Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  “Ten cows,” said Thingy. “I have ten on this side.”

  “Pretty good,” said Mr. Clawson, “but look up ahead.” He sped the car up, smoothly muscling around a sedan filled to the brim with a pudding-faced family who all turned almost as one to gawk at us. “It’s a grain silo, Ingrid. All your cows have been lost in a terrible flood.”

  We had never played this game before. I think Mr. Clawson was making up the rules as he went along. Every time one or the other of us got up above a ten or fifteen cows he would announce another common highway feature which, depending on what side of the road it was on, would cause either Thingy or my cows to be massacred by some sort of natural disaster. So far our cattle had been blown away by a tornado, burnt alive in a forest fire, dropped into a gaping chasm opened up by an earthquake and now, it appeared, they were drowning in a flash flood. I imagined Thingy’s cows paddling across a wide, quick-moving river, stretching their necks above the brown waters, mooing to each other as they rolled their eyes.

  We stopped at a truck stop a couple of hours into the drive for what Mrs. Clawson instructed Thingy to refer to as a ‘potty-break,’ after she had announced to her father that she needed to piss like a racehorse.

  “I need to potty-break like a racehorse, then,” said Thingy, making a face at me. The trunk of the car was crammed full of collapsible lawn chairs and folded beach umbrellas, deflated rafts in a delirium of colors (jewel-pink, mint-green, azure, maize), rainbow-striped beach towels, oversized hats, pails and shovels, nets and masks. Already the car smelled like coconut lotion and, increasingly, salt. I had never seen the ocean. For weeks, ever since I found out I was coming along, I had been walking around feeling as if I were carrying my heart in my mouth. As if, should I open my mouth too suddenly, my heart would fall out onto the table and beat there, bouncing up and down on the gingham-checked plastic tablecloth making a mess.

  To Thingy and my delight, the bathroom stalls were heavily graffitied and there was a scale that would also tell your fortune for only a quarter.

  “You go first,” Thingy said, and I stood on the scale while she put my quarter in the slot.

  My fortune said: Your Happiness is Next to You. It also told me my lucky numbers were two and seventeen and gave me the Mandarin characters for pony and water park.

  “Your happiness is in a bathroom!” said Thingy, hooting with laughter as she elbowed me off the scale and climbed on.

  Her fortune read: You Will Set Off on a Journey, and she was disappointed.

  “I already know that,” she said. “I’m already on one. What a gyp.”

  “At least your words are cool,” I said. Thingy could now read the Mandarin characters for wizard and Mexico, but she was unimpressed. I offered to trade and she said not to bother.

  “It doesn’t mean anything,” she said, but she was wrong.

  A couple of hours later we arrived.

  The Clawson’s beach house was a part of a private community of near identical houses, tall and flat-faced with tiered porches and ceiling fans whose blades were more often than not shaped like the leaves of giant palms. The houses were painted shades of peach and apricot, turquoise and sea-foam green. They had sandy yards plugged with saw-grass and crossed by creeping tendrils of railroad vine, their moony blooms nodding in the breeze. The Clawson’s house was orange as sherbet and sat right at the end of the cul-de-sac, nearest to the beach.

  “Okay,” said Mr. Clawson, getting out of the car and stretching, his hands on the small of his back. “Bring out your dead.”

  “Don’t be fatuous,” said Mrs. Clawson, fanning herself with her hat. “It’s too hot.”

  After the house had been opened and the car unpacked; after Mr. Clawson had gone from window to window pulling up shades and throwing open sashes and Mrs. Clawson checked every kitchen cupboard and pantry shelf for tracks and trails, nits and eggs; after Thingy and I had dragged our suitcases up the stairs (white carpet with a deep pile, white banisters and white lathes, a white hall and at the top a mirror so it seemed we had beaten ourselves to the bedroom) and stowed our clothes, bathing suits, towels and toiletries in their proper receptacles; after Mrs. Clawson had made a list for the grocery store and Mr. Clawson had dragged the gas grill out of storage; after Thingy had shown me the special spots in the house (where she slid into the kitchen as a toddler and gashed her forehead on the corner of the counter top, where she had sliced her heel on the crushed oyster shell that lined the front walk and, not realizing she claimed, stamped one red foot behind her all through the house) and taken me into the backyard to shout over the fence at the neighbor’s dog; after Mrs. Clawson had pulled the car back out of the drive, her sunglasses hiding half her face like the mantic eyes of a wasp and Mr. Clawson had dragged the hose out from under the porch and begun to spray rainbow arcs of water into the butterfly bushes, Thingy and I went down to the beach.

  How can I say this?

  We cut through the front yard to the road, shoeless, stepping carefully around flat pads of cactus. The asphalt was fresh, bubbling in the heat. Thingy bent down and popped a line of tar-bubbles. One, two, three. There was wind coming in from the ocean, lifting the tasseled grasses that grew along the top of the dune and fanning them out toward us. Sand was sifting onto the road from the dune, from the sandy slopes of the yards. The line between the road and the yard and the dune was shifting, fluid. Everything wavered in the sun.

  “Come on,” said Thingy, “It’s hot.” She ran ahead of me, mincing on the hot road.

  There was a boardwalk: weathered boards, rusty nails which pierced the dune and rose with it so as I walked both the earth and I seemed to rise together, keeping pace with each other. There were flowers on the dunes: yellow daisies, a tough succulent whose red and orange blooms burst like bristles out of its plump green pads. A little mouse ran from the shadow of a dune to shelter under the boardwalk. It was an unusual color. Tawny, almost gold.

  I was stalling.

  “Come on!” said Thingy, out of sight, her voice catching on the wind and tearing to shreds.

  The wind beat my face. Salt. Stinging. I realized my eyes were shut and so I opened them. I saw.

  The sea.

  It was flat. It was heaving. It swept gray and green and blue out of my sight. The light jumped off its surface as if flung back, repulsed. It came toward me. Was coming toward me. It flung itself toward me, hissing on the sand. Thingy was already down in the surf, running into the waves without even bothering to strip to the bathing suit she wore under her clothes.

  “Wait,” I shouted. I was terrified. She was leaving me, diving into a wave that closed like a hand over her silver head. I shouted her name. A sea gull wheeling in the air over the beach and was joined by another, a third. They called like cats. I couldn’t see where the water ended and the sky began. I couldn’t see the end of anything. There was a glare, heat. The gulls came to rest on the sand and sprung up again, back beating their wings to hover near my head. I could see the sheen in their eyes as they cocked their heads to examine me.

  “Thingy,” I yelled. I couldn’t see her.

  Then she popped up from the trough of a wave and raised one tiny arm to beckon me. She was drifting further out, kicking to the top of a wave and bobbing behind it. Rising again to cup her hands on either side of her mouth and shout.

  “Come in,” Thingy said: a speck, my heart’s shadow. “Come on, Alice. The water feels fine.”

  Later in the month, Thingy’s parents threw a party. All the neighbors were invited, plus people Thingy’s parents knew who summered on other near-by islands, plus a contingent from Charleston, plus some of Mr. Clawson’s business partners who were in the country from Germany and needed to be shown a good time. This was how Mr. Clawson put it. It was very important that a good time be had by all, he told us. That meant Thingy and I too, he said. He tried to be funny about it, but we understood that this was a kind of an order.

  On the morning of the party, a cleaning crew swept into the h
ouse and vacuumed the sand out of every corner, polished every surface and generally scrubbed away any evidence that four people had eaten and slept there for the past two weeks. By the time they swept out again at noon, the house was a gleaming artifact, almost hostile in its intensity. Thingy and I had been banished.

  “Go to the beach, or go out back to the pool,” Mrs. Clawson had said to Thingy. “It doesn’t matter to me where you go, darling. I just need you out of the way.”

  When we returned for lunch we were just in time to see the maids leave and the catering crew pull up in their refrigerated van. Inside, the house was cool and quiet. Ocean light lay in white slats across the carpet and every object looked as if it had been considered in relationship to every other object, arranged to form sympathetic angles and soothing blocks of negative space. The lacquered clock over the mantle—abstract, made of interposed coral-colored triangles, lacking numbers—had been polished to a high shine and ticked as smoothly as a latch falling into place. The turquoise throw pillows that Thingy and I often stacked on the floor to support our heads as we read or looked at magazines, were placed at precise intervals along Mrs. Clawson’s sweeping white suede sofa, each pillow plumped and then dented as if a casual lounger had just risen to his feet.

  Thingy’s mother was sitting in a white wicker basket-chair, her legs crossed neatly at the knee. She gazed out over the room with a blank, unwritten expression as she twirled a swallow of red wine around the bottom of a glass. Mrs. Clawson was wearing her usual beach gear: linen clam diggers that slide up over her knees as she sat, a melon-orange tank top. Her hair rose in a high wave from her forehead and tumbled over her shoulders, pinned here and there for shape by tiny gold bobby pins. She had not yet put on lipstick and her lips looked exposed, as if they were glimpsed for just a second between shifting screens of fabric. Happenstance, a prurient luck. Overall, she looked exhausted.

  “The caterer’s are here,” said Thingy. Mrs. Clawson nodded, but didn’t look up at us.

  “So are the florists,” said Thingy, sticking her head back out the door and waving it open and shut as she watched them unpack the van.

  Mrs. Clawson sighed and stood up. “Shut the door, Ingrid,” she said to Thingy, “You’re letting in the heat.” She wandered into the kitchen, leaving her glass to sweat a ring onto the end table. We heard the faucet turn on.

  “Also we’re hungry,” Thingy yelled after her mother as the first of the caterers pushed past her into the house. They were closely followed by the florists and soon the room was full of busy, shifting bodies, everyone talking at once and all proffering before them foil-covered chafing dishes or buckets of hot-house flowers like offerings they meant to lay on an alter at the feet of a statue of some minor god, bare-breasted, already a little drunk.

  At seven-thirty the guests began to arrive, and by eight o’clock the house was full. Thingy and I watched from the top of the stairs. I hadn’t brought anything suitable for a party, so Thingy leant me something from her closet: a rose-pink dress with a belted waist and short, full skirt overlaid with silver netting. On Thingy it came to mid thigh and showed off the muscular stretch of her legs. On me it was much too big, hanging almost to my knees, the bodice loose and folding in awkward ways as I fidgeted on the stairs. Our feet weren’t the same size, so I had to settle for my old, white sandals with the torn strap my father had mended using kitchen twine and a leather awl.

  Thingy looked much older than she was. Her dress was strapless with a deep sapphire bodice and a black velvet skirt which bloomed from her hips like a black tulip. The dress made her seem serene, even chilly, nodding indulgently to the catering staff as she lifted another handful of miniature crab puffs from a silver tray. As for me, I remember thinking I looked okay. Certainly I didn’t look as if I belonged there, but I didn’t look terrible either. I stood in front of the mirror in Thingy’s parent’s bathroom for a long time after Mrs. Clawson had finished our makeup and gone to supervise the last minute bar setup. The mirror was large and oval with an ornate frame featuring an old-fashioned cornucopia motif replete with tumbling grapes and thieving sparrows perched as if to take flight. Someone had spray painted it silver and in places the paint was beginning to chip away. The effect was as if the frame had contracted a skin disorder or as if it were an enchanted garden, frozen in time, slowly remerging beneath a film of melting snow.

  In the center of the garden was my face. Thingy’s mother had chosen a very pale green shadow, shimmering like the wings of a moth, and outlined my eyes with slightly darker green liner. She had swiped my eyelashes with a single coating of brown mascara and left my cheeks alone. “Let’s not overdo it,” she said.

  It was still me in the mirror: my sallow cheeks and slightly off kilter eyes, but there was something else beside. It was as if I was wearing a thin mask that moved as my muscles moved, came down over my eyelids when I blinked. The mask did not obscure my features, so much as it redefined them. Underneath was my nose, but the mask’s nose was for something other than smelling. Underneath were my lips, but the mask’s lips felt no compulsion to open or smile. I put my fingers to my cheeks and pinched them, watching as the blood rushed momentarily to the surface. I understood, maybe for the first time, that this was how people went about in the world, how it was possible.

  In the cold garden, when the prince bent over the sleeping princess and commanded her, “arise!” what happened next was not a gradual return to consciousness, not a surfacing. Rather, the princess sat up and shielded her face from him, groped all around her bier until she found her mask and slid it on.

  By eleven o’clock the party was in full swing. We had been sneaking drinks for an hour and we were both loose on our feet.

  “Let’s go,” Thingy said. “This is boring.”

  The party wasn’t boring and I didn’t believe she was bored. The house was filled with noise. The rumble of conversation, a high hysterical laugh from a woman in a tuxedo jacket who was watching a man in a white linen suit as he rolled his eye wildly and ate the carnation he had been carrying in his buttonhole. A joke, I realized, when he laughed too. He bent and lifted the hem of her skirt as if he were going to eat that next and she shrieked, delighted, her dark mouth like a tear in her face.

  Elsewhere, a man and a woman were sitting on the couch pressing their foreheads together and an elderly woman with a face like a frozen waterfall was smoking a long cigarette and tipping the ash into her husband’s drink. Thingy’s mother was standing in the center of the room, inclining her head to listen to a short, bald man whose his head was as brown and peaked as an egg. Thingy’s father was sitting at the piano picking out a jangling little tune with a woman who was jabbing at a single low note and staring very intently at the side of his head.

  On the far side of the room from us, a woman was weeping, her face buried in her hands, and the man who was sitting at her feet patted her knee with absentminded regularity. Next to them, another woman was not paying enough attention to her dress. When she bent to set her glass on the end table, or stooped to pick it up, one breast, tanned as a glove, would slip out and hang framed in the deep V of her halter, swinging slightly as she shifted her hips in time to the music. Her nipple was fleshy and brown, like a fig.

  The bar tender winked at me when I accidentally caught his eye and pushed a full glass of wine someone had abandoned there to the edge of the counter as he turned away. Thingy drank half and gave the rest to me. She crossed her arms over her bodice as she scanned the room, biting her lip. The room was full and the people in it so intent on each other and themselves that there was no room for her. No Thingy shaped space in which she could stand and be seen. My dear Thing had many qualities, but none of them were modesty, none patience.

  “Come on,” she said again. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  We slipped out a side door that opened almost directly onto the dune. It was a still night, the moon full and the face in it clearly that of a woman, her mouth open in decorous shock. I was still carryi
ng the wine glass, taking tiny sips of the warm, musty wine and trying not to gag. We left our shoes behind us in the sand and dragged our feet so our tracks looked as if they had been made by someone crawling on all fours along the hissing edge of the surf.

  “Where are we going?” I asked Thingy. I was suddenly tired and feeling more and more drained the further we went from the lights of her house.

  “Look,” Thingy said. “There’s someone standing under the pier.”

  Once there were two girls and one of them was me. That is the part I keep forgetting.

  Sometimes, in stories, a girl will look into a mirror and realize the face she has been seeing all along is not herself but a girl from the other world who looks very much like her. When she realizes this she generally has to make one of two choices. She can trap the other girl by tricking her into exposing herself for what she really is. She can enter the mirror after her and hunt her down. In stories, girls are often predators, if carefully disguised ones.

  To put it another way: an eastern newt, such as the one we turned up today in the shallows, Ingrid, spends most of its life as an unremarkable olive creature in the bottom of a murky pond. But there is a time of two or three years when this newt is actually a red eft. During this period, the newt-to-be races across the forest floor, rappelling between rocks and burrowing under the leaf mulch, in a brilliant flame-red skin that ripple over its ribs as it breathes. A red eft is poisonous and attention getting. It is looking for a safe home, but this is not how it appears to an outside observer such as a crow or a black tie-snake. Rather, the eft seems to be bragging.

  Look at me, how fast and trim, is what the crow hears. Look at me, my dainty foot, is how it sounds to the snake.

  This is not to say that we weren’t also perfectly ordinary girls. Children of our time, not so unlike children of any other time, who were encouraged to believe our world would soon end. As children grow, they begin the life-long process of mythologizing their younger selves. “I put my pudgy little hand in my daddy’s big brown one,” a young woman will say. “I gave my mommy a kiss and ran into the woods as fast as my little legs would take me.”