by Olivia Clare
Lv your M.
BEE is not back. i admit i thought maybe it would come. probably it won’t at all. because it’s very tired and truly because it doesn’t want to go anywhere. not at least anywhere in the world.
stell
Mother!
You “mean well” (I know). But please don’t increase her sense of young ego and entitlement with mere clichés. (And don’t get upset with me for saying that! You know I’m right. Do not write to me until you think about this a little bit, please?) You know what they say about our generation. I see all that mad hormone and bullish, bully ego and entitlement at this fine institution I attend. And for what? These twenty-year-old college juniors think they can “be whatever they want to be” (merely because they are human)? Because they live and breathe and have lots of sex and drink beer and eat cheez doodles—this makes them special children???? Please, Mother, stop filling her head with it.
Your Loving Finn Who Wants Only Good
(But Not Simple) Things
Dear my well-intentioned Finn,
I’m not responding to all this yet. In the meantime—please don’t forget to use condoms—
M.
BEE is back! right now and i wanted to tell you this while it is happening. i hope you are reading this at this SECOND wherever you are, office or school. write back to tell me if you are and just think THIS is a minute of your life thinking about a bee. THIS.
stell
Stella,
I’m bw patients right now but pls promise me you’re eating something.
M.
Hi, Bee.
Finn here. And wherefore do you sting?
because i have no other life and know no other thing.
Bzz, Bee
Dear Stellest of Stells,
I’m in lecture, crammed between two sleepy, drooling freshmen in sweatpants! (Have you noticed these sweatpants girls wear with words on the rear? I HAVE.) We’re being told there are metaphors everywhere, in the strangest of places, but you know all this already, somewhere in your head, which, less and less alas, is my head.
Mother told me you asked her an important question. Good, ask questions, as long as you remember that you are generally not the first to ask them. Yesterday I read a poet who says you must name the world. By that I think he meant not just what you see but what you don’t. What you know and don’t really know. But we’re all so tired. A little bit hungover from nothingness. I’m tired of looking at my laptop and phone. We’re all tired from things we can’t really name, or things that don’t deserve to have names. And these things that aren’t the world.
The purpose of your life is to walk out of your bedroom, out of our house, and into the sun and into the yard, and to find your little creatures in their shells, your Reebles, in the hedges. And don’t let them poison you.
Fin.
Finn, call me . . . I’m at work but I’ll answr. M
Why aren’t you picking up your phone—Stella just left me a message saying she was going to your father’s, which I don’t believe . . . she claims she’s taking a cab, but that’s 40 miles . . . when was the last time she was there? A year ago? I phoned yr father and he confirmed she’s going there but I can’t trust what he says and I’ve tried calling her many times . . . the phone doesn’t even ring . . . there’s nothing on the other end and I don’t know—call me as soon as you get this and call yr father for me. I don’t believe anything he says.
Stell?
Please answer your Fin-Fish.
(Please.)
StellStellStellStellStellStellStellStellStell, answer your Fin.
Fin.
Mother,
You need to calm down. I believe her that she’s gone to Papa’s. Nothing happens when I call her, either, but I believe her. Just calm down. She’s an adult, practically.
Finn
Stell?
Fin-Fish needs an answer. Call or write your Fish. (And you’ve got people worried. Mother is worried.)
Love,
Fin.
Finn,
It is not your place right now to tell me when to calm down . . . did you talk to your father? It doesn’t matter. He’s completely untrustworthy . . . but that’s because he has his own trust issues—you know that. I need to know where she is.
Stella,
Pls answer your mother. We need to talk very seriously. I need to know where you are. One day you will have a daughter and understand. Please.
Lv. your M. who needs to hear from you right now
Stell,
I’ve driven the 500 miles to Papa’s place and of course you’re not here. And he’s lying to Mother for you because he loves lying to her. This isn’t funny now. I’ve driven all the way out. I’ve left school. I’m missing classes. Here I am. Where are you?
Fin-Fish
Stell, Stell, Stell,
You won’t answer me?
Where are you?
Where are you?
Where are you?
If I ask you three times, you’ll come out?
Fin.
fish,
here i am.
Mother,
She’s all right. She’s fine. Stop worrying.
Finn
Where are you, Stell? I don’t like you by yourself. Tell me where you are, and I’ll come. Fin.
fin-fish,
i went out on the street this morning fin-fish and got groceries. i was walking out with my bags and there were so many people and NOT ONE SQUARE-INCH without people in it like a ZOO or amusement park. i could barely see ahead of me anywhere and then i looked down. there was something beneath everyone’s feet. many things. like soft bodies left over from the shells, and there they were, all of THEM, the Reebles, not dead or alive and still and lying like that in the street without their shells. and without their shells, well. without them i knew i was wrong. they WEREN’T poisonous. they felt safe. of course i was not afraid.
you don’t have to believe me, i don’t believe it and i saw it. or i didn’t see it, but i imagined i could and that’s what you asked me to do without asking. the point is i can see them when i want to and know they are both there and not there, and somehow that makes me sane or saner than most people and maybe even mother could understand and papa could. and yes YOU always can.
i’m a spoiled girl who knows nothing and says the wrong words. i’m selfish but feel sick and then feel guilty for it. you have an idea of what i mean. so i had to be away from people, people who know me.
Stell
Where are you, Stell? Tell Fin?
i’ve found my own shell! and am just fine, my fish. it doesn’t have very much except for a bed and towels and desk. it’s a small shell for a bee named Ree. it costs a little money that i already have. i have a way of doing things.
i wish you had some such Reeble-shell as i have, my fin. i imagine you here.
Stell,
I believe you. I will talk to Mother. She’s worried, of course. You understand. But basically, don’t worry.
For now, stay in your Stell-shell. I know you need to, but . . . it isn’t all right for you to leave everything and lock yourself up for more than a while.
Today I came down from Papa’s mountain and went to the city. I looked at the sidewalk below everyone’s feet—a place no one else looked—and if I squinted I could see THEM on the pavement there sort of breathing beneath everyone. No one looked at me looking. It was like people had no faces.
Shell yourself away, for a while. Shell everything away right now, and let nothing in. Then tell me where you are, and I’ll come get you. Because you can’t truly be alive alone. This can’t be your exit.
Fin.
Pittsburgh in Copenhagen
There was a great tenderness to the sadness when he would go there. She knew how much he love
d his wife. They were like casualties helping each other as they waited for the end. She cooked their dinner at the stove, her blonde, bent head reflected, like an abstract sun, in a stainless steel pan on a hook.
On the table, delftware bowls of eggplant and sausage. Cricket on the English-language station on the radio. She didn’t like to talk at dinner—her English could be difficult. He brought out lemon and onion and folded the paper napkins the way she liked. She insisted on serving him. Or, if not casualties, they were thieves, taking these afternoons and evenings for themselves, their appetites, gathering up the few coins that had spilled in the act.
He got up from the table to get the child, her son, who’d woken and started to call. Beneath the mobile of rotating planets and stars at the foot of the crib, he found the child on its stomach, trying to hold up its head, its neck stretched like that of a straining tortoise—it could not make itself go where it wanted. In the crib was a small machine, simulating sounds of the ocean. You strange island, thought the man. Little life.
At the table, he held the child facing forward in his lap, so that it leaned toward its mother and the half-finished dinner into which she’d put so much effort. The man offered her a sip of beer, and she refused. There was something withheld about her now, eating very little very quickly. He supposed he liked to watch her eat; she almost revealed herself that way. One-handed, he tore a chunk from the top of his buttered bread and rolled it in a dense small ball between his fingers and offered this to the child—it was crying again, twisting its torso, coaxing itself into a fit.
“Give him to me,” she said.
“It’s all right.” The man tried to comfort the child, rubbing its heel between his fingers. A plain smoothness.
“I can take him.” She held out her arms.
“Just eat,” he said. “Relax.”
But she said she was finished and scraped flecks of salt and garlic off the table with the edge of her hand into her napkin. He felt his beard for crumbs and decided to tell a lie—that this had been his favorite meal. Maybe what she gave away to him was in her face, in the particular immobile expression that asked him to spend the night when she already knew he would. What she knew of his wife in America was all he’d told her—married fifteen years, almost.
The child had now screamed for what seemed like a minute, as if without taking a breath. The man turned it around in his lap. He held it by its fragile chest.
“Are you ready?” He pushed back his chair.
He threw the child up, nearly two feet above the tabletop, then caught the child. Very easy. It had stopped crying somewhere on the way down.
“I prefer you do not do that,” she said calmly. “Before I said that.”
She cleared the table, leaving his unfinished plate. She swept the kitchen while the child, quieted, kicked its legs in the man’s lap. He consoled it, patting its back, whispering to it what Danish he knew, simple phrases. My dear. You look beautiful. Two coffees, please. Down the hall, to the right, second door on the left. Mr. Iversen doesn’t work here anymore. He put his pinky in its mouth and felt the tiny tongue. He tapped the tongue, softly. She’d named the child after its father, who worked in the Faroe Islands eight months a year. It was just learning to turn toward its name, which she sang a few times as she swept.
He sat with her son whimpering in his lap for a long time, longer than he preferred, listening to it ask for what it couldn’t say. With the radio on and the white noise of water running, the whimpers churned his thoughts. She put on an apron and blue rubber gloves and washed the dishes.
“Do something for him?”
She turned her English sentences to questions frequently. Within her was a detailed life in a country still mostly unknown to him. Her mother had died before he’d met her. She’d been married to the child’s father and then divorced, and the child had come after. One life alongside hers, then another. And now me, the man thought, and soon not.
She held a dish to the light. “What is this? Water streak?”
He’d taught her that last word, and she’d been sure to use it every day he saw her; each time, it seemed to lose part of its definition. Rain streak. Streak of pepper, streak of skin. Once, after he had given her a short lesson, she told him she laved him.
He walked out of the kitchen and around the apartment, the child still kicking in his arms. She kept almost nothing in those rooms. In her bedroom was a hooked Armenian rug he’d bought for her at a shop two months before. She’d strung silver lights through the fretwork of her bamboo bed’s headboard. He could feel himself hoarding images to remember later. On her dresser were lipsticks next to a bottle of perfume the color of brandy—he saw his person in the mirror, holding this woman’s child, a woman who had hardly any family photographs, who preferred rugs and dishes to jewelry, who had asked him so little about himself because she knew they both preferred it that way.
The phone rang. Four times before she answered, then laughter and—from what he could tell, from the English nouns among the Danish—she talked about an old American movie. He’d seen it in Pittsburgh. He was fourteen in a Cineplex with a marquee, and with a girl from school who’d kept her high heels in a box hidden in the bushes in her parents’ front yard. Now in the mirror, he held this, this woman’s thick-legged son.
“Comrade,” he said. “You have to stop crying.”
In Pittsburgh, his father had had factory work. They’d lived in a small house, he in one bedroom with his brothers. His mother had put lamps everywhere, candles. The bill wasn’t paid. She decorated the walls with blank postcards of foreign cities. He remembered it all. He was almost ashamed for his great happiness in that plain life.
She hung up the phone and turned off the radio, but immediately turned it back on for the news. Something about an important election.
“Enough,” he said to the child. “You’re fine now.”
The phone rang again. She picked it up before it could ring twice. She never received phone calls when he visited, and tonight there had been two. He went to the archway in the hall but still couldn’t hear her above the radio.
With the child, he walked to the kitchen door—her head was down, her hand cupped over her mouth and the mouthpiece, a rubber glove tucked in her armpit, the phone cord stretched to the far side of the room. The sink water ran. He watched her.
She was at the kitchen window, opened out onto the shared courtyard where he had installed a small swing after the landlord and neighbors had agreed to it. She’d begun to talk loudly. So much of her life he could not account for—she contained too many decoys, invisibilities, trapdoors with latches easily triggered. She held the phone away from her, as if holding something infectious. Then suddenly she yanked it back, jerking the cord, yelling into the mouthpiece in Danish, she was tired, fuck, lort—this word he knew—and hung up. She went to the sink, turning the water off, then on again. He walked into the room with her quieted son. She didn’t turn around.
“What does he need?” she said, scratching at food on a plate with a fingernail.
“Who was it on the phone?” he said.
“He needs diaper.”
“Sig det,” he said. “Who was it?”
She looked at him with the water running. “I am not yours. You are not mine.”
“Nevertheless, you can tell me.”
“Doesn’t matter, I said.”
In the child’s room he turned on the tiny television for sports, anything. The man changes the cloth diaper of her child. This stranger in front of you, holding you. He almost didn’t know if these were thoughts or if he said them aloud, but he observed himself, the evening. The man changes the baby in the woman’s apartment. She knows what he almost knows, that he will leave after tomorrow. Not leave, stop coming.
“You see? Powder. Under your legs.” He held up the powder. “What fine, fat legs you have! Fat, fat! And now the diaper. Clip,
clip. Now we tuck in the cloth.” He surprised himself and sang, “Clip-clip, and tuck. Fat, fat legs, clip, clip, and tuck.”
He snapped the bottom of its pajamas.
“You have nothing to say?”
The child sucked the back of its hand and looked at him, focusing. Nothing?
“Must be the world is at peace,” he said.
In one of the few photos in the apartment, above the crib, she had her back to him sitting on a towel on a pebbly beach. Another woman, her sister, stood above. He’d met the sister once, accidentally, when he’d shown up at the apartment on the way to his office at the embassy. The sister had been visiting. She hadn’t introduced them, but had curtly kissed her sister before seeing her out. When the door closed, she told him—afforded him—the thoughts on her face: please, never uninvited.
How directly had he ever looked at her? She was remote and posed, sometimes even in bed. She frustrated people, she had told him with a little satisfaction. She required one’s patience. Her emotions were practiced, harbored, or unresolved.
“Are you ready, Comrade?”
He lifted the child and anchored his thumbs in the small and satisfying cushions of fat in its armpits, tightened his fingers on its shoulders. The man, getting older, straightens his back. He throws the child in the air. He threw the child up again, higher, or high enough, that it might feel an envied weightlessness.
“Pittsburgh.”
He threw the child again. This time he waited until it reached his chest to catch it.
“Pittsburgh,” he said into the child’s ear. A word the child would never go to. “Pittsburgh.”
He threw it up with some force, and it smiled with prearticulate glee at the man, who was leaving the child with a trace of himself.
They were in bed, not sleeping or talking, listening to more of the evening news, when the doorbell rang. They’d gotten the child to sleep around seven.
“What now?” he said.
“No idea,” she said.
He’d propped a small heater next to the bed. They were drowsy, shirtless in their jeans—he feared any ritual tonight, including sex, and he told himself he was right in guessing she did, too. Maybe he wanted to feel sorry for her, and could not—could never, she was too good for that—and he showed it. Sometimes that was his mistake, revealing some negative thought, then acknowledging his misstep with a weary remark or inflection. She could extract those confessions without effort, without a word, or, worse than that, she might make him think he had something to confess. But nothing.