Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

by Kristin Bair

  But she looked. Of course she looked. She always looked. All the Moms look. It’s what they do.

  Happy?

  They look.

  Lonely?

  They look.

  Sad?

  Look.

  Hungry?

  Look.

  Jealous?

  Look.

  Vengeful?

  Look.

  Bored?

  Look.

  Look, look, look, look, look, look, look.

  Agatha stared at the new post. It was a photo of her shed. Now just a pile of broken sticks with tools and ride-on vehicles poking up here and there. A swatch of aquamarine fabric glinted in the corner. “Uh oh,” the post said. She looked at the poster’s name. Kerry Sheridan, aka her neighbor with the red mulch and shit-brown lawn. She looked up and spied Kerry cowering behind the hydrangea bushes their boys always used as a fort. Kerry’s two and Agatha’s two. The four musketeers. Comments flooded in.

  Rachel Runk:

  “Uh oh is right! Who’s shed is/was that?”

  Kerry Sheridan:

  “Agatha Arch’s.”

  phyliss-with-one-l-and-two-esses:

  “agatha arch’s?”

  Agatha Arch:

  “PHYLLIS, STOP WHISPERING IN ALL LOWERCASE LETTERS. YES, IT WAS MY SHED.”

  The splinter embedded in the tip of her thumb made typing a slow, agonizing task, but Agatha had to respond. She couldn’t let such nonsense slide.

  phyliss-with-one-l-and-two-esses:

  “agatha, that’s phyliss with one 1 and two esses. you know that.”

  Agatha Arch:

  “It’s also Phyliss with a capital P.”

  Rachel Runk:

  “Forget that. Who destroyed the shed?”

  Kerry Sheridan:

  “Agatha Arch.”

  Kerry’s smug satisfaction at being able to share this gold nugget of information dripped from Agatha’s phone as nearly seventy-five Moms responded exactly alike in what Agatha calls the “stink bug syndrome.” It went like this:

  Priya Devi:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Meena Johnson:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Quynh Nguyen:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Bridget Weller:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Candice Anderson:

  “AGATHA ARCH?”

  Emily Patterson:

  “Our Agatha Arch?”

  Kimberly Stanton:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Grainne O’Neill:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Mary Devlin:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Holly McCarthy:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  David Watkins:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Susan Snow:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Ava Newton:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Olivia Charles:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Mila Janssen:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Tiana Samuels:

  “AGATHA ARCH? THE AGATHA ARCH?”

  Brigid Egan:

  “Agatha ARCH?”

  Lin Zheng:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Isabelle Fish:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Erin Abel:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  Abby Smith:

  “Agatha Arch?”

  This would have gone on for many more minutes had Kerry not butted in and said, “Yes, ladies, Agatha Arch. The one and only Agatha Arch.”

  Agatha Arch:

  “I’m right here, Kerry. I can answer for myself.”

  Rachel Runk:

  “Why did she destroy her own shed?”

  Agatha Arch:

  “I said I’m right here!”

  Rachel Runk:

  “OK, Agatha, why did YOU destroy your own shed?”

  Agatha paused, flagging slightly under the pressure of the 2,690 member Moms (and odd dads and guardians) waiting for her answer. Two thousand six hundred ninety Moms staring at their phones in line at Target, between sips of iced lattes at Starbucks, on treadmills at the gym, on conference calls in their offices, driving to work, blending kale smoothies, watching their little ones eat sand at the park. This was the kind of moment the Moms lived for. Better even than the big moment at a gender reveal party.

  Agatha Arch:

  “My husband screwed the dog walker in that shed today. I destroyed it.”

  Rachel Runk:

  “With what? An ax?”

  Agatha Arch:

  “Close. A hatchet.”

  High Priestess Jane Poston:

  “Holy shit.”

  Kumbaya Queen Melody Whelan:

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  Agatha clicked out. She and the High Priestess didn’t occupy the same space very well. Ever. And pity from the Kumbaya Queen? That was the last thing she needed.

  * * *

  When Kerry Sheridan popped out from behind the hydrangeas for a follow-up photo, Agatha shot her the bird. Just above the tip of her middle finger, the daytime moon hung in the sky. It was the boys’ favorite celestial phenomenon. Always there but not always visible. “Like you, Mom,” Jason often tells her, “when we’re at school or baseball.”

  Agatha lay belly down on the porch and rested her cheek on the boards, convinced that if she stayed in this insanely uncomfortable position until her bones ached, Dax and the boys would pull up in the minivan, she would wake from this nightmare, and life as she knew and loved it would resume. The brain is capable of such trickery.

  But then the sun dropped behind Kerry Sheridan’s historic Federal, and Agatha got a text. “Mom, it’s us. Dad says we’re staying at this hotel 2night. U OK? We love u. Weird & scary.”

  Agatha’s heart sank with the sun. This day was not just a bad nightmare. Her husband had screwed the dog walker in their shed. She really had destroyed the shed with a hatchet. The Moms already knew, so, really, the whole world knew. Her sons were not coming home that night.

  “All OK, J&D,” she typed without lifting her head from the planks, thumbs stinging. “Don’t be scared. Have fun in the hotel with your dad. A little vacation. I’ll see you soon. Remember, daytime moon.”

  A text came back. “OK. Can you bring our swimsuits? Dad forgot them.”

  Even in the midst of such calamity, Agatha chuckled. Leave it to kids. Them first, no matter what.

  Minutes later, Susan Sontag scuttled out from under the porch for her nightly rendezvous with Jerry Garcia, her shaggy beau from Kerry Sheridan’s yard. When the motion light clicked on, Susan turned, spotted Agatha in the shadows, and jumped with surprise. Then she lifted her tail and sprayed, proving that even the crappiest of crappy days can get crappier.

  Agatha groaned but didn’t move. She had zero left. Zero energy. Zero pride. Zero huzzah. Zero urge to fight. Zero everything. Zero anything. As the cloud of skunk stink burrowed into her hair and clothes, headlights rounded the bend and paused near the bottom of her driveway. Her heart jolted. “Dax! Dax!” Maybe! Maybe?

  But no. Not Dax. Lights too low to the ground, too golden, too bright.

  The car crawled past the house. The first in a long line of looky-loos.

  If Agatha were not Agatha—if she were Michelle or maybe Tanya or Katherine … geesh, even if she were a different Agatha—then a cavalry of friends might have arrived at that very moment. They would have galloped in on stallions, surrounded her, drawn swords to protect her, and shot poisoned arrows at Dax. They would have lifted her to the sky, pulled splinters from her hands, and tended her wounds.

  But Agatha is Agatha. She is not good at friends. She has no cavalry in good times or bad.

  If I did, she thought, they would not be called a cavalry. Too militant. Too male.

  Just before drifting off to sleep, a mosquito bit her forearm. The final insult. The last screw-you of the day. When the itch began, Agatha didn’t even attempt to scratch it. She just lay
there. Belly down on the porch. Perfectly imperfectly still. And she stayed this way until morning. A teary, stinky, itchy, aching, creased, cantaloupe-assed mess of mad and sad.

  * * *

  And now, a new day. Big-ass latte in hand, Agatha circles the remains of the shed and considers her favorite collective nouns:

  dazzle (zebras)

  quiver (cobras)

  tower (giraffes)

  prickle (porcupines)

  crash (rhinoceroses)

  mob (kangaroos)

  shrewdness (apes)

  maelstrom (salamanders)

  murmuration (starlings)

  rafter (turkeys)

  wing (plovers)

  knot (frogs)

  descent (woodpeckers)

  Each is clever, but her favorite is the first. A dazzle of zebras.

  But friends? A collective noun for friends? If she had them …

  Maybe a flicker.

  A flash.

  A quiver.

  A clementine.

  A zephyr.

  So many possibilities. She can dream.

  Chapter Three

  By midafternoon, hordes of cars are inching past Agatha’s house. Crawling as if they are stuck in looky-loo speed. Escalades, Humvees, Highlanders, and Mini Coopers line up behind three Teslas, an RV, and Wallingford’s passionate gaggle of Subarus. A few shiny Mercedes join the parade, then the Range Rovers, the BMWs, and all the rest. Even Wallingford’s favorite cupcake van does a lap. Everyone wants a glimpse of the shed. Or what’s left of it.

  Sitting on the porch, Agatha likens the procession to the crush of people who charge past the Mona Lisa every day. On their honeymoon in Paris, Dax had insisted they do the same. Agatha had not been impressed. “Who needs to stand in line for three hours to see another wry woman not speaking her mind?” she’d said.

  But the shed. The shed in the late afternoon light. The golden light. The light in which all the best movie scenes are filmed. Now that is something to see. Hard evidence that women have the strength and the voice and—damn right—the skill and willingness to handle a hatchet.

  As they pass, Moms lean out of their windows and snap photos with their phones. They wave to one another, call out, and beep beep beep. Jane Poston—who else?—introduces a new thread on the Moms page: The Shed on Sutton Circle. What better way to get back at Agatha for one of the many insults she’s hurled at Jane and her cohorts throughout the years? For her annual carol, “The 12 Days of the Wallingford Moms”?

  What goes around comes around.

  * * *

  As the Moms stream past, Agatha soaks her swollen toe in a shallow basin and thinks about water, then swimming, then drowning, because this is the kind of human she can be, the kind who leaps from the mundane to the maudlin in seconds, the kind we all can be in our worst moments. She glances at the potted tomato plant at her side. “It’s like that quarry I swam in during my first weekend in college,” she tells it. She is also the kind of person who converses with plants when no other options exist. Sometimes even when they do. She remembers leaping into the greenish limestone water feeling brave and daring because all the other freshmen were lingering on the rocks, staring fearfully into the quarry. When she’d been accepted into college a few months before, she’d decided to let go of the fears that had nibbled at her through high school. “Go brave” was her new motto, and shouting that very thing while cannonballing into the quarry with an impressive splash symbolized the new Agatha.

  She paddled around in her red-and-white-striped bikini flaunting her courage and breasts and calling out “Hey, come on in!” to potential friends. “Don’t be chicken!” She felt intrepid and vulnerable. It was a new and welcome feeling.

  It wasn’t until she swam smack into the rotting carcass of the cow that she realized why her potential friends were not joining her and what they’d been staring at so fearfully. She back-paddled as fast as she could, but the rotting cow followed in her wake. Its eyes were gone. Its tongue nearly so. The hide on its hindquarters was flaking off like filigree.

  As the squeals and laughter of her classmates echoed off the quarry walls, one boy offered a hand and helped her scramble to the rocks.

  “I’m Dax,” he said.

  “Agatha,” she whispered, trying not to look at the bits of cowhide stuck to her swimsuit.

  “That was brave,” he said.

  “That was stupid,” she said. “Never again.”

  * * *

  A woman wearing a daisy-covered dress hops from her Lexus, jogs fifty yards into Agatha’s yard, and takes a selfie with the remains of the shed. When the photo shows up on the Moms thread, Agatha admits it’s a good one. The white daisies and gleaming teeth complement the splintered wood. She thinks again about the quarry and likens the Moms group to that poisoned pool and herself to the rotting cow. In that moment, she’s quite sure the group had been just fine before she showed up. A harmonious, supportive clan of generous women.

  “I am the rotting cow,” she says to the tomato plant.

  “You’re not,” it assures her.

  Her phone buzzes with posts to the shed thread. “They disagree,” she says.

  Three fat tomatoes hang from the vines; two remain stubbornly green, the third offers a hopeful hint of yellow.

  * * *

  After dark, a dotted line of headlights moves up Sutton Circle. Agatha raises her binoculars. It’s the Dads. The men. The humans with penises and power who, unlike the women, don’t want to be seen eyeballing the shed. They don’t want Agatha or their wives or their lovers or any other woman to glimpse their fear, thinly veiled as curiosity. They don’t want any woman to know that the splintered shed represents the thing that scares them most: women rising up. Women grabbing a hatchet and hollering uh uh, no more, ain’t doing it. If all their women rise up and do what Agatha did, how many sheds will look like this? How many lives?

  As they cruise past, Agatha hears the sound of testicles shrinking. “Shlooop,” she says to the tomato plant. “That’s it right there. The sound of shrinking balls.”

  What if women start doing this with other things? What if the hatchet becomes the go-to response?

  Unequal pay?

  Grab the hatchet.

  Glass ceiling?

  Grab the hatchet.

  Cat-called?

  Grab the hatchet.

  Sexually assaulted?

  Grab the hatchet.

  Cheated on?

  Grab the hatchet.

  “Get your shed-shattering hatchet here!” Agatha says to the tomato plant. “Hatchets on sale, two for ten bucks.”

  Women aren’t supposed to think this way … act this way. Violence is not the answer after all. Children should not see their mother obliterating a shed while their half-naked father and his more-naked lover flee its confines.

  This last statement is true. Children should not see this. And the fact that her boys might have caught even a glimpse will haunt Agatha until she decides it won’t. But then there’s Dax, right at this moment sitting with his pretty little cake and eating it too. She knows that at some point he’ll look back and see all that he broke and pray he won’t witness a ripple effect in his sons. But she also knows that some things travel that way, father to son. Some things you can’t control.

  * * *

  That night, Agatha takes her first-ever tomato juice bath and reads an article about a mysterious outbreak of anthrax near the top of the world. The very tip-top of the world. In the morning, she can’t remember the exact location. Mongolia? Russia? Just the fact that somewhere near the Arctic Circle thousands of reindeer and dozens of people have become deathly ill. A single child has died.

  “What caused this?” her shrink asks the next morning when Agatha shares the story.

  “Global warming,” Agatha says. “Climate change.” Her voice is high and trill-y. Like a buzz saw. “A recent heat wave thawed a reindeer carcass that had been infected with anthrax decades ago. Right at this very moment, scienti
sts are running around vaccinating reindeer and trying to prevent other humans from keeling over, all while spores of unleashed anthrax are whizzing about trying to find new victims.”

  “The Arctic Circle is very far from here,” Shrinky-Dink says. She knows Agatha well.

  “We all breathe the same air eventually,” Agatha says. “You do know pollution from China is causing health problems in California, right? China!” She ignores Shrinky-Dink’s raised eyebrows. “Anyway, the article warned that global warming will continue to thaw corpses infected with all kinds of fatal viruses and bacteria: bubonic plague, smallpox, variants of the flu, and lots more we know nothing about.”

  “Agatha, please stop reading these types of articles,” Shrinky-Dink says. “While they may be true, there is something to be said for perspective.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning an outbreak of anthrax at the top of the world is not going to directly affect you.”

  “You don’t know this.”

  “I’m pretty sure.”

  “That’s not good enough.”

  “So you’re going to spend time fretting about this possibility because …?”

  “Because if I can anticipate it, I can avoid it.”

  “That philosophy doesn’t often work.”

  “Sometimes it does.”

  “It didn’t work with Dax.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning you got suspicious about Dax having an affair a few weeks ago, but you couldn’t avoid the fallout.”

  “I wasn’t suspicious.”

  “What were you?”

  “Aware.”

  “Aware that he might be having an affair.”