The Petty Details of So-And-So's Life
Page 23
The dump is a rusted field of the discarded, disused and forgotten: a shore where you can’t see the beach for the shells. Nina and Emma comb metal mountains like they are archaeologists of the next millennium. Emma is looking for something that resembles a conventional hook, Nina, less literal-minded, picks up a flat round disc, like the blade of a circular saw.
“It’s okay,” she says, cupping Emma’s find. “That’s great. We can use them both. Now what else?”
“What about these things?” Emma suggests, picking up a rusted pair of clamps. “They look like antiquated stirrups or something.”
“Great! So we take those and some other brutal-looking objects and we make some installation piece about women as guinea pigs in the examining room.”
“And we give it both historic and futuristic dimensions,” Emma says, eager to show Nina she can join her in this game. “Like this thing,” she suggests, holding up a radiator. “It’s an artificial womb!”
“We can have an exhibition called From Room with a View to a Womb with a Screw!” Nina exclaims.
“Or, Without a Screw!” Emma adds.
“Hilarious!”
“Make room for the industrial nightmare,” Nina calls out, pedalling them down the hill with a basket full of junk. “It’s not junk,” she has corrected Emma. “It’s art waiting to happen.” A nice philosophy, thinks Emma. Nina sees the potential for beauty in a dump; the humanity in her brutish-looking brother.
“You’re so … I don’t know … urban,” Emma later says self-consciously. She becomes clumsier the more time she spends near Nina.
“Well, that’s a joke,” Nina laughs. “Considering I was born in a barnyard amongst a bunch of pigs and cow shit. I grew up on carrots and chicken giblets.”
Emma finds herself reaching to pull Nina’s hair away from her face. A wavering, breathless gesture. A hand stretched across the silently guarded space between two bodies. Nina closes her eyes. Emma runs her fingertips over her eyelids and angular cheekbones, down her chin and neck. “You have the most interesting clavicle,” she tells her.
“You mean ugly,” Nina laughs. “I’ve always thought it was so ugly. I flipped off my bike when I was about fifteen and broke it. It didn’t heal properly,” Nina says, fingering it delicately. It’s Nina who seems nervous now.
“It’s beautiful,” Emma says. “Twisted and beautiful.”
Nina inhales deeply and runs her hand through Emma’s hair. Emma leans her face against Nina’s chest, closes her eyes, and listens to her breathing. Nina’s chest is soft and solid, her sweet smell emanates possibility; her being yields to curiosity. Nina’s breathing becomes heavy as Emma’s hair falls from behind her ear and tickles her neck. She leans over Nina’s face and moves slowly to brush her wet lips with her own. She parts Nina’s lips with her tongue.
“Take my tongue,” Emma whispers. Nina pulls Emma’s tongue into her mouth. Tastes sugar on her teeth, salt on her upper lip. They breathe heavily, with gently tangled tongues, and Emma is sure her heart will stop. “Remember to breathe,” Nina giggles.
Imagine that this is Emma, a girl in the moment of finding her courage; taking the lead down a road less travelled, and trusting herself enough to take someone there with her. Somewhere Over the Rainbow sinks his claws into Emma’s back, but somehow, she fails to notice.
Roadkill
The idea is to reconstruct an animal. Strip it down to the bones and build it back up again. Label every one of the bones and analyse their wear. Look for osteological indications of how and at what age the animal died. It’s the term project for Emma’s faunal archaeo-osteology course—an exploration of the weird and wonderful science of looking at animal remains in archaeological context—taught by Professor Melville Savage.
Nina offers to help Emma with the project. “That is so perverse!” she shrieks when Emma tells her she is going to have to locate a dead animal. “Like roadkill?” she asks hopefully.
“Could be. As long as the bones are relatively intact.”
Professor Savage is the last of his kind. He’s continued teaching the course into his late eighties because there is no one else who can quite do it. Initially, he expressed considerable excitement about having Emma in his class—with her background in Middle Eastern studies, surely she knew how to embalm. Emma had read books, but she couldn’t exactly say that she’d had any practical experience. This disappointed him and Emma became just another student—that is, until she volunteered to take on the ostrich.
Where everybody else was keen to do their neighbour’s dog, the python at the pet store, and the bird that had smacked itself unconscious against their window one morning while they were munching their muesli, Emma had bravely stuck up her hand when Professor Savage asked if anyone was willing to tackle a flightless bird he had been fantasizing about for years. Why the hell not, she thought. She kind of liked the idea of being an integral part of some old man’s fantasy.
The ostrich was lying frozen in a giant freezer in the basement of the Royal Ontario Museum, and had been, apparently, for the better part of seven years. So one particularly cold morning in mid-November, Professor Savage picks Emma up in a rusty truck and they drive up the street to the loading dock at the ROM. Professor Savage squints over the steering wheel. In that moment, Emma questions the wisdom of accepting his help, but she knows no taxi driver is going to agree to transport a hundred-and-fifty-pound bird. All five feet of it are stuffed into a canvas bag. It looks like a corpse. It certainly doesn’t look legal. It takes the combined strength of Emma and two men to lift it into the back of Professor Savage’s truck, and two more men at the other end to haul it up the three flights of stairs to the lab at the top of the decrepit, asbestos-lined building. “It’s small for an ostrich,” Professor Savage says helpfully, taking up the rear.
In the dust-filled attic, they begin the unveiling. With the aid of a hair dryer they unwrap and unwrap the gauze layered around its sizable girth. Professor Savage makes a noise like he’s got a potato caught in his esophagus. “The toes!”
Emma isn’t sure what he means, but it’s obviously something important given Professor Savage’s reaction.
“It’s got three toes on each foot!”
“Is that, uh, unusual?”
“Christ, woman!” he shouts. “An ostrich only has two toes!”
“Well, what is it then?”
“You tell me. Grab that book and look it up.”
Emma flips through the various pictures of flightless birds. “An emu?” she says tentatively.
“What makes you say that?”
“Three toes. The size of it—smaller than an ostrich.”
“Good girl,” he says. “This is indeed Dromaius novaehollandiae, not Struthio camelus, as the label suggests.”
“Not even the same family?”
“Surprising, isn’t it? They must have labelled it incorrectly. Now this is exciting,” he says, stroking his chin in delight. “This is cause for celebration.”
Emma can hardly refuse his invitation to go and have a pitcher of beer for lunch in the Faculty Club. Be it ostrich or emu, a hundred and fifty pounds of flightless bird isn’t going to thaw over lunch.
There are only men in the dark, smoky club—with the exception of one animated woman holding court at a table otherwise exclusively surrounded by men. When Emma walks in, this woman looks over immediately and gives her a venomous stare. “Shall we join them?” Professor Savage asks, gesturing toward Patti Summers and her graduate students.
“I’d rather not,” Emma mumbles awkwardly.
“Fine by me,” he shrugs. “I just suggested it out of departmental collegiality. Personally, I can’t stand that woman.”
Emma looks at him with surprise.
“Poor Peter,” he sighs. “One of the finest young archaeologists I’ve ever known. Didn’t get tenure here because of that one there.”
Emma thinks of Peter and his vanishing erection covered in dust and sweat in the boiler room.
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Over beer and chips, they are back to the matter at hand—how to proceed with the ostrich that turns out to be an emu. Two hours later, both of them slightly drunk, they are at it. Up to their elbows in subcutaneous fat. They slice giant frozen slabs of fat off the girth of the bird and toss them into a double-lined garbage can. Six hours later they have cleared away enough fat and tissue to lay the bird down in a giant copper bathtub suspended over a heating element. It will simmer there slowly for the next three days, filling the air in the lab with a smell of musty, evaporating blubber so thick they can feel it cling to their clothes and hair.
They leave it over the weekend, a weekend Nina comes to spend with Emma in Toronto. Nina arrives on Friday night, and they chat nervously for a while—talking one thing, thinking another, Emma sitting on the edge of the bed, Nina perched on the windowsill, wondering who is going to make the first move—and then, somehow, all their civilized intentions of having dinner and seeing a movie seem to be forgotten. Emma stares at the ripeness of Nina’s mouth, trips over her words, walks over to the window ledge, and stands, too close for friendship, in front of her. Smells her like honeysuckle, sees her nipples through her shirt, kisses her neck and her clavicle and her ear and her cheek and her upper lip, and then, with the fullness of her lips parting, they begin to suck and pull each other’s tongues, over and endlessly over in that rolling, compulsive way that could go on forever, mouths melting while your hair turns grey and your bones start to shrink and the world is no longer the world as you once knew it until you eventually stop, sore-lipped and still hungry.
The bird is happily bubbling away in an attic down the street and Emma and Nina are busy getting naked. A bird and two girls stripped down to their essence, discarding all former lives. Nina is fluid and languid despite her bones and length. Emma is stronger than she knew. And braver. She reaches up from the bed to take Nina’s hand and pull her down. Nina lies still on top of her. “Breathe,” Nina whispers, and then pushes her pelvis into Emma. Emma feels Nina from her feet to her neck and arches her back in lieu of moaning. Nina buries her wet mouth in Emma’s neck, grips her around the waist, and slides her way to Emma’s nipple. She lingers there with a delicate tongue, bites gently, while Emma grips the back of her neck.
Emma pulls Nina back on top of her and rolls her over onto her back. She grazes her lips across Nina’s shoulder blade and moves her mouth along the length of Nina’s body. She brings her weight down and runs her hands through Nina’s hair as she kisses her, rocks against her. She feels Nina’s stomach breathing into hers, like one giant, undulating wave. Movement slows to heartbeats over hours, lulling them to eventual, partial sleep where limbs are entwined, lips are close, and bodies burn with the ache for more.
Emma wakes under Nina’s weight. Nina rocks against her like seaweed in slow water, until Emma sits up and takes her nipple between her teeth. Her hands reach and crawl under the twisted sheet to grasp the dark wet hair between Nina’s legs. A strange curious confidence in her fingers. She slides down to spread Nina’s lips with her tongue. Nina moans as she pushes herself into Emma’s mouth. Emma licks her saltiness as Nina floats up and down over Emma’s tongue, and Emma is lost for a thousand days and nights in the rhythm of a beautiful woman until Nina cries out, shudders, and freezes. Emma pulls Nina down, pulls at the good weight of her. She wishes Nina could melt into her as her hands run delirious circles over Nina’s back. Nina buries her mouth in Emma’s hair.
They don’t actually get out of bed until Sunday morning, and they only do so then because Emma is a little concerned about the simmering emu. They are silent as they walk to the lab together. Not shy, not embarrassed, not regretful, but mesmerized with each other and themselves.
When they arrive, the bird is still happily bubbling away in its own juices. Professor Savage is asleep in a chair beside it, apparently keeping vigil. Emma puts her hand on his shoulder and he awakes, startled, and mumbles something about an angel in the bathtub. Emma has the sudden, horrible thought that if Professor Savage should die before the term is over, she will be stuck reconstructing this giant, flightless one, alone. She looks alarmed.
“Oh Christ, woman!” he scoffs. “I’m not losing it! I mean, it’s like a godsend! I’ve done an ostrich before, but never an emu!”
Nina laughs, and introduces herself. She and Emma can’t refuse when he asks, half an hour later, if he can take them out for a liquid lunch.
Nina charms the pants off Professor Savage with all her knowledge about birds.
Emma looks at her with surprise. Nina is endlessly surprising. “I grew up in a house full of dead birds,” she laughs, explaining. “Fred—he’s a taxidermist. Not professionally, but it’s a hobby of his.”
“The antique dealer?”
“Yeah,” she nods. “Thing is, though, my mother can’t stand to have the things in the house. That’s what she calls them—‘the things.’ ”
The things, Emma thinks. The wild things. Where the wild things are. “Where does he keep them, then?” she asks.
“In the garden shed, or sometimes in the deep freezer. My mother defrosted one once—she was a little hammered—little, that’s an understatement—anyway, she thought it was a turkey.”
“What was it?” asks Professor Savage, curious.
“A cassowary.”
Emma doesn’t want to admit it, but she’s never heard of a cassowary.
“How fascinating,” muses Professor Savage. “Where on earth did he get a cassowary? I think they’re an endangered species.”
Nina shrugs. “Through the Internet somehow. He’s always on the Internet—usually downloading porn—it keeps him occupied so he doesn’t have to deal with my mother. He belongs to some discussion group for taxidermists and they hold an international symposium every year in New South Wales. Must have been through that somehow.”
“Fascinating,” Professor Savage nods.
And on they go—birds of a feather, flocking together, Emma amazed and delighted with all that they share. When Emma tells Professor Savage that Nina is a sculptor, he becomes quite animated. Nina says she would be very interested in following their work: she’d like to replicate it by erecting an emu out of scrap metal. Professor Savage thinks it is a wonderful idea, invites her to sculpt alongside them, and Emma can feel herself go so red at the proposal that she has to stare at her shoes for the next ten minutes.
Emma hates to admit it to herself, but she thinks she might be a lesbian. She and Nina are doing stuff that certainly makes it look that way—and not just once, but repeatedly. She’s slipping and sliding body first, with abandon. Laughing without restraint. Crying without provocation. A head on her shoulder, a nipple between her teeth, a tongue down the length of her. A compulsion, an ache, a belonging so normal that she doesn’t feel the slightest bit weird about it, although she can’t stand the thought that some terrorists in grade seven knew her better than she knew herself.
Being with Nina is giving her a history. A context for interpretation. Like any archaeological find, a kiss is meaningless in isolation. No wonder she couldn’t stand the purple peanut-buttered tongues all the girls in her classes seemed so hungry to swallow. It seems to be making a whole lot of sense, unravelling some of the confusion, simplifying things.
In the euphoria of it all, Emma feels like she actually wants to tell Elaine. “I think I’m falling in love,” she longs to say. She never spoke to Elaine this way about Andrew. She hadn’t used words like “love” when she told Elaine about the brainy boy in the library. She had said: “intelligent,” “educated,” “big house,” and “big dreams.” And she had moved out of Elaine’s house with the announcement that Andrew’s world just seemed “more conducive to what she wanted to accomplish.” Those were the words she actually used. Jesus Christ, she thinks. How pompous, how desperately unromantic.
“I’ve met someone,” she tells Elaine when she’s back one weekend visiting Nina. “And, uh, I thought maybe you’d like to meet her too.”
“Mum? Do you hear what I’m saying?”
Elaine takes a swig from her Scotch glass and puts it down on the counter and quips, “Emma, you’re always looking for a reaction!”
“Well, just a sign of life. A heartbeat or something.” It had always been this way. Whenever she or Blue told their mother anything of significance they were accused of being deliberately provocative, when all they really sought was the slightest acknowledgement that they had been heard.
“I’m pleased,” she says quickly then, pouting to apply her lipstick in the mirror.
“Pleased?”
“Well, at least it means you won’t go and get pregnant.”
Emma takes what she can get. At least she’s not displeased, even though she’s not displeased for the strangest of reasons.
“I just want you to be happy,” Elaine admits.
“You do?” Emma can’t help saying.
“Of course I do! Both of you. I just want you and Blue to be happy,” she snaps, making it sound much more like a command than a wish.
Truth and Lies
Emma’s got hundreds of bones to deal with, all scattered in front of her, none the slightest bit like another. One by one, Emma brightens and disinfects each with bleach, lays it down, identifies it, and labels it with black ink. Each vertebra, each rib, each digit of a six-year-old female bird, slowly and painstakingly, cleaned, identified, and labelled.
Beside Emma’s table of bird bones, Nina has accumulated a scrap heap of tangled metal. Nina picks a piece of metal for each one of the thousands of parts of the bird—welding certain pieces together, filing others to shape, bending flexible bars of a mattress for ribs, creating a cascading wave of increasingly larger bolts for each vertebra of the bird’s spectacular spine.