Prepare Her

by Genevieve Plunkett

  Sometimes, when her mother is not home, Rachel calls Jess. It is not quite loneliness that leads her to this decision, but a kind of suffocating boredom. He could be anyone else at this point, but he just happens to be himself, his miserable, available self.

  “How are the sticks?” he asks her every time, and, every time, she regrets her decision to call. The question is somehow repulsive to her, and she is reminded of his long, tolerant face, his slow, mournful desire. She finds herself saying things like “I’m not your girlfriend” and “This is probably the last time I’m ever going to call.” She has become catty and spiteful and still full of rangy, insolent lust. When she last spoke to him, about a week ago, he was about to fly out to San Francisco to buy a new guitar. She did not know why he needed to go all the way to San Francisco to buy a guitar and she was annoyed at him for leaving, for seeming so feckless and indulgent. She knew so little about his life—where he got his money, what kept him going in general. He could be moody and immature, and Rachel often feared that she had fallen into a trap, that she had been taken in by a false front, or a secretly volatile personality, and so she was coarse with him, unfair, tyrannical. She had to keep her dignity.

  Her mother does not want to know anything about him. No names, no reasons, no confessions, she has always said. I don’t want to understand it. But Rachel sometimes worries that her mother carries certain assumptions about Jess, that in her mind, he is nameless, faceless, but somehow still striking and successful, like Rachel’s husband. Jess is neither of these things and Rachel wants credit for it. Look how low I can stoop, she wants to say, how little sense I can make.

  She wants to call him now. She had meant to call him today, before it became clear to her that Bianca would not be going to school. She would like to tell him about the horses in the woods, their magnificent, shadowy procession through her mind; about the horrendous things that children can say. But she has never spoken of Bianca with him. He knows of her existence, of course, but that is all. It is strange to think that there is a part of her life, a lewd, anarchic part, where Bianca does not fit, where no one does.

  The girl is back on her feet, doing little hops across the kitchen. Her body is straight and tense, her teeth set in a hard line. Her hair, too, seems to be standing on end, electrified in the dry air. It is wavy and exceptionally blond with streaks so light they are almost white. Strangers often stop her to tell her that she is beautiful. They will ask her, “Do you know that you are beautiful?” And Rachel wonders what they are expecting her to say. Do they hope that she will say, Yes, yes I know? I have always known? No. Rachel does not think so. She reaches for Bianca, to brush the hair from her eyes, to trail a finger down her cheek—some idle, motherly gesture that she knows will not help. Bianca stops hopping and holds her arms straight, tightening her fists, locking her knees. Touching her is like touching a wax doll. She has closed herself off. This is her last effort to control her body, to keep everything neatly inside. It must be painful, Rachel thinks, but perhaps not as painful as letting go. She has forgotten that, as a child, she used to do the same thing.

  And then when it happens, it happens all in a matter of seconds. Something dawns on Bianca’s face, a shocked, ominous look of defeat. She runs from the kitchen and Rachel follows her. She does not hurry—she never hurries after her daughter, unless it is a true emergency—and by the time she catches up to her, Bianca is already in the bathroom, pants around her ankles, looking at the lump on the floor.

  Two days before she moved out, Rachel’s husband did not wake up at his usual time. Rachel had awoken in Bianca’s room, where she had been sleeping on a cot beside the bed. She had explained to Bianca that it was because of Daddy’s snoring that she had switched rooms, but it was clear that Bianca was not alarmed. She did not need an explanation for why her mother might want to be closer to her. Rachel went downstairs and made the coffee. She opened the window shades and swept some crumbs from the table into her hand. It was not usual for her to be awake before her husband, and she felt at once a sense of freedom and a terrible responsibility. She could not decide whether her husband’s habits were still her concern. It might seem obvious that they wouldn’t be, but nothing was obvious anymore. She had expected for a marriage to fall apart, as they are said to, but hers was disappearing gradually, like snow, leaving odd-shaped islands behind—moments of unexpected tenderness, or sudden and vivid memories that had no business appearing when they did. He no longer kissed her in the mornings with his hand on the doorknob, ready to walk out, impatiently, generously. She did not go downstairs to see him after putting Bianca to bed, but stayed at her desk, pretending to read until she was too tired. And yet it seemed that they still made room for each other, emotionally. There was something that Rachel had expected to close in, dramatically, like the entrance to a cave collapsing. But the cave was still there, with all its chambers, its trafficked areas and its unexplored darknesses. There was still the question of whether or not to wake him. There had always been this question, for he would wake in a confused and angry panic no matter how gentle her tactics. It would be worse, however, to let him be late for work, to stand by while he rushed through breakfast and his shaving, to feel her morning split between his urgency and her guilt. So she went to his room—it had gone from their room to his room so easily that she wondered if she had always, subconsciously, felt this way—and stood by the bed. It was dark. She could barely make out the pale outline of his cheek above the blanket. What if this is it? she found herself wondering. What if he has died in his sleep? He would have died still married to her, his intentions obliterated. It would be an injustice. She sat at the edge of the mattress and rested her hand on the mound of his shoulder, feeling it rise and fall. She was relieved and sad—sad that they would have to go through with it after all, that she had made him into something that was, for the moment, incomplete. Something stirred beneath the blanket and his hand emerged, touching her lightly in a moment of forgetfulness. A sweet, hopeless error.

  “Are you coming?” Bianca calls up the stairs. She has put on her boots and her mittens and is standing in the front hall. Her blond hair, in the light from the doorway, floats around her head in an almost frightful, otherworldly crown.

  “Where are we going?” Rachel asks. She is at the top of the stairs. Her hands are full of laundry. She has been putting clothes into a dresser that had once stood in her bedroom as a child. The top coat of red paint is chipped, revealing a dark evergreen underneath. This discovery feels to Rachel like a betrayal of character, the dresser having been one of those solid, immovable staples of childhood.

  “The woods, remember?” Bianca puts up her hands, waving her mittens.

  Yes. Rachel remembers now. It was one of her many bribes. If you go to the bathroom—if you just sit on the toilet and try—we can go out to lunch, then to the pet store to look at the turtles. We can go for a walk in the woods. Bianca had not shown interest in any of these suggestions, so Rachel had not given them another thought.

  “You said there are horses in the woods.”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You said we could go.”

  “Yes.” Rachel drops the clothes back into the laundry basket and slides the basket into her room, closing the door so that her mother will not see the chore left undone. This will not stop her mother from opening the door and finding it anyway, but Rachel cannot help herself. She is the type of person who hides candy wrappers and receipts in the trash, photographs between the pages of books. There is a little green dress that she keeps at the back of her closet, for fear that her mother might discover it and know, as if by magic, where it has been.

  They have not been in the woods since early fall. Rachel has made many excuses to avoid it: It is too cold, or too late in the day. The snow is too deep, the wind too harsh. But the truth is that she is unnerved by the woods. She feels that time might pass without her knowledge while she is there, or that something will happen that will render her helpless, or hugely in
convenienced. She might lose her contact lenses, or get her socks wet. Some devastation might befall the world and she would not know.

  They layer wool socks. They tie scarves under their coats and fasten the cuffs of their mittens. They do not have any long underwear, so they wear pajamas underneath their pants for warmth. Rachel has written a note for her mother, which she leaves taped to the faucet, where her mother has always left notes so that they will not be missed. They walk outside, squinting at the snow. Bianca trudges ahead with a new determined energy, her body made pudgy and babyish again by her snowsuit. She is shouting happily, some private incoherence that she has not invited Rachel to share, and Rachel wishes that she would be quieter, so that she would not feel so exposed, so rapturously unguarded. “Hush,” she says under her breath. She focuses on the fine dusting of snow on the tree trunks, a thread of footprints made by some lightweight animal. She tries to relax.

  It has never made sense to her why her mother decided to escape civilization. They had lived in town when Rachel and her brothers were growing up, on a wide, shady street overrun by children on bicycles. Rachel had known all the neighbors’ yards intimately—the toolsheds, laundry lines, aboveground swimming pools, all the friendly dogs. The map of her neighborhood was the layout of her freedom. She never needed to go any farther. Later in life she would try to recreate the interiors of the neighbors’ houses in her own home, the cool safety of the kitchens, which were conservative and dark in daytime, the tall, blue-carpeted stairways. There were lilac bathrooms and deep, secret bedrooms. The best houses always had a touch of anonymity, she decided, something hotel-like that kept them from becoming too steeped in their own history. When she and her husband bought their first house, she had chosen colors that she had no attachment to—marigold and grays—she filled vases with sprigs of pussy willow, because it seemed sophisticated and did not remind her of any particular season or occasion. Rachel’s way of making something hers was to make it plain and bearable.

  This is another disadvantage of the woods. Nature has no style, no predictable emotional cues. It is all beautiful and endless. If it stirs anything at all, it stirs something primitive, something beneath nostalgia, or heartache, or love. A tree made into a chair, Rachel thinks, can bring such precise, harmonious longing, but a tree when it is just a tree demands something unbridled, rhapsodic. A crow takes off from a branch above their heads.

  “Aw,” Bianca says, “it’s cute.”

  There are deer tracks on the trail. The droppings make little melted nests in the snow, while scattered drops of urine are deep and surgical. Sometimes a clump of snow will float down from the trees and make its own soft mark. Rachel can no longer see the house behind them. She has stopped turning around to look. Her fingers are cold. Her toes have an icy edge.

  “Time to turn around now,” she calls to Bianca, who has run ahead. The girl stays where she is, facing away, planted stoutly in the snow.

  “Bianca.” Rachel cups her hands around her mouth, needlessly. It’s not as if Bianca cannot hear her. She does not respond, because she is looking at something off the path, deep into the trees: an orange corner of cloth flapping in the wind. It might be a scrap of old tarp, or a jacket left on a branch by one of the fabled riders on horseback. It could be nothing, but to Rachel it is a camp, a fully settled camp in the middle of the forest. She is sure that she can smell it, the foul black odor of a doused campfire, the grimy, lived-in crawl space of the tent. It is not a regular tent with a flexible domed roof, but a makeshift one, an oily canvas draped over a fallen tree and covered by pieces of tarpaulin stitched together with plastic zip ties. The entrance is like a burrow, hollowed out in the snow. It is a black, shabby hole. How is it that Rachel is aware of this when she cannot possibly see that far? She does not know. She takes Bianca’s arm and begins to lead her back along the path toward the house. Her gut is filled with white heat. She is radiant with white, mortal heat, and for once she cannot summon the language to describe what she is doing, or what she is running from. This danger has always existed within her. It has always been possible, just as the bottom of the ocean is possible. Just as the tall, stooped figure has always existed in just that way, with his shoulders peaked and his head lowered, as if gathering himself up to lift a heavy object. He is painted in her mind—a cave drawing, a crude flash of pigment in the back of her thoughts—his image presiding over everything, over every decision that she has ever made. But before he steps out across the path, before he bears himself up in that weary, inevitable way, Rachel thinks of Bianca. She is still looking down at Bianca from the top of the stairs, at the bright static crown of hair flying around her face, her wet petulant mouth, her mittens raised in a bold salute, and she thinks, Not now. Not yet.

  Acknowledgments

  Many of these stories have appeared in other publications: “Something for a Young Woman” in New England Review (2015), later reprinted in The O. Henry Prize Stories 2017 and Literary Hub; “Arla Had Horses” in West Branch (2017); “Single” in Post Road (2020); “Rodeo” in The Massachusetts Review (2016); “Trespassers” in New England Review (2016); “If Tooth Could Mean Heart” in Arts & Letters (2019); “Schematic” in Willow Springs (2016); “Gorgon” in JuxtaProse (2019); and “Prepare Her” in The Southern Review (2019), later excerpted in Literary Hub.

  To my agent, Reiko Davis, and my editor, Leigh Newman. You gave me what I needed most when I needed it. We also happened to put a book into the world. Thank you both. You have no idea.

  Thanks to my professors, especially Annabel Davis-Goff, April Bernard, Marguerite Feitlowitz, and Mark Wunderlich, who taught me how to read so I could teach myself to write.

  To my friends, Anne, Keenan, Rebekah, Douglas, Gabriele, and Andrew: Thank you for wading through the sludge of my first stories. They are better now because of you.

  Thanks to all the editors of the literary magazines who supported me, especially Carolyn Kuebler, from New England Review. It has been a thrill working with you and reading your beautiful publications.

  Megan Mayhew Bergman, Lori Ostlund, and Anne Raeff: You have been such an inspiration. Thank you for answering all my questions over the years.

  Thank you, Meg H., for listening and for being proud of me.

  To my parents: I love you.

  And thanks to my loving family, to Ava and Frances and Wilson. To Jackson and Lucas, for making my world better.

  To Jamie: everything.

  © Jamie Granger

  GENEVIEVE PLUNKETT is the recipient of an O. Henry Award. Her work has also appeared in The Best Small Fictions and journals such as New England Review, The Southern Review, Crazyhorse, Colorado Review, and Willow Springs. She lives in Vermont with her two children.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this collection of stories are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2021 by Genevieve Plunkett

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-64622-040-3

  Cover design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2020943101

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