◊
The marsh air is thick and heavy, like a wet invisible wall pushing Molly back. She moves with feverish eagerness, her worn-down flat-soled shoes slipping on rotted wood and wet moss. Scott and Janine go at a leisurely pace at first, but then they start to go faster, heedless of Molly’s diffident cries that they slow down and wait for her to catch up. Sometimes she can only get glimpses of their backs through the marsh. They are always a unit moving together, their bodies nearly colliding and then pulling apart only to rejoin in their next strides. Molly cries weakly for them to stop and is almost surprised when they comply, turning as one to face her. In her bleary-eyed confusion, she almost thinks they are the same creature, four-eyed and four-legged, Janine’s slim shoulders and Scott’s broader ones collapsing together like lopsided halves.
“How close are we?” Molly says.
Scott and Janine are looking at each other, but their eyes are so close together that they might as well just be looking at Molly. She feels the uneasy prickle of being seen without being able to see back. She backs away slightly into the marsh, slips on a log, and falls. Scott leans down to help her up and she thinks: they are only people. Don’t be silly.
When Scott hoists Molly to her feet, she feels—for a second, only a second—like the women on the covers of romance novels, prone and delicate and teetering on a moment where ravishing and ravaging are the exact same thing. She feels every nerve in her body; her mouth opens slightly and her heart hammers. Then she opens her eyes and sees, too-big and much too close, the blood-colored wide-open mouth of Scott-Janine, the tongue working lasciviously, the teeth gleaming. Molly stumbles back, then breaks into a run.
Sometime later, the sound of the brush rustling at her back will cease. Molly will stop; the moonlight will show that she is alone. The marshes roil on unendingly in every direction, dark and formless. There is no one and nothing to be seen but the brilliant neon glow of the Flamingo’s long-dark electric sign, cutting through the miles, calling Molly home.
Life Cycles
The day my father gave me to the Glaire woman, I dressed in his clothes, a threadbare jacket and spit-shined Oxfords, my hair slick with his pomade, his cologne burning the back of my throat. My father was not a handsome man anymore, but he used to be. My face was his face twenty years ago, everything I had was his once, and that’s why I was to pay this debt for him.
The Glaire woman had a house in the hills that got a new room every quarter-century. No one saw the inside of the house and no one saw her until my father did. He told me he was the grocer’s boy, twice a week condemned to drop paper sacks on the front porch of the Glaire house. He always thought if he walked lightly she’d never know he was there, but she knew.
He told me the story like this:
She grabbed my chin in her hand and made me look at her. Dark eyes like you never saw. Dark eyes like tarnished bronze. She said, come inside. I had to do it.
A house like that, she must have money or her ancestors did. Rooms crowded with old, fine things. I followed her into a parlor and she poured wine for us. I didn’t want to have any, I had to go back to work, I told her, but with her eyes on me I couldn’t not drink it.
You’re younger than I guessed, I told her, and she said, young, yes, but too late for you. She’s already here. Then she put her hand on her stomach.
I said, who is her father?
And she showed me a crate full of bones.
I said, you’ll be needing someone else then? I was mad, out of my head—but that house enchanted me.
She said in twenty years. Come here in twenty years. We’ll have you then. I felt her eyes on me. Her stare sinking into my bones. She would hold me to it. I ran from the house, but I knew she would hold me to it.
When he ended his story he never said the part that mattered:
I wouldn’t be held, so I held my son to it instead.
But I knew that part already.
◊
I was anxious like a bridegroom, like a first date, like a human sacrifice. I asked if I should have flowers and my father laughed. “Nothing lives in that house,” he said. I went to the door like a schoolboy on a dare, fist shaking as I knocked.
Everyone knew who the Glaire woman was. Boys and men whispered about her ferocious appetites, filling out rumors that I knew my father was the first to feed. They wanted her, they hated her; they loved the feel of fearing her. But when I thought of the Glaire woman, I thought tarnished bronze, crowded with old things, I couldn’t not, crate of bones. She was a disease I knew I was going to die from someday. I couldn’t desire her.
The door was unlocked so I went in, hundred-year-old air thick in my lungs. I thought perhaps she was dead inside and I was saved, no more debt to pay, but there has always been a Glaire woman. I said, “I’m here,” feeling how sharply my voice cut the silence. Please I was thinking, but please what I didn’t know.
I stepped into the hallway, feeling my trespass with the helpless shame of a dreamer who can’t wake, and when my eyes adjusted to the darkness I could piece together the figure at the end of the hall into a woman, old and stooped, hair hanging like moss on her shoulders. Some voice like my father’s in the back of my head said, that house enchanted me.
“Is your daughter here?” I said, wondering if she was the daughter, if Glaire women are born haggard, if I was husband to a creature as old as the house where she hid.
“I have none,” she said.
Her parlor was wallpapered in a tangle of dahlias, yellows and pinks painted sepia by dirt and time. A grand piano sulked in one corner. The reflections of costume masks swam in the lid, their faces like the life cycle of a nightmare: wan-faced infant and sleek taupe-colored child, sharp-featured adolescent, grown woman so beautiful until you saw a moment too late that she was skinless, as if a mask could lie and have you believe it.
The Glaire woman watched me solidly, stopping her stare only when she blinked. I felt I should say sorry, and I didn’t know why. I looked around the room for a crate of bones. She coughed and I found my eyes on hers, snagged like her face was a fishhook. She had no brows or lashes or softness. Her skin stretched thinly over crow-like features. She gleamed where her flesh slipped loose to reveal bone. If she ever smiled, I thought she would crack apart.
I said, “What do you want with me?”
“Breakfast at 10, luncheon at 2, dinner at 8,” said the Glaire woman. “Go anywhere you like. But not my nursery.” Her eyes watched the doors lining the hallway, then she stared back at me. “Not my nursery,” she said again, decisively.
◊
I had a room on the third floor, an octagonal little chamber lit with candles on brass hooks, the scents of verbena and cedar so strong I could taste them. I slept because I could not think what else to do, and woke to find the chest of drawers full of clothes my size and a coffee tray steaming expectantly beside me. I was relieved, I was in dread. If not last night, some other night. If she only wanted a husband—how impossible, that the Glaire woman should only want a husband—or if she wanted my bones before anything else, I was still hers, corrupted by association, never again to belong to the not-Glaire world.
I got sick in a porcelain toilet bowl where two dead rats swam, their limbs interlocked, and wondered if fear or the heavily perfumed air had been responsible for my nausea. I changed out of my father’s clothes into hers, their newness scratching my shoulders. I poured my coffee black to get the taste of sick out of my mouth and watched out the dirty window to the ground below. I thought, today perhaps she is dead. Today perhaps she will tell me she does not want me, and my debt is paid, and I can go home.
When I got the courage to go downstairs, the morning had slipped by and I was coming up against the backside of luncheon. The Glaire woman sat at the head of the table in her dining room, eating strips of rabbit in cranberry sauce. She had no cook here that I had seen, so she must have assembled the meal herself. Reluctantly I ate, telling myself things like keep your strength up and mak
e her think you want to be here. By now I had already decided that I would go as soon as I got the chance, leave town, leave the continent, sneak onto a cargo ship bound for somewhere I could forget that my father was going to pay his own debt, since I wouldn’t.
“You won’t see very much of me, after today,” she said.
That forced my eyes up from my plate. “Why not?” I said, again looking at length on her too-wide eyes and hairless brow.
“I must find a father for my child,” she went on.
I felt a stab of something like embarrassment, like resentment, like hurt. Here I was trussed up like a lamb on an altar holding a knife to my own throat, and she didn’t want me.
“Did your mother tell you,” I began dizzily. I felt I could not stop my mouth from moving. “Do you not know—”
“My mother taught me,” she said, “never to disappoint a man.”
What a thing for the Glaire woman to say. “What do you mean?” I managed, staring down at my plate and wondering what hid inside that rich tart sauce, that made me open my mouth when I should have kept quiet.
“Do you think your father was the first man to get curious about the Glaire woman?” she said. “Boarded-up windows, thrice padlocked doors, blackberries tangling on the walk, and they want you all the more. Promising their bodies, their souls, their sons. They’d do anything to get inside here.” She shut her mouth, opened it for a moment, then shut it again.
“Naturally,” I said, understanding not at all. I would go to Calcutta, I thought, or Amsterdam, or Saigon, or somewhere very far. I would change my name, rub ink into the roots of my hair, break my own nose twice. No one would know that the hideous old Glaire woman had the perfect chance to devour me, paused with her fork poised over my heart, and said, “No, thank you.”
◊
I shivered at the dock, a job application in my hands, feeling weak, feeling distracted. If I came back, it would take me. She wouldn’t but the house would. It had opened its mouth to me. The woman said no but the house didn’t. If the house had me, she would have to have me too. I dropped the paper on the wet dock and saw the print blur, redacting my name, my age, my address. The big man in his fish-scented boots regarded me with something like pity and said, “Go home, let Mother tuck you in,” and I laughed, watching my breath fog the air, watching my hands shake as I pushed the paper back at him.
I would go nowhere, I would change no names. I had not realized before I left the house. I knew now. I hurried down the dock, running when I felt steady enough on my feet, then running when I didn’t, still quicker, halfway into a crawl before I reached the house. I threw myself on the brick walk and felt blood drip hotly down my chin as I stared up at the black-eyed creature, magnificent, voluptuous, who waited for me to come home. The clouds passed frothily around her face and the moonlight shone white on her clapboard sides, and I staggered to her, leaning on the back door until at last the old hinges gave and I was inside, full of her scents and sounds, doubled over with how my adoring hurt.
◊
I woke in my bed feeling hungover, my head reeling, my body too heavy to move. The ceiling spun in slow circles. The candles were not lit; no coffee waited on the bedside table. So, I thought, this is what the lady does when she’s had her way with you. This is the five-star treatment you can expect once you’re not the new boy any longer.
I bathed and dressed, hoping to feel more awake, but the more I woke the hungrier I became, the more desperately I needed to gorge myself on something I didn’t have. I shoved my hands in the pockets of my trousers to ward against the itch in my fingers and moved slowly down the back staircases, to the rear of the house where long-empty servants’ rooms sat with the doors hanging open. The mess of architecture, neo-Roman doorjambs pressing up against prim Georgian baseboards, doors of stern modern walnut, faded damask papering on all the walls, made me dizzy.
I wandered all day, watching the sun move across the sky in the slanting beams of light that came through the cracks between the boards on the windows. I ended in a wine cellar, sitting on a crate with my arms raised above my head, fingers curled around thick ropes of spider silk. Something skittered across my forearm and I let it pass, feeling the depth of the house sink into me, feeling its utter largeness, remembering what the Glaire woman had said at the table: you don’t say no to that kind of promise.
Above me the house stirred with the Glaire woman’s movements. She would be having dinner by now, by herself as she apparently wanted to be, thinking, “There’s another man enchanted and done away with.” I thought for the first time in a day of my father. I understood better now the fever in his eyes when he remembered her, but not how he could relinquish his claim to the house when she had handed him the chance to return and take his place as master.
I heard movements closer now, footfalls on the back staircase, and tucked myself deeper into the darkness of the wine cellar. I had left doors open and lit lamps as I’d come; certainly she must know I was here, but I didn’t want her to see me and throw me out. Until I knew she wanted me here, I would stay hidden.
She stood outside the cellar. I could feel her watching the open door. I heard her breath catch when a rat came scuttling across the floor, then she whispered, “Come out and show me who you are.” I stayed still, thinking viciously, do you get so many male callers in your empty wine cellar that you cannot remember their names? Do you think anyone else will come for you besides me?
◊
I walked the house for days, following my hunger. I knew the starlings who roosted in the attic, and the salamanders who laid their eggs in the bathtub, and the rats who holed up in the larder. The house nourished them. As my hunger swelled, I found the house could nourish me too. I peeled the wallpaper from the walls in long slender strips and unmasked the house’s gleaming bones. Bones, I mean, really bones—some rooms held together by alder planks but others by yellowed lengths of human femur and pelvis and rib. Dark hair fine as satin insulated the house from the New England cold. These are the Glaire men, I thought, this is why the Glaire house gets a room every twenty years. I ached to be part of the house like them. When I courted the Glaire woman I really courted the Glaire house, you understand. I had no other love after that night I tried to escape and found myself back at the door; there was nothing else for me.
A single room could keep my stomach full for days, but my hunger came back fiercer every time, an appetite building deep inside me for something I hadn’t yet tasted, like but not like the rooms I had now. Licking plaster and sawdust from my lips after I gorged myself, I felt as if I’d been woken abruptly from a dream. I would stare at the damage I had done to the walls, tracing fingertips down the wounds torn in the wallpaper, stroking the house’s broken bones, feeling her steady heartbeat, hearing her footfalls above me, horrified by my own appetites, starving.
◊
I heard voices come from the parlor and knew already who the soft-spoken man was; the woman talking to him, I did not recognize, and she drew me down from the fourth floor to the landing above the parlor, a tight rectangle of wood that creaked in two places and groaned in another. If I was careful, I would hear them and they would not hear me. I would see them and they would not see me.
The parlor was lit in pink and gold, coating the slumping green settees, the grand piano, even the masks in a bright warm sheen that stung my eyes. One of the masks was missing, an empty nail left to mark where it had once stood, and a new mask was bolted to the wall beside the others: an old woman, hair like moss and eyes like stone. In the parlor the Glaire woman wore a different face, the one I had found so striking when it hung on the parlor wall.
A beauty with no skin appealed viscerally to me, all the sweet lushness of flesh and bone without the trouble of wallpaper. My fingers itched, my scalp crawled. I managed, somehow, to hold still so I could look at the man with her. By his stiff, overlarge wool coat and the shaving nicks peppering his stubble, I recognized him as a surrogate: the trembling boy owed to her that
the Glaire woman had not gotten. But for him she wore a black sheath dress and a pearl necklace, for him she twisted her dark fine hair into a chignon and painted her mouth with wine-colored lipstick. For him a bottle of champagne rested in a bucket of ice, some recording of Liszt murmured vaguely in the background; for him, the parlor had been lit.
“You would like to see the house, I suppose?” she said, and he said something else, and she laughed, a soft-edged tinkling sound. “I don’t get as many visitors as I’d like anymore. With Mother upstairs, things are difficult. She simply won’t make any changes.”
I saw them move down the hall, the man’s champagne glass too full, dripping on the carpet when he stumbled a little. He motioned to a door and she bristled. “Only my nursery,” she said. “Not much to look at.”
“Your nursery? You were raised in this house, then?”
“Oh, yes,” she said, “but I never lived in that room. It’s for someone else.”
The man didn’t care by then, what she said; he pushed her into the door and kissed her, and she laughed, and kissed him too. I moved down the stairs, feeling sick, feeling exhilarated. If she wanted someone, she could want me. Her eyes widened as I came closer, but the man didn’t see me, not soon enough anyway, only when I threw him into the wall.
“He hit his head hard,” the Glaire woman whispered, kneeling beside him. “He won’t want me any longer, he’ll believe all the rumors. And he was the only outsider I’ve seen in so long.”
“Don’t take his bones. Take mine,” I said.
“It’s not his bones I want,” she said, and she swung open the door to the nursery. A maple bassinet trimmed in tulle stood in the middle of the room, casting a long oval shadow on a wooden crate. Her nursery, she had said, but not the nursery where she had grown up; that was somewhere else in the house, a different Glaire woman’s legacy. This one was supposed to be for her own child.
Thin Places Page 7
