by Melanie Tem
Eventually the daughter detached herself from the palsied fist of pain which the other brother, sister, father, mother had become, and sought out a quiet dark corner. Where he waited, had been waiting for more than an hour.
“Everybody’s dying,” she said softly to the wall, as though she knew he was there. Her tongue played with sadness as though it were prey, a mouse that might escape the damp chamber of her mouth. Inhaling deeply, he immediately knew that her vagina was moist, and he stepped into her smell. He then allowed her to smell him. He heard her pulse quicken. He felt his spirit soar, then, and change.
Via his own and her desire and shadow and lament, he willed buttons and fasteners to fade, fabric and elastic to dissolve. As he pressed against her he momentarily permitted her to see him, encouraged her youthful fantasies and her senses engorged by shock to create the bare-skinned youth of him, the long and impossibly thick black hair that became a creature all its own, and the dark penis down there in the shadows, because she wanted only a glimpse.
At that moment she began to weep, not so much a child’s cry as the cry of a child departing, and the depth of it actually surprised him, made him gasp. He was quickly engulfed in this young woman’s exploding emotions, gliding into the turmoil of her, feeling himself alive in the orgiastic brevity of his taking, taking, until she was irrevocably emptied and he, however fleetingly, was filled.
When he returned to their marriage bed he found his wife still asleep. Comatose. Her withered face looked blank, stripped. Perhaps she was dead. He held his breath to listen for hers. He peered at her, laid his ear against her hollow chest. She was not dead.
He slid his arm from under her shoulders and crept out of their room, out of their house. He would leave her for a while, and then he would return to take whatever else she had for him in the last hours of her life.
This time in another emergency room he waited afterwards, and was gratified that he had thought to do so. Numbly, this other teenaged girl rejoined her family, her body spent, her eyes glazed. They would think perhaps that sorrow had overtaken her, and after a few hours there would be speculation that drugs were the cause, and the passions so exhibited would have been as nectar to him, and only after days or months had passed would they suspect that something was dangerously amiss. That she had given away her ability to feel.
The parents’ despair would then be doubled. They would brood over how they had considered the adolescent daughter selfish. They would berate themselves for not understanding how desperately attached she’d been to her little brother, how fervently attached she was to them. They would try their best to reach her, then, but she would be beyond them.
At still another emergency room vigil it was the father he determined to stalk and court. The father welcomed him, grasped him in a savage embrace, wanted to kill him. The father’s rage was a sweet surprise that lasted well into the morning hours, and so he was late getting home.
This time his wife did not respond to him at all when, already wincing from the pangs which he had learned to term “hunger,” he presented himself at her bedside. Her eyes, nostrils, mouth gaped, but it was obvious that she neither saw, smelled, nor tasted him. Her fingers clawed, but she was not touching him.
He knew her, though. She was his mate, his wife, his companion for this stretch of his endless life. Since she’d been a headstrong beauty of fifteen, renowned for her intensity and reputed to be untamable, she had belonged to him. She had loved him beyond all others. She had given him everything she had, countless times, and replenished herself in order to give him more. She would not fail him now. He knew how to take what was his.
He pulled her to him. Her body and mind were flaccid, but she was not dead, for he could feel her heartbeat and her faint rattling breath. He kissed her, bit into her, but she gave him nothing.
He entered her. At the surface and for many layers under the surface there was nothing—no fear, no pain, no passion, no love for him.
Trembling with hunger and with the anticipation of an even greater hunger—starvation, famine—to come, he thrust deeper into her with nails and teeth and penis. So deep, distant and all but closed to him, was something. Joy, he thought. Profound peace. But he could not reach it.
She died in his arms. Reluctant to let her go, he lay there for a few minutes with the emptied body. “More,” he pleaded. He stroked the creviced face. “I am not finished with you. I have not had enough. I need more.” He lifted her in his arms and shook her. Her head lolled back across his forearm but her throat was motionless, did not pulse. Her lips hung slack but did not part for him. She had given him all she had, and it was not nearly sufficient.
Eventually he sighed and rose. Wearily he prepared himself to go out again, wondering whether he would find another mate as good for him as she had been. As he shut and locked the door of their home behind him, it came to him that he had loved her. He was shocked and—for a few, brief astonishing moments—full.
MORE THAN SHOULD BE ASKED
“Jake never was an easy child.” Mrs. Klein always started stories about her son in just that way. It didn’t matter whether the occasion was that Jake had exhibited bad table manners at a dinner party she had given for friends, or that Jake had just been arrested for robbing a convenience store. Even if she were talking to any one of a succession of teachers, social workers, lawyers, police officers. “It was a difficult delivery.” As if that explained everything.
“Evelyn …” Mr. Klein always tried to stop her, smiling at the officer, social worker, person-in-charge, as if this were an old joke. An old joke that was killing him. He loved his son; he loved him very much. But to say that Jake was never an easy child was the grimmest of jokes.
“I’m just trying to fill the officer in, George,” she would admonish him, in a feigned whisper that never failed to embarrass. Then she would turn back to the official with a conspiratorial wink, as if George couldn’t possibly understand what they knew to be obvious, that Jake was a good boy, just currently experiencing some bad luck. A problem of timing, was all. “In the first place, he was nearly a month late, taking on this world in his own good time. All along, he’d been so active in the womb, kicking, punching, tossing and turning, even (I swear) biting, so that my poor insides were bruised and torn from his occupation of them, and they never have fully healed.”
George always turned his back at that point, sat down, or went outside. No doubt they considered him the unconcerned parent, perhaps even the root cause. Not that it mattered. He just didn’t want a stranger see him shudder, or cry.
Baby Jake had been more than a demanding infant. He didn’t whimper or cry; he roared. He howled. He raged. Nothing they could do for him was ever enough. Especially, he never got enough to eat, either breast milk or formula. Evelyn’s nipples were always so sore she wept when Jake reached for them. Often they were bloodied—George had never imagined such a thing as possible—he was appalled as Jake managed to make holes in an endless supply of rubber nipples. Jake never did sleep through the night.
To this day, George knew that Jake was up at all hours. Often George would get up in the middle of the night and drive by the apartment building where Jake sometimes stayed, and the lights would always be on, and sometimes there would be this form pacing by the window, motioning wildly with its arms as if arguing with itself. George never told Evelyn about that. He himself didn’t sleep deeply after all those years of Jake racing down the stairs on all fours, Jake singing and yipping at the top of his lungs, Jake leaping out a window or climbing back in. After all, he had never been an easy child. In fact, he had never been a normal child.
When he was three, George had found him carefully laying broken bottles in the road. When he was seven, their neighbor informed them he’d been beating chickens to death with rocks; the man was almost apologetic when he brought a struggling and utterly unchastened Jake to the door, and George couldn’t tell if he was sorry he hadn’t told them before or sorry he was telling them now.
&n
bsp; Even then, Evelyn hadn’t believed a word of it. He was never an easy child, but somehow he would always be perfectly normal to her.
“He needs help,” George had warned her. “And we can’t help him by ourselves. Really, this is more than should be asked of any human being.”
“Pre-natal care is vital,” she replied. “I was young, and I skipped some visits. I was too busy. It’s not your fault, George. It’s dangerous to expose a developing fetus to any toxins, especially during the first trimester. It’s in all the books. And I was still smoking some, hiding it from you, and remember I took up oil painting that summer? All those toxic paints, and the heat?” She began to cry.
“For heaven’s sake, Evelyn! He was nine years old when he burned the goddamn house down!”
Show me an arson fire in a house, one of the firefighters opined, almost jauntily, apparently trying to comfort them, and I’ll show you a nine year old boy with a match. And Evelyn had nodded as if it were practically the wisest thing she had ever heard. Then she’d looked at George as if he should have known this essential bit of trivia all along.
But this hadn’t been just a curious kid; Jake had deliberately built piles of old clothes and newspapers at strategic locations, doused them with gasoline he’d pilfered from the can in the shed, and set the fire. The house had been completely destroyed.
By the time he was thirteen, Jake had discovered the short-lived but gratifying thrills of stealing cars and doing drugs. At fifteen he was declared incorrigible and institutionalized. George and Evelyn had visited him dutifully twice a week, and each time George had told his son he loved him, loved him more than almost anything. That had not been a lie, but the smile on George’s face as he said it was.
Between children’s homes, reform schools, and jails, Jake never lived at home again. Now, at twenty, he was out, and going to be a father himself. The thought was mind boggling.
“Jake never was an easy child,” Evelyn said again. “But maybe being a father will straighten him out. Sometimes it does, you know.” George had looked at her as if she were crazy, but he knew there was some truth in what she said. Being a father changes you, whether you want to be changed or not. It transforms you into another person. Because only another person can love a child as a child must be loved.
“The world is a dangerous place.” George had told his son this when his son was seven years old. “I know you don’t know this yet—maybe you’re not meant to know. But parents know this, and believe me, it drives them crazy.”
Jake had looked up at him as if he—the father—knew nothing about it, could know nothing about it. George could see it in his son’s eyes: the wildness. His son’s eyes were saying that the world was a wild place, a hungry place, and although to the father that meant dangerous, they weren’t really the same thing at all.
“I have never been afraid the way I have been afraid for you.” George had told his son that the last time he ever visited him in jail. Jake had looked back at him with eyes that borrowed darkness, and from that silence held so long at the back of Jake’s throat had come this murmuring, a sound George had been unsure of at first, but which later he knew to be far older than anything from the human families he knew anything about.
In a rare moment of confession, Evelyn once told George, “Sometimes he changes who I am. I have never been as angry with anyone else as I have been with my son. I look at myself in the mirror and I don’t recognize the shape of my own face.”
They never dared have another child because of Jake. Evelyn was as committed to that as was George. Now this would be their first grandchild; the first, at least, that they’d been permitted to know about. They couldn’t just stand by. They had to do their best to help.
“Children will bring up all kinds of unresolved issues for parents,” they warned.
Jake stared at them for a long moment and then laughed. “ ‘Unresolved issues’? Jesus, speak English, at least,” he snarled, and lit another cigarette. George imagined the lungs of his unborn grandchild corroded with secondhand smoke and felt silly, and obsolete.
“Children will change you,” Evelyn promised, but Jake wasn’t a father yet. He had no way to understand.
“Being a parent is the toughest job you’ll ever have,” George told him, even though none of his lectures had helped over all the years before. So why was he trying now? “You’re expected to have the patience of Job and the wisdom of Solomon, not to mention a sense of humor and the ability to make critical split second decisions a hundred times a day, plus you have to give unconditional love. Being a parent is more than should be asked of any human being. Sometimes it seems like more than any human being can do. It changes you, son.”
George had waited twenty years to deliver that speech, and Jake adroitly dismissed him with a wave of his hand, walking away with the comment, “You guys think too much—that’s your problem.”
The baby was born with an excess of body hair. George had worried over that until Evelyn read to him from one of her huge baby-care books about how that was perfectly normal, and that the baby would lose the hair over time. It had something to do with evolution apparently, something to do with our animal selves. George wondered how sane parenting could have possibly taken place in the centuries before Gutenberg.
The baby was a fierce little thing, just like his father, George thought. Fussy. Ravenously hungry. No easy child. Sometimes when George held his baby grandson up to his chest he was actually a little afraid, suddenly nervous that the child would try to bite him. Not trying to hurt his grandfather, really, but out of a natural fierceness and a natural need. A hunger that could not be satisfied, especially not under the rules parents and grandparents would feel compelled to lay down for him.
So then George would kiss his grandson nervously, and hand him back, and feel his neck for scratches.
One Sunday evening they stopped by Jake and Melinda’s apartment on the pretext of taking them an extra chicken that had been on sale 2 for the price of 1 at Safeway. In truth, as their son almost certainly knew, they were there to monitor how the new parents were doing with their grandson. George could hear Jake yelling and the baby screaming before he even got out of the car.
George and Evelyn looked at each other. Their worried gazes had met in just that way hundreds of times over Jake—helpless, enraged by their helplessness, furiously longing to do the right thing. George wished they could just drive off and come back later when this crisis was over, one way or another, and they could pretend they hadn’t known about it and therefore bore no responsibility. But that wasn’t so. Their son may have been beyond their reach, but their grandson wasn’t as yet, and they had to do something.
One after the other, they made their way as fast as they could, on legs that weren’t young anymore and with lung capacities that showed themselves to be alarmingly limited, up the unlit and musty smelling steps to the apartment. Their footsteps clattered and echoed. The door at the top landing was ajar. George could see through the young couple’s minuscule living room into the tiny alcove that served as a bedroom for all three of them. But Jake didn’t seem to know or care that they were there, even when Evelyn said his name.
In the few seconds that passed while George caught his breath and took stock of the situation, he saw his son with his grandson in his hands. Not in his arms, for he held the baby well away from him, but in a two handed grip such as you would use on a basketball. His hands seemed unnaturally large, much larger than George remembered them—in fact, George remembered Jake as having relatively small hands. Jake was roaring. The baby was roaring. They were having some kind of yelling match.
Evelyn said, “Jake!” again, but he didn’t hear. “Shut up!” he bellowed at the baby. “Shut the fuck up, you little bastard!” and he shook the baby, too hard. Thinking of the soft infant brain skidding around inside the skull, George stepped forward.
Jake lifted the squirming and bellowing baby over his head. George was sure he was going to throw him.
Both George and Evelyn reached for the baby. Jake twisted away. Now he had folded his son in against his chest. As if he loved him, which George believed he did. As if he owned him. As if he could do with him whatever he wanted.
George couldn’t let that happen.
Jake twisted his head and looked fiercely at his aging parents. George could feel his son’s disdain. As if they were too old, too weak, too wounded to be of much use anymore. Jake threw back his head and howled. “We were just …” He laughed uncontrollably. “The little cub and I were …”
George tried to say something to his son—some small lecture, some bit of easy wisdom—but discovered that his body, however aged, had rushed past his voice, his words lengthening into a growl that solidified in front of his face.
With the intuition and unspoken communication that parents often develop when they’ve worked for years to present a united front, George and Evelyn sprang at once.
Without thinking George’s jaws closed on the back of his son’s neck and snapped it.
Evelyn’s clawed nails went through Jake’s shirt and the skin and bone of his chest, into his heart.
Jake dropped his son. George caught his grandson in his mouth.
And in the sudden stillness the grandsire and his mate of decades licked the baby clean of its father’s blood with tongues that grew gradually shorter, until finally capable of speech, but there were no more words that might be counted on.
MAMA
Elizabeth’s mother was dead.
Which was a shame, because right now Elizabeth wanted to kill her herself.
She guessed she didn’t mean that. She guessed it wasn’t Mama’s fault that she’d gotten the cancer. No, that wasn’t true either. Mama deserved the cancer because she’d always smoked, smoked in secret in the bathroom and in the garage but everybody knew about it—they just pretended they didn’t know. That was the kind of power Mama had. Dad had pretended so well that one time he smelled cigarette smoke outside Elizabeth’s room and he yelled at her, accused her of it, until he realized it was Mama who had done it and he’d looked all embarrassed, and then he’d looked angry and he’d said, “But someday it will be you, Elizabeth. You’re just like her!” And then he’d stomped away and Elizabeth felt like she’d been slapped in the face.