Lauren Groff - Fates and Furies

“We’re here to see Antoinette,” Chollie said. He felt his sister’s hand on his arm.

“I was heading out for groceries. Well, you might as well come in,” she said. “I’m Sallie. Lancelot’s aunt.”

They had been sitting for ten minutes, drinking the iced tea and picking at the sable cookies when a door opened and a woman came out. She was tall, grand, plump, her hair heaped elaborately atop her head. There was something feathery about her, the gauze of her clothes, the way she moved her hands, something disarmingly soft. “How pleasant,” she murmured. “We weren’t expecting guests.”

Chollie smirked in his chair, reading her, hating what he read.

Gwennie found Antoinette’s eyes on her and made a twisting motion with her hands to show her stomach.

On Antoinette’s face, an expression like a paper blazing into fire. Then she smiled brightly. “I suppose my son had something to do with that. He does love girls. Oh, dear.”

Chollie sat forward to say something, but out of her bedroom waddled a baby in a diaper, her hair in twin puffs. He closed his mouth. Antoinette put the baby on her knee and sang, “Say hello, Rachel!” and wagged the baby’s fat hand at the twins. Rachel chewed on her fist, watching the visitors with her anxious brown eyes.

“So what is it you want of me?” Antoinette said. “Ending a pregnancy sends a girl directly to hell, you know. I will not pay for one.”

“We want justice,” Chollie said.

“Justice?” Antoinette said mildly. “We all want justice. And world peace. Frolicking unicorns. What do you mean precisely, little boy?”

“You call me little boy again, you fat hog, and I’ll punch you in the fucking mouth,” he said.

“You only show spiritual poverty when you swear, little boy,” she said. “My son, bless his pure heart, would never be so vulgar.”

“Fuck you, cunt-face hag,” he said.

“Darling,” Antoinette said very softly, putting her hand on Chollie’s, stopping him short with her touch. “It does you credit to fight for your sister. But unless you would like me to take a cleaver to your manhood, I suggest you wait in the car. Your sister and I will come to an agreement without you.”

Chollie paled, opened his mouth, opened his hands, closed them, and then walked out the door and sat in the car with the window open, listening to sixties pop on the radio for an hour.

Alone, Antoinette and Gwennie smiled politely at Rachel until the baby waddled back into the bedroom again. “Here’s what we’ll do,” Antoinette said, leaning forward. Gwennie would tell her brother and parents that she’d had an abortion. One week later, she would run away, although, in fact, she would go to an apartment in St. Augustine. It would all be arranged through Antoinette’s lawyers. She would be cared for as long as she stayed inside. Also arranged would be the adoption. After the birth, Gwennie would leave the baby in the hospital and walk back into her own life. She would never breathe a word to anybody or else the monthly allowances would cease.

[Echoes everywhere. Painful, the backstage manipulations, how money trumps heart. Good. Press the finger into the wound; bear down.]

The girl listened to the ocean, muted through the window. Rachel came in again and pressed the button for the television and sat, sucking her thumb, on the carpet. Gwennie watched her, wanting to hurt this woman who reeked of roses, baby powder. At last, Gwennie looked at Antoinette without smiling. “You won’t acknowledge your own grandchild?” she said.

“Lancelot will have a brilliant future,” she said. “Less brilliant if this happens. A mother’s job is to prop open all possible doors for her children. Besides, there will be likelier candidates to bear his children.” She paused, smiled sweetly. “Likelier children as a result.”

Inside Gwennie’s stomach, a snake was twisting. “Fine,” she said.

[How much of this is supposition, projection? All. None. You hadn’t been there. But you knew Antoinette, how her lazy sweetness belied ferocity. She would say this speech again, though the dart would miss its target the second time. Oh, yes. You knew Antoinette in your bones.]

In the car again. Chollie drove and felt queasy, watching his sister cry into her elbow. “You tell her to go to hell?” he said. He would sue that warthog for everything she had, screw the fact that she was Lotto’s mother. He’d take her for all she was worth and live in that beach house for the rest of his life, exulting, rich.

Gwennie took away her arm, and said, “Money for silence. Don’t fight me. I signed the contract.”

He tried to say with his own wordlessness what he wouldn’t say aloud, but she was having none of it. “I liked her,” she said, though this was terribly untrue.

They showed up at their parents’ house because there was nowhere else they wanted to be. Okra and chicken and cornbread from a box, their mother dropping her spatula, coming over with open arms. Gwennie announced both the pregnancy and the termination over butterscotch pudding. It was for Chollie, so he wouldn’t meddle. Her father put his forehead on the edge of the kitchen table, wept there. Her mother stood without speaking and flew the next morning to El Paso for work. It was easy for Gwennie to pretend to run away. She packed a small duffel and climbed into the car that came for her when she should have been at school, and was installed in a two-room apartment, all oatmeal carpet and plastic mugs, and was visited by a nurse every week and had groceries show up at the door and as much television as she could process, which was perfectly welcome, since she couldn’t have read a book if there had been one anywhere around, which there probably wasn’t, not in this entire sad condo complex with its turquoise fountains, dyed red cypress mulch.

The baby took. It took from her bones and took from her youth day by day. Gwennie ate little, watched talk shows all day. Dear Lotto, she wrote once to the boy banished to cold northern misery, but half the words were already a lie so she tore up the letter and put it below the coffee filter in the trashcan. Only floating in the bathtub gave relief.

Her life had paused; but in fast-forward the baby was born. Gwennie had an epidural; it was a dream. Her personal nurse came to the hospital and did everything. She put the baby in Gwennie’s arms, but when she left the room, Gwennie put the baby back in the bassinet. They wheeled him away and kept bringing him back even though she told them not to. Her body healed. Her breasts hardened. Two days, three days. Green Jell-O in cups and American cheese on bread. One day, she signed a paper and the baby was gone. There was an envelope full of cash in her backpack. She came out of the hospital to blazing July heat. She was beyond empty.

She walked all the way home, more than ten miles. She came in the house to find Chollie in the kitchen, drinking Kool-Aid. He dropped his cup. He turned red in the face and screamed at her, that their parents had filed a police report, that their dad spent all night every night casing the streets, that Chollie had nightmares of her being raped. She shrugged and put her backpack down and went into the rec room to turn on the television. After some time, he brought her scrambled eggs and toast and sat beside her, watching the light move on her face. Weeks passed. Her body worked independently of her brain, which was elsewhere, in another hemisphere. There was something dragging at her, an anchor snagged on something invisible below. It took great effort to move.

Her parents were gentle. They let her skip school, took her to a therapist. It didn’t matter. She lay in bed. “Gwennie,” her brother said, “you need to get help.” There was no point. Her brother, without looking at her, took her hand. So gently, so tenderly, that she wasn’t embarrassed. Weeks passed since she’d showered. She was too tired to eat. “You stink,” Chollie said angrily. You always stink, she thought but didn’t say. Chollie was worried, gone now only during school hours. Her father only during work. The overlap when she was alone was three hours, short. On a day when she had more energy than usual, she called Michael’s neighbor who sold drugs. He came, looked at her matted hair, her little girl’s nightgown, seemed reluctant to hand over the paper bag. She thrust money into his hands, slammed the door in his face. She put the bag between her mattress and box spring. Day after day, all the same. Sticky fringe of dust on the blade edge of the overhead fans. Enough.