Baby Geisha

by Trinie Dalton

  But I am more thrilled about the prospects of having family. I call my brother after a tenth read.

  “Guess who emailed me?” Like he could. “Our cousin,” I say. “Remember all those cousins we have?”

  We struggle to recall them. One caused a family feud at the funeral because he got my dad’s pick-up truck, the only possession of monetary value. I got my dad’s war medals, which I somehow managed to lose. My brother remembers one of our cousins smelling like salami.

  “Should I try to see her?” I ask him, about the cousin who wrote.

  “Sure, Annette,” he says.

  The only date I recall with my aunt, this cousin’s mom, was to the Rosicrucian church to see mummies. Over a hotdog lunch afterwards, we got a lesson in Egyptian afterlife. We don’t care how eccentric they are or were; it’s lucky we have a family. At this point, I’d pay top dollar for any memories of my dad.

  “I’ll make a lunch date,” I say before we hang up.

  Then, there was my embarrassment at dad’s house. He didn’t have duck or golf paintings, he had one watercolor of the World War I flying ace, Red Baron. Instead of a pool table room full of beer signs, lapis lazuli globes, shoehorns, and other Father’s Day crap, he had a ramshackle room with one fraying orange armchair and a homemade plywood bookshelf. For washing hands, he used gritty Lava soap instead of musky man-scented mall soaps like Sandalwood or Spice. Rather than the preppy upper-class tortoiseshell and brass brushes my friends’ dads used to comb their hair, he had the kind of plastic comb you buy at the gas station—the type called combbrush with a flat-toothed surface and a three-fingered slot on top for maximum control. I pleaded with him to get a real mirror in the bathroom. He said all we needed was a 3x4 emergency mirror, the tinny metal kind you take camping. I was a teenage girl. My girlfriends had track-lit three-angle mirrored vanities to primp in. I wasn’t that picky, I just wanted a mirror.

  One day, I learned why my dad hated mirrors. Dad was in the bathroom, finishing his shower, and I was in the living room when I heard his scream-grunt.

  “Hunnnhh, hunnh!” Then the bathroom door slammed open. The apartment was dinky, and I was already at that bathroom’s door. Little did my dad know that I was now prepared to drive him to the hospital if necessary. I’d practiced driving illegally and was well versed in stick shifting by age thirteen, from having given older friends sober rides home. I was ready to yank that skinny canvas cot I hated sleeping on right out of the bedroom, to drag Dad, unconscious, out to the car if need be. I would be his ambulance.

  “Dad!” I said, putting my hand on his shoulder. “What happened?”

  He stood there, silent, pale, still groping the little mirror. His beard stubble made him look deranged.

  “Bad daydream,” he said, inhaling deeply. He set the hand-held mirror down on the sink’s edge, and walked out of the bathroom into the bedroom to lie down. I followed him into bed.

  “What was it about?” I asked.

  “The war,” he said.

  I didn’t press him, and instead went into the kitchen to bring him back some water. He had seen something terrible in that mirror. From then on, I didn’t pester him to install one.

  A few years ago I found a manila envelope of papers I kept, containing letters and notes he wrote, his handwriting samples. He had angular writing, like an architect’s: neat, slanting forward to the right, penmanship marked with speed and purpose. I know that folder of his papers intimately, but I had never seen this poem of his in there. How and when had it been slipped in? I read it, again and again, trying to remember when he gave it to me, and if he really wrote it. Though his printing is proof of authorship, I have difficulty reconciling the poem’s content with that person I loved.

  No one escapes death

  Hoped and believed in the world beyond death

  Try to change the facts

  Why fear death?

  In order to live one must nearly die

  Try to communicate with the dead

  Life includes death

  The Lord of Misfortune

  Beyond the threshold of our ordinary experience

  Cataclysmic journey from birth to death

  Old terrors mingle with old truths

  Death rides a Pale Horse

  Ecstatic convulsions

  Smell out the demon with snakes for feet

  Sudden death from sheer terror is not unknown

  He feigns to abstain from death

  Exquisite torments

  The taint of diabolical possession

  Was it Death he saw in that tin mirror? My dad died two years later.

  Beyond the cheese, the government-issued Salisbury steaks tasted a little bit sweeter than dog food, like Alpo mixed with sugar and slapped into patties. Smell some Alpo and you’ll know how it tasted—like horse and cow scraped off the floor of a meat-packing plant after men have stomped in it. The steaks came in slender olive-green boxes that contained sealed baggies with meat encased in a jellied aspic sauce. The box had SALISBURY STEAK in the same lettering as the cheese. The sauce may have had tomatoes in it, but they were hard to detect due to its uniform russet color. You could eat the steak or poo it out, and it would look pretty much the same except for having been transformed into a log. Poo has that intestinal flavor as well—I’ve never tried it, but the smell tells you. It’s the smell that goes, I am not only unfit for human consumption, I am unfit for anything in the animal kingdom. This is food that only microbes should be eating.

  My dad reserved the “poo steaks” for fishing trips to Lake Isabella. This summer trip, the lakeshore was clouded with mosquitoes. We were in the bush—canvas army tent, rations boiling in the plastic baggies over the fire, lantern burning white gas, and our dad slathering us with insect repellent. My brother thought this way of living would aid him if he ever got stranded in the jungle. He even got his pocket knife out and carved X’s into his bug bites, then sucked out the blood, like our father had taught him. It was all very Vietnam—like a POW had taken his children into hiding and was briefing us on stratagems. I wondered if my dad had ever been tortured, had his wrists tied down and bamboo slivers pushed under his fingernails. Had he ever been forced to eat rats? No, but he’d told me once how he’d taken his camera on a photo shoot of severed Viet Cong heads, and he’d showed me a picture of an old lady who’d had her eyes poked out by soldiers. Not by anyone he knew, but he’d felt compelled to commemorate her.

  On the first night of this camping trip, Dad woke us up in our tent, shouting, “I’ll see you in hell!” The next morning, feeling guilty, he let my brother and I paddle all over the lake while he picked at his teeth with toothpicks on the lakeshore, fishing for catfish. In our canoe, I told my brother that our dad was a Pirate of War—a different kind of POW.

  I ate the steak that night because I was starving. I’d been rowing all day. My dad pulled the sack of meat out of the fire with the point of his rosewood-handled hunting knife and slit open the plastic, plopping the slop into my mess kit pan. I unfolded my aluminum fork and bravely dove in. I couldn’t bear to chew my bites; I just placed them as far back in my throat as possible and swallowed.

  My girlfriends back home were probably at some fancy steak house, while their parents sipped martinis and flashed their jewelry. Whenever I ate with these families and saved my meat to take home in a doggy bag, glances shot back and forth between the parents. Does she have enough to eat at home? I can’t wrap my mind around people who are embarrassed to take good food home. What a paltry thing to be embarrassed about. I had different food embarrassments. This camp steak, for example. It tasted grainy, like it had been stored in the attic with the wartime memorabilia and the musty furniture. My dad must have been saving these rations since he was released from duty in 1974.

  “So, did you meet the cousin?” my brother asked after I returned from the road trip I took to meet the cousin.

  “No,” I said. “I just can’t handle it. The whole food thing…”

  �
�Food thing?” he asked.

  “The lunch idea was too much,” I said.

  “Why didn’t you meet her for a walk in the park, then?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what to talk about,” I said.

  “Kids, careers,” he said.

  “You’re welcome to,” I said. “I can’t do it yet.”

  My brother hung up, baffled. But as of today, he hasn’t gone to meet our cousin either.

  I went to fix myself a sandwich in the kitchen. Birds tweeted out the window, teetering on the branches of a guava tree. They chipped their beaks at the budding fruits to get at ripening tidbits. Birds don’t need to wait for fruits’ full sweetness; they savor every stage. My PB&J sandwich did the job. Will I ever take an interest in food preparation? I’m a terrible cook. I eat to survive, ever since my dad served me those gnarly Salisbury Steak rations. Choke it down and move on. I miss my dad, and this petty remembrance of him doesn’t make me proud.

  Don’t eat government-issued foods unless you are a prisoner of war. Don’t eat Velveeta; use it for fishbait. Don’t eat boxed meat. These foods are last resorts if you’re out of grocery money or trapped in earthquake rubble. Eating sick things when it’s not necessary is like watching people agonize over gunshot wounds. I guess this diet was gratifying for a soldier who wanted to reminisce, but it was boring and confusing for his offspring. Re-hashing desperate times doesn’t compute with children who haven’t had desperate times.

  War pirates like my father make sure their kids know they have it easy, but not in the conventional way. They shell-shock the young with the grotesque. I was taught to be grateful for the war foods because my dad lived on them for two years straight. I wouldn’t insult his patriotism. I was glad I had a dad who weathered that war to feed me. But will I always be a dog eating kibble?

  SHRUB OF EMOTION

  I used to be a dolphin trainer, and drove to work in a black swimsuit and flip-flops. My office was a bench next to the pool. I sported a clipboard and waterproof work supplies. The dolphins could fetch, jump through hoops, score goals in water polo, and were advanced synchronized swimmers. With a whistle and some hand signals, I could tell them to circle the perimeter of their pool, pick up a disc and chuck it to me like a Frisbee, then come over for mackerel. Dolphins can handle a string of up to twenty commands.

  Getting to know porpoises will convince any skeptic that animals can talk. That’s why it didn’t seem far-fetched to me when this sprout I germinated began to make noise. I just brought it into a quiet corner of the house so its sounds would bounce off the walls and be magnified.

  My weed’s first word was water. It took me a week to figure out what she was saying. It sounded like a two-syllable high-pitched hum: mra mur. It could have been a fly talking. Since then her voice has deepened. By the time she was a month old, she could say in elfin intonation, Get these gnats off me.

  I took my leafy friend along to my new home because this is no ordinary plant. Sure, I will smoke her when she reaches maturity, but in the meantime she has been teaching me what it means to be herbaceous. I see her wilt with fatigue or perk up when misted. I nicknamed her The Shrub of Emotion.

  Since when did it take hours for my bush to form a sentence? Maybe it was because we were on the airplane, and my potted friend disliked cabin pressure. Maybe she was shy. For a female bush, she is easily intimidated. Someone gave me a look from across the aisle. For a minute, I didn’t know why.

  “Ohh. They think I’m talking to myself,” I said. My weed was making me look bad.

  It was like this for the duration of the flight. I kept her in a duffle bag under my seat, so only her leaves peeked out. Don’t ask me how I weaseled my way through customs.

  My shrub and I escaped the airport and taxied two hours to our new rural Swiss abode. She was back to her chatty self after requesting an extra dose of fertilizer. Put me in the window sill, she said, that artificial light was torture.

  My emotional shrub forms sentences by bending her stems and buds into a series of squeaks, wheezes, and bursts of air. She sounds like a child mimicking a choo choo train. I can hear her plainly now, being well attuned to her needs, but I might offer you an ear trumpet to magnify her words until they become recognizably audible. As with any new language, her creaks and whispers are foreign jumble until you learn the words. It’s a mistake for humans to personify plants, but it’s also a mistake to assume plants don’t try to communicate with us.

  Translated to English, this town is called Milk of the Wise Man. This rented farmhouse in the Alps is clean and sparse. Its windows crank open and closed, and exposed wooden beams line the ceiling. The bathtub used to be a trough—hopefully no livestock had used it as their hot tub. I bathed and put on a nightgown, even though it’s still light out. It’s tweaky how the sun doesn’t set until midnight. This residency will be a challenge. A neighbor just dropped off a strudel.

  Goats are roaming through my yard. I’m here on a grant to study how alpine flora and fauna feel about living above the tree line. Do rams enjoy it when their horns ice up? Is living on the side of a cliff satisfying? Do ferns like having their brackens pelted by hailstones? I have lists of questions, and a trunk full of equipment to record and transcribe my wildlife interviews. My grant application was entitled: Middleman. My main duty, as I see it, is to ease negotiations between the plant and animal kingdoms.

  It all started with a choking Sinaloan donkey. My boyfriend at the time and I stopped to help it. We were in a dusty marketplace, traveling in a border town below the Rio Grande. There were donkeys all over, standing idly, packed with heavy loads. This donkey’s owner yelled for help as his donkey coughed something up. I wasn’t dying to put my fingers down that animal’s throat.

  When I finally grabbed a stick and inserted it into the donkey’s mouth as my boyfriend, Francis, held its jaws open, a baggie full of seeds fell out. The donkey gasped for air and we gave it some water. People clapped and the owner—not the donkey—yee-hawed. No one wanted to touch the seed pouch, so I snatched it up, rinsed it off, and pocketed it.

  “Yuck,” Francis said. He was wearing walking shorts and rope sandals, so with his big beard he looked like a saint.

  “See how they’re bundled?” I asked. “Someone was smuggling them.”

  “Drugs,” Francis said. He always restated the obvious. Sometimes I admired this, but this time it was annoying.

  These Donkey Seeds reminded me of small jumping beans. Would they grow donkeys?

  Francis and I were taking a trip to forget that we were sick of each other. When we met, I loved his gentle demeanor and simple approach to complicated topics, like love. “I love you,” he’d say. “That’s all that matters.” He wasn’t sidetracked by excess psychological baggage. He never doubted my intentions, for example. But his idealistic naïvete irked me. I felt like hurting him. When it started affecting our sex life, I decided it was time for a vacation.

  To my mind, these seeds added a lot of excitement to an otherwise dull trip. I brought the seeds home with me, in hopes that they’d continue to work their mojo on our life together, which needed spicing up.

  I snuck the seeds across the border in my bra, and then germinated them in wet paper towels. Day by day, I’d enter the kitchen and find another sprout dead. But my Shrub of Emotion was thriving. By the time I transferred her into soil, she told me that if I harvested her in a year, I could smoke her for a pleasant high. Francis the Skeptic came over to see her.

  “I don’t hear her talking, if it’s a her,” he said.

  “She only talks at night, and it is a her because her hairs are crossed,” I told him. (If the hairs point straight out, you’ve got a boy, and if they make an X, it’s a girl.)

  “I think you already smoked her,” he said.

  “Stoners can’t train dolphins,” I said. “But this is an exception. If a plant tells me to smoke it, I’d be dumb not to. It’s my scientific obligation.”

  “You’re spending too much time with d
olphins,” he said.

  “They’re the only other animal besides the bonobo that has sex for pleasure,” I said.

  “If you’d rather have sex with a dolphin than with me, go right ahead,” he said.

  I was shocked that he stood up for himself. It made me like him more. For a split second, I thought that I’d made a mistake. He was a nice guy, the solid down-to-earth type. But that was the problem. You can re-evaluate somebody on the spot, but usually your previous assessments are correct. Someone can be wonderful and still not be right for you.

  We don’t keep in touch. I was sad, but the plant had already replaced him, in a way. I couldn’t wait to roll up a fatty and taste her.

  A few days after my split with Francis, Mike (the dolphin) tried to attack me underwater again, so I resigned. It was the fifth time this had happened, and each time my supervisor, Ron, said it was natural, even good, a sign that Mike accepted me as a true mate. Ron is a twirp; he probably likes getting accosted by dolphins. But I don’t like being violently pumped from behind by a large rubbery creature. It’s discomfiting and painful.

  Ron offered me a sabbatical and recommended me for this grant. I packed my clothes and bought a ticket to Switzerland.

  So here I am in this Swiss chalet. European life has its advantages. Each morning I eat cheese and bread, and feed Shrubbie with compost from a nearby turkey farm. Women hang clothes on twine clotheslines, and kids carry water buckets. Cows moo constantly, I guess because they’re happy it’s summer. The other day, I saw a man in lederhosen pulling a wagon full of chickens. Everyone here drinks beer and plays the accordion. There’s a street festival dedicated exclusively to white asparagus. What century am I in? I’ve been thinking more about schnitzel than this science project.