Elegies for Uncanny Girls

by Jennifer Colville

  She hunches toward her baby, her eyes bugging. And all of a sudden a small hand shoots up, wraps its fingers around a lock of her hair, and pulls. The hand rings her head gently—and as it bobs up and down she says, “I mean, I know it’s all overboard. How do you have time to love your baby, if you’re constantly preventing it from dying?”

  And I say, “And if you don’t prevent it from dying, how can you love it?”

  And then I’m back in the delivery room, pushing.

  The baby’s heart is slowing down inside of me.

  I’d been in the bed for two days when the nurses started to bend their heads together and murmur like pigeons. To glance quickly at the monitors and murmur some more. It was between the murmurs that I lost touch, floated up above myself with terror, and haven’t yet been able to get fully back inside.

  So the birth happened to me. I tried to be there but could only see it from a distance, through Daniel, the rotating doctors, midwives, nurses, and interns, the separate team of specialists hovering in the corner of the room, ready to whisk us away in the likely event that something went wrong. Even with all the drugs (and I had plenty), I couldn’t escape this crowd of faces. Half of them quiet and concerned, half yelling or cheering me on as if I were a sporting event.

  I couldn’t get to that primal place my yoga teacher told me about, that place of grunting and moaning beyond caring what anybody thought. That place where I’d shed my vanity, where I imagined I’d turn animal, and porn star—turn into my mom and my sister and all the other mothers. I would turn common, and incredible.

  Instead I asked for a C-section.

  I said, “Wouldn’t it be better?” And then …

  “For shit’s sake, her heart is slowing!”

  And the doctor with the forceps propped over her shoulder said, “We don’t do C-sections here. This is San Francisco.”

  Later my husband told me the forceps ripped me open like Jaws of Life tearing open a car. He said the young doctor pulled so hard on the forceps that she braced herself by placing one foot in front of the other and leaning back. Another doctor came in behind her, wrapped her arms around her waist, and pulled in this manner too.

  And she was not breathing at first.

  And she was not breathing.

  Sometimes, even though I know my baby is healthy and growing—I’m still back in the delivery room. I think I see one of the faces, a doctor or nurse, displaced onto someone else’s body on a crowded street, and I freeze. Freud would say deep down, I want to see these people, one of my strange witnesses. And I do wonder what would happen if we came face to face. Would they smile and say hello, feel happy to see me or the baby? Or would they be embarrassed for me or for themselves, would they avert their eyes? Most likely, I think, they wouldn’t recognize me at all.

  “Maybe we can go for a walk sometime,” the woman says, as I put on my jacket and grab the handles of my stroller.

  She scribbles her number down on a piece of paper, and holds it out. She says, “The worst of it is that I can’t swim anymore.” She holds up her hands again, now, like a supplicant, and a drip of watery pink blood falls on the table, before which I hesitate in my flight. I dig in my bag and offer her a baby wipe.

  I’ve always been a swimmer—love that wonderful feeling of being underwater in a crystal womb you can look up through and see out of, see the world all bent, and different (I felt) from the way anyone else saw it. When I was younger I could swim entire laps underwater—push off from the wall, arms in front of me, pull the water toward my chest, kick, dart my arms up again, pull the water, cup it like a heart.

  And as I remember this I realize I’m in front of the woman’s baby looking down into the stroller.

  It isn’t wearing a neck brace.

  She has no bruises. No safety helmet. She doesn’t even have those blind soothsayer eyes that my baby has. That way of looking that sees everything and nothing—all my faults—and in an instant forgets, moves on to a fascinating piece of fuzz. Her cheeks are fat, nearly incandescent. She’s a full year old, I’d guess.

  She’s smiling, holding her arms up and jerking them arrhythmically, as if jamming out to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.

  I turn back to the woman and say, “I like your wrists. I think they’re cool. I mean, they could be like a statement if you want to keep them.”

  And before I go, I feel a pull and turn to see the baby is still really watching me. She latches onto my gaze and holds it in a challenge. She furrows her brow and throws her arms into the air, exploding her hands like stars. She jerks them back down and covers her eyes.

  “It’s her best trick,” the woman says, and we smile at the baby’s amazingly fat legs, for her disappearance has, of course, made her more visible.

  “Ahh, ahh, ahh,” the baby demands.

  I say, “Whoa, girl, you’ve got skills,” and then her laughter peals upward, buoyant and spreading. It’s let loose like bunches of balloons, like all the babies who will grow into children, and then become teenagers despite their crazy mothers. It’s let loose like all the babies who will learn to float free of their mothers, who will grow, however fitfully, into adults.

  Costume

  My brother is squeezable. I like to squeeze his head and rest my fingers on the soft spot at the top where the bones stay open, waiting for smartness to enter. I fit two fingers in this spot and rub in slow circles.

  Today my brother is dressed as a pink bunny rabbit and I am a witch. My mother designed his costume because he’s still too small to imagine for himself. He’s at the stage where he hops around in his plastic underpants and eats the dog food. He lives in a round leaky world, with a round face and cheeks that are just waiting to be pinched, so he can have a pink face to poke out of his pink costume, with the satin hood that fits over his head like a ballet slipper, and the ears my mom spent hours on—carefully stuffing with pipe cleaners and pieces of cardboard.

  “He’s perfect,” my grandmother says as she greets us at her front door on Halloween night. She carries him into the living room, props him up in the middle of the couch for all to admire.

  “Oh, oh, oh,” say my aunts of the long flowing hair: Delia the difficult, Annie who is worrisome, Sandra the serious and responsible. They gather around him and he sits there smiling and interpreting every word as a sign of love, every sound and smell as the goodwill of the universe.

  “Yes,” says my mom. He’s her very own special creation.

  I slide along the living room wall of my grandparents’ house in my crooked glasses. I slide and creep. I’ve used masking tape to attach plastic eyelashes to my eyelids, to make my eyes appear more mysterious. My glasses have no lenses—all the better to see him with. I’ve made my costume myself, out of my mom’s short silky green negligee, a witch hat, and fifteen Mardi Gras necklaces looped around my waist, neck, and arms for casting spells. I can see the future with my glasses, and in it I’ll be good.

  * * *

  When it’s time to take our Halloween picture the family assembles in the living room. I lift my brother off the couch and prop him up in front of me, against the coffee table. He lets me do what I want with him. Hold him up by his armpits, dangle him upside down over the edge of my parents’ bed. I tell him in the bathtub not to feel bad about the weird thing between his legs: all boys have it and it’s called a penis.

  Now Grandma is yelling for someone to get Great-Grandma Mary who’s losing her memory of us. She thinks the camera’s flash will fix us, bright and smiling, in her mind. But Great-Grandma Mary is half-blind. She has to be fetched from the kitchen and wheeled up in her chair very, very close, and when she’s finally in place and my aunts and uncles have gathered to see, Great-Grandma Mary leans across the coffee table and says, “Oh, what a beautiful geranium!”

  “No!” my grandmother yells.

  I settle my hands on my brother’s head as my aunt Delia and my mom explain to Great-Grandma Mary what she’s supposed to see. “The children! They’re wearing
costumes!”

  But I like her originality.

  I blur my eyes behind invisible lenses. I pat my brother’s stomach, hug him, whisper “Shhh,” and when he giggles and says “Shhh” back, I roll his satin bunny ears, very gently, bending the pipe cleaners and crunching the cardboard my mother spent such a long time on into two small handles.

  Great-Grandma Mary leans closer, her eyes swimming behind glasses as thick as crystal balls. My father, who takes me out to shoot hoops, who treats me like a boy but will soon discover I’m not; Delia, who asked of my costume, “Whose idea was that?”; and my uncle, with the frightening voice, who yells, “My, what beautiful eyelashes you have!” all lean forward. They press in on us with their decisions about who is the best looking, who is too much of an individual, who is a little bit strange.

  I smile, squint, blur my eyes and turn my family into shadows. But I can still feel them, filling us up with their different ideas, fastening us in place. My grandpa, steady with the camera, counts, “One, two,” but before he can snap the shot, Great-Grandma Mary, whose voice is like water, says, “I see now. A pink bear, and a clever little witch,” and my mother, much louder since she’s begun taking art classes, declares, “No, he’s a rabbit!”

  I feel her love shoot an arrow straight at his costume. She spent one week with directions of feathery brown paper like maps, and tiny needles held between her teeth.

  “I love the little babies,” she likes to say. It’s the little ones, she tells me, who need the extra attention, the extra patting and pinching; it’s the little ones, I think, who don’t ask questions, or want to do things their own way.

  Grandpa aims the camera, centers us, and resumes: “One, two…” I look inside my great-grandmother’s glasses, a space where people can change shape, fade, or completely disappear. I pull up, as tight as I can, on my brother’s handles. The flash explodes into blinding light and then recedes into silver around the edges of everything. Globs of red and yellow move across the family’s faces. Their hands rise to their throats. Their eyes pop. I let go of my brother’s handles, and the room exhales. There is one tiny moment before he screams.

  “Meredith!” my mom yells. “You were choking him.” Her eyes and hair are loose. She runs toward me, pulls me by the upper part of the arm, the root. She pulls me down the hall and sits me down on a bed that used to belong to my father.

  Now I have her full attention. I see I look strange to her in her silky nightie, slippery, like a piece of unstitchable satin. I wonder if it’s the costume that makes me bad. I test it by running my fingers along my beads—I try to summon back their power. I smooth the folds of the negligee along my legs.

  “Look at me!” my mother yells again, grabbing both of my arms, so I know she could shake me if she wanted.

  “Why do you do things like that?” She reminds me that my brother is smaller than I am. That he needs to be protected.

  I ask, “Do you like my costume?”

  She takes a deep breath. Like me, she has a hard time not telling her truth.

  She says, “It’s very interesting.” She says “interesting” the way she says it about the kids down the street who are allowed to run loose in their underwear, or about my outfits when my father dresses me. I start to feel crumbly inside, like we’re separating, just slightly, like we’re two of her skin-colored costume patterns slowly peeling apart. She hugs me and says, “I know you made it, sweetheart, it’s nice, it’s very, very…” She’s running her hands over my beads, as if trying to feel their magic.

  Center

  Susan only half believes she’s visiting the home of her newly married brother. She has a queasy, unreal feeling left over from the plane ride: New York to Los Angeles—nonstop, a feeling of distances covered too quickly. On the plane she’d studied the back of the inflight magazine—the states mapped out like different regions of the brain, the flight trajectories swooping and swirling electric pulses. She’d been surprised at the number of connections leading to and away from her childhood home in Cedar Rapids.

  It didn’t help Susan’s sense of reality that the wedding, in her experience, was still just an image on the invite. The card had shown black-and-white photos of her brother and his fiancée making faces and kissing. She’d found the display of beauty and quirkiness annoying. And her annoyance made her feel like the “bitter older sister,” so she’d taken the invite off of the refrigerator where she’d placed it as a reminder. She’d then lost the invitation, actually. She’d somehow managed to schedule an important part of her doctoral exams on the same day as the wedding.

  Yet Susan now stands at her brother’s front door, in a pocket of shade amid the bright LA sunlight, on a porch with a swing and other convincing realistic details like half-dead pansies in terra cotta pots. The door is cracked, and her brother Alex is rummaging around the car for the house keys he’s dropped between the seats. Susan pushes the door open. She could call out to her brother, say, “Hey, it’s open,” but she’d rather be a spy. She’d rather check things out, make them her own.

  It happens right away:

  Inside the front room is a familiar slanted block of sun across a shaggy carpet, and pothos, hanging plants with their tropical twining leaves, like living wigs of long green hair. Here are the nubby cinder block walls. Although one is now painted a yellow ocher and seems to vibrate as if pregnant or alive. Susan is thirty-five, four years older than her brother, and she thinks, no, this is not his house, it’s hers, the one she inhabited for that brief time without him, when she was the center of the universe.

  Bubbles of romantically edited memory form:

  She sits on the carpet inside the patch of sunlight and is spotlit underwater. Dust motes float like sea monkeys in the beam and the carpet is a jumble of aqueous worms.

  But Alex, who has graciously picked her up at the airport, who is disconcertingly excited to see her, comes bounding through the door. “Oops,” he says. He’s a monstrously large child with orange leather bowling shoes and one sparkly earring. He shakes his keys in front of Susan’s face. He skips to the kitchen, and destroys, as usual, Susan’s romantic visions of herself—they rise, tremble, and pop.

  The kitchen is very clearly not their old home. It’s too California—the cabinets are white and sleek, not that old butterscotch brown with the faux-rustic hardware. There is a chrome dishwasher, refrigerator, and range. And Susan remembers that her brother’s new wife Melinda is a “fancy cook person,” as her mother called her. A gastronomist, with a blog and a personal consulting business. She is a yoga-doing, take-care-of-yourself-in-order-to-spread-good-vibes-across-the-universe person, Susan thinks. Enlightened bourgeoisie. Little jars of herbs line the countertop. As if for more evidence her brother opens the refrigerator, which blooms into an exotic jungle of leafy greens, fruit as large as heads, blocks of cheese, and expensive blue and green glass bottles.

  Susan thinks of her small Brooklyn apartment, meals of one precooked sausage, coffee, and gummy bears. She thinks about her brother’s old refrigerator, full of beer and half-eaten bags of French fries—oh, how they bonded over their bad health habits.

  Alex now sticks his hand into the green mass and pulls on something beige and full of twisted appendages, something that grows larger as it emerges from the leaves. “It’s a root baby,” he cries and drops it suddenly on the counter. He takes a few steps back and laughs, at first forced, then real.

  Susan has her choices—she can laugh along with her brother and bond over the sudden weirdness. An ironically random message from the universe?

  Instead she takes the laugh and tries to unravel it.

  She thinks the laugh is partly for her sake, a way to say, “Don’t worry, older sister, I haven’t been domesticated either,” and she doesn’t like the pity.

  She thinks the laugh might carry a tinge of self-congratulation—a satisfaction that his unfamiliarity with root vegetables is proof he’s still antiestablishment, still a struggling artist, even if fully funded by hi
s wife.

  She thinks the laugh comes from a fear that they’re no longer neck and neck, a fear that he’s fallen behind. She’s still out there in the real wilds—not those of a suburban refrigerator, but like Baudelaire or Basquiat (Alex’s heroes), those of a real city.

  But Alex doesn’t seem to be thinking anything. He bounces around the kitchen, working a fancy espresso machine, and tells her about all of his projects: he wants to fill in the swimming pool with soil and grow a huge urban garden, because that would be so anti-LA; he’ll sell his car if Melinda lets him and turn the garage into his studio. He’ll get a bus pass and become the flâneur of public transit, “because how else do you see real people in LA?” He laughs at himself, and Susan hears that large portion of humility and grace, an excitement that stretches far back and bubbles up from their childhood, a time when having a new toy, something magnificent all to himself, meant he wanted to share it with her.

  She sits on the carpet inside the square of sunlight beamed through the living room window. He buzzes at her edges, watches her carefully, and leaps into her beam of light. She plants her hand in the middle of his chest, and shoves him hard.

  She moves to the kitchen table and wills herself into the tip of a crayon. She makes water with blue and yellow waves, but can see through the door that baby Alex has already forgotten he’s been shoved. He’s trying to take her sea monkeys and capture them in a glass jar. He dances and leaps in and out of the beam, and scatters the dust motes everywhere.

  Susan draws a storm.

  Alex swipes the glass through the air and covers it, quick, with the metal lid. She hates how her brother wants to see everything she sees, and then copies it. She knows their mother will always give him more encouragement for his efforts because he will always be younger, and, like the little engine that could, the one who is always trying to catch up.

  Until now, that is.