The Great Turd? Just a bloop of the brush.
When I got home, Charmaine was leaning on an old VW Bug parked across the street, talking to the same ginger-haired Togetherist I’d seen with RubiaMorena. She stopped to put her hands around her mouth and holler “No excuse/for abuse!” I waved and went in.
Writing about these incidents now, there’s the danger I’ll draw them too tightly together. My pen keeps catching in the connecting threads, pulling them up out of the weave, into plain view. But I couldn’t see them at the time. I did have a sense, though, of nothing as definite as a pattern, but of almost imperceptible tightenings, no more binding than a thread of spider-silk stretching across an eyelid in the dark, but linking improbably distant things. Each, before they snapped, tugged at a mooring deep inside me, drawing out, for one instant, the many-eyed guardian.
THE SIAMESE TWIN REFERENCE MANUAL
Voice Recognition Transcription
Moo moon oh moo, Mama mnemonymy Mom. 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
Day! Oh I apron you do that. Would you consider knocking?
Hat check you decided Tamal is really working mine oeuvre. Next I’m pick someone with a nigh chaffeur re: voice. Low voices get loss in DMV ant noise. You miss dove notice that car stair Rio sound Timmy. The trouble cutthroat the hinge in sound. In the future no less a bear attone. Jew want me toga tread aver for you? Yeah snow! Leaded Jew haven’t mine? No you don’t. Stay outfit. It’s your few neural. Can I close this? I’m closing this. Bang! Cow.
Nora there something wee Curie oh so going down. What? Did Jew vent your into the sit a doll while I was gone? Sit a doll? My rune, winch the rune of Trey. I was sleeping somebody splaying a trick. You’ve gone off on nickel ore. I of been waiting a long time for the chance to sadist Trey don’t but you have yes you half factually Trey. Blanche. Nap. No you blood dead me, you hard on. Look, it gave me a hard on. Caskets. Trey, back off.
Moon.
Our converts Haitian is being faithfully recorded. More or less anyway. The profoundest dance between hard on and hard on has escaped ascribe. Maybe it would help if you pronounced them correctly. No. Don’t tell me I’ve been mispronouncing hard on all these ears. Trunk. You’re not carries manic 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 erotics tends. Thank you. Were you talking to the moon calf, like free associating? Moronic call or singing some sort of song?
I never sing, it makes my mouth look funny. Would you like a pinto?
THE ROSE TOWEL
The dollhouse was splashed with blood. Blood mingled strangely with the oversized sprigs on the wallpaper in the parlor, dotted the dining room floor in squashed hemispheres the relative size of Frisbees.
What was floating in the bowl should have been dead. It, the babies, was very small and still. One would like to cast a forgiving light on this moment, on Mama, and say that it was so still that it seemed dead, could easily have been mistaken for dead, dead as a drumstick stuck in a ring of fat. But no, it was not as dead as that. Or one might like to say that it was lively, even antic, certainly small but quite self-sufficient, like an elf in a storybook. Doing backstroke in the blood, kicking its little toes. So that she might easily have imagined it would climb out on its own, towel off in the dollhouse bathroom, and put itself to bed. But it was not as alive as that. The pale form paddled feebly in the warm bath. The blood was a magenta circle in the bowl. A curd of humanity twitched in the center of it.
If the babies opened their eyes, they would have seen a house that seemed to have been hit by a hurricane. There was a four-poster bed in the kitchen, and a cleaver stuck in a ham in the nursery, and everyone in the house lay sleeping under a spell, and half the furniture stood out in the yard. The light had changed. It was cooler, bluer, and Mama had gone.
The blood was cooling and thickening at the surface when Papa came home. He called, and got no reply. He came into the room. The creaking of the floor, loud, preceded him, and scared the babies, who tried crying now, and continued crying out of fear at the noise they made. So when the father kneeled over the bowl he heard them peeping, and there was never a question whether he would care for them, as he would have cared for a baby bird shoved out of its nest. He picked up the warmish bowl, went carefully down the steps, watching it, balancing it. The heavy fluid swung as one mass, its surface almost still and slightly wrinkled like the skin on heated milk.
He emptied the basin into a colander in the kitchen sink. He paused, staring into the colander, but only for a moment. He turned the faucet aside and ran the water over his wrists until it felt neither hot nor cold. Then he washed the babies, holding the heads up with one finger. The skulls were not much bigger than lima beans. The veins showed through.
He laid the babies on a folded paper towel. He examined them, stretching out the curled, rubbery little limbs, checking the minuscule cleft and the pink dots of the nipples. The exceptionally wide shoulders, the two heads on their frail stems. The remains of the umbilical cord he tied off with the help of tweezers and a pin. Then he got out his baby-bird kit: the cardboard box, the low-wattage lightbulb, a nest of shredded papers and old washrags. He made his baby-bird formula: milk, warm water, mashed hard-boiled egg yolk, oatmeal pressed through a sieve.
The two heads swayed in the paper nest, their cheeks smudged with printer’s ink, in which a few mirror-image words might have been made out. They stared wearily at the eyedropper as it advanced toward them, a milky drop swelling at the tip. The heads weaved, and one brushed against the wand. When the drop touched her lips it broke all over her face. A tongue the size of a stamen slid out and tasted it.
He sat with his hand in the box until the babies fell asleep on his palm, and then he shifted them into the nest, arranged the lightbulb, draped an old towel over the box. The towel had roses on it.
The vultures told him where she was. They were not circling, but flapping abruptly up and then settling again, which said to him that she was not moving much. He could see their dark shapes appearing sudden above the red bluff and then dropping behind it again. As he began to climb, though, the rock rose up between them and he couldn’t see them anymore, and this made him climb faster. The yellow dog scrambled ahead of him, claws rattling on the rock, showering him with sand and little pebbles. He slipped in one such small avalanche and scraped the bottom of his chin. He swarmed up the last few feet over a moving landscape bent on downhill.
He saw her down the slope a distance. She was propped against a boulder. The vultures occupied the rocks around her, looking formal and interested, like a committee.
The vultures slowly unstuck themselves from the rocks. A moment later the yellow dog appeared at her knee. Papa could feel the wind of wings flapped low overhead. Fritzi was prancing and fawning around my mother, who turned out one hand for her to lick without opening her eyes.
Under the towel the light shone all night, dimly illuminating the ceiling with a pink glow and attracting a few large, sleepy moths, who pressed themselves against the roses, making black angel-shapes. Papa came down naked several times during the night, and lifted the towel. Moths staggered into the air. When he was gone, they settled again.
Our father hid us in the shed. We suckled at the eyedropper. We ate baby-bird formula, suet dissolved in milk, damp cracker crumbs, bits of Vienna sausage snipped off with scissors. Our father was our first mother. He might have been our only mother, but by the time we were baby-sized, we were bawling in stereo, and my cries rung through the whole of Too Bad, then bounced off the bluffs and came back again. Our mother couldn’t ignore any longer what she had guessed weeks before.
She stood in the tool-shed door. “My milk’s come,” she said, twin blotches on her blouse, over her breasts. “I might as well take the baby.�
� She held out her arms. “Or babies?”
Too Bad, Pop. 3 ½.
Women are alleged to be the gentle sex, more reliable, more nurturing than men. In my experience, the reverse is true. Women are untrustworthy, intractable, better at leaving than staying on. It is men who are the homebodies. Gentle creatures, they mean no harm, and they are restful. But my mother did not care to rest. I could tell when the sap was running through her, volatile as ethanol. She could touch a match to her tongue and hold a pool of blue flame in her mouth. She tried not to burn him when he pressed his mouth to hers, but his lips came away blistered. He didn’t seem to notice. This was his charm and his failing.
“I sometimes feel like you’re a horse and I’m a rhinoceros,” said Mama.
I had two incongruous pieces of information about my mild-mannered father. That he married Mama was the first. The other was that he was descended from cannibals. We learned this at an early age. It turned out that there had been only one cannibal, driven to it by privation in a long winter somewhere northerly, but by then it was too late to eradicate the image of my father squatting, his pale chest grease-smeared, nibbling at an all too recognizable bone. My mother often brought up the “ineradicable stain” on the heirloom bib, with a relish my father missed completely. I understood, however, that this image somehow aroused her. She would hoist herself up in her chair, wet her mouth. How restive and glittering she became at a whiff of that profane smoke rising through the generations, like an idol animated by the greasy clouds of the sacrifice. Her eyes sparkled, her plump upper arms grew blotchy, her nostrils flared. As she pressed further, eliciting details she had already heard (the long red hair between great-great-grandfather’s two front teeth, the seal ring fished out of the stewpot), Papa turned more and more in his chair, until all she could see was the back of his collar and one ear that emanated tragic resignation.
Eventually she would lead him into their bedroom. She would come out yawning and irritable. Father on the other hand would have more energy than usual and set out with his Geiger counter. By lunchtime everything was back to normal.
Eventually my mother managed to love him. She showed this by picking fights with him. Later, I understood this very well; my father did not. The more she loved him, the quieter he got. The quieter he got, the more she pried, chivvied, and expostulated. She pursued, he shrank, both of them yearned for what they already had, and misread as rebuffs each other’s most tender offerings.
Of course, couples are always monstrous. Everyone senses this, and grows uneasy in their company. Nobody likes to watch the blending of things that should be separate: a sea urchin making up to a buffalo, a mosquito fondling a worm. (Audrey, of course, would disagree.) Why would two people who are free to walk away stand side by side and even hold hands? If I were single, I would always walk away. I would specialize in it.
Well, that’s what Mama did, she started walking away. She would pack a bag, put on a pretty dress, get in the car, and go—to political rallies, EST training seminars, lesbian separatist cookouts, clothes-free solstice celebrations. She spun her wheels for our amusement as she peeled out, raising a peacock’s tail of pebbles. Then the car lumbered slowly out of sight. As she topped the curve, her hand would wriggle out the chinked window. That was the last thing we saw every time, her hand descending behind the hill like a swimmer’s last wave. It made my throat ache, it looked so tiny and already so far away.
Mama came back from one of her longer trips with Max on her arm. Papa shook Max’s hand and politely fixed a bed on the sofa. We wondered who was going to sleep there. (To our dismay, we did. Max slept alone in our room.) Over the next few weeks Max and Papa banged together a little house, more like a shed, and she moved in. She never left. Eventually she and Papa went into business together. Does this seem strange? The fact was, Max and Papa were much more compatible than either of them was with my mother. Mama, with her will and her carnality, coaxed out of them both a helpless, ashamed lust, which they entrusted uneasily to her not entirely reliable hands, since, practical in everything else, they were at a loss before this violent, irrational feeling and this activity that produced nothing. That Mama was remarkable they agreed, and said no more, pleased with each other’s tight-lippedness. And so they became friends. This sort of thing happens often between people with common interests and so will not be remarked upon further here.
DEVIL’S FOOD
My next bad dream was only a glimpse before waking, but it felt very real. A sense of an interior, very close and warm, not a tent, perhaps a costume of some kind. Or a womb? Things moving close to my skin. Flashes of brightness. Something was wrong with my sense of balance, and this dizziness spun me awake. For once I wanted to go back; there was something I needed to find out. When my head cleared, I did not know what it was I was missing, but my throat ached as if I had been crying.
Something else was wrong: it was quiet. Charmaine had stopped yelling. It seemed too much to hope for that that malignant dot on her nose had already killed her.
I stumbled out into the kitchen, where Audrey was reading the Two Times, looking pleased with herself. I narrowed my eyes at her and shook some Grape-Nuts into a bowl, sliced a banana into flabby coins. The knife made a sudden sound when I set it down on the counter, and I flinched. “What have you done?” I said, sitting down.
Charmaine had agreed to stop harassing me on condition that I enroll in some kind of consciousness-raising group, she informed me smugly. Audrey had brokered the deal. She had been trying to raise my consciousness for years.
“Let’s don’t and say we did,” I suggested.
“Hah,” Audrey said.
She had forgiven me. “Turncoat, traitor, Judas, snake,” I said happily. In my relief I agreed to go to a party with her later that evening.
It was a purplish blustery night. The low fog was weirdly underlit and ripped in places to show black behind it. The warehouses south of Mission seemed like dummies, solid concrete blocks with no room for rooms inside them, despite the doors and windows on the outsides. At the crunch of the emergency brake I felt a sudden panic and aversion, as I always did before a party.
I held Blanche’s head down so I didn’t bean her getting out of Audrey’s Datsun. These little acts of kindness I could still perform, and feel a faint warmth in my chest. “Who is the luke in lukewarm?” I said.
“Is it the biblical Luke?” said Audrey vaguely. “Maybe he only kind of liked Jesus. I left the address at home, but I think it was 2112. Hey, how do I look?” She spread her arms and twirled. Strands of silver fiber from her vintage 1970s jumpsuit flickered under her arms, which were multiple and blue under the alternating current streetlights.
“You look like Kali, or do I mean Krishna?” I said.
“Maybe it was 2116. All multiples of two seem like essentially the same number to me,” said Audrey. “They’re all basically chunky and amiable, like Labradors.” She poked at the bell.
A girl with a long, sideways-tending chin ushered us in with exaggerated gestures as if she thought we were deaf or foreign, then, on spinning around, tripped on the bottom step and twisted her ankle. We helped her up the stairs into a brightly lit bedroom. She sank onto the heaped coats on the bed. Audrey and I put down our own coats beside her as gently as we could.
Everyone seemed to be in the kitchen. In the doorway a chubby boy in a tiny lead apron and a T-shirt that read GIRL was talking to an actual girl who was wearing a bridal veil and picking individual sprinkles off a plate of devil’s food cupcakes and eating them. Everyone else was crammed into a tiny space around the refrigerator. I went to put the six-pack away. When the refrigerator door opened, everyone shuffled back. They shuffled forward again when it closed.
Behind me, someone drawled, “How’s that for a twin-pack?” I whirled, and Audrey put a restraining hand on my arm. Everyone was looking at a cigarette lighter with a decorated windshield. Apparently the girl on it shed her bikini when the plastic got hot. Audrey pulled me out through a s
eries of rooms in each of which a few twofers and singletons loitered, one of the latter looking fabulously uncomfortable in full haz-mat fetish-wear, goggles and all. “Her girlfriend’s totally toxic,” Audrey whispered admiringly. They lifted their drinks slightly as we entered each room, as if to explain why they were there. Audrey scanned them and moved on, summing up their sexual preferences for me in an undertone: “Kitty corner. 669. Möbius strippers. Foursquare—hey, that’s Theo/Dora!” I craned my neck. Theo/Dora had nearly caused a civil war at the Womyn-born-Womyn’s Music Festival last year. They presently identified M/F. Last year, F/M. All anyone knew for sure was that one of them had transitioned twice and one only once, but whether they had started out M/M or F/F was anyone’s guess. I certainly couldn’t tell.
“Were you hoping to run into anyone in particular here?” I asked.
She gave me a coy look. “Maybe.”
“Oh, no. Who is it now?”
Audrey dropped the simpering. “OK, so you know Pili?”
“Not Pili.” Pili had a distinctly smaller head than her twin, which made her look something like a growth. Her face appeared squeezed, her eyebrows too close to her eyes, her nose struggling toward her chin.
“What’s wrong with Pili?” Audrey asked, distracted. “No, no, I’m just filling you in on the background.” Pili, of Inga and Pili, was seeing Inga’s ex, Temper (of Temper and Ruth). Apparently while Inga was affecting celibacy and burning the midnight aromatherapy oil in her efforts to transcend jealousy, Ruth, after being jilted by Pili, had renounced women and was sleeping with Gordon of Gordon and Grant, which caused some friction with Temper, who was a lesbian separatist, philosophically (if not, quite, any longer, practically). To make matters worse, Grant was seeing a low-level politico named Chloe whose ambitions for public office made her a bit homophobic, though those ambitions were doomed anyway since her twin Ashley was a hopeless pothead. Grant thought everyone was trying to put the moves on Chloe, which couldn’t have been further from the truth, when actually it was stoned Ashley who had developed a damp inarticulate straight-girl crush and would stare across the various activities of the others at Inga, who found it hard to ignore her while she was meditating and also trying not to trip on the fact of her ex-girlfriend seemingly going down on her in the old style but not for her benefit any longer but for that of her twin, Pili. Meanwhile Gordon, who was struggling with his sexuality and was probably, in Audrey’s opinion, only into Ruth because with her dyke energy she was kind of like a boy, had been spotted by Audrey on the balcony of the Café making out with the worst person he could have picked to experiment on, the mean, egotistical, and predatory Ignacio—though his twin Ben was very nice and supposedly bi and into singletons…her voice trailed away. I was shaking my head, lost. “Here, I’ll show you.” She found an abandoned napkin (damp circular indentation in its center) and began covering it with intersecting ovals, each neatly labeled, like a Venn diagram run amok. The ink gave out somewhere between Chloe and Ashley. We went back to the kitchen in search of another pen.
Half Life Page 7