The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  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.