Fates and Furies (33 page)

“No,
mamzelle
,” he said. “
Non oncle.
The driver.”

She didn’t understand, so he pantomimed driving a car. She swallowed her disappointment.

“No
parlez français
,” the driver said. “Except
voulez-vous coucher avec moi
.”

She blinked hard, and he said, “No, no, no, no, no. No
vous
.
Excusez-moi.
No
voulez coucher avec vous
.” He flushed redder and chuckled all the way to the car.

He stopped off the highway to buy her a strawberry milkshake; it cloyed and made her stomach hurt but she drank it all because it was kind of him. She was frightened of spilling on the leather seats and held the cup carefully all the way to her uncle’s house.

They stopped on a gravel drive. The house was a modest place for a man with a driver. Stern old Pennsylvania Dutch farmhouse of impenetrable stone and ancient windows so bubbled they played tricks with the landscape beyond. The driver carried her bag up to her room, which alone was twice the size of her grandmother’s Paris apartment. In one wall was her own marble bathroom, with a green shower mat
of such thickness it was like new spring grass in the park. She wanted to lie down on it immediately and sleep for days.

In the kitchen, the driver pulled out of the refrigerator a plate with a pale chicken cutlet, potato salad, beans, and a note her uncle had written in French about how he would meet her when he got home. Television, he counseled, was the best way to learn English. Do not leave the house. Make a list of the things she needed and the driver would see to it that she got them tomorrow.

It was hard for her to overlook how many mistakes he made with his spelling.

The driver showed her how to lock the door and put on the alarm. He wore a worried look on his flabby face, but he had to go.

She ate very close to the television, warming herself against its staticky screen, watching some incomprehensible show about leopards. She washed everything and put it all back where she thought it belonged, and tiptoed upstairs. She tried every door, but every one but hers was locked, then washed her hands and face and feet, brushed her teeth, and climbed into the bed, but it was too large and the room too full of shadows. She brought the duvet and a pillow into the empty closet and fell asleep on the carpet that smelled like dust.

In the thick of the night, she woke suddenly to find a thin man peering down at her from the doorway. Something about his large eyes and apple cheeks brought back her grandmother. He had ears like small, pale bat wings. His face brought her mother’s, through the smoke of years, to her.

“So,” he said in French. “The devil girl.” He seemed amused, though he wasn’t smiling.

She felt her breath twist. From the first, she understood he was very dangerous, despite his mild aspect. She would have to be careful. She would have to keep to herself.

“I’m not home often,” the uncle said. “The driver will take you to
buy your necessaries and the groceries you may need. He will drive you to and from the bus stop, which will take you to school. You will hardly see me.”

She said a quiet thank-you, because silence would have been worse.

He looked at her for a long moment, and said, “My mother made me sleep in her closet as well. You must try to sleep in your bed.”

“I will,” she whispered. He closed the door, and she listened to him walking, unlocking, opening, shutting, relocking a series of doors. She kept listening to the silent house until the silence filled her and she slept again.

—

W
ITHIN
THE
FIRST
HOUR
of American school, the boy sitting in front of Aurélie turned around. He whispered, “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine!”

She didn’t understand. “You’re stupid,” he said.

Lunch an incomprehensible slab of bread and cheese. Milk that smelled rotten. She sat on the playground trying to be as small as possible, though she was very big for her age. The boy with the joke came by with three other boys.

“Orally, orally!” they cried, and stuck their tongues in one cheek, mimed a penis going in and out with their hands.

This she understood. She went to the teacher, a babylike worm with sparse white hair who had prided herself on talking to Aurélie all morning in her high school French patois.

Aurélie said as slowly as she could that though Aurélie was her given name, nobody called her that in Paris.

The city’s name made the teacher’s face light up.
“Non?”
she said.
“Et qu’est-ce que c’est le nom que vous préférez?”

Aurélie thought. There was a girl in the form above her at school in Paris, a short, strong, and wry girl with flowing black hair. She was
mysterious, cool, the one all the other girls courted with
berlingots
and
bandes dessinées
. When she was angry, words came whiplike to her lips. She used her power sparingly. Mathilde was her name.

“Mathilde,” Aurélie said.

“Mathilde,” the teacher said.
“Bon.”

Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin. She felt the other girl’s stillness come over her, her cool eye, her quickness. When the boy in front of her turned around to mime a blow job, she darted her hand out and pinched his tongue hard through his cheek, and he yelped, and tears rose to his eyes, and the teacher turned to find Mathilde sitting calmly. The boy was punished for making noise. She watched as, over the course of the hour, twin purple grapes developed on his cheek. She wanted to suck them.

—

A
T
A
PARTY
ONCE
, in the happy underground years in Greenwich Village, when Lotto and she had been so desperately poor [holes in her socks, lunches of sunshine and water], their Christmas lights making a chain of lemons on the walls, rotgut vodka mixed with juice, she was flipping through the CDs when she heard someone shout out
Aurélie!
and she was immediately eleven again, desperate, lonely, confused. She spun around. But it was her husband, full-bore:
Didn’t know it was a suppository, so he took it orally!
Friends hooted; girls danced by with cups in their hands. Mathilde went into the bedroom, feeling robotic, passed the three engrossed bodies on the bed without looking. She hoped when they were done they’d change the duvet cover. She went into the closet that stank of cedar blocks and the dust of her own skin. She nestled among her shoes. Fell asleep. Woke to Lotto hours later opening the door and laughing and picking her up tenderly and putting her into bed. She was glad of the mattress stripped of its sheets, she and her husband alone at last, his hot, avid hand on her neck, her upper thigh. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t want to, really, but it
didn’t matter. The weight of his body was pressing her into the present. Mathilde was slowly coming back. [And Aurélie, that sad, lost girl, vanished again.]

—

A
URÉLIE
WAS
MEEK
AND
MILD
; Mathilde boiled underneath a placid skin.

Once, she was playing tetherball and a boy in her class was winning and she deliberately hit the ball so hard into his face that he was knocked down and his head bounced on the asphalt and he had a concussion. Once, she heard her name from a pocket of girls who then laughed. She waited. At lunch a week later, she sat next to the most popular of those girls and waited until she took a big bite of her sandwich and, underneath the table, stabbed her fork into the girl’s thigh. The girl spat out the bite before screaming, and Mathilde had had time to hide the fork under a table buttress. She blinked her huge eyes at the teacher and was believed.

The other children regarded her now with fear in their faces. Mathilde floated through her days coolly, as if she were in the clouds, watching dispassionately down. Her uncle’s in Pennsylvania was only a place to stay, chill and dim, not a home. She imagined for herself a separate life, a chaotic mess with six sisters, loud pop on the radio, nail polish stink and bobby pins on the vanity. Game nights with popcorn and screaming fights. Voice from the other bed in the night. The sole welcome in her uncle’s house was the warm buzz of the television. She mocked a soap opera,
The Starrs in Your Eyes
, in the characters’ own voices, until she lost her accent. Her uncle was never home. Did she burn to see what was behind those locked doors? She did. But she didn’t pick the locks. [Already, a miracle of self-possession.] On Sundays, the driver took her to the grocery store, and if she was fast and they still had time, he’d drive her to a little park near a river to feed sheets of white bread to the ducks.

Her loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors.

Once, even, swimming in the river, a leech attached to her inner thigh, so close to what mattered that it thrilled her and she left it there, thought of it throughout her days, her invisible friend. When it fell off in the shower and she accidentally stepped on it, she wept.

To stay away from the house, she joined the time-intensive clubs at school that didn’t require her to speak. She swam and joined the chess team and learned the flute for the band, a thoroughly demeaning instrument, she felt, but easy to master.

In the height of her happiness many years later, she would think of that solitary little girl, face downturned like a demure fucking bellflower, while inside there was the maelstrom. She’d want to smack that kid hard. Or pick her up in her arms and cover her eyes and run somewhere safe with her.

Instead, her uncle adopted her when she was twelve. She wasn’t aware he was going to until the day before the court hearing. The driver told her.

He’d gained so much weight over the year that his stomach had grown a little stomach. When he was lifting her groceries to the trunk, she had the urge to bury her face in the many pillows of him.

“Adopted! Isn’t that nice?” the driver said. “Now you needn’t worry,
mamzelle
, about having to go somewhere else. You belong here now.”

When he saw her expression, he touched her—was it the first time he’d touched her?—on the crown of the head, and said, “Oh, girl pie. Don’t take it so hard.”

On the ride home, her silence was like the fields they were passing. Ice-wracked, weary with blackbirds.

Inside the car, the driver said, “I’m supposed to call you Miss Yoder now.”

“Yoder?” she said. “But that wasn’t my grandmother’s name.”

The driver’s eyes in the rearview grew merry. “They say your uncle changed his name to the first thing he saw when he got to Philly. Reading Terminal Market, it was. Yoder’s pies.”

Then a flash of alarm in his face, and he said, “You won’t tell I said so.”

“Who would I tell? I don’t talk to anybody but you,” she said.

“Sweet thing,” he said. “You break my heart. You do.”

The day Mathilde turned thirteen, she found one door downstairs unlocked and open a crack. Her uncle must have left it for her just so. For a moment, the hunger in her tipped over and she couldn’t suppress her curiosity. She entered. It was a library, with leather couches and Tiffany lights, and save for a glass cabinet that held what Mathilde would later find out to be antique Japanese erotica, she could reach all of the books in the room without stretching. They were strange things, ancient hardcovers that seemed, despite their similar deckled edges and cloth bindings, to be gathered randomly. In her sophisticated years, she’d understand that these were books sold by the yard, mostly for decorative purposes. But in those bad years, in her early teens, they were volleys from a kinder Victorian world. She read them all. She was so versed in Ian Maclaren and Anthony Hope, Booth Tarkington and Winston Churchill [the American], Mary Augusta Ward and Frances Hodgson Burnett, that the sentences in her English papers became ever more ornate and elaborate. American education being what it is, her teachers took her rococo sentences to be evidence of a prodigious facility with language that she didn’t actually have. She won all the English awards her last year in middle school. She won them all in high school, also. On her thirteenth birthday, she thought, closing the library door behind her, that at this rate she would know what was in every room of the house by the time she was thirty.

Except that, one month later, her uncle left a door unlocked unintentionally.

She wasn’t supposed to be home. She had walked back from school because of the half day called—there was a brutal snowstorm on the horizon—and the chauffeur couldn’t be reached on the office phone, and she missed the bus anyway. She walked in the freezing cold, her bare knees numbed after five minutes. She pushed the last two miles in a sideways wind with her fingers making blinders to keep the snow out.

When she came back to the stone house, she had to crouch on the doorstep with her hands under her bra to warm them enough to work the key. She heard voices inside, at the end of the hall where the library was. She took off her shoes, feet blocks of ice, and crept to the kitchen, where there were half-eaten sandwiches on the counter. A bag of chips splayed its barbecue guts. Someone’s cigarette burned in a teacup, quarter inch of ash. In the windows, the storm was almost black.

She tried to go toward the staircase noiselessly but stopped short: under the stairway there was a small room, and she’d never seen the door open until now. She heard footsteps and stepped inside, quietly shutting the door. The overhead light was on. She flicked it off. She crouched behind a strange statue of a horse head and breathed into her hand. The footsteps passed. There were loud male voices and more steps. In the dark, her warming skin was full of chewing ants.

The great front door slammed, and she waited and waited, but she could feel that the house was empty and that she was alone.

She turned the light on and saw what she’d only vaguely seen before. Along the wall there were canvases with their faces turned away and little pieces of statuary. She picked up a painted board. It was heavy, solid. She turned it around and almost dropped it. Never in her life had she seen a more perfect thing. At the bottom, in the foreground, there was a curvy white horse with a man in blue robes riding it, the fabric so lush she touched it to make sure it wasn’t real. Behind
him were other men, other horses, a jagged rock face. Up against the blue sky was a soft, pale city so perfect it seemed made of bones.