–AnnEstelle does that as a trick sometimes. When she’s causing a stir in front of restaurants. She pulls a doll’s head the size of a baseball out of Anchorage’s stomach and she waves it at the people watching. It’s to make them think about what they’re eating.
–Does it work?
– It makes people vomit.
– Right into their laps? I asked. Disgusted, but excited to imagine that.
–Then I have to come get Anchorage because the police usually collect my sister.
I tried to reach deeper into the cow. I wanted to touch the other side of her wide stomach just so I’d know it was there. Without grazing that far point my hand only felt like it was floating in humid weather.
– How long have you been cleaning up after her?
–I can’t remember when I didn’t.
When living in Ithaca only I suffered my messes. An unwashed body or the brass-band argument I had with a Wegman’s supermarket manager about sneaking one box of soda crackers down my pants.
–AnnEstelle apologizes all the time, Fane explained.
– Is that good enough for you?
–Depends on what she put me through the day before.
Nabisase was probably waiting at the car with arms crossed and very little confidence in me. I have the keys, I thought. I should go and let her in.
11
Our car entered the city limits of Lumpkin, Virginia, at one in the morning with the four of us asleep inside. I certainly wasn’t driving, just keeping the steering wheel warm. Our seven-hour trip had lasted ten. At least, while our eyes were closed, there were fewer complications to life.
When settlers were first tracking across the American Midwest they’d discard big furniture like dressers or great wooden headboards when their horses were near death. When settlers stopped believing they’d reach their destination the littered frontier trails became furniture showrooms. Other travelers following after must have wondered why’d they leave this here and not twenty yards farther; why not ten miles back? What reason?
This was sort of how we reached Lumpkin. Like many explorers before us we stopped when our vehicle went off the plotted path.
Luckily I was in the slow lane of I-81 so we just listed right onto the grassy shoulder. The new white car was one of those rounded models with no real corners or edges and must have looked like a giant commode from far away. I woke when the bumpy earth shook our car. As I drove over to the actual interstate exit I felt like everyone in the world was asleep but me.
–That was dangerous, my sister whispered.
Lumpkin was an acorn-shaped town of 20,000. The only hotels were just off the interstate at the rounded bottom end. It was the Comfort Inn for the Miss Innocence contestants and two family members. A relaxed, two-story affair shaped like the letter U. While my family registered at the front desk I pack-muled the suitcases and gowns into the lobby.
Pageant rules stipulated that I stay in a different hotel. Fathers were the only men allowed. They were very serious about keeping virtue in the Miss Innocence pageant. So much so that they wanted my sister to sign a contract.
Nabisase might have liked Mom to read it over, but Mom was carrying Grandma to the elevator because she couldn’t walk on her own.
Grandma took a squashing at that McDonald’s riot. Underfoot as my arm was in a cow. Her hip popped audibly when she tried to walk from the car into the Comfort Inn.
I suggested a hospital, but Grandma wanted the pain. Used it.
–If we had not been making stops I would not be harmed, she’d said in the last stretch before Lumpkin.
–Let us reach town so the granddaughter can get to bed.
To atone Mom hefted Grandma from the car into the Comfort Inn and to the elevator and their room. We fastened my grandmother to my mother’s back by using my jacket like a tourniquet; tied together at the middle.
Mom didn’t talk after we had escaped the rest stop chaos. She was so quiet that I kept looking in the rearview and asking, –Are you there? Mom? Still there?
I was kidding, but that only made her fainter. The sound of her breathing even disappeared for the rest of the drive. At the Comfort Inn, even as Mom got into the elevator with Grandma, she didn’t say good-bye.
My sister sat down on one of the brown lobby couches. Late as we were other girls were still arriving.
Nabisase looked most like a thirteen year old as she read the Miss Innocence contract; running a finger under each line; reading aloud.
The Miss Innocence pageant portrayed virginity as something sacred and I don’t feel like mocking them for it. I remember one of my freshman scholarships at Cornell demanded that I remain patriotic all the years until I died. In my own way I was trying.
How were they going to check and see if she was telling the truth about her hymen?
–They would trust me, Nabisase said, too serious for a child.
– I’m not trying to down you, I assured her.
This Comfort Inn was excited to host the pageant hopefuls. There were balloons of ever y color and clipped dogwood flowers in bowls. The lobby smelled like lemon rinds; from another part of the first floor I heard the thrum of a floor buffer on wood.
–Are you actually a virgin?
– Sure I am, she said.
–I thought you’d be insulted.
–No, it’s all right.
–Does it say in the contract that you can’t ever have done anything? Like with your hands on a boy or anything else?
–What could ‘anything else’ mean? she asked coyly. My feet?
–Never mind. Let me look at the paper.
She put it behind her back. –You can’t say that word? I’ll help you. It starts with a B.
– I’m not going to talk to you like that.
–You just asked me if I ever used my hands!
–Come on.
I tried to go around the side, but only managed to nip her elbow. She stood. She walked backward toward the exit doors.
–I’m trying to help here, I said. Just let me read it. Contracts are made to cheat you. They might have fines listed in the small print. $100 dollars for every French kiss you ever gave.
–How would they find that out? She laughed because her older brother was squirming.
–You’re like a nun now, church girl, you’ll probably tell them. Let me see it.
She held the contract up to one of the ceiling lights. –There’s a word you won’t say, but maybe it’s in here. Bl. Blo. Blow.
– Shhhh!
The desk clerk bestowed electronic key cards upon a father and mother as their daughters slapped at the buttons of elevators to make them race.
–Maybe I should ask Ledric to help me? she asked.
– He can only help you plan a big meal.
She said, – ‘Blow job’ isn’t the worst thing you could say to me.
I covered my ears. – If I was a judge and heard you say that word it’d be automatic disqualification.
–You shouldn’t worry about girls acting dirty, she said. That’s not the meaning of Innocence.
12
The Hampton Inn was accepting the other men; brothers, cousins, uncles, pals. For all the stridency about separating us Comfort Inn was on the same street, eighty-five feet away. There wasn’t a fence or even a line of trees. If there had been a natural barrier then at least wickedness would have to be an act of imagination, but boys could look out their windows and see right into any chaste girl’s room.
Besides the American and Virginian flags the blue and white Hampton Inn banner was stuck up on a pole in the parking lot. They charged $49 a night.
I wanted a shower, but first I walked across the street to the large twenty-four-hour convenience mart inside Sheetz gas station, where I found a bag of caramels to lull me through the night. When I went back to the Hampton Inn I found room 603 to be quiet except for the heater in the corner burbling in a deep voice.
There were two handbills under my door. I picked them
up. I turned the shower on and took off my shoes; while I sat in the armchair beside the room’s single window the sound of hot water slapped softly against the shower walls.
‘Goodness Girls’ the flyer said. Those were the two biggest words, right across the top. Then there was a picture of a tiara, the diamonds in it badly oversized. A hand-drawing. Under the image there was a question, ‘Haven’t you always wanted to win?’
My love of horror movies, I can’t say how far back it started, but the books came first. I never read fantasy, my personality was more terrestrial. Misty marshes; deserted backwoods; an apartment closet that, whenever opened, exhales a sepulchral breath.
A muffled trumpet woke me at four that morning. Not a genuine instrument, but a children’s toy. The sound was from the hallway outside my room door. This was at four o’clock, the hour of grand regrets. I heard shuffling but was too tired to make sense of it. I looked at the time again. Four-twenty.
My curtains were open; I was sitting in the armchair. I could see there was still a lot of night to go before dawn. Maybe someone’s dumb kid was playing reveille in his sleep. One flyer was in my lap and the other was on the floor. The one that had fallen was water-stained.
My room was much hotter than it should have been even with the heater running through the night. Steam was coming out of my bathroom in bellows. Everywhere the carpet was wet.
Outside the room I heard sticks knocking together. I looked at the bed hoping Lorraine would be there. Still wearing my socks, my green suit, I walked on the wet carpet.
The shower must have been going three hours now; forget puddles, there were pools. I must have passed out sitting up; the bed was made.
Panic less, I told myself. Be calm. Go get more towels from the front desk.
I opened the hallway door. There was the idea of driving back to Queens but I’d given my real name and home phone number when checking in. Why hadn’t I thought ahead and used an alias; I wished I had a criminal mind.
The power was out in the hallway, which really started me shivering because I couldn’t ever work off a debt the size of a hotel-wide electrical failure. I touched the light switch in my room, but current wasn’t running. Had I blown the whole floor? Could I have destroyed an entire town while sleeping? My eyes adjusted in the darkness until I saw clearly that the hallway was full of dead soldiers.
– What?
I just stood in the hall asking, –What? What?
Four-foot-tall Confederate soldiers in those distinct gray uniforms. In the darkness I saw twelve. Shadows were shawls over their faces.
I said, –No thank you.
But they were children, not dead men. And far down the hall stood one grownup.
Just twelve boys dressed as Rebel forces and six more sat on the ground wearing Union blue. Some knocking short thin sticks together. One carrying a play trumpet. Half a dozen of the standing boys turned then shrank from me.
–We’re practicing, said the grown man when he reached me. He was slim, bearded and talked to me dispassionately. I thought, This guy has never been scared in his life. He wore a striped buttoned shirt and Hagar slacks. It wasn’t that he seemed tough, just easy.
–I didn’t know they used kids for wars anymore.
He smiled politely. The kindest way to deal with any stupid tourist’s questions. –We’re in the pageant this weekend.
–Miss Innocence? My sister’s a contestant. I didn’t know they’d have a marching group at the show, I said. Usually it’s just music.
–Yeah. There’s a band, but our boys show out at just about anything. They’d march before every baseball game if we let them.
He had a black baseball cap in his left hand and slapped it patiently against his thigh.
–What are they commemorating? I asked.
The boys were bored already. I think they were ten years old and without a vigilant chaperone they got frisky; punching arms, mushing foreheads.
–We’re up early because they’ve been forgetting their drills. It’s our historical society that sponsors them. I’ve got a newsletter on me. You can take it. Hey now, said the guy to the boys. Hey now!
They stopped, stood calmly.
Through the picture window at the far end of the hall I could see the bright sign for Sheetz gas station still alight. This was more comforting than it should have been; it proved I hadn’t shortcircuited the town. Anyway, a little neon always makes me feel like I’m near people I understand.
The imperturbable man in Hagar slacks, probably a size thirty-two, walked close enough to shake hands. That’s when his shoes made a –squish– noise on the soaked carpet. My leaky shower had made all the way out the room door into the hall.
–I had a problem in the bathroom, I admitted.
He jumped back, yelled, – It’s not piss, damn it?
– It’s just water. His raised voice surprised me so much that I even wondered if it was pee.
He looked at it for some time; I wondered if urine made a different discoloration in cheap carpeting; if he could detect such a thing it was the strangest kind of survival training I could imagine.
–That would have been a lot, he finally decided. He grinned, but stood outside the ring of moisture.
– Go get towels from downstairs, he said to the boys who had stopped bothering with historical accuracy and stood together regardless of uniform.
– How many? two asked in unison.
The coach walked into my room then poked his head back. –Much as you can carry.
The tiny replica war veterans tore off; happy to help, but gladder for the fun of running. After swaddling my floor in blankets they were sent to their rooms by 5:30 AM. I thanked the man another dozen times then put on my shoes. I spent the earliest hours of November 11th reclining in the passenger seat of our Dodge Neon. When I woke up a few hours later a dozen ‘Goodness Girls’ handbills had materialized on the windshield of my car and every other.
13
‘Disheveled’ is a generous adjective to qualify my appearance at the family breakfast in conference room C at the Comfort Inn on Saturday morning. I was early since the insistent sun woke me at eight in the car. Afraid to go to my room at Hampton Inn, even into the lobby, I walked to the Comfort Inn and used their mainfloor’s bathroom to wash my face. My body would have to wait.
In the largest conference room tables were already made. Instead of fifty small round places there were four long rows, cafeteria style. On each was a white table cloth. More dogwoods again, but they’d been left in the palms of small ceramic angel figurines. There were three to each table, twelve altogether in the room. A dozen kneeling baby boys, their wings tucked under rumps, hands held open on the thighs.
The ceilings were twenty feet high and since I was alone in the room I started jumping up and down. Do you ever do that when you’re alone? How high could I get, that was the game and it was miserable. I’d have to count my leaps in millimeters. It was silly to do that in some conference room, but it made my nature rise; circulating blood throughout my body. I felt pretty good.
At the other end of the conference room a microphone and podium were just in front of an enormous white screen hanging from the ceiling. I wondered if they’d show slides of pageants past, diagrams of acceptable hemlines. I walked closer just to see if the microphone was on, but when I tapped the mesh end for feedback it didn’t.
A server leaned out a door way. – I can turn it on for you.
–Thanks, I said, though I wasn’t planning on singing.
The difference between a waiter and a server is that the former gets tipped, but the latter doesn’t have to stand around blithely waiting to take orders.
We misunderstood each other, that server and I; voltage wasn’t funneled to the microphone. It was the colossal hanging screen instead. That thing started speaking so loudly it surprised me. I shuffled down the earth tone carpet to get away. It was playing cable news.
The volume of the news was then turned lower. I sat at a tab
le, halfway between the pictures and the exit. There were remote shots from Bosnia and Newt Gingrich. There was footage of a mouse with a human ear on its back.
The mouse story might have been two weeks old, but I was still hard pressed to turn away. Even without the grotesque accessory the red hairless mouse was grisly. It shivered and limped and its eyes were moist.
The anesthesiologist who’d done this breakthrough work hadn’t simply stuffed a human ear down some rodent’s hole. He’d twisted a polyester fabric into the shape of a human ear then went under the mouse’s skin and attached it to the body. The polyester ear had been dosed with human cartilage cells that survived like a parasite, living off of the mouse. As the polyester decayed the human cartilage cells grew to take its place until a human ear was generated where there had been an artificial one. After that the new human ear could be removed to be used in cosmetic surgery while the mouse lived on unhazed.
Why these games the reporter wanted to know as he interviewed the scientists. Build a better ear? A bigger one? Different colors? Would each have a corporate logo and bar code? Would this turn into another dumb fashion craze? The reporter was snide throughout the interview.
Then those researchers explained that some kids are born without ears; terrible car accidents occur that split faces to bits; a young boy lost his nose to a neighbor’s champing mutt; a girl fell from a fifth floor window and her ear was crushed. Because of this spiny mouse many people could be fixed.
I’d like to tell you about when my Uncle Isaac taught me how to organize Japanese honeysuckle in a basket. He really did. At the time I thought his bouquets made a Thanksgiving day table warmer than any fireplace could. I’m afraid that I’ve never let him go. Purgatory might be the place a soul goes until everyone stops needing him in any way. A second life that penalizes the well-known or loved.
Ecstatic Page 9
