As the teacher moved from the coasts to the jungles, she felt the steaminess of Africa closing around the part of her body where the animal was waking, the warmth, the moisture of antediluvian creatures rising from muck and living in jungles, eating trees. And dinosaurs. Were there dinosaurs in Africa or were they extinct there, too, and who wanted to know? All that was important right then was the sensation of something happening to her inside, and she was not sure yet whether this awakening beast was something to fear, something to trust, something to ignore, something she imagined, or something just to feel when other things were still, like the thunder always sounding in her chest when she searched for it, the tick of a clock.
The bell rang in the hall, dully, indistinctly, a high mechanical recording of her mother’s voice: Come-home-now-Jeannie, come-home-now. She left class and headed for the girls’ rest room before she walked home and, though it was a ritual she followed every day, today when she stopped to look in the mirror she noticed she looked pale. Was she sick? She splashed some cold water on her face. The wash basins were getting too low for her. She dried her face with a brown paper towel that smelled funny and began to disintegrate in her hand, then threw it away and went into the second stall from the end, wondering if it were true what her older sister said, that there weren’t any partitions and doors in the boys’ bathrooms.
She absently pulled up her dress and pulled down the plaid shorts she always wore underneath so she could do cartwheels at recess, then pulled down the Carter’s underwear with the frayed elastic. She listened to the sound of rain outside and looked at the clean white porcelain between her legs, elephant tusks? She brought her legs together, caught the Carter’s where they were sliding down between her knees, caught them before they fell limp around her shoes like a puddle. They felt damp and warm, jungle feeling. She saw a tiny dark hair like a pig’s tail on her thigh. She tried to brush it away, but it stayed, it was growing there. It looked funny and it made her laugh. The animal was pushing out through her skin. She pulled the underwear back up. The jungle felt good. She relaxed with it, lay back into the steaminess of it.
She left the stall and looked among the porcelain and chrome for pygmies or amazons, everyone who lived near jungles a result of Alice’s wafers. She remembered the words, she’d seen them on the door to the second stall, etched with something sharp, so the metal gleamed through the dull pink paint. She opened the door and looked. There were the words, the quote from the Alice book: the door said, “Eat me.” If she did, it would make the mirrors liquid, the sinks taller to her or much smaller; she could swim in her tears. Her pink tongue touched pink paint, dug into the crevice where the paint was missing. The metal sent a shiver through her teeth, but nothing happened. She was still the same size. All of the real Alice wafers must be someplace else, she thought. The steam radiator under the window began to hiss. She left the bathroom, carrying the jungle with her.
She wouldn’t tell her mother about the animal, not until she could see it, could touch it, was sure of it as something that existed, not just a feeling that could come and go. She decided that it would surely grow in her like her mother’s baby. Her mother had said she had a new baby because she was married, that that’s how God knew to give women babies, when He saw they were married. Once a woman on the soap opera had had a baby and she wasn’t married; she had asked her mother how that was possible and her mother had told her that the woman must have prayed very hard. Jean had prayed for one for two years and had received a Tiny Tears for Christmas. But now there was this, that had been still, awakening in her. She’d never heard of it happening before, but surely in a world where there were pygmies and elephants and oceans clinging to continents, anything was possible.
The baby lay in a wicker crib outside the door to the sauna in the basement of her house. He lay among blankets, chewing on his fingers, saliva dripping out of his mouth. She took a corner of the blanket and dried his face and he laughed, kicked the blanket off his feet. Since the baby had been born, she had to control an urge to suck her thumb again, something she hadn’t done in years, not since her mother had painted her thumb with iodine when she went to bed. She opened the door to the sauna and the dry heat pinched her face. The wooden walls smelled like graham crackers; there were rocks glowing red in the corner. Her mother sat wrapped in a towel, one breast uncovered. She was rubbing oil onto it; it gleamed like polished wood. Her mother covered her breast quickly when she came in. She very seldom saw her mother undressed.
Did you see the baby on your way in? her mother asked. I love him so much that I could bite him, she answered. Her mother laughed and asked her about school while she pulled the towel up tighter under her arms and tucked one end of the towel under another so that it stayed up on its own.
Her mother leaned back into the corner of the sauna, an iguana in the corner of a cardboard box at school, the box might tilt, the rocks in the other corner for balance. Her mother peaceful, eyes lizard slits in the heat. There were grainy blue veins on her legs like a map of rivers. Her own legs were milk-white, unblemished, like the painted plaster legs in stores that they used to sell nylons. Mother, she said. Her mother said, Jeannie, would you pour water on the rocks? She picked up a coffee can with the letters wearing off and poured the water so slowly that the steam rose like a rain forest. Something in her liked the steam. Mother, she said, looking down at her own body, how do you know if you have pretty legs? wondering as she said it if this would be a new gift, so many things waiting to surprise her, like the day her father had told her she had a pug nose and that that was beautiful, when she’d always assumed that noses were noses. That’s a funny question, her mother said. Why don’t you take off your clothes and bathe with me? Her mother leaned forward and ran her hands over the inside of her calves. Jean took off the dress and the plaid shorts and undershirt and climbed up onto the second level. She sat awkwardly in her cotton underpants, careful not to jostle the animal. Your father says that I have pretty legs, it’s hard to say, her mother said. Are mine pretty? Jean grabbed her foot with her hand and extended her leg to the side. Nine-and-a-half-year-old legs aren’t all that formed yet, her mother said, they’re fine legs. They’ll get a shape in a few years, a little swelling in the calf, tiny at the knees and the ankle, why? Just wondering, she said, if mine will look like yours or like Daddy’s; Daddy’s legs are hairy. Women scrape the hair off, her mother said.
She’d seen her mother in the bathroom, in a terry cloth robe, the hot water fogging the mirror, clouds of white foam covering her leg, running a blade across the skin, saying it may look like a silly thing to do, and probably is, but no sillier than anything else when you thought about it, even breathing for that matter. It was all the same in the end, something to fill your time with. Not important, she said, but she’d seen her mother panic at the appearance of a tiny hair on her thigh as she left for the pool, panic and run back inside for another scrape of the blade, a tiny dot of coagulated blood replacing the hair. In Africa there are women who cut their faces to make scars in designs, she told her mother. See? her mother said, not referring to anything, and she licked the perspiration from her upper lip. Pour a little more water on the rocks, her mother said. It’s getting dry in here again. Jeannie poured water from the can. The rocks hissed. She climbed back onto the wooden bench. Why do they call this a sauna bath? she asked, you don’t take a bath in it. I don’t know why, her mother said, eyes closed, but I think they do take baths in it in Sweden. They must use sweat for water then, sweat and soap, Jean said, and laughed. Her mother shuddered and said, No, they must have buckets of water, they’re more civilized than that, horses lather in sweat, not people, and she unhooked a corner of the towel to mop up the perspiration forming on her chest. After all we’re not animals, she said.
Her mother changed positions, stretched out on the bench, one leg folded over the other. Jean pulled her knees up and sat Indian style on the bench. It’s really hot in here, isn’t it? she said. She settled against the wall a
nd closed her eyes, conjured a picture of herself a few years older with long honey-blonde hair, no matter that her hair was really almost black; she was wearing a short leather tunic, the fur of an animal not scraped clean enough in places still sticking to the leather, having adventures, being tied to stakes with fire beneath her and being rescued. And then, lying in the middle of the jungle, in a clearing, stretched out in the greenness, surrounded by macaws, jungle birds, and the hot breath of lions, letting herself fall into the moist grass.
She felt the animal stirring again. A slight cramp in the stomach, motion. She said, Mother, what’s it like to have a baby? and her mother said, I slept through as much of it as I could. I couldn’t stand to hear the cracking bones. I’ve forgotten the rest; it’s a pain you forget. That’s all. The stirring again. She hopes there won’t be pain with this, tells her mother that in Africa there are women who don’t feel pain when they have babies, that the men do, that the women in the field give birth to a child then pick up a hoe, confusing. Her teacher told her that. The next time she feels pain she’ll go to Africa on a safari and give it to someone else. Her mother laughed and told her she’d probably end up with someone else’s toothache in exchange, that she can’t really believe that story. Jean said she guessed she just wouldn’t grow up then, and her mother said she had no choice. She’d already swallowed the wafer. Her mother said if she knew how to stop it she would, and she ran her finger along one of the blue veins on her leg. She said that there were always women turning twenty, women that had been babies when she was twenty herself, that she had babysat for them and let their small hands wrap around her finger and tug, knowing that she was large enough to crush them, and loving them for that. And now, she said, she was sometimes afraid of them, even though she knew it was silly. Jean said that they could all make scars on their faces like those women in Africa and that no one could tell who was young and who was old then and everyone would be pretty. Her mother said that her teachers had been filling her head with stories, that there weren’t very many places like that left anymore, that Africa was becoming just like everywhere else, no longer dark and moist, but concrete and steel and men in suits. Jean said she didn’t believe that, that when she was old enough she would drop from a plane over the continent and the jungle would catch her like a soft sponge. And anyway, she said, she was really not going to grow too much bigger. And her mother leaned over and hugged her, her nails accidentally making a small scratch on her back, and said, That’s good.
Jean could hear sounds beginning outside the door, a rustling of jungle grasses. Then the cry of a wild bird. More birds, gathering noise, until the sounds turned into a wail which brought her back to the baby in the crib outside the door.
Her mother said, Darn, a harsh word, and slid her legs to the floor while she touched the towel over her right breast. There was a dark wet spot on the towel. Her fingers were wet and she wiped them off on another part of the towel, leaving a wet spot there too. What’s that? Jean asked. Nothing, her mother said. Jean thought she might cry, her mother doing this, not sick? What is it? she asked again. Her mother shrugged, smiled, said, Milk. Starts when your brother cries; I can’t stop it. And she opened the door to the sauna and left, saying, Come out in a minute; you’ve had about enough heat. Jean promised herself never to cry again, if it made her mother do that.
She poured more water on the rocks to make more steam and sat back on the bench. She stretched the elastic on her underpants to look at her stomach. A flash of something russet caught her eyes on the white Carter’s. It was red, it was blood. The animal must be dying, not waking, and she lay down on the bench and put her feet up on the wall. She wouldn’t let it die. In a few minutes her mother came to the door, dressed, and said, Jeannie-come-out-now, and Jean whispered, Blood, at her mother who looked filmy through the steam. Her mother looked and said not to worry, though it was odd, only nine and a half and after just promising not to grow. And she asked her to sit up so she could talk to her, but Jean wouldn’t sit up, she wouldn’t let the animal die. So her mother tried to draw pictures for her in the steam condensing on the window, of organs existing where she had always thought only one existed. She reached down and touched the blood and then looked at the slick blood on her finger. This is one story she couldn’t believe, it could just as likely be an animal. And she wouldn’t let it die and it would never happen again and she thought of the rain and the blood and the milk and the steam and the oceans and blue rivers on her mother’s legs and she promised herself that she would never drown.
Cousins
We share some of the same relatives and, if diagrammed, they would hold us together like hinges or bonds drawn in geometric shapes between hydrogen, say, and oxygen in water, or any other elements that fuse. But it’s a tenuous fusion; there are many other relatives that we don’t share, and if one of these other relatives draws a family tree I am not included, unfastened and set to drift because I am related only in that my mother is sister to their father and my blood does not flow directly to the treasure we all hope to find, hidden in our genes and only waiting to be recognized, some man or woman centuries before whose life was important enough to justify the secret knowledge that we deserve more, much more, recognition from the world than we have ever received.
There is one grandmother between us. They have another, a millionaire’s wife with orange pink hair who has been lying in bed for three years from a hip that healed months after it was broken. I had another grandmother who had cancer hidden for ten years behind the denim overalls she wore all summer while she nurtured zucchini, cherries, corn. She died one week after the doctor made her lie down, finally, for some rest. It would be interesting if something could be, but nothing can be, inferred from that. It says nothing about my character or about my cousins’. I am not related by blood to their mother, but we have the same thighs. My oldest cousin is not related by blood to my father, but they share a nose. My own brother does not look at all like me; he looks like a man I saw once, for a brief instant, in a shopping mall, buying a pearl-handled umbrella.
When we were children we could say that we were good friends, close friends. At Christmas, the oldest girl cousin and I got matching dolls from our shared grandmother. There is a photograph at the bottom of a glass paperweight in my mother’s bedroom where the three cousins and my brother and I are falling out of an overstuffed chair. We look like we know each other well. At age eleven I got very fat and had a permanent that was too tight; then I got tall and thin. Five years later, when she was eleven, my oldest cousin did the same thing. For a while she was like a spring following me. When we were children I knew them so well that I could have summed up each one of them in a sentence if I had been asked to, looking past those things that were contradictory until I found what was continuous. I could say that the oldest one cried tears without making a sound, the middle one cried with more sound than tears, and no one had ever seen the youngest one cry. If you knew these things about them, then you knew everything you needed to know.
But there seems to come a time when the relationship between individuals becomes set, a concrete wall, when past that point if one of the individuals changes it demands change in all of the others, a recognition of the change, a breathing. And if the others refuse, the wall breaks down into separate blocks and that is all. In the case of my cousins and me, the breakdown is my fault, although it’s possible that I am making myself too central, that actually, because I am five years older than the oldest of them, I am only on the periphery, an observer, unimportant. I admit that possibly each one of them and my brother and I would all rush to assign the guilt to ourselves, that it does underline our importance, but in this case I can’t help feeling that it is truly I who have caused it because they are the ones who have stayed in the same place, the same houses, and done nothing more than grow older and I am the one who moved away and have tried to come back, but never for good.
The summer before I left for college was when our relationship was set for me.
I was the only teenager; my brother and our oldest cousin were twelve. At dinner they performed for me and for each other. When it was my turn to perform, I gave them secrets: names of rock groups, clothing stores, high school teachers that would serve as passwords, keys to the exciting life they supposed I led. I grew used to being the sage, used to the openness of them, the transparency of children. Then I left for college, came back for brief visits, graduated, began to work in another state, and—returning for visits at Christmas and Thanksgiving—found that I was becoming obsolete, that the secrets no longer resided in me. I was no longer needed. I am ashamed to admit that I was hurt by this, found it difficult to speak with them. It was difficult for me to change. I suppose that I am selfish or too easily intimidated. Perhaps I am shy. They were different people, aware of themselves, able to think about their actions secretly at the same time that they performed them—a definition, I suppose, of adulthood. It seems so much more alienating when you watch it grow, when there is suddenly something that needs to be broken down between people who were, at one time, close. I suppose that parents feel this, I’m not sure. I know that it is profoundly sad. With strangers it is more easily broken down. There is no false assumption that you know each other, that it is not necessary to begin at the beginning.
And worse, there is the feeling, unthinkable, that we are the seeds scattered by a single tree, in the hopes that one will take. William and Henry James are a rarity. There is only one Joyce, one Shakespeare, one Pasteur, one Michelangelo. Raised as we were, similarly, we cannot occupy the same space. As teenagers, all of our ambitions ran deep. Only mine are becoming tempered by the demands of practical things. I am slowly beginning to realize that teaching is not something that I make my living at temporarily until I become a famous actress, a playwright. It is what I do, what I am. My cousins do not want to hear this, that it might happen to them. I had been sent out to test the waters, and am no longer trustworthy. Perhaps I am exaggerating. Perhaps I am feeling, right now, the price of my restlessness.
The Invention of Flight Page 7