White Nights in Split Town City. Annie DeWitt
which he found unsettling.
“I’m sorry,” Mother said after a minute. “I didn’t mean to start anything.”
“No harm done,” Otto said. “Sometimes my son stumbles on something new and can’t get past it.”
“Well,” Mother said. “That’s a blessing isn’t it. Most days I would kill to find something new to amuse me. One could live for that kind of excitement.”
“That depends,” Otto said. “On how much newness you can stand witnessing in a man his age.”
“I think he’s charmed,” Mother said. “I find him refreshing.”
No one spoke for a minute. I had never known anyone to put Otto so much into his place. Even Wilson sensed the tension and settled back down in his chair.
“Go on, Son,” Otto said to him. “Like the lady says, dance wherever you damn well please. Burn the house down.”
There wasn’t much room at Otto’s kitchen table. We all crowded in. Wilson took up nearly two chairs, all his weight settled under the belt. Otto took Birdie on his knee to compensate. Birdie picked at his plate. She didn’t much care for crust or fish. The tuna was thick and moist. There was so much to say between the whole of us, nobody could get any of it out.
Otto stared out the bay window that looked out over the pasture. After a while, he started talking about a dream he’d had several days previous about an indigenous community that had resurrected a series of tenement houses on stilts to allow the water to pass underneath. The people carried their belongings around on their backs during the day in case their houses were missing when they returned home from fishing. The houses, called kelongs, were built without nails, depending on rattan to bind the tree trunks and boards. Otto had read about it once in a back issue of National Geographic his wife had left behind years ago on his desk in the barn.
“Kelongs,” Otto Hauser said that afternoon, squaring his fingers in front of his mouth and blowing underneath them like a river rushing forward. The movement of his breath tousled my bangs across the table.
I heard keys turning in the entryway door. The light in the front hall flicked on casting an odd glare over the living room where His Helene was asleep. I wondered who had stopped in on us and sat back, easy-like, in my chair. Otto Hauser seemed oblivious to the sound of the keys or the quality of the light that day. Looking across the table at the old man holding up his diorama of this invisible house, I pictured the Steelhead brothers’ Jeep tumbling full-speed down the hill earlier that summer looking as though it just might crash into the doorway of the Bottom Feeder where Mother and I had stood watching.
As the car descended the mountain, Mother had shifted her weight to her outside foot, leaning her hip against the interior wood of the doorframe so the structure could support her recline. I had stood silently next to her, encased in the rectangular entryway of our home. Together, I had thought, our postures alone might hold the house up.
“I just hope they’ve got some good brakes on that thing,” Mother had said looking up at Fender Steelhead patterning against the sky like some great gull. “I hope they plan on using them.”
2.
The hill on our front lawn housed what Father called two trees of knowledge, old apple trees that flowered in the spring and shed small bitter apples in the fall. The yearly continuation of this cycle was inexplicable. Having fallen under the care of a long line of neglectful owners who had failed to prune away the dead wood to make way for the new sprouts, their fruit all but went to seed on the branch. And yet each spring the trees sprouted great plumage, large white blossoms that, if you sat at the base of the trees, smelled like a mixture of honey and vinegar.
I attributed this cycle to what I’d once heard Mother call the wayside of things. “The wayside of what?” I’d said. Mother was sitting in the living room then, in her blue bathrobe, her arm draped over the couch near the back window which she had cracked just wide enough that she could ash out of it.
“The wayside of life,” she said. She tapped her cigarette on the sill and stared vacantly across the deck, her eyes trained on the three men on horseback who were cresting the top of Fay Mountain, about to disappear under the power lines that ran down the back.
Mother extinguished her cigarette, flicking the butt out the window. She got up to turn on the fan so that the smoke blew out over the porch and the air came back into the room. As she sat back down on the couch, she leaned slightly forward and folded her hands. This position was the way she introduced speaking opportunities, times when she would tell me something I wasn’t supposed to hear. Times I would listen. The thing I learned from this opportunity was that the wayside was a place where Father had brought her, this house on a road with aging neighbors where a city girl like herself lost the occasion to put on a pair of decent shoes and escape the house.
Mother had a whole closet of shoes. They were lined up on the floor in the back under her dresses. Birdie and I tried them on evenings when she and Father went out. We were always careful to put them back just in their order. We called these shoes her lady slippers. We had first heard about the extraordinary nature of lady slippers when Father pointed them out to us one afternoon while hiking the land out back of the house. The flowers were rare. They were small and white and delicate, like the inside of a child’s palm planted in the grass.
Being that we grew up on the wayside, Birdie and I often burned off the afternoon hunting about the yard, inventing games under the trees. These games were best played when the grass had just been mowed and the clippings stuck to your body. Afterward, when you got a good hosing, you could really see the grass coming down, you could really watch yourself being stripped of earth.
From his window across the street, Otto Houser watched our games of rolling down the hill and blasting each other with the hose. He said it looked like we were wearing our birthday suits. But, there weren’t any birthdays that summer. Birdie was born in May. I was born in November.
In the evenings, Otto sat on the couch in front of his picture window and watched me finger away at the piano. The learning books came in a box with a set of tapes, which I listened to each day before sitting down and reading the notes. The piano was an old baby grand, an antique Father had bought at the town hall flea market from the cabinetmaker who sold restored furniture out of his flatbed. The only room large enough for Baby was the portico at the front of our house where Mother kept the dining table her parents had sent her, the one with the feet that looked like bird talons. Father called the table Old Eagle Back.
The morning Baby arrived, Father moved Old Eagle Back into the basement. Mother was at church. The man who delivered Baby was there to help.
“All a man needs, Jean,” Father told me as he carried Old Eagle across the living room and down the stairs. “A little bit of music. And an extra set of hands.”
Baby was an instant hotshot. All black around the body, she came with a hood that you propped open when you played to let the music out. Sometimes after practice, I’d imagine crawling under the hood and closing the top over me, just to feel the tension in the strings.
For a short stint after Baby arrived Father’s brother joined us over a series of weekends. Uncle’s real name was Dutch but everyone called him Sterling. Sterling lived a few hours away in a small manufacturing city. He worked at a plastics factory and lived in an old two-story motel where he kept a permanent room. What I knew of Uncle was that he had a strong alto voice and a red sports car. Those nights he joined us, Father drank cans of light beer while Sterling told stories about the men who worked next to him at the plastics factory over bottles of wine and fingers of Old Granddad. Sterling got on too much about old times.
“Leave it alone,” Father’d say.
“Is it wrong for a man to talk about his father?” Sterling would say, and they’d retire to the piano.
Sterling had a penchant for Italian opera. It was one of many tastes no one could account for. Those nights he visited, Sterling sang at Father’s back, performing long stretches of lively arias with precision and grace,