Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“Anyways,” Mother said. “Your grandmother just burnt her pie.”

There was a pause then. I could hear the air rushing over the receiver. It sounded as if Mother were shouting in a vacuum, a long narrow tube laid next to a highway. Occasionally, a car whooshed by.

“It’s still morning here too,” she said.

She’d run to Granny Olga’s old gaping house. There was enough space there for getting lost. There, she fostered what the children of all first generation immigrants feared, an innate feeling that the day to day was long and hard and struggling but as the city teamed around you progress was being made. The struggle was the pride of it. It was only in the face of adversity that Mother was ever truly free. Under Mother’s feet, there was the kind of ice made for skating. It was thin. But she was light.

“Where’s that?” I said. “Where you are.”

“Here,” she said. “Outside of the Stewarts.”

We’d used the pay phone there together once when we’d forgotten a carton of cream that Granny Olga had wanted. Or a certain spice. We’d rung her up with a dime Mother had found wedged between the seats of the Toyota. “White pepper,” Granny Olga had said. “Creamed corn.” “Remember that,” Mother had said as she went back into the store. “Or she’ll have our heads, the both of us.”

“I hope I didn’t wake you,” Mother said.

“No,” I said. “You didn’t. I just got up.”

“Well fine,” she said. “Is your father around?”

“He’s out,” I said. “He went riding with Otto.” I paused, trying to steady my breath.

“Well that’s fine then too,” Mother said. “Some things are as they are.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “Look after your sister.”

“I will, Mom,” I said.

“Good,” she said. “Oh, and Jean. Look after yourself a little too.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Is there anyone there with you?” she said. “Or did he leave you two to your own devices? I hate thinking of you two left to your own devices.”

“K’s here,” I said, looking into the living room at the doughfaced girl lolling on our couch.

“Is that her name?” she said. “I thought it was Kat or Katherine. Yes, it was Katherine. I remember meeting her once and thinking she looked like Catherine Deneuve.”

“Maybe it is,” I said, examining the girl’s face more closely as she tapped her cigarette out the window and yawned.

“I’ve been mistaken for a Katherine you know,” Mother said.

“People used to say I looked like an actress. I could’ve been in films.”

“I know,” I said. “I remember.”

“I know you know,” she said laughing a little. “Does it scare you that your old Mom was once mistaken for someone other than who she is?”

I didn’t know who Catherine Deneuve was. I looked in at K, or Kat, or Katherine, the small pudgy-faced girl stomaching around on our couch with her legs stretched skyward. I imagined her as she would look as a Catherine. Her hair done up in a wave that gave several inches of rise to her face and highlighted her cheekbones making her look finer than she was.

I could imagine someone mistaking Mother that way.

“No,” I said. “I’m not scared.”

“Good,” Mother said. “That was all some time ago anyways. Now I’m your mother. You know me as your mother. I still want you to think of me that way.”

“Sure,” I said.

“Well,” she said.

Her voice dropped out after that. I had the feeling that the line had died. There was the static. And the distance. And the Stewarts. Mother was saying something about K again.

“Is she often over?” she said.

“Not too often,” I said.

“Well,” she said. “I meant to talk to you about that before I left. I meant to talk to you about men and their ideas.”

“OK,” I said.

“I don’t know if you know what I mean yet,” she said. “But one day you will and we will talk about it.”

“Right,” I said.

“Well good,” she said. “Then one day soon we’ll talk about it. In the meantime, keep an eye out for me.”

“Sure, Mom,” I said.

“I don’t know what’s going on over there, but you know what I mean about your father and that girl.”

“Callie?” I said.

“No,” she said. “Katherine. Or whatever girl he’s hired to replace me. Don’t let her get her claws into him. And call me if she does.”

It was hard to imagine the plump teen lounging on the settee next to the window raising her claws to a man. All K dragged out of the world was a relief from momentary inertia. Even when her boyfriend stopped by, when she rose up into him in the doorway and kissed him on the mouth, the most she drew out of him was the faint stench of sweat. Afterwards, she released the smell out the window and was back to her smokes.

“OK,” I said.

“Your father thinks he could do no wrong,” Mother said. “The way you girls coddle him.”

“He’s my father,” I said.

“Well sure,” she said. “But he’s a man too. And sometimes he’s not half the man you’ve raised him up to be in reputation.”

“Reputation?” I said.

“It just means keep your eyes out for your mother. And don’t you go rising up into his arms too often either,” she said. “He’s lonely, you know. Yes. I imagine he’s quite lonely there.”

I could hear the skittishness coming back into her voice. She would hang up soon. Soon she would be on her way back to us.

“OK,” I said.

I hung up the receiver. The refrigerator kicked in.

When I returned to the living room, K was painting her nails. She was sitting on the edge of the L-shape, one knee drawn up to her stomach, her foot poised on the edge of the cushion revealing a long line of toes, which she covered with a red gloss. I recognized the bottle. Mother kept it in the back of the drawer where she stashed the compacts she used to paint her face those nights she was going out. On K the polish looked thick and cheap. Something about the color made me want to vomit. The way she went down the row, her eyes barely moving from the screen of the television to dab or wipe a smudge, I doubt she cared much.

Birdie was curled up next to her. A box of cereal wedged between them. They were watching that program again about the circus pony who’d learned to dive.

“Go, go, go,” Birdie said grabbing her feet and flinging them in the air.

“Easy there, Little Wonder,” K said. “You’ll upset my color.”

I felt outside myself. I had not entirely left the void I’d entered the night before. Standing in the doorway watching K and Birdie’s bodies across the room was like watching the exposed side of a mountain in a storm. The more the rain came on, the more their expressions washed into a sheen. Eventually their eyes eroded into shutters. The shutters flicked open from time to time revealing a faint light behind them. Probably just a reflection of the glare from the tube.

“Have a seat, soldier,” K said to me, her eyes challenging mine for a moment. “You’re making your sister nervous hovering like that.”

“It’s okay, Jean,” Birdie eventually said. “It’s just a movie.

“I know,” I said.

I looked out the window behind them. Through the fog I could make out the bodies of The Sheik and Father’s big Morgan. Their heads were down, grazing in the doctor’s field. The brown patches of their saddles rose and fell as they shuddered along looking for new spots of green. I’d seen horses graze so many times this way. The absence of any rider didn’t strike me until I heard someone laying hard and long on the doorbell.

In the brightness of the morning light Otto’s body looked pale and shrunken. I shuddered at the sagging chicken skin of his neck where he stood on the other side of the door. He was half way through the archway before I had the chance to shut him out.