Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything Read online

  Agatha Arch is Afraid of Everything

  A Novel

  KRISTIN BAIR

  For all who face down their fothermucking fears with gusto and verve. You’ve got this.

  Acknowledgments

  To publish a novel in any year means a lot, but to publish a novel in 2020, the year of the COVID-19 global pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement, means even more. As many of our kids shift to remote learning, it feels important to acknowledge the teachers who helped me along the way. Sending out big thanks to: Mrs. Mangus, my 2nd grade teacher who introduced me to Indigenous Australians, the life cycle, and the importance of experiential education; Marcia (Klimo) Rosen, my 6th grade English teacher whose trip to Aruba inspired me to look at maps and dream about faraway places; Gloria Feather, my 7th grade English teacher, who talked to us kids like people and taught me that the past participle of lie is lain (right?); my 9th grade English teacher Mrs. Van Gorder, who taught connotation; Mr. Rubright, for teaching me to type and pay attention to patterns; my chem teacher Mr. Pollack, for seeing me and prompting me to quietly celebrate Linus Pauling’s birthday every February 28; that high school creative writing teacher who took us to the cemetery to write our own epitaphs and demanded something happen in each story we wrote (I didn’t get it then; I get it now); my 12th grade English teacher Mr. Mochnick, who dressed up like a lion and literally shivered with excitement about words and literature at the very moment I needed to know that was an okay thing; Mr. George Taliaferro, my social work professor at Indiana University, who got me thinking deeply about race and white privilege and making a difference; Kitsey Ellman, my creative writing TA at Indiana University for somehow convincing my shy self to read one of my first stories out loud—out loud!—to a group of visiting professors; Lynda Hull, for metaphor and fragility; Randy Albers, for seeing and listening and being; and so many more.

  Writing Agatha Arch has made me think deeply about friends and family, love and loyalty, vulnerability. Cheers to all those in my zephyr, past and present, visible and invisible, including but not limited to Sandy Huffman, Julie Samra, Marissa Hsu, Christi Sperry, Katrin Schneck, Becky Stelmack, Mishi Saran, the three best sisters in the world who’ve cheered me on from my earliest days as a writer (Traci Gere, Nancy Bair, and Amy Berg), and my folks, Peg and Jim Bair, two of my fiercest supporters.

  Thanks to Zora Neale Hurston, Bear Grylls, and Steve Irwin, for showing me what bravery and passion look like in writing and life; my agent, Barbara Poelle, and my team at Alcove Press for believing in Agatha; that special soul at the intersection near Market Basket who I hope finds her way from lost to found; all the moms (and dads and guardians) in Facebook mom groups … I love you; my darling kiddos, Tully and Yao, who remind me daily why I’m a pantser, not a plotter; and my dear husband, Andrew, who has gotten me through lockdown during a global pandemic with love, laughter, margaritas, and way too many tubs of Oreo ice cream.

  Throughout the book, I reference several sources, as follows:

  Chapter Six—Peterson, Christine. “Ten Strange, Endearing and Alarming Animal Courtship Rituals.” Cool Green Science: Smarter By Nature, February 9, 2016. Accessed August 19, 2020. Web, https://blog.nature.org/science/2016/02/09/ten-strange-endearing-and-alarming-mating-habits-of-the-animal-world/.

  Chapter Fifteen—Coelho, Paul. The Alchemist. New York: HarperOne, 1993. Print.

  Chapter Twenty-Six—Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose. New York: Harcourt, 1983. Print.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine—“Barnacle Goose Freefall.” BBC FOUR, Life Story, October 20, 2014. Accessed August 19, 2020. Web, https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p028w8yc.

  Chapter One

  It is quite possible Agatha Arch will be alone forever. Or maybe not. It’s much too early to consider either eventuality. Today is her very first “my-husband-screwed-the-dog-walker-in-the-shed-and-left-me” day. Phrased that way, it sounds almost like a celebration. But it absolutely is not. Agatha smells like skunk. Her cheek is creased from lying on the porch all night waiting for Dax to return with their boys. Her big toe throbs. The house is quiet. Silent. Except for that bloody woodpecker pecking another hole in the clapboards near the roofline. Tap tap tippity-tap. Agatha’s hands are full of splinters. No wonder. To say her heart hurts is an understatement. Or maybe an overstatement. Can she feel her heart? Is it even there? Did Dax pack it up and take it with him? Hello, hello, heart? Are you in there?

  Agatha has so many questions. How long will it take for the skunk stench to wear off? Will taking a bath in tomato juice extinguish the odor or is that an old wives’ tale? Who the hell were these old wives? And why did they have so many tales? Will her toenail turn black and fall off? If so, is that a sign of fortune or a warning of impending doom? Will her cheek be creased forever? Will she wear the crease like a scarlet letter? What is the best way to kill a woodpecker (not that she would)? What are her boys thinking? How are they feeling? When will they return?

  Slumped against the porch swing, upright at last, she remembers the previous evening’s posts in the Wallingford Facebook moms group, about her and the shed and the hatchet and the dog walker and Dax. Oh, god. The hatchet. The Moms know everything. High Priestess Jane Poston knows everything. Kumbaya Queen Melody Whelan knows everything. Agatha drops her head into her hands. Gingerly. The splinters hurt.

  From her perch, she sees the shed. Or, rather, what’s left of it.

  * * *

  Tap tap tippity-tap.

  * * *

  An hour later, a little more coherent, but probably not coherent enough, Agatha shuffles to her car and drives to Starbucks. “All hail the drive-through window,” she mutters into the speaker. She is not presentable according to Wallingford standards. She is not presentable by anyone’s standards. The crease. The stink. The hair. The splinters. The sobby eyes. That outfit. No shoes. If HP Poston catches a glimpse, she’s toast.

  “Excuse me? May I help you?” says the disembodied voice of the coffee-making person.

  “A humongous latte with as many shots of espresso as you can stuff into it,” Agatha says.

  Met with silence, Agatha repeats, “A humongous latte with as many shots of espresso as you can stuff into it.” She purposely sidesteps the lingua franca and imagines the Starbucks barista staring blankly at the wall, trying to translate humongous into venti. “Hey,” she says, after yet another minute, “coffee-making person, can you or can you not make a big-ass latte with lots of espresso?”

  “I can.”

  “Then please do so.”

  Agatha pulls around the corner. As she waits, she pulls splinters from her palms and piles them on the console between the driver and passenger seats.

  When the window slides open, she grabs the latte and waves her phone in front of the swiper thing. She keeps her eyes on the gigantic cup so she doesn’t have to see the look of horror on the coffee-making person’s face when he sees and smells her. That wide-eyed grimace may have been the thing to push her over the edge, past the point of no return. The match in the powder barrel. The straw that breaks the camel’s back. The exhausted, flabbergasted, emotionally wrecked camel’s back.

  Next stop, the pharmacy.

  “All hail,” she starts to mutter again as she pulls up to the drive-through window but stops. Enough hailing.

  The young man at the window passes the cans of tomato juice to her with one hand. With the other, he pinches his nostrils closed. “When I saw the order, I couldn’t figure out why someone would need so many cans of tomato juice,” he says. “I thought, ‘Tomato soup for a party of fifty, maybe?’ Now I get it.”

  Agatha doesn’t respond. She’s getting used to the e
ye-watering stench.

  “You know, we sell a wash for skunk scent,” he says, blinking. “People say it works better than tomato juice. And it doesn’t sting your eyes.”

  Agatha smirks. She’s thinking about all the old wives and their tales, and she imagines their husbands likely screwed the milkmaids in the barn. Like Dax and the dog walker in the shed. She imagines they didn’t have the same wherewithal as she to use the hatchet. Buying fifty cans of tomato juice feels like a virtual, time-traveling fist bump to those powerless old wives, as well as a nod to their wisdom. “Don’t screw the milkmaid,” she says to the young man, “or the dog walker.” Then she drives away, leaving him in a cloud of skunk stink and confusion. Cans rattle on the passenger seat; a few tumble to the floor.

  * * *

  Back home, Agatha walks to the shed, big-ass latte in hand. The woodpecker starts again. Tap tap tippity-tap. Tap tap tippity-tap. Agatha eyes it and believes it eyes her back. She picks up the boys’ basketball and hurls it at the determined bird. The ball hits the house but doesn’t come close to its target. Tap tap tippity-tap.

  * * *

  On the day before, the steamiest Saturday of a very steamy September, for the good-god-gazillionth time, the boys had gotten the soccer ball stuck under the back porch where resident skunk Susan Sontag hangs her hat. Agatha chased them inside for lunch with an “if you’re going to kick it in that direction, it’s going to get stuck and I’m not retrieving it one more time,” but after every single bite of grilled cheese sandwich, it was, “Mom, the ball,” and “Mom, please,” and “Mom, we can’t leave it under there. It will smell like Susan,” and “C’mon, Mom, for Big Papi’s sake, go get the ball.”

  Thirty minutes later, she surrendered. They were dogged, their finest skill. “Okay, okay, but I’m using the rake,” and she stepped into her flip-flops. “Finish your sandwiches,” she said as the screen door slapped behind her.

  She trotted across the driveway, noted the fuzzy pooch tied to the tree across the street yapping and yapping and yapping, spread her arms to touch each of the two towering oaks as she passed between them [“luck, Mom, luck!” the boys insist every time], righted a tipped soccer net, and skipped over the side lawn to the shed. Their yard is one of those endless New England lots that could double as a practice field for the Red Sox. The kind folks drool over in magazines. A white gazebo, a tree house, lilacs and rhododendrons as far as you can see. And, oh, the hydrangeas. So many quintessential hydrangeas.

  Agatha pulled open the door and let out a sigh as the chilly air hit her. It was so damn hot out. The scurry of micely beasts with their tails and squeaks made her quake with fear, but she summoned her inner Bear Grylls and thrust her face into the cool interior.

  “Fear sharpens us. Fear sharpens us. Fear sharpens us,” she chanted. Bear says it all the time. He is her idol, her hero, her golden calf.

  Then, between the yaps of the damned dog tied across the street, she heard a shuffling and the clattering of tools.

  Chipmunk?

  Squirrel?

  Raccoon?

  She sucked in a breath. “Fear sharpens us.”

  But, next, a gasp. A human gasp. A girly gasp.

  And a grunt. A human grunt. A manly grunt.

  Things in Agatha’s brain got all jumbly as it started to make sense of what was unfolding, well before her pounding heart could even go there.

  When her eyes adjusted to the dark, she saw the silhouette of her husband’s erect penis poking out past the edge of the workbench. There was no mistaking that cock. The hideous, delightful knob at its end. She knows it as well as she knows the can opener in her kitchen drawer. She’s had both since college.

  She stepped over the threshold, stubbed her big toe on the snowblower, and whispered, “Dax?” When she spotted the silky aquamarine muumuu-maxi dress puddled on the floor in a bit of sunlight—the same she’d seen earlier that morning on the dog walker who’d swaggered up their street with four corgis on leash, earbuds and glossy lips and hips in tow—her heart took a step in the direction of her brain.

  WTF?

  The next minute got all wobbly. Dax bent, grabbed the dress, and held it behind him. His hirsute back was bare. Then a hand reached from behind the ride-on mower and nipped the dress from him.

  WTF?

  Dax’s glisteny knob wagged, then sagged. He found his britches and jammed a leg into them. “Agatha, go outside!” he said, toppling a stack of terra cotta pots. “I’ll be out in a minute.”

  She was Agatha. She knew this. He was talking to her. But her head clanged and she felt a mad stinging all over her body as if she’d stepped on a nest of yellow jackets.

  She remembers nothing after this moment and can only trust what the police officer tells her later. She got her hands on the hatchet. Naked people ran for their lives. A single shriek pierced the afternoon. She destroyed the shed. No one died.

  Chapter Two

  When Agatha snapped out of whatever state she’d snapped into when her heart finally caught up with her brain, the boys had left with Dax and the dog walker had been escorted to safety, generously draped with a tarp, a green tarp, the same green tarp under which, each spring, Dax protected his much-anticipated mulch delivery from rain. Black mulch, not red, absolutely not red, despite Kerry Sheridan’s annual campaign for matching red mulch in the neighborhood. Even the dog walker’s yappy charge, the very one she’d tied to the tree across the street before screwing Agatha’s husband in their shed, had been tucked into the back of a squad car and delivered to its owner. An officer was waiting with Agatha until she was “calm.”

  “Are my boys okay?” she asked as soon as her voice returned. “Did they see everything?”

  The officer shook his head. “They’re fine. From what I heard, they’d been watching SpongeBob and didn’t know a thing until an officer knocked on the door.”

  Agatha didn’t think she’d ever have reason to thank the universe for SpongeBob, but life is funny like that.

  She and the officer sat on the back porch staring at the jagged remains of the shed while she ranted. “You know that line about Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God …,” she said. “The one about her buttocks …”

  “Whose eyes were doing what?” the officer said.

  Agatha pulled an inch-long splinter from her thumb and side-eyed this young-not-young man. If his assignment was to help the crazed lady chill out, things were not starting off well. “What do you mean, whose eyes were doing what?”

  The officer winced.

  “Their Eyes Were Watching God. By Zora Neale Hurston. One of the best novels ever written by one of the best goddamn writers ever born.”

  He shook his head. “Nope, never read it.”

  “How in the world can you be a police officer without having read Zora Neale Hurston’s magnum opus?” Agatha said, but really, she was asking, “How in the world can you be a human without having read Zora Neale Hurston’s magnum opus?”

  “I don’t read many books,” he said.

  Agatha rolled her eyes as her soul rose up and towered over them. She doesn’t trust people who don’t read books—despises them really—but other than Kerry Sheridan, who was pretending to study her sun-scorched lawn but who was really trying to see if Agatha was going to go ninja on anything else, the officer was the only one around. “Well,” she said, “Janie—Janie Mae Crawford—is the main character in this novel you really should read, and, in it, there’s a line about her that goes, ‘The men noticed her firm buttocks like she had grapefruits in her hip pockets …’”

  The officer nodded in slow motion.

  “That’s how I’d describe this woman who just screwed my husband in our shed. Her buttocks, her ass, her behind, her derriere, is just like Janie’s. Fothermucking grapefruits in her fothermucking hip pockets. Gorgeous work of art. You should have seen it.” She was forgetting that he did see it, naked even, running wildly as Agatha chopped and chopped and chopped the shed into smithereens.

&n
bsp; Holy crap, what a day.

  Agatha stood and turned so her own buttocks were just a foot or so from the officer’s face. “No grapefruits here,” she said, smacking her bottom with both hands. “Just a couple of mushy, thirty-five-year-old, kid-chasing cantaloupes. Miss I-Screwed-Your-Husband-In-The-Shed walks dogs all day, firming those cheeks, while I slog after our children— our children—and end up with a couple of overripe cantaloupes stuffed into black leggings.”

  The officer slid back on the step, putting another foot or so between them. “Ma’am, how are you feeling now? Better? Calmer? More like yourself?”

  This man was so young, so dumb. He had no idea Agatha may never feel like herself again.

  “Yes, I’m fine. Go on back to the station and close your report on the woman who destroyed her shed. I’m all done chopping things up with a hatchet.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “I’m sure.” And she was. Mostly.

  The officer stood, clearly relieved. “Your husband and his friend will not be pressing charges. But, please, no more destruction.”

  If she had a single ounce of energy left in her limbs and this man wasn’t a cop, Agatha would have decked him, laid him out right there on the sidewalk. He actually believed that she was the destroyer here and the shed the object of destruction. He saw the splintered wood but not the shards of her family, her marriage, and her heart piled up all around. Fuck the shed.

  As the officer climbed into his car, her phone buzzed. An alert from her Facebook Moms group. Update! Update! Look! She shouldn’t have looked. She would have bet the dog walker’s silkiest muumuu-maxi it was about her. News traveled fast within the Moms group. Lightning fast. Cheetah fast. Peregrine falcon fast. Fothermucking supersonic fast. She pulled her phone from her pocket.

  “Don’t look,” she told herself. “Do not look.”