Some Possible Solutions (18 page)

*   *   *

Here on the
porch beside the muddy pond where five-legged frogs crawl over tumorous lily pads, someone dear to me asks why I always tell this story in the present tense. We lean back in our hand-hewn chairs, waving smoke sticks at the mosquitoes that churn around the slimy cattails. Soon it will be utterly dark in the abandoned swamp, no ambient light from anywhere, and we will retreat into the wooden cabin where the tilting floorboards remind us of the day we laid the clay foundation.

 

THE WEDDING STAIRS

At the tail end of the wedding, as the last guests were fighting over whose coat was whose, the maître d' took me aside. He'd had his eye on me all night; even when he'd handed me my third rosemary-cucumber martini in that dismissive way of his, still he'd had his eye on me.

I wondered, with some amazement, how he'd singled me out, my particular cocktail-length dress, my particular shoes; I was identical to every other drunk young lady at the wedding, in no way deserving of additional admiration or scorn, distinguished only by the fact that I happened to be the sole witness when the cancerous woman ran into the Ladies' Room with a nosebleed (“Can I get you seltzer perhaps?” I said, because the blood was falling on her green silk jacket and I've heard seltzer can do some good against blood. “It's my pancreas is all,” she replied; I couldn't think of anything to say to that).

“I have to show you something,” the maître d' said. They were the first words I'd heard from him, and while I wasn't surprised that his tone was scornful, I was surprised that he would make such a forthcoming statement.

We were standing at the bottom of a staircase, one of those staircases with red carpeting running down the middle; it was up this staircase that he gestured.

He was skinny, this maître d' of mine, almost skeletal, with a shorn head. His eyes were black and filled with rage or something else that made them burn. It was not hard to imagine him surviving a concentration camp.

In the dimness beyond the dance floor, my husband was leaned up against the wall, passed out there with a portrait of a woman from 1632 around his neck. I don't know how it had gotten there, that painting, but at the beginning of the evening it had been hanging grandly on the wall and now here it was with my husband's drunken head stuck through it, violating the lady's charcoal dress. I didn't know how much it would cost, or if our lives were essentially over.

“Of course,” I said to the maître d', stepping onto the first stair.

Behind us, the bride and groom held each other weeping—hopefully for joy—in the starlight.

Just kidding. There was no starlight. In fact, the fluorescents had just come on; the staff was dying for us to clear out. But they
were
holding each other, the bride and the groom, and they were most definitely weeping.
With this ring, you are holy to me.

The maître d' joined me on the step. I looked over at him, turning on the faucet of my smile, eager to dazzle him, to grab his hand and run upward. But yet again I'd misread the situation; he returned my gushing smile with that withering gaze of his, and my hand dangled un-held between us.

At a pace exactly halfway between slow and fast, the maître d' mounted the stairs, and I followed. There was a sharp right, then a second staircase. Hours we'd been here, in this old stone venue, hours of revelry, and I'd never had any idea about these staircases. What had happened to them, all my powers of observation? Already it was fading behind me, the wedding vanishing into the past, the things I shouldn't have said at all, much less in the middle of the dance floor: that my husband had desires I wasn't capable of satisfying, that my grief about the fetus had yet to drain away, that I wanted things to be different than the way they were.

I shivered with shame for that girl, that girl who had said those things, who had sat alone at an abandoned table trying to devour the dessert placed at her seat as well as the one at her husband's while the waiters looked on with distaste, but walking up these red-carpeted stairs alongside my maître d', I no longer felt responsible for the words I'd shed like dead hair upon the dance floor.

On the third staircase, the food began. At first, just a nibbled dinner roll in the corner of one stair. A whoosh of specks that might have been stains, or poppy seeds. A patch of something wet on the carpet—wine, or water, or an illusion.

But by the fourth staircase there was no question: the steps were littered with food. An unmistakable smear of that green pistachio mousse. A sprig of butter-encrusted sage. Gnocchi scattered moistly down the side.

With each step it got worse. The decimated body of a trout. A half-eaten fist of beef Wellington. A quail pulled to pieces. A slick of port sauce. The breathtaking garnishes—the rosemary, the begonias, the curls of candied lemon peel. The aftermath of the luxury, all just garbage now. Worse than garbage.

Then, on the sixth staircase, I got this odd feeling in my heart: there, unmistakable, were the remainders of the two desserts I'd failed to finish, the lavender crème brûlée still in its little cup, the hazelnut tart whose integrity I had violated.

Too ashamed to look at the maître d', I ducked my head and cried quietly as we passed the wasted desserts.

How fragrant these foods had been when they were bestowed upon the cream-colored tablecloths—the smell of butter, warmth, safety, joy. Yet now dark and disconcerting odors arose from the rejected food, the rot already encroaching. I had never before understood that the end of a feast is a funeral.

I didn't want to step on any of it—it seemed like stepping on corpses—but sometimes it was impossible to avoid, the food thicker on each stair. I shuddered as my shoe crushed an errant slice of blood orange, a handful of capers.

“You're right to feel pity,” the maître d' said coldly on the ninth or maybe the tenth or maybe the nineteenth staircase, “but you're not supposed to direct that pity toward yourself.”

It was impossible that this stone house contained all these staircases. We'd long ago shed the loveliness of the rooms below—the candlelight, the delicate white poppies, the old Dutch paintings. Here the red carpet looked cheap and stank. Bare bulbs, unfinished walls. We arrived at a paint-splattered plywood door.

The key that the maître d' removed from his inner pocket looked like a key from a fairy tale. Think Bluebeard; seven dead brides. Why did it take me so many staircases to realize the kind of danger I was in?

I whirled around to dash downward, but the maître d' somehow had his arm about my waist—what a long arm he had, a miraculous arm. I whirled back around to face him, hoping against hope that what he'd brought me here for was a kiss, but it only took one look at his mouth to know this was a cage, not an embrace. With his other hand he twisted the key.

*   *   *

Rows of washing
machines. Rows and rows of washing machines. Brights and whites swirling, the gushing bubbles and water.

That was all. An enormous laundry room.

When I looked over at the maître d', I saw that he was smiling for the first time that night, and perhaps for the first time ever.

Strolling among the machines, in various states of undress (a shirt unbuttoned, a vest slung over a shoulder): waiters whose hairstyles I recognized from the banquet. Their faces, which had been blank blurs to me before, now seemed exceptionally vivid: an exhausted forehead, a wan smile, a cynical eyebrow.

“This,” the maître d' told me, “is where we wash the costumes.”

I wanted to ask him which costumes he meant, or if he'd misspoken, if he'd intended to say “the uniforms” or “the linens.” But he was not the type to stand corrected.

Amid the aroma of laundry detergent, I caught a whiff of something less pleasant. I glanced down at myself, only to discover the gray fabric of my dress covered in old food, chunks of the feast plastered to the soles of my faux-vintage high heels, a layer of inexplicable stickiness on my skin; the odor emanated from me. I reached up to touch my hair—sure enough, smears of butter met my fingertips.

I hadn't worn a gray dress to the wedding! Yet I found myself unable to recall the original color of my dress—hadn't it been pink, or at least lavender? As I examined the dress, it struck me darkly that I recognized many of the stains now adorning it, recognized them by their shape and location; the red wine my husband spilled on my bodice at our own wedding, the sweat marks from the interview for the job I didn't get, semen and saliva, a teaspoon or two of amniotic fluid, the olive oil from the first dinner I'd ever cooked by myself, the requisite menstrual blotch, the mud from the hill behind my grandmother's house, the grass stains from where I'd sat on the lawn as a baby. And brownish droplets on my sleeve, which I could only attribute to the cancerous woman with the bloody nose.

“Excuse me,” I said to the maître d', hesitant yet also desperate, desperate. “Can we wash my—costume?”

The word “costume” felt awkward in my mouth—“dress” was the word I'd have preferred.

I pictured myself unzipping my dress, unhooking my bra, stepping out of my shoes and underwear, standing there in the laundry room among the waitstaff, heavy-limbed and calm, like a child who's never heard of sex. Maybe they would gather around me, poke at me or mock me or tickle me, or maybe the vast indifference they currently exhibited would continue. It didn't matter, though; nothing mattered as long as my costume got washed.

“You don't want that,” the maître d' said simply, as though he already knew that in two days' time I'd bust my knee while stomping my foot on the sidewalk during a fight with my husband, already knew that soon my husband would cup my face in his hands and truthfully say, “When I am an old man, I will look back on this as the happiest time of my life,” already knew that I'd truthfully reply, “When I am an old woman, I will look back on this as the happiest time of my life,” already knew that for years and years we'd alternate between the foot-stomping and the face-cupping, that I'd limp down the cereal aisle on my busted knee, that my heart would lift with joy in the produce section, that I'd wince among the pastas and laugh past the milk, back and forth, again and again, on and on, forever, until the day I once more entered the laundry room.

 

CONTAMINATION GENERATION

Our daughter knows the word “lawn,” of course she does, and the word still sounds green, it still sounds like leisure. And there are still people, rich people, like the Stanhopes on the other side of the wall, who have private lawns.

But when we take Lulu for a very special fifth birthday outing to the Botanical Gardens across the city (bus, subway, bus, grass for the masses) and promenade the lawn where the cherry trees are blossoming, she asks, “What's all this grass for?,” and then I feel bad, like why the heck didn't we bring her here when she turned two, three, four?

And then I'm remembering that time last summer when we rode the subway out to the shore and I said, “Don't you love the sound of the sea?” and she said, “Yeah, just like WaveMaker!,” which is the machine we've used ever since she was born to try to drown out the sound of sirens and other bad things. And then I'm remembering when we took her to the urban stables, five-minute pony rides on the sidewalk for sixteen dollars a pop every Sunday morning, the dirty white pony (“Marshmallow”) stepping carefully among blowing candy wrappers, and though Lulu was so stiff with terror that I had to pull her off after forty-five seconds, she insisted I feed Marshmallow a few of the baby carrots we'd brought along.

The truth is we hadn't taken her to the Botanical Gardens when she turned two, three, four, because we'd taken her there when she turned one. We'd set her down on the lawn, so pleased with ourselves, all ready to snap a bunch of photos, but she'd burst into tears—she was scared of the grass, she kept jerking her hands up as though the grass was burning her, she looked at us like,
Hey, what's wrong with the floor?

Lulu, five years old now, staring at the lawn at the Botanical Gardens. Lulu. A spritely, springy name. A name for feeling carefree. But our Lulu is serious. The friendly cashiers always say, “Those
eyes
!” but I can hear the note of fear. I get it. The largeness of her eyes. The darkness. My dark little thin little odd little glittering shadow child. I put my hand on her disproportionately large head, 90th percentile. Big brain, we told her when a kid on the playground said something a couple weeks back.

“It's a lawn,” I explain. “For playing.” My throat surprises itself by clogging up. In the city parks, the streambeds are empty except for old soda cans, used condoms, dirty napkins, plastic bags, cigarette butts, rabies vaccination pellets. Back where I grew up, or I guess more accurately, back
when
I grew up, I was king of a creek.

“No,” Lulu corrects, pointing at a wooden sign:
NO PLAYING ON THE GRASS
.

Sarah gives that cold laugh of hers. “Kid's right,” she says. Don't get me wrong, Sarah is the best, my great big love, but she didn't grow up anywhere where she could be king of a creek and sometimes that makes her less kind than, say, me.

“It's for
looking
,” I correct myself. “For en
joy
ing. For feeling the
green
in your eyes. The green in your bean.”

“The green in your dream,” Lulu plays.

“That's my girl,” I say like a dad in a movie. I shoot a look at Sarah. Sarah smiles back at me. So nice. A family on a lawn, or
near
a lawn, at the Botanical Gardens on this fine day, half a decade into the life of Lulu, into the life of Sarah and Danny as parents.

“Well,” I say, “maybe you can't play on it, but you can walk on it. Go ahead, Lu. Walk on the grass. Walk on it. It'll feel nice.” I push her gently forward.