Prepare Her

by Genevieve Plunkett

  The story of Medusa, as it was recorded on my Myths and Legends cassette tape, ended with the birth of Pegasus. Pegasus, a white, winged stallion, was said to have sprung from the pool of blood issued from the hole in Medusa’s neck. He was fully grown, completely unstained, and he flew up to the heavens, where he remained, delivering lightning and thunder to Zeus. I did not like this ending. I did not like the cool and arrogant way in which the narrator, a British woman, described it, like a cheery nurse explaining a very painful procedure. There seemed to be an underlying smugness to the whole thing, as if the storyteller herself were conspiring against me. Isn’t it just the way it is, she seemed to say, that innocence would be born of evil? It felt like a lesson that I did not want to learn, like being told by an adult to give up a fear that you are holding on to very tightly. Accepting this would mean being flung headlong into a kind of nihilistic maturity, where everyone turns up dead in the end, but the audience applauds anyway. I sometimes wonder: If there had been a touch of irony, just a drop of regret in her voice, would I have turned out differently? Would I have been altered, reformed—tamed, like a monster shown a kindness?

  Richie continued to bother me on the playground for another two weeks before he dumped me for another girl. It felt as though I had been both spared and rejected. The unfortunate girl’s name was Cameron Wright. Her father had an antique car with large spoked wheels and a shrill, train-like whistle. For this reason, I had always considered her to be untouchable. The car was neither cool nor uncool. It distinguished her as “the girl with the old car.” It was shocking that Richie would choose her, in the same way that it was shocking whenever someone chose the color gray.

  I’d like to say that my troubles at home ended as well, that the two instances were tied neatly together, but things only became more complicated. The man from the woods had begun spending nights in the shed in the backyard. I could see him from my window, sitting on the stoop with his long legs stretched out. Sometimes he would eat a whole box of doughnuts and then smoke a cigarette. I could smell the smoke from my bedroom, like a whiff of bad breath. By mornings, he was always gone.

  I did not tell my father about this for fear that there would be a confrontation. So, for many nights, I stayed awake, watching him from my window. He would come up from the woods, a tall, bowlegged silhouette with a winter cap on his head. As much as I feared him, I could not look away as long as he sat outside the shed door, cracking sunflower seeds, or picking stones from the soles of his shoes. He performed these tasks with a slow deliberateness, as if he were not trespassing but setting himself up to go fishing for an afternoon. And every now and then he would cast his gaze toward my window and I would startle, convinced that the meeting of our eyes would cause a disturbance like a firecracker, great enough to wake my father, who had been sleeping peacefully all this time, unaware of what was going on.

  Prepare Her

  “The girl has to poop,” Rachel tells the school. “Doctor’s orders.” This last bit is not a lie, although it feels like one, maybe because Rachel has never said “doctor’s orders” in her life. There is also something questionable—rebellious even—about the idea of keeping her daughter home when she is not contagious.

  “Poor thing,” says the school’s director. “We’ll be thinking of her. We’ll be sending her positive vibes.”

  “Yes. I will let her know,” Rachel says, and, as she hangs up the phone, she decides that she will indeed tell her daughter this. She has tried every method that she can think of—prunes, warm baths, hot drinks, promises of chocolate chips and sodas. There have been scare tactics, which Rachel regrets—threats of having to go to the hospital, of complicated, invasive measures. She might as well let her daughter know that her whole preschool is rooting for her.

  Bianca won’t be embarrassed, Rachel thinks. Or is it that Rachel has forgotten that shame is an opportunist, its means subtle and unfair? When she was Bianca’s age, she watched her mother drop an egg on the kitchen floor. It landed with a slap of yellow, leaving a thin, snot-like thread across the toe of her shoe. This had filled her with humiliation, as if the thing had come from her own body, like some kind of unsightly discharge that was beyond her control. She began to cry and then to wail, and her mother did not know what to do with her.

  “I don’t know what to do with you,” her mother said. Rachel’s sorrow was unrecognizable, alien, dysfunctional.

  Downstairs, Bianca is on the couch nibbling a piece of celery. The television is showing some kind of nature program. A volcano erupting. Veins of bright orange lava against a matte-black earth.

  “I would just walk around the lava,” Bianca says haughtily. The celery hangs from her mouth. She has not actually ingested any of it, but has only bitten the tip into a wet, stringy mess.

  They have been to the doctor, who has suggested things like making “poop muffins,” with bran and psyllium husk—simple, wholesome measures that Rachel is certain they are now beyond. Bianca has refused the toilet for five days. The pain comes in sharp, urgent waves and still she refuses, clenching her fists, dancing on her toes, anything to keep herself from going.

  This has become a psychological struggle, Rachel realizes. The solution is somewhere in her daughter’s head, which is already, at four years old, filled with strange, fiercely sophisticated ideas. On the television, a scientist in a fire-resistant suit pokes a stick into one of the lava flows and pulls it up, slowly, as if he is stretching taffy. It does look harmless. It all looks so slow and harmless.

  Rachel has been living with her mother now for six months, ever since she and her husband separated. Rachel’s mother is hurt and perplexed by the separation. It was entirely Rachel’s fault. It was not toxic and voluminous like her mother’s divorce. There is nothing impressive and darkly human and novelistic about the way her daughter’s relationship deteriorated. It simply ended, without mystery or confusion. A waste.

  Rachel herself is not pleased with the way things have turned out. For one, she wishes that her mother’s house were not so far from town. She feels helpless out here, buried in snow, beneath the creaking trees, the steep, forbidding face of the mountain. She keeps forgetting to buy things at the grocery store, ingredients that slip her mind during the thirty-minute drive. When she arrives back and remembers that they are still out of peanut butter, or baby carrots, or dish sponges, she feels a sort of desperation, as if she is starving. She opens bags of potato chips, thrusting her arm noisily inside while setting groceries on the shelf. She can’t stop. She is starving.

  Rachel writes for a magazine, which was fine while she was living off her husband’s income. She felt a rush of false opulence whenever she opened a check, this marvelous piece of extra money that represented her independence, the heroism of late-night multitasking. But now she knows that the money holds little significance. She has just finished writing an article about coffee, how it does not pair well with fruit. She contacted experts on the subject, experts with headshots that were somehow both angelic and murderous. They told her that coffee did not taste good with fruit.

  “Too much acid,” they told her. She had written the article despite being sick and having to care for Bianca, who was also unwell. “Most likely the flu,” the doctor said. “But knowing for sure won’t make a difference in how I treat you. Or how you feel.”

  Yes, thought Rachel. It will.

  She took Bianca back home and they wrapped themselves in a blanket on the couch and when her mother returned from her job at the hospital and walked wearily across the living room, dangling her keys, Rachel called out, “We have the flu!” Because it would make a difference to her mother, whose sympathy was contingent on that sort of thing.

  It is not just the separation that Rachel’s mother disapproves of. When her mother is at home, she holds a constant, irritable vigilance. She opens the refrigerator and peers inside, challenging its contents, shaking the milk carton, peeling open the lid to the yogurt to check its level. She steps over toys left on the f
loor with great, elderly sighs. At the table, she quizzes Bianca on hypothetical moral dilemmas.

  “If you had four chocolate chips, but Nana only got two, what would you do?”

  “I would build a wall around my chocolate chips so you didn’t see.”

  Rachel’s mother looks at Rachel over her granddaughter’s head, a deeply troubled, warning look.

  There is something that Rachel hasn’t tried, something that she has been avoiding. The doctor advised letting the child do it herself. At four and a half, she has the dexterity, said the doctor. Dexterity. It is a clean, mechanical-sounding word that does not take into consideration her daughter’s stubbornness, her skepticism, her outrageous, practically feral imagination.

  On the television, the volcano is still spurting lava, thickly, and sluggishly. Bianca watches rapt, the chewed stick of celery discarded beside her on the couch cushion.

  “I have something that might help,” says Rachel, switching off the television. She clasps her hands together, fortifying herself against insult and objections.

  But Bianca is not insulted. In fact, she is surprisingly eager to try. Rachel watches a mature and businesslike hope settle across her daughter’s face as they walk, holding hands, to the upstairs bathroom. It occurs to her that Bianca has reached a degree of suffering that has made this resolve possible. She, a child who won’t even try a new flavor of ice cream for fear that it won’t be her favorite, will do this strange, unheard-of thing, because she wants to stop the pain. Rachel feels this reality seep into her chest like a leak, warping and blistering a wall—the damage of another small heartbreak.

  In the bathroom, Rachel takes the cap off the suppository and hands it to Bianca. It is a clear plastic bulb with a long tube, or spout, at one end. The girl takes it, looks at it with cool consideration, and points the tip toward her bottom.

  “Now what?” she asks.

  “Well,” says Rachel, “first of all, you have to move it closer.”

  “Like this?”

  “Closer.”

  “Like this?”

  “Even closer.”

  Bianca is confused.

  “When do I squeeze it?” she asks.

  “When it is in,” Rachel says.

  “In where?”

  It is here that Rachel begins to suspect that her daughter has been misled in some way. She recalls their brief conversation downstairs, examining it for errors or ambiguities. No, she thinks. I explained it properly. She knew what she was getting into.

  “In the”—Rachel struggles for a moment. She does not want to use any terminology that might alarm the girl.

  “Hole,” she says. It is the best that she can do, given her options.

  “What hole?”

  “The one in your bottom.”

  A nervous, imperious fury begins to take over Bianca’s features. She drops the suppository on the floor.

  “I do not have a hole in my bottom.”

  Rachel exhales. She has been poised, encouragingly, on her knees, but now she sinks down, resting her palms against the cold tile. It is not her own, biting, self-critical voice that she hears at first, but her mother’s, followed by her husband’s. How could you let her reach this age without knowing? This is basic anatomy. This is vital to a proper and healthy self-image. You have failed to prepare her, they say, although Rachel has only a feeble, closed-minded understanding of what this means. Prepare her. It means more than she wants it to. She is on the verge of something terrible, something unspeakable, when she laughs.

  “Okay,” she says, softly. “We don’t have to do this.”

  From the beginning, Rachel’s husband has been calm and insistent about the process. He is a lawyer. He has seen how ugly divorces can be, how men and women turn to pettiness, as if picking up a new and aggressive addiction. He has always imagined (and has congratulated himself in doing so) that, in delivering these small jabs of pettiness, it is not a reward that they are after, but rather the avoidance, at all costs, of emptiness, meaninglessness, and regret. He knew of a woman who, rather than allow her husband to take the dog, had instead driven the animal—an eight-year-old shepherd—to the edge of a state forest and let it loose.

  “What kind of high must you be on?” Rachel’s husband had asked her. “What kind of raving, diabolical high?”

  Rachel suspects that her husband has always known just how he will react under the same circumstances. She can also sense his satisfaction, the clean, uncomplicated triumph of being blameless. He has taken the blow, the shock and humiliation of it, but he will not be amazed by the aftermath.

  Before the separation was imminent and they spoke to each other in only polite, distrustful language, Rachel and her husband used to argue. Rachel remembers these arguments with astonishment—how easily they fell into playful civility whenever Bianca wandered into the room and then how powerfully they worked themselves back up again when she left, like an engine, hot and ready. They would argue until there was nothing to do but reconcile, which they managed to do firmly, with concessions made on both sides. It was uncomfortable for both of them to see the other defeated. It was lonely to win an argument and so they worked just as hard to keep it fair as they did trying to strike the other down. But eventually this arrangement left Rachel bewildered. She did not have the constitution that her husband had for debate and would often carry his words with her long after they had made up, trying to make them useful, but failing, as if experimenting with strange spices. He wanted her to be more assertive, if not for her own sake, then for Bianca’s. One afternoon he came home early and overheard the last minutes of one of her phone conversations. She can’t remember exactly what was said. She might have laughed, she might have said thank you more than once, let her voice rise to an unnatural servile pitch. Phone calls make her nervous. Their conditions are tight and airless, squeezing her into compliance no matter how ordinary the circumstances.

  “You let people push you around,” he said. “Whoever that was, you’re letting them have too much power.”

  “It was an interview,” she told him. “I’m writing a story on unoaked wine.”

  “That’s how you do an interview?” He was incredulous, concerned. His anger had a focused, terrifying benevolence.

  He encouraged her to have more friends, successful friends with interesting lives. It would be good for Bianca to be around strong, driven women. But Rachel could not work up the nerve. She saw these women dropping off their children at the preschool on their way to work. They looked busy. They looked tired. They had clean hair. They did not need her friendship. She thought of these women when her husband came home at the end of the day.

  “What did you two do today?” he would ask, and she would think, I watched Bianca twirl in her new dress exactly fifty-eight times. I spent fifteen minutes trying to convince her to eat a bite of scrambled egg. I brushed the hair on one side of her head but did not push my luck with the other. I forgot to be spectacular.

  Soon their arguments lost their vigor, their morale. Rachel had lost her stamina, and her husband seemed to be missing something, too, some roundness or element of security in his voice that used to keep Rachel from feeling afraid of him. Now she was afraid of his logic and his intellect, of the harm that they were capable of. As a kind of preparation, she began to argue with herself during the day while he was at work, muttering, prodding her opinions, searching them for weaknesses. This way, she thought, he can’t get to them first.

  “I know it’s terrible,” she’d say as she carried dinner to the table.

  “I’ve been a lazy mother today,” she would tell him as he was walking in the door.

  This was not received well. “You can’t say these things in front of Bianca,” Rachel’s husband told her. “She can’t hear you putting yourself down.” And Rachel felt dizzy, disarmed, the blows coming at her in all the wrong directions. Of course, she thought. Bianca.

  Bianca won’t eat. It is lunchtime and she is under the kitchen table, folded in h
alf, her arms crossed over her stomach.

  “Help,” she moans. “I’m dying.”

  Amazing, Rachel thinks, how quickly sympathy gets traded for exhaustion, how easily someone else’s pain becomes commonplace. She has caught herself wanting Bianca to get better for the wrong reasons—so she can go to school tomorrow, so Rachel’s mother doesn’t come home and find them like this. She is frustrated. She is murderous. She wishes she could take the girl’s suffering upon herself, because she would know what to do with it, how to force it into submission. From here, she thinks, on her knees, rattling a box of raisins, everything looks so infuriatingly simple.

  “I’m dying!” Bianca cries. “I’m going to faint!” She looks up at her mother with steady, reproachful intelligence. “Why did you even have me if I’m just going to die?”

  It is too much. Rachel gets up and puts the raisins back into the cupboard. She wants to call her husband to tell him what their daughter has just said. She feels momentarily and sadly devoted to him, as the only person in her life who might believe what is happening.

  From the kitchen window, Rachel can see far into the woods, back to where the black trunks of the trees blend together into a kind of visual nonsense. Sometimes the trees are wet and full of sun and their naked branches form a brilliant snarl of light. Other days, the snow settles on every twig and the effect is clean and meditative, every surface retraced and made sense of. Rachel knows that there are paths through these woods. Her mother owns the land, but she allows the neighbors to ride their horses through, which brings Rachel a sense of comfort. It somehow makes the whole cold, bitter forest easier to fathom.

  I wanted you, she considers saying to Bianca, but she knows how that will sound. A four-year-old will see right through it.