Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  Rachel had not felt much obligation to the living for years. Of her children, all but two were dead. There was almost no one still alive who remembered her. "What about," she pointed at the demon.

  "Don't look at him," the man said, quietly.

  Rachel looked down at her lap, at the envelope and the plastic ticket. "I'm not sure I should have come," she said.

  "Most people don't," the man said. "What's your seat number?"

  Rachel looked at her ticket. Now, in addition to saying "Gate 4A," it also said, "Seat 7A.

  "I was hoping we were together," said the man. "But I'm afraid I'm 12D. Aisle seat. I prefer the aisle. 7A. That's a window seat. You'll be able to see the stars."

  She could see the stars at home.

  "There's the plane," he said.

  She could hear the whine of it, shrill, like metal on metal. It was a big passenger 747, red on top and silver underneath, with a long, swirling gold dragon running the length of the plane. She didn't like it.

  She stayed with the man with the Fedora through boarding. A young man in a golden suit, narrow and perfectly fitted, took their tickets. The young mangy name tag said "Golden Boy." His face was as pale as platinum. At the door of the plane, there were two women in those beautiful green suits and little pillbox stewardess hats, both identical to the girl at the counter. Standing, Rachel could see that their skirts fell to their ankles but were slit up one side almost to the knee. Their nametags both said "Jade Girl." On the plane, the man with the Fedora pointed out to Rachel where her seat was.

  She sat down and looked out the window. In the time they had been waiting for the plane, it had started to get dark, although she could not vet see the first star.

  They landed in Hong Kong at dawn, coming in low across the harbor which was smooth and shined like pewter. They came closer and closer to the water until it seemed they were skimming it and then, suddenly there was land and runway and the chirp of their wheels touching down.

  Rachel's heart gave a painful thump and she said, "Oh," quite involuntarily, and put her hand to her chest. Under her hand she felt her heart lurch again and she gasped, air filling her quiet lungs until they creaked a hit and found elasticity. Her heart beat and filled her with- she did not know at first with what and then she realized it was excitement. Rising excitement and pleasure and fear in an intoxicating mix. Colors were sharp and when one of the jade Girls cracked the door to the plane, the air had an uncertain tang-sweet and underneath that, a many-people odor like old socks.

  "Welcome to the Fragrant Harbor," the Jade Girls chorused, their voices so similar that they sounded like a single voice. The man with the Fedora passed her and looked back over his shoulder and smiled. She followed him down the aisle, realizing only after she stood that the demon was now behind her. The demon smelled like wet charcoal and she could feel the heat of his body as if he were a furnace. She did not look around. Outside, there were steps down to the tarmac and the hear took her breath away, but it fresh wind blew off the water. Rachel skimmed off her flip-flops so they wouldn't trip her up and went down the stairs to China.

  A Golden Boy was waiting for her, as a Jade Girl had been waiting for the man with the Fedora. "Welcome to San-ying, the Heaven of Highest Purity;' lie said.

  "I am supposed to he in Hong Kong," Rachel said. She dropped her flip-flops and stepped into them.

  "This is the afterlife of Hong Kong," he said. "Are you here to stay?"

  "No;' she said. "I got a letter." She showed him the Chinese envelope.

  "Ah," he said. "Tin Hau Temple. Excellent. And congratulations. Would you like a taxi or would you prefer to take a bus? The fares will be charged against the monies you collect."

  "Which would you recommend?" she asked.

  "On the bus, people may not speak English," he said. "So you won't know where to get off And you would have to change to get to Yau Ma Tel. I recommend a taxi."

  "All right," she said. People wouldn't speak English? Somehow it had never occurred to her. Maybe she should have seen if someone would come with her. This granddaughter, maybe she had burned ancestor money for Robert as well. Why not? Robert was her grandfather. She didn't know any of them, so why would she favor Rachel? That had been foolish, not checking to see if Robert had wanted to come. He hadn't been on the plane, but maybe he wouldn't come by himself. Maybe he'd gone to find Rachel and she'd already been gone.

  She hadn't been lonely before she came here.

  The Golden Boy led her through the airport. It was a cavernous space, full of people, all of whom seemed to be shouting. Small women with bowed legs carrying string bags full of oranges and men squatting along the wall, smoking cigarettes and grinning at her as she passed with the Golden Boy. There were monkeys everywhere, dressed in Chinese gowns and little caps, speaking the same language as the people. Monkeys were behind the counters and monkeys were pushing carts and monkeys were hawking Chinese newspapers. Some of the monkeys were tiny black things with wizened white faces and narrow hands and feet that were as shiny as black patent leather. Some were bigger and waddled, walking on their legs like men. They had stained yellow teeth and fingernails the same color as their hands. They were businesslike. One of the little ones shouted something in Chinese in a curiously human voice as she passed, and then shrieked like an animal, baring its teeth at another monkey. She started.

  The Golden Boy, smiled, unperturbed.

  Out front, he flagged a taxi. The car that pulled up was yellow with a white top and said Toyota and Crown Comfort on the hack-it had pulled past them and the Golden Boy grabbed her elbow and hustled her to it. Rachel expected the driver to be it monkey but he was a human. The Golden Boy leaned into the front seat and shouted at the driver in Chinese. The driver shouted back.

  Rachel felt exhausted. She should never have come here. Her poor heart! She would go back home.

  The Golden Boy opened the hack door and bowed to her and walked away.

  "Wait!" she called.

  But he was already inside the airport.

  The driver said something gruff to her and she jumped into the taxi. It had red velour seats and smelled strongly of cigarette smoke. The driver swung the car out into traffic so sharply that her door hanged shut. A big gold plastic bangle with long red tassels swayed below his mirror. He pointed to it and said, "Hong Kong in-sur-ance pol-i-cy," and smiled at her, friendly and pleased at his joke, if it was a joke.

  "I've changed my mind," she said. "I want to go back home"

  But apparently, "Hong Kong insurance policy" was most, if not all, of his English. He smiled up into his rearview mirror. His teeth were brown and some were missing.

  This was not what Rachel thought of as death.

  The street was full of cars, bicycles, single-piston two-cycle tractors and palanquins. Her driver swung through and around them. They stopped at an intersection to wait for the light to change. Two men were putting down one of the palanquins. In it was a woman sitting in a chair. The woman put a hand on one of the men's shoulders and stood up carefully. Her gown was a swirl of greenish blues and silvers and golds. Her face was turned away but she was wearing a hat like a fox's head. There was something about her feet that was odd-they looked no bigger than the palm of a human hand. Rachel thought, "She's walking on her toes." The woman looked over towards the taxi and Rachel saw that it wasn't a hat, that the woman had marvelous golden fox eyes and that the tip of her tongue just protruded from her muzzle, dog-like. The light changed and the taxi accelerated up a hill, pushing Rachel hack into her scat, queasy.

  Narrow streets strung overhead with banners. The smells- dried fish and worse- made Rachel feel more and more sick. Nausea brought with it visceral memories of three years of illness before she died, of confusion and fear and pee in the bed. She had not forgotten before, but she hadn't felt it. Now she felt the memories.

  The streets were so narrow that the driver's mirror clipped the shoulder of a pedestrian as they passed. The mirror folded in a bit and then sn
apped out and the angry startled cry dopplered behind them. Rachel kept expecting the face of the driver to change, maybe into a pig, or worse, the demon from the plane.

  The taxi lurched to a stop. "Okay," the driver said and grinned into the mirror. His face was the same human face as when they had started. The red letters on the meter said $72.40. And then they blinked three times and said $00.00. When Rachel hadn't moved, the driver said, "Okay," again and said something in Chinese.

  She didn't know how to open the car door.

  He got out and came around and opened the door. She got out.

  "Okay!" he said cheerfully and jumped back in and took off, leaving the smell of exhaust.

  She was standing in an alley barely wider than the taxi. Both sides of the alley were long red walls, punctuated by wide doors, all closed. A man jogged past her with a long stick over his shoulders with baskets on both ends. The stick was bowed with the weight and flexed with each step. Directly in front of her was a red door set with studs. If she tilted her head back, above the wall she could see a building with curved eaves, rising tier upon tier like some exotic wedding cake.

  The door opened easily when she pushed on it.

  Inside was the temple, and in front of it, a slate-stone paved courtyard. A huge bronze cauldron filled with sand had incense sticks smoking in it, and she smelled sandalwood. After the relative quiet of the alley, the temple was loud with people. A Chinese hand was playing a cacophony of drums and gongs, rhong, rhong, Chang-thong, while a woman stood nodding and smiling. The band was clearly playing for her. Rachel didn't think the music sounded very musical.

  There were red pillars holding up the eaves of the temple, and the whole front of the building was open, so that the courtyard simply became the temple. Inside was dim and smelled even more strongly of sandalwood. A huge curl of the incense hung down in a cone from the ceiling. The inside of the temple was full of birds; not the pleasant, comforting and domestic animals her geese were. They had long sweeping tails and sharply pointed wings and they flickered from ground to eaves and watched with bright, black, reptilian eves. People ignored them.

  A man in a narrow white suit came up to her, talking to the air in Chinese. He was wearing sunglasses. It took her a moment to realize that he was not talking to some unseen spirit, but was wearing a headset for a cell phone, most of which was invisible in his jet-black hair. He pushed the mic down away from his face a little and addressed her in Chinese.

  "Do you speak English?" she asked. She had not gotten accustomed to this hammering heart of hers.

  "No English," he said and said some more in Chinese.

  The envelope and letter had Chinese letters on it. She handed it to him. After she had handed it to him, it occurred to her that she didn't know if he had anything to do with the temple or if he was, perhaps, some sort of confidence man.

  He pulled the sunglasses down his nose and looked over them to read the letter. His lips moved slightly as he read. He pulled the mic back up and said something into it, then pulled a thin cell phone no bigger than a business card and tapped some numbers out with his thumb.

  "Wei!" he shouted into the phone.

  He handed her back the letter and beckoned for her to follow, then crossed the temple, walking fast and weaving between people without seeming to have had to adjust. Rachel had to trot to keep up with him, nearly stepping out of her foolish flip-flops.

  In an alcove off to one side, the wall was painted with a mural of a Hong Kong street with cars and buses and red-and-white taxis, traffic lights and crosswalks. But no jade Girls or fox-headed women, no palanquins or tractors. Everything in it looked very contemporary; the light reflecting off the plate-glass windows, the briefcases and fur coats. As contemporary as the white-suited man. The man held up his hand that she was to wait here. He disappeared back into the crowd.

  She thought about going back out and getting in a taxi and going hack to the airport. Would she need money? She hadn't needed money to get here, although they had told her that the amount of the taxi had been subtracted from her money. Did she have enough to get back? What if she had to stay here? What would she do?

  An old woman in a gray tunic and black pants said, "Rachel Ball?"

  "Yes?"

  "I am Miss Lily. I speak English. I can help you," the woman said. May I see your notification?"

  Rachel did not know what a "notification" was. "All I have is this letter," she said. The letter had marks from handling, as if her hands had been moist. What place was this where the dead perspired?

  "Ah," said Miss Lily. "That is it. Very good. Would you like your money in hills or in a debit card?"

  "Is it enough to get me home?" Rachel asked.

  "Oh, yes," Miss Lily said. "Much more than that."

  "Bills," Rachel said. She did not care about debit cards.

  "Very good," said Miss Lily. "And would you like to make arrangements to sell your goods, or will you be shipping them?"

  "What do people do with money?" Rachel asked.

  "They use it to buy things, to buy food and goods, just as they do in life. You are a Christian, aren't you?"

  "Baptist," Rachel said. "But is this all there is for Chinese people after they die? The same as being alive? What happens to people who have no money?"

  "People who have no money have nothing," said Miss Lily. "So they have to work. But this is the first of the seven heavens. People who are good here progress up through the heavens. And if they continue, they will eventually reach a state of what you would call transcendence, what we call the three realms, when they are beyond this illusion of matter."

  "Can they die here?"

  Miss Lily inclined her head. "Not die, but if they do not progress, they can go into the seven hells."

  "But I have enough money to get back home," Rachel said. "And If I left you the rest of it, the money and the goods, could you give it to someone here who needs it?

  "At home you will not progress," Miss Lily said gently.

  That stopped Rachel. She would go back to her little clapboard cabin and her geese and everything would become as timeless as it had been before. Here she would progress.

  Progress for what? She was dead. Death is eternity.

  She had been dead for over seventy years, and she would be dead forever and forever. Dead longer than those buried in the tombs of Egypt, where the dead had been prepared for an afterlife as elaborate as this one. In her mind, forever spread back and forward through the epochs of dinosaurs, her time of seventy years getting smaller and smaller in proportion. Through the four billion years of the earth.

  And still farther back and forward, through the time it took the pinwheel galaxy to turn, the huge span of a galactic day, and a galactic year, in which everything recognizable grew dwarfed.

  And she would be dead.

  Progress meant nothing.

  It made no difference what she chose.

  And she was back at her gate in Swan Pond standing in the talcum dust and it was no difference if this was 1927 or 200; or 10,158. Hong Kong left behind in the blink of an eye. She wasn't surprised. In front of her was the empty clapboard cabin, no longer white-painted and tidy but satiny gray with age. The windows were empty of glass and curtains and under a lowering evening sky, a wind rhythmically slapped a shutter against the abandoned house. The tomatoes were gone to weeds, and there were no geese to greet her.

  And it did not matter.

  A great calm settled over her and her unruly heart quieted in her chest.

  Everything was still.

  In the Air

  join a dog club. I take along Smith, my seven-month-old golden retriever, because, of course, if you are going to join a dog club, it should be because you want to train your dog. Smith can already slap her butt on the floor when she hears the rattle of the biscuit box. Smith will even sometimes sit when told to, even if no puppy cookie is in evidence. But Smith doesn't heel and doesn't stay.

  This doesn't strike me as a major proble
m. Smith is housebroken, which is what really matters. And if she jumps on people when they come to the door, well, the only person who's come recently was UPS delivering my videotape on "Decorating with Sheets," and if I've become the kind of person who lives in the suburbs and has a golden retriever and orders videotapes called "Decorating with Sheets," then life is already too surreal to worry about whether or not Smith can heel and stay.

  "I'm thinking about sponge painting," I say, to the air, to Michael, who is practically air anyway.

  Michael nods. Even though I'm not looking at him, I can tell that he nods; we're twins, and I know these things about Michael.

  "Imagine it, sponge painting. Wallpaper." My back window opens on trees and sometimes cows, and I'm looking out of it instead of at Michael. "Next will be fabric painting and decoupage."

  "There's no rule that says that just because you live in the suburbs you have to be vapid;' Michael says, oh so softly, softly enough that his voice might not even be there.

  Michael is wearing a plaid shirt and a white T-shirt and boots. I realize that the shirt looks like one of Joes. Which is probably on purpose, although, with Michael, I don't know if "purpose" is exactly the right description. (Does grass have "purpose" when it grows? Do cats have "purpose" when they hunt?)

  Joe is still in Brooklyn and I'm here in Ohio, and I haven't seen Joe since he moved in with Keith five years ago, and I'm not a fag hag anymore, I'm a suburban matron. I don't even miss Joe or all that sexual tension-his for guys, mine for him.

  I think about those abortive attempts at sex with Joe, and I'm embarrassed for both Joe and myself again.

  "I'm middle-aged," I say.

  Michael says nothing. He doesn't say that thirty-six is hardly middle-aged. He doesn't say that just because I've put on ten pounds and now weigh 140, that doesn't mean that I've become suddenly soft and frowsy and invisible.

  I don't know why weighing 140 pounds means I'm middle-aged, but it does. It is a magic number. A matronly number. More important than wishing young people would get their hair out of their eyes and more important than thinking Green Day sounds banal and that MTV is too sexist. If I could lose ten pounds, then maybe I could put off middle age for a while. But the thought of dieting, of thinking of food all the time, seems like too much to contemplate.