Читать книгу The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish - Katya Apekina - Страница 10

Chapter 1

EDITH (1997)

It’s our second day in New York City. We’re with Dennis Lomack. Mom is in St. Vincent’s, resting. She has recently done something very stupid and I’m the one who found her. Dennis has been taking us around town, trying to get our minds off of everything, trying to make up for the last decade.

Tonight, he brought Mae and me along on a date with a redhead to a dance recital. Mom would take us sometimes into New Orleans to see The Nutcracker, but this isn’t like that. We’re in the basement of a church. It’s cramped and damp. On stage a woman in a white sundress dances by herself. She looks like a feral cat. Her rib cage shows on the sides and down the front. She has thick dark hair that sways at her waist as she moves. The stage is covered in folding chairs and she dances with her eyes squeezed shut. She seems aware of nothing, banging her legs and arms and not even noticing. The chairs collapse and fall around her and she keeps going. She slows and cocks her head at an angle as if she’s listening for something, then makes little twitchy movements with her hands. Even from my seat, I can smell her dirty hair. It wafts with each spin.

She blurs and I realize I’m crying. I don’t know why.

That’s not true. I do. It’s because she reminds me so much of Mom. The way she dances, so desperate, but also so closed off. She isn’t dancing for us. She’s somewhere deep inside herself and the seats could be empty and still she’d dance like this.

Mae looks terrified. I squeeze her hand but she doesn’t notice. I don’t know Dennis well enough to guess what he’s feeling. Probably nothing. In the dark theater his face looks like it’s carved out of a rock. His date has fallen asleep on his shoulder.

Outside, Dennis pries the redhead off his neck, twirls out from under her, and puts her in a cab. It’s almost a dance too, the way he does it. His movements are so calculated. Obviously, he has a lot of practice getting rid of people. As the cab pulls away, the woman looks at us through the glass like she’s a sad golden retriever. Mae waves. I already don’t remember her name. Rachel? Rebecca? It doesn’t matter. I doubt we’ll ever see her again.

We walk back to Dennis’s apartment in silence. He walks between us, holding our elbows. It’s a long way, 30 or 40 blocks. The air is cold and most of the stores are closed with the metal grates down over the windows. The benches we pass have men lying on them. Some have sleeping bags, but others are just wrapped in newspapers. The ones who didn’t get a bench lie in doorways or on the ground. Dennis leads us around the men in silence. I’ve never seen so many homeless people before. At an intersection, a group of women walks by us, laughing and licking ice cream cones. They don’t even look at the people on the ground as they step over them.

“I’m sorry,” Dennis says. His words hang there. Mae and I glance at each other. I wish he’d be a little more specific about what it is exactly that he’s sorry about.

At the apartment, we sit at the kitchen table to have tea. When I think about the woman swaying on the stage, I start to cry again. Mae strokes my hair, rubs my temples with her cold fingers. Dennis hovers behind her. He helps her out of her coat, tries to help me with mine, but I shake him off. “What have we done?” I say. “How could we have left her?”

“Please calm down,” he says and hands me a napkin. I blow my nose. His face is stiff and unreadable but his hand is shaking as he pours water into our mugs and he has to steady it so he won’t spill. I look away at the box of teas Mae is holding. I don’t like that his hand is shaking. He has no right to lose it. I take a deep breath and focus on the box. It’s wooden with carvings of elephants and full of tea bags—ginger lemon, rooibos, açaí berry, shit I’ve never heard of. Mom only drinks coffee. I pick one that smells the least like grass. I bet the box was left here by a woman, just like the small sock we found balled up in the corner of our room.

Dennis wedges his chair between the table and the refrigerator. He buries his fingertips in his beard as he stares at us. I look away, but I see Mae staring back at him. He shakes my shoulder until soon I’m looking at him too. It’s strange because his eyes are the same eyes that I see in the mirror. I feel momentarily hypnotized, like I’m outside my body.

“Listen to me,” he says and his voice is wet. “I understand that you might feel, at first, that I’m a stranger. But I’m not a stranger. I am your father.” And then his rigid face collapses and he pulls us into his chest and holds us until the tea gets cold.

MAE

This is the kind of thing my mother liked to do: she’d pick a person and follow them for hours. Through the mall, to the garage, to their house. Once, we drove all night through the woods with our headlights off to somebody’s hunting cabin. Sometimes, if it was during the day, she would let Edie come too, though when Edie was there it would become something fun and toothless. A game where she and Edie would share a bag of Twizzlers in the front seat and speculate about the people we were following.

But when it was just Mom and me at night, the trees and swamp rushing past the windows in the dark, it was not a game at all. I was submerged in Mom’s reality. Sometimes she’d get out of the car and I’d have to go with her. Once we walked for a long time down an overgrown path to somebody’s deer stand. The air was thick and cold. The sound of crickets and tree frogs was deafening. I was 10, maybe 11, and I remember this unpleasant recurring feeling I’d get every few steps like I was waking up and waking up and waking up.

The deer stand was a plywood shack on stilts. I don’t know if we stumbled on it, or if Mom had been leading us there deliberately. I followed her up the ladder because I was scared to stay on the ground alone. It was like a treehouse, but it smelled of mold and blood. Mom went through an entire book of matches, reading the headlines of old newspapers covering the floor. We got lost on the way back to the car. I was terrified that we would get shot at or chased by dogs. These things had happened too. It was light out by the time we got home, and then I had to go to school and pretend like nothing out of the ordinary had taken place. I’d have to try not to fall asleep in class or draw attention to myself in any way.

I don’t know how much Edie knew. She would say I was Mom’s favorite, but it’s not true. It was more that Mom saw me as an extension of herself, while Edie was free to be her own person. Edie would be out with her friends, riding her bike, sunbathing, sneaking into the movies, and I would be trapped upstairs in Mom’s bedroom, buried under blankets despite the summer heat, my grandmother’s fur coat draped over both of us. The coat was made from nutria—swamp rats—and Mom would make me lie under it with her for hours, sweating and itching, while she sucked the sleeves bald.

Yes, Mom dragged me with her to every terrible place. I needed to get as far from her as I could. She was consuming me. That day when she tried to hang herself from the rafter in the kitchen, I’d been lying on my bedroom floor. My mind was a radio tuned to her station and her misery paralyzed me. I must have known what she was doing, but I did nothing to stop her. It was Edie who saved Mom’s life.

When Dad appeared out of nowhere to rescue us, it felt like he’d been summoned by magic. He took us out of school—I was a freshman and Edie was a junior—and brought us back with him to New York City. It was our first time out of Louisiana. We didn’t know how long we’d be staying because everything was up in the air, but I understood that I was being given an opportunity to start over, and I wasn’t going to squander it.

Everything about Dad felt like déjà vu. I would see an object and feel inexplicably pulled towards it. A pair of brown leather shoes at the back of his closet, for example, worn soft and in need of resoling. I didn’t remember them exactly, but my body did. I’d shut the closet door and hold them in the dark, cradling them in my arms. I didn’t want Edie to know that I did these things, and it was hard to hide from her in such a small apartment.

I loved that apartment. It was like a tight, dusty womb. Edie was constantly sneezing because the dust was so hard to clean out of all the books. The shelves in the living room overflowed onto the floor and there were stacks of books everywhere, against all the walls, on top of the piano, under the kitchen table. Dad was a writer, so books found a way of multiplying in his apartment. He got new ones in the mail every day, mostly from young authors hoping for a blurb. A blurb from Dad went a long way. He was a cultural icon. Once he’d even been a clue on Jeopardy!.

Mom had been a writer too, a poet, though not nearly as well known. She read to us a lot. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of the kitchen with Edie, watching as Mom towered above us with her eyes closed, swaying, stomping, intoning, her notebooks covering the counters. Sometimes she would send her work out to magazines and have Edie and me lick the envelopes for luck. She rarely got published. At some point she stopped writing, and then eventually she stopped reading. The books became props. She could spend entire days sitting in the breakfast nook, staring glassily at some volume of poems open in her lap, her oily hair staining the shoulders of her nightgown. She would stare and never turn the pages. Her fingers, disconnected from the rest of her body, would be tapping something out against each other.

EDITH (1997)

The sound of traffic gets louder when I close my eyes. I bet this is what the ocean sounds like. Our bedroom is like a cabin on a cruise ship. It used to be Dennis’s study and it’s so tight that if you’re standing in the middle of the room you have to make sure not to “talk like an Italian,” as our French teacher would have said—or you’ll jam your fingers against the bunk bed or the dresser or the paper lantern.

Mae is lying next to me on the bottom bunk. We’re scared to leave each other’s side. All night we take turns drifting in and out of sleep.

“It’s like we’re on a cruise ship,” I whisper to her, but she doesn’t open her eyes. She shakes her head and her thick, dark hair falls over her face. She’s like a little furnace when she sleeps. Her neck gets wet and her hair sticks to it. Her hair is just like Mom’s. When she turns away from me to face the wall, I comb it with my fingers and pretend it’s Mom lying there with me. Sorry, Mom. I’m sorry. We’ve been here for almost a week and the doctors still aren’t saying anything. They tell Dennis that it’s too early to know for sure. When I call, they tell me that they aren’t authorized to discuss her condition with me. They treat me like a little kid, as if I haven’t been the one taking care of her all these years.

Dennis still hasn’t told us when we’re going back. I don’t mind a break, but I’m on student council and on the homecoming and dance committees and the longer we stay here the more likely all that shit is going to be usurped. Plus, I miss Markus, and it’s only a matter of time before he gets usurped too, by one of the Laurens or worse.

I’ve asked Dennis, will we be back on the 3rd? The 4th? But he just smiles like an asshole and tells me how happy he is to have me here. I don’t know how much more I can take of him following us around and making incessant observations about stupid shit. How we hold our spoons! How we drink our water! We are so similar to him! Oh, the wonder of genetics! I wouldn’t be surprised if right now it turned out he’s actually standing on the other side of our bedroom door, listening to us sleep, making notes on how similar our sleeping sounds are to his own. Maybe he can put that in his next book. We are such exciting material! Little mirrors in which he can stare at himself even more.

“Don’t you think it’s strange,” I whisper loudly, “that Dennis never took any interest in us for 12 years and now, suddenly, he can’t get enough?” If he’s on the other side of the door, I hope he hears me.

Mae doesn’t open her eyes but I can tell she’s awake. Anyway, I already know what she thinks. She doesn’t think it’s strange at all. When I brought it up before she defended him. She was only two when he left, so what does she know. I was four. I actually remember it. I remember missing him, waiting for him by the front window every day like a dog. He never called, not on birthdays or Christmas. He never sent letters or postcards. He’s this famous writer, or whatever, and I have no idea what his handwriting even looks like. And then there’s also what Mom told us. Even when we were little she’d talk very openly with us, since we were all she had. She’d tell us how he’d taken advantage of her, of her youth, and how he’d been jealous and rageful, and slept with all her friends, not even because he wanted to, or was particularly attracted to any of them, but because he didn’t want her to have friends. And she didn’t have friends, not really. She had Doreen and she had us and we hadn’t been enough.

“This isn’t gonna last,” I whisper. I don’t want her to get her hopes up only to have them crushed. “As soon as we go back home we’ll never hear from him again.”

Mae is so bad at pretending to be asleep. She holds her breath, that’s what gives her away. I don’t say anything else and soon the sound of traffic fills the room until it feels like I’m floating on it. I drift off. I’m back home, in my own room. Mom is fine. I hear her in the shower, singing. See, she’s fine. I knew she’d be fine. Her singing turns shrill. Sirens wake me up.

Mae is by the window. The lights from an ambulance seven stories below are making her face a blue then red mask.

“Mae,” I whisper, but she doesn’t budge. She goes into trances sometimes, that’s why the kids at school called her Spooks.

“Mae,” I say again, and put my hands on her shoulders. We both watch someone on the street below get strapped into a stretcher.

There was a torrential rainstorm the day I found Mom in the kitchen. The EMTs and firemen left puddles all over the carpet when they carried her out. It was like God made me and Markus get into a fight, so that I’d come home early from his lake house and find her. Mae says that she doesn’t believe in God, but how else would you explain my being there in time? Just five minutes later and she would have died. I can’t imagine her dead. It’s like an eclipse, where if you look directly at it you’d go blind.

She hadn’t really wanted to die. I know this for a fact. You know how I know? Because she’d put the hot water on and set the percolator up to make coffee. The whole wall was wet with condensation and the kettle was still whistling when I found her. I don’t know how Mae hadn’t heard anything. She must’ve been in one of her trances.

I walk Mae back to the bottom bunk and tuck her in. She reaches over and strokes my face.

“Don’t cry,” she says and closes her eyes.

I hadn’t realized I was crying. Tears have been leaking out of me since we got here, like my face is incontinent. “I’m not,” I say and wipe them with her hair.

“Don’t you wish it could go back to how it was?” I ask. Before this happened, before Mom got depressed. She wasn’t always sad. Sometimes she was happier than anybody I’ve ever seen. She would laugh, doubled over, unable to stop, and we would laugh too, even if we didn’t get what was so funny. And then there were other times, when she wasn’t happy or angry or sad. When she was just Mom, when she would take us to the park or to the parades, and when she’d stay up late, sewing us elaborate Mardi Gras costumes.

Mae doesn’t answer me, turns to face the wall. Finally, when I’m almost asleep I hear her say: “Sometimes it feels like you and I grew up in different houses.”

MAE

The first couple of weeks Dad didn’t let us out of his sight. He’d take us on epic walks, trying to cram in as much as he could to make up for lost time. We covered hundreds of blocks on foot. He said that when he moved back to New York he missed us so much that it felt like his internal organs were crawling with fire ants and walking was what brought him back to sanity.

It wouldn’t have occurred to us to walk in Metairie. There was nowhere to go and you couldn’t get very far without eventually ending up where you started or hitting the interstate. There were the terrifying night walks through swamps and woods with Mom, but that was its own thing. In New York, we walked like pilgrims and when our shoes wore down, Dad bought us fancy sneakers, designed to mimic the strut of a Maasai warrior. We’d wear them as we walked from the Cloisters to the southernmost tip of Battery Park, stepping around junkies nodding out on the sidewalks of the Lower East Side, sampling dumplings in Chinatown and pizza in Little Italy, fingering the bolts of fabric in the Fashion District and buying bouquets in the Flower District that wilted by the time we got home.

We’d walk through neighborhoods right as schools were getting out. Girls would pour into the street, wearing similar uniforms to what we had at St. Ursula’s—gray-and-green plaid skirts and button-down white shirts—though, of course, these girls made them look a lot more sophisticated. We’d see them standing in long lines outside bakeries in Greenwich Village, rummaging around in their big, fancy purses.

Dad would try to steer us away from those girls because seeing them would inevitably put Edie in a foul mood.

“You’ve basically kidnapped us!” she would scream at him, and some of the girls would turn and watch us uncertainly, not knowing whether to take her accusation seriously. Once she took off her new sneakers and threw them at him. Dad looked so befuddled and surprised that it only made Edie angrier.

“When are we going home?” she screamed, and the only way to calm her was to invoke the doctors and Mom’s health. Then she begrudgingly settled down, and after several blocks put her shoes back on.

My favorite was when Dad would take us on ghost tours of all the places from his childhood that had been effaced, places where he had lived and gone to the movies and drank malts and played pinball. I liked seeing another layer of the city under the immediately visible one. Metairie was a static swamp. Nothing there felt like it could ever change.

One time he took us to Morningside Park to look at the caves he’d camped in to protest attempts to segregate the park. Columbia had wanted to build a gym there with two separate entrances for “Whites” and “Coloreds.” Anytime he talked about the Civil Rights Movement, Edie would forget she was supposed to be angry and would listen to him with her mouth hanging open.

LETTER FROM DENNIS LOMACK TO MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN

April 24, 1968

Dear M—

I sat down with the intention of working on a novel but everything I write turns into a letter to you. I’m under your spell, girl. Why fight it?

Fred and I are in Morningside Park. The Pigs are patrolling the park’s perimeter but they won’t do anything. Even the Mayor knows we’re right. We’re drunk and singing, celebrating Columbia’s capitulation. Goodbye, Gym Crow.

Fred spilled our water bucket over the wood, so it wouldn’t light (poor Fred, no depth perception). I had to climb down and look for more wood. From below the view is very satisfying: caves pockmark the side of the cliff, each one with a campfire burning in it. The side of the cliff is thus transformed into: a primordial skyscraper. A CAVEMAN SKYSCRAPER (this phrase came to me in your father’s voice). Oh, how I wish you could both see it! It’s better than a sit-in, it’s a camp-in! It’s a CAVE-IN! This isn’t Mississippi! Not on our watch! etc. etc.

How is your father? I’ve been meaning to write him. I heard from Ann that the case against him is a mess, a total farce, though she did not go into specifics. I’m happy to talk to my sister for advice. She’s a lawyer, you know. I just saw her earlier this evening, as a matter of fact. She brought us pork and cabbage, and that drip of hers, Stewart. Friends came over from the cave next to us, two Puerto Rican sisters. Stewart tried to talk to them about Gandhi but they were not impressed. They left. Stewart says if he could kill me and wear my skin, he would. Stewart’s face is what you’d call a “bouquet of pimples.” He blames this for his poor luck with women. Why my sister tolerates him is beyond me. Mosquitoes are flocking to the candle so I’m going to blow it out.

Goodnight, goodnight, my little m.

EDITH (1997)

“I’m too old,” Dennis says and waves us on. He’s standing by the barbecuers in the grass below.

Mae and I climb under the railing and crawl along a narrow ledge to the caves along the side of the cliff. I don’t look down. The caves have small openings. As we crawl into them, our hands brush against dirt and trash. Candy wrappers or is it condom wrappers? Dennis is shouting directions at us from below.

“To the left, to the left,” he’s saying. I stick my head out and see he’s pointing to the cave next to us. That’s the one he camped in back in the day.

We climb over to it. I hoist Mae in and then she pulls me up. The cave is deeper than the others and darker. It takes a while for my eyes to adjust, and then I see an outline of a figure. I can feel Mae tense but before she can do anything, I cover her mouth with my hand. There’s a man very close to us. Asleep. He is naked, lying on top of a sleeping bag. Even in the dark I can see his dick. It’s draped on his stomach, looking directly at us with its eye. Mae and I nearly fall out of the cave, crawling backward. I bet it’s the first one she’s ever seen.

“What happened?” Dennis says. Mae and I are both out of breath. Her face is smudged from where I covered her mouth. A Snickers wrapper is hanging off her knee and Dennis peels it off.

“We saw a snake,” I tell him. I don’t know why I lie. It just comes out.

“Oh,” he says. “Was it green and yellow?”

I nod.

“A garter snake. Don’t worry, they’re harmless,” he says.

There’s a woman standing next to him. Not the one from the theater, a different one. The way she smiles at us makes her look like a horse. When she tries to compliment Mae on her hair, Mae growls.

MAE

Dad had a lot of women. It was better not to encourage them. The worst was when they tried to act motherly, and then it felt like some awful community theater production where they were auditioning for a part that didn’t really exist. Edie and I both made a point of being rude to them, though we had different reasons. I had finally been given a father and I didn’t want to share him, while Edie thought these women were an insult to Mom.

I don’t think Dad knew how to keep all the women at bay. His whole life he got a lot of female attention. Growing up, he was the youngest, and his mother and sister doted on him. And then, as an adult, he was handsome and charismatic, tall enough to have to stoop through doorways, talented and famous. Of course women liked him! But it didn’t seem like he took any of them very seriously. He was completely focused on Edie and me. Being in the center of someone’s world like this was intoxicating. The way he looked at us… I’ve never experienced anything like it.

One night when Edie was asleep, I snuck out of our room and crept up to Dad’s door. I stood there for a while, gathering my courage to knock. I needed to tell him that I couldn’t go back, that I couldn’t leave him, but I was afraid to say anything in front of my sister. I was nervous to break rank and go behind her back.

I remember as I tapped on his door, it pushed open and I found him sitting at his writing desk, staring at a photograph. I startled him, and he quickly slid the picture into a drawer.

“What are you doing up?” he asked.

I lost my nerve. I didn’t know what to say. And what if Edie was right? What if his love for us was an illusion, and my words would expose this and scare him off? So, I said nothing.

But I didn’t have to. “Come here,” he said, and pulled me onto his lap.

“Are you scared?” he asked me.

I nodded, and he kissed me on the forehead.

“Who wouldn’t be,” he said.

EDITH (1997)

“My two beautiful daughters, my beautiful, beautiful girls,” Dennis says at breakfast. My shoulder is warm under his hand. His eyes are soft like we’re his baby birds.

I look at Mae looking at him and I can see things, important things, slowly shifting around in her like plate tectonics.

I’m not gonna lie. I also felt a moment of sudden completeness when he touched me, like the wires in my Bullshit Alarm had been cut. But at least I recognize it for what it is. Two weeks have gone by since Mom disappeared into the hospital and we’re betraying her already.

“I thought I would take you to the Met today,” he says. The phone rings but he keeps smiling at us. I squirm out from under his hand. It’s Markus, probably, calling me back. I’ve left him three messages. That, or one of Dennis’s ladies. So many ladies. They call and call. One showed up the other day in a trench coat with nothing on underneath. She’d been out of the country and came straight from the airport to surprise him. Surprise! She couldn’t even sit down, just held the coat closed tight around her neck with one hand as she shook our hands with the other. I almost felt bad for her.

“Hello?” I say into the phone.

It’s a male voice. “Could I speak to Mr. Lomack, please?” It’s the doctor, I think.

I hand Dennis the phone. I watch his face as he listens.

“Yes,” Dennis says. “How is she doing?” He looks down at his hands. “Yes,” he says, “yes.” He turns from us, and the cord on the phone wraps around his back. “What about the medication?” he says. “I see,” he says. “Yes.” His voice gives away nothing.

My heart is beating in my throat.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, but he doesn’t sound particularly sorry. I can’t see his face. What is he sorry to hear?

Mae shifts in her seat, and the chair creaks. I must be giving her a mean look because her lips are quivering. She’s sensitive. That’s what Mom always says. Be careful with your sister, she’s so sensitive. I smile at her, or try to, then take a deep breath.

“Yes,” Dennis says again, about three thousand times. They’re keeping Mom there against her will. She’s probably tied to a bed, screaming. She’s lost her voice. That’s why they won’t let me talk to her. She has no voice. I picture her face screaming and no sound coming out. This scares me so I take Mae’s hand.

“Ow,” she says, and rubs where I touched her. She can be a real brat sometimes.

Dennis hangs up the phone. His eyes are shining and he doesn’t say anything until he sits down at the table with us.

“The doctors think it would be best,” he says, burying his fingers in his beard, “if you moved here on a somewhat permanent basis. Your mother is not doing well. She needs more time.”

“No,” I say.

Dennis nods. “I know this isn’t what you were expecting,” he says.

“What about school? We can’t just leave in the middle of the spring quarter. We can go back and live there by ourselves. I’m 16. Who do you think has been taking care of things this whole time?”

“Legally, you couldn’t do that,” he says.

“We can stay with Doreen.” Doreen is like Mom’s sister. Not biological, but they grew up together. She owes it to us.

“She hasn’t offered.”

I try to stay calm because I know that is the only way to win an argument, but I can hear my voice growing shrill. “I don’t agree to this.”

Mae interrupts. She glares at me and says: “I think you’re being very selfish.” It feels like she has reached across the table and slapped me.

DENNIS LOMACK’S JOURNAL

[1970]

Last night I began… something. Something big, alive. I don’t want to speak too soon, but maybe finally a book (!). I typed and Marianne lay on the mattress on the floor, watching me. With her I am an open glove welcoming a hand. It is her energy working through me, I’m certain of it. I wrote all night. Outside, it rained. Marianne lay on her back, raised her arm, squinted at her ring, fell asleep. Yesterday, my sister came into the city for a visit and as we were passing City Hall, I felt compelled to get married. We bought carnations, dyed bright blue, from the deli across the street. “Look,” Marianne had said, running her thumb along the stems, veined like arms. We stopped a tourist on the street, asked him to take a picture of us with his camera. He promised to mail it. And since our marriage, the urge to write has consumed me. Beneath all my words, like subway clatter—my wife, my life, my wife. It was already light out when I stopped and crawled in beside her. I needed more of her to keep going.

“They bit me all night long,” she told me, sleepily showing me her arm. A row of small red welts. The bedbugs live between the floorboards and inside the electrical sockets.

“I’ll bite you too,” I said. And I did.

Then after, in the bathroom mirror, as I washed my face, I caught sight of my earlobe—two uneven lines, marks from her crooked front teeth. And again, that zap of desire.

I ran back to bed, unbuttoned the blouse from the bottom that she had begun buttoning from the top. She’s shy but about all the wrong things. I moved her hands off her breasts and kissed her wrists. Pinned her down.

And then, her whispered refrain: You can save me?

For which there is only one answer: Yes, of course, yes.

EDITH (1997)

Dennis and Mae are banging pots around in the kitchen. He’s teaching her how to make dumplings from scratch. It’s his grandmother’s recipe from Poland. I guess that makes her our great-grandmother. I did most of the cooking back home and kept the batteries out of the smoke alarm by the kitchen because of Mom and Mae. All our pots had outlines from burnt rice on the bottoms from when they would try to make red beans and rice. I was thinking about that yesterday, when we got a special tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by some woman Dennis was/is/will be putting it into, and she was showing us the swirly night sky in a painting by Vincent van Gogh. It looked just like the bottoms of all our pots in Metairie. It makes me sad: those pots, stacked and unused in the cabinets of our empty house. I don’t know how much longer I can take being away.

I heard someone say once that if you visualize what you want, like really picture it with all the details, it’ll come true. Sort of like prayer. So, I try it. I close my eyes and concentrate. I’m not in this cramped shithole anymore. Instead, I’m back home, standing in our living room. To the left is the shelf with the gourd sculptures filled with my grandfather’s ashes. In front is the window with its lace curtains. It’s the middle of the day and light is streaming in, casting patterns on the green velvet couch and the coffee table.

I try to imagine the smell of the neighbor’s trees. It creeps in, despite the closed windows and the humming air conditioner. Those trees were just starting to bud when we left, by now they should be in full bloom. Little white flowers that smell like fish sticks. Last year people complained and signed petitions to have them cut down, but I liked them. I’ve always liked those kinds of smells—fish, skunk, gasoline, armpits, dirt.

Mom and Mae are in the other room. I stretch my arms out and walk towards them. But then, as I’m getting close, as I’m almost at the threshold of our kitchen, the floor creaks and ruins everything. Our house has thick carpet. The floor never creaks. I try to stand still, hoping that if I focus hard I can start again where I left off, but it’s not working. I can’t figure out how to teleport entirely, how to be in Metairie for more than a few seconds at a time. I open my eyes and there is Mae, the real one, standing in the doorway, watching me. She has flour on her face and on her shirt. She’s holding the cordless phone.

“It’s Markus,” she says. “You want to take it?”

I’m embarrassed, but then I think, why should I be? She doesn’t know what I was doing. All she saw was me with my eyes closed. Mae always acts like she knows everything, but what does she really know?

“Finally,” I say into the phone, shutting the door in Mae’s face. “Didn’t your mom give you my messages?”

“I’m calling you, aren’t I?” He sounds annoyed. We broke up the day everything happened with Mom, but we got back together the day after, and the day after that I came here. “So,” he says, “what’s up?”

“I need your help,” I say.

“Okay…”

“I need to stay with you.”

He doesn’t say anything for a moment so I rush to fill the silence. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. Dennis wants me to move to New York, and Mom isn’t better yet.”

“I’ll ask my parents,” he says.

“Please,” I say, because I don’t think he will.

“I’ll ask them.”

“I could live in your guest room,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. It sounds like there are people in the background, voices, laughter. I feel a pang.

“Where are you?” I ask.

“At the lake house,” he says.

“Who’s all there?” I ask.

“Lauren B, Lauren S and Drunk Mike.”

“Why are you hanging out with the Laurens?”

“Don’t…” he says, but then someone grabs the phone from him.

“Edie!!” Mike slurs. “Why aren’t you here??”

I hear Markus wrestling the phone away from him.

“He doesn’t know?” I ask Markus.

“He probably forgot,” Markus says.

“So, you’ll ask your parents?” I say.

“Jesus,” he says, “I said I would.”

He sounds so annoyed with me. Neither of us say anything. I sniffle loudly into the phone. I know he can hear it and that he feels bad, because his voice goes low, and I feel like it’s Markus I’m talking to again, not this other person he has become over the last few months.

“Edie, come on, stop. I’m sorry. Stop crying.”

“I want to go home,” I say.

Someone picks up the phone on his end and starts dialing.

“Hello? Hello?” It’s Markus’s father.

“Hi, Dr. Theriot,” I say.

“Hello? Hello? Markus, is that you? I need the line—the hospital is paging me,” he says, seeming not to have heard me.

“I’ll call you later,” Markus says and hangs up. I hold the phone for a moment, listening to the dial tone. In the other room Mae is laughing. It’s a weird sound, ugly.

I come out into the living room and see Dennis on the ground and Mae standing on his back.

“Bend your knees! Arms out! Eyes on the horizon!” He’s shouting the commands as he wriggles around and bucks under her. They’re both covered in flour. Mae is trying to balance, but she’s doubled over with that hideous laughter.

“I can’t… I can’t…” she gasps.

“I’m teaching Mae how to surf,” Dennis says when he sees me. They look about as idiotic as this sounds.

“Stop sticking your butt out like that. You look like you’re about to take a dump,” I tell her.

She keeps smiling, but doesn’t look at me.

Dennis yells: “Wave!” and bucks under her. She squeals as she flies off and lands on the couch.

“You wanna try surfing?” he asks me. He’s got to be fucking kidding. This is the kind of shit he should have been doing 12 years ago when he abandoned us, not now when I’m 16.

“You know, we’ve never even seen the ocean,” I tell him. But how would he know this? He’s a complete stranger. I knock a stack of books off the coffee table for emphasis and there’s a cloud of dust. Dennis gets up, streaks of dirt on his belly and legs, flour in his hair.

“You don’t know anything about us,” I try to say, but I can’t stop sneezing.

MAE

I think Edie was so scared of Dad leaving again that she wanted to preempt it. If she drove him away, she’d feel like she had some say in the matter.

Well, she’s done it, I remember thinking after Edie threw her first fit. Every little mean thing Edie said, I would think, this is it, because everything in New York felt so precarious. We weren’t in school. We had no routine. We didn’t know anyone. We were just floating there.

Even though I’d get mad at her, I’d hold her until I could feel her rumbling rage subside, until finally whatever it was inside her would grow silent and still.

People who didn’t know Edie very well were always surprised to find out that she had a temper, because of her voice, and also, because she had this look, like a blind baby animal, a leggy calf or a freshly hatched chick—all bones and matted fluffs of yellow hair. One of my earliest memories, though, is of her wailing on me. She claims not to remember, but whenever she was feeling contrite, she’d pet the tiny white scar in my eyebrow with her finger. I don’t have it anymore, but it was over my right eye. She’d given it to me by kicking me in the face with an ice skate.

Once, after an argument when I told her to stop making trouble with Dad, she took a handful of my hair and jammed it in my mouth, enough for me to choke, and said: “He’s going to leave us again. He’s going to leave us as many times as we let him.” In that moment I believed her, despite Dad doing everything he could to convince us otherwise. Like when she threw a fit because she wanted to go to the beach, and within minutes Dad was in his swim trunks, carrying towels, herding us onto the Q train to Brighton Beach. It was a long subway ride and because it was the middle of the day I remember the car being empty. It had felt like it was our private train, and even though Edie was trying not to enjoy it, I know she did. It was my first trip to see the ocean and I didn’t even know that I was dying to see it until I was on my way there. People are always surprised when I tell them this because we lived by the Gulf, but the coast of Louisiana is all swamp. We’d go up to Lake Pontchartrain, but there were no ocean beaches—for that you’d have to drive out to Alabama or Florida, and we’d never left the state. Mom traveled, but she never took us. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, leave us with Doreen, or when Doreen got sick of us, with the Wassersteins, an older couple who watched crime shows all day and fed us nothing but hotdogs. Edie and I loved to hate the Wassersteins.

In a recent show, I tried to recreate the feeling of that first trip to the beach, but it was hard to capture the intense and simple joy I’d felt. It was windy and full of seagulls and it was Brighton Beach, so I’m sure the sand was full of wrappers and trash, but I didn’t notice any of that. I was bowled over by the horizon line! All that water! Water, stretching out forever, and those waves! The way the water gathered itself and suddenly rose up! The force of it as it pulled the sand out from under my feet. It was cold, but of course we all went in. Edie looked like an animated broomstick in a bikini. The coldness of the water just made her broomstickier, hopping from foot to foot. The cold water was a shock to our systems. It made us momentarily euphoric. Our teeth practically fell out they were chattering so much, but it was really lovely. The Atlantic Ocean in March.

After the beach, we went to a Russian dumpling restaurant and met Aunt Rose, our dad’s sister. We didn’t even know we had an aunt. Mom had never mentioned her. She looked like Edie, if Edie had been left out to sour. It must have been strange for my sister to be surrounded suddenly by so many approximations of herself.

EDITH (1997)

I’m sick of strangers acting as if they are continuing some sort of conversation with me, as if they’d just stepped into the other room for a minute as opposed to, you know, abandoning Mae and me completely for over a decade. With Dennis you’d think he’d tripped and fell into a time portal. Oops. I forgot all about my daughters and made my wife go crazy. My bad.

His sister is just like him. Looking at her face makes me want to die young.

“I didn’t think I’d get to see you again,” Rose says with a quavering voice. And, “You probably don’t remember me,” but she says it like she thinks we should.

When the waitress brings Dennis extra dumplings “on the house,” Rose rolls her eyes but you can tell she takes some weird pleasure in her brother “having this effect on women.” She keeps reaching over and picking food out of his beard. If he’d gotten a steak I bet she would’ve insisted on cutting it up into small pieces for him.

“You poor girls,” she says after we finish the appetizers. She tries to take my hand, but I quickly move it onto my lap. “Your mother. What that woman put you through!”

Mae is sucking the salt water out of her hair, not saying anything.

“She’s not the one who abandoned us,” I say and glare at Dennis. He stares back at me.

“Your father did not abandon you.” For a public defender Aunt Rose is not a very good liar. She blushes in the same blotchy, grotesque way that I do, and noticing this makes my ears burn.

I tell her: “Mae doesn’t remember, so go ahead and tell her, but I was there, Rose. He never called or wrote. I waited for him for months.”

“I’m sorry,” he says. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You can be mad at me as long as you need to be.”

Like I need his permission.

Rose grabs his sleeve. “It’s not right for them to think that.” She turns to us. “Marianne drove him away. It’s how she wanted it. Your mother—”

“Stop it!” Dennis slams his fist against the table hard enough to make the dishes rattle.

We’re all silent. Rose takes a sip of her ice water, her eyes thick with tears.

Then Dennis says: “I did a horrible thing. I can only hope that eventually you’ll forgive me.” The words come out practiced, like he’s been saying them every morning in front of the mirror for the last 12 years.

He is staring at me, waiting for my reaction, and when I don’t give him one, he stands abruptly. Rose tries to stand too, but he pushes her back down into her chair. He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. We watch him in silence through the window. His back heaves, the smoke appears in a cloud over his shoulder like a thought bubble.

Rose dabs her eyes with a napkin. I finish the dumplings on Dennis’s plate out of spite, shove them all violently in my mouth, try not to gag as they slide down my throat. The waitress is watching us. Mae gets up slowly and goes outside. Through the glass, I watch her comfort Dennis. She looks so gentle and serious.

“If you’d only seen what your mother put him through,” Rose murmurs to me, but I don’t take the bait. She gestures to the waitress for the check. “My poor Denny.”

ROSE

The first thing that struck me when I saw my nieces after all those years was how much Mae looked like her mother. It was uncanny. That pale skin, that long, thick black hair. Girls used to get burned at the stake for looking like that. My choice of words… all I meant was that Marianne had been a witch. A witch and a bitch. And in the end, even she didn’t want to live with herself.

I remember Denny writing me to say he’d met the girl he was going to marry, but that he would have to wait a while. He fell in love with her instantly when she was a kid. Not in a perverted way, but he just knew. He waited for her to grow up and then he married her.

How sad that I had not been able to help those girls when they were little and living with Marianne. But Denny told me not to meddle. It was his life. What could I do? Especially after they moved back to New Orleans.

Stewart and I couldn’t have children, and when the girls were born I thought of them as my own. I know it drove Marianne crazy, especially when the first one came out looking nothing like her. She said I was like one of those parasitic birds who hides her eggs in other birds’ nests. It was a joke, sort of. But that’s what her sense of humor was like. Not exactly “ha ha.” Always an edge to it.

She would say Denny took advantage of her. She was 17 and her father had just died, and she was left all alone. A barefoot orphan. For God’s sake, Denny saved her by marrying her. How is that taking advantage? He probably saved her life. He loved her since she was a child. It was very romantic.

Thirty-two and 17 seems like a big age difference, but it’s only 15 years. And she was no innocent. He loved her more than anything. She broke him. She wore him down and broke him. Drove him out of their house. When he got off that plane I fell to my knees. What she did to him. There was no Denny in front of me, just broken pieces. His neck was so thin it could barely hold up his head. His skin was the color of a corpse’s. Stewart and I nursed him back to health. Fed him, found him an apartment. But he couldn’t write, and when we tried to introduce him to someone else, to get his mind off Marianne and the girls, it was no use. I don’t mean to say there weren’t other women. Sure. There were. Women loved him. How could they not? Talented, handsome, and now also damaged.