Little Bandaged Days

by Kyra Wilder

  Maybe, I screamed at them, the last time, in their offices, before I left, when they were telling me again and again, with their pens poised just above their notebooks, what it is that I need to talk to them about. Maybe I am already talking about those things, I screamed, Maybe I’m talking about those things all the time.

  10

  We had to go to the shops then, for the baby gift. The nice ones on Rue de Rive. Afterwards I could check on M’s suits at the dry cleaners. I wanted to go to the park. I wanted to look for Nell. I filled containers with sliced cucumbers, tomatoes, a bottle of water, diapers and outfit changes, thousands of small packages each with their own lid snapped tight against all possible disasters.

  I was in a hurry, for once, to leave, so I pulled the long coat from M over my stained saggy shirt, so thin and colourless as to be almost nothing, and pulled the beautiful camel-coloured lapels up close to my neck. Under the coat I could have been anyone. Anything. An elegant lady with a silk lace bra hugging her ribs, a jackal with a woman’s face, anything at all.

  E had dressed herself, as usual. I felt monstrous but out we went. I was tired today in a way that made my face feel strange, peeled open almost. The coat was too heavy and wrapped up inside it, I immediately began to sweat. E ran toward the tram stop and I called for her to stopstopstop, but she skipped ahead without turning back.

  The boutiques were sprinkled up and down the beautiful old street. E and B and I began ducking in and out of them looking for a gift, me practising the way one should smile on entering, on leaving. The little curl up at the corners of the mouth. Not too much, just a bit. Bonjour I would say when someone said bonjour to me.

  In one of the shops, E and I and B in his stroller found a small table on which baby things were displayed. Fat-bottomed baby pants, white bonnets, everything plush, everything tiny. Wooden animals painted in soft colours, their noses sanded down, their teeth blunted, made delightful. Rattles filled with wooden beads tuned to sound like spring rain. Everything was expensive. I picked out a set of small white cloth squares tied with linen and a wooden elephant with an upcurled trunk. Then I drifted over to another part of the store to solve the problem of wrapping everything up.

  I could feel E tugging at my coat, pulling me over to look at something or other that had caught her eye. But if I could only find the correct paper, the right ribbon, I would resolve this for myself. I was doing something that needed to be done. I gazed at the ribbons for a long time, the mounds of smooth coils, my eyes floating over the blues and greens, the pinks were numerous but none of them right. One was too soft, another too brash, needy: all elbows. The wrapping papers, displayed half unrolled, fluttered like eyelids or butterfly wings.

  E, it seemed, had run off. I called her name, but without lifting my eyes from the tissue paper, the ribbons. Images of large hands finding hers and leading her away, out of the store, a pink tuft disappearing around the corner and out the door flew across my mind. But still, that was nonsense, and I was busy doing this. B was sleeping in his bassinet and I should continue doing this necessary and important thing. I should for once not let myself succumb to everyday hysteria, to the thoughts of disaster that pressed themselves up against me, up against my face.

  Next to the ribbons and papers the shop ladies were arranging silk wraps in a display. The wraps kept escaping their hangers and sliding to the ground, as if they were alive, as if they could run away from the ladies who were trying to hang them. E, I called out, but softly, so as not to disturb the quiet shop. E didn’t answer. The ladies continued to try to arrange the wraps. One, a beautiful blue-grey wrap, embroidered with cranes, the birds all wide wings, necks turned upwards, a flash of red at the throat, fell at my feet.

  I felt I really had lost E. I couldn’t see her, but the cool silk pooled at my feet like a pond hidden in the forest, touching my bare ankle, inviting me in. E, I called softly. E, where are you? But my eyes were on the silk, not quite blue, not quite grey, a colour completely lost within itself. The cranes stared up at me with their crooked necks. I bent down to pick it up. B squirmed in his stroller, buried in a nest of pink ribbons I hadn’t realized I’d taken, his hands coiled in them, fighting. The ribbons dangerous as snakes, my baby, buried in a nest of flicking tongues.

  But I continued to run my hands through the silk. The shop ladies, seeing me, laid aside the other wraps, letting them slide to the floor like so many sighs. They turned to me, their eyes newly bright. They smiled at me with their painted jewel lips. I flipped over the price tag, the number made me sick, but I smiled back at the ladies. I could smile too, like them, in my beautiful coat. I took a step towards the register, leaving B, leaving all the ribbons, leaving the baby gift in the bottom of the stroller. I took a step as if I were a crane stretching out my long wings, my feet about to leave the cold surface of the pond.

  There was a commotion behind me. A voice boomed, loud and insistent. I turned to find a large carelessly dressed woman holding E by the hand. I’m looking for her mother, the woman was saying, or something like that. She was out on the street, a child out alone on the street! She was speaking French, but she could have been saying that. I let the silk wrap slide from my fingers onto the cool black expanse of a table and went to gather my daughter up in my arms. The woman glared at me, the shop ladies had lost their pretty smiles. I quickly bought the baby’s present and one of the pink ribbons and left.

  We played in the hot park all afternoon and E managed to get a sunburn despite my attentions. Nell didn’t come. Perhaps she would never come back. Perhaps that man had killed her.

  That night in bed with B it felt as if aphids were crawling under my skin. Beading there. My heart buzzed under the sheets like a hive, choked by veins, by blood fighting its way out of my chest. I couldn’t sleep. B was awake every hour, hungry, or too hot, or dreaming bad baby dreams.

  It seemed that our two bodies were never not touching, would never not be. He was so hot in the hot apartment. I wanted to oil the floor in the guest room but he would not be put down, his small body burrowed next to mine. One moment he was like a soft-eared lion cub and the next he was like those blind maggots that seek out gangrenous wounds. I could never be sure in any minute which he would be, which I would. When he finally slept I slipped him into the crib and collapsed by the door of the guest room without opening it, without even raising my hand to the handle, and imagined that if I did open it, there would be a quiet ocean waiting inside with water salty enough to strip away everything that was unwanted from my skin.

  I had begun to realize, or, really, to feel that there was something with me in the apartment. There was something that had slipped in somehow, through the locked door or through the window. The apartment was shifting I felt, turning, rolling over, opening up its arms, welcoming this thing that was not a person. Not M. This thing that was something slippery, something that smelled like dirt.

  Maybe I was all wrong though, maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was just my phone, lost somewhere, buzzing, keeping me half awake. Maybe M was calling me. Maybe he was calling me often.

  It was so dark and so quiet. I could hear B breathing in his crib.

  There was a change in the air inside the apartment. I felt it and then I felt that there was almost surely something in the apartment with me, slipping, keeping just in the corners of my eyes, one moment too light, like the shadow of a child, the next too heavy, a toad, a slimy thing burping out an underground musk. I became very still where I was on the floor pushed up against the door of the guest room. Would I get up? Would I run, now, right now when it was important? When it was important to my children? Would I save them? With this wrong thing sneaking in the dark? Surely I would.

  I waited and waited. What I’m trying to tell you is that I waited such a long time to find out if I would, if I would save them I mean. I passed through the whole night like this, crouching, waiting, watching myself to see what I would do.

  There must have been a part of the night that passed without me
realizing, because the next thing I knew, it was morning and I was waking up. I was pressed against the door of the guest room with my neck and shoulders horribly cramped, almost unmovable. I was waking up and it was morning and, well, I could feel that the thing was over. Whatever it had been. It was over, poof and gone like dust and I could stand and stretch and run my fingers through my hair. Hah! I could say. Hah! It was like standing on the top of a mountain, me saying it, the words all bold and free on my lips.

  B woke up and was hungry. E woke up and was hungry. There were red marks on their faces and arms, a heat rash or kisses. We were out of yogurt. I got them ready and we all stumbled to the little store, half in our pyjamas and half out.

  We filled our basket with warm croissants and almonds and milk from Gruyères, just because we could fill our basket with things like that. E found a package of lace-like cheese cut fine and curled in on itself, arranged behind its plastic window to look like flowers. We bought that too even though it was six francs because we were lucky and happy and when the checkout girl asked me if I’d found everything I was looking for, I nodded and said, Oui, merci, because we had. And also because miraculously, I’d understood what she’d said to me. Then she touched the side of her face and said something I didn’t understand, so I only smiled and said have a good day with my best words and my careful accent, Bonne journée, I said, like that, and took the plastic handles of the bag and left.

  We ate breakfast by the pump. We ate yogurt with our fingers and uncurled the little cheese flowers with our teeth. We tore up the croissants and watched all the hot little pieces fall to the ground. We could behave like this, like wolves, because we had the whole place to ourselves.

  I let B nap in the grass beside the pump. I let E cover up my feet with handfuls of sand a hundred times and when she looked up and said, Ready, I held my face and moaned. Oh my god, I said a hundred times. Oh my god where have my feet gone. Then E would find them for me, scraping away the sand from my toes and I hugged her, a hundred times. Oh I was so worried, I said a hundred times. I thought I’d lost them. Other women began showing up at the park mid-morning with their children, their strollers, their tiny buckets and shovels. I thought we should go back and get dressed but I also thought, a quick flash that wasn’t even really a thought, we should not go back, we should not go back to the apartment. We should not go back to that place. Besides, B was still asleep and E was saying please stay, please please stay. Sometimes being a good mother was just staying right where you were. So I leaned back into the pump and we played the game with my feet again and again and again. Some mornings could be like this if you let them.

  Later, Nell came to the park. She walked right past me, close enough that I could smell her perfume. She opened her blanket and laid it out on the grass beside B, unwrapped the baby and put him down on it. I watched her carefully because I wanted to make sure that she was all right. I checked her arms for bruises, things like that, but there was nothing. She was humming some song to her baby, the older boy was already playing at the pump. Looking for him, her eyes caught on me and widened for a moment and she touched her cheek.

  She was going to say something to me. She was going to say something to me and after all this time we were going to be friends, we were going to help each other easily. Can you? I’d say, reaching for something, and she would be able to reach it and hand it to me. The baby cried and Nell turned to him, whispering something in his ear. She turned back to me and touched her face, and the look in her eyes then was distant and a little afraid.

  It was time to go. I stood up, not wanting anymore to linger, to be looked at. I collected E, crying now that we had to leave, tugging on my arm, really pulling me, and B who had been beginning to cry already, and we left the park. I regretted that we’d been there, put ourselves outside of the apartment to be seen and watched and spoken to.

  Back inside the apartment I went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror. The side of my face was covered in a dark spreading bruise. Purple black and yellow, swollen even, with veins spidering out, blood running away, or to it, depending.

  There were small bruises on my left arm below the elbow. Like the shadows of blackberries, I thought. Like there is a vine growing inside my arm and the fruit is finally ready to come out. But of course, of course, I knew these marks were fingerprints, long oval fingerprints. Of course also, I knew that my arm must look exactly like Nell’s arm had, after that man, her man, had grabbed her in the park. I hadn’t felt a thing all day, but now looking in the mirror, my fingers touching my cheek just as Nell had touched her own, just as, I now realized, the checkout girl at the store had touched hers, I could feel how my cheek was. I could feel the bruise now, pulsing under my fingertips as if it were a thing complete with its own heart.

  E was calling me. Calling me and calling me and calling me. I ran out of the bathroom. She was standing in the hallway holding lemons. The baby giraffe was thirsty, wanted lemonade. Could I make it? Her voice was fuzzy, far away, I could hardly hear it. I pressed my hands to my chest and calmed myself down. Overreactions were common enough, the point was to remain quiet about them.

  I walked to the kitchen and made lemonade, cups and cups and cups of it, mashing the lemons down onto the rental-company citrus squeezer until the little reservoir underneath was overflowing with juice and seeds and the counter was covered with lemon rinds, cracked open like sticky yellow egg shells. It was so hot. All the windows were closed tight but the flies still found a way in, buzzing around me the moment I tried to sit down or close my eyes. They walked all over everything. They touched us all over with their dancing feet. We could feel them all the time on our skin.

  E and I played Amazon jungle with the baby giraffe. We pretended the raft would only take two of us, that there were red-bellied piranhas in the water, night on its way and all sorts of other terrible things. A decision would have to be made or none of us would make it out alive. The raft was simply not sufficient. E smiled her wicked smile, and hugged me tight.

  More and More February

  Can I tell you about my mother’s Christmas parties? Would you stay so I can tell you? It’s just so grey out today and I’m all alone and it feels like I’m tied up and drowning in this gown. Like a fish caught in a net. And I suppose that makes them, and you too really, trawlers doesn’t it? Where are you pulling all of us fish I wonder?

  Really though. Would you stay? Just a bit longer. What if I kicked over my water glass? Would you stay then? To clean it up? Oh, that was horrible of me to say. Really, I’m sorry. I feel that we’re much more than that to each other. Much more than kicking feet and cleaning hands. I hope I can be more than that. Please stay. For just a moment. She’s at treatment now, the woman in the bed under the window, so it’s just the two of us.

  Just the two of us girls. Someone might say that about us, if they peeked in. Oh, they might say, it’s just the two of you girls.

  Would you listen? Mother gave the most wonderful Christmas parties. All the neighbours came. It was as if the house became a paper lantern, I always thought of it like that, in December. One of those lanterns with a candle inside that gets released up into the sky. It was all that perfect and that delicate. Nothing could be touched inside the house in December, while Mother got it ready for the party. The mantel was set with white cotton and decorated with Santa and his reindeer. The table was covered over with the best white tablecloth from Paris and set, the week before the party, with the nutcracker plates and fresh pine boughs and red poinsettias and, in the middle, the red and gold punch bowl from Hermès. Mother always said it just like that. A bit breathlessly. Hermès. She would lift her right hand to touch just here, just under her throat, when she said it. I don’t know if she knew that she did that. The punch bowl from Hermès. She would say it just like that. I want you to hear her saying it. Her voice, her breathlessness. It feels so important for you to understand.

  My favourites though were the little houses that Mother set out along the windo
wsill. The Christmas village. One house with red shutters, one with green, one with blue and all with white painted snow and perfect lines of icicles just under the little roofs. There was a bakery too, with painted cakes in the window and an ice-skating pond where little ceramic children wearing tiny ceramic skates were glued to a track. At the flick of a switch the houses would light up with real electric lights and the tiny children would loop and loop and loop around the same track for ever, as long as anyone wanted them to.

  What I mean to say was, inside December, inside my house, inside the party, there was a switch. A switch that could be turned on, and it was magical and wonderful and real. As real as plugs and electricity and engineering. At the party, Daddy would be home all day and my mother would wear a new dress and they would even dance, just a moment but laughing. If the right song came on late in the afternoon. I remember his hand on her back, guiding her around the living room in circles, like the ice-skating children. I remember all the smiling. The punch. Parties can be like that, can’t they? A place where anything is possible.

  Mother didn’t keep the punch bowl after Daddy left. It’s possible that she broke it. It’s possible that she picked it up and smashed it on the driveway at night. On the night after the last party. After all the guests had left, after he was leaving. I just have to go, he said. I have to go I have to go I have to go. I can’t do this anymore. It’s possible that she followed him, in her dress, in her dress that she had danced in, in the dress that was possibly still warm in the place on her back where he had put his hand when they were dancing, down the steps from the front door carrying the huge red bowl sloshing with the last of the punch, sloshing up onto her dress in dark red waves. A wine-dark sea so small you could miss it, if you weren’t watching it with your nose pressed up to the window. So small and furious. It would have been quite possible to miss the way the punch sloshed up onto the dress and stained the dress’s red a redder red and made it so that you could see the soft indent of her belly button through the silk. It’s possible that she raised the punch bowl up over her head and threw it at his car as he pulled out of the driveway and it’s possible that it all smashed on the drive. The sea, the punch bowl from Hermès. And if it really had been a sea, inside the bowl, all the men on all the boats would have been instantly killed. Can you see it? The wreckage of all those little boats?