The Body Farm, page 15
“A loyal gardener . . .” Mother said. “The roses, you understand . . . I don’t know what will happen to them now . . .”
The seven of us stood in the corner of the room, all of us touching, Gracie’s hand on Katherine’s shoulder, Emilia’s arms around Rosalind’s middle. The officers did not ask us a thing. They explained to Mother that it looked like a heart attack. He was an elderly man, Hamish. We hadn’t thought of him that way—all adults looked elderly to us—but now we realized that he’d been gray-haired and wizened as long as we’d known him.
We watched through the drawing room windows as the officers got back in their vehicle. An ambulance had come to take away the body. It purred quietly down the drive, no lights or siren. There was no emergency here.
Dolores was teary and touchy that night. “It wasn’t my fault that he died,” she shouted over dinner when Gracie reminded her to eat her vegetables.
“Nobody said it was,” Gracie said mildly.
“I just wanted to learn about roses. Roses are interesting.”
“You didn’t give him a heart attack by following him everywhere or asking him things,” Gracie said. “He was old, so he died.”
Father was the one who first explained death to us. He told us that all living things perished and there was no God. He told us that we’d better learn what brought us joy and seek it out, because a human life was a fleeting and precious thing.
And then he left us. The implications about where he found his own joy—or no longer found any joy at all—were clear as day.
○
We were all a little in love with the pool boy who came once a week to skim dead leaves off the surface and change the filter. He had a tattoo of a ship on his forearm. He smelled like chlorine. We would gather at the windows of the morning room whenever he appeared, pressing our noses against the glass and doodling hearts in the condensation left by our breath. He never noticed us, intent on his work, eager to finish up and thunder away on his motorcycle.
With Father gone, the pool boy’s appearances took on an extra importance. We all sympathized with Dolores to an extent; we might not have been desperate enough to ask grumpy Hamish about roses, but ours was an overwhelmingly female world now, missing that dash of otherness that Father had always provided.
The pool boy was the second to die. On a cloudy morning in July, Leah rose early with the intention of continuing her vigil on the western terrace. She was still waiting there for Father, though not every day; sometimes she joined us now for games or arguments. The rest of us were slumbering when Leah slithered out of her sleeping bag. She picked her way across our bodies sprawled over the floor.
As she padded along the hall, she glanced down through the broad mullioned windows and saw what appeared to be a shark in the swimming pool below. She drew closer to the glass, reluctant and curious at the same time. Something dark floated in the clean turquoise water—recently cleaned, in fact, skimmed and filtered that very morning by the same figure who somehow, we never found out exactly how, pitched headfirst into the pool once his work was done and drowned.
○
Two officers came, both women this time, resplendent in their uniforms. They wanted to speak to each of us alone, but we flatly refused to be separated, and Mother was in too much of a state to make us.
“I can’t cope . . .” she kept saying, leaning back against the plush cushions of the couch. “I really can’t . . . I don’t understand . . . if only . . .”
In truth, there was nothing we could tell the policewomen, much as we wanted to. We’d stayed up late the night before, using a Ouija board to see if the spirits had news about Father. Perhaps the ghosts that lived in our house (we’d never encountered one, but we were certain they existed) could see farther than we could, across the ocean. The results from the Ouija board had been equivocal: a series of letters that did not spell a word. Clara said they were clues. Gracie said they were nonsense.
After our midnight séance, we’d slept late, even Rosalind, who was barely out of her toddler years and usually woke before dawn. Only Leah had seen the body. She ran to find the butler, who hurried to remove the offending item from the pool with the help of the maids and the cook. All of us were annoyed with Leah for not coming to us first. By the time we woke up, we’d missed the whole thing.
The officers returned to their vehicle, and once again the ambulance drove off in funereal silence.
○
“We might be cursed,” Dolores said that night as we lay sleepless on Gracie’s floor, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark star stickers on the ceiling.
No one answered.
○
The police did not catch the chauffeur. Gracie overheard the maids whispering about it, but she could not glean any specifics, just a disapproving tone and a few snickers.
In August, Leah abandoned her post on the western terrace. She said that she was sick of seeing other people’s boats on the water. She always mistook them, at first, for Father’s yacht. He’d been gone six weeks now. Every time a trim little sailboat scudded by or a sluggish barge churned toward the horizon, Leah felt a surge of hope, then a reawakening of loss.
The butler was the only man left in the house. He was British, bald, and snooty, and we half suspected that Father had hired him as a sort of sustained practical joke. Mr. Gantry was so out of place in our California mansion that he almost seemed to have come from another reality, an Agatha Christie novel, maybe. He was even more frightening than the gardener had been. Hamish might have squinted at us disapprovingly, but Mr. Gantry treated us with such icy disdain that he cowed even brash Emilia. We tried to avoid sharing a room with him, though he always hovered in the doorway during meals, forcing us to eat faster than we wanted to. Then he removed the plates and silverware as rapidly and completely as though we’d never been there at all.
“I bet he’s going to die,” Dolores said on a rainy afternoon. We were gathered in the library, a windowless cave of a room ringed by floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.
“Mr. Gantry?” Clara asked. “Why would he die?”
“Because of us,” Dolores said. “We’re cursed. I’m sure of it now.”
“You’re so silly,” Gracie said, but she didn’t sound as confident as usual. “What makes you think that?” she asked, after a moment.
“First Father, then the chauffeur, then Hamish, now poor Frankie,” Dolores said. The pool boy’s name had been Frank, but we always called him Frankie, as though by nicknaming him we could manufacture some sort of intimacy.
“Coincidence,” Gracie said.
“If Mr. Gantry dies, we’ll know for sure,” Leah offered. “We’ll know if we’re cursed or not.”
“We are,” Dolores said.
“Maybe,” Gracie conceded. “If Mr. Gantry dies, maybe.”
○
Three days later, the butler quit without warning. He did not steal a car, as the chauffeur had done; he took only what belonged to him. The maids informed Mother that his room had been vacated in the middle of the night.
For once, Mother was galvanized into something like anger. She threw off her dressing gown and changed into the sort of clothes she used to wear, a conservative pearl-gray dress and stockings. She even put on lipstick. We sat with her in the drawing room as she spent the morning on the phone, hiring a female housekeeper to replace Mr. Gantry.
“Men are inconstant,” she informed us. “A woman, however . . . I do hope you realize . . . I want you to go out into the world with clear eyes . . .”
Emilia snuck into the servants’ wing, where we were never supposed to go. “Everyone needs their privacy,” Father always said. She found Mr. Gantry’s bedroom beside the cramped little lavatory the maids shared. The butler’s bureau stood empty, but his razor and shaving cream remained in a bathroom cabinet, evidently forgotten. Emilia stole them and smuggled them upstairs to Gracie’s room, where we all gathered around to stare at these relics of masculinity, foreign and unknowable, the last of their kind.
○
Before taking to her bed again, Mother hired a new gardener, a wispy blond woman with a faraway stare. Within days, the roses were blossoming again, no longer leggy and untamed. Mother hired a pool girl, too, who showed up in ripped denim overalls, snapping gum as she worked. We were not impressed. We convened at the morning room windows where we’d so often watched Frankie skimming leaves with his long net. The pool girl wore her hair in a doughy bun. When she noticed us pressed against the glass to stare at her, she stuck out her tongue.
At this affront, Gracie stormed away from the window and flopped on the couch.
“This is all Father’s fault,” she said. “All of it.”
“Why?” asked little Rosalind, climbing up on the cushion beside her.
“It’s obvious,” Gracie said, with a preteen eye roll. “The curse began when Father left.”
The seven of us considered this.
“I don’t know if you’re right,” Dolores said at last. We all stared at her open-mouthed. It was heresy to disagree with our eldest sister. Dolores flushed pink but continued, “What if the curse made Father leave in the first place? What if it was already inside us then? The curse might have done this to him.”
“No,” Gracie said with absolute conviction. “No. It was Father who did this to us.”
○
Chilly fog alternated with golden sunlight. At the two-month anniversary of Father’s departure, Leah made us all join her on the western terrace once more, despite the biting wind. We stood there in silence until Rosalind’s teeth began chattering and Gracie led us inside.
Then came the crash that woke us before dawn and sent us skittering into the hallway, Katherine dragging her sleeping bag, caught on one foot.
“It’s an earthquake!” Leah cried.
This was California, after all. Father always told us to stand in a doorway or climb into the tub.
“I don’t think so,” Gracie said. “It’s coming from downstairs.”
And she was right. Nothing was shaking around us, not the portraits on the walls or the light fixtures overhead. Instead, the clamor seemed localized to the front hall—a sound like we’d never heard, glass shattering and stone falling.
We ran down the stairs and found one of the maids already there, her mouth wide open in horror. The front door had been smashed in by the front end of a vehicle. The doorknob glinted on the floor, severed from the rest. Part of the wall was crumbling from the impact. The hat stand lay in pieces. One of the columns outside had been pulverized; we could see what was left of it through the gap in the shattered remnants of the heavy oak door that Father had ordered specially from Sweden.
Leah bounced anxiously on her toes. Rosalind clung to Gracie’s hand, and Dolores began to cry. But Emilia kept her wits about her.
“It’s the mail truck,” she informed us. “Look, you can see the stripes.”
She pointed. The headlights were cross-eyed now, gazing at each other across the concave wreckage of the front bumper. The windshield resembled a spiderweb. Yes, we could just pick out the telltale stripes, scraped and dirtied almost beyond recognition.
The maid wrung her hands. “I saw it happen,” she wailed. “I saw him turning in at the gate. Oh my god. Oh my god, he didn’t even try to stop. He just kept coming.”
○
The eastern terrace overlooked the front door. We could see the wreckage clearly from there. Every morning, the postman had trundled down our sweeping drive and pushed the day’s letters through the mail slot. He usually came before we were awake; we’d actually never seen him alive, only now, battered and bloody, a limp figure crushed against the snowy cushion of the airbag.
Apparently he’d driven straight up the marble steps and slammed full throttle into the house. He took out a pillar on his way, along with a portion of the wall to the left of the door. Not a door anymore—kindling, matchsticks. Even a nearby window had cracked, we could see now, presumably from the force of the impact. The stairs were chipped beneath the wheels of the mail truck. Smoke rose from the deconstructed engine.
“Look what happened,” Rosalind kept saying. We looked.
The sound of Mother’s weeping carried down the hall. She was distraught at this latest calamity, though her grief seemed to be focused on the ruined door. Our father had loved it so. We left her in the care of the competent housekeeper—a brisk, rotund woman with a voice like warm honey—who had replaced the butler.
An emergency team was busy extracting the body from the smashed vehicle. A stroke, they were saying. The postman must have lost consciousness during the final leg of his approach. His muscles tensed up—there might have been a seizure—and the vehicle careened onward. Hopefully he was dead before the impact.
“It’s only women,” Emilia said suddenly.
“What?” Dolores asked.
Emilia gestured toward the EMTs darting around the vehicle. One tall, one thin, one fair, one dark, all of them female.
○
Mrs. North, the new housekeeper, hired a work crew to come and fix the front door and the column and the demolished brickwork. She offered them an extravagant fee to turn up the very next morning with ten strong men and a new oak door.
But they never came. We waited for them, gazing through the windows at the empty drive. At noon we abandoned our surveillance and went to swim in the pool. Mrs. North shouted into the phone for an hour. Then, with the help of the maids, she affixed a sheet of plastic over the gaping hole, taping the edges to the wall.
She booked a second crew, but they never came either. Days passed, and the plastic remained, flapping when the wind blew like the sail of a ship.
Over lunch, Mrs. North complained to us as she laid out our bowls of soup. We sat in our usual places around the table, four on one side and three on the other. Father’s chair stood empty at the head, as did Mother’s at the foot. The only sign of life from Mother’s room lately was the trays of food that the cook sent up, which vanished and appeared again a while later, emptied of everything but crumbs.
“I don’t understand this behavior,” Mrs. North said in her sugary voice, which belied her obvious irritation. “I’ve tried four different companies now. Seven men were supposed to be here an hour ago. We confirmed the date and time. And then radio silence. It’s ridiculous! We can’t have a house with no door, can we, girls?”
Mrs. North bustled out to fetch us a pitcher of ice water. In her absence, Gracie leaned in, her face lit from beneath by the reflected glow from the linen tablecloth.
“You know what this means,” she said.
“It’s us,” Dolores whispered in awe. “We’re doing this. Men can’t be here.”
“That’s right,” Gracie said.
“We’re keeping them away,” Leah said. “The workmen can’t come. They want to, and they say they’re going to, but they can’t.”
“We kill men too,” Emilia said. “That’s right, isn’t it? Hamish and Frankie and the postman all died because of us.”
“We kill them, or we make them disappear,” Clara said. “Poof. Gone.”
“We’re cursed,” said little Rosalind, her voice high and sweet.
“We’re cursed,” we all echoed reverently.
○
At midnight, we snuck out of the house, even Rosalind, yawning and rubbing her eyes. She was a wishbone child, not yet grown into the solid limbs and apple cheeks that made the rest of us look so similar. Sometimes, in photographs, we appeared to be a single girl moving through different ages in stop-motion.
On our way outside, we paused at our mother’s room. Her hoarse breathing perfumed the air. She still kept to her side of the bed, leaving a blank space where Father used to sleep. We stood over her, all seven of her daughters. Then we left and moved silently in single file to the back door.
The moon rose buttery behind the house. Every window was dark. The grown-ups were sleeping—the women, that is. No men here. We had destroyed them and banished them, every one, with the strength of our curse.
Moonlight glazed the beach. The sand was cold beneath our feet, but the air felt surprisingly warm, like bathwater. No wind. There was the pier where our father had moored his yacht. There was the horizon he had crossed without us. Was that the moment the curse took hold? Did it happen when he first decided to leave us, or when he turned his prow away from us, or when he vanished from our sight?
With a grunt, Gracie yanked off her pajama top and threw it onto the sand. She kicked off her shorts and stood in front of us naked, hands on hips.
“What are you doing?” Dolores gasped.
“There are no men,” Gracie said. “No men can get near us.”
And then we were all naked and dancing. The moonlight rendered our bodies new, milk-pale, shimmering with eerie power. Gracie pirouetted down the sand, her dark hair tangling in her armpits. Katherine went up on pointe, as she had learned in ballet class. Clara and Leah did the twist, laughing as their bare bottoms wiggled against the balmy air. Dolores tangoed with an imaginary partner while Emilia twirled in place, her arms aloft. Little Rosalind was the wildest of all of us, cavorting and kicking through the gleaming tongue of each new wave that slid up the beach.
“We’re cursed!” Gracie shouted to the sea.
“We’re cursed!” we screamed, our voices reverberating over the water, bouncing and echoing as though there were more than seven of us. Dozens. Hundreds.
○
How should a story like this end? We could never agree. Seven sisters can’t agree on much of anything. We all had our own opinions, our own ideas.
Leah maintained that Father would return one day. He would come home chastened and apologetic, and the curse would be broken. We would nobly forgive him. She would, anyway.
Katherine was certain that Father had already taken up residence in some foreign land. She believed that as long as he lived, we would remain cursed, unable to leave the house for fear of killing or exiling any man we encountered. We would grow old together, seven white-haired crones in a dilapidated mansion with a broken door.
