In the beginning, I know I want him before he does. This isn’t
how things are done, but this is how I am going to do them. I am at a
neighbour’s party with my parents, and I am seventeen. Though my father didn’t
notice, I drank half a glass of white wine in the kitchen a few minutes ago,
with the neighbour’s teenage daughter. Everything is soft, like a fresh oil
painting.
The boy is not
facing me. I see the muscles of his neck and upper back, how he fairly strains
out of his button-down shirts. I run slick. It isn’t that I don’t have choices.
I am beautiful. I have a pretty mouth. I have a breast that heaves out of my
dresses in a way that seems innocent and perverse all at the same time. I am a
good girl, from a good family. But he is a little craggy, in that way that men
sometimes are, and I want.
I once heard a
story about a girl who requested something so vile from her paramour that he
told her family and they had her hauled her off to a sanitarium. I don’t know
what deviant pleasure she asked for, though I desperately wish I did. What
magical thing could you want so badly that they take you away from the known
world for wanting it?
The boy notices
me. He seems sweet, flustered. He says, hello. He asks my name.
I have always
wanted to choose my moment, and this is the moment I choose.
On the deck, I
kiss him. He kisses me back, gently at first, but then harder, and even pushes
open my mouth a little with his tongue. When he pulls away, he seems startled.
His eyes dart around for a moment, and then settles on my throat.
– What’s that? he
asks.
– Oh, this? I touch my ribbon at the back of my neck. It’s just my ribbon. I
run my fingers halfway around its green and glossy length, and bring them to
rest on the tight bow that sits in the front. He reaches out his hand, and I
seize it and push it away.
– You shouldn’t
touch it, I say. You can’t touch it.
Before we go
inside, he asks if he can see me again. I tell him I would like that. That
night, before I sleep, I imagine him again, his tongue pushing open my mouth,
and my fingers slide over myself and I imagine him there, all muscle and desire
to please, and I know that we are going to marry.
*
We do. I mean, we
will. But first, he takes me in his car, in the dark, to a lake with a marshy
edge. He kisses me and clasps his hand around my breast, my nipple knotting
beneath his fingers.
I am not truly
sure what he is going to do before he does it. He is hard and hot and dry and
smells like bread, and when he breaks me I scream and cling to him like I am
lost at sea. His body locks onto mine and he is pushing, pushing, and before
the end he pulls himself out and finishes with my blood slicking him down. I am
fascinated and aroused by the rhythm, the concrete sense of his need, the
clarity of his release. Afterwards, he slumps in the seat, and I can hear the
sounds of the pond: loons and crickets, and something that sounds like a banjo
being plucked. The wind picks up off the water and cools my body down.
I don’t know what
to do now. I can feel my heart beating between my legs. It hurts, but I imagine
it could feel good. I run my hand over myself and feel strains of pleasure from
somewhere far off. His breathing becomes quieter and I realize that he is
watching me. My skin is glowing beneath the moonlight coming through the
window. When I see him looking, I know I can seize that pleasure like my
fingertips tickling the end of a balloon’s string that has almost drifted out
of reach. I pull and moan and ride out the crest of sensation slowly and
evenly, biting my tongue all the while.
– I need more, he
says, but he does not rise to do anything.
He looks out the
window, and so do I. Anything could move out there in the darkness, I think. A
hook-handed man. A ghostly hitch-hiker repeating her journey. An old woman
summoned from the rest of her mirror by the chants of children. Everyone knows
these stories – that is, everyone tells them – but no one ever believes them.
His eyes drift
over the water, and then land on my neck.
– Tell me about
your ribbon, he says.
– There is nothing to tell. It’s my ribbon.
– May I touch it?
– No.
– I want to touch it, he says.
– No.
Something in the
lake muscles and writhes out of the water, and then lands with a splash. He
turns at the sound.
– A fish, he says.
– Sometime, I tell him, I will tell you the stories about this lake and her
creatures.
He smiles at me,
and rubs his jaw. A little of my blood smears across his skin, but he doesn’t
notice, and I don’t say anything.
– I would like
that very much, he says.
– Take me home, I tell him.
And like a
gentleman, he does.
That night, I wash
myself. The silky suds between my legs are the color and scent of rust, but I
am newer than I have ever been.
*
My parents are
very fond of him. He is a nice boy, they say. He will be a good man. They ask
him about his occupation, his hobbies, his family. He comes around twice a
week, sometimes thrice. My mother invites him in for supper, and while we eat I
dig my nails into the meat of his leg. After the ice cream puddles in the bowl,
I tell my parents that I am going to walk with him down the lane. We strike off
through the night, holding hands sweetly until we are out of sight of the
house. I pull him through the trees, and when we find a patch of clear ground I
shimmy off my pantyhose, and on my hands and knees offer myself up to him.
I have heard all
of the stories about girls like me, and I am unafraid to make more of them.
There are two rules: he cannot finish inside of me, and he cannot touch my
green ribbon. He spends into the dirt, pat-pat-patting like the
beginning of rain. I go to touch myself, but my fingers, which had been curling
in the dirt beneath me, are filthy. I pull up my underwear and stockings. He
makes a sound and points, and I realize that beneath the nylon, my knees are
also caked in dirt. I pull them down and brush, and then up again. I smooth my
skirt and repin my hair. A single lock has escaped his slicked-back curls, and
I tuck it up with the others. We walk down to the stream and I run my hands in
the current until they are clean again.
We stroll back to
the house, arms linked chastely. Inside, my mother has made coffee, and we all
sit around while my father asks him about business.
(If you read this
story out loud, the sounds of the clearing can be best reproduced by taking a
deep breath and holding it for a long moment. Then release the air all at once,
permitting your chest to collapse like a block tower knocked to the ground. Do
this again, and again, shortening the time between the held breath and the
release.)
*
I have always been a teller of stories. When I was a young girl, my mother carried me out of a grocery store as I screamed about toes in the produce aisle. Concerned women turned and watched as I kicked the air and pounded my mother’s slender back.
– Potatoes! she
corrected when we got back to the house. Not toes!
She told me to sit
in my chair – a child-sized thing, only built for me – until my father
returned. But no, I had seen the toes, pale and bloody stumps, mixed in among
those russet tubers. One of them, the one that I had poked with the tip of my
index finger, was cold as ice, and yielded beneath my touch the way a blister
did. When I repeated this detail to my mother, the liquid of her eyes shifted
quick as a startled cat.
– You stay right
there, she said.
My father returned
from work that evening and listened to my story, each detail.
– You’ve met Mr
Barns, have you not? he asked me, referring to the elderly man who ran this
particular market.
I had met him
once, and I said so. He had hair white as a sky before snow, and a wife who
drew the signs for the store windows.
– Why would Mr
Barns sell toes? my father asked. Where would he get them?
Being young, and
having no understanding of graveyards or mortuaries, I could not answer.
– And even if he
got them somewhere, my father continued, what would he have to gain by selling
them among the potatoes?
They had been
there. I had seen them with my own eyes. But beneath the sunbeams of my
father’s logic, I felt my doubt unfurling.
– Most
importantly, my father said, arriving triumphantly at his final piece of
evidence, why did no one notice the toes except for you?
As a grown woman,
I would have said to my father that there are true things in this world only
observed by a single set of eyes. As a girl, I consented to his account of the
story, and laughed when he scooped me from the chair to kiss me and send me on
my way.
*
It is not normal that a girl teaches her boy, but I am only showing him what I want, what plays on the insides of my eyelids as I fall asleep. He comes to know the flicker of my expression as a desire passes through me, and I hold nothing back from him. When he tells me that he wants my mouth, the length of my throat, I teach myself not to gag and take all of him into me, moaning around the saltiness. When he asks me my worst secret, I tell him about the teacher who hid me in the closet until the others were gone and made me hold him there, and how afterwards I went home and scrubbed my hands with a steel wool pad until they bled, even though after I share this I have nightmares for a month. And when he asks me to marry him, days shy of my eighteenth birthday, I say yes, yes, please, and then on that park bench I sit on his lap and fan my skirt around us so that a passerby would not realize what was happening beneath it.
– I feel like I
know so many parts of you, he says to me, trying not to pant. And now, I will
know all of them.
*
There is a story
they tell, about a girl dared by her peers to venture to a local graveyard
after dark. This was her folly: when they told her that standing on someone’s
grave at night would cause the inhabitant to reach up and pull her under, she
scoffed. Scoffing is the first mistake a woman can make.
I will show you,
she said.
Pride is the
second mistake.
They gave her a
knife to stick into the frosty earth, as a way of proving her presence and her
theory.
She went to that
graveyard. Some storytellers say that she picked the grave at random. I believe
she selected a very old one, her choice tinged by self-doubt and the latent
belief that if she were wrong, the intact muscle and flesh of a newly dead
corpse would be more dangerous than one centuries gone.
She knelt on the
grave and plunged the blade deep. As she stood to run she found she couldn’t
escape. Something was clutching at her clothes. She cried out and fell down.
When morning came,
her friends arrived at the cemetery. They found her dead on the grave, the
blade pinning the sturdy wool of her skirt to the ground. Dead of fright or
exposure, would it matter when the parents arrived? She was not wrong, but it
didn’t matter any more. Afterwards, everyone believed that she had wished to
die, even though she had died proving that she could live.
As it turns out,
being right was the third, and worst, mistake.
*
My parents are
pleased about the marriage. My mother says that even though girls nowadays are
starting to marry late, she married father when she was nineteen, and was glad
that she did.
When I select my
wedding gown, I am reminded of the story of the young woman who wished to go to
a dance with her lover, but could not afford a dress. She purchased a lovely
white frock from a secondhand shop, and then later fell ill and passed from
this earth. The coroner who performed her autopsy discovered she had died from
exposure to embalming fluid. It turned out that an unscrupulous undertaker’s
assistant had stolen the dress from the corpse of a bride.
The moral of that
story, I think, is that being poor will kill you. Or perhaps the moral is that
brides never fare well in stories, and one should avoid either being a bride,
or being in a story. After all, stories can sense happiness and snuff it out
like a candle.
We marry in April,
on an unseasonably cold afternoon. He sees me before the wedding, in my dress,
and insists on kissing me deeply and reaching inside of my bodice. He becomes
hard, and I tell him that I want him to use my body as he sees fit. I rescind
my first rule, given the occasion. He pushes me against the wall and puts his
hand against the tile near my throat, to steady himself. His thumb brushes my
ribbon. He does not move his hand, and as he works himself in me he says I love
you, I love you, I love you. I do not know if I am the first woman to walk up
the aisle of St George’s with semen leaking down her leg, but I like to imagine
that I am.
*
For our honeymoon, we go on a trip I have long desired: a tour of Europe. We are not rich but we make it work. We go from bustling, ancient metropolises to sleepy villages to alpine retreats and back again, sipping spirits and pulling roasted meat from bones with our teeth, eating spaetzle and olives and ravioli and a creamy grain I do not recognize but come to crave each morning. We cannot afford a sleeper car on the train, but my husband bribes an attendant to permit us one hour in an empty room, and in that way we couple over the Rhine.
(If you are
reading this story out loud, make the sound of the bed under the tension of
train travel and lovemaking by straining a metal folding chair against its
hinges. When you are exhausted with that, sing the half remembered lyrics of
old songs to the person closest to you, thinking of lullabies for children.)
*
My cycle stops soon after we return from our trip. I tell my husband one night, after we are spent and sprawled across our bed. He glows with delight.
– A child, he
says. He lies back with his hands beneath his head. A child. He is quiet for so
long that I think that he’s fallen asleep, but when I look over his eyes are
open and fixed on the ceiling. He rolls on his side and gazes at me.
– Will the child
have a ribbon?
I feel my jaw
tighten. My mind skips between many answers, and I settle on the one that
brings me the least amount of anger.
– There is no
saying, now, I tell him finally.
He startles me,
then, by running his hand around my throat. I put up my hands to stop him but
he uses his strength, grabbing my wrists with one hand as he touches the ribbon
with the other. He presses the silky length with his thumb. He touches the bow
delicately, as if he is massaging my sex.
– Please, I say.
Please don’t.
He does not seem
to hear. Please, I say again, my voice louder, but cracking in the middle.
He could have done
it then, untied the bow, if he’d chosen to. But he releases me and rolls back
on his back. My wrists ache, and I rub them.
– I need a glass
of water, I say. I get up and go to the bathroom. I run the tap and then
frantically check my ribbon, tears caught in my lashes. The bow is still tight.
*
There is a story I
love about a pioneer husband and wife killed by wolves. Neighbours found their
bodies torn open and strewn around their tiny cabin, but never located their
infant daughter, alive or dead. People claimed they saw the girl running with a
wolf pack, loping over the terrain as wild and feral as any of her companions.
News of her would
ripple through the local settlements. She menaced a hunter in a winter forest –
though perhaps he was less menaced than startled at a tiny naked girl baring
her teeth and howling. A young woman trying to take down a horse. People even
saw her ripping open a chicken in an explosion of feathers.
Many years later,
she was said to be seen resting in the rushes along a riverbank, suckling two
wolf cubs. I like to imagine that they came from her body, the lineage of
wolves tainted human just the once. They certainly bloodied her breasts, but
she did not mind because they were hers and only hers.
*
My stomach swells. Inside of me, our child is swimming fiercely, kicking and pushing and clawing. On a walk in the park, the same park where my husband had proposed to me the year before, I gasp and stagger to the side, clutching my belly and hissing through my teeth to Little One, as I call it, to stop. I go to my knees, breathing heavily and near weeping. A woman passing by helps me to sit up and gives me some water, telling me that the first pregnancy is always the worst.
My body changes in
ways I do not expect – my breasts are large, swollen and hot, my stomach lined
with pale marks, the inverse of a tiger’s. I feel monstrous, but my husband
seems renewed with desire, as if my novel shape has refreshed our list of
perversities. And my body responds: in the line at the supermarket, receiving
communion in church, I am marked by a new and ferocious want, leaving me
slippery and swollen at the slightest provocation. When he comes home each day,
my husband has a list in his mind of things he desires from me, and I am
willing to provide them and more.
– I am the
luckiest man alive, he says, running his hands across my stomach.
In the mornings,
he kisses me and fondles me and sometimes takes me before his coffee and toast.
He goes to work with a spring in his step. He comes home with one promotion,
and then another. More money for my family, he says. More money for our
happiness.
*
I am in labour for
twenty hours. I nearly wrench off my husband’s hand, howling obscenities that
do not seem to shock the nurse. I am certain I will crush my own teeth to
powder. The doctor peers down between my legs, his white eyebrows making unreadable
Morse code across his forehead.
– What’s
happening? I ask.
– I’m not satisfied this will be a natural birth, the doctor says. Surgery may
be necessary.
– No, please, I say. I don’t want that, please.
– If there’s no movement soon, we’re going to do it, the doctor says. It might
be best for everyone. He looks up and I am almost certain he winks at my
husband, but pain makes the mind see things differently than they are.
I make a deal with
Little One, in my mind. Little One, I think, this
is the last time that we are going to be just you and me. Please don’t make
them cut you out of me.
Little One is born
twenty minutes later. They do have to make a cut, but not across my stomach as
I had feared. The doctor cuts down, and I feel little, just tugging, though
perhaps it is what they have given me. When the baby is placed in my arms, I
examine the wrinkled body from head to toe, the colour of a sunset sky, and
streaked in red.
No ribbon. A boy.
I begin to weep, and curl the unmarked baby into my chest.
(If you are
reading this story out loud, give a paring knife to the listener and ask them
to cut the tender flap of skin between your index finger and thumb. Afterwards,
thank them.)
*
There is a story about a woman who goes into labour when the attending physician is tired. There is a story about a woman who herself was born too early. There is a story about a woman whose body clung to her child so hard they cut her to retrieve him. There is a story about a woman who heard a story about a woman who birthed wolf cubs in secret. Stories have this way of running together like raindrops in a pond. They are each borne from the clouds separately, but once they have come together, there is no way to tell them apart.
(If you are
reading this story out loud, move aside the curtain to illustrate this final
point to your listeners. It’ll be raining, I promise.)
*
They take the baby so that they may fix me where they cut. They give me something that makes me sleepy, delivered through a mask pressed gently to my mouth and nose. My husband jokes around with the doctor as he holds my hand.
– How much to get
that extra stitch? he asks. You offer that, right?
– Please, I say to him. But it comes out slurred and twisted and possibly no
more than a small moan. Neither man turns his head toward me.
The doctor
chuckles. You aren’t the first –
I slide down a
long tunnel, and then surface again, but covered in something heavy and dark,
like oil. I feel like I am going to vomit.
– the rumor is
something like –
– like a vir–
And then I am
awake, wide awake, and my husband is gone and the doctor is gone. And the baby,
where is –
The nurse sticks
her head in the door.
– Your husband
just went to get a coffee, she says, and the baby is asleep in the bassinet.
The doctor walks
in behind her, wiping his hands on a cloth.
– You’re all sewn
up, don’t you worry, he said. Nice and tight, everyone’s happy. The nurse will
speak with you about recovery. You’re going to need to rest for a while.
The baby wakes up.
The nurse scoops him from his swaddle and places him in my arms again. He is so
beautiful I have to remind myself to breathe.
*
My son is a good baby. He grows and grows. We never have another child, though not for lack of trying. I suspect that Little One did so much ruinous damage inside of me that my body couldn’t house another.
– You were a poor
tenant, Little One, I say to him, rubbing shampoo into his fine brown hair, and
I shall revoke your deposit.
He splashes around
in the sink, cackling with happiness.
My son touches my
ribbon, but never in a way that makes me afraid. He thinks of it as a part of
me, and he treats it no differently than he would an ear or finger.
Back from work, my
husband plays games in the yard with our son, games of chase and run. He is too
young to catch a ball, still, but my husband patiently rolls it to him in the
grass, and our son picks it up and drops it again, and my husband gestures to
me and cries Look, look! Did you see? He is going to throw it soon enough.
*
Of all the stories I know about mothers, this one is the most real. A young American girl is visiting Paris with her mother when the woman begins to feel ill. They decide to check into a hotel for a few days so the mother can rest, and the daughter calls for a doctor to assess her.
After a brief
examination, the doctor tells the daughter that all her mother needs is some
medicine. He takes the daughter to a taxi, gives the driver directions in
French, and explains to the girl that, at his home, his wife will give her the
appropriate remedy. They drive and drive for a very long time, and when the
girl arrives, she is frustrated by the unbearable slowness of this doctor’s wife,
who meticulously assembles the pills from powder. When she gets back into the
taxi, the driver meanders down the streets, sometimes doubling back on the same
avenue. The girl gets out of the taxi to return to the hotel on foot. When she
finally arrives, the hotel clerk tells her that he has never seen her before.
When she runs up to the room where her mother had been resting, she finds the
walls a different colour, the furnishings different than her memory, and her
mother nowhere in sight.
There are many endings
to the story. In one of them, the girl is gloriously persistent and certain,
renting a room nearby and staking out the hotel, eventually seducing a young
man who works in the laundry and discovering the truth: that her mother had
died of a contagious and fatal disease, departing this plane shortly after the
daughter was sent from the hotel by the doctor. To avoid a citywide panic, the
staff removed and buried her body, repainted and furnished the room, and bribed
all involved to deny that they had ever met the pair.
In another version
of this story, the girl wanders the streets of Paris for years, believing that
she is mad, that she invented her mother and her life with her mother in her
own diseased mind. The daughter stumbles from hotel to hotel, confused and
grieving, though for whom she cannot say.
I don’t need to
tell you the moral of this story. I think you already know what it is.
*
Our son enters
school when he is five, and I remember his teacher from that day in the park,
when she had crouched to help me. She remembers me as well. I tell her that we
have had no more children since our son, and now that he has started school, my
days will be altered toward sloth and boredom. She is kind. She tells me that
if I am looking for a way to occupy my time, there is a wonderful women’s art
class at a local college.
That night, after
my son is in bed, my husband reaches his hand across the couch and slides it up
my leg.
– Come to me, he
says, and I twinge with pleasure. I slide off the couch, smoothing my skirt
very prettily as I walk over to him on my knees. I kiss his leg, running my
hand up to his belt, tugging him from his bonds before swallowing him whole. He
runs his hands through my hair, stroking my head, groaning and pressing into
me. And I don’t realize that his hand is sliding down the back of my neck until
he is trying to loop his fingers through the ribbon. I gasp and pull away
quickly, falling back and frantically checking my bow. He is still sitting
there, slick with my spit.
– Come back here,
he says.
– No, I say.
He stands up and
tucks himself into his pants, zipping them up.
– A wife, he says,
should have no secrets from her husband.
– I don’t have any secrets, I tell him.
– The ribbon.
– The ribbon is not a secret, it’s just mine.
– Were you born with it? Why your throat? Why is it green?
I do not answer.
He is silent for a
long minute. Then,
– A wife should
have no secrets.
My nose grows hot.
I do not want to cry.
– I have given you
everything you have ever asked for, I say. Am I not allowed this one thing?
– I want to know.
– You think you want to know, I say, but you do not.
– Why do you want to hide it from me?
– I am not hiding it. It is not yours.
He gets down very
close to me, and I pull back from the smell of bourbon. I hear a creak, and we
both look up to see our son’s feet vanishing up the staircase.
When my husband
goes to sleep that night, he does so with a hot and burning anger that falls
away only when he starts dreaming. I sense its release, and only then can I
sleep, too.
The next day, our
son touches my throat and asks about my ribbon. He tries to pull at it. And
though it pains me, I have to make it forbidden to him. When he reaches for it,
I shake a can full of pennies. It crashes discordantly, and he withdraws and
weeps. Something is lost between us, and I never find it again.
(If you are
reading this story out loud, prepare a soda can full of pennies. When you
arrive at this moment, shake it loudly in the face of the person closest to
you. Observe their expression of startled fear, and then betrayal. Notice how
they never look at you in exactly the same way for the rest of your days.)
*
I enroll in the
art class for women. When my husband is at work and my son is in school, I
drive to the sprawling green campus and the squat grey building where the art
classes are held.
Presumably, the
male nudes are kept from our eyes in some deference to propriety, but the class
has its own energy – there is plenty to see on a strange woman’s naked form,
plenty to contemplate as you roll charcoal and mix paints. I see more than one
woman shifting forwards and back in her seat to redistribute blood flow.
One woman in
particular returns over and over. Her ribbon is red, and is knotted around her
slender ankle. Her skin is the colour of olives, and a trail of dark hair runs
from her belly button to her mons. I know that I should not want her, not
because she is a woman and not because she is a stranger, but because it is her
job to disrobe, and I feel shame taking advantage of such a state. But as my
pencil traces her contours so does my hand in the secret recesses of my mind. I
am not even certain how such a thing would happen, but the possibilities
incense me to near madness.
One afternoon
after class, I turn a hallway corner and she is there, the woman. Clothed,
wrapped in a raincoat. Her gaze transfixes me, and this close I can see a band
of gold around each of her pupils, as though her eyes are twin solar eclipses.
She greets me, and I her.
We sit down
together in a booth at a nearby diner, our knees occasionally bushing up
against each other beneath the Formica. She drinks a cup of black coffee. I ask
her if she has any children. She does, she says, a daughter, a beautiful little
girl of eleven.
– Eleven is a
terrifying age, she says. I remember nothing before I was eleven, but then
there it was, all colour and horror. What a number, she says, what a show. Then
her face slips somewhere else for a moment, as if she has dipped beneath the
surface of a lake.
We do not discuss
the specific fears of raising a girl-child. Truthfully, I am afraid to ask. I
also do not ask her if she’s married, and she does not volunteer the
information, though she does not wear a ring. We talk about my son, about the
art class. I desperately want to know what state of need has sent her to
disrobe before us, but perhaps I do not ask because the answer would be, like
adolescence, too frightening to forget.
I am captivated by
her, there is no other way to put it. There is something easy about her, but
not easy the way I was – the way I am. She’s like dough, how the give of it
beneath kneading hands disguises its sturdiness, its potential. When I look
away from her and then look back, she seems twice as large as before.
Perhaps we can
talk again sometime, I say to her. This has been a very pleasant afternoon.
She nods to me. I
pay for her coffee.
I do not want to
tell my husband about her, but he can sense some untapped desire. One night, he
asks what roils inside of me and I confess it to him. I even describe the
details of her ribbon, releasing an extra flood of shame.
He is so glad of
this development he begins to mutter a long and exhaustive fantasy as he
removes his pants and enters me. I feel as if I have betrayed her somehow, and
I never return to the class.
(If you are
reading this story out loud, force a listener to reveal a secret, then open the
nearest window to the street and scream it as loudly as you are able.)
*
One of my
favourite stories is about an old woman and her husband – a man mean as
Mondays, who scared her with the violence of his temper and the shifting nature
of his whims. She was only able to keep him satisfied with her unparalleled
cooking, to which he was a complete captive. One day, he bought her a fat liver
to cook for him, and she did, using herbs and broth. But the smell of her own
artistry overtook her, and a few nibbles became a few bites, and soon the liver
was gone. She had no money with which to purchase a second one, and she was terrified
of her husband’s reaction should he discover that his meal was gone. So she
crept to the church next door, where a woman had been recently laid to rest.
She approached the shrouded figure, then cut into it with a pair of kitchen
shears and stole the liver from her corpse.
That night, the
woman’s husband dabbed his lips with a napkin and declared the meal the finest
he’d ever eaten. When they went to sleep, the old woman heard the front door
open, and a thin wail wafted through the rooms. Who has my liver? Whooooo has my liver?
The old woman
could hear the voice coming closer and closer to the bedroom. There was a hush
as the door swung open. The dead woman posed her query again.
The old woman
flung the blanket off her husband.
– He has
it! She declared triumphantly.
Then she saw the
face of the dead woman, and recognized her own mouth and eyes. She looked down
at her abdomen, remembering, now, how she carved into her own belly. Next to
her, as the blood seeped into the very heart of the mattress, her husband
slumbered on.
That may not be
the version of the story you’re familiar with. But I assure you, it’s the one
you need to know.
*
My husband is
strangely excited for Halloween. Our son is old enough that he can walk and
carry a basket for treats. I take one of my husband’s old tweed coats and
fashion one for our son, so that he might be a tiny professor, or some other
stuffy academic. My husband even gives him a pipe on which to gnaw. Our son
clicks it between his teeth in a way I find unsettlingly adult.
– Mama, my son
says, what are you?
I am not in
costume, so I tell him I am his mother.
The pipe falls
from his little mouth onto the floor, and he screams. My husband swoops in and
picks him up, talking to him in a low voice, repeating his name between his
sobs.
It is only as his
breathing returns to normal that I am able to identify my mistake. He is not
old enough to know the story of the naughty girls who wanted the toy drum, and
were wicked toward their mother until she went away and was replaced with a new
mother – one with glass eyes and thumping wooden tail. But I have inadvertently
told him another one – the story of the little boy who only discovered on
Halloween that his mother was not his mother, except on the day when everyone
wore a mask. Regret sluices hot up my throat. I try to hold him and kiss him,
but he only wishes to go out onto the street, where the sun has dipped below
the horizon and a hazy chill is bruising the shadows.
He comes home
laughing, gnawing on a piece of candy that has turned his mouth the color of a
plum. I am angry at my husband. I wish he had waited to come home before
permitting the consumption of the cache. Has he never heard the stories? The
pins pressed into the chocolates, the razor blades sunk in the apples? I
examine my son’s mouth, but there is no sharp metal plunged into his palate. He
laughs and spins around the house, dizzy and electrified from the treats and
excitement. He wraps his arms around my legs, the earlier incident forgotten.
The forgiveness tastes sweeter than any candy that can be given at any door.
When he climbs into my lap, I sing to him until he falls asleep.
*
Our son is eight, ten. First, I tell him fairy tales – the very oldest ones, with the pain and death and forced marriage pared away like dead foliage. Mermaids grow feet and it feels like laughter. Naughty pigs trot away from grand feasts, reformed and uneaten. Evil witches leave the castle and move into small cottages and live out their days painting portraits of woodland creatures.
As he grows,
though, he asks questions. Why would they not eat the pig, hungry as they were
and wicked as he had been? Why was the witch permitted to go free after her
terrible deeds? And the sensation of fins splitting to feet being anything less
than agonizing he rejects outright after cutting his hand with a pair of
scissors.
– It would huight,
he says, for he is struggling with his r’s.
I agree with him.
It would. So then I tell him stories closer to true: children who go missing
along a particular stretch of railroad track, lured by the sound of a phantom
train to parts unknown; a black dog that appears at a person’s doorstep three
days before their passing; a trio of frogs that corner you in the marshlands
and tell your fortune for a price.
The school puts on
a performance of Little Buckle Boy, and he is
the lead, the buckle boy, and I join a committee of mothers making costumes for
the children. I am lead costume maker in a room full of women, all of us sewing
together little silk petals for the flower children and making tiny white
pantaloons for the pirates. One of the mothers has a pale yellow ribbon on her
finger, and it constantly tangles in her thread. She swears and cries. One day
I have to use the sewing shears to pick at the offending threads. I try to be
delicate. She shakes her head as I free her from the peony.
– It’s such a
bother, isn’t it? she says.
I nod. Outside the
window, the children play – knocking each other off the playground equipment,
popping the heads off dandelions. The play goes beautifully. Opening night, our
son blazes through his monologue. Perfect pitch and cadence. No one has ever
done better.
Our son is twelve.
He asks me about the ribbon, point-blank. I tell him that we are all different,
and sometimes you should not ask questions. I assure him that he’ll understand
when he is grown. I distract him with stories that have no ribbons: angels who
desire to be human and ghosts who don’t realize they’re dead and children who
turn to ash. He stops smelling like a child – milky sweetness replaced with
something sharp and burning, like a hair sizzling on the stove.
Our son is
thirteen, fourteen. He waits for the neighbour boy on his way to school, who
walks more slowly than the others. He exhibits the subtlest compassion, my son.
No instinct for cruelty, like some.
– The world has
enough bullies, I’ve told him over and over.
This is the year
he stops asking for my stories.
Our son is
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen. He begins to court a beautiful girl from his high
school, who has a bright smile and a warm presence. I am happy to meet her, but
never insist that we should wait up for their return, remembering my own youth.
When he tells us
that he has been accepted at a university to study engineering, I am overjoyed.
We march through the house, singing songs and laughing. When my husband comes
home, he joins in the jubilee, and we drive to a local seafood restaurant. Over
halibut, his father tells him, we are so proud of you. Our son laughs and says
that he also wishes to marry his girl. We clasp hands and are even happier.
Such a good boy. Such a wonderful life to look forward to.
Even the luckiest
woman alive has not seen joy like this.
*
There’s a classic,
a real classic, that I haven’t told you yet.
A girlfriend and a
boyfriend went parking. Some people say that means kissing in a car, but I know
the story. I was there. They were parked on the edge of a lake. They were
turning around in the back seat as if the world was moments from ending. Maybe
it was. She offered herself and he took it, and after it was over, they turned
on the radio.
The voice on the
radio announced that a mad, hook-handed murderer had escaped from a local
insane asylum. The boyfriend chuckled as he flipped to a music station. As the
song ended, the girlfriend heard a thin scratching sound, like a paperclip over
glass. She looked at her boyfriend and then pulled her cardigan over her bare
shoulders, wrapping one arm around her breasts.
– We should go,
she said.
– No, baby, the boyfriend said. Let’s go again.
– What if the killer comes here? The girl asked. The insane asylum is very
close.
– We’ll be fine, baby, the boyfriend said. Don’t you trust me?
The girlfriend
nodded reluctantly.
– Well then, he
said, his voice trailing off in that way she would come to know so well. He
took her hand off her chest and placed it onto himself. She finally looked away
from the lakeside.
Outside, the
moonlight glinted off the shiny steel hook. The killer waved at her, grinning.
I’m sorry. I’ve
forgotten the rest of the story.
*
The house is so
silent without our son. I walk through it, touching all the surfaces. I am
happy but something inside of me is shifting into a strange new place.
That night, my
husband asks if I wish to christen the newly empty rooms. We have not coupled
so fiercely since before our son was born. Bent over the kitchen table,
something old is lit within me, and I remember the way we had desired before,
how we had left love streaked on all of the surfaces. I could have met anyone
at that party when I was seventeen – prudish boys or violent boys. Religious
boys who would have made me move to some distant country to convert its
denizens. I could have experienced untold numbers of sorrows or
dissatisfactions. But as I straddle him on the floor, riding him and crying
out, I know that I made the right choice.
We fall asleep
exhausted, sprawled naked in our bed. When I wake up, my husband is kissing the
back of my neck, probing the ribbon with his tongue. My body rebels wildly,
still throbbing with the memories of pleasure but bucking hard against
betrayal. I say his name, and he does not respond. I say it again, and he holds
me against him and continues. I wedge my elbows in his side, and when he
loosens from me in surprise, I sit up and face him. He looks confused and hurt,
like my son the day I shook the can of pennies.
Resolve runs out
of me. I touch the ribbon. I look at the face of my husband, the beginning and
end of his desires all etched there. He is not a bad man, and that, I realize
suddenly, is the root of my hurt. He is not a bad man at all. And yet –
– Do you want to
untie the ribbon? I ask him. After these many years, is that what you want of
me?
His face flashes
gaily, and then greedily, and he runs his hand up my bare breast and to my bow.
– Yes, he says.
Yes.
– Then, I say, do
what you want.
With trembling
fingers, he takes one of the ends. The bow undoes, slowly, the long-bound ends
crimped with habit. My husband groans, but I do not think he realizes it. He
loops his finger through the final twist and pulls. The ribbon falls away. It
floats down and curls at my feet, or so I imagine, because I cannot look down
to follow its descent.
My husband frowns,
and then his face begins to open with some other expression – sorrow, or maybe
pre-emptive loss. My hand flies up in front of me – an involuntary motion, for
balance or some other futility – and beyond it his image is gone.
– I love you, I
assure him, more than you can possibly know.
– No, he says, but I don’t know to what he’s responding.
If you are reading
this story out loud, you may be wondering if that place my ribbon protected was
wet with blood and openings, or smooth and neutered like the nexus between the
legs of a doll. I’m afraid I can’t tell you, because I don’t know. For these
questions and others, and their lack of resolution, I am sorry.
My weight shifts,
and with it, gravity seizes me. My husband’s face falls away, and then I see
the ceiling, and the wall behind me. As my lopped head tips backwards off my
neck and rolls off the bed, I feel as lonely as I have ever been.