“At first, she’s a baby,” Muriel said. “I can make a two-headed doll.”
“That sounds horrible, a two-headed baby,” said the man.
“You want a two-headed woman,” Muriel said slowly from her lone folding chair, turning her big head in his direction, “you got a former two-headed baby.”
When my friends the LoPrestis take a trip, Philip keeps a journal that he later copies and gives to people he knows, recording not private insecurities or arguments with Charlotte but discoveries of painters and architects, praiseworthy restaurants, hotels worth the money. He must like to imagine being asked for advice; so do I. I’m no journal keeper, and I began writing this narrative without knowing why, but as I proceed, the reader I think of wants a guidebook. A voice—maybe Philip’s, maybe my brother Stephen’s—asks, “What’s it like to live the way you do?”
“The way I do?”
“Heedlessly. Is it a choice, or is this the best you can do? Is it worth it?”
“Heedlessly? Is that how I live?”
The client I described to myself as Irritating Ellen, who couldn’t reject what nobody wanted, was in her late forties, with too many light brown curls on her shoulders and fluttery arms, accustomed to shrugs and hugs. Though she’d given me a key, trusting me instantly, she seemed able to leave her job at any hour to meet me. Ellen had grown up in a big house, all cupolas and porches, on East Rock Road. When her husband left her, she and her two children returned there to live with her parents. Now one parent had died and the other was in Florida, while Ellen and her kids lived on with their own possessions, her parents’, and everybody else’s. We had an appointment on a sunny morning in March—around the time of the first meeting about the play—but when I rang the doorbell, I heard no footsteps. It was the first day warm enough that waiting wasn’t uncomfortable, and Ellen’s old-fashioned street was pretty even in the dull season between snow and buds. Each ample, intricately trimmed house had its own variation: carved balusters, curved front steps, a widow’s walk. As I stood there, my mind went not to Ellen’s mess but to Gordon Skeetling’s, and I tried to think where I’d sit in that side room so he couldn’t see me through the wide glass doors. When Ellen still didn’t come, I let myself into her crowded foyer and big, crowded, dusty living room, planning what I might do in her absence, noting that in Ellen’s house windows were obscured with junk. I was about to find the kitchen and fix myself a cup of coffee when Ellen came toward me. Not every window in this house was blocked, and sun lit her solicitous face. She held something in her arms.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m here.”
I thought she carried a pile of old clothes, but it was a baby.
“You didn’t let somebody give you that!” I said. Her children were school age.
“Just for a few hours.” The baby, a tense creature with hard fists and a swirl of light hair, was soon screaming.
“Why didn’t you say no?” I said, as if my work with Ellen entitled me to candor. I don’t have children, and other people’s instigate too many feelings in me: a wish both to protect them and to shake off encroaching protection, and helplessness, and also a frightening wish to hurt. Apparently I am both the one who might be harmed, rescued, or stymied by good intentions and the one who’d do the hurting, the saving, the encroaching. Soon I was carrying this girl around, my arms itchy with conflict while her fingers clutched my hair. Later, I couldn’t remember why Ellen suddenly wanted to show me something she had to retrieve, kneeling, from a basket on the floor—or exactly when she handed me the child. “At least she doesn’t have two heads,” I said nervously, so then I had to explain.
“I did theater in college,” Ellen said.
“This may not qualify as theater.”
“Mostly I was a director,” she said. “Sometimes I acted. I wish I had time for it now.”
I might have said she’d have time if she didn’t let other people rule her life, but the one-headed baby was making too much noise. I didn’t want to prolong the conversation anyway, lest Ellen try to join our cast. If she did, I’d drop out, I thought. If Ellen was even slightly interested in our play, it must be too obliging. The baby’s sobs quieted as I held her.
“We can make lists,” I said. “Get paper.” I demonstrated surprising patience with other clients, watching myself in disbelief as their tedium just made me smile like a cartoon Buddha, or a stereotype of a cloistered nun. With Ellen, I was my cranky self.
She went for paper. As I waited, I noted that she or someone else had once woven baskets, or people had taken to giving her baskets. Tall hampers and wicker urns held dusty dried flowers or fabric scraps that would never make a quilt. She might have carried baskets of goodies to her grandmother through the wood: she had that look. When she returned, she stood in the dust motes under her high ceiling, holding paper and pen ready. Even scrap paper in this house had been donated: this was the stationery of an oil company.
I didn’t know what to say while holding a baby. When I pretended to sympathize with other clients’ acquisitiveness I was not pretending—though I wasn’t a gatherer myself—but I couldn’t seem to join Ellen in her acquiescence, even temporarily. The baby wouldn’t settle into my arms but stiffened and arched. She and Ellen were in cahoots, preferring discomfort. Ellen had reasons I was too bored to refute for refusing to take any single load to Goodwill. “I thought we’d just arrange it more efficiently,” she always said.
“Could I have a cup of coffee?” I asked now.
“Of course!” I followed her into the kitchen, a big room with old-fashioned appliances. I stood where the baby could see over my shoulder, out the window, and she calmed enough that I gingerly sat down. Ellen measured coffee into a coffeemaker that stood on a tiny open space at the corner of a cabinet whose surface was filled with stacks of bowls, vases, and carafes. Glass doors in cupboards revealed shelves crowded with china and glasses.
Ellen served me coffee in a mug in which magenta and blue glaze splashed over speckled gray horizontal ridges, and my mood shifting, I curved my fingers around it to feel the warmth. “Hold the baby well away from the mug,” Ellen said, and I looked at her, startled by authority in her voice. I never yearn for the objects I see when I work. I alternate between wanting my clients to keep their elaborate constructions of junk and wanting to destroy and banish their possessions any way at all, ignoring civic-minded strictures about recycling, toxic waste disposal, and charity, scoffing at the supposed obligation to avoid waste by providing simple good people in simple good places used tires to make sandals of, used paper to turn into new paper. At home, after a day of work, I consider throwing out everything I touch, and Pekko and I don’t have a lot of objects. But in Ellen’s kitchen, I liked the mug I drank from, and then I desired something else: a fat white pitcher, possibly Italian pottery. It was about the size of the baby, with painted yellow flowers. Next to the sink, it took up counter space. “Let’s start by getting rid of that pitcher,” I said.
“My cousin . . . ,” she began. “And I think it’s nice.”
“Everything’s nice, but let’s decimate this collection, for a start. Let’s put every tenth object in the garbage can.”
“You said you had ideas,” Ellen said.
“Oh, you hate everything here.”
Ellen stood and stepped backwards, leaning against her sink as if to insert herself between me and everything in the room. She stretched her arms out and put a protective hand on the yellow-and-white pitcher. Then the baby wriggled, and for a second it seemed she’d fall. I started, and she did slip through my grasp, but I caught her with my other hand. In the meantime, Ellen’s arms swept toward us, and the pitcher crashed to the floor as my client cried out in grief and anger. Its interior was red clay, with the potter’s coils still visible. Ellen took the baby and carried her upstairs, shaking her head when I offered to clean up the shards. “Next week,” she said as she left the room, her coffee untouched. Not “Never.”
The play began w
ith the pregnancy of the two-headed baby’s mother, who didn’t yet know about the two heads. The first time we tried making up a scene, I played the father. Feeling helpless, I stood in the middle of an open floor next to the young black woman, Chantal, who stared at me through rimless glasses. She had rolled up a sweater and stuffed it under her shirt. “Are you worried about your wife?” Katya prompted. She kept a tape recorder running.
So the father of the two-headed baby would be a worrier. “Did you sign up for childbirth preparation classes?” I asked my wife, remembering a friend’s account of this phenomenon.
“Shut up, I’m cooking!” she said. “Shut up! I’m dancing!” Chantal mimed cooking and dancing. She’d once been in an improvisation troupe. She had a quick way of moving, turning her head swiftly in response to what others said, so her glasses flashed.
“Did you ask the doctor if it’s all right to dance around like that?” I said, again after silence.
“Doctor, may I dance? May I eat? May I fool around with men?”
“Men?” I said. It was embarrassing. Why was I doing this?
The doctor sat on the floor, cross-legged, giggling. She was Denise, a Hispanic woman of about forty. Now she seemed to realize she had to talk. “None of that stuff. Certainly no sex,” she said as the doctor. “And don’t eat.”
“But I’m hungry,” said my wife. “I’m horny.”
The childbirth preparation teacher, who was Muriel Peck, organized two pregnant women and their husbands (everybody including Katya), and made the women lie on the floor and breathe deeply. After a while she stopped and said, “This isn’t a play.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Katya from the floor. “We’ll settle on a script later.”
I tried to be the husband. “My wife can’t lie on her back,” I said. “Her belly is too big.”
“I’m fine,” my wife contradicted me. “Leave me alone. I want to suffer.”
The other father—the Korean American kid, David—turned to me. “Are you glad your wife is pregnant? I’m scared.”
“I’m scared, too,” I said. “I’m scared the baby will die. I’m scared I’ll kill the baby.”
“How would you do that?”
“Oh, there are plenty of ways to kill a baby.”
In labor, Chantal kicked rapidly, then got up and ran around in circles. “In the improv troupe,” she said, “we looked for the large, surprising gesture.” Then she sat down on the floor and said, “I don’t want to be a mother! I can’t get this baby out because I don’t love it!”
“Oh, you’ll love it,” said the doctor. “But this is a difficult birth. I’d better do a cesarean.”
Chantal said, as herself, “Doctors call it a C-section.”
“A C-section.”
Katya stepped in as a nurse. “Here’s a knife!”
“Did you wash it?” said the doctor. I was surprised, and I laughed. I hadn’t expected Denise to surprise me.
With a swoop of the imaginary knife, the doctor slashed Chantal’s belly. She reached forward. “I know how they pull it out, because I had one,” she said. She grunted and held up an imaginary baby.
“Oh, my God,” the doctor shouted. “The baby has two heads!”
All of us except Chantal rushed around, clutching our heads. I was astonished to be doing this.
Chantal shouted, “It’s my fault!” and we stopped. “I slept with another man when I was pregnant. Each head looks like one of them.”
“Unfaithful?” I said. “How could you do that to me?”
“Well, I’m the one who slept with your wife,” David said. “But I didn’t make her pregnant. I’m Asian, and neither of these heads looks Asian.”
“It’s too soon to tell,” Denise the doctor said firmly. “Stop yelling, all of you. Nobody can live with two heads. Don’t look at the baby. She’s going to die. She has too much brain.”
Chantal had been lying on the floor, but now she sat up and said firmly, “Let me see my baby!” After the boisterousness, this was somewhat impressive. Obediently, as her husband I took an imaginary child from Denise and carried it toward my wife. “I love the baby,” she said, taking the child in her arms.
“Better not love the baby,” said the doctor.
“But I want to love the baby!”
“Give it a name,” said the doctor. “Name the baby before she dies.”
“I’ll name her TheaDora,” said Chantal. “That way, we don’t have to decide if she’s one person or two people. She’s Thea and Dora, or she’s TheaDora.”
Katya stopped being the nurse and withdrew to her place beside the tape recorder. “I’m the baby,” she said, and wailed. David joined in as the rest of the baby. This play was full of shouting.
Pekko’s back reveals more than his face. A thick man, he experiences feeling with his shoulders. He thinks his face conceals him, and maybe it does, but his back is less circumspect. Walking into the kitchen one evening, I saw his back first as he sat at the kitchen table, talking on the phone, and I guessed we wouldn’t be making love for a while. He was elsewhere and needed to be retrieved, but I don’t know how to do that. I’d come home tired and was in the bathtub when I heard him come in, greet Arthur, and then answer the phone. From the rise and fall of his voice, the pauses, I knew he was talking to my mother.
Pekko was the landlord of several apartment houses and one of the last SROs in New Haven—that’s a single-room-occupancy building, in which people with meager resources have a room with a hot plate and use a bathroom in the hall. At the time I’m recalling, he was having the hallway fixed up and painted, and uncharacteristically, he’d hired a contractor who was a former drug addict and who’d put together a company of ex-users. They were competent, but they wanted to be watched and praised as they worked. “I’m not a kindergarten teacher,” Pekko had been saying. He hates standing around. He’s incapable even of waiting while I finish playing solitaire on the computer (and he thinks playing solitaire is addictive behavior). Pekko looks like the king of spades, by the way.
Walking into the kitchen behind him, I sat down, half listening and looking over the mail, assuming Pekko would soon hand me the phone, but he didn’t. It had grown dark, and he hadn’t bothered to stand up and turn on the light.
“You buy these things ready-made,” Pekko was saying. “She doesn’t have to be an old world cabinetmaker.” At last he hung up.
I was too tired to talk to Roz, but I said, “She didn’t want to talk to me?”
“She called to ask my advice.”
“I gather, but usually that’s just an excuse.”
“Not this time.”
“What did she want?”
“She wants to hire Daphne to install kitchen cabinets.”
“But she already has kitchen cabinets,” I said. “Not that she cooks.”
“She doesn’t like them. Daphne claims what she’s really good at is carpentry. She says she took a job training course in carpentry for women.”
“Is that true?”
“I don’t know. Your mother seems to think I’m an expert on carpentry and an expert on Daphne.”
“She thinks you’re an expert in everything, but you like that. How did they get from raking leaves to carpentry this fast?”
“How should I know?”
“She had her in for coffee,” I said, picturing the two of them in the kitchen. “She was so happy with Daphne’s raking that she offered her a cup of coffee.” This image annoyed me, as if my mother was allowed to have coffee only with me, although I didn’t visit her often. “There were the old cabinets,” I continued. Then I said, “I wish she wouldn’t make friends with people like that.”
“Like what? There’s nothing wrong with Daphne.”
“Pekko, you’re obviously wary of Daphne. And she’s doing community service. Doesn’t that mean she committed a crime?” I stood up and turned on the light.
“I don’t know anything about it. We’re old friends,” said Pekko. “I ought to
fire those druggies and hire her to paint that staircase.”
“Did you sleep with her when she worked for you?” I said.
“I didn’t even know you then.”
“I don’t care.” But now he picked up the newspaper. So I went back to reading the catalog I’d glanced at before, and time passed, and the mood changed. I for one was too hungry to think about what my mother and Daphne did, or even what Daphne and Pekko did.
I was too hungry to think and too hungry to cook, too tired even to take on the minor responsibility of suggesting dinner out. I knew Pekko wanted me to take charge, and I thought he might know I wanted him to. So we continued to sit. This sort of impasse led to bad times in our dating days. We’d finally eat at ten o’clock and be so hungry we’d quarrel. Now, Arthur pressed his head onto my lap and under my hands, making me stroke his hard, narrow skull. Then he thrust his nose into the crotch of my pants. I rose to feed him and broke the tension in the room. Pekko stood too, slapped his thighs, and watched me feed the dog. “Basement Thai,” he said. The Thai restaurant we like best, where there’s usually room for us, is in a basement on Chapel Street.
“It’s Tuesday, so I have time,” I said.
“No radio.”
“Radio’s finished. No play.” Both were on Wednesdays.
But that made me think about the radio series, and I wanted to ask, “Was Daphne ever a prostitute?” Of course I wouldn’t get an actual answer.
“So what you’re saying,” said Pekko, “is that if you had something to do, you’d skip dinner with me and do it.”
“I’m hungry,” I said.
Why the fascination with prostitutes?” Gordon Skeetling asked a few days later, as we walked down Temple Street, where the sycamores weren’t green yet. He’d proposed lunch so he could explain what he wanted of me. “Not that you can’t develop your own ideas.” He had a way of whooshing aside objections that hadn’t yet been made, by claiming not to disagree with them. The objections were bold, so within a sentence or two he might make fair conversational progress on my behalf. Now he added, after “fascination with prostitutes,” “Not that there’s anything illegitimate about the subject of prostitution.”
Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman Page 4