“It’s to the death,” he says and I stand up. I cannot watch for very long. “Where are you going?” John asks and I shrug and let my hair fall back in front of my eyes.
“How about some?” he says and he pulls out a Hershey from his apron pocket and pats his knees so I’ll come to him and sit on his lap.
“No thank you,” I say.
“No thank you, what’s that? I never heard you say that before,” he says. “Fuck, that is what you say. That is all you know how to say,” he says.
“Fuck, no thank you,” I say. He nods his head and keeps nodding it.
“Remember me, kid,” he says.
“Why, where are you going?” I ask.
“It’s you who’s left, I’m not going anywhere,” he says and he puts his Hershey back into his pocket.
“No,” I say, “I won’t remember you.”
“Remember all the crap I gave you, the Hersheys and the sodas and the hot dogs,” he says, “just remember that.” He stands and puts his hands on the handles of his cart as if he’s about to push it in front of him, but he doesn’t go anywhere, he just stands, looking out at the park, and it is me who walks backward, away from him, watching him get smaller, deciding to see if I can walk all the way home backwards, knowing I’m getting closer because the bells from the church near my home are ringing and the sound is getting louder as I walk.
Our mother comes home dangling a set of keys. A few weeks at a lake cabin in the country. A woman at work is lending it to us. Our mother says the woman at work is moving up, now has other options and a chalet in the Alps for her vacation needs. The cabin, the woman warned, had not been summered in since summers long gone. She handed over the keys to our mother on a miniature gold stirrup key chain. “Yee haw,” our mother said and says again as she turns the key in the front door’s lock.
Inside mold grows in creeping fashion up the sparsely whitewashed walls. The cabin smells as it if has been sitting at the bottom of the lake for years and was just lifted up and set in the woods where we are, where the sun hardly shines, where its walls and peeling-down wallpaper and warped floorboards will never dry. The mold grows in corners up from the floor in fuzzy humped shapes like the backs of furry animals most likely found in these dark woods.
Where’s the lake? We look out windows ridden with bullet holes from the guns of poorly aimed hunters or from BB guns town boys shot for winter fun. “The lake is near,” our mother says, while looking out at the trees with leafy green tops and long grooves in the bark like furrows in a farmer’s field. Our brother carries Ma Mère and puts her on a wrought-iron chair in the glassed-in porch where she and our mother drink Bloody Marys they stir with their fingers, flecks of black pepper swirling in a whirlpool of red. Our brother sits with them on the glassed-in porch and drinks with them, saying he has developed a taste for tomato in Spain. “I will will myself to die here in this cabin,” Ma Mère says to our mother.
Branches press against the windows. Roots finger up through the crawl space beneath the cabin. We are dappled here. Triangles and circles of light play on our summer tees, our suntanned faces, our melting pops of lemon and of lime.
The dog cannot go out without coming back in having picked up something from outside in her fur. Foxtails in between her toes she worries with her muzzle and bits of twigs hang from her brushlike fanning tail.
They call them “bloodies,” their drinks, and we leave Ma Mère and our mother and our brother drinking them and we go explore. Sticks in hand, we head for the lake swatting spider webs aside and following a path we are not sure is a path but could be just the space between rows where skunk cabbage grows and where we weave through slender maples just our height, our heads level with their modest show of leaves about to turn. We are coming on fall.
The lake is a mirror and the wind is at bay. We walk to the end of the dock, sidestepping dried dead worms pulled waterlogged from hooks that never felt a bite. We look down at ourselves in the smooth lake. Above our heads clouds float by and a raven caws and crosses the lake. Our eyes follow it. There’s nothing over there we see, just more our-sized maple trees, and tufts of grass growing on a black and muddy shore. There’s a boat by our dock half-filled with water and a split wooden oar and a life vest missing straps.
We jump into the boat and set to bailing. The dog on the dock starts to bark. We are breaking all her rules. Louisa paddles us away. The lake is clear. This is the water we drink, she says, this is the reservoir. We can see fish swim beneath us and turtles in an upward climb.
Later we say we taste it in the water from the tap, the wood from the split wooden oar. Taste, we say, and offer some to our mother, but she says, “No, thanks, I’ve got my bloody.”
There is a family of eleven who shares our woods. At night in our beds we can hear them. A door slam, their cat, the mother running baths.
“Catholic,” our mother says, shaking her head.
We see the mother reading aloud to them from a Bible while they are snapping beans at her feet and listening. Sometimes we listen too, we cannot help it. The mother’s voice is loud. It carries down to us on days we go to the lake and jump from rock to rock in the shallows.
“The Lord sayeth,” we hear and a breeze ruffles the lake’s water as if it were not a breeze at all, but the power of her words. The sun is warm on us while we sit on the rocks, each of us on a different one, our knees pulled to our chins. If someone from the hill looked down, he might not see the rocks, but only us, seeming to float on top of the water. But no one ever sees us. It is a quiet lake, except for the crow who caws and travels between the banks or the sound of our one oar splashing through the water in the sinking boat we sail.
Our mother says she does not want us listening to the mother of eleven read.
“Get religion from the lake,” she tells us. She goes down with us sometimes. We hold her bloody for her while she negotiates paths and when she misses her step she grabs at maple leaves. She stops and stares and looks out at the water and breathes deeply and then motions for us to give her a drink of her bloody and then she puts her hand on her chest as if her heart were hurting her.
“This might be lovelier than France,” she says and then she sits on the pier and lights a cigarette and cups her hand to hold the falling ash which she later drops on the path on the walk back up to the cabin in the woods.
Ma Mère looks out her glassed-in porch and points to a mockingbird in a tree branch.
“Whippoorwill, whippoorwill,” she says in a French accent and raps the porch glass. The bird turns his head to each side.
“Say it, merde,” she says.
The family of eleven bakes bread and we smell it down our way, a sweet smell of something our mother thinks is molasses.
“I can bake,” our mother says and she tries to light our oven but the blue flame explodes out the oven door and blackens the white enamel sides.
“How about I teach you French?” Ma Mère says and tells us to sit in a circle at her feet.
She says, “Repetez moi, whippoorwill, whippoorwill.”
“That’s not French,” we say.
“Oh, merde,” she says. “Just say it. Someone. Please,” she says.
She is the first to spot our father in a car that sways from side to side as it makes its way up our driveway, humped and bumpy with piles of dirt made by rains and winter weather past. “Cherie,” she calls to our mother, “your husband’s come. He wants you to take him back.”
Our father found out where we were when he called our mother’s place of work. He looks different. He’s hunched over, looking like he is trying to run away from an outstretched arm of the law through some low-ceilinged tunnel. We have the outstretched part right, his hand reaching for a handout, whatever we can spare. He is in debt up to his ears. Lucky, he says, to still be wearing the shirt on his back. Our mother won’t come out. She sits with Ma Mère in the cabin with the door locked. He makes us walk by his car. Note the baldness of his tires, the needle of the gas gau
ge hovering at empty, the spiderweb crack in the windshield. Too bad, we say. We dig into our pockets for him. Up comes a popsicle stick, a joke printed on the blond wood. Hey Dad, what did the fish say when he hit the wall? Damn.
He doesn’t like it. All the borrowing he has to do, he says, he has no choice, you see. It was the man at the betting window’s fault who did not hear him correctly, who gave him the wrong ticket on a horse, otherwise he’d be sitting pretty right now. Our brother comes outside, his madras looking cool and summery, ample in the sleeves. He shakes our father’s hand. “How’s it going, Dad?” he says.
Our mother mouths to us from behind the porch window that our father must leave. Ma Mère makes a gesture, shooing him away with her hands, the tips of her fingers pointing down and pushing him away. We say we have to go. We have to get back inside the cabin. Dark is coming on. Mosquitoes buzz past our ears. We slap our arms and legs.
“Aren’t we a family?” he says, but he is not looking at us when he says it, he is looking at his car. At the balding tires, shiny and smooth as innertubes. Then he stands by each one of us and hugs us, not from the front, but from the side. He takes turns with us, putting one arm across our shoulders, pulling us close to him. He stands that way for a moment with each one of us, as if there is someone taking our picture and he is making sure we stay still long enough so that the shot can be taken.
And then our brother says to us, let’s go back inside. Out through bullet holes in our cabin we watch our father leave, over the humpy, bumpy driveway, his car lumbering, sometimes scraping bottom, sending up the summer dust.
Ma Mère dies days later saying it herself. Her mouth slightly open, the “will” sound stuck in her throat that we swear we hear released when she’s lifted from her chair and taken away by the ambulance. Our mother holds her hand, insists on it, has the coroner unzip the black bag slightly so she can slip her hand in there and hold onto Ma Mère as if Ma Mère were not altogether dead, just injured somehow and our mother was a comfort on the ride to the hospital.
Our mother and brother having left with the ambulance, my sisters and I head down to the lake. We can hear the mother of eleven. She is singing now, a song we can’t quite make out, just a “Jesus” here and there.
It is night but the moon is bright and we climb in our sinking boat and push off from shore. In the middle of the lake we drift. The mother of eleven still sings. We bail for a while, then we tire and quit and let the water come above our chests. “We’re going down,” Louisa says and as she does our arms float from the sides of the boat and the boat comes away like a skirt we let fall from our hips. We tread water. The mother of eleven still sings. I say I’m diving down. Don’t, they say, think of all the things down there. But I take a breath anyway and dive just to say I did. For a moment I can still hear the mother’s song. But then there’s only a swishing sound, all the fish going by, their tails and fins waving, the opening and closing of their gills, the eyes of the turtle slowly moving to and fro, the eel slipping past, the grazing barb of a catfish touching muddy bottom. Down deeper I go, to where I can hear only the beating of my heart and it sounds caged and angry, my ribs metal bars it can’t squeeze between or saw through, and I wonder if it knows how close it is to breaking my bones and setting itself free.
When I come back up, my sisters are gone. They have swum to the other shore and are calling for me. I meet them there. We wring out our summer tees. Amazing, they say, the song of the mother of eleven sounding louder here, as if this is where she wanted her voice to reach.
The other shore is no different from our shore. The same skinny maples grow, the same skunk cabbage. Maybe this isn’t the other shore. Maybe we are where we were all along, we think. We walk a little ways. Into the thick of trees. But then we stop. This is too scary, we think. The moonlight blocked by thick pine boughs and what if everything was the same on this side of the lake as on the other side? What if we walked and found the same cabin we were staying in, the same family of eleven, the same family of us? We turn and run back to the lake. We dive in and swim back to our shore. On the pier, we see someone standing. In the water we stop and clutch each other. Then we see who it is, we can tell by the pointed ears, and we call to her. She jumps in with a loud splash and we float on our backs, offer her a place to grab us by the collars of our summer tees and we let her do what she loves to do best, save us. One by one we are rescued, towed to our shore in the moonlight where our silver faces are licked back to life.
“Is this enough?” our mother says.
“Enough of what?” we ask.
“The lake, the cabin, all the fucking R & R,” she says. We nod, our heads still wet, our hair still smelling of the lake. We are ready to go home.
Back in the city, we can taste it in the tap water, the sinking boat we sailed and let fall to the bottom of the lake. Louisa has done research. She has brushed up on her watersheds, knows where New York gets its crystal-clear supply. This is from there, she says, meaning the water she holds in a glass. We drink our water down and I think how what I’m tasting tastes like all of it, the fish, the turtles, the eels, the catfish, myself, my summer T, and the words that the mother of eleven sang that rippled on the surface.
School has started up again, so many weeks now our notebooks are old, the paper ripping from the spiral spines and the covers worn and thickly doodled.
Rena’s father moved her family. He found a house in Queens where the carpets were plush and the squirrels in the neighborhood healthier looking than here, that was the deciding factor, he had said, their glossy fur.
We tell our mother that it’s spring when it’s supposed to come upon her, this wild urge to clean. The barrel with the dull-bladed ice skates and the old wax-stained sweaters is dropped in a box at Goodwill.
“That’s a shame,” she says, “that’s what’s wrong with this country. Spring is for flowers, not cleaning,” she says.
“That’s what’s wrong with this country,” she says it again the day I get my period. She has taken us all out to a restaurant to celebrate. People don’t celebrate that kind of stuff, we tell her. “Oh, pooh,” she says, “damn this country, anyway,” and she orders me champagne. “To being a woman,” she says.
“Here, here,” my brother and my sisters say and I am given presents and kisses on my cheeks. Then our brother gets up and leaves. He has a job now, playing mandolin and guitar in an Irish band. He’ll come home late. When we get home our mother sends the elevator down for him so he won’t have to walk up the five flights of stairs with his instruments when he gets back. She opens up the door and pulls the cable inside the elevator, then she steps back and the elevator travels down in the dark by itself. But then our dog comes running through the hallway. Her eyes not so good now, maybe she thinks when she runs past our mother’s legs and steps down into the air that the elevator is still there, that there’s a possibility we will take her on a walk. But the elevator isn’t there and our dog falls down the shaft. She hits the top of the elevator where there’s a little trap door. She falls through the door and the elevator automatically stops between floors. We run downstairs and we hear her whimpering. We call her name.
We can’t move the elevator and finally the fire department has to come. It isn’t until morning that they are able to pull her out. She is stiff and dead, but the fur at her neck is still soft. We all feel it and say our goodbyes and then her fur becomes wet with our tears and our mother says “Merde” and I say “Fuck” and we all say how she was a good dog, the best dog. We have nowhere to bury her and so we find a huge cardboard box, a box for refrigerators that our neighbor had. We lift our dog into the box and leave her on the corner by a city wastebasket and we call the sanitation department and wait for them to come. When they come they put the box into the garbage truck and the back of it starts going around and around, and our dog in her refrigerator box starts to do circles in the truck and get smashed and made small.
There are a few more trips to where our father now live
s alone in the country, but we don’t let the visits last long. Maybe we are all afraid of the transfer effect, of us turning into him or him taking what is good inside us for himself. We leave. We stand on the steps of the train and look down to where he stands, noticing new blotches, the toll the summer sun has taken on his bald head, and we wonder if years later we will always have this bird’s-eye view of him. As we grow taller will his shoulders stoop more with age, more with life? Will shapes of unknown lakes and oceans start appearing on his head as if we are seeing a satellite’s photograph, the faraway image sent back to us here on Earth? When the time comes, will we carry him from his chair to his bed, from his bed to the grave? Will we stand by, mourners who have already mourned for him long ago when he was still alive? Done with our mourning, will what we notice on that day only be the hillside he is buried in, the wildflowers in bloom, the color of the sky that ordinary unlike any other day? Will we walk back arm-linked, my brother and sisters and I, down the grassy hillside, our legs falling into a stumbling run, a flying off almost to home? Our mother waiting there in her chair, drink topped off, and up her sleeve a gaming plan. Five-card draw, with peanut shells to serve as chips and cards held close to chests. We’ll burn the hours, deny the night its darkening hold. What could ever hold us now? What would ever dare? Our bags of garbage are fortress walls, the lolling cats our lions barely tamed, the empty lot out back our moat of sorts. Our mother splays out her colored pairs, cackling, delighted with her win, spit dappling her kings and queens and the splintered table where we play. Beneath the wood, our knees together, the royal bones we share.
Here They Come Page 16