The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  “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 w
atching 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.

  Chapter 2

  LETTER FROM

  AMANDA SINGER TO DETSTVO PUBLISHERS

  Dmitry Appasov

  Detstvo Publishers

  St. Petersburg, Russia

  February 2, 1997

  Dear Mr. Appasov,

  I am a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin and I have a question that I was hoping you might be able to help me with. I am writing my dissertation on the work of the American writer Dennis Lomack. One of his books is a translation of Russian folk tales. There is one story in particular that fascinated me, but when I showed it to some colleagues in the Slavic Studies Department they did not think this particular variant sounded familiar. One of them suggested that I get in touch with you, as you are an expert in the field.

  The story is about a raven-haired beauty living in a hut perched atop a set of chicken feet. She spends her days making tapestries out of flowers. Then, one day, a boy and a girl who got lost in the woods appear on her doorstep. These children cast a spell and turn the beautiful woman into a bald witch, a Baba Yaga. She has no choice but to put the children in a cage and make soup out of them. Unlike the Baba Yagas of other stories, this one returns to her true, beautiful self after she eats the children.

  If you could point me to the original story that was being translated, I would be extremely grateful. I have attached the text and included a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.

  Sincerely,

  Amanda Singer

  MAE

  Dad would take us everywhere, even if he was only going downstairs to check the mail or to the post office up the street to buy stamps. He never left us alone at first. I would wake up sometimes and see him silhouetted in the doorway. I think he checked on us several times a night. Just being near him did something for me, and as long as he was there I almost didn’t think about Mom, about the darkness that was in her and also in me, waiting. The only times I couldn’t help thinking about her were in the moments right before falling asleep. There’d be the sensation of falling into her body, and then the hospital sounds—the other patients moaning, the stern voices of the nurses, the canned laughter from the television. But this lasted only a second, maybe two, and then was obliterated by sleep. I’d never slept so well in my life. After years of being woken up in the night by Mom, forced to go God knows where, it was a relief to wake up in the same room as my sister, to hear lip smacking and light snores coming from the bunk below. We’d never shared a room before, unless we were at Doreen’s or at the Wassersteins’. I loved it.

  Since we weren’t going to school, Dad made a point of filling our days with an assortment of enriching activities. Once, we spent a whole afternoon riding back and forth on the Staten Island ferry. Dad taught us a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay: We were very tired, we were very merry, we had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry. The ferry didn’t run all night. And I don’t know that we were merry exactly, but joy found a way of squeezing through, even for Edie. Dad had bought us a netted sack of navel oranges and we peeled them and sucked on the slices as we floated by the Statue of Liberty, watching her green face change in the light. It’s how immigrants must have felt, coming to Ellis Island. All that water around us like a baptism. Yes, it was a rebirth, the fresh start I’d been longing for.

  And then, on our way home from the ferry terminal in Battery Park, we saw a cardboard box with a “Free Kittens” sign in front of it. When we opened the box though, there weren’t any kittens; there was just one adult cat. We had assumed it was the mother, abandoned there after everyone had taken her kittens. White paws, white nose, white tail. Heartbreaking!

  We were instantly attached to it. I could picture the cat slinking around in Dad’s apartment, or spread across all our laps—it was that big. It would be the first thing that belonged to all three of us.

  One of the women Dad was dating met up with us in the park. It was Rivka, an art curator from Prague who had dyed pink hair that was so garish it managed to make her ugly face somehow transcend itself. She was so strange to look at that it got confusing after a while, why it was you were staring at her—was it because she was ugly or because she was beautiful? It was extreme to the point that it basically looped around the spectrum and became its opposite.

  Rivka insisted that Dad shouldn’t let us touch the cat until it got its shots, so we brought the box to an animal hospital on 7th Avenue. The cat had not expected to be moved. It was difficult carrying a box for over a mile with a clawing and squirming cat inside of it. Edie and I nearly dropped it at several intersections. We told the vet the whole story of its discovery, and he lifted the cat’s tail and told us there was no way this cat was the mother of those kittens. It was a male. Maybe all the kittens had been taken and he was a stray who just found the box? Though he was pretty fat for a stray. Maybe he had eaten all the kittens? We named him Cronus for the Greek god who ate all his children. We’d never been allowed to have a pet before. Mom had been allergic, or that is what she’d always said.

  CHARLIE

  I met Edie for the first time the day they brought home the cat. I’d been living in my grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment directly below Dennis Lomack, but I’d been too shy to introduce myself. As a teenager, I’d devoured his books. At 16, everything I knew about sex came from them. I’d read them in a frenzy until the pages stuck together. It’s funny because I looked at Yesterday’s Bonfires recently, and it wasn’t even that smutty. What strikes me now about that book is its sense of
freedom, in the broadest sense. Maybe this is what inspired me to become an adventurer, an urban explorer.

  I usually take the stairs, but I didn’t that evening because I saw Dennis Lomack and his daughters standing in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. The two girls were huddled over a cardboard box. What was in the box? It’s in my nature to be curious about such things. And then Edie glanced up at me and she had this look and that was what gave me the nerve to finally introduce myself.

  “I’m Charlie, your downstairs neighbor,” I whispered, as I followed them into the elevator. And because they were looking at me strangely, I added: “I’ve lost my voice.”

  This was a lie. I had not actually lost my voice. I stutter and whispering is one of the few things I can do to hide this. I’ve whispered through job interviews. It’s awkward but it works. It’s how I’d landed my gig as a substitute teacher.

  Before I got out, Edie lifted the cat up from the box and showed it to me with such pride. It was a beautiful cat, probably part Coon cat, judging from its size, and Edie was beautiful too, of course. That night I went out on a shoot with an NYU film guy I met online. I was giving him a tour of the decommissioned subway stations, but I was distracted and kept getting us lost. I couldn’t get that image of Edie holding that cat out of my head.

  RIVKA

  Poor Dennis. He tried very hard with them. “We’re a package deal,” he said to me, a daughter on each arm.

  Not for me. Not my kind of a package. I tried, but it did not work.

  That is okay. For some time it was very nice. I had a gallery. I traveled. I was busy. I did not fear being alone, but sometimes I became lonely. Dennis was gentle and constant. He did not demand from me emotionally. This is a hard quality to find in a man. I kept an apartment key in the flowerpot and he would come by a few times a week to make love. But after his daughters arrived, it became too difficult and we made love only once. The daughters were in their room and I begged him to take me on the kitchen floor. I pulled him down onto the ground. He was distracted. I knew it was to be our last time.