After they finish eating, Jeanette produces a German chocolate cake she’d stored in the microwave. It’s on a plate, frosted sloppily, but it’s the most tender, moist cake Beth has ever eaten. Beth’s recipe is good, but not as good as this.
“You made this?” Beth says.
Jeanette shrugs.
“Where’d you learn to bake like this?”
“Food Network.” She’s licking the last of the icing off her plate.
“Since when do you have a sweet tooth?”
Jeanette shrugs again. “I’m on the rag,” she says.
Beth hadn’t known her twelve-year-old daughter had gotten her period. Her stomach hurts when she realizes she’s just as distant, just as self-absorbed, as her own mother had been.
* * *
• • •
Ask Beth about her mother on any given day, and you might get a variety of answers: She died three years ago, so suddenly nobody knew what to do. Or she lives in another state, far enough away to still count as an absence; she and Beth haven’t spoken in years. Or she still lives in-state, holed up in a house cluttered by hoarder tendencies; Beth can’t visit her mother, can’t even get a foot in the door. All of these have the ring of truth, the feel of it, but here’s the reality: Gretchen’s physicality is far less potent than the thought of her, the ways in which she and Beth have hurt each other over the years. As such, Gretchen is there, always there, a hunched bundle of nerves lurking in the corners of Beth’s mind.
Years ago, Beth’s family disintegrated. Her mother is always mad at her auntie (who lives down in Indiana, where people haven’t yet realized she ain’t Miss Thang), and her auntie won’t talk to Beth, who’s guilty by association. Beth’s grandmother spends most of her time abroad, since she has the good sense to keep some distance between herself and the rest of them. Beth hasn’t seen her whole family together in nearly two decades.
When Beth told her mother about losing her job, about potentially losing her house, Gretchen’s reaction was much the same as when Beth told her mother she was getting divorced: “I could have told you this was going to happen.”
Her mother had never approved of the marriage in the first place. She never visited her grandkids, didn’t even talk to them on the rare occasion she called Beth. She skipped Beth’s wedding, although she did send a gift, a leaded crystal vase, in lieu of her presence. The vase was already broken when it arrived, a chunk from the rim rattling around in the bottom, and Beth hadn’t bothered filing an insurance claim with the carrier, or even notifying her mother. Instead, she used the vase broken, filled it with cheap bouquets bought at the grocery store and left too long to wilt, and then rot, Beth never bothering to change the water. When Dan was seven, he broke the vase for good while throwing a football in the house, and while neither Beth nor Greg were angry, Dan felt terrible. Come to think of it, maybe that explained his aversion to sports.
Beth is surprised by how few memories she has of her mother in this house. She tries to imagine her in the kitchen, making dinner, or hanging laundry in the backyard. Did she garden? After Beth’s parents divorced when Beth was four, Beth moved with her mother into the Section 8 housing in town, but within a year, Gretchen was remarried. Beth’s first stepfather was rich, or at least appeared to be rich. Turned out, all of his trappings of wealth belonged to his company—his car, his house. All of it went under with the company a few years later. No doubt Gretchen had hoped to strike it rich with this divorce—her own mother had set herself up quite comfortably by divorcing a rich man—but Gretchen took very little. There wasn’t much left to take. She’d had to move Beth back to the Section 8 housing.
“Serves you right,” Beth had told her mother.
* * *
• • •
Ever since the move, Dan’s father has called daily to check in on him. At first, Dan wondered whether this was his father’s real reason for buying him and Jeanette cellphones, except his father doesn’t call Jeanette every day. According to Dan’s father, Dan’s problem is that he doesn’t form relationships like his sister does. And it’s true; Dan doesn’t get attached to people in the way he thinks he should, and it sort of worries him. Actually, he never noticed it before, never thought to worry about it, but one night just before the move, he heard his parents fighting. His father had come to pick them up for the weekend. He heard his mom tell his father that yes, they really were moving, and no, there was no reconsidering, and then his dad asked if his mom really thought it was a good idea, and his mom said it was a little late to start this again. And then his dad said it: “He’s not like other kids. He’s not going to be able to just start over like that.”
Well, (a) Dan’s not a kid—he took driver’s ed this summer; and (b) Dan is kind of on his mom’s side: His dad was always trudging up old, already-settled conversations. Dan had been through months of counseling, at his father’s behest, had learned strategies to get out of his own head, to be present in the moment. Of course he could start over. He was even looking forward to it.
The truth is, Dan has a girlfriend now, or pert near, and even though part of him knows to keep it to himself—he can’t imagine his mother would invite Kelli Brody and her family over for dinner or anything like that—another, more primal part of him wants to climb onto the roof of his granddad’s house and shout to passersby. Not about Kelli per se, but about the general natures of attachment and physical magnetism. But he hasn’t climbed, hasn’t shouted, has he? See there? Impulse control. He’s successfully navigated a social setting with a fair amount of decorum, and emerged on the other side with a great feeling of accomplishment. This is surely a mile marker: Dan is now an adult. Ergo, his dad needs to lay off him.
And anyway, it’s not like Jeanette isn’t also affected by the move. At her new school, Jeanette is so far ahead of her classmates that soon she’s falling behind. She doesn’t want to do her work—it’s boring—and so she doesn’t.
“You only have to give the idiots what they want,” Dan says when she brings him a letter from her history teacher, Mrs. Schwartz, detailing Jeanette’s failure to live up to her teacher’s expectations. Jeanette asks him to add their mother’s signature. In the month since they moved here, their mother rarely comes out of the bedroom, except for work. On her days off, she doesn’t emerge at all, not to shower, not to eat. A sour bodily smell permeates the air, so that Jeanette often sleeps in a sleeping bag on the floor of Dan’s room, or on the couch. She does her homework in the dining room—when she does it at all.
“It’s just so boring,” Jeanette says, rolling her eyes. For emphasis, she places both of her hands on her cheeks, pulling down her lower eyelids until the red inner parts show.
“Well, no wonder. Look at your classes. Reading development? You already read at a high school level. Have Granddad go in and make them switch you.”
“Why would I do that? They’ll just give me more boring work.”
But Dan talks to Granddad, who has Jeanette switched wherever possible. There isn’t another history class, though. When Beth learns this, she acts like she’s the one who’s been wronged. “You can always come to me,” she tells Dan, and Dan wonders whether she misunderstood, whether she thinks he was the one who had her classes switched.
In her new classes, Jeanette is behind for the semester, having come in a month into the school year. She doesn’t know anyone, and these kids aren’t too eager to talk to her. They look at her askance and whisper among themselves, giggling but falling silent when they see her watching. After school, she doesn’t have time to catch up with her horse-girl friends from her old classes; she has too much homework now.
Dan comes home from band practice to find her sprawled out on his bedroom floor with textbooks everywhere. She’s wrestled her hair up into a tight bun on top of her head, the only way she wears it anymore. She looks like a librarian.
“Thanks a lot, ass face,” she says, indi
cating all her homework.
“My pleasure,” Dan says, feeling very grown up indeed at having ruined his sister’s life.
* * *
• • •
Beth is washing dishes one day, staring out the window into the backyard, when Dan comes into the kitchen and nudges her aside.
“You should go chill,” he says, taking the sponge from her.
He’s a good kid, and she’s grateful for him. She’s not really sure where he learned to be so sweet. Not from his father, surely. As much as she wants to take his suggestion, her mind is restless. She decides to get caught up on the laundry instead. She goes around the house, gathering clothes—there’s a half basketful of Linda’s tunic shirts and yoga pants in Ernest’s bedroom, and for Christ’s sake, can’t the girl do her own laundry?
The laundry room is tiny, with barely enough space to close the door behind her. The washer and dryer, the rack for detergent and fabric softeners, they take up almost the entire room. There’s a window above the washer, and when the afternoon sun shines in, the room grows as hot as the inside of a mouth. Today, the sky is overcast, a dreary day to usher in the second week of October, and the room is cold. The door behind Beth stands open, yet the room still feels too small. Beth can’t wait to burst back out of it.
There was a time—how old had she been?—when Gilmer Thurber was here, in this house, this room, with Beth. She can’t remember how or why, but she seems to think it was at her father’s invitation. He was here, in this house, and where was her father? In the house, but not in the room. And Gilmer grabbed Beth, pulled her into the laundry room. He had her up on the dryer, her clothes on the floor beside them. She could hear the shower running. Gilmer smelled like sweat and engine oil. He’d been teaching her father something about cars—she’d forgotten that, willfully: He and her father had been close, a mentor/mentee relationship, and he had been here, in this garage, and then this house, frequently. Beth’s parents divorced when she was four, and she moved in with her mother. She must have been no more than four when Gilmer had her up on the dryer.
Of course, her father didn’t know. Under threat of violence, she never spoke about it, instead accepting it as just a part of life: Sometimes her father would be unavailable, and then Gilmer could put her on the dryer.
Beth leaves the laundry unfinished, backs out of the room, and shuts the door. She’d thought moving back to River Bend would be okay now, with Gilmer gone, but she has her work cut out for her, damming these memories up again. It takes her the rest of the day, in her bed. Over the next few weeks, she finds more memories resurfacing, in the ill-lit recesses, on all the flat surfaces, the tables, the counters, in every room but the bedrooms, never the bedrooms, so that these rooms—especially her bedroom—become the only safe spaces. If she finds herself in one of the other rooms, she has to back away, pull herself up the stairs and to her bed, where she breathes deeply, concentrates on this room, its sunny wallpaper, the way the smooth wood floor creaks as she crosses it, the smell of the pine tree outside floating in through the open window. She finds her fingers in her mouth, scraping the undersides of her fingernails clean on her lower incisors, and this becomes a part of her ritual, the cleaning of her nails. She takes comfort in the fact that her hands often retain the taste of garlic and onions, or the flowery soaps Linda placed by all the sinks, or even the taste of dirt. Even this helps to calm her.
* * *
• • •
Downstairs, Linda makes coffee every morning. Ernest will have three cups, Linda half a cup, her pregnancy cheat. If Beth isn’t around, Jeanette will also pour herself a cup. She drinks only half, leaving a half-full mug in the sink. Linda doesn’t mind. She herself drank coffee at Jeanette’s age; she needed it when she would wake in the dark of winter and head downstairs, the kitchen cold before Grandma made breakfast. Linda would drink coffee as she pulled on her snow boots, her coat, and shuffled outside wearing a headlamp, huffing her way through the snow to the barn, her breath puffing in the glow of her lamp. She kept a mug of coffee with her as she fed the horses and cows before school.
Linda is a little annoyed, though, by the amount of sugar Jeanette heaps into her coffee. Linda buys coffee online—the local shops don’t carry her brand—and it doesn’t need anything but a splash of milk. But Linda reminds herself that Jeanette is twelve, a new coffee drinker.
Sometimes Beth, too, comes down for coffee, standing in front of the window over the sink and sipping it while watching the squirrels in the yard. At the first sip, Beth’s face will lift into something akin to a smile. She doesn’t talk to Linda, who is usually sitting at the kitchen table, her feet on the heater grate, but she’ll do the almost-smile, and sip half a cup at the sink before refilling and heading back to bed or to the bathroom to get ready for work. Linda had always thought black people were so loud and lively; she doesn’t know what to make of Beth’s silence.
Linda doesn’t mind, though. She’s accepted that she and Beth will not be friends, that Beth cannot bless Linda’s relationship with Ernest. If Linda had a say, she wouldn’t even be here. She’d never have chosen to fall in love with a man so much older. And yet, here she is, the acting stepmother to a woman seven years older than she, a woman who can barely stand to be in the same room with her, a woman Linda has no idea how to read, how to coax out of the soft womb of depression she’s curled inside. But Linda can take care of Beth in this one small way: She can make her a cup and a half of coffee in the morning.
* * *
• • •
From her bedroom, Beth smells something burning. It’s a faint smell, scarcely detectable. Probably someone burning leaves, she thinks. She lies there, trying to ignore it. She tries concentrating on this space, but the smell intrudes. There’s no choice but to get out of bed.
On her way down the stairs, the smell grows stronger, and it occurs to Beth that it may be inside the house. She finds Linda cross-legged on the couch, with Jeanette sitting on the floor in front of her. Linda wields a curling iron and is using it to press Jeanette’s hair, which is so long, it piles into Linda’s lap. She’s pressing it dry, too, no leave-in, no oil. Nothing. Jeanette’s head pulls back each time Linda drags the iron through her hair. Jeanette doesn’t look bothered by it, but watching this scene, something inside Beth breaks. She makes a grab for the iron, and it touches Jeanette on the side of her neck, right along her jawline. Jeanette yelps, jumps away from her mother. Beth jumps, too, and ends up with the iron against the crook of her arm.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Beth says.
Linda says nothing. Just pulls herself up from the couch and leaves the room.
“Did she hurt you?” Beth asks once Linda is gone.
“Did she hurt me?” Jeanette says.
Beth inspects the burn on Jeanette’s neck. It’s purple-brown. She goes to the medicine cabinet, rubs Jeanette with aloe. She thinks the skin will flake, but it probably won’t blister. Her arm is another story. There’s already a great gray blister forming on the inside of her elbow.
“You can style your own hair,” Beth says when she finishes rubbing Jeanette with aloe. She inspects Jeanette’s hair, the ends now dry, singed, the white tips ready to fray.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jeanette demands. Beth has gotten to her daughter; for once, Jeanette’s voice is on the verge of real emotion.
Beth goes and gets a pair of scissors. Jeanette doesn’t speak, doesn’t move, as Beth cuts her hair.
“It has to be done,” Beth says, as if Jeanette had asked her a question. “She’s burnt it.”
Clumps of hair fall on the couch, cling to the front of her. They stick to the blistering burn on Beth’s arm. Jeanette freezes. Closes her eyes. Beth cuts it to Jeanette’s shoulders, but it’s uneven, so she cuts it chin-length. It’s still uneven. She gets the clippers she normally uses on Dan’s hair, puts the longest guard on it. When she’s done, Jean
ette’s hair is less than an inch long. It curls into little corkscrews. Her scalp is pure white, visible where the curls pull away from it.
Jeanette still doesn’t move, doesn’t open her eyes, a reaction Beth can’t understand. Beth’s worked her whole life to protect her daughter. Even during the divorce, Beth and her husband were careful never to raise their voices, to always treat each other with respect. But this immobility. Somewhere along the line, Beth has failed.
* * *
• • •
Your hair,” Ernest says from the doorway, and Jeanette opens her eyes. She looks so much like Beth at that age, it’s alarming. Those wide, dark eyes, so distant, focused on something beyond here. When Beth was twelve, she was acting out in school, and Gretchen would call Ernest, would ask him what he was going to do about it. But what could he do? He didn’t know how to reach Beth, hadn’t known for years, not since he and Gretchen were called into the school when Beth was in second grade. The questions that school counselor asked, and the way she’d eyed Ernest. He and Gretchen both realized the school suspected some kind of abuse, and Ernest felt they were accusing him personally.
“Can I talk to you?” Ernest says to Beth, and Jeanette wastes no time. She’s up and headed for the doorway, her back unnaturally straight, brushing hair from her shoulders and chest as she turns the corner.
Ernest sits down on the couch next to Beth. He’s not accustomed to living with other people, to maintaining familial bonds: He’s been a bachelor for over thirty years. What he wants to say is How can I help? What do you need from me? It hurts him to see his daughter so visibly broken, and to be at such a loss for how to fix things. He blames her mother, for how Gretchen raised Beth after the divorce, because blaming Gretchen is easier than thinking too hard about things he doesn’t want to think about. Gilmer Thurber. The trial. He’d been contacted by a lawyer. The questions had caught him so off guard, but since then, his mind has been working on it. He should call the lawyer back; he should testify, tell what he knows. But, God, the thought of that man, the thought of his own little girl. Ernest isn’t sure he can do it; he’s not sure he’s strong enough.
The House of Deep Water Page 11