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The Spider

 

The Bijoux's house lights came on while the credits for King Kong were still rolling. George and his granddaughter did not get up. George did not want to squeeze into the line, for there was always the chance that someone would tread on his heels, or that he would feel another's breath on his ear. He was not a man who relished the close proximity of his fellows.

"There are times when I am really overwhelmed by how ugly the human race is," he said to Crystal. It had occurred to him many times before and it was not the first time he had said so, but today, as he looked over the customers moving past them, the thought struck him with more than usual force. This one had eyes too small, that one a head too small. Nearly half were obese. A parade of disfigurement and deformation, of port-wine stains and vestigial limbs. Even the children were unattractive -- inbred-looking, with lank, lusterless hair and small, snouty faces. They were in startling contrast to Jessica Lange, the star of King Kong and a woman of unusual beauty.

"We see people on TV or in movies and we think that's what people look like but it's not. Mostly, we're ugly, each of us in our own way. Like snowflakes, only ugly. Instead of a blizzard of snowflakes, we are a blight of people." George had never spoken these phrases aloud, and he was pleased with how they sounded, though he did not expect any affirmation of his wit from Crystal. He looked at the weak-chinned profile of his granddaughter and shook his head. Her appearance was not in any way a challenge to his opinions about the unattractiveness of the human race. She had a soft, sallow face with a mouth far too small for it. She was at least as fat as any of the children appearing before them on the sidewalk; at twelve she easily outweighed most girls of sixteen. She had lately acquired a secretive look, too, as if she knew things which it pleased her not to communicate. The only thing to say in her favor was that she had grown almost dignified over the past month or so, full of something she seemed intent on not squandering. All in all, though, George did not think there was much hope for her, but then he was not inclined to indulge much in hope, and rather proud that he was not.

"Animals have it all over us for beauty," he continued.

"Leopards," suggested Crystal, moving into the aisle at last. "Deer."

"Exactly," said George as he followed. "Of course some animals are not quite so attractive."

"Ants," the girl proposed, lumbering up the steeply raked theater. "Anteaters." Their conversations often proceeded thusly -- George expounding theories, the girl illustrating them.

The lobby smelled of popcorn, and George inhaled deeply. He had a keen sense of smell, and he had noticed that if they went to an evening show, the next morning he could still smell on his granddaughter the buttery, now slightly rancid odor of the popcorn. It must seep into the pores of her palms and into the interstices of the diamonds of the three big cocktail rings that she wore whenever he let her. But it was the matinee they'd just seen, and he knew she'd wash her hands before they prepared dinner.

The two squinted when they stepped into the hot summer light.

"Those were two interesting pairs you gave me. Leopards and deer, anteaters and ants. Do you, Crystal, see a pattern?"

The child shook her head and pushed her thin, dark hair out of her eyes. Her role was to provide him with an opportunity to explain things, one of his principal pleasures.

“No? Leopards eat deer, anteaters eat ants. Could it be that the beautiful feed on the beautiful and the ugly on the ugly? Does the pattern hold? Humans eat chicken, sheep, and cows, ugly animals all."

"Buzzards eat deer. Buzzards are ugly," said Crystal.

George considered this. "True, but a dead anything is ugly, too."

Crystal stopped to look at the posters for next week's offering. There was to be a Superman extravaganza. Now that the first-run movies had fled to the megaplexes in the suburbs, the Bijoux featured only foreign films, classics and those recent American movies which showed to particular advantage on the large screen.

Crystal examined Christopher Reeve, and George examined his granddaughter. She didn't resemble him in the least, he thought. He was tall and fair, and the gauntness that slender men get as they age did not yet afflict him. Homo sapiens may not be an especially attractive species, but he believed he was a more than usually presentable example. "Bone structure will tell," he informed the girl. "I am still much sought after by the ladies. I believe I am the recipient of more widows’ casseroles than any man in town." He smiled with satisfaction.

Crystal did not even shift her gaze from Christopher Reeve's muscled torso. George frequently and without warning changed the topic from the general to himself.

"You got wrinkles, Grandpa," she pointed out sullenly. Superman's face was stern and unlined.

"I have what's called craggy good looks." He smiled again, and a splendor of crags appeared. The King Kong poster caught his eye. "King Kong, who is ugly, preyed on Jessica Lange, who is beautiful." He frowned and the furrows on his face rearranged themselves.

"It doesn't count, Grandpa," said Crystal. "They're not real."

George thought Jessica Lange was very real, but perhaps her delicate blonde beauty rendered her otherwise to his granddaughter. "Fiction doesn't count? That's reassuring."

"And anyway," added Crystal, "King Kong doesn't get her."

 

 

Crystal and George lived next to the Bijoux, not at all such a bad thing, in George's estimation. They had free passes, and had spent many hours sitting in its air-conditioned darkness, sharing an extra-large bucket of buttered popcorn. The theater was empty most of the time, and having it next door meant that George had only one real neighbor, Dorothy, who lived in a house that would have been identical to his, were it not for the fact that she went to the expense and bother of having hers painted every few years.

There was something not quite right about his house, thought George now, looking at his porch and front door. Not wrong exactly -- just not as he had left it. It was the rusty black mailbox near his door, he decided. The top was up. He opened it every day himself, of course. Opened it and closed it. Dorothy was quite capable of opening it -- she was a snoopy neighbor, straight out of a TV sitcom -- but she'd close it too, just as methodically as he would, to cover her tracks. Maggie, Crystal's mother would have left it open, though. When she'd lived there, cupboards stood open and drawers pulled out, just as she'd left them. Maggie. She'd been gone for five years.

As the peeling wooden door swung open, he half expected to find his daughter standing there, theatrically revealed. It would be so like her. There was a light, citrusy odor though, as if she had indeed disappeared in a cloud of perfume when his key slid in the lock, an act he didn't think quite in her line.

"What's that smell, Grandpa?" asked Crystal. "Has Dorothy been here?"

Dorothy used perfume, used it heavily, and he could imagine her wanting to sneak in -- for the two years she had been his neighbor, it had been her more or less openly stated goal to insinuate herself into his life -- but he couldn't imagine her actually managing this. Furthermore, it was clearly not a Dorothy perfume. She preferred the exotic scents, which all smelled a bit like Raid to George. "Do you like this?" she'd ask, lifting her wrist to his nose. "It's called Diva."

The living room was undisturbed, but George found his bedroom virtually ransacked. The drawers were pulled open, the contents of some of them dumped on the bed.

“Grandpa, we’ve been robbed!” said the girl.

“No. Your mother’s been here, that’s all.” It was quite enough, though. Maggie would likely come up with an alternative course of action and return. He'd raised her to value persistence.

Crystal's jaw dropped, which did not enhance her looks in any way, George noted. She stood there in the bedroom doorway and blinked, apparently trying to take in that the mother she hadn't seen since she was seven had come, searched the house, and then gone again, all while she and her grandfather were next door watching King Kong.

"Why did she leave?"

George snorted. “Because she couldn’t find what she was looking for.” His granddaughter’s tiny mouth cleft a small smile in her broad face.

“For me? She was looking for us?”

“Rummaging in a closet?”

Crystal’s mouth returned to its usual implausible rosebud. She looked down at the cocktail rings she wore. George saw no harm in letting her wear them around the house and to the trips next door to the theater. Aside from the rings, there was no other sign of his beautiful daughter on this, her child.

George and Crystal made dinner together as they always had. The girl did as much of the work as her grandfather, peeling and chopping the potatoes and carrots while he dressed the chicken. Because of her size he thought of her as ungainly and slow-moving in mind and body both, and the deft movements of her chubby hands surprised him. Every day they surprised him, as if he couldn't integrate this piece of information into the schema that was his granddaughter. The swiftly moving fingers with the cocktail rings reminded him of the dancing tutu-clad hippos in Fantasia. George and Crystal worked in near silence, each lost in thought of Maggie. He had taught Crystal not to try his patience by peppering him with questions, but there was one.

"Grandpa, who was my dad? You said someday I’d know. I’m not a little kid anymore."

"It's a question for your mother."

"She wouldn't tell me."

She wouldn't tell George either. She had run away at sixteen and two years later had arrived on their doorstep pregnant with virtually nothing to say for herself. (George was a curious man, and Maggie's silence about her life in general, and the paternity of her child in particular, had frustrated him as much as her behavior.) His wife had been beautiful and sensible. Maggie was beautiful and foolish. Beautiful, foolish, and sly, it turned out. Crystal was not beautiful. It remained to be seen whether she was sensible.

"Some man," he replied, arranging the chicken pieces in the baking dish.

Crystal stopped her chopping, and waited for more from George. She knew a thing or two about the uses of silence too, thought George, surprised. He'd always thought it was Maggie's consciousness of her beauty that enabled her to use silence to her advantage. Staring at an adversary through air that was suddenly and deliberately emptied of words might make him grow anxious, but not Maggie, not her. She would stand quietly, almost motionless. He had imagined her as a classic statue, buried in volcanic ash for a millennium or more, awaiting an obliging archeologist to dig her out, dust her off, and gaze upon her chilly brow.

"A dark, heavy-set man with a good line, I imagine," George answered. "You don't need to be thinking about that. You have me." She'd had a mother once, too, and ought to, still -- a girl her age, especially. Not that Maggie would necessarily be of much use if she were around, what with the drugs, the booze, and those menacing-looking men. He remembered three such men standing around her in the backyard one hot spring night years ago. With a mocking bow, the shortest one had handed her a needle as if he were presenting a bouquet of flowers to the Blessed Virgin. He’d made a bit of clear liquid jet out from the tip like a fountain; Maggie's laughter then had been clear and light -- still girlish. George had not said anything. Maggie was the one person who could make him feel in the wrong -- in this case for having come home too early and witnessed what she preferred to have held secret. She'd left for the first time soon after. From the very beginning Maggie had had no use for boys, nice boys, and those men had guessed that the goddess incarnate among them had a predilection for the down and dirty.

It seemed likely to George that Crystal too was thinking of her mother's shortcomings and her abrupt departure for she asked, "You're not going to leave me, are you?" At least she no longer asked that question with an imploring look; an averted gaze now tempered the intimacy, but her words made George feel her fat arms wrapped around his neck, her clammy cheek pressed against his, even though she had long ago learned not to touch him.

"Damn it all, no, I won't leave you. You'll be the one to leave. It's in your blood on both sides if anything is." He repeated this to himself with satisfaction while he washed and dried his hands; certainly the truth of it justified any disdain he might harbor for this girl, his own flesh and blood. Crystal stood quietly beside him.

 

 

After dinner was prepared, George liked to lie on the couch in the living room; usually Crystal preferred to retire to her room to read, but today she joined her grandfather, sitting in the naugahyde recliner across from him. George thought he knew why: she wanted more information about her mother. She'd know that getting information from him was less a matter of skillful questioning than a matter of being in the room when he was in the mood to speak. There was a large spider in the window beside her, and Crystal studied it as if that was why she'd come to the living room. She'd become wily, he'd noticed. But Maggie: she was wilier still. There was no use thinking about her, however. Just as he would only speak when he was good and ready, Maggie would come again in her own good time. There was no point in anticipating when that would be or what she would say and do when she came.

"That's one strange pet you have there," George said of the spider. "You used to want a puppy."

"You wouldn't buy me one," Crystal pointed out.

George laughed. "True. You are a resourceful child, I have to say.” He had a moment of what might be called tenderness for his granddaughter.

“Why was Mom here? What was she looking for?”

The girl must have sensed his moment of weakness. She was growing up for sure.

“Some money she thinks I owe her,” he said, kicking off his shoes and then flexing each toe in its turn. He did this every afternoon. It was a talent he’d gotten from his father’s side, and it saddened him that neither his daughter nor his granddaughter had inherited it. Likely it would die with him. “She thinks her mother left it to her along with those rings of yours. She’s wrong.” All ten toes moved up and down in unison, as if taking a bow after their performance. “Your mother’s usual modus operandi is to call when she wants money.” He’d never mentioned the calls to the child because he wasn’t sure whose side she’d be on. Perhaps Crystal would have wanted him to send Maggie money.

A humid little breeze, its strength depleted from its trip through the better neighborhoods between the sea and the tiny house, feebly stirred the faded pink curtains, the dirty string shade pull, and the gossamer web of the spider.

"Spiders are ugly,” said George. “The bugs they eat are, too. The pattern holds." With that, he went to sleep.

 

 

Crystal really had been examining the spider when she'd sat down with her grandfather, though she did hope for more information about her mother. She had recently resolved never to simply sit in expectation. It was best to have some alternative occupation, if only to avoid looking foolish in your own eyes when your expectations were dashed. She'd been watching the spider grow since early summer. It was the largest spider she had ever seen, its body the size of a quarter at least, and she wondered if it might be the largest in the world, or at least the town. After each rainstorm she would raise the shade expecting to find the spider gone and its web tattered, but there it would be, busily making some minor repairs, the web stretched fully across the window. Even tropical storm Edna -- a hurricane that had partially spent itself on its way up the coast -- had failed to destroy it; the next morning the sun sent a shaft of light between the movie theater and the house, making the web glisten with rain.

The spider was greenish and iridescent, and it had seven legs, one of them shorter than the others. Crystal supposed it had once had eight, but even with seven, it danced agilely across the web. It didn't seem to her that it ate enough to sustain itself, let alone grow so large. Devouring even a small beetle was time-consuming. The spider would hug its prey tightly while it sucked it dry over the course of a morning, and days would go by between victims. She knew she couldn't offer any help. Earlier attempts to feed dead flies to a spider that had made its home behind the toilet had taught her that she needed to provide live prey which would make the web tremble from its movements, and she wasn't inclined to go to such lengths.

Crystal had no desire to touch the spider and she was not tempted to name it. (She was not a sentimental child -- she'd always been like her grandfather in that.) It was ugly and repellent, and beautiful and attractive at the same time, and therefore not easily contained within her grandfather's categories. It was as if these opposites were on something that curved around and met, like her mother's jade bracelet that snapped closed. She shuddered at the mere thought of the spider touching her, and yet that morning after Edna, she had held her breath as she raised the shade until she saw it there, resplendent on its shimmering, dripping web.

She held up her hands to the meagre light from the window, and splayed the fingers so that they seemed to radiate from the center of the web behind them. She pulled at the rings, struggling to remove them from her pudgy fingers. The rings didn't fit as well as they once had. Two of them were difficult to get on, and the third Crystal was forced to wear on her pinkie. She lined them up on the window sill. She especially liked the smallest ring -- it was an opal surrounded by diamonds. Her mother had once said to her, "You have graceful hands. Well, not graceful really, they're not pretty hands, but the way you move them, they're, well, sort of graceful." Although it had been five years ago, Crystal had a clear memory of the words and of her mother's melodic voice, partly because it was the nicest thing she remembered her mother saying to her, and partly because her mother had left home for the last of many times the following day, and as far as Crystal knew, she hadn’t been heard from since. Perhaps Crystal’s father had given her mother the rings and she’d left them behind in order not to be reminded of him. An association with her father would also account for why her grandfather did not object to Crystal playing with the expensive jewelry. What her grandfather said about her mother was, as often as not, negative -- Crystal knew, for instance, that he didn't approve of her having left her child behind, although she suspected his principal objection was the trouble this desertion put him to. But he said nothing at all about her father, and she thought this silence bespoke a final and complete dismissal of him rather than simple ignorance.

A small, tow-headed boy appeared on the other side of the window, looking for something in the tall grass between Crystal's house and the movie theater.

"Hey, kid, get out of here!" growled Crystal. The child looked up with large, startled blue eyes. Crystal viewed his face through the tracery of the web, as through a veil. She was unsure whether he could see her in the darkness of the house. The boy took off, without whatever it was he’d sought.

 

 

Crystal knew she was heavy, dark, and unattractive (qualities unalterably linked) and that no member of her family had ever been any of these. Her mother was beautiful. George had told her this, countless times. Crystal hung over his stories of beauty pageants, flocks of boys on the porch, the modeling agency, wondering if there would come a time when she would in some way resemble her mother just a little, but her grandfather related the stories with no reference to her. The stories enlarged his view of himself -- this was why he told them. They were about his daughter, not her mother. Maggie was "sharp," he'd often said, never adding, "Your mother would be proud of how well you're doing in school." She fantasized her mother's pleasure in her academic achievement anyway: her one accomplishment. She suspected, however, that her mother's vaunted acuity was not the kind that had resulted in good grades.

She had imagined her mother as blandly pretty, with the blue eyes and blond hair that she dimly remembered. Her mother would look at her, lovingly and possessively, cupping Crystal's chin in one hand. The look would tell her she was real, the touch would tell her that it was a good thing to be real, and that someone was glad that she was. She watched the other mothers and daughters with a pang and once, long ago, she'd tried to convince a bewildered Portuguese woman down the street to take her in, merely because the woman had smiled warmly and brushed the stringy, unwashed hair out of Crystal’s face. At night the warmth of her mother's touch became as potent as the kiss of any fairy-tale prince, making her feel languorous and beautiful, and she'd sleep with her grandmother's embroidered pillow between her legs.

She looked at the ropey veins of her grandfather's arms, and thought of his blood, thin and blue, flowing decorously through them, rising up to pool in his eyes. Her own blood was thick and red, and although she knew it was impossible, she thought of her blood as not confined to any arteries, but throbbing directly against the surface of her skin, saturating the very fat and meat of her. "There's no telling what’s in that blood of yours," he’d once said.

He took her to church most Sundays; the priest there seemed to think that people chose their allegiances more than she thought was the case -- more than her grandfather thought was the case, as well, it seemed, given his comments about her blood. "To whom do you belong?" the priest had shouted. ("The idiot should lower his voice," her grandfather muttered after mass. "Someone should tell him we're not Baptists.") "Declare yourself! Satan is marked and our Lord has risen. Are you Satan's or are you God's? Are you covered in filth or are you washed in the blood of the Lamb?" It seemed to her that everyone was marked; you could tell at a glance where and to whom someone belonged and you treated him accordingly, though she avoided giving this much thought since it led to certain unflattering conclusions.

Was there anything in her that her mother might recognize and lay claim to, she wondered. Her mother would return. (At any moment she might -- her grandfather had said as much.) However, Crystal tried not to indulge in anticipation anymore. She had discovered that the unexpected did not occur frequently, and surprises were more likely than not to be unpleasant. Her small brown eyes were two windows with the shades drawn.

A few days earlier, Crystal had listened to a particularly treacly “I-care-about-you-dear” speech from Dorothy, and at it’s conclusion had said "Yeah," allowing herself to say it dryly. Dorothy had called her cynical, but her wary, respectful look led Crystal to believe that cynicism might be a precocious and not entirely negative achievement. Now she pulled the dictionary from the bookcase by the chair and laid it across her lap. The battered volume was her main research tool. Much of what she knew about sexual functions, for instance, she’d learned though following a trail of cross-referenced words. What, exactly, did cynical mean?

A cynic was "someone who believes that self-interest is the motive of all human conduct; a habitual scoffer." Crystal liked this very much. Cynicism was a refuge for anyone without expectations, for it held the very idea of hope in contempt; it was a philosophy which promised to never leave you foolishly waiting in vain.

She closed the book and thought. Cynicism would make the most of her critical faculties, of which she was inclined to be proud, but she sensed that it might be a corrosive fluid on softer parts of her, the parts that allowed her to still dream of her mother, parts which might have other uses and whose loss she might some day grieve were she to let them soak in it for too long.

The doorbell rang. Her grandfather, a heavy sleeper, did not budge. Crystal would usually ignore the bell -- it was likely to be Dorothy, standing on the threshold with something hot in her hands. She was the most persistent of her grandfather’s casserole widows, though not the most talented. ("Too much salt," he sniffed .) This time, though, there was the chance it was Crystal's mother, and this chance grew into a certainty by the time she got to the door. It was not easy to give it up, the stubborn habit of hope.

It was Dorothy, empty-handed now and minus her usual ingratiating smile. Of course, Dorothy. What was the evidence of her mother's visitation, after all? It might as well have been poltergeists earlier. According to a show on TV, they made their presence felt through small disturbances of the air and the order of a house.

"Dear, is your grandfather home?" Dorothy produced a false-toothy grin.

"He's sleeping," Crystal said flatly. Dorothy had -- with some encouragement from George -- assumed a big sister role with her, but Crystal had never yearned for any womanly camaraderie with Dorothy. A few weeks ago she’d overheard a phone conversation which rendered her neighbor’s company even less welcome. From her wicker chair in the yard, Crystal could see the back of Dorothy's head through an open window, the pink receiver to her ear. (Dorothy’s hair was red again. According to her grandfather, she changed her hair color more often than most women changed their minds.)

"She's the most unpleasant child I've ever met," Dorothy had said, "especially over the last year or so. But maybe she's just premenstrual... Well, why not?... It would make sense...."

Crystal did not mind being thought unpleasant, especially by Dorothy, but she did not like the idea that anyone might think that her attitude was based on hormones, rather than the cool consideration of the world as it was.

Now Dorothy stood before her, trying to look into Crystal’s downcast eyes by cocking her head to the side with a simper of unwelcome solicitude. She reminded Crystal of a parakeet; Crystal tried to imagine a parakeet with hoop earrings. Dorothy righted her head and said, “Well, I suppose I can just tell you and you can tell your grandfather because I think he really should know..."

Crystal would not invite Dorothy in, and Dorothy would not invite herself, and as Crystal would never go so far as to slam the door in Dorothy's face when she was mid-sentence, and Dorothy did not bring many of her sentences to a conclusion, they had had quite a few lengthy conversations on the threshold of the kitchen door.

"...this well-dressed blonde was on your front porch, looking in the picture window, and then I saw her go around back and try the back door, but just as I was about to call the police, she opened the door. I couldn't see what she was doing, but I thought, maybe she has a key, and I didn't want to look like a fool with the police so I just stood by the window to keep an eye on the situation because your grandfather's car was in the garage, and I figured you'd just gone to the movies. I checked the newspaper so I knew you'd be out soon, but she was only there about twenty minutes, and then she left in a little red sports car with a license plate that said "BLNDE" with a little dot where the "O" should go. Pretty woman. Natural blonde, I bet. You know who she was?"

Crystal just shrugged. She was not going to provide encouragement to a woman who was intolerable enough without any.

"So you promise to tell your grandfather?"

Crystal nodded, which was apparently a species of encouragement to Dorothy, for she added another question.

"Have you started yet?" she asked, nodding vigorously. Her large gold hoop earrings swung back and forth, counter to the direction of her head,

Crystal stared at her blankly. Her mind was now on her mother, whose presence in the house was all but incontrovertible.

"Your period, dear."

Dorothy had been pressured by George to explain matters to Crystal. Crystal would soon be a woman, Dorothy had said, some months back. Crystal had tried to tell her that she had heard it all two years earlier in health class, but though Dorothy had looked decidedly uncomfortable broaching the subject, once she’d begun she had seemed filled with a sense of mission and responsibility and could not be deterred from finishing what was obviously a carefully prepared speech. Trapped, Crystal had taken the only pleasures that were left her, which were the idle one of waiting to see if the false eyelash that had become detached at the inside corner would finally poke Dorothy in the eye as it threatened to, and the sadistic one of denying Dorothy any kind of response aside from an occasional shrug.

"No."

Dorothy looked disappointed; Crystal wished it was justified, for she had gotten her period for the first time just a couple of weeks earlier. Although it did not seem likely that she would be bleeding again so soon, Dorothy had emphasized that she might not be regular for awhile, and Crystal felt driven to visit the bathroom to check herself a half dozen times a day. She found only the faded brown stain from before. It had been just a few drops, not the gush she had expected after Dorothy's lecture, but the idea that she might at any time suddenly begin to hemorrhage torrents which would pour down her legs and fill her shoes, in public maybe, or in front of her grandfather was, although illogical and counter to what she knew of biology, so horrifying and shameful that although she had consciously entertained it only once, it loomed in the back of her mind and sent her to the bathroom again and again to check herself. The worry was, however, insufficient to cause her to wear protection. The pads were themselves reminders that her body was even less reliable than she had supposed and she might at any time spring a leak, and that merely because she was female, she must be purged monthly of something foul. Sometimes this latter thought would segue into a consolatory fantasy, one in which her femaleness, such as it was, resided in the menstrual fluid and filled all of her. She would bleed and bleed until wholly emptied -- devitalized, but cleansed -- destined, perhaps, to be the vessel of something else. "Are you covered in filth or washed in the Blood of the Lamb?" Covered in filth, cleansed of filth, washed in the blood, washed of the blood.

Dorothy patted Crystal's head and gave her a look of sympathy and secret kinship that drove her wild. "Just you wait. It's a very special time in a girl's life and ..."

The girl suspected her neighbor’s enthusiasm was intended to make her feel better about some ugly truth.

"It's all perfectly normal..."

"Perfectly normal" was a phrase that had cropped up a lot in Dorothy's monologues. Crystal knew that the normality of anything beautiful was never questioned, and if this were really an occasion for celebration, one to be proud of, then there would be a list on Crystal’s classroom wall of all the girls who had entered womanhood, along with a date on which this event had occurred. Their names would be announced at assembly. Dorothy had warned of hormonal mood swings. (There hadn't been any variation in her mood, as far as Crystal could tell. This was a relief; she was generally scornful of the display of any feeling except scorn.)

"You'll be a member of the club..."

Not a very exclusive club and therefore of little interest to Crystal -- it could do nothing to compensate for the base life she led as George's stout granddaughter.

"...of women, women who can bear children, and someday..."

Crystal did not, in any case, much like children; having them was a dubious distinction, scarcely more appealing than bleeding once a month from an orifice that generally remained nameless outside of dirty jokes and health class. Crystal's current relationship with the boys her own age was one of mutual distaste and suspicion, and she didn't foresee any change; she furthermore suspected that at least a few of the more perceptive of the girls in her class were more or less dutiful in their enthusiasm for boys.

"...remember that your body is just another wonderful part of God's creation."

This did not sound to Crystal like the clincher Dorothy was after. God had made a great many things that he might not have if he'd taken more time to think about it, if he'd not felt obliged to finish his creation in under a week. Mosquitoes, for instance. Tornadoes. Chihuahuas. (She shuddered when she thought of small, yapping dogs. One of the other widows had one.) Female reproductive equipment could be added to the list now.

By the time Dorothy took her leave, beads of sweat had sprung up on her forehead. It was a hot day, but Crystal was pleased to think they might be the result of exhaustion.

Upon her return to the living room, Crystal adjusted the angle of the door so that she could sit in the easy chair without catching a glimpse of her own reflection in the full-length mirror by the book case. "I don't like to look at myself sitting on the pot," her grandfather had said, objecting to having the mirror on the back of the bathroom door. He’d moved it across the hall to the living room. "I get to look at myself with my pants pulled up now."

This was all fine with Crystal  -- it made it a little easier to avoid the mirror. She had not examined her reflection in its entirety since a trip to Filene's a year ago, Mrs. Doucette looking doubtfully over Crystal's shoulder at a too-tight size fourteen light lemon turtleneck. Over the years she had been taken clothes shopping by a variety of women, and except for the maiden cousin who had been called upon until her death, they had all been casserole widows whose interest her grandfather had exploited in order to see Crystal appropriately dressed without troubling himself. They would coo over her reflection in department store mirrors, and she would smile ingratiatingly before she'd learned to suspect them of designs on her grandfather, before she learned the look of distaste mingled with pity. She'd since discovered a trick of glancing in the mirror without seeing herself. She could restrict her depth of field and peripheral vision to isolate the one part of her reflection that demanded her attention: the dirty neck, the hanging slip, the incorrigibly meandering part in her hair.

Her grandfather still slept. His bones seemed more prominent when his muscles were relaxed. He looked cadaverous, a skeleton stretched out on the couch.

Crystal was warm and very tired. She took the rings from the window sill and pushed them on her fingers. Then she curled up on her side in the big recliner and fell asleep. She dreamt of rings. Some were like her mother's only larger, others were very strange: black, made of what looked like wrought iron, filigreed, with a few small diamonds sparkling like stars in the night.

 

 

Maggie had been missing for longer than George’s wife had been dead, but it was she he had so often dreamt of, wearing his wife’s gown and looking him boldly in the eye; now here she was in front of him, in a sundress sufficiently demure that Arlene might indeed have owned it. Maggie laughed wickedly at his astonishment; in spite of the evidence of her earlier visit and his discussion with Crystal, he realized he would not have been more surprised if it had been his wife who had shown up in the old kitchen. She looked so like his wife, just then, but she was more intelligent and she looked that too. He liked to think that this was his contribution, this canniness -- hers through his genes and his careful education, much of it conducted right at this old formica table. The knowledge he imparted to her consisted largely of what she could expect from people and what she could not, and how to best get what she wanted in either case.

Before she’d left, they’d fought, though it seemed to George that their battles were curiously unimpassioned compared to those he remembered fighting with his own father. This might have been because he often didn’t know who to root for -- himself or his star pupil. She pounced ruthlessly on his hesitation and made the most of it. He’d taught her to. Part of him wanted her to defer to him, though he’d also taught her to defer to no one. He yearned for her to award him some recognition. In the end, though, to make an exception of him, a moderately good-looking retired postal clerk from a fading fishing port whose principal talent was the ability to move each of his ten toes in turn -- he didn’t want her to do it.

Crystal stood in the kitchen door, gaping at the woman in the crisp red and white striped sundress. The child was blindsided by her mother's beauty, thought George. It had been years since Crystal had seen her, and at that time Maggie had been on heroin and her front teeth had been missing. George knew that Crystal did not have any pictures of her mother -- Maggie had taken them all with her.

His daughter was restored in appearance now. When he looked at Crystal with her small, slack mouth and then at Maggie, whose eyes had yet to settle on her daughter, he thought of the moment in Rear Window when Grace Kelly turned on the light under her face, amazing the audience of common, ugly people with her perfect beauty.

“Mom?” 

“Crystal, honey, how are you?” Maggie smiled while she looked her daughter up and down. George thought that was quite a feat and half admired it.

"I'm fine." She had the imprint of the crocheted throw on one side of her face, and her bangs on that side stood straight up from her forehead. In spite of her surprise, her small eyes were still half closed with sleepiness as she stared helplessly at her mother. George figured she out-weighed her mother by at least thirty pounds. He and his wife had had a blessed and sanctioned relationship, and the proof of it was Maggie and her unearthly beauty. He wanted to say to his daughter, "This is what your unholy lust and degradation produces!" but he checked the impulse and kept quiet while she examined her child. Maggie was a fool, but she was not stupid. She was capable of seeing things truly, which is to say without sentiment. He had taught her that, too.

"Aren't you going to ask how I am, Crystal?" asked Maggie coquettishly.

"How are you?"

"I'm fine. In fact I was just explaining to your grandfather how fine I've been."

"Are you staying?"

Maggie smiled sweetly. "Why no, I'm not, honey. I'm sorry. I'm meeting someone in Boston this evening. I just came to see about some things. And see how you were." As she spoke the last phrase, Maggie had already turned away from Crystal to look meaningfully at George. And there was something unpleasant in her voice, something with pinprick eyes that peered out from shadows.

"I know you still have them. I understood why you didn't give them to me when I was here last, but you can see for yourself I'm straight now. They're mine and I want them." She paused; the three of them listened to Dorothy's radio droning in a small kitchen identical to the one in which they stood, just a half dozen yards away through the open windows.

"I don't have anything that's rightfully yours," he finally said. "Your mother never specified that the rings were to go to you, and never said she'd leave you what was left of your aunt's money, and it's gone now, spent years ago. I don't know what you think, but it was never much. I've been raising your daughter alone, and you know all I've got is my pension. The money aside, Crystal likes the rings. You'd take them from her?"

George gestured with his chin to Crystal's hands, to the rings. Crystal looked down at them, as if it was their presence on her hands which was surprising, rather than the central role they played in the discussion. Maggie also looked at them, but her face registered nothing. She'd give away nothing, thought George, now as always.

"What good are cocktail rings to her?" snorted Maggie finally.

"None whatsoever. They represent you well, I'd say --"

"Can you stay to dinner?" Crystal interrupted. She was panicking, for if the discussion grew any more heated, her mother would leave, perhaps never to return, and if her grandfather relented and gave Maggie what she asked, she might leave then too. She couldn't let her mother leave. She hadn't dared expect her mother, and yet here she was. The cynical voice within had lately been telling her that if the hazy prettiness of her dream mother, the mother of her memory, were ever to be brought into sharper focus, flaws would be revealed. But such was not the case, not at all. Maggie's fantastic beauty had the effect of muting the mocking voice that had been telling her lately that reality always -- inevitably -- fell far, far short of dreams. Her life had been unshaped and valueless, but with the arrival of this fabulous creature, it would turn into a story, one with a dreary prologue, but a happy ending. She was not conscious of this or of having any definite expectations of her mother; she merely wondered: had she been lately wrong about things? Could it be that the world was simpler, more orderly, and far less dark than she had come to suspect? Her lungs filled, and she said to her mother in one breath, "We're having mustardy chicken, carrots and potatoes, and ice cream, maple walnut ice cream."

Maggie was silent. Crystal assumed her mother was considering the menu, but George believed his daughter was rethinking her strategy. She wanted the money and those rings. Not that anyone who knew his daughter an iota less than he did would intuit this, he thought with pride. Maggie leaned against the refrigerator and folded her arms. The skirt of her sundress swayed gracefully, her right thigh disturbing the folds, the stripes falling plumb; George wondered whether all this was premeditated by his daughter. He liked to think that it was

George rested his eyes on Crystal. The girl had an eager, ingratiating look now, a warning signal that you were at risk of being touched by her. Next she would sidle up to you, lean her full weight against your flank -- nearly knocking you over if you weren't expecting it -- twist around to look into your face with some horrifying combination of coyness and supplication, and say something foolish, frequently in mock baby talk. He'd acquired a repertoire of moves to head her off. This was a younger Crystal, one he hadn't seen much of these past few months.

"Yes, why not? I haven’t eaten all day." Maggie finally answered; George noted a flick of her right eyebrow, a gesture that meant something clever had just occurred to her. Maggie would do well to forget the money for a moment and be on her guard about her child, he thought; Crystal jumped and clapped, but stifled the urge to hug her mother. George was disappointed. He'd wanted to see what Maggie would do.

Crystal had hesitated a heartbeat before jumping for joy, for if her mother were to leave right then, her dreams would be undisturbed, might even benefit from the infusion of raw material -- how after all, could she have ever invented a mother who looked like this woman? -- but should this mother fail her, and without quite knowing what she expected of her, she sensed that there were many, many ways she could disappoint -- how could she sleep in her mother's imagined arms at night? How could she continue to dream of things that could never happen about a woman who didn't exist, at least not for her? She had an acute appreciation of fantasy, but of fantasy that had not been absolutely revealed as such. Nevertheless, she let hope billow inside her.

Maggie sat down in one of the wooden chairs and surveyed the drab kitchen. "Nothing seems to change here," she said. It hadn't changed in Crystal's memory, and she could imagine all the fixtures, furniture and appliances being there when her mother was a girl. What she couldn't imagine was the woman before her coming home from school and dumping her books on this table, looking for left-over potato salad in this fridge, making hot chocolate at this stove.

"There's where you're wrong," said George. "Look at your daughter, how big she's gotten."

Her mother did not look. She never took her eyes off George, even when she said, "Your grandfather is always right, did you know that, Crystal?"

Crystal opened her mouth to respond, but thought better of it.

"I hope she gives me less opportunity to demonstrate my superior wisdom than you did," said George.

Maggie gave a tight smile and raised an eyebrow. “How about I give you two an opportunity to make me feel at home?” said Maggie. “Do you have an ash tray for me?”

George produced a pyrex dessert dish. “Your ash trays went a couple of garage sales ago,” he said. She lit up, put out the match with a graceful flourish, and then sat languidly at the table, the smoke floating up before her face. She looked to George like a thirties movie star -- more like Jean Harlow with her blatant sexuality than Grace Kelley. Movie stars didn’t smoke any more.

George and Crystal bustled about the kitchen preparing dinner. Maggie sat at the table in the center with an expression which said to George that whatever her situation now, she had at some point accustomed herself to settings far grander, but then his wife had been able to do that too, and she had never known grandeur of any kind. Arlene could sit at a pitted kitchen table and make people feel that she was gracing it. She would have had a smile which said no, she didn't consider it beneath her, but disdain tugged at the corners of Maggie's mouth.

The chicken pieces were piled helter skelter on the serving platter. George took a whole drumstick, and Maggie plucked out a good-sized piece of breast meat with a strip of golden skin still clinging to it.

"You've always had a healthy appetite," George observed. "Not like your mother in that."

Maggie snickered. George handed the platter to Crystal. She was hungry now, she realized, and the gizzards -- her favorite -- did not look overdone. She pulled them all out, then added a small slice of white meat. Usually she and George fought over the drumsticks.

Crystal stared frankly at her mother while they ate. It was difficult to believe this woman had ever lived there and easy to see why she'd left. And yet this mother seemed very much like her grandfather so far; he had always been full of his own thoughts. Crystal did not eat -- she barely exhaled, hoarding each breath as long as she could, waiting for Maggie to finish her business with George and to turn her attention to her daughter.

George watched Maggie's admirable cheekbones move delicately as she chewed. "Are you modeling?" he asked. Whatever her immediate situation, it was clear she had been successfully doing something at in the recent past. If Maggie were to ever manage to sleep her way to the top of the world, he and Crystal certainly wouldn't hear from her then. Maggie loved to strut when circumstances allowed, but she would not want to appear ready to take on responsibility for her child. She must need money desperately to put in an appearance after having been away so long.

"No. I'm not tall enough."

"Too old, too, I bet."

She smiled. She wouldn't take the bait. He might have known she wouldn't. As much as he bragged about Maggie, when they were together, he always had the urge to savage her. There was no filial feeling on her part, he was sure, or feeling of any kind, probably. She had felt anger, desire and envy, certainly. When she'd been a child it had sometimes been her pleasure to have people think her affectionate, too, and to this end she had studied others, her friends, people in the neighborhood -- but particularly the actors on the screen next door, thus making her own performance twice removed from reality. She studied them to learn the look of love. He knew she had. Just as he now sat with Crystal in the theater, he had once sat with Maggie. He'd seen her lean forward as she catalogued emotional responses: that's the way you react when someone you care about is hurt, that's how you respond to a loved one's good fortune... Later he'd note the borrowed words, the counterfeit intonations, the purloined gestures. (Why hadn't she found some success as an actress? Has she even sought it? As far as he knew, she'd confined her acting to private stages.) She found various little ways to remind his wife that they were never more than members of her audience. As for himself, he had no use for love; it was his daughter's respect that he wanted. He wanted to be an esteemed member of her audience.

"How are things going here?" she asked him.

"You can see." George believed that everything that was true was visible. "Your daughter's growing up. She's nearly a woman." He wanted Maggie to consider this.

Maggie did look at Crystal, and the girl smiled expectantly. She was not, George thought, like Margaret O'Brien in "The Secret Garden," who looked suddenly appealing when she smiled. The kitchen was hot and her hair was wet with perspiration. George never sweated to any significant degree, nor did Maggie. He believed that excessive perspiring was peculiar to the darker races, the Italians on down. Crystal's lately acquired self-possession was melting in the heat of the kitchen. She was an unappealing sight, a grotesque puppy.

Crystal could feel sweat on her face, and she could see that it coated only hers. She looked down, and a drop fell, as much a betrayal as any tear. It landed on one of the rings, seeping down amid the diamonds.

"This place is a real haunted house," said her mother. Crystal was heartened by the possibility that she was addressing her at last -- hadn't she glanced at her before looking around the room? But what did she mean, haunted? The house was pretty messy all right and layers of dust were everywhere except on the kitchen counters, but haunted houses were large and this wasn't. Haunted houses had antique furniture; theirs was just old.

"It's a dump, all right," said Crystal. She feared her mother might judge her by the house, so she joined in its critique. "You should see the outside in broad daylight. The paint's falling off. In embarrassment." She grinned forcefully.

When Maggie gave no indication of even hearing her, the little grin lost its support. George watched it fall at uneven rates on each side of her face and crash with a dying quiver of her lower lip. Crystal looked down at the chicken innards -- the kidney, liver, and heart -- turning brown and shriveling as they cooled on her plate.

"Maybe we should just go whole hog for the effect and buy that spray cobweb stuff they sell for Halloween," said George, but before Maggie could respond, Crystal rallied and said, "We don't need that, Grandpa -- we grow them from scratch."

"We do everything from scratch, actually," added George gesturing to the meal on the table.

"I didn't mean that kind of haunted," said Maggie. "I mean Mother's still here. It gives me the creeps."

"Your mother was a wonderful woman," said George smugly. A glance from Maggie told him that she had not missed his tone. He smiled with satisfaction. He figured the words "cold, hard woman" were on the tip of her tongue, but the desire for cold, hard cash would undoubtedly keep them there.

"I made the honor roll. I made straight A's. I always do," said Crystal with mounting despair. Her mother was now supposed to compliment her and then really look at her. Through those eyes of such an improbable shade of blue, her mother must be able to see with perfect clarity.

"That's nice," Maggie said, distractedly, not taking her eyes off George. "A lawyer could get me the rings, you know, but we don't need to go through that, do we?" She cast a glance at the two rings on Crystal's left hand. The girl's fingers were puffy with the heat, and the bands nearly disappeared into them, embedded in flesh. "You know, some money now based on their value would satisfy me. For the time being, anyway, and don't tell me that stuff about just having your pension. You get social security and you get money from the state for the kid and I know you don’t spend it all on her. You sure don’t spend it on the house either, and any women you've got around take care of you, I'm sure."

"I should spend it on you? Tell you what -- I'll give you the money each month, all of it." Maggie was too shrewd to jump at this, George noted, with a mix of pride and irritation that colored all his transactions with her. She'd wait for the catch. "But you take the kid. You take the money, you take the kid."

Maggie laughed. George thought it was a sound more suited to a ballroom than a cramped kitchen in a bad part of town. He watched her drape an arm across the back of her chair. Graceful in defeat. You were intended to feel as if you had just beaten the Duchess of Windsor at whist.

Crystal put her fork down and stared into her plate, her face red with humiliation and chagrin. She'd wagered her self-respect on her mother and lost; she could not remember now what she had even sought to gain. Bones and skin collected at the side of the plate and a potato eye she missed looked blindly out from the mashed mound. She didn't think she'd ever be hungry again.

George thought there was a lesson or two for the girl to learn here, and judging from her demeanor, she had probably learned it. This was one good thing to come from her mother's visit. He, of course, had known that there was nothing in Maggie that would make her feel obliged to notice her child, and that she certainly would have no desire to acknowledge a plain one. Crystal had surprised him, though -- putting any faith at all in a mother who had not only deserted her but who'd proven inadequate in other ways as well. It was so irrational that he was surprised that Crystal had done it, even a little. Before this he'd been tempted to credit her with some sense. But better to have her hopes dashed by her mother than by some man. No permanent damage done, no pregnancy. Perhaps she had been inoculated against the irrational now and would not in the future succumb to the blandishment of hope, at least not hope in anything human.

It would be pleasant to get under Maggie's skin once more.

"She doesn't look much like you."

Maggie was unperturbed. "Her father was not a small man, not in any way, actually," she said in a soft voice, with a genteel upward tilt of her chin.

George marveled at how adroitly Maggie could redirect the conversation, and how easily she could say something as coarse as this in her mother's patrician manner.

Crystal did not think she wanted to hear anything else this mother might have to say about her father. She picked up her knife again, newly sensitive to its feel, to the contours of the handle, to its density, its heft. The knife touched the inside of the opal ring, the metal against metal energizing it, almost like aluminum foil on a filling, and suddenly she could feel the ring against her skin, too. Her world shrank to that part of her hand which touched the knife and the ring, and all else -- her mother, the kitchen, the little house and the others so much like it -- were mere suppositions from which she could and had withdrawn her acknowledgment. The gravy had begun to congeal inside the cold white bowl of mashed potatoes. She cut and scattered the carrots, severed the heart and liver, and frayed the chicken breast into strands, blocking out her mother's flute-like voice and the exquisite hand that occasionally swept into view over the small table, crowded with dishes.

The subject had returned to money, and Crystal left the kitchen, unremarked. Even were she some other girl, pink and white and slender, her absence would not be noted when the topic was money and the claimants her grandfather and her mother.

 

 

Crystal felt damp all over, but especially between her legs, so she went to the bathroom to see if her period had started. Bags of sanitary pads sat under the sink. Dorothy had bought enough supplies to last well into Crystal’s reproductive life. The girl thought she detected a darkening of her underpants; she stroked her vulva lightly to see. Not long ago her sex had been closed, apparently invulnerable, a perfect bivalve. Then one day she had noticed that it had opened, like some loathsome flower blooming moistly between her legs. She sighed and pulled up her pants.

She returned to the living room to check the spider. The mirror: there it was behind her, as dangerous as a Medusa's head. This time she looked. She certainly was large, and she wouldn't have been pretty even if she had been smaller. Her face was wet and mottled from emotion. She didn't see any feature which might with time increase her resemblance to her mother, however much she allowed for the potential effects of puberty. She was tall for her age, taller already than her mother. Her shorts rode up between her legs, as if pointing to her stomach. She had breasts, but they were slightly almond shaped, like eyes over her belly, the kind overweight boys had. Dorothy had treated her womanhood as an accomplished fact, but for the girl it remained a hypothesis. She narrowed her eyes so that her vision blurred. She could, perhaps, succeed in looking threatening. She'd try to remember to attempt this. She also had a smart mouth when she dared; she resolved to dare.

The spider occupied the dead center of its web. In the diminishing light it was the color of gun metal. Crystal had been reading about spiders in the encyclopedia at the library. They had their skeletons on the outside, a very good arrangement, she thought. Their spinnerets secreted a lacy filament, delicate looking but stronger than steel, far more beautiful and useful than anything women exuded. They lacked any kind of blood vessels; their abdominal cavities was filled with their clear, colorless blood. They had proper lungs and tiny mouths through which they breathed and sipped their victims. In her absence this spider had captured some kind of beetle and was curled motionless, drinking deeply of it.

Crystal remained at the window a long time, taking in the image of the spider, imagining herself filled with and washed by its blood. Better that than the Blood of the Lamb. The spider's pure fluid would harden her from the inside out, eventually turning her skin into a sturdy carapace, making her terrible and strong. She looked at the rings on her hand. Lacking much light to reflect, they were dull, almost colorless. She tugged at them, and after a time, they came off; she examined them in the light of George's reading lamp. Amid the beads of sweat in her palm, the rings recovered their gay, frantic glitter. Whatever her grandfather might call the allure of the spider, it seemed to render mere prettiness insipid. She closed her hand around them tightly. The rings warmed and the tines dug in.

 

 

© 2004 Virginia Rivard  All rights reserved.