The Deeper the Water the Uglier the Fish

by Katya Apekina

  “I don’t mind it. I don’t know.”

  I take a bit of gauze that hangs loosely from her wrist and rub it between my fingers.

  “Why would you do something like this?” I ask her, staring at the gauze in my hand.

  “I had to,” Mae says dreamily. Her voice sounds different and odd. I squint at her lips. It’s hard to tell what they look like under the blistering. She barely moves her mouth as she talks.

  “But it was an accident,” I say. Even though of course it wasn’t. She looks at me in response with those big, unblinking eyes. Can she even blink anymore? Does she still have eyelids?

  I wipe my nose with the back of my hand and watch her pick the camera back up. She aims it at the middle of the room. It takes me a moment to see what she’s looking at—a speck of dust suspended in a shaft of light. She follows its slow descent through the air down to the corner of the hooked rug on the floor. We sit for a while in silence.

  “Why are you wearing that coat?” she finally asks.

  “I took it. Did they tell you about Mom?” I ask.

  Mae doesn’t seem to have heard me. She’s looking down at her camera, fiddling with one of the knobs. It must be hard with her fingers bandaged like they are.

  “She disappeared,” I say. “She’ll turn up though. You know how she is.”

  A knock on the open door. Rose. Mae aims the camera at her. Rose pulls her lips over her teeth and grimaces. I guess that’s supposed to be a smile?

  “Why don’t you help me make some lunch,” Rose says through that bizarre grin, “and we’ll let Mae rest a bit.” I’ve never seen a person so uncomfortable in front of a camera.

  I stand and the bed creaks under me. I reach to hug Mae, but I can feel her tense. Her entire body is one raw wound. Rose beckons from the doorway.

  “All right, then,” I say, bringing my hands back down to my sides. “I’ll see you in a bit.”

  And then, as the door is shut almost all the way, I hear Mae say very quietly:

  “She’s gone this time. I can feel it. She’s dead.”

  Heat shoots through my face. I put my palm on the door and try to push it open. “She’s not! You have no idea what you’re talking about. You weren’t even there.”

  Rose pulls me away from the door. “Edie, why are you yelling at her? What is wrong with you? She’s high out of her mind on morphine.”

  “My mom’s not dead,” I say to Rose. I might as well be a duck in a children’s book. I feel so stupid. I hate that I’m crying.

  “Yeah, okay, I heard you,” Rose says. She opens a door to another one of the rooms. Mine. She stands behind me with her hands on my shoulders as I face away from her, crying. The flowers on the wallpaper blur and melt.

  “I don’t care if you don’t believe me,” I say.

  “I don’t ‘not believe you,’ Edith. But your mom isn’t here, we can agree on that. Dead or not, she isn’t here.”

  This makes me sob harder. Because I know she’s right. Mom doesn’t want to be found. Mom doesn’t want me. And if I had been looking after my sister like I was supposed to be…

  Rose lays me down on the brass bed, dries my cheeks and neck with the corner of the crocheted blanket until I finally calm down. I hiccup. The exhaustion of the last few months descends on me. There’s the gray ocean outside the window. Rose’s cool fingers linger on my face. She’s humming a lullaby.

  “Why did Mae do that?” I ask her.

  “I don’t know.” She shakes her head.

  “Where’s Dennis?” I ask her. “Why isn’t he the one taking care of her?”

  A glimpse of something that she immediately tries to cover. “I’m better at taking care of people, I guess.”

  “What did he do?”

  “What could he have possibly done? He didn’t do anything.”

  I know she doesn’t believe what she’s saying. I give her a shove and she falls off the bed, lands on her hands and knees on the floor like a dog. I turn to face the wall, the red flowers and vines.

  MAE

  Before the fire I had assumed Mom and I would always be a closed system. We were like a hall of mirrors—her-creating-me-creating-her, and so on. Which one of us was real? Which one was the reflection? But then with the fire, that was all over. When I burned her face off of my face, I killed her in myself. And so it made sense to me that I killed her outside of myself, too. When Edie tried to tell me Mom was still alive, I knew she was lying. Mom was gone.

  I blamed myself for her death. I suppose I still do, and I’ve coped with this and everything else by retreating into my camera. The world through the viewfinder was contained and manageable. My Leica became an extension of my new body. I slept with it pressed to my belly, so it was always warm.

  When Uncle Stewart noticed my interest in photography, he set up a darkroom in one of the many spare bathrooms, and as soon as I was well enough, I began spending many hours a day in there. Aside from this, Uncle Stewart and I rarely crossed paths. They took very good care of me, my aunt and uncle. Rose took a leave of absence from work so she could nurse me back to health. Whatever her true feelings about me were—she was dutiful; she was consistent; she cleaned out my wounds, administered my medications, and drove me to endless doctor appointments. She didn’t seem to want anything from me emotionally, for which I was grateful.

  Unlike poor Edie, whose need for me was bottomless. I’d see her shadow under my door, just standing there, and instead of being kind and asking her to come in, I would pretend to be asleep. She tried so hard. She decorated my room with cutouts from National Geographic when I wasn’t yet allowed to leave the house. Iconic photographs of mountains and glaciers, reminders of the wide world outside. Probably reminders she needed more than I did. It’s easy to say now that I wish I’d been kinder to my sister, but at the time I don’t think I was capable of it. Our father had just broken my heart, our mother had just killed herself, and I had just set myself on fire. I couldn’t afford to be generous.

  ROSE

  Stewart and I tried to have children when we first got married, but I wasn’t able to conceive. After the girls moved in with us, when Stewart and I would be lying in bed about to go to sleep, I’d ask him: “Stewart, do you regret it—not having any children of our own?”

  And he’d say, “Rose, what’s the sense of regretting something we can’t have?”

  “But we could’ve adopted,” I’d say. “We still can.” I imagined my own babies, little Russian, Chinese, and Ethiopian girls. One for each empty bedroom of our huge house. And Stewart, because he didn’t like to argue with me, would nod in agreement and go on reading whatever it was he was reading. But we never did adopt.

  The closest I ever came was Edie. Sometimes, I’d pretend she was my own. I’d walk through town with her, and take her on errands to show her off, even though Montauk is a small place and our neighbors knew that we didn’t have children. It was easy to see myself in Edie, not just in her looks but in her personal qualities. She was fiercely loyal and independent, but also vulnerable. She was a typical teenager of course, so slightly surly, not always very good at containing her anger. There were rough patches, but she came out all right. More than all right. I’m very proud of her. It was nice for me to pass on some of myself, family recipes and traditions, this sort of thing. It was nice to not feel for once like the broken branch on our family tree.

  I never experienced these maternal feelings toward her sister. Mae was just so odd. Stewart reads a lot of biographies, and he says that all great artists have something awful or empty at their core that they need in order to fuel their work—Dalí and Picasso and Emily Dickinson. I don’t know if I believe that entirely. Denny was never that way, but I guess it applied for Mae. She was intense and inaccessible, and she made sure you knew not to get too close.

  Marianne had no doubt done a number on the girl. I’ve seen Mae’s films, but I don’t believe Denny was capable of doing those things to her. Of course not. Whatever kindness he gave her
she must have misconstrued. But Mae was a sick and sensitive girl and he should have taken more care with her. She grew up with that madwoman, of course she learned to think that left was right and up was down. It’s very sad.

  I came to her once the movies were at the Whitney and begged her to take them down. I said: “I have done so much for you—I have put you through Montauk Academy and then art school. I have taken care of you. I’ve never asked you before for anything. But this, what you are doing, it’s not right. It’s not just hurting Denny, it’s hurting his family.”

  I begged her. But she didn’t care. There was something about her that had always been impenetrable. That didn’t change. She’d never been a person you could reason with. I understand completely why Amanda had started that libel suit, but I was very much against it. I knew all it would do was get Mae’s work more attention. And it did. Denny’s books ended up getting banned in school libraries in Indiana, and you couldn’t go into a hair salon without seeing Mae on the cover of half a dozen magazines—her face covered by a balaclava, her eyes staring out at you in a way that should have made me angry, but instead only made me feel sorry for her.

  EDITH (1997)

  I took one of Mae’s pills this morning. It was robin’s-egg blue. I hope it was morphine and not an antibiotic. There were so many pills, who’s going to notice one gone?

  I’m watching Rose chop a carrot with the grace of an architect. Mae is on a special high-calorie diet for the burns—lots of meat. Meat makes meat. In the kitchen, there’s nothing gooey limbed or foolish about Rose. Her movements are quick and confident. She sweeps the chopped carrots off the cutting board and into the gumbo pot.

  The lightness hits me all at once. Like I’m floating over the black and white tile floor of the kitchen. I should watch my head on the hanging pots. The clanging! The clatter! Don’t fall into the cauldron! Meat, meet Meat!

  “What’s so funny?” Rose says, smiling, ready to agree and be in on the joke. I shrug, shake my head, nod. I’m not making any sense, so I bend over to tie and untie my shoelaces with the concentration of a stroke victim. When I sit up, the floaty feeling dissipates a little. Rose is still talking. She has asked me a question.

  “Sure,” I say. I stick a stray tip of a carrot in my mouth, busy myself with chewing it. If I keep letting her talk, I’ll figure out eventually what I agreed to.

  “Back to school shopping…”

  This has probably been a fantasy of hers for a long time. Us gals going shopping! Matching outfits! That poor woman.

  “Do you want me to peel some garlic?” I offer. She passes me three cloves and watches me struggle to get the edge going.

  “It’s easier this way.” She rolls the garlic with a glass bottle, then passes it back. I did all the cooking growing up, so no one taught me any tricks. The papery shell slips off like magic. Beneath, the clove is shiny and smooth. A little green shoot peeks out from the tip. I feel the pill gently purring in my stomach.

  “Mince it…” Rose is saying to me.

  She trails off. Is she looking at my pupils? Are they giving me away? No. Not that. I follow her gaze.

  Mae is standing behind me in the doorway. Mae doesn’t lean anymore. She stands stiff and straight. She looks like some Greek mythological creature—bare human legs, but gauze from the waist up. And always the camera.

  “How are you feeling?” Rose says to her. “Lunch will be ready in half an hour. I heard back from Dr. Stern. He said he’d squeeze us in tomorrow. He’s a parent of one of the boys at the academy, that’s the only way I was able to get us that appointment. He’s the best reconstructive specialist in New York, probably in the world. We’re very lucky.”

  Mae nods.

  Rose pauses with her knife. “I noticed one of your morphine pills was missing. It’s not something to mess around with, Mae. It’s highly addictive. You can’t just help yourself.”

  I focus on the garlic I’m chopping. I can feel Mae’s eyes on me. If I look up and intercept her disappointment, what’s left of this blue pill will disappear completely.

  “I was in a lot of pain,” Mae deadpans. “It won’t happen again.” She photographs the two of us for emphasis.

  Another person, Uncle Stewart, would probe this. But Rose doesn’t want to. She’s the kind of person who makes decisions about people and then any new information is bent around accordingly. It’s a nice quality. It will take a lot to get her to finally hate me.

  The phone rings. It’s Mom. She’s standing in a phone booth, pressing the receiver to her wet ear.

  Stewart holds the cordless against his vested chest. His mouth is not quite synced up with the sound. “Charlie for you,” the words come at a delay. I look down at my garlic and keep mincing it. Something clenches, nausea. Out of the corner of my eye I see him holding out the phone to me, but I don’t take it.

  “For God sakes,” Rose finally says. “Tell him she isn’t home.”

  “You tell him.” Stewart is above playing games. He has an empire to run. He has to get back to the study and set his toy soldiers up in the Battle of Austerlitz. The man is demented. I knocked them all down once and the next day they were all set up again just how they were.

  “…She doesn’t wish to speak to you,” Rose is saying into the phone.

  I go outside and vomit into the azaleas.

  Dear God, I think, I sound like a horse. And then, Dear God. And then just, God. Are you watching me do all of this?

  No, but Mae is, through the lens of her camera. Neither of us acknowledge that she has lied for me.

  “Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” I finally say and wipe my hand on the slick grass.

  MAE

  Rose removed the mirror on the medicine cabinet in my bathroom so I wouldn’t have to look at myself. Of course, she couldn’t protect me from all reflective surfaces. In the evening, with the lights on in my room, I would glimpse my bandaged face in the hand-blown glass of the windows or in the shiny copper pots hanging over the island in the kitchen. Out of curiosity, I asked Rose once to show me what I looked like when she was changing my bandages. She didn’t want to, but eventually she gave me her powder compact. Of course, it was horrifying. It was before the cartilage in my nose was reconstructed, and everything else was still so blistered, red, and shiny with the thick ointment. Despite all that, I don’t think I thought much about what I saw. There’ve been times since then when the sight of my bare face has filled me with despair, but that summer it felt like a small price to pay for my freedom. However disfigured, my face was finally my own.

  And I liked that it kept people at a distance. I liked this about my camera too. Looking through the viewfinder I could never get sucked in emotionally again, as I had with my dad. The world now was flattened and circumscribed. The only times I felt a strong stirring in my chest was when I looked at the ocean. I photographed it constantly, hoping it would eventually lose this power, but also hoping it wouldn’t. Rose took me on early morning walks on the beach. She’d hold a parasol over us as I photographed the water curving along the horizon. I wasn’t thinking about that first trip to the beach with Dad and Edie. I wasn’t thinking about Mom’s body at the bottom of the Gulf. I wasn’t thinking about any of the particulars of my own situation, that it would be a long time before my skin would heal enough for me to go swimming in the salt water, for example. No. I was aware only that the ocean was enormous and that I was very small.

  It was mostly these photos of the ocean that I printed that summer. I kept all the undeveloped rolls of film in an old straw hat that I recognized from a picture Rose had in The Dad Room. In the picture, Dad is sitting on a riverbank and the straw hat casts a shadow over the top half of his face. A cigarette hangs out of the corner of his mouth and a wisp of smoke curls towards the camera. I believe it was Mom who took the picture. Seeing that younger version of him did not fill me with the same kind of lust that it had before. The hat was just a hat.

  For a long time I photographed compulsively, b
ut it wasn’t art. When I was getting ready to apply to art schools I went into the city and met with Rivka, my dad’s old girlfriend. She sifted through the stacks of photos—really generic stuff—blurry photos of the ocean, my cat, my feet. It was kind of her to meet with me and take me seriously.

  She looked at my work, then looked at me and finally said:

  ART IS NOT A SHIELD.

  IT IS A KNIFE.

  YOU HAVE TO BLEED!

  Of course, she was right. I was not letting any of myself into the work. It was not expressing anything. It was just a way of making the world more manageable. I wasn’t ready then to bleed. That came later.

  RIVKA

  I saw a video installation in the Whitney Biennial that haunted me for weeks. A dollhouse nightmare, like a modern Hieronymus Bosch shot on grainy Super 8 film. I watched it and felt immediately transported to a memory that felt like my own but wasn’t.

  It was the piece everyone was talking about. There was a long, stupid write-up for it in Art in America. The critic understood it to be a metaphor for the Jungian conception of childhood. So bloodless and reductive. The film was not a metaphor, it was personal, and yet I didn’t understand how personal until I met the artist in her studio.

  It was a very hot day and she wasn’t wearing the balaclava that had become her signature. Her skin was thick and clotted, but her gray eyes were so clear and unaffected that it made everything surrounding them look like a mask. I remember wondering if it was all part of some elaborate performance piece. I remember also that one of her ears was perfectly formed, smooth and intact, not affected at all by the burns.

  She welcomed me. “Rivka,” she said, “you haven’t changed at all, still ugly as ever.” I wasn’t offended, not when it was coming out of a face that looked like hers. We caught up for a while. She thanked me for something inspirational I had said to her years ago, which I did not remember saying and which did not really sound like the sort of thing I would say.