The music is too loud! She cannot hear what anyone is saying. But there is still dessert to be had—the masterpiece—and still in the center of the table Diane's dish covered with its towel which, now that she notices, has darkened at the center as if sopping something, wicking it away.
“What is this music?” she asks. “If it's Scheherazade that was my grandmother's favorite,” but even as she says it she is rising, moving into the kitchen. The dessert has been chilling in the refrigerator and when she sees it again she is relieved to find it still pristine, unaged. It stands alone on the center shelf, the cool of the fridge a blue shadow below its peaks. She feels a great love for this dessert, almost a swooning for it. She lifts it as she might an animal, a docile one, though one whose habits remain uncertain. The music swells and peters. It is Scheherazade, she is sure, and she turns to the table, the dessert held before her, smiling so that her teeth will show, but what of it? They are friends. It is a party.
And yet, what is this? She sees Diane has uncovered her dish. The men are cheering, her husband tilting his head back, holding a fold of flesh up and away from his eye with one blunt hand. Diane's husband has laid his head fully on the table as if to get a better view of her dish, which is, she will admit, incomparable—dark, rich, heaving slightly in the very bright light that pours from Diane's hands, spills from the deep cleft of her neckline.
“Oh, no darling,” says Diane, motioning her forward. “Yours is too beautiful. You mustn't mind. You don't mind? Put it here, right on the table. Let's look at them together. Cheers.”
But it is really too late. She knows that. She can picture how her dessert will look on the table, littered now with dishes, stained, the tablecloth askew and in some places tattered. She has failed her dessert, failed its dear crevices, its frail, tremulous desires. She has failed the party, she sees, as she notices a cobweb hung thick and cloistered between the spires of the chandelier, a rung hanging down from the back of Diane's husband's chair and the borders of the rug unraveling, each thread faded to the same murky brown. There is nothing for it. She holds the dessert out in front of her.
“It had no chance, poor thing,” she thinks, stepping forward. Diane's dish has somehow slipped to the side of the plate and now hangs there, pattering a warm liquid onto the table cloth. It seems to elongate as she watches, as if seeking purchase, and then there is a terrible clamor of drums, trumpets, fifes. Something insurmountable has happened to the music, and the light grows so bright, so piercing, that all she can see are Diane's husband's eyes, black, unblinking, tilted toward her as if sharing a joke.
A White Hat on His Head, Two Wooden Legs
There was a girl who was wild and a boy who was tame. This is not to say anything, but merely how they were raised: both with great care, almost precision, but one with a stick brought down on his head every night and one who had been given a fat little book with onion-skin pages and anatomical drawings in full color therein.
One day, when they had both grown out of their plump infancy and exchanged the fine fur that swathed their limbs and torsos for coarser, more menacing stuff, their mothers packed them each a brown sack filled with bread and cheese, dried fruits and skins of milk and water and waved to them from the gates of the tidy houses in which they had previously spent all of their lives. The girl and the boy walked many miles down the roads that led from their homes which were ringed on all sides by an impenetrable forest. They were alone, but they had been raised to anticipate being alone. They were hungry, but they had been raised to expect that feeling could and should be appeased. In separate clearings, they both sat down to enjoy the first meal that had not been served to them on a thin china plate and drink the first drink they did not sip out of a chipped china cup emblazoned with their very own names.
When their appetites were satisfied both the girl and the boy took a moment to be still in their surroundings and listen to the noises the world was making. The girl ran her fingers over a tussock of moss that was growing up next to her thigh. She pinched the heads of some purple gerardia so she could better see down the length of the flowers' speckled throats. The boy closed his eyes and leaned back on his elbows. He listened to the call of a phoebe who, protecting its nest, fluttered at the forest edge canting a lame wing over its eyes. “Phoebe phoebe phoebe phoebe,” the bird said and the boy pulled his stick out of his sack and ran his hands over its familiar knots. Many miles away, the girl squinted as a cloud passed over the face of the sun. She ruffled the edges of her onion-skin book so the flayed muscles within blurred together and seemed to stretch and bunch.
They traveled this way for many days. One day, the girl sat down on a log beneath a rustling oak and ate the last crumb of her bread, swallowed the last hot slug of water from her skins. The water was musty and animal. For the first time in her life, the girl was unsatisfied. She tucked her head between her knees and pressed her knees against her ears until everything sounded like the color apricot. She called out, “Oh oh oh oh,” and that too sounded apricot which was a color that made her feel nauseous and even more unhappy. Soon she was inconsolable. She gnashed her teeth.
Meanwhile, the boy had taken many turns at random and found himself off the road entirely. He did not feel lost because he had not from the first day known where he was going, but he did feel uneasy. He had eaten his last morsel of cheese many hours before and had hoarded his milk so long it had gone sour in the skin. The day before, the boy had come across a swift cold stream that frothed and tinkled, but he did not drink from it because he remembered stories of both enchantment and disease. Many days before that, he had come across a bush heavy with plump red berries, but he did not eat from it because he remembered stories of pain and an enduring thirst that thickened in the mouth until the tongue went dead and grey. The boy recognized he was in dire straits, but he did not know what to do next. He supposed he would keep traveling, and then he heard a horrible noise. “Oh oh oh oh,” went the noise and the boy crept forward, parting the undergrowth before him with his stick.
Of course the two met. This had been assumed from their earliest days and they were told in their childhood beds that there was another in the world who had been kept for them, groomed for them. This other person would do for them all the things their mothers had done and perform other actions as well, though what these were was a secret their mothers did not explain. So. Though in fact the boy and the girl met as strangers and were alone in the forest, a dangerous place, and one of them was howling and one of them was carrying before him a fiercely knotted stick, neither the boy nor the girl felt alarm or threat. Rather, they greeted each other with calm recognition. As if to say, “Good to see you again,” in the sort of situation where this is expected, but not fully believed.
That evening, the boy and the girl slept at the base of the great oak. Through the overlapping branches, they could sometimes see stars.
“Did you come a long way?” asked the boy who had put his arm under the girl's head so she could use it as a pillow.
“Far enough,” said the girl, pinching the skin along the boy's ribs with the tips of her very sharp nails. She had right away apprehended the uses of the stick and left behind her a trail of inflamed wheals which made the boy sigh happily and soon put him to sleep.
Indeed, the children, for they were still that, turned out to be most symbiotic. The girl showed the boy the pictures in her book which he found altogether too red, too linear. Though he did not share it, he recognized her fascination and in response the boy took off his clothes and let her touch and bend, stretch and manipulate all the parts she had previously understood without dimension but which now confronted her whole and unexamined, functioning without the knowledge of their innermost chambers. Which she had. Which she treasured.
When the boy rose in response to her touch, he showed her how to make a ring between her thumb and index finger, where to stroke, how hard to squeeze. The first time, he guided her hand with his own atop it and when he came and his semen washed
over her wrist he called her attention to the change in his spent texture, to the vein that pulsed thickly along the side of his withering sac. Having understood them only through pictures, she had never known how quickly a body could alter its forms. As she was wild, her own body had never been a conveyance for her. She was her body and so incapable of figuring her self as a separate, interior passenger, incapable of imagining an alternative to what she had just done or what it was she might do next. She felt a weeping tide of gratitude that this boy and his body had come into her life.
In thankfulness, the girl picked up the boy's stick and beat him about the head and torso. She cracked bloody knots in his shoulders, split open his eyebrow, burst his mouth like a plum. It had been so many days since the boy had been beaten that he too felt weak with gratitude. As he lay shaking on the forest floor, he looked up at the girl framed by the tree's tossing limbs and shards of sky winking blue as mirrors. He said, “I love you,” and she said, “Don't talk.” In this fashion, they knew each other.
As the days passed and they traveled through the forest, the girl and the boy experimented with roots and berries. They drank from the cups of mushrooms so white they glimmered in the forest darkness and chewed strips of bark they pulled from trees which first filled their mouth with an oily fire before softening to a green tingle that numbed them from within. It was clear they could not live in this provisional fashion for long. Already, they had become very thin and what muscles were left hung slack from their bones. Already, they felt a pervasive exhaustion and the girl's lustrous eyes seemed smaller and harder and the boy's rich brown hair hung lank and dull.
Then one day, quite suddenly, they passed out of the forest and into the skirting fields of a small town. As it turned out, this was just in time. The boy collapsed onto the warm, turned soil and the girl dug into the ground, using her hands like paws. She turned up two wizened potatoes and held them in front of her, considering, while the sun, always before so dappled and fleeting, beat down on her head with a feeling like trumpets and clashing shields. They were out of their element, that was for sure. As far as the girl could see in one direction the field stretched in grizzled hummocks. In the other direction the girl could see buildings, their squares and triangles harsh and garishly overlapping after so long among only the shapes of the forest. A fan of smoke was feathering in the breeze. As she watched, another rose to join it, black at the base as if someone were burning leaves. The girl remembered her mother saying, long ago now, in the little kitchen where almost all the meals of her life had been prepared and consumed, “Everything you need, the forest will give to you. This is a warning. I'll only say it once.”
But they had been traveling so long now . . . But surely another sort of life had already begun . . .
The girl held the potatoes up to her face and inhaled their thin, yellow scent. She rubbed them over her cheeks and chin, over her lips, as if they were stones, appreciating their texture, their weight. She was just thinking, she thought. She was just pausing for breath. The girl was honestly surprised when she found, passing the potato back over her lips, that she had taken a bite but then, the morsel in her mouth both watery and sharp, her saliva flooding her teeth and her tongue, she ate the whole thing and two bites of the second. With a great effort of will, she woke the boy up and shared what was left and they sat together in silence, not yet satisfied, surrounded by a pale infinitude of shifting air in which nothing rustled and nothing snapped, from which nothing treasured them as prey or marked them a danger and skirted their location on careful feet. Eventually, they both fell asleep and slept until the sun sank to the tops of the trees and the wind of another season blew cool across the field.
Had anyone come across them, they would have seemed a picture out of some pretty book. The girl with her tattered skirt, the boy with his ragged stockings. The girl with her hollow cheeks, the boy whose face was stained and swollen. They were two children at the end of a hard time and on the next page, as such stories go, one might expect to see them further imperiled or graced by their earlier virtue with rescue in the form of a fox or an owl, the king of the field mice or a great, black swan. The truth was nothing so kind and nothing so simple. But, as they were young and alone, unobserved in a field which was shorn for the winter, they were gifted long confusing years between action and consequence. When the truth finally came it passed unremarked. As brief as a ray of light fingering through the forest. As strange as a bell tolling in the tower.
And yet, here at last, the boy and the girl had found a place where they could settle instead of a place through which they must toil. The town was large enough that no one paid attention to two new inhabitants, which was as the boy wanted. But, the town was also small enough that at least twice a month the town's people threw festivals to celebrate a detail of the year and the pageant and costume, the ritual and parade, satisfied many needs the girl had not known she possessed. The boy and the girl moved into a cottage located between the butcher's shop and the apothecary's larder. The boy built a little fence, for privacy, which he painted white and latched by means of a silver latch tied up with a thin, blue string. The girl beat the dirt floors and oiled them until the floors shone underfoot and could be swept clean of crumbs with a pine-straw broom. They had a cottage garden in which the boy planted radish and hot peppers. They kept a hutch full of rabbits which the girl fed on radish-tops and stroked between their wide, wet eyes until they went into a trance. When it came time to slit their throats, the girl did this too and she caught their blood in a silver pail and she turned them out of their skins and set their skins on the fence-posts to dry.
The boy and the girl took care of each other's needs. For a little extra money, the boy hired himself out as a butcher's apprentice. When his master was out, he would bring the girl over and show her the cuts: the shoulder which would become a goulash, the leg destined for stroganoff, the aitchbone which would be stewed and boiled, served with cabbage or made into a fine, clear soup. The girl took in the neighbors' laundry and scalded and scrubbed it, delivered it back to them tightly folded and tied with twine. In the winter months, she taught a class made up of farmers' sons and daughters who came into her tidy kitchen to learn what she could teach them of simple sums and how to sign their names, what she thought lay beyond the forest that ringed the town and what she was pretty sure did not.
In the evenings, when the boy came home, he would eat the supper the girl had made and they would talk together about the day that had passed and the one that was coming. Then, they would retire into the bedroom where the girl had stitched thick curtains out of the remnants of their traveling clothes and the boy would show the girl new things about their bodies. After a certain time, one would think there could no longer be anything new to show, but the girl was observant, ravenous for detail, and the boy was imaginative, strong, generous with his time. When they were finished, the boy, still out of breath, would kneel in the middle of the room. The girl would take up his old knotted stick from its place by the hearth and beat him severely, the sound of her blows sometimes carrying all the way to the street where people passing by might imagine someone was chopping wood, or slapping a wet blanket against the side of the washtub so it might dry.
And so, time passed.
This happened at once very fast and with infinite tedium. On some days, the girl would amuse herself by trying to remember what it had felt like to be inside her body on the same date the year before and on the same date the year before that. Other days, when they finally lay down together to sleep, the boy would remark that the only clear impression he had of the day just passed was waking up that morning in the same small bed and opening his eyes. Of course, there were other, more durable markers. The girl noted that the boy had grown a single white eyelash which stood out starkly amongst his other hairs. The boy noticed that the girl had developed a fondness for cream-based sauces and on most days her lips were very chapped and rough. They neither of them remarked these things to the other, but both of
them felt a spreading sort of feeling, as if they were growing to accommodate the space allotted to them. As if they would eventually grow to press against one wall with their knees and the other with their elbows, to cant their necks against the peak of the ceiling, to shove one shoe in the black mouth of the hearth. So far would they grow, but no farther. This was a natural way to feel they both of them supposed.
One February, when the fields were grey and beaten flat by freezing rains and the forest around the town radiated darkness and rustling, the girl was teaching a class of farm and village children to sing a song.
“What kind of bird is that?” the girl sang.
And the children sang in reply, “A little bird, a black bird, a bird that flies away.”
“And how does that bird eat?” sang the girl.
“A white hat on his head,” the children sang. “Two wooden legs. He goes hungry.”
“And how will that bird taste?” sang the girl.
And the children sang in reply, “We eat him up, we eat him up, so fast we do not know.”
At this point in the song, all the children were supposed to sing sounds instead of words. The girl children were supposed to sing high and eerie sounds like icicles snapping in the silent forest and the boy children were supposed to sing low and empty sounds like the black water of a winter pond, or a winter stomach. This is what they did and as they did the girl looked out over them. The children were of all ages. Some were very young and their cheeks were bright and red with heat from her stove and excitement about the bird who had been caught and so got what he deserved. Some were quite a bit older and of these one girl and one boy in particular seemed older still.
That girl struck her as very silly. She had grown her hair longer and longer as her body grew up out of her childhood and now her hair slipped down to the wide mound her buttocks made in her skirt and fanned there stiff and coarse and unhealthy. She had plump feet which she fidgeted constantly so they rustled beneath her hem like two pale animals, and sometimes when she answered a question, the girl could see her thoughts lift and scatter like a flock of birds rising all at once from a tree.
Mother Box and Other Tales Page 4
