The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  EDITH (1997)

  Mae and I lean against each other, trying to catch our breath. Luis the doorman is asleep at his desk with a baseball game playing quietly on the transistor radio.

  …Nice-looking pitch right there, curve ball gets the inside corner, that’s gonna even up the count…

  “We can ask Luis to let us in,” I say between gasps. “We should have propped open the door.” Luis doesn’t stir at the sound of his name. I notice a man standing by the mailboxes, looking at a coupon booklet.

  Mae shakes her head and jabs several times at the elevator button. “No, don’t. He’ll tell Dad that we went out,” she says.

  “So? We’re free to go wherever we want. We aren’t his prisoners,” I say. The man is still staring at his coupon booklet. It must be the most interesting coupon booklet in the world. He’s obviously eavesdropping.

  “Excuse me,” Mae calls to him. He looks up like he’s been waiting for this invitation. I’ve seen him before. Something is strange about his face. No eyelashes. But as he comes closer I see that he does have them, they’re just the same color as his hair, yellow-white. “You live here, right?” she asks him.

  He nods. Oh God, Mae. What is she about to do?

  “I-i-i-i-in…” he stops and clears his throat. “In the apartment under yours,” he says through his cough. “We met the other day. Charlie.” He shakes her hand as he coughs into his other elbow.

  “Can we climb through your window to get to the fire escape?” Mae asks. The elevator doors creak open before I have a chance to contradict her or laugh it off. He’s going to think we’re freaks, not that Spooks has ever cared about that. Standing up for her in school was a full-time job.

  An old woman limps out of the elevator with a balding Pomeranian. We stop talking and wait for her to pass. She moves between us slowly like a barge, eyes straight ahead.

  “Sh-sh-sh-sh-sure,” Charlie says after the woman has gone, and follows us into the elevator. I’m embarrassed that we’ve invited ourselves over to his house. I stare down at the floor. Charlie’s shoes are the strangest things I’ve seen—a wetsuit type of material with each toe separated out. Like gloves for his feet.

  “We locked ourselves out,” Mae explains.

  “Of course, it h-happens,” he says. He pauses between his words, like he’s swallowing air.

  His apartment is the same layout as ours but feels smaller. All of the furniture has been pushed to one end of the living room and stacked to the ceiling—wooden tables with doilies, ceramic lamps, a plaid couch, a rolled-up rug. It’s darker too, because cardboard boxes are blocking one of the windows. It smells like cigarettes, B.O., peppermint, and something else.

  “Did you just move in here?” Mae asks, eyeing his boxes.

  He nods. “A few months ago. My grandma used to l-l-live here.”

  A telescope is set up by the living room window. I stop and look through it. The lights are off in the apartment across the street.

  “There’s too m-m-m-much light pollution to see any stars,” he says and playfully taps the telescope so it swings out of position. I’m not sure if it had been aimed at that apartment on purpose or not. “Can I get you guys s-s-s-s-s…” He stops, swallows, tries again. “Water?”

  “No, thanks,” Mae says. She’s in a hurry.

  “Sure,” I say.

  He fills a mug for me from the tap. The door to the room that’s under Dennis’s bedroom is ajar. The ground is covered in sawdust. That’s what the other smell is—sap.

  “That’s my wood shop,” he says, handing me the water and pushing the door open all the way. Piles of 2x4s and plywood boards. A table saw. “If you ev-v-v-er want to build anything.”

  What could I possibly want to build?

  Mae tugs me towards Charlie’s bedroom, the room directly below ours. It’s empty except for a sleeping bag on the floor, a stack of books, a box of tissues, an ashtray, and an Altoids box. I wonder why he doesn’t build himself a bed.

  Mae pushes the window up and crawls out onto the fire escape.

  “Come on,” she hisses at me. I’m looking at the books. One of them is by Dennis—Cassandra’s Calling. “Hurry up.”

  “Thank you,” I say to Charlie. I pass him back the empty glass and crawl out his window.

  Through the fire escape steps I can see his face looking up at us. It’s an interesting face. He’s definitely a weirdo, but that’s not necessarily bad.

  “Help me,” Mae says. She’s trying to pry our window open. I squeeze my fingers into the crack under the frame and push.

  “Go in a little, and then up,” I tell her. The window loosens and creaks as we finally get it open from the outside.

  I scrape my leg on the sill as we crawl back in. It stings. I limp into the living room where Mae is already sitting on the couch, pretending like this is where she’s been all night. I sit next to her and we both pant quietly, ready for the sound of the key in the door. A few minutes go by and nothing. I’ve caught my breath. Maybe Dennis isn’t coming straight home. Maybe he’s going to that woman’s house.

  “What’d you think of our neighbor?” I ask.

  Mae shrugs, eyes still on the front door. “He seemed fine.”

  I drape my injured leg over her lap and inspect the tiny beads of blood already beginning to clot along the surface of the scrape.

  “Fine or fiiiiiine?”

  “Ew,” Mae says, ignoring the question. “Stop picking at it.”

  “But I’ve been in-jured on the job,” I drawl, lifting my shin towards her face. “How’m I gonna find a law-yer to get me the settlement that I de-serve?” Personal Injury Law Call and Response. A game we started when we had to live with the Wassersteins, since those ads played on endless loop in their living room.

  Mae pulls the scarf off my neck and ties it around my leg like a tourniquet. “Why, it’s just as easy as picking up the phone!” she says dutifully, and then whistles the jingle.

  “Do it in a bow,” I say, pointing my toes.

  “You’re ridiculous,” she says but ties the ends in a bow.

  “What do you think the Wassersteins are doing at this very moment?”

  “Choking on a hotdog,” Mae says.

  “Just one?” I snort, picturing the two of them gagging on opposite ends of the same hotdog like Lady and the Tramp.

  Cronus emerges from Dennis’s room and stretches.

  “Was that open before?” Mae points past our cat to Dennis’s door.

  “Oh, right,” I say. The photo. I fish it out from my back pocket, and smooth it against my thigh. Looking at it now with Mae beside me, I feel very stupid for having thought it was her. Of course it’s not Mae. It’s Mom. Obviously it’s Mom. I’ve just never seen any pictures of Mom from when she was Mae’s age, and they do look exactly alike.

  “What is that?” Mae says.

  I pass her the picture.

  “Where’d you find this?” she asks.

  “In his desk.”

  She stares at it. “I think I saw him looking at it the other day. He must think about her still,” she says finally and makes me put it back exactly where I found it.

  Then I join her again on the couch and we wait.

  LETTER FROM

  MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN TO DENNIS LOMACK

  June 14, 1962

  Dear Mr. Dennis,

  Daddy says, long hair or no long hair, it’s impolite to call you Dennis. So, now I will call you Mr. Dennis. I went up to the lake yesterday with Cynthia and her little brother and I saw the burial mounds! I told her what you said about the Indian bones inside and her little brother Gus, who is a pain-and-a-half, heard and started to try to dig them up with his hands. He thinks he found an arrowhead but I think it was just a sharp rock. He kept sneaking up on us and poking the back of our necks with it and telling us we were cursed. Then he got stung by a bee, so I guess he got what was coming.

  Then we saw girls from our school and they didn’t talk to us, but Cynthia’s mom said
we just had to keep our chins up, and that we were on the right side of history, and that when those girls grew up they would be deeply ashamed of what their parents had done to our daddies. Then Cynthia’s mom gave us chicken grease sandwiches and I ate mine and pretended to like it. I think Cynthia was embarrassed. Daddy says you are coming back in September to help register people to vote.

  I miss you! I miss going on our walks and your stories and having you and all your friends on our living room floor. It was like a slumber party and there was always someone to talk to. The house is so empty now and Daddy just paces back and forth. Here is the photo of me you took with Daddy’s camera.

  Don’t forget me!

  Marianne Louise

  Chapter 3

  LETTER FROM

  MARIANNE MCLEAN TO EDITH AND MAE

  [1997]

  my dear daughters,

  please ignore my previous letter. a familiar itch behind the eyeballs, words not my own.

  can you even read this? it’s the medicine that makes my hands shake. please do not be alarmed. tremors & earthquakes in my hands & feet & face. they’ll keep deforming me until there’s nothing left to deform.

  every morning, they put me in an ice bath up to my neck. i have never been so cold. a nurse, sadistic bitch, sits & watches my teeth chatter. i’ve developed a nasty cough, pneumonia? but they say some of the fog has lifted. i am writing you girls a letter, after all. my two lovelies. my ribbit & rabbit.

  i forgive you & try not to think about you. i’m ashamed, of course. i want to keep you, even thoughts of you, away from this place. the suffering is in the walls, in the floor, under the tables. it’s mixed into the paint. it smells like shit & fear. it gets into your nostrils & then it’s too late because it’s in you. my neighbor can’t stop crying (can’t or won’t?). i have only recently begun to distinguish between awake & asleep. i’ve started writing again. words repeat in my head, the only way to flush them out is to write them down. poems. your father is no saint, but he is a lot of things.

  i love you, it’s a bell in the fog, the only thing that still exists.

  be brave,

  mom

  EDITH (1997)

  What have they done to her in there? What did I let them do? The paramedics and the police. I should have lied, but I was so stunned. I told them what happened, and then they twisted it.

  The man with the gun holsters, pouring me an orange soda into a Styrofoam cup. He was younger than the detectives on television shows, practically my age, wispy mustache. He asked me question after question and stupidly I told him everything, and he rubbed my shoulders and wiped the orange from my mouth with a napkin. Why hadn’t I kept quiet?

  I put her in there. She thinks so too. Why else would she need to forgive me? And now they’re torturing her because of what I said. Between the ice baths and the pills they’re giving her, it’s a miracle she can write at all. Her handwriting was always so small, neat, round. She would press down hard enough that it was almost an engraving. You could run your fingers over the paper and feel the words.

  Here, though, her handwriting looks like a ghost sneezed. There is nothing in the way it looks that is hers. It could have been written by someone else. Her sobbing neighbor. Some fat slob in a turban. It makes me feel better to think it was somebody else’s hand shaking over the paper, that Mom was just dictating.

  I read the letter again, a third time, a fourth time. I start to hear the words and not see them. my two lovelies. my ribbit and rabbit. That sounds like her. The sound of her voice in my head calms me—bell in the fog—even though the things she is saying—tremors… deforming me—are not very calming. I get to the beginning of the letter again, and stop. please ignore my previous letter.

  “Where’s the other letter?” I ask Dennis. I never saw it. He must have hidden it from us.

  Dennis doesn’t answer me. He’s busy reading over our shoulders. He’s squinting because he’s too vain to get glasses. Has he gotten to the part about him yet? No saint. If he has, he gives no indication of it. I don’t know what she means when she says he’s a lot of things. I assume it’s bad?

  “What did you do with the other letter?” I ask him again.

  “What letter?” he says, looking down at me with his wet lamb eyes.

  Is he lying? Where did he put it?

  “She said she sent another letter. You can’t hide things like that from us.” I feel the blood rushing into my face. “It’s not right.”

  “I’m not hiding anything! You’re with me all the time. You see me get the mail.” This is true, but it’s not like we pay attention to it. He could easily have hidden it in a magazine, read it later in his room.

  “She probably never even wrote it,” Mae says slowly. “She probably just thought she did, or dreamed she did and got confused.” That’s Mae—she’ll take any opportunity to make Mom look foolish. It’s disgusting.

  “Or, maybe the doctors held on to it,” Dennis says. “They monitor her correspondence.”

  I imagine a doctor unfolding and reading my mother’s letter, and then folding it back and putting it in a manila folder in her file, evidence against her, words she said to us in anger that will now be used to keep her locked up.

  “I think you’re lying.” The chair falls backwards as I stand, bangs against the tile on the kitchen floor. Mae puts her hand on mine, but I shake it off. That little know-it-all traitor. No, thank you. She probably knew about the letter all along. Dennis must have showed it to her, and she told him it would upset me too much to see it. Well, I’ll find it.

  “Edie, what are you doing? Please don’t touch my desk. Edith!” Dennis follows me into his room. He crouches, gathering the papers I threw on the floor.

  “Enough,” he says as I try to swipe at a stack of papers on his bedside table. I open the book he’s been reading and shake it out. A bookmark flutters to the ground, nothing else. “Edith, that’s enough.” He holds me by the back of my shirt, but I leap forward like I’m on a leash. I’m looking at the windowsill. That’s where he probably sat, reading it. Smoking, reading, crying.

  “Why is there so much ash in the ashtray?” I say.

  He burned it, lit the tip with a match and watched the words melt.

  “Edie, stop,” Mae’s voice is quiet. She’s embarrassed. I look at her face. No, she’s not embarrassed, she’s scared. Of me. I place the ashtray back on the windowsill, careful not to spill any of it.

  MAE

  I was the one who threw out the first letter from Mom. I could hear the whistle of it hurtling towards us, so I intercepted it. This was difficult since I was almost never alone, but desperation makes you crafty. The envelope felt heavy and hot to the touch and it contained ten illegible pages, each word a barbed hook. I skimmed it, careful not to let any of the words catch in me, before I tore it up and flushed it down the toilet. I didn’t want Edie getting any more agitated about Mom than she already was. I wouldn’t say I wanted Mom dead, I’m not a monster, but I wanted her vacuum-sealed somewhere where she couldn’t get to us. In New York I was happy. Happy and safe from her, I thought.

  I failed to intercept the second letter. It arrived—narcissistic, well wrought, barely legible, and full of those elliptical riddles that get under your skin and tug. Edie became obsessed, analyzing it to death: What did it signify that nothing was capitalized? Mom’s low sense of self-worth? Her aversion to order? Her artistic temperament? Was she a frustrated creative person with no outlet for her artistic energies? Was this the true source of her unhappiness? Would poetry prove to be her salvation? I let Edie talk and talk about it. I didn’t contradict her, even though I knew that none of what she was saying was true or relevant. She did not understand Mom at all.

  The third letter came a few days after that. Edie was already wound up, and she pored over the new one like a cryptologist. It wasn’t really a letter. There was no “Dear” or “Love.” It was a poem. How coy of Mom, how opaque to communicate with us in this way, to demand that we
guess what it was she was trying to say, like she was Sylvia fucking Plath.

  “What do you think it means? What do you think it means?” Edie kept saying, standing too close and watching me as I read it.

  The poem was gibberish, the unpunctuated words together unpleasant sounds, repeated, oppressive. goatman’s goatpelt fur mouth spackle choke grind down water in the throat ears choke. But reading it filled my mouth with the fetid taste of lake water. It made me think of those night trips when Mom would disappear into Lake Pontchartrain and I would nervously pace the shore, waiting for her head to break the surface. I was dry and on land, getting devoured by mosquitoes, but I could only feel the algae squishing under my feet, the black water burning in my nose. Once Mom emerged from the water with an enormous catfish latched onto her arm. On the drive home the fish flapped and struggled in the backseat while Mom laughed so hard I had to steer. She was laughing, but what does that mean? It wasn’t an expression of joy. It was just a sound, like something in her was trying to get out.

  “What?” Edie said. “What?” She sensed that I had been able to decode it in some way.

  It was clear to me the poem was a suicide note. It might as well have been an acrostic that spelled out: GOODBYE! FOREVER!

  How selfish, how grotesque. Why pull us into all that again? We were children. And the text, the handwriting, jerky and weak, it forced me to imagine her in the act of writing, which I also resented. I did not want to imagine her at all, because if I allowed her in, I felt like I would lose myself again. It was better to take this rare opportunity that forced her off of me and leave it that way.

  I never told Edie what the poem really meant. I think I made up an interpretation involving mythology and even tried to convince myself of it. But I couldn’t get the images out of my head of Mom floating face down: in a lake, in a bathtub, in the neighbor’s pool. I remember hugging Cronus at night and burrowing my face in his fur, letting his purring replace the static that her words had left in my head.

  PHONE CONVERSATION