[natural remedies.]

Enid never expected to have a fourth child. The third baby, Nell, was special: at birth, doctors noted and whispered over the single fold in her palm, her flattened nose and small, scalloped ears. At three years old, she died. The circumstances were hazy: Enid was at her sister’s home in the city, recovering from pneumonia – she couldn’t stay at home because Nell’s immune system wasn’t particularly strong. Bill was home with the children. There was a phone call, loud, staccato words: “Fell – blue – Enid! – she – come,” and then, clearly, “Enid. Come home. Nell isn’t breathing. Get home.” And when Enid arrived, still in the long thin nightgown she favored when she was ill, Nell’s little body was cool, her chunky appendages still malleable but limp. Her short, broad hands were curled as though she were delicately cradling some treasure; Enid unfolded one and watched the fingers curl back again.
Enid still remembered coming up her own driveway and scanning the house with her eyes from the passenger seat of her sister’s sedan; they locked on a deep bucket standing at the edge of the front porch. Bill had been washing the windows, dipping a rag in the ever-dirtier water and swiping it across the glass; hours later, when Enid inspected the bucket, it would still be full of sudsy, scummy water. Bill had gone inside to check on Anthony, their oldest, and when he came back onto the porch, Nell’s legs were sticking out of the bucket, her dimpled knees and lumpy calves visible and fatally significant even, Bill said, from the moment he stepped through the front door and out into the blinding light of summer. He knew, he told Enid and the paramedics – and, in the years to come, the family and friends who hadn’t even asked – that Nell was dead even before he crossed the porch to her, even before he had her in his arms and the weight of her made his arms sag, just as it did when she was sound asleep and had to be carried from the car to her crib, or the floor to her parents’ bed.
“She was dead,” Bill would intone, leaning toward whomever he was speaking to, “and I knew it even before I held her. Fathers know these things about their children.”
A short, wide woman from the state came. She moved through the house on heels that clacked on the linoleum, asking questions, testing locks and handles and knobs, pipes, windows, nodding in agreement with whatever unspoken observations were formulating in her head.
She left the Hainsworths’ house with a kind of promise: “I don’t find your home hazardous.” Here she placed a damp palm against Enid’s forearm: “It’s hard to safeguard everything. This wasn’t your fault. It will be alright.”
Enid stood shaking against the doorframe, watching the state car pull out of her driveway and glide almost soundlessly down the road; Bill had already gone back inside. She repeated to herself over and over that the state woman had said it would be alright.

Anthony and Dalia, at ages six and five, respectively, learned quickly to behave as though they had never had a little sister. Bill told them not to trouble Enid with questions about Nell, about where she was now or if she would come back, and so they did not. On an almost pathologically realistic day, on which everything happened for a reason and everything was justified within the grand scheme of the world’s goings-on, Enid could understand the children’s easy adaptation to life without Nell. A special sibling is sometimes a nuisance to other young children, Enid would think coolly, certainly to hers. Anthony and Dalia were too small themselves to understand that the attention Nell received was necessary, as requisite as Enid’s or Bill’s pre-cutting the older children’s food before it reached the table, so they need not risk contact with sharp, serrated edges. On these days, Enid could also admit that life was easier for her, too, when she did not have one child that needed almost constant attention. And Bill was easier to deal with, certainly: he was more friendly, less tense. He voluntarily executed chores that Enid’s friends’ husbands did without complaining, but that Bill had always used to gripe over. But on these days, the dangerously honest ones, Enid’s mind would dwell on Bill and Nell, on Bill’s bitter resentment of Nell’s constantly being attached somehow to Enid’s body; on Bill’s anger that morning when Nell was screaming and couldn’t articulate her dilemma and Bill had put her in her crib and closed the door and Enid had come home to find the child feral-eyed and desperate, tangled in her blankets; on the nasty comments Bill made in hearing range of the older children about “retards.”
Sometimes, even in moments when Enid watched Bill’s back move slowly away toward the garbage can, or cut a line across the grass plodding behind a whirling mower, images of him holding Nell facedown in the bucket would flash before Enid’s eyes. The image seared itself onto the backs of her eyelids, and there were days that she could not escape it. On these days, she ducked Bill’s hands and lay awake those nights with her eyes hard and stinging, cool as marbles from not blinking. Bill seemed to be able to sense when she was still awake, and his hands would rove over her body and up under her nightgown – the same one Enid wore home on Nell’s death day – and he would whisper about making another baby.
And then, one night, she rolled toward her husband and wrenched her nightgown over her head. “Alright, Bill,” she’d said, and her words had dropped into the space between them, settling on the sheet and curling like a dormant viper. Bill didn’t move, so Enid slid toward him, taking him in her hands. Night after night they took to the sheets, armed with magazines boasting articles entitled “New Tricks to Try” and “O-scar Awards.” They fucked more than they had at any other point in their marriage, rabidly, not caring that the headboard might occasionally clap against the wall. The children, the children who were left, slept soundly.
There was relief in this, the carnal release of pain, but there was also a certain degree of self-consciousness on Enid’s behalf. Often, she remembered a friend’s pet rabbit. The woman, Margaret, kept a rabbit in a hutch beside her home. Her children, two girls, adored the rabbit, toted it, cried when a neighbor boy broke its leg by lifting it from its cage by its left hind foot. The children cried so long and so hard that Margaret’s husband paid to have the rabbit’s leg set in a plaster cast. And the neighbor boy, apologetic in his own way, went to a local pet shop and purchased a male rabbit as a companion for the injured party. He slipped the buck into the hutch one night, and in the morning, Margaret’s daughters caught sight of the copulating rabbits. Within two weeks, the female rabbit’s hindquarters were rubbed raw by the constant friction of intercourse. Her skin was pink and upraised; bumps not unlike razor burn stood out against her bare rump. Margaret released the buck rabbit into the woods behind her home, prepared a blanketed corner in the family room for the female rabbit and prayed that the poor thing’s hair would grow back. It never did.
There were dreams, horrible dreams in which Bill entered Enid and Enid suddenly realized that the skin below her waist and above her thighs was falling away, settling on the bed sheets in piles. But nothing happened. Enid’s skin stayed in place and the children never woke and Enid’s dot came every month, resolutely, like a touring relative paying his respects. It dawned on Enid that perhaps Bill had never wanted another child, that he was somehow protecting himself and that the whole thing had been a ploy to bed her. She repaid his selfishness by digging her nails a bit too deeply into his back, or sinking her teeth into his shoulder for too long. They developed a routine: breakfast with the children; their respective places of employment – Bill’s an insurance firm, Enid’s a natural pharmacy; small talk at home in front of Anthony and Dalia. The routine was punctuated by their stealing into a bedroom, closet or hall at opportune moments so that they could sweat and ache and act out their individual frustrations: Enid’s with Bill, Bill’s with Nell. Except in those moments that their bodies were joined together, they might have hated each other. It often occurred to Enid that they might.

The affair with Mendel began several years after Nell’s death. Seven, actually. Sex with Bill had gone stale again; the passage of time exponentially increased their mutual resentment, so much so that sex was not a reliable outlet for it all. They reconfigured their routine: breakfast with the children, their respective offices, small talk at home in front of Dalia and Anthony and then sleeping in separate bedrooms, Enid stealing down the hall to the guest bed after confirming that both children were soundly asleep. In the morning, Enid packed the children off to school and left the house while Bill showered, walked to the Village Herbalist and sorted through vitamin bottles in a kind of stupor.
Mendel came into the Village Herbalist one afternoon just after lunch, about an hour before Enid would swing her bag over her shoulder and retrace her steps to her front door, mix chocolate powder into hormone-free milk for the children and set out plates with food flowers: peanut butter or cheese pistols, petals of apple slices or crackers. She was reading the label of a new product, some pill vowing to stimulate hair growth, particularly along the hairline.
Mendel approached almost silently; Enid started when he spoke.
“Will it keep you young?” his voice was gruff, his shoulders peppered with flakes of skin, his hair patchy and dry, “Because I need to stay young.” He laughed, gesturing at the bottle.
Enid smiled uncertainly, “It’ll keep your hairline looking youthful” – she glanced back down at the bottle – “supposedly. Twenty-one ninety nine. Care to try it?” She lifted the bottle.
“Doubt it’ll help, actually. But you might keep me young,” spoken awkwardly, with the kind of self consciousness that older men develop after years of being rebuffed, “What do you think?” And he shifted his weight onto his other foot and laughed again.
“Oh, I – ” Enid began.
Mendel smiled brightly, “Oh, don’t let me give you any pause. I’m just kidding. Old men like to do that with pretty clerks.”
Enid felt her blood rise a bit: she had studied herbs for years. She opened her mouth to ask him if there was anything specific she might assist him with, but he thrust a hand toward her. She surprised herself by taking it; his hand was rough and calloused.
“I’m Mendel. Harvery. I’m Mendel Harvey. And really, I’ll stop heckling you. I just need something to combat heartburn, if you’ve got anything like that. I don’t know, really, I just thought I’d ask. You got anything like that, by any chance?”
“We do, actually. A few things. I’ll shop you around the store,” Enid said, coming around the counter and striding toward one of three aisles. She looked behind her. “I’m Enid. I’m sorry,” and she took two steps back toward him to shake hands again. “That was rude. I’m Enid, and it is nice to meet you, Mendel. Now, if you’ll follow me, we’ll see what we can do about that heartburn of yours.”
Mendel left that day with a small plastic envelope of chewable deglycyrrhizinated licorice and a vial of slippery elm, although Enid assured him that one of the two would be sufficient to combat the incredibly mild discomfort he’d described. He came back several times over the next few weeks, requesting natural remedies for stomach ulcers – and leaving with yet another packet of deglycyrrhizinated licorice – and sinus infections, migraine headaches and nausea. Enid would watch him step out of his car and come toward the door. In her mind, the bottles of all the herbal remedies he’d purchased would line up like soldiers at attention, marching toward a war that didn’t actually exist: grapefruit seed extract, candied ginger, vitamin B12, beet extract, aloe juice, fenugreek seeds. Somehow, even as she imagined these things, she knew that Mendel never used the products to assault anything akin to the discomforts they were intended to combat. They were allies, really, more than soldiers, a united front to reduce her to submission.

For many years, Enid couldn’t remember when she and Mendel actually began to meet outside of the Village Herbalist. Sometimes she looked at her youngest son and tried to pinpoint the moment at which she knew she loved his father, but she couldn’t; hers and Mendel’s relationship was a kind of progression, a process with no recognizable beginning or end. And then one sun-speckled afternoon, while she was wrapping a bandage around the youngest boy’s foot, it came to her: she and Mendel were casual acquaintances one day, and then, on another, he was telling her that he couldn’t properly mix the water and vinegar solution she had recommended for his athlete’s foot, and she had found herself volunteering to mix it for him, and had heard him answer that he would appreciate it.
Enid told Bill that she was having dinner with a client – how many clients could an herbologist possibly have? – although she probably needn’t have bothered. She might have told Bill that she was meeting another man. Enid could not imagine Bill having the visceral reaction another woman’s husband might, upon hearing that his wife was intentionally seeking comfort outside of their marriage. Bill agreed to watch the children and Enid told him not to feel like he needed to wait up for her.
A shadow passed over Bill’s face, contorting it slightly; only for a moment, then it moved on and he nodded once, firmly. “I wouldn’t have.”
Enid left the house in a skirt and printed blouse; she did not wear heels, understanding that donning them might signify a formal provocation toward Bill.

She met Mendel in front of the shop, and they crossed the street to his small red hatchback.
He opened her car door, doffed an imaginary hat: “M’ lady.”
Enid heard her own laughter bubble forth from a place she had forgotten about almost entirely. She watched Mendel cross in front of the car – maybe it had been then that she fell in love. He was much older, but looked so very much like he needed someone to love him, to take care of him. He wore a starched button down shirt, a button-up vest, rumpled woolen trousers. The outfit was unfortunate: Mendel’s dandruff flakes stood out against the dark green vest.
Mendel steered them smoothly toward his home, into his driveway. Mendel made dinner while Enid stirred vinegar into water. They ate, and at one point, Mendel covered Enid’s hand with his own.
“You don’t wear your wedding ring,” he nodded, almost idly.
“We lost a child. Marriages don’t often survive something like that, especially not –” and Enid almost said, “when you think your husband killed her,” but didn’t. Instead, she repeated herself and let her voice drop, trailing the unfinished sentence into oblivion: “especially not –”
“Must be hard,” Mendel commiserated. “I’ve always wanted a child. Got a natural remedy for that?” he asked, and laughed heartily.
“I think the old fashioned way might be best,” Enid said quietly, turning her eyes but not her head up to Mendel. “Maybe after we treat your feet,” she added lightly, trying to smile the statement into nothingness, to relegate it to the same place she chained her accusations about Bill.
Mendel shook his head seriously. “No, no I think it might be best to get to it now.” He leaned toward Enid, so close that she could feel his breath against her ear and just the slightest contact between his cheek and hers. “I don’t really have athlete’s foot, anyway,” he whispered.
And he dropped his napkin onto the table, took Enid by the hand and led her to a room that was clean and full of light.

Mendel was sweet and gentle, as consistent in his lovemaking as he had been in his visitations of the Village Herbalist. Enid knew that Bill was dimly aware of a certain elevation in her mood, buoyancy that he knew he could not have facilitated. When Enid found out she was pregnant, she realized she would have to sleep with Bill; it would not do to have her children realize one day that their mother had become pregnant despite not having slept with their father in almost five years.
Enid went to Bill one night when he was downstairs in the den, reclining in an overstuffed brown armchair. She leaned down, as though she might tell him something, and licked his ear. Enid watched the light rekindle in his eyes, saw his pupils dilate; she held her own eyes tightly closed throughout the entire encounter.
Three weeks later, she told Bill that she was pregnant; Anthony was 11, Dalia, 10. Dalia whined, “Mom, we’re too old for you to have another baby,” and shook her head with a petulance Enid had not seen since Nell was alive. Those three years of Nell’s life had been difficult ones for Dalia, who constantly needled her mother for unnecessarily coddling Nell. Then, Dalia couldn’t understand that the coddling was, in fact, necessary; now, she couldn’t understand that having this baby was also a kind of necessity.
Enid started to tell her daughter that she could be a wonderful helper, almost like a second mother to the baby, but Bill spoke before she could: “Dalia, this is a wonderful thing for your mother and me. Don’t try to make it ugly, please.” He met Enid’s eyes over the kitchen island, and for the first time in several years, his gaze stemmed from a feeling of camaraderie, not raw sexual attraction or bitter resentment.
Dalia flounced from the room and Enid watched Bill move around the kitchen, collecting dishes and running them under the tap before placing them in the dishwasher, recapping the jam and honey jars, freighting them to the pantry. She wondered when he had become this man. While Enid was with Mendel, Bill was becoming the husband she’d always wanted: on Tuesday mornings, the trashcans were standing attention at the curb even before Enid remembered that they needed to be put out; dishes that she had not washed dripped in the drying rack; the towels seemed to be folding themselves. Her heart ached, suddenly, and she buckled under the realization that she could no longer see Mendel.

Mendel never knew about the baby. Enid wrote him a note, used a rubber band to secure it to a large plastic container of vinegar and water solution she’d prepared for him. It read:

Mendel,
I’m glad you pretended to have athlete’s foot. I never would have gotten to love you if you hadn’t, but this thing has run its course. I have children, and a husband. Who I love is irrelevant at this point. But, for the record, I love you.
I love you.

And that was all. Mendel did not protest, did not recoil from the doorstep when he found that large bottle on his welcome mat. His facial expression did not change when he read the note; Enid watched from down the street. It still stung, when she looked at their son, to remember Mendel’s stolid expression, the resignation she could see in it.
His face floated through her mind just as the image of Bill murdering Nell once had. Enid was haunted by Mendel, unsettled by his absence from the Village Herbalist, by not receiving notes from him, or cooking dinner in his large, orderly kitchen or making love in the dappled sunlight that fell into his bedroom from high, wide windows. She rubbed her growing belly and tried to transmit all her memories of Mendel through her skin to the baby; she hoped her fingers conducted her true feelings to the baby, that it would somehow know who its father was.

The fourth baby was a boy. Bill was present in the delivery room. He held Enid’s hand and she squeezed it and screamed out of sheer fury that it was Bill holding her hand instead of Mendel. Bill suggested that they name the boy Neil.
“For Nell,” he explained, and Enid’s throat tightened and her stomach reeled. She insisted that they call the child Harvey.
Mendel Harvey, she thought. Mendel Harvey. I at least gave him part of your name, Mendel. She hoped that one day she would have the opportunity to tell him.

Harvey grew up and blossomed as none of the other children had. He was radiant, joyful, effusive and boisterous, rascally but always repentant. There was nothing of Bill in him: no trace of Bill in Harvey’s skin tone, his hair, his eyes, his mannerisms. There was nothing of Enid in him, either, or anything that might bind him to Anthony and Dalia. Bill fondly called Harvey “the little stranger,” and tousled his mop of thick, curly hair.

Enid often wondered if Harvey’s shoulders would be dusted with dandruff when he was older. For a while, from when Harvey was 11 to when he was 14, Enid surreptitiously ground fenugreek seeds into a fine powder and mixed them into whatever she prepared for him. She came to value Harvey’s strangeness to her, to her family. He was, in fact, a stranger, and out of some selfish impulse in her soul, she did not want Harvey, one day, to discover any affiliation with his father. He had never met Mendel; Enid had not seen him since the day she left the athlete’s foot remedy on his doorstep. Still, she had nightmares about them one day running into each other, and so she ground the fenugreek seeds until she heard – from another Village Herbalist employee, who happened also to work in a hardware store Mendel frequented – that he had died from a ruptured spleen. Enid did not know of a natural remedy for that.

[kawalek.]

There is an old man at the coffee shop counter. He lays a cane across the counter, so that the head of it – metal and carved, an eagle? – rests at his thigh, the foot at the barista’s crotch. The man orders a Coke, startles upon hearing that the shop doesn’t have fountain sodas; only bottles. He doesn’t want a bottle, but he counts out change anyway, bumbling it into the barista’s open palm. The girl, a collegiate brunette with ringed eyes, watches the man with flat disinterest. She places the change on the counter and sorts it, meticulous and insulting.
“You’re short twelve cents.” The girl sweeps the money off of the counter and back into her hand.
“Let me tell you something – I only had a sixth grade education, and all my siblings called me stupid. Do you know what it does to a person to hear he’s stupid?” The girl’s eyes begin to shift in the way of those embarrassed by having been impatient with others. “It makes you feel dumb. I’m not dumb – ” the octogenarian and the young adult, grappling over a granite countertop flecked with gold mica. The man’s rant probably began decades ago, but he picks up the thread as effortlessly as though this girl, this young woman in particular, was the sibling who called him dumb, the teacher who gave him low marks.
I plunk a quarter onto the counter and keep moving toward the bathroom. The old man turns in a slow circle; I imagine that in another incarnation, the one in which he wore a pressed military uniform, he pivoted neatly on one foot. Instead, the man takes several very small steps, turning and looking and finding my face and then, after a half second of complete confusion during which his eyes are blank, unfocused, my eyes.
“Well now thank you, but this young lady is not correct. She does not stand correct.” He shuffles around again so that he faces the barista. “You are not correct. I have a sixth grade education and even I know you’re not correct.”
The girl begins backing away from the counter; her cheeks color and her brow furrows. “Sir, a Coke is one dollar and ninety-two cents. You only gave me a dollar, eighty.”
“That’s because a Coke is a dollar and eighty cents!” The man’s trembling hand comes down hard on the granite counter.
“Tax,” the girl says helplessly. “There’s tax, sir.”
I touch the man’s elbow: “Why don’t you find a table? I’ll bring you your drink. Would you like ice in it?”
“Ice?”
“Yes, sir, would you like ice in your drink? In your cup.”
“Of course I want ice.”
“Alright, find a table. I’ll bring your drink. Alright?”
Indecision crosses the man’s face; his eyes are small behind myopic lenses. “Alright. Alright, I’ll find a table.” The man takes up his cane. “Will you sit with me?” he asks, and his voice leaves little room for refusal.
Perhaps he thinks that he knows me; he does not, but I hear myself saying, “I’ll be right there.”
“And you’ll sit with me?”
“Yes, I’ll sit with you.”
The man retreats: white, thick-soled tennis shoes move haltingly toward a table.
I smile at the barista; she drops her eyes and begins scrounging in the cash register; she puts thirteen cents on the counter between us.
“I’d like a small cappuccino, skim,” I say, then add, “Please.”
I am not certain that the girl’s heard me. She steps away from the counter and reaches into the deli case, shuffles some muffins onto a tray. Right before I speak, she straightens and is suddenly engaged in a flurry of motion: hands reaching, pouring, stirring. There is the scream of a milk steamer, the rich smell of espresso. And then, there before me, is a wide, deep ceramic mug. She’s made a brown fern, fronds reaching into the puffy white of the frothed milk.
“Can I have a cup, too, please? With ice.”
She seems to have forgotten the old man already. Then, “Oh.”
I leave the cappuccino on the counter and go to the drink cooler and choose a Coke from the back of the case. I carry the cup of ice in one hand and the soda in the other. The old man has chosen a four-top, hooked his cane significantly over a chair’s back. When I set down his cup, he looks up anxiously, eyes searching. For a moment, he looks hunted.
“Where’s your drink? You didn’t get a drink?”
I gesture toward the counter.
“Where’s your drink?”
I open my mouth slowly and calibrate each word’s impact before I say it. “I couldn’t carry both drinks, so I brought yours first. You’ve been waiting longer. And my drink is hot – I didn’t want to spill it on myself.”
This is the voice in which I speak to my students: exacting language and a firm, even tone.
“Well, you said you’d sit with me, and I’m going to hold you to it,” the man says. “You said you would.” His eyes are darting from my face to the counter, where my drink still sits. He looks at my drink for a long, steady moment, and then says, “That yours?”
“It is.”
“She’ll bring it. It’s her job, anyway. Shorted her twelve cents, my foot…” he lapses into a murmured reverie and then barks, “Twelve cents and you can’t bring the lady’s drink?”
The girl behind the counter scrabbles out from behind it. She moves slowly and carefully, as confidently as I imagine she can in this burning moment of frustration and outrage.

Fragment[s]

In the ox-blood room, he waits, and wonders, and passes the time by counting the ceiling tiles. At 12 tiles, he forgets whether or not he has just counted the twelfth tile or is about to count it. His eyes retrace his progress and he begins again.

He is on his seventeenth tile when a door opens and a woman’s head appears. First, a head; a body follows, and the woman is framed by a strange static light. She is shockingly diminutive. “Anderson – Anderson, Adams?” Her voice is like steel wool; Adams does not look up. He almost cannot: his eyelids are heavy and the woman’s voice carries a conviction that makes Adams certain she already knows who he is, could pick him out in a lineup, does not require his acknowledgment.

But if she’ll see him anyway – Adams rises, still without meeting the woman’s eyes. “I’m Anderson.”

He feels the woman’s eyes; the added stress of being closely-scrutinized makes his scrotum tighten. Fuck, he breathes, and lifts his gaze to meet the woman’s, and follows her through the door into the room that is neither well lit nor dark enough to be sinister.

The fluorescent bulbs hum; there is still an almost imperceptible tremor in the light. These things are irrelevant – the buzz, the lighting, even the fact that, in this remarkable lighting, Adams can almost convince himself that the situation is imagined. He entertains himself, for a moment, with the idea of the situation as a thought, a dream, and so – a cloud he can sweep from the sky. His sister used to scoop spider webs from corners in much the same way. She would shake her hand, use the other to peel the filaments from her skin. […]