“Who is it?” she said. “Who's there?”
But there was no answer.
She asked again. “Who is it?” she said. “Who's there?”
Her voice sounded to her as if the fog had somehow gotten inside her throat. She couldn't tell how far it had carried, if it had carried at all beyond the chambers of her throat, and wondered how she would ever have been able to tell this. What was the empirical standard for how far one will be heard? And what, in that same vein, is the furthest limit after which one will no longer be heard? In other words, she thought, what are my boundaries? What keeps me in?
“Who is it?” she said for the last time. “Who's there?”
But it was the children, of course. And, as there were a great many of them, she was quickly overwhelmed.
A Category of Glamour
In the nineteenth year of her abandonment, Penny Linden began to talk to the man in the garden. This was not the first time Penny had seen the man. She could not remember exactly the first, but a series of images came readily to mind when she considered the issue: a figure fading back into the deep cool underneath the pine trees, the shadow of a bowler hat falling across the inset patio sundial. These were from the early years of Ollie's absence, before she began to consider it abandonment. No one else's husbands had come home. Later, the man in the garden became more precise. He was tall. He wore a neat gray suit, somewhat old fashioned, and a bowler hat which Penny considered an extravagant eccentricity. The man carried a walking stick and his hair waved in a lush, oiled way that made each curl seem purposeful and intent. One curl unspooled neatly in the center of his forehead and the man brushed it aside with the back of his wrist as he stooped to inspect the bell of a foxglove or tap a loose patio tile with the tip of his stick.
When Penny first met Ollie he had curls too, but they were tight and held close to his head like a fleece. It wasn't psychologically difficult for Ollie to shave them off because they were so close to his head and so tight they did not seem like separate expressions of his body, but more like a helmet, something that could be removed at will rather than amputated. Ollie had to shave them off to fit on his real helmet. “There can be no room between the skull and the helmet, except for padding,” he told Penny. She thought later she must have found him dashing saying that, holding his helmet under one arm while the evening sun drowned in the whiteness of his head and neck. The rest of Ollie was bronzed from hours of drills on the base, then weekends at home with her in the garden. There was something menacing about the whiteness of his head and neck. It was like a weapon and Penny felt sorry for all the enemies he would swoop down upon bearing that whiteness.
At that time, they were putting in a vegetable patch. Ollie had a book with many facts about vitamins and minerals. The garden was to be organic because Ollie's book also had facts about pesticides and pictures of malformed infants which Penny looked at in the kitchen at night after Ollie had gone to bed. In one picture, the little boy had been born without a face. Where his face would have been was an expanse of shiny skin, like a hardboiled egg, unbroken except for two slits which Penny assumed were his nostrils. The rest of his body was perfect except for a blank, smooth place where his genitals would have been. “Oh, now,” thought Penny, eating a sour organic tomato over the sink and looking at the picture. “Now, that's going too far.”
Ollie planted marigolds around the vegetable patch to discourage the fire ants and he saved eggshells from breakfast, crushed them and mixed them with the ashes from her ashtray. Then he dissolved that mixture in water and sprayed it over the soil around the plants to keep off slugs. He made another water soluble solution out of cayenne peppers and sprayed it on the tomato plants to protect against worms and deer. “You shouldn't smoke,” he told Penny, “but if you are going to, at least there is a useful application of the product.”
After Ollie was deployed, Penny took down all the maps of Northern Africa that Ollie had framed and hung in the living room for her to reference while he was gone. She traced the continent's outline with her finger and then blew smoke on it. She put the maps away in a drawer and went into the kitchen to lean against the sink and look out at the garden. Fireflies floated up between the tomato vines and she smoked a cigarette and said to her stomach, “You go right to hell.” It was an experiment, but she wasn't sure of the hypothesis. Inside her, the baby was a round, self-satisfied stone, like a river stone that has rolled in the water for a long time without tiring of the sport. “Go right to hell,” Penny said again and laughed with the baby who pushed up under her hand like a stone kicked from the bottom.
After Ollie was deployed, Penny had to think of things to do for amusement. For a while she tended the garden. She had a large straw hat to wear. She also had a leopard-print cowboy hat. The cowboy hat was fuzzy and thick. Her mother had bought it for her as a joke when Ollie was transferred to the Alabama base, but Penny wore it sometimes in the garden. It made her head sweat and cast a terrible shadow across the sundial. At that time, Penny's shadow was always terrible, so lumpy and full of unexpected demands. Still, she would not turn away from herself and when she stood on the sundial path to find out with her body whether it was one o'clock or closer to one thirty, she was not bothered by the shadow that seemed to move through the pine forest behind her.
After Max was born, Penny began to go to the grocery store for amusement. Max rode in a cloth sack that Penny could tie around her neck. The sack was designed especially for babies and had holes through which Max could dangle his legs. It was blue and on the front, picked out in lemon and navy stitching, was a large, yellow duckling who was saying Qvack! Qvack! and flapping his stubby wings. The baby sack was another gift from her mother and Penny was disturbed by the singularity of the duck. Was it supposed to be a stand-in for the baby? For any baby? Were a baby and a duckling actually the same thing? This seemed possible to Penny. Max, at least, looked like no one she had ever met and she could imagine calling him Bear or Black Snake with equal ease, but it didn't seem polite for the sack to point this out so publicly. There was also something unsettling about the duckling's insistent Qvack!, but Max seemed to like the baby-sack and when they walked down the aisles of the supermarket he reached out toward the shiny cans of peas and white potatoes and tiny ears of corn.
In this way, many years passed. Penny let the vegetable patch overgrow its marigold border. She neglected to make water-soluble cayenne mixtures to spray on the tomatoes and when she planted in the spring she did so by filling a plastic bag with mixed seeds and tossing them wildly into the air. The garden gave way entirely to ornament. Fat, striated eggplant grew up among the pansies. Cyclamen and violets trembled in the fierce shade of a pepper bush. The sundial path, which Ollie had lined with butterfly bushes and silky lamb's ear, was overgrown by a rampant sweet pea vine and the wrought iron numbers were gentled by a thick layer of moss and made useless by the prevalent shadow of sapling pines.
After the fourth year of Ollie's absence, other women's husbands began to come home to the base. Penny would hear the parade for the husbands winding down the road past the house and when she put Max in the car to drive to the grocery store she had to turn on her wipers to clear confetti from her windshield. That same year, she began to attract cats. They seemed to like the garden and many of them would come across the fields and over the hot road to lie in the cavernous hollow of her forsythia or stretch out on the patio tiles. Most of the cats did not like the house, or Penny, but some would come inside and then went in and out as they pleased through a little swinging flap Penny installed in the bottom of the kitchen door. Penny named the cats that would come inside things like Mulligan and Cooper. The names were interchangeable and she did not distinguish any one cat from the number of cats who padded through the kitchen or haunted the forsythia waiting for birds to come to the feeder. The only cat Penny consistently recognized was a yellow tom with a missing eye who she called Qvack! Qvack! and let sit beside the sink while she did dishes so he could consider th
e faucet water. Occasionally, Qvack! would dip the tip of his paw into the faucet's stream and then shake it in the air above his head. He would look up at her with his one eye as if sharing the results of this experiment, or asking her to take a note, and Penny would rest her thumb between his ears.
Also in this time Max grew older. He did not like the cats and shut his door quietly against them at night. He also did not like the grocery store as much and began to find his own ways to amuse himself. Once, Penny came home with two bags filled with shiny cans of baby carrots and found Max in the living room with all the maps of Africa and the shifting Mediterranean spread out in front of him. He had stolen one of her cigarettes from the pack she kept on top of the refrigerator and was smoking it while he examined the maps and wrote the names of countries and their major rivers on a sheet of paper. All of the country names and river names listed neatly together looked very attractive to Penny. She thought of the great, pink gums of a hippo she had seen in a magazine, the hippo yawning in the river, its stubby peg teeth streaming water. She was going to tell Max about the hippo—how it too was in order, was free not to concern itself with what came next—when he turned around and saw her in the door with her bags, Qvack! sitting next to her and touching the back of her calf with his tail. Instead, Penny said, “You shouldn't smoke a cigarette in the living room, Max,” and went into the kitchen to put the cans away. That evening, sitting in the garden, Penny thought that now Max did look like people she had met, though which ones and under what circumstances remained a mystery. He also looked a little like that boy with the hardboiled egg instead of a face. Penny considered that knowledge until it was very dark in the garden, but not so dark she couldn't see a shape bending over the bed of verbena, or smell their sudden wounded scent as the figure clipped a bouquet and held it up to his indistinct nose.
One day, all the men who had been on Ollie's mission were home. Many had come in time for their parades. Some had arrived for more somber processions, the headlights on their processional cars overwhelmed by the blazing summer light of the fields and road, but all had reported for their accounting. Penny imagined the list she knew existed somewhere on the base. It was not a long list, no more than three pages, but it was tidy, squared away. Each name was followed by some fact or other, except for Ollie's name which, Penny felt, had all along been unfactual, bare.
There had been a series of phone calls, by turns both official and silent, from the base to Penny and from Penny to the base. Finally, an officer had come and sat on Penny's sofa with his knees held tightly together and his hat placed precisely on top of his knees where he could hold it without appearing to be holding anything. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Linden,” the officer had said, “but we will have to assume.” The officer was not very old but had bands of gray hair that bristled elegantly at his temples. Penny supposed that she had met his wife at a potluck somewhere. She had a faint impression of Spanish rice and pigs-in-a-blanket, a very tan woman with lip-gloss in an unfortunate shade of tangerine. “This is still a human business, Mrs. Linden,” the officer had said. He cleared his throat a few times and stroked the top of his hat with his index finger. “Sometimes the only thing left to do is assume.”
Penny had invited the officer to stay for dinner. “We are having a macaroni casserole,” she had said, “It's my son's favorite,” but the officer had already placed his lovely hat on his head and straightened up by the door. “I am very fond of your hat,” Penny had said and the officer shook her hand for a minute and looked over her shoulder at Max who was sitting in the corner. When he was gone, Penny sat on the sofa with a tall glass of limeade. Max went into the kitchen and came back with his own glass and a bottle of gin. He poured some gin into his limeade and held the bottle out to Penny. This was the summer Max was sixteen and in the dusky light that slanted through the blinds his face looked stretched and fervent. Penny found herself always wanting to touch his forehead to check for a fever.
“I think you have to put it in the oven before it actually counts as a casserole, Mom,” Max had said, crunching an ice cube. He poured some more gin into both of their glasses and later got up and turned on a lamp.
Another day, Penny came back from a trip to the store and mistook the house. She drove past it in one direction and then again in the other before turning around in a neighbor's drive and counting the telephone poles to her own gravel driveway. In front of the house was the familiar crab apple tree with its hard, green apples. The house itself had a familiar rainspout pulling away from the roof, a familiar missing brick crenellating the chimney. It had the architecturally significant turret that many base wives had commented on standing on the walk with their empty casserole dishes or leaning against their husbands in the post-potluck dusk with a half empty bowl of guacamole balanced on their other hip, saying, “Well, I hope it's a girl. She'll live up there like a princess,” while the cicadas emoted from the tops of the surrounding trees. Eventually, though, it was Penny herself who lived in the turret. She moved Max's crib up against the wall and later, when he slept alone and through the night, Penny repainted the funny ducks and piglets onto the walls of the master bedroom downstairs so Max could have more space. She didn't feel like a princess, but the turret looked out on the garden and the pine barren behind the house. In the mornings, Penny would wake only when the light crested the tops of the pines. She would stand in the window of the turret watching the wind sweep through the tips of the trees like a hand carelessly raking through hair.
It was the turret that finally made Penny decide she was in the right driveway, but the house itself was an entirely different color than when she had left that morning. In the morning it had been a chalky antacid kind of blue that faded into the blue morning shadows and was peeling in places to show its elemental brick. Blue with black shutters. Now, the house was a creamy peach with bright green shutters. It looked like the lovebird Penny had often admired in the pet store window in town. The bird had bright, vacant eyes and terrible, wise feet. Sometimes, Penny would go in the shop and the owner would let her put her finger in the cage for the bird to grip with its foot while it admired itself in its little looking glass. Penny thought there was something about the lovebird's peachy head and bright green mask that made it look like a baby, a poor baby all dressed up by some mother who had purchased too many cute hats. The bird liked to sharpen its beak on a cuttlefish block while it held onto Penny's finger and at such times she was swept away by a complex series of pleasures and the pet store owner would ask if she needed him to hold her purse.
For a long while Penny stood in front of her house and considered its new colors. She shifted her bags—what heavy bags, she could not now remember what was in them—and observed the shadow of the ladder leaning up against the front of the house elongate rapidly across the lawn. Finally, Penny opened her front door and went into the kitchen with her purchases. The kitchen was surprisingly bright and noisy. Max was sitting at the table with two other young men drinking beers and smoking. They had music playing on the radio and all three were laughing at once as if at the end of a long, hard-earned joke.
“Mom!” Max said, standing up and stretching his arms wide as if introducing her to the kitchen. “What do you think?”
“What do I think?” said Penny. She lined up three jars of borscht and a little tin of sardines. Qvack! jumped up on the counter next to her and nuzzled the plastic bags.
“About the house, what do you think about the colors?” Max said, coming around the table and turning down the radio. “I thought it was time for a change.”
Penny rolled back the sardine tin's lid with its little tin key and offered one to Qvack!. He accepted it graciously, eating it in two compact bites and licking the fish oil off the counter with only a trace of shame. Penny considered her son. He was leaning against the doorframe, stretching easily to grip the lintel. He hadn't shaved that morning, or it was late enough that the hair had grown back, and the line of his jaw was underscored by dark stubble. She thought about
the nature of gifts, who they were most important to. Her mother was very inclined to buy hats, but had never once come to the house in Alabama where they had moved and then settled. In Penny's turret closet there were dozens of prim hat boxes tied at the top with lush, wrinkled ribbon.
“It's lovely, Max,” Penny finally said. “Very lifelike.” Max grinned and swooped away from the doorframe, turning back to his friends with his arms spread wide again as if introducing them this time. Here is the kitchen, his arms seemed to say. Here is my mother and her one-eyed cat. Max turned the radio back up and Qvack! put his paw on the back of Penny's wrist and miaowed politely for another sardine.
Max's two friends' names were Jenner and Paul. They were house painters and Max was also going to be a house painter and drive with them in their blue truck as they circled the town looking for houses in stages of ill-repair. Penny sat with them at the kitchen table and listened to the radio while Jenner talked about small business owner's insurance and ladder length and latex over-coats. Paul was more the silent type and Max, sitting between them, eventually suggested they go down to Newt's for the drink specials and a local band. After they left, Penny took down a pony glass from a high shelf and mixed herself a limeade and gin. She stood in front of the cupboard for a long moment and then reached up for a second glass. She opened the back door and, with Qvack! running out in front of her, took both drinks into the garden.
It was almost dark, an uncertain moment in the evening that made the garden seem longer and narrower than it ever appeared in the day, and Penny watched the ground carefully to avoid tripping as she made her way to the little garden bench which sat underneath a pecan tree. Honeysuckle had grown up around the legs of the bench and over its back. When Penny sat down she sank back into its dark, fragrant tangle. Penny swept a few empty pecan shells off the bench next to her and took a sip of the limeade. She called out, “I've brought you a drink,” and watched as a shadow detached itself from the nearest pine trunk and made its way over to her.
Mother Box and Other Tales Page 9