Primordial Soup Page 6

  Something new was opening up in me, a strange new appetite from somewhere below, a pleasant tug which I wished to satisfy, and then again, did not.

  I squeezed my knees together like Jesus did on the cross. I wanted to hold my arms out wide open and hug anyone or anything, even a pillar. The Holy Spirit, I thought, was flooding me with love, a love so great I could have eaten any of my neighbours. My heart thumped wildly at this thought, as I stared at the strong veined hand of a man in the pew in front of me. In my mind, I nibbled at the webbed skin between his strong fingers. My body tensed with an ever growing hunger.

  A woman was holding a baby so chunky that its arm was dimpled where there should have been an elbow. Each time the baby began to cry, the woman simulated eating it. I wanted to groan, scream, tell everyone I loved them, and would gladly eat them. I imagined the fattest women in the church, Belinda Moors, naked on all fours as her doughy breasts dragged on the floor. I imagined kneading them with my hands and face, tugging at them with my teeth.

  That thought was the drop that made the bowl spill over. I gasped loudly, clutching at my stomach as my whole body underwent a series of contractions. Those in my vicinity, including my own mother, looked at me alarmed, as though I were going to be sick. The woman with the baby offered me a putridly sweet smelling rag.

  “You. Wha’s de matter wit’ you?!” my mother asked me as we left mass.

  For some reason, I felt horrendously ashamed. Pleasure seemed more embarrassing to confess than did pain.

  “It felt like someone kept stabbing a knife into me, here,” I misled her as I pressed down on my lower stomach.

  Belinda Moors smiled at me before getting into her old dented beetle. I turned my head the other way. The blood that had invaded my lower parts rose to heat my face with shame.

  I helped my mother carry Cecilia back to bed. As soon as the lights in the house went out, I slipped into our bathroom. I expected, anxiously wrenching my underwear down to my knees, to find blood, or some side effect of the newly opened hole. All the way home, I’d sensed my crotch was drenched. I was bewildered to find nothing of the sort, let alone a colourful drop.

  Upon closer examination, I discovered a gooey substance, that of egg white, that had miraculously dripped out of my flesh and onto my underwear. I pinched some off the fabric, though it was not at all easy to seize. As I slowly opened my first three fingers like an orchid come to life, I studied the tightrope lines it left in between, like when someone sleeping yawns and a similar gooeyness trails between their upper and lower teeth. If beaten, would it make a meringue, I wondered, at the same time fascinated by and disgusted at Mother Nature’s recycling ability.

  CHAPTER 10

  “Are you sure, Mrs. Lester, she’s menstruating?”

  Dr. Kreushkin fingered my boobies; I kicked my legs and shrieked with laughter.

  “Wha’ you mean, am I sure? She ruined me a whole week of un’erwears, de child, den it stop like dat, for months, an’ now she has pains like a knife in her ovries …”

  “What are ovries?” I sat up on the examining table to ask; the long paper towel doctors cover their examining tables with fell off the side.

  “You, please keep quite, you.”

  “When you say she bled, did she flow heavily or just spot?”

  “Spot, only spot, bu’ she so skinny, look a’ her, how can you expect more?”

  My mother used her hands to brush my hair away from my face as she spoke, gathered it together like a ponytail, and looked around for an elastic band; finding none, she held it there too tightly.

  Dr. Kreushkin contemplated my young body that my baggy white Tuesday underwear and bare feet only accentuated; it looked like I was wearing a nappy. When Dr. Kreushkin asked me to take my underwear off, I stared at the wall, and wished I could be sucked into it. I untangled the undies from my feet, glanced worriedly at my crotch, and looked around as to where I could dispose of them, when my mother offered me her hand.

  Dr. Kreushkin opened my legs and then bent each one. He slid his hands into a pair of disposable dishwashing gloves. Before he even touched me, I closed my legs tightly.

  “Come, come, I’m not going to bite …”

  Denying it meant the idea was going through his mind. If he was searching for the mysterious hole, he wasn’t about to find it for I myself had already looked, and with the magnifying side of my mother’s dressing table mirror where even a pore looks like a crater, and a face, the last thing in the world anyone would want to walk around and face people with.

  “Do I have a right to know what you’re searching for? Did I do something wrong? Am I being punished for … something I did?”

  Dr. Kreushkin’s eyes widened in surprise, which exposed the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.

  “Mrs. Lester? Haven’t you taken the time to explain the facts of life to your daughter?”

  “I a’ready explain all, she knows ev’ryting dere is to know.”

  My mother drew my hair together again and began to toy around with it; she hesitated between a ballerina bun, tight and high on top of my head, or a schoolteacher’s bun, coming loose at the nape.

  “Does she comprehend the function of the ovaries?”

  I could tell she was about to say I did and since I would not be allowed to contradict her, I spoke up, “No! What are ovaries?”

  She dropped my hair back onto my shoulders, shot me a look of contempt, “Egg! You have egg!! So, nosy, you more hap’pay now to know?!”

  No wonder egg white had already started seeping out of me, and my mother had two hollow egg shells on her dresser, with a photo of Cecilia and I each inside.

  “How can the baby breathe? Is there air in the egg shell?”

  Dr. Kreushkin checked my mother’s face and his watch before responding that the egg is more like a seed in a woman’s stomach from which a tree grows than an egg from which a baby hatches.

  “But how does the baby breathe in there?”

  What I really wished to understand was how much air must be pumped into a woman’s stomach and if the hole weren’t a sort of valve like one used to inflate a bicycle tyre.

  My mother scratched the back of her neck and turned to the side as Dr. Kreushkin explained to me the miracle of life, that because the earth used to be entirely covered with water and we all originated from the sea, a woman’s stomach contains water during pregnancy and not air. He was just revealing how an unborn baby at one point develops short-term gills, a residue of evolution, when my mother censored his speech with a shift of her ice-blue eyes in his direction; she handed me back my underwear.

  I was overtaken by unexpected bliss. How logical it all suddenly seemed. Noah’s ark had sailed the flooded earth, the waters after forty days subsided, and now on land, high and dry, there lingered puddles in a woman’s stomach. Newborns’s eyes, Mrs. Wella had told us, are always blue, be the infant red, black, yellow or white. Noah’s flood has lingered, I thought, in places long forgotten.

  As I was getting dressed, I could hear Dr. Kreushkin and my mother talking in the next room about whether it would be better to regulate my bleeding with patience rather than with some substance they simply referred to as “the pill”.

  “Excuse me,” I fumbled to fasten my oversized sandals, “How am I to know when a baby will come out of me?”

  My mother’s reply was imprecise, like when would I stop growing, or be allowed to listen to music when I wanted to without asking: “De time will come.” Such a reply was nonetheless reassuring, because the time had come for me to walk instead of crawl, to have knees clear of scabs, and to be able to sleep without checking under my bed to make sure no one was there; so time, though slow in coming, comes.

  Dr. Kreushkin’s reply was vaguer than my mother’s, it hid the truth in just another cabbage patch: “The egg must be fertilized first, Kate, in order to grow …”

  My mother opened the door and held her hand out to me.

  Dr.
Kreushkin kept hold of my shoulders, “Kate. You look troubled. Are there specific questions that are bothering you?”

  It was now or never. Maybe something was wrong with me, and I should mention it to a doctor. How could I word it? I didn’t have the vocabulary for the symptoms.

  “Well … actually there is something that’s bothering me … down there.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  I don’t know how I mastered the courage, but this time I pointed directly at the zone between my legs.

  “… and it … itches. It itches. Not a little itch, no, a big big itch that scratching doesn’t help. An itch deep inside of me. An itch that wants relief, although in a way, it doesn’t.”

  When I first heard myself use the word “itch”, I was disappointed with myself, a hopeless coward; but the more I went on, the more I found the way I put it was actually quite nice.

  Dr. Kreushkin looked at my mother calmly. “Yeast infection.”

  “A’ her age? So lil’?”

  Yeast? I’d misheard.

  “A wet bathing suit, that’s all it takes for yeast infection, Mrs. Lester.”

  “Yeast, as in bread?”

  “Yes, all women have yeast inside of them, there where it itches you inside, Kate.”

  “The Bible says a man will leave his father and his mother and he must cleave to his wife and they must become one flesh. How do man and wife become one flesh?”

  Dr. Kreushkin was going to tell me something, but my mother pleaded, “Don’ put any more ideas into de child’s brains, please, dat’s ’nough for today!”

  I changed my tactic.

  “How is the egg, hm-hm, ‘fertilized?’ ”

  “Look at de child, how she’s all excit-ed, she’s sweatin’, look, her forehead, please, no more.”

  Dr. Kreushkin lowered his eyes and the side of his mouth twitched; I would never know those words that tried to get out.

  CHAPTER 11

  “I knew damn well something was going on. I knew it. I could feel it in my bones. He brings the boys over to his mother’s, it takes two hours normally, back and forth. No, he comes home again at eleven. Quarter after. I don’t say a thing. Just keep watching the news. But inside, I’m boiling up. He thinks he’s winning. I’m keeping my big mouth shut. One three day cruise and my mouth’s sealed for good. That’s what he thinks. You’re never gonna believe what I did, Olga, you’re never gonna believe …”

  “Cecilia, put sometin’ on you head to protect you. I don’ wan’ de wind to burn you! You hear me?”

  Ursula waited for my mother to turn back to her so she could continue her story.

  “For hours I listened to him snore away. Nothing could trouble Harry’s conscience. I think I could’ve killed him in his sleep. Finally, I couldn’t stand it, I got up, must of been three in the morning. By dawn, I cracked the code of his briefcase. It was both our sons’ birthdays, backwards. You had to think of it. I took his keys and made doubles before he was up; he was singing La Bamba in the shower when I came back. I don’t think he even noticed I was gone, the s.o.b.”

  My mother opened the cooler and gave Ursula a plastic cup of wine with pieces of our neighbours’ fruits in it. A boat’s wake struck us and half of it spilled.

  “Monday, I waited in the street two hours ’til his secretary left for lunch. I had to force the key, but it worked; I go in expecting to find all kinds of stuff, you know, pictures of her naked, jewelry bills, that kind of thing. What do I find? Our wedding picture right there on his desk like it always was. After a while, I start wondering if I’m not paranoid. But some voice inside me says, ‘Ursula, wait.’ So I wait. Then I can’t stand it, I’m tired, I’m starving, I go back outside and grab myself a beef-n-chedder at Arby’s, and as I’m about to leave, a voice tells me, ‘Ursula, go back’.”

  A tingle went down my spine. Something was nibbling on my bait. The nose of my pole dipped once, violently, and rose. Whatever it was, was gone. The shrimp was on its way to something else. I could feel the hook snagging the seaweed on the bottom as I reeled it back in. My mother contemplated me angrily.

  “I couldn’t have been gone more than ten, fifteen minutes. The door was unlocked, I walked right in. Olga, you’ll never guess what I found, oh my God, Olga …”

  “Girls, go for a lil’ swim for you circulation, it do you good.”

  “The water’s cold, Mótina. I’m fine.”

  “Yeah, we’re fine,” Cecilia echoed.

  “Do I have to coun’ three?”

  Cecilia doggy-paddled towards the sand bar. The sand-pipers guessed her intentions and were far up in the air before she’d accomplished two strokes, or rather, splashy slaps. I hung onto the back of the boat.

  “There they were, both of them! On the floor on all fours! Like animals! She was wearing an apron, and her dress was up over her big fat ass and Harry was busy smacking it with the sole of his shoe! Can you imagine? The sole of the shoe I gave him two years ago for his birthday!”

  The image of a butcher striking a strip of meat with a metal block utensil came to my mind. Was Harry tenderizing the woman’s ass? I fell back into the dead man’s float.

  “Oh my Guard! My Guard!”

  “That’s not it. I stood there watching. They didn’t even see me. The more I looked at the woman, the more I said to myself, ‘Come on, Ursula, you know the lady,’ but I couldn’t quite place her out of context. I thought at first it was one of the boys’ teachers, then it dawned on me. You remember Betty, the baker from Winn Dixie? I’ll never buy bread from her again!”

  I looked around for Cecilia; she was squatting on the sand bar, poking sea pencils into the wet sand.

  “Tsu, tsu, Ursula, calm down, it not worth you healt’. Please.”

  “I didn’t know what the hell I should do! Scream or cry or run. The next thing I knew, I took off my shoe and gave it to Harry! The more I hit him, the more he squeezed her ass and yelled in pain, and the more she thought he was liking it! I was about to shove it up her you know what, but he wrenched it out of my hand. Defending her, when he should have been thinking about me, about my feelings!”

  “When you have chil’ren, you don’ do such tings! You put de chil’ren first!”

  “Harry says I was spying on him. I don’t trust him. I ended up having to apologize. I said, quote, ‘I am very sorry to have disturbed you and your piece of ass,’ unquote. Haven’t seen him since. He says if I really loved him, I would understand he needs it. Don’t know what he’s trying to prove. That he’s still got enough juice to go around? She can have it! I’m not going to share any more!”

  “Drãmos! Nè, nè! Juokãvo!! Baislùs, baislùs, bjaurlùs!” When my mother depleted her stock of American interjections, she spoke Lithuanian to God in the sky, with her arms as well as her words. Actually, she spoke less than she hollered, bellowed in Lithuanian; when she addressed God, she figured her words had a longer way to go.

  CHAPTER 12

  I set the bowl of shrimp down on the table. Ursula’s expression underwent that subtle change when a guest turns into a victim. She recognized what we were about to eat as our former bait. I shall add that the heads of the shrimp were still on; and not just the heads; the legs, eyes, fantails. I suspected the country my mother came from didn’t bother with daintiness.

  My mother began twisting their heads off, tearing off their rigid pink bathrobes, and eating their soft curved bodies. Ursula reluctantly put her hand in the bowl. I lifted a specimen up by a long antenna and left it to rest in peace on my plate. My mother liked seafood so much, she rarely complained about our pickiness with it. The price per pound was high, even if she didn’t buy it in a store, but on the peer, as bait.

  When Cecilia served the main course, our mother’s chin lifted habitually: rump roast, cream of wheat with sesame oil and thyme, mashed sweet potatoes with finely chopped raw onions. I pressed the cream of wheat through the prongs of my fork, and made a deep criss-cross design. Meat was rarely too hot to put in the mou
th, though I often acted as if it was; if it could not prevent my eating it, it could at least delay it.

  “Kate. Eat you meat. You need de red to replace what you lose.”

  “With teeth like that, Olga, you know she’ll never get a man.”

  I made a face to show them I didn’t want one, which amused, of all people, Ursula. It was the first time she laughed all day.

  “You know the Minsky girls are getting them, too. Rosa and Lucy. Braces are really a must these days.”

  “Please, Ursula, stop. You are ruining my appetite.”

  Someone who hadn’t grown up with my mother might not understand what she meant, might think she simply shunned all that was related to the teeth, or those forlorn days with a man. I, her eldest child, could explain. My mother had thought that braces were going to do most of the work like an electric hedge-trimmer and that it would be like buying one at K-Mart on sale for $19.99, for braces were not even a handful of stainless steel, when you can get a casserole for under five bucks. She had not been prepared to part with two thousand dollars of hardworking money for abstract dental services. For that price, one could purchase a used vehicle and in her mental balance, a used Buick versus a palm full of metal bands were no more comparable than a feather and a lead-heavy life of sin. My mother would never consider an orthodontist’s know-how as work, as he did not sweat. The consultation which started out friendly enough had ended up otherwise, and that was what was ruining her appetite.

  “De damn crook. He wan’s to cheat me, all ’lone in de world wit’ two chil’ren, two tousand dollars, an’ on top, he tinks I have nothin’ to do dan go over de bridge, back an’ fort’, one hour ev’ry week, de traffic, my gas, den wait more hours of my precious time so he can take her five minute an’ look in her mouth to say ev’ryting is a’kay?! Fin’ another sucker!”