by Rich Horton
I wonder how it tastes, that plum—and Ned, being Ned, sees and knows it all: my shamefaced ambition. My inexcusable excitement. To know so much is to excuse so much, I guess, because he beckons me, my brother and my friend, and once I’m knelt before him, spits that heavy, sweet paste straight into my mouth. And makes me king.
The Karen Joy Fowler Book Club
Nike Sulway
Two bright bangles on an arm clang,
a single bangle is silent, wander alone like a rhinoceros.
—Khargavisana-sutra [the Rhinoceros Sutra] c.29 BCE
Ten years ago, Clara had attended a creative writing workshop run by Karen Joy Fowler, and what Karen Joy told her was: We are living in a science fictional world. During the workshop, Karen Joy also kept saying, I am going to talk about endings, but not yet. But Karen Joy never did get around to talking about endings, and Clara left the workshop still feeling as if she was suspended within it, waiting for the second shoe to drop.
Eventually, Clara had attempted a cold equations story, and though Karen Joy never read it, Clara thought she might have liked it if she’d had the chance. In Clara’s story, “False Equations,” the Emergency Despatch Ship (EDS) was packed full of animals, rather than people, and the stowaway was the child of a White-backed vulture pair. An egg when she was smuggled aboard, the stowaway hatched during the journey to Walden (rather than Woden).
Clara had made several copies of the story and sent them out to the other members of her book club. Fern wrote back to say that the story was too complex and far-fetched. Bea wrote that she hadn’t time to read anything just then except the book that they were supposed to be reading for their next meeting. And Belle said simply that there were far too many “Cold Equations” reworkings and inter-textual responses out there, and she didn’t see why Clara had bothered attempting another if she had so little to say about the matter.
Clara, like Fern and all of the other members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club, had never managed to finish reading the set book before their scheduled get-together. But then, none of their planned book discussions had yet taken place. There was always some complication, some hindrance that they were incapable of overcoming.
The workshop had not been a total loss, however, since Clara had met Belle there, and they had ended up good friends. They lived near each other—their farms were only a short walk apart—and a few years ago they had opened up a café in town where they served good, simple food and provided their customers with a shaded garden in which to sit and chat.
These days, when Clara can, she takes time off from the café to go and visit her daughter. Alice lives near the great lakes. She has a large house; tall and stone-walled, with large windows to catch the afternoon breezes. As Clara comes down the shared driveway to Alice’s house, she always experiences a moment of something like regret, or fear. What if, once she enters her daughter’s house, she isn’t able to leave again? What if, once she sees all the children her daughter cares for, she can’t stop herself from saying something cruel? Telling her daughter what she believes: that Alice’s house full of other people’s children is just a way for her daughter to endlessly delay her own grieving, her own letting go of things. Or what if the opposite occurs: What if she enters that house full of children, sees all the work that needs to be done caring for them, and is caught up in her daughter’s Sisyphean task of feeding, bathing, and holding other creatures’ young? Like Sisyphus forever pushing his stone up the same mountain, only to watch it roll down again.
Clara isn’t sure she is a welcome visitor any more, or whether she wants to go there. She doesn’t think about these things directly, but as she comes up the walk she tries to imagine herself greeting and being greeted by her daughter and struggles to construct an image that contains ease or warmth.
As it happens, she finds Alice in the garden with her new lover. They are walking from tree to tree, looking up into the canopy of each one and then moving on.
This is not Alice’s first lover, Jeff, who is dead now, and Clara has difficulty remembering this one’s name. Blue? Balloon?
They go to wallow in the mud-hole that spreads out from beneath the African tulip tree. The one Jeff had liked to wallow in with guests. They had been cooling off there together—Alice and Jeff—when they had told Clara there would be no grandchildren. “It’s my fault, I’m afraid,” he’d said, as if he’d forgotten to pick up ice on the way home, but blushingly. “They’re no good, my swimmers. My—”
“She knows what you mean,” Alice had said. “There’s no need to go on and on.”
Clara had remembered, then, the termination Alice had when she was in high school. The waiting room full of pictures of empty landscapes at sunset, the interview with the cheerful nurse, the other young females in the waiting room—all of them avoiding each other’s eyes. And afterwards, her daughter wanting ice cream and to sit by the river and watch the waterbirds dancing in the shallow water. Alice had rested her head on Clara’s shoulder, curled her feet up under her bottom like a child. Her breath had smelled of milk and sweet biscuits, and her hair of antiseptic. It is the last time Clara can remember her daughter wanting to be held.
The garden has changed more than Clara’s daughter has, since Jeff’s passing. The paths that were once just worn earth have been widened and cleared of weeds. The beds of unnamed flowers that Alice and her husband used to grow have been replaced with vegetable patches and rows of imported exotics. Mulched and weeded and trimmed and fertilised to within an inch of their lives.
“You should keep going,” Alice says to her lover.
“Oh,” he says. “Oh yes, of course! Women’s talk.” He winks at Clara as he moves away. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”
When he has gone, Alice sighs and settles into a more comfortable position. “The sad thing is, he means it,” she says. “He won’t tolerate me doing anything without consulting him. He calls it communication, when what he really means is him telling me what to do.” She flicks her ears a little to clear away the flies. “It almost makes me glad we’re too different to breed. Imagine us: the parents of the last generation!”
Clara squints into the sun and watches her daughter’s lover still moving from tree to tree, looking up, thinking, then moving on. She is tired of being a visitor already, but Alice asks her all the questions a daughter asks anyway. No, Clara hasn’t heard from her husband of late. Yes, the café is going well. They’ve started a new tradition of monthly dinners. Seasonal dishes, all made with local produce. No, nobody special.
Alice looks across the mud-hole to the forest. “I’ve lost track of Dad,” she says. “Wasn’t he out west somewhere, living on a wildlife refuge of some kind?”
“I’d heard that,” Clara said. “Him and that female were working the summers and mostly left alone in the winters. Wandering the hills.”
“Janet,” says her daughter.
“What?”
“Dad’s new partner, her name is Janet.”
She ought not to have come, Clara thinks. Everything her daughter says or asks of her feels like a reproach. Even the gardens are reproachful, the liquidambars arching over the green lawn. The perfect garden beds, the even paths, the vistas like postcards. It was just what she’d dreaded, coming down the driveway, just what she’d been preparing herself for.
Alice wants to show her around the bottom end of the garden, which she says is where Jeff spent most of his time during the last few months of his life. Sometimes, he would fall asleep on the lawn, stretched out like a child and snoring so loudly that the small birds—the fairy wrens and tits—would scatter with fear.
“When I woke him up he would always say he hadn’t been sleeping at all,” Alice says. “He’d say he’d been writing. He’d tell me all about whatever it was he had been working on. By the end, the things he told me were just a jumble. A nonsense. But at first I believed him. Or . . . or I wanted to. He was working on a cold equations story, he said. But it was set here on Earth, and
instead of people, the two characters were rhinos, like us. The last two rhinos on Earth. And as soon as one died, the other would become functionally extinct.”
Alice was smiling, as though even now she could hear Jeff working out the shape of his story in her head. “That must be how he thought of us,” she said. “After all those years of being together, of sharing our lives and building this house and this garden. That there was no point to us being together, or having children. That we were just the leftover scraps of something that had once been whole.”
Jeff had died five years ago, just before the end of the summer, but Clara had not heard about it until six months after that. She got the news in a letter from Janet, her former husband’s new partner, one of the founding members of the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. They had once met, purely by accident, near a temporary market in Pullington. Janet had been walking away from a dungpile that Clara was going towards and somehow they had gotten to talking. It wasn’t till much later that they had realised they shared a man. In a manner of speaking.
Of course, I know that you knew Jeff far more intimately than I ever did, Janet wrote. But I’ve been surprised by how often I’ve thought about him. His passing makes me think about all of us, how we were, fifty years or so ago, when we didn’t know that it was all going to come to such an ending. We were full of ideas for growing the future—remember that plan Hildy had for forming a partnership with the San Diego Zoo?—and the males were all so ready to charge out into the world and lay down babies wherever they could.
Of course, Jeff wasn’t like that. Not even slightly. He never wanted anyone but his one dear wife; he wasn’t like his father, or any of that generation that were ours to love. Jeff seemed the most vulnerable of us all, even when he was young. I remember I could hardly bear to look at the dark spaces between his skin folds.
Did Janet really think that’s how it had been, for all of them? That, like her, they’d spent their youth getting babies on and from whoever they could? Clara’s memory of those days was that she and her husband had expected to stay together for their whole lives, babies or no babies. Until one of them died and was left to rot in some godforsaken grove of spindle-trees. Without a future generation to be mindful of, there was no reason for him to move on after twenty days. He could stay; they could form a pair-bond that would last through as many breeding seasons as they survived.
Clara and Janet had never been close—they had their reasons not to be—but Janet had known where to reach her when Jeff died, and she had kept in touch with Jeff, or with Clara’s daughter. She had known about Jeff’s death, and written to Clara with those strange, true words. Without Janet, Clara might never have known that her daughter’s husband had died. She might still have been keeping her distance, thinking that one day soon she would hear from him, and from her daughter.
The first time she went to Belle’s place it had been to drop off some salad greens she had picked up from a roadside stall on the way home. Belle’s crash was more or less what Clara had expected. Abundant and shabby, her teenage daughters sprawled across the savannah, leaving a trail of unconsciously messy beauty in their wake. Belle didn’t come to greet her, just hallooed her in, and when Clara came through she found the kitchen, unlike the one in the café, a lively and fragrant jungle of ingredients. Belle herself was the least colourful thing. She had taken off the two clanging bangles she wore around her ankles at work and stood in the kitchen barefoot, her skin rough and grey.
Belle’s husband, Robert, poured drinks for all of them. Clara put the greens in a clear space and somehow was invited to stay for dinner. The food Belle served was not as fancy as that she served in the café, and the dinner service was a mismatched collection of hand-thrown pottery pieces. The kind you pick up cheap at garage sales and second-hand stores. Robert kept their glasses full and talked about the fields of grapes he had seen growing on a property out the other side of the reserve. He also told stories about the Scandinavian furniture he had bought cheaply on eBay, especially about a queer couple of Silverbacks from whom he had wrangled a pair of original Thonet chairs. The way he talked about the exchange made it seem scandalous, as though they had propositioned him in some way. Later, when he made coffee, he talked about a workshop he had gone to on “cupping” and tried to teach Clara and Belle how to smell the grounds, insisting that they all drink their coffee sugarless and milk-free in order to better appreciate the flavours of the coffee.
During a pause in the conversation, Clara asked Belle if she had thought any more about whether she wanted to join the Karen Joy Fowler Book Club. Robert leant back away from the conversation, raising an eyebrow at his daughters as if he had been interrupted mid-anecdote, and then listened to his wife talk about the book they were planning to read with studied, careful attention.
After dinner, the pale-skinned daughters dragged their father off to help them with something and Belle and Clara were left alone in the mud-hole. The solar fairy lights were starting to dim, but the citronella candles threw off more than enough light. Belle stretched herself out, her feet in the cool spot where Robert had been sitting.
“I should go,” Clara said, and Belle turned and reached out as if to stop her.
“Don’t go,” Belle said. “Nobody else gets a word in once Rob gets going.”
Clara saw how it was. How Belle was in no hurry to be left alone with Robert after their evening of high talk and laughter. How he was the kind of male who was roused by such things into something like rage. Belle was weary, and filled with the kind of dread that comes when a party is over and you see, all at once, all the damage you must now repair.
Clara and Belle were both of that generation who were unlikely to have grandchildren, though they had both had husbands and children of their own. They were the mothers of daughters they did not understand, and whose troubles they could barely recognise. They went in and out of each other’s houses on a daily basis. They would graze in the savannah, or stand side by side in the kitchen making bread and listening to Belle’s daughters talk about their lives. The jokes about being the last of their kind. The bullying and despair. The gossip and conspiracies. A female in another herd had had a child, but it had died after one year. Another had given birth to three at once, stillborn and pale as cake. Clara and Belle looked at each other and twitched their ears in silent amazement. Who were these females? What lives were they living?
“Where did you hear that?” Belle said. “Facebook? It sounds like a hoax. Fear-mongering.”
The girls said it didn’t matter if one particular story was true or not, the point was not that one female had bred or not, but that they would never have children of their own. And if they did, they would be outcasts.
“We’d stay friends, if one of us had a child,” said one of Belle’s daughters.
“Sure,” said the other. “We’d set up a home and raise it together. Share it.”
“What about the bull?” said the younger daughter. “Would he have to live with us, too?”
Belle and Clara shared another of their looks, folded and pounded the dough they were working.
Belle’s older daughter shrugged. “You know what the males are like,” she said. “The ones who can breed are like . . . ugh.”
When they had talked enough about the future, the daughters talked about movies and music and the parties they were going to. Belle’s daughters were into bushwalking, and were always trying to drag their mother and Clara along on their week-long walks across the reserve. They talked about the places they would walk to next, and the things they planned to do when they got there.
Clara and Belle also worked together in the kitchen at the café. Or they went to other cafés to eat cake and drink coffee. They liked to sample the menus in the other cafés and consider the clientele. Sometimes, they would buy flat, sweet Dutch donuts from the baker, and get take-away coffee from the place next door to that, and then they’d go for a long walk along the beach together.
They talked, at first
in a sidelong fashion, and later with increasing heatedness, about the males with whom they had paired, their children, the lives they still felt they might live.
Clara said that her husband had been the kind that, whenever they invited people for dinner, would insist that she spend the two days prior to their arrival cleaning the whole of their home from top to bottom. She would pull out the weeds along the pathways and pull out the saplings that were too hard or bitter to eat. Trample the path till it was good and wide, and gather extra food for everyone. “It got to the point it was just easier not to have guests,” she said. “By the time they arrived, I was too exhausted to enjoy their company.”
Belle said that she had found out Robert still wrote letters to his childhood sweetheart. One a week. And that the woman wrote back just as often.
“What do the letters say?” Clara asked.
Belle shrugged and looked away, squinting out to sea. “I don’t know. He keeps them in a toolbox in his solitary territory. I’ve never had the courage to read them. I can’t decide whether I want them to be in love still, or not.”
They looked at each other, and then they both laughed. It was ridiculous, wasn’t it? The way the ones that were meant to be the centres of their lives were so peripheral. It was their friendship with each other that was the true and central thing.
“I shouldn’t talk about him like this,” said Belle. “He’s a good enough husband.”
Clara nodded. “Mine was, too. He was all right, as far as husbands go.”
“Just not—I don’t know. It’s as though he’s given up. As though now that we know we’ll go extinct—there’s no point in paying attention to the lives we do have. The lives we’re living.”
“As if we’re already ghosts,” said Clara. “Already dead.”
