Fates and Furies (46 page)

The doorbell rang. She opened the door to Rachel and Sallie. On the porch, doubled, her husband briefly shining out.

Mathilde let herself lean for a few breaths into the buttress of their arms, felt the weight of her own body relieved for the first time in so long.

She opened cold champagne for them. [Why the hell not.]

“Celebrating?” Rachel said.

“You tell me,” Mathilde said. She’d noted Sallie’s collar askew, the ring twisted wrong around Rachel’s finger. Nerves. Something was up. But they didn’t tell her, not yet. They sat drinking. With her long and bony face, Rachel in the twilight looked molded of resin; Sallie polished in a silk jacket, chic haircut. Mathilde thought of Sallie on her world tour, imagined lushness, fruit in the shape of swans, lovers in damp sheets. The word
spinster
hid behind it a blazing freedom; and how hadn’t Mathilde seen this before?

Rachel put the glass down and leaned forward. The emerald tapped three slowing swings against her clavicle, dully gleamed when it came to rest in the air.

Mathilde closed her eyes, said, “Say it.”

From her pocketbook, Sallie pulled a thick kraft file and put it on Mathilde’s knees, and Mathilde lifted a corner with her index finger and opened it. From most recent to least, a gallery of vice. Most were not even hers. From freshest to oldest; all before Lotto died. Grainy photo of Mathilde in a bikini on a beach in Thailand, the failed separation. Mathilde kissing Arnie’s cheek on a street corner. [Ludicrous, even if she were canted toward infidelity, he was too slimy.] Mathilde, drawn, a skeleton, young, walking into the abortion clinic. Her uncle, strange shiny pages smuggled from some sort of secret file delineating his purported offenses as of 1991—she would read it like a novel much later. Finally, her Paris grandmother and her rap sheet in French, smiling wickedly at the camera,
prostituée
like flyspecks across the page.

Great gaps here: a lacework of her life’s tissue. Thank god that the worst of it remained holes. Ariel. The sterilization, the baseless hope for children she’d let live in Lotto. What Aurélie had done all those years ago. All the deficits of goodness that added up to a shadow Mathilde.

Mathilde reminded herself to breathe, looked up. “You researched me?”

“No. Antoinette did,” Sallie said, clicking her teeth against her glass. “From the first.”

“All this time?” Mathilde said. “She was committed.” A pang. All this time, and Mathilde had been vibrantly alive in Antoinette’s head.

“Muvva was a patient woman,” Rachel said.

Mathilde closed the file and tapped the papers neatly back. She poured the rest of the champagne equally into the glasses. When she looked up, Sallie and Rachel were both making grotesque puffed-up faces that startled her. Together, they began laughing.

“Mathilde thinks we’re about to hurt her,” Sallie said.

“Sweet M.,” Rachel said. “We wouldn’t.”

Sallie sighed, wiped her face. “Don’t fret. We kept you from harm. Twice Antoinette tried to send packets to Lotto, once with your uncle and then the abortion, and again when you left him. She overlooked that I was the one to walk mail down to the box at the end of the drive and back.”

Rachel laughed. “The will she sent me to have notarized was lost. Donating Lotto’s share of the trust to a chimp rescue. Poor needy monkeys are going to go without their bananas,” she said. She shrugged. “It was Muvva’s fault. She never expected gross perfidy from the meek and mild.”

Mathilde saw her own face reflected in the window, but no, it was a barn owl on a low branch in the cherry trees.

She could barely master herself. She had never expected this. These women. Such kindness. Their eyes shining in the dim room. They saw her. She didn’t know why, but they saw her and they loved her even still.

“There’s one more thing,” Rachel said, so quickly Mathilde had to concentrate to understand. “You don’t know this. We didn’t until my
mother died. I mean, it was a total shock. We had to process it before we did anything. And then we were going to tell Lotto after we put things in order. But he.” She left the sentence unfinished. Mathilde watched as her face, as if in slow motion, collapsed. She handed over a photo album in inexpensive cordovan. Mathilde opened it.

Inside: a confusion. A face startlingly familiar. Handsome, dark-haired, smiling. With each successive page, the face grew younger until it was a red, wrinkled baby asleep in hospital blankets.

An adoption certificate.

A birth certificate. Satterwhite, Roland, born July 9, 1984. Mother: Watson, Gwendolyn, aged 17. Father: Satterwhite, Lancelot, aged 15.

Mathilde dropped the book.

[A puzzle she’d thought she’d solved revealed itself to go endlessly on.]

  
  
22

M
ATHILDE
HAD
ALWAYS
BEEN
a fist, in truth. Only with Lotto had she been an open hand.

—

S
AME
NIGHT
;
ROTTING
TOMATOES
. Sallie’s perfume lingered, though she and Rachel were dreaming drunkly in the guest rooms above. In the window, a paring of moon. Bottle of wine, kitchen table, dog snoring. Before Mathilde, an expanse of white paper, easy as a child’s cheeks. [Write it, Mathilde. Understand.]

Florida, she wrote. Summer. 1980s. Outside, sun blaze unbearable over the ocean. Inside, carpets in beige. Popcorn ceilings. Potholders in the olive kitchen silkscreened with the lewd shape of Florida, mermaids on the left, rockets on the right. Naugahyde recliners; a bestiary of modern American life flashing on the television. Floating alone in the hot cave of the house: a boy and a girl. Twins, barely fifteen. Charles, called Chollie; Gwendolyn, called Gwennie.

[Odd, how easy it all is to summon. Like a pain from a dream. A life you’d imagined so long that it had almost become a memory; this middle-class American childhood of the eighties that you’d never had.]

In her room, the girl rubbed Vaseline on her lips, face blooming white breath in the mirror.

She would emerge in pink pajamas when the father came home, her wild curly hair in two braids, and warm up the dinner she’d saved
for him, some chicken and a boiled vegetable. She’d yawn and pretend sleep. Keeping their father company in the kitchen, her brother would imagine the metamorphosis inside his sister’s bedroom: legs peeled, pale in the miniskirt, eyes darkened with makeup. A strange creature, so different from the sister he knew, breaching into the night through the window.

Her nighttime changes were not despite the fear; they were about it. Small even for a fifteen-year-old, she could have been held down by any passing boy. A refutation of the girl who had already studied calculus, who had won science fairs by building her own robots. She went shivering down the dark streets, toward the convenience store, feeling acutely the untouched place under her skirt. She walked it down the aisles. Burt Bacharach; the cashier watching her with open mouth, skin piebald with vitiligo. Man in a white jumpsuit, watching her in the soda section, jangling the change in his pocket.
Get me one a those,
he ordered, but about the greasy spinning hot dog. Under the angry moth light outside, three or four kids were flipping their skateboards. She didn’t know them. They were older, college-aged though she doubted—greasy hair, baja hoodies—they were in college. She stood by the pay phone, dipping her finger in and out of the coin slot. No change, no change, no change. Slowly, one came closer. Bright blue eyes under a monobrow.

Debatable how long the seduction took. The smarter the girl, the swifter these things go. Physical forwardness as intellectual highwire act: the pleasure not of pleasure but of performance and revenge against the retainer, the flute, the stack of expectations. Sex as rebellion against the way things should be. [Sounds familiar? It is. No story on earth more common.]

For nearly a year, a besotment of fingers and tongues. Out the window in the dark she went, again and again; and school came and debate team and band practice. Slow solidification beneath the ribs like rubber cement exposed to air. The body knows what the brain
refutes. She wasn’t dumb. That year she was lucky in fashion: sweatshirts worn huge, to the knees. The mother came home late on Christmas Eve. The girl came out on Christmas morning in her flannel nightgown and the mother turned, singing. She saw her daughter, the bulge at the waist, and dropped the monkey bread she’d been making.

The girl was taken to a cool place. Nobody was unkind. Her insides were scrubbed. Voices soft. She left, not the same girl as she’d been when she went in.

[The lives of others come together in fragments. A light shining off a separate story can illuminate what had remained dark. Brains are miraculous; humans storytelling creatures. The shards draw themselves together and make something whole.]

The twins turned sixteen in the spring. There were the new locks outside her door, on the windows. Her brother suddenly three inches taller than she. He began to follow her around, a goofy-looking shadow. “Play Monopoly?” he’d say, as she crossed through the room one of the dull Saturday nights. “Don’t worry about me,” she said. She was grounded, she had to murmur to the skateboarding boys who hung around the school gates waiting, to the girls she’d known since kindergarten, who’d wanted her to join them watching
The Dark Crystal
and eating Jiffy Pop and crimping their hair. She was always more popular than her twin, but soon a whiff of sex sullied her. She had only her brother. Then Michael.

—

M
ICHAEL
WAS
BEAUTIFUL
, half Japanese, tall and dreamy with a fashionable slab of black hair over one eye. In class, Gwennie had spent weeks surreptitiously imagining her tongue licking the pale skin of his inner wrist. He dreamt of boys; Gwennie dreamt of him. Chollie liked him grudgingly; her brother required absolutes: loyalty, generosity, things Michael couldn’t give. But the marijuana he shared relaxed Chollie enough to make him begin to crack jokes, to smile. So
it passed until the end of school. Her mother in San Diego, Milwaukee, Binghamton; she was a traveling nurse who took care of babies almost too tender to survive.

They met Lotto. Painfully tall, face blitzed with acne, his sweet boy’s heart. Summer stretched out before them: different drugs, beer, huffing glue, all fair game as long as the twins were home for dinner. Gwennie was the center of this circle; the boys spun around her, satellites.

[Such a brief time, this ménage à quatre. Only all summer tipping into October, but it changed everything.]

On the crenellations of the old Spanish fort, they did whippets with stolen cans. St. Augustine with its herds of tourists shining below. Michael sunbathed, twitching to the music from the tape deck, the glorious smoothness of that body. Lotto and Chollie were in deep conversation as usual. The sea below winking light. She needed them to look at her. She stood on her hands at the edge of the fort, a forty-foot drop into death. She’d done gymnastics until her body turned traitor with boobs; she held the pose. From upside down, their faces against the blue, her brother standing up in fear. She came down and almost passed out from blood to the brain, but sat. The pulse so loud in her ears she didn’t hear what he was saying, just waved her hand, and said, “Chill the fuck out, Choll. I know what I’m doing.”

Lotto laughed. Michael’s abs flexing to look at Lotto. Gwennie looking at the abs.

In early October, they spent a Saturday on the beach. Their father had begun trusting her again, or trusting Chollie to keep her in line, and had flown off to Sacramento to be with their mother for the weekend. Two free days like an open mouth. They drank beer all day in the sun and passed out, and when she woke, she was burnt all over and it was sunset and Lotto had started building something enormous with sand, already four feet high and ten feet long and pointing toward the sea. Woozy, standing, she asked what it was. He said,
“Spiral jetty.” She said, “In sand?” He smiled and said, “That’s its beauty.” A moment in her bursting open, expanding. She looked at him. She hadn’t seen it before, but there was something special here. She wanted to tunnel inside him to understand what it was. There was a light under the shyness and youth. A sweetness. A sudden surge of the old hunger in her to take a part of him into her and make him briefly hers.

Instead, she bent and helped, they all did, and deep into the morning when it was done, they sat in silence, huddled against the cold wind, and watched the tide swallow it whole. Everything had changed, somehow. They went home.

The next day, Sunday. Sunrise sandwiches eaten over the sink, bleed of yolk. Bed until three in the afternoon. When she came out to eat, Chollie had sunburn blisters on his face, but he smiled. “I scored some acid,” he said, the only way to bear the party at the abandoned house beside the swamp that night. She felt a pang of fear. “Great,” she said coolly. They took burgers to the beach again. Where the lifeguard’s chair had been buried at the end of their spiral jetty, it was dug out, set upright, like a raised middle finger. She abstained from the drug, but the boys partook. The strange thing between Lotto and her sharpened. He stood close to her. Chollie climbed atop the lifeguard chair and stood against the stars, shouting, holding up a handle of rum. “We are gods!” he said. Tonight, she believed it. Her future was one of those stars, cold and brilliant and sure. She would do something world-bending. She knew it. She laughed at her brother, shining in the bonfire and starlight, and then Chollie gave a shriek and jumped, hovering for a long time like a pelican, with his flabby neck, his awkward limbs, in midair. He landed with a crack. And then her brother’s screams, and she held his head, and Lotto sprinted off to get his aunt’s car, and when he drove up the beach, Michael picked Chollie up in his arms and threw him into the backseat and jumped into the driver’s side and took off without Gwennie or Lotto.