Sylvia has blown up her life.
She slices potatoes into screaming hot water and chants, “Take it back, take it back, take it back.”
Out in the living room: regular thudding. She has agreed to let the twins have fries for lunch if they are quiet and good while they color. The boy’s whine trails each of the thuds. She’s been played.
Sylvia drains the hot water, and then plunges the sliced potatoes into an ice bath. The water numbs her fingers and wrists. Starch turns the water hazy, and the potatoes go slick like something hauled out of the sea. When her hands turn white, she pours off the cold water and blots the potatoes dry. Then she rubs them down with salt and garlic butter she made herself. And into the oven.
She feels productive, virtuous. Her reward is to close her eyes for just a moment. She dips into the brief dark of her eyelids, feels that woozy elation like holding her breath and letting it go. She drifts, sways. She considers, not for the first time this week, Hammond, the breakup. The doomed trip they took up to see her mother last month, how they’d they fought all the way there and back. The farm had done nothing to ease their splintering. All they’d done was move the location of the argument, not defuse the argument itself. Then she’d left him and that was that. But now, standing in the kitchen, she considers the permanence of that choice and how easy it had been to make in the end. So swift. Like a bolt of lightning. There and gone, but behind it an acrid, burning trail.
But before she can conjure sufficient self-pity, something pulls at her shirt like she’s been caught on a nail or stray corner. She cracks her eyes open and sees the girl, who’s got the hem of Sylvia’s shirt gripped tight. Sylvia smiles at first. The desperate tension of the girl’s grip sends a little thrill through Sylvia’s stomach. She feels needed. But then she spies the brown clay sticking to the girl’s fingers. Flecked through with green and black. The girl shifts her hands around Sylvia’s shirt, and the motion changes something in the air current between them. Sylvia catches the scent. Dog shit.
“What are you doing?” Sylvia asks. She marvels at the cool distance in her voice. How mature and far away she sounds to herself. The girl doesn’t even seem pleased with what she’s done. She’s no gloater. There is that to say for her. The girl spreads her fingers and clenches them shut again like she’s making a point.
It would be nothing, would take nothing, to rend this girl to pieces. Sylvia feels in this moment like the grandmother who is part wolf. She’d gobble the little girl down and keep her there. Instead, she takes the girl’s wrist and leads her into the living room. The boy sits quietly with his coloring.
“Stay,” Sylvia says to him when his eyes track toward them. She winds through the piles of toys and cushions. The living room resembles not so much a battlefield as one of those emptied-out neighborhoods in a dying Rust Belt town. There’s a sense of order having been overrun by chaos and wreckage. Work for later. Before the parents return. This is what they have been doing while they have been coloring. The sliding door is cracked open. No doubt it is the opening the girl slipped through in order to find her little surprise. This, Sylvia thinks, is what they consider being quiet and good.
In the bathroom, Sylvia runs water into the sink while the girl stares ahead. No fear. No remorse.
Good for you is what Sylvia almost says.
The water steams as it collects, turning the mirror ghostly white. Beneath the fog, Sylvia: Raw eyes, oily skin. Frizzed out, frayed at the edges, stained. This is not the first mishap of the week.
The girl coughs and smears dog shit across her face. No reaction. Sylvia’s fingertips sting when she dips the cloth into the water. She reaches over and takes the girl’s chin in hand without pretense of being gentle or trying to explain to her in a child’s voice why what she’s done is wrong. Her knuckles pop a little from the suddenness of turning the girl’s head, but when their eyes meet, she almost gasps at the lack of surprise or discomfort. It’s more out of her own fear that Sylvia puts the hot cloth to the girl’s face and wipes at the shit. Anything to get away from the dark of her eyes, like she’s staring up out of some deep well. After a few moments, the girl fixes her eyes on the back wall in a stare so intense that Sylvia almost turns to look, but she resists. There’s nothing waiting for her back there except floral wallpaper.
The towel gets most of it, leaving the girl’s cheeks and lips flushed. Sylvia holds out her hand for the rest, and the girl squeezes their palms close until they’re glued together in the brown mess. At close proximity and in the bathroom’s humid heat, the smell is more potent. The texture is like wet sand, grainy and clumped. Sylvia can feel diffuse, solid kernels of something sticking between her fingers.
“Come here,” Sylvia says, and she lifts the girl up over the sink. Before she can threaten to drop her in, Sylvia feels her throw herself forward. She plunges in up to the elbow. Sylvia tries to pull her back up and out of the hot water, but the girl flails and kicks as though she is being kept from the thing she desires most in the world. When Sylvia jerks her back one solid time too many, the girl screams with such fury that the room fills with the sound of her. It’s a horrible, fierce sound. Sylvia’s legs buckle. How can one tiny human make so much noise?
Take it back, take it back, take it back.
Eventually, the girl vents herself empty and goes limp in Sylvia’s arms. She tilts forward like a little rag doll when Sylvia puts her on the edge of the sink, and so Sylvia has to let the girl’s face rest against her chest. She pulls the girl’s tunic up, and blots her dry. Then the girl rocks back and Sylvia catches her by the shoulders. It’s then Sylvia remembers the shit on her own shirt. She works up and shimmies out of it using one hand. She feels greasy in the humid bathroom. The girl’s eyes shift over her, widen slightly. The girl lifts her hand, the tips soggy and red, touches the bruise on Sylvia’s side.
Sylvia growls.
In the kitchen, they all wait for the fries. The twins sit at the table with their coloring, the boy struggling to decide between red and blue to fill in the crude tree he’s drawn and the girl staring at him hatefully. Sylvia would like to go over there and color the whole thing green. It’s a disservice to let children go on thinking the world can be something it cannot. Her parents hadn’t let her think that sort of thing for long—that life could be what she wanted it to be, that all she needed was to try.
“Sylvie,” the boy says with his cheeks between his hands. “Hungry.”
“Is that a whole thought?” she asks, and he frowns, folds his arms across his chest.
“Hungry.”
“Five more minutes.”
The boy licks his lips until his whole mouth is wet and bubbly with spit. Booger eater, she thinks. The girl cuts her eyes at him.
“Sylvie. Hungry,” the boy says again.
The fries crackle and hiss on the sheet pan. Sylvia wedges them free instead of letting them cool and transfers them to a plate that she leaves at the center of the table. They sit in a steaming mound flecked with coarse sea salt and red-pepper flakes. She hoists herself up onto the counter and watches the twins watch the fries. The boy licks his lips again. He is first, of course he is. Boys are greedy, always taking. But the world will make a mess of this boy. He’s all nerve and skin. Nothing between him and the outside. The food burns his fingers, and he drops the fries onto the table. He tries again, blows on one of the fries. Sylvia can see his mouth watering. He makes little chewing motions. Oh, he wants it bad. Like his father. Scratching at her bedroom door these last few nights. She has fewer reasons to say no, and the last time that she let him go down on her, he had seemed so grateful that Sylvia had only felt a little guilty and a little selfish. Impossible not to see the resemblance between their two wants.
Sylvia tucks her knees against her chest and watches as he tries and fails, tries and fails, burns his mouth and his tongue. But he keeps trying. Eventually, he gets it in his mouth and keeps it there, chewing it into white mush. He smiles at her broadly, shows his food.
“Good!” he says, as if approving of her. “Good! Like!” The girl, because she is smart, stabs a fry through with a crayon and blows on it. Then she shoves the whole thing into her mouth, crayon and all. She gulps it down. Good for you.
Their lunch doesn’t take long, and then Sylvia puts them down for a nap. She takes a tall glass of cold water to the back patio, where she sometimes smokes at night and sometimes drinks the father’s beer with the mother while they talk about the twins, about Sylvia’s life, about the easiness of youth and no attachments. It’s not a conversation, not really. It’s a monologue on the mother’s part, delivered from a cashmere throw and the blurry edge of late middle age.
Sometimes, the mother gets drunk and waxes philosophical about her geriatric pregnancy and how utterly sexist the terminology is, running through the litany of grievances she’s stored up at the world these past few years, returning to them again and again like treasured anecdotes of some far-off life. Reliving the trauma of maternity leave the way some people relive the horrors of the Great Depression or the Jim Crow South.
The house, like all of the other houses on their street, is not old but has been made to look that way. Pseudo-Victorian splendor meant to communicate—what, exactly, Sylvia wonders. Comfort? Material establishment. It’s a street of doctors and white-collar serfs. The father works at a tech company down on the square. The mother works in pharma. She synthesized some sort of filament as a graduate student. Did some kind of molecular geometric voodoo, and now they have this house and they have Sylvia, and due to modern technology, they have the twins.
They split the cost of Sylvia with Mac and Jill Ngost next door. For slightly too little money—it would be more in Manhattan, but what can she do about Wisconsin—she cooks meals and looks after the twins. The Ngosts don’t have children, and don’t expect Sylvia to clean, only to cook. Mac and Jill are in their early forties. Jill is attractive, a brunette. She is funny, and she tells stories that always turn in unexpected places. She keeps her lips over her teeth because she is insecure about a gray, misshapen canine. There is no reason that this tooth should have emerged as it did from her gums. All of her other teeth are beautiful and white. Mac is tall and dense with what is either muscle or fat or both. He runs up and down the street for an hour or two in the mornings. Sylvia watches him from her bedroom. He likes sweet things, and is always willing to let Sylvia experiment on him with her desserts. Last night, she served a berry crumble with a jam she’d made herself.
Tonight, for the Ngosts, she is making some sort of soup. Lots of shredded chicken breast, a stock from the bones and marrow, a thick cream base, some herbs. French bread from the market. She can see the soup in her mind, the way it goes from clear to creamy white. She can smell the celery and the carrots, the onion and small pieces of beet she’ll julienne and sprinkle in. A bit of cumin, not too much. The meat for texture. She will serve a salad with berries and apricots. Or, she thinks, she could leave the chicken out of the soup and serve them cream-poached fish instead. The soup in small bowls next to the beautiful salmon.
She imagines Mac and Jill, their faces warm with hunger and desire. Jill will give her a knowing look. She will reach across the table, squeeze Sylvia’s hands. Her mouth will become a perfect circle. Mac will eat, but while he chews, his eyes will stay on her. She is certain of this, can already feel the long pull of his gaze at her body.
But it is Jill who sits at the center of this fantasy. She is its white-hot core. Jill, with her longer fingers and sensible haircut. Jill, the investment banker. Jill, the insatiable.
Sylvia presses the glass between her legs to keep it still. It’s cold and slick against her skin. Her stomach aches. There is something moving through her, working its way up her belly and into her chest, coiling and uncoiling. She grips her knees and tries to calm herself.
Inside, Sylvia can hear the soft rumble of footsteps.
The girl.
Up the stairs Sylvia goes, passing the pictures of the family, how they seem to regress as she goes. The two children vanish, and the parents recede back through their years, gaining hair, gaining smiles, gaining happiness. A family blooms, uncles and aunts, sisters and brothers, grandparents. It’s like tracing a muddy stream to its clear, frothy headwaters. At the top of the stairs, she pauses. The sound of footsteps farther ahead. Yes, the girl. Except she is in her parents’ room. Sylvia rolls her eyes. She is still a little jagged, a little rough. She tries to conceal her wolf’s teeth, the part of her that wants to reach out and snatch the girl and tear her to pieces.
Along the long hardwood hall, with its expensive rug thrown down the middle, more pictures. Upstairs, the home is shut-in and close. Downstairs, there are so many windows, so much clear light, but here it’s a cocoon, a hollow. She passes the boy’s room. On the other side of his door, there is silence. He will not move until someone comes for him. It is his nature. The girl’s door is ajar. Sylvia peers inside. Her low bed, her toys scattered everywhere. A lilac curtain thrown open. Pale light. Her sheets have been dragged from her bed. There is an ugly stain on them, something yellowing, already smelling sour. Sylvia will have to attend to this before the parents return.
She leaves the doorway and turns to the parents’ bedroom. There, sure enough, the door is also ajar. Sylvia hears a repetitive creaking. She pushes the door open. The girl throws herself into the air, lands on her back, and bounds back up.
“What the hell are you doing?”
The girl does not answer. She uses the bed as a trampoline. The Martins have blackout curtains, and there’s just a sliver of light coming in through the tiny space between them. Everything is all velvet upholstery. It’s the sort of room that needs torchlight, which seems incongruous with the sort of brightness that overhead lighting offers. Still, Sylvia flips the switch, and the room is bathed in a harsh white light.
The girl is naked. There are scratches up and down her arms, around her back. Her face is blank. She’s lands on her back, climbs to her feet, leaps again into the air, getting God knows what all over the duvet and pillows. There are twigs and dirt in her hair. How has she done this to herself? She looks like a wild thing.
“Little beast,” Sylvia says. The girl makes no attempt to stop bouncing. Sylvia grabs her bare ankle. The girl begins to scream, to screech, to holler, to tear at Sylvia’s hands and arms and face. She is strong, and it takes all of Sylvia’s strength to hold her down, to shake her into stillness. “What is your problem?”
She gazes up at Sylvia, and for a moment Sylvia thinks she can understand the girl. She knows what it is to be trapped inside a thing, inside a life. She knows what it is to want to tear a hole in everything. But still there is something else. This girl seems bound by nothing at all, except for the moment by Sylvia. There is nothing that can keep her inside herself. It’s the kind of life Sylvia would like to live, but she knows it’s the kind of life that is impossible because the world can’t abide a raw woman.
“I know it’s hard,” Sylvia says to the girl. “But you have to try.”
The girl lies on her back, as if the words have passed completely over her. In the light, Sylvia can now see that there are bugs, small green grubby things, among the tangled blond hair. Sylvia can smell the urine. It’s dried in ugly patches on her thighs. She is never like this with her parents. With them, she’s quiet, almost sullen. It’s only when they leave that she gets unhinged this way. Sylvia thinks that she should say something, but it feels somehow like a betrayal.
“You have to try,” Sylvia says.
Sylvia sits on the edge of the tub, pulling her fingers through the girl’s hair, freeing bits of detritus. Where has she gotten this filthy? How has she managed to get herself into such a mess? The girl fidgets in the water, reaching for her bath toys, moving away when Sylvia’s hands snag on tangles. She has already been still for longer than she likes, and Sylvia can feel the energy coiling inside her like a snake about to strike.
“Where did you get all these things?”
“My closet,” she says, the first words she has spoken all day. “I keep them in my closet.”
“Why?”
The girl shrugs and the bugs writhe as they drown. Sylvia rinses her fingers in the water and goes back to soaping the girl’s hair. The bathroom is the same plush velvet as the bedroom. There’s an insulated, womblike quality to the acoustics. The light is comforting in its haziness.
“Why do you live with us now?” the girl asks. Sylvia considers her answer to this question. She could give the kind of gummy non-answer that children chew on for years before realizing there’s nothing to it, or she could say the truth of it, but that might involve having to answer more questions, worse questions.
“Well,” Sylvia starts. “I broke up with my boyfriend, and I needed a place to stay, so your parents are letting me stay here.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do you break up?” The girl turns to look at her, her eyes wide and blue.
“Oh, that’s a boring story,” Sylvia says. “Nobody wants to hear that story.”
“I do,” the girl says. “I want to hear.”
“Well,” Sylvia says, scooping up handfuls of water and letting them drizzle into the girl’s hair. “He was not well. He was sick. And I was sick. And we weren’t very good together.”
“You’re sick?” the girl asks.
Oh, yes, Sylvia almost says. I’m fucking sick.
“Just a little bit—I’m getting better.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Hard to say,” Sylvia says. More water drizzling down the girl’s face, across her cheeks. There’s shampoo in her eyes, and it must burn, but she does not look away from Sylvia. How does she explain it? To this child? To herself? To Hammond—oh, Hammond.
Hammond is probably in their apartment—no, his apartment—pulling his hair out. She left him. She waited until he went to sleep that night, then packed her things and left him. She couldn’t be with him, couldn’t lie next to him, because she sensed in him the same thing that was knocking around inside her. The same looming, wild, stalking thing that moves behind her at every turn and corner. Something furry and evil that followed her off the mountain and all the way up here, to this city full of polite, clean people.
She left him—no note, just the careful packing away of her things. She left him.
“Grown-ups get sick sometimes, and nobody knows why and nobody knows how to fix it,” Sylvia says. “And you try your best not to get anyone else sick.”
The girl sneezes. The sound is scraping and rough in the bathroom. Sylvia tucks her hands under the girl’s armpits and lifts her out. “All clean,” she says. She wraps the girl in a towel and leads her down the hall to her bedroom. Leaving her there, Sylvia returns to the bathroom and lets the water out of the tub.
She runs some water to rinse the soap down the drain. Bugs twitch on the bottom of the tub, and Sylvia picks them out one by one, along with the twigs and the pieces of leaves that have not been washed away.
She flushes the black things down the toilet and goes downstairs to clean the living room. The parents will be back soon. In just a couple of hours. And then she’ll slip from this house to the next like a ghost, like a phantom in the middle of the day.
As she cleans, she hears the girl upstairs, thumping around.