Man V. Nature: Stories (6 page)

Beatrice walked beside Linda, swinging Lewis's chair wildly. The girl should look familiar, but Linda thought her the strangest of all. She watched Linda out of the corner of her eye, and seemed ready to flinch should Linda reach for her. So Linda didn't.

As they left the house, many of the children, crying, had embraced the man, and he had cried too. Most called him Dad, but she heard a few call him Kevin.
Kevin
, she repeated to herself, and she almost laughed at how ordinary it all began to seem. At the head of the trail the man had worn through the woods, Linda looked back. The man was slumped on the porch, already yellow and dead.

What if the man hadn't been ill? Would he have fought her for the children? Linda wasn't sure anymore. Perhaps he'd never intended to keep them, to become caretaker to untold numbers of children throughout his life. Maybe he'd had other plans but long ago had given in to a sick impulse. And the defeated young women thought this must be what motherhood is, and they let it continue. They learned to expect—and so, accept—certain losses. And the man waited a lifetime for some relief.

Linda regarded her sullen brood. They stood expectant, sad and hungry-looking. Her stomach sank.

 

Linda phoned her neighbors and left messages. The man is dead, and I have all the children. Come and see if any are yours.

Only a few women came, called out names that weren't recognized, tentatively lifted children, peered at their heads and bottoms as if making sure of something, then left with the ones that most fit what they thought they remembered or what they most wanted. Only one woman teared up with joy. The others emanated a feeling more like confusion. Or resignation. If you could suddenly get back everything you'd already said good-bye to, would you want it? Other women she had called answered with their silence. They never came.

Linda recognized their parents in some of them. Inherited noses, eyes, smiles, temperaments, gave them away. She was certain she could match these children, walk them over to their proper homes. Two children who had earlier been claimed reappeared on her doorstep, apology notes pinned to their jackets. She could have sent them back to their indecisive parents. But she didn't do it. She kept all the children.

Linda hired men to build a cramped addition onto the house, and her husband worked extra hours to pay for it and for all their new expenses. Often after work he took long night drives, drank late at a bar, anything to avoid coming home to this new bustling clan. Linda remembered how, when they were newly married and fantasizing about their family to come, he had argued that three was the ideal number of children. Now they had twenty-five.

The new addition covered the footprint of the backyard and left no room for outside play. The children slept in rows on rough-hewn bunk beds that reminded her of a ship's galley: industrial, sad, adult. She tried not to picture it that way and concentrated instead on how these children were no longer stolen. They had been found. Freed. She had rescued them. But was anything better? Her husband was unhappy; the children who had seemed content in their forest home now seemed lethargic. And though she had her children back, she still felt grief for what could have been, for what would never be. Maybe this is what her neighbors had tried to tell her. Motherhood was naturally replete with loss.

She tried to keep her own children close. She put their beds in her bedroom. For Lewis a crib and then later his own small bed, with a train engine's face painted onto the foot, covered in conductor-striped sheets. And for Beatrice—a bed with pink sheets and a comforter trimmed with lace. But Beatrice didn't sleep there.

Beatrice prowled the house at night, looking through cabinets and books. She went for long walks and came back with things that didn't belong to her. In the morning, Linda would find her curled in a corner under a moldy, yellowed blanket Linda didn't recognize and couldn't remember bringing from the man's house. Beatrice's socks would be half off her feet in that way socks slide off children's feet but never adults'.

Beatrice kept her treasures in her corner of the living room, and at night, when the children were in bed, when Lewis was asleep, when her husband was working late to avoid the teeming house, when Beatrice was loping through the halls, Linda explored the collection. Mixed in with the dirty baseballs and lost car keys, Linda found a box of letters she had written to her stolen daughter and hoped one day to give to her. Baby pictures were tucked into a dog-eared grief book heavily marked with Linda's handwriting. Beneath it, Linda's hairbrush, full of wiry grays, a sweater she hadn't worn in years, a swatch of pink snipped from Beatrice's own lonely bedding doused in an expensive perfume Linda kept on her dresser.

Linda waited for some warm tug of emotion, but the collection only made her uneasy. This study in the past cast doubt in Linda's mind about the girl—she couldn't possibly be Beatrice; Linda felt little for her. At times she wondered if the man had lied to her, or mistaken this girl for another. When the children were all together, Linda watched the girls and tried to feel a yearning for them, something. She asked herself, Is that how my Beatrice would look at age six? But none of them were like the daughter she'd spent years building in her imagination. And neither was this interloper who always seemed unsure where to stand, with her sly stare and twigs in her hair.

Some nights, after Beatrice had slipped out, Linda stood at the door and placed her hand on the lock, debated turning it. What would become of her? Linda pictured the girl returning to the sprawling house in the woods where she'd been raised, where her hiding spots were, padding across those bare floors with her dirty feet, tacking up new pictures, living like the man, collecting things in her travels, which would eventually lead to collecting children.

These were rare times Linda felt a straightforward, understandable emotion for Beatrice. She felt pity for the girl who was far from home. But it wasn't the same as love.

So she took to imagining Beatrice truly roaming, undetected, wild; able to cast off the trappings of her true home and Linda's home. Searching for a new home in the bottom of a dead tree, or maybe in a wet cave deep within a park. She'd sleep on pine boughs in the hot summer and shiver in her filthy yellow blanket in the winter.

Linda spent long nights composing Beatrice's adventures, obsessing over the details. She tried to convince herself they had the makings of an enviable childhood: Beatrice drinking from fountains and bathing in lakes, calling owls at night and chasing butterflies during the day, hiding from snooping dogs, raiding squirrel stashes, spying on crows, making speeches to the tallest trees, weaving weeds through her hair, drawing pictures on sidewalks with burned wood, being a princess, reading street signs like they were adventure stories, laughing with ducks who told her jokes, digging through garbage, watching, from a tree, happy families picnicking across a great lawn, and waiting for the moment when she might slip unnoticed among them as though she belonged to them and steal their lunches, then, more.

GIRL ON GIRL

Freshman year starts, and somehow everyone is someone else, someone older, someone interested in the faraway future life. Everyone except me. I'm back from a summer at my dad's divorce condo—decorated to seem remote and armed—and no one cares. I'm watching my old clique grind into boys on the dance floor while the male coaches-slash
-
civics-teachers roughly separate them, swipe at inappropriate girl parts, and get away with it in the authoritative heat of the moment. I'm watching it all, cringing, but I wish I were in the scrum.

I want to be fondled. I want someone to press me somewhere too hard. I'm hot with shame. The good kind.

I turn to Clara. She never talks because her parents are professors. She still wears girls' undershirts, and she can't quit horses. She looks about as far away from the dance as a dead star.

“What do you think Mr. Ryan
tastes
like?”

Clara turns red. I do too.

My math teacher is breaking up a couple by getting in between them, his groin brushing a junior in a glitter skirt. He has a chestnut beard and glassy eyes. Sharp shoulders. I'm imagining inspecting the pale skin under those fine dark hairs of his forearm as he leans over my desk to tell me what
x
is. He must taste like just-dug rocks. My mouth waters. His calculus fingers wiggle toward me. He says I'm a ripe pear. He is very close. My ears ring. Pears are rotten.

I smack my head to stop my dirty movie.

That's when I spot Marni tossing her hair around the way women do on daytime talk shows. She's screaming at her boyfriend, Mack. She's louder than the music, and it sounds like one long
wee
. Marni is attractive and fat, with an unnaturally narrow waist and unnaturally big boobs and ass. Her cheeks and lips are plump, but somehow her jaw is sharp, and she looks like a sexy Victorian porcelain doll. She wears her hair big and together it all works to make her seem normal-sized with a lot to grab. But I've seen her getting into her pajamas and I've seen her gullet a whole pizza at a birthday party, and there is nothing normal-sized about her. She is a magnificent cow. She was my best friend. I wrote her twenty-six letters this summer, and she wrote me none. We haven't talked since middle school.

Mack grabs some of that big hair. He pulls her to him, mouth wide, rooting for hers. Marni raises her hand. Maybe she'll stick fingers in there, swirl them around. I want her to. But she scratches at his face and hauls herself across the crowded floor. Couples part for her because somehow she is revered; rumor is she'll be at least nominated for homecoming, though she won't beat anyone on cheerleading. In the corner of the gym Theresa and Hill, Marni's new bests, detangle from their dates. They're getting felt up, but they somehow know Marni is on the move and they follow. I guess that's what it means to be bests now. I only know what's happening because I'm spying from bleacher land.

“I wonder what that was all about,” I say to Clara. My voice is conspiratorial. I'm trying to make gossip. But the dead star barely shrugs.

My knee quivers like a compass needle.

I know Marni's favorite spot.

Dancing couples step all over me like I'm a cat underfoot. It takes me two whole songs to get across the gym. I throw my shoulder against the rusty door. It squawks.

The hallway is quiet but full of couples pressing against lockers. Skirts inch up thighs; pants creep low. I can't tell if it's just style or if they're all about to do
it
. Where are the teachers? What's that smell? I want to grab all their hair as I run, and give a terrific yank. I want to sweep their legs and watch them go down.

The girls' bathroom is a floor above, at the end of the hall. I hear thudding and I sprint up the stairs. The ruckus gets louder down the corridor. I hear a thump and then an
ooph,
another thump and an
ooph.
From behind the door Marni shrills, “Harder!” and it's like she's in my ear.

I crack the door and see Marni lying on the floor, coat spread under her, her hair splayed out. She looks romantic and princesslike, and then Theresa lands a socked foot hard onto Marni's protruding fat gut.

“Ooph.” Marni's cherub face bunches. Hill stomps her size nines down. They both say, “Ooph,” then Hill wheezes like it's hot.

“Come on,” Marni growls. She reaches for Theresa's leg just as Theresa lets it drop. Marni's head snaps back on the floor. A sick crunch.

I gasp. The three heads jolt. They see it's just me.

“What do you want, Fart?” Marni sneers.

She's lying there: beaten, regal. Cracks in the windows make shimmering webs. The heater is clanging. The stomping girls are huffing. Everyone is waiting. I want to join, is what I want. I want to land some full-force kicks. I want to miss and get her shoulder, her head. I want to jam a toothbrush down her throat, make her thin.

“You're going to get in trouble,” I say. I try to sound loud and sarcastic, but I don't.

The girls exchange looks and laugh too loudly; one big fake
ha
each. It's effortlessly coordinated.

Theresa plants a foot on Marni's belly, claiming her like an explorer. “She's in trouble all right,” she says, arching her back, sticking her gut out, rubbing it. She strains her face and moans.

Marni on Mack. Mack in Marni. A little Mack and Marni. My head rushes. I want to watch, hear the sounds.

Marni, a scowl storming, pushes Theresa, who topples down to the tile and stays down, plays dead.

“Get out,” Marni roars at everyone, but I'm the one who runs.

Outside the gym, I find a gaggle of teachers gossiping. A flask is tucked when I skid up to them, breathless. I tell them Marni Duke is getting beat up in the second-floor girls'. I can't even tell them why. We're just fourteen.

I'm hot with shame. The stomach kind. The kind that hurts. I run home, punching low tree limbs as I go.

 

In homeroom on Monday, everyone whispers about a fight in the girls' bathroom. The rumor is Marni. The rumor is one girl held her down while another kicked her. People gasp.
Marni from Homecoming?
Coos of sympathy all around.

I'm summoned to the office.

Marni, Theresa, and Hill slouch in the lobby, and the principal calls me in. The girls glare as I close the door.

He asks, “Gabby, what did you see?”

They glare through glass, and I can't speak until the principal lowers the blinds. As they fall, Hill raises a fist. I catch Marni's eye, and it's an eye so familiar I'm momentarily grateful to have its attention. Then the blinds are down. It's just me.

The principal wants my version.

“I don't have a version,” I say.

He sighs. “Just tell me what you saw.”

I tell him what I saw—Marni on the ground, Hill and Theresa stomping.

“Where?” he asks.

I touch my stomach, watch him jot on a notepad. “But I ran,” I say. “I don't know anything else.”

“Did they say anything to you?”

I shake my head no. I can't say.

He stares, pen poised.

I clear my throat, speak sideways. “Marni had a fight with her boyfriend right before. You could talk to him?”

The principal is confused. “Was he there?”

The swirl pattern of the carpet is moving; it wants to crawl up my leg. I shake my head again. “No.”

“And how do you know about this fight?”

I shrug and look at my hands, the skinny fingers and fat tips. They're like frog hands; sticky, creepy. They'd ruin a lily pad. I smooth my strained jeans. Something smells. I'm sure it's me.

“I watched them,” I answer.

The principal nods, leafs through a file of papers—the paper version of me.

I'm dismissed.

I brace myself for the lobby, for the baseball bat I'm sure will meet my skull when I enter it, but Marni and the girls are gone.

I walk to the nurse's office and puke on her desk. She sends me home. I go the backyard route so no one will see me.

 

In homeroom Tuesday, everyone whispers about how there was no fight between Marni and Hill and Theresa. People nod.
They're bests, you know.
Who lied? The rumor is me. “Gabby,” girls whisper conspiratorially, ready to hate. “Who?” Uncertain glances from desk to desk. “Gabrielle?” Heads shake. No recognition. I'm sitting right there.

I'm in line for lunch and Theresa comes up behind me, digs her plastic tray into my spine. I double over my ravioli.

“Meet Marni out front before fifth. Do it,” she bleats.

I sit next to Clara. Her whole look is skeptical. I don't touch my food. The ten-minute bell.

“Clara,” I hiss. “Come to the bathroom.”

She startles like I've just woken her. Looking out the window is her form of sleep. But she follows.

First-floor bathroom. Lots of postlunch traffic. I peer under doors. The so-what smokers are enshrouded near the sinks. My eyes water.

I grab Clara's hand, but she takes it away quickly, disturbed. Too close, she seems to say. I think I hate her. “Just stand guard outside the bathroom, okay? When the bell rings, text if you see Marni, Hill, or Theresa.”

“Why? Because you lied?”

How does Clara know a rumor? She's a corner-sitter. “I didn't lie. Just do it.”

I lock myself behind a stall door and crouch on the toilet. I can monitor through the crack. I wait.

Girls rush in, rake brushes through their hair, apply shiny gloss with wands, blot, spit into sinks. Cheap perfumes mist the air.

The bell rings; the room clears out. A drip glugs down a drain.

I text Clara a question mark, but I get no response. She's probably wandered into some empty classroom to wait for her life to begin.

The door swings open. I smell Marni before I hear her, the fake coconut of her sunless tan. Hill and Theresa stifle awful snorting
haws
. They walk the line of stalls, kick in each door. They're not wondering where I am. They know. I make myself into a small clump on the toilet seat. The whoosh of the door parts my bangs.

Hill pulls me out. “Nice try,” she mocks.

From behind the cracked door, Clara peeks. We lock eyes. I wait for a mouthed apology. She scans the scene and, incredibly, smiles before bolting. Have a nice day. I hate her.

Hill and Theresa each pull an arm behind my back. Marni smiles and knees me in the groin so hard I dry heave. They scoot to avoid my puke, but when it doesn't come, Marni knees me again.

“Ooph,” I say and gasp for air. I'm not big like Marni. I'm misshapen, weak. My legs are logs, but my middle is bird bones, doughy, and her knee reaches the center of me.

I'm bent. Hill and Theresa try to pull me up but I pull down, not out of preservation or show of strength but out of defeat. I want to hug the ground. My legs tremble. Marni's hands reach for my face and I let them guide me gently up because they're her hands. I know their gentleness from when she taught me things, placed my fingers on guitar strings to press as she strummed, held me up on a bike. When she soothed me after my dad left. I look into her eyes and at her sweet, pink face. She wears more makeup now, and under all the coconut she smells stale, as though she smokes outside so that the smoke will blow away but it gets caught in all that hair. For a moment I think she's going to smile, rub a smudge from my cheek, kiss me. But then, finally, her fist meets my face. I hear the crack, and now it's the floor reaching for me. I see their smiles as I go.

Lying here, what I cry about is that not one of them speaks as they leave. There's nothing to say about the downfall of unremarkable me. The only sounds are their different shoes on the tile: the click of too-grown-up heels, scuff of sneakers, clomp of daunting boots. They strut out the whining door and down the hallway, uncaringly late for fifth.

The tile is cool. Dirt shames my cheek. I have a bug's-eye view of the bathroom floor, littered with snarls of long girl hair and dropped cigarette ash. A glittery popped-off stick-on nail lies almost close enough to touch.

 

I wake up in bed. My head hurts. I can't breathe right. A rigid thing covers my nose. I tenderly pick. Crusty blood clogs my nostrils. I try to drink from a glass of water but the nose won't let me.

The door creaks. Mom's tentative head appears. Her eyes crinkle above her nervous smile.

“Oh good, you're awake.” She perches at the edge of my bed, smoothes the hair across my forehead, and then I'm aware that I have a bump there.

“What happened?” I gurgle.

Her hand stops in mom alarm. “Don't you remember?”

“Yes.”

The hand continues across my forehead. “Do you want to tell me who did this?”

“No.”

The hand stops, rests heavily on the protruding bump. It hurts. Does she know she's hurting me? I think she does.

“I mean, I don't remember. I mean, I don't know.”

Mom sighs, disappointed. “Okay for now, Gabrielle. But we're not done.” Then she brightens like she's just been handed pages for the next scene. She says, “You have a visitor!” She straightens the sheet across my chest. “Honey, Marni is here.”

I tense. “Why?”

She smiles self-pityingly. Her daughter is strange. “To see you. To see if you're okay. Isn't that nice?” She pauses. “Marni hasn't been by in such a long time. I didn't think you two were still friends.”

“We're not.”

“Well, then, it's doubly nice that she came, isn't it? Are you up for it?” She's up for it, I can tell. She's already fondling the doorknob.

I remember how Marni's fist cut the smoky light shining through the cracked windows of that bathroom. It's half-the-day-left light. It's the kind of light here now.

I nod, and when Mom leaves, I pull myself up to a sit.

Marni tiptoes in, straight-backed and calm, her face friendly and serene. For a moment, I'm relieved. But when the door clicks behind, her body slouches into a threat. Hands on her hips. She looks at my face and snorts. “You look like shit.”