Dwight
–from a work in progress
by Jacinda Townsend
He’d heard his mother tell the story until it was legend. Her years on the North Carolina coast, attending college as an afterthought, an avocation secondary to her true purpose, that of allowing the ocean to wash over her feet and sweep up her calves, to draw her so far towards the continental shelf, the sea hugged her shoulders.
She’d pack off from her rented room, motoring to the beach while the sun was still a stage light behind clouds, then catch a city bus home in time to attend exactly one afternoon sociology seminar. Regularly, she’d skip even that, keeping her place on the sand until dusk fell and the tides reported, until she heard forty masts ring in unison as the docked boats shifted in higher water.
When she wasn’t hurried, she’d walk from Yarmouth Pier all the way back to her apartment, she said, listening to the crunch of her shoes as sand met sidewalk. Her landlady complained and boxed her into sweeping the kitchen floor, but when Nkemdilim switched on the overhead light, she’d find fine grains still sparkling in the grout between tiles. She’d lick her finger and run it along the floor in exploration, coming away with the microscopic cubes of quartz, clear except for their corners dotted brown. On the kitchen table she left the giant halves of clam shells, some turned scarlet at the hinge, some with violent striations that radiated like fire across their diameters. The landlady cleared them away each Saturday. Nkemdilim never knew, and never asked, what she did with them, but she felt the absence of the small animals who’d lived inside them as one might miss an eternal hallelujah chorus.
When Nkemdilim told Dwight about college she made it sound like one long day at the beach, but Dwight realized, eventually, that it must have lasted about twelve hundred days and evenings, given that his mother did, at the end of it, receive a degree. Still, she never spoke the names of other students and could not summon, when he asked, the names of any of her professors; she could not provide the titles of the courses for which she’d registered. She just recounted, repeatedly, this four-year, molecular lesson, on the roar that fired itself constantly over the multitudes of the ocean, the waves draining and then replenishing the bowl of beach, as if powered by a leviathan undersea battery.
She never said whether she’d met his father on the beach, never hinted at what might have been his father’s name or whether he, like Dwight, was partial to peanut butter. She never spoke of his father at all, never spoke even of the concept of his having a father: they lived as if she’d simply sprung Dwight from humors in her thigh. When asked by a teacher or a stranger about a husband, she’d visibly recoil, as if astonished there could be such a thing. “Not applicable,” she’d say, making a tilted slash with her hand between the n and the a.
The only unpaired man in Dwight and his mother’s neighborhood was a recreational hockey player named Mikey Stone, who sold what he called pre-owned inventory at the Car Palace in Pye. Mikey drank at the Patriot Bar and Grill every evening, starting five o’clock sharp, and had a bare patch in his moustache where hair wouldn’t grow. Half of Mikey’s left front tooth was veneer: Dwight could see the way the years had yellowed its surface.
Dwight tried to imagine having someone like Mikey as a father but couldn’t make Mikey stick. He wondered about his real father, what city the man lived in, whether he enjoyed jelly or cinnamon sugar on his toast. Whether he played the guitar; whether he knew he had a son named Dwight. One full, twenty-four-hour day after Rhonda asked her question, Dwight spent daydreaming about what might happen if his father showed up at their front door with a party pack of Oreo cookies and a PS5. He imagined his father flush with cash, with either a Cadillac, a gambling addiction, or both. He tried to decide whether his father would have the same last name as he and his mother, and whether the man would have let him have a hamster. He wondered. He looked out the window and tried to lure his father out of the woods.
After that twenty-four hours, though, he didn’t. He let the concept of a father go, and proceeded with real, relevant life.
Jacinda Townsend is the author of Trigger Warning and Mother Country, winner of the 2023 Ernest Gaines Award for Literary Excellence. Townsend’s first novel, Saint Monkey, winner of the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize and the James Fenimore Cooper Prize for historical fiction, was an Honor Book of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. A former antitrust lawyer and elected official, Townsend teaches in the MFA program at Brown University.
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