ANNA SOLOMON
These Wildernesses
In our part of town, when I was very young, long before I’d told any lies, my father made himself into a strange sort of hero. He did this not through acts of great bravery or brilliance, but by going on long drives after dinner and looking for people who, he decided, needed help. So it was that when old Mr. Seed went out into the woods behind his house, broke the lock on the lab where some university scientists were breeding an endangered species of frog, released every frog into the night and then wandered, apologizing, out his driveway, my father was the one who brought him home. When Sarah Putnam’s husband left her to go sail around the world with his young mistress, my father shoveled her walk and brought wood to patch her fence and even tried to do the patching himself, though he was terrible with a hammer. And when Biddy Marsh would show up on the road wearing nothing but a diaper, looking as vengeful as a three-year-old can, my father would scoop her onto his lap, drive her up the Marsh’s lane and deposit her in the arms of her stoned mother. There was no one else to notice she’d been gone—Biddy’s older brothers were off vandalizing empty summer houses, and Biddy’s father was usually downtown drinking at the House of Howard—but when my father returned, he never spoke ill of the Marshes. They were unlucky, he said, that was all.
My father worked days as an accountant, a regular job on Main Street where his desk was metal and his office had no window. He got flustered when my mother and brother and I walked in on him there. He was embarrassed, I believe, by the numbness of the numbers, and by the fact that he didn’t really mind them, that they absorbed him so fully he often lost track of time, which was the only reason we ever showed up at his office: to remind him of our lunch dates at the downstairs sub shop. He would look up, find us watching him, then cover his papers with one hand and his bald spot with the other. His right eye blinked for a few seconds, steady as a metronome, before he relaxed enough to stand up, offer a sheepish smile, and usher us out.
Our father’s tic, like his nighttime forays, had nothing to do with wisdom or courage. It was not a sign—though secretly he might have wished otherwise—of unique vision. Nor was it a result of injury. Our father’s flat feet had kept him out of Vietnam; he was the sort of man who had never even been in a fistfight. His blinking was simply the result of a bout with Bell’s Palsy in his early twenties.
He’d been lucky, he liked to tell us, that the palsy hadn’t crippled him. Just like his immigrant parents had been lucky with their business and he with his, like he’d been lucky to have found our home when the country was in recession and the blizzard of ’78 had just blown through and nobody wanted an uninsulated farmhouse down a half-mile dirt driveway, let alone a sinking septic tank.
I’ve often wondered if he really wanted it himself. If he wanted to want it but couldn’t. So much of my father seemed to long for the kind of neighborhood he’d grown up in, a packed ghetto in Brooklyn where people’s lives were not separate things but one frenzied collision of desires and betrayals all bared so there was no shame. My father described it like this anyway. He did not believe in the reticence of our Protestant neighbors, in the stoicism of their stone walls, in the New England oak leaves which refused, all winter, to drop. He believed that human beings could in fact help each other. He believed it was his job to loosen and heal and forgive.
So perhaps it should not have been a surprise, given my father’s public displays of beneficence, that when Biddy Marsh was about eight and her three older brothers had done enough damage that the summer people had started boarding up their cottages, forcing the Marsh boys to start breaking into local houses instead, that they chose our house first. And perhaps it should not have been a surprise, when they woke us with their unlucky loud feet and their unlucky larynxes, which had not been granted the ability to whisper, that my father would not want to call the police as my mother suggested but chose, instead, to try and reason with the Marshes, and that the oldest son, terrified by my father’s sudden appearance on the stairs, would pull out a gun and shoot our deaf old golden retriever, Nell, who was too busy begging for food at my father’s side to notice the intruders.
By the time the Marsh boys ran out, my mother and brother and I were at the upstairs landing. We could see Nell’s body, which had slid down the stairs, leaving a trail of blood. We saw my father kneeling over her, his hands splayed in front of him like he was waiting for them to do something. I stared at the air he held and wished it would transform, into a rock, or gun—anything to give him direction.
“Max!” my mother shouted. “Max, you fucker! You fucker!” She leapt down the stairs and started slapping my father’s head, too gentle to hurt him but hard enough that I was scared. My mother was not a woman who shouted or slapped. I did not know then that she had grown to hate my father’s heroism long before this night, that she had let it go on only because she knew it was his way of apologizing—for his luck, for being a Jew in a place where Jews didn’t belong, for whatever million other things I still don’t understand. She knew apologies pretend to be tender but possess a desperate force. “You fucker you fucker you fucker,” she spat, then she looked up at us, standing there, and cried, “Look at your children! Look at your children, Max!”
But he couldn’t. For what seemed like minutes, except for his right eye, my father didn’t move. My mother pointed a shaking finger at us, and my father did not follow it. He had already gone away from us—I knew this as a child does, simply, certainly—and I remember seeing myself then, for the first time really thinking about how I looked, a nine-year-old girl in a long, ripped No Nukes T-shirt standing next to my seven-year-old brother in his Batman pajamas. I felt every inch of my skin—goose bumps on my shins, warm pricks against my chest—as if my nerves were being played like strings. I felt my body as a thing that might make my father look up, but I had no idea what to do with it and so I stood there shifting from leg to leg, resisting the urge to lift my shirt and wipe the tears off my face, because I didn’t want to be crying, and because I wasn’t wearing any underpants.
Finally, my father gathered Nell into his arms, stood, and walked out through the door the Marsh boys had left open. The next morning we saw a tamped-down rubble of dirt under the big maple. The carpet on the stairs had been ripped up. Our father had left for work. Our mother stood at the kitchen counter, two school lunches neatly packed beside her, circling pet ads in the classifieds.
For a short while, my parents fought each other. They did it at night, as if the bitterness might blend in better that way, as if the dark that surrounded our house might thicken its walls. My brother and I never spoke of it, but his bedroom was even closer to theirs than mine and I suspect he heard everything I did. They argued in steady, quiet tones which sounded similar, even agreeable, almost like dolphins conversing on an underwater tape, until you listened closely. Our mother wanted to press charges against the Marsh boys. She said they’d wanted to shoot my father, not Nell, and that they might return.
“They will not,” my father said. “They were afraid. I saw it in their faces.”
“You see everything in every face.”
“They did not mean to do us harm.”
“What do you think they meant?”
She didn’t give him time to answer. “What do you think you look like to the world? A saint? Saint Mordechai?”
“I’m just a man. We’re all just men—”
“No one likes saints.”
Eventually, my mother won a security system for the house. “Mistrust breeds mistrust,” warned my father the night he relented. His condition was that she not mention the Marsh incident to anyone. My mother shouted then: a growling, sky-bound, wordless shout that grew until it seemed she might break, then spun into a little wail and stopped.
That was the last argument I remember. The next night was quiet, and the night after that. I was relieved, at first, but soon I realized that something worse had happened. The fights had left behind a wake of fear, and fear of fear, and the silence that accompanies these wildernesses. We had more to fear than the Marsh boys now. My father was not pure, my mother was not happy, and neither of these facts, it had turned out, was containable. Better, then, to shut up. Better to become the people who kept to themselves, the ones my father had always pitied.
Soon, we had another dog, a mutt my brother named Robin and tried to ride. I was older so my mother gave me the chance to name it first, but I found that I had no ideas—I was as emptied out as the air outside our house. That was another realm of silence I was just beginning to comprehend. Apart from the jays who stayed all winter, or the tallest pines cracking when the wind picked up, there was nothing at all to hear. Snow fell and the silence grew layers. My father tried to install new carpet, but he was no better at measuring than he was with a hammer and my mother wound up doing it herself. I remember the smell of that carpet roll filling the house, its plastic intoxication crying smile, smile, and the mute, mocking trance it fell into once it was tacked to the stairs.
The ladybugs were breeding in the walls again, like every year, showing up soundless between the storm windows and glass, emerging onto curtains, too weak to do anything but flit and tumble. As usual, most of them died, their shells faded and shrunk into papery hollows. They died everywhere, on the nest of a dirty sock, the lip of my desk drawer, the exact center of my pillow, desiccated and weightless. They had nothing to say. I stopped carrying them outside as I once had, then I stopped even carrying them to the trash. I lay down on them. I woke with them.
My father stayed home after dinner now. The tall slope of his forehead gullied into shadows. He sat next to the fire and pretended to read, though I would see, in passing, his unblinking eye on the flames. Early on, a couple neighbors called to check on him—“Haven’t seen his car go by”—but it didn’t take long for them to stop. Many of their families had lived in the neighborhood for centuries before my father came. They had never needed him, he had simply been there. He was like the highway sign for our exit off route 128 that disappeared one day and was never replaced because no one had looked at it anymore anyway.
I was in fourth grade and had a couple friends, but they had started not to like me. They didn’t trust my silence, and it bored them, and I had always been a pain to play with besides because I lived so far from the center of town. I saw them only at school now, in the cafeteria or on the playground, and they looked at me gently and faced slightly away, like children do when they are just learning how to be not entirely honest. I wanted to tell them what had happened, but even my mother was not allowed to do that. So one Saturday a few months after Nell was shot, when I saw Biddy Marsh slogging up our muddy driveway, her whole skinny body pitched forward with a weight she was dragging, her fists up by one ear holding a rope, I felt a kind of promise in my throat. I stood out on the front porch and waited. Spring was making every smell big, the mud minerals, the mint of tree bark, my shampoo. I was glad that I’d showered and combed the ladybug scraps out of my hair that morning.
“Hey.” Biddy’s voice was already old, deep and run through with rasp. She was a year behind me and went to school so infrequently I’d never seen her up close. She had a small nose and round pale cheeks and black hair with a chunk of purple in her bangs. She spoke the same hard way she’d walked up the drive, locking her eyes on mine, a dare. Her eyes were nearly as dark as her hair. “I brought you something,” she said, and stepped aside. Behind her was a wire cage, and in it, the fattest raccoon I had ever seen. “It’s not a dog,” Biddy said, “but we’ve had her for years, she won’t hurt you. I wanted to bring her sooner, but everyone got sick so they were always home. They wouldn’t want me giving her away.”
The raccoon looked up at Biddy with its dark mask. Biddy looked at me, waiting. I didn’t know where to start. Who are you? What happens in your house? What makes you strong enough that you could drag that thing all the way here?
The raccoon was standing now, stretching. Claws the color of dirty picnic forks extended from its paws, then receded.
“How do you know it’s a girl?” I asked.
“I just do,” said Biddy.
“How’d you get it?”
“My brothers trapped her.” Biddy squatted by the cage. She reached a hand in, and the raccoon pushed its head into her palm. “I’m sorry about your dog,” she said. “So you have to take her. Her name is Filthy.” Biddy’s voice turned high, as if imitating an adult talking to a child. “Right, Filthy? Isn’t that right? Aren’t you going to make a good pet for Julie?”
I was honored that Biddy knew my name. The raccoon pushed itself forward, nudging her hand down its gray shoulders, and I started to bend over, to feel if its fur was wiry or soft—then I heard footsteps. I scuffed my feet against the porch, trying to cover up the sound, hoping my father was just going to the kitchen for a glass of water and that he would take it back to his chair. I liked that Biddy seemed to think I was alone, that she was offering her gift to me, that I was enough. My mother and brother were at a soccer game. They’d brought the new dog with them, thankfully; I didn’t want Biddy to think we were ungrateful.
“What do you feed it?” I asked.
“Everything,” Biddy said. “Anything you don’t want, she’ll eat.”
I pictured the Marsh clan around a dinner table, yelling at each other, the raccoon running between their feet. I wanted Filthy.
“What’s this?” My father stepped onto the porch, shielding his eyes against the light.
“Biddy? What’s going on?”
Something strange had happened in his voice—a gurgling crack—and I remembered all the times he’d taken Biddy home. He thought she’d come looking for him, I realized, wanting his help. He thought she would be his redemption. For months he’d barely looked at me. Now he would take her home again, and leave me alone.
“Her name’s Filthy, she’s a pet, Biddy’s giving her to us,” I gushed. “Biddy’s sorry about her brothers, she wants us to take the raccoon, instead of Nell, see? Filthy eats anything. We wouldn’t even have to buy food.”
Another parent would have laughed; the idea was ridiculous, unworkable. But my father was simply disappointed. “Oh,” he said. “That’s very kind of you, Biddy. But we don’t need your raccoon. You should keep it. It’s your pet.”
“I want you to have her,” said Biddy.
“We can’t take it.” His voice was withering. “You keep your raccoon. You need it.”
“We don’t deserve her.”
“That’s not true, Biddy. You mustn’t let yourself believe that.”
Biddy’s black eyes sharpened, her chin showed its edge. “You have to take her.” My father paused, breathing deeply—so deeply I could hear his lungs, like dry
skin on paper. “Let me give you a ride home,” he said. “We’ll put your raccoon in the back seat. We’ll get you home.”
Biddy grasped the latch on the cage and scowled. “If you don’t take her, I’ll let her go.”
I could feel my father next to me, his blood pulsing faster than it had in months, his tall, useless body searching for a way to dodge her charity. I wanted to get down on my knees and beg him to let me keep Filthy. But I guessed he would barely notice. My father, I knew, could not take the raccoon any more than Biddy could keep it.
Finally, he unfisted his hands. He spoke in low, measured syllables. “Your brothers will be very angry,” he said. “Just like they’ll be angry if you give it to us. You don’t want your brothers angry, do you, Biddy? You know better than anyone what they can do.”
I had never heard my father threaten anyone—not directly, at least, not in a way I recognized. For an instant, I felt a strange relief; it was as if he’d finally realized that he held the rock or the gun, as if he was admitting that he’d wanted them all along. My whole body flinched as Biddy threw open the cage.
The silence made its own sound, a timeless, halcyon buzz. Filthy came to the edge of the cage, sniffed Biddy, then turned back around and curled into a ball. Biddy reached in and grabbed a handful of fur. “Get!” she shouted. “Get out of here!” She lifted Filthy off the ground, but the raccoon refused to plant its legs. Biddy stood and tilted the cage, but Filthy held on easily with her claws. “Go now, you shit!” Biddy was starting to cry now. She looked up at me, begging and venomous, and when I said nothing, she glared at my father. “Who are you to stop me?” she shouted. “Who are you with your eye always flapping? You’re nothing but a weird old Jew!”
I looked at my father. I wanted him to yell back, to explain his eye, explain something. But my father looked as if someone had just touched him for the first time. His eyes closed. His brow was a great rippling continent. I thought he might fall down on the porch. Then he turned, walked into the house, and shut the door.
Biddy didn’t look at me now. She was breathing hard, shaking Filthy’s cage. Her shouts hung in the air. She was eight years old but already full up and through with fear and meanness and being told what to do.
“Take your stupid raccoon,” I said.
And she did. Biddy closed the cage door, picked up her rope, and started back down our driveway, leaning into her haul like there was a great wind coming at her. I watched until she and the cage had disappeared around the first bend, then I kept watching. There was no wind. All I heard was the echo of the cage dragging across the mud, and the finches attacking the eaves above my head, picking at the ladybugs that were trying to get back out, or in—they never seemed to know.
