He wants to make things right, wants to make up for lost time, but he doesn’t even know where to begin, and so what comes out of his mouth is “Why can’t you just be nice?”
Elizabeth DeWitt
14
My friend Deb and I play penis in choir class. It goes like this: I say penis, and then Deb says penis louder, and then I say penis even louder, and in theory, we keep going until we get caught. We don’t ever get caught, mostly because we end up giggling before we can finish our game. We’re altos and stand in the back row, and we play while everyone else is singing. Also, our choir director is too busy mooning over Alexia, the blond soprano in the first row, to bother with much of anything else. He and Alexia are dating. It’s supposed to be a secret, but this is a small school, and just about everyone has seen them at the mall holding hands.
“It’s so gross,” Deb says, and I nod along. “I mean, he has buck teeth and wears those gay vests,” she says.
I don’t tell her that part of me signed up for voice lessons with him after school because I imagined being the student who got seduced. Like in a romance novel, I could be the student whose talents, whose beauty, had gone unrecognized until now. She wouldn’t understand anyway. She’s thin and white and redheaded.
A few weeks later, we find a heart drawn in pencil on one of the music stands, with “Alexia + Mr. Henley” written inside. You can see it against the black lacquer of the music stand only if the light hits the graphite just so. I find myself wondering whether she calls him Mr. Henley when they’re alone together. I can’t even imagine what his first name is.
HEAT
The kitten is in heat. Deborah thinks about letting the damn thing out in the middle of the night. For three days the kitten has writhed, slinking around the house, rubbing its sides on everything, purring and yowling and whipping its tail around. Now it rears up on its hind paws and scratches at the back door, leaving ragged wounds in the screen, its moans lewd and low.
It’s too hot for October, a late-season heat wave, and the house is crowded, with all of Deborah’s girls indoors. Hannah, the youngest, follows the kitten around, scratching it just above its tail to watch it roll on the floor. Deborah’s older girls, Kelli and Mandy, are currently grounded. Plus there are the two dogs. And Steve’s bird, that damn African gray parrot he got ages ago from a friend whose toilet he fixed even though the guy didn’t have any money to pay him. The bird speaks mostly swear words and bad French. Mandy always corrects its pronunciation.
Mandy is the one you have to watch out for; even though she’s fifteen, younger than Kelli by eleven months, she’s the instigator, the sassy one. Kelli is quiet and shy, would have been bookish in a different environment. The girls are both teenagers, Irish twins their grandma likes to joke, because they were born less than a year apart. They got grounded for breaking curfew. Deborah might have gone easy on them, if Mandy hadn’t compared the household to a concentration camp. So. No phones, no computer, no leaving.
Deborah thinks it’s only fair, considering how strict her mom had been when she was their age. All of her mom’s strictness didn’t matter; Deborah still got married in haste at nineteen, just before her son, Layne, was born. She would be damned if her daughters were going to live that life. Deborah was seventeen, only a year older than Kelli is now, when she started dating Steve. And then she found out her friend Eliza was dating him, too. She’d seen Eliza—she goes by Beth now, according to Facebook—at the gas station, and has heard she’s back in town with her two kids. Deborah shook her head; that woman had better stay away from her family.
Deborah is well aware of the threats in a town like this. River Bend is full of men who want to take and take. Just last June, that horrible man Gilmer was caught hurting children in his basement. Deborah can’t even imagine the terrible things he did to them—young children, too, some four or five. There are times when she hates her husband for his insistence that she needs to stay home with the kids, but other times, she’s thankful. Who knows what might have happened to her own kids if she had a career, if she had to leave them in someone else’s care? Their house may not be big and fancy, like the houses she’d always dreamed of living in, but inside, she and her family are safe.
Even so, today the house seems shrunken, its walls pressing in on the family. Mandy stood in the kitchen with the refrigerator door wide open for a good ten minutes, yelling across the house to Kelli, telling her sister what there was to drink. Now the girls hang in the open front doorway, shouting to some neighborhood boys on the sidewalk, thinking they have their mom on a technicality. They keep pushing the dogs back as they try to nose between their legs and out the door. If the kitten should sneak out, it would be their fault. How many times has Deborah talked to them about letting out all the air-conditioning?
Hannah sprawls on her belly on the concrete floor in the living room, the kitten rolling around next to her. She’s coloring in a book—not a coloring book—with one hand, and stroking her kitten with the other. Deborah can hear its unholy purring from the kitchen. Hannah likes to lie on the floor, which is bare because the dogs messed it so much that Deborah pulled up the carpet and threw it out on the curb a few months ago. The slab underneath is discolored in the spots where the dogs had most often gone, and no amount of bleach can remove the stains. Deborah has scolded Hannah time and again for lying on the dirty floor, but it’s hot in the house even with the window unit blasting, and the floor, Hannah says, is good and cool.
“The cat’s being silly,” Hannah giggles. As she scratches the kitten, it squats down low to the ground and begins pumping its butt like that Nicki Minaj in those music videos Mandy always watches.
“Knock it off,” Deborah says. She picks the kitten up by its scruff, drops it in the bathroom, and shuts the door. The simple act of moving around the house has dampened the underside of her bra. Sweat trickles down her back. What she wouldn’t do for a cigarette right now, but she’s out and it’s three days until payday and she needs her last few dollars for laundry.
When she leaves the bathroom, she realizes the front door is closed, and Kelli and Mandy are nowhere to be found. The girls’ bedroom is empty, the backyard is quiet; Deborah begins to fret when she hears thumping on the roof. She pokes her head out the front door and hears her girls. When she steps outside, both the dogs bound past her and jump around in the driveway, hoping to greet visitors. She finds Kelli and Mandy lying on beach towels on the roof. The girls are always saying the grass is too pokey to lie in the yard. On a day this hot, it takes commitment to lie out on a black-shingled roof in a bikini, especially for Kelli, who inherited her mother’s red hair and fair skin. Still, at least the boys they were talking to are no longer in sight. Deborah herds the dogs and chains them up.
“You aren’t supposed to leave the house,” Deborah calls up to them.
Kelli raises herself onto her elbows, removes the washcloth from her eyes.
Mandy, without moving, calls back, “We didn’t leave the house. We’re on the house.”
* * *
• • •
Back inside, the damp air smells like dogs. They have just the two, a bitch and the one puppy that didn’t die directly after being born, and didn’t wander out into the street and get hit by a car, and didn’t get adopted when Deborah put an ad on Craigslist. The puppy isn’t really a puppy anymore; it’s two years old and has long since grown into its paws. Deborah likes the puppy, but part of her doesn’t want to get attached. So she tells herself. If she were honest, she’d have to admit that she already is attached, that she really should get rid of the dog and the puppy since there isn’t room in the two-bedroom house for two dogs, three children—four, if Layne ever comes home—a husband, and herself, and now the kitten the girls found behind the dumpster at the gas station when they walked down last week to buy pop. And the damn bird, half-bald because it’s always pulling out its feathers. Deborah lived in constant hope that
her husband’s parrot would die, until Mandy informed her that some African grays live to sixty or seventy years.
Yet for the moment, the house seems almost sufficient, with Steve working, and the dog and puppy chained up in the yard. Hannah has fallen asleep on the couch with the air conditioner dripping on her, even though Deborah has told her a thousand times not to, that sticking her face in that thing or sleeping in its breeze is why Hannah’s always got ear infections.
Deborah shuffles from room to room, gathering up laundry. The space around her shifts, the walls swell; the house expands in the afternoon heat. Deborah stands up a little taller, and the air moves in and out of her lungs with less effort on her part.
The Laundromat is just across Main Street. When she steps outside, a basket on her hip, she has trouble finding Kelli and Mandy. Their towels are still on the roof, a ladder leaned against the house. In the backyard, the lawn chairs set up next to the kiddie pool are empty. Back around front, she sees the girls standing on the sidewalk, talking to a boy who has to be Eliza DeWitt’s son. He has a nappy head and dark knees, just like his mother. Mandy giggles and punches the boy in the arm, and the dogs strain at their chains, barking, egging each other on. So much energy for such a hot day. The boy doesn’t seem to notice Mandy’s flirtations; he’s fixated on Kelli, whose bikini, Deborah realizes, no longer fits right; her breasts, though small, are all too visible through the fabric and on the verge of oozing out around the edges of her top, which is old and thin and downright indecent. Deborah feels her face heat up and pinch into a frown. A hard bulb grows in the pit of her stomach. Kelli must be aware of how she looks, too, because she crosses her arms over her chest. A line of sweat darkens the back of her bikini bottoms.
“You need to answer me when I call,” Deborah says. Had she even called to the girls? She can’t remember.
“God, we’re just talking,” Mandy says. “It’s not a sin.”
Deborah sizes the boy up. Those dark eyes. He’s a full head shorter than even Kelli, who’s shorter than Mandy by a couple inches. “I never seen you before,” Deborah says.
“Dan Hansen,” the boy says, holding out his hand to shake. Then he adds, “Ma’am.”
Even the way he moves his mouth looks like his mother. Deborah feels the hard bulb in her stomach sprouting, sending up creepers. Eliza DeWitt has been back only a couple of weeks, and already her boy has found Deborah’s girls. The only black family in town. They don’t belong here.
Deborah eyes her oldest daughter. “Go in and watch your sister. Both of you.”
Kelli now has her legs crossed as well as her arms. She looks like she needs to use the bathroom. She’s staring down her own long, pale legs at her toenails with their chipped blue polish. It’s been a long time since Deborah was young enough to wear shorts, when she seldom felt cold even when the snow fell, even when her pinkie toes had worn through her canvas shoes. When she was Kelli’s age, she had no money to buy a winter coat and instead wore layers of cardigan sweaters in pink and green and yellow, always Easter colors, all year long. But she was smart, her teachers had said so, and she showed promise. That was before she met Steve, when she still thought she was getting out of this town, when she could still imagine herself wearing heels to her office job. But what are her kids’ options, really? Even if her girls get grants for college, their grades are poor. Hannah is always in trouble at school, for fighting with the other kids, for refusing to do as the teacher asks. And God only knows what Layne will do when they let him out.
“You watch her,” Mandy says, and without thinking, Deborah slaps the girl. Dan’s eyes widen. He opens his mouth like he wants to say something, and then thinks better and shuts it. He turns and walks away up the sidewalk.
Mandy narrows her eyes and her lips, her bottom jaw shifting to one side, a look she learned from her dad.
“I’m washing laundry,” Deborah says. “Get inside. And put on some clothes.”
“It’s too hot,” Kelli whines. “Stupid Indian summer.” She reaches an arm up to wipe the sweat from her brow, and when she pulls her arm away, the hairs on it are plastered to her skin.
“You don’t need to be sitting around the front yard half-naked for all the world to see. Get inside and make Hannah a snack.”
* * *
• • •
That night, after Steve comes home and pulls his dinner from the oven, while he eats on their bed in his dirty work clothes, Deborah brings the last of the clean laundry home.
“I saw that DeWitt boy today,” she says.
Steve sits on the edge of the bed, his plate in his lap, hunched over his food.
“God,” she says. “The DeWitts have been back what? A month? And he’s already met the girls.”
“Hansen,” Steve says with a mouth full of potatoes.
“What?”
“The kid’s name is Hansen.”
“Whatever, Eliza DeWitt’s boy.”
“Beth,” he says.
As soon as he says it, he realizes his mistake. He knows she goes by Beth only because of social media, but doesn’t want his wife to know that he’s been keeping tabs on Beth. When he was younger, he was better at juggling these interactions, better at keeping straight in his mind who knew what. Somewhere along the line, though, his brain grew fuzzy, and he lost his knack for compartmentalizing. The best he can do now is hope Deborah didn’t notice.
Deborah did notice, though, and she wonders how he knows. Has he visited Beth? She remembers their encounter at the gas station—the way Steve looked at Beth—and her stomach feels watery. She wants to find out, but she’s aware she’s already pushing it. She takes a deep breath, sends the creepers back down into the bulb. What’s done is done; it’s her daughters’ futures she’s worried about tonight.
“You’re getting the bed all dirty,” she says, brushing sawdust off the blanket.
Elizabeth DeWitt
15
I know how to break apart frozen beef patties with a quick tap on the flat-top griddle. I know how to crack an egg in each hand and deposit them without shells into the silicon rings. I’ve mastered the art of squirting condiments in the dead center of a bun, of evenly distributing the two pickles on a Quarter Pounder, of making sure the processed cheese food droops evenly over the sides of the burger. My manager nicknames me the Grill Goddess.
I’ve learned everything I can in this kitchen, and I’m bored. I dream of the day when I’ll work in a real kitchen, in the kind of place they feature on Great Chefs on PBS. I’ll learn to sauté and braise, to sear meats with a perfect crust, to bake soufflés, sauced with dollops of compote or crème anglaise. But for now, this job helps me save for college, save for the time when I’ll get out of this cow town.
My manager moves me to the second drive-through, where I have to bag the sloppy work of other cooks. My coworker Earl, who’s taking orders in the first drive-through, uses the opportunity to hit on me over our headsets. He’s cute enough, his floppy hair and olive skin, but also maybe a little skanky. He just broke up with Lila, who smelled so bad in gym class the other girls were whispering that she had a yeast infection—we all smelled it when we were in the showers, and doesn’t that mean she’s a slut? He seems tainted by that smell, and I can’t tell if I’m grossed out by him now, or excited. He’s probably experienced. He might know things. Regardless, I’m a good girl. I tell him I can’t go out after work. I have to wash my hair.
After work, while I’m waiting for my mom to pick me up, he says we should go out after I wash my hair. I tell him I have to clip my toenails. He asks how long that will take. He’s cute enough, but boy is he dumb. I tell him it will take all night, all week, it will take as long as he’s interested in going out with me.
He offers me a ride home, and I’m scared. He’s standing too close to me, close enough I can smell his fabric softener, and I’m frozen here on the concrete. My mother has told
me about getting into cars with boys. I wish she was here, I wish I was getting into her car right now, but she’s late, and when she does arrive, when I point out how late she is, she says, “You’re the one who wanted this job.” She shakes her head and humphs. “So hell-bent on going to college.”
DINNER SHIFT
The Hudson House isn’t what it once was. When Slick and Mike Hudson’s parents ran the place, it was a clean and efficient kitchen serving simple, wholesome food. Now, with Slick as the owner, the kitchen is understaffed, Slick trying to cut labor costs. To compensate, he buys canned vegetables and instant mashed potatoes, precooked chicken for salads, factory-made dinner rolls, pre-breaded frozen shrimp. Anything to speed up prep time.
Beth is embarrassed to work here. She misses the country club in Charlotte, regrets that she took it for granted while she was there. There was an energy to that kitchen, a hustle that is utterly missing at the Hudson House, where she and her coworker—who seems to change every week—putter around a too-small kitchen, plating mostly fried food, greasy because the fryer is set too cool. Slick seems to think that turning the temperature up to 375 would increase his electric bill exponentially.
Worse yet is the fact that Gilmer Thurber used to work here. There’s something about stepping into Thurber’s role that makes Beth feel nasty. She thought when he was arrested, that was it, he was gone, but now she can’t help but think about the fact that he must have touched everything she touches: the pans and trays, the spatulas, the fryer baskets, the plates. She can almost feel him permeate her skin, and when she goes home in the evenings, no amount of soap and hot water can scald away his residue.
The House of Deep Water Page 12