Florida

by Lauren Groff

  The boys pass the bakery slowly, sniffing. They speed by the butcher shop because the window is gruesome with dead flesh. They are vegetarians, though only when it comes to creatures with faces.

  It was simple to get to the center of town, but now the mother appears to have lost her way. The streets were silent and eerie with drizzle when they arrived in the morning but are now thronging with visitors. The boys run ahead; she yells to prevent them from being hit by the cars sliding along in the tight roads between the houses. They look back at her blankly.

  She asks someone where their street is, but the man, clearly a fisherman, responds in an impossible French, a French that makes her fear she has somehow lost her French entirely. Yportais, she’ll learn later, is its own dialect, as knotty as old rope.

  At last she puts down the groceries and rubs her arms. She won’t cry, she tells herself firmly. The older boy has found a tall round pole beside a set of stairs leading up to a bricked-in front door. He is showing his little brother how to climb up, slide down. Dark hair, gold hair, dark, then gold.

  Guy was also the beloved older brother of someone smaller and blonder, Hervé. But Hervé was the even more tragic mirror of his tragic brother, and the parallel feels like a curse on her own boys, and she rushes it out of her mind.

  The littlest playground in the world! her sons shout, sliding.

  She watches, feeling each slide in her own body. She had a battery-operated toy when she was little, a set of penguins that marched up a staircase only to launch down a curvy slide and start the march again. The thrill was vicarious, the adrenaline outsourced. Good training, the mother thinks, for a life in books.

  She comes up the sidewalk, pushing the box with her feet.

  What’s wrong, Mommy? the little one says.

  I think we’re lost, she says. Don’t worry. I’ll figure it out.

  He makes a pinched face as if he’d sucked a lemon, then slides down the pole and runs up the stairs again.

  The older boy comes over and stands on her feet, pressing his head into her sternum. He looks up at her face questioningly. Isn’t that it? he says, pointing to a great cracked terra-cotta pot with red geraniums, beside which is the gap in the houses that leads into their narrow street. He knew where they were for a while but was being careful of her feelings, she sees. Sweet child. Or not so sweet, because when they arrive at the house, while she fumbles with the key, the older boy either pushes his little brother off the step or doesn’t mean to knock him off, it is hard to tell; he has gone watchful in his graceful predator’s body, but the little one’s wails are echoing in the close street and his knee has a dab of blood on it, and she hustles all three inside as quickly as she can and shuts the door against their noise, for fear of the neighbors.

  * * *

  —

  She cleans the house while the boys play with Legos, though the place was supposed to have been already cleaned before they arrived; this is why they had to wait until the afternoon to see it. There is nothing she can do about the smell but keep the windows open and hope for a speedy decay. They eat pasta and carrots, and go for a walk before bed, and on the way home there are cooking odors, people just beginning their evenings in vacationland, the sun still bright overhead.

  She sings the boys the Magnetic Fields’ “Book of Love” and reads to them from The Little Prince, and they fall asleep quickly in their sleeping bags because they can’t understand French and she might as well have been singing whalesong. Oh, but she loves the language in her mouth, the silk and bone of it, the bright vowels and the beautiful shapes a mouth makes to speak it.

  Downstairs, people keep passing the window, and their voices are loud. She closes it, closes the curtain. The wifi won’t work, though she turns the router on and off many times, though she follows the instructions in the binder the house owner left, each time more carefully than the last. She isn’t going to talk to her husband; he is in the thick of work by now, would respond curtly, would hurt her feelings and make her feel unloved, but maybe she has some good email, she doesn’t know. She opens her notebook but finds it impossible to write. She opens a bottle of the great cheap burgundy and is startled when she goes to pour another glass to find the bottle empty so soon. There must be an invisible her in the room, drinking from the same bottle, a second her, in yoga pants and a fleece jacket and smudged glasses, a doppelgänger just like her, right next to her, but unseeable. The only explanation.

  Maybe she’s imagining this because Guy’s later stories had many doubles, because, as Guy’s disease progressed, he began seeing a ghost of himself. One of his many lovers was Gisèle d’Estoc, bisexual, a demimondaine, famous for a bare-breasted public swordfight with a female lover who wronged her. She had such a fiery temper, she was suspected of bombing Le Restaurant Foyot to get back at a nasty critic. In her posthumous tell-all about her love affair with Guy, Cahier d’Amour, Gisèle says that he once told her about his double:

  Guy, she says, was lying still on the bed so that she could hardly see him in the shadows. The dark corners seemed to pulse with phantoms. Was he asleep? Suddenly, she heard his muted, jerky voice, saying in a harsh tone, This is the third time he’s come to stop me in my work. At first he had a strange moving face, a face from a dream, my own face, as if I were looking in a mirror. This time, he wouldn’t speak to me. On the last visit, this visitor who looks more like me than my own brother seemed real to me. He walked into my office and I heard his footsteps. Then he sat in my chair, all naturally, as if he belonged there. After he left, I would have sworn that he’d moved my books, my papers, all the objects on my desk. Like the last time, just now he said nothing to me, his face in an expression that has nothing to do with my work or worries. Only on this third visit did I understand what my double was thinking. He’s furious with me, he hates and scorns me. And do you know why? He believes that he is the author of my books! He is accusing me of stealing them from him!

  Sometimes, Guy whispered to her, I feel madness rolling around in my brain.

  The mother finishes the second bottle of wine. The page before her is still blank.

  Fuck it, she thinks, it is the travel, the strain of newness, the stink in the house, and her body feels heavy, as if over the course of the day it had been stuffed full of stones from the beach, all of these things conspiring to keep her from working. With some effort, she climbs the spiral staircase up into her cold white windy room.

  Ten at night and yet the sun is still blazing in the skylights. She pokes her head through into the air and sees the tide far out, the black exposed seabed terrifying in its rawness, its gleam somehow sinister like the surface of a dark moon. Tiny people pick their way across it, holding white things she imagines are buckets.

  On the next rooftop there is a line of seagulls. They are strangely still, facing away from her and toward the sea. She counts a dozen but stops counting because something makes her uneasy about their silence. This is a species of bird that is never quiet; they are three-fourths scream, they are the birds of rage, all of them mothers; even the male gulls are mothers.

  Something, she thinks, is wrong.

  Soon, pink and navy spread across the sky, and the sun blazes, then goes out. She’d read of sailors at sea who, on extremely clear days, see a flash of green the moment the sun sets. The only thing she sees is the ghost of the old dead sun on her eyelids when she closes them.

  A moment later, the biggest seagull opens its wings. All at once the birds break into shrieks, laughter, wild flapping; it is deafeningly loud, and she is so startled she hits her head on the skylight, and when she stops wincing, the seagulls are lifting up in the wind, peeling off the rooftop, carrying backward toward her. She ducks again and watches a handful float backward close over her head, their tongues darting out of their open mouths like long and pink and panicked worms.

  Then they are gone, their noise coming down from the distant air. She is sh
aking, but maybe she is just cold. She gets into bed to warm up and within a few breaths is asleep.

  * * *

  —

  In the morning, there is a tiny freezing body climbing under her warm duvet, then another one. The boys fidget but stay quiet, all elbows and knees knocking her sides, cheeks on her arms and chest. They watch the sky lighten overhead. She hadn’t shut the windows and the room is frigid, the way her bedroom had been frigid when she was small and her family lived in a drafty antique house in upstate New York, and some nights she’d watch wind through a crack whip a thin string of snow across the room to settle in a tiny perfect nipple in the fireplace.

  At the bakery, she makes the boys order what they want in French, and the baker looks at the mother kindly and holds her hand for a moment when she passes over the paper twists of pastries, and all the way home, the mother feels the baker’s warm fingers on hers.

  Not many other people are awake in Yport. A man bullying his spaniel down the street. The fishermen winching their boats with the long chains down the beach and through the channel.

  Here it is, the France the mother loves. The butter and pastry in the mouth, the cobblestones, the picturesque dawn with almost no French people in it.

  * * *

  —

  Today they will visit Étretat. Guy de Maupassant had loved Étretat. His mother, Laure Le Poittevin, spent most of her life there. Guy grew up there, and built a house not far from his mother’s when he made money. He called it La Guillette, the little Guy, in his complacent narcissism.

  The mother drives the windy road up to the top of the cliffs, which finally seem white in the morning sun, blindingly so. Aha, she thinks. It just gets dirty as it goes through the day, like the rest of us. Wow, breathes the little boy, but the elder holds his own counsel, watching. Something in him, she knows, wants her to spin the wheel and accelerate over the cliff, just to see what would happen.

  Tiny forests, meadows, songbirds, villages. The Mercedes purrs into Étretat; they park on rue Guy-de-Maupassant.

  The town is spotlit by the early sun, utterly still. From the density of souvenir shops, she knows it will later be full of tourists. The boys are hungry again, and she finds another bakery and again lets them have what they want as long as they order in French. Both boys choose a salambo, some sort of éclair with green frosting, which looks disgusting, but then again Salammbô the novel is her least favorite of Flaubert’s books, and it seems right that the boys choose something gesturing at Flaubert, who was Guy de Maupassant’s mentor and friend. Such a tragedy, to follow up the greatness of Madame Bovary with melodramatic historical fiction about ancient Carthage, as if a maker of an uncannily humanoid robot decided next to turn his attention to cuckoo clocks.

  But Flaubert had loved Guy truly, finding in the boy the ghost of his closest friend, Alfred Le Poittevin, Guy’s uncle. Alfred had been a poet who died too young, and Flaubert never got over the shock of it. When Guy grew up, he became close to Flaubert and pressed himself into Flaubert’s mold: disciplined on the page and obscene in the life. Guy was called by the family to prepare and dress Flaubert’s body when the master died of apoplexy; Guy wept in anger when the hole dug for the corpse was too short for the coffin. Later, a grieving Guy wrote to Turgenev: The great old soul is following me. His voice haunts me. His sentences are in my ears, his love, which I look for and can’t find because it is gone, has made the entire world seem empty around me.

  * * *

  —

  The mother and the boys go out to the boardwalk. The red flags are up, which means bathing is a no-go, as if anyone sane would brave these waves, wild and crashing white. This beach is like Yport’s, only supersized. Here, though, the great cliffs take her breath away. On the left side, there is a needle, one huge pointed rock, as well as a giant’s archway somehow carved out of the bone-white stone; on the right, a smaller archway has a church like a brown chapeau up top.

  When they grow too cold in the wind, they walk the town, but something about the aesthetics of the buildings feels off to her, close and mean. There are brown timbers everywhere, tight streets, second and third stories that tilt frighteningly far off their foundations into the road. The native style seems so ornate and dark and airless that the effect is almost disdainful. She feels the buildings leaning like women watching behind her back, whispering.

  She takes the children to the villa Les Verguies, where, after their parents’ divorce, Guy and Hervé were raised by their suffering mother, but there is nothing to see there, and a great gate blocks the way. She takes the children down the long road to La Guillette. The only thing to see there is a sign that says La Guillette. She takes a picture of it, then of the boys in front of it, and then, not finding herself capable of trespass, they walk back. Some writer named Maurice Leblanc was a much bigger deal in Étretat than Guy de Maupassant, it appears; he’d written some detective named Arsène Lupin. The arsenic wolf; the name could be applied to Guy, who had taken arsenic among many other medications for his syphilis and was predatory sexually, reportedly able to make himself erect at will.

  She walks her boys up the long climb toward the church atop the cliff. She carries the little one when he grows too tired to go on, and feels her muscles burn pleasantly. When she’s too tired, the older boy carries his brother for a spell, and, God, this makes her want to cry with love. Up at the stone church, she stands closest to the drop like a sheepdog to keep her boys from nearing the lip of the cliff but lets them run and play around the church, climbing the steps, leaping down.

  They drift down and eat a margarita pizza for lunch. They buy water shoes for the painful stones on the beaches, a mat so they can sunbathe, floaties, their own blue-and-white mariner’s sweatshirts because cold like this was impossible to imagine in the hellmouth that is summer in Florida. They buy a postcard for the boys’ father that will remain in the bottom of her bag, staining and shredding at the corners, unwritten, until they are home.

  There is nothing else to do so they walk down, across the boardwalk, up to the top of the other cliff, where there is a staircase carved into the rock and a winding pathway with no guardrail to keep people from tripping and falling three hundred feet into the evil.

  Ow, says the older boy, trying to rip his hand away from hers, but she won’t let him go.

  Keep me safe, she says to give him a job, pretending to be afraid. I don’t want to fall.

  Then both boys hold her hands and steer her around rocks and talk to her in the gentle voices she heard them use once to urge a baby gosling out of a gutter, which they tried to do for hours, until the chick got hungry and darted out and they caught him and released him into their neighborhood’s duck pond, where he was never seen again, where, she thinks now, he was probably eaten immediately by a hawk, as he had no mother goose to protect him.

  When they cross a narrow bridge over a vast drop, the wind nearly blows the sunglasses off her face, and she becomes genuinely frightened. She squeezes her sons’ hands, having visions of their shirts filling with wind, pushing them up and into the air like kites, their little faces first dazzled and delighted and then the slow dawn of dread as they begin to blow away. She would tether them here, to the earth, with her body.

  I’m not scared, the smaller boy says, pressing close to her leg.

  Me neither, the older one says.

  Mommy’s scared, the smaller boy says. Though we’re not.

  Oh, Mommy’s scared of everything, the older one says, but pets her leg with his free hand.

  From here, the other cliff they climbed earlier shows itself to be perilous, the church ready to fall off in a gust of wind. She can’t believe she let her boys run around up there. The nausea rises in her throat. She has dragged her children across the world; she is risking their death, and for what? For a long-dead writer whom she finds morally repugnant, whose work she likes only about five percent of, filled as it is with
white male arrogance and anti-Semitism and misogyny and flat-out celebrations of rape.

  This town, from up here, feels malevolent, an outgrowth of Guy’s bad heart.

  The nausea stays until they descend and she finds the car. She drives out of Étretat with a sense of relief, and the boys fall asleep, and she reads a book, parked in the casino lot back in Yport, because her boys are too beautiful, asleep like this; she can’t disturb them when there’s such peace in their faces.

  * * *

  —

  At the end of the boardwalk in Yport, near the spooky cave in the cliff, there is a carousel of ersatz Disney characters with vehicles that jerk eight feet into the air when the boys push a button.

  The woman who sold the mother twenty tickets is beautiful, a bleached blonde with huge tits. She lives in a trailer behind the carousel with a fleshy man who never wears a shirt. She never speaks. The mother thinks she is maybe Eastern European. The woman makes savage faces at the backs of the parents who buy tickets, and when she goes around to take the same tickets from the children before their rides, she rips them nastily out of their little hands.

  The boys ride together in the Dumbo car. They flash by, flash by, flash by, first low then high in the air, shouting with joy over the Spice Girls.

  At her first family, in a village outside Nantes, during her study-abroad year, her fourteen-year-old host sister would play the same song loudly and on repeat when her eighteen-year-old boyfriend, who was in the navy and wore a silly pom-pom on his beret, came over and they locked the door. She could hear their moaning even through the noise. I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want; the mother associates the song with statutory rape.

  When her children descend from the air and the ride settles, the little one runs to her, banging his golden head into her lap, and only then does she understand that he is weeping; he hadn’t been laughing, he’d been screaming with terror the entire time. It hadn’t been the height, she understands, but the red button. His brother had told him that if the four-year-old touched it, the Dumbo would explode.