by Chris Dennis
I dream of Mother. I am looking out the kitchen window. She is outside, holding a bucket. She is looking cautiously into the bucket, as if it contains something dangerous. I open the kitchen window.
“The neighbor!” she yells sulkily. “He and I want you to have this!”
“What’s this regarding?” I ask, pretending not to recognize her.
“This here’s birdseed.” She smiles like a crook. She is proud of the birdseed, I realize. “The neighbor used to make it for me all the time. I was a good woman, Adelaide. You might wanna fill them feeders since I can’t do it.” She nods in the direction of the numerous bird feeders that hang from the awnings.
“No,” I say. “You’re dead.”
“I know,” she says, sitting the bucket down. “Have your friend fill them anyway.”
She turns around to face the rigid pines, where the creek splits the woods. She removes her old blue bandana and scratches her head. “See you later,” she says. Her gait seems angry, but she gives me a little wave as she crosses the bridge.
“Thank you,” I whisper.
Masses of paperwork, big boxes of manila folders stuffed with menacing, shadowy xeroxes. Books stacked waist-high around the desk. So many naked women and illustrations of arcane gynecological equipment, orifices packed tight with instruments, X-rays of fallopian tubes shimmering with dye.
“Maybe I’m a masochist?” I say to Miriam over lunch.
“Are those the people who eat their own hair and fingernails?” she asks.
I offer her more cooked carrots.
“My friends used to call me the Nursing Home,” she says.
“Why?” I ask.
“I was the place where all the old men went to die.” She laughs enormously, making a spectacle of herself, showing her fat tongue, pink as chewed-up gum.
“All of your boyfriends were senior citizens?” I ask. She likes to make me guess at things.
“More or less,” she says. “I feel my weight has kept me from finding a good husband.”
I can’t tell if she’s joking this time. I’m inclined to say it has more to do with her face, but I don’t. “There’s someone for everyone,” I say. “You should move to a big city.”
“No,” she says. “That’s not an option. Maybe there are other options here now,” she says, piling carrots onto a slice of buttered bread.
“Doubtful,” I say.
After lunch we follow the little creek through the trees.
“I even dated Rupert,” she says, “the old dude who lived over yonder. We once were engaged. He’s passed now. It was intense though,” she says. “Which is why it didn’t last. He was too demanding, sexually.”
“I can’t imagine,” I say, though I can. This was Mother’s old neighbor. I’m forced to picture Rupert and Miriam together. His feeble gnome body perched on top of Miriam’s beastly thighs, stabbing into the folds.
“And I’m only thirty-nine,” she says, smiling, shyly fluffing her hair with her palm, as if to signal she knows she looks good for age. She indeed has the face of a giant infant. “You know how people can be,” she says. “They want a woman to be their everything and then nothing at all.”
We cross the bridge. We walk through the woods until we hit the tree line. There is a long stretch of electric fence. The grass is sparse and I can see ragged animals bending to graze at scattered blotches of green.
“He loved his goats,” Miriam says. “His daughter takes care of them now.”
“He’s the one,” I say, “that Mother used to work for when she was a teenager. The one that grew dry corn. And my Mother would shell it.”
“Oh!” Miriam says. “For feed. He loves feeding things,” she says, winking, running her hands over her solid, head-sized breasts. She makes a loud clicking noise with her tongue and the goats lift their heads. A few of them amble over, but change their minds and eat more grass instead. “Do you feel closer to your Mother here?” she asks.
“I don’t think so,” I say.
“I do,” she says.
The story Miriam always wants to hear is one Mother used to tell me when I was a kid, about the shelling of corn for Rupert. Mother described the hand-cranked sheller he kept in the barn, and how hard she had to work to get the corn through. She was working in the barn after school one day when a man whispered to her from outside the barn. “Lucille, when will you come for me?” he said. My mother’s face always scared me when she described the voice. Her eye would twitch. Like someone had called up to her from the hottest caverns of hell. It was one of those dizzying childhood moments when I knew she wasn’t just my mother but also a woman living alone in the world. She’d asked what the man meant and when he didn’t answer she stepped out of the barn to see that no one was there, just the goats chewing garlic near the fence.
I am feeling troubled today by how similar my build is to patient D568. Perhaps my arms are longer, my shoulders narrower? The whole endeavor is beginning to feel like fodder. I play the game again where I allow my eyes to fall out of focus so that the vaginas are not vaginas but instead: sea slugs; aquatic plant life; dry, veiny leaves; compact mounds of fresh clay. I’m waiting to stumble upon a formula. I wouldn’t consider myself the sort of person who sees patterns where there are none, though maybe I am not myself. It seems important to acknowledge how consistently we are encouraged to see ourselves in such uniform ways, goaded into it, slowly, from girlhood to old age, enticed by the shallow rewards that come with correctly performing our femininity. Like a hot, horny pork chop dangling from a string, a diamond ring on a razor-sharp fish hook. And we are marginalized, of course, if we can’t produce femininity in a recognizable way. One becomes prone to imagining her body in a dozen untrue ways. Every mirror is a funhouse mirror.
Miriam returns from the grocery store with all the dogs in the back of her pickup truck. She’s wearing the same clothes she had on yesterday. Her hair looks uncombed, the curls tangled and jutting out in odd directions. The dark circles under her eyes have grown more pronounced. She snaps the truck door closed with her powerful hip. “Trudy! Timmy,” she yells, prompting the dogs to leap out of the truck. The two small ones trail behind. The other two chase each other around the yard like manic children. Their names are, shamefully, Pat and Benatar. “I’d have ten more if I could afford to feed them!” she says, always, to anyone who shows the slightest interest. They make my skin crawl, most days, especially when Miriam wants to discuss what will happen to them when she dies. All day the dogs are in tow, their claws clicking like tap shoes on the hardwood. The deception of dogs disgusts me. The lie of pretending to lead, when of course they’re just following in front, looking back constantly for approval. I ask Miriam if she’d like to help me plant the garden. She says, “I would! How wonderful,” clapping her hands together, exciting the dogs. When I look at her, when I see her reaching to pick up the terrier, or straining to pull the detergent from the shelf above the washing machine, I imagine pulling off her khakis and pressing my mouth against her anus. I want to own her, and please her.
At the feed store a gathering urge overwhelms me. I fill my basket to the brim with seeds. Miriam has rented a gas-powered tiller. It turns out to be a joyously loud machine that is often hard to handle but fun because it is so unwieldy and tough. After the ground is ready we consult one of Mother’s books to determine the best method of planting. On one end is a variety of greens, the other tubers and corms. When you’re standing on the hill near the shed, the fresh plot looks like a grid. The parallel lines are comforting. The dogs trot the perimeters. They wrestle like mongoloids in the grass. After dinner I find my favorite hairbrush half-chewed under the buffet in the hall.
Miriam goes into town for dinner and the moment she’s out of the house I phone Trisha. I leave a message this time, telling her that she should come for a visit. I water the garden and read in a lawn chair near the woods. When I
go back into the house there is a message on the machine. I am sweating as I play it back. Trisha’s voice is tired and cold. She declines the invitation, saying her schedule is full. She sighs into the receiver and quotes Foucault: “We return to those empty spaces, don’t we, Adelaide, that have been masked by omission or concealed in a false or misleading plentitude?”
I return her call but she does not pick up. I leave a message as well. “When I think of Foucault,” I say, nearly screeching, “I can’t help but imagine a bridge troll in a bobby helmet with an ass full of anal beads. So it’s hard to take what you’re saying seriously.” I sit by the phone for almost half an hour before giving up and dialing Miriam’s cell instead.
“When are you coming back?” I ask.
“Never,” she says. “Or in a couple of hours.”
Another dream of Mother: “I’ll get you a shovel,” she yells from the bridge, her boots booming on the planks, a tear in the seat of her overalls so big you can see her long johns. She heads in the direction of the goats. Miriam has her head stuck out of the kitchen window, giving me a stupid look.
I say, “What are you doing, eavesdropping?”
She says, “I can hear you talking to your mother even if you think I can’t. Don’t do this, Adelaide.”
“Don’t do what?” I say, lying, because I know I’m working out a deal of some kind with Mother. “You’ll thank me later,” I tell Miriam. “Get the animals ready!” Miriam slams the window down without taking the prop off the sill. The rod splinters everywhere. Mother comes back with a shovel.
“You’re going to need this,” she says.
When I open my eyes there is the stiff, ridiculous sense of an omen on me. I hate the feeling.
I sit on a bucket and leaf through Nonoperative Physical Measures in Gynecology. It’s probably not something a person should get worked up over, but I do. They’ve got these women spread wider than the Cumberland Gap, most of the faces carefully cut out, an alluring anonymity that stirs my libido like a spoon.
I stay out late, making notes in the back of my book and watching the sun do its little show along the property line before it burns off completely into the woods. Inside I rinse sweet potatoes. I ask Miriam to cook them for dinner. She is bitching about another headache, more nausea. She says she needs brown sugar to make the potatoes but we don’t have any. “Sweet potatoes is made with brown sugar not white,” she says.
I say, “Get off your ass and go get some.” She bends down to scratch Trudy. She rubs the dog behind the ears before walking off down the hallway where she figures I can’t see her. She stands there a long time just staring down at the carpet. After a while she comes back into the room and plucks the keys from the hook. “I’m going to the store to get the brown sugar,” she says. “Will you ever finish this book?”
“I doubt it,” I say.
“What else do we need?”
“A bag of ideas. A pound of insight,” I say.
“Vanishing now,” she says. “Poof. Goodbye.”
If I get at Miriam slow enough and long enough I can bury my hand inside of her. Once it’s in, I open my fist slow and lissome as a cloud. It is then that she is my property.
Lately the dogs spend too much time inside the house. I chase them into their pens with a flyswatter and in an hour Miriam has let them out again. As soon as she unlatches the doors they run about and abuse the furniture. How quickly an outdoor dog becomes an indoor pet. Fuck you, Miriam. I never wanted dogs. She lugs them around like infants. How willing those dogs are to please, to soil the rug, to return later to a shit stain and lap at the ghost of their own waste.
Miriam and I stand near the toolshed. “The hysterectomy was wrong,” she says. She’s emotional today.
“Mother had one,” I say. “Like removing perishables from a broken-down refrigerator!”
“Children were just always something I thought I might like,” she says.
“Just thinking about little children makes me want to drink,” I say. “This is why you treat those damn dogs like babies,” I say.
“In a way, I’m sure,” she says.
She weaves a small wreath out of weeds—black medic, some wood sorrel. She presents it to me. It fits perfectly around my wrist.
Cancer is a shy bully. The gutters are filthy. I get a ladder and clean them.
Later I brush my hair in front of the fogged-up mirror, using the chewed-up hairbrush. In bed I listen to the dogs tapping against the kitchen tile. I yell through the bedroom door, “Lie down, for shit’s sake.”
“They must hear something outside,” Miriam says.
“Of course they do,” I say. “When do they not hear something? When do any of us not hear something somewhere—the sneaky rodent of life burrowing inside the clogged gutters of our subconscious! Shh. Listen. I can hear it right now.”
“Oh, Lord in heaven. Is this because of your mommy dreams, Adelaide? Or because you can’t think of anything smart to say in your book to win that old lesbian bitch’s heart? Or because I’m dying? Why do you treat the world like a trash can?”
She gets out of the bed and laughs all the way to the kitchen. Suddenly Miriam is a satirist. There’s nothing like the humor of a self-loving fat ass. I can hear her filling the water bowls. I’m sure she’s rubbing the dog’s heads, kissing them on the mouth. I hear the sliding glass door open as she lets them outside, where they can root around and investigate in their usual idiot manner. It’s a while before she makes it back to bed. No doubt she fixed herself some food too. She should be losing weight, but she grows bigger. The wind outside is loud, and unusual. We’re situated in a shallow valley. All around is the sound of a low, satisfied sigh.
Page twenty-three in Decker’s Handbook of Gynecology for the General Practitioner: “Menstrual abnormalities are frequent in the masculine female. Her pubic hair extends toward the umbilicus. She struggles to achieve sexual gratification, either alone or with her partner. In general, there is much hair, growing disobediently from her knuckles, her nape, and on and on as if trying to cover her, censor her in the face of civility. Her sexuality is a condition that must be corrected.”
Decker wants to cure her, not merely for her own sake, obviously, but also for her restless husband’s.
On a Saturday I cut words from antique medical records and arrange them into more potential chapter titles. Miriam leads the dogs on a walk up to the ridge. I have: “Hormone Girdle,” “Manic Cervix,” “Genital Apron.” Miriam shows back up at the house almost four hours later, without her dogs. “I guess the dogs are out there trying to dig up an opossum. How’s it going?”
“I think women have been trained to hate themselves. Also, they’re moles,” I say.
“Whatever,” she says.
“Those bitches couldn’t dig up a T-bone,” I tell her.
“You might be onto something,” she says.
“Your hormone girdle is too tight,” I say.
When Miriam lies down for her nap I call Trisha to hear her raspy voice mail rumbling over the telephone. I unzip my jeans. I pull my underwear to the side. I can almost feel her staticky breath against my mouth. Her voice detonates me like a land mine. After I hang up I decide that when I finish the book I will dedicate it to Trisha. It will be for her, and, if done correctly, she will feel awe and affection toward it.
I nap too, and dream that Mother insists I seal the deal. “It’s certainly a perfect trade,” she says, “hell of an opportunity!” She is prodding forcefully with a wooden oar in a large metal trough full of corn. She moves the oar about as if she’s rowing through it, like a little muddy pond. I move closer and realize that she’s mixing a goat into the trough, covering it with corn. “We’re backwoods,” she says. “This is what we do. It took me a while to work out the details, but this should do it.” She’s making something in the trough. She insists I taste it. I do. I wake and I feel
an enormous kind of relief that lasts for hours. I write until sundown.
There are small contradictions. They blemish the pages. I trace them angrily. It is certainly difficult to separate the body from its mannerisms, the shape and its performance, the origin of both. Does the hipbone make the lesbian? Or the lesbian make the hipbone? I resort to binaries: man/woman, penis/clitoris, angular/rounded, fertile/desolate, intelligent/overweight, ugly/overweight, old/young, dead/alive. Veracity is hinged to discomfort like a snake’s jawbone to its skull. What good are we? Where are these confirmations of the parallels between the swells and reductions in one’s passivity and dominance? I have convoluted the aim. I am trapped in a dumpster of possibilities.
After she’d heard the voice in the barn that day, Mother knocked on Rupert’s door. No one came. She knew they weren’t home. There was no car in the driveway. She went back to the barn to finish shelling corn. She started feeding the corn into the crank again when she noticed that the bucket was swarming with wireworm larvae.
The larvae hadn’t been there before she’d stepped outside. Someone started screaming. I explain to Miriam that the last time Mother told me this story over the phone, she stopped talking and I thought she’d hung up, until finally she yelled, “It was the man outside the barn, Adelaide, screaming for me! He wanted me! He wanted to kill me!”
“That makes sense,” Miriam says. “Put that in your book.”
“No,” I say, “it doesn’t.”
Miriam spent the day searching for the dogs. “Where could they have gone?” she asks.
“How would I know?” I say.
“Don’t play dumb,” she says, picking at a bit of food she’s discovered on her blouse.
“Farewell,” I say.
She weeps in her chair on the deck.