The Monster’s Corner: Stories Through Inhuman Eyes

RUE by Lauren Groff

THE GIRLS SLIP IN AT NIGHT. I see the ravages in the morning, the bald patches in the tansy, the yarrow mowed in swaths. Vervain and pennyroyal, feverfew and sage, ginger, lemon balm, parsley. A tincture or tisane of any of these, and the white bellies of the girls stay smooth, scrubbed from inside out. It is true: Secretly I planned my gardens for these girls. After the Ministers seized the country and remade it in God’s name, I could be hanged in the gibbets for my garden; I could be laser-flayed for the powers of my plants. But the girls only talk between themselves, and steal, and in any case they are too quick for me. They watch my house for movement, or listen for the slide and drag of my bad leg. When I know they are there, I stand and clump over to the door as quietly as I can. But in the sudden crack of light that falls into the garden, a girl is always leaping, a white doe, over my stone fence.

Tonight, I hear another one out in the darkness. I pause the movie I am watching and move silently through the house and onto the warm lawn. I can come close enough to catch this girl’s arm: She is either stupid or her ears are too stuffed with panic to hear. She spins under my grip and I see her broad, triangular face turned to dumpling in terror, the pillowcase in her hands stuffed with rue.

I know this girl. She is the long-legged one who breathes her wet breath onto her desk. Then she makes a brush of her red hair and paints the moisture into designs that fade as she draws them. The boys find this behavior mysterious. I find it gross. Her essais in my class are trite beyond belief, not to mention ungrammatical.

I know why you’re here, I say.

She blinks and her eyes fill with tears. Two waning moons are reflected in them. Don’t tell, she whispers. Don’t call the Ministers.

I shrug: I must, I say. It is illegal, what you are doing. You will go to prison and maybe die there. Or one of the work camps, if you are lucky.

Oh, she says. Madame. Please. I’ll do anything.

She looks me deep in the face, trying not to look away. Anything, she says, and reaches out a hand and makes an attempt at a caress. I watch her hand near my bicep and falter, then fade away. She can’t look at me.

Not that, I say, drily. But there is something.

On her face, the hope flares briefly like an ember. Then, under the wash of my words, under all that I require of her, the hope extinguishes. She hangs her head. When she nods, the moons fall from her eyes and break on the ground.

Days pass, and my own waiting grows inside me, a pulsing, moving creature in this desiccated body. All day in my classes, I read from Perrault, leaving a crumb-trail, but not a soul is clever enough to pick it up. I show them films I have found online, À bout de souffle, Les enfants du paradis. Blasphemy is not blasphemy, it seems, when it is in another language. Also, the students don’t understand enough to complain.

When the bell rings, during the interclass prayers, I see how the red-haired girl bulges against her uniform. She notices I notice and startles and pales.

Now I wait for her in a thigh-high sea of Queen Anne’s lace in the dark. Here she trudges, at last, through the gate. If she thinks I don’t notice the flash of mute stubbornness when I reach out to guide her into my house, the pure donkey of her, she is wrong.

The dogs come as I had thought they would, but I had washed her trace from my path with the hose, then dragged her dress full of rocks down to the river and threw it in. All day, we hear the poor dogs bay on the riverbank, and when the Village Ministers come knocking at the door, the girl is safely hidden in the garret, and I am fishing my underclothes from a great pot on the stove.

It is forbidden for men to look upon a woman’s private things, not that the Ministers would want to see my translucent monstrosities. With some pleasantries in French that they only half-remember from my classes and say to please me, they bow away.

At last, the girl and I are alone.

I carry on at the school as if all were normal, as if the girl weren’t at home swelling in my absence. I make the chicory coffee, because I am the one who does it best, and listen to the bloodless criticism of the government in the grunts of the other teachers when they read the State News before First Prayer. Too frightened to make more definite criticisms, too weak to hold it all inside, these pasty, pale creatures call themselves my colleagues.

I carry on. Un, deux, trois for the elementary, Demain, dès I’aube for the high school. A subtext of gossip goes on under my nose. When one is ugly enough, one can feign ignorance with great success. I hear the whispered theories about the girl, who in her absence has become an unlikely Jeanne d’Arc: They say she has rebelled against the Ministers’ strict regime, has fled into the mountains with the anarchists. One can almost see her as these hopeful children do, rushing down from the mountains, swords in both hands, her long red hair licking in the wind. Not even the boys who knew the depth of her badness suspect where she truly is: on my couch watching Gospel shows on the television, eating my rich egg custards, my baked bread, my raspberry jam.

Day and night, the blinds are closed, the house set far from the road. And yet one day I come home to hear her high, clear soprano dazzling all the way to the gate, and clump inside, hiss and spit at her like an angry cat.

After that, she is silent. Her skin, unsunned, turns mushroom. Only her long red hair gleams, still glorious, in the darkness of the house.

I hate you, she whispers over my roasted chicken one night.

I pretend to not hear.

I hate you, she says, louder.

Such gratitude. I slap her.

She holds her hand to her cheek, bloodred in the shape of my hand.

Without me, I say, the Ministers would have you. And where would you be? As soon as the baby came, you’d be dead.

No, she says. I’d have made the boy marry me. I’d be free.

I smile at her, not unkindly. Which boy? I say, and the rest of her skin goes as ruddy as her cheek and she holds my eye for one beat, two. Then she bows her head and salts her meat with her tears.

The time comes. I must gag the girl to keep her screams inside her. I call in sick to work, pinching my nose to pretend sinus trouble, and the secretary is startled: Twenty-five years, and I have never been ill once. And then the bustling, the kettles of hot water, the sheets torn to stanch the blood, the rust spreading across my mattress. I play my parents’ Chopin records loudly to cover the girl’s muffled pain. All day and into the night, we struggle, the girl and I, Jacob and angel. Sweat paints the air.

The girl rips, it seems, in two, and the baby, a waxy livid thing, bawls in my hands. It is a girl with fat folds and curlicues of red hair all over her body. Her eyes open and they are chips of the sky.

I feel myself floating out of the twisted body I call my own when I look at this creature, more beautiful than anything I have seen. This child of mine.

When I look up, dazzled, the girl on the bed is reaching out her arms, her face hungry. Please, she says, and I put the child in her arms.

Oh, she says. Oh, she’s so beautiful. The infant nuzzles her breast, slides her little face to the nipple, tries to latch on. The girl says, weeping, Oh, my baby.

I snatch the infant back. My baby, I say.

No, the girl says. The donkey has risen again in her, kicking, and surprises me. She sits up against the headboard, though it clearly pains her, though she has not stopped bleeding, and levels a finger at me. Give my baby to me.

A demand? I say. You are in no position to demand. All I have to do is call the Ministers, and off you go. You wouldn’t survive a year in the work camps, you know.

The girl’s stupid face has turned into a fist. Whatever the Ministers do to me, she says softly, will be nothing compared to what they will do to you. For a long, horrible moment, this gives me pause. Even idiots, at times, can stumble on truth.

But. One could never have survived the purges I survived in my own youth without being canny. Survived; not unharmed. My leg twisted when they sliced my Achilles tendon, my womb twisted with forced use. I scrubbed potatoes in the rebels’ kitchen, reciting poetry in Romance languages, keeping fresh my Ph.D. in comparative literature. I spent the bad nights on my back translating the poems into English. Such ugliness as mine has been earned.

I played along with the girl. For two days, as she became peremptory, demanding food and help, picking up the telephone threateningly when I even neared the baby, I pretended fear. And then on the third night, I slipped some ground passionflower into her tea. Passionflower, with its variegated petals, with its good, black heart. Her face closed like a letter. She slept and slept.

The infant also drank the passionflower in her mother’s milk and slept for over twenty-four hours. This was fortunate, for by the time the child woke I had ridden my bicycle through the night and the day and the night again, with her bound to my back like an extra hump. By the time she began to stir, I had abandoned the bicycle and was on the train.

I had made a giant bottle in the station, and as the infant was struggling to wake, I put the nipple in her mouth and she sucked and sucked her hunger away.

Now she looks at me, sated, clean, lulled by the quick flash of the very fast train over the countryside, and I smile down to her. I imagine her mother in my bed, just now awakening in her own pain and mess, slowly lifting a hand to her lovely pale face. She winces, I imagine, at the light through the curtains, parted for the first time in so many months. The sun falls on the empty bassinet beside her, and the silence in the house becomes an accusation.

A man in a business suit looks at us over today’s State News and smiles. Grandmother? he asks, and I smile back. Godmother, I say. He says the required response: Blessed be the Godparents, though there is a glint of interest when he looks at my twisted old body. Godparents are normally young and hale, able to raise the children if anything goes awry for the parents, if they are denounced and deported, if the Ministers find deviance in them at all.

I must be the most unlikely Godmother this man has ever seen.

I am the most unlikely mother, I know, that’s a certainty.

And so we slide, quiet and calm, into the city by the sea.

The afternoon of our arrival I buy a house on a path lost through thickets of dune-weeds, a high-gabled antique with wind-battered gray boards. The Realtor tells me hesitantly that the house is so cheap because it has been on the market for years and years, and has been on the market because it is haunted. I laugh, and the baby makes a little birdlike coo in response.

Ghosts, I say, do not bother us.

It is isolated, she says. Five miles from any store.

We require no company, I say.

Where the house is, the ocean is too rough against the rocks to sunbathe, she says. And even if you were to go swimming, the riptide will take you out to sea in a blink.

Do I look like the beachgoing type? I snap bitterly, and her eyes slant away. Then I say more calmly, We will take it.

If the Realtor is surprised to see me count out the money bill by bill, she doesn’t show it. She hands me the key. I will have a boy bicycle groceries up to you today, she offers. It is a courtesy we show to all our buyers. I smile at her, and take a few minutes to write out a list of things I need. Her eyes widen when she scans it, but she swallows and nods, and I can feel her relief cracking when I finally leave the room.

The boys arrive after I have opened all the doors and windows and the strong sea wind is carrying the dust out the door. I have scrubbed the kitchen tiles to their original white, and have swept and washed the bedroom where the baby and I will sleep.

The seven boys stop their bicycles, exhausted, at the porch. They carry up the wooden crates and put them in the hall, their sweat dripping on the floorboards. The baby gurgles, and one handsome blond boy with eyes the pale of sage stops to smile into her face. I tip them all generously, and they ride off into the dusk, down the hill again into the city.

I close the door. I intend for those boys to be the last males ever to step foot into this house. I say it aloud to say it at all. My words hang in the air, then chime back to me, silvery and quick. The ghosts approve.

After a quick supper and bottle, I take the baby out to the back of the house, where the garden ends at a cliff’s edge. Stars pulse over the last red line of sunset. I hold the child up to show her all this vast beauty, to let her feel the night wind, full of spray.

This is happiness, my girl, I say aloud, and find myself laughing for the first time in years. The baby sticks out her tiny pink tongue and licks the salt from the air.

It takes until the baby’s head stops wobbling on her neck for her name to come to me. When it does, I cannot believe it took so long. The herbs her mother was plucking that night when I stopped her in my garden; what I feel growing furiously in the world we left behind, a building storm of the birth-mother’s wrath and sorrow.

Rue, I say, smiling. A cousin of rouge; my well-chosen road. I say to the baby who blinks and focuses, My daughter, your name is Rue.

I scan the State News every day until I find the notice about a runaway returned home to our old village; I think of Rue’s mother’s body slowly healing in my cottage, the girl eating my food until there was no more to eat, then waiting it out another week until hunger drove her home.

It goes on to say that she was in the public stocks for a week; and I think of the neck-polished wood on the little dais in front of the Library. How it would smell of accumulated sweat and shame and rain in the pores of the wood.

She will be sent to a work camp for a few months, it says, in light of the complications of her case; and I think of the girl cracking rocks, picturing each rock my ravished face.

I shiver. But then I put my hand on the baby’s back. Her breathing, in and out, calms me. It plays between the sound of the waves, echo or source: and who would be so foolish as to try to tell the difference?

The wind turns icy. My bicycle slips over the road under my body when I try to ride it, and I fear for Rue in the little seat behind me. I stay in the house and order groceries by telephone. When the man puts them on the porch, he picks up an envelope of cash. It is such a smooth transaction, and I have come to fear the glances of strangers so, the feeling that everywhere I turn in the world I have Rue’s mother’s eyes upon me, that I continue the practice into the spring when the winds quiet and bring the sweet perfumes of washed-up seaweed and cherries in bloom. I stop taking the State News. If the world hums and clanks and grinds its machinery elsewhere, I don’t know or care. The baby grows, sits up, grins. Her hair on her skin is a smooth, soft pelt that I love to rub my cheek against. Her hair on her head is the color of the world seen through a glass of wine. I speak to her in French and this is the language she first learns. She speaks falteringly, then lispingly, then clearly. Maman, she calls me. The white kitten that showed up on our porch hungry one morning, its pink mouth open in a jagged bawl, she names Milou after a comic-book dog. Soon, she is chattering away in the pretty dresses I make for her, my little French canary. Like this, the old language becomes another wall I build between the world and my daughter, keeping us apart.

Some days my daughter is mermaid, some days she is water. We walk slowly beyond our rocks to a calmer stretch of the beach and she crouches beside the tide pools, watching the creatures within. Regarde, maman, she cries, and points her finger down. I see the dazzle of the miniature world, the urchins the color of pumpkin flesh. The translucent crabs threaten their claws at my girl like tiny skeptics damning the gods. Her own head is framed against the wintry sky, reframed within its thick crowns of red braid. My old blood warms, watching her, my little girl in tights, her jacket clenched over frozen hands. So beautiful, with her mother’s face and hair, and my quickness in her eyes.

Our days are sweet and short. She falls asleep in my lap, as I read to her. And underlining it all is the other mother’s fury, which I feel ever nearing, ever darkening, defining our life the way shadows give definition to the day. That she will come is the one thing I know about the future, and the only thing I fear.

Seasons pass, however, with the calm of heaven. We are fond company, the cat on our laps, the good meals in our bellies culled, mostly, from our own beautiful garden, the books delivered and devoured. As we listen to the surf each night, I comb out her hair. Sometimes we play with it: It becomes tent, and I crouch beneath its scalpy smell; I heap it over my face and it becomes my own hair and we laugh at how ridiculous it is against my wizened face; I bind my wrists with it, and it takes her some work to free me. She is gentle and sleeps deeply. Raised on sweets and sea air and literature, Rue walks through dreams the way she walks through rooms.

But today she crouches in last year’s swimsuit, peering again at her old friends in the tide pool, and I see how tight the suit has become on her body. She is bigger, her hips and chest, her lips suddenly abloom. I stand, agitated, shaking, saying, Oh-oh-oh. She runs over as fast as she can: Her hair is so very heavy she can’t run fast or far, normally, but she does her best to help me. She asks if I am cold, and I nod, yes I am, mute. There is something wrong with my body. I cannot stop shaking; my lips can’t form words.

Rue murmurs as she helps me over the suddenly steep and long path to home, and brushes my own sparse hair from my face until I am soothed asleep.

Something has shifted. My leg clumps harder on the ground, and words come with more difficulty into my mouth. Rue takes the harder cleaning, though it must hurt her neck with all its heavy hair to support when she scrubs the floors the way she scrubs, with low grunts that remind me of something I’d rather not remember. Once in a while, I see her hair resting on the windowsills, as if to quietly steal some relief. I tell her what we need and she writes the lists: My hands shake so, my writing is illegible. I still call the orders in, and she listens with a strange look on her face: I have never taught her English, and before was careful to keep her from hearing this other language. But when it is too difficult, and the man on the other end loses his patience, Rue takes the telephone from my hand and in her lisping accent tries hard to replicate my sounds. She does well, and I am proud, but there are some comical mistakes. Instead of cherries one day, we get cheese; instead of batteries, we get tweezers. But one thing I never, never let her do is to take the envelope of money out to the porch. No matter how long it takes me and how many breaks I must take on the way to the door, I am the one to risk the delivery boy. I keep my own treasure tucked away inside, as she was tucked inside me those many years before I had ever met her, or her mother, my tiny seed waiting for the right moment to bloom.

It is somehow winter again. I stand in the widow’s walk as the morning dawns on the sea and watch a man cupping a cigarette in his palm beyond the dunes. What hair he has is golden, but there’s a pink patch of bald at its heart. Yet he is not old. His limbs are vigorous when he shakes them, and he wears the droopy clothing the delivery boys all wear these days. He scans the windows of the house carefully, so carefully that I in my black dress behind the balustrade above the house am camouflaged, no more than a mushroom. Even from here I can see his eyes are the soft green of sage. He flicks his cigarette into the weeds. Idiot, I mutter: He could start a fire. He doesn’t: At least not one I can see. He sees nothing, and the wind grows colder and he hefts one leg over the seat of his bicycle and glides away.

My limbs are full of furious energy: I have told Rue that we will make ourselves an entire set of all-new clothing, how fun! We are ripping the seams of our frocks, fairy trifles based on patterns from my faraway childhood, all swim camps and cotillions and unremembered Easter dresses. She is laughing as she rips, the excitement of destroying filling her like bloodlust. I need to keep her occupied, away from the windows; I need to think. She has rickrack in her hair and grosgrain looped over her shoulders, and even like this, silly and childish, she is a goddess.

We are laughing. Yet I smell smoke. By the time I make it to the window, however, the boy or man, or the boy-man, of the outside is gone, and only my fury remains.

Rue is so enraptured with our project that I never see her go outside, even once, even when I plead to go to our swimming hole. But now she sits frowning over a skirt she is making, and when I look at it, I feel the frown begin to spread across my face, too. There are embroidered holes in the sides and frills in the front. It is a most ugly and excessive article, an indecent thing to even look upon.

I demand to know where she could have gotten this idea: I do know that my girl is dreamy, but there is no fire to her imagination to make it dazzle in such a direction.

Rue blushes, but shrugs. She shows me a magazine she says she found under the apple tree outside, and in it I see such horrid concoctions, such stupid, bright, strange-looking people, such horrible words that if the Ministers saw it, they would kill on sight whoever was reading it. I throw the magazine down as if it has bitten me. Rue looks at me sideways and asks what it is about the world outside that I hate so. I want to tell her about everything: the rebels who methodically destroyed me, the Ministers who imprisoned us in rules, and my own old and twisted body, my hideous jail. But I look at my daughter, whom I have worked hard to keep innocent of such things, and bite my tongue. I kiss her on the musky part of her hair, and take the magazine outside and hurl it off the cliffs, into the pounding sea.

I am extra vigilant. With great effort from my body, I wait until Rue sleeps at night and steal down the hill. With rocks I lug in a wheelbarrow, I divert a stream so the path is cut off, and the delivery boys must abandon their bikes on the far side and walk the last uphill mile in wet shoes. I can hear the slop of their footsteps from afar and am ready for them far from the house, holding their pay with my trembling hand.

At night, I hold Rue’s head in my lap while she reads her novel, and scratch her warm scalp, and watch her. Finally she puts down her book and sighs and asks what the matter is.

I cannot help myself. I watch myself lose control, I watch in horror as I blurt in French: If you left me, I would die, I say.

It is not a consolation that she sits up, her whole face an Ô. Under her breath she asks me where she would go. And now I see it and my dismay makes me ill: A spark from my own fevered brain has just landed in her, is now lighting her up.

Once her face was a window and now it is a door, always slamming shut. She disappears, and when I call for her in the old house, the ghosts maaa like old sheep in reply, taunting me. Mornings, she smells of grass and night. I lock her into her room, and she takes off the hinges with a screwdriver. I tempt her inside with cakes and creams, but she eats the salty, hard plums from the trees out back with a twist on her lips. I cry, but she only watches me, gone hard.

I blink, it seems, and Rue is gone. The house is decrepit without her, the windows shattering one by one under the gusts, the roof shedding shingles the way I am shedding teeth.

I saw her coming, the original mother, but never knew which direction she would take: I had feared the dark and angry force of her all these years, building with every day we were distant, one sudden day erupting. I imagined her stealing my daughter from me the way I first stole her away, carrying her bodily away. I had imagined the mother marching up the hill, grown mighty with age, and carrying the girl off like a wee infant in her arms, trailing Rue’s braids in the dust.

I always thought that I would grab on to those braids and ride them, down the hill, into the town, I would tie myself into them so that when they went away in the train, they would float me like a kite behind them.

But I have known for decades that the mother is probably dead. Has been, for some time. And I should have guessed that where the mother would show herself would be in my daughter’s blood. The one thing I couldn’t give her. Though I would have. I would.

Those nights when poetry would not do it for me, I lay in the pounding of my pain, under the cold rain in the mountains as the men came in, and every moment I made myself blank, and promised myself a daughter.

And now I kneel in the little nest of braids shorn from my daughter’s head with her own hands, and wait for this old, crooked body to leave me be.

I wait. In my hunger, in my thirst, the courtship rises to me with the vividness of childhood dreams. I see it as it must have happened: the first words as he emerged from behind the pear tree, that strange beast, this man. He was unintelligible to the girl, and the sounds in his mouth put such fear in her heart, all she could do, this first time, was run. All night, though, he kept stepping from behind the pear, and by the morning her body trembled with wanting to see him. Then, slower, he coaxed her out. They met at night. It took no time. One kiss and Rue’s mother awoke in her blood, the sexy young beast. It didn’t matter that those two children didn’t understand one another. Anyone would look upon my Rue and want her. And girls like Rue — too trusting, too pulsing, too unlike me in the end — never really need words in this grand world, at all.

I wait for the house to topple off the cliff, the defeated house with its defeated ghosts. And I see her in the world, shorn, feeling so light, freed from her hair, her battered house, her heavy old me, that she feels weightless in her beautiful young body, as if with one leap she would flutter into the air, my daughter turned bird.