Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

In the kitchen, the driver pulled out of the refrigerator a plate with a pale chicken cutlet, potato salad, beans, and a note her uncle had written in French about how he would meet her when he got home. Television, he counseled, was the best way to learn English. Do not leave the house. Make a list of the things she needed and the driver would see to it that she got them tomorrow.

It was hard for her to overlook how many mistakes he made with his spelling.

The driver showed her how to lock the door and put on the alarm. He wore a worried look on his flabby face, but he had to go.

She ate very close to the television, warming herself against its staticky screen, watching some incomprehensible show about leopards. She washed everything and put it all back where she thought it belonged, and tiptoed upstairs. She tried every door, but every one but hers was locked, then washed her hands and face and feet, brushed her teeth, and climbed into the bed, but it was too large and the room too full of shadows. She brought the duvet and a pillow into the empty closet and fell asleep on the carpet that smelled like dust.

In the thick of the night, she woke suddenly to find a thin man peering down at her from the doorway. Something about his large eyes and apple cheeks brought back her grandmother. He had ears like small, pale bat wings. His face brought her mother’s, through the smoke of years, to her.

“So,” he said in French. “The devil girl.” He seemed amused, though he wasn’t smiling.

She felt her breath twist. From the first, she understood he was very dangerous, despite his mild aspect. She would have to be careful. She would have to keep to herself.

“I’m not home often,” the uncle said. “The driver will take you to buy your necessaries and the groceries you may need. He will drive you to and from the bus stop, which will take you to school. You will hardly see me.”

She said a quiet thank-you, because silence would have been worse.

He looked at her for a long moment, and said, “My mother made me sleep in her closet as well. You must try to sleep in your bed.”

“I will,” she whispered. He closed the door, and she listened to him walking, unlocking, opening, shutting, relocking a series of doors. She kept listening to the silent house until the silence filled her and she slept again.

—

WITHIN THE FIRST HOUR of American school, the boy sitting in front of Aurélie turned around. He whispered, “Why is six afraid of seven? Because seven eight nine!”

She didn’t understand. “You’re stupid,” he said.

Lunch an incomprehensible slab of bread and cheese. Milk that smelled rotten. She sat on the playground trying to be as small as possible, though she was very big for her age. The boy with the joke came by with three other boys.

“Orally, orally!” they cried, and stuck their tongues in one cheek, mimed a penis going in and out with their hands.

This she understood. She went to the teacher, a babylike worm with sparse white hair who had prided herself on talking to Aurélie all morning in her high school French patois.

Aurélie said as slowly as she could that though Aurélie was her given name, nobody called her that in Paris.

The city’s name made the teacher’s face light up. “Non?” she said. “Et qu’est-ce que c’est le nom que vous préférez?”

Aurélie thought. There was a girl in the form above her at school in Paris, a short, strong, and wry girl with flowing black hair. She was mysterious, cool, the one all the other girls courted with berlingots and bandes dessinées . When she was angry, words came whiplike to her lips. She used her power sparingly. Mathilde was her name.

“Mathilde,” Aurélie said.

“Mathilde,” the teacher said. “Bon.”

Like that, all at once, Mathilde grew up over Aurélie’s skin. She felt the other girl’s stillness come over her, her cool eye, her quickness. When the boy in front of her turned around to mime a blow job, she darted her hand out and pinched his tongue hard through his cheek, and he yelped, and tears rose to his eyes, and the teacher turned to find Mathilde sitting calmly. The boy was punished for making noise. She watched as, over the course of the hour, twin purple grapes developed on his cheek. She wanted to suck them.

—

AT A PARTY ONCE, in the happy underground years in Greenwich Village, when Lotto and she had been so desperately poor [holes in her socks, lunches of sunshine and water], their Christmas lights making a chain of lemons on the walls, rotgut vodka mixed with juice, she was flipping through the CDs when she heard someone shout out Aurélie! and she was immediately eleven again, desperate, lonely, confused. She spun around. But it was her husband, full-bore: Didn’t know it was a suppository, so he took it orally! Friends hooted; girls danced by with cups in their hands. Mathilde went into the bedroom, feeling robotic, passed the three engrossed bodies on the bed without looking. She hoped when they were done they’d change the duvet cover. She went into the closet that stank of cedar blocks and the dust of her own skin. She nestled among her shoes. Fell asleep. Woke to Lotto hours later opening the door and laughing and picking her up tenderly and putting her into bed. She was glad of the mattress stripped of its sheets, she and her husband alone at last, his hot, avid hand on her neck, her upper thigh. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t want to, really, but it didn’t matter. The weight of his body was pressing her into the present. Mathilde was slowly coming back. [And Aurélie, that sad, lost girl, vanished again.]

—

AURÉLIE WAS MEEK AND MILD; Mathilde boiled underneath a placid skin.

Once, she was playing tetherball and a boy in her class was winning and she deliberately hit the ball so hard into his face that he was knocked down and his head bounced on the asphalt and he had a concussion. Once, she heard her name from a pocket of girls who then laughed. She waited. At lunch a week later, she sat next to the most popular of those girls and waited until she took a big bite of her sandwich and, underneath the table, stabbed her fork into the girl’s thigh. The girl spat out the bite before screaming, and Mathilde had had time to hide the fork under a table buttress. She blinked her huge eyes at the teacher and was believed.

The other children regarded her now with fear in their faces. Mathilde floated through her days coolly, as if she were in the clouds, watching dispassionately down. Her uncle’s in Pennsylvania was only a place to stay, chill and dim, not a home. She imagined for herself a separate life, a chaotic mess with six sisters, loud pop on the radio, nail polish stink and bobby pins on the vanity. Game nights with popcorn and screaming fights. Voice from the other bed in the night. The sole welcome in her uncle’s house was the warm buzz of the television. She mocked a soap opera, The Starrs in Your Eyes , in the characters’ own voices, until she lost her accent. Her uncle was never home. Did she burn to see what was behind those locked doors? She did. But she didn’t pick the locks. [Already, a miracle of self-possession.] On Sundays, the driver took her to the grocery store, and if she was fast and they still had time, he’d drive her to a little park near a river to feed sheets of white bread to the ducks.

Her loneliness was so huge it took the form of the upstairs hallway, dark and lined with locked doors.

Once, even, swimming in the river, a leech attached to her inner thigh, so close to what mattered that it thrilled her and she left it there, thought of it throughout her days, her invisible friend. When it fell off in the shower and she accidentally stepped on it, she wept.