by Claudia Dey
The child is a fresh ballet. Her toes are long, her hands too. She is languid and ravishing as a mermaid. Her lashes are a perfectly curled inch of wet black. Her eyes are a most miraculous purple. She enters the world with one cry and has not cried since. Mink names her Immaculata.
Mink takes to motherhood instantly. She grows her garnet hair long and watches the muscles in her arms rise and tighten as she hoists her daughter about, slings her to her hip, lifts her up in the air and holds her to her breast for hours at a time, listening to the soft whale sounds she makes as she feeds. She is so thankful, her daughter. Mink takes her everywhere. Baby as decoration. Baby as corsage. It is the world of strangers that has Mink hooked. Bending and peering, they revere the baby. The whole world has leapt to its feet and is applauding Mink for what she has made. And for the first time, she is alone on the stage. All of the noise is for her and it is deafening. It makes her heart, that octagon, split into smaller units. But Immaculata will surely grow and learn to walk – eventually away – so Mink wants another one immediately.
I am born three months premature on the kitchen floor in less than twenty minutes. Mink later jokes that my birth is like a one-night stand. ‘Quick and dirty. We didn’t even make it to the bedroom.’
You move in strides, breathing along with Mink in exaggerated baritones. You see the crown of my head cropping up, a siren in the kitchen. You pull me free. You sever the umbilical cord with your palette knife and place me on Mink’s chest. My mother: smooth as the skim of a frozen pond – one that, with its darkened centre, no one has dared to cross. Slick, white-blue, I have a full head of black hair standing on end. And one tooth. Surprise. Mink looks at me and I can hear the chatter in her brain. It is ticker tape: runt, whelp. I shriek. I am a tadpole, a thing birthed in the wild. I see a moose kicking away its young. She hands me to you. My father. I fit inside your palm. We lock eyes. I am quiet. So are you.
You refuse to call an ambulance. You refuse to leave the house. You refuse to go to the hospital. I am almost three pounds.
‘She is the size of the world’s smallest cat his name is Mister Peebles,’ says Immaculata, already talking. Mink scrubs the floor with lye until it goes from red to pink to white, until she can no longer lift her head. It appears to her as the site of a massacre. Her own. And there don’t seem to be any other witnesses.
Blown back into a corner of cupboards, the aftermath of an explosion, you hold me to you, your smallest finger in my mouth, a succour. You are a heat lamp. In your arms, I grow hesitantly. In slow and suspicious inches. To tonight. Five feet tall. Eighty-five pounds. And my heat lamp is gone.
Immaculata coughs, the bathwater splashing the edges of the tub. She coughs again. It is an imitation of the first cough. Without breaking her reflection, Mink claps Immaculata hard on the back. Immaculata’s face turns to glee under a blanket. The smoke is suddenly spears in my throat. I stub my cigarette out in the marble soap dish. Tap tap. And now that we are in conversation, I say to God that I quit smoking and I welcome his wrath. I could use the attention. Go ahead. Drown me. I hold my breath. Cheeks puffed out, I slide under the water.
Floating there, in that waterlogged quiet, I remember the moment of my conception. My parents are under sheepskin in the afternoon, sun fissuring the blinds, turning everything to honey – even the dust helixes are made of sugar. My parents are good at sex. Aside from their feet, this is their other point of commonality. Their other standard greeting. They twine each other, Immaculata – their perfect halfway point, never a cry – is bundled between them, an elegant cocoon. They have not slept for three days, my parents, dreaming her and each other, slithering through blood and wishes, pooling themselves, and then me: a collision in sharp edges.
See, I cannot shake anything. I cannot shake anything because my brain is a weakling. Whip-skinny, it wants to fight everything and everything wants to fight. Drum roll.
This is my brain: a stranger on the streetcar with a runny nose playing the flute. Mink in her dish gloves throwing out a half-finished jar of mustard because it no longer looks neat in the fridge. How when we are camping, the stars are the confetti left on the floor of the legion hall. How when I tell you this, you say that I should write every book that is ever read. I wonder for a second if this could happen. And then I think that you are bad for me. And then I think that you can hear this thought so I stamp it out but it still burns. So I picture the van that was parked down our street for a year that had no seats in it. And that it could house a very small opera sung by the shortest man in Parkdale, Leopold of the Onions. Lettuce. Pyrotechnics. The hole in the end of my tights that lets my big toe poke out. How it used to be a recluse and now it is a showgirl, how it has stopped drawing cartoons and become one. Your last words to me. The sound of them in my ear. The feel of your mouth there, a storm rolling in. This is the worst fight my mind is in. It is a brute. It always lands its punches. They are square and straight-faced and they don’t negotiate. I search out other smaller fights but I am down. The bell rings. A small man in a black bow tie declares: It’s a knockout. And just when I start to get up and find my bearings, there they are again. Your last words to me. Smack.
Find me.
I wish for one blank moment, one flatline moment, but just when I think I am alone in my head, a parachutist with nothing but the wind, those words crop up. They are the ground rushing at me from below.
The bathwater is loud as an isolation tank now. It is lodged in my deaf embryo ears. I am zero gravity. I continue to hold my breath. What little is left rises to the surface in tiny bubbles.
Once you cried while we were listening to the radio. You pulled it to you like a friend who had gone out of his mind and wanted to cause himself harm. You shook it while it spoke. You tried to reason with it. No. No. A group of whales was stuck in a chain of northern lakes. There was only one hole in the ice for them to breathe through. The whales were taking turns breathing through the one hole. But they were running out of oxygen. Already, some of them were falling into the deep never to return. They were all going to die. A team of hunters and scientists was on its way to kill them. This is mercy, you told me.
I don’t want my oxygen anymore. Take it.
Mink pulls me up by the hair like I was a kitten in a pillow-case and now she wants me for a pet. Immaculata examines our cabled shapes. ‘What a polite thing to do,’ she commends Mink. ‘Death for life a clean trade I have learned something.’ She has unburied our family crest. ‘Save people.’
I take in a deep breath. The air is a battle cry. Your French cigarettes. Bombs and redcoats in the distance. Shivering hands holding open maps. They were the kind of cigarettes you bought from your special man at your special store. You bought your coffee from another special man, greens from another and meat from another. The meat man. The greens man. The coffee man. The cigarettes man. They dot the city, these special men, and you were bonhomie to every one of them. You knew their wives’ middle names and their parents’ diseases. Together, you spoke in exaggerated gestures like you were doing a show for deaf children whose wondrous faces were pressed up against the window, the world an aquarium to them. You spoke in Greek and Yiddish and Polish. Yours was cobbled together, but your pronunciation was so perfect it was as though you had lived there and you really were brothers.
We would walk into their stores. The smell of oil paint and urethane coming off you, spiralling in the air in whips and sinews. A bullfight. I was tall as your belt buckle. I watched it shimmer telepathic. You would lift me up so that I could ring the bell. When I did, I could see into the back room. The special man would scuttle to a leather case, pull out a hand mirror, flatten his hair and eyebrows with his saliva, pop a mint into his mouth, lick his lips and undo his top button. Arms open, he would emerge victorious; he had just stepped off a plane and his stock was screaming his name. ‘Monsieur Ledoux,’ he would say, shaking your filthy hand – long and gangly and sure. He would shake it as if you were a tourist and his town were dying. ‘Wel
come.’ He would yield to your every request. He would take you into his storeroom. He would unlatch the backs of refrigerated trucks. He would lift lids off boxes that had not been opened in years. He would dig up his mother if you thought she might be the freshest.
When we left, I would feel sad because these men now had to bide their time before you would return again and who knew when that would be. You weren’t sad. Nothing would cling to you. You would already be inside the next moment. Time with you, in compressed portions. Time with you: all poems.
I open my eyes to Mink. My hair is still in her palm. It is a root system dug up. It shivers in the light. It wishes to be underground. Mink has broken her reflection. But it is not us falling away. It is her. She stares at us. Her lips quiver. Her face sinks. Smoke comes out of her nostrils in tailwinds. She is a dragon collapsing.
I walk out to the backyard, hair still wet, like I have greased it for a fight, my body too, slick in your shrunken suit and boots. Your stray cats climb out of the dark and into my arms. Their bodies beat warm in my hands, their hearts striving, bombs in their chests. Tails curl up into ties around my neck, bracelets around my wrists. They are a coat that flexes. I attach small bags to their backs filled with two feedings each of your bony fish and a small note that reads:
I have been abandoned.
Please be kind.
And then I toss them. Straight-legging their way through the air, onto the sidewalk in front of our house, they land in unison, bored cheerleaders. They look back at me with vague accusation, and then they walk away, a funeral procession up to King Street. I watch them shrink with the horizon. Another unrecorded moment of loss in the world. Another notch in the invisible gloom. The strays made strays again.
You told me that to hunt something, you have to become the thing you are hunting. I cut my hair in the style of yours, a slice across the front and a slice across the back. I bury it, making my bare hands black. The twins watch me. They are in their nightgowns, freshly bathed, their hair combed down flat against their foreheads. They glisten, open wounds. Their teeth: kindling. I let them watch me, knowing that I possess a higher magic, the hard worm of my grief. I am the widow. I am full of spells and incantations, languages they never knew existed. I have snuck up on them and won the race. Their sombre faces strain through the chain-link fence, legs overbandaged from their earlier collisions.
I walk toward them. The one with the gash across her cheek moves away. I hold up my hand, white-flagging. ‘Sorry,’ I whisper, my voice hoarse, a scrape to the air. I take in their faces: fruit growing hollow. The other one wants to touch me as though she paid admission. I won’t let her. She pulls her hand back through the fence and says, caterpillar lips, ‘It’s okay.’
‘Yeah. It’s okay.’
‘We know what a difficult time this must be.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We know suffering.’
‘Yeah.’
‘We are baking some stuff for you right now.’
‘Cookies and casseroles.’
‘Our personal favourites.’
‘From a Betty Crocker cookbook for kids.’
‘It’s excellent.’
They hop.
‘When we’re ten, we can make pastry.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Pastry is tricky.’
‘We’ll bring the baked goods by.’
‘Tomorrow.’
‘If that’s okay.’
‘Yeah. If that’s okay.’
‘You could sell them if you’re not hungry.’
‘No. You couldn’t.’
‘Yeah.’
‘Eugenia?’
‘Yeah, Eugenia?’
‘We want to make a pyramid.’
‘We want to make a pyramid, Eugenia.’
‘And a pyramid takes three.’
‘Eugenia.’
‘We want you to play with us.’
‘You.’
‘Play with us tomorrow.’
‘Wanna?’
I can smell their breath. Toothpaste and vanilla. Premature death. Mrs. Next Door sees them and calls out, ‘Bedtime. Now.’ I watch them vanish past her. She forms the curtain to their world.
The lights of the twins’ house are turned off so quickly. For them, the sky is choked with bombers.
Where is my sign? My bundle of clues? An arrow. A homing pigeon. ‘It is I, Eugenia, your daughter beloved.’ I mouth this up to the apple tree. Its licked branches against the night sky, the strokes of the first alphabet. I wave two hands in the air, help, but the world is unmoved. A mute witness.
The twins’ house is a black eye now as they are pressed between their sheets and worried into sleep. Mr. Next Door comes out onto the back porch and lights a cigarette. He does not even pace while moths throw themselves at the porch light, suicides fast as fetal heartbeats. I listen to his inhalations and exhalations. They are the breath of a sleeping beast. I crouch to the ground.
Children lose their minds the way that adults do. Same as adults, we have various strategies to win our minds back. Immaculata told me about a girl who did equations in her head to fall asleep at night. The equations were very sophisticated. The numbers made her less distraught. And they kept the witches away. If you have a million birds flying in your head, it makes a difference if you can name them. All of that skittering. Name the birds. Only then can their calls be separated. Only then can their beaks be blunted.
You ride the shoulder of the highway, wheels spitting up gravel. A grimace on your face. Beard: hoarfrost. Cheeks more sunken, more hungry than usual, you’re thin as a line drawing. You think to yourself, I was supposed to be hero to something but I have forgotten what that was. Me. You were supposed to be hero to me.
You did not write eugenia on the note because you could not. I would have tripped you up. I was your last bit of health. I would have kept you here. When you ride, you hear a sound in the brush travelling, running alongside you. Sometimes you stop to see if it is animal and sometimes you stop to see if it is human.
Tonight you build a fire in a farmer’s field, and you burn, like diseased livestock, my photograph and my baby hair, and you fall asleep to the smell of me being licked away until I am black curls and ash. But you make the mistake of speaking to me when you are tired, a child who is lost on his way home, all of his landmarks inexplicably gone. You are not able to erase me from your mind. No matter how much your fists bleed from being scraped against rock, I am a noise there. A rattle. With the totems gone, the photograph, the hair, the thing you once wanted to remember and now try to forget is no longer fastened. It is freed and so it takes on a life of its own. I am freed. Framed by empty night, I take on a life of my own. The end of you. The beginning of me.
Marta stands in our yard in her black pantsuit with its cinched waist, her swollen face too rouged. I gasp when I see her. She came home from your funeral and, with an oven mitt on, loosened all the light bulbs in her apartment. It seemed to be the only thing she could do. She put on blush before leaving again. She wished to be civilized. She put it on in the dark.
Oven mitt still on, she hands me a rope, coiled into a perfect O, and says with the offering, guttural, ‘A gift. Purely symbolic. Otherwise useless.’ From the story. From the story about the girl who stood above the flood. I loop the rope around my shoulder. It sits heavy as if a ship hangs from its end.
‘Thank you.’ I look up at Marta, her desperate weariness. She has just been pulled to shore. So close to perishing, she cannot afford to be giving anything away. Too much has gone missing already. Habit, she touches her throat. Her locket is not there. She lets her hands fall. Arms still too tired to pat my head. ‘You’re welcome,’ Marta says, walking away, a straight black seam completing the night.
{POSTCARD FROM OUTER SPACE}
e,
there are astronauts lost in space. bolts,
gloves and tanks too. they float toward fires.
for days, for decades. sometimes, c
enturies.
just waiting to catch. everything, all of us just parts,
waiting to fall to the ground.
bring tobacco.
bring apples.
bring you.
sssss.
If Marta’s rope were laid flat on the ground, and there were no apartment towers or highways to negotiate, it could, from our backyard, reach the lake. It is as long as Finbar’s walk across the Niagara Gorge. As long as Finbar’s walk between the skyscrapers in New York City. And as long as Finbar’s last walk on that fateful morning in Florence when the world shook itself free of the thing he loved the most, and he retired into oblivion to feast on his own heart, among other things.
I sling it round my shoulder and I climb the south side of our house to the roof, where I will tie the rope from our chimney to the twins’ chimney. There, I will take my first walk, a humble length, but in the doing I will be feathered like Finbar, with the world below me, an open mouth, surrounded by water it cannot yet see. And you will clap so loud, a racket, that it will be, amidst streetcars, slurs, barrel fires, bottles smashed, sirens, the only sound that will reach me thirty feet above the ground. No matter how far you have gotten, even if you are clinking bronze mugs with Finbar, both of you in your overcoats despite the air outside being, you both agree, sultry, I will hear you. Your two half-ruined hands coming together as cymbals.
Our last night together, before we fished in the sideways rain, I did a handstand on a crane, hundreds of feet above a construction site on Lake Shore, just east of Bathurst, and below, you marched the mud, you snorted and paced, a penned-in rodeo bull, eyes on me, a speck, a balancing speck, and suddenly you hollered, ‘A daredevil, an aerialist, a miracle!’ like a great audience was gathering and they were hungry. Pow pow. You startled me with your cry, I tipped, a silver needle, speedometer, but I steadied myself, my white nightgown another skin, folded loose and sodden against me. My palms firm, they pressed down against the wet metal, making my stamp, my future.
