The Monsters of Templeton

by Lauren Groff

  As it is always good to have an image in mind when discussing abstractions, here is a picture from that report:

  An “artist’s” rendition of Glimmey. Sadly, the only “artist” that lives in Templeton is a seventy-five-year-old collagist named Milton Witherbee, who never quite got over his Ernst-inspired surrealism, and creates “art” like this rendition of Glimmey that, let’s be frank, has very little to do with the Glimmerglass Lake Monster as he actually appeared. Two weeks after the production of this work, Witherbee set fire to his studio, weeping, and retired to Hawaii, saying, “It is a false art that cannot survive a monster.”

  ON GLIMMEY, THE LAKE GLIMMERGLASS MONSTER, OR TEMPLETONIA PORTENTUM

  THE MONSTER OF our lake, the report said, was found by DNA analysis to be a placental mammal of the superorder Cetariodactyla, the same order that gave rise to even-toed ungulates (pigs, hippos, deer) and cetacea (whales and dolphins).2 But this is where the similarity ended between pigs, deer, and whales, as our monster was apparently a synchronous hermaphrodite,3 and self-fertilizing, at that. The only other animal known to self-fertilize is a fish called the killifish, so the discovery of a mammal that could do such things was enough to shock the scientific community out of its pants.

  Bone analysis found our monster to be over two hundred years old, and the tiny fetus of a fertilized baby deep within its cavernous body found the gestation period to be about twenty years. Twenty years! The little fetus was about ten years into its development and still didn’t have eyes: it was the size of a six-year-old child, and, despite its tail and superlong neck, its potbelly and clenched fists were so uncannily human that one of the researchers, the mother of an autistic boy, wept when they pulled it from the raw belly of the beast. From what evidence the researchers found, it was hypothesized that the monster had already given birth at least once. Thrilled calls were made, and the next day the scuba divers tried to touch the bottom of the lake and failed. They called in the ocean-diving equipment, all to no avail. That’s when they found Glimmey’s nipples were largely ornamental, as there were no milk sacs behind them: Potemkin nipples.

  In addition, the monster had rock-hard black teeth, flat, not pointed, and in rungs of three for better chewing the fish and lakeweed that made up its diet. It had huge reservoirlike lungs that held up to three months’ worth of oxygen, so that it only ever had to come up four times a year to breathe. It also had such dense fat that sperm whales were comparative lightweights; one ounce of pure Glimmey fat, the researchers found, would burn for fifteen hours, and the small amount of smoke that it let off smelled curious, fresh, like pine and lake water. It must have needed such dense fat, for the winters were terrible under the thick ice of Lake Glimmerglass, and there was a lot of bulk to keep warm.

  Glimmey also had four legs and curiously articulated hands, exactly like human ones, but without thumbs. In fact, they were so delicate and beautiful that the artist hired to draw every part of the beast snuck in late after all the scientists went home for a nap and made furtive plaster casts of the hands for further study, using a bulldozer to put them in the back of his truck. Though the monster was never seen out of the lake, it was, apparently, easily able to walk on dry land, though the researchers believe that after a certain point—100 or 150 years of its life—it would have been far too difficult to move such a vast body in the air, and so the monster stayed exclusively in the more buoyant water.

  Also, unlike a whale, Glimmey had an unfused malleus in its ear, and such exquisite inner-ear makeup that the researchers hypothesized the monster had the purest, most intricate sense of underwater hearing of any animal in the world. This was what had allowed the shy creature to remain undetected for so long: it could hear with great sensitivity if a human was even within sighting distance, and would, presumably, come up only during the darkest or foggiest nights to fill its vast lungs.

  ONE LAST THOUGHT

  Here is the image that popped before me when I read the article on Glimmey. I was in my pink little girl’s room in Averell Cottage in the twilight, my bags packed all around me, my ghost in a light violet protective ring, and I saw, clearly and in my mind’s eye, the monster in a cold cement warehouse, split open like a fruit. I saw cranes digging among the dead flesh, humans crawling on scaffolding around the corpse like Lilliputians across the body of poor shipwrecked Gulliver, the head bent back so the mouth flopped open and three rungs of shining black teeth bared to the ceiling. Offal extracted and studied and photographed, the creamy skin turning black at the wounds’ edges.

  It was such a terrible image, in such tremendous contrast to the idea I’d held of the monster—the silky white of the beast swimming in the black depths of Lake Glimmerglass, the happiness of limb through water, the joy of the wondering eyes, the hands grasping for a fish—that I put down the journal, and I couldn’t keep my eyes from overspilling.

  Wilhelmina Sunshine Upton

  As a baby. And at her college graduation, briefly and insanely blond, for some reason she still doesn’t quite understand. The day after her graduation, she will awaken and scare herself so badly in the bathroom mirror that she will promptly and forevermore dye her hair back to its natural color.

  34

  On Leaving

  THE DAY I left Templeton, I took my father out to lunch. He didn’t know he was my father yet and had sounded mildly surprised when I called him up the day before. I waited in the dark, cool cave of Cartwright Café, sipping my iced tea and trying to will the furious flush from my cheeks.

  When Sol Falconer arrived it was in definite date attire, a very expensive dress shirt and nice slacks, as if it were natural that a girl half his age would chase after him, and the least he could do was to dress up for her. Apparently, I wasn’t the first. I stood, and patted my own dark dress down. I held out my hand, and he looked at it, grinning.

  “Ah,” he said, shaking it. We had the same hands, I noticed, long nail beds, long fingers, a thumb twisted more to the side than normal. “You’re breaking an old man’s heart, Willie. I didn’t realize this was going to be about business.” He folded his great height into his chair, and smiled at me.

  “Business?” I said. “Depends on what you call business.”

  By now, the waitress was standing over us, tapping the eraser of her pencil against the notepad and sighing. She had been a few years behind me in high school, and kept from that era her great garish swoops of green shadow above her eyes, and the gold hoops dangling from her ears to her shoulders. She pretended to not know who I was. “Abner sandwich, please,” I said without looking at her. “Side salad, with balsamic on the side. Iced tea with lots of lemon.”

  He blinked and frowned a little. “Exactly the same,” he said to the waitress, and handed her the menus we hadn’t bothered to look at. “That’s exactly what I always get,” he said.

  “Makes sense,” I said.

  “What makes sense?” he said.

  “You’ll see,” I said.

  He unfolded his napkin and spread it across his lap. Then he leaned over the table. “All right,” he said. “The drama is unbearable. Could you explain the mystery, please, Willie?” he said. “Is this about the college loan? If it is, you know you don’t have to worry about it.”

  I looked around the restaurant to see if anyone could overhear, but it was an hour before the lunch rush, and the only patrons were at one long table, a baseball family all in Mets jerseys, save for one little iconoclast who obstinately sported a Yankees pinstripe. I caught his eye and gave him a little wink. He winked back, and a piece of his hamburger fell out of his mouth.

  “All right,” I said to Sol Falconer. “There’s a story I think I want to tell you.”

  “Tell away,” he said.

  “Once upon a time,” I said, “there was a young girl who came home to her hometown. She was an orphan, all alone in the world. One day, a very good-looking young prince stopped by, and they began to drink some wine, and one thing led to where such things generally lead if t
he parties are drunk and young enough. Unbeknownst to the prince, a child was born. That child, at last grown up, decided one day to find her unwitting father.” I waited, expectantly, looking at Sol, but I have always been a rococo storyteller, and this story only confused him.

  He blinked. “What?” he said. “Prince? Child? Where?” and he craned his head around and saw the waitress leaning over the baseball family. “The waitress?” he said, turning back. “Is she some secret heiress or something? This is a very strange story. Why are you telling me this, Willie?”

  “No. Duh,” I said. “Sol. Dad.”

  His eyes opened very wide, and seemed to drink my face in. The cheekbones that must have seemed familiar, the height, the eye color, the smile. He passed a hand over his face, and gave a shuddery sigh. “Willie? I just,” he said. “I just don’t understand.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said.

  “But I can’t have kids,” he said. “Three marriages broke up because I couldn’t have kids. This just isn’t possible.”

  “Apparently it is,” I said. “I’m living proof. Pinch me.” It was a joke, but he did, and I sported twin plums on my arm for a week afterward.

  “But,” he said, “nobody told me. Nobody said anything. I cheered for you at all your soccer games and track meets in high school and I didn’t even know.”

  “I didn’t know,” I said. “Not until last night. My mother told me last night.”

  “But I never did anything with your mother. I swear I didn’t.”

  “Hm,” I said. “Well, if that were true, we’d all be miracles. But, sadly, it’s not.”

  “But I didn’t,” he said.

  “But you did,” I said. “Just think back. Remember one fine almost-spring day with buds on the trees. Tomato salad. Wine.”

  I watched as his face (my face) turned red as his fine nose (my nose) caught scent of something deep and troubling. He began to blink, and then he sat back in his chair.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. “Something’s creeping back.”

  “I have all the time in the world. Dad,” I said, smiling so widely my face felt as if it were cracking at the seams.

  Solomon Falconer rubbed his hands over his face and gave a little twist of his lips. “Oh my God, that’s right. This is so, excuse me, bizarre. I didn’t even know what happened that night with Vivienne. Your mother. I woke up in that house hungover and half-naked. I panicked. If she ever found out, my fiancée would kill me, I thought, and I left, and just avoided your mother for a long, long time. Put it out of my mind. I didn’t even know what happened. Holy shit.”

  “Holy shit,” I agreed, “absolutely.”

  He sat back in his chair and folded his hands above his head. His hair had thinned and grown gray even since I was in high school, when he wore it in wild, gingery curls over his head. Now, he kept it clipped short. It looked nice.

  When he looked back at me, it seemed he was having difficulty keeping himself from tears. “You must forgive me for asking,” he said. “But I am. I have a lot of. Well, I do have money, and if this is a way to get…”

  In response, I stood and was about to stalk out when he grabbed my hand. “Stop,” he said. “I believe you. I just can’t believe it.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “This is just,” he said, his face suffused with red, “a miracle. A miracle. Willie Upton. I have a daughter.”

  “And she’s me,” I said. I squeezed his hand.

  “And she’s you,” he said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t have asked for better.”

  The invisible waitress laid our food down gently, but neither of us ate it. We sat there as the restaurant began to fill, baseball families and Templetonians both. But the people we knew steered clear of our table, sensing something, perhaps, and we could see them at their own tables, heads together, wondering what was going on.

  A fourth wife, I think some of them were thinking. I wasn’t far from the profile.

  At last, Sol Falconer heaved a sigh. “I couldn’t have asked for a better surprise,” he said, shaking his head and beaming. “I couldn’t be prouder of a surprise daughter, Willie Upton. I am just,” he said, “well, to put it simply, moved.”

  I KNEW, EVEN then, what I couldn’t admit that I had known: that now that I could lay claim to more predecessors, to more history, it wouldn’t vastly change the course of my future. Because before a little humanoid came striding across the Bering Strait, and died and left a tiny smidgen of his existence in the tundra to be dug up by people in the unimaginable future, there had probably been a good number of humanoids before him who had also stridden over those same ancient rocks. Because, even though I now had a father, he brought with him such thicknesses of ancestors that it would be impossible to dig and understand them all, and they would be stamped only in the DNA of whatever future children I could have. It was too much. It was impossible to understand it all.

  And yet, we cling to these things. We pretend to be able to understand. We need the idea of the first humanoid in North America though we will never find him; we need a mass of ancestors at our backs as ballast. Sometimes, we feel it’s impossible to push into the future without such a weight behind us, without such heaviness to keep us steady, even if it is imaginary. And the more frightening the future is, the more complicated it seems to be, the more we steady ourselves with the past. I looked at my father, Sol Falconer, and felt an impossible relief. It didn’t matter, not really, that I had him at last. It didn’t matter, and yet, in my illogical, unfathomable heart, it did. I was glad to have his real, breathing self on that long road behind me. I was glad to know he was there.

  LONG AFTER SOL Falconer and I shook hands, after an awkward embrace that turned real and warm, I walked up Main Street trying to gather myself. The day was beginning to blaze with bone-melting heat, and already the high school druggies were taking shelter under the huge old oak in Farkle Park, too hot even to play hackysack. Piddle Smalley stood, sweating, ringing a bell, wearing a yellow rain slicker backward and his signature bloom at his crotch. Small children wailed against the heat, cars seemed to have to push through the thickening air, even old Mrs. Pea, sweeping the steps of the post office, had bands of sweat deepening on her blue shirt. As I walked up past old Temple Park, where the Manor once was, I saw someone across the street who made me flush again. I hurried across the road and under the great Corinthian columns of the town library, where Ezekiel Felcher was sprawled on the stone steps in the shade.

  He looked good, I saw, when I came closer. He looked great. His thick gut had trimmed into a tapered waist, and I had a wild urge to run my hand up those small muscles marching in rows up his abdomen. His cheekbones had reemerged; he was tan. He saw the way I was looking at him, and he raised an eyebrow, and I laughed.

  Then his face changed, and he said, “Queenie,” sadly. “Come sit. This marble’s the coolest place in Templeton.”

  “Radical,” I said, sitting beside him. It was true: the stone was almost shockingly cold under my rear.

  “I meant in terms of temperature.”

  “I know, Zeke,” I said. “I know. You on the job? Towing those cars?”

  “Yup,” he said. “Slow day.” I tried to pretend I didn’t feel him watching my profile carefully.

  “Ah,” I said, and didn’t say any more for a moment. Over the bustle of town, the voices of the tourists pouring into the baseball museum, I could hear the slow August course of the Susquehanna, only half as high as it was when I had returned to Templeton only a few weeks before. Zeke sat up again, and looked straight at me.

  “I’m pretty mad at you, Willie,” he said. “I heard you’re leaving today for California.”

  “Yup,” I said. I had stopped by the NYSHA library the day before to give Peter Lieder a copy of Vi’s recipe book. I also slipped Guvnor Averell’s note to Hazel Pomeroy, though I kept Cinnamon and Charlotte for myself. Oh, gracious, the old woman had crowed. You’re going to make my reputation in my old age, Wilhelmina. I
wasn’t surprised the news had circled back to Zeke. “I’m taking off in a few hours,” I said. “I’m finishing that goddamn dissertation and moving on.”

  “You going to stay in the Bay Area, you think?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe,” I said. “Eventually I’ll come back here, though, I think.”

  “That’s funny,” said Zeke. “Because I’m going out there.”

  My breath caught in my throat, and I looked at him. “What?” I said.

  “I was thinking Berkeley,” he said. “But I’m afraid it won’t be challenging enough. I hear top colleges like Stanford love unconventional students. Especially ones who got really high SAT scores.”

  “Probably,” I said. “Jesus Christ. What about your boys?”

  “Ah,” he said. “I didn’t say it wasn’t complicated. Everything is complicated. The older you get, the more complicated life gets. It’s one of those joyful things we have to look forward to, I guess.”

  “I guess so,” I said.

  “Could I have a good-bye kiss?” he said.

  I leaned over and gave him one small one on the cheek, right where his dimple sometimes emerged. Then I stood. “Shucks,” he said. “That’s not at all where I was hoping you’d kiss me.”

  “Bye, Zeke,” I said. “Be good. Look me up when you come to San Fran.” We held a strange current between us until I began to feel a sort of panic in my gut, a growing feeling that, if I didn’t move it I wouldn’t, maybe, leave that day. I laughed and broke the moment.

  And Zeke’s face fell. He said, “Sure thing, Queenie,” a little bitterly and settled back on his arms. “It was nice knowing you.” He looked away, and bit his bottom lip hard. He looked so young, so wounded, it was all I could do to take a step away.