Authors: Anthony Doerr
Rosemary couldn’t see. She shifted from foot to foot. She mentioned that they should go—it was getting late. The crowd filled in behind them. Griselda tore off a puff of cotton candy and pressed it into the roof of her mouth with her tongue. She studied her sister, the panda hanging from her fist. I could lift you, she offered. Rosemary blushed, shook her head. It’s a metal eater, Griselda whispered. I’ve never seen one. I don’t even know what one is. It’ll be fake, Rosemary said. It won’t be real. This kind of stuff is never real. Griselda shrugged.
The sisters looked at each other. I want to see it, Griselda insisted. I
can’t
see it, Rosemary whined. Now it was Griselda’s turn to shake her head. Then don’t, she said. Rosemary’s face went stern and hurt. She clumped off toward the car, the panda against her chest like a rueful child. Griselda watched the stage.
Soon the metal eater came out, and the men in the tent quieted, and there was only the whispering of the crowd and the slow looping of insects in the yellow spotlight and, far off, the plink-plinking of the carousel. The metal eater was a tidy-looking man in a business suit, trim and small and mannered. Griselda stood
transfixed. What a man he was, what glinty spectacles, what shiny shoes, what a neatness to his construction, what pinstripes and cufflinks to wear to eat metal in Boise, Idaho. She had never seen a man like him.
He seated himself at the raised-up table, moving with a delicacy and tidiness that made Griselda want to charge the stage, throw herself upon him and smother him, consume him, flail her body against his. He was madly different, significant, endlessly captivating; she must have discerned something deep beneath his surface, something less acutely evident to the rest of us.
He produced a razor blade from a vest pocket and slit a sheet of paper lengthwise with it. Then he swallowed it. He kept his eyes on hers without blinking. His Adam’s apple jerked furiously. He swallowed a half dozen razors, then bowed and disappeared behind the tent. The crowd clapped politely, almost confusedly. Griselda’s blood boiled over.
When Rosemary returned to that place after dusk, indignant and frizz-haired, the metal-eating show was long done and Griselda was long gone, leaning over a plate of sausage patties in the Galaxy Diner on Capitol. Her eyes were still on the gray eyes of the metal eater and his were still on hers. By midnight she was gone from Boise altogether, lying across the bench seat of a Ryder truck, the metal eater crossing into Oregon and Griselda’s head in his lap, his thin fingers in her hair, his little feet stretching for the pedals.
In the morning Mrs. Drown made Rosemary tell her story to a traffic cop who yawned, thumbs through his belt loops. But you aren’t even writing it down, Mrs. Drown stammered. Griselda was eighteen, he told her, what should he be writing down. By law she was a woman. He pronounced woman loudly and carefully. Woman. He said to have hope. He’d heard the same story a thousand times. She’d come home eventually. They always did.
Around school the stories about Griselda took on teeth and venom, even left the school and lived for a while in produce sections and movie queues. She’ll be back soon, we told each other, and boy will she be sorry, dashing off with a carnival freak twice her age, a bad seed anyway, you wouldn’t believe the things she’d do. Probably knocked up by now. Or worse.
Mrs. Drown went sour immediately. We’d see her in Shaver’s Supermarket after work, shrunken, embittered, a basket of celery hung on an arthritic forearm, a handkerchief knotted around her neck. She imagined herself moving at the center of a pocket of formalities—Why, Mrs. Drown, this rain is something, isn’t it?— while her daughter’s story spun all around her, circulating in the town’s whispers, just outside her hearing.
Within a month she refused to leave home. She got fired. Her friends stopped coming by. They talk too much anyhow, is what she told Rosemary, who had dropped out of school to take her job at Boise Linen. Who talks too much, Mom? Everybody. Everybody talks behind your back. You turn your back and off they go, talking at you, telling each other stories they don’t know the first thing about.
Of course, it wasn’t long before we stopped talking about Griselda. She didn’t come back. There was nothing new or interesting about a portly sister who worked fourteen hours a day or a mother made bitter by a lost daughter. There were new bodies in the high school, new fodder for rumors. Griselda’s story was scrapped for lack of new material.
Unfortunately for her, Mrs. Drown never stopped believing that the gossip lived just one breath beyond earshot. She shouted at us when we strolled past the bungalow on our way into the hills. Stop blabbing, she’d yell from a window. Rumormongers! She moved into Griselda’s room, slept in Griselda’s bed. Her skin went sallow, yellow. She didn’t go out, even for the mail. Dust mounded up. The yard went brown. The gutters clogged with mulch. The house looked as if it were about to sink into the earth.
All this time Griselda sent letters home. Rosemary found them in the mail, one every month, lying between bills, envelopes addressed with tiny printing beneath a wild series of stamps and postmarks. The letters were short, misspelled things:
Dear Mom and Sis—this city we’re in has an acre reserved for dead people. They are kept in tall stacks of things like white cupboards with drawers inside. There are grass aisles to walk between. It is lovely. Our show is going well. The riots are on the other side of the island. Like you, we hardly know they are there.
They never explained, never betrayed a guilty twitch or regretful pause. Rosemary sat on her bed mouthing the names on the stamps and postmarks: Molokai, Belo Horizonte, Kinabalu, Damascus, Samara, Florence. They were names from anywhere and everywhere, each envelope stamped with some euphony like Sicilia, Mazatlán, Nairobi, Fiji or Malta, names that invoked for her imagination the great unknown tracts of land and ocean that lay beyond Boise. She would sit on her bed, holding a letter for hours, imagining the hands that had moved it along its path, all the hands between her sister and Boise, between herself and the cloud-pink alpen-glow of Nepal, the millennial gardens of Kyoto, the black tide of the Caspian Sea. There was a world glimmering beyond Boise Linen, Shaver’s Supermarket, outside the cracked and sinking bungalow in the North End. It was another world altogether. Here was the proof. Her sister was out in it.
Rosemary never showed the letters to her mother. She decided it was best for her mother if Griselda was gone permanently, gone for good.
Life for Rosemary yawned around the letters, her mother and work: dull, heavy-footed, tasteless. At Boise Linen she supervised
dyed cloth as it rolled onto bobbins, back stinging daylong, sitting behind safety goggles and listening to the grind and groan of spooling machines. She gained weight; her feet wore down the soles of shoes. She took meticulous grocery lists to Shaver’s, balanced her checkbook with a nubbed pencil, fed soup to her crumbling mother. She did not bother to clean the house or buy makeup. The curtains went gray; Twinkie wrappers sprouted from couch cushions; ants roved in the metal mouths of soda cans stuck to windowsills.
Eventually she gave her virginity and ring finger to Duck Winters, the timid and overweight butcher at Shaver’s who smelled permanently of ground beef. He moved into the sinking bungalow. He helped in a sheepish kind of way, tinkering around the yard, beer can in one hand, flushing out the lopsided gutters, replacing the screen door and the cracked sections of the front walk. He tolerated Mrs. Drown—her inane mutterings about gossipmongers, her insistence on sleeping in Griselda’s room and forgetting to flush the toilet—by keeping himself half-drunk on watery beer. He was sincere and big and fell asleep while Rosemary did the Find-A-Word beside him. Occasionally they grappled together at awkward sex. It never took.
And still the letters from Griselda came, each month, missives from all over the world, mishandled prose tucked inside envelopes stamped with heart-pulling names, Katmandu, Auckland, Reykjavík.
Ten years after Griselda ran off with the metal eater, Duck Winters found his mother-in-law dead in the bathroom. Natural causes. Rosemary sprinkled her mother’s ashes in the backyard. It was raining and the ashes clumped together undramatically; what was left of Mrs. Drown pooled on the leaves of the pachysandra or ran in mucky trickles under the fence into the neighbor’s yard.
When he came home from Shaver’s that evening, Duck drudged into the bedroom and found Rosemary splayed on the bed, her thick legs stuck out straight, tears shining on her checks, a tidily tied bundle of envelopes on her knee, a ragged stuffed panda in her lap. Duck lay down beside her and put a hand on her neck. Rosemary looked at him from tear-rimmed eyes. You should know, she blubbered, my sister has been sending letters all this time. I didn’t want Mom to find out. I know, whispered Duck. She’s been everywhere, all over the world. All these places with the same man. Duck pulled her to him, held her head against his belly and rocked her. She told Duck the story—Griselda’s story— while he shushed her and kissed the teardrops sliding over her cheeks. I know, he whispered. Everyone knows.
Rosemary sobbed, buried herself into him. They held on, Duck kissing the top of her head, the smell of her hair in his nose. They began to move together in a salty, careful sweetness, moving patiently and tenderly. He kissed her all over. After, Rosemary lay in Duck’s big arms and whispered, Those are my sister’s stories. Those are for her. We have our own stories now. Right, Duck? He said nothing. He might have been asleep.
In the morning Duck woke late and when he came into the kitchen Rosemary was burning the last envelope from her carefully preserved bundle. Together they watched it burn black and then flake apart in the sink. Duck took her by the wrist and walked her out under a gleaming sky, the trees and grass greened from rain the day before. They climbed past the neighborhood into a nameless gulch, huffing and wheezing through the sagebrush in their weight-tortured Reeboks, wading through prairie star, peppergrass, sunflower, the gossamery spores of plants kicked free and floating. They stopped on a high ridge, panting, the town stretched out below them, the capitol dome, the arbor-lined streets, the slim neighborhoods of the North End in rows and, far off, the glittering Owyhee Mountains. Duck took off his flannel shirt, laid it down over the wildflowers, and they made
love, among the moaning crickets, the drifting schools of spores, under the sky, in the foothills above the town of Boise.
From then on they lived with a measure of contentment, learning each other finally, imperceptibly. Duck whitewashed the bungalow; Rosemary planted a backyard stone for her mother. They shined up the doors and windows, carted out boxes and bags of old clothes, volleyball trophies, high school notebooks. They tried diets; we’d even see them out walking, hand-holding in a lazy lap around Camel’s Back Park. Griselda’s monthly letters went into the kitchen trash without so much as a glance at the postmark.
Then, one day, years later, the ad appeared. It was in the funnies section of the Sunday
Idaho Statesman,
an ad for the Metal Eater’s World Tour, a kind of cultish extravaganza, selling out all over the globe, coming to the gym at Boise High in January. It was extravagant, a full newspaper page, featuring ludicrous fonts dripping into one another, a barely dressed cartoon girl proclaiming outrageous things, that the metal eater never consumed the same thing twice, that he had eaten a Ford Ranger just two weeks before at his tour stop in Philadelphia.
Rosemary, Duck said over bran cereal and doughnuts, you’re not going to believe this.
Everybody wanted tickets. We wouldn’t miss it. It sold out in four hours, the telephones blitzed over at the high school, people clamoring for a bigger venue. But Rosemary wouldn’t go. She wouldn’t hear of it, wouldn’t dream of it. Twenty-five dollars a person, she moaned. You’ve got to be kidding me. Can’t we move on, Duck? Can’t we forget? A letter from Griselda arrived a week
later, a Tampa postmark. Rosemary shredded it and dropped the pieces into the trash.
On the afternoon before the metal eater was to appear in the gym, the management at Shaver’s declared that the supermarket would close its doors on the last of the month. It had been losing money for years, they said. Everyone shopped at the Albertson’s on State. They would be letting people go immediately.
Duck slogged out to the loading dock in his bloodied apron and sat on a milk crate. It was snowing. Clumps of flakes were melting in the alley. The produce manager tapped Duck on the back and held up a case of beer. They drank and talked a little about where they could find work. They peed in the snow. The produce manager got a call from his wife. She couldn’t go to the metal-eating show with him tonight. He offered the ticket to Duck.
My wife, mumbled Duck. She wouldn’t let me go. She says it’s a waste of money. Duck, groaned the produce manager, we just lost our jobs! You think we don’t deserve a night to ourselves? Duck shrugged. Look, the produce manager said, tonight this guy is going to eat
metal.
I heard he might eat a snowmobile.
Besides, he went on, Griselda Drown might be there.
Someone had built a stage in the high school gym, blocked it off with a maroon curtain and surrounded it with fold-up chairs. Twenty-five dollars a head and the place was packed. A half hour late, the curtain groaned upwards and there was the metal eater, seated behind a table. He was little, a well-kept fifty-something in a black suit, white shirt, black necktie. He sat at the table, prim, a halo of gray hair beneath a pink shiny head like a half egg. His eyes were gray, drawn back and too big. He sat complacently, wrists crossed in his lap. Behind him, a sequined blue curtain shifted briefly, then hung still.
We waited, shuffled our snow boots at this plain spectacle, this
unimpressive man seated before a bare table in the plain glow of gymnasium lights. We whispered, shifted, sweated. Upon us sat the great steam of a congregated people in parkas.