“Well, I got married and then later on I got married again,” the ghost said, nudging her. “Get it? Anyway, we bought a house and then my second husband was kind of an animal nut so we had a lot of weird ones. Different kinds of lizards and for a couple of years this horse named Bobo that my husband would just let come into the house. I swear, he walked around in there like a dog or something. Putting his nose on the countertops, everything!” The ghost was delighted by this, delighted to tell it. Mary imagined a horse wandering glumly through some kind of split-level. She imagined the imprint his hooves would make on the carpeting. “And my kids grew up, of course,” the ghost said, still watching Terry and Irma as they resumed their journey. “You remember them, right? I talked about them all the time.”
“Of course,” Mary said. She remembered very little, she realized. She remembered a sound someone made that she found annoying, some habitual sound of their body, but not what it was or who it came out of. Most of the things she thought of now hadn't happened yet, or, like the horse, hadn't happened to her. “A boy and a girl, wasn't it?” Mary said.
“No!” said the ghost, rocking back on her heels, preparing to stand. “Oh, Mary, I see you haven't lost your sense of humor. I always did so admire your perspective. But you remember, two girls, Beverly and Dumma. Dumma was this passing fancy I had, I was only eighteen when she was born after all, but later I really came to regret it. Such an ugly, frumpy name and, chicken before the egg I suppose, she turned out to be a kind of ugly, frumpy girl. Oh, and with an ugly spirit too, like her father, not a lot of fun to be around, but what can you do? Your child will always be the strangest of the strangers in your life, don't you think?” The ghost had risen and backed out of Mary's sightline. She was somewhere behind her, the voice drifting away toward the house as if the ghost were wandering toward the nearest bed of dispirited monkey-grass wilting in its solitary clumps. Irma ran forward the last few yards. She flung her bundle of clothes at Mary's feet and collapsed on top of them giggling. Her buttocks were so brown they seemed more like the haunches of an animal downed with a light, white fur.
“No,” said Mary, “that's not what I think at all.” But of course it was. It was just exactly what she thought.
“What?” Terry said. He sat in the grass and stretched his legs out in front of him. Mary could see the bottoms of his tough feet, the hard, yellow calluses at the ball of his foot and his heel. He laid the blue towel across his lap with an incidental air that Mary thought was quite insolent. “What did you say?” her child asked.
When Irma was born, the fly had settled in her midsection, only sporadically agitated into fitful buzzing as if it had landed on its back and was trying to right itself, and finally stilled completely. Mary had not expected this. After so many years, she assumed the vagaries of the fly to be a condition of her body—something to be attended to like her moles, which often now clustered into premalignant constellations, but nothing to get too keyed up about. One must live, after all. One must travel around and pick things up and put them down again.
However, Irma herself had been something of a surprise. There was a question as to her provenance. In those days, with the fly to anchor her and her time in the facility a matter of polite public secret, Mary was quite the dish. When she arrived on the scene, she felt the scene shift to accommodate her. She had beautiful teeth, small and sharp. She had really terrific calves and long, languid thighs which she enjoyed stroking as one would a disquieted child during lulls in the conversation. They had joined a party of Charlie's peers on a yacht owned by one of the firm's senior partners. There had been champagne and gin and shrimp curled atop tiny triangles of toast. There had been a dessert centerpiece, some kind of layered pudding studded with red and orange dahlias which seemed to leap into the air and burst like a simulacrum of fireworks which was exactly the image they were intended to present. Mary admired the dessert's dedication to artifice. How precisely the dahlia became a firework at its apex and would, as the petals withered and fell, resemble as well the firework at its descent. How cleverly the pallid surface of the pudding, which shuddered with each thud of the beating engine as they motored out of the harbor, resembled in both fact and theory the shuddering surface of the ocean currently surrounding them with an air of preoccupied silence.
It was dusk. The sun was splashing outlandish colors across the horizon. There was a band, a strange combo of drum, guitar and trumpet, playing softly on the aft deck, an open bar doing swift business on the fore and an exclusive company invited aboard—only two other couples, not counting the owner and his wife, whose names were Chris and Kris and Donald and Pet. Mary had never met them before. They were new, the men up-and-comers, the women having something to do with real estate, or, in Pet's case, the trauma room at the hospital. Appropriately, Pet had a scrubbed look about her as if her face had been washed so many times all her features had been pushed away from one another. Her eyebrows were charming, dark and sparse. Chris and Kris, on the other hand, were horribly unremarkable. They had an indeterminate number of children. Many children, Mary gathered and she imagined the weird dislocation the children must feel at the fact of their parents' names. How unnatural to know at such a young age that there were really no choices in the world, that somewhere a man or a woman named Chris was carving a space into which one would fit. It was oppressive, obscene. Kris was wearing a very pretty claret dress, entirely out of season, and Chris had a round head, round eyes, a round mouth pursed like a rectum. Mary took an instant dislike to them both.
The yacht was captained and crewed by a company of sailors who wore tidy, anachronistic uniforms with gold braid at the shoulders and widely cuffed pants, but it was owned by the senior partner in Charlie's firm who had been a friend of the family since Mary was just a very little girl. He had been a friend of her father's and had come to her childhood house with a different wife and sat out on the patio with her father and the other men smoking and accepting brown drinks in sturdy tumblers. His name was Walter Smit, though he had always admonished her to call him Wally. Once, when she was about six, Wally had picked her up and put her on the top shelf of the closet amongst the hats and gloves. He had shut the door on her in there and Mary had sat quietly, kicking her legs in the total, uncomplicated dark. It had been wonderful. Eyes open or eyes shut, it made no difference. Mary considered that something important was being shown to her: a mystery of adulthood, a way to still the ticking clock of her mind. Then, Wally opened the door and she saw it was all meant to be a joke. He lifted her down, his hands pinching under her armpits, and guffawed. He ruffled her hair.
She had never forgiven him, not even at her father's funeral where he seemed genuinely disturbed, as she had been, by the funeral home's choice of floral display: waxy bursts of frangipani interwoven with fans of pink gladioli. There was a terrible smell of shoe polish in the room where the service had been held. Several people, including Mary herself, were quite drunk and an elderly aunt from an unknown branch of the family had arrived with an entourage of small black dogs from which she could not be persuaded to part. The dogs sat on the pew beside her, three of them, looking upright and insincere. Wally sat in the pew directly behind Mary and she felt he had looked at her far too much during the service. She had felt the unspoken pressure of his gaze and, sensitive as she knew herself to be to outside influence, knew her experience had been altered by it. Was there nothing, then, that could be savored? Was there no life that could be lived outside the bidden realm? Mary thought she might tilt her head back and say to Wally, from the corner of her mouth, “I don't remember you at all, you know,” but she did not and then the time for it had passed. Then more than a few years had passed, and here she was on Wally's boat.
“It is a lot of children,” Pet was saying to Kris. They were on the foredeck near the bar. The crew maneuvered the boat out of the mouth of the bay and into open water and cut the engine. Over the creak of the booms and the whipping of ropes and sails, the band could be heard blatting and t
humping, some one of the men energetically calling out encouragement. Mary had no expectations of this moment. She watched Charlie as he dipped his head toward Wally's wife, Dina, who was unusually petite, almost pint-sized, and had lurid violet nails which she was using to shred the napkin wrapped around her drink. A nervous woman, Mary thought, a woman who is afraid of her body. Mary let the moment wash around her and then the next and the next after that. She inclined against the railing and watched the shoreline pass, ragged with houses and shore-grass, concrete pylons and wading birds.
“There is a special kind of bandage,” Pet was saying, “a very small kind of bandage which we keep in stock.” Kris was pressing her hand against the tanned expanse of her cleavage. The conversation had turned on her. Mary imagined a long gallery full of inordinately small beds. Inside each was a child wrapped in specially stocked bandages which had been ordered long before the child's accident or wasting illness, imagined for them when each child was whole and rosy and in control of all its parts. There was something so honest about a hospital, Mary thought. Planning for the future. She wished she was standing a little closer to Pet so she could tell her as much. She seemed the sort of woman who felt an intimacy with the macabre, a woman who understood the danger of palliative thinking, but she and Kris appeared to be getting along like a house on fire. Charlie took Dina by the elbow and led her into a short, jogging waltz. Chris clapped his fleshy hands together as if they were two hunks of roasted meat he had found at the end of the spit and Donald was nowhere to be seen. Mary felt integral to the scene in an odd way, like a caryatid, but a kind of slouching one. One who resented the weight of the pediment but considered it déclassé to rail against oppression or hoard golden apples, flee before the onslaught of the gods or whatever other sort of the thing a woman was expected to do in myth and architecture.
When Wally appeared at her side and laid a hand on her hip, Mary was not surprised. In the intervening years he had grown lean and sinewy, his features starkly disassociated from one another so the nose and the mouth, the ears and the eyes seemed to have only a passing relationship. He was poised in a golden moment in his life, his age upon him but not yet within him, his body comfortable in solitude. “Planning for the future,” she told him, instead, and he said, “You've become something else. Not a woman. Some other thing. How exactly did that happen?”
From there, it was short order.
She and Wally came together in a sort of a stateroom in the belly of the yacht. They were under the waterline, the water sometimes splashing to the halfway mark of the porthole windows set high on the curved hull where it slopped and foamed in just the way it did in movies that took place in boats, or in the staterooms of boats. Mary had always assumed this was artifice, a stagehand's simple replication of the world, and to find it accurate was disturbing to her. She did not want to look at the window, but there were few other places to look. It was a spare room, for all its attempts at grandeur; a blue velvet coverlet on the bed, brass lanterns hanging from brass hooks on the ceiling and the like. It was very early in the evening, only forty minutes since they left the dock. The sun hadn't even gone down, for pity's sake, and yet, here she was, the velvet pressed beneath her buttocks in a way that betrayed the grain of its artificial fur, and Wally pressed above her in a way that betrayed nothing about him. She could see the shoulder of his lavender shirt and the side of his neck, which was corded and sun-burnt. She could see his earlobe and behind it a trim, descending line of brown and gray hair. Wally made no sounds, which she was grateful for. She didn't want to be distracted from her experience of the moment by the experience itself. Wally climbed over her and moved her body as he saw fit. He bent and popped one of her breasts out of the neck of her dress and stuck it in his mouth. It was like being a big padded doll. Mary imagined herself white and jointless. She imagined x's painted in black paint over the spots where Wally might want to suck or press, enter or pinch and the rest of her a vast, pillowy white, a nominal shape meant only to instruct, a teaching tool. The fly buzzed from her lowest abdomen, explored her, absolved her. She was meant, after all, for a purposeful life.
Afterwards, disappointingly, Wally wanted to talk quite a lot. He described the boat to her, its circumference, the depth of its keel. He described afternoons he had spent on the boat, alone but for the subtle crew, trained to anticipate both his desire and his wonder and provide for him an experience he could have achieved on his own only with great forethought and a directed expression of will. He told her that eel grass, “sargassum,” Wally corrected himself, traveled across unfathomable distances with its tiny, dependent ecosystem accompanying it from the provisional shelter of its shadow. If one eschewed the Jacuzzi and leaned instead over the railing of the lower deck, one could watch the prow of the yacht break through these floating universes with hardly more than a ripple.
This wasn't to say anything, Wally carefully said. He was stroking her in an assiduous fashion, starting at the hollow of her throat and sliding down her breast and over her stomach, over the peak of her hip and down her leg. It was now outside their moment. He had ought to have let their moment end, and Mary turned crossly on her side and stared at the porthole which was washed with a film of water and salt. Mary imagined the salt all crystallizing very quickly as it might in a movie that used technology to explain the wonders of nature. She imagined the salt building up like a plug over the porthole and making a sound as it grew like the mouth of a bag pulling shut. Wally continued to stroke her side, adjusting to her new position with a break in neither his motion nor narrative.
“I've come to an agreement with myself,” Wally said. “I wish other people would intuit that and respect it.”
It did not seem to Mary that he was talking to her, but she felt very irritable all of a sudden. The porthole irritated her and also the way the brass lanterns swung out of rhythm with each other, though one might reasonably suppose they were set in motion by the same instigating event. She was irritated with Wally's stroking which was an unthinking action of his hand and not an expression of either mind or will. It was beginning to feel on her skin the way a very cold piece of metal pressed against the sensitive skin of an inner arm or thigh feels like an affront to the spirit rather than the flesh.
“Why don't you just tell them?” Mary said. “Illumine them. Seek clarity.” She felt peevish and spiteful. Wally stopped stroking her side but left his hand on her hip, just the tips of his fingers tented on her hip like the legs of a spider suspending its explicit body.
“You little thing,” Wally finally said. His tone was amused, but it was clear to Mary that this was now an encounter rather than an affair. The boat heeled and the brass lanterns swayed above them. Wally sat up and buckled his belt. “What are you, do you think?” Wally said. He was musing. Mary rolled over again and considered his profile, watched as he absentmindedly pushed the grain of the velvet back against itself, stroked it smooth. “A fox?” Wally asked, standing and slipping on his shoes. “A mouse? A squirrel?”
That was an interlude, a brief one. Mary was as comfortable with brevity as she was with long, static sprawl. She was actually quite a flexible person, mutable even, agreeable to all sorts of propositions that most people did not have the imagination to proffer. But then the fly began acting up again, buzzing with the kind of fervor she had not felt in years. And then, a few months later, there could be no doubt as to the cause and Charlie was cautiously optimistic, then overjoyed, then settled into the grim wait as she, Mary, walked the long halls of their house in her alltogether, requested that their son, now seven, keep out of her sight as much as he could.
Mary did not mention the encounter on the yacht to Charlie. Charlie was doing just fine as he was. When Mary and Wally had ascended from the lower decks, Wally pointing out the finer points in the wood detailing in what Mary wished she could interpret as a cover, Charlie had been dancing with Dina again, or still, a little parody of a jig he was apt to do when he was struggling through, barely making it. He
suffered from a lack of competition, was all. He suffered with the warm, sincere suffering of a man who is surrounded by paper cut-outs. Charlie parried and lunged, but even when struck no one around him would condescend to bleed. Really, he was too warm blooded for the world he had been born into. He expected too much affinity from his fellow living creatures, too much regard. They had talked for awhile about getting a pet, some animal to inhabit their living quarters in a fashion wholly unlike the way in which they themselves inhabited the space and thus, instructively, to give Terry an object lesson. To whit: one is not the world but rather one is in it. Additionally: one cannot know, not for sure.
Nothing had ever come of it. They lived in the country, surrounded by acreage in which all manner of animals lived abbreviated lives. Further, they lived not too great a distance from the suburbs where other sorts of animals, those rendered unfit for the forest by a learned capacity to calculate, often went missing and straggled, travel worn and touchingly suspicious, up the slope of their long driveway to lie at the front door. But Terry showed no interest in any of them. Even the box turtles that trundled out from under the hedges to lurch through his elaborate architectural studies, fashioned from rocks and twigs and repurposed swizzle sticks, were greeted with little more than momentary exasperation and gentle relocation. The problem was not that he was a cruel boy. Perhaps there was no problem at all. He was not a child that wanted: not companionship, not accolade. He was a child that existed, often sitting still for long hours on the lawn or in a corner of the house without demonstrable intent or purpose. Terry did not regard his parents or suffer them. He had no need of something to nourish and was frequently misunderstood. Understandably, Mary conceded, Charlie was anxious about how he would react to a sibling.
“He's sensitive,” Charlie said. “Too sensitive by far. He'll feel neglected. He'll feel resented.”
Mother Box and Other Tales Page 15
