Are we going to draw those straws or not? asks Dad. Because the dog is barking again and this time it is a brisk yip yip yip yip that assaults the family’s ears. Nothing worse than a yipper, says Mom. I’ll get the straws.
Here’s an ad for straws; it says Wanted, straws for underprivileged crippled children. We don’t have extras, says Darryl. They should really find their own straws, says Gwen. It’s not as if they’re completely helpless.
Why would they want straws anyway? asks the mom. It doesn’t make sense. We could sell them straws, says the dad, so I wouldn’t have to work.
Just then Wendy gets her leash mixed up in Charlie’s pant legs and she bites him angrily. Just then the mom pops a PLAY pill and imagines she is an Iron Chef competitor making braised eel. Just then the dad finds an ad for braised eel look-a-likes. Just then Darryl thinks it would be good TV if he whipped out his own eel-look-a-like and brandished it at the camera. Just then Bing throws up again. And finally someone—Gwen!—feeds poisonous meat to the barking dog.
Arf arf arf arf arf, says the dog who has not yet begun to die. Momentarily the landscape will be draped in shadow, the hills swathed and hushed, the dog dying and barking, barking and dying.
THE CORPSE AND ITS ADMIRERS
The coffin is grey with gold curlicues at the corners, at each of the four corners, although we only see two from where we are sitting with our mother. Each curlicue of a golden color has a shiny ring of silver around it and then some dots. The dots are very small.
The oak casket is very big. It is 10 feet. Maybe it is 20 feet. The feet of the corpse jut up from it since it is a shallow casket. Picture a pork chop in a crepe pan and that is how the body looks in the casket: jutting up, the nose pointed and white, the feet in their brown cordovans.
Our mother is crying. She is fishing around in her patent leather purse while crying and her face is very red and ugly. Picture a wadded-up piece of cloth soaked in bloody nose damage and you will get the feeling of her face. In her patent leather purse are the following items: sunglasses, a movie ticket stub from The Paradine Case starring Gregory Peck who falls in love with an imprisoned woman, Kleenex, Lifesavers, both of which are in blue and white packages.
For a murderess, the Paradine woman is exceptionally well-dressed.
The purse of our mother has a gold clasp shaped like a fish.
Also there is some change at the bottom and some flakes of tobacco, given that our mother is trying to quit smoking cigarettes.
We are embarrassed at the noises our mother makes when she weeps. Picture a siren interrupted by a braying sheep and also a coughing giant and you will have some idea how she sounds.
I myself am sewing a sleeve on a blouse.
The corpse does nothing. This is its advantage. There is a fly on the casket, resting languidly on one of the blond oak lintels. In a bad mood.
Now, my sister whispers, he will have no more bad moods.
I myself nod wisely, the blouse which is of a silky and thus slippery material slithers around on my little lap.
Yes, I say. I have only 10 stitches to go. Maybe 20. Then I will sew a little something onto my sister’s head who has begged me for some time to do this.
The corpse’s nose is long and white-tipped. From here we can only imagine the soft flare of the nostrils. Or maybe it is a hard flare. We can vaguely recall the teeth, yellow from the smoking of Pall Malls.
My mother who has given up smoking now removes a black veil from her purse. 10 feet long. Or 20 feet. Very long, it unfolds and unfolds, it seems this unfolding will go on forever, my sister Razor whispers to me, and soon we are covered in it, like insects trapped in a spider’s web.
My mother is bald and so is my sister. Once, at her request, I stitched the words WEIRD ZONE onto my mother’s scalp.
My father, who is dead, is not a skinhead but a corpse.
My mother covers us with her veil, still weeping, still shuddering under the veil but now we are part of that shuddering since, beneath the spider web veil, my sister, my mother and I make one shape.
We are thus part of the shape of my mother.
My father is crying in his casket but his tears are the tears of corpses which go inward and keep the body from thawing and melting away.
The blouse is made of vinyl (I think) and has little rubber buttons. I am sewing the sleeve, I just realized, in the wrong place.
Inside the coffin my father is sneezing. My mother reaches into her purse. Once more she reaches into it and this time removes a half dozen tacos which she divides among us. Then salsa and little plates of rice. Then spoons.
My father, when alive, was not a sneezer. He was not an eater. He had his moods which hammered themselves into our tumbling home, into our mother’s makeshift spirit. He was not a weeper.
No thank you, I tell our mother. Even so, I cannot seem to work up an appetite. The corpse is still sneezing and weeping, more copiously now: picture a jackhammer drilling into a human brain and you will have some idea of the racket which is beginning to assert itself into the air surrounding the coffin.
Perhaps he has allergies, my sister whispers.
All the while I am stitching the sleeve on the blouse—and it is going much, much better now, thanks for asking, creating a neat little seam in the shape of scythe. I am trying to think of a prayer to say for my father’s soul and the effort to do so makes me recall several moments: jumping rope, my father at one end, laughing with his mouth full; or driving over the bridge, my father saying he was frightened and so could not look; or singing for him at a large party and his face beaming and beaming. Hard to believe a face so white and frozen could have beamed so warmly or that in the cave of his arm we had felt so protected. Nevertheless.
The Paradine woman, a master of duplicity, manages to destroy Gregory Peck whom she hates for luring her lover (Louis Jordan) into suicide. His career over, his love unrequited and disdained, he returns to his nice wife (Ann Todd) who comforts him like a mother.
Not that our own mother is all that comforting. She distributes tacos from her voluminous purse and now she is chewing loudly. So many noises in this room! My mother chewing and swallowing, my father weeping and sneezing, my sister whispering, and I am making the sound of she who stitches a sleeve onto a blouse and who will soon stitch a little something onto the scalp of my sister.
The great moral lesson of The Paradine Case is that we should not trust attractive foreigners, no matter how beautifully dressed. Another way of saying this is that we must stay within our familiar realm and not venture forth. Don’t flirt with danger. Be safe. Or for me, a stitch in time saves nine.
Now that the father is dead, our lives will surely change. He who had been our armor, our jailer. He who stabbed us with his words and then caressed us. We who were stabbed, then caressed, defended and incarcerated. We may have murdered him, too.
At some point it occurs to me that we are all everything, that nothing separates us. Picture a parade of ants going toward a picnic arranged on a red-and-white-checked tablecloth and then picture a foot coming down. We are all things. The ants, the picnic and the foot.
THE NEW NEW MUSIC
Lim Kim & her band of sister-wives by the screen door. Close-up of Lim Kim’s eyeball. Ferret spike. Guitar strum. Hash of dust overhead where hats had once graced the metropolis. Debris includes a corset, macerated eraser, anthill, sketchbook. Doe-colored plastic bags open & fill not unlike an eye scanning the arena, becoming bored, shutting.
Pencil tucked in hairnet, Benny gangling in, heart-height, ready for a jot. The green hammock sways in its space of green. Lim Kim taps her bare foot. The sister-wives in unison say We are the propagators, the progenitors, the sister-wives, the dozens of us like one thing, oh oh oh.
Benny poised for a note-take, the new new music swell on the porch, the screen door clap-flap, the sister-wives haircuts severe & stationary.
Yearning is a thing of the past, Lim Kim announces. We are no longer cool with it. Bye bye blues. &
goodbye to burnt coffee & dat man who don’t come home. Goodbye to all dat gloomy weather wherein da phone don’t ring & da mail don’t come.
Benny has a whippet on a chain, balloons sizzling from its neck-ring. Lim Kim these days missing a tooth, whistles meatily: a grander, hipper sound than previous, Benny has to admit.
~
In another part of the metropolis Muscle Man Cole with a snowy chest parades the seashore, black socks to mid-calf.
But even the sea has moved on to contemporary pitches & moans. Almost impossible to discern among the wheeling gulls, the dust-clouds whose narratives drift into sub-topics & estuaries.
Lagoon on her way somewhere, black-hatted, sunglasses with pearled rosettes large satchel of plastic weave into which she lobs seashells, feathers, clumps of sea grass hard as toenails.
Birds open their pie holes, lurp into the sea. Muscle Man a hesitation at the sea’s edge ripples his furrow. Birds are so cool, he proclaims loud enough for an osprey to blink awake, screech through a dust castle & caw-caw.
Not a pretty sight, Lagoon says to Sally, brand new Sally. Having recently joined the narrative, Sally has no progenitors. I agree, though, nods to Lagoon. Of Muscle Man Cole who has begun to scratch his behind. What gets into people? Sally wonders. Out in public view amongst the public?
~
At the casa of sister-wives, even an egg scramble takes on a duh-duh in the face of the new news. Lim Kim at the forefront. Brandishing a spatula as if to instruct the others to partake. It’s a time to be more like ants, she argues, super-organizing so that we won’t. Won’t what? says Benny who beautifully moans between phrases. The whippet as well.
We wonder, then, summarily, if it’s just a little bit over-designed, self-annihilating, its structuralism touting Barthes in a cowardly nostalgie. Not that either, says Lim Kim. She know what she want. She know what she invent for da purpose. The new new music, as opposed to the old new music, where one guy played a little, then another become King. Where the sister-wives braided each others’ hair to the beat of the tom tom tom.
Any minute Lagoon, Sally arrive, Muscle Man Cole in tow, osprey scent faint upon clothing. It’s all pheromones all the time from now on. Even while the universe darkens, especially so in the dark, creepy caves of this our earth, its intermittency, its big noise.
THE STORY OF MS BARBARA HOWE
Ms Barbara Howe, walking on the beach near her home in Santa Monica, where she lived with her brother Frederick and her dog Curl, so named for his tail, discovered a rare shell on her morning walk. At first—she reported—she thought it was a shoe.
Ms Barbara Howe possessed a lovely singing voice and used to sing in her church choir. After a while the climb up to the church balcony where the choir and organ were lodged became too much for her and so she resigned. The teenagers in the choir were not sorry to see her go. Despite her fine voice, she exuded an air of disapproval and they could not help but feel she was judging them for the very things they could not help: their young bodies and minds.
Ms Barbara Howe, as a child, had been outgoing and sunny. A popular teenager, she later married a man with a job at a bank. She’d always kept her hair pulled back to show off her ears which her mother told her were her finest feature. An ear is like a shell with its graceful design of whorls and spirals leading, like a fugue played on a cello, to a dark, mysterious interior.
Ms Barbara Howe moved in with her brother Frederick after her husband left her for one of the bank tellers, a glamorous woman older than he by five years, what they call “a cougar” these days. Frederick was younger than Barbara by five years and Barbara had been younger than her husband by three years.
Ms Barbara Howe was fond of saying Life Throws You Curves. Sometimes, before she resigned from the choir, Barbara enjoyed throwing in some fanciful trills to spark up songs that were otherwise a little too solemn for her taste. When she was met with resistance from the choir master, a traditionalist with a lisp and a meticulously groomed moustache parked on his upper lip, she complained that too little innovation in church music might lead to a repressive, cold religious practice. Music can make everything new, she was also fond of saying.
The seashell Ms Barbara Howe discovered, shaped like a shoe, and still harboring a little creature within its deep vortices, was green. Now that’s unusual, her friend remarked. A green sea shell. Perhaps it isn’t a sea shell at all, said Barbara.
When she first moved in with her brother Frederick, she was greeted with exceedingly disarrayed premises. Frederick, a cheerful, silent fellow, hadn’t washed a dish in months; he’d allowed the dishes, plus pots and pans, to pile up on any surface not yet occupied by unopened mail, laundry, and the various knickknacks that had belonged to their mother and now had been pushed nonchalantly to one side to make room for everything else. Although he had a perfectly good job as a manager of a retail store, he spent his hours away from work holed up in his room watching pornography. Unashamed of his unusual hobby, he claimed that it relaxed him to watch the sexual interactions of others. When he left the house, Frederick wore suits and the thin ties that had belonged to their father.
Living near the beach was a lucky thing, always there were cool breezes and a good smell of salt. Nostalgia is sensual and Ms Barbara Howe surrendered to it in the same way she’d surrendered to her future husband on their first date, his lovely smell, his clean-shaven neck.
Her friend wore a camel’s hair jacket and a woolen cap. Barbara wore blue jeans, a red sweater and a checked scarf. For some time they passed the shell between them. There seemed to be a small noise issuing from its interior, but each was afraid to listen closely.
About Curl the dog: he was not afraid of many things. The world, such as it was, struck him as small and endurable. He was fond of Ms Barbara Howe, his benefactor or his slave, depending on one’s point of view, but was not given to affectionate gestures, per se. He enjoyed running and napping. His curiosity was not voluminous but reasonable. He was not inclined to nudge his canine nose into the odd shell any more than the women in his company were. Not afraid so much as prudent.
Ms Barbara Howe had never needed to work since her husband, the banker, wracked with guilt over having left her for an older woman—supplied her with alimony. Frederick, likewise, took care of the household expenses. Though his pornography habit or hobby ran him into the hundreds per month, he made a good salary at the store, a large renowned chain store wherein almost anything one needed for life could be purchased.
In any case, Ms Barbara Howe was not a shopper. She enjoyed her friend, in whom she confided, and she enjoyed collecting shells. This shell, however, gave her pause.
The friend removed her woolen cap, turned it inside out and dropped the shell inside. The sun had long since disappeared behind a cloud, it had been there for weeks, hiding out glumly, and the sky was all one color, a color that was hard to name. Curl, the noble dog, if I may say so, was running out of earshot so that when Ms Barbara Howe called to him, as he knew she would sooner or later, he had the handy excuse of not having heard. It was his deepest wish to escape Ms Barbara Howe and go live in a cave with gypsies, but gypsies were not around these parts, as far as he could tell.
Like most who are addicted to pornography, Frederick had vexed relationships with the objects of his sexual fantasies. Women made him awkward and shy in real life. Ms Barbara Howe informed him he had issues with intimacy and occasionally it worried him to think this might be so. Other than that, he was a happy guy who worked hard to keep the shelves properly stocked even though he was rarely the one to do the heavy lifting. The other employees respected him because he was fair and because he was quiet. It is interesting that quiet people earn more respect than their chatty counterparts.
The building that housed the chain retail store that Frederick managed was square and grey, and duplicated many such buildings that housed many such stores in this famous chain of stores. Typically this store would move into a community, buy a large lot and eventually slap up
their signature square grey behemoth and before you knew it the local stores were priced out of business. This is capitalism, explained Frederick to his sister, and she concurred, though she did not approve.
What if, said her friend in the camel’s hair coat, the creature inside this shell were from another world? You mean an ET? said Ms Barbara Howe. Something like that, said the friend. There is definitely something spooky about this shell, agreed Ms Barbara Howe. I know, it felt as if it were burning my hand, said the friend, which is why I had to get rid of it. They both surveyed the shell at the bottom of the woolen hat and beneath the slashing sounds of sea breezes they could have sworn they heard something.
To Barbara the sound resembled a song she used to sing in the choir, a hymn to Christ Almighty invoking angels and worship and death. But her friend heard something entirely different, not so melodic, the noise of freeway traffic or an egg white being whipped into a froth. Christ is risen Christ will rise again, Ms Barbara Howe remembers.
And so you see, Ms Barbara Howe’s story is not eventful. Do not expect events. If you keep reading, you will encounter more of the same: Curl the dog, disgruntled that his companions seem to have forgotten about him, wandering slowly home, humiliated. Frederick, a willing pawn of the state or the store or the culture, climbing for once a ladder, then dismounting, then realizing that a mosquito has stabbed him on the wrist, then enjoying a bright evening of pornography. Ms Barbara Howe parting ways with her friend at the corner flanked by stately palm trees. Twilight through the fronds. Curl safely in tow woof-woofing. Beautiful details like the grey swirl at the outermost edge of the shell’s languid orbit. A noise faint and fainter. A sudden elevation of Ms Barbara Howe’s mood replaced by its opposite.
Monsters Page 13
