Читать книгу They Is Us - Tama Janowitz - Страница 11

Each night Murielle drifts off but wakes at three or four in the morning and can’t go back to sleep. And she is hungry. It seems to her that she never eats, at least she can’t remember doing so. She is always hungry and she never eats and yet she grows and grows.

Refrigerator

Sometimes, late at night, she wakes to find herself in front of the refrigerator. Staring blankly at first then… lo and behold, a slice of Swiss cheese in one hand, a bottle of soda in the other! Breakfast at her feet prodding her ankle with a paw until she tosses him bits of the food. Only his whimpers of “More! Please, more,” rouse her from her comatose state. Does the damn dog have to have a Russky accent too?

“No more.”

“But why? Why, Mama?” says the dog.

She wants to say she’s not the dog’s mother but she knows the dog would cry. “Because in this lifetime I’m the person and you’re the dog! And, for your own health, I say so.” This doesn’t sound quite right. “So, if you don’t like it, come back in your next life as a human being! And my recommendation is, preferably male.” Lip curled, Breakfast slinks out of the kitchen with an expression simultaneously hurt and contemptuous.

How has she gotten here? Where has the food come from? She has no memory of buying the Swiss cheese, or the ham, or the puffy white flavorless Parker House Rolls.

Or whatever it is she finds in her hand, almost in her mouth. The combination lox-and-cream-cheese on a garlic-bagel, the Benny-Goodman-and-Jerry-Lee-Lewis-Nuts-Bolts-and-Berries-ice cream – let alone how or when she ever got out of bed and made her way to the refrigerator.

Murielle wonders what is wrong with her, that she can’t keep the place even remotely clean? She looks around the kitchen: implements – spatulas, knives, spoons, a blender, crumbs, dirty sponges, almost empty milk cartons – cover the green vintage Dormica counter. It gives her the skeeves, the sheen of gray grease rimming each area around the cabinet doors. In the sink strainer is a hummock of partially rotten food – bits of pasta, carrot cubes from canned soup, coffee grinds.

Bugs are in the walls, roaches and ants, a number of different varieties, fire, grease and sugar ants, the big black wood-eating ants, a strange mutated variety of leaf-cutter ants, or rather linoleum-cutter ants, at least, that is what they like to chew.

There are moths – the kind that live in food; hair-eating moths (attracted by the odor of urine), earwigs and flies. Tiny white flies that live on the children’s house plants (some plants in particular have bad infestations); fruit flies, houseflies, ichneumon flies as big as a chihuahua. The news has said that soon there will be a new kind of fly, beneficial, to eat old fibers and fabric, but slow enough to be killed easily.

The scene is one of chaos from which no order is possible. Tipping out the refuse from the sink strainer does not completely empty it, bits are still enmeshed in the trap; now Mister Garbage Dehydrator with grease dripping down the sides of the plastic trash bag liner should be cleaned! The disembodied voice says, “Who’s doing the dishes!” with a nasty, perky giggle, it’s part of the hologramovision system or the computer, then a man comes over the speakers, “Sey Vramos!” he yells, some kind of Spanish?

The forks and whisks lying around are rinsed, stuffed into drawers, counters wiped with paper towel – nevertheless nothing about the kitchen looks cleaner. It’s a kind of mental imbalance on her part, Murielle thinks. Other people have come into the room, gotten out the dustpan and broom, sprayed spritzer, wiped and tidied and polished and within minutes the place has appeared clean if not new.

But no matter how or what she does, objects seem only to be shuffled from one area to another; her attempts at cleaning only stir up more crumbs, grease, dust that emerges shyly, gaily, from secret nests and now expands in its own kind of reproductive frenzy.

From chaos it is not possible for her to create order, only an alternate chaos. Even with the friendly robototron whirling on its endless round of vacuuming and steam and plugging itself back in if it needs a charge, she is not lucky – all it does is strew dirt. Sometimes she finds it banging endlessly against the wall – which it is not supposed to – shouting, “Will somebody please help me. Help me. Time to change my bag!” and then, with greater panic, “Help me! Please! I’m gonna bust my bag!”

Still, that is not what is really the matter at all.

She has let the kids take over the living room with their house plants. It had seemed harmless enough, even positive, their hobby. They acquired clippings from neighbors – Christmas cactus stubs, rubbery succulents, the offspring of spider plants; dead and dying discards.

There isn’t a single thing that perishes after the kids acquire it, no matter that it appeared completely dead it is now growing at a frightening speed, Caladium and kumquat, Dieffenbachia and Norfolk pine needing to be moved practically weekly into bigger and bigger pots. When it’s time to water them, the two kids fight: “You’re over-watering! It doesn’t need that much!” – “Yes it does, can’t you see how dry it is?” – water overflowing, spilling onto the floor, making rings under each pot.

A moist jungle humidity permeates the house: the living room windows can’t be opened and roots have begun to crawl, fingerlike, into floorboards or along the walls, the tendrils of ivy and a kind of Philodendron that had air-roots waving white, obscene stumps that several times a year gave birth to a single, phallic-shaped stinking flower which was able to move to a new pot, slowly and painfully, by air-roots.

Two dwarf banana trees eight feet tall with great stalks of ripening bananas – that neither child would permit the other to pick – are so tall they hit the ceiling, the flies have merrily swarmed on the rotting fruit. Apart from the sofa, the plants – the jungle – take up the entire living room and the floor is buckled and rotted from the moisture.

The kids collect animals, too. She is passive in the face of their gargantuan demands, two giantesses – or so they appear to her – two giant daughters with gaping maws waiting to be filled with worms that she has no energy to collect. Long before Julie’s internship at Bermese Pythion the kids had managed to acquire a number of animals – post-experimentation – others had actually been thrown out, scarcely alive – and Murielle couldn’t help but believe these animals were products of genetic tampering of some sort – anyway, she has never seen creatures like these.

The girls, or at least Julie, keep a lot of them in cages in the basement. Mice with hair so long it can be braided. Guinea pigs with incredibly long legs, little tusks, and nasty dispositions. And the family pet? Something the kids said was a type of dog called a Muskwith who wanted – according to them and Slawa – to be called Breakfast.

Only, if it is a dog, what kind of dog jumps on the table to eat apples and using its claws climbs the curtains to the point that they are completely shredded? The kids say that a Muskwith is a modern canine combined with some genetic material from an aardwolf – who knows, though. She has to admit she is fond of the animal, though she had totally objected to it at first, a fluffy little thing with tufts of white fur and great bald patches, runny black eyes, short-legged and a long pink snout lined with sharp, pointy teeth more feline than canine.

The dog (it is apparently a hermaphrodite; at least that’s what the vet says) feels alone and isolated. Breakfast often disappears for days on end down some hiding hole, or at the neighbors’; it knows everyone in the vicinity and, digging its way under the fence in the back when in a sulky mood, has other homes to visit.

All the neighbors are fond of it, fortunately, and report new words it can speak or how it affectionately likes to rest its sharp, pointed chin on whoever is around. It loves bananas, chopped liver and the glue on the backs of stamps or envelopes. When at home, it has a terrible habit of taking hold of one end of the toilet paper roll and running through the house; or will think of ways to deliberately hurt her, if she doesn’t pay it enough attention – climbs on her lap and smacks her, forcefully, with its paw, or lifts things from her pockets, so stealthily she doesn’t know until hours later that the dog has taken a whole packet of chewing gum, peeled each stick and eaten it.

Breakfast isn’t like any dog she has ever known. It is cute, in its own way, and can even say a few words – “Mama” and “Breakfast” and “I’m hungry”; occasionally says “out” or “cold” – not in a human voice, but painfully, sounds coaxed under duress not dissimilar to that of a child being tortured.

Sometimes it will talk when promised a treat of chicken liver; other times in its sleep, a bad dream, she hears whimpers and “no, no,” or, more astonishingly, “no hurt, no hurt.” But ultimately, in time, it doesn’t seem all that odd – it isn’t like the dog is putting together whole sentences or anything.

Still, it isn’t what a dog is supposed to be. Nothing in Murielle’s life is the way it is supposed to be. Not her marriage, not even her own kids – willful, uncontrollable, sexed-up –! Even being alive wasn’t what she had thought it was going to be. But then she actually had no clue as to what it should have been like, either.

In the morning she has a Health-Nut muffin, the type that heats itself in a little bag if you pull the string, containing ZERO CALORIES and One Hundred Percent of Daily Requirements of Vitamin C, sugar and salt. The kids don’t eat breakfast. When Slawa had still lived here he ate various health foods, yogurt with fresh fruit and nuts, wholewheat cereal with bran or thin slices of heavy dark stuff gritty with sunflower seeds that was supposed to be bread but was a closer relative of paper, hand-made from newsprint or dryer lint.

Her baking. If she had time she would have made regular meals, but why bother? The kids prefer pre-made growth products in different textures and flavors: frozen burritos heated in the microwave, pizza, everything nowadays comes from one of the factories. Slawa is a vegetarian – if you want to call it that, vegetables are expensive but probably also made out of the same stuff – and he usually ate before he came home.

Even when she tried to bake muffins with wholegrain-enriched flour, he said that anything she cooked had hairs in it, or wasn’t sanitary – and it was true, the flour, no matter how recently purchased, was swarming with meal worms, moths flew out of the cabinets, jars of spices swarmed with heaving larvae of one sort or another and even the refrigerator had roaches which thrived on the cold and darkness and the spills of syrup and ketchup or ancient crusts that oozed from the walls. “It’s probably healthy, to eat bugs,” Murielle says. “Protein. I never get sick. Look at you, you have a cold all the time.”

“It’s not a cold, I am having reaction to the shoe repair chemicals,” he says. “And I am telling you – you kids!” he shouts upstairs as the girls scramble, perpetually late, to get dressed. “The best thing you can do for yourself is to eat a healthy breakfast and have a regular bowel movement!”

“Ew, gross!” Their groans of contempt could be heard up the narrow six-step flight of stairs.

“Yeah, you kids with the laughing, to sneer, wait until you are in a place of work wishing you didn’t have to take a big crap in the middle of the day with all your co-workers wanting to kill you for stinking up the toilet, or like me, gotta find a public toilet and getting some filthy on your shoes! You gonna be sorry you didn’t listen to me then.”

“Wow,” yells Tahnee, “you really give me a lot to look forward to, why don’t I just kill myself now?”

It is true everyone but Slawa is constipated, even the dog, Breakfast, who squats, a tortured U-shape in the backyard, slowly stumbling around for hours until finally one hard pellet drops. You might as well throw loaves to the fishes, Slawa thinks, what’s the point, how could they not be constipated when they never eat vegetables nor fiber, and besides, as soon as you poop, those things, whatever they are, no one is ever quite sure, come scrambling up the pipeline to eat the… shit. These nasty primordial-looking little creatures will, with nothing but a mouthful of teeth, leave you with a buttock full of pinholes if you don’t jump off the pot immediately. Whatever they are, you could pour bleach down the drains and it would kill the ones who are there but afterwards their brethren would be back, more furious than ever and could even on occasion hop out onto the floor, surfaced all the way up from the sewers.

A sourness permeated Slawa’s existence that hadn’t been vanquished by Volthrapeâ. Now that he was coming off the stuff he was like a rutting elephant seal swimming back up to the surface. How had he been able to live this long in such a mess? He ran around shouting until finally she had no choice but to throw him out. “It was the Dora mixed with Volthrapeâ that made me… not apathetic, but indifferent. Accepting. It was only thanks to the Dora that I have been able to accept my entire existence. I see that now!”

“Who cares, Slawa! Come home once in a while and help me clean up if you don’t like to live this way! You were the one who wanted a shoe repair place, now you have it!”

“It was something I did for you! You and the children! The dark shoe repair shop, reeking of leather cleaning fluids! What can I care about the kids steeting gluf and pait when basically I have been stoned out of my mind for the past years?”

“So? And you think everyone else isn’t?”

Anyway at least now he is gone. But… every morning – although he is not there stumping around, in his black sulk – it is still always the same thing, one thing substituted by another almost the same. “Kids! Are you up and dressed? You’re gonna miss the bus!”

“Tahnee’s already left, Ma! She went running!”

“Great.” That meant she hadn’t eaten; the child seemed to live on slivers of watermylon, baskets of those strange hairy sprouts. She would jog to school in her tiny shorts and track shoes and get a bagel at the convenience store nearby, from which she would pick out the center dough and consume only the crust. Anorexia, bulimia, Tahnee swore it wasn’t true; anyway, what could Murielle do about it at this minute? “Julie, did you see a stack of bills I left on the table?”

“No. Ma, can you do something about Sue Ellen? She is getting worse and worse, she’s really bothering me.”

Sue Ellen is Julie’s imaginary friend, a sort of unpleasant companion who Julie uses as an excuse for when things go wrong. “No, I have not seen her.” Murielle turns on the HGMTV. Some kind of infectious kidney virus… the anchorwoman is saying it’s an epidemic. There aren’t enough dialysis machines in the country.

Now the weatherman comes on. “Excuse me for interrupting,” he announces gleefully, and goes on, thrilled beyond belief, to announce “a hailstorm is coming, the hailstones will possibly be the size of tennis balls! Tennis balls, great destruction, no electricity for the dialysis, limited though the quantities may be!” What the heck is going on? Where has she been?

Bills. Vaguely a memory of a bill. Eight thousand and ninety-five dollars? From who? And where is it? There is no use in looking, she knows that by now. It was due, when, a couple of days ago? She had meant to search for it the night before, now she had to get to work and make sure the kids got on the bus, there is no time to look; nevertheless she begins rummaging through a heap.

“Everybody at school has them, Ma. Jommy Wakowski had one last week that started coming out of his nose and he got the whole thing but the teacher actually threw up! What the hell are they, Ma?”

She hasn’t been paying attention. “I don’t know. Some kind of worm, a tapeworm, I guess, that’s vermicide-resistant. If you’d wash your hands… Is this something of yours, Julie?”

Julie grabs the paper. “Oh, great! My homework! I was looking for that. See, I told you – Sue Ellen takes stuff, all the time, and hides it!”

Draw a map of the United States

– Name the relevant details

– Outline the former landmasses in a different color.

“Why can’t you get organized the night before?” Murielle looks at the homework.

“Julie, did you do this?”

“Yeah, why, what’s wrong?”

“Um, nothing… What’s the wall of burning clothes?”

“Oh, that’s to keep out the Mexicans, you know, where all the clothes get sent and formed into a wall that they soak in dirty oil and stuff, it’s on fire?”

“I didn’t even know about that! You really did this all by yourself? You didn’t copy?”

“No.”

“I’m surprised, that’s all.”

Her mother always thinks she is stupid! But Julie doesn’t say this, she knows it would only make her mother mad. “Can I have fifty dollars for lunch? Hurry up, Ma.”

“Oh God. Hang on just a second,” Murielle says.

“Ma, I’m gonna miss the bus. What?”

“It’s, you know, the worm thing. What the hell is it with these things, why can’t the doctor give you some kind of medicine that works?”

“The bus is coming! Are you going to drive me?” Julie involuntarily sticks her little finger in her nostril.

“No, don’t, don’t touch or it’ll retreat.” Murielle takes some tweezers and grabs the worm head. The face with dark eyes and no chin is unpleasant. Then with the head of the worm in the tweezers she begins to pull, slowly winding the thin white body around the nearest thing to hand, a broomstick, which she twirls. When she has wound almost twelve feet of worm, the end breaks off and falls to the floor where, though missing the head, twitches across the room toward the gap under the cabinets. Being snapped in two doesn’t seem to have killed the worm.

“I’ve definitely missed the bus.”

“That’s all I could get,” Murielle says. She carries the broomstick and the tweezers over to the sink. The two of them look at the partial worm. As soon as Murielle releases the tweezers the other half of the worm uncoils itself from the broomstick and slithers down the drain, turning around once to look at them – or so it seems – with a contemptuous sneer. “Come on, I’ll give you a lift.”

“Gross,” says Julie. “Turn the hot water on or something. Boil it. You should have flushed it down the toilet. I’m now officially late! How could it live when I could feel it snapped in two?” She sticks her finger in her nose. “I can’t feel any of it in there, but I know you didn’t get the whole thing.”