Milk Blood Heat

by Dantiel W. Moniz

  “Are you joining us for the moon festival?” she asked Kit.

  Kit blushed and ducked her head. “My mom won’t let me.”

  “That’s too bad,” my grandmother said, and turned to the sink to put away dishes she’d already washed. “What about you, Sylvie? Up for it tonight?”

  It was a school night, but of course I was. I’d never been a good sleeper, and my grandmother knew this. Everything is as it is, she was always saying, which I took to mean I could go to bed when I was tired.

  “Duh,” I said, my mouth full. I scarfed the rest of my sandwich and drained my glass so we could figure out what Kit’s animal was.

  “Your mother called,” my grandmother said as I picked the last crumbs from my plate with the tip of a spit-slick finger. “She’s temping at the hospital while she’s in town. She might come by.”

  “Mmm,” I said, and then to Kit, “Come on.” She thanked my grandmother for the food and we thundered up the hardwood stairs to my room. It was exactly how I’d left it that morning: bed unmade, my dirty socks hanging from the hamper, the window wide open, letting in sun and air. I hit play on my Sony Boombox, and TLC’s “Unpretty” bumped from the speakers, a song that, lately, I kept on repeat.

  “What are the festivals like? Is your mother really a gypsy?” Kit asked rapid-fire, flouncing down on my bed. I turned my back to her and squashed my clothes into the hamper, straightened the books on my desk, as if I cared about such things.

  Kit told me that this word—gypsy—was something she’d overheard her parents say. Apparently, they discussed my situation often while she eavesdropped from her room. Her parents had a Christmas-card family: Mom, Dad, Kit and her little brother. All of them well-groomed, smiling practiced white grins they tacked up on their walls for visitors to see. Kit’s mom sold Mary Kay at parties to other moms wearing identical cable-knit sweaters and the latest yoga pants, and she served store-bought guacamole in authentic Native American pottery she ordered online. Every time I saw her, she smiled at me with all her teeth, and the silver fillings in her back molars winked. When I heard “gypsy,” I pictured someone beautiful and dark and charming, but the way Kit repeated the word made it clearly a slur. Like whatever her parents meant when they said it, was lesser than them. She said “festival” that same way.

  “What does your mother say about the festivals?” I asked Kit, flexing my nails into my palm.

  Kit laughed, and propped back on my bed. “She doesn’t like them. Every time I come over here, she asks if your grandmother walks around naked.”

  I felt my anger prickle in my fingertips, jab underneath my ribs. How could anyone judge my grandmother, let alone Kit’s mother? I wanted to stare down her mother’s generic face and tell her yes, we walked around naked. And we dipped ourselves in blood. I wanted to tell Kit exactly what I thought about her mother, but she was nearly the only girl in school who didn’t think I was weird, who had interest in the games I liked to play. I pretended not to be offended by her questions, as if the implications of either topic were lost on me.

  “They’re magic,” I said about the festivals. “You’re missing out.”

  I said nothing about my mother, whom I called Helen to her face. I didn’t talk about her with anyone. She was mine to talk about, or not, and I was the only one allowed to think badly of her.

  She’d left me, two years old with my newly constructed sentences, Bye-bye Mommy!, to travel the world. I only saw her when she drifted home—when she was tired or missing something—on a schedule regulated by a system only she could understand; that she made out in a bird’s flight south or a certain turn of tide. A Helen’s Almanac for when to appear in her daughter’s life. She liked to tell me about all that she’d done. She had cleaned yachts for a living, chased boys across continents, cut paths on Antigua’s smoking mountains with a silver blade. Once she swam with baby humpback whales. She told me of a time she walked barefoot up Mount Sinai to the burning bush, fresh blisters on her toes, and bowed down to it on the summit. She told all her friends she’d heard the voice of God. Do you know what He said? she’d ask them, eyes shining, and everyone always asked, What? leaning in, greedy for secrets. Nothing, she’d say. Sometimes the voice of God was silence.

  I told myself I didn’t begrudge my mother these experiences; how could I? We barely knew each other, if at all.

  Kit and I turned toward my neatly labeled shelves. I was interested in discarded things—dead scalp flakes, toenail rinds, animal remains. I pressed cast-off flower petals onto yellowed sheet music. Rolled snake skins into opaque scrolls and corked them inside specimen bottles. In this realm, I was the expert, and Kit deferred to me. With the photos on the floor at the center of the room, we went through all my bones: wolf, cougar, goat, and sheep. There were chipmunks and rabbits, a viper and a blue jay. A tortoise. We arranged their heads around Kit’s pictures like totems, as if maybe their spirits were hanging out somewhere near my room—though I’d had most shipped from faraway places off the internet—and could be summoned to help us solve this mystery. They watched us arranging the sum of their parts, eternal grins indecipherable. There was something dark in their look, something true. We gathered my entire supply, tossing down femurs, scapulae, one rodent clavicle, and yellowed vertebrae like strange doorknobs. We beat upon the skulls with the ribs from a porcupine, popping our skinny hips to the graveyard music. I combed Kit’s hair with a bear’s phalanges; she placed a crown of thoracic spikes on mine.

  After a while, we got tired of searching and thought: maybe fox. It didn’t matter if we were right. Sometimes, it wasn’t about naming the bones we found; we rejoiced in the questions as much as the answers. It was enough, for us, to hold them against our skin, run their particular shapes across our mouths and taste that something remained—a sweet flavor, dust-dry.

  We left the bones where they lay and called numbers on my yellow daisy phone. My grandmother had a second line installed so the internet wouldn’t tie up her main. When she wasn’t using it, it was mine; when she was, a horrible robotic blatting and thick static filled the receiver—the sounds of connection.

  We called for the time, though we had nowhere to be. We phoned a free dating service that allowed us to skip through chatrooms by pressing pound or star and pretended to be girls older than we were. We laughed when men told us what they would do to us—spastic, ugly giggles that made our stomachs ache. They would treat us like princesses; they would kiss our feet; they would slather us in honey and lick the cracks of our succulent asses. We never said what we would do.

  But Kit and I figured we should be prepared, so we practiced giving hickeys on our own arms, then receiving hickeys from each other. Kit left controlled blooms beneath my collarbone, but I sucked her left shoulder splotchy red. I imagined Kit as the dark-skinned boy who wore tucked-in shirts and smiled kindly at me at school, and we practiced kissing on the lips. I was an eighth-grade girl on a school bus, basking in shy admiration.

  “I’ve got to go,” Kit said around five, and waved good-bye. Her sweater covered up our practice work. My grandmother’s voice drifted up the stairs, offering Kit a ride home, but she said, “No, thank you.” She’d walk. Exhausted from our searching, our pretending, from all our nervous laughing, I lay down on my bed and watched the sky in its singular mass of blue.

  I thought about the last time I had seen my mother, when she showed up last year in a gauzy black dress and burgundy leather boots, as if for a concert instead of a daughter’s eleventh birthday. I was surprised to see her. Usually she appeared a couple of weeks before or after a birthday, never quite getting the timing right. The year before that, I hadn’t seen her at all.

  At the front door, she’d held up a small box wrapped in gold paper.

  “Earrings,” she’d told me, rattling the present before placing it in my palm. “A girl should have some jewelry.” Helen wore none.

  She grabbed a bottle of r
ed wine from my grandmother’s cabinet and brought it to my room with a glass already full, wedging herself onto my bed that used to be hers. I sat with her and we faced each other, our knees pulled up. She told me about how she and her high school friends used to spray-paint their bodies bronze and pose as statues at the park, copying famous figures, unmoving for hours while one of them shook a ball cap at whomever happened by. She said on weekends they used to rake it in, but paid most of their earnings to a kid they knew with a fake ID who’d buy them packs of light beer and cigarettes. The emptier the bottle got, the further into the past she went.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?”

  “I’m eleven, Helen,” I’d said.

  She told me about when she was eleven. How she’d ride her bicycle to her boyfriend’s house, who was eleven too, and give him head in his backyard, knees scraping against the hand-poured slab of his basketball court, bone on concrete—the tender patches of ashy skin those encounters left. She said his come tasted like nothing. “Not like later,” she’d said, touching the soft hairs at the nape of her neck. She wasn’t looking at me; she didn’t seem to be looking at anything. She was somewhere inside herself. “Later, everything tastes like something.”

  My grandmother appeared in the doorway. “Cake’s ready,” she said to me, but she was looking at my mother. “Why don’t you go on downstairs and get the stuff for frosting? I’ll be down in a minute and we’ll ice it once it cools.”

  “Yes ma’am,” I said, realizing she’d overheard some of our conversation and didn’t want it to continue. I didn’t mind leaving; I thought I already knew how sex worked, anyway. I had seen the glossy torn-out pages other girls brought in from their mothers’ Cosmos, had watched a boy at school stick his hand up the leg of a classmate’s rolled-up gym shorts. Nothing was said to the boy, but she was written up for dress code. I didn’t need Helen to tell me.

  I pretended to leave, but lurked just outside the doorway, holding my breath, eager to see how Helen handled reprimand. Instead I saw my grandmother finger-comb my mother’s hair. Watched her wrap her arms around her, and Helen snuggle in. In the kitchen, while I slammed down bowls and dye and piping bags, I wondered why she’d even bothered to have me. I estimated the number of boyfriends she might have had over the years, the many children she had swallowed as seeds. How painless. I wished I’d been eaten, too.

  Later that day, when some of my grandmother’s friends were visiting, my mother sat in the tree swing facing the field—all that land, the gentle green slopes—swaying softly, her wine glass refilled. The women looked on from the porch, and one friend said to the other, “That girl,” and rolled her eyes. She said it low so my grandmother wouldn’t hear, but I heard, and thought, If she’s still a girl, when can any of us be women?

  I pictured my mother as a child, dressed in frills and lace, a red bow in her hair bigger than her head. She had a sticky, lollipop mouth instead of a wine bottle and glass and, sitting in that same swing, she pumped her legs, taking herself higher and higher, so high that her nose grazed the green of the tree, and the leaves all fell around her, turning red, turning brown, leaving the shriveled skeletons of their former selves underneath her feet. She was laughing, unaware she was about to swing into the sky, about to be lost, a pinprick among clouds. She didn’t call my name. She didn’t say words at all. There was only her in her dress and her smile, swinging into blue, then pink-orange, then gray-purple into black.

  My grandmother’s face hung above me, radiant and calm; I must have fallen asleep. She brushed a hand across the trail of self-inflicted love marks on my arms. “Are you ready?” she asked, and then helped me dress—I chose a skirt of such pale pink it was almost white, my grandmother a gown of teal chiffon. Then, wreathed in flowers, crowns of lavender and orange carnations like puffs of colored dust, we stepped into the yard.

  The field had been transformed in the time I slept. My grandmother and her friends had set up a tent underneath which tables were laid with wine and bread and fruit, slices of yellow pear and nectarines, black grapes large as pinballs, hunks of soft cheese staged attractively atop banana leaves. Lanterns and paper streamers hung from the porch and every branch, and a bonfire crackled. The field was bathed in all manner of light—soft light, twinkling light, roaring red light. Someone played the ukulele, someone else a tambourine.

  There were women everywhere—my grandmother’s friends and strangers from the next town over, some from even farther than that. There were women who taught children, women who filed papers, women who cleaned toilets. Businesswomen, pleasure women, women who’d married, and those that never did. Women in flowers, in grass skirts, in braids, in beads, women in only their skins. Old women, new women, tall women. Women hugging and singing and running and praying, women drinking in the night.

  A forest of women undulating under a full harvest moon.

  My grandmother left my side to dance, and I walked the grass among them. During these festivals, she didn’t hold my hand. It was up to me to navigate my own way, and I took this as a sign of trust. I could handle myself; I would be okay. I thought about Kit and her mother inserted into the scene, their bloodless faces, how small and lost they would be.

  I wandered toward a group telling stories by the fire, sitting cross-legged on the ground. They beckoned me to join them and spoke about their ghosts—a sister slain, a son dead in the womb. A grandmother who’d never made it over to this country, and all that remained of her was a pair of kidskin gloves. “It’s rarely cold enough,” the granddaughter said, “for me to wear them.” The woman next to her reached over and squeezed her hand; she’d painted gold circles in a line across her cheeks. I couldn’t guess her age, but she was older, darker-skinned, more beautiful than me. She said that she was fortunate, she hadn’t lost a loved one, not yet. She told us you could be a ghost in your own life, and sometimes that was worse. I sat among them, enraptured by their stories, realizing for the first time that every one of us was a link stretching back, mother to daughter to mother, in an unbroken chain from the center of time, connected by milk and blood. Suddenly it felt urgent, that empty space between my grandmother and me.

  “Tell your story,” the women encouraged each other. I closed my eyes and tried to picture mine, not my past, but something like a future. I was underground, beyond rock and root, stones like bones drawing me deeper, still deeper, until I was in the yellow molten center of the planet. I passed through it, hair and muscle and everything else I thought I was sloughing off until I saw the true shape of myself without my skin. I was a glorious creature, spare and glowing.

  Then, piercing through that vision I heard the sound of my own voice. “Sylvia,” it said, and I realized it wasn’t me. I opened my eyes and saw Helen standing in front of me, appearing as if from the smoke. She wore green scrubs and a fatigue-darkened grin. “I found you,” she said. She shifted her purse to the crook of her arm and held out her hand. I said nothing. I was always there, right where she’d left me.

  I stood up from the circle and put my hand in hers. “I’m hungry,” she said, and led me toward the house, leaving the sound of women behind us—crying happy, laughing sad. The sounds of connection.

  At the front door, I stopped her. My grandmother used to tell me that full moons brought out impish creatures, magical beasts that traveled only by its light. I glared at Helen. All that time she’d been away. Her hunger. I wanted to be sure. “Are you a vampire?” I asked. I wouldn’t be the one to invite danger in. My mother shuffled through her bag and very seriously showed me her reflection in a heart-shaped compact.

  “Not yet,” she said.

  I swung the door wide, letting it hit the wall, and stomped upstairs to sit on the edge of my bed, swinging my legs, waiting for her, because even though she wasn’t necessarily here for me, I knew she’d come.

  She brought the rest of the tuna salad, eating it straight from the Tupperware, and a glass of milk. “Drink
this,” she said, and handed the glass to me.

  “Why?”

  “Isn’t that what mothers do? Bring milk to their unsleeping children?”

  I said nothing. The milk glowed blue-white in the glass.

  “It’s good for the bones,” she tried.

  “Actually, that’s not true,” I told her, glad to disagree.

  “It was true when I was your age.” She didn’t speak again until I’d grudgingly taken a sip. She pointed with her fork to the bones on the floor. “What’s that?”

  “Coyote femur,” I said. My grandmother had brought it back from a trip to Arizona.

  Helen laughed. “Good lord, you’re just like me.”

  I bristled at that, baby hair on my arms standing on end—how would she know what I was like? I thought of Kit’s ready-made mom, and looked at Helen the way she would: gypsy, lesser than.

  “My friend’s mom would never let her come to the moon festivals.”

  She looked at me, and the center of her eyes were black as grapes. “What does your friend’s mother do?” she asked, like she already knew the answer and it was laughable.

  “Stays,” I said. Maybe I imagined it, but I thought I heard her inhale, a small sound, like a flinch. She asked, “Is that what makes a good mother?”

  She was the one with all the answers, woman of the world. I clutched the glass tight in my hands, bracing myself. “How would I know anything about mothers?”

  A beat, and then Helen laughed—raspy, sad—and speared an onion, crunched it hard between her teeth. “Domesticity is for animals,” she said. “And really, not even them.” I pictured Kit’s family as a skulk of foxes, their skulls all lined up and proper on someone’s fireplace mantle—daddy, momma, and two babies—unfamiliar to one another without their silky pelts.

  “Everything is as it is,” my mother said. She smiled at me and it reached her eyes too. There was something dark there, something true. “You learn to be who you are, or you die as someone else. It’s simple.”