by Rachel Yoder
Had he apologized when he knocked over her peanut plant, which she’d been tending for a year, coaxing it bigger and bigger—why was it growing so slowly?—moving it from window to window based on the season, feeding it blue water fertilized with blue powder? Annoyed one Saturday morning when she had dared sleep in, in the middle of making the boy breakfast and reading the boy a book and trying to dress the boy, he had gone to throw a banana peel in the trash and had somehow, in his flummoxed clumsiness, knocked the peanut plant from the windowsill, hastily brushed the dirt back into the pot, and only superficially pushed the plant back into the dirt. He had done all this and not mentioned it, and when the mother saw the mess, the dirt that had not been cleaned from the floor or the windowsill, the already wilted plant—when she had found this and confronted her husband about it, he said with annoyance that the plant had been perched precariously and really, truly, it was bound to fall, suggesting he had merely fulfilled its destiny rather than made any mistake himself.
It had been folly to try to grow a peanut plant. Who grew a peanut plant? And would one even flourish at such a northern latitude? How long did it take them to mature? And how did a person even go about roasting a peanut? Of course, all these and more questions had occurred to her, but still she persevered, because it was fun, because it was a project that was just hers, because it was a mother’s artistic gesture in the face of obliterating domesticity.
It shouldn’t be dying, he’d said, annoyed. There’s no reason for it to die. Just put it back in the dirt. Water it.
I did, she’d said.
Well, it doesn’t make sense that knocking it over would have killed it, he continued matter-of-factly, as if his rationale would bring it back to life.
All you have to say is you’re sorry, she said. That will make it all better.
But I want to fix it, he said. That will make it better for me.
Just say you’re sorry, she said, and instead he went to the plant and fiddled with the dirt, held the plant up, and then watched it fall back down when he let go.
Finally, after all that, he had walked by her, on the way to the living room, and mumbled, Sorry.
She had wanted to bite him by the throat or pummel him with a baseball bat or scream at the top of her lungs, but instead she’d started washing the dishes he had dirtied from breakfast.
And so she emphasized her points, emphasized that she had left a note, did not apologize, said this had been what she needed, and had anything been hurt? No. No! The husband listened, objected, listened more, finally calmed. She made coffee, and they both stood in silence, drinking it. Their son babbled in the living room, playing with—what else?—his trains.
I was afraid for a second you were that dog, the husband said sheepishly.
Oh sure, she said. I turned into a dog. Do you hear what you’re saying?
Well, you’ve been saying…, he began, then trailed off, unsure of himself and this irrational territory into which he had wandered.
You aren’t seriously going to…, she added.
They paused, then doubled over with laughter. He grabbed her around the waist, and she jumped in to him, and they tumbled together onto the floor, and then the boy came and tumbled onto them, too.
There was a wonderful emptiness to the house that Saturday morning as the family wrestled on the floor and laughed, touched each other’s clothes and stroked the soft skin of arms and legs. They sat on the floor, telling stories and jokes, playing hand games and tickles. The boy brushed his mother’s hair, and Nightbitch brushed her husband’s hair, and then they read books for hours.
The cat meandered through the living room, meowing horribly, and the husband got up to trundle after her, hands outstretched, a game he played only when in the best of moods.
Kitty! her husband said, stalking the animal as she waddled away from him, wide-eyed with panic. I’m going to throw you on the roof and let you starve to death up there, he said, grabbing her on either side of her convex belly and making her deflate, then squeak, like a rubber chew toy.
Maybe a chicken hawk will swoop down and grab her with its talons while she’s up there, Nightbitch suggested, picking a dust bunny from the cat’s flailing paw and laughing at her terror. Then take her up into the sky and drop her from a great height into a deep quarry, where heavy mining equipment with caterpillar treads will repeatedly run over her broken corpse.
Wow, the husband said, impressed. Very specific.
Thanks, she said.
Nightbitch and her husband made love that afternoon as their son napped in his shady room in the cool breezes of the ceiling fan. In their own shady room, they united as they never had. Her husband, the engineer, put in a particularly sensual performance, which she knew was a stretch for a man of his disposition. But this once, it seemed he let himself go, biting her shoulders and licking her neck, kissing her deeply and hungrily until they were both, finally, free of the weight of their human minds, their mortgage and bills, the dirt on the floors and ants in the cupboard—all of it gone and only them there, together, animals alive in a house.
Fling wide the doors. Open every window. Welcome bugs and dirt. Welcome allergens. The family moved freely between worlds for a time, in and out, as the wind did.
Yet wasn’t it peculiar—indeed, perhaps even more peculiar than the mother’s transformation itself—that the husband did not, in a real and searching way, attempt to get to the bottom of the presence of the dog he had seen that evening he arrived home to an almost empty house? Wasn’t it indeed perplexing that this detail remained largely uninterrogated, given that he was a man of science and reasonable explanations? And odd, too, that the mother had felt no real need to account for the dog at all?
Perhaps we can assume that even the husband—the good, stable, reliable husband with his engineer’s reasonableness, his common sense, his strong hold on reality—had also, in some small or large way, been bewitched?
* * *
—
ON MONDAY MORNING, SHE did what any totally and completely normal person would do who had recently transformed into a dog and sat on the toilet with the lid down, searching the Internet as she listened to her husband and son move about the house. She started with werewolf facts and real monsters, then moved on to shapeshifting and shapeshifting Native American, then skinwalkers and Navajo witches. She read and read, but what she wanted to find was a mother who turned into a dog—a regular domesticated dog capable of being a pet, even—and so she kept on, with mother myth and madre perro (thinking somehow the Spanish would produce more desired results), hormonal extremes hair and postnatal hair abundance, humans killing animals with their mouths, and then, because it occurred to her, cannibals and headhunters, and it was at this point she knew she had wandered too far astray and stopped altogether.
Despite her cleaning that week, the bathroom remained a mess, mildew crawling between the shower tiles, hairs mingling in every corner of the room, a lone Q-tip beside the trash can. The towels hung haphazardly, and she whisked a hand over them in a halfhearted attempt at tidying.
She would not properly clean it. She wouldn’t. In fact, it simply could not be cleaned, no matter how hard she tried! And now she was done trying. She would let it grow dirtier and dirtier until, one weekend, her husband would finally notice and do something about it. What if I just didn’t do a thing? she wondered. What if I just stopped? Would he notice? Would he do anything? So far, her findings were no and no.
Though their weekend lovemaking session had indeed been restorative for their marriage and for Nightbitch’s attitude toward her husband, that enchanted honeymoon of sorts had lasted but a day. Sunday morning, she rushed from bed to the bathroom, for she felt the impending blood-fall waiting inside her, a deluge that gushed into the toilet when she sat down and provided her great relief while, at the same time, inspiring a wave of ultimate exhaustion, an unwieldy project she
must now attend for the next week. With the blood also came all the old resentments. The bathroom was, yes, dirty. Her husband was, yes, leaving again. And whether or not she would be happy and succeed as a mother and person this week were again pending and open questions, hanging there, taunting her.
She rose from the toilet and stretched. She looked herself in the mirror, considered the dark bags beneath her eyes, then pulled her top lip back to check her teeth for signs of canine activity, of which she found none. She was determined, yet again, to get out of the house. They would go to the library, to Book Babies, so she could prove to herself that she was in no way going crazy or on the brink of something insane. Even more, she would get another good look at—good sniff of—Jen and her sidekicks, just to assure herself that they were, you know, mommies. Women. Homo sapiens who desired to sell herbs and nothing more.
Yes, she was on the reasonable path, she told herself as she packed her bag with toys and diapers and wipes and snacks and water and a change of clothes for the boy just in case. She felt oddly cheered as she kissed her husband goodbye and was out of the house even before he was, watching him wave from the stoop as she departed—the man looking a bit deflated, to be honest.
Okay, byeeeee, he hollered as he waved.
She wanted to know how a person—after spending the night romping through the neighborhood, shitting and killing and howling—how that same person might rise just days after to take her child to something as quotidian as story time at the public library.
How am I doing this? she asked herself, examining her hands on the steering wheel. The only physical remnant of her transformation was a dark swath of skin on her forearm, a birthmark of sorts. She had an urge to lick the spot but resisted.
Though much of her fur was now gone, the tail lying somewhere in the underbrush, her claws receded back into her fingers, she still felt very much the pulse and pant of the animal she had become. Her sense of smell had distracted her that morning, causing her to clean more and more obscure corners of the kitchen in an effort to get rid of every last trace of mold and onion and meat. She longed to tend to her son the way she felt she should, licking him and biting at his feet lovingly, yowling as they played, and feeding him raw meat. And though the animalness of her being remained, she was also inside her full human-mother being, back to the usual worries and insecurities, the thoughts of career success, the burden of failure, the marital resentments, feminist rage, and so on and so forth. All of this was back, yet somehow transformed. She felt she could abide it as long as she still had Nightbitch. As long as she had that.
Nightbitch felt she was owed her secrets, but this did not preclude feelings of profound guilt inspired by said secret-keeping. Not to tell her husband of her transformation, to keep it as a silent and seductive memory inside her, to pretend that something extraordinary and life-changing had not occurred, that life just moved on as normal, the boy in the living room playing with his many-wheeled toys, the husband off on another trip, and the mother who remained, unchanged, simply undertaking her domestic duties, her simple life—to carry on as if all of this were true did indeed evince in the deepest parts of Nightbitch a swirl of dread. She did not usually lie to her husband, and certainly not about events as monumental as this, but it felt very important to keep this her own.
At Book Babies, mothers and children crowded into the library’s back room, where a chirpy librarian showed them books and puppets and sang songs, after which toddlers crawled and walked and teemed over one another, a squirming mass of fists and baggy diapers and too-big heads. Sure enough, there were Jen and Babs and Poppy, engaged in their usual happy, animated conversation. Nightbitch sat in the only open space still available on the floor, closer to Jen than she would have liked, for she wasn’t sure what to say or how to be. Nightbitch nodded formally, awkwardly, when she caught Jen’s eye, then flushed red.
Were they!? Weren’t they!? How preposterous even to entertain that these women had visited her house, ripped her clothes from her body, then left behind a pile of dead vermin for her enjoyment.
She was just going to sit there and participate and be a normal mom! That was it!
She listened as the other mothers, the contented mothers, talked about their best recipes that the kids would eat. They all seemed to be friends. She didn’t make eye contact, instead looked at her phone and felt slightly superior for not caring about leggings and essential oils. She felt educated. She felt interesting and independent and did not want to be like the happy mothers. Was it that she didn’t want to be happy? That wasn’t it. It was that she wanted another option.
All the while, she shot surreptitious glances at the hard-core Book Mommies—those mommies who were really into being mommies and selling herbs and enriching their children all the time—chief among them, of course, Jen, her curled eyelashes and penciled brows, concealer that must have been painstakingly applied so as to cover every blemish, the smallest imperfections. Her fingernails were manicured, as were her toenails. Her legs were shaved. She smiled and chatted easily about herbs, how she loo-ved Mombie (whatever that was) on those days when she woke up with the grumpies, as if this mother, this Jen, even had a true, working understanding of the grumpies.
Nightbitch wanted to say, You don’t even know what the grumpies are! Have you ever yelled at your twins, in full voice, in the middle of the night? Yelled at them to go back to sleep, pumping your diaphragm with rage and sound? Have you sobbed beside them when they asked for another glass of water, another snack, at ten at night, just really let go and had a full-on snot fest in front of your children, so they were the ones comforting you? Have you ever locked yourself in the bathroom for twenty whole minutes to peruse your phone while your child bangs on the door and yells MAMA as loud as he can, until he is sobbing and, probably, permanently traumatized?
Sometimes—Nightbitch longed to say, stunning all of them into a sweet-smelling silence—I fantasize about getting in my car and driving through night and day, as far south as I can go, until I get to a dirty beach and check in at a cut-rate motel where I’ll drink horrible piña coladas all day in a faded beach chair.
Sometimes—Nightbitch imagined uttering plainly to their beautiful, happy faces—I imagine abandoning my family, abandoning this entire life.
So don’t invoke the grumpies unless you’ve really got them, she wanted to scream. Just don’t.
As the librarian read about a sad giant who just needed a hug, Nightbitch studied Jen down to the tiny wrinkles by her eyes and the white tracks of foundation collecting in the folds. Had this other woman, this perfect mother, turned into a dog recently? Had she gallivanted about town? How was a person to tell which mothers changed and which didn’t? Surely she couldn’t be the only one? A horrible loneliness bloomed in her chest when she imagined herself the only mother in the room, in the entire world, to roam the silent lamplit streets, part woman, part animal.
Nightbitch ballooned with anxiety. She must make a friend of one of these mothers! She must open her mouth and say something! She must at the very least try: a small smile, a single word. She must, must, must forge a real human bond, or she might actually go insane, if she hadn’t done so already.
All she had to do was say, brightly, Your son’s so cute, or, understandingly, We love pretzels, too, or, with a roll of the eyes and a gesture in her son’s direction, He’s obsessed with wheels. She could very simply just ask, So what is it about these herbs? Just a little throwaway, anything, something to open the door to extended mindless conversation. Why was it so difficult?
She looked at the mom on her left, ready to smile, but the woman was busy digging through her diaper bag as a small girl screamed, snot-faced, at her side. To her right, Jen had her eyes closed and was humming as she rocked one of her smiling twins back and forth in her arms.
The librarian read the last page of her book, and Nightbitch brushed her son’s unruly hair with her finge
rs, then absently, instinctually, bowed her head and licked the cowlick swirled at the center of his scalp.
Mid-lick—really, even before she could get in a full and proper lick at all—Nightbitch jolted upright, as if shocked with electricity. Her entire body flushed with heat and then cold and then heat again, and blood flooded her ears, turning them red. She stared straight ahead and closed her eyes, took a deep breath.
No one saw, she told herself. Everyone was busy getting ready to go. It was just a small lick—a touch of the tongue, really, not even a complete full-tongued lick. It was fine. Not even that weird.
She calmed herself by repeating things she knew were not true over and over again.
Eventually, she forced herself to open her eyes and glance around with the coolest of nonchalance, the most even and unperturbed look on her face. Nothing was wrong. She had done nothing weird. And so what if she had licked his head? Maybe she was just eccentric? It was only a singular, weird thing she had done, not evidence of her canine escapades. No one would have seen that and thought to themselves, Oh, that mother must turn into a dog sometimes.
She was fine.
The mother of the snot-faced girl was now cleaning her face with a wet wipe. The child was no longer crying and was eating Cheerios from a purple container. On her other side, Jen chatted with other Book Mommies. The children were all now playing with toys the librarian had brought out from the closet: plastic car ramps and plush colorful balls, animal finger puppets and germ-infested LEGO.
Yes, everyone was chatting mildly, and no one had seen. Nightbitch let out a long stream of air and watched as her son pulled back a toy car, let it go, watched it speed and crash into the wall, laughed.
Jen went on about herbs, and then Babs started talking about leggings, and Poppy picked up with essential oils. They complained about their husbands, how the men wanted to know what they were doing with these herbs and such, the amounts of money being spent on such things.