Annie DeWitt - White Nights in Split Town City

Once, I’d dreamed I’d put Granny Olga in the microwave. Someone held me down on the couch and held my eyes open, made me watch her spin in that glowing box. She’d turned into one of the small Russian dolls she kept on the shelf, the one with the golden hair that looked like Birdie. I’d watched the doll as it went around on the carousel. “It looks like you,” I’d said taking the doll off the shelf and putting it in Birdie’s hands. “All the way from White Russia.” Birdie’d fingered the doll’s hair and made a little face. She’d made the same little face when the scout had stopped Mother in the mall. “Pretty mouth,” he’d said, nodding at Birdie. He’d said, “She could sell cereal. She would show up well on film.”

“She’s got my eyes,” Mother had said.

The scout had made Mother dance a little then. He’d pulled some string in her back. Maybe he’d pulled the same string that made Wilson dance that night in the barn.

“Rake her,” Wilson had said.

So what if my teeth fell out. So what if that little girl at the barn was right. “Down there” she’d said, touching herself. “You’ll figure it out.” And when I’d gone home that night, I’d felt around a little too. “Nothing came,” I’d told her. “Except this doomed little squeeze.”

A patch of clouds shifted in the sky overhead. The sun cast a glare over the window. I could see the places where it was dirty. The sand from the road in front of the house kicked up and flew. Bird droppings clung to the corner of one of the panes. I imagined scraping them off with a chisel as I had scraped the back of the house that day with Birdie before we’d applied the paint. “It’s all about getting on a good cover,” Father had said.

“Look,” I said, pointing out the window in front of Margaret. “A low glider.”

A small passenger plane hovered over the power lines that lined the far side of the mountain. There was a commuter airport in the nearby industrial city where Sterling had lived. He’d taken a small six-seater to Vegas once.

The glider was moving slowly. The body of the plane was so compact it appeared toy like. At a distance it looked about the size of the model Father had brought home from the office. The model was mechanical. It was set on a long stick that you flew through the air. The wings shifted with the current. But this drone in the sky was more lyrical. It hovered so close over the wire, chugging cylinder over cylinder, like a child reeling in a kite, watching it dive and rise. The closer the plane got to the house, the more the air thinned. It hovered in the stillness searching for a current. I imagined blowing up under the body but there wasn’t enough air in my lungs to keep it aloft. “Birdie,” I said, watching it spin. “Keep your eye on the birdie,” Father always said, his feet firmly planted on the other side of the net. “Keep your racket lifted. Don’t wait for the dive.” It felt good all this letting go. I felt lighter in a way. We sat there, the three of us watching the plane train its way down the mountain and closer to home.

The landscape was silent except for the birds on the wire above the barn. I’d sat there in that same spot where I sat now with Margaret and Mother so many mornings. But this time I knew the news. It was me who held some knowledge over them. Pretty soon it would be spring. I thought of the apple trees and their big white blossoms. I envisioned K standing under the branches with all their flowers. She tossed her match. The whole head of them went up in flames. At first, the burning was bountiful. Small flecks of light bouncing off the petals where the flame leapt. After a while the smell set in.

I thought of all this as I looked out the window at Otto’s barn.

“What do you see?” Margaret said.

“I see a lot of people screaming,” I said.

“What are they saying?” Margaret said.

“Nothing,” I said.

To these folks I am forever indebted: Thank you Sam Lipsyte and Ben Marcus for giving me the courage from the beginning. Thank you early readers: Katherine DeWitt, Caroline Dowling, Luke Goebel, Darcey Steinke, Heidi Julavitz, Rebecca Curtis, Anya Yurchyshyn, and Kristen O’Toole for your invaluable insight. Thank you to Diane Williams and NOON for publishing excerpts of the novel in progress. And to Alan Ziegler for your unwavering mentorship. Alan: you have given me two perfect mirrors on the world — your spirit and a profession, both of which I adore. To HH for showing me the way out the tunnel. To Tracy Halford for thirty-five years and counting of “discovering the woods.” Thank you, Pop, for: the piano, the horses, Susan Sontag, reading me adult books as a child and cycling ahead of me on the “Free Spirit.” And to Mom, for: the scope of the city, an innate sense of beauty, and always hoping the “weather was with us.” Thanks, Uncle Lee, for my first Joni Mitchell cassette and showing me how to live your own vision. Thank you Ralph Woodrow DeWitt for your silent support. You never knew how far it carried me. And to Grandma for dancing to Elvis. With thanks to Kirby Kim and Giancarlo DiTrapano for making it happen. To Catherine Foulkrod for her tremendous eye. And to the MacDowell Colony for providing me peace and solitude in the final hours. And most of all to my partner, Jerome Jakubiec, without whose strength and belief I would have surrendered long ago. This is for all the spirits who long to run free.