Kathryn Davis - Duplex

That’s not a fairy, someone said.

How do you know? Janice sniffed as if maybe she’d been crying, too. No one understands poetry. Another lightning bug flew past and she reached out and caught it. Some things are real and some things are like real. The girls died. They died for love. She opened her hand and let the bug go. Everyone watched it drift away across the street until it was too small to see.

The mothers and fathers, though, Janice said. They never got over it. They had to harden their hearts so they wouldn’t keep breaking.

You can sit out here forever, Janice said. They’re not going to call you in.

HIS NAME WAS WALTER WOODARD, THE ELDEST OF the three Woodard boys — Sorcerer was only the most well known of Walter’s nicknames. No one could believe it when Mary agreed to marry him. Of course everyone thought she was going to marry Eddie. To imagine one of them without the other was like seeing the sky without the sun in it, an affront to nature, a rift in the fabric of the common good, an invitation to obscenity. Along with the family business — a variety of dark ventures comingling in a sack called “real estate”—the Woodard boys were known to have inherited their father’s questionable character, his ability to perform such sleights-of-hand as could turn abomination to gold.

Marriage proved to be a surprise to Mary, who had thought being a wife would mean being constantly busy. Her new neighborhood was quiet, the house all by itself at the end of a long driveway bordered on both sides by rose bushes and backed by a woodlot. They had bought the property to escape the noise of the city, especially the din of people and objects being moved from place to place. It was a lovely house, quite expensive, the walls white as snow inside as well as out. Through every window Mary had a view of growing things driving their shadows deep into the wide suburban lawn.

Her husband claimed the noise of the city had been the source of Mary’s problem. Her unhappiness troubled him, as if she were being unhappy on purpose to make a point. When she woke at night from bad dreams he told her she needed to take it easy during the day — nightmares were caused by stress. When she said the dreams weren’t her dreams he gave her the look that eventually won her heart. It was exactly like the look Eddie used to give her, one that had been designed to show his fondness for how adorable Mary was, which these days, as far as she could tell, was not very. In a contact dream the dreamer’s mind got swallowed by the mind of another dreamer, usually someone who lived in close proximity though not in the same house; this phenomenon occurred most often in the very young or the mentally ill, whose brains lacked such walls as the mature brain erected over time, brick after brick of old passwords, the secret location of a soul, schoolmates’ birthdays, how to sew a dress, recognize a prime number. People living in duplexes were especially susceptible, which was why the sorcerer had bought such an isolated house in the first place.

He would lie in bed facing Mary, his face inches from hers, cupping her ears in his hands. How was she expected to hear? If she wanted to get pregnant again, it seemed like he was saying, this certainly wasn’t the way. Her life was supposed to be perfect now that all the unpleasantness with the boy was behind her. They never talked about Eddie, the way he brought her home from the prom and that was the last she saw of him. The sorcerer knew the subject was one better left alone.

“I’m not ready for this,” Eddie had said to her that night, though Mary later realized that she’d never been exactly clear on what he meant by “this.” They were standing under the porch lamp like people in a show, with the Darlings and Miss Vicks in rapt attendance. Eddie didn’t want a baby, that much was obvious. He’d have to be some kind of an idiot to have a baby now, he told her, just when his career was getting off the ground. It wasn’t fair to her, either, he added, though with much less conviction. There was a place she could go — he’d heard about it from one of the fellows he’d be playing with in the fall. Saint Something-or-other, run by nuns; he could get the name from his new teammate. The place was supposed to be nice, not far from the shore everyone on the street used to go to on vacation, and afterward the baby would be adopted by some nice people who couldn’t have babies of their own. Better yet, she could just get rid of it. Roy’s father was a doctor and he said he’d help out. He would lose his license if she ever told a soul. “You don‘t have to worry about money, though,” Eddie told her. Now that he’d signed with the Rockets, money was the least of their problems.

It wasn’t as if Mary wanted a baby. It wasn’t even as if she wanted to get married. Everyone kept telling her she had her whole life ahead of her — whatever that meant. No, it was more like a part of her life got sliced into and lifted out like a serving of sheet cake. As it transpired, the nuns were silent and surprisingly lacking in judgment. Sea breezes blew through all the windows of the convent day and night, moving Mary’s thoughts around to make unreadable patterns like the grains of sand on the floor of her room.

Meanwhile Eddie disappeared completely after signing with the Rockets. The only way Mary knew he was alive was through Downie, who’d gotten a job at the ballpark as the team mascot. He didn’t even need to wear a costume. The sweet summer days turned to star-patched evenings, the ballpark filling with noise and the smell of beer and popcorn. When Downie came to visit he would bring her news of Eddie, but only if Mary asked, and even then it was like pulling teeth.

When she finally returned to the street no one recognized her. She took to bleaching her hair and putting it up in a beehive, wearing large round sunglasses and stiletto heels. Often she could be seen standing with her hips thrust forward, paging through fashion magazines at Resnick’s Drugstore. The store still smelled like the horror comics she used to buy back when she first learned to read. She would hand Mr. Resnick her allowance money and carry the comic to the booth farthest from the door so no one would disturb her while she studied the monsters, their misshapen limbs and faces with pieces missing, their fangs and claws and fur and bandages coming undone. The monsters used to make her feel lonely and tenderhearted, unlike the fashion models, who made her feel like a monster. She remembered folding construction paper in Miss Vicks’s classroom prior to recess. No one knew where Eddie was then, either. Outdoors hadn’t been any better. The drinking fountain water in the bubbler tasted awful. You couldn’t see the sun itself, only a flat pan of sunlight on the rough playground floor.

“I wouldn’t worry,” Miss Vicks told Mary’s mother, who in fact didn’t. It was Miss Vicks who worried; Mary’s mother was too busy thinking about her next drink to worry about her daughter. “Once she gets to art school she’ll be herself again,” Miss Vicks reassured her.

“Mary’s a big girl, Marjorie,” said Mary’s mother. “She can take care of herself.”

Neither woman knew what went on in art school — if she had, she wouldn’t have been so sanguine about Mary’s prospects. During the day the students were a hive of industry, drawing plaster casts, painting from the model, learning the rules of perspective, stretching canvas. But night was a different story. At night the square they had crossed in the morning to enter the building was transformed, the central fountain no longer a cheerful sunlit place where young mothers came to sit with their baby carriages, gossiping and eating lunch and blocking everyone’s view of Aphrodite. At night the fountain became a shrine, the goddess standing there fully revealed in the middle of the water, her body white and naked, her back arched and her breasts lifted to the moon. Elm trees lined the square, their leaves falling ceaselessly through the dark like coins. This is how Zeus got women pregnant.