I was couch-ridden for a month after having the twins. I felt like Prometheus, the babies were eagles with soft beaks, my breasts being continually emptied and filled. I didn’t name them Romulus and Remus as Peter and I had planned—Peter thought we simply couldn’t name them anything else—but Aeneas and Arthur.
My mother looked after the twins when I was well enough to look for work. She left them in strange places, under tables and in cupboards, but they weren’t old enough to attend day care. I couldn’t go back to the doll’s house shop, the owner was more interested in a fake pristine, miniature domestic life—unused pots and pans, cradles without babies in them. She didn’t even like to have children in her shop, her ideal customers were older men and women like herself, who wore brooches and would spend hundreds of dollars on a tiny imitation Baroque chair. I was too embarrassed to go looking around the university for work, or to put up any signs offering Latin tutoring—I felt like I had given birth to the twins from my head and my head hadn’t recovered.
The air in my mother’s neighborhood was always sickly sweet because of a chocolate factory, and it was there I got a job. All the chocolates were sold in purple and gold packaging. Fruits, nuts, and other things were delivered and encased in chocolate, the opened boxes looked like displays of shells, eggs, and rocks in a natural history museum. From my first day working there, I had nightmares of eating chocolates filled with bird bones, rocks, gold nuggets, Roman coins, teeth.
There was one other person with a university degree at the factory, a girl named Susan who studied English but couldn’t find a job in that field and had a child. She had named her daughter Charlotte Fitzgerald after Charlotte Brontë and F. Scott Fitz gerald. She was a horrible, large child who carried a headless plastic doll everywhere with her, and spat it into its body like an old man who chewed on tobacco. Her spit was always brown because Susan gave her sweets from the factory. Charlotte Fitzgerald was six, and didn’t know how to read. She threw tantrums if Susan didn’t give her sweets. I liked Susan but didn’t want my babies to spend too much time with Charlotte in case she influenced them. I never took home any free chocolates. I knew my mother would like them, but I also knew she would give some to Aeneas and Arthur when I wasn’t there, and sugar was like a nasty potion that would turn them into monsters. Susan often told me you could only have a limited influence on how your kids turned out, she felt Charlotte was already ruined and wished she hadn’t been born. I tried to pick out the nicest toys at second-hand shops, I stayed away from garish plastic things, I took lots of books out of the library for them but they were too young to read them and ripped them apart. They learned all sorts of things I couldn’t control at day care, words like “gosh.” Once, as I read them Aesop’s Fables translated into Latin, one of them yelled “Batman” at me.
As they didn’t have a father, I bought a male doll wearing a suit and bowtie with a string coming out of his back which, when pulled, emitted a laugh, but the laugh didn’t take long to stop working, and his grin bothered me so I threw him out, longing for sombre and cruel Peter.
I saved up enough money to find a place of my own when the twins were almost two years old. It looked like a house from the outside, but was really just one small room with a bathroom built in an old closet, a concrete yard, and a little fence that didn’t reach my knees. There was no bathtub, only a shower, and I had to buy a plastic bin to wash the babies in. There was a tile depicting St. Francis on the front of the house, beside the door.
I thought of Peter all the time. I took the twins for walks in the cemetery where he used to work, though the stroller was hard to push over grass. Whenever I saw cigarette butts, I imagined they were his. I collected umbrellas, and sold them from my front door on my days off. I also walked by our old apartment. The grocery store was still the same, and I imagine our rooms upstairs were too—the parlor organ, the bed now stripped of blankets, the shelves with no books on them—and of course the shriveled old lady downstairs behind the counter.
I tried to remind myself of all the times Peter acted horribly: just after we moved in together, we decided to have a costume party. I wanted to dress up as Argus from The Metamorphoses. I bought a white dress and painted eyes all over it, as well as a pair of white gauze wings which I also turned into eyes. When I tried my costume on a few days before the party, Peter said I looked terrifying, and everyone would think I was maddeningly jealous and controlling of him and he wouldn’t be able to enjoy himself. I threw the costume out, and decided to be a mouse from The Nutcracker instead of anything from Greek and Roman mythology. Peter didn’t know anything about ballets or Tchaikovsky and neither did I, really. I had seen a production of The Nutcracker as a child and I remembered it as all blurry with a cardboard sleigh and fake snow. I bought a grey leotard, crinoline, and made a mouse tail, ears out of paper.
Peter decided to be a lamppost. It was quite awful, he painted his face yellow, with a red and blue line across the center of his face, and made a kind of black paper lantern to wear over his head—it looked more like a bird cage. And he wore a black shirt with frills which he thought resembled the arabesques on some old European streetlights. I was baffled as to why he chose to be a lamp and was so enthusiastic about it, though I knew he thought dressing up as historical figures vulgar: he was furious when someone showed up as St. Francis, wearing a dirty brown tunic with fake birds sewn onto it.
A girl dressed up as the full moon kept trying to kiss Peter. She smelled like talcum powder and unwashed stockings, which is how I imagined the moon to smell. For the party, Peter had bought tins of snails, they smelled nasty, and floated in grey water. Why did he have to waste money on them when there were snails in the shed behind our building? The Romans enjoyed snails, he said to me in an irritable voice. He arranged them decoratively on bits of lettuce, that’s all there was to eat, besides the punch we made and some saltine crackers.
Lots of people came, and there were, I realized, many rich girls from our university who had grown up doing ballet. I was so afraid of them asking me where I had taken ballet, and if I could do a demonstration, that I took off my mouse ears, tail, and ballet shoes: I said I was dressed up as a ball of dust. One of Peter’s old friends from the boys’ private school he attended came in a brown fur coat, he had silk pajamas underneath, and played our organ while smoking a cigar, getting ashes all over the keys. He had a cruel habit of telling almost every girl he met that they looked like a male star he had seen in a film long ago—so and so, what’s his name, the funny chap with the moustache, you’re just the image, don’t say are you related to…? Peter didn’t say anything the time his friend compared me to a well-known silent film actor. He always took on a feigned look of innocence whenever anyone mentioned movies, as if he had spent his whole life in churches and libraries, though I had once overheard him humming Singin’ in the Rain while in the bath.
The twins looked more and more like Peter. It made me howl and pull my hair, though it meant they would be handsome. Peter once told me I looked like an owl, my eyes were very round. His favorite Roman god was Minerva.
On my way to work I had to cross over a bridge, and I often imagined hanging the twins from it on ropes, their little legs kicking, saving them at the very last moment—I thought such an act would make me love them more. The image disturbed me so much, I saw it every time I passed over the bridge, so I took to running over it, arriving at work sweaty and full of pity for my children.
Peter sent a postcard to my mother’s house, she called me to say there was a “Spanish or Italian letter” waiting for me. It was written in Latin and he said he was faring well. It had an American stamp on it, though it was an antique postcard of broken columns at Pompeii. He didn’t ask about the twins, with their heads that looked like shrunken, half-bald versions of his own. Though I didn’t have his address, I went to a photo booth in a subway station with the intention of taking a family portrait. Perhaps I would send it to American newspapers. Inside the booth, the twins wouldn’t
stop screaming and struggling. They hadn’t had their photos taken before.
In the photo Aeneas and Arthur weren’t on my lap, as I had put them, but sitting on a black wolf whose eyes reflected the photographic flash. It had a horrible, fanged grin. I stuffed it in my pocket and pushed the stroller home, the twins were screaming, I had to belt them in.
After I got them to sleep, I took the photo out of my coat pocket and looked at it again. I didn’t see why Aeneas and Arthur had cried so much. The wolf was handsome.
The longer I looked at the photograph, the larger it seemed, until I noticed the photograph was being held between two small black paws rather than hands. I was covered in fur the same color as my hair—black. I was too frightened to look in a mirror so I filled a bowl with water, and looked at my face. I had a long black nose and my eyes were green, as they were when I was a human. I wasn’t shocked, I didn’t feel like I looked that different.
I looked at the photograph again: yes it was me, the photo booth had somehow known before I transformed. I felt an urge to go outside and went through the backyard door. I ate some old apples in a rubbish bin, killed a rat, and sniffed some puddles. I wandered from alley to alley, from quiet street to quiet street—I had never been in an alleyway at night-time before, it had the inhuman liveliness of a puppet show.
Every night the same thing happened. I would put the twins to bed, read a while then, yawning, at around 9, turn into a wolf. I would then turn back into a human sometime around 3 or 4, those hours of transformation were always blurry like my memory of The Nutcracker.
As a wolf, I had no fear of jumping through windows. I stole, from bookstores, grocery stores, clothing shops, even flower shops. I carried things home in my mouth—bouquets and novels and sausages.
I was back in human form by morning, though sometimes I had stray black hairs on my chin or lips, my ears were a little long, or a few of my nails were still dark and thick like claws—I told people they were damaged after being smushed under a window frame. I had a lot of small cuts from breaking windows—I told everyone the twins scratched me.
A few times, the twins were awake when I returned home from hunting and stealing. When I approached them, they crouched and covered their eyes although I had stolen them all sorts of expensive, fanciful toys. I had more breasts as a wolf, but they refused to feed from me.
It ended up in the newspapers: “Wild dog breaks into shops.” A man had seen me leave a toyshop with an expensive Julius Caesar doll in my mouth. “It was a dark and horrid beast,” he said to the newspaper. “I bet it was looking for a real baby to eat.” I needed a disguise for getting around while in wolf form.
On a weekend, I went to a costume shop and purchased a nice pink rubber mask of a girl’s face, stretchable enough to fit over my long wolf’s nose, with yellow braids attached to it, a blue and white Alice in Wonderland dress, and a dainty pair of Victorian boots perfectly sized for my back wolf paws. I felt I could trust the girl who worked behind the counter at the costume shop. She looked somewhat wolf-like herself, with a long nose. She gave me the toy pistol for free, and indistinguishable, fluffy animal ears for the twins to wear, though they cried when I tried to put them on their heads. At home, I had a Red Riding Hood cloak someone had left at our costume party. It was made out of felt and had a copper clasp.
When no one was in sight, and I found a store I wanted to steal from, I took off my costume in a hidden spot, and jumped through the windows, taking what I needed. I was much greedier as a wolf. I decided to take care of the old woman in the old home Peter and I had lived in. I broke in through the back of the shop, but when I went to eat the woman, still in a bag behind the counter, the smell of embalming chemicals was so repulsive to me that I couldn’t do it. She seemed to have shrunk. I thought it would be better to leave her there than bury her in a nearby park. Instead, I chased a fat raccoon I found rooting in a compost bin, then stole a bag of pomegranates from a fruit and vegetable store.
The next morning, when I woke up, the twins were nowhere to be found. Not in the cupboards, or the bath, or the rubbish bin. I ran up and down the street and the alley, my belly and breasts flapping like the sad wings of a fowl. They were gone. I must have eaten them in the late hours of being a wolf. Usually I remembered my wolf hours clearly, but I had no memory of making a meal of my children. Yet my stomach was stretched, as if I had eaten something large. I retched, but nothing bloody or hairy came out. I drank cupfuls of coffee, trying to digest them as quickly as possible so they would be out of my body. After I went to the bathroom I looked into the bowl to see if there were any bits in my excrement. I found a tiny white bone. It could have been from a pigeon—I loved pigeons while in wolf form.
I sold all of Arthur’s and Aeneas’s things, which didn’t amount to much, around forty dollars. I bought myself some books and a plaid skirt which was too small for me.
Maybe Peter had come while I was asleep and taken them away. The idea very much relieved me. I imagined him raising them somewhere along the coast of the Black Sea, speaking to them only in Latin and making them herd sheep. I called the day care and their doctor, explaining that I was moving to Rome with the children.
That night, I stole enough brie from a cheese shop to make it look like I had a fridge full of moons. I made myself a meal of brie cheese, pomegranates, and raw pigeons. I started to write something I called Memoirs of a Wolf. I wrote in Latin first—Latin is the human language wolves know best—then translated it into English when I was in human form again the next morning.
Sometimes Susan arrived at work with a few stray brown hairs around her mouth, or a spot of blood, but I didn’t say anything and neither did she, and we stopped asking each other about our children.
THE GOTHIC SOCIETY
The first act of the Gothic Society was no more than a grotesque scribble, a heavy, ugly face drawn with charcoal on the walls of a concrete underpass that was quickly washed away.
Then someone found a stone griffon perched on the edge of a garbage bin, a leering wooden monk in a bathroom stall, a store window replaced with stained glass depicting a saint, a stretch of concrete sidewalk painted with suffering and comical beings.
Increasingly, their acts became more detailed and preposterous. A woman discovered that a bunch of her jewels had faces carved into them, someone else a gargoyle tattoo on their back, and a car was found with three stone kings sitting inside.
One morning, the residents of a glass building heard their alarms ring in the dark. From the outside, their building had changed overnight, into some sort of rectangular windowless cathedral, every inch covered in moldings. The material wasn’t stone—the whole building would’ve collapsed under a stone façade—but something similar to spray foam.
A construction company was called in to remove the gothic crust and free the residents. (Some of the workers took pieces home—a gargoyle face, a bird—to place in their gardens, only to have their gardens encrusted with gothic—every inch of green, every flower covered in nasty faces and snakes, fish, and virgins.) Some windows were broken during the procedure, and the next morning, the empty spaces were filled in with grey faces, vines, and winged beings once more. The building had to be abandoned.
The Gothic Society was compared to zebra mussels, to leprosy, to feral cats and urban foxes. Its members were never identified.
WAXY
My new bedroom was an old kitchen. One wall was taken up by dozens of small cupboards and drawers, a fridge, a black stove, and a little brown sink with a beige hose hanging out of it like a child’s leg. The landlord told me the fridge and stove didn’t work, but they were good for storing clothes and other things. I could use the fridge as a wardrobe, she said.
It was on the fourth floor of a fat house covered in green tarpaper, and shared a hall and bathroom with another room, where a couple lived. Neither of our rooms had doors, only door frames. All the windows looking out onto the street were covered in dirty sheets, giving the impression from the outsi
de that the house was nothing more than an empty shell with a giant’s patchwork blanket hanging on the other side.
Along with the fridge and stove, my room had a table, a stack of flimsy chairs, and a couch, which I was to use as a bed.
The kitchen cupboards were painted green and the walls were papered a reddish brown, with water spots and black mold here and there that reminded me of tinned meat that has been opened and forgotten. The sink water only ran cold.
I was very relieved. As soon as I moved in, I removed the sheet covering my small window, and washed the glass with vinegar.
A few days before, a girl from my Factory said she was leaving her place, since her Man had done well on an Exam and she could afford to move, and she told me I could take it. I was desperate to find a place and another Man, but when I went to look it was no more than a curtained-off section of a gloomy room shared with two other couples. One of the Men had brown teeth and kept licking his upper lip and leering at me as I was shown around the room. All four of them shared one filthy hotplate, and the windows were covered in long, thick, mouldy purple curtains. Damp Philosophy Books were stacked everywhere. In one corner there was a mountainous pile of empty tins, like a doll’s house for vermin. The curled, hanging metal lids reminded me of the Man’s protruding tongue.
There is nothing worse than being taken advantage of by someone else’s Man. It’s always considered the woman’s fault. I knew I wouldn’t be safe there. I was very fortunate to find the kitchen room through an advertisement posted in a café.
I had my own kerosene lamp, hotplate, toaster, tin bathtub, and kettle, all of which Rollo let me keep because he assumed the next woman he lived with would have them too.
The Doll’s Alphabet Page 2