Alphabetique, 26 Characteristic Fictions

by Molly Peacock

  It was her mother as a tomboy with thick straight bangs and shining eyes. Somehow Miss Lily Valley was inside the Lothario.

  Compliments tell you what you are. They tell you what you already know, but when other people know it, too, the lake inside you deepens. You reflect them in your waters, L thought, and they reflect you in their eyes.

  When L was a precocious teenager, she once shouted at her mother, “That’s narcissism!” as the retired actress reposed in satin at a dressing room mirror, recounting her compliments.

  “No, darling,” Lily said to her daughter. “Narcissism is craving your own reflection. A compliment is a response to one’s effort at being.”

  Now L’s phantom repositioned his mask and his mustache rematerialized. Through the mask, his eyes were liquid. He loitered a little, loath to leave, and she lolled on the chaise, watching him adjust his hat, then disassemble his cells into a vapor that passed through the cabana stripes with a pleasant hiss. A hint of Muguet hung in the air.

  I need you even now, she thought, even now.

  All around the pool the privet hedge enclosed a lustrous emptiness. So often the satin of our mother’s glamour reincarnates itself as the shadow of amour. In the stillness where her ache for love almost echoed she plucked at her curls as she had as a child.

  Time to highlight my locks and lacquer my nails, she thought, reaching for the poolside phone, hearing Miss Lily’s lavish voice inside her own, leaving the phantom lover to evanesce into his next act. He did not return.

  L had a next act, too. She did return to the screen, a splendid lady in a daring cameo, and she lived on the compliments she got for a long, long time.

  M’s Dream House

  M loved the little house she shared with her mum, its magnolias and mansard roof. Inside, the smell of molasses and ginger had sunk into the timbers. Water mumbled from a hand pump, not a faucet tap. Music murmured, not from a radio, but from a soft piano. All was washed to softness—the sheets, the table linens. Even the gold rims on the old dishes were brushed down to a blur.

  M had been a surprise late baby, and her mother was almost the age of a grandmother. There were only the two of them—plus Maugie, their cat.

  M grew up thinking she understood her mum. But in fact she only understood her in daylight. The night world was where mum paced with her mountains of money worries. Down the hall M blissfully slept, and down in the basement Maugie moused, bringing her prizes up to the landing so M and Mum could find them first thing in the morning.

  And in that morning light Mum’s money misery vanished. She never spoke of it. But when Mum got sick, her worries magnified. Her illness brought the night world to daylight, though she still managed to hide it from her daughter. Mum could no longer hope for a miracle. Unbeknownst to M, just before Mum died, the ancient lady up and took misfortune into her own misguided hands. She sold their home to the neighbors who had always coveted it.

  Why didn’t she tell me? M plagued herself with questions all through the small funeral—she and her mum were the last of their line—and said to her distant cousins and her friends: She never ever mentioned money! Lawyers, real estate agents, and the neighbors of course were summoned. But the deal was done. Though M harbored murder in her heart for those greedy neighbors, she couldn’t get the house back.

  It’s all MY fault—I should have known, M moaned.

  It took a long time for her to settle these affairs. She’d taken a leave from her job at the museum, but eventually she had to go back to work. She and Maugie went to the only place M could afford to buy, a small but gleaming condominium. How could she transfer doilies and dusty velvet couches with broken legs into this glare? What was home any more? She had an iron bedstead, not a sleek futon. Of course Maugie kept finding her way back to the old homestead, and M had to keep quashing the mayhem in her heart as she retrieved the crafty little animal from that basement now full of the neighbor’s traps instead of mice.

  Up in the condo, M’s dreams began. Each night she dreamed of a ruined house. Mornings she woke to a smell like something left in an oven too long, a whiff of burnt molasses. Sometimes in a dream a window without a wall fell to the ground in mockery. Night after night in her sleep M shouldered mountains of blame. But then came morning.

  All she could do was embrace the day. With her long shapely arms, she put on her makeup, donned her mackintosh, and struck out for the museum, determined to muddle through.

  “It’s not my fault, I know,” she said to McM, the man who occupied the next desk. “I just miss my home.” He offered her a meatloaf sandwich. She said, “I never knew my mum, after all.” M’s dreams went on mortgaging her nights. When she startled awake, there was only Maugie at the foot of the iron bedstead squeaking an unsatisfactory plastic rodent, and a monstrous stink of burnt molasses and cat pee.

  M decided to bake. Using her mother’s measuring cups, she chased the aftermaths of the dreams away by spicing the smells. With cinnamon, with allspice, with vanilla and cardamom, she made muffins, mousse, and meringues in the open-concept kitchen. She used all her mother’s bowls, and all her mother’s spoons, to expunge the smells—and she almost did.

  Meanwhile, Maugie knew whenever workmen propped open a staircase door. The cat would slip into the hall, then escape down the stairwell through the service door. And M would get a call at the museum from the mingy mean-spirited neighbors.

  “And what am I going to do with Maugie?” M moaned to McM.

  “Your cat is lonely,” he said. “Does she have service potential?”

  Maugie would be tested. McM agreed to help.

  The minute McM walked into the combo of gleam and old wood and velvet and iron, the marvelous smells wrapped around him. “You’ve been baking,” he murmured approvingly, “in your farmhouse in the sky.” But M was busy wrangling Maugie into the carrier.

  Shortly the cat was deposited on the welcoming laps of ancient ladies in wheelchairs. That champion purr eased the ladies’ hearts. Maugie aced the test. Seeing the ladies, something in M eased, too.

  “My mother is a mystery I may never solve,” she said to McM on one of their lunchtime trips to the old ladies. Maugie now went willingly into her carrier.

  And so the bright weekday activities wore down the mountains of dreams. Blame became a molehill. M’s nightmares became so predictable they were almost friendly. Metamorphosis set in. McM lingered when he held M’s coat, and she lingered as he slipped it on. Their hands met when they put the cat carrier into the car. But these were the gestures of daylight.

  Thinking she was ready to brave the evening light, M had made the mistake of inviting McM for Saturday dinner. When the day came, she lay in bed with a fever, vacuuming was abandoned, her mahogany hair unwashed. Though the mushroom soup gurgled on the stove and the mousse slept in the fridge, the main course had never been started. She left a message canceling.

  McM arrived anyway with merlot and magnolias. He merged into M’s mess. It smelled of cough drops and kitty litter and dust and the fragrance of a woman in a slept-in nightgown. She slid beneath layers of consciousness like the layers of the blankets he straightened for her. And then balancing two hot toddies, fully clothed, he climbed into the bed. Maugie obliged him with a space.

  M was too weak to protest. She woke and drank and woke and slept. At midnight M sat up and slurped the mushroom soup held by McM. Magnificent …

  And then she sank. That night of course she dreamed of a house, but this house was merely old, not ruined. It was the homestead, magnolias laden, sheet music still in the piano bench. When she woke, she smelled McM, still fully clothed at her side, his glasses on the floor, batted about by Maugie. Nothing smelled burnt. Unlike her mother, M didn’t believe in miracles. She believed in muddling through. Slowly something had risen in her, like those moons you sometimes see in an afternoon sky, night inside the persistence of day. M sat up in bed, hugging her knees, looking at McM sprawled beside her. The house at last is inside me, she thought. I’ve final
ly moved.

  The Negativo Trio

  NO was a violin, NOT a viola, and NEVER a cello. They were noble instruments, but highly nonconformist. Prickly in personality, if sexy. Wayward. Always went in their own direction. Made odd choices. Loved the difficult. Naysayed the popular. Collectively unified in a single reaction to the mainstream: negative.

  When they first chanced to come together, they doubted they would ever meld.

  But the minute they began to make music, they discovered a numinous core to their triangle. They couldn’t see this core, smell it, or touch it—and neither could their slender audience (thirty people on folding chairs in a church). But all felt it was a natural union of sound, nimble and sublime.

  That night they became the Negativo Trio.

  Retiring to nestle in the velvet warmth of their cases, they whispered to each other, debriefing and musing in the first of many nightly pajama parties. This very first evening they discovered that what they wanted above all were two things. One was to play their music with the very nacre of its nature, and the other was fame.

  Night after night they played. Increased their bookings. Recorded. And were downloaded. They raised money to pay off the debt of their obscure choices. On stage they each shone with the patina of centuries: maple, spruce, and willow with an elegant varnish of gum arabic, honey, and the whites of eggs.

  But they weren’t famous, even though they played a nocturne as if every note were a black pearl.

  Yet NO, NOT and NEVER did everything everyone advised them to be famous: they networked, they nodded nicely to publicists, they flashed their Negativo news on social media. But the fact was, the trio wasn’t for everybody.

  “Do you think it’s our name?” NOT the Viola asked. “Would we be more famous as the Nightingale Trio?”

  “Nope,” said NEVER the Cello. “Negativo has our brio.” And NEVER was right. The three of them played with nerve. The knottier the piece, the better. They made their audiences reach.

  “We should be sexier,” NO the Violin said. “Naughtier. It’s our propensity for the minor key; we should lighten it up.” But when they played in the minor key, their audiences felt they had arrived at the navel of the universe. The instruments could never give up the minor.

  Would the Negativos ever learn what the people in the seats knew? The trio wasn’t famous because, well, they kind of unnerved people. You had to have nettle to take them on.

  Though they certainly wouldn’t have said no to notoriety, eventually they had to admit that they could not surrender their quirks.

  “We will never be famous,” NEVER said one night after they had nestled in their cases for their midnight debriefing.

  “I’m nauseous,” said NO extravagantly.

  “And neglected,” said NOT excessively.

  “Never,” said NEVER decisively.

  They would never fill the biggest halls. Or be the first name on the tips of tongues. And with the inverted logic of misplaced dreams, even though they had toured, had notched up reviews, and had triumphs and fans, and websites and bloggers, and a body of criticism devoted to them, they felt they had reached their nadir.

  The next morning they couldn’t seem to get up. They lay immobile, as if their velvet-lined cases were coffins.

  A netherworldly silence descended.

  The dust of despair drifted through the crack between the case tops and bottoms onto these living dead.

  Time dragged like a dirty hem.

  Naught into Nil.

  Desolation into Dormancy.

  Dormancy into …

  … Rest.

  Rest into Snoozing.

  Snoozing into Sleep.

  Sleep into Healing.

  The nostrum of sleep lasted until the pinkish light that heralds spring.

  A noisy nuthatch drilled for insects in a nearby tree. It was a forest sound, yodel-y and ebullient. It awoke the maple and spruce and willow of the Negativo’s constitutions. Their bodies couldn’t help responding to the vernal signal given when spring utters its only word: Nevertheless.

  If not fame, nevertheless music.

  “Numbskull nuthatch!” NEVER growled.

  “Ninny nuthatch,” NO yawned.

  “Bumptious bird,” NOT shifted, inadvertently jostling the snap to the dusty case. It sprang open. NO unclicked and climbed out, too. And NEVER heaved the lid.

  They played immediately of course, trying a violin piece by the underrated Nardini. Most thought him a light-weight, but the Negativos gave it their signature interpretation of naked necessity.

  “Oh it was NOTHING,” they began to say to one another as they did musical favors for themselves, producing scores of synchronicities and the occasional juicy nihilistic dissonance. They buoyed on their notes, as if a midnight Pacific of calm, rich, dark negatives were effused with luminescence.

  How relieved their listeners were to have them back. Again their audiences were made aware of the noses between their ears. That slight, brief piquancy in the nostrils was the smell of earthly harmony. It came from within the airy column that united the instruments, the nucleus of their refusal to suit. Such accord, though it is as rare as ease, seems like nothing.

  And so the Negativo Trio was known as a trio’s trio.

  Not famous, but known.

  Contrary to the vicissitudes of fame, ease is the path of the known, smooth as the satin of the instruments’ finish. To be recognized, yet not to suffer the disadvantages of fame, is a state so ideal it is the pinnacle of a career. NO, NOT and NEVER had at last woken up to that.

  O’s Full Circle

  When it came time for O to horrify her parents, she dated lassos, loops of rope who threw themselves around her opulent waist (how they knew where it was, even she had no idea), and pulled her tight, clenching her in the middle. But an O roped in the midriff becomes two smaller os—an 8. She knew that she wasn’t a number.

  She was a realization, a shock, a unity.

  Still, she loved being squeezed by the lassos because then at least she had some definition, a way to fit into someone …

  “But you’re our little opal, complete in yourself!” the outraged senior Os objected. Objurgate her as they did, their daughter took every occasion to offend them, hugged in two so often by the lassos that she had little waist-dents in her sides. Each time she thought, Now someone can hold me, and we can sweetly osculate! But within a few hours she had plummed back into perfection.

  “We’re earning a zero in parenting,” Daddy-O said to Mom.

  Onward went their family operetta, the adult Os overreacting and the teen provoking, till late one night in the kitchen after Mom had retired to bed, Daddy-O said softly to his daughter, “When you came into this world, you were a lovely little ochre dot, you were the blink of an eye. You were just perfect …”

  At that O was desolate.

  Complete she might be, but she felt incomplete—for how could she ever conjoin? “I wish I were still a dot,” was all she said to Daddy-O, and then went up to bed.

  There she fell into pessimism. Was anything worth doing?

  For the rest of her senior year she lay, otiose, on an ottoman. Nightly the Os discussed the situation. For them, the state of an O was sublime. Os opened doors, created occasions and, best of all, offered opportunities! Why was their daughter so mopingly hopeless when the natural state of an O is optimism?

  Young O fulfilled her obligations and graduated, rolling across the stage to get her diploma like everyone else, if not with aplomb, at least with a forward motion.

  On she went to university. There she became a bio major, deciding to orbit solo for a while, achieving her orgasms as a unity unto herself.

  One day after the lecture on ovipara (her favorite animals, the egg-layers), something brushed against her at the lab table. “I’m assigned to share this station, too,” whispered a lanky, elongated oval. “I just transferred in.”

  She looked into his long, transparent center.

  “What’s your nam
e,” he asked her.

  O frowned. She’d really been hoping to keep this lab table all to herself. “I’m O,” she said.

  “A letter O,” he smiled as he began to set up his half of the station. “I do revere the capacities of letters.” He jiggled the oxygen source, “Hey, does this work?” She showed him how to unstick the lever. “Thanks. My name is Zero, since you didn’t ask.”

  Something began to oscillate.

  “A number,” she said. “In high school I tried to become a number.”

  “What did you want to do that for?” 0 asked her. “O is the word of poets! O rapture, O divine.”

  “O shit, O hell, O damn,” she reminded him.

  During 0’s enthusiastic and O’s reluctant cooperation in the lab assignment, by chance he brushed against her again. It was the farthest thing from a lasso that she could imagine, but there was something … a valence exchange … like static from a balloon. He did give out a dreamy scent of stretched rubber.

  “Zeros,” he said when they signed off their experiment, “consume a huge amount of energy. Want to go for an all-day breakfast?”

  In the booth of the coffee shop, they had the first of many intense, overwhelming conversations.

  “But the price of being a universe unto yourself is solitude,” O said, “isn’t it?”

  “Even perfection needs company,” 0 said casually, tucking into the oatmeal he’d ordered as an appetizer before his omelet arrived.

  She had met a positive thinker. Slowly she chewed her onion bagel.

  “O is what everyone in every language says when they’re overwhelmed. You give them the syllable to say. You’re the world!” he said between bites.

  She was amazed at his bottomless capacity.

  “Me,” he continued, “I’m the perfect absence. I’m the last. And the first.” After he polished off the oatmeal and the omelet, he ordered the Old-Fashioned Pancakes, which he insisted she share.