Mother Box and Other Tales (7 page)

“What are you thinking?” she said to her husband. But it was altogether too late. The chapel was filled with variable shadows, the brilliant cold light dampened by flurries that clumped as they fell past the vaulted windows. Her husband's face wavered in and out of the shadows; drawn, bluing, extraordinary, she realized, but yet the same as all the other faces he had ever had in their lives together. She pictured her husband in his familiar settings, the easy muscle of his younger arm stretched up to grip the doorframe and the way he held his knife to press a bit of meat onto the prongs of his fork. Yes, even in her memories it was still this face—twitching, unsure what to do with its mouth—superimposed over each of the other possible faces as if someone had clipped it out and pasted it messily over the still scenes of their past.

“I don't know,” she said, filling in the gap, but her husband paid her no mind. He stared around him: at the chapel, at the guests, stared at the bride, now advancing down the dais to welcome them, and at the groomsmen, his sons, the smallest and
shyest raising one sleek paw to wave. He stared at their immaculate suits, their sharp immaculate heads, long brows, fine whiskers, the dear points of their ears and their bright eyes. He stared at their russet fur gleaming in the snow-light that poured through windows, the little puffs of breath that rose from their black muzzles, their sharp yellow teeth as they smiled, all of them, dear sons, smiled at their parents, happy to see them arriving at last, standing together in the aisle, happy to see them looking upon them, the seven sons, the brothers, the singular bride.

“This is a shock to me too, you know,” she said. She felt a little peevish now, a little uncertain with the gift clock ticking, the bride advancing and holding out one indistinct, welcoming arm. Her husband beside her suddenly seemed too small for his suit and continued to shrink, dwindled in the aisle. But a number of years had passed for them, too many for their situation to change much now, and she said it in the way she would have said almost anything. What was there left to do but step forward, graciously, into her daughter-in-law's embrace?

No one would have disputed it was a terrible thing. It was a terrible thing. A thing that had happened, that frequently happened to very many people they had individually known and some whom they had known together. Everyone had a story about it. Their voices were hushed. It was not in dispute. There was nothing to dispute. Everyone had something to say.

The same day it happened, they began to update each other. “She's resting comfortably,” one of them said to the other. Some of them would not comment. “I heard she took some soup,” some of them said to others of them who, leaving the tight group and traveling across the building, went on to say it to yet others who nodded, tight-lipped. Someone had seen an omen. On their drive in to work, someone had seen three crows by the side of the road. Another one had had an uneasy feeling for weeks. Mr. Haslip had nothing to say about any of it, but he was a confirmed
bachelor. Mr. Haslip had round eyes, hard as cherries. Many of the women walked around all day touching each other. One would touch another on the small of the back. One would touch another on the hip. The light was very strange. They agreed.

The women there did not sleep easily. At night they turned in their beds and wound themselves into their sheets. Their cheeks were flushed; they breathed heavily. In the cold mornings, everything had receded. Their sheets were cold and stiff as if the heat had gone out in the house overnight. It had already been an unusually cold winter. The women found they were very hungry. They told each other in the lunch room how hungry they were, but they could not bring themselves to eat, no single one of them, and they began to grow pale and taut like candles. Some of the women had husbands and some had lovers. Some of the women's lovers began to hate them, just a little bit. They wanted to hurt them, just a little bit, and that was okay with the women who felt they had fallen somehow out of the order of their lives. This was already the third day. She was still not back to work. “Are you alright?” the women asked each other. One woman took another woman's hands and pressed them to her cheeks. She moved her head all around with the woman's hands on her cheeks, the pad of one thumb on her lower lip, the tips of the middle fingers grazed by her eyelashes. There was a right way to do things and a wrong way to do things. Someone sent an update: she had taken a turn for the worse.

She was on the mend. She was out of the woods. Mr. Haslip was even more an enigma. He strode down the halls with his hands in his pockets. He stroked his long brown hair like a pet. The women could not help but be a little disappointed. Soon, it would be business as usual. Soon, it would be right as rain.
Spring was coming, though the freeze had not broken. Some of the women had dreams in which they all lived together in an ice palace. The beds were made of ice, the chairs and cushions. For food they ate ice cakes and ice apples, ice gravies poured over cuts of ice meat. They looked in ice mirrors. They fixed the ends of their hair with ice combs.

A long time earlier, the company had been young and they had been young. They had not known each other. A terrible thing had happened to some of their mothers, but no one said anything. Somehow their fathers left the house every day and came home every night. Their mothers draped over the rooms like pin-ticking; they steamed as if they had been left to dry hung over the radiator. This was the way things were. Would no one go back? They did not yet know what their bodies were like. Their bodies took them from place to place. Some of them had bad relatives, bad neighbors, bad friends. One of them was punched on the chin and bit the tip of his tongue clean off. Another put his hand up a girl's shirt and rolled her nipple back and forth between his fingers. Someone stroked himself into strange places. He did not fit. Someone's mouth filled with blood. In their dreams they traded bodies with each other. Everything was very rough and nothing quite fit. They heard themselves saying terrible things. They did not even know they knew those words. Their mothers floated up at the top of the room with their feet dangling down. Their fathers jumped and jumped but could not reach them. In the library, at the ends of the long cool rows, were certain books on the subject, but, though they had read them all, no one could remember what was said. Would no one go back?

The women walk around all day touching each other. The small of the back, the hip, the top of the thigh. It makes all the
men angry and productivity goes down. The building has received a new coat of paint. It is a very nice place to work, plenty of natural light. The women put their fingers inside each other's mouths. In the lunch room, Mr. Haslip is eating a cream-cheese sandwich. Where his teeth come together, there is a record of it. There is nothing to be ashamed of anymore. No one would dispute, it was a terrible thing. Mr. Haslip's hair has grown very long. Why has no one noticed this? It lies across his chest like a quick animal. It is longer than that and it lies across his thighs. The women have all grown very tall and distant. They wear gold about their heads as if they were trees with golden leaves. It is hard to see Mr. Haslip's body amid all that hair, but there it is. Mr. Haslip has a beautiful body. It is very threatening. In the lunch room, the women all stand in a line. They really do dislike each other. There is nothing the women dislike more than each other. This is why they are able to be so patient. Mr. Haslip rears up. He is under tremendous mental strain, but he will not tire easily. He is in the prime of his life. It is on everyone's mind, but they have all stopped talking about it. “Oh!” say the women, “Oh, oh, no.” They do not mean it. The ones who have lovers wear bruises around their necks like necklaces of plums. The ones who have husbands are also in fruit. If they think a story has to be unbiased, they are wrong.

Finally, she comes back to work. It has been a long time since anyone said her name out loud. When she hears her name out loud she feels like a child again. It is not that she is better, but she is here. She will not go away. Mr. Haslip says she has done a dumb thing, but it is not her fault. Mr. Haslip has grown enormous and cannot be contained. The women find him very fine, indeed, very sweet. She is confused; she does not recognize anything. At home, her husband is waiting with a bowl of soup for her to eat, but she does not want it. She does not want anything. The light is strange.
Around her head are these golden leaves. Overall, productivity has suffered. The women do not say anything now. It is as if they have donated their mouths to a charity. It is as if they are all making one very high noise, so high that no one can hear it. Someone has punched someone else in the mouth. It is broken. It cannot be fixed. Something is bubbling over. It makes a terrible smell. Someone clean it up. Someone clean up this mess, right now.

Everyone had said there was really a very nice quality to the light that would stream, all year, through the windows in her office. This was before she'd taken the job, before it had even been offered; though, from the beginning of the interview process, she had understood the whole event to be a formality. After all, there weren't very many like her in the country. In the world even, if one were to be frank. She was so specialized. And their needs—their pressing, urgent needs—formed such a tight niche.

In fact, she had not been misled. The light that streamed, all year, through her office windows was thick and nuanced. At times, she even found it a little distracting and swiveled away from the two-way mirror, from her computer screen, to pass her hands in and out of its beams, the noises the children made fading to a disarticulated buzz behind her.

In the lunch hour, her colleagues gathered at habituated times in the spacious room that doubled as a presentation hall when the
pharmaceutical representatives came to peddle their wares. The room was designed to defy the idea of institutions. Not through luxe carpeting or banks of white, chocolate-scented orchids, as had been the case at her previous place of employment, but through embracing the very iconography of the institutional soul, thus rendering it a null prophecy. This had been explained to her by the Director of the facility on her interview tour. He had used those words, “iconography,” “prophecy,” though perhaps not in that particular order, and she remembered looking then as she did now up at the raw girdered ceiling of the lunchroom, with its loops of dangling, color-coded wires, and then over to the riveted steel conference table and the hammered steel door with its improbable, thick porthole window and feeling not as hungry as she had just been, not as sure as she was say that morning of all the possible directions of her life.

One thing the lunchroom and presentation hall had going for it was an emergency exit door that could be disabled and propped open. The man who had shown her how to do this was named Anthony. He was a laboratory technician in the Research and Development sector and thus of a much lower professional standing than she but also, and perhaps thus, not inclined to give a hot fuck, as he said, slipping a piece of computer paper between the tiny diode and its sensor and nudging the door open with his hip. “After you,” said Anthony and she went, sliding through the narrow space between the doorframe and his chest, hugging the wall where she could not be seen from any of the south facing windows as she accepted a cigarette from his pack and listened to the paper crackle fitfully against his flame.

Anthony wore his lab coat out of the lab, which was a breach of protocol, and filled its deep pockets with a number of stupid items designed, she suspected, to entertain the children if he ever came across any outside of their dormitories, classrooms or
other assigned areas. He carried around finger puppets shaped like jungle animals and brightly colored Chinese finger traps and little rubber balls just the right size to fit into a childish palm. Anthony's preoccupation with items designed to keep small hands busy made her suspect he was afraid of the children, at least on a subconscious level, and one day, pressed against the wall on the right side of the door while Anthony pressed against the wall on the left—both tearing up as the spring breeze blew smoke back into their eyes, both ducking involuntarily as a shadow crossed in front of a south facing window—she asked him about his fear, just brought it up as if it were perfectly approachable, perfectly broachable lunchtime chat. Immediately, she was amazed by herself. On the far side of the security fence, a cherry tree was budding in tightly furled profusion and she concentrated on counting its future bloom. One, she counted. Two. Three. Four. Ten.

“I'll tell you something,” said Anthony. “A lot of times, with a woman like you, eventually we will reach the point where there is nothing to it but just to put each other up against the wall.” She stopped counting the cherry buds and looked at Anthony. He had a long upper lip and a short, fat underlip. He looked at her and scrubbed his hand back and forth over the hollows of his cheeks as if he had made them with his hand, as if he was still in the process of sculpting himself. “I'll tell you something else,” Anthony continued. “When that day happens you are going to like it, a lot, but it won't change anything for you and that's why at the end of your story it's always still you. No transformation. No like mystic power or secret identity. Just you. You understand what I'm saying?”

She said she thought she did and looked down at anything, happened upon his lab coat pocket. The nubby arm of a tiger finger puppet protruded over the edge of his pocket like it was waving. Or going under.

“Uh-huh,” said Anthony. He dropped his cigarette onto the walkway and ground it out. “I don't know if you do. I'm saying I'm going to fuck you. It's a simple as that.” Anthony bent down to pick up the Styrofoam box lid he had wedged between the door and the frame as a prop and motioned her in front of him. As she edged by, he reached around her and grabbed her breast, found the nipple through her blouse and her bra and twisted it hard. She gasped and Dr. Rutgers looked up from his turkey club and waved. That afternoon she stood in a reticulated lozenge of light in her office window and counted all the buds on the cherry tree. One hundred and sixty-two, she determined, though the angle was not clear enough to ensure perfect accuracy.

Some time later, she was pressed against her window and noticed the cherry tree was fully immersed in its own foliage. It looked preoccupied, but, she supposed, so do we all. She, for example, could not recall what its blooms had looked like in the height of its season, whether it had been a good year for the tree or a disappointing one. She considered asking Anthony, but he was working hard. He put his hands on her hips to steady himself and worked harder, hurting her, really digging in. Behind them, on the other side of the two-way mirror, the children were being led in some sort of song. They were getting the words wrong, she suspected on purpose, and laughing about it, laughing and laughing. The children's laughter sounded spiny to her—brittle, harsh with edges—but perhaps it was only this way because of the quality of the light which today was even more than usually resplendent, falling as it did over her breasts and then beyond them, paying attention to all the details.