Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  It’s true the university is as much a pillar of civilization as the trades—bricklaying—in Providence. It’s fashionable to be sort of self-conscious about their little city; or maybe not so little: just last night Heather’s daughter, Persia, fourteen, discovered online that it ranked as a “global metropolis.”

  Who knew?

  Then Garrett crowded his sister at the desktop and Persia cried out that “Alpha ++” cities were in blood red while “sufficiency cities,” like Providence, Ciudad Juarez, and Kaohsiung, were in anorexic yellow.

  “Anemic,” Heather had murmured.

  In the east the sky is translucent.

  A dog and owner pair materialize before her and she hates to greet them, but they’re not forthcoming either, and no word is exchanged as the parties meet and separate. She can’t help thinking that Gilda would have loved the fact that a psychologist couldn’t choke out hello in the neighbory morning.

  The ghost moves swiftly down the block ahead of her. It’s five two, the sweater becomes a caftan, Heather suspects it’s been looking in all the neighbors’ windows.

  Sometimes Gilda made up her eyes so heavily they seemed recessed. The mask was primitive and ageless.

  The ghost vaporizes around the corner. Gilda admitted to belittling the other school moms out of insecurity. And in the neighbors, muted New Englanders who raised indoor children, hired yard work but not gardeners, she diagnosed a self-deprecation that had nothing to do with self-knowledge.

  Heather trips over a joint in the sidewalk ruptured by the roots of a big old linden. A hairy beast of a tree holding onto its dried wings and potato-smelling flowers.

  Neurosis or ritual that she walks past Gilda’s house every morning? Icicle chandeliers circa 1875, nautilus staircases, stained glass and deep wood paneling. Wrought iron, slate, corn-starch plaster. Gilda in dismay: “Our house isn’t fancy anymore with us in it.”

  Heather’s own house holds the heat in summer and the cold in winter and with wall cavities full of old knob and tube it’s impossible to insulate.

  But of course they’ve corrupted their houses. Bundles of alarm wires, smoke detectors, shapeless family rooms.

  A pair of young professionals live in Gilda’s house now, commuting to Boston, nesting on weekends like shy storks. There’s a sense of stewardship, as Matthew says, when you live in a house built two centuries ago. But also of passing through. Ghost-like.

  She pauses at the bottom of the steep granite stairs. She can see Gilda at the top, all four kids arrayed around her, Maggie, Rachel, the little twins Ben and Lila. A precarious glass of white wine somewhere in the picture.

  She sees Gilda descending with her small hand trailing behind on the iron railing. She imagines tight black garbage bags of Gilda’s clothes bouncing down the same stairs, abandoned at the donation bay behind the Salvation Army.

  She would have looked through every pocket, every fold, to find some message. It’s a cliché but so is death: some meaning.

  Giant showerheads of dill poke up out of the community garden in the hollow of the playing fields. Two years Heather was on the waiting list. The in-crowd strutting bristles of parsley, photogenic cherry tomatoes. Bourgeoisie, as Gilda said, but who knew the neighbors could conjure those bright yellow and orange daisies Heather had just learned were calendula?

  A couple of off-leash dogs zoom around the split-rail fence, a congregation of captive humans in the faded baseball diamond. How do dog owners have so much to say to each other? Is it going to be as hot as yesterday? The day is still poised, undecided. Pink mist rises from the bean teepees and sunflowers. Heather looks up.

  There’s a channel of blue sky through the clouds.

  A long, shirred contrail.

  Once Gilda showed up at a dinner party wearing a belted kimono. Nothing underneath—she flashed Heather coming out of the bathroom. It would have been the Scheidels’, there would have been gossip about the head of lower school, bearded, corpulent, marinated in coffee, how he said mothers in this community would do well to check some of their parking lot chitchat, how it was war now between him and the mothers.

  Gilda’s cold, dry hand was suddenly on top of hers. In a low voice, “I want to get out of here.” She didn’t look at Heather directly. They both let it settle.

  The Scheidels’ dining room was over-lit, the table bald as a mirror between dishes and paper napkins. Females with forced hair, glad-handing males had nothing to say that they hadn’t said already. Tracy Donlon, on Heather’s other side, was red-nosed and chafed from Shiraz—her son cried when he didn’t get one hundred percent on his spelling, Garrett reported, then petitioned for a retake, and the teacher obliged because she thought she was supposed to reward self-advocacy.

  “Come with me?” said Gilda. Heather looked around. She had not uttered a full sentence all evening. The Scheidels’ daughter had scampered down the stairs in her ballet slippers to practice taking their coats in port de bras, Joe Scheidel received the bottle of wine apologetically, Julia Scheidel’s long hands flew up in surprise at the chocolates.

  Heather poked at her pesto chicken, her spiral pasta pesto. Otis Redding atmospherizing from the air-conditioning ducts in the ceiling.

  “I used to lust after getting invited to these parties,” whispered Gilda. “Back in the 1950s.”

  Heather laughed belatedly.

  “What’s so funny down there,” called Julia. Tracy Donlon pretended she’d been part of Heather and Gilda’s conversation but Heather and Gilda were more or less a bottleneck of close friendship.

  Now the heat is stirring. Every summer gets hotter but it’s not called global warming, Garrett admonishes her.

  She and Gilda agreed they’d never gut their houses for central air, like the Scheidels, though. In retrospect, natural enough for heliotropic Gilda, who tanned to walnut, donned those goddess dresses with straps that slipped as she shouldered bags, children. Heather’s feet get thick in the heat. She never had the arms, even before the yoga standard, for sundresses.

  She catches the ghost out of the corner of her eye walking Gilda’s three-legged dog, forced to zigzag awkwardly behind him. The ghost’s sundress brushes the ground.

  Heather stumbles on a seam again and stops, shaken. What was it, in light of Gilda’s death, that was false about Gilda’s life? Gilda, you liar. Betrayer of the pact between the living to keep living.

  But every time she fake-talks to Gilda she ends up feeling defeated. The self-help canon would have a field day with her, as would her pastor, who’s lately affected “mindfulness” as the antidote to all “reactivity.”

  Curriculum night, the terrarium brightness, Gilda performing for the school moms: “You’d think I had PTSD,” re: the difficulty of recovering from the front lines of childrearing.

  Heather had laughed along, but really she was more alarmed that her kids spent their days cooped up in such a classroom, stuffy with hamster, while she was so well-suited to her position as a three-quarter-time administrator, telling anyone who asked how she adored her colleagues and the folks she served through the mission-driven hospital.

  Gilda had never worked “outside the home,” she’d say, evoking mid-century mystique. Then, ominously, “I work inside the loony bin,” and everyone would be won over. Heather would call her midday in good weather, walk breaks replaced smoke breaks in the progressive workplace culture, and Gilda would answer her phone anywhere, any time. Even if the conversation was potholed by the twins, Ben and Lila, or she was dawdling in the presence of the earth-shatteringly beautiful Latina girl who slaved away at the Chinese cleaners (they found it incomprehensible that the girl hadn’t been discovered), Gilda was also, always, listening. If Heather didn’t know it then, she knows it now: she felt unconditionally loved when Gilda was listening.

  Come on! Heather wants to shake her. She’d shake the corpse till everything that was loose fell out, teeth and toenails. Couldn’t you have gotten fat, gotten drunk, stayed drunk, stayed in bed all day, before y
ou killed yourself, Gilda?

  A jogger comes up behind her, his dog after him, busy with the smells under holly hedges, the stains at dog height on the slender street trees. Why did Gilda do it, but also why did she think she did it? Heather overtakes the dog squatting irritably in someone’s blighted little flower patch. There’s no solution. The jogger up ahead, unaware, the street suddenly in full daylight, Gilda had that scurrying walk, furtive almost—the dog keens as the ghost passes.

  She’s late returning from her morning walk, and Matthew’s already hollering, “Out the door!” as the kids flail and whiz around her. Persia has a babysitting job for the neighbors, and this is Garrett’s fifth consecutive week at soccer camp, a.k.a., as he says, paradise, which Persia has noted makes him sound like a jihadist. What a cliché, effortlessly adapted by her brainpan. There’s a round of goodbyes and then the house is abruptly silent.

  Heather stands back from the front door as if struck, immobilized.

  The house seems enormous in its quiet, a dark forest, her floors are oak, fir, and maple. It’s more than her share, she knows this deeply. In fact, who does she think she is? There it is again: she has always tried to live in some kind of reasonable proportion. Fuel-efficient cars; she’s let Japanese knotweed take over her yard rather than water a hobnob of little boxwoods from Home Depot; and if Matthew bemoans the fact that two thousand kids pass through Econ—that’s two-thirds of the undergraduate population—and he has to woo and bribe to keep classes half full in History, he can still walk to the university.

  Who is she talking to? Her life in proportion to what?

  Lemons softening in her favorite glass bowl. What had she imagined a family of four would do with a bowl of lemons? Not even Garrett had seen lemonade in them. She suspects she’ll find blue fur on their slack bellies.

  She looks around her forest. Garrett’s unreasonably long and damp soccer socks deposited like bunched cocoons; Persia’s food journal in which all the mothers and daughters are supposed to write positive things about body image; Garrett’s empty firefly jar—the last firefly was caught in 1971 in Providence.

  She sees Garrett dribbling the soccer ball crablike in the full sun. His new cleats remind her of the bean pods from their locust tree. She sees Persia, flat-chested but with a green-apple puberty headache, her new argyles pulled up over her knotted knees in a long tradition of trampy schoolgirls, reading The Hungry Caterpillar to the neighbor’s three-year-old.

  The kitchen smells like a lemon grove.

  She quit work six weeks after Gilda died. More than a year later she’s still home with herself as if she were an infant. She’s read that children raised by working moms are more resilient, have higher self-esteem, attend more prestigious colleges.

  She’s met with unapologetic darkness at the first turn in the basement stairs. Why does she always forget to turn the light on?

  So, laundry before breakfast dishes, before getting a job to impress her children. The cement floor is cool on her bare feet. She bats around for the chain on the light bulb. Brown paper bags of giveaway clothes stand at attention. She sees the concrete loading dock at the Salvation Army again, sees herself heaving the bags up to the recovering addict with haunches so melted by heroin he wears children’s blue jeans—

  She supposes she thought of Gilda as a fellow working mom, and Gilda considered her a sort of honorary stay-home mother. What did Gilda do all day, though? Besides laundry? She’d get bored of sororitizing and begin toying with the moms who bragged about their kids whizzing through some series: “But can I count you in for my Harry Potter book-burning party?”

  Matthew laughed fully when Heather told him, he had to suffer college kids playing that broomstick game out in the open, on the quad. She didn’t tell him that Gilda believed Harry Potter was underwritten by Big Pharma using an algorithm designed to promote Attention Deficit Disorder.

  Besides laundry, Gilda emailed writers of novels. Once she insisted Heather read a story by Doris Lessing that one of her writers had sent her, in a manila envelope, and here was the marked-up Xerox, the writer’s code of checks and circles and question marks in an off-putting green pencil, and Gilda’s descant in ballpoint.

  “To Room Nineteen.” Heather thought it was one of the most galling things she’d ever read, but when she leveled the accusation Gilda seemed pleased. “So tell me about it.”

  Briefly Heather wondered if it was a trap, but the story had in fact offended her, and she felt righteous. “Well,” said Heather, trying to match Gilda’s tone. “First of all,” she faltered.

  “The domain of vested privilege,” Gilda readily interrupted. “English gardens, lovely river behind the manor, faithful husband and four adorable children.” She paused with satisfaction. “Do we have a happy housewife?” Gilda shook her head no as if prompting kindergarteners.

  At first Heather had assumed the protagonist was a proxy for Doris Lessing. “Rookie mistake,” said Gilda.

  “Call it anomie, call it existential,” Gilda smiled, “but our poor housewife wants solitude.”

  Secretly Heather found it pretentious to talk about literature. The gas fireplace that requires a shilling in the hotel room in London where the housewife seeks her isolation wasn’t real; Heather could not feel the heat from it.

  But she could feel Doris Lessing’s nastiness, even cruelty, as she chases her protagonist further and further from center.

  The story ends with the housewife gassing herself in the hotel room, Room Nineteen—unreasonably, unjustifiably, with no sympathy from Lessing, no psychological intervention either.

  “What is she trying to say?” said Heather. “You want solitude, I’ll give you solitude?”

  To Heather’s irritation, Gilda had declared easily, “The insolubility of the modern woman.

  “Or maybe,” she’d added, “the suicide only proves that the protagonist is unreliable, like any other woman.”

  Heather leaves the giveaway bags behind and heads upstairs, promptly skidding on a T-shirt, banging her shin badly. “Fucking T-shirt.” She remembers how in the early days she had thought she herself discovered the genre of housekeeping complaints, transgressive. But then the fiber-optic lines were choked with racy female protest and it was revealed by blog, etc. that all the moms were cynical about laundry. Heather turns and nudges the T-shirt back down the basement stairs ahead of her. In fact it’s Persia’s favorite, and it would be unconscionable not to wash it.

  Facing the paper bags again, she has to admit some of the giveaway clothes are so badly stained and torn not even the Salvation Army would want them. The reel picks up right where she left off: the sinewy smoker (“Human beef jerky!” said Garrett once, not unkindly) reaches down from the loading dock to receive her round-bottomed bags with their fragile paper handles. Another admission: she’s too cheap to use the heavy plastic garbage bags she buys for her own garbage. Garrett pointed out to her recently that you can read the name of the person who made the paper bag if you look at the base where it’s folded. The kids’ school has an annual yard sale fundraiser and she’s always being nabbed to donate. To be honest, she said to Matthew, she’s a little freaked out by all that privilege going round and round. But really she’s embarrassed. She’s sure nobody else holds onto the junk she holds onto. There’s the cord of an old clock radio, its simple two-prong plug, a piteous relic. Her heart is a battered woman who will pick through “household goods” down the food chain, so to speak, in order to set up the tiny post-restraining-order efficiency, courtesy of the Salvation Army. A cutting board—but was she supposed to just toss it? It’s maple. Is it?—the shape of a fish, a houseguest present—it’s true, she has made use of it, it has probably been christened with runnels of meat juice, and she burns with shame as the battered woman holds the fish shape out with two hands for a long unsure moment.

  How does she get to feel sorry for herself as she feels sorry for the battered woman? How is it a twofer?

  She sits down on a cooler. Her eye
s pass over a tower of nested yogurt tubs. Empty shoeboxes. So many brown paper bags they’re like a species. Suddenly she remembers Gilda saying, “So many people can’t even have children, how can I complain that mine don’t pick up their socks?” And there’s that shockingly blunt instrument, grief. She has to stand up, she has to hug the washing machine for counter-pressure.

  Every day since Gilda’s death (she hears herself saying this), she has asked herself how much suffering tips a life over. When she reads in the paper that recent fiscal austerity has caused “great suffering,” she’s repulsed, and fear of the Afghanistan kind—those barren moon shots—the Holocaust kind, of course, grips her. How much pain? How high did the water have to rise to sweep Gilda away from her? Is suffering indigenous to motherhood or is it our modern condition? And is she exhibiting signs of the condition by living with a running commentary, a comparison to non-modern times when breakfast dishes and laundry and socks on the floor weren’t so freighted? Were women at peace as they moved barefoot about the fire pit with their papooses? I’m talking to you, Gilda.

  Hi Gilda, (She has a recurring dream that Gilda’s name appears in her inbox and when she opens the email it’s not a message but a whole scene, colorful trees and firm sky, clouds like sifted flour.)

  I had a total breakdown the other morning, in the middle of the whole feeding and readying hustle, when I discovered that someone had left the freezer door open. Overnight!!

  A surge of ill will had overtaken her and bodied forth: for once in her life she wanted to name names. Cast blame. Just haul off and take someone to task, no more of this earnest disappointment: “Oooh, shoot, guys. It looks like the freezer door got left open.” Or as if she had a scientific interest in the big mess: “Wow! How about all this water on the floor, guys!” Or (she’s on a roll) an admiring curiosity: “All twenty-four organic ice cream sandwiches are liquefied in their packages.” Enough! Who did this? There’s ground beef, by God, in beautiful waxed-paper packages. Think of the poignant cows. The woolly lambs, the piglets with their quivering sawed-off noses. And clean it up while begging forgiveness!