Return to Soldier

Haeyoon Fry

I.

                      The history of Margot Traugott, the once Miss Potato Queen of Kootenai County, began in 1977, in a blue Ford Fairmont at the edge of the Idaho hills where her baby was left for dead.

           That was the point in time, anyway, that people plucked to begin their dissertations about Margot and the rest of the Traugotts. In sunlit tearooms across The Falls church ladies would hold court each Sunday to vivisect poor Margot, her portly sallow husband Gregory, and their living child Matthew who was never seen outside save for the walk to school and back. They never named the dead child, out of respect and superstition, as if evoking the name would draw some universal attention to the shame of their chatter.

           Sunday mornings after the last steeple bell was chased away, they'd start their own sermons, hands folded in their laps, wiping away crumbs of stale cake, and the conversation would slither and veer between the weather, crop yields, or upcoming weddings. They'd bend time, pulling it into putty with their gloved and powered hands, waiting until the moment when a keyword or phrase would break the membrane of their darkest hopes and thus would begin the prodding and tearing at the soft entrails of Margot, eviscerated on their linen dining room tables as each woman took a turn at dragging out her sordid history. That history always started up in the hills, along the hot steaming highway between The Falls and Soldier.

           "I heard she did it on purpose," said Mrs. Baker whose blue eyeshadow made her wrinkled graying lids look something less than alive. "It was getting to be too much for her. An easy out."

           "But why do it with the boy there?" asked Mrs. Clements, who had cut her daughter out of her will that past summer because she refused to grant her grandchildren. "The boy would see it all, she would have known that."

           "I heard it was a fugue state," said Mrs. Browning whose son was a doctor, so everyone listened to her. "She didn't even know her own name. Just did it without thinking."

           "Well, I don't think that's possible," said Mrs. Cooke who was 23 and newly married. Since her marriage, she'd been extended the invitation to Sunday tea and she took it because it was better than going home to Mr. Cooke who waited, shadowed in the covers of their four-poster bed, comatose with invisible agony since he'd come back from the war. She wrung her hands in her lap, under the table out of sight. "How could anyone do that to their child? I can't imagine."

           "You're not a mother yet," said Mrs. Barton, the oldest of them all, whose tearoom it was that they all occupied week after week. "Being a mother can be a wretched thing."

           They all laughed, subdued and agreeing, and Mrs. Barton took a sip from her rose gold rimmed china teacup. Her children were all dead, so no one ever disagreed with her.

II.

          Margot Traugott, nee' Clabber, like the girl on the baking powder tin, lived a life out of order. There was no way to organize it, to tell it from beginning to end, and the words were never her own. Others were always at the ready to come forward and scribble in her margins, say what they thought of the red-headed girl from Iowa who told lied as easy as breathing. She let them believe their stories and in private she was the dutiful librarian to her personal histories which were all real in her heart, whether they happened to be true or not.

           Margot had kept a diary from girlhood that told conflicting stories, from the age of six when she wrote that she'd been the top of her class and later, at seven, she'd told her pink wide-ruled journal that she'd always been an outcast, failing out of school with no friends. The story changed, at 12, when she wrote how everyone in her class clamored to be her friend forcing her to rebuff them each in turn. She had, the diary confessed, been a long-nailed lipstick-smeared rebel in the sixth grade and she'd led student rallies that shook the foundations of the school. All the boys had wanted to her, in ways they didn't have names for, and neither did she, but she knew that being wanted felt like your skin during a lightning storm. 

           The entries were scattered, adopting new styles as Margot discovered new parts of herself that she wanted to bring forward. She was an acrobat, a ballerina, a punk, a sharp-eyed photogenic tantamount of intellect, at once 16 and then 21, traipsing through the halls of her private journal as if she knew that someday it would be put to a microscope, pressed into print, and her fans would hem and haw over the particulars of her Sunday evening baths. Rosewater, she wrote, in a looping style she adopted because it looked rich, is all that I'll let touch my sensitive skin. Margot was her only audience, but she wrote as if for the world.

           Margot's dream of moving to Hollywood had been one of the continuous threads of the diary. There were heady and cloying entries of teenage adoration at 13 when Margot was passionately in love with the world and she demanded, in her fictions, that the world love her back as an actress on the silver screen. Then, there were the slowly solidifying plans of her senior year in high school when she tore down each of her associates, one by one, as they planned their higher education. Margot’s future was in tea rooms and ballrooms, surrounded by Chinese folding screens and silk gowns, the dressing mannequin of ages past at the center of a turning Hollywood gyre. These beatific meanderings wound through the more mundane entries about day-to-day life until they withered and died on the vine after an entry marked “AUGUST ‘69” where the only thing written on the whole two-page spread were the words

Dear Diary (looping and grandiose) I'm pregnant (written small, in tight cursive, as if hoping to fold up and leave a blank page behind). 

III.

           Margot Traugott died in 1987 and Matthew fled The Falls. The service had been poorly attended but he'd seen the windows of each house he passed in town, cracked open like an egg, eyes watching him pass through the blue rain-soaked streets. He'd been alone, at the graveside, and left before they lowered her down. Elsewhere, in dining rooms and kitchens, the townspeople kept a different kind of vigil. He stopped home to pack a bag and left town that night.

           The swirling dust devils of gossip seemed to pause and recede as soon as he passed off the main dirty highway and onto the paved one. He hadn't said goodbye to his dad, who had been passed out since morning. Gregory Traugott had become a moist stain in the living room armchair, a permanent fixture who had one day poured a drink, sat down, and never got up again.

            After "The Accident" as it had been dubbed (for to call it anything more specific would send his mother into waves of terrifying and unpredictable fits) their tiny family had dragged itself on, lopping off parts of their social life until there was nothing left. Margot had been iced out of the Sunday teas. Gregory had been unable to get regular work at the garage. The nursery was boarded up, by Margot, who had been foaming at the mouth and screaming like an eagle all through the night. She'd left after that, in the Ford, and neither Gregory nor Matthew had looked for her until news came to town that she'd turned up dead in Arkansas. Matthew received the news in the middle of his senior year and the remains arrived for burial the day after graduation. 

           He wasn’t sure that his father knew there was a funeral. They were lost boys, the two of them, but with Margot finally buried that time had to come to an end. Matthew's name had grown without his consent to include unflattering titles of pity and reproach. Matthew, the Poor Boy. Matthew, that Sweet Lamb. Matthew, Basically an Orphan. 

           The entire drive out of town he thought of his father and found it was a fishhook in his heart. As the sunset on the horizon, and he pictured Old Gregory stumbling through the house and hearing the dull echo where his family had once been. There wouldn't be a bowl of soup in the microwave that night, or a new roll of toilet paper on the shelf, and as Matthew drove further on, he had imagined more and more dire circumstances that ended in his father, melting away into a sentient puddle of fermentation and loathing. 

           He'd ridden on the spit-slick road out of town, through the tall trees, and burst free like he'd been born into the long rows of corn that spread out for endless miles. He'd printed out a map to the city from the library and packed a bag of snacks and underwear, like a good Boy Scout 

           It took him ten hours and three packs of cigarettes to get to his Aunt Ruth in Spokane. She hadn't looked pleased when she'd opened the door, but most of his memories of her were of her lopsided, pinched expression. She'd muttered something about, "calling next time" and set him up in the guest bedroom of her little townhome. He'd watched her through the crack in his door, as she'd paced through the hall with the cordless, trying to get a hold of his father. She didn't get through, had cursed and kicked at the air, and in the morning, she'd made chocolate chip pancakes and smoked a pack of Ultra Lights, just like his mother had, while he wolfed them down. They arranged that he would find a job in the city, and she would let him live there as long as he kept his room clean and didn't bring any of "that small town bullshit" into her metropolitan abode.

           Aunt Ruth had fancied herself a worldly woman and she showcased it by collecting globes, maps, and on sale perfumes with French names. She had been to Europe, she told him, when she was young, and she lamented not marrying a tall, dark European man every night over a heavy glass of box wine. Sometimes she gave him some, too, and he let himself swim in her regret as if it were his own. The taste of regret for him was the tang of his father's slow pickling, back in The Falls, and he knew his Aunt called back there every night and every night she failed to get through to anyone. Matthew might have suggested calling the Reynolds from up the road to go and check up on his dad but that was something a caring son might have done, and he was adrift in a sea of cheap pink wine and day to day work in the City, capital C, washing plates in an office cafeteria. 

           Matthew had tried to forget his father in those years. Away from the suffocating attentions of the residents of The Falls, he inundated himself with the radiation of pop culture. He spent weekends at the theatre, buying one ticket and sneaking from one screen to the next, a never-ending reel of fists and screams and passionate embraces. He stole porn magazines from the gas station and fell in love with every girl he met. He collected coins, then lighters, then bumper stickers he didn’t have anywhere to stick. He forgot the Falls, forgot Margot, and the hot steaming road out to Soldier where his life had cracked and broken open seemed to belong to a stranger until soporific Ruth rapped on his door with her wine and long cigarettes to tell him that his dad had shot himself in the head.

Matthew paused his new life, got back in the truck, and went home. He was 23.

           His father had left behind a legacy of trash, the filth of a man possessed. It was clear that he had drunk himself into a corner, surrounded by a crawling mountain of cans and bottles.

The police had cut up the carpet where most of the blood spatter was which left a damp-looking plywood square in the center of the room.

Matthew had stood amid the wreckage of his father's life as cops and volunteers rifled through, throwing him flat, familiar looks of pity. 

           When they all left and the winds of agony and pity had abated, he laid back on the couch, dusty but covered in a clear plastic zip cover, and his eyes drifted backward into his head and back to the time when he stood next to his mother in the Ford Fairmont, his sister screaming in her car seat, and the hot road dazzling like broken glass.

IV.

          Margot Clabber, age nine, dreamed that she was on a raft in the center of a swamp. The air was like a million pinprick tongues licking her skin, cold and shocking like an animal come out of the night. She didn’t know what time of day it was since the sky was tall and endless and gray. It glowed.

           This was the swamp that she visited in her dreams until, later, it bled into her waking hours as well. In the hot Idaho sun, she’d feel the tinkling, lapping bells of the mist against her bare arms and she’d disappear, from a minute, an hour, a day, and wake up suspended halfway between life and death. 

           For a long time, no one noticed her disappearances. They happened slowly, in pieces, and they called her a clumsy girl, for a while, and then they called her a dumb one. She crashed her bike when she was 12 and woke up curled in the dew of the grass at midnight. She started to drown in the community pool that same summer and had to be told hours later when she blinked her eyes open in the back of her mother’s trailer with a cool rag on her head. When she’s 16 the Sheriff grabbed her arm, burned red in the sun, and told her that she’d been standing still in the McCree field for over an hour.

           As her reveries and vanishings grew more frequent, she felt as if she’d been dunked, headlong, into a dark blue ocean. She was angry, all the time, and her skin felt too loose, too tight, too wrong and it itched as each summer passed and she found her memories were Swiss cheese, full of black holes. Her bust expanded, her waist curved inward, and everyone told her she's going to break hearts. She didn’t want those hearts. She wanted to throw them back, trade them for sunny days where she could recall what she did from sunup to sundown. In her diary she wrote, I'm breaking everyone's heart. 

            She dreamed of a raft made of thin swamp tree trunks, lashed together with Cyprus vines. In her dream, she’s on her back in a heavy linen dress, barely afloat. The raft buoys under her, just at her back, but the moon can only see her round white face peering back like a mirror. She woke up crying and her bed was soaked red.

Her mother sent her to school with homemade pads and she dropped them all over the school bus floor.

           Her diary that day read, everyone at school lined up to be my friend.

V. 

           Matthew was surprised, upon his return to town, that a raft of aunties awaited him. The ladies of the town, with their sharp eyes and cold hands, came to attend him at his father's funeral. The same women who had disdained his mother all those years before came to call, with casseroles and flowers, cookies and tea. Aunts and aunties, the invisible web of women who found it fit to meddle in his life. He took the good with the bad. In a daze, he cleaned out the old shotgun house, and while one woman tittered something sour and tasteless ("if you'd had real parents," Mrs. Browning said while scrubbing the sink, "this might not have happened") another would slip him a mentholated cigarette and give a conspiratorial wink as if he weren’t a grown man. Matthew was convinced that women, in their aprons and skirts, their big hair and calloused hands, ruled the world like a secret cabal. 

           He wondered what his mother’s life would have been if the ladies hadn’t locked her out. As he remembered it, his mother never had friends over. She never hosted any teas of her own, and the only women who came calling were relatives on dutiful missions to bring canned soup and canned smiles when someone in the household took ill. Ever since he'd been small, before The Accident, Matthew was used to seeing Margot sweep through the house at all hours. She was like a great fire, a burning bouffant of dark red hair that tore from room to room along with some invisible air current only she could see. Margot would bang the doors open and shut, moving clothes and books and garbage from one room to the next as if it created a sense of order. At their worst, when Margot's mutterings turned into ravings, loud sharp nonsensical ramblings that prodded at whatever was in their path, Gregory would alley-oop Matthew up under his arm no matter the time of day and they'd ride out in the pickup truck, past the fields until you couldn't see the town. Matthew would try to stay awake on these rides, but he was always lulled to sleep in the endless silent net his father cast as they rode together. Gregory didn't talk but he made shushing sounds while he drove as if telling Matthew that speaking wouldn't be permitted. They would return to house set right and Margot would be inert in the room next door, breathing deeply and staring at nothing. That was their life for years. Long seasons of lucky summer, filled with motherly kisses and soft hands swinging him around and extra cookies before bed, but then the freak lightning of his mother's madness would strike them all and they'd have to pause life and begin again. 

           No one ever visited the Traugotts for pleasure. Matthew had not realized it, but his mother had created an island of their home. At seven years old he carried a tenseness around his shoulders as if waiting at any moment to be slapped by something invisible and terrible. 

           Then, Grace was born. 

VI.

           The life of Margot Traugott ended in a blue Ford Fairmont at the edge of the Idaho hills where her baby was left for dead.

           Matthew knew that the Margot sitting in the driver’s seat was not the same woman that cut his hotdog into bite-sized pieces and ruffled his fluffy head with both hands, a wide red smile on her lips. This Margot sat before him, chain-smoking a pack of Ultra Lights with the windows rolled up and locked tight. The engine was dead. The car was baking in the sun, exposed between the hills on the road out to Soldier.

           She had started selling hand lotions door to door, a business he didn't know the particulars of but knew his role. She’d carry suitcases out to the car, filled with pale pink bottles, sprays, and compacts, and he would run around the house making sure she didn't forget her own particulars. Matthew oversaw her purse, keys, cigarettes, and lighter which tended to lay scattered throughout their squat shotgun home. For such a small space Margot Traugott managed to lose every useful thing and Matthew grew a knack for finding them. 

           The Fairmont had always been loud, a buzzing racket every time it started up, so conversation was impossible. Not that Matthew had a lot to say to his mother. Even less so, after Grace had come into the picture. Matthew's mother, even at her best, would ping-pong between snapping at him to lulling into a distant glassy-eyed gaze herself. She'd close her eyes and rub her temples as if scrubbing his presence from her mind and lapse into a long stretch of inactivity. 

            Matthew yelled that he saw a desert hare out the window, his voice lost in the din of the motor. His mother had sharply pulled over, killed the engine, and put her head into her hands. When she didn’t resurface, he knew that she’d disappeared.

           "Mom," he said, pulling himself forward on the leather seats, his skin catching and pulling. "Mom, roll down the windows."

           Margot didn't seem to hear him. Her cigarette was still clutched between the pointer and middle finger of her left hand, amid the glittering costume rings that she sometimes let Matthew use as stands-ins for pirate treasure. It was a long column of ash. Her other hand reached out, poised in front of her as if paused in reaching, and it shook. 

           "Mom, what are you doing?" Matthew asked. Grace started to cry. "Mom?"

           The car cab filled with smoke and Grace cried. It was mid-August, dry and hot in the Idaho hills. Matthew's mouth felt gummy. There was nothing to drink in the car. Just suitcases of hand creams.

           He looked down at Grace. She was crying so hard her eyes were screwed completely shut. Her face looked swollen and pained, like a bruise. He unlatched her and picked her up. She threw up and he lost his grip and she slipped from his hands.

VII.

           The sun moved from overhead in a long slope along the curve of the Earth. The black pavement was soft and melted, sticking to Matthew's shoes as he walked back to the car. His shirt was soaked at the armpits and his skin felt hot to the touch. It had taken him an hour to find an outcropping of rocks away from the road. It had taken another hour for him to dig a small hole in the sand dirt, using only his cupped hands.

            Purple and red rose from the mountains and when he got back to the car he stood beside his mother, frozen in the driver's seat, and listened to her breathing with his eyes closed, matching each long intake and exhale as if he could disappear, too, if he tried.

             It was dark when Margot looked at him and told him to get back in. They rode in silence, pulled up to the house, and Margot went inside without looking back, slamming the screen door behind her in a profusion of lightning bugs.

             Matthew stayed in the car, curled up on the front seat, and tried to imagine that the night would never end. He hoped that the world would never exhale, and the sun would never rise and his mother would never run back in the burning red dawn to wail at the windows, banging her fists and tearing at her clothes as if she had been pierced in through the heart. 

            "That's a terrible thing your mother did," his father said, later, when she'd gone away, and the house was achingly still. "She didn't mean it, probably doesn't even remember it."

             "I remember," Matthew said, and because he was eight years old and traumatized and the world already hated Margot just enough, that was all he ever had to say.

Back to the September issue