Fates and Furies (28 page)

It’s lonely when you’re among people, too,
said the snake.

—

L
IKE
CARP
, the loved ones surfaced, mouthing the air around her face before sinking deep again.

They put her in a chair, put a blanket on her. God the dog sat trembling beneath.

These loved ones all day were lowering their faces at her, moving away. Lotto’s nieces and nephew creeping up to put their cheeks on her knees. Food on her lap, taken away. The children sat there through the long afternoon. They understood at an animal level, new enough to the world to be uneasy in language. Sudden night in the window. She sat and sat. She thought of what her husband might have been thinking the moment he died. A flash of light, perhaps. The ocean. He had always loved the ocean. She hoped he’d seen her own younger face coming near his. Samuel put his shoulder under one arm, Lotto’s sister put hers under the other, they deposited her in the bed that still smelled like him. She put her face in his pillow. She lay.

She could do nothing. Her whole body had turned inward. Mathilde had become a fist.

  
  
2

M
ATHILDE
WAS
NOT
UNFAMILIAR
with grief. That old wolf had come sniffing around her house before.

She had one picture of herself from when she was tiny.

Her name had been Aurélie. Fat cheeks, gold hair. The only child in a large Breton family. Her bangs clipped from her face in a barrette, scarves on her neck, lacy socks to her ankles. Her grandparents fed her galettes, cider, caramels with sea salt. The kitchen had rounds of Camembert ripening in the cabinet. It could knock you down to open the door, unsuspecting.

Her mother was a fishwife at the market in Nantes. She’d rise in the blue night and drive to the city and come home midmorning with her hands chapped and glittering with scales, cold to the bone from contact with ice. Her face was delicate, but she had no education. Her husband had wooed her with his leather jacket, his pompadour, his motorcycle. Small things to trade for a life, but at the time they had seemed powerful. Aurélie’s father was a stonemason, and his family had lived in the same house in Notre-Dame-des-Landes for twelve generations. Aurélie was conceived during the revolution of May 1968; though her parents were far from radical, there was so much excitement in the air that they didn’t know how to express themselves except animally. When it was impossible for the girl’s mother to hide
her pregnancy, they were married with orange blossoms in her hair, a slice of coconut cake in the freezer.

Aurélie’s father was quiet, loved few things. Putting stone on stone, the wine he made in his garage, his hunting dog he called Bibiche, his mother who’d survived World War II by black-marketing blood sausages, and his daughter. She was spoiled, a happy and singing girl.

But when Aurélie was three, the new baby came. He was a fretful and screaming creature. Still, he was cooed over, that wizened turnip in blankets. Aurélie watched from under a chair, burning.

Colic arrived in the baby, and the house went piebald with vomit. Aurélie’s mother walked around as if shattered. Four aunts, smelling of butter, came to help. They gossiped viciously and their brother showed them his grapes and the aunts chased Bibiche from the house with a broom.

When the baby at last began to crawl, he got into everything, and the father had to build a gate at the top of the stairs. Aurélie’s mother cried during the day in her bed when the children were supposed to be asleep. She was so tired. She smelled of fish.

The baby liked best to crawl into Aurélie’s bed and suck his thumb and twirl her hair, the snot in his nose catching so it sounded as if he were purring. During the night, she would slowly move both of their bodies toward the edge of the bed so that when he finally fell asleep and rolled onto his back he’d tumble out and wake shrieking from the floor. She’d open her eyes in time to watch her mother rush in and pick the baby up with her swollen red hands and, scolding in whispers, carry him back to his own crib.

—

W
HEN
THE
GIRL
was four years old and the baby brother one, the family went for supper to the grandmother’s house one afternoon.
The house had been the grandmother’s ancestors’ for centuries, and she’d brought it to her marriage with the neighbor boy. The fields, still conjoined, were all hers. The house was far finer than the little girl’s family’s, the bedrooms larger, a stone creamery from the eighteenth century still attached to the main building. The manure had been spread that morning and could be tasted in the milk. The grandmother was like her son, square, strong-featured, taller than most men. Her mouth was carved down into a sharp
n
shape. She had a granite lap and a way of puncturing the jokes of others by sighing loudly at the punch line.

The baby was put down for a nap in the grandmother’s bed and everyone else was outside under the oak, eating. Aurélie was on the downstairs potty, trying to go. She was listening to her brother upstairs thumping around in the grandmother’s room, crowing to himself. She pulled up her panties and slowly went up the stairs, collecting a gray fur on her finger from the dust between banisters. She stood in the honey-bright hallway listening to him through the door: he was singing to himself, thumping his feet on the headboard. She thought of him inside the room and smiled. She opened the door to him, and he climbed off the bed and toddled into the grandmother’s hallway, grabbing at her, but she stepped backward, away from his sticky hands.

She sucked a finger and watched him move beyond her, toward the top of the stairs. He looked at her, beamish, teetering. He reached out his daisy of a hand, and she watched as her baby brother fell.

—

W
HEN
A
URÉLIE
’
S
PARENTS
returned from the hospital, they were silent, gray-faced. The baby’s neck had broken. There was nothing they could have done.

Her mother wanted to take Aurélie home. It was late and the girl’s face was swollen with crying, but her father had said no. He couldn’t look at her, though she clung to his knees, smelling his jeans stiff with
sweat and stone dust. After the baby fell, someone had dragged Aurélie down the stairs and her arm was black with a bruise. She showed it to them, but they didn’t look.

The parents were holding up something invisible but terribly heavy between them. There was no power in them to lift anything else, certainly not their daughter.

“We’ll leave her for tonight,” the mother said. The sad face with the apple cheeks, the glorious eyebrows, came near, kissed the girl, went away. Her father slammed the door to the hatchback three times. They drove off, Bibiche gazing out the back window. The taillights winked in the dark, were gone.

In the morning, Aurélie woke to her grandparents’ house, the grandmother downstairs making crêpes, and she washed herself neatly. All morning, her parents didn’t come. They didn’t come and they didn’t come.

The kiss on the forehead was the last she’d smell of her mother [Arpège by Lanvin, undermusk of cod]. The brush of her father’s stiff jeans on her hand when she held it out to touch him as he walked by, the last she’d feel of him.

After the fifth time she begged her grandparents for her mother and father, her grandmother stopped answering her.

That night, when she waited by the door and they still didn’t come, a terrible rage rose in Aurélie. To get it out of her, she kicked and screamed, broke the mirror in the bathroom, the glasses one by one in the kitchen; she punched the cat in the throat; she ran into the dark and tore her grandmother’s tomato plants out of the ground with her fists. The grandmother first tried to embrace her for hours to calm her, but lost patience and had to tie her to the bed with the curtain tassels, which, being ancient, snapped.

Three scratches beading blood on her grandmother’s cheek.
Quelle conne
.
Diablesse,
she hissed.

Hard to say how long this went on. Time, to a four-year-old, is
flood or eddy. Months, perhaps. Years, it’s not impossible. The darkness in her circled, landed. In her mind’s eye, her parents’ faces turned to twin smears. Was there a moustache atop her father’s lip? Was her mother bright blond or dark? She forgot the smell of the farmhouse where she’d been born, the crunch of gravel under her shoes, the perpetual twilight in the kitchen even when the lights were on. The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.

  
  
3

T
HERE
WERE
THOUSANDS
of people at Lotto’s funeral. She knew he’d been loved, and by strangers, too. But not this excess. All these people she didn’t know were lining the sidewalk, keening. O! great man. O! playwright of the bougie. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of blackbirds. Her husband had moved people and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them. Was not hers. Was now theirs.

It felt unhygienic, this flood of snot and tears. Too much coffee breath in her face. All that assaultive perfume. She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.

After the interment, she drove to the country alone. There may have been a reception planned, she didn’t know. Or if she did know, she blocked the knowledge; she never would have gone. She’d had enough of people.

The house was hot. The pool winked sunlight. Her black clothes on the kitchen floor. The dog made herself tiny on her cushion, her eyes beading out from the corner, feral.

[God licking at Lotto’s bare bluing feet below his desk, licking and licking as if she could lick the life back into him, dumb thing.]

And then there was the strange separation of self from body so that she watched her own nakedness from very far away.

The light slid across the room and extinguished itself, and the
night stole in. This impassive self watched the friends come to the back window, recoil at seeing her nude body at the kitchen table, turn their eyes away, and call through glass: “Let us in, Mathilde. Let us in.” The nude body outsat them until they eked on home.

Naked in the bed, she wrote
Thank you, Thank you
to all of the e-mails until she remembered control-C, control-V, and then she copied and pasted
Thank you
. She found hot tea in her hand and thanked naked Mathilde for her thoughtfulness and found herself in the pool under the moonlight and worried about naked Mathilde’s mental state. Naked Mathilde neglected to answer the doorbell, woke on the wrong side of the bed seeking heat that wasn’t there, let the food rot on the porch, let the flowers rot on the porch, watched the dog piddle in the middle of the kitchen, made scrambled eggs for the animal when she ran out of kibble, gave her the last of the vegetable chili that Lotto had made, and watched the dog lick her own bum, sore from the spices, until it was red. Naked Mathilde locked the doors and ignored the loved ones peering in, calling, “Mathilde, come on! Mathilde, let us in, Mathilde, I’m not going anywhere, I’m camping in the yard.” The last was her husband’s aunt Sallie, who actually did camp in the yard until naked Mathilde left the door open for her so she could come in. Aunt Sallie had lost the two loves of her life in a few short months, but she chose to peacock her grief, wearing Thai silk dresses in jewel colors, dyeing her hair blueblack. Naked Mathilde put the covers over her head when a tray appeared on the mattress, and shivered until she slept again. Tray, sleep, bathroom, tray, sleep, bad thoughts, terrible memories, God whining, tray, sleep; on and on it went, forever.

—

I
REMAIN
HERE
,
cold, a
widow in your halls.
Andromache, the perfect wife, railed while holding dead Hector’s head in her white arms.
You have left me only bitterness and anguish. You didn’t die in bed, stretching your arms toward me. You didn’t give me one last sweet word that I might remember in all my sorrow.

Andromaque, je pense à vous!

—

O
N
AND
ON
IT
WENT
, forever, except that during the first week she was a widow, somewhere inside the tent of covers, in the bed that held her naked body, a lust rose so powerfully she felt choked by it. What she needed was a fuck. A series of fucks. She saw a parade of thrusting men all in silent black-and-white, like talkie movies. Jangling over it all, organ music. Organ music. Ha!

There had been a few times before when lust was just this powerful. The first year with Lotto. Also, her first year of sex, long before Lotto. He’d always believed he’d deflowered her, but she’d just gotten her period, that was all. She indulged his belief. She hadn’t been a virgin, but there had been only one man before him. This was a secret that Lotto would never know. He would never have understood; his egotism would not admit a precursor. She winced to remember herself at seventeen, in high school, how, after the first illuminating weekend, everything spoke sex to her. The way the light pulsed the leaves of the ragweed in the ditches, the way clothes teased her skin as she moved. The words leaving a person’s mouth, how they were tongued, rolled, lipped before they emerged. It was as if the man had suddenly reached into her and pulled out an earthquake and set it loose on her skin. She walked the last weeks of high school wanting to eat every one of these delicious boys. If she had only been allowed, she would have swallowed them whole. She smiled at them hugely; they scurried away. She’d laughed, but felt it was a shame.

None of this mattered. Since they were married, it had only ever been Lotto. She had been faithful. She was nearly certain he had been, too.