need to stay with you.”
He doesn’t say anything for a moment so I rush to fill the silence. “I don’t have anywhere else to go. Dennis wants me to move to New York, and Mom isn’t better yet.”
“I’ll ask my parents,” he says.
“Please,” I say, because I don’t think he will.
“I’ll ask them.”
“I could live in your guest room,” I say.
“Okay,” he says. It sounds like there are people in the background, voices, laughter. I feel a pang.
“Where are you?” I ask.
“At the lake house,” he says.
“Who’s all there?” I ask.
“Lauren B, Lauren S and Drunk Mike.”
“Why are you hanging out with the Laurens?”
“Don’t…” he says, but then someone grabs the phone from him.
“Edie!!” Mike slurs. “Why aren’t you here??”
I hear Markus wrestling the phone away from him.
“He doesn’t know?” I ask Markus.
“He probably forgot,” Markus says.
“So, you’ll ask your parents?” I say.
“Jesus,” he says, “I said I would.”
He sounds so annoyed with me. Neither of us say anything. I sniffle loudly into the phone. I know he can hear it and that he feels bad, because his voice goes low, and I feel like it’s Markus I’m talking to again, not this other person he has become over the last few months.
“Edie, come on, stop. I’m sorry. Stop crying.”
“I want to go home,” I say.
Someone picks up the phone on his end and starts dialing.
“Hello? Hello?” It’s Markus’s father.
“Hi, Dr. Theriot,” I say.
“Hello? Hello? Markus, is that you? I need the line—the hospital is paging me,” he says, seeming not to have heard me.
“I’ll call you later,” Markus says and hangs up. I hold the phone for a moment, listening to the dial tone. In the other room Mae is laughing. It’s a weird sound, ugly.
I come out into the living room and see Dennis on the ground and Mae standing on his back.
“Bend your knees! Arms out! Eyes on the horizon!” He’s shouting the commands as he wriggles around and bucks under her. They’re both covered in flour. Mae is trying to balance, but she’s doubled over with that hideous laughter.
“I can’t… I can’t…” she gasps.
“I’m teaching Mae how to surf,” Dennis says when he sees me. They look about as idiotic as this sounds.
“Stop sticking your butt out like that. You look like you’re about to take a dump,” I tell her.
She keeps smiling, but doesn’t look at me.
Dennis yells: “Wave!” and bucks under her. She squeals as she flies off and lands on the couch.
“You wanna try surfing?” he asks me. He’s got to be fucking kidding. This is the kind of shit he should have been doing 12 years ago when he abandoned us, not now when I’m 16.
“You know, we’ve never even seen the ocean,” I tell him. But how would he know this? He’s a complete stranger. I knock a stack of books off the coffee table for emphasis and there’s a cloud of dust. Dennis gets up, streaks of dirt on his belly and legs, flour in his hair.
“You don’t know anything about us,” I try to say, but I can’t stop sneezing.
MAE
I think Edie was so scared of Dad leaving again that she wanted to preempt it. If she drove him away, she’d feel like she had some say in the matter.
Well, she’s done it, I remember thinking after Edie threw her first fit. Every little mean thing Edie said, I would think, this is it, because everything in New York felt so precarious. We weren’t in school. We had no routine. We didn’t know anyone. We were just floating there.
Even though I’d get mad at her, I’d hold her until I could feel her rumbling rage subside, until finally whatever it was inside her would grow silent and still.
People who didn’t know Edie very well were always surprised to find out that she had a temper, because of her voice, and also, because she had this look, like a blind baby animal, a leggy calf or a freshly hatched chick—all bones and matted fluffs of yellow hair. One of my earliest memories, though, is of her wailing on me. She claims not to remember, but whenever she was feeling contrite, she’d pet the tiny white scar in my eyebrow with her finger. I don’t have it anymore, but it was over my right eye. She’d given it to me by kicking me in the face with an ice skate.
Once, after an argument when I told her to stop making trouble with Dad, she took a handful of my hair and jammed it in my mouth, enough for me to choke, and said: “He’s going to leave us again. He’s going to leave us as many times as we let him.” In that moment I believed her, despite Dad doing everything he could to convince us otherwise. Like when she threw a fit because she wanted to go to the beach, and within minutes Dad was in his swim trunks, carrying towels, herding us onto the Q train to Brighton Beach. It was a long subway ride and because it was the middle of the day I remember the car being empty. It had felt like it was our private train, and even though Edie was trying not to enjoy it, I know she did. It was my first trip to see the ocean and I didn’t even know that I was dying to see it until I was on my way there. People are always surprised when I tell them this because we lived by the Gulf, but the coast of Louisiana is all swamp. We’d go up to Lake Pontchartrain, but there were no ocean beaches—for that you’d have to drive out to Alabama or Florida, and we’d never left the state. Mom traveled, but she never took us. She’d disappear for weeks at a time, leave us with Doreen, or when Doreen got sick of us, with the Wassersteins, an older couple who watched crime shows all day and fed us nothing but hotdogs. Edie and I loved to hate the Wassersteins.
In a recent show, I tried to recreate the feeling of that first trip to the beach, but it was hard to capture the intense and simple joy I’d felt. It was windy and full of seagulls and it was Brighton Beach, so I’m sure the sand was full of wrappers and trash, but I didn’t notice any of that. I was bowled over by the horizon line! All that water! Water, stretching out forever, and those waves! The way the water gathered itself and suddenly rose up! The force of it as it pulled the sand out from under my feet. It was cold, but of course we all went in. Edie looked like an animated broomstick in a bikini. The coldness of the water just made her broomstickier, hopping from foot to foot. The cold water was a shock to our systems. It made us momentarily euphoric. Our teeth practically fell out they were chattering so much, but it was really lovely. The Atlantic Ocean in March.
After
