by C. Kubasta
She’d begun the night before, right after the boy had gone to bed. Her husband was still watching TV, his feet up on the coffee table, the blue screen light bathing his face. The first few times she just stepped over his outstretched legs, but the fourth time, he reached forward and wrapped his arms around her slight form. She was holding a skein of yarn in her hands, loosely, rainbow-colored, letting the lengths unfold themselves and stretch from here to there. Already there were knots and gathers. For the next batch, she thought, she’d probably re-roll it first into tight little balls. Or maybe she’d roll it onto the leftover cardboard tubes she’d been saving for some future project – then she could put the roll over a dowel or larger knitting needle and make fast work all over the house. She was so deep in thought about how best to spiderweb all the rooms that she didn’t even notice that her husband was holding her, immobile.
“Carol,” he interrupted her thought, “what are you doing?”
“Oh.” She looked down at the limp yarn in her hands. It was a cheap poly, and the edges frayed and caught in her thinned nails, each crack and crevice grabbing at stray fiber. “Working on the party.”
“Already?”
“Yes, I’m getting started tonight,” she said. She tried to explain the maze, the Treasure Hunt to him – how the whole house would be a web of yarn, and each child would have their own trail to follow to treasures, small and large, leading to their big surprise. Midway through her explanation, he turned his attention back to the TV.
“I’ll probably be up late tonight,” she finished, cutting off her explanation. In this case, like many others, she wasn’t able to communicate her excitement to him, her careful planning, the way she hoped the children’s faces would light up when they saw it.
“Matt?” she called him back to her.
“Yeah?”
“In the morning, I want you to take him out for breakfast – a big breakfast. Pancakes and syrup.”
“OK.”
“That way, if you bring him back around eleven, everything will be all ready and the other children will be arriving.”
“OK.” She left him there, watching whatever he was watching, and went back to her preparations.
In the morning, Matt woke and the spot next to him in the bed hadn’t been slept in. When he went into the hallway, light filtered through the high transom window and caught in the feathered yarn that blocked the stairs to the living room, to the basement. The hallway was mostly clear, and he woke the boy, told him to get ready for breakfast. They brushed their teeth together in the shared bathroom, washed their faces and dressed. Somewhere else in the house, Carol was moving. The boy was excited for his birthday party, anticipation already building in his small-boned body.
As they were leaving for breakfast, passing through the kitchen, the boy caught sight of strings of yarn peeking from the living room, stretched across the length of the open spaces. He opened his mouth in a wide O. Carol caught them then, at the door, caught the boy up in her thin arms.
“It’s a surprise for your party,” she said, holding the boy. The freckles on his face matched the freckles on his mother’s, orange dots in butter cream. “Don’t tell anyone,” she cautioned, smiling wide.
The boy smiled his own wide smile back, promised by pursing his lips and sealing them with his hand and fingers pantomiming a key and lock. They both laughed. Matt put his hand behind his wife’s head.
“Were you up all night?” She nodded. She was paler than usual, a little flushed. “Promise me you’ll eat something,” and she nodded again, broke eye contact. His eyes swept the kitchen: the table covered with hanks of yarn, scissors, tape, paper, twine and glue. Hammers. Rope. The coffee maker’s indicator light on, a pot of thickened liquid. “Besides coffee,” he said, looking meaningfully at her. She nodded again. Carol kissed her son on his nose; she kissed Matt on his lips. Her breath smelled sweet and chemical.
When Matt and the boy arrived back at the house, shirts syrup stained, there were a few cars there already. Children and parents were milling in the backyard. It was a beautiful late spring Saturday. Balloons in green, yellow, purple, orange and blue were tied in the trees that ringed the small backyard. On the picnic table was a self-serve punch dispenser, a veggie tray, a fruit tray, and a note from Carol.
Welcome to Cade’s 8th Birthday Party!
Please grab a snack & wait for all the guests to arrive!
When you’re ready, the Treasure Hunt can begin!
The backdoor, off the kitchen, had one more balloon in each color – but each had a child’s name written on it. Attached to each balloon was a strand of yarn. The parents asked Matt where Carol was – Matt didn’t know, but he covered, suggesting that she was part of the Treasure Hunt, or maybe inside still, working on some party game. Maybe Carol had explained this to him last night, when he should have been listening, but wasn’t. Knowing Carol, this was all part of the plan: some elaborate ritual, some carefully-planned surprise, some over-the-top reveal for her birthday boy.
Cade was their only child, and he could have been a carbon-copy of Carol. He was a little slight, although not as thin as his mother. Already he showed aptitude in music and art. Matt would try to play rough and tumble games with him, throw the ball, get him to watch a game, or go along with him to a job site once in a while, but he was always happiest with his mother. When she would carve out a long afternoon for playing, he would lean up against the base of the small grand piano that had been a wedding present – that they really didn’t have space for – and just seem to absorb the music. Sometimes he’d draw along with his mother’s playing, or quietly read a book, but mostly he just seemed to be listening with his whole body. When Matt would catch a glimpse of this, usually when he happened to walk by the spare bedroom, he’d feel an urge to shut the door – as if he was witnessing something intimate, something he shouldn’t see.
They’d turned that spare room into a music room early on, before they’d even known Cade would come to be. When they’d first married, and moved to this split-level ranch, he’d helped sell it to Carol by promising there’d be room for the piano. He’d thought maybe the living room – a long open space more like a landing, but she’d pursed her lips and shook her head, insisting she’d want privacy and quiet to practice. She couldn’t possibly share that space with a TV, she said, the space between her eyebrows frowning in irritation even as she tried to keep her mouth neutral. So he’d ripped out the carpeting in that room, taken out the paneling, redone it into a “perfect white cube” (that’s what she said she wanted), and installed a few acoustic panels along the walls, hung symmetrically. She said she loved the high transom windows and the way they let in the light. It did make it easier when she began taking in students – that room, with the door.
Once the children discovered the balloons with their names on them, and figured out how the Treasure Hunt worked, it was impossible to get them to wait. Once the last child arrived, they were off. Matt opened the back and front door of the house, and the sunlight and fresh air permeated each room. He invited parents in, and they laughed at their children carefully following their assigned piece of yarn, high and low, up and over furniture, stepping over and through each other, focused totally on the trail they were following.
The parents were amazed. Carol’s plan was a wonder. While Matt was sleeping, the house was transformed.
She’d put away each and every knickknack and breakable thing, so the children could crawl over everything to follow their treasure, their own individual map.
She’d closed the door to the music room, the bedrooms, the bathrooms, but everywhere else in the house was fair game, and the spiderweb of yarn traversed the house high and low. The children shrieked and screamed, flushed with exertion.
She’d anticipated confusion, so every once in a while, the child’s particular trail was tagged with their name, just to ensure they were still on track. Any potential argument quickly diffused.
She’d anticipated worries about what to do with the accumulated yarn, once followed. Each child was given a cardboard tube for winding. At strategic points, a new tube, tagged with the child’s name, was tied onto the yarn treasure trail.
But mostly, she’d anticipated that even pleasure can flag. It was around seven months into their marriage, lying in bed with Matt, that Carol had begun to wonder if even this could last, if even this would be enough. She loved him, of course, and he loved her. He said it, and showed her every chance he got. They were past the honeymoon, and the settling into the house, and lying there, both of their breathing returning to normal, he was tracing the shapes of her areola and nipple with the callused pad of his fingertips. When he did this a few minutes earlier, it had brought her quickly into that final circle of pleasure, the place where she knew she would beat out her own intimate rhythm onto his body. It was a joke between them: his working man hands, her ultra-sensitive nipples. A touch there was often a question, an answer. She laid there, him lightly touching her, and wondered if this pleasure would be enough to sustain her.
The week before, she’d gone to the local high school to see if the choir needed an accompanist. They didn’t. She’d talked with the choir director, the music teacher, the band director, about work. She’d played for them – she played beautifully. They’d never heard anyone play so beautifully. She was a wonder, she was classically trained, she had a masters in music performance. And here she was in this small town, with her little baby grand, all this time on her hands, a man who loves her, and afraid already of the unhappiness arriving soon. But then Matt remodeled the music room so she could take on students. And then she had Cade.
Knowing that the difficulty of untangling criss-crossing yarn could begin to weigh on eight-year-olds, that the initial flush of pleasure could begin to wear off, Carol planted small treasures along the way for each of them. Somehow, in the way of mothers, she knew what each of them most desired.
The girl with the purple balloon loved purple, all things purple – she always had. At one point, her yarn became bright purple, flecked with silver, and led her into the kitchen where it wrapped three times around the refrigerator door and slipped inside. Inside was a can of grape soda. Soda (soda wasn’t allowed at the girl’s house) and grape (so sweet to be cloying, so purple it would stain the teeth). Because at this point all the other treasure-hunters were diverted to the basement, the girl took a quick look around and glugged the sweet sticky nearly in one swallow. Soon her belly would ache, but no one would know why – all they’d had outside where healthy snacks (and how the parents had smirked when they’d seen that… you know Carol, they’d said, she’s never understood children, they’d said). And what even the girl didn’t know is that Carol had been in the kitchen watching.
Another boy, who had three older brothers and two older sisters, and never had anything for himself, followed his treasure-trail down to the basement and found a room with a lock on this inside, and inside was Mousetrap and Operation and other games with lots of small little parts. All those games that a younger sibling never gets to play, and by the time they’re handed down, all the parts are missing anyway, and the boy locked the door from the inside and played and played, listening with pleasure to each startling buzz as he worked and worked at the wishbone and the funny bone and the rubber band that connects the ankle bone to the knee bone, until the furious knocking on the door forced him out. Carol saw that too.
For one boy, who she’d run into with his mother school shopping with Cade, who’d stood fascinated by the row of different colored pens and markers at the point-of-sale display, trying each on the piece of scrap paper, until his mother yelled at him, grabbed him roughly by the shoulder. The mother had told him to “stop scribbling,” and “you don’t need all those colors!” Carol and Cade had both ducked their heads, but the mother had seen them. So Carol bought all twenty-one colors for the boy, tied them in intervals along his yarn. With each new color, a little more of this memory came back to the mother, and she felt shamed, felt judged. She looked around for Carol, and was glad she couldn’t see her.
Each of the children’s desires grew greater as they continued along the Treasure Hunt. They knew that Carol knew that happiness is desire with the certainty of fulfillment. They knew that Carol knew their deepest desires.
As Carol was setting up the Treasure Hunt the night before, unspooling all the rainbow of color, hooking yarn across furniture, behind curtain rods, around spindles, and between table legs, she could feel it spooling out of her, like some metaphor of motherhood. She knew that when Cade was born something had gone wrong; they hadn’t cut the cord right, and ever since then, wherever he went in the world, however far he went away from her, she felt an ever-tug between his body and hers. Her interior was like a halved spaghetti squash, all strings, and she was scraped and spooned out by the day-to-day until she was only a flimsy shell. The light shone through; she couldn’t hold form.
Wherever she was, she had a need to touch things. If her fingers weren’t laying on the cool ivory of the piano keys, she pantomimed playing the most difficult pieces: Rachmaninov, or Beethoven’s Hammerklavier. Matt told her she tapped his body in her sleep. She took to counting her bites, following an internal metronome in her head. She tried to slow down the tempo each day, moving from adagietto to adagio, from adagio to largo. She dreamed of lentissimo. During the day, she imagined every room Cade inhabited, counting the steps he must take from the art room to his classroom, from the classroom to the bathroom. She volunteered at the school so she could have a mental blueprint in her head, to allow her to better imagine his days, the shape of his hours. Matt said their sex had become “mechanical.” He said she was getting “too thin.” At dinner, he watched her move the food around her plate, eagle-eyed. She bought him hand lotion, balms, said the feel of his hands bothered her.
For the girl with the purple balloon, the end of the Treasure Hunt led her into the back basement. She had been in a room like this before, but hadn’t been able to get out. Her uncle had blocked the door, and she had frozen. On the table was a tangle of hammers. The girl thought she heard someone whisper smash the windows… so she did. She took the hammers to the high basement windows, where a ladder had been positioned in front of each. After tapping timidly at each pane of glass, she broke through, ringed around the frame and knocked loose each stray shard. She shimmied out easily, and this time that little bit of blood bore witness to her escape.
The boy with the many many colors of pens was led to the upstairs hallway, where a fire escape ladder was hung out the window. He’d seen the same ladder under the bed in his parents’ room, dreamed of the day he’d be a hero, leading them all to safety. He put on the child-sized fireman’s hat that waited on the floor for him, shimmied down the ladder, and jumped to the ground. To the new-spring green grass outside, and if he would color it he’d use his fine-tipped art pens, mixing lime with clover.
The boy with the yellow balloon’s yarn-trail led to the door to the music room. On the door was a note with his name on it: only he could go into that room. Inside, there were dolls – all the dolls his sisters had, that he wasn’t allowed to play with. Boys didn’t play with dolls. He closed the door and in the quiet of the room, the clean white space of the room, he dressed them and brushed their hair, and told them how pretty they were. They told him how pretty he was too.
The parents left, all angry. They wanted to talk to Carol, but no one could find Carol. Matt apologized, and apologized. The children each had a bundle of gifts: they’d be carefully picked over, and some discarded. Each had a secret smile, each knew they’d been seen. Carol had disappeared – but Matt and Cade knew she was there. Over the coming days and months and years, they would hear her playing the piano, feel her slight weight on the couch, or in the bed next to them. They’d hear her voice, a whisper-sibilance, but didn’t know how to explain to anyone else why they couldn’t see her. If anyone had asked, they’d say the last time she’d been visible was before Cade’s eighth birthday party, before she’d finished the Treasure Hunt, before that final unspooling.
Cade grew up, continuing to look more and more like his mother: brown-ginger hair, scattered freckles across his nose and cheeks. He’d have children of his own, and they too looked like their grandmother. Every once in a while someone would ask after her: How’s your mother? Is she still…? and trail off. No one knew how to address Carol’s state – her not-being. Her invisibility. She’s still around, Cade would say, still the same. Carol enjoyed her grandchildren. Matt never remarried, or dated. There was nobody to serve papers to, there was no body. In pictures of the extended family, there’s an empty space that may or may not be Carol, a space that may or may not be blank, a whisper-space of an invisible woman, who began disappearing long ago, and finished disappearing the day her boy turned eight, when she translated her corporeality into the dreams and desires of children and let them each see that there are rooms where they could be themselves, where they could lock the door, where they could escape, if they needed to.
C. Kubasta is the author of several books, most recently the poetry collection Of Covenants (Whitepoint) and the novella Girling (Brain Mill). Her work explores place (the Midwest), the body (our imperfect perfect flesh), and language (its slippages). Her novel This Business of the Flesh is forthcoming this fall (Apprentice House).