Strange Folk You'll Never Meet
Page 11
That night, she had a hard time falling asleep. She wondered if that brunette had seen the scar on his chest, and what a young girl would think of it. A grown man, afraid of a dumb beast.
* * *
“What are you doing for Halloween this year?” Todd asked her, early in October.
“I’m not sure yet,” she said. “Maybe pigs? We can go as the three little pigs.”
“I’m not wearing a onesie,” Todd said to her.
“Maybe just pig ears for you then,” she said.
They had not spoken of the girl in the hallway, but Cora was desperate to say something. To have everything she suspected burst out of her, and to hear him laugh with incredulity, so that she could feel foolish and forget.
She remembered the fetus he had pulled from the toilet and held, like it was a precious thing. Before, she had always considered the act something special, one of those grand gestures she was not fond of, but because he had done it privately, it became one of the grandest. How he had lovingly touched it, this thing that was all potential of the two of them, how he must have mourned the loss in such a disgusting and kind way. Much like his scar which he said he showed to no one, save her and his doctor, it was something for them alone. A cornerstone of their marriage. A private thing.
“Mommy,” Fiona said, wandering into the living room. “Donkey’s ear is broke.”
Todd was on his feet faster than she was. “For God’s sake, Cora, why does she still have that fucking thing?”
“Mommy,” Fiona said, backing away from her father.
“It’s just a toy,” Cora said.
Todd threw his hands up. “Throw it out.”
“No!” Fiona screamed, clutching the donkey, one of its floppy ears loose and held together by thread. “No!”
Todd started towards Fiona, and Cora was on her feet immediately, prepared to do what she did not know she would do. Throw herself at him? Strike him if he went to strike their daughter? Fish the donkey out of the trash if he threw it out? But she was not quick enough, and Todd snatched at Fiona and ripped the donkey from the girl’s arms. Its ear, which had been hanging on by threads, tore off entirely. Fiona screamed and screamed, and when she made to go and take it back from him, he pushed her over and she landed with a hard thud, which only made her scream louder.
Cora held Fiona and shushed her, watching as Todd took the donkey outside. When he came back in without it, he looked at the two of them huddled on the floor, shook his head with disgust, and went upstairs.
* * *
Cora slept in Fiona’s bed that night. The girl was inconsolable for most of the evening, and Todd had not left their bedroom. Though she had searched the garbage can, she had not found the toy, and she wondered if that was how Todd felt when he pulled that part of her from the toilet: trying to search for something precious in the waste.
“Don’t cry,” Cora told Fiona. “I’ll keep the bad dreams away.”
* * *
Marjorie was livid when she was told of what happened to the donkey, but livid for Marjorie was rolling her eyes and smoking two cigarettes in a row.
“I never liked him,” she said.
“Marge,” Cora said. Stopped, then started again. “Have you ever been happy not knowing something?”
“What do you mean?” Marjorie asked, lighting up her third.
“Like, you suspect something. You suspect something awful, which might be the most awful thing in the world, and if it was true your whole world would be…different. Worse. Like everything would fall apart and every bet you placed would lose.”
Marjorie looked at her with such sadness, Cora thought she might break down.
“You remember those penguins?”
“God dammit,” Cora said, putting her head in her hands. “I’m so sick of hearing about those penguins.”
“Yes well, one more time, and then I won’t ever mention them again. Fair?” She took a long drag. “That penguin who went to the center of Antarctica, the one who would not turn around even though there was nothing for him in the center of it except death…that was the easier choice for him. To go into certainty. It would have been harder for him to turn around and go back to the ocean, where any number of things could have snatched his body and ripped him to shreds. Or perhaps he would have starved. Or gotten lost. Or any number of terrible things. Can you imagine what it would be like to have your little body torn apart by a seal? So he took the path where he was blind to everything but his own certain destruction.”
Cora closed her eyes. “So you can’t win.”
“Probably not,” Marjorie said with a chuckle. “But you shouldn’t go on the path where you know the ending. Where there is no potential for anything else.”
* * *
They were talking again, but politely, in a strained way that two people who love one another do when they were still angry but were grounded in history. Small talk, mostly, about their days, how they were feeling after a sip of coffee, if they had a dream the night before (neither of them shared if they did). Fiona was discussed in only the most vague terms: how she was doing in school, if she was eating her vegetables. Cora would have to work a little harder reading with her, as Fiona was struggling to pronounce certain words. Todd made a vague promise about taking them to a kid’s movie that weekend, which neither of them cared to see.
Cora knew she should not bring it up, because it wasn’t really the thing that ached at her, but she was inclined towards dealing with the past hurts rather than the present ones.
“Remember when Fiona was small, in my belly?” she asked him.
He smiled at her, a genuine smile, one she had not seen for a while, and she realized then the power she held in this moment. She could smile back at him, and they could work at peace, or work on another child, maybe at that moment, scrambling like teenagers to their bed to do it comfortably or even bend down on the floor of the kitchen and pretend at an exuberance their knees had long since stopped accommodating.
“You said you wished she was a boy,” Cora said, with a quiet viciousness.
Todd stared at her.
“Why did you say that?” she asked.
“No reason,” he said, turning back to his coffee. “It was a dumb thing to say.”
Later, when she was curled up with Fiona and reading alongside her, a book about dogs with simple sentences, patiently helping her to pronounce words with three or more syllables, she would be reminded that words, and how you say them, have a kind of power. When Fiona sniffled a little for her donkey, she was reminded that actions do too.
That night, she worked on their costumes.
* * *
Cora invited Summer and Winter, along with Todd’s parents and his co-workers, their neighbors, and Marjorie over for a Halloween party. Fiona was upstairs in her room, having promised that she would be quiet and only come out if it was an emergency. Cora had spent the whole week getting ready, putting up decorations, ordering food, and picking up the expensive wine that cost over ten dollars a bottle from the store. She worked every night to finish sewing, measuring, and putting the final furry touches on their costumes. She had not returned to her bed with Todd in this time, but they had been making headway into being more pleasant with one another. She made him coffee in the morning before he went to work and brought it to him in bed. He gave her a chaste kiss on her cheek when he returned home.
“You can’t smoke inside,” Todd was telling Marjorie, who looked like she wanted to tell him where he could smoke it, but she only nodded her head, which made her witch’s hat fall to the floor.
Summer and Winter, never ones to under-dress for any event, came as Harlequin clowns with Venetian masks, which they had picked up after a spontaneous weekend to New Orleans. They were delighting Todd’s parents, who had come dressed as pirates complete with stuffed birds on their shoulders and eye-patches, wi
th a waltz. The neighbors and co-workers were a mix of nurses, skeletons, one notable couple who came as a priest and a sexy nun, and Todd who, having not been given a costume by Cora this year, had pasted a sign that said “Pedestrian” to his shirt, which everyone gave him grief over for being so lazy.
Todd pressed his lips to Cora’s cheek when she approached, eyeing his parents as he did. “This is a wonderful party,” he told her. “Thanks for putting it together.”
“I’ve always loved Halloween,” she told him. She took his glass from his hand and took a sip. When she handed it back, there was a smudge of pink from her lips on the rim.
“I’m surprised you didn’t dress up this year,” he said, then spoke quietly. “I know things haven’t been the best between us, lately. And I’m sorry about that. It’s childish of me, and I know it, but I can’t explain how it feels to remember that…” he put his hand over his chest, where the scar was.
“It’s alright,” she told him, and meant it. “I understand.”
He smiled at her, then, true and gorgeous as he could, that secret smile that was only for her when she made him happy. For a moment, she almost decided not to go through with it, to stay in her dress and keep looking at the center of the continent that was the love she had for him, and move forward without looking behind her, to an ending that she could keep her head down to and push ever onward.
But there were scars on her body, too, the kind where her skin stretched her breasts to store milk for her daughter. Todd was not the only one who bore such things.
“I did make a costume,” she said. “I didn’t want to wear it when I was putting out the food. I’ll go get changed.”
“Of course,” he said, then turned to the room. “Everyone, Cora is going to show you her latest creation.”
Everyone clapped, and she distinctly heard Winter or Summer say, “Finally!”
* * *
It was both not her best work, having been done in something of a hurry, and her favorite. She had learned, from the year of the bee when Todd was working late and she had to go out with Fiona trick-or-treating alone, that when you did full body costumes and had no one to zip you up, you had to put a zipper on the side, not the back. Fiona giggled as Cora zipped her into her miniature version.
“Do you like it?” she asked her daughter.
“Love it!” Fiona said, reaching out to touch her ears, which flopped down on her face.
“Careful with those,” Cora said. “They’re delicate.”
Gathering her daughter into her arms, she walked downstairs into the party. The room, boisterous before she got down there, was quiet now. Todd’s parents were exchanging glances with one another, and Summer and Winter looked at her with confusion, trying to mime their faces into politeness, but clearly struggling with the effort.
Todd’s arms hung loosely at his sides, and the wine he was holding slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor. It splattered, like a blood stain, on the carpet. She saw the whites of his eyes and in the quiet of the room, heard the breath he took into his lungs.
Marjorie jumped up from her seat, cackling like the witch she was dressed as, an unlit cigarette dangling from his lips. “Cora, it’s simply marvelous. Now what sort of animal would you two ladies be?”
Cora held her grinning daughter higher. “Fiona, tell our guests what we are.”
“Donkeys!” her daughter cried, her floppy ear, hanging on by only a few threads, falling on her face.
“That’s right,” Cora said, looking at Todd. “And what sound do donkeys make?”
“Hee-hah!”
Todd started to back away, to retreat into a corner, but he could only retreat so far before he backed into a wall. Cora moved forward towards him, her daughter in her hands, until his whole body was smashed flat.
“Hee-hah!” Cora shouted along with her daughter, raising her voice high and joyously. “Hee-hah, hee-hah, hee-hah!”
How does a girl dance when her legs are bent at the knee? This is a riddle my grandmother once asked. At the time, I had no answer. My legs were as still as the two beams of the cross, and I dared not do anything but stand as straight as corn.
“You’ll have to bend sooner or later,” she told me. “All girls get on their knees.”
She crushed rose petals in her palm until the red dripped down her arm like a wound. She did this for many weeks, each morning and evening, until her skin was a gnarl of stains. She collected the droplets into a silver bowl. When the liquid neared the brim, she bade me bring her my white shoes and dipped the leather in.
“When you’re up there with your head bowed with the rest of them,” she told me, a wink creasing her eye, “they’ll only be looking at you.”
Red shoes needs black stockings and black stockings need a white dress to cover them, but I had no white dress except the one I was to wear on my knees, and so I put it on. I twirled and plied and pirouetted as well as I could, though I had never been trained to do more than lower my eyes. None of us girls were trained beyond the smallest of movements. An eyelash flutter there. A curl of the finger here. Anything more and you’d have green eyes on you.
Green eyes on red shoes was another sort of riddle, but there was a simple answer to that.
The other girls were already on their knees when I arrived at our little church, so the only eyes on me were the priest with the buttoned-up cassock. When he woke up that morning his eyes were blue, like bird eggs, but when they changed the other girls saw—such magic, after all, is only possible through our Lord—they began to weep, for nothing they wore inspired a miracle.
But a miracle is not a miracle unless it spreads as dandelions do in the wind. I bent my legs where bone meets bone and leaped into the air, so high that the girls could see my body over the pews, and more so, they could see my shoes, as bright as rubies, tipped to a point at the toe.
I knew better, but how could I stop, now that I knew all the ways my body could move?
Later, one night after dancing well into starlight, I awoke to my grandmother weeping in the other room, and the hands of my sister-cousins holding me down. The moon was only half full through my window, but it was enough light to see the edges of green in their eyes, and the glint of silver on the dull blades they grasped.
How does a girl dance with only shoes? They asked this to one another that evening. One by one they put my red shoes on over their stockings, but they had never considered bending their knees for anything other than kneeling, and no matter which way they swayed back and forth, they could not dance.
If their hands were not covering my mouth, I could have told them: shoes were not enough, not for twisting, not for crouching, not for leaping. They realized this on their own soon enough, but they did not solve the riddle of how to bend.
They took my legs as well.
Grandmother wept but she did not weep long, not even when, over the small fence around our house, we saw my legs propped in the air, my red shoes bright in the sun, swaying back and forth in a macabre parade. Even with these parts of me, those girls did not know how to dance.
Later, my grandmother would tell me she did not mean me any pain. Later, she would say that a girl with legs as long as I should have been born in a place where girls were not discouraged from knowing what their bodies were capable of. Later, she stood far enough away from me so I could not touch her, and her grimace pulled at her chapped lips until they bled.
Then she brought me another pair of bright red shoes.
“How does a girl get out of bed?” she asked me. “Will you bend again?”
I moved what I could at first. A twist of my neck. The curl of my thumb. Blinked both eyes. My belly could curve inward.
My hands slid into the shoes as easily as my feet. An elbow is not so different from a knee, and mine curved into a fine edge. I could swish. I could reach. I could lift myself into the air.
Poor Dada had no glue to put her back together again.
He long suspected Mama was, in the kindest way to describe her, a skin bag to hold the lungs and liver inside. The rest of her was a mystery. Her head flying across the room while he was digging into his egg and pepper breakfast only furthered his belief. She was some thing that transported guts and goo from the market to the kitchen and back again, like a dancing milkmaid on the wheel of a German clock. Now he saw she was made of many different parts, and each one was likely to go flying off with enough pressure. The force of having the baby in the middle of their kitchen must have snapped her head loose.
“It’s dusty down here,” her head told him. It had rolled behind the couch and, as such, was a little muffled.
Once or twice, he imagined her neck as one big ‘ol screw where she would fasten a different head each morning. Some of her heads were kinder than others. He liked the one that stood behind him and whispered her wishes for his good day before he went to work, the one who licked the skin of his earlobe. He was not as fond of the one who told him she was tired. He, too, was tired. Everyone was tired. It was not worth mentioning.
“I wish I could see you,” her head said. “Is that the baby crying?”
There should have been more blood. When he accidentally nicked his neck with a letter opener one winter ago he bled all over their wooden floor. The head she wore that day did not like those stains one bit. Her neck must have been drained of all her red, because when he looked down the hole on the top of her torso, he only saw darkness, like a whirl of shadows. It made him nauseous. Or maybe the eggs made him nauseous. She’d cooked them too quickly, and they were a tad runny for his liking.
He did the only thing he could think of to do: he snagged her head from behind the couch, placed her on the mantle and wrapped the baby in furs.
“I still can’t see my family,” said Mama’s head, her voice a little weaker than it was before. “Where did you go?”