I remember Denny writing me to say he’d met the girl he was going to marry, but that he would have to wait a while. He fell in love with her instantly when she was a kid. Not in a perverted way, but he just knew. He waited for her to grow up and then he married her.
How sad that I had not been able to help those girls when they were little and living with Marianne. But Denny told me not to meddle. It was his life. What could I do? Especially after they moved back to New Orleans.
Stewart and I couldn’t have children, and when the girls were born I thought of them as my own. I know it drove Marianne crazy, especially when the first one came out looking nothing like her. She said I was like one of those parasitic birds who hides her eggs in other birds’ nests. It was a joke, sort of. But that’s what her sense of humor was like. Not exactly “ha ha.” Always an edge to it.
She would say Denny took advantage of her. She was 17 and her father had just died, and she was left all alone. A barefoot orphan. For God’s sake, Denny saved her by marrying her. How is that taking advantage? He probably saved her life. He loved her since she was a child. It was very romantic.
Thirty-two and 17 seems like a big age difference, but it’s only 15 years. And she was no innocent. He loved her more than anything. She broke him. She wore him down and broke him. Drove him out of their house. When he got off that plane I fell to my knees. What she did to him. There was no Denny in front of me, just broken pieces. His neck was so thin it could barely hold up his head. His skin was the color of a corpse’s. Stewart and I nursed him back to health. Fed him, found him an apartment. But he couldn’t write, and when we tried to introduce him to someone else, to get his mind off Marianne and the girls, it was no use. I don’t mean to say there weren’t other women. Sure. There were. Women loved him. How could they not? Talented, handsome, and now also damaged.
Chapter 2
LETTER FROM AMANDA SINGER TO DETSTVO PUBLISHERS
Dmitry Appasov
Detstvo Publishers
St. Petersburg, Russia
February 2, 1997
Dear Mr. Appasov,
I am a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin and I have a question that I was hoping you might be able to help me with. I am writing my dissertation on the work of the American writer Dennis Lomack. One of his books is a translation of Russian folk tales. There is one story in particular that fascinated me, but when I showed it to some colleagues in the Slavic Studies Department they did not think this particular variant sounded familiar. One of them suggested that I get in touch with you, as you are an expert in the field.
The story is about a raven-haired beauty living in a hut perched atop a set of chicken feet. She spends her days making tapestries out of flowers. Then, one day, a boy and a girl who got lost in the woods appear on her doorstep. These children cast a spell and turn the beautiful woman into a bald witch, a Baba Yaga. She has no choice but to put the children in a cage and make soup out of them. Unlike the Baba Yagas of other stories, this one returns to her true, beautiful self after she eats the children.
If you could point me to the original story that was being translated, I would be extremely grateful. I have attached the text and included a carton of Marlboro cigarettes.
Sincerely,
Amanda Singer
MAE
Dad would take us everywhere, even if he was only going downstairs to check the mail or to the post office up the street to buy stamps. He never left us alone at first. I would wake up sometimes and see him silhouetted in the doorway. I think he checked on us several times a night. Just being near him did something for me, and as long as he was there I almost didn’t think about Mom, about the darkness that was in her and also in me, waiting. The only times I couldn’t help thinking about her were in the moments right before falling asleep. There’d be the sensation of falling into her body, and then the hospital sounds—the other patients moaning, the stern voices of the nurses, the canned laughter from the television. But this lasted only a second, maybe two, and then was obliterated by sleep. I’d never slept so well in my life. After years of being woken up in the night by Mom, forced to go God knows where, it was a relief to wake up in the same room as my sister, to hear lip smacking and light snores coming from the bunk below. We’d never shared a room before, unless we were at Doreen’s or at the Wassersteins’. I loved it.
Since we weren’t going to school, Dad made a point of filling our days with an assortment of enriching activities. Once, we spent a whole afternoon riding back and forth on the Staten Island ferry. Dad taught us a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay: We were very tired, we were very merry, we had gone back and forth all night upon the ferry. The ferry didn’t run all night. And I don’t know that we were merry exactly, but joy found a way of squeezing through, even for Edie. Dad had bought us a netted sack of navel oranges and we peeled them and sucked on the slices as we floated by the Statue of Liberty, watching her green face change in the light. It’s how immigrants must have felt, coming to Ellis Island. All that water around us like a baptism. Yes, it was a rebirth, the fresh start I’d been longing for.
And then, on our way home from the ferry terminal in Battery Park, we saw a cardboard box with a “Free Kittens” sign in front of it. When we opened the box though, there weren’t any kittens; there was just one adult cat. We had assumed it was the mother, abandoned there after everyone had taken her kittens. White paws, white nose, white tail. Heartbreaking!
We were instantly attached to it. I could picture the cat slinking around in Dad’s apartment, or spread across all our laps—it was that big. It would be the first thing that belonged to all three of us.
One of the women Dad was dating met up with us in the park. It was Rivka, an art curator from Prague who had dyed pink hair that was so garish it managed to make her ugly face somehow transcend itself. She was so strange to look at that it got confusing after a while, why it was you were staring at her—was it because she was ugly or because she was beautiful? It was extreme to the point that it basically looped around the spectrum and became its opposite.
Rivka insisted that Dad shouldn’t let us touch the cat until it got its shots, so we brought the box to an animal hospital on 7th Avenue. The cat had not expected to be moved. It was difficult carrying a box for over a mile with a clawing and squirming cat inside of it. Edie and I nearly dropped it at several intersections. We told the vet the whole story of its discovery, and he lifted the cat’s tail and told us there was no way this cat was the mother of those kittens. It was a male. Maybe all the kittens had been taken and he was a stray who just found the box? Though he was pretty fat for a stray. Maybe he had eaten all the kittens? We named him Cronus for the Greek god who ate all his children. We’d never been allowed to have a pet before. Mom had been allergic, or that is what she’d always said.
CHARLIE
I met Edie for the first time the day they brought home the cat. I’d been living in my grandmother’s rent-controlled apartment directly below Dennis Lomack, but I’d been too shy to introduce myself. As a teenager, I’d devoured his books. At 16, everything I knew about sex came from them. I’d read them in a frenzy until the pages stuck together. It’s funny because I looked at Yesterday’s Bonfires recently, and it wasn’t even that smutty. What strikes me now about that book is its sense of freedom, in the broadest sense. Maybe this is what inspired me to become an adventurer, an urban explorer.
I usually take the stairs, but I didn’t that evening because I saw Dennis Lomack and his daughters standing in the lobby, waiting for the elevator. The two girls were huddled over a cardboard box. What was in the box? It’s in my nature to be curious about such things. And then Edie glanced up at me and she had this look and that was what gave me the nerve to finally introduce myself.
“I’m Charlie, your downstairs neighbor,” I whispered, as I followed them into the elevator.