Nightbitch

by Rachel Yoder

  I mean, basically, at this point, if he doesn’t agree with me, I just bite his leg and stay like that until he sees it my way, Jen said, then tilted her head back and laughed big and loud.

  You just need to train them, Poppy agreed.

  Jen looked directly at Nightbitch, who had been eavesdropping on the conversation.

  You know what I mean? Am I right? she asked Nightbitch, who startled and smiled bashfully, smiling and saying, What? Oh…what? Ha-ha. Sure. Yes.

  I mean, you just errrrrr….Jen growled, showing her teeth and shaking her head side to side, eyes wide. The Book Mommies chuckled, and Nightbitch only opened her eyes wider, a faint, unsure smile turning her lips.

  Ha ha, Nightbitch said. Yeah? Okay.

  Look, Jen said, I have got to tell you about these herbs.

  I don’t really need herbs, Nightbitch said, packing her bag, stuffing it with a water bottle and a squeezie packet, a wayward truck, for she didn’t know what else to do.

  Hey, here’s my card, Jen said, digging through her purse, then leaning close to hand over a crumpled rectangle. I meant to give it to you the other day. And I don’t give it to just anyone, only people who I really think will excel. I mean, you’ll make so much money. It’s a great opportunity. She paused and made meaningful eye contact with Nightbitch, eye contact that felt scripted, as if she had practiced this very move in a circle of chairs beneath the fluorescent lights of a hotel conference room.

  Nightbitch did not know how to move her face, what show of emotion to arrange there. Not only was she stunned because of Jen’s show of animalistic behavior—teeth baring and head shaking, particularly weird because it seemed so out of character for a normie blonde Midwestern mom—but, even more, because of the distinct and unmistakable smell yet again of Jen’s hair as she bent close to hand over her card. Strawberry, strawberry, strawberry shampoo.

  Nightbitch told herself that, of course, this was all in her head. I mean, strawberry shampoo certainly isn’t all that uncommon? And perhaps she hadn’t even smelled strawberry exactly. Was she sure? Could it have been raspberry? Mango?

  So what if this perfectly nice mother with lavishly styled blond hair had the specific aroma of a mysterious dog who’d shown up on her lawn and tried to lead her away from home while two other dogs put her son down for a nap? She eyed Babs and Poppy, who flanked Jen. Poppy with her long, bushy, ombré hair, and quick, athletic build. Babs, yes, a bit jowly, a bit of what one might call a “hangdog” face. Nightbitch would have laughed were she not so stunned. It was all too preposterous to entertain even for a moment, these completely normal mothers leading double lives as dogs. Yes, she had longed to find other mothers like her, but now that this desire hinted at becoming a reality, Nightbitch began to sweat and grow dizzy from the eye contact, from the whiff of strawberry, which had already abated, from the strangeness of all of it, what had happened that weekend and what had happened there in Book Babies, and god knows what else might happen in the future.

  Oh my god, you’re flushed, Jen said, her face contorted with concern. Nothing a little Balance won’t fix, she added, and again began to dig in her oversized bag.

  Oh, no thanks, Nightbitch said, looking at Jen’s card, which proclaimed her an “Herbal Ambassador” with the tagline Live the Life You Deserve.

  Thanks, Nightbitch repeated, but I don’t need anything. Then she lay flat on the floor and gulped deep breaths and told herself this was all in her head.

  Jen’s face filled Nightbitch’s line of vision, and she dangled a little packet of Balance in front of her. Take these, she said, and you’ll feel fine. I’ll find you online!

  She dropped the packet on Nightbitch’s chest, and with that, Jen was gone, and Nightbitch was left on the dirty industrial carpet with her son crawling over her and over her again, then sticking his hand in her mouth and saying Mama.

  Nightbitch had held it together exceptionally well up until that point. She had continued on with her life despite extremely perplexing and magical events. And so, given Jen, her snarling and show of teeth, her scent of strawberry—given Babs and Poppy and their maybe canine features if you looked at them in the right way—Nightbitch would persevere.

  She wanted to call after Jen, Wait! and Please come back! I have so many questions for you! But how could she possibly ask her, Well, hi, I know we don’t know each other, but do you, well—ha ha, isn’t this so funny?—do you happen to change into a golden retriever sometimes? I was just wondering, because it seems like you use strawberry-scented shampoo….

  But the moment had passed.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEXT MORNING, HER son pulled her from her sleep by jumping on her tummy from the top of the couch, where she had fallen asleep reading from, once again, the “Domestic Varietals” portion of the Field Guide. It had become her favorite section these days, for she found in its pages women she used to know or could imagine one day befriending. The night before, Nightbitch had read about the Blues, such a lovely varietal, which reminded her of a friend who had moved away long ago and whom she now, inspired by the passage, missed immensely.

  “Born close to water,” White wrote, “be it on a coast or the shores of an inland sea, the Blues are known for striking and vivid eye color ranging from silvering indigo to a deep and meditative navy.

  Prone to song, they are apt to take up the mandolin or ukulele—really, any small, whimsical stringed instrument will do. The Blue, without exception, will be deeply spiritual (see: Rituals [Solstice], Herbology, Volunteerism) though not eager to join standard organized religion, and will draw to herself an eclectic and accomplished circle of artists, musicians, recovering addicts, fallen capitalists, the elderly, the poor, the romantics, seekers of all sorts. This endearing breed is most easily identified by her ability to sync all other women around her to her own monthly cycle, since her fecundity is among the strongest on the planet (though you will almost never find her the wife of any man). Her houseplants are among the healthiest you will find in a home. Catch her feeding them with the water used to rinse clean her cloth menstrual pads, and you are certain to have found a true Blue. Count yourself very lucky indeed.

  She fell asleep reading and then dreamt of cauldrons full of sweet-smelling brews, blood-red rain, footprints of soot leading down a sun-dappled wooded path, the sound of female voices singing an old song somewhere far ahead.

  So, when the boy woke her from this dream by jumping on her in a way that made it feel as though he had actually and completely flattened her liver, she howled, and as she did so longed for a Blue to appear in her living room to do something motherly and witchy, burn some weeds and sing a song, whatever, to make it all right.

  Arooooo­ooooo­o! she moaned, so long and loud that the boy began to cry.

  Oh, I’m sorry, honey, she finally said, clutching her side. I’m sorry. I’m not mad, she said, stroking his head and pressing her tender stomach with the tips of her fingers.

  As the boy ate his breakfast of dry cereal and sliced bananas, she checked her phone. A call for submissions to a juried art show. Delete. A newsletter from a gallery where she had long ago had a small show. Delete. And then a friend request and message notification, JEN!!!!!, writ beside the smiling profile pic of, well, Jen.

  She accepted the friend request and scanned an accompanying in-app message as the boy began to cackle, throwing his cereal to the floor. Jen opened with So great! to see you! yesterday at Book Babies!!!!!—which Nightbitch actually admired for its mid-sentence exclamation audacity. The exclamation points gave way to ALL CAPS in subsequent sentences, which reiterated that she should definitely come to the UPCOMING PARTY that would feature the TEN-DAY EXPERIENCE PACK as well as WINE and lots of other moms/representatives who will share experiences of SUCCESS and FULFILLMENT with the brand. It ended with promises of a KID-FRIENDLY environment, should she need to bring along he
r little one, thus creating a totally barrier-free community of motivated and ambitious work-at-home moms.

  An invitation followed, and Nightbitch clicked Maybe, because Jen had said WINE, which she felt was the most persuasive part.

  Jen’s entrepreneurial positivity-speak, her liberal use of exclamation points, her promises of fulfillment and work-at-home success filled Nightbitch with an unrelenting darkness, as if the sunny shell of her message contained within it a meanly pulsing vein that insisted on something sinister and toxic. Or maybe Nightbitch was just projecting.

  Either way, she didn’t want to get sucked into some herbal-remedy hustle, yet the prospect of camaraderie, she had to admit, was the smallest bit enticing, despite her former disavowal of mom friends. There must certainly be at least one mom cynical enough to sip wine with her in a corner and crack dark jokes about killing cats and shitting on lawns. Just one. That’s all she needed, all she could hope for.

  She’d think about it. She’d wait and see and think about it and try to have a more positive outlook and an open mind about people who were different from her, even if they were into herbal remedies. I mean, maybe she could be into such a thing ironically?

  In Wanda White’s book, she had read about a kind of mother who appeared and disappeared at will. Some were said to fade in and out, always there in the right light, at the right angle, but often translucent, whereas others took on more of a coyote quality, showing up unexpectedly in the corner of a room, or disappearing at the precise moment they were needed. These mothers, to whom White referred as the Flickering, were thought to be nearly extinct, yet there were still random reports of them around the world. A mother in Buffalo had been reported to fade away just after bedtime. Her children claimed they could find her nowhere when they rose from bed for a glass of water, or else could see only her shadow as it moved always one room ahead of them, flitting from wall to wall, eternally elusive. Their mother reported she did feel not “altogether there” in the evenings, after long days spent with her four children, cooking and cleaning and ironing and bathing and singing and dancing and hiking and romping. “Might the mind-body connection be so strong that these women are in fact able to disintegrate their physical selves via intense maternal ennui?” White pondered. “I, for one, think not, for the motivating maternal impulse is toward creation rather than destruction, and so I challenge both the reader and myself to consider the Flickering within a transformational framework. In this way, we are better able to undertake the profound philosophical work needed to understand such a creature.”

  But on this day, Nightbitch was thinking of another Flickering, a mother in Barisal, Bangladesh, who was reported to appear sometimes as a playful mongoose and other times as a mother. Nightbitch had been pondering this particular magical woman, for, though the woman had rodent-like tendencies rather than mongrel, the ways in which she appeared and left, and her relationship to her children, Nightbitch found quite interesting indeed. In particular, she noted how this creature was said to show up just as her children began a game outside, a beautiful mongoose with silky, gold-flecked fur who stole their balls and ruined their games and made them laugh. The children claimed it was their mother, because the mongoose answered to Ma (pronounced May) or Chokkabanijjo, their mother’s given name. And more: the fur, they said, felt just like their very own mother’s hair, exactly the same color, and smelled just like her, with notes of sage and soap. Their mother, in mother form, had the same teeth as the mongoose, unnaturally sharp and biting. And never did the children ever see Ma the mongoose and Ma the mother in the same place at the same time.

  The mother never disabused her children of this notion, and did not disabuse Wanda White of it, either, instead eluding the question, mischief a-sparkle in her eyes. She told White that Ma watched over her children when they played in the streets, that she had trained the animal to do this, that the mongoose had in fact been hers as a child. And when pressed about the age of the mongoose, how it could possibly have survived long enough to watch both mother and then her children, Ma simply shrugged and tilted her head. She initially claimed that it was descended from the whistling Indian mongoose, then that it had first appeared in her family after they read a fable in which a mongoose saved an infant from a tiger, and, finally, that her great-grandmother had purchased it at an open-air market nearly one hundred years ago. “In the end, she advised that knowing was not necessary, only experiencing,” White wrote, “and suggested I stop asking so many questions.”

  And, in fact, this is what Nightbitch had remembered most clearly, this directive to enjoy oneself within the mystery. So much effort and worry put in to understanding and explaining and thinking and thinking and thinking. At least for an afternoon, couldn’t she just be? They were downtown, after all, on a beautiful midweek summer day. She had even pedaled the boy down on her bike, pulling a blue bike trailer behind, just as she had imagined she would back before she had the child, in her most idealized fantasies of motherhood.

  She found this line of thinking to be incredibly reasonable, incredibly levelheaded and healthy, the sort of thinking her husband would no doubt support unilaterally, and in this moment of full-armed embrace of the unknown, she found herself inspired to play—to real, fullhearted play—with her son, on the playground next to the library, on a late and sunny summer afternoon. Certainly she had played with him before, but all too often her efforts were uninspired and weary, unable as she was to shirk the burdens of adulthood and reality. On this afternoon, however, they slid from her as easily as a silk robe, and there she was, resplendent in the afternoon light, hair unspooling behind her as she dashed toward the small boy, who screamed with delight.

  The boy cackled at her on the little metal bridge, his face squeezed between two of the uprights, and she lunged at him and barked brightly. He turned and ran. A dirty girl in a tutu giggled on the steps leading up to the structure. Another little boy stared in openmouthed puzzlement.

  Yip! Yip! She yipped at each of them—causing the girl to scream and the boy, no more than eighteen months old, to begin to sob gently—and then took off after her boy, up the steps and up, up, up, to the little turret from which a curvy red slide descended precipitously to the ground.

  Get me! her son yelled, and she fell to all fours and growled, stalking him now, her movements measured and precise.

  Mama, he uttered, part question, part delight, and she let out a slew of murderous barks and growls that sent him screaming down the slide, after which she followed, panting.

  It went on like this, her romp over and across the play structure, her son’s delight, other children joining in or running away in terror, depending. Soon, she had a whole herd of children who bade her, chase me!, and she did as they instructed, chasing and barking and panting, and the children, in turn, offered their own joyful yips, until the entire playground sounded like a kennel, the growling and barking tremendous. The smaller children sorted themselves out along the edges, on parents’ laps or tucked into strollers sucking on their thumbs, for what they were seeing did not make sense to their small minds and instead challenged their sense of all that was stable and ordered in the world.

  It was quite a scene, this vigorous mother and her barking, the children erupting in glee. The tutu girl brought her puzzled father a stick in her mouth. A redheaded boy put his muddy hands on his mother’s clean white shirt and barked in her face, to her great dismay.

  As the sun set, the crew there worked themselves into a frenzy of which the awaiting parents who surrounded the playground had never quite seen the like: a pack of children, feral and barking, sniffing, chewing, chasing, and a mother orchestrating it all, with her long unkempt hair and puzzling face, which seemed to grow more and more canine in the lengthening shadows.

  Soon the other parents grew uneasy with the play, or else their children tired as bedtime approached or, you know, it was time for dinner. One way or another, the crowd thi
nned, then scattered, until it was just Nightbitch and her tired boy, curled together in the little playhouse nestled beneath one of the structure’s platforms. She licked his head a bit, and he licked her arm and nuzzled her face. She was hot and dirty and sweaty as the boy closed his eyes.

  She would tuck him, half asleep, into his bike trailer, swathed in blankets, buckled tight, and use the might of her legs to propel them both home. But before that, under cover of the child’s playhouse, she spied in her peripheral vision a little bird hopping close, closer, too close, until, with a flick of her wrist, she reached out and grabbed it in one deft movement, so smooth and liquid her son did not even stir as she brought the small, beating body to her chest and twisted its head with a near-silent snap.

  * * *

  —

  THEY WERE REALLY ON it now, on the mommy schedule, the mommy fast-track if you will, Book Babies and the playground and today—how could it already be Friday!? such a beautiful day!—Tyke Hyke. Next week, it would be Play Space at the mall and Gymnastic Jam. Nightbitch had already scheduled it! Really, the sky was the limit—literally. Balloon Babies was all the rage now, a hot-air balloon experience that encouraged overcoming phobias / a love of heights.

  She surged with mommy adrenaline, the knowledge she was doing what was best for her child and focusing on his needs. How can I be a more perfect mother? she wanted to know. She was nearly foaming at the mouth with the question, with projecting the most mommyishness she could. Of course, there would be some dog in there, too, but she could just tuck that in behind everything, behind her most excellent motherhood.

  The boy had a runny nose and a horrible little cough, and during the entire drive to Tyke Hyke the sweet little prince had been kicking the back of her seat, despite her calm implorations that he please stop and that it wasn’t nice or funny and that she would take away cartoons, a threat she seldom carried out, because she, too, wanted the boy to watch cartoons. She wanted it so badly, so that she could stand at the kitchen counter and eat coins of dry salami on buttery crackers and think about nothing. So that she could clean her pores in her magnified mirror for a full episode of his favorite doggy cartoon, or lie in the middle of the living-room floor and close her eyes without the threat that any small person, in that particular cartooned moment, might pounce directly on the fleshy middle of her and bruise a vital organ, or kick her head, then trip and fall again onto her fleshy core, or spit in her general direction, because how remarkable that a body could produce its very own liquid! Just like that! Look, Mama! Look!