Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  Instead of school, I had been going to the library and spending my days with Miss Fawcett. The building is an old one and used to be the train station when the train still came through town. The ceilings are high and vaulted, painted a deep blue and the vaulting a jungly green as if the passenger waiting for her train was taking shelter beneath a bower made of vine, tendrils uncoiling even as she pressed her lips against a tissue and snapped her compact shut.

  Now, however, everything is falling apart. The building was then and I assume remains damp, the books closest to the wall swollen between their covers. Miss Fawcett too seemed damp, like a handkerchief soaked and then wrung dry. After a few early attempts to find out what I was doing there, she largely left me alone to browse the stacks. Sometimes as I read a patter of green paint chips would sift down from the ceiling and drift across the pages of the book. Sometimes, Miss Fawcett would sit down across from me and offer me half of her sandwich, watch me as I ate it with an avidness that made me feel as if any second I would find my mouth filled with soil, a vine shooting out of my nose and curling up toward the decaying net of the ceiling.

  “You might as well have this, too,” Rosellen said, tapping her toast on the napkin in a shower of crumbs and sliding it onto my plate. “Or do you want another egg? I could boil one.”

  “Tuna salad,” Miss Fawcett said. She wrinkled her nose as if she weren’t the one to make the sandwich just that morning, pulling a leaf of lettuce from the head as she stood at the kitchen counter, trimming the crusts. A sheet of snow slid off the roof and rippled past the window. We were all buried alive, it was true. Nothing to sustain any of us but dry toast and tuna salad, a mildewed copy of Watership Down, an egg timer, a gust of wind that somehow made its way inside and then racketed around.

  “Hard or soft?” Rosellen said.

  Miss Fawcett tapped the book’s cover, her blunt nail striking the air just above the rabbit’s head. The book showed a beautiful place: a long slope of waving grains, a golden wood receding into umber shadows beneath a pale golden sky. The rabbit, too, was gold and wary; his ears skewed to listen, a ring of white around his liquid eye. “It’s hard to believe someone could find so much to say about a rabbit,” she said. Then she coughed. Then she sighed and looked out the window where the white world deadened itself, no shadows.

  One Monday Miss Fawcett was ill, blowing her nose into tissues she then left wadded up on the countertops or in the shelves like stiff, white chrysanthemums. The next day she was sicker still and Wednesday, when I came down the hill from the school and tried the library doors, I found them locked and a handwritten sign in the front window that read Closed, Due to Illness There was no one to replace her, which is not to say she was irreplaceable, but it did leave me in a quandary. The steps were icy. A path had been scraped straight up the center by the man who ran the auto parts store across the street but had been left to glaze slick and narrow between wind-carved banks of snow. There was nowhere to sit. Nowhere to enter. It was very cold.

  A car came down the hill and spun on the ice, its rump swaying gracefully back and forth over the lane marker. The driver looked right through me, her face a pale oval filled with other ovals. Then the tires caught. She inched past and disappeared around the bend.

  I rattled the door again, but the lock held. Up the street two old woman were walking with their arms latched at the elbow, puffy pink heads bent down toward their feet. A bell rang at the school. The wind whirled up a funnel of salt and sand which blustered around the street and then subsided.

  There was nothing to do but go home and so I went: up the hill and around the bend, past the Laundromat, past the saw mill, past Thingy’s house where the porch light was still on, its yellow stain swallowed by the snow, through the side yard and up the stairs, ducking under the dragon’s neck. I had warmed my key in my pocket, but it was still stiff in the lock and had to be coaxed and jiggled. Even with all that extra warning the Sainte Maria didn’t see fit to rise from the kitchen table or pull her shirt all the way closed.

  (An egg pushes the golden wall. Pressure from below, darkness. There is a tide that pushes past, something that drifts and clings. Feathers in the wall which push, push. A quavering, a shivering. The egg bounces into shape and floats free. Then comes the long journey down the mountain.)

  “I could hear them all,” my father said. “He’s dead, he’s dead, they were saying, but how could they have thought that when I was still right there? I mean, there I was. Lying in front of them, listening to them yammer on and on.”

  But that was later. Or earlier. Time was strange for me. I was inside a parenthesis.

  The Sainte Maria sat at our kitchen table smoking a cigarette. Her mouth looked raw, as if she had erased the edges and then left all the pink rubbings lying around. She was wearing a button-down shirt—my father’s shirt, red and blue, the pocket frayed—and black panties. Nothing else. Thump and drag, thump and drag. My father stood in the door in his walking cast. They both looked at me and the shape we made in the room was a triangle. Against the snow-light coming in the window, the cheery curtain, the ivy border; against the space on the floor where my mother had lain and the space in the door where my father had stood; against the sprouting onions, the dishes in the sink, the beautiful, furred plume of smoke the Sainte Maria unfurled above her head; against the violet pucker of her nipple we overlaid a wedge-shaped core of darkness, but it was true that anyone could have stood at any of its points and created the same effect. There are times when geometry unsettles the world and times when it fits right in. Then the moment passed and my father said, “What are you doing home?”

  Thingy shook her head. She had plucked all the clover within arm’s reach and crawled to a fresh patch so she could continue her chain. “I guess it’s not a surprise,” she said. “But still a shock.”

  She snipped the stem of a clover with her nails and twirled it under her chin so its purple crown just brushed her skin. Her profile as she gazed out over the bee meadow was very sharp and straight. Not so much like a statue as a pair of shears; golden ones for sure, but still capable of clashing.

  “She was always so weird,” Thingy said. A bee, attracted by the clover, swooped down to the level of her mouth and hovered there, buffeted by her breath. “So intense. You know my mother always called her The Fox. In a really nasty tone. ‘I went to Abbots and saw The Fox,’ she’d say and do you know what else?”

  “What?” I said, watching the bee as it darted to the left and right as if to outflank her, lifted finally and settled near us on the head of a flower which it began to comb. Thingy braided her clover into the chain and held up the length to examine it. She tied the ends together and passed the loop flower by flower through her hands.

  “She said if the Sainte Maria were any kind of object she’d be a paper plate with a stain on it. Mustard or something, smeared right across its face. Isn’t that mean?” Thingy said, brushing another bee away with the back of her hand.

  This seemed unusually invested for Thingy’s mother, but I remembered a day when I was very young and the Sainte Maria had taken Luke and I out into the backyard to get some sun. Thingy came up the hill with her father behind her and, while we played a game where we found important stones and heaped them in a pile in Luke’s lap, Mr. Clawson fidgeted on the other side of the wall where the Sainte Maria sat and ran his hand from the crown of his head to his eyebrows until his hair laid flat and straight across his forehead like a curtain.

  Where was Mrs. Clawson? Was there such a thing as the blinds twitching? Her knuckles battering the glass? It seemed much more likely she was on the side porch with a book and a glass of wine. Mrs. Clawson doomed by my memory to drink and finger the page, wear white pants and seethe.

  The sun was shining that day, too. I put a green stone in Luke’s lap and he inclined his head toward me. “My liege,” Thingy said and danced away.

  (I dreamed I was sewing together a white shirt. Up one side I stitched tiny white xes, a hole for the a
rm, a hole for the neck. On the smock I stitched a white peacock, a white bear, a white horse and white owl. When I was done, I turned the shirt against the darkness and saw I had made a mistake. The animals could not agree. They tore at each other, claws piercing fur, hooves splintering bone. Soon there was nothing left of them but raveled ends which I picked apart and set aside. I unstitched the shirt and laid it out in pieces. I gathered my needle and thread.)

  One night, at the beach, there was a terrible storm. It was far away, but anyone could tell it was only the ocean that held it back. At any moment the tide could turn and the storm would rush to our doorstep. Meanwhile, it made a beautiful show.

  We all watched from a different place in the house. Mr. Clawson was on the veranda, a drink in his hand. Mrs. Clawson had last been seen pacing the hallway looking for flashlights. Thingy and I were side by side, each in our own window in the little white sandy room that was ours. The thunder rolled across the ocean like a carpet being flung out. The lightening struck and struck and struck.

  “A fistful of stingers,” Thingy said.

  I wondered about the fish below. The whales and sharks and sea turtles flashing into x-ray, their eyes flat and impassive in their heads.

  “Relax, Alice,” Thingy said. “It happens all the time.”

  (I dreamed the needle was a bone and the thread was a bone. I dreamed the cloth below them was bone and, as the needle punched in and punched out, flakes of bone pattered onto my skirt. I dreamed the shirt itself was finished and it clinked and clattered as I folded it into a box. Much later, I dreamed I guided a little arm through the arm hole, a little head through the neck. The shirt was stiff and unyielding. When I set it out into the water, I saw that it would float.)

  When Thingy finally came home, Mrs. Clawson threw her a party. Everyone we had gone to school with who was still in town had been invited, the house lit inside and out—paper lanterns hung from the porch roof, the pagoda strung with fairy lights—so from the tip of the mountain all the way down Jacob and I could see the house nestled on the ridge like a softly glowing egg. When we went around a curve the house was gone, had never been. When we went around another there it was again. We had been invited; I had the invitation in my lap where I could dig my thumbnail into the thick cardstock and scallop the edges. Jacob drove. His hands were dark shapes on the wheel. We went around a curve and the house disappeared. It was like we were a river instead of two people in a car: winding down, going wherever we had carved a path.

  “It wasn’t an accident,” my father said.

  “What did he mean?” Thingy asked. She strung the clover without particular order, but still a pattern had formed. Purple and white, two whites and another purple. A bee settled on the chain and Thingy blew it away. Another took its place.

  “Was he trying to kill himself? Wracked with guilt?” She laughed to think of my father affected by anything so conventional. Once, when we were seven, he had dug a pit in the backyard and run the hose into it for five hours. This was in the early morning. By noon we had a mud spa in which to perfect our complexions and he sat in there with us all afternoon. Two girls in polka-dot bathing suits with skirts, my father in his boxers, drinking a beer, stretching one long, hairy leg across the pit to prop his foot up in the sun.

  Once, when we were a little older, he took us out for Chinese food and detoured on the way home to stop at a green house on the far outskirts of town. He was gone for an hour and we sat in the car. When he came back he was humming under his breath and didn’t say a word though we called and called to him as if he had gone deaf or were sweating deep in a fever. When Thingy pounded on his shoulders from the back seat, he reached back and caught her wrist, held it straining over his headrest as he steered one-handed around the curves, and smiled, and hummed.

  “We met at a dance hall,” Rosellen said, giggling, lightly scratching the back of my father’s hand. “I was there with someone else.”

  My father had black hair and tan, hollow cheeks. My father made Thingy yellow mittens and pushed his welder’s goggles back on his head so his hair stood up behind them as if he had always just come in from a high wind. When he walked women bowed before him like waving grasses, but because he never looked back he didn’t know that when he passed they rose up again, their edges sharp as razors.

  “Fie Fi Foe Fum,” Rosellen said. When she fed him, she pushed the spoon a little too far into his mouth. When she wiped his cast, she let it drop back onto the table with a thud.

  “Seriously, what did he mean?” Thingy said.

  “I was thrown,” my father said, his leg encased before him, slowly turning to stone. “I was flicked out of the universe. I was tossed. How else do you want me to say it? I was expelled.”

  (The egg settles in a valley, but in the very first battle it is pierced. So much for fortresses; so much for rose-twined mullion. It grows a golden web—latticework, hatch stitching—and never, it will never again. . .But no use, no matter: the enemy is in the gates and already asserting his preference. Gone are the great, green tapestries where the hart and the hind panted in the thicket. Where the lord blew a horn and the lady pricked her finger on a spindle. Gone is the lacquered screen, inlaid with pearl; the gilded chairs covered in some gay tapestry revealing a woman lifting her dress. . .The enemy will not poison the well, but he will move in a day crate for his dog. He will not pillage the spoils—a chest full of gold and one full of ashes, a chest full of gems and one of white moths’ wings—but he will insist on track lighting and regular meals. “Put some meat on your bones,” he will say as he takes off his shoes. “Come watch the end of this show with me.”)

  Much later, I woke up and the storm was over. It was raining, the water buffeted regularly against the window as if an extension of the waves, but no flash, no bang. In the bed across from me, Thingy slept tangled in the sheets. One of her legs was flung out across the mattress and I could see the luminous swell of her buttocks where her nightgown had rucked up. Her hair was in her face, a curl slipping in between her lips as she breathed. Otherwise, the house was still.

  Too-ra-loo-loo-loo, sang the birds in the mountains. They were idiots, I thought, hardly worth the attention. Here the birds shrieked and mewled, got to the point. “Give me,” said the seagull as he sidled toward me on the fleshy petals of his feet.

  Toward the end of the night the crowd had thinned. Gone was Missy Howard, voted Most Good Natured; gone was Ronald Tolliver, who, in the fifth grade, Thingy had kissed in the science annex while Mrs. Dory’s captive spring peepers looked on. In the years since I had seen her last, Thingy had graduated and graduated again. Sometimes we wrote letters. She wanted to do something about the world; she wanted to take it apart and see if there was a different way it could be put together. I wanted a mild winter, an early spring. Then, out of the blue, she had written with a different sort of proposition. She was coming home and she was bringing someone with her. I had been up on the mountain in that old house for so long, hadn’t I?, just Jacob and I, and she knew there was plenty of room.

  “We won’t disrupt your routines at all,” Thingy wrote. She used a blue pen which bled through the page when she let it rest to think. “In fact, we want to become a part of your routines. We strive for seamlessness. Daniel needs a quiet place to write.”

  Tomorrow would be the first night. I had spent the day making up beds and sweeping out corners. It was spring. The garden was in, but not yet growing; the chickens were molting their winter down which blew across the yard in dingy drifts. Jacob had agreed but he had conditions. Now he was standing beside the Clawson’s back stoop in the dark. Once in awhile I could see the wet glimmer of his eyes as they caught the dimming lights. The lanterns out, candles smoking, someone using a flashlight to write their name on the lawn. Thingy wore a long white dress that covered her feet. She kept pressing my elbow as she passed, saying my name: Alice Alice Alice. Up the hill, my father’s house was dark. It was only a shape, like a rock or a massive deadfall. It could hardly
be seen.

  Finally, the Sainte Maria said, “It’s good to see you again, Alice.” Her breasts were small and sat high on her chest, the nipples dark and complex in their folds. She had one foot propped on a kitchen chair, but she moved it and nudged the chair toward me so I could sit. In front of her was a big, white, clunky glass of milk which she finished in one gulp. Behind her, the pass-through which could connect us to anything: the living room or a long tunnel leading downward. . .plaid couch and china figurines or a cross section of the river. . .green weed, gold drift, silver needles of fish darning the current.

  There was something very wrong in the room, but it is too easy to say it was the Sainte Maria. The top of the Sainte Maria’s panties were black lace and some wiry, surprisingly red strands of pubic hair poked through their weave. She had a birthmark in the hollow of her sternum, just between her breasts, as if someone had pressed their thumb there and twisted it around. There was snow on my boots, so I unlaced them and left them by the door. I came over to the table and sat.

  “Jesus Christ,” said my father. He was melting away in the doorway, slowly fading back into the shadow of the living room. Soon, all I could see of him was the beacon of his cast and then that too was gone and the Sainte Maria and I listened to him stump across the house to his bedroom where he slammed the door.

  “I’m sorry about your father,” she said, but that could have meant anything. What was wrong was that we were all too close, had lived overlapping each other so that our shapes became confused, our colors muddled, our lines tangled. Though I didn’t know it yet, the Sainte Maria made a shape like a spiny sweet gumball; the Nina one like a lasso; the Pinta one like a flat, smooth shell. My father had one shape, Thingy another and I another still, but all atop each other we had become monstrous, many-headed. All atop each other, there was no room to breathe.