Mr. Lomack, please?” It’s the doctor, I think.
I hand Dennis the phone. I watch his face as he listens.
“Yes,” Dennis says. “How is she doing?” He looks down at his hands. “Yes,” he says, “yes.” He turns from us, and the cord on the phone wraps around his back. “What about the medication?” he says. “I see,” he says. “Yes.” His voice gives away nothing.
My heart is beating in my throat.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he says, but he doesn’t sound particularly sorry. I can’t see his face. What is he sorry to hear?
Mae shifts in her seat, and the chair creaks. I must be giving her a mean look because her lips are quivering. She’s sensitive. That’s what Mom always says. Be careful with your sister, she’s so sensitive. I smile at her, or try to, then take a deep breath.
“Yes,” Dennis says again, about three thousand times. They’re keeping Mom there against her will. She’s probably tied to a bed, screaming. She’s lost her voice. That’s why they won’t let me talk to her. She has no voice. I picture her face screaming and no sound coming out. This scares me so I take Mae’s hand.
“Ow,” she says, and rubs where I touched her. She can be a real brat sometimes.
Dennis hangs up the phone. His eyes are shining and he doesn’t say anything until he sits down at the table with us.
“The doctors think it would be best,” he says, burying his fingers in his beard, “if you moved here on a somewhat permanent basis. Your mother is not doing well. She needs more time.”
“No,” I say.
Dennis nods. “I know this isn’t what you were expecting,” he says.
“What about school? We can’t just leave in the middle of the spring quarter. We can go back and live there by ourselves. I’m 16. Who do you think has been taking care of things this whole time?”
“Legally, you couldn’t do that,” he says.
“We can stay with Doreen.” Doreen is like Mom’s sister. Not biological, but they grew up together. She owes it to us.
“She hasn’t offered.”
I try to stay calm because I know that is the only way to win an argument, but I can hear my voice growing shrill. “I don’t agree to this.”
Mae interrupts. She glares at me and says: “I think you’re being very selfish.” It feels like she has reached across the table and slapped me.
DENNIS LOMACK’S JOURNAL
[1970]
Last night I began… something. Something big, alive. I don’t want to speak too soon, but maybe finally a book (!). I typed and Marianne lay on the mattress on the floor, watching me. With her I am an open glove welcoming a hand. It is her energy working through me, I’m certain of it. I wrote all night. Outside, it rained. Marianne lay on her back, raised her arm, squinted at her ring, fell asleep. Yesterday, my sister came into the city for a visit and as we were passing City Hall, I felt compelled to get married. We bought carnations, dyed bright blue, from the deli across the street. “Look,” Marianne had said, running her thumb along the stems, veined like arms. We stopped a tourist on the street, asked him to take a picture of us with his camera. He promised to mail it. And since our marriage, the urge to write has consumed me. Beneath all my words, like subway clatter—my wife, my life, my wife. It was already light out when I stopped and crawled in beside her. I needed more of her to keep going.
“They bit me all night long,” she told me, sleepily showing me her arm. A row of small red welts. The bedbugs live between the floorboards and inside the electrical sockets.
“I’ll bite you too,” I said. And I did.
Then after, in the bathroom mirror, as I washed my face, I caught sight of my earlobe—two uneven lines, marks from her crooked front teeth. And again, that zap of desire.
I ran back to bed, unbuttoned the blouse from the bottom that she had begun buttoning from the top. She’s shy but about all the wrong things. I moved her hands off her breasts and kissed her wrists. Pinned her down.
And then, her whispered refrain: You can save me?
For which there is only one answer: Yes, of course, yes.
EDITH (1997)
Dennis and Mae are banging pots around in the kitchen. He’s teaching her how to make dumplings from scratch. It’s his grandmother’s recipe from Poland. I guess that makes her our great-grandmother. I did most of the cooking back home and kept the batteries out of the smoke alarm by the kitchen because of Mom and Mae. All our pots had outlines from burnt rice on the bottoms from when they would try to make red beans and rice. I was thinking about that yesterday, when we got a special tour of the Metropolitan Museum of Art by some woman Dennis was/is/will be putting it into, and she was showing us the swirly night sky in a painting by Vincent van Gogh. It looked just like the bottoms of all our pots in Metairie. It makes me sad: those pots, stacked and unused in the cabinets of our empty house. I don’t know how much longer I can take being away.
I heard someone say once that if you visualize what you want, like really picture it with all the details, it’ll come true. Sort of like prayer. So, I try it. I close my eyes and concentrate. I’m not in this cramped shithole anymore. Instead, I’m back home, standing in our living room. To the left is the shelf with the gourd sculptures filled with my grandfather’s ashes. In front is the window with its lace curtains. It’s the middle of the day and light is streaming in, casting patterns on the green velvet couch and the coffee table.
I try to imagine the smell of the neighbor’s trees. It creeps in, despite the closed windows and the humming air conditioner. Those trees were just starting to bud when we left, by now they should be in full bloom. Little white flowers that smell like fish sticks. Last year people complained and signed petitions to have them cut down, but I liked them. I’ve always liked those kinds of smells—fish, skunk, gasoline, armpits, dirt.
Mom and Mae are in the other room. I stretch my arms out and walk towards them. But then, as I’m getting close, as I’m almost at the threshold of our kitchen, the floor creaks and ruins everything. Our house has thick carpet. The floor never creaks. I try to stand still, hoping that if I focus hard I can start again where I left off, but it’s not working. I can’t figure out how to teleport entirely, how to be in Metairie for more than a few seconds at a time. I open my eyes and there is Mae, the real one, standing in the doorway, watching me. She has flour on her face and on her shirt. She’s holding the cordless phone.
“It’s Markus,” she says. “You want to take it?”
I’m embarrassed, but then I think, why should I be? She doesn’t know what I was doing. All she saw was me with my eyes closed. Mae always acts like she knows everything, but what does she really know?
“Finally,” I say into the phone, shutting the door in Mae’s face. “Didn’t your mom give you my messages?”
“I’m calling you, aren’t I?” He sounds annoyed. We broke up the day everything happened with Mom, but we got back together the day after, and the day after that I came here. “So,” he
