Audio: Lauren Groff reads.
It is Halloween; she’d almost forgotten.
At the corner, a man is putting sand and tea-light candles into white paper bags.
He will later return with a lighter, filling the dark neighborhood with a glowing grid for the trick-or-treaters.
She wonders if it’s not hazardous to allow small uncoördinated people with polyester hems near so many flames.
All day today and yesterday she has been reading the early naturalist William Bartram, who travelled through Florida in 1774; because of him, she forgot Halloween.
She’s most definitely in love with that dead Quaker.
This is not to say that she is no longer in love with her husband; she is, but after sixteen years together perhaps they have blurred at the edges of each other’s vision.
She says to her dog, who is beside her at the window watching the candle man, One day you’ll wake up and realize your favorite person has turned into a person-shaped cloud.
The dog ignores her, because the dog is wise.
In any event, her husband will inevitably win, since Bartram takes the form of dead trees and dreams, and her husband takes the form of warm pragmatic flesh.
She picks up her cell—she wants to tell her best friend, Meg, about her sudden overwhelming love for the ghost of a Quaker naturalist—but then she remembers that Meg doesn’t want to be her best friend anymore.
A week ago, Meg said very gently, I’m sorry, I just need to take a break.
Outside, in Florida, there’s still the hot yellow wool of daylight.
In the kitchen, her sons are eating their dinner of bean tacos glumly.
They had wanted to be Ninjas, but she had to concoct something quickly, and now their costumes are hanging up in the laundry room.
Earlier, she put her own long-sleeved white button-up backward on the younger boy, crossed the arms around and tied them in the back, added a contractor’s mask she’d slitted and colored with a silver Sharpie, and, because he was armless, pinned a candy bucket to the hem.
Cannibal Lecture, he is calling himself, a little too on the nose.
For the older boy, she cut eyeholes in a white sheet for an old-style ghost, though it rankled, a white boy in a white sheet, Florida still the Deep South; she hopes that the effect is mitigated by the rosebuds along the hems.
She also forgot the kindergartner’s Spooky Breakfast this morning; she failed to bring boo-berry muffins, and her smaller son had sat in his regular clothes in his tiny red chair, looking hopefully at the door as mothers and fathers in their masks and wings who kept not being her poured in.
She wasn’t even thinking of him at that hour; she was thinking of William Bartram.
Her husband comes in from work, sees the costumes, raises an eyebrow, remains merciful.
The boys brighten as if on a dimmer switch, her husband turns on “Thriller” to get in the mood, and she watches them bop around, a twist in the heart.
It’s not yet dusk, but the shadows have stretched.
Her husband puts on an old green Mohawk wig, the boys shimmy their costumes on again, and the three of them head out.
She is alone in the house with the dog and William Bartram and the bags of wan lollipops that were all that remained on the drugstore’s shelves.
It’s necessary to hand out candy; her first year in the house, she righteously gave out toothbrushes, and it wasn’t accidental that a heavy oak branch smashed her windshield that night.
She can almost see three blocks away into the kitchen of Meg’s house, where beautiful handmade costumes are being put on.
Meg loves this shit.
A week ago, when Meg broke up with her, they were eating ginger scones that Meg had made from scratch, and the bite in her mouth went so dry that she couldn’t swallow for a long, long time.
She just nodded as Meg spoke kindly and firmly, and she felt each rip as her heart was torn into smaller and smaller pieces in Meg’s capable hands.
Meg has enormous gray eyes and strong hips and shoulders and hair like a glass of dark honey with sunshine in it.
Meg is the best person she knows, far better than herself or her husband, maybe even better than William Bartram.
Meg is the medical director of the abortion clinic in town, and all day she has to hold her patients’ stories and their bodies, as well as the tragic lack of imagination from the chanting protesters on the sidewalk.
It would be too much for anyone, but it is not too much for Meg.
On the mantel in Meg’s house, there are pictures of Meg with her children as babies, secured on her back, all three peering at the camera like koalas.
She, too, has often felt the urge to ride nestled cozily on Meg’s back.
She would feel safe there, her cheek against her strongest friend.
But for the past week she has respected Meg’s wish to take a break and so she has not called Meg or stopped by her house for coffee or sent her children down the street to play with Meg’s children until someone ran home screaming with a bruise or low blood sugar.
What is it about me that people need breaks from? she asks the dog, who looks as though she wants to say something but, out of innate gentleness, refrains.
A generous kind of dog, the Labradoodle.
Well, William Bartram won’t need a break from her.
The dead need nothing from us; the living take and take.
She brings William Bartram in his book costume out to the front porch, where it is cooler, and fetches the candy in a bowl and the dog and the wineglass so big it can hold a full bottle of ten-dollar Shiraz.
She settles herself under the bat-lights she plugged in because she forgot to make jack-o’-lanterns, and watches real bats swinging between the rooftops.
William Bartram seduced her with his drawings of horny turtles and dog-faced alligators, with his flights of ecstatic gratitude that lifted him toward God.
A week ago, after the ginger scones and suffocating with sadness, she took the afternoon off from work and drove to Micanopy to look at antiques, because she feels solace when she touches things that have survived generations of human hands.
She stood in the center of Micanopy hating her unsweet tea, because it was encased in plastic foam that would disintegrate and float on the surface of the waters forever; but then she found the plaque about William Bartram, who had passed through Micanopy in 1774, when it was a Seminole trading post called Cuscowilla.
The chief there at the time was called Cowkeeper.
When Cowkeeper heard what Bartram was doing, traipsing about Florida, collecting floral specimens and faunal observations, he nicknamed him Puc-Puggy.
This translates, roughly, to Flower Hunter, which—as bestowed upon Bartram by a warrior and hunter and proud owner of slaves he’d stripped from the many tribes he’d brutally subjugated—was probably no great compliment.
Still, what would bright-eyed Puc-Puggy have seen of Florida before the automobile, before the airplane, before the planned communities, before the swarms of Mouseketeers?
A trio of witches comes up the walk and not one says thank you when she drops her bad candy in their bags.
An infant dressed as a superhero, something like sweet potato crusted on his cheeks, looks on as his mother holds the pillowcase open for the treats and then clicks her tongue in disappointment.
But her street is a dark one and full of rentals, and the savvy trick-or-treaters mostly stay away.
It’s just before twilight, and the sky is a brilliant orange.
She is inside the pumpkin.
In the absence of tiny ghouls, the lizards come out one last time, frilling their red necks, doing pushups on the sidewalk.
Like Bartram, she was once a Northerner dazzled by the frenzied flora and fauna here, but that was a decade ago.
She is no longer frightened of reptiles, she who is frightened of everything.
She is frightened of climate change, this summer the hottest in history, plants dying all around.
She is frightened of the small sinkhole that opened in the rain yesterday near the southeast corner of her house and may be the shy exploratory first steps of a much larger sinkhole.
She is frightened of her children, because now that they’ve arrived in the world she has to stay here for as long as she can but not longer than they do.
She is frightened because maybe she has already become so cloudy to her husband that he has begun to look right through her; she’s frightened of what he sees on the other side.
She is frightened that there aren’t many people on the earth she can stand.
The truth is, Meg had said, back when she was still a best friend, you love humanity almost too much, but people always disappoint you.
Meg is someone who loves both humanity and people; William Bartram loved humanity and people and also nature.
He was a gifted and perceptive scientist who also believed in God, which seems a rather gymnastic form of philosophy.
She misses believing in God.
Here comes a prospector with a tiny pick; two scary teen-age clowns in regular clothes; a courtly family, the parents crowned regents, the boy a knight sheathed in silver plastic, the girl a fluttery yellow princess.
What a relief she has boys; this princess nonsense is a tragedy of multigenerational proportions.
Stop waiting for someone to save you, humanity can’t even save itself! she says aloud to the masses of princesses seething in her brain; but it is her own black dog who blinks in agreement.
She reads by bat-light and sees two William Bartrams as she reads: the bright-eyed thirty-four-year-old explorer with the tan skin and sinewy muscles and the sketchbook, besieged by alligators, comfortable supping alone with mosquitoes and with rich indigo planters alike, and also Bartram’s older paler self, in the quiet of his Pennsylvania garden, projecting his joy and his younger persona onto the page.
Both Bartrams, the feeling body and the remembering brain, show themselves in his description of a bull gator: Behold him rushing forth from the flags and reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail brandished high, floats upon the lake. The waters like a cataract descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with his thunder.
Usually, she’s the one who trick-or-treats with the boys, with Meg and her three children, but this year Meg is out with Amara, a banker who is nice enough but who competes sneakily, through her children.
She can take Amara in small doses, the way she can take everyone except for her sons and her husband and Meg, the only four people on earth whom she could take in every dose imaginable to man.
Maybe, she thinks, Meg and Amara are talking about her.
They’re not talking about me, she tells her dog.
Something has changed in the air; there’s a lot of wind now, a sense of something lurking.
The spirits of the dead, she’d think, if she were superstitious.
The dark has thickened, and she hears music from the mansion down the road where every year the neighbors host an extravagant haunted house.
She is alone, and no trick-or-treaters have wandered by in an hour, the white sandbags of candlelight have burned out, and the renters have all turned off their lights, pretending not to be home.
She reads from Bartram’s prologue, where he describes his hunter companion slaughtering a mother bear and then coming back mercilessly for the baby.
The continual cries of this afflicted child, bereft of its parent, affected me very sensibly, I was moved with compassion, and charging myself as if accessary to what now appeared to be a cruel murder, and endeavoured to prevail on the hunter to save its life, but to no effect! for by habit he had become insensible to compassion towards the brute creation, being now within a few yards of the harmless devoted victim, he fired, and laid it dead upon the body of the dam.
And now she is crying.
I’m not crying, she tells the dog, but the dog sighs deeply.
The dog needs to take a little break from her.
The dog stands and goes inside and crawls under the baby grand piano that she bought long ago from a lonely old lady, a piano that nobody plays.
A lonely old piano.
She always wanted to be the kind of person who could play the “Moonlight” Sonata.
She buries her failure at this, as she buries all her failures, in reading.
The wine is finished; she sucks a lollipop that only tastes red.
She reads for a long time until she hears what she thinks is her stomach growling, but it is, in fact, nearby thunder.
And just after the thunder comes the rain, and with the rain comes the memory of the baby sinkhole under the southeast corner of the house.
Her husband texts: the boys and he have taken shelter at the haunted house; there’s tons of food, all their friends, so much fun, she should come!—but he knows her better than that, this would be the third circle of Hell for her, she cannot abide parties, she could not abide any friends when she’s lost the best one.
She can’t even read Bartram anymore, because the thought of the sinkhole is like a hole in the mouth where a tooth used to be.
She prods and prods the sinkhole in her mind.
The rain knocks at the metal roof, and she imagines it licking away at the limestone under her house, the way her children lick away at Everlasting Gobstoppers, which they are not allowed but which she still somehow finds in sticky rainbow pools in their sock drawers.
The rain rains yet harder, and she puts on a yellow slicker and galoshes and goes out with a flashlight.
Her face is being smacked by a giant hand, and another is smacking the crown of her head.
She puts a fist over her mouth to find the air to breathe and stands on the edge of the small sinkhole, then crouches because the light is weak in the downpour.
No rain is collecting in the crater, which she thinks is extremely bad, because it must mean that the water is dripping through small cracks below, which means there’s a place for the water to go, which means there is a cavity, and the cavity could be enormous, right here beneath her feet.
She becomes aware of a stream of water licking its way down the end of her hair and into the collar of her slicker, and then slipping coolly across the bare skin of her left shoulder and then over her left breast and across her lower left rib cage and entering her navel and unfurling itself luxuriously over her right hip.
It feels remarkable, like a good cold blade across her skin.
It is erotic, she thinks; not the same thing as sexual.
Erotic is suckling her newborns, that animal smell and feel and warmth and tenderness.
Laying her head on her friend’s shoulder and smelling the soap on her skin.
Letting the sun slide over her face without worrying about cancer or the ice caps melting.
She thinks of Bartram in the deep semitropical forest, far from his wife, aroused by the sight of an evocative blue flower that exists as a weed in her own garden, writing, in what is surely a double-entendre, or, if not, deeply Freudian: How fantastical looks the libertine Clitoria, mantling the shrubs, on the vistas skirting the groves!
This, this is what she loves in Bartram so much!
The way he lets himself be full animal, a sensualist, the way he finds glory in the body’s hungers and delights.
Florida, Bartram’s ghost has been trying to tell her all along, is erotic.
For years now she has been unable to see it all around her, the erotic.
The rain, impossibly, comes down harder, and even the flashlight is no help.
She is wet and alone and crouching in the dark over an unknowable hole and now she locates the point of breakage.
Odd that it has taken so long.
Two weeks ago, she called Meg at eleven at night because she’d read an article about the coral reefs in the Gulf of Mexico being covered with a mysterious whitish slime that was killing them, and she knew enough to know that when a reef collapses, so do dependent populations, and when they go the oceans go, and Meg had answered, as she always does, but she had just put her youngest back to bed, and she was weary after a long day of helping women, and she said, Hey, relax, you can’t do anything about it, go drink the rest of the bottle of wine, take a bath, we can talk in the morning if you’re still sad.
That was it, that last call.
Poor Meg.
She is exhausting to everyone.
She would take a break from herself, too, but she doesn’t have that option.
For a minute, she lets herself imagine the larger sinkhole below the baby one opening very slowly and cupping her and the house and the dog and the piano all the way down to the very black bottom of the limestone hollow and gently depositing them there so far down that nobody could get her out, they could only visit, her family’s heads peering once in a while over the lip, tiny pale bits against the blue sky.
From down there, everyone would seem so happy.
She comes in from the rain.
The kitchen is too bright.
Surely, in the history of humanity, she is not the only one to feel like this.
It was called the New World, but Puc-Puggy understood that there was nothing new about it, as almost every step we take over those fertile heights, discovers remains and traces of ancient human habitations and cultivation.
She takes off the wet boots, the wet jacket, the wet skirt, the wet shirt, and, shivering, picks up her phone to call her husband.
The dog is licking the rain off her knees with a warm and loving tongue.
If she says sinkhole, her husband will race home in the rain with her children and their goodies.
They will put the boys to bed and stand together at the lip of the sinkhole, and maybe she will become solid again.
And so, when he picks up, she will say, Babe, I think we have a problem, but she will say it in the warmest, softest voice she owns, having learned from a master the way to deliver bad news.
She lets her hunger for her husband’s voice grow until she is almost incandescent with it.
As the phone rings and rings she says to the dog, who is looking up at her, Well, nobody can say that I’m not trying. ♦
