Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  The Groomsmen

  One day, she gave birth to seven babies. This was a great surprise, the more so because all of the babies were boys. “I am the mother of seven sons,” she practiced in the little square mirror the hospital thoughtfully provided. On the table behind her was a vase with a bouquet of pansies her mother had sent and behind that an incredible number of bassinets.

  When she brought the babies home her husband said, “Good Lord,” and retreated to his study where he sat and looked out the window, gloomily eating a sack of pretzels. For awhile, she walked her sons up and down the halls, wiped their bottoms with rags, threw diapers in the washing machine, hung diapers out on the line to dry, spooned carrots and peas and beans and chickens and corn and mushrooms and pears and eggs into their mouths, sanitized bottles, sanitized pacifiers, washed their hair, washed their bodies, wiped their bottoms with rags, made choo-choo noises and showed them the spoon, spooned carrots and peas and beans and chickens, made a horse out of her knees, made a horse out of her back, hung their diapers to dry, boiled their bottles, boiled their dishes, rubbed a finger over their sensitive gums. Then, her husband came out of his study and gave one of the sons a pretzel. “It won't be so bad,” he said and picked up a spoon.

  Previously in her and her husband's lives together she had thought of herself as the kind of woman other men would describe as a spit-fire. She understood there was a certain volatile element to her temperament that would be misinterpreted by those who did not live with her as sexual passion. To her husband, it was the element of uncertainty. Would she take the joke or would they quarrel? In public, would she swallow her melancholy or, turning away from the shop window with its rending display of skins and furs, would she go ahead and cry? Perhaps, she hoped, to her husband the uncertainty was also understood as sexual passion. Perhaps when she cried on the street corner and he said, “What is this with you? What is this thing?” he was really thinking quite clearly of the friction of their parts, the cachinnation of their immoderately creaky bed, the humors of their various desires.

  Prior to her and her husband's life together, when she did not think of what she was doing as deliberately living a life, she had been confused by the parameters of possible behavior. For example, when she saw something she wanted, say a pair of blue silk panties, or a ring, or a bole of sourdough bread still steaming from its cross, when could she reach out her hand and take it and when must she occupy herself some other way, her hands in her pockets, in her mouth, folding the hem of her shirt? For example, when she found someone to whom she was attracted—by their laugh, or their walk, or their hand on her forearm, rattling her forearm as if it were a bone in a cage—could she turn to look back at them over her shoulder? Could she sweep all the pint glasses from the table, erect and trembling with anger? With want? Could she take their finger into her mouth? Up to the knuckle? Further? More than one finger? Could she try for the hand?

  She had often been described as a difficult woman. People said this to her face with the same tone they might use to explain the difference in pricing between, say, the regular eggs and the organic, brown ones; the picked lobster meat purchased by the pound and the whole, fresh lobster still flexing its blue tail in the tank. She took this in the spirit with which it was intended. People also frequently described her husband as her savior. This she was not supposed to hear, but did, and with such frequency that sometimes when she stepped out onto their terra-cotta tiled porch of an evening to listen to the rain fiddling around in the azaleas, she would hear the description of her husband as her savior as a sort of ambient hum in the neighborhood air. It was a blue hum, like the dusk itself. When it got under the sodium street lights it flared briefly green.

  Regardless of their histories, both shared and otherwise, she understood her sons as a new beginning for her and her husband. Children are often figured this way—a point along a time-line at which, in sudden confusion or teleological upheaval, everything changes. Her sons felt to her like a reflex. Her response to them was like their response to her when she was inattentive, or blindly feeling about the darkened house at three in the morning, and held them insecurely against her breast. Her reaction to them was to yip a piercing warning cry; her reaction was to nip. In this way, warning and nipping, a large amount of time passed very quickly.

  One day, one of the sons called to announce he was getting married. She was sitting right by the phone when it rang, perched at the very edge of a high stool at the kitchen counter, her hands gripping the edge of the kitchen counter as if at any moment she would leap from the stool and race across the room, though she had been sitting that way for twenty minutes at least. As the phone rang she thought to herself, “There is the phone, ringing again,” and counted the rings and considered who it might be, always coming back to the sons because there were so many of them and they had various, often pressing, needs.

  In the time that had passed, she had kept her figure, had in fact improved her figure through worry and want and the constant silent expression of male desire which, she considered, was only natural in a household of seven sons. Also, it had become increasingly clear that both she and her husband were local celebrities even outside the circle of their regular environs. She was the mother of very many children and in line at the bank or in the poultry section of the supermarket people would look at her, look away, look back at her with the furtive recognition usually reserved for television weather women or white-collar criminals vindicated by some tricky exigency of law. She had filled with a downy, comforting plushness at the breast but had kept her skinny haunches, her runner's calves. She had grown her hair long and it spilled over her breasts and hung into the freezer, glinting a purple-sort-of-russet in the harsh florescent lights, as she pressed the pimpled skin of the chicken breasts and watched their pale blood well and pool.

  Her husband, on the other hand, had declined precipitously in bodily health. Previously, he could be described as slender. Now he was gaunt, his chest almost concave, the skin around his lips blue in certain light as if he weren't getting enough oxygen with his breath. He too had grown his hair longer so that it brushed his jaw line, catching in his stubble, or formed a stubby queue when he pulled it back at his nape. The effect could not have been what he desired—he was a fan of Jeffersonian reason, a fan of the body, a fan of the stoic in both study and practice—but his clear tenuousness had done nothing to lessen his physical appeal. Now more than ever, she followed the lingering gazes of women and found them attached to some part of her husband, his wrist or the small of his back, exposed as if by the chance of his movement to both the light and their scrutiny.

  The problem of the wedding was a considerable one for her. The colors her son and his bride had chosen were unflattering, the season dull and her role as mother-of-the-groom ill-defined. Her husband began to spend more and more time in his woodworking shop at the back of the house. He was making a wedding gift for the son—a clock fashioned entirely of native woods, the whirring gears, the chimes, the hollow clapper all hand carved by her husband who frequently cut himself with the sharp tools and came in to dinner wearing mitts of white gauze, bleeding through the gauze in patches. It was such a romantic gesture, she became suspicious. It seemed there must be some other kind of union involved, something more desirable and fleeting, but this turned out not to be the case. Even though it seemed her husband could never finish it in time, on the morning of the wedding he rose in a very quiet, silver pre-dawn and went out into his workshop. She too rose and made coffee and, sipping it, listened to the noise he was making—a syncopated clattering, a rising pitch—and watched his shadow move back and forth across the squares of light cast from his workshop windows over the ruin of their sons' childhood sandbox. When he emerged, the clock was mostly whole. It only lacked some of the fine-work which, if you had not seen his plans, you would not know to miss.

  Thus, later on the morning of the wedding, she and her husband met each other in their living room. There was the familiar couch,
stained from their years of living on it, and there the end table. There the bookshelves and the entertainment center and the many many family pictures, both posed and candid, and the vase she had filled earlier that week with yellow tulips which had now bloomed past their breaking point, some sides drooping to expose the waxy stamens standing dark against their yellow screen. If she looked through the French doors and down the hallway she could even see herself and her husband reflected in the hall mirror, standing together in complimentary grays next to the couch, her husband fiddling with his tie stud, the gaily wrapped gift-box which contained the clock sitting on the end table next to the lamp. Oh, but who were they? She felt so tired now, and it was only the beginning of what was historically supposed to be a very long day. There would be so many different kinds of emotions to go through. She tried to conjure them up in her head: Pride and Guilt, Strength and Providence, Envy, Greed. Through the French doors and down the long hallway her very small face in the mirror flickered through the emotions. Pride and Greed, Guilt and Providence. She thought she looked strange in her steely gray dress which made her hair take on a sympathetic sheen, her shoulders seem mottled, her mouth like a dent in her face.

  “What are you thinking about?” her husband asked. It had been a long time since he'd asked her this, but it had used to be a kind of code between them. At night he would say it, reaching under the sheets to rest his hand on her stomach, and she would say it back. “I don't know, what are you thinking?”

  “I'm thinking about what you are thinking about. What are you thinking?”

  “I don't know.”

  Eventually, they would just echo each other, their voices so alike, and then they would come together, have sex carefully so the bed would not proclaim itself too loudly, and be surrounded in the house by the sound of their sons sleeping, their seven sons packed into all the corners of the house breathing in tandem through the night.

  Now, however, the context seemed different and when she said, “I don't know,” her husband used her shoulder to steady himself as he wiped a fine film of sawdust off the tip of his polished shoe. He said, “Where are the directions? Are they in your purse?” and together they walked out the door of their house and their figures in the mirror behind them also dwindled, smaller and smaller, then gone.

  The night before it had snowed and the world was unmistakably altered as they drove through the town and out of the town, through the countryside and up into the mountains where their son had reserved a mountain lodge for the ceremony. In the town, the snow made her neighbors' houses look like cheerful idiot children. Some of the houses even had hesitant little ribbons of smoke drifting up from their chimneys which made their doors and their windows looked rosy the way an idiot child's cheeks would look rosy if he had stayed out too long in the cold. She wanted to scrub the houses' cheeks, but of course this made no sense and she shifted in the seat so that her dress, uncomfortable beneath her, wouldn't crease.

  In the countryside, the snow fell over the fields and hedges with soothing formlessness, but was already starting to be marked, tracked all over with the markings of animals cutting across the wide, white fields. In the mountains, where the trees grew thicker and thicker and closer to the road, the snow took on a blue tinge. It seemed to be hiding from them, moving through the forest alongside their car so that when she looked she would see snow—gullies of it, blue pockets studded with rocks—but when she turned her head to watch the tightening, climbing road, it would be something else: a pacing, a dark movement between the trees. The snow was in the road as well, fresh and deep. Her husband had to drive slowly, tense with concentration, while she turned the dial on the suddenly squealing radio looking for the latest weather news. As a result they were late getting to the top of the mountain, late pulling into the gravel parking lot of the lodge which was already crowded with other guest's cars—parked at desperate, hasty angles as if they had arrived together, all at once, from every imaginable direction—and late climbing the lodge's wide stone steps, the shoulders of her husband's overcoat frosted with a thin layer of snow which was again beginning to fall.

  When she and her husband entered the lodge, they found themselves in the foyer, a narrow room planed in rough pine planks and constricted with the cold that seeped in around the door, through the window panes, up through the cracks in the uneven floor. It was empty save for a coat tree hung about with scarves and hats, mittens stuck to its various knobs, and beside it a chair draped with heavy overcoats. Her husband handed her the box containing the clock and added his overcoat to the pile. It was by far the largest and overwhelmed the other coats, its soft grey wool spangled with melting snow like asphodel spangling a secret, luxuriant, ashen meadow. None of the rest of the coats is so beautiful, she thought. In fact, many of them were ugly and strange. Some of them were also very small—diminutive, doll-like coats with too many armholes and buttons fashioned from the carapaces of iridescent beetles. She lifted the hems of the many coats layer by layer. Some seemed to be stitched of leaves and rustled under her fingers and she realized the whole room was filled with rustling, as if a large crowd were talking very softly, each member of the crowd talking on and on, not necessarily to each other, not necessarily intending to be understood. “Hurry up,” her husband said. “We're late.”

  So she and her husband, dressed in beautiful outfits of complimentary gray, one of them, herself, carrying a gay gift box inside of which was a clock that had just that moment begun to tick, opened the wide double-doors at the far end of the foyer and stepped together into a great, vaulted hall. The hall had been set up like a chapel: rows of whitewashed pews down either side of an aisle carpeted with lichens; garlands of feathers in reds and blacks and grays festooning the rafters; a smell in the air like thick, dark incense, like peat moss, like cold soil piled by the side of a hole. It was altogether a startling effect made worse by the fact that the other guests were already seated, all facing the dais at the end of the aisle on which stood six of her sons dressed in gray, the groomsmen, and one son in black who was today taking a bride. The bride herself was also there on the dais—oh, they were late indeed—and she seemed to have chosen an unusual dress. It was hard to see exactly what shape the dress was, it was so unusual. Hard to see, exactly, what shape the bride was even as she turned, rustling, her face covered by the billowing veil—a hoary veil, crackling, vertiginous—to face her and her husband as they stood together in the doorway. The rustling sound increased and the guests swiveled around in their seats to look.

  “What are you thinking?” she said to her husband. But it was altogether too late. The chapel was filled with variable shadows, the brilliant cold light dampened by flurries that clumped as they fell past the vaulted windows. Her husband's face wavered in and out of the shadows; drawn, bluing, extraordinary, she realized, but yet the same as all the other faces he had ever had in their lives together. She pictured her husband in his familiar settings, the easy muscle of his younger arm stretched up to grip the doorframe and the way he held his knife to press a bit of meat onto the prongs of his fork. Yes, even in her memories it was still this face—twitching, unsure what to do with its mouth—superimposed over each of the other possible faces as if someone had clipped it out and pasted it messily over the still scenes of their past.

  “I don't know,” she said, filling in the gap, but her husband paid her no mind. He stared around him: at the chapel, at the guests, stared at the bride, now advancing down the dais to welcome them, and at the groomsmen, his sons, the smallest and shyest raising one sleek paw to wave. He stared at their immaculate suits, their sharp immaculate heads, long brows, fine whiskers, the dear points of their ears and their bright eyes. He stared at their russet fur gleaming in the snow-light that poured through windows, the little puffs of breath that rose from their black muzzles, their sharp yellow teeth as they smiled, all of them, dear sons, smiled at their parents, happy to see them arriving at last, standing together in the aisle, happy to see them looking upon them, th
e seven sons, the brothers, the singular bride.

  “This is a shock to me too, you know,” she said. She felt a little peevish now, a little uncertain with the gift clock ticking, the bride advancing and holding out one indistinct, welcoming arm. Her husband beside her suddenly seemed too small for his suit and continued to shrink, dwindled in the aisle. But a number of years had passed for them, too many for their situation to change much now, and she said it in the way she would have said almost anything. What was there left to do but step forward, graciously, into her daughter-in-law's embrace?

  A Terrible Thing

  No one would have disputed it was a terrible thing. It was a terrible thing. A thing that had happened, that frequently happened to very many people they had individually known and some whom they had known together. Everyone had a story about it. Their voices were hushed. It was not in dispute. There was nothing to dispute. Everyone had something to say.

  The same day it happened, they began to update each other. “She's resting comfortably,” one of them said to the other. Some of them would not comment. “I heard she took some soup,” some of them said to others of them who, leaving the tight group and traveling across the building, went on to say it to yet others who nodded, tight-lipped. Someone had seen an omen. On their drive in to work, someone had seen three crows by the side of the road. Another one had had an uneasy feeling for weeks. Mr. Haslip had nothing to say about any of it, but he was a confirmed bachelor. Mr. Haslip had round eyes, hard as cherries. Many of the women walked around all day touching each other. One would touch another on the small of the back. One would touch another on the hip. The light was very strange. They agreed.