Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

“A marble fireplace! Well you should ask Bernice to be sure about the chimney before you go drying your hose or, as you say, burning your papers. Send me your papers, instead, Les! I’ll keep them for you until you’re famous!

“We did have a chimney fire here because of nesting swallows…

“You see?” says Jonathan, sliding his glasses up with a knuckle. Even from her nosebleed seat Marguerite can see he’s gotten sweaty.

He leans forward. “Picture me setting the letter down beside me. I’m sitting on the bare wood floor, I have no idea at all how to obtain furniture. I barely know how to feed myself. I don’t have to go to the single west window, across from the fireplace, to see my mother’s view.” One last pause. “I’ve already spent hours looking down on that pocket cemetery.”

5

Dinah Holly stared at the green and white linoleum, every stain obvious in the harsh glare of the university-run coffee shop. James maneuvered his chair so he could stretch his legs out beneath the little white table. He squinted at her and her heart raced like a rabbit’s. Her hands were warm from the thick white coffee mug — he had bought her a hot chocolate.

Yes, driving gloves; and at twenty-two he kept martini makings in the kitchen of his off-campus apartment. His walnut hair, his cigars, his gentleman’s manners juxtaposed with an adorable, adolescent thuggishness…his father was the president of a bank with branches that overarched the Eastern Seaboard, he told her. His family’s “summer cottage” was eleven bedrooms and a mansard roof, high hedges and a whole Stonehenge of chimneys.

Dinah imagined herself grazing on seaward lawns, twirling batons of crabstick among those sloshy Daughters of the Revolution (James called them drakes and tomcats) with inverted lips and dresses as thick as linen tablecloths. She loved the unctuous smell of boxwood, mothballs, and the Atlantic.

James shared his apartment. Cousin Henry was possibly a graduate student, possibly not this semester. He had the same thick roll of hair as James, the same wafer-white chest with rosebud nipples. They had the same compulsion to clear their throats, which every time made Dinah start, but Henry Webb had a shallow laugh like a shale shelf, three inches of water.

His neck was skinnier and his hands, with nails the same rosebud pink, were smaller than James’s, as if they could pick locks, poke things into knot-holes. He had a weakling’s bag of tricks, James said, and the unpitiable nature of an asthmatic. At the beach club, Henry had been known to spit into the beverages of cousins who beat him at tennis, examining the foam of his own saliva before handing the concoction over.

The three of them drove around on weekends. They made fun of the provincial surroundings, the mom-and-pops, small dirt roads that squirreled through the forest. James and Henry recounted beach club antics from last summer or the summer before. They declared that mental illness was rampant , genetic.

“Our grandparents!” cried Henry, the natural braggart, “were second cousins!”

They brought any kind of liquor. They drank it out of the bottle until Henry took Dinah aside and insinuated that she, being the girl, was expected to provide the ice and chalice. James drove steadily when he was drunk; when he was sober his driving was a mean streak. He’d go for miles in the wrong lane, until something happened to Dinah’s equilibrium and she lightly fainted.

Sometimes, at Henry’s suggestion, they swerved off the road and walked for a while into the forest. Henry jumped about laterally as if in tennis, and was always drawn to the sound of water. The woods had ample veins of it.

When they came to a pool in a stream or a Guinness-thick beaver pond they sat down to rest and James eyed her until she couldn’t stand it. She rose self-consciously and went to him. Sometimes they had forgotten the liquor in the car, they were so drunk when they left the car in a ditch or a pull-off, and then the sound of the forest gradually became scratchy and close and James’s desire for her drained like color from his face while her longing for him increased. He pushed her away and Henry watched carefully.

She could never quite figure where they grew up. They laughed: the beach club, New York, dark Satanic boarding school, and “Damnit, Henry, do you remember that time in Paris?”

It seemed to Dinah that there was no layering of time between generations. The grandparents were superimposed on the grandkids, the given names were the same, all the Jameses and Henrys, and everyone lobster pink, Lamarckian, from summers on the Atlantic.

James would always kiss her goodbye when they dropped her at her dormitory, but if he kissed too much, his lips became covered with something like flour. Dinah’s were chapped, too, from the unfamiliar furnace heat. In fact her bottom lip had split in the night, and she’d woken up to the hissing and clanking radiator, the taste of blood, smell of iron.

He took her to the beach club in the wrong season. The place was nearly deserted, and Dinah imagined the ruins of a Roman settlement: actors in sandals, dusty nubs of stables, a snaggle-toothed tower against a rougy sunset. She told him — shyly, sparkling — and he was pleased as any tutor.

The foreign help had long been visa’d back — in James’s father’s day they were Irish, now they were all from Eastern Europe. Relishingly James described for her the Slavic girls with tight scalps and the springy boy gymnasts occasionally called upon to fill in a game of tennis; he caricatured for her the matriarch of the next-door cabana, breeder of Shetland ponies, with a forelock of thick strawberry-blond hair absolutely unaffected by rogue coastal weather; and her ponies, sulky dwarves with oversized teeth their owner called “bone structure.”

The cabanas were closed and they looked like nothing more than a row of public restrooms. The sea was heavy after a storm, mud brown, churned up and hollow-smelling like a rotted-out tree trunk. The sand had been scoured and then pummeled with rocks and there were ugly, soupy rivers running widthwise.

James showed Dinah the hedges of honeysuckle that extended to marsh grass behind the cabanas. He led her along the rabbit paths; had she ever tasted honeysuckle? You pulled the stamen through the slender horn. Early summer, he smiled apologetically. Each flower gave up a bead of sweet, lymph-colored liquid.

Did she know horsetail? Did she know he had loved her since the dinosaurs?

The wind was like sandpaper against the cement boardwalk. As if he were brought to his knees by it, James said, “Don’t go back for Christmas.”

Once Diana was a parent chaperone on a school field trip. The maritime nature center was close by; nonetheless, the fourth graders were required to board the nauseating midmorning school bus. There were presentations on pollution, ospreys, oysters, whales. There was a booth for listening to the mating calls of certain seabirds, and there was a life-sized model of a right whale.

The right whale was so called because it was the right whale to harvest. Diana wasn’t like the other mothers, who read in uninflected voices. Even the teachers edged closer to listen. Her voice was rushy and melodic, the same as when she told Marguerite stories in their loft over ginger ales and gin and tonics, that narrow ribbon of dark between them.

The right whale always swam against the shore, Marguerite’s mother continued. Ideal for the whaler: no fortnight upon fortnight leaving wife, children, and difficult mistress. Its blubber, melted and boiled, was ninety barrels of oil. It had baleen like fine dry grass before a fire. Every part had a use except its heart, which was four hundred pounds, read Diana.

Afterward they ate their bagged lunches in the sand and crispy seaweed. Not only her friends, but classmates Marguerite had never spoken to clustered around her beautiful mother. Marguerite had to make space for them.