Mother Box and Other Tales (16 page)

“No,” Mary said. “I didn't know anyone there.” It was true, she thought. Just not at the time.

After all that, it was startling to say the least to have the ghost turn up. Out of the clear blue, as it were, though actually the sky was a different color than blue. It was white and, underneath, violet. It was like the white powder that covers the skin of an unripe plum. Mary thought she handled her surprise admirably. She took a sip of her drink and looked at the ghost only out of the corner of her eye.

“Don't you remember me?” the ghost said, pouting and shifting her weight so she could tuck her legs beneath her and bring herself up closer to Mary's eye-line. “Oh, I know you do, silly. It's me? Remember? It hasn't been that long.”

Mary thought she might scream, out of irritation, surely, but it turned out to be a burp which rose from her stomach to the top of her throat and then subsided without finding expression. It had been such a non-descript day, so expected. Mary noticed the ghost's shadow huddled around her knees with the same watery meagerness as Mary's own. The sun was almost directly overhead. It beat along Mary's part and made her hair feel hot and crisp. I should wear a hat, Mary thought, and noticed, with some satisfaction, that her prediction about the ghost's breasts had been correct. The ghost wore a marmalade tank top and a pair of cropped linen trousers. There were deep lines creasing her forehead and her lips were seamed and puckered, impressed with an uneasy orange lipstick. Her ears were still tiny, however; delicate as twin halves of a pistachio shell. Her hair was still bright and blond.

“Would you like a drink?” Mary said at last. She groped around her feet for the bottle, keeping her eyes fixed on the tree line though the children had stopped singing, stopped splashing,
seemed preoccupied with some other, quieter, play. She could find the bottle nowhere. She groped and groped, but all she kept touching was her own ankle. Anyway. It didn't matter.

“That's alright,” said the ghost, waving her hands at Mary as if shooing her away. “I stopped a while ago. Years ago, it would be now. I had an infection, supposed to be nothing serious, but then it was something else and then something else until finally it was just easier to never drink a drop again, and you know me, bull by the horns.” The ghost laughed and clutched Mary's forearm where it lay against the chair's wooden arm, had lain all this time perfectly inert and lax like a dead snake. The ghost's hands were dry. She scratched at Mary's skin with her nails in a friendly fashion and then folded her hands back in her lap.

“Well,” said Mary, vaguely. The children were coming up the hill. Terry came first and Irma following him with all of their clothes rolled into a bundle which she pressed to her chest. Terry had a blue towel slung around his neck. They looked so alike, her children, though Terry of course was taller and there were other obvious differences. They both had oval faces and even features, straight dark brows, definitive noses which came to a fragile crest between their eyes. They were tanned all over as if they had been cut with one swoop of the scissors and not pieced together in so many scraps as other people's children must seem to be. Terry rubbed his hair with the towel and waved.

'And how have you been otherwise?” Mary said to the ghost who had canted her hand over her eyes like a visor and was peering down the hill. Mary took a sip of the dregs of her drink. The missing bottle was bothering her somewhat and she moved her foot, hoping she would strike against it with her heel. It was supposed to be around here somewhere; everything was supposed to be around here somewhere, but Mary knew it was not. It had gone. It was disappeared.

The ghost laughed, a high, twittering laugh, and grabbed Mary's forearm as if for ballast. Mary thought of things she had not thought of in years. The garden, the river. The sound of the trees high on the mountain as they rubbed against each other. “Well, I died, of course,” said the ghost, still giggling. “You're so funny, Mary. But let's see, other than that . . . ” The ghost tapped her teeth as she thought, a gesture Mary had forgotten. Irma dropped Terry's sandals and he waited for her as she picked them up, readjusted her bundles. He really was a nice brother, testing her mostly in reasonable ways. Terry's hair was very long. He claimed to have never once cut it, though Mary thought this could not be right. Still, seeing it now clinging darkly to his shoulders and down his back, it was possible to believe the very tips of his hair were the same thin, silky strands he had as a baby. The alien hair he already had when he was born.

“Well, I got married and then later on I got married again,” the ghost said, nudging her. “Get it? Anyway, we bought a house and then my second husband was kind of an animal nut so we had a lot of weird ones. Different kinds of lizards and for a couple of years this horse named Bobo that my husband would just let come into the house. I swear, he walked around in there like a dog or something. Putting his nose on the countertops, everything!” The ghost was delighted by this, delighted to tell it. Mary imagined a horse wandering glumly through some kind of split-level. She imagined the imprint his hooves would make on the carpeting. “And my kids grew up, of course,” the ghost said, still watching Terry and Irma as they resumed their journey. “You remember them, right? I talked about them all the time.”

“Of course,” Mary said. She remembered very little, she realized. She remembered a sound someone made that she found annoying, some habitual sound of their body, but not what it was or who it came out of. Most of the things she thought of now
hadn't happened yet, or, like the horse, hadn't happened to her. “A boy and a girl, wasn't it?” Mary said.

“No!” said the ghost, rocking back on her heels, preparing to stand. “Oh, Mary, I see you haven't lost your sense of humor. I always did so admire your perspective. But you remember, two girls, Beverly and Dumma. Dumma was this passing fancy I had, I was only eighteen when she was born after all, but later I really came to regret it. Such an ugly, frumpy name and, chicken before the egg I suppose, she turned out to be a kind of ugly, frumpy girl. Oh, and with an ugly spirit too, like her father, not a lot of fun to be around, but what can you do? Your child will always be the strangest of the strangers in your life, don't you think?” The ghost had risen and backed out of Mary's sightline. She was somewhere behind her, the voice drifting away toward the house as if the ghost were wandering toward the nearest bed of dispirited monkey-grass wilting in its solitary clumps. Irma ran forward the last few yards. She flung her bundle of clothes at Mary's feet and collapsed on top of them giggling. Her buttocks were so brown they seemed more like the haunches of an animal downed with a light, white fur.

“No,” said Mary, “that's not what I think at all.” But of course it was. It was just exactly what she thought.

“What?” Terry said. He sat in the grass and stretched his legs out in front of him. Mary could see the bottoms of his tough feet, the hard, yellow calluses at the ball of his foot and his heel. He laid the blue towel across his lap with an incidental air that Mary thought was quite insolent. “What did you say?” her child asked.

When Irma was born, the fly had settled in her midsection, only sporadically agitated into fitful buzzing as if it had landed on its back and was trying to right itself, and finally stilled completely. Mary had not expected this. After so many years, she assumed the
vagaries of the fly to be a condition of her body—something to be attended to like her moles, which often now clustered into premalignant constellations, but nothing to get too keyed up about. One must live, after all. One must travel around and pick things up and put them down again.

However, Irma herself had been something of a surprise. There was a question as to her provenance. In those days, with the fly to anchor her and her time in the facility a matter of polite public secret, Mary was quite the dish. When she arrived on the scene, she felt the scene shift to accommodate her. She had beautiful teeth, small and sharp. She had really terrific calves and long, languid thighs which she enjoyed stroking as one would a disquieted child during lulls in the conversation. They had joined a party of Charlie's peers on a yacht owned by one of the firm's senior partners. There had been champagne and gin and shrimp curled atop tiny triangles of toast. There had been a dessert centerpiece, some kind of layered pudding studded with red and orange dahlias which seemed to leap into the air and burst like a simulacrum of fireworks which was exactly the image they were intended to present. Mary admired the dessert's dedication to artifice. How precisely the dahlia became a firework at its apex and would, as the petals withered and fell, resemble as well the firework at its descent. How cleverly the pallid surface of the pudding, which shuddered with each thud of the beating engine as they motored out of the harbor, resembled in both fact and theory the shuddering surface of the ocean currently surrounding them with an air of preoccupied silence.

It was dusk. The sun was splashing outlandish colors across the horizon. There was a band, a strange combo of drum, guitar and trumpet, playing softly on the aft deck, an open bar doing swift business on the fore and an exclusive company invited aboard—only two other couples, not counting the owner and
his wife, whose names were Chris and Kris and Donald and Pet. Mary had never met them before. They were new, the men up-and-comers, the women having something to do with real estate, or, in Pet's case, the trauma room at the hospital. Appropriately, Pet had a scrubbed look about her as if her face had been washed so many times all her features had been pushed away from one another. Her eyebrows were charming, dark and sparse. Chris and Kris, on the other hand, were horribly unremarkable. They had an indeterminate number of children. Many children, Mary gathered and she imagined the weird dislocation the children must feel at the fact of their parents' names. How unnatural to know at such a young age that there were really no choices in the world, that somewhere a man or a woman named Chris was carving a space into which one would fit. It was oppressive, obscene. Kris was wearing a very pretty claret dress, entirely out of season, and Chris had a round head, round eyes, a round mouth pursed like a rectum. Mary took an instant dislike to them both.

The yacht was captained and crewed by a company of sailors who wore tidy, anachronistic uniforms with gold braid at the shoulders and widely cuffed pants, but it was owned by the senior partner in Charlie's firm who had been a friend of the family since Mary was just a very little girl. He had been a friend of her father's and had come to her childhood house with a different wife and sat out on the patio with her father and the other men smoking and accepting brown drinks in sturdy tumblers. His name was Walter Smit, though he had always admonished her to call him Wally. Once, when she was about six, Wally had picked her up and put her on the top shelf of the closet amongst the hats and gloves. He had shut the door on her in there and Mary had sat quietly, kicking her legs in the total, uncomplicated dark. It had been wonderful. Eyes open or eyes shut, it made no difference. Mary considered that something important was being shown to her: a
mystery of adulthood, a way to still the ticking clock of her mind. Then, Wally opened the door and she saw it was all meant to be a joke. He lifted her down, his hands pinching under her armpits, and guffawed. He ruffled her hair.

She had never forgiven him, not even at her father's funeral where he seemed genuinely disturbed, as she had been, by the funeral home's choice of floral display: waxy bursts of frangipani interwoven with fans of pink gladioli. There was a terrible smell of shoe polish in the room where the service had been held. Several people, including Mary herself, were quite drunk and an elderly aunt from an unknown branch of the family had arrived with an entourage of small black dogs from which she could not be persuaded to part. The dogs sat on the pew beside her, three of them, looking upright and insincere. Wally sat in the pew directly behind Mary and she felt he had looked at her far too much during the service. She had felt the unspoken pressure of his gaze and, sensitive as she knew herself to be to outside influence, knew her experience had been altered by it. Was there nothing, then, that could be savored? Was there no life that could be lived outside the bidden realm? Mary thought she might tilt her head back and say to Wally, from the corner of her mouth, “I don't remember you at all, you know,” but she did not and then the time for it had passed. Then more than a few years had passed, and here she was on Wally's boat.

“It
is
a lot of children,” Pet was saying to Kris. They were on the foredeck near the bar. The crew maneuvered the boat out of the mouth of the bay and into open water and cut the engine. Over the creak of the booms and the whipping of ropes and sails, the band could be heard blatting and thumping, some one of the men energetically calling out encouragement. Mary had no expectations of this moment. She watched Charlie as he dipped his head toward Wally's wife, Dina, who was unusually petite, almost
pint-sized, and had lurid violet nails which she was using to shred the napkin wrapped around her drink. A nervous woman, Mary thought, a woman who is afraid of her body. Mary let the moment wash around her and then the next and the next after that. She inclined against the railing and watched the shoreline pass, ragged with houses and shore-grass, concrete pylons and wading birds.

“There is a special kind of bandage,” Pet was saying, “a very small kind of bandage which we keep in stock.” Kris was pressing her hand against the tanned expanse of her cleavage. The conversation had turned on her. Mary imagined a long gallery full of inordinately small beds. Inside each was a child wrapped in specially stocked bandages which had been ordered long before the child's accident or wasting illness, imagined for them when each child was whole and rosy and in control of all its parts. There was something so honest about a hospital, Mary thought. Planning for the future. She wished she was standing a little closer to Pet so she could tell her as much. She seemed the sort of woman who felt an intimacy with the macabre, a woman who understood the danger of palliative thinking, but she and Kris appeared to be getting along like a house on fire. Charlie took Dina by the elbow and led her into a short, jogging waltz. Chris clapped his fleshy hands together as if they were two hunks of roasted meat he had found at the end of the spit and Donald was nowhere to be seen. Mary felt integral to the scene in an odd way, like a caryatid, but a kind of slouching one. One who resented the weight of the pediment but considered it déclassé to rail against oppression or hoard golden apples, flee before the onslaught of the gods or whatever other sort of the thing a woman was expected to do in myth and architecture.