Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

by Kristin Bair

  Meghan Wilson:

  “Germs. I’m so afraid of germs. I wear gloves all the time, which embarrasses the hell out of my kids. They beg me to take them off when I visit their schools for a parent/teacher conference or ice cream social, but I can’t. They’re getting old enough to know most mothers don’t wear gloves 24 hours a day, and they’re starting to hate me for it. Soon they’ll hate me completely. I’m even typing with my gloves on.”

  Samantha Yang:

  “Dogs.”

  Priya Devi:

  “I’m afraid of mice, and I know there’s one in my basement. I spotted his droppings a few days ago, and I haven’t gone down since. It’s a fucking mouse, for god’s sake. I’m a million times bigger than him. But still, I’m terrified. I’m going to send my laundry to the dry cleaners so I don’t have to go down there.”

  David Watkins:

  “Not being accepted for who I am.”

  Carla Met:

  “Failing. At my job, at parenting, at life. It keeps me from taking any kind of risk or trying something new. Drives my husband batty because I talk about it constantly. Sometimes I think he’s going to take off and leave me behind because I’m so annoying.”

  Grainne O’Neill:

  “Me, too. Fear of failure is my greatest weakness. I was passed up for a promotion because of it. A promotion I wanted and that I was quite qualified for. But the hiring director said they needed a risk-taker and I hadn’t shown that characteristic in the three years I’d been at my job. It sucked. But I still haven’t taken a risk.”

  Katie Kim:

  “White water rafting.”

  Deirdre Heathers:

  “Scary movies.”

  Agatha gives her a fist bump.

  Blonde Brenda What’s-Her-Name:

  “My kids dying.”

  Tanya West:

  “Sneezing in public cuz it makes me pee my pants and I don’t want to wear Depends.”

  Anne Pape:

  “Getting old.”

  Lots of funny-face emojis pop up after the getting old one. It seems everyone but Agatha is afraid of that. That’s the one thing that doesn’t worry her.

  High Priestess Poston:

  “Just saw this thread and scrolled up to see who posted the original question. Honestly did a double-take, Agatha, when I saw your photo next to the post. Kudos.”

  Kudos for what?

  She doesn’t ask. For once she keeps her mouth shut. She just sips her pinot noir and reads through the crazy-ass fears the Moms are sharing.

  Faith Flanagan:

  “Flying. My kids live all over the world. Hong Kong. Scotland. France. And I rarely see them because they’re too busy to visit and I’m too chicken to fly. I’m retired. I have money. My kids love me and want to see me. But I can’t get on a plane. How f’d up is that?”

  Amanda Stout:

  “Leaving my house, at all. I haven’t gone out the door in two years. Not once.”

  Melody Whelan:

  “I’m most afraid that the people who are most afraid will not achieve their true potential because they remain governed by their fears.”

  If anyone else had spit out this mumbo jumbo, Agatha would have called them on it, but knowing Melody the bit she does, she knows she is telling her truth. Melody Whelan’s fear is all about others not achieving their true selves. Agatha doesn’t know what mix of DNA and voodoo occurred at the moment this woman had been conceived, but this is who she is.

  Agatha also knows that while she wasn’t specifically mentioned, Melody is talking directly to her.

  Agatha Arch:

  “Thanks for all the input, ladies.”

  She despises the word ladies but it feels right in this context. Convivial even.

  High Priestess Poston:

  “Agatha, have you been abducted by aliens and forced to engage in a congenial and helpful conversation with the Moms? Type a poop emoji for yes.”

  Agatha laughs. She is actually kind of glad someone says it out loud.

  Agatha Arch:

  “Nope, no aliens, Jane. Thanks, all. Nice to know I’m not the only one afraid of shit in the world.”

  She called her Jane. Not High Priestess. Not HP. Not you giant pain in the ass.

  High Priestess Poston:

  “”

  Melody:

  “Never the only one, Agatha Arch, never the only one.”

  * * *

  Agatha dreams about Susie. She asks all the questions she wants to ask the world.

  Is it possible to feel afraid and brave at the same time?

  Happy and sad?

  Hopeful and bleak?

  Benevolent and malevolent?

  Awake and dormant?

  Horny and hideous?

  * * *

  In response to the last, she wakes lustful. She wants to roll over and into and onto some body that wraps itself around her. Legs and arms and tongues. Weeks have passed without a single touch. Weeks. Good god. Weeks. All this post-shed turmoil is hard but this may be the hardest part. Definitely the loneliest. Who can I kiss? she wonders.

  Scrape, slide, slide.

  Slide, scrape, slide.

  The Tush?

  Kiss the Tush?

  No.

  Slide, slide, scrape.

  Maybe.

  Agatha hauls herself out of bed and pulls her “Who Can I Bonk?” hat from a pre-marriage box in her closet. She smiles and puts it on.

  “You have a ‘Who Can I Bonk?’ hat?” Shrinky-Dink asks when Agatha shares the story.

  “Not a real one,” Agatha says, rolling her eyes. “It’s metaphorical.”

  Hat in place, she digs around in drawers and boxes until she finds a couple of silky dress-up things from her pre-kid life that were too snug when she’d tried them a few months ago for a night out with Dax but that fit just fine now that she’s been on the my-husband-screwed-the-dog-walker-in-the-shed-and-left-me diet for a few weeks. They smell like mothballs, but they’ll do.

  She peeks out the window, spots the Tush on the ladder near the east corner of the house, and targets him as her very first my-husband-screwed-the-dog-walker-in-the-shed-and-left-me lover. He’s perfect. Convenient, responsible, and, just as the Moms promised, he has a great tush.

  In a few hours’ time, she develops a strategy for the development of their tryst. It’s simple really. She will sashay about the yard in alluring clothes, then saunter into the house and toss back a look of longing and lust. The Tush will come to the door and growl, “I’m thirsty.” She will wag a bare shoulder at him and say, “I’m thirsty, too.” He will narrow his eyes, raise his eyebrows, and smile ever so slightly. Then he will throw open the screen door, whip her into his paint-spattered arms, and take her right there and then on the kitchen table.

  Perfect plan.

  It lasts three days.

  * * *

  Day 1: Agatha pulls on the low-cut lavender bubbly thing with a pair of white jeans and some jingly-bell sandals. Then she delivers a cold, sweaty glass of iced tea to the Tush, holding her own sweaty glass against her now mothbally cleavage.

  * * *

  Nothing.

  * * *

  Day 2: Agatha dons the shortest dress in the world—a shirt, really—but forgets she is wearing her faded gramma gutchies until a gust of wind whips up the dress and reveals her truth to the world. And to the Tush.

  * * *

  Nothing.

  * * *

  Day 3: She steps into her roller skates [“Roller skates?” Shrinky-Dink is incredulous when she hears this.] and spins around the driveway in a yellow tank top with her boobs poking out like torpedoes. When, for whatever unfathomable reason, this final display of desire does not cause the Tush to swoon with desire, she tries a double spin, loses control, and slams face first into one of the oak trees. This, at least, makes the Tush leap down from the ladder, run to her side, and inquire about her well-being. After confirming that she is not critically injured from the impact, he eyes the swell of her
cheek and says, “That’s going to bruise. You might want to ice it.” Then he makes his way back up the ladder, his adorable tush swishing and swagging in his painter whites. “Perhaps women your age should avoid roller skating,” he adds when he gets to the top. “My mother gave it up years ago.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Though she’s not sure why, Agatha accepts Melody’s third invitation to lunch. Maybe she is curious or lonely. Maybe she’s worn down. Maybe some greater cosmic energy intervenes and calls out in a deep, echo-y voice, “It is time to have lunch with the Kumbaya Queen.” She’s not into the God thing, but every once in a while, she does get the feeling there’s something more than mere humans governing the beauteous fuck-up of a world.

  When Melody answers, “Great! Does next Friday at noon work for you?” Agatha panics. Does next Friday at noon work for you? This response is so normal—so banal—she knows it has to have some hidden meaning.

  But finally, she responds, keeping it just as simple. “Yes,” she writes.

  “You know the house,” Melody writes back, letting Agatha know she has not forgotten the spying incident.

  “Oh, I’m not sure I do,” Agatha replies. “Address?”

  She can hear Melody tsking through the internet.

  “164 North Circle Street.”

  * * *

  During the week leading up to the lunch, Agatha obsesses. Is this going to be some kind of intervention? Are five hundred Wallingford Moms going to be present, encouraging Agatha to be kinder and gentler? Will the Moms join hands in a circle around her, sway like pines in the wind, and sing “Kumbaya”? Will Marty Snow deliver notice of her final eviction from the Moms group, citing lunacy and erratic behavior? Will Melody have a therapist waiting in the wings to whisk her away to a rehab center immediately following the gathering, like they do on afternoon talk shows?

  But the scariest question of all is, will Melody invite the Interloper? Will she use this lunch as an opportunity to introduce the two of them, to cajole Agatha into seeing the Interloper as a wounded soul instead of imminent danger? This is the possibility that gets Agatha’s stomach churning, and that week she gets even less sleep than normal. She tosses and turns, tosses and turns, from the time she gets into bed to the time she gets out.

  * * *

  “For in the end, freedom is a personal and lonely battle; and one faces down fears of today so that those of tomorrow might be engaged.” Alice Walker

  Fears of today. Fears of today. Agatha slams the book closed and tries to pick one to face down.

  Mice?

  The dark?

  Fireworks?

  Tunnels?

  Bridges?

  Men with tiny patches of hair on their chins?

  Alien invasion?

  Ghosts?

  Beans?

  Drowning?

  Not fitting in?

  Public bathrooms?

  Anesthetic?

  Surgery?

  Shadows?

  Nope, nope, nope.

  That stranger on the street?

  Uh uh. Cross the street before you have to deal with that one.

  Butterflies?

  Can’t they just stop flitting around and land on something?

  Being alone?

  Grrr.

  The rats Kerry promises will be invading the yard?

  Absolutely not.

  The Interloper?

  Hell no.

  * * *

  The second nor’easter of the season blows in overnight. It’s a doozy, but by dawn still no snow, just rain and wind and more rain, and the Moms thanking goodness for that. Agatha is awake early, monitoring a cupcake kerfuffle in the group when an ad for brush-clearing goats pops up in her FB feed. Brush-clearing goats? She has never heard of such a thing, but vacillates between finding out if one of Wallingford’s finest specialty bakers is going to make a new batch of Minion cupcakes for the Mom who is royally pissed that her cupcakes look more like penises than Minions OR finding out if the goat thing is real.

  She stares at the yard-cum-meadow—wet, muddy, beautiful, and beastly, like her heart—posts a GIF of a Minion waltzing with a cartoony penis, and calls the goat company. “Is this a real thing?” she asks the woman who answers. “I can hire goats to clear a yard? An overgrown yard? An eyesore, as my neighbor calls it?”

  “It’s a real thing, ma’am. Better than poisonous chemicals. Better than a bulldozer. Better than a hundred lazy men. Eyesores are our specialty.”

  “The goats eat the weeds?”

  “The goats eat the weeds.”

  The Moms are mad as hell about the cupcakes. “Damn the Penis-Maker-Baker,” one Mom writes. The specialist baker, previously known as Barbara, will now be referred to as Penis-Maker-Baker until the end of time or the end of Facebook.

  “The goats eat poison ivy?” Agatha asks the goat woman.

  “They eat poison ivy.”

  “Do they smell?”

  “Absolutely not. Goats are very clean creatures.”

  “How about their poop? Does it stink?”

  “No, goat excrement is odorless, and it’s terrific fertilizer. A true gift of nature.”

  Another Mom asks if anything was broken or thrown or hurled in the bakery during the altercation. Fists, cupcakes, spatulas?

  There was hand-slapping, a tossing of the receipt, and lots of yelling, the poster assures.

  “How quickly do goats clear an area?” Agatha says into the phone, trying to stay focused.

  “It depends on the size, density of brush, weather, and so forth. Baseline, four goats can eat a quarter of an acre of shrubbery and weeds in a week.”

  “Wow.”

  “That’s what our customers say.”

  The Moms are piling on. It’s like that king of the hill game-not-game you play as a kid.

  “Do goats destroy structures?”

  “Structures?”

  “Like a shed. Or what used to be a shed.”

  Agatha hears the wind pick up. It sounds like a train coming out of a tunnel.

  “No, no, that’s the beauty,” the goat woman says. “These sweet peas eat the unwanted stuff and leave everything else intact.”

  “Amazing,” Agatha says.

  “Now they might climb on a structure. They are climbers and leapers. It’s a goat thing.”

  Agatha nods. “Not a problem. The shed is in shambles already.”

  “Perfect,” the goat woman says. “Anything other questions?”

  The Moms are pulling orders from Penis-Maker-Baker, vowing to ruin her hard-won reputation. They’ve loved her desperately until this very moment, for her Thomas the Train cakes, the Having-a-Baby vagina cake, and her flowers, oh, her flowers, but that’s how it goes in the Moms group, as Heidi Klum says on Project Runway, “One day you’re in, the next day you’re out.”

  “No,” Agatha says. “It just sounds too good to be true.”

  “It’s good. It’s true.”

  “How soon can I book them?”

  Agatha clicks back to the Moms group. It turns out that Penis-Maker-Baker has refused to bake another batch. Her Minion cupcakes are loved near and far. She knows it and she stands her ground. “She said, ‘I will not do it! They are not penises. They are Minions,’” the poster reports.

  The next crack of lightning is followed by a deafening boom, and one of the two mighty oaks is felled. It hits the house, shakes it, scoots the furniture a few inches this way, and rattles the windows a few inches that way. The boys come running, and Agatha’s heart jumps all the way to the moon and she thinks about the “My Favorite Things” scene in The Sound of Music but can’t bring herself to utter a note or dance with her curtains because there is no Dax to calm the waters, so she holds on to those boys in the room now darkened by the oak flush against the window and thinks about Janie and Tea Cake fleeing the hurricane and the cow swimming in the flood with the massive dog on its back.

  That book. About so much more than a hurricane.

&n
bsp; This tree. This downed tree. About so much more than a nor’easter.

  In the days that follow, Penis-Maker-Baker receives two death threats as a result of the altercation, and as far as anyone knows, these are the first death threats ever to be issued as a result of a Moms group posting. It is frightening but thrilling.

  It also affirms Agatha’s prediction about an eventual murder in a Moms group.

  It comes that close.

  * * *

  Agatha shimmies through a narrow space between the driveway and the trunk of the oak.

  “Agatha? Agatha!” It’s Kerry Sheridan. “Are you and the boys okay?”

  “We are,” Agatha says. She pushes a bunch of orange leaves out of the way and tries to step through the tangle, but a branch blocks her path. “Storms make you stronger,” she says.

  Kerry’s eyes get wide. “What?”

  “Storms make you stronger. Bear says that.”

  “He does?”

  “Yup.”

  “I hope he’s right.”

  Agatha pulls her Leatherman Super Tool 300 EOD from a pocket and opens the saw. She pulls the blade back and forth against the thick branch. “He’s always right.”

  Kerry looks dubious.

  “This tree hit the house hard.” Agatha sighs. The northeast corner is smasheroo’d. It’s pretty clear the Tush isn’t going anywhere soon.

  When a blister starts to form on her thumb, she stops sawing, gets outs her phone, and calls TreeLife. There has to be some kind of guarantee.

  * * *

  “Do not bark,” Shrinky-Dink says. “Do not bark at Melody Whelan. Do not bark at Jane Poston. Do not bark at the Interloper. Do not bark at Dax or Willow Bean or Kerry Sheridan or …”