by Darrin Doyle
Their father didn’t seem to notice. He kept talking, flapping like a bird as he tried halfheartedly to take flight from the front cement steps and over the Bader’s dilapidated two-story across the street. Murray had strapped on the latest prototype of his Man Wings—this particular untested pair built from wax paper, tin foil, and eight hundred melted-together plastic Sporks.
“McKenna, you’re in charge of baths. Three a week. Don’t get soap in her eyes, and pay special mind to the stumps. Be gentle but firm, dig into those crevices like you mean it, and don’t let her drown.” He paused long enough to ignite a Kool 100 and kick his flip-flops onto the lawn, for less ballast. He resumed flapping, the white cigarette hanging from his lips. He was doing a dry run, a “flap check,” trying to get a feel for the wings and how they responded to his body before the Actual Launch Date. (The Actual Launch Date never came. FYI.)
McKenna and Toby stood on the grass near the steps. Toby, like a Wimbledon ball-boy, sprinted to retrieve the discarded flip-flops. McKenna watched her father, anticipating with each swoosh of the wings that he might actually rise off the stoop, take to the sky, and never return.
Murray continued with his instructions: “And space them out, okay? Or else it won’t count. Like for example Monday, Wednesday, Friday. That’s not a rigid schedule, understand? Just a ‘for instance.’ Nobody’s trying to lock you into anything. No contract except the one you draw up in your own head. I trust you. Pick different days! Have fun with it! You’re a smart girl. You’ll figure it out.”
McKenna hated her sister’s stumps, the little knobs of skin where the feet were supposed to be. Like drawstring purses cinched tight. The mere mention of them upset McKenna’s stomach.
Later that night, she tried to get Toby to switch jobs.
McKenna’s eyes had adjusted to the darkness, and she could see in the adjoining bed that Toby was also awake, studying the ceiling, perhaps imagining, as McKenna was, two-week-old Audrey walking acrobatically on her hands, ascending a flight of stairs, entering Heaven for all eternity.
McKenna tried to make her whisper sound casual, conversa-tional—any way but desperate: “Baths are so easy. And you love the water.”
“I love swimming,” Toby answered. “Not water. No way I’m washing Stumpy.”
“You want to change her diapers? That’s nasty!”
“They can’t smell as bad as you.”
It was a low blow. McKenna had no response. She felt her face blushing. Despite being triple-wrapped in Bounty and sprayed with Misty’s patchouli oil, the soiled underwear McKenna had stashed behind her dresser (until smuggling it to the toilet before bedtime) had filled the room with rank. Her neck itched with perspiration. She tried to sleep. Toby snored for hours.
4.
Murray Mapes wanted to give his new daughter the feet she’d forgotten to carry out of the womb. By his own estimation, he’d been an inventor for twenty years at the time she was born. He liked to tell the story of how, at age five, he’d transformed three plywood boards, a handful of nails, and four industrial-sized rubber bands into a gun and turret mounted on a Radio Flyer wagon. The weapon could launch screws and nails up to twenty-seven feet.
In the following decades, Murray filed dozens of patents (the first at age twelve), including, but not limited to, the Clock Hat, the Squeezable Survival Kit, the Hood Wiperz, the Detachable Shirt Collar, the Hot Dog Pouch, the Pencil Pachyderm, the Collapsible Ukulele with Hairbrush, and the Moldproof Towel Organizer.
Murray’s habit was to pursue each new idea with an intensity approaching madness. Once a brainstorm hit him, he spent every free moment in the basement, from which issued clanks and buzzes, scrapings and explosions, celebrity impersonations, paroxysms of laughter, and, now and then, weeping. He pretty much drained his emotional well down there. If Misty and the twins saw Murray ten minutes each day during an invention jag, they felt blessed.
Then, three months after the idea first took shape in his mind, Murray would ascend from his dungeon. He would kick open the basement door, his clothes and hair covered in sawdust and metal shavings, bearing his new baby. He would promptly demonstrate the gadget to his wife, children, mother-in-law, and a few select neighbors, to varying degrees of applause.
That’s as far as Murray took any one idea. The fury of his initial passion left him exhausted and listless, and he was unable, or unwilling, or a combination of both, to actually thrust his inventions into the public sphere. Try as he might (“might” being the operative word) he could never find an investor to fund the production of his goods. And of course, there wasn’t enough money in the Mapes’s bank account to make the inventions anything more than conversation pieces in a future attic museum.
Daily bread found its way to the table because Murray worked the line at Hanson Mold, a factory that made plastic injection molds for automobiles. It was a thankless, noisy existence. Murray hunched hour after hour in the shadow of the 300T Castmaster press, far from natural light and fresh air. By age forty, half of his hearing would be gone, causing him to shout for his salt and pepper. Red trenches from the safety goggles would become permanent circles around his eyes. His palms would thicken with calluses from repeated burns. His fingers would chap and split.
But that was years later. And on the plus side, Hanson Mold was the type of repetitive, mindless, union-protected work that allowed a man to daydream. While the radio rocked “Running on Empty” and “Point of Know Return” for the hundredth time in a month, and while his coworkers bickered about the pros and cons of low-cal shortening substitutes as a way of diverting their attentions from their indignation over the latest infringement on personal rights (Article 4.9.4 of the Standard Operating Procedures now stipulated that all mustaches had to be “well-groomed”), Murray lived somewhere else, sketching in his mind (and during lunch breaks, on McDonald’s bags), the perfect pair of prosthetic feet for his breathtaking new daughter.
Audrey was a comely baby; this much is indisputable, no matter how twisted and grotesque people try to make her in legend.
Henri Rousseau said, “Beauty is the promise of happiness.”
Notice that the “promise of happiness” is all it takes. No actual happiness is necessary.
Audrey was beautiful like the fever that kills a virus. Like a vivid dream of an ex-lover. Like a perfect beach moment just before the carnation horizon is swallowed by a night so complete you forget pink is a color. Like a fat, barn-red apple straddling the line between ripeness and rot.
Audrey stole the breath of all passersby who happened to glance into the stroller Misty piloted to the supermarket. Half a dozen times a day, a bespectacled old retiree leaned in, blew kisses, and tried to stammer out a verbal appraisal of Audrey’s intense splendor. An impossible task. Misty smiled, her eyes flashing a crumb-sized speck of doubt, or maybe exhaustion, and offered a quiet, “You’re sweet to say so,” or, “She takes after her daddy,” before bustling away.
McKenna and Toby trailed behind, kicking pebbles.
5.
The twins were midway between five and six when Audrey was born, so in theory they were able to help in the ways their father wanted them to help. But the only skill they’d mastered thus far was sprinting through the house in Dukes of Hazzard underwear, spitting water at lampshades.
Toby was eight minutes older than McKenna—a fact Toby kept filed in his mental reserves and brought out as a way of settling certain profound disagreements, such as who would eat the last cookie, who would sit in Daddy’s TV chair when Daddy was working in the basement, who could belch the loudest, who would end up married first and to a more beautiful wife (he always said “wife,” no matter how much McKenna protested), and who would be crowned heavyweight boxing champion of the world.
According to the baby books, McKenna and Toby were physically identical in nearly every visible way for their first four years: Long, narrow feet and hands; tiny rumps; wide ears flat to their heads; fair skin; green eyes; mud-brown hair, cut by Misty i
nto “bowls”; and prominent rib cages and spinal cords.
“Gangly kids,” according to their parents.
“Gangly if skeletons are gangly,” according to their maternal grandmother.
Grandma Pencil possessed authority on the issue of malnour-ishment, having been on a death march in the Philippines when she was a child. If she found herself outside arm’s reach of a food source, she became uncomfortable to the point of itchiness. She would snatch at invisible flies, her wrinkled forehead worming with sweat. Nonsense words like “mag-mag” and “riddle kidder” fled her throat at six per second until Misty raced to her side and inserted a disc of summer sausage into her mouth. Breathing and temperature returned to normal; no more riddle kidders.
To avert such a crisis, Grandma Pencil stocked her purse with peanuts and American cheese. However, fear of robbery prevented her from taking her purse anywhere unless “absolutely necessary,” which meant the post office or bank. The Mapes home, therefore, was Snack Food Central. Bowls were positioned in a dozen strategic locations: Pringles on the buffet; roasted almonds on the bookshelf; Hershey’s Kisses on the end table; Corn Nuts on the telephone stand; sunflower seeds on the kitchen counter beside the toaster. As most people know, Grandma Pencil lived five houses down the street. She visited often.
Perhaps because of this gratuitous access to food, the twins rarely felt hungry. At dinner, they carved frowny faces into their mashed potatoes or flicked chunks of hot dog into Snoodles’s mouth.
Murray and Misty had grown used to the twins’ eating habits: “If they’re skinny, they’re skinny.” All a parent could do was put food on the table—the rest was beyond their control. If the twins were indeed “adults-in-training,” as Misty called them, then they would never, never, learn to be adults unless allowed to make their own decisions, which meant making a few mistakes along the way. Clever sound bites filled Misty’s arsenal, and she lobbed these like grenades at Grandma Pencil as well as at the nosy kindergarten teachers who attributed the twins’ lack of appetite to, among other things, their late and inconsistent bedtimes. “Nothing earned means nothing learned,” was Misty’s reply. And “Boners make geniuses of men.” She meant “mistakes.” This last one might have been a red flag for the nuns, come to think of it.
But Misty’s grenades were tossed with pins unpulled. Neither she nor Murray was a fan of confrontation. Not with each other, not with their kids, not with anyone. They were mellow, pragmatic young adults quick to remind anyone who would listen that they were good listeners. In 1972, while stoned and drying the dishes, twenty-year-old inventor Murray had invented a simile that served him and his twin-pregnant nineteen-year-old wife for the next two decades: parenthood was like bowling. You gave your ball a hearty push in the best way you knew. Then all you could do was wait. You stood anxiously, shouting with glee when your ball toppled ten pins, or shedding a tear as it thudded into the gutter.
Grandma Pencil tried to fatten up the twins. She took them on the No. 7 GRATA bus to the movie theater at North Kent Mall. She bought tubs of buttered popcorn. At dinner, she told them a fairy would visit their bedsides with a train of solid silver if they would eat two whole hot dogs (“Without buns, even!”) and just a “f stful” of macaroni and cheese. She melted lard into their oatmeal, hoping they wouldn’t notice.
And then, when she was especially ornery—when not only were Toby and McKenna hurdling her legs in a mockery of the slaughter of the Native Americans, but their father was also filling the house with a blinding turpentine reek—at times like these, Grandma Pencil pulled out the heavy artillery.
She would cry. Softly at first. A whimpered coo, a morning dove. When the twins didn’t notice, or when their notice consisted only of timid glances in her direction, Grandma’s volume and urgency increased until they approached, heads down, index fingers idly exploring nostrils.
“Are we being too loud?” McKenna would say. Always McKenna.
A long pause.
“That’s not why I’m crying,” Grandma Pencil answered. Sniffle. Sob.
“You hate to see Indians getting chased, don’t you?”
“Anyone with a heart would pity the red man,” she admitted. “But tears won’t help his plight.”
“You want us to put on pants,” Toby would say. “No chance!”
She dabbed her eyes with tissue. “It’s your house. You may do as you please.”
As the twins turned to resume their chase, Grandma would freeze them in their tracks by launching into a detailed account of how she, as a girl, had watched a pretty young woman collapse in exhaustion after walking twenty-seven hours in 104-degree heat without food or water. “And what did this woman get for falling to the ground? A bullet to the nose. Boom. Face explosion. Bits of face on every leaf.”
Grandma then nodded at Toby’s nose-digging finger and described how her own mother had done the same thing, except instead of flicking her goblins away or rubbing them under a chair, “Mummy” had saved them between her toes so that little Pencil could have something, anything, in her belly at the end of the day.
Then came the story of her shoes swamped with pus and blood. And the noises that rang through the darkness, the moans of children dying of thirst, the shrieks of girls being violated. And the cold night winds that made you wish your toes had been chopped off. And the monkeys that laughed from the trees. And the bats that landed on your chest and nibbled at you because you were too weak to shoo them. Then the recurring dream of cutting into your own leg with a knife and fork, and how the dream made you deliriously happy, causing you to wake in a puddle of drool (that you eagerly lapped up, sharing with no one).
At about this time, McKenna would sprint to the kitchen. She would squat beneath the table, sobbing, squeezing her sphincter until coaxed out by Misty with promises that she wouldn’t have to eat Grandma’s leg or anything else she didn’t want to eat.
6.
McKenna had to bathe baby Audrey. Three times a week, she hugged shampoo, towel, washcloth, and soap to her chest and walked through the dining room to the kitchen, where she arranged the supplies on the counter. She could hear coos and gurgles resonating through the house from somewhere unknown, most likely Mother’s arms, most likely Mother’s bed upstairs, where Audrey was being rocked, sung to, and loved behind closed doors. McKenna dragged the collapsible stepladder from the space between the refrigerator and wall and spread it open at the foot of the sink. Following her father’s instructions (pinned by magnet to the refrigerator, “just in case” McKenna’s memory faltered [it never did]), McKenna climbed the stepladder. She unfolded the towel across the countertop. She filled the sink with two inches of “tepid” water. She submerged the washcloth, swished it, let it drink.
She pulled open a drawer and withdrew the silver bell, which was smaller than her five-year-old fist. Using three overhead arm motions, as deliberate as a lion tamer cracking a whip, she rang it. The high-pitched sound, her father had said, would ascend stairs, drift around corners, pass through doors and walls. The special curvature, along with the pea-sized, felt-covered clapper, allowed the bell to be audible from one hundred yards away, and most importantly—this was Murray’s big selling point—at a consistent volume. In other words, to a person standing two feet from the bell it would be no louder than it was to a person two hundred feet away. The patent was for The Tap-on-the-Shoulder Handheld Alarmer Bell.
Only one such bell was ever produced, and it remains in Mc-Kenna’s possession, tossed carelessly into the bottom of an un-labeled box in the attic.
Since the birth of her sister, McKenna had noticed that Audrey’s tiniest squeals were audible from almost any location in the house. Not always at the same volume, to be sure, but what did that matter? McKenna rang the bell and wrestled with the notion that her father’s invention—and by extension, her father—was a crock.
Still, the bell did summon her mother every time. So perhaps it worked. Perhaps Murray was as brilliant as he claimed. Mc-Kenna wanted it to be s
o.
Misty padded barefoot into the kitchen and placed Audrey, stripped to her skivvies, onto the towel. McKenna ascended the stepladder. Her sister was the size of a doll. She unpinned the cloth diaper and began the bath. Misty stood watch the first few times, offering tips for scrubbing the hair and neck. Once satisfied that Audrey was in no danger, she patted McKenna’s head, offered a “Thanks, buckaroo,” and retired to the living room for a nap.
McKenna hated cleaning the monster. Audrey’s bald head made her resemble Grandpa Mapes in his coffin. Red bumps that Mom called “baby acne” speckled Audrey’s forehead. Her unwieldy head lolled as if her neck had no bones. Instead of a thingy, there was a tidy slit between her legs.
McKenna could get past the lack of a thingy. She knew about anatomy. She understood that she herself had no thingy, and Mom had no thingy, and that no matter what Toby said, this didn’t make them any less of a person.
The baby kicked. Her legs resembled broken branches.
But without feet, can they still be called legs? Without ball peen and claw, is it still a hammer? Without tines, is it still a fork? Is a spoon without its bowl still a spoon?
By the end of the first week of washing, the stumps ceased to frighten McKenna. They became sad. They made her feel as if a heavy blanket were smothering her chest, suffocating her. Part of McKenna wanted to protect this crippled, sweet-smelling girl, this big-headed angel with the plump cheeks and curled swath of blond hair and nipples no bigger than periods. At the same time, she wanted to lift her by the throat and stuff her into the garbage disposal.
What made Audrey a monster was her mouth. Always needing to be filled. The mouth opened wide, enormously wide, as she lunged at any object in her path. Her own fingers were a typical target, but when these were restrained, she craned and twisted until her gums hit pay dirt: McKenna’s hands; the washcloth; the rubber duck; the faucet tap. Audrey’s eyes, pulsating like Kmart blue lights, registered no recognizable emotion. She resembled the hatchlings on Wild Kingdom that probed the air blindly with their beaks, ready to swallow what ever dropped into their dark holes.