You draw a breath full of sawdust and incense and think, Too perfect. You might even say it, but Marty wouldn't hear you, and sometimes talking to yourself is really talking to be overheard. So you wait until he turns to check your reaction, moving into the warm shop with the snow dripping off your cuffs, and you say, "You made all these?"
"Every one." He reaches out and taps the hull of a double bass, the face striped purpleheart and rosewood and something gold. It thumps like a melon, sweet and ripe, so you wonder if he can feel the resonance through lingering fingertips.
"Do you sell them?" You want to touch the jazz guitar hanging over the lathe. Its faceplate is honey-colored, riddled with holes from worms that must have worked in the tree after it was fallen. The neck is mahogany, and it too has small scars, the imperfections of salvaged wood.
"I give them away," he says, and lifts down the guitar you were eyeing. It's finished and strung; he sets an electric tuner on the bench and bends over the strings. You probably couldn't tune as fast by ear as he does in his deafness.
When he's done, he scoops up the beast and holds it out to you like a toddler, archtop gleaming under the worklights. It's strung left-handed, and you wonder how he knew.
He says, "Care to try her?"
Your cold-stung fingers itch for it. "Give them away?" you ask. "How can you afford that?"
He gestures around and grins. "It doesn't take a lot of money to live like this, and I made some when I was young. When I still played myself, a little. Go on, take the guitar."
He has a point there. So you lift the guitar off his palms and stroke it for a second, finding where your hands should fall. You glance up, about to ask him what he wants to hear, and find him staring at your fingers. Oh, of course.
So you pick out a Simon and Garfunkel tune, because it's easy and fun and suits the instrument. And then you play a little Pete Seeger something, until your cracked fingertips start to more-than-sting. You don't bother singing: Marty's not listening, and you want to hear the guitar. You'd give it back, but it feels good in your arms, close and friendly, so you let it sit there and puppy-snuggle for a minute while you chat. You play a couple of bars of "Peggy Sue" and a couple of bars of "I Wanna Be Sedated," and it all sounds good. You expect a little buzz at the bottom of the neck, but it's clean all the way down.
"Who do you give them away to?"
"Deserving folks," he says. "Folks with music people listen to. Folks whose music makes a better world. That one's yours."
Your right hand locks on the neck. "I can't take this."
"I made it for you," he says. "The siren called you, Missy. There's no two ways about it. That there's your guitar."
You'd have expected to be too ill and exhausted to continue your vest-pocket tour, but you wake up rested and strong on Thursday, and in fine voice as if in spite of having been half-drowned in ice water and left on the stones. You hum to yourself in the mirror while you fix your hair, and you pick out a white button shirt and patchwork vest with swingy glass bead fringe across the chest to pull on over threadbare jeans. Spiked up hair and too much makeup gives you cheekbones that will read from stage. You're getting too old for the scapegrace gamine schtick.
At the last minute, as you're packing up the Toyota, you decide to bring the new guitar.
Boston and Albany are great, better than good, CDs flying out of the booth, and in Albany you pick up a gig in Portsmouth for May and a business card from a booking agent who sounds six kinds of excited and impressed.
"You're a lot better live," she says, tossing bottle-red hair behind her shoulder. "We need to get you into bigger venues, get some quality production on those CDs."
You think you like her.
Two weeks later, when you make it back to play for the Eddies again, you've figured out something is up. The crowd treats you differently since the mermaid. It's not about the guitar, nice as the guitar is, because you experiment with using other instruments and it doesn't seem to change anything.
You have to stop yourself from scanning the crowd for the mermaid. She won't be here, you tell yourself, wondering why it's so hard to believe.
It's no surprise when Little Eddie sidles up after the second set and asks you for a return booking in another four weeks, at the same fee. You tell him you have to check your calendar and your booking agent will call him. You make a note to negotiate him up, and sharply.
But when he walks away, you catch Big Eddie looking over the bar at you and you can see the shine in her eyes. That rattles you. Big Eddie doesn't get like that. She never lets anything get under her skin.
You walk over on the excuse of a beer—the second set ends and the café closes before last call, so it's still legal to serve—and drape yourself over a stool.
Big Eddie slides it in front of you and says, "What did you do to your voice?"
"Does it sound bad?" You clear your throat, sip beer, and try again. "I kind of fell in some water and wound up with hypothermia on a hike, and it's sounded funny since."
You didn't miss the way your voice has changed, and not just the timbre: it's your phrasing and your range as well. It took a little while and some messing around with a digital recorder to understand what you were hearing. The tentativeness, the derivative garage-band sound the mermaid commented on, have been washed from your music, leaving something etched and rough-edged and labyrinthine as sea caves.
You love it. You haven't been able to stop singing—to the cat, to yourself, in the shower, walking down the street—since she kissed you. Your new voice fills you up, clothes you in bright glory. You know how everyone else who hears it feels, because you feel it too.
Eddie says, "No, no. It sounds great. But it doesn't sound like you."
You have to bang on the door of Marty's shop to get his attention. When the door creaks open on sawdust-clogged hinges, he blinks at the brightness of sun off snow and covers it by pushing up his safety glasses. "Problem with the guitar, Missy?"
"Actually, just the opposite," you say, shaping the words so he can read them on your lips and tongue. "The guitar is wonderful. It's something else I need to give back, and I was hoping you'd come with me. Because I don't know what I'll do if I hear her singing. I'd really—" You look down in embarrassment, force yourself to look up again. If he can't see your face, he can't understand what you're saying. "—I'd really owe you one."
You already owe him one. More than one. Closer to a dozen. Your impression that he's a good guy is reinforced by the fact that he hangs the goggles on a nail inside the shop threshold, pulls his coat and gloves on without a word, and only pauses long enough to padlock the door.
You go down into the earth like pilgrims, making obeisance to the gods of deep places, sometimes scraping on your bellies over rough stones. Marty takes you deeper and by different passages than you went before, and all you can do is follow. You can't talk to him in the dark, not unless you make him turn and shine his light into your face, and so you listen to what he has to say instead.
"I had a daughter your age," he says, and you notice the verb tense and don't ask, just let your fingers brush the back of his wrist. In the cave, echoing from stone, shimmering from the moving surface of the underground river, his voice takes on the resonances and harmonics that have come to invest your own.
But then he adds, "She was a guitar player too." And, after another moment, "Kids are stupid. And maybe God protects fools, drunks and musicians, but all three at once is a bit much to ask of anybody."
You touch his shoulder in the dark, and realize it wasn't the deafness that made him give up playing. He leans into it for a second before walking forward, placing feet carefully on the rippled stones, ducking sideways to bend under a low roof. Water's worn scallops on the floor of the cave; they look like ripples in sand where a river's flowed over it. Wave patterns, sine patterns, like sound.
Water and music are the same thing, at the core.
You stop at the edge of a pool deeper and wider and even more pel
lucid than the one in which you met the mermaid before. The water moves only where slow drips scatter into it from the ceiling, the beams of your flashlight and Marty's scattering where they're reflected.
You half-expected the mermaid to be waiting, maybe even for her to sing you in, but the only sound is the arrhythmic plink of droplets. She's taken what she wanted and given what she chose to give. She's done and the rest is yours now.
Except you want it all to be yours, earned, not borrowed glory. You wonder if Marty—if anyone—can get her to let you go this time, let you come up out of the darkness again. You wonder if she'll be angry that you're rejecting her gift. You wonder what she'll say, and if she'll curse you.
You breathe deep of wet air to fill yourself up, and nerve yourself to call her up with your song. Because even if it's quick and easy, even if you've already paid for it, even if it's the most beautiful sound you'll ever make, you don't want to echo her voice forever.
You want to grow your own.
Useless Things
Maureen F. McHugh
Señora?" The man standing at my screen door is travel-stained. Migrant, up from Mexico. The dogs haven't heard him come up but now they erupt in a frenzy of barking to make up for their oversight. I am sitting at the kitchen table, painting a doll, waiting for the timer to tell me to get doll parts curing in the oven in the workshed.
"Hudson, Abby!" I shout, but they don't pay any attention.
The man steps back. "Do you have work? I can, the weeds," he gestures. He is short-legged, long from waist to shoulder. He's probably headed for the Great Lakes area, the place in the U.S. with the best supply of fresh water and the most need of farm labor.
Behind him is my back plot, with the garden running up to the privacy fence. The sky is just starting to pink up with dawn. At this time of year I do a lot of my work before dawn and late in the evening, when it's not hot. That's probably when he has been traveling, too.
I show him the cistern, and set him to weeding. I show him where he can plug in his phone to recharge it. I have internet radio on, Elvis Presley died forty-five years ago today and they're playing "(You're So Square) Baby I Don't Care." I go inside and get him some bean soup.
Hobos used to mark code to tell other hobos where to stop and where to keep going. Teeth to signify a mean dog. A triangle with hands meant that the homeowner had a gun and might use it. A cat meant a nice lady. Today the men use websites and bulletin boards that they follow, when they can, with cheap smartphones. Somewhere I'm on a site as a "nice lady" or whatever they say today. The railroad runs east of here and it's sometimes a last spot where trains slow down before they get to the big yard in Belen. Men come up the Rio Grande hoping to hop the train.
I don't like it. I was happy to give someone a meal when I felt anonymous. Handing a bowl of soup to someone who may not have eaten for a few days was an easy way to feel good about myself. That didn't mean I wanted to open a migrant restaurant. I live by myself. Being an economic refugee doesn't make people kind and good and I feel as if having my place on some website makes me vulnerable. The dogs may bark like fools, but Hudson is some cross between Border collie and golden retriever, and Abby is mostly black Lab. They are sweet mutts, not good protection dogs, and it doesn't take a genius to figure that out.
I wake at night sometimes now, thinking someone is in my house. Abby sleeps on the other side of the bed, and Hudson sleeps on the floor. Where I live it is brutally dark at night, unless there's a moon—no one wastes power on lights at night. My house is small, two bedrooms, a kitchen and a family room. I lean over and shake Hudson on the floor, wake him up. "Who's here?" I whisper. Abby sits up, but neither of them hear anything. They pad down the hall with me into the dark front room and I peer through the window into the shadowy back lot. I wait for them to bark.
Many a night, I don't go back to sleep.
But the man at my door this morning weeds my garden, and accepts my bowl of soup and some flour tortillas. He thanks me gravely. He picks up his phone, charging off my system, and shows me a photo of a woman and a child. "My wife and baby," he says. I nod. I don't particularly want to know about his wife and baby but I can't be rude.
I finish assembling the doll I am working on. I've painted her, assembled all the parts and hand rooted all her hair. She is rather cuter than I like. Customers can mix and match parts off of my website—this face with the eye color of their choice, hands curled one way or another. A mix and match doll costs about what the migrant will make in two weeks. A few customers want custom dolls and send images to match. Add a zero to the cost.
I am dressing the doll when Abby leaps up, happily roo-rooing. I start, standing, and drop the doll dangling in my hand by one unshod foot.
It hits the floor head first with a thump and the man gasps in horror.
"It's a doll," I say.
I don't know if he understands, but he realizes. He covers his mouth with his hand and laughs, nervous.
I scoop the doll off the floor. I make reborns. Dolls that look like newborn infants. The point is to make them look almost, but not quite real. People prefer them a little cuter, a little more perfect than the real thing. I like them best when there is something a little strange, a little off about them. I like them as ugly as most actual newborns, with some aspect that suggests ontology recapitulating phylogeny; that a developing fetus starts as a single celled organism, and then develops to look like a tiny fish, before passing in stages into its final animal shape. The old theory of ontology recapitulating phylogeny, that the development of the human embryo follows the evolutionary path, is false, of course. But I prefer that my babies remind us that we are really animals. That they be ancient and a little grotesque. Tiny changelings in our house.
I am equally pleased to think of Thanksgiving turkeys as a kind of dinosaur gracing a holiday table. It is probably why I live alone.
"Que bonita," he says. How beautiful.
"Gracias," I say. He has brought me the empty bowl. I take it, and send him on his way.
I check my email and I have an order for a special. A reborn made to order. It's from a couple in Chicago, Rachel and Ellam Mazar—I have always assumed that it is Rachel who emails me but the emails never actually identify who is typing. There is a photo attached of an infant. This wouldn't be strange except this is the third request in three years I have had for exactly the same doll.
The dolls are expensive, especially the specials. I went to art school, and then worked as a sculptor for a toy company for a few years. I didn't make dolls, I made action figures, especially alien figures and spaceships from the Kinetics movies. A whole generation of boys grew up imprinting on toys I had sculpted. When the craze for Kinetics passed, the company laid off lots of people, including me. The whole economy was coming apart at the seams. I had been lucky to have a job for as long as I did. I moved to New Mexico because I loved it and it was cheap, and I tried to do sculpting freelance. I worked at a big box store. Like so many people, my life went into freefall. I bought this place—a little ranch house that had gone into foreclosure in a place where no one was buying anything and boarded up houses fall in on themselves like mouths without teeth. It was the last of my savings. I started making dolls as a stopgap.
I get by. Between the little bit of money from the dolls and the garden, I can eat. Which is more than some people.
A special will give me money for property tax. My cistern is getting low and there is no rain coming until the monsoon in June, which is a long way from now. If it's like last year, we won't get enough rain to fill the cistern anyway. I could pay for the water truck to make a delivery. But I don't like this. When I put the specials on my website, I thought about it as a way to make money. I had seen it on another doll site. I am a trained sculptor. I didn't think about why people would ask for specials.
Some people ask me to make infant dolls of their own children. If my mother had bought an infant version of me I'd have found it pretty disturbing.
On
e woman bought a special modeled on herself. She wrote me long emails about how her mother had been a narcissist, a monster, and how she was going to symbolically mother herself. Her husband was mayor of a city in California, which was how she could afford to have a replica of her infant self. Her emails made me uncomfortable, which I resented. So eventually I passed her on to another doll maker who made toddlers. I figured she could nurture herself up through all the stages of childhood.
Her reborn was very cute. More attractive than she was in the image she sent. She never commented. I don't know that she ever realized.
I suspect the Mazars fall into another category. I have gotten three requests from people who have lost an infant. I tell myself that there is possibly something healing in re-creating your dead child as a doll. Each time I have gotten one of these requests I have very seriously considered taking the specials off my website.
Property tax payments. Water in the cistern.
Eclipse Three Page 13
