Mother Box and Other Tales (11 page)

When Penny went into the garden that evening, the drink cart and the little plate of finger sandwiches were standing as usual by the bench, but the man in the garden was nowhere to be seen.

“Hello?” Penny called and looked around. The garden was getting darker earlier and the bowers of scuppernong and heavy honeysuckle vine were in complete shadow. The forsythia bush hulked a dark, unblended outline. Penny found herself grinning, an uncontrolled expectant smile, and strolled down the dark path toward the bench. “Hello?” she called again and the garden seemed to echo her. On the bench where she normally sat was a tented piece of heavy, ivory stationary. On the front of the stationary her name was written in a fine copperplate, but when Penny picked it up she saw nothing was written inside. Qvack!, who had been following behind her, croaked a rusty miaow and rubbed against the drink cart, causing it to rock slightly on its wheels.

A wind picked up in the forest and bent the tops of the dark trees toward the garden in a formal sweep. The pine trees tossed, creaking deep in their limbs, and then the wind passed into the hollyhock beds, chiming their silent bells, rustled through the nodding poppies, skirled a thick patch of creeping morning glory and lifted the hem of Penny's shift. The wind whipped the cotton shift around Penny's legs and slid coolly over her knees. She laughed and raised her arms, twirling a little as the wind suddenly flattened her skirts to her side and then died. When she turned to the bench again the man from the garden was standing behind it watching her.

“A place setting,” he said, nodding toward the ivory stationary which Penny still held. “I thought we could stand to be a little more formal, don't you agree?”

“Certainly,” Penny said, still laughing, though the sudden absence of the wind made the garden seem very still and quiet.

“Also a gift,” said the man in the garden. He came around the bench and presented Penny with a bouquet he had been holding behind his back. He bowed low before her, holding the bowler hat in place with one hand and presenting the flowers with the other. All Penny could see of him was the long, sleek line of his spine, the impeccable suit coat expanding slightly with each breath.

“Thank you,” said Penny, taking the flowers out of his hand. “They're lovely,” she said, though to her the flowers seemed slightly aggressive. They clung thickly to their stems and drooped over the edges of the bouquet in long tendrils that hung and swayed against her wrist. The flowers tapping against her wrist reminded Penny of a moth tapping out of the darkness against a lit window, insistent and softly destructive.

The man in the garden straightened and stood looking at Penny. He was silent and serious. Penny noticed his eyes, which she had always thought were a precise shade of blue, were really a dark brown. They were almost black and the man in the garden blinked slowly, his long, curling lashes resting against his cheek. “The summer is almost gone,” said the man in the garden. He took the bouquet out of Penny's hands and laid it on the little bench.

“Yes,” said Penny, “you've said that before.” She took a step closer to him, then another and the man in the garden pushed his bowler hat back on his head. A single curl unspooled itself on his forehead and Penny touched its tip. The curl bobbed and the man in the garden reached out to Penny and pulled her, for one quick, close minute, against him. Then, just as sharply, he stepped back, hissing and shaking his finger. He had pricked his finger on one of the hat pins that lined the back of Penny's shift. The man in the garden held his hand up between them and he and Penny both watched the bead of blood swell and break, trickling down his long finger and into the palm of his hand.

“Careless,” said the man in the garden, “Wouldn't you agree?”

“Yes,” said Penny, and the man in the garden reached out and brushed his finger over the front of her shift. His blood was black in the dark garden and marked her dress. “Yes,” said Penny, taking a step closer, “I would.”

When Penny came downstairs the next day, Max was gone again. The envelopes on the kitchen table had all been opened and one of the chairs was lying on its side. Penny sat the chair upright and opened a fresh tin of sardines for Qvack! who was sleeping in a patch of sunlight on the kitchen counter. Sheets of notepaper were spread over the kitchen table. They were filled with cramped handwriting on both sides and had been creased many times. Some of the pages had drawings on them: little figures of men and animals, an airplane, an ocean, something that looked like a single, unblinking eye. Penny dumped coffee out of Max's mug and refilled it with water from the sink. She stood over the kitchen table and sipped the water, stirring the pages around with her finger.

Qvack! jumped down from the counter and trotted into the living room, his tail held high, burbling a question. Penny looked after him and saw that the front door was standing open. “Careless,” said Penny, and flicked the edges of the white cotton shift around her legs. She went to the front door and started to shut it, humming a little tune that kept floating through her head. It was a cloudy day out, dim and shifting, and Penny noticed the crab apple tree's leaves were starting to turn. The small leaves were flushing red and yellow along their veins. The bigger ones were already curling brown and heaped around the tree were soft, pitted apples. Bees hummed over the apples and Qvack! sat on the porch twitching his tail.

Penny hummed the last of her tune and started it again from the beginning. The shift, she thought, was the best of all possible
dresses, but it was getting a little cold outside, making her legs feel stiff and thick. Suddenly, Penny realized that the tune she was humming was also now a tune she was hearing. It was bigger than the version in her head, full of brass and a heavy, thumping drum, but still the same song and getting louder. Penny stepped outside and down the porch stairs. She went around the crab apple tree and to the end of her walk. A wind picked up, rustling the dead weeds by the side of the road and sending a line of yellow poplar leaves spinning through the still, expectant air. Penny stood in the middle of the road and looked down it. Far in the distance the song gathered strength and form. A trumpet rose in a triumphant tinny spiral. Cymbals crashed and rung and crashed. Penny shaded her eyes and looked at the cloud of dust rising at the end of the long road. She watched the dust, which could be a parade or any other type of thing, as it traveled toward her.

Then, one day, she went into the forest.

This was a surprise to no one. What is the surprise when a girl comes to no good? Maybe how is a point of interest, maybe when.

She was an only daughter, much beloved, and beautiful by all accounts. Her grandmother, who doted on her, said she looked just like her mother when her mother was that age. Her mother, who had a long, disfiguring scar fissuring her face, said she had unusual coloring, should always make the best of her coloring, pay attention to the light, pay attention to warming fall tones, stay away from blues, particularly ice blue, and also her hair, what nuanced hair!, people would pay good money for hair like that, people did. Every year, the girl's grandmother would tell her she looked just like her mother at that age, until one year she didn't
and from this the girl surmised the age at which her mother received her ruinous scar. It was younger than she had expected. Many things were left unsaid between them but the girl was a child, beautiful and beloved, and the house they all three shared back then was so small there was nothing to do but sleep tucked together like spoons, trading places over the years as the grandmother shrunk and the girl grew and the mother wiped her one weeping eye over and over with the hem of her skirt.

You might know something about biological imperatives. You might know something about hive societies, or nesting dolls. Perhaps you have a treasured memory of a kiosk on the banks of the river Volga, fingering a coarse wool shawl, pressing your lips against the cheek of a porcelain girl, very rosy cheeks, a real girl's hair, a skirt you can flip and discover beneath the head of a wolf or a pig who then has a skirt you can flip and discover beneath the head of a girl. Perhaps you are inarticulate. Perhaps you are dogged by an intermittent fever, your life marked by tremor, or perhaps you are unusually tall and feel as if the world was modeled for another sort of mammal entirely, another sort of girl. You see, I make assumptions about you even as I avoid them. You see how foolish it would be to tailor this story toward your tastes. I cannot help what happened. I would not want to.

Of course, it is often the case with girls that they must make their own way out into the world and from there find their own way back. The more organized ones draft maps or make hatch marks in the trunks of trees, bend branches, leave a patter of crumbs. Sometimes a girl will tie a thread to something she wants to come back to and dole the thread out behind—a raveling hem of her cloak or the loose end of a golden ball, very precious, she was previously using to string the geese in a row to and from
the lake. This is why if you come across a thread in the forest you should never pluck it, not even rest your fingers upon it, or the girl it belongs to will feel it quiver and come rushing back—her hair in a tangle, her mouth so frightful, stained with berries—to see who has crossed her trail.

You see, there is a reason for everything. If you wait long enough it will all come clear, but in the meantime many things change.

For the girl, so beloved, she got a good job. She was used to being petted but also used to going without, and this unusual combination prepared her for the corporate world. Up, she went, up and up. Each of her offices was more spacious and more naturally lit. In each office she was allowed to keep an increasing number of personal mementos—a picture of the grandmother on the bookshelf, a wooden spoon, nicked at the edges with years of teeth, balanced atop the computer console. Always there was an office above her which made her feel safe, beautiful girl used to small spaces, and clear at least about the direction in which she should go. With the money she made she bought her mother lace hankies. She bought a house in the suburbs, a condo in the city, kept the old tiny hut in the country and sometimes drove past in her red car—an old car, restored, a powerful engine, flattering bucket seats—and noticed how the yard grew wild, the trees bowed wild, the vines came tangling up and every year the little hut was harder and harder to see from the road. She had enough money. Not so much she couldn't spend it, not so little she had to count it penny by penny and keep it in a stocking tied to the foot of the bed. She had plenty to eat and wore fashionable clothing in warm fall tones even in the summer when the sun clanging back and forth between the windows of the tall glass buildings that
surrounded her condo made a terrible racket for the eyes. At night the girl would sit on her balcony and drink a cool drink out of a slim glass. She would call her mother and her grandmother, who were now living in the house in the suburbs, and compare with them the sound of the cars hooting at each other many floors below to the sounds of the suburbs: crickets and cats, knives scraping the faces of china plates, spoons rattling in empty bowls, brushes ripping one hundred times through crackling tresses and the tiny
skirt-skrit
of something living in secret inside of the walls. They all agreed that everywhere was very loud. Each place was, in fact, almost the same place because it was so loud, and this made them feel close to each other and closer to who they had used to be in their old house in the country when the girl was a child.

But what does a girl need? She needs a skirt, of course, a good pair of shoes. She needs something to apply to her lips and another sort of thing to apply to her cheeks, such rosy cheeks, something to give the appearance of warmth even when the girl herself is cold. And what does a girl want? All manner of things. It would be difficult to list them even if you had the time, which you do not, you yourself being so busy, and the girl herself also so busy acquiring items she needs to make her seem warm. A brassier for her breasts, razors for the fur that grows in her creases, a cigarette to hold at the fold of her lips, another cold drink, many colors, sipped from the throat of another slim glass.

The girl, so beloved she had to hang up on her grandmother's breath every time, sat on her balcony overlooking the city and had another drink. The city's natural colors were pink and lime green, tan, roughly various, and a teal that flared at unexpected intervals. As the sun went down, molten in the tall buildings' cacophonous glass, pink and lime, tan and teal sobered, muddied each other,
dipped in and out of the canyon alleys where they seemed to become a dusky kind of gray. This was a nightly display in all seasons, and the girl appreciated its constancy but did not overdo it. She poured herself another cold drink. Some nights, she called back inside to the man who was there and he joined her, sitting across the latticed iron table from her, admiring the colors and the failing light, admiring her—although he did not overdo it—while she admired him until they stopped seeing each other and saw only each other's most admirable parts. His jaw line, for example; that funny thing she did with her mouth. Some nights, she called back inside and the man wasn't there. Some nights, he preferred to remain in the living room with a book, or at the kitchen sink washing the faces of each of their dinner plates with slow, lascivious gestures, gazing out the kitchen window onto the various tan bricks of the building next door and their startling teal shadows.

You too might have a man in your home to whom you can call over your shoulder. Perhaps he is also the sort of man who washes your dishes; also the sort of man you lie next to in the early morning as he snores and you reach over to scold him, reach over to scold him, do so until he springs from the bed and goes to squat in the bathtub, naked, shivering with anger. Perhaps you fight. Perhaps you hiss at him and batter the overstuffed arm of the couch with your fists to show your man what you could do to his body if you let yourself, for even a moment, really just let yourself go . . . Perhaps you no longer recognize yourself. Perhaps even in your man's most admirable parts you no longer recognize how your parts used to fit. Perhaps when you look in a mirror—also in the bathroom, the tepid water running to cold, another problem with the heater, your man, shrunk-pricked, still angry, asking “Why,
why
, do we have to have this fight now?”—you see a simulacrum of a person: dough-hole sockets, slung-dough jowls,
the mouth a cavernous gawp, yawping, yawping, the eyes trapped and furtive. At this juncture, many girls choose to set forth on a journey.

But what does a girl
need
?

A basket. A ball of string.

Sooner than she would have suspected, the girl came to believe her looks were fading. There was a looseness around her mouth, a thin scrim of fur above her upper lip. There was a line furrowed between her eyebrows and a scar she could not remember receiving white and spidery on her temple. It was the scar that bothered her most—a thin, crazed, complicated scar like cracks in porcelain glaze. She tilted her head under the bathroom's harsh globe lights and observed herself from all angles in the mirror. She handled herself the way someone might handle a pot unearthed unexpectedly in the garden, thumbs brushing the crazed glaze, rolling it between the palms. How long has it been there? Why was it buried? Observe, the only thing holding the pot together is the weight of the dirt that has filled it. Accidental dirt, perhaps some incidental treasure—silver spoons, photographs with singed corners, a complete collection of teeth, tiny as seeds, drifting through the strata of the soil. She went into the bedroom and asked the man, reading in bed with a cat asleep on his knees, if he had seen her scar before, if he remembered how it had come to her. And he mistook her. He heard the girl say, “Look at this scar, you gave me this scar,” and he was angry. It became another sort of night altogether—the book left tented, slipping from the foot of the bed, the cat arching disconsolate in the windowsill—and in the morning the girl packed a brief lunch and went for a drive in her old red car in order to clear her head. There were many roads she could have taken. Some led deeper into the city: twisting roads,
maven roads, the rough walls leaning closer, the turns curling always to the right and people pressing their ears to their doors or thin plaster walls to listen to her passing, listen to the whisking rustle of trash in her wake. Some led away over a high ridge and guttered down in dusky hollows, lavender dust spuming in twin tails from her tires, the road skirting a cliff and the sea like fields of thistles, each field collapsing below the next field, purple-cone thistles, their glassine stalks. The sea like a flower, her car like a horse, the road unfurling like shoots on a vine. These are only the echoes of a story.

Of course, we all think in complicated ways. Even the least of us, even the meanest, our minds are busy and tense. Of course, there was only one road for her. She thought without thinking and turned the wheel under her hand. There was a basket in the passenger seat, a little dirt shifting, drifting from her ears, black scrim under her nostril. A little room was being made, a little hollow.

When she arrived at a place in the road that felt right, the girl parked the car, shouldered her basket, set off into the forest.

What do you see?

I see the forest, the trees, their pale bark. I see a path which is rutted, grown over. Flowering mosses I can't bear to crush.

And what do you do?

I follow the path, skirting the mosses. I come to a pitcher, drink from the pitcher. Come to a key, pocket the key. Come to an animal . . . 

What sort of animal?

I can't see. It's dark. It's like there's a hand pressed over my mouth.

Aren't you a silly thing? Didn't I warn you?

Whatever it is, I watch it feed. After a time, it moves off into the forest—a shadow of a shadow—and I follow, first tying one end of my string to a branch so, should I desire it, I can find my way home.

Why have I wasted so much of my time with you?

I hear the animal breathing. The crack of the twigs as it breaks its trail.

Are your ears full of potatoes? Is your head full of sand?

I come to a pitiful clearing, a doorstep. I see a house the forest has invaded, nests on the lintels, a tree grown through the roof. I run out of string and tie the end of my line to the doorknob. The animal's mark is fresh on the stone.

Why, foolish girl, should I bother to save you? Why, stupid girl, should I unlimber my axe?

I am a beautiful girl, a well loved one. Inside, I hear breathing. I open the door.