Clothed, Female Figure

by Kirstin Allio

  Gilda had taken one look at her and narrowed her eyes, but Heather sat down anyway. Just then they caught sight of the self-appointed squirrel watch—Natalie? Valerie?—a near-emaciated former lawyer with purple adult acne, famous for her raw contempt of those who left Ziplocs of Cheerios or Craisins on the seats of strollers. Heather and Gilda had peeked at each other at the same moment and then fallen together in unfiltered, cathartic laughter.

  Valerie Marshall, Heather thinks now, who let it be known she was aching to get back to lawyering, and the other moms agreed—the moms who made fun of themselves for their own former lives as women—that she had surely been a formidable woman lawyer. The squirrels bugged and twitched around her as if she were St. Francis.

  No, Heather would rather die than spend an hour at a baby park now, the way the music of the ice cream truck wavers and goes flat in the distance.

  She leans on the door of the coffee shop to open it and waves to Christine and immediately feels flustered. She’s never sure about the whole order of greeting her friend, buying her coffee, doctoring her coffee, and the mild shame, in front of Christine, of soy milk. Should she sort of sign language to Christine from her place in line, or look straight ahead at the coffee-bean-porn poster? Today, the added embarrassment of decaf—her heart is already shattering, and frankly even the smell of coffee is making her a little nauseous.

  But there is no virtue in anxiety, she chides herself. What’s the worst that can happen? The awkward moment of silence when she sits down. She latches onto her straw and pulls up on the poison.

  She eyes Christine’s mug of tea with its green cast, teabag ballooned on the surface like a dead body. Christine catches her looking and pushes it away.

  A beat and a half goes by, or maybe it’s half an hour. Christine says, “I don’t know how people drink this veggie water.”

  Heather tries to laugh but it’s out of sync. Suddenly she realizes that somewhere along the way her mind has been swept clean of conversation. It’s a new level of loneliness; she has zero curiosity.

  That new song comes on the radio, or Pandora, “La-dy, running down to the riptide...” and Heather knows it’s not meant for their demographic but still, here’s a song Gilda will never hear. How could Gilda have done it, knowing pop songs would go on without her? She will never know that Hamas fought Israel in Gaza all summer! Gilda, a secular Jew whose memorial service was held in a congregational church—what would she say about Israel? That the birthright nation fought terrorists?

  She won’t get the news that people are once again wearying of Facebook (but still posting rows of hearts on Gilda’s wall, I miss yous), that Dan moved to a different state to get away from all the co-mothers. Heather’s grandmother died September 10, 2001, unsuspecting, slipping out with a whole era; for that matter, Persia was born and named in 1999, light-years before 9/11. What tears Heather apart is that the dead become innocents so quickly.

  “Well, you picked the wrong person to reach out to,” Christine says tiredly. For a moment Heather is too surprised to process. Then—she knows it’s not meant as a rebuke or a rejection, but it lands that way—she stares at Christine dumbly. Christine, usually polished and elegant with her auburn hair and pale skin, has traces of sunblock on her cheeks this morning. The person Heather wants to talk to about Gilda’s death is Gilda.

  “Heather?”

  She draws herself up. She has to go. She has to water her tomatoes in the community garden. The acid-soil smell of coffee! The rocks caught in the coffee grinder! She really has to go. The moment is suddenly unbearable, yet it bears her up, and she has a view of another school mom entering the coffee shop, all brokered up for her workday, deep in conversation with a male colleague. With superhuman effort she turns to Christine in parting.

  She knows she’s afraid to discover a “reason” for Gilda’s suicide. Why? Because it might be banal. It might just be life getting in the way of death. What if she found Gilda’s reason was no better than anything she herself could come up with?

  Outside, the air is still as if it’s been trapped under a hat for days. There’s the pungent smell of burning asphalt, summer roadwork on the surface streets in the university neighborhood, and the long rattle of a jackhammer. Her jeans are sticking to her thighs; who wears jeans in this weather? She doesn’t believe grown women should wear shorts though. The word “unseemly” lights up in her circuits but she’s not going to preach to the choir of herself right now, she’s not crazy. Not crazy? Do the math, as Persia says lately, because if she’s crazy, then everybody is crazy. If everybody has days they talk to themselves a little too constantly, loudly, days they can’t handle a simple coffee, why had Gilda been singled out?

  Her loose sandals snap the sidewalk. She turns into her own neighborhood, the houses themselves like neighbors. She passes her own house. She should stop to change her clothes but she can’t afford to lose her momentum.

  Gilda turned her nose up at the community garden. What really got her, she said, were burghers pretending to be hipsters, copping to be all down with zukes and compost. But then she accepted a plastic newspaper sleeve of herbs with uncensored delight, a handful of cherry tomatoes with reverence.

  A month after Gilda died there was a heat wave and it felt like high summer in May, like Heather had flown somewhere far away for vacation. Her light skirts and tank tops seemed foreign, and it was in this dislocated state that she found herself descending the hill toward the Westin one morning.

  She was always ashamed of her shock at downtown Providence; it surprised her that such a small city could sustain so many homeless people. Sustain? Or people who looked homeless, waiting for buses or friends or a cigarette, eyeing her with interest. She didn’t know if she should look back at them, as if to bear witness, or train her gaze on the horizon of office buildings, signaling her ease with manifold humanity. That morning was no different.

  She had never been inside the Westin, and pushing through the revolving doors she couldn’t help but feel she was passing into a netherworld. The shadowed lobby was refrigerated and she felt suddenly naked. Of course it was like any hotel in any city though, and she had the sense again of having traveled—taken a flight in a half daze—and that this was the first surreal hour of some half-dreamed vacation. There was a reception table in the center of the room with an enormous, formal, funeral-worthy arrangement of fresh flowers. Then Gilda passed her on the other side of the lilies and roses. She wore her full-length fake fur coat and dark glasses. There she was bunched at the desk, checking in, ready to die or not at all ready?

  She really just misses Gilda. It’s not fancy. She’s hardwired, she supposes, to be shocked and repulsed by death, and she is. But faced with it, with death, she finds she believes in everything. Ghosts, resurrection, wrinkles in time, miracles.

  Despite the heat she charges down the grass hill now, suddenly every minute matters in terms of her tomatoes. She rotates the dial on the lock to get the right combination of numbers, one, two, three, four: Persia had regarded her with disbelief when Heather inducted her, Persia who is mistress of a thousand and one night skies of passwords, each constellation an intricate admixture of caps and signs and numbers. The garden is at a midday droop, not so much listless as waiting, but already she feels better. She remembers her walk this morning and she looks up to find the sky again. Clouds like parchment.

  Her tomatoes could have used her attention yesterday, but the Velcro leaves are still green, and she turns her water cannon on them. The surface soil runs off the edges of the raised bed and she pauses to let the water soak deeper. Those weightless white pellets stay on top now. Are they Styrofoam? She lets the plants rest while she showers the fragrant tent of green beans, basil and nasturtium in the undergrowth.

  She gazes over the garden and catches motion. A figure in a long tunic, harem pants, and a floral patterned headscarf is passing suspiciously close along the outside of the split-rail. Heather steps to one side of her jungle to see better. The figure
drops to a crouch behind a screen of pea vines. Heather is suddenly aware that she’s breathing loudly through her mouth and she tries to calm herself. There’s a rustle in her own ears—it looks like the stranger is weaving her hand through the rabbit fence to get at someone’s bounty.

  Heather hears a voice: “Please don’t pick those tomatoes.” It’s her voice. Proprietary. Also supercilious. She sees the big cherry tomato plant shiver. She drops the hose on the ground.

  “No,” she says very clearly, striding across the garden.

  The stranger stands up on the other side of the fence. She’s heavy, swarthy, dirty, with striking dark-lashed green eyes. She’s holding a ball of used plastic shopping bags in one hand. She looks, improbably, like a gypsy, like the hardened older sister of the Afghan refugee girl from the National Geographic cover. Heather was twelve when that photograph came out, the same age, purportedly, as the refugee.

  Heather finds she can’t maintain eye contact. She takes in the plastic sandals, bare toes black with dirt. “No,” she says again, before she can stop herself.

  “No English,” replies the woman, staring straight at Heather. She holds up her hands and her plastic bags and backs away, but not so far that she isn’t still connected to the harvest. Is that a smile?

  A chasm opens up between them. Heather’s been wronged, she tells herself, but she feels unmoored rather than indignant. She doesn’t believe the woman has no English: the look in her eyes is of roaring intelligence.

  She hears herself babbling shrilly now, and finally the woman shrugs and moves off, obviously unashamed and unimpressed with Heather.

  Heather goes back to her plot and collects a few basil tips, a fallen tomato. She feels watched. She loops the heavy hose around its dock. She has to concentrate on not fleeing. She locks the gate behind her. She imagines the stranger already doubling back to the garden. She thinks of the National Geographic girl in her loose red hijab like a painting of the Virgin Mary. The longing Heather had, as a girl herself, to save her. By which she really meant befriend her.

  The neighborhood seems altered. She’s drawn toward the narrow passage behind one of the university gym buildings: an entire alley for the HVAC. She’s walked this way countless times but for the first time she notices the tough, shade-resistant plantings in gravel, the gigantic air-cycling roar, and the smokestacks. She feels cold and floaty. She sees the whole university athletic complex as a crematorium, she remembers reading recently that German prosecutors were beginning to use 3-D imaging of the death camps to recreate the vantage points of individual guards, in order to indict them.

  At that moment she sees the woman slipping around the hockey rink, a giant scallop shell of painted metal. Before she can think it through she starts after her. Come back! In her heart she’s relinquishing the whole garden. She too would have been a top-notch gatherer if she came from a stealer-gatherer society. She would have prowled the neighborhood in her rags, her plastic bags, unmoved by someone like herself. She begins to walk faster and then to run. Please! Let me open the gate for you! She can hear her own breathing with the HVAC. She’ll scale walls, drop and roll on the landscaping gravel if she has to. But she comes out the other end of the athletic complex and the woman has vanished.

  It’s too hot to run like this. She’s been left behind, the way the dead leave the living. The way Gilda alone knows her mystery. There’s some shade under a row of serviceberry trees and she stumbles into it.

  QUETZAL

  1

  In a vanished time (dinosaurs, thinks Marguerite), Marguerite and her mother lived in a one-room cottage between the landlord’s sea-captain Colonial and an overshadowing, porchy Victorian. 18½ Maple Street was hardly bigger than a child’s playhouse, but Marguerite’s mother was the beneficiary of the landlord’s particular New England philanthropy.

  Philanthropy, sure, but who could resist her mother, Diana? The beautiful young widow, natural mother of a child who looked nothing like her, gentle, presumably hopeful yet ravishing Diana, making a go of it in a forbidding climate, making sacrifices for her daughter, overqualified for her work at the library, known to take solitary winter walks along Newport’s public beaches. The wind salted and swept seaweed into giant nests for bird bones, as if some pterosaur had collapsed after its flight across the Atlantic.

  Mr. Goff, the philanthropist-landlord, was in his sixties, tall, with a high forehead and faded eyebrows, a drinker of gin in tablespoon measures, a pronouncer of long a’s, as in hahf and tomahto. Mrs. Goff had a 1950s waist and wore circle skirts to accentuate it. Her hand-loomed sashes and folky silver brooches were unique in Newport; the couple had lived in Guatemala. They had one child and he had died there. Perhaps sorrow had made them broadminded. Indeed it was because of the Goffs that Marguerite was under the impression that young single mothers like her mother were rare, and precious.

  Mr. Goff had renovated the cottage for Diana. There was a perfunctory kitchen along one wall, a prefabricated shower stall in the bathroom, and a fixed ladder to the open loft “bedroom.” His generosity was somewhat austere: Marguerite’s mattress was separated by a narrow aisle of bare floor from her mother’s. The small skylight seemed muffled, as if a large gray cat, harangued by tireless seagulls, lay across it.

  The neighborhood was rundown but historic. There were raw patches on every street where the blacktop had worn or potholed to reveal the original cobbles. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century houses in muted stone and sand and seagull colors, the occasional drab olive or deep cranberry, lined the streets, small windows divided into small panes, no shutters, no front yards, the sidewalks lapping up (frozen) against them. There were a few overextended, trammeled-looking Victorians, which Diana called haunted houses.

  Even in the winter Diana liked to sit on the Goffs’ granite steps, the navy-blue Rhode Island flag snapping at the sky’s rib-cage. The cold burned Marguerite’s skin through her blue jeans. “You don’t have to stay,” Diana started, and Marguerite could never quite tell if it was motherly empathy or a secret hope that her daughter would leave her to a sunset that was invariably lost in the mattress of clouds and early darkness.

  The view was territorial: Andrade’s Liquor across the street, dun-painted cinderblock, bars on the windows. The store was tended severely, funereally by the Andrade family, but there was a stand of peach trees in the back. “Just think,” Mr. Goff regaled Diana, with self-satisfied admiration for both his subject and his audience, “Tony Andrade chipped out the loading dock by hand for an orchard!”

  When Mr. Goff crossed the street for a bottle of Gordon’s he’d often add, for Marguerite, one of the register-side baglets of cocktail peanuts, and when Mrs. Goff sent her for milk, Marguerite entered the lemon-smelling shade almost holy with her errand.

  At the library, Diana Webb re-shelved in flat shoes; secretly Marguerite held in high regard the fact that her mother had never had her ears pierced. “You’re to go to Mrs. Goff in an emergency,” Diana told her carefully. On days her mother worked late Marguerite spent hours imagining what sort of event might release her from solitude to the care of the landlady.

  Mr. Goff was an avid hobbiest. He brandished a cheerful, layman’s philosophy: “The brain, Diana, is marvelous, and it craves new information.” Marguerite never conflated her disinterest in dinosaurs (for they were the object of his hobby) with being a girl, possibly because her mother could be engaged on the subject for hours. There were weekend afternoons Diana spent wholly with Mr. Goff, touring his amateur collection of replica fossils and low-resolution photos of dig sites and open display cases. Marguerite had noticed that her mother looked even more beautiful than usual when she was rapt—and wrapped up in someone else’s life altogether.

  One afternoon Mr. Goff staged a backyard scavenger hunt. It was March, and Marguerite was nearly eleven—too old for Easter egg hunts, which was distinctly what it felt like—old enough to know it wouldn’t be polite to refuse the landlord.

  The flowerbeds were soft and
bare except for a few pale snowdrops, and with a quick scan Marguerite could see the places where Mr. Goff had been active, and how he’d patted the dirt for her benefit. Come to think of it she’d been half-listening to the sound the back of the trowel made when it hit a rock for what seemed like hours. She stood a bit apart from the three adults, and, now that her ears were trained, she could hear the ice bash around in their cocktails. Her prize, if she completed the treasure hunt, was to be a children’s dinosaur encyclopedia.

  Dutifully she rummaged through the garden borders. She could feel Mrs. Goff watching, her features as small and tense as a mouse’s, through her cat glasses. The landlady called out a couple of times, “Please, the bulbs, Marguerite,” and Marguerite heard her scold her husband for putting daffodils and tulips in danger.

  Mrs. Goff needn’t have worried. Marguerite was constrained by the vague sense of shame the endeavor caused her—her lack of heart and Mr. Goff’s whinnying eagerness to please her mother.

  She paced herself. She had a sense of how long Mr. Goff thought it should take her, and in the end, with no surprise, she came up with all the ivory-stained resin bones he had planted. He puzzled them together himself, a sketch of a skeleton. Marguerite couldn’t help noticing that his deft fingers were the same color, and that her mother had lost interest.

  Mr. Goff wiped his hands and then folded the towel devoutly, as if to preserve prehistoric bone dust. Marguerite held the encyclopedia out like a serving platter.