The Mothering Coven (3 page)

“Even much later, when he was discovered by the men and women of the Philippines, his face remained frozen,” says Ozark. “That is why they called him Dumbfoundland and claimed him for Lapu-Lapu.”

X

Dorcas flexes her retinas. So far, so good. She blinks. She looks to left, to the right. Dorcas has returned safely from her first shamanic journey! She is standing in the corner opposite the hat stand. Her fingers tingle. Why? Her arms are stretched above her head, palms up. She lowers them. Her feet tingle too. Why? She looks at her big bare feet with the Fauvist toenails. Of course! The vibrating boundaries of opposing colors!

Are they Fauvist? Dorcas squints at her feet, far away, on the carpet. There’s the Seine, ultramarine, pink flowers floating, and beneath the blue currents, green sea cucumbers and purple anemones, and on the grassy bank, a dark-haired woman in a violet dress and red hat, scattering white and gold sand. Or is it birdseed? Dorcas gasps. Her whole body is tingling. Why?

“You’re not dancing,” calls Bryce. Her smock has spots and swirls of vivid color and her bare feet are moving too quickly to decipher the designs on her toenails. They are just a bright flash glimpsed through chair legs.

Dorcas isn’t much of a dancer. She hops behind Bryce, around and around the wingback chairs. She feels grit on the carpet. Sand? Birdseed?

“Keep going,” cries Fiona. “Don’t stop.”

“Let’s dance all night,” cries Bryce.

“Like spinsters everywhere!” shouts Fiona, although, of course, Mrs. Borage is a dowager.

[:]

Who did Mrs. Borage vote for, those many years past?

She voted for Leon Czolgosz, a mirage from the deserts of Poland. She remembers that he won and won and won and won and for sixteen years there was a dune-forest in Washington.

X

We sit in a circle on the carpet, eating cinnamon toast from a large platter. The cinnamon toast is very hard and brown, with clear butter dripping. Everyone is chewing cinnamon toast. Mrs. Borage listens to the reports of cinnamon toast. The burnt cinnamon smells oddly like gunpowder.

“Taken orally, and at low velocity, gunpowder extends the life expectancy,” remembers Mrs. Borage. Bryce jumps to her feet.

“Fireworks!” shouts Bryce.

In the rubble of the Security Spray Complex, Ozark has found the remnants of a Gypsy encampment. It is a snow covered flannel backpack. The rest of the encampment has vanished without a trace. Ozark is suddenly afraid that her inventory is suffering from logocentrism. Shouldn’t there be more untraceable encampments? More vanishings?

She unzips the flannel backpack. It is filled with delights, beers and spray paints, cigarettes, a Jacob’s ladder of prophylactics, all kinds of sparklers, bombs, and rockets. Luckily, there is a pink lighter in the front compartment. Ozark never carries a lighter, or loose change for that matter, or tissues. Something has always worked out.

Mrs. Borage sees a woman climb onto the battlements. She is hurling flares into the sky. Do the flares make an eight-pointed star?

Yes, the lesser conjunctions of Venus shower down, glowworms and ashes.

[:]

Everyone looks at the platter on the carpet. It is empty.

“Do you remember eating anything?” asks Dorcas.

The parlor is a mess. The wingback chairs have been tipped over; the card table is broken; the tank has shattered, and the clown-fish! They lie dry and dead on the carpet. Bryce flips over the nearest card. It is from the pinochle deck. A young man, with a feather in his hat, and a mustache. He doesn’t look healthy. The love disease.

“Am I disgraced in fortune?” wonders Bryce. She opens up the daily paper.

“Align with the syzygy,” reads Bryce. What kind of horoscope is that?

“I just wrote it because I like the word ‘syzygy,’” remembers Bryce.

What did she write for Mrs. Borage?

“This one is inspiring,” says Bryce.

“You shall rend the veil of the phenomenal world,” reads Bryce. She looks at Mrs. Borage expectantly.

“Inspiring,” nods Mrs. Borage. Which veil is Bryce referring to?

“She must mean the vale of tears,” thinks Mrs. Borage. “They always mean the vale of tears unless specified.”

[:]

Agnes comes back with cinnamon toast. It is terrifically burnt. “Thank you!” says Dorcas.

“Thank you,” says Fiona. Dorcas has started thinking about witches, how they can turn into cats and regain themselves eight times, but the ninth time they stay cats forever.

“What about shamans?” thinks Dorcas. She crunches her cinnamon toast.

“Thank you!” says Dorcas.

[:]

Mrs. Borage’s teeth have never given her a moment’s trouble. Agnes’s teeth are square, but serviceable. Bryce’s teeth are tiny and resplendent. Dorcas feels oral shame: her peg laterals, her crooked bicuspids. Fiona’s caries do not enter into her psychic register. Behind Ozark’s shy smile: an inner ring of milk teeth, weaker and smaller, but tenacious, like shade plants.

No cinnamon toast for the foreign student, Hildegard. She’s still sleeping in the room beneath the stairs. Agnes is beginning to wonder if she mustn’t be enchanted.

“Adolescents do need large amounts of sleep,” says Agnes. Are they all enchanted? At least a little bit.

When Hildegard was awake, she listened to her small silver headphones at the dining room table and she emptied pixie stix into her yogurt.

“Pink tastes best,” said Hildegard.

“It’s some kind of synaesthesia,” said Dorcas. Mrs. Borage closed her eyes.

“Pink,” murmured Mrs. Borage. “Yes, it tastes like salmon.” Agnes watched Hildegard eat the pink yogurt. Hildegard sang to herself, eating.

“Can’t you hear my love buzz? Can’t you hear my love buzz?

Can’t you hear my love buzz?”

She wouldn’t like it if Agnes answered. Agnes learned not to answer the questions someone is singing from Bertrand.

“Can I try the salmon yogurt?” asked Mrs. Borage. She took a spoonful.

“Oh yes,” said Mrs. Borage. “It is delicious.”

[:]

Dorcas cracks her slice of cinnamon toast; Fiona cracks her slice of cinnamon toast; Agnes, crack; Ozark, crack.

Crack! Cinnamon toast between the interminable teeth of Mrs. Borage.

Bryce hangs her cinnamon toast from the hat stand. It is terrifically burnt. She will call the hat stand “After the Tungus-ka Fireball” in honor of all the catastrophists born beneath the burning sky in Siberia.

[:]

“Mmmm,” sighs Mrs. Borage. She pops open a bottle of cranberry mead, and she holds the bottle in the crook of her arm. The mead is cold in her mouth and hot in her chest, as though the mead starts at Axel Heiberg, and flows south, Crane Creek, Horse Creek, Turkey Creek, converging at last in the Indian River.

“It would make sense if humans had several esophagi,” thinks Mrs. Borage. “On the principle of tributaries.”

Why don’t they?

“That might be where evolution went wrong,” thinks Mrs. Borage. “Unless it was elsewhere.”

[:]

Agnes slips away and stands at the back door. The night sky cracks through the clouds and she watches the crack widen. The stars are very beautiful. The galaxy looks like the stringy tissue in egg whites.

“Chalazae,” sighs Agnes. A lovely word. Snow drifts across the yard, and the upper stories of the oak trees have whitened. Agnes sees a shadow slip between the trees. Her throat tightens, but it’s just lonely Mr. Lomberg, the retired fire marshall, on his old wooden skis, following the smoke back to the chimneys.

Will Bertrand come back with the first snow? What if Agnes calls her with a magic name from the old books of lost girls?

“Snegurochka,” whispers Agnes, just to see if something will happen.

X

The snow has melted away. Did it even happen? We wouldn’t believe it, but there is Ms. Kidney’s sled, parked in the garage between the televisions. The sled takes up quite a bit of space. Bryce will have to move her studio into the dining room. She and Fiona carry televisions up the front steps. Dorcas carries the refrigerators. Lately, Bryce has been acquiring found objects at a dizzying rate.

“The trick is looking in magazines,” says Bryce.

[:]

Bryce opens a magazine and studies it intently. She loves home electronics but not to the neglect of intimate apparel and cook-ware.

“A newly patented baking pan!” cries Bryce. Due to the addition of interior walls, each brownie baked will have at least two crisp edges!

“Let crispness proliferate,” thinks Bryce, rapturously. She draws a quick mock-up on the dining room wall. It looks like the garden labyrinth at Chartres. Will that do the trick? Bryce draws a Greco-Roman square.

“A hundred crisp edges per brownie,” breathes Bryce. “A hundred birthday brownies for Mrs. Borage.”

Bryce can hear her cinnamon toast popping up in the kitchen. She runs to push it down again. Cinnamon clouds roll through the house.

Agnes is practicing weather charms. Shouldn’t the party end with a midnight rainbow? She sniffs. Cinnamon clouds will make everyone hungry.

“Herring, punch, toast, popsicles, nut mixes,” says Agnes. She’s nervous that won’t be enough.

“Better make it a potluck,” thinks Agnes. Potlucks make everyone happy. Even the guests who have herring allergies. Invariably, there are guests with herring allergies.

“They can bring the marshmallows and pasta salad,” thinks Agnes.

[:]

Agnes wonders if we can call the party a centennial. After all, a century is defined as one hundred consecutive years.

What if Mrs. Borage starts talking about Ethan Allen? His fawn vest and sagathy breeches? The time they rode together on catamounts all the way from Isle La Motte?

“We’ll all be embarrassed,” thinks Agnes. Agnes more than anyone else, of course. Agnes has a professional degree.

[:]

Today Bryce is working on block-prints, the gilded roses and wreaths and the Roman numerals MDCCXXXV. They are exactly like the pink Ruckers papers you can buy in all the finest auction houses. Now she can put out her shingle

H
ARPSICHORDS
R
ESTORED
H
ERE
.

[:]

Bryce also made our kitchen wallpaper, a Privy-council green flock and, on the second floor, red glitter gorgons and a border of narrow leaves, cannabis sativa.

“Bertrand insisted they were Japanese maple,” says Bryce, defensively. She has grown to like the cannabis sativa leaves, from the purely artistic perspective.

Bryce imagines Bertrand in Japan, or on Taketomi Island, where the sand is made of a trillion tiny star-shaped skeletons and bushes of cannabis sativa bloom on the coral. Water buffaloes graze on cannabis sativa and children brush the water buffaloes all over with glue and the water buffaloes wander gently through the town, pollinating everything they touch with cannabis sativa.

We haven’t received a postcard from Taketomi Island, or a little box of star bones, or blue corals, or star-shaped seeds of cannabis sativa.

“Not that I expect anything,” says Bryce. She wonders what kind of glue the children brush on the water buffaloes. She wonders if the glue is made of water buffaloes. It must be.

“Either that or it is made of cannabis sativa,” thinks Bryce.

[:]

Fiona has a mouthful of pins. She has decided to make Mrs. Borage leather chaps. She can’t ask Mrs. Borage for her measurements; the chaps are a surprise. Fiona took her own measurements instead. The chaps fit her perfectly. Fiona looks at her reflection in the mirror. What was Fiona thinking? Mrs. Borage doesn’t want leather chaps. Fiona will have to make her something else.

“A fringed leather jacket!” says Fiona.

[:]

Today Mrs. Borage is wearing a navy blue jacket, gold lace jabot and cuffs, white knickers and black leather boots with high heels. She walks the long walk to the center of town. She sits on the bench in front of the library. She takes a popsicle out of her boot. Popsicles are more refreshing in the summertime, but in the summertime, you can’t pack them for lunch. They melt. Mrs. Borage wolfs the whole thing down immediately. Was it strawberry cheesecake? Probably. It might have been Black Forest Chocolate.

Mrs. Borage remembers that chocolate makes special pathways in the brain. Or does it make a kind of chocolate shell? She concentrates very hard on her brain. Her brain seems to have a chocolate shell with nougat pathways.

In her other boot, Mrs. Borage has a candy bar. She’ll save that for later. For now, she is perfectly content.

[:]

Mrs. Scattergood peeks out the drop slot in the library door. She hopes that Mr. Henderson will walk by soon to check on his pottery sales in the Country Store. He is going to be extremely surprised!

“Mozart,” gasps Mrs. Scattergood. He is sitting on the bench in front of the library, noon on a workday. He’s not even reading.

“Retired?” thinks Mrs. Scattergood. There is something elderly about him…. The powdered wig! That might fool the Social Security Administration, but not Mrs. Scattergood. Anyone who plays glass harmonica knows that Mozart died young, of hitziges Frieselfieber.

All day, Mrs. Scattergood has been sitting at the circulation desk, reading the science journals. She is halfway through an article about translucent concrete, a wonderful new building material. World cities will soon resemble aquariums, see-thru towers lit from within, and the people moving visibly inside, dressed in brightly colored uniforms provided free of charge by Municipal Beautification Commissions.

Mrs. Scattergood decides to go back to her article. If the Waddington Library were made of translucent concrete, what would she look like from a distance?

“I would look like a tweed-fish,” thinks Mrs. Scattergood, unexpectedly. Lately, Mrs. Scattergood has been thinking all kinds of unexpected things. Now she seems to be having visions.

“El Niño has fallen on an election year,” thinks Mrs. Scattergood. “I am an Aquarius. Also, the change of life.” Mrs. Scat-tergood stirs dong quai powder into her chamomile tea.