On the ride back, Marguerite shared a booth-like seat with her mother in the mid-body of the school bus. She longed to talk, but she was too prim—or too cold—to breach her mother’s privacy.
And then all of a sudden her mother seemed to be crying. The right whale, larger than a school bus. How handy for the whale hunters; it floated along dead for hours on account of its prolific blubber. Marguerite drew back into her growly window corner. When she closed her eyes against her mother she saw the grainy photographs from the nature center: the giant mammal pulling the dinghy by the very harpoon it would be killed by within a couple of hours. The whale swam so fast it turned the dinghy into a modern-day speedboat.
Speeding toward the horizon, all the way to the vanishing point...
They had just turned into the school lot and the melee of dismissal when someone rose over the seatback wielding a Polaroid camera. Marguerite and her mother, looking up through a membrane, nebulous, their eyes at once indistinct and magnified.
Marguerite pushes the ugly photo away from her on the table. She has a slim envelope of photographs she keeps unceremoniously with her files. Telephone bills, old SAT scores, her mother. All to scale.
It’s five o’clock somewhere. She cringes when anyone says that. Laugh-track material, and to Marguerite, drinking is no laughing matter. She has a headache that feels like a tumor, and weird referencing pain in her upper stomach. She swings through the kitchen—glass, ice, jug. She makes an echoing half circle for the lemon.
Speaking of scale.
Quetzalcoatlus of the Late Cretaceous had a thirty-nine-foot wingspan. What a stupid coincidence. The same length as a school bus.
The scale of loss...she can’t stop thinking about Jonathan Hughes’ mother. She can’t stop thinking about her loss compared to Jonathan’s.
The pressure on the earth, the skid, the bite in a fossil track reveals the speed of a powerfully hungry Allosaurus, in one illustration.
What is it about their extinction? It’s not just death, but the God of death. The remainder. The hard and final thing that is irreducible. Quetzalcoatlus, imagined from a few spare wing bones, inverse creation.
In those few months between Mr. Goff’s scavenger hunt and her mother’s vanishing act she never read the children’s dinosaur encyclopedia. Was she so terribly busy? She never asked her mother to read it to her, either. Now and again she must have paged through: dutifully, guiltily, impatiently. She might have vaguely wished to put Mr. Goff behind her.
How much would she have lost going to the landlord and asking a few simple questions about his hobby? What’s five minutes out of childhood? But she never did, and it occurs to her now that after her mother left there was so little between her and the retired couple that she failed to say goodbye to them on the single occasion that her grandmother brought her back to collect, Grandmother Webb insisted, only her “good” clothing.
Mr. Goff was working in the backyard. Those very borders where the bones had been lightly buried were now filled in with phlox and rose and black-eyed Susan. Marguerite was surprised to see that he was beginning to walk with his neck turtled forward.
Two hundred and fifty million years ago the equator ran up and down instead of around like a girdle.
No, it didn’t, but there was only Pangaea, the mother of all continents, the single mother supercontinent.
Horsetails full of spores, fern tufts, and scaly conifers.
Dinosaurs like kangaroo-lizards hopped around with strands of vegetation hanging from their orifices.
There were no great worries like polar ice caps.
A fossil exists of the underwater birth of an Ichthyosaurus. A bone-lattice baby coming out midstream, mid-extinction. No letters, no records of her existence.
Grandfather Webb once suggested he hire a private detective. Marguerite was so shocked and distracted by his kindness that she only wanted to reply in kind—in kindness. “Oh, no,” she fumbled. “That would be too much trouble.”
6
Her grandmother calls before she’s out of bed, eleven thirty, still morning.
“Mah-gret.” As if the name were one syllable, with a little foot on it. “Dinner with Hope Grosvenor last night, and her boring husband.”
Her grandmother is not in a Masterpiece Theatre production. They both know she amuses herself putting on certain airs for her granddaughter’s benefit. “Hopesie’s nephew has had no word from you, Mah-gret.” The nephew is a young lawyer just launched at the “only” firm in Providence, and Marguerite was to suggest lunch at the plate-glass lobster-and-rib-eye emporium on the ground floor of his building.
“He hasn’t?”
Grandmother Webb blows like a horse. Marguerite empties a can of soup into a saucepan. Is the glop more than mildly disgusting? She never makes food for anyone. She pours out a little white wine she keeps for this kind of morning.
After what she absorbed last night, she has a many-headed headache. The wine is cheap, but silvery. She decides it’s the color of a banana—very pale—and thus perfect for breakfast. Screw the soup. She washes it down the drain with Palmolive to cover the meaty odor. Disgusting, absolutely. She’ll glow with health in a minute. But she has to admit that she doesn’t have it in her to sleep with a lawyer.
She slept with a teacher, at boarding school.
Maybe Jonathan Hughes slept with a teacher too, his puppy eyes velvety as sleep—she can see it. Like flying above the path in a dream, suddenly she can see everything.
Her English teacher was a lipless bachelor of thirty-seven, age of resentment and dissymmetry. His PhD was wasted, and he believed, perhaps needless to say, that he should have been teaching college. Something was owed him, compensation for tenth-grade Frankenstein, twelfth-grade Great Gatsby. Being a man of literature, he was entitled to his liberalism, in an unexamined, belligerent fashion: how stratospherically far he was above bourgeoisie convention. Nothing he did could be anything less than unstintingly original.
His apartment was in a painted brick house in town, a short walk off the boarding school campus. There was a clutch of metal mail sleeves at the front porch, and it thrilled Marguerite to see his last name on one of them. As if the man she loved had staked a claim in the world. She put little notes inside it; she believed they were cryptic.
She had nothing to compare it to, so she would never, then, have said the liaison was unimaginative. It seemed natural each one retreated, during sex, to his or her own private world. She would say to herself: I am holding a man’s penis in my hand. Or her lips were forming a seal around it, it tickled her tonsils. When he grabbed her hair she felt abruptly sad, always, but she knew very well she wasn’t a knock-kneed little victim.
Au contraire (as she used to say, constantly, determined to mock everything), she had a feeling of triumph when he slid out of her. She was on the pill, juice spilled all over. “Look at the mess you’ve made!” she’d exclaim. She would pretend she was maternal, or whorish, or anything to entertain herself. He used his T-shirt to wipe her.
They never discussed school. They weren’t intellectual intimates. Marguerite imagined they were pawns of the large-heartedness of love. She told herself love was Love, she told herself the smell of his cinnamon chewing gum was Love also.
They carried on for almost four months, and she became absurdly comfortable in his presence. She would let her clothing drop as soon as the door closed behind her; she would slouch around thin and nude whether or not they consummated. She had the idea that he liked to hear anything she had to say. That she, in fact, had the upper hand in conversation, because she could make him laugh so easily.
He could not make her laugh. She told him frankly that he was not in the least bit funny.
Another glass of wine, a nice big brimmer.
Good thing she chose Comp Lit over Women’s Studies. Wasn’t a victim? Now she has the stomach to finish washing the saucepan from the soup misadventure, and she tips the thin vomit down the drain with a tap water chaser.
She liked imagining herself adult enough to keep a secret. She thinks now, all of a sudden, that she didn’t like him, and he must have known that.
The front door of his apartment opened straight into the living room, the kitchen alcove was on the left, with the rather crumbling bathroom behind it. His bedroom was behind the living room, with an illicit washer and dryer in the closet, stacked one on top of the other. Never once did he offer to do Marguerite’s laundry. One evening there was a knock on the door as they were feeling each other up on the sofa. In fact they sat facing the door, the world, like the farmer and his wife in American Gothic. Outside the frame, perhaps, if indeed they were a painting, Marguerite was naked on the bottom and he was one-handedly, rhythmically, spreading her open. She made a clicking sound that was only slightly distracting.
It seemed as if the knock was right there in the room with them, and they both recoiled. Marguerite’s first thought was that it was her mother. She stuffed her heart back down like a jack-in-the-box and grabbed his damp T-shirt to cover her fuzzy triangle. Maybe because of her ever-increasing and self-perceived ease with sex she had been lulled into forgetting the danger. Maybe it was the head of school. The police. Or just an unwitting neighbor. Did someone want to borrow a cup of sugar? she whispered. He motioned for her to stay quiet.
Finally the knocker ceased, discouraged, and Marguerite turned to her lover. “When are you going to make an honest woman of me?” she said, almost without thinking.
One weekend, James took Dinah to New York City.
She stood between the double doors that divided one room of their suite from the other and watched him unpacking. It seemed to her he’d brought everything. A suit for the opera, flannel pajamas, shirts for morning, afternoon, and evening, professionally folded. He looked up at her and flinched. She noticed his thick, wood-colored hair was clumped and almost matted where he had a cowlick in the middle of his forehead.
He said, “I’ve forgotten something important.” He was rummaging through the suitcase. But he seemed more surprised than bereft, and it was forgotten.
He couldn’t get enough of her. All weekend he kept bearing her back to the bed. They skipped the opera, the bed had its own brocade curtains. Every time she woke up, in the morning or in the middle of the night, James was propped up on one elbow wiggling his foot and gazing at her. “I love you so much I can’t sleep,” he whispered.
But by Sunday afternoon he had fallen silent. It was almost as if he would have forgotten to get in the car and drive back to Providence if Dinah hadn’t said it. Then she had to drag their suitcases out to the hall and shove them in the elevator by herself, and how would she know how much to tip the concierge or the doorman?
The car seemed enormous, a cold, echoing chamber. Dinah realized she had no idea how to drive it. “What is it?” he mimicked. Only she hadn’t actually said anything. He looked at her triumphantly and the car swerved and fishtailed, throwing off gravel.
“Scared you. Scared us both,” James said, mildly. “You know, we could keep going. I could drive you all the way to—” Dinah saw that he was trying to locate something. Where she was from, that’s what he couldn’t remember. For a moment she believed that she couldn’t remember either, and that was love, wasn’t it. Being unable to remember where you came from.
Very quietly James started, “I’ve just lost it—”
He walked around the car and opened the door for her in front of her residence hall. He placed her luggage on the ground beside her. His picked up her hand as if it were a blank and squeezed it.
Another scene: he teased her, If she went back to California, he’d freeze the harvest! Oranges, avocados. Brightly flowering ice plants lined her childhood walk—he said, ice plants?
There was a Bird of Paradise with a spiked orange comb that stalked the house’s shadow. She showed him a playful snapshot: back to back with the prehistoric-looking flower, her arms crossed tightly over her stomach.
Blue-flowering rosemary, whole hedges of it.
As a child Dinah had put her thumb over the round tinny mouth of the hose and sprayed water into the hibiscus. In spite of her father she let the water dump down on the bleached, thirsty sidewalk. The sun was like white noise in Los Angeles, and the trees and the hibiscus were outlined in heat. Her wet footprints on the walk must have sizzled and evaporated.
Another Webb cousin was coming for the weekend. All was well again: “I’m going to show you off, darling,” James hooted. Henry came out of the bathroom with a towel around his waist and another around his shoulders. How had James described those men of his father’s generation? Festooned in scarves and bowties and ascots. Henry scuffed into his heel-bitten moccasins.
James had scribbled pages of notes for the final paper in Economies of Power. The notes were rolled into a tube and rubber-banded. James shot a rubber band at Henry.
“The boy has had those damn slippers since when, Henry?”
“Since my mummy gave them to me,” said Henry. James snorted.
“Have the whites come back? I didn’t leave you any towels,” said Henry.
James looked through the tube of notes. He passed the tube to Dinah, perched on the desk beside him. “Have at it.” He was failing out of college and going to work for his father. “I’m that kind of son,” he had explained reasonably. “There’s always one in every batch of us.”
James said, “Let’s make it a Christmas party for Ol’ Charley.” They were eating ham sandwiches they had made for themselves for dinner. There was only a week left in the semester. James wouldn’t bother with finals. Threads of snow had begun to blow about in the afternoons when the sky, it seemed to Dinah, became simultaneously dark and pale.
That afternoon he’d blundered into the bathroom drunk when she was washing her armpits. She’d taken down the top of her dress in front of the mirror.
“Goddamn it, Dinah,” he said loudly, but also peevish. “Don’t they have showers in your dormitory?” He put his hands on the doorframe to steady himself.
There were often no towels even though they subscribed to a laundry service. She had never seen one hung to dry or air after a boy had used it. They paid for the heat themselves, and so had decided simply not to use it. Once Henry had taken her hand and pressed it on a cold radiator when James wasn’t looking.
Dinah’s dress was tight, binding in the armpits, which had made her sweat in the first place. She couldn’t pull it up easily. She had thin arms and full breasts. Indeed her breasts seemed to push against her clothing lately. She was hot even though the weather was getting colder, even though she was from California. She had dark freckles on her torso, a neatly tucked-in belly button. Now James covered his eyes impulsively. From behind his mask he said, deadpan, “My strangely alabaster Californian.” He grinned and took his hand away from his face. She was still naked.
“A sight to behold,” he said, not looking at her. She could tell he was forcing himself to take a step forward, over the threshold. “I’d help you but I’m terrible with those,” and he wiggled his fingers, “fasteners.” She saw that he tried to smile.
Still she was quiet. He stepped inside the bathroom and closed the door behind him. He came up behind her and put his chin down on her shoulder. His face was ruddy in the mirror, even mottled. In fact he had one of those faces that appeared lopsided when reflected. They looked out to look at each other. His eyes were round holes, frightened. Din
ah’s eyes shone. Her breasts were goose-fleshed, the brown nipples hard and stem-like. Cool water dripped down the sides of her ribs from her armpits. Finally James reached around and held her breasts hard against her.
Henry took James’s car in the snow and bought pine roping at a florist. The boys sang Christmas carols and hammered nails into the rented walls and lintels. They draped the scented pine over doorways and windows. They bought a Christmas cake with holly rosettes in green icing, and they decided to throw everything together in the punch bowl. Henry hunched forward stirring and sniffing like a witch over a cauldron.
Cousin Charles swished out of a taxi that honked for the sake of honking. He rapped on their unlocked door and called out, “Father Christmas!” He was taller than James and his mouth was fuller, more feminine. He wore wire-rimmed glasses and stooped like a misanthropic schoolteacher. Dinah imagined for a moment that the three male specimens were fanned out entirely for her choice in marriage. She was necessary to their survival: new blood, Henry had teased her just yesterday, practically a vaccine against madness. But the suspense only lasted a frivolous instant. James twirled her to him, and Henry dropped the needle on a twirling record.
It was midnight when Henry popped downstairs to invite the landlord to the party. He brought a glass of punch with him, or maybe a mug, white with an ivy-green stripe around it, something they’d lifted from the university coffee shop. The landlord, a bachelor, didn’t need convincing.
At two o’clock in the morning Henry eeled his way through the crowd to tell Dinah that James had taken Old Charley to the hospital and might not be back till morning. Henry put his hand on her shoulder and pushed her deeper into the throng, toward the drinks table. “Appendicitis runs in the family!” he had to shout. “Runs the family! Come on, another drink and be merry!”
Figures moved backward and forward along predetermined planes of conversation. The punch had numbed Dinah’s tongue completely. Whenever she turned around Henry was watching her. She had to sit down somewhere, but Henry grabbed her hand and pulled her playfully off the loveseat.
Clothed, Female Figure Page 22