The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  Yours,

  M

  EDITH (1997)

  We’re on a bus with Dennis and Amanda, somewhere in the depths of Queens. The buildings are squat and the signs are in Chinese. Everything looks flat and gray. Dennis hasn’t told us where we’re going. He says it’s a surprise. Amanda wouldn’t stop asking me questions, so I moved to the back of the bus, squeezed myself between a sleeping guy in a puffy jacket and a fat lady knitting.

  What kind of books did your father read to you when you were little? What pet names did he use for you? Was she for real? And he wasn’t doing anything to stop her, just looking out the window like we weren’t there, like he wasn’t the one dragging us out into the middle of nowhere. When I told Amanda to fuck off it only seemed to make her more cheerful. I tried to get backup from Mae but things between us have been weird. All she does is lie around reading Dennis’s books.

  The guy next to me, his head rolls onto my shoulder with the movement of the bus, then rolls back to his chest. What if I stayed on the bus with him? Begged him to take me home? Maybe I could sleep on his couch? Or what about our downstairs neighbor, Charlie? Maybe I could use his woodshop to build my own place. Something portable.

  I can see Amanda across the bus, still talking.

  Had Dennis read to me when I was little? I seem to remember something with pictures of a tiger. What difference does it make, though? And how is it any of her business? I caught her the other day trying to read one of Mom’s letters over my shoulder. Good luck with that, Amanda. Even I couldn’t decipher it. Mom’s hand is now a seismograph. Soon she won’t even be able to hold a pencil. The only part that was legible was Mae’s name. Of course.

  They stand at the next stop and Dennis gestures for me to follow. I bid a silent goodbye to the sleeping man, to the life we could’ve had together. Outside, the sky is low and the air feels strange and thick, ready for lightning. Mae has dark circles under her eyes and a tiny bruise on her forehead. From me. I watch her smile at Dennis, and it reminds me of the photograph I found. The photograph of Mom.

  The thick air is making my heart beat faster. Amanda is talking, but I tune her out. Something is about to happen. Any moment now. But nothing does. We just keep walking. The buildings around us get uglier and more decrepit. No more brick, only vinyl siding. A moving truck idles across the street. All the furniture is out on the sidewalk. I see Mae notice it. I wonder if she’s thinking of Inside/Outside too—a treat Mom would do for us sometimes, where, in a burst of super-human strength, she would drag all the living room furniture onto the lawn and then the three of us would sit on the velvet couch, feet on the coffee table, and look up at the sky through the branches of the oak tree.

  “Remember…” I start to say but change my mind. Amanda is too eager for any scraps, and I don’t trust Mae not to ruin the nice memory. That’s exactly the kind of thing she’s in the mood to do. I can tell by the way she’s pressing her lips together. She’ll find some way to take the three of us, curled up, looking at the stars and turn it into additional proof of Mom’s failures.

  We get to a hill with a park entrance, a bronze plaque that none of us bother to read. Amanda is giddy. She’s not walking, she’s skipping, despite having been laid up on our couch for the last few days. There’s a patch of trees, a dirt path that snakes away from the road. Splintery green benches, cigarette butts, and beer cans. I kick a can towards Mae and she doesn’t kick it back, doesn’t even notice. When the trail makes a sharp right, Dennis stands to block our view of what lies beyond the turn. He looks awake now, alert, completely here.

  “Close your eyes,” he says.

  I don’t. What is he going to do to me? Amanda tries to cover my eyes with her hands, but I shove her away from me, so then Dennis makes us turn around and walk backwards. I feel like I’m being walked off the plank of a ship.

  Something begins welling up in me, but then Dennis spins me around and it catches in my throat. We’ve emerged on a clearing. There, on the side of the hill, are thousands of yellow flowers glowing radioactively against the gray, overcast sky. The light is escaping from somewhere and making the ground yellower than anything I’ve ever seen. I feel lightheaded, dizzy. What had I thought would be here? Dennis looks triumphant. Mae is happy. Amanda looks back and forth between the two of them. I take a deep breath. The smell of dirt, the strange-looking glow of the yellow flowers on the hill. The emotions that have been building this whole walk are being rerouted. I don’t want to cry but it’s hard to breathe. Yes, this place is overwhelming. It’s magnificent. How did he know to take us here? Why do I feel this way?

  “Go,” Dennis says, “go,” shoving me forward.

  I run into the field and down the hill. I’m trampling the flowers. Blades of grass whipping over my ankles. I can hear Mae behind me. She’s running too, chasing me. She dives onto me and we roll through the tall grass down the side of the hill. Just like when we were little. The flowers crush under us, sharp stems and petals. It’s the first time she’s touched me in days. I am so happy to have her back. She’s mine again. I’ll do anything she wants to keep her. It hurts to breathe because I’m laughing so hard. She pulls me up, we run back to the top of the hill. She takes my other hand too, crosses it, and starts to spin. We grip each other tight and lean back. The flowers smear yellow, the sky a circle of gray.

  Yellow, yellow, yellow.

  We fall down and we’re laughing like we share a set of lungs. The sky is so low that soon we’ll be able to touch it. Our hands reach up for it at the same time.

  Dennis hovers over us. Mae moves her hand from the sky to his shirt collar and pulls him down onto us. He falls. We’re all rolling now. Someone’s foot in my stomach, elbow in my face. We collapse at the bottom of the hill. Then slowly sit up, our limbs still tangled.

  Amanda crawls towards us. A raindrop hits my arm. Amanda and Mae both look up at Dennis. I don’t know why he needs me too. But he does. He peels a flower petal off my cheek and draws me towards him, presses me against his chest. I let him for a while to please Mae, inhale his smell of cigarettes and sweat, then pull away. He looks at me and I feel shy.

  I remember: a plaid wool blanket, a lake, a Popsicle melting down my arm, Mom and him reciting poems together. This was before Mae, when it was only me. Something stabs through me, I don’t know if it’s joy or not, but whatever it is, it hurts and I don’t want it.

  I sit up. No. I don’t want it. I don’t want what he’s offering me.

  There’s a big flat stone near us. Amanda won’t stop talking. I see another flat stone, and then another. How did I not notice before that we’re in a cemetery? We’ve been rolling around on top of people.

  “…This is just like when Gregor takes Cassandra…” Amanda is saying.

  Did I hurt Dennis’s feelings by pulling away? He looks only at Mae now. Her head is in his lap. They’re staring at each other. It’s probably not the best time to bring it up, but I do anyway because I can’t stand watching them stare at each other like that.

  I interrupt Amanda. “Mae and I have to go back,” I say.

  “No,” Mae says.

  “Yes,” I say. “We’ll take the bus home this week.”

  “I’m never going back,” she says. She sits up. Her face looks crooked, dreamy. “I’d rather die.”

  I don’t know what to say to this. It was her that Mom wanted, not me. There’s a steady drizzle now. Amanda scurries under the trees for cover. Dennis stands and helps Mae up.

  The rain is getting harder. It runs through my hair, trickles down my back. He offers me a hand but I don’t take it.

  “Mae,” I try to coax her, “you know we have to. She needs us.”

  Mae shrugs. “Needs us for what.” She walks away to join Amanda under the tree.

  “To get better,” I call after her.

  “Mae and I are going home,” I say to Dennis. His hand is still outstretched for me. Water drips down his forehead and into his eyes. “You have no right to keep us from her.�
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  He squints. “I’m not keeping you from her. Your mother is not well,” he says.

  I stand without his help.

  “She’s not well because of you,” I say. Who else? He broke her somehow. He changed her.

  He wipes his face, exasperated. “What do you think I did? What do you imagine I did to her?”

  I follow him under the tree, where Mae and Amanda are.

  “You did something,” I insist. He’s about to lose it, I can tell, and then Mae can see for herself who it is she’s siding with.

  “Did something to whom?” Amanda says.

  “Shut up,” I tell her.

  Mae is staring glassily at the rain hitting the grass. She isn’t even listening. Whatever he did to Mom he’ll do to her too.

  “We’re going back,” I say to her again.

  Her face quivers with irritation. “Are you deaf?” She walks away from me, out into the rain, up the hill where we came from.

  Amanda stands there like a wet bobblehead, looking between us, back and forth. “Why are you even here?” I scream at Amanda because it’s easier to scream at her than at my sister. She nods, she nods, she backs away.

  MAE

  That afternoon was the first time I felt… I don’t know how to describe it exactly. My head was in Dad’s lap and all the happiness that I’d missed was being compressed into that moment. I looked up at him, and I was no longer me. I was Mom, but not as I knew her. This wasn’t her forcing her darkness on me, like a bag over my head. No, this was something else. I’d become Mom from many years ago. Dad felt it too, I could tell. Maybe it would have lasted longer if not for Edie, talking and talking, pressing and pressing. She wanted to take me back to the other mother. The one in the mental hospital who needed me brought to her, tied and quartered, like a sacrifice.

  Chapter 4

  EXCERPT FROM

  FREEDOM FIGHTERS: THEN AND NOW

  INTERVIEWER: Thank you for talking with me. I was so excited when I figured out it was you in the mugshot. I’m a huge fan. Would you like to have a look? Hold it by the corners, please.

  DENNIS: Oh, wow. Where’d you get this?

  INTERVIEWER: I found it actually, on an auction website on the Internet. A whole box of mugshots. Do you remember having this picture taken?

  DENNIS: I’m trying to think. I’ve been arrested more than once.

  INTERVIEWER: They were from the Freedom Rides arrests. It’s dated May 15, 1961. Opelousas, LA.

  DENNIS: And they were just available on the computer?

  INTERVIEWER: Yes. A lot of old documents are. Do you recognize any of the people in the other photos?

  DENNIS: That girl looks familiar, but I can’t remember her name. I think she ended up working with us on registering voters. Oh, and there’s Fred! Fred Jones. Damn he looks young. I guess I do too, though in my mind that’s still what I look like. And there’s Diane. She and Fred got married.

  INTERVIEWER: Can you talk about how you got involved with the Freedom Rides?

  DENNIS: Sure. Fred and I knew each other from Columbia. We were both English majors, and we took a liking to each other right away. I was 24, old for an undergraduate, and Fred was one of the few black students at the school; neither of us quite fit in. We kept hearing about the boycotts, the sit-ins going on in Greensboro and Nashville and so on. We participated in some stuff like that in New York, but nothing large scale. Then Fred’s cousin turned us on to the plan to ride a bus down South to integrate the interstate.

  INTERVIEWER: Had you visited the South before?

  DENNIS: No. I’d never been south of DC. But the fact that I wasn’t from there, and of course that I was white, this gave me a level of protection others didn’t have. I could swoop in and swoop out, and this gave me the courage I might not have otherwise had. The people who lived there, for whom this was their inescapable reality, they were the truly brave ones.

  INTERVIEWER: Okay, so what happened on the ride?

  DENNIS: Well, after we crossed into Louisiana, a mob stopped the bus and attacked us. Those of us who managed to escape were taken in by a man named Jackson McLean. The police came for us later at his house to arrest us. They made a point of breaking down his door, trampling his garden, scaring his daughter.

  INTERVIEWER: Your wife?

  DENNIS: Eventually, yes, she became my wife.

  INTERVIEWER: Was this your first time getting arrested?

  DENNIS: No, but this was different.

  INTERVIEWER: How so?

  DENNIS: In New York when I’d been arrested during protests it hadn’t felt personal. Here they were trying to make a point. They stripped us, tried to humiliate us by making us walk up and down the hallway, naked. They put us in separate cells—blacks on one end, whites on the other—but it only made us more determined. We drove the guards crazy because we wouldn’t stop singing “We Shall Overcome,” our voices carrying from the opposite ends of the hall. They took away our mattresses and toothbrushes, and when that didn’t stop our singing, they took the screens off the windows and let the cells fill with mosquitoes. We kept going, though. Up until the moment when Jackson McLean bailed us out.

  INTERVIEWER: Were you scared?

  DENNIS: That’s a good question. I don’t know. I was so angry, so righteous, I don’t think I was scared of anything. I was on some sort of autopilot. It was only afterward when I wrote about it—

  INTERVIEWER: In Yesterday’s Bonfires?

  DENNIS: Yes. It was only after writing about that time period that I was able to start processing it.

  INTERVIEWER: Did you think as you were doing these things that they would make for good writing material later? Is that, in part, what motivated you to go?

  DENNIS: I don’t know who would admit to something like that. I was young. I wanted adventure, so sure, that was part of it. But it wasn’t just some stunt so I could write about it and win awards. I believed deeply in what I was doing.

  INTERVIEWER: And do you miss it?

  DENNIS: It was an awful time in history. But, if you’re asking me if I liked being a hero, doing the right thing and being completely confident that what I was doing was the right thing, no ambivalence, no vagueness, then, yes. That, I miss. I miss being young and sure of myself and pumped full of adrenaline. I miss being surrounded by brave friends who felt as strongly as I did about these things. I miss trusting people completely with my life.

  INTERVIEWER: Yesterday’s Bonfires is the only one of your novels that deals directly with social justice.

  DENNIS: Sorry, was that a question?

  INTERVIEWER: Do you feel a responsibility to promote social justice in your work?

  DENNIS: Sure. But I don’t write propaganda, if that’s what you’re asking.

  INTERVIEWER: Is propaganda always bad? Couldn’t it be good if it was being used to a good end?

  DENNIS: I think propaganda is always bad.

  INTERVIEWER: Can I ask you, is it true that Yesterday’s Bonfires was autobiographical?

  DENNIS: It’s like what Flaubert said: “Madame Bovary, c’est moi.”

  INTERVIEWER: What?

  DENNIS: All the characters are me. That’s what the writing process is like. It’s schizophrenic. A person talking to himself. Robert might’ve had biographical features similar to Fred’s, but he wasn’t Fred. He was me. They were all me. So, yes, it’s deeply autobiographical in that sense.

  INTERVIEWER: And what about your wife? What role did she play in Yesterday’s Bonfires and the other books? Are the rumors true that she helped you write them?

  DENNIS: She was my muse.

  INTERVIEWER: What does that mean though? Like in practical terms. Was she your co-writer? Your editor?

  DENNIS: No, she was my muse. She inspired me.

  INTERVIEWER: That sounds romantic. And, what about current projects? What are you working on now?

  DENNIS: I don’t discuss projects until they’re finished.

  INTERVIEWER: Not even a taste?

 
DENNIS: Nope.

  INTERVIEWER: Thank you so much for your time.

  DENNIS: Happy to help.

  FRED

  Dennis first caught my attention back in college at a reading for a lit mag I edited. It was your usual fair: a Barnard girl read a story about her cat, an ROTC guy read a sonnet about his mother, I read a villanelle, a terrible villanelle, and then Dennis stepped onto the stage, cleared his throat and ACHOO!! Blew us all away, read a poem about trying to chop down a tree after his father died. Strange poem, surreal and sad, not like anything we’d heard before. He read it in that booming voice of his and sat back down. I don’t even think he was aware of the shift in the room that happens at a reading when somebody is finally, actually, very good.

  Afterward, I had to fight through a throng of girls to introduce myself. God, that talented prick—girls were always surrounding him and he just took it for granted. We became friends after that reading. We’d stay up late, drinking at a soul food joint where we’d talk and debate until it got light out. Dennis was usually the only white guy there, but that didn’t slow him down any—in a loud voice, he’d happily pontificate into all hours of the morning on questions from the core philosophy class we had to take: Was man inherently good or evil? Was he motivated by reason or desire? Dennis always wanted to talk about Jung, and I always wanted to talk about Marx, but we could meet halfway at Dostoyevsky.