by Lauren Groff
My mother, after her night shift the day before, had silently delivered my dinner to me on a tray when she saw I wasn’t coming down. I was distracted, hadn’t even seen that I’d eaten an entire wedge of quiche—a food I despise—until she came back to pick up the tray, and chuckled with surprise to find it gone. I heard her go to bed at nine, then the house creaked and moaned with 300 years of rheumatic pains in its joists and beams. I was sorry when I awoke to my modern tourist’s village, even though that morning the fog was lit by the sunrise like a lamp under batting.
WHILE MY MOTHER slept her weariness away, I worked in the garden. I still had to digest Cinnamon and Charlotte, and didn’t want to move on without talking to Vi first. There was still so much to fathom: that Henry was Charlotte’s son and not adopted from one of her sisters, that she was an arsonist; that Cinnamon had murdered her many husbands. I could say with some certainty that the two ladies weren’t the sources of my father, but I would only know for sure if Vi told me.
So, I plucked green beans and tomatoes lusty with juices. I pulled weeds from the rows of lettuces and found tender baby squash under the broad leaves. I filled a little container with raspberries and squashed copper-coated Japanese beetles between two gory rocks. When I came up to the house, my mother was up, warbling along in her shower. When I passed through the dining room on my way to wash up and dress, though, I saw a letter in the mouth of the little toy horse on the dining room table, which Vi had put there in a bizarre attempt at levity. The letter was addressed to me.
Willie Upton, Templeton, NY, was all it said.
And it was written in Primus Dwyer’s handwriting.
And it was postmarked from Alaska.
This was as far as I got by the time my mother appeared in the doorway, rubbing her hair with a towel. “Whoa,” she said, “Willie,” because by that time, I was halfway to the floor, woozy, the letter still clutched in my hand.
WHEN I COULD focus again, I was propped up in a dining room chair and my mother was across the table, frowning at me. The envelope was torn and she was skimming the letter.
“Vi?” I said. “That’s mine.”
She folded the note up again and raised an eyebrow. “Maybe,” she said. “But I’m not sure you want to see it.”
“Oh,” I said in a very small voice. “Uh-oh.”
“Should I read it to you?” she said, and I could now see that she was angry. Very, very angry, and it wasn’t, for once, at me.
“Okay,” I said, but she had already started.
“Wilhelmina,” she read, in a staccato voice. “I can’t believe what happened. Hope you know how sorry I am. Poor Jan still wants to press charges but she’s being calmed. One week, I warrant, and it’ll be fine. Going into Fairbanks next week, will try to call. There was a huge development—well, you know what it is! Don’t worry—you will be an author. You seem mediagenic—maybe you can go on the Daybreak! show for us, pretty girl like you. Better than fat old professors and gormless PhD blokes. Ha-ha! Oh, Willie, what a muddle we made of things! Hope you don’t hate me. I have forgiven you, I know you were only in the throes of what was between us when you tried to hunt down poor Jan. I’ve got to run (nobody knows I am writing this, of course), but I think of you often—Yours, affectionately, Primus.”
I stared at my mother, and she stared right back. The Lump twisted and twisted in me, hard as a cramp. I grabbed the paper from Vi and reread it three times, only feeling its proper sting on the third. And then I stood, ran to the bathroom, and threw up my impromptu lunch of garden vegetables. When I came back, my mother didn’t speak. She just held out her soft arms, and I put my head on her shoulder and buried my face in her clean smell. I pressed my face to her neck and my body to her body, and for that long while we stood there together in the mudroom, her cross pushing into the skin of our stomachs, until I moved it aside.
“Assholes like that,” she said then, and her voice washed warmly over the knockings of her heart, “are why, no matter what John says, I think it’s natural that some women are. Well. You know.”
“Lesbians,” I said, into her skin.
“Exactly,” she said. “Because of insensitive boors like this Primus one you’ve got here.”
“Yeah,” I said, and pulled away, feeling tiny and very, very frail. “To be honest, I’m tempted to give up the whole Y chromosome for good.”
My mother put her hands on my face and looked up into my eyes. “If you want,” she said, in a horrific thug-Italian accent, “I still have some connections in San Francisco. I could arrange a little sumpin-sumpin. Take him out, quietlike.”
“Sounds good to me,” I said, and we both laughed a little. A motorcoach carrying baseball fans sighed as it passed our house. A mockingbird gave a tentative rill on the windowsill beside us. When she moved, Vi’s crucifix swayed and swayed on the bulge of her stomach, like a pendulum counting the seconds.
THAT EVENING, MY mother and I took a long walk around Templeton. The twilight had dimmed into dusk and the windows in all of the mansions began to twinkle. The heat of the day had cooled into a gentle warmth, and the families, sitting on their porches or on the benches of Main Street, all seemed to be murmuring, eating ice cream, watching the sleepy flickers of late lightning bugs in the hills. Those who were only here for the museums had gone home. The town was safe again for the natives, and we had emerged, shyly, like big-eyed ungulates of the fields.
Vi walked beside me, her jowls shivering with each step. I noticed this, and that she had crow’s-feet etched deeper beside her eyes than I had ever seen before. She, too, stole small glances at me as we went up and down the streets, as familiar to us as the whorls in our own fingertips. My town had begun to insert itself subtly under my skin again. I could feel it there, moving shards, painfully alive.
“So,” I said to keep from thinking, “it was nice to officially meet your beau yesterday.”
She seemed peeved at me, and just said, “Great.”
“He seemed like a good person.”
“He is,” she said, and a small smile now alit, mothlike, on her lips. “He is a great person.”
“He should be. With the whole ministering thing and all. Did the religion come first, or did you date before you were a convert?”
“I sat in the back of the church for about a year,” Vi said. “The whole time just saying to myself, good grief, this is all such nonsense. I thought it was a crock, but I just kept coming back. And then I just fell into it all at once. Belief. Love. Just looked up one day and saw both just sort of shining in his face.”
“Love?” I said. I tried not to grimace. “Shining in his face?”
“Yes,” she said.
“Well,” I said. “That’s grand. Just grand.”
“Don’t make it sound cheesy, Sunshine.”
“Oh, I’m not. I’m not,” I said. “Now, tell me, Vivienne Upton, why is it that you all wear those crosses everywhere? Makes you all look like a cult.”
“These?” Vi said, poking at her crucifix. “Oh. Well, some of us just like them. I mean, the weight of it around our necks is like the weight of being good. It’s a reminder. But John first thought of it as a way to make enough money for our sister town in Kenya where we’re trying to build a clinic. He calls it a visual reminder, but I think it’s sort of a passive-aggressive technique to shame the town into giving. People who aren’t part of the flock give so that they don’t have to feel guilty every time they see these crosses. People in the congregation give because they’re reminded every day. Me?” she said. “It’s the weight I like. The reminder.”
“Well,” I said. “I have to admit that the passive-aggressive thing is pretty ingenious.”
“Well,” she said. “I hate to brag, but that’s John.”
We were nearing Averell Cottage, but something in both of us made us slow our steps so we wouldn’t have to go in immediately. “Tell me one thing. Do you sleep with him?” I said. “On your sleepovers?”
She looked at me, st
artled, then stopped walking. We were in the garage by then, and I blushed a little, remembering Felcher in this place, only a few nights earlier. “No,” she said. “John doesn’t believe in sex before marriage. I’m not so sure about marriage. So, it’s a standoff.”
“What do you do, then, when you stay over?” I asked.
Her face folded into a little wince, and then she said, “You ready for this? We pray a lot. We pray over dinner, then before bed. Then we both get into our pajamas, and I crawl under the covers and he crawls above them beside me. And then he holds me all night long.”
I couldn’t keep the disgust at bay this time, and Vi saw it, and belted out a laugh. “I know,” she crowed. “It’s so pathetic. I know. But sometimes when I wake up and feel his arms on me, it’s just nice. Just, I don’t know. Really nice.” She gave me a little tap on the cheek and said, “It’s not that bad, Willie. Get that look off your face. I just hope you’ll know how it feels someday.”
“I do know how it feels,” I said, but it came out weakly. “I think I do,” I said, remembering certain moments, men sleeping beside me over my long and illustrious life as a bachelorette, the rhythm of their breath, the delicate swoop of their eyelashes on their cheeks, their manly smell. Vi shook her head, giving me an affectionate moue of disbelief. I thought of Primus Dwyer. “I really do,” I said as I went in.
IT WAS BECAUSE I was thinking about Clarissa, and because when I thought about Clarissa I necessarily thought she was thinking about me, that I answered the telephone that night already talking.
“My God,” I said, “am I glad to talk to you. Have you ever had those days where so much has gone wrong in your life that you just sort of find yourself in the calm epicenter of the storm while everything else rages around you? That’s the sort of day I had. I’m not feeling horrible at all until I start to think about how horrible I feel. But don’t listen to me. I am a total jerk to not ask you about how you are. So. How are you?”
“Great. And, yes, I have one of those epicenter days every day. Man, I’m really, really relieved to talk to you. I thought you were so pissed at me we’d never talk again, Queenie.”
It took me to the end of the second sentence to understand that the voice I was hearing was a man’s; it took me ten seconds more to understand it was Ezekiel Felcher’s. But as I was trying to place it, time seemed to slow down, then stretch interminably, and he, at last, said, “And you weren’t really talking to me, were you. You thought I was someone else.”
I debated just hanging up then, so suddenly furious with this chunky old boy on the phone that I went numb and clammy in the extremities. But before I did, he said, “Okay, just hold on. I was prepared for this,” and there was a distant twanging and some guitar playing and then, voices beginning to sing.
“Ooooh-ooh, so sorry I feel. Oooh-ooh-ooh, I’m sorry, for real.”
The lyrics were embarrassing, but the guitar chords were complicated, embroidered, and I finally placed the harmonizing voice. Peter Lieder. Though he had lost all that weight, he still had the rich voice of a fat boy.
When the song was over, I was laughing so hard I could barely speak. When I was only hooting, wiping my eyes, I said, “Put Peter Lieder on.”
There was a shuffle of the phone, and Peter Lieder’s normal, thin man’s voice was saying, “Hello? Willie? Hello?”
“Peter-Lieder-Pudding-and-Pie,” I said. “Don’t kiss the girls and make them cry. Tell your friend.” And then I hung up.
20
Noname
THERE WAS THE before, then the after.
The before was large. I ran through the grasses and trees. Twigs bit my winter-soft feet. My people moved in the night in silence, chased by something dark and bad. My mother’s head bent with mine over the King James, pages like flakes of skin and her finger bright in the sunlight, tracing the words, saying them soft in my ear. And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. The strange language slipping from her mouth, sounds glistening like fish. My mother’s hand against my cheek, her arm strong around me. My father’s face, growing sadder and sadder.
The after was seven strides in each direction, a dirt-packed floor, the color brown, a hut smelling of meat and men. One small room of wood and mud, a place where nobody touched me, my skin hungry for human warmth. Darkness and the sweet smoke of Davey’s pipe, Davey’s curious inward laugh, my grandfather’s herbs drying on the ceiling. Alone in the hut during the day, the sound of the town below us a dream, the humming of a living thing that I could not see, but craved. The after was one new doeskin shift a year, my grandfather moving the awl in and out by firelight as the hounds snored at the hearth. His hands fleet as birds, weaving, sewing, stirring. The moon a buckle slipping over the lake. Longing the color of sky. A hut I couldn’t leave. My silence.
The lake, slippery and speaking, infinite bright glimmers in my eye.
What was between the before and the after was a story my grandfather wove, strand by strand. He would tell it in the long night, in the fire-smoke, softly, beginning with these words: Your father, my lark, was Chief Uncas, your mother was Cora Munro. For years, your tribe had been threatened by the settlers in the lake land in the west. The settlers with their guns closed in, and your tribe moved often to keep from being found.
One day, my grandfather always said, you were found.
It was the autumn when Davey and my grandfather left the lake to go west, to search for my family and spend their last days with the tribe. But in each place they found the ashes still warm, the scent of bodies in the air. The last place they came upon, they were hours too late, and everything was smoldering, dusted with snow. There were babies on bayonets like spitted pheasants. Squaws’ heads gazing upon their bodies from three strides away. My father and mother both naked, charred, holding each other. They knew Uncas only from the tomahawk buried between his shoulderblades. Cora only from her father’s signet ring clutched in her hand.
My grandfather felt the life leaving him, looking at them. He wept, as did Davey. They dug into the hard frozen ground and buried everyone.
Later, in the dark, my grandfather chanting for the souls of the dead, there was a small movement by the edge of the firelight. Me, naked and blue, blood across my face, down my legs, darting toward the warmth. My grandfather saw my father in my eyes, my mother in my form. He was struck to stone, yet felt life flaming up inside of him again. I reached my frozen fingers toward the muskrat roasting over the fire, and put a handful of raw meat in my mouth. When my grandfather dug it out, he couldn’t tell what was meat and what was tongue. Both were raw and bloody. I was missing half a tongue. I was four years old.
They returned to Templeton and, not knowing my name, called me Noname until they could find my real one. Speechless, I couldn’t tell them. They never found another. They kept me indoors because women were scarce in those parts and a native was hardly deemed human. No telling what the woman-hungry settlers would do to me if they found me alone, even a girl as small as I, they said. What they meant by this, I wondered at, for hours, until one day I simply knew.
I did remember that night, though. But while my grandfather’s story was whole cloth, my own was only in flashes, like the dark world turned strange in dry streaks of summer lightning. Of the last night with my mother and father, I remember the cold, the silence as we found our campsite and began to set up camp. I, stealing my mother’s book to look at while she spoke with the other squaws. My father looking out, giving a cry, leaping up. Then, the roil, horses and men, loud reports, blood; one settler upon me, and the cold ground on my back and pain, and then a spray of blood where his head was, and my father with blood dripping from his tomahawk, carrying me by the arm, throwing me up into a tree. My mother screaming, and my father turning back; the King James still warm in my hand; the great fire. Then, silence for a very long time. For whole lifetimes, I sat in the tree.
When I climbed down, m
y grandfather’s fire spun before me as I walked toward it. The muskrat smell made me shudder, and before I ran into the circle of light, I spat out the meat I had found in my mouth, my tongue, which I had bitten through.
It was thus that I came from a large life into a life so small that the smallest things became large. Two meals a day each became feasts. My grandfather telling a story became thrilling as the dances that I remembered vaguely, night and thrumming and voices and red-gold firelight with legs flashing black through it. I made pets of flies and brothers of the hounds and looked for hours out the window, watching the small changes of clouds, the shadows they pressed on the trees. All those years, there was an egg-shaped emptiness inside me, aching; all those years, time stretched long as late shadows. I dreamt and wove tiny baskets and looked at my book, brown-spotted with blood, until Davey showed me some letters, and then I learned to read, slowly, painfully, things I could not fully understand.
Queer old Davey, my intended; I always knew, I heard them talking. But he was good to me. So careful around me, not to look, not to touch, especially as I grew. But his heart was in the stews he made, in the first pale bud from wintry tree, trembling as he put it in my hand. A good uncle he was, until I reached twelve, and then I began wondering what husband meant. Once, alone in the hut with my grandfather while Davey was still out in the forest hunting, I asked about it, signing the way my grandfather had taught me, but he only smoked his pipe and watched me until I sulked away. I wanted to throw his pipe embers in his eyes; I played with the soft ears of a pup instead.
Times like those, I only pretended to be good. But I was never truly good, at all.
For, every day from the time I first came into the hut, I, bad, moved closer to the door. Outside was forbidden; I would have been punished if caught. After the second year, when I was six, I dared put a toe outside. For a year, when my grandfather went into the town to sell his baskets and Davey went into the woods to hunt our meat, I warmed my toe in the good touch of the sun. At night, I would feel my foot, warm from the day, and a wildness would rise in me like a sudden winter blizzard. My grandfather would look at me, and I would look away and Davey sat and talked and smoked, comfortable and warm, seeing nothing.
