Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

The kiss on the forehead was the last she’d smell of her mother [Arpège by Lanvin, undermusk of cod]. The brush of her father’s stiff jeans on her hand when she held it out to touch him as he walked by, the last she’d feel of him.

After the fifth time she begged her grandparents for her mother and father, her grandmother stopped answering her.

That night, when she waited by the door and they still didn’t come, a terrible rage rose in Aurélie. To get it out of her, she kicked and screamed, broke the mirror in the bathroom, the glasses one by one in the kitchen; she punched the cat in the throat; she ran into the dark and tore her grandmother’s tomato plants out of the ground with her fists. The grandmother first tried to embrace her for hours to calm her, but lost patience and had to tie her to the bed with the curtain tassels, which, being ancient, snapped.

Three scratches beading blood on her grandmother’s cheek. Quelle conne. Diablesse, she hissed.

Hard to say how long this went on. Time, to a four-year-old, is flood or eddy. Months, perhaps. Years, it’s not impossible. The darkness in her circled, landed. In her mind’s eye, her parents’ faces turned to twin smears. Was there a moustache atop her father’s lip? Was her mother bright blond or dark? She forgot the smell of the farmhouse where she’d been born, the crunch of gravel under her shoes, the perpetual twilight in the kitchen even when the lights were on. The wolf spun, settled in her chest, snored there.

THERE WERE THOUSANDS of people at Lotto’s funeral. She knew he’d been loved, and by strangers, too. But not this excess. All these people she didn’t know were lining the sidewalk, keening. O! great man. O! playwright of the bougie. She rode at the head of a shining line of black limos like the head raven in a convocation of blackbirds. Her husband had moved people and, in so moving, had become their Lancelot Satterwhite, too. Something of him lived in them. Was not hers. Was now theirs.

It felt unhygienic, this flood of snot and tears. Too much coffee breath in her face. All that assaultive perfume. She hated perfume. It was a cover for poor hygiene or for body shame. Clean people never aspired to the floral.

After the interment, she drove to the country alone. There may have been a reception planned, she didn’t know. Or if she did know, she blocked the knowledge; she never would have gone. She’d had enough of people.

The house was hot. The pool winked sunlight. Her black clothes on the kitchen floor. The dog made herself tiny on her cushion, her eyes beading out from the corner, feral.

[God licking at Lotto’s bare bluing feet below his desk, licking and licking as if she could lick the life back into him, dumb thing.]

And then there was the strange separation of self from body so that she watched her own nakedness from very far away.

The light slid across the room and extinguished itself, and the night stole in. This impassive self watched the friends come to the back window, recoil at seeing her nude body at the kitchen table, turn their eyes away, and call through glass: “Let us in, Mathilde. Let us in.” The nude body outsat them until they eked on home.

Naked in the bed, she wrote Thank you, Thank you to all of the e-mails until she remembered control-C, control-V, and then she copied and pasted Thank you . She found hot tea in her hand and thanked naked Mathilde for her thoughtfulness and found herself in the pool under the moonlight and worried about naked Mathilde’s mental state. Naked Mathilde neglected to answer the doorbell, woke on the wrong side of the bed seeking heat that wasn’t there, let the food rot on the porch, let the flowers rot on the porch, watched the dog piddle in the middle of the kitchen, made scrambled eggs for the animal when she ran out of kibble, gave her the last of the vegetable chili that Lotto had made, and watched the dog lick her own bum, sore from the spices, until it was red. Naked Mathilde locked the doors and ignored the loved ones peering in, calling, “Mathilde, come on! Mathilde, let us in, Mathilde, I’m not going anywhere, I’m camping in the yard.” The last was her husband’s aunt Sallie, who actually did camp in the yard until naked Mathilde left the door open for her so she could come in. Aunt Sallie had lost the two loves of her life in a few short months, but she chose to peacock her grief, wearing Thai silk dresses in jewel colors, dyeing her hair blueblack. Naked Mathilde put the covers over her head when a tray appeared on the mattress, and shivered until she slept again. Tray, sleep, bathroom, tray, sleep, bad thoughts, terrible memories, God whining, tray, sleep; on and on it went, forever.

—

I REMAIN HERE, cold, a widow in your halls. Andromache, the perfect wife, railed while holding dead Hector’s head in her white arms. You have left me only bitterness and anguish. You didn’t die in bed, stretching your arms toward me. You didn’t give me one last sweet word that I might remember in all my sorrow.

Andromaque, je pense à vous!

—

ON AND ON IT WENT, forever, except that during the first week she was a widow, somewhere inside the tent of covers, in the bed that held her naked body, a lust rose so powerfully she felt choked by it. What she needed was a fuck. A series of fucks. She saw a parade of thrusting men all in silent black-and-white, like talkie movies. Jangling over it all, organ music. Organ music. Ha!

There had been a few times before when lust was just this powerful. The first year with Lotto. Also, her first year of sex, long before Lotto. He’d always believed he’d deflowered her, but she’d just gotten her period, that was all. She indulged his belief. She hadn’t been a virgin, but there had been only one man before him. This was a secret that Lotto would never know. He would never have understood; his egotism would not admit a precursor. She winced to remember herself at seventeen, in high school, how, after the first illuminating weekend, everything spoke sex to her. The way the light pulsed the leaves of the ragweed in the ditches, the way clothes teased her skin as she moved. The words leaving a person’s mouth, how they were tongued, rolled, lipped before they emerged. It was as if the man had suddenly reached into her and pulled out an earthquake and set it loose on her skin. She walked the last weeks of high school wanting to eat every one of these delicious boys. If she had only been allowed, she would have swallowed them whole. She smiled at them hugely; they scurried away. She’d laughed, but felt it was a shame.

None of this mattered. Since they were married, it had only ever been Lotto. She had been faithful. She was nearly certain he had been, too.

In her little house in the cherry orchard, the house of bleakest widowhood, Mathilde remembered and got up out of her dirty bed and showered. She dressed in the dark bathroom and crept past the room where Aunt Sallie was whistle-snoring. Past the next room, door open, where her husband’s sister Rachel looked at her passing from the pillow. In the dark, a face like a ferret’s: triangular, alert, quivering. Mathilde got into the Mercedes.

Her hair was in a wet bun, she was wearing no makeup, but it didn’t matter. Three towns north there was a yuppie bar, and in the yuppie bar was a sad-faced man in a Red Sox cap, and a mile away in a little copse of trees where the road split, where they would have been pinned like moths on a board by headlights had any passed, she stood on her right leg, the left around the sad-faced Red Sox’s jerky hips, and shouted, “Harder!” And the man’s face, which had been first set in concentration, began taking on a look of alarm, and he kept on valiantly for some time while she shouted at him, “Harder! Faster, you fucker!” until it was clear that he was spooked, and he faked an orgasm and pulled out and mumbled something about taking a whiz, and she heard his feet in the crunchy leaves as he hurried away.