Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

Across from Aurélie was a man who stared at her. He had pale shining skin and puffy folds under his eyes. She squeezed hers shut to avoid him, but every time she looked, he was staring. A terrible certainty stole over her. She tried to block it, to squeeze her legs, but it was no use. She pressed both her hands against herself to hold the urine in.

The man leaned forward. “Little girl,” he said, “I will escort you to the lavatory.”

“No,” she said.

He reached forward to touch her and she gave a scream and the fat woman with the dog on her lap in the other corner opened her eyes and glared. “Silence,” she snarled.

“Come to the lavatory,” the man said. His teeth were many and tiny.

“No,” Aurélie said, and let go. The urine was deliciously hot on her thighs. The man said, “Ugh!” and left the carriage, and the pee gradually turned cold. For hours, as the train rocked eastward, the fat woman in the corner gelatined in her sleep, and her lapdog sniffed the air voluptuously, as if tasting it.

All at once, they were at the station.

The grandmother stood before her. She was a woman as pretty as Aurélie’s mother, apple cheeks and thick eyebrows, even if this version was wrinkled around the eyes. She was astonishing. Her clothes were both grand and tattered at the same time. The perfume she wore, her elegant hands like pencils in a soft suede case. The grandmother leaned over, took the packet, and looked in. “Ah! Good peasant food,” she said. She was missing a lower incisor, which gave her smile some dash. “We shall sup well tonight,” she said.

When Aurélie stood, she revealed the wetness of her lap. Over the grandmother’s face, like a roller blind flipping upward, the refusal to see.

“Come along,” she said airily, and Aurélie took her suitcase and came along. The pee dried as she walked, and chafed her thighs.

On the way home, they bought a single sausage from a butcher who appeared to be seething silently. The grandmother took the suitcase and made the girl hold the white paper package. By the time they reached the heavy blue door of the building, her hands were stained with clammy red grease.

Her grandmother’s flat was sparse, if neat. The floors were bare wood, scrubbed skinlike. There had once been pictures on the walls and they’d left dark shadows on the otherwise pale passion-flowered wallpaper. It was no warmer inside, simply less windy. The grandmother saw the girl shivering and said, “Heat costs money.” She made her jump fifty times to warm herself. “Jumping’s free!” she said. A broom handle from below made a ratatatat on the floor.

They ate. Aurélie was shown to her room: a closet with a quilt doubled for a bed on the ground, low-hanging canopy of the grandmother’s clothing, smelling powerfully of her skin. “Until I move you to the closet for the night, you will sleep in my bed,” the grandmother said. Aurélie said her prayers while the grandmother watched.

Aurélie pretended to sleep as the grandmother washed herself carefully, brushed her teeth with baking soda, put on more makeup and perfume. She left. Aurélie watched the lightbulb’s curves on the ceiling. When she woke, she was being carried to her closet. The door was closed. In the bedroom, a man’s voice, her grandmother’s, the bed squeaking. The next day it was decided that she should just stay in the closet the whole time and was given her mother’s old Tintin books and a flashlight. Over time, she would recognize three men’s voices: one rich, as if encased in fat like a pâté, one helium giggling, one with rocks in it.

The grandmother kept perishables on the windowsill, where the pigeons and rats sometimes got them. The men came and left. Aurélie dreamt of adventures in strange cartoonish lands, ignored the noises, eventually slept through them. She went off to school and delighted in neatness, the pens with their cartouches, graph paper, the cleanness of orthography. She loved the goûters that the school gave out, madeleines filled with chocolate, and milk in pouches. She loved the loudness of the other children, watched them with delight. And so it went for six years or so.

In the spring after her eleventh birthday, Aurélie came home and found her grandmother in déshabille on the bed. She was stiff, skin icy. Tongue protruding. There may have been marks on her neck or maybe they were kisses. [No.] Two of her nails had been ripped off and the fingers ended in blood.

Aurélie went slowly downstairs. The concierge was not in her apartment. Aurélie went down the street and shuddered in the greengrocer’s shop at the corner until he finished weighing asparagus for a lady in a fur hat. He was kind to Aurélie, gave her oranges in the winter. When they were alone, he leaned forward, smiling, and she whispered what she’d seen, and his face went stark. He took off running.

Later, she found herself on a plane over the Atlantic. Below, clouds feathered. Water pleated and smoothed itself. The stranger in the seat beside her had a pillowy biceps and a gentle hand, which passed over and over Aurélie’s hair until at last the girl slept. When she woke, she was in her new country.

—

HER FRENCH PROFESSORS at Vassar had marveled: “You have no accent at all,” they said.

“Oh, well,” she said lightly. “Maybe I was a little French girl in a previous life.”

In this one she was American, sounded American. Her mother tongue stayed under the surface. But the way roots push up paving stones from beneath, her French rippled her English. The way she said “forte,” as in “Making your life run on rails, Lotto. That’s my forte,” and in her mouth it was strength, feminine. Lotto looked at her curiously, said, “ For-tay , you mean?” in the American way.

For-tay: a nonsense word. “Of course,” she said.

Or the faux amis. Actually for currently. Abuse for mislead . “I cannot breathe,” she said, in the lobby on opening night, the crowd rushing Lotto, “in this affluence.” She’d meant crowd , but, well, on second thought, the other worked just as well.

Despite her fluency, she would mishear, misinterpret. Her whole adult life she would believe one kept all one’s important things — wills, birth certificates, passports, a single photo of a little girl — in a place in the bank called the Safety Posit box. Security, a hypothetical, remaining to be proved.

HER TONGUE WAS STILL HEALING from when she flipped the car. Mathilde said very little. The tongue hurt, true, but silence became her. When she spoke, she showed her contempt.

She went out at night and picked men up. The doctor still in his scrubs, smelling of iodine and clove cigarettes. The boy who sold gas at Stewart’s, with his downy moustache and ability to pump for hours like a lonely derrick on the dry Texas plains. The mayor of the little village where Mathilde and Lotto had lived so happily; the owner of the bowling alley; a shy divorcé with shockingly floral taste in bed linens. A cowboy with four-hundred-dollar boots, he’d informed her with pride. A black jazz saxophonist in town for a wedding.

By then she’d made a name for herself without saying anything at all. School superintendent; owner of a hunting camp; CrossFit trainer with deltoids like hand grenades; a semi-famous poet she and her husband had known from the city, who’d come up to visit her on an impulsive hajj of Lotto grief. He’d put three fingers up her and she felt the cold of his wedding band.

She picked up a fat balding man who drove school buses. He only wanted to hold her and weep.

“Disgusting,” she said. She was in the middle of the motel room, still in her bra. She’d shorn her hair to velveteen that day in the pool. The locks had drifted atop the surface like drowned snakes. “Stop crying,” she said.