LITMIR.BIZ

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voice. I stutter and whispering is one of the few things I can do to hide this. I’ve whispered through job interviews. It’s awkward but it works. It’s how I’d landed my gig as a substitute teacher.

      Before I got out, Edie lifted the cat up from the box and showed it to me with such pride. It was a beautiful cat, probably part Coon cat, judging from its size, and Edie was beautiful too, of course. That night I went out on a shoot with an NYU film guy I met online. I was giving him a tour of the decommissioned subway stations, but I was distracted and kept getting us lost. I couldn’t get that image of Edie holding that cat out of my head.

       RIVKA

      Poor Dennis. He tried very hard with them. “We’re a package deal,” he said to me, a daughter on each arm.

      Not for me. Not my kind of a package. I tried, but it did not work.

      That is okay. For some time it was very nice. I had a gallery. I traveled. I was busy. I did not fear being alone, but sometimes I became lonely. Dennis was gentle and constant. He did not demand from me emotionally. This is a hard quality to find in a man. I kept an apartment key in the flowerpot and he would come by a few times a week to make love. But after his daughters arrived, it became too difficult and we made love only once. The daughters were in their room and I begged him to take me on the kitchen floor. I pulled him down onto the ground. He was distracted. I knew it was to be our last time.

       EDITH (1997)

      Dennis is leaning on our windowsill, smoking a cigarette. The ugly Czech woman is in the living room, moving around, dropping things, making her presence known, but he doesn’t seem to hear her. He’s telling us about how he had tuberculosis as a boy, and how he almost died. After he got over the worst of it, he still had to stay in bed for a very long time. Running a low-grade fever for months, he discovered The Count of Monte Cristo. This is when he learned to love books.

      I drift off, thinking about that cozy feeling, the warmth from a fever before it gets high enough to make you shiver. When I was eight and got the chicken pox, Mom never left my side. She read to me and fed me soup. I remember looking at her through my crusted-together eyelashes and thinking she was the most beautiful person I had ever seen. I recognize that look in Cronus now when he looks at me, purring and squinting.

      Dennis puts his cigarette out and closes the window.

      “Tell us more,” Mae says.

      “Okay,” Dennis says. “What do you want me to tell you about?”

      Since Mae is too scared, I ask: “Tell us about how you met Mom.” On the rare occasions that Mom talked about this, I always felt like I was missing something important.

      These were the facts as I knew them: Dennis had known Mom since she was a child, he married her when she was 17, and eventually, he left her. Left us. But why? And what had he done to her to make her the way she is? I want to hear him tell it.

      “How I met her, or how I fell in love with her? Those are two different stories,” he says.

      They had loved each other? This hadn’t even occurred to me. He sits on the edge of my mattress and I scoot back into the wall to balance his weight.

      He closes his eyes. “I’ll tell you how I met her. She was nine, I think. Nine or ten. I didn’t know much about kids but I could tell that she was special, already a fully formed person. And so smart and kind and perceptive. And disarmingly sweet. Her father, Jackson McLean, was a friend of mine. What an amazing human being. He took me and my friends into his home and nursed us back to health after we’d been attacked and that’s when I met your mother.”

      “Attacked how?” I have only a vague idea.

      He tells us about how he joined the Freedom Rides to desegregate the interstate highways in the South. He’d gone with his friend Fred, who was black, and they’d driven together to Chicago from New York and boarded a Greyhound bus with the other members of the student group they’d been a part of. The first bus driver refused to take them, said he didn’t need that kind of trouble. They eventually got another driver, but outside of Lafayette the bus was stopped by a white mob. Dennis and the other passengers were dragged off the bus and beaten, and the bus was set on fire. Remnants of the bus are in a museum now in Mississippi. Fred was beaten so badly he lost an eye. I mean, he lost the use of it. Dennis was beaten too. His front teeth were knocked out with a bicycle chain.

      My grandfather had been a medic in the war. He scooped up Dennis and Fred and the others and took them to his house in the woods where he patched them up as best he could. Of course, this didn’t make him popular with the neighbors. Mom was teased a lot at school. A boy held her down while some older girls cut her hair, all while the teacher watched and egged them on.

      He describes her coming home with her hair hacked off and how she tried to pretend that she’d wanted the girls to do this to her, that it had been part of a game they’d all been playing. And then my grandfather had evened it out and Dennis gave her a big magnolia blossom to put behind her ear and told her that she looked beautiful, just like a silent-film star.

      I’m waiting for Dennis to say something, some combination of words that will work like a spell, that will make what happened to our family make sense. But the more he talks the further away I feel from understanding anything.

      “People were doing such horrible things, it was easy to feel like the world was a hopeless place. When Marianne was around though, even the angriest and saddest people felt a little less angry and a little less sad,” he says.

      The ugly woman in the other room puts on a record too loud then lowers the volume. It’s a singer Mom plays sometimes. A woman who sounds like her throat is full of splinters.

      “But Dennis…” I start. I want him to skip ahead, get to the part when they are in love.

      “Please, call me Dad,” he interrupts me. “Could you?”

      For a moment I don’t say anything. The song coming from the other room seeps in:

       … Why not take all of me, can’t you see, I’m no good without you. Take my lips, I want to lose them, take my arms, I’ll never use them…

      “No,” I finally say, “I don’t think I could.” I feel Mae kick the mattress above me, like she’s warning me, but I don’t care.

      “Okay,” he says, standing up, “fair enough. I won’t rush you.” The mattress creaks as it releases him. The music playing in the other room stops.

      “Goodnight, Dad,” Mae says. I hear him kiss her goodnight, a loud smacking sound. Then he squats next to me and looks for a moment intensely into my face, like he is trying to read my thoughts. It makes me shy and I look away.

      “Goodnight, darling,” he says, and squeezes my shoulder.

      “Finally,” I hear the woman in the living room say as Dennis shuts the door. Mae tosses angrily in the bed, making a lot of noise as she gets “comfortable.”

      Dad? No, I don’t think so. Sorry, Mae, you can toss till you fall off the bed. I’m not calling him that.

       DENNIS LOMACK’S JOURNAL

      [1961]

      This morning Jackson McLean made us grits. A bunch of us have broken teeth, so grits are about all we can manage. Grits and milk.

      The adrenaline is still pumping, which is why I don’t feel the pain fully yet. Yesterday was as close to death as I have ever been. Max is at the hospital in a coma. Fred’s eye is swollen shut and his arm is broken, but there are Citizens’ Council thugs waiting around the black hospital, and the white hospital won’t treat him. Jackson worked as a medic in the war, so he set Fred’s arm himself. He used the plaster from his workshop to make a cast. Fred asked Jackson’s daughter to draw something on it. She’s shy, but she took out a paint set and is drawing what looks like a three-headed cat. She says that we’re not to look until she’s finished.

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