The Mothering Coven

by Joanna Ruocco

  Bryce remembers the story of the old couple in the forest, how they shaped the snow into a maiden with a glittering crown and a brocade cape and the snow maiden was so beautiful, the old couple cried, “Come home with us, Snegurochka!” and she went with them between the pines to the warm little hut with the wood fire crackling and she turned into a puddle right then and there. The old couple tried and tried, but they couldn’t love a tepid little puddle, and the puddle-maiden was so saddened she wept bitter tears, and every day the puddle grew larger until at last the old couple was swept away, the end.

  “Oh!” thinks Bryce. Will she be swept away? No. Bryce will love Dorcas’s soul up in the branches of the hat stand. She will care for it tenderly. She will hang Dorcas’s favorite things from the hat stand—hard squares of cinnamon toast and her collection of clear plastic cassettes. She will put Dorcas’s body in the opposite corner, with her arms stretched upwards, just like a hat stand. She will put an orange in each hand.

  X

  Ms. Kidney’s purple overalls have given off all their steam. They’ve started to shrink, the cuffs rising up to the tops of her swamp boots until they are the perfect length for wading in the Indian River. It’s almost time to go, then. A moment more.

  Ms. Kidney and Agnes and Mrs. Borage sit together on the sofa, talking politics. Mrs. Borage is remembering a red-lacquered voting booth, how she swept the velvet drape to the left and all the golden rings whistled on the pole. She sat. A burst of light. Her picture fell through a metal slot.

  We have the picture on the mantel. Mrs. Borage looked serious, voting. Those were serious days.

  [:]

  The three women on the sofa have fallen asleep. Now there are many kinds of brain waves in the parlor. Bryce paints the different waves across the walls. She doesn’t know very much about neuroscience. The waves are all tangled up.

  “Medusa again,” sighs Bryce. She adds a pegasus. She gives the pegasus a mane of green vipers and a green viper tail.

  Will Bertrand see the self-eating serpent? It is unlikely. Every year there are fewer snakes in Europe. The Irish Example has proven too powerful.

  [:]

  Agnes jumps to her feet.

  “Fo ic under fot, funde ic hit hwæt eorðe, mæg wið ealar wih-ta gehwilce and wið andan and wið æminde and wið ba micelan mannes tungan,” says Agnes. She looks around the parlor. The charm has had no effect. Bryce’s painting, however, has turned Dorcas to stone.

  “Beginner’s luck,” thinks Agnes. “Luck of the Irish. Lucky stars.”

  Ms. Kidney is pulling on her parka.

  “You,” yells Ms. Kidney. “Buzzard with the crockpot!” She rattles the amber-poke against the window frame.

  “You,” she bellows. “Vile Borgia! Away!” We rush to the window.

  “It’s just poor Mr. Henderson,” says Mrs. Borage. Mr. Henderson waves towards the open window.

  “Do the creatures take soup?” shouts Mr. Henderson. He is stamping his boots on the sidewalk, clutching the crockpot. The streetlight above his head winks on.

  “The last bus!” yells Ms. Kidney. “It leaves from the lumberyard at sundown.”

  A kiss for Mrs. Borage.

  “Happy birthday my Scrumpleshine, my darling,” says Ms. Kidney. “I’ll bring you honeybells.” She bangs through the front door.

  “Skip, Ziegenpeter!” bellows Ms. Kidney, and Mr. Henderson goes skipping out of Ms. Kidney’s path. His knees creak. Mr. Henderson is a Przewalski, quite a Przewalski, but his legs are the legs of a cricket, skinny, black, and chirping. Mr. Henderson skips like a buzzard-horse-cricket. It is the saddest skip we’ve ever seen. Agnes documents it for her research. A hyper-color Polaroid.

  “Can I have it!” says Bryce.

  “No,” says Agnes.

  [:]

  Suddenly, the crockpot slips out of Mr. Henderson’s arms and breaks on the sidewalk. The broken pieces fall away from the soup, which is a red cylinder, unmoving. Mr. Henderson stares at the cylinder of soup. He stares at the unnecessary crockpot.

  “Does everything suffer my attention?” asks Mr. Henderson. He can’t bear to look at the brightly lit house, with the warped walls and the sinking roof making curves like the physical universe, and Mrs. Borage waving kindly from the window, so he looks down the street, not toward the cul-de-sac and the abandoned Security Spray Complex, but in the other direction, toward the lights of the lumberyard. He watches the woman run toward the lights, her broad back and high-crowned Russian hat with the earflaps moving up and down like wings. She is shouting something. It sounds like “Heißa hopsasa!”

  “Who is Heißa Hopsasa?” says Mr. Henderson.

  Mr. Henderson is afraid that he will see the woman lift into the air. He is afraid that the wings of the Russian hat will carry her up, up, and away, high above the treated planks piled in the lumberyard, and she will go flying through the unmonitored airspace of the town. Did the Russians send her?

  Mr. Henderson remembers the days of espionage, the little plane circling the pink and gold striped domes of St. Basil’s Ca thedral. Basil the Blessed. Basil Fool-for-Christ.

  Mr. Henderson forgets how Ivan the Terrible blinded the architects, how they never erected another dome in Moscow. Poor Postnik! Poor Barma! That happened before the days of espionage, in the days of feudal pattern warfare.

  Mr. Henderson has been losing his vision slowly, a little bit lost to each pot, not one of them fearsome in their beauty.

  X

  Bryce turns the keys in the cockatoos and the music starts again. Does everyone know the words?

  Der Vogelfänger bin ich ja,

  stets lustig, heißa hopsasa!

  Ich Vogelfänger bin bekannt

  bei Alt und Jung im ganzen Land.

  Ozark does! She winds the cockatoos at night for practice. She likes to hear them sing about Ganzenland in deep, rich voices, as though Ganzenland is where the cockatoos belong. Every time she creeps to the hat stand in the darkness, Ozark expects that they’ll be gone, the whole flock out the window. She has not been able to locate Ganzenland anywhere in the episteme. But does an island of cockatoos belong in the episteme?

  It’s too cold to go outside in just her spangled leotard and tights, so Ozark puts on Bertrand’s gambeson. Ozark climbs up the rubble of the Security Spray Complex. She can look out at the lights of the town. What does she know about the town?

  It is latitude 42N52, longitude 73W12.

  “It is one of the vortical centers of the universe,” thinks Ozark. But there are so many of them. It might not mean anything. She takes out a piece of paper and makes a guest list. If the episteme and the guest list were a Venn diagram, the area of intersection would be very, very small. The episteme has a smaller inventory than Ozark originally thought.

  Ozark hears distant cursing. It sounds like “bung-less barrel saunas.”

  There is Ms. Kidney, sneaking up the street. The wind has just swept her Russian hat off her head. Up it goes. Ozark blinks in surprise. Is she imagining things? It is hard to imagine Ms. Kidney. She is so voluble and Ozark’s imagination is mostly pictures.

  “Neck pimples,” yells Ms. Kidney. She kicks Mr. Henderson’s garage door. Her wild, steel blue hair is blowing every which way.

  “Not a brindle, ponies,” shouts Ms. Kidney. She is shouting at her dogs. They are standing silently on the sidewalk, two by two. Ms. Kidney disappears through Mr. Henderson’s garage door just as Mr. Henderson comes out onto his porch. He sees his garage door swing open and slam shut with the wind. He sees the dogs lined up, looking at him. The soup is still frozen on the sidewalk, only now it is white, like cream of mushroom.

  [:]

  Ms. Kidney is staying for Mrs. Borage’s birthday party after all! Of course she is. Ozark has the urge to hook her legs behind her neck for joy, but she hesitates. She does not like to trigger muscle memories from her days as a contortionist. Ozark turns somersaults instead. The muscle memory this triggers is not specific to contortionists. Everyone tu
rns somersaults. Certainly, ev eryone on the guest list. Ozark writes “Ms. Kidney” in purple letters. Now it’s back to her inventory.

  She has reached “Magellan,” as is inevitable. Before Magellan the ships sailed over the thunderous falls that marked the edges of all the oceans.

  “Magellan did something,” thinks Ozark. “He invented hydroelectric dams?” Ozark tries to remember about hydroelectricity. She taps her pen on the paper. Snow is settling on the paper. Ozark shivers. Her face has grown numb. She suspects there is some accumulation on her face, on the bridge of her nose. She remembers when the circus caravans drove through Buffalo, the little towns on the outskirts of Buffalo, and the helpful yellow signs, Bridges Freeze Before Roadway. She remembers Magellan in the Channel of All Saints, how he was starving there, how he gave up all hope. It was All Saints’ Day, and crying, Magellan ate his entire cargo, 26 tons of cloves. After eating 26 tons of cloves, Magellan was unable to form any words. He tried to move his lips but his face was still and astonished.

  “Even much later, when he was discovered by the men and women of the Philippines, his face remained frozen,” says Ozark. “That is why they called him Dumbfoundland and claimed him for Lapu-Lapu.”

  X

  Dorcas flexes her retinas. So far, so good. She blinks. She looks to left, to the right. Dorcas has returned safely from her first shamanic journey! She is standing in the corner opposite the hat stand. Her fingers tingle. Why? Her arms are stretched above her head, palms up. She lowers them. Her feet tingle too. Why? She looks at her big bare feet with the Fauvist toenails. Of course! The vibrating boundaries of opposing colors!

  Are they Fauvist? Dorcas squints at her feet, far away, on the carpet. There’s the Seine, ultramarine, pink flowers floating, and beneath the blue currents, green sea cucumbers and purple anemones, and on the grassy bank, a dark-haired woman in a violet dress and red hat, scattering white and gold sand. Or is it birdseed? Dorcas gasps. Her whole body is tingling. Why?

  “You’re not dancing,” calls Bryce. Her smock has spots and swirls of vivid color and her bare feet are moving too quickly to decipher the designs on her toenails. They are just a bright flash glimpsed through chair legs.

  Dorcas isn’t much of a dancer. She hops behind Bryce, around and around the wingback chairs. She feels grit on the carpet. Sand? Birdseed?

  “Keep going,” cries Fiona. “Don’t stop.”

  “Let’s dance all night,” cries Bryce.

  “Like spinsters everywhere!” shouts Fiona, although, of course, Mrs. Borage is a dowager.

  [:]

  Who did Mrs. Borage vote for, those many years past?

  She voted for Leon Czolgosz, a mirage from the deserts of Poland. She remembers that he won and won and won and won and for sixteen years there was a dune-forest in Washington.

  X

  We sit in a circle on the carpet, eating cinnamon toast from a large platter. The cinnamon toast is very hard and brown, with clear butter dripping. Everyone is chewing cinnamon toast. Mrs. Borage listens to the reports of cinnamon toast. The burnt cinnamon smells oddly like gunpowder.

  “Taken orally, and at low velocity, gunpowder extends the life expectancy,” remembers Mrs. Borage. Bryce jumps to her feet.

  “Fireworks!” shouts Bryce.

  In the rubble of the Security Spray Complex, Ozark has found the remnants of a Gypsy encampment. It is a snow covered flannel backpack. The rest of the encampment has vanished without a trace. Ozark is suddenly afraid that her inventory is suffering from logocentrism. Shouldn’t there be more untraceable encampments? More vanishings?

  She unzips the flannel backpack. It is filled with delights, beers and spray paints, cigarettes, a Jacob’s ladder of prophylactics, all kinds of sparklers, bombs, and rockets. Luckily, there is a pink lighter in the front compartment. Ozark never carries a lighter, or loose change for that matter, or tissues. Something has always worked out.

  Mrs. Borage sees a woman climb onto the battlements. She is hurling flares into the sky. Do the flares make an eight-pointed star?

  Yes, the lesser conjunctions of Venus shower down, glowworms and ashes.

  [:]

  Everyone looks at the platter on the carpet. It is empty.

  “Do you remember eating anything?” asks Dorcas.

  The parlor is a mess. The wingback chairs have been tipped over; the card table is broken; the tank has shattered, and the clown-fish! They lie dry and dead on the carpet. Bryce flips over the nearest card. It is from the pinochle deck. A young man, with a feather in his hat, and a mustache. He doesn’t look healthy. The love disease.

  “Am I disgraced in fortune?” wonders Bryce. She opens up the daily paper.

  “Align with the syzygy,” reads Bryce. What kind of horoscope is that?

  “I just wrote it because I like the word ‘syzygy,’” remembers Bryce.

  What did she write for Mrs. Borage?

  “This one is inspiring,” says Bryce.

  “You shall rend the veil of the phenomenal world,” reads Bryce. She looks at Mrs. Borage expectantly.

  “Inspiring,” nods Mrs. Borage. Which veil is Bryce referring to?

  “She must mean the vale of tears,” thinks Mrs. Borage. “They always mean the vale of tears unless specified.”

  [:]

  Agnes comes back with cinnamon toast. It is terrifically burnt. “Thank you!” says Dorcas.

  “Thank you,” says Fiona. Dorcas has started thinking about witches, how they can turn into cats and regain themselves eight times, but the ninth time they stay cats forever.

  “What about shamans?” thinks Dorcas. She crunches her cinnamon toast.

  “Thank you!” says Dorcas.

  [:]

  Mrs. Borage’s teeth have never given her a moment’s trouble. Agnes’s teeth are square, but serviceable. Bryce’s teeth are tiny and resplendent. Dorcas feels oral shame: her peg laterals, her crooked bicuspids. Fiona’s caries do not enter into her psychic register. Behind Ozark’s shy smile: an inner ring of milk teeth, weaker and smaller, but tenacious, like shade plants.

  No cinnamon toast for the foreign student, Hildegard. She’s still sleeping in the room beneath the stairs. Agnes is beginning to wonder if she mustn’t be enchanted.

  “Adolescents do need large amounts of sleep,” says Agnes. Are they all enchanted? At least a little bit.

  When Hildegard was awake, she listened to her small silver headphones at the dining room table and she emptied pixie stix into her yogurt.

  “Pink tastes best,” said Hildegard.

  “It’s some kind of synaesthesia,” said Dorcas. Mrs. Borage closed her eyes.

  “Pink,” murmured Mrs. Borage. “Yes, it tastes like salmon.” Agnes watched Hildegard eat the pink yogurt. Hildegard sang to herself, eating.

  “Can’t you hear my love buzz? Can’t you hear my love buzz?

  Can’t you hear my love buzz?”

  She wouldn’t like it if Agnes answered. Agnes learned not to answer the questions someone is singing from Bertrand.

  “Can I try the salmon yogurt?” asked Mrs. Borage. She took a spoonful.

  “Oh yes,” said Mrs. Borage. “It is delicious.”

  [:]

  Dorcas cracks her slice of cinnamon toast; Fiona cracks her slice of cinnamon toast; Agnes, crack; Ozark, crack.

  Crack! Cinnamon toast between the interminable teeth of Mrs. Borage.

  Bryce hangs her cinnamon toast from the hat stand. It is terrifically burnt. She will call the hat stand “After the Tungus-ka Fireball” in honor of all the catastrophists born beneath the burning sky in Siberia.

  [:]

  “Mmmm,” sighs Mrs. Borage. She pops open a bottle of cranberry mead, and she holds the bottle in the crook of her arm. The mead is cold in her mouth and hot in her chest, as though the mead starts at Axel Heiberg, and flows south, Crane Creek, Horse Creek, Turkey Creek, converging at last in the Indian River.

  “It would make sense if humans had several esophagi,” thinks
Mrs. Borage. “On the principle of tributaries.”

  Why don’t they?

  “That might be where evolution went wrong,” thinks Mrs. Borage. “Unless it was elsewhere.”

  [:]

  Agnes slips away and stands at the back door. The night sky cracks through the clouds and she watches the crack widen. The stars are very beautiful. The galaxy looks like the stringy tissue in egg whites.

  “Chalazae,” sighs Agnes. A lovely word. Snow drifts across the yard, and the upper stories of the oak trees have whitened. Agnes sees a shadow slip between the trees. Her throat tightens, but it’s just lonely Mr. Lomberg, the retired fire marshall, on his old wooden skis, following the smoke back to the chimneys.

  Will Bertrand come back with the first snow? What if Agnes calls her with a magic name from the old books of lost girls?

  “Snegurochka,” whispers Agnes, just to see if something will happen.

  X

  The snow has melted away. Did it even happen? We wouldn’t believe it, but there is Ms. Kidney’s sled, parked in the garage between the televisions. The sled takes up quite a bit of space. Bryce will have to move her studio into the dining room. She and Fiona carry televisions up the front steps. Dorcas carries the refrigerators. Lately, Bryce has been acquiring found objects at a dizzying rate.

  “The trick is looking in magazines,” says Bryce.

  [:]

  Bryce opens a magazine and studies it intently. She loves home electronics but not to the neglect of intimate apparel and cook-ware.

  “A newly patented baking pan!” cries Bryce. Due to the addition of interior walls, each brownie baked will have at least two crisp edges!

  “Let crispness proliferate,” thinks Bryce, rapturously. She draws a quick mock-up on the dining room wall. It looks like the garden labyrinth at Chartres. Will that do the trick? Bryce draws a Greco-Roman square.

  “A hundred crisp edges per brownie,” breathes Bryce. “A hundred birthday brownies for Mrs. Borage.”