Fiction from The Literary Review
No clairvoyant gypsy came to the mother before the birth. No dream named the danger. Yet the mother felt something, a foreboding that crawled over her skin and settled damply in the small of her back. So she made a vow to protect her daughter from certain corruptions of the material world, and to that end, she planned to bar from the nursery kitchen all forms of sweet delicacies - spun sugar, chocolate, iced cakes and colored lollipops.
When the time for her confinement drew near, the mother stripped the pantry shelves, cramming all the confections into a series of tight-lidded tins, which she carried into the back parlor. Her fingers trembled as she unlocked the small oak cabinet. She had hoped to find space for the tins, but the cabinet was already quite full with the meager cache of vanities she had brought from her father's house - miniature figurines of fine porcelain, a green silk shawl, a pair of white kid gloves and a small packet of unsent letters that had been written in heated ink. She removed the figurines, placed them on overhanging shelves and then wedged the tins into the cabinet and locked it. She secured the door to the back parlor with an iron bolt.
In the child's early years, people in the small village doted on her, for she was beautiful and glowing in her high carriage. Her smile was said to change the weather, and all cheered who saw her approaching. Often, a shopkeeper would beg the mother to accept a small gift, a wooden rattle or a sweetmeat. The sweet, naturally, was refused and it was observed that the mother would grow rather anxious and short-tempered, turning the carriage around and heading quickly back to the family's cottage, even forgetting the errand that had brought her to town in the first place.
Now it came to pass that the father's mother arrived for a visit and it was her intent to establish herself in the affections of the child, her only grandchild. She had brought a special present, a large porcelain rabbit, with a tail that operated as a crank. When the crank was turned, a wrapped bit of taffy would drop from the rabbit's mouth.
The mother glared at the grandmother. "You are aware of the prohibition of sweets," she said.
"Why of course, but I thought surely an exception would be made for this splendid toy." The grandmother indicated the porcelain rabbit with a flourish of her hand.
"No, I cannot allow it. You must remove the candies and discard them, immediately."
Though the grandmother was offended, she complied.
However, the grandmother did not consider the matter closed and waited for an opportunity to present itself. Finally, there came a day when the mother was called to visit an aunt who was ill, and the child was left in the sole care of the grandmother.
The grandmother lost no time making a trip into town, where she fussed over selecting the most delectable chocolate cake from the baker's shelves. Into the child's ears she whispered, "It's a crime how your mother has deprived you, my dear, but that's all in the past, for I am taking you under my wing."
She was nearly breathless, so anxious was she to be the one to give her grandchild her first taste, and so fearful was she of being thwarted. So, without a thought to being observed, and without benefit of a utensil, the grandmother dug her blunt fingertips into the cake, gouged out a thick glob of buttercream and extended it to the child.
Now the aroma of chocolate impressed the child immediately and an eagerness spread down from her eyes, across her cheeks, and moistened her opening mouth.
"For you, my darling," said the grandmother.
Even those like the baker who were familiar with the child's charms and extraordinary beauty were astounded by the transformation. As her small tongue and lips felt their way around the morsel, a strange light etched new facets in the child's eyes, sharp-edged and blue-black with ecstasy, and her cheeks flushed with an eerie glow. The child had discovered what she had been born to seek.
The grandmother was delighted. She immediately turned to the aghast shopkeeper, and directed him to wrap up truffles, lollipops, marzipan animals and sliced jelly rolls and to charge the entire lot to her son's account.
Slipping her stiff fingers under the strings of the boxes, the grandmother guided the child back into the cobbled street. Her heart began to beat faster. She had to get home before the child's mother. If she thought she could have made it over the mountain, she would have absconded with the child, but she was no longer a young woman, and her extra pounds weighed heavily on her swollen feet.
So the grandmother pressed towards the cottage. Whether it was due to the excitement of the opportunity before her, the aromas from the bakery boxes, or the lightheadedness brought on by the unaccustomed exertion, the grandmother felt the gnarled grip of age loosening. She imagined her shoulders bare and her hair in glorious streams that fell lightly like the threads of a gossamer shawl against flawless skin. And down her firm white arms moved drops of sweat, hot and greedy, tracing the pulsing veins of her wrist and settling against her palm, like a caress filling in the lines, smoothing out the skin until it was as taut as an evening glove on the hand of a young girl.
Inside the cottage, the grandmother opened the boxes and, like a peddler of exotic wares, set them all before the child. While the child was thus amused, the grandmother hurried to the small box she had kept hidden ever since the mother had banned the porcelain rabbit's taffy trick. The small candies were perhaps a bit stale, but still edible. The grandmother called the child into the back parlor where the impotent bunny was kept on display.
"I have something to show you!"
The sound of the first nugget to drop onto the tin plate from the rabbit's unhinged mouth was metallic and musical, sending rings of vibration up the grandmother's flesh. The child grabbed the candy and while still chewing it insisted on pulling the rabbit's tail again herself. She shoved the candies into her drooling mouth and yanked on the tail over and over until the supply was exhausted.
The rabbit's refusal to produce another treat enraged the child. She dug one smeared fist into the uncooperative mouth and pulled the tail with the other. Her grandmother was making small humming sounds and waving her trembling hands in an attempt to calm the child. But the child no longer seemed aware of anything but her own mania for candy. When the child hoisted the insubordinate rabbit off the counter and hurled it blindly across the room, the solid china base cracked decisively against the old woman's jaw, knocking her off her feet and against the glass shelves that supported the mother's collection of figurines.
When the child's mother arrived home shortly after dusk, the house was quiet. She found the child asleep, sprawled across the steps leading from the kitchen to the front parlor. In the dim light, the mother noticed a cake fragment, lurid with strawberry jelly, on the floor by her daughter's hand, and part of a jagged lollipop stuck in her hair. Not far away were crumpled tissue papers and the remnants of a white cardboard box stained with small brown and red fingerprints.
The mother began to breathe in short shallow gasps. She tiptoed around the child, her eyes alert and wary, wondering where the old woman could be. When at last she entered the back parlor, she found glass and porcelain and bits of china and a small pool of blood forming a halo around the grandmother's silver head.
No one ever said to the child, "You killed your own grandmother." And indeed, the child was the only person living who knew what had happened.
But the child had her penance, nevertheless. The mother's instincts had been confirmed. "It's a sign," she told her husband. And so she made it her business to heed scrupulously the warning carried in the teeth of that dreadful day.
She kept the daughter forever within her own keen sights and never again did a grain of sugar or a dollop of cream cross the threshold of their cottage. Coffee was black. Toast was dry.
And when her father told stories of his childhood, the girl would ask, what was your mother like, what kind of bread did she make, where is she now? As if the catastrophe with the porcelain rabbit had never happened.
But the child was not altogether devoid of memory. The coating of sugar left on her tongue from that reckless day with her grandmother never quite wore off and the child was troubled by dreams. More than once each night, she would cry out and her mother, rushing in, would find her throbbing in the bedsheets, bursting with vehement, but unintelligible sounds. When she woke dry-mouthed in her mother's arms, the child had no words for the images that came in her sleep.
She did not go to school, but was tutored at home. She learned to read and to sew, and she cut out biscuits and scrubbed laundry alongside her mother.
"She is so pale and thin!" protested her father. "You must let her out, to run in the fields, to fetch water from the stream! At least take her yourself to the village."
"We must give up those things now," replied the mother, her face serene, but unyielding. "I know this is the only right way."
So the father left her alone. He did the marketing, the visiting, the walking under the heavy limbs of the pine trees and the open night sky. He went out enough for the whole family, gorging on pastries and treacle, growing wide and indifferent. But he would often bring home to his wife and daughter the tiniest and most delicate creatures made of glass or porcelain. In the brightness of their little kitchen, the child stepped in her mother's shadow, dipping dry bread into long brewed dark tea, putting her needle in and out, never deviating from the chalk lines her mother had traced onto the sampler.
But hours drew long. The girl's embroidering fingers would sometimes cramp, and her mouth would balk at the stale crumbling bread. In time, her shape became fluid, agitated, spilling out beyond the mother's thin shadow. With the passing of years, the girl had grown to womanhood.
And so there came a night of mist and stars when, instead of dreaming and crying out, the girl rose from dry sheets. She crept into the back parlor and, with her mother's key, she unlocked the cabinet. She rooted around until she found the green silk shawl and white kid gloves. She firmly wound and knotted the shawl around her shoulders and breasts, letting it flow down around her hips like a leafy skirt. And she put on the gloves, taking care to button them to the elbow. Then she left by the window and ventured into the woods.
There, the girl travelled by instinct, nimbly stepping around trees and thorny bushes, balancing on logs and stones to traverse black currents. From the shadows there were flickers from the eyes of fox and deer intent upon her. And the girl felt in the insistent throb of her own pulse the echoing of an unseen owl. Finally, as she trod on a silent bed of pine needles, she came upon a swing of braided hemp that seemed to hang from the sky. Its long drifting arc carried her away from the steady curve of earth.
By the time she returned to the cottage, the green shawl and the kid gloves were moist with dew and her parents were close to waking. At the breakfast table, the mother said, as she poured warm milk into the daughter's mug, "It was a strange dream I was having." But no more than that. Later in the day it was discovered that one of the porcelain figurines was broken, its arm snapped off. The father laid a trap for mice.
And so, evening after evening, the girl separated her curtains and pursued the darkness. Until there came the night, when the clouds were so heavy and low that the girl could barely see the rope of the swing in her gloved hand. But she moved her body, green with the shawl, pumping the swing higher and higher. And she heard the sound of what she could not see, the sound of creatures trying to get out of a house, crashing blindly into walls. But they were small, she knew, and many. She had a notion to be afraid, but was not.
A bit of light seeped through and the girl could then see the yellow and black and the swirling around her that lifted her up and filled her mouth with a mysterious syrup. Somehow, the bees were feeding her the sweet thickened nectar from their hive. And the girl began to twirl around, her long loose hair filled with bees as with a thousand bows of gold. She danced with abandon, pierced with dizzy sparks of light and warmed with a luscious murmuring. In her delirium, the girl thought she detected another presence joining her in the dance. She couldn't say whether this shadowy figure was leading or following, for the girl was spinning faster and faster with each revolution, until finally she fell softly into the blanket of bees.
When the girl woke, she found the green shawl gone and her hands bare, but she had no time to search for her mother's things, since it was nearly dawn. She hurried back through the woods to her bed.
How did her father convey the news? By addressing her tenderly at the breakfast table? By howling in grief?
Did either of them notice that on that morning there was not one figurine in the back parlor that remained intact, that the glass shelves were strewn with shards of porcelain?
The girl could never recall what words her father had spoken, or how she had learned that her mother had died in the night. What she remembered was approaching the rough-hewn bed which held her dead mother and seeing, laid out at the foot, as if in readiness for a dance, the green silk shawl and the white kid gloves.
Did the father have his own suspicions regarding the shawl and the gloves? Did he know something of the late-night wanderings? Or was it simply instinct that led the father to bury these artifacts with his wife, even against the daughter's urgent protests?
After a period of subdued grief, the father packed a trunk and set off over the mountain. The girl chose to remain in her mother's house, but she too felt confined. When she became restless, she did not seek out the woods, but turned instead to the village, where she discovered the pleasure of men's eyes. It was not long before she paired with a man who could clasp her to him with one hand and spin, lifting her off the ground. Around and around they went, until she began to grow large with child.
The life stirring within filled the girl with foreboding. She dreamed of her mother's death. She looked at her own hand and saw her mother's long pale fingers as they lay lifeless in her narrow coffin. For days, the girl was haunted by the fury of the porcelain rabbit and the spinning delirium of the green silk shawl. But then she had a vision. The spell that had been tucked between the buttons of the white kid gloves appeared to the girl as a heavy thread of white smoke that began to waver and thin out, swirling up and dissolving in the light. And the girl trembled with hope.
Around this time, an old midwife came to stay with the girl. This woman taught the girl many things her mother had never known. She taught her how to listen so that she could hear her child's cry from deep in the forest and how to hold her child so that she would be warm even as she ran out of sight and how to feed her child twigs that tasted of oranges and feathers that smelled of berries and bark that continuously dribbled a mellifluous, nourishing liquid.
Under the old woman's guidance, the girl began to prepare for the birth. She did not clear out and hide the sweet things of life, as her mother had done. Instead, she brought in pots of honey and armfuls of flowers and beautifully carved lutes and harps and began to compose stories and songs to encourage her child on her journey.
When all was ready, the old woman put her hand on the girl's belly and said, "Do not be afraid. Your child will be a daughter. You will feed each other on peaches and cream. You will let her go and she will come back to you. You will call her Nectar."Copyright 1998 Maureen E. O'Neill All rights reserved.
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