“OK,” the saleslady says, “panties!”
Thinking of sex and fertility and bodies, the woman says, “People are probably having babies today.”
“I bet you’re right.”
“And dying.”
“OK,” the saleslady says, stuck now in a conversation she was not trained for. “Well, here are your panties. I hope you have fun with your panties. I hope you have a blessed day.”
* * *
—
THE WOMAN STANDS on the corner outside the mall and unbuttons her coat. Who knows what time of year it is on a day like this. The problem is not her affliction, which is painless and possible to remedy. The problem is that her body was once a house where her daughter lived. The problem is that the two of them lived there together. The room her daughter occupied, the room where she swam—it’s impossible for the woman to forget this fact, that her girl was a swimmer first—has been a silent comfort. All these years she has carried the tiny inland sea her daughter swam in. Thinking of it this way makes it more possible to survive against the real sea with the girl in it.
Three teenage girls approach in short skirts, and though it is a nice day for this time of year, it isn’t that nice a day. There is nowhere to go in this town, nothing to do, and the woman feels sorry for these girls who just want to take their young selves out and be seen. The woman studies their faces, just like she has studied every face of every girl in case it is her girl, in case her daughter has found her way home. Her daughter would have been forty-four now, but it is the faces of fifteen-year-olds that the woman always looks at.
“Here, have a pair of panties,” the woman says to one of the teenagers as the group passes. The girl does not take the panties. “Please,” the woman says, “take them from me. Nothing is wrong with them. Everything is going to be fine.”
“Fucking weirdo,” says the teenager, and goes on.
People want to buy things, but they do not want things for free. People do not know how to accept a gift.
* * *
—
THE WOMAN GETS on the bus and looks out the window. A purple bruise of a storm darkens twenty miles away and the woman watches it move across the juniper and piñon. She knows she will be able to smell the rain long before it arrives. The old woman looks over a pamphlet given to her by the nurse. On the cover is a pencil-drawn picture, like an art-class sketch, of a naked woman with all her anatomy visible. The person, as these people always are, is standing with her arms a few inches away from her hips, her palms out. She looks like she is waiting to be saved, to be taken up to heaven or to dive from a great distance into a deep sea.
Above her are the words “Your Happy Hysterectomy!” Inside are facts.
One in three women in the United States has a hysterectomy by age 60!
It’s the second-most common surgery for women after the C-section!
The hysterectomy can either be completed by making an incision through the abdomen or by going in vaginally!
If it’s possible to go in vaginally, the recovery time can be less than two weeks!
Having the uterus removed before menopause has greater side effects!
Ask your doctor about hysterectomy!
The woman puts the brochure down on her lap. The rainstorm is still far away. What are you so worried about? she asks her impatient body. We’re Jewish, did you even know that? We don’t have a heaven. We have Israel, but it’s easy to die there and it’s hot. They would like to think that you can get a good bagel, but it isn’t true. You helped me make a daughter. I’ll always be grateful for that. If there’s anything left of her, would you please leave it with me? I hope it works out for you, wherever you’re headed.
* * *
—
THE DAY ITSELF is easy. The woman’s neighbor comes with her, waits in the lobby, picks her up at the end and takes her home. The woman goes to sleep. When she wakes up she is foggy with worn-down anesthetic and pain medicine. She looks up and there in the chair beside her bed is her daughter. She is dripping wet, her hair matted and green, her feet slightly webbed.
The woman cannot stand up, so the girl comes over to her and lies down beside her mother, soaking both of them. She smells sweet and reedy and the woman begins to weep and kisses her girl on the forehead. Her skin is warm, still warm, despite all those years in the water. The woman wants to lick her daughter dry.
“When you were a little girl, six years old, I came in and found you sitting on the floor looking at your palms. I remember you were wearing a T-shirt with two cats on it that said ‘Sophisti-cat-ed.’ I asked you what you were doing and you said you were checking to see if you were a saint. ‘A saint?’ I asked you. ‘I’ll get cuts in my hands if I’m a saint,’ you told me.”
“This is embarrassing,” the daughter says.
“But you weren’t a saint, you were a fish. How could we have known?”
They lie in the bed for hours, possibly days. They drift off, awaken. No one gets hungry. No one gets thirsty. No one moves.
The room turns gold with evening light—who knows which evening it is—and the woman sits up for the first time and they look around. The brochure from the surgery is on the nightstand. At the daughter’s suggestion, they cut the figure out of the picture. The daughter goes to the kitchen, her feet awkward on the floor, slapping and leaving a trail of water, and comes back with a newspaper. She folds it into a three-inch-long boat. She turns the hot water on, leaves it running. She helps her mother into the bathroom and they both sit on the floor.
The daughter places the ship in the water. “Time to go to sea.” The bath fills higher.
The thing floats along, bobbing. Right away the newspaper soaks through.
“Did you ever encounter your father? He went in after you.”
“There are a lot of ways to take care of someone,” the girl says. “He did his best.”
“Don’t tell me if you suffered. Don’t tell me what it was like in the water before you got used to it.”
The bath is full to the brim but no one reaches to turn it off. The boat gets lower and the newspaper begins to bloom. The little lady figure is still slick and stiff. She floats on her back, her arms out.
The woman puts her head on her daughter’s shoulder. Water begins to spill over the lip of the tub. It is warm and good.
The floor is wet, the bathmat is wet, and the water keeps pouring. The little figure washes over the side of the tub and floats now on the pool gathering on the floor. The mother lies back in the warm wet room and the daughter lies back in the warm wet room and they put their arms out. They grab hands and float.
Heaven
It’s his address, the man tells himself, that makes love so difficult—his house is at the junction of the River of Stealing and the Falls of Eternal Despair. The man often imagines how he’d give directions, if anyone would ever come looking. It’s left at the Pond of Bowling. If you get to the Pond of Cards and Saloons and Church Lotteries, you’ve gone too far.
* * *
—
THE MAN FEELS CLEAR that he is only here because land was cheap, cheaper even than on the Lake of Private Dancing. He’s no sinner, he says. The plan is to fix the place up, sell for more than he paid, get into a condo or a loft, stacking washer and dryer, stainless fridge. He sits on the porch looking up at the bright white mountain of Heaven, not at all far away, hovering. He is handsome and sturdy, the kind who profits from his good investments.
* * *
—
THESE SWAMPS ARE feverishly green, saturated earth that can’t help but invent a hundred new kinds of vines each year. His is a floating house, tethered to the deepest roots of the vines with fresh ropes. The ropes the man makes from the sinners’ old clothes, the relics of their lives, cast out in a last attempt to be forgiven. “What if I throw away everything?” they say, nakeder and nakeder as they go. The
man in the floating house doubts that a late decision to abandon one’s shirt is enough to get saved. The man shreds the guilty rags quickly because the specificity of them makes him sad. This faded pink-and-gray flannel shirt with a ring in the pocket from thirty years of carrying the same brand of chewing tobacco. Stains on the front from splattered spit-brine. Loneliness.
* * *
—
ON A STRANGE BRIGHT DAY, sun where there isn’t usually any, a dress catches on a branch. It is red, meant to tie around the waist and be untied by a true-lover and holding it makes the man feel suddenly very far away. He imagines pulling the dress’s woman onto the good earth, a vision, her whole self bared and holy and ready, everything unbeautiful washed away. How long it has been since he’s touched someone. The man hangs the dress as carefully as if it is the woman’s shell. The arms are empty and begging, and the man comes close and wraps them around his body. They are grime-wet, and they stick to his skin. He is held on to.
The Dream Isles
The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following
For generous donations in support of their preservation, the animal mummies wish to thank the Institute for Unforbidden Geology, the Society for Extreme Egyptology, the Secret Chambers of the Sanctuary of Thoth Club, and President Hosni Mubarak, who may seem to have been around a long time, though not from a mummy’s point of view. They wish to thank the visitors who make it to this often-skipped corner of Cairo’s Egyptian Museum, which bears none of the treasure of King Tut’s tomb. And to the British colonial government, without whom the animal mummies might still be at rest, deep in granite tombs, cool and silent.
They would like to thank Hassan Massri of Cairo, Alistair Trembley of London, and Doris and Herbert Friedberg of Scarsdale, New York, for their support of climate-controlled cases to house the animal mummies for the rest of time. The animal mummies will admit they are somewhat surprised that this is what the afterlife has turned out to be: oak and glass cases, Windexed daily; a small room, tile floor, chipping paint; the smell of dust and old wood. Even for the permanently preserved, the future is full of surprises.
The animal mummies wish to thank their mothers—and their fathers, but mostly their mothers. Gauzy now, two thousand years later, they still remember being licked and suckled. The vole mummies remember the feel of their mothers’ teeth grazing—painlessly, absentmindedly—across small, tufted cheeks. To be a vole like this, forever, unendingly as the vole mummies are, is to know humility. No one asks to be born a vole. No one dreams of millennia of voledom. The vole mummies would like to thank everyone who, through these drawn-out centuries, has not confused them with moles, muskrats, mice or shrews. They would like it noted that they are proud to have been small enough to hide beneath the bed listening with their soft round ears to the pharaoh and the queen rattling toward a different kind of eternity. In their memories, they are a mighty brigade, moving soundlessly through the kingdom, pawing tubers on the banks of the Nile.
* * *
—
THE SNAKES ASSUME that someone would like to thank them for being so easy to enshroud.
* * *
—
THE MUSEUMGOERS WEAR shorts and hats and T-shirts with names of places on them: Kenya, Norway, Hawaii, as if they are trying to communicate their origin to the dumb natives. We do not care what dirty modern city you sleep in, what sad vacation you once took, the cat mummies think. Where did the cats come from? Where did they live? At the feet of queens; on the banks of the mighty river. The cats were a million gods. In those days, when a cat died, its family shaved their eyebrows in mourning. If a man killed a cat, whether he meant to or not, he was sentenced to death. Those were days of justice.
* * *
—
LAST WEEK, WHEN the squat man in a blue suit clomped up the stairs to their dusty little museum tomb and hung a plaque on the wall stating “The Animal Mummies Wish to Thank the Following,” with a list of donors, the cat mummies thought, Do we? Do we really? Doris and Herbert Friedberg? Next, they figured, they would be told to bow down to a group of ten-year-olds and their imbecilic drawings of pyramids. You’ll have to find a vole to do that, the cat mummies snickered. If the cat mummies must be grateful for one thing, it is that they are forever-cats, and not forever-rodents. The cat mummies can think of nothing so embarrassing as that—the great gift a vole gets is, finally, to die. If he is very lucky, his toothy little life comes to an end at the paw of a stealthy feline.
* * *
—
THE NILE CROCODILE mummy would like to thank the egg from which she hatched, though she does not remember such a time. She would like to thank the Nile, for obvious reasons. She would like to thank the ship full of sailors that ran aground, for those lovely thighs and buttery, soft drumsticks, and also for their bracelets and jeweled rings, which she has kept in her great preserved belly since. Life now, and death, are given meaning by the cold weight of those treasures in the center of her lengthy body. The crocodile mummy would not like to thank whoever it was that stitched her jaw shut to keep her from biting in the afterlife. If only she was not staring for all time at the small nugget of a vole, unable to open her giant jaws and clamp the bite-sized creature between her knife-edged teeth. She dreams of meeting the man who mummified her and ever so carefully running a silk thread through his upper and lower lips.
* * *
—
THE BABOON MUMMIES would like to thank their owners for having the foresight to remove the baboons’ canine teeth so that they, forgetting their masters’ fragility for a moment, could not bite off a little finger and chew on it before the fury of guilt and regret kicked up like a storm.
* * *
—
THE EGGS WISH to thank the idea of life, which has reassured them over the centuries that they were preserved in earnest, not simply because the priests mummified anything they could get their hands on. The eggs have been waiting for three thousand years to find out what they will hatch into. Will they become crocodiles or hens? Surely, when the egg mummies finally crack, it will be a god who has broken them.
* * *
—
GRATITUDE IS NOT what the dog mummies wish to give. Their museum tag explains, “In Abydos, Upper Egypt, dogs were buried in the same area as Women, Archers, and Dwarves.” The dog mummies are insulted. Is there some through line, a theme, they do not understand? Once the thin-nosed guardians of young kings, they now find themselves in a permanent state of death, crusty and gawked at. What an honor, the dogs snicker. Life, that single luminous moment, would have been enough for the dog mummies. They remember their names: North Wind, The Fifth, and Useless. They remember stalking the night-dark graveyard where the stones were still warm from the day. Caught rats and voles flicked their tails against the dogs’ noses. Children moved aside in the market when the dogs passed. When they died, old and tired, full of the memories of the long walk their lives had been, they were ready for that to be the end. So who, then, would the dog mummies like to thank? Each other, because they were a living pack and now they are a pack frozen in time, each with one front leg bent, waiting for the right moment in this eternity to make a run for it.
* * *
—
THERE ARE ALSO bodiless mummies, shaped mostly like cats. Empty spaces, preserved forever. They wish to thank their mothers, though they have none. Instead, the nothing mummies would like to thank the priests who made them, carefully as they did, as if what was inside was sacred. As if to wish for a cat is to create one. Before these priests, they were just cat-shaped gusts of air, invisible. Now, they can almost remember what it might have been like to be alive as such a beast. The voles they would have caught. The golden collars they would have worn. The real cat mummies are filled with bones and a heart. The nothing mummies are filled with prayers written on slips of papyrus, organs of faith. If scientists came and cut them open, the nothing mummies wonder: Would the
little piece of hieroglyphed papyrus rolling out be any less beautiful than the dried raisin of a heart? Aren’t they not only the container but the prayer itself?
Enshrouded and encased, the animal mummies are trying to be patient. They did not expect the afterlife to be lit with flickering, fluorescent bulbs. Darkened sarcophagi, woven boats rowed across the heavenly river, glimmering, gorgeous night—that was what they thought would be in store after they died and priests washed them with palm wine and pulled white linen tight. Voles imagined their emergence into the next life, a place filled with nuts to paw, holes to hide in, secrets to keep. When the newly mummified eggs dreamed, they could almost feel something inside them begin to peck. But time has no ending and forever meant forever. Someone’s fingertips prepared these animals for the farthest of journeys—their noses were stuffed with peppercorns, their bellies with lichen and their eyes were replaced with onions.
* * *
—
THE CAT MUMMIES allow themselves one fantasy: if only there had been no such thing as an archaeologist. To think of the day they were dug up makes the cat mummies sick. Awake for the first time in thousands of years, they peered out, wanting to see, finally, the afterlife. Instead: the inside of a crate, the inside of a canvas tent, and then someone began, with fine-tipped tools, to dissect them. If only they had remained entombed in the cool earth with their kings. We were not afraid of eternity, of forever, they think. They would have made the journey to the other side, no matter how long it took. No matter how furiously, how magnificently long.
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