Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  You might know something about biological imperatives. You might know something about hive societies, or nesting dolls. Perhaps you have a treasured memory of a kiosk on the banks of the river Volga, fingering a coarse wool shawl, pressing your lips against the cheek of a porcelain girl, very rosy cheeks, a real girl's hair, a skirt you can flip and discover beneath the head of a wolf or a pig who then has a skirt you can flip and discover beneath the head of a girl. Perhaps you are inarticulate. Perhaps you are dogged by an intermittent fever, your life marked by tremor, or perhaps you are unusually tall and feel as if the world was modeled for another sort of mammal entirely, another sort of girl. You see, I make assumptions about you even as I avoid them. You see how foolish it would be to tailor this story toward your tastes. I cannot help what happened. I would not want to.

  Of course, it is often the case with girls that they must make their own way out into the world and from there find their own way back. The more organized ones draft maps or make hatch marks in the trunks of trees, bend branches, leave a patter of crumbs. Sometimes a girl will tie a thread to something she wants to come back to and dole the thread out behind—a raveling hem of her cloak or the loose end of a golden ball, very precious, she was previously using to string the geese in a row to and from the lake. This is why if you come across a thread in the forest you should never pluck it, not even rest your fingers upon it, or the girl it belongs to will feel it quiver and come rushing back—her hair in a tangle, her mouth so frightful, stained with berries—to see who has crossed her trail.

  You see, there is a reason for everything. If you wait long enough it will all come clear, but in the meantime many things change.

  For the girl, so beloved, she got a good job. She was used to being petted but also used to going without, and this unusual combination prepared her for the corporate world. Up, she went, up and up. Each of her offices was more spacious and more naturally lit. In each office she was allowed to keep an increasing number of personal mementos—a picture of the grandmother on the bookshelf, a wooden spoon, nicked at the edges with years of teeth, balanced atop the computer console. Always there was an office above her which made her feel safe, beautiful girl used to small spaces, and clear at least about the direction in which she should go. With the money she made she bought her mother lace hankies. She bought a house in the suburbs, a condo in the city, kept the old tiny hut in the country and sometimes drove past in her red car—an old car, restored, a powerful engine, flattering bucket seats—and noticed how the yard grew wild, the trees bowed wild, the vines came tangling up and every year the little hut was harder and harder to see from the road. She had enough money. Not so much she couldn't spend it, not so little she had to count it penny by penny and keep it in a stocking tied to the foot of the bed. She had plenty to eat and wore fashionable clothing in warm fall tones even in the summer when the sun clanging back and forth between the windows of the tall glass buildings that surrounded her condo made a terrible racket for the eyes. At night the girl would sit on her balcony and drink a cool drink out of a slim glass. She would call her mother and her grandmother, who were now living in the house in the suburbs, and compare with them the sound of the cars hooting at each other many floors below to the sounds of the suburbs: crickets and cats, knives scraping the faces of china plates, spoons rattling in empty bowls, brushes ripping one hundred times through crackling tresses and the tiny skirt-skrit of something living in secret inside of the walls. They all agreed that everywhere was very loud. Each place was, in fact, almost the same place because it was so loud, and this made them feel close to each other and closer to who they had used to be in their old house in the country when the girl was a child.

  But what does a girl need? She needs a skirt, of course, a good pair of shoes. She needs something to apply to her lips and another sort of thing to apply to her cheeks, such rosy cheeks, something to give the appearance of warmth even when the girl herself is cold. And what does a girl want? All manner of things. It would be difficult to list them even if you had the time, which you do not, you yourself being so busy, and the girl herself also so busy acquiring items she needs to make her seem warm. A brassier for her breasts, razors for the fur that grows in her creases, a cigarette to hold at the fold of her lips, another cold drink, many colors, sipped from the throat of another slim glass.

  The girl, so beloved she had to hang up on her grandmother's breath every time, sat on her balcony overlooking the city and had another drink. The city's natural colors were pink and lime green, tan, roughly various, and a teal that flared at unexpected intervals. As the sun went down, molten in the tall buildings' cacophonous glass, pink and lime, tan and teal sobered, muddied each other, dipped in and out of the canyon alleys where they seemed to become a dusky kind of gray. This was a nightly display in all seasons, and the girl appreciated its constancy but did not overdo it. She poured herself another cold drink. Some nights, she called back inside to the man who was there and he joined her, sitting across the latticed iron table from her, admiring the colors and the failing light, admiring her—although he did not overdo it—while she admired him until they stopped seeing each other and saw only each other's most admirable parts. His jaw line, for example; that funny thing she did with her mouth. Some nights, she called back inside and the man wasn't there. Some nights, he preferred to remain in the living room with a book, or at the kitchen sink washing the faces of each of their dinner plates with slow, lascivious gestures, gazing out the kitchen window onto the various tan bricks of the building next door and their startling teal shadows.

  You too might have a man in your home to whom you can call over your shoulder. Perhaps he is also the sort of man who washes your dishes; also the sort of man you lie next to in the early morning as he snores and you reach over to scold him, reach over to scold him, do so until he springs from the bed and goes to squat in the bathtub, naked, shivering with anger. Perhaps you fight. Perhaps you hiss at him and batter the overstuffed arm of the couch with your fists to show your man what you could do to his body if you let yourself, for even a moment, really just let yourself go . . . Perhaps you no longer recognize yourself. Perhaps even in your man's most admirable parts you no longer recognize how your parts used to fit. Perhaps when you look in a mirror—also in the bathroom, the tepid water running to cold, another problem with the heater, your man, shrunk-pricked, still angry, asking “Why, why, do we have to have this fight now?”—you see a simulacrum of a person: dough-hole sockets, slung-dough jowls, the mouth a cavernous gawp, yawping, yawping, the eyes trapped and furtive. At this juncture, many girls choose to set forth on a journey.

  But what does a girl need?

  A basket. A ball of string.

  Sooner than she would have suspected, the girl came to believe her looks were fading. There was a looseness around her mouth, a thin scrim of fur above her upper lip. There was a line furrowed between her eyebrows and a scar she could not remember receiving white and spidery on her temple. It was the scar that bothered her most—a thin, crazed, complicated scar like cracks in porcelain glaze. She tilted her head under the bathroom's harsh globe lights and observed herself from all angles in the mirror. She handled herself the way someone might handle a pot unearthed unexpectedly in the garden, thumbs brushing the crazed glaze, rolling it between the palms. How long has it been there? Why was it buried? Observe, the only thing holding the pot together is the weight of the dirt that has filled it. Accidental dirt, perhaps some incidental treasure—silver spoons, photographs with singed corners, a complete collection of teeth, tiny as seeds, drifting through the strata of the soil. She went into the bedroom and asked the man, reading in bed with a cat asleep on his knees, if he had seen her scar before, if he remembered how it had come to her. And he mistook her. He heard the girl say, “Look at this scar, you gave me this scar,” and he was angry. It became another sort of night altogether—the book left tented, slipping from the foot of the bed, the cat arching disconsolate in the windowsill—and i
n the morning the girl packed a brief lunch and went for a drive in her old red car in order to clear her head. There were many roads she could have taken. Some led deeper into the city: twisting roads, maven roads, the rough walls leaning closer, the turns curling always to the right and people pressing their ears to their doors or thin plaster walls to listen to her passing, listen to the whisking rustle of trash in her wake. Some led away over a high ridge and guttered down in dusky hollows, lavender dust spuming in twin tails from her tires, the road skirting a cliff and the sea like fields of thistles, each field collapsing below the next field, purple-cone thistles, their glassine stalks. The sea like a flower, her car like a horse, the road unfurling like shoots on a vine. These are only the echoes of a story.

  Of course, we all think in complicated ways. Even the least of us, even the meanest, our minds are busy and tense. Of course, there was only one road for her. She thought without thinking and turned the wheel under her hand. There was a basket in the passenger seat, a little dirt shifting, drifting from her ears, black scrim under her nostril. A little room was being made, a little hollow.

  When she arrived at a place in the road that felt right, the girl parked the car, shouldered her basket, set off into the forest.

  What do you see?

  I see the forest, the trees, their pale bark. I see a path which is rutted, grown over. Flowering mosses I can't bear to crush.

  And what do you do?

  I follow the path, skirting the mosses. I come to a pitcher, drink from the pitcher. Come to a key, pocket the key. Come to an animal . . .

  What sort of animal?

  I can't see. It's dark. It's like there's a hand pressed over my mouth.

  Aren't you a silly thing? Didn't I warn you?

  Whatever it is, I watch it feed. After a time, it moves off into the forest—a shadow of a shadow—and I follow, first tying one end of my string to a branch so, should I desire it, I can find my way home.

  Why have I wasted so much of my time with you?

  I hear the animal breathing. The crack of the twigs as it breaks its trail.

  Are your ears full of potatoes? Is your head full of sand?

  I come to a pitiful clearing, a doorstep. I see a house the forest has invaded, nests on the lintels, a tree grown through the roof. I run out of string and tie the end of my line to the doorknob. The animal's mark is fresh on the stone.

  Why, foolish girl, should I bother to save you? Why, stupid girl, should I unlimber my axe?

  I am a beautiful girl, a well loved one. Inside, I hear breathing. I open the door.

  The Silent Woman

  There once was a woman who swallowed a fly.

  I don't know why she swallowed the fly,

  Perhaps she'll die.

  When Mary was only thirty she met a ghost. She was in one of those places people go when the people who have to attend to them every day are required to send them somewhere, for whatever reason. In her case, it was because she had swallowed a fly that had gone on living inside of her. This was not on the official paperwork. Almost nothing was. Rather, Mary supposed, she was there because she had become indefinable and lived the sort of life in which being defined was quite an important prerequisite.

  The facility was in a northern state, ringed by frequently mist-shrouded mountains. The winters were assumed to be fierce and uncompromising, but she had arrived in early summer and all of Mary's surroundings seemed to be struggling cheerfully out of the ground. There was a garden and a quaint, ramshackle barn in which the staff kept four nanny goats and a spavined pony named Bert. The garden was lush and impractical, zealously attended by both staff and residents alike. It was bordered to the west by a fast, shallow, tea-stained river that chucked gamely along between its high banks and spilled over the old millrace with a companionable show of foam and spray like someone laughing too loudly at a party. She had a private cottage composed of an airy south-facing bedroom, whose window boasted an assertively framed view of the mountains, and a tidily furnished sitting room. There was also a half-bath with a toilet, sink and shower stall in which the management had thoughtfully included a little cedar bench. So the ladies among the residents would have someplace to rest the ball of their foot as they shaved, Mary concluded, though it did not escape her notice that there might be a more dreary rationale. The residents were not all so young, after all. Some of them were actually quite decrepit or, unlike Mary whose fly buzzed in her throat and made her scintillate, fizz at all her joinings, were so denuded by their official diagnoses that they might need some kind of moral support, if only in the form of a cedar bench, to get on with the duty of sloshing hot, soapy water into all of their stultified crevices.

  “No kitchenette, I'm afraid,” said Jolene, the staff member who had given Mary her tour and helped her settle into the cottage. “You understand.”

  And Mary did. The knives and such. The oven. This was a facility, after all, she explained to Jolene who nodded and showed Mary the button to push on the call box if she needed assistance in the night. A facility, not a vacation, Mary emphasized. And what a relief that was! If there was one thing Mary had had enough of it was vacations. The stickiness, the enforced levity. The spiraling panic as the last day approached and one realized afresh that one had not yet swum out past the sandbar, or hooked an infant shark from the pier. She remembered one year in particular when she was very young in which her father had insisted the entire summer that the low concrete dome just visible across the bay from their beach house porch was what he termed a rainbow silo. If she watched it attentively enough, he insisted, she might be the lucky girl who saw the rainbow first, just as they unleashed it and before the colors had separated, so it would appear to her, lucky lucky girl, as one big band of astonishing light. Well. It had been his idea of parenting, she told Jolene, who was clacking along in her brown clogs, leading Mary to the community dining hall for her first lunch. He really was the most uncomfortable father and she was an only child so there was no one else on which he could practice. She supposed she understood the impulse, the paternal bonhomie which he must have believed was patrician in some sense, as obsessed as she knew him to be with the trappings of the Republic, but really. Really?

  The dome had turned out to be a sand bunker, Mary told Jolene as she left her at the door. A place where the city council kept backup supplies of pillowy white sand dredged up from ocean trenches and bleached sterile to replace the dunes washed out to sea or carted off in the treads of dune buggies and the tight rolls of beach towels. But, even after she knew the truth, she had never been able to shake the feeling that the empirical evidence of her failed observance proved she was not after all a lucky girl. Not, it turned out, special in any particular way. And wasn't that something a parent might be expected to foresee? Of course she didn't feel that way anymore, she told a member of the kitchen staff as he levered a sliced chicken breast onto her salad. She had grown up. A lot of things had happened. And now here she was: resplendent, didn't he think? Mary turned on her heel to show him the full affect and, from the murmuring room of residents intent on their meals, somebody clapped.

  So it went on from there.

  It soon became clear to Mary that the facility, like the rest of the world, had broken itself down into two groups which could be roughly defined as the Haves and the Have-Nots. Mary had always disliked the imprecision of this term. Have what, after all? The answer was almost never as quantifiable as money which could be stacked and counted, double-checked for errors. Rather it implied some amalgam of various moneyed signifiers, attitudes and ways of holding one's wrist cocked and languidly vulnerable as one swirled one's drink in its glass, which shifted from epoch to epoch with infuriating fluidity. Even in the very short epoch of her own, Mary's, life! The eighties, for example, in which she had observed her older female cousins decked out in beguiling pastel blouses and high-waisted cotton trousers that showed off not only their waspish waists and slim, tight hips, but, more subtly, the firm, plump placard of thei
r lowest abdomen. This advertised a sort of invulnerable vulnerability. A cool, juicy quench the men of the party, boyfriends and male cousins and even the uncles who, when drinking, were not totally surreptitious about their admiration of each other's daughters, clearly longed to drain. Mary remembered looking down at her own body, absurdly banded by the shadow of the blinds, and wondering how her own pallid, hairless cleft could possibly metamorphose into such grandeur. Surely it would have to be replaced, she concluded. An operation that she was not yet old enough to know about in which the froglike thing she had now would be cut out of her and a new sort of thing—sleekly pelted, waterproof—would be stitched firmly in its place. That was a sort of Have which Mary could understand. She wanted those pants, to be what was inside those pants. She Haved-Not it.

  And then, just when she was old enough to procure them, and to realize how foolish she had been to think any part of herself could be lifted away—she was stuck with all of it just as it had first become her in the warm slush of her mother's womb—the fashion changed and to Have became not to show. To appear to Have-Not through cheap fabrics, coarse patterns, clothes that competed with the girls' bodies with their sullen clangor, and thin white scars that laddered up the inside of the girls' forearms like a public tally of the passing days. It was frustrating. Mary was an early riser and had plenty of time in the morning to devote to costume. She was unfulfilled by merely tousling her over-bleached ratty curls and ringing her eyes with thick, black liner. When she was with a boy, a boyfriend or a pick-up or, more than once, an older male cousin on the basement couch, the back of her car, the floor of his bedroom, a blanket in the dunes, or under the pier, she couldn't help but think as the boy ground on top of her and thrust his ruddy, strenuous penis in between her tight lips and into her shockingly deep interior vacancy that the whole experience would be enhanced for her if only first he had had to strip her out of those pants.