The young woman straightens and grips the wheel as if she’s steering us somewhere, though no one on this road has moved for hours. I’m nothing to her, but now I see her face in the mirror—a tear sits on her cheek like a jewel. Maybe she’s missing something important at Framingham State. I keep talking.
“‘Public school?’ Mom glared. ‘The kids would eat you alive. You haven’t got the senses. You’d understand nothing and have to pretend everything.’
“I was shaking—I had never contradicted my mother before. I couldn’t speak out against all the evidence she’d accumulated. And I couldn’t describe my nighttimes of fingering and palming myself, envisioning tall school girls leaning forward under their backpacks, tossing their hair, gossiping and laughing with open mouths. How could I tell my mother that touching myself released the same feeling I had when the blimp crewman lost his grip on the rope. ‘I do feel,’ is all I said.
“‘Oh—’ Mom stuck out her jaw. ‘That.’ She sighed. ‘That’s nothing. Your nocturnal emissions? Those are no secret. Who do you think washes your sheets and socks? You don’t dream you’re experiencing a tenth of what it’s possible to feel, do you?’
“My face was hot,” I tell the young woman. “‘This is something else, Mom,’ I said. ‘I want to be with people. I can do it.’
“Mom lifted her eyebrows. Her smile looked more like grieving. She reached toward me, as if she was going to lay her hand on mine, but instead her palm fell flat on the table. ‘Phantom limbs,’ she said. ‘Your sight, your smell, your touch. You think you have them—something in your brain tells you that you do. You’re like an amputee—people without legs and arms swear they can wiggle their toes and fingers, swear that they’ve got an itch where there’s nothing.’ She settled back in her seat, took her hand off the table, folded her arms over her breasts. ‘Son, I thought you had accepted your limitations. I thought we’d come to terms with that. There’s no reason you should suffer through those urges of yours. They’re a nuisance, really—messy. We can make something for your hands, thick mittens. And we can rig up something thick and tight under your pajamas that will prevent the touching. Let me think about it.’
“Later that night Mom came to my room with mittens as broad and stiff as ping- pong paddles. They had Velcro straps. And she brought a woman’s girdle. Mom tugged these on me, fastened them, and left me in my bed. ‘I guess you can’t turn pages. No reading yourself to sleep,’ she said. ‘Or maybe you’ve had enough reading. Too confusing—what could it be for you besides frustrating? Better to accept your boundaries and stop pretending.’”
The young woman suddenly strikes her steering wheel with the heel of her hand. Was she aiming for her horn? Why now? We’re no less stuck than we’ve been for hours. A sketchpad sticks out of the backpack beside me, and I slide it out. It’s folded open to a penciled caricature—it’s the young woman . . . a self-portrait? She’s smiling in the picture, but tears splash from her eyes. There’s a black cavity between her breasts—her sweater is torn around the wound. And she’s holding her heart in her hand, severed arteries and veins writhing like eels.
I tuck the sketchpad back in her bag. “That night,” I tell the young woman, “after Mom left me trussed up in my bed, swallowed by darkness, I thought about the world she’d imprisoned me in—a world in which scents, colors, and now touch were as distant from reality as dragons, unicorns, and witches. Then I heard a low, sweet sound—there’d been so little music in our home I didn’t recognize it at first as singing. The muffled voice was Mom’s. I couldn’t hear her distinctly, but I knew the words and recited them in my head: ‘Queen of the waves, look forth across the ocean/ From north to south, from east to stormy west/ See how the waters with tumultuous motion/ Rise up and foam without a pause or rest.’ The words were from a hymn sung by roped-together nuns and orphans who drowned in a hurricane long ago. Mom made me memorize it years earlier for a homeschooling assignment.
“The girdle must have been cutting off my circulation, because my feet were numb. What if I lost them? How could I follow the school girls? As tightly bound as I was, I needed Mom to set me free. And it was her voice and song that drew me all the way to her closed bedroom door. Light seeped beneath it. Mom still sang, but much more softly. I knocked with my mitten and called for her, but she didn’t answer.”
There’s a cool breeze—has the young woman opened her window? I catch my breath—her blue eyes, brimming with woe, fill the rearview mirror. But she couldn’t be looking at me—it’s the name of her college or the grill of the truck behind her she sees. Her self-caricature—am I sure she held her heart? Was the cavity in her upper or lower abdomen? Did the bloody thing in her palm wave tiny arms and legs? Might one of the severed arteries have been an umbilical cord?
“I fumbled with the doorknob,” I continue, “and pushed the door open, preparing to argue for my life. ‘Mom,’ I said to an empty bed. Where was she? She’d taken off her robe and hung it on the hook of her open closet door. And then I saw that she was in the hanging robe, swaying slightly, that her wrists were cinched behind her back, that her bare feet twitched a dance six inches from the floor, just above the shoeboxes she must have stood on and kicked aside. Her face was pressed into the door, and the cord cutting into her neck was stretched tight over its top.
“I lunged for her, embraced her—she was soft and heavy in my arms—and I yanked her sideways until the cord, fastened to the knob on the other side, slipped off the door. Mom collapsed on top of me, her purple, swollen face inches from mine. Her hair smelled of her shampoo. There was a dreadful rasp as she struggled for breath. I lay still a moment under her body, feeling our intimacy, before I shrugged myself clear, tore the Velcroed mittens off with my teeth, and dug my fingers under the cord around her throat. Her flesh felt like dough against my knuckles. I dialed 911 from the cell phone on her night table.”
I’m back in my car. Unless it’s an illusion, traffic has begun to move. Exhaust drifts from the tailpipe of the van in front of me. The truck beside me inches forward—the angle’s too steep for me to see the driver. The truck follows the car with the Framingham State sticker. My car starts up as if there’d never been a delay, and I slide the gearshift to “drive.” I creep with the flow of traffic. In my rearview I see the busy woman I’d visited first. She chokes her wheel at nine and three.
After Mom was evaluated and declared unfit for parenthood, I became a ward of the state and lived in a group home for teens, where I kept to myself. I attended a public high school and earned a scholarship to the state college. Mom’s hospitalization became permanent.
“Munchausen syndrome by proxy” was a diagnosis repeated to me again and again in therapy. I was told that there was nothing different about any of my senses, that there never had been, that I had been a victim of my mother’s delusions. I was told that I was a completely normal boy, young man, man, in every way.
The power of my senses was not a subject I ever broached with Mom during our short, supervised visits. She was always heavily sedated, nodded as I told her about school, raised her eyebrows and clamped her mouth shut as if stifling a yawn as I spoke. And each time I left her, she gave me an unmistakable wink, as if we shared a secret no one could possibly understand.
Traffic moves along the Mass Pike like a funeral procession. For a while, the lane to my right outpaces mine, and I feel like I’m losing part of a family. Far ahead, the young woman’s arm—red sleeve and white hand—dangles from her open window. The rear door of the trucker’s trailer asks HOW’S MY DRIVING? and gives a phone number that’s now too distant to read. The woman behind me stares at her cell phone while she drives. Is she looking at the picture of her baby?
The smell hits me the second I see the flashing lights where the state cruisers wave traffic off the road onto the shoulder, and I’m not sure if I’m imagining the odor—in spite of years of therapy, I don’t trust my senses. Denial has become ingrained, a
nd who can measure overcompensation? My eyes water from the foul stench, but I see that the young woman hasn’t rolled up her window—I catch a last glimpse of her arm as my lane funnels into hers. I glance behind me and see with another pang of loss that the busy woman has been replaced by a white-haired couple in an SUV. I’m surprised she let anyone slip in ahead of her.
The smell intensifies as we come upon the site of the accident, but it’s become less noxious. In fact, it’s as if the terrible odor has been peeled away, releasing a sweetness at first ambrosial, then more lightly aromatic. I see crushed and twisted metal—cars and guardrails, a tractor trailer on its side with its cab smashed into a grinning skull. Lights riot from firetrucks, ambulances, police cruisers, tow trucks. Grim officers in broad hats and high boots wave us forward, and we slink by, one witness at a time. The pulse of the lights is saturated with the sweet fragrance, and the voices of children and women rise from the wreckage: “Queen of the waves,” they sing, “. . . the waters with tumultuous motion rise up . . .”
We drift past, car by car, and we’re directed back onto the open lanes of the highway. The sweet smell fades. I move to the fast lane and before long pass my trucker. His windshield is shadow and glare. Is that the busy woman hunched over her wheel, accelerating past me on the right? I don’t recognize her from this side. I look for the young woman, for the college sticker—I don’t know if she’s ahead of me or behind, whether I should speed up or slow down. Had I made it clear to her that the ropes the nuns hoped would save the orphans drowned them instead?
“For the love of God, Montressor!”
—“The Cask of Amontillado,” E.A. Poe
An Oofy Baby Sees Fortunato’s Side
The sweating teen boys with the basketball sit at a picnic table in the far corner of the park’s only covered pavilion. They drink sports drinks they bought from the refreshment stand by the pool, which is hidden behind a fence. I can hear kids frolicking, water splashing, shouts, the shrill blast of a lifeguard’s whistle, a hoarse command to “stop running.”
I eat my lunch and eavesdrop on the boys’ talk. Is it sports? It’s got to be sports, though I’m not connecting it up yet, waiting for a recognizable phrase, like “slam dunk” or “home run.” Their voices are low and serious. I’m eating a chocolate pudding cup with a plastic spoon. This is Mrs. Cuchinello’s pudding. When I dropped off her “Meal on Wheels,” she didn’t notice that dessert was missing. If she complains tomorrow, which she’s never done, I’ll tsk-tsk and tell her I’ll inform Administration. Mrs. Cuchinello isn’t a caller. Only three of the eighteen people on my list would call if something was missing from their meals, and I keep them off my “special rotation.”
“Implications of gestational location . . .” My head snaps up when I hear the phrase from the shorter of the basketball boys. His baggy shorts and tank top hang from him like hand-me-downs from a giant, and his yellow wristbands match the sweatband crimping his black hair. The boy and his lanky friend, whose blue jeans are fashionably torn at the knee, glance at me before I duck back down to my meal. Does my thinness confuse them as they measure my age? Am I as old as their mothers? A big sister?
Pudding done, I move on to the entrée—Mrs. Poulter’s chicken broccoli alfredo with bowtie pasta. The tiny widow flutters around her living room to music she plays so loud her windows vibrate. I could probably take her entrée every day without her noticing, but that’s not how my plan works. Mrs. Poulter will lose her entrée no more than once every three weeks, like everyone else in my special rotation. She still got her garlic roll, pudding, and three bean salad. This afternoon I’ve already eaten the roll I took from Mrs. Wong. It was soggy with alfredo sauce.
Gestational location? That’s not sports talk or kids’ talk. Did I hear right? Maybe it was rap lyrics, like “just take a vacation.” Maybe I’ll try Mr. Silberbach’s three bean salad before the pasta.
“It’s called ‘extra-uterine fetal incubation,’” Yellow Bands says. “They can grow a baby from scratch, outside the mother. E-U-F-I. ‘Oofy’.”
“‘Oofy’?” Blue Jeans has got their basketball pinned under his arm. “That’s goofy.”
The boys snort ragged laughs at the rhyme. But which do they think is goofy, the name or the idea?
I never take more than one item per five day week from my fifteen non-caller Meals on Wheels patrons, and I rotate through their bread, vegetable, entrée, and dessert. Every weekday I wind up with a completely free, multi-course meal. The kidney bean I stab at with my plastic fork slips off, and I chase it across the picnic table where I finally spear it. The boys are too involved in their conversation to notice. I nip the bean and wince—it’s too vinegary. Mr. Silberbach is lucky I’ve taken it off his hands. He was today’s last stop. Before I carried his meal to his front door, I hunched down in the driver’s seat of my car and pinched back the foil on his plate, then scooped all but one kidney, one wax, and one green bean into my Tupperware bowl.
My car has a permanent smell like boiled cabbage. At night sometimes when hunger nags, I sit in my car, inhale deeply, and pretend I’m eating.
Mr. Silberbach greeted me with his usual stained-dentures smile. “I’m hungry,” he said. “You’re late.”
“Only five minutes,” I lied—it was more like fifteen. Today being a Monday, I was fighting the headache I get from weekends without eating. On Saturdays and Sundays I only drink water. On Sunday nights I dream about food.
It was Mrs. Poulter’s fault that I was late to Mr. Silberbach’s.
“Come in, come in, I want you to listen to this,” she said through her door. The music flooding past nearly pushed me off her stoop. Every day she listens to something from Man of La Mancha. Today’s song, like on most days, was “The Impossible Dream.” The singer’s voice was muffled as if he had a pillow over his head. Mrs. Poulter looked at me slyly.
“It’s Hungarian,” she said over the singing. “This is from the performance Peter and I saw in Budapest in 1987. They were selling cassettes in the lobby, so we didn’t have to use the recorder I had in my purse.”
“Hungarian, nice,” I said, hyperventilating slightly as I raised my voice. “Better than the Japanese.”
“Not better than the first of our three Japanese versions, the one from Kyoto. Have I told you that we saw Man of La Mancha over two hundred times? In seventy-seven cities on five continents? Peter and I would play a game where we would try to remember a detail from each different performance, and we almost always could. Since he’s been gone, all but the special ones are muddled together.”
“Mmm.” Of course she’d told me. Mrs. Poulter’s meal, even without her pasta, felt like a lead weight in my hands. Stars swirled when I blinked. “Gotta go,” I said. “Hungry folks are waiting.”
Mrs. Poulter’s head swayed to the familiar tune and its incomprehensible lyrics. With her eyes shut she mouthed the words in English: “‘This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how faaaar…’” Then she squinted at me with a suddenness as sharp as the swipe of a knife. “You look so pale, dear. And you’re nothing but skin and bones. Would you like something from my lunch?” She clawed at the box, which, of course I couldn’t surrender—if she opened the meal she’d certainly have noticed the missing entree. I clung to her meal.
“You know what I’d like to hear in Hungarian?” I asked. “That song about the prostitute. The part where she says she was left in a ditch after she was born.”
Mrs. Poulter’s frown of concern lifted into a smile. “Ah, ‘Dulcinea’: ‘Naked and cold and too hungry to cry,’” she sang creakily. She pivoted and, with a slow motion prance, headed for her cassette player across the room. While she had her back to me, I tossed the meal box onto her foyer table and hurried down her walkway to my car. “The Impossible Dream” halted abruptly behind me. I knew from experience that she wouldn’t miss me.
Dark clouds
blot the sun, and it’s so dark in the pavilion I can hardly make out what’s left of my meal. Rain would make basketball impossible. The boys are still discussing EUFI: “Oofy.” The lives of boys who talk about extra-uterine fetal incubation are a mystery.
“There’s implications,” Blue Jeans insists. His knees poke through the holes in his pants. He’s tucked the basketball inside his T-shirt and slaps it while he talks. Is he mimicking pregnancy on purpose? “If the baby’s not inside, how does it get the mother’s, you know, juices?”
Juices?
Yellow Bands is drinking his blue Gatorade when he hears the word. He wipes his mouth and frowns. “There’s chemical fluids that supply those, whatever they are,” he says. “Who knows what the set up would look like? It doesn’t have to be a replica of a woman’s…” He pauses, searching for the word, which is funny, since he knows “extra-uterine fetal incubation.” I grin into my Tupperware bowl, pry a green bean from under a limp bowtie.
“Womb,” his friend with the basketball belly supplies after a few seconds, though at first I worry that it’s me who’s answered. Do the boys notice how womb rhymes with tomb?
“Womb, right. Nothing has to look like a real womb. Probably something like a fish tank hooked up to a computer. There’d be tubes and wires. You’d see a wall of tiny babies in aquariums, like tropical fish in a pet store. Things will be rigged up to get them all the juices they need.”
Women of Consequence Page 2
