My Year of Meats

by Ruth L. Ozeki

  I nodded.

  “Yeah,” he continued. “Well, it’s still easy to get down there. Some of the girls were just babies, like a year old, with almost fully developed breasts. Some of them were even boys.”

  “What happened?”

  “Nothing much. There was this one doctor who tried to get the FDA to do tests, which ended up half-assed and inconclusive. But the media attention was enough to scare off the farmers from using the drugs, and after a while the symptoms just slowly regressed when the kids stopped eating the contaminated foods. But not before a lot of them developed cysts in their ovaries ... and of course there’s the danger of cancer too.”

  “Do you think it’s in the meat, then?” I asked, still looking at Rose.

  “It’s gotta be that feedroom, something she picks up there ...”

  “The popsicles ...”

  “Or just the dust from her fingers. What I’m wondering is, do you think Bunny knows?”

  I thought about it. “She must. Look at the way she dresses her, in those loose clothes....”

  “The brother knows too,” said Suzuki. “Look.”

  We all stared at the screen. Suzuki was holding the tight shot of Gale’s hand, and after a moment, the large thumb started to move, slowly, surreptitiously, up and down, underneath his sister’s breast.

  “God,” said Dave. “He’s fondling her.”

  Suzuki coughed. Oh turned away from the screen and started to re-coil the camera cables one by one, even though they didn’t need it. His cables were never knotted or kinked. He always kept them perfectly wrapped and secured them with little-girls’ hair elastics, the kind with pastel plastic balls on the ends. I looked back at the television. Suzuki widened out to a two-shot and something occurred to me.

  “You know, I don’t think Gale knows what causes it. In fact, I think he’s got a dose himself. Look at him. I thought it was just a barrel chest, but now I’m not so sure. And his voice, it sounds like it’s changing. He had to strain today to keep it low, but as soon as he got upset it went up about an octave and started to crack.”

  The tape ran out and cut to static. We sat there for a moment, watching, then Oh got up and ejected the tape and slipped it into its plastic case, and like the moving parts of a heavy machine, we gathered up the camera equipment and filed out to the sweltering van. A TV shoot is like a tank, I sometimes felt, rolling over anything that lies in the path of its inexorable forward momentum.

  “What are you going to do?” Dave asked as we drove down the frontage road, away from the motel.

  I looked out the window. We were passing a large construction site, where bulldozers had dug a gaping crater in the ground. The site was empty now; the workday was over. A red, white, and blue sign, standing next to the mobile office trailer, read “Future Home of Wal-Mart.” Beyond the pit, the fields stretched away into the distance.

  “I’m going to talk to her,” I said.

  Bunny and Rose came to greet us at the door in matching white cotton dresses with cinched waists and wide ruffles around the neckline. Bunny’s was quite low-cut, to offer up her cleavage, but Rose’s was cut high and prim. They led us out to the patio, where John sat by a low bar, scaled to the height of his wheelchair. He waved a bottle of Jack Daniel’s over his head when he saw us.

  “Just in time, just in time,” he hollered. “I’m servin’ bourbon and bourbon. Take your pick.”

  Behind me I could hear Suzuki gulp. I declined for all of us, and then relented: we’d shoot the cocktail scene quickly, I promised, then the boys could have a drink. They needed it. Suzuki and Oh sprang to a grim sort of attention, and within minutes they had the camera cabled up, balances set, and were tracking backward in front of Bunny as she proudly carried a large silver platter of piping-hot Pigs-in-a-Blanket from the kitchen. She set them on the coffee table next to John. Rose climbed up on her daddy’s lap and fed him a plump wiener, skewered on the tip of a toothpick and wrapped in a crusty twirl of golden dough.

  “She’s gonna be a regular little heartbreaker,” John cackled as she waggled another sausage coyly in front of him. “Just like her mama.”

  He fed her a sip of bourbon from his glass, watered down now with melted ice, and she screwed up her face and shook her curls, then begged for more. Hand on the zoom, Suzuki hunkered down to get a close-up of the two, as John traded her a sip for a sausage.

  We filmed a quick setup of the three of them—All-American ranch family spends a happy time together at the end of a long, hard day—then I called it a wrap and John made drinks for the boys. When Bunny went back to the kitchen to fetch some hot hors d’oeuvres, I followed her.

  “I have to tell you something.”

  I know what denial looks like, and what it feels like too. It’s a mercurial flicker of recognition in the eye, quickly blanketed with a vagueness that infuses the body like sluggish blood. It is opaque. Murky. Like wading through a swampy dream that drags at your limbs, and no matter how hard you try, you can’t move forward. I know this feeling because I make television and try to walk through it on a daily basis. It feeds on convention, cowers behind etiquette, and the only way to deal with it is with a blunt frontal attack.

  “Bunny, I think Rose is sick.”

  Her look was quick and sharp before she turned her back to me. She slipped her hand into a black-and-white oven mitt shaped like a cow’s head and bent down to open the oven.

  “I think she’s received some sort of hormone poisoning, probably from the drugs around the feedlot, and that’s why she’s got breasts. There’s a name for it. It’s called premature thelarche.”

  Bunny extracted a hot baking tray of Pigs-in-a-Blanket, set them carefully on top of the stove, then turned to face me.

  “She takes after me, you know, in the breast department,” she said. She looked ruefully down at her own chest and sort of pushed at it with the nose of the cow mitt. Her tanned skin was the texture of an old mushroom, dotted with beads of sweat that clung in the cleavage. It was hot by the oven and I was sweating too. “John says I should be proud ... ,” she added.

  “He knows?”

  “Well, sort of.” She took off the mitt and started scraping the pastries away from the tin with a metal spatula. “About her breasts, anyway ... But he’s so old, you know? Like, maybe there’s not much difference between five and fifteen from where he stands....”

  “What is it, Bunny? Is there something else ... other than the breasts?”

  She piled the pastries onto a platter. “The doctor’s a good friend of John’s, you know? But he’s an old guy too. Said he’d never seen anything like it. But even he doesn’t know about ...” She stopped again and looked out onto the patio. Little Rose was turning pirouettes and squealing with delight as she danced in a circle from her daddy to Suzuki to Oh and finally to Dave, popping the sausage pastries into their mouths, one by one. John was clapping, egging her on. The boys sat with hunched shoulders and frozen smiles while Rose spun round and round.

  “It’s none of your business, you know,” Bunny informed me, handing me the platter.

  “I know,” I said. I took the platter and turned toward the porch, then stopped. “Well, actually, no, Bunny. That’s not true. It is and it isn’t.”

  She gave me a long, cool stare.

  “I had a kind of estrogen poisoning too. Different—I got it from my mother—but, well, it screwed me up inside. I had a growth, like a cancer, on my cervix. And my uterus is deformed. These things are dangerous, Bunny.”

  I waited, watching her, but her gaze drifted, looked right past me onto the porch, just staring like she hadn’t heard a word I said, so I gave up. Balancing the tray of Pigs-in-a-Blanket, I got as far as opening the sliding patio door when her voice behind me, so low I could barely hear it, made me stop.

  “Come back tonight,” she said. “After eleven. After they’re asleep.”

  I turned back, but she was already busy at work, head bent, wrapping little canned cocktail wieners in triangles of
Poppin’ Fresh dough. I wasn’t sure I’d heard her right. But then she looked up, looked me straight in the eye.

  “Bring the cameraman.”

  The house was quiet when I pulled up the van and parked. Bunny met us at the door; she had recovered her composure and was as garrulous as ever.

  “I gave John a sleeping pill,” she offered as we walked down the hallway. “And also a half to Rose. We can tear the house down and they won’t wake up.” We entered a bedroom.

  Rose lay under a white four-poster canopy, awash in crisp floral bedding. She was wearing an oversize T-shirt with a “Babes for Beef!” slogan, from the local Cowbelles Auxiliary, emblazoned across the front. Bunny sat down on the side of the bed and patted the place next to her.

  “I’m okay now,” she offered as I sat down. “Now that I’ve decided to do this.”

  “Bunny, I don’t want to force you....”

  “Forget it. I gotta do something. You guys are journalists. Maybe you can figure out a way to help.”

  “I’m going to need you to sign releases, you know....”

  “Yeah, that’s fine.”

  “And I’ll need to interview you about Rose’s condition, like when it started and what the doctor said....”

  “I can do that. But let’s just get this part over with first, okay?”

  She reached over to her daughter and smoothed a wisp of hair from her forehead, then lifted the T-shirt to reveal her belly and the two concentric arcs of her lower rib cage.

  Rose’s skin was still a baby’s, milky white and downy, and underneath this translucent sheath, her rib cage rose and fell with her shallow breathing. The bones were blue and achingly fragile. I thought of the tiny curl of a child inside me, and my heart leapt. I wanted to put my head against this small belly, blow warmth across it, inhale her sweet baby-sour smell. Then Bunny pulled the T-shirt up farther. Naked, Rose was not plump at all. The plumpness was an illusion created by two shockingly full and beautiful breasts, each tipped with a perfect pink nipple. Suzuki, behind me, shuddered. The girl was five years old. She lay on her back with her arms spread and bent upward at the elbows. Her soft little fingers were tangled in the hair on her pillow. The breasts were firm, but they had separated the way breasts do and slid to either side of her thin rib cage, into her armpits. Disturbed, perhaps, by our presence in the room, she arched her back and turned her head toward the light that was shining from the hallway door. Her mouth opened and closed like a little fish’s. She rubbed the hair out of her face with the back of her hand, then her mouth found her thumb and closed around it, and she started sucking.

  She was wearing little white cotton underpants, hiked up high over her belly. Bunny stood over her and raised her small hips and drew the underpants down around her thighs. The baby skin continued, smooth and uninterrupted, down over the swell of her belly to her pubic bone, where suddenly, like grotesque graffiti, her skin was defaced by a wiry tangle of hair.

  “She’s had some bleeding too,” Bunny said sadly.

  I turned on the sun gun and gently panned the beam across the child as Suzuki hoisted the camera and focused. My hand was shaking and I couldn’t make it stop.

  “Just...” Bunny tapped Suzuki lightly on the arm. “Please, not her face ...”

  And then she dropped her hand to her lap and looked down at her daughter. Her spine, formerly so straight and tall, strong from counterbalancing the weight of her chest, collapsed into itself, and in that instant Bunny looked old and fat.

  “Oh, what the hell. It’s not like it’s her fault. And with a body like that, who’s gonna be looking at her face, right?”

  Gently she stroked the tendrils from her daughter’s forehead. Her tone, part defeat and part bravado, was filled with the echoes of strip joints and neon, of tinsel and tassels and the hooting of men. All the pain of her own freaky career seemed to hang in the gaps between her words and then spread like an oily wake, wide, in the silence behind them. Suzuki heard the pain and slowly panned the camera to her face.

  “Bunny?” My voice sounded harsh even though I was whispering. “I’d like to do the interview now. Tell us about Rose.”

  That night I dreamed it was time to give birth. It was odd, because my stomach was still taut and concave around the hipbones, and Ma laughed and pointed to my chest and said it couldn’t be time since I still didn’t have any oppai to feed my baby with, and she handed me some small white pills to make them grow bigger. But I knew she was wrong, because this is America and she just didn’t know, so I went out behind the milking barn where I used to play on my grampa’s farm before he went bankrupt and sold it, and I pulled up my dress and waited. As I stood there with my legs spread, it started to emerge, limb by limb, released, unfolding, until gravity took the mass of it and it fell to the ground with a thump, gangly and stillborn, from my stomach. It was wet, a misshapen tangle, but I could see a delicate hoof, a twisted tail, the oversize skull, still fetal blue, with a dead milky eye staring up at me, alive with maggots.

  I woke and had to pee, but it was a strange motel and I couldn’t remember where the bathroom was, which sometimes happens on the road in the dark. And I forgot the dream until I had groped my way to the toilet and was sitting there with my elbows on my knees, staring into the blackness, and maybe it was the release of my bladder that brought the birth dream back, but suddenly I remembered it and started to cry. And when I was finished I turned on the light and checked the toilet bowl carefully, but there wasn’t anything there except water and pee.

  I went back to bed, shivering, so cold. I wanted to call Sloan, but then I’d have to tell him about the feedroom and the Lutalyse, and it made me sick with shame to think about. So I decided, just tomorrow, just the slaughterhouse, and that’s all. It will be easy after that, no danger, and after this show I will quit, and even though we’ve never talked about it, I’ll make Sloan support me while I grow fat and happy; maybe we’ll move in together somewhere, not Chicago, maybe New York, maybe the country somewhere, where I can grow organic vegetables and learn to pickle things ... and I drifted back off to sleep.

  Mornings had once been filled with a secret joy, but not any longer. Now they were cold and overcast, no place to linger.

  The weather had changed overnight, suddenly bleak and autumnal. The wind whipped up the tumbleweed and sent it skittering across the road in front of Gale’s oncoming Dodge. He had come to meet us at the motel to take us to the slaughterhouse. I opted to ride with him in his pickup, while the van with the boys followed behind us. I told Dave what I was planning and asked him to stay close. Now, as we hurtled down a rutted back road, I could see the van in the rearview mirror, swallowed up in the dust.

  I turned to face Gale across the wide bench seat in the cab of the pickup.

  “Bunny showed me Rose’s breasts last night. You know about that, right?”

  I watched his head slowly swivel on his mottled, turtlelike neck. He stared at me, then swiveled back. Maybe he thought that if he didn’t respond I would just disappear.

  “Well,” I continued, “then you may already know that she’s also got pubic hair and she’s starting to menstruate. The problem is that this condition almost always coexists with ovarian cysts and often leads to cervical or uterine cancer, which can kill her. I told Bunny. I’m pretty sure it’s estrogen poisoning from the feedlot. There were cases like this in Puerto Rico, where they kept using DES—”

  “You still goin’ on about that?” He was trying to sound light. “What is it with you and this DES business, anyway?”

  “Gale, I think you’ve got it too. I heard about a case of hormone poisoning in the South where grown men started developing symptoms....”

  He drove with both hands, and his knuckles whitened. I thought the steering wheel would snap, but I kept on going.

  “Enlarged breasts and elevated vocal—”

  He reached across the wide front seat and grabbed my hair and yanked my head to within inches of his face.

  “You
shut your mouth!” he screamed, spraying me with rage and spittle. “You go spreadin’ these filthy lies around here and I’ll kill you, you fuckin’ bitch, I swear I will.”

  His eyes were cold and insanely blue. The truck was veering wildly from side to side.

  “I saw you, Gale!” I screamed right back at him. “We have it on tape. You were feeling up her breast, you pervert. I saw it.”

  “Shut up!” Gripping my hair hard in his fist, he shook my head like a dirty onion. Finally he let go, but his voice continued, tightening with rage, spiraling up and up into a high-pitched squeal.

  “I never touched her, I swear it! I love that little girl. I wouldn’t ever do that, not ever. And about the other, well, you think you’re so fuckin’ smart, if you got somethin’ to accuse me of doing illegal around here, you just go right ahead and try. You and that whore my daddy’s married to. This here’s ranch country, girl, and we do what we want, when we want, without no government’s say-so. You got that? Your East Coast politicians can’t say boo out here. We take care of our own. We got our own kinda justice, frontier justice, and don’t you forget it....”

  “Are you threatening me?”

  His small eyes were fixed on the road ahead and he spoke through gritted teeth. “I’m just tellin’ it like it is. So don’t say I didn’t give you no warning.”

  “Right. Got it,” I answered. “Likewise.”

  He didn’t answer, but his knuckles stayed white and ready, and my heart stayed pounding in my ears.

  We drove the rest of the way in silence. When we got to the slaughterhouse, I climbed down from the Dodge and my knees buckled. Dave saw and came over.

  “You all right?” He put his strong, calm hand on my elbow to steady me.