The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  Our things are there. But they’ve been rearranged.

  “What the fuck.” The big glass jars on the counter where I kept beans and rice now have… I don’t even know what. Dried mushrooms?

  “W-what?” Charlie says. “W-w-what’s wrong?”

  I open the cabinets and they’re full of packaged food. Not our food. The writing on them is in Greek or something.

  “This isn’t our stuff,” I say.

  Did I go into the wrong house? The houses on our street are similar. Are we on the wrong street? A parallel street? Of course not. That’s ridiculous.

  I go into the living room.

  The green couch is out of place and there’s a baby pen. A baby lives here now? The carpet still holds the dents from where the couch legs used to be. The room feels off balance. It’s more than just the couch. What is it?

  A little boy appears at the bottom of the stairs.

  I shriek in surprise, and this scares him because he shrieks too.

  “Who are you? Why are you in my house?” I ask him.

  “D-d-d-don’t yell at him,” Charlie says uneasily. I wasn’t yelling.

  A woman, wide eyed, comes down the stairs. Yanks her son away from us. She shouts upstairs at someone in a phlegmy language I don’t recognize. A man comes down, buttoning his shirt.

  “Why are you here?” I ask them. “This is my house.”

  “My house,” the man says.

  “This is my house,” I repeat.

  “We have lease,” he says.

  The woman hesitates, then comes to me. She’s holding the cordless phone in her hand like it’s a gun. I don’t understand what is going on at all. She tries to talk to me, but the only word I understand is “hospital.” She keeps saying Du rin. Du-rin. Doreen. Of course, Doreen is behind this. Giving my house away to strangers.

  “Give me the phone.” I grab the cordless out of her hands and call Doreen’s house.

  Doreen picks up on the fifth ring.

  “Doreen. What the fuck?!”

  “Excuse me,” she says. She sounds like I woke her up.

  “It’s Edith. I’m at my house. But it seems you’ve given it away.”

  “You’re what?”

  “I’m. In. My. House.”

  “Jesus, Edith. Who told you to do that? Get out of there!”

  “It’s my house!” Why does this even need to be said?

  “Not right now it’s not! I rented it out. How do you think your momma’s paying for the hospital? You get out!”

  I turn my back away from Charlie and that stupid family.

  “Doreen, I swear to God—”

  “You swear to God??!! I swear to God! I told you not to come. They can sue you now. It’s the last thing we need. Get over here this instant.”

  I hang up.

  The squatters look at each other. “Leave or we call police,” the man says again. I hand him the phone and turn back to stare at my living room.

  It’s the gourds. That’s what’s missing. The shelf with the gourds that hold my grandfather’s ashes. What did these people do with them?

  “What did you do with the gourds?” I ask them. I point to the place on the wall where they used to be and gesture a gourd shape with my hands. If they threw them out or damaged them in any way, I will break everything in this room… The woman looks confused. The man is on the phone, presumably with the police.

  Then I spot a cardboard box in the corner, my grandfather piled carelessly in there. I grab it and elbow my way past the couple, out the front door.

  Charlie starts the car and I inspect each gourd to make sure none of them were damaged. When I was little, Mom used to stand in front of them and talk to my grandfather, sing to him. I shake one to make sure the ashes are still in there and a small gray cloud escapes from the little hole drilled at the top. A few specks settle on my lips and shirt.

  “W-w-what’s that?” Charlie asks. He looks a little too exhilarated, like this is another of his adventures and not my busted life.

  DOREEN

  Do you know the story with those damn gourds? After her divorce, Marianne got all giddy, dumped her children on me, and took off to Honduras with some little man with a unibrow. She said he was Trotsky’s grandson or some shit. Anyone with half a brain could tell he’d be bad news—shifty, dirty, not much to look at, I don’t care whose grandson he was. I remember he fainted a lot too, which Marianne, of course, found fascinating. Anyway, he was a visiting scholar or something at Tulane, which impressed Marianne, and the two of them took off for Central America without giving a thought to how it would affect anyone around them.

  Edith was terrified of being abandoned. When Marianne dropped them off at my house, Edith sat on Marianne’s foot to try to keep her from leaving. She broke Marianne’s toe, but that didn’t stop Marianne. Nope. Marianne hobbled off with her broken toe and ugly boyfriend and one-way ticket to Honduras.

  A couple weeks went by and I finally got a call from her. That guy disappeared. She was rambling about some sort of international conspiracy, though it was pretty obvious to me that he just got sick of her and left. Took her money too. All she had was a hotel room full of those stupid gourds, lord knows where she got them. She was telling me she was going to use them to build a monument to her father, or to open up a little store where she’d sell gourds and poems. Big ideas. Cuckoo stuff. I paid for her return ticket myself.

  I was having a hard time with my husband and I had enough to worry about. Edith wet her bed and Mae was always watching me. It got on my nerves. There was nowhere to put them other than in my son’s room, and then he was forced to sleep on the floor of my room in a sleeping bag. It was disruptive. Of course, none of this was their fault, and I probably could have been kinder to them. If my mother had been alive, she would have been disappointed in me.

  The girls only stayed a few weeks. Marianne came home, still limping, her suitcases full of gourds, looking happier than she had any right to be, talking about all of her plans and making a whole lot of empty promises.

  And then, déjà vu, Edith shows up at my house with those damn gourds again. I could have smashed each one of them. I’d told her on the phone: stay in New York. But she’s a stubborn girl, always was. When she got something in her head, good luck getting it out. She didn’t give one thought to the fact that my brother was staying with me—he had stage-three pancreatic cancer and I was working extra shifts to help him pay for treatment. No, it didn’t occur to her that I had bigger problems than Marianne.

  MAE

  Instead of being with Dad, I had to waste most of my days going on dopey errands with Amanda. Before leaving the house, she would brush my hair with unnecessary roughness. I was too old to have my hair brushed, and yet, I sat there and let her. Oh, how I hated her. The feeling was mutual. When we were out of sight of Rose or Dad she wouldn’t bother to pretend.

  I remember once at the grocery store she bought me children’s cookies. They had garish faces on them—vanilla on one side, chocolate on the other, and a crème filling that came out through the eyeholes. I remember feeling deeply insulted. It didn’t even occur to me that it could be a peace offering, because it wasn’t. It was her way of saying that I was a stupid, insignificant child.

  I tried to get back at her by taking pictures of her. In my photography class, I would print the least flattering ones in triplicate. At home, I would spread them out on the floor and hack them up with scissors, presumably for a collage that I never bothered to assemble. She’d sit nearby, watching me with that impassive face of hers.

  She never said anything about the re-enactments. I had naively assumed that it was a secret, but she must have known. She must have been dying with jealousy when she went to the antique stores to pick up the objects that Dad and I would use. With Amanda it was a game, I see now, I couldn’t possibly win. I was just a child.

  EDITH (1997)

  Doreen heats up a half-eaten rotisserie chicken from the store and some canned peas. Charlie
stutters for a long time through his name. She shakes his hand but looks over his shoulder at me while she’s doing it.

  “Where’d you find him?” she says.

  “He’s my neighbor in New York.”

  “How old are you?” she asks him. Like it’s any of her business!

  “25.”

  “Doreen,” I say before she can sidetrack us with more of this nonsense. “How long are those Greek people going to be staying in my house?”

  “They’re not Greek, they’re Ukrainian. And they signed a two-year lease. He’s working at the hospital. We’re lucky to have found them.”

  “And where is Mom supposed to go when she gets better?”

  Charlie’s gaze darts back and forth between Doreen and me. Why is he still here?

  “We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it, Edith,” Doreen says, and there’s the edge back in her voice, the edge she gets whenever she has to deal with our family’s shit. You don’t want to deal with it? Don’t deal with it! You aren’t doing me any favors.

  “I had to pull a lot of strings to get her into St. Vincent’s,” Doreen is saying. “If anyone can help her, it’s them, but they can only do so much. And… Well, you visited her. You saw how she is.”

  My bottom lip starts to quiver, so I bite down on it hard. Doreen is one of those people who think they’re being honest, when really they’re just being mean.

  “I don’t think you ever understood her,” I say. That’s as far as I dare take it with Doreen.

  She just snorts and clears our dishes off the counter. She and my mother have always seemed more like sisters than friends. When I was little, Mom would have her over for coffee and I remember feeling embarrassed because Mom was always holding onto Doreen’s hand, begging her not to leave so quickly, and Doreen was always pulling her hand away and looking at it, as if Mom had left a goopy stain on it. How dare she. It’s Doreen that should’ve been embarrassed for being such a bitch.

  “Well, where am I supposed to stay? Since you stole my house?” I say it.

  As soon as it comes out I regret it. Doreen lets whatever she’s washing clatter into the sink. She turns around and I brace myself because she’s about to slap me with her soapy hand. It wouldn’t be the first time.

  But she doesn’t slap me. Instead she pulls me into her chest and holds me there. Her boobs are so big she gets all her bras from special catalogues, and I can’t help it, I cry into them like they’re pillows.

  “Shh,” she says. “Shh… baby. Poor baby.”

  I hate how comforting it feels. I hate that Charlie is watching all of this. Gaping at me. Why hasn’t he left already? I pull away and wipe my eyes on my sleeve. I’ve left a big wet spot over Doreen’s heart.

  “Does your daddy know you’re here?” she asks.

  “He doesn’t have a say in the matter,” I tell her.

  Doreen shrugs, already growing distant, like that hug has used up her quota of warmth for the week.

  “Well, you can stay here for a couple days, but that’s all. And don’t even think you’ll get to share a room with your boyfriend,” she says as she’s already walking away, heading up the stairs.

  Charlie’s not my boyfriend. He opens his mouth like he’s about to say something “comforting” to me. His pity is about the last thing I can handle.

  “I’ll see you later,” I say and quickly squeeze past him. Markus’s house is a 45-minute walk from here. I need to be around someone who actually knows me.

  I don’t turn around but I know Charlie is following me. What’s his problem? I break into a jog, cutting through people’s yards. When I get to Beaux Artes Ave. I look back and he’s not there. I feel disappointed. No, that’s stupid. I feel mostly relieved.

  WALTER

  I ran into Dennis Lomack and the girl at the Turkish Baths on E. 10th St. I recognized him immediately, though he had no idea who I was. My wife was his therapist when he first moved back to New York. She’s a genius at unblocking creatives but she counted Lomack among her few failures.

  My wife never discussed her clients but her practice was on the ground floor of our brownstone and the vents carried sound. I was curious about the author at first. I’d expected him to be more interesting, based on his books—a man of action. Instead, he would cry and carry on about his ex-wife. It was practically all he could talk about. That, and sometimes about how badly he felt leaving his daughters. But tell me, what kind of man abandons his children in the first place? Particularly with a woman who, by his own account, was so unstable? Rather than cry to my wife about his creative blockages, why didn’t he do something?

  So, all those years later, when I saw him in the swimming pool with his daughter, I thought, how nice, maybe in the end he came through for someone. The girl was a teenager, but she looked young. I remember she was wearing an old-fashioned-looking bathing cap. She was on her back and he was holding her, pulling her back and forth through the water. He seemed completely focused on her.

  At first their display touched me. He was a gruff guy, so it was sweet to see him doting on this girl. But then as I swam closer, I began to feel unsettled. The girl’s eyes were shut tightly as he pulled her through the water. They were murmuring to each other, and though I couldn’t make out what they were saying I could sense the intensity. I remembered the abrupt way he’d ended the sessions with my wife, how for weeks she would cry in the bathroom, where she thought I couldn’t hear her, and pick fights with me over nothing. His books would be disturbed on our bookshelves so I know she’d been reading them. He’d talked about himself as a toxic force in other people’s lives despite all his best intentions, and maybe this was true. He certainly didn’t do my marriage any favors.

  I got out of the pool, went to one of the sauna rooms, had a massage, the kind where they beat you with birch sticks, came back to the pool for one last dip, and found Dennis and his daughter in the same exact place, in the same positions.

  I hadn’t thought much of the odd encounter until I saw his daughter’s piece in the Whitney Biennial. It made me ill to know that I had probably witnessed one of their rituals.

  MAE

  I didn’t know that this would be the last scene Dad and I ever staged. Dad watched me from his window as I walked back and forth in front of his building in the rain, holding a small battered suitcase that Amanda had bought a week earlier to his specifications. I don’t know what was in it because it was locked, but it was heavy despite its size and covered in old travel stickers. That morning Dad had laid out my clothes for me—a pale yellow blouse with cloth buttons and a navy skirt that smelled like mothballs.

  I walked in circles up and down 7th Ave., around the block and down the alley. I felt disoriented, as though I was seeing the city for the first time. When the rain got stronger the rats scurried out from under the dumpsters and ran for higher ground. Rain came down in gusts, tearing through the drainpipes. My soaked blouse turned see-through and the wool skirt smelled like a wet dog. Each time I passed the front entrance to the apartment building, the doorman would try to run after me and give me an umbrella, but I studiously ignored him until eventually he gave up. I don’t know for sure if Dad was watching me or not. Several times I glanced up at his window, but I couldn’t tell. Maybe the idea of me out there was enough for him, or maybe he was walking from room to room, from window to window, tracking my every movement.

  Time went by. The rain eventually eased up into a drizzle and then I came inside. The doorman avoided eye contact as I waited for the elevator. He mopped up the puddles I’d made without looking up.

  When I got to Dad’s apartment, I pressed my forehead against the front door, clutching the suitcase to my chest and shivering. I remember thinking: something is about to happen. I was thinking it both as Mom and as myself. I was thinking: my life is about to change.

  CHARLIE

  Doreen was kind, but also suspicious of me, which was good, I think. What normal person wouldn’t have been in that situation? After Edie lef
t, Doreen talked to me like I knew a whole lot more about the situation than I did. I played along. She said that after Marianne’s dad died Marianne lost it and never got it back.

  I asked her what she meant by “it.” Her sanity?

  Doreen said, no, not quite. Or, yes, but that there were so many ways to be insane, it wasn’t really saying all that much. All she knew was that Jackson’s death broke something in Marianne—her decency, maybe.

  Then Doreen sighed and said that she didn’t know anymore what the right thing to do was, that maybe if Marianne wanted to die, she should die. Then Doreen put her head on the table and we sat like that for a while in silence.

  I didn’t know Marianne yet, but I felt like I did because I’d read Dennis Lomack’s novels. In those books Marianne had seemed like the most fascinating and enchanting woman, but maybe Doreen was right, maybe she wasn’t particularly “decent.” I hadn’t really thought about it in those terms. Decency is something you value more as you get older. It makes sense that these were the terms Doreen saw things in, since Doreen was the kind of woman gravity held down to earth with a stronger grip than most.

  When she sat up, her face looked completely calm. I thought maybe she’d been crying, but no, she hadn’t been. She said she needed to leave for a half-shift at the hospital and told me to make myself comfortable on the couch, gave me a remote for the TV.

  After she left, I sat there for a while. I wasn’t sure if I should go look for Edie since she had run out, or if I should give her space. Something between us had changed—I could sense that, though I was hoping it was temporary. I tried to watch the TV but it had been years since I’d watched one, and I found all the shows difficult to follow. The actors had very similar faces and teeth and voices and I had trouble telling them apart. Eventually, I turned it off and sat in Doreen’s house in silence.

  After some time passed, I became aware of sounds coming from upstairs. I thought it was the wind at first, or maybe some kind of animal. When I climbed to the second floor though, I realized it was a person moaning behind one of the closed doors. I stood for a while, listening, before I entered the room.