Read What Strange Creatures Online
Authors: Emily Arsenault
What Strange Creatures
What strange creatures brothers are!
—Jane Austen,
Mansfield Park
To Dan and Luke
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W
hat are you supposed to do on the second night your brother is in jail on a murder charge?
Should you watch
The Colbert Report
? Should you clean the black crud from behind your kitchen faucet? Should you make yourself a smoothie with protein powder?
I did all of these things, trying to forget the prosecutor’s words:
Her body was found in a wooded area, about ten yards from the side of Highway 114. According to autopsy reports, she died of strangulation and also had a deep wound in her upper left thigh, consistent with assault using a screwdriver or scissors.
But what was I
supposed
to do? Was I supposed to settle into the situation and practice saying things like, “Jeff? You didn’t hear? He’s in the clink. Homicide.” Or in reminiscent fashion, with a long, throaty cough and the resigned wave of a cigarette: “Back when Jeff was still on the outside . . .”
Probably I wouldn’t need to practice. Probably one grows used to saying these things, as the first nights turn into first weeks, then months and years. I’m a Battle, after all. And Battles get used to all sorts of shitty things—like noisy mufflers and bad lighting and generic plastic wrap that sticks to nothing but itself and your angry, frustrated fingers.
Police investigators obtained a search warrant for Mr. Battle’s apartment and vehicle. In the trunk of the vehicle, in the spare-tire compartment, they found a screwdriver with blood on it
.
Finally I settled on the dog bowls and cat dishes. Yes—that was what needed to be done next. They all had a fine layer of Iams crust on them, from days of hasty feedings—bribing the poor dears with wet food as I dashed home briefly between trips to Jeff’s place, the prison, my job, the courthouse. Now I collected the dogs’ metal bowls and the cats’ delicate ceramic dishes, dumped them in a plastic tub in the sink with some Palmolive, and ran the water till it was scalding. I winced as I plunged my hands into the soapy water.
Police also found that Mr. Battle’s trunk had been saturated with vinegar and an ammonia-based cleaning liquid.
Tears sprang to my eyes.
My brain struggled to find words to drown out the prosecutor’s and came up with this:
And, daughter, don’t be at all afraid, for it is a singular and a special gift that God has given you—a well of tears which man shall never take from you.
I recited the original words softly to myself:
“And, dowtyr, drede the nowt, for it is a synguler and a specyal gyft that God hath govyn the, a welle of teerys the whech schal nevyr man take fro the.”
I’d memorized this sentence at a different time in my life, when feeling smart had been a misguided priority. It was comforting now—not for its content so much as the sound of the Middle English. I’d always liked its long-ago, faraway feel in my mouth.
After the dishes were done, I opened my dryer and folded a single towel and a single pair of underwear—gray boyshorts with slutty black lace unraveling at the backside. Had I been married when I bought these? I couldn’t remember. The rest of the laundry could sit in the dryer for another day, but these I’d need now, as I’d noticed my underwear drawer empty this morning.
I carried them to my room and collapsed on my bed, where I used my cat Geraldine as a pillow. As I began to repeat those words under my breath, she slipped away politely, hopped off the bed, and retired behind the dust ruffle. Geraldine is not interested in being a therapist—she’s always made that very clear.
Besides, she was right. This was no time for comfort. I needed to do something. Something for Jeff. But what could I do at this hour?
The black lace of the boyshorts—still in my hand—gave me an idea. There
was
something I could try. Something a little bit shadier than my usual comfort zone of indifferent to mildly degenerate. I used the underwear to wipe away a tear and snuffled back the rest that wanted to follow it.
Yes. I would try it.
I was willing to try almost anything for my brother.
Three Weeks Earlier
I
can just
feel
myself becoming Margery Kempe—slowly and organically, as I creep toward middle age. I’m steadily getting crazier, more self-righteous, more contradictory to myself, more prone to deranged weeping fits. And maybe about to enter a celibate stage of life, but that’s a separate matter.
I’ve not heard this ever proposed before: that the longer one works on a doctoral thesis, the more one begins to resemble one’s subject. Maybe it happens only in the humanities. Because how much can one start to resemble a slime mold or the Tokyo stock exchange? I’ll leave that question for the biologists and the economists.
In case you don’t know, Margery Kempe was a middle-class Englishwoman who was born in 1373. She wrote what is thought to be the first autobiography ever written in English. Or rather she had it written. Unable to read and write herself, she hired scribes to take down her life story for her. She had fourteen children (though they don’t factor much in her book), then convinced her husband that Jesus had told her she shouldn’t have sex anymore and should spend some time traveling. She often wore white clothing to show her virtue—as per the instructions of God—even though it was highly unconventional for a married woman to do so.
The Book of Margery Kempe
is her account of her visions and prophecies, her relationships with her supporters and detractors, her daily life in the town of King’s Lynn, and her harrowing pilgrimages—to the Holy Land and elsewhere. She spent a great deal of time crying and wailing and carrying on about the sweet, sweet music Jesus made in her head, generally annoying her neighbors and fellow pilgrims and often pissing off church authorities. Still, she managed to avoid execution for heresy and lived to see old age and have her story documented. She was absolutely an eccentric and almost certainly a nut job.
You would think after seven-plus years of on-and-off trying to finish this infernal thesis, I’d get sick of explaining to people who she was. I don’t. While I’m tired of my situation, I rarely get tired of her. When I started, my life was very different. I was younger and thinner, a full-time grad student, and engaged to a lawyer. I found Marge quirky and amusing. When I took a job editing Whitlock’s Candles’ catalogs and mailers—after my funding ran out and I stopped teaching undergrads—I thought it would be for a year or two while I finished writing the dissertation. My husband, Brendan, generously paid my grad-school fees as two years turned into three. Then I paid my own way after Brendan was gone.
Gradually my writing sessions produced fewer and fewer words as I sipped more and more Malbec in front of the computer, listening to Jeff Buckley sing “Hallelujah” on repeat. One marriage, one divorce, three boyfriends, and a bunch of other shit later, it’s just Marge and me.
I felt my inner Marge creeping up on me on Wednesday while I was standing by the eggs in Stop & Shop, trying to decide if the ones fortified with omega-3 were worth the extra fifty cents. I had noticed also that the omega-3 ones did not say “cage-free,” and I was wondering if this meant I’d always have to choose between my own neurological health and chicken happiness. And then I started to think more deeply about my word choice: “always.” No, I wouldn’t
always
have to choose, because I’d be dead before always came around.
And then this Adele song came on over the supermarket loudspeakers. You know the one—that super-popular one where Adele belts out
yoooouuuu
like gangbusters? I don’t know what it’s about, because whenever I hear it, I’m simply too overwhelmed with my own vague yearning to listen to the lyrics. I’ve always been a sucker for a good pop song—ever since I was eleven years old, when Casey Kasem’s countdown would regularly reduce me to a puddle of inexplicable longing.
I started to wonder, right there by the eggs, if this would ever change. If I heard the Bangles’ “Eternal Flame” on my deathbed in my old age, for example, would I still feel that same wistfulness? Would it give me comfort or fill me with despair?
I started to whimper at the very question and had to put down the omega-3 eggs. I began to cover my eyes, but a voice behind me said, “Excuse me?”
It was a young woman with a very full cart, baby in car seat affixed to the top. The baby was tiny and pink, with a hand-knit blue hat and the most delicate of closed eyelids. And his mother needed to get at the eggs. I muttered “Sorry” and stepped away. Sobered, as usual, by seeing women younger than me with children, I wandered across the aisle to the frozen entrées and selected a Lean Cuisine spinach and mushroom pizza for my dinner. Still, I found myself narrating my own actions in my head, calling myself “this creature” as Margery did.
This creature then decided to treat herself to some frozen yogurt. And then she felt better
.
By then Adele had stopped singing and this creature had come back to herself.
Mind you, Margery Kempe referred to herself this way presumably to remind herself and her reader, constantly, that she was a creation of God. I, on the other hand, do it only occasionally, and only because I am turning into a freak.
I was eating the last of the frozen pizza when my brother knocked on my front door that evening. I was glad to have gobbled up most of it before he arrived, because I didn’t much feel like sharing. The crusts and the limp pizza box were in the trash before he’d made it into the kitchen.
“Hey,” Jeff said.
“Hi there. What brings you here?” I asked.
“Bad time? Working hard on Marge tonight?”
“No. Hardly.”
It wasn’t that I wasn’t happy to see him. It was only that it had been a few weeks since he’d waltzed in aimlessly like this—like he used to. His relationship with his new girlfriend seemed to be growing more time-intensive.
Boober came into the kitchen, yapping and dancing toward my brother with desperate excitement. Jeff bent down and tried to scratch behind his ears as he rolled onto the floor and nipped at the air.
“
You’re
happy to see me, aren’t you, Boob?” he said, then stood and opened my refrigerator. “Got any doggie bags?” he asked.
Jeff knows I go out often with my friends Megan and Tish. Chinese with Megan on Sundays. Mexican with Tish on Thursdays when she can get a babysitter or when it’s her ex’s turn to take the kid.
“Yeah. A chimichanga.”
“You saving it for something?”
“No. The guacamole’s turned a little brown. Not sure I want it anymore.”
I don’t at all resent my brother always eating my restaurant leftovers. In fact, I save them for him to be sure he doesn’t starve. What bothers me is that he puts me through this charade of asking if I want them. I’m not creative enough to keep coming up with these bullshit reasons for why I’m not going to eat them.
Jeff took the foil dish out of the refrigerator and pulled off its circular cardboard top. “I didn’t think you were into fried food like this.”
“It was a low moment,” I explained. “I got some . . . uh, thesis news this week.”
Jeff glanced from the chimichanga to me, uncertain if he should dig in or politely wait for my news.
I handed him a fork. “They’ve given me a deadline—of sorts. They were hinting about it last spring. But it’s finally happened.
“Eat,” I said, and he did. He looked ravenous.
“The new department chair has decided to lay down the law with me,” I said, watching Jeff gobble the side of refried beans. “She called me in. Me and the other hanger-on. His name’s Buck, and he’s been working on a dissertation on
Robinson Crusoe
for like twelve years.”
“You’ve mentioned him before.”
“Yeah, well. The new department chair is making us each present pages and do a talk for our committees at the end of this semester. ‘Wherein you will show significant progress,’ she said.”