Regan Wolfrom - Catholic Guilt and the Joy of Hating Men

“In Portugal we spend as much time driving on the sidewalks as we do on the road.”

She gave him a little smirk. “Not your best.”

“Sorry,” he said. “Your brother told me you play video games.”

“Don’t girls play video games in Portugal?”

“I don’t know. I play video games. Maybe we should play sometime?”

“Maybe,” Marguerite replied. She’d already lost interest.

As much as she wanted someone to notice her… no. Not Rafael. He just didn’t count.

Marguerite spent the rest of her day out by herself, since her father had chosen to work from home rather than drive in to Lisbon on a Saturday, and the last thing she wanted to do was apologize for the most recent most terrible things she’d ever said to him.

He’d chosen his career over his family. He’d left Marguerite’s mother locked in a hospital ward in Cincinnati. He’d given Bradley everything he’d ever wanted, while giving Marguerite nothing more than his pale complexion that would burn in minutes in the Portuguese sun if she didn’t dunk her face in a gallon of sunscreen three times a day.

There was no way she would say she’s sorry.

So on days like that she’d leave her Xbox and go out, wandering the mountains of the moon that towered over the town of Sintra, sketching in her notebook and identifying plants, and wishing for something unusual to happen.

She’d been walking through the grounds of the great and mystical estate of Quinta da Regaleira, on a cloudy day, strolling through the lush gardens that are always on the line between scenic and overgrown. It was a place that was not nearly as old as the mountains around it, but still it seemed almost as magical to her.

She’d been walking not far from the Initiation Well, the stone staircase that descends into the earth, when she stumbled on two plastic garden gnomes.

One looked playful, with a toothy smile and a long light gray beard, dressed in an orange hat and tunic and no pants, while the other was more serious-looking, dressed all in dark brown with a pipe hanging out of his mouth. The second gnome had a dark and curly beard, and nothing about him seemed friendly. The two gnomes looked nothing like a matching pair.

“Who left you here?” she asked them, almost as if she expected an answer. There was no way those gnomes belonged in the glade of blue and white flowers and brown-capped mushrooms.

She sat down beside them, nibbling on one of the mushrooms that she recognized from one of her field guides, finding it edible but bland; still, it reminded her of home, of picnics at Shawnee Lookout, of having friends and family around her, of not being half a world away, of not being so damned lonely all the time.

She picked up the gnomes, cradling them in her arms like two hairy watermelons, carrying them with her as she decided to climb down the stairs of the stone-columned well. She’d only been down there with Bradley and his bragging before; now she had two little guides, funny-looking and plastic, to take her down the mystical stairway, and she felt both like laughing and crying at the two-foot boyfriends she’d found.

As she walked with the gnomes she started to feel funny, as though her heart were beating louder; she could feel the pulsing through the gnomes themselves, as if they themselves had grown little hearts of their own. Had she been wrong about the mushrooms? She didn’t think that was it; Marguerite felt that she was probably just overwhelmed by loneliness.

The trip down was long, a hundred and twenty steps if she remembered it right, and she paused at each of the platforms, not that she’d admit that she needed to catch her breath so often. She’d once been an athlete, but now she just felt like a freckled cream puff.

She reached the bottom half-winded, and walked out from the dark stairwell into the marble floor in the middle. She looked straight up, past the rows of stairs and stone columns, up to the cloudy spring sky; it had started to rain lightly, and the drops of water fell like mist on their way down to the deep.

“It feels magical,” she said. She realized that she was either talking to nobody or to two plastic gnomes.

Marguerite put them both down on the floor, placing each on a red arrow of their own, pointing to what she thought were east and south.

“I’ll take the north,” she said as she stepped onto an arrow of her own. She dropped down to one knee and could feel her eyes welling up with tears. She felt like an idiot.

“You’re upset,” someone said. A warm voice… a friendly, older man.

“A little,” she replied. She looked around but could not see him. She found it unnerving to be talking to an unknown man hiding in the shadows.

“You are beautiful… you shine like an angel from heaven.”

“You’re weirding me out, sir. I… I can’t see you.”

“Look to your feet, my darling.”

She looked down, and there she saw the little orange gnome looking back up at her, the plastic now gone and his smile now real.

“It’s magic, dumbass,” the other gnome said, his voice hard and unfriendly. He was just as alive but not nearly as pleasant.

“I think it’s the mushrooms,” Marguerite said. “I need a new field guide.”

“Tell me of love, my angel,” the orange gnome said. “Tell me of the love you want for your life.”

“Tell us what you like to do for kicks,” the brown gnome said.

They were alone down there, as far as she could tell, so she told them what she wanted. “I just want to be in love… it doesn’t matter who it is. It’s the feeling I want… not the boy or anything. Well, okay… not Rafael…”

“Would you love me?” the orange gnome asked. “Could you love a humble creature of the soil?”

“You can have us both,” the brown gnome said with little enthusiasm. “The two of us, right here, right now. No waiting.”

“That’s very nice,” Marguerite said, truly flattered, “but I’m not the kind of girl who goes for that type of thing.”

“We’ve been waiting forever for you, Marguerite,” the orange gnome said. “For as long as there’s been magic in these mountains we’ve been waiting.”

“It’s more or less our destiny to make love to you,” the brown gnome said. “So it’s easier if you just say ‘yes’”.

“I need to go,” she said. “Some friends are waiting for me at the Chapel.”

She felt the grip of four small hands on her ankles. Her first instinct was to kick the dirty gnomes as hard as she could, but for some reason she didn’t. She could have ended it there, threw them off and stomped on their little heads, but she didn’t.

She wanted something to happen.

Soon they were both hugging her with their entire bodies, holding her firmly and amorously… or possibly humping her legs.

“Love us, Marguerite,” the orange gnome said.

“Let’s find somewhere a little more private,” the brown gnome said.

“I guess I have a few minutes,” she said.

The gnomes led her toward the dark at the edge of the well, pulling on her knees and almost tripping her. As they reached where the stairs met the rock, a door opened to a tunnel that she’d never seen before.

“A second tunnel,” she said.

“Our secret tunnel,” the orange gnome said.

“Where it’ll just be the three of us,” the brown gnome said.

They went into the tunnel, stepping into the dark. The stone door closed behind them, and all of the light disappeared.

“I can’t see,” she said.

They kept leading her, so she felt she had no choice but to trust them, and they walked for another few minutes before they stopped tugging at her knees.