Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  But, as the facility was meant to be a stripped down, more simply codified version of the world from which the residents had all sought refuge, in this distinction as in so many others the lines were more clearly drawn. At the facility, the Haves were what Mary's friend Donovan termed, “the decorously insane.” They were allocated private cottages and no night-time supervision, though when they entered their houses after midnight the doors would lock irrevocably behind them and not let them loose again until breakfast unless overridden by the emergency sensors which were attuned, one assumed, to fire and other natural disasters. They were also allowed free run of the facility grounds (garden, river, barn, spa, meditation parlor, yoga studio, dining hall and community greenhouse) and daytime access to the surrounding town which offered two Laundromats, a grocery store, a shop of healing herbs and crystals and a gas station that sold an impressive variety of spirits.

  Doctors Throng and Bledsoe, who had founded the facility and remained its chief psychiatric practitioners, operated under the guiding premise that the most pressing part of a life was the experience of it. “This part of your life,” Dr. Throng patiently explained to each new resident and then repeated once a week at the daily group meetings while Dr. Bledsoe nodded in a stentorian fashion behind her, “is just as real as the part where you have a career or a spouse or a child.” Dr. Throng was a small woman with a blunt face and something Asiatic about her eyes. She had a quiet voice, spoke expressively with her hands and was universally beloved by all but the most hardened of the asocial aggressives of which Mary did not consider herself, although she had to admit she grew a little tired of straining forward to hear what Dr. Throng was saying.

  “In the other world,” Dr. Throng said, “you may get up in the morning and armor yourself in the clothes you wear for a day as a worker or a parent. You may put on a mask or practice a false emotional coloration, what in the animal world is called crypsis, as a means of defense against psychic barrage.” She pressed her hands to her face and then her throat, made a fist and a fluttering motion to indicate intangible menace. “But here,” Dr. Throng concluded every week, “you may get up in the morning and do whatever the experience of yourself encourages. Immerse yourself in yourself,” she said. “And then tell us about it. That's all we ask of you.”

  The Have-Nots were, as Dr. Bledsoe put it, “more fully integrated into a private experience of the self.” Which meant they were unstable to the point of grotesqueries, could not be trusted with their hygiene or personal responsibilities and made for unsavory company, to say the least. These residents, at least fifty of them by Mary's count, slept in separate dormitory style housing, at which a staff member was always on duty, and ate at a separate meal hour. They had their own individual and group therapy meetings and their activities around the facility's grounds were strictly controlled and constantly supervised. Mary and her compatriots, Donovan and August and Pete, sometimes caught sight of a group of Have-Nots being ushered from one building to another, a shambling line stooped with the enthralled torpor of the heavily medicated which progressed in moderate silence, emitting only the occasionally hoot or guttering cry. They were grim sight, unsettling. Enough to put one entirely out of the mood of one's day if Mary and her fellows had allowed it, which they did not. They were made of sterner stuff, Mary thought, and were also naturally the sort of people who gravitated toward the outer edge of their orbit. The sort of people who, if they were stars, would situate themselves so they could whirl right at the brink of the vast, black cosmos and peer in at the fissioning core of their galaxy with caustic skepticism.

  “Barbarous,” said Donovan, as he watched the line of the Have-Nots wind from the dining hall to the barn where they were to have a touch-therapy session with the goats. “In-transmutable,” he muttered, pulling his mobile upper lip down over the wall of his long, yellow teeth.

  Mary tended to agree, but August, who was tender-hearted and given to fits of despair over the abbreviation of such minor lives as ants and wasps, became quite inconsolable. He wandered into the river where he stood in an eddy and gazed upstream toward the point where the silver band of water jogged out of sight and higher to where it reappeared in a break in the trees as a sliver, a filament, a pure shining thread of the self that was rollicking over August's shins and wicking up his trouser legs. Mary could sympathize, up to a point. There was no doubt it was sad. There was something brittle about the air when the Have-Nots passed. Something crisp and rapacious like the thinnest edge of ice as it extends across the black void of a lake, though it was warm in the garden, practically balmy. Mary supposed it was betweeness she was feeling, a border she could sense and not see, or something like that. As soon as the Have-Nots were out of sight, she could not seem to bring herself to care. The garden was no help at all, festooned as it was with thrusting stands of blue iris, plump-headed daylilies, bobbing arm-lengths of lupine and speckled fox-glove clustered along their spears. Bees dipped and doddered everywhere. The birds were delirious. Mary chewed on a lime rind she fished from her glass and held it out to Pete who lifted the gin bottle from the coffee tin they were using as an ice bucket. From across the field, the ghost shouted, “Hi guys,” and waved her arms above her head.

  The ghost was a Have, but barely in Mary's estimation. In therapy sessions, when Dr. Throng asked them all to talk about why they were at the facility, August said, “I realized what I've been doing all these years is unforgivable, heinous.”

  Mary said, “I've swallowed a fly.”

  Donovan cycled through set answers, his favorite being, “I finally got around to reading Dostoevsky,” and Pete refused to speak at all, expressing himself instead through a progressive blanching that left his face with the same gelid, near-translucency as an egg-white and his watery eyes blue as milk.

  The ghost, who was maddeningly chipper, stated every day, “I am a rapid cycling manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies.” She would look brightly around, beaming at each of them as if she were a kindergarten teacher leading the class in a sing-a-long. “Also, I have daddy issues,” she would add, kicking up her feet and stretching her hands out into the circle as if she were leaning back against a line someone on the other end was holding taut.

  The ghost was very pretty. She was younger than Mary, but not by so many years, and one could see from her demeanor, her relentless cheer, that she had previously been not so pretty. In fact, she had most likely been plump and stodgy: the kind of girl Mary's grandmother would have sympathetically dismissed by saying, “Poor dumpling,” and then, out of a sense of guilt, seated at her right hand during Mary's birthday party and made sure she got the slice of cake topped with the only unmaimed frosting rose. Somewhere in the ghost's young adulthood she had had a blossoming. Perhaps it was madness that became her, Mary didn't know, but in any event she had pleasant, regular features, oval white teeth, tiny ears behind which she could tuck her blonde hair with a truly enviable delicacy and stupendous knockers. In another ten years they would probably deflate entirely, but right then the ghost's breasts were suspended in their ripest moment, dropped fully into the form of themselves and depending from her prominent clavicle like two turgid drops of sap just about to slide from the lip of the wound down the smooth bark of their limb.

  The ghost liked Pete and explained to them all that individuals with her diagnosis were frequently hyper-sexual beings as she stroked the inside of Pete's thigh and he froze, trembling with what Mary took to be nervous revulsion. The ghost also liked Mary and tended to follow her around the grounds and town proper making bright comments about the beauty of their surroundings, the simplicity of the native people, the dastardly nature of her father which she saw reflected in most items of the natural and manufactured world.

  “My father was a real motherfucker,” the ghost would say, fingering a hank of raw wool in the farmer's market. “One time, when I was thirteen, he purposefully opened the door on me going to the bathroom while he was giving the neighbors a tour of our new additio
n.” She held her hand up to Mary's face and made her smell the musky lanolin odor that clung to her fingertips. “He died in ’96. A car accident, entirely his fault, where a piece of rebar actually went straight through his heart. Isn't that funny, Mary?” the ghost asked, taking her arm at the elbow and pressing her breast against Mary's forearm. “Don't you think the guy selling the rhubarb is kind of cute?”

  The ghost was also a mother, as was Mary although the ghost's children were quite a bit older. “Already pre-teens if you can believe it,” said the ghost. Mary's child was very young, only a few months old. At the time her husband had flown with her to the facility so she could become a resident, it was still suckling from her breasts which were, even as she thought of it, pricking with squandered milk. This could have been quite an annoyance, but Mary found the longer she sat in the garden with Donovan and August and Pete, the more she held out her glass to be filled and felt inside her the fly—which had feather-light feet and shivered its wings as it walked inside her body so its edges felt like a snowflake tessellating permanently outward—the less she did think of her child (a boy, a son, they had named him Terry) and the smaller, firmer, more prepared her breasts became.

  “These breasts are built for speed,” she told Donovan, who looked at them appreciatively and laid a hand across her stomach as they lay in the grass. “These breasts are in training,” she said.

  “Oh, a little baby!” the ghost squealed when Dr. Bledsoe, in what was in Mary's opinion an almost criminally unprofessional breach of privacy, let it be known that she had recently had a child. “You must just be going crazy you miss him so much.”

  But that was it. Mary was not going crazy at all. It was just this fly, just its tickling progress around the environs of her gullet that was distracting her and making it so difficult to concentrate.

  In her life outside of the facility, Mary had brought a lot of money to her marriage. And there's more where that came from, had been her father's catch phrase, though, it must be said, he employed it more often to indicate a reservoir of grit or anti-plutocratic esprit-des-corps than any measure of his substantial tangible wealth. This was not her husband Charlie's catch phrase. Charlie tended to look at the bitter side of things. If given a melon, whole and rare and thudding with summer, he would paw through its flesh looking for the seeds before he would take even one bite. Charlie had senatorial aspirations, though right now he was only a young partner in her father's firm. He had the broad, noble forehead and soft, wet mouth of a golden retriever and had wooed her in college by showing up at her dorm room unannounced with reservations to a Michelin-starred restaurant and box under his arm that contained a dress in just her size wrapped in pink tissue paper. It was a disgusting story, really; so boring. It was no wonder she didn't think of it now, Mary told August as he lit a cigarette for himself and then fished around in his pockets to find one for her.

  She supposed it had been Charlie's idea that they have a child. They had not been married for very long and even before she was pregnant Mary had not worked. She preferred instead to drift around the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse her father had bought them as a wedding present picking up silver saltboxes from the credenza or a set of tortoiseshell-backed brushes from the upstairs powder room and carrying them out into the rambling back lawn where she left them to blacken in the grass. This was a kind of work, in her estimation, but, when she recalled it to herself, or to Pete who was a good listener, it sounded to Mary very much like a poor little rich girl story, which of course she had been, but was not what she meant at all. She was not telling a story, she explained to Pete who put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Rather, she was just trying to live an empirical life, a life bolstered and actually improved upon by the fact that every part of it could be proven through physical evidence readily apprehended not only by the eyes, but by any other one of the senses possessed by a person of reasonable mental capacity. When she was in the house, Mary ran a piece of red chalk under the chair molding to mark her passage. When she was in the yard—more problematic, especially after a dry spell when the long grasses closed seamlessly behind her heels—she was forced to leave a scattering of objects, mobile monuments one could say, to stand in evidence of her hours. It was a project she had set for herself, she told Pete, speaking more hurriedly than she would have liked as she spotted the ghost approaching their table with a loaded plate. Something she had decided on in her teenage years, perhaps even as early as the dawn of her sexual awakening, as a measure against the obscurity of what she understood to be the fleeting score of her life.

  Mary knew herself to be a determined woman, even a superlative woman, but the ongoing record of her life as she lived it was a demanding endeavor which began to take up more and more of her time. Charlie had determined her to be harebrained, charmingly scattered, a product of another age. But, when she abandoned the chalk and took to slicing the ball of her thumb and each of her fingertips with the fillet knife and leaving rambling ruby droplets through the conservatory and the parlor, up the front stairs into the bedroom, in ten tiny pools on the coverlet, down the backstairs and out into Charlie's vegetable patch, he suggested it might be time to procure for her a distraction.

  “You must learn to be more careful with the knives,” he had said, cupping her chin in his hand and turning her head from side to side as if seeking, and not finding, her eyes to gaze into. “Why don't we have a baby?” he had said and when she did not protest he pulled her onto his lap there on the stiff, horsehair stuffed sofa she had once thought made a sophisticated counterpoint to their ultra-modern globe lamps and slipped her nipple into his mouth.

  ***

  In group therapy, the ghost discussed her pregnancies. “I had my first baby when I was only fifteen. Can you believe it?” she said, shaking her head earnestly as if answering her own question. “And then I kept it! If you think that wasn't a monkey wrench in the works, well, you can think again, I guess.”

  It was a clear morning. A storm the night before had washed the air so clean breathing it was like spinning. It felt as if it were a late day in the week, but Mary didn't know which one nor, as calendars and other time marking devices were expressly discouraged, did she quite know how long she had been at the facility. If she consulted herself she might conclude it was around a month, perhaps a month and a half. The days seemed longer and hotter. The spent heads of the lilies crisped and withered on their stalks before the Have-Nots on garden duty got in there to pluck them green again, and the house wrens which had taken up residence under the eaves of her cottage were darting back and forth to their bosky nest with the cycling legs of insects clamped in their beaks rather than twigs and pine straw.

  Therapy sessions were always held just before lunch. “When one's physical and mental acumen is at its height,” said Dr. Bledsoe, and Mary could feel her hunger roiling up from her core like a spume of heated water. At about her sternum, the heat of her hunger stirred up the fly, which tended toward torpor, and she marked its progress as it buzzed around the pink vesicles of her lungs, pricked her heart with its sticky feet, descended to her liver where it unfurled its proboscis to eat. Mary considered that she had never felt stranger than she did at just that moment. In her previous, pre-fly life she would have felt compelled to commemorate this fact, but now she was content to sit, be still, to look inside. A wasp droned through the propped door and began to beat itself against the overhead light. Mary caught Donovan's eye and nodded up to it so they could watch together as the wasp experienced the self that was embroiled in this battle against the cut-glass shade.

  The ghost was saying, “ . . . frigid is the term for it, I think, or anyway the old-fashioned one, and my father really didn't have any other outlets because he was Catholic and took that very seriously, so instead he sublimated I supposed you would say, and turned all of our interactions into these really eroticized spaces where he'd be lifting me up to reach a light switch when I was little and he'd sort of hold my hand inside the shape of his a
nd like breathe onto my cheek, or, you know, putting suntan lotion on my back, under the bathing suit straps and sort of lingering?”

  Dr. Throng was taking notes, but Dr. Bledsoe, normally bent so fervently over his pad all Mary could see of him was his sleek part, was leaning back in his chair looking bored. He was watching the wasp too, Mary saw, tracking it with his eyes which, how had she never before noticed?, were a very intricate sort of hazel. He also had an intriguing mouth. It was thin and a little mean on top with a fat, tremulous, well-sucked looking lower lip posing an elegant counterpoint to his sharp, scythe-like chin. Mary tried to catch Donovan's eye again and call attention to her revelation about Dr. Bledsoe. Donovan was a self-confessed connoisseur of beauty. The more uninhabitable the better, he had said. Often, he could tell what she was thinking just by the expression on her face or the cant of her shoulders, but just now he seemed absorbed by the drama above him and didn't look at her. He pressed his fingers into his thighs as if playing a score on a piano, his knuckles whitening with pressure.