And then a woman stood up, and it was Beverley, and at her feet Jennie saw a pile of smashed instruments. ‘I love you, Jennie,’ her mother said. ‘I’ve always loved you. I love you more than anything in the world.’ Then they all came and stood together, hugging and laughing and crying, while behind them the waiters came, bringing all Jennie’s favourite dishes.
A part of the Story of TOO PRETTY FOR HER OWN GOOD
The Liberator set about his task of creating the world. He tore down the shacks and built houses with black and white taps pouring out perfumed water. He banged together streetcars which broke down on the freshly laid roads, and when the trolleys split open automobiles drove out from their bellies. His scientists invented soap powders, and posters, and dried cereals, and flags, and lamps that moulded themselves into the faces of vanished lovers. The leader gave his empire a name: the Celestial Republic. He called his capital the Democratic City of God and his home the Bleached House. He named himself Sacred President, and his wife Blessed First Lady.
The President put on the Head of His Father and ordered his aides and secretaries to ask him questions. They asked, ‘What do we do when two farmers want the same land?’ ‘What happens when no one wants to work?’ ‘How can I make my son visit me?’ Whatever the President answered, his aides wrote it down, and then his messengers flew across the Republic, announcing the ‘divine code of law and moral correctness.’
In every territory the Sacred President had left someone in charge. Now he began a yearly pilgrimage of surprise visits to check that the finger of heaven still stroked his surrogates with wisdom and mercy. He arranged tests for them. He ordered them to split rocks with the brilliance of their judgements. He ordered the women to reason with the animals and speak with the birds.
All this time the Blessed First Lady waited in her dark rooms. At first she tried to push herself into the sun. Her husband demanded it. The people wanted to see her. Too Pretty For Her Own Good begged for more time. She tried to pray but gave up, convinced that the Sun burned her prayers before they could escape the sky. Months passed, until the President told her she could have all the time she liked. He left her house and did not return.
At times Too Pretty became sick with cramps for her mountain home. But then she would remind herself how her husband had rescued her from servitude in a mud dress. And she’d draw another picture of her longing for him and beg her blind servants to pass the drawing to the President. Late one night she disguised herself as a speaker and escaped from her house, pretending to search for divine messages in the litter that filled the streets of the City of God. Instead, she was searching for her husband. She did not find him that night.
Too Pretty limped through the city, unused to the flat streets (her rooms were built with sloping floors), listening to the competition of languages, watching thieves glide through crowds, seeing homeless women die in front of restaurants. She returned home at dawn, only to set out again the next night and the night after that. After a week of this she saw a sacred messenger asleep on a window ledge and climbed up to grab his ankles before he could fly away. She exposed one breast, just long enough for him to understand that the sight of both together would catapult him into puberty and lose him his wings. He directed her to where the Sacred President stood on a platform higher than the Palace of Justice.
Machines crowded the platform. Shaped like lions’ heads, their mouths spewed what looked like black smoke into the sky. Too Pretty’s husband ordered her to leave. Instead, she threatened to strip naked, knowing that even machines broke apart at the sight of her body. ‘Tell me what you’re doing.’
‘I’m expanding the sky,’ he said. Every night his lions pumped out blackness and dust, opening the sky wider and wider until the mountain, the Father of the World, would become lost, isolated by oceans of emptiness. His emptiness. The Lady begged her husband to stop. He ordered his assistants to bind her hands and feet so she couldn’t undress, and then they carried her home and sealed the doors of her house.
The Blessed First Lady began a spell against her husband. At first she tried to guess what the old women would have done. She drew diagrams and recited poems. She stopped, knowing her own hate would serve her better. Each day, behind her shrouded windows, she added to the curse: drawings, strips cut from her dresses, scrapings from the walls, words and dances and stillness, toenails and spittle, urine and blood. She opened it up as fast as her husband opened the night. And even when the curse started to eat him, when his legs collapsed and his stomach caught fire, even when he shut down his machines, his wife continued, recognizing before her husband that the work had grown beyond its target. She would always find something more to add; no solemn phrase or line of thread could ever mark an end to her life’s creation.
He came and lay at her feet and begged her to release him. For disease had begun to gnaw at his face and genitals, and the buildings round the edge of the city had begun to decay back into shacks. Name something, he told her, name something he could give her that would buy his freedom.
She said, ‘Build me a mountain.’ A true mountain, stone and trees and ice, with clouds to force away the Sun. The President stood up. A mountain.
A kind of wind blew away his sickness. He went to the window and rubbed away the painted clouds. He looked out at his flat streets. A mountain. His mountain.
That same day he ordered a new tax across his territories—a tax of trees and rocks, of water, pebbles, and snow. And children. For he knew that no adults would believe such a thing possible, and whatever they would build would collapse around them.
Every day the mountain grew, and every night Too Pretty For Her Own Good came to inspect it. She examined angles and textures, she laughed at the mistakes of a builder who’d never seen a hill until after he’d filled his hands with bodies. Then one night she found the locks back on the doors. A servant told her the Sacred President had heard of threats against her life and was worried for her safety. She knew that he wanted the mountain for himself. But what could she do? She’d stopped her curse too soon, she’d given up her work for his. And now it was too late.
The President too had given up everything but the mountain. He no longer sat on the Seat of Heaven. He no longer visited the outer territories or marched in parades. He gave up reciting his ‘Song of the Modern World’ by which all the inventions maintained their existence. Outside his Democratic City of God the highways had begun to crack, the cars and buses caught fire, the taps and toilets filled with flies. The television stations broadcast nothing but memories.
The work continued. When the children grew old enough to doubt, the President piled them in warehouses and sent for replacements. But the warehouse walls split open and the children escaped. As they told their stories the citizens of the Celestial Republic realized that their President had deserted them. On the day that the Liberator announced his mountain complete an army attacked the City of God.
The President’s soldiers went armed with tanks and rocket launchers. These worked no better than the cars and televisions. The rebels yanked the soldiers out of their metal shells and crushed them with wooden clubs. In the Bleached House He Who Runs Away searched for the Head of his Father. He found it behind cartons of dance music ordered to celebrate the mountain. The Sacred President led his beloved followers into battle.
For days the fight rolled on, with He Who Runs Away growing stronger with every slaughter. His own excitement defeated him. As a fresh wave surged towards him he shouted with joy and charged ahead of his troops. He swung about so violently in his search for victims that he shook the mask off his shoulders into the torn belly of an old man. The President found himself surrounded by women dressed in lion skins with iron penises strapped to their groins. ‘You’re all dead,’ he told them. ‘I killed you all.’ And then they got their hands on him, and that was the last anyone ever saw of He Who Runs Away.
15
Jennifer Mazdan lay in the old four-legged bathtub on the second floor of her mother
’s house. When she’d come down from the roof the cold had finally caught up with her and she’d started shivering uncontrollably until she could dunk her body in steaming water. Across from her, above the brass taps, a guardian carved of African blackwood stuck its tongue out at her. Of all the rooms in the house only this and Jennie’s bedroom escaped Beverley’s periodic renovations. No moulded toilet seats, no expressionist bathtub. Aside from the gilt edging round the mirror above the sink the room’s only decoration was a large dieffenbachia plant beside the window. A rope held the plant’s two trunks together.
Jennie closed her eyes and slid further down in the tub, not bothering to try and lift her hair above the water line. She wiped the sweat off her face. When she opened her eyes Beverley was standing in the doorway. She wore her blue dressing gown and her ridiculous mule slippers with their pink pompoms. ‘Can I come in?’ she said. Jennie nodded, and Beverley came and sat down on the edge of the tub, pulling her gown closed over her thighs. A surge of love almost propelled Jennie out of the bathtub and into her mother’s arms.
Beverley said, ‘Where have you been all day?’
‘Just walking around.’
‘In this weather?’ She laughed. ‘Are you doing a penitence?’
‘Not intentionally.’
‘What?’
‘Nothing. I was just—just walking around.’ She couldn’t think of anything plausible. She wanted to tell her mother everything.
Beverley trailed her hand in the water, then rubbed it on her face. ‘Nice,’ she said. ‘Nice and warm.’ Jennie noticed faint smudges of colour on the cheeks and neck, remnants of paint from the ceremony the night before. ‘Darling,’ Beverley said, ‘what were you doing on the roof?’
‘How did you know I was on the roof?’
‘I heard something moving. And then I saw the door was open. What were you doing there?’
‘I wanted to see the Moon rise.’
Beverley nodded. ‘Has the Moon become important to you?’
Jennie became aware that her mother was looking at her belly. If only there was some way she could suck it in. ‘I just wanted a look.’
Beverley looked away a moment, pressing her lips. ‘Jen,’ she said, ‘if you ever need anything, any help, will you come to me?’
Jennie nodded, then said ‘Yes.’
‘Do you promise?’
‘I promise.’
Jennie could see a pink glow of light around her mother’s face. Beverley said, ‘I love you, Jennifer.’
Do you? Jennie thought. Do you really? Or is this just some kind of reward?
Her mother stood up. ‘There’s nothing in the house, but would you like to go out to eat somewhere?’
‘No. Thank you. I’m too tired.’
‘I could call for something. Shall I do that? How about Chinese? You always like that.’
‘No. No Chinese. You just get what you want. I’m not really hungry at all.’
Beverley shrugged and Jennie realised how much her mother wanted the two of them to eat together. She wished the thought didn’t make her ill. ‘All right,’ Beverley said. ‘But if you want anything…’ At the door she added, ‘Or if you want to talk about anything…’
‘Thank you,’ Jennie said. Before her mother could close the door Jennie called after her, ‘Mom?’
Beverley turned around. ‘What is it? Do you want to tell me something?’
‘When I came in before—’
‘Yes?’
‘Were you—were you standing on the stairs?’
‘On the stairs? No, of course not. I was lying down. I would have seen you if I was on the stairs.’ Jennie said nothing. Looking at her daughter, Beverley shook her head slightly.
Jennie said, ‘I love you, Mommy.’
Beverley walked back to kneel beside the tub. ‘I love you too, Jen,’ she said. Jennie wrapped her wet arms around the blue silk. For a long time she hugged her mother. When Beverley left the room Jennie lay back, weeping into the water.
16
The official residence of the Poughkeepsie Committee of Tellers occupied a four storey wooden building beside Vassar lake. The property lay outside the city limits, at the end of Raymond Avenue, across from the stone wall separating Vassar College from the world of profane ignorance. The Residence was an old-fashioned building, with black and white panels of wood broken by bay windows, and a large glass-enclosed porch at the back. Set close to the road the house stood guard before a sloping back lawn that led to a small patch of dense woods, like a sacred grove gone wild. To the left of the house another stretch of lawn led to the water, more a pond than a lake. Despite the night-time frosts, high weeds surrounded the water’s edge.
Five chimneys broke the line of the roof. Jennie imagined rustic stone hearths, with fires casting glows over fourposter beds, and furniture carved by country craftsmen. Only a very few of the county’s hundred or so Tellers could actually live in the house. They were the ones closest to the True Voice, the ones who officiated at major recitals. Jennie had parked her car up the road from the house. She could see the back lawn and the edge of the trees. She kept the motor running and the heater on. The December sun had done no more than show up the dirt on the windscreen.
Jennie was wearing her first official maternity dress, bought the week before, at the Sacred Heartbeat Mall, in a shop with pink and blue walls. The shop was run by a middle aged woman with fine scars all over her face—from an initiation, she had told Jennie. She wouldn’t say which one, but she had invited Jennie to touch the scars. ‘As an omen,’ she’d said, ‘for the baby.’
Jennie hated the dress. Grey, with a small collar, it just hung there, pushed out by her swollen breasts and belly. She wished she could have stuck to the sweatshirts and elastic waist jeans she’d been wearing every day to work. But what would the Tellers have said to someone who came begging for help without even the courtesy to make herself presentable?
She opened her bag to take out her mirror and inspect her make-up. Instead, she made a face at the jumble and snapped the bag shut again. Being dressed up hadn’t helped her at the Fifth Avenue Hall three days before. Jennie stared out of the window and thought about the Palace, the Tellers’ residence on Madison Avenue, across the street from the back of the Hall. She remembered the red marble staircase, the arched ceiling, the fireplace flanked by stone dolphins spouting water into gold sunbursts. And she remembered the woman smiling at her from behind her long wooden bench.
The woman’s grey overalls, traditional uniform of the faceless Workers, had been made of thick velvet, with gold trim at the wrists and neck. Above the left breast the woman had worn a silver pin in the form of a spiral. A black chain circled her right wrist. Her make-up looked like she had had it done in Saks before going on duty—arched eyebrows, glowing cheeks, a slight pout to the lips. She’d asked, ‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I want to see Allan Lightstorm.’
The woman’s smile had flickered on and off, like a wind-blown candle. She’d said ‘Master Lightstorm no longer graces this Hall.’
‘What? What do you mean?’
The smile solidified. ‘The Master has chosen to retire.’
‘Why?’
‘The whys of a Living Master do not concern you or me.’
‘Well, where can I find him? I have to speak to him.’ The receptionist hadn’t answered. ‘Where has he gone?’
‘No doubt,’ the woman had said, ‘into the depths of the Voice. Or across the boundaries. Or into the Black Feast. No doubt the SDA will give you his flight plan.’
‘Well, can I see his head Teller then?’
‘Master Lightstorm has no head.’
‘What? Oh, I mean the head Teller for the Hall. I don’t know the name.’
‘Her name is Judith Whitelight, and she does not see petitioners without appointments. If you wish an appointment you may apply in writing, three typed copies, no xeroxes, stating the purpose of your petition and the offerings you propose in return
for the Teller’s benevolence.’
‘And if I do all that,’ Jennie had said, ‘will I get to see her?’
The woman’s shoulders had twitched. ‘That is not for me to say.’
‘Look,’ Jennie’d said, ‘this is an emergency. I wouldn’t have come here all the way from Poughkeepsie if I—’
‘Poughkeepsie? You’re not a resident of this district?’
‘No.’ Shit, Jennie had thought. Stupid.
‘I see. Well, I’m afraid you’ll have to petition your own district committee.’
‘Come on. You know that a place like Poughkeepsie doesn’t have the same power as—’
‘All districts have ultimate power.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’
‘We are all one body,’ the woman had said, misquoting the Guadeloupe Proclamation.
‘This is ridiculous,’ Jennie had said, and headed for the stairs. Two men in grey uniforms with guns had appeared in front of her. They wore badges on their left pockets, silver spirals on brass discs. Black chains, heavier than the receptionists’s, circled their right wrists. Jennie had looked at the woman smiling from behind her desk. ‘You goddamn stooge,’ Jennie had said. The woman had laughed as Jennie left the building.
And now here she was, ready to try again. She leaned back in the car seat. Why couldn’t she just give in? That was what you did when the Spirit took hold of you. Let everything go and rolled around on the floor with it. Shrieked away in foreign languages. You didn’t whine about Agencies. You took off from work with a holy exemption and ran through the streets in mismatched clothes, waving your arms or carrying placards.
If only they’d asked her. If only…They just took over her life, invaded her body, planted their damned fish inside her…
She laid her palms gently against her belly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not you. Really it’s not.’ The baby turned, a settling into position. Jennie began to cry. ‘I’m sorry. Please don’t hate me. I just don’t like something taking hold of me.’ If only she could separate the baby from the Agency. She just wanted—she wanted to fight.
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