Chapter Text
Sometimes he would take Mel beyond the fields to the murky and smelly little lake, where she would amble among the clots of washed-up algae looking for beached snails and pretty rocks. The water was perpetually cold and dark. Rarely, she would hear the slap of a large fish’s tail on the water as it broke the surface. Her grandpa told her it was a sea monster, but only a little one. (There was a dusty snail shell on a dilapidated desk inside the shack, turned almost transparent with time.)
On an obligatory visit in the autumn, during a nasty spat between her parents in the city, they had gone fishing on the quaint sea, in rowboat almost lost to the years even then. It had been windy, and Mel could see a rolling carpet of abysmally grey clouds on the horizon, untransmutable into any animal, any whimsical shape.
She had been very cold and bored, and as the pier slowly disappeared as Grandpa rowed, a great anxiety coiled more and more tightly within her. Water began to splash over the sides of the boat as they rocked. A small bucket with a faded advertisement for a bait shop was thrust into her little raw-red hands. She bailed out the water spurred on by her grandpa’s shouts and curses. Nothing was caught that day, though Grandpa stewed in his foul mood the entire night, much as the rainstorm gathered overhead and hung low before releasing its own tirade. She hid in the dingy little guest room after, and carved tiny drawings and letters into the wooden paneling with her bitten fingernails, listening to the cold rain on the little window, to him talk to no one in the next room.
A winter vacation far in the past- a hike in the snowy woods, supernaturally quiet save for the wind rattling the last few brittle, tenacious leaves. Cheap instant hot chocolate in a battered thermos that had leaked onto her puffy pink coat. Mel had been amazed at her grandpa feeding the birds right out of his gnarled and weathered old hands, how they would perch and peck at the seed he held, how clear the wingbeats sounded as they sprang from his hands back into the thicket. Later, as the sky had reddened, she watched as a black vole leapt from one of her footprint and scrabbled across the layer of crunchy ice on top of the snow before disappearing again. She wished sometimes that she were small like that, able to find a safe, warm little den wherever she went, no matter what happened.
And now she was the proprietress of her grandfather’s patch of stinking, stagnant water, the same land of dubious quality covered in wilderness gone unchecked, logs and weeds rotting in the cold spring rain. She hadn’t been there in fifteen years. Some of the recollections she had of this place she never thought about, out of fear or some unknown twisting, crushing pain felt chiefly in her throat.
She listened to the water on her hood, felt the damp and furry quarter in her pocket, turning endlessly through her sweaty fingers. The sky was colourless, the clouds without breaks. A solid wall. The rain wouldn’t stop for a long time. There were drops on her eyelashes running into her eyes as she blinked.
There was a woman by her side, overbearing, with a very firm grasp on her elbow, trying to sell her, with a familiarly cramped businesswoman’s smile, some home renovations she could never afford. An old man with a soft face that looked like it would droop entirely off if he got too upset stood stooped on the porch in a very old-fashioned long raincoat and cap. He was quite bad at sticking with his welcoming façade, and as his little speech went on it dulled, and then dropped entirely. Mel knew her grandpa had been about as popular here as with the fragmented family that had ceased contact with him back home.
“With a little hard work…. A little elbow grease…. A bit of gumption….” The mayor repeated endlessly.
She made some eye contact, but hadn’t been listening at all, just watching the faces and hiding within herself making cheap prayers that the odd pair would leave quickly.
Mel thanked them absently, and they left with their halfway-there smiles.
The shack in which her crumbling old memories of her grandfather had been only repaired to the extent that the floor would not give way as she stepped in. there was a solid door on the outside, but on the inside the screen door hung on a single hinge, full of large tears.
One of the windows was long since broken, but recently sealed in plastic; the curled corpse of a lone spider trapped inside, web still intact. The sill was crumbling from water damage and mold; a large chunk of the remaining peeling paint came away easily at her touch.
There was room for her small, creaking bed, and enough storage for most of her boxes save for two, of superfluous kitchen tools (a cheap expresso machine bought at an excellent sale on a whim and never used, ancient pottery from some dead relative depicting cheerful, ruddy-faced children frolicking with farm animals in gaily painted porcelain).
It felt like some sort of bizarre nightmare, for her entire life and all its modest, realistic, achievable plans to be upended like this. Mel had stepped in a mud puddle on the way in; she had broken its thin crust of ice and soaked her good jeans in filthy water halfway up her calf. She was glad for the fallback option, the lack of rent, but was beginning to hate the place again despite the forceful and artificial sheen of positivity she had cultivated, alone in the drafty farmhouse.
She had been paradoxically happy at her desk job at Joja; it was like an old childhood game of pretend, something comforting and warm in her mind come to reality. The opportunity to don real actual business casual and grownups’ silky pantyhose and sensible heels, to earn a living on one’s own in a predictable pattern. She missed her lineup of dead and rotting houseplants, ill-thought but well-meaning gifts after a couple of lengthy bouts of flu, et cetera. The pictures of her old cat, the pretty frame that still had the stock photo of the happy couple with grinning, drooling toddler inside.
Job security. A place of her very own, admittedly with a less-than-ideal roommate with a disruptive lifestyle but not so bad that she could call for eviction, cold beer, making regular payments on her bills and debts and feeling so functional, so efficient at her mechanical little routine.
It was no more than a sticky-cheap and dirty bandage on the superiority complex she had nursed for years at the top of her classes at the little poorly funded high school in her district, which had been broken quickly and easily by the hands of her peers in college. Each special, each a standout overachiever and wonderkid in their own right now ordered in a rigid hierarchy of pure achievement.
To get hired full-time with room for advancement at a large and famous company straight out of college was a pure dream, which had come unbelievably true the summer after her graduation. That was the best it ever got; of this she had been assured all her life by family and friends and firmly believed so herself.
And when the inevitable happened, the frightening rumor that she assured herself couldn’t possibly happen occurred, it shook her to her bones. Joja started at the bottom of the corporate ladder for cost-saving layoffs and she had been another casual fatality, out on her ass with those bills and debts over which she had once felt so in control looming over her threateningly. No severance, no nothing. A partial paycheck, not even a goodbye from the few work friends she had made over the years who eyed her quietly as she took her small box of dead, dry plants with both great relief and contemptuous pity.
She launched immediately into a job hunt, sure that her paltry savings weren’t going to cut it for rent much longer, but there seemed to be an overabundance of fresh meat on the market and there was nothing save degrading part-time retail work. Mel had been through the works in high school, college, and pre-Joja, and had vowed never to return.
But the work tied her over for two a month and ended mostly in firings, the most memorable of which was her dismissal over a loud spat with a customer staining a dress with coffee and insisting a discount be applied, ending in a very public and embarrassing panic attack. The savings went dry fast supplementing the shitty service-industry pay.
Finally, at wits’ end, she visited her mother on a damp night at the end of a very mild winter. She was a stout, red-faced woman with a penchant for tropical fish, travel, and exotically rich men. Her looks, a misty sort of revenant beauty visible in full only in a certain light and angle, had faded long ago but she still retained the mysterious quality that drew men to her as if by magnetism.
This trait was more desirable to Mel as an adult, unlucky in love, than it had been as a bewildered child, unable to understand or accept fully that there was no love in the tenuous marriage her mother maintained for a time with a rather well-off man who was not her biological father and who took every opportunity to remind her of it.
She could not understand why Momma had male guests over all the time, that smelled of spice or sea or sometimes just sweat, why she took them in the spare guest room when Dad wasn’t there and screamed at them in no language she had ever heard.
Somewhat of a dinosaur with that artifact of the past, free love, still alive and well in her heart, her mother appeared at the nondescript door of her condo in an atrocious flowered muumuu and silk scarf.
Her apartment was lit almost totally by the otherworldly, wavering fluorescents of her fish-tank lights, lending a feel of creepy unreality to the rooms. Tacky little seashell knick-knacks and dolls from her travels were the sole genre of decor along with masses of scented candles; the furniture was leather so used that it had no discernible colour. Perhaps it had been white once, maybe a buff tan.
They sat at the too-large dining table to discuss their business, accompanied by the peaceful bubbling of the aquariums, old ceviche (one-hundred-percent chance of food poisoning), and an old folder chock-full of family matters that were totally irrelevant at best and potentially painful at worst to her mother. It was covered with anonymous stains and bloated with too much information; an old polaroid slipped out and floated across the table. Mel turned it over to inspect it, expecting a rare fond memory.
It was a lurid portrait of her mother, red-eyed and looking away from the camera, sitting supinely upon a unmade, tacky bedspread in a cheap beach hotel, clad scantily in beaded bra and thong and cheap rhinestone belly piercing. Her arms folded behind her head so that her modest bust was thrust forward.
Looking at the date, Mel guessed that it was taken when her mother was not so much older than she. She swallowed hard in embarrassment and passed it wordlessly to her mother, who suppressed a girlish giggle and slipped it in one of the large pockets of her dress.
"Sorry, dear, I’ve gotten all my important documents mixed up.”
Mel noticed a huge wad of the little pictures in the family documents folder, and despite herself held a secret seed within her of admiration for her mother’s complete lack of self-consciousness. She could feel the seat bead on her upper lip as the night wore on and she became more uncomfortable with her mother’s stories as they emerged along with some of the more PG snapshots. There were extremely few pictures of her in childhood, even less of the man she had called her father.
Her mother in a sunny wet t-shirt contest, first place medal, with huge teased-up hair dampened like wet cotton candy.
Her mother, blurry and young and much slimmer, bronzed and napping on the beach with a crude message written in sunscreen on her back, swimsuit undone.
Her mother with endless bland men, some women, plenty of alcohol.
All thrilling social adventures, all good experiences and lucky mishaps as if her mother was unable to relate anything but the positive aspects of her memories.
A larger picture of her balding grandfather, younger than she had ever known him, squinting and smiling in the bright sun, wearing an old-fashioned bathing costume at some beach. Mel showed her mom, whose smile degraded into a thin, tight line. This picture too was swept into her pockets.
Eventually the proper documents were found, explained rather poorly by her red-faced, tittering mom, already into the tequila, who offered pina coladas and a night of home videotapes at the end of Mel’s visit. Though a loose-lipped drunk, she spoke almost nothing except for what was strictly necessary to the documents about her own father. Nothing of the town. There was a yellowed envelope, torn open ages ago, addressed to Mel on the table in cursive too fancy to be practical. This too was claimed by her mother’s meaty hands, accompanied by an incoherent excuse. Mel let it slide, used to it.
On her way out, she spied a tall, boxy man with slicked-back grey hair and a meagre but styled moustache on the stairs. His cologne, an especially powerful witch’s brew of spice and musk and god only knew what else, arrived well before him, and she knew he was bound for her mother’s apartment.
Mel drew up the hood of her raincoat and slipped past, muffling a cough with her sleeve, exhausted by the force of her mother’s flippant exuberance.
In the coziness of her own place, her roommate gone out for the night undoubtedly to someone’s wild party, she composed an overly-formal email to the mayor of the little town listed in the documents and googled farming techniques and business strategies late into the night, listening to the steady rain against the windows.