Mother Box and Other Tales

by Blackman, Sarah

  “He won't,” Mary said and inside her the other child, who was maybe a fox or a mouse, who might have the face of an aging man forming in the translucent slosh of its bones, turned in a slow circle.

  “Well,” Charlie said, “he might feel replaced, then. He's been the only one for so long. He might feel abandoned.”

  “He won't,” Mary said, and turned away from the window where Terry could be seen squatting in near perfect stillness at the base of the forsythia. Every now and then, he would reach out and pat a hummock of mulch, but his attitude was not that of a child immersed in a private fantasy, just as it was neither that of a child waiting nor a child bored. To Mary, he seemed as if he was enacting a prescribed circumlocution. There was room for some variables, but on the whole Terry only did what it was inevitable he should do. He never quite seemed to arrive in a place, say at dinner or at a particular spot in the yard, but it was clear that he traveled. Every moment, so far, her son had spent traveling.

  “He'll go on,” Mary said. She felt as if she did not know Terry, but she certainly knew of him. She felt as if she had observed him from a great distance and made little annotations regarding his nature every moment of every day since she had returned from the far north and once again taken up the measure of her, and the fly's, life. Perhaps that was mothering, she concluded. It was possible, was it not?, that all along she had been doing it exactly right. Often at night, Mary would go to Terry's bedroom and stand next to the door with her back to the wall. Should he wake up, she would not present to him a looming shadow backlight by the dim ambience of the hallway, but rather only a slightly altered passage in the wall, a shape his eyes would have time to become accustom to before his intellect stirred itself to either acceptance or alarm. This was how she would always like to be with her child, with her children, now; yet Mary knew there were many other ways in which women became mothers. Some of them, like Kris, Mary assumed, placed a series of objects in front of their children and watched intently to see which they would choose. According to that first choice—the fat little hand attracted to the glint of the mirror, the warmth of the coal, the shape of the knife—a series of other objects would be laid in a line. This would guide them in their particular direction, a simulacrum of cause and effect created by the mother as was both her duty and her right.

  As a very young woman, Mary might have thought from this model that the mother was a guide bringing the child through life and delivering them to death as a jungle guide might bring a party to a particularly arresting waterfall, or a cave guide to a formation of rocks that looked just exactly like rashers of bacon and sunnyside eggs. However, there was the example of her own mother, a woman who was whittled away by her belief in order and eloquence until she assumed a paradoxically disorderly form, a shape like a root turning in the long darkness, crabbed by rock and clay. But that was such a confusing way of stating things. After all, her mother had only been a woman who died. It was a cancer, one of the usual ones. When alive, her mother had liked certain things, cut flowers, aperitifs, and when she was dead she had ceased to desire any of these things. All the rituals Mary's mother had created in her life came to an untidy end, though her daughter continued to enact them in a painful confused way, returning to certain rooms at certain hours, carrying before her certain objects as if under a spell of her body which compelled her and compelled her though there was no one there to apprehend or acknowledge. Mary's mother had brown hair which she wore cut into a shape that rose from the back of her head like a rising cloud of dust in the road. She had long, intelligent fingers and there was little to be said of her, little time in which to have said it.

  Mary herself had grown very thin. The organ in which the child slept rose from her body as if rooted directly in her bones. Her joints articulated themselves with a disturbing fervor. It seemed to Mary as if her son might be awake when she entered his room and stood against his wall. It was something in his stillness, his very still silence, but she said nothing, touched nothing. She was neither the mother who would lay a trail nor the mother who would leave a void. She was the mother who observed. It was not an abnegation of the self so much as it was a reallocation of resources. Her son shifted in bed and made a wet sound with his mouth. Her daughter shifted in her body, perhaps already transfixed by the pull of her brother's gravity, and made no sound.

  Mary's other passenger, the fly, was a frantic thing. Its life had been subsumed by a moment of inattention. In spite of the tenacity of her previously held beliefs, the fly held no intent. It was an accident, a happenstance that had ridden in her body all the long years of her life doomed by its belief in its own singular existence, seeking pattern in the fluke rather than escape. The fly buzzed in her throat, but Mary did not choke and, after some time of dry swallowing, she felt it descend to the level of her womb and lost its particular feeling within the feel of her daughter, the long slow dreaming that was happening there. The moon rose over the tree tops and crossed her son's window as small and blind as the eye of a fish long jellied-over on the fisherman's ice.

  Mary was tempted to tell all this to the ghost but somehow, whenever the ghost was around, she found herself discussing more topical matters. The ghost did not seem bound by any particular convention, but arrived more readily at mealtimes and was predictable to the point that Mary began to set a place for her at their table. She told Mary that she had been quite a cook in her time. “In my time, for my daughters,” the ghost said, “I was known to cook a fish in parchment paper cozened all about with sprigs of dill and tiny baby carrots I would buy at one particular market in spite of the fact that it was out of my way. I made bread from scratch, whipped cream from scratch. You remember how I liked to keep busy, how I liked to fully apprehend my days?”

  From comments like these, Mary understood that the ghost was not particularly impressed with the quality of the meals she herself served, but she ate with gusto, helping herself to seconds and lingering at the table long after Charlie and the children had gone off into their private evenings. Mary found herself not ungrateful for the company.

  “Is there too much salt in the broth?” Mary asked, her bowl before her and the soup within beginning to skim over with fat.

  “Oh no,” the ghost replied, dipping her spoon directly into the serving tureen. “If anything, there's too little.”

  There was never enough salt for the ghost. She often poured a shifting hill of it into her hand in which to dip the tip of her tongue between bites. She changed her clothes an inordinate number of times in a day and appeared to have an endless supply of gauzy scarves which she would tie around the base of her ponytail in order to create a sort of pennant effect, Mary supposed, though they hung limp and passive, doing nothing to mark either changing weather or shifts in the ghosts frequently mercurial moods. The ghost continued not to drink, but she did smoke at an alarming rate. She would often pinch out the end of a half-smoked cigarette and leave it balanced on the edge of an end table or propped against the central stem of a house-plant while she lit another from a bullet shaped silver lighter she was constantly losing in the bottom of her purse. In general, the ghost was a rummager. More than once, Mary caught her digging through the children's drawers, really getting down to the bottom of things, with the clothes themselves stacked in bright piles around her. Though Mary made no special efforts towards stealth, and did not consider herself particularly effected either way by a rearrangement of the children's privacy, the ghost reacted every time as if they were both trembling on the edge of a social precipice.

  “Oh, Mary,” the ghost would exclaim, both hands pressed to her chest, cigarette expressing a wavering wreath around her chin. “My dear, it's not how it looks. Let me explain. Do let me make this up with you.”

  In this scenario, Mary would walk to the window and fiddle with the seam of the curtain. She would look out onto the vantage which sometimes afforded her a view of Terry and Irma, who were seldom apart, and sometimes showed her nothing but the slow affections of th
e vegetative world: the blades of grass which caressed each other, the banded hostas which yearned, each leaf, away from their tender beds. Not instructive to humans, Mary thought as the ghost shuffled around behind her and continued to protest an innocence that was not in question or of concern. An example of neither the canny nor the marvelous, Mary thought and then she and the ghost would descend the stairs together and the ghost would tell her again some story of her past life which seemed to have been at once full and minutely observed.

  Well, Mary supposed, we all have our weaknesses. Her own was a lack of perspective, a new and perplexing inability to keep track of numbers higher than ten. Like a partridge, though her body felt more like the bones of the bird and not its meaty breast, its officious feathers. At night, in bed with Charlie, she described this feeling and he listened in silence. She told Charlie many things and he listened in silence, his back to her and the shape of his body, which had bulked up over the years, soft and dark in the deeper darkness of the room. Sometimes, as she talked, Mary knew the ghost was in the room as well, sitting in the corner of the room in the deep, maroon armchair that was intended for late night vigils though it was seldom used. Sometimes she could hear the ghost somewhere else in the house, the particular weight of her tread, her habit of singing little snatches of song under her breath, and sometimes Mary knew the ghost was gone entirely though where she went when she was not there remained a mystery Mary did not seek to solve.

  “My greatest fear has always been too literal a knowledge of myself,” Mary told Charlie as they lay together in the dark. “I've overcompensated for that, I know. I've made a mockery of the everyday.” Or no. That is not what she said, but what she meant to say. Mary told Charlie stories about her childhood. She told him things her mother had used to say, little snippets, her mother's little habits of speech. She often thought Charlie's naked flesh was like the belly of a toad, porous and impossibly soft, liable to shine with a luminescence entirely independent of light both natural and artificial. Though she had always considered herself to be a rigid woman, pliant in body but never in soul, now Mary wished he would turn over and make a space for her.

  “Not to belabor the point,” Mary told Charlie, “but I have loved you very much. I have loved you as well as I could.” She considered this a transformative moment in their relations with each other. It was some one of a number of very dark nights. The moon in this season seemed disinclined toward illumination, which Mary would have thought a prerequisite of its condition; although, come to think of it, Mary did not even know what the moon was, not for sure. Some kind of orbiting satellite of course, but what of it? What else? She couldn't name even one of the kinds of rocks the moon was composed of or state with any degree of assuredness if it was even composed of rocks and not, perhaps, a very fine, luminous dust compacted into the semblance of a solid, scarred ball. What had been done with all this time she had spent? What had been made of it? The ghost was in the corner sitting in the maroon chair with her knees drawn up to her chest and a musing expression on her face. Mary could not see her, but she knew this was the case. The ghost was on her side, but she had no answers.

  “Do you remember the goats?” the ghost said. Her voice in the dark was different than in daylight; a soft and private voice. “Do you remember their dear faces, each one the same face, and the way they would butt their heads up into your palm?”

  “I love you, I love you,” Mary told Charlie. “I love you. Did you hear me? Did you hear what I said?”

  Charlie rolled over. He pulled her against him, put one hand on the side of her face, but it was dark in there, still dark, nothing glowed. Mary could just see the outline of her husband's teeth as he talked. She saw the dark room, dark corners and dark mullion over the window, through the screen of her husband's fingers over her eyes.

  “I heard you,” said Charlie. “The garden and the river and your friends. The goats and the garden and your friends and the river.” Suddenly, she knew. Her husband was not a man, but a grub! He burrowed in the warm earth, turned the soil. Her husband was necessary, but not pleasant to look at. Oh, she had been so mistaken in her life. She had looked in all the wrong places, missed everything.

  “Every time you've said something, I've heard it,” said Charlie, but of course this was not right.

  “This is not then, Mary,” said Charlie. “This is here, now. No one else is in this room but us.” This was not right either, but closer. The ghost shifted her weight and sighed. She got up and crossed the room. Mary could hear her making her way down the hall toward Irma's room and then, after a brief pause, passing back before their door and down the other end of the hall toward Terry. In the dark house in the long night, the ghost passed from room to room, checking in. Which meant Mary did not have to. Which meant she was not compelled.

  “Rot,” said Mary. “The soil.”

  “I know, Mary, I heard you,” Charlie said. “The fire, the river, the garden, the goats.”

  When Mary and Charlie were still in their courting phase they had used to go to a bar out in the country. The bar was called The Silent Woman and it was down a long country road seamed with other roads that leapt out of copses of trees or from between the high cuts of the fields and were always empty. Charlie was a fast driver. He steered with one hand and maneuvered the other back and forth between the gear shift and the radio consol, the rear view mirror, the back of her seat, the top of his head, his mouth. Charlie drove with his whole body, leaning into the curves as they whipped around them, and Mary always felt it would better suit the dramatic narrative of the story if The Silent Woman were at the very end of the road, a beacon gleaming at the head of a cul-de-sac already crowded with other cars into which they could bellow, Charlie announcing their presence by blowing the horn, as the bar's happy patrons spilled out into the parking lot. Instead the bar was just off the road at the edge of a gravel turn-around, unheralded. It was bound on either side by fields which were high with corn or shorn to a copper rubble depending on the season and, while laid perfectly flat to her inspection, always seemed to Mary as if they were full of hidden or merely unperceived lives.

  “Sure. Lots of snakes, field mice,” Charlie said. Mary felt sure he didn't know any more about these things than she did, but when he drove his fingers raked through his hair or came to rest in the center of his lower lip and seemed imbued with a private temperament at which Mary could not stop looking. Charlie did not look at her. He shifted gears. He stamped the clutch flat to the mat and let it out by begrudging inches while Mary had a little flask with her initials etched in silver spirals on the front which Charlie had given her and which he thoughtfully filled for her so she would have something to do on the ride.

  Outside the bar was a sign that showed the bar's name, but did not spell it out. The sign depicted a woman in an ankle length blue dress. She was wearing a long white apron and carrying a silver tray with a single silver cup set upon it which, by the careful way she gripped either side of the tray, was probably full. The woman had a wide, soft, white collar and above that nothing—no head, no hair, no habits of expression. She was the silent woman and Mary was taken with her and thought about her as she and Charlie sat at a wobbly table and watched the people at the bar dance, waved for the waitress to come bring them more drinks and, eventually, danced themselves amid the crush of bodies. The band throbbed in the corner and Charlie's hands were damp on Mary's hip and buttocks. Mary twirled around and around, her head bobbing over Charlie's shoulder.

  “What kind of shoes was she wearing?” Mary would shout, pressing a thumb against the base of Charlie's ear so he would hear her. “It's a test. What kind of ring did she have on her right index finger?” Charlie spun her around and around while the band played. The bar was always packed.

  One day, they drove out to The Silent Woman. Charlie had not yet proposed but Mary knew it was a matter of time.

  “A waiting game,” her father had said. “He's a man who needs time to see what he thinks.” Mary's fat
her was not entirely sold on Charlie. He had not been entirely won over by Charlie's satellite courtship of him which had involved gifts of liquor and cigars and, once, a book bound in brown leather which showed the inside view of all the different kinds of ships built in the harbor in the early days of the city's preeminence. Mary thought the book was interesting in a terrible way—all those ships splayed open, gaping, the tiny kegs of rum or salted fish stowed away by tiny sailors who clambered through the ship's holds oblivious to the ruin of the shape that was to keep them safe on open seas. But her father was not given to flights of fancy and remained impervious to Charlie's advances. Her father, in his encroaching age, had shut up like a clam shell. He was not waiting for anything anymore and his modes of locomotion became mysterious, seldom glimpsed. In fact, Mary's father was starting to become a problem for her, but now, in Charlie's car, going fast down a straight road with Charlie's hand on the back of her seat and his arm stretched taught between them, she considered herself problem free. So many things were meant to be left behind. It was impossible for any one person, and certainly not for her, a motherless child, little more than a girl despite her tight, short skirt, to have too explicit a say in what was lost and what was gained.

  Charlie was in a fine mood. He sang along to the radio and occasionally lifted his hand up to her face, holding his fist like a microphone she should sing into as well, though she did little more than lean forward and breathe. The moon was out. That was something Mary would always later remember. The moon was fat and low and orange as a persimmon. It seemed to be traveling along the horizon line like an animal preoccupied with marking its own progress. The moon traveled back and forth along the horizon line snuffling in the underbrush. It was fall. The air was high and sharp and they traveled down the road quickly in a straight line.

  “The stars are so far away,” Charlie sang. It was a line from a children's song which someone had redone with electric guitars and heavy drums. Mary didn't even know how he had found that station on the radio. He held his hand up to her face and Mary breathed into it, imagining her breath seeping down between the creases of his hands and condensing there, a damp ball rapidly cooling.