“They are similar, maybe with different species of trees and animals and with different weather. Have you been to a city before, Mara?”
“I haven’t seen much of the world.” I gave myself, “Palpable.”
I read Goldilocks and the Three Bears to Kat in our bedroom after she told me that she wanted me out of her room very soon or else Peter would come in the middle of the night and throw me out. She lay on her small bed with her legs crossed. I was on my bed on the floor. There wasn’t any space left in the room.
“I don’t even believe he exists. Like Goldilocks, who is a fictional character,” I explained to the little girl.
“He does,” she screamed. “He knows how to hide, how to live in the woods since our father taught him.”
“Why would he do that when he has a home here?” But I knew there were many different reasons to escape.
“You’re Goldilocks,” the girl was screaming again. Her hair was dirty and crept around her neck like a vine. “You eat our porridge, sit in our chairs, sleep in my room. They are all too small for you. You came out of the forest, and you’ll go away and never come back to the home of the three bears.” She smiled triumphantly.
“First of all, you are two bears. . . ,” I began logically.
“Peter too.”
“And I’m more like the big bear than Goldilocks.”
“It’s just a story.” She stuck out her tongue, then banged her fists against the wall.
“Would you eat me like the bears if I was Goldilocks?”
“In a minute.” She snapped her tiny teeth. “Goldilocks was scared after taking everything.”
“What if none of the three bears was perfect? One was too small, one too big, and one still wasn’t right?”
The girl didn’t answer me. She lay on her bed in her disheveled pajamas decorated with faded elephants. We could hear damp laundry flapping on the numerous clotheslines that Theresa’s husband had built for her business. The rows reached back into the woods like long, thin roads. The sound was eerie and constant in a breeze, like muffled footsteps. At least they didn’t grow any closer.
“Do you miss your father?” I asked the little girl who reclined on her back with her eyes closed.
“He hit Mama,” the girl barely whispered as she was exhaling. She sighed, turned onto her side, facing the wall.
“Reprehensible,” I gave her since I didn’t have anything else to offer her. But she, the Childcloud, was already asleep and breathing steadily.
I wrote in my notebook: I didn’t really understand my father. There is so much I still don’t understand. All the books have helped me with the world, but there are subtleties I can’t grasp.
There is both good and evil in a little girl.
Everything is about the body.
The moon was trying to thrust itself past our curtains. Its light reminded me of muscles under the skin of this house, a motion. Movement was spreading, opening one door and then another.
I tried to imagine the city, tall buildings stacked onto one another. All those people and cars threading, held onto the ground by questionable gravity. There were so many activities and colors, noises, tastes, and odors were torrential. Everyone leaked onto everyone else. People lived in compartments. Some people were withering, some were thriving like weeds. All who disappeared there were reappearing.
It grew quiet. “Taciturn,” I exhaled.
I fell asleep.
My dream was of a city full of creatures like me, sewn, glued, stitched together from other parts, enormous, strong, larger-than-life. Cats like Gloves roamed cement streets and alleyways searching for mice who were also pieced together and losing their tails, ears, paws, sometimes a nose or an eye. A ramshackle man swept the streets and roads with a large broom, tossing lost animal and human body parts into his garbage.
As I walked down a street I greeted Childclouds who were new and fresh to life. White birds seemed to fly out of their mouths from their recent operations. The Childclouds held the scarred hands of a Mara that didn’t look like me and a male creature unlike anyone I had seen before. I didn’t recognize them, except one that resembled Carl, who had driven the car, and one old man, who was an older version of Father. They filled the streets. I stopped to peer in the window of a restaurant and saw an older waitress, with a likeness to Miss Elaina, whose hand flew off onto the floor when she tried to pick up a customer’s emptied plate of food. The waitress laughed, and so did her customers, and then she stooped and picked it up, subsequently dropping it into her apron pocket. I overheard her say to an adolescent creature, “I’ll just have to get another one.”
As I continued down the street I noticed that buildings, doors, windows, steps, cars, and buses were all bigger to accommodate us. The people I saw often reminded me of people from my memories that weren’t really mine. I didn’t know if there was a city full of Fathers who created these new fully grown Childclouds or just one working furiously, maybe with assistants, to fill the city. All of us one-of-a-kinds, with our own cars, jobs, storefronts selling clothes (with removable sleeves or pant legs in case some part wore out). I passed a shop with an auto mechanic underneath a car, who had no legs and he was scooting everywhere on a skateboard. He smiled at me with a lopsided grin webbed with scars. Were we all disintegrating? Then replenished?
A dog bounded up to me who was on a leash. “Berserk,” I cried. She leaped onto my legs. We greeted and kissed each other. I noticed that she had a different tail and a patch of black fur near a hind leg that was different from her brown and white, long, silky fur. Her owner reminded me of Greg. I had to turn away from him.
“Sorry,” I exclaimed, “a misperception.”
“Malingerer,” he threw at me as he pulled the dog to leave.
s s s s s
I woke suddenly. The little girl had Miss Moscovitz and was removing her tattered clothes. The doll’s head was wobbly but attached to her body again. What was left of the hair was smoother and thinner. It was an updated doll. Theresa must have fixed her in the night.
“What are you doing, Kat?” I asked her, sitting up from the floor.
“Nothing.” She whisked the doll behind her. “Playing.” She fidgeted.
There was a knock at the door and Theresa poked her head inside. “Today is church, so you girls get yourself ready.” Then she closed the door behind her.
The little girl grimaced, made her way, surefooted, to her closet. With her hands outstretched she found a dress trellised with flowers and edged with lace. “I hate dresses.”
“Why must you wear one to church when God is everywhere?”
“I don’t know. Ask my mother.” She turned her blind eyes toward me, “We have to take baths first. I hate those too.”
“Does your mother want you to look like someone she is thinking of?” I fingered my mole.
“I guess so. Or else it’s because everybody from town is in church.” Kat made a funny face, twisting her features around purposefully.
“Did your father ever hurt you?”
“No, but he hurt Peter.” She faced the wall.
The forest couldn’t help peering in our window. Light rushed into our room, grew giddy around all the furniture and toys. A bird skittered from branch to branch and flew past our window. I touched the glass. Flowers gathered around stones and vegetation. The wash on the clotheslines was stiff under the blue sky, but became boisterous with the tumultuous clouds.
“Do you want me to describe the morning to you, Kat? There’s so much going on. It’s beautiful.” I knew I could open the window, walk out the door, and hardly look back. Was I feral?
“I don’t want to know about stuff I can’t see,” she said dejectedly.
“We all long for what we can’t see or have yet.” It was something Father could have said.
Chapter Eight
The church was filled with peo
ple wearing their fanciest clothes. When I usually saw it, it was empty except for Theresa and me. Women wore hats punctuated with feathers, ribbons, or bows, and pale dresses choked with flowers or lace, attractive hems and seams twitching around their torsos. The men were dressed in dark, stiff suits as if they needed to prepare for a death. Many of the outfits were familiar to us because Theresa and I had washed them recently. Theresa had returned the laundry, but it would be my job this week. Theresa, Kat, and I wore our most resplendent dresses. Theresa had patched together several dresses that she had found in unclaimed laundry piles from women who had died or moved away to make my dress, which hardly fit me. I didn’t have a hat.
“Ostentatious,” I told myself quietly. “Church is so unscientific,” I complained to Theresa. “And I still haven’t found God.” I looked around. Theresa was sitting complacently on the pew next to me. Kat sat squirming next to her.
“It’s hard for the living to understand higher beings,” Theresa said softly.
“You mean the dead?” I inquired, immediately interested.
“Those who have already completed their lives or . . . like when an animal is about to give birth, those that dwell in the place the newly born come from.”
I knew partly where I came from. I’d seen Greg’s body. I had memories that informed me. But I had no idea where I was going. “Does church tell us where we go?”
“Sort of,” Theresa explained, “but, as you said, it’s not scientific.”
“Shh,” said an older woman whose white head immediately drooped close to her lap.
“Flummoxed,” I gave myself, enjoying the entertaining word.
I didn’t spy Miss Elaina, but I located Mr. John Benjamin in a suit that reminded me of me since it appeared to be unthreading and had patches at his elbows and knees. He waved, a floppy black book precarious in his hands.
A young, rough-looking, unknown man with black hair sidled close to Theresa and the little girl, said, “Hello, Kat, sweetheart.” She grabbed her mother’s arm. Then he spoke over their heads to me, “I couldn’t help noticing this lovely woman here. What’s your name, darling?”
I smelled cigarettes, liquor, sweat, and something like bean soup permeating his skin. I turned away. “Mara.” I stood, my size overshadowing him.
“Mara, you can’t put one over on me. I’ll catch you later.” He pointed his finger at me and wagged it, tilted his smirking face.
“That’s Fred. Stay away from him, Mara. I don’t like him near Kat either,” Theresa warned.
I didn’t have time to ask her why because a man in black and white, the minister, began orating from the podium. The wooden cross with that sad, injured man was suspended behind him. I received a memory while the minister was speaking, men rolling up a large scroll, men bowing and praying under shawls near black books collapsed into rows. I was sitting in a balcony with women. They were speaking a language I didn’t understand, but I nodded. I was thinking about building a golem out of straw, mud, and stone. Why would I need such a creature? Did the golem resemble me, except that it was male? When the memory disappeared, I wanted to cry, thinking how fragile human beings really were.
Singing filled my ears, my skeleton vibrated, my elaborate circuitry tuned in to each note yet absorbed the melody, the rhythm. My tongue wished to surge, catch every phrase and repeat it. My pulse jumped, and I froze at the music’s fluidity. My remaining toes were tapping. The music smelled of vanilla, sugar, baked eggs, caramel.
“You must not have heard much music before,” Theresa laughed after the service, “because we’re not that good here, being a little church and all.”
When I bit into a chocolate chip cookie, I lost another tooth, this time halfway between the front and back of my mouth. I spit it into a napkin and threw it away. Entropy I would write in my journal to explain. People were eddying in groups. Several couples complimented Theresa on the upkeep of the church.
“Mara is helping so much,” she told them.
“It’s good to have a purpose in life,” a wife told me and Theresa.
“What’s my purpose?” I asked Theresa. I thought that my purpose was one thing with Father, another to companion animals, and another thing here with Theresa. Maybe I was composed of many purposes.
“You have to figure it out yourself. I’m a mother and I was a wife,” Theresa stated, sipping some coffee.
Kat knocked over some hot coffee cups with her roving hands. She was bumping into people’s legs, blinking her blind eyes. She parked herself in a corner of the hewn wood church, and she began dancing in circles to some unheard music. She crawled on the floor and then raced her fingers up a wall.
Theresa spotted her antics. “Kat’s bored. Maybe you could walk her home, Mara. I’ll be there soon. This is the only chance I get to talk to certain people all week.”
“Raucous,” I stated. I walked over to the little girl. “Come, I’ll take you home.”
She spun round in her flowered dress, lace coiling in the air. “I don’t need you. I can go home by myself.” She clapped her hands over her ears, which were poking out from her neat hair. “It’s noisy in here.”
It was full of voices contained in a small space. The reverberations hurt me too. “I’m done here. I’m going,” I told her.
“Can we play in the woods?” She grinned.
“Yes.” I took her impatient hand. The forest with its indirect, apostatizing sounds beckoned. The noises of tiny animals, insects, twigs brushed aside, the solid anger of rocks, the way the sky spread out like a blue puddle. “I can’t find what I’m looking for here anyway.”
We left behind all the adult conversations, the polite inquiries about someone else’s family, the intoning of the men’s and women’s voices. There weren’t many children there. The little girl skipped ahead of me. I wasn’t sure whether she would be benevolent or malevolent that day, maybe both. She was her own phenomenon like me. Her combed blonde hair wicked back and forth behind her in the wind and suddenly she disappeared. I grabbed a tree trunk and hurled myself forward to find her. It was the first time I had ever lost someone and it was a little blind girl. I searched in a grove of trees.
“Kat, Kat,” I called.
Finally I heard giggling and found her in a clearing, the sun highlighting her sleek blonde hair, a yellow river. She was rolling in some high grass, her shoes off.
I was angry. “How did you get here so fast? How did you find your way?”
“I know these woods. I know all the paths through them.” She was laughing, grass blades protruded from her hair.
“Rebellious.” But it was enjoyable to hear her soft laughter. I found all those emotions confusing and mixed. I was relieved to find her.
“Do you want to play Doctor?” she asked me.
“What does it entail?”
“You take off all your clothes and I give you an exam,” she said.
“Will there be operations?”
“Of course,” she sat upright, using a deeper voice she said, “that’s part of my job.”
“Then no, I definitely don’t want to play Doctor.”
“You know I can’t see you anyway,” she sulked. “I can’t see one naked bit of you,” she emphasized.
“No, I said.”
“What if you are the Doctor then?” She started to pull her nice dress off. “Then you can give me an exam.”
“Is that what you were doing to poor Miss Moscovitz?”
Both of our heads turned as we heard a distinct snapping of branches to our right. I expected to see a swath of glistening blonde hair. I wasn’t sure why. But it was black hair that appeared from behind a tree with that terrible smell. Then the man, Fred, lit half of a cigarette, contemplated us, and, snickering, moved closer.
“What are you girls doing?” the man stupidly asked.
“Fred!” Kat said with alarm. “Y
ou’d better not come near.”
“Oh and why is that, little Katrina?” He inhaled and exhaled. Smoke somersaulted in the air. “Are you doing something you shouldn’t be doing?”
The man was stuffed with silly questions. I didn’t understand him. I remembered what Theresa told me. “Go away,” I demanded.
“You’re new here,” Fred said. “Kat comes from an interesting family in these here parts, a father with a temper, a religious mother, and a brother who’s supposed to be haunting these woods. Now, they say that Kat wasn’t blind at birth. That something happened to her. Is that true Kat? What really happened?”
“I’ve been blind as long as I can remember.” The little girl was confused and upset by the man. She began prancing in circles. “This is one of my favorite trees.” She hugged a Ponderosa Pine.
“You can come back to my house with me, Kat. Hell, you can live with me if you want to and get away from your crazy old mother. I have candy and horses to ride. You’d like it, living with me.” The man was looking at me as he spoke. He smiled, and I saw that his teeth were rotting and brown. Entropy.
He walked closer to us. “Run,” I whispered to Kat. She whisked her head in the direction of her house and began to move quickly but carefully. I scooped her in my arms and ran faster. His words ricocheted inside my hollow head. Everyone had a past. My past was just not singly my own. The man followed us, running behind me.
I stopped for a moment to hear if he was still behind me. He caught up with us swiftly. I was surprised.
“Hey, Mara, you’re a big girl. Why stay with that crazy family? You should just leave. You can see that Peter’s gone and you came here for him. Our town’s done fine without you. Just collect your wash money and go. You don’t want to get in the middle of something that isn’t any of your business.” He was right behind me. He reached out and touched my shoulder.
With my one arm cradling Kat I reached out my other arm and twisted his hand away. I heard his wrist snap. So did Kat.
The Solace of Monsters Page 10
