Hex: A Novel

by Sarah Blackman

  I shifted my weight and a board creaked under my foot. The cats, who had slunk in through the window, lifted their heads in unison from the hollows where they had nested. I don’t know how long I stood there, arms black to the elbow, rag dampening my jeans where I had forgotten it and pressed it to my hip, before I realized that Thingy too was awake and watching me. Six eyes then: green, gold, blue. Six silent, six scanning for signs that they should spring, as they were all poised to do, up out of comfort and into the chill afternoon where they would balance on the tin roof and from there escape. I pictured Thingy with the sheets streaming from her arms and legs plugging the window like a hysterical gosling. I pictured her stretching her neck and greeting for help. I laughed then, and I’m sure it was laughter, but who knows what Thingy heard in the noise I made. Regardless, she didn’t sit up or speak, but only watched me and in the end I was the one who slunk away. Rather, shall I say it?, I fled.

  Out the nose, Ingrid. Banished from my last home.

  ‘Pity me at seventeen.’ Isn’t that what the song says? Something about brown-eyed girls, ugly girls. Something about the men who call them at night and murmur obscenities.

  ‘Love was meant for beauty queens.’ I am sure of that. Equally sure there is nothing in the lyrics about how the brown-eyed girls might have felt to hear the voice catch and rasp on the other end of the line, how private and thrilling its greed must have been and how they too might yearn for words to perform their long promised transubstantiation.

  For the tongue to become a tongue, I’m saying. For it to lick her hot, sweet. . .for the fingers to slip into her tight, pink. . .for the nose—plugged it sounded, did he have a cold?—to snuffle against her moist, hairy. . . .for the teeth, oh the teeth, to gnash between them, grind between them, to nip and nip her rosy, swollen, tender, dripping, pearly, quivering, juicy, wet, wet, wet. . .

  Another kind of essentially empty line, a one-sided conversation, is the one on which the birds chatter. “Oh baby baby baby,” says the goldfinch and the phoebe responds with a sound like a telephone ringing in its cradle. “Pity pity pity,” requests the cardinal—though of whom? Though for what?—to which the crow, cutting to the chase, responds with the sound of a tolling bell. At seventeen, Thingy pulled up to Thalia’s house in a red jeep her father had bought her as a graduation present. Almost before the engine had stopped rumbling, she flung herself out of the car and up the porch steps, tripping on the last one, bowling into me and nearly knocking me to the ground. “You look like a weeble-wobble,” Thingy said, smacking me on the stomach as if it were a watermelon she was testing for ripeness. “Seriously, you’re huge.”

  Thingy and I hadn’t seen too much of each other since February when I went to live with Thalia. We talked on the phone—the conversations colorless and watery as if coming to me thinned by altitude—but I didn’t know how physically I missed her until I saw her again. She was a shock, almost literally like touching a faulty switch. I realized then, standing on the porch with Thingy’s hands all over my stomach, rubbing my ridiculous belly hard enough to make the skin flush and then turn red, that I had been thinking of her all this time as a child. The Thing who I missed, who I pictured in my mind’s eye while I listened to her hum and fold her laundry on the other end of the phone line, was no older than eight, silver-haired, wearing the galoshes she had favored then (white with the toes painted yellow like a duck’s beak, black eyes bright as seeds painted on either side of her arch). On her hands yellow mittens with a jolly, oversized button that could fasten them open or fasten them closed. Clutched in her fist, a long, wooden spoon.

  But it wasn’t my own eight-year-old self—perpetually runny nose, hair plaited in a braid like a raccoon’s tail down my back—who talked to Thingy. It was my self as I understood it now. My self which contained another self and in that self (a girl, of course, I didn’t need a machine to look inside me and tell me that) the seeds of other selves. Millions upon millions of them, though even now, even as Thingy stood before me with long legs and full breasts, sweat beading in the hollow of her collar and her hands, studded with rings, chiming across the surface of my stomach, four million potential selves had become two and would be reduced even further before my baby was born. Lost in the slosh.

  Still, “Pity pity pity,” I had said to Thingy in those conversations, and she had responded with a sound like a bell and a sound like a bottle breaking. Pip-pip-pip, she had said. Tur-a-lee-lee-lee. Coo-coo-ra-koo.

  We took a tour of the place. Thingy was particularly interested in the hives which we watched from the other side of the creek so as not to get in the way of the thrumming lines the bees were laying to and from their secret, jealously-tended feeding grounds. She was less interested in the chickens who strutted for her approval, tilting their heads and pecking at nothing at all just to show her the busy dart of their beaks. Eventually we ended up in the meadow, lying together on the little rise just above the creek. The clover was blooming white and purple. Thingy pinched them off low to the ground with her fingernail and braided them into a chain.

  “So, tell me,” I said and Thingy did. About graduation; about Atlanta; about her new roommate who had already written her a letter (“She’s hideous,” Thingy said. “Fat and wears nothing but rose pink and Laura Ashley. You can tell from her handwriting.”); about her father who had unexpectedly offered her a room in his apartment if dorm life didn’t work out and said he was thinking of spending more time at home; about a boy from our school who had crashed his car into a creek bed and slept there all night with the water flowing over his lap; about the Sainte Maria who she had seen stocking shelves at Abbot’s, an ugly orange smock hanging off her hips, her hair cut short and the bangs dyed purple and green.

  It was a beautiful day, the sun booming in the sky, no wind at all to stir the trees. The sow had birthed a new litter—her last it turned out—who were now squealing at her teat and in the hives row upon row of ladies swathed in white were waiting their turn to be brought to life. A touch on the crown of their heads like a wand perhaps, or only the busy brush of their sisters’ mandibles as they tamped a cap in place, packed them in. A bird called; a bird answered. Thalia got in the green truck and drove away.

  Goodbye, said Thingy, but only to me. To the rest of the world she gave a enthusiastic greeting and inside me the baby, asleep until now, woke with a start and pushed up against my skin as if suddenly lonely, desperate for warmth.

  I didn’t know what to say to Thingy, so I seized on the story of the Sainte Maria and we talked about her instead. Since Luke’s exile the summer I turned thirteen the Sainte Maria and I had barely seen each other. Or at least not at more than at a distance. Not more than in parts: her bare ankle flashing below the bat wing of a car door, the sleeve of her coat—the same tattered leopard—caught up for just a moment on the doorknob before she tugged it free.

  This was mostly true. On that day four months before when I had walked down the slope from my house to the Feed Store, the Sainte Maria, standing in the restaurant’s kitchen and sliding her dirty bowl into the dishwater, looked at me with the same lack of interest a well-fed cat lying in a square of sunlight would regard a small rodent or bird. As if to say Tut Tut, as if to say Well, look at you. . . .

  The Sainte Maria was wearing black jeans and a cropped black T-shirt. She had a bruise on her hip, just a small one as if she had been poked with a small, bony finger. She looked, standing there among the steam and damp and huffing impatience of cookery, like a seed pod that had been blow in out of season. Not insubstantial, you understand, but thorny. Not waifish or childlike, but densely concentric, liable at any moment to begin expanding rapidly outward.

  She looked like a stranger, which is perhaps why I treated her like one—like the real stranger, Jacob, who turned from his work, didn’t he? Who turned from the mounds of dishes that must forever be scrubbed but would never be cleaned and looked at me with his eyes like something else’s eyes, weren’t they? As if he had lived a long time in
darkness—

  In reality, I had seen her only the week before, sitting at my father’s table, drinking a glass of milk.

  The Egg’s Tale

  I shouldn’t have been home at all. It was a Wednesday morning, a snowfall the night before tamping the world to a murmur as if just beyond the range of my hearing a great, calamitous noise was going on and on. I had stopped going to school the month before, when I could no longer deny what I had known from the first.

  (The door to the motel room snicking shut behind me, the parking lot adrift with brown leaves. It was mid afternoon, a weekday. His was the only car in the lot but we’d taken a room on the side of the building facing away from the highway, and it was a company car, identical to any number of glossy, black others. I left first, before he had gotten out of the shower. I liked imagining him coming back into the room, sleek and pink, rubbing the coarse motel towel into his ears and under his armpits. His moment of confusion when he realized I was gone; perhaps even a few words he might say to the empty room. “Alice, did you know. . .” or “Alice, have you heard. . .” before he trailed off into the lack of me: a neatly made bed, the rickety chairs drawn back up to the round table, the curtains pulled, but in between them a zip of clean, white light. Behind the motel was an empty lot grown over with fescue and great bouquets of goldenrod. There were signs all over the lot proclaiming it For Sale! Reduced! but these too were weathered and overgrown. A wind was blowing. Some scrubby trees that had grown up along the fence line tossed and shook, but not a single one of their brilliant red leaves broke free.)

  I had refused to acknowledge my pregnancy because isn’t that what one did? Girls like me in my particularly predictable situation. I admit it had occurred to me to will this nonknowing to its farthest flung conclusion. To be one of those girls like me who give birth in the bathroom of the hamburger joint or on the floor of the laundry room at a friend’s house, sneaking away from the party, still holding my drink. The music thumping out my little sounds and the baby—born dead of course, was there another way?—bundled into the washing machine with the guest bathroom towels where, even as small as it was, it would unbalance the load. Small as a mouse, I imagined. Covered in fur but with a human face peeking out between its soft, oval ears. . .

  That was impossible, I knew, a fantasy. I was always very small and began to show almost immediately. By February, when I came home unexpectedly in the middle of the day, it was still possible to wear loose clothes and pretend I was merely gaining weight, but I couldn’t keep it up for much longer.

  “Looks like your metabolism’s finally catching up to you,” Rosellen had said only the week before, eyeing me overtop a coupon circular which advertised discounts on tanning, gym memberships, mulch and ground chuck among other things. We were eating breakfast, my father long gone for a morning of plowing roads or clambering around on the roofs of houses he himself had built and which were so shoddily constructed that the shingles were already peeling beneath the ice sheets like scales sloughing from an ill-tended hide.

  Pretty soon he would slip off one of those roofs and land with his right leg folded beneath him, the sound of the bone snapping, he said, prolonged and somehow chewy. He came home from the hospital in a blinding white cast that encased his leg from foot to hip. Rosellen took it upon herself to tend the cast by spritzing it with bathroom cleaner; the bleach, she reasoned, serving both the kill germs and keep the thing from growing dingy. Instead it was my father who grew dingy, his skin graying in comparison to the plaster, a smell about him like a damp cellar in which someone had foolishly been storing a side of meat.

  During his recovery, Rosellen put my father up in the same way someone would swaddle and store the good china, knowing all along it would never again see the light of day. She heated blankets in the dryer and tucked them around him while he sat on the couch. She fed him soups and lit his cigarettes in her own mouth, propping them in between his lips as if everything below the level of his neck had been struck off—snicker-snack!—with one blow of the axe. My father resented this, as one might imagine, but Rosellen sailed through the house impervious and serene, happier than she had been in a long time. When my father walked the crutch and the metal bar attached to the bottom of the cast to keep his weight from spiraling up the bone conspired together to echo through the house. Thump and drag, thump and drag. “Fie Fi Foe Fum,” yelled Rosellen from her study. My father broke a dish in the sink.

  All this was on the horizon, though coming closer. Perhaps even as we spoke my father was climbing the pitch of the very roof. Perhaps he was taking a little break, catching his breath; straddling the house like a horse as he looked out over the cowed, white valley, wreathed as it must have been with plumes of his own breath. It would have been very quiet up there, the tacking hammer blows and shouts from the rest of the crew as they worked on other houses in the development coming to him as if from far away, as inconsequential as the cawing of crows lifting up from some tree or other, clustering in a tiny, distant hubbub in the ice gray sky. Who knew what they were saying? He might have thought of both crew and crows. Who cared?

  “And then bam, I was falling,” my father narrated from his position on the couch. “Just like that. One minute I’m a man sitting down and the next a man spinning through the air.” I imagined his shape, arms spread like a snowflake, spinning airily downward. In reality, he surely fell more heavily—crumpled even, like a bird folding around the sudden hole in its breast—but I like to imagine him drifting, give him some leisure to look around. My father blew from the roof of the house to the ground, see-sawing as he fell. First he saw the sky, then the bristle of pine tops; the sky, then a window in which a woman looked out at him, shocked, amazed.

  He landed on his back, that much I do know. “Knocked the wind right out of me,” he said. “Rolled my eyes back in my head. Tim Pruitt got there first and he said my eyes looked just like hard-boiled eggs. He said you almost wanted to touch them they were so white and so round.”

  (We are not often together. Six times in four years. This is the seventh. We do not talk about our bodies, or our minds, the spaces behind our eyes. “Alright?” he says and I say, “Yes. Yes, okay.” The next time we see each other, he will ask how my father is doing and nod, not quite looking at me, reading the paper and stirring his coffee so the spoon hits the side of the mug. Ting-ting, ting-ting, ting-ting. When I think about him, I think about two people. They are both essentially strangers, but one muscles the car around curves, adjusts his wife’s umbrella in the sand, bows his head when I answer, “My father is fine,” as if I am much younger than I actually am. As if he has to decipher the slurred honey of baby-speak coming out of my mouth. The other would like me to hop up on the dresser, just like that, back to the mirror, back against the mirror, he would like to see my teeth. Good, all right? yes good. . .just like. . .is it good?. . .oh, it is just like that, like that, it is. . . .

  Not a single leaf blew off the tree, though I stood for a moment too long watching them shake and tremble. I am supposed to make my way across the lot and up the hill. There is a brief fringe of forest, the underbrush dotted with flotsam—socks and straws, small bones and plastic bags, beer cans, hanks of fur, pyramids of perfectly spherical dung—and then the tree line breaks again on the outskirts of Elevation, on the alley alongside the TreeTop Diner, to be precise, where I will enter and sit and order myself something to eat.

  The woman who owns the diner is named Marta. She brings my plate and doesn’t ask why I’m not in school. In a moment he will drive into the lot, parking his car at an angle to the road in between a white utilities truck and a hatchback with a spidered windshield where something has struck and bounced heavily away. He is just stopping in, getting a quick bite on his way back to the city. I am a surprise and when he slides in across from me in the booth, he is only being polite. How is my father? Marta brings him a plate of country ham, a cup of coffee. My father is fine. Ting-ting, ting-ting. My body blinks and when it opens its eyes again
there are three of us and it has started to rain.)

  Everyone thinks my father is dead. Tim Pruitt says it first and then dead echoes through the crowd that has gathered. He isn’t breathing after all, the wind knocked out of him, though he can hear perfectly well. He hasn’t moved.

  “It wasn’t exactly peaceful,” my father said, “but it wasn’t too bad either. I couldn’t see anything, but at the same time I could see the sky and it was bigger than before, flatter. Like if I punched my fist up I could tear through it and feel around on the other side, but I couldn’t move and that was okay too. I just watched the sky come closer and closer. Big, flat, gray sky.”

  “And then what happened?” I asked. Rosellen clucked and readjusted his blanket. Outside, Dog, geriatric now and unsteady on his legs—Bitch long dead and buried under the dragon’s belly—began to wheezily bark.

  “Then Tim Pruitt stuck his damn finger in my eye,” my father said and opened his mouth for a spoonful of soup.

  (Oh oh oh. Is this okay? Is this. . .yes. . .Is this. . .He will give me a ride back to town, because it is raining, after all, because he is concerned for my well-being. “Why aren’t you in school?” he says when Marta bends over the table to refill his coffee. He cuts all his ham into little bites and then picks them up one by one to put in his mouth. Marta jingles the coins in her apron and would like to not hear us. She has been here for a long time watching people cut their ham into little bites, offering them pie. “Would you like some pie?” she says to me. “Isn’t it a school day?” he says to me. Marta jingles her coins and moves on. Oh oh oh. Is this okay? Yes, it is. It is good.)