The Best American Short Stories 2014 (47 page)

Isabel realizes three things in a single instant:

1. She is not strong enough to continue to hold her sister and her nephew; the exhaustion in her shoulders and hands has reached that point when it is searing pain.

2. Even as she is constantly stepping backward in a sort of reverse pedaling, the gravel beneath her feet is constantly giving way and she is being pulled inexorably toward the current.

3. If she lets go of Jerry, Ivy might still drag her into the flood, whereas if she lets go of Ivy and continues to hold on to Jerry, there is a chance that she might be able to lift him to safety and then climb up after him.

Isabel conveys all this information to her sister in a single glance.

As Ivy slides away on the flood, her eyes are locked on Isabel's with complete comprehension. Ivy's face grows smaller and smaller atop the current, and she seems to be shooting backward in time: not thirty-nine anymore, but thirty-five, then twenty-eight, then seventeen, twelve, five—until, just before she disappears over the falls some hundred yards downstream, her face seems to journey through something other than time, because, as small as it continues to grow, it never looks remotely like an infant's face, but more like that of an elf, then a fairy, then the bride on a wedding cake, and finally like a dotted face on a pencil-tip eraser.

Then Ivy is gone.

Isabel's back is against the pyramid rock and Jerry's back is against her chest.

“Mommy!” he cries, clawing at the red water with both hands.

“Hush,” says Isabel.

“Mommy! Mommy!” Jerry strains helplessly against the rigid rings of Isabel's arms.

“Hush,” says Isabel. “There's nothing we can do.”

“Mommy! Mommy! Mommy! Mommy!”

“Come on,” she says. “We have to get onto the rock, or we'll get washed away too.”

“Mahhhh-meeee!” screams Jerry. “Mahhhh-meeee!”

“As soon as this is over, we'll come back and look for her,” says Isabel. “I promise. But we have to go now or we are going to die.”

“Noooo!” shouts Jerry. “Mahhhh-meeee!”

Isabel has to fight the urge to let him go too. And then she wonders if that wouldn't, in fact, be the best thing to do.

FROM
Zoetrope: All-Story

 

I. First Love

 

T
HEY TOOK WALKS
to the beech grove at Banneville, near the abandoned pavilion. Foxglove and gillyflowers, beige lichen growing in one thick, crawling curtain around the socketed windows. Moths blinked wings at them, crescents of blue and red and tiger-yellow, like eyes caught in a net.

Emma sat and poked at the grass with the skeletal end of her parasol, as if she were trying to blind each blade.

“Oh,
why
did I ever get married?” she moaned aloud, again and again.

The greyhound whined with her, distressed by her distress. Sometimes, in a traitorous fugue, the dog forgot to be unhappy and ran off to chase purple butterflies or murder shrewmice, or to piss a joyful stream onto the topiaries. But generally, if her mistress was crying, so was the puppy. Her name was Djali, and she had been a gift from the young woman's husband, Dr. Charles Bovary.

Emma wept harder as the year grew older and the temperature dropped, folding herself into the white monotony of trees, leaning further and further into the bare trunks. The dog would stand on her hind legs and lick at the snow that fused Emma's shoulders to the coarse wood, as if trying to loosen a hardening glue, and the whole forest would quiver and groan together in sympathy with the woman, and her phantom lovers, and Djali.

At Banneville the wind came directly from the sea and covered the couple in a blue-salt caul. The greyhound loved most when she and Emma were outside like this, bound by the membrane of a gale. Yet as sunset fell Djali became infected again by her woman's nameless terrors. Orange and red, they seemed to sweat out of the wood. The dog smelled nothing alarming, but love stripped her immunity to the internal weathers of Emma Bovary.

The blood-red haze switched to a silvery blue light, and Emma shuddered all at once, as if in response to some thicketed danger. They returned to Tostes along the highway.

The greyhound was ignorant of many things. She had no idea, for example, that she was a greyhound. She didn't know that her breed had originated in southern Italy, an ancient pet in Pompeii, a favorite of the thin-nosed English lords and ladies, or that she was perceived to be affectionate, intelligent, and loyal. What she did know, with a whole-body thrill, was the music of her woman coming up the walk, the dizzying explosion of perfume as the door swung wide. She knew when her mistress was pleased with her, and that approval was the fulcrum of her happiness.

“Viscount! Viscount!” Emma whimpered in her sleep. (Rodolphe would come onto the scene later, after the greyhound's flight, and poor Charlie B. never once featured in his wife's unconscious theater.) Then Djali would stand and pace stiff-legged through the cracked bowl of the cold room into which her mistress's dreams were leaking, peering with pricked ears into shadows. It was a strange accordion that linked the woman and the dog: Vaporous drafts caused their pink and gray bellies to clutch inward at the same instant. Moods blew from one mind to the other, delight and melancholy. In the blue atmosphere of the bedroom, the two were very nearly (but never quite) one creature.

Even asleep, the little greyhound trailed after her madame, through a weave of green stars and gas lamps, along the boulevards of Paris. It was a conjured city that no native would recognize—Emma Bovary's head on the pillow, its architect. Her Paris was assembled from a guidebook with an out-of-date map, and from the novels of Balzac and Sand, and from her vividly disordered recollections of the viscount's ball at La Vaubyessard, with its odor of dying flowers, burning flambeaux, and truffles. (Many neighborhoods within the city's quivering boundaries, curiously enough, smelled identical to the viscount's dining room.) A rose and gold glow obscured the storefront windows, and cathedral bells tolled continuously as they strolled past the same four landmarks: a tremulous bridge over the roaring Seine, a vanilla-white dress shop, the vague façade of the opera house—overlaid in more gold light—and the crude stencil of a theater. All night they walked like that, companions in Emma's phantasmal labyrinth, suspended by her hopeful mists, and each dawn the dog would wake to the second Madame Bovary, the lightly snoring woman on the mattress, her eyes still hidden beneath a peacock sleep mask. Lumped in the coverlet, Charles's blocky legs tangled around her in an apprehensive pretzel, a doomed attempt to hold her in their marriage bed.

 

II. A Change of Heart

 

Is there any love as tireless as a dog's in search of its master? Whenever Emma was off shopping for nougat in the market or visiting God in the churchyard, Djali was stricken by the madness of her absence. The dog's futile hunt through the house turned her maniacal, cannibalistic: She scratched her fur until it became wet and dark. She paced the halls, pausing only to gnaw at her front paws. Félicité, the Bovarys' frightened housekeeper, was forced to imprison her in a closet with a water dish.

The dog's change of heart began in September, some weeks after Madame Bovary's return from La Vaubyessard, where she'd dervished around in another man's arms and given up forever on the project of loving Charles. It is tempting to conclude that Emma somehow transmitted her wanderlust to Djali; but perhaps this is a sentimental impulse, a storyteller's desire to sync two flickering hearts.

One day Emma's scents began to stabilize. Her fragrance became musty, ordinary, melting into the house's stale atmosphere until the woman was nearly invisible to the animal. Djali licked almond talc from Emma's finger-webbing. She bucked her head under the madame's hand a dozen times, waiting for the old passion to seize her, yet her brain was uninflamed. The hand had become generic pressure, damp heat. No joy snowed out of it as Emma mechanically stroked between Djali's ears, her gold wedding band rubbing a raw spot into the fur, branding the dog with her distraction. There in the bedroom, together and alone, they watched the rain fall.

By late February, at the same time Charles Bovary was dosing his young wife with valerian, the dog began refusing her mutton chops. Emma stopped checking her gaunt face in mirrors, let dead flies swim in the blue glass vases. The dog neglected to bark at her red-winged nemesis, the rooster. Emma quit playing the piano. The dog lost her zest for woodland homicide. Under glassy bathwater, Emma's bare body as still and bright as quartz in a quarry, she let the hours fill her nostrils with the terrible serenity of a drowned woman. Her gossamer fingers circled her navel, seeking an escape. Fleas held wild circuses on Djali's ass as she lay motionless before the fire for the duration of two enormous logs, unable to summon the energy to spin a hind leg in protest. Her ears collapsed against her skull.

Charles rubbed his hand greedily between Emma's legs and she swatted him off; Emma stroked the dog's neck and Djali went stiff, slid out of reach. Both woman and animal, according to the baffled Dr. Bovary, seemed bewitched by sadness.

This strain of virulent misery, this falling out of love, caused different symptoms, unique disruptions, in dogs and humans.

The greyhound, for example, shat everywhere.

Whereas Emma shopped for fabrics in the town.

On the fifth week of the dog's fall, Charles lifted the bed skirt and discovered the greyhound panting up at him with a dead-eyed calm. He'd been expecting to find his favorite tall socks, blue wool ineptly darned for him by Emma. He screamed.

“Emma! What do you call your little bitch again? There is something the matter with it!”

“Djali,” Emma murmured from the mattress. And the dog, helplessly bound to her owner's voice—if not still in love with Madame Bovary, at least indentured to the ghost of her love—rose and licked the lady's bare feet.

“Good girl,” sighed Emma.

The animal's dry tongue lolled out of her mouth. Inside her body, a foreboding was hardening into a fact. There was no halting the transformation of her devotion into a nothing.

 

III. What If?

 

“If you do not stop making poop in the salon,” Félicité growled at the puppy, “I will no longer feed you.”

In the sixth month of her life in Tostes, the dog lay glumly on the floor, her pink belly tippled orange by the grated flames, fatally bored. Emma entered the bedroom, and the animal lifted her head from between her tiny polished claws, let it drop again.

“If only I could be you,” Emma lamented. “There's no trouble or sorrow in
your
life!” And she soothed the dog in a gurgling monotone, as if she were addressing herself.

Dr. Charles Bovary returned home, whistling after another successful day of leeches and bloodletting in the countryside, to a house of malcontent females:

Emma was stacking a pyramid of greengage plums.

The little greyhound was licking her genitals.

Soon the coarse, unchanging weave of the rug in Emma's bedroom became unbearable. The dog's mind filled with smells that had no origin, sounds that arose from no friction. Unreal expanses. She closed her eyes and stepped cautiously through tall purple grass she'd never seen before in her life.

She wondered if there might not have been some other way, through a different set of circumstances, of meeting another woman; and she tried to imagine those events that had not happened, that shadow life. Her owner might have been a bloody-smocked man, a baritone, a butcher with bags of bones always hidden in his pockets. Or perhaps a child, the butcher's daughter, say, a pork chop–scented girl who loved to throw sticks. Djali had observed a flatulent Malamute trailing his old man in the park, each animal besotted with the other. Blue poodles, inbred and fat, smugly certain of their women's adoration. She'd seen a balding Pomeranian riding high in a toy wagon, doted on by the son of a king. Not all humans were like Emma Bovary.

Out of habit, she howled her old courtship song at Emma's feet, and Emma reached down distractedly, gave the dog's ears a stiff brushing. She was seated before her bedroom vanity, cross-examining a pimple, very preoccupied, for at four o'clock Monsieur Roualt was coming for biscuits and judgment and jelly.

A dog's love is forever. We expect infidelity from one another; we marvel at this one's ability to hold that one's interest for fifty, sixty years; perhaps some of us feel a secret contempt for monogamy even as we extol it, wishing parole for its weary participants. But dogs do not receive our sympathy or our suspicion—from dogs we presume an eternal adoration.

In the strange case of Madame Bovary's greyhound, however, “forever” was a tensed muscle that began to shake. During the Christmas holidays, she had daily seizures before the fireplace, chattering in the red light like a loose tooth. Loyalty was a posture she could no longer hold.

Meanwhile, Emma had become pregnant.

The Bovarys were preparing to move.

On one of the last of her afternoons in Tostes, the dog ceased trembling and looked around. Beyond the cabbage rows, the green grasses waved endlessly away from her, beckoning her. She stretched her hind legs. A terrible itching spread through every molecule of her body, and the last threads of love slipped like a noose from her neck. Nothing owned her anymore. Rolling, moaning, belly to the red sun, she dug her spine into the hill.

“Oh, dear,” mumbled the coachman, Monsieur Hivert, watching the dog from the yard. “Something seems to be attacking your greyhound, madame. Bees, I'd wager.”

“Djali!” chided Emma, embarrassed that a pet of hers should behave so poorly before the gentlemen. “My goodness! You look possessed!”