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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

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BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Her illustrations also depicted Rapunzel in the life she’d left undersea, where she’d lived, like royalty, in the wreckage of a luxury liner. She’d eaten her octopus salad off broken plates of fine china and had drunk her kelp tea from cups of rusted silver. At parties, she’d made her entrances by swimming down the grand staircase lined with candelabra lit by phosphorescent jellyfish and she’d waltzed across a ballroom floor of Moroccan tile that chipped away with the sweep of her fin.
The drawings that made Axel cry were of the pirates who’d captured her and her sisters in a net as they’d swum, rebellious, near the surface to glimpse the ship’s figurehead, a carving believed to be based on the mermaids’ mother. Their mother, a stunning beauty who’d loved, as a girl, to swim up above the surface to sing torch songs, had become quite a legend, blamed for little yachts and sailboats capsizing in the rocky waters as sailors were lured forward by her melodious throat.
As one pirate had held Rapunzel down on the floor of the ship and another had held open her mouth, the captain had wrapped his fingers around the handle of a small knife and had pushed the blade against the tongue he held with his thumb, like slicing off a strip of apple peel. Onshore, professional singers and pop stars paid obscene amounts for mermaid tongue, which was believed to have enhancing properties. If licked within a few days of being cut fresh from the mouth, a mermaid tongue could strengthen the voice and perfect the pitch.
As Axel played his banjo on the boardwalk one drizzly evening, Rapunzel sat beneath the battered silk parasol he’d roped to her wheelchair and she drew a portrait of an opera singer collapsed on a fainting sofa in her dressing room, her spectacular breasts spilling over the top of her corset with busted laces, her wig in her lap, the tip of her long tongue curling at the tip of the mermaid tongue in her open palm. Madame Ernestine Swarth, the mezzo-soprano whose farewell performance at the Mudpuddle Hall had been selling out nightly for three years, happened by that evening and lifted the black veil of her feathery sinamay hat to look over Rapunzel’s shoulder as she sketched. Charmed, she offered Rapunzel a tidy sum for the drawing.
From that point on, Axel pinned Rapunzel’s drawings to the back of her wicker wheelchair, and up along the bent stem of her parasol, and her most gruesome portraits sold the quickest, the ones of mermaids in peril. She piled her hair atop her head and kept it in place with a handful of drawing pencils stuck through. She wore an artist’s smock with deep pockets where she kept her wads of gum erasers and her Q-tips for blending and shading the charcoal.
At night in their flophouse bed, Axel sat cross-legged, naked, strumming the banjo and composing new songs about his love for Rapunzel as she lay next to him, singing along in her head.
Desiree, meanwhile, left notes for Axel in the usual place—stuffed into a jaggy crack along the wall between Rothgutt’s and Starkwhip Academy, the crack hidden by the Japanese honeysuckle vine that climbed the bricks. But the notes went unretrieved for more than a month. Was he angry at her, she wondered, for not following him to the nurse’s station? Or maybe he was embarrassed that he’d dropped her ring in the sea?
Blame me for everything
, she wrote in one of her unread notes to him,
if that will make you love me again. I won’t claim innocence
.
One autumn day, the leaves of the vine having fallen, Desiree went to the crack in the wall and found all the notes gone. But her relief lasted only seconds. She was grabbed by the elbow by Sister Bathsheba and hurried to the chapel, where two detectives in dry raincoats stood gnawing their toothpicks to splinters. Her notes were spread out on a pew in front of them. Her own handwriting, so bare in the gaze of the rumpled men, startled her; her penmanship looked so poor, the loops of her
o
’s and
l
’s so girlie, the fat dots of her
i
’s so obnoxious.
“You were the last one to see him,” said the detective on the left, and that was all the prompting she needed. Her heart lifted so that she nearly cried with joy. She could forgive Axel now, after weeks of hating him for hurting her. He hadn’t abandoned her after all, he hadn’t intended to leave all her notes in the wall and all her words unsaid. She told the detectives about the Ferris wheel, the ring dropping into the sea, the mermaid on the horse, each confession met with a scolding yet comical-sounding thwack on the back of the head by Sister Bathsheba’s spank-paddle, saved from her days as a vaudeville clown. It wasn’t until after Desiree had said everything that the worry—which had been such a relief, such a reprieve from feelings of rejection—began to twist her stomach. What had become of Axel?
And what
had
become of him? At that particular moment, Axel pushed Rapunzel’s wheelchair up the cobbled walk of a mansion overlooking Mudpuddle Beach, where lived the owner of the Waterloo Casino and his invalid wife. The marrow-colored mansion resembled the skeleton of a whale, with portals of stained glass embedded in the porous rib bones. The windows depicted classic scenes of havoc at sea—Jonah devoured, the
Titanic
half-sunk, Captain Nemo wrestling the tentacle of a monster squid. The casino owner watched them navigate the walk that wound among the overgrown toad-spotted fox-gloves, a snifter of brandy the size of a basketball cupped in his bird-boned hand. He stood on the deck, located in what would have been the hinge of the jaw of the open mouth. He swirled the brandy around, unsmiling, undrinking.
Rapunzel, against her every ounce of common sense, had become addicted to the nurse’s murky green elixir, despite all the veins in her arms having fallen from Axel’s inexpert stabbings with the syringe. Axel lately shot the drug into her neck, at least ten times every day, to keep her from sobbing and clawing at the itchy scales of her fin, but the street junk was watered down and costly. To access the clinical strength required the bribing of the delinquent pharmacist of Anemone Lane, and to afford the bribing, Rapunzel agreed to sell some of the organs she had doubles and triples of.
The casino owner’s wife was a mermaid who’d been on land for twenty years, and suddenly she was failing rapidly. The pharmacist had put Axel in touch with a surgeon known around the county as the Malignant Dr. Benign, the Organ Grinder. The doctor would remove Rapunzel’s middle swim bladder (“You can get by just
swimmingly
with just the two,” he’d joked) and her upper marginella (“As useless as a tonsil!” he’d said unconvincingly; if it were so useless, then why was it worth triple the price of the swim bladder?) right there in the upstairs kitchen of the mansion. Axel had pushed the wheelchair along that winding walk to the mansion so many times over the next several weeks that Rapunzel began to resemble an over-loved ragdoll with all her crooked stitches.
One night as she soaked, groggy, in the flophouse tub after an injection of the elixir, Rapunzel put her fingers to Axel’s lips, which had always meant she wanted him to tell her about the night he’d saved her life. Axel tried to tell the story, but couldn’t without sobbing hysterically. Rapunzel, in her drifting to and from reality, tried to convince herself he was laughing from happiness.
In the middle of that night, Axel stood at the mirror and sawed at his tough beard with rusted scissors. He shaved away the old man’s gray hair that covered his head, to get at the raw baby-pink skin there. But still he looked nothing like the boy he’d been only weeks before. Nonetheless, in the morning, he put on his turtleneck and peacoat and rolled up one of Rapunzel’s illustrations of him walking, sopping wet, across the night beach, Rapunzel a precious ruin in his arms. He tied the drawing closed with a polka-dot hair ribbon and took the bus to the town of his childhood home.
Axel’s parents desperately wanted this wrecked child to heal their broken hearts, but try as they may, they couldn’t recognize a thing about him. It wasn’t that they didn’t believe he was who he said he was, but he was so absent of the beautiful, craven, childish need he’d once possessed that they couldn’t reconcile themselves to his corruption. Axel’s mother and father held tight to each other’s fists, leaning against each other on the sofa in the parlor, unspeakingly agreeing to accept this lost soul. Axel sat across the room from them, atop a footstool with a needlepoint cushion, its cross-stitches having been mostly plucked out by his mother in her mourning. She’d spent all the days of Axel’s disappearance undoing every sampler and embroidered homily she’d ever sewn.
“We love you, son,” his father said, but calling this hardened, broken-backed man “son” choked him, and he cried so hard his nose bled.
“And I have a wife,” Axel finally said, though he and Rapunzel had been pronounced married only by the flophouse landlady, her slum-lord husband Axel’s best man. Axel gave his parents the gift he’d brought. “She drew that,” he said. “She’s a talented artist.”
“A wife?” his mother said. She picked at the pink monogram embroidered at the corner of her silk hankie.
“That’s why I’ve come home,” he said. “She’s very sick. We need to find a doctor to help her.” Axel leaned forward to point toward the illustration and said, softly, “That’s her. That’s Zel. My wife. In my arms, there. I saved her life. I’ve saved her life again and again and again.”
This was all Axel’s father needed to stifle any flicker of impulse to accept this boy back into his home. His back stiffened and he cleared his throat. He deepened and steadied his voice as if he could fool Axel into thinking he’d not shed a tear at all. “I don’t think so, Axel,” he said. “This is not . . . We didn’t raise you to ...” He shook his head. “The nerve. Your nerve. Coming into this house. An insult to your mother. Obscenity.” He stood up. “I won’t stand for it.”
Axel’s mother stepped forward to protect her husband from his own crushing sympathies. She held out her hand to Axel and was satisfied by the strange weight of his swollen knuckles and by the clammy chill of his skin. She led him to the front door, where she wrapped around his neck a striped woolen muffler she’d only half unraveled in his absence. “This had been yours,” she told him, as if he hadn’t known. She put her arm in his and walked him out onto the porch. “You let us believe you were dead,” she said. “So don’t go thinking that
we’re
the terrible ones.”
His mother had always smelled so comfortingly of nutmeg and orange peel, though she rarely stepped foot into the kitchen, not even to advise the cook. “I was so scared,” Axel said, his chin trembling. He’d hoped to never have to see his Rapunzel through their eyes.
“Please know that we wish you nothing but the best,” she told him with a friendly pat of dismissal. She went back into the house, and as he walked toward the front gate, she returned to the porch. “Wait,” she called, and she met him at the gate. From behind her long skirt she produced Rapunzel’s illustration, rolled back up and tied back closed. She smiled with pity as he took it from her, as if she felt sorry for him for having a mother and a father who no longer loved him, and she turned to walk back to the house.
At the flophouse, Rapunzel puffed on a long pipe fashioned from a hollow reed, a whittled acorn lashed to the end of it, in which a flower petal burned. She put the pipe aside and ran her cool hands over Axel’s cheeks, red and puffy from all his weeping on the train. She wiped his nose with the cuff of her sleeve. She undressed, then she undressed Axel, who was so despondent he could barely lift his arms for her to pull his sweater off. She brought his head to her breast and followed her fingers softly along the grooves of his ear. She tried to remember the words to the songs she used to sing undersea, and their melodies, but it was as if they’d all escaped her with the severing of her tongue. A mechanism of the mind, she supposed, that kept her from lamenting their exact loss.
Axel smoked from the pipe, too, and his dark mood lifted into melancholy. Around midnight he wheeled Rapunzel over to The Ink and Stab, where an elegant old Japanese woman in a man’s red smoking jacket, her white hair pinned up in a nautilus swirl, tattooed Axel’s back. “Give the mermaid that pretty girl’s face,” he said, gesturing toward Rapunzel in her chair, her long secondhand prom dress reaching down past her fin. The tattooist, who herself was covered throat to toe with sea dragons committing gory violence, pumped the machine’s pedal with the tip of her peg leg, setting the needle to buzzing. The pain she inflicted as she painted the many glittering green scales was excruciating, and he squeezed Rapunzel’s hand so hard for comfort that she bit through the flesh of her lip. The tattooist wrote
cruel destiny
in a fluttering banner beneath the mermaid, in lettering that reminded Axel of the Popeye comic strip he used to read every Sunday after church.
“How much for that on your back?” the casino boss asked as Axel waited in the living room of the mansion, popping wheelies in Rapunzel’s chair. The doctor had Rapunzel up in the kitchen, bleeding her for a transfusion.
“What do you mean?” Axel asked.
The casino boss licked his bony middle finger and ran it across his own forehead, straightening the line of his comb-over. His shoe-polished hair was as black as the shiny suit he wore. He stepped behind Axel in the chair and tenderly touched his fingers to the back of Axel’s neck. Axel leaned forward, and the casino boss’s fingers followed the curls in Rapunzel’s hair shaped like sea waves. “I meeeeeeean,” the casino boss purred,
“how . . . much?”
Ever since the tattoo had healed, Axel had gone shirtless everywhere, despite the unlifting fog that kept Mudpuddle Beach cold and wet in the late autumn. People would gather behind him, enraptured by the tattooist’s art, as he strummed his banjo on the boardwalk and sang the love songs he wrote for Rapunzel.
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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