by Shannon Kirk
“Can we go inside, please?” I said with a trembling voice.
She jostled at the question, a look of terror on her face.
“Inside?” she said, as if her own home haunted her.
What the fuck is inside?
“Please?”
She did her head shake of calibration once more and returned to a cool, practiced calmness. “Of course. Yes, of course,” she said. “Let’s do that. Go inside.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
MOP
Two weeks ago
Aunty led me out of the burned basement—the night not raining nor storming—a regular summer night with a full moon. When we neared the side room of the barn in which the woman “slept,” I stared at the boarded window blocking my view of her. Aunty walked on ahead of me, brushing up the scent of rosemary and basil as she passed her herb garden. A couple of crickets sawed their legs in a solemn violin duet.
Aunty’s various perennial beds spread out across and around her lawns like a multicolor patchwork quilt: yellows, purples, pinks, and blues lit by the big, bright moon on high, by strategic solar lights down low, and midair by twinkle lights, strung, like always, throughout the limbs of her willows and birch, maple, and oak.
Aunty’s roses were in full bloom and pink, yellow, and red. The pillows of her white hydrangeas were baby clouds, and the blue ones electric sea anemone. Her annual round forest of fifty sunflowers was growing to its usual monumental height and about ready to burst into yellow-and-brown dinner plates atop swaying ten-foot stalks. She always planted the sunflowers in a spiral, and it seemed to me they were a council of elders convening a summit on how to govern Aunty’s lawns and farther, the sea beyond. Guarding the entrance to the sunflower summit, a resident rabbit of gray and white froze like a stone next to his best friend, a granite cherub. Assessing me as a nonviolent threat, the rabbit unfroze and resumed his nonchalance. A blade of grass hung from his slow chewing mouth like a mechanic with a toothpick. The fattest, laziest sentry on the planet.
Given this intoxicating environment, I allowed a wave of nostalgia to comfort me for three seconds, amid the turmoil I felt inside. Nature must have sensed me needing sedation, for she sent a bullfrog to add thrums of bass to the crickets’ violins, and a seagull to cut the sky with a cry of soprano, long-winded and mesmerizing. How I used to love this place, my happiness reflected in the concert of the creatures and the rainbows of the plants and the white-noise hum of the strung twinkle lights.
I was awakened out of my slip into familiar comfort and back into our new strange reality, when in arriving at Aunty’s blue front door, flopping pink hibiscus stabbed a vapor of high-octane sugar up my nostrils, like a magician’s finger snap to the hypnotized. But I wanted the happy hypnosis back. I wanted my mother. My aunty. Us. Our family. I wanted to conjure illogical, fantastical conversations with that lazy rabbit, and gossip with him in my mind about the snobbish severity of the sunflower congress, all tall and high and mighty and pretentious as always—like before. Carefree in my curiosity. I wanted to be better, less frantic in my mind, less grieved. Less fogged. I wanted, really wanted to emerge. I wanted to break down and hug Aunty, and I wanted her to hug me, so we could heal each other and at least be us together again. I’d take a fraction of our old lives. Please, just a splash of happiness back again. Anything. Please.
Her marble foyer, the Mermaid Library on the right with the multiple sets of metal mermaid bookends, the living room with the multicolored sea-life wallpaper on the left, the one with the blue-and-white rug I once muddied with potatoes: all the same. The hallway that ran center of the house to the kitchen in the back still held its own pattern of multicolored wallpaper, the hallway’s pattern being of birds and vines, not sea life like the living room.
“It’s funny you should show up today with a blown gasket, Mop. Manny called here today, too, looking for you. He’s home from London. Graduated,” Aunty said.
And another slap to awaken.
“What did you tell him? Did you tell him where I was?” I had just finished crying over my mother and her Tory Burch shoe, which I still held and didn’t plan on letting go. What she said about Manny was a wallop of a slap. I stalled in the foyer, the white marble shining like an ice rink after a Zamboni pass. Expecting her to lead me up the stairs to my regular bedroom, I remained waiting for an answer and for her to head up the stairs, but she continued on through the Mermaid Library.
“What did you tell him?” I said louder, causing her to stop by the section of her library she called the Good Books section. All the good books’ spines were cracked so badly you could barely read the titles, for she read or loaned them so often. But unlike before two years ago, dust now covered this frequently used section. It seemed the mermaid bookends were crying, but upon closer inspection, the tears were wispy strings of spent spiderwebs. Still, Aunty didn’t answer me.
“Aunty, seriously, Aunty, what did you say to Manny?”
Her change of subject to something lighter, Manny of all things, my lost love, my one lifelong friend, was yet another disconnection to the insanity around us. I sounded frantic over him, and I didn’t care.
“I told him I hadn’t talked to you and didn’t know where you were. I gave, as I’ve given him before, your Rye number.”
“Before?” And your Rye number? She used to always say the Rye number. As if she could be reached in Rye too. The difference between your and the is meaningful in this context. I felt a stab of pain in my heart, like she abandoned me all over again and meant to stick with it.
“He’s called several times over the last two years, Mop. Hasn’t he reached you at the house? At Princeton?”
“No. Only sometimes, a text message is all, I think.” I trailed my words in doubt for some reason I didn’t then know, or yet acknowledge.
With all the strangeness and Aunty flitting in and out of being my old aunty and this other being of strange psychology, I couldn’t even summon anger. How do I explain what fog feels like? Tastes like? Tastes like dehydration; feels like sitting at the bottom of the pool, brain pulsing, sight wavy, wanting only one thing: air.
I followed her to the first-floor guest room, the one off the library with gray-and-green wallpaper and a twin bed, which threw me as yet another sting of abandonment.
“Won’t I stay in my old room?” This, this act of putting me in the gray-and-green guest room, which is what we always called it, a room she reserved for people who visited her maybe once a year, was so impersonal, like downgrading me to a mere acquaintance. I swallowed air so as not to choke. I fought back tears to be led to this room, a sign I was still and would always be a castoff. She no longer loved me, no longer wanted me around; she couldn’t stand to look at me with her one eye, or worse yet, grew indifferent to my existence, that’s how it felt. I wanted to lie down and die.
Parading through the Mermaid Library, I once again questioned the Roosevelt gun in the glass case and why such violence existed in such an otherwise love-filled room, pointing its barrel out the window at her fantastical lawn.
I had my own room in Aunty’s house, upstairs. I stayed at Aunty’s so much, both my mother and I did, the family joked how we should claim Aunty’s as our permanent address. Obviously, it was Aunty’s house and I would respect if in the two years since she shut us out she’d made renovations, but given the history, wouldn’t she explain, acknowledge the change, and at least say why I couldn’t use the room she previously, for my entire life, kept solely for me? She’d painted a sign for the door: MOP CLOSET—it’s not a closet, it’s a girl’s room with a canopy bed and lace curtains, a green dresser, a retro record player, a dictionary, a writing desk with all my papers, journals, too, and three of my favorite paintings of the sea, painted by none other than Aunty.
“Oh, baby—” And here she was being Aunty again. “I’m so sorry. I’m so rattled.” She hugged me, which felt half-true, half-false, and too long and too short, all at the same time. Pulling away, she said, “Right. So your
room. I didn’t mention. Right. Um . . . So there’s a raccoon up in the attic. Hmm.” She held her long finger to her closed lips, then popped it off to continue. “He’s stuck up there. Weird. I had to board the attic doorway and all. I’ve been trying to get him out of there on my own, but I need to get animal control out here. I’ll try tomorrow. He’d keep you up all night with his scratching about.”
She’s been living with a raccoon in the attic? The attic is a finished bedroom with four dormers. It’s not really an attic. It’s a finished floor of the house with carpeting, a king bed, and a second master’s bath. So . . . um . . . and . . . a trapped raccoon? Boarded the attic door? Which attic door? There’s two. One from her bedroom, and one at the end of the hall in which my bedroom sits. I don’t think, yes, I definitely think I don’t believe this story.
I chose not to ask further. I needed space. Needed to sit in the guest room and hug my mother’s shoe. Alone.
“Okay. I need some rest. And a shower. I’ll deal with my car in the morning,” I said. The guest room had its own attached bath, a single stall shower, no tub, and a white pedestal sink.
At some point while showering, a time that was a mental black hole from all the crying and confusion, I forced myself away from obsessing over my mother’s shoe, which I kept in eyesight by keeping it on the lip of the sink and the shower curtain open. It took concentrated effort, but I had to stop spiraling into grief, or wind up like I did two years ago, sleeping in the fetal position for three weeks and not eating, not talking to anyone, and convicting the sun of a conspiracy with the devil to cause me debilitating migraines—my sentence to the sun being to blot it out by drawing blackout shades so tight and stapling them in place, I never knew the difference between night and day. A psychiatrist tried to breach the barrier of my locked door in Rye to feed me grief pills, and I told the bitch to fuck off or I’d staple her eyelids. Then I launched the stapler at the door and made a dent in the wood. Aunt Sister Mary Patience Pentecost sat outside my door the whole night saying her novenas, fifty rosaries clinking on her lap as she spent each one, either guarding others living in Rye (herself, my father, and the servants) from me, or guarding me from others, I couldn’t tell.
I don’t know why I shouted such violence through the door at the psychiatrist or why I denied treatment. I think I said the thing about stapling her eyes shut because that’s what I was poised to do to my own self when the psychiatrist’s knocks interrupted me. Simply put, it was a confusing time. Insanity is a well we might fall into, and with luck and hard work, we might climb out. Standing in Aunty’s guest shower two weeks ago, I asked myself if it was still a confusing time. I asked myself if I had forgotten some things. But even thinking these questions caused me to swallow the shower water and choke, so I had to think on lighter things, like Manny. I didn’t want to crawl out of the shower and submerge into Sylvia Plath poems again, allowing myself to consider how she stuck her own head in an oven—a logical conclusion. Think of Manny, it’s okay. I switched to thoughts of Manny, as a gift to myself, something I realized in Aunty’s shower had always been an option, but an option neglected. And so the images and the questions rushed in.
Did Manny ever call me at Rye looking for me? No one ever gave me a message, I think. I pictured his black hair, his blue eyes, his long legs, the birthmark on his chest, the birthmark under his right eye, the others on his arms, his thighs, his inner thighs, the creamy tanness of his skin, like new leather, and swayed in the warmth of the guest shower, training my thoughts on him so as not to fall in the stall and sit under the showerhead for hours—as my active mind wished to do. I looked away from my mother’s shoe, shut my eyes, and pretended the white tiled wall and the wetness that steamed there was Manny’s skin after a swim. I pressed my fingertips into the tiles and raked down, down again.
But in thinking on Manny and the fact I couldn’t remember a call from him in two years, except occasional texts when we were at school, I wandered further into thoughts of my family home in Rye and who lives there still and who might have answered the phone and never given me his messages, maybe. I had to blame someone.
I thought of Aunt Sister Mary Patience Pentecost. I caught her once in my room, rooting through my drawer of crosses, the ones she’s gifted me. I think this was about a year after my mother disappeared into the sea.
When I walked in, Aunt Sister Mary heard my steps behind her and froze, bent over my drawer. She stood slow, removing her hands, allowing the crucifixes on chains and rosaries to lace like hair through her fingers.
Facing me with guilty hands, which were glistening clean, as if she scrubbed them with Brillos every morning, she dropped her head to the side and sagged her mouth. Contemplative, like a sad ghost. Although retired from the church, she still wore shapeless house frocks, hiding the curves of her forty-something female body, condemning her breasts as original sin.
“Mary Olivia,” she said, as a confession.
“Aunt Mary, please. My name is Mop.”
“I know, child. Yes. I’m sorry. It’s just, well . . .”
“It’s fine. Whatever,” I said in apathy. “I don’t mind you going through my drawers. I’ve got nothing to hide.”
“But why do you not wear any of the crosses?”
“We’ve been through this, Aunt Mary. You know why.”
“I know your thoughts on the matter.”
“I’m sorry. But I need to get ready. I’m going out. Do you mind?”
“With a boy? You know, you should, oh, child. I’m sorry. But without Johanna, I mean, without your mother here, I feel compelled. I hope you are respecting your body and the church.”
I wasn’t going out with a boy that night, but I wasn’t about to correct her. I wasn’t about to tell her, or anyone, where I was really going. They’d have locked me up if they knew.
I raised my eyebrows. I didn’t want to fight with her. But this was sensitive stuff here, her in my room, riffling through my drawer of crosses, her mentioning my mother and in the same breath the church. It was all I could do to not push her out of my room and slam the door. I also brought to mind some snarky jabs Aunty Liv had woven into conversations about Aunt Sister Mary, quick comments that she didn’t give me time to react to. For example, when cooking a fresh whole cod once, Aunty Liv said, “The eyes of the dead fish, like the judgmental eyes of a rich, hypocritical nun.” And another time, when I told Aunty Liv about how Aunt Sister Mary didn’t approve of my swimming laps every morning like I do, she said, “If you were performing for her, the grand master of approval, she’d be fine, I guess. Hmm. You do your laps here, in the ocean at Haddock in your wet suit like you do. Don’t monkey around her byzantine rules, which she herself doesn’t follow.” She ground her teeth, crossing her own belly with both arms, hugging something missing there. And before I could question her severe reaction and the accusation that Sister Mary didn’t follow every single rule and law in the universe, Aunty Liv said, “Enough of what’s her name. Hand me the cake bowl,” smiling away in her regular shininess.
These comments from Aunty Liv came after Aunt Sister Mary left the church under circumstances that were never explained to me. And these comments and Sister Mary’s strange ex-nunship were what I considered when I caught her riffling through my crosses in my Rye bedroom, a year after my mother disappeared into the ocean.
“I’m sorry, Mary. Mop. I’m sorry. I’ll leave now,” Aunt Sister Mary had said, and fast walked out of my bedroom. And yet, she stopped in the doorway and looked over her shoulder, stiffened her back, and wide-eyed me with her big green eyes like she does, like possessed, and said in a low hum, “If you’re to see a boy tonight, I will have to inform Philipp, rather, your father. And you know, and I just have to say, I simply do not approve. I don’t know how to. The Lord has not provided me the ability. I must protect you from yourself.”
Who is the best to protect you from yourself? Is it you? Is it family? Is it a spirit? Who?
Sometimes I think Aunt Sister Mar
y Patience Pentecost is the inverse of me. She seems to first think on practical facts, then dismisses those in favor of divine blind faith and grandiose meanings. Like she’s an upside-down mirror, able to hold the inverted image of me.
“Anyway,” she continued, pressing her clean palms down the no-pleat fabric of her stiff cotton housedress. “I’ll have to report this to your father, and I’ll pray to our Almighty for you tonight. You are so restless, child. I know your grief remains.”
“Don’t. Just don’t. My father does not care what I do, and neither does anyone else, celestial or real. So you don’t have to, either, Aunt Mary. I’m sorry, but please, I need to get ready.” I kick-closed my bedroom door and slammed the drawer of crosses in one quick series of motions, not angry that she invaded my space, again, like she always did, which was annoying, but wanting to shut out in a definite slam any mention of beings, living in my drawer, in the air, in the heavens, who might access my mother when I couldn’t.
I allowed Aunt Sister Mary and my father to think I went out with a boy, because it was easier if they chose to believe I was back to being a young adult—only about twenty years younger than both my aunts and eighteen younger than my missing mother. Actually, you could say I was a grown woman of twenty-four, so all of Aunt Sister Mary’s fumbling about me going out with a boy was a lie of concern, and she knew I knew it. She just wasn’t willing—no one was, certainly not I—to address the rabid tiger in the room: my mental state.