Mother Box and Other Tales (2 page)

The conversation they were having was about Dannie's recent pregnancy. How to plan at once for a birth and a funeral. Her friend pushed the double stroller and, at ten o'clock, the day had already become threatening.

Recently, Dannie had met a woman named Mrs. White. This in itself was not remarkable, but the woman's first name was Rose. She was an old woman, thrice-over a widow, and she worked in a shop selling jeweled hatpins in the shape of bumblebees, scallop-shell treasure chests, tiny slivers of the original cross suspended in a ruby tear and all sorts of other charms. The shop was owned by Mrs. White's friend, another Mrs. White whose first name was Lily. Dannie was very taken with this story. In it she heard something like a prophecy, though her friend's name was Sylvia and they hadn't known each other very long.

They had gone around the block several times already. Their houses sat side by side in the middle of the island. Two miles
in one direction was the bay, two miles in the other the ocean, and the neighborhood went downhill very quickly. On their walks, they turned left four times: once at the red-brick Baptist church, again at the house with new copper guttering, third time at the bungalow with bed sheets for curtains and lastly at Sylvia's house, her garden newly planted with pansies, her eaves in need of paint.

They came to the corner and started again up the hill. Dannie considered her own house. Sylvia's house's twin, but freshly painted—an inner-sanctum pink, she liked to think of it, while Sylvia's house was garish, a squawking green. On Dannie's porch was her wooden swing, her red table. Also two plastic baby swings, side-by-side, so her babies could dangle their fat legs above the rhododendrons. Truly, she had been through it!

“You tell me what you would have done,” she said to Sylvia. “Is it possible not to be ironic in that situation?”

But Sylvia was not fully listening. She was aware they were being watched, a man sitting on the porch of the blue Federalist house which had been sectioned into apartments, smoking a cigarette. Oh, he was harmless enough. What was his name? Steven? But it changed the way Sylvia thought of herself on this walk, changed the way she listened. She was aware of her bun, greasy and too tight. She was aware of how wide her friend's buttock had become, rolling extravagantly under her black yoga pants, and the way no one would think, though she tightened her grip on the stroller, what she was pushing around was her own. “I am a stork,” thought Sylvia, but it was unclear even to herself if she was referring to her playground nickname or referencing the myth of conception her mother had insisted on during Sylvia's puberty and returned to with an almost religious fervor in the facility they had picked out together during the early years of her mother's decline.

Dannie had met the first Mrs. White through sheer chance. She had been to the bedding shop. She had just replaced her
bedding and there was something complicated about the pillows, a color scheme she couldn't get right. She needed a visual aid, and then there she was, bawling in the parking lot, in her sixth month and already big as a house, as she liked to say. Dannie thought of her house, all the rooms freshly painted, the long cool hallways and the speckles of paint she still had to sand off the floorboards and would sand as soon as she could find the time. Also the underside of the windowsills to paint, the blinds to dust and straighten, a loose washer on the kitchen faucet, a strange smell wafting up the drain in the tub. A house is as bad as a baby, she liked to say. Maybe as bad as two babies, which brought her back to the point. Really, Sylvia slunk along. A front wheel of the stroller was turning blindly, rattling over the occasional divots in the sidewalk. She gave it a little kick to straighten things out.

“I mean what?” Dannie said. “Even just picking the flowers. Carnations? Baby's Breath?”

They had reached the top of the hill and paused for a moment at the foot of the church steps, directly across from the blue house. This was perhaps the highest hill on the island and they could see the bay glimmering in the distance. It seemed very flat and dark, a clouded, blind sort of blue. Sylvia knew the bay's ecological function and was familiar with its shallows rife with urchin and seagrasses, but it was hard just now to think of the bay as any kind of shelter. Its half-moon seemed a sickle rather than a horn. On the porch, the man—Robert? John?—lit another cigarette and leaned forward to grind out the first butt in the mouth of a ceramic planter shaped like a fish. He had an almost perfectly round head and his hands too seemed round, as if he could spread out his fingers and describe between the thumb and the littlest finger a geometrically perfect circle. Because of his round head, his features had an uneasy relationship with one another. From a certain angle, Sylvia had always thought him quite attractive, but then he would turn
or the light would change and his jaw would be revealed as weak, his eyebrows confused, his upper lip short and petulant, soft and pursed as if he were puckering for a facetious kiss.

A wind was blowing steadily at their backs. This was the second time Dannie had kicked the stroller, jolting the whole contraption to its side wheels, and Sylvia did not know why she was now laughing. At least it wasn't a hot day, though it had seemed like it was heading that way when Sylvia got up that morning. Another ash-white day is what it looked like they were getting, but now the sky had darkened, ratcheting everything down a few degrees, and the tops of the tall pines were starting to toss back and forth. This was the kind of light that made everything look queer—patio furniture, a lawnmower, a half empty bag of potting soil—and she supposed it also made her look queer, accentuating her angles and shadows. A marabou stork, perhaps, with a mottled scalp and cruel, opportunistic beak. Dirty, clanking feathers.

Sylvia looked over to her friend, her neighbor really, but Dannie seemed consumed with her story, showing Sylvia with her hands just how big the big pillows were and how small were the small ones. Steven, she had decided to call him for convenience sake, had come down off the porch and was poking around in the shrubbery next to his driveway, a stinking tangle of sumac and poke-weed. For a moment, Sylvia felt the urge to call out to him, warn him against the poke which was poisonous and would stain his shoes if he snapped one of the thick, purple stalks. Then she imagined how she would seem to him, peering at him with her bossy eyes which, when she tried to seem kind, crinkled into pudgy imbecility. Far away behind them came a rumbling that could have been thunder or someone's truck gearing down to take a hill.

Mrs. White had been sitting in a lawn chair outside the shop smoking a cigarette. She was using a conch shell for an ashtray
and her hair was piled on top of her head in an elaborate fashion that required much underpinning, struts and braces clearly visible through her thin yellow-gray curls. She had a wide mouth, pulled down slightly to the left, and she brought the cigarette to that lax side so the smoke poured out and spilled over her chin without volition or direction. It was like looking at a dragon armored entirely in pearls. Mrs. White was wearing a tee-shirt which said Palm Springs in fading pink script and featured a jungle-green palm tree accentuated at all its points with clusters of rhinestones, but this did nothing to diminish what Dannie had immediately identified as her native gravity. A practical sort of obtuseness which surrounded her as she looked past Dannie—lowing in the parking lot with her packages and the helpful chart the bedding store clerk had drawn for her and her great looming belly casting its own shadow like a miniature planet, for god's sake—and pretended to be watching the traffic pass on the causeway. At the time, this had seemed a kind of challenge to Dannie, though she conceded this was true of most situations at that stage due to hormones and worry, the worry worse even than the hormones which were, after all, natural. She had risen to it the way she rose to all challenges. Every one of them that had come her way since she was sixteen years old, just a baby really, and her life somehow seemed to slip out of gear.

“I marched right over to her,” Dannie said, halting the procession to adjust the stroller's sun-shade against the slanting light. “I let her know what was going on right in front of her, but which she had refused to recognize due to her own sufferings, which were apparent, but that are nevertheless a part of being alive.” Dannie loved this part of the story. She replayed it in her mind some nights while trying to fall asleep against the hum of the baby monitor, the neighbor-up-the-street's husky yodeling mournfully at the end of his chain and the palms in Sylvia's side yard clacking
their hollow, gray fronds together like two immense, desiccated birds shifting their weight. Clack Clack Clack, all night. Softly, she conceded, but with great purport right outside her window as if reminding her they were still there, older than her, had been there first, rooted their whole life in exactly that soil. Another challenge! She knew the world by now; it couldn't fool her.

Dannie pictured her face as she told Mrs. White about her condition, the real life drama, the human passion of it, and she pictured it proud: her neck drawn back, cheeks highly colored, nostrils flared and quivering with the extremity of her emotion. Of course, there had been no mirror and the window of the shop was too dusty and cluttered with items for her to catch the image of herself. Mrs. White, in any event, had reacted only by blinking, her eyes delightfully out of sync so the effect was something like watching an alligator at the nature park decide whether or not it is going to submerge. She had gestured toward the lawn chair next to her. “Well, sit down,” she had said, and then, “poor creature,” shaking her hand toward the chair, her many bracelets jangling, her rings catching a dull light behind each of her swollen knuckles.

“You said all that?” said Sylvia, but she still could not make herself fully listen. Steven was walking down the street behind them. Out for a stroll, hands in his pockets, stopping now and then to admire the survivors of someone's late-season lilies, proud heads bobbing high above all their decapitated neighbors, or to tie over and over again his shoe. Only, he seemed to keep the distance between them exactly. Only, as they reached the house with new copper guttering and turned left, Steven also reached the house and turned left, his footsteps heavy and measured and surely a little over-loud, deliberately over-loud, behind them. Sylvia tried to focus on other things. The guttering, for example, was starting to weather, taking on an oily sheen, and she tried to remember when exactly it had been new. Was it even this year? But
the image had no location, no real limits. There it was, the flash of the copper against the maroon brick, and there again were her thoughts on first seeing it: how much it must have cost/clearly, the wife didn't work, home all day, her idea/one hoped it wouldn't be stolen, copper so expensive now, people in the neighborhood just wandering through, looking for what they could get. It came back to her in that particularly synchronous way private thoughts are remembered. Her body too, how she had felt and the angle of her vision, but none of the other telling details like the shade of the sky or the quality of the light. Just herself and the copper guttering, the copper guttering, herself, herself, the guttering—

It was sickening how everything in her head repeated. Really, it was enough to make her sick, woozy as the street sloped sharply downward and she braced herself against the stroller's pull. For a moment, she imagined just letting go, the stroller rocketing crazily down the hill like a scene from some funny movie. A comedy about women, but still starring Steven who would sprint out ahead of them and save the day. They stopped so Dannie could pull the sun shade back again and behind them Steven also stopped. They started and she heard his shoe scrape against the sidewalk.

It didn't matter, it didn't matter. The house with the copper guttering was large, but the family had too many children. Sylvia had never been able to get an accurate count. The children were all around the same age, but looked very different: one with dark hair and black, almond shaped eyes, two towheads, a little girl with the raw, buff face of mental retardation. They came and went, some piling into the wife's van while others played in the backyard or sat on the front porch steps pushing clacking wooden toys. Perhaps she ran some kind of center, but the backyard as they glimpsed it through the wrought-iron fence was filled with a sort of simple clutter that seemed very private to Sylvia. Many
of the border stones around the flower beds were turned sideways and boards were nailed haphazardly to the elm tree to form crooked, unsteady looking rungs. Toys had been left to lie where they'd been dropped, beaks or truck-beds agape, and there was a dog, some tall, sleek breed which thrust its head between the bars and sniffed them with a disinterested, liver-colored nose. The dog sniffed at Steven, too. It didn't matter. It seemed no one but the dog was home.

Before them, the sky had massed into a heaving dusky purple shot through here and there with streaks of yellow. The high, burning clouds of summer had descended and streamed now over their heads, fleet and mean, weirdly bright as they whipped toward the bay. Sylvia imagined what the ocean must look like beneath that coming storm. She imagined it had risen to the occasion, was itself heaving, hysterical, impressionable. In the end, it was the ocean that would do the most damage to the island. A slow erosion of the land and the things that had been made of the land: the piers and shops and pavilions, the fountains and rickety crab shacks, the houses with their sandy curbsides and carefully banked garden soil. Her mother had always said the ocean was like a little brother—foolish and easily led, but once it got going, boy, look out! Her mother said the ocean had something to prove, but Sylvia was an only child and as far as she knew her mother was also an only child. They had lived alone together all of Sylvia's young life in a little house near the mouth of the bay. The island was so narrow there that in her bed at night Sylvia could hear both the impassioned tossing of the ocean's waves and the more circumspect murmuring of the bay. In the season, the oyster-rakes passed back and forth over the beds just beyond her window. It had not been idyllic. There was no air-conditioning and the sump-pump yielded up a steady trickle of gritty, brackish water from around the foundation, but to Sylvia it had been very real and so
constant she remembered every surface and angle of the house in a still, clear, inviolate light as if it had never been visited by her own experiences. As if it were a place wholly independent of her, enduring, to which the fact of herself was incidental and easily overlooked.