Fruiting Bodies: Stories

by Kathryn Harlan

I lived wild, or as wild as one could be with a warm living room to return to.

When I think about it, when I think about Vienna, this is where my mind goes more often than not. To naming. The things that it has made less frightening, and the things it has obscured, and what was different, a little, when I had nothing to call it. Even accurate words you don’t live in, the way you don’t live in a photograph of your house.

God knows how much of her father Dorothy has inhaled over the years. And the skin means that they will not be shut up in the RV together, forever and always, until the end of the world.

She knows that Elaine and Dad sat up all night, after she fell asleep, that they drank coffee and beer, that Dad took a cigarette from her even though he doesn’t smoke because he liked the sinewy lines of her arms, and thought about asking her to dinner and how he didn’t have any place to ask her. And she knows that Elaine would have said no, though she would have said it nicely, and that Dad didn’t ask anyway, because when he told Elaine that just one person could taste the fat, she shrugged one of her sharp shoulders and said, “I guess I know a thing or two more than I ever needed to anyway.” Dad liked her less after that, he liked her a lot less. And Dorothy knows why that is, because she looked so certain while she said it, the light glancing off the hard edges of her eyes. Dad has never known what to do with people who are anything but discontented in the boundaries of their lives. She knows that Elaine would have said no because she’s discovered she likes to be alone more than she likes to be not alone, and that she discovered that after she caught her husband with his brother’s wife in her shower, but she got the farm out of it so she could mind more than she does.

The only way to really love someone is to know them. Even more so, Esther thinks, that is what love can be broken down to. That is what intimacy is. With enough love you could conjure someone perfectly in a room they are not in.

Naomi took a journalism class in her undergrad, when she thought she might do more conventional fieldwork. Here is one of the things she was told: Never forget that your presence will influence your subject. Never forget that your subject is responding to you. The bias of the study is really unfortunate enough, but, furthermore, Naomi would not like to be in the way of her subject’s response.

Looking at her is like looking at a photograph of yourself taken too long ago to remember the circumstances of it, recognizing yourself there, but being unable to recall ever inhabiting that moment.

They ask you where the coffee is, they remember your name and bring you chocolates at the end of the semesters. Some of them are your age; why is it that they sometimes feel like a different species? Like they’ve sprouted claws or a horn from the center of the head. You’d like to think you’d be a good mother.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about, Maura,” your mother said. Which was true, you didn’t. On the TV, a woman lifted her baby into the air, maybe so that the camera could see him, but for one absurdist second you thought she might toss him into the crowd. Your mother was quiet for a moment too long and you braced yourself, as you had learned to do against a certain kind of silence. You glanced around the kitchen for the remote, but couldn’t find it. Looking past you, at the screen, your mother murmured, “It’s terrible to have a child.” You raised your hand to your mouth unthinkingly, the tips of your teeth resting against your knuckles. “Don’t do that, Maura,” your mother said. And she sighed, pressed her palm against her forehead. “I hate it when you do that.”

Because Maura’s fourteen and since you’re driving her home from school she’s talking about school and she starts talking about being bullied. She’s really specific about it too, she’s got this look like she’s trying to be casual but she wants you to be worried. You hate that look because you know that’s something you still do, where you’ll say something like it’s nothing, but you know it’s bad, and what you really want is for someone to say that it’s bad, to say that it’s awful. But Maura tilts her head like she’s talking out the window, and says that Ashley in her chemistry class called her a “saggy cunt.”

“This happened to me too.” That was what your mother said, the one time you yelled at her for the essays, which was after the one about your suicide attempt. You hadn’t yelled at your mother in years; it wasn’t productive. Knowing every action is documented, perhaps you have tried to restrain yourself to those you could account for. Yet you were crying on the phone, your hands were shaking, you were folding up the crumpled sheets that Maura had resigned to you after giving up trying to hang yourself with them. That’s what your mother said on the phone. “This happened to me too, Maura. You aren’t the only one this happened to.”

Sadness is different when it is coming from a place you can make sense of.