Mothers & Other Monsters: Stories

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  What right does she have to talk about me that way? Her house was a pigsty when I came.

  What am I thinking? What is wrong with me that I blame my mistress? Where is my head? I feel ill, my eyes water and head fills. I can't breathe, I feel heavy. I must be dutiful. I used to have this feeling once in a while when I was first jessed, it's part of the adjustment. It must be the change. I have to adjust all over again.

  I find the mistress, tell her I'm not feeling well, and go lie down.

  The next afternoon, just before dinner, it happens again. The day after that is fine, but then it happens at midmorning of the third day. It is Sunday and I have the afternoon off. I force myself to work through the morning. My voice is hoarse, my head aches. I want to get everything ready since I won't be there to see to dinner in the afternoon. White cheese and olives and tomatoes on a platter. My stomach rebels and I have to run to the bathroom.

  What is wrong with me?

  I go to the Moussin in the afternoon, lugging my bag, which is heavy with paper, and sit in the cool dusty darkness, nursing my poor head. I feel as if I should pray. I should ask for help, for guidance. The Moussin is so old that the stone is irregularly worn, and through my slippers I can feel the little ridges and valleys in the marble. Up around the main worship hall there are galleries hidden by arabesques of scrollwork. Kari and I used to sit up there when we were children. Above that, sunlight flashes through clerestory widows. Where the light lilts the marble floor it shines hard, hurting my eyes and my head. I rest my forehead on my arm, turned sideways on the bench so I can ]can on the hack. With my eyes closed I smell incense and my own scent of perfume and perspiration.

  There are people there for service, but no one bothers me. Isn't that amazing?

  Or maybe it is only because anyone can see that I am impure.

  I get tired of my own melodrama. I keep thinking that people are looking at me, that someone is going to say something to me. I don't know where to go.

  I don't even pretend to think of going back to my room. I get on the tube and go to Mardin's house. I climb the stairs from the tube-these are newer, but, like the floor of the moussin, they are unevenly worn, sagging in the centers from the weight of this crowded city. What would it be like to cross the sea and go north? To the peninsula, Ida, or north from there, into the continent? I used to want to travel, to go to a place where people had yellow hair, to see whole forests of trees. Cross the oceans, learn other languages. I told Kari that I would even like to taste dog, or swine, but she thought I was showing off. But it's true, once I would have liked to try things.

  I am excited, full of energy and purpose. I can do anything. I can understand Fhassin, standing in the street with his razor, laughing. It is worth it, anything is worth it for this feeling of being alive. I have been jessed, I have been asleep for so long.

  There are people on Mardin's street. It's Sunday and people are visiting. I stand in front of the house across the street. What am I going to say if someone opens the door? I am waiting to meet a friend. What if they don't leave, what if Akhmim sees them and doesn't come out. The stun bakes my hair, my head. Akhmim, where are you? Look out the window. He is probably waiting on the mistress. Maybe there is a bismek party and those women are poisoning Akhmim. They could do anything, they own him. I want to crouch in the street and cover my head in my hands, rock and cry like a widow woman from the Nekropolis. Like my mother must have done when my father died. I grew up without a father, maybe that's why I'm so wild. Maybe that's why Fhassin is in prison and I'm headed there. I pull my veil up so my face is shadowed. So no one can see my tears.

  Oh my head. Am I drunk? Am I insane? Has the Holy One, seeing my thoughts, driven me mad?

  I look at my brown hands. I cover my face.

  "Diyet?" He takes my shoulders.

  I look up at him, his beautiful familiar face, and I am stricken with terror. What is he? What am I trusting my life, my future to?

  "What's wrong," he says, "are you ill?"

  "I'm going insane," I say. "I can't stand it, Akhmim, I can't go back to my room-

  "Hush," he says, looking up the street and down. You have to. I'm only a harm. I can't do anything, I can't help you."

  "We have to go. We have to go away somewhere, you and I."

  He shakes his head. "Diyet, please. You must hush."

  "You said you wanted to he free," I say. My head hurts so bad. The tears keep coming even though I am not really crying.

  "I can't be free," he says. "That was just talk."

  "I have to go now," I say. "I'm jessed, Akhmim, it is hard, if I don't go now I'll never go."

  "Your mistress-"

  "DON'T TALK ABOUT HER!" I shout. If he talks about her I may not be able to leave.

  He looks around again. We are a spectacle, a man and a woman on the street.

  "Come with me, we'll go somewhere, talk," I say, all honey. He cannot deny me, I see it in him. He has to get off the street. He would go anywhere. Any place is safer than this.

  He lets me take him into the tube, down the stairs to the platform. I clutch my indigo veil around my face We wait in silence, he has his hands in his pockets. He looks like a boy from the Nekropolis, standing there in just his shirt, no outer robe. He looks away, shifts his weight from one foot to the other, ill at ease. So human. Events are making him more human. Taking away all the uncertainties.

  "What kinds of genes are in you?" I ask.

  "What?" he asks.

  "What kinds of genes?"

  "Are you asking for my chart?" he says.

  I shake my head. "Human?"

  He shrugs. "Mostly. Some artificial sequences."

  "No animal genes," I say. I sound irrational because I can't get clear what I mean. The headache makes my thoughts skip, my tongue thick.

  He smiles a little. "No dogs, no monkeys."

  I smile back, he is teasing me. I am learning to understand when he teases. "I have some difficult news for you, Akhmim. I think you are a mere human being."

  His smile vanishes. He shakes his head. "Diyet," he says. He is about to talk like a father.

  I stop him with a gesture. My head still hurts.

  The train whispers in, sounding like wind. Oh the lights. I sit down, shading my eyes, and he stands in front of me. I can feel him looking down at me. I look up and smile, or maybe grimace. He smiles back, looking worried. At the Moussin of the White Falcon, we get off. Funny that we are going into a cemetery to live. But only for a while, I think. Somehow I will find a way we can leave. We'll go north, across the sea, up to the continent, where we'll be strangers. I take him through the streets and stop in front of a row of death houses, like the Lachims', but an inn. I give Akhmim money and tell him to rent us a place for the night. "Tell them your wife is sick," I whisper.

  "I don't have any credit. If they take my identification, they'll know," he says.

  "This is the Nekropolis," I say. "They don't use credit. Go on. Here you are a man."

  He frowns at me but takes the money. I watch him out of the corner of my eye, bargaining, pointing at me. Just pay, I think, even though we have so little money. I just want to lie down, to sleep. And finally he comes out and takes me by the hand and leads me to our place. A tiny place of rough whitewashed walls, a bed, a chair, a pitcher of water and two glasses. "I have something for your head," he says. "The man gave it to me." He smiles ruefully. "He thinks you are pregnant"

  My hand shakes when I hold it out. He puts the white pills in my hand and pours a glass of water for me. "I'll leave you here," he says. "I'll go back. I won't tell anyone that I know where you are.'

  "Then you were lying to me," I say. I don't want to argue, Akhmim, just stay until tomorrow. Then it will be too late. "You said if you could be free, you would. You are free."

  "What can I do? I can't live," he says in anguish. "I can't get work!"

  "You can sell funeral wreaths. I'll make them."

  He looks torn. It is one thing to think how you
will act, another to be in the situation and do it. And I know, seeing his face, that he really is human, because his problem is a very human problem. Safety or freedom.

  "We will talk about it tomorrow," I say. "My head is aching."

  "Because you are jessed," he says. "It is so dangerous. What if we don't make enough money? What if they catch us?"

  "That is life," I say. I will go to prison. He will be sent back to the mistress. Punished. Maybe made to he conscript labor.

  "Is it worth the pain?" he asks in a small voice.

  I don't know, but I can't say that. "Not when you have the pain," I say, "but afterward it is."

  "Your poor head." He strokes my forehead. His hand is cool and soothing.

  "It's all right," I say. "It hurts to be born."

  Frankenstein's Daughter

  m at the mall with my sister Cara, doing my robot imitation. Zzzt-choo. Zzzt. Zzzt. Pivot on my heel stiffly, 45 degrees, readjust forward, headed towards Sears, my arms stiff and moving with mechanical precision.

  "Robert!" Cara says. It's easy to get her to laugh. She likes the robot stuff a lot. I first did it about a year ago, and it feels a little weird to do it in public, in the mall. But I want to keep Cara happy. Cara is six, but she's retarded so she's more like three or four and she'll probably never be more than about four or five. Except she's big. She was born big. Big bones like a cow. Big jaw, big knuckles. Big blue eyes. Only her blond hair is wispy. You have to look really hard to see how she resembles Kelsey. Kelsey was my big sister. I'm fourteen. Kelsey was hit by a car when she was thirteen. She'd be twenty now. Cara is Kelsey's clone, except, of course, Kelsey wasn't retarded or as big as a cow. In our living room there's a picture of Kelsey in her gymnast's leotard, standing next to the balance beam. You can kind of see how Cara looks like her.

  "Let's go in Spencer's," I say.

  Cara follows me. Spencer's is like heaven for a retarded girl- all the fake spilled drinks and the black lights and the lava lamps and optical projections and Cara's favorite, the Japanese string lights. They're back with the strings of chili pepper lights and the Coca-Cola lights. They sort of look like weird Christmas lights. If you look right at them, all they do is flicker, but if you look kind of sideways at them, you see all these Japanese letters and shit. Cara just stares at them. I think it's the flicker. While she's staring, I wander towards the front of the store.

  Spencer's is shoplifter paradise, so they've got really good security. There's this chubby guy in the back, putting up merchandise and sweating up a storm. There are the cameras. There's a girl at the front cash register who is bored out of her mind and fiddling with some weird Spencer's Gifts pen but who can pretty much see anything in the store if she bothers to look. But I've got Cara. That, and I understand the secret of shoplifting, which is to have absolutely no emotions. Be cold about the whole thing. I can switch off everything and I'm just a thinking machine, doing everything according to plan. If you're nervous, then people notice you. Iceman. That's my name, my tag. That's the nickname I use in chatrooms. That's me.

  I look at the bedroom board games. I stand at the shelf so that I pretty much block anything anyone could see in a camera. I don't know exactly where the cameras are, but if I don't leave much space between me and the shelf, how much can they really see? I wait. After a minute or two, Cara is grabbing the light strings and after another couple of minutes, the girl who's watching from the cash register has called someone to go intercept Cara and I palm a deck of Wedding Night Playing Cards, They're too small to have an anti-theft thing. I don't even break a sweat, increase my heart rate, nothing. The ice man. I head back to Cara.

  Everyone's just watching the weird retarded girl except this one chubby guy who's trying to get her to put down the lights but who's afraid to touch her.

  "Not supposed to touch those," he says. "Where's your morn? Is your mom here?"

  "Sorry!" I say.

  The chubby guy frowns at me.

  "Cara," I say. "No hands."

  Cara looks at me, looks at the lights. I gently try to take them.

  "No!" she wails. "Pretty!"

  "I'm sorry," I say, "I'm her brother. She's developmentally delayed. Cara! Cara, no. No hands. "

  She wails, but lets me disentangle her hands.

  "I'm sorry," I say again, the concerned big brother. "I was just looking around and thought she was right with me, you know? Our mom's down at Dillard's."

  Chubby guy kind of hovers until I get the lights away from Cara and as soon as I put them on the shelf he grabs them and starts straightening them out and draping them back over the display.

  I herd Cara towards the front of the store, mouthing sorry at the front cashier. She's kind of pretty. She smiles at me. Nice big brother with retarded sister.

  Back out in the mall, Cara is wailing, which could start an asthma attack, so to distract her I say, "You want a cookie?"

  Mom has Cara on a diet, so of course she wants a cookie. She perks up the way Shelby, our Shetland Sheepdog does, when you say 'treat' I take her to the food court and buy her an M&M cookie and buy myself a Mountain Dew and then while she's eating her cookie, I pull the deck of cards out of my pocket and unwrap it. We've got another fifteen minutes before we have to meet my mom.

  The idea is to play fish except every time you get a match you're supposed to do what it says. Tie partner's hands with a silk scarf Kiss anywhere you like and see how long your partner can keep from moving or making any noise. The one who lasts the longest gets to draw an extra card.

  Tame, but pretty cool. I can't wait to show Toph and Len.

  Cara has chocolate smeared on her mouth, but she lets me wipe her face off.

  "You ready to go back to see Mom?" I say.

  When we pass Spencer's again, she stops. "Uhhh," she says, pointing to the store. Mom always tries to get her to say what she wants, but I know what she wants and I don't want to fight with her.

  "No," I say. "Let's go see Mom."

  Cara's face crumples up and she hunches her thick shoulders. "Uhhh," she says, mad.

  "It's okay," I say. "Come on."

  She swings at me. I grab her hand and pull her behind me. She tries to sit down, but I just keep on tugging and she follows me, gulping and wailing.

  "What did you do?" my mom says when she sees us. My mom had to buy stuff, like gym shorts for me and underwear for herself, so I told her that I'd take Cara with me while she bought her stuff. She's holding a Dillards bag.

  "She wanted to go in Spencer's" I say. "We went in but she kept grabbing stuff and I had to take her out and now she's upset."

  "Robert," my mom says, irritated. She crouches down. "Ah, Cara mia, don't cry."

  We trail out of the store, Cara holding Mom's hand and sniffling.

  By the time we get to the car, though, Cara's wheezing. Mom digs out Cara's inhaler and Cara dutifully takes a hit. I tried it once and it was pretty dreadful. It felt really weird, trying to get that stuff in my lungs, and it made me feel a little buzzy but it didn't even feel good, so it's pretty amazing that Cara will do it.

  Cara sits in her booster seat in the back of the car, wheezing all the way home, getting worse and worse, and by the time we pull in the driveway, she's got that white look around her mouth.

  "Robert," Mom says, "I'm going to have to take her to the Emergency Room."

  "Okay." I say and get out of the car.

  You want to call your dad?" Mom asks. "I don't know how long we'll be." Mom checks her watch. It's three something now. "We may not be back in time for dinner."

  I don't want to call my dad who is probably with Joyce, his girlfriend, anyway. Joyce is always trying to be likable and it gets on my nerves after awhile- she tries way too hard. "I can just make a sandwich" I say.

  "I want you to stay at home, then," she says. "I've got my cell phone it you need to call."

  "Can Toph and Len come over?" I ask.

  She sighs. "Okay. But no roughhousing. Remember you have school tomorrow
." She opens the garage door so I can get in.

  I stand there and watch her back down the driveway. She turns back, watching where she's going, and she needs to get her hair done again because I can really see the gray roots. Cara is watching me through the watery glass, her mouth a little open. I wave good-bye.

  I'm glad they're gone.

  I watch my daughter try to breathe. When Cara is having an asthma attack she becomes still; conserving, I think. Her face becomes empty. People think Cara looks empty all the time, but her face is usually alive- maybe with nothing more than some faint, reflected flicker of the world around her, like those shimmers of light on the bottom of a pool, experience washing over her.

  "Cara mia," I say. She doesn't understand why we won't pick her up anymore, but she weighs over sixty-five pounds and I just can't.

  She doesn't like the Emergency Room but it doesn't scare her. She's familiar with it. I steer her through the doors, my hand on her back, to the reception desk. I don't know today's receptionist. I hand her my medical card. When Cara was born, we officially adopted her, just as if we had done a conventional in-vitro fertilization in a surrogate and adopted the child, so Cara is on our medical plan. Now, of course, medical plans don't cover cloned children, but Cara was one of the early ones.

  The receptionist takes all the information. The waiting room isn't very full. "Is Dr. Ramanathan on today?" I ask. Dr. Ramanathan, a soft spoken Indian with small hands, is familiar with Cara. He's good with her, knows the strange idiosyncrasies of her condition- that her lungs are oddly vascularized, that she sometimes reacts atypically to medication. But Dr. Ramanathan isn't here.

  We go sit in the waiting room.

  The waiting room chairs don't have arms, so I lay Cara across a chair with her head on my lap and stroke her forehead. Calming her helps keep the attack from getting too had. She needs her diaper changed. I didn't think to bring any. We were making some headway on toilet training until about two months ago, but then she just decided she hated the toilet.

  I learned not to force things when she decided to be difficult about dinner. She's big and although she's not terribly strong, when she gets mad she packs a wallop. The last time I tried to teach her about using a fork, I tried to fold her hand round it and she started screaming. It's a shrill, furious scream, not animal at all, but full of something terribly human and too old for such a little girl. I grabbed her hand and she hit me in the face with her fist and broke my reading glasses. So I don't force things anymore.