White Nights in Split Town City

by Annie DeWitt

  “I agree with him there,” she said. “It might be inappropriate.”

  She stared hard at me as though searching for something. I looked at her naked hand. I thought about taking it in mine. I thought about smelling her fingers. I thought they would smell like something but I didn’t know what.

  “Although,” she said, stroking the edge of the bed. “It might be instructive.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “He lived down the street,” she started. “His father ran the bakery. He was the oldest of the three boys. All handsome too. Or at least that’s how I remembered them. He was my sister’s age then.”

  “And now?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “Now I suppose we’re the same age. Maybe he’s a few years older. He had some gray in his hair.”

  “What does he do?” I said.

  “He writes films,” she said. “Or he wrote one film I remember. It was based on a book of his that was optioned for a movie. The book was called Did I Wake You Up?”

  “What a title,” I said.

  “Well,” she said. “We were in college then.”

  “What was he like?” I said.

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “He wasn’t. We went to a few diners.

  He picked me up in his car. I borrowed your Grandmother’s mink. But after a week, I realized he hadn’t changed any since he’d written that book. He hadn’t expanded.”

  “Is he married?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “He married young and divorced. He was in town for a few weeks visiting his parents.”

  “Where does he live?” I said.

  “Someplace sunny. Near the beach,” she said.

  “Sounds illuminating,” I said.

  “It wasn’t,” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I figured if I couldn’t feel anything for a man like that then maybe I couldn’t feel for anything new,” she said.

  “We’re not new either,” I said.

  “I know,” she said.

  Mother got up and walked over toward the mirror over the dresser. She’d hung it there so she could see the length of herself. Father had marked the wall with a ruler while I’d helped her find the correct height. The mirror was part of a set Granny Olga had given her. The wood was fine but the glass was damaged in places. When you looked in it on a cloudy day you lost pieces of yourself, as though bits of your body had drifted away. Mother turned now in front of it, examining herself from both sides.

  “I may be old,” she said cupping her breast in her hand for a moment, giving her chest more shape. “But I’m not blind for feeling.”

  She looked so young in the light.

  19.

  Margaret sat on the wooden stool in our kitchen the next morning as Mother brewed her tea. The two women had quickly resumed their habit.

  “Friday night this town belongs to the bikers,” Margaret said as I yawned and slipped into the kitchen to poke around for something to eat. “They stop for subs at Harry’s on their way up the interstate.”

  Mother laughed. “If I find you sitting out Friday nights on the terrace in the center of town hitting on the musicians and widowers, I’ll be disappointed,” she said.

  “Not at all,” Margaret said. “We could use a new scene.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Mother said. “I still have my engagements.”

  “Bring them along,” Margaret said. “I hear there’s pinball in the back.”

  “You’re terrible,” Mother said.

  “Sure,” Margaret said. “You depend on me for it.”

  “I spent my marriage preparing to be a lover,” Margaret continued.

  “By the time I got around to applying myself, the opportunity had disappeared.”

  “So find a new opportunity,” Mother said. “It’s all in the description.”

  “Sure,” Margaret said. “I’d try on any description which didn’t involve organizing my day around when the plants in the window get thirsty and the bird feeder needs seed. Not that I mind. It’s my thrill really. All that time with no one to bother me. Sometimes I find myself standing in the bathroom wondering what season it is.”

  “I do the same for different reasons,” Mother said.

  “I bet you do,” Margaret said.

  “It’s terrible,” Mother said. “This drought.”

  “It won’t let up,” Margaret said. “Lately I wake up in the night feeling like I drank a shaker of pepper.”

  “It must be the change,” Mother said. “My mother was forever with it. I remember her sitting out on the porch one summer with a cloth around her neck. She put a fan in the window so that it blew out over the rocker where she sat. She said she needed to adjust the air in the room. One night I came home to find her asleep outside in the rocker, her nightie pulled up around her waist.”

  “That’s a thirst of another kind altogether,” Margaret laughed.

  The Separatists had adjourned for the summer. Several of the women were on vacation. In lieu of their meetings, Margaret had taken to spending Sunday mornings on our portico training Mother in the ways of meditation. Together they sat cross-legged on the carpet in front of the window that looked out over our road and free associated among the throw pillows. Margaret kept a flask on her. Every now and again she doused her coffee with a liquor that smelled like anise and holly.

  After a period of silence, the woman free associated while watching out the window for any cars that might pass. Mother referred to these mornings as her unloadings. To me, free association seemed akin to the acts of youthful poetics that unveiled themselves at sleepovers or the late night parties I imagined Fender and his brothers having at the butte. The more you improvised, the less committed you were to the necessity of yourself.

  That morning after their session, Margaret made a motion toward the barn.

  “Let’s take that horse of yours out,” she said.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “Good,” she said. “I’ve often wondered how he went.”

  I went upstairs to get dressed. When I came down Mother was buttoning Margaret into one of her slickers. On Margaret the slicker appeared boxy and childish. There was a jauntiness to the shape of the coat Margaret’s body couldn’t support. It was odd to see Mother bother over another woman. The way her hands moved over the buttons, it was as though she were caring for a child. When she was done, she smoothed Margaret’s braid over her shoulder.

  “There,” Mother said, running her hands down the front of Margaret’s coat to smooth the portions where it had wrinkled.

  Margaret blushed. Her eyes creased oddly around the corners.

  Mother’s touch had a way of lighting up things to which she couldn’t always respond.

  “Give me time to get dressed,” Margaret said, embarrassed.

  The barn was quiet at that hour. Margaret had brought her old Leica. The camera hung from a leather strap, which she slung over her shoulder. As the Sheik and I entered the pasture, Margaret was bent over the water trough trying to capture an oak leaf where it had fallen onto the surface of the water.

  “Tender little floater, isn’t it,” she said as we pulled up next to her. I let The Sheik have his head and graze a little in the yard.

  “Once,” I said. “I found a bird in there. Father said it had flown into the window of the barn.”

  “Birds do that,” Margaret said. “Sometimes they loose their sense of direction and fly into the glare. Nature is brutal. It’s our circumstance. Sometimes all you can do is turn your head and look the other way.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  I turned to look toward Mother. She was sitting on the fencepost near the gate. She waved when she saw me look over.

  “Giddy up,” she said, motioning Margaret into the saddle.

  “Well,”
Margaret said. “Let’s get a few rounds out of these oxers before the old man comes out here and starts directing us.”

  I cupped my hands and gave Margaret a leg up. The Sheik came to attention as she swung into the saddle hitching her shirt up around her legs.

  I stood in the middle of the ring and observed how the Sheik moved under her. Margaret rode with a stiff confidence. There was a dictation to the way she posted. Her rhythm worked less in communion with the speed of the flesh beneath her and more in line with the order of her thoughts. There was a grim set to her elbow, which she kept locked close to her waist. Her eyes she trained on the horizon. She seemed hardly to rise out of the saddle as the jumps passed under her.

  There was a nervous tentativeness to their whole program. Even the Sheik buried his head and bore into the jumps as though he hardly cared whether he lifted his chest or crashed into them. Afterwards he cantered off in a short, clipped stride. The only thrill was watching Margaret’s skirt flare up behind her when the Sheik took a jump too high.

  After a few rounds, Wilson came out of the RV and sat on the rail next to Mother to watch. He’d had a bath. His hair, a thin sweep of white, which he often wore combed over his forehead slicked close to his face, fluttered in the breeze. Wilson had developed a cough. During the day, Otto made him wear a medical mask in the house, which Wilson strapped over the thick part of his face in order not to spread his germs. His Helene’s immunity was low from the transfusions.

  I watched as Mother leaned close to Wilson on the rail, helping him remove the elastic of the mask from around one of his ears. “It’s okay,” she said, freeing him. “You can speak as much as you want out here. There so much air, whatever you have won’t travel.”

  As The Sheik started to tire, I walked toward the far part of the pasture away from the jumps and the makeshift ring. The earth there was rocky and sloped, unsuitable for riding. I felt a pang of guilt in my stomach as I carried Margaret’s camera. She’d wanted me to capture some of her lift. I’d stood close to one of the oxers and snapped a few shots as she’d cleared them. Capturing the frames gave some pause to her steady forward throttle.

  The far end of the pasture was covered in milkweed. It was the season where their husks dried and the pods split. I sat down in a dense patch on the far rise of the hill. There was a feeling of disassociation watching the seed take to the air. The area was thick with flies and bees that propagated the cycle.

  As Margaret circled the ring through the haze of the milkweed, I was reminded of the winter Fay Mountain had been stormed in by a nor’easter. The drifts had risen half way up the door to the house. Father had to shovel a path into the yard. There was talk of pipes freezing. After the electricity went, I’d helped Father empty the contents of the refrigerator into bags which we’d buried in the drifts in front of the house. Mother’d grilled pancakes in a skillet on top of the wood stove. Afterwards, she’d washed Birdie and me in pots of water she had warmed on the wood stove. By the time we carried the pots to the bathroom, the water had already gathered some of the chill of the house. We stood for a quick dousing. Mother took off her rings and set them on the rim of the tub so as not to scratch us. “Those will be yours,” she’d said, “After I go.”

  We’d driven to the barn. Margaret had insisted. She needed to get home. Mother sat in the front seat with her legs stretched out over the bench toward Margaret as we drove away. “Chicken legs,” Margaret teased her. Margaret drove as she did normally, one hand at midnight, one leg crushed up under her crotch. The brush at the bottom of the driveway to Otto’s barn grew thick over the fence. “Blind drive,” Father had warned Mother. “Be careful when you turn out.”

  The accident happened much the way I’d watched The Sheik leap up over the rail as Margaret had ridden him. The world slowed. Movements were jerky and halting. He’d come careening. He’d accelerated around the corner. His bike went up and over the hood. We watched through the windshield.

  Mother was the first out of the Volvo. I recognized the tan of the windbreaker laying in the gutter to the side of the road. It was Wilson. “Don’t move, baby,” Mother said crouching down next to him. She patted the old man’s hair where it folded over his forehead. Mother’d had an accident once in a barn as a youngster. Her spine had ruptured on the concrete where she’d fallen out of the loft. “Don’t move her,” the man who owned the barn had said to her parents. For a few weeks she’d been in a body cast. Afterwards she’d walked off.

  We waited silently by Wilson’s body until the ambulance came.

  That night Margaret stayed with us. “He’ll be alright,” Mother said. “He’s a good boy.” Every few hours the phone rang. Callie called from the hospital with updates. “Observation,” she said. “There’s nothing we can do now but wait.”

  Margaret sat in the club chair in our living room while Father smoked his cigars. Every now and again she got up and paced the room. She had the same blank face I’d seen on Father the morning I’d found him sitting there after Mother had left for the city. “Don’t stare,” Mother said to me, adjusting the afghan on Margaret’s shoulders.

  For Margaret’s sake we went through the motions. “Blind drive,” Mother repeated, taking Margaret’s hand as she led her up the stairs to bed later that evening. “It could’ve happened to any one of us.”

  Margaret passed the night with my parents. Mother made her a bed on the chaise that lined the far end of their room under the window.

  I woke in the night to the phone ringing. Granny Olga answered it. After she hung up, she padded up the stairs in her slow heavy gait. She paused outside my parents’ room before she entered to collect her breath. I reached down between my legs to feel around for something to make me feel better. Something to make me land. All I felt was the sweat from the day and the nervousness.

  Sometime later I needed to pee. As I crossed the hall, I stopped in front of my parents’ room. Their light was on. The door was open a crack. Margaret was standing on the deck where Father went out to do his screaming when he couldn’t sleep nights. He was standing there now beside her with his back turned. Margaret was in Mother’s arms. They had closed the slider so as not to wake us. Through the glass I could make out the outline of Margaret’s face as she covered it with a pillow and unleashed whatever it was she was needing to say.

  In that moment, I felt Wilson’s presence rise up over the road. I imagined him as he had been in the barn that evening. “I’m gonna rake a girl,” he’d said, dancing in the dimly lit barn. Here was the moment, I thought, when all the knowledge the world had kept from him came rushing back into his body like the third eye I’d often heard Margaret speak to Mother about.

  “What’s the difference between vision and a vision?” Margaret had said, placing her fingers on her forehead and exhaling the breath in her body until she was empty, so empty she said she felt weightless until her chest rose up again and sucked the world back in.

  I had seen Wilson’s face that night. His breath had steamed up the window despite the summer heat, Skeeter Davis’s “The End of the World” playing on the hi-fi in the background. “Just lie back,” I’d said. Or maybe Otto’d said, “Just look out the window.” When Wilson had knocked, I’d looked up at him. He’d waved. “Let him watch,” Otto had said.

  Perhaps, I thought, this is what is meant by witness. The act of stealing something private from someone, something they otherwise would never have released into the world. As Margaret released her long, low scream, I thought I was free. I knew Wilson was no longer with us.

  20.

  The roads that circled the town were hilly and lush. Occasionally on the bus when school resumed, we passed one of the old farmhouses with their acres of clear land traversed by long runs of post and fence. Windmills of painted pewter spun over the barns. Animals were once again let outdoors. If you closed your eyes to a slit and looked out the window you could follow the gradations of green as the lands
cape shifted. A short jaunt down the road was a single story prefab, the likes of which I’d seen the tractor trailer trucks deliver down the highway. The bikers who lived there had plowed a circular drive in front of the house to park their chrome. A line of roadsters littered the drive and the grove under the pine trees in front of the house. They’d hung an American flag out a window. Next was the junkyard where people brought the automobiles they’d driven to the ground.

  Stacks of compacted cars towered around a two-door garage constructed of plywood and strips of corrugated metal. The sign out front advertised tires and parts. A pit bull ran the length of the barbwire that lined the yard each morning as we passed.

  Granny Olga had seen me off the first morning. “Here,” she’d said pushing a small bag of wax paper into my hand before I’d boarded the bus. “One for each of your little friends.” She was standing on the porch, her hair still wet on the curlers. Around the thin ply of her nightgown she’d wrapped the old mink Mother kept in the closet in the hall, the one she’d bought in the city.

  Halfway through our route, the bus came to a halt at the end of the hill which bottomed out into K’s drive. It had been some time since K had sat us. Since Mother’s return, she’d become just another of that summer’s passing apparitions. K descended from the steps of the salty Cape that morning just as I’d remembered her, leathered and floating. The small red door swung shut behind her. She paused mid-step in the middle of her parents’ plot. A look crossed her face. She pointed toward the wooden bridge that lined the brook where the water rose when the road washed out. A large tan form lumbered across it. In the beam of the bus’s headlights—the driver had been cautious in the mist—I could make out the faint glean of the animal’s coat. The body resembled a bobcat in grace and build. The thin grain of its fur pulled away from the muscle. There was something noble in its stagger. Its head hung, barely able to carry it’s own weight, and yet the animal continued forward despite the blood letting from the gash in its chest. From the scars and mud on its body, it looked as though it had traveled a great distance. Its torso was already weaving. Whatever had hit it had run.