Mr. Fox

by Helen Oyeyemi

  Loves me (says M). Doesn’t know me.

  Under M he had written:

  Is so many things (too many things?). Is unpredictable. Is lovely to behold. Disapproves of me; wants more, better. There’s nothing she doesn’t know about me.

  I sat with my head in my hands, shaking. Because the situation was so much worse than I’d thought. My husband was trying to choose between me, his wife, and someone he had made up. And I, the real woman, the wife, had nothing on the made-up girl. We each had five points in our favour. That son of a bitch.

  I hate him, I hate him, oh, God, I hate him.

  I was holding my stomach. I felt sick because I had been a fool, I’d been foolish. I’d stopped using the Lysol after we made love. I wanted to run upstairs and fix that right away, but then I thought, It might be too late. I could already be pregnant. I have a doctor’s appointment tomorrow. I thought if I gave him a child—

  But he’s been making lists. I’m pretty sure I could have him certified insane. But then she’d win, wouldn’t she, this Mary? It’d be the two of them together in the ward. Unbelievable. Horrible and unbelievable. I had to laugh. There’s no one I can tell, not even Greta. There’s nothing I can do about this. I measured my waist with my hands. He must have imagined her smaller about the waist than me. How much smaller . . . I pulled my hands in tight, tighter, this much smaller, this much. She was taking my breath. Taller than I am, or shorter? Taller. So she could look down on him. He seemed to like her looking down on him. I hunched over the desk with my hands in fists, and my wedding ring swung from the chain around my neck.

  “But it’s not fair,” I said. “You don’t really exist. He could take a fall, or hit his head, and whatever part of his brain you belong to, that could suddenly shut you out. You’re just a thought. You don’t need him.” The sounds I’d heard down the telephone, the awful sobbing, those sounds were pouring out of me now. So many crazy thoughts kept coming: Maybe I could make him take a fall—not a serious one, but it might shake him up, and she’d be gone. Or I could ask him, tell him, to stop, just stop, do whatever was necessary; he could kill her or something—what did that even mean, to kill someone imaginary—why, it was nothing at all. He could do it. He should do it, for me.

  I had to get out of his study, go get the Lysol, do something, before I started kicking his things around again. That was no way to win him over. I could see him adding to Mary’s side of the list in his cheery handwriting, all apples and vowels: She doesn’t trash my study. I stood up. And then I sat down again, staring at the floor. I stood up and sat down, stood up and sat down. There was something on the floor. A shadow that stood while I sat. Long and slanted and blacker than I knew black could be. It crept, too. Towards me. “Oh, my God.” I held my hands out. “No!”

  The shadow stopped. What would have been its hair fanned what would have been its face in long wings. The shadow seemed . . . hesitant. I didn’t move. The shadow didn’t move.

  “Mrs. Fox?” it asked.

  Its voice was faint but present. Not inside my head, I heard it with my ears.

  “Did you hear me?” The voice was even fainter the second time. If I ignored it, it would disappear. But I couldn’t ignore it. I looked at the ownerless shadow on the floor and I saw something that was trying to take form, and I felt bad for it. I felt sorry for it.

  “If you can hear me, why won’t you speak? Do you know who I am?” I really had to strain to hear the last few words.

  “You’re—Mary,” I said, as loudly as I could.

  And she stood up. I mean—she stood up from the carpet in a whirl of cold air, and there was skin and flesh on her, and she was naked for almost a second, and then she turned, and she was clothed. I screamed—that time I know for sure I screamed, because she looked so alarmed, and screamed a little herself.

  “You’re real,” I said. I don’t know why it came out sounding accusing; I just wanted to establish the facts.

  She held her arms up to the light and looked at them exultingly, as if she’d crafted them herself. They were nice arms. Nicer than mine, that was for sure.

  “Stay back,” I said, when she took another step in my direction. “Stay back.” I picked up St. John’s stapler. It was a big stapler, about the size of a human head. If I had to, I’d staple her head.

  “Okay, okay,” she said, wide-eyed. She must not have wanted anything to ruin all that peachy skin. He’d said she was British, but her accent was just as New England as mine—maybe even more so.

  The doorbell rang, and she scattered. That’s the closest word to what happened to her when the doorbell rang. I want to say “shattered,” but it wasn’t as sudden as all that.

  It was John Pizarsky at the door. Before I let him in I looked hopefully through the spyhole for Greta. Maybe I could tell her after all. What else are friends for?

  I could tell her: St. John’s in a bad way. He says he’s fine and he acts as if he’s fine, but he’s in a bad way. I don’t blame him for not being able to tell; he doesn’t do sane work for a living. And I have been sleeping with him, eating with him; we took a bath together last Tuesday—so I’m in a bad way, too. I’ve seen and heard a woman he made up. I know what this is called—a folie à deux, a delusion shared by two or more people who live together. It was such a strong delusion, though. Like being on some kind of drug. Nobody warned me how easily my brain could warp a sunny morning so fast that I couldn’t find the beginning of the interlude. One moment I was alone, the next . . . I was still alone, I guess, and making the air talk to me.

  Those opium eaters . . . Coleridge could have said something; he could have let the people know that it could happen this way, without warning. De Quincey could have found a moment to mention this, for God’s sake.

  Greta wasn’t with J.P., but I opened the door anyway. I had to have company. If I didn’t have company now, right now, I didn’t know what would happen or what I would do.

  “What the hell took you so long?” J.P. asked.

  “St. John’s out,” I said. “And I don’t have a number you can reach him on. So beat it.”

  (Please stay.)

  J.P. stood on the doorstep, looking at me. He looked until I twitched my nose, thinking I had something on my face.

  “Say . . . did you ever play croquet?” he asked, finally.

  “Never,” I said. “Come inside and tell me about it.” He stepped back onto the driveway.

  “Get your coat,” he said. “Come outside and play it.”

  I had my coat on before J.P, or anyone, could say “knife.”

  It turned out to be the nicest afternoon I’d had in a long time. Greta was at some luncheon or other, so it was just me, J.P., Tom Wainwright, and his wife, Bea, who’s just the right side of chatty and very nice, never has a bad word to say about anybody. So relaxing—we played on the Wainwrights’ front lawn. I was terrible at croquet, kept forgetting the rules even though J.P. tried to help and whispered them in my ear. But Tom and Bea just turned a blind eye when I did my worst. And there was sunshine, and cucumber sandwiches, and champagne, and I swung up high on it, higher than heaven, and forgot all about what was waiting for me at home.

  MY DAUGHTER THE RACIST

  One morning my daughter woke up and said all in a rush, “Mother, I swear before you and God that from today onwards I am racist.” She’s eight years old. She chopped all her hair off two months ago because she wanted to go around with the local boys and they wouldn’t have her with her long hair. Now she looks like one of them: eyes dazed from looking directly at the sun, teeth shining white in her sunburnt face. She laughs a lot. She plays. “Look at her playing,” my mother says. “Playing in the rubble of what used to be our great country.” My mother exaggerates as often as she can. I’m sure she would like nothing more than to be part of a Greek tragedy. She wouldn’t even want a large part, she’d be perfectly content with a chorus role, warning that fate is coming to make havoc of all things. My mother is a fine woman, allover wrinkles and she a
lways has a clean handkerchief somewhere about her person, but I don’t know what she’s talking about with her rubble this, rubble that—we live in a village, and it’s not bad here. Not peaceful but not bad. In cities it’s worse. In the city centre, where we used to live, a bomb took my husband and turned his face to blood. I was lucky, another widow told me, that there was something left so that I could know of his passing. But I was ungrateful. I spat at that widow. I spat at her in her sorrow. That’s sin. I know that’s sin. But half my life was gone, and it wasn’t easy to look at what was left.

  Anyway, the village. I live with my husband’s mother, whom I now call my mother, because I can’t return to the one who gave birth to me. It isn’t done. I belong with my husband’s mother until someone else claims me. And that will never happen, because I don’t wish it.

  The village is hushed. People observe the phases of the moon. In the city I felt the moon but hardly ever remembered to look for it. The only thing that disturbs us here in the village is the foreign soldiers. Soldiers, soldiers, soldiers, patrolling. They fight us and they try to tell us, in our own language, that they’re freeing us. Maybe, maybe not. I look through the dusty window (I can never get it clean; the desert is our neighbour) and I see soldiers every day. They think someone dangerous is running secret messages through here; that’s what I’ve heard. What worries me more is the young people of the village. They stand and watch the soldiers. And the soldiers don’t like it, and the soldiers point their guns, especially at the young men. They won’t bother with the women and girls, unless the woman or the girl has an especially wild look in her eyes. I think there are two reasons the soldiers don’t like the young men watching them. The first reason is that the soldiers know they are ugly in their boots and fatigues; they are perfectly aware that their presence spoils everything around them. The second reason is the nature of the watching—the boys and the men around here watch with a very great hatred, so great that it feels as if action must follow. I feel that sometimes, just walking past them—when I block their view of the soldiers these boys quiver with impatience.

  And that girl of mine has really begun to stare at the soldiers, too, even though I slap her hard when I catch her doing that. Who knows what’s going to happen? These soldiers are scared. They might shoot someone. Noura next door says, “If they could be so evil as to shoot children then it’s in God’s hands. Anyway, I don’t believe that they could do it.”

  But I know that such things can be. My husband was a university professor. He spoke several languages, and he gave me books to read, and he read news from other countries and told me what’s possible. He should’ve been afraid of the world, should’ve stayed inside with the doors locked and the blinds drawn, but he didn’t do that, he went out. Our daughter is just like him. She is part of his immortality. I told him, when I was still carrying her, that that’s what I want, that that’s how I love him. I had always dreaded and feared pregnancy, for all the usual reasons that girls who daydream more than they live fear pregnancy. My body, with its pain and mess and hunger—if I could have bribed it to go away, I would have. Then I married my man, and I held fast to him. And my brain, the brain that had told me I would never bear a child for any man, no matter how nice he was, that brain began to tell me something else. Provided the world continues to exist, provided conditions remain favourable, or at least tolerable, our child will have a child, and that child will have a child, and so on, and with all those children of children come the inevitability that glimpses of my husband will resurface, in their features, in the way they use their bodies, a fearless swinging of the arms as they walk. Centuries from now some quality of a man’s gaze, smile, voice, or way of standing or sitting will please someone else in a way that they aren’t completely aware of, will be loved very hard for just a moment, without enquiry into where it came from. I ignore the women who say that my daughter does things that a girl shouldn’t do, and when I want to keep her near me, I let her go. But not too far; I don’t let her go too far from me.

  The soldiers remind me of boys from here sometimes. The way our boys used to be. Especially when you catch them with their helmets off, three or four of them sitting on a wall at lunchtime, trying to enjoy their sandwiches and the sun but really too restless for both. Then you see the rifles beside their knapsacks and you remember that they aren’t our boys.

  “Mother . . . did you hear me? I said that I am now a racist.”

  I was getting my daughter ready for school. She can’t tie knots, but she loves her shoelaces to make extravagant bows.

  “Racist against whom, my daughter?”

  “Racist against soldiers.”

  “Soldiers aren’t a race.”

  “Soldiers aren’t a race,” she mimicked. “Soldiers aren’t a race.”

  “What do you want me to say?”

  She didn’t have an answer, so she just went off in a big gang with her school friends. And I worried, because my daughter has always seen soldiers—in her lifetime she hasn’t known a time or place when the cedars stood against the blue sky without khaki canvas or crackling radio signals in the way.

  An hour or so later Bilal came to visit. A great honour, I’m sure, a visit from that troublesome Bilal, who had done nothing but pester me since the day I came to this village. He sat down with us, and mother served him tea.

  “Three times I have asked this daughter of yours to be my wife,” Bilal said to my mother. He shook a finger at her. As for me, it was as if I wasn’t there. “First wife,” he continued. “Not even second or third—first wife.”

  “Don’t be angry, son,” my mother murmured. “She’s not ready. Only a shameless woman could be ready so soon after what happened.”

  “True, true,” Bilal agreed. A fly landed just above my top lip, and I let it walk.

  “Rather than ask a fourth time I will kidnap her. . . .”

  “Ah, don’t do that, son. Don’t take the light of an old woman’s eyes,” my mother murmured, and she fed him honey cake. Bilal laughed from his belly, and the fly fled. “I was only joking.”

  The third time Bilal asked my mother for my hand in marriage I thought I was going to have to do it after all. But my daughter said I wasn’t allowed. I asked her why. Because his face is fat and his eyes are tiny? Because he chews with his mouth open?

  “He has a tyrannical moustache,” my daughter said. “It would be impossible to live with.” I’m proud of her vocabulary. But it’s starting to look as if I think I’m too good for Bilal, who owns more cattle than any other man for miles around and could give my mother, daughter, and me everything we might reasonably expect from this life.

  Please, God. You know I don’t seek worldly things (apart from shoes). If you want me to marry again, so be it. But please—not Bilal. After the love that I have had . . .

  My daughter came home for her lunch. After prayers we shared some cold karkedeh, two straws in a drinking glass, and she told me what she was learning, which wasn’t much. My mother was there, too, rattling her prayer beads and listening indulgently. She made faces when she thought my daughter talked too much. Then we heard the soldiers coming past as usual, and we went and looked at them through the window. I thought we’d make fun of them a bit, as usual. But my daughter ran out of the front door and into the path of the army truck, yelling, “You! You bloody soldiers!” Luckily the truck’s wheels crawled along the road, and the body of the truck itself was slumped on one side, resigned to myriad potholes. Still, it was a very big truck, and my daughter is a very small girl.

  I was out after her before I knew what I was doing, shouting her name. It’s a good name—we chose a name that would grow with her, but she seemed determined not to make it to adulthood. I tried to trip her up, but she was too nimble for me. Everyone around was looking on from windows and the open gates of courtyards. The truck rolled to a stop. Someone inside it yelled, “Move, kid. We’ve got stuff to do.”

  I tried to pull my daughter out of the way, but she wasn’t hav
ing any of it. My hands being empty, I wrung them. My daughter began to pelt the soldier’s vehicle with stones from her pockets. Her pockets were very deep that afternoon; her arms lashed the air like whips. Stone after stone bounced off metal and rattled glass, and I grabbed at her and she screamed, “This is my country! Get out of here!”

  The people of the village began to applaud her. “Yes,” they cried out, from their seats in the audience, and they clapped. I tried again to seize her arm and failed again. The truck’s engine revved up, and I opened my arms as wide as they would go, inviting everyone to witness. Now I was screaming, too: “So you dare? You really dare?”

  And there we were, mother and daughter, causing problems for the soldiers together.

  Finally a scrawny soldier came out of the vehicle without his gun. He was the scrawniest fighting man I’ve ever seen—he was barely there, just a piece of wire, really. He walked towards my daughter, who had run out of stones. He stretched out a long arm, offering her chewing gum, and she swore at him, and I swore at her for swearing. He stopped about thirty centimetres away from us and said to my daughter, “You’re brave.”

  My daughter put her hands on her hips and glared up at him.

  “We’re leaving tomorrow,” the scrawny soldier told her.

  Whispers and shouts: The soldiers are leaving tomorrow!

  A soldier inside the truck yelled out, “Yeah, but more are coming to take our place,” and everyone piped low. My daughter reached for a stone that hadn’t fallen far. Who is this girl? Four feet tall and fighting something she knows nothing about. Even if I explained it to her, she wouldn’t get it. I don’t get it myself.

  “Can I shake your hand?” the scrawny soldier asked her, before her hand met the stone. I thought my girl would refuse, but she said yes. “You’re okay,” she told him. “You came out to face me.”

  “Her English is good,” the coward from within the truck remarked.