My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (62 page)
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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER
BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Now, on the higher, winding road, a car passed them, and then another. It was Sunday morning, and unsmiling country families were driving to mass. Their faces were less friendly than those of the shop-keepers in Kenmare; no waves were offered, or invitations to ride. Once, on a blind curve, the couple had to jump to the grassy shoulder to avoid being hit. Vivian seemed quite agile, in the pinch.
“How’s your poor back holding up? he asked. “Your sneakers still pushing your hips around?”
“I’m better,” she said, “when I don’t think about it.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
He should have let her have a baby. Now it was too late. Still, he wasn’t sorry. Life was complicated enough.
The road turned the third right on their map gradually, unmistakably, while several gravelled driveways led off into the hills. Though Kenmare Bay gleamed ahead of them, a tongue of silver in the smoky distance, they were still being carried upward, dipping and turning, ever closer to the rocky crests, which were becoming dramatic. The sheep, now, seemed to be unfenced; a ram with a crimson chest skittered down a rock face and across the road, spilling scree with its hooves. In what could have been another nation, so far away it now appeared, a line of minuscule telephone poles marked the straight road where Vivian had announced she would not move another step. Overhead, faint whistling signalled a hawk—a pair of hawks, drifting motionless near the highest face of rock, hanging in a wind the Allensons could not feel. Their thin hesitant cry felt forgiving to Allenson, as did Vivian’s voice announcing, “Now I have this killing need to pee.”
“Go ahead.”
“Suppose a car comes?”
“It won’t. They’re all in church now.”
“There’s no place to go behind anything,” she complained.
“Just squat down beside the road. My goodness, what a little fussbudget.”
“I’ll loose my balance.” He had noticed on other occasions, on ice or on heights, how precarious her sense of balance was.
“No you won’t. Here. Give me your hand and prop yourself against my leg. Just don’t pee on my shoe.”
“Or on my own,” she said, letting herself be lowered into a squatting position.
“It might soften them up,” he said.
“Don’t make me laugh. I’ll get urinary impotence.” It was a concept out of Nabokov’s
Pale Fire
that they both had admired, in the days when their courtship had tentatively proceeded through the socially acceptable sharing of books. She managed. In Ireland’s great silence of abandonment the tender splashing sound seemed loud.
Pssshshshhlipip
. Allenson looked up to see if the hawks were watching. Hawks could read a newspaper, he had once read, from the height of a mile. But what would they make of it? The headlines, the halftones? Who could know what a hawk saw? Or a sheep? They saw only what they needed to see. A tuft of edible grass, or the twitch of a vole scurrying for cover.
Pale Fire
that they both had admired, in the days when their courtship had tentatively proceeded through the socially acceptable sharing of books. She managed. In Ireland’s great silence of abandonment the tender splashing sound seemed loud.
Pssshshshhlipip
. Allenson looked up to see if the hawks were watching. Hawks could read a newspaper, he had once read, from the height of a mile. But what would they make of it? The headlines, the halftones? Who could know what a hawk saw? Or a sheep? They saw only what they needed to see. A tuft of edible grass, or the twitch of a vole scurrying for cover.
Vivian stood, pulling up over the quick-glimpsed thicket of her pubic hair her underpants and pantyhose. A powerful ammoniac scent followed her up, rising invisible from the roadside turf.
Oh, let’s have a baby
, he thought, but left the inner cry unexpressed. Too late, too old. The couple moved on, numbed by the miles that had passed beneath their feet. They reached the road’s highest point, and saw far below, as small as an orange star, their Eurodollar Toyota compact, parked at a tilt on the shoulder of their first crossroads. As they descended on to it, Vivian asked, “Would Jeaneanne have enjoyed Ireland?”
Oh, let’s have a baby
, he thought, but left the inner cry unexpressed. Too late, too old. The couple moved on, numbed by the miles that had passed beneath their feet. They reached the road’s highest point, and saw far below, as small as an orange star, their Eurodollar Toyota compact, parked at a tilt on the shoulder of their first crossroads. As they descended on to it, Vivian asked, “Would Jeaneanne have enjoyed Ireland?”
What an effort it now seemed, to cast his mind so far back! “Jeaneanne,” he answered, “enjoyed everything, for the first seven minutes. Then she got bored. What made you think of Jeaneanne?”
“You. Your face when we started out had its Jeaneanne look. Which is different from its Claire look. Your Claire look is sort of woebegone. Your Jeaneanne look is fierce.”
“Darling,” he told her. “You’re fantasizing.”
“Jeaneanne and you were so young,” she pursued. “At the age I was just entering graduate school, you and she were married, with a child.”
“We had that Fifties greed. We thought we could have it all,” he said, rather absently, trying to agree. His own feet in their much-used cordovans were beginning to protest; walking downhill, surprisingly, was the most difficult.
“You still do. You haven’t asked me if
I
liked Ireland. The Becketty nothingness of it.”
I
liked Ireland. The Becketty nothingness of it.”
“Do you?” he asked.
“I do,” she said.
They were back where they had started.
Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard” is sometimes interpreted as a tale intended to prepare young women for the brutality and shock of marriage. This theme is well served by the tale’s goriness: it must have both titillated and horrified its readers. However, many of the bloodless contemporary variations of the tale, particularly this version by the late John Updike, are just as powerful. Despite being contemporary, educated, and clearly fond of each other, this couple is nonetheless burdened by a frail institution demanding concessions and secrets that, while not involving rooms full of bloodied limbs, are still that harrowing in their own right. George and Vivian’s problem isn’t that they don’t love each other, but rather that love doesn’t invalidate the quiet darkness of every marriage. Even when we choose our lovers, we are still at the mercy of their interior lives, the place where they do the most living.—CGS
RABIH ALAMEDDINE
A Kiss to Wake the Sleeper
MOTHER ISSUED DIRECTIONS AND HER ASSISTANTS CLEANED. ONE scrubbed the floor and mopped, covering it with lye, and the other suctioned dust out of the living room. Mother fanned her magazines out on the coffee table, making sure that each title could be discerned at a glance. I had nothing better to do than witness.
I reached for my brush, combed and combed my hair, a ritual of untangling. “I’m a mess,” I announced.
Mother hesitated, stopped what she was doing for only an instant. “I dislike that word.”
“I am a mess.”
“All right,” she said. “You may be a mess, but you’re clean. You’re a clean mess.”
“I’m a fine mess.”
“Well, you’re my mess,” Mother said, “and today we’re going to fix you,” and she began washing her hands. She had a smile on her face, or maybe a grimace. You cannot decipher nuance through plastic.
I was a mess. I had SCID (no dirty jokes about skid marks, not that kind of mess—ha, ha), Severe Combined Immunodeficiency. No B cells, no T cells, nothing to protect me from any organism wishing to penetrate my body. A walking, talking gossamer. It sucked.
Thirteen years—thirteen years of living inside an antiseptic bubble, making sure my environment was scoured clean, daily scrubbing of every inch of skin, keeping the world and its dangers at bay. It double sucked.
Mother was sure the nuns would be able to cure me—sure of it, emphatic about it, double emphatic, triple emphatic. She’d heard about them, talked to them, and believed in their miracles. But she couldn’t convince them to come to us no matter how much she offered them. The healing chamber couldn’t be moved. I had to leave my bubble for the first time in years and go there. We had to travel hundreds of miles to some suckhole castle in some podunk village in the middle of nowhere.
How would you pack for that?
The driver stopped the car in front of the pack of camels. Three nuns in full Halloween costume, white habits and all, waited for us. We’d driven through a forest on a gutted, gravelly road (Mercedes shock absorbers weren’t as perfect as advertised). Lushness still surrounded the car on three sides, but before us lay emptiness—a desert where nothing grew, not one thing.
“Camels?” Mother fumed. “Stay here and let me deal with this.”
I ignored her command. A camel ride might prove interesting, a change, if nothing else. Getting out of the car wearing the protective suit and lugging the oxygen tank was no mean feat. Mother argued with the nuns, until one of them interrupted to ask if she was ill as well.
“No,” my mother replied, “just my child. I wear this so she doesn’t feel odd.”
In solidarity
was what she usually said. She had on the same protective suit, sans oxygen tank, except hers fit better, of course. “We can drive there,” she said. “We don’t need camels. You ladies should keep up with some of our modern conveniences.”
In solidarity
was what she usually said. She had on the same protective suit, sans oxygen tank, except hers fit better, of course. “We can drive there,” she said. “We don’t need camels. You ladies should keep up with some of our modern conveniences.”
“A car won’t survive the drive,” one nun said.
“The camels barely do,” another said.
“Once you cross the line,” the third said, “nothing survives, not for long. No human, no plant, no infection. Until she reaches the room.”
“She will not need the suit.”
“No one can accompany her. Only seekers live.”
“The camels might return.”
“If they’re fortunate.”
“If the princess smiles upon their fate.”
While my mother interjected, “No, this won’t do,” “You must be completely mad,” “This is insane,” and, “Can she at least take the pâté de campagne with her,” the nuns explained what I must do: how to reach the room, how not to disturb the sleeper, how to look for possible signs that I was cured, how to parcel out the three loaves of bread and three eggs, and, most important, how to make sure that I had enough energy for the perilous return trip.
Hungry. I was hungry. My belly twisted and spasmed, my stomach grumbled and growled, and at least once every hour, a mewl escaped my lips.
Yet dare I touch the last egg? I dared not.
On the cherry-colored night table, the last boiled egg and loaf of bread lay next to the clay water pitcher, the loaf as fresh as the day I walked into the chamber. As for the egg, as long as it rested next to the princess, rot it would not. The sleeping beauty exuded much power, much goodness. Peace and tranquillity seeped from her every pore, health and well-being resided in her domain. I’d never been more hale, or more hungry. I hadn’t needed my suit or tank since I arrived. In the beginning I felt liberated and unshackled. Without the bubble, my breath was light. I was even able to pinch myself. But I definitely needed food.
My gaze returned to the egg, and my stomach whimpered.
Upon first discovering the sleeping princess, the nuns, wanting her curative powers close at hand, attempted to bring her to the convent, but were unable to lift her. Indeed, a cluster of cloistered virgins could not move a single pebble out of the room.
Frankly, I could understand her position.
Since the mountain would not come, the nuns chose to erect a cloister next to the castle, but building was halted mid-brick, plans dropped, once they understood that for three leagues around, nothing outside of the healing chamber survived. Life flourished within, death without—a reverse Disneyland. (Please! You know it’s true.) In a small room in the tower the beauty slept and breathed, while everything else in the palace, everyone else, breathed no more. Carcasses of her family, skeletons of nobles and attendants, of servants and slaves, of pets and parasites littered the crumbling castle. I stepped over many a pile of bones when I ascended the stairs. Terribly unpleasant.
Wild forest turned to desert precisely three leagues from the room. The transformation was immediate and striking: before an invisible line, forest; desert after. No creature, no plant, crossed. I noticed not a single living thing after I passed the boundary, not till I reached the princess lying on her altar of a bed in the middle of the chamber. Inside the room, the princess wore the healing if slightly off-putting color forest green. Outside, what was once a lush garden had atrophied. Man-made lines delineated arid squares. Outsized trunks and gnarled roots, sculptures created by an insane or indifferent artist, were all that remained of the once-great oaks, the beeches, birches, and lindens. Desert dust invaded every nook in the castle, except for the sleeper’s pristine chamber, where no mote dared enter.
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