Dawn Raffel - Further Adventures in the Restless Universe

The woman does not want to open the door. She has failed or has neglected or refused or such — whichever you will — flat out, it can be said, to respond. The voices implore her.

The house smells of wax and of sanitary poison.

Perhaps they will believe, she tells herself, she’s gone to sleep.

“Silence,” said the woman. They were up in the attic — the crawlspace — again.

The neighbor had a weapon: out in the a.m., bandanna on the neck, checked vest, and fine, tanned arms. The aim too high. “Damnation,” she said.

The woman — not the neighbor — was my mother, which should not surprise you. “We do not live in a place like this. Look at this. Wash,” she said.

It was hanging like flags, a nation of wrung-out bodily shapes: stained, not ours, not ours — a madwoman’s torso.

Ours was in the house.

What they left was evidence, a hole in the wall up under the eave — intruders of nature — the gutter where the leaves collected in the fall.

It was supposed to be nice.

Someone would be paid for this, to settle this, or so my mother said, and winter, when it came, would do the rest.

In the museum, I watched the chickens hatch. Too cold to go out — it is never as cold as it was anymore, back then: downed up and shivering. I was sent there to play, and watch the spectacle of birth.

Always there was scurrying, too many offspring, the neighbor asserted. “One is too many,” I heard my mother say, although apropos of what I do not know. Quiet she liked, and weaponlessness.

You could take out an eye.

The newborns stumbled into the springtime under the glass as if stunned by the light. Their feathers were wet.

Knock on wood. I have not been in years.

The exhibit was a designated permanent fixture — but sadly, the neighborhood, my mother said, went.

My mother left a message on the answering machine in which she spelled the world “nails.” She asked me to call her. She asked if I were possibly already home.

It was a product she wanted — a hardening agent. “I need you to buy it and mail it,” she said.

My mother’s hands are lovely, I might add.

The man who was my father asked me a question: whether the house in a story I had written was symbolic of the body — but whose he did not say.

When he left, he left behind a drawer of items. We couldn’t have sold them.

“What have you got in there?” the neighbor said. She was polishing a barrel.

The ceiling pouched. Birds broke and entered, carriers, wreckers of homes — then squirrels, hoarders, and last of all water.

Tap, tap, tap.

A peck on the cheek.

A rag in the voice.

The drawer was stuck, the laundry defeated, and Missus Bandanna was missing a tooth.

Still, men came to look.

“ Varmints,” she said.

My father left directions for the answering machine.

They are waiting out loud, as children do. There is never a minute of peace in this house, and nothing unbroken, it seems to her, not even the past, nor even her silence. Nothing is even. “Where is your father?” again and again. Not off the hook — the telephone ringing; it always is. Too many extensions. Somebody all the time listening in — cutting in — needing something, more or less.

Love me.

No moment is sacred and all of them are.

The sun is on the floor because it has to be, probably; the hand, as you’d expect, is at a knob. Already there are fingerprints.

She blinks at a threshold.

Who is the woman? Who is the woman now?

1. Hungry. Crash diet. Hit the floor in the high-school corridor and get sent home. I wasn’t out more than a minute, they say, insist to me. I thought that I was moving, maybe jigging uncontrollably. I still have the scar on my chin.

2. Lab class. It’s called “Pests, Parasites, and Man”—an improbable freshman science class for humanities majors, kids who wouldn’t stand a chance in Physics 101. It ’s, by the way, the only class that hadn’t been closed out at registration. The lab is suffocating. Our teaching assistant, in lieu of instruction, has taken to showing us graphic film footage of infectious diseases. We’ve had rocky mountain fever and whatever the thing is you get from a cat that’s dangerous when you’re pregnant — coccidiomycosis. Today ’s diseases are amoebic dysentery followed by cholera. We are watching barely living skeletons expel diarrhea. There can’t be any hope — by now, at the time of our viewing, they must surely be dead — yet the volunteer medics are bucketing vomit, looking with a needle for a vein. During an intubation of the neck on a patient whose veins appear to have collapsed, I fall off my lab stool and hit the concrete floor head first. I don’t know where I am — or where I was — but I have been here before. Someone turns the lights on. The teaching assistant stops the film; it sputters off. He hadn’t watched it first, he concedes, before showing it to us. Perhaps, he says, this one was a bit too…he ’s searching for a word. Early, he says — class is let out early.

Everyone, it seems, is heading for the lakefill, our hard shore built of what has been cast off.

Back at my dorm, I look in the bathroom mirror at the gash across my forehead, the bird’s egg (or is it goose?) that’s starting to form. I try to do the crossword puzzle that someone has taped, along with a pencil stub on a string, to the door of a stall. My eyes hurt, so I go to my room and lie down. My roommate is elsewhere, as ever; when her parents call, as they do, I tell them she’s just down the hall, in the shower, indisposed. “Dinner time,” my friend says, entering while knocking. When I tell her I don’t want to eat, she makes me put my shoes on to walk to the infirmary. I think this is a terrible idea.

The person who examines me says he is an “extern” and looks to me to be about my age. He shines in my eyes and listens through his stethoscope, then says he has concluded I don’t have a concussion—“ But, ” he says. But, but, but. “ Do you know you have a heart murmur?” he says. He won’t let me go home. When I wake up, my mother is there. “ You look upset, ” I say. She’s looking in her purse. She keeps Kleenex in her purse. Someone, she says, from the infirmary called her and told her I had a concussion. “How could you…” she says.

“You r father, ” she says, over club sandwiches, no middle slice. Then we go to a real doctor, who fails to find anything going on with my heart. “Concussion?” he says. “Possible.” What I have are two black eyes, so we swing by the drugstore that cashes checks and stock up on concealer before my mother leaves.

The gash is scabbing over. My nose is badly swollen. People ask me whether I’ve been in an accident — meaning, with a car. My sweet, elderly Russian teacher tells me it ’s okay for me to miss the last week of class before Thanksgiving. She tells me to go home, then says something inflected that I can’t understand. Walking around with pods of mismatched makeup under my eyes, I seem to make people wary. When my report card comes at the end of the term, I see that I’ve gotten an A in “Pests, Parasites and Man.”

3. Blood test. I stand up, then fall down. The nurse can’t find a pulse at first and panics. I tell her I must have one. Then I lie back down.