by Leni Zumas
Please let it work this time.
She doesn’t move her pelvis the whole drive home. Lifts her toes carefully on the brake and accelerator, no thigh muscle. “Hell, you could go to the gym today if you wanted,” said Kalbfleisch after the first insemination, to underscore how much it didn’t matter what the biographer’s body did after a few minutes of lying still on the exam table; but the biographer’s body is going to stay as quiet as it can.
It has to work this time.
She will sit behind her desk in class without thigh movement or pelvic commotion of any kind; and the eggs will float in the tube waters unjarred, open, amenable; and one sperm-struck egg will welcome a single invading spermatozoon into itself, ready to meld and to split. From one cell, two. From two, four. From four, eight. An eight-celled blastocyst has a chance.
I spent eighteen months in my husband’s house before a storm sank his boat and him with it.
That in eighteen months I had not been gotten with child brought shame to my mother.
The red morn I left for Aberdeen, she said, “Go on, get that broken fisa away from us.”
THE DAUGHTER
Her parents aren’t religious. Their reasons are pragmatic, they say. Logical. So many people want to adopt. Why should people be deprived of babies they will nourish, cherish, rain love down upon, just because other people don’t feel like being pregnant for a few months? When the Personhood Amendment passed, her father said it was about time the country came to its senses. He had no truck with the wackos who bombed clinics, and he thought it was going a little too far to make women pay for funerals for their miscarried fetuses; but, he said, there was a loving home out there for every baby who came into the world.
Her eighth-grade social-studies class held a mock debate on abortion. The daughter prepared bullet points for the pro-choice team. Her father proofread her work, as usual; but instead of his usual “This is top-notch!” he sat down beside her, rested a hand on her shoulder, and said he was concerned about the implications of her argument.
“What if your bio mother had chosen to terminate?”
“Well, she didn’t, but other people should be able to.”
“Think of all the happy adopted families that wouldn’t exist.”
“But Dad, a lot of women would still give their babies up for adoption.”
“But what about the women who didn’t?”
“Why can’t everyone just decide for themselves?”
“When someone decides to murder a fellow human with a gun, we put them in jail, don’t we?”
“Not if they’re a cop.”
“Think of all the families waiting for a child. Think of me and your mom, how long we waited.”
“But—”
“An embryo is a living being.”
“So is a dandelion.”
“Well, I can’t imagine the world without you, pigeon, and neither can your mother.”
She doesn’t want them to imagine the world without her.
Ash offers a ride home, but the daughter says no, her dad is coming; retirement means he’s so bored he can pick her up anytime. It is cold, dim skied, the grass on the soccer field stiff and silver. The team has an away game today. She hasn’t told Ephraim. What if he’s like “Is it even mine?” Or “You made your bed; now lie in it.” They passed each other last week in the cafeteria, and Ephraim in the old-school hat she once adored said, “Hey,” and she said, “Hey, how are you?” but he kept moving and her non-rhetorical question was rhetorical. He was probably on his way to put his hand up Nouri Withers’s shirt.
Her bio mother could have been young too. She could have been headed to medical school, then to a neurochemistry doctorate program, then to her own research lab in California. (What if she’s close, at this very moment, to finding a cure for paralysis?) Keeping the daughter would have meant forfeiting her med-school scholarship.
She doesn’t want the kid to wonder why he wasn’t kept.
And she doesn’t want to wonder what happened to him. Was he given to parents like hers or parents who scream and are bigots and don’t take him to the doctor enough?
She jumps at the tsunami siren—will never get used to that nerve-scraping howl.
“Only a test, my love,” says Dad.
She turns up the car radio.
“How was school?”
“Fine.”
“Finished the academy application yet?”
“Almost.”
“Mom’s making fish tacos.”
She swallows down a little spurt of vomit. “Awesome.”
“Earlier today,” goes the radio, “twelve sperm whales ran aground a half mile south of Gunakadeit Point. The cause of the beaching has not yet been determined.”
“Oh my God.” She turns it up.
“Eleven of the whales are dead, says the sheriff’s office, though it remains unclear—”
“Remember the stranding of ’79?” says Dad. “Forty-one sperms on the beach near Florence. My pop drove out to photograph them up close. He said they made—”
“Little clicking sounds while they died.” She knows the gruesome details, because Dad likes to repeat them. He’s told her many times that a whale can be killed by the pressure of its own flesh. Out of water, the animal’s bulk is too heavy for its rib cage—the ribs break; the internal organs are crushed. And heat hurts whales. Greenpeacers brought in bedsheets to soak with seawater and throw over them; it didn’t help.
But that was 1979. Hasn’t somebody by now figured out a way to get them back into the ocean?
“Can we go down there, Dad?”
“They don’t need the public meddling in—”
“But one is still alive.”
“Are you going to roll it back down to the water yourself? Don’t turn this into a morbid preoccupation.”
“The heart of a sperm whale weighs almost three hundred pounds.”
“How do—?”
“Me and Yasmine once made a list of how much different animals’ hearts weigh.”
“Yasmine and I.” Dad gets tense at the mention of her. “Don’t worry too much about the whales, okay, pigeon? Otherwise those lovely eyebrows might get tangled up in one another, never to untangle.”
“They’re not lovely, they’re thick.”
“Which is what makes them lovely!”
“You’re not objective.” She wants a cigarette but will content herself with a licorice nib, for now.
Ash isn’t into the idea. So tired, etc. But she is convincible. The daughter crawls out her bedroom window onto the roof, rappels down the trellis, stands still a full minute in the porch shadow in case any noises were heard. A block away is the blue mailbox, their meeting place, where she smokes and waits.
Yasmine once asked her why white people are so obsessed with saving whales.
The beach is crowded with people shouting, dogs yapping, cameras popping, rain raining. A TV crew has aimed screeching lights on the whales, a row of twelve, their pewter-gray hides slashed with chalky white. They look like stone buses. The one at the very end is slowly lifting and dropping its flukes. Each time a fluke hits the sand, the daughter’s thighs tremble.
Humans pose for photos in front of the dead.
A guy has clambered onto a massive gray tail. “Snap me!” he shouts. “Snap me!”
“Get the hell down.”
“Move back, folks!”
“Did the dead man’s fingers have anything to do with this?”
“Who do I talk to about reserving some of the teeth? For scrimshaw?”
“Sir, get down from there immediately.”
“Were they poisoned by the seaweed?”
“Move aside, move aside.”
A woman with gloves and a long knife—a scientist?—squats by the first whale in the row. Will she carve off a slice of blubber to test for disease? A madness, maybe, has infected their spines and driven them onto land, all twelve fevered with death wish. Maybe the infection can pass to humans. Newville will be quarantined
.
“You need to leave, girls,” says a cop not much older than they are. “We’re clearing the beach. And put out that cigarette.”
“Why isn’t anyone putting them back in the water?” says the daughter.
The cop peers at her. “A, they’re dead. B, you realize how much these goddamn things weigh?”
“But one of them isn’t dead!”
“Go home, okay?”
She and Ash walk past the enormous bodies—one spray-painted with an orange question mark, another sprayed with OUR FAULT!—to the last breathing whale. Its flukes lie still. Blood pools on the sand by its head. The mouth is open, drenched red. The beaky lower jaw, illogically small for such a huge skull, is sown with teeth. The daughter touches one: a banana of bone.
Has moved amid this world’s foundations.
“Now your hand is infected,” says Ash.
She wipes it on her jeans.
The whale’s eye, wedged between wrinkled lips of skin, is open and black and quivering. Hast seen enough to split the planets. She kneels down. Leans her cheek against the gray body. Dry, scarred leather.
“It’ll be okay,” she says.
Can’t hear any clicking sounds.
Where are the machines? The cables, the levers?
A whale is a house in the ocean.
A womb for a person.
Whale song is heard from sea floor to star, from Icy Strait Point to Península Valdés.
“Ash, give me your hoodie.”
“I’m cold.”
“Give it.” The daughter runs down to the waves and douses Ash’s hoodie and her own. Runs back to throw them, dripping, onto the whale’s head. The only song she can think of is “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” She’s in the midst of chanting “Someone’s in the kitchen with Dinah” when she hears a gunshot.
Then screams.
Everyone is clustering around something up the beach.
It wasn’t a gun; it was a whale. Exploding. The gray belly, split wide, leaks slimy bundles of pink intestine and purple organ meat. Fat shreds of flesh flap in the wind. “Get it off! Get it off!” yells a boy, pawing at ropes of innards stuck to his chest.
And the stink—God!—rancid blast of farts, fish rot, and sewage. The daughter pulls her shirt up over her mouth.
Black-red liquid foams at her feet.
The scientist is explaining to the cop that she’d been trying to collect samples of subcutaneous adipose tissue and visceral adipose tissue. When she sank her knife into the whale, it burst.
“Methane gas builds up in the carcass,” she says. “This one must have been the first to die, possibly days ago. If he was their leader and died at sea, and his body floated to shore, the other whales would have followed. They’re loyal to a fault.”
“Ma’am, you can’t just go around chopping up corpses,” says the cop.
“This magnificent creature isn’t anyone’s property,” says the scientist. “I intend to analyze the tissue and figure out how they ended up here.”
“What lab are you with, ma’am? My captain said the OIMB guys weren’t going to be here until—”
“I’m an independent researcher. But this”—she holds up two clear plastic bags of red flesh—“I know what to do with.”
The daughter heads back to her whale.
His eye is no longer moving.
Thou saw’st the murdered mate when tossed by pirates from the midnight deck.
She presses the eye with her fingertip.
It is clammy and springy, like a hard-cooked egg.
How to make tvøst og spik:
1. Prepare pilot-whale meat in one of the following ways: boil fresh, fry fresh, store in dry salt, store in brine, or cut into long strips (grindalikkja) and hang to dry.
2. Prepare pilot-whale blubber by boiling, salting, or drying. (Do not fry.)
3. Serve meat and blubber together with boiled and salted potatoes. In some Faroese homes, dried fish is also included on the tvøst og spik plate.
THE MENDER
Cotter reports that Lola fell down the stairs. Was in a little coma. Better now.
New clients are supposed to leave a note at the P.O., but Lola just showed up one day, drenched. “I heard of you from my friend.” The mender brought her inside, gave her a towel, inspected the red smear on her forearm.
“Is it going to scar?”
“Yes,” said the mender. She pressed fresh-bruised leaves of houseleek to the damaged skin, waited, blinked at Lola’s breasts, those plump puddings, then wrapped the arm with a poultice of leek juice and lard. “How did this happen?”
“It was stupid,” said Lola. “I was making dinner and I caught my arm on a hot pan.”
Her husband also snapped her finger bone. Left a six-colored bruise on her jaw.
Two more warts on Clementine’s fig.
Clementine says, “This is kind of extremely humiliating?”
“Just a body doing what it does.”
“But they’re so nasty.”
“Lots of people get them,” says the mender, and she holds a compress of crushed, wet lupine seeds against the vulva. White lupine is also good for bringing down blood—a missed period, a uterus unhappily full—and for calling worms to the surface of the skin. Summers, the mender burns its seeds in stone cups to fend off gnats.
“Stick out your tongue.”
Scalloped at the edges, as usual.
“Still eating pizza?”
Clementine cutely scrunches her mouth. “Not that much.”
“Stop all dairy. Too much dampness in you.”
“Hey, would you ever consider waxing your eyebrows?”
“Why?”
“I mean, not that you need to, because big brows are making a comeback, but a friend of mine at Snippity Doo Dah does great sugar waxes, if you ever—”
“No,” says the mender. If she has such a friend, why not deal with the two-inch hair dangling from that mole? It is a misfit hair, discordant with her bleached curls and fake nails.
The mender spoons a mash of mugwort and ginger into Clementine’s belly button; lays a fresh slice of ginger across the mash; holds a burning moxa stick over the ginger until she complains of the heat; and tapes the belly button with two Band-Aids to keep the mash in place for a day at least, better two.
Clementine pulls her shirt down. “Thanks for all your help, Gin.” Takes small white boxes from her backpack. “Hope you like fried rice and garlic shrimp. Don’t worry, it’s not customer leftovers—”
“I’m not worried,” says the mender.
Or hungry enough for Chinese food. Once Clementine is gone she drizzles half a slice of brown bread with sesame oil. Every Thursday Cotter leaves a loaf he baked himself, wrapped in a towel, on her cabin step.
Some supermarket breads are made with human hair dissolved in acid, part of a dough conditioner that accelerates industrial processing. The mender does not eat bread from the supermarket, and she has her own supply of hair, which instead of dissolving in acid she grinds into her mixtures. She keeps head hair in a separate box from pubic, as they’re good for different things—pubic has more iron, head more magnesium and selenium. The mender’s supply came from one person and is dwindling.
Long red head hairs can be used in mixtures. Brown pubic hairs can be used. But there are some hairs that can’t be. The stray whiskers under the arms; the little breath of brown on the upper lip. Those hairs are iced onto the skin of the body in the freezer.
What does the girl’s hair taste like, her shining flat dark hair? The girl doesn’t slick or shellac it. Long enough to get caught in her satchel strap, the mender noticed when she saw her come through the blue school doors, the girl had to tug and rearrange, she was annoyed for a second, a flip of heat on her cheeks, then she forgot her hair, the mender saw, because she was looking for someone, but the someone wasn’t among the burst of kids. The girl kept walking, alone, and the mender almost followed.
The brown bread is dry, because tod
ay is Tuesday.
Aunt Temple died on a Tuesday, eight winters ago.
Before Temple, when her mother forgot to buy food, the mender cooked ketchup, mustard, and mayonnaise into a hot crust.
Before Temple, she put herself to bed.
Before Temple, she took a lot of aspirin, because regular doctors were too expensive and the ER staff knew the mender’s mother only too well.
Before Temple, she had never been to the movies.
She had those wild red braids and wore billowy purple pants and wasn’t married. She laughed in a shrieky way. Her shop was named after a witch who lived in Massachusetts three centuries ago. The people of Newville called Temple a witch too, but they didn’t mean it the same way they mean it about the mender.
When she was young, Goody Hallett loved a pirate who forsook her. Legend has it she killed their baby on the night of its birth, suffocated the thing in a barn, then was imprisoned and lost her mind and lured ships to crash on the Cape Cod rocks. In truth, said Temple, she gave the child in secret to a farmer’s wife. The wife kept a diary, which preserved the fact.
The baby is the mender’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather.
The innermost chamber of her left ear notices powderpost beetles scratching in the roof joists, laying their eggs in the seams of the wood.
“Never forget,” said Temple, “that you descend from Black Sam Bellamy and Maria Hallett.”
But the mender would never tie a lantern to a whale. Like sailors and fishermen, she hates to swim.
The red morn betoken’d wreck to the seaman and sorrow to the shepherds, woe unto the birds, gusts and foul flaws to herdmen and to herds.
THE WIFE
Screaming screaming screaming. No stop no stop no stop.
“TURN!”
John wants her to play the record again; she will not do it. The whole morning has been records: yell scream yell scream, throw self on floor, starfish arms and legs “TURN!” no stop no.