My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (17 page)
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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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The performance artist has tea at a sidewalk café with the woman with silver hands. Her own healing hands are silvery with scar tissue. “Now I can ask,” she says, but doesn’t. She is watching a pigeon strut and bob, his neck fat with desire. The harried-looking female pecks at a pebble, then suddenly flaps away. The performance artist smiles, inexpertly, and turns back to her friend. “To lose one hand might be regarded as a misfortune,” she says; “to lose both looks like carelessness. I’m quoting. Ish.”
“I was trying to jump a freight train with some friends, a girl I met in the shelter, an older guy who said you could get all the way to Reno that way and that it was cool. They made it, I didn’t.” She stirred her tea with a silver finger.
“Really?”
“No, my father cut them off with an axe. Otherwise, he said, the devil would wrap his tail around his, my father’s, neck and drag him away.”
“Sucks for you.”
“Yep. Though . . .” They look at her hands.
THE OPENING, CONTINUEDShe looks in the mirror and says, Oh for fuck’s sake, and starts wiping her mouth with mean strokes. She has smeared her lipstick again; she has even managed to get some on her chin.
Or, she has just had oral sex on a hot afternoon with the woman with silver hands, who has previously pulled out her ghastly tampon by the string and slung it whooping out the window (later they would peer out and see it lying on top of the neighbor’s air conditioner, like a dead mouse, and burst out laughing), and has slid up for a kiss that tasted like iron and salt, and caught sight of herself in the shards of mirror glued to the wall, a red halo around her mouth.
Or, she has eaten her own children. The children she made with the art critic. But who disappeared over the course of the six years she spent making shirts out of nettles. Little shirts that would no doubt fit the children she also made. She had suspected her dealer, whose jealousy—of her own artists!—was well-known. But she could not voice her suspicions, since she was not speaking at the time.
Across the room, she sees her dealer speaking to the art critic. He is bent forward to hear her in the noisy room, his head almost touching her breasts, which are offered up in a fashion not so much sexual as maternal.
Someone is talking about a glass mountain that has sprung up in midtown, or maybe it’s just a new building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Barcelona. For some reason she is suddenly sure that that is where her children, that is, her brothers, no, her children, have gone.
The art critic has some difficulty with one of the miniature pork chops that are circulating on platters, and the dealer wipes his mouth for him in a fashion not so much maternal as sexual, though he is certainly at least half her age.
The art critic has a big head and longish, floppy, wavy hair like a cellist. He catches her eye from across the room and raises his plastic cup to her, sloshing a little sparkling water over his wrist. The light shines in his brown hair as if something golden were nestled there.
The performance artist nods, distracted. The children: where can they be hiding this time? Under the paper skirts of the table with its ranks of plastic cups? She can feel her dealer watching her. There is a smell of burning meat in the air—the mini sausages, maybe.
“Oh, no, here he comes,” said the woman with silver hands. “Don’t do it. You’ll just live happily ever after. Again.”
THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVERHe turns his back to me in bed and I tuck my hand under his wing. I can feel him thinking, thinking, thinking; then he softens to sleep.
I know what he thinks about, I was someone else once, too. I hopped it when she kissed me, scared of such a pink and hearty love. I whose blood had not yet warmed, between whose fingers translucent webs still stretched. Ugly with gravity, I lugged myself back to the pond—weak jump, volcanic splash.
Quelle surprise!
The water barely covered my head.
Quelle surprise!
The water barely covered my head.
Now I’m thick and pink myself and sometimes pull a sweater on. I have hair on my balls. Hell, I have balls. But I still blush green, and I knew him when I met him. Saw, in my mind, red legs coming down from a feathered sky. Neck coming down, pearls of air in the feathers. Robber’s mask over bulging, vulnerable eyes. We had shared that cold world. I did not hold it against him that he once might have nibbled me up with the duckweed. If anything it thrilled me. But.
Sliding down the long curve of his throat, or lying next to him on a double futon: both are, I guess, love, but I choose this.
MOTHERHOOD, BROTHERHOODTime goes by. The children don’t turn up. Did she ever have children? The performance artist considers adoption. She reads from the information packet: “Fees may be significantly lower for foolish and lazy youngest sons, children thumb-sized and smaller, those with the heads of hedgehogs or the ears of donkeys. Many so-called special needs, given proper care, will not significantly impact the future health and happiness of your child.” She schedules a home study. “So they can determine whether I am likely to eat my children, I guess. When it should be obvious that I am responsible to a fault. But I do have doubts. My brothers, for example: I lost them. Who was it who said, ‘to lose one brother may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose six looks like carelessness’?”
“You were how old?” said the woman with silver hands. “What kind of father leaves seven children alone in the woods? For that matter, what kind of father marries a woman he can’t trust with his children?”
What kind of father cuts off his daughter’s hands, thinks the performance artist.
“Anyway, you got them back,” said the woman with silver hands. “How’s your brother?”
“He and his boyfriend have bought a house in the Berkshires. Well, a cabin, really. You’d like it, it stands on a giant chicken foot. Hops around the yard. In winter they’re going to ‘tool down to Florida’ in it. They’ve asked me if I want to come along, but I don’t know.”
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DAYDREAMSA group of swans—six cobs and one pen—shift their weight uneasily as a woman walks toward them, carrying six little shirts.
LIVE POULTRYThe performance artist goes to a live poultry store in south Brooklyn. There are hand-painted Arabic letters on the yellow sign, and a proud white cock with one red foot raised. Inside are a lot of Hasidic men and Mexicans, or maybe Guatemalans or Colombians, who knows, and cages stacked to the ceiling, with dirty feathers sticking out of them. She bends and peels up a feather from the sticky floor.
She buys six swans, no, geese, the live poultry store does not sell swans, and barricades them into the backseat with cardboard boxes. They honk out the windows as she drives over the bridge, possibly smelling water, and draw startled looks from passing drivers. In the gallery, they walk around importantly, looking like art critics and nibbling at electrical cords. The next morning, the gallery reports the theft of artworks valued at thirty thousand dollars.
NEWSSix small robbers are spotted on a department store security video, pulling on identical shirts and turning this way and that in front of the mirror, then dropping the shirts on the floor.
Six small robbers are caught on video attempting to enter the glass building by that architect, the one who did that thing in Sidney. They are frightened away by a night watchman.
Six small robbers are found sleeping in children’s beds in the Red Hook IKEA. Locked in a room to await the arrival of a law-enforcement officer, they apparently escape through a third-floor window. Goose dung is discovered on the windowsill.
ABOUT TIME“Isn’t it about time you came out with something new?” said the art critic. “Not that it’s any of—”
“No, it isn’t.”
When they met, she wasn’t speaking. They went for walks in the dark; sometimes she climbed a tree, and when he, growing impatient of the game, begged her to come down to bed, she would throw down her shoes, her stockings, her dress, aiming at the red light of his cigarette (several of her favorite dresses still had tiny round holes in them); she would unhook her bra and pull it out through her sleeve and throw that down, until she stood barefoot on a branch in nothing but her slip, looking down at the darkness where he stood.
“Marry me,” he would say, to the pale shape roosting in the tree.
“Of course he knew I couldn’t answer,” she told the woman with silver hands.
Now that she is speaking, their relationship has deteriorated.
“It’s about time you came out with something new, don’t you think?” said the art dealer. “If you’re ready.”
“I think the art critic is sleeping with my dealer,” said the performance artist to her friend.
“Ew,” said the woman with silver hands.
FEATHERS NEEDEDThe performance artist puts an ad on Craigslist. Feathers needed, swans preferred.
FACTSThe best quill pens were cut from swan feathers.
A female swan is called a “pen.”
Right-handed writers favored feathers from the tip of the left wing, which curved outward, away from the line of sight.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS (AGAIN)In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning feathers into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. Down drifts around her, collecting in loose, dusty rolls on the floor. Her nose is running; she has developed an allergy.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMSThe feathers, too, sting her fingers.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST’S REVIEWS“Lacks the critical edge of her best work” . . . “Has the performance artist lost her sting?” . . . “The aspirational tone is a welcome shift from the claustrophobia and bitterness of her ‘Nettled’ show, but the feather shirts, while frankly gorgeous, resolve the vexed issue of female domestic servitude perhaps too easily in resorting to the hackneyed metaphor of flight” . . . “In repeating with variations her own earlier work, is the performance artist cannily engaging the current trend of reenactment, or has she just run out of ideas?” . . . “Though the memory of pain lingers in the form of the scars that silver the artist’s hands, the element of physical suffering has been removed from this new, softer work, and there is a corresponding loss of intensity” . . . “The trick has grown old. One wonders whether, after yet another six years of silence, anyone will be left who cares.”
THE OPENING, CONTINUEDThe room is hot, the air is thick. It stings her throat like nettles. It tickles her throat like feathers. Either way she can’t breathe. No, it’s not the air, it’s a length of yarn twining round her neck; the children have appeared, the children have been found, wandering in the forest, shut up in yet another castle, it’s joyous news, and they’re running around their mother, the performance artist, with a ball of yarn they’ve found somewhere, and they don’t realize, nobody realizes, how tight the loops have become. Unless it’s her brothers, who have come after all, who are grateful after all, all six of them, pulled away from their barbecues, their robbers’ dens, their high-stakes online poker games, their castles, their princesses, led of course by the youngest, the one with the disability, and as her knees give way they are severing the yarn with their beaks, fanning her with huge wings, lifting her up with their red, red feet—they’re weaving a net, they too know how to weave, a net of nettles, they’ve taken the sides in their beaks and they’re lifting her on it, beating their great wings, already she is high above the city, she sees the glass mountain rising before her—
Or it is the man with chicken feet helping her up, he’s kicked off his boots to free his feet, he’s more agile like that, and the woman with silver hands is fanning her, with one of her own shirts. What has happened? She must have slipped on the glass mountain and fallen. But luckily she still has the chicken bones folded into her napkin, and now she plants one in a crack in the glass, tests to see if it will support her weight, and plants another a little higher. Up she goes! Higher and higher into the rushing sky, her gaze steady, her knees only trembling a little. She is nearing the top. One more step and she will be able to reach—but the napkin is empty. She cuts off—with what? Bites off—her little finger. Stepping on her finger, she reaches the top.
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