Hex: A Novel (15 page)

“Oh, look! Look!”

A turtle. It swims out of water, swims up the beach. So painful. Leaking water from its shell.

Ha ha ha.

“Give me the bottle.”

The mule brays; his mane bristles.

The bottoms of Thingy’s feet are white and kick up sand.

After the chorus, a mother travels a long way but cannot save her children.

In the end, someone cracks the eggs to bake a cake.

In my mouth, the ocean coils a finger.

My Thing glows inside her black dress and on the turtle’s back she lays her hands.

When I came back into a better understanding of myself, I was alone under the pier. The tide hissed up the beach toward my face and fell just short. I watched the water recede, bubbles of foam bursting in its wake.

The tide hissed up the beach toward my face and slapped me. Seawater rushed up my nose and into my mouth and I sat up coughing, dizzy. I looked around.

Further in the direction we had been traveling, the beach was a long, clean sweep of gray sand. The dunes massed blackly behind it as if herding the sand toward the sea. In the far distance, the mainland blazed with the lights of hotels and restaurants,
banks and stores that sold clever beach blankets and tins of sex wax. At the tip of the spit, the lights winked out leaving only an abandoned lighthouse to sulk at the mouth of the bay.

The other direction was mostly dark. The night had clouded up, the moon high now and small. There was no sign of Thingy or any of the boys. I got to my feet unsteadily, gripping the concrete abutment for support and scraping my palms on the barnacles.

“Thingy?” I said. And then, “Thingy?” I said again.

But she was gone, that was clear, and I was here surrounded by nothing more prophetic than an empty bottle in a soft paper bag, many cigarette butts stubbed into the sand like tiny, haphazard pylons and a fork, the shaft pitted, the tines bent willy-nilly.

I stood for a while running my hand through the wet, gritty tangle of my hair. I was still drunk and I remember thinking that the dress, which was clearly ruined, was not so much the issue as my face with which Mrs. Clawson had taken such pains.

I bent from the waist and vomited a brown stream into the churning surf at my feet. I did it again. And then again. There was sand in my eyelashes and sand on my lips. One side of my throat was stiff with sand and my legs inside the wet flop of the skirt pricked with salt and sand. I stayed bent, heaving like a donkey, the dress heavy as canvass against my shins, but nothing else came out of me. Eventually I straightened and turned back in the direction from which Thingy and I had come.

After a long struggle up the side of the dune, I found myself back in the road, the summerhouses presenting on either side of me their austere, flat faces. Most of these buildings were uninhabited. Their owners lived in Charleston or New York or Labrador or Bavaria, for all I knew, but they were not here and
the road itself was dark and still. In some houses though, the lights were on and as I made my way up the road I saw through some of the windows and into the depressing grandeur within. A man was sitting at the kitchen table reading a magazine. A woman wearing a blue bathing suit was cutting the heads off a cluster of peony buds and cramming the tight, sour balls into a range of small vases arrayed before her on the table. In one house, a dog had fallen asleep in the bay window, its fur pressed up against the glass in brown and white whorls. Beyond it, in the bright sofa-adorned living room, people walked back and forth carrying things.

I took the turns at random until I came to a road that seemed slightly more familiar and heard, blown toward me over the constant groan of the ocean a babble of voices and music and a woman’s rising laugh. It was Thingy’s road and, at the end of it, Thingy’s house: all the lights lit, the windows ablaze against the dark pit of the sky, people strewn about the upper balconies and the veranda while the small fires of their cigarettes rose and fell like lovelorn fireflies strobing their asses off in the sterile salt air.

Let’s imagine for a moment, dear Ingrid, the scene. You haven’t yet attended any parties—though if Thingy had had her way, this would not be the case. Well before your birth, you were scheduled to attend, indeed to be the guest of honor at countless mother’s teas and luncheons, a Mother’s Day brunch and a formal introduction to the Rotary, in which Mrs. Clawson was a member.

Thingy even bought outfits for the still imagined you to wear to these events. Little frocks in butter yellow with overskirts of white organdy polka-dot, miniature blush-rose gowns
and long, flowing shifts in picked white lace—all of which I’ve kept as a memory of her. I’ve put them away in the attic, enough to fill six shoeboxes. You can unearth them later in your life, if you’re so inclined, Ingrid. If you become the sort of girl who is charmed by the mysteries of the past.

Regardless, try to imagine the scene from a distance. The party has become a looser, messier event than it was even when Thingy and I first left it. There are fewer people in the house, fewer cars parked along the sides of the road, but those who remain seem to have swelled to take the place of their wiser or soberer compatriots. On the balcony and veranda there is a sense that all bordering lines have been eradicated. The provisional shapes of people’s bodies merge into each other, merge into the wrought-iron railings and cunningly replicated Doric columns that distinguish the wall on either side of the front door.

A man is talking too loudly. He says, “Damn it, Cynthia,” or maybe, “Damn you, Cynthia,” and a woman laughs a teetering laugh like a gull caught in an updraft, soaring helplessly higher above the sheer, rocky shore. Inside the house there is a sense of many bodies moving very quickly. It is almost as if people are running back and forth in front of the windows; tearing back and forth with their arms over their heads and their dresses floating out behind them as if giving chase. Someone tosses a full drink into the oleander. Someone on the balcony tips the dregs of their glass onto the head of another someone standing in the yard, then runs into the house and slams the door.

Now, from the same critical distance, Ingrid, imagine me. Stiff-kneed, soaked, small as a rat inside my pink dress. Imagine my hair matted to my cheek and neck. The sand gritting in between my toes and the burn from a cut on my foot I didn’t remember getting as I shifted my weight on the black, absorbing
road. Is it any wonder, even at the end of such a difficult journey, that I took the long way around? Is it any wonder that I slunk?

I picked my way through the narrow side yard catching glimpses as I went of partygoers in all manner of disarray. At the foot of a bed of day lilies, I clambered over the low iron fence that ringed the Clawson’s backyard pool. Despite the discarded glasses, puddles of melting ice cubes and an open tube of dark lipstick bobbing enticingly in the drain—all of which gave clear evidence that the party had indeed swept through the pool area with its scouring winds—I seemed to be alone. At the back of the house, a large plateglass window stretched the length of the wall. I perched on the side of a beach chair, adjusting the plastic so it cradled my haunches, and looked through the window, down the length of the brilliant, white living room where I found myself unsurprised to see Thingy with the three boys from the pier clustered at her side. She was holding a group of adults in disheveled formal clothing enthralled as she waved her arms in the air in front of her.

“They found a turtle on the beach,” Mr. Clawson said.

I jumped and jerked around. In my haste I slipped out of my cradle of plastic slats and was dumped unceremoniously onto the ground, my legs braced like a marionettes over the chair’s metal frame. To his great credit, Mr. Clawson didn’t laugh. He actually didn’t seem to fully notice, his eyes locked on his daughter as she hitched up her skirt and preformed a curious waddle across the living room.

“They watched her lay her eggs,” Mr. Clawson said as he maneuvered around the chair. The branch of a struggling camellia snagged his pant leg and he pushed it away as one might the snout of a friendly, but impolite dog. He drank out of his glass and sung the ice cubes around its belly, the picture of a man at
ease, a man preoccupied with ease. He stared a moment longer through the window, then, as I pulled myself upright, eased himself down onto the concrete by my side.

Thingy’s father had dull, straw-colored hair which he wore very short on the sides and back and cut in the front in a straight fringe across his forehead as if to mark with its line the definitive place where his face came to an end. He had a round face, a snub nose and a thick, heavy jaw that had settled as he aged so it appeared to weigh down his thin neck. It gave him a contemplative look, the look of a deep thinker who was willing to dive ever deeper into his thoughts like an inexperienced tourist scubaing just a little further into the cave. He was wearing white trousers through the seat of which the denser white of his pockets could be clearly seen. As he braced his arms and leaned back against them, the sleeve of his polo shirt brushed against my thigh. He looked rumpled and distracted. He looked as if, at any moment, he might burst into some prodigiously mournful song, but he only sighed and sat with me in more or less companionable silence as we watched his daughter tell the tale.

For a time we sat quite still together, not talking, the sleeve of his shirt shifting minutely against my thigh as he breathed. It seemed possible we would spend the rest of the night sitting like this—drowsing under the silky spell of the pool, its toothless blue murmuring, its completely fathomed deeps. The entire night wrapped in stillness as the moon wore to a thin nacreous wafer and the ocean, it seemed just possible, faded too with the coming dawn until, pale as a cloud, it drew itself back and disappeared.

Where would we sleep? I was beginning to wonder. What would Mr. Clawson offer me in lieu of his missing sport’s coat to make into a pillow for my head?

“How could anyone be expected to believe it?” Mr. Clawson finally said.

“I think it’s true,” I said. I was dry now and thought how it was that dryness was a condition noticed only by the lack of damp whereas to be wet was sudden and appalling. The sand showered from my skin in plates like calving glaciers. “I think I saw it come out of the water.”

“I was there, of course,” Mr. Clawson forged on, “but in the waiting room. That was the way things still were. The waiting room for fathers with its plastic chairs and even ashtrays.” He plucked something off his lower lip and wiped it precisely on the knee of his trousers. “It was a terrible hospital, not the one we had chosen.”

I had heard this story before. The story of Thingy’s birth, but only in whispers that subsided into silence when I or my Aunt Thalia or my father was seen entering the room. Thalia, who had never whispered once in her life, was inclined to shout whatever last breathy word she had caught dying on the lips of the Pinta who believed death and romance were different words for the same story. “Went to the wrong house?” Thalia would roar, without breaking stride or even looking at the Pinta turned suddenly pale and sweaty as a wedge of cheese. “Well go on,” Thalia would shout as she strode out the door, “The baby screaming on the floor, you were saying. Mrs. Clawson snug as a tick, you were saying. Don’t mind me. I’d hate to interrupt.”

From this, and from our own shared memory, Thingy and I had pieced together a plausible narrative: Thingy’s mother’s untimely panic, her father’s absence, an ambulance called twice to houses on the same road and the sort of careless, take-it-for-granted accident that happens in a place where everyone knows
the details of everyone else’s lives. Including their due dates. Including, as my father would insist, how much they put in the bank on Friday afternoon.

In the end, the dispatcher assumed that the two calls, for side-by-side houses high on the same generally under-populated street, was a mistake, some kind of foul-up on the part of the operator, DeeDee Smitz who was fat and had bad skin, read novels about dragons and the societies that attended them while on duty, and was generally considered to be not all that bright. After all, what were the odds? After all, when considered from a purely objective, mathematical perspective, what was the likelihood? As a result, only one ambulance was sent. Mrs. Clawson rode to St. Francis Sans Souci in a froth of peach-colored maternity wear, accompanied by a halo of sirens and bleating horns, where she was dismayed to labor in a shared maternity ward. My mother bled to death on her kitchen floor.

“I think a woman can’t quite understand the mystery of her parts,” Mr. Clawson said. He was still gazing through the window where his daughter seemed to be telling the story all over again to a smaller, but no less enthusiastic audience. The two brothers had faded away into the far reaches of the house, but the mule-faced boy was still with Thingy, still stuck tight to her side and following her every move with his cruel, melancholy eyes. Mrs. Clawson was nowhere to be found. Not a trace of her. As if she had lifted through the ceiling, toes dangling pale and pointed beneath the hem of her dress.

“Perhaps it is because a woman is afforded both the exterior and the interior sensation of her parts—or the posterior and anterior?—” Mr. Clawson mused. He was leaning back more frankly now, his forearm pressed up against my calf which for some reason I didn’t move.

“No matter. No matter,” he went on, passing a shaky hand before his eyes to banish his confusion, “either way it’s sure: she knows what goes into her and she knows what comes out. Any woman does. It’s a matter of instinct, natural primal instinct—nothing wrong with that—but while she’s busy bearing down, while she’s busy expanding and contracting, think of the man. Think of her clueless mate, boozling around in the waiting room, buying her flowers, a teddy bear.”

Mr. Clawson laughed and looked up at me. He had very white teeth, very straight. They caught the moonlight with an unapologetic frankness and I suddenly wanted to reach across the space between us and press the tip of my finger against one of his square, smooth, wet, white teeth.

“Can you imagine?” Mr. Clawson said. “A teddy bear. Well, I did—I bought a blue teddy bear and a bouquet of Gerber daisies, it was all they had, and I went down a long hall, through swinging doors, past all kinds of carts and other detritus, to her room.”

Mr. Clawson paused, remembering. I could feel the thick wiry hairs of his forearm against my calf and worried that he could feel the prickle of my own hair growing back in from that morning’s shower. Mr. Clawson had thin lips, almost nonexistent. It was as if the flesh of his jaw and cheeks rushed right up to the hole of his mouth where it plunged out of sight. I imagined his lips would feel rubbery. They might even prickle with stubble. He smelled of some sort of thin, clean spice. Something blue. We were sitting very close together, watching the busy house, listening to the busy ocean, apart from those things in the tidy isolation of the little, square yard.