“Excuse me?” I say. She is leaning over onto her lap, looking at me and then at my magazine.
“Is that you on the cover?” She smiles hopefully.
I turn my magazine over. A pretty brunette woman is beaming and holding triplets. “Oh my goodness, no,” I laugh politely.
“Oh,” says the older woman and pinches in her mouth. She smooths her skirt and looks straight ahead.
I resume flipping pages.
“Have you ever seen it rain on only one side of the street?”
I turn my head and stare. Her lipstick is on crooked. It’s a bluish pink and bleeds out beyond the lines of her mouth. “No, I don’t think so,” I say.
“I have.” She nods, very pleased. I, too, bob my head and together we bob our heads.
In the examination room Hazel Doyle the doctor presses my abdomen. “Some water retention,” she says, smiles, keeps pressing.
“I’ll do anything for retention,” I say. Now she starts to poke and prod a birthmark below my left breast. It’s a mark that I myself have never paid much attention to. I want to ask her about having a baby at the age of thirty-four, at the age of forty, about infertility, about artificial insemination, about test tubes.
“I think it’s a third breast,” she says. “Hmmmm, this is interesting.” She glances at me to note my reaction, which is not good. “You see, it’s in perfect line with the nipple above it.” She’s excited by this. She calls in two of her assistants who also bend over me to look at it. Everyone smiles and ooohs and aahhhs. It’s only a flat little beige thing I never much thought about. But now I’m upset. I don’t know why Eleanor has recommended this doctor to me. I pull my shift back on rather rudely and hop off the examination table. “Excuse me,” I say. “I’m due at the circus in three minutes.”
I drive home near tears, and when I tell the story to Gerard, he smiles and puts his arm around me. I tell Eleanor her doctor’s the hound of hell and she says “My word!” and I don’t breathe a note of it to Darrel.
My mother died when I was nineteen. She had some sort of strange disease where her organs began, mysteriously, to dry out. When the doctors caught it, she was gangrenous throughout her intestines. She was the one who told me about it first, sitting up in the hospital bed, strong, rigid, tall (she was a head taller than my dad), trying to fight the grogginess of painkillers, and using all the exact names for things. None of the names she told me registered. I sat down on her bed and cried into my knees. Then she lifted me up and we both cried together. When she brushed my bangs off my forehead I could smell garlic still on her fingers, in the grain of them, like a kitchen cutting board, that’s how fast she’d been rushed off. From the discovery of her illness until the funeral service was only six days. My father drank the whole time. Afterward Louis and I got him a dog—half-beagle, half-collie—to keep him company. I went back off to college and fell immediately and tearfully into the arms of my boyfriend. Ten days after my mother died I made love for the first time. Perhaps I’d been waiting for her to die, this woman whose slips I’d worn for childhood dress-up games, the bodice hollow and droopy like old breasts, this woman who in the name of perfect posture allowed her children no pillows. Perhaps I’d been waiting for all that terminology, that correctness, to die so that at last I could relax, with my sloppy carriage and careless parlance, my thrice-kissed shoulders, and my one pair of black nylon tricot underwear—of which she’d never have approved. Though she might have smiled and shaken her head about the underwear, standing there at the laundromat, holding them up. She might have said, “And whose fancy underlinens are these?” She might have done that.
Saturday morning and I have to call my father. I have to find out what’s he doing for Thanksgiving. He still lives alone in the trailer in Tomaston. He’s named the dog Elizabeth (for five years she was just “Dog”), and she is now so old she does little but sit in the family room and breathe, her whole body moving in and out, her eyes looking up at you, a glassy black.
The last time I spoke to my father he was talking about finally getting circumcised and about having all his moles removed. For health reasons.
“Dad? Hi, guess who this is?”
“Now let me see. Is this my favorite daughter?”
We always do this. “This is your only daughter. How’s it going?”
“Just fine. How are things in Fitchville?”
“Okay. I’m calling to find out what your plans are for Thanksgiving, if you’d like to come down here for dinner. I’m planning a big turkey with chestnut dressing.”
There is a pause, then some muffled noises. “I’ve got some news, Benna,” he says. “I’ve got a girl friend.”
There is a dictionary on top of the phone book, and I flip through it nervously, as if looking for something to say: My father has a girl friend, my father has a girl friend. In the dictionary, after sild, a type of sardine, comes silence.
“Oh, my goodness,” I manage. “Congratulations.” That is, I’m certain, what my mom would say. She would say it in a hearty voice and thrust out her hand. Quid pro quo comes just before quiescence. “I hope, gee, that doesn’t mean the two of you won’t be coming here for Thanksgiving?” There’s some scuffling and some clicking noises.
“Hello, Donna, dear.” There’s now an older woman’s voice on the other end of the phone. She sounds like the woman in Dr. Doyle’s office who thought it was me on the magazine.
“Hi, who is this?”
“It’s Benna, Miriam,” coaches my dad in a loud whisper. “Benna,” he says, “this is my girl friend, Miriam. Miriam-Benna, Benna-Miriam.” Being introduced on the phone like this, what is one supposed to say? “Delighted I’m sure”? I never really knew what that meant. Delighted, I’m sure, what? “Nice to meet you”? I can hear my father say, “Here, Miriam, now you speak.” They must be passing the receiver back and forth, two old people who have pulled up card-table chairs by the phone. I can see them leaning forward, heads cocked, faces sparkling with holiday.
“Hello, Benna, dear,” she tries again. “This is Miriam.”
“Hi, Miriam.”
“My, you do have a sweet voice. Your father’s told me all about you.”
“The part about the awards and prizes is true.” I’ve just made this up; I don’t know what else to say. I can hear a hand, like a seashell, over the phone.
“She says the part about the awards and prizes is true, Nick. What part about the awards and prizes?” Miriam then gets back on the phone. “Hello, this is Miriam.”
“Hi, Miriam. Only part of the part about the prizes is true. And I was just kidding about the awards.”
“Yes,” she says. “Your father and I are planning on taking a lovely trip to Florida for Thanksgiving, aren’t we, Nick?”
“Yes, that’s true,” says Nick, my father.
“How nice,” I say.
“My son and his family are down there and they love to have grandma for holidays, you know how that is.”
“Of course.” I’m feeling lost, floating.
“Nick, do you want to say more to Donna?”
Afterward I put on a sweater and go for a walk. I try to breathe deeply and can’t. My breath won’t catch and turn over; it stops prematurely in a panic and I have to breathe shallowly, off the top of my lungs. My nose has gone numb. Though it’s sunny for November, my nose has gone cold as meat. I touch the tip and it feels not like a nose but like a strange, fleshy bump, like a cervix through a diaphragm, a distant knob. I feel a pain in my chest and in my head. I wonder if I’m having a stroke. I keep walking, thwarted and dizzy. A girl is trying to roller skate in the big chunky gravel of her driveway and can’t. She stumbles around, an image of all the impossibilities of everyone’s life, ridiculous and heartbreaking. I used to do that, skate around like that in the driveway and fall, stones sticking in the pus of my scraped knees, like something necessary.
Even walking I am disoriented. I must get outside of myself, I must extend myself, communicate with th
e world. I stare at a squirrel up ahead and, without thinking, call, “Here, kitty-kitty-kitty.”
“What is this scar?” I’m tracing a long, pale train track along Darrel’s leg. “Is that from the war?”
“No. I was in a bicycle accident when I was ten. I smashed into the bumper of a car and landed on pavement and glass. I had to have fourteen stitches.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry to disappoint you.”
“You didn’t disappoint me.”
“Of course I did.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Yes, I did. I know what it is you want me to be.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I’m figuring you out, Carpenter.”
I look him straight in the shoulder blade. “No you’re not,” I say. “Buster.”
When I think of my father dying, both of my parents gone, it somehow becomes important to remember my childhood and that’s when, of course, I can’t. It all becomes evaporated, like a doomed planet in a science-fiction movie. Sometimes, though, I remember bits and it’s like finding a few odd pieces of lost jewelry. I remember visiting my father at the fire station, trying on his hat; playing dress-up with my mother’s old lingerie (I sometimes modeled for my father when he was home); trying on secondhand things my cousin in Boston had outgrown, sweaters with Filene’s and Jonathan Logan tags. My mother would stand me on a chair—“Ta-da!”—and we would have a fashion show.
These are all connected with clothes, with trying to be someone else; that’s mostly what people remember—that effort to leave themselves. Although there are a few other things I remember, odd lodgers in the rooming house of my recall. I remember my paper route, my trombone lessons, summers spent squeezing open the throats of snapdragon blossoms and pretending they growled and really snapped. I remember a friend named Sarah Garrison coming over to play, fascinated that we lived in a trailer. She stayed for dinner, and when her mother came to pick her up, Mrs. Garrison came to the door with a pale, bewildered face: “Is Sarah there?” The trailer appalled her, maybe frightened her. Here, I knew, was an adult I was stronger than. I showed her my monster finger puppet. “This is a snap dragon,” I said.
And I remember playing with Louis: Flying Horses, Astronaut, Wedding. When we were flying horses we would flap our wings and whinny and gallop down the road. The neighbors worried. We would make nests in the field across from where we lived, and we would lay eggs in them and then spring up and rejoice in horse language. We would do little dances with our hooves and teach our babies how to look for worms in the ground. For Astronaut we hiked a hot mile and a half down the road to the junkyard, where we climbed, like gleeful astronauts, into the old abandoned cars, steering them, making motor noises, squealing tires, squinting out through the smashed windshields which had been splintered into stars. When we played Wedding, we would go out into the woods with gauzy curtains draped over our heads. Louis consented to this mostly because he was lonely and had nothing else to do. We were both brides. We would pronounce our ersatz vows to one another and throw our fern bouquets (made by grabbing the bottom of the fern and moving our hands slowly up the stem, denuding the entire fern). I would sing the wedding music—something I deemed romantic, a song my father had learned in the army and would sometimes sing around the house: “… She’s got a pair of hips/Just like two battleships / Hot dog, that’s where my money goes.”
But even these bits drift away from me, even now after I’ve conjured them. It’s because they don’t fit anywhere, so I can’t keep them still, can’t connect and possess them. They make only for a jagged fuzz of a past and a father getting old and eating giblets in Florida.
My life, what I’ve lived so far, crumbles across its very center and the pieces float off a slight distance and just stay there, jigsawed, glueless, and dead.
My heart is raucous as a tea kettle. I have stopped by Gerard’s with Chinese food for a quick chow-down. I eat and rant at the same time, sitting cross-legged on the floor against the couch. I pointlessly hurl throw pillows across the room. “What are you doing?” he asks. “Throwing cushion to the winds?” I curl my lip. I tell him I want to pretend. I want to pretend there’s such a thing as requited love. As the endurance of love.
“Endurance is a country in Central America,” says Gerard. “It has nothing to do with love. As for requited, that has nothing to do with anything. Except, my dear, you and me.” He extends a long, curving arm. He kisses me. I say good night, I have to go, I have to go home and make honey milk.
Gerard walks me out to my car. It’s dark already, and the night sky is beautiful and cold. Gerard points up to it. “You see the sky?” he sings to the tune of an old Herb Alpert song. “The sky’s in love with you …”
I hold up the tail end of an egg roll. I look Gerard straight in the beard. “I am a wok,” I say, “I am an island.” Then I get in my car and drive away.
Darrel has keys, I hear the jangle and thud downstairs, and soon he has slipped into bed beside me.
“Did you say something?” he asks. He glides his hand down the side of my ribcage.
“No. Why?”
“I thought you said something.”
“No,” I say. “Did you?”
“No,” he says.
This morning I get up to correct papers and it’s still dark outside, the streetlights still on. I put some water on for coffee, then wander out into the living room. I glance out the front window, and there’s a woman in slippers and a robe standing in the middle of the street, grinning and waving at me as if she’d been standing there all night just waiting for me to look out and find her. I shut the curtains, terrified, then peek out again to see if she’s still there. She is and gives me a glorious, gregarious wave. She sees me, recognizes me, knows me—how does she know me? Oh my god. I walk to the kitchen and back. I peek out again. Only the frozen gray street—she has vanished.
The greatest number of accessory mammae was reported in 1866 by Neugebauer, who found ten in one woman.
Many images of Diana, the virgin goddess, portray her as polymastic, having over a dozen breasts. They look like clusters of tropical fruit; she doesn’t look too displeased but then she’s a goddess why the hell should she.
Tonight Gerard plays at the Ramada in the Nickelodeon Lounge, a space lit with dusky rose lights, the ceilings dangling coleus and mingy philodendra and spidery antique fans which are motionless and probably don’t work. With a small stack of student poems, I sit in one of the booths that line the far wall. The upholstery is a sort of crooked Aztec, the table waxy polyurethaned cherry. Gerard is at the piano up front in a coral-hued spotlight, swaying from side to side, fingers dribbling along the keyboard while he chats exuberantly at the audience, various members of which look up occasionally from their veal cutlets and fried mushrooms to nod, clap, or laugh with their mouths full. I give him a subtle wave and a broad wink, and he smiles, armlessly directing one of his jokes my way: “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal? ‘I don’t know what to make of my husband these days. Could I borrow a recipe?’ ”
The audience likes it, likes the idiocy of all this, though one woman near me has glanced down at her stroganoff and complained, “Please, not while we’re eating.” Gerard begins singing the Cabaret medley, his high notes occasionally strained and misshapen. When he gets to the song “Married,” he stops singing for a moment, his hands continuing in some bland arpeggios, and he says, “My wife: She’s one in a million. I just have to make sure she doesn’t find out.” A large white-haired man to my left, part of a two-couple foursome, guffaws loudly, then gets swatted in the arm by the woman next to him. Gerard smiles at me and moves quickly on through to the end of the song, the musical-comedy bliss of marriage. Gerard has never had a wife. Sometimes I think he knows too many philanderer and lady cannibal jokes to ever have one. “What did one lady cannibal say to the other lady cannibal?” he’s now asking. “ ‘Boy, is my husband in hot water!’ ” He bangs out some loud chords
, there are some amused groans. Another lady cannibal joke is about how to make a husband stew. With onions.
I’m not sure why he feels so brutalized, or why he’s directing so many of these my way. Perhaps this is my self-centeredness, my failure to really know Gerard.
He finishes up the Cabaret medley. I applaud vigorously, and he nods, says thank you, keeps playing. He is trying to appear tireless. He creeps a ways into a Louis Armstrong song—“I went down to St. James infirmary / Met my baby there / Saw her laid out on the table / So sweet, so cold, so bare”—and then quickly moves into a Fats Waller tune, “Keeping Out of Mischief Now,” a weird, dark wit to the juxtaposition. This song is pretty, and Gerard sings it with his eyes closed, his electrically haloed face raised toward the ceiling, a religious painting in bright colors on black velvet. I think for a brief, glowy moment that even though people are getting up and heading for the salad bar, loading up with pickled beets, pickled corn, pickled beans—kidney, string, wax—that they appreciate Gerard, that he really is talented, that in some endless way I too will always be in love with him.
The song is over, but his fingers still linger on the keyboard, a salad-bar tinkle.
At the break the spotlight goes off and he comes over and sits at my booth. “More freshman poems?” He riffles quickly through the pile, a polite curiosity.
“Yeah, I keep thinking of leaving them at the salad bar. Next to the croutons, like an alternative lettuce.”
Gerard smiles wearily, then buries his face in his hands, a pianist’s hands, leathered trees of knobs, dour veins, branches of fingers. I reach over and touch his forearm. He feels embarrassed working here. The salad bar gets to him.
“I can’t come out,” he says, not removing his hands. “Not for at least ten minutes.”
I feel superfluous, a giant, wet flesh match in a sweater I just bought on sale this afternoon. “Okay,” I say, and we sit there, silent, sad, his shoulders heaving twice, his face vanished into his palms until finally, a long finally, he wipes his hands down slowly off his face and though pink-eyed and sleepy, he looks all right again. He has used up most of his ten minutes, and the spotlight has come back on, and no one is in it, a signal that Gerard’s break is over.