Talia has never seen a live tortoise, but knows something about them—she’s read the fable where the tortoise beats the hare. She stands up and tip-toes over the sand. The tortoise freezes under her shadow; when Talia stoops, it retracts its head and legs. The shell is its house: old Talia pictures young Talia imagining a skinny green creature, more like a frog than a turtle, standing inside its home on its hind legs. She picks up the tortoise, which is both heavier and lighter than she expected, and there’s the tortoise’s beaked snout in the space between the upper and lower halves of its shell. Daring herself, she touches the beak with the tip of her tongue and leaves it there for a five count.
“There,” she says to the clammed up tortoise. “I’ve tamed you. I’m Queen of the Tortoises.” Her palms are wet. Tortoises pee? The word “anoint” from church jumps into her head.
“I am your queen,” she repeats to the creature she holds to her face like a big sandwich.
Traffic hasn’t moved for a quarter of an hour. The margin she left herself to get to the library and her Book Babies is evaporating. She’s misplaced her phone charger somewhere on her way back from Florida, and her cell phone is out of power. In her side mirror she sees the door of the truck behind her swing open, and the driver steps down to the pavement. He’s got a little dog on a leash—when he sets the pooch down, it tugs him between their vehicles toward the shoulder.
“Hey,” she calls out her window, and the trucker stops and leans back, winking against the sun. “Do you know what’s wrong?”
He shrugs. “Have you got a phone?”
“Yes,” she says, “but it’s out of power.” She feels her face close up in a frown. She glances up and down the line of cars frozen in the fast lane beside her, drivers stiff as mannequins behind their steering wheels.
“Probably an accident,” the trucker says, and follows his dog. Talia pulls her head back in the window and glances at the dashboard clock. Should she picture this delay as a chapter for her graphic memoir? Soon the Wellesley mothers will arrive at the library with their toddlers, but Talia won’t be there. How long before they give up and go home? The room they gather in for Book Babies is circular, and its ceiling domed. When the session is in full swing, it’s not hard for Talia to imagine that she’s hosting a party inside a huge tortoise shell.
Seven-year-old Talia is back on her belly in the RV’s shade. She watches the tortoise struggle away from her toward the brush she’s plucked it from. It drags the little plastic doll, which she’s tied to one of its hind legs with a blade of beach grass.
“Good waterskiing, Barbara,” she whispers to the doll. A moment later the tortoise stops and jerks its head and legs into its shell. Talia turns and finds her parents and a stranger looming over her. The frowning stranger wears a uniform and a broad-brimmed hat. Mirrored sunglasses hide his eyes. In Talia’s graphic memoir these glasses spread across a two page illustration, one lens per page. Each lens reflects little Talia, prone on the sand, the tortoise and doll in the background. When this image arises before Talia, sometimes she sees faint Xs across the lenses behind the reflected figures. Sometimes this seems a brilliant touch and sometimes it doesn’t.
The uniformed man stomps past Talia, his shoes black and huge. When he squats beside the tortoise, the stripes on his trousers bend at sharp angles. “You’re disturbing the ecosystem of the beach,” he says, looking back at Talia and her parents. A badge over his heart glints like his glasses. “This gopher tortoise is trying to reach its burrow. It’s protected—it’s a keystone species. Its burrow is protected, too.” He breaks the beach grass tow rope and tosses the doll in Talia’s direction. “Hundreds of species depend on that burrow. Three-hundred-sixty, to be exact. They’re called ‘obligates’—their whole cycle of life is based on that gopher tortoise’s burrow. When you start tying baby dolls to things, you’re messing with the natural order of the universe. Is that what you mean to do? Destroy the natural order?”
Talia’s graphic memoir is impossible to organize—some of the illustrations don’t fit with specific chapters and seem to appear and disappear with a will of their own. Was it her father who told her that several ancient cultures—Native American, Chinese, Indian-Indian—believed that a gigantic tortoise carried the world on its back? She imagines unfolding a picture as big as a highway sign for her Book Babies and their mommies—a tortoise supporting the earth, afloat amidst the stars.
And here is young Talia again, with her eyes squeezed shut in the petting zoo of an animal park. She holds out fistfuls of feed to overeager goats and lambs and disfigured deer. Hairy lips nibble her fingers and rough tongues swab her wrists. Hard muzzles butt her ribs and thighs. Then a sound like a foghorn rises from another part of the park.
“The giant tortoises!” someone shouts. “They’re mating!”
Now Talia stands among a crowd outside a chain link fence. Her father’s hands grip her shoulders. Inside the pen one huge tortoise leans on another like a toppled armchair. The top tortoise’s beaked mouth opens, and it releases a moan so deep Talia feels it in the soles of her feet.
“You know what this is, right, honey?” her father asks, and Talia, even though she’s not sure, nods. The crown of her head rubs against her dad’s chest while she waits for the tortoise to cry out again.
Traffic is going nowhere. Other drivers have emerged from their cars and trucks. Some shield their eyes and gaze into the distance. Some mince around their vehicles as if the highway is paved with hot tar. Some chat in small groups. By now, word has probably been passed around explaining the cause of the delay, but it no longer matters to Talia—it’s too late for Book Babies. She slumps behind the steering wheel and closes her eyes. She leaves the window rolled up to discourage visitors, and, because the air conditioner is shut off, she smells Sinclair. His sweat, his deodorant, his hair gel—and an unidentifiable fungal odor. Talia thinks of sex, sex with Sinclair, slides down further in her seat and peeks out her window. Dare she risk touching herself? Scenes from her memoir rise:
“OBLIGATES,” she’s labeled the poster board displayed on the middle school cafeteria table. Her project for the science fair lists all three-hundred-sixty species whose survival depends on the keystone gopher tortoise and its burrow. To accompany the list she’s drawn a cross section of a typical burrow: a long tunnel angled underground ending in a round bulge where the tortoise resides. Smirking boys pass by her display. “Looks like a big dick,” is the snickered whisper that captions this memory.
“OBLIGATES”: For Talia’s eighteenth birthday, she gets the first of her tattoos. The artist’s needle punctures her shoulder—a halo of little stars in the air indicates the pain. The tattoo is of a cave cricket. It’s hump-backed like a shrimp; the bend of its long hind legs suggests a woman waiting to fuck—is she the only one who sees this? The cave cricket is an obligate: she has resolved to have one species a month tattooed somewhere on her body. She plans to cover herself with all three-hundred-sixty.
When she meets Sinclair, she is nearly a third of the way there. Sinclair guesses about the obligate tattoos, is it the second or third night they sleep together? They lie side by side on Talia’s bed, and he asks about the snakes on her legs.
“The snake around my left ankle is a diamond back rattler; the snake around the right is a gopher snake,” she says, and when his fingers tighten over the rattler, it comes to life. Sinclair palms Talia’s ass and runs his hand down her hip, her thigh, her shin, then reaches down and cups her heel.
“So,” he says, “all these tattoos—if they’re all things that live in a gopher tortoise’s burrow, that makes you the burrow, right? You’re like the what, the physical embodiment of that empty space, is that it?” He falls silent. His hands leave her body. He is so still that when Talia closes her eyes it is possible for her to imagine that she’s alone—that
he’s never been there at all. When he speaks, it feels like a spank that might leave a mark: “‘Obligates’—why not?” He squeezes her calf, probably looking at the lizards, toads, and insects tattooed there. “A theme’s a theme.”
The destination in New Smyrna Beach Talia returns from is the plot of land her father still refers to as “our toehold in Florida.” He bought the half-acre lot the day after the mirror-eyed conservation officer interrupted Talia’s play with the gopher tortoise. Her road trip to visit the site is the first time in twenty years anyone in the family has been back.
“Our toehold,” her dad repeats when she visits her parents in their assisted living facility and tells them where she is about to go. “It doesn’t take much to be a Floridian.” Talia pictures her father as a towering giant, his face hidden in a cloud, his toe stuck in a hole in the ground.
Talia dozes behind the wheel of Sinclair’s car in the middle of the Mass Pike, struggling and failing to visualize herself as a tortoise burrow—she can’t differentiate between what is solid and what is space. All that appears before her mind’s eye is the lip of a burrow: she stands over it with the property manager of the New Smyrna Beach condo community that has risen around her family’s undeveloped lot. The manager tells her she’s got gopher tortoise problems:
“The fellow that abides here makes his way around the neighborhood,” the manager says. “That means the burrow’s active. If you want to build, the whole thing’s got to be excavated and the tortoise relocated. The process has to be overseen and certified by the department of conservation and wildlife. It’ll cost you a few thousand dollars. I can give you contact information if you want to make inquiries.”
Talia stares down into the mouth of the burrow, expecting a tortoise to peep out. The skin on her arms and legs tingles, as if all one hundred-plus of her tattooed obligates—snakes, insects, mice, lizards, frogs—are trying to wriggle off her flesh and dive into the hole.
“Did you know,” she asks, “that when gopher tortoises lay their eggs, the sex of the hatchlings can be affected by the temperature of the environment?”
“That’s a new one on me,” the property manager says.
“If it’s hot there are more females. Cool means more males.”
“Well, what do you know…” The property manager’s tone suggests disbelief.
Talia is not interested in developing the property. Her life is in Wellesley. Her parents are too old to uproot themselves from the Northeast. But the burrow—Talia waits in Sinclair’s car, parked between beach houses in front of her half acre. The sun sets over the across-the-street neighbor’s roof. The sky darkens, but streetlights absorb whatever stars might be emerging. She can’t find a moon. It’s past midnight—Talia is wondering how much black ink an actual illustration of midnight would require—when she sees the gopher tortoise clawing across the road in front of her, heading toward its home on her land.
Sinclair’s car is both shelter and prison—does it deserve an illustration for the graphic memoir? Is this final leg of her trip, where time stands still, an important part of Talia’s story? Her right heel burns— a blister’s rubbed up from pressing the gas pedal for thousands of miles. Across the tendon above Talia’s painful heel is her only non-obligate tattoo: an inch long “Sinclair.” She could have it removed, but what if she leaves it and dots the two “i”s in Sinclair with Xs? Or, better yet, what if she dots one “i” with a tattoo of a tick and the other with a sand flea? That would use up two more obligates on her list, and the parasites could suck the blood out of her ex for as long as Talia has flesh.
She looks at the dead cell phone in her fist. The library director will be worried about her, as might some of the mothers she missed today, but the babies won’t have noticed. And the graphic memoir? Locked in her head, available only to her mind’s eye, isn’t her story-in-pictures as dead as the phone? She probably lost the charger when she stopped at the dunes on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on her way back north—where she discovered she couldn’t draw:
Talia sits atop one of the white dunes under a sky so blue she regrets her decision to render her memoir in black and white. She glimpses the ocean half a mile away—the dunes are further inland than she’d have guessed. Laughing teenagers surf down them on strips of cardboard. An art pad is open on her lap. A gentle breeze from behind lifts her blonde hair and drapes it over her shoulders and chest. Talia focuses on the blank page. When she points her black marker skyward, saluting the sun, her hair slips off her shoulder, exposing a dozen inked creatures huddled there.
She takes a deep breath and outlines a female figure. She draws a hole in the torso, then shows one of the figure’s hands clutching something torn from within—or maybe catching something that’s burst out on its own. Then she caps the marker with trembling fingers, closes the pad, stands, and takes several deep breaths before gliding down the dune with strides so long she feels as if she’s bounding off the moon.
In the parking lot of the state park, neither dunes nor ocean visible, Talia clears the trash of the road from the car—food wrappers, coffee cups, water bottles— before looking at her picture. When she finally opens the pad, she blushes so hard her empty piercings sting. Her belly aches—this child’s scrawl couldn’t be hers—couldn’t be her. It’s proportioned like a gingerbread man. Only the sheaf of hair distinguishes it as female. That black scribble in the middle, the supposed opening to Talia’s core, looks like an attempt to cross out the whole picture. And the thing from inside that the figure holds? Just a naked, shell-less turtle, as ugly as an abortion.
Finally, traffic on the Mass Pike begins to move. Drivers rush back to their vehicles, engines roar to life, exhaust spurts from tailpipes. Talia starts Sinclair’s car and inches forward with traffic, her foot tapping back and forth between the brake and gas pedals. The two lanes merge, and the truck in her mirror is eclipsed by an SUV. Ahead, state troopers wave orange cones and direct the single line of cars from the highway to the shoulder. Talia’s palms sweat, and she turns up the air conditioner so high her forehead aches as if she’s gulped down a Slushy. Is that Sinclair’s odor wafting again from the upholstery? When she gets back to Wellesley, she’ll drive straight to the library, where she’ll explain her lateness to the director. She will call her parents to let them know she’s back in town. “The property is fine,” she’ll say after she reminds them where she’s been. Then she’ll send a message to Sinclair thanking him for the use of his car and informing him that he can pick it up in the library parking lot. Or maybe she’ll wait to send that message until after she’s had a chance to rest. She’ll leave the car in the library lot for the weekend at least. Maybe for another full week. Sinclair doesn’t need to know she’s back. If he needs the car, too bad. Let him walk or take a bus.
The creeping line of traffic carries Talia along the shoulder. Police cruisers, ambulances, fire trucks, and tow trucks, their lights flashing in discordant rhythms, block the highway lanes. They look as if they’re circled up to repel an attack. Talia knows that soon she’ll pass the kind of wreckage that will mark the history of lives she’ll never know; she sets her jaw and resolves to keep her eyes forward. In the distance, yellow-vested men direct traffic from the shoulder back to the double lanes of the turnpike, and vehicles speed off like released fish, leaving anonymous tragedy behind them.
But here is a trooper approaching Talia. He holds one hand up and points to the side of the road, an instruction he’s given no one else. Mirrored glasses hide his eyes, and Talia shivers—suddenly the air conditioner is intolerably cold, but she’s afraid to make a sudden move to shut it off. Gravel crunches under her tires as Talia pulls beyond the shoulder and stops. She blinks hard. Does the officer bending toward her window think she’s fluttering her lashes flirtatiously? Does he mistake her wince for a smile? Her gaze slips from his glasse
s—she’s afraid she might see Xs—and pauses on the inspection sticker in the corner of Sinclair’s windshield. The sticker has been there for all three thousand miles of her trip, but she’s never noticed it. Something’s not right: a registration sticker should show a future year, not a past. Has Sinclair really let her drive the width of the country and back in a car with a registration that expired long before they’d even met?
The sleeves of her sweater hide her tattoos, but Talia feels her obligates shuddering all over her arms and legs as if they sense a threat to their home. If Talia disappears, if she turns to air, all hundred of them will scatter from her empty clothes. She holds her breath, waiting for the trooper to tell her what to do next. He’ll demand documents. Will he ask her to leave the vehicle? Will he insist on searching Sinclair’s trunk? Talia’s heart pounds. She hasn’t opened the trunk since leaving the family lot in New Smyrna Beach, where, under a moonless, midnight sky, she slammed it shut on the gopher tortoise she couldn’t allow to possess her property.
Demi-Christmas
While Dahlia assesses her reflection in the mirrored doors of her closet, smiling with professional approval at her smart figure—she is a casting agent with a full client list—the cellphone on her dresser hums. She watches herself answer; she looks every bit the modern working mother in spite of the failed womb her tailored suit covers. It’s Dr. Morrison, the fertility specialist who has laid the groundwork for the surrogate birth that will make Dahlia a single mom in a week. Delivery will be induced on June twenty-fifth.
Women of Consequence Page 10
