Omnivores

by Lydia Millet

  She became her mother’s procuress, in charge of new acquisitions for the Betty shrine. She made calls about auctions, when Betty Grable’s toothbrush or hair curlers went on the market, ordered memorabilia by mail, investigated by modem new venues for the purchase of Betty Boop cels and Betty Friedan first editions. Betty gave voice to a series of repeated themes, whining plaintive solos that sounded polyphonic, like fugues, like symphonies, like bagpipe serenades. “Have you found the shower curtain yet? Have you found the special mailbox decorated with her name? The leaflet the girdle the oven mitt the Negro ceramic the doggy bone the apron the potpourri sachet the baby book the ashtray the urn the poster the tampon the grass from the grave?”

  At 3:30 on Sundays the bell rang for cocks, and Estée joined her father in the open air in order to observe the carnage. The number of cockfights grew as their audience diminished, until no one was present but Mr. Kraft and his daughter, whose attendance was mandatory. Over loudspeakers Bill blasted out “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” which he supplemented occasionally with a personal reading of “The White Man’s Burden.” True, he was not a man for poetry, he owned. But in former times Kipling, like him, had been a soldier, he claimed. He could also recite the first lines of “The Gettysburg Address.”

  The rooster death toll mounted until gaming birds had to be shipped in from Arizona. Estée’s tolerance for fowl was tested past the breaking point. She had no more condolences for their final thrashing minutes, a veteran of too many gravel-pocked gizzards hanging by a thread, too many curled snakes of intestines, gall bladders, and pancreases in the sand. Even the eggs, incubating under heat lamps, and the newly hatched round-eyed chicks in Easter fuzz struck no maternal chord. She had to look elsewhere for her compatriots—to the bust of Betty, to the moths, to an army of imaginary martyrs. The dead of past centuries, like stars, were peers, perennial and silent. She recorded them in her electronic diary. “They might not be alive right now, but the possibility of them is alive. It is the same as a memory. History includes every combination. I have already been here ten thousand times. I’m dead, I’m dead, I’m here.”

  In the evening, after Bill retired, she carried out her tasks in solitude till bedtime. He banned her from the library when he became suspicious of it; thus she had no access to information save those few necessary bulletins from the outside that pertained to Bettydom and moths. The modem was her only avenue: the Kraft household had entered the information age early, due to its spatial isolation. But she was fined for searching out irrelevant data. “Ten bucks for twelve minutes Esty?” he thundered, the bill shaking in his hand. “What were you doing? Were you downloading bullshit Esty? News, current events? I told you, everything you need is here. How do you know this stuff is real? Never trust what you read. It’s lies. They got whole books that are nothing but lies, they tried to fob ’em off on me when I was your age, Peter Pan and shit, a bunch of lies on purpose. I’m the only one that tells you what’s what. This comes out of your allowance.”

  Since she had none it was gentle punishment.

  Her first jailbreak effort was disorganized, pure impulse, and resulted in her capture five miles down the road by Bill, who zoomed after her in his goliath Cadillac, into the trunk of which he bundled her with no further ado. The second was better orchestrated but came to a sadder end when Estée, who had taken with her a lode of resalable jewelry, a wallet of crisp fifty-dollar bills straight from Betty’s chest of drawers, and a small Vuitton suitcase belonging to same, tried out hitchhiking and was hit upon by a Confederate trucker who told tales of the South before the Civil War. “When nigras was in their place,” he drawled. She asked him to let her off and in response he bundled her into the back of the cab, dressed her in a stinking, ratty ball gown, called her Scarlett, and licked her feet with Red Man in his mouth, his right hand down his pants. After that she was deposited at a McDonald’s and the trucker made a quick collect call to her father, who drove out and picked her up.

  With that her quota was made and she resigned herself to marking time.

  Her father’s guns had names. He took them down and polished them on Saturdays, all the while conversing with their infrared night scopes or matte-finish grips. “Now you be careful, Simon maboy, or I may just move you over there beside Jigaboo,” he would scold a semi-automatic, tsk-tsking and shaking his head. Estée would tiptoe off while he spoke, along through shining halls and archives where she expected to see, one dawn, the flocks of winged bodies shedding their pins, passing like ghosts through their glass sarcophagi, and flying in pale clouds of color to alight on her father, covering his face and cloaking his arms, binding his legs in a vast cocoon, and bearing him, wrapped in their homespun shroud, aloft to oblivion.

  Bill, by accident, let her watch a show on TV one day about people living in an apartment, leading lives that must be standard. The people said stupid things and laughter came from nowhere like a miracle. It was the laughter of crowds, like the men that used to come to bet on the cockfights, who laughed loudly when Bill said something or gave them all drinks. The actors did what they wanted, went to and fro, out their front door and in again. She saw that luck eluded her, though it lunged into the paths of charlatans, flapping its arms and smiling.

  Her birthdays passed unnoticed, unlike Betty’s, but she was glad to have the luxury of fading from sight. She had been exhausted since before she was born, her embryo, the far-flung molecules that constituted the idea of her, dragging themselves through fields of gravity with untold weariness. She looked for solidarity in the snippets of news she was permitted, items she heard when she borrowed a Sony Walkman radio from a temporary maid, when she bought a magazine from a pizza deliveryman by bartering a pearl barrette of Betty’s: routinely, other people too were forced through squalid tunnels of someone else’s devising. It was a maze run by perverts and idiots. There could be no protest: only, at long last, emergence into daylight.

  Waiting for the new world, she compromised whenever danger crept near. Capitulation was natural, but she feared it. Invasion robbed her of herself. Boundaries were fluid, water and air exchanged atoms, she was unsure where she ended and the others began.

  The moths, at first just one more pound of flesh off the lumbering mass of her father, horrible adjuncts to his tyranny, became objects of sympathy as soon as her scholarship saved her from having to eat them. In the face of her erudition, Bill no longer had recourse to scare tactics. She handled the lepidopterans gently, regretted piercing their corpses with her superfine pins. She attributed speech and character to them. “Excuse me,” a polyphemus would suggest, “be careful, I’m dead.” Handmaiden moths admonished her with sighs of defeat, decrepit viceroys talked about the kings and queens of exotic countries, a webworm told jokes. There was nothing else to do in her boredom. Silent dialogues with the dry carapaces consisted of connections made too quickly to be said, dismissed before fruition. Bill had another approach: he appropriated all things, exercised droit du seigneur even beyond the boundaries of human flesh. Inanimate and animate were one: black Rugers could be called homeboys, a weak .22 was named Flossy, there were assault rifles named Arnold and rifles christened Ronnie, dying cocks referred to as Minor and Major, Jewboy, Polack, and Spic. She watched him and made sure that her own lonely conversations didn’t reek of ownership. Bill’s was a cruel, one-sided alliance against helpless matter.

  The claustrophobia of her routine was mitigated only by the fact that Bill was more and more distracted, making forays by airplane to collect his own specimens. He brought them back alive, tens or hundreds beating their wings against the mesh of compartmentalized lodgings, mating and fighting through the grilles. He came home with cocoons, mourning cloak pupae suspended on a branch by their cremasters, a silken nest constructed by American tent caterpillars, over which in dark and furry pandemonium they writhed. He was the hunter, she was the taxidermist.

  Bill spent weekends in Mexico, warm summer weekends when the house was soft in his absence and the mai
ds moved more lightly in their duties, carrying through passageways muted laughter and snatches of Spanish. Fans whirred overhead, stirring curtains and the scraps of laundry hanging in the atrium on clotheslines. On the evening of the solstice Estée watched a sunset from the second floor, a wash of tropical orange and mauve falling to the horizon. She overlooked the landlocked structures of crematorium, refinery, and power plant, their ugly daylight hulks turned into silhouettes. In the black and the orange she felt like ascending, trumpets behind her, into the dome of the sky. She thought: Without him we weigh nothing, there’s no gravity at all, I can float. Let Betty lie in her bed, nothing can touch me. She projected onto the air in front of her the vision of her own rising body, her wings unfurling from her sides, the sails of boats, but then there was noise, shrieks. She turned and rushed to the stairs, where two maids were hovering at the bottom of the grand spiral staircase, their burdens of dirty towels and silverware abandoned on the floor.

  Betty was sitting astride the banister, chest pressed against its length. She pulled herself up bit by bit, bare, psoriatic scalp exposed, mouth smeared with lipstick. Her legs, thought to be atrophied from disuse, clutched together, toes curled, feet meeting through the interstice of rails; she made mewling noises, interspersed with grunts, which signaled she was not displeased by the friction between smooth wood and the angry grip of her pelvic muscles. She clambered in grubby desperation, pulling herself along by sheer arm-strength, her knuckles white.

  “Let me help you down, you’ll be hurt,” said Estée, reaching out to take her hand. Betty growled and brandished a salad fork, the dull tines of which she inserted forcefully into her left knee. The knee was bony, but still a limp tab of flesh gave purchase to the fork, which stuck out almost level with the ground as Betty continued her rutting. It took all three of them to pry her off, kicking, mumbling, and biting with toothless gums, and carry her up to her bed so that the knee could be attended by medicos.

  Mr. Kraft, on his return, was furious.

  “Would Betty Grable be caught doing that?” he was heard to explode in milady’s chamber, after firing the maids for their roles as witnesses. He told Estée he held her responsible. “But she can walk,” said Estée. “She can walk, she got there by herself!”

  Bill caught her by her shirt collar and shook her until he was tired. When he put her down she had a dislocated shoulder. “Your mother,” he shot out in parting, “is a sick sick sick sick woman. She can’t do one thing for herself.”

  Betty was incommunicado for the next week, but when Estée was summoned she came out, in wary stage whispers, with a different account of the events. “Didn’t you know?” she asked Estée. “That’s when I walk. I walk when I’m in estrus.” Estée hummed the Agnus Dei aloud, but Betty failed to notice. “It’s not perpetual with me,” said Betty. “The call of the wild, I feel it and I make good. For that I can rise from my fetters.”

  “Can we talk plainly just for once? Let’s can the crazy shit,” said Estée. “You’re either paraplegic or you’re not.”

  “The stupid deafness of the young,” said Mrs. Kraft, and shook her head with condescending mien. “My place is in this bed. Why can’t you see I have a kingdom here?”

  “Do you feel this?” said Estée, and felt around until she hit her mother’s knee beneath the quilt and comforter—the pocket of fat the salad fork had pierced, where there was still a scab. “Do you feel it or don’t you?”

  “Not a twinge,” said Betty.

  “This? This?” and blows were rained down on the thighs, the ankles, the feet.

  “Why nothing, absolutely nothing,” protested her mother, straight faced, appearing, in her casual indifference, to be genuine.

  It was an impasse. Lying in bed, Estée wondered if, when she closed her mother’s bedroom door behind her, there’d been an exhalation, grimace, and slow release of tears, the invalid rocking back and forth in her disheveled hills of linen, biting her lips and nursing, stroking with patient hands, the intricate patterns of pain.

  For Bill the stakes had risen. He hired construction workers and electricians, the foreman of whom, a potbellied, inky-armed simian, stood guard outside Betty’s door while the others built fortifications. A second door was built beyond the first, with a built-in alarm to be triggered by anyone emerging from the room who did not punch the proper code into a digital keypad. Access to the room was easy, but exit was by number only. Numerical knowledge alone would get you nowhere, though: the second door was sixteen inches thick, with a metal bar across its midriff. Brute strength, therefore, was also required. Bill put his daughter on a weights program, installing a Nautilus machine in the basement, so that her own exit would be possible and the diurnal visits to Betty could continue. “I’m not an irrational man,” he said. “A mother, a daughter, there’s a bond there. Blood is thicker than your polystyrene.” In the meantime, while she was building up her biceps, the foreman would heave the door open as she went out.

  Since the bettors had deserted him, Mr. Kraft went hunting on his own. Rubbing doe musk on his face, the urine of red foxes into his armpits, Mr. Kraft stalked elks and bucks and brought their heads home to hang on walls inside his trophy room. His supervisorial duties at the crematorium were slight: he delegated authority and his rounds were just for show. He watched to make sure that expertise prevailed, that there were no unseemly congresses between the employees and the deceased. On a day of inspiration he would roll up his sleeves and get down to work himself, to show the others how it should be done.

  Estée was advised that she would inherit the establishment: to her would go the long rows of incinerators and metal drawers, and before long Bill would train her in their ways. She would start at the bottom and work to the top. Bill would practice what he preached, would take the necessary dose of his own medicine, because he too—and the plan was in his will, in black and white—would be burned to a crisp in the furnaces. He assured clients of this for persuasion, and it did the trick. For a hard sell he would take out a sealed copy of the testament, always freshly updated, and proffer it for their perusal.

  When the second door outside Betty’s room was completed and fortified, and Estée was bench-pressing eighty, Bill decided to give up the roosters. “The grand finale,” he told Estée, “is gonna be a blowout. Company picnic, all the employees. IBM has ’em, other companies too. It’s good for morale. Serve ’em up some slop, give ’em a show. Give ’em a run for their money. Strictly speaking those fights are illegal, but I’m my own man. Those guys work for me, biting the hand that feeds if they gabbed about it. Your cockfights are some good clean family fun.”

  Barbecue pits were set up, striped circus tents, a sea of folding chairs. To each worker from the crematorium, with his family in tow, was assigned a laminated badge and tickets to redeem for plates of food. The herds were ushered in through a makeshift parking lot on the plot of bare ground adjoining Kraft land, and they entered warily, prodding their children in front of them. A long line straggled out from the solitary Port-a-John. The program consisted of spectacle first, food last. Cow and chicken pieces simmered on the grills and barbecue smoke floated over the cheap seats, exciting salivary glands while the audience waited obediently for the show. Estée sat beside her father in a royal booth, a balcony on the second floor from which a banner hung: Velut arbor ita ramus. Moth lingo. “The branch is sorta like the tree, is what it stands for,” explained Bill.

  Tape-recorded bugles sounded. The banner was raised to expose a huge screen. When the cocks were let out they were followed by the lens of a camera and the action was replicated, in extreme close-up, on the enormous screen. A gouged eyeball was presented in Technicolor, its gaping socket four feet high. Confused spectators turned in their seats and muttered to each other. For accompaniment Bill played “Pomp and Circumstance” from mammoth speakers set into the window frames at the rear of the house.

  Bill stood on the balcony, straight-backed and regal. “Now that’s a sport,” he crowed. “No
w that’s a damn good fight.” Wagers had not been made, but he professed love for the sport itself, the graceful ballet of evisceration, complete with pirouettes and pliés. When Estée shut her eyes and turned away from the screen, Bill pinched her slyly till she opened them again. Squawk, flap, feathers churned, the combatants were staggering maimed. Their strutting slowed, they flopped and heaved on the henpecked sand, they were limp and bleeding, one blind. Estée glanced over at the ringside seats, where frantic families played at censorship. Mothers covered the faces of their sons with flat hands, with peekaboo fingers, or scolded them until they looked away; fathers played patty-cake with female toddlers in desperate distraction measures. A few weak-stomached couples escaped to the parking lot, with surreptitious glances toward the balcony.

  When the roosters collapsed, feathers skittering across the chairs, into hair and pockets, a stray gizzard pecked into fragments on the dry earth, Bill saluted and the screen blipped to black. Spectators were slow to rise. Hamburgers and pepper steaks piled up on festive platters, but no guests gravitated toward the grills. Chatter was kept to a minimum. Bill descended from his platform and mingled with the hoi polloi, making ad hoc speeches on the lawn, hands clasped across his bursting abdomen. “How’d you like it, put some iron back in your pecker, John? Bob it was? Iron in your pecker, Rob? Fine animals, yessir. Fine animals. Got guts. We know that for sure!” Wanly smiling, his employees stood with restless arms slack at their sides, their children clinging to their legs, eyes fleeing nervously to right and left. Behind her father Estée hovered, watching the wave he made as he advanced through the throng, people pulling away.

  Soon they fled in droves. Their cars jammed the vacant lot and a rude cacophony of horns and raised voices drowned Bill’s speechifying. Estée stood motionless, soaking herself in the residue of the crowds, their normalcy, the relief afforded her by the evidence of their disgust. She lived in a nuthouse, it was confirmed, yet she was not insane. Stow away in a Volvo? It would never succeed.