Mushroom Girl 

Mushroom Girl, like her namesake, was largely subterranean, invisible, and enmeshed in the roots of everything. In fact, until today, I never saw her—her self proper—but only her fruiting bodies, which appeared three times, in the spring of my thirtieth year, on my kitchen counter in a plain white box. 

The first time, my husband was already frying them in garlic, singing a bit too loudly to himself, not looking at me. And I knew it had rained in the night and a fairy ring had reared up around him, again. 

Wherever my husband stands, the ground seethes obscenely underneath. It rains, and I find myself eating a plateful of linguine with garlic and pink oyster mushrooms, or, heading into the ravine, being stopped in the muddy path by a smiling young woman who knows my name and assumes a sisterly affection that, all marital freedoms and autonomies granted, I never consented to. 

I had almost ceased to be surprised in these instances. But the appearance of mushrooms is always slightly surprising.

I was never sure what to do with them. They were gifts deployed along difficult to determine vectors. Because not even the most audacious and oblivious girlfriend would have given my husband a box of mushrooms without thinking at least for a moment about his wife. Would his wife cook them? Would she eat them? Would she eat them after he cooked them for her? Would they be brought home and left to rot in her fridge? Would they be brought home? 

After all, there is something sinister about mushrooms. It is one of those little jokes of life that fungal webs, of dubious and varying levels of toxicity and community spirit, are essential to the circulatory systems of most trees, and thus to the health of our diminishing forests, and thus to the continuation of all earthly life.    

At times, I felt the contents of Mushroom Girl’s white boxes were peace offerings, aimed like a blind and determined hypha at myself, the root in most need of nourishment. At other times they felt like threats, intimations of a fecund and writhing life beyond the walls of my home. Or reminders that it is in a dark, wet place, where organisms become each other and the poisonous becomes the gourmet, that the erotic also begins.

But the joke was on Mushroom Girl if she thought of marriage as a clean, bright, airy space—as clean and bright as my clean kitchen.

Who can say where is it more important to look—at the overworld or the underworld? My husband thought she was the bright, easy thing, the relief, the fun, the fun guy, the little cap poking up like an auspicious sign in a video game. Whether Mushroom Girl was symbiote or parasite, substrate or root, red cap or pale mass of filaments, the question is nothing compared to the questions that, year by year, my husband and I are forced to answer. 

Questions such as whether or not to have unprotected sex (a question Mushroom Girl and my husband will never have the privilege of discussing). When we were first married, the risk appeared as the spectre of infertility; what if it didn’t work? Several years into it not working, the risks have diverged, for me and my husband. My risk is now precisely that it will work, that I will be absorbed into a web of reproduction, reuse, and recycling that my husband still tends to fondly romanticize. His risk is that it will work, and that I will have an abortion without telling him, thus plunging an invisible and inevitable seed of destruction into our relationship. I do not believe he is aware of his risk. 

Questions such as if we should allow my crazy, childish mother to come and live with us. (It is another little joke that there are also tree funguses—powdery ones, black growths like charred cancers, frilly grey ones—that adhere to the bark, eating through it and into the trunk, or appear like a rash on the leaves, heralding the tree’s death.)

Questions such as what it means to cleave to someone with a crowd standing behind them.

Questions such as made Mushroom Girl appear frivolous at best, with her roommate situation, her tiedyed thongs (discovered in my husband’s pants pocket, in the laundry), her organic job at the organic mushroom distributor. Still, I worried that we would fail to thrive without her. 

By the second box of mushrooms, I had learned Mushroom Girl’s name, though I refused to use it. Calling her Mushroom Girl was a way of mocking her and bragging about my own comfort with her existence simultaneously, though of course I was not comfortable; I didn’t know if I was waiting for the ground to dry and the earth to close up again, or for a profusion of new, if alien, growth. My husband didn’t know either.

Which was probably the reason he waited until it was almost too late to bring that second box home. They must have been at his office in that tiny fridge for a week before he finally produced them. It was after six when he got home, reached into his bag, pulled out a handful of wizened black tubes, and told me to plan dinner around them. I was horrified. I was already cooking steaks. But the mushrooms turned out to taste like Dutch liquorice, honey, and shallots. He fed them to me on the end of his fork while I pretended to resist. Then he took my jaw in his hand and pulled my head down into his lap, where I wanted it to be.

Mushrooms are often cast as “helpers”, friendly assistants running the fiddly errands so the primary organism—say, an aspen tree—can get on with the business of growing upward. The problem with aspens as an example here is that an aspen is rarely one tree, discrete. A single organism of the aspen species is very likely to be a clump or indeed a whole grove of deceptive single trunks, supported by a fungal network so vast and indispensable, so complimentary to the functions of the aspen, as to have become a virtual organ rather than a separate creature. 

Casting myself and my husband as the aspen grove, Mushroom Girl as the fungus, one question to ask is: Taking for granted that the aspen depends on the fungus for its very survival, can the fungus survive without the aspen? The unsatisfying answer is that I don’t know.

Correct polyamorists would prefer to describe the multitude of us—husband, girlfriends, and myself—as the aspen grove, our platonic community, perhaps, as the the fungal network, the mycorrhizal mycelium. This is laughably inaccurate. There is a hierarchy. It only remains to be seen which is in the more elevated position: the dependent user or the indispensably used. For instance, though I persisted for months in referring to “Mushroom Girl”, I am sure that when she and my husband are together, “Mushroom Girl” has always been compelled to use my first name. 

He uses hers, ad nauseam, when he fucks me. As I’m sure you’ve guessed, nothing makes me come faster, unless it’s some other girlfriend’s name. I have at times been tempted to conclude that my husband is the only truly independent one, fucking whomever he wants and enjoying it. Not worrying, even when he fantasizes about impregnating me. But by now I know that he needs both of us (all of us) to get off.

It seems too obvious not to entertain—the possibility that it is women in general, and not girlfriends, that form the fungal network. Quite possibly we are all mushroom girls, breaking down and repurposing organic matter, delivering nutrients, accomplishing death and birth as a single process, under the surface. 

What is cooking but another instance of energy transformation? Hardly different from composting, except it’s faster. The different modes of transformation depend on the energy recipient. For instance, my husband not only has no use for compost, he doesn’t like soup. 

Today, I made a soup with the third box of mushrooms. 

I made it exactly the way I wanted to, with celery, fennel, and miso paste, and a stock boiled for twenty-four hours with chicken bones, bay leaves, cloves, and anise. I cooked slowly, listening to music, opening the windows, and chopping the vegetables precisely. I was moving gracefully. I was wearing an apron. I was alone in my clean kitchen. I was not expecting anyone. 

A recent paper published on mycorrhizal symbiosis opens with this ominous statement on how fungi establish themselves in a root system: “During this mutually beneficial interaction, the fungus takes control of its host plant by injecting a small protein that neutralizes its immune defences thereby allowing the fungus to colonize the plant.”

When the doorbell rang, I thought it was a delivery. I went without thinking about it. A woman I didn’t recognize stood outside wearing a red raincoat and khaki pants. She laughed at herself and apologized for being awkward and nervous. She waved her wet hand at the rain. She said she had waited too long for my husband to introduce us. She said her name was Monique. And my name must be. She asked if I’d enjoyed the mushrooms. She said that she’d enjoyed listening to my husband describe cooking them for me, feeding me. She said she’d found it kind of hot. Was I too busy?

I stood in the open door and the unmistakable savoury smell of the mushrooms that preceded her leaked out from behind me. It was mortifying. I must have been chopping the mushrooms as she was taking the bus to my house. The whole afternoon, as the cool air wafted in and the flavours of the fennel and miso and mushrooms developed, she had been getting ready to come see me—checking the bus schedule, putting on make-up, no doubt—and then traveling closer and closer to me, closing in on me as she followed the city streets’ branching pathways. The intimacy was accomplished. And as I stood in the door, there was nothing else for me to do. I opened it. I invited her in and she came, wiping rain off her purse. I apologized for my awkwardness and we laughed appreciatively at this symmetry. I asked her if she’d eaten. 

“Mushroom Girl” appeared in The New Quarterly 160, after being named runner-up in the 2021 Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Contest