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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (52 page)

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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KATHRYN DAVIS
Body-without-Soul
IT WAS A SUBURBAN STREET, ONE BLOCK LONG, THE HOUSES MADE OF brick and built to last like the third little pig’s. Sycamore trees had been planted at regular intervals along the curb and the curbs themselves sparkled; I think the concrete was mixed with mica in it. I think the street was so new it couldn’t help but draw attention to itself.
The families living on the street came from all over, but the children had no trouble forming friendships, the boys’ based on rough-housing and ball games, the girls’ on a series of strategic moves, tireless linkings and unlinkings, the bonds double, triple, covalent like molecules. “Heads up!” the boys would yell when a car appeared, interrupting their play; the girls sat on the porch stoops, cigar boxes of trading cards and stickers in their laps, making deals. School was about to start. The darkness welled up so gradually the only way anyone could tell night had fallen was the fireflies, prickling like light on water. The parents were inside, presumably keeping an eye on their children but also drinking highballs. Fireflies like falling stars, the tree trunks narrow as the girls’ waists.
Occasionally something different occurred. One girl pasted a diadem of gold star stickers to her forehead and wandered from her stoop to get closer to where one of the boys stood bent slightly forward, his hands on his knees, waiting for another boy to hit the ball. This waiting boy was Eddie, who lived at the opposite end of the street from Mary, the girl with the diadem; their bond was exquisite, meaning it would never let go, though they were too young, really, to understand the implications. Once she fell roller-skating and skinned her knee and he stood spellbound, staring at the place on the sidewalk where he could see her blood. “I shouldn’t have let it happen,” he told her, even though he’d been at the dentist having a cavity filled at the time. When he described how much the drill hurt she gave him one of her two best trading cards, Pinkie, who she thought of as herself despite the fact that she, Mary, would never dream of wearing a hat that had to be secured with pink ribbons, not to mention the fact that she needed glasses and had mouse-brown hair and wasn’t especially pretty despite her nice brown eyes. Giving him Pinkie meant she had to break up the pair with Blue Boy, who she thought looked like him with his dark hair and soft lips and studiously downcast expression. But, then, she wasn’t sentimental like he was, either.
Bedtime, the end of summer. In the brick houses the clocks kept ticking away the time, chipping off pieces of it, some big ones piling thick and heavy under the brass weights of the grandfather clock in Eddie’s parents’ hallway, others so small and fast even the round watchful eyeballs of the cat clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen couldn’t track their flight. The crickets were rubbing their hind legs together, unrolling that endless band of sound that when combined with the sound of the sycamore trees tossing their heads in the heat-thickened breeze could break even the least sentimental human heart.
Headlights appeared; the boys scattered. The car was expensive and silver-gray and belonged to the sorcerer Body-without-Soul, a tall thin bald man with a small gray mustache who lived somewhere on the next block over with a woman everyone knew as Miss Vicks, the elementary school teacher, who also may or may not have been his wife. One minute Mary was standing there in her plaid shorts and white T-shirt, balanced like a stork on one leg, the headlights turning the lenses of her spectacles to blazing spinning disks of molten gold so she could no longer see the street, the sycamore trees, the brick houses—anything at all, really, let alone Eddie—and the next minute she was gone.
“Has anyone seen Mary?” Eddie asked.
“She disappeared,” Roy Duffy told him, but he was joking.
Everyone knew how Mary was—here one minute, gone the next. Besides, they were all disappearing into their houses—it was only the beginning. The game was over; the next day school started. When the crest of one wave of light met the trough of another the result was blackness.
Miss Vicks handed out sheets of colored construction paper. They were to fold the paper in half and in half again and then in half again—in this way after unfolding the paper they would end up with eight boxes in each of which they were to work a problem in long division. A feeling attached to the act of being given instructions involving paper and folding it, a feeling of intense apprehension verging on almost insane excitement. Eddie filled his boxes with drawings of Mary, some of them not so bad; it was his plan to be an artist when he grew up. From time to time he looked to his left where his subject sat folding her piece of orange paper, folding and folding and folding it, many more times than they’d been instructed, many more times than it’s physically possible to fold a piece of paper, in this universe at least. He tried getting her attention but it was as if she weren’t there, the light bouncing off the glazed schoolyard pavement and onto her glasses. It was like looking at a robot, Eddie thought, but also like looking at an old-fashioned girl toiling up a steep hillside in a faraway land, carrying a bucket of cream.
“Mary is sick,” Miss Vicks told them the next day. “She won’t be coming back to school. Wouldn’t it be nice if we made her a present?” The teacher was pretty and seemed no older than most of the students’ parents, but in fact she was very old, old as a breastplate of hammered bronze, a virus.
“We could make a card,” suggested Betsy Abbott, a suggestion Miss Vicks met with disdain verging on rage.
“Oh, a card,” said Miss Vicks. “What good would that do?”
Someone was going to have to go to the old Poole estate. There they would find a black egg hidden somewhere in the middle of the knot garden, the only thing that could make Mary better. As Miss Vicks talked she paused from time to time and cocked her head like she was listening to someone or taking dictation. She described the egg in detail—the dark shell dappled with pale white spots that shifted when you weren’t looking at them, as if sunlight were falling onto it from above through the shifting crowns of the trees, but you’d be wrong, oh so wrong, for this egg could only be found where there was no light at all, the aroma it released when you cracked it open unpleasant but also sweet, like a mouse decomposing in the wall of an old house, all of which made perfect sense given the fact that the egg could only be found in the body of a dying animal.
“Let’s see,” Miss Vicks said, looking around the room, pretending to think. She put one manicured fingernail to the delicately upturned tip of her chin. No one was surprised when her gaze fell on Eddie—everyone knew it had been headed there all along, which was also why no one except Eddie found her description of the egg disturbing, since he was the only one who had been listening. Eddie and Mary were a pair; they had been formed that way—everyone knew that.
“Edward, wait!” Miss Vicks said, reaching into her desk drawer and removing a small curved knife with a gold handle. “You’ll need this. The shell is hard as rock.”
To get to the Poole estate you went to the far end of the street, up the three little green hills beyond the school, and over the trestle bridge above the railroad tracks. Old Mr. Poole had abandoned the estate years earlier for some reason no one was able to remember—the parents had all warned their children to stay away from the place. The mansion was dangerous, its floors and staircases rotten, the windowpanes smashed to glittering daggers of glass. In the spring you could still find lilacs and forsythia growing in what had once been the formal gardens, but by summer’s end the stringweed and creeper covered everything, leaving behind only the general shapes of things, disquieting like the sheeted furniture in Victorian novels, and if you weren’t careful you would pitch into a cistern and drown.
Of course Eddie had been there—all of the children who lived on the block had been there on their bicycles. It was the best place to play hide-and-seek or sardines. Eddie knew without being told that some egg wasn’t going to cure Mary, assuming she was sick. From the sound of it, in all likelihood it would probably make her sicker, if not kill her. Even so he rode his bike to the Poole estate that same afternoon. The minute he had passed beyond the formal entryway’s twin pillars, one surmounted by an armless Athena, the other by a noseless Aphrodite, the air suddenly grew ice-cold, as if a thin veil of pretense had been let fall, the illusion of light and heat withdrawn, the planets swimming closer and closer, drawing into their orbits the dark chill nothing of outer space. “Is this because the season’s changing,” Eddie wondered, “or is this the way the world really is, or is this my mood because of Mary?”
He left his bike leaning against a pillar and began to explore, eventually locating the knot garden, more or less unrecognizable as anything at all under its blanket of vines. There at the garden’s heart, lying on its side, was the dead body of one of the big gray hares that had appeared in the neighborhood the previous spring—the cause of many a minor automobile accident—but it didn’t have an egg like the one Miss Vicks had described to him hidden in it. Nothing was hidden in the hare’s body.
While he sat hunkered there, looking at the hare, night fell, taking Eddie by surprise. He’d brought no flashlight, forgetting how quickly the days grew shorter once the equinox was past. As unsentimental as Mary was, Eddie was suggestible. The hare’s dead body frightened him, the glazed surface of its upward-facing eye reminding him of Mary’s the other day in the classroom when she couldn’t stop folding the piece of paper. He returned to where he’d left his bike leaning against the pillar and removed the curved knife from the basket. Then he retraced his steps to the maze and cut the hare’s body into pieces.
By now it had grown so dark he could barely see a thing; if there was a moon most of it seemed to have slid through a slot in the sky. It took Eddie a long time to once again track down his bike. When he did, he found a big yellow cat sitting there by the front wheel waiting for him. “Pssst,” the cat said, licking the hare’s blood from its paws and flicking its long yellow tail from side to side like the cat on the clock in Mary’s parents’ kitchen. Atop Athena’s head perched a flea-bitten crow, a string of entrails dangling from its beak; a rake-thin dog sprawled under a lilac bush, worrying a foot bone. “Thank you, Eddie,” he heard a tiny voice say, and when he tried to figure out where it had come from, it seemed to be from the ant he saw crawling up his ankle. “We were starving.”
It wasn’t until he got home that he found the gifts the animals had left for him in his bike basket: a cat’s claw and a dog’s whisker, the feather of a crow and the leg of an ant. These things might come in handy, he thought, and he stowed them away along with the curved knife in the shoe box where he kept Mary’s trading card.
Mary returned to school the following day as if nothing had happened, and Miss Vicks acted as if Mary had never been gone, withholding the usual favors she granted students snatched from the jaws of death, such as clapping the erasers or feeding the fish. At some point Mary got contact lenses and stopped wearing glasses; for a while in high school she and Eddie were sweethearts, but even when they started having sex things never went back to being the way they’d been when they were young.
In spite of that, though, the look of Eddie, his obvious preoccupation with an inner life he kept hidden from everyone, excited Mary; she would grow so moist she’d have to leave class. There was a cot in the furnace room where she would lie waiting for him, her skirt hiked up around her waist and her underpants down around her ankles. The one time he asked her where she’d gone that summer night so many years ago, she looked at him in amazement. “I was kidnapped,” she told him. “I thought everyone knew.”
Eventually Mary moved on to other boyfriends, some of them the same boys who’d played baseball in the street with Eddie. She developed a reputation for being fast. Then she got engaged to a much older man who was said to have a lot of money. Sometimes Eddie saw her standing by the magazine rack in the corner drugstore, teetering a little in her stiletto heels, her mouse-brown hair now bleached blond and worn in a French twist. She would be paging through a fashion magazine, but because she had on sunglasses Eddie couldn’t tell if she’d noticed him too and was choosing to ignore him, or if she hadn’t seen him at all.
After graduation he went off to the city to study painting at the Academy. He moved into a large apartment building where he lived by himself until one day the big yellow cat showed up at his apartment door, wrapping itself around his ankles while he was struggling with his key, and then slipping through the open door so quickly and curling itself so comfortably in his one good chair that it was as if it had always been there. Often he would talk to the cat about the past and the cat would offer monosyllables in exchange; Eddie told himself this was the way things were meant to work out. Whatever he had felt for Mary—and, really, he wasn’t certain what that had been, only that it had been everything for him—he chalked up to the fires of youth, which he told himself were behind him. I think he was encouraged to feel this way, to belittle everything that had happened between him and Mary; time healed all wounds, everyone knew that!
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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