Mother Box and Other Tales (6 page)

The parade was long. It wound up the town's high streets and dove into the low ones. It circled the town hall and marched to the corners of each of the community fields. All around her, the girl saw the people who had bound their lives. There was the
butcher's son, who had taken over from his father, wearing a long, white apron, and brandishing a bouquet of chicken's feet. There was the banker who had loaned them the money for their cottage, bent now double with age and pushing before him a wheelbarrow full of miniature houses and barns, flat wooden disks that symbolized fields and here and there tiny wooden babies with their smooth heads painted gold. There were the other girl and the other boy, her long ago students, grown stouter and duller but essentially the same. They walked together but did not touch each other and the girl's belly was huge with false gravity and her skirt was a labor of green and blue feathers sweeping the ground.

She turned to her own boy and adjusted the shoulder of his paper suit. He was waving to people marching on either side of them, eyes slatted against the heat of the blacksmith's mobile oven. She saw how his face had fallen, how his nose had grown. She saw how his eyes were pushed deep in his skull now, how his cheeks had caved into a slide of folds. His ears started red and thick from the sides of his head. “We are old, we are old,” the girl thought, but just then the band started up. The boy noted how each of the players were dressed like their instrument and the girl saw a reflection of her formidable dress wavering on the back of the tuba player's helm.

They were there: in the sun, on the hill. There was no denying them, either what they had been or this simple thing they had become. The boy leaned over and said something close to her ear. They had reached the top of the highest hill in the town and here the parade disassembled itself, became a crowd pulsing in toward its center and out toward its fringe. The boy and the girl faced their friends and neighbors. Everyone shook each other's hands, gripped each other at the elbow. Some kissed the air behind each other's ears. The tuba bloomed like bubbles rising from the peat and the crowd turned as one to face the town. The trumpet pealed like a tree cleaving in a storm and the crowd sent up a great, booming cheer.

“To the town!” shouted the townspeople and the girl and the boy shouted with them. From here the girl could see the streets unraveled and the fields unwieldy with fruit in these few days before the final cull. The air was crisp and high—a blue, thin air—and she could see the slate roof of her house like the roofs of all her neighbors. It was so clear and small she felt as if she could reach out and fit it on her thumb like a thimble. Around them massed the forest, patched with sunlight, seeming to stream as the clouds streamed across the sun. The forest like a tide, ascending.

“To the fields!” shouted the townspeople and the girl and the boy shouted with them. Within her dress, the girl felt the furs shift about her. Next to her, the girl heard the boy rustle as he shifted his weight.

“To the forest!” shouted the townspeople and a spell that was cast many long years ago suddenly, finally, broke.

A few hours later, when the crowds dispersed, there was found on the cobblestones a drift of brown paper and a heap of torn rabbit skins. Of the boy and the girl, no trace was ever recovered and, after a short search, the townspeople collectively wrung them from their memories. A minor mystery for the October ghost tour. Nothing more.

There was only one witness able to tell the story. This was the butcher's youngest grandson who had happened to be crouched at the girl's skirts at the time. He had been fascinated with her dress, had the intention of thrusting his finger into the hard clasp of one of the claws to see if it would grip, and so he was close, very close, saw it all. But, though he was interviewed several times by the magistrate, the tale he told made no sense. Something about their bodies shrinking, their empty clothes falling to the ground. Something about two little birds with white caps and bright black eyes hopping from the garments' loose necks and cocking their heads to peer up at him. The butcher's grandson described the
sleek line of their feathers, their trim wings. He described how they blinked, the fragility of their eyelids, the moment of blindness when they were most at risk.

For a short time, the birds hopped about the cobblestones on their stiff legs, pecking at crumbs, dodging the revelers' heedless feet. They crossed each other's paths, before each other, behind each other, but gave no sign they were working in concert or were aware of their momentous change. Then, as if at an unheard signal, both sprang into the air, pumping their competent wings, and rose above the heads of their fellow townspeople. They wheeled once, the boy saw them, and flew off in opposite directions with no show of sorrow or even farewell.

“It was as if they didn't know each other at all,” the child said.

Try as he might, the magistrate could get no other answer out of him and it was observed that this was a child who had come to his mother late in life, who had been born at the end of a long, difficult labor. His head was too large and round, the magistrate observed, and his hair crossed it only sparsely. His eyes were too wide and his cheeks were too red. Hadn't he been born in the light of a dubious moon? the magistrate said. And didn't these things happen? And wasn't it a shame?

For the rest of his short, baleful life the child was treated with gentle constraint. His bad behaviors were overlooked and his good ones too fervently praised. When he died, his family erected a monument garlanded by lambs, cast a concrete bench for quiet contemplation and fashioned a little fountain to gurgle at his feet. Many years later, when the forest had taken back all the lands of the town, it was still possible to see the outlines of his grave through the tangle of thicket and to apprehend the shape of the bench beneath its coat of moss. Though the fountain no longer bubbled, every storm filled it to running over. In the long dreaming of the season, birds came there to splash and groom.
They clung to the fountain's lip and sung their songs. They lived their brief lives and bore no witness.

One day, she gave birth to seven babies. This was a great surprise, the more so because all of the babies were boys. “I am the mother of seven sons,” she practiced in the little square mirror the hospital thoughtfully provided. On the table behind her was a vase with a bouquet of pansies her mother had sent and behind that an incredible number of bassinets.

When she brought the babies home her husband said, “Good Lord,” and retreated to his study where he sat and looked out the window, gloomily eating a sack of pretzels. For awhile, she walked her sons up and down the halls, wiped their bottoms with rags, threw diapers in the washing machine, hung diapers out on the line to dry, spooned carrots and peas and beans and chickens and corn and mushrooms and pears and eggs into their mouths, sanitized bottles, sanitized pacifiers, washed their hair, washed their bodies, wiped their bottoms with rags, made choo-choo noises and showed them the spoon, spooned carrots and peas and beans
and chickens, made a horse out of her knees, made a horse out of her back, hung their diapers to dry, boiled their bottles, boiled their dishes, rubbed a finger over their sensitive gums. Then, her husband came out of his study and gave one of the sons a pretzel. “It won't be so bad,” he said and picked up a spoon.

Previously in her and her husband's lives together she had thought of herself as the kind of woman other men would describe as a spit-fire. She understood there was a certain volatile element to her temperament that would be misinterpreted by those who did not live with her as sexual passion. To her husband, it was the element of uncertainty. Would she take the joke or would they quarrel? In public, would she swallow her melancholy or, turning away from the shop window with its rending display of skins and furs, would she go ahead and cry? Perhaps, she hoped, to her husband the uncertainty was also understood as sexual passion. Perhaps when she cried on the street corner and he said, “What is this with you? What is this thing?” he was really thinking quite clearly of the friction of their parts, the cachinnation of their immoderately creaky bed, the humors of their various desires.

Prior to her and her husband's life together, when she did not think of what she was doing as deliberately living a life, she had been confused by the parameters of possible behavior. For example, when she saw something she wanted, say a pair of blue silk panties, or a ring, or a bole of sourdough bread still steaming from its cross, when could she reach out her hand and take it and when must she occupy herself some other way, her hands in her pockets, in her mouth, folding the hem of her shirt? For example, when she found someone to whom she was attracted—by their laugh, or their walk, or their hand on her forearm, rattling her forearm as if it were a bone in a cage—could she turn to look back at them over her shoulder? Could she sweep all the pint glasses from the table, erect and trembling with anger? With want? Could
she take their finger into her mouth? Up to the knuckle? Further? More than one finger? Could she try for the hand?

She had often been described as a difficult woman. People said this to her face with the same tone they might use to explain the difference in pricing between, say, the regular eggs and the organic, brown ones; the picked lobster meat purchased by the pound and the whole, fresh lobster still flexing its blue tail in the tank. She took this in the spirit with which it was intended. People also frequently described her husband as her savior. This she was not supposed to hear, but did, and with such frequency that sometimes when she stepped out onto their terra-cotta tiled porch of an evening to listen to the rain fiddling around in the azaleas, she would hear the description of her husband as her savior as a sort of ambient hum in the neighborhood air. It was a blue hum, like the dusk itself. When it got under the sodium street lights it flared briefly green.

Regardless of their histories, both shared and otherwise, she understood her sons as a new beginning for her and her husband. Children are often figured this way—a point along a time-line at which, in sudden confusion or teleological upheaval, everything changes. Her sons felt to her like a reflex. Her response to them was like their response to her when she was inattentive, or blindly feeling about the darkened house at three in the morning, and held them insecurely against her breast. Her reaction to them was to yip a piercing warning cry; her reaction was to nip. In this way, warning and nipping, a large amount of time passed very quickly.

One day, one of the sons called to announce he was getting married. She was sitting right by the phone when it rang, perched at the very edge of a high stool at the kitchen counter, her hands gripping the edge of the kitchen counter as if at any moment she would leap from the stool and race across the room, though she had been sitting that way for twenty minutes at least. As the
phone rang she thought to herself, “There is the phone, ringing again,” and counted the rings and considered who it might be, always coming back to the sons because there were so many of them and they had various, often pressing, needs.

In the time that had passed, she had kept her figure, had in fact improved her figure through worry and want and the constant silent expression of male desire which, she considered, was only natural in a household of seven sons. Also, it had become increasingly clear that both she and her husband were local celebrities even outside the circle of their regular environs. She was the mother of very many children and in line at the bank or in the poultry section of the supermarket people would look at her, look away, look back at her with the furtive recognition usually reserved for television weather women or white-collar criminals vindicated by some tricky exigency of law. She had filled with a downy, comforting plushness at the breast but had kept her skinny haunches, her runner's calves. She had grown her hair long and it spilled over her breasts and hung into the freezer, glinting a purple-sort-of-russet in the harsh florescent lights, as she pressed the pimpled skin of the chicken breasts and watched their pale blood well and pool.

Her husband, on the other hand, had declined precipitously in bodily health. Previously, he could be described as slender. Now he was gaunt, his chest almost concave, the skin around his lips blue in certain light as if he weren't getting enough oxygen with his breath. He too had grown his hair longer so that it brushed his jaw line, catching in his stubble, or formed a stubby queue when he pulled it back at his nape. The effect could not have been what he desired—he was a fan of Jeffersonian reason, a fan of the body, a fan of the stoic in both study and practice—but his clear tenuousness had done nothing to lessen his physical appeal. Now more than ever, she followed the lingering gazes of women and
found them attached to some part of her husband, his wrist or the small of his back, exposed as if by the chance of his movement to both the light and their scrutiny.

The problem of the wedding was a considerable one for her. The colors her son and his bride had chosen were unflattering, the season dull and her role as mother-of-the-groom ill-defined. Her husband began to spend more and more time in his woodworking shop at the back of the house. He was making a wedding gift for the son—a clock fashioned entirely of native woods, the whirring gears, the chimes, the hollow clapper all hand carved by her husband who frequently cut himself with the sharp tools and came in to dinner wearing mitts of white gauze, bleeding through the gauze in patches. It was such a romantic gesture, she became suspicious. It seemed there must be some other kind of union involved, something more desirable and fleeting, but this turned out not to be the case. Even though it seemed her husband could never finish it in time, on the morning of the wedding he rose in a very quiet, silver pre-dawn and went out into his workshop. She too rose and made coffee and, sipping it, listened to the noise he was making—a syncopated clattering, a rising pitch—and watched his shadow move back and forth across the squares of light cast from his workshop windows over the ruin of their sons' childhood sandbox. When he emerged, the clock was mostly whole. It only lacked some of the fine-work which, if you had not seen his plans, you would not know to miss.

Thus, later on the morning of the wedding, she and her husband met each other in their living room. There was the familiar couch, stained from their years of living on it, and there the end table. There the bookshelves and the entertainment center and the many many family pictures, both posed and candid, and the vase she had filled earlier that week with yellow tulips which had now bloomed past their breaking point, some sides drooping to
expose the waxy stamens standing dark against their yellow screen. If she looked through the French doors and down the hallway she could even see herself and her husband reflected in the hall mirror, standing together in complimentary grays next to the couch, her husband fiddling with his tie stud, the gaily wrapped gift-box which contained the clock sitting on the end table next to the lamp. Oh, but who were they? She felt so tired now, and it was only the beginning of what was historically supposed to be a very long day. There would be so many different kinds of emotions to go through. She tried to conjure them up in her head: Pride and Guilt, Strength and Providence, Envy, Greed. Through the French doors and down the long hallway her very small face in the mirror flickered through the emotions. Pride and Greed, Guilt and Providence. She thought she looked strange in her steely gray dress which made her hair take on a sympathetic sheen, her shoulders seem mottled, her mouth like a dent in her face.

“What are you thinking about?” her husband asked. It had been a long time since he'd asked her this, but it had used to be a kind of code between them. At night he would say it, reaching under the sheets to rest his hand on her stomach, and she would say it back. “I don't know, what are
you
thinking?”

“I'm thinking about what you are thinking about. What are you thinking?”

“I don't know.”

Eventually, they would just echo each other, their voices so alike, and then they would come together, have sex carefully so the bed would not proclaim itself too loudly, and be surrounded in the house by the sound of their sons sleeping, their seven sons packed into all the corners of the house breathing in tandem through the night.

Now, however, the context seemed different and when she said, “I don't know,” her husband used her shoulder to steady
himself as he wiped a fine film of sawdust off the tip of his polished shoe. He said, “Where are the directions? Are they in your purse?” and together they walked out the door of their house and their figures in the mirror behind them also dwindled, smaller and smaller, then gone.

The night before it had snowed and the world was unmistakably altered as they drove through the town and out of the town, through the countryside and up into the mountains where their son had reserved a mountain lodge for the ceremony. In the town, the snow made her neighbors' houses look like cheerful idiot children. Some of the houses even had hesitant little ribbons of smoke drifting up from their chimneys which made their doors and their windows looked rosy the way an idiot child's cheeks would look rosy if he had stayed out too long in the cold. She wanted to scrub the houses' cheeks, but of course this made no sense and she shifted in the seat so that her dress, uncomfortable beneath her, wouldn't crease.

In the countryside, the snow fell over the fields and hedges with soothing formlessness, but was already starting to be marked, tracked all over with the markings of animals cutting across the wide, white fields. In the mountains, where the trees grew thicker and thicker and closer to the road, the snow took on a blue tinge. It seemed to be hiding from them, moving through the forest alongside their car so that when she looked she would see snow—gullies of it, blue pockets studded with rocks—but when she turned her head to watch the tightening, climbing road, it would be something else: a pacing, a dark movement between the trees. The snow was in the road as well, fresh and deep. Her husband had to drive slowly, tense with concentration, while she turned the dial on the suddenly squealing radio looking for the latest weather news. As a result they were late getting to the top of the mountain, late pulling into the gravel parking lot of the lodge
which was already crowded with other guest's cars—parked at desperate, hasty angles as if they had arrived together, all at once, from every imaginable direction—and late climbing the lodge's wide stone steps, the shoulders of her husband's overcoat frosted with a thin layer of snow which was again beginning to fall.

When she and her husband entered the lodge, they found themselves in the foyer, a narrow room planed in rough pine planks and constricted with the cold that seeped in around the door, through the window panes, up through the cracks in the uneven floor. It was empty save for a coat tree hung about with scarves and hats, mittens stuck to its various knobs, and beside it a chair draped with heavy overcoats. Her husband handed her the box containing the clock and added his overcoat to the pile. It was by far the largest and overwhelmed the other coats, its soft grey wool spangled with melting snow like asphodel spangling a secret, luxuriant, ashen meadow. None of the rest of the coats is so beautiful, she thought. In fact, many of them were ugly and strange. Some of them were also very small—diminutive, doll-like coats with too many armholes and buttons fashioned from the carapaces of iridescent beetles. She lifted the hems of the many coats layer by layer. Some seemed to be stitched of leaves and rustled under her fingers and she realized the whole room was filled with rustling, as if a large crowd were talking very softly, each member of the crowd talking on and on, not necessarily to each other, not necessarily intending to be understood. “Hurry up,” her husband said. “We're late.”

So she and her husband, dressed in beautiful outfits of complimentary gray, one of them, herself, carrying a gay gift box inside of which was a clock that had just that moment begun to tick, opened the wide double-doors at the far end of the foyer and stepped together into a great, vaulted hall. The hall had been set up like a chapel: rows of whitewashed pews down either side
of an aisle carpeted with lichens; garlands of feathers in reds and blacks and grays festooning the rafters; a smell in the air like thick, dark incense, like peat moss, like cold soil piled by the side of a hole. It was altogether a startling effect made worse by the fact that the other guests were already seated, all facing the dais at the end of the aisle on which stood six of her sons dressed in gray, the groomsmen, and one son in black who was today taking a bride. The bride herself was also there on the dais—oh, they were late indeed—and she seemed to have chosen an unusual dress. It was hard to see exactly what shape the dress was, it was so unusual. Hard to see, exactly, what shape the bride was even as she turned, rustling, her face covered by the billowing veil—a hoary veil, crackling, vertiginous—to face her and her husband as they stood together in the doorway. The rustling sound increased and the guests swiveled around in their seats to look.