She keeps smiling, but doesn’t look at me.
Dennis yells: “Wave!” and bucks under her. She squeals as she flies off and lands on the couch.
“You wanna try surfing?” he asks me. He’s got to be fucking kidding. This is the kind of shit he should have been doing 12 years ago when he abandoned us, not now when I’m 16.
“You know, we’ve never even seen the ocean,” I tell him. But how would he know this? He’s a complete stranger. I knock a stack of books off the coffee table for emphasis and there’s a cloud of dust. Dennis gets up, streaks of dirt on his belly and legs, flour in his hair.
“You don’t know anything about us,” I try to say, but I can’t stop sneezing.
MAE
I think Edie was so scared of Dad leaving again that she wanted to preempt it. If she drove him away, she’d feel like she had some say in the matter.
Well, she’s done it, I remember thinking after Edie threw her first fit. Every little mean thing Edie said, I would think, this is it, because everything in New York felt so precarious. We weren’t in school. We had no routine. We didn’t know anyone. We were just floating there.
Even though I’d get mad at her, I’d hold her until I could feel her rumbling rage subside, until finally whatever it was inside her would grow silent and still.
People who didn’t know Edie very well were always surprised to find out that she had a temper, because of her voice, and also, because she had this look, like a blind baby animal, a leggy calf or a freshly hatched chick—all bones and matted fluffs of yellow hair. One of my earliest memories, though, is of her wailing on me. She claims not to remember, but whenever she was feeling contrite, she’d pet the tiny white scar in my eyebrow with her finger. I don’t have it anymore, but it was over my right eye. She’d given it to me by kicking me in the face with an ice skate.
Once, after an argument when I told her to stop making trouble with Dad, she took a handful of my hair and jammed it in my mouth, enough for me to choke, and said: “He’s going to leave us again. He’s going to leave us as many times as we let him.” In that moment I believed her, despite Dad doing everything he could to convince us otherwise. Like when she threw a fit because she wanted to go to the beach, and within minutes Dad was in his swim trunks, carrying towels, herding us onto the Q train to Brighton Beach. It was a long subway ride and because it was the middle of the day I remember the car being empty. It had felt like it was our private train, and even though Edie was trying not to enjoy it, I know she did. It was my first trip to see the ocean and I didn’t even know that I was dying to see it until I was on my way there. People are always surprised when I tell them this because we lived by the Gulf, but the coast of Louisiana is all swamp. We’d go up to Lake Pontchartrain, but there were no ocean beaches—for that you’d have to drive out to Alabama or Florida, and we’d never left the state. Mom traveled, but she never took us. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, leave us with Doreen, or when Doreen got sick of us, with the Wassersteins, an older couple who watched crime shows all day and fed us nothing but hotdogs. Edie and I loved to hate the Wassersteins.
In a recent show, I tried to recreate the feeling of that first trip to the beach, but it was hard to capture the intense and simple joy I’d felt. It was windy and full of seagulls and it was Brighton Beach, so I’m sure the sand was full of wrappers and trash, but I didn’t notice any of that. I was bowled over by the horizon line! All that water! Water, stretching out forever, and those waves! The way the water gathered itself and suddenly rose up! The force of it as it pulled the sand out from under my feet. It was cold, but of course we all went in. Edie looked like an animated broomstick in a bikini. The coldness of the water just made her broomstickier, hopping from foot to foot. The cold water was a shock to our systems. It made us momentarily euphoric. Our teeth practically fell out they were chattering so much, but it was really lovely. The Atlantic Ocean in March.
After the beach, we went to a Russian dumpling restaurant and met Aunt Rose, our dad’s sister. We didn’t even know we had an aunt. Mom had never mentioned her. She looked like Edie, if Edie had been left out to sour. It must have been strange for my sister to be surrounded suddenly by so many approximations of herself.
EDITH (1997)
I’m sick of strangers acting as if they are continuing some sort of conversation with me, as if they’d just stepped into the other room for a minute as opposed to, you know, abandoning Mae and me completely for over a decade. With Dennis you’d think he’d tripped and fell into a time portal. Oops. I forgot all about my daughters and made my wife go crazy. My bad.
His sister is just like him. Looking at her face makes me want to die young.
“I didn’t think I’d get to see you again,” Rose says with a quavering voice. And, “You probably don’t remember me,” but she says it like she thinks we should.
When the waitress brings Dennis extra dumplings “on the house,” Rose rolls her eyes but you can tell she takes some weird pleasure in her brother “having this effect on women.” She keeps reaching over and picking food out of his beard. If he’d gotten a steak I bet she would’ve insisted on cutting it up into small pieces for him.
“You poor girls,” she says after we finish the appetizers. She tries to take my hand, but I quickly move it onto my lap. “Your mother. What that woman put you through!”
Mae is sucking the salt water out of her hair, not saying anything.
“She’s not the one who abandoned us,” I say and glare at Dennis. He stares back at me.
“Your father did not abandon you.” For a public defender Aunt Rose is not a very good liar. She blushes in the same blotchy, grotesque way that I do, and noticing this makes my ears burn.
I tell her: “Mae doesn’t remember, so go ahead and tell her, but I was there, Rose. He never called or wrote. I waited for him for months.”
“I’m sorry,” he says. “You’re right. I’m sorry. You can be mad at me as long as you need to be.”
Like I need his permission.
Rose grabs his sleeve. “It’s not right for them to think that.” She turns to us. “Marianne drove him away. It’s how she wanted it. Your mother—”
“Stop it!” Dennis slams his fist against the table hard enough to make the dishes rattle.
We’re all silent. Rose takes a sip of her ice water, her eyes thick with tears.
Then Dennis says: “I did a horrible thing. I can only hope that eventually you’ll forgive me.” The words come out practiced, like he’s been saying them every morning in front of the mirror for the last 12 years.
He is staring at me, waiting for my reaction, and when I don’t give him one, he stands abruptly. Rose tries to stand too, but he pushes her back down into her chair. He goes outside to smoke a cigarette. We watch him in silence through the window. His back heaves, the smoke appears in a cloud over his shoulder like a thought bubble.
Rose dabs her eyes with a napkin. I finish the dumplings on Dennis’s plate out of spite, shove them all violently in my mouth, try not to gag as they slide down my throat. The waitress is watching us. Mae gets up slowly and goes outside. Through the glass, I watch her comfort Dennis. She looks so gentle and serious.
“If you’d only seen what your mother put him through,” Rose murmurs to me, but I don’t take the bait. She gestures to the waitress for the check. “My poor Denny.”
ROSE
The first thing that struck me when I saw my nieces after all those years was how much Mae looked like her mother. It was uncanny. That pale skin, that long, thick black hair. Girls used to get burned at the stake for looking like that.