Sometimes Dannie would call Sylvia over and have her hold one or the other of the babies to keep them occupied while she attended some task of the house. “Just bounce her a little,” Dannie would say. “She likes it when you blow on her head.” But Sylvia was discomfited by the girl child. She found herself constantly fighting the urge to pinch her on the inside of her elbows or the backs of her knees, to take the tiny fold of her ear between her lips and, very gently, bite. It was different with the boy. She respected him. She supposed she felt deferential to him and to what she inferred were his clear preferences. Peas, for example, over pears. The flash of the keys on Dannie's keychain over the sandy cush-cush of the white-noise machine. Both of the babies' eyes had darkened, but the girl's had become a sort of mossy green while the boy's had complicated—a blue shot through with indigo, a gray striated by navy. Like clouds, Sylvia thought, like these clouds lowering now over their heads as they turned down the alley. Like the lid of a bucket levering shut.
Sylvia thought too much, that was for certain. Her mother had always said this about her with something in her voice both of pride and approbation. In church, her mother said this about her to the other mothers as they gathered around the folding metal table spread with platters of pastel cookies and Styrofoam coffee cups, the rims smeared with equally pastel lip-prints: shimmering pink, oyster cream, chill lavender. Sylvia's own mother had never worn lipstick, and where were the other children? Sylvia scoured her memory for them, but found only her mother in a green serge skirt, her hands thrust into the skirt's deep pockets, rocking back on her kitten heels. A thinker, her mother had described her to the other mothers, but Sylvia had always thought of herself more as a witness. She saw the colors, heard the whispers, felt the damp heat of the breeze. She remembered the nap of the carpet in the church basement, a hard industrial nub, and the coarse, split feel of her mother's knuckles as she reached into her mother's pocket to take her hand. There was so much all around her. So much always going on between the bay and the ocean, the weather, the demands of the seasons one after another, and now her neighbor, Dannie, whose motion lights were too sensitive and struck on at the slightest breeze to shine in her bedroom window, who left the television on for company in her dark house so its blue light gathered and pattered and flashed into the dawn, who thrust her torso over the porch railing and called to her—“Sylvie! Sylvie! Are you there?”—to come over, come over, for a minute come over, come with her on another walk around the block.
When would there ever be time to think about any of this? It seemed to Sylvia as if she had been gathering herself for the effort. As if, for a long time, the materials she would need had been washing into her like flotsam caught in an eddy, and soon she would array them all before her, the stuff of her life, and really think about it the way her mother had always assumed she would.
What would her life have been? Ladyfinger cookies and paper plates, a lace embroidered handkerchief, an aquamarine hairnet and jet beads hanging in an unraveling fringe from the flap of a handbag.
What would it have been? A loose screen flapping against the window, the pop of ice fracturing in a glass, the rustle of underskirts, nylon thighs, the clack of short heels measuring up and down a hall.
What else could it have been? The taste of cream fillings, of powdered cheeses, the bite of grass sucked at its sweet root. The raw iron oyster of blood. The brine of the ocean. The thick massy rot of the bay.
The baby boy made a sound almost like a bark and when Sylvia peered over the sun-shade to check on him, she found he had twisted against the strap that held him in place, craned his neck to look up at her. The metal joints of his braces glinted an oily light at his knees and ankles. His bare feet flexed at the end of this armature and looked slightly swollen, tinged purple as if Dannie had cinched the straps too tight across his thighs. It was a shame his legs had lost the ability to gesture, though in the end, she conceded, the braces would make them more useful for walking. And that was what they were for, after all, Sylvia told herself. Was that not what a child's legs were for? At the far end of the alley two cherry trees tossed their limbs back and forth, streaming together in the wind so it seemed the alley did not empty again into the road, but into a wild green cacophony, a frenzy. Behind her, very close, Sylvia heard Steven clear his throat and thought, looking down into the baby boy's fierce eyes, Now Now Now Now Now.
But even as she thought it, she recognized the question. The wind flattened against them in a huge, coughing pant and it seemed to Sylvia as if their shadows danced around them. Her shadow and Dannie's shadow, the babies' hydra shadow craning out of their stroller and Steven's cast before him, so close now it pressed into their own. It was as if the light of the day were a bulb swinging loose from the sky, knocking around crazily, shining onto all sides of them at once. “Now?” thought Sylvia. “Is it now? now? now?”
And now this, is what Dannie was thinking. She was busy, of course, the way everyone had said she would be busy. There was the house to keep up, the babies to bed down. An incredible disorder had taken hold of her refrigerator where, in the bottom of the crisper, something had liquefied into a foul sepia slurry. It also held sway in her linen closet where the towels were neither folded, nor rolled, but smashed into wrinkled wads, the hand towels and bath towels tangling together, the babies' soft swaddling blankets twisting like pastel snakes in and out of the shelves. Soon she would have to go back to work, her leave almost spent, and that would add another layer to her day. The traveling layer. The hurrying layer. Her breasts were hugely swollen, the veins so prominent along their bulging sides it was as if her skin had thinned to isinglass. The smallest thing set them off. A cat yowling in the yard, a particular series of notes played on a record, the call of the garbage men high over the rumbling of their truck as they scoured the blue morning streets, and her breasts ached and leaked. In fact, everything about her leaked. Breast milk darkened the front of her shirts, drool slipped from the side of her mouth as she dropped into an exhausted afternoon nap, blood and other mucous flux slid in streamers from the still lax muscles of her vagina.
It was no different from incontinence, Dannie thought. She was no different from some species of giant, incontinent snail hauling her outlandish, gaudy shell about the house as she picked up a baby, washed a pan, put down a baby, proffered a breast, sipped weak coffee out of a dirty mug, and slicked her airy house with her effluvium. The wet of her trailed in clotted swathes across her floors and furniture, walls and window-glass. Anyone could see it. It was filthy, foul. She was supposed to be emptied now, the loose skin of her stomach doubling the elastic of her waistband as a reminder, but here she was still filled with the waste-material. Mucous, useless veins, milk and blood.
One of the babies hiccupped with the preoccupied breathiness that was the precursor to a wail and Dannie reached across Sylvia to joggle the stroller. Movement was supposed to be soothing. Well, they were moving. It seemed to Dannie as if all she did just now was move. Around the block over and over again. Turn left and left and left and left, always with Sylvia, always in this strange season—a blooming, bruised, sullen summer that had come to the island months and months ago and seemed in no hurry to leave. And now it was going to rain again. And now something was wrong with Sylvia, always something wrong with Sylvia, who stared ahead of them down the alley with a fixed, strained expression such as someone might wear if they caught sight of a meteorite, impossibly far but getting closer, bearing down over their head.
Dannie looked from Sylvia's face, down the length of the alley and back again. It all looked the same as usual: The chain link fences smothered with honey-suckle and poison ivy. The skeleton of a neighbor's greenhouse project, unglassed, but stuffed anyway with stands of tomato, small furred ferns, pots of herbs left to bloom and seed. Dannie had not been back to see the Mrs. Whites since the babies were born. It seemed a rude disappointment, these two healthy babies in their white cotton onesies, the event they had so looked forward to definitively can
celled, and she felt the least she could do for the old ladies was delay. After all, let's be practical. How long could they have? The Mrs. Whites so bent they were like swamp roots, wavering from the earth only to turn and dive once again. The Mrs. Whites in their dark, dirty store, barely mobile, cleaved in turn by ocean light as it scythed through their window on the way to the bay. And come to think of it, where was that store exactly? Pregnant, Dannie had navigated as if by tides, a swelling drift pushing her toward the causeway, pulling her back to the little neighborhood, the little house, the little neighbor shut up like a bug behind her little, green front door. Now, Dannie felt a dangerous, unfamiliar volition. It was as if her self, her real self called Dannie, was a skinny, electrified nerve encased in pulpy layers of fat and blood. As if, should the nerve get out of the house, put on pants that buttoned, pack the babies into the complicated struts of their car seats and steer them all out onto a main street, where it went from there could not be predicted. What rules did a nerve have? Did it have any rules, any behavioral stricture other than to feel, to thrum, to buzz? Where would a nerve go if it had all the world in which to foray? How could it ever bring itself to stop?
One of the babies made a husky, throttled noise. It was not of their usual repertoire. Not a sound that portended or precluded, and though Dannie did not feel alarmed—she had never been, would never be, a woman bitten along the edges with useless care—she did feel some interior part of her quicken and turn. Her damn breasts again, but no, they were dry, she herself dry, and the wind buffeting her limbs like thick cotton. Dannie leaned over the stroller and looked down at her children. The boy was twisted around in his seat, his forehead wide and smooth, his eyes blue and troubling. They were hers, it occurred to her. He and his sister, every moment of them under her ownership, at least for now. It was a cheering thought. Maybe she would take them to see the Mrs. Whites after all, painting their faces first as if she and the babies had all just swept in from some outdoor event replete with balloons and colorful exhibitions of skill. Just because the crux of the conversation had changed didn't mean it couldn't continue, couldn't evolve to include the unimagined perils inherent in being the mother of two healthy children. And wasn't it the unknown that was supposed to be so enticing? Wasn't that, after all, what the Mrs. Whites had designed their store to sell?
Dannie imagined depositing each baby in the crooked cradle of a Mrs. Whites lap—the girl painted up like a beaver, little buck teeth lapping onto her sharp chin, and the boy something else, something the Mrs. Whites would approve of. An insect perhaps, garishly alien, his legs already so many jointed it was no great feat to imagine them twisted back above his head, rubbing out a measuring tune. She imagined the expressions on the old ladies' alligator faces, their mouths widening like cracks crazing through varnish, their ropy knuckles popping as they bent their hands to grasp. Delightful! These anthropomorphic babes, these little mummers. Curios, apologies, proffered gifts.
This is what Dannie was thinking when she recognized the sound behind her as running footsteps only a second before the blow landed at the base of her skull. A great blackness bloomed and the world pressed around her, a last lashing fever, as she fell.
Sylvia's mother had believed in many unfashionable ideas. Fortitude and mutability, tenacity and penance. In her last years, her suspicion of the world grew deeper and she saw everywhere around her evidence of an endemic failure to transform. Evidence that evolution had reached its standstill. “There's nothing left to look forward to,” she told Sylvia, tracing one finger along the back of her daughter's hand. Out her mother's window Sylvia could see a little manicured square of the facility's lawn, then the cracked expanse of parking lot, then a row of tourist cottages, identical rainbow wind-socks fluttering at each front door. It was a late summer day, high season. If the window could open Sylvia might have opened it to hear the shattered cheer of the beach, each voice heaving itself momentarily up out of the mass of voices, clear and bright, gilded with sun. She might have sat with her mother and had another sort of conversation entirely, touched there in her mother's white room by the unknown lives that had always accompanied them, partners in the shared square of warmth and salt and faint, fading spray. But the building was an institution, the window built as an idea of a wall and the air fluorescent with artificial chill as the air conditioner kicked up another notch. “No more freaks,” her mother said, resting her hand on the back of her daughter's hand for the last time in either of their lives. “No more monsters.”
Yet, here is her daughter, many years later, turning to face what surely comes next. Around her roars the surf from which all such monsters have crawled. They rattle their saber limbs, cast pale snouts to test an unfamiliar wind.
The Dinner Party
She has prepared the dinner, but the guests are late. The foods sit in their various serving bowls, wrapped snugly in foil. In rotation, she tents each foil top just slightly to let out steam and condensation. The kitchen fills with intermingled smells.
On the third rotation, the guests arrive. It feels to her as if she has been standing in the kitchen for days—chopping and slicing, deboning and trimming the scales, basting, brazing, deglazing pans, beating together eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar, eggs and sugar until stiff peaks hang like mock icicles from the end of her whisk.
“I'm so sorry we're late,” says Diane. Her husband stands in the doorway behind her holding a serving platter draped in a dinner-party themed kitchen towel. The towel is patterned with martini glasses and open mouths laughing. There is a woman's mouth and a man's mouth. The woman-mouths are misprinted so their lipstick hangs just below their lip-lines like carnelian ghosts and the man-mouths are crowned with trim black moustaches which remind her viscerally of Diane's husband, though he is clean shaven and smiles at her, nods toward the bottle of wine he has clamped in the crook of his arm.
She reminds herself she is often reminded only of what is directly in front of her, that this is a failing of hers, and they all tumble into the kitchen to eat toast points crowned with various savory spreads, drink cocktails and watch as she puts the finishing touches on a dish she has set aside, unfinished, for just this purpose.
“I've always believed the chive was an immature onion,” says Diane. She laughs. “Can you believe until this very moment that's what I've always thought?”
It is her husband, the host, who has set Diane straight on this matter. He has just now emerged from the back of the house, where it seems to her he has loitered almost exclusively for the past many months, and stands blinking against the low light of the kitchen. He is wearing his work clothes, the shirt ripped at the shoulder seam so she can see a pale diamond of his skin, and has tucked his spectacles into his shirt pocket.
“That's alright,” her husband says, clearing his throat first, a little hoarse, “that's your prerogative.”
Everyone laughs in a sincere way. They are good friends; it is alright to admire each other. Diane whose hip curves like a cold moon at the top of her jeans. Diane's husband who seats himself at the table, his plate bare before him, and smiles at her as she adds the chives, at last, to the dish.
Then, the eating begins. There are many dishes and they pass them around and around. The plates are soon slick with juices and beside them her husband and Diane's husband build growing cairns of bones. Diane picks up two bones from her husband, the host's, plate and slips them into the sides of her mouth so they bob like whiskers. The bones are translucent, sliver thin. This is an old joke among them. They are celebrating something—Diane is pregnant again or they have bought a larger house—and Diane's husband toasts to the celebration, to the meal. He rinses his mouth with wine and moves his chair closer to her, the hostess, so when he turns to smile at her she can feel the heat coming off his dark face, waves of heat, and sees, she believes, that his dark eyes are blacker than she had ever thought them to be. They shine in his face like polished beads and when he blinks she believes she can still see them shining.
“Another toast!” says her husband, the host, and when he reaches across the table to clink his glass the tear in his shirt gaps and yaws like a tiny, diamond-shaped mouth. There is a smell from him. A russet smell like the one in the back of their house, which reminds her of rust, something has rusted, the pipes?, something below the house crumbling so what is contained within it pours out. It is a problem they were supposed to have dealt with a long time ago. “To us!” her husband says, draining the wine from his glass.
It has gotten louder in the room. Someone has turned the music on, turned it up. Diane's husband passes his wife another chop, a little pot of mustard and the mustard paddle with which to slather. She herself is full, she is sure of it, but fills her plate again—root and seed, muscle, flower.
“It's all so delicious,” Diane says. “Incomparable!”
Diane is very white and taut, she realizes. Even whiter and more smoothly muscled than she had remembered from their many many, uncountable many, dinner parties of the past. She seems to glow, in fact, incomparably, and is hard to look at as she holds her naked fork in the air, dips it as if conducting the music. Her husband, the host, emits a sudden squeal and scrabbles at the table. He has dropped his spoon into the soup, cannot find it. His eyes have grown very small or his face very large. His eyes are almost totally enfolded by his face and he cannot see. His roving hands are clumsy, spill wine and gravy, and Diane's husband dips his sleek head to his plate in seeming sympathy. He turns to face her so she alone can see he is laughing, his black eyes wet with it, and he unfurls his quick tongue so it just grazes her wrist, long and light and dry.
Mother Box and Other Tales Page 3