by Kate Walbert
A severed head of an elk, the bar’s inspiration, its marble eyes dulled, its fur patchy and antlers obscene, stares down from above at the end of the narrow hallway to the bathrooms. Antlers is decidedly male and unaccustomed to such a throng of females or the waft of estrogen rising like mist—its makeshift stage not a stage, exactly, more a dais of the kind found for elevating politicians above a crowd.
Look now at Beth as she takes another bow! All the colleagues reluctant to let her go as she waves goodbye to the left, goodbye to the right, spoons still in hand though blouse fortunately buttoned up. Groups of women, some strangers, offer high fives as she threads through the tables. Constance watches then turns to Beth’s quinoa, a hearty, fiberesque gray. She pictures opening her mouth and blowing, setting the entire place to flame or at least reheating the quinoa—she could do it, too, given what she’s put down in the course of the last hour, given her general mood. A little fire would put a swift end to Storytelling Wednesdays.
We’re all about inhibition, Mary Ann, the MC, recently tenured and flush from the publication of a bestselling dystopian novel, announced at the start of the evening, losing it, or possibly creativity, gaining it, reclaiming it, owning it, she had added. Her own story, kicking things off, had to do with her firstborn, a cesarean section, the doctor’s hands deep in her gut, a recurring feeling even after he’d sewn her up, even after her newborn was a toddler, those hands still there, rooting around.
“Amazing!” Constance says to Beth, who slides, with a ginger handoff from Mary Ann, back into her seat.
“You liked?” Beth says.
“Loved. Completely loved. Insane. How did you even do that?”
“Practice,” Beth says. “Muscle memory. Tim thinks it’s a hoot.”
Beth held two familiar-looking spoons in her hand.
“Your quinoa’s cold,” Constance says.
“I know,” Beth says, scooping, chewing. “It’s supposed to be. Well not cold, exactly, but not hot. Hot is too much. Lukewarm is best.”
“I completely agree,” Constance says.
* * *
Another mother story, not that anyone’s asking: a day long ago, summer of ’74 or thereabouts, Constance scrounging for spare change and possibly a cigarette in one of the cloisonné boxes in the living room. Constance is a teenager in tennis whites, a big match that afternoon. The living room is a room she rarely enters, sanctioned as it is for weekend gatherings of adults. They come in pairs like monogamous swans, arriving for her parents’ famous cocktail parties, chitchatting among the heavy walnut furniture, the coffee table with its twisted, vined legs, the drawers of the tiger oak sideboard stuffed with silver she and her younger sister, Sally, polish with rags from the pantry the day before Thanksgiving, or Christmas Eve. On the walls are the artifacts from her parents’ collections, her mother’s framed Hans Christian Andersen illustrations, torn from an ancient valuable edition, a flea market steal: the Little Match Girl, shivering, and a near-dead Hansel and Gretel. And splayed on the living room couch, one arm across her eyes as if against a glare, her mother out cold.
Know Constance has come into fourteen like Juliet Capulet, lovesick, desperate, a pawn in the vagaries of jousting boys. She keeps a diary under lock and key and rarely tells anyone her true thoughts—how she alone can see the way the world tilts and slips off its axis, the way no one knows a thing but her. She understands in her bones that she will reinvent the universe in the image of something better, something as of yet unimaginable but just beyond the horizon of this failing world just as soon as she gets out. Now she loops her mother’s arm over her shoulder and drags her up the stairs.
Soon the bridge group will arrive, clustering in the foyer—bags and shoes, curious expressions. They are here for their weekly game, they tell Constance, who has answered the door. They were on for 11:00, they say, and isn’t that her mother’s car still in the drive?
Who knew? Who didn’t? Constance’s mother had once not been far from the rest of them, if measured by this and that, yardsticks or swizzle, and now she’d soared straight into space: shot to the moon, tucked in bed where Constance has lugged her.
“Mother’s upstairs,” she says. “She’s under the weather.”
“It’s going around,” says Margaret Jones.
“I believe she knew we were coming,” Florence Spears says.
“I told her I’d play her hand,” Constance says, improvising. “I’m not bad. I’ve been teaching myself.”
“She’s been teaching herself,” says Taffy Bott, as if Constance speaks French, and she must translate for the rest of them.
Constance smiles and holds up the cards, tall in her tennis whites, her legs and arms tanned. She explains they could play a rubber, maybe two, but she has a match in an hour and will have to cut it short.
She has her mother’s eyes—they’d never noticed!—and a way of looking as if she might rip their throats. No doubt she has a killer serve.
Sally appears to offer lemonade, ten cents a glass.
“All right,” they say. “If you’re sure,” they say. Everything almost fine and what isn’t could be ignored: Constance subbing for her mother! Little Sally selling the lemonade! Eleanor Spears tells a funny story. Taffy Bott shows them her broken toe, the bruise reaching all the way to her calf. Margaret Jones has a summer cold but who doesn’t?
Constance sets up the card table in the middle of the living room, the folding one from the garage still sticky with the spills from Sally’s stand the weekend before. She sends Sally for a tablecloth from the kitchen, cocktail napkins, a can of peanuts from the pantry.
The women eat the nuts in fistfuls, down their drinks quick. The cocktail napkins read, OF ALL THE THINGS I’VE LOVED AND LOST I MISS MY MIND THE MOST.
* * *
Beth walks Constance to her apartment, one of the nondescript new condos on Sheridan near the university. They burrow against the wind in their puffy, ugly coats, too cold to speak until the shelter of the courtyard.
“Would you like a nightcap?” Constance asks her.
“I’ve got midterms,” Beth says.
“Right,” Constance says. “Forgot,” she says. Sabbatical haze, she says, her explanation, these days, for everything.
“Well, good night,” Constance says, pulling open the heavy outer door to the vestibule. “You were great,” she calls to Beth as the door slowly closes behind her. Within the vestibule there are the usual take-out menus and free newspapers scattered on the tiled floor, and someone has once again plastered the buzzer panel with stickers advertising a locksmith. CALL PHIL, the sticker reads, again and again. There must be a hundred of them, or hundreds. Phil everywhere. Constance reaches into her pocket for her key: a single key, unadorned. She likes it that way, though her ex-husband, Luke, is convinced she’s a fool. You’re a fool! Luke tells her every time she pulls her single, silver key out of her pocket. A fool!
But there’s no key, only a piece of paper. A list. Folded over and over again as if top secret, the ink faded though clearly her mother’s hand: To Do, it reads: bleach; yarn; Q-tips?; blueberries?; call Constance; organize girls; talk to William.
* * *
“What did I miss?” her mother wanted to know. She lay in bed eating the buttered toast Constance delivered on a tray. There were smells here beyond the homey toast, her mother’s smells, and the cold smell of the big black telephone next to the bed where her mother and father slept, lying straight and still, side by side. Her mother’s clothes were lined in the closet like so many other mothers and in the third drawer, behind the box with her mother’s rings and pearls, the bottle of gin Constance had found foraging for cigarettes weeks earlier. She had swigged some for good measure, then poured the rest of it down the drain in her mother’s master bathroom, the counter cluttered with her mother’s makeup and perfumes, the mirror smudged in places, as if her mother had pressed her face to the glass.
“Nothing,” Constance says. She has played her match, returning st
raight home along the road to the club. Somewhere between here and there she saw a flattened armadillo, its splintered shell streaked with brown blood. Someone must have dragged it to the dirt. She stinks of sweat dried to salt: if you licked her you could survive for a while but not forever. She has won her match in straight sets. In fact, the few onlookers, other girls’ mothers, said they had never seen Constance serve so well: Constance playing as if her life depended on it. Her opponent, a taller, older girl named Macy Levitt, her glasses hooked with a needlepoint band, thought at first that Constance wasn’t Constance at all, that somehow, in the time between now and before, Constance was replaced with a different Constance, not the Constance Macy Levitt knew from the past but a Constance from some distant, Amazonian tribe.
* * *
“So, you’re the famous Phil,” Constance says. He’s arrived as promised, pulling up in his big tow truck as if this were the country, leaving it to idle, its headlights illuminating the two of them, casting their shadows backward out the glass door into the frozen courtyard, the withered rhododendron.
“Yes, ma’am,” Phil says, pulling out a ring of keys, a bowling ball of keys.
“Good to meet you,” she says.
“Same,” he says.
Phil is stunningly handsome. She wouldn’t have predicted it at all, but the world turns in mysterious ways, as her mother would have said. Her mother would also have said, “There but for the grace of God go I”; “Hindsight is twenty-twenty”; and “Better than canned beer.”
“Ma’am?” he says. She’s been drifting, apparently. Sabbatical haze.
“Yes?”
“Done,” he says, and she resists, as she’s inclined to do, correcting his grammar. A turkey is done, she might say to him. You are finished.
“Really? Wow. I mean, I wasn’t exactly watching, but that was fast.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I’m glad you left your stickers all over the place.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
The ma’am might have been irritating but the rest of him she liked. She remembers the story of her friend from college, who had invited the UPS guy in—this was a novelty back then, a man in a brown and yellow uniform on your doorstep, ringing your doorbell, goodies in large cardboard boxes in tow.
“How about a drink?” she asks Phil. “Would you like a drink? A nightcap? I was just going up and, boy, you really saved my life. No one answered the buzzer. The whole world is out. I mean, I have a cat and my son, well, he’s with his father, but my son would have totally freaked if I couldn’t get in to feed the cat. It’s his cat.”
“Sure.”
“What?”
“Sure. I’ll have a drink,” Phil says. “I’ve got coverage.”
“Coverage. Great!”
Phil holds the vestibule door open for her and then follows Constance into the elevator to her floor, brightly lit, a line of doors on either side, strangers within. It’s Chicago real estate of a certain kind—thin walls, thin-glassed windows that leak heat in winter, the radiators blasting like nobody’s business. Here the Little Match Girl looks entirely out of place—Constance has kept the print through college and graduate school, its twin, Hansel and Gretel, lost to a moldy basement in Oakland, unrecoverable.
* * *
It is very late when Constance finds herself naked from the waist up, attempting to balance spoons on her nipples—something we used to do at football parties, she lies—for the entertainment of the locksmith Phil, a man to whom she has already recited her mother’s to-do list, hoping for a better reaction than the silence of Storytelling Wednesday. Phil had come through; he had applauded heartily.
“You get it?” she said. “You get it!”
They have finished the bottle she found in the refrigerator, their sex vigorous, inspired, or what she remembers of it, the couch wide enough for both of them though she preferred the floor.
Now he watches the spoons, which she has, after several attempts—muscle memory, she said—finally mastered. They balance from her nipples like silver icicles.
“Neat trick,” Phil says, buttoning up. “I’ll teach my wife.”
* * *
Constance could eat Macy Levitt for lunch; she could pummel her with aces, lunge the net, drive the ball down her throat. She pictures it clearly. Think like a winner, her coach is saying, her coach a woman whose name has been engraved countless times in the trophies in glass outside the ladies’ lounge: BABY ROLLINS, 1ST PLACE, LADIES SINGLES; BABY ROLLINS, 1ST PLACE, CLUB CHAMPIONSHIP; BABY ROLLINS & BEV WHITE, FIRST PLACE, et cetera, et cetera.
She beats Macy Levitt in straight sets; she makes Macy Levitt cry; she makes Macy Levitt throw off her glasses and stomp them with her Tretorns, losing the needlepoint band in the crabgrass next to the court, its fine handiwork sucked up and spit out shredded by the power mower a few days later, its driver entirely oblivious; she makes Macy Levitt drop out of the junior varsity team and years later, when she learns that Macy Levitt has been hospitalized for anorexia, she wonders if she also made Macy Levitt do that.
* * *
Constance reheats the coffee. She shuffles the stack of business cards Phil has left behind—what’s with this guy?
Outside a bright moon and far below the scurry of late-night students, home from the library, the clubs, other dorm rooms elsewhere: the university taking over this neighborhood, once a place of revolutionaries and poets, men and women who labored in the slaughterhouses, whose fathers and mothers escaped lives so unspeakable they never spoke of them, their languages, their etymologies, submerged in the rising tide of English, their customs obliterated, or at least that’s what the public said when the public weighed in, person after person waiting for her chance at the microphone.
But no one listened.
And here’s another mother story, the part Constance doesn’t like to tell: the reason for all this mother business. Why her mother is here again, as she will always be here again; Vassar girl, Katie Gibbs girl, a ghost perched on the narrow, faux-brass railing of the balcony only good for the cat litter and the trash she is too lazy to take down, a ghost stepping out of Hansel and Gretel, shaking the dead leaves from her sweater, still confused as to what path she was meant to follow: her smile, her crooked front tooth; or maybe standing on the corner with her last match.
“What’d I miss? her mother says, first complimenting Constance on her presentation—Constance has folded a linen napkin, one of her mother’s favorite floral ones, next to the plate and sliced some bananas into a bowl. She has poured a glass of milk and picked a daylily from the long drive, put the flower in a silver bud vase. She wants everything nice.
But as she watches her mother’s hand shake holding the toast, a feeling of pity or, rather, revulsion reaches up to tighten its hold, to grip her throat. It’s a feeling Constance knows from catching her mother alone in padded bra and girdle, her mother’s blue-white skin, the frayed straps of her complicated undergarments she has seen drying in the master bathroom, slung over the silver shower rod. So Constance does not say nothing as she sometimes remembers, cruel, cruel child that she was, that she continued to be; instead she waits, fingering the grass stain on her tennis skirt, a smudge of dirt on her wrist, her animal smell rank, furious.
“Everything,” is what she says, looking back at her mother, whose green eyes, rimmed in red, stare out so hungry.
“You missed it all,” she says.
PARIS, 1994
Into the City of Light she descends in darkness. Or this is how Rebecca hears it; I descend on the City of Light in darkness—a gray storm-ridden sky, clouds bunched in fat grape colors, a strange mauve. The city of stone streaked with pigeon shit, ripped rock-and-roll posters. A poet’s place.
Rebecca cannot see but imagines the inside of all the passing storefronts: cafés, restaurants, boutiques where she has heard they arrange clothing by color.
Crowds on narrow sidewalks herd beneath umbrellas, everyone wearing a smart raincoat. Parisians. S
he is sure they are being taken for a ride.
“Did you ask him?” she asks Tom. “Does he know where to go?”
“He knows,” Tom says, his eyes closed, head against the back of the cab seat. She turns away to the window. Paris, she thinks. The name enough. Round as a bun, the P. Marie Antoinette. The South; something about cake. Tanks barreling through the Arc de Triomphe. Springtime. Poplar blossoms. Or maybe, winter. She can’t remember. She studied French once, in a classroom in a school whose name she has since forgotten, with a teacher who wore red wool dresses and clunky shoes. Mademoiselle, they called her. The boys with CB radios; the girls in cheerleading uniforms: Mademoiselle, they said, blowing smoke rings. Merde, they said in the hallways, it’s time for French.
“I’m hungry,” Rebecca says out the window, though she hears Tom’s light snoring. The taxi moves slowly over a bridge and in the instant before it bumps onto the narrow street of their hotel, she glimpses a long gray river and silver domes of unimaginable heights.
* * *
Tom wakes from his nap and stretches his arms, touching walls on either side wallpapered a faded whorehouse red. Cracks in the plaster thin as hairs. The pillows smell of spiderwebs and sweet perfume. Rebecca opens the shutters then the glass doors of the window. Dust on her fingers, a tangerine glint to the rain. Orange light reflected in tiny tears; what had she heard? That insects fly through a downpour without getting wet. No insects here. No screens. Only flowerpots and wrought iron and four-story buildings painted the pastels of teacups and women with black hair and a constant din: a crowd far away pushing at the seams of quiet. Someone nearby coughs. Spits. Rebecca leans farther out the window. “You can see the gate to the Place des Vosges,” she says, bending at the waist. She wears panties and a bra, her white skin mottled pink from cold, from rain. She sits back down on the corner of the tiny bed and puts on her stockings.
