The Fall of the House of Dorothy Lynch
by Astrid Munn
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Table of Contents parts 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
After dinner, the men gathered in the living room while Lindy and Aunt Didi herded the children downstairs to the basement. Beatriz stood outside the pantry while Leslie dug around its shelves. From that distance, Beatriz caught a few lines of Harry’s story.
“What’s new, Sugarboobs?” Harry’s flat voice read from a Compaq.
Beatriz wondered what kind of boobs, exactly, constituted sugarboobs. It seemed like a meaningless phrase.
“Not much; just finished my shift at the co-op,” Harry continued, not even attempting a higher register for his female character. “My coven has a gathering later.”
Beatriz wanted to keep liking Harry, so she stopped listening in and focused back on Leslie.
“You’re still hungry, aren’t you?” Beatriz asked. “All you had were veggies and ranch. You do realize ranch isn’t vegan, right?”
“Pretty sure that ranch was,” Leslie said, “but we’ll need these.” She eased a sleeve of crackers into a huipil bag.
“Are we feeding ducks?” Beatriz asked. “Because they’re probably asleep.”
“You’ll see.”
* * *
Beatriz and Leslie strolled into the swampy darkness toward the park. Acorns and sweetgum pods crunched underfoot. Although a year had passed since Beatriz left the arid West, where oaks and maples seldom grew beyond the country club’s perimeter, little things like acorns reminded Beatriz she was in another world.
“So, remember how I went to Eudoratopia last month with my dad and brothers?”
“Is that the festival where you tried opium and got that nautilus tattoo?”
“No, that was Watauga,” Leslie explained. “Anyway, I have some leftover ’shrooms from the trip. I thought we could do them.”
“Oh, wow,” Beatriz started. “I’ve never tried them.”
“They’re super fun.”
Leslie led Beatriz to a park bench. It was surrounded by ornamental grasses and little granite plaques. The plaques listed whom the grasses and bench commemorated. The streetlamp overhead enveloped them in an amber bubble of light. With great solemnity, Leslie opened the crackers, topped one with a leathery lump, then handed the combination to Beatriz.
“Leslie! This looks like a lot!”
“It’s what I’m going to eat.”
“But you’re, like, six inches taller than I am!” Beatriz whined. “How much do you weigh?”
“I dunno... 150?”
Beatriz fell silent. That was Beatriz’s weight, too.
“It’ll be fine,” Leslie reassured. “Just eat it.”
* * *
A few moments passed. Beatriz felt nothing. When the crickets finally reached a lull in their song, Leslie spoke: “Beatriz, I really wish you would not talk about white people like you do.”
“Like at dinner, you mean?”
“Yeah, it hurts my feelings.”
“Well, I wasn’t talking about you, Leslie Hagen, pretty white girl living in the year 2006,” Beatriz chuckled. “I was talking about Mill and his privilege and his impact on us.”
“See? That... what you just called me. ‘Pretty white girl.’ Why do you do that?”
“Dude, you’ve been a model. Weren’t you in an Alloy campaign?”
“It was Delia’s. Still, I feel like my whiteness is all you care about. And there’s so much more to me than that.”
Beatriz’s head felt heavy, and her feet felt prickly. She eventually figured out why. At some point, she had rotated 180 degrees in her seat, her legs now hanging over the back of the bench.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Beatriz began, slowly righting herself. “Once you start looking at things through a new lens — the lens I use in my research — it can be hard to turn off.”
Leslie sat with her arms and legs crossed, unmoved.
Beatriz needed to change tack. “Maybe, subconsciously, I’m a little envious of how easy you have it? As a pretty white girl, I mean.”
“My life’s not easy, you know,” Leslie retorted, her foot jiggling. “And I work really hard to help minorities. Maybe harder than you, if we’re being honest.”
“OK.”
“For real, though. Remember when I taught that dance clinic at the Tatanka Center for Urban Indians?”
“Yeah,” Beatriz conceded. The discomfort of fourth-graders channeling their inner Britney was still fresh in her mind.
“Or when I ran that book drive for refugees?”
“Of course.” Beatriz nodded, wondering which unlucky Somali got Lindy’s yellowed collection of Harlequin romance novels. “You’re right. Again, I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” Leslie sighed, standing up. “Let’s hug it out and go back to the house.”
Beatriz shot up to meet her friend’s embrace, only to find herself gripping Leslie’s bicep for balance.
“Jesus!” Beatriz gasped. “Did the ground just roll?”
“Ha. That’ll happen. You’ll feel better once we start walking.”
* * *
Leslie led the way, which Beatriz secretly appreciated because she no longer recognized the neighborhood. Were the tidy rows of bungalows Tudors all along? Had sidewalks always worked like this, gently rolling toward a convergence point impossibly far away, pulling her forward, feet first?
“I am truckin’,” Beatriz whispered. “I have to keep... on... truckin’.”
“What was that?” Leslie interrupted. “Are you even listening to my story?”
“Sorry,” Beatriz replied, trying to recall Leslie’s monologue from the last million blocks. “You were saying something about Bill O’Reilly. Jesus Christ... are all you Kappa Chis reading him?!”
“RILO KILEY,” Leslie chided. “Also, remember?”
“Oh, right.”
The previous winter, the Kappa Chis had kicked Leslie out for leading a boycott against the Beta Tau’s Much Ado About Beef fundraiser on animal cruelty grounds.
“Your boycott was a... a valiant effort,” Beatriz sighed. “Didn’t it cut ticket sales by, like, a third?
“Yeah, but apparently some of the proceeds were for Birds ’N Da Cage.”
“The Shakespeare for inmates thing?”
“Right. And so, when I applied for their residency, I got rejected because of the boycott. I mean, that’s what I suspect. So here I am, doing ‘Rocky Horror’ with you instead.”
“Rocky Horror.” That’s what they were supposedly practicing at the park.
“Crap! We didn’t rehearse anything!” Beatriz said. “What do we tell your family? I’m really bad at lying!”
“Relax, brainiac,” Leslie cooed, “you’re overthinking it.”
“Can you tell I’ve partaken? Are my eyes bloodshot?”
“You look fine,” Leslie said, her gaze fixed elsewhere. “They probably won’t ask much unless you say something. If you get a little goofy, they’ll just think we smoked a bowl.”
Beatriz started up the front steps, but Leslie stopped her. “No, no, let’s go around back, to the basement.”
Perhaps the basement was better, Beatriz thought. For now. Peering through the door’s beveled glass, Beatriz could make out the shapes of Dr. Hagen, Uncle Mitch, and Harry. She wondered if they could see her, looking in.
* * *
Down in the air-chilled, cream-carpeted basement, Lindy and Aunt Didi had resumed their bickering while Scout helped her little brothers rifle through the shelves of DVDs and videotapes that made up a whole wall of Dr. Hagen’s home theater. Leslie swaggered in casually; Beatriz tried to follow suit.
“What are we watching?” Leslie asked, sliding into the beige leather sectional. It, too, was chilled to the touch.
“We wanted to watch ‘The Rescuers,’” the smaller boy said. “But its box had ‘The Fox and the Hound’ in it.”
“’Fox and Hound,’” Beatriz muttered. “I never saw that one all the way.”
“Of course you didn’t,” Scout said, barely looking up as she opened and closed videotape clamshells. “’Fox and Hound’ is a boys’ movie.”
“A boys’ movie?” Beatriz asked. “But it’s about a fox. And a hound. Overcoming the pressure to be enemies.”
“She means it doesn’t have princesses,” Leslie interjected, trying to bring the conversation — and Beatriz’s newly stilted manner of talking — to an end.
Beatriz, now silent and stunned that she had missed an apparent boy-girl split in the Disney canon, watched as Leslie patted her mother’s doughy knee for attention.
“Mom! What movie did you get at Menards?”
People buy movies where they buy their lumber and plungers, Beatriz wondered.
Lindy blinked hard as she processed the question.
“‘Dumbo.’ It’s in a bag. In the laundry room. With the OxyClean and borax.”
OxyClean and borax, Beatriz thought. She came from a Lysol and bleach home.
While Leslie dug around for ‘Dumbo,’ Aunt Didi scooted closer to Beatriz, who was now lost in the distressed threads of her jeans.
“Can I tell you something, Beatriz?”
“Uh, sure?”
“You have a lightness about you,” Aunt Didi whispered with deep conviction. “A glow.”
“Thank you?” Beatriz replied, some threads now twirled around her forefinger.
“Now let me ask you something else,” Aunt Didi continued, leaning in.
Beatriz braced the muscles of her stomach, as if preparing for a punch.
“OK,” Beatriz said weakly.
“What is your nationality?”
There it was: the question everyone at dinner wanted the answer to but was too afraid to ask. From the corner of her eye, Beatriz spotted a woolly goblin emerging from the television. Beatriz wanted so badly to yell at it — order it back to whatever mental labyrinth produced it — but the opportunity to gently mess with Aunt Didi was irresistible. The goblin would have to wait.
“I’m a United States-er,” Beatriz beamed. “I grew up out West, but I was born just north of here.”
Aunt Didi chuckled and swirled her sweaty glass of iced Zin to regroup.
“Sweetie, no. What I mean is, where are your parents from?”
Before Beatriz could further antagonize Aunt Didi with yet another unsatisfactory response, Leslie swooped in, DVD in hand. “Her dad is white and her mom is kinda black from Central America,” Leslie announced.
Scout and her brothers stopped their chatter to study Beatriz. With pursed lips, Beatriz gave them a little smile and a wave.
“You’re not black!” the smaller one yelled accusatorially, as if Leslie had lied to them.
“OK,” Beatriz sighed, not wanting to argue with a first-grader, “if you say so.”
“What he means is he’s used to seeing big Brazilian basketball players,” Aunt Didi explained, “with dreadlocks and braids and skin much, much, darker than yours. They go to the junior college in our town. Mitch and I host them every Christmas.”
“Ah,” Beatriz said, nodding politely.
“Anyway, I ask because you remind me of a woman I met in Sedona last year. Her mother was Hopi and her birth father was Creole, but she grew up in Indonesia.”
Beatriz sat there and sucked on her jaws. The tiny, hard growths in her mouth were absolutely fascinating. But Aunt Didi’s face hinted that it was her turn to say something.
“I’ve... been to Dallas?” Beatriz offered.
“Salome,” Aunt Didi continued, lost in recollection. “Her skin glowed like yours, but with a gray undertone. It gave her beauty a haunting quality. Kind of like yours.”
Beatriz nodded some more. Part of her hoped the woolly goblin would come back.
“My best friend Marisol and I, we look kind of green at Walmart,” Beatriz uttered after a beat. “Because of the lighting.”
“I’m sure you and Marisol don’t look green,” Aunt Didi reassured. “Your skin is olive. It has an olive undertone.”
“Really?” Beatriz asked, staring at the backs of her hands. “Because the lady at the Clinique desk says I’m ‘Honey.’ I mean, when she’s not following me around, wondering if I’m shoplifting.”
Aunt Didi took another swig of Zin and leaned in again. “You know who else probably wants to call you ‘Honey’?” she asked, her words beginning to slur a bit.
Beatriz’s stomach tensed up again. She smiled and shrugged, certain that she knew the answer but did not want to give herself away.
“Well, Harry, of course!” Aunt Didi beamed. “You know he has always preferred exotic girls. And he’s probably frustrated, seeing as how his cousin Scotty got a black girl first.”
“Exotic,” Beatriz mouthed to herself. The word always made her feel like a cat in a cage.
“DIDI!” Lindy snapped. “That’s enough.”
Aunt Didi rolled her eyes then got up in search of another drink.
* * *
Leslie shushed the room and dimmed the lights. The movie was about to start. Beatriz hugged a pillow and looked straight ahead, unsure what to make of Aunt Didi’s words or the trademark castle cascading down the bright blue screen.
Beatriz could not remember the last time she saw “Dumbo.” Or anything Disney, for that matter. She had turned her back on the Mouse in second grade; even then, “The Lion King” felt too saccharine and therefore too uncool. But in the darkness, amid so much sincerity, Beatriz let the magic sweep her away.
“These title cards, they’re so arcane,” Beatriz shout-gasped. Still images of clowns and acrobats faded in and out. “I forget there was a time before Saul Bass.”
“Hey, Leonard Maltin,” Leslie whispered, checking her phone. “Quit tripping out!”
“She has a point, though,” Aunt Didi said, pouring herself another glass. “Back in the day, this was how all movies started. We didn’t know better.”
The movie opened with storks flying above a cartoon map of Florida. The flapping of their wings and their downward spiral was so slow and crude that Beatriz could feel the shifting of pencil strokes from cel to cel. Time had apparently melted, as she could now see where the artists had forgone feathers or scales to depict motion instead. It hurt so much to keep looking. South Park had never felt this coarse, and Beatriz was pretty sure that show was literally made from paper. “Dear God, what is animation?”
“I know, pretty crazy stuff, right?” Leslie replied, her thumbs repeatedly punching numbers to spell a few words on her phone. “Listen, I have to go meet Kane; he’s the dude I met at Eudoratopia.”
“I’m going with you, right?” Beatriz asked, her eyes locked on the screen as storks delivered baby animals to surprised-looking mothers.
“I’m still getting a feel for him, so just stay here for now. I’ll be back soon.”
Beatriz was upset but all that came out was more commentary: “Aaaand suddenly i’m lactating.”
Scout stopped the DVD. Everyone turned to look at Beatriz.
“Are you OK?” Scout asked.
“Sounds like some good bud,” Aunt Didi guffawed into her glass.
“No, it’s not that!” Beatriz explained, bolting upright. “The tiger! In the movie! It’s like, one minute she has nothing inside her, but the next minute she rolls over and is ready to nurse all those cubs.”
“I thought you were lactating,” Scout said, cringing a little.
“No, Scout. I never have,” Beatriz sighed. “I was just, you know, speaking for the tiger mom.”
“You remind me of that show my dad likes,” Scout said, restarting the movie. “The one where the robots yell at bad movies.”
“’MST8K,’” Beatriz mumbled, ashamed. She could sense Lindy was deliberately ignoring her out of anger.
“So, I’m going now,” Leslie started, slipping on her rope sandals.
“Can’t I go, too?” Beatriz whispered. “I feel very inappropriate.”
“You’re fine. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”
Onscreen, Dumbo finally arrived. The older elephant moms mocked his freak ears. Beatriz could relate; now more than ever. As Dumbo and his mother pounded tent stakes with their trunks, Beatriz was certain her heart was skipping beats just to sync up with the chain gang melody booming through the speaker system.
“Ms. Didi,” Beatriz whispered, “do I feel feverish to you?”
Aunt Didi leaned over and touched Beatriz’s forehead and neck. The pads of her slender fingers were cool and soft. Aunt Didi smiled, shook her head, and returned to the movie.
“I don’t feel well,” Beatriz announced, sliding out of the sectional. “I’d really like to check in with Dr. Hagen if he’s not too busy.”
“Oh, sweetie darlin’,” Aunt Didi pleaded, “you don’t want to do that. Not at this hour. He and the boys have been up there a while.”
“You really don’t,” Lindy added. “Everything’s great down here.”
“I’m sorry but I really think I need, like, medical attention.”
“You’re fine, sweetie darlin’!” Aunt Didi called out as Beatriz padded up the carpeted steps. “You probably just need a glass of water. You want some of my wine?”
“What’s wrong with going upstairs?” Beatriz asked herself. “It’s just some dudes.”
* * *
Copyright © 2025 by Astrid Munn
