by Leni Zumas
After that I avoided the girls, but our town was small. I saw them at school. I heard my new name in whispers, snorts, giggles—Blotilla, Blohhh-tilla! I was eating like a champ, and as I got bigger, my mother got smaller. What if she grew so thin she couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t go to work, and I’d have to drop out of school and waitress at Applebee’s to save our house?
I worked at Applebee’s once, interrupts Karen.
I narrow my eyes; she is breaking the flow. Well, I didn’t end up doing that, I say loudly, but I wanted to, because it would’ve given the lawyer some ammunition for the child-support case. My father would start writing checks or else.
And it wouldn’t have been that bad, I figured at the time, never to go to school again. My mother would be so impressed by my work ethic that she would raise herself up on her elbows and ask for a plate of food. Her strength would return; she would fill out to her regular self. With her sleeping so much and being in a terrible mood, I didn’t let her know about my tormenters. I didn’t tell her who was calling in the evenings to say, May I speak to Blotilla? and hanging up when my mother told them wrong number.
When the invitation came for Amy Danbury’s birthday, I couldn’t explain why I didn’t want to attend. All the parents on the block were invited too. But you don’t have to go if you’re not feeling up to it, I reminded my mother.
She said she might as well, since Gloria Danbury would be offended by her absence and it wasn’t worth the aggravation.
So there was this party, I tell the group, and Amy had a humongous white coconut cake, and. . . . I pause, twisting my hands. The clock on the wall buzzes and clicks. Aren’t we pretty much out of time?
Go on, Rachel, says Linda. What happened when they served the cake?
It was just a stupid thing.
Let the other women share it with you.
Everyone’s eyes on me, even Karen’s, even Viv’s, and she normally falls asleep halfway through. Well, they started to cut the cake, Amy was serving it, we all had our little plates and were holding them out. . . .
And Amy delivered a slice to each plate, smiling like a princess, with the mothers standing around the table cooing and applauding. My mother had her fake-pleasant face on. When she got to me, Amy hesitated, then shook her head.
Rachel is watching what she eats, she announced.
There was a tiny silence, then Gloria Danbury whispered, Move on to the next one.
Please can I have a piece? I said politely. Amy looked at me with gloating pity and I added, in a smaller voice, Because it’s a special occasion.
Amy said, I don’t think you can afford these calories.
The other girls laughed.
My mother was blushing. Blushing. That little fuckface small-sweatered whore had embarrassed my mother.
I don’t remember much after that, only the sun sparking off the knife in Amy’s cute little hand, my ears ringing like the ocean. There was a lot of blood and it got all over the white cake. People were screaming but they sounded far away. The next place I went was the hospital, for evaluation.
Hold on! cries Sandra. What happened? Did you cut her?
Stab. I stabbed. I stabbed her and it severed tendons and she can never play piano with that hand again.
Like a wave breaking, they start to clap. Viv hoots and Grace whistles and even Charlotte nods approvingly.
Way to fucking go! yells Sandra. A stab for justice.
I wish Murphy were here. I think she would be proud of me too.
It is time for water aerobics. As we file out of the group room they all come up and hug me, even Viv, who is not a fan of hugs. They say she got what she deserved. They say it’s good what I did. Deep down, I know that’s not true. But what I love is that they don’t care, the women here. They don’t think I am a sociopath and are not bothered by the fact that for years I swallowed so many laxatives it made me bleed from my rectum.
I look for Linda so she can tell me I did a nice job. She is talking to the nurse. They are both frowning.
Where’s Murphy? I ask. It is time to put on bathing suits and fill the pool with our various bodies, the big and the small and the medium, to flap our arms to the beat of early-eighties dance remixes and hear the overeaters complain their lungs are exploding.
Murphy has been discharged, says Linda.
The nurse pads off down the hall.
Charlotte says matter-of-factly, But she’ll die.
We picture Murphy going back to her apartment across the bay in Tampa, where the refrigerator has not a single thing in it, where there is nobody to roll her around in a wheelchair so she can save her strength—Murphy who believes her stomach can’t digest anything but cigarettes and diet Sprite.
Linda, who is paid to console us, says, Yes, I think she probably will.
I’m sorry, I say to nobody in particular.
You’re banishing her, demands Sandra, for not drinking a can of liquid dog food?
It was more than just the Ensure, says Linda, adjusting the folds of her sari. Go get your suits on.
But, we say.
In the pool, we are lethargic. The aerobics instructor shouts louder and louder. I lie kicking on my back. The sky is ruthless, a brilliant blue that will go on being blue even after Murphy’s heart stalls and her lungs cave in and her wrinkled kid’s body drops to the linoleum with the same thud as a bag of groceries. My own body feels heavier than it ever has, like if I don’t keep moving I will sink straight to my watery grave.
LEOPARD ARMS
A new family is taking the place of the woman who choked on a peanut. They arrive in a dented sedan. Their belongings are few. No lamps or saucepans, two chairs only, clothes in plastic bags. It’s drizzling, so they hurry.
The little girl says, Who’s that? and points up at me.
Nobody, says the no-haired mother.
Step lively, morsel! adds the rope-haired father.
My name is not a word; it’s a smell. Call me the tang between smoke and scraped bark. Some years ago I fell to Brooklyn, was born as ornament on a block of cheap flats. The man who cut me was jolly and slapdash. His chisel was dull. He made my mouth open as if to growl, snout broad, eyes lashless. I wish I were more frightening. My shoulders, for one, are tiny—they barely protrude from the battlement—and my lips could as easily be laughing as scowling. I look as if I’d been carved with blunt scissors, by an only slightly talented child.
The word you know me by is from gargouille, the French for throat. A throat can sing a tune, swallow milk, be sliced wide open. Down throats go slender needles aimed at human hearts.
The family ensconced: parents pouring drinks, girl pacing along each new wall to listen.
A large red charabanc chugs past, its upper-deck riders ponchoed against the rain.
And here on our right, trumpets the guide, we have the apartment where Mel Villiers wrote Still Life with Gaping Wound. He waves his microphone at the stack of microlofts (formerly a public library) across the street. In the very same building, he continues, is where Polychrest recorded the eight-track demos of Mumcunt.
A gust of oohs from the deck.
When’re we gonna see where Squinch Babbington’s girlfriend overdosed? shouts a passenger. That was in the brochure.
Next block, says the guide.
If Mrs. Megrim had been on her lookout when the bus came by, those tourists would have gotten an earful. Quit nosing, you nostrils! Why don’t you go look at something actually interesting? Megrim’s husband is long dead, her children far flung. She sits on a plastic lawn chair outside the mouth of the building, condemning all who pass.
But today the only person who noticed the bus was the watcher, a young woman on the top floor who stays behind planked-over windows and touches the world through binoculars.
I watch too: the light dies. Dark water falls. The drinkers and dancers swim out. O kiss me please, o throw me over. Hot rooms stink, are entered and fled. With each small hour the frenzy hardens: which of these f
uckers can I bring back to bed? Then the night unclenches. Birds’ wings begin to itch, stumblershome pull keys from pants, and the old—already restless—wait on mentholated pillows until an acceptable hour to open their eyes. The sun staggers forth. There is only so much it can do, since along these narrow streets the buildings loom and tilt, keeping sidewalks in constant shade.
The edifice I grow from, five stories of blond stone, is called Leopard Arms. Its dwellers believe I am here to spout rain and to guard them. They’re unaware I would make a fine witness for criminal trials. A gargoyle’s ears collect sounds from impossible distances, and we don’t need eyes to see. A mere adornment, a forgettable decoration, I know everything they do. But they don’t do much. They are, in fact, a disappointing lot. I’ve heard tell of unpleasant posts—the church whose cleric drives tent pegs into the necks of prairie dogs, or the planetarium whose female staff drink one another’s menstrual yield—so I suppose I ought to be grateful; but Leopard Arms is not the most electrifying assignment in Brooklyn. Many of its residents rarely leave the premises. The ones who do don’t get far; they return an hour later, bag of provisions on an arm, looking exhausted. A few have jobs but are on the brink of losing them. Because gossip and songs have made the neighborhood popular, it costs far more than its moldy ceilings, anemic trees, and high rates of asthma deserve. I don’t know how these people keep coughing up the rent.
We have thrown water from the flat roofs of Egypt, where sacred vessels were rinsed. We have roared as marble lions on the war temples of Greece. From English ramparts we have seen necks swing at the gallows, shoulders run red under the lash. In Paris, a million postcards perch us cutely on Notre Dame. In Freiburg, one of our number defecates upon the cornice of the Munster, his crude pose revenge by a fifteenth-century mason upon the nobleman who refused to pay him.
There is a belief, passed down through the centuries, that gargoyles ward off evil. Our monstrous faces must surely be enough to panic the toughest phantom. Churches and minsters, cathedrals, the odd vicarage—we’re presumed to defend them from the noxious oils massing round their spires, the midnights waiting to pry with yellow claws their stained vents of glass.
But I am here to tell you: we do not protect.
Our job is not that at all.
You can tell somebody died in here, observes the mother, because it has that shiver feeling.
The father says, Be grateful. It knocked a shit ton off the rent.
People are squeamish, says the mother.
Could we not afford it if she didn’t die? asks the daughter.
Jesus, morsel, it’s not as if we killed her. The father circles the small rugless room, massaging his bony forearms. This goddamn skin-jacket, I want it off! Why can’t I be made of water?
Because you crimed in your last life, says the mother.
Next life we’ll be water? asks the daughter.
If you keep on being good. The mother pushes her glass at the girl. Refill my snowbroth, please?
The shame collector lives with his cat, Sophie, who happily does not need to be walked. He has stopped going outside altogether. Food comes on bicycles, and toilet paper is mailed from a recycling company. I twist the dial on his radio: explosion here, pile of dead there. The collector, pinning a hemorrhoid to a sheet of foam board, listens for a few seconds, then reaches to turn it off.
Into her beloved’s room, across the narrow courtyard, the watcher can look with no other hindrance than curtains so flimsy it does not matter whether he draws them. Through her binoculars she sees him wipe his eye, examine the speck, cough.
Look up, she thinks. Look up.
If she had a cat, she would stoop to stroke it. If she had a cat, it would not be a cat but a shark.
The watcher’s flat has three windows, two of them boarded. The one in the bathroom is too high and small to nail anything across. She once taped a sheet of construction paper over it, but moisture from her baths made the tape curl off the wall.
A shark, she knows, is not practical as a pet.
Tourists shield upcast eyes from the new-millennium sun, through split fingers see us crouched and leering on parapets, and think Such quaint remnants! We remain, to them, from darker, stupider days. It does not occur to these squinters that no days were ever darker than theirs. One glance at a gargoyle and they think Medieval superstition, how charming but fail to heed the omens of now: a moron grinning into a microphone, ten-year-old soldiers lined up to march, flags cracking in the desert wind.
In America I have learned the meaning of heads in the sand.
Under the watcher’s binocular gaze, the beloved and his sidekick recline with beers.
How’s your new script going? inquires the sidekick.
Crazy.
Yeah?
As in, crazy-awesome!
What’s the plot?
It’s a porno about Helen Keller.
Huh. Sounds. . . .
Awesome?
Is Helen Keller an actual character, or is it more like role-play?
The beloved puffs a palm-kiss at the sidekick. More shall be revealed!
I have not yet heard the young one’s name spoken. She is referred to simply as morsel. She is the only child in the building. Her stockings are red with white rabbits stitched at the knee. I’m sorry, she says daily, for talking too loud when her parents’ heads are killing them. When their heads are not killing them, they debate philosophy—of a sort. Theirs is a rather personal metaphysics. They talk of people who have wronged them, fortunes that have skipped them, the various piques and umbrages scattered in their wake. It seems the world has not dealt them a fair hand.
The father reasons, Assholes are not suddenly—or actually, ever—going to vanish from the earth. So the best defense is Hypnos.
Don’t forget Morpheus, says the mother.
Since the walls at Leopard Arms are as thick as thick fingernails, shame breeds like a grateful spore.
The collector worries that his snoring will keep the watcher awake. He moved his bed to the far wall, but the room is so narrow not much can be done to impede the travel of his slurpings and honkings and cuh-cuh-cuchhh-ings into the adjoining flat. If he sees the watcher in the lobby or hall, he swivels right round. The only mammal who is ever going to sleep next to him, he figures, is Sophie.
Mrs. Megrim, meanwhile, wonders if the flautist hears her crying after short, unsatisfying phone calls with her children. Or if her heavy tread bothers the phantom-faced boy below. Oh, but let him be bothered, she always reminds herself. Let him.
The watcher listens to the morsel’s parents intercoursing nightly between eleven-fifteen and eleven-thirty, directly under her bed. (The floors are holey.) When softly the tiny sighs begin, the watcher readies herself: face down, toes braced, hips arched, fingers slitted. Sighlets give way to whimpers, a moan or two, then many moans, accelerating. In due course the father joins in with his staccato whinnies. The watcher herself makes no sound.
The tellies switch on by themselves to the news channels. How the fuck, says everybody. The news reveals only a fraction, but that’s more than my humans want to hear. Limbs torched, bullets bouncing. Stop looking at that, orders the mother of the morsel, whose eyes are huge at women sobbing round a coffin.
They have no idea I encourage their midnights, rather than frighten them away.
For that, you see, is the gargoyle’s way with worry.
We invite.
I am rained on, wind-whipped, scorched. The stone they cut me from was not of high quality, and down the years I have greened and softened. At the academy they drilled us in the history of weather, since we were to live in it. I learned that the ancient Greeks believed truffles were made by thunder: during a storm, the noise would invert itself and sink—newly solid—into fungal soil. The ancient Romans reported that blood and milk poured from the sky, as did iron. And wool. And flesh. Then, of course, cyclones: a notorious peril to seafarers. The nautical remedy was to splash vinegar on the ship before the cycl
one’s arrival. (Was this effective? The logbooks are unclear.)
My favorite weather is cloud; it reminds me of home. When vapors from the sewage plant waft south to flour the skies, I am, in my way, smiling.
If that child bangs on the wall one more time while my stories are on, I will contact the law.
Oh really? says the mother. And which law would that be?
Mrs. Megrim looks the mother up and down, her mouth a venom bloom. She says, You’re so thin it’s like a concentration camp happened.
Thank you!
Not a compliment, says Mrs. Megrim.
Actually, says the mother.
The father stops to examine a typed notice affixed to the front door. He is a slow reader. Huh, he says finally, shouldering his sack of bottles.
The new referendum requires all persons over the age of thirty-five to evacuate the neighborhood on or before March 15. Furthermore, per an auxiliary proviso, all persons between eighteen and thirty-five must report to the post office and receive an Appearance Assessment. If deemed inferior for any reason (understyled, overweight, etc.) the person must leave the zip code within sixty days.
Safe for now, says the father, although in a few years we’ll be—
Fucked, nods the mother.
The daughter asks, But what if you don’t pass the Assessment?
Are you kidding? Look at us.
The morsel looks.
The mother says, We’re hot, okay?
The only people in the building over thirty-five are Mrs. Megrim and the flautist, who says cheerily, At least they gave us plenty of time to pack!
The referendum can screw, says Mrs. Megrim.
She’s been at Leopard Arms since her husband was alive. Together they saw a lot of life pass through these doors. They played rummy here. They bemoaned their children’s unwise choices here. They walked across the light-strung bridge after suppers in Manhattan, glad to return to the quiet of here.
I budge not, she declares.
The flautist whispers, They’ll come for you eventually.