For some time, they lived this way together. Twyla’s father went to work and came home. He went to work and came home. In the evenings, he sometimes hung pictures from clotheslines he had strung across the living room and looked at them in commiseration. The pictures were of internal events—arrangements of atoms, momentary spasms caught in strobe. Family portraits; pregnancies; engagements; the brief, soft flush of a child looking away from a harsh light. The fact that they were all strangers and strung across the living room made the photographs seem like evidence or an homage to the past constructed after some equally long-ago disaster. Life as it was Before. But Before what? The family; the marriage; the first, crushing love? The childhood, the continent, the earth, the universe? Twyla was curious. What did her father see when he looked at images meant to commemorate someone else’s time line? How did he place himself among them—a reflection in sunglasses, dilated pupil, birdbath, convex mirror? One day, when she was still quite young, she had asked her father, “Are you an artist?”—a provocation she understood even then—and her father had growled at her, showed his teeth like a dog, and actually growled as he backed out of the room.
Twyla’s father was tall and bald and curt and blasé. He smoked a little pot in the basement; he read The New Criterion and wrote mendacious, corrosive, or spurious in the margin in his square, runic hand. He was not likable in the sense that it was possible to like him. Watching him string the scornful pictures of sleeping babies maneuvered into barnyard scenes or identically dressed family units arranged in descending order along the limb of a massive live oak, it was entirely possible for almost-Twyla to believe that her father was some other order of creature altogether. An insect overlord wryly documenting the indigenous species before their sublimation into the hive. A time-traveling replicant from the far-distant future when men were brains in jars and women had been replaced by tasteful arrangements of potted plants.
Then Twyla’s mother died. The order was wrong. Twyla’s mother left; Twyla’s mother had a baby; Twyla’s mother worked as a bartender in a bar by the beach where women with legs like rubber Slinkys stood on top of the bar and slowly, slowly lifted their skirts; Twyla’s mother peered out between the legs of other women, other women’s legs the flaps of a tent parting before Twyla’s mother’s face, small as a mouse’s face, that was parched; Twyla’s mother had visions of God—God perched on the end of a swizzle stick, God peering down from a ginkgo tree; Twyla’s mother married the man with whom she had the baby, a girl, named Jancie; Twyla’s mother left the man, left Jancie, moved in with God in a tent on the beach, peered out through the flaps of her tent at the surf, the sky; Twyla’s mother stopped eating; Twyla’s mother stopped drinking, in ecstasy, on the beach, under the hand of God, who laid his hand over her stomach to calm her the way she had laid her hand over the stomachs of her babies in the night when they woke up and did not know they were in the world. Twyla’s mother posted all this on her Facebook account. There were pictures. There were grim collages. Her friends, women Twyla did not know, wrote: “Honey, please give me a call,” to which Twyla’s mother responded: like. Twyla’s mother liked the sky, the sea, her babies, the hand of God. Twyla’s mother died.
By then Twyla was Twyla. She and Anther took a handful of pills before the funeral so that the sheen of the soft spring rain on the lid of the coffin was either a product of the soft spring rain on the lid of the coffin or a product of her own eyes quivering behind the soft spring sheen of pills. She took at least a couple too many pills so that she was unreliable and could not hold her sister, Jancie, now a toddler and largely left to the great, peeping glee of her own recognizance. “What a spiral,” said Twyla’s aunt, her mother’s sister. She shook her head, in admiration, it seemed. In awe. “What a descent.” This as the coffin sat graveside, a sleek pod washed in flowers. This as the rain picked up, then poured, and the crowd dispersed. Twyla’s mother’s new husband had a weak chin, buckteeth, the bulging, old-fashioned eyes of a thyroid patient or Benzedrine addict. He had befuddled hands that he rested on top of his daughter’s head as she passed below.
Twyla’s father shook his hand, stepped out into the rain, walked away. The new husband also left, Jancie’s head pressed under his chin, her fine, dark hair rising to cover his mouth. Soon it was just Twyla and Anther and the cemetery employees, who were in no hurry. Anther shared from his pocket. Twyla did a little dance. Twisty and sorrowful. A dance about rain and, if she had had multiple scarves to flutter, a dance that would have involved scarves fluttering in the rain. Fluttering o’er top the dirt that had been removed from the hole in order to reveal the hole into which the cemetery employees would soon lower her mother and which was now leaking out from under its tarp in a slick of red mud that spattered her ankles. And that was the point, was it not? The hole that was uncovered, not created. The hole that had always been there, waiting for excavation.
No. No. The point was her mother—her hands on which the rings were always loose, her blunt, square toes. Her mother running her fingers under and under Twyla’s chin. Today would soon be a day that was over. And the next day another. And another. Her mother was bathed in the orange glow of a tent, the orange glow of the sun, the orange glow of spiritual excess or no food but carrots filched from the bar’s salad buffet. Her mother pointed her square toes toward the ocean. She waited, patiently, for rapture. And now, postrapture, her mother was arranged in a sleek pod as if for interstellar travel. The hole had never been there until just that morning when the same cemetery employee who now clapped for her, or the one who now whistled, had dug it out of the solid earth with a backhoe. Breaking the body of the earth. Pocking it full of useless dens in which no one would ever sleep.
No. Not the point.
Her mother. Her mother. Her mother.
She was curious. Was there a point?
No, she concluded. None.
Twyla pulls a kitchen chair up in front of the closet. She parts the curtains. She sits. Divine means thunderstruck—waiting is part of it, she reassures herself. Still, a long time passes. Twyla tries some gentle encouragement. She strikes yoga poses: Downward Dog, Half Lord of the Fishes, King Pigeon. She smokes a joint. For a week she eats nothing but vegetable broth, and waits. The next week she eats nothing but ice water, and waits. In front of the closet, Twyla makes low, slow noises, then high, chittering noises, then no noise but the sound of her breath through her nose, which, annoyingly, whistles. Seek absolution, seek entropy, seek enlightenment, seek collapse. Twyla seeks with her eyes closed, the object held in her mind like a cupped hand holds water. Twyla seeks with her eyes open, the object outside of her mind and her mind filled with … water? … entropy? … cupped hands? It is fall and the town is disabling its crepe myrtles. Up and down all the drowsy blocks, chain saws whir the trees down to warty clubs. Mums season! Decorative gourds! If I’m still doing this by Halloween, Twyla thinks, but what is she doing? Twyla’s curiosity is laissez-faire. Before the cave of the great unknown, she stands in Mountain Pose, firmly planted. Seek restitution, seek recidivism, seek rationale, seek right. Seek apraxia, apogee, ascension, aardvark. What might emerge from the cave can be altered by too much peering. Twyla seeks by refusing to wonder. She denies herself the living pulse of her own inquiry and in so doing is gifted nothing more interesting than the world.
At work, Twyla is distracted and unpleasant. She gets drink orders wrong. She ignores the regulars’ gesticulating arms. “What’s the matter with you, grrrrl?” asks a Flying Roll-Linda.
“I no longer have any faith in myself as a character,” Twyla does not say. “I dislike all my institutional gestures. I lack creative emphasis and harbor mediocrity. I ambiguate with neither design nor focus. I have too many artists for friends.”
If she had a sense she was getting closer to something … If she had a sense that something was approaching her, wary, skittish as an animal unhabituated to human touch, but still approaching, attracted, sidling her way. …
“What do you want?
” Twyla says. “I mean, what kind of drink?”
In the evening, Twyla strips off all her clothes and stands in front of the dark window. Outside, children with leaves painted on their cheeks are delighted by some hay bales, a scarecrow, a man juggling sugar pumpkins, the fading light. The sculpture hangs in a dark corner. Twyla hangs in a dark corner. The sculpture is still, parched, uninhabited. Twyla is still, parched, bursting full.
“What am I doing wrong?” Twyla asks the sculpture, but it refuses to reply.
When she imagines whatever it is she seeks, Twyla sees an orange light, orange as a slice of orange held up to filter the sun. She sees her own toes stretched out before her and between them a wavering triangle of blue. She feels hot and sticky, gritty, tired. In her dark apartment, in her dark bedroom, before the dark closet in which hangs a collection of metal weights shaped like stones, Twyla holds up her hands and peeks through her fingers. She is more than curious now. She is perilously close to fully involved. Where is the crack in her life through which something strange must peer? There are no eyes here that regard her. It’s almost as if no one can see her at all.
Anther knocks on the door, the era of window entrance long passed, and when Twyla answers he says, “Breaking News: Homo Erectus Sued for Sexual Misconduct by School Librarian. Local Leaders Say They Didn’t Know She Had It In Her.” Then he looks more closely at her and says, in another voice, “Oooo, seriously, what’s wrong with you?”
The worst part is how long this might go on. How had her mother stood it—all those years of being herself? No, the worst part is how long it has already gone on, and how many witnesses there appear to be. Anther holds out a bottle of wine in a paper sack, the neck of which he has wrung on his way up the stairs until it cleaves to the side of the bottle like the crinkly brown skin of an over-bloomed flower. “What is this?” he says, looking at the open closet, her bare stomach, the luminous, diffident light. “It’s like a Chekhov play restaged by mole people. At any moment someone’s going to burrow up through the floor and start complaining about their provincial ennui.”
Anther waits for the applause and when none comes he says, a little testily, “I haven’t seen you for a while. I thought you might need a pick-me-up.”
Into her cupped hand, three silver pills round as pips. As she slips them into her mouth, Twyla thinks, “Who could blame me?” Then later, “You are a different sort of animal than this.”
“Than what?” Anther says. He has crawled into the closet and is curled like a cat on a pile of sweaters he has pulled down from their hangers. The hangers sway and bang. Behind them, the weights are still. That sculpture is cut-rate, Twyla thinks. Secondhand, conceptually half price. Just like me to steal a clearance sale, she thinks, or maybe says out loud.
“You should get a dog,” Anther says from the middle of his deepblue dream. “You’re the kind of person who needs something to lick her hand.”
In November, Anther is beaten very badly in a street robbery. They—there were three of Them—had a gun and hit Anther in the head with the gun, then kicked Anther in the face with their boots as he lay on the wet, leaf-plastered ground still smattered with pumpkin essence. There was a vegetative smell, here and there a lone seed entangled in its gut work that Anther had time to examine up close and personal before his eye swelled shut. It was early in the morning hours. Anther was on his way home. Robbed, of course, he was robbed—cash, credit cards, driver’s license—but also robbed of his other booty and they knew just where to find it. A casual hand down the front of his pants, lobbing aside his penis and testicles. The little bag snagging for just a moment on the teeth of his zipper, then free, and Theirs, and another boot for good measure, which broke his jaw, which is now wired shut so he cannot speak.
Anther writes all this down for Twyla, not in so many words, though he does mention the pumpkin seed. He uses a yellow legal pad his mother has brought for him, backups stacked on the neoprene couch in the corner of his recovery room. After she reads each sheet, Twyla tears it from the pad, crumples it into a ball, and tosses it into the wastepaper basket beside his bed. She has to restrain herself from writing her end of the conversation back to him. As it is, she says very little. Her voice sounds strained, condescending, suspicious in the way people who were unpopular in school sound when talking to small children massed together in a group. No matter what Twyla uses it to say, her voice sounds like this. One of Anther’s eyes is so swollen and black it looks like an overripe plum, as if, were she to press on it just slightly, the black plum skin would split and the sunset pulp come oozing out. The other eye is open, but awash with blood. Anther’s nose is broken. He has stitches in a rainbow arc above his left ear, each black twitch of thread tugging the pale skin below it into a pucker. “I guess you’re not going to be passing out blow jobs anytime soon,” says Twyla in a voice that sounds like she said, “Does your mother know you have those cookies? Did she say it was OK?”
“Fuck you,” Anther writes and glares at her. Or maybe he glares. It is hard to read the expression in a blood eye. Ire? Indignation? It is upsetting to admit, but in the hospital bed, his body smoothed into associated shapes by the uniform hospital sheet, Anther is powerfully appealing to Twyla. Maybe it is because he can’t speak and misdirect her with performance. Maybe it’s because she cannot ever remember him this way—neither coming nor going and with nothing cupped in the palm of his hand. Twyla has been doing better as of late. A little better. In the morning she goes to the store on the corner of her street and buys coffee in a Styrofoam cup. She drinks it sitting on a park bench beside a monumental public sculpture of yellow coiling girders that has always reminded her of a monumental pile of steaming dog shit. It is tucked into a square bordered by a Waffle House and an auto parts store. Across the street, a phalanx of new parking garages is going up. Twyla scallops the rim of her cup with her fingernails and watches men in hard hats straddle the girders as they tack Tyvek sheeting to the provisional walls. Twyla feels she has come through a kind of training ground and, upon scaling the final impossible muck-covered wall, has found spread out before her another vast training ground, this one filled not with silence but with nauseating detail. Styrofoam, for example. Tyvek. Yellow. Tacktack-tack.
Anther has a hospital smell to him—plastic antiseptic smell traced underneath with the iron of old blood. When he writes again on the pad, Twyla notices blood under his fingernails; his own, she is sure. When he turns his head gingerly on the sheet, reaching to sip a little water through his special pink plastic hospital mug with built-in straw, Twyla notices a ring of blood deep in his ear canal, which is surprisingly red and articulate. A precise, tiny rivulet of blood that has left Anther’s body but still lingers like a … She cannot think what it would be like. It is like nothing else but what it is. A tiny ring of blood deep inside Anther’s ear.
Anther is writing and writing on the pad. He has always had so much to say and she so little. In some ways, their friendship has been a process of osmosis, each eagerly rushing into the space where they were not. What did they think they would find there that was so unlike themselves? Human beings come in a limited array of forms and, whatever else they may have imagined, that is what they are. Gingerbread shapes stamped in a line. Factory-fresh. Qualitycontrolled. What is the point of exploration when it always leads to the same location? Twyla wonders. By the edge of a lake, at the peak of a mountain, deep beneath the earth, in the back of one’s own closet. It’s always the same place when the person who gets there is you. Better to close your eyes, Twyla thinks. Better to curl up in a ball and go to sleep.
Twyla imagines lifting Anther’s sheet and burrowing in. She imagines pulling down his hospital pants—or lifting a gown; what is he wearing down there?—and sliding the little pug of his penis out reverentially, as if it were an artifact of great antiquity, something whose intricate detail can only be fully appreciated with a magnifying lens screwed deep into the socket of the eye. She imagines slipping him into her mouth and swirli
ng her tongue until, in spite of himself, he rises into her, fills her, perhaps even—she has faith in him—makes her gag. Anther has never wanted her. He has always been only incidentally curious about the mechanisms of her form: a big, heedless dog’s body snuffling around in her life. Yet, Twyla goes so far as to finger the corner of the sheet—so cheap it is almost as stiff as paper—as she imagines the taste of Anther’s semen in the back of her throat. Musty like mushrooms or the pages of a damp book. Sharp like blood. It is not a question of when she will kill herself, Twyla decides, but of how. She’d like it to be entirely passive. She’d like to kill herself by standing so still in one spot that eventually, through the law of impossible averages, a meteorite would spin out of the sky and bury itself in her head. She’d like to kill herself by slipping down the drain with the water from her bath.
Anther is still writing. Every now and then, he looks up from the page to stare at her with that inscrutable blood eye as if he is not writing but sketching. As if she were a reference point that he needed to correct his course. She has been here for hours. For a while she even held his hand while he slept, though when his mother came in with flowers, more yellow pads, a warm pair of socks that she slipped onto Anther’s feet so deftly he didn’t even stir in his sleep, Twyla let him go guiltily, as if she had been caught posing him for a picture. Putting a funny hat on his head. Slipping a cigarette between his broken lips.
While Anther was asleep, Twyla turned his hand up and uncurled his fingers. There was a padded foam clip on the end of his index finger (stomped) that complicated things somewhat, but otherwise it was not so difficult at all to lay her head down and fit her cheek within his upturned palm. When nothing happened, Twyla laid her head next to his on the pillow. She might even have gone to sleep. Once, long ago, almost-Twyla woke up in the middle of the night to find Anther cuddling her from behind. It was not raining, had not been raining, but his pant cuffs were wet and the water had wicked up his pants almost to his knees. “What were you doing? Standing in a river?” she asked. Her sheets were damp, her toes cold. Strands of her hair were in his mouth.
A Cabinet of Curiosity Page 26
