Welcome
John William Tuohy lives in Washington DC
“Bettering Myself” a short story by Ottessa Moshfegh
My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with talcum powder. Another nun plugged the sink and filled it with water. I never understood the nuns. One was old and the other was young. The young one talked to me sometimes, asked me what I would do for the long weekend, if I’d see my folks over Christmas, and so forth. The old one looked the other way and twisted her robes in her fists when she saw me coming.
My classroom was
the school’s old library. It was a messy old library room, with books and
magazines splayed out all over the place and a whistling radiator and big
fogged-up windows overlooking Sixth Street. I put two student desks together to
make up my desk at the front of the room, next to the chalkboard. I kept a
down-filled sleeping bag in a cardboard box in the back of the room and covered
the sleeping bag with old newspapers. Between classes I took the sleeping bag
out, locked the door, and napped until the bell rang. I was usually still drunk
from the night before. Sometimes I had a drink at lunch at the Indian
restaurant around the corner, just to keep me going — sharp wheat ale in a squat, brown bottle. McSorley’s was there but
I didn’t like all that
nostalgia. That bar made me roll my eyes. I rarely made my way down to the
school cafeteria, but when I did, the principal, Mr. Kishka, would stop me and
smile broadly and say, “Here she comes, the vegetarian.” I don’t know why he
thought I was a vegetarian. What I took from the cafeteria were prepackaged
digits of cheese, chicken nuggets, and greasy dinner rolls.
I had one
student, Angelika, who came and ate her lunch with me in my classroom.
“Miss Mooney,”
she called me. “I’m having a problem with my mother.”
She was one of
two girlfriends I had. We talked and talked. I told her that you couldn’t get
fat from being ejaculated into.
“Wrong, Miss
Mooney. The stuff makes you thick in the middle. That’s why girls get so thick
in the middle. They’re sluts.”
She had a
boyfriend she visited in prison every weekend. Each Monday was a new story
about his lawyers, how much she loved him, and so forth. She always had the
same face on. It was like she already knew all the answers to her questions.
I had another
student who drove me crazy. Popliasti. He was a wiry, blond, acned sophomore
with a heavy accent. “Miss Mooney,” he’d say, standing up at his desk. “Let me
help you with the problem.” He’d take the chalk out of my hand and draw a
picture of a cock-and-balls on the board. This cock-and-balls became a kind of
insignia for the class. It appeared on all their homework, on exams, etched
into every desk. I didn’t mind it. It made me laugh. But Popliasti and his
incessant interruptions, a few times I lost my cool.
“I cannot teach
you if you act like animals!” I screamed.
We cannot learn
if you are crazy like this, screaming, with your hair messy,” said Popliasti,
running around the room, flipping books off window ledges. I could have done
without him.
But my seniors were
all very respectful. I was in charge of preparing them for the SAT. They came
to me with legitimate questions about math and vocabulary, which I had a hard
time answering. A few times in calculus, I admitted defeat and spent the hour
jabbering on about my life.
“Most people
have had anal sex,” I told them. “Don’t look so surprised.”
And, “My
boyfriend and I don’t use condoms. That’s what happens when you trust
somebody.”
Something about
that old library room made Principal Kishka keep his distance. I think he knew
if he ever set foot in there, he’d be in charge of cleaning it up and getting
rid of me. Most of the books were useless mismatched sets of outdated
encyclopedias, Ukrainian bibles, Nancy Drew. I even found some girlie
magazines, under an old map of Soviet Russia folded up in a drawer marked
Sister Koszinska. One good thing I found was an old encyclopedia of worms. It
was a coverless, fist-thick volume of brittle paper chipped at the corners. I
tried to read it between classes when I couldn’t sleep. I tucked it into the
sleeping bag with me, plied open the binding, let my eyes roll over the small,
musty print. Each entry was more unbelievable than the last. There were
roundworms and horseshoe worms and worms with two heads and worms with teeth like
diamonds and worms as large as house cats, worms that sang like crickets or
could disguise themselves as small stones or lilies or could stretch their jaws
to accommodate a human baby. What is this trash they’re feeding children these
days, I thought. I slept and got up and taught algebra and went back into the
sleeping bag. I zipped it up over my head. I burrowed deep down and pinched my
eyes closed. My head throbbed and my mouth felt like wet paper towels. When the
bell rang, I got out and there was Angelika with her brown-bag lunch saying,
“Miss Mooney, there’s something in my eye and that’s why I’m crying.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Close the door.” The floor was black-and-piss-colored checkerboard linoleum.
The walls were shiny, cracking, piss-colored walls.
I had a
boyfriend who was still in college. He wore the same clothes every single day:
a blue pair of Dickies and a paper-thin button down. The shirt was western
style with opalescent snaps. You could see his chest hair and nipples through
it. I didn’t say anything. He had a nice face, but fat ankles and a soft,
wrinkly neck. “Lots of girls at school want to date me,” he said often. He was
studying to be a photographer, which I didn’t take seriously at all. I figured
he would work in an office after he graduated, would be grateful to have a real
job like that, would feel happy and boastful to be employed, a bank account in
his name, a suit in his closet, et cetera, et cetera. He was sweet. One time
his mother came to visit from South Carolina. He introduced me as his “friend
who lives downtown.” The mother was horrible. A tall blonde with fake boobs.
“What do you use
on your face at night?” is what she asked me when the boyfriend went to the
toilet.
I was thirty. I had an ex-husband. I got alimony and had decent health insurance through the Archdiocese of New York. My parents, upstate, sent me care packages full of postage stamps and decaffeinated teas. I called my ex-husband when I was drunk and complained about my job, my apartment, the boyfriend, my students, anything that came to mind. He was remarried already, in Chicago. He did something with law. I never understood his job, and he never explained anything to me.
The boyfriend
came and went on weekends. Together we drank wine and whiskey, romantic things
I liked. He could handle it. He looked the other way, I guess. But he was one
of those idiots about cigarettes.
“How can you
smoke like that?” he’d say. “Your mouth tastes like Canadian bacon.”
“Ha ha,” I said
from my side of the bed. I went under the sheets. Half my clothes, books,
unopened mail, cups, ashtrays, half my life was stuffed between the mattress
and the wall.
“Tell me all
about your week,” I said to the boyfriend. “Well Monday I woke up at
eleven-thirty a.m.,” he’d start. He could go on all day. He was from
Chattanooga. He had a nice, soft voice. It had a nice sound to it, like an old
radio. I got up and filled a mug with wine and sat on the bed.
“The line at the
grocery store was average,” he was saying.
Later: “But I
don’t like Lacan. When people are so incoherent, it means they’re arrogant.”
“Yeah.”
By the time he
was done talking we could go out for dinner. We could get drinks. All I had to
do was walk around and sit down and tell him what to order. He took care of me
that way. He rarely poked his head into my private life. When he did, I turned
into an emotional woman.
“Why don’t you
quit your job?” he asked. “You can afford it.”
“Because I love
those kids,” I answered. My eyes welled up with tears. “They’re all such
beautiful people. I just love them.” I was drunk.
I bought all my
beer from the bodega on the corner of East Tenth and First Avenue. The
Egyptians who worked there were all very handsome and complimentary. They gave
me free candy — individually wrapped Twizzlers, Pop Rocks. They
dropped them into the paper bag and winked. I’d buy two or three forties and a pack of cigarettes
on my way home from school each afternoon and go to bed and watch Married…with
Children and Sally Jessy Raphael on my small black-and-white television, drink
and smoke and snooze. When it got dark I’d go out again for more forties and,
on occasion, food. Around ten p.m. I’d switch to vodka and would pretend to
better myself with a book or some kind of music, as though God were checking up
on me.
“All good here,”
I pretended to say. “Just bettering myself, as always.”
Or sometimes I
went to this one bar on Avenue A. I tried to order drinks that I didn’t like so
that I would drink them slower. I’d order gin and tonic or gin and soda or a
gin martini or Guinness. I’d told the bartender — an old Polish lady — at the beginning, “I don’t like talking
while I drink, so I may not talk to you.”
“Okay,” she’d said. “No problem.” She was very respectful.
Every year, the
kids had to take a big exam that let the state know just how badly I was at
doing my job. The exams were designed for failure. Even I couldn’t pass them.
The other math
teacher was a little Filipina who I knew made less money than me for doing the
same job and lived in a one-bedroom apartment in Spanish Harlem with three kids
and no husband. She had some kind of respiratory disease and a big mole on her
nose and wore her blouses buttoned to the throat with ridiculous bows and
brooches and lavish plastic pearl necklaces. She was a very devout Catholic.
The kids made fun of her for that. They called her the “little Chinese lady.”
She was a much better math teacher than me, but she had an unfair advantage.
She took all the students who were good at math, all the kids who back in the
Ukraine had been beaten with sticks and made to learn their multiplication
tables, decimal places, exponents, all the tricks of the trade. Whenever anyone
talked about the Ukraine, I pictured either a stark, gray forest full of
howling black wolves or a trashy bar on a highway full of tired male
prostitutes.
My students were
all horrible at math. I got stuck with the dummies. Popliasti, worst of all,
could barely add two and two. There was no way my kids could ever pass that big
exam. When the day came to take the test, the Filipina and I looked at each
other like, Who are we kidding? I passed out the tests, had them break the
seals, showed them how to fill in the bubbles properly with the right pencils,
told them, “Try your best,” and then I took the tests home and switched all
their answers. No way those dummies would cost me my job.
“Outstanding!”
said Mr. Kishka when the results came in. He’d wink and give me the thumbs-up
and cross himself and slowly shut the door behind him.
Every year it
was the same.
I had this one
other girlfriend, Jessica Hornstein, a homely Jewish girl I’d met in college.
Her parents were second cousins. She lived with them on Long Island and took
the LIRR into the city some nights to go out with me. She showed up in normal
jeans and sneakers and opened her backpack and pulled out cocaine and an
ensemble suitable for the cheapest prostitute on the Vegas strip. She got her
cocaine from some high-school kid in Bethpage. It was horrible. Probably cut
with powdered laundry detergent. And Jessica had wigs of all colors and styles:
a neon-blue bob, a long blonde Barbarella-type do, a red perm, a jet-black
Japanese one. She had one of those colorless, bug-eyed faces. I always felt
like Cleopatra next to Opie when I went out with her. “Going clubbing” was
always her request, but I couldn’t stand all that. A night under a colored
lightbulb over twenty-dollar cocktails, getting hit on by skinny Indian engineers,
not dancing, a stamp on the back of my hand I couldn’t scrub off. I felt
vandalized.
But Jessica
Hornstein knew how to “bump and grind.” Most evenings she bid me adieu on the
arm of some no-face corporate type to show him “the time of his life” back at
his condo in Murray Hill or wherever those people lived. Occasionally I took
one of the Indians up on his offer, stepped into an unmarked cab to Queens,
looked through his medicine cabinet, got some head, and took the subway home at
six in the morning just in time to shower, call my ex-husband, and make it to
school before the second bell. But mostly I left the club early and got myself
on a seat in front of my old Polish lady bartender, Jessica Hornstein be
damned. I dipped a finger in my beer and rubbed off my mascara. I looked around
at the other women at the bar. Makeup made a girl look so desperate, I thought.
People were so dishonest with their clothes and personalities. And then I
thought, Who cares? Let them do what they want. It’s me I should worry about.
Now and then I cried out to my students. I threw my arms in the air. I put my
head on my desk. I asked them for help. But what could I expect? They turned
around at their desks to talk to one another, put on their headphones, pulled
out their books, potato chips, looked out the window, did anything but try to
console me.
Oh, okay, there
were a few fine times. One day I went to the park and watched a squirrel run up
a tree. A cloud flew around in the sky. I sat down on a patch of dry yellow grass
and let the sun warm my back. I may have even tried to do a crossword puzzle.
Once, I found a twenty-dollar bill in a pair of old jeans. I drank a glass of
water. It got to be summer. The days got intolerably long. School let out. The
boyfriend graduated and moved back to Tennessee. I bought an air conditioner
and paid a kid to carry it down the street and up the stairs to my apartment.
Then my ex-husband left a message on my machine: “I’m coming into town,” he
said. “Let’s have lunch, or dinner. We can have drinks. Next week. No big
deal,” he said. “Talk.”
No big deal. I’d
see about that. I dried out for a few days, did some calisthenics on the floor
of my apartment. I borrowed a vacuum from my neighbor, a middle-aged gay with
long, acne-scarred dimples, who eyed me like a worried dog. I took a walk to
Broadway and spent some of my money on new clothes, high-heeled shoes, silk
panties. I had my makeup done and bought whatever products they suggested. I
had my hair cut. I got my nails polished. I took myself out to lunch. I ate a
salad for the first time in years. I went to the movies. I called my mom. “I’ve
never felt better,” I said. “I’m having a great summer. A great summer
holiday.” I tidied up my apartment. I filled a vase with bright flowers.
Anything good I could think to do, I did. I was filled with hope. I bought new
sheets and towels. I put on some music. “Bailar,” I said to myself. Look, I’m
speaking Spanish. My mind is fixing itself, I thought. Everything is going to
be okay.
And then the day
came. I went to meet my ex-husband at a fashionable bistro on MacDougal Street
where the waitresses wore pretty dresses with white lace–trimmed collars. I got
there early and sat at the bar and watched the waitresses move around so
gingerly with their round, black trays of colored cocktails and small plates of
bread and bowls of olives. A short sommelier came in and out like the conductor
of an orchestra. The nuts on the bar were flavored with sage. I lit a cigarette
and looked at the clock. I was so early. I ordered a drink. A scotch and soda.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. I ordered another drink, just scotch this time. I lit
another cigarette. A girl sat down next to me. We started talking. She was
waiting, too. “Men,” she said. “They like to torture us.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” I said, and turned around on my stool.
Then it was
eight o’clock and my ex-husband walked in. He spoke to the maître d’ and nodded
in my direction and followed a girl to a table by the window and just waved me
over. I took my drink.
“Thank you for
meeting me,” he said, removing his jacket.
I lit a
cigarette and opened the wine list. My ex cleared his voice but said nothing
for a while. Then he did his usual hem and haw about the restaurant, how he’d
read about the chef in whatever magazine, how the food on the plane was awful,
the hotel, how the city had changed, the menu was interesting, the weather
here, the weather there, and so on. “You look tired,” he said. “Order whatever
you want,” he told me, as though I was his niece, some babysitter character.
“I will, thank
you,” I said.
A waitress came
over and told us the specials. My ex charmed her. He was always kinder to the
waitress than he was to me. “Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. You’re the best.
Wow. Wow, wow, wow. Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
I made up my mind
to order then pretend to go to the bathroom and walk out. I took off my dangly
earrings and put them in my purse. I uncrossed my legs. I looked at him. He
didn’t smile or do anything. He just sat there with his elbows on the table. I
missed the boyfriend. He’d been so easy. He’d been very respectful.
“And how’s
Vivian?” I asked.
“She’s fine. She
got a promotion, busy. She’s okay. Sends her regards.”
“I’m sure. Send
her my regards, too.”
“I’ll tell her.”
“Thanks,” I
said.
“You’re
welcome,” he said.
The waitress
came back with another drink and took our order. I ordered a bottle of wine. I
thought, I’ll stay for the wine. The whiskey was wearing off. The waitress went
away and my ex got up to use the men’s room, and when he got back he asked me
to stop calling him.
“No, I think
I’ll keep calling,” I said.
“I’ll pay you,”
he said.
“How much money
are we talking?”
He told me.
“Okay,” I said.
“I’ll take the deal.”
Our food came.
We ate in silence. And then I couldn’t eat anymore. I got up. I didn’t say
anything. I went home. I went back and forth to the bodega. My bank called. I
wrote a letter to the Ukrainian Catholic school. Dear Principal Kishka, I
wrote. Thank you for letting me teach at your school.
Please throw
away the sleeping bag in the cardboard box in the back of my classroom. I have
to resign for personal reasons. Just so you know, I’ve been fudging the state
exams. Thanks again. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
There was a
church attached to the back of the school — a cathedral with great big mosaics of people holding
up a finger as though to say, Be quiet. I thought I’d go in there and leave my
letter of resignation with one of the priests. Also I wanted a little
tenderness, I think, and I imagined the priest putting his hand on my head and
calling me something like “my dear,” or “my sweet,” or “little one.” I don’t
know what I was thinking. “My pet.”
I’d been up on
bad cocaine and drinking for days. I’d roped a few men back to my apartment and
showed them all my belongings, stretched out flesh-colored tights and proposed
we take turns hanging each other. Nobody lasted more than a few hours. The
letter to Principal Kishka sat on the bedside table. It was time. I checked my
reflection in my bathroom mirror before I left the house. I thought I looked
pretty normal. That couldn’t be possible. I put the last of the stuff up my
nose. I put on a baseball cap. I put on some more ChapStick.
On the way to
church I stopped at McDonald’s for a Diet Coke. I hadn’t been around people in
weeks. There were whole families sitting down together, sipping on straws,
sedate, mulling with their fries like broken horses at hay. A homeless person,
man or woman I couldn’t tell, had gotten into the trash by the entrance. At
least I wasn’t completely alone, I thought. It was hot out. I wanted that Diet
Coke. But the lines to order made no sense. Most people were huddled in random
patterns, gazing up at the menu boards, eyes glazed over, touching their chins,
pointing, nodding.
“Are you in
line?” I kept asking them. Nobody would answer me.
Finally I just
approached a young black boy in a visor behind the counter. I ordered my Diet
Coke.
“What size?” he
asked me.
He pulled out
four cups in ascending order of size. The largest size stood about a foot high
off the counter.
“I’ll take that
one,” I said.
This felt like a
great occasion. I can’t explain it. I felt immediately employed with great
power. I plunked my straw in and sucked. It was good. It was the best thing I’d
ever tasted. I thought of ordering another one, for when I’d finished that one.
But that would be exploitive, I thought. Better let this one have its day.
Okay, I thought. One at a time. One Diet Coke at a time. Now off to the priest.
The last time
I’d been in that church was for some Catholic holiday. I’d sat in the back and
done my best to kneel, cross myself, move my mouth at the Latin sayings, and so
forth. I had no idea what any of it meant, but it had some effect on me. It was
cold in there. My nipples stood on end, my hands were swollen, my back hurt. I
must have stunk of alcohol. I watched the students in their uniforms line up
for the Eucharist. The ones who genuflected at the altar did it so deeply,
wholly, they broke my heart. Most of the liturgy was in Ukrainian. I saw
Popliasti play with the padded bar you knelt on, lifting it up and letting it
slam down. There were beautiful stained glass windows, a lot of gold.
But when I got there that day with the letter, the church was locked. I sat down on the damp stone steps and finished my Diet Coke. A shirtless bum walked by.
“Pray for rain,”
he said.
“Okay.”
I went to
McSorley’s and ate a bowl of pickled onions. I tore the letter up.
The sun shone
on.
.jpg)
When fiction becomes fact: Thomas Jefferson fathered dozens of children with his slaves.
The
story that Jefferson slept with his slaves appears to be mostly rumor since
the entire story is completely unsubstantiated. Recent DNA tests show that
members of the Jefferson family, which was large and extended, more than
probably fathered children with slaves, but there is no evidence the children
were Thomas Jefferson’s offspring.
When fiction becomes fact: A cemetary in King’s County Washington.
No.
No monsters. Not in that sense. A child, bearing the surname Monster, was born in Washington state on October 23, 1888,
and died about four months later on February 3, 1889. A photo of the child’s gravestone.
Reading “Baby monster” was passed around the internet, but only after the top
portion of the photo which showed the child’s father’s name “John C. Monster”
was cropped out. The monster family was prominent in the region for many decades.
This family happened to be of English ancestry, but the name probably derived
from the Latin word Monasterium, meaning monastery.
Ponder this simple thought by Marcus Aurelius.
The happiness of your life depends upon
the quality of your thoughts.
All Summer in a Day. A short story by Ray Bradbury
Ready?
Ready.
Now?
Soon.
Do the scientists really know?
Will it happen today, will it?
Look, look; see for yourself!
The children pressed to each
other like so many roses, so many weeds, intermixed, peering
out for a look at the hidden sun.
It rained.
It had been raining for seven
years; thousands upon thousands of days compounded and
filled from one end to the other
with rain, with the drum and gush of water, with the sweet crystal fall of
showers and the concussion of storms so heavy they were tidal waves come over
the islands. A thousand forests had been crushed under the rain and grown up a thousand
times to be crushed again. And this was the way life was forever on the planet Venus,
and this was the schoolroom of the children of the rocket men and women who had
come to a raining world to set up civilization and live out their lives.
It's stopping, it’s stopping!
Yes, yes!
Margot stood apart from them,
from these children who could never remember a time
when there wasn’t rain and rain
and rain. They were all nine years old, and if there had
been a day, seven years ago, when
the sun came out for an hour and showed its face to the stunned world, they
could not recall. Sometimes, at night, she heard them stir, in
remembrance, and she knew they
were dreaming and remembering gold or a yellow
crayon or a coin large enough to
buy the world with. She knew they thought they
remembered a warmness, like a
blushing in the face, in the body, in the arms and legs and trembling hands.
But then they always awoke to the tatting drum, the endless shaking down of
clear bead necklaces upon the roof, the walk, the gardens, the forests, and
their dreams were gone.
All day yesterday they had read
in class about the sun. About how like a lemon it was, and how hot. And they
had written small stories or essays or poems about it:
I think the sun is a flower, that
blooms for just one hour.
That was Margot’s poem, read in a
quiet voice in the still classroom while the rain was falling outside.
Aw, you didn’t write that!
protested one of the boys.
I did, said Margot. I did.
William! said the teacher.
But that was yesterday. Now the
rain was slackening, and the children were crushed in the great thick windows.
Where’s teacher?
She’ll be back.
She’d better hurry, we’ll miss
it!
They turned on themselves, like a
feverish wheel, all tumbling spokes. Margot stood alone.
She was a very frail girl who
looked as if she had been lost in the rain for years and the rain had washed
out the blue from her eyes and the red from her mouth and the yellow from her
hair. She was an old photograph dusted from an album, whitened away, and if she
spoke at all her voice would be a ghost. Now she stood, separate, staring at
the rain and the loud wet world beyond the huge glass.
What’re you looking at? said
William.
Margot said nothing.
Speak when you’re spoken to.
He gave her a shove. But she did
not move; rather she let herself be moved only by him and nothing else. They
edged away from her; they would not look at her. She felt them go away. And
this was because she would play no games with them in the echoing tunnels of the
underground city. If they tagged her and ran, she stood blinking after them and
did not follow. When the class sang songs about happiness and life and games
her lips barely moved. Only when they sang about the sun and the summer did her
lips move as she watched the drenched windows. And then, of course, the biggest
crime of all was that she had come here only five years ago from Earth, and she
remembered the sun and the way the sun was, and the sky was when she was four
in Ohio. And they, they had been on Venus all their lives, and they had been
only two years old when last the sun came out and had long since forgotten the
color and heat of it and the way it really was.
But Margot remembered.
It’s like a penny, she said once,
eyes closed.
No its not! the children cried.
It’s like a fire, she said, in
the stove.
You’re lying, you don't
remember! cried the children.
But she remembered and stood
quietly apart from all of them and watched the patterning windows. And once, a
month ago, she had refused to shower in the school shower rooms, had clutched
her hands to her ears and over her head, screaming the water mustn’t touch her
head. So after that, dimly, dimly, she sensed it, she was different, and they
knew her
difference and kept away. There
was talk that her father and mother were taking her back to Earth next year; it
seemed vital to her that they do so, though it would mean the loss of thousands
of dollars to her family. And so, the children hated her for all these reasons
of big and little consequence. They hated her pale snow face, her waiting
silence, her thinness, and her possible future.
Get away! The boy gave her
another push. What’re you waiting for?
Then, for the first time, she
turned and looked at him. And what she was waiting for was in her eyes.
Well, don’t wait around here!
cried the boy savagely. You won’t see nothing!
Her lips moved.
Nothing! he cried. It was all a
joke, wasn’t it? He turned to the other children.
Nothing’s happening today. Is it?
They all blinked at him and then,
understanding, laughed and shook their heads.
Nothing, nothing!
Oh, but, Margot whispered, her
eyes helpless. But this is the day, the scientists predict,
they say, they know, the sun...
All a joke ! said the boy, and
seized her roughly. Hey, everyone, let's put her in a closet before the
teacher comes!
No, said Margot, falling back.
They surged about her, caught her
up and bore her, protesting, and then pleading, and
then crying, back into a tunnel,
a room, a closet, where they slammed and locked the door.
They stood looking at the door
and saw it tremble from her beating and throwing herself
against it. They heard her
muffled cries. Then, smiling, the turned and went out and back down the tunnel,
just as the teacher arrived.
Ready, children? She glanced at
her watch.
Yes! said everyone.
Are we all here?
Yes!
The rain slacked still more. They
crowded to the huge door. The rain stopped.
It was as if, in the midst of a
film concerning an avalanche, a tornado, a hurricane, a
volcanic eruption, something had,
first, gone wrong with the sound apparatus, thus
muffling and finally cutting off
all noise, all of the blasts and repercussions and thunders, and then, second,
ripped the film from the projector and inserted in its place a beautiful tropical
slide which did not move or tremor. The world ground to a standstill. The
silence
was so immense and unbelievable
that you felt your ears had been stuffed or you had lost your hearing
altogether. The children put their hands to their ears. They stood apart. The door
slid back and the smell of the silent, waiting world came in to them.
The sun came out.
It was the color of flaming
bronze and it was very large. And the sky around it was a blazing blue tile
color. And the jungle burned with sunlight as the children, released from their
spell, rushed out, yelling into the springtime.
Now, don’t go too far, called the
teacher after them. You’ve only two hours, you know.
You wouldn’t want to get caught
out!
But they were running and turning
their faces up to the sky and feeling the sun on their
cheeks like a warm iron; they
were taking off their jackets and letting the sun burn their
arms.
Oh, its better than the sun
lamps, isn’t it?
Much, much better!
They stopped running and stood in
the great jungle that covered Venus, that grew and
never stopped growing,
tumultuously, even as you watched it. It was a nest of octopi,
clustering up great arms of flesh
like weed, wavering, flowering in this brief spring. It was the color of rubber
and ash, this jungle, from the many years without sun. It was the color of stones and white cheeses and ink, and it
was the color of the moon.
The children lay out, laughing,
on the jungle mattress, and heard it sigh and squeak under them resilient and
alive. They ran among the trees, they slipped and fell, they pushed each other,
they played hide-and-seek and tag, but most of all they squinted at the sun
until the tears ran down their faces; they put their hands up to that
yellowness and that amazing blueness and they breathed of the fresh, fresh air
and listened to the silence which suspended them in a blessed sea of no sound
and no motion. They looked at everything and savored everything. Then, wildly,
like animals escaped from their caves, they ran and ran in shouting circles.
They ran for an hour and did not stop running.
And then -in the midst of their
running one of the girls wailed. Everyone stopped.
The girl, standing in the open,
held out her hand.
Oh, look, look, she said,
trembling.
They came slowly to look at her
opened palm.
In the center of it, cupped and
huge, was a single raindrop. She began to cry, looking at it.
They glanced quietly at the sun.
Oh. Oh.
A few cold drops fell on their
noses and their cheeks and their mouths. The sun faded
behind a stir of mist. A wind
blew cold around them. They turned and started to walk back toward the
underground house, their hands at their sides, their smiles vanishing away.
A boom of thunder startled them
and like leaves before a new hurricane, they tumbled
upon each other and ran.
Lightning struck ten miles away, five miles away, a mile, a half
mile. The sky darkened into
midnight in a flash.
They stood in the doorway of the
underground for a moment until it was raining hard. Then they closed the door
and heard the gigantic sound of the rain falling in tons and avalanches, everywhere
and forever.
Will it be seven more years?
Yes. Seven.
Then one of them gave a little
cry.
Margot.
What?
She’s still in the closet where
we locked her.
Margot.
They stood as if someone had
driven them, like so many stakes, into the floor. They looked at each other and
then looked away. They glanced out at the world that was raining now and
raining and raining steadily. They could not meet each other's glances.
Their faces were solemn and pale. They looked at their hands and feet, their
faces down.
Margot.
One of the girls said, Well...?
No one moved.
Go on, whispered the girl.
They walked slowly down the hall
in the sound of cold rain. They turned through the
doorway to the room in the sound
of the storm and thunder, lightning on their faces, blue and terrible. They
walked over to the closet door slowly and stood by it.
Behind the closet door was only
silence.
They unlocked the door, even more
slowly, and let Margot out.
.jpg)
The Husband Stitch. A short story by Carmen Maria Machado,
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.