The Shape of Water Read online

  The older kids could show you outbuildings where you could find equipment stenciled with Home’s prior title: the Fenzler School for the Feeble-Minded and Idiotic. By the time of Elisa’s arrival, children whose files would have once encumbered them as mongoloids, lunatics, or defectives were gathered under the wings of retarded, slow, or derelict. Unlike the Jewish and Catholic orphanages down the block, Home’s mission was to keep you alive, if barely, so that when you hit the street at eighteen, you could find a menial job serving your superiors.

  Home’s children might have united, just as Occam’s janitors might have united. Instead, the paucity of food and affection circulated cruelty like a cough, and each child knew her or his rivals’ pressure points. You were sentenced to Home because your folks landed in the poorhouse? You’re Breadless Betty. Your parents are dead? You’re Graveyard Gilbert. You’re an immigrant? You’re Red Rosa, Harold the Hun. Elisa never knew the real names of some children until the day they were pushed out the door.

  Elisa’s own nickname was “Mum,” though housemothers knew her better as “22.” Numbers tidied matters in the untidy world of unwanted children, and each child had one. Every item assigned to you had your number on it, making it easy to ascribe fault when something of yours manifested where it didn’t belong. Ostracized children like Mum were luckless. Adversaries had only to wad her blanket under their coat, toss it outside in the mud, and watch as the “22” on the tag was identified and Mum was assigned her discipline.

  Punishment could be delegated to any housemother, but the Matron herself often liked to dole it out. She didn’t own Home, but it was all she had. As early as age three, Elisa intuited that the Matron saw Home’s unruly brood as reflections of her unstable mind, and to keep the children in order was to keep herself sane. It didn’t work. She’d laugh hard enough to make the littlest ones cry, then break into raging sobs that would further alarm them. She carried a sapling switch for the backs of legs and arms, a ruler for knuckles, and a bottle of castor oil for forced swallowing.

  Treacherously, the Matron also carried candy. Because she depended so much on the feedback of pleading and sniffling, she smited silent Mum above all others. An incorrigible little monster, she called her. Secretive, up to something. Even worse were the opposite days when the Matron, her gray hair ribboned into obscene pigtails, cornered Elisa to ask if she wanted to play dollies. Elisa would go through the motions, terrified as the Matron asked if any bad little girls were wetting their beds. That’s when the candy came out. It was okay to tell her secrets, the Matron said. Just point out the kids, so I can fix them. It felt to Elisa like a trap. It was a trap. Same as Mr. Strickland, crinkling his cellophane bag. One way or the other, offered sweets, all of them, were poison.

  Elisa got older. Twelve, thirteen, fourteen. She sat alone at soda fountains, apart from the other girls, and listened to them talk about drinking alcohol; her glass of water tasted like soap. She heard them talk about dance classes; she had to freeze her hands on her ice-cream bowl so she wouldn’t pound her fists. She heard them talk about kissing. One girl said, “He makes me feel like somebody,” and Elisa dwelled upon it for months. What would feeling like somebody feel like? To suddenly exist not only in your world, but someone else’s as well?

  One of the places to which she trailed other girls was the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She’d never been inside a theater. She bought a ticket and waited to be asked to leave. She spent five minutes choosing a seat, as if it might determine her whole life’s path. Maybe it did: The movie was The Yearling, and though she and Giles would poke fun at its schmaltz years later on television, it was the religious experience she’d never had inside a pew. Here was a place where fantasy overwhelmed real life, where it was too dark to see scars and silence wasn’t only accepted but enforced by flashlight-armed ushers. For two hours and eight minutes, she was whole.

  Her second film was called The Postman Always Rings Twice, and it was a fleshly, fervid froth of sex and violence, a nihilism for which nothing in Home’s library, nothing adults had told her, nothing girls gossiped about had prepared her. World War II was only lately finished, and Baltimore’s streets bustled with clean-cut soldiers, and she looked differently at them on the way home, and they, she thought, looked differently at her. Her interactions, however, were failures. Young men had little patience for flirtations made from fingers.

  By her own estimate, she sneaked into the Arcade roughly one hundred and fifty times over her last three years at Home. This was before the theater’s downturn; before plaster began dropping from the ceiling; before Mr. Arzounian started running films 24-7 in desperation. It was her education—her real education. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman gasping for air inside each other in Notorious. Olivia de Havilland writhing away from the madwomen of The Snake Pit. Montgomery Clift wandering through curtains of dust in Red River. Elisa was finally nabbed by an usher while slinking into Sorry, Wrong Number, but by then it didn’t matter. She was a fortnight from what Home had deemed as her eighteenth birthday. She’d be booted out and forced to find a place, and a way, to live. Terrifying but also sensational: She could buy her own tickets, look for people to gasp against, or writhe from, or just wander among.

  The Matron conducted Elisa’s exit interview while smoking and pacing the length of her office, infuriated at Elisa’s survival. A local women’s group supplied Home’s graduates with a month’s worth of rent money and a suitcase full of thrift-store outfits, and Elisa was wearing her favorite, a bottle-green wool dress with a pocketed skirt. All she needed was a scarf to hide her scars. She added it to her crowded mental checklist: Buy scarf.

  “You’ll be a whore by Christmas,” the Matron vowed.

  Elisa shivered, thrilled that the threat didn’t scare her. Why would it? She’d seen enough Hollywood films to know all hookers had hearts of gold, and sooner or later, Clark Gable or Clive Brook or Leslie Howard noticed the glow. This musing might have been what led her, later that day, not to a women’s home but her favorite place in the world, the Arcade Cinema Marquee. She couldn’t afford to see Joan of Arc with Ingrid Bergman, yet wanted nothing more than to lose herself among what the poster promised was “a cast of thousands”—just like the wider Baltimore of which she was now a part, except safely constrained to the screen.

  She felt so irresponsible fishing forty cents from her purse that she hung her head, and that’s how she noticed the poorly placed sign: ROOM FOR RENT—INQUIRE WITHIN. There was never any doubt. Weeks later and one rent check from losing the place, she saw an ad for a janitorial position at Occam Aerospace Research Center. She composed her letter, achieved an appointment, and spent the morning of her interview ironing her bottle-green dress and studying a bus schedule. One hour before her planned departure, disaster: great silver scythes of rain, and she owned no umbrella. She panicked, tried not to cry, and became aware of rumblings from the Arcade’s other apartment. She hadn’t met the man who lived there, though he was always around, some sort of shut-in. She’d lost the luxury of guardedness. She knocked on his door.

  She expected squat, hirsute, unshaven, and leering, but the fellow who answered had an aristocratic air, tucked like an envelope inside jacket, sweater, vest, and shirt, pushing fifty but with eyes sparkling behind spectacles. He blinked and absently touched his bald head as if he’d forgotten to put on a hat. Then he registered her distress and smiled gently.

  “Why, hello, there. To whom do I owe the pleasure?”

  Elisa touched her neck in apology, then made the sign for “umbrella,” an intuitive one. The man’s surprise at her muteness lasted only a few seconds.

  “An umbrella! Of course! Come in, my dear, and I’ll pull it from the pile like Excalibur from the stone.”

  He dove into the apartment. Elisa hesitated. She’d never been inside a home that wasn’t Home; she leaned rightward and saw baroque, shadowy shapes rippling with skulking felines.

  “Of course you’re the new tenant. How inhospitable of me not to visit soon
er with the ritual plate of cookies. I’m afraid the only excuse I have is a deadline which has had me nailed to the desk.”

  The desk in question didn’t look like a desk. It was a tabletop hinged at an adjustable angle. This man was an artist of some sort, and Elisa felt a windblown tingle. The table had at its center a half-painted image of a woman from over her shoulder, the curls of her hair as the chief focus. Beneath her was painted the legend: NO MORE DULL DRAB HAIR.

  “My neglectfulness notwithstanding, please let me know if you need anything at all, although I do recommend that you pick up your own umbrella. I notice you have a bus schedule there, and the station is a longer walk from here than is ideal. Many things, as you have no doubt noticed, are less than ideal about the Arcade Apartments. But carpe diem, and all that fine stuff. I trust you’re getting along all right?”

  He paused in his canvas rifling and looked to Elisa for a response. She expected this; once people started talking, they tended to forget the disability over which they’d chosen to discourse. This man, however, smiled, his slender brown mustache broadening like open arms.

  “You know, I’ve always wanted to learn sign language. What a wonderful opportunity for me.”

  The worried tears Elisa had been tamping for weeks should have fallen in a grateful gush, but she forced them back; there was no time to redo makeup. It only got harder over the subsequent minutes, as the man, Giles Gunderson per his magniloquent introduction, located the umbrella, decided to drive her himself, and refused to accept her signed protests. Along the way, Giles distracted her with how the word janitor came from Janus, the god of entrances and exits, only stopping the lesson when an Occam guard established that Giles’s name wasn’t on a list. The guard motioned Elisa to climb out of the van and into the slashing rain.

  “‘And wheresoe’er thou move, good luck / Shall fling her old shoe after,’” Giles had called out after her. “Alfred Lord Tennyson!”

  Shoe, she’d repeated to herself, keeping eyes on her ugly, inherited heels as they splatted along a rain-run sidewalk. If I get this job, I’ll buy myself a nice pair of shoes.

  16

  THE MYSTERIOUS ADVENT of Strickland has supplanted Brewster stories as the favored topic of conversation. Elisa can’t quit thinking of what she saw in the tank, yet keeps it private from Zelda—the memory feels more preposterous by the day. Instead, and to Elisa’s gratitude, Zelda has defused tension by poking fun at everything else. Realizing, for instance, that Fleming kept calling Strickland’s armed guards “MPs”—Military Police—and not “Empties,” a label that was even more fitting, as the silent, stern soldiers showed no proclivity for independent action. Empties are, at least, easy for the women to avert, as they march in a buckle-jangling lockstep beyond the abilities of gawky scientists. Even now they hear a few, and Zelda and Elisa sidestep them, turning down a hall they usually save for later.

  “Even when the Empties aren’t on the warpath, I know just where they are,” Zelda says. “They breathe together, you notice that? It’s like air coming out of the vents, all at once. Whoosh. I’m telling you, all these extra men here, and it’s just as quiet as before? It’s not natural.”

  Before Elisa can sign a reply, the aforementioned quiet, a decade undisturbed, is cracked in half. In the neighborhood in which Elisa lives, such a sound might have her looking for a backfiring car before hedging toward cover, wary of local tales of organized crime. Inside Occam, the bang is so astonishing it might as well be a spaceship crash; Zelda ducks behind her cart, as if cheap plastic and corrosive liquids will be her salvation.

  Then another bang, then another. The sounds aren’t sloppy. They aren’t objects being dropped. They are of mechanical issue, urged by a trigger, and Elisa has no choice but to assume that they are, in fact, gunshots. Shouting follows, as well as the rabbity heartbeat of running feet, both noises muffled behind the nearest door, which is, of course, F-1.

  “Get down!” Zelda pleads.

  Zelda signs the order, too, and Elisa suffers a wallop of love for the woman. She realizes she is, indeed, still standing. The door opens, striking the wall as loudly as a fourth gunshot. Zelda recoils as if she took the bullet, toppling to a hip and crossing her arms over her face. Elisa’s entire body jerks once, and then she’s frozen by the size, speed, and force of the humanity gushing out.

  Fleming is out in front. His grimace is familiar to anyone who’s seen him overreact to a clogged toilet or a hallway puddle, the difference being the bloody handprints tracked up both of his sleeves. Coming third is Bob Hoffstetler, and he’s the most upset of any of them, spectacles akimbo and his thin net of hair in an upright thatch. He carries a red, soaking wad of cloth that could be anything—towel, smock, undershirt. His eyes, usually so kind, shoot like darts into Elisa.

  “Call an ambulance!” The accent, usually so delicate, is husky under hardship.

  Between these regular-sized humans is Strickland, his deep-valleyed eyes ablaze and his lips peeled back, gripping with tourniquet tightness the wrist of his left arm, which ends not in the expected hand but a bouquet of fingers arranged at hinky angles, baby-breathed with blood, and vased in loose peels of skin. Blood drops to the floor as loudly as ball bearings. Elisa gapes at them, the ruby beads; they will be hers to clean.

  Empties burst outward, kicking the blood beads. The guards break off on either side of Strickland, coming at Elisa and Zelda with rifles thrust out like dancers’ canes. This is crowd control. This is clearing the scene. Elisa grabs her cart, wheels it around, and knows by its yawing swerve that the back wheels have been fully slickened.

  17

  ANTONIO IS THE first to make it to the cafeteria to ask if everything’s okay. His crossed eyes pose the question to both Elisa and Zelda, but Zelda knows full well she’s the one who has to answer. All this time and the crew hasn’t bothered to learn so much as the sign-language alphabet. Zelda’s tired of it. She doesn’t want to be in charge here, or at home, or anywhere. It’s too hard. Look at her hands—they’re shaking. She conceals it by turning to face the Automat, scanning the geometric sandwiches and gamy fruit like it’s just another three-in-the-morning dinnertime.

  Duane arrives next, toothless as a newt and just as squeaky. Yolanda makes up for their timidity, cycloning in and honking on about how it sounded like someone was shooting up the joint, she can’t work like this, she has half a mind to blah, blah, blah. Zelda lets her eyesight blur until she can only make out the Automat’s nickel-operated compartments, each one an itsy-bitsy Alice in Wonderland doorway. If she could become small, she might crawl through one and get the heck out of here.

  Instead, she’s trapped to relive F-1’s gory eruption in her mind, over and over. She tries to generate sympathy for Mr. Strickland. The next time he visited a men’s room, would he even be able to undo his zipper? This stab at sympathy is like trying to chop ice with her hand. There’s no way that man couldn’t guess how it might feel for a black woman to be cornered by a white man with a cattle prod. She looks up and notices Lucille; her albino coloring cloaks her against the cafeteria wall.

  “Look, even Lucille’s upset,” Yolanda cries. “¿Qué pasa?”

  Zelda turns around. She’s been avoiding it. She doesn’t want to look at Elisa right now. She loves the skinny little lady so much, yet can’t shake the certainty that this is her fault. She’s the one who insisted they follow the questionable QCC directive to enter F-1, which grounded them on Strickland’s bad side, and Zelda can’t help but think Elisa purposely lingered outside F-1 tonight, which put them in the worst spot imaginable when the gunfire began.

  Elisa wilts in her chair, like Zelda is stomping her chest. Zelda feels terrible, then tells herself to quit feeling terrible. Elisa’s a good person, but she’ll never get it. How could she? Things go wrong at Occam, and it won’t be the white woman who gets blamed. Hell, Elisa goes around pocketing loose change from labs like it’s nothing. What if it’s a trap? Elisa would never even think of such a thing. What if a s
cientist left it there to test the night janitors, and when it vanishes, and Fleming is told, guess whose neck is on the butcher block?

  Elisa lives in a world of her own devising. That’s obvious from the shoes. Zelda imagines Elisa’s perception as one of those dioramas she saw in a museum, perfect little realms, breakable but not if you walk softly. This is not Zelda’s world. She can’t turn on a TV without seeing black people marching, stabbing signs into the anger-stirred air. Brewster sees footage like that, he changes the channel, and Zelda, in her heart, is grateful, even if it’s spineless. Anything racial goes down anywhere in the USA, and the looks she gets at the punch clock the next day are murder. All over the country, men like David Fleming are looking for reasons to fire women like Zelda Fuller.

  What other work could she do? She’s lived in Old West Baltimore since birth, and the row houses haven’t improved much since then. Today, the neighborhood is more crowded, more segregated. Zelda gets the concepts of blockbusting and white flight, but doesn’t give a damn. She dreams of the suburbs. She can taste the air, like pine and marmalade, feel it flushing Occam’s toxins from her body. She won’t be working at Occam when she lives out there—it’s too far away. She’ll be running her own cleaning business. She’s told Elisa about it a hundred times, how she’ll bring Elisa with her, hire other smart ladies, pay them square like no man would. She’s waiting for Elisa to take it seriously. She never does, and it’s hard to blame her. How would Zelda make enough dough with Brewster only working at whim? What bank would cosign a business loan for a black woman?

  Zelda imagines the cafeteria is a white man’s paradise of horseplay and joviality during the day, but at night it’s as bare and clangorous as a cave. Footsteps resound down an adjacent hall, coming closer. It’s Fleming, every last one of his promotions evident in his unfaltering stride. Zelda looks at Elisa, her best friend, her potential ruiner, and feels her dreams of getting out of Old West Baltimore, and out of Occam, start to drip down like blood off the prongs of Strickland’s cattle prod.