Mother Box and Other Tales (12 page)

There once was a woman who swallowed a fly
.

I don't know why she swallowed the fly
,

Perhaps she'll die
.

When Mary was only thirty she met a ghost. She was in one of those places people go when the people who have to attend to them every day are required to send them somewhere, for whatever reason. In her case, it was because she had swallowed a fly that had gone on living inside of her. This was not on the official paperwork. Almost nothing was. Rather, Mary supposed, she was there because she had become indefinable and lived the sort of life in which being defined was quite an important prerequisite.

The facility was in a northern state, ringed by frequently mist-shrouded mountains. The winters were assumed to be fierce and uncompromising, but she had arrived in early summer and all of Mary's surroundings seemed to be struggling cheerfully out of the ground. There was a garden and a quaint, ramshackle barn in which the staff kept four nanny goats and a spavined pony named Bert. The garden was lush and impractical, zealously attended by both staff and residents alike. It was bordered to the west by a fast,
shallow, tea-stained river that chucked gamely along between its high banks and spilled over the old millrace with a companionable show of foam and spray like someone laughing too loudly at a party. She had a private cottage composed of an airy south-facing bedroom, whose window boasted an assertively framed view of the mountains, and a tidily furnished sitting room. There was also a half-bath with a toilet, sink and shower stall in which the management had thoughtfully included a little cedar bench. So the ladies among the residents would have someplace to rest the ball of their foot as they shaved, Mary concluded, though it did not escape her notice that there might be a more dreary rationale. The residents were not all so young, after all. Some of them were actually quite decrepit or, unlike Mary whose fly buzzed in her throat and made her scintillate, fizz at all her joinings, were so denuded by their official diagnoses that they might need some kind of moral support, if only in the form of a cedar bench, to get on with the duty of sloshing hot, soapy water into all of their stultified crevices.

“No kitchenette, I'm afraid,” said Jolene, the staff member who had given Mary her tour and helped her settle into the cottage. “You understand.”

And Mary did. The knives and such. The oven. This was a facility, after all, she explained to Jolene who nodded and showed Mary the button to push on the call box if she needed assistance in the night. A facility, not a vacation, Mary emphasized. And what a relief that was! If there was one thing Mary had had enough of it was vacations. The stickiness, the enforced levity. The spiraling panic as the last day approached and one realized afresh that one had not yet swum out past the sandbar, or hooked an infant shark from the pier. She remembered one year in particular when she was very young in which her father had insisted the entire summer that the low concrete dome just visible across the bay from their beach house porch was what he termed a rainbow silo. If
she watched it attentively enough, he insisted, she might be the lucky girl who saw the rainbow first, just as they unleashed it and before the colors had separated, so it would appear to her, lucky lucky girl, as one big band of astonishing light. Well. It had been his idea of parenting, she told Jolene, who was clacking along in her brown clogs, leading Mary to the community dining hall for her first lunch. He really was the most uncomfortable father and she was an only child so there was no one else on which he could practice. She supposed she understood the impulse, the paternal bonhomie which he must have believed was patrician in some sense, as obsessed as she knew him to be with the trappings of the Republic, but really. Really?

The dome had turned out to be a sand bunker, Mary told Jolene as she left her at the door. A place where the city council kept backup supplies of pillowy white sand dredged up from ocean trenches and bleached sterile to replace the dunes washed out to sea or carted off in the treads of dune buggies and the tight rolls of beach towels. But, even after she knew the truth, she had never been able to shake the feeling that the empirical evidence of her failed observance proved she was not after all a lucky girl. Not, it turned out, special in any particular way. And wasn't that something a parent might be expected to foresee? Of course she didn't feel that way anymore, she told a member of the kitchen staff as he levered a sliced chicken breast onto her salad. She had grown up. A lot of things had happened. And now here she was: resplendent, didn't he think? Mary turned on her heel to show him the full affect and, from the murmuring room of residents intent on their meals, somebody clapped.

So it went on from there.

It soon became clear to Mary that the facility, like the rest of the world, had broken itself down into two groups which could
be roughly defined as the Haves and the Have-Nots. Mary had always disliked the imprecision of this term. Have what, after all? The answer was almost never as quantifiable as money which could be stacked and counted, double-checked for errors. Rather it implied some amalgam of various moneyed signifiers, attitudes and ways of holding one's wrist cocked and languidly vulnerable as one swirled one's drink in its glass, which shifted from epoch to epoch with infuriating fluidity. Even in the very short epoch of her own, Mary's, life! The eighties, for example, in which she had observed her older female cousins decked out in beguiling pastel blouses and high-waisted cotton trousers that showed off not only their waspish waists and slim, tight hips, but, more subtly, the firm, plump placard of their lowest abdomen. This advertised a sort of invulnerable vulnerability. A cool, juicy quench the men of the party, boyfriends and male cousins and even the uncles who, when drinking, were not totally surreptitious about their admiration of each other's daughters, clearly longed to drain. Mary remembered looking down at her own body, absurdly banded by the shadow of the blinds, and wondering how her own pallid, hairless cleft could possibly metamorphose into such grandeur. Surely it would have to be replaced, she concluded. An operation that she was not yet old enough to know about in which the froglike thing she had now would be cut out of her and a new sort of thing—sleekly pelted, waterproof—would be stitched firmly in its place. That was a sort of Have which Mary could understand. She wanted those pants, to be what was inside those pants. She Haved-Not it.

And then, just when she was old enough to procure them, and to realize how foolish she had been to think any part of herself could be lifted away—she was stuck with all of it just as it had first become her in the warm slush of her mother's womb—the fashion changed and to Have became not to show. To appear to Have-Not
through cheap fabrics, coarse patterns, clothes that competed with the girls' bodies with their sullen clangor, and thin white scars that laddered up the inside of the girls' forearms like a public tally of the passing days. It was frustrating. Mary was an early riser and had plenty of time in the morning to devote to costume. She was unfulfilled by merely tousling her over-bleached ratty curls and ringing her eyes with thick, black liner. When she was with a boy, a boyfriend or a pick-up or, more than once, an older male cousin on the basement couch, the back of her car, the floor of his bedroom, a blanket in the dunes, or under the pier, she couldn't help but think as the boy ground on top of her and thrust his ruddy, strenuous penis in between her tight lips and into her shockingly deep interior vacancy that the whole experience would be enhanced for her if only first he had had to strip her out of those pants.

But, as the facility was meant to be a stripped down, more simply codified version of the world from which the residents had all sought refuge, in this distinction as in so many others the lines were more clearly drawn. At the facility, the Haves were what Mary's friend Donovan termed, “the decorously insane.” They were allocated private cottages and no night-time supervision, though when they entered their houses after midnight the doors would lock irrevocably behind them and not let them loose again until breakfast unless overridden by the emergency sensors which were attuned, one assumed, to fire and other natural disasters. They were also allowed free run of the facility grounds (garden, river, barn, spa, meditation parlor, yoga studio, dining hall and community greenhouse) and daytime access to the surrounding town which offered two Laundromats, a grocery store, a shop of healing herbs and crystals and a gas station that sold an impressive variety of spirits.

Doctors Throng and Bledsoe, who had founded the facility and remained its chief psychiatric practitioners, operated under
the guiding premise that the most pressing part of a life was the experience of it. “This part of your life,” Dr. Throng patiently explained to each new resident and then repeated once a week at the daily group meetings while Dr. Bledsoe nodded in a stentorian fashion behind her, “is just as real as the part where you have a career or a spouse or a child.” Dr. Throng was a small woman with a blunt face and something Asiatic about her eyes. She had a quiet voice, spoke expressively with her hands and was universally beloved by all but the most hardened of the asocial aggressives of which Mary did not consider herself, although she had to admit she grew a little tired of straining forward to hear what Dr. Throng was saying.

“In the other world,” Dr. Throng said, “you may get up in the morning and armor yourself in the clothes you wear for a day as a worker or a parent. You may put on a mask or practice a false emotional coloration, what in the animal world is called crypsis, as a means of defense against psychic barrage.” She pressed her hands to her face and then her throat, made a fist and a fluttering motion to indicate intangible menace. “But here,” Dr. Throng concluded every week, “you may get up in the morning and do whatever the experience of yourself encourages. Immerse yourself in yourself,” she said. “And then tell us about it. That's all we ask of you.”

The Have-Nots were, as Dr. Bledsoe put it, “more fully integrated into a private experience of the self.” Which meant they were unstable to the point of grotesqueries, could not be trusted with their hygiene or personal responsibilities and made for unsavory company, to say the least. These residents, at least fifty of them by Mary's count, slept in separate dormitory style housing, at which a staff member was always on duty, and ate at a separate meal hour. They had their own individual and group therapy meetings and their activities around the facility's grounds were
strictly controlled and constantly supervised. Mary and her compatriots, Donovan and August and Pete, sometimes caught sight of a group of Have-Nots being ushered from one building to another, a shambling line stooped with the enthralled torpor of the heavily medicated which progressed in moderate silence, emitting only the occasionally hoot or guttering cry. They were grim sight, unsettling. Enough to put one entirely out of the mood of one's day if Mary and her fellows had allowed it, which they did not. They were made of sterner stuff, Mary thought, and were also naturally the sort of people who gravitated toward the outer edge of their orbit. The sort of people who, if they were stars, would situate themselves so they could whirl right at the brink of the vast, black cosmos and peer in at the fissioning core of their galaxy with caustic skepticism.

“Barbarous,” said Donovan, as he watched the line of the Have-Nots wind from the dining hall to the barn where they were to have a touch-therapy session with the goats. “In-transmutable,” he muttered, pulling his mobile upper lip down over the wall of his long, yellow teeth.

Mary tended to agree, but August, who was tender-hearted and given to fits of despair over the abbreviation of such minor lives as ants and wasps, became quite inconsolable. He wandered into the river where he stood in an eddy and gazed upstream toward the point where the silver band of water jogged out of sight and higher to where it reappeared in a break in the trees as a sliver, a filament, a pure shining thread of the self that was rollicking over August's shins and wicking up his trouser legs. Mary could sympathize, up to a point. There was no doubt it was sad. There was something brittle about the air when the Have-Nots passed. Something crisp and rapacious like the thinnest edge of ice as it extends across the black void of a lake, though it was warm in the garden, practically balmy. Mary supposed it was betweeness
she was feeling, a border she could sense and not see, or something like that. As soon as the Have-Nots were out of sight, she could not seem to bring herself to care. The garden was no help at all, festooned as it was with thrusting stands of blue iris, plump-headed daylilies, bobbing arm-lengths of lupine and speckled fox-glove clustered along their spears. Bees dipped and doddered everywhere. The birds were delirious. Mary chewed on a lime rind she fished from her glass and held it out to Pete who lifted the gin bottle from the coffee tin they were using as an ice bucket. From across the field, the ghost shouted, “Hi guys,” and waved her arms above her head.

The ghost was a Have, but barely in Mary's estimation. In therapy sessions, when Dr. Throng asked them all to talk about why they were at the facility, August said, “I realized what I've been doing all these years is unforgivable, heinous.”

Mary said, “I've swallowed a fly.”

Donovan cycled through set answers, his favorite being, “I finally got around to reading Dostoevsky,” and Pete refused to speak at all, expressing himself instead through a progressive blanching that left his face with the same gelid, near-translucency as an egg-white and his watery eyes blue as milk.

The ghost, who was maddeningly chipper, stated every day, “I am a rapid cycling manic-depressive with schizophrenic tendencies.” She would look brightly around, beaming at each of them as if she were a kindergarten teacher leading the class in a sing-a-long. “Also, I have daddy issues,” she would add, kicking up her feet and stretching her hands out into the circle as if she were leaning back against a line someone on the other end was holding taut.