Honeydew: Stories Page 10

“Agnes will make a sandwich when I ring,” she said. A porcelain bell sat on the night table. And so housekeeper and husband left the room.

  “Rennie, I must…make an inventory of my things. It’s been on my mind. In the hospital…all I thought of.” This was a prolonged utterance, and she lengthened it further, asking Rennie to open the walk-in closet and announce its occupants. Rennie obeyed. Two pairs of black alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown alligator pumps. Two pairs of brown oxfords. Mr. and Mrs. Penny Loafer—that couple, or its ancestors, must have been all the rage fifty years ago. And dozens of skirts, each of a slightly different tweed; and dozens of sweaters, ranging in shade from vanilla to rancid mocha. And stalwart broad-shouldered fur coats in plastic capes of their own. “Now the chest, the Stephen Badlam chest of drawers, start from the bottom,” said Muffy’s weak voice. There were two drawers of silken underpants, piled squarely like memo pads. Tidy slips, camisoles, beige silk scarves. The three next drawers held gloves, and stockings, and little white blouses. Rennie intoned descriptions. The drawer second from the top held only pearls, strand after strand, each separated from the next by pearly candles, how clever. And finally the single top drawer, high and narrow. Rennie stood on a mahogany stool inlaid with mother-of-pearl. She pulled the drawer out. What could be here? The good stuff must be in a safe somewhere.

  What was here was a shoe box. What was in the shoe box was the good stuff. The diamonds, the emeralds, the rubies. Necklaces, bracelets, rings. Worthy jewels of impeccable dull design—some purchased in the finest of stores, some bought at Forget Me Not—all repeating each other like crocuses. Rennie felt rather than heard Muffy’s sigh. She put the shoe box on the bed. One by one Muffy picked up the pieces of jewelry, then put them down, seeming to check them against a mental list—this urgent inventory did not require paper and pencil. Finally she put the lid on the box. “Tomorrow you and Agnes can help me get downstairs, and we’ll look at the furniture and the silver…” She was almost asleep, but with a motion of her hand she indicated that Rennie should return the shoe box to its resting place.

  Rennie could leave now. She could go downstairs and say good-bye to Agnes and walk into the spring afternoon. She could return to her store filled with lovely items, some of them oddities: recently she’d had a bronze Puck, and now a graceful brass device with a long spout and a receptacle and a miniature pestle in a hollow cylinder. She had bought this mysterious thing from a man who said he was a Turk…Or she could go home.

  Instead, Muffy’s best friend remained at the edge of the bed listening to the shallow breaths, feeling a wet warmth within her own body, as if she were bleeding. Was it envy oozing there? This spoiled Muffy had known what she wanted and had acquired it. What a rare accomplishment. And the objects of Muffy’s affection repaid that affection just by being there, trustworthy, trusting. Something long contained burst from the competent woman sitting on the bed, who did not love things though she traded in them, who did not love people though she pleased them. “We all need you,” Elissa had said. “You’ll live forever.” It would only seem like forever, Rennie thought, and leaned against the bedpost, her mouth loose.

  Stu coughed himself into the room. He looked down at his wife. “Still lovely, isn’t she.”

  Muffy fell out of bed that night. She broke her arm. She went from hospital to rehabilitation center to nursing home. Even there she managed to sink to the floor when an aide’s attention momentarily wandered; this time she broke a hip. Back to the hospital…

  Stu fluttered from the house to wherever Muffy lay. Muffy whispered to Rennie—who visited, who kept visiting—that there were long stretches when he didn’t come. He closed his office, and sold some silver to one of Rennie’s colleagues to pay its back rent. “The stuff wasn’t going to fetch much,” the colleague told Rennie. “We melted it down.” A breezy young couple bought the town house. They would no doubt gut the place from front to back before they divorced.

  “I’ll auction everything inside,” Stu said to Rennie one day outside Muffy’s room. “But first you take whatever you want. Buy, I mean.”

  Rennie selected a few things: a needlepoint chair, an eighteenth-century sewing box, and the entire dining-room set. “We never used that stuff,” Stu told her. “We liked the Tavern. My new apartment is right near the Tavern.” The table and chairs looked handsome under Forget Me Not’s skylight.

  Yefgin took an immediate interest in the sewing box. “Vera would love it,” he said, waving away a starburst pin with pink jewels. But the sewing box was too expensive, even on credit. In the end he asked for the Turkish instrument.

  “You mean that lamp?” Rennie wondered. It was a strange gift for either of his loves.

  “It’s not a lamp, it’s an opium pipe,” he told her. “I’ll grow poppies in my window box.” He paid cash, and bent his head to kiss her fingers, and he pressed his lips to the roll of twenties too.

  The day before the auctioneers were to remove the furniture and paintings, Rennie and Agnes packed up shoes, sweaters, skirts, underwear; all would soon adorn the more petite guests at the local shelter. Agnes carried the boxes downstairs, and left. Rennie put the pearls into a silk sack and moved the inlaid stool to the dresser and took down the shoe box.

  She didn’t open it, though. She could tell from its heft that it had lost half its contents. She heard a creak at the threshold of the bedroom, and turned; and there was Stu, one tweed shoulder against the jamb, his thin lips twisted in a grin—shamed maybe; proud maybe; repulsive in any case. Could somebody find this half-man attractive? Ah, somebody probably could, somebody probably did, why, just yesterday, a couple had bought the ugliest lamp Rennie had ever handled and carried it lovingly away. She stepped cautiously down from the stool—the cracking of bones could begin at any age—and handed the sack of pearls and the diminished shoe box to the husband of her best friend.

  What the Ax Forgets

  the Tree Remembers

  I.

  The first hint of trouble came early in the morning. The telephone rang on Gabrielle’s desk in the lobby—her glass-topped, strategically placed desk: she could see everyone, anyone could see her.

  “It’s Selene,” lisping through buckteeth. “I have flu.”

  “Oh, my dear…you’ve called the clinic?”

  “The doctor forbids me to leave my home.” Home indeed: a heap of brown shingles in an alley in a town forty miles north of Godolphin. Three children and a once-in-a-while man…“My friend Minata will give testimony in my place. From Somalia too, and now she lives on the next avenue. She knows the fee, and that she will stay overnight in the inn. She agrees to come, and tell.”

  “And she has…things to tell?” Gabrielle softened her voice. “Was her experience like yours?”

  “Ah, worse. Thorns were applied. And only palm oil for the mending. She will take the same bus…”

  Thorns and palm oil and two fullback matriarchs, each with the heels of her hands on the young girl’s shoulders as if kneading recalcitrant dough. Someone forces the knees apart. Horrifying tales; Gabrielle knew plenty of them. But would this Minata touch the heart like Selene? I am happy to be in this town Godolphin, in this state Massachusetts, in this country USA, Selene always concluded with humble sibilance. I am happy to be here this night.

  Would the unknown Minata also be happy to be here this night, testifying to the Society Against Female Mutilation, local chapter? Would she walk from podium to chair in a gingerly fashion, remembered thorns pricking her vulva like cloves in a ham?

  Gabrielle had first heard Selene three years earlier, at the invitation of a Dutch physician whose significant protruding bosom looked like an outsize wedge of cheese. Gabrielle privately called her Dr. Gouda. Dr. Gouda was staying at Devlin’s Hotel, where Gabrielle was concierge extraordinary—Mr. Devlin’s own words. Gabrielle said yes to guests whenever she could. She’d said yes to Dr. Gouda. She’d accompanied the solid woman to an empty basement room in a nearby church. After a while twelve pe
ople straggled in. Then photographs were shown—there was an old-fashioned projector, and a screen, and slides that stuttered forward on a carousel. A voice issued from the darkness beside the projector—the doctor’s accented narration. The slide show—the Follies, Dr. Henry Ellison would later name it—featured terrified twelve-year-olds in a hut. Behind the girls was a shelf of handmade dolls.

  The brutality practiced in the photographs—shamefully, it made Gabrielle feel desirable. She was glad that she and her stylist had at last found a rich oxblood shade for her hair; and glad that her hair’s silky straightness conformed to her head in such a Parisian way, complementing the Parisian name that her Pittsburgh parents had snatched from the newspaper the day she was born. She knew that at fifty-two she was still pretty, even if her nose was a millimeter too long and there was a gap between a bicuspid and a molar due to extraction; how foolish not to have repaired that, and now it was too late, the teeth on either side had already made halfhearted journeys toward each other. Still, the gap was not disfiguring. And her body was as narrow and supple as a pubescent boy’s. She was five feet tall without her high-heeled shoes, but she was without her high-heeled shoes only in the bath—even her satin bed slippers provided an extra three inches.

  In the basement room of the church there was no podium, just a makeshift platform. After the slide show a white-haired gentleman unfolded a card table on the platform and fanned laminated newspaper articles across it. Dr. Gouda then stationed herself in front of the screen now cleansed of enormities. She wore a navy skirt and a pale blouse and she had removed her jacket, idly revealing her commanding bosom. The width of her hips was apparent to all. In ancient China child-buyers sometimes constricted an infant’s body so that the lower half far outgrew the upper. Gabrielle had read about it: they used a sort of straitjacket. The children thus warped into human pawns often became pets at court.

  But the Dutch doctor’s shape was nature’s doing, not man’s. “This is Selene,” she said, and surrendered her place to a mahogany woman.

  My mother was kind to me, Selene began that night, begins every time, would begin tonight if it weren’t for her flu. My mother was kind to me. Yes, she brought me to the hut, as her mother had brought her, as her mother her, on and on backward through time, you understand.

  When she bears witness Selene wraps herself in native costume—a colorful ankle-length dress and turban. Her face is long and plain. The thick glasses, the large teeth with their goofy malocclusion, the raw knuckles—all somehow suggest the initial maiming.

  My mother loved me.

  The thing was done for my good and for my future husband. This was believed. I believed it too. I was held down, yes, the body fights back, that is its nature, no one scolded me for struggling. But they had to restrain me. My…area was swabbed with something cold and wet. The cutting was swift. Painful. A small curved knife cuts away a portion of your flesh, it could happen by accident in the garden or while preparing food, that tiny slice I mean, though not in that…area. The wound was salved. There was no shame. All the women in the hut had gone through the cutting.

  My mother was kind to me. She was kind to me throughout her life. She procured for me a fine husband, one who would not have taken me whole, as someone might say that piano lessons had broadened her marriage opportunities. I was sorry to leave my husband when I took our children and ran away.

  “Your experience of intimacy?” Dr. Gouda usually asks from some dark place.

  The lids behind the glasses close, open. “My husband was not at fault.”

  “And childbirth?”

  “I wished myself dead.”

  The listeners are still.

  But I love my children, she continues. I have a new husband, not an entirely accurate statement, Gabrielle would learn; but the fellow was as good as a husband, or as bad. It is the same excruciation with him. He understands. No one asks if he spares her. I think of my mother and I do not scream. But the cutting should stop. I hope you can make it stop. I am happy to be in this country. I am happy to be here tonight.

  That first time, the Dutch doctor stood at the table and waited until the silence turned into murmuring. Then she said that regrets were unproductive. The challenge was to save today’s victims, tomorrow’s. To that end…She went on to speak of the work of the World Health Organization, of associations in Europe, of the Society Against Female Mutilation she represented, which hoped to form a chapter tonight here in Godolphin, Massachusetts. The noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison would serve on the advisory committee. “And we are looking for more help,” said the Dutch doctor tonelessly.

  Many attendees signed up, and several took out checkbooks. Two were elderly women who looked alike, as old friends often do. A pale, emaciated college girl clasped and reclasped her hands; perhaps she felt personally threatened by mutilation. There was a thuggish dark fellow. He probably had a taste for porn. The man who had unfolded the card table now folded it up again. That handsome ruddy face, that crest of white hair—he must be the noted gynecologist Dr. Henry Ellison.

  At last Gabrielle approached the Dutch doctor. “I’d like to sign up,” Gabrielle said.

  “Of course!”

  II.

  There was no “Of course” about it. For half a century Gabrielle had avoided Good Causes as if they might defile her. Efficiency and orderliness were what she cared about, and her own lively good looks. She cared about Devlin’s Hotel too, a double brownstone on the border of Godolphin and Boston. Mr. Devlin had transformed it into a European-style inn, Gabrielle its concierge extraordinary, Gabrielle with her clever wardrobe and her ability to say two or three sentences in half a dozen languages…Gabrielle was made for the job, Mr. Devlin had sighed, more than once.

  Really the job was made for her. It left her time to read, to tend her window boxes, to give an occasional dinner party, to go to an afternoon concert. She lived alone. She wasn’t burdened with an automobile—she biked to and from the hotel in all but the worst weather, her confident high heels gripping the pedals, two guiches of hair pointing forward beyond the helmet. She wasn’t burdened with family either, unless you counted the half-crippled aunt back in Pittsburgh. The old woman loped along on a single crutch, the filthy adhesive that wrapped its hand bar replaced only on her niece’s annual visit.

  Until that night in the church basement this game relative had been Gabrielle’s only responsibility. And yet now Gabrielle was writing her name on a clipboard and undertaking work on behalf of females unrelated to her, unknown to her, half a planet away.

  Something had stirred within her. She supposed that a psychologist would have a name for this feeling. But Gabrielle would as soon discuss emotions with a psychologist as with a veterinarian—in fact, she’d prefer a veterinarian, she thought, biking home with a packet of information in her saddlebag. It was as if the kinship she felt to those pathetic girls was that of mammal to mammal, house pet to feral cat. The jungle creatures had been cruelly treated by other beasts, attacked with needles and knives as sharp as flame; whereas she, a domestic feline, had in her two brief marriages only been left cold. Free of sex at last, she was disburdened of her monthly nuisance too. The loss had been hastened by a gynecologist—not the distinguished Henry Ellison, rather a Jewish woman with unpleasant breath who advised Gabrielle to rid herself of the bag of fibroids beginning to distend her abdomen. The hysterectomy was without complications. And now, flat as a book below her waist, dry as linen between her legs, she felt pity for the Africans’ dripping wounds…well, curiosity, at any rate.

  III.

  Gabrielle’s chief responsibility within the new chapter was arranging its semiannual meeting—the visit of Dr. Gouda, the visit of victim Selene. The first thing she did was thank the church for the use of its chilly basement; then, in its stead, she commandeered the function room of the hotel, a small cocoa-colored space with three elongated windows looking out onto the boulevard. She wheedled a promise of wine and coffee and cheese from Mr. Devlin and c
onvinced him to charge the chapter his lowest rates for the overnight stay of doctor and witness. She did other work too. She and the two elderly women—who were in fact sisters, and hated each other—designed a fund-raising brochure. She helped the emaciated girl, who had volunteered to be a liaison with the local university, withdraw without shame. “Suffering affects me too strongly,” the goose said, her hand on her meager chest.

  “Of course, dear,” said Gabrielle, flashing her compassionate smile with its friendly missing tooth.

  And she listened to the boring conversation of the man with white hair. He turned out to be not Dr. Henry Ellison, as his dignity suggested, but a retired salesman with time on his hands. He was good for running the Follies, though he sometimes got the slides upside down. And she answered e-mails for Dr. Gouda, who hated the computer, and she wrote letters on behalf of Dr. Henry Ellison.

  Henry Ellison was the man who looked like a thug. On closer inspection he was merely unwholesome. He had pockmarked skin, teeth like cubes of cheddar. His children were grown and his wife suffered from some malady. He wasn’t on the prowl, though. He seemed to welcome Gabrielle’s indifference to romance just as she welcomed his pleasure in quiet evenings and good wine and the sound of his own voice. He liked to answer questions. “Is the Dutch doctor gay?” she asked him one night when they were sorting new slides in her living room.

  “Doubt it. She’s got a muscular husband and five children.” A well-trained surgeon, she could have had a splendid practice in The Hague. Instead she was now running a fistula-repair hospital. She drove a van around the African countryside, performed procedures under primitive conditions, sterilized her own instruments.

  Henry held a slide up to the light. “Oh Lord, too graphic. Our folks want terrified damsels. They want stories of eternal dysphoria. This…” He kept looking.