Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  All around us the world is compressing itself like an accordion, Mary thought. Expressing itself of all its air so when it expands again it can make a tremendous, attention-calling racket.

  The rat-box of the imagination, Mary thought.

  ***

  It was when Mary was pregnant that she first became aware of the fly. Who knew when she had swallowed it, how long it had sat quiet in the unfamiliar puckers of her body before making itself known. So many things happened in a day, and she was so absorbed in marking their passage, it was sort of insulting to expect her to remember each little detail. The fly was probably very young, foolish and not used to complicated aerial navigation. Mary pictured its green iridescent carapace and the black hairs that bristled from its thorax. She envisioned its clear, articulate wings held at an angle from its body and thought she could feel when the fly moved blindly forward and when it stopped, scrubbing its face with its folded front legs as it tried to assimilate itself to this new life of darkness and pressure and clutching heat. When the fly came to Mary and passed through her lips as she slept or ate or walked down her sloping yard toward the creek, it would have felt like little more than half of a pill or a morsel of dry bread. It would have caused nothing more than a hitch in her breathing, an involuntary clutching swallow. For her, it was an instant, but think of the fly! It's whole world suddenly pink and convulsive. The wet terror it must have felt as it slid down, deeper down, away from the pleasures of the world and into an unremitting dark. No wonder it was shocked into stillness, stunned as surely as if it had been swatted from the air by her hand, and yet, however long it may have lain dormant, the fly lived and, feeling itself alive, somewhere in the middle months of her pregnancy it cocked its wings, buzzed them once, began to explore. In her second trimester Mary became suddenly and irrevocably aware of the fly's presence. Though she could not quite hear it buzz, she felt it travel.

  “Morning sickness,” said Charlie when she came to him and complained of this unprecedented sensation. At this stage, with her stomach beginning to assume the taut ovular shape so fetishized in the mother-to-be magazines Charlie kept buying and leaving about the house for her perusal, the only article of clothing Mary could tolerate against her skin was an old bikini she had bought for the sailing season some year in her teens when the white sails snapping crisp against the green-gold haze of the bay at dusk had seemed such an ordinary beauty she didn't even bother to observe it. The bikini had always been impractical, always gauche in an aggressive fashion that Mary thought suggested a deliberate deconstruction of both taste and money. It was made of gold lame with more closely woven silver palm trees situated over her nipples and pudenda. It had been quite expensive, she recalled, and even in its heyday had been an article of clothing meant to enhance rather than conceal nakedness. In her altered state, it must be said, the bathing suit was no longer doing any but the most nominal of duties to preserve her modesty. She swelled from it like dough rising emphatically out of its pan.

  “You are essentially in the nude,” said Charlie. In spite of their frequent coupling, he seemed to be more than usually bothered by this behavior and averted his eyes whenever she wandered into a room. “What if someone tries to deliver a package? Or knocks on the door to sell you a vitamin subscription?”

  “They'll think I'm heading off for a swim,” Mary said. She hardly even needed to hear Charlie anymore to know how to answer him. The baby twitched in its fishy way and the fly buzzed, as if in answer, scaled the ridged tubing of her esophagus and fizzed at her jaw line like a ruff made of ecstatic needles. She closed her eyes in order to better feel and the room receded from her—the slick of the waxed floorboards beneath her feet, the chill breeze wafting over her buttocks, the drone of Charlie's voice high and cyclic as a wasp's whine, all fell back from her as if she had shed the sensation like a cape or a gown, stepped out of the puddled fabric and onto a clean, smooth, empty stage.

  Another time, Charlie came up behind her as she was picking hips off the rose trellis in the front garden and grabbed her by her own hips.

  “You are not an animal,” Charlie said, his breath puffing in hot, barely controlled bursts into her ear. He pulled her back and, though she could tell this wasn't his particular mood, her body did what she expected of it and she arced herself against him, rubbed. Charlie spun her around and shifted his grip to either side of her collarbone. “You are not going to shit this baby out in a ditch,” he said. His eyes were dilated, the pupils looking sweetly baffled if one ignored the expression on the rest of his face. He shook her and dug his thumbs in under her clavicle. “You're not going to leave it squalling and wander off leaking a trail of blood. You are a woman,” he shook her, “a wife,” he shook her. “Put some clothes on; put your tongue back in your mouth. Stop being such a cunt,” Charlie said. He thrust her away as if she were the one who had infringed on his space and strode back into the house.

  For Charlie, this was quite a display. Mary lost her balance—so topsy, so weeble-wobble in those final weeks. She caught herself on the rose trellis with some difficulty and at the expense of several crushed blooms and a row of punctures in her palm where the thorns dug in. The next morning, as she slipped the bikini strings over her head and fingered a new tear in the overstretched fabric, she noticed a pair of bruises like iridescent false eyes stamped on either side of her chest where Charlie's thumbs had pressed. Still, she could not find it in herself to feel outrage or concern. Charlie slunk around the house like a dog that has peed again on the rug and even at the time, with the swell of the baby and the drone of the fly forming a barrier between them, she had felt supremely distanced from the whole event. She had watched as her hand swanned across the impossible space between them and stroked Charlie between the eyes. She had even, had she not?, slipped two of her fingers between his lips to feel the broad heat of his tongue.

  No, she had not done those things, but it didn't matter. She could have and in the night she watched Charlie sleep and thought nothing of him. She pressed her thumbs against his eyelids and felt his eyes twitch and roll beneath her pressure. She concluded he was like the anatomical model her father had given her when she was eight. A visible man whose parts were all painted realistic colors and inserted so that their tubes and valves lined up in the correct fashion, but who was nevertheless just plastic in temporary stasis. An object at the mercy of any passing creature's whim to bat him about or open him up and rearrange. Charlie's problem was that he was uninhabited, Mary thought. He could never say that he was being, only that he had been. He had no proof, Mary thought and gently peeled back his eyelids so she could see the blank crescent of his eyes as they rolled back and forth in his head.

  And then the baby came.

  She remembered a time of panting, of constriction. In reality, this was very much like squatting over some weed-rank ditch and slicking a path with her blood, but with more people present, a greater preponderance of cartoon patterning in the nurse's scrubs and peach tones in the purportedly soothing color scheme of her private labor room. Charlie was there saying something very close to her ear. There was a sharp pop, like the sensation she always supposed the television in her father's study felt as its picture dwindled into a white-hot point, and Charlie was gone. Something in the room made a high, gasping wail, and the fly continued to sip at her juices, wholly unconcerned.

  That was really the clincher. She didn't understand why no one else could understand her position. The baby, though intricate in its parts, was not absorbing. Rather, it absorbed and seemed perfectly content to hang at her breast grunting and rooting around with its puckered, puffy lips. The fly, on the other hand, was unique and her relationship with it required a sort of undivided attention to the experience she could not afford if she were to continue with her extant duties of the home. Indeed, in what Mary considered the coup d'etat of her thus far single-minded life, she had totally abandoned her record making in favor of delving more deeply into the daily intricacies of the fly's behavior. This
necessitated that she spend a great deal of time in a prone position, either in the slender guest bed Charlie had moved her into for what he termed her recovery, or on the horse-hair sofa with her feet propped on the uncomfortably baroque armrest. There she would lie with her eyes closed and every part of her anatomy slowed to its most somnambulant measure. It might have seemed like sleep, Mary conceded, or even a sort of trance state, but really this was an expression of deep concentration. Of an inward gaze so finely tuned it skipped over mere meditation and became a sort of transcendence wherein she and the small, improbable life that was going on inside her merged and were one. It was inspiring. She herself was inspired. Meanwhile, Charlie spent a great deal of time pacing around the house with the baby in one arm and the phone propped between his chin and shoulder. That was his choice. She supposed he could not help his limitations.

  “I am finally getting to the work of my life,” Mary said, and Charlie, whacking the baby on the back with one tanned hand as it jiggled and coughed said, “I've heard of a really great place, up north, in the mountains, for a rest. What do you think?”

  The ghost's father was, apparently, quite a bad man. He was the worst kind of man who would do a thing in such a way so that later he could convincingly deny it. It was probably all in her head: the way his hand had lingered, the way his breath had puffed. But then again, by her own confession, the ghost had been a clumsy girl, always in harm's way. And wasn't she constantly arriving in such a fashion as to suggest her willingness? “I'm up for anything,” the ghost had often said in her, Mary's, hearing. It was practically a mantra.

  Oh, this was all so exhausting. All Mary had wanted was to be a pretty girl walking through a parking lot. When she walked on the asphalt she would hear the clickety-clack of her little black heels stuffed full of her little white feet. When she stepped up onto the median she would feel the faintest tear as she punctured perfectly round holes in the sod. A pretty girl who had two or three boys to talk to and long hair she could flip over one shoulder and a car waiting at the corner that would pick her up and whisk her away, silent behind the passenger glass, bound for an unknown fate.

  The ghost said, “In a weird way, I think I can't forgive him because he never did it. I mean not all the way. If he had it's like it would have confirmed something, you know? But as it is I feel like I'm in a small room with a lot of other people, and the air conditioning's broken or something, and maybe somebody farted but maybe they didn't. Do you know what I mean? Like maybe I can smell somebody's fart but it's just the hint or whisper of a fart and I'm sniffing and sniffing to tell whether I can smell it or not and suddenly I realized that this is all I'm doing anymore. Sniffing for someone's fart.” The ghost sniffed rich and deep through flared nostrils to demonstrate for them and turned to Dr. Bledsoe with her hands folded in her lap. Mary resisted the urge to sniff with her, an almost overwhelming impetus to mimicry. Mental contagion, she thought. The last thing she needed was someone else's flotsam cluttering up her mind.

  “I think that's all I have to say,” the ghost said, beaming, and the woman sitting next to her put her hand on the ghost's arm in a universal gesture of empathy. Mary rolled her eyes.

  “Fine, that's fine. Very good,” said Dr. Bledsoe. He slipped the tip of his pen from between his mismatched lips and used it to point across the circle to Mary. “Mrs. Madrill, I believe you're the only one left?”

  Well, what could he have expected? By this point, Mary felt as if her voice was sliding down a pair of well-worn tracks entirely independent of will or volition. Her voice was like a mine cart, propelled by gravity, which might reasonably be trusted to guide its own way into the interior darkness of the earth. She could leave it alone and come back later to see what she had said.

  “I am here because I swallowed a fly,” Mary said. She folded her own hands primly in her lap and used the rest of her allotted twenty minutes to follow the progress of the wasp which beat herself silly against the unheeding light and finally collapsed to the floor in a tightly curled ball of exhaustion and hurt. The fly buzzed at around the level of her small intestine in either alarm or sympathy. Dr. Bledsoe sucked his pen. Between them, Mary considered, something else was being said.

  Later that evening, Mary was in the garden. Startlingly, she was alone.

  Alone the noise the river made was more apparent than when she was engrossed with a conversation or a companionable listening silence. In fact, Mary thought as she tipped the last drops of her gin onto the petals of a delphinium, closed up for the night, and poured herself some more from the bottle, the river was positively raucous. It sounded as if it were in the middle of a frivolous, but absorbing discussion. As if it were actually many rivers all talking at once. Mary took a turn around the garden. She held her cup at an elegant angle from her body, her arm outstretched like the long, white, elegant neck of a crane and her hand just as cruel and fast as its head which was, after all, mostly beak. She was really quite drunk, that old veil down over her eyes so the garden seemed to swim to meet her focus in particular parts which were difficult to anticipate. Here was a coiled vine descending from the trellis; here a paper plate smeared across its face with a streak of mustard. Mary found herself in amongst the irises whose gentian blooms were all stiffly furled. “Come open,” someone said in a thick, gargling voice and Mary saw it was her own fingers that were sliding over the tops of the plants but could seem to get no purchase.

  Well, how absurd. Mary was not above laughing at herself. She had once had a conversation with her father about that very subject in which he had said she was a fine girl. “Fine as horses,” he had said, running his finger in an arc around the corners of her mouth, but she was altogether too dramatic.

  “You'll find the earth is quite resentful,” her father had said to her. They had been somewhere. A forest of some sort. The memory was insubstantial, but Mary seemed to see her father sitting on a log, the rotted wood crumbling beneath him as he shifted his weight. His hands were dangling between his knees and he was wearing a butter yellow shirt, something with a collar. His hair was mussed. For the life of her, Mary could not think what she and her father might have been doing out in the woods, but she had been a biddable child, likely to follow anyone anywhere given only the slightest encouragement. Probably she hadn't even been invited. That would have been just like her, Mary thought and snorted.

  She had come to the lone spruce again, was coming back around to the trellis and picnic table. The route was getting easier and easier. Her feet seemed so light and independent it was as if she were prancing about the garden like a pony. A white pony, like Bert, with a black clown mask like Bert had hiding her eyes. Mary tossed her mane and picked up her pony feet.

  “The earth's already got two strikes against every living thing,” her father said. There was something wrong with one of his eyes. Or maybe it was the way he was looking at her with it. His finger went around and around her mouth which was wet and sticky with some sort of berry or punch as children's mouths often are. There was something so wrong with one of her father's eyes! Oh, she felt sorry for him and also as if she had neglected something, an action she was supposed to perform or a certain knowledge she was supposed to have committed to memory. Mary shook her head, but could not clear it. It appeared the fly had flown up from her gullet and was fidgeting now behind her eyes. This was neither pleasant nor exactly unmenacing, but, Mary supposed, the fly was evolving as all things evolve. Trying things out. Seeing what stuck.

  “It's better just to stay out of sight,” her father said, “Escape notice. Do you know what I mean?”

  Mary couldn't remember if she knew what her father meant or not, but all this was in the past, the enormous past, and now she was going around and around the garden, greeting again each thing that swum up at her with wholly honest surprise and delight. “I am here as much as I am,” Mary told the fly and found, as she had worried she eventually might, that she was standing in the middle of the river, balanced atop a sandy hummock with riv
er water curling against her shins and tugging at her ankles.

  It wasn't so bad. The river was cold, a deep aching cold that could only come from some very high place like the top of a mountain. Or outer space, Mary briefly considered, but no, this was no time for hubris. The river was cold because it came from the mountain where everything was always very cold. Even the little birds and animals, the rabbits with their incendiary eyes, were so cold their flesh shrank inside their feathers or fur until they were much much smaller than they appeared to be. The river came down from the mountain and, as it came, it had a long conversation with itself, and now here was Mary, right in the middle of it all. The fly moved higher in her head, buzzing up and down just below the crown of her skull. It was surely still a very small fly, Mary thought, to be able to travel about so freely, but it didn't feel small and now, as it picked its way across the folds of her brain, it was also starting to feel quite demanding. The best thing to do might be to ignore it. Give it a taste of its own medicine. She dug her toes under the smooth rocks and coarse sand of the riverbed. The moon was full and high and in its light her skin and the river water took on the same sheen. It was easier said than done. “What do you want?” Mary said to the fly, but she got no answer. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught the quick flurry of something that has been startled into motion and then freezes again, hoping not to be seen.

  Mary stood in the middle of the river and looked. She knew where it was, right there under the white bridge that crossed the river just beyond the old mill house. Right there, in the shadow where the crisp white pylon was cut by the dark water. But it was not there. There was nothing there but the pylon, the sandy bank, the river. Still. Mary was certain. It was suffering her gaze. It was breathing in apprehension. It was poised to rush—which way? toward her? poised to spring? It was waiting for her next move which would have to be so deliberate, her most carefully balanced move to date. What would it be? This test, which she had always anticipated, had come upon her so suddenly, when she was so preoccupied with other considerations. On paper, it might appear that Mary was in the worst possible state to accept such a challenge, but, she thought, perhaps after all this was the only state in which such challenges could be proffered. Her dress fluttered forward between her legs, caught in the breeze of the river. It was important to articulate herself as both predator and prey; it was important to indicate the hard kernel of self that had never before been breached. Mary mustered all her resources. The fly buzzed furiously, each bristle erect. There was nothing there; she was sure. “Dr. Bledsoe?” she said and flung out her hand.