*
We became our own constellation on that patch of sod, the two of us pressing our weight down into the earth like stars pressed into the black vault of the sky. Now* I can look down from here* and see our contours still there, perceptible to my new eyes for eternity, his heels, elbows, shoulder blades, and head, dark dots on the dun earth, and my smaller ones next to them. My marks are less distinct than his, made scattered and fuzzy by my growth through the years. It almost looks as if my contour was shaded in to give flesh to my form. I wonder, now*, if this is what the Assembler wants me to see, how I brought that man to love me through the assembly of a horse, how I created a pattern fixed for eternity on the soft crust of the world the same way He hung the stars on the velvet void. I think, The girl with hands useless as a bird’s begat a constellation of love. This is the meaning I am meant to see in the tapes. I am certain of it.
5
THE NINE IN JEANINE
At age three I became perplexed by the groups of things so randomly categorized in my reading. How many zebras, a herd? Wolves, a pack? Seals, a pod? Crows, a murder? Oh, the books all cast out their declarations of names, but never would they commit to an honest integration of individuals into a group. Cassidy chuckled each time I brought this topic up. He was reading me his newest gift—The Big Book of Animal Groups—most nights of the week. Even when Miss Lamb had her evening sessions, he’d stop by after dinner to learn sign and, later, to read me to sleep.
We opened the book, exposing the luminous blackness of the crow that both frightened and fascinated me. “Haw ahn-y cro-aws?” I asked after he’d read the page’s caption about a murder.
“Five crows, that’s murder. Gotta be,” he said with authority.
We turned the page. The next bird was the owl. Its squat shape and bulbous head somehow reminded me of a thumb. “Why?” I asked Cassidy. “Why no thumbs?” I shook my hand over the brown-speckled bird. It seemed strange to me that there would be a bird that looked exactly like what I didn’t have. Then I remembered the book about penguins. “And why no ears?” I circled the rims of mine with index fingers. “Why in penguins no ears?” A-wha ahn pahn-kans na ah-res?
Cassidy closed the book and took a deep breath. “Damned if I know. Could be the Man upstairs just plain forgot. Screwed up, you know. Or maybe He was just braggin’ through His work. You know, ‘Look what I can do, even when I throw away some bones.’ Like someone showing off, sealin’ a box with hardly no tape at all. But whatever, it was Him, the Assembler, His doing,” he said. “He puts the parts of everything together. Just the way He likes.” He took my hand in his. “These are good hands. Good as any, Jess. The Assembler made ’em, and He don’t make junk. You got enough fingers for two kids. Enough voice for ten. He makes everything just to please Himself. The bones and the skin, the meat and the sap, just the way it suits Him.” He let go of my hand and tweaked me on the arm. “Bones and sap.”
I nodded. “He makes things like I make cookies?” I studded cookies with raisins—three eyes, or two, or one and as many noses as I wished—just for my own pleasure, and then gave them to Mother or Nana to admire. Then I’d get to bake them and eat them.
“He got everything together in one place and glued you all together and there you were, and you made Him happy,” he said nodding.
“Nails, screws, glue and whatnot,” I added casually. “The Assembler did it.”
“He did,” Cassidy said. “All the little parts became you, a human being little girl.”
“Ah-lls,” I said, satisfied about my origin. “Read the ah-lls.”
He opened the book and found the place. I patted the page with my right hand, letting it rest briefly next to the bird that was a thumb with feathers and, when I looked carefully, with the tiny ears of a mouse.
It was not an idle thought, the grouping of things into one unit. I had a growing, evolving world on the ceiling above my bed. The sea had been there, primordially, since my earliest scanning of that stuccoed space. Through the months the waters receded in places—over there by the corner windows, and to my right in the space above the doorway, and to my left where my changing table had been and where my orange dresser now sat. The islands dried when I was eight months old. Wavy stands of grass appeared at a year and, later, palm trees and bushes with hanging fruit. There was no logic to the evolution of the animals for my Eden. When I was a year and a half, the first creature to walk the savannah grasses of my new world was an elephant. We watched each other in mutual adoration for several months. Then one bright winter afternoon I awoke from my nap and an egret had alighted on his island. The next day, a lion. Just as in my books, there was no squabbling. They all stood their ground regally, gracefully, and let the light play with them.
The light. The ever-changing light. That’s what seemed to put this burgeoning world into motion. On rabbit island, next to the western-facing window, three rabbits stood on hind legs, each slowly waving a curled forepaw goodnight in the waning evening glow. Enough for a warren, three rabbits? I do not know, even now*. Above my door, the swirled plaster fashioned two zebras. The early slanting sun moved through the swales of pale grasses where they stood. Their tails seemed to twitch in the morning, their lancet ears in the western evening light, as if a slow shudder had passed with the day through their skins. That same transit of sun tusked my elephant in the morning, flapped his rogue, rug ears at midday. It was this that stirred the dust in my room.
It was in ardent following of a particularly massive suspended speck that my eyes were first drawn to him. The clown. There he was, all of a sudden, as if he had popped out of a speeding miniature car that had zoomed away leaving him stranded there on my ceiling. Short, dumpy, face broad as a shovel, eyes wide as a syndrome, nose bulbous as a doorknob, lips fat as sausages. It was the day after Cassidy had taken me to my first circus, my birthday present from him even though it was two months late because the circus didn’t come to Washington in February. When I saw the clown on my ceiling, I immediately smelled again the sharp urea of moist sawdust, the warmed peanuts, the tangy cocktail of all those manures deposited by carnivore and herbivore alike, the breath of lions. The breath of lions, especially, for some clown not unlike the one there with me in my room had inserted his head—his whole head—into the mouth of one of those roaring beasts. I sniffed ferociously that day in my room. As the sun went behind a cloud, the light waned. The clown winked.
People laugh at clowns for their antics. I applaud their courage. I was convinced, too, that one clown was a circus.
It was good to have the clown to talk to. He understood my flawed speech perfectly. And if Mother, standing at the bottom of the stairs, shouted for me to quiet down and take my nap of an afternoon, I’d simply switch to my equally imperfect signing and carry on with that.
I introduced him to the waters, the trees, the animals defying gravity all about him. I told him about Mother and Father, Nana and Ned. I told him about me. I told him I didn’t like green beans or squash or Velcro or metal snaps. I told him about my operations and about how I heard and spoke and tied my shoelaces and buttoned my buttons with the index and middle fingers of both hands. I told him about my friend Cassidy from the post office. I think he already knew about him. How, I don’t know. But a slight shift in light from a passing cloud or a wisp of birds—five at least in a wisp, but certainly not more than twenty—made the clown’s face darken like a shadow. I put my fisted right hand to my chin with my index finger extended and drew it down. Lonely, I signed. The clown’s eyes widened as the light returned.
I began going to preschool when I was four and a half. There were six other kids in my group. None of them wore hearing aids, but none was particularly good at hearing, either. They all had attention deficit and learning disorders. The four boys liked to wrestle and fight and take the things the girls were playing with and try to make us chase them. Poor Ms. Whitney had her hands full. Jeremy was the worst. He even looked the worst. The skin of his face had a patchy look like the
bark of a peeling sycamore. He had a crew cut just like Cassidy, but there was something strange about the pattern of his hair. It was all in intersecting whorls, like tornadoes touching down everywhere on his head. Even his brown eyebrows seemed to spin. He made me dizzy just by looking at him. And he couldn’t even sit still long enough to finish eating a cookie. One time he started running in the very middle of a long burp he was forcing from his mouth. But for me, the most remarkable thing about him was that when the phone on the desk rang, he’d startle like he’d just received an electric shock. His hands would fly out and his legs would skip a step and his head would twist around. You could get hurt just by standing next to him when Ms. Whitney got a call. And the second ring would produce the same wild jerking response, albeit with a little less vigor. As would the third, and so on.
One day, just two weeks into the school year, Ms. Whitney was attending to the spurting bloody nose of my friend Tina—Jeremy had snatched her doll and thrown it at her, hitting her square on the bridge of the nose— when the phone began to ring. Caught in disposable plastic gloves and with the teacher’s aide gone to fetch ice, Ms. Whitney had no option but to let the phone ring. Except for Jeremy, we were all sitting on the floor waiting to start a song. Jeremy jumped and jerked like a loose-limbed puppet on a string for the first six salutes. Then only his shoulders and arms went into spasm, going up two inches or so as the caller persisted. Seven or eight rings later, only Jeremy’s neck responded to the sounds. The long muscles in front, under his jaw, tightened like snapping leather belts, and his head jerked forward and downwards. I watched until finally his eyes closed and he slumped to the floor where he lay across my legs like a dead boy. He felt so heavy lying there on me. Ms. Whitney continued to attend to Tina’s bloody nasal mucus and tiny clear tears. I put my index finger on Jeremy’s head, tracing the swirls of hair from place to place. It was slippery under my finger and sort of silky. My finger went all over, from tornado to tornado, spinning easily against his skull. It was as if his bones were without a single groove or bump, polished smooth as old wood by the spin of the storms. Jeremy began to snore like a fat old dog asleep. It was the first time I had seen him quiet in the weeks I had been in school with him.
We didn’t learn much in that class. In part, it was because Ms. Whitney had to spend most of the time trying to control Jeremy and the three other boys. Some days she’d get them quieted down long enough to read stories or wash baby dolls. Some days if the boys were especially bad— Mondays, usually, it seemed—we got to go outside and play on the playground. I’d climb the monkey bars or slide down the twisting slides. This often was the best option for the morning—it seemed a waste of time to sit and wait for hours while the boys disobeyed Ms. Whitney or just began to roll around with each other, wrestling and trying to break things. I soon realized all I had to do was get Jeremy to chase me around the classroom, and Ms. Whitney would declare our need for fresh air and exercise and take us to the playground. I’d wait until she wasn’t looking. Then I’d grab Jeremy’s sleeve and tug. “Get me, boy!” I’d whisper in his ear. Ah-gt me, ba-oi! And, unless he was tied to his chair, he’d be after me in a heartbeat. I’d run around, wobbly, and scream in pretend panic. Ms. Whitney would abandon her plan for finger-painting or a rondo of children’s songs and usher us all outside. I needed practice on the monkey bars.
But the sad thing about Jeremy was that sometimes he was tied to his chair. His parents had given the school permission to use broad, soft restraints that caught by Velcro to hold him, bound at the legs and chest, in his seat. It was sad, really sad, to watch him when they did that. He was like those caught wild animals I had seen on TV. He threw himself at the table, banged his hands, screeched like a wolf pup with a trap-crushed paw. The third or fourth time they tied him up, we were trying to draw sailboats on a lake. The phone rang. Jeremy, caught in the early part of his tantrum, jerked, and jerked, and jerked again. On the fifth ring, Ms. Whitney made for the phone from where she stood bent over Tina’s drawing.
“No!” I signed, too excited by my thought even to speak. But then I did shout, “No! No, Ms. Whitney! Ett a-hit wing!” I rose and went to the phone. I put my hand on the receiver to block hers. “Let it ring so he’ll sleep.”
Ms. Whitney looked at me the way some adults do the first time they meet me, caught between pity and revulsion, between the command, “Get your paws off that!” and the compliment, “You’re so thoughtful!” She had never looked at me like that before. I said, “It makes him tired,” and I pointed to Jeremy who by then had settled to his shoulder-shrug with each ring. Ten seconds later, his head bowed repetitively like a priest in prayer, and then finally his eyes closed and he lay asleep on his folded arms atop the table. Ms. Whitney watched as Jeremy began to snore. “When he wakes up, he’ll be quiet,” I added. “Could we read a book then?” I asked.
“If you’d like,” she said with a far-off voice.
A few days later they moved me to a different class. It was a lot bigger—fourteen in all, counting me. In this class the boys didn’t run and fight. But they weren’t nice to me, either. They stared at my hearing aids all the time. One of them refused to touch anything I had touched. He was a fat boy with a face like a big pink cake, and he smelled like wet ashes in a fireplace. Timmy was his name. During lunch period on my first day he watched me eat my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Mother had cut it into quarters, as she always did, so I could hold each small square between my index and middle fingers.
“You eat like a chimp,” he said to me from across the table. “Monkey hand. Monkey girl.” A few boys laughed. My face got hot and my mouth got dry.
The teacher’s aide went to Timmy and put her hand on his shoulder. “We don’t call people names here, Timmy,” she said. “Jessica was born without thumbs. Other than that she’s the same as you.” The aide was about Nana’s age. Her face was the color of coffee, and kind.
“No, she’s not. She’s deaf, too,” Timmy said and then defiantly sipped his chocolate milk through a straw. The aide opened her mouth to say something, but before she could speak I said, “I have only one kidney and holes in my heart.” Ah huve uwny un khadny ahn howza ahn mah hahr. “I’m not like you at all.” I dropped my sandwich on the table and brought my fisted hands to my face with the index fingers pointed up. I crossed them quickly, then uncrossed them and curled the index fingers down.
“She gave me the finger!” Timmy shouted. A brown clot of mucoused chocolate milk unexpectedly oozed from a nostril, and he began to choke and cough.
“No, I didn’t,” I said.
The aide clapped Timmy on the back to settle his cough. “Yes, you did!” he said hoarsely. “I saw you.”
“What was that sign, Jessica?” the aide asked, none too pleased with our behavior.
It was the first time in my life I considered lying. My inclination was to say that I had given the sign for a surgical operation. But I knew how easy it was to look up signs in the manual. “I said he’s ugly.” Timmy started to cry.
I finished my lunch seated at a separate table in the corner, where I quietly read a book on whales, thinking I was the only one in class who knew Timmy had been wrong when he called me “monkey hand.” Monkeys have thumbs, even though they don’t work exactly like human ones.
There were six girls in my class. We got along alright if we were doing individual activities, like finger-painting or writing our numbers and letters or stringing beads into necklaces. Sometimes a few of them would stop what they were doing and watch me. For some it was the way I held a brush or pencil between my middle and ring fingers that fascinated them. For others, it was the way I used my mouth and teeth when stringing beads or tying a cord in a knot. I had already learned the whole alphabet and could count way past a hundred and could write those letters and numbers down. None of my classmates had learned half of what I had at home. I was proud of it all, but especially proud of my printing. Cassidy taught me. He was a great printer. It came in handy when he had
to help customers fix addresses on letters and packages. I tried to make my letters just like his. It made me feel good to catch one of my classmates studying my H’s or G’s and then regarding their own scribble with a look of surprise on their faces. I always offered to help.
But it was group activities that brought out their meanness. They took after the boys in that regard. If we played a game with a ball, many refused to catch the one I threw. And that game where you pass from person to person a red apple held against your neck with your chin—that was always an embarrassment for me. It was always boys against the girls, each group standing in a line facing the other. There wasn’t a girl in the class who allowed me to put my face against her shoulder to receive or transfer the apple. The teachers tried everything—having me go first or last, offering prizes for the winning team, giving heartbreakingly beautiful expositions on the dignity of the handicapped. Not a single girl bought it. The first time my turn came to receive the transfer, the boys whooped and hollered, Timmy especially, and shouted, “No way! Don’t do it.” Dorey with the tucked chin looked at me. Her eyes fell on my ears, bowed down by the weight of my hearing aids. And then those eyes dropped to my hands. “Go, Dorey, go! Pass it on to Jess,” the aide exhorted. At this she started toward me a little. She positioned her neck and torso to align with mine. But then she straightened, raised her head, and let the apple drop. The boys laughed. I wanted to kick them all—apple, boys, and Dorey—but I saw the aide take Dorey roughly by the elbow. I reached out and took the aide’s hand instead. “A-hit’s okay,” I said. She let Dorey go.
The Assembler of Parts: A Novel Page 9