by Noy Holland
After long months at sea without women, the father fell in love with a delicate, flinty girl who went by the name of Penelope. To watch her mouth as she spoke—he would give anything. She loved him briefly and they married. Her feet were always cold and her teeth ached and she ate nothing but tiramisu.
They watched a film one spring night about a speed skater stricken by a crippling disease. Exquisite, such ease, like something winged—the way she moved across the frozen expanse. It was as if you were watching music. Then the wreckage, the counted hours.
A beetle, caught in the lens of the projector, kept walking across the screen. It was a thousand times too big.
The marriage was over.
They were driving home, after. He wanted to know why.
A rabbit loped along the shoulder, keeping pace with their car. She couldn’t begin to say, but it was over. She had her bags out the door by morning, monumental in the sun.
He moved south for the heat with his third wife, mother of his three boys. For years the boys played Who Would Win? A tsetse fly or an elephant? An anchor or a hawser? Diabetes or a Colt .45?
The boy rowed her out in a dory on flat water at dusk and strangled her. The eyes were the proof, the marks on her neck, even after the lake had done its work. She had looked like her mother once, people remarked, as consolation.
The father grew calla lilies also, and drank water from the throat of the bloom. The blooms were extravagant, cousins to the lethal datura, succulent in the moon. Best by far were, to him, the bromeliads, slow to grow and scrappy, needing nothing but mist and sun.
SEARCH AND RESCUE
A climber fell to her death today from a chalky face in the Rockies. Rush hour, happy hour, dusk among the cities of the plains.
SHE LAY WITH her face to the sky. As though an offering. Patch of bright. A broken parakeet.
WHITE FLECK OF a jet descending. The picker-uppers—quick with the news—clairvoyant or just plain lucky.
THESE FREE CLIMBERS, the woman, that boy on El Cap—they must move with the mind of another. Free climb, free to fall. Don’t think of it.
DID SHE THINK, as she fell, with a buffalo’s mind—tumbling, no more, once a pishkun, driven into the sun?
NO MORE. HERE’S to you. It’s your birthday. We search and search and rescue. Feeble-sighted. Slow.
SO HOW, SO fast, do they find her—nature’s homely helpers? By the eye, is it, by the nose?
BY THE LOOK of the balding white man, the Lakota supposed: scavengers. By the smell. Feeding on the rotting meat of their sweet-faced cows.
NO THUMBS—WHAT THE African once thought of the white man. Imagine that this is so. Had been so. What changes? Colt .45, etcetera.
BY THE TIME the kind boys from search and rescue arrive, the woman is eaten clean. Sounds a little grim, but really? Why not let them carry you, flesh of your flesh, brainy heads, into the indigo heavens?
TONGUE OF BRIGHT foam is the stream. Lift of the wind, a slow ascent. To you, my life. Splendid.
PACHYSANDRA
Rose called.
I said, “Hello, Rose.”
“You sound funny.”
I was lying on my back with my legs in the air trying to make a baby with my mister. I had his seed in there. My poor egg had slipped out to meet it.
“Can’t you come out here and help me?” Rose pleaded.
She had bunions. She had busted her elbow stirring oatmeal.
I was busy. My mucous was of a quality. I had just the least clutch of eggs left out of the millions I got when I started.
“Get off,” my man said, “and I’ll do it again.”
“Is that Tonto I hear?”
Tonto snorted. “She’ll talk all day if you let her.”
“Just send me the obituaries,” Rose said. “I want to see if I’m in them.”
COME MARCH, ROSE called again. I wasn’t doing anything. I was solo again.
“I broke my back,” she said, “reaching for butter.”
“For butter?” I said. “That’s ridiculous.”
“I bought you a ticket. I’ll send Rudy.”
Rudy was the help. He was wicked. His eyebrows made a lovely shade for his eyes. He was Hopi and his hair shone like butter.
I said I’d come. I flew across. Landed in the land of enchantment. I’d been a girl here. Been in quicksand in the big muddy river. I scrambled out.
No Rudy.
But who after all can blame Rudy after all we’ve done?
I caught a taxi and went straight to the hospital where I had come out into this world.
“WHO WAS THERE,” I asked, “anyone?”
“Gotcha. Big Ed and Snicker Bar were somewhere in the back.”
Gotcha looked up weepily whenever Rose said his name. He worked to sit up and tipped over. Rose fed him off her fork at the table.
“I like butter,” Rose told me. “Is it so much to ask?”
Her back was cracked in three places. She broke like pencils. She had a hump you could set your mug on.
The doctor said, “Doll, if you can get her to walk. Get her at least to sit and eat.”
“Eat?” I asked him. “She will vomit in her plate.”
I hated to so much as touch her.
Rose broke a finger dialing the telephone. She snapped the neck of her femur off stepping up the step from the driveway.
March, and the jonquils were blooming. I had brought a few stalks to the hospital in a peanut butter jar. A bee buzzed in the cup. It made me sleepy.
“Are you sleeping?” I asked her.
“I will be.”
I WENT HOME while Rose slept to scrub up the house. I’d find a nurse and sort through the cupboards—the blackened fruit and applesauce, the chewed-open boxes of Jello. Rose had cans from the 1940s. Sacks of sugar hard as adobe. She had a hip-high stack of aluminum pans the city delivered her meals to her in.
I’d move the bed. She needed a hospital bed, cranks and pulleys. The handsome doctor said so.
Under her bed I found droppings and newspaper, stuffing tugged from the mattress, insulation, sponge. I found the ossified stools of her dachshunds, still ruddy from Kibbles ’n Bits. The cretins snapped at me while I worked: Big Ed, Gotcha, Snicker. They pissed on my lumpy pillow. They ate every bristle of my toothbrush and threw it up in my shoes.
“You could take them to the vet,” Rudy suggested, “and ask if they are in any pain.”
“And if they are?” I asked.
I COULDN’T DO it.
Rose had saved those dogs from the gas box. They had no manners. You couldn’t blame them.
Gotcha had a tumor in his bowels. He puffed up and walked his belly raw on the carpet. Snicker was missing an eyeball. Something ate Big Ed’s hair.
They chased mice and never caught them. Cockroaches feasted at their food bowls.
Candles went limp in their holders, helpless in the heat of the desert. Every doorknob was choked with elastics Rose had saved from the paper for years.
I ROLLED MY sleeves to my elbows, afraid to have something run up them.
I slept blasted on the beach with Tonto one lovely week in Panama City. A ghost crab scooted up my pants leg. A fiddler crab sat in my eye socket.
“You made it up,” Rose said, “but I like it.”
The handsome doctor thought Rose was my mother.
“My mother is already dead,” I told him. But then I wished I hadn’t.
I WISHED I hadn’t come. I wished I had Tonto to work with still, slow in a sunny bed. My time was passing.
Rose said, “Whose isn’t?”
I held her sweet hand and looked out. A jogger streaked past the hospital window. He weaved between cars in the parking lot, sweating and showing off. He looked like Rudy.
He was Rudy. Rudy was supposed to be high on the Spanish tiles patching leaks with cut-in-half coffee cans. Half Rose’s roof was cans. Rudy sprayed them a desert amber, glopped them in with a fat seam of
caulk.
“Let me out,” Rose pleaded, “before he knocks the house down.”
She reached for the handsome doctor, her eyes sparkling in her head. She was jacked up. They call that comfortable.
That house was coming down around her ears. For forty years the roof had leaked. The walls shed stucco like continents the English ivy had dug its fingers down in.
Everything Rose knew needed helping—Rudy and the gas-box dachshunds, her defaced and stricken elm. She knew a one-legged boy she took cookies. She married a man who was dying and spent her honeymoon in the hospital. A year later they were picking out coffins. The Big Pink. The Satin Amplitude.
“If you find me with my throat slit,” Rose told me, “look for Rudy.”
I LOOKED FOR Rudy. Rudy was turning cartwheels in the street.
I was still inside cleaning. I cleaned up the oatmeal, the butter. Everything felt buttered. The soap grew mold, a green velour. The chairs wicked piss from the carpet.
I thought of hanta, death by mouse, amazing what can kill you.
Rudy stayed away.
I bathed the dogs and they bit me. I set the organ to play “Moon River” and scrubbed my knuckles bloody.
THE HANDSOME DOCTOR let Rose go. I got her squared away in her rented bed with the hand crank and the pulleys. Her house was clean but she didn’t like it.
She liked yard sales. Topiary and porcelain, other people’s pictures. She liked chubbies in bikinis and butterflies climbing the garden fence. Reminders, little helpful hints, tea tags and winged cookies: Next time order the shrimp.
She liked bacon fat and Jimmy Dean sausage.
She liked her bed I took apart.
“Rudy helped me,” I lied.
Rose said, “Stonewall Jackson slept in that bed,” she swung her feet until her slippers dropped off, “before he burned Atlanta.”
WATCH IT, GIRL, those luscious
mounds of ice cream topped with cherry
Can be the source of extra
pounds that people note . . . just barely.
“I LIKE YOUR mouth,” Rudy said. “I like your buttocks.”
He brought his women to the pachysandra that grew beneath Rose’s window. I watched them in the streetlight doing what people do.
I tried missing old Tonto but couldn’t.
“There’s something about you,” I told Rudy.
“Maybe this?” he said, and showed me his package.
“SOW YOUR WILD oats on Saturday night, hope the crop fails on Sunday,” Rose liked to say.
When there was moaning in the pachysandra, Rose said, “Open the blind and let’s see.”
Rudy waved at us. He was kneeling in leaves.
He was killing her with it, how it sounded.
Big Ed ran laps around the bed legs. His stool hung from the hole by a hair.
Something was leaking from Gotcha.
A pair of roaches chased Snicker from her food bowl until she was too spooked to eat. Rose fed her in bed, the TV blaring, her eyecup buzzing with flies.
Rose kept TVs on in every room of the house—half the day, all night. I woke to car chases, shootouts, Rose thrashing in her bed. We kept her jacked up. We lost track of the bones she was breaking.
We lost Gotcha, who had leaked for too long. There was a big rusting freezer in the basement stuffed with meatloaf and frozen lettuce. Citymeals for a dollar. Individual portions.
Rose had us put Gotcha in with them. He would keep.
“Throw the lot in there and bury me with them.”
RUDY CARRIED GOTCHA down.
“Psst,” Rose said. I can think of no other way to spell it. “Hopi eat dogs,” she whispered. “They dance with chickens. They dress up like ravens and snakes.”
Rudy carried Rose to her Naugahyde chair. He smelled like Gotcha. She fell out of it.
Rudy said, “You meant to.”
Rose spat at him. “I’m starved. Give me a leg to gnaw on.”
SHE QUIT EATING. She didn’t care if she lived. They gave her something for it.
We gave Rose a siren flashlight for her to call us to her bed, to her chair. Wao wao wao, it went.
She motioned for me to bend near.
“Check on Gotcha,” she said.
“Gotcha’s dead,” I said.
“Exactly.”
He was there but an ear was missing. I turned him over to hide the deed.
I TOOK TO Rudy.
My next little egg went out. I picked life, was my way of thinking, despite the blah blah blah.
Rose said, “If at first you don’t succeed, keep on sucking ’til you do suck seed.”
Wao wao wao, the siren went, but we kept to the pachysandra, doing what people do.
Rudy had me knocked up come April.
Come April, Snicker died of poison. We found her in back in the sunshine, blown up and leaking foam.
“Get out,” Rose said.
I had nowhere to go.
She said, “I’ll tell you a cute little story.”
She made Rudy sweep the flagstone where deer mice pissed and lived.
“There once was a little Indian,” Rose began.
Drool crept from her mouth to her ear. She had hairs in her ears. I offered to pluck them. I plucked her whiskers. We drank Pabst from cans and watched the window where Rudy lay the pachysandra down.
NO RUDY.
No Rudy in that house long enough it seemed he must be gone.
I took a photo of the last place I saw him—his buttered hair, his silken tongue. He took Gotcha, bundled up like a baby, already starting to thaw.
Rose said, “I never did have any babies. I never had brothers or sisters. My neighbors have been awful good to me. We make our choices,” she said, and drifted to sleep, and waked and said, “and then we lie in them.”
I LAY IN bed and felt the baby kick me, mine and Rudy’s. Rudy was wicked. That didn’t matter to me.
I couldn’t say if the baby mattered to me or if it was just something that happened, like breaking the neck of your femur off on your way to driver’s safety.
I caught myself in the mirror, pulled my face toward my ears. That was better. I didn’t look hard.
I touched myself and kept going. I went until the bees bunched up in my lungs, thinking, Rudy, Rudy—slow until they lit out through me, how lovely like they used to do.
IN THE MORNING I went to the hospital and had them scrape what Rudy gave me out.
I would not have been much of a mother. I went for shitbags. I liked to sleep late. I liked people who could work their own spoon.
I stopped in for caustic green chili. It made my head sweat. It made me cry until I couldn’t stop crying. I flirted with the waiter and stiffed him, getting back at Rudy.
ROSE WAS SINGING when I walked in.
Won’t you go on, Mule,
don’t you roll those eyes,
you can change a fool
but a doggone mule
is a mule until he dies.
I pried the window open. Something had shit in the grass. Maybe elephant.
The pachysandra was still matted down. I felt it for heat like a campfire the cowboys have ridden out from.
THE TELEPHONE RANG. It hadn’t done that before.
“Is Spanky there? Hey, Spanky.”
“Spanky?” I said. “Rudy?”
“Git back here, little bunny.”
It wasn’t Rudy. It was those characters down the street.
That night I tied a rag around Big Ed’s jaw to stop him yapping when I went out. Even outside, I heard Rose sleeping.
It was just me and Rose and Big Ed now.
I walked to Spanky’s. It was right down the street.
There were hookers outside in Barbie clothes. Strippers inside in sequins. They danced in cages. They lunged at the bars.
I ate French fries. I drank a nice cold Coke.
“YOU KNOW I love you forev
er. But if you pour me a Coca-Cola I’ll love you forevermore.”
Pot roast, frozen lettuce, prunes.
Chicken leg, frozen lettuce, peaches.
Meatloaf, frozen lettuce, pudding.
Pot roast, frozen lettuce, prunes.
NO RUDY.
“I could take you out.”
“Only way I’m going out is in a coffin.”
Rose quit singing. She ate a grape here and there if I skinned it.
She quit letting me pluck her chin hairs out or work at her ingrown toes. Her siren weakened. Her organ quit.
She quit sitting in the back with Big Ed. Come May, Big Ed was finished, dead of having lived.
I STARTED IN the far room pulling plugs on TV sets, the murders and the heartbreak, the vim and vigor of the news. The sound closed around Rose. She never noticed. I pulled the last prong and her room went oooo.
Now it was me and Rose and long desert days and three square meals she wouldn’t touch anymore.
The siren gave out altogether and Rose had to call me by name. She forgot my name. She forgot I was there.
When she saw me she said, “Who is it?”
I went to her attic and tried on dresses—much too short, far too wide.
“What do you want to do today, Rose?”
“Swing on the bars?” she said, her hands hooks beside her chin.
Her room filled up with butterflies. She was suffocating in them.
RUDY SENT A photograph.
His chest was heaving from the dance he had danced. His face was shining, and the brave lovely wings of his back.
“We need air,” I told Rose, “a little sunshine.”
Every day was sunshine.
I suggested, “A little Tang party and tea.”
I brought Lorna Doones to the front stoop where the rest of a world went by. The dying elm was spray-painted “DISCO.” A punk pinched a loaf in the grass. I thought I had never seen it but I’d seen it a hundred times.
Rose struggled along behind her walker to the lip of the front stoop. I tossed her walker in the pachysandra. I hooked my arms behind her neck and knees and swung her softly up.
My bride, I thought, my balding doll. But everything in her was breaking.
“Oh,” Rose moaned. And then, “Move it.”
We lay on our backs breathing. The grass was pokey and dry beneath us. The leaves did their thing in the sun.
