Mother Box and Other Tales (13 page)

The ghost was very pretty. She was younger than Mary, but not by so many years, and one could see from her demeanor, her relentless cheer, that she had previously been not so pretty.
In fact, she had most likely been plump and stodgy: the kind of girl Mary's grandmother would have sympathetically dismissed by saying, “Poor dumpling,” and then, out of a sense of guilt, seated at her right hand during Mary's birthday party and made sure she got the slice of cake topped with the only unmaimed frosting rose. Somewhere in the ghost's young adulthood she had had a blossoming. Perhaps it was madness that became her, Mary didn't know, but in any event she had pleasant, regular features, oval white teeth, tiny ears behind which she could tuck her blonde hair with a truly enviable delicacy and stupendous knockers. In another ten years they would probably deflate entirely, but right then the ghost's breasts were suspended in their ripest moment, dropped fully into the form of themselves and depending from her prominent clavicle like two turgid drops of sap just about to slide from the lip of the wound down the smooth bark of their limb.

The ghost liked Pete and explained to them all that individuals with her diagnosis were frequently hyper-sexual beings as she stroked the inside of Pete's thigh and he froze, trembling with what Mary took to be nervous revulsion. The ghost also liked Mary and tended to follow her around the grounds and town proper making bright comments about the beauty of their surroundings, the simplicity of the native people, the dastardly nature of her father which she saw reflected in most items of the natural and manufactured world.

“My father was a real motherfucker,” the ghost would say, fingering a hank of raw wool in the farmer's market. “One time, when I was thirteen, he purposefully opened the door on me going to the bathroom while he was giving the neighbors a tour of our new addition.” She held her hand up to Mary's face and made her smell the musky lanolin odor that clung to her fingertips. “He died in ’96. A car accident, entirely his fault, where a piece of
rebar actually went straight through his heart. Isn't that funny, Mary?” the ghost asked, taking her arm at the elbow and pressing her breast against Mary's forearm. “Don't you think the guy selling the rhubarb is kind of cute?”

The ghost was also a mother, as was Mary although the ghost's children were quite a bit older. “Already pre-teens if you can believe it,” said the ghost. Mary's child was very young, only a few months old. At the time her husband had flown with her to the facility so she could become a resident, it was still suckling from her breasts which were, even as she thought of it, pricking with squandered milk. This could have been quite an annoyance, but Mary found the longer she sat in the garden with Donovan and August and Pete, the more she held out her glass to be filled and felt inside her the fly—which had feather-light feet and shivered its wings as it walked inside her body so its edges felt like a snowflake tessellating permanently outward—the less she did think of her child (a boy, a son, they had named him Terry) and the smaller, firmer, more prepared her breasts became.

“These breasts are built for speed,” she told Donovan, who looked at them appreciatively and laid a hand across her stomach as they lay in the grass. “These breasts are in training,” she said.

“Oh, a little baby!” the ghost squealed when Dr. Bledsoe, in what was in Mary's opinion an almost criminally unprofessional breach of privacy, let it be known that she had recently had a child. “You must just be going crazy you miss him so much.”

But that was it. Mary was not going crazy at all. It was just this fly, just its tickling progress around the environs of her gullet that was distracting her and making it so difficult to concentrate.

In her life outside of the facility, Mary had brought a lot of money to her marriage. And there's more where that came from, had been her father's catch phrase, though, it must be said, he employed
it more often to indicate a reservoir of grit or anti-plutocratic
esprit-des-corps
than any measure of his substantial tangible wealth. This was not her husband Charlie's catch phrase. Charlie tended to look at the bitter side of things. If given a melon, whole and rare and thudding with summer, he would paw through its flesh looking for the seeds before he would take even one bite. Charlie had senatorial aspirations, though right now he was only a young partner in her father's firm. He had the broad, noble forehead and soft, wet mouth of a golden retriever and had wooed her in college by showing up at her dorm room unannounced with reservations to a Michelin-starred restaurant and box under his arm that contained a dress in just her size wrapped in pink tissue paper. It was a disgusting story, really; so boring. It was no wonder she didn't think of it now, Mary told August as he lit a cigarette for himself and then fished around in his pockets to find one for her.

She supposed it had been Charlie's idea that they have a child. They had not been married for very long and even before she was pregnant Mary had not worked. She preferred instead to drift around the two-hundred-year-old farmhouse her father had bought them as a wedding present picking up silver saltboxes from the credenza or a set of tortoiseshell-backed brushes from the upstairs powder room and carrying them out into the rambling back lawn where she left them to blacken in the grass. This was a kind of work, in her estimation, but, when she recalled it to herself, or to Pete who was a good listener, it sounded to Mary very much like a poor little rich girl story, which of course she had been, but was not what she meant at all. She was not telling a story, she explained to Pete who put his head in his hands and closed his eyes. Rather, she was just trying to live an empirical life, a life bolstered and actually improved upon by the fact that every part of it could be proven through physical evidence readily apprehended not only by the eyes, but by any other one of
the senses possessed by a person of reasonable mental capacity. When she was in the house, Mary ran a piece of red chalk under the chair molding to mark her passage. When she was in the yard—more problematic, especially after a dry spell when the long grasses closed seamlessly behind her heels—she was forced to leave a scattering of objects, mobile monuments one could say, to stand in evidence of her hours. It was a project she had set for herself, she told Pete, speaking more hurriedly than she would have liked as she spotted the ghost approaching their table with a loaded plate. Something she had decided on in her teenage years, perhaps even as early as the dawn of her sexual awakening, as a measure against the obscurity of what she understood to be the fleeting score of her life.

Mary knew herself to be a determined woman, even a superlative woman, but the ongoing record of her life as she lived it was a demanding endeavor which began to take up more and more of her time. Charlie had determined her to be harebrained, charmingly scattered, a product of another age. But, when she abandoned the chalk and took to slicing the ball of her thumb and each of her fingertips with the fillet knife and leaving rambling ruby droplets through the conservatory and the parlor, up the front stairs into the bedroom, in ten tiny pools on the coverlet, down the backstairs and out into Charlie's vegetable patch, he suggested it might be time to procure for her a distraction.

“You must learn to be more careful with the knives,” he had said, cupping her chin in his hand and turning her head from side to side as if seeking, and not finding, her eyes to gaze into. “Why don't we have a baby?” he had said and when she did not protest he pulled her onto his lap there on the stiff, horsehair stuffed sofa she had once thought made a sophisticated counterpoint to their ultra-modern globe lamps and slipped her nipple into his mouth.

***

In group therapy, the ghost discussed her pregnancies. “I had my first baby when I was only fifteen. Can you believe it?” she said, shaking her head earnestly as if answering her own question. “And then I kept it! If you think that wasn't a monkey wrench in the works, well, you can think again, I guess.”

It was a clear morning. A storm the night before had washed the air so clean breathing it was like spinning. It felt as if it were a late day in the week, but Mary didn't know which one nor, as calendars and other time marking devices were expressly discouraged, did she quite know how long she had been at the facility. If she consulted herself she might conclude it was around a month, perhaps a month and a half. The days seemed longer and hotter. The spent heads of the lilies crisped and withered on their stalks before the Have-Nots on garden duty got in there to pluck them green again, and the house wrens which had taken up residence under the eaves of her cottage were darting back and forth to their bosky nest with the cycling legs of insects clamped in their beaks rather than twigs and pine straw.

Therapy sessions were always held just before lunch. “When one's physical and mental acumen is at its height,” said Dr. Bledsoe, and Mary could feel her hunger roiling up from her core like a spume of heated water. At about her sternum, the heat of her hunger stirred up the fly, which tended toward torpor, and she marked its progress as it buzzed around the pink vesicles of her lungs, pricked her heart with its sticky feet, descended to her liver where it unfurled its proboscis to eat. Mary considered that she had never felt stranger than she did at just that moment. In her previous, pre-fly life she would have felt compelled to commemorate this fact, but now she was content to sit, be still, to look inside. A wasp droned through the propped door and began to beat itself against the overhead light. Mary caught Donovan's eye and nodded up to it so they could watch together as the wasp
experienced the self that was embroiled in this battle against the cut-glass shade.

The ghost was saying, “ . . . frigid is the term for it, I think, or anyway the old-fashioned one, and my father really didn't have any other outlets because he was Catholic and took that very seriously, so instead he sublimated I supposed you would say, and turned all of our interactions into these really eroticized spaces where he'd be lifting me up to reach a light switch when I was little and he'd sort of hold my hand inside the shape of his and like breathe onto my cheek, or, you know, putting suntan lotion on my back, under the bathing suit straps and sort of lingering?”

Dr. Throng was taking notes, but Dr. Bledsoe, normally bent so fervently over his pad all Mary could see of him was his sleek part, was leaning back in his chair looking bored. He was watching the wasp too, Mary saw, tracking it with his eyes which, how had she never before noticed?, were a very intricate sort of hazel. He also had an intriguing mouth. It was thin and a little mean on top with a fat, tremulous, well-sucked looking lower lip posing an elegant counterpoint to his sharp, scythe-like chin. Mary tried to catch Donovan's eye again and call attention to her revelation about Dr. Bledsoe. Donovan was a self-confessed connoisseur of beauty. The more uninhabitable the better, he had said. Often, he could tell what she was thinking just by the expression on her face or the cant of her shoulders, but just now he seemed absorbed by the drama above him and didn't look at her. He pressed his fingers into his thighs as if playing a score on a piano, his knuckles whitening with pressure.

All around us the world is compressing itself like an accordion, Mary thought. Expressing itself of all its air so when it expands again it can make a tremendous, attention-calling racket.

The rat-box of the imagination, Mary thought.

***

It was when Mary was pregnant that she first became aware of the fly. Who knew when she had swallowed it, how long it had sat quiet in the unfamiliar puckers of her body before making itself known. So many things happened in a day, and she was so absorbed in marking their passage, it was sort of insulting to expect her to remember each little detail. The fly was probably very young, foolish and not used to complicated aerial navigation. Mary pictured its green iridescent carapace and the black hairs that bristled from its thorax. She envisioned its clear, articulate wings held at an angle from its body and thought she could feel when the fly moved blindly forward and when it stopped, scrubbing its face with its folded front legs as it tried to assimilate itself to this new life of darkness and pressure and clutching heat. When the fly came to Mary and passed through her lips as she slept or ate or walked down her sloping yard toward the creek, it would have felt like little more than half of a pill or a morsel of dry bread. It would have caused nothing more than a hitch in her breathing, an involuntary clutching swallow. For her, it was an instant, but think of the fly! It's whole world suddenly pink and convulsive. The wet terror it must have felt as it slid down, deeper down, away from the pleasures of the world and into an unremitting dark. No wonder it was shocked into stillness, stunned as surely as if it had been swatted from the air by her hand, and yet, however long it may have lain dormant, the fly lived and, feeling itself alive, somewhere in the middle months of her pregnancy it cocked its wings, buzzed them once, began to explore. In her second trimester Mary became suddenly and irrevocably aware of the fly's presence. Though she could not quite hear it buzz, she felt it travel.

“Morning sickness,” said Charlie when she came to him and complained of this unprecedented sensation. At this stage, with her stomach beginning to assume the taut ovular shape so fetishized in
the mother-to-be magazines Charlie kept buying and leaving about the house for her perusal, the only article of clothing Mary could tolerate against her skin was an old bikini she had bought for the sailing season some year in her teens when the white sails snapping crisp against the green-gold haze of the bay at dusk had seemed such an ordinary beauty she didn't even bother to observe it. The bikini had always been impractical, always gauche in an aggressive fashion that Mary thought suggested a deliberate deconstruction of both taste and money. It was made of gold lame with more closely woven silver palm trees situated over her nipples and pudenda. It had been quite expensive, she recalled, and even in its heyday had been an article of clothing meant to enhance rather than conceal nakedness. In her altered state, it must be said, the bathing suit was no longer doing any but the most nominal of duties to preserve her modesty. She swelled from it like dough rising emphatically out of its pan.