After graduating, we planned to live cheaply and save up to move to Rome. We both thought there was no point in applying to graduate school unless we first spent a period of time in Rome researching something original to write about.
In the meantime, I found work in a doll’s house shop. We sold tiny things to put in them, from lamps to Robert Louis Stevenson books with real, microscopic words in them. Peter got a job in a graveyard, installing tombstones, digging graves, helping with Catholic burial processes, and cleaning up messes. He would find diaphragms, empty bottles of spirits, squirrel skins left over from hawks’ meals, and dozens of umbrellas. He brought the umbrellas home, until our apartment started to look like a cave of sleeping bats. I had an umbrella yard sale one Saturday when he was at work:
ALL UMBRELLAS TWO DOLLARS AS IS
It was an overcast day so I did well for myself.
Peter was sombre-looking and strong so everyone thought him ideal, and his Latin came in useful. He was outdoors most of the time. He developed a permanent sniffle, and smelled like rotting flowers and cold stones. There was a mausoleum that was a perfect, but smaller replica of a Greek temple—Peter spent his lunch breaks smoking, reading, and eating sandwiches on the steps. It was built by the founder of a grand department store that sold furs, uncomfortably scratchy blankets, shoes and other things. Peter threw his cigarette butts through a gated window leading into the mausoleum, as he didn’t think such a man deserved a classical temple. He was half driven mad by the cemetery—‘a dreadful facsimile of Rome’, he called it—but couldn’t afford to leave. It paid very well because not many people were morbid and solemn enough to stand working in a cemetery. The owner said Peter was very dignified and he could see him going far in the cemetery business.
We both put up advertisements—‘latin tutors available’—in bookstores and libraries, but received no replies.
Living together we became careless compared to how we normally acted with each other, and a few months after graduating I discovered I was pregnant. When I started to show, I was fired; the owner of the doll’s house shop thought I would bump into all the precious little things with my new bulk and break them. I felt like a doll’s house myself, with a little person inside me, and imagined swallowing tiny chairs and pans in order for it to be more comfortable.
When we learned we were having twins, Peter said the ultrasound photo looked like an ancient, damaged frieze. As I grew larger, I wore pashmina shawls around the house, tied around my body like tunics.
Neither of us had twins in our families. It was the Latin that did it, Peter said, did I have any dreams of swans or bearded gods visiting me? He acted like I had betrayed him in a mythological manner. I had dreams that Trajan’s column and the Pantheon grew legs and chased me which I didn’t tell him about, as I thought they would upset him further.
One night Peter didn’t come home from the graveyard. He arrived at dawn, covered in mud, his coat off and bundled under his arm. He opened the coat, inside was the corpse of a very small woman, a dwarf I suppose. She wore a black Welsh hat like Mother Goose, it was glued to her head. She had black buckled shoes and a black dress with white frills along the hem, wrists and neck, and yellow stockings. Her face was heavily painted, to look very sweet, but her eyelids had opened, though she was dead.
We buried a small, black coffin today, said Peter, I thought it was so terrible, the eternal pregnancy of death. If we are to have two, what difference will three make, he said, and laughed horribly, like a donkey. He had never laughed like that before. I dug the coffin up again, took her out and put the coffin back empty, he said, no one will know.
Peter stumbled off to bed, leaving me with the little corpse. Her eyeballs looked horrible. I thought I would turn to stone if I looked at them too long. I threw Peter’s coat in the bathtub, wrapped her in a sheet, put her in a garbage bag. Then I picked her up. She was extraordinarily heavy. I decided I would stuff her in the organ, it was the only good hiding place but I had the horrible thought that it would become haunted with her, and the keys would play her voice.
I brought her down to the grocery store, and put her behind the counter. She was heavy. I hoped if she stayed there long enough she would shrink like an apple, and Peter could bring her back to the graveyard well hidden in a purse and rebury her like a bulb.
I kept thinking about her eyes, and later returned downstairs to put pennies over them. The pennies didn’t cover the whole of them, they were very large eyes, but I didn’t want to waste one- or two-dollar coins.
Peter slept for twenty hours. When he woke up, he didn’t remember what he had done, so I didn’t tell him. As he recovered his accusations against my pregnancy redoubled: I had consorted with ancient pagan gods. He sat in the bathtub with no water in it, reading St Augustine and burning incense. He left for Mass on Sundays without me. We had our own odd version of Catholicism where we went to a different Catholic church every Sunday, while on sporadic Sundays we went to a large park that was mostly forest and took off our clothes and drew crosses on ourselves with mud as Peter muttered incantations. I never knew which church he was going to. I stayed home and read my favourite passages from The Metamorphoses.
He boiled our marriage certificate in the tea kettle, saying he wouldn’t work in a cemetery for the rest of his life just to feed the children of Mars and, finally, he left, while I was at the grocery store buying him lettuce and coffee.
When I came home, his bulky green leather suitcase, which reminded me of a toad, was gone, as were a selection of the Loeb books, the jar of Ovaltine, and my favourite purple wool cardigan which was too small for me to wear with my pregnant belly. He had left all his underwear, most likely out of forgetfulness, and they stared at me like the haughty, secretive heads of white Persian cats when I opened the clothes drawer.
I found his parents’ address on an old report card. I had never met them. The house was in the suburbs, I had to take a train there. There weren’t any sidewalks, only lawns and roads. I passed a frightening house with a sagging porch. Between the door and the window there was a rotting moose’s head on a plaque. The moose winked at me. The movement caused the moose’s glass eyeball to fall out and roll across the porch and onto the lawn.
It was a very large fake Tudor house, the white parts were grimy, and there was a bathtub on the lawn, used as a planter for carnations. There were two very old black Cadillacs parked in the drive, probably from the 1980s. I had grown up in an apartment with only a mother who didn’t know how to drive. It was Peter’s mother who answered the door, I knew it was her because she also resembled an otter, her grey hair slicked back from her face. She wore a very old-fashioned looking purple suit, and grimaced at my stomach.
I asked her if Peter was there, and she said no, he had gone to the States for law school, she was glad he was finally getting himself together.
I left, feeling sick, imagining the babies swimming in my stomach like otters, with the faces of Peter and his mother. I ran back to the train station, not caring if the motion killed the foetuses. Back downtown, I wondered what it would be like to be run over by a tram—perhaps like being pushed through a sewing machine.
I didn’t have enough money to pay the rent the next month. I hoped the landlord would forget me the way he forgot his grocery store, but he came a few days before the month was up and asked for cheques for the next three months in advance as he was going to Wales to visit his cousin.
I had to leave all the furniture and the organ, we couldn’t afford to rent movers. I scooped all the stuff off the organ’s mantel and dumped it in my purse. My mother scolded me when I tried to pack Peter’s clothes and other things. He hadn’t taken his razor, his galoshes or his long maroon scarf. My mother and I took what we could box by box, on the tram, and once in a cab, my arms weighed down with plastic bags filled with Loeb books. I was glad to leave the old dead woman, whom I hadn’t had a chance to check on.
My mother lived in a dark, ground-floor apartment, she had m
oved after I started university, to a smaller place. It only had one bedroom, so I had to stay on the couch. All the furniture was blue and green brocade, and there were trinkets I remembered from childhood: a wooden horse missing its two back legs, a paper clown in a music box which started to dance when you opened a little drawer on the bottom, a model ship covered in dust, a collection of toy donkeys I was never allowed to play with because they had belonged to my grandfather, and all sorts of things bought at yard sales, discount shops and in Chinatown—baskets, pincushions, backscratchers, plastic flowers, peacock feathers. It was a horrible thing that you could buy peacock feathers for less than a dollar.
There was no room for all my Loeb books, I had to put them underneath the couch where they became all dusty.
When I was little, my mother had given me a department store catalogue to read. It was full of toys I couldn’t have, but I could cut out the pictures, she told me, she had already looked through the catalogue. I was amazed by a set of twin dolls: how did they manage to make them exactly the same? My mother laughed at me and said there were hundreds of them made in a factory, and everything else I owned had identical siblings, that’s how the world was now.
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 neighbourhood 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 Fitzgerald. She was a horrible, large child who carried a headless plastic doll everywhere with her, and spat 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 parlour organ, the bed now stripped of blankets, the shelves with no books on them—and of course the shrivelled 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 centre 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 pyjamas 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 librarie
s, 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 favourite 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.
Year's Best Weird Fiction, Volume 5 Page 32