Primordial Soup Page 3
Perhaps a fruit grows down there, I conjectured. An apple, that in God’s punishment to Adam, every woman and man must still eat. Or a vegetable? I concluded it must be meat. Otherwise, why would the priest have distinctly used the word “flesh”. Which meant it was raw. A sort of meat that probably kept growing back over and over again, like a fingernail. No wonder my mother kept forcing me to eat red meat. She was preparing me for adulthood.
CHAPTER 4
Cecilia stepped around the spray of every over-enthusiastic sprinkler, swinging her Miss America lunch box out in large arcs. I trudged along, my sighs turning into yawns. Well before dawn, the sound of my mother’s heavy urination had warned me to return to the pantry closet. I’d hardly slept. When we got to the bus stop, Cecilia squatted, opened the hatch with the bathing beauties and took out crinkly aluminum paper packages. My mother actually hand washed aluminum paper, we always had to bring it back. She bragged a roll can last ten years. Not that we didn’t have a dishwasher. My mother used it for storing lentils when they were on offer. She said washing dishes was easier by hand. And I suppose it was, since Cecilia and I were always the ones to do it.
As Cecilia undressed the aluminum forms to see what leftovers awaited her, I continued to ponder at what grown men could possibly lodge inside their trousers; and if that wasn’t the reason they permanently wore belts, to keep hands and unwanted mouths outside. I knew “it” was what separated girl from boy, but I didn’t know what “it” frankly was. Until then, I imagined it to be chain links. Unexpectedly, the chain links converted into sausage links. I almost laughed aloud, finding that utterly grotesque. Harry stood in front of a frying pan as they cooked, curling his toes into the floor. He faced Ursula with his dangling specialty. To his great pain, she ate them off, and they in this way became flesh united. But the sausages kept growing and Ursula grew sick of eating them. Maybe one grew per day. A man could not go walking around with a line of sausages trailing out of his trouser leg.
The school bus drove up with its familiar yellow snout. Cecilia and I were wearing narrow, scarlet gowns and had trouble stepping up, for the gowns cupped our ankles in their bottom rings of lace. Josh Kugel and Barry Ramsey cut across the corner lawn and pushed us aside.
“Out of the way, Mary Poppins!”
Barry was the meanest. I felt, though dared not inform him that he was ignorant. We were dressed not as Mary Poppins but Anna Karenina. In the United States of America, in the midst of the fanaticism for Levi jeans and corduroy trousers, Nike and Adidas trainers, Cecilia and I attended class in exorbitant gowns, inspired from I don’t know what century but not the twentieth. To make it worse, my mother made Cecilia and me exactly the same model so we would not be jealous of each other.
My mother was kind enough to make us three versions of the same pattern so we could have a fresh dress to wear every other day, but it looked as though we were wearing the same dress all week. At school, we were baptized the Bobsey Twins. My mother could not understand our complaining. She had attended an all-girls Catholic school in Vilna and they wore uniforms. She’d only had one uniform all year, which she hand-washed with the soap they themselves made with their hardwork and sweat.
After putting up with puerile ammunition, spitballs and rubber bands, despite taking care to sit directly behind Mr. Ginger, the octogenarian bus driver who proved (purposely) deaf, dumb (and unfeeling; because of us, he was hit once in a while, too), Cecilia and I each went our own way. I hated walking past the bigger kids, leaning against the wall.
“It’s Heinz ketchup! Hey! Heinz ketchup?!”
“Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious …”
The familiar Mary Poppins tune … I would never make a friend. I guess one generation has to do the melting before the others may brew less conspicuously in the pot.
“Frank Tudor. Kirk Gummer. Okay. Kate Lester?” Mrs. Wella checked off my name. Nowadays, I just signed instead of asking my mother to do so. It used to be that when she saw the statement about the school not being responsible if I was injured during an excursion, she refused to sign. I would be the only child to sit in an empty classroom with a substitute teacher, with pages of arithmetic problems to solve so she could write a love letter to her boyfriend.
We would watch two reels of a film in the morning, have lunch, then visit Coral Springs Zoo. That meant driving over Gables Bridge, which was cause for excitement. On top, we occasionally spotted porpoise and about once a year, it lifted to welcome a yacht into our bay.
Numbers flickered on the screen, ten down to one. A white haired man greeted us, presented a view of the earth seen from the moon, and asked us to follow a drop of water which evaporated to the notes of a harp. Then to a cymbal trying to sound like thunder, rain dropped over a rolling ocean. I wondered how they knew it was the same drop, but after awhile my arm grew tired and I put it back down. When we’d reached Antarctica, I recognized my mother’s Wagner record. The crescendo went better with the pure, white vastness than it did with my mother’s pebble-stone patio.
An icicle began to thaw and a drop fell, enabling daisies to grow. The camera closed in on a butterfly drying its wings on one, when a frog’s tongue attacked the frail creature. The frog was ravaged by a snake, the snake in turn was seized by a pair of talons and wiggled its adieu to the camera below, as a falcon joined the horizon. The white haired man returned to explain.
“The food chain,” he began.
I didn’t feel well. Mrs. Wella put a new reel on the projector. I rose to sharpen my pencil. I ground it down to a stub, smelling the old and new shreds of lead and wood tossing around in an earthy mix.
“Sit down, Kate,” ordered Mrs. Wella.
I stepped back to my desk in a trance, overcome by the drier sound of lions tearing the skin of some hoofed creature, quite like the raking of dead leaves off a driveway.
“Can you pick up the pace, Kate?” questioned Mrs. Wella.
The aisle before me turned into a stream I waded down, as fish dodged from me as they would a grizzly paw.
“Kate? Is everything all right?”
I heard some of the children laughing. It felt as if my brain were a small cork bobbing about the five oceans of the world. How fast must the hare flee so as not to wither into another? How high should the cricket leap? How pointed must horns be in order to fend off those who wish to eat us? I didn’t want to be eaten. What defences would I have against grown men?
“Kate? Kate? Wake up!” I discovered a collage of worried faces peering down at me, including those who usually tried to trip me. My mind was soupy with confusion. I remember hearing myself repeat, “paradise lost”.
“It’s all Adam’s fault,” I wailed to Adam Freeman’s dismay.
“Nu-uh! I wasn’t anywhere near her!” he protested.
I continued, “If he hadn’t bitten the apple, none of the animals ever would have started biting! Why should God punish us all?! It’s not fair! It’s not fair! I didn’t do anything!”
Mrs. Wella seemed to catch on, but her face looked all the more worried. “Shh, now you just hush, darling …”
Dorothy told me to sleep. She was the school nurse, known to soothe the principal Mr. Liverpool’s headaches. Contradictions, enigmas, frolicked in my mind. Do lions hate zebra? Then why do they eat them? If it is because they like zebra, why do they growl before pouncing? Why would they eat a friend? Does the zebra become the lion? Or does the lion become part zebra?
The sick room walls were silent, pink, except for a poster of a human silhouette with foodstuffs drawn inside. The slogan read, “You are what you eat.” I wondered what adults were always trying to get at. If I were what I was forced against my free will to eat, then was I not already many living things? Wasn’t I a turkey, a rabbit, part pig and cow by now?
“Boy, she’s sure going to be disappointed not to visit the zoo this afternoon,” I overheard Mrs. Wella in the hallway.
“Wha’ zoo? Whose zoo?! I din’ give permission to go to no zoo!!”
“I don’ give hardworkin’ money to Yuncle Sam so you drag my child to de zoo! I sen’ my chil’ren here to learn! To b’come sometin’ later in life!”
I hoped Mrs. Wella might promote the eminence of biology, but she referred back to the permission slip she was certain my mother had signed.
“Kate Lester. Mrs. Lester? Did you not sign this waiver?”
“Waiver of wha’!” accused my mother who when she did not understand something, converted rapidly into her pressure-cooker state of mind.
“A waiver of responsibility.”
“Le’ me see dat!”
I imagined my mother had just torn the slip out of Mrs. Wella’s hand. I would never be able to face her again.
After a menacing silence, my mother shouted, “No! Me, never in my life, I sign dat!” in a tone of righteous indignation, as though Mrs. Wella was insinuating that she had, but now for some reason was trying to get out of it.
The door opened. I stopped breathing, yet my heart wouldn’t slow down. In front of Mrs. Wella and Dorothy, my mother ordered, “De truth! You! You do dis?!”
What she was referring to was the forged scribble of her own signature.
In the meekest of voices I uttered, “I wanted, Mommy, just to be with the other ki … ”
My explanation was interrupted by the impact of her palm. It wasn’t a strong, impulsive slap, but she had the bad habit of doing it on the mouth and my front teeth had grown in at that unfortunate angle that made them buck.
One is always surprised in tasting one’s own blood how similar its flavour is to the juice of a steak. I tried to push my tongue back into my throat so I could avoid the somewhat salty flavour, but there was no getting away from it. I wasn’t wishing to be dramatic when I allowed, and somewhat helped, the crimson to dribble down my chin like baby-drool. Mrs. Wella’s gasp weakened me. I found myself crying as audibly as a baby in front of her.
“Please, madam, don’t be so hard on her, she’s only a child …” Mrs. Wella only wished to help.
“You mind you own oats! Who pu’ in a child’s head to go to de zoo?!” inquired my mother, both fists on her hips. Mrs. Wella remained speechless. I believe she was afraid of being struck, too.
Meanwhile, Dorothy applied cotton to my wound, and then a bandage, which wasn’t practical on a moist inner lip. She rolled her eyes at my mother’s every word.
“You!”
It was now Dorothy’s turn. Spending time with my mother meant there would be many places where you’d never want to go back.
“Such stupidity, never I see, to pu’ a stupid ban’age on de inside of a lip! You! You go to school to learn dat?! Even a child, she know a ban’age, it will not adhere onto de inside of a lip!”
“I was just trying,” retorted Dorothy with a sarcastic tone and a toss of her sleek blonde hair to the back, “is that okay with you??” She rolled her eyes again.
“You need try to know? Me, I don’ need try to know, I see, I use my brains, see!”
At this, my mother indignantly lifted the bloody bandage out of my mouth and let it drop into the waste basket.
“An’ you teach our chil’ren! Kate, honey, pu’ you shoes back on.”
“If it’s true you see so well, you might have noticed I’m a nurse, I don’t teach,” retorted Dorothy on our way out.
My mother was holding my hand, which made me feel like I was on her side when I was strenuously trying to relax my facial expression to appear neutral.
“Tank Guard! Maybe dere is a future for our chil’ren, af’er all.” My mother slammed the door so everyone in the hallway could share her exit.
CHAPTER 5
“Never, I can take my eye off you,” repeated my mother.
It had become a musical phrase, as she went about her own kitchen business, lifting the steam-jingling pot covers and dropping them back down like cymbals.
“Never, I can take my eye off you …”
“Then why do you close the door??”
The short pause was to me a long stretch of hope, broken by another, “Never, I can take my eye off you,” the sighing version.
I supposed even as a suggestion to crack open the pantry door, she wasn’t about to give in. My mother wasn’t that mad at me about the forged signature. After the number of “stolen” solitary diamond and ruby rings she had had converted into pendant necklaces before filing insurance claims, she wasn’t one to talk. What got her was the admission price that I’d stolen from her purse. If it had been to open up a savings account, maybe I’d have been rewarded. But not for wanting to see, “Dose poor animals, half’sleep in a cage! You see better in TV, in natur’l, witout all de aggravation an’ stink!”
I heard ceramic cymbals in the darkness. Cecilia was setting the table but whatever it was that my mother was concocting, smelt obnoxious. Red wine was evaporating, but there was a worse smell, similar to the sharp odour of goats. Cecilia opened the pantry door and I was drowned in it.
“Come and get your din-din,” chuckled Cecilia.
It was not the right time or the right place to be picky. But two real life kidneys in the middle of my plate was going too far.
The bed of mashed potatoes transformed into cotton on which lay the relics of a murder victim’s autopsy. A naked woman lay face down on an examining table, with two deep, kidney-shaped holes in her lower back. I already had a hard enough time making incisions into meat, how was I supposed to get my fork prongs and knife’s teeth into an organ. I was unprepared. I hadn’t attended medical school.
“Oh! De best! De juice! Ah!” My mother rushed back to the kitchen.
“Juice” is a fine euphemism for “blood.” I grabbed a kidney with my fingers and panicked when I didn’t know what to do next.
“I’m going to tell!” warned Cecilia, “You better put it in your mouth right now.”
“Please, Cecilia! I’ll do anything!” I pleaded with her, my hands cupped in prayer, the kidney somewhere in between.
Nevertheless, she blurted, “Mommy!!”
“The record,” I reminded her in a ventriloquist whisper as my mother returned with the saucer and miniature ladle.
“You. Wha’ you wan’, you big mouth?” my mother covered her ears.
I never understood. My mother’s own mouth was nearer to her ears, yet it never hurt them when she was the one who did the screaming.
“Um, some salt, please …” muttered Cecilia.
“You don’ need no salt! Dere’s salt enough in natur’l Mot’her Nature! Don’ start now, you, too! Eat!”
I held the kidney under the table while I continued to fork the mashed potatoes into my mouth.
“Kate. I don’ wan’ see de cherry …”
I switched the mashed potatoes to my other cheek. As though I were scratching my neck, I dropped the kidney down the front of my dress. It remained caught in between the fabric and my chest, exactly in the middle like the birth of a unicorn breast.
Cecilia shot me a worried glance. I leaned over my plate so the slackening in the fabric would help it to descend.
“No elbows on de table! How many times mus’ I repeat myse’f?”
I straightened. The kidney landed on top of my skinny thighs. Getting up would pose a problem. The kidney would plop down on my mother’s plush cream carpet, and God knows what she would think. I pinched the fabric until I managed to get it in my underwear. The feeling of a greasy kidney against my bare skin was revolting. I balanced the second kidney on my fork, nothing in the world could get me to stab it, and brought it to my lips.
Looking at Cecilia, I mouthed, “Moussorgsky.”
I lowered it into the collar of my dress while my mother was “cleaning the serving platter,” that is, scraping the last crusty, oily bits and licking the spoo
n. She avoided eye contact with us whenever she did this, embarrassed about her table manners and, even worse, her broken diet. I stretched out the elastic waistband of my white Tuesday underwear, and the kidney fell inside.
After dinner, my mother armed herself for her nightly walk around the block with a towel to swat mosquitoes with, and an orange fluorescent flag to prevent hit-and-runs. She never gave a second’s thought to the latter until she heard a talk show about it and now it was a central preoccupation in her life, along with cholesterol, getting struck by lightning and holding your back straight when you picked up a box.
I walked along the sea wall. One kidney fell quickly but the other stubbornly dangled from my underwear. I jumped up and down like a silly little kid.
“Mommy! Look what I can do!”
Faking a tap dance, I pushed both kidneys off the edge with my foot. My new sandals were too big and flopped down noisily. My mother chose sizes that would fit the next year.
“You be careful of de all’gators! You!”
The kidneys floated and oil rainbows sprouted around them in larger and larger circles. The catfish darted up to fight over the remains. I was alarmed to see such a commotion with my mother so near, breaking a basilica leaf and admiring its fragrance, or her ingenuity at having planted the seeds.
“You wan’ go for a lil’ walk, honey?” she asked.
“I do!” Cecilia slammed the screen porch door, panted down the stepping-stones as though she feared we would leave without her and never come back.
My mother held my right hand and Cecilia’s left one down the hot, barren streets of Wachovi. I had to wave the orange flag.
CHAPTER 6
“A’kay … yes, a’kay …”
My mother twisted the cord of her telephone around her finger. It was an imitation turn of the century model that only the rich would have had back in the days when operators listened in on people’s conversations, that she’d purchased for fifty books of green stamps.