Mother Box and Other Tales (17 page)

When Wally appeared at her side and laid a hand on her hip, Mary was not surprised. In the intervening years he had grown lean and sinewy, his features starkly disassociated from one another
so the nose and the mouth, the ears and the eyes seemed to have only a passing relationship. He was poised in a golden moment in his life, his age upon him but not yet within him, his body comfortable in solitude. “Planning for the future,” she told him, instead, and he said, “You've become something else. Not a woman. Some other thing. How exactly did that happen?”

From there, it was short order.

She and Wally came together in a sort of a stateroom in the belly of the yacht. They were under the waterline, the water sometimes splashing to the halfway mark of the porthole windows set high on the curved hull where it slopped and foamed in just the way it did in movies that took place in boats, or in the staterooms of boats. Mary had always assumed this was artifice, a stagehand's simple replication of the world, and to find it accurate was disturbing to her. She did not want to look at the window, but there were few other places to look. It was a spare room, for all its attempts at grandeur; a blue velvet coverlet on the bed, brass lanterns hanging from brass hooks on the ceiling and the like. It was very early in the evening, only forty minutes since they left the dock. The sun hadn't even gone down, for pity's sake, and yet, here she was, the velvet pressed beneath her buttocks in a way that betrayed the grain of its artificial fur, and Wally pressed above her in a way that betrayed nothing about him. She could see the shoulder of his lavender shirt and the side of his neck, which was corded and sun-burnt. She could see his earlobe and behind it a trim, descending line of brown and gray hair. Wally made no sounds, which she was grateful for. She didn't want to be distracted from her experience of the moment by the experience itself. Wally climbed over her and moved her body as he saw fit. He bent and popped one of her breasts out of the neck of her dress and stuck it in his mouth. It was like being a big padded doll. Mary imagined herself white and jointless. She imagined
x
's
painted in black paint over the spots where Wally might want to suck or press, enter or pinch and the rest of her a vast, pillowy white, a nominal shape meant only to instruct, a teaching tool. The fly buzzed from her lowest abdomen, explored her, absolved her. She was meant, after all, for a purposeful life.

Afterwards, disappointingly, Wally wanted to talk quite a lot. He described the boat to her, its circumference, the depth of its keel. He described afternoons he had spent on the boat, alone but for the subtle crew, trained to anticipate both his desire and his wonder and provide for him an experience he could have achieved on his own only with great forethought and a directed expression of will. He told her that eel grass, “sargassum,” Wally corrected himself, traveled across unfathomable distances with its tiny, dependent ecosystem accompanying it from the provisional shelter of its shadow. If one eschewed the Jacuzzi and leaned instead over the railing of the lower deck, one could watch the prow of the yacht break through these floating universes with hardly more than a ripple.

This wasn't to say anything, Wally carefully said. He was stroking her in an assiduous fashion, starting at the hollow of her throat and sliding down her breast and over her stomach, over the peak of her hip and down her leg. It was now outside their moment. He had ought to have let their moment end, and Mary turned crossly on her side and stared at the porthole which was washed with a film of water and salt. Mary imagined the salt all crystallizing very quickly as it might in a movie that used technology to explain the wonders of nature. She imagined the salt building up like a plug over the porthole and making a sound as it grew like the mouth of a bag pulling shut. Wally continued to stroke her side, adjusting to her new position with a break in neither his motion nor narrative.

“I've come to an agreement with myself,” Wally said. “I wish other people would intuit that and respect it.”

It did not seem to Mary that he was talking to her, but she felt very irritable all of a sudden. The porthole irritated her and also the way the brass lanterns swung out of rhythm with each other, though one might reasonably suppose they were set in motion by the same instigating event. She was irritated with Wally's stroking which was an unthinking action of his hand and not an expression of either mind or will. It was beginning to feel on her skin the way a very cold piece of metal pressed against the sensitive skin of an inner arm or thigh feels like an affront to the spirit rather than the flesh.

“Why don't you just tell them?” Mary said. “Illumine them. Seek clarity.” She felt peevish and spiteful. Wally stopped stroking her side but left his hand on her hip, just the tips of his fingers tented on her hip like the legs of a spider suspending its explicit body.

“You little thing,” Wally finally said. His tone was amused, but it was clear to Mary that this was now an encounter rather than an affair. The boat heeled and the brass lanterns swayed above them. Wally sat up and buckled his belt. “What are you, do you think?” Wally said. He was musing. Mary rolled over again and considered his profile, watched as he absentmindedly pushed the grain of the velvet back against itself, stroked it smooth. “A fox?” Wally asked, standing and slipping on his shoes. “A mouse? A squirrel?”

That was an interlude, a brief one. Mary was as comfortable with brevity as she was with long, static sprawl. She was actually quite a flexible person, mutable even, agreeable to all sorts of propositions that most people did not have the imagination to proffer. But then the fly began acting up again, buzzing with the kind of fervor she had not felt in years. And then, a few months later, there could be no doubt as to the cause and Charlie was cautiously optimistic, then overjoyed, then settled into the grim
wait as she, Mary, walked the long halls of their house in her alltogether, requested that their son, now seven, keep out of her sight as much as he could.

Mary did not mention the encounter on the yacht to Charlie. Charlie was doing just fine as he was. When Mary and Wally had ascended from the lower decks, Wally pointing out the finer points in the wood detailing in what Mary wished she could interpret as a cover, Charlie had been dancing with Dina again, or still, a little parody of a jig he was apt to do when he was struggling through, barely making it. He suffered from a lack of competition, was all. He suffered with the warm, sincere suffering of a man who is surrounded by paper cut-outs. Charlie parried and lunged, but even when struck no one around him would condescend to bleed. Really, he was too warm blooded for the world he had been born into. He expected too much affinity from his fellow living creatures, too much regard. They had talked for awhile about getting a pet, some animal to inhabit their living quarters in a fashion wholly unlike the way in which they themselves inhabited the space and thus, instructively, to give Terry an object lesson. To whit: one is not the world but rather one is in it. Additionally: one cannot know, not for sure.

Nothing had ever come of it. They lived in the country, surrounded by acreage in which all manner of animals lived abbreviated lives. Further, they lived not too great a distance from the suburbs where other sorts of animals, those rendered unfit for the forest by a learned capacity to calculate, often went missing and straggled, travel worn and touchingly suspicious, up the slope of their long driveway to lie at the front door. But Terry showed no interest in any of them. Even the box turtles that trundled out from under the hedges to lurch through his elaborate architectural studies, fashioned from rocks and twigs and repurposed swizzle sticks, were greeted with little more than momentary exasperation
and gentle relocation. The problem was not that he was a cruel boy. Perhaps there was no problem at all. He was not a child that wanted: not companionship, not accolade. He was a child that existed, often sitting still for long hours on the lawn or in a corner of the house without demonstrable intent or purpose. Terry did not regard his parents or suffer them. He had no need of something to nourish and was frequently misunderstood. Understandably, Mary conceded, Charlie was anxious about how he would react to a sibling.

“He's sensitive,” Charlie said. “Too sensitive by far. He'll feel neglected. He'll feel resented.”

“He won't,” Mary said and inside her the other child, who was maybe a fox or a mouse, who might have the face of an aging man forming in the translucent slosh of its bones, turned in a slow circle.

“Well,” Charlie said, “he might feel replaced, then. He's been the only one for so long. He might feel abandoned.”

“He won't,” Mary said, and turned away from the window where Terry could be seen squatting in near perfect stillness at the base of the forsythia. Every now and then, he would reach out and pat a hummock of mulch, but his attitude was not that of a child immersed in a private fantasy, just as it was neither that of a child waiting nor a child bored. To Mary, he seemed as if he was enacting a prescribed circumlocution. There was room for some variables, but on the whole Terry only did what it was inevitable he should do. He never quite seemed to arrive in a place, say at dinner or at a particular spot in the yard, but it was clear that he traveled. Every moment, so far, her son had spent traveling.

“He'll go on,” Mary said. She felt as if she did not know Terry, but she certainly knew of him. She felt as if she had observed him from a great distance and made little annotations regarding his nature every moment of every day since she had returned
from the far north and once again taken up the measure of her, and the fly's, life. Perhaps that was mothering, she concluded. It was possible, was it not?, that all along she had been doing it exactly right. Often at night, Mary would go to Terry's bedroom and stand next to the door with her back to the wall. Should he wake up, she would not present to him a looming shadow backlight by the dim ambience of the hallway, but rather only a slightly altered passage in the wall, a shape his eyes would have time to become accustom to before his intellect stirred itself to either acceptance or alarm. This was how she would always like to be with her child, with her children, now; yet Mary knew there were many other ways in which women became mothers. Some of them, like Kris, Mary assumed, placed a series of objects in front of their children and watched intently to see which they would choose. According to that first choice—the fat little hand attracted to the glint of the mirror, the warmth of the coal, the shape of the knife—a series of other objects would be laid in a line. This would guide them in their particular direction, a simulacrum of cause and effect created by the mother as was both her duty and her right.

As a very young woman, Mary might have thought from this model that the mother was a guide bringing the child through life and delivering them to death as a jungle guide might bring a party to a particularly arresting waterfall, or a cave guide to a formation of rocks that looked just exactly like rashers of bacon and sunnyside eggs. However, there was the example of her own mother, a woman who was whittled away by her belief in order and eloquence until she assumed a paradoxically disorderly form, a shape like a root turning in the long darkness, crabbed by rock and clay. But that was such a confusing way of stating things. After all, her mother had only been a woman who died. It was a cancer, one of the usual ones. When alive, her mother had liked certain things, cut flowers, aperitifs, and when she was dead she had ceased
to desire any of these things. All the rituals Mary's mother had created in her life came to an untidy end, though her daughter continued to enact them in a painful confused way, returning to certain rooms at certain hours, carrying before her certain objects as if under a spell of her body which compelled her and compelled her though there was no one there to apprehend or acknowledge. Mary's mother had brown hair which she wore cut into a shape that rose from the back of her head like a rising cloud of dust in the road. She had long, intelligent fingers and there was little to be said of her, little time in which to have said it.

Mary herself had grown very thin. The organ in which the child slept rose from her body as if rooted directly in her bones. Her joints articulated themselves with a disturbing fervor. It seemed to Mary as if her son might be awake when she entered his room and stood against his wall. It was something in his stillness, his very still silence, but she said nothing, touched nothing. She was neither the mother who would lay a trail nor the mother who would leave a void. She was the mother who observed. It was not an abnegation of the self so much as it was a reallocation of resources. Her son shifted in bed and made a wet sound with his mouth. Her daughter shifted in her body, perhaps already transfixed by the pull of her brother's gravity, and made no sound.

Mary's other passenger, the fly, was a frantic thing. Its life had been subsumed by a moment of inattention. In spite of the tenacity of her previously held beliefs, the fly held no intent. It was an accident, a happenstance that had ridden in her body all the long years of her life doomed by its belief in its own singular existence, seeking pattern in the fluke rather than escape. The fly buzzed in her throat, but Mary did not choke and, after some time of dry swallowing, she felt it descend to the level of her womb and lost its particular feeling within the feel of her daughter, the long slow dreaming that was happening there. The moon rose over the tree
tops and crossed her son's window as small and blind as the eye of a fish long jellied-over on the fisherman's ice.

Mary was tempted to tell all this to the ghost but somehow, whenever the ghost was around, she found herself discussing more topical matters. The ghost did not seem bound by any particular convention, but arrived more readily at mealtimes and was predictable to the point that Mary began to set a place for her at their table. She told Mary that she had been quite a cook in her time. “In my time, for my daughters,” the ghost said, “I was known to cook a fish in parchment paper cozened all about with sprigs of dill and tiny baby carrots I would buy at one particular market in spite of the fact that it was out of my way. I made bread from scratch, whipped cream from scratch. You remember how I liked to keep busy, how I liked to fully apprehend my days?”