by Abby Frucht
“I’m sure it did,” says Daniel.
I tell him there were books, that the books were big and frayed, and that hanging from a nail is one of those chains carved out of a single block of wood. I describe the rust stains in the sink, the algae on the windows, the dampness of the floor. Deliberating, I tell him also about the caps-one painter’s, one trucker’s – that sat on top of the laundry basket.
I don’t tell him that I recognized both caps, or that the books were printed in German. They appeared to be war diaries, their spines ribbed and threadbare, their pulpy frontispieces adorned with tinted photographs of bearded and uniformed men.
Nor can I bring myself to tell Daniel about the strange vase of flowers, which I would have missed had it not been for Stevie, for it was Stevie who saw it as we walked out the door, and squealed until he got my attention. Daniel probably would think nothing of it, would go on doing what he’s doing and forget what I’d told him by the time I had finished; he is in any case thoroughly engrossed in the project at hand, an examination of female floral parts under the gaze of the dissecting microscope. I am reminded of me and my doctor. Having sliced open a style he examines it for evidence of successful matings-the grains of pollen having sprouted, the slender tubules gaining access to the ovaries. This particular female appears to have been unyielding; Daniel grunts, nudges the slide with the tip of the dissecting needle, moves on in search of more receptive tissue.
He takes it personally, I know. We collected these flowers together. In the field recently we’ve developed a rhythm like the rhythm of sex-a slow, measured descent into the damp part of the woods where the jewelweed proliferates, a careful inspection of the site while we check to see if any blossoms have been eaten, trampled, or otherwise trespassed or violated, and then again to see what wilted, what dropped, collapsed, withered. After that, more hurriedly, we assume our positions, Daniel here, myself there, and begin impatiently the act itself as if after fore-play, plucking and peeling, then touching blossom to blossom over and over in a rhythm reminiscent of Daniel’s kisses in the hollow of my neck. Afterwards, we are damp, thirsty, sticky, tired, and climbing up from the patch, wordless.
“There were some wildflowers in the greenhouse, too,” is all I finally tell him.
“What kind,” he asks. Hunched over the UV light, his face has a worried, lavender cast.
“Some umbel. I don’t know.”
Grunt, grunt. Nudge, nudge.
“In a really weird vase,” I continue weakly.
Daniel glances up at me, gives a little nod, lowers his pursed lips closer to the specimen.
Instead, I’ll tell Nikki about the vase.
But carefully, in keeping with the newly enforced silence about her house; when she shuts the door after me, it is with such cunning that the hardware never clicks, and then she leads the way on stockinged feet into the living room where she perches on the edge of the coffee table.
When she crosses her legs, the sheer, nylon layers of her sari whisper around her ankles.
I sit on the beanbag chair, which farts magnificently even under my scant weight. Nikki raises her eyebrows and offers me a handful of the miniature marshmallows her brother brings over. Coming in, I glanced into the kitchen and noticed on the counter the preparations for her lunch; a little platter of tofu, sliced egg, and dressing. Not a thing that makes a sound when it is chewed. No wonder her garden has been so full. Nikki has lost some weight, I see now as I look her full in the face; the tilt of her cheekbones more pronounced, the fine shape of her skull more delicate, somehow, beneath the heavily beaded tug of the braids. She eats only one of the candies, solemnly chewing while I tell her about the greenhouse.
“There was this really weird vase,” I begin. “I don’t know if I told you about the day Stevie and I went raspberry picking. We were up near the tracks, on that high plateau, and we were picking berries but we had nothing to put them in except – Have you ever been out to the old arboretum?” I ask.
A shake of the head.
“Did you know it was there?”
Another shake of the head, a shrug.
“So we went back there today, me and Stevie. I’d been out there before with Daniel but not in years, and this time I found that greenhouse and I –”
Nikki’s still shaking her head, and when I’ve paused I can hear that she’s saying something under her breath. “That bastard,” she’s saying. “That bastard, that bastard.”
Her brother’s name is Dewey, I know.
“You doing all right, Nikki?”
A smile, and after that she asks “Want to hear something?”
“Sure.”
She takes her place at the keyboard, switches a switch, flicks back the loose sleeves of her sari, slides a disk in the slot and having readied her hands at the keys, starts playing. The beaded braids sway just a little, but her eyelids never flutter, they just stay half-closed, and there’s that same, pained expression on her face. From what, I can only guess. Not music, I hope, because there isn’t a sound coming out of her speakers. Not a note, not a trill, not even the whir of the technology.
“I don’t know a thing about music,” I say nervously when she’s done, and Nikki grins in my face before leading me to the tv and showing me what happens when we turn it on – nothing.
Same with the lights.
Same with the washing machine, the clothes dryer, the hair dryer in her bathroom. She holds it up, I press the button, nothing happens, no air, no buzz, no whir.
“Oh,” I say, “I thought maybe you were losing your–”
Her what? Her mind?
“I thought maybe you were losing your hearing,” I say.
“I wish,” Nikki says.
So I DON’T TELL Nikki about the flowers, either, but maybe that’s just as well. After all it was only what anyone would put flowers in when they didn’t have a vase. It was the body of the doll, with the drying purple flowers pin-wheeling out of the headless neck. Joe had been careful to pour in water, but the water had seeped from the hole in the doll’s crotch and made a puddle between her feet. I imagine Joe returning to the greenhouse to find the wilted flowers, then, puzzled, holding the neck to the rusty tap. Even balancing the doll attentively on her chewed toes he doesn’t notice the puddle growing before his eyes but instead settles down to the preparation of his dinner as just at this moment Daniel and I settle down to the preparation of our own. We’re having stewed zucchini from Nikki’s garden, and more croissants from the Epicurean. Also, a jar of tiny marinated onions. The croissants are filled with almond paste, presenting a dilemma: dinner, or dessert? Perhaps I should have told Dr. Kirshner more about this new, imposed diet: smoked oysters, guava jelly, creamy spreadable cheeses and canned patés, chutneys, even a jar of lemon paste that I don’t know what to do with, eat it with a spoon, maybe, or spread it on toast although we don’t have toast, just Carr’s Water Biscuits. We get fruit only every so often, when the wild berries ripen or when the Washington Apple basket in the Epicurean is restocked, and these days we’re eyeing our cherry tree, shooing birds from contemplation of the hard pink sour spheres although I have no sugar to cook them in. All the markets have closed for eighteen miles around, and even Danka’s finicky William had trouble recently finding bottles of tonic water. I told him they might have, some at the Epicurean. They have licorice, at least; yesterday I bought Dutch, in leathery black guilders, which turn out to be chalky, not sweet, but licorice just the same, the black mineral flavor like sucking a lozenge of coal. I’ve got a five-guilder coin in my mouth this minute-a secret from Daniel—as I scrub some of Nikki’s zucchinis. Daniel slices them up, dropping bite-sized strips into Stevie’s mouth. Stevie eats even onions, and whole green beans, but never those yellow embryonic peppers we discover now and then inside the hollows of the big green ones, like curled-up Easter chicks.
“What do you think about fish,” I ask Daniel, who doesn’t understand me with the guilder in my cheek.
“What do you t
hink about fishing?” I repeat. “People do it, you know, at the reservoir.”
“At the woolywoo?”
“At the reservoir.” I slide the licorice under my tongue. Captured like that, the burnt flavor swells like a sponge.
“Blue gills?” says Daniel. “Sorry. I like my fish to fight back when I reel them in. I’d rather buy a new car.”
“You would?”
“Well…” he says, and meets my eye, because he knows I know how much he likes the romance of living like this, with only a bike and a backpack to scavenge for food. Our legs are sinewy, our shoulders solidly reassuring, our son a blonde cupid pink-lipped from wild raspberries. Only our bellies show the jars of Macadamia nuts, the cartons of Haagen Daz.
“Anyway a car is too much of a pain in the neck,” says Daniel. “Besides, what about those clippings?”
“What clippings?”
“Excuse me?”
“What clippings?”
“Those clippings.”
“Oh.” I remember I showed him my stash, a paperclipful of order forms from Harry and David, Hormel, Hartwell’s Gourmet Gifts, Omaha Steaks. If the Epicurean folds, and when Nikki’s garden gives out, we can order whole banquets from here and there provided there’s somebody left to deliver. Sides of beef, whole smoked salmon, cartons of tangelos, of kumquats, of coconut paste. I wonder, what do you do with coconut paste? The same thing you do with lemon paste? And what about tea?
“What about tea?” I ask Daniel.
“Harry and David have tea, I bet.”
“Maybe.”
“Probably,” says Daniel.
“Possibly.”
“Excuse me?” says Daniel.
“POSSIBLY POSSIBLY POSSIBLY” I yell, spitting licorice juice like chewing tobacco all over Daniel’s julienne strips of zucchini.
Silence.
Daniel sweeps the zucchini into a colander and showers it with tap water.
Then he sets the colander on the cutting board, and puts his hands not-quite-on-my-shoulders. Just about, but not quite.
He’s about to be diplomatic.
“I have a feeling it might be worthwhile to remind you that your doctor pointed out to you that this sweet tooth of yours seems to be interfering with your health,” he suggests.
“I have a feeling it might be worthwhile to point out to you that Dutch licorice is chalky, not sweet. Besides, I seem to have a craving for it, Daniel.”
Besides, I have to stop myself from saying, I can live with aches and pains, with thirst and fatigue, but if I can’t have licorice to fill me up, I’ll be hungry for something else instead. For something more elemental. For something primitive, Daniel. For the thing that makes me hungry in the first place, Daniel. You don’t want to know, you’d be appalled, I could say. I should be appalled, but still I can’t stop thinking of it. Of him. I’d do his ears, first, then his bald head, then every inch of his backbone straight down to his combat pants. I’d chew on the camouflage, then crawl under the sink and swallow him whole while he skins and trusses our dinner.
Our squirrel.
Joe would be careful to skin it over the sink, then lay it flat on its pelt to drain it, behead it, de-paw it, de-muck it. He’d feed the globules of fat along with the innards to Eva, but outside, in the spoon-shaped cleft in the flat rock to the left of the hedge apple tree. Then he’d slide in a skewer from anus to neck, and hold the animal over the fire pit while rolling the skewer evenly between the palms of his callused hands.
We’d eat it sitting outside; a single plate, no napkins, and the bottle of Red Devil Louisiana Hot Sauce. Later, in bed, we’d be all grease, all pepper, all soot, all thirst.
Through the gaps in the windows we’d hear Eva at her spoon-shaped trough in the rock under the hedge apples, munching bones. Her approach would be practiced and delicate; having split a bone in half she’d lure the marrow onto the tip of her tongue, the bone upright between her paws, her tail rigid with concentration. She would have eaten the head in similar fashion, the soft tissues licked out of the skull while close by on our blanket of scratchy wool we mimicked her sighs and sucks, her groans, thumps, and pauses. Every so often she’d stop what she was doing and listen warily for noises from the woods and the trails, for the snap of a branch, the rustle of dry grass, but there would be nothing-no coyote, no fox, no feral dog-only the peculiar silence of all three of us listening, lying in wait. Joe would keep his pocketknife close at his side, and at these intervals he’d stroke it. But then the ritual would come to a close; Eva returning to her bones, Joe turning to me with meaty tongue; soon he’d flip on his back, lift me up on the palms of his hands, lower my body precisely onto his own.
Later, in sleep, he’d insist on the dead weight of me lying across his chest, and would not allow me to turn on my back to look at the moon through the algae-streaked glass of the greenhouse roof. Instead I’d watch the glint of moonlight on my earrings swinging from the chewed fingers of his flower vase, the very thought of which fills me with anguish so persuasive that
Daniel’s fistful of chopped vegetables stops mid-air over the sizzle of the wok as he turns to me and asks what’s the matter.
Stevie, who on the floor fills his own pot with invisible zucchinis, pauses too in imitation and looks at me.
“Nothing. Just hungry,” I say, and think of Joe at this instant unfolding his pocketknife while between the legs of the doll the little puddle spreads incrementally. Still he doesn’t notice that it’s there, so absorbed is he in the scraping of his knife blade across the pelt of a squirrel, in the snugness of the cap upon his head, in the view through the glass of the bunches of hedge apples bobbing on the limbs of the tree. So intent is he on the solitariness of the moment, so contented with his reclusive, farfetched abode that when he’s thirsty it’s never beer he wants or even water but just the feel of the tin camper’s cup against his lips. It’s the cup that he ordered from a hunting magazine. When he reaches for it, that’s when he first sees the puddle, and then the doll’s damp legs and the hole in her crotch. How appalled he is-how embarrassed-by this fact of the doll’s anatomy; how could he not have noticed, how could he have overlooked, and now, what to do with her? Throw her out the window? Banish her? But in the end he only stuffs up the hole with a thread pulled from the splitting seam of his combat pants, refills her with water, rearranges the flowers, and restores himself with another glance at the mute, misshapen hedge apples, enough to assure him that he is still alone, unbothered, unmated, isolated as he intends to be.
“Actually, since you asked, I’m bummed out because Nikki shut off her electricity and I won’t be able to hear when she’s playing her music,” I lie to my husband, and pour a beakerful of strictly rationed soy sauce into the wok as he drops in the last of the zucchini.
“Why’d she do a thing like that?” he asks.
“Privacy,” I tell him. I pick Stevie up and rock him.
SEVERAL NIGHTS LATER I come home from a late night meeting at the post office (we’re discussing shrinking routes, depleted staff, depleted need, depleted inventory, and we always hold our meetings late at night because even though our supervisor left town, she was a night owl and we all got used to it) and since I’m not quite ready to go to sleep, myself, I go out to the cherry tree to find the fruits – so late to begin with – already soft between my fingers as I pick. No music from Nikki’s studio, of course, but the crickets are humming and now and then someone slams shut the door of a moving van and starts up the engine. Past three a.m. I go inside, rinse the cherries in the colander, set them to drain, have a glass of water, then head for the guest room, stripping in the hallway as I go. No need to wake Daniel upstairs, I’m thinking, as I open the door and just climb into bed. And there’s somebody in there, naturally.
Under the sheets in the darkness.
NOT ARNIE, although at first I think that’s who it must be, a man asleep on his belly, his hands hidden under the pillow and just the top of his head exposed by the flipped-back sh
eet. I see a mass of hair, but not Amie s, not feathery, not tremulous enough to be his.
Not Joe, either, then.
Not bald.
Curly.
Maybe Ben.
Maybe lonely in the house without Leah, Ben made his way over here with little Simon murmuring in a blanket in his arms, and laid Simon asleep in the crib next to Stevie, and talked to Daniel after that-about me, probably, about Daniel’s husbandly worries. Just recently, and briefly, Ben hooked up with a group of men whose wives and lovers had, like Leah, disappeared, but the meeting, which took place in a church basement, was unsuccessful according to Ben. “All they did was talk semantics,” he said. “Like whether she left me, or whether she just left, but not whether she might come back.” In any case he didn’t go to the next of the meetings, but came to Daniel instead and talked about it with him, the two men all the while poking around with the microscope or mixing dyes to be applied to some pollen grains. They work happily together, Ben and Daniel, like boys hunched over a toy, their bodies colliding every so often while reaching simultaneously for a focusing knob.
Leah and I used to spy on them, our arms folded over our chests. They talked about David Letterman, Doonesbury, baseball. Then one would knock a slide off the edge of the counter and the other would catch it before it hit the floor.
For a moment I wish I hadn’t missed the sight of their happy camaraderie or of their foreheads banging together over the ocular.
“Cute,” I would have said.
And Leah would have answered, “Isn’t it.”
So it is best I wasn’t there, my very posture making visible the fact of Leah’s invisibility. Leah’s absence is a blind spot in the corners of our eyes, these days. Ben sometimes breaks down and weeps, but momentarily, because he doesn’t want Simon to see. When we visit their house, they are always in the backroom playing basketball – the ball is foam rubber, and the basket has a suction cup that holds it to the inside of the door-or else they’re on the porch with the scooters and trykes. The rest of the house has an unlived-in look, because the mess doesn’t change: same toys, same magazines, same books, same couch cushions knocked off in the same places. Occasionally the television has been left turned-on, or there’s a red light blinking on the stereo. Ben doesn’t water the plants, and he doesn’t clean the toilets, but he’s determined to feed himself and Simon well; he cooks lentils from the jars Leah stocked in their kitchen: red lentils, blonde lentils, green. All the while Leah’s absence stands tall and narrow in the doorway, relieved that he’s getting by.