Wolfless

Volume 26

Apr 2

Many are the deceivers

-Red Riding Hood, Anne Sexton

You think to trick your daughter. To teach her a lesson. To lessen her. She’s too good, this girl, too trusting. She needs to learn, as girls learn, that a bright hooded cape won’t keep her safe in the woods. More often than not, it’ll be draped over a rock, studded with briars, or torn, a strip of rich red dangling from the barbed wire fence she scales to reach the better flowers — the bloodroot, bunchberry, dogtooth.

Disguises come easy. Red sees you as wolf, not mother, and all it takes is skipping lipstick and bra, parting your hair along a new path, letting your shins grow the fur they want to grow. You don’t even alter your voice when you greet her. Good day. She takes no pause, greets you back, even shows you where she is headed. There, among the roots and trunks.

The womb is not a clock, says Anne Sexton. But it will keep time. With both of my babies, my labor came precisely on my due date. I was ready for the pain, but not the grief of being flipped inside out. And not the afterbirth, the way my midwife worried her cold fingers into my belly as if it were a mound of uncooperative dough, until I delivered my placenta into a bedpan. She fished it out, held it up for me to see. I looked past my new baby to study my guts, brandished like a gown. They were the beauty. They were the blame. I had been told I would see the tree of life here. And indeed, the umbilical cord formed a trunk, real roots. The capillaries reached like branches reach. But it was no tree to me. It was, Oh, a forest, a place to go missing. A bright red hot wet cape.

My friends took their placentas home with their babies. They buried them under new ginkgo trees or had them desiccated and encapsulated into pills. They swallowed themselves every morning for a month, washed themselves down with gulps of special tea — raspberry leaf, blessed thistle. But I let mine tumble into a 30-gallon garbage bag, as I would any massive, damning evidence. I cut the cord myself. I let my midwife come at me with scissors, thread. A third degree tear, needle through muscle. I called my mother.

In documentary footage, Sexton and her daughter stall at their own front door. Sexton says, Tell them we’re fake! She eggs her on. We’re fake! Until the girl agrees, Fake! They show obvious affection, take pleasure in shouting, We hate each other! Despise each other! We just can’t bear each other! They nuzzle together, laugh. The girl disappears inside the house. Sexton goes on. Her voice is rich, theatrical, straight from a 1940’s switchboard girl connecting your call. It’s so easy to be natural, when you’ve got this. She means her daughter. I mean, that’s for real! Inside, at her desk, she tries to read a poem aloud, but is interrupted by a barking dog. Should I let the damn dog in? she says, annoyed. A look in her eye, into the camera. I’m peering at the dog, not you. A beat. Right? Back in her poem, a mother poem, she calls, My carrot, my cabbage! She asks, Will I give you my eyes?

You get the idea packing Red up for a visit to Gram, who is sick again, like her mother before, always ailing. A cruel stitch in her belly or a godawful headache or a heart gripped with anxiety you can’t bear to sit beside. You are grateful that the girl is old enough to send on her own. If your daughter does nothing more than save you from a conversation with Gram, you will deem motherhood worth the trouble. But is she quite ready? You’ve been wrong before. The time when she was just a toddler and she took off on her trike. That hill, that scrape on her face. And the stories that bored her, the poems with the words she had no interest in sounding out. She was teaching you. Not everybody wants to know everything.

When I was a teenager, a little girl went missing. It was all over the news. Her mother’s grief was all over the news, a cloak. When they dug up the little body, stuffed in a garbage bag, they found that the girl’s mouth had been duct-taped shut. Everyone blamed the mother, who admitted to the burial but not the murder, insisting that the girl was already dead. She had no explanation for the duct tape. My sisters and I relished our outrage, but our mother told us to hold our judgment. What did we know? Maybe the mother couldn’t bear the thought of her daughter’s mouth filling with bugs. Even if that mouth was dead. Even if those bugs would get in there eventually. She told us it was a horrible thing for a mother to imagine. Which of course made us imagine it, too. That girl’s mouth. Kept quiet. Twitching with life.

Red doesn't ask, Where’s the aspirin? The penicillin? Where’s the fruit juice? Still, she clocks the wine and cake for what they are. Bookends to a feast, treats, nothing that can make a person better. Nothing like the pink stuff or the horse pills or the heady ointments that have dressed Red’s wounds.

You meant to keep the lesson small. In the forest, you would steal the basket. Leave her cakeless, wineless. Maybe even lost. She would turn wise, guarded. This would make her safe. And you would reveal yourself, you would, once you’d polished off the cake you made, reddened the forest floor with the wine you never liked. She would see you as mother. She would be grateful when you returned the empty basket, grateful to have a way to carry the wilting flowers to Gram, who would feel her own disappointment, no doubt, but who doesn’t have some little hurt waiting up ahead through the trees?

What you failed to imagine: That Red would never put the basket down. That when you found her in the woods, she would have already left the path of her own accord, that the girl would lure herself. And why wouldn't she stop for a spontaneous bouquet? You are not the only one hunting for a remedy.

Sexton loves her poems, doesn’t want to throw any of them away. She says, I didn’t know what was good and bad for a long time. I still don’t. In the footage, she grows distracted by a classical piano recording. This tune is like sex! I mean it’s like the most beautiful! Like my daughter! Anything living! This song is better than a poem! Music beats us!

After Sexton’s death, the tapes from her therapy sessions go public. In some, she’s been hypnotized, given sodium pentothal — truth serum. In some, she details her abuse as a child. In some, she admits to abusing her daughter. Sexton kills herself. Her daughter writes the story. Inherits the story, inhabits the story. Car humming in the garage, blood running in the bathtub. Mother, daughter. No one unhaunted. When they find the dead poet, she is dressed in her mother’s fur coat.

You beat Red to the cottage, which is new but built to look old. Gram has the notion that nothing haunts a new house. She is wrong. You’re in the door before she can shuffle into her slippers. So it’s you, old sinner, she says. Are you wolf to her? Are you daughter? There is only time to be both at once. The windows are open, always open, and you hear Red singing as she comes up the path.

You tell Gram to hide. She obliges. It must be her turn to disappear. She steps out of her slippers, out of her nightdress. She helps you pull it over your head. She hands you the matching sleep cap and climbs into your mouth, unhappy. If you wanted her dead, you would bite down now, but you swallow instead. It’s as fast as a slap.

A new belly. What big, you say. The better to! as you labor across the floorboards, towards the tiny brass bed, once yours. It is plenty big enough for Gram, who prides herself of how little she longs for. She never dreams, never flips onto her belly, never flips her pillow to feel cloth gone cold. She’s not like you, full of need. The bed is stale with your childhood. You settle in just as Red lifts the latch.

Red has never been my color. Redheads, as a rule, can’t pull it off. We’re too pale. Too strange. Too blue of vein. Red is nothing but clash. But the hair, called red but not red, I grew it past my waist. My mother said it was too beautiful to cut, and I believed her. When, after more than a decade, it grew heavy, I protested. This was too much for a girl to carry. This was Rapunzel territory. My mother relented, cut it herself to the middle of my back. Light hit the scissors. She wrapped the bright braid in foil, tucked it into a drawer where it would darken, dullen. Was it still mine, this pelt in a chest?

Later, love. One who saw nothing special in my hair, whose eyes could not distinguish among red, green, brown. If I was red, then the grass was red. If I was red, then so were the woods.

But I get ahead of my story.

What big teeth you have, you say to Red, who uses them to tear the foil from the wine. Who knows her way around a corkscrew. She smiles your wide smile, her milk teeth long gone. She pours an inch of wine into a teacup, the way Gram likes it, carries it to the bed with a bite of cake on a plate. She gives it to you, compliments your grandest features, then turns to search through your cabinets for a canning jar. This wild bouquet needs a home.

If you gave my mother flowers, she would see them as a burden. Now she had to dig out a vase, find a blade to trim the stems. Now she had to fill another vessel. Now she had to put a pretty thing on a table, watch it wither.

They say a daughter steals your beauty. If you’re pregnant, and ugly, there’s a girl in there. It’s a lie. My mother stayed lovely, even as we donned her small shoulders and feet, her big brains and strong legs. Her arthritis. Rosacea. Her hot, sad stare out a picture window. I once showed her a photograph I took of her on the beach. She failed to recognize herself. She could have been anyone. And I, in the mirror, see my own body’s surrender. How the flesh grows disinterested in the bones, wanders off. How the skin around my eyes, inherited, welcomes its doom to pillow and droop. Hell, I was only sixteen when an optometrist suggested I might like an eye lift. What big eyes! Maybe I wanted a little tuck, a pinch at the corners of my lids to make me better?

Red should get home. The light outside is fading. She has regaled you with stories about school and braids and boys and wolves, more than she ever shared with you as her mother. Skip the trick, you decide, and you ask her to stay. Tell her to hang up her cloak for goodness sake, to polish off the cake because Lordy knows you don’t need it. You don’t need anything.

She hangs her cloak but declines the cake. Her mother, she confesses, bakes everything wrong. She goes to her basket, pulls out handfuls of earth. Here is what she really loves. Mushrooms, she says. She found them pulsing inside the moss.

The girl lodges in your throat. From within you, some growl. You think of the early days, when she’d pretend a doorway was her picture frame, when she’d climb halfway up, bracing herself. A leg on each side. Or her back against one side, feet together on the other. You’d find her, posed, waiting to be found. Pretending to read a book mid-levitation. Demanding a secret password to let you pass. And once you tickled her armpit, in a mean but deniable way, and she fell like you knew she would fall.

She drops past your heart, settles in with Gram. What else is lost inside of you? Where is the moral? Whatever you say, they will hear it. You remember that much from pregnancy. Little ears are big ears. No whisper goes unheard. And while many are the deceivers, even liars say what’s true.

Once, my mother played a prostitute in a community theater production of the old musical Bells are Ringing. The plot centers on Ella, a young woman working for a telephone answering service. Ella tries on several voices, a different self for every client. She falls in love with a caller while masquerading as an old woman. She follows that love, has to reckon with her lie. Along the way, a detective has a hunch that this answering service is actually a front for an escort service. And so there was my mother, stage left, suggestively twirling a long beaded necklace. Part of a crowd, a pack of other middle-aged mothers from my town, hands on hips, lips pursed. Pretending to be prostitutes. Or women mistaken for prostitutes. Suburban matrons, who, for one night, had simply chosen cocktail parties over cottage and supermarket. There was nothing cartoonish about my mother up there. She was a beauty. It was the only time in my life I saw her put her body on display, and I remember wondering if she did this sort of thing in the mirror when we were at school. If she caught her own eye, letting her stomach fill up with helium. Letting her limbs go loose as kite tails.

Once, she died a little on a hospital table and she floated above her body. It was not unpleasant. Once, her dead grandmother appeared at the foot of her childhood bed on Florence Road. It was a comfort. Once, she pulled a story out of my hands. She wanted me to know that her mother read books. That’s all she did. Read books and cried. It was a warning.

Not all knives are for stabbing, but this one is. The huntswoman licks the blade, caked in cake, and her tongue is spared. She’s been drawn by your snore, too much wolf for her liking. She sees Red’s cloak, hears the chatter in your belly. It’s as simple as opening a letter.

Babies cry when born, but Red and Gram are laughing, some new tether between them, as they step out of the basket of your ribcage, push aside the curtains of your belly flesh. This wide wide open is worse than the blade, and you cannot bear to look as the others set to work on your body. Somebody shaves your legs, colors your lips. Somebody embraces you; it must be Red. Somebody fills you up with rocks. You will never be empty again. You remember this is how they did away with witches once. Rock climbs on rock, a lesson in fits and starts. Then there is the stitching. Gram’s deft hand, no doubt. She once showed you how to mend, but you refused to learn. She gathers your flesh, your skin, her own nightgown with the needle. Your eyes go last.

Then, a party? The clinking of glasses. The pouring of more wine, some red reserve you didn’t know she kept. More cake, mushrooms, wedges of cheese pulled out of the icebox. Crusty bread sliced, then torn. Meat, from some animal, sizzles in a pan. No one discusses you. You are already a memory, a premonition. A figure in a story. And so the harm you have caused is unforgivable. But also forgettable, for those who tend to forgetting. It’s not the lesson you dreamed up, but it’s what the girl learns.

Sexton is haunted. But she tells the camera, I’m not going to spend my life researching to see if I can get related to a Salem witch. Probably. It’s not entirely clear if she means she probably won’t spend her life doing so or if she reasons that, in all likelihood, she is related to a Salem witch.

Like me. My ancestor was a grandmother when she was accused, tried, and killed in Salem. We have so many mothers.

They leave you in the cottage, under some old blanket. It smells of butter, sinew, spirits, the residue of all they wolfed down. Then it hits you. This is the cloak. Red won’t wear it again, this gift you gave her. Which Gram gave you. Which Great Gram tied around her own tender throat with a satin ribbon, long since lost to the whims of the woods. This might be love. This might be womb, clock, bell. Wearing it, you are willing to be the villain. To have eyes so big, a mouth so big, you can fit the truth inside.

Yes, it was red.

Once, or over and over, a mother went to her sewing stash, pulled out her brightest bolt of fabric. She cut it to fit you, to find you. She marked you as a target. If there were wolves they stayed wolves, and away. They knew about mothers. Mothers will swallow you whole.

Wolfless

Folkcal Fraim 13

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