Heartland

by Ana Simo

  The days flowed agreeably. I would wake up at eight o’clock and work in the garden until noon, when McCabe began stirring in bed and Petrona would arrive. After giving Petrona the instructions for the day, I would abandon myself to the pleasures of cleaning and polishing the Judge’s possessions until dinner. I developed a system. Mondays were for porcelain and faience; Tuesdays for furniture; Wednesdays for wooden floors, wainscoting and other woodwork details; Thursdays for clocks and assorted metal items like the Judge’s penholders and letter openers; Fridays for silverware, and Saturdays for glass. Sundays, I plotted McCabe’s death.

  Three times a day I checked the hydrometer and adjusted the relative-humidity device, averting my eyes from the Annunciation icon. Now that I could, I dared not look at it directly, even less touch it. I wore around my neck the Judge’s key, discovered in his desk drawer. My mother’s key, which she had returned to the Judge before dying, was nowhere to be found.

  I saw McCabe only at dinner, which Petrona served at six o’clock, before leaving. Bebe was never mentioned. It had been my therapeutic suggestion, but McCabe’s obedient silence should have been a warning to me. McCabe had recovered her natural volubility. She did not converse: she harangued. Her only subject was her own forcefulness, even when she was seemingly talking about something else. News items were her favorite self-launching pads. Half of her sentences began with a rhetorical, “Did you read about…” It didn’t matter if I had, or not. She would paraphrase the entire article, adding her own explanations and footnotes. At first I’d interrupt her with a sharp, “Yes, I read that,” even if I hadn’t. “What about this other… ?” she’d volley back. Soon I pretended ignorance about the first item proposed, to save us time. McCabe had an unnatural memory for facts, figures, and quotes, and a passionate enthusiasm for regurgitating them at dinnertime. She knew the rules and lore of all sports, including obscure ones like Zorbing. Money, celebrity gossip, horse racing, science, and security trivia were at her fingertips. But it was all about her. Paradoxically, she never talked shop. She warned me early on that her own line of work was off-limits, at the dinner table or at any other place or time. It wasn’t necessary, since art galleries, hers in particular, had on me the same vomitive effect as the defunct Macy’s fitting rooms. McCabe’s only conversational originality was her footnotes, always irrelevant to the issue, as when she linked Inuit whale hunting to America’s military decay. However dull her dinner blather, McCabe had started so low in my estimation that just finding out that she read the Times and the Journal every day from cover to cover (at least in her enforced Elmiran idleness) impressed me against my will. I realize it only now, under this dusty bed, as I try to breathe with what remains of my nose. At the time, her vitality exhausted me.

  McCabe was not just fleshy. She was a sweaty, breathing, walking, talking chunk of meat. A big flank steak, reputedly honest and nutritious, but capable of harboring the stringy and the coriaceous. What had Bebe fallen for? Without the discipline of mind to sublimate, explain, and abstract, images from my decade-old cabinet of horrors flashed back whenever my gaze inadvertently wandered to McCabe’s flesh: Bebe licking McCabe’s drippy cunt in 3D, for example. This happened at the table, when McCabe’s statistics and animal vitality had put my brain to sleep, and my unfocused eyes caught a glimpse of her fat thighs as she suddenly stood up to rescue a fork that had flown out of her enthusiastic hand. I always lowered my eyes to my plate while McCabe came to table, or engaged in her cutlery gymnastics, but she was often faster than my reflexes. Bebe and McCabe’s blissful matrimony had sealed the repulsive cabinet. I did not want it reopened now. Killing McCabe had to be on pure and moral grounds. Not from herbivorous repulsion. Thus, I struggled with McCabe’s flesh at dinnertime as a pious lover would. But not to love better: to hate better, as Justice does, in her rational and calculated way. Besides, McCabe had her subtleties, like all good cuts of meat. Only Justice could do justice to them.

  One day, for example, I heard the sound of a mandolin upstairs. Someone was playing “McKinley’s March” at finger-breaking speed, either live or recorded. At dinner McCabe asked if the noise bothered me. I said I had not heard anything and waited for more musical information, but she changed the subject. Another day, at dusk, I looked out my window and saw a figure in the distance, by the far hedge, doing triple somersaults. It seemed smaller and more limber than McCabe, but who else could it have been? By the time I returned with the Judge’s binoculars, the figure was gone. But all that happened much later, that Fall.

  A week after our arrival, I took McCabe on a Sunday stroll through Elmira’s derelict Main Street. Reconstruction had been a smashing success in Elmira. All the old shops were boarded up. Scraps of plywood and moldy particleboard had been slapped on by panicky owners who’d been first ravaged by strip malls, then had to flee a barbarian invasion. Only a Chinese takeout remained. A Wal-Mart thirty miles away had sucked dry the last holdouts, the Cantonese cook told us, and was now crushing the one half of Elmira’s female population it employed (the other half waiting at home until the Beast called them).

  It was a miracle that the town was still hanging on by its grimy fingernails. Except for our state capital, site of the metastasizing National Penal Colony, all other towns in the heartland had been bulldozed years ago to deny shelter and food to the homicidal marauding gangs. An inspired decision: the gangs had migrated west and the countryside was pleasantly empty and pacified.

  On the edge of town, I showed McCabe the ruins of the candy store where I got my first lesson in economics: quick butt squeeze, fully clothed = two gummy bears; longer squeeze half-clothed (pants off, but panties on) = four gummy bears; and letting stinky Dwayne slip his hairy hand inside my panties and rub my butt = one Milky Way bar. I didn’t tell McCabe anything about Glorita. Not even her name. I’m positive. Glorita got two Milky Way bars for letting Dwayne put his finger flat inside her butt crack. He offered her a bubble soap bottle to let him stick his pinky just a little inside her asshole, but she got scared of his big hands and ran away. Next day I saw Glorita blowing bubbles from her porch. She told me her godmother had bought it for her. I knew she was lying. This was the first time I felt a weight on my forehead and eyelids that made me lower my eyes, which I later discovered was shame. The dictionary, from which I got my sentimental education, told me that shame combined feelings of dishonor, unworthiness, and embarrassment. My shame at Glorita’s first lie was purely the shame of dishonor. I neither felt unworthy, nor embarrassed. Like Tirant lo Blanc, I would have killed a ferocious dog with my bare hands to cleanse my honor. But Glorita did not own a dog. Condemned to dishonor, I was freed to sink even lower: I began to watch Glorita from our attic window with a pair of toy binoculars I had stolen from Woolworth’s when my grandmother wasn’t looking. I kept a log of Glorita’s after-school and weekend comings and goings. Soon, there wasn’t much I didn’t know about her. It wasn’t hard: she lived next door, we were in fourth grade together, and took the same school bus every day.

  Glorita had long legs ending in a tight little butt, and a small torso with tiny hard nipples that already showed under her tee shirts. Her skin was the color of light tea with milk, and as soft as my red velvet dress. Everybody always said that she had a very pretty face, a term I despised, perhaps because it was never applied to me (or to any boy, Rafael Cohen once sympathetically pointed out). I thought then that Glorita was ugly, with her big mouth that tasted like plum, slanted hazel eyes, strong nose and frizzy reddish-brown hair. Being near her always made my stomach a little queasy (I didn’t know the real meaning of “dangerous” then). Through my toy binoculars, she was at once repellent and fascinating, like the shellacked bees Ezequiel Cohen pinned into his insect collection with color-coded pins: purple for the queen, royal blue for the male consorts, forest green for the workers.

  One night I was woken up by a faint squeak coming from next door. By then, I had developed a refined ear: I could tell whether Glorita was trying to sneak in or out o
f her godmother’s house through the kitchen screen door, her bedroom window, the garage, or even the front door. I ran to my window. Glorita was walking through our backyard, shoes in hand. She was wearing her old blue dress from third grade, now too short and too tight for her. “Are you nuts or what?” I whispered, softly so she wouldn’t hear. I climbed out of my window and followed her. She headed straight to the road that led to town. Fool! Scumbag Dwayne is going to kidnap and torture you. I’ll have to kill him. I’ll rescue you. Glorita looks me in the eyes, her soft arms locked around my neck, her lips quivering close to mine… . Half an hour later, Elmira’s broken sidewalks suddenly sprang up on either side of the road, now renamed Main Street. I immediately tripped on a crack and took a dive. Glorita walked past Dwayne’s candy store. She was walking fast now, running, and I had trouble keeping up with her. She was just a silly girl, but she sure could run.

  When I caught up with her, she was approaching the back door of our school. Someone opened the door and Glorita slid in. I went around the building a hundred times that night, clockwise, and when I got dizzy, counterclockwise, sniffing at the bottom of the doors, hoping to catch Glorita’s scent, trying all the windows with my drug-terrier paws to see if any would give and I could jump in and carry her out on my back to safety. And licking the back doorknob, which she may or may not have touched. There wasn’t a sound, smell, or sight all night, except for my breathing and sweat, and my pee trickling over all four corners of the school building. I ran home at the first sign of light in the sky, afraid of my mother’s wrath. Ashy and exhausted, I pretended a stomachache that morning, but pity was a luxury my three-job parents couldn’t afford. On the sidewalk, waiting for the school bus, was Glorita, fresh as a morning gladiolus.

  McCabe and I reached my old school. “It looks like a fucking prison!” her contralto boomed. I realized that she had not said a word during our walk. She stared directly into my eyes. I looked away, afraid she might be trying to read my mind (I don’t believe in mind reading, I’m a rationalist, a rabid Darwinian, I worship at the altar of logic, but one is most afraid of what one doesn’t believe in.) “Whatever happened to Glorita?” McCabe asked.

  ‌4

  How and Why (a Philosophical Pause)

  I had lured McCabe to Elmira to kill her. Picturing her death in Manhattan had felt fake. Shifting the scene to Elmira made it instantly true. Moved by such vigorous realism, I had picked up the phone, figurative tears still in my eyes, and asked McCabe to meet me at the brasserie. Soon we were flying to Elmira.

  Pulling weeds in the Judge’s garden a few weeks later, I asked myself, Why here in Elmira? The question made me dizzy. Like looking at millions of stars in a black night above the Elmira cow fields, or coloring the picture of the Dove, the Eye inside the triangle, and the Rising Jesus.

  To keep my head from cracking, I shifted from the bottomless “why here” to the modest “how,” as I attacked the dandelion roots with a sharp garden fork. I did not want to kill McCabe in her sleep, or from behind, or while she was looking the other way, or by surprise, not even if frontally. I wanted her to be aware of who was killing her and why. Even more: I wanted her to realize what monstrous harm she had done me, and to agree that her death could not even begin to repay her debt to me and to the natural order. In short, I wanted McCabe to judge herself, pronounce herself guilty, sentence herself to death, and beg me to carry out her execution. After much feigned hesitation, I would consent to this. It would be a big favor, a sacrifice on my part to commit a cold-blooded crime to improve her moral standing, even at the risk of lowering mine. That’d be the icing on her guilt cake: a new crime on her long list of crimes against my humanity to be atoned for by her, pre-mortem.

  No dry, unilateral killing this one. No bilateral killer and killed, executioner and executed. This was to be an affair of universal truth and justice, our own private Nuremberg trial. Furthermore, McCabe had to fully agree to, even propose, all the steps that I must take to hide her corpse and escape the imperfect justice of men.

  I sat on the damp soil to catch my breath. Under the garden glove, my right index finger hurt from clutching the weeding fork. Some dandelions I had pulled a few days before were showing again. Had I missed them or did they normally sprout back so quickly? Tonight I would look that up in the Judge’s “Useful and Noxious Weeds of North America.” To get McCabe to sit in majestic judgment of herself would take time. Weeks, maybe months. We had arrived in Elmira at the end of August. It was now mid-September. I wanted to wrap it all up by Christmas.

  Remembering that Indian summer day, now that frost has begun to cover my outer shell and I have lost all feeling in what used to be my right hand, I regret having given so much thought to the form of McCabe’s death, and so little to the substance. With reflection, I may have realized that I had two irreconcilable desires, each opening a distinct path: one, to get McCabe to acquiesce to her death; the other, to give Elmira the fresh blood it was thirsting for, so it would finally let go of me. The first path could be taken only by someone born without the Elmiran blood curse (like McCabe herself, but then, McCabe would not have despised me if I had been a McCabe, nor Bebe rejected me—a paradox I did not grasp that balmy afternoon while struggling with the weeds); the second path of indiscriminate bloodshed was open to anyone capable of decisive action, whether human or mutt. I thought myself free—by choice, if not birth—but indecisive. So I took the first path thinking that it would lead to the second, like those streets that change names without one having to turn a corner. It didn’t. In the end, my Nuremberg followed its languid course in the Judge’s old house, while Elmira tired of waiting with gaping jaws for the fresh meat promised to her. Oh, unforgiving, wrathful Elmira.

  ‌5

  Baking

  McCabe spent most afternoons in the kitchen, of all places, sunglasses atop her head, Dolce Vita style, sausage frame encased in D&G one day and Missoni the next. Unafraid to burn or stain her rich rags, she baked and baked. Her signature creation, her only creation, in fact, was a bourbon prune cake. She baked large quantities for the Church of Saint Glykeria, Martyr at the bottom of the Hill, which Petrona delivered every Friday evening on her way home in a fancy basket covered by a red-checkered napkin. Mrs. Crandall, the appetizing head church lady, returned the empty basket on Sunday afternoons. McCabe opened the kitchen door for her the first time to bask in her gratitude, but did not invite her in. Mrs. Crandall left dazzled and thirsty for another glimpse of the celebrated SoHo art merchant. By the time she got home and reported back to her crone troops in lengthy phone calls, her gratitude had turned into abject adoration. Reports of the reports reached me the next morning via Petrona, who had heard the increasingly fantastic accounts, in Spanish, from the spic delivery boys who brought in our food from the state capital’s only fancy grocery store. Their pit stops at the kitchens of the town’s petty notables provided them with a rich source of gossip. At my request, we did not patronize the local Wal-Mart, the only other source of food outside the state capital: I’m a picky eater and McCabe, who couldn’t care less where her food came from, was nevertheless swayed by my warning that her standing in Elmira would suffer if she was thought to eat from the same trough as the hoi polloi.

  McCabe was so thrilled with my English translation of Petrona’s Spanish version of the white gentry’s phone follies, that she made me retell it over and over until my voice got hoarse. Each time, she demanded more details. These I offered, not from Petrona’s account, but from the bottomless pit of my intimate and anthropological memory of the Elmira massas. McCabe laughed at my stories the way people laughed when they knew how to laugh, and writers knew how to write them laughing: so hard that tears streamed down her cheeks, so hard that her belly rolls, arm rolls, and jowls gleefully shook, with a laughter so stentorian that it rattled the Judge’s window panes. I can still hear her laugh. Accurately, now that my ears have fallen off, like my nose and all other bodily protuberances, and my memory is cleansed of self-pity. McCab
e wasn’t laughing at Elmira’s rulers; she was laughing at me still laughing at them.

  From that moment on, as Señora Mirtila, the housekeeper, I was charged with opening the door for Mrs. Crandall, retrieving the basket, and offering a different excuse for McCabe’s absence in thickly accented English each week, so it would whet her appetite. One week McCabe would be in bed with a migraine, the next she’d be en route to Antarctica, the next she’d just been called to the White House (this one, which I repeated occasionally, always made Mrs. Crandall gasp).

  Mrs. Crandall was also the head librarian in Elmira’s public library, the only one still standing in the state. It always embarrassed me to see her behind the main desk, with her curvaceous body badly tamed by dresses whose soft, clingy fabric belied their severe cut. She should have worn tailored suits, preferably pantsuits with longish jackets, to hide her provocative flesh. It would not have been a solution, just an improvement on the current, intolerably voluptuous situation. A black burka would have only increased Mrs. Crandall’s carnality: it was as bad as that. When the Caliphate finally reaches Elmira—sooner than we think—she will be the first to be stoned to death. I could see their viewpoint, while naturally abhorring it. Her presence among the books was a provocation. I dared not think of her at Saint Glykeria, Martyr, although Byzantine churches have always felt like boudoirs to me. Was Mrs. Crandall unaware of the power of her flesh? Were the other librarians? The church people? Mrs. Crandall’s rectitude was so unimpeachable that no one dared acknowledge the copulating elephant in the middle of the room, which was her flesh. However, the men at the faded polo club bar must have exchanged at least subliminal messages as she walked by, no words, but maybe a raised eyebrow, a batted eyelash, given that Mr. Crandall was old Elmira, and, as such, chairman of the club’s board, and bank president with life or death power over their mortgages. It must have been a trial for Elmira’s white rulers to live with this unmentionable thing, Mrs. Crandall’s carnality. They’re not easy, the lives of our rulers, even in their present, shrunken conditions. On the other hand, I bet the town’s spics, female and male alike, talked freely about Mrs. Crandall’s bountifulness. We’re that crass and uneducated. Our lack of discretion and boundaries will either hasten the triumph of the Caliphate (the backlash theory), or altogether prevent it (the sensual overflow theory). I take no sides since both sides abhor me, the homo vermin. I’m as embarrassed by us spics as by Mrs. Crandall, but the white townspeople’s code of silence repulses and frightens me. It courses underground, so no one knows what foulness it carries. Spic sex babble, equally repulsive, is at least out in the open for all to see.