The Morels

by Christopher Hacker

  Her brother Ryan was appalled. You’re so young, what are you doing?

  I’m happy, she said.

  But what happened to your brain? You’re a poster child for the pitfalls of marriage! In one fell swoop you’ve managed to get yourself pregnant and enslaved. What happened to apprenticing in Provence? What happened to owning a restaurant?

  I can still do those things, she said.

  How? You’re grooming yourself to be somebody’s maid.

  What about Martha, Penelope said.

  Martha’s different. She has the ankles for it, the double chin. From my baby sister, I expected something different.

  But Penelope was proud to be engaged in this fertile life of hers, this fertile marriage. Her brief status as biological celebrity. There were maternity clothes that attempted to deemphasize the belly—dark colors, loosely fit—she didn’t understand this. Why would anybody want to hide the only clear evidence of her biological worth—her fifteen minutes of fame? She walked down the grocery store aisle grandly, like royalty. She bared herself, weather permitting, in spandex scoop-necked tops, pulled up so that the crown of her belly was showing, belly button like the tip of a thumb.

  Neither, though, was she one of those hippie freaks who went on about how “beautiful” this all was, about “body wisdom,” who hennaed their tummies and braided their hair and performed their deliveries in rivers while chanting in time to a drumming circle. Nor was she like those yuppie freaks who invited their girlfriends to make papier-mâché pregnancy casts over sparkling grape juice and Manchego. She had no illusions about the ordeal of pregnancy. The morning sickness was brutal. She had to breathe delicately through her mouth because any smell, savory or otherwise, would have her groping for the bucket, and not just in the morning, it turned out—it was constant, unrelenting—it was a twenty-eight-week hangover, a boat cruise in bad weather. She lost her balance, her composure, her sense of dignity, and when it finally went away in the beginning of her third trimester, she was left with this thing inside her, floating, ravenous, feeding on her from the inside out—it had gills, apparently, and fed on her blood—it was an alien implant, sucking the life out of her, bleeding her dry, growing stranger every day, and it would eventually emerge triumphant, tearing its way through and leaving her a shell, a lifeless shell of spent meat. The sonogram reinforced this image—it looked like an ancient fossil, some extinct creature from a time when the world was more dangerous, or a satellite photograph of life on one of Jupiter’s moons. The technician handed it to them and, sure, she and Arthur stammered over it, cried over it, and, yes, in part that blubbering was because they were stunned by this ancient biological miracle that had visited its everyday magic upon them, but it was also the blubbering of the sole survivors in a horror movie being chased by the monster. She tacked it on the fridge. My God, what was this thing they were about to unleash?

  And then came her Will. Her reason for breathing. New parenthood was an ordeal but a different kind of ordeal. Will was on their side. They were in it together. It was them and Will against the world. They battled their health insurers for coverage for the emergency room visits they were forced to make—Will was prone to febrile seizures. She battled her family’s stubborn refusal to wash their hands before touching Will. Her mother: Do you think your grandparents washed their hands every time they handled you kids? They battled pedestrians and restaurant-goers who’d give them dirty looks every time Will so much as gurgled from his stroller—as though he were a boom box they’d brought in, as though they were the selfish ones! Arthur battled his employers—for paternity leave, for more vacation time, for more sick days, for more compassion for the new father whose wife had all she could do to keep from going crazy in the house alone with a baby who wouldn’t stop crying because he, well, who the hell knows why he won’t stop crying! They called the pediatrician, whom they liked, whom they trusted, but who frankly was of no goddamned use. New parenthood was a fire alarm that wouldn’t stop, that followed them around wherever they went, even into their sleep—Penelope would wake at three in the morning in a sweat and rush to Will’s crib to find him fine, he was fine, happily asleep. It was one unfixable thing after the next—it was everybody wanting a piece of them, but they barely had enough for each other—and when Will was crying, when he wouldn’t sleep or take the nipple or jump through the hoop in the next stage of development like the book said, it was a total nightmare they couldn’t wake from, but when he smiled or the moment he finally said, “Da,” when he slept through the night or finally got up onto his wobbly fat little legs and took those five, six, seven steps before toppling over, it was a dream they never wanted to end. How could this be? This miracle, how was it she could be so lucky?

  And when she felt this way, she guarded the feeling; she didn’t tell her family or Arthur even. It was hubris to feel this way. If anybody else knew, the word might spread, and then anybody could just come and take it away from her. So she told her mother that she was struggling, that it was hard, which was true enough, but she didn’t tell her mother how her heart ached for Will when he was in another room or in another person’s arms. Her mother thought she was doing Penelope a favor when she drove up from Virginia to babysit, insisting that she and Arthur go out, have fun, treat themselves to a hotel, but really all they did was sulk over their candlelit dinners, fidget through the movie distracted, until neither of them could take it anymore and canceled the room reservation and took Will back, relieved to be home, to be a family again.

  It was hard, though. Arthur was right. It was life altering, mind altering, they were no longer the same people they once were, not older exactly but different. To be a mother wasn’t merely to have a child; it was to have weathered a fundamental change of chemistry, of identity. She looked back on the years before their marriage, before Will, and thought, Who was that girl? Not meanly. Like a compassionate big sister. She finally understood that contradiction in her parents—was able to reconcile those disjointed impressions she had of them—the hip teenagers they claimed to have been with the prudish fuddy-duddies she knew them to be now. It made perfect sense. She’d read somewhere once that humans shed their old cells every seven years—or maybe it was that humans renewed their cells at a rate of every seven years—so that after seven years one was literally no longer the same person. If that was true, then why couldn’t both versions of her parents coexist? And she, Penelope—why couldn’t it be that she had been both of these people? That she had evolved?

  This was the idyll of motherhood, of the family life of Penelope and Arthur and Will.

  I’d emerge from these talks at the diner confused. My friendly crush on Arthur’s wife had flared into a chest-burning ache, and with it came an equally hot jealousy of Arthur, who clearly didn’t deserve this woman’s love. I felt guilty. It was like we were having an affair, meeting clandestinely twice a week. We’d sit in our “reserved” smoking booth, and Penelope would go through half a pack of my cigarettes while she talked.

  On Halloween, we all put on suits and homemade FBI badges and followed Will’s flashlight trail down the long corridors of the building looking for unexplained phenomenon, which mostly took the form of Reese’s Pieces. Penelope played Scully while Arthur sat by the open apartment door with a large tray of her homemade peanut brittle. There were apparently four other kids who lived in the building, somewhat younger and with whom Will had no interest in playing. These kids and their parents, all in Rite Aid costumes, tagged along with us warily, not sure what to make of our little mafia clique. We went around ringing bells to mixed success. A few on any hall were anticipating our arrival with a cobwebbed door or a red-lit foyer, generous with the treats. Others we’d catch genuinely by surprise, a look of panic on their faces—was there a fire?—until they processed who we were. But mostly, nobody was home.

  By the first week in November we had a final cut of Dead Hank’s Boy. I set Suriyaarachchi up with a fellow composition student I knew from conservatory. She was getti
ng her DMA now in Ann Arbor and agreed to score the film for very little cash and a bullet point on a résumé. We collaborated over the course of weeks via Express Mail. With a darkly atmospheric sound track, trimmed to within an inch of its life—a lean eighty-seven minutes from title card to final fade—the movie was more than watchable: it was downright entertaining! Suriyaarachchi went out and bought a giant dry-erase calendar on which to mark the deadlines of every film festival we were eligible to enter, and two, as it turned out, we weren’t—being neither Latina nor Canadian. We put together a “press packet,” with synopsis, production stills, headshots, and résumés. We went at this project with painstaking care, spending hours on these ancillary materials to accompany the tape in the mail, as though these things might make up for any unexcisable failures the film still bore.

  On one of my errands, juggling an armful of stuffed envelopes, I ran into Arthur. He invited me to Thanksgiving dinner. His in-laws were coming up for the long weekend. Penelope wanted me there, he said. “She thinks we can use an ally.”

  That afternoon Will came over. The central heat in the building hadn’t kicked in yet, and we were all sitting around in our coats. Dave said, “My man Will! Is it three o’clock already?”

  Will said, “Where are you guys going?”

  “We’re freezing.”

  Will noticed the hardcover on the couch. “That’s my father’s new book,” he said.

  “Have you read it?”

  “Not yet,” he said ponderously. “I plan to, one day, but I decided it would be better to wait awhile. And anyway, I already know what it’s about.”

  “And what’s it about?”

  “Art. And Mom and me.” Will sat down by my side. His puffy jacket wheezed a smell of banana and ham sandwich. He picked up the book and flipped through it.

  “Your hands are filthy,” I said.

  “I’m eleven years old. That’s what happens when you’re eleven. I don’t like the cover.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I think it’s kind of clever.”

  “Is that supposed to be us? Art’s hair isn’t blond, Mom’s hair isn’t blond, and my hair isn’t blond either. What were they thinking?”

  “So you’re not the least bit curious to read what your father’s written about you and your mom?”

  “I mean, I could. I told you, I make my own decisions. It’s called delayed gratification.”

  I arrived at the Morels’ empty-handed, something I noticed only as Penelope was welcoming me in. Seated on the sofa was an older woman with a square crop of coiled hair and an embroidered velvet jacket.

  Penelope said, “This is my mother.”

  “Mrs. Wright,” the woman said. She did not hold out her hand for me to shake. “Tell me, dear, is this a convertible sofa I’m sitting on?”

  “Yes, Mother, it’s a convertible.”

  “I was just wondering—it’s very comfortable.”

  “Why don’t we get you a drink,” Penelope said to me, rolling her eyes with her back turned so that only I could see. I followed her into the kitchen. “ ‘Is this a convertible’! Meaning, why couldn’t she and Dad have stayed here?” She poured out some champagne into a fluted glass and told me that this was the first time her parents were visiting since the move. They didn’t understand why they couldn’t stay with Penelope and Arthur. Her mother was hurt; her father was angry. “It’s not Queens, for crying out loud! But that means nothing to them.” They were used to a certain kind of hospitality—and budget—from living below the Mason-Dixon Line and were put out to be spending so much on a hotel when they could be staying with family for free. And indeed when I sat down with Mrs. Wright, she spent a good ten minutes comparing their hotel room with her daughter’s “three bedroom.”

  “It’s a one bedroom plus den, Mother.”

  “It’s a palace compared with where we’re staying.”

  The patio’s sliding door opened, and Arthur entered with a stocky older man. They trailed a distinct whiff of cigar smoke. Penelope’s father, who introduced himself to me as Frank, crew cut and upright, looked like he had kept up a twice-daily regimen of sit-ups for the past forty years excepting no holidays. Frank regarded me with a certain amount of suspicion. His questions about who I was seemed less to do with getting to know me and more to do with getting to the bottom of what my motives were, intruding on this family gathering.

  He said, “So what was this fella like back in his school days?”

  “He hasn’t changed much,” I said.

  “Once a troublemaker, always a troublemaker. Could have used you around a decade ago, warn us what we were getting ourselves into.” He didn’t crack a smile. If he was being humorous, the humor was of the driest sort.

  “It would have been too late,” Penelope said, going around the room with a platter of deviled eggs. “He already knocked me up.”

  “Okay, now,” Mrs. Wright said. “Not in front of the boy, surely!”

  Penelope gave me a wink.

  It smelled good in the apartment, juices caramelizing in a roasting pan. The air was steamy, festive. Cinnamon candles flickering on the windowsills, doorways trimmed with lights and pine branches. The dining room table was set and twinkled like a department store display. Holly shaped rings coiled around each red cloth napkin.

  The first part of the evening was pleasant. Penelope’s mother proved easy to talk to, despite the frosty first impression. She asked me what I did, and for the first time, I was honest. “I work at a movie theater,” I said.

  “My friend is being modest,” Arthur said. “He’s also a movie producer. He and his cohorts work here in this building, down the hall from us.”

  I told a couple of anecdotes. Though Frank remained cool to me, Mrs. Wright warmed up some—she was an eager listener, or at least an obliging one, responsive with a gasp or a laugh, with wanting to know what happened next. I was aware of myself in her eyes as Arthur’s long-lost childhood friend—it seemed Penelope had billed me as such—and right then I allowed myself to indulge the illusion.

  I went out onto the patio for a smoke, and to my surprise Mrs. Wright joined me. We stood side by side, looking out. I offered her a cigarette and, with a glance over her shoulder, she nodded. She kept her back to the door and her elbows tucked in and smoked with small movements so as not to betray what she was doing to those inside. Without looking at me, she began to talk about the predicament the Wrights found themselves in with their son-in-law.

  Although they both had their reservations about Arthur’s left turn into fiction and worried over his ability to be a financial asset to their daughter and grandson, they were nevertheless supportive of his need to express himself creatively and of his decision to make a go of the writing life. Especially Frank. Give the boy some room to breathe, he said. After all, the family had some money, and whatever drain it might be on their daughter’s finances to have a writer for a husband certainly would be made up for by the buzz it would bring.

  “We are strivers, you know,” Mrs. Wright said. “Our friends, too. As a group, we’re a competitive bunch.” And the contestants in this competition, she explained, were the children. Whenever she would get together with her friends, they traded their children’s achievements like they were playing a game of cards—a graduation, a new job, a child on the way—keeping the failures close to the vest. Arthur’s first bloom of success was a coup for her and Frank as well. There was something giddy about it she couldn’t explain and something generous that allowed their friends to participate without being jealous. So she perceived. Whereas Ethelyn Owen’s new grandson was a success only for the Owens, and subject to the petty jealousies that they were all helpless to, Arthur’s minor splash as a debut novelist was something they could all share in, as a community. And it was a success that promoted itself—neither she nor her husband ever had to mention it—their friends would come to them with news, sightings of the book in a magazine or in a bookstore. It was the prestige felt at the blackjack table duri
ng a winning streak—proud in a shy way of the table’s attention—even though you knew it was only luck that brought this about. They admired Arthur’s success in a way they wouldn’t have had it been their own child. Of their children’s success, they felt differently. They would have counted it as their own, as owed—a success they were at least partly responsible for. But Arthur’s success was a gift, and for it they were grateful.

  Then came the new book. That passage at the end.

  She didn’t want to think what kind of recesses such writing had come from in Arthur, or what life experience had led him to write it. She wished she could undo having read it; she didn’t want to associate Arthur with those words on those pages.

  What are we supposed to do about this? Frank had wanted to know. He was worried, as was she. They were together in this at first—in their concern, in their confusion at their son-in-law, in their attempt to reconcile this young man who married their daughter and of whom they were so fond, with the man he revealed himself to be in this book.

  They tried out explanations on each other: he was merely voicing a part of himself we all have, the id. Or Arthur could have been abused as a child, and this was his way of coming to terms with it. Frank reminded her that Arthur was an artist, and this is what artists did. They pushed buttons, pushed boundaries. And what about Lolita? she added. Wasn’t that book banned in this country? Maybe it hadn’t even been Arthur’s idea. There was an agent, after all, and a publisher. Maybe somebody along the way had told him his story wasn’t risky enough, “artistic” enough. They couldn’t sell some boring old book about a sad sack. And so they insisted he spice it up. Maybe Arthur didn’t even write the passage—it could have been added after the fact, to make it more marketable to a reading public who expected extremity in their literature. Or could it be that Arthur was referencing some other work of literature? Maybe it wasn’t at all about what it seemed to be about. It was an allusion—the real subject hidden, subtextual. The way Joyce was really writing about Greek heroes when it only seemed he was writing about drunk Irishmen. She had always been too literal minded when it came to literature.