The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  I was so swept up in our newfound happiness that I’m afraid I was not clear-eyed enough about his daughter. I was too cautious because of what happened last time, when he’d sent me away. I tread too lightly and as a result I failed to manage her. She was determined to gain her father’s attention at any cost. The histrionics! The dramatics on the Ferris wheel! She was jealous that her father was finally happy with a woman who loved him. I found it all very irritating, but it seemed like teenage girl stuff. I assured Dennis it was just a phase and we both wanted to believe that.

  EDITH (1997)

  The three of us are inside the Spotted Cat on Frenchman. Onstage there’s a man crouched on top of his white bass as he plays it, a girl on the fiddle, another on the washboard, the accordion man from earlier but now he has a painted-on mustache, and a fat man with breasts on a horn. Every time the fat man blows, his face turns deep red and his chest jiggles. Mom pulls Charlie and me onto the packed dance floor. Charlie is shy at first, but Mom starts spinning him and now he’s spinning me, a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.

  Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

  Everyone around me blurs into one ecstatic mass. Then Charlie spins Mom. You can see the dark sweat stains spreading as he lifts his arms, and Mom’s hair has come loose from its little ponytail. She grabs him by the shoulders and shakes, shakes, shakes, sweat from her face flying onto his. I don’t remember the last time I saw her dance like this. Sometimes in the kitchen with Mae and me when we were little and maybe at Doreen’s. Her face looks so intense now. Like she is more alive than anybody else in the room.

  Aren’t you glad, I want to scream over the music, aren’t you glad to be alive?

  Of course she is. She grabs my waist and dips me. I’m taller than she is and I nearly topple over, but Charlie catches me, and spins me again like a top. I collide with an old man in a three-piece suit, dancing with an umbrella. He holds the umbrella over me even though we’re indoors.

  “All right, all right,” he’s shouting over the music. He does a two-step around me. We’re in the center of a circle that’s forming.

  “Go, Uncle Lionel, go,” people are shouting. He’s ancient but he can dance. I try to keep up, but I can’t quite. He makes a flirty face at me and I start laughing. He’s probably a hundred years old. People clap. A woman closer to his age cuts in and they both hold on to the handle of the umbrella and circle around it. Is Mom seeing all this? Where did she go? I look around for her and try to catch my breath. It’s so hot in here.

  A tall woman stoops down to let a short guy light her cigarette and over her shoulder I spot Charlie leaning across the bar, ordering something from the bartender. And there’s Mom draped over Charlie, her arms circling his chest. Is she all right? What’s wrong with her? She buries her face in his back and he’s talking to the bartender as if she’s not even there. I watch her blow on the back of his neck. What has he done to her? I try to push my way towards the bar, but a drunk man with slicked back hair grabs onto me for balance.

  “Get off me.” I try to slip out from under him, but he leans his full weight against me.

  “Wass your name?” he slurs over the music. His breath in my face makes me want to vomit.

  I shove him and he topples onto someone else. I move past them, squeeze between two fat women dancing and almost collide with a guy with a goatee, standing on a bar stool, photographing everyone from above with a camera. By the time I get to the bar, it’s just Charlie. Mom is gone.

  “You w-w-want anything?” Charlie asks when he sees me. He must think I’m a real idiot.

  “No, I don’t ‘w-w-want anything,’” I say back to him. “Where’s my mom?”

  He looks hurt about the stuttering but not as hurt as he would if he didn’t deserve it.

  “Edie, w-w-what’s wrong?” He puts his hand under my chin.

  “Really?” This is unreal. I jerk my head away and knock his drink over. Ice and vodka spill down his shirt and over the bar. “Where’s my mom?” I repeat. He thinks he can take advantage of my mom? That I would let that happen? He thinks I would let him do that? She just came out of the hospital. That sick fuck. I can’t look at his stupid quivering face. Everything is starting to darken around the edges with rage.

  “Hey! Hey!” The bartender is on our side of the bar now, pulling me towards the door. “I don’t need to see your ID. I know you’re underage.” Charlie is following us. I break free and run back to the bathroom. A black door with a picture of a pinup girl.

  “Mom! Mom!” I shout. A woman comes out of the stall but she is not my mom. The door swings open and the bartender grabs me by the arm and yanks me back out.

  “Don’t touch me.” I go dead weight, but he lifts me. I kick, kick whoever is in my way.

  “I’m looking for my mom,” I shout to him, but he doesn’t care. He deposits me outside by the bouncer.

  “I don’t know how she got in,” the bartender says. “But you need to do your job.”

  I try to slip back in again but this time the bouncer takes hold of my arm. “No, ma’am,” he says.

  “I’m looking for someone,” I say. He acts like he didn’t hear me. He cards a group of old women who giggle as they show their IDs. Charlie is hovering beside me but I ignore him. What if she’s looking for me in there? I press my face to the window, but it’s hard to see through the steam and it’s so packed.

  “Edie,” Charlie’s saying, “Edie, t-t-t-talk to me. N-nothing happened.”

  That’s what he thinks I care about? I don’t care. If she wanted him, he’s all hers. If she chooses him over me, that’s fine. “Where is she?” I finally say. “Where did she go?”

  “I d-don’t know,” he says. “I thought she went to f-find you.”

  Did she? Is she in there looking for me? She’d forget Mae and me sometimes. At the mall you had to stay close. No. I don’t know. I don’t know. I feel something is… Something is wrong. I know something is wrong. It’s how I felt when I opened the front door before I even saw her hanging from the rafter. I put my hands on my knees and double over. I try to catch my breath. Taking her out of that hospital was a mistake.

  “You have n-n-nothing to be jealous of. I d-d-d-didn’t do anything.”

  I bat Charlie’s hand away. “I don’t care,” I say. “Go back and find her.”

  He disappears inside. I wait. The bouncer lights a cigarette and watches me pace back and forth.

  “You aright?” the bouncer finally says.

  I shrug. Of course not. I’m so stupid. On the dance floor the intensity on her face, that was not happiness. It was something else. I’m so, so, so stupid. It’s like when Doreen’s momma suddenly sat up and started talking to us and I thought it meant she was getting better but it didn’t. She died right after.

  Eventually, Charlie comes back out. “I c-c-couldn’t find her,” he says. I start to cry.

  “Keep looking,” I say even though I know she isn’t in there. “Don’t touch me.” I stand upright.

  “M-maybe she went back to the house?” he says. “I swear to God, Edie, n-n-nothing happened.”

  “Of course something happened!” I scream in his face. “She’s gone.”

  CANDICE VANCE

  Yes, I remember them. A woman, a man, and a girl had started staying in the shotgun next door in late May. That house had been empty for a while, so I was glad to have them there. It gave me something to do, something to be curious about. You lose your curiosity and you might as well be dead, that’s what I’d always tell my late husband. He was not curious. I can’t get out much on account of the diabetes. It’s hard because of my legs. On Sundays after church the gals come by, but otherwise, looking out the window and calling in to the radio is how I stay tied to the world.

  I’d see the new neighbors and think, is this some kind of love nest? Are they bank robbers? They seemed like they were hiding something. I don’t know if they were in the house legally or not, since the “For Sale” never went down, and I never s
aw a moving truck. They weren’t there very long before I got a knock on my door, sometime after midnight. I was old then and now I’m ancient, but I still remember everything perfectly. It was the girl. I’d waved at her from the window and she’d waved back, but this was the first time we spoke. It was an odd time of night for her to come introduce herself, and she looked like she’d been crying. She wanted to know if I’d seen her mother. I had not. I’d been sitting by the window all evening, hoping to see somebody, so I’d have noticed.

  I asked the girl what was wrong, but she wouldn’t say. She asked to use my phone. I set her up in the kitchen with a Yellow Pages. I didn’t have long distance, so I insisted on dialing the numbers for her. The first number she had me call was a loony bin out in Metairie. The loony bin didn’t have her. The woman had not seemed crazy to me, but who knows. My Aunt Ginny had seemed normal enough too until she stabbed everyone at the hat shop where she worked with her sewing scissors. The girl used my phone for a long time, had me call everyone in the phonebook it seemed like. All the hospitals and hotels.

  I told her, why don’t you wait. Your mother probably just went for a walk. It’s a nice night. Through the open window I could tell it was a very nice night. I told her, her mother probably just needed to be alone. Why all the panic? Why the doom and gloom? She said she needed to call the police. Then I tried to take the phone away from her. I said, listen, why are you getting the police involved? What are they going to do? Arrest a woman who went for a walk? Sometimes mothers need their space too. She’s an adult woman. That’s when the girl got rude. She wasn’t interested in my wisdom. She grabbed the phone away from me and called the police anyway. And what did they do? Just as I predicted. They told her there wasn’t a thing they could do until the woman has been missing for three days.

  Of course the police did eventually get involved. A nice officer, young, practically a schoolboy, came by. He said his people were from Plaquemines Parish, which is where my late husband was from. He asked me some questions. I wish I could have been of more help. I never saw that woman again. I saw the girl and the man a few more times from my window, but they didn’t wave back and then they disappeared soon after and the house was bought by a very nice couple. Mr. and Mrs. Perez. He’s of Spanish descent. Lovely people.

  MAE

  One afternoon, a few days after that trip to Coney Island, Dad and Amanda left me in the apartment by myself. I don’t know where they went. They probably weren’t gone long.

  After Coney Island, Dad was never alone with me and never too close physically, Amanda made sure of this. It seemed impossible that a person could want something as much as I did and not get it, and yet here it was happening. I was pacing in the apartment, asking myself what I had done wrong.

  My eyes weren’t working properly and I kept running into things as I paced. When I opened a book to calm myself I found its pages incomprehensible. The words and letters had been replaced with scratch marks from Amanda’s talons. Her stink was everywhere in the apartment. It made me retch. I knew that I would be sent away soon. Dad and Amanda were probably out arranging it at that very moment. I would rather die.

  The only way I’ve been able to make sense of this period in my life is by making art about it. I use dolls and build sets and hire actors to read the voiceover. Some of the movies I make cleave closer to “fact” than others, but all of them are emotionally honest. Each film tries to recreate my subjective experience, to share what it was like to be consumed by this love for my dad.

  My piece Conflagration sold to the Whitney in 2008. It was part of a triptych with two other films—one in which I recreate the experience of going to the horse track with my dad while pretending to be my mother. Another is a fantasy in which my dad and I finally consummate our relationship in the bird sanctuary in Central Park, and as a result, in an Escher loop twist, I am conceived. Conflagration is a recreation of the fire as I remember it:

  In the first shot, I am a doll, standing alone in the dollhouse apartment. It’s quiet. I’m wearing a dirty yellow shirt. The light coming in through the kitchen windows is also yellow.

  I run my hands over the Formica table and say—“goodbye”

  The books stacked underneath—“goodbye”

  The chairs—“goodbye”

  The carved tea box ‒“goodbye”

  The teapot—“goodbye”

  With my doll-hand I trace the parallelogram of light on the countertop—“goodbye”

  I move on to the living room.

  I touch the couch—“goodbye”

  The coffee table—“goodbye”

  The cat made from actual cat hair—“goodbye”

  The piano—“goodbye”

  I drag over the piano bench so I can reach each shelf of the bookcase—“goodbye, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.”

  My doll-fingertips are dusty. Cronus twitches his tail slowly as he watches me.

  I open the hall closet and pass my hand over the coats, the scarves, the hats, all knit for this film—“goodbye”

  I crouch down and touch the shoes—“goodbye, shoes.”

  I go into the bathroom.

  I touch Dad’s toothbrush. I touch Dad’s comb. “Goodbye. Goodbye.”

  I try the handle to a locked bedroom. I try it again. Nothing. I stand for a moment, with my hand on the knob. My doll-lips moving. “Goodbye,” they say soundlessly. My face is pale and damp. A strand of hair is stuck to my forehead. I take two steps back and slam my weight against the door. And again. And again. And again. Finally, a cracking sound. The door swings open.

  The camera follows me as I stumble towards an empty bed and sit there for a long time, catching my breath. The window is open. A slight breeze rattles the blinds. I am so pale. Where is my dad? Why has he left me alone in this state?

  The light outside is fading. Grayish blue. Now my doll-face is mostly shadow.

  I run my hands over his pillow, over the nightstand and the empty bottle of whiskey. All these things are recreated precisely and painstakingly to scale. On his desk, next to the typewriter, an empty glass with a tiny, dried up wedge of lime. I reach under the cushion of his chair and take out the key. I open the drawers and touch everything in them.

  “Goodbye,” I say out loud to the little gold-plated binoculars.

  “Goodbye,” to his manuscript pages.

  “Goodbye,” to the photos of either Mom or me.

  I arrange all these things neatly, in a circle on the little bed. The room is dark now. I’m just a silhouette as I take the tiny box of matches off the windowsill. Wooden matches. Strike Anywheres. Dad would light them off my zipper like a magic trick.

  I climb onto his bed, into the nest I’ve made, and strike the match against the headboard. It sparks. A tiny leap of yellow. Slowly, I move my arm in a circle and the pages ignite.

  I don’t do this because I’m angry. Not at all. Do you know what Joss paper is? On one of our earlier walks, Dad showed Edie and me a store in Chinatown that sold paper objects. Paper cars and paper suits and paper jewels and paper cats and paper dogs and paper vases and so on. It’s for Chinese funerals. People burn these things as offerings so that the deceased can have them in the afterlife.

  That’s why I burn Dad’s book. It isn’t spiteful. No, I just want company on the other side. I want him with me.

  I lie down on my back, fold my arms over my chest. There is a crinkling sound as the paper around me begins to burn. The flames are jumpy in the breeze from the open window. My face glows like I am lying on a birthday cake. Smoke rises off the duvet. The pages curl, turn to ash, drift into my doll mouth. They taste like our kiss. The mattress squeals when it heats up. My hair sparks and shrivels. My shirt catches like a curtain. My face. Look at it. Red and soft as it melts.

  It’s very loud, the sound of fire. And through it I can hear Mom’s voice. Hush, hush, go to sleep, she says as she lowers her long braid down my throat until I choke.

  EDITH (1997)

  I spent all night wa
lking around the Quarter, retracing our steps, looking for Mom like she was something I dropped. But the whole time I was feeling the pull of the river, and finally, I let myself come here. Why have I been resisting it? This is where she went. I can feel it. I’ll stumble on her, asleep on the river-bank. Her hair spread out over a rock like it’s a pillow.

  Someone far away is singing. I’m at the industrial canal. A thick fog hangs over the water as the sun is beginning to come up. I can’t see more than a few feet in front of me. The air is slowly changing color from purple to gray.

  The song sounds familiar.

  Because I, I’ve got a bulletproof heart

  I’ve got a bulletproof heart

  “Mom?” I shout, even though I know it’s not her voice. It sounds like a black woman. Which side of the river is she on? I can’t tell if it’s near or far. Is she on the river itself? I hear the water splash against the embankment.

  “Mom, is that you?” I shout again.

  The singing stops. I’m at the edge of the river.

  “Don’t believe that I am. No.” The voice is feminine, but I think it belongs to a man. I hear the slap of a paddle on the water. The prow of a metal rowboat emerges from the fog a few feet away. The person on the boat has a crooked wig and a dress on, but also an Adam’s apple and a stubbly chest.

  “Sorry,” I say. “I thought you were my mother.”

  “Interesting.” The man in the wig says, this time in a deeper voice. “I haven’t heard that one before.”

  “Have you seen a woman out here?” I picture her in the boat with him. He is taking her somewhere. Ferrying her across… to the afterlife. I’m being stupid. “She has black hair.”

  The man shakes his head. “Can’t say that I have, child.” Something about the way he says it feels off to me. He starts to push away with his oar, but I lean forward and grab the front of his boat.

  “You sure you haven’t seen her?” I say.