Primordial Soup

  Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

  PRIMORDIAL SOUP

  Christine Leunens was born in Hartford, Connecticut, the daughter of an Italian mother and a Belgian father. Her grandfather was the Flemish artist Guillaume Leunens. After graduating from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill she went to live in Europe with the intention of becoming a writer but ended up a fashion model, working for Givenchy, Pierre Balmain, Paco Rabanne, Nina Ricci and making tv commercials for Mercedes-Benz, Suzuki and the House of Fraser.

  Her success enabled her to give up modelling for horse breeding in Picardy, where she wrote her first play in French, Tu N’As Qu’A and her second Porcelain White in English. She received an award from the Centre National du Cinema for her screenplay Maux D’Amour.

  Christine Leunens now lives in Normandy and combines writing film scripts and fiction with the occasional modelling job.

  CONTENTS

  Title

  Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Copyright

  CHAPTER 1

  “Eat, you!”

  “But it won’t go down …”

  “You jus’ put in de mouth an’ swallow!” my mother yelled.

  I added another finger width of leprosy-stricken banana into my mouth and wished she’d stop staring at me like that. It joined the stagnant reserve which I moved from right to left to show her I was trying.

  “I don’ wan’ to see de cherry.”

  “De cherry,” to which she alluded was the pouch for storing unwanted nutrition in my left cheek. She seized it and twisted until the saliva-softened food seeped back onto my palate.

  “How long i’ take?”

  “I’m chewing.”

  “You wan’ I count three??”

  She had concluded there was nothing to chew. Leprous pus could, according to her logic and the laws of physics, slide down any inclined surface with ease. I wished it were the kitchen sink tube and not my own.

  “One. Two …”

  I drove my finger into the flesh and began to carve out the soft brown spots someone had the big idea to name bruises, all the while trying my hardest to stop imagining the banana was Mir’i·am’s forearm and what I was sapping were the undrained sores under her scabs. What I considered a bruise, my mother considered consumable flesh. The banana was drawn out of my hand and thrown in my face, which I turned aside in time.

  In less than a week, I could not walk straight any more than could a drunken sailor. I complained to my mother about it; she measured my legs, told me to eat more. I was carrying in groceries, when I fell down and chipped my front tooth on the driveway. She left the papaya, the fennel and the half-priced bags of whole-wheat flour where they were, and checked my polio vaccinations.

  The doctor pressed my tongue with an ice-lolly stick, examined my eyes and ears with a ray of light. He told me to be still and with a fine pointed tool, pulled something yellowish out I thought was dried pus.

  “How in hell did banana get in her ear?!” Most eyes squint with anger; Dr. Kreushkin’s opened wide, exposing the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.

  “Oh, she do anyting, dat child, no’ to eat her food. She’ll make me ol’ b’fore my time.”

  My mother shrugged, then readjusted the tissue paper in her cleavage. The beads of sweat on her lip, for some reason, bothered her less. Dr. Kreushkin looked down at me with unconcealed disgust. With a crinkle of the chin, I swallowed my pride. I was not allowed to contradict my mother, which basically meant, to tell the truth.

  On our way home, she stopped at Mr. Walter’s garage sale and purchased “Fool’s Stool” for one dollar. Mr. Walter had designed it for his son, Jade, long before he was the local weather forecaster. “FOOL” was written on the seat with tenpenny nails, points up. My mother declared that from now on, until I cleared my plate, I would have to sit on it. She was a persuasive woman, and more often than not I ended up giving in.

  Abandoned at the table, I was facing or rather faced by, a stuffed stag’s head, and that, for hours on end. My father had eaten the rest of his forest-roaming body long ago in his bachelor days. The nails poked at my bottom until I lifted up one cheek after the other. Despite his imposing antlers, the stag had wise, benevolent eyes, like the suspended man we saw at Saint Andrew’s on Sunday, whose open sores would save me from my sins.

  “This is the body of Christ,” explained our priest, and afterwards offered us some, “and this is the blood of Christ,” which we were not obliged to drink, though my mother grudgingly gave up a nickel or a dime so he would drink it out of his golden chalice instead of us. At our father’s funeral, my sister and I were each given a one inch figurine of the same man to hang around our necks on fine silver chains. I hid mine inside my dress. He was half-naked, and bleeding badly.

  I think it is necessary to add that whenever my sister and I fought, my mother would throw her hands into the air and sob, “You own flesh an’ blood! Flesh an’ blood!” She repeated this phrase until, without quite seizing its meaning, the thought of my own sister as red meat made me cry as well. I would hug my sister and let her play with my Mr. Potato Head. The intensive doses of theology and genealogy did not assist my cold-blooded eating of flesh.

  One evening, I was facing the stag who not only understood but granted me eternal salvation for not eating a quail that my mother had anointed with butter before baking, then baptized with whisky before setting aflame. In my mind, I called it Saint Quail, to join that space between purgatory and heaven that God reserved for Noah’s faithful pairs. There it would find Lassie and Flipper from the original series, I was sure. Stag Head agreed in silent majesty, upon which Ursula Tatta rang the doorbell and let herself in.

  “I’m fed up! Up to here!” she saluted her hair-line.

  Before my mother asked for particulars, Ursula added, “With Harry.”

  That was how adults referred to Mr. Tatta, her bald-headed husband. My mother was relieved to see the bird on my plate as yet uneaten, and retreated with Ursula to the living room, a showroom of crystal ashtrays she would never consider offering anyone to use and carvings of more wounded men on crosses.

  I pressed my ear to the door. From what I could understand, Ursula had not had dinner, Harry was drinking, and not at home, for she’d found matchboxes in his pockets when she did the laundry. There was a long silence before she admitted that she had smelt, “Harry’s underwear.”

  I cracked the door open to see my mother holding Ursula in her arms, patting her back. I was ashamed that Harry had hurt her so. Had he neglected to wipe when he did a number two? I had sat sideways with my sister to share the toilet once and we began shoving for space then missed. My mother yelled but she didn’t cry about it. I assumed it more forgivable with children.

  That is when I learned the unspeakable circumstances of my own father’s death. I had known that he was killed in a car crash when my sister was a baby and I, four. It had happened in Rhode Island, US21, when he was selling insurance policies for The Mutual Insurance Company of Freyburg, the tragedy rendering my sister and I fatherless, and my mother anaemic, or so I�
��d overheard.

  “Paul,” my mother began, Paul Lester was our father, “wasn’ ’lone in de car.”

  Ursula stopped crying and stared at my mother in disbelief. “A woman?”

  My mother played with one of the ashtrays, and for some time, there was no change in her expression. “All men are jus’ animals,” she finally responded, “dey think wit’ wha’s b’tween deir two legs.”

  “But how can you be sure that they were …” Ursula could not come up with a suitable verb.

  “B’cause whe’ de firemen, dey go through de chassis an’ find ’em, it was in her mouth,” my mother spoke wryly.

  Here, Ursula gasped and covered her own, as if she feared intrusion of a similar sort. What was in the woman’s mouth?

  “It was bitten right off. He die on de spot. She chok-ed on it, Peggy Summer, only a youn’ girl, she was jus’ sixteen,” added my mother with no regret, but rather as if the Old Testament God had given the incident special consideration. My mother believed in a personalized God that punished those who trespassed against her, including any salesman who didn’t give her a reduction when she found a defect in his merchandise, be it a blouse, a sofa, or a loaf of bread, yet never seemed to fear Him herself; her personalized God realized she lived in a hard world. What could the girl have possibly been eating? An adjutant brain? An inner leg? We were, I remembered, not allowed to eat in my father’s nauseatingly new-smelling car.

  My mind was racing, especially when Ursula concluded it was better for my father, my mother and the girl that way. My mother returned to evaluate my progress. I rushed back to Fool’s Stool and poked the quail with my fork.

  “Mom, I’m really not hungry!” I complained so she would not suspect all I’d been lucky enough to learn.

  My hand was trembling. My mother stared at me for some time.

  “It’s a’kay,” she patted me on the head, “Go an’ play wit’ you sis’er.”

  I ran to tell Cecilia everything.

  CHAPTER 2

  Cecilia and I were given dye-kits with which to colour eggs boiled in vinegar. My mother had been indifferent to my aesthetical pleas to purchase white eggs. She claimed brown eggs more “natur’l”. In reality, they were five cents less.

  Cecilia proceeded in a spontaneous manner, dipping the brown shell in traditional Easter colours, yellow, pink, sky-blue. I wanted to give each of our guests a more unique egg. A tricoloured German flag egg seemed suitable for Ursula. I dipped the thinner end in orange, then discovered to my dismay that there was no black in the kit.

  “Black is not a colour,” smirked Cecilia.

  I kept the upper part orange and gave the lower part blue eyes and orange freckles, for Tommy Tatta’s egg. Cecilia said this wasn’t nice. Taking her advice, I dipped it in blue, and the whole egg turned a dreary smoky purple, more suitable for Hallowe’en.

  “It looks like a sparrow’s egg now,” Cecilia consoled with a forged smile and a somewhat humid pat on my shoulder.

  It was out of the question that our mother would let us have extra eggs for the flops. Those cracked from overboiling, with outgrowths of egg white, we had to put in our own baskets. I thought the whole ceremony futile. Even the fanciest Easter egg was nothing but a hard-boiled egg when you came down to it.

  Lucy and Rosa Minsky sat on the grass in the backyard, their knees opening and closing in their dresses like butterfly wings. Tommy Tatta and Timmy Tatta, Ursula must have been inspired by the Little Drummer Boy when choosing their first names, amused themselves by throwing our pebbles into the canal to make them skip. As soon as the adults proudly emerged with their camera, the children ran towards the boat davits where Easter baskets were conspicuously hung. My feet shovelled the gravel as I walked. The hiding places were an insult to human intelligence.

  I chuckled inside. It was their first Easter at my mother’s. My mother wasn’t about to allow us to have chocolate bunnies, although she almost hesitated at white chocolate this year, claiming white more natural than brown. Unlike egg shells. She nevertheless abandoned the stiffly standing bunnies on the health food shelf. My mother refused to “throw hardworkin’ money out de window for dat junk”. “Hardworkin’ money”, meant money that accumulated interest.

  The boys emptied their baskets on the dock. I watched their faces. Besides a boiled egg, each basket contained a pound of dates, unshelled walnuts and dried figs. Easter bunny must have turned into a health freak. Tommy picked up his handsomest walnut and threw it at the canal. It skipped five times, which was his record.

  Timmy prepared to surpass him, when his father slapped him on the ear. Tommy, in wailing how much he hated nuts, only attracted a slap of his own. Both boys had to say thank you, audibly, to my mother. It was easier for the children that hadn’t been slapped.

  My mother returned to the kitchen. Sharon and Ursula offered to help, probably wanting to discuss in greater depth Mr. Tatta’s potty-training problem. My mother said it would ruin the surprise and ordered me to set the table. I put out my mother’s most elaborate china, silverware and crystal, praying I would not have to sit next to Mr. Tatta.

  I sat across from him. As we eleven tore apart our stuffed artichokes, my mother answering each compliment with “fresh from de tree”, I contemplated Mr. Tatta. I could not believe that a full-grown man with a pot belly, a Timex watch and a wedding band was not yet potty-trained. Then again, his baldness gave him the look of an overgrown baby. I imagined him wriggling on his back, his legs in the air, as Ursula wiped his bottom, sprinkled talc upon it and secured a safety pin into his nappy. Sharon Minsky had trouble looking at him, too. I supposed Ursula had let her in on the secret and she was imagining the same thing I was.

  My mother presented the main course as a Lithuanian speciality her mother had passed on to her before she died, like hers had to her. She lifted the silver dome to reveal bony brown bits of meat with prunes mixed in. My mother warned there were stones in the prunes, but said they had more flavour that way. I was with her when she was shopping, she had wanted the stoneless ones but they were forty cents more.

  Mr. Tatta blushed as he stared down at his plate. Maybe he thought my mother was trying to tell him something.

  “Prunes?!” protested Tommy.

  “You should not criticize before you try. Remember ‘Green Eggs and Ham’?” asked Ursula before adding with a defiant stare, “Yes I like them, Sam I Am?!”

  “I won’t like ’em in any house, with any mouse,” Tommy broke off as his father’s face foreboded another slap.

  Cecilia gave thanks for this day, the sunny weather, our health, named each of us present, including “mociùté” (“granny” in Lithuanian) already in heaven, then at last thanked God for the food we were about to eat. Stag Head and I exchanged a look of sympathy.

  Everyone but me had dug in and was not unpleasantly surprised, when Timmy had to go and ask what it was. He was too young to know that what you don’t know doesn’t hurt you. My mother straightened up, stuck her chin as high as it would go to make herself appear taller (a technique she resorted to whenever she saw her reflection in a store window or a camera was aimed anywhere near her) and proclaimed, “Rabbit.”

  “It’s a great specialtay, rabbit,” she bragged, “some German beer on de top and he cook wit’ prune … I clean him myself, he was very young, very fresh, beautiful …”

  Lucy and Rosa began to weep, followed by Tommy and Timmy.

  Rosa, usually the quiet one, blubbered, “You mean we’re eating the Easter bunny??”

  My mother did not understand, “But it is Easter, no?!”

  I guess she didn’t quite pick up the difference between eating chocolate and living, breathing rabbits across the nation.

  “We’re eating the Easter bunny!!” confirmed Lucy, covering her face with her forearms.

  The other children repeated this phrase endlessly, followed by funereal sobs. It was as if my mother had served Santa Claus on Christmas Day. Lucky they hadn’t come over that Christmas
Eve when she had made venison with cranberries, Rosa would have accused her of brewing Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer and the cranberries would have probably glowed.

  Stag Head looked as though he bore the weight of the world on his plaque and his antlers already were heavy enough. Ursula kept on nibbling to make light of the matter, and as a member of the German-American club, she had probably already eaten worse in her knackwursts. Sharon contemplated her girls, afraid they would be traumatized. They had sheltered lives, they didn’t have to live with my mother.

  “Go eat what’s in your baskets. You can go outside,” Joseph Minsky advised.

  “It’s more than de Indians, dey have, dey should be tankful to me,” retorted my mother when they were gone. She confused Easter with Thanksgiving.

  “De more for us,” she added, her feelings hurt, which basically meant leftovers for me.

  The following day, I suffered upon Fool’s Stool two hours before gnawing at Easter bunny’s hind leg in Stag Head’s company. I wondered if the land of milk and honey was a land of only milk and honey. I slipped off my sandals. They hurt my feet anyway. They would have to hurt more before I was given another pair.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ursula popped by regularly to see how we were doing at dinner-time. In the kitchen light, her sparse eyebrows gave a small sanctuary to the burgundy streak of eyebrow pencil. Her hair had recently been dyed to a pepper red, but the chlorine and the sun were robbing it of some vital element and it was turning into a burnt-looking burgundy. I noticed she always carried with her, even in an evening gown, a faint scent of suntan lotion. No one could compete with her tan; her forearm beat anyone who dared present their own next to hers, as I often did.

  My mother slid lima beans into an iron pot of salted water. Ursula unwrapped a bundle of brown paper to reveal four forked hooves.

  “Pi’ feet, oh!!” my mother laughed merrily.

  The skin was rubbery and thick, the colour of the Crayola crayon called “flesh”.