The Problem with Murmur Lee

by Connie May Fowler

  “But it’s crap. He’s personifying a lizard!”

  “Just because you graduated from Harvard doesn’t mean you can use fifty-dollar words with me or that I’ll be at all impressed.”

  And she would continue, reading to us about, for instance, a lizard whose eyes resembled those of a “broken artist.”

  I would sneak a glance at Zach and discern a faint warming of his features. Those pouty lips would relax, elongate, approach a smile. A flesh-colored lizard right there on his face. He might even close his eyes. But once Mur had read the poem’s closing line and we were all left to contemplate the images—an empty field, or a cuckoo that sings only intermittently, unable to break the darkness—the dear doctor would say something foolish, such as: “Well, he’s certainly no Shakespeare.”

  To which Mur would respond, “And you’re no brain surgeon.”

  Thus it went night after night, always a different poem, for a good four or five weeks. And always there was this: a generosity of spirit that transcended breaking bread together. Oui, there was my willingness to allow Dr. Z a studious glimpse at my new sex, and Mur’s selfless brewing of magic soups, and our sometimes crabby indulgence regarding the nightly poetry readings. But what clings to my heart’s memory, above all else, is Mur’s tender insistence—even when I cried that I was too exhausted or too frightened or too sore—that I use my dilator before sleep.

  Dr. Z would have disappeared into the night, ready to face his empty house, which was just a bit farther than a stone’s throw away, fortified by drink and magic soup and friendship. Mur would have washed the dishes and wiped down the kitchen, and then she would come sit beside me on the bed, take my hand in hers, and say, “Edith, it’s time. Just once more today and you’re done.”

  “Please, let it go until tomorrow.” I would wave her away with my free hand, which held a lace hankie.

  “You cannot let it close up on you, Edith.”

  “I am simply too weak.”

  “No, you’re not. What you are is stubborn. You know you have to do this.” She’d fuss with my sheets and comforter. She’d reposition and fluff my pillows. Her dangling silver earrings would sparkle in the candlelight. “You know I’m right.”

  I would sniffle and dab tears with my hankie. “Merci, mon amie. But I am so tired. Très fatiguée.”

  “Edith!” Her strained patience would claw at each letter of my name.

  That was my cue. I played the tragic waif, sighing, silently nodding my assent, blatantly ignoring another marine creed that I held dear: Pain is temporary; pride is forever.

  Mur would float across the room, first pausing to turn up Edith’s volume, then disappearing into the kitchen, where she would retrieve the hard white plastic dilator from the dish drainer. She kept it sparkling clean for me. With the serene confidence of a field commander, she would return to my bedside, plant the dilator firmly in my hand, and say, “I’ll be out on the porch. Call me when you’re finished.” Then she’d pause, rummage in her deep skirt pocket, and pull out a square of fabric—almost always raw silk, sometimes linen—that she’d dyed herself, using plants she cultivated across the island. “Place this against your throat; just let it rest there. It will take you to where you need to be.” And out the door she’d go.

  This act—one might even say indignity—was the final medically necessitated task that separated my old self from my new. I was fleeing fast from any connection to my Palatka childhood, which was spent—at my father’s insistence—killing quail and rabbit. He would have, by his own hand, murdered me if he had known about those long nights I spent hidden in my closet, guided by the beam of my flashlight, pouring over the pages of my sister’s fashion zines. And, yes, fleeing—I hoped—from whatever sin and redemption, dishonor and glory Gunnery Sergeant MacHenry might have brought upon his head as he served his country with distinction. What a long journey it had been! And now, when I was nearly too old to enjoy the wonder of it, I was participating in the last step in my quest to become a whole woman. My friend, my dear Mur, would sit on the porch, smoking cigarettes, giving me my privacy and her acceptance. And I would begin. With a magic square of fabric floating on my throat, carefully, tentatively, I would insert the dilator into my new vagina. Each time, I concentrated not on the act but on Edith—Edith Piaf and her voice that swallowed the night—allowing my suffering to swirl like incense along the winding altar of her voice.

  “Des yeux qui font baiser les miens . . .”

  Lucinda Smith

  Fuck! What do you want me to say? That I saw it all? That I watched the vultures gather as they brought Murmur’s corpse out of the river? That I noticed how oddly masculine Edith the Sex Change looked as she barreled down the dock? That I smoked five cigarettes as I stood at my French doors and watched Dr. Z preen all official, even though I knew his fucking heart was breaking. Well, no. I won’t talk about it. It’s nobody’s business. My pain is off-limits.

  Dr. Zachary Klein

  Two women. Two loves. Two deaths.

  I’m a Jew. And an atheist. Where does that leave me? Whom do I dump my sorrow on? Whom do I blame?

  Doctors are supposed to be healers. That’s medical school lie number one. What we are, are dispensers of hokum churned out by pharmaceutical companies for the benefit of stockholders. Sometimes we ease pain. More often than not, though, we dispense a pill or pump a vein full of morphine. Unfortunately, the pain and illness still wreak havoc. All we’ve done is rendered the poor sick bastard incapable of caring.

  Sure, sometimes we get lucky. But if death insists on its due, we’re simply handmaidens.

  No, I didn’t cause Katrina’s death. But I sure was impotent in the face of disease.

  And sweet Murmur Lee? I was impotent all right, in ways great and small.

  Murmur Lee Harp Sees a Moment in the Life of Her Mother, Lily Cordelia Harp

  The wind has scattered me across this infinite darkness. If humans had animal eyes, they would see me, phosphorescent, a wild-flung smattering of glitter. They wouldn’t give me a second thought.

  Here, in this void, I witness my mother, Lily Cordelia Harp, at the moment of her greatest pain. It’s not anything I want to see, but the vision insists on its due; the past is saying, Murmur Lee, you gotta know.

  She is newlywed—pushing nineteen, looking fourteen—fresh as hyssop on a summer’s day. She stands in her yellow kitchen, at the supper table, folding laundry that smells of the new sun and the old sea. Her hair is swept into a golden ponytail and her midriff top fits her snug and sweet. My mother is a pretty woman. She is petite, like me, with blue eyes—Oster Harp eyes—but I don’t have golden hair. I wish I did. I want her hair. The kitchen door is open. The midmorning light spills in. She must not have closed it after bringing in the laundry off the line. Towels, washcloths, white T-shirts—my father’s T-shirts. She hums. I don’t know the tune. But I see the shadow at the kitchen door and I am afraid. She is not. She is unaware.

  A man walks into the kitchen, just strides right on in as if he owns the place. He is ordinary-looking: brunette, crew cut, jeans and a plaid shirt. There is nothing emblazoned on his forehead that shouts, Run, bitch, because I’m a dangerous motherfucker.

  And still, Mother is oblivious. She is loving her wifely duty, just folding those clothes and humming and pushing a fallen curl back off her forehead. He is a tall man, with long, long arms. He reaches out with one long, long arm and grabs her shoulder.

  My mother screams, clutches my father’s T-shirt to her chest. The man spins her around and smiles. He smiles. “You’re what I want.”

  “No! No!” My mother says this quietly, as if she is praying. It doesn’t do a bit of good. That man takes my mother. He hurls—yes, hurls—her onto the supper table, takes a knife out of his pocket, rips her shorts from the waist to the knee. “Bitch. Yes. I’m taking it all, you little bitch.”

  My mother stops praying the “No! No!” prayer and unleashes a wail that should make the sea retreat. But nothing retreats
. The world outside goes about its business, as if there is not a crime against all creation taking place. To muffle her wail, he rips my father’s T-shirt from her tiny hands and stuffs it in her mouth, stuffs it so hard and deep, I hear her gag and I see the edges of her lips rip.

  When he is done, he takes that knife and cuts my mother. He cuts a shallow crescent at the top swell of her left breast. Her blood bubbles up like a string of garnets. “Don’t forget this.”

  That’s what he says. And then he strides out of our house—saunters, really—leaving my mother to cry the hollow ballad of women who long for death.

  Here I am, sand-scattered and glinting, lost, hating the pain that omniscient knowledge breeds.

  William S. Speare

  Two days after we met, Murmur Lee stopped by the trailer unexpectedly. She stood on my stoop in her tight jeans and tight tee, batting those sapphire blues, balancing a willow basket on the whispering curve of her hip.

  “Hey,” she said. “I’m sorry to disturb you, but I think you’re in need of some soup. Your chakras are under siege.”

  “My chakras are under siege? Good God, girl, what in the hell are you talking about?”

  She claimed I knew what she was talking about, and she bustled on in and set me a place at my own supper table and served me up homemade who-the-hell-knows-what’s-in-it soup. She sprinkled some kind of powder that she claimed she ground from the root of a plant she discovered in the hammock.

  Before dipping the spoon in the bowl and bringing it to my lips, I asked, “Are you some sort of a witch?”

  She reached over and touched my hair. She gazed at me—steady and confident—and said, “No. I’m simply a good woman.”

  Sainthood: Murmur Lee Harp Reveals the Zenith of Her Childhood

  Let’s move past the movies the universal jester keeps running before my eyes. I want to ruminate on my own memories, not on tragedies and triumphs that happened before I was born.

  Me alone in our kitchen. My cotton night shift damp with sweat. The polished wood floor cool beneath my bare feet. The light spilling in through the kitchen door—the locked kitchen door; oh yes, all our doors stay locked, and now I know why; now I know why Mother slapped my behind whenever I left the door open—and the softer light filtering through the pale yellow curtains that waft like ghosts, fluttering about the window above the sink.

  Everything was as it should be. The house was quiet. Father was gone. Mother was attending to something—praying somewhere. That’s what Mother did. She prayed. But she also always left the makings for breakfast at the kitchen table: a box of Lucky Charms, a white bowl with a red-checkered rim, a soup spoon, a jelly glass, and two clear pitchers—milk and orange juice.

  I poured the cereal into the bowl and used two hands to add the milk. I spilled a bunch of it on the table but didn’t wipe it up. Mother would clean up after me. She always did. I ate fast. I liked my cereal crunchy. When I finished, I wiped my mouth with the back of my arm—something Mother would have flown all over me for. Then I clutched my juice glass with both hands and gulped, gulped, gulped. Ladylike was not a description ever applied to me—not by parents or boyfriends, and certainly not by my husband.

  Anyway, as I downed the orange juice, I thought of my ladybugs. They were orange, too, only a deeper color, and sprinkled with tiny black dots. I had spent the day before searching the vines of the confederate jasmine that sprawled and twined across our weather-worn fence, collecting the insects, dropping them into a jelly jar, talking to the tiny creatures as if they were my best friends. Mother said ladybugs were good luck. I needed good luck. Every little girl did. So I set down my juice glass and pushed my chair away from the table. I ran outside—spring was just beginning to tendril its scent into the briny air—and uncovered the jar from its secret hiding place beneath the brown crackle of fallen magnolia leaves.

  “Hello, little ladybugs. How are you today?” I brought the jar close to my face and waved my stubby fingers against the glass. Here’s how I know I was never a bad child, that early on I cared about the lives of unseen beings: Guilt began to natter away at my high spirits. How sad for these bugs to be trapped in a jar! But how else could I watch them? How else could they be my friends? I wanted to carry them with me everywhere I went. Even into Mr. Posey’s store. But was it fair to them? And there were so many difficulties. How would I feed them? What did they eat? And if they went to the bathroom, wouldn’t they mess on one another? There was no room to fly, not in this jar. Why hadn’t I thought of this yesterday? Why was I so bent on collecting every single bug I saw? I sighed, rubbed my nose, fretted over what to do. There was little choice; I would have to set the ladybugs free. First, I would empty them into my hands and let them wander through my soft arm hairs—wander, wander, wander, anywhere they wanted. Some might even dance across my face. I would be magic. Blessed. Fairylike. The world—and maybe even the God that Mother was praying to right at that moment—would be pleased. And after I was covered in ladybug dots, I would whisper, “Fly, fly away.” And they would, spreading my good luck on the breeze and into the secret throats of flowers.

  That was my fantasy, my intent. But as I stared into the jar, it dawned on me that the ladybugs had not flittered at all. Not one wing. Not a single beat. My good-luck friends appeared to be little more than hard orange beads, curled and still and piled like dust. I shook the jar. Their bodies hissed. Sh, sh, sh. “No! Wake up!”

  But, of course, they didn’t. I had killed them. I had killed every single one. The spring sun tumbled from its blue perch. My heart lurched like a skimmed stone. I dropped the death jar into the brown leaves. With tears streaming, I hurled myself back into the house, searching for my mother. “Mama! Mama!”

  I found her on her knees in her bedroom, wearing that yellow dress—the dress I loved so much, the one I would slip on over my clothes when she wasn’t home and play grown-up in—praying the rosary aloud. She was so pretty in that yellow dress with the white bow positioned at the waist, an exclamation mark dotting the thin curve of her backbone. “Mama!”

  She opened her eyes. They were vacant. In time, I would come to recognize that hollow stare as a signal of faith. Despite the interruption, her fingers continued to travel the rosary, insistently, stubbornly conjuring the ancient prayer. Hail Mary, full of grace. “What? What is it, Murmur Lee?” Her voice was soft, pillowy. I wanted to crawl inside it.

  “I killed them!”

  “Killed what?”

  “My ladybugs.” By now, snot was running down my face and I couldn’t breathe well because tears had tied my throat in knots.

  “Oh, really, Murmur Lee.” She shook her head and her face bobbled as if she were being pulled between prayerful contemplation and irritation. “They’re just insects. They die every day. Don’t you know that?”

  I nodded yes, but my crying escalated. What was she trying to say? Why was she so calm in the face of death? And what had become of my good luck? Wouldn’t God smite me for killing his most innocent of creatures?

  “Go on now. Go wash your face. I’ll be with you in a little while. We’ll finger-paint or something.” She turned away, back toward God.

  I stumbled out of her bedroom, heaving my grief into the air and down my face. I was five years old, and for the first time in my life, I feared the stranger she was praying to.

  Another first. Two weeks after the jar incident and three weeks after my fifth birthday. My mother had joined the choir at the cathedral in St. Augustine. She had to go to rehearsal. She just had to. And Mrs. Ringhoffer, the widow who lived in the old lodge, couldn’t baby-sit that day. I don’t know why. I think maybe she was sick. And there was no one home at Charlee’s. So I had to go to town with Mother. I had to sit in the pew and listen to the music and look at the pretty stained-glass windows of Jesus and all the saints. And I had to keep from making a sound. Not one peep.

  Ladymass. That’s what they called it. A special program to celebrate Mother’s Day, and, of course, to honor Mary. Only t
he women would sing. Of course, of course. “Don’t make any noise, Murmur Lee. Just sit here and say some prayers and listen to the pretty music. Be a good girl. Mama’s going to be right up there in the loft. I’ll be watching you.”

  I’m not sure if it was her tone of voice or her vacant stare or the way she kept glancing up at the loft as if she couldn’t wait to get away from me, but I knew then—even in my five-year-old heart—that Mother loved Christ more than she loved me. So I tried to look her straight in the eye, tried to keep my face steady, tried to fight my urge to throw myself into her arms and beg her to love me. I said, “Yes, ma’am” over and over. Yes, it’s true: I was desperate to please her, desperate to push Christ into playing my role, that of second fiddle.

  But I don’t believe my good behavior swayed my mother in any way. She fingered the strand of pearls around her neck. “We’ll go for ice cream afterward,” she said, nodding thoughtfully, as if the promise of something sweet would seal our deal.

  “Okay, Mama.”

  She smiled briefly—barely at all—and then, with her lime green pocket book hooked on her arm as if it, too, were an appendage, she turned on the soles of her lime flats, which matched her lime dress—all in all, she reminded me of a lime wedge perched on the lip of a water glass filled with pink lemonade—and trudged through the shadows and into the bowels of the church.

  So there I sat, alone, a small fink of a child amid Christ and crosses and saints, flickering in the illuminated glow cast by the stained-glass windows—and I tried to do as Mother wished. First, I would pray. I dropped to my knees. The cold leather of the kneeling bench pinched my sunburned skin. I rearranged the folds of my cotton skirt so there was more padding between me and the leather. Then, feeling as pious as any five-year-old possibly can, I crossed myself, clasped my hands, and started the only way I knew how. Our Father, who art in heaven. I asked for forgiveness for all my sins—I wasn’t specific—God knew about my transgressions even before I had committed them. Then I asked him to bless my parents and the dolphins and the birds and the lizards and the butterflies and my best friend, Charlee. I went on like that for a while, asking God to bless about every little thing that crawled, walked, flew, or swam.