This Wicked Tongue

by Elise Levine

  Leaving the restaurant at evening’s end she sprang a lengthy bear hug on Will, who of course dealt beautifully. She caught up his hands in hers and shook them. Welcome, she said. Welcome, Will. I know Martin loves you very much.

  How does she know? Martin instantly wondered. A rancid irritation writhed in him at her smugness. And welcome to what? he wondered later that night in the fancy hotel-room bed, he and Will swiping through photos of the evening on their phones. To what was she welcoming Will that she had a right to welcome him to? The so-called and much-abbreviated family?

  This one’s great, Will had said, stopping at a full-body image of Martin’s mother, holding it up so he could see. The photo caught at Martin’s throat. Couldn’t Will see it too? Her shapelessness as she stood aloof from the other guests. Her superior, estranging smile which she’d regained over the course of the evening. Her self sabotaging. Her resulting loneliness. Like Martin’s when he was growing up.

  He’d fixed that problem, though. Here he was with Will. Proof. Martin was not his mother. He’d made sure to not stand alone with her at the reception, to not look as if they were the odd couple out. To not stand alone period.

  There she is, Will said. The proud mom you’ve been hiding from me. What’s her story, anyway?

  You have no idea, Martin said, swiping faster.

  Will laughed. I don’t, he said, because you never tell me. From what I saw earlier tonight, she seemed nice. Maybe a little sad.

  Ha, Martin said and placed his phone on the nightstand. He turned off his bedside lamp and lay facing away. Only after a pause did he say, I’m sorry.

  Another pause and Will said, That’s a start.

  What is her story? Where to truly begin?

  Martin is in his mother’s storage unit—the existence of which she confessed to Will during his visit with her, when she also magically bestowed the key to the unit upon him. The unit is in Blue Island, a working-class, industrial South Side Chicago neighbourhood Martin can’t imagine his mother ever visiting. He sped here in his rental direct from Midway, having decided he’d deal later with the enigma that is his mother. Deal IRL or from the safety of Atlanta? he’d decided to decide later, despite what he’d told Will.

  And what’s with all this shit in here? Layers of totes, cardboard and plastic, and giant overstuffed trash bags that obscure the cement floor and stack up against the corrugated walls.

  Some of the stuff is Martin’s. He’s surprised at his relief and also sickened by it. He wants to not feel a thing as he rips the tops of boxes stuffed with ‘reflections’ and ‘research papers’ he wrote in grade school and digs through old photos of himself as a miserable big-boy posed awkwardly on a rock at Promontory Point. The boy’s expression says, I’d rather be at my computer, among my ribbons and trophies from science fairs—which Martin now also locates. Plus a pair of polka-dotted swim trunks he can’t recall ever sporting and a few XL tees he unfortunately does remember wearing and then immediately regrets feeling badly about. When will his self-fat-shaming end and he can begin to love his formerly ample self? One of the never-ending questions. More work to do, he thinks wearily, and sifts through brown-paper bags of his old National Gs, Scientific American. Hard fucking work—he can feel the dirty nails grub through his skull as the stinker viciously grasps at Martin’s adult brain. If he could somehow seize the monstrous wretch and uproot him, would that boy—the unhappy flesh self—finally die? Die, Martin says aloud. Loudly? He just knows he yearns to kill the fucker, to just kill. Die, I’m begging you, Martin says for good measure.

  He heaves a sigh. Off to a great start with the self love, he thinks. And what would Will, generous as he is, think of such internal violence toward this child Martin once was? Would Will still want Martin to sign on as co-parent, trust him to love another child? Would Will want Martin period? Could Martin trust himself as parent?

  He staggers through more piles of lost, dubious treasures. Against all un-hoping he uncovers stacks of his mother’s belongings. Unopened packs of Post-its. Clothing still in plastic wrapping, never worn. In a folded suit bag, the cream-coloured get-up she donned for his wedding. He fears the easement garbage is here too, squirreled in these blimp-like garbage bags. Proof of something only she can name or maybe can’t, maybe never could—as if the bags might contain her secrets. Which are non-secrets. Symptoms of a decrepit, corrupted code, and hope to fuck it’s not one he shares. A treacherous cache at the heart of the secret map stored in his own cracked cells.

  Such as—paranoia, early dementia. A rotten, causative solitude.

  How early, how far back did it go—might it go—before clearly manifesting?

  For here there be monsters, Martin thinks, struggling for breath. For fucking real.

  He can’t find his old posters.

  Now something assumes mass and throbs inside him. He struggles, does he ever. DUMB FUCK, Martin thinks, wiping sweat from his brow with a wadded tissue from his pants pocket. LET GO NOW.

  He gingerly prods at his first pair of ice skates.

  The yellowed-now kippa from his bar mitzvah, which he refused to allow the deadbeat to attend—the dad who’d proposed performing blues versions of Leonard Cohen songs during the service.

  A hand-bound writing journal lovely with a repeating pattern of pomegranates on the cover. The cream-coloured inner pages are a thick, superior stock. Italia is embossed on the back cover. A memento, Martin guesses, of the time his mother once spent alone in Venice, away from an already wandering husband and endless arguments in a cramped apartment. Her one overseas trip, a splash-out before she started med school. Not alone—she was pregnant with Martin. When he was young she liked to talk about which churches she’d visited, the Jewish ghetto, the ducal palace. Dainty women in exquisite knits. How she found traces of her and Martin’s distant ancestors after searching the ancient registers in the splendid Venetian municipal offices—how hot it was there amid the dust and declining light of late afternoon. The cool silence. The abiding waters of the canals on her solitary strolls back to her cheap hotel room.

  She’d never gone anywhere after that trip. Too busy studying and then practicing medicine. Scrimping and raising Martin.

  He flips the pages of the journal. All blank.

  He lies down. Floating atop the sea of trash bags, the back of his neck itching from the plastic, he senses bumps and bulges clamoring distantly beneath him.

  DUMB FUCK, he thinks. Maybe the story is love.

  In six months, a year—however long—he’ll move his mother to a nice nursing home here in Chicago. Round the clock care as needed. He and Will can afford it. Much better than moving her to Atlanta, into the house where she might mess up the baby. Maybe the baby.

  Martin finishes up. Homeward fucking bound. Time to own it. Head-on face the fight of his dumb-luck life.

  Alice in the Field

  After, we exited the mountain. Fog grizzled the road. The tins on our backs clapped. Semi-blind we bore it all and at the bend we slowed then crossed the river. On its far bank, Pretty and Pitou straightened their skirts. Pretty had lost her shoes.

  We rested, ate. First swallow, last swallow—nothing in between. A2 was there, still with us. A too. Together we bowed.

  How convey such love?

  I stood and smoothed my own skirt. I rummaged in my sack. Observed to myself that my instrument needed polishing.

  We moved on.

  That night we lit a fire and toasted Pretty’s tattered right foot.

  Even now these tastes come and go like glimpses of a place where peoples parade in furs. Their boat decks are broad. Oars narrow, with blades fine as the facets of a diamond engineered without lust or greed.

  All this is maintained in the literature.

  What is not, is what follows.

  We wept and laughed. We heaped kindling and blankets and precious warm clothes and bonfired under s
tars. M and A thumped stumps. We cooed. Days we traveled forests reserving tears like tar—for Small Dolly nailed to a charred oak, large Dolly spiked on a scorched pine. Stoned flat on a narrow pass, Dolly In-Between.

  A Great Lake later, we roasted M’s heart.

  The day came when I alone straightened my skirt.

  Next, the next mountain.

  On a rare bluebell morning I returned alone to the valley. Stopped to rest by a low rock wall. Had lost my own shoes. Dug in my sack. My instrument required outright replacing.

  I rose and resumed my walk, led by faint then louder sounds of piping, timbrels. Soon I attained a cold green meadow. Youthful limbs tangled in sinuous dance. Clusters of long-breasted grey heads chatted. Sparse-beards poked forefingers to ears and grinned at the clear sky.

  Bitterness swept my blood. I shook out my uncut hair. I shut my eyes the better to see.

  Snakes, I shouted. Stones that glow and stinging crawlers. Fine houses once patrolled by peacocks now vermin-run.

  The music skittled to a halt. I farted and took the opportunity to cheat a glance. Of all I’ve seen, nothing has ever scared me so much.

  I skirted a path that led to the village and in the village I found a church. That’s where I stole the car.

  I drove, dread in me like a wrinkled balloon. Wednesday Seventh Month. Friday Year Ten. I can report gas stations closed. Brisk trades in underpasses. More mountains filled with fog. Too dangerous to stop. To miss you all like crazy.

  Sallowday Eighth. This snow. This wind.

  I met Rose. Where. Swooped out of nowhere on a steep curve. Leave it at that. Hailed from the Six Cavalcades whereas the Various Eastnesses begat me. Rose. We camped in abandoned mansions. We pushed memories of cake between each other’s sharp teeth.

  Rose.

  We also talked. I missed Pretty and A and A2 and the others as well and the missing was a gear grinding in my throat.

  Yes, Rose would respond, folding her long skinny arms around herself, soft mouth curved like a beak. Oh yes. Mother’s rape occurred on a train. Old St. John to Near Halifax, crossing the river valley. Years later, in a hospital in Lower Montreal, dying, my mother stretched her arms, reaching repeatedly in the air, thinking she was back on that train.

  Dear Rose.

  I know, she’d say, and crush my hand in hers. That fucking train.

  And so the time came when I left Rose or she left me—no brainers. Always the fog. Always such snow. Until—solo again—I came down from the passes to a rotting village and breasts bound fathered twin dogs. Smoke and Smoke. They passed. And I in silence passed of a sort too.

  Ninth Moonist Year. Found a horse, rode hard, call me lucky. On the high plains, where nineteen types of grasses rippled in the ninety winds, what was in my heart cried, but my mouth slept. I took Farther North. Spring came late then later. I moved into a crumbling apartment complex on the outskirts of a brand-spanking empty airport god-huge for what reasons I couldn’t, just couldn’t. I wandered the ancient buildings. I fixed the leaking pipes. I maintained the cranky boilers. Pushed mop and broom and pinched filters from cigarettes. Nights, Rose floated through my locked apartment door, locked bedroom door, bathroom door, exposing her grin and slow tremble—in this way I knew the even worse.

  She was paler now of course. Under-bite more pronounced. Her, not-her. Wouldn’t show those strong hands, kept them behind her skinny back.

  The Ten Longest Months over, I stood outside the complex in a fair rain. I’d washed and ironed my skirt. Donned a cape of blanket and plastic sheeting.

  For a few seconds, in grey sequins that matched the mist, M and Pitou paraded across the vacant lot adjacent my building. They vanished with no trace.

  Rose joined by A2 and Pretty flickered at my old apartment window.

  I left before they went out.

  Peoples with shivering scales for lips and a scorpion-spider bucked onto the page of a book a daughter reads on the back deck of her house in New Richmond. A green sky stretches around her and turns tangerine.

  Someone’s mother’s beloved Montserrat under ash.

  Someone’s mother’s fox-thrice-played-with in the weeds blooming by a house on a hill in Old-Timey Rothesay. River town, river smell.

  Silent forms.

  Equatorial nights bring Ophiuchus, Serpentarius, Aesclepius the healer, the thirteenth, exile.

  I arrive. At long last. Snow falls in the mountains, Argentina.

  For you, darlings, were loveliest of them all.

  Acknowledgements

  These stories appeared, in often different form, in the following: “Money’s Honey” in The New Quarterly; “The Riddles of Aramaic” in The Malahat Review; “Armada” in Sententia, 16: Best Canadian Stories, and in very different form in the novel Blue Field; “Made Right Here” in The Gettysburg Review; “All We Did” in Gargoyle; “Public Storage Available Now” in PANK; “This Wicked Tongue” in The Walrus; “Princess Gates” in Bateau; “Alice in the Field,” a finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2018, in The Collagist.

  Many thanks to Jessica Johnson, Mark Drew, Richard Peabody, Jen Michalski, John Barton, and Gabriel Blackwell. My profound gratitude to John Metcalf, keeper of the faith. Thank you as well to Dan Wells, Vanessa Stauffer, Casey Plett, Chris Andrechek. Thanks and love to David Smooke and Michael Kimball, to Joel Levine, and to Susie Brandt, Regina DeLuise, Katherine Kavanaugh, Tom Livingston, Sherrie Flick.

  I’m grateful as well to Cyndy Hayward and the Willapa Bay AiR for providing time and space during which some of these stories were written.

  Elise Levine is the author of two novels, Blue Field and Requests and Dedications, and the story collection Driving Men Mad. Her work has also appeared in Ploughshares, The Gettysburg Review, The Collagist, Blackbird, Best Canadian Stories, and the Journey Prize Anthology, among other publications, and was named a finalist for The Best Small Fictions 2018. She has taught creative writing at Johns Hopkins University and American University, and lives in Baltimore, MD.

  Copyright © Elise Levine, 2019

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright license visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

  first edition

  Levine, Elise, author

  This wicked tongue / Elise Levine.

  Short stories.

  Issued in print and electronic formats.

  ISBN 978-1-77196-279-7 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-77196-280-3 (ebook)

  I. Title.

  PS8573.E9647T55 2019 C813’.54 C2018-904446-2

  C2018-904447-0

  Edited by John Metcalf

  Copy-edited by James Grainger

  Typeset by Chris Andrechek

  Cover designed by Natalie Olsen

  Published with the generous assistance of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the financial support of the Government of Canada. Biblioasis also acknowledges the support of the Ontario Arts Council (OAC), an agency of the Government of Ontario, which last year funded 1,709 individual artists and 1,078 organizations in 204 communities across Ontario, for a total of $52.1 million, and the contribution of the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation.

 

 

 
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