“Are you sure you can do that? It gets pretty heavy. I had a cart for a while, but it got caught in the bushes and on rocks and stuff so I stopped using it.”
I stood up, walked behind the sofa, with Theresa still sitting on it, I bent down, gripped the sofa from underneath and lifted it a foot or so into the air. Theresa gasped. I gently dropped the couch back into its rightful place and sat back down on it.
“Why do you worry about Kat? She seems capable of taking care of herself.”
“I know she can be trying, and she hates everyone, but I’m her mother.”
“Misanthropic,” I gave Theresa. Like Father. Theresa didn’t seem to care about the gift of words. “What do you do as her mother?”
“It’s my job to protect her and to love her.”
“Love can annihilate, or destroy,” I explained.
“Some kinds of love. You’re different, Mara, strong though. That’s a good thing. I don’t need to worry about you. Just be polite to Miss Elaina. Anyway, you can come to church with me on Sunday. There’s another kind of love there.” She rose and called out to the kitchen, “Miss Elaina, I’m sorry, I have to go and take care of Kat, but Mara will stay for a little while.” She left before I could ask her any more questions.
Miss Elaina returned carrying a tray with gold cups and saucers and a steaming teapot, which she placed on the table in front of me. Peppermint coiled in the air, then rested on our shoulders. It was light and green. A small cross with the sad, dying man hung on her wall.
“Have you met God at the church?”
Miss Elaina giggled, like glass splintering. “God’s probably the last person you’d meet there.” She poured the peppermint tea so the odor spread toward the edges of the room and rested there. She lifted a cup to her lips. “You do know that you can meet God anywhere, don’t you?”
I was shocked. “No, no one told me that. How?”
“I can’t tell you. I haven’t seen Him. Except for glimpsing Him through a few incredible people I’ve met.” She sipped. “Seeing Him never lasted for me. I must admit I’ve given up on Him.”
My mouth gaped. “Are you a mother?”
“You certainly are a direct young woman.” She peered at me, her eyeglasses fogging as she sipped her tea. “No, I don’t have any children of my own, and I’ve never been married. So who am I to teach others? What about you?”
“I don’t think I can have children. I’ve met only one available man so far and it didn’t end well.”
“Was there anything else you wanted to know before you take the laundry?”
“There is so much I have to learn,” I mumbled to myself. “Can I see your books?”
She appeared startled by our conversation. She placed the tea cup on the table. “Certainly, come.” She showed me to another room in the house that had bookshelves from the floor to the tall ceiling. There was a table and two chairs by a window.
I gasped. It was my turn to be startled. “Is this a library?”
“This is MY library.” She touched a few of the books. “But you’re right. This is bigger than the library behind the post office.”
“Can I borrow some books?” I twirled round and round. “I don’t know where to begin.”
“Perhaps when I know you better I can make some suggestions. I want to make sure you’ll take good care of my books.”
“I have so much to learn. My father allowed me only certain books.”
“What did you want to learn about first?” Miss Elaina’s fingers brushed one of her books.
“How to filter through memories,” I said, haltingly. “No, the relationship between parents and children. Or all about God.” I looked at Miss Elaina inquiringly. “I don’t know how to choose. I don’t know anything.”
She slammed her book shut. “That’s it. I’ll find you a book all about life, full of life, for next time.” She walked out of the room. “We can discuss it, too, if you want.”
“Can I have a pen and a notebook?”
“For what?”
“I want to write down my stories and adventures.”
“Don’t we all, Mara. But I suppose Theresa doesn’t have much in the way of pen and paper.”
I shook my head.
She rummaged through some boxes in another room. “Here,” she said, tearing out some pages in a miniature book with a black and white splattered cardboard cover. The name Sandy Shane was scribbled on a blank line on the front with some crude pictures. She handed me a few pens. “For now you need to go.” She pointed toward her pink tiled bathroom. “And there’s my washing.” She opened her front door.
“Audacious,” I gave her as I was leaving.
“Yes you are,” she said from her doorstep.
She was the only other person, besides Father, who understood the value of words.
Chapter Seven
On the way home that afternoon, as I walked through the woods, I relished the various shades of green, the touches of yellow or red on leaves and flowers, the brown of logs or tree trunks. Under my feet the smell of crushed greenery, fresh and growing, lifted toward my nostrils. Weeds, long grass, and ferns tickled my pant legs and shoes. Sunlight jeweled the trees, made patterns on the bark. I enjoyed the way evergreens hoisted up the sky, opening into all that blue. I detected the scent of cows, their digestions and excrement, the slow way they scraped against and shifted within their fences. I smelled horses, and thought of the way they penetrated everything with their hooves, tearing up the landscape as they ran through it. Those horses, with their large, expressive eyes, swished at flies with their lovely manes and tails. How they could run in all different directions at the same time. I liked all the animals, all the plants, maybe even better than people.
I neared Theresa’s house. My load did not feel very heavy. But I put it down near a small rock. I heard the uncomfortable squealing of a mouse, claws digging at dirt. I didn’t understand the sound. A spider surprised me by swinging near my face, then alighting again on its thinly woven web. I missed the companionship of mice. I grew closer to the noise and spied Kat sitting on the ground pulling something elastic and gray in her hands. Then she threw it against a tree. I saw a tail.
“Ouch,” she cried and began sucking on her fingers.
A twig crackled under my feet and her head with its boisterous hair snapped upward, in my direction.
“Who’s there? Peter? Who’s watching me?” She scowled in my direction.
“It’s me, Mara.” I emerged from my hiding place. “What are you doing there? Didn’t your mother find you?”
“I’m playing and my mother knows I’m out here.” She grimaced, her hand reaching toward the unmoving gray mass.
I moved closer, saw the dead mouse. “What did you do to it?” My voice was growing louder and louder.
“It bit me. I made it fly away.”
“You’re a monster,” I screamed at her. She did it on purpose. “Do you think you’re a god?” I yelled.
“Animals and people die too easily,” she said, touching what was left of the companion mouse’s body. “I don’t know where they go. They just don’t move anymore.”
“You’ve done this before?” Was she different than Father even though she was a child?
She didn’t answer me. “You’re the monster,” she yelled back at me as she rose, seemed sure of her way back to the house. She didn’t need to use her hands much. “And we don’t want you here.”
I sat on a rotting log. Ants crawled near me with their frantic processions. I aligned my bones, tried to feel normal. I breathed steadily. Light penetrated the trees in pieces, arrived at my feet in various shapes. I wondered if I gathered all the pieces together whether I, too, could create another creature, a creature made entirely of light. At least no one would be hurt by that.
I removed the top part of my ear from my pants
pocket. That missing part was covered by my hair and couldn’t be seen. I threw it toward the small clearing where Kat had been sitting. A gray squirrel leaped near, its tail bristling and full. It dug around my prostrate ear top, sat on its haunches, lifted and twirled my curved ear piece between its paws, as another squirrel arrived to watch it. Then the squirrel put my ear in its mouth and leaped away. I began to think about trees that grew ears or fingers or toes, an innocuous method for Father to find the parts for me that he needed. He could simply pick one from the correct type of tree during flowering season. There could be trees growing internal organs too, heart conifers, liver oaks, vascular maples, kidney ash, lung spruce, pancreatic pine.
I sighed. Kat was correct; I was a monster too. I couldn’t help it though. Kat could. I closed my eyes and received another memory that I didn’t try to stop.
I was painting on a large canvas. Different colors were splashed onto the white, and I tried to match my brushstrokes with my mood, which was mixed, inspired, despairing, and hopeful. A face emerged from the maelstrom of color as I used black on my palette knife. Done, I stepped back.
“Interesting,” my husband said. He rubbed his chin, “The forest with that small, gray animal emerging. What were you trying to do?”
“A self-portrait.”
I opened my eyes and thought I saw someone watching me from behind some bushes. I stomped over there, past where Kat had sat, and parted the leaves and branches, but no one was there. I wasn’t sure Kat could move that quickly.
I smiled. I’d received a memory that wasn’t an incredible, emotive moment of extinguishment. It had been a moment of self-realization, a memory that could teach me something. I could learn to live more fully through these memories, to make them my own. Was this one trying to tell me about my own creation? How a painter creates themselves over and over again? And how do I see myself?
“Cohesive,” I whispered to myself. With every step I was losing and gaining.
I rose and noticed something flesh-colored under a fern. When I parted the fronds I found Miss Moscovitz, her head twisted aside with its explosion of blonde hair. She was lying on some moss. Her body was riddled with scars, deep gouges, and sprawled near some fallen tree limbs. Had Kat thrown her against a tree by mistake? Or worse, had Kat inflicted these injuries on purpose? Was this how she treated what she cared about? I understood the doll.
I pulled out the notebook Miss Elaina had given me. Where Sandy Shane had written her name, I crossed it out, put Mara F. I was evolving. I opened the cardboard cover, wrote Exegesis on the top of the first page, my interpretation of Father’s work. We, all the Maras, were alive. I penned Maybe the memories were real and Father, Theresa, Kat, and this very green world were a dream. I had so many impulses in this world outside of Father’s laboratory and house. But I didn’t know which of them were important. Instead of my adventures, maybe I could use the notebook as a journal.
I rose and gathered what was left of Miss Moscovitz in the two laundry bags, stuffing my small notebook inside one of them. A late afternoon mist on the ground ghosted my ankles. A wind began, and leaves whispered in an uncomfortable manner. I peered back into the deeper forest and I glimpsed a running tuft of blonde hair. I wasn’t sure what held me together.
At the house Theresa had begun making dinner and Kat was blowing those beautiful bubbles from the washing tin. I deposited the laundry bags near Kat’s legs.
“Kat brought me Solomon’s Seal to make tea and huckleberries that I’m cooking with venison, all from the woods.” Theresa beamed, looking briefly at Kat, “She does well out in these woods. She even brought wildflowers.” A mass of bent flowers poked in every direction from a glass on the eating table.
“Are there any computers or phones nearby?” I asked, curious and unsure what could be discovered.
Theresa thought for a moment. “Someone in town, maybe a merchant, might have a computer in a back room. Everyone in town has a phone, but we don’t get much reception outside of town. Who would we call out here? Besides, Kat and I don’t have the money. Did you need to contact someone?”
“No, I was just asking.” I could see how one life fell open into another one. “I found this along my way,” I held out the doll to Kat. Then I realized and lifted her arm, and I placed the head and torso into her small hand. “Miss Moscovitz had been ravaged on the path home.”
Theresa looked at me sadly, then at Kat.
Kat tossed her aside. Her body skidded and came to rest at Theresa’s feet and her head rolled into a corner. “I don’t want her anymore.”
“Why? What’s the matter, Kat? What happened?” Theresa asked, with concern in her voice.
“Nothing. Miss Moscovitz was trying to climb a tree and she fell down and her head came off.”
Theresa picked up the doll parts. She tried to put them back together. “You could still play with her.”
“I don’t want her anymore. I said already.” She was glowering.
I knew how Miss Moscovitz felt, although Father still wanted me back. He just didn’t want the real me.
“But Kat, we don’t have any money for a new doll.”
“I don’t care.” She turned away from her mother with her vacant eyes.
“Maybe I can ask in town and see if anyone has any old dolls for you.” Theresa, with her dark hair knotted in a flowered scarf, moved toward us like an impending horizon. She carried plates of food. The aroma filled me. But, as she grew closer, I became hungrier, my stomach groaned, being absolutely precise in its need. Theresa made the three of us plates of food, but Kat moved her fingers onto Theresa’s plate and scooped food into her mouth with her hands.
When she tried to taste mine, I chided her, “You know who the plates belong to.”
“I want yours.”
“You have your own,” I told her, and she didn’t come near my food again.
The little girl grunted as an acknowledgement. She was eating her own food aggressively.
“Tonight, Kat, you can sleep in your room again. You’ll have to share it with Mara. So be a good girl, please.” Theresa ate what was left of her dinner, daintily with a knife and fork.
“Avaricious,” I explained. But neither of them understood. “And garrulous,” I continued. The little girl crawled underneath my skin. She was trying to mark her territory. I continued, “I understand the need for money to eat and for things, but I don’t understand why people want more than what’s necessary.”
Kat snickered.
“To get ahead, Mara. So people can fulfill their dreams.” Theresa tapped Kat’s shoulder.
“I dreamt about a road lined with angels once,” I explained.
“Not night dreams. I mean things you hope for during the day like fixing up our church, being able to buy Kat toys, visiting somewhere, or going to the doctor if someone gets sick. Things like that.”
But I didn’t completely understand it. Father complained about his job sometimes but it was how he made money to create the Maras in his basement. That was his dream. I did miss him. The old Father before me and the Maras, that was never discussed. That father must have had different dreams. I didn’t always see what Father called The Big Picture.
“Father always claimed that the body was temperamental. Like a fussy clock. One small component could go out of whack and destroy something. He said the different parts were reliant on one another. People could continue with only one kidney, but not without a heart or liver or stomach. We could persevere with one arm or leg but not without one head.” I had given them one of Father’s lectures. I glanced at the little girl. “Kat seems to do fine with her blindness.” She was missing one of her senses.
“Someday I’d like a doctor, a specialist, to take another look.” Theresa tossed a look at Kat that she couldn’t see.
“Mama, I do okay.” Kat grabbed a red crayon from a pile.
We we
re finished eating and Theresa was cleaning up the dishes. “Your father sounds like an interesting man. Is he a doctor or something?” she asked.
“Or something. I don’t know. I think he once was a doctor but he does research now.”
“What kind?’
“I don’t know.”
“Mara, come over here,” Kat yelled loudly.
I did.
“Mara needs to help me with the laundry. What do you need, Kat?”
“Lie down on the floor.”
I did. Kat gleefully traced my outline in red crayon on the floor.
“You’re so big. You could wrestle wolves and bears.”
“I’m an archetype, one-of-a-kind.”
“Please don’t make a mess, Kat,” Theresa screamed from the kitchen.
“You shouldn’t be afraid of anything,” the frightening little girl said.
“Some days I’m afraid of everything,” I confessed.
“That’s silly. You could live in the forest like Peter and have plenty to eat.”
“I don’t know how.”
“Kat, Peter’s gone. He doesn’t live in the forest,” Theresa added.
The little girl bent down to my ear and whispered, “She doesn’t know anything.”
“What would Peter be doing in the forest?” Theresa asked.
“Living,” the creepy girl answered.
“Why wouldn’t he come home?”
Kat didn’t say anything.
I rose and began doing the laundry. Theresa directed me while she finished up the dishes. Kat went outside to play.
“Not too late tonight and I’ll call you when it gets dark,” Theresa told her.
“Next week, on Tuesday,” Theresa hovered over the washing tub, “we’ll be going to the big city to see some cousins. Mack in town has to drive in and pick up some stuff for his store and we can go along with him. Would you like to come, Mara?”
“Are all the other forests like this one?”
The Solace of Monsters Page 9