“C’est facile, Bébé. We will chop off ze legs.”
Cayenne frowned. “Don’t tease her,” she said. “He’s just kidding, Baby.”
Guy whinnied though his nose. He was smoking a joint, which was all he ever had for breakfast. Baby ate dry Froot Loops from a bowl because Cayenne had forgotten the milk.
“Oh, lady! Comme tu est bête,” Guy said, taking a toke so that the words came out strangled. “Not ze legs of Bébé. Ze legs of ze bed.”
But Cayenne didn’t get it. Guy rolled his eyes and exhaled. “I will cut a few inches from ze legs of ze bed,” he explained through the smoke. “So we will gain in length what we lose in height.”
Born in New Haven, Connecticut, in 1956, RUTH OZEKI began her career in the arts as a set designer for low-budget horror films, and later swapped severed limbs and exploding heads for the more subtle horrors of Japanese television production. She has made several award-winning independent films, including Halving the Bones and Body of Correspondence. Her first novel, My Year of Meats, evokes the darkly comic chaos of commercial meat and media production. Her second novel, All Over Creation, is about potatoes.
Guy had been in engineering school until he did too many psyche delics and dropped out, sometime back in the sixties. He was older than Cayenne. He was not Baby’s father, but she liked him. She liked the way he pronounced her name. Bébé. His name was pronounced Gee because he was Quebecois.
Baby’s bed was just a mattress on a sheet of plywood, supported with two-by-fours that Guy had nailed together after she’d seen the rat on the floor. He had drilled holes into the plywood, “So it can breeze,” he said. They were living off his unemployment checks while Cayenne worked on her romance novel. It was going to make them a lot of money, Cayenne said, and Baby believed her. Cayenne didn’t know about engineering, but she knew about romance. She’d named herself for a pepper, after all. It would look good on the jacket of her book—no last name, just Cayenne, in big, raised gold letters. They’d been living with a guitar player in El Paso, and everything was very romantic—muy caliente—until it wasn’t anymore, so they moved on.
“You don’t have to take that shit,” Cayenne said, gripping Baby’s wrist. “Remember, you don’t have to take it lying down.” She pushed Baby into the front of the Chevette and slammed the door, then she went back for their stuff. Baby watched through the car window as Cayenne humped the broken suitcase across the yard. Her long India-print skirt dragged in the dust and tangled around her ankles. One of the suitcase latches came undone, spilling some of the contents—a torn shawl, a platform sandal. For a moment Cayenne looked like she was going to cry, but she picked up the sandal and threw it at the car, instead.
The skin on Baby’s arm hurt. There were red marks like a rope burn and a smear of blood from the cut on Cayenne’s knuckle. Baby licked her thumb and rubbed away the blood, then she spread the road atlas across her bare knees. The cover was sticky from spilled Coca-Cola. She fingered the tattered pages.
The car slumped as Cayenne got in. Baby opened to the map of the whole United States and waited, but Cayenne just sat there, frozen, clutching the steering wheel and staring straight ahead. Her hand was still bleeding. There was a bruise below her eye.
Baby traced the nation’s veins, its blue and red arteries, with a dirty finger. “Where are we going, anyway?” she asked, finally.
Cayenne sighed, let her forehead drop to the wheel. “I’m sick of the whole damn country,” she muttered. They sat there for a while longer. Suddenly she sat up. “Hey!” she said. “Canada! What do you think?” She turned the key in the ignition and gunned the engine. “Buckle up, Baby. We’re going straight to the top!”
When they first moved in with Guy, into the little wooden house, it was exceedingly romantic. “Oh, Baby,” Cayenne whispered. “What do you think? Fuck America, right? Canada is awesome!”
She gripped Baby’s hand and pulled her up the narrow stairs, opening every door. The floor creaked and the lintels were crooked. It used to be the carriage house, built behind the main house where the Chinese landlord lived. Baby’s window looked out the back, down into the wide alley that the carriages once used. Now it was mostly delivery trucks and garbage trucks and Dumpsters.
Cayenne gazed out past the dirty rooftops, splattered with seagull shit, to the ragged, snowcapped ridge just visible beyond. “The vast north!” She sighed. “Can’t you just feel it? Look at those mountains! We got room to breathe here, Baby.”
Her eyes were like hot stars on Baby’s horizon.
Baby remembered the stars.
“It’s all about experience,” Cayenne said, as she drove the battered Chevette through the star-filled desert night. “Real life experience. A writer needs that, don’t you think?”
Baby nodded.
“I’ve got it figured out, see? The heroine is from Texas. From El Paso. Maybe she’s the daughter of a rich oilman, who falls in love with a musician . . . What do you think?”
Baby turned to face her mother, scrunching down in the seat and stretching out her legs so that her feet were in Cayenne’s lap. The window knob dug into her backbone. “Is she beautiful?”
“Of course,” Cayenne said. “Is your door locked?”
Baby twisted and punched down the button. “How beautiful?”
“Extremely beautiful. The most beautiful girl in all of Texas. She’s got flaming red curls and a temper to match. Like you, Baby. She gets her looks from her mother.”
Cayenne’s profile was the only thing that stayed the same—her face, encircled by the moon and the stars, framed against a landscape and blurred by speed.
“The musician guy . . . is he a guitar player?”
“Hmm,” Cayenne said, tilting her head. “That’s a good idea. Do you think he should be?”
“Yeah,” Baby said. “A guitar player creep.”
Cayenne glanced over at Baby. “You glad we left El Paso, hon?”
Baby nodded.
“Well, I think you’re right,” Cayenne said. “We needed some distance. You can’t write about a place until you leave it behind.”
The old glass pane in Baby’s window looked like it was melting. When she knelt on her mattress and stared down into the alley below, everything seemed molten, a wavering underwater world with big steel Dumpsters like rusting shipwrecks, and girls like gaudy fishes flitting up and down.
It was called the Stroll, Guy told her. At one end was Hung Lung Enterprises, a chicken-processing plant that filled the alley with the sweet stink of death when the wind came warmly off the Burrard Inlet. The seagulls rode the pockets of air, perching on splintery wooden poles that rose and tilted like a forest of crosses. Dotted with ceramic insulators, their trussed limbs supported the great looping strands of high-voltage wire, heavy and rubber-coated, that attached the house to the grid, just below Baby’s window. The wood on the sash had swollen, leaving the window stuck slightly ajar, so that when the wind blew off the alley, Baby could lie on her back in bed and watch the curtain lift and settle above her.
Cayenne had made the curtain out of a worn housedress that she’d found at the Union Gospel Mission Thrift Store.
“Look, Baby!” she said. “It’s antique! Can’t buy fabric like this anymore.” She held the dress up to herself. “I don’t know. Do you think it’s too domestic?”
The thin yellowed fabric was decorated with blue cornflowers and smelled like the thrift store, of vinegar and mold. When puffs of wind billowed the curtain above Baby’s face, it was like looking up a mother’s dress, except that mothers didn’t wear housedresses anymore. They wore sweatpants in pastel colors and plus sizes. Cayenne had pointed out the moms, crossing America. They had names like Madge and Dot and Gert, Cayenne whispered. Terrible names. Not romantic.
Standing in line at a convenience store late one night, waiting to pay for gas, Baby found a little booklet called, What to Name Your Baby.
“What’s the Texas girl’s name?” she asked.
; Cayenne was looking at a People magazine, but now she put it down. “Let me see that.” She flipped through the booklet, then pretended to return it to the rack. Instead, she slipped it into Baby’s pocket and gave her a quick hard smack on the head.
“I thought I told you to stop touching everything,” she said loudly, so the cashier would hear. “Get out to the car and wait for me.”
As she pulled out from the parking lot, Cayenne reached over and rumpled Baby’s hair. “What a team!” she said.
“That hurt,” Baby said, sulking, but Cayenne just laughed and flicked on the dome light. “Go on,” she said. “Start with the L’s.”
Baby flipped through the booklet. “Liz?”
“Boring.”
“Laverne?”
“Cheap.” Cayenne frowned. “L’s should be sensual. Like love.” She curled up her tongue, touched the tip to her teeth, and Baby could hear it vibrate. “Can’t you hear the difference, Baby?”
In the alley, Baby watched the girls as they scratched through the gravel. “Like chickens,” Guy said. “Looking for stash.” Couch grass cracked the asphalt in patches, grew up and then went to seed. The girls came in from the prairie provinces, Guy told her. They were not much older than Baby, from places like Moose Jaw or Cut Knife or Qu’Appelle.
“C’est la ville terminale,” Guy croaked through the smoke he held in his lungs. “It iz Terminal City, Bébé! End of ze line.”
Across the alley, rickety wooden steps led up to the Golden Happiness Printing Company, and underneath, to the clatter of the presses, the girls did things with men. Rhythmic. Fast. Sometimes they did it behind the Union Gospel Mission, on broken sofas that leaked stuffing in tufts.
When a storm came in from the Pacific and rattled the glass, Baby lay in bed and listened to the electrical poles creak. The wires swung like heavy rigging on a pitching ship. Now and then, she would hear the rat in the wall, and when it rained, the girls in the alley would start to swear, their high heels clicking faster as they ran to the eaves for shelter. The summer Baby turned fourteen, she felt the restless breath of the alley play across her face as she watched the curtain swell.
Sometimes when Guy was doing a deal downstairs, Cayenne would come and lie on her bed, and they would gaze out the window together. “It’s like we’re princesses,” Cayenne whispered. “Imprisoned in a tower while the whole world passes us by.”
Down below, homeless men pushed shopping carts across the gravel. They crawled over the Dumpster’s tall steel walls and dropped down inside. When too many went in at once, a fight would break out. Like a tangle of rats, they rose to the surface, wrestling for a prize—a torn sweater, a broken toaster.
“Look at that,” Cayenne said, leaning into Baby. She cupped her chin in her hands. “What do you suppose he wants with that toaster?”
Under the streetlight, a hooker in a Spandex tube dress was doing jumping jacks in stiletto-heeled shoes. Her ankles wobbled and she toppled off the edges.
“She’s doing aerobics,” Baby said. “She’s got a needle in her mouth.”
“That’s enough,” Cayenne said, trying to close the curtain, but Baby opened it again. The girl hiked her dress up to her waist and folded over like she was hinged.
“No,” Cayenne said, pulling Baby back from the window. “Don’t look.”
But Baby shook her off. The girl was bending over, doing something down below, then her knees buckled and she plopped down, bare assed, in the gravel. Her legs were splayed, and the hypodermic needle stuck out from her groin beside the patch of pubic hair, but she had already forgotten.
Cayenne sat at the edge of the bed. Her shoulders were slumped, and she rubbed her temples. “I’m going back to work,” she muttered.
“What about your novel?” Baby asked.
Cayenne looked up quickly. “That’s what I meant. What did you think I meant?”
“Nothing,” Baby said. “You said work. I—”
Cayenne held up her hand. “I don’t want to know.” She got to her feet and stood in the doorway. They listened to the whore moaning, Come on! Come to Mama . . .
Cayenne’s voice was low and charged. “I would never do that,” she said. She crossed the hallway to the bedroom that she shared with Guy. After a while, Baby heard the clack of the typewriter keys. Slow, one letter after another. Then a pause. Barely a word even. Certainly not a long word. One worth any money at all.
A narrow patch of kitchen garden, which had once been a backyard lawn, separated the carriage house from the landlord’s house in front. On one side lived the Wongs, and on the other side lived the Fongs, and the landlord was a lady named Lily. They were always screaming at each other in Cantonese across the chain link that separated their gardens. Lily lived with her mother and a man who, Guy insisted, was a former Politburo cadre from the Guang Dong Province and had once shared a bottle of mi jiu with Li Ping.
“He’s Triad now,” Guy said. “A real gangster.”
“Ce n’est pas vrai,” Cayenne said. She was trying to learn a little French from Guy so she could use it in her novel. She had typed out the first chapter, and now she was reading it at the kitchen table. Next to her was an advertisement she had torn from a magazine for a company that published novels. Cayenne was going to send them her chapter.
“It iz the truth,” Guy protested. “Mrs. Wong told me so.”
“She doesn’t speak English,” Cayenne said. “And you don’t speak Cantonese.”
“Kam tin tin hei hou . . .” Guy sang.
“What’s that?” asked Baby, giggling.
“It iz a fine day today. What do you say, Bébé? Hoi sam ma?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Are you happy?” Guy said. “Say it. Hoi sam ma? It means, Do you open your heart?”
Cayenne rustled her pages and rolled her eyes. “I’m trying to concentrate,” she said.
Lily worked at Hung Lung Enterprises, boning chickens. Mrs. Wong got up early and cut the guts out of fishes. Her garden was overgrown with vegetables—bok choy, yu choy, snap peas and chards. She dug her kitchen scraps right into the earth. Whenever Baby left the little house, she had to pass Mrs. Wong, squatting outside with her sleeves rolled up, doing something wet and violent to food. She scrubbed black earth off white radishes as fat as legs, cracked ribs of pork, scaled red snappers for luck, decapitated turtles for longevity. Sometimes when Baby went out to buy cigarettes for Cayenne, Mrs. Wong would wipe her forehead with a bloodstained knuckle and call out to her—You! You!—hoisting herself to her feet and parting the tendrils of the pea vines that climbed up the chain link. She had a gap-toothed smile that squeezed her eyes into crescents as she thrust things into Baby’s hands—a dusty bunch of mustard greens, the head of a cabbage. Guy told Baby she must always accept the gift and always say thank you. She could say, “Tao-che,” which meant, “I appreciate you many times.”
One day, Mrs. Wong hauled a garbage bag from the house. The bag smelled raw and leaked blood, and Baby recoiled into the hydrangeas.
“You! You!”
Baby took the bag, holding it away from her. “Tao-che,” she remembered to whisper, and Mrs. Wong smiled and nodded.
“What the fuck—?” Cayenne said, as blood dripped on to the linoleum.
“Fish heads!” Guy cried. He pushed back his chair. “It’s Chinatown, Bébé!” He and Cayenne had been weighing marijuana, but now he cleared the table, flung open the cabinets and started pulling out spices—star anise, dried dates, bone-white shark cartilage. The fish heads slithered from the garbage bag, sticky and wet. An hour later Guy lifted the thick lid from a steaming clay pot, ladled out large bowls and set them on the table. Baby stared at her fish head, resting on a nest of noodles. It stared balefully back.
“Eat!” Guy cried, poking his chopsticks into the fish’s cheek.
Steam rose off the bowl, into her face. Baby pushed it away. “It’s gross!” she said.
Guy reached over and skewered the large milky eyeball.
He waved it in front of Baby.
“Stop it,” Cayenne said. “Stop tormenting her.”
Guy shrugged and popped the eyeball into his mouth. He closed his eyes, grunting with pleasure. His lips moved as he sucked, and his forehead was greasy with sweat and steam. He opened his eyes and spit out a hard white kernel the size of a small pearl.
Baby pushed back her chair and ran upstairs to her room. From her bed, she heard Cayenne complaining, and then Guy declared, “Bien. If she must eat hamburgers, then take her back to America.”
Their voices dropped, and after a while it was quiet, and all Baby could hear was the wind in the alley and the dry sporadic cough of an asthmatic hooker. The sound made her feel lonely, like she wanted to cry. The coughing continued. Baby lifted the curtain and looked out into the dusk. A girl was standing alone in a cone of light cast by the streetlamp. She was weaving and dancing—two steps to the left—cough—two steps to the right. Her head looked like a balloon on a string, bobbing and partly deflated.
Baby heard the stairs creak, then footsteps. Guy’s voice was low. Cayenne giggled. “Shhh!” she said. The door to their bedroom clicked shut behind them.
Outside, the girl had started to wheeze and gasp for air. She dropped to her knees and spat. Baby wanted to call Cayenne to come and see, but she didn’t. The girl clutched her stomach and looked toward the moon. She caught sight of Baby instead.
“Hey!” she called.
It was the hooker from before, the one with the needle. Now Baby could see she was just a kid, Native, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old. She was wearing bike shorts that hugged her rear end in a way Baby admired. Her black hair was razored into a bad shag. It may have been a trick of the streetlight or the watery flux of the windowpane, but as the girl stared upward, it looked like her eyes were crossing and uncrossing as she swayed from side to side.
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