A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  No.

  No one here is rich. Not really rich. Not rich enough. Some of the women wear fur coats. Some of them carry cranky handbags shifting all over with jet beads. The trappings of richery, which meant, in Twyla’s pretty well extensive experience both in real life and through her appreciation of celebrity culture, not rich. The rich dress like hoboes. The ends of their sleeves fray; there are holes in their shoes. The rich do not give even one little fuck about Michelin tires, though they might go in for hot-air balloon rides. Nothing is going to happen here. The chicken feet will not descend. She is wasting her time.

  It is the pills that make her so mean. They make her lips pucker with meanness, which Anther knows as he knows almost everything about her starting from the eighth grade when they had become friends smoking in the woods behind the school—forbidding forest of cigarette butts, used condoms, Mountain Dew cans, shotgun shells—and continuing through some truly rough but also stereotypical times. His father kicked him out. Her first boyfriend gave her herpes. He had an affair with the high-school track coach. Her mother died. Through it all, he kept climbing through her window at night as if they were in a television show. She woke up in the morning to find him in her bed, snuffling into the pillow like a big, heedless, entitled dog. Or woke up in the morning and he would already be gone, but have left her something on the windowsill. A little pyramid of pills: chalky white ones, translucent amber fish eyes, striped ones, fat aquamarine ones that whirled when she tilted them like a tiny pill galaxy was slowly expanding inside. The pills erased the world’s curiosity and replaced it with a figment of curiosity about the world. The pills took colors and turned them into sounds. All Twyla had to do was lie back and listen.

  Together, she and Anther graduated from high school. They changed their names. Twyla became something of a celebrity in the local bar scene: tending one, drinking in another. Not quite the sort of person who adopted an exotic pet and took it everywhere with her—a chameleon leashed to her lapel, say, or a ferret noodling around in the pouch of her sweatshirt—but not far from it, if she is honest with herself. Anther works for the public radio station, where he reads things in a low, slow, warm voice that is nothing at all like his regular speaking voice (shrill and lemony) or his other voice, his third and secret voice, which even Twyla herself has not heard for a long time. “Fourteen killed in passenger train derailment,” says Anther when he is on the radio, and it sounds just the same as when he says, “Up next, a track from Sly and the New Sinners off their album Plop Culture,” which, of course, is the point.

  “Guh,” he now says in his radio voice as he eyes the line for the bar over the top of his illusory spectacles. “A dismal procession in the name of progression. Up next: What Kind of Bird Did I Just See? with your hosts Marv and Mike.”

  Anther’s family has money, nothing fabulous but sufficient to the town and the times. They mostly remembered that he was a child while he had been a child and now that he is not they invite him to meals in an amusingly formal way. His mother’s stationery hand delivered to his mailbox with the time and date of the Saturday night pot roast, for example. There really is a show on Anther’s radio station that is essentially just that: birds, brown ones, in the crepe myrtle, causing a ruckus in bushes along the property line. “They eat the berries,” say the callers, whispering in their alarm. “I’m standing at the window and can see them eating the berries right now.”

  But this is not the right night for gentle humor. Nor for scorn. This is not even the night for the mouthful of creepy crawlies (blue pills that made one fizz in all one’s sockets) that Twyla knows Anther has nestled against his crotch. It is cold outside. Pockets of slush refreeze in doorways and women’s heels pock the ice on the street as if a giant, assiduous robin has just been through looking for worms in the concrete. “Nope,” Twyla imagines it chirping. “Nope. Nope. Nope.”

  “I’m going to steal it,” she says instead, and when Anther says, “What?” she responds by reaching up and untwisting the twine. Then, as he turns to block her from the sight of the rest of the room, Twyla lowers the whole pendulous assortment of shifting nets and weights, ropes and soft, collapsing space into the maw of her oversized bag.

  “There,” Twyla says, pleased with herself.

  “Wild,” says Anther. “C’mon, let’s get a drink.”

  For a week, Twyla leaves the sculpture in its disarray at the bottom of her bag underneath her bed. She transfers her ID, her credit card, a few other pieces of flat, rectilinear plastic to her pants pocket and wears the same pants every day to prevent their accidental loss. At night, standing in the kitchen in her underwear, she washes her pants out in the kitchen sink, scrubbing the stains with dish soap, sluicing water through the beleaguered stitching of the crotch. It is still cold. The skin on her poor white haunches puckers like a plucked goose. She can see herself in the reflection of the living-room windows and thinks she looks raw and anticipatory, just like a plucked goose slung on the counter waiting for the butter rub. Although a plucked goose was no longer waiting, was it? All its bead-eyed inquiry had ended with a single whack of the ax. So, really, anything anticipatory about her thighs had to do with the butter rubber who was imagining the tender pleasure of goose flesh. Not to mention the side dishes. Cozy carrots. Tributaries of overcooked peas. “This is the way a life can dismantle,” Twyla thinks, sniffing the crotch of her pants and sliding them back under the water. A series of shapes with no relation to each other but proximity. Geometry no longer concerned with the properties of space. Later, she googles “curious goose” and cries at the images of cocked heads, stretched necks, bright eyes rising up from beneath the edges of tables. She is an expert, after all, on what comes next.

  After a week, Twyla hangs the sculpture in the back of her closet—visible only by a parting of the cardigans—and goes back to wearing skirts. The season changes and changes again. Twyla waits for uproar, outrage, manhunt, but the theft does not seem even to have been reported. She reads the papers; she watches the local news. In early June, the show at the gallery is taken down and replaced by a watercolor collective called Plein Air in the Park! Twyla reads about the opening in the Art & Style insert in the local paper. She looks at full-color reproductions of splotchy park paintings, gladiolas prominent against the water of the city’s turgid little river. Then she reads an article about compounding skin-affirming vegetable creams right in your own kitchen and another about the sudden, some might say alarming, popularity of forestry as a major at the local state college. On the back page of the paper is a write-in column that specializes in domestic gripes. “My husband never loads the dishwasher,” aggrieves one letter writer. “My mother cannot even sign her own name on her checks.”

  “Same-same,” Twyla writes in the paper’s margins. She considers elaborating and mailing it in, but finds she cannot elaborate. Her pen runs out of ink. Some kind of bug has eaten all the glue off the backs of all her stamps. Twyla feels small, obscure, even fuzzy. It appears her crime was one of record keeping, her passions masked by the wainscoting. In the understory of the city the mice tussle and bite, perfectly capable of committing a mouse murder over a sunflower seed or knot of coarse twine. Blood sieves between their teeth, she knows; it soaks into the suede of their fur. On the streets of the city, however, a local children’s book author has bronze cast statuettes of mice in whimsical poses and tucked them into nooks and crannies for the delight of the pedestrian caste. Mice drink lattes; mice frown down at the paper. Mice are overjoyed by a button or thrust their paws out from under the edge of an umbrella to see if they can still feel the rain. No mice adrift in the flotsam of their minute obsessions—Twyla has checked. No mice mixing too much wine with pills and waking up in the bathtub, or sniffing the cottage cheese before they eat it, or masturbating in surreptitious darkness although the house is empty. No mice shuttering within them the great white light of what must be their own unraveling consciousness, the pure pith of their single, short life. Twyla dabs her tongue
against the backs of her nibbled stamps. What might a bug find to delight itself here? she wonders, but if there was a flavor it has long since been consumed. Or maybe her tongue is the wrong shape for tasting. Or maybe no single thing can ever be tasted twice.

  At night, not every night, Twyla pulls a chair up to the open closet and parts the cardigans. The sculpture has not been substantially changed by its new locale. Even enclosed by the soft frame of her clothes, the sculpture is pendulous, testicular; something that seems as if it should wobble, though in fact it stays very still. It contains the implication of water without the element of water. It is dry dry dry, but is easy to imagine dripping wet.

  Twyla sits before her closet and imagines water. She uses the sculpture as a kammatthana—a term she learned from the community center’s Intro to Buddhism course, taught by a woman named Upshama Valentine—but not a virtuous kammatthana or one that promoted tranquility. “Kammatthana can be repulsive too,” said Upshama, reading off a printout of a Wikipedia page. “Consider a corpse,” she said, then turned the page over. The other side was blank. “Consider a corpse,” she repeated and they all sat silently together on their folding chairs, considering.

  Twyla is at work. It is early, but the regulars are all there. Or at least the early regulars, not the late regulars, who come in only after dinner, first drinks, second drinks, outfit changes, first fights, second fights, fraught and messy entanglements, disentanglements, parkinglot lip-gloss applications, parking-lot side-mirror kisses smearing lip-gloss ghost mouths on the side mirrors of the early regulars, just leaving, who never fail to be enraged. The late regulars are local college students, hollering with youth. The early regulars are older, stranger to look at. They have geologic forms: craggy noses, cheeks that sink into the pockets of trapped, black air below them. It is not a nice bar, but it has its moments. For example, one of the regulars is a man who makes a spurious living as a Ben Franklin impersonator, and, in fact, looks just like Ben Franklin with his potato-shaped head and pursed, lascivious mouth. Even out of costume, he seems rumpled with the wear of the intervening centuries. Sometimes he writes Twyla poems on the bar napkins. Once, drunk, he stood weaving in front of her with his tri-cornered hat over his heart and said, “Tonight, my love, your entire body looks like a pussy.”

  Twyla had looked down at her body—the serviceable thighs under her black skirt, the ropy forearms, sticky with slosh, emerging from the black cuffs of her rolled-up sleeves. Her body had been with her all along and she thought of it in the companionable, irritated way she might think of an elderly dog she no longer entirely trusted on the carpets. “Hello, buddy,” she thought in the mornings when passing in front of the mirror. “You again,” she thought at night, stepping out of the shower and sliding naked between her sheets.

  Twyla has never been one to nickname her vagina, though there is a sort of vagina bravado that is all the rage among a certain subset of bar regulars. “My muff, my pocket-pie, my mouse, my oyster,” say these women, who have wild hair, illustrative makeup, lots of tattoos and visible bruises on their rackety knees like little girls who spend their afternoons in the treetops. “My Lorna Doone, my Anne Boleyn, my hamburglar, my Lurch.” Some of these women are on a Roller Derby team called the Flying Roll-Lindas and they come into the bar after matches still wearing their knee and elbow pads. Their wet, torn team tank tops feature their mascot—a cheesecake pinup with a helmet and mouth guard—as she roller-skates menacingly across a tightrope that appears to be strung between the two towers of the World Trade Center. “This is Roll-Linda,” the women say, laughing, stinking like trapped sweat and hair spray. “You should join the team, Twyla,” they inveigle. “Seriously. You look like you could really bust some shit up.”

  Twyla’s role as a semimythic service professional at a popular dive bar in an otherwise thoroughly gentrified part of town tended to encourage people to tell her quite a bit about what she looked like to them. A bruiser, a buster, a bitch. A giant walking vagina, hairy and secretious, with the winking, reflective eyes of a cat. “If my body has names other than my own name,” Twyla asks one of the Roll-Lindas, “then isn’t it actually something different than myself?”

  “So what are you saying, Twyla?” a Roll-Linda roars, sloshing her drink like a pirate. “Do you call your little pussy-pie by your own first name?” This is greeted by general hilarity. Even some of the early regulars look over as if waiting for her to reply, though probably it is only the light winking off the Roll-Linda’s sequin-emblazoned hot pants that has caught their attention. Like lizards they blink first one eye, then the other. They dab out their tongues to taste the air for danger or for prey.

  “Yes,” Twyla says, as she swabs down the table and strings empties along her thumbs. “I guess I do.” As she walks away, a Roll-Linda playfully slaps her on the rump but her aim is slightly off and she grazes a stinging knuckler against Twyla’s hip instead. “Punched in the ass,” Twyla says to Ben Franklin when she gets back to the bar. He nods seriously and writes her a poem that rhymes “ass” and “foie gras.” Twyla tucks it into her bra.

  Later that night, she tries it. “Twyla,” she whispers, stroking herself first this way, then that. “Twyla,” she wheedles, rolling over and working with her thumb. When nothing happens but an orgasm, Twyla is disproportionately disappointed. What would her vagina say to her if she could only conjure up its one true name? Hopefully, it would not just be a list of grievances. Names were words of power, Twyla knew. They were exposers of secrets, openers of doors, lines of code that answered unasked questions, lights that shone into vast interiorities subsequently revealed to be filled with rare and precious stones. “Treasure seeker,” Twyla accused, but no one answered as the night was late and stale and Twyla lived alone.

  As a child, Twyla wanted to be a prospector. She had watched a PBS special in which reenactors in appealingly spattered vests and gapthroated shirts sat with their boots in the mud and thumbed up the secrets of the earth. It had seemed to her, at age eight, a perfect combination of her desire to be history’s victim (marked by the filth and homespun wear of her own heedless subservience to destiny) and her desire to uncover … something … anything. Something secret that someone else wanted. Something small enough to hide in her pocket and roll in her palm in times of stress.

  “Not that I thought of it in those terms,” she said to Anther when she told him this story. “I was only eight!” But she did think of it in those terms. In exactly those terms. In the third grade they did a unit on the Civil War. For extra credit, Twyla, who was not yet named Twyla, came every day dressed as one of the wounded. On Monday an arm in a sling; on Tuesday a bandage dyed with red Kool-Aid wrapped around her head. By Thursday she was an amputee, and Friday, dead: dead in the hallway, dead in the cafeteria, dead in the reading nook at the back of the class, bloating among the colorful beanbags and the leering cardboard cutout of the Cat in the Hat manhandling a terrified fish. The teacher called home. Conferences were established and conducted. Her mother, such a long-ago personage, came home from one of these in her serious clothes—a pin-striped skirt and loose, goosey heels left over from a secretarial stint—and clattered up the stairs, where she found not-yet-Twyla in her little room at her little desk doing some little work. Fat-pencil work. Rubbery-nubbin eraser work. The difficult lineup of finger and thumb required to entice the kinds of thoughts necessary to higher learning. Sometimes, when the weather was windy, not-yet-Twyla would go out into the yard and lie under the black walnut with her eyes shut in the hopes that a direct strike by a black walnut would drive discovery into her noggin—that she would open her eyes onto a world suddenly prismatic with insight—but she was never struck.

  Her mother sat on the edge of her bed and picked at her nylons as she recounted the he-said/she-said/he-said/I-said of her meeting with not-yet-Twyla’s teacher, principal, school psychologist. “Honey,” her mother said, “kitty-cat. I am your fierce protector here, you know? I am your momma bear roaring out of the cave. In
the springtime. When they’re hungry and they’ve got those little baby bears to feed?” Twyla’s mother looked faraway even when she was right up close. She had a kind of smudgy face, as if faded by distance, and had used it to good effect as a photographer’s model in her younger days. This was what attracted Twyla’s father when he and her mother first met—her smudgy, faraway face and her tight, precise, right-there body, which she often dressed in oversized clothes as if she were a doll or a wet infant animal just about to be tipped out onto the lawn.

  Earlier that year, when not-yet-Twyla had written in “Gold Prospector” in response to the third grade’s annual career-day quiz and had gotten a frowny-face stamp from the teacher with the encouragement to “Aim for your full potential,” not-yet-Twyla’s mother had buried all her bracelets and rings, including her wedding ring, in the backyard sandbox and sent not-yet-Twyla out there with a pie pan and a hose. But this day was not one of her good days and she had become lost in her own metaphor. “A momma bear gives birth in the dark,” she said as not-yet-Twyla practiced the cursive letter i. “She doesn’t even know her cubs, which are only the length of my forearm, are there. She could roll over on them. She could accidentally smash them under her paws.” None of this was news to not-yet-Twyla. Her mother was culling her information from a nature show they had watched together: the squalling cubs caught in gray scale on the hidden den-cam, their almost dog faces yowling soundlessly in the dark. I i i, not-yet-Twyla wrote. She dotted each dot round and empty as a bubble though her teacher marked off for that. She imagined each dot floating up and away.

  “A mother bear could swallow her cub whole in her sleep,” her mother went on absently. “She could dream she was eating a honey pot and scoop the poor little thing right up.” Her mother smacked her jaws as if she were chawing on the drippings of a particularly sticky honey pot. She looked out the window. “Imagine how bad she’d feel then,” she said to the magnolia in the front yard. “When she woke up to all that blood.”