by Lucy Ellmann
In revenge, at Christmas, Sam would make a huge gingerbread house, TWO FEET HIGH, with sugar icicles hanging from the rafters, roof tiles made of m&ms, vanilla-wafer window shutters, a chocolate door-knob and a WITCH woman standing just inside. A candied fruit path led round to the back. Dot and Ferdinand picked at all this for months, sucking at the gutters and pulling chunks off, until finally kicking at it until it collapsed.
For Easter they decorated hollowed-out eggs, by drawing on them with delicate wax-melting implements and dyeing them. On Easter morning they had an indoor JELLY-BEAN hunt but that was it — no ham, no bunny.
Ferdinand wanted to enter a float in the 4th of July Parade. The theme that year was George Washington. Ferdinand decided to do a float called: ‘George Washington as a Baby’. They got the old bassinet down from the attic, decorated it with red, white and blue crêpe paper and tinsel tassels and in it laid an effigy of the infant president.
They were sure they’d win a prize but DIDN’T. On the day, they trudged TWO-AND-A-HALF MILES, maybe THREE, with the bassinet strapped on to a toy wagon which Ferdinand pulled, stopping every few paces to blow his bugle (Ferdinand in red breeches and white knee socks, Dot in a hooped skirt made by their mother). They kept George Washington in his bassinet for years afterwards, lured friends up to the attic to see the founding father there.
They had an AMERICAN CHILDHOOD in SUBURBIA, what can I tell you? There was popcorn. There were toasted marshmallows. There were sprinklers, sparklers, dinner rolls, pickles, popsicles, icicles, grazed knees, glass in the foot, goldfish in a bag from the fair, vacant lots, school glue, car trips, Girl Scout cookies, breezes, one attempt at fishing, swings that went frighteningly high amongst oak trees, a giant cement TUBE to crawl through in some distant unfamiliar park, chipped teeth, bloody noses and MOTHERS WHO WERE ALWAYS AT HOME.
Dot and Ferdinand presented Pepito at the school Pet Show. He got Honourable Mention! They watched Saturday morning cartoons together, eating cereal. They put on plays, went skating, peeled bits of paintwork off the skirting boards, went on picnics and bicycled round and round the school playground on weekends when nobody else was there.
Between cracks in the sidewalk outside their house, Ferdinand found fossilised SHELLS. He told Dot they were trillions of years old. Weird things, curled and curlicued like time itself. What to DO with all the fossils in the world? Impossible to either find them all, or get RID of them.
Dot’s IRRITATION when she came home from school, to find her mother smoking, reading and wearing glasses, or SEWING something, when she should have been thinking about DOT. Her ELATION when her mother was in the kitchen baking cookies and ready to hear which teacher had been mean. Sighting her mother’s soft shoulders and yellow hair through the open back door.
The SECURITY of staying out late on summer nights after supper, running wild with the neighbour kids, knowing her mother was home. The INSECURITY of leaving her, to stay over at some friend’s house where Dot wouldn’t dare suck her thumb, or going off on the school bus to some MUSEUM. Missing your mother! What a great thing to HAVE, a mother. She knew Dot’s favourite MEAL: French Onion Soup and Apple Pie.
Because of her mother, Dot loved that house and her own tiny room with her mother’s sewing machine perched (temporarily) on the desk. Dot kept her baby pillow, slept with it so much it had to be replaced with a NEW Little Pillow but Dot weathered this. On her bed, the quilt her mother had made from many old dresses, its tight ruffled discs. The closet with its squeaky door-knob, filled with old toys and unknown family stuff like HAT BOXES. On the bedside table her electric alarm clock with its orange glow that comforted Dot at night, when all she could see outside were tiny dots of light like stars from the windows of neighbouring houses, or during TORNADO SCARES, when the sky for once was not blue but ominously yellow-grey.
The Wholly Irrelevant Year of the Barbecue
There are events which CHANGE LIVES. For Dot it was the arrival of a BARBECUE JOINT in town. It just opened one day smelling of barbecue sauce and serving barbecued stuff and everyone liked it! Dot’s family ate there so often it coloured the whole year for Dot. For the whole family. The whole TOWN.
It just seemed to appear one day. A whole new log cabin-style building was built for it. The chairs and tables were made from huge chunks of log too. It just opened one day smelling of its own particular brand of BARBECUE SAUCE, enticed everyone into its dark wooden interior to eat barbecued meat with barbecue sauce on it and chunky French fries and Coke and root beer and corn cobs and salad and coleslaw on the side, filled the TOWN with that smell and messed up the sidewalk outside with plastic platters and forks and scraps of hamburger bun and gnawed RIBS and onion rings in the gutter, fed everyone in town on barbecued meats and barbecue sauce and big chunky potatoes until the walls of the restaurant were SATURATED with the smell of barbecue sauce and everybody in there was SICK of barbecue sauce and barbecued meat and chunky potatoes and coleslaw on the side. Everyone OVERDOSED on barbecued meat and barbecue sauce. For a year everyone WELCOMED the barbecue joint, tried every dish, talked about it on the way home (though you could barely WALK after eating there), went back again. Then — NO! NO MORE, sick of the sight of it, sick of the smell of it, sick of the THOUGHT of it, never want to smell that smell again or see that food.
And that was that! The place shut down. This is what HAPPENS. People take you up, embrace you, welcome you, DROWN you in their own particular brand of BARBECUE SAUCE and then they drop you, no explanation offered!
There’s no knowing just how that barbecue joint, that barbecue taste, that barbecue smell and that eventual barbecue FAILURE affected everyone in town. BUT IT MUST HAVE.
The Best Game in Town
In the attic, near George Washington as a Baby, Dot found an old corset with fluffy edges, which reminded her of Rowlandson (her parents had a book of Rowlandson prints). She showed the corset to Ferdinand. Ferdinand painted a pubic triangle on Dot and lines on her chest suggesting breasts and thus they developed their cheerful form of rumpy-pumpy. They were not as PLUMP as Rowlandson would have liked but they had gusto and merriment. Ferdinand cried ‘Wench!’ while he fucked Dot boisterously from behind.
At first they didn’t suspect the IN-OUT routine; they thought you just put the dick inside and left it there a while. But they soon made their own improvements on the basic PLUG idea. It was PLAY, the best indoor game they’d ever found, better than TIDDLY WINKS or Snakes & Ladders or even Monopoly (ANYTHING’s better than Snakes & Ladders). How close they felt afterwards, sitting at the kitchen table competing against each other in drawing contests (no Rowlandson now, just a tree, a camel, a kangaroo), or doing their homework.
It was a trusty source of fun, but they didn’t crave it in between. In fact they often FORGOT they were lovers, forgot they’d gone beyond the ginger touching of tongues so repulsive to parents, or sneaking peeks at each other through a crack in the bathroom door. They kept it secret, even from themselves.
Over the years they elaborated on the original conception, adjusting to real pubic hair and real breasts without difficulty. Caught in a sudden thunderstorm when they were alone at the orchard one day, picking apples, they had to shelter in the old corrugated-iron shed. Dot idly squeezed Ferdinand’s dick until it PUSHED BACK. There on the damp ground, rain pounding hard on the roof, Ferdinand fucked Dot until she came in a new way, lengthily, LOUDLY. It astonished them both but was instantly incorporated into their repertoire.
It was sex without a single PROBLEM. No distaste, for they were family. No disapproval, for they were equally guilty. No big surprises, since they invented it together. No agenda, for there seemed to be no future. No THOUGHT, only the familiar touch, a continuing AGREEMENT that needed no revision. Like rain on a corrugated roof: a simple perfect thing.
Onions & Lemons
INSECTS OUTWEIGH US. Chickens outnumber us four to one! The present human population of the earth could fit into Lake Windermere! There is liquid everywhere, running t
hrough the body, through the buildings, down the hills, streaming always downwards, muddy bloody water running through the body and the land.
What do you do if you have a fatal disease? If it’s not KILLING you yet, you pretend it’s not there. Your disease humiliates you, so you try not to think about it. But you’re already HALF-DEAD just from KNOWING about it! You are already shutting down operations, not BOTHERING with stuff. You are already preparing yourself for losing and leaving everything.
At first Maisy was stoical, in the grand heroic tradition. She told no one, rested secretly, canned fruit, made pies, tearfully sorted through papers when nobody else was around. INCENSED that she and her concerns would soon amount to NOTHING, she embroidered. The cushion covers piled up, enough cushion covers to last her family and their descendants for centuries (as if THEY wouldn’t die too). She suffered and felt virtuous in her hiding of it, got OFF on this, her only comfort. But it was a withdrawal: she kept turning from Sam in the bed. Eventually he demanded an explanation. When she told him, he cried and BEGGED her not to die.
That night they went out and got drunk together. They talked about their life, the children, Ferdinand’s gifts. They talked about their love. They talked MONEY. But the DISEASE they did not discuss, out of sheer terror (and no, you DON’T get to know what it was: this is not a course in MEDICINE).
Wandering home through the back alleys of Cincinnati, they almost tumbled over a lot of small round fruits or vegetables that lay across the alleyway, dumped from some restaurant’s trash-can. They leaned over and examined them a bit, then walked on hesitantly. Maisy said she thought they were lemons. Sam thought onions. In the end he had to go back and check! As he wandered away into the darkness, he told Maisy that if they turned out to be lemons he’d take her on a second trip to Mexico.
There was a long silence while Sam scrabbled on the ground somewhere. He finally came back to Maisy, his face wet with tears, and said they were lemons. Maisy never knew if this was true but at that moment, though dying and therefore barely capable of love, she loved him yet.
They arrived in Mexico City just in time for the DAY OF THE DEAD! It could have been a FIASCO. As soon as they got out of the taxi they were confronted by paper skeletons and miniature CORPSES in tiny coffins. In the hotel they found an ofrenda in the front parlour, dedicated to a chambermaid’s baby who had died without being BAPTISED, leaving it stuck in LIMBO and therefore amongst the first due to return for the Day of the Dead. Incense was burning by the altar, which was decorated with yellow marigolds and photos of the dead baby. Brand-new toys had been placed under it, and baby food and baby clothes. The baby was expected any minute!
Sam and Maisy put their suitcases in their quiet shuttered room and went out for something to eat. Men in women’s clothing and skull masks were dancing in the street: the whole world had turned INSIDE OUT. Sam and Maisy passed stalls selling little sugar skulls and paper cut-outs of jovial death scenes. The afterlife seemed pretty much the same as THIS one: you farm, you frolic, you sing, you smile, you dance, you smoke, you carry heavy loads and you EAT. Everyone was buying or cooking food for the dead. It was all too much for Sam and Maisy. They ended up buying a bottle of wine and some bread shaped like BONES and went back to their hotel.
But the next day they were desperate for MORE Day of the Dead! After eating tortillas with beans and green chillies, they wandered into a cemetery that was being dolled up for the dead, with red and yellow flowers and a new dash of white paint on all the gravestones, which gleamed in the sun. Sam and Maisy had only ever viewed death as an INVALIDATION of a person: the dead in America are immediately VACUUMED UP by some giant suburban HOUSEWIFE IN THE SKY (there’s no arguing with HER). But HERE the dead still had a presence, a MEANING. In fact, they OWNED the place!
Wary of ritual, Sam held himself back from true enjoyment of this scene, but Maisy was ENCHANTED. The secret idea she was forming of an AFTERLIFE gave her the foothold she needed to endure the agonies to come, a newfound courage and optimism which found instant expression through SHOPPING.
They went to a market where Maisy bought a colourful skirt for herself, and baskets, then four nice soup bowls for however many family dinners they had left. Tiny toy coffins too! In a junk shop they saw an old revolving lamp with the image of a steam train painted on the shade in acute perspective. The hotter the lamp got, the faster the train went round and round, spewing steam. Sam thought he could detect a faint WHISTLE too, and chugging sounds. So Maisy bought it, their train through this limbo land of death. They carried their loot back to the hotel and held each other all afternoon.
While they were away, Yetta tidied with officious sanctity, forbidding any Hallowe’en shenanigans.
‘How can you dress up when your mother’s sick?’
She stayed up late to combat bacteria and throw out precious stuff. All night the dishwasher and washing machine raged, clothes spinning disconsolately in the drier, every light on. In the morning Dot found all the TOWELS missing and the fridge empty.
‘What, WHAT?’ screeched Yetta. ‘I just cleaned the place up a bit, is that so bad?’
IT WAS BAD.
Limbo Land
What was she dying of? She was dying, that’s all. You think that if you knew what it was you could AVOID it? You could rule it out? But you do accept that it happens, people dwindle and die? They do it ALL THE TIME. They don’t WANT to but they do. It will happen to you and everyone you know, in due course. Whatever the cause — disease or something else — whether or not you try to evade it. Local pollutants, evil grandmas, radiation, a vitamin deficiency, a boring job, asbestos cowboys, the stress of having a GENIUS for a son or an excess of organic produce that needs bottling. IT HAPPENS. Most people in America don’t believe you die if you’re good. They’re wrong.
Of course you’re CURIOUS. We all study illness, our own especially. Every illness reminds you of every other; every time you’re sick in bed you feel like a CHILD sick in bed. You want to watch TV and be brought broth and ice-cream. Maisy became childish in her last days. She surveyed the landscape of her bedroom a thousand times, looked at it in new ways that made it GIGANTIC, unfamiliar, her hands wandering upon the quilt. Her legs now needed someone else to lift them and PUT them in the bed. Her hair was gone, her speech slurred, her face like a MOON.
The sick pound you with the fact that they are sick! New intimacies are required, abhorrent reminders of how ill they are. Dot didn’t mind helping her mother off the toilet or putting on her socks and shoes, but hated and feared what these jobs INDICATED. The progress of the disease was so swift, and there was no going BACK. Each new household chore her father suggested she take on depressed Dot further. Ferdinand was off the hook: in the last year of high school, he had much serious scientific work to do. He cringed from his mother’s death over his microscopes. Sam did the cooking, but Dot did most of the shopping, buying ready-made meals and secret treats for herself like Twinkies, which she ate while listening to her parents in the next room.
The whole thing was GROTESQUE, her mother lying there unable to WASH herself, her father sitting beside her ENDURING that. Every night the lonely meal without her and the dishwashing after. Everything in LIMBO waiting for the DEATH, which would bring some relief. The guilt of thinking this.
Every autumn Maisy had insisted they all get in the car and go for a drive to see Fall Colour. Sam always grumbled about it, saying there were plenty of trees right by their house, but actually he LIKED driving along listening to her exclaim about a red or golden tree they passed. But this year she didn’t mention Fall Colour, and when Sam offered to take her she wouldn’t GO: the pain and the painkillers dissolved her interest in anything. So he brought her red and gold and green leaves in bed.
All cosy in her bed, unwilling ever to be removed from it, Maisy dreamt that she danced with paper skeleton puppets twice her size, and once, that she was running through ankle-deep water in Mexico (but this was probably because she was thirsty).
; Sally, one of Sam’s ex-patients, came to help out a bit. She brought brownies from some unknown bakery that were the best brownies Dot had ever had! She shopped, took Dot to her piano lessons, and she vacuumed. One day Sally got so hot vacuuming she took her shirt off and vacuumed half-NAKED. Dot was embarrassed by all this liveliness and splendour in a house of the dead, but noted that Sally had great breasts. Dot liked having her around! Then Sally stopped coming. See what happens? People come, they vacuum, and THEN what?
After Sally’s disappearance Dot went into a state of TORPOR which saw her through the death and several years after it. Her metabolic rate fell, her friendships disintegrated. She lost the ability to absorb new information or handle personal hygiene. She felt perpetually cold, hungry and lethargic, HALF-DEAD.
Before Dot’s mother got sick she taught Dot things: how to eat, walk, speak, go to the bathroom, tie her shoelaces, draw, read, paint, sew, fasten buttons, snaps, toggles, hooks-and-eyes, comb her hair, brush her teeth, put on skates or galoshes, use a knife and fork, play solitaire, put stamps on envelopes, remember the days of the week, months of the year and how many days in each month. She taught her that i comes before e except after c. She taught Dot how to press autumn leaves in a book, draw a cat, wear sanitary towels and bake the perfect apple pie.
AFTER she got sick, Dot’s mother taught her what sick people LOOK like, how little sick people can DO for you, how aggravating OTHER people are when your mother is sick, how crass doctors and nurses can be, how PREHISTORIC death is, and that your mother is irreplaceable.
Yetta arranged the funeral with gusto — she just TOOK OVER. Sam bought what seemed much too big a tombstone, sarcophagus-style, spotted it and bought it without a word. It had a stone wreath at each corner, and her name — MARY DELANY RADZIWILL — inscribed deep in its side. No RAIN would ever wear that thing out. All joy was bound up with her bones and now they were weighed down with stone.
Ferdinand was stunned amid all the grief to be shunted off to YALE. His presence wasn’t needed. It was only what Sam and Maisy had always HOPED for, but Ferdinand was hurt and went sulkily off to Yale.