“They never speak when spoken to,” Charlie sang.
That night, the bar was more than usually full. Mary and Charlie had to share their table with another couple, slightly younger than them, who looked alike with a burnished, simple similitude Mary found soothing. The boy was tall with unusually long hair which he wore loose over his shoulders and there was something about his teeth, something about his teeth behind his cheeks, that was very apparent. The girl was smaller and plainer. She seemed to huddle into herself the way a bird or a small mammal will huddle into its down or fur for comfort and protection from the cold, but, Mary noticed, it was the boy who sought reassurance. He couldn't keep his hands off her. Always touching the back of her hand, stroking her knee, circling her wrist with his thumb and index finger as if making her a bracelet and then trying it on for fit. They were both absorbed in the music, jogging their knees under the table to the beat.
“What a beautiful couple,” Mary said to Charlie. He gave her a squeeze, but was mostly preoccupied trying to get the waitress's attention. He thrust his hand into the air and waved it back and forth in an exaggerated fashion that reminded Mary of semaphore. The ancient sea language for two rye whiskeys, neat, she thought and laughed. The girl caught her eye and smiled with her, though she could not possibly get the joke. That was the kind of people she needed, Mary thought. People who were pleased to be in the here and now; people who were gracious about it. The band swung into another song without pausing for breath.
It seemed to Mary as if this night had been traveling toward her for a long time. Their drinks arrived and she sipped hers, the liquor sliding down her throat in an obedient fashion, all as expected. It seemed to Mary as if she had seen this before, which of course she had, many times over the months she and Charlie had been dating, but tonight something was the same in a very particular way. Mary let herself wander out over the crowd. In her physical body she was sitting with her back to the wall, Charlie's hand on her thigh like a lap rug. The young couple got up and moved to the dance floor where they began some kind of mirror dance, the girl leading and the boy copying her movements with a sinuous intent. Mary took another sip of her drink and moved in her non-physical self out between the tables and the crowed, rickety chairs, past the drinkers who were laughing or nodding intently or drawn and pale and alone, past the black and chrome dental chair at the corner of the bar which was reserved for the owner, an elderly man with a menacing haircut who was often hobbled with the gout, and over to the dance floor where she slipped between the couples, feeling the push and pull of their bodies like the tide tormenting a water weed.
She drifted around on the bandstand for awhile. The drummer was admirably out of place. Too tall and thin and pale for his position in the band, nevertheless, he pounded a complicated rhythm and rocked back and forth in his seat with his eyes shut, the color progressively draining from his face. He seemed about to collapse, but Mary understood from the angle of his torso as he leaned away from the noise he was making that this was a choice, this calamitous solitude he had created at the back of the band. The other band members were hardly better off. There was a guitarist and a singer and a trumpet player. They were in the middle of a long, complicated instrumental solo, and the singer seemed at a bit of a loss. He had loose limbs which appeared to have too many joints and jangled a tambourine against the side of his long haunch in such a way that suggested that even if the instrument were not there he would be making the same discordant noise. He had long, yellow teeth which showed to great advantage as he blurted counterpoint sounds into the microphone. The guitarist was smoking, smoke fanning back from the cigarette and making his eyes blink and water.
The dancers were really getting into it. Everyone in the bar seemed to feel the eternal weight of the now in the same way Mary felt it. They were of accord. Certainly the dancers were not all beautiful people, but to Mary, traveling through them with the freedom of a woman released from her body, released by Charlie's satisfaction with the scene from the need to nod and smile, to hold his hand as it rested atop her thigh smothering the flesh beneath it in a wide, wet shape the same shape as his palm, they seemed to scintillate. All the people in the room gathered light within themselves and sent it flashing back. Every person in the room refracted from many internal facets.
There were four women on the dance floor who seemed to have come with the same man. The women had an affinity, sisters perhaps, and were wearing variations of the same checked dress from whose old fashioned lace collars their necks rose columnar and surprisingly thick. Each woman had fixed her hair in the same way as the others, two loose plaits that started at the crown of their heads and flopped over their ears as they danced, and they each possessed the same wide, tawny eyes. The one in the pink and white check was the prettiest, somehow. She held each of her sisters' hands in turn, encouraging them, bringing them further into themselves. The man they came with was short and fiery. He was an antonym to the sisters' willowy limbs and paunchy torsos, and wore a trim black suit with a stiff white shirt and a skinny black tie. His hair was white and rose from his head a bristling inch before subsiding angrily down the back of his neck. Oh, how he stomped and pawed! He described a furious circle around the sisters and they turned to follow his progress, eyes placid, a little wicked, unblinking. The sisters all had small hands and small precise feet. They had prominent hipbones and Mary understood they were women who were afraid only of the elements. Nothing less could sway them. Nothing less could make them blanch.
How strange that I am in this place and not some one of the many other places I have been, Mary thought. It was one of those thoughts that seemed to be spoken by someone else, an overheard thought. She could see the waitress, Joellen or Joanne or some other name she could never quite remember, behind the bar filling an order that was probably their second round. Joellen speared a cherry with a blue cocktail sword and slid it all the way to the sword's hilt. She speared another.
Mary looked across the room and saw herself leaning back against the wall. She was so young, so comely. On her face there was a look of perfect, removed expectation. Something was coming to her, all right, and her hand on the table, Mary's very own hand there on the table, followed the high notes of the trumpet just now starting in with a fluidity she had not known she possessed. Charlie shifted in his seat so he could look at the side of her face, surreptitiously. Across the room, of course, Mary could see it all, but the Mary right next to him was as unaware as if she were made of cold wax, an unlit taper, full of potential. Somebody strike the fucking spark, Mary thought and she watched the thought blaze up in her face and turn her cheeks pink. Her lips parted. She stared out over the crowd, seeing nothing, and Charlie was so hungry; he was ravenous. He leaned toward her, his cheeks hollow with hunger, and she knew in a moment he would pull her to him, turn her head toward him and they would meet at the mouth and eat from each other and be filled.
“Strike the spark!” Mary said.
Joellen brought them their drinks and set them down hastily, slopping them onto the table. She had her hands full. She was practically running with that long gliding stride that comes from voluntary servitude, a sense of self that can be put on hold. Some of the men were excited by this and reached out after her to slide their hands across the shiny seat of her pants, pinch the soft white flesh that bloomed under the fabric just below her back pocket. Mary took a sip of her drink and Mary watched herself swallow. She lifted the cocktail sword from the glass and slid the cherry off between her teeth. Charlie was leaning closer. There was something different about the shape of his head, something she couldn't remember having seen before, but perhaps it was that they were so young, so in love. Joellen was okay; she was moving very fast. She hoisted a tray onto her shoulder and walked through the crowd with the full drinks chiming next to her ear. She was a statue rising above the surf. The men's hands rose up after her, red and cramped like the little claws of a crawfish, boiled open. The trumpeter played and played and played her repet
itive song. She inserted herself, irrevocably, into the scene.
Both Marys turned to watch her. Both Marys felt a surge of jealously at the way her body filled her black cat suit at the hips and breast. Both Marys admired her shining hair and strong jaw line, her small ears and the way her eyes focused on the bell of her horn and no further, took nothing else into account. Both Marys closed their eyes. The trumpet was astonishingly loud. The room was very hot. Heat filled the room as if it were pouring through a crack in the ceiling and running down the wall in rills. A blast of heat blew across her cheeks and nose, across her eyelids. Someone put their hand on Mary's chin and turned her head. Someone pressed their mouth against Mary's mouth and when they pulled away she sat with her mouth open as the band shook all manner of things loose from the rafters, as the drinkers swept through the door headless of what drafted in after them. She caught her breath; she swallowed. The trumpet blatted triumphantly. The drums banged.
“The stars are too many to count,” said the singer. He was breaking in. It wasn't quite his turn. “The stars are so far away.”
“They're playing our song,” said Charlie. Mary could feel a strand of saliva strung between his lip and hers. She opened her eyes and saw his face from so close it was like nothing else she had ever seen or ever would. It was his face but looked like the great, shocked face of the moon and, also like the moon, it was orange in the weird bar light. Around them, there was a tumult and the strange jangle of the tambourine sounded more and more like crackling, a rising din.
“Why is it so hot in here?” Mary said, but no one answered. She coughed. She swallowed something like a little pill and felt its rough edges scratch all the way down her throat.
Mary was asleep. She was having a dream. In the dream, the ghost was telling her a long story with some urgency.
“Listen,” said the ghost. “I met him in the garden.”
Mary looked around to see if she was in the garden again. She regretted ever having been so unguarded with the place. She also regretted the regret, but there it was. Some things cannot be passed off as a folly of youth; sometimes a permanent damage has been done.
But no, Mary wasn't in the garden, not anywhere near it. She was in her own room, in her own bed, just as she had entered it the night before and brought the covers up over her shoulder thinking, I will never get to sleep at this rate, until suddenly she was asleep and having this dream. By the slant of the light and the empty hanger on the closet doorknob which had held Charlie's suit coat the previous night, she surmised the time in the dream was late morning. In the dream, she had overslept.
“This is unlike me,” Mary said. She propped the pillows under her back and sat up against the headboard. Outside the window, a large brown bird was in the spruce, hopping from limb to limb. It wasn't looking in the window exactly, but it clearly knew the window was there. Its entire affect betrayed its awareness of the window. For the life of her, Mary couldn't think what it could want.
The ghost was sitting at the foot of the bed, practically on top of Mary's feet. She looked terrible, her hair disheveled, her salmon pink blouse stained and misbuttoned. She looked into the air with a vacant remembered expression that Mary found annoying.
“I intended nothing. That was a time in my life when I had no intent but a kind of expulsion instead. Sort of like how a squid swims around in the upper levels of the ocean by pulling water into its body and then expelling the water in a jet? I guess you could say I had propulsion, and of course that heightened sex drive.” The ghost laughed. She was suddenly right there with Mary, beaming into Mary's face. The ghost gripped Mary's toes beneath the blankets and shook them. There was a joke to be shared and the ghost was sharing it. She had always been that sort of woman, Mary thought. Afraid to be alone.
“Was I there, too?” Mary asked. It seemed a reasonable question. After all, she had been so often in the garden, so often with her friends sitting around the picnic table under the trellis passing glasses back and forth while the garden grew still and gray and then flared silver with the rising moon. Sometimes, light would fall across the sky and it was impossible to tell whether it was a shooting star or a satellite. Whether it crossed the sky with intent or hapless abandon. “Was Donovan there? Or August?”
But the ghost ignored her. She might as well have said nothing at all. The ghost crawled up the bed on all fours and lay down beside Mary. She tucked herself around Mary's body and stroked the side of Mary's face as she talked.
“His first name was Mark, did you know that?, and I asked him what his middle name was, but that was some kind of breach of privacy with him, one step too far, although of course, we had already gone way too far and we both knew it. I wasn't stupid, Mary, and nobody thought I was but you, poor dear.” The ghost traced Mary's hairline, rubbed her earlobe between her fingers. She scratched the soft swag of skin just below Mary's chin the way one would a cat or small dog whose humor one was trying to cultivate.
“Anyway, he stripped me out of my clothes like that.” The ghost snapped her fingers and held them up in the air before her face as if she were seeing the sound. “But he was still in his suit, you know that grey one he wore even though everyone else was so casual?, and when he knelt down he got big wet stains on his knees and I remember thinking that would be a hard thing to explain if anyone came across him later, although it wouldn't be, of course. He could just say he dropped his keys and had to pat around to find them. He could have said anything at all and no one would have questioned.”
Mary tried to picture the garden: its doddering phlox, its heady scents. She tried to picture the river and feel again the precise place on her shin where it had reached its highest tide, rilled and receded. She felt as if something were being taken from her. Each word that came out of the ghost's mouth took another word away from Mary which she would never again be able to use. The bird hopped onto the windowsill and cocked its head as if asking a question, but that was all anthropomorphic nonsense. That was all a fantasy of the self projected onto the wholly unconcerned itdom of the bird. Mary was disgusted with herself. She detected a faint smell, like the faintest whiff of decay when one is still far down the beach and has not come upon the source bloating in the tide, and knew it was emanating from somewhere within her own person. The garden was lost to her. She could not imagine it. She could not reinhabit its space.
“But that's not what I'm telling you about, Mary,” said the ghost. She smacked her palm against Mary's stomach, and then against the tops of each of her thighs. The ghost was very close to her ear, talking directly into Mary's ear so she both heard and felt her words. “That's not what I'm talking about at all.” The ghost stuck her tongue into Mary's ear; she took Mary's earlobe gently between her teeth.
“Listen,” said the ghost, “when Dumma was born she didn't breathe at all for the first three minutes. She slid out of me like a pip from an orange. She was so self-contained and quiet and the most beautiful color. I really can't tell you how beautiful a color Dumma was, just this pale, uncomplicated blue. Anyway, the nurses whisked her right up, you can imagine, and carried her away to the corner where they bent over her and said tight, grim things and everyone started to move in this very constricted sort of way, like their joints had frozen up?, which I understood was the motion of emergency, but I wasn't worried. I wasn't even upset. I remember thinking, well, at least this one will be easy. Because her sister was such a spitfire, and because I had already been tired so often in my life. Do you know that way you get tired that you can't ever recover from? Well, I was that way when I was only ten. I just wasn't born with any resiliency. I was born already partially used up.” The ghost shifted around on the bed so she was lying on top of Mary. She lined her arms up with Mary's arms and her legs with Mary's legs. She spoke directly into Mary's mouth. The bird suddenly, savagely, attacked the glass with its beak.
“Finally, I spoke up,” the ghost said into Mary's mouth. “Can you imagine the scene? Me in bed, flattened really, all the vessels i
n my eyes broken open, still leaking, and all those official sorts of people clustered at the other end of the room, bent over that little wax doll like she was the first brand new thing they had ever seen? Well, it was disgusting, let me tell you that. I said, pretty loudly if I recall, I said, ‘Leave her alone!’ I said, ‘Leave her be!” The ghost's breath was overly sweet, like the breath of a flower bloomed past its peak, unpollenated. Somehow Mary couldn't see the ghost's face, though it was so close. Somehow Mary couldn't move.
“They ignored me of course, they always do, but that was the first time I ever stood up for my daughter and it was at no small personal cost. I meant Dumma could choose what she wanted. I meant Dumma could just as easily never have taken a breath at all and it wouldn't have invalidated her as an object of worth.” The bird flung itself against the glass, making an unrelenting noise. It battered the glass with its wings, struck at it with its claws. The expression in the bird's eyes had not changed at all. There was no expression in the bird's eyes, Mary thought, that was what had not changed. Nothing.
“Then, of course, Dumma took a big breath, all on her own, and started to wail. I felt so betrayed, Mary. I felt, for the first time, like I really understood just how unconcerned with a person's feelings the world could be.” The ghost was quiet, but she kept breathing. Her breath flowed over Mary, into Mary. Together they listened as the bird broke its beak on the glass—the thin noises it made, a cry hurking out of its broken face unlike song or anything else.
“When we left the garden I could already smell smoke,” said the ghost. “I remember saying as I zipped up my jeans, ‘Is someone burning leaves?’ and I remember him saying, quite distinctly, ‘I'm sure it's nothing,’ and walking away.” The ghost pressed her lips against Mary's lips and when she spoke Mary's lips moved with the words. Deep in her stomach something shifted, a furtive tingling and then, unmistakable, a buzz.
Mother Box and Other Tales Page 17