“Yes! Your father!”
He sneered.
“Your address,” she whimpered.
“Here?” He stopped the car in front of a coin laundry where, on the second storey, apartment windows faced the street. Even after the frightened girl had bolted from the car, Carey sat there pounding his fist against the steering wheel. He’d racked his brain! Night after night he’d lain awake trying to think of the men Anna knew who might be responsible, but he hadn’t been able to think of anyone. He half suspected she was pregnant with an elaborate lie.
With a screech he drove off homeward. Surely by now it would be over. Surely he wouldn’t have to watch.
When he got in, the answering machine was winking its red, accusing eye. There was a single, hissing message that left him stunned. “Asshole,” Pauline said. “There is no heartbeat.”
He went and stood in the nursery door, staring in at the crib in the centre of the otherwise empty room. Tucked up inside it, a bolus of grey fur.
The Unexpected
The tyrant was dying; she would not moon about to watch. Anna and her mother could stare at him in his cage of pain, but not Pauline. She got a standby flight to Acapulco and from there took the bus. Took buses. Often she was the only gringa on them. The men crowded around her, clicking and whistling like starlings. The only English phrase she heard was, “Hey, Blondie.” At first she didn’t realize they meant her.
Almost immediately she found herself seduced. It was the fruit. The mango’s hairy core as she sucked it reminded her of a Mound of Venus. So like the women’s fallen breasts were the papaya, their seeds slippery, cum-coated. She bounced on the seat while the huge breasts of the peasant woman next to her, unrestrained by a brassiere, moved in the same orgiastic rhythm. The dark oily faces of the men with their ripe lips began to excite rather than repel her. When she went up to the driver it was partly to feel their cockroach eyes scurrying across her body as she pitched and swayed in the aisle. She gestured for him to stop the bus: too much fruit, too much fruit! He understood and, though they were driving through forest, did not apply the brake until they had passed the sheltering trees and come to a mile of field. She clambered down and, with nowhere to go for privacy, squatted in the ditch. A hot flux gushed exquisitely from her. Glancing back at the bus windows lined with faces, she giggled.
Outside the depot in Oaxaca she bought strawberries for the last part of the trip. Their juice ran down her arms. Nothing to wipe it off with, she had to use her tongue. It was unseemly, she knew, a woman cleaning her arms like a predator after the kill. The men stared on, licking her with their eyes.
“You shouldn’t eat those,” someone across the aisle said. “You shouldn’t eat anything that’s not cooked or peeled.”
She’d thought he was Mexican, but now that he had given himself away, she noticed his pallor. His accent was American. “The weirdest goddamn thing just happened to me,” he told her, “so please don’t eat those strawberries.”
He had been working in the mountains on a development project, was heading back there now, though the way he was feeling he wasn’t sure he would make it. Eight months in poverty and isolation had not agreed with his bowels. He’d lost weight steadily until the morning he knew he had to leave. Something wasn’t right. “I had that, you know, gut feeling, ha ha.” They got him on the Oaxaca bus, but he had to keep asking the driver to stop.
“I know, I know,” said Pauline. “And everybody watched.”
“I wondered what the hell could be coming out. I mean, I wasn’t eating anything. There I was, hunkering. I looked and—whoa there! Whoa just a minute! A piece of my goddamn intestine!”
“What?” cried Pauline, recoiling. “Coming out?”
“I was shitting out my guts.”
“No way.”
“Yeah. So I stuffed it back in and got back on the bus gripping my ass. Days it seemed to take to get to Oaxaca. Months. The whole time I sat there clenching.”
“Oh, God,” said Pauline. “Oh, my God.”
“Finally, I got to the clinic. My guts are coming out! My guts are coming out! Crazy gringo. The doctor saw me right away. No rubber glove, nothing. Just stuffed his finger up my Khyber Pass. Señor, he said with perfect manners, I suggest you go right now to the toilet.”
His white face sheening with sweat, he paused and stretched his lips in a slow, sick grimace.
“Are you okay now?” Pauline asked.
“It was as long as my arm. Jesus Christ. Have you ever seen a tapeworm?”
She got off the bus at Puerto Ángel and from there had to walk, not on a road exactly, just a wide sandy path through the forested hills where the peasants drove their burros. Whenever she met a man he would, in a simultaneous gesture, avert his eyes and touch his hat brim. So unlike how they had treated her on the buses, either they feared her here or they hated her. She preferred the obscene chirrings because she understood them.
Rounding a bend and looking down: a radiant half circle of sand cupping turquoise water. Where she stayed there were no walls, only a palm-thatched roof supported by wooden posts—a house undressed, in effect. Everything was owned by Americans and most of the people were American or German. The only time she ever saw a Mexican on that beach was very early one morning before anyone else had gotten up. He was utterly still, poised, something shiny in his hand. Walking toward him, she saw it was a machete, but had no time to feel afraid; as soon as he saw her coming, he turned and ran. When she reached the place he’d been standing she noticed a giant sea tortoise a few feet away, labouring, moving her clumsy flippers back and forth in the white sand, making an angel that would ease her down to a depth safe enough to lay her eggs.
The waves rolled onto the beach, then retreated—a rhythm as regular as a metronome set on largo. It was the very pace of life, the timing of those days. She rose early, took a walk, then climbed the hill to the café for breakfast. Afterward, she would lie on the sand reading a book she’d picked up somewhere. Maybe the story didn’t interest her, or the sun was glaring off the page, but she found herself always reading the same six pages over and over again. She’d doze off, only to wake in time for a siesta and stagger back to her hammock under the leafy roof. For dinner there was beer, fried fish, fruit. It got dark early. Someone had a guitar and would play Dylan or the Eagles. The pot was excellent. The waves rolled up. The waves rolled back.
She had no idea how long she’d been there when she began to feel unwell. There was no way of telling time, no calendar or clock. Too much of an effort, carving notches in a tree. No one had a mirror so she couldn’t tell if her hair had finally bleached enough to earn her the appellation Blondie, or if the skin on her bare ass had darkened to a native shade. Her body offered no clues at all; since she’d gone off the pill, her periods had ceased. Civilization’s other chronometer, laundry day, did not apply.
“I ate some strawberries,” she confessed when someone finally noticed she was ill. Apparently it was common knowledge that the fields were irrigated with raw sewage. She mentioned the possibility of worms.
“Worms at least.”
She should have gone back to Puerto Ángel and found a doctor, but couldn’t face the walk. Even getting from her hammock to the beach exhausted her. She would lie in a stupor on the sand, now and then digging a hole to retch in, thinking about her father who would be dead by now. Probably she was sunstruck from lying there too long, delirious and therefore susceptible to weird imaginings. Her father had died, but that did not mean the end of their clash of wills. Far from it. Now he was inside her, fighting her from within.
Then one morning she woke feeling herself again, but very hungry. Overnight her energy had returned. Triumphant, she climbed the hill to the café. The woman who worked there looked surprised to see her. “You haven’t been around for so long, I thought you’d split.”
“How long?” asked Pauline.
The woman shrugged, guessing. “Six weeks?”
It had seemed a lot longer to Pauline, who now
felt silly for imagining the spirit of her father had possessed her in the guise of a tapeworm. She must have been hallucinating. In fact, she remembered she’d eaten some mushrooms a few days before falling sick, so maybe the whole episode had been nothing more than a very long, very bad trip. She ordered a café con leche and pancakes. The woman sauntered over to the wood stove. Dangling between her brown thighs, the pink string of a tampon.
The waves rolled on. She sang “Tequila Sunrise” again and passed along the joint. Leaning back into the arms of some boy, she heard him whisper, “Gorda,” felt his tongue work through her tangled hair and probe her none too clean ear. Just then, something lurched in her belly. She sat up, rose clumsily to her feet and hurried from their circle with the boy in tow.
“Qué pasa?” he asked.
“Leave me alone.”
“Is it because I called you fat?”
“Get lost,” she told him. She could feel it coiling and uncoiling, nudging the walls of her gut, slithering through the folded corridors of intestine, trying doors. She pounded fists against her spongy, distended abdomen. “Get lost!” Putting on her clothes the next morning confirmed that she was bloated. Her shorts would not close. Thankfully, she had a drawstring skirt and a baggy shirt. Clutching her phrase book, she left Paradise, not even wearing any panties.
There was no translation for “tapeworm,” she discovered after arriving at the Puerto Ángel clinic. “Serpiente,” she told the nurse, “serpiente,” and pointed to her ass.
“Loca,” she heard the nurse tell the doctor in the next room. “Otra gringa loca.”
“¿Esta vestida?” asked the doctor. They both laughed, then the nurse came back with a half-dozen white suppository bullets that were, naturally, ineffective.
All her life Pauline had watched people watching her sister. She had seen their eyes shift focus the moment Anna came into the room and never really centre back on Pauline. They would look to Pauline again, certainly, but their eyes would be empty after that, gazing inwardly instead, at the lovely memory of Anna passing. Didn’t Pauline want to claw at those eyes every time that happened? Didn’t she just want to scream? It wasn’t fair and neither was how Pauline was blamed for every fight between the sisters. So many weekends grounded for supposedly picking on Anna, Pauline seemed to have spent the whole of her adolescence in the prison of her room. Of course, Pauline was also punished for the many outrageous things she did. She was known as an attention-seeker, though attention wasn’t half of what she sought. What she really wanted was to be adored, like Anna.
In Mexico, as she moved over the hot sand, stately, one—no, two—in a procession, everyone turned to follow her with their eyes. There were astonished double takes, audible clucks of admiration. Strangers patted her belly, stroked it even, despite the nudist credo not to touch without permission. They would not let her be alone, not even for a second. If she rose from her hammock and headed toward the waves, someone would instantly appear on either side to escort her in. They took turns fanning her with palm fronds and once, while she napped on the beach, someone sculpted her likeness in wet sand three feet away. Waking, she marvelled at the belly of the sand goddess beside her, the protruding navel a seashell spiral. If only it could have lasted.
She came home before she got too big to fly. The next week she had the ultrasound. “Look,” said the technician, pressing the lubricated wand hard under Pauline’s ribs. On the screen, the ghost of five little bean-shaped toes curled and uncurled.
“Great,” Pauline drawled. “It has a foot.” Nothing could convince her that these separate parts would come out properly strung together. No way. Pauline had done too many drugs. She planned donations to the eye bank and the foot repository after it was over.
“You don’t want the baby?” asked the technician.
“I’m more of a cat person,” Pauline admitted.
They offered her a picture, so she took the one of the foot and brought it home to show her mother. Betty surprised her by saying, “It’s too bad your father couldn’t see this.”
“Why? He’d only ground me.”
“He wouldn’t have to. That baby’s going to ground you. You’d better believe it.”
Pauline didn’t. Nobody had ever really cramped her style, and a person weighing in at under ten pounds was, she thought, an unlikely first.
“I’m dying!” she screamed. She was pushing a planet out her loins in great shuddering, tearing waves. “I’m dying!” And finally a head emerged, then a floppy sunburned body gooey with silver vernix. Eyes slitty, but the mouth open wide. Inside: white gums and a furred, thrushy tongue that would soon shoot burning darts up Pauline’s milk ducts. The greedy way she grabbed at the nipple the moment she was placed on Pauline’s chest gave Pauline her first inkling as to how things were going to be. They were going to be about the baby. Already the baby was shrieking Me! me! me!
They sent her home the next day. How to care for an infant, Pauline had no idea. Every time they’d wheeled Rebecca into the room in her clear plastic box, Pauline had opened one eye and waved the nurse off as if refusing the fare on a dim sum trolley. She hadn’t wanted to see anyone who could have used her so violently.
Once home, she hobbled around the house with a sopping, brick-thick menstrual pad between her legs, but no one paid attention. “I have a hemorrhoid,” she announced to Anna and Carey and Betty convening around the bassinet. Betty was concerned because Rebecca had changed colour and now looked washed in an iodine solution. All over her misshapen head, black hair was patched like a radiation victim’s. Pauline lifted the hand mirror and examined the Catherine wheel of broken blood vessels in her left eye, from pushing. No one had given her an ounce of sympathy for that either.
She’d had enough. She was going back to Mexico with her inheritance. Bowlegged, she pegged up the stairs, dressed, packed and left unnoticed. She thought she would call a cab from the grocery store on the corner, but when she had got halfway across the yard Me! me! me! came floating through the open window. Me! me! me! Panic overwhelmed her. She beat a stinging retreat and burst back in the house.
“Is she crying?” she called.
“Shh!” hissed Anna. “You’re going to wake her up!”
In Pauline’s nightmare she was watching herself sleep. For hour after decadently uninterrupted hour, she slept on because, for once, Rebecca was not shrilling. She watched herself toss dreamily in the covers, saw her own chest heave languorous sighs of relaxation and peace. The dream-Pauline was not the one having the nightmare. She was in a state of complete bliss.
Then, in the nightmare, the closed bedroom door opened up a crack. Someone was looking in at the dream-Pauline, but she didn’t know it. The door opened wider and a person stepped inside. For some reason the diminutive stature of the intruder was the most terrifying thing about her. She was an evil imp or dwarf or, worse—a child! Reminded then that there was a baby in the house, Pauline began to panic. Where was the baby? Why wasn’t she waking every other hour? And who was this menacing little creature creeping over to the bed, tiptoeing closer and closer to her oblivious dreaming self? Had she done something to the baby? What? What?
Now it became apparent that it was a child, a child dressed up like a lamb. Still Pauline didn’t wake, not until the child was right beside her, glowering in her fleece hood, ears pricked up. Abruptly, the dream-Pauline sat up, pulling the covers tight around her. Her mouth opened to scream, but no sound came. Only the little girl could speak. She grabbed Pauline’s wrist.
“Me-ow.”
“I’m in labour!” sang Anna on the phone.
“Right,” Pauline scoffed.
“I am!”
“It’s false labour.”
“My waters broke.”
Pauline hesitated. After seven months of jealous waiting, she was unwilling to let her hopes rise, especially prematurely like this. “Any contractions?”
“What do they feel like?”
Pauline laughed. “Call me back.�
�
The day before, the sisters had gone for lunch. Two men in business suits, allowed now to perform all the chivalrous gestures banned by feminism, rushed to open the door for Anna. They followed her solicitously into the restaurant, leaving Pauline outside grappling with a toddler, the full set of luggage that came with her—diaper bag, toy bag, food bag, stroller—and now the door. Pauline nearly spat. How she longed for that commanding, dirigible figure herself! She wanted to feel once again inflated with her own euphoria.
Rebecca was in the bathroom unspooling toilet paper all over the floor. “Auntie Anna’s going to have a baby. Baby’s coming.” She scooped up her child, hot sticky cheek against her dry one, cool seashell ear. “Poor Auntie Anna,” she laughed. Soon she would be as enslaved by a tiny pair of hands creased at the wrists—screw-on hands!—by a round tyrant face peeking out from under a KKK-hooded bath towel. Unbidden and unstoppable, the love would pour out of her like milk.
Anna didn’t call back until the next morning when she was about to leave for the hospital. Pauline said she would meet her there. By cab, she took Rebecca to her mother’s where, parting, she grabbed her dirty hand, kissed it fervently, then pushed it right inside her mouth, pretending to eat it. Rebecca shrieked with delight. If anything happens to you, Pauline incanted in her head, I will kill myself by the slowest, most agonizing method. I will stick pins in my every pore. I will gargle battery acid.
Anna had just been relegated to a curtained cubicle when Pauline arrived. “Where’s Carey?”
“He’s working,” said Anna. “But he’ll come. I know he will.”
“If you’ve actually got a father, he may as well be here.”
Anna bowed her head and, gripping the chrome bed rails, panted heavily. When she lifted her face again, Pauline saw how bloated she was, her pretty features embedded in flushed and sweaty cheeks. “I feel like pushing,” she gasped.
“What? Already?” Pauline hurried off to get a nurse.
The nurse came back with Pauline and did the internal examination while Pauline stayed by the head of the bed. “You’re not the teeniest bit dilated,” she told Anna as she peeled off the rubber glove. “I’m going to send you home.”
Pleased to Meet You / The Sky is Falling Page 18