After the picnic we drove up to the huge municipal swimming pool; ours alone for the afternoon. One useless white-nosed lifeguard stayed behind. The crowd of full-bellied men in swimming trunks would have knocked each other aside for the chance to rescue someone; it would make the day complete. I lay baking in the sun and imagined drowning, dropping into the water, lost; I am saved by firemen, raised up sputtering from the water by a host of hard, stout hands that pull me up and out and into the cathedral of sun in one motion.
The lifeguard with his poker face scans the crowd, ignoring the flirting girls. The air is filled with the bright sounds of splashing water, the muscular double bounce of the diving board, hollering boys, sing-song children’s cries. The firemen even drink beer on the swimming pool deck, a sin so great and marvelous I fall backward into the water with joy. My brother scrambles to the top of the high dive and blasts off into a cannon ball, tucked and spinning, hitting the hard blue water with a wanton splash.
I wash the sticky pitch and sauce away without a thought. The sweat is gone, the juices gone, dried up by the sun and rinsed away by the chlorine scent of the pool. We stay while the flat empty sky turns from chalk blue to ivory to black, our little voices carried off like vapor, until the men and women lean back to watch the stars appear, and I rest my own sleek head in the breast of water, and sink away.
YOU WILL THINK me disingenuous if I tell you now that I didn’t know what meat was. I couldn’t know, the shift from cow to beef is a shift so monumental and sudden that it’s hard to conceive. Perhaps small children cannot know this even when they are witnesses, and I was never a witness. I have never seen an animal slaughtered for meat. And if you had leaned over me when I was four or five or six, and suggested I eat an animal, I might have struck out with shock. I loved animals more, and more easily, than I loved my parents. I held my old dog, a dour, mongrel Lab, for hours in my room sometimes, telling him what I couldn’t tell; I was weak with him because he kept that secret. I loved horses, goats, deer, and the cattle chewing stupidly by the backroad fences; in my bedroom I kept lizards, snakes, chameleons, and a rat, and that was all my mother allowed. And it was my mother who one day told me where meat came from, as though it were the most natural thing.
I was about seven when I asked, that age when one begins to see the depth of betrayal in the world, that one can’t really count on things after all. And my mother answered, yes, the chicken we ate for dinner was the same as the chickens down the street I would cluck at through the fence, the ones with the thick white feathers that filled the breeze. That the peeled skin of the wieners Mr. Bryan gave me were loops of intestine washed clean, and their pulp a ground mash of bodies and bones. That the unbelievable objects had a name, a face, a history, the sweet and salty taste was the taste of blood, the same as my blood. It came all at once, like a blow, that pickled pigs feet was not a colorful metaphor but the very thing, that I had eaten a pig’s foot, and much more.
I lived on bare noodles and butter sandwiches for a long time after that. I wouldn’t allow her to spoon the sausage-flavored spaghetti sauce onto my plate. A few years later, it seemed less important, the resistance too hard. Perhaps I had had other surprises; it’s hard to remember whole sections of those years. I’ve gone years without eating meat as an adult, and years when I was too tired not to eat whatever I found in front of me. And lots of times when I craved flesh, when I broiled and roasted, made scratch gravy and giblet dressing like my mother’s or sat at my long dining table with a pot of steamed clams clattering against my fork, times when I longed for the irreducible flavors of meat, to be full of meat. And I will even now find myself knocked flat sometimes when I see meat in front of me and realize what I’m doing. It is a heart-felt knowledge—that word, like all those other words for sudden understanding—it is visceral, gut-level, organic. I hold the steak with a fork and begin to cut a slice and my stomach turns upside down; it feels as if I’m cutting my own flesh off and that I’ll choke to death upon it, like a prisoner fed his own treacherous, boiled, tongue.
One shock after another. Breasts and hips and hair, more of the pleasures and debts of flesh. I began to bleed several days a month, and when I sat to pee the smell rose up yeasty and rich. I found furtive darting touches: I found lips, saliva, tongues, sweat, fingers. My dog decayed from the inside out, and stank and stumbled and licked the mysterious lumps under his fur. I traced his ribs so near the surface the day before he died. Then my mother yellowed and thickened and wept and died and my father’s big arms hung loose and his black hair turned gray. He took his snorts out back in the garage. I knelt between the knees of a boy a little older than myself, and took his penis in my mouth, and smiled not with pleasure or appetite, but with triumph, behind the curtain of my swaying hair. I moved out to the fleshy edges of things, and finally I grew wings like angel wings, and I flew away.
The word butcher comes—a long way down the years—from the word buck. He-goat. They are set aside, butchers, into their own unions, their own neighborhoods, their own bars, set aside. I don’t know if it means anything that besides Mr. Bryan, my father’s closest friend was the undertaker; it may not mean anything more than the limits of a small town. But I think of the Butcher’s Mass, their special blessing, and the shehitah of the Jews. The shohet, the slaughterer, who must be pious and above reproach, must be as swift and painless as he can be in the killing, murmuring a benediction near the animal’s ear and following with a graceful stroke across the throat. I think of Mr. Bryan’s cleaver.
The Meat Market burned down on a hot day under a blank blue sky. It was apocalypse. It was a great fire.
I stood at the end of the alley and watched the flames spurt out the back door in gouty bursts. I heard a shriek of metal inside, and guessed the white metal cooler had turned red and ignited its own frost. The smoke billowed out the back door in a cottony black cloud, and I clapped my hands. Men in turnouts and boots rushed past and paid me no attention, and I could see my father paying out the hose from the pumper with great speed.
The meat burned; the water washed it clean. I learned later that Mr. Bryan had inherited the Meat Market from his father, and he’d secretly hated it all those years, going home at night with the stink of blood on his hands and hair. He is still jolly and thick-fingered, and he still comes by to see my father, who is tired and gruff and without cheer. They have been retired from fires, too old to go into the heat and pull things out. For myself, I know you can’t be cleansed until you know how dirty you really are. I still live far away, still seek salvation from my many sins.
Antioch Review, Summer 1994
My father was a firefighter—have I mentioned that? And his best friend was the butcher. One day I remembered how those things connected and how flesh is one of the problems every thoughtful child eventually must solve.
The Basement
GRANDMA STELLE IS A VERY SMALL WOMAN, WITH LAVENDER hair curled around her little wrinkled face like sunset clouds. She smells of face powder and cigarettes, and waves the smoke away from her with a lacquered cigarette holder. I have to sit next to Grandma at the annual family birthday dinner, the one with all my gray-haired aunts and uncles. I don’t know why she wants me there; she usually ignores me, but this time she suggests it.
The birthday dinner is held in the banquet room of a country steak house around a long rectangular table. The room is cold and echoes a little under the high beams of the ceiling. The walls are rough wood, decorated with horseshoes, checkered curtains, and mountain scenes in elaborate brass-colored frames. Sputtering white candles in nubbly red glasses sit on the plastic red-white checked tablecloth. The waitress, smelling of sweat, brushes against me with her ruffled apron and calls me hon. I play at making rivers of gravy on my mashed potatoes and kicking my brother under the table, caught up in the fragments of noise around me. We are eating fried chicken, and Grandma loves fried chicken.
She picks up a drumstick in her fingers, manicured red nails extended out away from the sticky
juice, and nibbles delicately through the crispy skin. Bite by bite she eats the dark meat, dribbling a little oily puddle onto her plate. With steady, tiny nips and pecks, her dentures clicking quietly, she turns the drumstick like a cob of corn until it’s clean. She looks away from me, brings her napkin up to dab at her red lips, smiles at someone I can’t see, and in one hidden motion slips the bone onto my plate. And reaches for another piece.
WE ARE GOING to Grandma’s house, as we often do, Mom, Dad, my brother, my sister, and me. It’s a long drive, but I don’t mind the car. I’m used to beauty on this drive, a splendid, moving beauty. First the volcanic plain, undulant with empty hills. By daylight they run for miles, without a single sharp edge in them. In moonlight their bare skins look like the hides of rhinoceroses, rough and warm. Lonely rock walls climb the hills and disappear without reason, and here and there I see a scatter of white beehives and the polka-dots of sheep. Then lush carpets of pine and fir, full and dark, with spiky teeth of enormous granite towers rising out of the trees, like dragon lands in unmapped places. In the middle is the mountain, immense and solitary, covered in snow, visible from every turn. I know stories about this mountain, how some people think superior beings live inside—tall, slender people in white robes who play extravagant, alien bells. Sometimes I see strange clouds around the peak.
We drive to Grandma’s house, through the plain, past the forests, up into the steep hills near the mountain, rolling down the highway in our tired station wagon, past the sheep, the beehives, the mountain, past the dark ribbon of the river, shallow, fast, and cold, and past the railroad and the trains.
Grandma’s house is perched halfway up a long, steep hill; the whole bright town steps block by block up a slope, facing the mountain. The houses are built on levels, first floors turning into attics, front porches hanging off in space, bedrooms opening into yards—a crooked cartoon town with fountains on every corner, making a ceaseless murmur, bubbling out water that looks like silver and tastes the way silver should taste. Mountain water, come all the way down and up again. Sometimes there is grass and roses, and sometimes there is snow, great heaps of snow shoved up against the houses, above the windowsills, packing them in. Always there is light.
Dad pulls off the highway into town and drives along the wide street until he comes to a small church made of darkened wood planks and embroidered with wisteria vines. At the church, he turns up, straight up, and I spin around in my seat to stare out the back window at what we are leaving behind, the receding church below, the lines of railroad tracks beside the winding river, the toothbrush silhouettes of trees beside the cockeyed houses, until we reach the top and turn the corner on Grandma’s street, and park.
Before we arrive Grandma lays down plastic runners on the carpet, marking the children’s required path, and covers the huge sofa and armchairs with crinkly plastic sheets. We march in single file like soldiers, through the living room, down a short hall, and into the shiny kitchen, where suddenly we are two stories high. Out the kitchen door are two flights of wooden stairs down to the sloping flower garden. Flying straight out from the tiny porch like a flying buttress over the sea is a long double clothesline on a pulley. The spotless, pale kitchen is split by sun, the light unencumbered by trees; below Grandma’s house is the slope of the town—the backyard neighbor’s house, and his neighbor below that, falling off into the sky, the forest, the plain, and far away, looking on, the white mountain. Whenever I think I’ve left it behind it is there again, closer than before, a cold luxury of light.
“Go on down to the basement, now,” someone says, and we go, and stay.
THE LONG FLIGHT of wooden basement stairs descends to the center of a clean cement floor. The main room is lit by a bare bulb with a silver pull chain that shakes the bulb, making the shadows flicker for a long time after someone turns it on. In dimness we come slowly down the stairs, gooseflesh on our arms, into the spotlight. The movement of the bulb illuminates our faces in new, strange ways; our faces become anyone’s faces, all faces, no longer familiar. We step off the last of the wooden stairs and someone in the kitchen notices we’ve left the basement door open and closes it, and the square of sun disappears.
From visit to visit, day to day, nothing changes. We explore, wearing t-shirts and sneakers, shorts in the summer and jeans in the winter, never warm enough. The walls are hidden by piles of boxes, cupboards, dressers, bureaus and trunks, a wicker pram, a big highboy decorated with faded paintings of geese and ducks, a dusty steel safe, and heavy things lost in shadow, submerging me. Grandma saves everything; she keeps it here, keeps the house, keeps it all.
I am more than two years younger than Bruce. Bruce and I are sturdy, competent children, and look so much alike, with our brown hair and green eyes, that we sometimes pass for twins. Bruce is scared of ants, and girls, in that order, something he only tells me. But he’s brave, too; I admire his bravery; he takes my father’s blows without tears. I know how much he hates Pop Warner football, too, but he never mentions quitting; we know that’s not an option. Susan, barely a year younger than me, isn’t brave at all. She’s squeamish, chubby, pale, and black-haired—she’s the one left out, the baby. At home, Bruce and I often tease Susan, with bugs and gory stories, or simply ditch her when we’ve had enough. In the basement at Grandma’s house the three of us form a band. We wander through the dim, cold rooms, round and round. “Don’t touch anything,” Grandma calls down from the kitchen, a little alarmed at our distant sounds, and we promise we won’t, and she closes the door again.
We try again and again to open the safe, flipping the dial through endless combinations, and pry unsuccessfully at the locks on the trunks. We trace the painted ducks with our fingers. Bruce, being brave, looks in the darkest corners and under the stairs, where we long ago hid the only toy we have here, a battered red scooter that belonged to my father when he was a boy. At the end of the stairs are two small rooms with a tiny bathroom between them, smelling of rust. Grandma calls them the guest rooms. Each has a musty twin bed with a chenille bedspread that feels damp under my hands. There are bookshelves in the rooms, old paperbacks and hardback novels with cover paintings of masted sailing ships blown by storm and gunmen atop rearing horses. On top of the bookshelf sits a pair of tiny bronze shoes with stiff, metallic laces tied in bows.
I go upstairs to ask my mother about them, and find her in the kitchen making coffee. She says they are my father’s baby shoes. Upstairs, the mantelpieces are covered with porcelain animals and rococo clocks, vases and picture frames, paperweights and china dolls. I follow my mother through the living room into the front bedroom, where Grandma is searching for something in her strange trousseau. The bedrooms are full of hampers, big jewelry boxes, cupboards, valises and hatboxes, piles of blankets, mountains of ironed and folded linen, closets stuffed with clothing, and a chiffonier, each drawer filled with nightgowns and bathrobes. In the den is a rolltop desk covered with files, a wardrobe filled with several sets of china packed in quilted covers, shelves packed with dark, bound books. In the main bedroom and both bathrooms, the long vanity tables are covered with lace runners and doilies, big pink boxes of powder, vials of cologne, hand lotion, hair spray, and creams. Nothing is ever threadbare or worn, and nothing is ever new. Nothing changes.
Grandma’s small bent body barely clears the pile of blankets beside the bed. She has red lips and yellow teeth, and her hands are swollen and thick; her fingers look like chicken bones, clutching a cigarette.
She turns and sees me standing there in the doorway, watching, and sighs, white smoke dribbling out of her nose. Her intense dark eyes are like the shiny eyes of teddy bears, which I hate. My stuffed animals have soft cloth eyes and long lashes. She stares at me a moment and says, “Go on down to the basement, now.” My mother doesn’t say a word, only looks at me and I go.
Downstairs, I sit on the bedspread a long time, holding the weight of the tiny shoes in my hands. How could a baby wear such heavy shoes? I wonder. They’ve made my fa
ther a weary man. He has trouble waking up in the morning, and often mother has to coax him out of bed, and he sleeps in his chair in the late afternoon before dinner, and he sleeps again after dinner, laid out flat on the sofa like a corpse while we sit in the front of him on the rug, watching television.
We are all quiet at once. The airless clutter slowly fills with sound—the lack of sound, the sound of someone making no noise, someone holding very still, subterranean, buried. I jump up and grab the scooter.
Round and round and round we ride, counting the laps, the short oval laps, counting one, two. “That’s four!”
round and round
Upstairs, the grown-ups are in the den. My grandmother is at the center, prim, elegant, smoking with a restrained grace. My grandfather leans back in his dark brown leather armchair, holding a glass of whiskey on ice. My father sits in the smaller chair. He is my grandmother’s only child, her destiny, her hope. He lives in a house his father built, next door to the house where he was raised. His hand shakes a little as he reaches for his drink. My mother sits nearby—nervous, homely, laughing at every little joke.
She is fond of a photograph from her college days—a dozen anonymous young people on the grass, one blond and one brunette cheerleader leaning on the football captain’s arm in the center of the picture, and my mother alone in her patch grinning, pleased to be so close. I know, because she told me when I asked, that she proposed to my father herself, tired of waiting, and when he refused she left him, but then there was the war, two years of worry and a few cryptic letters, and when he came back he was different, he was ready. In the wedding picture she looks happy, really happy, standing upright and proud in a fashionable dress, and he looks thin and dark and serious. A year later, Bruce was born, and in a photo taken shortly afterward, Dad holds my newborn brother in the crook of one big hand, and a can of beer in the other. He is already getting fat.
Violation Page 13
