The Elephant Box

Elizabeth didn’t write to Amanda day after day and she hoped she would stop hoping he would do so. They had not communicated for decades, and then one day they did because somebody died, and their notes to each other were short and circumscribed. Mostly they were about words, such as, “I learned that counting used to mean telling,” and sometimes they were about objects. The elephant box Elizabeth gave to Amanda many years before Amanda had lost; now she told him it had been stolen, and it might have been stolen, and when she told him it was stolen, she described it so that he might remember it. As she did so, she thought it sounded unlikely as an object; it didn’t make sense: “I refer to a wood carving of an elephant,” Amanda wrote to Elizabeth, “which was also a scale when you slid it open (it was a box?), with little chains and metal plates for weighing stuff on.” She added: “Sounds really weird. Maybe I mis-remember.” And Elizabeth said he did remember, he remembered under the surface of his knowing mind, and Amanda said the known lies under the known like words within words and no words, and Elizabeth had not answered that note.

Instead, the red pine on top of a hill had spirals in its cones and Amanda climbed the first nine branches to read a handful of letters from Elizabeth. It was unclear to Amanda when she’d received the letters, which she found in her desk underneath some photographic postcards from the 1940s. The postcards were from Egypt and she’d been neither to Egypt nor alive in the 40s, but her desk was full of paper things that once belonged to other people: railway timetables,  menus, shipping and postal labels, stamps, letter-pressed company stationery with lots of space between the characters, bits of wrapping paper, old postcards. It had been easy for Elizabeth’s letters, written in Amanda’s own lifetime specifically to her, to get buried under what antique dealers call “ephemera,” of which she’d been a sporadic collector since childhood.

Amanda’s bare feet gripped the pine’s surprisingly smooth bark and arched as if to spring up from the branch with only her toes left on the branch by the time she was nearing the next one. Her hands and arms were equally involved in the climb, reaching upward and pulling on the higher branches, so that almost, her legs followed her torso rather than initiated the ascent. The red pine was the oldest, tallest tree on a hill with seven evergreens and a plethora of scraggly maple, scrub oak, wild plum, and underbrush. It was a messy hill. Amanda worried about the seven evergreens having to fight with scrub for light and nutrients, but the task of cutting the underbrush seemed beyond her. She had done so one summer, and by late spring it was back. Entanglement was everywhere in nature, yet Amanda, despite being often outdoors, had never said so. She perceived it merely, and grappled with it from time to time.

Elizabeth’s letters were dated—Marchs and Aprils in a handful of years late in the previous century—but that did not help it feel clear to Amanda when she had received them. She could not place them, or she couldn’t place herself in relation to when the letters appeared in her mailbox or post office box. The addresses on the envelopes, at least three different addresses including one in care of someone else, should have helped, but it was more like looking at a map than being in a place. She thought of Peter Quince warning the audience, “We are not here,” while standing in plain sight with the rude mechanicals on stage, and she hoped that climbing the red pine and reading the letters under and above the arms of the evergreen would help her locate herself in relation to Elizabeth’s words. 

“Hey, now,” one of them began in Courier on foolscap with a period after the two words: “Hey, now.” It continued, “Your apology, though unnecessary, was gracious and welcome.” Reading the letter now, Amanda did not know why she had apologized. Although Elizabeth went on to contrast the “simple grace” of Amanda’s apology with the effusive emptiness of a roommate’s—the roommate repeatedly locked her bike to Elizabeth’s and took the key—nothing in the letter shed light on the circumstances of Amanda’s apology to Elizabeth. It was strange to Amanda that whatever had occasioned the letter could disappear, even as both the words and tone of Elizabeth’s greeting were instantly recognizable. More than recognizable, they were audible, and there on the ninth branch, Amanda pressed her spine into the trunk as if to supplement her normally superb balance on any branch whether she was standing, sitting, or lying down, whether she was ten or twenty or any age at all. Elizabeth’s “Hey, now” with its end stop (“Hey, now.”) had the same gentleness and tacit humor as his hands did, or Elizabeth’s voice was like his touch, and that was as far as Amanda was willing to consider their effect. 

She read on. “O goddess,” began another, making Amanda laugh out loud until she came to Elizabeth describing how his face hurt. Around his eyes and mouth he could feel tension and he could see in the mirror the minute muscles stuck in clenched and grimacing ugliness, he said—Amanda was paraphrasing to herself, having immediately folded the letter yet still hearing his words, inexactly—and he needed Amanda to place her hands on his face in ways she had learned growing up on a commune of midwives and skinny men in Tennessee. 

Amanda could not remember specific occasions of massaging Elizabeth’s head and face, but it made sense to her that she had done so. Even when they were young, she liked the lines around his mouth and eyes and across the length of his forehead. Her fingers had gone to them instinctively, as if to begin remembering them from the start as much as to soothe them in the present. And that was where the gist of that memory was stored after all, in her fingers and hands. She heard in her head her mother’s friend, Inge, who had left the commune for an ashram, saying, “What if your mind were in your feet? Or if your mind were in your hands? What would that feel like?” They were good questions, Amanda thought; they brought her attention to her feet on the ground, or to her hands being either loose and open or closed and clenched at the ends of her arms. Inge’s questions made Amanda think that reading Elizabeth’s description of facial tension was one of the ways it would feel if her mind were in her hands. Responsive to his plea, and capable.

It occurred to Amanda that until now, she had not read the letters from Elizabeth in this century, and she wondered if she should tell him about them. He had asked her to return them long ago, longing ago, and she had ignored his request even when he repeated it. It stung to be asked, was how she thought of it then. She had not wanted to give them back. She had known she was being uncharacteristically (she hoped) inconsiderate, and Elizabeth did not ask a third time. She could offer them now, or she could put them back in her desk drawer. She could bury them under the red pine or read them a few more times. She could, if it turned out that they were to meet ever in the future where neither of them lived, offer the letters in person, and/or she could ask whether her own letters to him, including the apology, existed. 

Among the spiraled cones and mobile needles and finely layered bark, Amanda did nothing but hold four letters lightly in her hand. All had envelopes except one. Of that letter, the briefest of all, she let go, and it drifted in inconsistent directions down the hill before landing in a clump of Queen Anne’s lace. Wild carrot, she suspected Elizabeth would call it, especially if he had ever torn it out by its roots and smelled it.

She retrieved the stray letter on her way down the hill, and long ago it was spring. Longer ago, soothe came from sooth, she imagined telling Elizabeth or conversely, and sooth means “to verify, show to be true.” As she walked with scraps of an earlier and frequently interrupted conversation in her hand, Amanda thought that all the words, not just hers and Elizabeth’s but all of them, meet up in earlier forms and other meanings. Anything I say to you, a person could say to anyone, means more than one thing at a time. The words in a sentence hear the ghosts of each other, and they listen. A person might say soothe my face, Amanda was thinking to Elizabeth, and the words would hear the person’s need to be sooth’d: shown to be verifiably true (to exist?) by being touched—which is the one thing they themselves, the words, can’t do.

ξ

Lisa Fishman is the author of seven books of poetry, most recently Mad World, Mad Kings, Mad Composition (Wave Books, 2020). Her hybrid prose and fiction appear or are forthcoming in Granta, The Rupture, Fairy Tale Review and elsewhere, and a collection of stories, World Naked Bike Ride, will be out in Fall 2022 on Gaspereau Press (Nova Scotia). A dual US/Canadian writer, Fishman teaches at Columbia College Chicago.