Terrarium Read online

  Terrarium

  TERRARIUM

  Copyright © 2018 by Valerie Trueblood

  First hardcover edition: 2018

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American

  Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to publications in which some of these stories first appeared:

  “The Finding,” The Seattle Review; “The Magic Pebble,” One Story; “The Llamas,” Thresholds (UK); “His Rank,” “Cherries,” and “Dogs of War and Peace,” Southword (Ireland); “Crisco,” Glimmer Train; “The Tamarins,”

  “Forced Entry,” and “Flag of the Nude” (as “The Speech”), The Northwest Review; “The Bull,” The Saturday Evening Post.

  The passage about trees read aloud by Diana in “Beloved, You Looked into Space” is from Donald Culross Peattie’s A Natural History of North American Trees, vol. 2 © 1953 by Houghton Mifflin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Trueblood, Valerie, author.

  Title: Terrarium : new and selected stories / Valerie Trueblood.

  Description: Berkeley, CA : Counterpoint Press, [2018]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018001954 | ISBN 9781640090736 | eISBN 9781640090743

  Classification: LCC PS3620.R84 A6 2018 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001954

  Jacket designed by Donna Cheng

  Book designed by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  For Jessica Papin

  Contents

  From Marry or Burn (2010)

  Invisible River

  Choice in Dreams

  Trespass

  Phantom Father

  Beloved, You Looked into Space

  From Search Party: Stories of Rescue (2013)

  The Finding

  The Magic Pebble

  The Llamas

  The Stabbed Boy

  Later or Never

  Who Is He That Will Harm You?

  From Criminals: Love Stories (2016)

  Bride of the Black Duck

  His Rank

  Astride

  Da Capo

  You Would Be Good

  Sleepover

  Novel of Rose

  Criminals

  Terrarium (2018)

  1. Cherries

  Aliens: Saving the Child

  Helen of Troy

  Dogs of War and Peace

  Book Review

  The Witch

  Crisco

  Cherries

  What We Found

  2. The Infralife

  The Tamarins

  Ghost

  Stay

  Tarp

  Two Dogs

  3. Earthly Love

  Hero

  Afternoon Tango

  Two Birthdays

  Whiteout

  Forced Entry

  Seurat

  Raccoon

  The Flag of the Nude

  The Bull

  Orogeny

  4. What We Found

  Where We Grew Up

  Harvest

  Visiting Revivalist

  The Girl Who Told

  Advice

  Freeway Rescues

  River Boat

  Terrarium

  From

  Marry or Burn (2010)

  Invisible River

  1

  A woman stands at the mirror in a train station bathroom. Next to her a dark-haired girl is blending the shadow on one eyelid with a fingertip, while the woman marvels at the black pressed-down lashes, thick as a pocket flap. When both lids are done the girl pulls down her lower lip with two dark nails, perfect ovals, and examines her teeth and gums. Now she’s making an O of her lips to cream on red lipstick, furiously round and round, not pausing at the corners. All right, all right, thinks the woman, you’re a beauty but that’s too much lipstick. The girl goes on a little longer and then without blotting her lips drops the lipstick in a little velvet bag and roughly cinches it tight.

  She grabs the handle of a black leather suitcase on scuffed wheels, with a strap around it, and drawing her black eyebrows together yanks it on one wheel through the door a fat girl coming in holds open for her. Whoever’s out there waiting for you, the woman at the mirror thinks, he’s in for it. Or maybe there’s nobody. Maybe that’s the problem.

  Of course nobody paces outside the door waiting for her, either. What train would she board, to what destination would someone accompany her, a woman of fifty-some who has laid a big brown purse in a puddle on the counter and seems content to daydream in a public bathroom? Finally she takes her hands out from under the water and pulls down the groaning belt of towel. She looks at herself. Despite her open stare, she didn’t get a fraction of a glance from the girl. She isn’t old. If she were, a quick smile might easily have passed both ways between them, a small bow across time. She is unsure, herself, about applying lipstick, which may in this light have the effect of a label stuck on an orange, but eventually she does it anyway.

  Unlike the girl, whose big eyes were red-rimmed under the makeup, she is happy. Or very close. She sees the possibility.

  2

  Groundless near-happiness doesn’t do anything for the Reader, if she comes across it on the page. She is looking for something with an edge.

  The Reader is blond, healthily pretty in a laissez-faire way. At first glance her clothes look casual too, but they are carefully chosen. Two years in the city have taught her where to find clothes, which colors are hers, how to minimize her breasts. Intelligence and determination have won her the job she holds, not her first by any means, despite her youth. Having worked on publications for years, ever since high school, she has a long résumé that belies her wide crooked smile and her accent. Those in the ranks above her rely on her to hear a certain range of notes, in particular the notes struck by some of the newer writers, and convey it to them in the way of someone quickly transposing a tune. Some of her enthusiasms make them scratch their heads. “Take a look at this,” they say. “What can I say, the Reader likes it.”

  When she has kicked off her shoes after work she stands on one foot with her knee on the painted tin cover of the radiator, leaning a shoulder on the glass. The sky narrows to a dark blue cone between buildings, with its tip in a river that can’t be seen from here. But she relaxes. It is close by: a river. Full against its banks and then walled in, moving heavily alongside the streets with its own slow purpose.

  The Reader grew up in a mining town with a river running the length of it. Until the age of twelve she lived in a house overlooking the river, which brought a shallow whitewater and a six-foot falls right into town. Two parents, three children, dogs, cats, trees, porch. Then her father died. After that she lived in several smaller houses, and finally, when her mother was getting into serious difficulties, an apartment above the café where her mother sometimes worked. No one called it a studio, it was one room, for just herself and her mother by then—her brothers were gone—and one cat. You couldn’t see the
river from the café but you could always hear it, hastening past the town where, with her mother, the Reader lived what she calls the sad part of her life. From time to time it rose out of its bed and flooded the town, drowning people’s goats and pets and occasionally people themselves, sucking them through culverts, upending their trailers and wallowing away with them before they could wade out to a rowboat—the peaceful golden-brown river that gave them fish and black soil and green vegetable gardens.

  Now she has made a second river her own, welcoming its tugs and barges, its measured progress into the heart of a city fit to be the destination of water.

  Yet Nature has not been banished here, as people in her hometown would claim; it haunts the city, especially in this season. Wet leaves plaster the sidewalks, some as big as the pockets of the yellow slicker she wears in defiance of all the city black. She springs down onto the yellow carpet every morning thinking, My wedding. Should she have included a flower girl, one of her nieces, to give more of an aisle-feeling to the space? The space—that’s what the hotel’s wedding consultant calls the long airy room where the wedding will take place. The same was true when she was looking for an apartment: everything, even the closet, was a space.

  She doesn’t miss houses with rooms, or anything else about the town she came from. Too much was known there. Even her mother is gone from the town, no longer on her stool in the café lounge late with the regulars and the two floozies and an occasional girl in overalls from the highway crew. Too much was seen in that town, too much gone over in stores and church circles and on the telephone. A widow didn’t go on and on in the sloppy condition permitted in the first weeks; a widow remarried or took an interest in the church or the lives of the next generation, or all three, ideally. To do otherwise, to let a bad habit get the better of you, to drink cheap wine for months on end, certainly to be picked up out of wet grass before dawn and have the snails pulled off you by your own child . . . to do these things was to imply that your loss had exceeded the losses of others. That your husband had been somehow superior. That you, yourself, had been uniquely struck down.

  The daughter, the Reader, was another story. In all likelihood people in town still speak of her, persist in expecting her. There, homecoming queens are remembered for a generation. But no one she would want to run into is there. Her brothers left early and never went back.

  She can call the brothers or not call them. Her boyfriend is on his way over. Her fiancé, now. Husband: sober word. But her boyfriend has nothing sober about him. He’s like a dog, she tells her friends, a dog in a movie. Everyone on the set is making a movie, but the dog is at a picnic, sniffing, peeing on the grass, called back again and again to flop down, relax. Rewarded for it, for lying there panting. The dog thinks the picnic is real. And it is real. It’s real when her boyfriend is around. That’s partly because he’s rich. The story of Midas is wrong, she thinks. The rich touch things to life. They think what they’re doing is real, and so it is. They don’t get stuck in the wet mud of was. Nothing had to be over, for people like her boyfriend, teased and admired for his appetites—too many green olives at the tapas bar, too much duck breast, too many girlfriends until she came along. True, new to the city he had gotten himself involved with girls who were not as easygoing as he. But he meant no one harm and his good nature always rescued him from these episodes, adventures on the way to her.

  At the thought of him, and filled with the promise of blue, early evening, she does stretches at the window. All day she has read, taken notes, typed short, courteous letters that will go out under signatures other than her own. The stack she has left to read before the honeymoon is on the scarred steamer trunk where she props her bare feet when she sits on the couch. One panel of the old chest bears a Cunard White Star label.

  It was a trunk she saw in an antique store, under a table. She knelt down, bumping her head, ran her hands over it, lifted the lid and saw it was full of moldy magazines. She could hardly breathe. She bought it.

  Just before that she had broken off with a man, a married man who had taken her with him to England on the QE2. He wasn’t rich but he knew how to do things like that. He gave her books and jewelry, a big dinner ring and pearls that had been in his family and should have gone to his daughters. She knows that now, though at the time she took the heavy pearl brooch from his hand carelessly, like a piece of fruit. And the fact that the big pearls were pears, spilling from a basket of gold, didn’t charm her. The intricate basketwork, the braided handle—she didn’t want these things out of a drawer in his house. She wanted him. “I bet this was your mother’s,” she said.

  “It was. She had it from her grandmother.”

  In a way she had won after all, shaken him to the point that although he had sworn not to, he still called her from time to time, a year and some months later, just to hear her voice. She talked to him. She could do that now. A man older than her own father would have been had he lived, tall and half bald like her handsome father.

  But certainly not, as her boyfriend claims, a father figure.

  She doesn’t hold it against her boyfriend that he can’t judge. Why should he be able to? That, he always says of her long affair, was a bad deal. But—this can’t be explained to him, ever—the disguise in which the older man moved, of someone unapproachable, trapped in his own power, the surprise of him when he rose up and showed himself, streaming some element of his hiding place, as if other men were logs and he a crocodile, that had had a charm almost fatal to her. Finally she shook free of it, just in time. She met someone who could soothe her, free her from her concentration on the charming, intent, eroded personality of the man, and from his body—though athletic and graceful—so capturable by hers, so quickly made tense and still. A body marked off into distinct regions, unlike hers, that has one surface like a heavy coat of paint. The dry skin of his face so unspringing-back, almost as if you could strip off patches of it by pulling, or leave fingerprints. The thin, dark, almost transparent skin around his eyes . . . maybe she would describe the skin as like the unwound cassette tape you saw for a while, shifting along the sidewalk or caught around the base of a fire hydrant. But she wouldn’t go on and on. “Thin skin, bluish,” she might write if she were the editor she intends to be, striking out lines of prose.

  There was a time when creases, baldness, a graying mustache were things that acted on her heart like a drawstring. Probably he was one of many men his age she saw around her now, now that her eyes were opened, men getting out of taxis, crossing lobbies, who might laughingly admit to each other that they were learning in secret, from someone like her, how to be adored.

  Thus also in the manuscripts she is reading: always the possibility that such a character, while feeling himself sad, his life-ardor waning, can be startled into explosive action. Especially with a guide—a Beatrice or a Tadzio. Maybe as he strides along the sidewalk with his hands in the pockets of his overcoat his heart is pounding from the cigarettes he can’t give up. Or from longing, mortally pounding. Maybe he has children who are almost grown, almost not his any more, with no interest in how wild he is inside. A crocodile, she called him. But not one of the “new” men, gratified by their ability to produce tears; no, his tears are real, his sad half-closed eye has fallen on her. But he won’t stay long, mired in this sort of love. He’ll saw the murky waters aside and swim away. Maybe the motor of his soul is idling with fast jerks, maybe he is sleepless with readiness for the new. In some scenarios he will burst out in another hemisphere, in Africa or Australia. Anything could happen to him. He may not know it. In plots of another kind, all that is needed is for someone who does know it to lay her hand on his and lead it to the new continent of herself.

  These possibilities are not the same thing as a romance.

  As for women: Often, the Reader says, it’s simply that they’re predictable. They’re embarking on this or that, lowering themselves into unfamiliar waters, testing their freedom. Behind them there’s always some ruin, some man
has ruined everything, and then they surmount the ruin. You have to be wary of this material, now there is so much of it. It would be better if somebody gave us a devoted wife. That would be something.

  So many ex-wives come streaming across her desk. So many half-crazy plotters, cast-offs, matriarchs without a household. Or the brainy tough talkers, the intuitives, the solvers of murders. Rarely, a murderer. Revenge is of other kinds. So much revenge. Most of it imagined rather than carried out.

  The bookstores are filled with these women. That’s the strange thing, the Reader says regretfully: They’re the readers.

  3

  The bride’s mother in blue silk. The groom’s mother in a linen suit of a fawn color that doesn’t agree with her skin—she knew it with certainty as she was having her hair done—and a necklace of small emeralds set in old coins, to redeem the unlucky color of the suit, because she is a doctor married to an executive, and has good jewelry, while the bride’s mother is practically a street person. The bride bought her the silk dress and jacket and altered them; she got her on her feet and dried out and sober for a week, to arrive at this moment of standing with a fine tremble and a set jaw, in the grip of what is not yet dread, more an apprehension regarding the reception: whether she is going to put her lips to a glass of champagne. Whether, despite her promise to her daughter and her daughter’s faith in it, she will tilt her head and swallow.

  When the bride draws near on the arm of her brother, she turns opposite her mother and stops dead, swaying a little off her careful balance. This causes the brother to just miss stepping on her hem, and frown a warning that any delay could collapse the whole occasion on top of them like a tent. The bride smiles at her mother, a studied, down-turned smile of acknowledgment, like a child’s stiff stage curtsy, for the guests to see. When she starts to move again the mother raises her hands to her cheeks.

  In actuality she is pressing her fingers into her ears to stop their ringing, but the groom’s mother beside her turns, sees the hands cupping the face in a classic maternal gesture, and smiles her agreement. She does this in spite of knowing her son said goodbye to another woman in his apartment last night.