Marie-Helene Bertino

VIOLA IN MIDWINTER

The Margaretville Shop & Save stays open twenty-four hours as a service to hunters, hospital employees, sex workers, and other creatures who work at night. Viola in pre-dawn debates poppers and Pharaoh snakes in the fireworks aisle. In the checkout line, hunters discuss a bobcat one saw on his drive into town. A mama, probably, looking for food before the real snow arrives and locks the county in place. Seeing her, their talk zips closed. Viola knows they call her Dark Lady, which she sometimes enjoys. The cashier rings up her purchases (poppers, a small axe, mint tea for sleep), still talking to the men collected under the announcement board though they’ve gone silent. They watch her pay and leave, her puffed black coat trailing like a cold remark. Viola feels a numbness in her forehead framed in pain, a cricketing in the temple. She is always on the verge of a headache: the Shop & Save is always open: she is always forty-nine.

Outside, pale light crowns the higher mountain peaks though the parking lot is dark. Other hunters low under a streetlight. Viola positions her bags in the trunk, overhearing ideas in their mumblings, I was going to, she would, until one of the men, emboldened by her lack of attention, calls out. “Need help?”

She keeps her gaze on him and swings the trunk closed.

“Trying to say hi,” he says.

“Being polite,” his friend adds.

She pulls a cigarette from a pocket and pauses as if waiting for a light, an extinct ritual from a former life. The men blink. She finds a lighter in another pocket.

The original hunter seems to decide the smoke is meant to anger him and blooms. “Where you from?” he says. “Not here.”

She exhales smoke toward where they move from foot to foot like deer that cannot smell the origin of disturbance. The Shop & Save doors whistle. A man wearing hospital scrubs emerges carrying groceries. He walks toward a different part of the lot, then, seeing them, changes course for the encounter that had for the men changed from something they understood.

“Everything okay?” the EMT asks her. Blank eyes. Poised posture.

Viola spits loose tobacco onto the ground.

He turns to the men. “Everything okay?”

They push one of their own forward, a lantern thrown in front. “Just being friendly,” he says.

Viola uses this interruption as cover to get in and start the car. The men move aside. The EMT stands under the streetlamp, holding his bags. In the rearview mirror, she watches him. Do-gooder, maybe. She takes the road that leads into the foothills and parks at the base of the woods she heard the men discussing.

Viola follows the tracks down the county road, in and out of the tree line until it jags into an embankment by the creek. Another awareness grows alongside hers as she walks, royal blue and not solitary. The bobcat is pregnant, Viola thinks, watching it move along the frozen stream, slow and exposed. It must be injured, but there is no blood on the trail. She follows it, avoiding the mud-crust, whose sound would give her away. The movement of a cat’s shoulders out of sequence with its forward motion pleases her. The cat slips on its way up the other bank. Her grasp is firm. She pushes a blade into its neck.

A pink dawn, flurries beginning. The animal draped like a bride over her legs. Viola sits in the snow and drinks.

*

Viola was forty-nine in 1917 when she met the woman who would immortalize her. Viola’s husband, a temperless Swede, was fighting in France. Their seven-year-old daughter Bea had been good-natured before her father left, but now it was like living with a gathering storm. Always some petulant, bruising remark, a brush hurtling through the air. Every morning Viola left for the factory, buoyant with relief. She loved the simple purpose of a job.

The neighbors viewed Viola with suspicion for waiting until thirty to wed. She preferred the factory women who discussed how they’d shore up the line better than that sack of shit Haig, and at the end of sweat-ridden shifts, how they missed their husbands rarely if at all. Under the factory’s wasting lights Viola met more kinds of women than she knew existed. One or two were married to hitters and joked that these years were the clearest their faces had been. Viola didn’t know women could speak so candidly, but she’d never been among so many, protected by war’s isolation.

Samarra was the pinnacle of that candor. Her administrative role at the factory allowed her to walk the line and chat. Her wide, expressive mouth made everything she said sound scandalous even when she let the younger girls go to catch some school. She befriended Viola and her storm-cloud daughter, bringing them food and clothes they could never afford. During the summer of 1917 they’d drink Samarra’s whiskey in Viola’s cold-water walkup, the smell of the Greenwich Street fish shops souring through the windows. Fanning themselves only deepened the stink, but it made them laugh. Their friendship loosened whatever fist always seemed to grip Viola’s breastplate. She confessed to Samarra that a longing rose inside her whenever she walked a street with a view of the river. Sometimes she feared it would split in her two.

Samarra said she knew a way to lessen that woe. She called it The Occupation. Typically, the conversion procedure was harder for women. The men could bite each other on the neck, but women had to receive permission. The subject had to be certain.

*

A week after the hunters, the EMT approaches Viola in the Shop & Save.

“I’d love to know your name,” he says. “So, the next time those guys bother you, I can at least say, ‘Hey, don’t bother…’”

In the moment that passes his smile reconsiders then strengthens. “This is where you say your name,” he says.

“Men aren’t new to me,” she says. She says, “Viola.”

He takes a few glancing steps back, pretending to be moved by beauty. It is meant to seem corny. She smiles, in spite of herself. His basket is filled with honey, bread, and yogurt. Soft, sweetening things. If he had known he’d run into her, they’d seem designed to woo.

Outside they load her car. “How many fireworks does a woman need?” He says, gesturing to her bags.

“You never know when I’ll need to shove one up a hunter’s ass.”

He laughs, apologizes for the hunters as if he is their mayor. He has already drawn the line between her and the town she’s lived in for half a century. She says, “I’ve been through it before.”

“Ten times today, I bet.”

“A hundred.”

She likes that he laughs when she curses. She wonders if under his scrubs his biceps are defined. His hands look strong and soft, and while he speaks, one rests on his lower stomach. She knows it is where he wants to touch her.

Later, Viola watches him park in front of her property. He is not a stand-up straight man but hovers lower in his body; the glancing steps at the Shop & Save and these chastened ones, crossing her lawn as if clearing a series of boughs. He’s young, mid-forties maybe, but like many white men in middle-age he looks floured, older. Viola meets him on her porch and asks what he thinks of her house.

He makes a show of considering. “The yellow and white reminds me of my grandparents’ cottage. We spent summers swimming in a stream like yours.”

“You see the stream?” She is pleased.

“It’s running a bit low because of the cold. But healthy,” he hastens to add. “Beavers are working it, that’s a good sign. I didn’t know it came out this far. And so loud.”

“You can hear it too?” Noting his confused look, she explains, “Sometimes I think only I can see how pretty it is here.”

“How long have you lived up this way?”

“Forever.”  

She tells him that every night more icicles grow from the gutters, and he says it’s because the house isn’t properly winterized. “You’re not protected.”

She doesn’t offer him dinner. They sit on the couch with tumblers of whiskey. She asks what it’s like to be an EMT and he says it’s a lot of waiting until it’s not. He says he has healer hands and she says, “You have healer hands,” so he hears how ridiculous it sounds. He asks to touch her. She places the glass on the table, removes her sweater, and lies on the carpet. This seems to cue a tuxedo cat who comes around to sniff. She motions for it to leave.

The EMT drains his drink and crouches near her. She is pleased that he seems cowed by the sudden exposure of her skin. He places his palms against her back. When was the last time anyone touched her? He digs in with his fingertips, beginning at her spine’s base. She has what he calls an ancient coil in her lower right back. It’s where she keeps people she loves. An old wound activates. She dislikes so-called healers but dislikes more that he’s right.

“I’ll make you a steak for your trouble,” she tells him after. “Do you eat meat?”

“You cook?” He gestures to her kitchen, the sink and counters covered in plants.

Viola sets one place at her table and prepares the meat on an outside pit. She serves him the steak, pours herself more whiskey, and sits across from him.

“You’re not going to eat?”

“Not hungry,” she says.

He cuts a forkful and swears that the area’s hunting helps its animals.

“A progressive and a hunter?” she says.

“There’s no way around the body craving meat.”

“The body craves protein, not a sirloin filet. I bet the animal prefers to live. I’m too old to pretend.”

“You’re so old.” He grins.

“Middle-aged.”

“I’m middle-aged too.” He seems happy to be connected by this. “You’re not a vegan, are you?”

“No,” she says. “I’m a hunter, too.”

He takes off his shirt and jeans. She sits astride him on the couch. He drags a flat tongue over her breasts. He whispers, pushing into her, that he wants to build her a house. She doesn’t want him to build her a house but doesn’t mind the sentiment. It’s been decades since someone has pressed their cheek against her heart and shuddered against her.

*

On the night Viola ceased to age, she’d received a letter from her husband in France, outlining his plan for return. They’d move in with his family. She would quit the factory. It angered Bea that he mentioned the thickness of the fighting, the ranks obliterated by rot and illness but not her, not once. She spit food and threw her plate. Finally, she lay in the back bedroom performing occasional, pitiful whimpers. Viola and Samarra shared a bottle of rye on the fire escape.

Viola was grateful for Samarra’s unblinking company. She’d never seen a woman move through a room like a cleaver.

“It’s hard to be forgotten by a man,” Samarra said about Bea.

“She doesn’t know that the letter sounds like it does because he’s scared and not admitting it.”

The rye worked her mood loose until the fish stink seemed participatory. She asked about The Occupation. Samarra said that inability to handle sunlight was a myth. It was more of a strong aversion that had been exaggerated by men who couldn’t handle it. “Like most things, the truth has contradictions that don’t fit neat theories,” she said. “We don’t turn to ash. We’ve just usually had long nights and are nursing plasma hangovers.”

Human blood was not the only way to receive sustenance. They could hunt animals, though Samarra considered this beneath her. She was raised by maids in the Philippines in an affluent political family. She made deals with meat factory bosses and had first pick after the slaughter. “You’d be surprised how easy it is for an older woman to go unnoticed. They either assume I have a family somewhere or I’m there to clean.”

The war was ending. Survivors were coming home. After her husband returned, she’d be with his mothers and sisters all day, mending, darning, keeping polite. Samarra reached over and untied the top of Viola’s dress. Viola felt the chill of her skin meeting air. Samarra leaned over and pressed her lips against the skin she’d exposed. She pushed her fingers inside her. From the top of her hill, the river looked indistinguishable from the clouds. The feeling made Viola want to choose something for the rest of her life.

“Are you sure?” Samarra said, and Viola said, “Please, yes.”

*

In the morning, the EMT does not leave but chooses a contemporary collection of short stories from her library and reads to her. The next day, he works his hospital shift and returns with a bag of groceries. Flowers, mint, salt. She places her lips against the hollow of his collarbone. He works another night shift. She goes with him: Newness makes joining someone at work seem fun. He opens a wall-sized cabinet revealing racks of blood, shining in bags. A genital pulse overwhelms her, her vision pinwheels. He holds her up against a wall during sex. He pulls a hammock from the attic and hangs it outside. She watches him from the shadows on the porch. The sun makes his eyes go clear. He leans against a pine, pulls his arms overhead to stretch. The crescent of pellucid skin above his belt adds itself to the night shifts and blurs time. She doesn’t know how many nights have passed since the first when she made him a steak. She likes pressing moisturizer she doesn’t need into her cheeks while he reads in the other room. Viola writhes, cries out, fixed in place by the softest pin. The joy of having a tongue inside her that knows what it’s doing.

“It’s not fair,” she says, meaning: Thank god life can still hold this joy.

Samarra would call this “love jail.” Viola thinks she knows how it feels to wear nothing and lie beneath the sun.

*

In the waning days of war, Viola’s new appetite became a second body. In the pale, drenched moments before satiation she could watch it as if she were a bystander. How it swerved and knuckled down on an unsuspecting figure. She engaged in nocturnal benders that ended at Samarra’s apartment where she stopped herself in ice baths.

Plague shuttered the city. A telegram from France arrived. Her husband was missing. Bea retreated into the room of herself and Viola became a foe.

Viola was the oldest she’d ever be and no longer needed food. She registered the loss of her husband in an unlit part of her brain. She was a novice immortal and though Samarra was a veteran she was unwilling to teach. She didn’t want to explain, for example, why the longing to leave had not lessened but hardened. She hadn’t anticipated that The Occupation alongside Viola’s age would combine to quadruple desire. Samarra was in her sixties, safely beyond middle age. They didn’t argue but backed away from one another.

*

Viola and the EMT hunt.

His gear and blinds amuse her. He lines up a shot to find she’s been streaming in from another direction. Both methods prove effective. Bodies pile up. Their love is bad for the animals.

Showing off is new to her, as is someone anticipating her tricks. Even in deepest cover, he finds her.

He says, “If you think you’re being watched, you are.”

One night, a whiff of impermanence makes her crave concrete answers. Does he want to stay with her? No town? No job? Just his body and hers.

“Always,” he says.

She says there is a way, but he must be certain. “It will be for a long time.”

The future tense makes him grow still—a squirrel sensing movement freezing at the base of an oak—until she doesn’t know what is him and what is tree. She thought she’d been following the path of their desire. He makes an excuse and leaves.

*

Though Viola’s aging halted, other parts advanced. Her hair and nails grew so fast she could shave her head and have floor-length hair within weeks. Menstrual blood disappeared for months then, as if to compensate, returned with painful hemorrhaging. No longer able to care for Bea, Viola took her to live with her Swedish relatives. At sixteen, Bea began work as a boarding house waitress.

One evening in the middle of the century, mother and daughter passed each other on the street. It took Viola a moment to understand that this hard woman was her daughter. Bea had exceeded her in age and looked to be in failing health. Viola realized that the girl with her was Bea’s daughter, who’d inherited her grandmother’s lavender eyes. Bea belonged to another time that moved like a barge away from where Viola was pinned to the dock. She’d already forgotten Bea’s birthday and her own. Split with regret, she left the city.

In the 1960s, Viola worked as a flight attendant. She hunted in the Scottish Highlands, prowled the bars in Golden Gai, visited the battlefield where her husband had fallen. For a while travel allayed her restlessness. Samarra was right about one thing—it was easy for a middle-aged woman to go unnoticed. The other flight attendants were on their own thresholds—after college, before marriage, before babies, after changing careers.

But Viola was pursued by a sensation of vanishing. She worried that instead of being freed, she’d been forgotten. She longed for her chin to sag, any indication she was still alive. Perhaps this was why people invested in religion or children or causes. To pass time pleasantly while watching something grow. Instead, Viola noticed how human tendencies genuflected through time. Hemlines and mothering trends advanced and receded. The tendency of women to wound their own. The nucleus of the house became the child who even had their own room for toys. It sickened Viola to watch mothers be controlled by toddlers.

Age’s boundaries were occasionally recalibrated. At the turn of the century, the idea of youth reached the age of forty. Viola’s body seemed newly valued. Men’s gazes, once trained solely on college-aged asses, lingered on hers. Factories, planes, space travel, the Internet. Though the structures varied, they were built from hubris. Stitched with greed.

New mandates after 9/11 required flight attendants to submit to regular reviews and Viola could no longer fly with anonymity. She returned to America and moved to the Western Catskills, where she spent the rest of the century in and out of hot flashes, chased by an unleavened smell, fertile and not, fertile then not, joints swelling, trapped in a developmental doorway. She kept routines she did not need like market shopping to tend the last ember of being human and lived timelessly in the woods that were silenced by snow for half of every year. She’d been middle-aged for a century, intuitions deepening, minor and major knives growing along the walls of her understanding. She had become a cave purpled with stalactites. She could smell feelings in a room.

*

The EMT shows up after two weeks carrying chanterelles he’s foraged. Viola had missed him so she participates with a few bites. Worm-thick, spiced by earth. Since it serves no purpose, food is something she understands but doesn’t enjoy, like perfume and holidays.

“What do you do for fun?” he says. He seems distracted. The question belongs to an earlier stage of courtship. It sounds like he is returning to an improperly filled-out form to correct mistakes.

She shows him her arsenal of fireworks, he lines up an impressive display. Colorful sparks soar above the woods. A tornado of snapping around their ankles.

“I’m surprised you don’t get noise complaints,” he says, gazing over the trees toward town. She notices a stab of effort in his voice, as if he is trying to recall what brought him here.

“No one would come all the way out.”

She’s been with local men before, though none from the EMT’s generation. A dirt farmer with soft hands. His wife. Two brother lawyers. Their wives. Her favorite was a married door-to-door vacuum salesman she saw for a year before his shame grew too large. Occasionally she sees him slow on her road—elderly but still possessing the same dazed, blinking calm—trying to determine her house amid whatever glamour appears. But she never loved him, or the others, or even Samarra. She never lost breath when leaving them, or when they stayed away too long.

*

In the 1960s Viola was traveling through the Midi-Pyrenees when she met a woman who taught her the spell to glamour homes.

If what appeared to the visitor was a pleasant memory, they’d get along. If it was troubling, the connection wouldn’t last. One lawyer she’d been excited about was startled back into his car by whatever he saw. She never had a chance to ask. His bumper took a chunk out of her hedgerow when he roared away. Most guests couldn’t see the stream, the feature that was dearest to her. Powered by some relentless turbine, every so often it would produce a cherubic black beaver, moving its weight front-to-back, front-to-back over a lichen-thick rock. Before she met the EMT, these rare sightings had been the highest delight of her endless life.

*

A week, a month, no visits. Viola finds him in the home of a local bartender, a generous pourer. Their bodies are pearlized in television light as he pumps into her, whispering. Maybe this is the woman who wants him to build her a house, Viola thinks, hovering outside the window.

She drags her firework arsenal to the lawn and lights each one. The sky fills with fury. Sparks ignite in the dusky growth. The arriving firemen cannot find a house but hear laughter spiraling in the hollow. Amid the damage a centuries-old hemlock falls, bisecting the county road. For a week the locals must travel longer on the highway to avoid it.

Heartbreak slows the hours as months creak by. Viola’s hair grows past the floor. She dyes it Lights Out black from a Shop & Save kit. Doubles up on face creams she doesn’t need. The memory of her birthday returns. She spends November 15th shivering in a scalding bath. She cloaks her house so he’ll find only ankle-breaking ruts if he tries to visit. Adds a few cats to her home and one tall dog named Oberon who stands like a masthead in the yard, every so often conjuring a single, day-splitting bark.

*

When she had just moved to the mountains, Viola came across Death on a train platform in Arkville. Death wore an impeccable hoodie under an acid-washed blazer. She stood beside an elegant suitcase, checking a timepiece. Sensing Viola’s stare, she looked over. Her gaze was a climate. She raised a delicate hand and saluted.

Viola returned the gesture. She imagined they could be friends since neither needed anything from the other. They were workers who shared a commute. It must get lonely being that essential. Viola thought she knew how that felt. The train arrived. Viola watched Death move through the car of sleeping travelers. She selected a window seat, removed her watch, and gently laid it on the tray table in front of her. No passenger stirred. No one notices remarkable women.

Viola watched the train leave then bought a newspaper and a bottle of pills that promised to alleviate the ankle swelling that accompanied her like an assistant.

*

A little boy gapes in the firearms aisle of the Margaretville Shop & Save where Viola wears remnants from her past lives. A corset shows under a one-shouldered dress from the eighties belted in the style of the nineties. Bobby socks. Boots from her first life’s job.

She misses the factory. She misses the women who snuck flasks, spit seeds, bit, demurred to the bosses then exposed their asses for laughs. She hadn’t known there were women like that. Since then, she has been them all.

The little boy’s mother snatches him away but he steals glances from under her arms. He wants to keep looking at the Dark Lady.

Viola points one glowing shoulder at him, shows her teeth. Then zips it all—her mirth and misery—under the purple coat, makes her expression into a storm cloud, and leaves through the whistling doors.

That evening, Viola wakes, struggling for breath. Her sheets are soaked in sweat. The wind swirling in the hollow sounds like a passing big rig. Gun powder fills her nostrils. She checks outside but there’s no one in the meadow blanketed with snow, or on the hill milked in the waxing Wolf Moon. No deer lolls in the copse of hemlock that stubbles the crest. More icicles have grown from the gutters. One side of the house shines in the dark.

Viola repots plants in her kitchen, uneasiness growing. Finally, she feels a presence behind her.

“Devour me,” it says.

Samarra stands in the center of the room, arms raised for a hug. She is in town to check out the “whole upstate thing.”

“Girl,” she says. “You look rough.”

“I could use a party,” Viola admits.

“You could use a haircut. No matter. Party’s here, babe.”

They are naked for days. They throw a log into the fire. They finish the whiskey.

Samarra, addressing Viola from between her legs, tells her the word for the EMT is narcissist. “My seventh—no, eighth!—husband was one. Diminishing returns. They leave you starving.” She laughs. “Which is the worst thing you and I can be.”

“What did you do to him?” Viola says.

“Poor man. He did not go easy.”

Samarra suggests they kill the EMT too, but Viola refuses. Killing him would bring no relief, she says. Who she wants to kill is deathless.

“Well, I’m going to have to eat something,” Samarra says. “I’m not here to ski.”

“I know where we can go,” Viola says.

They drive to the Shop & Save and chuck tote bags and firewood into a jangling cart. Samarra humps the bear statue and tries on fluorescent hunting gear. It is good to be with this unruly woman in a cheap grocery store at night. They’ve been friends for a hundred years.

When they’d arrived the parking lot was empty but when they load their bags into the car hunters watch from under every streetlamp.

“Hello, boys,” Samarra calls, driving away.

Viola directs her to the unmarked door at the back of the hospital. She leads them through a series of hallways, avoiding night nurses who glimmer in deeper rooms. Viola reveals the cabinet of blood.

Samarra leans on the counter for support. “Why do I have the urge to bless myself?”

They fill the tote bags with the plastic sleeves, retreat through the hallways, and load the car.

“Hurry,” Viola says when she hears the door open behind them. Samarra climbs into the car.

“Wait.” The EMT approaches, face mapped with pain. “Talk to me. Viola. Why have you disappeared?”

“Babe?” Samarra lowers the window and observes him with flat, gray eyes. Her pallor has been flawless for centuries.

“Who’s that?” he says. “Who is that?”

She gets into the car and Samarra drives away. “That’s the guy?” She says, “You need to leave the woods more.”

*

Samarra predicts the EMT will show up again, and on a moonless night in midwinter, he does.

Viola reveals her house (she’s been drinking). He stands on the porch and speaks quietly into the closed door, while on the other side she listens in the dark, Oberon beside her keeping a low growl. She watches him walk to his truck. His headlights scan her as he pulls away.

Viola drains every fisher cat on the mountain.

*

The EMT takes up with another local girl, homely with pretty eyes. Another progressive who insists that hunting is fair to the animal and who defers to him, unlike the bartender he keeps fucking even after he and the pretty girl marry.

They have two boys, indistinguishable from the other county kids. One moves to Canada, the other marries a local girl like his mother, hunts with his father on weekends, pulls the sightless deer onto the car, sings down the mountain. The girl gets homelier though her pretty eyes stay. Every year the EMT decorates their house with blow-up snowmen. His property backs onto an overgrown section of woods that connect the hamlet.

One night toward the middle of the century, the EMT administers to a pile of steaming meat in his backyard. He is in his seventies, lymph nodes stuffed with cancer. She smells it coursing above the meat stink; metallic, salted. It seems unfair that he gets to die.

A windless rustle, a certain un-sound. He doesn’t have to see her standing inside the tree line, owl quiet. If you think you’re being watched, you are.

*

She meets him again, in this town or that, a man or not, employed or jobless, sick or well, a doctor, a stoneworker, and he runs his systems on her. Sometimes, she doesn’t have the energy. She tells him she’s been through it before. Sometimes she accepts his dances, his tongue, attempts to summon love’s old frictions until, inevitably, the drumming subsides.

*

A girl on the verge of adulthood arrives in November when the forest’s reddish growth makes the mountains appear rusted. She has compiled a map from four semi-accurate ones procured in visits to town hall. She has sweet-talked a hunter who liked her lavender eyes. This determination paired with a hard countenance has separated her from everyone she’s ever known. The girl walks onto the empty meadow and the word ancestor occurs to her as if from clear air. Each foot presses it into the moss. Ancestor, as icicles gleam on rocks that pin the stream. Ancestor, she feels the Devonian gaze of hemlocks. She speaks to her hammering heart (the house will arrive or it won’t, and if it doesn’t, she’ll return home). Nothing in her life has prompted such breathlessness. Something in the meadow seems to unlock and turns toward her. The stream begins a louder chatter that sounds like, hello. I won’t leave. I’ll wait forever.

MARIE-HELENE BERTINO is the author of the novels Parakeet and 2 a.m. at The Cat’s Pajamas, and the story collection Safe as Houses. Awards include The O. Henry Prize, The Pushcart Prize, The Iowa Short Fiction Award, and The Frank O’Connor International Short Story Fellowship in Cork, Ireland. Her fourth book is the novel Beautyland (FSG, 2024). She teaches in the Creative Writing program at Yale University.