“But aren’t the real mother’s juices special?”
“How?”
“I don’t know,” Blue Jeans shrugs. “Maternal instinct? Isn’t that a thing?” I think he’s just realized he looks pregnant.
“That’s mental. It’s not juices. How do you not get attached to the thing that fills you up for nine months? But all the baby needs is, like, food and shelter. What, you think there’s some kind of ‘maternal instinct sauce’?”
The boys laugh.
I’m always famished on Mondays. If I were alone in this pavilion, I’d lick the alfredo sauce from my Tupperware. On weekends I look at food pictures in supermarket ads, but they don’t fool my stomach as much as the smell inside my car. Meals on Wheels pays me fifty-five cents a mile for gas, three times what I need, but most of what’s left over goes for rent. I could probably afford a box of crackers once in a while, but I don’t want to create a dependency. There never seems to be as much money as there should be, though toilet paper I get from stalls at McDonalds, and I haven’t needed tampons in a while since my period stopped last winter. I’ve stopped producing eggs. I’m empty. What would my Oofy boys think about that?
There’s an ozone smell that comes before storms. The kids at the pool are whistled out of the water. Lightning flashes, and I get an idea—I could double my income with a second Meals on Wheels route! It would have to be at another location, because eighteen clients is the maximum for each driver. The boys are staring my way. Have I said something out loud? No, they’re looking past me at the rain that’s suddenly spattering the pavement outside the pavilion.
Two routes. There’s an hour to deliver the meals, noon to one, and only one me. Impossible, right?
Mr. Silberbach’s the one who got me thinking about time. He didn’t really mind that Mrs. Poulter’s Hungarian “Impossible Dream” made me late. Half a minute after I showed up at his door, I sat next to him on his sofa, looking at pictures of his granddaughter, who’s with the Peace Corps in Madagascar, where she’s teaching villagers how to raise bees.
“She’s about your age,” Mr. Silberbach said, though I’m sure I’m much older. Being starved-skinny makes me look like a kid. When I first volunteered at Meals on Wheels they checked my license to confirm my age. To my great relief, they didn’t notice it was expired. Renewing a license is expensive.
When Blue Jeans stands, the basketball slips out of his shirt, and he dribbles it on the pavilion’s concrete floor. There are two echoes with each bounce, a loud one off the roof of the pavilion, and a tiny buzz inside the ball like there’s a bee trapped inside it. It’s raining steadily, and thunder rumbles overhead like someone moving furniture. If I leave the shelter, I’ll get soaked. My clothes will take forever to dry, like they do on Saturdays when I rinse them in the sink. I spend most Saturdays naked and waiting.
“There wouldn’t have to be abortions,” Yellow Bands says.
The beat of Blue Jeans’s dribbling slows. “Why not?
“Because instead of throwing the baby away, you can just grow it. People need babies to adopt. They wouldn’t have to go to China or Russia. There’d be tons of fresh ones.”
Bounce-pause-bounce-pause . . . Tons of babies. Don’t throw it, grow it! I snap the cover onto my empty Tupperware container and stare through the foggy plastic, half expecting to see a bee. How do I drive two routes at once? How does a body decide to stop making eggs?
“But is that it—is that all abortion is?” Blue Jeans holds the ball. He doesn’t look at his friend. “Isn’t there more to it than that?”
“Like what? If you’re throwing the baby away anyway, what do you care what happens to it?”
“I don’t know—just more.” He stops dribbling, spins the ball like a globe on his index finger. “Maternal instinct sauce,” he says, pronouncing each word like he’s sharing a song title.
I feel the boys’ eyes suddenly stuck on me like the mouths of sucker fish. I stare into my empty container. There’s no genie inside, or even a bee, just bits of clotted food.
“You must be tired, all that driving.”
Mr. Silberbach’s words came to me out of a black void deeper than sleep. He thought I’d dozed off, but I’m pretty sure I passed out. Just for a second though, because I still held the picture of his granddaughter in Madagascar.
“You want to see something?” Mr. Silberbach asked. He took back his photograph. He rocked himself to his feet, his body hunched in the shape of a question mark. I rose like a lifting fog and followed him to his kitchen.
“Here,” he said, stopping beside the kind of kitchen table I’d seen in Salvation Army stores. He was so stiff, he had to swivel his whole body to look me in the eye. “Did you ever read ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ by Edgar Alan Poe?”
“Armadillos?” I knew what they looked like—rat-sized, armored rodents that could roll themselves into a ball. About Poe all I knew was that he wrote spooky stories.
“No, Amontillado. It’s a kind of wine. Poe wrote about a man who feels insulted by an old acquaintance, so the insulted one lures the insulter, a man called Fortunato who’s a very heavy drinker, down into the cellar deep under his house with the promise of some very special wine called Amontillado. Then the insulted fellow chains up Fortunato to a wall in the corner of the cellar and quickly builds a brick wall in front of him so nobody would ever find him. Fortunato is left there behind the wall in the dark. Forever.”
The hair on the back of my neck tickled like someone was blowing on it. Very creepy. When I looked warily at Mr. Silberbach, he was gesturing at his kitchen table.
The rain drums on the roof, hissing on the concrete and grass outside the shelter where puddles are forming. A narrow stream leaks into the shelter from a big puddle like a finger sticking out of a palm. The boys have stopped looking at me.
I peek at Yellow Bands, who rubs his chin. “You think they could grow meat like that? Outside the cow? Could you pull out the calf right away, when it was just a couple of cells, and start growing it on the outside, and then get the cow pregnant again, you know, like, the next day? And then the day after that and the day after that? No waiting around for a birth. There’d be big warehouses with tanks where Oofy calves grew to birth size, and when they were ready, they could be harvested for meat.”
“Does a cow have a cycle like a human woman?” Blue Jeans asks. “Does it get new eggs once a month? Or does it take a cow longer because it’s a bigger animal?”
I wince, expecting the suck of their mouth-eyes, but feel nothing.
“Well, it’s got to take less time than a whole pregnancy.”
“And I bet you could speed things up by injecting the cows with hormones or something.”
“I think they call them steers when they’re for food.” The boys speak quickly, excited by their idea.
“Whoever works it out, they’d be billionaires,” Yellow Bands says. “But you’ve got to be an expert on how a cow’s body works.”
Cows have more than one stomach. Would the boys want to know that?
And then the boys do look at me again, though I’m sure I haven’t spoken. I focus on the splinter of wood I push at with my thumb. I’m trying and failing to force it through my skin. I’m no expert at cow anatomy, I want to tell them. I don’t even have a period. I don’t eat enough. Are they worried that I might steal their idea?
“The hell—” Yellow Bands mutters. “All of this Oofy technology won’t be ready for decades, anyway.” He catches the ball Blue Jeans tosses and rubs it with his palm and stubby fingers.
“Nope,” Blue Jeans says. “Probably not. But this meat talk is making me hungry. I could use a double cheeseburger.”
My shrunken stomach growls, even though I’ve filled it with a Meals on Wheels lunch.
“This is a model for a life-sized sculpture,” Mr. Silberbach said. “If I get the materials, I’ll build it in
the yard. I thought of the idea one night when I couldn’t sleep. I’m no artist. I was a school teacher.”
The “model” on his kitchen table was under a dome—a turned-over glass mixing bowl, actually.
“I cover it with a bowl because of ants,” Mr. Silberbach said. “They smell everything in the summer. They’re after the dried apple, which I used instead of clay. My daughter was supposed to bring me some clay, but she kept forgetting. She’s worried all the time about Sarah in the Peace Corps. There’s no clay sitting around at Meals on Wheels is there?”
“None that I’ve ever seen,” I said.
The apple part of Mr. Silberbach’s sculpture model didn’t look dried. The puffy brown lump sat in a pool of leakage. Mr. Silberbach lifted the dome with two hands, as if he was removing the crown from a king, and the sweet odor of rot hit me like a punch. Backed up against the rotten apple was a pink plastic doll. I rested my hand on the table’s sticky surface and bent over for a closer look. It was one of those troll dolls—I hadn’t seen one in years. Mr. Silberbach’s bug-eyed, grinning troll stood naked and with open arms, like it was waiting for a hug. But the thing I remembered most about trolls was the long hair that burst from their heads like colored fire, and this one was completely bald. There were dots in its scalp where the hair had been pulled out. Had Mr. Silberbach found the troll like this or plucked it clean for his art?
Then I noticed that the doll was wired to the rotten apple: paper clips had been twisted around each spread-eagled arm and jammed into the rotten apple. And then I saw the wall of dominos stacked like bricks a few inches in front of the troll. I gasped, tasting a hunger burp.
“That’s right,” Mr. Silberbach whispered, admiring his own work. “It’s Fortunato. He’s been chained up and walled in by Montressor, the man he insulted. Fortunato will never escape. He would have been in total darkness, but we have to pretend that the light shining on him here is the opposite of light.
“The light is the dark?” I asked.
“If it was actual total darkness, how would we see him? You’d have to take my word for it. Besides, Fortunato eventually took care of the light. I call my sculpture ‘Fortunato’s Side.’ Because we’re on his side of the bricks. Edgar Alan Poe didn’t write about that. But this became Fortunato’s whole world.”
The basketball boys don’t mention that there could be Oofy piglets or lambs, too. Any kind of meat could be grown. If I was a vegetarian and chose never to eat the meat from the entrees I deliver to my Meals and Wheels clients, I’d probably starve to death. The life plan I stay faithful to doesn’t leave me much of a margin.
The snickering boys sit together now. The rain has thinned to a drizzle. These are not kids I would have known when I was in school. These boys would have been in different classes, the ones for smart kids, classes where topics like “extra-uterine fetal incubation” came up. They would have eaten lunch at tables far from mine and taken school buses to and from homes on streets I never knew existed before I started driving for Meals on Wheels.
“One business not to put your money in would be rubbers,” Yellow Bands says. His big grin and squishy body remind me of Mr. Silberbach’s troll. “Everybody could have sex all the time and not worry about it. Women could sell the little embryos. Now that would be a business to get into.”
I blush. I’d been looking at the puddles and thinking of the wrong kind of rubbers.
“Wouldn’t the embryos belong to the men, too?”
“Maybe women would keep it secret and take all the money. There’d probably be legal hassles. Women.” Yellow Bands shakes his head, looking more like a troll with every word he speaks.
“It would be the same thing as with the cows, anyway, wouldn’t it?” Blue Jeans asks. “The technology won’t be around for years.”
The boys are quiet again. There’s just the rain. I’m picturing a huge building with row after row of incubating human fetuses lined up in thousands of tanks: Oofy babies arranged in order of development, so if you ran down a row a long, long way it would be like time-lapse photography. You could pretend you were watching a single baby grow from something the size of a pea into a fully ripe infant. In the very last tank in the row, I picture a full-sized baby troll, as bald as Mr. Silberbach’s Fortunato.
“This is Fortunato after Montressor, the insulted man, left him chained up and walled in,” Mr. Silberbach said. “But what Montressor didn’t know is that Fortunato didn’t die. Nope. At first he was terrified, alone in the damp, cold blackness. Who wouldn’t be? But then Fortunato figured it out. And after that, he lived a long time, relatively speaking. As happy and fulfilled as any human being has a right to be.”
“What did he figure out?” Bent over and dizzy, I resisted resting my chin on Mr. Silberbach’s dirty kitchen table. My gaze stuck on the bald, grinning troll doll’s whiteless bug eyes.
“Out of the silence and darkness, Fortunato heard a tiny buzz. He wasn’t alone—a fly was walled up with him. What did he know about flies? Not much, he’d never thought about them except to swat them away from his food. Minor nuisances. He listened to this fly circle his head, and he tensed—all of him tensed, his muscles, tendons, bones, even his skin. He was waiting for the fly to land on him—to touch his flesh. Where would it make contact? He was certain it would settle on his face, and his eyes and nose and lips twitched with anticipation. And, oddly enough, chained there in total blackness, Fortunato felt his features for the first time in his life. Because his face, his body, his senses—these were all he had.”
Riveted to the face of the troll doll, my dry eyes burned. “What happened to Fortunato’s fear?”
“Fear was a feeling too, just like his other senses. Feelings were all he had. They were his treasures, he realized.”
“Fear was a treasure?”
“Fear and everything else he felt.”
“And when did dark become light?”
“Ahh—” Mr. Silberbach reached out and floated his palm just above the doll. “Light is supposed to come first, but it didn’t for Fortunato. First came time—he was thinking about the rest of his life, and he measured it against that buzzing fly’s. Neither had more than a day or two left, but to the fly, that day or two was a lifetime. And this was Fortunato’s triumph. Chained up and walled in down in Montressor’s cellar, he determined that he would live out his remaining time with the sensibility of a fly. If every breath was a week, if every heartbeat a day—I’ve figured this out—forty-eight hours times sixty minutes, times an average heart rate of sixty beats a minute—Fortunato had forty-seven years of fly life left—he’d die at a ripe old age.”
I shivered. I no longer felt my legs. I stood up straight, but it was like I was a pencil balanced on an eraser. The slightest nudge would have toppled me. Did troll-Fortunato wink at me? I tried to imagine living forty-seven years in the dark.
“The light?”
“Simple. Fortunato had so much time, he invented it.” Mr. Silberbach swiveled toward me, pointed at his head, and squinted one caterpillar-browed eye. “With the power of his mind. It didn’t take him long. A thousand heartbeats, maybe—less than three of his years.”
I heard my own heartbeat, which sounded like a dripping faucet.
“What did he eat?” I asked.
“Eat? I thought you were worried about the light. What did he eat? He licked the sweat from his upper lip: water, salt—plenty of nutrients to last forty-seven of the kind of years that were his to live. But the light—that he molded out of darkness. Like a bat’s echolocation. You know what that is? Echolocation?”
“No.”
“I told you, Fortunato had his feelings. He threw his treasure at his world, and what there was to see, he saw. He ‘saw’ the bricks a few feet in front of his face, and he saw the mortar between them. He saw the grains of sand in the mortar, the flecks of light in the mica. And you know what? He looked so hard, he sa
w the history of each rock and pebble and grain of sand—he gazed into the past, for millions of years, from when the rocks were bubbling lava that swelled into mountains and hardened. And then he watched as the mountains were worn away by rivers, wind and rain, then pounded into beach sand by waves. Fortunato saw the first creatures crawl out of the sea. On Fortunato’s side of the brick wall he saw forward and backward for as long as there was time.”
Mr. Silberbach’s tongue slipped up to the little groove under his nose. When he pulled it back in, the skin over his lip glistened. “Fortunato was a god,” he said. “And he never would have known it if he hadn’t insulted somebody and gotten himself imprisoned in a cellar wall.”
Then I must have fainted again, or fallen asleep, because I dreamed I was in a tent in Madagascar, and a young woman I understood to be Mr. Silberbach’s granddaughter was talking about honeybees:
“When their hive is attacked by a Japanese giant hornet, the sting of which is fatal to bees, the entire population of honeybees surrounds the invader. And then they vibrate—a mass vibration that produces heat at a level that honeybees can stand, but that’s intolerable to the giant hornet, which melts to death from the inside out. As if it was microwaved.”
I heard singing—a familiar tune in an odd language, and then I saw Mrs. Poulter and a smiling old man sitting in folding chairs in another corner of the tent. They wore matching safari hats and bobbed their heads in time to the music.
“‘The Impossible Dream’ in Malagasy,” said the man with Mrs. Poulter, who clasped a cassette player to her chest. Someone passed me a Meals on Wheels food container.
“We’re going to have hornets for lunch,” Mr. Silberbach’s granddaughter said. “Toasted hornets. Yum.”
I woke up sitting on Mr. Silberbach’s sofa. I held a glass of water. How did I get there? He couldn’t have carried me. Dust filmed the glass. Particles swam in the water. I held the cool, smooth glass against my forehead, then peered through it—walls and furniture were warped like reflections in funhouse mirrors. Did I dare look at Mr. Silberbach through the glass?
Women of Consequence Page 3