The Unsuitable

by Molly Pohlig

  * * *

  What could she say? Iseult sank down in the chair and curled herself up like a dormouse. She thought of taking her nails to her shoulder, but in the face of her mother’s newfound force, she decided not to press her luck. The rain outside the window was coming down so hard that everything was obscured. It was cozy and warm inside, but Iseult felt cold and miserable, as if she’d been sleeping in wet clothes.

  Was her mother going to scream like this for the rest of her life? Iseult didn’t even know whose life she was referring to. Her face hurt.

  * * *

  mother?

  mother.

  please mother.

  * * *

  Beatrice’s diatribe did not pause or slow or change tack. She called Iseult names that Iseult had never even heard before; she used words that could not be construed as anything other than obscenities. Beatrice was wild and furious, but possessed of a newfound precision. As horrified and beaten-down as Iseult was by these words, the sheer surprise of them broke her out of her stupor.

  * * *

  mother you must keep to words that i am familiar with in future. where did you even learn to pronounce such things?

  * * *

  Finally Beatrice paused for breath, and Iseult swore she could feel her mother bare her teeth inside her neck. Pointy little teeth like her own, scraping against her skin. She was afraid to touch her neck in case she could feel them jutting out from the other side.

  * * *

  you think you know everything don’t you little madame but you never think to ask a question you know nothing nothing nothing at all while i know your every thought and conniving desire you have not had a single moment not a breath of life that i didn’t breathe right here inside you you have no right to ask me a question i’ll not answer you

  * * *

  Iseult eased herself up into a sitting position, wondering, as she had often, whether her mother was affected by the positions of Iseult’s body.

  * * *

  don’t start pretending to care now it won’t do you any good and i am well acquainted with the trickery of your mind. you pretend my comfort is of importance to you when i know you would kill me in less than a heartbeat

  * * *

  It had been such a short period of time that Iseult had had without her mother’s thoughts intruding upon her own, and she didn’t realize it at the time, but she could see now that those unfettered thoughts had had a clarity to them that she should have appreciated.

  * * *

  you wasted it though didn’t you you wasted your escape you assumed i would just leave you just leave you alone do you not know me better than that after all of these years if i had lived i would have smothered you in your crib

  what do you want me to say, mother? i only ever have tried to please you. i am sorry that sometimes my temper gets the better of me and i wish i could just have a moment to myself to think, a moment when you don’t know my thoughts.

  what is the point of having a mother who doesn’t know what you’re thinking? i told my mother everything everything and i was glad to

  * * *

  Iseult eased herself up and began to pace the room, pausing every few seconds when her head began to whirl. Sometimes she concentrated better the more things there were to concentrate on, so she walked carefully, trying to make the distances between footsteps impose a little order in her brain.

  Beatrice had fallen silent, and Iseult was hesitant to risk angering her again, but something was going to have to be untangled if she was going to live in peace.

  * * *

  mother. could you tell me simply, plainly, what you want from me? i love you. you know i love you. but i am always going to do the wrong thing, even when i try to do what you want, because i never know what it is that you do want! wouldn’t it be better for everyone if i knew what you wanted? so i could see whether i could give it to you?

  * * *

  Iseult walked the length of the room two, three, four times.

  * * *

  what do you want from me?

  * * *

  She heard Beatrice draw in a breath, a gust of wind rushing between her ears. It grew louder, and louder, and putting her hands over her ears did nothing to stop it.

  * * *

  everything

  * * *

  Iseult gripped her neck as if to smother what was inside.

  * * *

  mother. i am going to be married. i think you would like him. he is kind to me. i think it might be all right.

  then what is the matter i shall go with you wherever you go and we three shall live together it will be like it is with your father you and i together i am sure he is a decent man if you say he is and if he is he will be as content as your father to leave us alone

  but … but.…

  mealy-mouthed child what is it spit it out

  * * *

  Iseult leaned her cheek against the cool window, watching the raindrops trip over each other in their haste.

  * * *

  could i have some time on my own? when i am talking with jacob, if i could be on my own with him, then i promise i would come and talk to you about everything.

  * * *

  Beatrice’s voice went cold as steel, and the hinges of Iseult’s jaw stung as if she’d eaten a lemon.

  * * *

  no i don’t think so iseult i know you don’t trust me well i no longer trust you not to try to get rid of me forever to get me out out out you’re trying to kill me your mother you’re trying to kill your mother

  i am not mother i swear to you that i am not.

  oh no iseult you won’t trick me again with your needles and your knives you can stab me to death but you’ll only kill yourself i won’t leave you again not when you need me so much that you no longer know your own mind i won’t leave you ever my darling and you are going to love me as a girl should love her mother as the best girl would you are the best girl you are my best girl

  * * *

  Sometimes in life you are beaten, and there’s nothing more to say about it. Iseult had never won an argument with her mother by trying to speak reasonably, by convincing her that she was wrong. Iseult had never won an argument with her mother at all.

  And in the past, that had been all right. If the argument was truly upsetting to Iseult, she had her ways of cooling down, cooling her mother down. Her tools always came in handy when she needed a respite, even though she knew it would be temporary.

  At the moment, she knew, retaliation of any sort would anger her mother further, and her cheek and jaw hurt too badly to contemplate such a thing. She heard a faint knocking over Beatrice’s monologue, and the knocking sound began to grow louder. Iseult wondered whether the sound was coming from inside her head until Mrs. Pennington stepped through the door, sweaty and exasperated.

  “Are you going to explain to me what on earth is going on?” she said loudly, looking more annoyed than concerned as she inspected Iseult’s rapidly swelling cheek. “All sorts of noises and goings-on and pretending nothing’s happening. And there’s blood on the wall of the landing and Lord knows how I’ll clean that up.”

  Iseult would have liked to leave her mother and Mrs. Pennington to argue with each other instead of haranguing her.

  “I tripped,” she lied. She and the housekeeper stared at each other, each willing the other to be the first to concede defeat. Mrs. Pennington shook her head slowly, clearly not believing Iseult for a moment, but lacking the energy to press the issue.

  “If that’s what you’d like the story to be, I won’t argue with you. But come down to the kitchen with me and we’ll see if we can’t at least make it look less angry. Did you bite your tongue, is that where the blood is from?” Mrs. Pennington had sidled right up and was poking her fingers inside Iseult’s mouth. They tasted sweet, and floury.

  “Are you making a pie?” Iseult intended to say. It was a little more muddled with fingers in her mouth. Still, she was understood.

  “Not
just one pie; Sarah and I are making as many as we can.” Mrs. Pennington, satisfied that the damage to Iseult’s mouth wasn’t too severe, wiped her fingers on her apron. “And one started burning right before you walked into the wall.”

  “But why are you making so many pies?” Iseult let herself be led out of her room and down the stairs. Beatrice was still prattling on, but she wasn’t saying anything worth paying attention to. Iseult could almost have pretended that someone was humming, if her head hadn’t still throbbed with her mother’s efforts at punctuation.

  Iseult could see (even though her vision was not to be trusted at the moment) that Mrs. Pennington looked cagey, and had something to tell her that she definitely did not want to tell her. And although what Iseult felt for the housekeeper was most likely as close to love as she was ever going to get, sometimes it angered her that she was so often treated as someone who couldn’t be trusted with the basic facts of her own life.

  “There’s to be a bit of an evening tomorrow.” Mrs. Pennington was oversolicitous helping Iseult down the stairs.

  As much as her head hurt, as shaky as she felt, as constantly as Beatrice was droning on, Iseult felt something inside of her strengthen. “Am I always to be treated like a child who can’t be given the slightest bit of information?”

  Mrs. Pennington drew breath. “Your father has invited your aunt’s family for dinner and he instructed me not to tell you in case you tried to excuse yourself.”

  Iseult opened her mouth, ready for a retort about her father, but Mrs. Pennington wasn’t finished. “And Mr. Vinke and his family will also be in attendance.”

  Iseult’s mouth opened and shut and opened again, like a guppy’s.

  “But I saw him today,” she said more plaintively than she was sure she meant, “and he didn’t say a thing to me about it.”

  They had reached the still-smoking kitchen and Iseult was plonked down in a chair. “Well now, Miss, you leave me out of that part. I’ll not come between the bride and groom—don’t you roll your eyes at me!”

  Iseult knew that Mrs. Pennington was not entirely to blame for the fact that she was always treated like a child. It was more comfortable to be treated like a child, so in many ways she accepted, and often even relished it. It was just that sometimes she hated herself for that acceptance.

  “Now, let’s see about cleaning you up, because we can’t have you looking like this tomorrow night,” Mrs. Pennington said, huffing herself down in front of Iseult with several towels and a bowl of cold water. She scrutinized Iseult’s cheek and began dabbing away, then set to work on a complicated arrangement of cold wet towels that she tied over the top of Iseult’s head, “to get that swelling down.”

  Mrs. Pennington sat down and put a small plate of raw pie dough, Iseult’s favorite, in front of her. She reached out a hand and took a small nibble, smiling. The muscles felt tight with disuse.

  “Now then.” Mrs. Pennington crossed her arms and fixed her eyes on Iseult. “What do you want to know?”

  “About what? The dinner party tomorrow?”

  Mrs. Pennington’s nose wrinkled. “No, dear, not about the dinner party, although you’ll be pleased to know that I’ve only put things that you like on the menu, even though it annoyed your father. No dear, don’t you have any questions about marriage? Without your mother here, I thought maybe you would have some questions, and I know that you aren’t particularly close to your aunt, or even your cousin for that matter, and I thought, well, if you had anything to ask, you could ask me.”

  Iseult put more dough in her mouth, feeling her face grow hot and red. She put a hand up to her cheek and was surprised to feel the slightly raised areas still suffering from the poorly applied rouge. Had that really only been last night?

  * * *

  what does she know the great cow she’s trying to usurp us again

  i don’t think you’re using that word quite right, mother.

  nonsense i still know what i’m about she thinks she can replace me in your affections what could she tell you about marriage that i can’t tell you myself i’ll tell you anything you need to know don’t listen to her what if she’s doing your father’s bidding the cow the great bloody cow

  * * *

  “What was your husband like?”

  “‘Was’? Is,” Mrs. Pennington corrected. “Mr. Pennington has not yet gone to his reward, not that I’m aware. Mind you, it’s hard to tell.”

  It was very difficult to know sometimes if Mrs. Pennington was speaking in metaphor or hard truths. But if you were content to let her keep talking, she explained herself in the end. She continued. “I felt more sure of him in the days when he would run off for a week or two every six months or so. Every time he came back, he was all flowers and apologies, and in the month before he was off again he was a blur, couldn’t sit still or stop talking. But that broken leg never healed right, you know, and that slows a man down in all sorts of ways. Oh, he’ll still drag his sorry bones down to the local once or twice a week, to keep some semblance of routine, but usually he just sits in that chair and grumbles at the papers.”

  Iseult felt ashamed. She couldn’t remember having heard a thing about a broken leg, to say nothing of what sounded like serial philandering. (She thought that was what was being implied, although she was by no means sure.)

  “Do you … like him?” Iseult’s fingers crawled over for more dough. She wondered why she had such a hard time deciphering other people’s feelings. She needed them to come right out and say, I am happy. I am sad. She wondered whether she was stupid or whether hers was the normal behavior of the motherless child.

  Mrs. Pennington leaned back in her chair, arms folded, eyes distant. “Like him? I wouldn’t say that exactly. I’m used to him, that’s all.”

  There was a crumb of dough with flour still sticking to the side, and Iseult blotted it up with her tongue, enjoying its empty taste. “Did you ever like him?”

  There was a pause, and Mrs. Pennington sighed. “Of course I did. When we were young, and he was handsome, at least a little bit. Before we were married, he was charming. Rough around the edges, mind you, but so was I.”

  * * *

  rough around the edges indeed when she first came to the house she was uncouth as a beggar child in the street i had to teach her all sorts of manners didn’t know how to walk to talk to be polite or silent or do a lady’s hair or use a buttonhook

  * * *

  Iseult thought about Jacob. She thought she probably liked him. He was handsome enough, if silver. There was no getting around that inconvenience. He could be bold, and Iseult felt certain he would only get bolder, but he was not half so rough as her father, whom she had never liked at all. She thought boldness was likely preferable to her father’s veneer of politeness. It was a very well-constructed façade that most people were unable to see through. But Iseult could always hear the undercurrents. He sneered at everyone. She could not imagine Jacob sneering at anyone who didn’t deserve it, and maybe not even at them. Would he sneer at her father? For her sake, perhaps?

  “Is that why you married him? Because he was handsome?” Iseult knew that Mrs. Pennington knew that Jacob was silver, but they had not spoken of it. She wanted to know whether it was the gradual waning of handsomeness that made Mr. Pennington intolerable, but she didn’t know how to phrase the question. Because maybe Jacob’s handsomeness would fade, leaving her with the novelty of his skin color, and she could see how that might get on one’s nerves after a time. She had never been one for novelty.

  “Well, of course that had something to do with it,” Mrs. Pennington said. “But mostly I married him because he made me happy. Well, that and no one else seemed likely to ask me.”

  “Did he stop making you happy, then? Did it happen right away?”

  “Oh, not right away, no,” she said. “It was fine for a while, but once the children were born he stayed out later and later, and then he started not coming home at all, weeks at a time.” She glanced at Iseult’s
face and tried to change tack. “I mean, we still had our good times, still do, every now and then—but don’t you worry yourself, love. He was always a scoundrel, not at all like your Mr. Vinke.”

  Iseult stiffened and tried to look haughty, which is impossible when you have a puffy face swaddled in towels. “He is not my Mr. Vinke.”

  Mrs. Pennington just smiled and patted Iseult’s knee before rising with one of her customary groans and making her way back to the pies. Iseult felt a sharp stab of pain somewhere indefinable as she thought of what life would be like without the constant companion she almost always took entirely for granted. She tried to keep the panic out of her voice. “You will be coming with me, won’t you?”

  “Coming where, love?”

  “Coming to—to where I go. When I marry.” Iseult regretted that she’d eaten all of the dough, because if the answer was to be no, she was going to want a lot of it.

  Mrs. Pennington didn’t even turn around. “Well, of course I will; why wouldn’t I? Silly girl, what would your father want with me about the house all day? I’ve got a cousin who’ll be taking my place here. You wouldn’t have met her, though. Next week I’ll start showing her what she needs to know, and as soon as Mr. Vinke has sorted out your living arrangements I’ll be there.”

  Iseult smiled even though her face hurt, and another bowl of pie dough appeared on the table before her. She wondered whether she ought to say something to express her appreciation, but thought better of it. Anyway, Beatrice was continuing to grumble, and the nicer a thing Iseult said, the worse the punishment she would get.