One morning I faked being sick so that I wouldn’t have to go to school. While Mama was making me lunch I told her that Daddy had been coming into my bedroom at night, and she dropped the can of tuna all over the floor.
“You must have had a bad dream, Jane,” she said. We were both crouched over the linoleum, wiping up the runny oil and the flakes of fish.
I told her it had happened over and over, and I didn’t like it. I started to cry, and she held me, getting fingerprints of grease on my nightgown. She promised me it would never happen again.
That night Daddy did not come into my room. He went into his own, and had a tremendous fight with Mama. We heard crashes and loud shrieks; in the middle of it all you came into my room and crawled under the covers. The next morning Mama had her arm bandaged, and the frame of their pine bed had been split.
The next time that Daddy came to my bedroom, he told me we had something very serious to discuss. “Here I am, spending all this special time with you,” he said, “and what thanks do I get? You run and tell your mother you don’t like to spend time with me.” He told me I’d have to be punished for what I’d done. He wanted to spank me, but he made me pull down my underpants before he started. As he struck me, he told me not to tell anyone again. He said he wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. Not Mama, not Joley, not anyone.
In retrospect I believe I was very lucky. I have heard stories from the social workers at the San Diego schools about children younger than I who have sustained much more violent sexual abuse. It never got beyond the point of touching, and it only lasted for two years. When I was eleven, just as strangely as it all had started, it stopped.
So I wanted you to know why I never told you what I am sure you already have deduced. Perhaps now Daddy won’t be able to hurt you.
Please do not be angry with me. Please do not-
I stop writing here, and I reread the letter. Rebecca turns on the water in the shower and starts to sing at the top of her lungs. On second thought, I rip the paper into shreds. I rip it so many times there is no more than one word on each piece. I toss them into a garbage pail. And then, taking the matches the housekeeping staff has placed beside the bed, I set the shreds on fire. It is a plastic trash can and the flame scorches the sides. It will never be seashell pink again, I think. It is probably ruined forever.
46 JOLEY
Dear Jane,
When you were twelve you had a rabbit named Fitzgerald, you’d seen the name on the shelf at the library at school and liked the word. The rabbit wasn’t as interesting as the circumstances that surrounded it-Daddy had actually broken two of Mama’s ribs and she’d been hospitalized and you got so distracted by it that you refused to eat, sleep, whatever. In the long run Daddy broke the spell by bringing home this rabbit, striped like an Oreo, whose ears couldn’t quite stand up.
Unfortunately this was February and rather than building the rabbit a hutch you insisted we keep it safe and warm indoors. We took a thirty-gallon aquarium tank from the attic and put it on the floor of the living room. We filled it with wood chips that smelled of forests and then we dropped Fitzgerald in. He ran in confined circles and pressed his nose up to the glass. He pawed at the clear corners. All in all, he was a rotten rabbit. He chewed through telephone cords and socks and the edge of the rocking chair. He bit me.
You loved that demonic rabbit. You dressed it in applespotted baby clothes; hid it in your shiny, stooped church purse; you sang it ballads by the Beatles. One morning the rabbit was stretched out on its side-a revelation-we discovered the rabbit was male-but you felt this change of position was a bad omen. You made me stick my hand in Fitzgerald’s cage and when he didn’t nip me you knew he was sick. Mama refused to take him to the vet; she wouldn’t get close enough to the rabbit to drive it anywhere. She told you to be sensible and get ready for school.
You kicked and cried and tore the upholstery on a certain loveseat but in the end went to school. That day, however, as if God was involved, a nor’easter was predicted. When snow came down so heavily we couldn’t see the playground from our classrooms, we were dismissed. By the time we got home, Fitzgerald was dead.
It’s a funny thing, we’d never experienced death before this and yet both of us were pretty much matter-of-fact about it. We knew the rabbit was dead, we knew there was something to be done, and we did our best. I went to get a shoe box from Daddy’s closet (the only one large enough to fit a rabbit corpse in) and you found Mama’s sterling silver serving spoons and stuffed them in your snowsuit. We put on our down bibs and boots and then it came time to put the body in the shoe box. “I can’t,” you told me, and so I wrapped a dishcloth around Fitzgerald’s cold legs and lifted.
There were three inches of snow on the ground by the time we left the house. You led me to the school playground-the spot where the window of your classroom met the outdoors, a place where you could see the grave all day long. Taking a spoon out of your pocket, you began to chip at the frozen earth. You gave me a spoon, too. An hour later, when the brown ground had opened itself like a raw mouth, we set Fitzgerald to rest. We said an “Our Father” because it was the only prayer we both had memorized. You made a cross in the snow out of the stones we’d unearthed and began to cry. It was so cold the drops froze on your cheeks.
Take Route 70 to Route 2, and then to Route 40. Your endpoint is Baltimore. If you get there before five, you’ll be able to tour the medical museum at Johns Hopkins-a favorite of mine.
Afterward, you denied that you ever owned a rabbit. But this is what I remember about the incident: it was the first time I ever held your hand when we were walking, instead of the other way around.
Love,
Joley
47 JANE
It’s empty, except for the twenty teenaged boys who wear T-shirts emblazoned with the interests they have at stake. Medical Explorers, the shirts read. They are outlined with the faint black cartoon of a skeleton. Boning Up on the Future of Physiology. Apparently they are a division of the Boy Scouts, devoted to the study of medicine.
If that’s true-if these well-meaning young kids are planning to be doctors-I’d never bring them to this museum. Set off from the campus of Johns Hopkins like a quarantined captive, the building is even more dismal inside than it is outside. Dusty shelves and dimly lit glass exhibition cases form a maze for visitors.
Rebecca runs up to me. “This place grosses me out. I think Uncle Joley got it mixed up with somewhere else.”
But from the looks of things, I’d say this is just up Joley’s alley. The meticulous preservation, the absolute oddity of the collection. Joley collects facts; this is cocktail party conversation for a lifetime. “No,” I tell her, “I’m sure Joley got it right.”
“I can’t believe the things they’ve got in here. I can’t believe someone would go to the trouble of saving all the things they’ve got in here.” She leads me around the corner, to a gaggle of Medical Explorers who are bent over a small glass case. Inside is a huge overgrown rat, bloated and patchy, its glass eyes frozen toward the north. The card says it was part of a research experiment, and died from the cortisone shots. At death, it weighed 22.5 pounds, approximately the same as a poodle.
I stare at the gummy features a few minutes longer until Rebecca calls me from across the room. She waves me over to a wall-length exhibit of stomachs that have been frozen in time. Floating in large canisters of formaldehyde, the anomalies are tagged. There is a series of hair balls in the stomachs of cats and humans. There is a particularly disgusting jar with a stomach that still contains the skeleton of a small animal. Amazing! the tag reads. Mrs. Dolores Gaines of Petersborough, Florida, swallowed this baby kitten.
How awful, I think. Was it possible that she didn’t know she was doing it at the time?
The next wall of the maze holds shelves of fetal animals. A calf, a dog, a pig, which Rebecca informs me she will dissect next year in biology class. A human, in several stages: three weeks; three months, seven months. I wonder who willed
their own children to this museum. Where the mothers are today.
Rebecca stands in front of the human fetuses. She holds her forefinger up to the three-week specimen. It doesn’t even look like a baby, more like a cartoon ear, a pink paisley amoeba. There’s that red dot, like Jupiter’s storm, that is an eye. It is just the size of the nail on Rebecca’s pinky. “Was I really that small,” she says rhetorically, and it makes me smile.
By the time the baby is three months, you can really start to see that it is a baby. An oversized head, transparent, carries thin blood vessels to the black hooded eye. Stick-figure arms and webbed fingers and Indian-crossed legs stick out from the body, which is little more than a spine. “When do you start to look pregnant?” Rebecca asks.
“It depends on the person,” I tell her, “and I think it depends on whether you are having a boy or a girl. I didn’t show until about three months.”
“But it’s so tiny. There’s nothing to see.”
“Babies seem to carry a lot of extra baggage. When I was pregnant with you, I had been doing a practicum towards a masters as a speech pathologist at an elementary school. And back then you weren’t allowed to teach and be pregnant. Well, you were allowed, but it wasn’t common practice, and you’d certainly be out of a job when you gave birth. So I kept getting bigger and bigger and to hide the pregnancy I wore these hideous tie-dyed caftans. All the faculty kept telling me, ‘Jane, you know, you’re putting on a little weight,’ and I’d say, ‘Yeah, I don’t know what I can do about it.’ I’d run out of faculty meetings and student consultations to throw up. I told everyone I kept contracting different strains of the flu.”
Rebecca turns around, fascinated with this story of herself. “And then what?”
“School ended,” I shrug. “I had you in July, two weeks after school was finished. I still had six months of student teaching to do in the fall, so your father took care of you. And then, when I finished, I stayed home with you till you went to nursery school, when I continued my coursework and graduated.”
“Daddy stayed home with me for six months?” she says. “Alone?” I nod. “I didn’t know that.”
“Actually, I’d forgotten.”
“Did we get along? I mean, like, did he know how to change diapers and stuff?”
I laugh. “Yes. He knew how to change diapers. He also burped you and bathed you and held you over his back upside-down from your ankles.”
“You let him do that?”
“It was the only way you’d stop crying.”
Rebecca smiles shyly. “Really?”
“Really.”
She points to the seven-month fetus, complete with tiny toes and a nose and a bud of a penis. “Now that’s a baby,” she says. “That’s the way they are supposed to look.”
“They get bigger. You’d think natural selection would have found an easier way of reproduction. Childbirth is like trying to get a piano through your nostril.”
“Is that why I don’t have a brother or sister?” Rebecca asks.
We’ve never talked about this. She’s never asked, and we didn’t volunteer. There’s no real reason we didn’t have any other children. Maybe because the plane crash scared us. Maybe because we were a little too busy. “We didn’t need any other kids,” I say. “We got it perfect the first time.”
Rebecca smiles again, looking like Oliver in this dismal light. “You’re just saying that.”
“Yeah, in fact, your father and I have already willed you to this exhibit. For the extra cash. Three weeks-three months-seven months-fifteen years!”
Rebecca throws her arms around me. As she speaks I can feel her chin, shaped exactly like mine, pressing into my shoulder. “I love you,” she says, plain and simple.
The first time Rebecca said she loved me I burst into tears. She was four and I had just rubbed her dry with a towel after a romp in the snow. She was very matter-of-fact about it. I am sure she does not remember but I could tell you that she was wearing red Oshkosh overalls, that there were hexagonal snowflakes caught in her eyelashes, that her socks had come off, bunched and burrowing in the toes of her boots.
This is why I became a mother, isn’t it? No matter how long you have to wait for her to understand where you come from, no matter how many bouts of appendicitis or stitches you have to suffer through, no matter how many times you feel you are losing her, this makes it all worth it. Over Rebecca’s shoulder there are brains of monkeys and eyes of goats. There is a thick brown liver curled inside a glass cylinder. And there is a line of hearts, arranged in order of size: mouse, guinea pig, cat; sheep, Saint Bernard, cow. The human, I think, rests somewhere in the middle.
48 OLIVER
They have two tapes at the Blue Diner in Boston-the Meat Puppets and Don Henley, and they alternate them over and over, the entire twenty-four hours that they remain open. I know because I have been here at least that long, having noticed the same waitresses repeating their shifts. I can sing most of the words from each tape. I have to confess I had never heard of either, and I’ve been wondering if Rebecca knows them.
“Don Henley,” Rasheen-the waitress-says, refilling my coffeecup. “You know. From the Eagles. Ring a bell?”
I shrug, singing along with the tape. “You’ve got that down,” Rasheen says, laughing. From the greasy grill, Hugo, the shortorder cook who is missing a thumb, cheers. “You got a nice voice, Oliver, you know?”
“Well.” I stir in a packet of sugar. “I’m known for my songs.”
“No shit,” Rasheen says. “Wait, let me guess. I got it. Blues. You’re one of those white-bread trumpet players who thinks he’s Wynton Marsalis.”
“You got me. I can’t keep anything from you.”
I have been on this stool, at the Blue Diner on Kneeland, for so long now that I am not certain I could use my legs to stand. I could certainly have taken a room at the Four Seasons or the Park Plaza Hotel, but I haven’t been overcome with the desire to sleep. In fact I haven’t slept since I left Iowa, three and a half days ago, and drove continuously through to Boston. I would have gone straight to Stow, but in all truth, I’m terrified. She is a supernatural force with which I have to reckon. No, scratch that. She isn’t the problem at all. I am the problem. But it is easier to blame Jane. I have been doing it for so long that it is the first explanation to spring to mind.
The Blue Diner management has been kind to me, neglecting to report me to the authorities for loitering. Perhaps they can see I am a distressed man by my rumpled suit jacket, or the circles beneath my eyes. Perhaps they can tell by the way I eat my food- three meals a day, the specials, reassembled in geometrical patterns on my plate until Rasheen or Lola or pretty Tallulah decides it is cold enough to take back to the kitchen. When anyone will listen, I talk about Jane. Sometimes when no one is listening I talk anyway, hoping my words will find an audience.
It is almost time for Rasheen to go home, which means Mica (short for Mon ica) comes on. I have begun to tell the time by the arrivals and departures of the Blue Diner staff. Mica is the latenight waitress; a dental hygiene student by day. She is the only one who has actually asked me questions. When I told her the story of Jane’s exodus, she propped her elbows against the speckled white countertop and rested her cheeks in her hands.
“I got to go now, Oliver,” Rasheen says, pulling on an armysurplus jacket. “I guess I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Just as she is walking out the door Mica blows in in a flurry of paper, pink uniform, and leatherette coat. “Oliver!” she says, surprised to see me. “I was hoping you’d be gone by now. Couldn’t sleep last night?”
I shake my head. “I didn’t even try.”
Mica waves to Hugo, who, oddly enough, doesn’t seem to sleep either. He has been here the same length of time as I. She pulls up a stool beside me and grabs a Danish from beneath a scratched plastic dome. “You know, I was thinking about you during lecture today, and I think Jane would be very impressed. From what you’ve said, I think you’re a changed man.”
“I’d like to believe that,” I say. “Unfortunately, I haven’t the same conviction as you.”
“Don’t you just love the way he talks.” Mica says this to nobody in particular. “It’s like you’re British or something.”
“Or something,” I say. Although she’s asked, I’ve refused to tell her anything about my life with the exception of the fact that I come from San Diego. Somehow I think that finding out I am a Harvard man, that I lived on the Cape as a child, would crush the mystique.
“No wonder Jane fell for you.” Mica reaches over the counter to pour herself some coffee. “You’re such a kidder.”
After our wedding ceremony, the reverend led us into the library at Jane’s parents’ house. He told us we could probably use a few moments alone; it would be all the peace and quiet we’d have that day. It was a nice gesture but I had no pressing information I had to share with Jane; it seemed to be a waste of time. Don’t misunderstand me: I loved Jane, but I did not care much about the wedding. To me, marriage was a means to an end. To Jane, marriage was a fresh beginning.
When Jane said her vows, she had given a great deal of thought to the ideas behind the words, which I cannot say I’d done at all. And so for those few moments in the study, she was the one who did the talking. She said she was the luckiest girl in the world. Who would imagine that of all the women around, I would pick her to spend forever with?
She said it easily but I think it took her a few months to understand what she meant. Jane settled easily into a routine: taking shirts to the dry cleaners, registering for courses at San Diego State, grocery shopping, paying the telephone bill. I must admit, she was well suited to marriage, making my own experience much better than I had imagined. Every morning she’d kiss me goodbye and hand me a brown-bagged lunch. Every night when I came home from the Institute she’d have supper waiting, and she’d ask me how my day had been. She liked the role so much she won me over. I started to act like a husband. I would tiptoe into the shower when she was washing her hair and grab her from behind. I checked her when she got into the car to make sure she was wearing her seat belt.
Songs of the Humpback Whale: A Novel in Five Voices Page 25