BETWEEN EDITH AND DOREEN
EDITH: Doreen.
DOREEN: Yes, Edie baby.
EDITH: I need to go home.
DOREEN: Go home? Your momma’s not up for that.
EDITH: Can’t I stay with you?
DOREEN: No, baby. I have a lot on my plate right now. My brother’s sick and he’s staying with me. I couldn’t be responsible for another human being.
EDITH: Doreen! I’m 16. You wouldn’t have to be responsible for anything…
DOREEN: Did you call me just to cry on the telephone?
EDITH: Yes.
DOREEN: How’s your sister?
EDITH: She likes it here. She’s very adaptable.
DOREEN: Well, shit, honey. You don’t adapt, you die. Why do you say it like it’s a bad thing? You don’t adapt, you die.
EDITH: …
DOREEN: I’m not going to talk to you if you keep sniffling.
EDITH: Don’t hang up!
DOREEN: I’m not hanging up, Edith. God damn.
EDITH: Have you gone to visit her?
DOREEN: I went yesterday.
EDITH: How was she?
DOREEN: Not great, Edie baby. Not great. It’s hard to understand what she’s talking about.
EDITH: Did she ask about me?
DOREEN: Sure, honey. Sure, she did.
EDITH: What did she ask?
DOREEN: Oh, you know, how you were doing. I told her you were doing great.
EDITH: We’re not doing great. That’s not true.
DOREEN: Edie, sweetheart, I’m tired. My brother kept me up all night, moaning. He’s in a lot of pain. I can’t keep talking in circles.
EDITH: She sent us a letter and a poem.
DOREEN: Well, that’s good.
EDITH: Did she say anything else about me?
DOREEN: She said thank you for that fuzzy bathrobe you sent her. She was wearing it. I could tell she liked it.
EDITH: She wrote in the letter that the doctors are torturing her.
DOREEN: That’s nonsense. You know that’s nonsense.
EDITH: She said they’re overmedicating and deforming her.
DOREEN: You gotta let her get better. You gotta let the doctors do their work. I have to go now, baby. Give Mae a kiss for me, will you?
EDITH: Yeah, okay. Tell Tyrell I said hi.
DOREEN: He’s with his daddy, but I will when he comes back. Bye, baby.
DOREEN
Marianne left you with her messes. Most people walked away, but once in a while she’d find a fool, a fool like myself, who couldn’t. I’ve known her since she was in diapers. My momma worked for her daddy, Jackson McLean. Everyone liked Jackson. After his wife died he hired my momma to help him around the house.
When I was little, my momma spent so much time over there, taking care of Marianne that, it’s true, I got jealous. I had five younger brothers and sisters, and my momma was wasting all her love and affection on a white girl across town. She’d come home tired and lie down. People only have so much to give and Marianne was taking it all. My friends in school, their parents worked for white people and none of them got invested the same way my momma did. I wondered if she was in love with Jackson, and I know my daddy wondered too. Sometimes I’d hear them fighting about it at night.
Because I was the oldest, I was responsible for my brothers and sisters. I made them food when they got home from school. I sewed their clothes when they ripped them climbing fences or being wild. My momma would bring Marianne over sometimes and make me play with her and that was one more chore on my list. My momma never said it, but I was expected to treat Marianne like a little princess. We did eventually become close, just because we were similar ages and spent so much time together. We’d pick blackberries that grew wild in the bushes along the railroad tracks and my momma taught us both how to can them and make jam.
Marianne wasn’t handy and she had no common sense, but she was good at making up stories. She’d even convince herself that what she was telling you was true and eventually you’d start believing it too. The swamps would become fairy castles and witches’ lairs, that kind of shit. As I got older, though, her imagination started to bug me. I could never afford to be strange because I had people depending on me. Being weird is a luxury. I was embarrassed to be seen with her. She’d trail after me and my friends, floating, round-eyed, walking on her toes. It drove me crazy the way she would walk, her heels never hitting the ground. The girl could hardly make herself a sandwich. I finally got into a big fight with my momma about it.
I was my high school valedictorian and I already knew what I wanted from life. I was going to go to college and become a nurse, move out to a big city and make something of myself. I told my momma that I didn’t need spacey Marianne, like a weight around my neck, dragging me down during my last summer at home. Oh, my momma got mad. She never usually laid a hand on me but that time she slapped me with the comb she was using on her hair. Here we were, all of us fighting for civil rights, and this girl was my responsibility? How do you figure? How is that fair? My momma felt we owed something to Jackson. But I think she would not have gotten so angry with me if she hadn’t seen my point.
For years I didn’t hear from Marianne. Both of us left town, got married, had kids. For a while the world had seemed big and anything was possible. I did what I had hoped I’d do: I moved to Atlanta, went to college on a full scholarship, and became a nurse. Then my momma got sick, and I had to move back home to take care of her. She passed away, my husband left me for someone else, and I stayed on here. Marianne had moved back too and I still felt responsible for her. Her weirdness got darker. She wasn’t happy with her husband. They’d fight and fight, loud enough for everyone to hear. I’d run into him at the store, buying paper plates because she’d broken all their regular ones. Eventually he left after she put herself in a coma with pills. Her daughters stayed with me while she was at the hospital and he moved out.
God, she was so selfish.
She’d say, “You don’t understand, Dor, it’s hell.”
Right? ’Cause that ignorant little bitch was the only one who’d ever felt pain.
And I’d say, “Marianne, choose the hell you know over the one you don’t, because it can always get worse.” It’s what my daddy used to say.
She didn’t believe in that, though. She’d say the only hell that existed was the one she was living in.
Her husband left and things got better and then worse again. She put me in charge in case anything happened to her, gave me power of attorney. But I had enough of my own problems, shit: a divorce, a teenage son who wouldn’t talk to me, a little brother dying in my living room. When she tried to hang herself I did what I could. I kept her out of the state hospital, got her a bed in St. Vincent’s, made sure she had good doctors. It’s an expensive place, but I got her ex-husband to pay for most of it and I rented out her house to help pay the rest.
EDITH (1997)
It pricks a little where the water is hitting me, but my skin has mostly gone numb. I am with you. Your eyes are the only things sticking out above the icy water. You are an iceberg. I am an iceberg. We are across the country from each other but our teeth chatter in unison—
“Edie, I really have to pee.” Mae is banging on the door.
I turn the water off and wait. I count to five, shivering. My fingers are numb. They don’t give her the towel right away, I’m sure. The nurses make her wait, those sadistic bitches. They make her shiver like this.
“Edie, come on.”
I pull the green towel off the hook and wrap myself in it before unlocking the door.
Mae pushes past me to the toilet and starts peeing as soon as she sits down.
“Your lips are blue,” she says.
They are. Like I just ate a blue Popsicle. I stretch my lips out over my teeth and look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror.
“You look like someone just thawed you out of a glacier,” Mae says as she wipes and flushes. I move aside and le
t her wash her hands.
“Jesus.” She touches my arm.
I shrug her hand off. I don’t need to get into it with her.
“Edie, what are you doing? Stop torturing yourself.”
Why should I? Saints whipped their backs raw then wore shirts made of thorns to punish themselves. Cold water is nothing. Cold water is pathetic. But I don’t say this because Mae doesn’t like other people’s feelings. Whenever Mom would get upset you could just see it in Mae’s face, her shutting down. And that’s the last thing I need. Better to be calm, to move slow, then she’ll come back with me.
“Don’t be stupid, Spooks. We ran out of hot water,” I lie, then clench my jaw to keep my teeth from chattering.
MAE
Anybody who’s read Dad’s novels could feel the intensity of his obsession with my mother. Obsession like that never really goes away, not when it’s connected to one’s fundamental sense of self. He never said anything about Mom’s letters, but I’m sure he heard her whistle as loudly as Edie and I did, that piercing sound that made Edie come running and made me dig in my heels. How did her letters have this power over us? I don’t know. The desperation was in the negative space of everything she wrote.
Before that spring, I’d never read any of Dad’s books. It had never even occurred to me to track them down at a library or bookstore because until we came to live with him, he hadn’t existed for me. But in New York, I started reading his books ravenously. I devoured Cassandra’s Calling. I read his novels before bed. I wanted to have the rhythms of the sentences inside of me, so that I could dream about them. In my sleep though, all the characters were Mom. Sometimes Mom would turn into a strong wind and pull me somewhere, or sometimes she would jump on my back and try to wrestle me down to the ground. I barely ever saw her face. Sometimes—and these dreams were always the scariest—I myself would turn into Mom, and then I would be on someone else’s back, or turning into a wind.
EDITH (1997)
Mae’s lamp casts large shadows on the wall as she reads in bed. Her fingers rustle the pages of her book. Cronus is lying on my feet, keeping them warm.
“Do you think she’s gonna stay here long?” I ask Mae. The woman from the basement restaurant is sleeping on the couch. She appeared in our lobby this afternoon, looking like a mess. A hospital bracelet on her wrist. That bracelet is the only thing she and Mom have in common but that seems to be enough for Dennis.
Mae doesn’t respond.
“It’s like what Mom said about him. He likes his birds with their wings broken,” I say.
Mae isn’t listening. She’s absorbed in whatever it is she’s reading.
“Kind of like you,” I say to Cronus and he squints back. “You also like your birds with their wings broken. Don’t you?”
Mae’s breathing has gotten too quiet. She must have gotten to a juicy part.
“Read it to me,” I say. She’s holding her breath.
Mae turns the page and doesn’t say anything. I reach my hand up to the coiled spring above and nudge her.
“Stop,” she says. I watch her shadow on the wall as she sets down the book. “I don’t think you’ll like it. It’s kind of…”
“I just want to hear your voice.”
Nothing. I hit the bed again.
“Fine.” She clears her throat, clears it again: “At first she was like a blind kitten in bed. Just hopeless and rooting, always rooting for my,” her voice flutters, “penis, trying to put it in her mouth. She would practically sleep with it there. Or in her hand. It was like it formed a circuit, a closed circuit, our bodies…” She trails off.
Something squirms through me and a weird giggle escapes. I’m thinking about Markus, and the way my throat would go numb when he came in my mouth, and then the footsteps in the stone chapel, or the footsteps on the carpeted stairs to the attic. Afterwards was always full of other people’s footsteps.
“Can I see it?” I ask her.
She lies there, silent, too still. Why? Suddenly, I realize what she’s been reading to me. My face goes hot. Disgusting. And that she hadn’t warned me first. Let me lie there thinking about it, thinking about Markus and not saying that it was some disgusting thing Dennis had written about Mom.
Mae hangs over the edge of the bed and looks at me. Her eyes are in shadow, her hair a curtain. Upside down, in the dark, her face could be someone else’s.
“Do you think that was about Mom?” she asks. That little pervert. “There were details that made it seem…”
Mae’s big white forehead is inches from my face. I feel the snap of my knuckle, the thwack of my nail against her skull. She shrieks and nearly falls off the bed.
Mom like a fucking kitten, rooting around for the turkey neck in Dennis’s disgusting pants. I feel nauseous. Mom in a white nightgown like a fucking kitten. Mom, Mae’s age, writhing around like a fish on a hook, a big white fish, a ghost, her mouth and throat numb.
“It could be about anyone,” I finally say.
Mae doesn’t respond. She’s not talking to me anymore. When I try to join her on the top bunk, she sticks her leg out to block me. There is a bump on her forehead, a red welt, it must be where I flicked her. I reach for it, but she bats me away.
“I’m sorry.” I really am. Below us, the sound of a saw. Our downstairs neighbor Charlie must be building something.
“Mae, I’m sorry.” I say it again, even though she won’t look up from the book.
AMANDA
I decided to get the abortion while I was in New York. I’d been waffling and my time was running out. I was worried that if I waited to do it until I got home it would be too late, or that Barry would somehow talk me out of it. I didn’t have anyone in the city to pick me up from the clinic, so I looked up Dennis’s address in the phone book and took a cab there after the procedure. I sensed that he wouldn’t turn me away and that it might even be my “in.” And it was. He very generously offered to let me stay on his couch and recuperate. It was an unpleasant procedure, but it was in no way earth-shattering.
I remember how completely surreal it felt, following Dennis Lomack and his daughters into his apartment, and then standing there surrounded by his things, feeling a little crampy and woozy from having lost so much blood and from the residual effects of the anesthetics. I remember standing in his bathroom, staring at the hairs in his hairbrush and the dirty Q-tips in the wastebasket and thinking that I’d made it into the reliquary.
All the details from my arrival at Dennis’s house still exist for me in a magnified Technicolor brightness. That first night he made a lentil mash, which surprised me initially, but after thinking about it more it made sense. Indian food, of course! That’s exactly what he would make. There were lots of moments like that. I had sat around in my basement cubicle at UW, daydreaming about all of these little things. How does Dennis take his coffee? (with cream, no sugar); How does he hold his mug? (the usual way, I suppose, no stray pinkies); How does he sit? (legs crossed, sometimes); How does he walk? (not lumbering, for his size), etc.
His daughters felt like characters that belonged in the world of his books. They were not friendly toward me, which was fine. It felt more authentic that way. It was flattering, their perception of me as a threat. That night after dinner, his younger daughter sat on his lap, and the cat sat on her lap, and I remember thinking that they looked like a totem pole of familial bliss. And even the older one, Edith, wasn’t arguing with anyone and they all seemed to get along quite well.
Edith was so headstrong. You could imagine her caught in a rainstorm, or leading oxen across a forded river. I would have cast her in a movie about pioneers. You know, stubborn, full of principles, but still delicate somehow.
I spent the next day recovering on his couch, making an inventory of his bookshelves. So these were his influences: All the Russians. And a lot of Germans. It was no longer empty speculation and lit-crit fiddle-farting, I had access.
That night after the girls had gone to bed, I followed Dennis Lomack
into his room. He looked surprised, but he didn’t kick me out. I touched every object on his desk while he got undressed.
“Well?” he said, after he had gotten under the covers and turned off the light, and I had continued to stand there in the dark, wondering if all of it was real.
“Well?” he’d said. Just like that. “Well?”
How many people can say that the heartthrob in the poster came to life for them? Because that is what it felt like: Mick Jagger stepping out into my childhood bedroom.
LETTER FROM
MARIANNE LOUISE MCLEAN TO DENNIS LOMACK
May 4, 1968
Dear Mr. Dennis,
I hung up the postcard you sent by my bed. I like to lie awake, tracing the outline of the skyscrapers with my finger and imagining you—tiny, walking through that city. All those little glowing windows have people living behind them. It’s hard to believe. Maybe one day I’ll visit you there?
How is the book you’re writing? Did you start it yet? Am I in it? Name a character Cassandra. Or put in a secret message. Like maybe on page 32 have one of the characters eat an apple, and then I’ll know that you were thinking about me when you wrote it.
It’s been such a long time since we’ve seen you. I miss you! And so does Daddy. He hasn’t been well. Ann told you about the trial? It’s set to start soon, and though he tells me it’s all nonsense, I know he worries. Mrs. Williams has been helping me take care of him. This last week Daddy has barely gotten out of bed but of course he refuses to see a doctor. School has been okay. Pointless but fine. Nobody talks to me. My only friend, Cynthia (remember you took us waterskiing? She had a huge crush on you, which I’m sure you knew), she had to move back to Illinois because her daddy had a breakdown.
Something strange happened to me the other day, when I was walking back from Mrs. Williams’ house. Maybe you could use it in your book? I keep thinking about it, but I’m not sure why. I guess because it scared me. It was last Thursday night when everyone was in town, watching the parades. I didn’t go this year. Daddy wasn’t feeling up to it. Anyway, I was walking alone in the dark on the dirt road behind the Hillhurst farm, the shortcut from our house to the river. Well, I was walking when suddenly I heard someone breathing, right by my shoulder. I could feel it on my neck. I was so scared I couldn’t even scream. I opened my mouth but no sound came out. I turned around to see who it was, but there was no one there. I told Doreen and she said I was being stupid, that the sound probably bounced off the trees and created an illusion. It was my own breath I was hearing, or maybe the breath of a horse in the pasture, and it only sounded close. Maybe she’s right, but that’s not how it felt. Ever since then I’ve felt different, like I’ve been marked. I worry about Daddy a lot. Maybe you could hitch a ride down here soon? I know he wants to see you and I do too.
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