Mother Box and Other Tales (4 page)

One of the babies made a husky, throttled noise. It was not of their usual repertoire. Not a sound that portended or precluded, and though Dannie did not feel alarmed—she had never been, would never be, a woman bitten along the edges with useless care—she did feel some interior part of her quicken and turn. Her damn breasts again, but no, they were dry, she herself dry, and the wind buffeting her limbs like thick cotton. Dannie leaned over the stroller and looked down at her children. The boy was twisted around in his seat, his forehead wide and smooth, his eyes blue and troubling. They were hers, it occurred to her. He and his sister, every moment of them under her ownership, at least for now. It was a cheering thought. Maybe she would take them to see the Mrs. Whites after all, painting their faces first as if she and the babies had all just swept in from some outdoor event replete with balloons and colorful exhibitions of skill. Just because the crux of the conversation had changed didn't mean it couldn't continue, couldn't evolve to include the unimagined perils inherent in being the mother of two healthy children. And wasn't it the unknown
that was supposed to be so enticing? Wasn't that, after all, what the Mrs. Whites had designed their store to sell?

Dannie imagined depositing each baby in the crooked cradle of a Mrs. Whites lap—the girl painted up like a beaver, little buck teeth lapping onto her sharp chin, and the boy something else, something the Mrs. Whites would approve of. An insect perhaps, garishly alien, his legs already so many jointed it was no great feat to imagine them twisted back above his head, rubbing out a measuring tune. She imagined the expressions on the old ladies' alligator faces, their mouths widening like cracks crazing through varnish, their ropy knuckles popping as they bent their hands to grasp. Delightful! These anthropomorphic babes, these little mummers. Curios, apologies, proffered gifts.

This is what Dannie was thinking when she recognized the sound behind her as running footsteps only a second before the blow landed at the base of her skull. A great blackness bloomed and the world pressed around her, a last lashing fever, as she fell.

Sylvia's mother had believed in many unfashionable ideas. Fortitude and mutability, tenacity and penance. In her last years, her suspicion of the world grew deeper and she saw everywhere around her evidence of an endemic failure to transform. Evidence that evolution had reached its standstill. “There's nothing left to look forward to,” she told Sylvia, tracing one finger along the back of her daughter's hand. Out her mother's window Sylvia could see a little manicured square of the facility's lawn, then the cracked expanse of parking lot, then a row of tourist cottages, identical rainbow wind-socks fluttering at each front door. It was a late summer day, high season. If the window could open Sylvia might have opened it to hear the shattered cheer of the beach, each voice heaving itself momentarily up out of the mass of voices, clear and bright, gilded with sun. She might have sat with her mother and had another sort of conversation entirely,
touched there in her mother's white room by the unknown lives that had always accompanied them, partners in the shared square of warmth and salt and faint, fading spray. But the building was an institution, the window built as an idea of a wall and the air fluorescent with artificial chill as the air conditioner kicked up another notch. “No more freaks,” her mother said, resting her hand on the back of her daughter's hand for the last time in either of their lives. “No more monsters.”

Yet, here is her daughter, many years later, turning to face what surely comes next. Around her roars the surf from which all such monsters have crawled. They rattle their saber limbs, cast pale snouts to test an unfamiliar wind.

She has prepared the dinner, but the guests are late. The foods sit in their various serving bowls, wrapped snugly in foil. In rotation, she tents each foil top just slightly to let out steam and condensation. The kitchen fills with intermingled smells.

On the third rotation, the guests arrive. It feels to her as if she has been standing in the kitchen for days—chopping and slicing, deboning and trimming the scales, basting, brazing, deglazing pans, beating together eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar until stiff peaks hang like mock icicles from the end of her whisk.

“I'm so sorry we're late,” says Diane. Her husband stands in the doorway behind her holding a serving platter draped in a dinner-party themed kitchen towel. The towel is patterned with martini glasses and open mouths laughing. There is a woman's mouth and a man's mouth. The woman-mouths are misprinted so their lipstick hangs just below their lip-lines like carnelian ghosts
and the man-mouths are crowned with trim black moustaches which remind her viscerally of Diane's husband, though he is clean shaven and smiles at her, nods toward the bottle of wine he has clamped in the crook of his arm.

She reminds herself she is often reminded only of what is directly in front of her, that this is a failing of hers, and they all tumble into the kitchen to eat toast points crowned with various savory spreads, drink cocktails and watch as she puts the finishing touches on a dish she has set aside, unfinished, for just this purpose.

“I've always believed the chive was an immature onion,” says Diane. She laughs. “Can you believe until this very moment that's what I've always thought?”

It is her husband, the host, who has set Diane straight on this matter. He has just now emerged from the back of the house, where it seems to her he has loitered almost exclusively for the past many months, and stands blinking against the low light of the kitchen. He is wearing his work clothes, the shirt ripped at the shoulder seam so she can see a pale diamond of his skin, and has tucked his spectacles into his shirt pocket.

“That's alright,” her husband says, clearing his throat first, a little hoarse, “that's your prerogative.”

Everyone laughs in a sincere way. They are good friends; it is alright to admire each other. Diane whose hip curves like a cold moon at the top of her jeans. Diane's husband who seats himself at the table, his plate bare before him, and smiles at her as she adds the chives, at last, to the dish.

Then, the eating begins. There are many dishes and they pass them around and around. The plates are soon slick with juices and beside them her husband and Diane's husband build growing cairns of bones. Diane picks up two bones from her husband, the host's, plate and slips them into the sides of her mouth so they
bob like whiskers. The bones are translucent, sliver thin. This is an old joke among them. They are celebrating something—Diane is pregnant again or they have bought a larger house—and Diane's husband toasts to the celebration, to the meal. He rinses his mouth with wine and moves his chair closer to her, the hostess, so when he turns to smile at her she can feel the heat coming off his dark face, waves of heat, and sees, she believes, that his dark eyes are blacker than she had ever thought them to be. They shine in his face like polished beads and when he blinks she believes she can still see them shining.

“Another toast!” says her husband, the host, and when he reaches across the table to clink his glass the tear in his shirt gaps and yaws like a tiny, diamond-shaped mouth. There is a smell from him. A russet smell like the one in the back of their house, which reminds her of rust, something has rusted, the pipes?, something below the house crumbling so what is contained within it pours out. It is a problem they were supposed to have dealt with a long time ago. “To us!” her husband says, draining the wine from his glass.

It has gotten louder in the room. Someone has turned the music on, turned it up. Diane's husband passes his wife another chop, a little pot of mustard and the mustard paddle with which to slather. She herself is full, she is sure of it, but fills her plate again—root and seed, muscle, flower.

“It's all so delicious,” Diane says. “Incomparable!”

Diane is very white and taut, she realizes. Even whiter and more smoothly muscled than she had remembered from their many many, uncountable many, dinner parties of the past. She seems to glow, in fact, incomparably, and is hard to look at as she holds her naked fork in the air, dips it as if conducting the music. Her husband, the host, emits a sudden squeal and scrabbles at the table. He has dropped his spoon into the soup, cannot find it.
His eyes have grown very small or his face very large. His eyes are almost totally enfolded by his face and he cannot see. His roving hands are clumsy, spill wine and gravy, and Diane's husband dips his sleek head to his plate in seeming sympathy. He turns to face her so she alone can see he is laughing, his black eyes wet with it, and he unfurls his quick tongue so it just grazes her wrist, long and light and dry.

The music is too loud! She cannot hear what anyone is saying. But there is still dessert to be had—the masterpiece—and still in the center of the table Diane's dish covered with its towel which, now that she notices, has darkened at the center as if sopping something, wicking it away.

“What is this music?” she asks. “If it's
Scheherazade
that was my grandmother's favorite,” but even as she says it she is rising, moving into the kitchen. The dessert has been chilling in the refrigerator and when she sees it again she is relieved to find it still pristine, unaged. It stands alone on the center shelf, the cool of the fridge a blue shadow below its peaks. She feels a great love for this dessert, almost a swooning for it. She lifts it as she might an animal, a docile one, though one whose habits remain uncertain. The music swells and peters. It is
Scheherazade
, she is sure, and she turns to the table, the dessert held before her, smiling so that her teeth will show, but what of it? They are friends. It is a party.

And yet, what is this? She sees Diane has uncovered her dish. The men are cheering, her husband tilting his head back, holding a fold of flesh up and away from his eye with one blunt hand. Diane's husband has laid his head fully on the table as if to get a better view of her dish, which is, she will admit, incomparable—dark, rich, heaving slightly in the very bright light that pours from Diane's hands, spills from the deep cleft of her neckline.

“Oh, no darling,” says Diane, motioning her forward. “Yours is too beautiful. You mustn't mind. You don't mind? Put it here, right on the table. Let's look at them together. Cheers.”

But it is really too late. She knows that. She can picture how her dessert will look on the table, littered now with dishes, stained, the tablecloth askew and in some places tattered. She has failed her dessert, failed its dear crevices, its frail, tremulous desires. She has failed the party, she sees, as she notices a cobweb hung thick and cloistered between the spires of the chandelier, a rung hanging down from the back of Diane's husband's chair and the borders of the rug unraveling, each thread faded to the same murky brown. There is nothing for it. She holds the dessert out in front of her.

“It had no chance, poor thing,” she thinks, stepping forward. Diane's dish has somehow slipped to the side of the plate and now hangs there, pattering a warm liquid onto the table cloth. It seems to elongate as she watches, as if seeking purchase, and then there is a terrible clamor of drums, trumpets, fifes. Something insurmountable has happened to the music, and the light grows so bright, so piercing, that all she can see are Diane's husband's eyes, black, unblinking, tilted toward her as if sharing a joke.

There was a girl who was wild and a boy who was tame. This is not to say anything, but merely how they were raised: both with great care, almost precision, but one with a stick brought down on his head every night and one who had been given a fat little book with onion-skin pages and anatomical drawings in full color therein.

One day, when they had both grown out of their plump infancy and exchanged the fine fur that swathed their limbs and torsos for coarser, more menacing stuff, their mothers packed them each a brown sack filled with bread and cheese, dried fruits and skins of milk and water and waved to them from the gates of the tidy houses in which they had previously spent all of their lives. The girl and the boy walked many miles down the roads that led from their homes which were ringed on all sides by an impenetrable forest. They were alone, but they had been raised to anticipate being alone. They were hungry, but they had been raised
to expect that feeling could and should be appeased. In separate clearings, they both sat down to enjoy the first meal that had not been served to them on a thin china plate and drink the first drink they did not sip out of a chipped china cup emblazoned with their very own names.

When their appetites were satisfied both the girl and the boy took a moment to be still in their surroundings and listen to the noises the world was making. The girl ran her fingers over a tussock of moss that was growing up next to her thigh. She pinched the heads of some purple gerardia so she could better see down the length of the flowers' speckled throats. The boy closed his eyes and leaned back on his elbows. He listened to the call of a phoebe who, protecting its nest, fluttered at the forest edge canting a lame wing over its eyes. “Phoebe phoebe phoebe phoebe,” the bird said and the boy pulled his stick out of his sack and ran his hands over its familiar knots. Many miles away, the girl squinted as a cloud passed over the face of the sun. She ruffled the edges of her onion-skin book so the flayed muscles within blurred together and seemed to stretch and bunch.

They traveled this way for many days. One day, the girl sat down on a log beneath a rustling oak and ate the last crumb of her bread, swallowed the last hot slug of water from her skins. The water was musty and animal. For the first time in her life, the girl was unsatisfied. She tucked her head between her knees and pressed her knees against her ears until everything sounded like the color apricot. She called out, “Oh oh oh oh,” and that too sounded apricot which was a color that made her feel nauseous and even more unhappy. Soon she was inconsolable. She gnashed her teeth.

Meanwhile, the boy had taken many turns at random and found himself off the road entirely. He did not feel lost because he had not from the first day known where he was going, but he did feel uneasy. He had eaten his last morsel of cheese many
hours before and had hoarded his milk so long it had gone sour in the skin. The day before, the boy had come across a swift cold stream that frothed and tinkled, but he did not drink from it because he remembered stories of both enchantment and disease. Many days before that, he had come across a bush heavy with plump red berries, but he did not eat from it because he remembered stories of pain and an enduring thirst that thickened in the mouth until the tongue went dead and grey. The boy recognized he was in dire straits, but he did not know what to do next. He supposed he would keep traveling, and then he heard a horrible noise. “Oh oh oh oh,” went the noise and the boy crept forward, parting the undergrowth before him with his stick.

Of course the two met. This had been assumed from their earliest days and they were told in their childhood beds that there was another in the world who had been kept for them, groomed for them. This other person would do for them all the things their mothers had done and perform other actions as well, though what these were was a secret their mothers did not explain. So. Though in fact the boy and the girl met as strangers and were alone in the forest, a dangerous place, and one of them was howling and one of them was carrying before him a fiercely knotted stick, neither the boy nor the girl felt alarm or threat. Rather, they greeted each other with calm recognition. As if to say, “Good to see you again,” in the sort of situation where this is expected, but not fully believed.

That evening, the boy and the girl slept at the base of the great oak. Through the overlapping branches, they could sometimes see stars.

“Did you come a long way?” asked the boy who had put his arm under the girl's head so she could use it as a pillow.

“Far enough,” said the girl, pinching the skin along the boy's ribs with the tips of her very sharp nails. She had right away
apprehended the uses of the stick and left behind her a trail of inflamed wheals which made the boy sigh happily and soon put him to sleep.

Indeed, the children, for they were still that, turned out to be most symbiotic. The girl showed the boy the pictures in her book which he found altogether too red, too linear. Though he did not share it, he recognized her fascination and in response the boy took off his clothes and let her touch and bend, stretch and manipulate all the parts she had previously understood without dimension but which now confronted her whole and unexamined, functioning without the knowledge of their innermost chambers. Which she had. Which she treasured.

When the boy rose in response to her touch, he showed her how to make a ring between her thumb and index finger, where to stroke, how hard to squeeze. The first time, he guided her hand with his own atop it and when he came and his semen washed over her wrist he called her attention to the change in his spent texture, to the vein that pulsed thickly along the side of his withering sac. Having understood them only through pictures, she had never known how quickly a body could alter its forms. As she was wild, her own body had never been a conveyance for her. She
was
her body and so incapable of figuring her self as a separate, interior passenger, incapable of imagining an alternative to what she had just done or what it was she might do next. She felt a weeping tide of gratitude that this boy and his body had come into her life.

In thankfulness, the girl picked up the boy's stick and beat him about the head and torso. She cracked bloody knots in his shoulders, split open his eyebrow, burst his mouth like a plum. It had been so many days since the boy had been beaten that he too felt weak with gratitude. As he lay shaking on the forest floor, he looked up at the girl framed by the tree's tossing limbs and shards
of sky winking blue as mirrors. He said, “I love you,” and she said, “Don't talk.” In this fashion, they knew each other.

As the days passed and they traveled through the forest, the girl and the boy experimented with roots and berries. They drank from the cups of mushrooms so white they glimmered in the forest darkness and chewed strips of bark they pulled from trees which first filled their mouth with an oily fire before softening to a green tingle that numbed them from within. It was clear they could not live in this provisional fashion for long. Already, they had become very thin and what muscles were left hung slack from their bones. Already, they felt a pervasive exhaustion and the girl's lustrous eyes seemed smaller and harder and the boy's rich brown hair hung lank and dull.

Then one day, quite suddenly, they passed out of the forest and into the skirting fields of a small town. As it turned out, this was just in time. The boy collapsed onto the warm, turned soil and the girl dug into the ground, using her hands like paws. She turned up two wizened potatoes and held them in front of her, considering, while the sun, always before so dappled and fleeting, beat down on her head with a feeling like trumpets and clashing shields. They were out of their element, that was for sure. As far as the girl could see in one direction the field stretched in grizzled hummocks. In the other direction the girl could see buildings, their squares and triangles harsh and garishly overlapping after so long among only the shapes of the forest. A fan of smoke was feathering in the breeze. As she watched, another rose to join it, black at the base as if someone were burning leaves. The girl remembered her mother saying, long ago now, in the little kitchen where almost all the meals of her life had been prepared and consumed, “Everything you need, the forest will give to you. This is a warning. I'll only say it once.”

But they had been traveling so long now . . . But surely another sort of life had already begun . . . 

The girl held the potatoes up to her face and inhaled their thin, yellow scent. She rubbed them over her cheeks and chin, over her lips, as if they were stones, appreciating their texture, their weight. She was just thinking, she thought. She was just pausing for breath. The girl was honestly surprised when she found, passing the potato back over her lips, that she had taken a bite but then, the morsel in her mouth both watery and sharp, her saliva flooding her teeth and her tongue, she ate the whole thing and two bites of the second. With a great effort of will, she woke the boy up and shared what was left and they sat together in silence, not yet satisfied, surrounded by a pale infinitude of shifting air in which nothing rustled and nothing snapped, from which nothing treasured them as prey or marked them a danger and skirted their location on careful feet. Eventually, they both fell asleep and slept until the sun sank to the tops of the trees and the wind of another season blew cool across the field.

Had anyone come across them, they would have seemed a picture out of some pretty book. The girl with her tattered skirt, the boy with his ragged stockings. The girl with her hollow cheeks, the boy whose face was stained and swollen. They were two children at the end of a hard time and on the next page, as such stories go, one might expect to see them further imperiled or graced by their earlier virtue with rescue in the form of a fox or an owl, the king of the field mice or a great, black swan. The truth was nothing so kind and nothing so simple. But, as they were young and alone, unobserved in a field which was shorn for the winter, they were gifted long confusing years between action and consequence. When the truth finally came it passed unremarked. As brief as a ray of light fingering through the forest. As strange as a bell tolling in the tower.

And yet, here at last, the boy and the girl had found a place where they could settle instead of a place through which they
must toil. The town was large enough that no one paid attention to two new inhabitants, which was as the boy wanted. But, the town was also small enough that at least twice a month the town's people threw festivals to celebrate a detail of the year and the pageant and costume, the ritual and parade, satisfied many needs the girl had not known she possessed. The boy and the girl moved into a cottage located between the butcher's shop and the apothecary's larder. The boy built a little fence, for privacy, which he painted white and latched by means of a silver latch tied up with a thin, blue string. The girl beat the dirt floors and oiled them until the floors shone underfoot and could be swept clean of crumbs with a pine-straw broom. They had a cottage garden in which the boy planted radish and hot peppers. They kept a hutch full of rabbits which the girl fed on radish-tops and stroked between their wide, wet eyes until they went into a trance. When it came time to slit their throats, the girl did this too and she caught their blood in a silver pail and she turned them out of their skins and set their skins on the fence-posts to dry.

The boy and the girl took care of each other's needs. For a little extra money, the boy hired himself out as a butcher's apprentice. When his master was out, he would bring the girl over and show her the cuts: the shoulder which would become a goulash, the leg destined for stroganoff, the aitchbone which would be stewed and boiled, served with cabbage or made into a fine, clear soup. The girl took in the neighbors' laundry and scalded and scrubbed it, delivered it back to them tightly folded and tied with twine. In the winter months, she taught a class made up of farmers' sons and daughters who came into her tidy kitchen to learn what she could teach them of simple sums and how to sign their names, what she thought lay beyond the forest that ringed the town and what she was pretty sure did not.

In the evenings, when the boy came home, he would eat the
supper the girl had made and they would talk together about the day that had passed and the one that was coming. Then, they would retire into the bedroom where the girl had stitched thick curtains out of the remnants of their traveling clothes and the boy would show the girl new things about their bodies. After a certain time, one would think there could no longer be anything new to show, but the girl was observant, ravenous for detail, and the boy was imaginative, strong, generous with his time. When they were finished, the boy, still out of breath, would kneel in the middle of the room. The girl would take up his old knotted stick from its place by the hearth and beat him severely, the sound of her blows sometimes carrying all the way to the street where people passing by might imagine someone was chopping wood, or slapping a wet blanket against the side of the washtub so it might dry.

And so, time passed.

This happened at once very fast and with infinite tedium. On some days, the girl would amuse herself by trying to remember what it had felt like to be inside her body on the same date the year before and on the same date the year before that. Other days, when they finally lay down together to sleep, the boy would remark that the only clear impression he had of the day just passed was waking up that morning in the same small bed and opening his eyes. Of course, there were other, more durable markers. The girl noted that the boy had grown a single white eyelash which stood out starkly amongst his other hairs. The boy noticed that the girl had developed a fondness for cream-based sauces and on most days her lips were very chapped and rough. They neither of them remarked these things to the other, but both of them felt a spreading sort of feeling, as if they were growing to accommodate the space allotted to them. As if they would eventually grow to press against one wall with their knees and the other with their elbows, to cant their necks against the peak of the ceiling,
to shove one shoe in the black mouth of the hearth. So far would they grow, but no farther. This was a natural way to feel they both of them supposed.