by Lauren Groff
It’s just before twilight, and the sky is a brilliant orange.
She is inside the pumpkin.
* * *
—
In the absence of tiny ghouls, the lizards come out one last time, frilling their red necks, doing push-ups on the sidewalk.
Like Bartram, she was once a northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna here, but that was a decade ago, and things that once were alien life have become, simply, parts of her life.
She is no longer frightened of reptiles, she who is frightened of everything.
She is frightened of climate change, this summer the hottest on record, plants dying all around.
She is frightened of the small sinkhole that opened in the rain yesterday near the southeast corner of her house and may be the shy exploratory first steps of a much larger sinkhole.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
She is frightened because maybe she has already become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she’s frightened of what he sees on the other side.
She is frightened that there aren’t many people on the earth she can stand.
The truth is, Meg had said, back when she was still a best friend, you love humanity almost too much, but people always disappoint you.
Meg is someone who loves both humanity and people; William Bartram loved humanity and people and also nature.
He was a gifted and perceptive scientist who also believed in God, which seems a rather gymnastic form of philosophy.
She misses believing in God.
Here comes a prospector with a tiny pick; two scary teenage clowns in regular clothes; a courtly family, the parents crowned regents, the boy a knight in silver plastic, the girl a fluttery yellow princess.
What a relief that she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions.
Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can’t even save itself! she says aloud to the masses of princesses seething in her brain; but it is her own black dog who blinks in agreement.
She reads by bat light and sees two William Bartrams as she does: the bright-eyed thirty-four-year-old explorer with the tan and sinewy muscles and sketchbook, besieged by alligators, comfortable supping alone with mosquitoes and with rich indigo planters alike, and also Bartram’s older, paler self, in the quiet of his Pennsylvania garden, projecting his joy and his younger persona onto the page.
Both Bartrams, the feeling body and the remembering brain, show themselves in his descriptions of a bull gator: Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.
Usually, she’s the one who trick-or-treats with the boys, with Meg and her three children, but this year Meg is out with Amara, a banker who is nice enough but who competes sneakily, through her children.
She can take Amara in small doses, the way she can take everyone except for her sons and her husband and Meg, the only four people on earth she could take in every dose imaginable to man.
Maybe, she thinks, Meg and Amara are talking about her.
They’re not talking about me, she tells her dog.
* * *
—
Something has changed in the air; there’s a lot of wind now, a sense of something lurking.
The spirits of the dead, she’d think, if she were superstitious.
The dark has thickened, and she hears music from the mansion down the road where every year the neighbors host an extravagant haunted house.
She is alone, and no trick-or-treaters have wandered by in an hour, the white sandbags of candlelight have burned out, and the renters have all turned off their lights, pretending not to be home.
She reads from Bartram’s prologue, where he describes his hunter companion slaughtering a mother bear and then coming back mercilessly for the baby.
The continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunger to save its life, but to no effect! for by habit he had become insensible to compassion towards the brute creation, being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead upon the body of the dam.
And now she is crying.
I’m not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.
The dog needs to take a little break from her.
The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.
A lonely old piano.
She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the “Moonlight” Sonata.
She buries her failure in this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.
The wine is finished; she sucks a lollipop that only tastes red.
She reads for a long time until she hears what she thinks is her stomach growling, but it is, in fact, nearby thunder.
And just after the thunder comes the rain, and with the rain comes the memory of the baby sinkhole near the southeast corner of the house.
Her husband texts: the boys and he have taken shelter at the haunted house; there’s tons of food, all their friends, so much fun, she should come!—but he knows her better than that, this would be the third circle of hell for her, she cannot abide parties, she could not abide any friends when she’s lost the best one.
She can’t even read Bartram anymore because the thought of the sinkhole is like a hole in the mouth where a tooth used to be.
She prods and prods the sinkhole in her mind.
The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed, but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers.
The rain rains yet harder, and she puts on a yellow slicker and galoshes, and goes out with a flashlight.
Her face is being smacked by a giant hand, and another is smacking the crown of her head.
She puts a fist over her mouth to find the air to breathe and stands on the edge of the sinkhole, then crouches because the light is weak in the downpour.
No rain is collecting in the crater, which she thinks is extremely bad, because it must mean that the water is dripping through small cracks below, which means there’s a place for the water to go, which means there is a cavity, and the cavity could be enormous, right there beneath her feet.
She becomes aware of a stream of water licking its way down the end of her hair and into the collar of her slicker, and then slipping coolly across the bare skin of her shoulder and then over her left breast and across her lower left rib cage and entering her navel and unfurling itself luxuriously over her right hip.
It feels remarkable, like a good cold blade across her skin.
It is erotic, she thinks, not the same thing as sexual.
Erotic is suckling her newborns, that animal smell and feel and warmth and tenderness.
Laying her head on her friend’s shoulder and smelling the soap on her skin.
Letting the sun slide over her face without worrying about cancer or the ice caps melting.
She thinks of Bartram in the deep semitropical forest, far from his wife, aroused by the sight of an evocative blue flower that exists as a weed in her own garden, writing, in what is surely a double entendre or, if not, deeply Freudian: How fantastical looks the libertine Clitoria, mantling the shrubs, on the vistas skirting the gro
ves!
This, this is what she loves in Bartram so much!
The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body’s hungers and delights.
Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.
For years now, she has been unable to see it all around her, the erotic.
The rain, impossibly, comes down harder, and even the flashlight is no help.
She is wet and alone and crouching in the dark over an unknowable hole, and now she locates the point of breakage.
Odd that it had taken so long.
Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an article about the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a mysterious whitish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go, the oceans go, and Meg had answered, as she always does, but she had just put her youngest back to bed, and she was weary after a long day of helping women, and she said, Hey, relax, you can’t do anything about it, go drink the rest of the bottle of wine, take a bath, we can talk in the morning if you’re still sad.
That was it, that last call.
Poor Meg.
She is exhausting to everyone.
She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.
For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
From down there, everyone would seem so happy.
She comes in from the rain.
The kitchen is too bright.
Surely, in the history of humanity, she is not the only one to feel like this.
Surely, in the history of herself, all of those versions atop previous versions, she has felt worse.
It was called the New World, but Puc-Puggy understood that there was nothing new about it, as almost every step we take over those fertile heights, discovers remains and traces of ancient human habitations and cultivation.
* * *
—
She takes off the wet boots, the wet jacket, the wet skirt, the wet shirt, and, shivering, picks up her phone to call her husband.
The dog is licking the rain off her knees with a warm and loving tongue.
If she says sinkhole, her husband will race home in the rain with her children and their goodies.
They will put the boys to bed and stand together at the lip of the sinkhole, and maybe she will become solid again.
And so, when he picks up, she will say, Babe, I think we have a problem, but she will say it in the warmest, softest voice she owns, having learned from a master the way to deliver bad news.
She lets her hunger for her husband’s voice grow until she is almost incandescent with it.
As the phone rings and rings, she says to the dog, who is looking up at her, Well, nobody can say that I’m not trying.
ABOVE AND BELOW
She’d been kept awake all night by the palm berries clattering on the roof, and when she woke to the sun blazing through the window, she’d had enough. Goodbye to all that! she sang, moving the little she owned to the station wagon: her ex-boyfriend’s guitar, the camping equipment they’d bought the first year of grad school (their single night on the Suwannee, they were petrified by the bellows of the bull gators), a crate of books. Goodbye to the hundreds of others she was leaving stacked against the wall. Worthless, the man had told her when she’d tried to sell them.
Goodbye to the mountain of debt she was slithering out from underneath. Goodbye to the hunter-orange eviction notice. Goodbye to longing. She would be empty now, having chosen to lose.
The apartment was a shell, scoured to enamel. She breathed fully when she stepped out onto the porch. There was a brief swim of vertigo only when she shooed the cat out the door. Oh, you’ll be all right, she said, and reached for the silky fur between his ears, but as quick as a blink, he struck at her. When she looked up from the four jagged lines slowly beading with blood on the back of her hand, he had leapt away. Then he, too, was gone.
* * *
—
She drove past the brick university, where the first-years were already unloading their sedans, their parents hugging their own shoulders for comfort. Goodbye, she said aloud to the tune of the tires humming on the road.
After a summer with the power shut off, a summer of reading by the open window in her sweat-soaked underwear, the car’s air conditioner felt frigid. She opened the window and smelled the queer dank musk of deep-country Florida. Out here, people decorated their yards with big rocks and believed they could talk to God. Here, “Derrida” was only French for rear end.
She thrust her fist out the window and released it slowly. She could almost see her hopes peeling from her palm and skipping down the road in her wake: the books with her name on them; the sabbatical in Florence; the gleaming modern house at the edge of the woods. Gone.
When she looked at her hand again, it was puffy and hot and oozing. She put it to her mouth. When she stopped at last at the edge of a little oceanside town and gazed over the dune grass at the sea, her tongue was coppery with the taste of blood.
* * *
—
Someone had left a cooler on the beach, and it still held a bag of apples, a half-eaten sandwich, two Cokes. She sat, watching the dusk turn mustard and watermelon, and ate everything. Seabirds clustered on the wet sand, then winged apart into the air. When it grew too dark for her to see, she took the cooler back to the car and walked up to A1A to a pay phone.
She was poised to hang up if her stepfather answered, but it was her mother, vague and slow, saying Hello? Hello?
She couldn’t speak. She imagined her mother in her nightgown in the kitchen, a sunset, the neighbor kids playing outside.
Hello? her mother said again, and she managed, Hello, Mom.
Honey, her mother said. What a treat to hear from you.
Mom, she said. I just wanted to let you know that I moved. I don’t have a new number yet, though.
She waited, feeling the sunburn begin to prickle in her cheeks, but her mother said only, Is that so? absently. Ever since she’d been remarried, she’d had chronic idiopathic pain, treated, also chronically, with painkillers. She hadn’t remembered her daughter’s birthday for three years; she’d sent empty care packages more than once. One hot July day, when the girl had stared at her sickening bank balance at the ATM, she’d considered calling for help. But she’d known, somehow, that the envelope would also arrive empty.
Over the line, there was the sound of an engine drawing close, and her mother said, Oh! Your dad’s home. They both listened to the slam of the door and the heavy boots on the steps, and she thought but didn’t say, That man is not my dad.
Instead she said, Mom, I just want you to not worry if you don’t hear from me for a while. Okay? I’m all right, I promise.
All right, honey, her mother said, her voice already softer, anticipating her husband’s arrival. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.
As the girl walked back on the road, headlights spinning by in the dark, she said aloud, I’m doing exactly what you would do, and laughed, but it wasn’t very funny after all.
* * *
—
During the day, she lay in the sun for hours until she was so thirsty she had to fill her camping water bottle at the fish-washing hose again and again. In the rearview mirror, she watched her skin toast and her hair shift from honey to lemon. Her clothes flapped on her. She thought of the thousands of dollars she’d spent on highlights over the years: all tha
t anguish, all those diets, when all she needed to be pretty was laziness and some mild starvation! She ate cans of tuna and sleeves of crackers and drank an occasional coffee from the beach café for pep. Her money dwindled alarmingly. The scar on her hand turned a lovely silver in the sun, and she sometimes stroked it absently, signifier in lieu of signified, the scratch for the lost life.
At night, she lay in the back of the station wagon and read Middlemarch with a penlight until she fell asleep.
When she smelled too strong for salt water to rinse the stink away, she walked into the gym of a fancy beachside condo complex in her running clothes. She waited for someone to yell at her, but nobody was watching. The bathroom was empty, and the vanities held baskets with lotions, tiny soaps, disposable razors. She stood in the shower and let her summer of loneliness wash away. Even before her boyfriend left her for a first-year master’s student, she’d withdrawn into herself. Her funding hadn’t been renewed, and she’d had only her TA stipend, which was barely enough for her half of the rent, let alone groceries. There was no going out, even if she could have swallowed her shame to look her funded friends in the eye. The boyfriend had taken everything with him: their Sunday brunches, the etiquette book he had unsubtly given her one Christmas, the alarm clock that woke them ten minutes before six every day. He had been a stickler for the proper way to do things—hospital corners, weight lifting, taking notes—and he’d stolen her routine from her when he left. Worst of all, he’d taken his parents, who had welcomed her for four years of holidays in their generous stone house in Pennsylvania. For weeks, she had expected the mother, a soft-haired, hugging woman, to call her, but there was no call.
The door opened and voices flooded the bathroom, some aerobics class letting out. She turned to wash her face in the spray, suddenly shy. When she opened her eyes, the showers were full of naked middle-aged women laughing and soaping themselves. They wore diamond bands and their teeth shone and their bellies and thighs were larded by their easy lives.