* * *
We do not send any message to Maebh’s parents. We do not tell the farmer there will soon be a disaster here. We do not talk about anything beyond The Farm. I wish I could say that we share a bed, or that we tell each other certain things. However, I can say we spend enough time lying on the porch with our bare arms flung above us that I memorize the pattern of the long brown hairs in Maebh’s armpits. I do not ask Maebh if she is scared. I know her well by now and I observe that she is not. She is waiting.
We enjoy large quantities of milk and preserves. Maebh consumes them with even greater zeal than before. Sometimes I am on the cusp of reaching out to stroke her. More than once I come close to blurting something. The words are right there, already in my mouth, swirling around on my tongue. But always Maebh stands up just then, or rolls away, or falls asleep.
These plums. This light.
* * *
On the day before we are supposed to return to the city, at that time when the sunlight gets richer and darker with each passing second, Maebh is wading through the grass ahead of me — the grass that only comes up to her thigh, that comes all the way up to my waist — carrying a rock we found, a rock covered in green moss and orange lichen as though someone decorated it. I am keeping an eye on Maebh. I do not think of her thighs as thighs — in my mind, I call them haunches. Haunches, that is the word in my mind when it happens.
The snap and the flash. The flash and the snap. The colorful rock thudding to the ground. The air into which she disappears — it does not even shimmer. There is nothing, just nothing. No bees disrupt the low sunbeams. Nothing makes any noise.
Even my howl is restricted to my insides, passing through my muscles but not exiting my body. This howl moves into my leg and I take a step, lifting my foot over the rock, the first step of many that will take me in the opposite direction of the city.
* * *
Here on the porch beside the muddy pond where five-legged frogs crawl over tumorous lily pads, someone dear to me asks why I always tell this story in the present tense. We lean back in our hand-hewn chairs, waving smoke sticks at the mosquitoes that churn around the slimy cattails. Soon it will be utterly dark in the abandoned swamp, no ambient light from anywhere, and we will retreat into the wooden cabin where the tilting floorboards remind us of the day we laid the clay foundation.
THE WEDDING STAIRS
At the tail end of the wedding, as the last guests were fighting over whose coat was whose, the maître d’ took me aside. He’d had his eye on me all night; even when he’d handed me my third rosemary-cucumber martini in that dismissive way of his, still he’d had his eye on me.
I wondered, with some amazement, how he’d singled me out, my particular cocktail-length dress, my particular shoes; I was identical to every other drunk young lady at the wedding, in no way deserving of additional admiration or scorn, distinguished only by the fact that I happened to be the sole witness when the cancerous woman ran into the Ladies’ Room with a nosebleed (“Can I get you seltzer perhaps?” I said, because the blood was falling on her green silk jacket and I’ve heard seltzer can do some good against blood. “It’s my pancreas is all,” she replied; I couldn’t think of anything to say to that).
“I have to show you something,” the maître d’ said. They were the first words I’d heard from him, and while I wasn’t surprised that his tone was scornful, I was surprised that he would make such a forthcoming statement.
We were standing at the bottom of a staircase, one of those staircases with red carpeting running down the middle; it was up this staircase that he gestured.
He was skinny, this maître d’ of mine, almost skeletal, with a shorn head. His eyes were black and filled with rage or something else that made them burn. It was not hard to imagine him surviving a concentration camp.
In the dimness beyond the dance floor, my husband was leaned up against the wall, passed out there with a portrait of a woman from 1632 around his neck. I don’t know how it had gotten there, that painting, but at the beginning of the evening it had been hanging grandly on the wall and now here it was with my husband’s drunken head stuck through it, violating the lady’s charcoal dress. I didn’t know how much it would cost, or if our lives were essentially over.
“Of course,” I said to the maître d’, stepping onto the first stair.
Behind us, the bride and groom held each other weeping — hopefully for joy — in the starlight.
Just kidding. There was no starlight. In fact, the fluorescents had just come on; the staff was dying for us to clear out. But they were holding each other, the bride and the groom, and they were most definitely weeping. With this ring, you are holy to me.
The maître d’ joined me on the step. I looked over at him, turning on the faucet of my smile, eager to dazzle him, to grab his hand and run upward. But yet again I’d misread the situation; he returned my gushing smile with that withering gaze of his, and my hand dangled un-held between us.
At a pace exactly halfway between slow and fast, the maître d’ mounted the stairs, and I followed. There was a sharp right, then a second staircase. Hours we’d been here, in this old stone venue, hours of revelry, and I’d never had any idea about these staircases. What had happened to them, all my powers of observation? Already it was fading behind me, the wedding vanishing into the past, the things I shouldn’t have said at all, much less in the middle of the dance floor: that my husband had desires I wasn’t capable of satisfying, that my grief about the fetus had yet to drain away, that I wanted things to be different than the way they were.
I shivered with shame for that girl, that girl who had said those things, who had sat alone at an abandoned table trying to devour the dessert placed at her seat as well as the one at her husband’s while the waiters looked on with distaste, but walking up these red-carpeted stairs alongside my maître d’, I no longer felt responsible for the words I’d shed like dead hair upon the dance floor.
On the third staircase, the food began. At first, just a nibbled dinner roll in the corner of one stair. A whoosh of specks that might have been stains, or poppy seeds. A patch of something wet on the carpet — wine, or water, or an illusion.
But by the fourth staircase there was no question: the steps were littered with food. An unmistakable smear of that green pistachio mousse. A sprig of butter-encrusted sage. Gnocchi scattered moistly down the side.
With each step it got worse. The decimated body of a trout. A half-eaten fist of beef Wellington. A quail pulled to pieces. A slick of port sauce. The breathtaking garnishes — the rosemary, the begonias, the curls of candied lemon peel. The aftermath of the luxury, all just garbage now. Worse than garbage.
Then, on the sixth staircase, I got this odd feeling in my heart: there, unmistakable, were the remainders of the two desserts I’d failed to finish, the lavender crème brûlée still in its little cup, the hazelnut tart whose integrity I had violated.
Too ashamed to look at the maître d’, I ducked my head and cried quietly as we passed the wasted desserts.
How fragrant these foods had been when they were bestowed upon the cream-colored tablecloths — the smell of butter, warmth, safety, joy. Yet now dark and disconcerting odors arose from the rejected food, the rot already encroaching. I had never before understood that the end of a feast is a funeral.
I didn’t want to step on any of it — it seemed like stepping on corpses — but sometimes it was impossible to avoid, the food thicker on each stair. I shuddered as my shoe crushed an errant slice of blood orange, a handful of capers.