Track Mangoes

Brief excerpt from the novella "A Shibboleth." A work in progress.

The two of them arrived in his classroom early. He told the mother to take off her clothes and handed her a white bathrobe. When she inquired as to the location of the proper changing place Menashe laughed and left the room, brushing his collar bones with the tips of his fingers. She found herself in a corner next to the craft sink, deep and dotted with paint, where she removed her belt and pants and shirt and panties and wrapped the robe around her body. She laid her clothes, folded neatly, next to a black box on top of which sat a gaunt burgundy stool. There she would relay posture after posture to his students.

Menashe came in a few moments later in a heated conversation about contemporary aestheticism with one of his students—a skinny boy in a blue plaid shirt with a lip ring and floppy hair. And then they started to trickle in, like ants marching up the side of their mound, first in a single file line, punctuated every so often with an emptiness; until, five minutes before class, a storm of twenty six tried to push their way through the door.

When Menashe began to explain the agenda a heavy silence fell upon the room. After he finished speaking he rubbed his hands together and said, “Ready to get down to it, then. Let’s get down to it." The mother removed the robe and he took it to the back of the room. “Gestures,” he crooned. “Twenty second gestures.”

The students started scribbling before the mother had even struck the pose she intended. The pencils and charcoal against the paper sounded like a herd of miniature garden snakes slithering across a field of dead grass. The mother breathed slowly, staying absolutely still until Menashe yelled “Switch!” and she changed poses setting her elbow on her knee. “Switch!” he cried again. She crossed her legs and put her hands behind her head. “Switch!” She put her feet on the stool. It was almost athletic, holding. Her body even worked up a satisfyingly cleansing sweat.

And then something unpleasant happened. The mother spread her legs open wider than she had intended and by the time the students began scribbling it was too late to change positions. The skinny boy who had entered the classroom first was sitting directly in front of her and peering deep between her thighs. He held his thumb up with a pencil next to it, measuring her proportions, and for a moment, the mother felt as though he was touching her with that raised thumb, as if the thumb was up in her, gauging the width and breadth of her innards, estimating the size of her. She tried to close her legs. Menashe cleared his throat. She stopped.

A familiar sensation began to weld up in the pit of her stomach, a snowball that amassed with fury. And though she stayed very still she swelled with rage. She was like the calm serenity before an avalanche. Her muscles tensed and she stared at the boy thinking, that pencil better be sharp enough to puncture the skin because when I leap off this stool …

“… Switch!”

Two weeks later she was walking down a hill in a trendy spot of town, on her way to the next sessions, when she ran into one of her friends from Menashe’s ceramics class entitled “Shattered Ethics: Pottery, Penile Systems, and Power.” The girl looked like the mother. She was tall and thin, with thick brown hair piled onto her head like a wad of dough, kept in check by a paisley scarf. The two, standing next to each other, looked like a pair of cypress trees, and when they laughed it was like the wind had moved them to do it.

Similar as they were, the two were not twins by any stretch of the imagination. Even at the tender age of twenty-two, the mother had sagging breasts and a sunken face. She wore cotton sweaters and leather shoes, full length dresses that masked the curves of her body and the points where her bones jutted from her flesh. The girl, on the other hand, wore colorful skirts and cardigans of silk and cashmere. She had a nose ring and her cheeks were the color of a nectarine. The mother walked lopsidedly; a flap of her shoe had come undone that day, causing her constant irritation, and the only way to have her shoe not come off completely was to gimp. How like life! she thought throughout the day. My shoe My shoe How I Need You and yet how broken you are. Oh oh oh oh oh my shoe. Shoe bee do.

The two sat down for coffee.

“I loved that thing you did with the lines and the shapes and that delicious red thing that ran through everything. What was that set called again?”
“Feminist Variations on Mapplethorpe,” the mother said.
“Fantastic!”
“Menashe had a lot to do with that project," the mother said bashfully.
The girl chuckled. The mother, slightly confused, sipped her coffee and broke off a piece of her scone, dropping it into the cup, fishing it out with her spoon and eating it.
“I hear you’re living with him?”
“I am living in his studio," the mother said. "So, yes, I suppose I am living with him.”
“So you’re living with him." The girl said this as though she had not believed the mother the first time she had said it. The mother plopped another piece of coffee-soaked-pastry in her mouth.
“Yersh,” she mumbled with scone on her tongue. The girl chuckled again and the mother frowned her eyebrows, unsure if the girl was laughing at her coffeehouse etiquette or something else. The mother swallowed and continued. “It’s really not that strange or bizarre. I just keep to myself in his studio. I paint sometimes. I clean sometimes. Read.”
“Have you two done it yet?” The mother’s eyes got wide.
“Excuse me? Done what?”
“Have you had sex.”
“Oh no, our relationship is not really sexual in it’s nature.”
“Don’t you know? Didn’t you know? That’s what he does.”
“Menashe?”
“Yes!” she tittered.
“Why would we do that?” the mother asked. “Menashe is my mentor.”
“Because,” the girl said, “You can’t get something for nothing. You can never get something for nothing. This is what he does. It’s probably why you’ve gotten—” the girl paused and touched her saucer. “I mean he does it for sex.”

The girl had also lived with Menashe, she explained, while interning at a photography studio run by one of his ex-wives. “First. He lets you stay with him. Then he gets you to model for his drawing seminar—have you modeled yet?” The mother nodded her head. “I’ve modeled before, but, Oh, isn’t that the worst? The way he looks at you. You know why he does that, right?”
“No,” the mother said plainly.

“It’s so that he can see you naked.” The mother put her forefinger up to her lips. The girl looked over her shoulder. Then, turning back towards the mother she leaned in and spoke in a whisper. “It’s so that he can see you naked. And if he likes what he sees, if he does, then he’ll get with you. He invites you into the house, beckons you from the studio and asks if you want to see his ‘woodblock prints.’ He keeps those in the attic, up in his house. He’ll probably invite you over for dinner. There’s this ratty sofa with Afghani fabric on it. He asks you to sit on it and he wines you up showing you his prints and, and something happens.”
“No!” the mother gasped.
The girl took a swig of her coffee, finishing it, and set the cup on the saucer rather loudly before whispering “Yes!” She looked at her watch and took a compact out of her purse.
“Something happens?”
“Yes,” the girl said, opening the compact and fixing her mound of hair.
“What happens?”
“There’s a box of condoms, a wooden thing with a creaky hinge, that he keeps under the sofa.”
“What happens?” the mother repeated. She dropped the rest of her scone into the coffee.
“Condoms” the girl said, “Condoms.” She closed her compact and shoved it into her purse.

That evening the mother was sitting at a desk in the studio trying to fix her shoe. She was fastening the flap to the body of the shoe with a safety pin when a tress of her hair fell in front of her face. The piece of hair enraged her. It seemed as though it had a vendetta against the mother, to impede her work, to sabotage the job she was trying to do. The mother kept set of hairpins, among other things, in an ornate dish on the desk. She reached into the dish and pulled out a pin. Her other hand slipped and the safety pin jostled and stuck her in the finger. She cursed and drew her hand close to her body. “Fuck,” she whispered, holding her hand in front of her face. A small dot of blood began to form. She stuck the finger in her mouth and sucked on it.
There had been many others, the girl in the shop had explained. The mother was not the only one. Each girl had fallen in order to have a dalliance with an artist—a famous artist. He was desirable, or rather, provoked desire from the girls he aided. The girls he aided were fools. The girls he aided were hussies and tramps, desperate dilettantes so hungry for sex they would eat it out of a dumpster.

But not you, a voice seemed to say.
“But not me,” she said to herself.
“But no what?” a voice said from the corner of the room. The mother turned around incisively to find Menashe standing in the doorway of the studio.
“I was fixing my shoe,” the mother said.
“What’s wrong with your hand?” he asked. She had not even realized that she still clutched the wounded hand with the other, close to her breasts.
“I was fixing my shoes,” she repeated. “And I just had a little accident.”
“Do you need peroxide?”
“No,” she said curtly. “Thank you.”
“I’ve made too much soup. Would you like a cup?” Menashe smiled in the doorway. There was nothing threatening about his stature and even something sweet in the way he smiled. She felt drawn to him.
“Okay,” she said switching off the lamp.
It didn’t take much to get him primed. She waxed lyrically about his “work” and filled him up with his own wine before asking to see his woodblock prints. “You want to see my prints?” he said, somewhat surprised. The mother nodded her head. Menashe paused and swirled the wine in his glass. He smiled and said, “Okay.”

When Menashe switched on the attic lamp dust began to unsettle, flying aloft in great plumes as if disturbed by the gentle agitation of the light. The mother sneezed as they entered. “Bless you,” he said. His woodblock prints leaned against all the walls. They ranged in size and character. Some came up to her waist, while others could fit in the palm of her hand. In the far corner of the room there was an old sofa with an extravagant cloth of white and burgundy. It was a thin cloth, dotted with little white spots. She sat down on the sofa and crossed her legs.

“Dusty up here,” she said. “I’m feeling parched.” She sneezed again. He sat down next to her, their thighs touching. He placed a hand on her knee and for a moment she wanted to take the pin from her shoe and thrust it right through his hand. “Get me a glass of water?” she asked politely.
Menashe got up and headed down the stairs, casting a great shadow on the wall in front of him. Once he was downstairs the mother leaned over and reached underneath the sofa. She swayed her hand back and forth in the darkness until it came across a little wooden box. She didn’t need to use her eyes to find it; it was right where the girl said it would be. The mother set the box on her lap. The top of it was inlaid with mother of pearl in the shape of a tree. She opened it and found twenty or so condoms and staring into the box, the multicolored squares, she began to get dizzy. The colors began to melt before her. She closed the box and looked at the tree. It seemed to sway with a gust of wind that came in through the open attic window. The gust blew up dust that blinded her, for a moment. In the darkness she saw herself standing in a clearing surrounded by trees of a thousand kinds. She was kneeling on the ground, one hand touching the earth. As she saw herself kneeling the skin on her knee fired up. Something was slicing through the flesh.

Remove your shoes, a voice said. For the place where you stand is holy.

The mother opened her eyes, still burning. A tear ran down her cheek. She wiped them with the hem of her skirt and when she did she noticed that during her vision she had removed her shoes. They sat in front of her, empty.

It was clear to her in that moment that she had left something behind that she had not intended. She was raised in the woods and there she felt she had to return. Something was lost. She had brought a part of herself to the city and that part of her had been extinguished like a flame, and it was smoking. The sight of the woodblock prints disgusted her. She wanted to take them, brake them, burn them in a great pile in the middle of his living room. She would take her own paintings, testaments to her failure, and burn those too. She had spent that past few years creating and now she knew that what she had to do was a little destroying.

But there was time to create one last thing. She noticed a safety pin peeking out from underneath the rouge flap that had been bothering her all day. She plucked it up and held it in the palm of her hand. From the rubble of what she was about to destroy she would take a token, back to the woods and back to her family, back to worship. She removed the string of condoms, all attached to one another like a ribbon and looked at them. “The Lord Giveth,” she intoned silently. “And the Lord Taketh Away.” She inhaled deeply and stuck the pin through the first condom. A satisfying sweat began to form on her brow, pushed through her pores like the bristles of a beast bursting through a peace of cloth. She stuck the second condom. It felt good. She picked up speed and began perforating each condom in a rage of ecstasy until she came to the end of the ribbon and there were none left. She collapsed backward on the sofa and grasped the cloth there. She was clutching it hard when Menashe came up the stairs.

She threw the pin back into her shoe. He was carrying a glass of water that he set on the table. He looked at her longingly and reached a hand out to touch her hair. He brushed a tress from her eyes and she looked up at him and began unbuttoning her dress, one by one, staring at him. There was something erotic about the rage of her vision, something that made his blood liquefy. It was as if there was something behind her eyes, something big, and something dangerous, waiting to burst forth.