Hex: A Novel (20 page)

In contrast, I was pregnant like the hard, horny burl a tree grows around a cleft where some burrowing worm has laid its egg. The tree does this to protect itself, though inadvertently it also protects the insect’s larvae as it twitches and grows. I was pregnant symbiotically, all interiors. But this isn’t really a fair comparison. They were such different times in our lives, after all. I remember that summer so well: the grass high and wet against my shins in the morning; the phoebes skimming the creek for gnats and catbirds tenting their wings to cast a shadow across the crickets and armored pill bugs; a smell like water and crushed greenery hanging in a fog over the meadow; Thalia standing in the side yard, two chickens whose heads bobbled loose at the ends of their snapped necks in her hand, eyes closed and face turned up toward the sun.

I don’t know what Thingy remembered. I never asked her. I was tight as a drum and felt whenever I opened my mouth as if a spotlight would beam out of me. I was preoccupied, I guess I would say. Suddenly, I was a source instead of just a reflection.

Nevertheless, time passed. Many years later I washed the baseboards of the house with a rag and a pail of soapy water.

Here the dust gathers like ash. There’s no explanation for this and yet, without vigilance on my part, the tabletops mist over with grit and the pages of all the books in Daniel’s library are seamed with it as if they are webbed with mold. I wash the baseboards once a week and the dust turns my rag and bucket water black. It gathers along the fine hairs of my arms as I dunk
and wring until, by the time I am done, my forearms look lightly furred as if I were stuck in midtransformation: caught forever in the body of a woman that is also the body of some shy black creature with not enough fur to keep it warm. Daniel compares our dust to the ash that falls from the sky along the Ganges, where he traveled when he was in graduate school and writing his dissertation.

“It coats everything, all of your exposed skin, in the creases of your clothes,” he said. “It gets in your eyes, your mouth. Later, you go back to your hotel room—white sheets on the bed and billowing white, gauzy curtains, they were big on that, to denote luxury, I guess—but you’d blow your nose and in the tissue it was black. Coming out of your own body, the ashes of other people’s bodies.” He told me this as we sat together on the porch and watched the forest darkening. Inside, Thingy was listening to one of Thalia’s old records. Something with clarinets that swooped and moaned. I don’t know where Jacob was. He had taken the truck. He had left us.

I can’t remember exactly when this was in the timeline. Was Thingy heavy or slim? Was she roaming through the house in frayed jeans, barefoot on the cool boards, or in the hideous yellow peignoir she adopted during the last months of her pregnancy? Was she inside because she was digging happily through something (Thalia’s records, quart jars full of unassigned buttons she found under the cellar stairs) or because we were outside, her husband and her best friend sitting together at the end of a day?

Night comes quickly into the forest and soon, though a lozenge of light still oozed across the porch railings, the scene before us was pitched into a jumble of silhouettes. Black trunks darker than the black tangle of brush behind them, black leaves
shifting black shadow onto the black turf. Something moved quickly through the grass and then held still. The fireflies winked up one by one and drifted around us as if they were all jockeying for a better view.

Daniel’s dissertation was titled
Death Rituals Among Tribal Peoples Newly Settled in Developing Mega-Cities.
It had been published by a small university press who had spent a disproportionate amount of their annual budget on a glossy black cover stamped with the outline of a black skull which lurked just behind the embossed letters of the title. Daniel was somewhat embarrassed by this and had stripped the dust jackets off the four or five copies he kept on a shelf in his study (previously the house’s formal front parlor) and folded them in a drawer in his desk. A shaft of light crossed his ear and creased the side of his soft, pink cheek. A firefly dipped close to his head and he held up a finger as he talked as if he expected it to land there.

“In Mali,” said Daniel, “the Dogon tribe will perform elaborate funeral rites for a man who has gone missing, who they presume dead, and if he shows back up again even just a moment after they are finished they will refuse to recognize him, as if he is invisible.” The breeze shifted and the heady odor of the Chinese privet, which had escaped from someone’s garden and grimly colonized the roadside ditches all the way up the mountain, washed over us like a thicker, slower form of air.

“The Merina in Madagascar take bodies out of their tombs and dance and talk with them, show them the recent changes in the area,” Daniel said. “A fallen tree or a flood marker. A new house. A new carburetor in the car.”

Inside, the clarinets came to a more somber understanding of themselves. They mourned like owls. Thingy switched on a lamp in the window and its light, neatly sectioned by the panes
of glass, spilled out around me. When I lifted my arm, Daniel was lit up, his arm resting on his knee, his empty hands—neat and clean, the nails trimmed—dangling into the darkness.

“Lotus blossoms,” Daniel said. “Spider tattoos. The crackle of burning grasses. The thwack of a stick breaking the skull.”

When I lowered my arm he was hidden again, the shape of any man surrounded by hovering, attendant lights.

Then Jacob came home, I suppose. I seem to remember a wash of headlights spilling across the porch and the sound of a door slamming. Then we went inside to eat whatever it was I made from whatever it was Jacob brought me and sat around the table at our accustomed places: I facing a window, Thingy facing a mirror; Jacob and Daniel facing each other and between us all the long, uneven table that had once been a door.

On some other day, at some other point in time I washed the baseboards on my hands and knees and so crawled down the hallway until I came to Thingy’s door. It was open and directly across from the doorway the brass bed that had once been Thalia’s creaked under its heaped weight of bodies, pillows and rumpled sheets. For someone who had always been slim, Thingy had begun to gain weight very early in her pregnancy and put it on steadily all throughout. At this point, she was close to full term, perhaps at the beginning of her eighth month, and was top heavy and plagued by back aches and varicose veins. She spent much of her time in bed where she had made a kind of nest for herself: the fitted undersheet stripped from the striped mattress and mounded around her, pillows plumped behind her back, trapped between her knees and dimpling under the weight of her plump, flushed arms. Thingy filched sheets from the linen closet on wash day with no regard for their size or
pattern which meant all those months Jacob and I slept beneath a shifting array of checks and stripes, faded roses clashing with blue plaid pillowcases, sheets which were often too big and billowed to the floor on either side of our small bed as if we were dolls put carelessly to sleep under an oven mitt or a larger doll’s discarded smock.

Thingy had propped the window open. A spring breeze, damp with exertion, puffed in and out of the room. It was afternoon, the sun slanting down toward the valley, and a panel of bright, white light was flung across the foot of the bed as crisp as paper. I straightened up in the door frame, putting my hands to the small of my own back to work out the kinks, and looked in on her. She was lying on her side, the sheer yellow fabric of that hateful peignoir taut against her belly, and had fallen asleep reading. I remember thinking this was the danger time, when she was asleep, when she couldn’t be misdirected. She had changed so drastically during her pregnancy that she didn’t look like my Thing at all—less the beautiful scullery maid with lentils in her hair and more the head chef cutting lattice for the pie; less the pert sister forcing her way down the throats of the flowers and more the heaving queen, moribund and carefully fed. If she were to sit up and speak to me, for the first time in our lives I didn’t have a clue what she might say.

I shifted my weight and a board creaked under my foot. The cats, who had slunk in through the window, lifted their heads in unison from the hollows where they had nested. I don’t know how long I stood there, arms black to the elbow, rag dampening my jeans where I had forgotten it and pressed it to my hip, before I realized that Thingy too was awake and watching me. Six eyes then: green, gold, blue. Six silent, six scanning for signs that they should spring, as they were all poised to do, up out
of comfort and into the chill afternoon where they would balance on the tin roof and from there escape. I pictured Thingy with the sheets streaming from her arms and legs plugging the window like a hysterical gosling. I pictured her stretching her neck and greeting for help. I laughed then, and I’m sure it was laughter, but who knows what Thingy heard in the noise I made. Regardless, she didn’t sit up or speak, but only watched me and in the end I was the one who slunk away. Rather, shall I say it?, I fled.

Out the nose, Ingrid. Banished from my last home.

‘Pity me at seventeen.’
Isn’t that what the song says? Something about brown-eyed girls, ugly girls. Something about the men who call them at night and murmur obscenities.

‘Love was meant for beauty queens.’
I am sure of that. Equally sure there is nothing in the lyrics about how the brown-eyed girls might have felt to hear the voice catch and rasp on the other end of the line, how private and thrilling its greed must have been and how they too might yearn for words to perform their long promised transubstantiation.

For the tongue to become a tongue, I’m saying. For it to lick her hot, sweet. . .for the fingers to slip into her tight, pink. . .for the nose—plugged it sounded, did he have a cold?—to snuffle against her moist, hairy. . . .for the teeth, oh the teeth, to gnash between them, grind between them, to nip and nip her rosy, swollen, tender, dripping, pearly, quivering, juicy, wet, wet, wet. . .

Another kind of essentially empty line, a one-sided conversation, is the one on which the birds chatter. “Oh baby baby baby,” says the goldfinch and the phoebe responds with a sound like a telephone ringing in its cradle. “Pity pity pity,” requests
the cardinal—though of whom? Though for what?—to which the crow, cutting to the chase, responds with the sound of a tolling bell. At seventeen, Thingy pulled up to Thalia’s house in a red jeep her father had bought her as a graduation present. Almost before the engine had stopped rumbling, she flung herself out of the car and up the porch steps, tripping on the last one, bowling into me and nearly knocking me to the ground. “You look like a weeble-wobble,” Thingy said, smacking me on the stomach as if it were a watermelon she was testing for ripeness. “Seriously, you’re huge.”

Thingy and I hadn’t seen too much of each other since February when I went to live with Thalia. We talked on the phone—the conversations colorless and watery as if coming to me thinned by altitude—but I didn’t know how physically I missed her until I saw her again. She was a shock, almost literally like touching a faulty switch. I realized then, standing on the porch with Thingy’s hands all over my stomach, rubbing my ridiculous belly hard enough to make the skin flush and then turn red, that I had been thinking of her all this time as a child. The Thing who I missed, who I pictured in my mind’s eye while I listened to her hum and fold her laundry on the other end of the phone line, was no older than eight, silver-haired, wearing the galoshes she had favored then (white with the toes painted yellow like a duck’s beak, black eyes bright as seeds painted on either side of her arch). On her hands yellow mittens with a jolly, oversized button that could fasten them open or fasten them closed. Clutched in her fist, a long, wooden spoon.

But it wasn’t my own eight-year-old self—perpetually runny nose, hair plaited in a braid like a raccoon’s tail down my back—who talked to Thingy. It was my self as I understood it now. My self which contained another self and in that self (a girl, of
course, I didn’t need a machine to look inside me and tell me that) the seeds of other selves. Millions upon millions of them, though even now, even as Thingy stood before me with long legs and full breasts, sweat beading in the hollow of her collar and her hands, studded with rings, chiming across the surface of my stomach, four million potential selves had become two and would be reduced even further before my baby was born. Lost in the slosh.

Still, “Pity pity pity,” I had said to Thingy in those conversations, and she had responded with a sound like a bell and a sound like a bottle breaking. Pip-pip-pip, she had said. Tur-a-lee-lee-lee. Coo-coo-ra-koo.

We took a tour of the place. Thingy was particularly interested in the hives which we watched from the other side of the creek so as not to get in the way of the thrumming lines the bees were laying to and from their secret, jealously-tended feeding grounds. She was less interested in the chickens who strutted for her approval, tilting their heads and pecking at nothing at all just to show her the busy dart of their beaks. Eventually we ended up in the meadow, lying together on the little rise just above the creek. The clover was blooming white and purple. Thingy pinched them off low to the ground with her fingernail and braided them into a chain.

“So, tell me,” I said and Thingy did. About graduation; about Atlanta; about her new roommate who had already written her a letter (“She’s hideous,” Thingy said. “Fat and wears nothing but rose pink and Laura Ashley. You can tell from her handwriting.”); about her father who had unexpectedly offered her a room in his apartment if dorm life didn’t work out and said he was thinking of spending more time at home; about
a boy from our school who had crashed his car into a creek bed and slept there all night with the water flowing over his lap; about the Sainte Maria who she had seen stocking shelves at Abbot’s, an ugly orange smock hanging off her hips, her hair cut short and the bangs dyed purple and green.

It was a beautiful day, the sun booming in the sky, no wind at all to stir the trees. The sow had birthed a new litter—her last it turned out—who were now squealing at her teat and in the hives row upon row of ladies swathed in white were waiting their turn to be brought to life. A touch on the crown of their heads like a wand perhaps, or only the busy brush of their sisters’ mandibles as they tamped a cap in place, packed them in. A bird called; a bird answered. Thalia got in the green truck and drove away.