Baby Be-Bop

by Francesca Lia Block

  Once when he looked up from the steering wheel he saw a house crossing the road. It was a cheerful-looking yellow house moving on wheels through the valley night. Dirk thought at first he must be hallucinating. Then he thought, my father. He didn’t know why but that was what he thought. He leaned his head back down and when he looked up the house was gone.

  When he got home finally he managed somehow to get the lamp Fifi had given him off the front of the car and carry it inside. He staggered to the bathroom and washed the gashes on his face while Kaboodle whimpered at his feet and gently pawed his leg. His reflection pitched and blurred in the mirror. Blood was caking now, turning darker and thicker.

  Dirk steadied himself by leaning against the wall until he got to his bed. He fell down there and closed his eyes.

  Dirk dreamed of the train. It was moving through the hills, through the forests like a thought through his mind, like blood through a vein in him. There were the fathers taking their showers. They were naked and close together under the water. But something was different. Thin fathers. Emaciated bodies. Shaved scalps. Something was happening. What was happening? Not water. Gas. Coming through the pipes. Gas to make their lungs explode. Dying fathers as the train kept going kept going kept going. To hell.

  Part II

  Gazelle’s Story

  K it was lying over Dirk’s heart staring at him, her usually aloe-vera-green eyes now black with pupil. Even Kit could not take away the pain flashing and shrieking through Dirk’s body like an ambulance. His blood shivered.

  Help me; tell me a story, Dirk thought, knowing that somewhere in the room the lamp was waiting. Tell me a story that will make me want to live, because right now I don’t want to live. Help me.

  He shut his eyes.

  The wind was tapping the peach tree’s long thin leaf fingers against the window. The moon cast shadows of the branches across the floor. Dirk sat up in bed and Kit jumped off of him, yowling. It felt as if Dirk’s heart leaped out of his body with her. In the corner of the room beside the golden lamp the figure of a woman was seated on achair. She was wearing a long dress of creamy satin covered with satin roses and beads that shone like crystals under rushing water, raindrops in the moonlight. There was a veil over her face but Dirk could see her pallor, the sadness in her eyes. Eyes like his own. He clutched his wild-duck-printed flannel pajama shirt closer around his chest impulsively but he was no longer cold. And the pain was far away now—a fading red light, a retreating siren.

  Am I alive? Dirk wondered.

  He wished that the woman would go away. But she looked so sad; she looked as though she needed to talk to him.

  “Who are you?” Dirk said softly into the darkness.

  “My name is Gazelle Sunday. You want me to go.”

  “No I don’t.”

  Was she about to cry? Dirk didn’t want her to. He tried to think of something.

  “Do you have a story?” Dirk asked.

  “A story?”

  “Yeah. I don’t have one.”

  “I can’t remember,” she said.

  “I bet you can. I bet you are full of stories. I can see in your eyes.”

  “No, no, not really.”

  “Try to think.” He really wanted her to tell him something now. “Maybe something about that dress. Where did you get that dress?”

  The woman reached her almost-transparent hand out to him.

  “Please,” he said.

  “If you will dance with me.”

  “Okay,” said Dirk, and then wondered if that was such a good idea. She looked like death. He wondered if she would dance away with him. Dance him to his grave. Maybe that was the best thing. Maybe that was what he wanted. Or it had happened already. And besides he had promised, and she, this white ghost lady, had begun to tell.

  “I never knew my mother but I knew she had given me my name and I loved her for that. I imagined that my mother and father were from France, very young, very in love. In my mind they looked like children in the book of fairy tales—the only thing besides my name that my mother had left me. The book was big and full of intricate, jewel-colored pictures of castles with turrets, enchanted mossy forests, goblins, banshees, trolls, brownies, pixies, fairies with huge butterfly wings and djinns on magic carpets. I pretended that the two children in one story were my parents. I saw them walking into the woods, their faces as pale as the snow they trudged through, their eyes big, dark mirrors like the frozen lakes they had to cross, their mouths like petals ripped from the red roses that they waited for all winter but never sawagain, dying in each other’s arms when I was born. At least that is the story I told myself, walking in circles, twisting my hair around one finger, sucking my lower lip, holding the book open in my arms.

  “I lived with my aunt in a dark and musty building. The kitchen smelled of boiled cabbage and potatoes; the claw-foot bathtub behind the screen in the kitchen corner smelled of mildew no matter how hard I scrubbed it clean. I was always leaning my head out the window to smell the bay, the baking bread, to hear the trolley car ringing its bell as it crested the steep hill. In the parlor was a dressmaker’s mannequin. I was afraid that if I misbehaved the mannequin would attack me with the needles and scissors my aunt used to make dresses.

  “My aunt was a cold woman with raw hands and a mouth that looked as if it was always full of pins. She hated me. I knew that the only reason she let me live with her at all was because I helped her sew. I became a better and better seamstress. I could do the most elaborate embroidery and beadwork with my tiny fingers. I could make roses out of silk; they looked so real you hallucinated their fragrance. Women came from all over the city for my dresses. My aunt never let me wear what I made. I had one black frock and a brown one for Sunday church—the only day she let me out of the house. I didn’t mind the hard work, really, or the plainclothes or even the fact that I couldn’t leave and had no friends. But I wanted to dance. I needed it. Dancing was the only thing I wanted. I would do it in secret. With a child’s wisdom I knew never to let my aunt see. She thought it was a sin.”

  That’s like me, Dirk thought. Like me loving boys, not wanting anyone to know.

  “When she went out I pulled back the carpets. It was very strange. Whenever she went out some beautiful music would start to play in the apartment next door. I learned later that it was Chopin. It was like a magical being from my fairy book had entered my body when I heard the music. I felt the strong center of who I was pulsing with the sound of those fingers on the piano keys; it radiated out through my limbs until I became like a giant butterfly or a silk rose, a waterfall, fire. I never saw anyone come out of the next-door apartment but it didn’t matter—the gift of their music made me feel I had finally found a friend. I danced wildly the story of my parents, of my birth, my life with my aunt. I saw worlds beyond the parlor as if I were soaring through the air on a magic carpet, cities twinkling like fairies or the crowns of giants, and forests green and singing with elves.”

  In just the way that Gazelle had seen those cities and forests, Dirk saw, there before him, a Victorian parlor and a slim girl dancing among coffinlike furniture draped indark shawls. She had a child’s body in old-fashioned white underwear but her eyes and mouth were a woman’s. She was spinning as if she wanted to make herself dizzy, falling to the floor where she twisted and turned and tangled in her pale hair, each motion full of longing. Dirk heard, too, the faint strains of piano music ghosting the air.

  “I danced till I was nauseous and sweating through my underthings,” Gazelle went on. “I had to change before my aunt came home. I knew she was coming because the music always stopped in time for me to change and get back to work. But one day even when the music stopped I kept dancing. I couldn’t stop. I heard the music inside of me still. So that when my aunt came into the room I didn’t even look up. I was kneeling on the floor, running my hands all over my body. Then I opened my eyes and I realized there hadn’t been music for quite a while. My aunt was looking at me with scissors in her
eyes.

  “She grabbed my arm and pulled me to my feet.

  “ ‘What were you doing?’ she said as if she were snipping pieces out of the air.

  “I told her I was dancing.

  “'Do you know what happens to girls like you?’ my aunt said.

  “I saw the mannequin in the corner. The cloth I had covered it with had slipped off. I imagined that the mannequin had needles sticking out of her body and was ready to shoot them across the room at me.

  “ ‘Girls who touch themselves grow up ugly,’ my aunt said, like a curse. ‘No one will ever marry you. No one will want you because you will be a little monster. You are the devil’s bride. He plays music in your head.’

  “And it was worse than being whipped. It was as if she had broken my legs with that. I never heard the music again. I never danced. I never told my story.

  “When I bled for the first time a few months later my aunt saw the stains on my underthings and said, ‘You see. You see what happens to girls who touch themselves. They bleed like little monsters. But they don’t die. You will wish you died, I think, because you will always be alone.'”

  “Oh my God,” Dirk said. “How could she do that to you? She was sick.”

  Gazelle wrung her hands. She was trembling.

  “Are you cold?” Dirk asked her. He took a blanket off the bed and held it out.

  “Oh, no thank you. How kind you are. Kind, like him.”

  “Who?” Dirk asked.

  Gazelle’s eyes filled with tears. “He saved me, finally. I thought I was a monster. I huddled and hunched in my black dress. My fingers cramped like an old woman’s. My face grew twisted with pain. There were alwaysbruise-blue circles under my eyes from holding my tears back. Without my dancing I was like the mannequin in the corner, no arms or legs, swaddled and bound. I never left the apartment.

  “But he came to me finally. It was my sixteenth birthday, and my aunt was out. It was a windy evening full of spirits. I almost thought I heard my piano player through the walls but it was only the wind. There was a knock on the door.”

  As she spoke, Dirk saw the parlor again, the image quivering as if behind smoke or water. The girl was older this time, and her body looked as if it had never danced and never would. Dirk gasped to see how different she was, almost as ravaged as the woman in white. He wished he could have waltzed with her out of that place.

  She hobbled over to a door and opened it. There stood a small man with dark skin and blue eyes. His head was shaved so that his sharp cheekbones seemed to stick out even more.

  “I shivered with awe when I saw him. I felt my whole life lived in that moment—blooming from a seed in my mother’s belly, swimming like a tiny slippery fish, growing a birdlike skeleton, clawing forth—a baby lynx, dancing as a girl, becoming a woman with a child inside of me, lying in a satin-lined coffin beneath the earth while a young woman danced the story of her life above me.

  “ ‘I need you to make a dress for my beloved,’ said the man in a voice like a purr.

  “ ‘Come in,’ I said.

  “He sat on the brown sofa. I noticed a red jewel embedded in his nose. It caught the light like a tiny fire.

  “'I want you to make me the most beautiful dress,’ he went on. He reached into the sack he was carrying—he must have had a sack of some kind although I don’t really remember it now. But how else could he have brought the fabric in? I remember the fabric. It was a bolt of thick cream Florentine satin. And he also gave me the most fragile lace—all chrysanthemums and peonies and lilies and baby’s breath—and a golden box full of tiny crystal beads.

  “He put all these things in front of me.

  “'I’ll need to see the woman in order to make it,’ I said. I imagined a fairy woman with dark skin and pale eyes like his, jewels in her ears and nose and on her fingers, chunks of rubies, emeralds and sapphires like her eyes. I would have been afraid to touch a woman like that—to have her there at my fingertips, just on the other side of the satin, vulnerable to my pins and needles. But I wanted to see her, too.

  “ ‘I want the dress to be a surprise for her’ was all he would say.

  ‘"Do you have her dress size and measurements?’ Iasked. I was very shy. I kept my head down the whole time I spoke to him. But I had to look up to see his answer because he was silent, just shaking his head and looking at me.

  “'Well, how will I know what size to make it?’

  “His eyes on me were like the softest touch, a touch I had not known since the last time I let my own hands caress my now monstrous, bleeding body, since the last time I danced. They were the color of blue ball-gown taffeta.

  “ ‘Looking at you … I think she is just your size,’ he said.

  “I blushed so much that I thought I was the color of the ruby in his nose. How could he know about my body beneath the black shawl I wore bundled around me? But I agreed to make the dress.

  “Then he left. I almost danced again. I did dance in a way—my fingers danced over the satin. I sat at the black-and-gold sphinx sewing machine and made a ballet of a dress—the most beautiful dress. When I was finished he came back. My aunt was away. He asked me to put the dress on.

  “I went into the back bedroom, so dim and draped in dark fabrics to keep out the light, and I put on the dress. The satin against my skin made me want to weep. The dress felt cool and warm, light and soft, supple and strong the way I imagined a lover would feel. I looked at myselfin the stained mirror and hardly recognized the gleaming woman, skin as pure and pale as the satin, eyes lit with the candleshine of the dress, lips moist with the pleasure of the dress, who stared back at me.

  “I came out into the parlor and showed the stranger. He sat forward on the sofa and looked at me with a hypnotic blue gaze.

  “'Thank you,’ he said. I started to leave the room to change but he called me back. He put a large stack of bills on the table and rose to leave.

  “'Wait,’ I said. ‘Don’t you want it? Isn’t it right?’

  “'It is perfect.’

  My eyes were full of questions.

  “'The dress is for you, Gazelle. And there is something else I want to give you.'”

  Dirk watched Gazelle take the golden lamp to her breast as if it were a nursing child. “I asked him what it was,” she said.

  “What did he say?” Dirk whispered.

  “That it was the place to keep my secrets, the story of my love. But I told him I have no story.”

  Like me and Fifi, Dirk thought.

  “He said, ‘Yes you do. We all do. Someday you will know it.’ He started to leave then, and I brushed my fingers against his shoulder. His eyes looked into mine—big pale sky crystals full of sorrow and wisdom. Lakes full of first stars that I wanted to leap into, wishing.

  “'Please,’ I said.

  “He took my hands in his. His hands weren’t much bigger than mine but they were powerful and hot, the color of the cocoa velvet I used to sew winter hats. He put his lips to mine. I felt the room fill up with satiny light and a sweet powdery fragrance.

  “'You must not be afraid’ were the last words he said to me.

  “The next month I didn’t bleed. At first I thought that my aunt’s curse was over—I wasn’t a monster anymore, I had been good. But when my belly got bigger and bigger I thought that her curse had become even more powerful.

  “'Oh, I knew you were evil,’ she said. ‘It must be the devil’s child. Who else could have touched you? Who else would have touched you?’

  “I thought about the stranger. Could he have been the devil? If he was the devil I would have gone with him anyway. I wished he would come back.”

  “How could she say those things to you?” Dirk asked. “What happened? Did you have your baby?”

  “Yes. She told me we would put it up for adoption when it was born. And she locked me in my room so the women who came over for fittings wouldn’t see me. She only opened the door to give me food and the material to sew. I wanted to die. I might have killed
myself with the sewing shears except for three things—the baby inside ofme, the magical dress hidden in mothballs and tissue in my closet and the words I heard purring through my head. ‘You must not be afraid.’

  “Then just before my baby was born my aunt fell ill. She let me out of my room, and I sat at her bedside pressing damp lavender-soaked rags to her forehead and feeding her soft food.”

  “You should have strangled her,” Dirk said. “Sorry. But I think she deserved it.”

  “She was a damaged woman. I would have been too if the stranger hadn’t come. Someone had seen her touch herself, maybe even seen her dance, and told her those horrible lies.”

  Dirk said, “You’re kinder than I am,” and she answered, “No, not really. I was just trying to protect my baby, you know. I remembered all the fairy tales about the evil witch cursing the child. She’d almost destroyed me, and I wasn’t going to let her hurt the baby.”

  “Did she?”

  “No. She died rather peacefully with my hands on her temples. Poor thing, I think I might have been the first one to touch her all those years.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “I gave birth to the most beautiful little girl! The most perfect little girl. She had tiny naturally turned-out feet and fluttering pink hands like wings and she dancedeverywhere. From the moment she came out of me she was dancing.”

  Dirk saw the phantom parlor again, although this time the walls were freshly painted white; the floral friezes along the ceiling were pale pink and blue. Lace curtains like bridal veils hung at the open windows. He thought he heard the piano music again.

  “I painted the inside of the house and kept the windows open all day,” Gazelle said. “I sewed large floral tapestry cloth pillows, pink, blue and gold, and stuffed them with dried lavender and rose petals. I re-covered the brown sofa in jade-green velvet. I made a chiffon canopy over the bed and lit long tapers so that through the draperies the house looked full of stars. I built fires in the fireplace that my aunt never used, and the house smelled of cedar smoke. I read poetry aloud—Shelley and Keats. ‘The silver lamp—the ravishment—the wonder. The darkness—loneliness—the fearful thunder,’ only it was a golden lamp and there was no more darkness.