Mammother

by Zachary Schomburg

  In the weeks that Enid slowly approached the XO Meats part of her journey, Zuzu visited Mano with regularity without her mother knowing, and Inez visited Mano with regularity without her daughter knowing. On the very first of Zuzu’s regular visits, Mano cut her hair into the only haircut that he knew how to cut. He gave her the same haircut he had always given Pepe, and everyone else in town, when he was the town’s barber. It was the first time Mano had cut any hair at all in 16 years. Zuzu had brought him The Barber’s spare tools, and The Barber never seemed to notice that they were missing. It was the first haircut she had ever received by anyone other than The Barber, and although it was, essentially, the same haircut, she liked how it looked much better from Mano.

  The first night Zuzu visited Mano, they stayed up late drinking beers, smoking cigarettes, and eating bananas. They baked a pie in the oven.

  “I was in Vera Good’s grave tonight,” Zuzu said.

  “How did you get in there?”

  “I just pulled back the carpet. It wasn’t a real grave. I mean, it was a real grave. But...”

  “I thought you said Vera was still alive. You said that everyone was still alive.”

  “Yeah, she’s alive. But she had The Shoveler dig her grave already. Isn’t that strange? She’s not even dead.”

  “I don’t think it’s so strange.” Mano held out another cold Pie Time for Zuzu. “In fact, maybe it’s a good idea. I should start digging my own grave.” Mano thought about how nice that would be, to not leave all that work for someone else. “It’ll have to be really big though. I’ll need some help.” He tried to solicit an offer of help from Zuzu with his tone of voice, but she wasn’t catching on. “What do you think? You want to help out with that tomorrow?”

  Zuzu was forced to admit that she had stopped listening. “With what?”

  “My grave. Eh, never mind.” Mano got up to check on the pie in the oven.

  “Mano?”

  “Yes?”

  “I felt that dull ache you were talking about. I felt it when I was in Vera’s grave, just lying there with all that time in front of me, by myself. The ache was so strong and throbbing all of a sudden that I didn’t need to be in the world anymore. I only needed to be in that grave, her grave, with her.”

  “You’re lucky.”

  “Why?”

  “Sometimes you don’t really feel the ache until they’re dead,” Mano explained.

  “Maybe it was seeing her grave that did it then.”

  “Yeah, maybe. You should tell her that.” Mano opened the oven door carefully, so he wouldn’t catch any of his hair on fire.

  “It wouldn’t do any good,” said Zuzu.

  “Doesn’t matter. Nothing does anything any good.”

  Zuzu stood up in the chair. She felt so tall. “Mano, can I live here?”

  Mano closed the oven less carefully than he had opened it. He walked over to Zuzu and lowered his body in front of hers, like a kind of mirror, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  The day that Enid finally entered XO Meats, it was a Sunday. It was busy with people buying this and that for their Sunday dinners and for their meals for the week. It was so busy that no one noticed her for a few hours. One woman thought she was part of the banana display, and she set her bananas in Enid’s basket.

  It was very bright inside XO Meats during the days, and very dark at night when The Butcher, or one of the other two employees, would lock up for the night. They locked Enid inside, and she’d keep walking slowly, tracing Zuzu’s path. Enid liked those nights the most, being in the quiet dark of XO Meats, looking at the pineapples in nothing but the red glow of the exit sign. Everyone got used to Enid’s presence there for that week. She was seemingly standing still, and they trusted her to go nowhere, to steal nothing, to do no damage. Besides, they knew of nothing else to do with her, or for her, but to leave her be. She was doing no harm. If anything, Enid was a delight to see around during that week, a consistent presence. It was like watching the moon wane.

  Following the path Zuzu had made, Enid made her way back to the meat department by mid-week. The Butcher watched her approach for hours. He prepared a ham sandwich for her. He remembered her from the strawberry patch, from the day that he and others searched the city, and the fields around the city for Zuzu. Enid recognized The Butcher from that day, too. She remembered how handsome he was, how she wanted to be touched.

  Only in her own head, Enid asked, “Did you ever find your lost love?”

  The Butcher said, “Would you like a ham sandwich?” He put the ham sandwich into Enid’s basket on top of some old strawberries and brown bananas, but he didn’t touch her. He was afraid to touch something that couldn’t touch him back. The sandwich was wrapped in white paper with black letters, XO. On the sticker that held the paper together, he wrote, “Free” and his initials, “T.B.” Enid thanked The Butcher.

  For the next few days, Enid grew very hungry. She was hungriest when there was the possibility of food, when something was in her basket waiting for her to eat it. She thought it was important, a matter of manners, that she leave XO Meats before eating. It was another Sunday, busier than the previous Sunday perhaps, by the time she reached the front register. They were so busy, no one even bothered to ask her about her sandwich, about whether or not she should have to pay for it, even though she could see that it was The Butcher’s kind intentions to give it to her free of cost. The Butcher, of all people, seemed to understand that Enid had embarked upon a particularly epic journey, and that she’d need provisions. The electric eye of the front double doors opened and closed on her for about an hour. It looked like an animal with no teeth gnawing on its prey.

  Mano was holding Inez’s naked body up against his gigantic bedroom wall, her long legs wrapped as far around his enormous waist as they could go, which left her bare heels resting on the top of his hips which were overgrown with hair. He was slamming her sweaty back against the wallpaper until some of it peeled off and folded over on top of them.

  “I’ll have to put that back up later,” Mano said. And then a few more slams until a photograph of his mother—taken when she was young, before she got into the bathtub—fell off the wall. “And that, too,” he said.

  Other than his nights with Zuzu, he looked forward most to his nights with Inez. His weeks were brighter with both Inez and Zuzu now in them. He felt young and unburdened again, but it was different with each of them. With Inez, he was able to learn so much about her body, how it moved and what it wanted. He wasn’t ready to learn those things when he was just a boy. When he was a boy, Inez was a young widow with a newborn baby in the room. But now, to Mano, they both seemed ready to learn something. He worried that he had little to offer her about how a man’s body moved and what it wanted. He hardly had a man’s body. He weighed eight tons and was covered in hair. Still, he had the body of something, if not a man, and there was a lot to learn about it. That was certain.

  But Mano couldn’t offer Inez his love. He couldn’t offer her a place to live. He couldn’t be anything she escaped into. So, as they collapsed on the floor, with the wet gluey wallpaper making a kind of fort over their bodies, when she told him she wanted to leave her husband, The Barber, and move in with him, Mano was silent. He stood up. He walked very heavily out to the kitchen, and got a Nun’s Hat just for himself. He cracked it open and walked outside and looked at the tops of the trees to the east, and the tops of some of the new buildings. There were hundreds of black birds making nests above him.

  Mano remembered standing in those same woods when he was very young, at the foot of The Reckoner wanting to die. There were no birds in the trees then.

  “Mano?” Inez was behind him in the doorway now.

  “You can’t live here,” said Mano.

  Inez didn’t want to walk outside, and she didn’t want to stay inside either. She asked a question that she didn’t want to hear the answer to. “Why not?”

  “Because I’m alone. Someone who is alone can’t live with anyo
ne.”

  “You don’t love me,” Inez said. She was saying out loud what she already knew to be true.

  “I’m sorry. Maybe this was a bad idea. I’ve always thought...”

  Inez interrupted him. She couldn’t bear hearing him talk about what they had, what they could have had, what they missed out on. “You know, my daughter found love. Can you believe that?”

  “You know that? She told you?” Mano turned around.

  “Yeah. She’s in love. She’s going to have the life I never had. What do I get? I fall in love with two people: a lovely and generous man who dies, and a little boy who becomes a monster and doesn’t know how to hold anything but other people’s shit. And then I end up marrying a bore with a backache.”

  Mano laughed. He was very happy, if not surprised, that Zuzu was able to tell Inez about her love for Vera Good. It was a conversation he had been encouraging for weeks, but didn’t expect Zuzu was quite ready to pull off.

  Inez cut his laughter off. “She’s going to have something I never had.”

  “I hope so. Doesn’t that make you happy?”

  “It should. But for some reason it doesn’t.”

  “Well, I can assure you it won’t likely work out between her and Vera. Vera loves June. But I’m happy that Zuzu has found a way to...”

  “Vera? What are you talking about?”

  Mano felt as though he had made a major misstep, but he wasn’t sure how. He tried to keep Inez talking, so he wouldn’t have to. “Oh, I must have misheard what you were saying. Who were you talking about? Who has she fallen in love with?”

  “The Butcher.” Inez stared at Mano. She was trying to read him. “Vera?”

  Mano took the last drink of his beer. “Yeah.” He started to walk back inside for another one. “Do you want a beer, Inez?”

  Inez was silent. She stepped to the side so that Mano could fit past her in the doorway. “Zuzu doesn’t love The Butcher, Inez. Wake up. She loves Vera. It’s just something you should know, that’s all. And after Vera, she will love another woman. She’s full of love. She’s very lucky in that way.”

  “But he loves her. And if she would just wear dresses...and, oh no, did you know she cut her hair again? I think everything will be...”

  “Inez, leave her alone.”

  “How would you know anyway?”

  Mano opened the refrigerator and got out another Nun’s Hat. He grabbed the pack of cigarettes Zuzu brought him from his shelf. “I’m the one who cut her hair,” Mano admitted. “Smoke?”

  “Fuck you, Mano.”

  Mano lit up the cigarette, and then went back into the bedroom. He picked up the photograph of his mother and hung it back on the wall.

  “I thought she only came here the one time,” Inez yelled. “She was curious, you said. You said she was just wandering the woods. You said she thought you were some fucked up animal thing.”

  “I am.”

  Those were the last things Inez and Mano said to each other.

  Still on her journey, Enid lay in Vera Good’s future grave for about a week. It felt good to be dead, Enid thought. A worm was crawling slowly up the inside of her leg. One day during the week, Enid heard Vera above her, talking to the corpse of June Good. She overheard Vera tell June that she was happy to have a home in life and in death, that she hoped people would be able to die soon, and that she was sure it would be just a matter of time. Vera talked about Zuzu, too, how she wished June could have met her. Vera thought June would have liked her. Vera brought flowers. Enid knew that because she overheard Vera describe the flowers to June. Vera said they were red, June’s favorite color, and bloomed.

  Inside the grave, Enid finally ate the ham sandwich The Butcher had given her. She couldn’t remember a time she had ever felt so full. Being full made her very tired, so most of that week she spent in Vera’s grave, she slept. She had many dreams. In one of the dreams, she dreamed she was on a vast frozen ocean, with nothing but white in sight—no horizon, no sound, just a relentless wind—hunting for mammoths. Even though there was no one else around in this landscape, she felt like she was not alone. Then, there was a tiny red dot on the horizon. It was a red dot that meant everything. It protected Enid from the wind, and it kept her moving. The red dot kept getting bigger and bigger.

  A few weeks after Inez left Mano’s cabin to never return, Mano and Zuzu were building a fire in the middle of an opening in the woods behind his cabin. Building fires was the thing they liked to do most with each other. They liked to sit around them, drink beers and smoke cigarettes. Together, they grilled some vegetables on a stick. They liked to tell stories about the people in town, which was fun for Mano. It’s how Mano knew that Mothers was pickling his insides, face down in a glass pile of liquor bottles and Nun’s Hat cans every night on the floor of Lady Bods. It’s how Mano knew about The Shoveler and the new train, and all the other XO Cities popping up in the valley. It’s how Mano knew that Fran Rile had found a habitable planet with her telescope and was making plans to travel there. Listening to Zuzu tell stories reminded Mano of his days as The Barber. He liked to listen to stories more than he liked to tell them. But something was different about this fire, about how they sat around it. Zuzu felt heavy with something.

  “No one can die,” she said. “Irene Mire is turning into dust on the inside. She’s crawling into graves. She can only fall asleep.”

  “Who’s Irene Mire?” asked Mano, hoping for a story.

  “It’s not important. It’s just so terrible.” Zuzu wasn’t in the mood to tell a new story. “No one has died since you left.”

  Mano offered up a theory. “Maybe they’re just too afraid to die. Did your mother ever tell you that I used to do this thing with my sheep? I would have kids ride on them...”

  “Everyone older than me still talks about it,” said Zuzu. “The Death Lessons, right? They sound like they were a lot of fun. Maybe that’s why people aren’t dying. They don’t know how. They need a lesson.”

  “That wasn’t exactly the point, but...” Mano put his stick into a squash, and held it over the fire. It occurred to Mano that he hadn’t tried to die in a long time. “Everyone deserves to die.”

  “You should see them. Irene’s eyes are rusty.”

  Mano didn’t feel like eating anymore. He felt like running. He wanted to run into XO City and kill everyone.

  “If we could die down there, I’d probably be dead,” said Zuzu.

  “Why would you say something like that?”

  Zuzu took a big breath, and pushed her stick of vegetables closer in to the center of the flame. “I feel embarrassed.”

  Mano just waited for her to keep talking.

  “They want me to marry The Butcher. They say everything will be just right then, that I’ll be happier.”

  “Who says that? Your mom?”

  “Yeah, my mom. And The Barber. And I guess The Butcher, too.”

  Mano laughed. “What did you tell them?”

  “Look, I took a job sacking groceries at XO Meats a few times a week. He’s a sweet man. He seems to like me quite a bit.”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “You know what I want.”

  “I’m pretty sure your mother knows what you want, too.”

  “No, she doesn’t know anything. She knitted me a dress. She bought me a pair of Mary Janes. But you want to know what the worst part is? She doesn’t want me working at The Good House anymore.”

  Mano grumbled and closed his eyes. He took a big drink without opening his eyes.

  “She’s said that caring for people like that has confused me. She says I’m confused, that’s all.”

  “You’re 18 years old.”

  “She still doesn’t even know I come up here. She stopped asking a few weeks ago where I go.”

  “You should tell them everything.”

  “It doesn’t matter, remember? You told me it doesn’t matter, and you’re probably right.”

  Zuzu set her stick of vegetables
down on the circle of stones around the fire, and walked into the cabin.

  “Where are you going?” asked Mano.

  “Getting ketchup for the onions. You want anything?”

  “Just a beer.”

  “Ok.”

  Mano watched Zuzu disappear through the open doors of the cabin. She walked into it like it was hers. She walked around inside of his large life like it was hers. It was that kind of walking through his life that he had imagined Pepe doing when he was younger. With Pepe, with anyone. But knowing Zuzu made him realize he knew so little about Pepe, that he knew so little about anyone at all. When she came walking back out of the cabin with the ketchup and a beer, Mano thought he would ask her if she’d want to share the cabin with him. Together they could build a room off of the back of the cabin for her. They could host their own visitors. They could have meals together. He’d stop hosting his daily visitors. Zuzu could go to work in the city at XO Meats and bring groceries back. Maybe they could start a polka band together.

  Zuzu came out of the cabin with no ketchup for the onions, and no beer. Instead, in her right hand, above her head, she was holding what both of them knew was Inez’s black bra. “Fuck you, Mano!”

  “What’s that?” It was the first thing Mano could think to say. His heart dropped into his stomach. He had no idea where Inez’s bra could have been hiding the past couple of weeks, but there it was, in Zuzu’s hand.

  “Where did this come from?”

  Mano’s head hurt. He needed what was happening to not be happening. “Your vegetables are done, I think, Zuzu.”

  “Mano!” Zuzu screamed his name and it echoed off the sky. “I trusted you!” She was crying.

  “I’m sorry. I...”

  “I’m supposed to learn something from you about opening up?! About honesty?! You’re telling me I should tell my mother about who I love?!” She was still holding her mother’s bra over her head. “Do you love my mother? Or do you just fuck her like you fuck everyone else.”

  Mano put his big head into his big hands.

  “Do you fuck my mother in the bathtub where I sleep?” She waited for an actual answer from him. “Do you?”