By Dana Jean Rider
When the plane lands, Liza’s seatmate stands, as though he might flow over or around her to join the current of anxious bodies in the aisle. Liza remains seated, pulls out her phone to emphasize her own stillness. What is the point of all the hovering? Why not stay seated until a space has cleared? You will get off the plane when you get off the plane, not a moment sooner.
Her aunt Winnie had loved to say things like this: truisms.
Liza has been thinking about Winnie a lot. Obviously. So obvious as to be banal? Probably, since Winnie is why she’s in Florida to begin with. Liza has flown down to see the houseboat.
When she told her therapist, Dr. Tarnowski, that she’d be missing a session for this trip, he told her to write her thoughts down, but she can’t fathom buying a journal just to do this. How embarrassing, walking up to the register with an empty book meant to contain her feelings and problems. The cashier would know. It would be horrible. Liza has settled for thinking her thoughts very intentionally instead, and is convinced this will be enough.
She texts J, her boyfriend. (The name is purposefully elided. His given name is Jason. A couple of his friends call him “Son” instead in a confusing pseudopaternal dynamic Liza has yet to unpack.) Landed in Tally, she types. She rethinks the nickname. Types out Tallahassee.
J replies immediately, though he doesn’t acknowledge her landing text. Instead, he sends his latest work of art. In it, Ronald McDonald is jacking off Mickey Mouse. Clean, crisp lines with heavy shadows and bright, primary colors. Mickey is frozen in the middle of blowing his load with a pained expression, ejaculating U.S. dollar bills.
All J’s art is like this. Anti-corporate? Social critique, he says. Liza worries, again, that if they move in together he will want to put it up on the walls. Presently, glossy prints decorate the walls of the room J rents in a gross boarding house Liza avoids visiting, especially when they have loud bands playing indecipherable “music” in the backyard. The image of J’s latest piece arrived with a single line of text titling it “Moneyshot.”
Once the overeager crowd has cleared, Liza retrieves her luggage and exits the plane.
*
A taxi takes her forty minutes south to the split of the Wakulla River, to a marina in St. Mark’s. The driver talks about a documentary he has recently watched about ancient beekeeping. Liza is a practiced nodder. She gives him her best oohs and aahs.
Winnie is—or was—Liza’s dead mom’s sister. They were five years apart but looked so much alike you would have thought they were twins. So much so that when Liza was six years old and her mom died, Liza held Winnie’s hand at the funeral thinking nothing was wrong. She didn’t understand death, only that they had come to a wide, dark, unfamiliar room that smelled like pine trees. That everything would be okay as long as she clung to the blonde woman in the long skirt.
She remembers, too, the shock at seeing double when she looked into the casket. Glancing cartoonishly from her mom’s body to Winnie and back again. Liza imagines being born would have felt like that, if you could remember it. Catapulted, screaming, into bloody existence; the moment she finally was.
A phone chime announces an email Liza has received from her substitute teacher, asking for elaboration on the lesson plan. It’s the nitrogen cycle. Draw the arrows, lady. Move on.
She remembers studying for an exam early in grad school, years ago, on Winnie’s couch. Winnie, who always seemed to know everything about whatever Liza happened to be studying, as if the knowledge of the world were an already-solved puzzle. Winnie explaining the nitrogen cycle with movements of her hand, her pointer finger moving in a circle, pausing at the apex to explain each step. The movement now lives in Liza’s head, though her aunt is no longer around to make it.
*
When she arrives in St. Marks, Liza’s first stop is to order a sandwich. A tuna BLT. After she places her order, the waitress tells her they have great salads. Liza reiterates her sandwich, and the waitress smiles sweetly.
While she eats, sunlight slowly encroaches across her left arm. She tries to keep as much of her pale body as possible underneath the beer-sponsored patio umbrella. It would be harder to love herself in an environment like this. Really hot, though it’s past five. Where did the word “muggy” come from? Why does it fit so well here?
If she cranes her neck, she can see the marina. She can’t tell which houseboat is Winnie’s from this distance.
The notice arrived on the day of the PSAT. Her homeroom students were quiet, number two pencils scribbling, grimaces, periodic erasing. An email from a law office, five last names in a row. Two of the last names are the same, representing different individuals. They aren’t placed near each other in the titular sequence, instead bookending the others. A-B-C-D-A. She can’t remember any of the names now except the repeater: Frederickson.
The attorneys Frederickson informed her: Winnie has specified Liza as beneficiary in her will. They had been trying to reach her, but she hadn’t answered their phone calls. A flurry of calls and meetings later, she had been delivered the keys to a houseboat—the same one where Winnie had lived out the last decade of her life—and several files Liza hadn’t opened.
She was surprised to have been bequeathed anything. As far as she knew—as far as anyone knew—Winnie hated her.
Liza didn’t say that to the lawyers. She did ask what the boat was called. Don’t most boats have names? The lawyers frowned, paged through their notes and documents. One of them (statistically, a Frederickson) told her the marina rent was only paid up through the end of the month, that the boat would need to be moved or sold.
Liza requested a few days off, arranged the substitute, and kissed J goodbye. In and out. Three days. No one needs to stay in Florida any longer.
*
A dank and tangy smell hits Liza when she steps onto the boat deck. Mildew meets cat urine? She opens the cabin door, which creaks eerily, metal on metal, rusty hinges.
There’s only one room inside, split by linoleum and shag carpet into a kitchen and living space. Liza wrestles down the urge to flee the smell and spectacle before her.
The issue, really, is the trash.
Boxes are everywhere, plastic bags full of—what? More plastic? Tissues? Dirty fabric in heaps. Newspapers stacked in places to the ceiling. Drawers bursting with water-damaged mail. Beyond all else, fast food garbage. Burger wrappers, fry-greased paper cups, crushed Styrofoam drinks with lids and straws littered around.
Unwillingly, Liza imagines one of J’s heavier-handed pieces about wasteful consumption—all the bright red burger chains thoroughly represented in this mess. Then another thought floats up like a plastic cup on an ocean wave: Winnie never ate fast food, Liza was sure of it. In fact, her aunt always gave her shit about it, when she found a stale fry or a Taco Bell cup in Liza’s car.
Liza shuts the door behind her and locks it, even though whatever criminals might be lurking are unlikely to do her the favor of burglary. She sinks into a swivel chair attached to the deck. The foam seat squelches when she sits, and she feels moisture seep onto her shorts.
She gathers the bothersome thoughts around her like stuffed animals at a tea party. How could Winnie have lived here? Did she live here? Was it storage? If so, why store garbage? Is this a reward, or a punishment? Well, that much is obvious. One final ugly justice for Liza’s betrayal, from beyond the grave. But why did it reek of cat?
As far as Liza knew, Winnie’s last cat was Bruce, an orb-eyed beast with a meow like a stalling engine, already ancient the one time Liza catsat for Winnie, which must have been shortly before the schism. Bruce watched her constantly, cautious and aloof. Finally, on the last of three nights, she woke sweating to find him curled up behind her bent knees. His body made her too warm, but she didn’t want him to move, to alter the first arrangement in which he had ever confessed tolerance of her, maybe something approaching affection.
From the deck, Liza notices a man watching her, two boats over. Sipping a beer and reclining in a rubbery seat high up on the stern (is that the word?) of his own houseboat. He nods when she catches his eye. She tries to nod back, but it comes across too formal, maybe condescending.
*
She had hoped to stay on the houseboat, but obviously that wasn’t going to happen. Liza cringes as she hands her credit card to the bored receptionist at a motel near the marina. The motel is small and has the same mildewy smell as the boat, albeit gentler. The kind of place that makes you happy not to have a blacklight.
The television only gets a cooking channel, which plays the same two episodes of a competition show over and over. Four contestants prepare steak dinners, which must include one vegetable side and one starch. Next episode: Three contestants prepare three kinds of seafood appetizer. Repeat. One of the chefs resembles Winnie—willowy and blonde, sternness settled in around the mouth in harsh lines. Liza’s stomach growls as she watches the Winnie-chef aggressively maneuver a huge pan full of paella.
They looked much alike for many years—Liza as mini-Winnie, assuming the role of her dead mother. Equally fair and petite, constantly donning Winnie’s hand-me-downs. Then, things shifted. Liza imagines it like this: she and Winnie standing next to one another, nearly identical, until someone pulls the ripcord on Liza’s back—like she’s the emergency life vest demonstrated by a flight attendant—and she begins to expand outward. Dr. T would tell her she is being unkind to herself with this mental imagery.
When Liza started gaining weight, it got harder to be around Winnie. Or maybe that wasn’t it. Maybe it was when Winnie first moved to Florida that the change set in. No, it must have been the reverse, that she changed and the cold north couldn’t hold her anymore—or another thing entirely that had nothing to do with place? In her mind’s eye, Liza sees a looping image of Winnie’s once-easy smile becoming a sneer, an accompanying tightness in the cheeks and forehead, stretching instead of wrinkling as age ought to do.
*
Liza walks across the street to McDonald’s for dinner, as though steered there by the malignant combination of J’s latest artwork and Winnie’s boat full of wrappers. Would J include her in his next piece if he knew? She already knows what Winnie would have said.
Liza reminds herself that her assessment of J is always harsher when she isn’t with him. He isn’t so bad. He loves her—loves her body and that she’s a teacher, which he believes is one of the few remaining honorable professions. Among the others: farmers and plumbers and artists. He falls into the last category, and that’s really his problem—he’s an artist. He gets myopic and particular. He’s a little like Winnie in that way.
Inside the restaurant, Liza sees the same man who had been watching her from his boat at the marina. After she orders and retrieves her cheeseburger and fries and drink, he waves her over to join him in the plasticky red booth.
Approaching strange men runs counter to cultural programming, but she assures herself that this time, as ever, she is performing the required safety scans to continue existing in the world as a woman—so, yes, she is sitting with a male stranger, but her oversensitive warning system has registered him as harmless, especially after he asks her, when she arrives at the booth, how she knew Winnie. Correct tense.
She tells him she was her niece. (Are you still someone’s niece once they are dead?)
The man gives a dramatic sigh and shifts the ice around in his cup of Coke. He tells her he’s sorry Winnie died. His name is Bill, he says, and he had known Winnie going on five years. He asks if there will be a funeral.
I don’t know, she says. Probably not, though. This part she doesn’t say: Winnie had no kids, and if someone were to do it, it would have to be me, and I won’t. She does say: I’m just here to clean out her houseboat. She asks him whether he knows where she might rent a large garbage bin on short notice.
Hmm, he begins. I know a guy with a dumpster that loads onto a truck. Lives a couple towns over, few miles inland from Wakulla Beach. He owes me a favor. He’ll come drop it off if I ask him. Could probably talk him down to a couple hundred bucks, if I tell him it’s my friend who died’s place.
He says all this as though to himself. She replies anyway, I wouldn’t ask you to do that.
Least I can do. I liked Winnie. She was a good woman. (As soon as he finishes speaking she thinks she may have summoned the “a” for him—amending his statement from “she was good woman,” where woman serves as a kind of mass noun.)
She is quiet for a while before the obvious occurs to her and she asks what his relationship was with her aunt, in only slightly more graceful terms. More like: What were you to Winnie?
Bill chuckles and shrugs off the question. When he laughs, she sees his teeth, yellow and gray in places. His face has too many details on it, freckles and spots and scars, though if you squint you could see how he might have been attractive underneath it all. She has thought before that aging is a process of accumulating such details. What did Winnie look like, the one Bill knew from the final years of her life? Whether she had retained the sharpness that came more from intelligence than cheekbones, whether she had also succumbed to minute imperfections.
The next question catches him off-guard: Did Winnie eat at McDonald’s with you?
Bill frowns and says, No, she wasn’t much for the fast foods. He says it like that, with the “s.”
Liza returns to sipping her Diet Coke, her mind slipping back to the trash in the boat.
Bill steps outside to call his friend about the dumpster. She waits for him in the booth, which has grown sweaty under her bare thighs. She texts J: Houseboat looks pretty bad. Bigger project than I thought.
He replies right away: Are you going to be staying longer in FL?
Bill returns and says his friend would drop off the dumpster overnight, in the part of the parking lot nearest to Winnie’s hitch. There’d be a short walk, but that’s as close as it’ll get. He asks if Liza knows what she is going to do with the boat when it is cleared out.
Sell it, probably.
Bill grunts. He slaps his knees and says if she needs anything else, she knows where to find him. She watches him walk toward the marina until he disappears from view.
She replies to J: No, I’m still hoping to be done in a few days. He sends back a thumbs-up emoji. He also sends another picture: A long, single-file line of monochrome blue human figures in nondescript clothes, drawn in sharp perspective angling away from the viewer. Each has a giant screw sticking out the back of their skull and connecting past their face to a smart phone. Heads are pointed down toward the phones at identical forty-five degree angles. Phone screens offer the only source of light, despite being cracked by the tip of the screw. Everything else is dark. The nearest punctured human face is smiling at the phone. He says it’s titled “Crucifixion.”
J’s arrival in Liza’s life almost exactly coincided with Winnie’s departure. The short overlap allowed for one meeting, at a small family Christmas party. Winnie and J had a long conversation about some arcane French art movement. Liza hovered alongside them, pleased neither was saying anything too off-putting to the other. When J used the bathroom, he sent Liza a picture of her cousin’s oblong bottle of rosemary-scented shampoo, saying it smelled nice and he wanted to remember it for later. She smiled at the screen.
Winnie, glass of wine in one hand, smacked the phone out of Liza’s fingers, onto the cousin’s plush carpet.
You're always on that stupid thing, she said, and sipped deeply. It’s making you an idiot.
Maybe the reason Liza struggles to describe what happened between them is because all the individual instances seem cheap from a distance. A bunch of small nothings that don't amount to estrangement, and certainly even less to a trash-filled houseboat.
Back at the motel, Liza puts her phone on silent and watches the steak dinner episode of the cooking show until she falls asleep.
An enormous crunching noise like metal teeth on cement startles Liza awake in the middle of the night. She’s confused at first—the cooking network is still playing, but the show has finally changed. Now, a tan redhead with a false smile is homemaking potato chips. Liza peers out the window to see a huge truck rumbling away with an empty cargo hitch.
Bill’s dumpster had gotten here fast.
Though it’s nearly three a.m., Liza walks to the houseboat. The thing about a big task is—she’s always trying to tell her students this—it’s over faster the sooner you start. She ties back her hair while sitting again on the mushy chair outside the cabin door.
She will feel better once she makes a dent in the garbage. And, most importantly, she has realized, once she finds non-garbage amid the mess. Waste renders us all faceless, identical, but Winnie must be in there somewhere, hiding.
*
Last week in therapy, Dr. T asked if she had known Winnie was sick before news came of her death. Liza said no, but that was a lie.
Winnie had called three months before she died, during school hours, so Liza ignored the phone’s buzzing insistence. Her students were taking a quiz. She saw Winnie’s name and thought that, in an alternate universe, she would answer and screech like a harpy. All her students would know she was insane, that an unhinged, unreasonable woman was teaching their science classes. She wondered whether they would respect her more or less if they knew Winnie. And whether they would remember her outburst the next time they thought of cheating on an exam.
Winnie left a message that said little, mostly that she was dying of a rare type of stomach cancer. Asking Liza to visit. She never returned the call.
The same night, she and J watched a documentary about the U.S. food system. The narrator spoke cryptically of rising rates of cancer, and before she knew what she was doing, she was saying to J: Winnie called me at school today.
He pulled his eyes from the screen hesitantly. He pressed “pause” on the remote.
Like, she called the school phone?
No, she called my cell phone.
Oh, he said. What did she say?
Well, I didn’t talk to her.
Oh, he said again, glancing toward the screen.
She didn’t bring up the cancer or her aunt’s cold invitation. She told herself that the girlfriendliest thing she could do would be to let him go back to watching—though really she was afraid he would tell her to go. J only had that one impression of Winnie. He found her smart and funny. He didn’t entirely understand what had happened between them, though he assured Liza he supported anyone going “no contact” with family on principle.
J left almost immediately after the documentary had finished, citing inspiration. In the painting, men wearing flag tee-shirts gorged themselves on piles of garbage packed between hamburger buns. One of the garbage burgers was made entirely out of medical waste, mostly needles and bandages, and J got upset when she asked what he was trying to say with that piece, which was titled: “American Hungers.”
*
Liza’s progress is notable by the time the sun has fully risen. The whole kitchen floor is visible. The expired foods in the pantry—swollen cans of beans and mouse-chewed bags of pasta and rice—have been tossed away. Initially, approaching the stacks of paper and envelopes, she was careful, scanning each for the potential of important information. This effort hadn’t lasted, and soon she was throwing out stacks of mail addressed to “current resident” by the armful, sweat pooling at the small of her back and under her boobs.
She works at times in a rush, an overwhelming drive to work through, under, around, over, whatever. With the garbage cleared out, a catalog of furniture: kitchen table, two chairs, a rolling cart. Small rocker by round window. Futon against the far wall.
And still, a lack of mementos. No photos, artworks, souvenirs, personal effects. No paperwork from the marina or bills from the doctor. Not even a hairbrush. No tubs of half-used lotion, no bottles of ibuprofen, no notebooks, pens, et cetera—nothing to make the implied occupant even slightly more specific of a person, one who experienced pain or dry skin, or who occasionally sought to write things down.
*
Late in the day, Bill interrupts with a knock. Liza closes the door behind her when she steps onto the boat's deck, not wanting to reveal the detritus of Winnie's life to him—she's not sure whether this is for her own benefit, his, or Winnie's. Bill seems utterly uncurious about the boat itself, only asks how it’s going, whether the dumpster is working out. He asks if she would have any free time to go see a better part of the river the next day, says his cousin's out of town and has a patch of land downstream with a great view of the greenery, a bit of shade to cut the heat. He could invite folks from the marina—to remember Winnie, give her a memorial of sorts—though some are away, since it's the off-season.
Liza agrees to attend Bill’s makeshift funeral without totally knowing why. Maybe because she had gotten so much done today, and was feeling pleasantly satisfied by all the visible progress. Maybe because she was curious about what had happened to Winnie in the five years since they had spoken that left her with a boat full of trash—despite her steadily rising fury with Winnie, whom Liza knew would want her to want to understand.
Bill smiles and tells her they’ll meet at the marina tomorrow morning. He struggles as he steps off the boat, the metal lip bobbing against the dock.
*
When Liza finishes, everything is in the dumpster except the furniture. She thinks about what Winnie ought to have and didn't. Family records and heirlooms, things Liza’s mother wasn't around to fight her for. A hideous ceramic statue of a weasel balancing a ball on its nose that Liza had made for her during a middle school art class. It was supposed to be a seal; Winnie had just called it a weasel. She was the kind of person who made it easier to accept what she said than to correct her assessment.
Liza texts J a picture of the empty room. Satisfaction simmers in her aching muscles, but still the twinge of a thought at the back of her mind that she now, still, must deal with the fact of having a houseboat. J gives the picture another thumbs-up. Then he sends a WOW with an emoticon with a mouth open in a shocked “O.”
She returns to the motel in the late afternoon. The cooking channel is still on the television—a panicked pastry chef pipes icing rosettes on a wedding cake. Exhaustion wins the battle against hunger, and Liza is asleep on top of the covers almost immediately.
*
Liza wakes in the middle of the damp night, the cooking channel still bouncing colors off the walls of the small room. She was dreaming about Winnie, she realizes, the kind of quiet, sprawling dream that occupies idea rather than space.
After an hour, she gives up on sleep and walks back over to the houseboat. She sits at the kitchen table and listens to the fan, which she had left on in the hope that it would soften the rankness. Her grandpa—her mother and Winnie’s dad—had a story about a friend killed by a ceiling fan. (Well, he had a story about a friend killed by almost any nameable object, more a statement of fear with regard to the external world, even urban legend rooted in his childhood, specifically, than an indictment of ceiling fans.) She listens to the fan making a whooshing noise. Rhythmic whoosh. Can a whoosh be rhythmic? whooshwhooshwhoosh. Same time and space between the climax of each burst. Every so often another noise sneaks in, faint clicks and hisses. Liza falls asleep at the table.
When she wakes up, morning is mid-arrival. Her neck pops when she stretches it. She notices a trail of ants along the crack where the wall meets the floor. The trail leads to the closet in the living space, where, despite having cleaned it out and seeing nothing the day before, she now notices a loose linoleum tile in the corner. She lifts it up and finds a shoebox inside. Within are the bones of a small animal. The arrangement of teeth on the skull calls to Liza’s mind the diagram of bone structure within the family Felidae, in the appendices of the enormous science textbook she uses with her students.
Again, she can feel Winnie wanting her to sweat over the questions, so she sets the cardboard coffin back down and goes back to the motel for a shower.
*
When Dr. T asked how their relationship had gotten so bad, Liza couldn’t answer properly. She started sentences and let them dissolve in the air as soon as they left her lips. When things changed between them it was slowly, slowly, then all at once. Like a coming of age, for her, and in reverse, Winnie’s unbecoming.
She managed to tell Dr. T about their earliest connection, after the funeral. Liza was a sophomore in high school, and she had pissed off a teacher by daydreaming. The teacher had sent her to in-school detention, her first-ever experience of the place. She fumed in the sweaty classroom as the other delinquents threw paper airplanes toward the monitor, asleep and drooling at the teacher’s desk.
That night, Winnie called the house to talk to Liza’s father. Usually, it was about some heirloom or piece of clothing of Liza’s mother’s—a plea for him to enter the basement where he had stashed all the evidence of her life. He wasn’t home, Liza told her aunt.
What’s eating you? Winnie had said. You sound awful.
Liza told her, hesitantly, about what had happened with the teacher.
That woman sounds like a real asshole, her aunt had said back. Liza liked the way Winnie called the teacher “the woman,” as though the words themselves contained insult. Winnie proceeded to tell Liza about a coworker she thought was out to get her, verbally arranging their situations as the same, the two of them—rational, innocent—against a world of assholes.
Winnie stopped being a peripheral adult in Liza’s life, became something more like a friend. A confidante. Liza thought this was the universe’s method of compromise. No mother, but a cool aunt—who made her feel cool in turn.
Years passed like that. A decade of friendship and guidance. Things got icy so slowly, Liza barely noticed it happening.
Once, around the time Liza’s body had started morphing into its favored shape (layered thickness to protect from famine or January, a gift from her father's side), Winnie told her a story. She had been helping a coworker find a dress for a wedding, and the woman stepped out of the fitting room to show her a satin, strappy number in turquoise.
I could see her pussy lips through the fabric, Winnie said. That happens when a woman gains too much weight. How sad, she said, to have a fat pussy.
Weeks later, she insisted on giving Liza a pair of jeans she no longer wanted. Liza told her they wouldn't fit, but she insisted she try them on anyway, spent the whole time watching her, tracing the bulges of Liza's body with her eyes.
It was like that: She wanted to know you knew.
Liza prides herself on not thinking about it. Her body as fact.
Sometimes she thinks J likes her because of her body, which is fine, she supposes, since she also likes him for his. Mannequin-normal, is how she thinks of him, but not the classic muscled plastic mannequins, more like the dad-bod-ish ones Target started using once it became hip to motion toward size diversity.
Once, during sex, J ran a finger through the crease of her stomach roll and smelled it. They were early in the relationship, and she decided he probably didn’t care about how fat her pussy lips were, that he might even like it. To be desired could be its own kind of healing, she thought, though she wasn’t about to bring it up to her therapist—the one before Dr. T.
That therapist thought if Liza spent more on groceries, she’d eat out less, though Liza had never told her eating out was a problem. It wasn’t. Her upbringing: frugal above all else. But also: ever the obedient patient.
Following those orders at Whole Foods, Liza placed several packages of dried fruit into a hand basket. Ten dollars for dried mango, seven for freeze-dried strawberries. At the time she was completing student-teaching hours toward a master’s program at a parochial school, and the pay broke down to less than minimum wage, but she was too anxious to admit to the therapist how much these items stressed her budget.
She saw Winnie frowning at the end of an aisle, comparing brands of olive oil spray. Things were already weird enough between them that Liza considered sneaking away, but then Winnie looked up. An exaggerated greeting, stilted on Liza’s end.
When Winnie saw the dried fruit in Liza’s basket, she said, So much sugar, not worth it. She reached in and pulled the packages out, placed them back on the wrong shelf for an underpaid worker to deal with. She grabbed Liza’s arm and pulled her over to the produce, encouraged her to buy underripe bananas instead.
Ripeness is sweetness is sugar.
Liza bought the bananas and let them yellow before eating.
How does a relationship fall apart? It's nothing, nothing, then something. Not a satisfying answer. Liza stopped picking up the phone. She was tired. Eventually, Winnie grew incandescent at her silence. It was a relief when she told Liza not to bother.
*
The substitute’s emailed report arrives: Classes have been fine. One student snipped at her and she sent him to detention. Liza rolls her eyes.
They’re people, she wants to tell the sub. They know when you don’t respect them.
The environmental science students finished their unit on the nitrogen cycle. The biology class began a brief unit on animal taxonomy. They had a lot of questions about reptiles the sub couldn’t answer. There’s a gecko in Liza’s classroom in a huge terrarium. A gift from a graduating class a few years back. She sends the sub back a “thanks” and a reminder to feed the gecko. They used to have a snake, too, but the student who watched it over winter break didn’t keep it warm enough.
Another email: One of the attorneys says they found a note in their files, the name of the boat. Winnie had called it the Water Moccasin. Funnily enough: there’s a picture of that snake on the cover of the textbook Liza had been thinking about. Dark curled muscle and wide mouth open in a distinct threat.
Liza shoots J a text to let him know where she’ll be for the day. She shares her location, a default precaution. She also asks him how it’s going. Three dots appear, as though he’s responding, but nothing comes through. He gets this way, so into his work, scanning each image to upload to his socials and share around. To become part of the same networks he’s seeking to condemn. She pointed this out to him once, early in the relationship. They barely spoke for a week, but when he came back around he gave her a bouquet of star-gazer lilies, which she immediately threw in the trash because her roommate had a cat.
*
Liza had thought they would drive to Bill’s cousin’s house, but instead they walk, since it’s only about ten minutes on foot from the marina. The property is small, just a rectangular manufactured home and a yard sloping down toward the craggy, sandy shore of the Wakulla.
Bill pulls a collapsible table from a thicket of weeds near the backdoor and shoves its legs into the dirt to stop their wobbling. Liza unloads their libations onto it, several semi-crushed packages of chips and a couple six-packs of predictable light beer.
The air is thick and sticky, barely delineated from the greenish water. The river drifts by lazily, though Liza knows from having grown up near the Mississippi that there can be deceptively strong currents beneath, waiting to suck you under and keep you there. There’s probably a term for the fluvial equivalent to rip-tides. This seems like something Winnie would have known.
Bill joins her by the river’s edge and says the others should be here soon.
She asks who all is coming, and he says it’s a couple friends from the marina and another set of cousins who live across the way—she’s not sure if he’s using the word “cousin” loosely or whether his family is hugely prolific. He motions toward the opposing property, where an identical manufactured home sits above a sharp drop to the water.
So you said you’re a teacher? he asks her.
Liza nods. She doesn’t remember telling him this, but it’s like her to babble then forget.
She adds, Science, high school. The heat makes her say things out of order. Normally she would say high school science. I am a high school science teacher.
Mmm, Bill grunts. Dissecting pigs and all that?
We usually do sheep brains. We get them from a meat processing plant, so it’s cheap.
Bill purses his lips in a way that is either paternal pride at her sense of economy or concern that she’s about to go all environmentalist on him. He tells her about dissecting a fetal pig in high school in the seventies—the guts tossed around the room by teen boys attempting to demonstrate how unaffected they were, and his own queasy heartache at the piglet’s tiny snout. For a moment, Liza can see why Winnie liked him.
Bill is much more talkative than Liza has come to expect—like being so near to the river has uncorked him. He speaks reverently about the lands around them, the collage of interconnected lakes and wetlands. About his childhood—rope swing to the dead center of the river, chasing herons and catching frogs, encounters with curious manatees.
Across the water, Bill’s cousins emerge from their house. Both are dressed almost identically to him: variants on cargo shorts and tropical-patterned shirts. Apparently a funerary standard. They wave. Bill says they must be on their way over, adds that the family name is Watterson. One Watterson brother lights up a cigarette and the other fishes around in a wood pile, then tosses logs into the back of a pickup.
They’re carpenters, Bills says. He smiles, like he’s letting her in on a secret, then continues, They occasionally cause trouble for the cops.
One of the brothers looks over at Bill and Liza again, eyes lingering on her as though trying to solve for her pale, fleshy body in the equation of the scene. Liza chooses not to ask for elaboration of their wrongdoings.
She tells Bill about the name the lawyer had given her for the boat: the Water Moccasin. He laughs and says he could have told her that. He also says that when he was a child, his mother would make him wait before going outside so she could clear the yard of snakes, cleaving them in two with a shovel. Despite this early conditioning, he says, he still finds snakes beautiful and fascinating.
A pair of kayakers come down the river, a man and a woman. They wave to Bill and Liza. She figures she had better ask her question before everyone arrives, so she turns to Bill and blurts: Do you want to buy Winnie’s boat?
Bill frowns, hums in consideration. He points an arthritic finger across the river, where a small caiman sits on a partially submerged log, beneath a drooping, willowy tree branch. Caimans might be smaller than alligators, he says, but they will still eat your fingers if you’re dumb enough to let them.
Finally, Bill tells her he wouldn’t be able to pay much for the boat. Liza suggests a number encompassing the cost of the plane tickets and taxi, and Bill eyes her suspiciously, tells her it’s too low.
You covered the dumpster, she says. This would really be a favor. What am I going to do with a houseboat?
They shake on it, and Bill cracks another beer. Looks pleased.
The slamming of car doors. Two women appear on the edge of the property, shouting and waving at Bill, who goes to greet them. Liza waits by the riverbank, clutching a beer to her chest.
The Watterson brothers follow the women, carrying their armfuls of logs. They beeline for the firepit, and soon an acrid smell joins the wetness.
The women busy themselves distributing snacks from Walmart bags across the table—off-brand Oreos, individual servings of Jell-O in reds and oranges, a cheap bottle of vodka—as Bill approaches, laughs with them, motions toward where Liza is standing.
Both women are skinny-legged and wearing oversized Disney tee-shirts. They might be sisters, but if they are, Bill doesn’t say so. He waves Liza over and introduces the women as “Tanya” and “Tonya,” stressing the vowel swap in each name. (Tonya’s shirt has Minnie Mouse sitting with one knee crossed over the other, and Liza repeats in her mind: Tonya with an o, Tonya Harding, kneecapping, see Minnie’s knee.)
Liza trades basic pleasantries with the women, who make eye contact with one another before each reply. As soon as she reasonably can, she slips away to join the silent Wattersons at their now-steady fire.
After a time, Bill clears his throat. Everyone looks his way. He raises his glass and says, To Winnie.
Tonya, Tanya, and the Wattersons raise their drinks—light beers for the brothers, red plastic cups of vodka for the women. Liza follows suit. They all repeat: To Winnie, Liza a moment behind the others.
For a moment Liza thinks this is all the “memorial” will be, but Bill continues, I thought we could say things about her. He shrugs then adds, Only if you want to, though.
The Wattersons stare at their beers. Tanya smiles at Bill a little sharply and says, You first, hun.
Bill exhales a puff of air. Winnie was as good a woman as I’ve ever met. He sips his beer again. I’m gonna miss her, already do.
Tonya and Tanya nod. The Wattersons nod. Liza sips at her beer, finds it is empty.
Tanya (not Minnie’s knee, instead Donald Duck pointing joyfully at a butterfly), clears her throat, and shuffles to where Bill had stood, the de facto location of eulogizing. She is a little red and breathless as she speaks.
Winnie was a sister to me. We met at AA, few years ago, back when that was still working for me—she laughs dryly and sips her vodka—and boy my first thought was that’s one tough bitch. She’d pop your logic like a pimple. She was smarter than just about anybody I knew.
A smattering of laughter. Liza sees Winnie among them, cajoling, making herself known as the most intelligent, the hardest to win over. This is the aunt she knew, the one whose personality had always been set to go rancid with time.
Tanya keeps talking: But she was more than that. She was also a kind soul. She once tried to nurse a busted up squirrel back to health. Didn’t work, but that didn’t stop her. She’s the kind to skip church on Sunday because God had called upon her to help a damn armadillo cross the road. Keep on coming up with animal examples, but that’s just cause I’m no good as a speaker.
Tanya pauses here, laughs to herself.
But the thing I loved most about her—or respected, maybe, that’s the better word—is that she was dealt this shit hand of cards and didn’t give up.
More nodding from the others. Liza frowns, can’t escape the feeling that Tanya’s talking about someone else entirely, not her Winnie. Has there been a bizarre mix-up with a second dead woman named Winifred?
She squints her mind’s eye to try to summon a Winnie with notable kindness to animals, can’t come up with anything besides her tolerance of Bruce and his sputtering meow. But then, an unbidden image of Winnie clutching the wretched animal close, warbling nothings at his tumid eyes while she strokes her finger along his head.
Tanya’s voice interrupts Liza’s thoughts. She’s speaking a little faster, turning redder.
Winnie was the kind of person who no matter how many times she’d been abandoned, no matter how much she cried for help and it didn’t come, she didn’t stop helping others, she wasn’t the kind of person who abandoned anybody else even when they abandoned her. Even when she’d been left as roadkill, she kept on trucking.
Tanya is as bright as the plastic vodka cup. She had been staring at the ground for the last few sentences, but she finds Liza’s eyes. Stares.
Tonya puts her arm around Tanya in comfort, though neither woman is crying. She motions her chin toward the brothers, says, Either of you wanna say some words?
They shake their heads.
Then to Liza, How about you? Got anything to say?
Liza shakes her head, but her mouth opens anyway.
Well, she says lamely, Winnie was my aunt, you all know that. She, uh. Well, I don’t know. She made me who I am? (This comes out as a question.) Or, she made me who I was, at any rate, which has a great deal to do with who I am now, even if it’s not, like, a one-to-one.
The others stare at her, waiting for her to say more. Liza raises her empty beer in the air again, and the rest follow suit mechanically. When they all sip, Liza sucks down air.
This seems to be the end. The Wattersons stalk toward the riverbank. Tanya and Tonya refill their vodkas. Bill grabs another beer, starts tending the Wattersons’ abandoned fire.
Liza hovers awkwardly next to Tanya and Tonya at the snack table. Tanya is still red in the face from her eulogy.
I didn’t know Winnie attended AA meetings, Liza says softly.
Honey, there’s a lot you didn’t know about her, Tonya replies, too fast.
The acid in the woman’s voice is impossible to miss, which she seems to realize. Tonya tacks on a little, I’m sure—as though what she had been saying was merely advice about how we all remain a little unknowable to one another.
Liza tries to smile it off. The three of them are silent. They know something about her. That much is clear. Was it worth it to try to tell the full story? Could they even hear it, the person Winnie was to her, had been? Come on, say something—anything.
Finally, Tanya says, That suit doesn’t quite fit you around the pits.
Liza looks down, suddenly remembering that she has a body and it is here with her. It’s true. The tight swimsuit—purchased last night from a corner store at a huge markup, when she was unsure whether “river” meant “swimming”—makes her skin protrude around the straps. Her stomach, too, bulges against the waistband of the skort that covers the swimsuit bottom.
A bleat of laughter escapes Liza, and the women’s eyes widen. She isn’t sure whether to tell them how Winnie-ish they seemed.
Sorry, Tanya mutters.
What? Liza says, though she had heard.
For saying that. I said I’m sorry.
Oh.
It’s what you say to someone when you want them to forgive you for fucking up.
Liza nods slowly. Tanya glares at her.
Tonya sighs. I’m gonna go grab stuff from the truck. You come with me. She drags Tanya away with her by the arm, leaving Liza alone and indignant.
They don’t understand. They have this limited slice.
Winnie the do-gooder, saving dying animals in a red cape. Waxing poetic in a church basement meeting. A martyr, abandoned, dying alone in a frigid hospital by a faceless, disdainful niece who was supposed to be there for support.
Everything they don’t have—the rancid comments and aimless wrath. The jeans, the food, the pussy lips. Maybe it would all be nothing to them. Maybe their Winnie wasn’t at odds with the one Liza sensed floating above her, smirking righteously at her misery.
God, it’s like time passes then all of a sudden you’re here, attending some dumbass not-funeral for your not-aunt who was also your not-mother and not-friend. Liza wants to puke.
Instead, she walks down to where the Wattersons are standing at the river. As she’s approaching, one of the brothers shouts, Hey! Liza is confused for a moment, thinks maybe they’re trying to get her attention, but then she sees another pair of boaters floating down the river in an aluminum canoe. Two girls, both wearing bikinis with geometric neon prints. One is stick-thin and tan, the other curvier and pale, already burning in the sunshine. Both stop paddling and watch the bank, where the Wattersons are waving.
Come on over here and park that boat, one of them yells.
Nice suits, says the other.
The pale girl leans nearer to the other and whispers. Liza doesn't need to be able to hear them to read their body language.
Don’t be like that, one of the brothers shouts to them. We like the other one better anyway!
The other laughs and grabs his crotch and shakes it.
Liza watches all of this happening in front of her like a movie, then comes back to herself, and says, What the fuck was that?
The brothers jump, not knowing she was there. What? says the crotch-grabber.
Why were you yelling at those girls?
The other brother shrugs. Gotta shoot your shot with cute women, he says.
Girls, she stresses. They couldn’t be more than eighteen.
Crotch-grabber, smiling: That’s plenty of years. The brothers laugh and jostle each other’s shoulders.
You’re grown men, she says.
Both of them frown. Well, who asked you? crotch-grabber says.
Yeah, says the other. We don’t even know you.
You’re grown men, she repeats. You cut that shit out.
(She won’t realize this until later, when she recalls the event from her AC-chilled motel room, but it’s not her voice, her reprimand. It sounds—tonally, in cadence—like Winnie. Stern, ridden with emphatic pauses between words.)
The Wattersons look bewildered. Not like they don’t understand, but like she’s a peculiar animal they’ve never seen before. One of Winnie’s precious armadillos, wearing roller skates and juggling bowling pins.
Liza turns her back on the brothers and walks over to Bill, who is staring pointedly into the fire.
I’m going to go, she says. Bill shrugs.
On her way out, she passes Tonya and Tanya, smoking cigarettes, a small pile of butts around their feet. They stare at her just like the brothers had: confused. Liza stares back, starts the walk back into town.
*
Years and years ago, before Liza got large, before Winnie got weird.
On Liza’s twenty-first birthday, she and Winnie took the light rail downtown to have their first (legal) drink together. They looked like sisters, even dressed alike, sheer black tights and tall leather boots beneath long wool coats. You could only tell there was a near-thirty-year age gap between them if you studied Winnie’s eyes closely.
A group of drunk boys tried to hit on them, too persistent. One of them made to touch Liza’s shoulder, and Winnie batted his hand away. Rose to stand. Told him those same words, or close to—maybe more like, Knock that off. And so much of the schoolmarm bled through, though Winnie had never worked in a school, that the boys were appropriately chastised. One even mumbled, Sorry.
Later, when they no longer spoke, Liza would often muse to herself—and to J, during his more emotionally receptive moments—about what she would say to Winnie if she would listen. Sometimes she would pretend she was talking to an earlier version of her aunt, warning her about what she was going become, and the Old Winnie would shake her head, let loose a sob.
*
As soon as she’s back at the motel, Liza sheds the tight swimsuit and crawls on top of the starchy bed covers. When she calls J, he answers, sounding irritated. He is in the middle of a new piece, he says, and he needs to concentrate. She tells him about the day anyway. She tells him about the Wattersons and their catcalling. She doesn’t mention the eulogies.
That’s fucked up, he says, in his easy, casual way. Did you say anything?
I tried, she says. I don’t know. It’s like the wet heat poisons people’s brains or something.
Yeah, he says. She can tell he has already gone back to staring at his art.
Listen, before that, she says. They were all talking so nicely about Winnie. Saying she was really sweet and liked to save dying animals.
Oh?
And I don’t know. It’s like I don’t know her at all. Or didn’t. Whatever. Because how can she be all that at once? What she was to them. What she was to me.
J makes several humming noises. Well, he says. A lot of people are two things at once. Or even more, probably.
Liza frowns. Thinks: this is simplistic to the point of foolishness, as J was perhaps bound to be. Suddenly, a swell of affection for him, for how easily he assesses and accepts. She is tired of trying to make connections, lets herself sink into the comfort of his certainty.
Yeah, she says. True.
He gives a mollifying hmm in the pause.
Well, anyway, she says. I’m out of here tomorrow.
I’ll see you tomorrow night, when you’re back?
Yes, definitely. Love you.
Love you too, babe. I’ll send you this next piece in the morning when I’m done.
*
The next morning, she meets Bill at his own (much larger and nicer) houseboat to hand him the key to Winnie’s. She scribbles his P.O. box address down and says she’ll put the deed in the mail when she gets home. She doesn't ask what he’ll do with a second boat.
Yesterday, when it was just her and Bill talking by the river, he asked her about Winnie again. She had thought he was about to ask her why he hadn't met her before or why they were estranged or why she had left Liza the boat—none of those questions for which she could offer a satisfying answer.
Instead he asked what Winnie had been like around her growing up. She told him the truth: She was intimidatingly intelligent, quick to judge, funny as hell. She was her best friend. He obviously didn't question her use of the past tense, because Winnie was dead to them both, and he couldn't see inside her head to notice the extra past-ness of it—she had been Liza's best friend, before Winnie had turned all that brilliance against her.
Bill chuckled softly to himself, as though she were merely confirming the shape of the person he had known. She meant to ask him again what he and Winnie were to each other, but then he started talking about snakes.
On Bill’s boat deck, he claps his hands and says, Well, in the old-man way that means, This is goodbye. He rubs his hand on the back of his neck and says, by way of closure, It’s like I said before, Winnie was a good woman.
That’s all he can seem to say. Liza tries to smile at him.
*
The same taxi driver takes her back to the airport. He has watched another documentary in the intervening days, he says. He thinks she’d like it, based upon what personal knowledge she isn’t certain. The topic: Roman aqueducts. She tells him she’s tired and might nap on the ride back to the airport. He smiles and drives on.
During the drive, a text from J. A picture. Several men in suits sit around a wide flat table in an office with fluorescent lights above. Every one of their heads is a skull.
The title above the image reads: “Bored Meeting.”
Another follow-up text reads: See you soon. A less-than sign and a three combine to make a heart.
On the plane back, no one is seated near her. A blissful allowance of leg room.
*
As the plane crosses the northern state line, Liza itches at a spot on her ankle, half absorbed in a high-altitude dream.
Late last night, she went back to Bill’s cousin’s land. She walked into the backyard, down the sandy slope of the river bank, into the water, which was colder than she expected. The space offshore was reedy and slippery with mud, so she moved slowly.
She stared hard into the Wattersons’ dark backyard. No signs of life.
She thought about everything that was still bugging her. Sure, the garbage and the dead cat. The years of silence and boat bequeathal. Maybe a storage unit lay forgotten somewhere, containing the totality of Winnie’s life. Maybe Bill had the key.
But also, and most troublesome: how she fit into this wet, aggressive place. The sharp and delicate woman who held Liza’s small hand beside her mother’s coffin.
She watched the water flow by. Steadied herself to pack these questions away into a box in the attic when she got home.
She thought she heard a door slam in the yard across the way and glanced up. Several seconds of stillness, the distant flicker of a cigarette lighter.
A moment later, she was aware of small movements in the water—she looked down and saw a snake, an undulating black body approaching, headed toward her. Adrenaline flooded in and she was frozen in that hot place. She was ready for the pain and the poison bite.
Not poison, venom, a pedantic voice spat in her head.
The snake wound once around her ankles, then departed.