Baby Geisha

by Trinie Dalton

  “Welcome to your biological clock,” Rita said.

  “I don’t want to think about any of this,” I said. “But I had this core realization that sex makes babies and that I have this magical power. Making love is something more instinctual now.”

  Talking to her about this wasn’t awkward, despite our geisha day. I already miss her and like talking to her whenever I can.

  “Its uncertain outcome is its main source of attraction,” Rita said. She talks like a fortune-teller. “You’re preparing for the uncertainty of the independent soul you’ll give birth to.”

  As if the birth is already fated. Fate, the set motion, versus the uncertainty of controlling who we create. Rita is so insightful—I remembered why I love her.

  “I can’t stand this sadness,” I said. “I’m afraid of sex now because the ritual is charged. It can’t be a simple pleasure anymore. I hate that my body is telling me to do something I don’t want to do—to think about myself and what I’m capable of producing. Sex is more selfish now. Am I still the geisha?”

  “You’re a baby geisha,” Rita said.

  Where will I land? Too much mystery, this sinking ship.

  Then, there’s Natalie. Natalie has been like a sister to me for twelve years, she’s a powerfully maternal figure with an excess of love to share. She always wanted kids. She loves menstruation and kept a jar of bloody rags to soak in our bathroom when we were roommates. This was part good luck charm and part environmental effort. At that time, it was all I could do not to ask why my mother had kids with a man who couldn’t commit to a family. I had stepparents, too, who struggled to muster up kid joy. Shaking off depressed parents encouraged me to discover nature’s ecstatic life cycle. Watching vines crawl towards sunlight up tree trunks, or observing chipmunks growing from inch-long pink squirmy things into pert, striped rodents. Imagining ancient redwoods surviving the centuries. Birth was not necessarily a curse. Growth could be a positive experience. I tattooed the chipmunks on my inner wrist to symbolize my Fear of Babies cure, though I hadn’t set my mind in any concrete way on one day having my own.

  Six weeks ago, between when Rita left and I moved in with my girlfriend who has the pirate kid, Natalie and I took a road trip across the Southwest. She had no trouble understanding that I like both Rita and Taylor. She’s not one to shy away; she digs deep into some female things that still make me squeamish, like vaginal mucus. Mucus: the worst word ever. For years before this road trip, she lectured me for not checking mine and keeping charts of how it looks and smells.

  “Stop it!” I yelled over the phone. “That’s disgusting!”

  “Since when is your body disgusting?” Natalie asks.

  You can’t argue with women like this.

  Now, she is thirty-three and announcing the good news on our drive.

  “It’s not that the rhythm method stopped working,” Natalie said from behind the wheel. “I just let go, so nature could come.”

  I thought of another girlfriend back east, home raising chicks to practice childrearing. She’s charting her months too. I recently enjoyed learning about ovulation from her, a process that I previously thought as alchemically mysterious as transforming shit into gold.

  “I can’t believe the rhythm method worked until now,” I said. “I thought for sure you would have got pregnant years ago.”

  Natalie explained the elaborate fertility calendar she keeps, how she knows to the hour when she’s ovulating and ready to conceive. Women are not geese, I think. But we make eggs.

  “Ovulation is as cryptic as the Mayan calendar,” I said. “Thank god for the pill.”

  “So, when are you having one?” Natalie asked.

  My head rested sideways on the seatbelt strapped across my chest. The flat-topped, tan mesas speeding by out the window looked like baby heartbeats on an electrocardiogram.

  “My life is not set up for that,” I said, feeling a little dead. “Taylor doesn’t want one.” Those sandy, eroded hills can’t control having their tops lopped off by weather. I am not as powerless as a mesa, but I was acting like it. Just like the people who enliven the desert’s desolation, like the Navajo who herd sheep on dry land, I am full of life. This road trip was what gave me the guts to tell Taylor I’d like a kid. It won’t go well. It will be a stalemate. I didn’t say any of this aloud, but Natalie knew. All my loved ones are psychic.

  “You can do it, mama,” she said.

  We arrived to the Painted Desert, where pastel rainbows stripe the sandstone. We pulled off the highway into the park, and drove along the two-lane road that shows off canyons marring the vast expanse. To ignore certain desires would be ridiculous, like putting lotion on one arm at the expense of your torso and legs. My neglected layers aren’t dissolving; they’re just drying up. Where’s my wisdom? Why won’t Taylor have a kid with me? Why can’t I have girlfriends? I pictured my torso shriveled into a raisin.

  A long time ago, I got a second tattoo: a rainbow over my belly button. The tattoo artist warned me that the rainbow would stretch way out when I got pregnant, swelling like an image on a blown-up balloon. I saw the bigger rainbow in my future as a bonus. I should have been brave enough when I met Taylor to admit that maybe I’d like a baby in the future, even if he didn’t want to hear it.

  In the Painted Desert, I decided it was time for me to take up praying. I don’t know how to pray and never knew what to pray to. But I obviously haven’t been listening to my body. There are pieces of me that demand excavation. Newness, a kind of birth, often comes from nothing new: that which is returned and reclaimed.

  “Pull a Wicker Man,” Natalie said as we passed some petroglyphs. “Take the flame inside you, burn and burn below, fire seed and fire feed, to make the baby grow…” she sang with an Irish accent. She has the film’s soundtrack memorized and this was not the first time she sang the song that scores the scene when women jump over a bonfire to bring fertility to their pagan village.

  “Spring’s here,” I said to Natalie, alluding to The Wicker Man’s older meaning. Bright green sprouts budded on the cottonwoods in a nearby wash. I thought of geishas, twirling parasols under cherry blossom trees to honor winter’s end.

  “We need more ceremony in our lives,” I said to Natalie. That’s what I want: rituals and a family to practice them with.

  The emerging leaves matched the pale, green sandy striation beneath the pink, orange, and yellow bands crossing the mesa like bars on sheet music. This land is a symphony, I thought. Its composition is small compared to challenges I am about to face. Will I listen to them all or will I let them fly by silently out the car window, as untranslatable vistas?

  ESCAPE MUSHROOM STYLE

  The animal hospital looked out upon the Wonder Wheel, an antique ferris wheel constructed of enough metal to build four skyscrapers. Plate glass windows in the waiting room gave the office, where Scruffles and I awaited a meeting with a soft tissue surgeon, a sleek feel. But carnival views don’t make cancer fun. I stroked Scruffles, panting at my side with a golf-ball-sized tumor hanging off his dong. Snake-skinned ladies, men with gorilla wives, fire-breathers, poodles riding tricycles, elephantitis—it had all gone down here on Coney Island. Penis tumors were probably old hat. Made sense that a polluted beach would be a mutant culture hub. The world’s oldest roller coaster loomed three blocks away. Was this vet going to be Siamese twins? Suddenly, it was moronic instead of ironic that I had considered administering dog cancer treatment at a facility bordering a decrepit amusement park. It was more moronic that I lived nearby.

  “Scruffles?” I asked, scratching his woolly, red left ear. “Will you feel like a freak if we operate?”

  Scruffles wagged his tail. Any question involving upped intonation at the end of the phrase produces in him a hope for fish.

  I kept this appointment because I needed a surgeon’s opinion. The receptionist called us in. The doctor was not a Siamese twin but rather an emaciated man whose head reminded me of a calavera de azúcar, a Day of the De
ad sugar skull. He groped my dog in a twitchy way and recommended something horrible.

  “I’m not removing anything except the tumor,” I vowed, petting Scruffles as I committed to keeping his body intact.

  “He’ll die,” the surgeon said. Who was he to issue the death sentence?

  I slammed the office door on the way out.

  Soft tissue surgeons are too fixated on slicing to know what you do and don’t cut. It’s just not right. Amputating a dog’s penis is ludicrous, I fumed in the taxi home. Scruffs panted, which I took as agreement. What would I tell people when they ask where my dog’s organ went?

  A week later, I left Scruff at home with three chew toys and took the train instead to ride the Wonder Wheel, whose cars, every quarter rotation, swing out on railings to the edge of the wheel’s circumference. These cages, called the Danglers, dangle you over the boardwalk like a hooked worm being lowered into a lake of big mouth bass. My brother and I, swinging every two minutes, questioned how long our corroded cage would hold. We needed a meaningful conversation during our limited time together, while he visited. Today, we cried a lot. Privacy was non-existent in this city, and we needed some. At least on the Wonder Wheel we had a car to ourselves.

  “We’re breaking up,” he said, of him and his girlfriend. Tears welled.

  “Don’t amputate,” I said, meaning, don’t cut her out of your life. “It’s not an ending, just a change.”

  Breakups or terminal illness, what’s worse? Why compare? This was our discussion as our car teetered above skeeball players and kids ramming bumper cars. The toxic Atlantic was on the left, and the veterinary hospital lurked right. From up here, New York was semi-manageable, as microscopic as the toadstool world I prefer to live in.

  “That’s where they told me Scruffles had four weeks to live,” I pointed down at the speck of an animal hospital, starting to cry. Wind whisked away my tears.

  “That’s some pathetic, salty rain,” I said of my tears melodramatically falling on people below.

  “Forget that vet,” Lolly said. I nicknamed him Lolly when we were kids, because he had a big head on a skinny body, like a lollipop. “Scruff’s a survivor.”

  “You’ll live too,” I said.

  “Have you tried natural remedies?” Lolly asked. We gripped the bars sealing our metal cage and swung.

  “Next week I take Scruffles to the herbalist,” I said.

  I have over a thousand mushroom photos under my belt. Last time I counted I was nearing four digits, so I began excursions to Rip Van Winkle’s home turf, the clove where Irving’s character allegedly fell asleep. Downy purple Cortinarius, a favorite fungus, grows under hemlock between blue slate outcroppings there. I may be approaching twelve hundred shots. I take road trips to my hideaway hills upstate after heavy rains. I’ve collaged my images, written amateur essays, and attended lectures at natural history museums about how genetic mushroom identification is outmoding Linnean taxonomic charts common to field guides. The mycological society recently performed a play there riffing on Doctor Faustus, in which nerds portrayed mushroom collectors haunting Faust, who sold his soul for a lifetime supply of morels. Now that’s Coney.

  Coney is the word I use to describe the grotesque and twisted, something so disturbing it’s funny. Something New York, something convoluted, something ill-flowering, like a wart. A friend who just returned from China was telling me over a shrimp dinner that markets in Beijing sell grubs-on-a-stick. That’s Coney. He handed me a menu he’d lifted from this Beijing restaurant called Escape Mushroom Style that listed fifteen pages of mushroom-based dishes—our collective reverie—minus one page of various sheep dick entrees. Coney.

  I used to peddle organic produce at health food conventions. Frequently, my booth was across from the reishi booth, always the most sparsely attended table. Littered with finger-like, brown, red, and orange striated conchs alongside pamphlets printed in Mandarin, the reishi table was considered by most to be mysterious and sketchy.

  “Is that a mushroom cult?” people whispered as I fluffed up kale bundles.

  Reishi contains anti-cancer agents, and is a detoxifier that has been used in tea, powder, and extract form for thousands of years. It’s a preventative. I was confused about why people avoided eye contact with the reishi promoters, as if looking at or thinking about cancer cure would promote neoplastic growth. Aversion to disease and the oddities surrounding it is weak. One cannot stay well without facing illness. Camped next to these mushroom enthusiasts for days straight, I read their literature, heard the miracle tales, and thanked Coney I didn’t have cancer. Chinese medicine is righteous. I stored the mushroom’s healing potential in the back of my mind, like a chestnut.

  It was during this healthy period that I selected Scruffles from a box of barking pups. His spotted paws won me over. A proud new pet owner, I headed to the local bookstore and bought pet books with wolf covers to study canine acupuncture and flower remedies. At the time, I lived three thousand miles away. For over ten years now, Lolly and I have taken turns parenting this dignified canine.

  Thursday after the Wonder Wheel tears, I took Scruffles to a Chinese herbalist in Manhattan. She had shiny auburn hair, and her hands and arms were ringed with silver and copper jewelry. She smelled friendly, like bok choy fried in ylang-ylang.

  “He looks really well otherwise,” she said. I inhaled her positivism as I would a fresh chanterelle.

  “How long does he have?” I asked, grasping my tissue just in case.

  “Years if the herbs work,” she said. “But you must remove that tumor soon.”

  “Tuesday,” I said, committing to a date. She was the doctor to trust.

  We left with a sack of herbal tinctures, a list of foods Scruffles could eat, and recipes for his home-cooked meals. Scruffles and I now eat the same stew: poultry laced with turmeric, sea salt, carrots, and other “cooling” veggies. Twice daily he gets syringes full of serums, multi-vitamins disguised as cheese powder, and Indian rhubarb extract alternating with aloe vera juice poured into his purified water. Bad tap water may have caused all this. When Scruffles was young, I put citrine and smoky quartz crystals in his water bowl, at least, and hoped for the best. Nowadays, I dose both of us with everything because it can’t hurt. We are on a permanent wellness kick.

  I process trauma in unproductive ways. I twiddle my fingers, or apply lipstick only to immediately remove it. I cook food and forget to eat it. After deciding against radiation, which meant thousands of dollars and a month of anesthetizing the dog several times per week, all my dreams cropped up stinkhorn. Those putrid mushrooms that I most detest because they look like dog dicks, sprouted out of Scruffles’ coat, appeared in salads and stir-fries I ate. Came out in the tap with the water.

  Years ago, when I toured the Kew Gardens mycology archive, the director opened one of Charles Darwin’s herbals and displayed a 150-year-old stinkhorn. He told me that Darwin’s daughter considered it pornographic. Cancer is Coney porno. I couldn’t translate these stinkhorn visions. I hoped the visions meant that Scruffles’ pain was transferring into me. Healing is exorcism, a withdrawal and transference of the unwanted. I wanted to be the medicine woman who could kill, neutralize, and dissipate my dog’s mutating cells. Step one was to physically remove the growth; step two was to escape the Coney.

  Two weeks after the procedure, Scruffles and I drove north to the foot of the mountain where Van Winkle passed out on ale. I called Lolly on cellular from the rock Rip might have napped on and explained a theory.

  “Tie some feathers in your hair,” I said. “Crow, eagle… anything but pigeon. The feathers will fortify you.”

  “You’re regressing,” Lolly said. “I haven’t heard these mystical hippie theories since you were a vegetarian ten years ago.”

  “Look,” I said. “Feathers can’t hurt. Put them on your dashboard if you can’t bear wearing them.”

  There’s a comical scene in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, when Peter Sellers shows up in a fringed le
ather jacket for his conservative brother’s tuxedo wedding. He’s covered in feathers, and the movie is one big happy ending from there.

  “We’re talking on cell phones,” Lolly said. “Feathers are retro.”

  “Is Rip Van Winkle too retro for you?” I asked.

  I considered chucking my phone into the stream running five feet over where Scruff was drinking. A woodpecker hacked at an elm tree. I’d have to email everyone for their numbers again, plus I couldn’t talk to Lolly. The golden handcuffs.

  “Your cell phone is probably giving you cancer right now,” Lolly said.

  “Luddite,” I said.

  “Aren’t you the Luddite, avoiding the city? Call me when you forgive civilization,” Lolly said. “I’ll be at the bar with my scotch on the rocks.”

  I didn’t lodge in a tee pee. I shacked up in a Catskills dive motel. A junky walked laps around the building, and whole families manned lawn chairs on the motel room porches. A pimp ran girls between his grass green sedan and his room. I had mushroom guides sprawled out on the bed, where Scruff and I watched M*A*S*H reruns.

  “Feeling okay?” I asked him, petting him beside me on the bed. Every time I looked at him my eyes went automatically to his shaved crotch, and I felt nasty. His six-inch stapled incision looked clean and was healing properly.

  Scruffles smiled and hung his tongue out. He was tired from hiking. I refilled his bowl of water and set it beside him.

  Next morning we headed out early. We didn’t see Rip as I’d hoped, but it was a breezy autumn day and planks crossed wet meadows to preserve plant life. Mushrooms sprouted on every dead tree trunk: oysters, maitake, sulfur shelf. Scruffles peed on rocks as we bushwhacked up a ravine. We shared turkey sandwiches again in that special hemlock grove.

  My cell phone sounded so out of place. West Coast: I answered.