“Mommy Dearest is here,” I say. Linda huffs. I watch Paula get out of the truck and stand there awhile, one hand on her hip, the other hand holding a dish of something orange covered in plastic wrap. I came here wanting to talk to Linda, maybe smooth things over after last weekend, but now my stepmother is knocking and Linda is staring Paula down through the picture window. I go let her in.
“Derek,” she says, surprised. I’m sure she hasn’t thought about me in years. “You’ve grown.” She looks pointedly at my waistline.
“You’ve aged,” I say with more bitterness than I mean. I don’t really hate her; I just hate what she did to Linda, to my dad, to Skyla and Paige.
“Dinah’s out?” Paula asks. “She never misses Sunday supper.”
“Nobody invited you,” Linda says.
“I’m sorry,” Paula tells Linda, setting her dish down on the counter. “I really am. I didn’t come here to fight. I came to put things right.”
“You got a time machine?” Linda says, glancing out the window at that truck in the drive. It somehow manages to catch the light, even on such a dreary day.
“Let’s start this over,” Paula says. She makes Linda tea and seats Linda in the living room. Ordinarily, I would take this as my cue to leave, but today I follow them in. I’m keeping an eye on my stepmother, because she wasn’t here, she didn’t see Linda—or Paige, either, for that matter—after she skipped town. Her daughters were broken, and I’ll be damned if I’ll let her break Linda again. After Linda devours the first piece of cornbread, I bring her a second, this time drizzled with honey. Paula watches Linda eat and, I swear to God, the woman is sneering.
Linda has to be about eight weeks into her pregnancy and her face has gotten rounder. Of course Paula would be disappointed. Growing up, Paula had always preached manual labor as a means of weight control. She would gossip about Aunt Deb, who’d grown plump in the years since she married Uncle Steve, even though she chain-smokes instead of eating.
“Tell me about this guy you’re marrying,” Linda sighs.
“Marrying?” I say. I can’t help myself.
“Can we talk in private?” Paula says, eyeing me, but Linda ignores her, so I do, too. She has no claim to this family. She relinquished that years ago, when she walked away.
“Why didn’t he come meet the family?” Linda says.
Paula’s gaze falls to the floor. “He couldn’t get the time off work,” she says. “Can I get you anything? Another cup of tea?”
“I’m good,” Linda says.
“Well, hell’s bells,” Grandma says from the doorway. “I’d taken her for dead.” She’s in a pair of faded frayed jeans and a flannel shirt. She has hay in her hair.
“Hey, Ma,” Paula says.
“You brought her here?”
“Not really,” Linda says.
“I came on my own,” Paula says. “I wanted to see my daughter.”
“You came for a divorce,” I mutter. Of course she did. What else would she have come for?
“’Bout time,” Grandma says.
“I don’t want to start trouble,” Paula says. “I just thought maybe it was time we reconnected.”
“Why?” I say. “You caught wind of the baby?”
Linda face-palms.
Grandma crosses her arms over her chest. “What’re you talking about? There’s no baby here.”
It hadn’t even occurred to me that Grandma wouldn’t know. I would have to go and open my big mouth. I came here to smooth things over, but I’ve made them a million times worse. I rack my brain, trying to figure out how to back out of this, but there’s just this low-level buzzing instead of thoughts. I’m that much of an idiot.
“Well, shit,” Grandma says, eyeing Linda now. “I thought I was just feeding you too well.” She comes into the living room, but refuses to sit on the couch where Paula is.
“How far are you?” Grandma says.
“Eight weeks,” Linda says.
“No,” Grandma says. “You’ve been back longer.”
Linda stares her down.
“You been to the doctor yet?”
“They put it at eight weeks, Grandma.”
Grandma is quiet while she considers. Then she turns to Paula. “This is your fault. I tried to raise ’em better than this, but there’s only so much I can do.”
“Hold on a minute,” Paula says.
“No. You don’t get to talk,” Grandma says. “You tricked my son into marrying you, and then dumped him with your children. Who gives you the right?”
Linda rubs her belly like she already feels movement in there. Paula leans forward on the couch. “What can I get you, baby?”
“I think it’s time you left,” Grandma says.
“She’s okay,” Linda says.
“I was talking to both of you,” Grandma says.
“That’s a little much, Grandma,” I say.
“You think I’m raising a third generation? No, sir. I am not.”
“Where do you suggest she go?” Paula says.
“Back to her husband? Let him sort it out.”
“That’s just like you,” Paula says.
“Or better yet, back to the man who did this to you. Ernest, right? Ernest DeWitt? You’ve been spending an awful lot of time with him.”
“You can always come live with me,” I say quietly.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Derek,” Linda says. “Shove a sock in it.”
“Don’t you dare talk to my grandson that way,” Grandma says.
Linda tries to get up from the chair, but she isn’t fast enough. She leans over and throws up cornbread all over the hardwood. She keeps heaving until her stomach is empty, until only strings of mucus and saliva come up. No matter how long I work in hospitals, I will never get used to watching someone puke. I can clean it up, no problem, but watching it in the process of coming up—I can’t. It’s all I can do not to puke, too. Grandma seems to waver, to want to comfort Linda. She has her arms crossed over her chest, her fingers gripping her forearms. Instead, I go to Linda’s side, hold her hair and rub her back.
* * *
• • •
Paula and I both help Linda pack what’s left of her belongings. It takes only about an hour. She didn’t bring much with her from Texas, and hasn’t acquired much since coming home. She’s called Ernest to make sure he’ll take her in.
“Let me drive you over,” Paula says.
“No,” I say. “Let me.” I still need to talk to her, still need to make things right.
Linda turns to her mother. “You’ve done quite enough,” she says, and I watch a flush spreading up Linda’s neck to her face. I try to put an arm around her, to comfort her, but she shrugs out of my grasp and goes to pack boxes into my car.
“I got those,” I say. Some of them are heavy, and she needs to take it easy. I start stacking boxes. Linda turns back to her mother.
There are fewer than a dozen boxes, but the last one won’t fit in my trunk. The backseat is already full. I’m struggling to find space while Paula is having the heart-to-heart I need to be having with Linda.
“This is silly. Let’s just put them in my truck,” Paula says.
“Fine,” Linda says.
That’s it, I think. I’ve lost. I’ve lost Linda. I unload the boxes and pile them in the pickup bed.
“I’m so sorry,” Paula says, taking a step toward Linda, her arms raised a little like she’s going to hug her. “If there’s anything else I can do . . .”
“I’ll be fine,” Linda says, taking a step back. “I’ve made it this far without you.”
“Is he at least nice to you?” Paula says, her shoulders slumped. “I remember Ernest. He had a reputation.”
“Yes, well,” I say, cutting her off and opening Paula’s passenger’s-side door for Linda. “S
o did you.”
Elizabeth DeWitt
13
In eighth grade, after one of our classmates gives birth to her second baby, my friends and I start the V Club. We even have a hand sign, which is just a peace sign, and we flash it at each other while pledging allegiance to our club.
Gloria is our first member. She’s a slumpy girl who won’t look you in the eyes when you talk to her, and she stares at her feet in the showers in gym class.
That fall, Gloria starts dating a guy who doesn’t go to our school. In fact, I don’t think he goes to school at all. I meet him at a football game. He has a bowl cut and a beer belly and an old letterman jacket that the leather is cracking on. He buys hot chocolate for all of Gloria’s friends.
Soon, Gloria stops returning the V sign when we flash it at her. She starts biting her nails, chews them away to nothing. She no longer talks to us, or anyone else in school. She’s always been quiet, easy to overlook, but now she’s somehow transparent, folding silently into herself. I am able to miss her, even when she is sitting in the desk in front of me in class.
Within a few weeks, she stops attending school altogether. She disappears so gradually that I don’t notice her gone, not at first, until all at once one day I remember she used to be there.
SMALL WAYS
Beth experiences every pothole, every dip in the road, as if it were a personal insult. Her back hurts, her head hurts, her butt is numb, and she feels like there is water sloshing the length of her legs, just beneath the skin. It doesn’t help that the U-Haul trailer seems to be weighing her car down, pulling at the back end and forcing it to ride low on the tires. Doing permanent damage, she just knows it. Even less helpful is the fact that this move is not Beth’s choice. Her financial situation hasn’t been good since the divorce. Now, after being fired from the restaurant where she cooked for the past eleven years, after deciding to move and waiting all summer for her house in Charlotte to sell, she finds herself with very few options.
Her son, Dan, so attuned to other people’s moods these days, tries his best to occupy her mind, to get her to stop fixating on the negative. He really is such a sensitive boy, especially for a fifteen-year-old. Beth often wonders where he gets it from. His father isn’t like that. And Beth certainly isn’t, either. Dan DJs for her, favoring nineties artists he knows she likes: Mariah Carey, Salt-N-Pepa, TLC, Destiny’s Child. Not a very creative list of faves, but then he knows she grew up in rural Michigan—the same place they’re headed now. Probably, she didn’t have much exposure to anyone else.
In the backseat, his sister, Jeanette, gives their mother the silent treatment. Occasionally Dan’s cellphone will buzz, Jeanette asking him to ask their mom for a rest area or a hamburger. When they stop, Beth notes how urgently Jeanette runs for the bathroom, how ravenous she is when she digs into her food. Jeanette holds grudges silently, but thoroughly, like a true DeWitt.
“Rest area?” Beth asks, eyes on the rearview mirror where Jeanette pretends to be asleep. Dan hesitates, swiveling in his seat to check on his sister.
“Jeanette, I saw you looking at your phone,” Beth says. “Yes or no? Rest area?”
Jeanette’s eyes pop open. She doesn’t glare at her mother. She holds her face blank, nodding at Dan. When Beth pulls into the rest area, she no more than gets the car in park before Jeanette is out the door. Beth tries and fails to remember being twelve, tries to summon the extreme loathing, directed both inward to the self and outward to family, classmates, teachers, strangers at the mall, grocery clerks, the guy who takes tickets at the movie theater—it’s as if Jeanette hates other people for not being her, but she also hates herself. A Gen-Xer stuck in an iGeneration body.
Jeanette is mature for a twelve-year-old, with hips and breasts and piles of natural hair. Beth knows the pressure Jeanette already feels, simply because she’s at that age. And it’ll only get worse from living in River Bend, where the default is Dutch. She knows Jeanette will feel like she’s supposed to be tall and slender, with long legs and blond hair. Beth can also remember, all too vividly, the isolation of never seeing anything of yourself in your classmates. Never seeing other people of color, never seeing black hairstyles. Not having a store that carries good black hair care products. Never finding clothes at the local shops that flatter your figure. Why is she bringing her daughter to this town? Why couldn’t she just shut her mouth at work and carry on the way she had for years? None of this would be necessary if she could only remember how to be complacent.
A few days ago, Beth found on Jeanette’s computer a listicle of pencil tests you can do to find out how attractive you are. It included things like placing a pencil under your breast; if the pencil didn’t drop, it meant your breasts were too saggy. Or holding a pencil against your chin and nose; if the pencil touched your lips at all, it meant your lips were too big. That’s how they get you: It’s all the small ways they tell you you’re not good enough.
“You spend too much time online,” Beth told Jeanette that evening. “It’s getting in the way of your school.”
Jeanette stared at her blankly.
“You only get half an hour a day.”
“What about school projects?” Jeanette demanded.
“Half an hour of recreational use.”
Beth hadn’t even wanted Jeanette to have a computer, but her father bought it for her for Christmas. Beth considered devising her own tests, skewed in favor of black girls everywhere: Place a pencil in your unbound hair; if the pencil drops, your hair is too straight and stringy.
“How are you doing with all this?” Beth asks Dan. He shifts in his seat, seems to be choosing his words carefully.
“I’ll be fine,” he says. Not It is fine, or I am fine. The wording is not lost on Beth.
“It’ll be nice to see your granddad, right?”
Beth will never assuage the guilt that she drove away her children’s father. The kids will see him in the summers, but she doubts that’s enough. She watches Dan not know how to act on a daily basis, not know what to say, and she wonders how he would be different with a male role model. Someone to teach him some semblance of confidence. Dan is a fragile-looking boy, with pale brown skin and hair cut too short—he doesn’t like to fuss with it, although she has heard him say he wishes he had dreadlocks. She’s noticed that, when he talks to people, he refuses to meet their eyes, instead wielding a paperback novel like a shield. If only he were outdoorsy, he might have that gold-russet skin like his sister. And he might lose some weight. He’s not fat, exactly, but doughy. He prefers libraries to football fields, and it shows. Jeanette is on her way back from the bathroom now, and even with her face in her phone, she moves with more pep, more confidence than Beth can ever recall seeing in Dan.
* * *
• • •
They arrive in River Bend around midnight. Beth had wanted to avoid driving at night, but they’d gotten a late start and made more stops than she anticipated. And now here she is, returning home to the town that, once upon a time, she couldn’t wait to leave.
The way back isn’t quite as she remembered—the new highway bypass throws her for a loop. It’s as if River Bend wants to be left behind, forgotten. Even in the dark, Beth can tell the town has changed only for the worse. Somewhere in the intervening years, the village installed lampposts that look like gaslights—someone’s kitschy idea of sprucing the place up. The new lights sort of resemble the Gaslight Village at the Muylder Museum in Kalamazoo, her favorite exhibit when she was a child, a life-sized diorama of how River Bend would have looked in 1850. The museum, however, had flickering lights that looked like real flames; the static bulbs in the lights along Main Street are stubbornly unchanging, like the village itself.
The potholes on Main Street are like trenches she has to rumble the car over, and most of the storefronts downtown are boarded up. River Bend was never a booming place, but now it’s just the skeleton of a town.
As she pulls into the alley behind her father’s house, the trees and garages lean close, bearing down on her. Beth finds herself taking great gulps of air, and is glad her kids are both asleep, that she can have a moment to pull herself together after parking.
The house had blurred in her mind over the years. In the darkness, it seems to have grown larger. She knows it’s painted pale yellow, but for the life of her, she now has trouble making it out against the sky. There is no moon out tonight. The alley behind her is dark, the streetlamp burned out. She stares at her father’s house, trying to discern the pitch of the roof, the stairs leading up to the back door, anything.
She should be able to find a happy memory of it—this is the house where she spent her early childhood, the house where they lived when her family was still whole—and yet, even as she strains her mind, all she can come up with are memories of Gilmer Thurber here, in this house, his presence in every corner, filling the house like dark water.
The longer she stares, the harder it is to see, so that she finds herself turning away, giving the house the side-eye, trying to trick it into materializing. Next to her, Dan snores quietly. Jeanette shifts in her sleep and gives an unhappy whimper. Beth knows the house stands there, yet the lot seems to be full of stars and space, with distant planets dotting the wall facing her. The Milky Way is folded into the roof. Her eyes are sore and dry. She finds herself dozing, her head drooping onto her chest, and then her eyes blink open. She could close them, just for a second, if only her mind would quiet. Instead, she stares at the house until its eastern-facing wall grows pale, until the sky around blues and brightens. At first she thinks it a trick of the light, but as the dawn comes on stronger, the house looks blue, and stays blue. It’s been painted recently, she realizes. It’s only the third week in September and the mulberry tree in the backyard is a sunny yellow, its leaves dropping to the grass beneath. A light goes on inside the kitchen, and she can see her father, Ernest DeWitt, through the gauzy curtains, poking around in the fridge, the pantry, making coffee. At the sink, he pauses, tilts his head, then reaches out and pushes the curtains aside.
The House of Deep Water Page 9