The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  “Do you know my mother?” I’m asking her.

  “What, honey? Who’s your mother?”

  I feel the way I felt when I was little and Mom forgot me at the grocery store.

  The woman’s features flicker. She waves to somebody over my shoulder. Dennis’s friend is shaking hands with all the girls. Some of them are so shy they don’t even look up at him.

  Oh. This woman must think I’m a real idiot. Of course I don’t know her. She’s that actress. She was in that ’80s movie based on one of Dennis’s books.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “I thought you were someone else.”

  I hear some girls behind me, snickering. The actress squeezes my shoulder, smiles at me, makes a point of looking into my eyes. I can tell she’s congratulating herself on how good she is at eye contact. She can go fuck herself too. The pressure is building in my brain. My mother: her purple face and tangled hair, feet twitching inches off the floor. A yellow puddle on the linoleum.

  Dennis pulls me away. He’s hurting my wrists. “You’re hurting me.” I can’t hear myself say the words, but I feel my mouth moving. My ears are ringing. People are turned around, looking at us. Even if I wanted to change what is happening, I wouldn’t be able to. I feel it coming. Mae looks away from me. She’ll never look at me again.

  And then, darkness.

  MAE

  Edie’s fit was terrifying and embarrassing. Her body jangled. Her voice became a horrible croak. Her eyes bulged as though something was forcing them out of her face from the inside. Before I would have made her a compress of frozen peas and whispered soothing things to her, but this time I hung back.

  Dad tried to hold her as she kicked and thrashed, and the actress Tillie Holloway and her girls lifted Edie up and carried her off into the coatroom.

  For weeks an unpleasant energy had been building around my sister and I wanted it to finally be over. I wanted her to go back to Metairie, to leave already and be gone. It’s horrible to admit how cold I was, but I wanted more than anything else for my new life with Dad to begin with no interference from Edie or Amanda.

  And I got my wish! It had only taken one word from me in front of his friends and Amanda was gone too. I had not expected it to be so easy. He must have already been looking for an excuse to get rid of her. I remember watching him through the gallery window as he put Amanda in a cab and I remember thinking: Life, real life, is about to begin.

  AMANDA

  Of course it came as a shock, especially considering how well things had been going and what a marvelous time we’d all been having. It was a mistake for Mae to interfere. Nobody ended up benefiting from that. I think maybe my advisor’s wife got involved as well. Who knows what that woman told Dennis, and he was in such a vulnerable state so I don’t blame him at all for believing her. Maybe I would if things had turned out differently between us, but my leaving only strengthened our relationship because it gave me the opportunity to prove my commitment to him.

  EDITH (1997)

  The room feels crowded. Faces and coats.

  “Here, drink some ice water. You’ll feel better.” The old woman I saw through the window now holds a shaky glass to my lips. I steady it, look at her poof of white hair. The actress and the girls back out of the room, one by one.

  “Are you embarrassed?” the old woman asks after they leave.

  Of what? Oh. That jittery feeling is back. I try to sit up more but can’t.

  “Don’t be embarrassed. Look at me.” I look at her feet. They don’t even reach the ground. She holds my chin with her soft hands.

  “Shame is useless unless it motivates you to do better. Usually it does no such thing. It only sucks up energy. Drink.”

  I drink.

  “You must be dehydrated from all those tears,” she says.

  My cheeks burn under her cold hands.

  “Do you know who I am?”

  I do not.

  “I’m Ann. I noticed you earlier, noticed you writing dirty words on the glass—”

  I try to protest, but she interrupts me.

  “That was you, Edith. Don’t lie about it! You’re not in trouble. It reminded me of something your grandfather said a long time ago.

  “You knew my grandfather?”

  “Sure. He was a good friend of mine. A dear friend. And he told me that he had a plan for all of the politicians, lobbyists, journalists who were ignoring him, who weren’t returning his phone calls, or reading his letters. He decided he’d haunt them by writing messages in the steam on their bathroom mirrors. Everyone would be forced to either finally hear him out or to start taking cold baths. I hadn’t thought about that in a long time.”

  The woman laughs at her own story and something about her laugh feels familiar.

  “I never got to meet him.”

  “I know,” she said. “He died too young. Are you feeling better? The color is returning to your face. Being brave is very difficult but being a coward is even more difficult. Trust me. Here. Put your head in my lap. I’m going to tell you a story. Close your eyes.”

  She begins to stroke my temples as she talks. It’s nice to have someone touch me. After the mess in the gallery I feel hollowed out and now her words begin to fill me back up…

  “When I was a few years older than you are now, I moved away from home. I was like you—popular, boys liked me. I wasn’t as pretty as you are, but I was pretty enough. A debutant, all that. Had a coming out party at the hotel ballroom, a big deal. My parents agreed to send me to college, but they expected me to come back, marry and play bridge, maybe join a flower club. Instead, I ran off to Louisiana. I told myself—‘I’m just visiting,’ even as I walked into the newspaper office and got a job as a stenographer.

  “When you grow up surrounded by so much wrongness, you don’t know how to notice it even if you want to. It took your grandfather pointing everything out to me before I allowed these vague feelings I’ve always carried with me to take shape and be given names.

  “For example, at the newspaper, when I typed up the crime blotter, the rule was if the person was white it was Mr. or Mrs. and if the person was black it was only the name, no honorific.”

  “That’s crazy,” I say. I wonder how it was I didn’t know this before.

  “Yes. It was. But I didn’t make much of this at first. It had seemed like any other arbitrary grammatical rule. After I met your grandfather though, I began making more and more typos.

  “Or, I’d be having lunch with the other stenographers in the cafeteria overlooking the courthouse across the street, and we’d be laughing, and joking, and suddenly my eyes would catch on the words: Equality, Liberty, Justice, engraved over the courthouse doors, and inexplicably I’d lose my appetite. I wasn’t thinking consciously yet that those words were lies. I was raised with the unconscious assumption that a white life was worth more than a black one. I took for granted that a white man who walked through those courthouse doors would only get two months in jail for murdering a black man, whereas he’d certainly get the chair if the victim were white. Or that a black man wouldn’t get more than a year for killing another black man either, but if he so much as looked at a white woman the wrong way, forget about it. I wasn’t consciously thinking about these disparities because my brain had been conditioned my entire life to turn a blind eye and yet I felt the injustice of all this on a primal level.”

  Her saying this scares me. How is it possible to not know something that is right in front of you?

  “My awakening came slowly. It didn’t happen overnight, though from the outside that’s probably what it looked like because one morning I couldn’t get out of bed. I pulled the sheet over my head and lay there like a corpse for hours. And it’s true, part of me had finally died. I was lying there thinking: What now? What am I supposed to do now? Your grandfather came by to check on me while the landlady stood in the doorway, watching us. He’d recently been through something similar. It’s a rite of passage for all Southern whites, you either open your
eyes and deal with the fallout, which I should say is an ongoing process, or keep them shut, which is maybe more convenient, but also infinitely more difficult.”

  Will it be a rite of passage for me? I wonder. I think about the vague feeling of wrongness and shame that throbs under everything. No, I don’t want to think about it. I focus instead on the old woman’s story.

  “Your grandfather coaxed me out of the house and took me to a party, which is where I met Lydia Van Horn. Has your mother told you about her?”

  I keep my eyes closed but shake my head “no.”

  “Lydia wasn’t the type of person I’d have known back home. She was white, but she was poor. She worked as a seamstress and lived with her sister’s family on the other side of town. She had a plump, young face, but prematurely gray hair and a gentle manner. She was very attentive. I never felt judged, stumbling through all these discoveries in front of her. Your grandfather, though, he couldn’t stand her. She was the subject of one of our first arguments. I was so excited to have a female friend that I was willing to overlook the little things that didn’t add up. Your grandfather thought it was a mistake for me to try to fill my loneliness as quickly as possible.”

  I open my eyes and look at her. “Why?”

  “It’s uncomfortable, but it’s a necessary step in a person’s awakening.”

  Is it? It seems like not giving a hungry person food. She shifts under me, then keeps talking. “Lydia would come over to my rented room and we’d sit on my bed, drinking tea or sherry. She never took her shoes off—I think her stockings had holes in them. She wasn’t a terribly good seamstress. She grew up in the country and, sometimes, I’d get her talking about that. Or, I’d talk about my family. Often, we didn’t talk at all. We’d just enjoy each other’s company, play cards, and then she’d rush off to take the trolley back to her sister’s.

  “Do you know about Willie McGee?”

  I shrug. “His name sounds familiar.”

  “It’s in history books now. He was a black man in Laurel, Mississippi, falsely accused of rape and given the death sentence. I say ‘man,’ but he was barely older than you. It was a lynching, plain and simple, only they were using the justice system to do it. Horrible things were being done to protect the white Southern woman’s ‘virtue.’ So, as a white Southern woman when I heard about Willie McGee, I felt personally responsible.

  “Men at work were joking around about the case like it was nothing—our paper wasn’t even covering it. When I tried to say something, they laughed at me, but rather than feeling embarrassed, I felt a simmering anger. And, as I was sitting in my room, watching Lydia darn socks, that anger transformed into action.

  “‘Lydia,’ I said. ‘We have to protest the execution.’ So she helped me get a few women together for a trip to Laurel and your grandfather and some others pitched in to pay our bus fare.

  “We rode the bus for hours, but the time flew by. I felt close to these women in a way I hadn’t before. We believed that since this was being done, presumably, to protect white Southern women, that when we got there and told them that we didn’t need such protection, they’d listen. It seems strange, I know, that at 23, I could be so naïve.”

  I try to picture her young but I can’t. A blank face.

  “We marched straight from the bus station to the jailhouse, chanting ‘Not in Our Names,’ and holding up signs we’d stayed up late the night before painting. Passersby stopped and stared, some shouted insults at us. A journalist from the paper even took pictures, the same way he would have if a local farmer’s pigs had gotten loose and stormed the courthouse.”

  I snort a little but she keeps going.

  “Lydia was with the rest of us, holding a sign and chanting. She was not as clever or as loud as some of the girls, but I remember thinking how lucky I was to have her on my side because she seemed so solid. As Southern ladies we’d all been socialized to be timid. Standing in front of men dressed in suits and police uniforms, yelling at them, it didn’t come naturally. But the sound of our voices, raised in unison, however awkwardly, was thrilling. We tried to get housewives who were out shopping to join us but of course none did.

  “Eventually, the sheriff arrested us for disturbing the peace and put all six of us in one cell. When you’re raised to believe that being arrested is a shameful thing, it’s hard to ignore this. The married ones especially regretted coming. Lydia, though, her face was blank. While the others argued and cried, she stood there, leaning against the wall, saying nothing. I remember coming up to her and hugging her because I’d imagined she was distraught. It felt very unnatural, like hugging a mailbox. I realized that I’d never hugged her before.”

  I open my eyes and look up at the old woman’s face. Her skin looks so soft. She’s staring off into the middle distance like a blind person. She must have had a mugshot too, probably many of them, enough to have a whole other gallery show.

  “The sheriff only held us for a few hours to teach us naughty girls a lesson, and then escorted us back to the bus station. On the ride home some women wanted to know: aside from humiliating ourselves, what did we achieve? We didn’t save Willie McGee from execution. But I argued that we spoke the truth, and who knows what the ripple effects of that might be.

  “Soon after we came back, your grandfather introduced me to his friend Carl, whom I married. I didn’t need Lydia in the same way. We grew apart and at some point she stopped coming around entirely. Carl and I moved to Tennessee for his job and then I didn’t see Lydia until many years later at your grandfather’s trial.”

  The trial. The trial Mom never talks about.

  “When the prosecution called her to the stand, I didn’t recognize her. Her hair was dyed black, or maybe this had been its real color all along. Her posture was different. She didn’t wear glasses. She said such awful things, ugly things, and had no problem looking at us as she said them. Lydia Van Horn wasn’t even her real name.

  “I tried to understand why she’d betray us. Some said money—she’d been in debt and it turns out that she had a sick son to support—but she was so ruthless on the stand I think it must’ve been ideological. This is mere speculation because really I didn’t know her. She’d been mirroring me back to myself and I’d been too caught up in everything to notice.

  “The charges against your grandfather were sedition, inciting a riot, being a Communist spy because he had been using his name to buy properties in white neighborhoods and then transferring the deeds to black families. The jury wouldn’t have known the difference between ‘communism’ and ‘rheumatism’ if it bit them. Such fear-mongering garbage, spearheaded by my very own Lydia-the-FBI-mole.”

  Mom never told me any of this.

  “Three months into the trial, your grandfather’s heart gave out. It was too much for him.”

  “That’s how he died?” I ask.

  “Yes. He was sensitive, but he was also staunch. He could have run. You know, your father offered to set him and your mother up in Canada, but Jackson wouldn’t hear of it. Jackson said his sweat and blood were in that town and the only way he was leaving was in a coffin. Which is what he did.”

  “Because of Lydia?”

  “I think in part.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “A few years ago, I decided to write her a letter. I don’t know if she needed my forgiveness, but I needed to give it to her. It took a lot out of me to write her, so you can imagine how I felt when the envelope was returned, unopened.”

  “She sent it back to you?”

  “She died.”

  The woman stops talking. She looks down into my face. I would not have forgiven her.

  “Do you think my grandfather should have run away?” If he had run maybe he’d still be alive, and then maybe Mom wouldn’t be in the hospital.

  “No.” She shrugs. “Most of the time in life there are no ‘should-haves.’ You do what you can do.”

  I sit up, grazing someone’s damp winter coat.

  �
��Listen,” she says. “You have a lot to be angry about, and that’s certainly your prerogative. But anger is a sap on your resources. You feel angry because you feel helpless. But you’re not helpless. What is it that you want?”

  “I want my mother,” I say. “I want to go home.”

  “So go,” she says. “Go tonight if you have to. Pass me my purse.”

  I pass her the fringed leather bag at her feet.

  “Here,” she empties her wallet without counting it. “Take some money for the bus fare.”

  I’m surprised. She folds my fingers over the stack of bills.

  “Go. Tell your mother… send your mother my love. I heard she was in the hospital again. If my daughter were doing better, I would try to visit. Speaking of which, I should get back to Franny. Help me up. Thank you.”

  She limps out of the coatroom. The door swings shut behind her.

  PART II

  Chapter 5

  PSYCHIATRIC NOTES ON

  MARIANNE MCLEAN

  Date: April 14, 1997

  Identifying data:

  Name: Marianne Louise McLean

  Race: Caucasian

  Gender: Female

  Age: 45 y.o.

  Height: 5’5

  Weight: 105lbs

  Hair: Black

  Eyes: Gray

  Physical Description: Long elegant fingers. Feline movements.

  Marital Status: Divorced

  Occupation: poet (?)/mother/none

  Chief Complaint:

  Patient was brought in via Chalmers Hospital following a suicide attempt (asphyxiation). Patient is in unstable condition. She is being held indefinitely, as per the request of Doreen Williams, her legal guardian.

  History of Illness:

  Patient was hospitalized once previously, 12 years ago. Severe post-partum depression and psychosis suspected. Bipolar Disorder and Borderline Personality Disorder seems likely diagnosis based on her dissociative spells, unstable sense of self, splitting with regards to feelings toward ex-husband, and the hypomanic and depressive states.