And Yet They Were Happy

by Helen Phillips

  wife #4

  We owe so much to the brave woman who first cut into an onion and went through with the gesture! I don’t know in what era of human history this occurred—certainly hundreds, if not thousands, of eager homemakers had attempted and (weeping) failed to chop an onion before our heroine emerged. It was she who could ignore her instinct screaming out that any food capable of making a human cry was not a food a human ought to eat. It was she who could ignore the implication, based on her tears, that the onion would be disgusting at best, poisonous at worst.

  I imagine her in a kitchen, though surely this happened before the time of kitchens. Let’s make it a primitive kitchen then, counters carved in a stone cave and water dripping down walls. Let’s say she’s gone out into the wilderness and dug up one perfect onion. Let’s say she’s brought it home with pride and conviction. She peels away papery layers. With her crude knife, she cuts into it. For a moment, all’s well. She notices the milky juice of it on her fingers. She smells it, and finds it a great, rich fragrance. It reminds her of the way he smells down there. But then: the tears come. Though she’s seen others cry, she has never cried herself. She’s bewildered, disconcerted—until she decides that she cannot be responsible for this impossible situation, tears in her brave, cold eyes; it must be that roguish onion. And she attacks.

  That night, he stares worshipfully at her while devouring piece after piece of onion. Neighbors come from all around; they fill with envy and admiration when they taste onion for the first time. The men regret that they didn’t select this woman; the women dip their heads in shame.

  I too am jealous of her, she who could separate one kind of crying from another. Even knowing all I know, still whenever he comes home and asks why I’m crying I can’t say Oh it’s just the onions.

  wife #5

  It started out fine. Delightful, even. One of us (later we couldn’t recall which) bought a pair of little brown birds. Our imitation of a happy marriage was still impeccable at that point; we ourselves did not realize it was an imitation. The birds had reminded the purchaser of a sight we’d seen in Latin America: an unfinished cathedral, wrecked by an earthquake partway through construction. It looked almost intentional, those jagged half-walls giving way to the terribly blue sky where the dome would have been, as though this was the best way to approach God. Weeds grew among the disintegrating bricks, sporting flowers of a brilliant pink hue that, in our country, can be found only on candy wrappers. Birds darted across the nonexistent dome. Yes, that memory somehow resonated with the sight of these birds in their pet-shop carrying case, and we went out to buy a cage.

  Two birds wasn’t enough, we decided, for two, as we knew, could get lonely. And once you had three, their tittering interfering with all your thoughts anyhow, the strange yet innocuous smell of their shit filling the apartment, why not four? Why not eight? Why not a whole flock? We named them, though it was impossible to keep them straight. We took pictures of them. Our co-workers called us the Bird People; we enjoyed the title.

  But we hadn’t prepared ourselves for death. When the first one went, we were shocked, speechless, staring at the tiny carcass. Then one of us convinced the other that someday we’d own a yard where we could bury it. In the meantime? We wrapped it in tinfoil and put it in the freezer.

  After that, we no longer kept our birds in cages. It seemed the least we could do. Every surface in our apartment bore a thin gloss of bird shit. We watched TV while the birds dipped and whirred above us. Eventually, our freezer became overfull with bird corpses. Someday, we told each other tensely at night, we’ll have a yard.

  wife #6

  Two friends meet in a café. One is recently and secretly divorced. One is recently and secretly married. They choose to sit in the courtyard behind the café. An uncertain warmth curls around the chilly wind. Spring is arriving. They wish to liberate their bodies from the cold, strange winter. Each has been feeling apocalyptic lately, and brave. By the time they’ve determined—egging each other on—to sit outside, by the time they’ve overmastered the waiter’s cocked eyebrow and warning about the cold metal chairs, by the time they’ve gotten settled at the wrought-iron table in the deserted courtyard, they’ve gone too far to retract their decision, to return to the interior where lamps glow yellow on chocolate walls. Each has come to tell the other her secret. They talk politely, then fall silent.

  One of the women stares into her white mug. She taps her cold feet on the flagstone. She glances at her friend and looks away. She grips the mug. She stares at the barren branches. She notices birdsong; is her attention to such details heightened due to the recent circumstances of her life? She glances at her friend again. She observes certain tiny effects of age in her friend’s face. “So,” she says.

  The other woman glances at her friend and looks away. She stares at the barren branches. She grips her white mug. She glances at her friend again. She observes certain tiny effects of age in her friend’s face. She taps her cold feet on the flagstone. She stares into the mug. She notices birdsong; is her attention to such details heightened due to the recent circumstances of her life? “So,” she says, just as her friend says, “So.”

  They talk politely. “So,” each sometimes begins, but nothing comes of it. Eventually, they both say they must be going. Shivering, they come in from the courtyard. The waiter grins triumphantly. He was right. They were wrong. The friends part in the vestibule of the café; it will be decades before they see each other again.

  wife #7

  I am dead now and an old woman who barely speaks English has come to prepare my face for burial. She says “revjuneate” rather than “rejuvenate.” The warm damp cloth she rubs across my face calls to mind the warm damp cloth Nana rubbed across my face when I was little. It’s too late now to explain that I’d prefer to burn instead, that I’ve always been curious about the color of the flames my body would release. Someone has decided—I wonder with shock if it’s you—that there will be calla lilies, a coffin, a line of people, a cemetery, a terrible clump of dirt. The old woman massages my cheeks with rose-scented cream. I wish this had happened to me more frequently when I was alive. I can tell from the tenderness in her fingertips that she finds me quite beautiful. This calls to mind the statue of Mary in the churchyard—mournfully hopeful, her loving white fingertips turned upward.

  It’s too late now to tell you about a little girl bouncing an enormous white ball on the roof of a skyscraper. I wanted to describe to you the rubbery sound it made, the thrilling and ominous sensation in the stomach as it reached its apex, the belief that if the ball bounced off the side perhaps I’d become capable of flight. It was a blindingly white ball. She bounced it hundreds of times.

  The old woman has revjuneated me as best she can. She has applied powders everywhere, and something moist to the lips. I died young, kind of, but not tragically young. She turns off the light, kisses my forehead. I wonder if I’m not little again, asleep in Nana’s house.

  It’s too late now to tell you that when the little girl bounced the ball to me, I bounced it back to her. We became involved in a game that we both took very seriously. I was not pregnant when I died, not exactly, but soon I would have been. It would’ve been a little girl.

  wife #8

  Once you’ve been dead for a period of time, you know how true it is that we each die alone; and indeed Snow White remained vaguely cognizant of this truth even after her life had revived and resolved itself in joyous ways. . . .

  She and Prince X were a happy couple. (In fact, everyone found them infuriatingly darling, and whenever they were paraded through the streets the roses tossed upon them contained, tucked among their petals, small cryptic curses—Sixteen onions in a barrel of brine, You may be hers but she is mine! Of course the royal couple never saw these; only the hunchbacked, dwarfish street-sweepers read them, giggling strangely.) They were happy . . . but Prince X was a dreamy fellow and sometimes vanished into his imagination, leaving her alone with her knowledge that we each d
ie alone. She searched for him in dusty abandoned towers. Speculating that perhaps he had been magically shrunken, she hunted for him in the sugar bowl.

  By the time he reappeared, barging through the bronze doors and proposing a picnic on the parapet, she’d already become lost in solitude. She wondered if the huntsman had removed her heart and replaced it with a clump of frozen dirt. What else could explain this coldness in her, this immunity to his eager eyes? How she wished she could coo back at him! But we each die alone! “Polgi nitsway,” she said apologetically. “Ogblitefa?”

  “What a joker you are!” he exclaimed, embracing her.

  “Ikne faldig ti!” She squirmed away and ran to the mirror. She was herself—black hair! pure skin! red lips!—and yet she was not. “Folea badong, u lemrig!” It was no joke—this had become the only language she knew. Her solitude swelled and completed itself. For days she would live lonesomely at his side, her heart like a tin can and her mouth producing unrecognizable words.

  Eventually, her mind would wrap itself around his language again. Again she would be darling enough to parade under showers of roses, happy enough to forget the truth.

  wife #9

  Once upon a time, a happy young wife set out to visit her family. In the months since their union, the couple had established the minor rituals of marriage: certain patterns of holding and shifting during sleep. He stood in the doorway. He placed a finger against the pulse in her neck. He knew she’d soon return.

  At the farm, nobody mentioned the hateful words that had been exchanged when she ran off to be married. Instead, they gave her a cup of milk. They stroked her hair. Later, they laid her in her childhood bed. She helped in the orchard. On the sixth day, approaching the farmhouse on the familiar path, she wondered briefly if perhaps she’d only imagined her husband, if she’d made him up while strolling down this very path.

  After two weeks, the husband—who’d been awaiting her return for over a week—appeared in the yard. He observed that, oddly, she looked somewhat younger than before—her skin, perhaps, a shade more radiant. She held a pail. She pretended not to recognize him. How dear and playful she was! But the game went on too long; she screamed when he reached for her, and ran inside. Torn between bemusement and terror, he plunked down under a pear tree. The family looked out the window at him. “Who is that fellow?” the young wife asked them.

  At night she sucked her thumb, as he learned when he spied into her bedroom. It saddened him that he hadn’t known this fact. She was smaller than he remembered. He sat under the pear tree, watching her. Eventually her sisters brought him water, but she shuddered whenever she passed by. He sat there for a long time, becoming skeletal and unshaven. The family put up with him. She avoided him. Yet he observed that she was getting younger each day. By the time she was a toddler, she’d approach him on unsteady legs and yank his spectacular beard. When she became an infant, he rocked her and dripped milk into her mouth.

  the offspring

  offspring #1

  She sees abandoned babies everywhere. A baby sitting on the pavement in a red snowsuit. A baby crawling down the subway platform toward a dead rat. A baby riding a swan across the lake. Her heart does acrobatics as she rushes to rescue them. Instantaneously, she envisions a wooden crib in her apartment, sunbeams illuminating a bottle of warm milk.

  But it’s just a red fire hydrant. A paper bag blowing down the subway platform toward a candy wrapper. A trick of light on the swan’s wings. Sadly, the world is not filled with abandoned babies. She stops running, cringes, turns away.

  She cannot stop humming: hush a bye baby in the treetop when the wind blows the cradle will rock when the bough breaks the cradle will drop down will come baby cradle and all hush a—

  Whenever she passes a big tree, she looks up. Surely someday she’ll come upon one with a cradle in its highest branches. She can picture this happening, not in the magical pink light of a lullaby but in the cold honest light of reality—the wind blows, the cradle rocks, the rope slips, the cradle drops. The impact of its fall bruises her chin, but there it is, in her arms, a wooden cradle containing an abandoned baby. She’ll change the lyrics to something gentler: Hush a bye baby in the toyshop, when the frog croaks the monkey will bop.

  She cannot stop humming. She cannot stop seeing abandoned babies everywhere. One time the abandoned baby is not a fire hydrant nor a paper bag nor a swan’s wing. It is a real baby, lying on a blanket while its mother chases the dog. It is not necessary to rescue the baby under these circumstances, yet she does. Afterward, they take her somewhere: a pale room. They give her an acorn squash wrapped in a blanket. Sometimes the acorn squash is an abandoned baby. Sometimes it’s just an acorn squash. She holds it close, waiting for it to turn back into a baby.

  offspring #2

  At the Anne Frank School for Expectant Mothers, we’re given cream for our tea and permission to pick unlimited peaches from the trees alongside the dormitory. Anne Frank doesn’t want anyone to feel deprived. Each day, she instructs us in how to overcome gravity. The meadow is ragged, its grass destroyed by the feet of generations of expectant mothers. The sky is pale, perfect, enticing. First Anne Frank explains the mechanics of flight. Then she tells us we must fill ourselves with ferocious terror and ferocious tenderness; only then will we rise. This she knows from experience. Anne Frank, who is always eight months pregnant but never bears a child, has dark and wonderful eyes. We love her desperately. Her arms are impossibly skinny, yet when she flaps them she begins to rise. Soon she’s ten feet above us, fifteen, forty, swooping through the clean morning. We attempt, flopping in the mud like wet chickens. “Ferocity,” Anne Frank commands. “There will be times,” Anne Frank tells us as we trip and sob in the mud, “when there’s no alternative but flight.” Nervously, we ask her to elaborate, but she falls silent. By nighttime, we’re exhausted, earthbound. We just want to sit on the veranda and brush Anne Frank’s thick black hair until it glows. We trade off, passing the hairbrush. Knowing how to fly is essential if we’re to become the kind of mothers we hope to be. And by the end of the two-week course, several women can, with much puffing and aching, rise six feet. The rest of us are failures. Anne Frank gives us our badges anyhow. She’s very forgiving. She watches as we board the bus that will return us to our bemused men. Her eye sockets so deep her eyes look like bruises.

  Thirteen years later, when they come for my daughter, I shriek and get ferocious, grab her and try to rise over fire escapes, clotheslines, flagpoles, garbage heaps; but there must be something Anne Frank forgot to tell us about how to achieve flight.

  offspring #3

  It’s disgusting, so I throw it away, but my daughter reaches into the trashcan, pulls it out, puts it on the table, and places her finger on its rotting mottled skin. As her fingertip disappears into the decaying peach, she looks upward, saintly, at the wooden ceiling, the copper pots, the dried herbs rattling in the wind coming from the garden.

  “Ugh,” I say loudly. “Disgusting.”

  As she stands there, one hand absorbed by the peach and the other on her belly, I’m suddenly stricken, or rather, slapped by the roundness of her: cheeks, chin, breasts, belly, bum.

  Slowly the peach becomes firm again. Her finger begins to reemerge from its depths.

  I go to the window. From here I can observe the gray day, cars on the highway twenty-three stories below, can remind myself what a vast bleak block this is, can turn back to face her. There’s no wooden ceiling here, and there never was. There are no copper pots, no herbs, no wind from the garden; in fact, no garden at all. There’s just a kitchen with linoleum floors. There’s just a laughable balcony clinging to this massive apartment building, scarcely room for two and certainly not room if one happens to be pregnant.

  But there is this brown peach turning pink beneath her fingers. There is this young woman who possesses many kinds of roundness; in such roundness copper pots appear, and gardens.

  She lifts the now-ripe peach to my nose. Its fragrance give
s me a headache.

  “How bout that!” I exclaim. “Lemme see.” Grinning, gleaming, childlike, she hands it to me. I stroke it—too similar to the skin of an infant. She looks at me with such delight—come on, it’s just a small miracle, just one salvaged peach—that I become claustrophobic. I rush to the balcony, a journey of one step in this silly apartment, and hurl the peach onto the highway below.

  Turning back around, I find that the delight has yet to drain completely from her face. “Mom,” she whispers mournfully at me.

  offspring #4

  Whenever my mother got frustrated by the quality of the lettuce in the supermarket, she’d kick off her shoes and vanish. Accustomed to such behavior, I’d lounge among the potatoes until she reappeared with an armful of lettuce so bright green and dewy it looked like it had been harvested moments before. Her face always seemed pale after these disappearances, but also there was an additional radiance about her. The girls working the checkout never noticed the incredible lettuce. Silently, I wondered why my mother insisted on paying for lettuce that didn’t come from the store. “It’s important to me and your father that you have the semblance of a normal life,” she said. As usual, nothing in my mind was opaque to her.

  If we passed a homeless man on the street, she’d kick off her shoes and vanish. Moments later, she’d reappear with a bag of food, a set of clothing in his size, and a winter coat. The exhausted men accepted these things without surprise.