Mother Box and Other Tales (18 page)

From comments like these, Mary understood that the ghost was not particularly impressed with the quality of the meals she herself served, but she ate with gusto, helping herself to seconds and lingering at the table long after Charlie and the children had gone off into their private evenings. Mary found herself not ungrateful for the company.

“Is there too much salt in the broth?” Mary asked, her bowl before her and the soup within beginning to skim over with fat.

“Oh no,” the ghost replied, dipping her spoon directly into the serving tureen. “If anything, there's too little.”

There was never enough salt for the ghost. She often poured a shifting hill of it into her hand in which to dip the tip of her tongue between bites. She changed her clothes an inordinate number of times in a day and appeared to have an endless supply of gauzy scarves which she would tie around the base of her ponytail in order to create a sort of pennant effect, Mary supposed, though they hung limp and passive, doing nothing to
mark either changing weather or shifts in the ghosts frequently mercurial moods. The ghost continued not to drink, but she did smoke at an alarming rate. She would often pinch out the end of a half-smoked cigarette and leave it balanced on the edge of an end table or propped against the central stem of a house-plant while she lit another from a bullet shaped silver lighter she was constantly losing in the bottom of her purse. In general, the ghost was a rummager. More than once, Mary caught her digging through the children's drawers, really getting down to the bottom of things, with the clothes themselves stacked in bright piles around her. Though Mary made no special efforts towards stealth, and did not consider herself particularly effected either way by a rearrangement of the children's privacy, the ghost reacted every time as if they were both trembling on the edge of a social precipice.

“Oh, Mary,” the ghost would exclaim, both hands pressed to her chest, cigarette expressing a wavering wreath around her chin. “My dear, it's not how it looks. Let me explain. Do let me make this up with you.”

In this scenario, Mary would walk to the window and fiddle with the seam of the curtain. She would look out onto the vantage which sometimes afforded her a view of Terry and Irma, who were seldom apart, and sometimes showed her nothing but the slow affections of the vegetative world: the blades of grass which caressed each other, the banded hostas which yearned, each leaf, away from their tender beds. Not instructive to humans, Mary thought as the ghost shuffled around behind her and continued to protest an innocence that was not in question or of concern. An example of neither the canny nor the marvelous, Mary thought and then she and the ghost would descend the stairs together and the ghost would tell her again some story of her past life which seemed to have been at once full and minutely observed.

Well, Mary supposed, we all have our weaknesses. Her own was a lack of perspective, a new and perplexing inability to keep track of numbers higher than ten. Like a partridge, though her body felt more like the bones of the bird and not its meaty breast, its officious feathers. At night, in bed with Charlie, she described this feeling and he listened in silence. She told Charlie many things and he listened in silence, his back to her and the shape of his body, which had bulked up over the years, soft and dark in the deeper darkness of the room. Sometimes, as she talked, Mary knew the ghost was in the room as well, sitting in the corner of the room in the deep, maroon armchair that was intended for late night vigils though it was seldom used. Sometimes she could hear the ghost somewhere else in the house, the particular weight of her tread, her habit of singing little snatches of song under her breath, and sometimes Mary knew the ghost was gone entirely though where she went when she was not there remained a mystery Mary did not seek to solve.

“My greatest fear has always been too literal a knowledge of myself,” Mary told Charlie as they lay together in the dark. “I've overcompensated for that, I know. I've made a mockery of the everyday.” Or no. That is not what she said, but what she meant to say. Mary told Charlie stories about her childhood. She told him things her mother had used to say, little snippets, her mother's little habits of speech. She often thought Charlie's naked flesh was like the belly of a toad, porous and impossibly soft, liable to shine with a luminescence entirely independent of light both natural and artificial. Though she had always considered herself to be a rigid woman, pliant in body but never in soul, now Mary wished he would turn over and make a space for her.

“Not to belabor the point,” Mary told Charlie, “but I have loved you very much. I have loved you as well as I could.” She considered this a transformative moment in their relations with
each other. It was some one of a number of very dark nights. The moon in this season seemed disinclined toward illumination, which Mary would have thought a prerequisite of its condition; although, come to think of it, Mary did not even know what the moon was, not for sure. Some kind of orbiting satellite of course, but what of it? What else? She couldn't name even one of the kinds of rocks the moon was composed of or state with any degree of assuredness if it was even composed of rocks and not, perhaps, a very fine, luminous dust compacted into the semblance of a solid, scarred ball. What had been done with all this time she had spent? What had been made of it? The ghost was in the corner sitting in the maroon chair with her knees drawn up to her chest and a musing expression on her face. Mary could not see her, but she knew this was the case. The ghost was on her side, but she had no answers.

“Do you remember the goats?” the ghost said. Her voice in the dark was different than in daylight; a soft and private voice. “Do you remember their dear faces, each one the same face, and the way they would butt their heads up into your palm?”

“I love you, I love you,” Mary told Charlie. “I love you. Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

Charlie rolled over. He pulled her against him, put one hand on the side of her face, but it was dark in there, still dark, nothing glowed. Mary could just see the outline of her husband's teeth as he talked. She saw the dark room, dark corners and dark mullion over the window, through the screen of her husband's fingers over her eyes.

“I heard you,” said Charlie. “The garden and the river and your friends. The goats and the garden and your friends and the river.” Suddenly, she knew. Her husband was not a man, but a grub! He burrowed in the warm earth, turned the soil. Her husband was necessary, but not pleasant to look at. Oh, she had been
so mistaken in her life. She had looked in all the wrong places, missed everything.

“Every time you've said something, I've heard it,” said Charlie, but of course this was not right.

“This is not then, Mary,” said Charlie. “This is here, now. No one else is in this room but us.” This was not right either, but closer. The ghost shifted her weight and sighed. She got up and crossed the room. Mary could hear her making her way down the hall toward Irma's room and then, after a brief pause, passing back before their door and down the other end of the hall toward Terry. In the dark house in the long night, the ghost passed from room to room, checking in. Which meant Mary did not have to. Which meant she was not compelled.

“Rot,” said Mary. “The soil.”

“I know, Mary, I heard you,” Charlie said. “The fire, the river, the garden, the goats.”

When Mary and Charlie were still in their courting phase they had used to go to a bar out in the country. The bar was called The Silent Woman and it was down a long country road seamed with other roads that leapt out of copses of trees or from between the high cuts of the fields and were always empty. Charlie was a fast driver. He steered with one hand and maneuvered the other back and forth between the gear shift and the radio consol, the rear view mirror, the back of her seat, the top of his head, his mouth. Charlie drove with his whole body, leaning into the curves as they whipped around them, and Mary always felt it would better suit the dramatic narrative of the story if The Silent Woman were at the very end of the road, a beacon gleaming at the head of a cul-de-sac already crowded with other cars into which they could bellow, Charlie announcing their presence by blowing the horn, as the bar's happy patrons spilled out into the parking lot. Instead
the bar was just off the road at the edge of a gravel turn-around, unheralded. It was bound on either side by fields which were high with corn or shorn to a copper rubble depending on the season and, while laid perfectly flat to her inspection, always seemed to Mary as if they were full of hidden or merely unperceived lives.

“Sure. Lots of snakes, field mice,” Charlie said. Mary felt sure he didn't know any more about these things than she did, but when he drove his fingers raked through his hair or came to rest in the center of his lower lip and seemed imbued with a private temperament at which Mary could not stop looking. Charlie did not look at her. He shifted gears. He stamped the clutch flat to the mat and let it out by begrudging inches while Mary had a little flask with her initials etched in silver spirals on the front which Charlie had given her and which he thoughtfully filled for her so she would have something to do on the ride.

Outside the bar was a sign that showed the bar's name, but did not spell it out. The sign depicted a woman in an ankle length blue dress. She was wearing a long white apron and carrying a silver tray with a single silver cup set upon it which, by the careful way she gripped either side of the tray, was probably full. The woman had a wide, soft, white collar and above that nothing—no head, no hair, no habits of expression. She was the silent woman and Mary was taken with her and thought about her as she and Charlie sat at a wobbly table and watched the people at the bar dance, waved for the waitress to come bring them more drinks and, eventually, danced themselves amid the crush of bodies. The band throbbed in the corner and Charlie's hands were damp on Mary's hip and buttocks. Mary twirled around and around, her head bobbing over Charlie's shoulder.

“What kind of shoes was she wearing?” Mary would shout, pressing a thumb against the base of Charlie's ear so he would hear her. “It's a test. What kind of ring did she have on her right
index finger?” Charlie spun her around and around while the band played. The bar was always packed.

One day, they drove out to The Silent Woman. Charlie had not yet proposed but Mary knew it was a matter of time.

“A waiting game,” her father had said. “He's a man who needs time to see what he thinks.” Mary's father was not entirely sold on Charlie. He had not been entirely won over by Charlie's satellite courtship of him which had involved gifts of liquor and cigars and, once, a book bound in brown leather which showed the inside view of all the different kinds of ships built in the harbor in the early days of the city's preeminence. Mary thought the book was interesting in a terrible way—all those ships splayed open, gaping, the tiny kegs of rum or salted fish stowed away by tiny sailors who clambered through the ship's holds oblivious to the ruin of the shape that was to keep them safe on open seas. But her father was not given to flights of fancy and remained impervious to Charlie's advances. Her father, in his encroaching age, had shut up like a clam shell. He was not waiting for anything anymore and his modes of locomotion became mysterious, seldom glimpsed. In fact, Mary's father was starting to become a problem for her, but now, in Charlie's car, going fast down a straight road with Charlie's hand on the back of her seat and his arm stretched taught between them, she considered herself problem free. So many things were meant to be left behind. It was impossible for any one person, and certainly not for her, a motherless child, little more than a girl despite her tight, short skirt, to have too explicit a say in what was lost and what was gained.

Charlie was in a fine mood. He sang along to the radio and occasionally lifted his hand up to her face, holding his fist like a microphone she should sing into as well, though she did little more than lean forward and breathe. The moon was out. That was something Mary would always later remember. The moon was
fat and low and orange as a persimmon. It seemed to be traveling along the horizon line like an animal preoccupied with marking its own progress. The moon traveled back and forth along the horizon line snuffling in the underbrush. It was fall. The air was high and sharp and they traveled down the road quickly in a straight line.

“The stars are so far away,” Charlie sang. It was a line from a children's song which someone had redone with electric guitars and heavy drums. Mary didn't even know how he had found that station on the radio. He held his hand up to her face and Mary breathed into it, imagining her breath seeping down between the creases of his hands and condensing there, a damp ball rapidly cooling.

“They never speak when spoken to,” Charlie sang.

That night, the bar was more than usually full. Mary and Charlie had to share their table with another couple, slightly younger than them, who looked alike with a burnished, simple similitude Mary found soothing. The boy was tall with unusually long hair which he wore loose over his shoulders and there was something about his teeth, something about his teeth behind his cheeks, that was very apparent. The girl was smaller and plainer. She seemed to huddle into herself the way a bird or a small mammal will huddle into its down or fur for comfort and protection from the cold, but, Mary noticed, it was the boy who sought reassurance. He couldn't keep his hands off her. Always touching the back of her hand, stroking her knee, circling her wrist with his thumb and index finger as if making her a bracelet and then trying it on for fit. They were both absorbed in the music, jogging their knees under the table to the beat.

“What a beautiful couple,” Mary said to Charlie. He gave her a squeeze, but was mostly preoccupied trying to get the waitress's attention. He thrust his hand into the air and waved it back and
forth in an exaggerated fashion that reminded Mary of semaphore. The ancient sea language for two rye whiskeys, neat, she thought and laughed. The girl caught her eye and smiled with her, though she could not possibly get the joke. That was the kind of people she needed, Mary thought. People who were pleased to be in the here and now; people who were gracious about it. The band swung into another song without pausing for breath.