White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  At the table, Dan Sr. had said grace. It seemed we’d barely stopped eating when the children were up clearing and scraping.

  A bungalow built in the style of the frontier with a large triangular atrium and a sleep loft that overlooked the kitchen and living area, the house itself boasted the slick and sleaze of a seventies ski cabin where people from the city went to drink bourbon and turn down the sheets on one another’s’ wives for a weekend before stumbling back into their Rolls, the fridge still stocked with dark winter brews and the carcasses of half eaten chickens. Here were the glass windows Mother dreamed of. I imagined Ginny luxuriating in front of them each evening after a long day of making the rounds, slowly undressing herself in front of the wall of glass that looked out onto the street while Dan watched from the couch, her thin chemise slipping down around her ankles to reveal her gentle curvature, which she pressed to the window, bending over so that through the part of her legs Dan could watch for the flash of headlights as they came up the street as Ginny made love to whomever might come to pass.

  Meanwhile, the kids were tucked into their dormers at the rear of the house at an early hour. Lissie laid on her back and breathed heavily through her nose. Danny engrossed in a monster truck magazine illuminated by the small screw-top flashlight he kept under his sheets where he would eventually keep a switchblade and later his first gun.

  The bungalow’s distinguishing feature was the flag Dan Sr. had erected on a tall metal pole on the front lawn. The girth of the pole intimated the seriousness with which Dan took this project. Erected in a small round bed of concrete around which the grass was mown, the flagpole was treated with the reverence of a monument. Each morning Dan walked out onto the lawn, barefoot and winded, with his eyes lifted toward the sky. Not a man to be rushed, he fixed any fold or snag in the flag’s fabric before raising the stripes to their full altitude where they billowed for the road to revere.

  That morning, we’d caught Dan securing the line when we drove by. Recognizing Ray’s truck as it lumbered down the hill, Dan waved, eyeing the hitch and the boat in back with envy. “Good man,” Ray said as we barreled by, saluting the flag through the window. A fellow man of the uniform, Dan came to attention. Ray chuckled. “Crazy bugger,” he said under his breath. “Now there’s a man who knows how to keep his luck around.”

  Beyond the Young’s house, down the road a stretch, was the stop sign where Lissie, Danny Jr. and I waited mornings, the little bridge in all its earnestness, and then the beginnings of Ada and Cash’s fields, their gray shingled house, and beside it the farm stand.

  The streets skirting the radius of town were decorated by the types of homes with driveways that ran in a horseshoe and were lined in a reception of old town cars. Pillared porches and tall white fences enclosed trellises of wild roses and pots of imported tomatoes. Here decadence shifted in perennial storm. In winter, when the flowers and the tomatoes were under snow, images of horses in gingham blankets speckled the landscape. The lawns of these homes were turned into pastures where horses were kept close to the houses. Occasionally, the animals would run to the front of the yards and cast their necks over the fences, whinnying at the cars as they passed.

  In the center of the town was a green with a gazebo where people were married. Around it, pillars of New England gathered in silent communion. The library with its green clock face. The Inn that housed the old tavern. Steeples and bell towers of every denomination. Next to the Congregational church sat a legal office, a tearoom, and a country store. Occasionally, Birdie and I rode our bikes to the store and bought Pop Rocks and Candy Cigarettes with change we collected from the tin under the kitchen phone. Margaret was sitting house for the young, recently widowed lawyer whose office was in the center of town. Margaret said our lawyer was suffering what every man faces after the death of his wife: the prospect of many sleepless nights bookended by two days of solitude. Weekends, for him, were marked by the occasional meal at the pub and the sound of the dog’s footsteps crossing the wooden floor of the kitchen in the morning before begging at the door to be taken out. The lawyer still kept up with his parents whom he often visited. Margaret, his neighbor and sister in solitude, watched his house. Despite the depth of its character, her own studio lacked the yawn and stretch of a true home in which the soul could forget itself between doorways.

  As Ray pulled into the drive, Margaret was outside watering the begonias. She’d tied a white scarf around her straw hat to keep it steady as she worked. The brim shielded her face. When she moved her head the shadow muted the sharp cleft of her nose and the harshness of her cheekbones. In one hand she was slung an old watering can. In the other, a metal trowel, which she waved at me as I walked up the drive.

  “Have her home by six, Margie,” Ray yelled out the window as he backed into the road.

  “Always a doll, Ray,” Margaret boomed back at him. “Save me that bass this time, if you catch one.”

  As Ray’s truck disappeared down the road, Margaret turned and started up the walk.

  “Let’s put lunch in the fridge and have a swim,” she said. “I like to get all my work out of the way in the mornings when I’m still good for it.”

  The kitchen was open and light. The sun streamed in over the large cast iron sink illuminating an island of wood over which hung a collection of cookware.

  “I’ll chop,” she said. “You give these a wash.”

  The salad was a cobbled together affair. Lettuce chopped into thick wedges, strips of bacon left from breakfast, and a handful of strong smelling cheese. Margaret smoked as she worked, resting her cleaver on the edge of the cutting board every now and again for a drag on her cigarette.

  There was a distance to her silence that I appreciated. After the vegetables were chopped, we went for a swim.

  The pool was long and in-ground. Strings of buoys were set up in lanes. Margaret removed her hat and her sarong, draping them over the fence post before heading to the deep end where she dipped her toes and then dove. I watched her swim several lengths. The oval of her back moved down the pool at a steady clip. When she reached the end, she curled into a ball and flipped under water. The backs of her heels were the only parts of her which displayed any evidence of exertion. They blushed a slight red as she pushed off the wall.

  I put my arms over my head and dove in to the lane next to her. I paddled in a rough breast stroke, an awkward choppy necking which involved a few strong pulls punctuated by the occasional scissor of the legs. I could never stave off the feeling of drowning.

  Afterward, we sat in the lawn chairs and dried off. There was a slight breeze. It dried the hairs around my temples. When I ran my fingers through them, I felt a tug where the roots pulled on the skin. Margaret tied her hair back with one of the thick rubber bands from the post office. She kept a stack of these around her wrist.

  “Well then,” she said. “Let’s have a nap to revive ourselves before lunch.”

  She put her hat over her face as she slept. Every now and again when she let out a low breath, I glimpsed at the chair where she was reclined. Margaret’s body was a solid raft which didn’t slumber out around her. Her breasts were modest. Small canonical hills that rode close to her body. Nothing about her outsized humble geometry.

  I grew tired and lay back in my chaise. When the sun hit, my body warmed at even integers. After a while the insides of my lids were lit a bright yellow, which burned when I stared up into them.

  I woke to Margaret tapping me on the shoulder.

  “I must’ve drifted off,” I said.

  “Are you getting enough sleep nights?” she said.

  “I’ve never been good at it,” I said.

  We lunched on the veranda next to the pool. The meal was punctuated by the occasional passing of the water or the chirp of a chickadee in the distance. Margaret kept a small white mug in her hand on which from time to time she tapped her ring. It was filled with a dark liquid
I figured for coffee. She sipped it as we ate.

  Afterward we retired to the darkroom, a makeshift studio in the bathroom of the hallway off the mudroom. For Margaret there was nothing secretive in the way images revealed themselves. The beauty of developing lay in the science of the chemicals and the way a body moved in a dark space. I sat on the back of the toilet and manned the wash. “Not such a bad day for an old lady,” Margaret said, holding up a large black and white image of the young lawyer diving into the pool. “What do you think of this one?”

  In that moment, I realized Mother had passed countless hours in this space. Here her presence was felt even in absence. It surprised me that Margaret had not mentioned her. A painful awareness was let back into the room. Mother would’ve known just what to say about anything. Here I was holding my tongue.

  “I’ve never been much good at diving,” I eventually said.

  That night Margaret drove me to the Starlings’. She took the back roads. Her old white Volvo, with its wooden stripe and bullish head, flew down the hill out of town. She drove in the center of the road with no regard for sides or lanes. With the wheel she took a light touch, switching hands often to tap her cigarette. I put my arm out the window when we took the curves.

  Ray’s pickup was parked in the drive when we arrived.

  The two men were on the back porch.

  “You’re forgetting something,” Margaret said as I opened the door of the car. She reached into the backseat and handed me the dusty black body of the old point and shoot we’d practiced with that afternoon.

  “Here,” she said. “Next time, we’ll develop some of yours.”

  There was something definite about the weight of the machine in my hands. I slipped the camera strap over my head, righting its body on my chest.

  “Sure,” I said.

  Father and Ray were on the deck as I came up the stairs. Their backs to me, the two men stood side by side looking out over the yard. Ray was teaching Father how to shoot. “Loosen your grip and let your wrist do the work,” Ray said.

  I paused as Father released a round over the pool and into the clearing. A metallic smell hung in the air. Ruth emerged from the kitchen with a tray of rock glasses and a bottle of Scotch. Father and Ray startled at the sound of the screen behind her.

  “Where’s all your fish?” I said.

  Father turned to look at me. I glimpsed a light in his eyes, a reflection perhaps from Ruth’s lampshade in the window. As he bent down, it flickered and went out. I reached up to him. He picked me up in his arms and pulled me to his chest.

  “Let’s get you home,” he said. “I bet that sister of yours is knee-deep in trouble.”

  My legs knocked against the Starlings’ railing as Father carried me down the stairs to the truck. I was too big already for carrying.

  The sun set over the hill as Ray drove Father and I home. The bed of the truck behind us smelled of sweat and fish. The stink came in through the windows.

  “Wreaks to high heaven,” Father said.

  “Keeps the coyotes away,” Ray joked. “They’ve been kicking up a storm. Woke me from the dead last night. I went out on to the porch and heard this yelping. It sounded like it was coming from over your direction. By the time I got my gun, whatever it was had wandered off.”

  “Poor sucker,” Father said.

  “Next time,” Ray said. “He’ll get what’s coming to him.”

  13.

  Fender turned me into the kind of girl who was always tearing the clothes off her body at the first sign of running water. “Hold up, little bug,” Father’d say those nights I came home from the clearing. “Stop all your buzzing. You’ll confuse the flies.”

  The day after Father’s big fish, I was waiting for Fender at the start of the drive. The smell of bass in the morning is enough to make anyone go running into the world. Father was sleeping. I scribbled a note for him on a napkin and left it in the kitchen under the glass duck where Mother’d once stashed notes to Father those nights she was going to be late at a Separatist meeting.

  “You’re early,” Fender said when he arrived.

  “Stunk out,” I said.

  “Well,” Fender said. “If your funk gets too thick down there in the clearing, you might have to go bathe it off in the stream.”

  The previous week we’d flung ourselves headlong into a stealing pact, pilfering Liden’s collection of dirty magazines. Fender’d come down one morning with a bruiser. Liden had gone on a hitting streak. K and I iced Fender’s eye with bags of frozen peas. We made him promise he’d sleep it off in the basement.

  Fender and I were going to paper the box by the marsh with cut outs from Liden’s magazines. Fender’d been slipping them out of the attic one by one since the bruiser. Each morning he brought me a few glossies: monster trucks, and Sports Illustrated, and some of the harder core stuff, which he kept at the bottom of the pile and told me not to be alarmed about. “That’s not for papering,” he said. “One night we’ll build a bonfire and blaze this smut.”

  “Sure,” I said. Smut sounded like it would burn.

  Fender was leaning hard on something. “Dad’s home,” he said. “First time since last time.”

  “When was last time?” I said.

  “Oh,” he said. “When Mom went on a cruise with her pharmacist. Said he came around to watch over us while she was out fucking. Admitted to liking us a little bit even.”

  “You’re a likable lot,” I said. “Minus your brothers.”

  “Mostly,” he said, “I think he came back to clean out his things when she was out of his hair. Now he’s on us about the house.”

  “Is it his?” I said.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “He left it to her when he split. Payoff for his mistress until he found out she had her own on the side. Now he lords it over her whenever he’s short on money.”

  “Maybe they’re fighting over custody,” I said.

  “Nah,” he said. “At this point we probably belong to the state.”

  “Refugees of California,” I laughed pointing at an ad for surfboards on our box.

  “Right,” he said. “At least it’s better than Michigan. Michigan never had any thing other than a lake.”

  “Well,” I said, “At least you could row out into it if you needed to make a break for a while.”

  We abandoned the bikes in the sand next to the mailbox and packed into the marsh on foot. Every now and again Fender gunned me with one of his half-smiles. When the wind picked up, I thought I smelled a trace of cologne he’d lifted from his father.

  At the bridge, he smoked a few cigarettes while I rummaged around under the trees picking my sprinters, short narrow twigs with enough heft to get picked up by the current but without the girth to create friction with the undertow. I won twice of my own merit.

  Fender lifted a small golden bottle out of the pocket of his bomber, which he said he wore to protect his arms from the brush, but really I knew he was keeping his bruises hidden.

  “What’s with that?” I said.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  He took a few swigs, more nosegay than fire. It made me sad, this kind of trying.

  “You don’t need any,” he said, when I reached for it.

  “How do you know what I need?” I said.

  It didn’t take long before the box from the rider was gleaming. Elmer’s glue, monster trucks, beaches with girls with all their womanhood in the chest. According to the front door, Winchesters were on special. We clipped the ad for surfboards that boasted the slogan California Dreamin’, and posted it on the rear wall above the little window I’d slit.

  The box was big enough that we could lay side by side on our backs with our legs stretched. Fender had stripped down to his shorts. He bathed his T-shirt every now and again in the stream and tied it around his neck.

  “Take
that thing off,” I said. “Before you flood the place.”

  “Just you make me,” he said.

  I straddled his middle with the thick part of my thighs while batting around at his head trying to undo the place where his T-shirt was knotted. The move was a holdover from childhood games of wrestling with Father. Father had said he didn’t want me to turn soft like him.

  Fender was swift but I had the advantage of his sleepiness from the liquor. I had him by the wrists. We paused like this for a minute, his arms out in front of me, raised up above his head. His chest heaved. I looked him in the face.

  “Not bad for a light weight,” he said.

  We struggled, my forehead cupped in the palm of his hand, the weight of my body blazing down into him, until a head rush set in.

  “Uncle,” I said, and he released me.

  I crawled off Fender’s body and lay on my back beside him. I pulled the front of my T-shirt out of my cut-offs and wiped the sweat from my eyes.

  “You’re taking up all the air,” Fender said quietly.

  The hair under his armpit brushed my neck as he slipped his arm under my head.

  I slid my hand down the front of my jeans, pausing to be sure he was watching. As I stared up at the sky, I made small circular movements with my hand. The birds chirped and Fender was silent as he watched. I thought of the young girl in the barn, the day she had showed me. She’d laid down in the hay stall one afternoon and spread her legs. She was wearing a pair of thick white tights with one of those circular crotches. Her hand moved around inside it.