Читать книгу Miss Entropia and the Adam Bomb - George Rabasa - Страница 10

On that Thanksgiving Day of ’01 our house smelled like sweat. Not the musky fragrance of recently exuded aerobic perspiration but the stale, bottom-of-the-clothes-basket kind. It was not the clean sweat that glistened on my father’s brow when he was thinking hard or the pearly mustache beading above my mother’s upper lip when she puttered in her garden. Certainly not the sweet dancer’s moisture that darkened Cousin Iris’s leotard along her tight midriff and under her breasts when she did bar work. That day’s smell was more like the sweat from my brother Ted’s glands, a musty redolence incorporating Giorgio aftershave and hot tar from his road-repair job.

Following my nose, I traced the odor to the kitchen where a fifteen-pound turkey had been in the oven since dawn. I was not going to eat any of it. This presented a problem because food is a contentious thing for my family. The way the day was shaping up, I expected I’d be sent packing once again. This time I was supposed to be home for good, but at thirteen I continued to feel like a visitor.

In the last few years I had undergone periodic banishment via the ’Tute van. This had harsh consequences, considering that I was born to be here among these fine people, ordained by the fates, I’m sure. I don’t know that there was anything unusual about my birth; I haven’t seen tapes or interviewed witnesses. In any case, my presence at home had been an off-and-on thing. The exact circumstances of my comings and goings were muddled.

Nobody has ever asked my opinion regarding the Webb household. It contains two official parents, one biological brother, and one honorary cousin. But my inclinations toward vegetarianism, Marx, the goddess Kali, alternative fashion, and psychotropic meds were much in conflict with the unambiguous preferences of the family.

On this visit home I carried a thick brown envelope with school transcripts, prescriptions, psychological evaluations, test scores (IQ 173, four As and two Bs, surprisingly excellent for a slacker personality). A second, sealed envelope inside the outer envelope contained a clinical evaluation of my progress that year. If I’d had the nerve to look inside, it would have provided much humorous material; even after years of Confessional Therapy (registered trademark: Institute Loiseaux), my psyche is a closed book to all, including me. An address was pinned to my jacket as if I were some kind of lobotomee who might get confused in the big city: The Webbs, 328 Kimball Street, St. Paul, 651-798-3269.

My suitcase with its scuffed corners and taped handle was crammed to bursting. I had packed a box of raisins for the sugar, sesame sticks for the salt, Diet Pepsi for energy, my prescribed meds for outward equanimity and inner joy. I had some books, including Das Kapital bound in black. Also all kinds of clothes because I couldn’t decide whether to put on a dress or jeans. Sure, I know what I am; I’ve got eyes, there are mirrors. Genital considerations aside, from the age of eleven I could go either way, swinging to extremes: either soaking in bubbles under the morning light that flows like honey through the bathroom skylight or rolling in the muddy backyard, a boy-pig in pork heaven.

I started out as a slow reader, but when I finally got around to Marx, I knew he would always be part of my intellectual arsenal. The Big K has, through the years, given theoretical heft to my ideas, from “Communal Order in Wasps” (show and tell, Miss Hanteel’s fourth grade biology) to “The Irony of Martyrdom” (honors paper, Mr. Steadman’s seventh grade world history). People know better than to argue with me when they realize my theories are solidly grounded. Marx is back in fashion in the better universities, too, now that he doesn’t associate with East European bureaucrats with cabbage breath and we have villains with beards and turbans to worry about. Next to those guys, communists are downright quaint.

When life gets prickly, I like to lose myself in reading while the natural order of things takes its course toward more favorable circumstances. That Thanksgiving day I escaped the kitchen smells by burying myself in Blindness, a novel about a very scary plague. I’ve been known to read a whole book without anyone seeing me blink. I used to pull out each page as I read it until the contents were scattered throughout the house, loose leaves slipped behind furniture, under rugs and cushions, in the toilet. I was releasing the story back into the ether. That’s what I imagined. It takes courage to let a book go and make room in your head for the next one.

Some people hang on to books and find a permanent place for them, rows upon rows classified by author, title, subject, color, size. My books end up wherever I happen to be when I finish them: a car’s backseat, their spines splayed from my trying to hold them steady over the bumps and twists of the road, or water-swollen in a corner of the bathtub, or disappearing into the sand on some beach. They don’t stay put for long; other eyes glom on to them. I am only a stop in their journey. Books, like me, are visitors.

Ted, aka Brother Tedious, considered himself a man of action; he did not like books. Or the people who read them. He had not broken the code that separates humans from turnips. He said reading was like being dead to the world, life’s experience reduced to black squiggles on white paper. He claimed that even TV is more active than that. His idea of action was Game Boy mayhem—lust, dismemberments and beheadings, explosions and car wrecks. It was a pity he couldn’t do anything more significant with his fingers after Homo sapiens had mutated through hundreds of thousands of years to the evolutionary peak of opposable thumbs. He also did serious weight lifting, slow, grunting presses that started smoothly and ended with a crash to the floor of his room. He used his strength to get into school fights with numbing regularity.

Tedious is a big, magnificent guy. He’s got ape-sized feet with hairy toes and hands like baseball mitts. For this holiday feast he was mashing up various tubers. He took the boiled sweet potatoes and pressed them down with a special utensil that is basically a bunch of small holes with a handle. He took a yam in his hand and showed it to me. At a certain angle, it looked like it had a nose, lips, and chin.

“This is your head,” he said. And proceeded to squash it down into the bowl, its features transformed into a dozen squishings wriggling out of the holes in the masher. He looked up and gave me his rascally devil grin.

Tedious was not yet a handsome guy. His face, in fact, was at the culminating point of his pimple-growing career; he may never again have as many pimples at one time as he did that day. His zits were like living organisms with minds of their own. It was as if they had gathered, each with its own consciousness, to colonize his head. As he smiled, an inflamed furuncle by the corner of his mouth got squeezed into exuding a mixture of pus and blood. Scary.

I had planned on mostly eating sweet potatoes with little multicolored marshmallows. In the end I settled on the green beans with slivered almonds and the fruit salad with the same marshmallows as the yams. That, plus not one but two kinds of pie, would make for a balanced meal.

The next biggest person in the family is my father. His name is Al, aka Albert. He’s a good guy but hard to get to know. Years ago, before I arrived on the scene, he was reputed to be very fun-loving. A real joker. A ladies’ man. He was voted most popular in his graduating class at Edison High School.

His mood changed one day when he said he noticed that his head kept getting heavier. He sat down at the dinner table, perhaps to a meal of turkey and gravy with giblets like that day’s, and his head dropped so low that his glasses got fogged up by the steaming sections of flesh and gravy on his plate. He rolled his bewildered eyes up at my mother. “I don’t know what happened,” he said. “My head feels like a bowling ball.”

“Excedrin might help,” She placed her hand on his forehead as if checking for a fever.

Father’s head became a persistent concern. For years he had worn a brown fedora. It occurred to him one day that the hat was tighter than he remembered. After that he was able to follow the gradual expansion, a millimeter at a time, of his head, until one day the headband had made a permanent crease along the sides of his skull.

He has become a morose, reticent man who sits at the dinner table or in his favorite La-Z-Boy chair looking tired, his chin resting on the palm of his hand or his fist positioned under his jaw. My mother, who has a flair for words, put it best when she described her Al as a man who was forever carrying the weight of the world on his neck. It was around that time that Albert grew to fear the news in any medium, from the daily paper to the radio traffic report, because he just couldn’t stay away from the screen. He found some relief in VCR tapes, watching the planes crashing into the towers over and over, pausing at the moment of impact, then speeding up to the smoke swirling about in a manic conflagration.

His room is strewn with copies of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the Congressional Record. He is familiar with every nuance of duplicity and disingenuousness on the part of politicians and journalists. He knows details of the budget and can cite examples of federal waste on behalf of obscure subsidies for research into medical sunflower seeds, bridges to nowhere, price supports for bee pollen. He has the radio tuned to 91.1, NPR news around the clock. The more he knows, the more unhappy he becomes. Global warming gives him night sweats. Iran, North Korea, and Israel hoarding enriched uranium fills him with a kind detached hopelessness. On some days, when the news of the day is particularly alarming, he remains unshaven in a plaid bathrobe and fuzzy slippers, brown fedora firmly in place. The family has learned it’s best to avoid him or he might clutch an unsuspecting listener by the sleeve and pour out his accumulated chagrin over the course of the war or the latest surveillance of our phone calls, our bank accounts, our hard drives. He can’t get enough of the news, and the very subject of his interest makes him sick—the president’s voice grates like sandpaper in the twists and turns of his ears. Occasionally Father will write letters to the editor of the Star Tribune. These are convoluted essays that drip with anger and sarcasm and are never published.

From time to time I can tell he enjoys looking at Cousin Iris, which I can understand; we all ogle Iris, who is the daughter of Mother and Father’s friends, the Fallons, who died when their airplane fell out of the sky. She was six.

Back then we all liked to look at Iris because her every movement was uncannily beautiful from start to finish. It was already clear that, at sixteen, she was a true dancer. The girl’s simplest gesture was art, alive in the moment, a singular piece of deliberate grace never to be repeated anywhere in the universe.

On that Thanksgiving quiet tears welled in my eyes as I marveled at how precisely she held her fork while making quick, delicate sawing movements with her knife on a piece of breast meat. It was a brutal act performed with elegance. She then took the morsel to her lips, her long, slender hand seeming to float in midair, fingers poised like flower petals, lips slightly parted. It was a moving thing.

There were already hints of her emerging Christianity, though she was not yet a proselytizing, born-again, rapture-ready zealot. She was best avoided when she felt possessed by the Holy Spirit. She found pleasure mainly in the anticipation of the world’s end. I couldn’t help thinking that in her estimation, Heaven would be a dull and lonely place.

My mother’s name is Marjorie. She was a vastly more interesting person, an artist’s model and a poet, in the days before she met my father. Sometimes she was both at the same time: art students sketched her nude while she recited verses to lift their minds from the carnal to the transcendent. She confessed to me once that she had at one time held great expectations of herself. But she came back to earth after she met Albert. There is clearly a pattern here of the members of my family stifling each other’s potential.

“I was going to study with Gregorio Hewett,” she said. “I was fearless. I wanted to learn the sonnet, the sestina, the Homeric simile. Then one day, while I was sitting for a life drawing class, your father saw me through a window. He was selling the famous Mightyplate Roof Coating from Fort Worth, Texas, and was on his way to meet with the principal about the school’s leaky roof. He had his sample case with him, and he had decided to take a short cut through the school grounds. He stopped and looked up at me.”

“Was it love at first sight?” I asked every time I heard the story.

“I thought it was plain voyeurism. There I was without a stitch, twisting myself into a natural-looking pose, when I saw this man outside with his pear-shaped head and wide, amazed eyes. I froze. My heart was beating like crazy, and I was gasping for air. I reached for my clothes.

“It took a while before people realized what was happening. The students were staring and studying my every pore and bump, and Albert was looking puzzled as it started to dawn on him that he may have had something to do with my sudden discomfiture. All he could think of doing was to smile at me kindly and wait for me to get dressed while the kids held their pencils and complained about being left hanging from a breast or stranded in a buttock.

“In the end I scurried out the door. Albert caught up with me, apologizing about a dozen times as he followed me home.”

After that Marjorie stopped posing for art classes. The realization that her body held the potential to so unsettle a man made her self-conscious about showing it to anyone other than Albert. By then her grandfather’s trust fund had kicked in, and she didn’t need the job. In fact, it was Mother’s modest wealth that paid for my years of treatment.

Marjorie opened the oven door, and turkey effluvium invaded every corner of the house. She leaned in with a giant dropper and sucked up turkey sweat from the bottom of the pan and squirted it all along the naked bird, which was all scrunched up, vulnerable and seemingly ashamed. Much the way my whole family seems to feel about nudity.

In fact, the one who first inspired me to walk around naked was Iris. Before finding Jesus she would venture forth in the middle of the night, stepping out from her bed and sauntering down the hall to pee. What a free spirit she was then!

I’m the only one who was lucky enough to have seen her. One time we nearly bumped into each other by the bathroom. I had on my pajamas, and she was a vision of moonlit skin. I whispered, “Well, hello, Iris,” as we crossed, acting as if the sight of her hadn’t taken my breath away.

“You should try sleeping in the nude,” she murmured in her haughty ballet-student accent. “It makes the night très sensual.”

That night I put away my pajamas and haven’t worn them since. In my nightly wanderings down the hall I have never again crossed paths with Iris. I have, however, stumbled into Tedious, who said I looked like a turnip, and my father, who told me it was unsanitary to sleep naked, and my mother, who warned that if the house caught fire I would not be properly dressed for the escape.

Sitting around the table that Thanksgiving, I delighted in the secret that Iris and I had something meaningful in common. Our skins shared a nightly experience of smooth sheets, each individual fiber seeming to find a pore to tickle and rub. It meant that when we dreamed we dreamed with our entire bodies. But most important, it meant that we were open to new experiences, courageous enough to be ready for whatever the fates might send us in the night. I never found a chance to tell her this.

Our family likes to dress up for celebrations. Tedious put on a white shirt and a bolo tie with a silver skull clasp. Albert actually removed his hat and slicked his hair back with a dab of old-fashioned brilliantine imported from Argentina to make his hair as glossy as patent leather. Marjorie put on her pearls. Iris wore a black dress that made her white skin positively luminescent.

As for me, I wore one of mother’s old Sunday dresses. I liked the style, with the full skirt and the blousy sleeves and the neat row of pearl buttons along the front. The overall effect was capped by a leopard-skin pillbox hat I’d found at a costume shop: the nice lady gone haywire.

White or dark?” Father asked, holding the carving fork in his right hand. He looked me straight in the eye, not letting on if he thought my attire was in any way strange.

“Neither.” I smiled throughout the exchange. “I have a contract with turkeys,” I said. “We have agreed not to eat each other.”

“You’re going to die if you don’t eat,” he said, pointing the carving knife at me.

It sounded like a threat. There are places around the world where people would kill for a slice of turkey. At home convention stands on its ear. I love contradictory logic.

“Okay, I love life,” I said. “A bit of white meat, please.”

He glanced at the knife, then laughed, as if it had just explained the joke to him. “I meant that you need the protein.” Still chuckling, he looked to his right and his left, and Mother smiled along with him, and Tedious shook his head with exaggerated incredulity. Even Iris rolled her eyes and quickly darted her tongue out at me. What a traitor. I loved her anyway; her tongue made the moment for me.

I held out my plate graciously because I knew how much love and enthusiasm the family had put into this meal. Still, even if Father hadn’t meant he would personally kill me for not eating turkey, the thought had wormed its way into my subconscious.

My plate was piled high with slices of meat drowned in gravy with bits of the bird’s most private organs floating about. Tedious had loaded on his potatoes and yams, and Iris had served me a huge helping of green beans with slivered almonds. The plate weighed a ton. I looked around the table and decided that I had more food in front of me than the four of them put together. Mountains of it sat there steaming, sending up to me a sweaty fragrance.

Suddenly out came a camera, and the flash went pop! pop! in front of my eyes. I got it: a family joke. I didn’t let on that anything was even slightly strange. I didn’t ask what the hell was so interesting about me that day that they needed to record it for posterity. Was it the clothes? They’d seen them before. Might it be the last time in my life that I would ingest turkey? Big deal. The frightened look in my eyes as I ate for my life? Yes, and how cruel. The old eat-to-live adage in living color. I straightened out the leopard-skin pillbox hat, which was about to teeter off, and proceeded to dig in.

Ah, how I dug. In contrast to Iris’s delicate ballet of knife and fork, I was spearing large chunks of turkey, then driving the meat into the hills and mounds of yam and beans and sending it flying into my wide open mouth. Pop! went the flash. Ha, this was fun. Even as I attempted to masticate one clump down to size, I was already angling the fork into a dive for the next bite.

It occurred to me that I’d lived this moment before. That I was only repeating a ritual that can’t be exhausted, which must be relived time after time with undiminished intensity. A fork dives and soars like an airplane doing acrobatics. The engines roar and whine as the payload is lifted into the sky and brought down with ballistic precision into the open cavern of my mouth. Watch it, here it goes! Hmmm, munch munch, yummy.

After a couple of passes I looked around the table. Nobody was laughing; they were doing their best to ignore me. I glanced from Tedious, who was staring blankly at some point in space above my head, to Iris, who was picking the almonds out of her green beans, to Albert, who was staring at my mother at the other end of the table in a silent appeal for help. I flashed Mother a grin.

She seemed about to cry. Carefully she leaned toward me and spooned off the remnants of turkey gravy on my chin, then handed me a napkin, which I put down on the table. Undistracted, I counted out ten green beans to spear on my fork.

“Every year it’s the same disgusting thing,” Tedious muttered under his breath.

He had no right to say this. Bits of pink-and-white marshmallow formed a mustache along his lip. He was wrong, of course; it’s not the same thing every year, but as I opened my mouth to speak only a couple of muffled grunts emerged.

“I’ve lost my appetite.” Ted pushed back his chair and crumpled his napkin on the table.

“For Christ’s sake,” Father said. “Can’t we all be in harmony as a family for one meal?” He looked at Mother as if his question hadn’t been rhetorical.

“Of course,” she might have said. “We’re together as a family, a wonderfully extended family if you take Iris into account, and we’re together every moment of our lives, whether we are sitting at the table or not.”

But this was not what Mother said. What she did say was, “I’m so sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” I asked, but nobody understood what I said because my mouth was still full. “You wanted me to eat, right?” My mouth went hlumph, hlumph.

Albert got up from the table and took his plate to the La-Z-Boy in front of the TV. He settled down to watch a replay of the famous 1966 Super Bowl.

“Eat up before it gets cold,” Mother said to the ones left at the table, namely Iris and me.

“It’s still warm.” I pressed my palm onto the heaping plate, as if to check its temperature, and let the warm ooze of stuffing and potatoes and gravy-soaked turkey seep between my fingers. It felt nice. It felt better than it tasted. I had visions of the different flavors and textures getting into my body through the skin, finding their way into the capillary network, entering the bloodstream, swimming around the system putting a little sweetness here, a little salt there, making the blood redder and richer. I bypassed the middle organs and got right to the heart of the matter.

I looked up at Iris and thought she could really understand this tactile stuff, the old touchy-feely, as they say, a naked kind of thing with nothing in the way between the brain and the food. Talk about sensuous. No, don’t talk about it; do it. “Hey, Iris. Put your hand on it. It’s like eating naked.”

“That is something strictly between us,” she said. For a moment I thought she was going to give me that sly grin of hers. But no, her lips were pressed tight, her eyes squinting mean thoughts at me. She put down her knife and fork, lining them up alongside each other on the edge of the plate. She stood up, smoothed down the back of her pretty dress, and said, “Excuse me,” to my mother. “I need to make a call.” To me she said nothing.

Then, it was just Mother and me. Like in the old days. And like other rough times, it looked as if we were about to have A Talk. She took her chair and pulled it around the table to sit beside me. She dipped a napkin into a water glass, lifted my hand off the plate, and wiped it clean. I started to put my other hand down on the mass of holiday victuals, but she gripped it by the wrist and bent it back until I cried out. She pushed the plate beyond my reach.

“I think I should go back,” I said.

“Are you happier there than at home?”

“They eat what I do.”

“All the residents are vegetarian?” She was not taking me seriously.

“They range from macrovegan to fishoterian. I fit right in the middle.”

“After all these years.” She started to weep. “Back and forth, back and forth.”

“Not always my idea.”

“We never should have sent you away in the first place,” she sniffed.

“Terrible things could’ve happened, Mom.” I gave her a little jab on the shoulder. “I have considered castrating Tedious, assaulting Iris.”

I didn’t qualify for the Clean Plate Club that year. An hour from the time I sat down at the table, the mountain of sliced bird and mashed tubers sat lumpily before me under a translucent sheath of congealing gravy. Mother gave up and left, stifling a sob. Brother Tedious returned and picked up around me, gathering silverware, the big platter with the dismembered bird, the sloshing gravy boat. I remained alone, knowing I wouldn’t eat any more but afraid to cross the living room, where I knew I would have to face my destiny, again.

Finally, unwilling to consider the lifeless remnants of my friend the turkey any longer, I rose from the table and edged out of the dining room, hugging the wall along the stairs to my room. I kept my head from turning, even though out of the corner of my eye I could see Albert, Ted, Iris, and Mother all sitting next to each other on the blue couch. They appeared primed for intervention.

“Come here, kid,” Albert said softly. “We need to have a talk.”

Well, it just about cracked me up to hear him call me over so tenderly, so sadly, knowing I had let him down in the worst way.

“Now?” I hoped he would say, No, not now, not this minute, a little later maybe. “Yes, now,” he said. “But it can wait while you change out of that getup.”

“I’ll be right back.” I gathered the skirt hem in one fist and, hanging on to the banister for balance with the other hand, continued up the stairs two steps at a time.

I went straight into my parents’ bedroom and rummaged through their closet. I pulled out, hastily, a pair of Albert’s plaid golf pants (very St. Paul, ca. 1978), a gray silk shirt with French cuffs, a doublebreasted blazer with a nautical insignia. The ensemble really came together with a wide tie of petunias on steroids. The dresser mirror told me that the getup still needed work. But give me an A for effort.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” Albert said when I entered the living room to face the tribunal.

“I am my cousin’s cousin,” I answered. “And my brother’s sibling,” I added, meeting my mom’s tear-filled eyes. “My mother’s daughter and my father’s son. I am part of this family.”