The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  EDITH (1997)

  Dennis is leaning on our windowsill, smoking a cigarette. The ugly Czech woman is in the living room, moving around, dropping things, making her presence known, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. He’s telling us about how he had tuberculosis as a boy, and how he almost died. After he got over the worst of it, he still had to stay in bed for a very long time. Running a low-grade fever for months, he discovered The Count of Monte Cristo. This is when he learned to love books.

  I drift off, thinking about that cozy feeling, the warmth from a fever before it gets high enough to make you shiver. When I was eight and got the chicken pox, Mom never left my side. She read to me and fed me soup. I remember looking at her through my crusted-together eyelashes and thinking she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I recognize that look in Cronus now when he looks at me, purring and squinting.

  Dennis puts his cigarette out and closes the window.

  “Tell us more,” Mae says.

  “Okay,” Dennis says. “What do you want me to tell you about?”

  Since Mae is too scared, I ask: “Tell us about how you met Mom.” On the rare occasions that Mom talked about this, I always felt like I was missing something important.

  These were the facts as I knew them: Dennis had known Mom since she was a child, he married her when she was 17, and eventually, he left her. Left us. But why? And what had he done to her to make her the way she is? I want to hear him tell it.

  “How I met her, or how I fell in love with her? Those are two different stories,” he says.

  They had loved each other? This hadn’t even occurred to me. He sits on the edge of my mattress and I scoot back into the wall to balance his weight.

  He closes his eyes. “I’ll tell you how I met her. She was nine, I think. Nine or ten. I didn’t know much about kids but I could tell that she was special, already a fully formed person. And so smart and kind and perceptive. And disarmingly sweet. Her father, Jackson McLean, was a friend of mine. What an amazing human being. He took me and my friends into his home and nursed us back to health after we’d been attacked and that’s when I met your mother.”

  “Attacked how?” I have only a vague idea.

  He tells us about how he joined the Freedom Rides to desegregate the interstate highways in the South. He’d gone with his friend Fred, who was black, and they’d driven together to Chicago from New York and boarded a Greyhound bus with the other members of the student group they’d been a part of. The first bus driver refused to take them, said he didn’t need that kind of trouble. They eventually got another driver, but outside of Lafayette the bus was stopped by a white mob. Dennis and the other passengers were dragged off the bus and beaten, and the bus was set on fire. Remnants of the bus are in a museum now in Mississippi. Fred was beaten so badly he lost an eye. I mean, he lost the use of it. Dennis was beaten too. His front teeth were knocked out with a bicycle chain.

  My grandfather had been a medic in the war. He scooped up Dennis and Fred and the others and took them to his house in the woods where he patched them up as best he could. Of course, this didn’t make him popular with the neighbors. Mom was teased a lot at school. A boy held her down while some older girls cut her hair, all while the teacher watched and egged them on.

  He describes her coming home with her hair hacked off and how she tried to pretend that she’d wanted the girls to do this to her, that it had been part of a game they’d all been playing. And then my grandfather had evened it out and Dennis gave her a big magnolia blossom to put behind her ear and told her that she looked beautiful, just like a silent-film star.

  I’m waiting for Dennis to say something, some combination of words that will work like a spell, that will make what happened to our family make sense. But the more he talks the further away I feel from understanding anything.

  “People were doing such horrible things, it was easy to feel like the world was a hopeless place. When Marianne was around though, even the angriest and saddest people felt a little less angry and a little less sad,” he says.

  The ugly woman in the other room puts on a record too loud then lowers the volume. It’s a singer Mom plays sometimes. A woman who sounds like her throat is full of splinters.

  “But Dennis…” I start. I want him to skip ahead, get to the part when they are in love.

  “Please, call me Dad,” he interrupts me. “Could you?”

  For a moment I don’t say anything. The song coming from the other room seeps in:

  … Why not take all of me, can’t you see, I’m no good without you. Take my lips, I want to lose them, take my arms, I’ll never use them…

  “No,” I finally say, “I don’t think I could.” I feel Mae kick the mattress above me, like she’s warning me, but I don’t care.

  “Okay,” he says, standing up, “fair enough. I won’t rush you.” The mattress creaks as it releases him. The music playing in the other room stops.

  “Goodnight, Dad,” Mae says. I hear him kiss her goodnight, a loud smacking sound. Then he squats next to me and looks for a moment intensely into my face, like he is trying to read my thoughts. It makes me shy and I look away.

  “Goodnight, darling,” he says, and squeezes my shoulder.

  “Finally,” I hear the woman in the living room say as Dennis shuts the door. Mae tosses angrily in the bed, making a lot of noise as she gets “comfortable.”

  Dad? No, I don’t think so. Sorry, Mae, you can toss till you fall off the bed. I’m not calling him that.

  DENNIS LOMACK’S JOURNAL

  [1961]

  This morning Jackson McLean made us grits. A bunch of us have broken teeth, so grits are about all we can manage. Grits and milk.

  The adrenaline is still pumping, which is why I don’t feel the pain fully yet. Yesterday was as close to death as I have ever been. Max is at the hospital in a coma. Fred’s eye is swollen shut and his arm is broken, but there are Citizens’ Council thugs waiting around the black hospital, and the white hospital won’t treat him. Jackson worked as a medic in the war, so he set Fred’s arm himself. He used the plaster from his workshop to make a cast. Fred asked Jackson’s daughter to draw something on it. She’s shy, but she took out a paint set and is drawing what looks like a three-headed cat. She says that we’re not to look until she’s finished. She sticks her tongue out and breathes loudly through her nose when she’s concentrating. I like watching her work because she’s so absorbed in it, so serious. When I look at her I’m able to not think about last night. Or, at least to not think about it for long. Faces through the flames like jack-o-lanterns, and then I’m back in Jackson’s kitchen where the curtains are drawn, and where his daughter is painting on Fred’s broken arm, turning something horrible into something beautiful.

  I will try to walk to the gas station this afternoon to call my sister. Jackson doesn’t have a phone and his neighbors are not… sympathetic to our cause. That is how Jackson put it. He’s careful not to badmouth his neighbors. They’re no different than anywhere else, he says. I hope he’s wrong.

  Even with all the chaos in the house, Jackson still manages to escape into his studio and paint every day. What’s my excuse for not writing? I try to keep notes, but I can’t seem to make them come together into anything intelligible.

  LETTER FROM

  DENNIS LOMACK TO PROF. FRED JONES

  April 17, 1997

  Dear Fred,

  It was good to hear from you! It’s been too long. We have quite a bit of catching up to do. Diane told me that you were made department chair. Congratulations! As for my giving a lecture this spring, it seems unlikely. Everything is on hold at the moment because my daughters have come to live with me. I believe when you met them Edie was in diapers and Mae was gestating. Well, despite my absence from their lives (or maybe because of it), they have turned out to be quite lovely almost-adults. You’ll see for yourself—you’ll be flying in for the Freedom Fighters book party, won’t you?

  As for your graduate student, t
hings here are a little crazy, but tell her that I’m flattered and that she should feel free to get in touch. I’ll try to be as helpful as I can. Not sure I can tell her anything very useful about my own work, but I’ll do my best.

  Keep On Keepin’ On, Right?

  Dennis

  EDITH (1997)

  I’m standing on the threshold to Dennis’s room. His door is ajar but it feels like an invisible velvet rope is holding me in the hallway.

  He’d gotten a phone call (from some woman) and based on his responses full of false modesty, it appeared that she was flattering him. When he finally hung up, he told us he’d be right back. It’s the first time he’s left us alone since we got here, and it’s true, when the front door closed behind him, I felt a surge of panic. Gone again? I didn’t look at Mae. I didn’t want her to see that I cared.

  It’s ridiculous. No, of course I don’t care! I feel freer with him gone, without him following me around, watching my every move. I push open the door to his bedroom. I can imagine it recreated in a museum somewhere, on display next to that piece of burnt-out bus. “The Writer at Work.” Look! His unmade bed, where he sleeps and dreams! An empty glass with a moldy lemon wedge! And that enormous desk with the typewriter! The very typewriter that he uses to type!

  I put my finger on the letter D, watch the metal arm slowly rise and fall back down before it touches the blank page. I take a seat in his chair and roll myself forward.

  Dear Dennis, I begin typing invisibly. Did you ever think about me…

  I don’t know why I’m doing this. I stand up and slam a few keys at random. The metal arms tangle together, catch in midair. Good. I leave them like that.

  There’s an ashtray on the windowsill. A cigarette burnt down to the filter. I touch it with my finger and the column of ash collapses into a pile. There’s another cigarette in there, half-smoked. I pick it up and look at myself holding it in the window’s reflection. I put the unlit cigarette to my lips and inhale. Sometimes, I’d wake up and find Mom sitting on the porch, smoking in the dark. I’d want to come sit by her but I knew better than to bother her. When you have a mom like our mom you develop an instinct for this sort of thing. Bother her too much and she’ll leave.

  “Where does Dennis keep the matches?” I call to Mae. Maybe in his desk?

  One desk drawer is filled with used-up pens and paper clips. The other one is locked. I jiggle the handle, try to pry it open with a pen. It doesn’t work. Then I take a paper clip and untwist it. I saw a girl at school do this one time, though I don’t know how exactly. The paper clip jams in the lock.

  “Mae, help me in here.” Where is she anyway? I’d think she’d be curious.

  “Mae,” I start again, but then something clicks and the drawer slides open.

  No matches. Papers. For a second I think: What if he’s been writing to us this whole time, but never sending the letters, and they’re all stacked here, neatly in this drawer? How dumb is that? Of course there are no letters. It’s a manuscript. I start skimming it, but then put it back. Who cares what it says. I haven’t read any of his novels, so why start now? I’m about to close the drawer, when something glossy catches my eye. A photograph. I pull it out from between the pages.

  It’s a picture of Mae from a few years ago. Black and white, not one I’ve ever seen before. She’s looking at the person behind the camera with the kind of smile Mae only uses on special occasions. She’s wearing a weird dress. It’s plaid and has a round collar. I don’t know where she would have gotten it. A thrift store? Was it from Halloween? No. No. I would’ve remembered it. And that fountain behind her, it doesn’t look familiar either. Where was it taken?

  The photo is bizarre. Totally bizarre. It’s just like her to have this secret life. She would say that Mom took her places when I was sleeping but I never believed her. And how had Dennis gotten the picture? She must have sent it to him. So they had been in touch before we came here. For how long?

  “Mae,” I call, as I go into the living room, holding the evidence.

  But Mae isn’t in the living room. The front door is ajar and I can see Cronus standing in the empty hallway, paw lifted. He looks back at me and twitches his tail.

  AMANDA

  The first time I met Dennis Lomack was at a basement Italian place across the street from where I was staying. I was a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, writing my dissertation on his work. My advisor was an old friend of Dennis’s back from their Civil Rights days together, and he’d helped me arrange the meeting. I got there early and was so nervous that I drank two glasses of wine to calm myself down. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was the sense of familiarity I had with him because I knew his books so well, but I felt an instant connection.

  Appearance-wise, Dennis was not what I’d expected. He was older than the pictures on his book jacket, and bigger. Not fat, but tall and broad shouldered. He had a beard. He was less handsome, but I think that was also what made him more attractive, more brutish. Next to him, Barry looked like a pencil neck wrapped in corduroy. Barry was the graduate student I was engaged to back home.

  I remember the first thing I thought when I saw Dennis. After: Holy shit, that’s Dennis Lomack! and I hope my teeth aren’t stained purple from the wine I’ve been swilling. It was: Barry and I are over. Done. I’m sure that realization would have come on its own eventually, but seeing Dennis sped it up.

  I’d prepared a long list of questions, but I didn’t quite know where to start. I mentioned how I had been trying to track down the original of his Russian folk tale translations with no success. It’s funny because as I was saying it out loud it finally occurred to me that there was no original source material. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious. I asked Dennis Lomack about that and he shrugged and said that he might have taken some liberties. He asked me how I had gotten my hands on the book at all, seeing as it had come out with a tiny press with a tiny print run. I told him Prof. Fred Jones had been very generous with his personal archives.

  I asked him if he had written the story when his ex-wife was pregnant with their first child. The date of the publication seemed to indicate this as a possibility. He took a sip of his drink and didn’t say anything.

  “Was the story prophetic?” I asked him.

  “In what sense?” He put his hand down on the table close enough to mine so I could feel the heat off of it, but not quite touching. “Did my wife become a witch? Did she eat our children?” His voice was low, hypnotic; patient, but not. He was straining to keep things light.

  “Did having your children change her? Did she love you less afterward? Did you want her to get rid of them to help her return to who she used to be? And did you say the story was a translation to avoid taking responsibility for your feelings? For these implications?”

  I had no experience interviewing people. The whole thing was preposterous. I’d used up my entire summer stipend to fly to New York and stay in a by-the-week motel in Midtown, purely in the hopes that Dennis Lomack would meet with me. I’d tried to seem casual and told him I was visiting an aunt, but I had no aunt. I was only there to see him, and after begging my advisor to put in a good word, ten minutes into the meeting I managed to botch it all completely.

  Dennis Lomack held the silence long enough for me to feel my missteps, but I think at that point my questions had crossed over from uncomfortable to so absurdly inappropriate that the equilibrium of power was again restored in his favor. He must have felt sorry for me.

  “Fred didn’t tell me your dissertation was on my ambivalence around having children,” he said after a while.

  My dissertation was about anachronistic temporalities across Lomack’s novels and essays viewed through a Foucauldian lens. Or, that is what it was going to be about. I never finished it.

  At that point in my life the thing that really interested me was exactly what I had been asking him about: How would having children change a person? Or more specifically, how would having children change me?
I was two months pregnant and had not told Barry.

  As we were leaving, I remember Dennis Lomack helped me into my jacket. My arm got momentarily stuck in the sleeve, and I remember standing with my back to him and feeling a rush of excitement at the thought that I was trapped and that I could feel what I imagined was his breath on the nape of my neck, like the scene in his book with Cassandra. When I turned around, though, he wasn’t even facing me. He was turned away, looking up at something in the window.

  MAE

  The first time Dad left us alone in the apartment, I followed him. I waited for him to get a block ahead like Mom had taught me. In those days, Mom was always with me whether I wanted her in my head or not. I could feel myself descending into a trance, and even though my body was on the street, following Dad, my mind was being trampled. She knew how to draw my attention to all the things that were ugly—a hypodermic needle, a man peeing, a woman talking to herself. She had me convinced that Dad was meeting with someone in order to discuss sending us away, even though I knew this wasn’t the case. I was so relieved when Edie appeared by my side. Once she was there, my mother’s grip on me loosened and I could pretend that my sister and I were running down Broadway on a fun adventure.

  It turned out I was right to worry—Dad was meeting a woman, Amanda, who would eventually prove to be a very troublesome person. They met in a dank-looking Italian restaurant in the basement of an office building. Patrinelli’s. It doesn’t exist anymore. Edie and I kneeled by the ankle-level windows in the alley and watched them sitting at a table with a red-and-white-checkered tablecloth. We watched them slowly eat spaghetti in real time. There was no way for us to hear what they were saying, but it didn’t look like Dad was all that engaged by the conversation. When he gestured to the waitress for the check, Edie and I ran back to the apartment, laughing as we ran.