I Hold a Wolf by the Ears

by Laura van Den Berg

  CULT OF MARY

  As we entered Arezzo, the guide pointed out the prostitutes lining the road. The women looked like awkward, flashy birds, teetering in bright spandex and spike heels, flimsy gold jewelry flashing in the summer sun. A man in our group made a joke about wanting to stop and check their prices—to see how they stacked up against the pleasure of a fine gelato—and the guide, still speaking into her little microphone, said that these women were impoverished and in some cases stateless, that their trade was born of survival and they deserved our respect.

  At that, the man sank back into his seat, let out a little huff.

  The trip had been organized by the local chapter of my mother’s university club and this man wasted no time making enemies. In Rome, there were the lewd comments about the statues of naked women. At lunch, he drank too much and broke into song, off-key American power ballads. He claimed to be fluent in Italian, but we had yet to hear him speak a word. At every available opportunity he reminded us that he’d planned to take this trip with his wife, who was now three months dead, ensuring we all felt held hostage by obligatory sympathy.

  In Arezzo, we parked and followed the guide up a steep stone street, curving in the direction of Piazza Grande, and that was when we realized this man, our common enemy, had peeled away from the group. Perhaps he had gone to check the prices after all.

  “Maybe he’ll like Arezzo so much he won’t want to leave,” my mother said, locking onto my arm with her wizened hands, the skin craggy and spotted in a way that made me think of clay.

  “We’ll never get that lucky,” I said back.

  The guide was a young woman with a lip ring and a curly-haired mohawk. She had the unflappable calm of a seasoned camp counselor and did not seem overly concerned that one of her charges had wandered away.

  “Half the time the prostitutes just take the men into the woods and rob them,” our guide remarked. “Or sometimes they perform witchcraft and cast spells. If that’s where he went, he’ll come back with a strange and memorable story.”

  This guide was full of strange and memorable stories herself. On the drive over from Florence, she had revealed to us the Tuscan secret to flower gardens: wrap a strand of your own hair around the root tendrils and plant on the night of a waxing—never a waning—moon, prompting my mother to comment that she kept a flourishing rose garden for years and never once had to get her own hair involved.

  My mother had been looking forward to Italy ever since her club announced the trip. She cut her spending in preparation, downgrading her cable package and declining invitations to go out to eat. For Christmas, I bought her a new suitcase, a sleek hard-shell roller, though when the time came she had insisted on using her ancient cloth suitcase with a broken wheel because it held more. It doesn’t hold more, I’d tried to tell her, it only seems like it holds more; at that, my mother had looked up from folding shirts and regarded me as though I had been seized by madness. On New Year’s Eve, I went to a party with a tarot reader, a man who examined my cards and told me, his face pinched with sorrow, that my mother would be dead within the year—and then in the damp chill of early spring she had a stroke, and though she would recover in time for the trip, we both agreed she should not travel on her own, so here I was in the Duomo di Arezzo, waiting for my mother to lean over and whisper that she couldn’t understand the guide, the girl’s accent was too thick and she was speaking too quickly, and why did she have to wear her hair like that anyway. My mother had never understood women who chose against conventional prettiness. Every day I had woken with a leaden sadness because I knew in my heart that this was the last trip my mother would ever take and Italy was all she had wanted (for months a Tuscan field had been the background on her phone) and now that she was here, nothing pleased her. If it wasn’t the guide, it was the heat or the uneven streets or no washcloths in the hotel or no ice in the restaurants or the boorish man who had recently lost his wife and had possibly abandoned our group for the company of stateless and impoverished roadside prostitutes. And of course we had set ourselves up for this failure, the two of us, for how could any trip, no matter how splendid, bear up under the brutal weight of last?

  As we moved down an aisle in a hush, the guide pointed out a statue of Christ that had been carved from a single block of wood. By a Piero della Francesca fresco of Mary Magdalene, the guide explained that long ago the church became anxious about the Cult of Mary and their secretive powers, so they had allowed the legacies of all the different Marys to be conflated, which meant now most people didn’t know the difference between Mary of Clopas and Mary of Bethany and Mary of Jacob; apparently this confusion had been the church’s intention all along. I wondered if the vaulted position Mary Magdalene held in the Duomo explained why so many prostitutes flocked to Arezzo.

  “Remember that history is not only about what happened,” the guide added, “but also about what those in power want you to think happened.”

  Back in Piazza Grande, I overheard a white couple muttering that they wished the guide would lay off the feminist politics.

  In the van, we had been given itineraries and I thought that maybe the missing man would turn up outside the Duomo, sweaty and smug, but I did not see him anywhere as we made our way down the twisting streets, past a park with five bronze sheep grazing on grass banks.

  The guide waved her small red flag, alerting us to our next stop.

  “These are fascist sheep,” she told us.

  “How can sheep be fascist?” someone objected. “Sheep don’t believe in anything.”

  The guide explained that Mussolini had initiated a tax credit for anyone in Tuscany who owned sheep, not because they were practically useful but rather because sheep-dotted fields and hillsides fit Mussolini’s pastoral ideal of the Italian countryside. The bronze sheep had been erected in Arezzo to commemorate this policy.

  “That is how evil first creeps in,” she went on. “Through the falsification of beauty.”

  She told us that evil rarely looked like evil when it first arrived. It could look like innovation and progress and prosperity, courage even, but more than anything it looked, to some, like a solution—a solution to the secret problem they believed had gone too long unaddressed. They felt as though they had been speaking a hidden language among themselves, and then a man or a woman in a suit stood on a stage and addressed cheering masses in that very same language, hidden no longer.

  The guide paused, breathless, and jabbed her red flag at the sheep.

  We pressed on. Behind me the couple who had objected to the guide’s feminist politics were now plotting word for word the terrible review they planned to leave her on TripAdvisor. Why is some person, everywhere you go, always demanding that you pick a side? At the bottom of a hill, we found the missing man sitting at a bus stop, a good distance away from where the prostitutes congregated. His clothes were rumpled and smeared with dirt; leaves stuck out of his hair like ornaments on a tree. He was missing his shoes. As a group, we approached him, demanded to know where he had been and what had happened. The man told us that he had followed two women into the woods, to a mattress under a tree, but before they did anything they wanted half their money, which he handed right over, and then they wanted to know how many Marys he could name.

  “I said the Mary who gave birth to Jesus and then that other Mary who was a prostitute, but give me a break, I was raised by atheists and I couldn’t think of any more damn Marys. They started pelting me with handfuls of dirt and sticks. They knocked me down and stole my shoes and drove me out of the woods.”

  The guide began to laugh and applaud, her face slashed by a wild grin. “Of all the tours for you to miss!” she exclaimed.

  “My wife’s not really dead,” the man said next, in flawless Italian, which shocked everyone. “She just left me and sometimes I feel like I’ve forgotten how to breathe.”

  He sank his face into his palms and began to sob, his shoulders heaving. The guide helped him up and led him over to a water fountain
, the kind that looks like a beautiful little iron hydrant with a spout, so he could wash his feet, his soles caked with mud and leaves. The guide rejoined the group on the opposite side of the street and together we watched this man struggle. First he tried standing on one leg and holding a foot into the stream, but then he started to wobble, so next he squatted and bent his leg into the water, like he was attempting a yoga pose. My mother leaned against me; I knew that soon she would be looking for a place to sit down. “Where’s Mary Magdalene when you need her?” someone said, but they were shushed by the rest of the group. We all knew we were witnessing a holy scene. Finally the man just stood in front of the fountain and let the water coat his feet, his back to us, shoulders still trembling.

  On the ride to San Marino, the van was warm and quiet and soon my mother slumped over into sleep. We both knew that she was too frail to be touring Italy and our shared knowledge of her weakness made her enraged by her own body, which in turn made her enraged by all the places that had no interest in accommodating bodies such as hers. I wished the club had announced this trip many years in the past. Near Sansepolcro, I watched my mother’s hand twitch in her lap and I hoped that she was not yet dreaming of death, but of gardeners wrapping strands of their own hair around dirt-clotted roots and fascist sheep and a life carved from a single block of wood and a man struggling to wash the shame from his feet.

  LIZARDS

  The judge is still in the news. The story has been unfolding for weeks and every time she sees his face she feels so angry she’s surprised surfaces don’t ignite when she touches them. By dinnertime, a third woman has come forward. She and her husband eat in front of the blaring TV, plates balanced on their laps, forks suspended in midair. Afterward they do the dishes, standing barefoot in their small kitchen, the news still droning in the background. He washes and she dries because she keeps cracking wineglasses; in the last week they have gone from six to two. The kitchen is a shotgun, with a yellow tile floor and an outdated light fixture and a refrigerator that shudders and whines. They keep meaning to call someone to come out and have a look at the fridge, but then life intervenes and no calls get made.

  “He should be in prison,” she says, toweling a plate. One thing about living in an apartment complex is that you’re always listening to a network of lives unfold around you and right now she can hear water running upstairs. She imagines a different couple washing dishes together, what they might be discussing. Lizards, perhaps. How they don’t have eyelids and can shed their tails at will and how they smell by tasting the air around them.

  They have lived in Florida for only six months, but already she hates lizards, almost as much as she hates her new job. Entry-level, securities corporation, hellish commute. She dreams of having more money, more time, more space.

  “Probably so.” Her husband pauses. He is concerned about the fridge too—the humming is louder than usual and he would be at wit’s end if the appliance broke down altogether; there is far too much he needs to keep cool. Also, a sharp and unfamiliar pain keeps flaring in his left heel, probably from all the waiting. They moved south for his job, his big opportunity, and then he was laid off before they could even finish furnishing the apartment and he didn’t expect to still be looking, but he is. In the meantime, he made a profile on a task app and discovered a great demand for taskers who could wait. Say you wanted barbecue from the popular place that did not deliver or concert tickets or the latest Apple product and you did not want to wait in line—well, why bother when you could hire someone like him to do the waiting for you.

  “That’s all you have to say?” She can tell he’s holding back, from the way he keeps shifting his weight around, eyes flitting from sink to fridge, anywhere but her face.

  He weighs his options, decides to press on. “Well—”

  “Well what?”

  “It’s just that nothing has been proven yet.”

  They both left dirty dishes in the sink that morning, so they have a whole mess of washing ahead. Sometimes she wakes so bleary she can’t do anything more than stagger into the shower and dress, her blouse buttoned crooked half the time. She has stopped blow-drying her hair or putting on makeup, save for a slash of lipstick applied in the rearview on her way to work. They don’t even have kids yet and she is already so tired, which worries her, though her husband blames the era that they live in—so divisive, so exhausting, who could keep up—and says they should spend less time watching the news.

  “Okay.” She adds the plate to the dry rack. All week she has been preparing for this very conversation. “Let’s say two of the women are lying. Let’s just say. That still leaves one who is telling the truth. One is enough. Right?”

  “Of course.” He raises the dripping sponge. He has learned to proceed carefully during these kinds of conversations. Ever since the allegations were made against the judge, the hostile nature of the news has started to leak into his wife; she’s like a boxer these days, always out there with that jab. He tries to channel the calm he feels while waiting in line. He is a good waiter, patient and focused, though in general the taskers are less agitated than the people doing their own waiting. For the taskers there is nothing on the other side of the waiting; the waiting is what they are there to do.

  “I’m just saying we can’t become so emotional, so caught up in the moment, that we forget about evidence. Corroboration and so on. I’m not saying he’s innocent. I’m just saying he hasn’t been proven guilty. Not yet, anyway.”

  She picks up a fork. He goes to work scrubbing a pot. The pain in his heel travels up the back of his leg like an electrical current; he tries to remember when exactly the discomfort first started. Was it last week, when he waited in line for three hours to collect tickets for a country music concert?

  “Have you ever—”

  She stops short, feels the fork tines through the dish towel. She has practiced asking him this question in their bathroom mirror and in the rearview and in the compact she keeps in her purse.

  “Have I ever what?”

  “Have you ever been at a party where things got out of hand?”

  “Well, I was in a fraternity.” He smiles at the memories of drinking shirtless and barefoot in the backyard of a house that no one person owned but everyone seemed to live in.

  “Okay, so at one of those parties, did you ever—”

  “Did I ever what?”

  “Did you ever hear about stuff happening? Like with other guys in the fraternity?”

  They’re edging into tricky territory, if he’s being honest. Sure, there were whisperings, here and there. The parties could get rowdy. A girl could maybe get touched in a way she wasn’t expecting (a sudden and unwelcome memory: his hand grazing a first year’s ass, which had looked so delicious in her jeans, and the girl whipping around, indignant, and him slurring, Where do you think you are?)

  “Look,” he says, loud enough to be heard over the ambient noise of neighbors and the humming fridge. “I’m not saying everyone was an angel back then. That we wouldn’t do some things a little differently now. All I’m saying is that there’s a difference between having a regret or two and committing an actual crime.”

  “I guess it depends on what’s being regretted,” she replies.

  “It’s just that, in this day and age, a simple mistake or a misunderstanding, made years in the past, when you were a completely different person, can be called up at any time to ruin someone’s life. Does that seem reasonable to you?”

  “He’s going to be on the Supreme Court,” she says. “His life is hardly ruined.”

  They work in thick, humid silence for a while. He passes her a glass salad bowl, a wedding gift. The bowl is big and slips around in her arms.

  “What about you?” she says.

  “What about me?”

  “Have you ever—”

  The next question she has not practiced aloud. It bursts from her, a detonation. She hugs the bowl and stares down through the bottom, the tile floor warped by the
glass.

  This time, the jab connects. The fridge hums louder; he implores himself to not rush over to the white door and investigate further. He feels genuinely wounded by the question and also like if he does not respond in just the right way, with the right amounts of shock and sadness and indignation, he will, despite being entirely innocent, be implicated in his wife’s eyes.

  He flings the sponge in the sink and turns off the water. He tries to keep both his feet planted on the floor, even as his heel throbs. “How could you even ask me that?”

  The glass bowl is too big for the dry rack, so she places it on top of the microwave. She slings the dish towel over her shoulders and crosses her arms.

  “Well,” she says. “Why didn’t you?”

  “Because I was raised right! Because I’m a decent person! Because I have a sister, for Christ’s sake.” He imagines his heel burning a hole in the floor, a small and perfect circle, lined with ash. He waits for her to say something more, to apologize, and when she doesn’t he adds, “We have really got to stop watching the news. It’s making you paranoid.”

  “Turn the water back on,” she says. “I’d like to be done before midnight.”

  “Be careful.” He hands her a wineglass.

  As she dries the glass, her eyes wander over to the empty wall, where they keep meaning to hang a watercolor of daises in a jar that they bought at a yard sale. She is staring at that blank space when a green garden lizard darts across. It pauses for a moment, cocks its tiny head, and then shoots behind the kitchen cabinet. She shrieks and drops the wineglass.