GENESIS
To my father she had seemed so beautiful that he strained helplessly toward her, like a sunflower to the sun. Now he noticed that she looked awkward as she climbed the street, heavier around the hips, more like the women he was used to seeing in the grocery store in town, and so he felt a faint disappointment just as his dreams were coming true.
She embraced him, stiffly. There were crumbs dusting the fine hairs on her upper lip. She had a funny look on her face. She could have told him it was “exaltation,” plucked out of her catalog.
Papa put his hand on her back and took her into the trailer. She was surprised to find tears in her eyes. She hadn’t even tried.
Cautiously, he introduced her to his mother, who drove a tow truck and lived in a small house right behind the gas station on the highway between Too Bad and Grady, the nearest real town. She was a bandy-legged cowboy in a dress. Mama pictured her spitting tobacco in luminous arcs, slapping a too-big ten-gallon hat down hard on her head. Her dresses were always askew at the waist so the side seam hung over her lap. “Well I’ll be damned,” Granny said, and stood there nodding her head and squinting at Mama, one hand cupping the opposite elbow at her waist, other hand holding up a cigarette between two stiff fingers.
“I’ll help you fix that leak now, Mother,” said Papa.
“What leak?”
“That radiator hose that’s been leaking.” He nudged her.
“My engine’s purring like a kitten. How would it look if my own truck broke down? I’d lose all my business.”
“Well, let’s just go have a look.” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her outside.
She didn’t think much of Mama. “You’ll have to teach her to boil water,” she told Papa. “She’ll last about as long as a snowball in hell. Why does she look so green around the gills?”
Later she told Mama in a stage whisper, “If you get Montezuma’s Revenge I have some pills that will firm you right up.”
“I’m fine, thank you,” said Mama coldly.
“You don’t look it. How long are you in town?”
What Granny had suspected right away, Papa took weeks to guess. When her belly made it clear that Mama had come to stay, Papa walked down to the highway with a can of paint. Too Bad, Pop. 2. Then he ordered a house. It was prefab and was delivered in two halves. I liked to think of my mother riding up in one half, from the east, and my father converging on her from the west in the other half. The join was imperfect, a visible seam through which ants and rain entered. Over time it became apparent that the halves’ forward momentum had not been completely exhausted. They continued on their divergent courses. Set down on gravel, not bedrock, they slid a little every year, but in different directions and at different speeds.
The desert is not easy to love, but Mama seemed to embrace it. Really she was courting death, ours or hers, which would also be ours. I am convinced, I really am, that this had more to do with the winking roadrunner on the masthead of the Grady paper than the fact that the doctor had told her she was going to give birth to a monster. She took long walks at midday with a recklessly small amount of water sloshing in the canteen Papa forced on her. Even the yellow dog, Fritzi, who loved her, would turn back to look for some shade. At first she thought the sun alone might snuff us out like earthworms stranded on the sidewalk. Then she took stronger measures. Woefully misinformed about anatomy, she swallowed sand, stones, and beetles. Sand, stones, and beetles rained down on our skullcaps, or would have done, if we had occupied her stomach as she vaguely supposed, and not her womb. She chewed the jojoba bean that tasted like wax and kerosene. She ate ants.
Once she came upon a Gila monster, fat, lazy, and poisonous, napping under a bush. She thought it was gorgeous, a beaded purse with teeth. She loosened her shirt, stretched herself out beside it, and fell asleep. When she woke up, expecting angels, she found the lizard snuggling against her thigh, and though she caught it up and held it dramatically to her breast, it would not be tempted to take a nibble, but gaped at her fondly.
She was afraid of snakes, so could not approach the rattlesnake for her quietus, though she did pinch out a scorpion’s life with her lacquered nails and swallow it between two slices of white bread. It was one of the small, translucent, very poisonous ones. My mother must have had a poisonous temperament herself; far from weakening, she grew stouter every day. The stones she swallowed gave her gravity. She was quieter and stood more firmly on the ground, as if her shifting sands were being pressed under the weight of her life, and slowly turning to stone. Inside her, we had the impression of a vast landscape of rounded red bluffs and constant, stifling heat.
The Gila woodpecker burrows into a saguaro and builds a nest there. The walls of the cavity harden and dry. When a saguaro falls, the flesh rots away until nothing is left but a pile of dry stalks and the nest. The nest looks like a wooden boot, or a womb. It is practically indestructible.
Mama ran full tilt at the dollhouse, rammed herself on the gabled eves, and knocked her breath out. As she bent croaking over the roof she felt the big bellows begin between her legs, and it was her sad laugh that shocked her body back to breathing.
A convulsion shook her and she squeezed the chimney so hard one of its glued-on pots popped off. She was half standing, half lying on the dollhouse, one hand squeezing the chimney, the other in the bathroom, thumb in the toilet bowl. One big breast loomed ominously into the second landing, where an astonished Papa doll lay flat on his back with his arms stretched wide on the painted carpet. Some blood came, and she stuck the miniature bathtub under her, then the sink, pitcher, bird bath, filling them up, then she swiveled majestically and unsteadily, staggered hugely back, and stuck out a fleshy gargantuan arm for the basin she kept by the bed for her morning sickness.
The blond doll Mama with her molded rubber dress lay on her back in the kitchen. The Papa lay on the landing. The little girl was the only one watching. Lacking the wiring to hold a pose, she was “sitting” in a rocking chair, actually leaning across it, like the hypotenuse of a triangle. With a flick of her finger Mama laid her flat as well. “Lights out, missy,” she said, and with a gush laid me in the bowl.
SISTER DOUBLE HAPPINESS
You oughta be locked up!” yelled Charmaine. She had stationed herself across the street from our building, so she could haze me whenever I went out. “Rapists!” She followed me as far as Church, shouting this every so often, then turned back. I prudently let the streetcar glide through the red light ahead of me, then crossed at an angle, heading into the Mission.
I had begun taking long walks to clear my head after nights thronged with dreams. They all started the same way: I was standing in the desert among sagebrush and wait-a-bit bushes, looking at the ground in front of me with tremendous purpose and urgency. There was a pack rat’s nest in the bush in front of me, but that’s not what I was looking at, or for. I could see the pebbles set flat among smaller pebbles set flat among smaller ones right down to the sand, and I could see the tiny stickery weeds, as clearly as if I were there. Then…nothing. But a fierce sense of imminence.
Since I moved to San Francisco, I had not gone back to the desert even in dreams, and I had the uneasy feeling that the recent change was Blanche’s doing. We had always wondered if elements of our dreams could make their way across the suspension bridge of nerves between our spines, or transmit themselves through a wholly bodily code of tics and jerks. At one time we’d kept parallel dream journals, with possible points of connection ticked off and elaborated. How is a tap-dancing dog (Blanche) like a box containing kidneys, livers, and other organ meats (Nora)? I had also conducted a series of private experiments, keeping myself awake by chewing on my tongue until Blanche dropped off, then beaming suggestions at her (“octopus, octopus, octopus in a wig”). I held my breath until my head ached, trying to stuff a tentacled nonesuch into the narrow passage where Nora morphed through Norche, Nonche, and Nanche to Blanche. In the morning I’d quiz her. Blanche, hopefully: “A bi
g green wooden chicken?”
“Go on.”
“I guess maybe we were hiding in it,” she hedged, sensing my disappointment. “I guess maybe someone was chasing us.”
“Here comes sister Double Happiness.” Startled out of my reverie, I looked up to see that I had made a wrong turn. With two heads you don’t walk by the projects. The inhabitants were notoriously peeved that yet another minority had edged them out for help and housing, due to better lobbyists, better connections, and fatter pocketbooks. The rise of the twofer, so ballyhooed by the partisan Two Times (“Formerly resistant landlords show growing preference for so-called double-income single occupancy renters!” “Longer shifts give twofers an advantage in the workplace!” “On the information highway, taking turns at the wheel: Negotiation skills of twofers tailor-made for today’s information-based economy!”), had thrust the singleton poor even further down the ladder.
“I bet she gives good head.”
“I hear Siamese twins swing both ways.”
Two of four guys guffawed and gave each other five. I lowered my eyes and kept walking. The flip side of Pride was loathing. I understood completely, but that didn’t make it comfortable. “Siamese, if you please!” one wag singsonged.
“Hey baby,” said an inveigling voice close at hand. One of the men was loping along next to us. “Why you so unfriendly? Got a swelled head? Think you better than us?”
Someone jostled us. “Can’t you hear?” I kept my eyes on the ground and sped up. If I could make it to the Bearded Lady Café around the corner, the lesbians would protect me.
“Check it out. Man walks into a bar, says my brother just married the two-headed girl from the sideshow. Bartender says, Is she pretty? Guess what he says.” This time it was less like a jostle and more like an elbow in the ribs. “Guess. Guess. Guess.”
“Yes and no.” The right answer.
His reply, if he made one, was drowned out by a very loud musical car horn playing what seemed to be “I Got You, Babe.” A heavily souped-up metallic gold lowrider was rolling slowly by. When it was level with us, it braked and started bucking—a sight both comical and menacing, like the courting display of a rhino. The girl in the passenger seat was waving. At me? Belatedly, I took in the mural on the side. It showed a big-haired, big-busted nude reclining on a serape. She had two heads, slightly smaller than her breasts. One of the heads had something wrong with the eyes, the other had something wrong with the mouth. Behind this occidental odalisque was one of those desert landscapes with saguaros, red-rock formation of the kind called a hoodoo, and bloodbath sunset daubed on varnished slices of tree trunks in southwestern gift shops.
I felt an unpleasant thrum in my chest. I knew that hoodoo. The Great Turd, as we had called it, with childish ribaldry, threw its early-morning shadow over the southern end of the main street of Too Bad.
Having a piece of my past drive up and honk at me was distinctly unnerving, and I hardly think I could have meant to thumb a ride, but somehow my thumb was out and the car had stopped and a door was squawking open. The girl scooched over and spanked the seat beside her, nodding and smiling. Her lipstick was almost black, shiny as patent leather. It made her teeth look grey, or maybe they were grey. I smiled too, but shook my head. She just looked like a whole new kind of trouble. Meanwhile, my friends consulted among themselves. It seemed the lowrider was trespassing, but nobody knew who to go get. I took advantage of the confusion to break into a run.
I heard the car door close. The lowrider burned rubber peeling out. The girl whooped. I saw a gold blur slow at the corners of my eyes, and thought they were going to pull over again. But they just blew their horn a second time. As they gunned the car up Guerrero, “I got you” took on a dying fall.
Absurd! That such a car existed at all. That it should drive by right then. If it had happened in a dream, I would have scoffed at it. As it was, I didn’t feel like walking anymore. I went straight home and took a nap. The minute I fell asleep, I was back on the desert. This time some of the pebbles moved, as if a lizard had just made a dash for a clump of sage and scattered them with its kickoff. But there was no lizard. In the background, though, was the Great Turd.
Someone was in my room! An oddly hunched figure, horned, in a white coat—I threw off the covers, then sank back with a groan. It was just Trey, in the ridiculous pimp coat (full-length, white leather) he’d bought from a freshly hard-up gambler in Atlantic City.
“I hate when you do that,” I said. “Would you consider knocking?” The horns were two locks of gel-hardened hair from either side of his part. They had flopped forward when he leaned over.
“That chick you decided to maul is really working my nerve,” Trey said, straightening and crossing to the window. “Next time pick someone with a nice low furry voice. Low voices get lost in the ambient noise. You must have noticed that car stereos sound tinny. The treble cuts through the engine sound. In the future molest a baritone. Do you want me to get rid of her for you?”
“Yes. No!” After that time at the Indian restaurant, there were jokes I didn’t make with Trey, in case he took them seriously. I was never sure exactly how shady Trey really was. For sure he didn’t have good sense. Like you could hide a three-quarter-life-size piece of tantric statuary up your shirt! “What did you have in mind?” I added. Trey pursed his lips and widened his eyes, for laughs. This reassured me. Then it didn’t. “No you don’t. Stay out of it.”
“It’s your funeral!” Trey said cheerfully. “Can I close this? I’m closing this.” He banged down my window, shutting out the distant trill of Charmaine’s current chant, “Hear my voice, heed my choice!” “Ow!” He clutched his right wrist as he left.
Trey had carpal tunnel syndrome—he said he’d got it logging too many hours in chat rooms—so he used a headset for sex work. He used voice recognition software to write. The program translated sounds into written words, whether the sounds were words to begin with or not. This afforded Trey much amusement. His laughter would be turned into more words (“The ketchup the ketchup the the the”), which made him laugh even more. This could go on for some time. When he left the room, the computer registered the distant yells and sirens and the various empty sounds of the room and dutifully took them down. Sometimes we sat and watched as the screen silently filled up with words. Silence spoke a lushly maternal language. “Mommy,” it said, “On a moon oh Mom, on on on moon, Mommy, om.”
Trey reappeared. “Nora, there’s something muy curioso going down.”
“What?”
“Did you venture into the citadel while I was gone?”
“Citadel?”
“My room, wench. The room of Trey.”
“I was sleeping.”
He led me to his computer.
The text began more or less as usual, with lowing and lunacies: “Moo moon oh moo, Mama mnemonymy Mom.” But then it took a turn for the improbable. No, the impossible: “A cowboy going hell for leather roped two long horned cows together. One was black the other red they gored each other then both were moo moo moo moon. How now brown cow. Death where is thy moo. Mnemonymy on on on Mom moon Mom…”
“Somebody’s playing a trick,” I said, but I felt my skin tighten.
“You’ve gone a funny color,” Trey said. “I have been waiting a long time for the chance to say this—”
“Trey, don’t.”
“But you have, yes, you have actually—”
“Trey!”
“—blanched.”
He threw up his arm and deflected my punch, which was aimed for his shoulder, so that I wound up clipping him in the mouth. His incisor cut through his upper lip. He clapped his hand to his mouth, and then looked at his finger with fascination. “Oh! You’ve blooded me, you harridan!” He grinned at me with stained teeth. “Look, it gave me a hard-on. Kiss-kiss!” He advanced.
“Trey, back off.” I pushed him away.
He sat down at his desk and began making multiple prints of his bloody lip on a piece of scr
ap paper. “Our conversation is being faithfully recorded,” he said. “More or less, anyway. The profound distance between harridan and hard-on has escaped our scribe.”
“Maybe it would help if you pronounced them correctly.”
“No! Don’t tell me I’ve been mispronouncing hard-on all these years!”
I snorted. He regarded me.
“You’re not charismatic,” he said. “But you are sort of fascinating, like a big crusty sore. You ask yourself, just how bad is it? It makes you want to probe. To see how far the rot extends.”
“Thank you,” I said. “Were you talking to the Mooncalf, like free-associating? Or on a call? Or singing some sort of song?”
“I never sing, it makes my mouth look funny. Would you like a printout?”
The next day I got up even before Charmaine did and made a trip to the Mission Branch Library, where a peppy elderly librarian in the Latin Interest Collection dug up an article from a three-year-old lowrider magazine archived on microfiche. She adjusted her glasses and read brightly, “‘With two-pump, four dump hydraulics, gold coils and six Trojan batteries to provide the juice, frenched antennas, shaved door handles, phantom top and moon window, phat paint scheme with ghost patterns and laid out along the side a freaky mama with two of the best, this two-headed dolly clowns the competition.’ There’s a picture of the owner, here, Salvador Swain.” She looked up. “I’m afraid there’s no information about the artist, dear.” Salvador was a dumpy stranger in a backward cap, mustache like a caret over a dot of a mouth. Just somebody mad enthusiastic about twofers and feeling the need to get the word out.
Half Life Page 6