Motherthing, page 22
My nothing is a vacuum, sucks Ralph’s dick right in, and he’s thrusting so hard, groaning, gripping my shoulder with one hand, thumb pressed into my throat’s hollow, slams me down on him harder and harder while I flail empty as a wind sock, every bit of tension pulled into my center, held there like a pack of froth-furious dogs on leashes, be a good wife, the best wife, A Good Woman, feeding him the most special dinner, giving him what he wants, and look at us, sick together, canvas and artist, fucking like I’m dead, eating that good meat, Ralph will love me more than ever now because look at me, I’m my real and actual self, my authentic self, the yogurt types would say, and look at what my authentic self has done to save him, to save us. Ralph my savior, but me our savior.
I am our savior.
A droplet of light lands suddenly behind my eyelids.
Quivering brighter, brighter, such a deafening density of packed light it feels like a portal, another world moaning open before me.
Come to me. Come, my sweet one. Come to the light.
The medium had been speaking to Laura when she said that. Magic words.
Come to me. Come, my sweet one. Come to the light.
Come to me. Come, my sweet one. Come to the light.
And it’s Cal.
I see her.
Cal, Cal, Cal, Cal, Cal. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tears warm the seal of my eyelids. My smile spreads past its borders, toward my ears, beyond my face, taking flight.
Cal, tonight, my baby, no question, she’s here, she’s here, she’s here, she’s here! And Ralph, my baby, returned to me finally. And me, I realize, a baby, coming to life tonight too.
Come to life.
Breaks the otherworldly stillness I’d brought to my sagging lips and tongue.
I lap at the drool I’d worked up from somewhere inside, spilling out, pressed fat and glistening on my cheek, lift my hand, wipe it with the bend of my wrist.
I palm a spread of Ralph’s slick back with one hand, use the other to drag up into his hair and squeeze and pull back his head, lick the sweat from his neck. He’s picking up steam, this is it, my plan, my plan: more powerful than I’d even realized, all of us, my whole family, coming to life at once.
I open my eyes, bring them back to center, peer over the mountain of Ralph’s warm shoulder and I see her, finally. In the deep dark of the hallway, through the open bedroom door, Laura is standing there, staring straight at us, head low, mounted on her frame, hair in gnarled sections of hard jerky, bisecting her sneer. But she’s faint, crackling more out than in. I direct all my new life to my eyes, focus on her, and she crackles louder, whorls of distortion growing, rubbing out her face, her hands. She feels it, but she’s not resisting, allowing herself to be scrubbed from this realm. A stain lifted. Fainter now. And fainter still, no match for my powerful cleansing stare. Lifted, lifting, until she’s completely gone, and Ralph comes like he’s stuck his dick in an electrical socket.
He rolls off and his semen weeps from me like a popped blister. “Oh, shit,” I say, because that’s Cal oozing out, my baby yowling on a wave of semen seeping into the sheets. I grab a wad of tissues from next to the bed, scoop most of Ralph’s stuff back into me. Hold it there, Welcome, Cal, while the rest pools jiggly in the center of the tissue wad, like some extremely upsetting Danish.
Ralph kisses me on the cheek and gets up, still naked, walks to the bathroom, and turns on the sink. He’s cleaning himself up but I won’t. I’m going to steep in this residue, our fluids, my favorite smell in the whole world. I close my eyes, breathe the smell in so deeply and effectively that it disappears inside me, coming out of me and back inside me, in and out and in and out and around and around and around and I’m almost asleep when I hear Ralph retch.
I get up, also naked, find him kneeling in front of the toilet, wedges of muscle along his back ratcheting with every backward yank of his digestive tract. I don’t ask if he’s okay because I know he is, the final step of the plan, the magic exorcising itself from his system.
The way he holds the bowl reminds me of the girl on the raisin box, golden hair in sumptuous buttercream masses over her shoulders, held off her pink face by a radiant red bonnet. In her arms a basket of ORGANICA, not shit this time, but some overflowing, uncontrollable cancer of fruit or vegetables or flowers, grown from the ground and ready for a yogurt type like Carol to fill her fridge with. Expensive, natural products that prove that you love yourself, that you’re a healthy, happy person with clean, flushed interiors. Though Ralph held the toilet bowl with that same lust for life, it was filled instead with the acrid glut of a spent enchantment: half-digested Janet à la king and the remnants of his mother’s influence. Ralph is sweating, spent, lying empty on the cool bathroom floor. I lean over, look into the bowl, and spit into our bubbling black victory.
32
[Scene: Ralph’s well-preserved childhood bedroom. Bright morning light sears the bed, where Abby is stirring, smiling before she even opens her eyes, feeling the warmth of the wide-open curtains, hearing the sound of Ralph in the kitchen downstairs, plates clanking, dishwasher latched and humming and forks and knives on their feet, rattle-dancing in their cages.
He’s awake. He’s cleaning. He’s cured. She rolls around the bed, wrapping herself up in sheet and blanket, stretches all the way awake, then stands up, yanks off the bedding, tosses it in the hallway. Pulls Laura’s bedding off too and adds it to the pile. Fresh sheets and blankets and pillowcases, all the curtains wide open and the sun pouring in thick and sweet as honey. Imagine a hot tub, an artificial womb for your very own backyard, filled with honey, better than shit, devoured by the overwhelming, all-consuming stick of it. Honey is better than shit and maybe that’s the lesson in all of this.
Or maybe the lesson is that honey and shit are the same, rich fluids, and what matters is the person devoured by them, like how Abby can lie and it’s good, but when Laura lied, it was bad; Abby’s world sweet and nourishing to Ralph, Laura’s world bitter and toxic. Abby’s plan had made Ralph well again, a perfect recipe of her loving design, restoring his mind, bringing him back to life, and now willing his happy, healthy Cal into being, most definitely here now, no question, the precious logic of her brand-new cells organizing undeniably in Abby’s honeyed womb. Hello, Cal, I can feel you. I can feel you there. A mother. Finally.
Her first duty as a new mother would be a good, productive Sunday. They’ll clean everything up, then maybe go for a walk, get dinner somewhere, snuggle up at the end of the night and watch a movie. Abby will fall asleep because she always does, then later, after Ralph’s pulled her up from the couch by both arms, herded her up the steps and into bed, he’ll tell her what happened in the rest of the movie like a bedtime story.
With all the sheets and blankets in her arms, piled high, she uses her feet to feel her way down the stairs, along the hallway, through the kitchen, where Ralph is puttering.
She opens the basement door, deposits the sheets in front of the washing machine, which she’s surprised to find already hard at work. The keyboard is gone, folded up in a closet somewhere. He’s pulled the pillows from the windows, sunshine streaming in, dust scrambling to look busy.]
ABBY: [Making her way back up the basement steps.] Hello!
RALPH: [At the sink, rinsing the suds from a pot, laying it upside down on a tea towel to dry.] Morning!
ABBY: [She wraps her arms around his waist, pulls him toward her for a long, comfortable kiss.] You’re feeling better.
RALPH: I am feeling better. [Reaching for the coffeepot.] Want some?
[Abby grabs a mug and Ralph fills it up and they sit at the kitchen table, leaned over either side of a month-old crossword like they used to on Sunday mornings. Ralph has already filled in some of the top corner, a few of the usual short, vowel-heavy suspects, épée, era, ire. A wet splotch lands on the page, fills with the slow swirl of blue ink, then another. Ralph is crying.]
ABBY: Oh no, Ralph, no, please, please, you’re better now, aren’t you? I thought this was over.
RALPH: [Face soaked in tears.] Abby, I love you. I—
[A knock on the door. He bites his bottom lip, stands up, makes his way to the front room, and Abby follows him.]
ABBY: Ralph, no.
[He turns to her: pained, confused. With the split-second totality of a car accident, she knows exactly who it is, exactly what’s happened, and what she’s going to see. He found something this morning, something she’d overlooked, the cooler bag full of blood, a hunk of flesh in the garbage that he found and pulled out and examined, not chicken, obviously not chicken. And she can’t blame him really, can she? She can’t blame him for doing what he does. Because he’s her Ralphie, he’s her god, he’s not psychotic anymore and he’s not going to leave her, but he is going to turn her in because that’s who he is. What she herself restored: the Perfect Good, Ralph the Perfect Good, with the strongest sense of justice, of what’s right and wrong and fair and noble. He’ll tell them it was all for him, that he’s responsible, how it was his psychosis that created the whole disaster. You can have us both, he’ll say, a genuine offer, but they won’t take it. Just like Randy or Doug or Todd didn’t take it. Because Abby, she’s the murderer. She’s the cannibal. She’s the bad one. And Ralph is the one who saves her.
Except when Abby opens the door, it’s not the cops. It’s Irena, Cud sitting hunched and splay legged at her feet. She tells Abby to hold out her hand, so she does, too tight though, like she’s feeding a horse. Irena cups hers underneath Abby’s, softens it into the right shape to accept whatever’s coming, and Abby feels it, light and small, it bounces a bit, has to settle before it lands.]
IRENA: Cud found it.
[Abby opens her eyes and the old woman’s opal eye is staring up at her. She screams and drops it to the ground, where it clanks across the floor, settles a few feet away.
She drops to a squat, level now with Cud’s exposed button of a penis, hands over her ears as Ralph bends over, pinches the eye from the ground.]
IRENA: [Laying a hand on Abby’s back.] Honey, what’s wrong?
[Ralph steps forward, Laura’s ring between his forefinger and thumb.]
RALPH: [A mixture of confusion and relief.] Where did you find this?
IRENA: It was in Cud’s bed. No clue where he got it. Maybe snatched it one day when your mother took it off to repot flowers. It’s a bit muddy. [To Abby.] What did you think it was?
ABBY: [Standing up.] Honestly I…thought it was an eyeball.
IRENA: [Smiling.] That’s a good omen, seeing an eyeball. Means someone’s looking out for you two. [Turning around, making her way down the steps with Cud at her heels.] You’ll be all right!
[Abby marvels at the bounce of Cud’s hindquarters down the porch steps. You fucking rascal. He’d gotten into their yard before, a burrow beneath their shared fence that Irena tried to keep blocked with loose dirt. And a few times through the alley after Laura, arms full with some garish centerpiece, couldn’t quite kick the gate hard enough to relatch. Hadn’t that happened the day Ralph found his keyboard? The gate yawning open, arousing Ralph’s gloomy eye, and Cud’s idiotic curiosity. Once Irena and Cud are gone, Abby closes the door. Ralph is still holding the ring, shocked, smiling; he etches a bit of dirt from one of the prongs with his thumbnail. The ring is Abby’s reward, she knows, for defeating the demon. For saving Ralph. Laura a more honorable foe than Abby had given her credit for.
And Ralph so happy, his mother’s ring recovered, and his most devoted wife by his side.]
ABBY: [Stepping toward him, holding her hand out for the ring.] I thought you’d called the cops.
RALPH: Why? [He flips her hand, moves the ring up her finger.]
ABBY: I don’t know, I don’t—well, what were you going to say then, before Irena came?
RALPH: I was going to say we should make a baby together.
ABBY: [A hand on her stomach, the spot where Cal was most definitely rooting this time.] Too late.
Acknowledgments
Thank you to Rach Crawford and the team at Wolf Literary. Rach, I can’t thank you enough. You’re a class act, and I’m so lucky to work with you.
Thank you to Caitlin Landuyt and the team at Vintage/Anchor. Caitlin, the way you understood this book, and me, felt like magic—written in the stars, even! Thank you for being the absolute best.
Thank you to Jordan Ginsberg and the team at Strange Light. Jordan, you went out of your way to give me a home in Canada—and what a home! I’m so proud to be a part of it. Thank you, pal.
Thank you to Meaghan McIsaac. Megs, what would I do without you?
Thank you to my precious shrimps for making me a better writer.
And thank you to Paul for absolutely everything. Every single thing. None of this is possible without you. You are my FD. You are my AOQ. And you’re right, I should make the coffee more. Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you…
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Ainslie Hogarth, Motherthing
