Stunt

by Claudia Dey

  Mink is picked up by a black limousine. Upon seeing the chauffeur, his hunchback frame in a dark suit, looking as though he has been living on arsenic and menthol cigarellos, Immaculata leans into the living room window and says, ‘The Grim Reaper,’ like she recognizes him and his sallow visage. Like they were intimates and now she is welcoming him home. She knows all of the chains that hang around his neck. One was a gift from her. She has been growing her hair all this time, her teeth turning soft, thinking only of him. And now he has come. For Mink. Immaculata’s eyes water; they have been stamped upon by tiny hooves.

  Before Mink leaves, she says to us, ‘This was always my dream, to be a travelling showgirl.’ She sings one note. ‘Ra.’

  ‘But aren’t you coming back?’ asks Immaculata.

  ‘Ra.’

  The chauffeur puts Mink’s suitcases and hat box into the trunk. He holds the door open. Immaculata knocks on the window. Thinking the knock is for her, Mink glances over at us, her eyes not quite settling on our eager outlines. She opens her mouth and then closes it. Whatever it is she was going to say to us she decides to save for herself. She is taken away, the black limousine vanishing into traffic on the Gardiner. Immaculata’s brow beads with sweat. She wipes it away with a stained white handkerchief, which she tucks back under the lace sleeve of her dress.

  We look at the old photographs of Mink lining the hallway. They are from what Mink calls her prime. The days before we were born. When she was a dove. Immaculata says, sotto voce, ‘The death of a star.’

  Not one for farewells, you finally emerge from your studio. Once Mink is on the highway, in the fast lane, her window rolled down, scarf flying out, a tongue pointed at the wind, her hair unpinning itself, a jellyfish, she practices her death yodel, screaming it at the oncoming traffic. Cars pile up and crunch like a game played for Titans.

  You are stock-still for a second, listening for rodents in the walls. Not hearing any, you waltz me briefly. Immaculata blushes the colour of nipples. You pull a piece of crumpled paper and a twenty-dollar bill from your pocket. ‘I’m a twenty-dollar man,’ you say, and you clap the money into Immaculata’s hand. Before she can leave through the front door, you squint at her: ‘A happy hunting ground filled with bushwhackers, horse thieves, whisky peddlers, counterfeiters, marauders that’ll kill you for a hatband.’ You are quoting Hang ’Em High. Then you bite the air in my direction. We are a triumvirate now. You send Immaculata to Mister Smoke and Milk with a list entitled: provisions. Mink will be away for one week.

  provisions

  potatoes

  white bread

  white sugar

  white cheese

  milk

  bacon

  hot dogs

  margarine

  newspaper

  lottery ticket

  surprise treats (one each)

  Above the list, you draw a monk in flight with an enormous penis. We have seen you naked. We know what penises are.

  ‘I am thankful I do not have one,’ Immaculata confided after our first viewing.

  ‘Still I admire it such as one might a handsome but mysterious pet.’

  ‘It’s probably the same as having a place in the country.’

  ‘Or a separate apartment.’

  ‘With no furniture.’

  ‘Empty but beloved.’

  ‘And you visit it sometimes.’

  I am perplexed by the list. So is Immaculata. Her face is that of a nun buying underwear. This is not your version of how to feed oneself in the universe. I have stood by your side too many times while you and your special men palm the heads of cabbage like lost sons. But Immaculata’s desire to fulfill orders has overrun her puzzlement. Before I can inquire, she has already made her way to the store. Still in her nightgown, she is fragile, a sleepwalker in the daytime. Her skin is translucent as tracing paper. I see her tiptoeing along a ledge, pigeons at her feet, pollen and the uninvited eyes hanging heavy around her, toothbrushes in their pockets, lullabies rotating in their heads.

  St. Joseph of Cupertino was nicknamed Open Mouth because he was retarded and his mouth hung open. Many bugs, too many to count, were caught, trapped and swallowed by him. This is a horror for any Jainist, who wears a mask over his mouth to prevent the needless consumption of winged creatures. The Jainists even have separate headquarters for insects because all things are holy.

  I think about living naked in that room full of insects. The sweep of thousands of wings against my skin, eyelashes and skirt hems and fitful souls. I would be their landing place. I would lie on the floor and be so covered in creatures that when Mink, frantic with her suitcases and hat box and fantasy-girl posters of herself, having travelled the globe to find me, walked into the room, she would not be able to see me, so hidden would I be by wings.

  Open Mouth could fly. Which means he caught an excess of bugs. All of them, airborne together. When in flight, Open Mouth brought passengers: townspeople, the sick, stray dogs and less talented monks. He carried an eighteen-foot cross along for one flight and a sea urchin for another. It is said that it was not faith so much as lust that made St. Joseph fly. His mouth was open for Mary more than anyone else. Lust makes you levitate. Lust gives you the better view. While others have to imagine the tops of trees, the tops of towers, the tops of heads, not so St. Joseph. I conclude that he is your erect monk.

  Immaculata comes home with the groceries and, as instructed, surprise treats: a mousetrap for her, a pair of oversized sunglasses for me and a pink cigar wrapped in ‘IT’S A GIRL!’ for you. You love my sunglasses. When I put them on, you call me pet, pixie, petit rêve, plaything in the everlasting sun. Immaculata keeps the change. I see it poking through her bobby sock. A quarter and some pennies mixed in with her anklebone. Maybe she has a hundred dollars somewhere and she will buy an exotic pet that she will slaughter and stuff and name Véronique.

  A ringmaster, you direct us to settle ourselves at the table. We watch you make a banquet!, a meal that involves all the ingredients! You puff on your cigarette, cheeks an accordion, the kitchen overcast with smoke. With much clapping, you spread the meal out. It is finger food for freaks: a giant bowl of cereal (the whole box of cereal, the whole carton of milk); potatoes fried and burned in bogs of margarine; hot dog after hot dog smothered in cheese, bacon and white sugar, each wrapped in a slice of white bread. You say, excitedly, ‘What is the point of a bun when you get more out of a bread slice? They sell the bun as though it is a higher version of the bread slice. If you look at the bread slice, actually look at the bread slice, look at the wraparound, the innate wraparound of the bread slice, it is a miracle. It is really a matter of volume, girls, a matter of volume. I hate the bun. The bun is a lie, and losing the war to the slice in this household one hot dog at a time. Breadwinner, breadwinner, breadwinner, say it with me now.’

  ‘Breadwinner. Breadwinner. Breadwinner.’

  You are being ironic. You are imitating the ‘Everyman’ to get us thinking. To make a point about ‘Consciousness’ and ‘Content.’ You always write in lower case, but you speak in upper case. This is a sermon. It could last for hours. It could last for days. If you were in a pulpit, you would break it. You always need more space. A mountain range. A perfect meadow. The moon. Here, there is too much to trip on. What you would call junk. Kitchen chairs and carpets and doors. The dish rack. The lamp. Mink’s water-skiing photo. You turn the floor to splintered glass and chipped wood with every point. Debris and dots of blood rise on our bare arms and cheeks. The world is never big enough for you. You are the mouse squirming in the tight throat of a cobra. You are always the one to lose at musical chairs. We are not afraid. If one of us interrupted your sermon and said, ‘Hold me,’ you would. And you would do it so well that we would wish you stood on our street corner with a sign that read FREE HUGS and that all the sorrowful people with sleep lines on their faces could go to you and be mended by your good grip.

  At your behest, Immaculata and I read the backs of the cereal box a
nd the plastic tombs that held the hot dogs. We lean our noses into the cartons and smell the antibiotics in the milk. While we run the sugar through our fingertips, you tell us about rats fed with sugar water. The rats binge and become addicts. Without their sugar water, the rats go into convulsions. You scratch your ears, a sugary rat, and then you suddenly stop your sermon, say, ‘There,’ and take my photograph: nightgown, sitting at the kitchen table, elbow propped against it, one hand holding up my chin, I am looking out the window at a squirrel with a shred of paper in his mouth. He is scampering up the trunk of a tree and then tightroping a branch. He drops the paper and feeds on a nut. His motions are private and subtle as snacking in church. He looks at me. His eyes are jet black and in that jet black, they are the eyes of every animal. I get it. The world is made up of winged creatures and we are the open mouth.

  I make a sign. I staple it to a two-by-four. I picket in front of Mister Smoke and Milk.

  DON’T EAT THE HOT DOGS

  People walk by. Some of them scowl. I imagine them full of pig hearts and pig kidneys and pig livers. I imagine them full of squirrels. I take to wearing a black armband. And sometimes I sleep with a mask over my mouth.

  Over the course of the week, the banquet hardens and congeals. Immaculata has shown me photographs of the dead in various poses, supine and not. The banquet takes on the features of the embalmed. We do not touch it. We are of course forbidden. Immaculata says that we are getting arsenic cheeks. Her diagnosis: absence of meat. Meanwhile, pantomime of a man reading the newspaper, you read the newspaper over and over again in crisp folds and squares, smoke sometimes catching the edge of a section, Immaculata there, bare-handed, to put it out. You cut out the birth announcements and add them to your collection. You say, ‘I love beginnings!’ with every one you snip. You do not go into your studio once. Mink would have called this unheard of.

  Mink calls us one night. We gather around the speakerphone like she might be full of cowboy poetry. Instead, in her Austrian accent, she tells us stories about her days on set. There are people in the background with whom Mink exchanges jovialities, her pitch that of a bar wench, every passerby her peg-legged customer. Mink tells Immaculata that she can see her doing this one day because of her schönheit, her God-given beauty. Immaculata dips her head camel-low, imagining herself in an evening dress, coiled in thick rope, tugging this way and that, a black steam engine smoking toward her.

  Dishes clutter the sink and the bathtub. The cats move in, their fur floating like dandelion seeds. We drag our mattresses into the living room and sleep there in front of the fireplace. You throw out the toaster, saying angrily, ‘Somewhere there is an island full of these things.’ The couch is next. The curling iron last. We do not change out of our nightgowns. Even when we paint the hallways with bold slogans:

  Gluten dulls the children!

  Beware the white bread!

  Milk kills!

  Luddites are our friends!

  I get used to Mink’s absence. We all do. And so it is jarring when the Grim Reaper brings her back and she smells of menthol and she looks for the toaster and the couch and the curling iron, and she sees us, her chalk-coloured children, our matted hair, the paint on our arms and nightgowns spotted and striped, a different species entirely, and she sees the meal laid out before us, palliative, and the ruined kitchen and the slogans, cats bawling at her ankles. She drops us in the bathtub, and then she says to you, ‘How was your week?’ and then she flicks your forehead between the eyes. You flinch. Her touch is a starter’s pistol. You do not answer her. Instead, you shuffle her question through your faculties. She has interrupted a delicate state of being. And then she says, ‘Have you lost your mind?’ and, with that, I think you do.

  Soon after, you take me to Our Spot by the Lake for the first time.

  I wake to you standing above me, grinning. You should have bird feathers between your teeth. A thermos of coffee and a bag of worms in your hands. Apples in your suit pockets making you the many-breasted Artemis, goddess of the beasts. Boots grinding the carpeted floor, you are flinging sparks. Secret. And suddenly we are on your bicycle and we are, with your fist in the air, heading southeast to fish and to make fire!, our house and the life that we stage within it shrinking behind us to a dot on a map – instantly, the Old World. How far will we go? The Scarborough Bluffs? The Orient? And will we ever go back? Or should I start to memorize my mother’s face now? My sister’s? Every night I ask myself this question, and every night we return home, smelling like fire.

  I sit myself on your handlebars, my back to you, contracted into the shape of a snapdragon. Slicing through traffic: our bravery game. I punch out the lenses of my oversized sunglasses so I can feel the wind whistle through my eyes.

  On your bicycle, we are flying. In my socked feet and nightgown, I stand up on your handlebars, the prow of a ship heading into the great unknown, and I climb onto your mile-wide shoulders, can see the next continent, hands cupped around the top of your head, a crown, fingers burrowing into knotted tufts of hair, thick and dry, that haven’t been washed in weeks. My face is frozen into a smile. Leaves skid the road in green shots. You catch the moon, always heavy in your mouth. You tell me it tastes like ice and regret. You tell me it tastes like liftoff. You tell me you have tasted everything in your life. Is this true? Been around the sun fifty-nine times. Is this true? Still prefer the dark. And there on your shoulders, feet dangling down to your blinking belt buckle, in that spine-straight attitude of Finbar’s beloved who fell all those mornings ago in Florence, I wave to an imagined crowd. You see them too. And then you introduce me, saying my secret name for the first time. ‘Stunt,’ you yell it extravagant, ‘Stunt.’ A word juggled up into the black night. ‘Stunt.’ I drink it thirstily as a nectar. And unlike Finbar’s beloved, I do not fall.

  The morning you disappear, Immaculata stands at the end of my bed. She glows, a girl pulled from a marsh. A maiden, ragged and graceful. She should be covered in moths. She should be holding out a pear. Something is wrong, and when something is wrong, it is you. She does not say anything. Instead, she stands with her mouth open. That is where the pear should be. That is where the moths should fly from.

  And then, false-starting, she says, ‘He.’

  There is only one He in our life and He is fixed how gravity is fixed. He is the Law of our Universe.

  Mink and Immaculata shuffle from foot to foot like the floor is fiery coals. Immaculata says, ‘There is nothing left of him but five fish there is nothing left of him but five fish there is nothing left of him but five fish.’ I find your note. It is duct-taped to the inside of your studio door, your own eviction notice, the drawing of the flying monk, his enormous penis, and below, in your ragged script:

  gone to save the world

  sorry mink,

  immaculata,

  sorry

  yours

  sheb wooly ledoux

  asshole

  ‘No Eugenia,’ says Mink.

  ‘No Eugenia,’ echoes Immaculata.

  ‘None.’ I round them up. They look at me as if I have nipped their ankles and taken square centimetres of their skin.

  Mink has never seen the flying monk. She does not know his significance. Every human being has his own Morse code. Yours was particularly dense. She studied you as one might read the clavicle of a bull, trying to divine messages from fractures and patterns. But to no avail. She did not live in your age. She did not have that skill. I did. I would know.

  I read the note once, roll it between my fingers, a missile, leave the studio and place it on the kitchen table, careful, it may go off. Five fish are fanned out there. Fried in butter. The pan is still on the stove. I touch it. A blister forms on my fingertip. I kick up my chin, feel my hair down my back, brambles, and shake my head, the horse before the race.

  Your bicycle.

  I run to the window.

  Your bicycle.

  Gone.

  The apple tree has been plucked bare. I run to your b
edroom, spare change gone, matches too. Did you kiss me while I slept? I touch my mouth. Yes. I look in the bathroom: toilet seat left up. Open the top drawer of your dresser: my baby hair is gone, that black tuft between the tie clips, single socks, handkerchiefs, leather boxes, pencils, French cigarettes and a photograph of you in your suit, in a rooming house, canvases lined up against the wall, attentive, waiting, and you, pretending to sword-fight them with a brush, cigarette dancing in your mouth, everything dancing for you, the world an instant tango. Huzzah, I hear your voice, huzzah. I run faster. The same route: the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, the bathroom, the dresser, the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, the bathroom, the dresser, the kitchen, the frying pan, the window, the bedroom, my mouth, your dresser – until a new part of me is lanced into being, red splotches burst on my neck making meteors of my skin, I beat them back. A brush fire. To put it out, you have to axe the roots.

  three

  It smells like butter and crematorium. It smells like melted dolls.

  Immaculata whistles in her sleep. If she sleeps. Of this, I have never been sure. She does not whistle songs, but whistles as though she is calling for something, for someone. Probably the dead. So marooned is she on the other side of the River Styx. The summoner. I crash mercifully against the rocks. I am whistled awake.

  With her call, the sun rises, swelling the room and wresting my eyes open. They are hard-boiled eggs. I have not really slept for a year, with you always shaking me out of it, your fresh tobacco breath, secret. Secret, I would repeat, touching my heart or my throat, fingers a cuff.