Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

“From what I remember, luck had little to do with it,” Otto said.

“I heard Father say you were a champion once,” Birdie chimed in.

“Did you now,” Callie laughed. “Well, I suspect your father has an unusual memory then.”

There was a pause. Nobody spoke. Mother stirred her coffee.

“Maybe sometime,” she said to Callie. “You could give me a lesson.”

“Sure, baby,” Callie said.

“Anyways,” Mother said. “I don’t see how you can control an animal in that.”

“How do you mean?” Callie said leaning into the table and casting her gaze up at Mother. Her breasts hung on the place mat within her shirt. The two women met eyes. Otto covered the tuna.

Mother did a strange thing then. She took her arms up over her head as though she were applying the horse’s tack to her own face. She took her thumb and her forefinger and placed them at the corners of her mouth and pulled. Her teeth were sharp and yellow in the corners from tea.

“There’s no bit,” she said releasing her hands.

“It’s an old hackamore,” Callie said. “This colt’s mouth shy. The minute you put the bit between his teeth he loses his confidence. For a horse like him, it’s all about how you guide him with your weight. They say it lengthens his stride and increases his stamina.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” Otto said to Mother patting the length of Callie’s thigh. “Ain’t nothing wrong about that at all.”

Otto got up to clear, leaning on the back of Callie’s chair for balance as he reached for our plates.

“No,” Mother replied. “I don’t suspect there is.” She shifted as though the seat had grown harder beneath her.

“Come sit with your Mother awhile,” she said to me. “Make some room in my lap why don’t you.”

Callie got up to do the dishes. I got up to help, feeling Mother’s bony parts where they cut into me.

“You don’t look at people like that,” Mother said quietly as I rose.

“Like what?” I said.

“The way,” Mother said. “You were looking at him. The old man. It’s not done at your age. It’s unsightly.”

Mother excused herself to the bathroom. Callie ran the water in the sink. Birdie clamored over to the counter next to her to rinse the fish off her hands. I scrubbed a little under Birdie’s nails with the pad.

“His Helene used to wash mine just the same,” Callie said nodding to where the water ran over Birdie’s fist.

“‘Don’t shine your light too hard in the backs of anyone’s eyes unless you want to see your own reflection,’ His Helene always said.”

“Mother’s just testing you is all,” I said.

“A woman doesn’t trust her own kind,” she said. “No matter how much I helped with the business, His Helene was always making sure I wasn’t leaving the barn with any of her bills. When you’re riding it’s different. Everyone falls away from themselves just watching. They look at the horse and wonder who leads who around. All the while, all you care about is going clean and staying the course.”

Otto came over with a pile of dishes. He stacked them on the drain board next to the sink pausing for a moment to lean over Callie’s shoulder, pressing himself into the curve of her where she was bent over the sink.

“I’ll take care of these,” he said.

Callie raised her head and looked out the window sliding the long rubber gloves down her arms and hanging them over the faucet. She turned towards Otto such that the side of her body was pressed against his chest.

“I’ll be out training,” she said.

“Alright then,” he said.

It was hard to say what they were to each other. It was even harder to say what they weren’t. The way their bodies locked and moved.

“Go easy on your old man,” Callie said to me from between the grip of Otto’s arms where he’d rested them on the counter.

She left through the back. Otto followed her into the breezeway. They paused in front of the door. He said something that made her chuckle. The way she tossed her hair off her shoulders, you could see the tension in her neck. You could see how sad she looked. Otto closed the door behind her and stood for a minute, watching her cross the lawn toward the barn.

Otto turned and looked at me across the kitchen. He seemed not to recognize me. The afternoon light was thick and golden. It cast a warmth through the window onto the backs of the flies such that, in the uproar of their exchange, they appeared nearly glowing.

I imagined Otto fingering Callie’s hairpin where it sat on his wife’s dresser, turning it over in his hand and inspecting it for evidence that it too had escaped a great plummeting to the earth. “You’ve gone wiggly,” he would tell himself.

By the time Mother came back to the table, there was swelling around her eyes. I could tell she’d cried a little in the bathroom. She often did that since her return.

“I just put on some coffee,” Otto said.

“We’d better not,” Mother said. “We’ve left Mother alone too long.”

When we got home the Bottom Feeder was quiet. The lamp in the living room was off. Shadows crept around the furniture where the light had grown thin and lazy.

“I’ll go down and check on her,” Mother said.

Granny Olga had a machine in her heart that made her breath keep pace. It beat for her. “It’s like leaning on something every now and again,” Mother explained. Father said Granny Olga had the heart of a mechanic. “It’ll fix itself even in the grave.” In practical terms, the machine in Granny Olga’s heart meant I couldn’t use the microwave when she was in the kitchen. I remember watching Father warm his dinner one night when he was late after work. Granny Olga stood in the doorway to the living room, waiting for the light in the box to go off and the carousel to stop spinning.

“It’s the only time when your Grandmother visits that I can be alone with my meal,” Father had said running the empty machine for another minute while he started in on his food.

Mother disappeared down the stairs to Granny Olga’s room. The basement carpet was a thick brown grosgrain. Utility grade. I knew it shamed Mother to store her mother in such a space. “Basement level,” Father had said. “There could be floods.”

I went to my room.

“Gram’s alright,” Mother said a few minutes later, peeking her head in. “She’s just had one of her spells. I wanted you to know. Let’s all have a lie down. I can see you look comfortable.”

“That’s fine,” I said. It seemed fine. We all seemed fine.

When I woke it was almost evening. There was a breeze coming through the screen in the window. The flies had laid off of their buzzing.

I went downstairs to check on dinner. Mother’s light was on in her room. The door was ajar. I could see the glow of the lamp on her table. One of the shades Ruth had made her.

I didn’t knock. It went against Mother’s rules about modesty. There was no such thing as nudity between women. There was just bodies and this or that mound of flesh.

Mother was sprawled out on top of the covers in her nightdress when I came in. The long thin expanse of her legs where they emerged from the sheets looked wild.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said.

I hesitated to enter. There was an energy in the air I couldn’t identify. Her body was prone and urgent, as though she’d been struggling with something.

“It’s OK,” she said. “I’m almost finished here.”

I sat on the edge of the bed furthest from her body.

“Why did you come back?” I said.

“Oh,” she said. “It was a confluence of things.”

Mother was always saying that. Everything was the fault of various hatreds.

“First off,” she said. “I met a man. I met exactly the kind of man I should have been attracted to but wasn’t.”