Elsewhere, page 2
* * *
That night as we ladled stew into bowls, brushed the tiny pearl teeth of children and sang them lullabies, we felt the stranger’s presence; it seemed we did these things for her, as if, while our town’s population had increased by a single person, we had also doubled, become both ourselves and the sight of ourselves, now that we had a stranger to see us.
Once our children were asleep, the lovemaking began, bodies pressed together under heavy damp quilts. Husbands and wives were together that night not like people who had never not known each other, but with the passion and hunger of strangers. A husband saw not his wife with the pink scar their son liked to stroke and call mama’s worm, felt not the fingertips callused by her instrument, smelled not the frying oil in her hair, talc on her thighs, but a mystery. The unknown of her rose above him, the precious things he knew of her reduced to almost nothing.
* * *
The atmosphere in town the next day was festive, everybody eagerly sharing news of the stranger. Sally made sure we all knew she’d been the first to see her. Sally ran the concession kiosk at the entrance to Feldpark, selling tea and shortbread and griddled sandwiches, and from that vantage point she had a clear view of the supply road’s final steep stretch. She claimed the stranger told her she had never seen a more beautiful place. While we were happy to hear this, we did not want to ascribe too much significance to Sally’s report. She was a shallow and unserious person, prone to embellishment, and she loved nothing so much as to be an authority on a subject of collective interest. We teenage girls often walked away giggling after we made our purchases from her. She was old enough that her hair was silver, and we couldn’t get over the fussy way she styled herself, in lacy blouses and ruffled skirts, or her hair, which she wore in ringlets like a birthday girl. The boys our age loved to get Sally going, to draw out her most ridiculous behavior, which was easy to do. Once, Di, Marie, and I were behind Nicolas in line, and we heard him tell Sally her shortbread was the best in town, even better than his mother’s. He leaned across the counter and whispered, ‘Let’s keep that our little secret, okay, Sally?’ Like clockwork, she fluttered her eyelashes and tucked an extra shortbread into his waxed paper packet, and as she passed it to him and their fingertips brushed, she whispered, ‘Our secret.’ In fairness, it wasn’t just us teenagers; Sally was one of the few childless women in town, and the mothers were always chattering about the way she badgered them with questions and pounced on the tiniest scraps of gossip about their lives, desperate to matter any way she could.
In the caf at lunch that day, everybody was talking about their first sightings. I told Di and Marie how the stranger had set her coins on the counter. Di, Marie, and I had been a threesome for years. I had secured myself to them shortly after Ana ended our pairing. We made for a somewhat unnatural threesome, frivolous Di and rigid Marie and quiet Vera, though like all threesomes we did everything together. Di told Marie and me she’d noticed the stranger wore no jewelry whatsoever in her hair. Marie recounted her sighting with particular relish. She had been practicing her cello by the parlor window when she looked up from her music and saw the stranger passing on the sidewalk. At first, she thought she was the woman from the framed illustration on the wall of the ice cream parlor. ‘Isn’t it funny, the tricks our minds play?’ Marie said. It turned out Marie was in good company. Many of us mistook the woman, at first, for someone whose image we had seen before, in a painting or on the packaging for some product or other.
Stories began to circulate among us uppers of the most memorable sightings. Jonathan had come quite close to her. He had gone out to skin and clean the rabbit his mother would cook for supper. He had slaughtered it the day before and was lifting it from the basin of salt water, now dark pink, on the front porch when she walked past. He said the skin on her arms was all gooseflesh; she must have been so accustomed to the sweltering lowland heat that her body didn’t know what to make of our refreshing climate.
Liese said that outside of her house on Gartenstrasse, the stranger had paused to smell the mother-of-the-evening that grew along the fence line. It was the end of the day, when the clouds were beginning to gather and the flowers released their sweet fragrance like an offering. The stranger closed her eyes and her face crinkled in ecstasy, as if she had never before breathed a scent so potent and lovely.
* * *
We were wary. Everything we knew of strangers suggested she was not to be trusted. But Ruth seemed harmless; a pathetic figure, not a dangerous one. Over the following days, we learned that she was a creature of habit. Every morning she came down from her room at the Alpina just before eight. We were so pleased that the Alpina had a real guest, one who had traveled to reach it, not just one of our newlywed couples staying in the honeymoon suite. In the dining room, she ate a breakfast of yogurt with stewed fruit. She took her tea with milk and four cubes of sugar, more than even our youngest children, like the only kind of pleasure she could understand was one as rudimentary as sweetness. Next, she walked in the mountains, vanishing from us for hours. She returned in early afternoon, her canvas shoes muddy, shoelaces snagged with burs. The boots she had worn the day she arrived had a small heel; in her canvas walking shoes we saw how slight she was. For the rest of the day she did what might be called poking around, strolling Hauptstrasse and popping into stores to look at this or that. She stroked the supple items in the leather goods shop, marveled at the pastries in the case at the bakery. She stood for a long time on the sidewalk outside the creamery and watched through the shop’s front window as our cheesemaker poured doe’s milk into basins, cut the curds and poured off the whey, pale and translucent as clouds. Her valise had been small and we quickly learned the few possessions she had brought with her. The brown boots and the canvas walking shoes, the dark crepe dress with the small white flowers, a chambray button-down and trousers, a gray shawl knit of a flimsy, fragile yarn, the straw hat with black ribbons.
She almost always had her camera with her, hanging from the strap around her neck. This interested us. We really only took portraits, whereas she photographed the smallest things. When we saw her pause to snap a picture, a warm sensation spread through us, the almost erotic pleasure of seeing her seeing us. For all her timidity, the stranger Ruth had a certain power. Her attention drew ours to those details of our town so familiar we had long ago ceased to appreciate them. With nothing but her presence she altered our familiar spaces around her.
Walking along Gartenstrasse at dusk, when the clouds were just beginning to appear, she photographed the mother-of-the-evening she’d paused to smell when she first arrived. The flower grew relentlessly, crowding everything else out. We’d grown sick of seeing it wherever we looked, but now we looked again and saw how beautiful it was, even this, our most bothersome weed, how through the clouds its pale purple petals seemed to glow. In the grove, she photographed the night-dark fruit. She even took a picture of a picture, a sepia photograph that hung in a corridor off the lobby at the Alpina: girls all in a row in front of our stone school. This picture was so old we didn’t know who the girls were or whether they had been born here or had been among the people who first came to this place. They wore matching white blouses with black buttons, skirts to their ankles, braids with the silver pins fastened near the bottom instead of the nape. Their eyes were creepy the way eyes so often are in old photographs. At the end of the row, the smallest girl, much smaller than the others, scowled down at the ground. Her image was smudged, doubled: both her and a faint ghost that seemed to pull away from her. It pleased us that the stranger took notice of this photograph; she could feel our town’s power even if she could not understand it. We believed our affliction began with this smudged, doubled girl, that she became a wife who became a mother who became the first of us to go.
* * *
Admittedly, it was mostly children who believed this about the girl in the photograph. This was owing to a popular legend, according to which a mother on the verge of going would not appear in photographs, or her image would be blurred or transparent. Occasionally, an anxious child or a new mother would get carried away with this superstition, a bit compulsive about it, which I would know because they would bring rolls of film to Rapid that turned out to be full of nothing but pictures of the anxious child’s mother, or pictures the new mother had taken of herself in a mirror. They couldn’t stop monitoring, checking to see if it was happening.
Perhaps because of my father’s work, I was always especially compelled by this legend. Some of my earliest memories were of being in the darkroom, its sealed red darkness like the inside of a body. While my father worked I studied the strips of negatives that hung from clothespins on a length of twine, lilting in the airless room as if buffeted by the memories of breezes held in their images. In the negatives, people turned the opposite of themselves: black teeth, bright open mouths, eyes an obliterated white like the eyes of animals at night. The negatives terrified me, and I couldn’t keep myself from looking at them. I watched my father manipulate the tools of his trade, reels and clips and tongs and rollers, working with sober grace, as if his fine-boned hands were mere extensions of his implements, his body one more mechanism in this mysterious craft. Sometimes he held me in the crook of his arm and I peered over the enamel trays, nose near to skimming the chemicals, the vinegar of stop bath so sharp it burned my eyes, and watched as he conjured faces from nothing, summoning them from their burial within the cloud-white paper. How had anyone ever come up with it? Mix this with that, soak this in the other, do all of it in the dark and call forth an image of a person as they were but are no longer. Pluck a vanished moment from the sea of the past and lock it in forever.
When our affliction came for a mother, her going was like unwinding this process: One minute she was here, as solid and real as any of us, the next her body faded, faded, until she vanished into the clouds. Gone. We all knew the stories. A mother woke her husband and told him she couldn’t sleep. He turned on the bedside lamp and looked back at her and … nothing, no one. In the middle of the night, a mother went to fix a cup of milk for her child. A few minutes later her husband was startled by the sound of glass shattering. Outside the nursery door he found the shards, warm milk all around, his wife nowhere. A mother nursed her infant in the rocking chair, and a father lay awake listening to the rhythmic creaking of the chair until, abruptly, it ceased, and there was the child, alone in the chair.
When a mother went, we woke in the morning and sensed it. The clouds that took her touched us all, connected us all, an intimacy we had never not known. We felt her vanishing like a thread cut loose, presence turned to absence.
Ana had been beside her mother when she went. She had crept down the hallway in the night and slipped into her parents’ bed. In the morning, her mother was gone. Ana’s arm still bore the imprints of her fingertips; her mother had clung to her until the last possible moment. I woke up that morning to the sound of the screen door across the street slapping shut. I went to the window and there was Ana, standing on the porch, barefoot in her nightie, the silhouette of her clenched body visible through the thin material, hair unbrushed and tangled like our dolls’ hair. She walked to the edge of the top step and unleashed a wail. It seemed to come from everywhere at once, down from the clouds and up from the earth and from inside me, like my bones had all along been tuned to the frequency of that wail and had now been set vibrating by it.
My own mother’s going, just a week after Ana’s mother’s, carried no such story. Three of us went to sleep, and in the morning only two of us were there to wake. I expected our mothers’ fates would draw Ana and me even closer, but I could not have been more wrong. The day after my mother’s going, in the afternoon when the proceedings were finished, I tucked Walina under my arm and ran across Eschen to Ana’s. I had to get away from our house, which was so empty now, my father and I settling already into the silence that was all we knew how to make together. But when I was about to cross the threshold into Ana’s house, she slammed the screen door in my face. She said nothing, only stared at me through the screen with a fury that seemed to steam out of her until I retreated to my own porch to play with Walina alone, which was no good at all; I would never play with Walina again after that. I would never play with Ana again, either. She was still the first person I saw when I woke up and the last one I saw before going to sleep, but now these were only glimpses I caught: Ana stretching her arms over her head in the morning, Ana unspooling her braids at night, and always, Ana turned resolutely away from me, as if determined to expand the distance between us however she could. She didn’t speak to me again until some months after our mothers went, when she had settled into her threesome with Esther and Lu, and then she spoke to me not as Ana but in their unified voice, with which they taunted and teased me for some offense I couldn’t determine. I understood only that I was hated, and that this hate was as strong and intimate as the love that had preceded it. Maybe Ana hated me for the week that separated her mother’s going from mine, that brief, unbridgeable interval when I still had my mother but she no longer had hers. Or maybe it was because, in the wake of our mothers’ goings, when our town combed back through their lives to determine what the affliction had seen in them, why it had chosen them, it was their pairing everyone focused on. Threesomes were standard in our town, while pairings were rare, and a risk: to bind oneself so tightly to one other girl, to build your fate around hers. It suggested a certain heedlessness, and once they went we saw plainly that this heedlessness had been all over their mothering in small but significant ways. One clue about my mother everyone kept recounting was that I often turned up at school with my buckle shoes switched, right shoe on left foot, left shoe on right foot, which gave my appearance an ‘unnerving’ effect. My mother let me put my shoes on myself and she didn’t bother to switch them if I did it wrong.
That might seem too minor to count for much, but that was just it: Our affliction was never not watching us. It saw us more clearly than we saw one another, or even ourselves, so the clues preceding a mother’s going could be the smallest things, so subtle they became visible to us only in retrospect, when her going cast its clarifying light onto her past. Nothing was too insignificant to be a sign. A mother let her children cross the Graubach on the rocks when the water was a little too high, the current a little too swift. At the time it merely struck us as incautious, one of the countless small choices mothers made every day that could end in disaster but didn’t. This was not a judgment. If mothers were cautious all the time, children languished; we understood this. But after she went, we found ourselves returning to that moment: the small children, the slick rocks, water rushing all around, and the mother, looking on calmly from the bank. It appeared differently to us then, no longer the sort of act that any mother might commit, but a moment that contained the singularity of her love for her children, the quality, individual to her as a fingerprint, by which our affliction had chosen her out.
Another mother refused to let anyone watch her infant for even a few minutes so she could bathe or do the shopping, not her sister or her mother or even her husband. She trusted no one but herself. She had always been tightly wound, and we had accepted this behavior as the inevitable and not altogether uncommon result of applying such a temperament to new motherhood. But after she went, we saw clearly the inimitable nature of her mothering, how her love had curdled into obsession.
One mother abandoned her impeccable garden after her child was born. She let the forest reclaim the beds of sweet pea and foxglove, allowed weeds to suffocate the rambling rose along the fence line. Another, who had never shown much diligence about anything before she became a mother, plunged herself into her basket weaving. She kept her child in his swing on the porch for hours while she wove, left the task of soothing him to the breeze instead of rocking him in her arms. One mother was seen yanking her daughter’s braids for a minor offense. Another remained eerily calm when her child spit in her face.
What connected these mothers? Their clues pointed in different directions, indicating recklessness and vigilance, insufficiencies and excesses of love. Love sublimated, love coarsened, love sweetened to rot. The signs preceding a mother’s going were individual to her. They did not add up to something so crude as criteria, as a lesson or a rule. But once a mother went, we saw it, something out of balance in the nature of her love for her children that set her apart. Had she fallen out of balance on her own, and had her fall drawn the affliction to her? Or was she born afflicted, and all along, through her girlhood and her adolescence, her marriage and her pregnancies and, as long as it lasted, her motherhood, had she carried it inside her, and had it worked upon her until there was nothing in her that was not touched by it? We couldn’t say. We knew only that she was no longer meant to be here, that we were not meant to have her, keep her, and her going was the proof of this. Her absence left a cavity, a wound, as if our affliction had opened us to perform a necessary extraction. But like any wound, it healed. For a time, we could still see the traces of it, still feel the tenderness in the places where she used to be. But soon enough a day came when we probed for the spot, and we discovered that we could no longer find it, or even remember how it had felt.
Every year on my birthday, my father took Di, Marie, and me to afternoon tea at the Alpina. We’d been doing this since I was a little girl, when it was what every girl did on her birthday. We were still doing it the year the stranger arrived in town; my sixteenth birthday had been the month before. My father hadn’t put together that I’d outgrown it and I couldn’t bring myself to tell him. Just as when we were girls, Di, reeking of her older sister’s bergamot perfume, snatched up the best pastries before the rest of us could get to them, while Marie put on a prim display, dabbing at invisible crumbs on her lips. I let my tea steep until it was nearly black. The last supply had been several months earlier and the Alpina had run out of the tea sachets Mr. Phillips brought, which came wrapped in pale blue paper with an illustration of tea leaves embossed in gold. For now, we drank a local brew, raspberry leaves and nettle, the loose leaves writhing at the bottom of the hot water like things long-dead, revived. Halfway through tea, as I always did, I excused myself to use the restroom, but I didn’t go to the restroom. I went down the opposite corridor to look at the photograph of the girls. I stared at it, at them, and thought that they were long dead now, all of them except the little one on the end, the blurred runt, who had, perhaps, done something other than die. And I wondered what our affliction had recognized in her, or cultivated in her until it was all of her.
