Attic

by Katherine Dunn

  This was all in November a day or so after Kennedy was shot. On that other day I knocked on the door and the whole house was carpeted and imitation maple and colonial chintz and she was crying in a 9 A.M. housecoat and the TV blaring and she was waiting to find out if he was dead and wouldn’t listen to me so I tried a few more houses in the nice ranchy suburbs and went back to the Greenbriar and said we might as well quit for the day because everybody was too put down to listen and you could walk off with their houses today and they wouldn’t even notice and the driver told me to get the hell back out there that this day of all days they were susceptible and to push the news mags. So I went out and sat in people’s warm houses all day and drank coffee and commiserated and sold one hundred and eighty dollars’ worth of magazines that day which was my all-time record.

  The day after Mogul Flats we were back across the river in Independence and I walked past the Harry S. Truman Memorial Library and got twenty dollars out of a lady with five kids on welfare, seventeen dollars out of a little old lady’s stocking under the mattress, ten dollars out of two high school teachers by using a fake Danish accent and got that stupid punk to write me a check on a nonexistent account for twenty-seven thirty-eight and then fell into myself trying to cash it at Kresge’s. Possession and Uttering they call it. It’s much better here than on the magazine crew. Twelve hours a day pounding on doors being so loud and phony cheerful and all that hoorah and the cold and all the money turned over to Horace at the end of the day and two-dollars-a-day allowance to eat on was all I ever saw anyway and sales meetings in the morning and sales meetings until eleven o’clock at night and crew songs and crew spirit and no life but the crew and the spiel (mustn’t call it that but I can’t think of their word) and no right to be moody and the brainwashing and the lies you pretend to believe until you actually do. Here the rules are clear. The bunk is mine. I can lie in it all day if I want to. Nobody cares how I feel or what I think or anything as long as I obey the rules and don’t cause trouble. It’s winter on the streets. It’s warm here. The food is plentiful and runs to starch which I always liked best anyway. It’s peace you know? They lock up your body but they don’t fuck with your brain. I could stay here forever like Blendina.

  —

  Walking down Eighth Avenue to the Village in the tightest blue jeans and the tightest jersey feel how hot they are for me—the whole city beating with the pulse high up inside my thighs—swinging so far—head into the art school office—the electric in my eyes how I feel myself all over when I move—such a strange thing—how comfortable to take off all my clothes in the little booth and put on the ancient terry cloth how many bodies and walk out covered with the warm around my throat and all the way down to my bare feet on the dirty wooden floors—and step up onto the platform they all waiting poised to see what I’m like and the robe falls down so easy at my feet and I stand with the air free under my arms and between my legs and relax into a pose knowing how the muscles look stretching against each other and how my bones thrust in the flesh and feeling myself all alive O and breathing like fresh meat on the hook and they say I look bored but no it’s the sinking back in. with eyes nearly closed and the stillness all around and I don’t have to do anything but be perfectly still and sink back remembering as real as dreams for twenty minutes at a time—and there are the hurdles like the first itch of the pose—the first time I almost sneeze—the beginning of the pain and how it grows steadily until I move again and how quickly it starts if I choose too hard a position but I’m vain and will not break the pose no matter the pain—no matter how hot and my head is sick and the cold sweat running down my sides and they are digging in the clay—they are scraping in the dead gray clay and I can see their twisted forms turning on the tripods and see myself in them and every touch of the tool touches me—every shaving of clay molds me—changes me and they unconscious zombies tooling roodoo—alter me as they portray me—I becoming what they see and time changes and leaks past in spurts of interest or unconsciousness and a fly comes and bathes in the sweat inside my knee and I experiment with twitches to spirit it away but it itches and crawls and I feel it more because I’m so wet and I can see this one but I cannot move my head enough to see if those other itches are flies or only the air in my sweat—the fly is crawling upward and the sweat is heavy—I can see the water shining in the hollow of my thigh and beading in the pale hairs turning on themselves and the fly is innocent and wants me and I am afraid—do they notice are they watching to see whether I let the fly come into me and the itching and the other itchings and the fly is shining with my sweat now I can see the beads on the straight black hairs standing like Quasimodo’s—the wings are gray and the eyes and the long legs machine-like moving—wading through my sweat and he stops to wash and I can hear the gritting as his saw legs scissor over his face and my lips there are trying to clench but there aren’t enough muscles and my legs are too wide apart and he is in the running pool now inside the thigh where I can barely see him and I can hardly stand the itching any more and I will scream if he steps onto the lips and I cannot break the pose because of the money and I’m vain and my muscles have forgotten how to move and I will be sick if he steps into the lips.

  Once I stepped out of the booth in the robe and stood upon the platform and the instructor signed that I should take a pose and the robe dropped and there I stood with my brassiere on—with everything off but my brassiere and grabbed the robe and rushed back into the booth and came out again calm and naked to take the pose.

  —

  I am fat. We are all fat, except Kathy and Blendina. My legs are shorter and shorter. When I lie on the bunk I spread out on either side of myself. I feel slow and old. My arms are loose and slide around the bone. If I move quickly the fat slaps together and stings the skin. If I jump from the top bunk I feel belly and breasts and buttocks bouncing, yanking the skin, stretching it. The pancakes, the potatoes, and macaroni and rice, the heavy milk and butter. It’s all a trick, a plot to weigh us down, smother us in ourselves. The tiny meats in the bones of the oxtail—the fast eating—the heaping plates and afterward ice cream vanilla—three gallons for the tank and heavy bowls and your own spoon creamy and cold and pots of butter and crocks of jelly shining and shaking spooned over the ice cream and loaves and loaves of balloon white bread falling on itself and warm butter spread with the back of the spoon and jelly sliding on top of the butter. You take six slices after ice cream. Four with butter and jelly and two with just butter. You lay them out on the bunk in front of you and pick one up in your left hand and take one clean sharp bite exactly the shape of your jaw out of the side or a corner for variety. Feel the jelly thick on your tongue melting down to sugar between your teeth and sinking into the ditch between the gum and the cheek and the butter grainy against the palate. If you open your mouth the bread sticks filling the arch of the palate and you chew voluptuously and swallow and bite again carefully symmetrical bites out of the soft white squares poised on the tips of five fingers and chew stars or hearts or your initial or someone’s initial or an outline of a rabbit or the United States of America not counting Alaska and Hawaii you chew these silhouettes into the bread and lay them out on the bunk before you and choose one carefully and eat at it delicately tasting the shape as well as the flavor until it is quite gone all gone away and then another until you fall asleep with all the shapes eaten or sometimes you forget and fall asleep with one left or a piece in your hand and wake in the morning with jelly and bread and butter spread on your hands or on your pale bloated face and in your hair which grows dirty very fast here. You lick it off and wash for breakfast not looking into the mirror where your eyelids are swollen and your cheeks close up till your eyes are small and when you touch your forehead there is soft flesh a quarter of an inch deep between the skin and the bone.

  —

  They took the Bible away with Mad Patsy. We have a book, very carefully preserved. A western paperback taken from a John Wayne movie McClintock and we have all read it seve
ral times carefully on the bunk between breakfast and lunch and lunch and dinner. The first two pages and the last six are missing. Nobody discusses it and between readings Kathy keeps it under the mattress on the empty bunk in the key-cell where the matrons never look. There was a newspaper a while ago maybe a week or so ago and we took turns reading it—reading every word about weddings and deaths and stock market numbers and recipes and on the top left-hand column of the fourth page there was a blurred dot photo of Aldous Huxley from the armpits up very gray with Gothic letters HUXLEY DIES and a paragraph and I had never liked him I remember reading Brave New World in high school English class when we were proud to be so sophisticated and analyzed and sat at the desk with my legs crossed at the knee with my body long leaning away from my legs with desk smooth in front of me leaning on one elbow on the desk with my face resting in my hand just so the index finger could smooth in and out of the deep hollow between my cheekbone and forehead beside the eye and slip down to the strong hard muscle just where my lower jaw joins the skull and feel how smooth my cheeks and lean when my mouth pursed to say to or you. And he was dead and I always thought he was a fool and talked too much, not wrong you see but a fool and the paper was a month and a half old when it came in wrapped around the new mop for C tank. I almost cried—tried to even but was too tired—about all the old guard dead and dying and who was there to take their place even if they were fools who was fool enough to take their place and I used to let the pencil hang slack between my finger and thumb in my left hand with the wrist bent slightly and the forearm balanced but dangling off the back of the chair and moved it slightly, just for me, counting when I made a point in the green room with green blackboards and the low windows raining and we few so bright young reading and talking in earnest impressive voices for each other and some they we had heard about which was supposed to discover us if our voices had the proper timbre.

  —

  I can’t remember how long it’s been since my last period. I know it’s been since I joined the magazine crew because Horace caught me taking time off from the route to buy Tampax and there has been no man though the lawyer and the detective tried to make out that it was just a front for prostitution and the boys and girls traveling together and I would have and they hinted around but there was never any time and we were always so tired and nobody on the crew ever except maybe Horace and his silver-haired German who was not Mrs. He always wore clothes like a Texas oil man in the movies and spoke with a Texas accent and when I first joined he wasn’t there for a week and they were waiting for him to get out of jail for beating up one of the boys but nobody mentioned it and it was as though he had been away on a business trip and I wanted to I remember in all the rooms and houses where men were alone and maybe they would have but I didn’t know how to make them only how to be made so I couldn’t be pregnant or maybe the laser it’s so hard to remember how long has it been? Not since I’ve been here I know at least five months then but my belly is fat evenly and not swollen or pooched. I haven’t been horny much here. Once in a while when somebody’s talking very specifically or in the bunk alone at night but never just generally horny I have to think of some particular time before—some moment when it was particularly hot with somebody in particular. Even then there’s just a kind of nostalgic shudder, no need for relief, no hunger, just the memory of hunger.

  I haven’t got the energy for it. I am so tired all the time and I do nothing. There is nothing to do. On Friday mornings we clean the tank—change sheets, sweep and mop and wax the floors—dust the bars—change uniforms but there are thirty of us now and it’s all over in twenty minutes and we sit on the tight stretched bunks in the clean smell of ammonia and wait for the gospel to begin on the speaker so there will be something to complain about—but there is never anything real. Sometimes if somebody’s uniform doesn’t fit or the coffee’s not hot enough in the morning or we hear about something on the grapevine we make trouble. The others do. They rattle things against the bars and curse and run up and down the bull pen screaming mad but somebody comes, the matron or the Sheriff. If it’s Glad-Ass there’s more screaming and they throw things at her. Once Rose hit her from the far end of the bull pen with a thick crockery ice cream bowl—she drew her arm back and the curling pit hairs nudged out of her short sleeve and flung her whole body straight after the arm and the bowl didn’t turn in the air but still as glass moved over the heads, between the bars and caught Glad-Ass right at the base of the skull with her stiff hair glued down under and didn’t break when it hit her but fell to the floor and starred under the glaze and Glad-Ass turned around and yelled who did that and everyone got quiet and Glad-Ass threatened no TV and Rose stepped out leaning forward over her belly with her arms stiff with fists beside her and her delicate head forward on the long neck and it all blew over. Usually it’s not Glad-Ass, it’s Mrs. Eliot and she tsks and sympathizes and compromises and explains and everybody feels bad about causing her trouble or the Sheriff jokes them out of it and nothing happens. I like all this and lie on my bunk looking through the bars at it.