“There now,” Miss Lewis said crisply. “He’s perfectly all right. Better not lean on that boulder. It’s a little unsteady, I noticed the other day.”
“It’s time,” Mrs. Wakefield said, “time for Billy’s orange juice.”
“It won’t hurt to wait a bit. But I’ll bring him up if you want me to.”
“It’s dangerous down there,” Mrs. Wakefield said vaguely. “The tide, rocks—really dangerous.”
“I’ll fetch him.”
“Yes.”
Miss Lewis’s retreating footsteps beat in her ears like the pulse of the earth.
Below the cliff, the father and the son. Their voices rose straight as the steam, but already dissolved before they reached her, already turned into something else in the cycle of change.
“See, Billy? It’s fine, isn’t it? Dip your feet in, feel it. Isn’t it nice? Take my hand. There, now. You must try, Billy, try very hard. You’re getting to be a big boy.”
He was a big boy, but he hung back, burying his face against his father’s ribs.
“We’ll surprise your mother, won’t we? She’ll be flabbergasted when she finds out you can paddle and float around and perhaps even swim eventually. Wouldn’t you like to surprise her, Billy?”
Yes, yes, but there must be other ways besides the cold and terrifying water. To hide and be found, to have a bowel movement at the right time, to clean his plate, to build a tower of blocks—other ways, soft as hair, warm as cocoa.
“You must try, Billy.”
Yes, yes. He moved his head up and down against his father’s ribs, willing to try, willing to surprise, yes. But the waves were animals with cold wet mouths.
John and Billy, turned to gold in the sun, advancing into a molten blue mirror that absorbed their golden skin inch by inch.
Wait, Mrs. Wakefield thought, wait for me. We will all take a walk in the sea, my garden. We must stay together, the three of us. Wait for me.
Into the garden, the mirror, the cold wet mouth.
“That’s my big boy. Now isn’t it fun? It’s like having a bath.”
Yes, but the tub was enormous as eternity, the water icy as death, and Miss Lewis was not there with her steamy hair and soft, soapy hands. Miss Lewis, Miss Lewis!
“You can splash all you want to. See? You splash me first, Billy. Go ahead, splash me, Billy.”
I cannot.
He pushed away, butting his father with his head, goatlike. He tried to run but the water was heavy, it dragged at his legs and pulled them down, it tossed him into a ball and chased the ball shoreward.
In the safe sand he uncurled like a giant worm, slow and silent, while Mrs. Wakefield’s scream ricocheted against the cliff wall.
Miss Lewis picked him up, pressing his dripping head against her starched chambray bosom, soothing him not with words but with low crooning sounds that she had learned a thousand years ago and had never quite forgotten.
Staggering under his weight she carried him up to the drier sand already hot with sun. He liked to be carried, to swing in time to Miss Lewis’ body and feel her warm quick breathing against his neck. He cried when she put him down, and lifted his arms to her like a baby. But in a moment he forgot what he was crying about. The tears dried on his cheeks leaving freckles of salt.
With Miss Lewis beside him he felt safe again, and pleasantly excited at her funny noises and at the sight of his mother scrambling down the face of the cliff calling his name. It was better than hiding and being found.
He felt quite safe again, yes, but he wasn’t ready yet to look at his father coming out of the jaws of the sea.
“He’s all right,” Miss Lewis said. “He’s a big brave boy. And he fooled us, didn’t you, Billy? We didn’t have any idea you were down here, swimming. My goodness!”
He had surprised them, after all. Miss Lewis trembled with surprise, and his mother was paper-white; and even his father, who had arranged the surprise, seemed quite taken in by it.
Everything dripped; his own hair, his father’s swimming trunks, his mother’s eyes. So much dripping, he urinated in the soft sand.
“Let’s go put on some dry clothes,” Miss Lewis said. “Come along.”
He lifted his arms to be carried, but she said, half-laughing: “You’re too heavy, Billy-my-boy. You weigh a ton.”
“I’ll carry him up,” Mr. Wakefield said.
Billy shook his head, grabbing at Miss Lewis’ skirt so that she almost fell. She helped him to his feet and they went off together, hand in hand, with Miss Lewis talking a blue streak.
Mr. Wakefield looked after them, defeated, shivering, feeling on his back and shoulders not the heat of the sun but the cold eyes of conscience.
“He let go so suddenly,” he said at last. “He made a push and knocked my breath out before I had any idea what he was going to do.”
“You shouldn’t have brought him down here at all.”
“He isn’t hurt.”
“He might have been. I’m not blaming you, I’m not. I was watching. I know how it happened. John . . .” Billy and Miss Lewis were at the stone steps now, and she was showing him how to hold on to the guard rail. From a distance they both looked very tiny and vulnerable, breakable dolls. “John, don’t ever bring him down here again, promise.”
“I thought he’d enjoy it. I thought—well, he seemed so much better, almost—almost normal. I thought you’d be—pleasantly surprised if I . . .” His voice dissolved at the base of his throat, and crystallized further down, thin and brittle as glass. “Miss Lewis said he showed a definite improvement. I wanted to—well, to enlarge his experience. I—expected too much of him, I guess. I’m sorry.”
“You must promise.”
“Yes. Yes, I promise.”
He felt sometimes that he lived within walls of promises and couldn’t breathe; a prison of promises. Promise me that you will never send him away to a school or anything. Promise that we will keep him with us always, away from other people, just with us so he’ll never know he’s different. Promise to make it up to him that he was ever born. Promise patience, faith, restraint, love, charity, strength, pity. Promise promises.
He turned to look at her and he saw that she was suffering more than he was. It was out of her womb that Billy had come, her son, her freak. Freak freak. He stabbed the word viciously into his heart, and pulled it out, and stabbed it in again until it was softened by his own blood.
It was no one’s fault, not his or hers or some obscure great-great-grandfather’s. It was an act of God. No blame could be apportioned, no justice expected.
“John.” Her hand was warm on his arm. “John, sometimes you look as if you hate me.”
“Hate you? I could never hate you, darling.”
It was true. He would always love her, it was the only promise in the wall that couldn’t be pried loose, or fall out from decay.
A gull cried, childlike, the sun was sharp as a devil’s eye. From its ledge the black flash of a cormorant swooped out to sea.
10
They found the starfish clinging to the underside of a rock in the shallow water. Mrs. Wakefield saw it first, just the tip of one of its arms uncovered by the ebb of a wave, but she said:
“You’d better investigate that rock, Jessie. I don’t seem to be able to find a thing.”
And so Jessie discovered the starfish for herself, and it was, from the first, her very own. It wasn’t as sweet and delicate as the baby one but it was far more sumptuous. Its five arms were fat and strong, violet-blue studded with silver beads. It was as big as Mr. Roma had promised it would be—as big as her head—and it clutched the palms of her hands powerfully, and curled one of its arms in dignified outrage.
“Look-it,” she cried in ecstasy. “He thinks I’m a rock, look-it!” And indeed, she felt like a rock, a fortress; a protector of all starfish; their fr
iend, Jessie Banner.
“He can’t really think at all,” Mrs. Wakefield said.
“A little bit.”
“No, not even a little bit.”
“But he must!” It was monstrous that he could be so alive and beautiful and not be able to think, to know he was with a friend.
“He can’t feel either. At least, very little.”
“He can feel me. He is doing it right now.”
“Yes, but he can’t feel the way we do. If we cut off his arm he wouldn’t mind very much. He’d just go ahead and grow another one.”
“He can feel me,” Jessie repeated stubbornly.
“He won’t feel it when he dies, that is what I meant.” Mrs. Wakefield took the starfish and laid it flat on her palm, straightening out the curled arm. “Starfish aren’t like us, Jessie. They are hardly alive at all. They can’t even make a noise.”
“Does he have to die?”
“We all do, some time.”
“Not little girls, though?” Jessie said. Old people, yes, and very old dogs with no teeth; house flies, and bees that had lost their stingers, people who caught dreadful germs by not washing their hands before meals, fish on a hook, and elderly horses gone blind and deaf, and even little boys who couldn’t swim. But not little girls.
“Not little girls,” Mrs. Wakefield said.
“Naturally not.” She’d known it all the time, of course, but it was pleasant to be reassured. She said soberly, “If he’s going to die I don’t think I’ll name him. I have about a hundred names ready, though. I’ve got to save some of them for when I have children and puppies and kittens and rabbits, but I could spare one.”
“No, we won’t name him.”
The starfish, anonymous, mute, without thought or feeling, was carried up to the kitchen where Mrs. Wakefield filled Carmelita’s spaghetti boiling pan with water and put it on the stove.
The starfish sat quietly on a newspaper on the floor with one arm raised tentatively like a shy child in a classroom.
Standing on a stool beside the stove Jessie looked down into the water and watched it get warmer and warmer, until it began to swirl in the pan and the steam rose, dampening her brows and lashes, giving her a moist, beady little mustache.
The steam didn’t smell exactly like steam. Even though the starfish hadn’t yet touched the water the steam that curled through the kitchen was subtly tainted with the smell of fish.
Carmelita noticed it, too.
“Such stinks,” she said, holding her nose and indicating her great anguish. “All over the house it’ll be stinks, stinks.”
“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wakefield replied in Spanish. “It won’t smell at all. I’ve done this many times.”
“Already I smell it.”
“It’s your imagination.”
“My casserole and now my spaghetti pan. Pretty soon I’ll have nothing left, and we’ll be living on baked potatoes. Nothing but baked potatoes, morning, noon and night.”
“I like baked potatoes,” Mrs. Wakefield said calmly. “They’re very nourishing.”
“She talks funny,” Jessie observed. “Why doesn’t she talk like us?”
“She could if she wanted to, but she’s a very obstinate woman.”
Carmelita denied this by stamping to the door. She stood on the porch sniffing the fresh air with exaggerated relief.
Jessie climbed down from the stool, somewhat dizzy from watching the lively water. She wasn’t sure why the water was being heated; she thought it might be to give the starfish a good warm bath to clean him off.
“It’s warm enough now for a bath.”
“It has to be boiling.”
“Boiling is very hot,” Jessie said anxiously. “He’ll burn.”
“He can’t feel, Jessie, I told you that. And he has to be—fixed, if you’re going to keep him. We must boil him for a few minutes and then let him dry out in the sun. After that we’ll paint him with formaldehyde and sun him a bit more and then he’ll be all ready, very light and strong, yours for keeps.”
“But he won’t be able to move.”
“No, of course not.”
Hers for keeps, but dead.
The steam rose, a shroud of chiffon, smelling of death.
Mrs. Wakefield bent over the starfish and pressed its upraised arm flat against the newspaper.
“We want him to be a perfect star,” she said. “It will be too late to straighten him out after he’s boiled.”
Jessie averted her eyes. She felt somehow that it was too late to straighten anything out, ever again. She had been trapped by her own words: I want a starfish. Between the wanting and the getting was this room, this steaming witch’s cauldron and the witch herself.
Mrs. Wakefield picked the starfish up from the newspaper and slid it off the palm of her hand into the boiling water.
Jessie held her breath tight and hard in her chest, expecting a cry, a protest. At this moment of death the mute might cry out in horror, the insentient suffer, the thoughtless understand.
The starfish sank quietly into the bubbles, to be Jessie’s for keeps. There was no cry; only a sudden shocking change of color. The blue arms burst into a new vivid orange-red life, the color of the setting sun.
“Ten minutes,” said the witch, “will be enough.”
Jessie let out her breath and it left a hollow of pain inside her. She felt quite hollow all over, not a rock or a fortress any longer, but something brittle, filled with fish-scented steam.
“I think I’ll go outside,” she said, rather coldly.
On the porch steps she sat close beside Carmelita who was warm and brown as a baked apple.
“Esstinks,” said Carmelita.
Carmelita’s skin smelled ripe. The flies sat on her forehead and her arms and her legs, so that she was dotted with extra little black eyes that could see everything.
“Baby,” she said, sighing, patting Jessie’s yellow hair. “Hi, baby.”
She had wanted many children, all kinds and colors, pale blonde children and redheaded ones with freckles, and dark striking children, but the Blessed Virgin had refused.
She brushed away her extra eyes and fanned herself with her apron.
“You’re nice and fat,” Jessie said gravely.
Carmelita laughed, throwing back her head and showing all her teeth, white as chalk. Jessie laughed too, until the tears came in silver worms tickling her cheeks.
For the rest of the morning she laughed quite desperately and suddenly at every little thing. Her father, sitting on the patio with his legs angled, was a hilarious frogman. Luisa, with her hair upswept, had a pointed head. Mr. Roma was a forbidden word, a nigger. Yes, a nigger, nigger, nigger. Everything was a scream.
Except her mother.
“What’s got into you?” Evelyn asked when Jessie flung herself half-exhausted, on the davenport.
“Nothing.”
“You haven t done anything naughty, have you?”
Jessie’s face worked; she wanted to tell her mother about the starfish but she couldn’t get a grasp on the right words, they slipped away, fishlike, as soon as she caught one. I am guilty. I have murdered.
“I hope we’re not going to have any scene,” her mother said in a warning tone. “Especially after Mrs. Wakefield went to all that trouble to fix the nice starfish for you.”
Evelyn put out her hand, as if coaxing her to be less difficult to understand, but Jessie drew away, shaking with inverted tears. Mrs. Wakefield was a redheaded witch, and Mr. Roma was a nigger.
“Stop that, Jessie.”
“Everything is—so—so-f-unny.”
“I don’t like it when you make those forced-laugh sounds. Now calm down and behave yourself. Why are you sticking around the house like this anyway? Why don’t you go outside and play?”
It was
simply excruciating to picture herself stuck to the house with glue. She ached all over with laughing and her eyes were so hot and puffed they seemed ready to burst.
The laughter was a cry for help, but no help came.
“If you keep this up you’ll go straight to your room,” Evelyn said. “And stay there. Do you hear?”
She heard. She ran out of the house leaving a trail of hiccups that hung in the air like bubbles.
Sitting in the sun on a packing case was the starfish, but she didn’t look at it. She kept her head turned away and walked past the starfish sideways like a crab.
Starfish, old men, stingerless bees and little boys who couldn’t swim. But not little girls.
Not little girls. The words were a stone fence behind which she would live forever, always young. But the moment had come when she was big enough to see over the fence, and what she saw was, yes, little girls, too.
She saw Jessie Banner in a rolling field of little girls. They lay like flowers dropped into the grass. Drowned, frozen, swatted like flies, slapped like mosquitoes, burned, smothered, broken, left to dry in the sun. She saw herself, Jessie, walking into the field of little girls to share death.
But the vision beyond the fence was too massive; it fell of its own weight into the bottom of her mind like a stone in a pond, and the only clues to its existence were the molecules it displaced, the bubbles of laughter, the hiccups, the swollen eyes.
“Hold your breath and swallow nine times,” Luisa said, dreaming on the swing in the pepper tree.
“What will I swallow?”
“Spit,” Luisa said. “Imagine, crying, at your age.”
“I wasn’t crying. I was laughing.”
It was very difficult to get enough spit for nine swallows but she did it by pretending she was sucking a lemon.
The hiccups went away and the world was suddenly and beautifully ordinary again. The rope of the swing scraped on bark, Luisa was patronizing and cross, the hummingbirds darted crazily in and out of the eucalyptus leaves and flung themselves at Jessie’s head. Spiders took a stroll in the sun and ants marched up and down the pepper tree.
Everything was alive, everything moved and felt and thought. Jessie’s pulse beat with love for this ordinary world. She loved even Luisa.
The Cannibal Heart Page 8
