by Sheri Holman
He is awake in the next room. He shared this bed with his mother, he told her, when his father wasn’t home, until he was ten or so. She can’t imagine sleeping with her parents, unsure whether to snuggle close or cling to the edge, putting herself as far away from their heavy, hairy bodies as possible. Right now she can’t imagine sleeping at all, her thoughts are galloping away from her, too insistent not to follow. She swings her feet to the ground and lets herself out of the stuffy room. The night has let go of the day’s heat and outside in the breezeway it is dry and clear.
“Dad?” she taps softly on the door to the front parlor where the lamp is still lit. “I can’t sleep.”
She waits, but gets no answer. Could he have dozed off and left it burning? Quietly, she pushes open the door. Wallis hasn’t been in this room since the first day, but her father has made up the antique sofa into a bed, with a quilt, and a rolled pair of trousers for a pillow. The room smells of wood smoke, but it must have been hours ago that they kindled the fire; only ruby coals remain in the hearth. She steps over four crushed beer cans and the uneaten crust of a sandwich. Two sharpened sticks with charred marshmallow tips. She didn’t know he’d bought marshmallows at the store. Jasper had unpacked the groceries.
Wallis steps back into the breezeway, peers inside the dark kitchen with its faintly glowing, freshly painted walls. Skirting the woodpile, she knocks her shin on one of the leftover spools of cable Jasper used to wire the cabin. Jasper, are you there? she whispers. His sheet is spread across the planks, one corner flipped over by the breeze. They must be out front watching the stars, she tells herself. They wouldn’t have left her here, alone on a mountaintop with a dead man’s clothes and a panther on the loose. She walks around the house in the white light of the Milky Way, as fresh and close as the kitchen ceiling; the house seems less permanent than it is by day, its walls giving a little in each direction as if breathing. She had forgotten the Perseids, but now she sees the first falling star. She thinks of the poor citizens of Hamburg staring up into a sky full of floating aluminum strips. The falling stars make Wallis feel she is falling, too. Or maybe flying. Tonight they feel the same.
Turning the corner of the house, she sees blue light flickering through the gaps of the old barn boards. For a second, Wallis has the childish certainty that her father and Jasper are hiding a spaceship in there, secretly plotting their midnight escape. Then the feeling passes but the relief that should replace it—someone is clearly in there, she has not been left alone—doesn’t come. There should be a word for this rapid cycling through, she thinks—the dread of the shadow on the wall, the sigh at discovering it was just the family cat, the swiftly following of course, when the ax connects to the back of the head just as you bend down to pet it. Wallis moves through the yard carried on this relief-dread, watching herself as she drifts through the musical strata of cricket and grinding bullfrog. She hears her father’s voice, above the frog, below the clicking timbals of cicadas that cling to the forks of trees. Her hand is on the barn door when she hears the clack of film and the whir of the hand-cranked motor.
She puts her eye to the crack, below the hinge, and she has a clear view of the projector set on an upturned crate. Awash in blue, they kneel behind it, both sitting back on their long, thin calves, their cheeks almost touching. She and Jasper are kids and share their length in years, but Jasper and her father are alike in bodies. When you are learning to love, she thinks, which part of yourself are you trying to satisfy? Length? Width? Depth? How, she wonders, do we know how to fit ourselves together?
Jasper cranks too fast and her father places his hand over the boy’s to slow him down. Like this, he says, showing him how it should be. Turn. Turn. Turn. Turn. Turn. The crate is placed too far from the wall and the picture is a little too wide and dreamy, as if being projected underwater. There is no screen to contain it and its borders seep into the cracks. Wallis has arrived at the end, the film is almost over. A pale man with dark circles painted around his eyes wrestles with the monster he’s brought to life. They reach out to each other trapped on opposite sides of the mirror, and then the monster is gone, the fiancée rushes in. The movie is over and Jasper stops cranking. The bulb hiccups once and then the barn is dark. Bodies move, Wallis hears the rustle, but it’s impossible to tell if they are moving closer together or quietly apart.
She shouldn’t be here and slowly she turns to leave, taking the end of that movie inside her. Back through the night’s soundtrack, across the yard, onto the porch, and to the bedroom, where she curls up on the bed, reaching for the comfort of dreams. She told her father where to find his Frankenstein, but she didn’t believe he would show it. Not without her. She asked to have the future shown to her, but she cannot say what she saw. It was dark, it could have been anything.
It was dark. It could have been nothing.
II
Ann
1967
Just because she never made it to Europe doesn’t mean Ann is uncultured. She keeps up. Old Masters. Impressionists. She wanders the halls of blinding white statuary, able to distinguish a Greek chiton from a Roman toga, the Archaic from the Hellenic period. She took art history in high school and knows how gaudily this pure white marble was painted back when those deities were all fetish and hung in dark rafters like cheap Puerto Rican saints, too pink and fleshy, with crystal eyes that watched all sorts of drunken orgiastic rites. She can say that word. Orgiastic. She’s not afraid of it.
She didn’t have to go to Europe because slowly, since the war, Europe has been coming to her. In the last two months she has eaten arugula and drunk Chianti, and she has visited this museum where they have the Charioteer on loan and other random godlets and shepherds, boys half dressed with hairless chests and rippled backs, and she studies them looking for clues to what makes them so desirable. She doesn’t see it. She knows she should but she doesn’t see what makes them so different from girls who are smooth and slim. Except. Of course.
The baby kicks in her belly and when she moves she sloshes like a wineskin. There is only one part of a man that swells, but she is all distortion these days, she doesn’t even recognize herself. A fat, coarse face and thick middle, ankles as wide as her knees, breasts heavy and tender. Her fingers have swollen to the point that she can’t remove her wedding ring, not that she would want to, except that it cuts into her finger where her flesh has closed over it like a barbed wire around a tree. She is hot and thirsty all the time. And pimply. A sculptor would never dare pock a boy’s face, though surely they would have been covered in acne, wouldn’t they? All those hormones. Maybe people didn’t have hormones back then. Don’t be stupid. Of course they did.
She would have made it to Europe. She had the route mapped out, beginning in Paris and following the path of Joan of Arc through Orléans and Tours and Poitiers, then overland to Spain and across the mountains along the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. She had no desire to see Greece and Italy, which were backward and dirty and full of perverts. The colorful brochures she had for small package tours focused on countryside churches and roadside shrines, tasteful inns in towns that had been untouched by the war. She would go on a clean bus with other women her age and be chaperoned but not oppressed and given enough room to shop a bit and haggle with the locals and feel herself there. She would send postcards home and collect dolls with different national outfits for the daughter she might one day have and flirt with a tour guide and maybe even kiss him one night by a hayrick, feeling the stalks press into the small of her back. She would have done those things.
There is an overpriced museum café with china and silverware and dainty teacups and she is very hungry but her doctor told her she’d gained too much weight already, she was only allowed two more pounds with four months still to go, and so she unwraps another stick of Juicy Fruit and tries not to think about food. She doesn’t want to look at these boys anymore. She really doesn’t understand it and when he tried it on her last night, claiming it was better for the baby not to
go where they usually went but the other place, there, she tried to be modern. Of course he wouldn’t want to look at this face, all swollen and grotesque. On her hands and knees it hurt so bad she bit her lip and she still feels the raw open skin like the slippery skin of the real place and he said it was his first time, too, but he seemed to know what he was doing and—STOP. Just stop.
When Eddie first showed up at the station they used to call him her stray. He followed her around like a puppy and brought her little presents, things he’d pawed out of the garbage because he didn’t have any money—rimed Whitman samplers and bruised velvet roses. He made up songs for her, “Ann’s Golden Hair,” and “Ann, Won’t You Ever Love Me?” that he played on the harmonica, the tune never quite set but meandering around a register both rueful and sad. She pled his case to her father like she pled the case of all the other strays that had wandered through their lives over the years. Please can we keep him? He won’t be any bother. Her father, like he did with all the others, blustered and raged—you don’t know the first thing about the mongrels you take in, then when they bite you, I have to foot the medical bills. She cried a bit and ran off and she scared him as she always did, and he gave in, as he always did, mentally calculating the weeks until he’d have to round up this boy like he rounded up the dogs and cats when the noise and chaos got to be too much and chuck him back into the world. Eddie, you’re in! she’d shouted, racing to find him where he was helping to lay coaxial cable in anticipation of the new receiver that would give them a tristate range. Go wash your hands. You get to come inside.
Maybe he resented her for that. Maybe he hated being under obligation. Men don’t like being beholden to women. Isn’t that what her father always said?
The hallway between the classical statues and the café is hung with paintings from Iran on loan from the shah, which she passes by without a glance. Too many small turquoise and ruby figures, all that writing around the margins, she is forced to squint, which causes wrinkles. She passes a room of Chinese porcelain, vases and more vases, there is nothing here she wants to see. What she likes are the yearly Christmas card exhibits, lovely little squares of Currier & Ives, not the modern ones that are trying so hard, just lines and squiggles suggesting the holy family, a circle with a U for a cow, a reclining figure eight—infinity—for the Christ child. Why did everything these days have to be suggestion? Why did everything seem to mean something else? She should have gone to college. She should have gone to Europe. She had the brochures.
The museum will be closing soon and caterers in white aprons are spreading white tablecloths and setting out champagne flutes for a reception, everything is pure and white. She likes this absence of art, in fact, she realizes; she is always most comfortable in parts of the museum that are blank, that allow rest from all the things she is supposed to be there to look at. She thinks of the stack of snowy diapers she has in the closet in the nursery, how they’ll never be that clean again no matter how hard she scrubs them. She thinks of the baby growing inside her, put there by a part of him that, all these years later, still feels like dirt under his fingernails. A Negro caterer bumps her with a platter of cheese cubes and strawberries and because she doesn’t want him to think she thinks she’s superior, she apologizes for being in the way and asks him what he’s setting up for. It’s a publishing party, he tells her. He nods to the small gallery behind him where Ann sees black and white photos hung on the wall and a stack of books on a table. There is a fountain pen set out and a crystal pitcher of water. The announcement has come over the public address system that the museum will be closing in ten minutes; they must all clear out, she knows, so that the important people might arrive. My husband is in TV, she says to no one, the caterer has set down his platter and disappeared. I am often welcome at parties like this.
Mothers are making their way to the exits, grasping the hands of school-age children. Why are they at a museum in the middle of the week? They shouldn’t be on vacation at this time of year. Maybe they have stayed home sick and their mothers, to distract them, have brought them here, and then Ann feels a knot of anger in her stomach that any mother would dare bring an infectious child out to contaminate everyone else. She scans each one for a telltale rash, a flush of red scab. Measles. Chicken pox. Diseases that carry miscarriages and death.
Okay. She can’t take it anymore.
Her hand darts out and she shoves a fistful of cheese into her mouth, washing it down with the juice of a frantically chewed strawberry. He won’t know. I won’t tell him, but whether she means Eddie or her doctor or the Negro caterer, she can’t be sure. The people are streaming past her now, the whole museum emptying out through the main doors, and she ducks into the small gallery behind her to chew and chew and chew, looking down, concentrating on the crumb and sweet, and her mouth is so full, a bright red drop of saliva escapes her lips and before she can cup her hand to catch it, lands on the white marble floor as if it has dropped from between her legs, and she stares at it in horror and fascination until she realizes she’s been staring for a very long time and then she smears it with the toe of her ballerina flat and looks up.
She is alone. No one has seen her and, emboldened, she moves to the crystal pitcher, pours herself a glass of water, and when she has drunk it all, wipes her lipstick from the rim and returns the glass to its place. She unwraps another stick of Juicy Fruit so that no one, should they get close, might smell the cheese on her breath. Now she might look at the photographs on the wall: originals, it seems, of those in the book on the table. Ann walks the semicircle of the exhibition, feeling the harsh spill of the spotlights pooling on her cheekbones. The wall text uses words like prescient and muscular and kamikaze. Ann stares at a dizzying color photograph of a building in napalm flames, two WWII fighter jets banking through the low clouds overhead. It was the presidential palace in Saigon, she reads, the failed coup of February 1962. On the floor of the living room, next to an undetonated bomb that spared the life of President Diem, lies the charred, smoke-damaged copy of the George Washington biography he was reading at the time. She moves to the next picture of taut-skinned North Korean women squatting over a roasting dog; she moves to the next—dazed men in wide stripes and yellow stars clinging to the fence of newly liberated Dachau. Ann realizes she is viewing the exhibit backward, moving slowly back in time rather than forward, and she should be noticing things about the artist’s technique, a coarsening or youthful self-consciousness overcome in later work, but she doesn’t. Every shot has the same intensity, dull eyes leveled at her like a howitzer, all that ugliness and brutality, degradation elevated to an art form. Then the war is over because it has not yet begun and the exhibit moves to the artist’s Works Progress Administration period, photographs of the indigent she did for the government, before moving on to her earliest work—the Wall Street suicide that launched her, some very stylishly lit gloves on a table beside some fresh-cut tulips. The WPA photographs look oddly familiar. A stern mountain woman with feral eyes and a humorless mouth standing with a boy on a porch. A man, better dressed than the others, focused on something out of frame as he cranks an old-fashioned film projector in low light. Ann reads the caption: In the autumn of 1940, Sonia Blakeman and playwright Tucker Hayes were mapping the mountains of Virginia for the state’s first official WPA guide. Last seen in the impoverished community of Panther Gap, Hayes, pictured left, failed to report for duty at Fort Dix and was later declared permanently Absent Without Leave.
Ann nearly chokes on the gum in her mouth, spitting it into her palm as if she’d been chewing on a bit of gray mouse flesh. She opens her purse and wraps the gum in a corner of Kleenex, then shoves it deep down. The guards are locking up, but they hold the door for her as she scurries out, a woman in her condition.
Panther Gap
OCTOBER 1940
She was standing in the breezeway outside the parlor door in her thin white web of nightgown. Her hair floated around her shoulders, the moon cast a dark shadow between her legs. Cora w
as waiting for him, but he winced at the sight of her. Oh, no, you won’t get me again, he thought. I know what I’m in for with you. Her face fell, she’d been looking forward to racing again. We had such a fine ride, didn’t we? she seemed to say. Yes, it was hard, yes, it hurt, but when have you ever flown over the earth like that? Did you even know it was in you? She didn’t speak, but he heard it all as if she’d said it aloud, and tried to stop his ears against it. He still had welts on his side from last time, he was just regaining his strength. Still she stood there, waiting. Look, I have a little something for you, she seemed to say, as she slowly extended her hand. Her fist relaxed and, shining like pure moonstone on her dry palm was a silvery, shimmering cube of sugar. Every facet etched, each grain in high relief. His mouth filled with desire, he licked his swollen lips. He was wary still, uncertain, but she was so beautiful and the sugar looked so sweet, like it would take all the bitterness of an entire life away, and he had to have it, he had to, and so he sidled over to her and touched his lips to her outstretched hand and as he tasted the sugar and her flesh together, he saw from her other hand, that which sneaked from behind her back, a bridle dangling, and before he could rear back, she had thrust the bit into his mouth, gagging him, and leaped upon his back. At his feet lay the nightgown and something slack and marrowless upon it. How did she slip out of her casings so quick?
They covered the distance of the first night in a matter of minutes. She wrapped her sinewy legs tight around his chest until he could barely gasp a breath, teaching him a new rhythm. His canter became a long undulating talus wave, sparking gold against the rock; he became once more all motion and desire and the desire for motion. But no sooner had he stretched out and found his stride than the whip came out. Frenzied, furious, he knew this went beyond the last time. There was no pretense of exploration or pleasure, merely the punishing ride to destination. He looked down over the curvature of earth and now they were nowhere on the mountain, they had entered a town, empty at that time of night, only a single traffic light spilling its light upon the pavement. He spooked at the blink from yellow to green, for how could he be seen like this, what was he? She struggled to hold him, wheeling him around to gallop for the cover of woods that followed the side of the road. In this way, they stalked the town until she found the route she was looking for and turned him out again, racing down a different street in a different part of town where what was man in him began to recognize storefronts and landmarks—the bank, the Esso station, the laundromat, the Woolworth’s. She pulled him up short at the plate-glass window of a cramped office at the corner of Fifth and Plum, which he instantly knew, and felt himself—man and beast—balk again. What were they doing here? Why had she brought him to this place?
