Milk

by Darcey Steinke

  MILK

  A NOVEL

  DARCEY STEINKE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Part 1

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part 2

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Part 3

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Part 4

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  By the Same Author

  Imprint

  The soul’s natural inclination to love beauty is the trap God most frequently uses in order to win it and open it to the breath from on high.

  —Simone Weil

  PART I

  MARY

  ONE

  THE LITTLE TREE sat on a table by the window, strains of aluminum glittering and the red Christmas balls reflecting the room in concave miniature, particularly the shelf with her husband’s collection of nude figurines. Mary sat on the paisley carpet, her back against the velvet couch with the frizzy fringe, and above her head a blond Keane kid in a floppy cap, eyes like sticky buns. The baby gnawed on his new teething ring; his green holiday bib was already dark around the neck with drool. Her gift from her husband’s parents was raspberry-filled chocolates.

  “Let’s see what kind of hideousness they came up with this year,” her husband said. Though Christmas was still several days away, they were opening the box from his parents in Kansas. He took a present onto his lap, shredded the Santa wrapping and passed the paper to the baby who bicycled his legs frenetically. Opening the box he lifted the tissue paper to find a Hawaiian shirt with a print of flamingoes and hibiscus flowers. Mary watched him throw down the shirt, flick his lighter and tip his head sideways toward the flame to ignite the joint. His long hair fell down in a straight line as the fire underlit the side of his face. She tried to think of something to say, but with him everything was either Good, i.e., sexy, funny, cool, or Bad, i.e., emotionally painful, boring, a hassle. You either GOT IT or you didn’t GET IT. There was no reason to discuss. The baby dropped the wrapping paper and raised his tiny eyebrows when he saw the lighter’s flame. He was a sucker for anything that glittered.

  Inhaling, her husband held the smoke down in his lungs, his features compressed and grayed. Aided by the joint, he produced a sequence of distancing actions: widened pupils, slowing of movement, elegant tendrils of smoke. She knew he was disappointed, though every year his parents’ presents were humiliating. Last year they sent a tight Speedo bathing suit and the year before the dreaded Christmas sweater. She watched him inhale again and hold the smoke down in his lungs. The radiators clanged and snow continued to rush past the window.

  She took the baby onto her lap, lifted up her shirt and nursed while her husband crumpled the paper into tight little balls and loaded them into a plastic garbage bag. After a while the baby’s mouth slacked off her milky nipple and he fell asleep. She laid him in his bassinet and went into the bathroom, took off her socks, jeans and sweatshirt, and stood naked as she adjusted the shower nozzle and waited for the water to warm.

  On the toilet tank her husband had created an altar: a plastic bust of Darth Vader, a Jesse Ventura doll and a ceramic unicorn. Steam rolled over the top of the shower curtain. An uninterrupted shower was rare; usually she had to lay the baby on pillows on the bathroom floor and pop her head out from behind the curtain so he wouldn’t cry. The inside of the porcelain tub was thoroughly spider-cracked and the shower curtain blotchy with mold. She shaved her grassy underarms and around her pubic hair. Pulling the blade along her leg, she knicked her ankle and a drop of blood fell and expanded in the water collected in the bottom of the tub. She dried herself and put on the thigh highs and teddy he’d bought her as an early Christmas present. Her stomach muscles were still loose and she had ten more pounds to lose. Her heart fluttered as she looked down at the lace against her thighs.

  “Sexy girl,” he said as he got up to cue another record. He was making a party tape and another techno song began, indistinguishable from the first. His face was flushed and smiling but he still moved deliberately, as if recovering from a terrible fall. She was chilly in the outfit and in the raw overhead light her skin looked powdery and loose as a latex hospital glove. It’d been since before the baby was born, and she wanted to touch him. But more than that she needed something inside. There had been a girl in high school, very tall with a long sullen face and dirty blond hair, who had the reputation for letting boys put things inside her. Fingers, real and plastic penises, candles, broom handles, turkey basters. It was rumored that once her pussy swallowed David Calloway’s arm all the way up to the elbow.

  After her husband changed the record, he sat on the floor by her feet. He probably didn’t want to—he never did anymore—but she had to try and so leaned her head down and kissed his lips. A modicum of pressure was returned, but when she moved her tongue into his mouth, his teeth were a smooth hard line and he turned his head. She looked down at the black patch of her pubic hair beyond the lavender nylon of her panties.

  “I’m beat,” he said as he slipped the record back into its sleeve and turned off the lamp with the brass angels and made sure the front door was locked. He walked down the hallway and into the bedroom.

  Mary sat for a while in her outfit watching tiny bits of ice stream down in the alley between their apartment building and the one next door. She watched the bits of ice rush into a cone of light, sparkle like glitter, then fall back into the dark. Already this winter forty inches of snow had fallen, and the weatherman predicted four more storm systems. She heard a guy on talk radio say it hadn’t snowed as much since the winter of 1947.

  Mary checked on the baby, who was sleeping on his side, one tiny foot pressed against the edge of the bassinet, and then walked into the bedroom. She lay down next to her husband, who was either sleeping, which Mary doubted, or pretending to sleep, and she, very softly, gyrated her pelvis against his ass. She felt his bones through his warm skin and her own sex tighten. But he lay still so long that she got up, changed into her flannel nightgown, went into the baby’s room and lay down on the rug next to his bassinet.

  When she woke much later, the room was cool and she worried that the baby wasn’t warm enough. Did he need another blanket? Maybe she should have put the thicker sleeper on him. His blue eyes had looked different yesterday, slightly melancholy. Was he sick of the mobile over his crib or the song “I Left My Heart in San Francisco” that played endlessly? Too much stimulation gave babies mini–nervous breakdowns. She had read about this in an infant-care book. Also that a child’s self-esteem was directly related to their mother’s gaze. So it was tricky. She had to look at him enough to build self-worth but not so much he went mad. Maybe she needed to play more Mozart? Classical music made brain channels that later could be filled with algebra and calculus. If she wasn’t diligent his mind would be like a block of impenetrable stone. And what about bonding? Was he attached enough to her? It was hard to tell if he was looking into her eyes or just at his own reflection. Babies in orphanages never got connected to anyone and later sometimes became serial killers. Maybe she should wake him up now and hold him; to a baby love was not abstract but visceral: warm skin, milk, her voice. Was she talking to him enough? He’d never learn to communicate if she didn’t speak to him all the time. When he woke for his next feeding she would tell him the story of Watergate and the Love Canal. But those things were too dark; she’d balance them with streaking. As a little girl streaking had delighted and fascinated her. She felt the various parts of her skull, temples, sinus and her cheekbones ache. Mary stood up; her neck was sore, as
if strains of metal wire were embedded in the musculature. She pressed her fingertips into the most painful spot as she walked into the other room and stood over her husband.

  He snored softly, his features open and relaxed, his hairless chest moving the silky blanket up and back. Snow brushed against the window and outside new snow coated the street, the sidewalks, the bushes, even piled delicately up on tree branches. The traffic light changed from green to red.

  Tonight, snow muffled the car tires and ticked like sugar granules on the window ledge. Snow created a silence similar to the silence of God. God was where your mind went when it wasn’t thinking of anything in particular. She stared at the paisley carpet. Pine needles from the Christmas tree floated in the weave. She watched the carpet; red light from the tree bewitched the wool threads. Mary pulled up her nightgown, the one with the bloodstain on the back from her first days home from the hospital, pulled it up gently around her thighs like a girl wading into a river.

  After his three A.M. feeding the baby wouldn’t sleep; he was fussy and agitated, so she told him the plot of Anna Karenina, leaving out all the boring agrarian details, and explained that in “The Beast in the Jungle,” Marcher was definitely gay. She told the story of the turtle and the hare and tried the fox and the grapes, though once she established the fox sitting there watching the bunch of grapes she couldn’t remember exactly what had happened.

  The key was to keep talking so the baby would be soothed by her voice and fall asleep. She felt his little fist against her collarbone and his tiny kneecap pressed into her breast, and wondered why he was so upset. She began to tell him the Christmas story, starting with the angel coming to Mary, ran through the star, the Wise Men, the divine baby sleeping in straw. Then to Jesus’ later childhood when he was left in the temple but she couldn’t remember the order of his miracles, and after the fishes and the loaves she got discouraged and started telling him what all the various religions thought happened to you after you died, how Jews didn’t believe in heaven or hell and how the Hindus believed in reincarnation. She could come back as a lamb; he could come back as a butterfly. The resurrection sounded ludicrous so she covered its grim details quickly.

  Snowflakes big as quarters slapped wetly against the glass, and the baby’s heart was like a tiny fluttery bird pinned inside his chest. She was so tired she was near tears and she missed her own mother’s generous lap and her way with a hamburger, and while she knew her mother was now with God, she was confused about where certain aspects of her personality had gone. Her interest in the occult and the British royal family, the way she laughed even at the smallest joke like it was hysterical. The baby started to scream. What else? She’d exhausted all of her oral information and now felt shapeless as a larva. Maybe it was colic. His arms flung around, and he twisted his head against the collar of her nightgown.

  Mary walked into the kitchen to switch on the faucet and let the water mesmerize him. But there was no need, as sparks were falling from the ceiling. At first she thought someone was welding in the apartment above. But who did ironwork at this hour? Besides, the sparks weren’t falling but hovering like fireflies. Maybe there was an electrical short inside the wall. Either way the baby was distracted, he hung onto her neck with his little hands and stared up at the bobbing flames, his mouth wide open.

  With one hand she swung the broom up, tried to knock out the tiny fires, but strains of straw just went through the mass as though it were a hologram. A reflection, Mary thought, remembering how once on a train she’d seen what looked like a small pond suspended over a field; it had undulated like tinfoil before the train turned. She glanced out the window into the narrow alley; no moon, and clouds covered the stars. Not enough light really for a reflected magic trick. The lights churned with the same motion as glitter inside a snow dome. The motion enchanted the baby, who bicycled his legs again and rocked his whole body forward.

  TWO

  WALTER HAD FESTOONED St. Paul’s front doors with evergreen garlands and the little statue of the Holy Mother wore a holly wreath around her head. Mary opened the iron side gate; the metal was cold on her fingers and she walked the icy path. Inside, the walls along the corridor were missing chunks of plaster, and Walter’s door was open, his office filled with smoke. He was addicted to incense, the rare variety produced by the Benedictine monks of Prinknash; sometimes his room was as smoky as a rock concert.

  “Mary,” he said, looking up from his laptop; the screen’s blue light underlit his face and highlighted his black curly hair. He could be working on his Christmas sermon, but he also frequented a chat room for theologically minded adherents of S&M. The computer light was the room’s only illumination. His bookshelf, the paintings of St. Paul’s former ministers, and all the other ministerial objects were cloaked in a vaporous gloom. Walter pulled the little chain on his desk lamp and the Jesus shade lit up, incense swirling above.

  “Thanks for letting me come. I know it’s busy, with Christmas and everything,” Mary said while laying her coat over the warm radiator and unzipping the baby’s snowsuit. Static from his polar-fleece cap made his hair stand on end.

  “Look at the little punk rocker.” Walter laughed. “Can I hold him?”

  “If you take off that smoky sweater.” Mary glanced at the cigarette butts in the glass ashtray. “What happened to the patch?”

  “It didn’t work; it was like getting the Holy Spirit when you want Jesus.” Walter took the baby onto his lap and kissed the top of his head. There was a tap on the door and Junot, the teenage custodian, stepped into the room. His jeans rode so low on his hips Mary could see Mickey Mouse on his boxers. He was a good-looking kid with olive skin and coffee-colored eyes.

  “What needs to be done today, Father?” he asked.

  Walter had given up explaining that he was an Episcopal, not a Catholic, priest.

  “I have a list here,” he said, passing over a piece of loose-leaf paper. “And I guess you better bring up the crèche. I think it’s tacky, but the Sunday school director wants it out there.”

  Junot nodded and retreated down the hallway.

  “So do you think I’m crazy?” Mary asked.

  Walter looked into her eyes, then glanced at her fingers worrying a Kleenex. She knew he was thinking of last summer when a voice had told her to fill the bathtub with dirt and plant flowers. Or that time in college when she’d been determined a little Yorkie had said her name.

  Junot walked past the doorway carrying a plastic camel, the electrical cord wrapped around the animal’s long golden leg. The baby whined and Walter jostled him on his knee.

  “Well. So. You have this baby,” he began, “this little creature that came through you but from the Great Beyond, or maybe I should say the Great Before or in any case another plane.” He paused; it was when he gave spiritual advice that Walter most resembled the stoner he’d been in college. “So that’s disturbing, right?”

  Mary nodded. Junot walked past the doorway again, this time carrying plastic sheep, one under each arm. The glass paperweight on Walter’s desk transfixed the baby. Mary knew he thought it was edible.

  “So maybe you feel curious about this spiritual plane and you feel you want some contact with it . . .”

  Mary nodded. She heard Junot coming down the hallway.

  “I mean you probably think God resides out somewhere in the universe, right? So in your mind you need a conduit.”

  She did feel a need for some sort of portal. “I guess that’s right, though you make it sound like a Star Trek episode.”

  Junot, who had overheard what Walter was saying, stuck his head into the doorway. He held a shepherd in a cream-colored robe. “Father, do you think if you step on a crack your soul flies out from your body?”

  “Who told you that?”

  “My mother,” Junot said. “It happened to her.” Junot lived with his mother in the Smith Street projects. She was, according to him, in nearly constant contact with the spirit world. She spoke to God in the middle of br
eakfast, condemning him for her lousy night’s sleep. She prayed on the subway, in the grocery store. When her sister in Puerto Rico was sick, Junot said her prayers were like a form of surveillance.

  “Did she get it back?” Mary asked.

  “Oh, she has some story about an angel putting her soul back. This was after she’d been through three trials. She had to assist a stranger in need. Help a sick animal. I think she fed a stray cat for that one.”

  “And the last one?” Walter asked.

  “She had to speak with a flower.”

  “She talked to it?” Mary said.

  “Yeah, that’s how she knew which night the angel would come.”

  “And you believe all this?” Walter asked.

  Junot shrugged and smiled. “I guess,” he said as he walked back down the hall toward the church basement.

  The baby’s eyes bulged a little and he spit up a few drops of curdled milk.

  “Oh dear,” Walter said, passing him back to Mary and using a Kleenex to wipe off his black pants.

  She heard pounding footsteps on the basement stairs, and Junot ran into the office. He was holding the baby Jesus. The plastic baby was no bigger then a football. His legs, arms and head were peach. He had blue eyes, blond hair and wore a tiny white toga. Junot held Jesus up to Walter’s face. “FUCK YOU” was written on the infant’s forehead in black Magic Marker.

  On the subway ride back home Mary tried to pray. Lord Jesus, have mercy on me, but her words were overwhelmed with the Desitin Ointment she needed to buy for the baby’s rash, the ear thermometer, that weird thing her husband had said about the French actress’s ass. Over her head was a placard poem about how numbers repeated rapaciously into infinity, how apples never lie, how the body at best is a transitory vehicle. A few seats down, a pale man wearing an aviator’s cap began to cough, his hack like syrup at rapid boil.