Mother Box and Other Tales (9 page)

She said, “I'm pregnant.”

He froze. His mouth fell open, revealing a yellow smear of yolk in a way that she found very comical and she snorted with laughter. Then he reached for her across the table. His hands cast great winged shadows on the wall and the light of the oil lamp skewed the proportions of his face, making his eyes seem huge and dark, his mouth a wet hole. Oh, but he was delighted! She had never seen him happy like this. He laughed. He came around the table and knelt at her feet, reached for her stomach with one hand, gripped her thigh with the other. Laughing, his mouth was wetter, his eyes hidden. She looked down at the top of his head, his face buried now in her lap where she could feel the hot gusts of his laughter. His body seemed to hulk in its skins, in his
clothing
she reminded herself, and it shook and quivered, his hand pinching up her thigh, his mouth wet against her stomach, kissing her kissing her, hot and wet. A baby! A baby! A baby!

“I will not have it,” she shouts. She stands, shakes him off. The room seems to contract around her, a ring of muscle tensing. It is dark and hot. She cannot see; she cannot. “I'm getting rid of it. I will not have it.” Because who is he, after all, to be so pleased at what she has done and what she will do next? She presses the top of her skull with her fingers and imagines her belly the same shape, with the same tensile glow. She imagines her body going on and on without her, building something, massing itself to a terrible effort and she left alone in her dark room, incidental. She drops the teacup and it breaks in half on the floor like the two sides of an egg. Scalding tea leaps up against her leg and around her in the whickering shadows something moves very fast. Inside herself, she feels a deep, irrevocable tearing.

All that follows next happens in darkness. She wakes in his bed and he is kneeling beside her, a washcloth in his hand. She wakes on her hands and knees in a tilted hallway (her hallway? behind that distant door, her bath? her mirror? her robes?) and feels a wetness between her thighs. When she puts her hand there it seems to come away sticky and green. She wakes to his face, concerned. His face, alarmed. His wet eyes, his strange expressions. What is the sound of his voice? She wakes to a pressing pulse, on all sides a tightness as if all the space in her is being squeezed out. The light is red, pounding. She wakes and she is alone, out in the garden. It is night and very still. High above, the moon is a sliver, so white it is almost translucent, almost not there at all. Her body feels wrung, each muscle stretched and sore as if she has gone through a tremendous struggle, but when she tries she finds she cannot lift her head, and when she concentrates she realizes she cannot feel her arms and legs. At the center of her is a great hollowness. A wind comes up and from the corner of her vision she sees the spiteful poppies toss their heads.

“I have been stepped on,” she thinks. “A boot has come down.”

Already the insects have found her. Next to her, something dark and shapeless unfurls and begins to cry.

When she stopped looking around so much, everything got a little better for her. For example, previously on her short drive to work in the mornings she would look to one side and see the ambulance men parked in the drive-through eating their egg sandwiches. To the other side, she would look and see a group of school children all wearing unseasonably heavy coats with oversized fur-trimmed hoods. With the hoods pulled up the children looked like ecumenical bears, gathered together to consider questions of portent and consequence. Hoods down they look skinned, raw. Perhaps they were waiting for a bus? Every day she drove past too quickly and was concerned for their safety, then hers.

A little further on, still looking around, she might see a hawk perched severely on the Baptist church steeple; a Giant Sale banner snapping loose of its eyelet and rippling on the wind; a waft of plastic flowers blown from the cemetery to the bustling gas
station across the street; a woman in a pink skirt taking very long steps.

Previously, when she went out at night, she would continue this behavior, looking at the bartender and the booths, at the people in the booths, the shadows behind the people, looking at the corners, back and forth from corner to corner until she was no longer sure which way she had come in. She had headaches and body aches. She had mind confusion and confusion over the ordinary things outside of her mind like house keys and terra-cotta pots. She was capable of looking back and forth between a green shoe and a stand lamp, a chicken breast and a tea pot, a cassette tape and a thick, blue pen, a loop of wires and a bundle of lilies for hours and hours. Clearly, something had to change.

At first, she did not look around simply by not moving her neck. There remained the question of her eyes, but in less time than you'd think she had conquered them too and stared only straight ahead. She had always been told she had beautiful eyes. They were an uncomplicated color, demanded very little from their audience. If one were lost in her eyes it would only be for the afternoon. Nothing to panic about, nothing to report back on. With her new way of holding her neck and her straight-ahead eyes, people seemed to find her disconcerting. They looked at her eyes and looked away, looked and away, looked and away, each time a little more startled, more angry. Under her gaze, people developed a tendency toward extreme agitation. They would fidget and pluck at their clothes. Soon they were hopping from foot to foot like apes. They hunched their backs and threw their arms up into the air exactly like apes, but of course she did not know this because she did not look. For awhile this was the perfect solution and many things fell into place in both her emotional life and in her career.

Then, her boyfriend, a recent acquisition, began to complain that there was something different about her.

“What is it?” she asked. They had gone out to dinner and she was eating a plateful of mussels. She could hear the ligaments creak as she pressed the shells flat and she held each mussel up before her eyes and studied its saffron sheen. She was a little worried about eating a bad mussel—this was not the best restaurant and they were far from water—but each one slid into her stomach and settled there in a wholesome, briny, companionable way.

“I don't know,” her boyfriend said. “Maybe it's like you're thinking about something really awful. Something that if I knew about it would make me uncomfortable and ashamed. Maybe it's like you're doing it on purpose. I don't know.” Her boyfriend looked down into his soup. Across the restaurant, a band was setting up on a little raised stage and they crossed back and forth through her vision carrying cables and amplifiers, guitars and drum-sets, accordions and a kazoo.

“I'm not thinking of anything,” she said. “I'm thinking about mussels.”

But her boyfriend said, “I wonder what kind of music this is going to be,” and turned in his chair so all she could see was the back of his head.

Later, they decided to go ahead and have sex anyway. It turned out the band had a large local following and the restaurant quickly filled up with people who passed drinks over her head and dipped the edges of long, embroidered scarves into her boyfriend's soup. The mussels were not off, but still she felt like something had happened. She had just a bit of fogginess around the edges of her mind and didn't feel up to trying the thing her boyfriend wanted to try, not right then, not without some time to think through the logistics.

“It's okay,” her boyfriend said, “just get on top.” But then the bed began to make an unpleasant noise and, because she was
looking at the wall directly above the headboard, she noticed they had chipped the paint a little there and after all this was a rented house.

“Okay,” her boyfriend said, “I'll be on top.” The situation became awkward. The bed continued to make its noise and one of the pillows had been carelessly arranged so that it kept falling down over her eyes. Her boyfriend went on for a while, much longer than usual, and when she pushed the pillow back so she could see the place on his neck which she liked, she noticed the vein that usually beat there so steadily was swollen and erratic in a way which was clearly indicative of stress.

Finally, her boyfriend rolled over and lay next to her. Together, they looked at the ceiling.

“I wish you would just stop thinking about it,” he said.

“Thinking about what?” she said, but he pretended to be asleep.

The next morning, she got up while her boyfriend was still sleeping and got ready to go to work. She brushed her teeth and looked at her eyes in the mirror. She chose her shoes by touch and ended up with alligator pumps, which would do just fine, and left very quietly, locking the door behind her to keep her boyfriend safe.

On the way to work she looked only ahead. She saw the road which had recently been repaved and glistened a little. It was an unusually foggy day and the sky pressed against the road in a way that made its newness more noticeable and the particular oldness of the sky, by comparison, a cliché. The road had been repaved so recently—it occurred to her it must have been in the night while she slept—that the road crews had not yet painted the abrupt yellow dashes and strict yellow lines which would normally tell her how to go, so she centered herself in the middle of the street.
Straight ahead the street was like a lavish, glistening tongue—unhealthy, too full of itself—and the sky was the low vault of a pallet afflicted with some kind of cottony disease. She decided to take a break, though she was almost to work, and pulled into the gas station for some gas and maybe a Danish to eat after lunch.

When she got out of her car her alligator pumps made echoing taps against the ground. The fog here was much thicker and she concluded the gas station must be situated in a natural depression. She could see only the roof of her car and then, when she turned, the pump directly in front of her. Even the trash can and windshield cleanser stand had been reduced to vague outlines and the gas station itself was invisible except for a neon sign advertising a brand of gum which glowed red through the fog. CHEW SNAP said the sign and suddenly she realized she wasn't alone.

Looking straight ahead, she couldn't see who had joined her. She sensed there were many bodies and assumed a kind of density and compactness to the bodies that was confirmed when something padded jostled her arm.

“Who is it?” she said. “Who's there?”

But there was no answer.

She asked again. “Who is it?” she said. “Who's there?”

Her voice sounded to her as if the fog had somehow gotten inside her throat. She couldn't tell how far it had carried, if it had carried at all beyond the chambers of her throat, and wondered how she would ever have been able to tell this. What was the empirical standard for how far one will be heard? And what, in that same vein, is the furthest limit after which one will no longer be heard? In other words, she thought, what are my boundaries? What keeps me in?

“Who is it?” she said for the last time. “Who's there?”

But it was the children, of course. And, as there were a great many of them, she was quickly overwhelmed.

In the nineteenth year of her abandonment, Penny Linden began to talk to the man in the garden. This was not the first time Penny had seen the man. She could not remember exactly the first, but a series of images came readily to mind when she considered the issue: a figure fading back into the deep cool underneath the pine trees, the shadow of a bowler hat falling across the inset patio sundial. These were from the early years of Ollie's absence, before she began to consider it abandonment. No one else's husbands had come home. Later, the man in the garden became more precise. He was tall. He wore a neat gray suit, somewhat old fashioned, and a bowler hat which Penny considered an extravagant eccentricity. The man carried a walking stick and his hair waved in a lush, oiled way that made each curl seem purposeful and intent. One curl unspooled neatly in the center of his forehead and the man brushed it aside with the back of his wrist as he stooped to inspect the bell of a foxglove or tap a loose patio tile with the tip of his stick.

When Penny first met Ollie he had curls too, but they were tight and held close to his head like a fleece. It wasn't psychologically difficult for Ollie to shave them off because they were so close to his head and so tight they did not seem like separate expressions of his body, but more like a helmet, something that could be removed at will rather than amputated. Ollie had to shave them off to fit on his real helmet. “There can be no room between the skull and the helmet, except for padding,” he told Penny. She thought later she must have found him dashing saying that, holding his helmet under one arm while the evening sun drowned in the whiteness of his head and neck. The rest of Ollie was bronzed from hours of drills on the base, then weekends at home with her in the garden. There was something menacing about the whiteness of his head and neck. It was like a weapon and Penny felt sorry for all the enemies he would swoop down upon bearing that whiteness.

At that time, they were putting in a vegetable patch. Ollie had a book with many facts about vitamins and minerals. The garden was to be organic because Ollie's book also had facts about pesticides and pictures of malformed infants which Penny looked at in the kitchen at night after Ollie had gone to bed. In one picture, the little boy had been born without a face. Where his face would have been was an expanse of shiny skin, like a hardboiled egg, unbroken except for two slits which Penny assumed were his nostrils. The rest of his body was perfect except for a blank, smooth place where his genitals would have been. “Oh, now,” thought Penny, eating a sour organic tomato over the sink and looking at the picture. “Now, that's going too far.”

Ollie planted marigolds around the vegetable patch to discourage the fire ants and he saved eggshells from breakfast, crushed them and mixed them with the ashes from her ashtray. Then he dissolved that mixture in water and sprayed it over the
soil around the plants to keep off slugs. He made another water soluble solution out of cayenne peppers and sprayed it on the tomato plants to protect against worms and deer. “You shouldn't smoke,” he told Penny, “but if you are going to, at least there is a useful application of the product.”

After Ollie was deployed, Penny took down all the maps of Northern Africa that Ollie had framed and hung in the living room for her to reference while he was gone. She traced the continent's outline with her finger and then blew smoke on it. She put the maps away in a drawer and went into the kitchen to lean against the sink and look out at the garden. Fireflies floated up between the tomato vines and she smoked a cigarette and said to her stomach, “You go right to hell.” It was an experiment, but she wasn't sure of the hypothesis. Inside her, the baby was a round, self-satisfied stone, like a river stone that has rolled in the water for a long time without tiring of the sport. “Go right to hell,” Penny said again and laughed with the baby who pushed up under her hand like a stone kicked from the bottom.

After Ollie was deployed, Penny had to think of things to do for amusement. For a while she tended the garden. She had a large straw hat to wear. She also had a leopard-print cowboy hat. The cowboy hat was fuzzy and thick. Her mother had bought it for her as a joke when Ollie was transferred to the Alabama base, but Penny wore it sometimes in the garden. It made her head sweat and cast a terrible shadow across the sundial. At that time, Penny's shadow was always terrible, so lumpy and full of unexpected demands. Still, she would not turn away from herself and when she stood on the sundial path to find out with her body whether it was one o'clock or closer to one thirty, she was not bothered by the shadow that seemed to move through the pine forest behind her.

After Max was born, Penny began to go to the grocery store for amusement. Max rode in a cloth sack that Penny could tie
around her neck. The sack was designed especially for babies and had holes through which Max could dangle his legs. It was blue and on the front, picked out in lemon and navy stitching, was a large, yellow duckling who was saying Qvack! Qvack! and flapping his stubby wings. The baby sack was another gift from her mother and Penny was disturbed by the singularity of the duck. Was it supposed to be a stand-in for the baby? For any baby? Were a baby and a duckling actually the same thing? This seemed possible to Penny. Max, at least, looked like no one she had ever met and she could imagine calling him Bear or Black Snake with equal ease, but it didn't seem polite for the sack to point this out so publicly. There was also something unsettling about the duckling's insistent Qvack!, but Max seemed to like the baby-sack and when they walked down the aisles of the supermarket he reached out toward the shiny cans of peas and white potatoes and tiny ears of corn.

In this way, many years passed. Penny let the vegetable patch overgrow its marigold border. She neglected to make water-soluble cayenne mixtures to spray on the tomatoes and when she planted in the spring she did so by filling a plastic bag with mixed seeds and tossing them wildly into the air. The garden gave way entirely to ornament. Fat, striated eggplant grew up among the pansies. Cyclamen and violets trembled in the fierce shade of a pepper bush. The sundial path, which Ollie had lined with butterfly bushes and silky lamb's ear, was overgrown by a rampant sweet pea vine and the wrought iron numbers were gentled by a thick layer of moss and made useless by the prevalent shadow of sapling pines.

After the fourth year of Ollie's absence, other women's husbands began to come home to the base. Penny would hear the parade for the husbands winding down the road past the house and when she put Max in the car to drive to the grocery store she had
to turn on her wipers to clear confetti from her windshield. That same year, she began to attract cats. They seemed to like the garden and many of them would come across the fields and over the hot road to lie in the cavernous hollow of her forsythia or stretch out on the patio tiles. Most of the cats did not like the house, or Penny, but some would come inside and then went in and out as they pleased through a little swinging flap Penny installed in the bottom of the kitchen door. Penny named the cats that would come inside things like Mulligan and Cooper. The names were interchangeable and she did not distinguish any one cat from the number of cats who padded through the kitchen or haunted the forsythia waiting for birds to come to the feeder. The only cat Penny consistently recognized was a yellow tom with a missing eye who she called Qvack! Qvack! and let sit beside the sink while she did dishes so he could consider the faucet water. Occasionally, Qvack! would dip the tip of his paw into the faucet's stream and then shake it in the air above his head. He would look up at her with his one eye as if sharing the results of this experiment, or asking her to take a note, and Penny would rest her thumb between his ears.

Also in this time Max grew older. He did not like the cats and shut his door quietly against them at night. He also did not like the grocery store as much and began to find his own ways to amuse himself. Once, Penny came home with two bags filled with shiny cans of baby carrots and found Max in the living room with all the maps of Africa and the shifting Mediterranean spread out in front of him. He had stolen one of her cigarettes from the pack she kept on top of the refrigerator and was smoking it while he examined the maps and wrote the names of countries and their major rivers on a sheet of paper. All of the country names and river names listed neatly together looked very attractive to Penny. She thought of the great, pink gums of a hippo she had seen in
a magazine, the hippo yawning in the river, its stubby peg teeth streaming water. She was going to tell Max about the hippo—how it too was in order, was free not to concern itself with what came next—when he turned around and saw her in the door with her bags, Qvack! sitting next to her and touching the back of her calf with his tail. Instead, Penny said, “You shouldn't smoke a cigarette in the living room, Max,” and went into the kitchen to put the cans away. That evening, sitting in the garden, Penny thought that now Max did look like people she had met, though which ones and under what circumstances remained a mystery. He also looked a little like that boy with the hardboiled egg instead of a face. Penny considered that knowledge until it was very dark in the garden, but not so dark she couldn't see a shape bending over the bed of verbena, or smell their sudden wounded scent as the figure clipped a bouquet and held it up to his indistinct nose.

One day, all the men who had been on Ollie's mission were home. Many had come in time for their parades. Some had arrived for more somber processions, the headlights on their processional cars overwhelmed by the blazing summer light of the fields and road, but all had reported for their accounting. Penny imagined the list she knew existed somewhere on the base. It was not a long list, no more than three pages, but it was tidy, squared away. Each name was followed by some fact or other, except for Ollie's name which, Penny felt, had all along been unfactual, bare.

There had been a series of phone calls, by turns both official and silent, from the base to Penny and from Penny to the base. Finally, an officer had come and sat on Penny's sofa with his knees held tightly together and his hat placed precisely on top of his knees where he could hold it without appearing to be holding anything. “I'm sorry, Mrs. Linden,” the officer had said, “but we will have to assume.” The officer was not very old but had bands of gray hair that bristled elegantly at his temples. Penny supposed
that she had met his wife at a potluck somewhere. She had a faint impression of Spanish rice and pigs-in-a-blanket, a very tan woman with lip-gloss in an unfortunate shade of tangerine. “This is still a human business, Mrs. Linden,” the officer had said. He cleared his throat a few times and stroked the top of his hat with his index finger. “Sometimes the only thing left to do is assume.”

Penny had invited the officer to stay for dinner. “We are having a macaroni casserole,” she had said, “It's my son's favorite,” but the officer had already placed his lovely hat on his head and straightened up by the door. “I am very fond of your hat,” Penny had said and the officer shook her hand for a minute and looked over her shoulder at Max who was sitting in the corner. When he was gone, Penny sat on the sofa with a tall glass of limeade. Max went into the kitchen and came back with his own glass and a bottle of gin. He poured some gin into his limeade and held the bottle out to Penny. This was the summer Max was sixteen and in the dusky light that slanted through the blinds his face looked stretched and fervent. Penny found herself always wanting to touch his forehead to check for a fever.

“I think you have to put it in the oven before it actually counts as a casserole, Mom,” Max had said, crunching an ice cube. He poured some more gin into both of their glasses and later got up and turned on a lamp.

Another day, Penny came back from a trip to the store and mistook the house. She drove past it in one direction and then again in the other before turning around in a neighbor's drive and counting the telephone poles to her own gravel driveway. In front of the house was the familiar crab apple tree with its hard, green apples. The house itself had a familiar rainspout pulling away from the roof, a familiar missing brick crenellating the chimney. It had the architecturally significant turret that many base wives had commented on standing on the walk with their empty casserole dishes
or leaning against their husbands in the post-potluck dusk with a half empty bowl of guacamole balanced on their other hip, saying, “Well, I hope it's a girl. She'll live up there like a princess,” while the cicadas emoted from the tops of the surrounding trees. Eventually, though, it was Penny herself who lived in the turret. She moved Max's crib up against the wall and later, when he slept alone and through the night, Penny repainted the funny ducks and piglets onto the walls of the master bedroom downstairs so Max could have more space. She didn't feel like a princess, but the turret looked out on the garden and the pine barren behind the house. In the mornings, Penny would wake only when the light crested the tops of the pines. She would stand in the window of the turret watching the wind sweep through the tips of the trees like a hand carelessly raking through hair.

It was the turret that finally made Penny decide she was in the right driveway, but the house itself was an entirely different color than when she had left that morning. In the morning it had been a chalky antacid kind of blue that faded into the blue morning shadows and was peeling in places to show its elemental brick. Blue with black shutters. Now, the house was a creamy peach with bright green shutters. It looked like the lovebird Penny had often admired in the pet store window in town. The bird had bright, vacant eyes and terrible, wise feet. Sometimes, Penny would go in the shop and the owner would let her put her finger in the cage for the bird to grip with its foot while it admired itself in its little looking glass. Penny thought there was something about the lovebird's peachy head and bright green mask that made it look like a baby, a poor baby all dressed up by some mother who had purchased too many cute hats. The bird liked to sharpen its beak on a cuttlefish block while it held onto Penny's finger and at such times she was swept away by a complex series of pleasures and the pet store owner would ask if she needed him to hold her purse.