An Abundant Supply of Good Things

Suzanne Manizza Roszak

^{Excerpted from the novel The Poison Girl, forthcoming from Spuyten Duyvil Press, 2024}

Sometimes I tried to say the words in my head at the same time. Apple. Mela. Pumu. I tried to say them simultaneously because they had equivalent denotations although they belonged to three separate languages and for me they connoted wildly different things. I failed because although I could twine two melodies together inside my mind like sad-euphoric songs at the end of a rock musical, I couldn’t make vocabulary from different universes ring out all at once. Apple was row houses, always row houses, their cross-hatched gleaming pies. Mela was the bible of that northern neighbor who had read to me when I was a baby and then a toddler and then a small and sullen child. “Perciocchè tu hai atteso alla voce della tua moglie, ed hai mangiato del frutto dell’albero—.” You have eaten the fruit of the tree; you know the rest. Pumu was the real apple of myth, coming as it did from the language of folk whispers, where a peasant could marry a king’s daughter and she would wake up to find fruits and flowers adorning the room by magic. No, I couldn’t possibly say all this together. As a compromise I strung words from the three languages into a single sentence. C’era una volta un pumu, or more precisely, once upon a time there lived una fanciulla, na figghia c’un pumu, always na figghia because where there are fathers in an episode like this, it can be depended on that daughters are never far behind.
          This was the summer when I discovered with certainty that my father had been trying to kill me, which was a truth I’d long suspected but hadn’t had the wherewithal or the nerve to fully put together. I could have counted in hours or even minutes the long stretch of time that had passed since I’d found out that I couldn’t caress the face of a daisy without it wilting. Poisonous plants were fine; I could kiss a bunch of hemlock and it would flourish. People were iffy and survived me if they maintained a certain distance from my breath and fingers. Otherwise they came down with headaches and became dizzy and stumbled around, sometimes collapsing, sometimes throwing up their lunch at my feet, and on occasion it had ended worse. My father had sat on his hands, whistling, pretending not to know why.
          But kiddo, my brother would undoubtedly answer. He made you deadly; he didn’t want you dead. The problem with this excuse is that there is no difference. Because I’ve done my homework, and the creatures produced by mad scientists—they don’t usually make it.

I showed up at Gina’s door with one solitary backpack.
          “You finally did it,” she said when she saw me.
          “Is your aunt home?”
          She shook her head. No.
          “Can I come in?”
          I had to ask because we had barely talked since Gina had confessed to me that her parents hadn’t been bitten by a rabid dog and died as she had once tried to claim. I hadn’t believed the dog story, but the new version also didn’t seem like it could happen to people outside of fiction, and I was spooked even though I shouldn’t have been because my own history was worse. Gina was the first friend my father hadn’t been able to keep me from making, and what I had wanted out of my relationship with her was no more and no less than a little joy. My hopes were irrelevant; I was twenty-six, not fifteen, and nothing had gone the way it was supposed to.
          The inside air was still hot and stale although the sun was already down. “Tell me,” she said. She sat her usual two feet away, her hand on my forearm because she could touch me even if I couldn’t touch her.
          “He keeps a diary. Can you imagine? My father, the diarist.”
          “And?” Her eyebrows knitted themselves into a single ridge.
          “And he wrote about it.”
          I paused. “The garden’s full of flowers. Poisonous ones. I already knew that. But he planted them on purpose, for me, and somehow—.”
          I couldn’t finish the sentence; she kept on talking as if I had. It was Gina’s typical method, this pushing ahead.
          “So you confronted him.”
          “Not confronted. Confronted isn’t the word. I asked for an explanation. I gave him that.”
          “Let me guess; he threw household objects.”
          “A jar of sauce against the wall. The frozen dinners barely missed me. You know I’ve been refusing to cook.”
          “And now you’re here.”
          “And now I’m here.” I said it with finality. “I’ll get a job,” I told her.
          She shook her head again. “It’s fine. Really, it’s fine.”
          I slept between two blankets at the foot of Gina’s bed, which I wouldn’t let her give up. A night on her floor was nothing compared to the day when I had seen my father slice open the bird that had died in our backyard after nibbling at the hemlock or the deadly nightshade or the snakeroot. Here I was safe, or safer. In the morning we drove to the closest second-hand store, where we bought me a twin mattress.

At first I thought that everything might be okay. Gina brought home a flyer that had been hung with a tack on the bulletin board in the lobby of the library. The company wanted translators, and they hired me and sent me papers in the mail: academic articles about the environmental potential of wind power and switching costs under a duopoly and supercompact cardinals, the mathematical kind. I sat with a dictionary that I used for the more specialized terms, trying to guess the intended meanings of phrases that sounded to me like gibberish because I had never studied any of the concepts they discussed. I started picking at my cuticles again, but I also liked the work or the fact of working, although this is an emotion that I now recognize as irritating and naïve. I typed out the manuscripts and stapled them together and placed them in large, orange envelopes that I brought to the post office for weighing, standing back from the counter per usual, avoiding the hands of the clerk. The checks arrived one by one in the mail, and I relished cashing them and then handing the proceeds to Gina’s aunt or walking to the grocery store where I would buy logs of pre-marinated pork tenderloin and cans of peeled tomatoes and cheap dry pasta. I hauled the provisions home in brown bags that bumped against my legs as I passed front lawn after front lawn.
          We were only eleven blocks north of the address I’d fled from, and they were short blocks rather than long ones. Still, Gina’s aunt lived by Juniper Valley Park, on a street where the row-houses had mulched yards big enough for shrubberies or were fenced in with pointy white wooden posts that belonged in a picture book. It felt impossible that my father would find me, which is why it was stupid of us to go back of our own accord. We did it because I was tired of borrowing Gina’s clothes, because Gina thought we shouldn’t let my father have the satisfaction of selling his daughter’s belongings. We did it because once again we were bored; being roommates was no longer a novelty. All of this and none of it is accurate, in the way that happens when you’re trying after the fact to rationalize a decision that makes no sense.
          “We can go tonight,” said Gina. Her eyes shone.
          “Don’t be ridiculous,” I told her. “You know he’s home at night.”
          “So what? Oh, come on.”
          Her voice rose and fell as she prodded and complained. I was just taking what was mine, she said. I protested; she didn’t get it. I didn’t want to see his face. In the end we split the difference and went the next mid-afternoon, at a time I told myself was close enough to harmless. My father would be using a trowel to remove the mortar from some new configuration of bricks. He would be polishing their surfaces with a wire brush, or overseeing some younger laborer who would polish them. He wouldn’t be there. I repeated these affirmations under my breath as we took our usual places in Gina’s car, which I drove less and less because I was tired of pretending the city traffic didn’t scare me.
          On streets like ours where the houses have no driveways, it can be hard to tell when someone is or isn’t home. The lights were off and the curtains in the one living room window were drawn. I tried the knob and it didn’t give. I fished out my key. Gina followed behind me, loving every minute.
          We’d brought a carry-on that belonged to Gina’s aunt because neither of us owned a suitcase. Nothing in the room where I had slept had been shifted out of place, and I started filling the suitcase with sweaters that I wouldn’t need for months. Gina had her head in the closet and was flipping from one gauzy garment to the next. “This, this—not this.” She tugged the skirts and shorts off hangers without bothering to unclip them.
          The light in the house was too bright for the time of day. Gina sang the melody to “Jane Says,” the notes getting louder and louder although after the first line she didn’t know the words, and the noise was bouncing off the back wall of the emptier and emptier closet. She kneeled down, unexpectedly careful but still singing, to smooth the ripples from a skirt. The door didn’t whine and the stairs didn’t creak, or if they did we didn’t hear them; it was a surprise when we blinked and looked up and a man’s head and neck and shoulders were looming over us like they had when I was a child at the kitchen table refusing to eat. Gina and I were both on the floor by the carry-on and it didn’t help that I was taller than my father: he was monstrous and dead-quiet, his face red and contorted and I stopped moving. Gina was also almost motionless, but I saw her slip her hand into the pocket where she’d placed a Swiss Army knife before we left her aunt’s.
          “I’m calling the police,” he said.
          His feet thudded on the floorboards and the stairs.
          “Hello?” Pause. “Police.” Pause. “There’s a thief in my house.”
          He didn’t say whether he was referring to Gina or to me. I ran, leaving the carry-on behind, not looking back to see what she would do.

For the next week I was consumed with the fear that my father could have us both arrested. Gina would crack a joke, rolling over to the edge of the bed and dangling an arm down toward me, and I would try to smile and she would scoff with a disgust that was only half-pretended. She had threatened my father with the knife. She came home later and later from the library until I was already asleep when she arrived and she would have to make her way around me on the floor, nudging the mattress by accident with her foot. She trod on me in the dark. I tried to give the impression of being a girl so asleep that even being trampled couldn’t rouse me.
          My panic attacks got worse; I would wake in the middle of the night with the darkness of the room lying heavy and expansive on my chest. I stopped being able to concentrate on work. The pages stuck together and my hands sweated when I struggled to peel them apart. Gina called me a drag, a drain on her energy. I was sure she would want me to leave. I had no one to talk to, which wasn’t new but was newly painful because I’d become acquainted with the opposite of lonely, and I was on the verge of screaming all the time.
          One morning I felt myself moving close to that deadened place where you no longer try to exert any control over anything because you’ve lost your sense that it could help. There was still a small part of me that looked on this possibility with a sense of horror, and I forced my arms and legs to propel me off the mattress and down the stairs swept by Gina’s aunt and through the door to the concrete path that led to the street. The birds were out, and as I trudged along I could swear that they were talking. “She doesn’t look so hot,” they said. “There’s one to watch,” they said, “and not in a good way.” I flipped them off and continued on.
          At Met Foods there was only one cart left underneath the window signs advertising Sclafani tomatoes and 24-packs of bottled water. I knew that inside the store there would already be interminable mothers with their children clamoring for chocolate cookies with double frosting and ridged potato chips in bags that made boisterous rustling noises when the children without permission lifted the bags from their spots on the shelf. The mothers were forever replacing items in their original locations or wiping the mouth of whichever child had swiped and eaten a donut. I hated them all and glared with a violence that made me almost immediately ashamed.
          The store’s newest manager had decided to place a sad selection of bouquets near the entrance, some of which were festooned with ribbons so that when the automatic door whooshed open and hot air rushed in, the strips of fabric would rise up fluttering before coming as suddenly again to rest. Five, six, seven: I grabbed the bunches of roses and daisies and carnations by their stems or by the paper they were wrapped in, avoiding their constellations of petals. When I was finished the black buckets were empty except for the water that had been keeping the flowers in a state that looked like life. In the produce section I filled disposable bags with cherries and plums and oranges and nectarines and apples. The apples were red or were a mottled red and green or were yellow and dotted with freckles. I chose them at random and dropped them into the flimsy sacks. They thumped against each other. I filled one, two, three, four, continuing until I thought I might have more than I could pay for or carry home.
          Then I waited in line, placing my selections in neat rows on the conveyer.
          The pimpled cashier eyed me. “Find everything you need?”
          Yes, I told him, everything.

“You’ve lost it,” said my only friend.
          The lights were on in the room and the room was brimming with flowers and food. I had dug through the kitchen cabinets and the recycling bin under the sink to find the pitchers and water glasses and soda bottles and food-encrusted cans in which the dead blooms were keeping fresh. The bouquets were on the windowsill and on Gina’s desk and chair and on the floor around the bed and around my mattress, and interspersed with them were mixing bowls and dinner plates and casserole dishes heaped with fruit. There were cherries and plums, oranges and nectarines and apples. There was no space to walk and Gina stood just outside the door, looking blank.
          “This is the part where we make up,” I said.
          Her face was still blank. “I think I want you to leave.”
          “You think?”
          “I do. I want you to leave.” The words came out slow and deliberate. She sounded like I had when I’d said I was moving in.
          For once Gina’s aunt materialized, and she insisted that I take another suitcase and a selection of her clothing and three fifty-dollar bills. On the train I sat hunched over with my cheek pressed against the handle until I could feel it make an indentation on my skin. Although there was a closer stop on the 1, I got out at 96th Street because I needed to breathe. I walked and turned and walked through Manhattan Valley to the new American Youth Hostel, which was large enough for 480 beds, they said, and which looked like a boarding school for English girls. There had been a blackout; the building had already been abandoned and it had caught fire and years had passed before it was finally refurbished. For five months the hostel had been open to whoever could pay $19 for the night.
          They gave me a key and I found my shared bedroom and dropped the suitcase and myself there on a lower bunk. Someone knocked, an employee who must have had nothing better to do, and since I didn’t get up to let her in she asked me through the door how I was finding the accommodations. Was there anything else I needed?
          Yes, I almost told the woman, everything.

Suzanne Manizza Roszak’s short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Cherry Tree, failbetter, Jabberwock Review, Necessary Fiction, and SAND. Suzanne teaches literature and creative writing at the University of Groningen and is the managing editor of Seneca Review.