Mother Box and Other Tales (8 page)

At the end of her life she found herself quite alone, living in an unfamiliar neighborhood on the outskirts of the city. To make a little extra money she rented out her basement as an apartment. A girl moved in and complained about the lack of light. A young couple moved in and fought over who would clean the bathroom. A middle aged man moved in and walked naked through the back garden at night, moonlight clashing on his grizzled chest as if striking off metal. His cock rose just to the height of the poppies and brushed them one by one as he strolled. She imagined it smeared with pollen.

Ah well, she was not unattractive, nor was she old. It was just that her life had turned out to be one without a lot of room, but she did not know it. She had every reason to expect this was a phase: this isolation, this lack of sleep. Every week she got the scale out from its hiding place under the bathroom sink and marked her weight on the long column taped to the bottom of
the drawer. She found her bones aesthetically pleasing and, as they became more assertive, she felt as if she was wearing herself—her wrist like a bracelet, her collarbone molded on her chest like a band of sculpted silver and somewhere beneath the jeweled pendant of her heart. Yet, when the weight came back, as surely it would, she thought that too could be a sort of assertion. Her rear, for example, mounded like the graceful back of a Queen Anne's sofa, the meat of her arms like the tasseled fringe of a hassock and her plump feet like little pitchers, one for cream, one with a silver spoon for scooping out the sugar. All of her life had been a series of phases. First she had looked like her father, then her mother. First she had sucked the fingers of her right hand, then she smoked long brown cigarettes that made the air smell like spice and dirt. She would be a body and next, who knew?, a house. So it went.

But then, her tenant moved in. And then, she saw him at night, as she stood in her window smoking and considering the night blooming flowers, walking naked in the garden with his hands clasped behind his back. From there it was really a very fast progression. What did they ever say to each other? She couldn't remember. Just, one night, after she had watched him for a long time making his rounds, he turned to face the window she was standing in and gave her a little salute. He ran his hand through his graying hair at the last moment so somehow it seemed a gesture he would have made regardless—saluting the house, saluting the moonlight sulking in the copper guttering, saluting her as well because she happened to be there, watching.

She considered him, framed by the thickly flowered catalpa, an evening primrose blooming moony at his knee. He had long hair caught into a queue at the back of his neck and a lantern jaw which made his head seem slung forward, made him seem always lost in thought. She could see his previous body, his younger one,
through the skin he now wore, muscles relating in competent affinity with the pads of fat that swathed his shoulders, ribcage, abdomen, hips. His legs were still corded and tense, the muscle cutting a heavy groove over his knee as if he were used to frequent lifting, and, though it may have been a trick of the moonlight, his cock looked un-gnarled, smooth and thick, arcing up toward his belly with none of the strenuous yelping sort of fervor she had become used to. They were very different. She knew that right away. He stood in the garden and watched her calmly with a conversational sort of air as she took off first her dressing gown and then her tank-top, as she hooked a thumb in the waistband of her panties and stepped out of them. She stood there with her hands at her sides, palms dishing in the moonlight, and watched him watch her ladder-rack ribs rise and fall, her nipples pucker like sour buds in the cool air, her concave stomach pulse slightly with the beat of her body beneath.

He was his body and she wore hers. She felt embarrassed, like she was cheating, and even went so far as to reach up to her shoulder as if she would suddenly find there a sort of snap or clasp to unlatch. Of course there was nothing, but the next night when she came to her window and took off her gown, her top, her panties, she showed him she had stripped the polish off her finger and toenails, had shaved the sparse fur that grew between her legs, on her thighs and calves, forearms, in the blue hollows of her sockets, and washed and washed and washed her skin until she shone a cold tallow candle in the window, unlit. The next night, she came to the window wearing a gray knit cap and when she had removed again her gown, her top, her panties—her hand lingering there to show him the skin, how smooth and slick it was—she took off the cap and showed him her skull. An unsuspected vein throbbed thickly over the fragile bulge of her temple, and she ran a finger over the weird ridges of her brow to show him that there
too she had removed the sparse, thin hair and now stood as close to herself as she could get.

He seemed un-phased, absentmindedly caressing a spray of pink phlox that bobbed against his thigh, and the next night when she came to the window he wasn't there at all. She was unprepared for how she felt at his absence. Before in her life she had occasion to be disappointed, angry. Once she had even become so wrathful, so powerful, she struck out at a lover, catching him by surprise and splitting his lip. Then, watching the blood slick his chin and flow over his fumbling knuckles, she had felt overwhelmingly contrite, had sunk to the floor sobbing and clawed at the back of her neck with her nails. Now, standing before the garden—somehow empty despite its cacophony of buds and blooms which massed riotous even in the grayscale of night, the dark huzzing thrum of seeds and sprouts, tendrils, shoots roiling behind a bubble of silence—she felt stung with rage, wrung with it. A hive of rage striking and striking until all of her was riled, all of her roused, until she was barely contained, striking about her dark bedroom as the moon cast warped shadows on the walls, beating her limbs against the walls, the floors, the mirror where she reflected a blasted, seething heave of bone and shadow, skin and weird, refracted light.

But she did not know him. Not even his name, which she had never quite heard, or his business. He paid her in cash, bills clasped with a thick clip and folded into an envelope he tucked into the space between her screen and her door. Every month, she took the bills and slipped the silver clip back into his envelope, left it for him at the top of the stairs that led down to his basement door. Every month it came back to her the same, so, until now, this was all that had passed between them: the clip, the envelope creased along its lines until it felt like skin, weathered, soft with age. She had no right to her rage. He had no right to his desertion.
She exhausted herself, slunk into a corner panting like an animal. Her head hung down almost to the floor and from her mouth slipped strings of saliva, thick and sour, which she watched pool on the old pine boards of her bedroom. Her eyes were full of blood; her ears beat with it. Her teeth felt newly cut, sharp as a mink's, but as she lifted her forearm to her mouth to test them, she heard a noise, a rapping, coming from under the coiled rug she kept at the foot of her bed.

It was him, tapping at a hatch that had once served some arcane purpose (coal cellar, root shoot) but now connected their rooms. What a detail! How remiss of her never to consider it before, though she had spent hours in a delirium of half-sleep, her bones aching, pressing her febrile cheek to the cool floorboards and listening to him beneath as he paced. He rapped again, this time sounding more like a question, and she threw back the rug, strained to lift the heavy trap door by its iron ring. He helped, pushing from beneath—she sensed his strain through the boards, his arms corded above his head like an Atlas heaving aside the globe—and when together they flung the hatch open he looked up to her, his lantern jaw thrust eagerly forward as if he were about to speak. What would he have said? A greeting? A declaration? His eyes were sunken, dim. He blinked.

At another time in her life she might have seen herself as he did. Or she might at least have tried, glancing in the mirror which gaped a shocked oval directly across from her, and she might have been ashamed of herself. Certainly her mother would have been ashamed of her, her childhood friends, her former lovers. Her father would have been horrified, pushed past speech. He might again have died to see her there in her extremity, her wildness. But this was the very end of her life, its final months, and though she knew almost nothing of the world, she was still animal enough not to waste her time. She pounced.

In the end, sad to say, she was quite violent with them both. She spidered over him, a fury of limbs, and her skin so pale that where he gripped her, pried her, pressed her to the bed, his hands left no mark, only a slight compression as if he had gripped a length of cold wax. She scoured him. She used her nails, her teeth. Where she could not find purchase, she dug in under his shy pads of fat. All over his body she left great welts, thready scratches beading with blood as if he had come through a forest of nettles. She did more besides. More and more as her little dark room filled with that compressed silence (a silence that somehow swallowed their breathing, his moans, her sharp fox cries) and outside the garden roared and trembled, trumpeted, disclaimed.

The garden mustered all of its dense, bushy conglomeration, from the dormant border mums to the fetid corners of moss, from the thickets of wandering Jew and bell-sprung hosta to the cyclamen beating its mewling blooms against the panes of her glass. It mustered its whole self to a hysterical frenzy, a shrill, mouthless clamor so total and extreme that her next door neighbor, smoking a cigarette on his porch and watching the streaming branches of the catalpa toss against the moon, wondered what it was that could have snuck through her fence. Something large, he thought, or several things, cats perhaps taking advantage of the clear night to mate. ‘Time to make more cats,’ he remembered, some distant line of poetry, and smiled, pleased with himself and this beautiful night. How still it was. How mild.

Their affair continued in much the same way for many weeks. Some nights, he would come to the hatch in her floor and scratch there. Some nights, she would fling it open and call down into the darkness. All throughout he continued to make his garden rounds and she continued to stand for him, a beacon in the window but lighting nothing, guiding nothing, noticeable only because behind
her was a darkness so black it seemed a living thing, pressing its furred weight into all the crannies of the room, folding around her like a cloak or a curtain. What did she see during this time? Often it seemed as if she were blind. And what did she hear? She heard a dense roaring, a hum approaching and receding, sometimes a twang as if of a wire snapping beneath an unbearable strain. She did not eat. Her spine now looked like a watch chain and her ribcage a pocket watch left carelessly open, slung over the back of some chair. It was all new, strange, howling, but sometimes it felt as if there was something—a resonant ache, a stretching—that she had always felt, that she had only forgotten for some little time after she had been born. When they were finished, she would take him limp into her mouth and taste all that was there. The salt and the pearl-seed musk, the copper tang (hers? his?) and under it the bitter yellow smear of pollens. The sex of the lily, the poppy, the rose.

One day, a departure, she opened the hatch herself and descended the ladder into his rooms. For some time now she had been aware of herself in a different way. She felt a fullness, an uneasy shift. That morning, she had woken to the sunlight climbing in tentative inches up her quilt, motes of dust distinctly glimmering against the eggshell walls, and thought, “Ah ha.” She had gripped the hasp of her pelvis and shaken it as if in confirmation.

The ladder seemed very long, or maybe her body was shorter than she was accustomed to, curled in on itself. Her dressing gown, which she had thrown on for some reason over her shorts and her yellow Pearl Harbor tee-shirt, flapped about her ankles and threatened to slip beneath her feet, tripping her. Her hands ached, her arms ached, and when she stopped to catch her breath and wipe the sweat out of her eyes, she saw the wall before her had gone from brick and mortar to raw, clay earth, packed and
smooth as if shined by the pressure of long use. She braced herself on the ladder with one arm and picked at the dirt, digging a little hole with her forefinger, but all she discovered was more of the same. The passageway seemed much tighter than it should be as well, but she didn't trust her balance enough to turn around. A warm breeze came up the tunnel and fluttered her dressing gown, soothed the backs of her thighs, flirted up the leg of her shorts and out the baggy gap of their waistband.

She found him in his kitchen frying an egg. He was fully dressed, which was something of a shock to her having never seen him in clothes, and seemed pleased to see her, though clearly quite surprised. He fussed over her, settling her in a chair, turning up the flame on an oil lamp he kept in the center of the table. His house was very dark, though all through its rooms breezes of varying temperatures floated and crossed as if about them were countless invisible passages out into the open air. Shadows, too many it seemed to her, shifted on the prettily wallpapered walls of his kitchen and she tried to remember if this was a paper she had chosen herself or something he had added. And this room, hadn't it once had a window? A window obstructed by the tangle of a forsythia bush which her first tenant, that miserable girl, was always threatening to raze? On the far side of the room something massed in a way that might suggest branches, but then it didn't seem to matter anymore. Then, she didn't care.

Would she like an egg? She would not. Did she mind if he ate? She did not. He poured some tea for them both out of a steaming kettle and sat across from her, merry, his jaw thrusting after his eggs and toast in a ruminative fashion as he watched her drink. His clothes were very simple—blue jeans, a black tee-shirt that flattered his shoulders—but they unnerved her. They made him seem like someone else entirely, someone with a name she should, by now, know. He sopped the last of the yolk off his plate
with his last bite of toast. She sipped the tea, a bitter musty tea, and shuddered as a breeze flipped suddenly up the back of her neck.