Sylvie: Short Story (3 page)

She nods.

He crouches down in front of her and starts with the right leg, pressing it as if checking for a break, lightly pinching the skin, asking does she feel this? This? “Yes,” she whispers.

“This?”

“Yes.”

He taps her knee, and the leg kicks out. He goes on pressing and pinching up to where the white stocking ends, up to the naked thigh and up farther to the little hips in their toddler-sized underwear. She closes her eyes. He immediately lowers her skirt.

They don’t talk about her legs again that day. At least, they don’t talk about them directly. In order to spend every minute with her, John has cancelled all his appointments. They go for a walk in the park. They hold hands. He tells her he is the only child of deceased parents. His father invented the grip in the
bobby pin, that’s where the money comes from. After lunch in a ritzy restaurant they wander into a bridal shop and he picks out a tight white wedding gown that he insists on buying. “Surely not,” she says, for it takes her a few seconds to remember that, by the time of the wedding, she will be able to wear tight dresses. He laughs at what he thinks is her horror at the price tag. In bed that night she tells herself, “I am going to be a normal,” but she can’t grasp what being a normal means, other than that she will be able to wear the tight white wedding gown and to sleep on her stomach.

The next day John sees patients until lunchtime, then he has her drink two cups of the nerve-calming tea before they go across the city to visit a renowned specialist in congenital malformations.

“I cannot perform the operation myself,” John says. “I am not a surgeon. But I will be assisting. I will be right by your side.”

The surgeon explains to Sylvie that she is an autosite-parasite. “You are the autosite,” he says. “They”—he gestures at her lap—”are the parasite.” He shows her pictures of other autosite-parasites: a boy in a turban who has a headless body growing out of his stomach, and a drawing of a man who has a foot coming out of his mouth. He then has Sylvie remove both pairs of her underpants and lie on a table, her own knees bent and draped with a sheet. John, standing beside the surgeon, tells him that both bowels function normally, both menstrual cycles are regular and not necessarily simultaneous, and that although both vaginas have been penetrated, she is, strictly speaking, still a virgin.

He assured her of her virginity yesterday, after she told him about the boy sticking his finger up her. The surgeon’s fingers are in greased, clear- plastic gloves. It must be the tea, Sylvie thinks, wondering at how unabashed she feels. Why isn’t she having one of her memory spells? She is so relaxed, in fact, she
could sleep. She closes her eyes, and her mind drifts to last night and John kissing her at her bedroom door, a long kiss on the lips that left her little legs tingling.

The surgeon is optimistic that not only will he be able to remove her legs and hips but that he will also succeed in ridding her of what he calls her excess plumbing. Over the next few weeks Sylvie and John go to see him twice more at his office, and then the three of them fly to consult another specialist in New York City. As it happens, the side show is in New Jersey, and after her examination, while John and the doctors are conferring, Sylvie takes a taxi to the fairgrounds.

She cries as she is being hugged and congratulated. She had no idea how homesick she was. Mr. Bean admits to having made the biggest mistake of his life, letting John buy her contract. Half-joking, he tries to talk her out of the operation. “Why would a four-leaf clover want to be an ordinary three-leaf?” he asks.

He’s upset because attendance has dropped off. When Sylvie and Merry Mary are alone in their old trailer, Mary says that he had better get used to it, side shows are becoming a thing of the past. “I’m thinking of going on a diet,” she says.

“I guess I got out just in time,” Sylvie says. She tells Mary about John’s library, where she spends her days reading. She describes the tight white wedding gown.

“Boy oh boy, you hit the jackpot,” Mary says.

“I love John with all my heart,” Sylvie says sincerely.

Mary tugs up her shift to aerate her thighs. The pink mounds of her knees have always struck Sylvie as vulnerable, recalling the bald heads of old men. In her act, Mary informs the audience that each of her thighs has the circumference of a big man’s chest. Sylvie thinks with a thrill of John’s lean chest, how it would lose out to Mary’s thigh. “I’m so happy,” she tells Mary.

Mary fans herself with the hem of her skirt. “So, what happens to Sue?” she asks.

“What do you mean?” Sylvie says.

“After the operation. What’s the doc going to do with her?”

Sylvie feels light-headed.

“See,” Mary says, “why I’m asking is I bought four plots in that cemetery where the baby is. One plot for her, two for me, and they threw in a fourth one half price, so I got one extra. Sue’s welcome to it if you need some place.”

Mary’s huge moon face overlays but does not obscure the face of the surgeon, two weeks ago, listening to her heart and saying, “In Frankfurt I excised an abdominal tumour that turned out to contain teeth, hair and an undeveloped spine.”

“Free, of course,” Mary adds. “No charge.”

Sylvie cannot look at Mary. She looks at her new diamond-and-gold watch and is startled by how late it is. “Five o’clock!” she exclaims. The watch in her memory, the one on the surgeon’s wrist, says four-thirty, the time she should have left the fairgrounds by. Five minutes later she is on the street, climbing into a taxi.

It’s a long drive back to the hotel, the taxi is caught in rush-hour traffic. “Two legs do not add up to a human being,” she says to herself. The night before last John said, “Just keep telling yourself that.” He said, “There is no Sue.”

They were in a restaurant, drinking champagne to celebrate the future her. When she repeated “There is no Sue,” he kissed the tips of each of her fingers, then presented her with the diamond-and-gold watch. Afterwards, crossing the parking lot, he stopped and pressed her against a wall, pressing his hips against her little legs, and kissed her on the mouth.

On the drive home Sylvie’s little legs started to twitch, but after a minute they settled into slow, rhythmic kicks under her skirt. It made her feel languid to hold her little knees. She and John didn’t speak, except once she said, “Oh, look!” at the ovations of fireflies glittering along her side of the road. She thought of the fireflies she had caught and preserved in her
first scrapbook—a page of them. Until her mother said, “They have to be alive, stupid,” she had turned to that page every night, wondering where the lights were.

John was nervous. He held her hand too tightly as they walked from the car to the door of his house. Sylvie
wasn’t
nervous, she didn’t know why. She tried to startle herself by thinking, “In a few minutes I will be in his bedroom,” but once they were inside the house John didn’t take her upstairs, he took her into his office. He threw the cushions off the sofa and pulled it out into a bed. Then he turned to her and began to kiss her on the mouth while undoing her blouse. His hands shook, reminding her of when he gave the tea and also that he was no surgeon. Since there were a lot of buttons (she was wearing a high-necked Victorian blouse), she started undoing some herself. She wanted him to know that she was willing. He started clawing at his own clothes as if they were on fire.

As soon as he was naked he resumed helping her, pulling her stockings over her ankles, yanking down her skirt before it was undone. Popping a button. They still didn’t speak. He was out of breath. He drew the combs from her hair and let them drop on the floor.

And then he stopped. On his knees in front of her, his hands on her knees, he stopped.

Sylvie closed her eyes. “Do you call ten dollars a bargain?” her mother shouted. “Sure,” her father shrugged, backing away, “bargain.” “Ten dollars?” her mother shouted. “Ten dollars?”

“God.” That was outside her head, that was John. He yanked down Sue’s underpants, pulling off her stockings and shoes at the same time.

A great tremor went through her little legs, which then began to clasp his thighs and kick out, clasp and kick out. The moment of pain was nothing compared to the spectacular relief. Sylvie felt as if her little vagina were a yards-long sucking
tube, and he was heading right out the back and into her own vagina. She felt a second sharp pain at what she imagined was the point of entry into her own vagina, and after that she felt him as a lightning rod conducting heat and pleasure from Sue to herself.

When he began to ejaculate, he dug his hands under her hips and lifted her, crushing her little groin into his and bringing on her first orgasm. The waves of the orgasm rolled up his lightning-rod penis into her own vagina and along to her own clitoris, where she had another, more luxurious orgasm.

For a few seconds longer, her little legs went on kicking. He seemed to wait them out. Then he withdrew and rolled onto his back. She ran her hand up and down the goosebumps on her little thigh.

“God,” he said. “Oh, Sylvie, God.” He sounded stricken.

Her hand stopped moving. “What?” she said.

“We got carried away,” he said.

“Yes,” she said uncertainly.

“I had no idea,” he said.

She waited, frightened.

“Of course,” he said, as if hitting upon some comfort, “this presents a whole new angle.”

Doors slammed in her mind. He didn’t want to marry her. He couldn’t let her have the operation, not now, and unless she had the operation, he wouldn’t marry her.

“New territory,” he said. “New data.”

Her feet were cold, sunk in mud at the edge of the duck pond. Her little feet were tucked in the folds of her flannel nightgown. There were crickets.

“But perhaps I’m being presumptuous,” he said. He paused. “Tell me, did … did what I think happened, happen?”

She turned her head to look at him. “Did what happen?”

He kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Did you experience orgasm with your …”

She looked down at his left hand. He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together so hard, he was making the noise that, for a second, she had thought she was hearing in her memory spell, a noise at the pond. “Two,” she said quietly. “I had two, I think. I mean, I know I did.”

“Two?”

“One in each place.”

He reached for her hand and squeezed it but kept his eyes on the ceiling. After a moment he said, “We can pretend it never happened, you know. You see, technically speaking, you have not had intercourse. By you I mean you the autosite, the host body.”

“Nothing has changed,” she said, but it was a question.

“No, no,” he said. “Not as far as you’re concerned.”

Back at the hotel, he is waiting for her on the sidewalk. He pays the taxi and takes her up to their room. He is very excited. The amputation (he uses this word for the first time) is set for three weeks today, here in New York. Wonderful, she says. He reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips. He won’t deceive her: the first operation isn’t entirely without risk, and there will be a long and not altogether comfortable recovery. But the follow-up operations will be less strenuous and will contain almost no risk. When the bandages come off, she is not to be frightened. The scarring will eventually be reduced by plastic surgery.

“I won’t be frightened,” she promises.

During the next three weeks, whenever she is with him, she has no doubts. But alone at night, in her bedroom, she starts to worry. Her little legs kick and fret. They know, she thinks, horrified. They know. They are licentious. Between her own legs, there is nothing, but between her little legs the urge for him is almost past bearing. She is overcome by terrible memories—her mother burning her scrapbooks, burning the picture
of her father’s mother in its filigreed frame … burns on her father’s hands. She doesn’t know why, maybe it was Merry Mary’s offer of the burial plot, but baby Sue’s perfect face keeps appearing to her. Will she forget baby Sue’s face? What if her freak memory is connected with her freak legs? What if she becomes somebody else for whom nothing that happened to the person she was will be worth preserving?

The mornings after these nights she can’t believe what went through her mind only a few hours before. “You’re a candidate for the loony bin,” she tells herself. The housekeeper brings in her tea, that bitter tea she’s starting to acquire a taste for. John pours it. If he has any misgivings about the operation, he never shows them. He talks about the future. They are going to have four children. They are going to visit her father’s village in Portugal.

Two days before the operation they return with the surgeon to New York City. Blood tests have to be done, more X-rays need to be taken, and John and the surgeon are giving a news conference. The surgeon wants Sylvie at the conference, but John is afraid that some of the questions might upset her, so she’s not attending, which is fine with her.

As the conference is scheduled for the afternoon of their arrival, John has time only to take her up to her hospital room. After he’s gone she lies on her bed and listens to “Vic and Sade” on the radio.

About ten minutes go by, and then a nurse barges into the room and hands her a hospital gown to change into. Throwing open the curtains, the nurse says that Thursday is the big day. She pretends not to be dying of curiosity, but Sylvie isn’t fooled and she undresses facing her, letting her catch a glimpse.

Throughout the rest of the afternoon nurses and interns arrive to take blood and her temperature or just to plump her pillow, and cleaners keep coming in to mop the floor and to empty the empty wastepaper basket. Sylvie sits on her bed with
her skirt hiked above her little knees. Why not give them a thrill? she thinks wistfully.

Around six o’clock John returns with their dinner on a tray, and they eat at the desk. “The news conference went very, very well,” he says. Pushing away his half-eaten meal, he gets up and prowls the room. “This is a very, very important operation in terms of certain precedents,” he says. He reminds her of Mr. Bean on opening night in a big city. Before he leaves for the hotel, he fills her coffee cup with water and has her take two sleeping pills.