My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (27 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Green Air
ONCE PRIZED, NOW SHE LANGUISHES IN THE DRAWER, ONE OF MANY contained within a cedar chest. It stands beneath a window, shut against the day. His little dog guards it from intruders.
Exactly twelve months ago they had measured his ballroom together: 666 paces one way, 666 the other. Thriving they were then: fucking and spending. His kisses tasted like sweet tobacco, and after he gave her pleasure, her sex tasted like tobacco, too.
 
She has a matchbox in her pocket, an artifact from when she was the only one, or so she believed, to light his cigar. But now the victim of his bitter policy, she sighs all day till evening and the long night through, attempting to decipher his robber’s mind, the reasons for her ritual incubation. Sleepless, she has all the time in the world to recall the looks of doubt and evil that often come to crowd his eyes and for which she once made a thousand excuses.
“My love!” she recalls now with horror her persistent request, “look kindly upon me!”
Yet he remains aloof, seemingly displeased with the roasted fowl, her failed attempts at conversation, the tenacity of her affection.
In her company he boils over with impatience when he is not deadly weary. She considers that if some aspire to the realms above the moon, her husband has chosen to dwell beneath it and so shoulder that planet’s shadow. Surely it is this that has corrupted his mind and darkened his mood. Yet in the whore’s booths he rallies, his laughter clattering into the streets like hail. Dressed to kill he takes his ease in unknown places as she staggers under the load of his many inexplicable absences. Still she persists in her folly.
“Smile upon me, my beloved,” she begs, pressing peaches upon him, the ripest fig. His eyes bright with malice, his snorted amusement frustrates her virtue. With real longing she watches his beautiful hand stroke down his beard. When for the last time he kisses her, he viciously bites her tongue. As the blood spills down her chin, he expulses her from their bed and drags her thrashing to the cedar chest although she cries out, “No! No! For I am no crone! But in the heat of youth! Even the beetles!” she shrieks, “move freely about! The insignificant snails! The tent pitchers! The camel drivers! Even the serpents make their way beneath the sun, the cool of dawn!”
 
That first night locked away, she notices how outside in the streets the hubbub decreases before ceasing altogether. Sprinkled with blood, the others in the chest are silent. Silenced their sobs, their barking tongues. The winter is a bitter one; no one recalls such cold! Catching a whiff of smoke from the merchant’s coffee fires she lights a match. For an instant the world is kinder.
There in the drawer she is taught the final lesson: her nature—humble, generous, and kind—does not assure interest or compassion. Her one hope: that her dreadful condition may turn out to be unforeseen luck of a kind. Something might come of it; the ways of the world are mysterious. Something . . . dare she imagine it!
Wondrous
. (This is what the little dog had said, his tail held high, his eyes like two saucers, each set with a black yolked egg. “Wait and see! Wait and see! Something wondrous will come!”)
 
The drawer is the only place where it could have ended because that is where it all began. Or rather, to be more precise, where she came upon the artifacts that caused her to consider that something was going on and not only in her head, mind you! That the marriage, so new! Barely begun! The prior wife’s body still warm!—was a figment. And the drawer—as are all things belonging to husbands—was strictly taboo. As were his pockets holding small silver and keys: taboo! But then one day, sweetly occupied by the innocence of her own wifely tasks, the house flooded with light, she found herself propelled toward the very drawer in which she now languishes.
It was the fault of the little dog, you see, until then always so uncannily quiet, who at once began to raise a ruckus with all its throat, calling and calling out to her: “Come look at this!” Insisting, “Come! Here! Look at this!” And then it happens.
She goes to the chest, her heart thrashing, not only because what she is about to do is forbidden but because what she is about to find will change everything.
A box of gold rings. His sharp pencils and pens. The small brass instruments with which he navigates the streets. A box of matches she pockets without thinking. And she finds some little sticks meant to keep his shirt collars stiff. (It is prodigious how in the morning he arises an old man suffering desolation of mind as though in the night he had seen firsthand, perhaps even participated in, all the horror of the world, only to step into the shower, his dressing room, and so transform himself into a prince. Glad-eyed, he leaves the breakfast nook with a lion’s muscled ease, sweetening her mind with longing throughout the day as the sun lifts and lowers in the deepening sky.)
Ah? But what can this be? Deep in the drawer she finds two little books coming unglued and held together with string. “You’ve found us!” they chirrup so shrilly she is startled. “High time! High time!” Raising their covers they fly directly into her hands. And the little dog prancing on his hind legs, he, too, cries out: “High Time! High Time!” It is hard to remove the string, her hands are shaking so.
The first book, the one on top, is familiar to her. It contains the name of the ship they sailed together on their brief honeymoon, the cities they visited, Pisa, Pompeii . . . the names of hotels, a list of gardens, museums—and she recalls all those distant places where it had seemed they had been madly in love, although . . . Everything written with his thick-nibbed pen and ink as black as tar. But now the second book shudders with such eagerness beneath the first she must attend to it at once. This book contains her husband’s dreams, and it thrusts and rages into her heart.
 
There are a number of dreams, any number of dreams, about E. E in the green dress is how the dream begins, E in the green dress laughing. E, the dress now pushed above her legs, above her ass and he, the dreamer, the one who is her husband, fucking E, fucking E’s cunt, E’s ass; E naked on a green couch in a green room—why is everything green? How can her own terrible jealousy color a dream about which she knew nothing? How can it be that this venomous air, this green air that she is forced to breathe because there is no other air, is the dream’s primary color?
In the dream E says, “I’ll fuck you till you weep.” But it is she, the one who is betrayed, who is weeping.
 
Outside the snow is falling. She has only one match left to light and so decides to save it. Nearly dead with cold, his dreams scramble into her mind like ferrets; they will not let her be.
He fucks a woman briefly encountered, a pale woman with hazel eyes flecked with gold. Yes. How fascinating women are—she can appreciate this—in all their variety. Flecked with gold, her white forehead as smooth as the egg of an ostrich. Her breasts, too, heavy and white. A woman she recognizes as someone she had once offered a perfect cup of tea, once upon a time in those days not long ago when she lived full of grace and wandered freely in rooms now impossible to reach. This woman she vividly recalls he fucks in a brothel within a maze or catacomb that extends beneath the Tower of Pisa or maybe it is Pompeii because there are ashes falling all around them. He chokes upon them. She chokes upon them.
Her husband’s dreams are all fucking dreams. He fucks his own sons: the one who is lame, the club-footed son, the halting son.
Have I hurt you?
he asks in the dream.
Have I hurt you?
he insists, dreaming. But his sons do not speak. Their place in the dream belongs to silence.
A year unfolds reduced to letters of the alphabet and the colors of things dreamed: black ashes, a white body, the green weather within a room. In the final entry he is fucked by someone terrifying; he has no idea who. Without color or letter she is a shadow as filthy as death, and collapses heavily upon him.
A shroud?
He wonders. Has he been fucking beneath the shadow of death all along? Could it be that simple?
 
The cold is too intense to bear and she is forced to light her last match. Its heat and clarity offer her a moment of hope at once snapped up and swallowed. Hugging her knees she falls into a dream of her own, a dream that like all her dreams these days comes to her like a malefic visitation from some lethal galaxy.
In her dream they are standing together by the side of a country road, one somehow familiar. A movie screen has been set up in a ditch and E, the E of the green dress, stands behind a projector showing a snuff film. The images smear the screen like a filthy water.
She wants to turn away, but he forces her to look, holding her wrists behind her back as when inexplicably his lovemaking had become cruel. Her head and eyes, too, are immobilized so that she cannot look away, will forever be forced to see what he could not help but see, all those things he saw night after night in those terrible dreams of his.
Outside in the winter streets people come and go on their way home with wheels of yellow cheese and fruit of all colors imported from distant places. She hears the sounds of the fruit vendors calling, and overwhelmed with longing imagines what it would be like to bite into a red fruit, freshly picked and brimming with juice.
It comes to her that if leprosy is rampant in the region, it is because the gods in their legions are unquenchable.
At the moment Kate Bernheimer asked me for a fairy tale, I was working on a piece that I realized only then was very much rooted in both “Bluebeard” and “The Little Match Girl,” who, in fact, often appear in one form or another in my work. (For example, Tubbs in
The Jade Cabinet
is Bluebeard, and in
The Stain
, Charlotte is the Little Match Girl.) When I was just entering into adolescence, a friend of my father’s dropped off a large box of old leather-bound fairy-tale books with thick yellow pages that had never been cut, a fabulous selection of tales from all over the known universe! After seriously damaging the first book, I learned how to cut the pages, and as my hands were stained red by the leather (the bindings were very fragile) devoured the entire collection again and again. I had always loved fairy tales, but these books were especially haunting for their beauty and their unbridled ferocity, even eroticism. (As I recall, Ondine was especially sparked with heat, and Bluebeard with bloody ice.) It could be that “Green Air,” the story here, is one attempt among many to shake off the ghosts of those marvelous books, some of them nefarious! Not many years later, my mother gave the books away without my knowledge, and I continue to search for them.
—RD
TIMOTHY
SCHAFFERT
The Mermaid in the Tree
DESIREE, THE CHILD BRIDE, AND HER SISTER MIRANDA HAD GONE grave robbing for a wedding gown. In the north end of the cemetery, among the palatial mausoleums with their broken windows of stained glass where the ivy crept in, was the resting place of a young woman who’d been murdered at the altar while reciting her marital vows. The decaying tombstone, among the cemetery’s most envied, was a limestone bride in despair, shoulders as slumped as a mule’s, a bouquet of lilies strewn at her feet. Though her murder, by her groom’s jealous mother, had been long in the past, everyone knew that her father had had her buried in her gown of lace and silk.
“Can you believe we’re the only ones to have ever thought of this?” Miranda said, her knuckles bloodied from shoveling dirt, as she undid the delicate whalebone buttons lining the back of the skeleton’s dress.

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