I will try to walk to the gas station this afternoon to call my sister. Jackson doesn’t have a phone and his neighbors are not… sympathetic to our cause. That is how Jackson put it. He’s careful not to badmouth his neighbors. They’re no different than anywhere else, he says. I hope he’s wrong.
Even with all the chaos in the house, Jackson still manages to escape into his studio and paint every day. What’s my excuse for not writing? I try to keep notes, but I can’t seem to make them come together into anything intelligible.
LETTER FROM DENNIS LOMACK TO PROF. FRED JONES
April 17, 1997
Dear Fred,
It was good to hear from you! It’s been too long. We have quite a bit of catching up to do. Diane told me that you were made department chair. Congratulations! As for my giving a lecture this spring, it seems unlikely. Everything is on hold at the moment because my daughters have come to live with me. I believe when you met them Edie was in diapers and Mae was gestating. Well, despite my absence from their lives (or maybe because of it), they have turned out to be quite lovely almost-adults. You’ll see for yourself—you’ll be flying in for the Freedom Fighters book party, won’t you?
As for your graduate student, things here are a little crazy, but tell her that I’m flattered and that she should feel free to get in touch. I’ll try to be as helpful as I can. Not sure I can tell her anything very useful about my own work, but I’ll do my best.
Keep On Keepin’ On, Right?
Dennis
EDITH (1997)
I’m standing on the threshold to Dennis’s room. His door is ajar but it feels like an invisible velvet rope is holding me in the hallway.
He’d gotten a phone call (from some woman) and based on his responses full of false modesty, it appeared that she was flattering him. When he finally hung up, he told us he’d be right back. It’s the first time he’s left us alone since we got here, and it’s true, when the front door closed behind him, I felt a surge of panic. Gone again? I didn’t look at Mae. I didn’t want her to see that I cared.
It’s ridiculous. No, of course I don’t care! I feel freer with him gone, without him following me around, watching my every move. I push open the door to his bedroom. I can imagine it recreated in a museum somewhere, on display next to that piece of burnt-out bus. “The Writer at Work.” Look! His unmade bed, where he sleeps and dreams! An empty glass with a moldy lemon wedge! And that enormous desk with the typewriter! The very typewriter that he uses to type!
I put my finger on the letter D, watch the metal arm slowly rise and fall back down before it touches the blank page. I take a seat in his chair and roll myself forward.
Dear Dennis, I begin typing invisibly. Did you ever think about me…
I don’t know why I’m doing this. I stand up and slam a few keys at random. The metal arms tangle together, catch in midair. Good. I leave them like that.
There’s an ashtray on the windowsill. A cigarette burnt down to the filter. I touch it with my finger and the column of ash collapses into a pile. There’s another cigarette in there, half-smoked. I pick it up and look at myself holding it in the window’s reflection. I put the unlit cigarette to my lips and inhale. Sometimes, I’d wake up and find Mom sitting on the porch, smoking in the dark. I’d want to come sit by her but I knew better than to bother her. When you have a mom like our mom you develop an instinct for this sort of thing. Bother her too much and she’ll leave.
“Where does Dennis keep the matches?” I call to Mae. Maybe in his desk?
One desk drawer is filled with used-up pens and paper clips. The other one is locked. I jiggle the handle, try to pry it open with a pen. It doesn’t work. Then I take a paper clip and untwist it. I saw a girl at school do this one time, though I don’t know how exactly. The paper clip jams in the lock.
“Mae, help me in here.” Where is she anyway? I’d think she’d be curious.
“Mae,” I start again, but then something clicks and the drawer slides open.
No matches. Papers. For a second I think: What if he’s been writing to us this whole time, but never sending the letters, and they’re all stacked here, neatly in this drawer? How dumb is that? Of course there are no letters. It’s a manuscript. I start skimming it, but then put it back. Who cares what it says. I haven’t read any of his novels, so why start now? I’m about to close the drawer, when something glossy catches my eye. A photograph. I pull it out from between the pages.
It’s a picture of Mae from a few years ago. Black and white, not one I’ve ever seen before. She’s looking at the person behind the camera with the kind of smile Mae only uses on special occasions. She’s wearing a weird dress. It’s plaid and has a round collar. I don’t know where she would have gotten it. A thrift store? Was it from Halloween? No. No. I would’ve remembered it. And that fountain behind her, it doesn’t look familiar either. Where was it taken?
The photo is bizarre. Totally bizarre. It’s just like her to have this secret life. She would say that Mom took her places when I was sleeping but I never believed her. And how had Dennis gotten the picture? She must have sent it to him. So they had been in touch before we came here. For how long?
“Mae,” I call, as I go into the living room, holding the evidence.
But Mae isn’t in the living room. The front door is ajar and I can see Cronus standing in the empty hallway, paw lifted. He looks back at me and twitches his tail.
AMANDA
The first time I met Dennis Lomack was at a basement Italian place across the street from where I was staying. I was a PhD candidate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, writing my dissertation on his work. My advisor was an old friend of Dennis’s back from their Civil Rights days together, and he’d helped me arrange the meeting. I got there early and was so nervous that I drank two glasses of wine to calm myself down. Maybe it was the wine, or maybe it was the sense of familiarity I had with him because I knew his books so well, but I felt an instant connection.
Appearance-wise, Dennis was not what I’d expected. He was older than the pictures on his book jacket, and bigger. Not fat, but tall and broad shouldered. He had a beard. He was less handsome, but I think that was also what made him more attractive, more brutish. Next to him, Barry looked like a pencil neck wrapped in corduroy. Barry was the graduate student I was engaged to back home.
I remember the first thing I thought when I saw Dennis. After: Holy shit, that’s Dennis Lomack! and I hope my teeth aren’t stained purple from the wine I’ve been swilling. It was: Barry and I are over. Done. I’m sure that realization would have come on its own eventually, but seeing Dennis sped it up.
I’d prepared a long list of questions, but I didn’t quite know where to start. I mentioned how I had been trying to track down the original of his Russian folk tale translations with no success. It’s funny because as I was saying it out loud it finally occurred to me that there was no original source material. In retrospect, it seems pretty obvious. I asked Dennis Lomack about that and he shrugged and said that he might have taken some liberties. He asked me how I had gotten my hands on the book at all, seeing as it had come out with a tiny press with a tiny print run. I told him Prof. Fred Jones had been very generous with his personal archives.
I asked him if he had written the story when his ex-wife was pregnant with their first child. The date of the publication seemed to indicate this as a possibility. He took a sip of his drink and didn’t say anything.
“Was the