“Would you like a cigarette?” the Sainte Maria said, pushing her pack across the table.
“I can’t,” I said. “I’m pregnant.”
The Sainte Maria had fed me dinner and given my brother baths. The Sainte Maria had pinched me when I whined and shown me the place in the stone wall where the chipmunks stored the sunflower seeds they stole from Mrs. Clawson’s garden. Somewhere in the house was her leopard print jacket and somewhere in the pocket, worked all the way down by now into the lining, was a little wax ball with something unspeakable inside.
“I think her father was a gypsy,” Thingy had said, both of us banished to my room for washing Dog in the kitchen sink and plugging its drain with his hair. “He came in some kind of caravan, selling pots or something, and stuck it in her mother and was gone the next day.”
“The Nina told me her father is in jail,” I said. I was a girl who was fond of the facts. “He robbed a liquor store.”
“That’s what I said, Alice.” Thingy rapped me on the forehead with her knuckles. “Weren’t you listening to me?”
Though the sky was flat and white, the clouds indistinguishable from one another, they still moved across the sun which threw patterns of shadow and light. Everything on the mountain fell under them, but sometimes a trick of the slopes would make the effect seem less arbitrary than it actually was. One house would be engulfed in shadow while right next door another blazed with light. One face was dark and hazy while another was bright as bone.
“Good for you,” the Sainte Maria said as shadow and light swept through the kitchen. She put her hand over the back of mine and squeezed.
(Already the sex is determined, the whole genetic code. A fish that dreamed of being a bird. A bear who dreamed it was a man and woke up blinking. It was spring! If you fall asleep on a feather bed and rise in the morning from a mound of straw. . .If you eat a little oat cake and find your mouth filled with dung. . .If a man gives you a raspberry and it grows in your stomach until it is a pie’s worth, a bushel basket, a whole bush’s crop. . . . If the crows come down and snip you open. . . . If they eat you clean. . . . These are things a mother should tell you, but already there are eggs inside the egg, a habitual gesture, a film receding from the wide, black eyes. At a certain moment, the heart begins to beat which it will do forever after. Forever and ever, until it stops.)
Some nights I would leave the house and go into the forest. I always did this with great secrecy and haste, no telling who could be watching, but once I had eased the back door shut behind me and skirted the exposed meadow, I was in the pitch-black shadow of the trees and could not be seen.
Then, as I walked between the trees I felt a great lightening. Coming out on the edge of a ridge, I watched from the comfort of the treeline as the tops of other trees rustled and tossed in a wind I was above, removed from. The moon was full and heavy. The face within it—eyes and mouth, twin pits for a nose—pulled down as if gravity were wiping it from the moon’s skull. Soon it would slide off to flutter into the forest and be picked apart for nests, dragged into dens to cozy the young.
I walked all over the mountain this way, my belly thrust before me. I was very young.
“I made you a soft one,” Rosellen said and slid the egg cup in front of me. She tapped around the crown of the egg with a spoon and lifted the shell free so I could pierce the floating yolk, slurp it up
. . .I live in a golden house with no doors or windows. . .Scarcely was my father in the world before I could be found sitting on the roof. . . .
When I didn’t dip my spoon in right away, Rosellen said, “A lot of people eat an egg like this and think they’re eating the chick, but let me assure you there was never anyone in that thing. It’s an also-ran, a never-was.”
“Sterile as a stick,” she said, losing interest in me and moving away to the window. “Barren as a box of rocks.”
“Are you looking for trouble?” Thalia said. “You’ll find it.”
From the top of the stairs I could see out across the living room where Mrs. Clawson was standing by the window. I sat down behind the railing and resisted the urge to thrust my legs through the slats. They would fit, I was sure, only a little trouble about the knees, but I was still that small, still that unformed. To kick my legs like a child above the dim, pulsing air of the room. The white couch and carpet, chairs and piano, the white sheer of Mrs. Clawson’s pajamas, a silk pantsuit with amorphous buttons made of pearl. My legs could be like beaters, stirring everything to grey. I could be a little girl and not understand what I saw.
The rain came down, pocking the dune, bending the grass. Mrs. Clawson looked rumpled. She stood without touching anything, not even herself.
“Alice, Alice, Alice,” Thingy said. “I want you to meet someone.”
Her dress flowed over her breasts and then descended like a pleated column from the high, banded waist. She looked like a candle and her face flickered and shifted like flame stretched upward by a draft. I wanted to touch her—my friend! my friend!—but she had her hand on a man’s arm and was pulling him toward me.
“It’s nice to meet you,” Daniel said. “I’ve heard so much about you I feel like I already have.”
Of course, I recognized him right away. Hadn’t there been something before this about a dragon, or a beetle, about a hole or a little snake uncoiling, testing the air with its tongue? But I couldn’t think of the right story—after all, where was his brother? Where was the lake from which he should ascend?
He wore a brown corduroy jacket and khaki pants. His hair was darker than Thingy’s, heavier, but he was still very pale, very gold and blue. Suddenly, there was almost no one there: Mrs. Clawson by the refreshment table talking to a man with a cane, a girl our age, very drunk, laughing as her boyfriend pulled her again to her feet. And Jacob who came up next to me then as silently as if he had swum across the yard. Jacob, who didn’t touch me, but still laid his hand.
“When I was your age we would bake cakes and bring them over to each other’s houses,” Miss Fawcett said. She twitched her nose, red from blowing, her eyes pink and rheumy as a white rabbit, overbred, allergic to straw. “We would try to outdo each other: Lady Baltimore cakes bursting with daffodils, King cakes with plastic babies baked into the rings.”
All the books in the library were fat with decay. The explorers and pirates, velvet rabbits and talking fish, the finches and cinders and centaurs and genies, sloe-eyed maidens and dead kings floating just beneath the waters of the lake: all laced with nets of algae, their eyes gelid and blind. The slightest ripple and they bobbed away from me: pages purring from their binding, covers slicking my palms with mold.
“Such disgusting cakes,” Miss Fawcett said. “Too sweet, improperly set. And we didn’t bake them for each other, oh no, but we were who ate them. Imagine five or six girls standing around the table. The squeak of sugar on our teeth, choking on batter. Imagine how we forced ourselves and still no one noticed us. Not one person said to me, ‘You look like a girl who can really bake.’”
(Immediately, the process of division begins. It bubbles up like froth in the eddy, like frogspawn riding the rill. Soon the eyelashes form and the pads of the thumbs. Soon enough the pattern of the hair—falling straight across the brow—and the joints and the bones and the teeth and the brain. Lights flicker—is it spring?—a blue pulse at the belly and one at the heart. The story is almost over now. No more roles to play. I dreamed the edge of the world: a rock upthrust, chill tooth, and the water lapping. The white sky and gray water. A boat that came closer and closer until it washed up at my feet little more than a tiny white shirt, complete with smocking. Peacock and bear, horse, and owl. They turn and see each other. They rear to strike.)
One night I walked further than usual; too far, in fact, and I knew I would have trouble making it home before dawn. Still I pushed on, through the thickets, around the stones. The moon was always out those days. It had abandoned its cycle and when we came into a sudden clearing it gaped with me
at the two streams—one sharp and tingling, one so sick it almost moaned—at the rock face and the crumbling cave, at the giant serpent, white as a grub but banded with red, horns on its head, a great blazing crest on its forehead like a diamond. The worm was the size of a well-grown man and rolled in the sick stream. It splashed the fetid water over its scales and rubbed its blunt, soft face against the ground. There was a terrible smell and the crest, as it swung its head from side to side, blinded me with refracted light, but still, there was something familiar about it. Still, I sank to my knees in the dirt and stared, only dimly aware as my bladder let go, my pants soaked through, liquid pattered on the leaves below.
“The Kerewe invite a stranger from another village to sleep with the widow three times before she can free herself from the pollution of death,” Daniel said. “The Baganda believe the placenta is the child’s twin and if the child dies at birth both are buried separately and separately mourned.”
“There,” Thingy said, and settled the clover chain around my stomach. She lay back in the sun and the bees rose and fell around us. One bee, ten bees. How many bees is too many? What an impossible question I could hear her laughing, though I hadn’t asked it, and we lay together in the green and blue world, under the bees which rose and fell, under the sun which turned away.
“Goodbye, goodbye,” Thingy said, but then she came back to me, many years later, and stood before me like a candle I had only to reach out my hand to take.
“I know you’re there,” said Mrs. Clawson. She didn’t turn from the window. The storm was passing; the storm was past. From where she stood she could see darkness and a slow drip from the roof.
“Don’t think I didn’t hear you,” Mrs. Clawson said, “Sneaking around. Breathing through your mouth.” Her voice was rising, though she hadn’t turned, hadn’t looked. I stood up and backed away. Behind me was the long, white hallway, the little sandy room, my Thing who slept so soundly she had once slept through an entire firework display curled in the back of my father’s truck. “I can’t have a moment to myself, can I? You ingrate. You thief. From the day you were born, I couldn’t have—”
But I was gone, down the hall, into the room. I shut the door behind me a little too hard and the change in air pressure sucked the blinds into the open mouths of the windows and spat them out again like rattling tongues. Still, Thingy slept, her breath heavy and sure, and it wasn’t until later, back in my own bed and wrestling with the damp, salty sheets, that I realized her eyes were open.
“What’s the matter, Alice,” Thingy said when she saw me looking. “Did you see a ghost?”
Born dead. Is there any other way?
But in the dark I couldn’t see the stain, and with the scent of the worm in my nose, its heat flowing over my skin, I was nothing more than a beetle lifted from one leaf and set down on another, stunned by the immensity of the void in between.
The worm swung its head toward me and I saw its snout, its fangs. Its eyes were blue and though I wanted to run I was afraid if I stood up I would walk right toward it, keep walking until I had delivered myself into its mouth.
“So that’s the kind of girl you are,” the worm said, its voice low and clotted. “I guess I can’t say that I’m surprised.”
And then I did run, stumbling as I went over a bundle someone had wedged under a root—blue jeans and a man’s leather belt, a thin red T-shirt emblazoned with white script—through the forest and across the ridge, over the meadow and the creek, up the stairs and to my own room where I locked the door and huddled in my bed, my hands clasped between my thighs, a pain in my belly that grew and grew.
(On the way back to town, we were quiet and he fiddled with the radio. “Ring-a-ding-ding,” someone sang. He kept switching the stations. “She-bop-a-loo-bop” “Too-roo-ra-loo-ra-lay” The wipers smoothed the rain in arcs across the windshield, but when they retreated it bristled back up again. This time around I had noticed him aging. He had never been a hard man, not wiry like my father, but there was a new kind of softness to him, a smothering as if his chest and his stomach, his arms, thighs and the pink curl of his penis were all collapsing in toward some interior mouth, toothless, gumming in his midsection. But then we had moved further into the room, further into the mirror, and touched here and here, here and here. . .It was an old trick—the rabbit out of the hat, a burst of doves from the silk bouquet—but as soon as his penis rose to touch the top of his leg and then the top of mine, straining from its nest of white-blond hair as if it had caught a scent, my sense of his body disappeared and he was again himself, agelessly older than I, kind because he didn’t care.
The road wound out of the forest and empty lots began to open up on either side. Soon we would be at the school and he would drive me right to the door, a concerned parent after all, and I a truant, well caught. Green light flashed in and out of the squalls of rain, a willow shimmied in the library’s side-lot and a flock of sparrows darted into a gleaming chokecherry which would, in the spring, once again suffer under its weight of hairy, white blooms. It was a vain hope, that we could skip the winter, and yet it still felt worthwhile to observe that while the rain soaked the earth, it did not flood. “YEOW” said the radio. We pulled into the high school turn-around and parked behind a glossy yellow bus. After today he would return to the world he had imagined for himself, filled with entrances and egress points, directional markers, signs rattling in the wind. After today, I would never again be alone.
Some kids were standing under the school’s front awning, their jackets tented up over their heads like broken wings, waiting to make a dash for the parking lot. They looked at us curiously and, never knowing what to do at this point, I reached over and shook his hand.
But the rain didn’t stop. Isn’t that the point? Soon enough all water joins the flood. . .)
It wasn’t until the morning, I saw the sheets were filled with blood. A few days later, we had a little burial in the forest. Thalia made the box herself and gave me a length of cream chenille she said her mother had once intended to make into a dress with which to stitch the lining.
“Pity pity pity,” says the cardinal, but no one answers and soon the bird moves on, secure in his bright coat, in his need to be pleased.
When we got to the clearing, Thalia didn’t ask how I knew it was there. When we left the box in the cave, neither of us spoke any words. It was a summer day, the summer forest tossing all around us. I was seventeen, and that is the whole story, Ingrid. All you need to know.
Unless you’re the sort of girl who is curious, the kind who won’t take no for an answer, who sneaks down the hall in her bare feet to eat the last slice of cake in the dark, who doesn’t clean up her crumbs.
In that case, I’ll tell you her name, but nothing further.
It was Alice, of course. Alice Small.
The Orifice
And the Orifice said:
Do You Love Horses? Are You Going to Heaven or Hell? Good News! Cockatiel Confessions—Everything You’ve Heard Is True! Plus, the Marvelous Cichlids of Lake Malawi. The Who, Why and How of Talking. Plus, Our Amazing Spaceship Earth. Care and Feeding Tips. Safe Branches for Perches. I Wasn’t Sure Whether I’d Enjoy the Good News. Rush! Toxicity Info. Safe Moving Day. Baby Cories, Dojo Loaches. Essential Chemistry Needs for Popular Species. Rabbitfish. Puff Up or be Eaten. True Story: I’m a Junior Endurance Champ. Inside! The Vasa Parrot Profile. Stressed Out? Plus, Territorial Aggression. 2 Tricks: Climb the Ladder, Ring the Bell. Too Hot? Too Cold? Why Does God Allow Disasters? Good News! Good News! Would a Compassionate, Merciful God Inflict Excruciating Pain and Torment on Human Beings in Terrifying Hellfire for all Eternity? Isn’t it about Time You Discovered the Truth?
The Black Knight’s Tale
Today we went into town, all together. The men are foragers; they did the shopping. The women, myself and yourself, Ingrid, you were there, we went to the Laundromat.
Jacob is a man to whom it has never occurred he might lose his mind. He doesn’t believe
in losing his mind and so it will never happen to him. Daniel is a man who sees his mind all around him—in objects, in other people’s expressions. I have seen Daniel cut a pear in half and sit there stunned by it. I have seen him reach out to touch something like a watering can or a silk flower, his finger trembling with anticipation, and then just stop. Not touch it at all. The object becoming a symbol to him of something far larger inside himself that he cannot see.
It makes for an uneasy pairing. It’s a wonder they can get along at all. Yet, they are friends, Ingrid, and I think honest ones. Daniel walks slightly behind Jacob. He keeps his eyes on the back of Jacob’s head. Jacob responds to Daniel the way he does to everything: with certainty, with uninhibited control. One is my husband and one is my lover. I thought about this as I put their shirts in the washing machine and smoothed their socks flat on the folding table.
Someone knocked on the window. I looked up and it was my father.
The Laundromat is like a terrarium. There is the same faint curve to the glass windows which trap the heat of machines and bodies, and a tendency toward obscuring mist. They both have the same iconography of arcane objects—carts and metal hangers, pirate chests, machines that dispense powder and ones that dispense colorful liquid, miniature motion-activated tiki gods—and the same general attitude of frozen display I observed in the frogs and green lizards kept in school to teach us the value of scientific detachment.
Today, the Laundromat was mostly empty: just you and I and an elderly couple who I didn’t recognize. They were both overweight, both with the same creamy skin that stretched over their fatty bodies as if it were a glove they were pulling on. The man was having a problem with his breathing. His breath sounded as if it were being artificially forced in and out of his body and he couldn’t seem to stand all the way up. He walked from the washer to the dryer and back again breathing in that fashion, curled into himself, as his wife murmured in the corner. She was folding his underwear. A pile of it sat fresh and airy and white in her lap.
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