Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

On the ride back, Marguerite shared a booth-like seat with her mother in the mid-body of the school bus. She longed to talk, but she was too prim — or too cold — to breach her mother’s privacy.

And then all of a sudden her mother seemed to be crying. The right whale, larger than a school bus. How handy for the whale hunters; it floated along dead for hours on account of its prolific blubber. Marguerite drew back into her growly window corner. When she closed her eyes against her mother she saw the grainy photographs from the nature center: the giant mammal pulling the dinghy by the very harpoon it would be killed by within a couple of hours. The whale swam so fast it turned the dinghy into a modern-day speedboat.

Speeding toward the horizon, all the way to the vanishing point…

They had just turned into the school lot and the melee of dismissal when someone rose over the seatback wielding a Polaroid camera. Marguerite and her mother, looking up through a membrane, nebulous, their eyes at once indistinct and magnified.

Marguerite pushes the ugly photo away from her on the table. She has a slim envelope of photographs she keeps unceremoniously with her files. Telephone bills, old SAT scores, her mother. All to scale.

It’s five o’clock somewhere. She cringes when anyone says that. Laugh-track material, and to Marguerite, drinking is no laughing matter. She has a headache that feels like a tumor, and weird referencing pain in her upper stomach. She swings through the kitchen — glass, ice, jug. She makes an echoing half circle for the lemon.

Speaking of scale.

Quetzalcoatlus of the Late Cretaceous had a thirty-nine-foot wingspan. What a stupid coincidence. The same length as a school bus.

The scale of loss…she can’t stop thinking about Jonathan Hughes’ mother. She can’t stop thinking about her loss compared to Jonathan’s.

The pressure on the earth, the skid, the bite in a fossil track reveals the speed of a powerfully hungry Allosaurus, in one illustration.

What is it about their extinction? It’s not just death, but the God of death. The remainder. The hard and final thing that is irreducible. Quetzalcoatlus, imagined from a few spare wing bones, inverse creation.

In those few months between Mr. Goff’s scavenger hunt and her mother’s vanishing act she never read the children’s dinosaur encyclopedia. Was she so terribly busy? She never asked her mother to read it to her, either. Now and again she must have paged through: dutifully, guiltily, impatiently. She might have vaguely wished to put Mr. Goff behind her.

How much would she have lost going to the landlord and asking a few simple questions about his hobby? What’s five minutes out of childhood? But she never did, and it occurs to her now that after her mother left there was so little between her and the retired couple that she failed to say goodbye to them on the single occasion that her grandmother brought her back to collect, Grandmother Webb insisted, only her “good” clothing.

Mr. Goff was working in the backyard. Those very borders where the bones had been lightly buried were now filled in with phlox and rose and black-eyed Susan. Marguerite was surprised to see that he was beginning to walk with his neck turtled forward.

Two hundred and fifty million years ago the equator ran up and down instead of around like a girdle.

No, it didn’t, but there was only Pangaea, the mother of all continents, the single mother supercontinent.

Horsetails full of spores, fern tufts, and scaly conifers.

Dinosaurs like kangaroo-lizards hopped around with strands of vegetation hanging from their orifices.

There were no great worries like polar ice caps.

A fossil exists of the underwater birth of an Ichthyosaurus. A bone-lattice baby coming out midstream, mid-extinction. No letters, no records of her existence.

Grandfather Webb once suggested he hire a private detective. Marguerite was so shocked and distracted by his kindness that she only wanted to reply in kind — in kindness. “Oh, no,” she fumbled. “That would be too much trouble.”

6

Her grandmother calls before she’s out of bed, eleven thirty, still morning.

“Mah-gret.” As if the name were one syllable, with a little foot on it. “Dinner with Hope Grosvenor last night, and her boring husband.”

Her grandmother is not in a Masterpiece Theatre production. They both know she amuses herself putting on certain airs for her granddaughter’s benefit. “Hopesie’s nephew has had no word from you, Mah-gret.” The nephew is a young lawyer just launched at the “only” firm in Providence, and Marguerite was to suggest lunch at the plate-glass lobster-and-rib-eye emporium on the ground floor of his building.

“He hasn’t?”

Grandmother Webb blows like a horse. Marguerite empties a can of soup into a saucepan. Is the glop more than mildly disgusting? She never makes food for anyone. She pours out a little white wine she keeps for this kind of morning.

After what she absorbed last night, she has a many-headed headache. The wine is cheap, but silvery. She decides it’s the color of a banana — very pale — and thus perfect for breakfast. Screw the soup. She washes it down the drain with Palmolive to cover the meaty odor. Disgusting, absolutely. She’ll glow with health in a minute. But she has to admit that she doesn’t have it in her to sleep with a lawyer.

She slept with a teacher, at boarding school.

Maybe Jonathan Hughes slept with a teacher too, his puppy eyes velvety as sleep — she can see it. Like flying above the path in a dream, suddenly she can see everything.

Her English teacher was a lipless bachelor of thirty-seven, age of resentment and dissymmetry. His PhD was wasted, and he believed, perhaps needless to say, that he should have been teaching college. Something was owed him, compensation for tenth-grade Frankenstein , twelfth-grade Great Gatsby . Being a man of literature, he was entitled to his liberalism, in an unexamined, belligerent fashion: how stratospherically far he was above bourgeoisie convention. Nothing he did could be anything less than unstintingly original.

His apartment was in a painted brick house in town, a short walk off the boarding school campus. There was a clutch of metal mail sleeves at the front porch, and it thrilled Marguerite to see his last name on one of them. As if the man she loved had staked a claim in the world. She put little notes inside it; she believed they were cryptic.

She had nothing to compare it to, so she would never, then, have said the liaison was unimaginative. It seemed natural each one retreated, during sex, to his or her own private world. She would say to herself: I am holding a man’s penis in my hand. Or her lips were forming a seal around it, it tickled her tonsils. When he grabbed her hair she felt abruptly sad, always, but she knew very well she wasn’t a knock-kneed little victim.

Au contraire (as she used to say, constantly, determined to mock everything), she had a feeling of triumph when he slid out of her. She was on the pill, juice spilled all over. “Look at the mess you’ve made!” she’d exclaim. She would pretend she was maternal, or whorish, or anything to entertain herself. He used his T-shirt to wipe her.

They never discussed school. They weren’t intellectual intimates. Marguerite imagined they were pawns of the large-heartedness of love. She told herself love was Love, she told herself the smell of his cinnamon chewing gum was Love also.

They carried on for almost four months, and she became absurdly comfortable in his presence. She would let her clothing drop as soon as the door closed behind her; she would slouch around thin and nude whether or not they consummated. She had the idea that he liked to hear anything she had to say. That she, in fact, had the upper hand in conversation, because she could make him laugh so easily.