by Mary Rickert
She hands me the shoebox.
“I’m sure I was trying to get the stones out of her mouth.”
She shakes her head. “Are you going to be okay? Driving home?”
“Of course,” I say, unintentionally shaking the shoebox. “I’m fine.”
When I get outside, I take a deep breath of the fresh air. It is a cold, gray day, but I am immediately struck by the beauty of it, the beauty of the gray clouds, the beauty of the blackbirds arcing across the sky, the beauty of the air on my face and neck. I think: I cannot save him. Then I see a familiar-looking man. “Excuse me?” I say. He continues, head bent, shoulders hunched, toward the nursing home. “Excuse me?”
He stops and turns, slightly distracted, perhaps skeptical, as if worried I might ask for spare change.
“Don’t we know each other?”
He glances at the nursing home, longingly, I think, but that can’t possibly be correct. Nobody longs to go in there. He shakes his head.
“Are you sure? Anyway, I have a question. Let’s say you could save the world by sacrificing your son’s life, would you do it?”
“I don’t have a son. Or a daughter. I don’t have any children.”
“But hypothetically?”
“Is this, are you . . .” He thrusts his hands into his pockets. “Is this some kind of religious thing? ’Cause I’m not looking to convert.”
“Are you sure we don’t know each other?”
“I’ve seen you before.” He glances over his shoulder. For a moment I’m sure he’s going to say something important, but instead he turns away and hurries to the nursing home.
I walk to the car with my box of stones. I have to decide. Robbie leaves in the morning. It’s time to stop fooling around.
This, I think, is like a Zen koan. What is the sound of one hand clapping? The secret for these things is not to be too clever. The fact that I am aware of this puts me at risk of being too clever. Okay, focus, I think as I carefully stop at a green light, realize what I’ve done, and accelerate as the light changes to yellow. It’s really very simple. Do I bury the stones? Or not? Glancing at the box, I lick my lips.
When I get home, Robbie is there with several of his friends. They are in his room, laughing and cursing. I knock on his door and ask him if he’ll be home for dinner. He opens it and says, “Mom, are you all right?”
“I was just trying to get the stones out of her mouth.”
He shakes his head. “What are you talking about?” His eyes are the same color as the stones, without the red spots, of course. “You remember about the party, right?”
“The party?”
“Remember? Len? He’s having a party for me? Tonight?”
I remember none of this, but I nod. It’s apparently the right thing to do. There’s some rustling going on behind him and a sharp bang against the wall, punctuated by masculine giggles. Robbie turns around. “Guys, be quiet for a minute.” He turns back to me and smiles, bravely I think. “Hey, I don’t have to go.”
“It’s your party. Go. I want you to.”
He’s relieved, I can tell. I carry the shoebox of stones into my bedroom, where I crawl into bed and fall asleep. When I wake up, feeling sweaty and stinky, creased by the seams of my clothing, it is like waking from a fever. The full moon sheds a cool glow into the room and throughout the house as I walk through it aimlessly. In the kitchen I see that Robbie amended the note on the magnetic board on the refrigerator. Gone. Back later. Love.
I go to the bedroom to get the box of stones. I drop them onto the kitchen table. They make a lovely noise, like playing with marbles or checkers when I was young and Tony was young too, and alive. I pick up a stone, pop it into my mouth, and see, almost like a memory but clearer (and certainly this is not my life), the life of a young man, a Roman, I think. I don’t know how long this process takes, because there is a strange, circular feeling to it, as though I have experienced this person’s entire life, not in the elongated way we live hours and days and years but rather as something spherical. I see him as a young boy, playing in a stream, and I see him with his parents, eating at some sort of feast, I see him kiss a girl, and I see him go to battle. The battle scenes are very gruesome but I don’t spit out the stone because I have to know how it turns out. I see him return home, I see his old mother’s tearful face but not his father’s, because his father was killed in the war, but then there are many happy scenes, a wedding, children; he lives a good life and dies in a field one day, all alone under a bright sun, clutching wet blades of grass with one hand, his heart with the other. I pick up another stone and see the life of another boy, and another, and another. Each stone carries the whole life of a son. Now, without stopping to spit them out, I shove stones into my mouth, swirling through centuries of births and wars and dying until at last I find Tony’s, from the blossomed pains of his birth, through his death in Berkeley, stabbed by a boy not much older than he was, the last thing he saw, this horrified boy saying, “Oh, shit.” I shove stones into my mouth, dizzy with the lives and deaths and the ever-repeating endless cycle of war. When my mouth is too full, I spit them out and start again. At last I find Robbie’s, watching every moment of his birth and growing years while the cacophony of other lives continues around me, until I see him in a bedroom, the noise of loud music, laughter, and voices coming through the crack under the door. He is naked and in bed with a blond girl. I spit out the stones. Then, carefully, I pick up the wet stones one at a time until I again find Robbie’s and Tony’s. These I put next to the little Buddha in the hallway. The rest I put into the box, which I shove under my bed.
The next day I drive Robbie to the bus depot.
“I don’t want you worrying about me. I’m going to be fine,” he says.
I smile, not falsely. The bus is late, of course. While we wait we meet two other families whose children are making the same trip as Robbie is. Steve, a blue-eyed boy with the good looks of a model, and Sondra, whose skin is smooth and brown, lustrous like stone. I shake their hands and try to say the right things, but I do not look into those young, bright faces for long. I cannot bear to. When their parents try to make small talk, I can only murmur my replies. Nobody seems to blame me. It is expected that I act this way, upset and confused. Certainly nobody suspects the truth about me, that I am a murderer, that I have bargained their children’s lives for my son’s.
When it comes time to say good-bye, I kiss him on the cheek. Oh, the wonderful warmth of his skin! The wonderful certainty that he will survive!
I stand and wave as the bus pulls away. I wave and wave even though I can’t see his face, and I have no idea if he can see mine, I wave until somebody, Sondra’s dad, I think, tries to get me to stop, then, mumbling, walks away. I stand here waving even after there is no bus on the road. People walk in wide circles around me as if somehow they know that I am the destroyer of the world. They are completely freaked out but act like they’re not, because, after all, what can they do about it, anyway?
The Mothers of Voorhisville
The things you have heard are true; we are the mothers of monsters. We would, however, like to clarify a few points. For instance, by the time we realized what Jeffrey had been up to, he was gone. At first we thought maybe the paper mill was to blame; it closed down in 1969, but perhaps it had taken that long for the poisonous chemicals to seep into our drinking water. We hid it from one another, of course, the strange shape of our newborns and the identity of the father. Each of us thought we were his secret lover. That was much of the seduction. Though he was also beautiful, with those blue eyes and that intense way of his.
It is true that he arrived in that big black car with the curtains across the back windows, as has been reported. But though Voorhisville is a small town, we are not ignorant, toothless, or the spawn of generations of incest. We did recognize the car as a hearse. However, we did not immediately assume the worst of the man who drove it. Perhaps we in Voorhisville are not as sheltered from death as people elsewhere.
We, the mothers of Voorhisville, did not look at Jeffrey and immediately think of death. Instead, we looked into those blue eyes of his and thought of sex. You might have to have met him yourself to understand. There is a small but growing contingent of us that believes we were put under a type of spell. Not in regard to our later actions, which we take responsibility for, but in regard to him.
What mother wouldn’t kill to save her babies? The only thing unusual about our story is that our children can fly. (Sometimes, even now, we think we hear wings brushing the air beside us.) We mothers take the blame because we understand, someone has to suffer. So we do. Gladly.
We would gladly do it all again to have one more day with our darlings. Even knowing the damage, we would gladly agree. This is not the apology you might have expected. Think of it more as a manifesto. A map, in case any of them seek to return to us, though our hope of that happening is faint. Why would anyone choose this ruined world?
Elli
The mothers have asked me to write what I know about what happened, most specifically what happened to me. I am suspicious of their motives. They insist this story must be told to “set the record straight.” What I think is that they are annoyed that I, Elli Ratcher, with my red hair and freckles and barely sixteen years old, shared a lover with them. The mothers like to believe they were driven to the horrible things they did by mother-love. I can tell you, though; they have always been capable of cruelty.
The mothers, who have a way of hovering over me, citing my recent suicide attempt, say I should start at the beginning. That is an easy thing to say. It’s the kind of thing I probably would have said to Timmy, had he not fallen through my arms and crashed to the ground at my feet.
The mothers say if this is too hard, I should give the pen to someone else. “We all have stuff to tell,” Maddy Melvern says. Maddy is, as everyone knows, jealous. She was just seventeen when she did it with Jeffrey and would be getting all the special attention if not for me. The mothers say they really mean it—if I can’t start at the beginning, someone else will. So, all right.
It’s my fifteenth birthday, and Grandma Joyce, who taught high school English for forty-six years, gives me one of her watercolor cards with a poem and five dollars. I know she’s trying to tell me something important with the poem, but the most I can figure out about what it means is that she doesn’t want me to grow up. That’s okay. She’s my grandma. I give her a kiss. She touches my hair. “Where did this come from?” she says, which annoys my mom. I don’t know why. When she says it in front of my dad, he says, “Let it rest, Ma.”
Right now my dad is out in the barn showing Uncle Bobby the beams. The barn beams have been a subject of much concern for my father, and endless conversations—at dinner, or church, or in parent-teacher conferences, the grocery store, or the post office—have been reduced to “the beams.”
I stand on the porch and feel the sun on my skin. I can hear my mom and aunt in the kitchen and the cartoon voices from Shrek 2, which my cousins are watching. When I look at the barn I think I hear my dad saying “beams.” I look out over the front yard to the road that goes by our house. Right then, a long black car comes over the hill, real slow, like the driver is lost. I shade my eyes to watch it pass the cornfield. I wonder if it is some kind of birthday present for me. A ride in a limousine! It slows down even more in front of our house. That’s when I realize it’s a hearse.
Then my dad and Uncle Bobby come out of the barn. When my dad sees me, he says, “Hey! You can’t be fifteen, not my little stinkbottom,” which he’s been saying all day, “stinkbottom” being what he used to call me when I was in diapers. I have to use all my will and power not to roll my eyes, because he hates it when I roll my eyes. I am trying not to make anyone mad, because today is my birthday.
As far as I can figure out, that is the beginning. But is it? Is it the beginning? There are so many of us, and maybe there are just as many beginnings. What does “beginning” mean, anyway? What does anything mean? What is meaning? What is? Is Timmy? Or is he not? Once, I held him in my arms and he smiled and I thought I loved him. But maybe I didn’t. Maybe everything was already me throwing babies out the window; maybe everything was already tiny homemade caskets with flies buzzing around them; maybe everything has always been this place, this time, this sorrowful house and the weeping of the mothers.
The Mothers
We have decided Elli should take a little time to compose herself. Tamara Singh, who, up until Ravi’s birth, worked at the library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and every other Saturday, has graciously volunteered. In the course of persuading us that she is, in fact, perfect for the position of chronicler, Tamara—perhaps overcome with enthusiasm—cited the fantastic aspects of her several unpublished novels. This delayed our assent considerably. Tamara said she would not be writing about “elves and unicorns.” She explained that the word fantasy comes from the Latin phantasia, which means “an idea, notion, image, or a making visible.”
“Essentially, it’s making an idea visible. Everyone knows what we did. I thought we were trying to make them see why,” she said.
The mothers have decided to let Tamara tell what she can. We agree that what we have experienced, and heretofore have not adequately explained (or why would we still be here?)—might be best served by “a making visible.”
We can hope, at least. Many of us, though surprised to discover it, still have hope.
Tamara
There is, on late summer days, a certain perfume to Voorhisville. It’s the coppery smell of water, the sweet scent of grass with a touch of corn and lawn mower gas, lemon slices in ice-tea glasses, and citronella. Sometimes, if the wind blows just right, it carries the perfume of the angel roses in Sylvia Lansmorth’s garden, a scent so seductive that everyone, from toddlers playing in the sandbox at Fletcher’s Park to senior citizens in rocking chairs at the Celia Wathmore Nursing Home, is made just a little bit drunk.
On just such a morning, Sylvia Lansmorth (whose beauty was not diminished by the recent arrival of gray in her long hair), sat in her garden, in the chair her husband had made for her during that strange year after the cancer diagnosis.
She sat weeping among her roses, taking deep gulps of the sweet air, like a woman just surfaced from a near-drowning. In truth, Sylvia, who had experienced much despair in the past year, was now feeling an entirely different emotion.
“I want you to get on with things,” he’d told her. “I don’t want you mourning forever. Promise me.”
So she made the sort of unreasonable promise one makes to a dying man, while he looked at her with those bulging eyes, which had taken on a light she once thought characteristic of saints and psychopaths.
She’d come, as she had so many times before, to sit in her garden, and for some reason, who knows why, was overcome by this emotion she never thought she would feel again—this absolute love of life. As soon as she recognized it, she began to weep. Still, it was an improvement, anyone would say, this weeping and gulping of air; a great improvement over weeping and muffling her face against a pillow.
Of all the sweet-smelling places in Voorhisville that morning, the yoga studio was the sweetest. The music was from India, or so they thought. Only Tamara guessed it wasn’t Indian music, but music meant to sound as though it was; just as the teacher, Shreve, despite her unusual name, wasn’t Indian but from somewhere in New Jersey. If you listened carefully, you could hear it in her voice.
Right in the middle of the opening chant there was a ruckus at the back of the room. Somebody was late, and not being particularly quiet about it. Several women peeked, right in the middle of om. Others resisted until Shreve instructed them to stand, at which point they reached for a water bottle, or a towel, or just forgot about subterfuge entirely and simply looked. By the time the class was in its first downward dog, there was not a person there who hadn’t spied on the noisy latecomer. He had the bluest eyes any of them had ever seen, and a halo of light around his body, which most everyone as
sumed was an optical illusion. It would be a long time before any of them thought that it hadn’t been a glow at all, but a burning.
Shreve noticed, when she walked past him as he lay in corpse position, the strong scent of jasmine, and thought that, in the mysterious ways of the world, a holy man, a yogi, had come into her class.
Shreve, like Sylvia, was a widow. Sort of. There was no word for what she was, actually. She felt betrayed by language, among other things. Her fiancé had been murdered. Even the nature of his death had robbed her of something primary, as if how he died was more important than that he had. She’d given up trying to explain it. Nobody in Voorhisville knew. She’d moved here with her new yoga teacher certificate after the second anniversary of the event and opened up this studio with the savings she’d set aside for the wedding. His parents paid for the funeral, so she still had quite a bit left, which was good, because though the studio was a success by Voorhisville’s standards, she was running out of money. It was enough to make her cranky sometimes. She tried to forgive herself for it. Shreve wasn’t sure she had enough love to forgive the world, but she thought—maybe—she could forgive herself.
With her hands in prayer position, Shreve closed her eyes and sang “shanti” three times. It meant “peace,” and on that morning Shreve felt like peace had finally arrived.
Later, when the stranger showed up for the writers’ workshop at Jan Morris’s house, she could not determine how he’d found out about the elitist group, known to have rejected at least one local writer on the basis of the fact she wrote fantasy. Jan asked him how he’d found them, but Sylvia interrupted before he could answer. Certainly it never occurred to her to think he was up to anything diabolical. Also, it became clear that Sylvia knew him from a yoga class she attended. By the time he had passed out the twelve copies of his poem—his presence made them a group of thirteen, but they were intellectuals, not a superstitious bunch—well, it just didn’t matter how he found them.
