Kirstin Allio: Clothed, Female Figure: Stories

I have not thought of the Hanauers, for example, in many years, but how clearly I recall Becky Hanauer, a quavery-faced woman who had a great deal subtracted from natural beauty, casting me from the servants’ quarters. “I just feel that you’re — overbearing in the household, Natasha.” I pointed out to her (I had nowhere else to live, but she didn’t know that) that most accidents happen in the presence of many adults because each individual adult assumes another is watching the children. Of course, a child can wander to the brink of an unattended swimming pool, I said, mistake the deep for the shallow, but more likely, it is when many mothers in oversized fashionable sunglasses like wasps at the nectar of gossip are present that a drowning actually happens.

Becky had fallen completely silent.

“Oh my, Natasha,” she said, several long seconds after I had finished. All of her lipstick had come off on her coffee cup and she looked both pale and lurid.

It occurred to me she thought I was accusing her of the — well, the pre-death — of one of her children.

“I am sorry, Becky,” I said somewhat woodenly.

“It’s stressful being with children, Natasha,” she managed.

My opinion was that, for her, it was, indeed, terribly “stressful.”

“I think you should come in the mornings, you know, in the breakfast rush hour…” Half smiling, she indicated the warzone of toast and yogurt and mashed banana for the baby. “And then,” she continued, “well, go on home after the baby’s dinner.”

I bowed my head until she said, “Natasha?”

“Becky, it’s as you wish,” I said. “Now please allow me…” and I moved in on the crumbly carnage, and the baby, who had been watching alarmedly, began banging with her bottle.

I came commuting in to Manhattan every morning by seven o’clock to get Leah to school by nine. Sometimes I volunteered in Leah’s classroom, divvying paint or helping at the scissors station. I used to stay there, in “Chelsea,” with Leah, until ten or eleven in the evening. A few times Ivy gave me cab fare but — I’m astonished at myself! — I categorically refused it.

Once, only a little bit less than a year after I’d left Leah, I had an opportunity to walk slowly past the front of her school at the dismissal hour. Many of the children who indiscriminately bumped and jostled one another were as tall as I was. I couldn’t believe that had been the case when I used to pick up Leah. I felt a terrible clutching and sourness in my stomach: in anticipation of this very moment, I realized, I hadn’t eaten anything since I’d left Nyack at six o’clock that morning. Suddenly I knew I was not in the right frame of mind to greet Leah. In any case I had no right to see her, none at all, it would be a compromise of context; like time travel, it was simply not possible.

I almost threw the next letter away as soon as I received it. I had intercepted it in the entrance hallway — Virginia need not creep up to the attic again, justified on her errand — and I stood beneath the chandelier that Jack had many times tried to leap for, holding the letter away from my body. I could see myself from above, too: I was very stilted and ridiculous in this action.

Such a correspondence need not continue, I heard myself whisper, as if I were, indeed, acting. I had a moment to myself — the boys were napping.

But what if I, Natasha, weren’t just an adolescent idea for a clothed, female figure? What if such a statue…took on a life of its own, like a guardian angel? I wouldn’t write back, that remained clear to me, but I must remain, somehow, open .

Dear Natasha,

Emmie’s other college roommate, Lorene, hired a real Italian grandmother to cook ragu that smells like it has a hundred ingredients. The sauce simmers, thickens, reduces, and the grandmother-cook sweeps the patio with one hand and picks herbs in terracotta with the other. Emmie’s all about: Don’t come near me, I am a ladysculptor. Molly and Eveline have urged me to let the boys watch TV with their boys. Do you know what? All the children are boys, future kings and princes, and all the grownups are women. I’m the only woman with any future to speak of.

Lorene, actually, has just returned from a week of Ashtanga in the center of Italy. Emmie keeps teasing her about being strong and centered — obviously, Emmie wishes she were a svelte yogini. Lorene and Hedwig think it’s very cute that I’m the nanny. They tease Emmie that she must really trust Mark, Emmie’s husband. They tease Emmie that their nannies have to pick up the slack, like making the kids the lunchtime chopped ham and ketchuppy hotdogs.

A rash and fever called sestina afflicts our Felix. The poetry of it! cries Emmie. Only in Italy!

I guess that’s where we are: the space between the verses.

Now it all makes sense. How he threw up upon our arrival, how he’s been so clingy, not his usual self, Emmie assures me. Hedwig is a biologist. She calls sestina one of the last remaining childhood illnesses. As if the illness itself were an endangered species! Free to burn, perhaps to purify, intones Hedwig. It occurs to me to ask Hedwig how she feels about death.

Lorene is a fashion designer in Paris. She says, So did we approve of the spaghetti sauce? We did, didn’t we. She has a way of pulling her ribs up off her stomach, as if to make more room for spaghetti. Hedwig comes in from wherever she has been with her laptop, wearing a bikini and the gauzy Indian tunic that all the ladies are wearing — really, another kind of housedress. Emmie hands me the sestina.

Mark’s arrival. The big personality. Everyone feels loved and it’s all worthwhile to be stranded in Italy. Yes, they’re already starting to complain about their vacation. Maybe we shouldn’t have listened to Francesca, maybe this isn’t the best spot. Maybe this is second-tier, maybe we’re missing the part where it’s going to show up in a glossy mag stateside. Mark heads down to the beach hours after everyone else has already departed. I know because I must stay in the tiled quarters with maladious Felix.

I’m not really sure if I should talk to him. Only it makes me think of so many things to say when I don’t talk to him. Last night I was so bottled up that I ended up telling Hedwig about you, Natasha, how you flashed in my mind every day after school, after you left us, and how I’d have to catch myself before running out to meet you.

All right, I’m beginning to recognize something of myself in Leah. I see how she’s making friends with those women, her professor and her professor’s girlfriends, by confession. She’s baring her wounds as a way to be accepted. Sure, she tells them about her daddy, how he left them for another woman; she tells them about her Russian nanny, who left them for a family in Nyack.

Yes, there was a time when my “opening line,” as they say, had something to do with losing Arturo. I didn’t think I could get a job without it. A mother would show me around her big sunny apartment, and I’d kneel down and greet her children, and then the mother would have to throw in some extra, like a dog who had allergies and had to be fed cooked turkey. Well then I would make my confession.

I go around all day worrying about Leah. The other husbands have arrived too, and Leah calls them bigshots, and now she calls the women longlegs. She writes,

They’ve all gone down to the salty still water. They’re all parading along the eucalyptus avenue toward the umbrella colony. If I close my eyes I can hear the sound of scuttling maids coming out from the corners, taking back the house, the loud brusque whisper that can only be the sound of sweeping. Your maid is like your garlic breath. Molly, the Thai nanny, and Eveline share a closet with bunk beds. Molly puts rice in the mouths of seven siblings in Thailand. I don’t know this for a fact but I sure can hear my mother say it. All Eveline will tell me about herself is that she hates the food in Italy.