Oh, there’s quite a bit more here about all the attempts over the years to burn and cut down the tree, I just don’t feel like copying it. But there have been many unsuccessful and aborted attacks upon the oak, it would seem. It strikes me as just shy of miraculous that the thing is still standing more than three centuries after the first word of it reached the ears of white men. You’d have thought, if nothing else, some bunch of teenagers would have cut it down and or something as a prank. Maybe I should not be so awed at the tree’s apparent wickedness as by its resilience. Then again, maybe they’re one and the same.
Bedtime, old lady. Put the spooks to rest.
Have I mentioned the heat? I don’t generally whine about weather. I’ve never much seen the point, but Jesus fuck. I’m about a hairbreadth from breaking down and getting a little window unit AC of my own, stick it on the damn credit cards, and worry about it later, after I haven’t died of heat prostration. The meteorologists say there are cooler days ahead, and I do hope they’re not just fucking with us.
Constance came down from the icy sanctum sanctorum of her garret this afternoon, as paint-stained as ever, but somewhat more talkative. I must admit, it was something of a relief, at least at first. My own company wears so goddamn thin. Even that of a flaky, temperamental artist is preferable, at this point. However, one of the first things she did was comment on the heat downstairs, and I briefly contemplated murdering her and hiding the body in the basement. Or taking it to the red oak, in hopes that Hobbamock the Narragansett demon might be pleased, take pity upon me, and grant a boon of cooler weather.
“You should come upstairs,” she said, and “You should ask me,” I replied.
Constance laughed, but did not proceed to invite me back to the attic. We sat on the living room floor for a while, talking and sweating, before moving to the kitchen table, which was even more cluttered than usual. She looked over a few pages of Dr. Harvey’s manuscript, offering no comment. We drank cold beer and nibbled at Spanish olives, whole-wheat crackers, and slices of Swiss cheese, because, lunchtime or no, we were both too hot for an actual meal.
“You know what it makes me think of?” she asked, and nodded at the window, nodding towards the tree. This was fifteen or twenty minutes after she’d returned the pages to the manuscript box, and it took me a moment to realize what she meant.
“No,” I replied and took another sip of my beer.
“It’s like something from Violet Venable’s awful garden in New Orleans. You know, in Suddenly, Last Summer.”
I forced myself to stare out the window, north towards the tree and the steely shimmer of Ramswool Pond, for a moment before answering her. “I think, technically, it was Sebastian’s garden. Mrs. Venable had merely become its caretaker after her son’s death.”
“Is that what you think?” and now, suddenly, there was a trace of derisiveness in her voice, something verging on contempt. I looked at the tree again, at the high blue sky suspended above it, not a cloud in sight. The sun seemed to have robbed the entire world beyond the window of shadows, or even the potential for shadow. Given the topic at hand, it was impossible for me not to be reminded of Catherine Holly’s fevered description of the sun on the day of her cousin’s murder — a gigantic white bone that had caught fire in the Mediterranean sky.
“Is it?” Constance prodded.
“It’s too hot to argue with you about Tennessee Williams,” I told her.
“I didn’t know we were arguing, Sarah. I only thought we were having a conversation. I thought you might be getting lonely, down here all alone. I thought maybe you would appreciate someone to talk with.”
“Sebastian planted the garden,” I said. “It was Sebastian’s garden,” and she laughed and lit a cigarette.
“The garden, it’s a womb,” she said. “The green and, in the end, barren hell of Violet’s own womb, guarded by carnivorous plants. I mean, really, those pitcher plants and the Venus flytrap and whatever the hell else Violet was keeping in that miniature greenhouse, that garden within the garden, those plants she hand-fed — if that’s not the vagina dentata, I don’t know what would be.”
I turned away from the window and stared at Constance a moment or two before saying anything more. The smoke rising from her cigarette curled into a sort of spiral above her head.
“I tend to avoid conversations about vaginas with teeth,” I said, finally, and she laughed again and tapped ash into an empty saucer.
“So not a big fan of Freud?” she asked.
And, by this point, I was growing angry, what with the heat and the sunlight and the fact that Constance was clearly, for reasons known only to her, trying to pick a fight with me. Thinking back on what I said next, I’d like to believe it was something more than me being a cunt, that she had the embarrassment coming, whether or not it’s the truth of the matter.
“The vagina dentata isn’t a Freudian concept,” I replied. “I’m not sure Freud ever even addressed it, as that image runs counter to the whole Oedipal thing. Freud said that little boys are afraid that their mothers have been castrated,not that their mothers’ vaginas have teeth.”
Check.
Constance glared at me and narrowed her hazy red-brown eyes, taking a long drag on her cigarette and then letting the smoke ooze slowly from her nostrils. I could tell that she was choosing the words that would form her retort with exquisite care. I glanced back to the window.
“What about our friend out there?” she asked. “You believe that old tree has teeth?”
Checkmate.
“You’d think it would fucking rain,” I said, and I suppose that can stand as a white flag of surrender, my refusal to acknowledge her question.
“Screw it,” Constance muttered, and I didn’t look at her, but I could hear her standing, could hear the legs of her chair scraping loudly across the floor as she pushed back from the table. “There are better ways than this to waste my time.” And when she’d gone, and the attic door had slammed shut, I sat alone and watched the red oak, pretending that I didn’t feel like it was watching me.
Home again, home again.
Home. Does that word, and the concept behind the term, retain any meaning whatsoever for me at this point? If not, how long since it has? Did Amanda and I ever have a home? Any of the women I lived with before Amanda, did we have homes? Was that shitty little house I shared with my parents, back in the dim, primeval wilds of Mayberry, was that home? I can hardly look at this old farmhouse of Squire Blanchard’s and see it as anything more than a place where I am presently sleeping, eating, writing this idiot journal, hiding from New York and the ruins of my career, and so forth.