How to Be Human

by Paula Cocozza

  To Mary’s surprise, the pregnant woman, Rachel, was pointing with her free hand to Mary’s own fence.

  “Ah, I know about that one,” Eric said with relief. He took Flora from Rachel. “That’s Michelle’s. Or it was Michelle’s. When she went back to plant her rose, something had dug where she was digging. She won’t touch it now. Says it’s the foxes’ hole!” Eric rolled his eyes. “I’ve filled it in twice, but it keeps getting unfilled. I’m going to have to stuff some bricks down there.”

  Mary smiled at Rachel. “Will you show me?”

  * * *

  “HERE. IT’S PRETTY weird. It’s, like, a hole within a hole,” Rachel said. “Is that even possible? I think I’ve just invented a new philosophical problem.” The main excavation was about a foot deep, but out of its side a second opening had been burrowed, which sloped toward Mary’s fence.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Just having a look,” Mary replied. The grass was warm under her knees, and her body threw the hole into shade.

  “Don’t put your hand in!” Rachel cried, but her voice already sounded distant to Mary, who was reaching down to where the air in the hole cooled. She patted the base, sides, up to the point where he had begun to scrape out his tunnel. Then she leant in, caterpillaring her fingers slowly along the track. It was quite narrow: he was still digging it out. Eric and Michelle’s garden must be a sort of anteroom to her own. “Probably best leave it, yeah?” she heard Rachel say, but she shuffled her knees forward on the lawn as her elbow entered the coolness. She was feeling her way into his fortress, crossing the underground boundary with her own garden. This was the last thing she had expected to find. She had come to Eric and Michelle’s primed to be a good guest at a rather boring barbecue, but now she realized there was a second, hidden occasion, tucked inside the advertised one. They were all her fox’s guests. And she was the only one who knew it. She was practically a cohost!

  “Are you OK? How far does it go?” Rachel called. She looked worlds away, her face a small dark circle, sunshine frizzing the blond tips of her afro.

  “All OK,” Mary said. She shifted her arm cautiously forward, as if her hand might be inching toward sharp teeth. Beautiful, earthy air prickled her nostrils. Then her knuckles knocked on a mud blockade. The tunnel stopped short. It was only a pathway between these two gardens, or it would be when it was finished, but just by kneeling here, her forearm wrapped in earth, she felt she was finding him. It was a hole made out of another hole, nothing dug out of nothing, but inside this cramped, damp, crumbly sleeve she felt her two worlds converge. A powerful sensation of ownership or belonging—it was hard to separate the two—puffed out her ribs. He was here at her neighbors’ party. He was here, in Mary’s heart, in the mud beneath her fingernails, and with the tight earth gripping her hand almost to congratulate her on the discovery, she thrilled with a sense of comfort and opportunity. The sensation was tremendously fortifying. Energy bolted up her arm. Her right ear dipped into the hole, as if her head were searching for a shoulder to lean on. All she could think was dear fox, fox, fox. Her mind dug up a memory.

  Rome, four and a half years ago. Her thirtieth. Mark’s idea. Mark? What was her head doing, finding him in the hole? He’d booked the flights, the hotel, packed her case, chosen all her clothes. Waited till the airport to tell her the plan. She pulled her ear from the opening, sat back on her heels, and brushed at the mud on her arm, trying to stop the memory. “Just one last thing I want you to see,” he’d said on the Sunday afternoon. She shook her head, trying to shake Mark out of it, but she was following him down cobbled lanes and across a main road to a church, Santa Maria in Something, his hand pulling her forward to a large stone face, a sort of drain cover with a grimace. One of its giant eyes had cracked into a tear-shaped fissure. “The Mouth of Truth,” he had said. He’d stayed on his feet. That was good. She hated clichés. Especially with the queue watching. When he asked her, he took her fingers in his and slipped them into the stone mouth. “You’d better answer truthfully,” he said. “Or it bites your hand off.” Looking back, this struck her as threatening, but at the time it had felt exciting. They had been together two years. They were happy. There was no lie to tell. With her palm on the cold stone, she had said yes. She could still see his fingers laced over hers in a protective claw.

  “No!” she exclaimed, snatching her hand into her lap.

  “What is it?” Rachel asked in panic. “Did something bite you?”

  Mary stood slowly and pushed a stray hair behind her ear with her wrist. “I just got spooked, that’s all.” She straightened her dress. Was that why Mark was here? Because he had worked out that he was competing for her headspace with another living being? He had a knack of understanding the things she kept unsaid. And here he was, breaking into her thoughts again.

  “Of course you’re spooked!” Rachel said, brushing at the mud on Mary’s shoulder. “It could have been in there.” Smoky fumes wafted upwind from the barbecue; the breeze rattled the leaves of the lime overhead. On the patio someone shrieked as a young guy broke out of the circle, walking on his hands, while his friend clapped together two beer bottles. “Er, so, Mary, isn’t it?” Rachel said to her. “Erm, Mary, how d’you know Michelle, then?”

  “I live next door,” Mary said, gesturing at the fence, where the fox’s digging had broken the bottom of the panel. “That’s my garden.”

  “Ah, right! Now I get it!” Rachel looked relieved. “Course you’re worried about the foxes! You should talk to Michelle. Get someone round to deal with them.”

  “I was looking for her,” Mary said, “but she seems to have vanished.” She raised her voice to make herself heard above the noise of a large group that had drifted across the lawn behind her. Something cotton brushed Mary’s back between the straps of her sundress. “So how do you know them—Eric and Michelle?” she asked Rachel. She felt the garden grow smaller, its sides creep inward. Particles of the conversation behind her flew up. Distinct words or phrases that evaporated as soon as she heard them. She strained for Mark’s voice.

  “My boyfriend, Farooq—have you met him? Skinny, beard, checked shirt?” Rachel looked around. “Over there with Eric, on the guided tour of the barbecue. Those two used to be flatmates. Michelle and I met through the boys.” The smoky smell was thickening, lugging its heavy, beefy juices up the garden. Raucous laughter. The person behind Mary was standing so close to her, she could feel the heat of his body on her spine, as solidly warm as if she were leaning against a radiator. She let one foot venture back to investigate.

  “Michelle started going out with Eric about the same time I started seeing Farooq,” Rachel said, resting her glass of water on the little shelf of her stomach. “After a month we’d both moved in. Double dates, the works.”

  Mary was considering this picture of the youthful Michelle when someone behind her sniggered quietly, and his quietness, so distinct from the group’s boisterous laughter earlier, gave her the answer. A few hairs softly grazed her right calf, a grope of millimetric precision. She tensed her right calf to double-check on his whereabouts, and the tips of Mark’s hairs fondled her once more. She was meant to find this hair’s-breadth mauling enticing, was she? There was something gross about the way he wanted the gesture to pass for accidental when it so obviously wasn’t. Their bodies joined by one hairy thread. He must have tracked her to this side of the lawn, on his own prowling loop of the garden. Well, he was going to find that this calf was a closed door.

  There was only a small space in which to maneuver, but Mary edged toward Rachel and turned. Now she had Mark exactly where she wanted him. His back faced her, so she could see him and he could not see her. She was free to look as much as she liked, and the one-sidedness of their proximity—hers unseen but understood, for he knew she was there—seemed to confer its own kind of power. She was going to enjoy this.

  Inside the espadrilles—yet another new pair of shoes—his ankles were bare. Mary’s eyes fastened on their
knobbly handles and climbed those wayward, naked calves. She had seen him standing like this at countless parties over the years, she thought, as she scooped over his buttocks. They had known each other inside and out with an intimacy embedded in the bones of daily life. She was thinking that she had no idea how much of him she still knew when her gaze bumped over his beefy shoulders and stalled sharply at his nape.

  Mark had clipped his hair so short that the skin beneath gleamed through, and here Mary saw four red blotches orbiting a larger stain. He had never told her he had a birthmark! Had he cut his hair in order to reveal it? Or perhaps he didn’t know he had one, kept under wraps all his life at the back of his head, and now unwittingly disclosed as a by-product of his post-breakup makeover. She took it as another proof of new Mark, Mark reborn, as if in shedding her he had uncovered previously unknown parts of himself. The stains looked uncannily like a handprint.

  She turned to Rachel and coughed. “Slightly awkwardly, that’s my ex.”

  Rachel’s eyes widened, but before she could reply, Mary was reaching forward and prodding Mark firmly on the shoulder.

  He swung around with the edges of a smile that instantly contracted because Tom began to call out. “Mary! You’re overdue a top-up.” He was swinging a bottle of champagne as he strode toward them. “And how about you, Rach?” Mark nodded to Mary, then turned back to his circle. “Come on, Rach! Special occasion,” Tom said. “It clears your system faster than wine, you know. Nope? OK, more for you then, Mary.” He held the bottle vertically to shake the last drops into her flute.

  “You two coming for food?” Rachel asked.

  Mary scanned the patio and the lawn, but in the time it had taken Tom to fill her glass, Mark had vanished. “Er … I think I’ll just check out the gazebo,” she said.

  A pigeon flew up from her lime, clattering a leafy branch like maracas.

  “Do it,” he cooed.

  * * *

  INSIDE, THE TENT was so cool and dark, Mary felt she had entered some kind of shady human burrow. Rows of upside-down glasses glimmered on a white cotton tablecloth. Unopened bottles chilled in a box, although the ice had long ago melted, and water rose around them. A soggy label floated free. There was no Mark. The gazebo was deserted. She turned to go.

  “Help yourself.”

  Mary jumped. In the gloom she hadn’t seen Michelle, sitting very still, barely ten feet away.

  “Michelle! Are you OK?”

  Michelle said nothing.

  As Mary’s eyes adjusted to the dimness, she could see that her neighbor’s gleamed with tears, and her lashes had stamped kohl smudges onto her under-eye bags. “What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  “You’re the first person to come into the gazebo,” Michelle said.

  “Am I? That’s not why you’re crying though?” Mary crouched beside Michelle and ventured a rub of her arm. Michelle smelt of wine and looked as if she might bite. “The gazebo’s beautiful. I love the fairy lights,” Mary said, searching for the right thing to say because the right thing would get her out of here faster. “And all this will be so handy for future parties. Come on out!” She looked at the doorway, half expecting to see Mark part the drapes and exercise his strong instinct for rescues.

  “There are no parties in the future.”

  Mary cursed herself for crouching, which made the exit seem further away.

  “Anyway, I can’t come out or everyone will see I’ve been crying,” Michelle said. “Not that I want to come out.”

  “Let’s dip this napkin in the bucket,” Mary offered, pulling one from the tablecloth. “Give you a wipe, get you presentable.”

  “Can you put that back, please? Give it here. That’s not how they’re folded.” Michelle reshaped the napkin, then regarded it forlornly. “Eric hasn’t even noticed I’ve gone.”

  “Gone” seemed an exaggeration. Michelle was holed up in a tent at the end of her garden. It was the kind of running away that kids did. Comically, her blouse was printed all over with birds in flight, and Mary suppressed a smile at the idea that she had flown her nest. To a gazebo. The whole thing was ridiculous. “You’re wrong,” she said. “He’s been looking for you. Why don’t I fetch him? Discreetly. Or is there someone else I could get? Rachel maybe?’ Her knees clicked as she stood. “Anybody you like.”

  “I see Mark’s come,” Michelle said.

  “He has.”

  “With a new haircut.”

  “Yes. And that reminds me … Do you lock your gate to the woods?”

  “Woods!” Michelle snorted. “It’s a bloody wasteland, Mary.”

  Mary gave a heavy sigh. Barely a crack of light broke between the drapes. To all intents and purposes, she had disappeared into a sort of urban Bermuda Triangle, a strange parallel party comprising just her and Michelle, locked within soft walls. Someone stumbled against the gazebo then, rippling the canvas, and the whole thing briefly shook. A shout, then a laugh, and the voices receded.

  “That’ll be Dave, my idiot brother,” Michelle said. “You know, when I had George, I left a shadow self behind me.” Her eyes turned back to the floor. “I think of her every day, this other me I used to know. I see her standing at a window, looking out. Always at a window. Isn’t that trite?” Michelle glanced up, and Mary shrugged. She was attracted to windows herself.

  “All her life ahead of her, and God knows where she is now.” Michelle was actually staring at the opaque plastic window in the canvas. “I left myself somewhere a long way back. I don’t think I know who I am anymore. Even hearing myself say this, I think the saying isn’t mine.”

  The chatter outside had receded, and in the silence Michelle’s words seemed to fall on the floor before them, pieces of some shared breakage, unclear whose hand was on it last. Mary stared at the pattern of lime leaves swaying on the groundsheet. She was caught in a gazebo with a woman whom she knew by nothing more than a randomly generated proximity—the sort of terraced intimacy that makes you privy to someone flushing a toilet but reveals nothing of how they feel. And here she was, telling her things she should probably be telling her husband or her doctor. The truth was, she did know what Michelle meant. But she wasn’t going to tell Michelle that. She said nothing.

  “I love it in here,” Michelle said, suddenly brightening. “When Eric takes this gazebo down, I’m going to get a shepherd’s hut.”

  “I think it would be better to just come out,” Mary said. “Eat, clean yourself up.”

  “Mark looks good with the new hair. You should get back together. Then you could leave Eric alone.”

  “What? Oh my God, you’ve got to be joking!” Eric! She hadn’t sunk that low. “Eric!” she exclaimed, her voice taking over in fury. “No way. No way. No offense but it would actually be a compliment to you if I was interested in Eric. Which I’m not. For many reasons.” Eric was a nice enough guy. Well-meaning. Harmless. She was annoyed to realize she was smiling. Picturing Eric’s moon face, receding hair, the general air of sweatiness. What she felt for Eric tended to be governed by what she felt for Michelle, meaning that she veered between scorn and pity. “I mean Eric’s a nice guy…” She did like him. But he was one of those people who had to be liked with a sort of physical disregard. Otherwise he became too gross. “Ugh!” she cried, her anger rising again as she belatedly registered Michelle’s assumption that she was single. “And for your information, I’m seeing someone.” She had already reached the drapes when Michelle called after her.

  “Don’t tell Eric I’m here. I want to see how long he takes to notice.”

  Mary pulled back a curtain and gave the supporting pole a sharp kick.

  * * *

  OUTSIDE, THE PARTY had moved toward the house, as if someone had tipped up the garden, and all the guests had slid to the patio. Sun glinted off the windows and blurred the humans clustered at the picnic table with a hazy rim. Soon her fox would be on the other side of this dark fence. Time was running out. She had to catch Mark, find out what he was after, then go hom
e. Saturday night—and for once she wouldn’t be alone.

  Mary stalked across the lawn, following the scent of burgers. She dodged a bloke in a fedora who was running, but his friend, the one who had been walking on his hands earlier, thumped right into her, spilling the rest of her drink. “Watch it!” she barked, but they were too busy rolling on the grass to care. Rachel and Farooq bowed their heads over Flora as Mary passed. Ordinarily, such a display of disinterest would have felt belittling, but as she drew near to the patio, the air bled with the smell of meat, and she imagined Sunset—not Sunset, why was it so hard to find the right name?—smelling it too, and the thought bolstered her. It crossed her mind to fold a burger into a napkin when she left. That would be OK if she fed him. Which she didn’t. “Mary! Here we go, this one’s got your name on it!” Eric called. “Pure grass-fed beef.” A drop of sweat rolled off the end of his nose and sizzled on the grill. “Where are you going to take it?”

  “Thanks. Have you seen Mark?”

  Eric looked around, frowning in the direction of the picnic bench. “He was there five minutes ago, sitting with Neville … Look, take this, will you? You’re my last customer. Unless Michelle shows up. I think she might have left me.”

  Mary made for the picnic table, but halfway there she turned and called out to Eric, “Try the gazebo.”

  * * *

  IN SILENCE, NEVILLE filled Mary’s flute. Tom, on the opposite bench, appeared to have abandoned his glass-watch. He was leaning into a blond woman, his arm sloping under the table. “Another fox hole!” someone shouted from the end of the garden. Another gateway to his brilliant, subterranean citadel, she thought. It tickled her that he was so big on home improvement, constantly adding new rooms to his floor plan. Mary looked over to see what Eric made of this information, but the barbecue had been abandoned. “Have you seen Mark?” she asked.

  Neville was running his finger flat along her arm; the pain was like someone pressing on a bruise. “This looks nasty,” he said, ignoring her question.