, with a barrel,” which does not make much sense but John nods anyway, and as he does, the first of his brain cells dies in a process that will continue until he must lay limply in a hospital bed, not even able to tremor, covered in browned flower petals and leaves. His brain cells will die until this memory at the falls is destroyed— muddled and frustrating, holes bored through his mind by the scalding molten lead of disease. The first brain cell blinks off because of an accumulation of insoluable alpha-synuclein, forming a Lewy body where a working cell once was. He can feel the mist on his face but can can not feel that particular cell dying and he will not know what is happening in his brain for several decades. He holds his new wife to his side and imagines what Anna might be thinking when she says, how crazy, with a barrel. He imagines someone who would be crazy enough to die over the falls, to risk that their last feeling on earth could be their skull crushed against the inside grain, the sound drowned out by 6 million cubic feet of water. Can’t even hear the sound of their skull shattering.
He holds Anna to his side and swipes his sopping hair from his face, and slips his wedding ring off in his pocket, fingering the edge of it, round and round, wondering absently what he has done in marrying this particular, proud woman.
Anna is not thinking about the woman in the barrel’s last moment and her skull against the wood. She is thinking about what a brave woman she must have been before the fall, how crazy but so brave, building what could end up to be her coffin, bending the oak and with each nail adding something to her legacy. And for the first time since she’s been married, really the first time in many years, she is optimistic, and it is something to do with the comfort of her husband’s arm around her, and with how much bravery she feels inside herself. She leans forward against the rain and feels very alive, but when the Maid of the Mist turns around, her back to the falls, she feels the future loom ahead, and if she was the kind of woman who would let herself, she would cry.
They simultaneously stick to and slip against the leather seats in the station wagon, their hair wild from the water and the wind. John thinks that maybe the adrenaline of being beneath the falls will encourage her to seize the moment and consummate their marriage, but when they get back to the room she seems even more withdrawn. He does not know that it is because the falls made her feel so very small, and when the two of them are alone she knows that John’s entire future rests on her, which feels insurmountably large.
He kisses her and she kisses him back, but then she locks herself in the bathroom to take a long shower. This time, though, she does not change in the bathroom. She comes out in a robe she found in the closet. John’s eyes linger on her wet hair, dripping down her back, and her body, muffled with fabric. Anna’s body is a straight line from here to there, crown to toe, no curving hips or large bust to fill out the robe, but she’s young and fragile and beautiful.
She has never worn a robe like this-- “Egyptian cotton”, the tag says, and she goes to the writing desk, and jots the words on a piece of hotel stationary so that she can ask Bert, who owns the fabric store back home. From the way it feels against her skin she knows she’ll never be able to afford enough to make her own robe but maybe just to own a swatch, a handkerchief, something to keep in her pocket. It feels so nice against her skin, her shoulders, she thinks, but she still feels indecent about it, how thin the fabric is, she feels how John looks at her. She thought it would feel more religious, his look, but it still makes her feel panicked.
At the end of their 3-day honeymoon, after dinners and long strolls that are sometimes very nice and easy and where a few times they even laugh together, Anna unmakes the bed and replaces the sheets she’d gifted to her husband with those that came with the room. The bouquet in the glass milk bottle is starting to brown at the edges of the petals but she decides to take it with them anyway, and plans to hold it on her lap for the 7 hour drive back to Brooklyn, where they have plans to move into their new basement apartment in her Aunt Bunny’s brownstone that night.
The sun is barely up but Anna decides they should drive by the falls before they leave for home. “When will we be here again?” she says. John shrugs. After they go to the concierge and check out, John drives them to a lookout over America Falls, where the fence looks over Niagara River. The water rushes to a sharp blueblack edge, before hitting a line of sky.
John sees him first. A man has climbed down past the barriers on the other side of the river, ambling over the rocks. He moves slowly, an ant below them. It’s hard to pick out what he looks like, or what he’s wearing. The river is green from erosion of salt, 60 tons per minute, which is dissolving into the water. In 50,000 years, the falls will erode themselves to nothing and they will cease to exist. The sky is just beginning to warm from pink from black. John sees the green water blush with the light of the sun, beginning to rise. The man appears as a black shadow against the rocky ledge, a silhouette, climbing purposefully lower, lower.
“What do you think?” John says. Anna is wearing a green shirtdress with a matching green belt at her tiny waist, and the wind catches her hair and whips it at her eyes. She doesn’t see anything at first, until John points a pink, ice-burned index finger towards the river. The man below has already reached the water. Two other couples here to see the sunrise stand at the fence. John is still pointing and they look as well. The water is so loud is it hard to hear if the other couples are speaking. After another moment on the rocky bank, the shadow of the man sits and seems to take off his shoes. He places them neatly next to him, and, after a pause, leaps in.
For one brief second it seems that the shadow is trying to hold the rocks with its fingertips. But his muscles are nothing against the current. The sun casts orange over all of the vacationers and honeymooners and the man, his face briefly visible and orange, too, as he floats by, his eyes two pricks of white sunriselight, is swept unceremoniously by the current over the fall’s edge.
A moment. There is silence, then gasps, loud enough to be heard over the water. One of the other honeymooners screams. Anna whispers, “how crazy,” and then, “how stupid.”
On the way home, she carries her bouquet for a few hours, as if route I-290 is a funeral procession. But somewhere around Binghamton they stop to use the bathroom and she fingers the wilted petals and looks at the milk bottle, that trash, and sees that the limp stems are curling and she tosses the whole thing in a dumpster. John doesn’t notice that she’s done this until they’re back on the highway and she places her slender left hand on top of his frigid right one.
Aunt Bunny has reserved the basement apartment for them. There are four apartments in the building and Bunny lives in the three-bedroom unit at the top.
Bunny collects crystal figurines. She has 12 of them. One for the birth of each of her five kids, one each for her 5, 10, 20, and 25-year wedding anniversaries, and three that she’d purchased at a church sale for $15. She keeps her figurines lined up on a mirror-topped table by her living room window that looks out on Yates Ave.
Bunny is dusting her crystal figurines as she watches John and Anna pull up to the front walk in their station wagon. Anna turned even colder after what happened to her sister, even though the two girls had never been very close. Too different. Bunny hopes John will rub off on her. She tries to see Anna’s face through her window–– she looks pale and her eyes are set, serious. John is known as a soft, quiet man. Her niece, Anna, could use that. Married couples grow more like each other over time, she thinks, until they become like two bald and spotting potatoes rotting on a windowsill. Her own husband, Carl, died a year ago of lung disease, and now she is bald and spotting in her apartment alone.
She finishes dusting her figurines and closes her curtains to give the newlyweds the illusion of privacy; then she peaks between the blinds.
In the car, John sits with his hands on the wheel. Everything the two own is in the back seat and trunk, picked up in one trip to each of their homes. Bunny had promised them all of the furniture, pots, pans, toilet brushes, and lamps left behind by Anna’s second cousin Martin and his wife who’d lived in the basement apartment last.
John looks at Anna. He still likes her long black hair and sharp chin, her soft hands that he now knows smells like the lotion she uses–– gardenias. He’d read the bottle aloud while she’d been in the shower. He likes Anna’s strength even though he didn’t expect it and it scares him, and he tries to feel excited to move into their home.
John takes her hands in his.
I am still happy to be spending the rest of my life with you, he thinks.
“I am happy,” he says.
“I’m glad,” she says, and “me too”, but what she’s thinking is: I suppose I am gone.
That night she waits until John is already in bed. The bedside lamp is on and the room is cold, like a root cellar. The walls are concrete painted pale yellow. She walks into the room and slips off her house shoes next to the bed, pulls the pins out of her hair, slowly, making sure her hands don’t shake. Her hair smells tired and hangs stiffly with hairspray residue streaked through. John takes his glasses off as she shrugs the shoulder of her robe down, unties the stiff fabric, leans over him to turn off the light.
John does not lean on her too heavily or hurt her as he pulls himself on top of her, stroking the inside of her thighs until they open. The smell of his neck is salty and fresh with sweat, and the light filtering in through the worn cafe curtains over the casement windows turn them into silhouettes; she feels afloat outside of herself, and it is all she can do to look up at him, strain her eyes to search his shadowed face in the dark. How strange this is, she thinks, how odd that we are built this way. And then she nearly starts to cry, and she tries to find comfort in his lips pressed against the dip of her collar bone.
I’m gone, she thinks, how strange.
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Cailin Barrett-Bressack is currently an Associate Editor at an independent publisher in NYC. Her work has previously been featured in The Louisville Review, Necessary Fiction, eFiction Magazine, This Magazine, Sherman's Travel, and was nominated for 'Best of the Web 2011'. She enjoys fine cheeses and strange cats, and is at work on her first novel.