Mother Box and Other Tales (3 page)

The house was no longer there. The whole area had been leveled to make way for a Palmetto Bank and a parking lot, a Build-Your-Own Burrito restaurant with a flashy lanai complete with taxidermied parrots and cane-benches cemented into the ground. In fact, the only marker of her childhood that still stood was a corrugated-steel warehouse which had housed in its time an auto-body shop, construction materials and then sand dredged from the deep ocean rifts to replenish the beaches after storms. The occasional fiddler crab would stray from the bay's mudflats and set up a territory in those artificial dunes, loiter in the cracked hanger doors with its swollen, belligerent claw drawn up before its eyes. Now the warehouse was a church called the First Holiness Spiritual Center in Christ, but it endured regardless. As did the bay, of course. And the ocean.

Steven stumbled over something. Sylvia heard him swear under his breath, closer than she had thought. “Let's cut through the alley,” Dannie said. “It looks like it's going to rain.”

After her encounter with the first Mrs. White, Dannie had gone back to the store frequently. The season was changing, but in such a begrudging fashion she found it difficult to mark the time, and already her body was no use to her. She was so large her size seemed a condition of her being. Like a blimp, she thought, but not in any old way. Not in the way the pregnancy guide books had encouraged her to figure—full like a fruit, or a pod from which would be squeezed perfectly identical peas—but rather full like a hovering disaster filled with swirling miasmic gasses, waiting for the spark. She explained herself in this way to Mrs. White who
nodded and produced a string of tiny, bone beads, each carved into a rudimentary face, dug-out hollows for the eyes, slashed mouths partially open.

“Lover's chain,’ said Mrs. White and pooled the little heads in Dannie's hand.

“I know what you mean,” Dannie said. “I have never been one to shy away from the truth.”

Oh, it had been, she now realized, some kind of salad days. All around the island, the jessamine had been blooming and falling off, blooming again. Her feet were distant, mysterious conveyances. She heard them as she went, rustling through the dropped bells, shushing in the brittle drifts discarded by the plant's swelling seeds. She and the Mrs. Whites sat in the front window beneath the air conditioning vent and watched cars sweep back and forth on the causeway like water bugs. Occasionally a truck would pass and they could see the bridge dip and sway below its weight, bob for long minutes afterward in a kind of gracile indecision.

“How many, do you think, if the bridge collapsed?” Dannie would ask. “How many if it happened right now?”

And the Mrs. Whites would laugh, one following the other, descending notes spilling creakily out to the corners of the crowded room.

She and the Mrs. Whites sifted through the store's objects. An inventory of unusual shells, carved do-dads, glass balls into which were blown smaller glass balls and inside those: bubbles, pin-points of emptiness which caught the light. Everything was covered with a thin layer of dust, yellowed as if cellophane had been slid over her eyes. She and the Mrs. Whites picked out fabrics from the store's back room. Sateen, pink polka-dotted organdy, a slick of water-shot silk that could be pinned and twisted into bunting, a romantic little spill of lace. It was going to be a party. She and the Mrs. Whites planned to drink mint lemonade
and eat finger foods. Red sausages wrapped in pastry dough, a blonde pudding studded with figs. They would wear dresses, little ankle socks. She imagined the Mrs. Whites fooling around in the sandy loam in their ankle socks, a stiff frill of lace cupping their ankle bones, tasteful plastic plates of cake they could gesture with, should they so choose, toward the dais or the horizon, the little box cozened in flowers and fabrics, the bridge flanked by its attendant gulls dipping and bowing in the evening light. Perhaps there would be an exigency planned for nightfall. Tiki-torches, a fire pit. Why not braziers placed at thoughtful intervals along the path back to the parking lot? Dannie loved the idea of shadows lapping against the stones all the way down the crooked hill. Like the sound of the bay lapping. Little waters, nothing really. An eddy, a shallow. The storm already passed safely out to sea.

And then she had the babies.

Then she had both of her babies.

Both of her babies had then been born.

Sylvia did not understand why they were still talking about this. It had been months and the babies were fine. A boy and a girl, both sleeping in the stroller and healthy seeming if small, their sharp faces screwed up against the fitful light. There had been something wrong with the boy's legs. They had curved in a strange way, the feet coming together below his torso like another set of hands, the way she imagined a baby monkey's feet would bend to clasp. Sylvia had found this charming and the baby boy did not seem bothered by it. In their earliest days, Dannie had invited Sylvia to the house to marvel over the babies, both stretching fretfully in one crib, and the boy had kicked off his blankets and clapped his strange feet together. The look on his face made Sylvia feel he was threatening her somehow, giving her a glimpse of his proud, severe future, but he was an infant—only a few weeks old—and she knew his face bore no indication of
his emotions. Still, Sylvia liked the baby boy. Even now that his legs were encased in braces, the soft bones being bent straight, she preferred him to his sister who was plump and creamy, her joints banded with rosy folds of skin. The girl yawned prettily in the stroller, her mouth as neat as a cat's, and when she pressed her lips back together and tucked her soft chin against her neck, Sylvia thought she could see some shade of the girl's adulthood cross her face, some shadow even of her old womanhood. The crepe neck wrinkling into her collar, the sweetheart chin soft as a dumpling. She would always look this way, Sylvia thought, pretty and vulnerable, soft and tempting.

Sometimes Dannie would call Sylvia over and have her hold one or the other of the babies to keep them occupied while she attended some task of the house. “Just bounce her a little,” Dannie would say. “She likes it when you blow on her head.” But Sylvia was discomfited by the girl child. She found herself constantly fighting the urge to pinch her on the inside of her elbows or the backs of her knees, to take the tiny fold of her ear between her lips and, very gently, bite. It was different with the boy. She respected him. She supposed she felt deferential to him and to what she inferred were his clear preferences. Peas, for example, over pears. The flash of the keys on Dannie's keychain over the sandy cush-cush of the white-noise machine. Both of the babies' eyes had darkened, but the girl's had become a sort of mossy green while the boy's had complicated—a blue shot through with indigo, a gray striated by navy. Like clouds, Sylvia thought, like these clouds lowering now over their heads as they turned down the alley. Like the lid of a bucket levering shut.

Sylvia thought too much, that was for certain. Her mother had always said this about her with something in her voice both of pride and approbation. In church, her mother said this about her to the other mothers as they gathered around the folding metal
table spread with platters of pastel cookies and Styrofoam coffee cups, the rims smeared with equally pastel lip-prints: shimmering pink, oyster cream, chill lavender. Sylvia's own mother had never worn lipstick, and where were the other children? Sylvia scoured her memory for them, but found only her mother in a green serge skirt, her hands thrust into the skirt's deep pockets, rocking back on her kitten heels. A thinker, her mother had described her to the other mothers, but Sylvia had always thought of herself more as a witness. She saw the colors, heard the whispers, felt the damp heat of the breeze. She remembered the nap of the carpet in the church basement, a hard industrial nub, and the coarse, split feel of her mother's knuckles as she reached into her mother's pocket to take her hand. There was so much all around her. So much always going on between the bay and the ocean, the weather, the demands of the seasons one after another, and now her neighbor, Dannie, whose motion lights were too sensitive and struck on at the slightest breeze to shine in her bedroom window, who left the television on for company in her dark house so its blue light gathered and pattered and flashed into the dawn, who thrust her torso over the porch railing and called to her—“Sylvie! Sylvie! Are you there?”—to come over, come over, for a minute come over, come with her on another walk around the block.

When would there ever be time to think about any of this? It seemed to Sylvia as if she had been gathering herself for the effort. As if, for a long time, the materials she would need had been washing into her like flotsam caught in an eddy, and soon she would array them all before her, the stuff of her life, and really
think
about it the way her mother had always assumed she would.

What would her life have been? Ladyfinger cookies and paper plates, a lace embroidered handkerchief, an aquamarine hairnet and jet beads hanging in an unraveling fringe from the flap of a handbag.

What would it have been? A loose screen flapping against the window, the pop of ice fracturing in a glass, the rustle of underskirts, nylon thighs, the clack of short heels measuring up and down a hall.

What else could it have been? The taste of cream fillings, of powdered cheeses, the bite of grass sucked at its sweet root. The raw iron oyster of blood. The brine of the ocean. The thick massy rot of the bay.

The baby boy made a sound almost like a bark and when Sylvia peered over the sun-shade to check on him, she found he had twisted against the strap that held him in place, craned his neck to look up at her. The metal joints of his braces glinted an oily light at his knees and ankles. His bare feet flexed at the end of this armature and looked slightly swollen, tinged purple as if Dannie had cinched the straps too tight across his thighs. It was a shame his legs had lost the ability to gesture, though in the end, she conceded, the braces would make them more useful for walking. And that was what they were for, after all, Sylvia told herself. Was that not what a child's legs were for? At the far end of the alley two cherry trees tossed their limbs back and forth, streaming together in the wind so it seemed the alley did not empty again into the road, but into a wild green cacophony, a frenzy. Behind her, very close, Sylvia heard Steven clear his throat and thought, looking down into the baby boy's fierce eyes, Now Now Now Now Now.

But even as she thought it, she recognized the question. The wind flattened against them in a huge, coughing pant and it seemed to Sylvia as if their shadows danced around them. Her shadow and Dannie's shadow, the babies' hydra shadow craning out of their stroller and Steven's cast before him, so close now it pressed into their own. It was as if the light of the day were a bulb swinging loose from the sky, knocking around crazily,
shining onto all sides of them at once. “Now?” thought Sylvia. “Is it now? now? now?”

And now
this
, is what Dannie was thinking. She was busy, of course, the way everyone had said she would be busy. There was the house to keep up, the babies to bed down. An incredible disorder had taken hold of her refrigerator where, in the bottom of the crisper, something had liquefied into a foul sepia slurry. It also held sway in her linen closet where the towels were neither folded, nor rolled, but smashed into wrinkled wads, the hand towels and bath towels tangling together, the babies' soft swaddling blankets twisting like pastel snakes in and out of the shelves. Soon she would have to go back to work, her leave almost spent, and that would add another layer to her day. The traveling layer. The hurrying layer. Her breasts were hugely swollen, the veins so prominent along their bulging sides it was as if her skin had thinned to isinglass. The smallest thing set them off. A cat yowling in the yard, a particular series of notes played on a record, the call of the garbage men high over the rumbling of their truck as they scoured the blue morning streets, and her breasts ached and leaked. In fact, everything about her leaked. Breast milk darkened the front of her shirts, drool slipped from the side of her mouth as she dropped into an exhausted afternoon nap, blood and other mucous flux slid in streamers from the still lax muscles of her vagina.

It was no different from incontinence, Dannie thought. She was no different from some species of giant, incontinent snail hauling her outlandish, gaudy shell about the house as she picked up a baby, washed a pan, put down a baby, proffered a breast, sipped weak coffee out of a dirty mug, and slicked her airy house with her effluvium. The wet of her trailed in clotted swathes across her floors and furniture, walls and window-glass. Anyone could see it. It was filthy, foul. She was supposed to be emptied
now, the loose skin of her stomach doubling the elastic of her waistband as a reminder, but here she was still filled with the waste-material. Mucous, useless veins, milk and blood.

One of the babies hiccupped with the preoccupied breathiness that was the precursor to a wail and Dannie reached across Sylvia to joggle the stroller. Movement was supposed to be soothing. Well, they were moving. It seemed to Dannie as if all she did just now was move. Around the block over and over again. Turn left and left and left and left, always with Sylvia, always in this strange season—a blooming, bruised, sullen summer that had come to the island months and months ago and seemed in no hurry to leave. And now it was going to rain again. And now something was wrong with Sylvia, always something wrong with Sylvia, who stared ahead of them down the alley with a fixed, strained expression such as someone might wear if they caught sight of a meteorite, impossibly far but getting closer, bearing down over their head.

Dannie looked from Sylvia's face, down the length of the alley and back again. It all looked the same as usual: The chain link fences smothered with honey-suckle and poison ivy. The skeleton of a neighbor's greenhouse project, unglassed, but stuffed anyway with stands of tomato, small furred ferns, pots of herbs left to bloom and seed. Dannie had not been back to see the Mrs. Whites since the babies were born. It seemed a rude disappointment, these two healthy babies in their white cotton onesies, the event they had so looked forward to definitively cancelled, and she felt the least she could do for the old ladies was delay. After all, let's be practical. How long could they have? The Mrs. Whites so bent they were like swamp roots, wavering from the earth only to turn and dive once again. The Mrs. Whites in their dark, dirty store, barely mobile, cleaved in turn by ocean light as it scythed through their window on the way to the bay. And come to think of it,
where was that store exactly? Pregnant, Dannie had navigated as if by tides, a swelling drift pushing her toward the causeway, pulling her back to the little neighborhood, the little house, the little neighbor shut up like a bug behind her little, green front door. Now, Dannie felt a dangerous, unfamiliar volition. It was as if her self, her real self called Dannie, was a skinny, electrified nerve encased in pulpy layers of fat and blood. As if, should the nerve get out of the house, put on pants that buttoned, pack the babies into the complicated struts of their car seats and steer them all out onto a main street, where it went from there could not be predicted. What rules did a nerve have? Did it have any rules, any behavioral stricture other than to feel, to thrum, to buzz? Where would a nerve go if it had all the world in which to foray? How could it ever bring itself to stop?