Arthur nodded. “You haven’t come to terms with her illness?”
“Terms. What terms? Yes. You’re right. One day, no doubt, I’ll wake up and be fine with it, but now... She’s always been so distracted that sometimes I think she’s just forgotten how to function. One day she’ll remember how to behave and come back. She’ll be very apologetic.”
There was a comforting silence.
“Do you see her much?” he asked.
I shook my head. “What about your family?”
Arthur put a cigarette into my mouth and lit it. He was silent for a moment. He leaned back into his chair and I took a long drag from the cigarette. He pushed the ashtray across the table. “My father died,” he said finally, “when I was very small. He was a good man.”
“That must make you sad.”
“When I remember,” Arthur rubbed his temples. “But sometimes I think it’s all right. I haven’t come to much.”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“At six years old, I was a tremendous success.”
I pictured the little Arthur looking much like the Little Prince at the edge of the stage in his high-collared coat and knee boots. He was holding his violin and out past the orchestra a sea of applauding hands created a deafening sound, as if a thousand birds had all taken wing. Arthur closed his eyes tight willing all memories away. “Do you know any stories with happy endings?”
“No, not really. Fairy tales.”
“Know any fairy tales?”
“Sure,” I said. “How about Hansel and Gretel?”
“I know that one.”
“I could tell you another.”
“No. Let’s hear Hansel and Gretel. I always liked it.”
Outside the house the trees were bowing rhythmically. The wind rose shrieking and then silenced itself. The doors shook in their casings, as if a hundred angry spirits were demanding to be let in.
Arthur knew the story, so I had to innovate here and there. I tried to convince him that the cottage in the story was actually the house we were in. “Try to imagine this place, only with fewer appliances and more period detail.”
“What period?” asked Arthur.
“Carpenter gothic,” I said. “Try to imagine that you are Hansel. There nestled between the aged trees and dripping vines is a tiny house, barely a plaything, but so perfect that you feel you must be dreaming.”
“Wouldn’t I be suspicious?”
“Yes, But before you can think it through, Gretel has broken off a piece of shingle and is eating it.”
Arthur closed his eyes. He was imagining the windowpanes, clear slabs of crystalline sugar, the candy cane doorjambs and fixtures of marzipan and boiled sweets. Loops of icing decorated the eaves and blocks of licorice formed the foundation and steps. He approached, his hand extended nervously. This was the work of an enchantress, but he was hungry and the smell of ginger, coriander, nutmeg, vanilla, mint, and cinnamon clouded his reason. He snapped off a piece of the window box: his favorite, white chocolate.
Arthur was smiling. “Remember,” I warned him, “this story is not all candy and gingerbread.”
“I know that much,” he said.
Because ultimately Hansel and Gretel is a story of evil grownups and the persevering children who manage to survive. It’s a story of abstract greed translated into unmistakable hunger—that of the stepmother, who says she’ll starve if the woodcutter doesn’t kill his children, and the witch, whose hunger is known and understood by all. Hunger is the catalyst to every element of the story—crumb-eating birds, house-eating children, children-eating witches. Hansel eats everything put near him and finds himself knocked down the food chain. The once-malnourished boy now has a triple chin and enormous, straining buttocks; his large and somber eyes are reduced to small black pits, like cloves pressed into a Christmas ham.
I find it hard to feel bad for Hansel. It’s the witch I feel for.
The witch, if she had not been blind, would have seen the air about the oven quivering in the heat. She would have noticed the burners glowing red hot and the flush of warmth over Gretel’s cheeks. But she didn’t. She didn’t feel the heat prickle across her skin, or her hand begin to roast as she reached into the oven with her stick, tapping for the problem flue. This is her last moment, this search and the thought of Hansel’s fine rump with Yorkshire pudding. She is desiccated by her years and when Gretel pushes her into the oven she catches fire as if she were kindling.
There is a brief flare.
One long tongue of flame licks out of the oven, touching Gretel’s apron. Gretel beats it out with a wet rag. She hears a loud crackle and a heated snap, and that is all there is of the witch. No slow roast. No dripping juices. No intoxicating smell. Within minutes, the witch is reduced to ash and bone.
And Hansel and Gretel are returned to their father, who is free of his wife. She has mysteriously died, apparently consumed in the same fire as the witch. How has this happened? The father wonders about this. He is glad the woman is gone, but her departure is strange. Finally he asks his children. And maybe it is Gretel who answers him—girls are quicker than boys at that age—and she will say, “Why, father, don’t waste your time thinking about it. People vanish every day.”
8
My childhood was a quiet place, my home so silent that books seemed to be the only place to find words. I slunk about the house with my black hair braided to my waist, Mary Janes scuffing on the floor, book in hand. There were many places I could read. The house offered small chance of interruption. The living room had comfortable chairs and natural light, but I preferred my father’s study with its broad wooden beams hewn by pilgrims, the shelves of scented wood, the oriental rug whose weft and pile made me think of generations of Chinese women, one after the other, losing their sight, although in retrospect the rug was Persian. I, in deference to my family’s code, was silent to the point of being invisible. I’d watch my father balancing the massive checkbook, scratching missives back and forth from his company (Park, Shea and Dunn) to other investment corporations that spun money out of paper. He pounded stamps and from this ink and rubber came gold. Sometimes I’d watch him for close to an hour before he noticed me sitting in the chair. I sat with my book, wide eyes focused on him, silent and stiff as a rag doll.
For my sixth birthday my father brought home the usual elegantly wrapped children’s book. The bow was cloth, wire-edged, deep red with gold trim. The paper was heavy and printed in matte flowers with whorls of silver and gilt-edged leaves. When I tore the package open, the rip made the low, shredding noise that is made only by paper of the highest quality. The book was Hansel and Gretel.
If I hadn’t been sure that my father’s gift had actually been purchased by my father’s secretary, I might have thought he was sending me a message by giving me this tale of thwarted infanticide. I know that I disturbed him. I looked like a miniature of my mother, the same dark beauty, but where she fluttered around like the daintiest of moths, I crouched in the corners like a spider. The translation that turned my mother’s fragile beauty into my gloom was exactly equal to my father’s failure. His inability to make her happy and his complete disregard for anything to do with me—perhaps out of his love for her and knowledge of her slow withdrawal from health—had created this discrepancy between the females in his life.
Hansel and Gretel looked like a promising read. I knew I had heard the story before, but couldn’t remember the exact sequence of events. The witch was frightening, the gingerbread cottage delicious. Hansel and Gretel stared out innocently, but I recalled some variety of wiliness that saved them in the end. I gave them both a grudging respect, even Gretel whose blond pigtails and apple cheeks reminded me of my first grade nemesis, Penelope Cornwall. I nodded a solemn thank-you to my father. He gruffly acknowledged this and left for his office.
My mother had bought me close to thirty gifts, all brightly colored and expensive. There was a china tea set with twenty place settings, in case I had planned a banquet fo
r the variety of stuffed animals and dolls she had also purchased. She made me open all the packages while she watched, and with each tear of cardboard and split of plastic I managed a small “oh” of wonder, which I knew pleased her. I even played with the things, sitting “Teddy” and “Dolly” up against the furniture, as my mother instructed me. I offered them invisible cake and tea, which they consumed without chewing and, although this gesture meal was an ordeal for me, I could see that my mother was pleased. She wiped little happy tears and hugged me close to her, finally sobbing at the tremendous accomplishment of having made it to yet another of my birthdays.
All the while I was longing to escape. I had dug up our recently departed tabby, Claude, and had been spending evenings with him in the backyard behind the compost heap, where I thought his compelling odor might not be noticed. I don’t know why I did this. It didn’t give me any comfort. I think I was trying to prepare for (or anesthetize myself against) death—mine, my mother’s, anyone’s—and although Claude presented a fearful sight, with the worms and grimace and leathery sides, I got used to him soon enough. Claude, who had little to say in life and less in death, was soon discovered by Mr. Jones, who disposed of him with the other garden trash. Mr. Jones, forgivably, had assumed that the carcass (almost a skeleton at this point) was not Claude but some other unfortunate cat whose ninth life had finally quit on our property.
After Claude was gone, I began reading Hansel and Gretel over and over. I don’t know why. Soon I had committed the entire text to memory, but still found myself drawn to the pictures and the rich smell of the paper, which somehow lingered despite my constant reading. I thought of what might happen should my mother finally succumb. Would my father take up with another woman? Would my father kill me with an ax in order to make her happy? This seemed unlikely, as my father was unconcerned with anyone’s happiness, even his own.
I’d like to think that the reason I loved the story—although love is a strange word choice, strange in nearly all its applications—was because of the triumph of good in the end. But in retrospect I think it was probably the child-eating witch that kept tempting me back to its pages.
I woke up on the couch. It took me a minute to figure out where I was, that the screaming outside was the crows. I remembered that Arthur had been there, but he wasn’t in sight. I got up and went to the door. His van was still parked in the drive. I pushed open the door. The clouds were all gone, the sky an even blue. I walked out in my bare feet and knocked on the back of his van.
“Come in,” said Arthur. I could tell from his voice that I’d woken him up.
I swung open the door. He was lying on a platform of boxes in a sleeping bag. I climbed inside and sat on a speaker.
“When did I fall asleep?”
“Not long after the power came back on. The first fifteen minutes of Silence of the Lambs.”
I picked up a framed photo that was at the top of a box—a man in squatting in catcher’s gear, poised as in a baseball card. “Who’s this?”
“My father.”
I put the picture back in the box. “I’m starving.”
“Me too.”
“There’s no food in the house,” I said. Boris would have had food, fried eggs, sausage, cheese.
“Let’s go into town. What do you feel like eating?”
“Grease,” I said. “And look, how convenient, we’re both dressed.” It was true.
Arthur took me to a diner right on one of the wharves, a place that actually did cater to fishermen. The tables were full, so we sat side by side at the counter on swiveling stools. I ordered steak and eggs and Arthur ordered something of his own concocting, which involved hash, eggs over easy, an English muffin, and melted cheese. While we were waiting for the food, I drank my coffee and Arthur went to find the paper. The fisherman beside me hunched grimly over his eggs and toast. A slick deposit of egg yolk rimmed his beard and moustache. His face was wrinkled like an elephant’s backside. Lobster traps were stacked outside the door and gulls scuffled on the boards. I sipped my coffee, which was somehow better burned than it would have been otherwise.
Arthur sat beside me, slapping the paper down on the counter. “He’s still at large,” he said.
“Bad Billy?” I leaned over and read the headline. He must have altered his appearance. There were several photos of Bad Billy with different hair styles and mustaches and beards. “Which one do you like best?”
Arthur took a look. “He makes a good blond,” he said.
The food arrived with a pot of jelly and the waitress topped up the coffee and dumped out some creamers that she had in the pocket of her apron.
“You shouldn’t sleep in your van,” I said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“Bad Billy’s not into guys.”
“What about that Borden guy?” I said.
“Ah, Borden.” Arthur shook the paper out and folded it back.
“You should be careful.” I poured an extra creamer into my coffee, which turned it a dreary gray. “Sometimes it’s hard to know how to be careful.”
Arthur lowered his eyebrows dramatically. “I could be Bad Billy.”
I sighed and sipped my coffee. “You make a good blond,” I said.
After breakfast, Arthur set up on Fore Street. Soon it would be lunchtime and the businesspeople would be stalking the streets in suits. He started tuning his violin. I lit a cigarette. I’d actually filled out the application for the bookstore.
“I could get you a waitressing job,” offered Arthur, “at a Mexican restaurant. I know the owner.”
“I don’t want a job,” I said. “But thank you.”
He finished tuning his violin and adjusted the case. I put in a dollar. “For good luck,” I said. I began to leave.
“Can I see you later?”
“When are you off?”
“It doesn’t really matter. I’d like to be here when the offices let out, but it’s Monday night so there’s no point waiting for the bar crowd.”
“How about seven?” I said. “That’ll give me a chance to get some stuff done.”
Arthur nodded. He looked happy.
The bookstore was busy at lunch hour. There was a line at the register, which was manned by my old friend. I went past the line and stood smiling until she looked up at me. She glared in a way that was calculated to make me feel insignificant.
“Can I drop this off?” I asked.
“Go ahead,” she said. “But we’re not hiring.”
The phone was ringing when I got home. I thought I’d missed it, but then it just started ringing again. I knew it was Boris.
“Where were you?” he said, instead of hello.
“In Portland. I had to drop off an application at a bookstore.” There was a moment of silence. “Boris,” I said, “what’s wrong?”
Boris was having a bad time of things. His last novel, Rupert on the Beach, had been rejected by his old publishing house. Apparently, they had been sitting on it for close to a year before finally deciding against it. I hadn’t even realized that Rupert was under consideration. Boris was such a literary fixture that I’d assumed, as had Boris, that the book would automatically be accepted.
“There’s a new editor,” said Boris, despairingly, his voice surprisingly clear on the phone.
“Oh, Boris.” I was genuinely sympathetic, although glad for the distance between us.
“He says he can’t identify with Rupert. Maybe, just maybe, it’s because he is TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD and has never done a DAMNED THING except go to COLLEGE and read the COMIC BOOKS.”
Boris was so upset that he was misplacing articles. “What are you going to do?”
“What can I do? I am almost done with the first draft of The Little Vagrant. This little PUNK seems interested in that.”
“But they’ve already given you the Rupert advance.”
“I know,” said Boris. For the first time he sounded truly old and defeated.
Boris was under so much pressure that he had no t
ime to visit me. In fact, Ann had agreed to move in with him temporarily just to cook and clean and keep an eye on things, while Boris shifted from desk to coffee maker to bathroom in his socks and boxers, reddish tufts of hair now matted to his skull, a strong odor of despair surrounding him that smelled much like gamy stew.
Boris had decided to return to Rupert on the Beach because the thought that it might not be of interest was truly terrifying, since Rupert was actually Boris, thinly disguised, and the plot was a clunky stringing together of Rupert’s musings as he stood solidly on the beach staring out at the waves. Sometimes Rupert thought of childhood experiences—his mother peeling potatoes and how hungry Rupert felt. Sometimes Rupert defined things in a new way—love grips you like a vise, then caresses you like a silk scarf, then bangs you on the head like an anvil. Sometimes Rupert recalled his coming to America—there was a scene where he, a young boy in a gray wool cap with a dirty face, stood at the prow of a ship filled with babushkaed women and mustached men, and how they cheered as they sailed past the Statue of Liberty. This last scene was not from Boris’s life (he actually stepped off a plane in Dallas/Fort Worth in 1972) but rather purloined from Hollywood. No, this young editor was not a raging philistine—despite his having gone to college—but was probably just a careful editor who, most importantly, had bothered to read the book.
I spent the day exploring the unexplored corners around the house with a sponge and Lysol. In the cabinet beneath the sink I had uncovered an unsprung trap, the bait gone. The trap was the usual spring-locked mouse variety, but was so large that it seemed intended for possums. I closed the cabinet and looked around, but I was quite alone. Later, when I was on my knees scrubbing the baseboard by the front door, I saw something—a dark shadow—slipping like a bead of mercury along the kitchen counter. The shadow disappeared behind the microwave. I took the broom and used the handle to edge the microwave away from the wall. There was a crack in the wall there. I don’t know how something large enough to occasion the trap could slide through the crack, but it must have had rubber bones or the ability to turn into mist like a vampire. I shuddered. It was only six o’clock. I’d be early to pick Arthur up, but there was nothing left to do but unload the last of the groceries that were sitting on the counter. The kitchen cabinets were still airing out, filling the kitchen with a lemon odor that smelled nothing like a lemon and more like a hospital.
A Carnivore's Inquiry Page 9
