Mae interrupts. She glares at me and says: “I think you’re being very selfish.” It feels like she has reached across the table and slapped me.
DENNIS LOMACK’S JOURNAL
[1970]
Last night I began… something. Something big, alive. I don’t want to speak too soon, but maybe finally a book (!). I typed and Marianne lay on the mattress on the floor, watching me. With her I am an open glove welcoming a hand. It is her energy working through me, I’m certain of it. I wrote all night. Outside, it rained. Marianne lay on her back, raised her arm, squinted at her ring, fell asleep. Yesterday, my sister came into the city for a visit and as we were passing City Hall, I felt compelled to get married. We bought carnations, dyed bright blue, from the deli across the street. “Look,” Marianne had said, running her thumb along the stems, veined like arms. We stopped a tourist on the street, asked him to take a picture of us with his camera. He promised to mail it. And since our marriage, the urge to write has consumed me. Beneath all my words, like subway clatter—my wife, my life, my wife. It was already light out when I stopped and crawled in beside her. I needed more of her to keep going.
“They bit me all night long,” she told me, sleepily showing me her arm. A row of small red welts. The bedbugs live between the floorboards and inside the electrical sockets.
“I’ll bite you too,” I said. And I did.
Then after, in the bathroom mirror, as I washed my face, I caught sight of my earlobe—two uneven lines, marks from her crooked front teeth. And again, that zap of desire.
I ran back to bed, unbuttoned the blouse from the bottom that she had begun buttoning from the top. She’s shy but about all the wrong things. I moved her hands off her breasts and kissed her wrists. Pinned her down.
And then, her whispered refrain: You can save me?
For which there is only one answer: Yes, of course, yes.
EDITH (1997)
Dennis and Mae are banging pots around in the kitchen. He’s teaching her how to make dumplings from scratch. It’s his grandmother’s recipe from Poland. I guess that makes her our great-grandmother. I did most of the cooking back home and kept the batteries out of the smoke alarm by the kitchen because of Mom and Mae. All our pots had outlines from burnt rice on the bottoms from when they would try to make red beans and rice. I was thinking about that yesterday, when we got a special tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by some woman Dennis was/is/will be putting it into, and she was showing us the swirly night sky in a painting by Vincent van Gogh. It looked just like the bottoms of all our pots in Metairie. It makes me sad: those pots, stacked and unused in the cabinets of our empty house. I don’t know how much longer I can take being away.
I heard someone say once that if you visualize what you want, like really picture it with all the details, it’ll come true. Sort of like prayer. So, I try it. I close my eyes and concentrate. I’m not in this cramped shithole anymore. Instead, I’m back home, standing in our living room. To the left is the shelf with the gourd sculptures filled with my grandfather’s ashes. In front is the window with its lace curtains. It’s the middle of the day and light is streaming in, casting patterns on the green velvet couch and the coffee table.
I try to imagine the smell of the neighbor’s trees. It creeps in, despite the closed windows and the humming air conditioner. Those trees were just starting to bud when we left, by now they should be in full bloom. Little white flowers that smell like fish sticks. Last year people complained and signed petitions to have them cut down, but I liked them. I’ve always liked those kinds of smells—fish, skunk, gasoline, armpits, dirt.
Mom and Mae are in the other room. I stretch my arms out and walk towards them. But then, as I’m getting close, as I’m almost at the threshold of our kitchen, the floor creaks and ruins everything. Our house has thick carpet. The floor never creaks. I try to stand still, hoping that if I focus hard I can start again where I left off, but it’s not working. I can’t figure out how to teleport entirely, how to be in Metairie for more than a few seconds at a time. I open my eyes and there is Mae, the real one, standing in the doorway, watching me. She has flour on her face and on her shirt. She’s holding the cordless phone.
“It’s Markus,” she says. “You want to take it?”
I’m embarrassed, but then I think, why should I be? She doesn’t know what I was doing. All she saw was me with my eyes closed. Mae always acts like she knows everything, but what does she really know?
“Finally,” I say into the phone, shutting the door in Mae’s face. “Didn’t your mom give you my messages?”
“I’m calling you, aren’t I?” He sounds annoyed. We broke up the day everything happened with Mom, but we got back together the day after, and the day after that I came here. “So,” he says, “what’s up?”
“I need your help,” I say.
“Okay…”
“I need to stay with you.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment so I rush to fill the silence. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. Dennis wants me to move to New York, and Mom isn’t better yet.”
“I’ll ask my parents,” he says.
“Please,” I say, because I don’t think he will.
“I’ll ask them.”
“I could live in your guest room,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. It sounds like there are people in the background, voices, laughter. I feel a pang.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“At the lake house,” he says.
“Who’s all there?” I ask.
“Lauren B, Lauren S and Drunk Mike.”
“Why are you hanging out with the Laurens?”
“Don’t…” he says, but then someone grabs the phone from him.
“Edie!!” Mike slurs. “Why aren’t you here??”
I hear Markus wrestling the phone away from him.
“He doesn’t know?” I ask Markus.
“He probably forgot,” Markus says.
“So, you’ll ask your parents?” I say.
“Jesus,” he says, “I said I would.”
He sounds so annoyed with me. Neither of us say anything. I sniffle loudly into the phone. I know he can hear it and that he feels bad, because his voice goes low, and I feel like it’s Markus I’m talking to again, not this other person he has become over the last few months.
“Edie, come on, stop. I’m sorry. Stop crying.”
“I want to go home,” I say.
Someone picks up the phone on his end and starts dialing.
“Hello? Hello?” It’s Markus’s father.
“Hi, Dr. Theriot,” I say.
“Hello? Hello? Markus, is that you? I need the line—the hospital is paging me,” he says, seeming not to have heard me.
“I’ll call you later,” Markus says and hangs up. I hold the phone for a moment, listening to the dial tone. In the other room Mae is laughing. It’s a weird sound, ugly.
I come out into the living room and see Dennis on the ground and Mae standing on his back.
“Bend your knees! Arms out! Eyes on the horizon!” He’s shouting the commands as he wriggles around and bucks under her. They’re both covered in flour. Mae is trying to balance, but she’s doubled over with that hideous laughter.
“I can’t… I can’t…”