FICTION

Vivarium

By Ashley Wurzbacher     VOLUME 57 No. 4

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Alba is watering the petunias on the back patio when she hears the wolf whistle from the house next door, where a father and son have recently moved in. It’s not the first time she’s heard it, but it startles her, the two glissando notes sliding up and down as if on a cartoon roller-coaster track to her ears. She takes a step closer to her house and squints toward the neighbors’, scanning the windows and the screened deck, the splintering fence that separates her yard from theirs. There’s nothing, nobody, no sound except her daughter Mary Carmen’s voice from her kitchen, where she is practicing a monologue in the voice of a martyred teenage saint.

Alba puts down her watering can and goes inside. “Did you hear that?”

Mary Carmen looks up from her notes. “What?”

“That whistle.”

Mary Carmen shakes her head. She’s still in her school uniform, seated with her legs pretzeled beneath her at the two-person table, though tomorrow she’ll deliver her monologue clad in Alba’s chenille bathrobe. “According to the most widely read account of my death, my eyes were gouged out before a sword was thrust into my throat,” she reads, and looks at Alba for approval.

“It’s so bleak.”

“It’s supposed to be bleak,” Mary Carmen says. She is Saint Lucy, executed in fourth-century Sicily when a suitor she’d snubbed reported her to Emperor Diocletian for her Christian faith.

Alba studies her daughter: the unruly mane she refuses to brush, the rumpled skort she won’t let Alba iron, the cavernous polo she insists Alba buy a size too large. So different from Alba, who has always been so attentive to her body, maybe to a fault—straightening her hair, plucking and shaving and dieting, soaking up sun (Ruining your beautiful skin, her mother would say), and for what? To be whistled at in her own backyard?

She checks the time. She has class tonight, an exam, and Luke’s mother will be here soon. She should wash the dishes piled in the sink, but she can’t bring herself to move. The kitchen is brilliant with afternoon light and quiet except for the buzz of the tank in the back corner where, in addition to a handful of guppies and cherry barbs, Alba and Mary Carmen keep an albino aquatic frog named Dale. Alba glances at Dale, who looks like a tiny, wizened white man naked-breaststroking his way through the water. Alba bought him for Mary Carmen four years ago, when Luke left again. When she offered her daughter a consolation pet, she thought the girl would choose a cute, fuzzball kitten or a dog that could scare away strangers. Instead she chose Dale, who demands bloodworms, carries salmonella, and can’t be cuddled.

Mary Carmen divides her attention between the speech on her phone and the notifications whose chimes keep interrupting her narration. The amount of time the girl spends on her phone—what is she looking at? Who is looking at her?

“In another account of my martyrdom—” Mary Carmen pauses to laugh at a text message. “I tore my own eyes out to discourage a suitor who praised their beauty. At my burial, my family discovered that my eyes had been miraculously restored. Today, I am the patron saint of the blind.”

“I thought you were going to be the patron saint of frogs,” Alba says. “Ulphia.” She and Mary Carmen had been delighted to discover the French saint, founder of a community of religious women and protector of frogs, who smuggled unwanted amphibians to a haven on the rocks of the Noye. Beneath the folds of her robes, they clung to her legs with their sticky fingers.

“Sylvia and I are both doing saints who rejected their male suitors,” Mary Carmen says. “Agnes and Lucy.”

Mary Carmen’s friend Sylvia moved to Florida from California earlier this year and has transfixed Mary Carmen, whom she calls “M.C.,” ever since. A few times, Alba has driven the girls to their favorite boba shop and watched them sit at a picnic table and suck tapioca balls like tiny brown eyeballs through their straws, giggling and scheming. Luke’s mother, Beverly, says Sylvia is a bad influence, but Alba suspects Beverly would say this about anyone who’d come from LA.

Alba rallies to address the dirty dishes. The window above the sink offers a partial view of the whistler’s house, obscured by a half-undressed camellia shedding its pink blossoms. “Help me clean up before Nana gets here,” she says, and reaches out to smooth Mary Carmen’s hair.

Mary Carmen swats her away. “I don’t need a babysitter. I’m old enough to be a babysitter.”

“She’s not a babysitter. She’s your grandmother.”

“I don’t need a grandmother.”

“You do if you want to keep going to Sacred Heart.”

“Sylvia’s going to public school next year.” Mary Carmen scoots closer to Dale’s tank. She has trained the frog to follow her finger by placing a fish pellet on her fingertip and tracing it through the air outside the tank while he follows her motions with his weak eyesight. Now she can move her empty fingertip any which way and watch him swim along.

“Sacred Heart is a good school,” Alba says.

Is this true? People say so. Sure, there are things about the school that don’t sit well with Alba—tomorrow’s All Saints’ Fair, for one, held annually in advance of the seventh graders’ confirmation, a chance for them to celebrate the contributions of the patron saints they’ve chosen, whose special virtues they wish to imitate. Eyeball-gouging is not a virtue Alba is eager for her child to emulate; she would rather see Mary Carmen embrace her natural beauty. But the Sacred Heart kids excel at science, score well on tests, end up at the best colleges. Who is Alba—a college dropout now navigating the world of transfer credits and night classes—to complain?

“Anyway,” Alba adds, “you used to love hanging out with Nana.”

Mary Carmen rolls her eyes. “She makes us lie. Sitting together at Mass, acting like we’re a family.”

“We are a family.”

Alba and Luke are still married, though he lives across town with a woman named Nicole, who is also still married to her husband. Alba sees Luke once a week, at Mass, when they sit with Mary Carmen between them in Beverly’s family pew. Mary Carmen’s tuition at Sacred Heart—paid by Luke’s parents—is conditional, and this is the condition. Alba supposes it’s good for her daughter to have faith, to feel herself watched over by a benign deity. But the role of Catholicism in Alba’s own life, at least prior to her pseudo-adoption by Beverly, has been small—less a practice than an aesthetic, a vibe. To Alba, God is just another man beneath whose gaze she both squirms and, in spite of herself, strives to be beautiful.

Mary Carmen traces her finger along the side of the tank where Dale rests on his aquarium gravel, but he just stares at her with his googly eyes. She balances a fish pellet on the tip of her finger and tries again, moving it along the glass. “Does he seem depressed to you?”

“Dale?” Alba finishes rinsing a dish and examines the frog, whose pale, splayed legs have always seemed obscene to her. “No.”

“Do you think he likes being watched?”

Alba has never considered Dale’s feelings about his glass-house existence. “I don’t know,” she says, and hears Beverly at the door. She dries her sudsy hands, gathers her keys and backpack, and kisses the top of Mary Carmen’s head.

She’s halfway to her car when she hears the wolf whistle again, the lewd notes issuing from somewhere behind the camellia. How is it he can see her when she can’t see him? One of the house’s windows is cracked open, but there’s no one there, and Alba detects no motion between the slats of the fence. She’s seen the father a few times, coming and going at odd hours in scrubs. A doctor should know better. Primum non nocere, Alba wants to shout. Creep. She hurries to her car.

It’s strange to be a college student again. Alba was a sophomore when she got pregnant with Mary Carmen. She’d been with Luke since their junior year of high school, moved in with his family when her mother went back to Buenos Aires, and continued to live with them after Luke joined a frat and moved out. Alba had had to sneak out of his parents’ house in order to spend nights with their son on campus. The frat house was damp and smelled perpetually of nacho cheese, and there were no doorknobs on the bathroom doors. Luke’s bathroom was a Jack and Jill—more of a Jack and Jack, really, shared by four guys, connecting two rooms—and when Alba used it, she’d had to stuff toilet paper in the holes where the knobs should have been. To “lock” the doors, which opened inward, the brothers braced them shut with a plank they called the beat-off board, which was graffitied with marker drawings of ejaculating penises and big-breasted women.

It was in that bathroom that Alba, a marketing major with a concentration in fashion merchandising, took her pregnancy test. Despite her grim surroundings, she was pleased. She had not enjoyed college the first time around, had always looked forward to being a mother, and though her own mother—who had studied law in Argentina before coming to the US—was furious, Luke’s family was encouraging. Luke himself had been chilly toward Alba since moving out, and she had thought, stupidly, that with a baby she could keep him. She finished the school year, gave birth in September, and didn’t go back.

But she was never meant to market, and now, older, wiser, she is studying nursing. Alba remembers the nurse that held a juice box to her lips when she gave birth to Mary Carmen, that held her hand, like a mother, when her own mother was a continent away. She remembers the painted fingernails steering the plastic straw to her lips, the cold squirt of apple juice hitting her palate. She would like to do this for another woman, to be the one steering the straw, checking the vitals. She has a job in a hospital gift shop, selling teddy bears to the families of the sick, and when she watches the nurses hustle by in their scrubs, she thinks she could do what they do. She’s never been squeamish, doesn’t mind the sight of blood, and is drawn to the relative predictability of the body and its rhythms. That we are all made of the same mush consoles Alba.

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ASHLEY WURZBACHER is the author of the novel How to Care for a Human Girl (Atria Books, 2023) and the short story collection Happy Like This (University of Iowa Press, 2019), which won the John Simmons Short Fiction Award and was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. In 2019, she was named one of the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 honorees. She lives in Birmingham, AL, and teaches creative writing at the University of Montevallo.


VOLUME 57 No. 4