Elizabeth DeWitt
21
I move in with my boyfriend after we’ve been dating for six months. I cook him butter burgers. I bake him hand pies. I clean his apartment. I wash his laundry. I want to keep this one.
He’s invited to a friend’s house, and I’m not invited to go with him. I don’t want him to go. I don’t know why, but it feels important that he not go. When he goes anyway, I am wrecked. On my way to the bathroom, to dry my face, I bang the wall with my fist. The drywall is damaged. He doesn’t leave me alone again for a while, until he can’t stand it anymore, until he leaves me alone for good.
THE GASLIGHT VILLAGE
Beth is in line at the grocery store, buying a turkey and potatoes and cranberries for Thanksgiving, and the woman in front of her keeps turning halfway around, squinting out of the corner of her eye, glaring, and then turning away again.
“Can I help you?” Beth asks with all the patience she can muster. It isn’t much.
The woman wears a polyester pantsuit, her white hair sprayed into a dandelion puff. Pale powder cakes her cheeks. Her eyes are small, blue, and watery, and she blinks like she’s fighting tears. “I’m sorry. It’s just, you’re Beth Hansen, right?”
Beth shakes her head. “DeWitt,” she says.
“Jeanette’s mother?”
“Is something the matter?”
“I’m Mrs. Schwartz.” She stares at Beth like this should mean something.
“And?” Have they met? The woman doesn’t look familiar. Beth hates this about River Bend. Anyone who meets her can guess who she is simply by looking at her: That’s the problem with being the only black family in town. She is always at a disadvantage, having been away long enough that people’s faces have grown raggedly unfamiliar.
“I’m your daughter’s history teacher?”
“Right.” How is this woman still teaching? She looks like she has to be at least eighty.
“I really hoped the notes I sent home would have inspired some improvement.” The woman’s hands grip her cart a little too tightly.
“What notes?”
“The progress reports? Detailing Jeanette’s poor performance in my class? You signed them.” She slowly blinks those runny eyes.
Beth stares at her blankly, Jeanette’s stare. She realizes now that it isn’t a look of incomprehension, but one of barely concealed anger.
Oh, the strength required to hold your tongue, the queasy effort involved in swallowing, suppressing, the mental gymnastics needed to convince yourself it’s better this way. Beth has stayed silent for so many years, about so many things, has spent so much time on hold that the slow work of unburdening, unclenching, feels almost like another kind of violation. Her very muscles ache as they loosen, and she quickly rebundles herself.
She isn’t sure she has the strength to keep quiet today. She wants this damn checkout line to move, but the woman in front of Mrs. Schwartz has a stack of expired coupons and is trying to convince the cashier to accept them anyway.
“Your daughter’s education is so very important.”
No shit, Beth thinks, but what she says is, “How many notes?”
“There must have been four or five by now. Weekly. Really,” she says, with that slow blink, “Jeanette is a bright child. If she only applied herself.”
“And these signatures, were they right slanted, or left?”
“How should I know? My point is, Jeanette needs a solid foundation if she’s going to attend college. And I do hope I can impress upon you the need for college, Mrs. Hansen.”
“Ms.”
Mrs. Schwartz pulls her neck in like a turtle. “Oh. I see.”
“And I ask because my son is left-handed.” She can’t quite believe Dan would do this, but he is the likeliest suspect.
“Without college, your daughter’s future is in jeopardy. You may not think much of college, but it really is important.”
“I went to college,” Beth says.
“Sorry. I just assumed—”
“And I will thank you to keep your assumptions to yourself.” Beth has the pleasure of watching Mrs. Schwartz’s cheeks flush.
“I just thought—”
“I can guess what you thought.”
Mrs. Schwartz turns around and busies herself with rearranging her groceries on the conveyor belt, no doubt wanting to leave, but caught between Beth and the woman whose expired coupons have warranted a visit from the store manager. After a few minutes, Mrs. Schwartz turns around again.
“Tell you what. I would be willing to allow Jeanette to complete an extra-credit project. I don’t normally do this, but, well, considering the miscommunication.”
“What would she have to do?” Beth says, her eyes narrowing.
“Go to the Gaslight Village exhibit at the Muylder Museum in Kalamazoo. It’s a nice little museum, not too expensive,” she adds, eyeing Beth’s groceries on the belt behind her own. “We’ve been studying River Bend’s history, its roots in milling and agriculture, its pioneer work ethic. She can write a report on the exhibit. It really is quite lovely. I think you might even enjoy it.”
* * *
• • •
When Beth was young, her favorite exhibit had been the Gaslight Village, a replica of how River Bend’s Main Street would have looked in 1850. Her father took her to the museum often to see the village. It had the kind of gleam that comes only from a child’s imagination; it sat off in its own corridor, the lighting dim, the hallway filled with the hushed echo of footsteps. While the village wasn’t nearly as flashy as the museum’s other exhibits—the dinosaurs, for instance, or the planetarium—its quietness was exactly why Beth loved it so much. It was easily overlooked, and so it felt personal, intimate. She always liked to pretend she’d stepped through a portal and found herself inside a frozen slice of history: a street paved in bricks, lined in storefronts and faux gas streetlamps flickering to simulate flame. In the middle of the road stood a stuffed horse yoked to a wooden carriage, a wax mannequin at the reigns. The village included the River Bend Casket Company, whose ruins still stand in River Bend today, and a replica of the Muylder Mansion, with wax versions of the tall, blond Governor and Mrs. Muylder and their butler standing on the porch, welcoming nobody. On the wall behind the mansion, a mural depicted the surrounding cornfields, the tall green rows of cornstalks growing smaller, bluer, as the fields drifted off into the distance. In and among the rows were workers, white men harvesting corn by hand. They looked so dignified as they worked, wearing trousers and jackets, wide swaths of fabric tied at their throats. As a child, Beth thought she would have loved to live in this time, to wear a bustled dress like Mrs. Muylder, to ride in a horse-drawn buggy, to shop at the haberdashery, to live in a fine big house surrounded by cornfields.
“It seems like such a hard life,” Ernest had said once, gazing into the windows of the casket factory. Beth was twelve at the time; she lived with her mother and stepfather, and rarely saw Ernest those days.
“Those men must have worked so hard,” he had said.
She’d moved on to the store windows, interesting for the myriad objects they displayed: leather-bound books on an old desk, a clothier sewing a bodice to a bustled skirt on a dressmaker’s dummy. Standing in front of the window to the oculist, where inside a mannequin worked on a pair of round spectacles, Beth noticed other people entering the exhibit, two teenaged boys. They both had bowl cuts. One was wearing a football jersey, and the other a boldly colored sweater. The boys stood by the Muylder Mansion, whispering.
Beth thought the one in the jersey was kind of cute. He wore glasses and kept pushing his floppy hair back. She watched their reflection in the shopwindow, saw them coming closer. They were looking right at her. She was keenly aware that she hadn’t done her hair that day, had just thrown it up in a puffy bun, the sides all dry and frizzy. She was wearing a pair of jea
ns that she hated, acid-washed hand-me-downs from one of her mother’s coworkers. Even on a good day, she was always so awkward around boys, especially cute ones; she didn’t know what to do, so she froze between wanting to talk to them and wanting to flee. At twelve, she was already lonely, yearning for a boyfriend, wanting to be touched, kissed, loved, but terrified of male attention. It was a problem, and one that left her angry.
When the boys came within earshot, she heard their whispers, heard the hissing syllables, the hard consonants. Something in their tone, in their energy, made them not cute anymore. Beth wanted them to leave; this was her exhibit, after all, and she didn’t feel like sharing.
They didn’t leave, and all she could do was ignore them, even as they continued to whisper. And then she heard one word, very clearly:
Nigger.
Out of the corner of her eye, she saw the boys staring at her. The one in the sweater was laughing.
“You have something you want to say?” Beth said, turning to them. The boy in the jersey looked down at his shoes, but the one in the sweater raised his chin, like he was thinking about it, until Ernest came up to put a hand on her shoulder. She watched the boys size him up, size up her white father, who was also tall and broad shouldered.
“Is there a problem?” Ernest asked.
“No, sir,” the boy in the jersey said.
“We were just talking among ourselves,” the sweater boy said. Both of them looked like they were fighting to keep a straight face, but their grins were breaking through. They wandered back over to the mansion, before the sweater boy said, “This is stupid,” and they left.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Beth said when they had gone.
“About what?” Ernest asked.
“Didn’t you hear what they called me?”
Ernest had gone back to the factory by then and stood staring through its window into the past. “I didn’t hear anything,” he said.
Beth felt her face heat up. Her hands were shaking.
“They called me the N-word,” she said. How could he have missed it? Even now, it was all Beth could hear.
“Sticks and stones,” Ernest said.
“That’s bullshit,” Beth said.
“Watch your language,” Ernest said.
* * *
• • •
When Beth tells her kids they’re going to the museum today, Jeanette goes into a silent huff. Dan begs to put it off until next weekend.
“I have plans today,” he says.
“You should have thought of that before you forged my signature,” Beth says. Still, part of her agrees. It’s mid-November, and the sky is clear. Beth wishes they didn’t have to waste the day indoors.
Much like River Bend itself, the village hasn’t really changed since Beth was a kid. Also much like River Bend, the museum no longer feels benign to her, although she has a hard time pinning down why. Maybe it’s the wax mannequins, once so lifelike, which now seem cheesy, the faces lumpy, the smiles like death rictuses. Beth supposes they have always looked this way, that her imagination has just grown weaker from years of watching CGI. The entire exhibit looks worse for wear, fingerprints smudging the shopwindows, bald patches on the stuffed horse’s haunches and nose where children—Beth included—have petted it over the years, despite the sign asking patrons to refrain from touching the exhibit.
“This is it?” Jeanette asks. Her disappointment is so complete that she momentarily forgets to give her mother the silent treatment.
“This is it,” Beth says, more harshly than she intends. “So you better find something to write about it.”
Dan buries his face in the museum pamphlet.
Jeanette walks down the brick street, peering in the shopwindows. “The old-timey dresses are kind of cool, I guess.”
Beth feels annoyed. She tells herself it’s because of Jeanette’s attitude, but really, she’s disappointed, too: The village no longer holds the same magic.
“Come on, guys,” Beth says. Even in her disappointment, Jeanette has to finish this assignment. “This is history. This is how River Bend actually looked.”
“Real cool, Mom,” Dan says, still studying the pamphlet. He pulls his phone out. “Next show at the planetarium starts at noon. We could still make it.”
“How come he gets to use his phone?” Jeanette asks, going sulky again.
“He was just checking the time,” Beth says. “Come over here. I want to show you something.” She leads Jeanette to the factory window, where she peers in to see rows of men working. “This is how the factory looked when it was in operation. Maybe there’s something here you can use for your report.”
“Why are they dressed so fancy?” Jeanette says.
“People were a lot more formal in those days,” Beth says. She always kind of liked the clothes the men wore. They seemed so romantic to her, maybe because she’d been a fan of historical romances when she was younger.
“They look hot,” Jeanette says. “They would at least take off their jackets.”
“They’re dressed like they’re upper class,” Dan says. He finally puts his pamphlet away. “I doubt factory workers would have even owned cravats.”
And isn’t that just like kids today, to be so demanding? They can’t appreciate the exhibit for what it is; they have to pick it apart.
“They look ridiculous working in such nice jackets,” Jeanette says.
“Okay, but focus,” Beth says, trying to tamp down her annoyance. “This exhibit tells a story.”
“I think it tells a lot more than it means to,” Dan says.
“What’s that mean?” Beth can feel herself getting flustered.
“Well,” Dan says, “for starters, where are all the black people?”
Beth closes her eyes. Takes a breath. “Maybe there weren’t a lot of people of color in River Bend in 1850.”
“No, there were,” Jeanette says. “We learned in class how a lot of free African American northerners came to work in the fields to escape racial tensions in Ohio.”
Beth smiles at Jeanette’s recitation. “And why are you failing history?”
Jeanette shrugs. “Homework is boring.”
“Okay,” Beth says. “So they worked agriculture, not in factories.”
“I’m sure some of them had factory jobs,” Dan says on his way past the museum’s replica of the Muylder mansion. He studies the mural on the wall. “Also, there’re no black people in the fields, either.”
“That can’t be right,” Beth says, following him to the mural. She checks the fields, row by row. As hard as she tries, she can’t find a single worker of color.
“Someone posted this thing the other day about the history of northern wage slaves,” Dan is saying, but Beth isn’t listening. Instead, she remembers that last visit with her father. They didn’t stay at the museum long after the run-in with those boys.
On the car ride back to her mother’s apartment, a news story had come on about the riots in L.A. that spring. Ernest quickly switched the radio off. He sighed twice and wiped his face.
“Here’s the thing,” he said, as if they’d been talking this whole time. “Those people, they think rioting is going to solve anything? They’ll take any excuse for vandalism, and theft, and violence. And then they expect to be treated like everyone else. No, not even. They expect the country to bow down, to apologize for things that happened ages ago. You want to get ahead in this country? You work for it. You work hard, and you improve yourself, because we’re Americans, and that’s what we do. Enough of this garbage. We’re not black, or white. We’re Americans, all of us, and it’s time we started acting like it.”
Beth sat quietly while Ernest talked, and stared out the window. Even as a twelve-year-old, she thought his arguments were weak, because if there was one thing she’d learned living in River Bend, it was that some A
mericans seemed to be more American than others.
“If you ask me,” Dan is saying, “they should call this the revisionist history museum.” He looked quite pleased with himself.
Beth wants to unclench, to shout and rage. Inside, Eliza sinks deeper into the waters, only her nose and mouth above the surface. How has Beth never noticed this before? How had her father not noticed? He’d been so focused on the hard lives of the factory workers, he hadn’t seen the interaction Beth had with those boys. But then, he’d always refused to see the truth if it was at all uncomfortable. And as Beth thinks about it, she feels her throat tightening, her hands shaking. She wants to hurt those boys, her father, Gilmer Thurber, Steve Brody, Mrs. Schwartz—every person who’s ever wronged her. She wants to dismantle the system that demands she wait patiently, quietly, invisibly, that her children wait obediently; don’t make a fuss, don’t stir the waters, just be thankful to be alive, to be allowed to exist, and to be of use, to fill a role she never agreed to, to serve as a receptacle for their narrative, their opinions, their anger, their admonishments, their shame, their abuse, their damage.
But instead of shouting and raging, Beth takes a pen from her purse and ducks out of sight behind the Muylder mansion. There she draws a black family, a man and woman and child, their hair in braids and afros, their bodies clothed in rags, into the distant blue end of the cornfield. A family working to pull ears of corn they do not own, their bodies lashed with corn rash, but finally visible, and present, and together.
Watching from deep inside, Eliza shakes her head.
“You’re acting the hooligan,” she says. “Vandalizing.”
“Fuck off,” Beth says, and pushes Eliza’s head under the water.
“Mom?” Jeanette says behind her, and Beth jumps, her pen trailing off of the body of the black woman. “What are you doing?”
“Fixing this,” Beth says, capping her pen and stowing it in her purse.
The House of Deep Water Page 19