Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  It happened at the sink one morning when I was brushing my teeth before school. At the sink I often lapsed into a trance as if on a hypnotist's cue. The sink was so white and gleaming, the silver chrome faucets poised with such priapism over the white basin. The tiny toothpaste cap like a droplet of ivory, all of it an altar. His fist at the back of my head came so fast that my lips hit the sink before I even had the toothpaste out of my mouth. A red tear opened behind my teeth and oozed into the toothpaste, warm and substantially salty. "Stupid, stupid, stupid moron," he said. I spit out the stuff in my mouth, replaced the cap, ran the water down the sink. Behind my eyes, the past sank somewhere far out of reach. In this country were fists. Coming at me always from behind, the fists, like snowballs, were random and impossible to predict, hitting the base of my skull where a blow would leave no bruise, unmappable, flung in silence, without words or with just the occasional stupid. Or a hand like a vise on my skull, bending my chin toward my chest, thumbs behind my pulsing ears. He was a doctor of osteopathy. He gripped either side of my neck, cracking it with a sharp turn to the right, then the left. The pain was a noose, a tourniquet, a dog bite in the skull. Maybe this morning, maybe tonight, maybe only the threat and that was enough. Try again, I silently told him. Go ahead and do it again. He could not resist me, I was certain of that. We had formed a relationship at last. A blow. The absorption of a blow. A symmetry, he and I together.

  One morning, after the Doctors fist had caught me alone again in the bathroom, I went to my mother's vanity to examine my puffed lip. I pulled up my mother's velvet hassock to the crescent moon of mirror. Oh, I thought, where is my perfume and my jewelry? Where are the señoritas and the cowgirls and the Menomenees in the woods in their quiet villages, and my mother, what can I tell her today about school? I tried on hats, lifted lipsticks, squeezed atomizers. Only recently have I realized that not all men view pain as a part of love, the hardest blows a kind of bond, deeper and more intense than ordinary love. My mother would never know about the Doctor's blows, or she pretended not to know. We cannot acknowledge what cannot be borne. My mother loved him, that much I knew, her eyes as radiant as the sun before its own eclipse. And besides, it seemed almost natural after a while to live in a land of occupation which had invisible locks and keys. But I was determined to learn the foreign language of escape. I have stood on no-man's-land between the soldiers and guns of opposing armies, between the stone throwers and the tanks, the Arabs and the Jews, and watched as legs and arms were gathered into body bags on Dizengoff Street in Tel Aviv. The bomber lies scattered among the bombed. Horror of horrors how familiar it comes to me the way they feed on one another, hater and hated.

  At the end of the school year, we would move to the Doctor's house in Menomenee, Wisconsin, a town only eight miles away and much bigger than our crossroads village on Lake Puckawasay. The Doctor's house should have been heaven with its fifteen-foot wall of glass that overlooked Lac La Jolie and white leather chairs and a fountain in the front yard. I could hear the fountain at night from my bedroom, my own room. It was Kate and Sarah who shared a bedroom now. The Doctor's house tempted us and we were not untemptable. I thought how lucky I was to live in a sumptuous house, in spite of everything, watching The Wizard of Oz in color on the Doctor's new television. I had been told that Judy Garland wore a blue dress. She didn't, though: it was yellow, and the Munchkins wore blue. Sitting in the Doctor's amazingly huge living room, as big as our entire old house, I knew we were rich. We had made it, or rather, my mother had, and we had gone with her, all the way.

  "Don'tcha love to go fast?" my grandmother was saying. It was the summer after my mother's wedding. We were tearing through the woods in Mabel's old Buick coupe between Menomenee and the small town where we had lived with my father. Mabel still lived on our old lane without sidewalks which rimmed Lake Puckawasay. We were taking the S curves outside of Wagner's Hospital, which my grandmother explained was a nuthouse, glazing the curves with our speed between Upper Ipesong and Lower Ipesong Lake. The road doubled on itself in loops between marsh plants and the hidden great houses of the past century. Often a siren came tagging after us, playing catch. At such moments, Mabel hit the gas. Louie taught my grandmother to drive when she was fifty-three, and she had had to wait all that time to discover she was a natural leadfoot.

  "Shit," my grandmother yelled. "Jesus H. Christ. It's the cops!" Mabel was usually caught by a young policeman named Randy, who was about twenty-one. Now I look at their weekly rendezvous as some kind of date. Sometimes he ticketed her and sometimes he let her go. He wasn't the type to enjoy issuing tickets to old ladies, but he loved catching Mabel. I thought he was a living doll.

  "We meet again, Mrs. P," he said. His teeth and shoulders were as even as balance beams. "You know, Mrs. P, there are two kinds of people I arrest in the S's. Teenagers, and you. Have you thought about what kind of example you're setting here for your granddaughter, Mrs. P?"

  "I know just what you mean, Randy," she said. "But today's a special hurry. You reach over there, and feel my granddaughter's forehead. She's burnin' up with fever. She threw up about an hour ago, and I don't know why, but I think maybe she drank some stuff Louie had open in the basement, you know what I mean? I gotta get her over to Northland Hospital's emergency room."

  Randy became all concern.

  "I'll escort you, Mrs. R" I wanted to marry Randy at that moment. He could arrest my grandmother as often as he liked.

  "You know you are just a dear man, but I think it would scare her, Randy, I honestly do, havin' that siren on, and I don' want her gettin' sick in the car."

  "Then just hold it to fifty miles an hour, OK? Promise me."

  "Cross my heart."

  And we were off. I crossed my heart.

  Mabel looked at me out of the side of her eyes, her glasses just catching a ray of sun.

  "I drank something?" I said. "Out of the basement? What on earth, like some paint thinner, you mean? I'm eight years old! Why would I do something that stupid? How could you tell him such big lies?"

  "Look," my grandmother said. "Sometimes you just gotta bend things a little bit, is what it is, OK? What he dassn't know won't hurt him. You think he was gonna let me go? Shit a brick, a guy like him lives to give people five-dollar tickets when they weren't even hurtin' anyone. It's people like me what gives him somethin' t' do with his time, or he'd be sittin' down there at the station house sittin' on his fanny, nose in a detective comic. Believe me, if there's room for the other guy t' go in the ditch, there's room for me to pass. I hate all them damn road laws. They're for the bohunks, like Louie. You wan' an ice cream, or you wanna go spend my money on a speedin' ticket? 'Cause I could go right down to city hall and empty my purse on the goddamned counter."

  "I want an ice cream at the Scottie," I said evenly. The Scottie was our drive-in. I wanted chocolate jimmies on my ice cream, and a waffle cone, and I knew I was in no danger of losing it.

  "Good," she said, chording, pretending she might have withheld it. "What he dassn't know won't hurt him, and I gotta ration the tickets, or Granpa Louie will bust a gut." Then she became sober. "You tell your ma, and I'll skin you alive like a red Indian."

  "Like to see that," I said, looking out at the tassels of cornfields as we neared Menomenee. The stalks cast shadows on the earth between the rows, and the sun spooled out between the pine breaks. The car window framed the horizon in neat rectangles of country. We could have all we wanted and more would be left over. Real harm was dispelled when I was with Mabel. Even if she'd gone to bed early, gin bottle on her nightstand, washcloth on her face. Grandma's sick again, don't tell nobody.

  Lies were necessary for us all, for my grandmother, my mother, and for us girls. But we did not think of them as lies. We thought of them as stories, as artful fabrications of real longing, as narrative inventions that made it more possible to live. It cannot be altogether a lie if you believe it, we reasoned, and truth is a bright flag, sometimes long and streaming, sometimes twisting i
tself around its own pole. My grandmother actually loved to tell outright lies to my mother, and my mother knew it. My grandmother lied to the cops when they gave her speeding tickets, and she lied to the neighbors about things I had accomplished in school. She lied the way other people took pictures to remember things. Events were not my grandmother's until she had embroidered them, and the lies were as real as the psalms on the sides of our home offering box. Those tales were comforts, and I can appreciate now that I am grown the sense of moral certainty beneath our spinning narratives.

  Down on Lake Puckawasay, Louie cut off the heads of his biggest fish and nailed them to an immense post that loomed into the air over his battered skinning table. The smell was rank. Ten heads, then twenty, then thirty, then more. Their bones whitened to silver. The sky could be seen through their gaping jaws. Gnats came in clouds, darting in and out of the skulls, giving the top of the post the image of fluttering, mouth upon mouth, bone upon bone. Looking up, I thought, These are our totems, to protect us from evil.

  There were two good things about my mother's remarriage. The first was living in the vast apartments over the Doctor's clinic, across the street from Lac La Jolie, in a neighborhood of children our own age. The second was that we traveled. We always headed west, to the Badlands and Rockies, pulling a silver Avion trailer behind a new Cadillac Seville convertible. Pressing a button on the dash brought the canvas top folding down into the car as neatly as a silk evening shirt. The top stowed, we three girls hunkered in the back seat under cowgirl hats, inhaling the new leather while my mother sat up front with the Doctor. Strange animals inhabited the landscape: two-headed calves, fleas in mariachi outfits, horned rabbits called jackalopes. They dominated the roadside gift shops, a signal that other people besides me had weird imaginations. The bizarre menagerie heralded the unreality of our western adventures. We were older, I thought, for having crossed the Continental Divide.

  As the Cadillac headed west, the trailer bumbled after us like a circus marquee. My mother sat up front like Rita Hayworth, wearing the black lace mantilla from Mexico over the waves of her hair, streamers flying, a goddess behind sunglasses. We traveled down the slower stretches of Routes 41 and 66, past the diners and bait shops and luncheonettes that are mostly gone now, in an America where there never seemed to be danger at the roadside. Except that somewhere in Nebraska we got the news from the waitress at a tiny café that Marilyn Monroe had died.

  The café was behind a Mobil sign, in front of a winged Pegasus flying over antique gas tanks. We pushed through a screen door into the dim little place. "They found Marilyn Monroe in her bedroom," the waitress said. "I heard she choked on her own vomit."

  "Not ever," my mother said, her face wan under her Copper-tone tan. "That just doesn't seem possible."

  For my mother, this news was a vortex opening. Marilyn Monroe was a charm, Marilyn Monroe had everything, Marilyn Monroe had come from nothing. She had attained the pinnacle just by being a heartbreaking object of lust (pivot and turn, girls, pivot and turn), just because she was beautiful and knowing. My mother, only a couple of years younger than Monroe, sat on a café stool, her legs hanging down in their pedal pushers, painted toes revealed through her sandals. I was fascinated by the fact that she had hammertoes on each foot. She arranged the wisps of her bouffant hairdo under its halo of net. She was only thirty-two years old, and no woman of her acquaintance and age had ever died by her own hand, certainly not one as enchanting as the goddess Marilyn. I watched my mother's shoulders quiver as she dallied at some blueberry pie. "I can't believe it, " she said, spooning some pie into Sarah's mouth. The compass inside her spun. "I can't believe she'd ever kill herself. I think somebody probably killed her. Probably snuck into the living room and put something into her drink because everybody was jealous of her." All her life, Mabel had told Dolores that the reason she had few friends was because she was so beautiful. My mother had identified with the isolated quality of the movie star, had no real friends, exposed her vulnerability. She had her own beauty and a child's belief in its salvation. Her beauty was a torch we could all follow through the night no matter how endless. Now she seemed shaken by the intimation that beauty alone was insufficient protection in the world of the flesh.

  The waitress leaned over the Formica counter, on which a patron had drawn a road map in pencil. "That's what all them Hollywood people out there are saying," she whispered knowingly. "All them people was jealous of her, and they did her in because she was rich and famous and told them to kiss her fanny." My mother finished her pie, cleaned the blueberry off Sarah's mouth, then adjusted her hair bonnet and redid her lips. I knew exactly what she was thinking. She was going to beat the odds of crashing, that's what. She had bet on the long journey, set her sights past the edge of our small town. She looked out at the smudgy yellow line of the Nebraska horizon as if it were a string she could pull and follow somewhere. I circled the penciled map on the counter with my finger, a little piece of nowhere, a road the size of the hatch marks on my palm. My road.

  When I could put the terror of the Doctor's proximity aside, which came most easily when I was outdoors, then the thing I loved best about those trips west was the sense of exploration. I longed for a prairie schooner and a chart under my arm, the painted topography of a mountain summit, tundra, timberlines, prospectors searching the high sierra for gold, and I loved the idea of a more valiant enemy than my stepfather, like a cougar or a bandit. I thought about heroic acts I might have performed had I been lucky enough to live in the past, like leading search parties for finding water in a dry gulch. I loved the idea of the Continental Divide, separating water into opposite paths, like Moses and the parting of the Red Sea as he led the Jews to safety. I was thrilled by the outlaw Belle Starr, by the mystery of the Face on the Barroom Floor, the ghosts of Little Big Horn, the Badlands, and all the other cowboy outposts we stopped at, for the Doctor had a fascination with the west which I secretly shared. If only he could have been more like Ben Cartwright—his most heroic cowboy paterfamilias—rather than his other favorite, John Wayne. Our home in Menomenee with the Doctor was full of cowhides and steerhead lamps, wagon wheel chandeliers and rearing horse bronzes, rope-outlined paintings of Indian wars and branding roundups painted by Frederic Remington, one or two of them original. There were also sand paintings from our journeys west and two old crossed pistols mounted on velvet. And there were more horses—walking, bucking, shod or driven in teams. I loved horses. It is a great gift to be given horses to ride as a young girl, and though it was years before I bought my own horse, I owe something of that love—the sweat and stink and wild freedom of motion that comes with equine flesh, the jolting sting of horse dung in your nostrils—to the Doctor. Yet though he gave us the means to ride, he was too awkward to enjoy horses as much as he would have liked. People gave him rough animals to ride because he was such a big man. But it's hard for an uninitiated adult to master a bucking horse or refrain from worry about what will happen to the rattled spine. In the end we girls were the riders and he was not, though I believe he felt happy out on those plains. He might buy a gun, he told my mother, in case we ever had a problem in our trailer with Indians. He might send the red man to the happy hunting ground. Fortunately, neither event ever materialized.

  At night on those trips my stepfather parked the Avion trailer in a camp or somewhere on the roadside in a lonely place, and the farther west we went, the better I liked it. Cacti were bent in agony beside us as we drove through a landscape so much more hostile than Wisconsin's green blankets, vegetation scrubbed down before an empty bowl of sky. In New Mexico great beetles crawled on the ground outside our trailer, which looked in the night like a glowing zeppelin, or an alien spacecraft poised on the horizon. I could see my family inside their silver cigar like an alien family, my mother cooking and lighting the lanterns, the Doctor at the table drinking his Pepsi. I walked through low sage and cacti, finding a rock to sit on, still warm as the desert around it cooled. From a small promontory, I look
ed back. I liked looking at my family in their circumscribed ellipse without having to be among them. They looked as distant as angels, except for the Doctor, who even through the trailer windows radiated fatal power only momentarily trapped. A bigness filled the light around him, and I stared on. The basalt beneath me was warm and secure. I had a mission out there. I had been collecting a stone diary. It was my great invention.

  The stone diary was my record, one I enhanced every summer on our trips west. There was a piece of rose quartz I found for the day that Marilyn Monroe died, and a piece of fool's gold from the Badlands which reminded me of my wedding rings—that is, those I thought of as mine, my mother's and my grandmothers first marriage rings, which my mother carefully kept in her jewelry box. There was a bit of road tar in my stone diary, a lump of it, from the time the Doctor had been forced to edge the trailer down hairpin turns on Pikes Peak after he'd missed a warning about a low tunnel. I closed my eyes and imagined the Avion's beetled back, the Doctor at the wheel of the Cadillac immobilized, plunging to the valley in the silver cylinder, a human juggernaut. The stone diary also held a piece of malachite that a man at a park had given me, and a tiger's eye, for luck, from the Corn Palace in Mitchell, South Dakota, and also from the Corn Palace a bright red agate that I could wear on a necklace. Leopard jasper from a roadside stand in Wyoming. A small geode from a Buffalo Bill shop fringed with more buckskin than an Indian village. The ribs were my pieces of the molten world, held for all the magical and searching reasons that anyone collects rocks, the bones of the world under our feet exposed. I would keep the rocks for bragging to my friends, of course, especially my two best girlfriends, but they also had a purpose known only to me. One night in the desert in the trailer, sleeping in my canvas bunk that hung like a sailor's sling above the lower bed, I heard the Doctor speaking in the bunk beneath me. Terror seeped like a kerosene fire along my body, racing pinpricks of both cold and heat and coming annihilation.