Primordial Soup Read online

  Ursula watched me block my nose to swallow my meat. I used my milk as mouthwash.

  “Olga. You can’t do that to the kid.”

  “Why not? She can eat with dem. If she don’ eat, it’s not b’cause o’her teeth, it’s b’cause her stubborn head.”

  “Look at her. Just take a look.”

  “An arm an’ a leg for a few stupi’ teeth??”

  “Olga, there’s no price. It’s unthinkable! Come on, she’s your daughter!”

  “Do I need them? Look.”

  Cecilia clenched her teeth together, and spread her lips wide, exposing her Hallowe’en pumpkin smile. In her enthusiasm, she’d forgotten what was in her mouth and a small piece of beef filled the space where the front teeth normally were. At first, I mistook it for her own tongue, for it blended in so well with her gums and the lining of her lips.

  “We are a’ de table now, not de dentis’ office! Cecilia?! Shut you mouth! It is time to eat!”

  We continued our meal with heads bowed in silence, though it was not really silent; it was rich with the familiar sounds of eating. Even the silence was in a way loud. It always was when my mother had just shouted.

  “Who wants more?” my mother threatened.

  I spoke up first, “Not me. No thanks.”

  “I do. Well done,” Cecilia requested.

  Ursula held out her dish. “I’ll take a little piece from the middle, please, if you can find something rare … ”

  My mother carved a generous portion for Ursula off the flat red end, when a thought of Betty’s posterior entered my mind.

  I never should have thought that. I put it out of my mind immediately. Quick, I had to concentrate on something because I could feel the thought was coming back. I thought of a toothache, icebergs in Antarctica, my dead grandmother, the pool filter that had to be emptied, but the thought of Betty’s buttocks returned as predicted, and the more I chased the thought away, the more it returned with gusto. The tingles were like tiny fireworks, pulling my attention more and more to them, pulling the blood out of my head, and down to that inglorious crossroad. I couldn’t understand how buttocks could trigger off such a reaction, make my blood change its very course. Naked human buttock used to make me scream with laughter. If Laurel or Hardy’s britches dropped, that would have been the end!

  “Stop that this very instant!” I ordered myself.

  To my surprise, my body answered me, it answered me with an unexpected wave of, what can I call it? Concentrated sweetness?

  It was with distaste that I noticed my underwear was wet; a baby would have had to be changed, but in my case, it was my second mouth that had begun to drool, to hunger. It wanted to be fed. I looked at the roast on the table. That wasn’t it. I closed my eyes and Betty’s copious behind popped again into my mind. So did Harry’s. The way he moved it to some inaudible beat when he was sloppily consuming Ursula. I thought of Belinda Moors’ breasts. Why were domes of flesh all at once, out of the blue, so bewitching? They had always been so pitiful before; ludicrous outgrowths, obnoxiously protruding humps, human hills that made you simultaneously laugh at and feel sorry for an adult.

  “Mótina, may I be excused from the table?”

  “Wha’ for?”

  I hadn’t thought of that.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  “You can’t contro’ youself?”

  I shook my head miserably.

  “Den hurry up.”

  There was a golden oval tray on the dressing table in my mother’s bedroom. On it, one invariably found an imitation turn of the century brush, mirror and comb set that she had purchased for twenty books of green stamps many years ago, orderly arranged on either side of a powder compact like a fork, spoon and knife. I locked the bathroom door, sat down on the toilet, leaned forwards and backwards with my arms hugging my abdomen, but the sensation was not going away.

  I took in a deep breath, prayed to God for courage, and with my mother’s mirror sought the source of agitation below. At first, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I consulted the other face of the mirror until I was sure a trick wasn’t being played on me. The two tender lips of my childhood had opened like a steamed clam and in-between, an excess growth of newborn flesh similar to a turkey’s crest ostentatiously proclaimed its status. Its colouring was that of a rooster’s comb. Multiple folds gave it the look of a sluggish, defenceless mollusk, just homely enough for people to consider a refined morsel, much like escargots, mussels, oysters and other bite-sized, boneless seafoods for which they are willing to pay great sums.

  The crest separated into two smaller flaps, well done and crinkly like bacon around the edges. I moved them up and down like airborne wings, stretching them out to their full wingspan. They were covered with permanent goose bumps which was proof that the material for this part originated from the plucked members of the fowl family. A small patch of hairs had grown nearby, curly as a lambs. The outer lips were browned at the edges as though they had undergone a light roast in the oven. I opened them like a dissected frog. I knew it! The inside was less cooked! It was exactly that red called medium rare, like the roast beef I had eaten on Thursday night. There was a brown opening to the very back, well done and stringy like the veal I’d also eaten not so long ago at Ursula’s. How fascinating: below, one found patches of the exact same skin as that which lines the interior of our mouths; not surprising, then, it was constantly feeling something similar to hunger.

  The more I looked down at the mirror, the more I found the composition prehistoric. It was the skin and flesh of seven animals without the brains of a single one; if they were under my brain’s jurisdiction, it certainly didn’t show. I removed a needle from a Holiday Inn sewing kit and gave each meat a prick. I couldn’t believe it. Each prick hurt me! So they, all seven distinct fleshes, were me.

  I hoped baptizing it would help and drew a palm of cold water from the tap, sprinkling it with the hopeful drops. At first, it did quell the hot tempers, but soon enough the beastliness resumed. I flicked it with a comb. It made me jump with pain, but it throbbed and enjoyed the attentions all the more.

  My fingers curled inwards like a cat’s paw, digging nails into my palms; my toes tried curling under in a similar manner, as though my feet were turning into bird claws; my head was thrust back; whatever was overtaking me didn’t need my head around to think. My jaws clenched: it was not that mouth that wished to be fed, despite the hungry grunts that escaped from it.

  It wanted to be fed. Didn’t it have all the ingredients it needed? Egg, yeast, Jesus’ bread, my blood that I could feel pounding down there. How could it ask for my husband’s meat if I had no husband? It didn’t care what I said or thought, it didn’t care one bit about me. It was a composite monster, drooling at the mouth, beckoning me for my hand. One cannot imagine my fear and abhorrence when I witnessed my hand disobey me and descend towards it. My poor hand was going to be bitten right off! I just knew it! Or even worse, it was going to be sucked up into it, or merge with it, and I wouldn’t be able to get it away! How would I explain such a thing to my mother?!

  I despairingly tried to fool the uncouth, salivating creature by touching it with a lint brush that was in the drawer next to me, in lieu of my hand. It moved! To my amazement, it accepted it, and gave the lint brush little kisses. It was almost cute, and yet it was not. It was simply as touching as any weakling is when in need of nourishment. It had no teeth as of yet; only the soft lips of an innocent baby that puts everything and anything in its mouth. I must not let the innocent baby parallels fool me, I warned myself. The hunger spells of babies are by far the most tyrannical.

  I closed my eyes. The pleasure increased until it could increase no further. My arm dropped limply, anchoring me back to reality, and the lint brush fell to the floor. I was freed of the curse, I was rid of it.

  Before returning to the dinner table, I ventured nervously to the medicine cabinet mirror, the model with three doors one can adjust to see oneself at every possible angl
e into eternity. I expected to see sparks in my eyes, two horns sprung out of my head, perhaps even a fluffy tail. I saw no bloodcurdling transformation, no horrific signs of catastrophe, only that old familiar me.

  I washed my hands with hot water and soap. I had trouble looking my mother, Ursula, and Cecilia in the face, so I concentrated on the meat left on my plate, cold and stiff like me. That’s when a lump began to form in my throat. I asked for more milk, but it didn’t help it go down. My mother treated my embarrassment with compassion. She promised to make me rice the next day.

  CHAPTER 13

  A green pea shot past my head. The cafeteria had turned into a battleground and the floor was covered with flat green casualties. Green plastic soldiers didn’t die like green peas did; they just fell over and were ready to start over again. The pint cartons of milk were assaulted with straws until bubbles rose high out of them like bunches of white grapes. Chicken legs and thighs were twisted and cracked apart, a few bites taken, and left to the side. The dishes had divisions for each food group, much like a TV dinner. There was constant bartering, especially for a second helping of dessert. I don’t know what was most unbearable to me, the table manners or the screaming; I ought to have been grateful for the screaming; it covered up a more hateful noise, that of mass eating.

  Needless to say, my mother wasn’t willing to pay hardworking money for “dat junk”. The first year we moved to Wachovi, she filled out a form for free lunches and free milk and was furious when her application was refused. To her, the title “unemployed widow” should have been enough to kindle charity in the heart of the nit-pickiest of American bureaucrats. When she filled the form out the following year, the zeros dropped like flies off her assets, property values, bank account balances; the number of her dependant offspring rose as radically. She claimed she had had three children before us in Lithuania. She said the school would never check up on that, and it was true, it didn’t. We were given hot lunch coupons, but went without eating half that year because the shame of being stigmatized with the red, white and blue coupons was too great. When my mother received a phone call from Mrs. Washington, the school principal at the time (Mrs. Washington was black, and had been transferred to our school during the bussing crisis) informing her that Cecilia and I spent our lunch time outside reading books instead of eating, and wondering if she, an active member of her church, Methodist or Baptist or one of those denominations, could personally be of any assistance to us, we were given lunch boxes from then on with my mother’s homemade concoctions. We never admitted to our mother that we were ashamed of the hot lunch coupons; we simply told her the food they gave us in school wasn’t good.

  The war degenerated and someone made a flame thrower out of a pint of milk and a straw. I walked around a few green smears and did my best to fit in wearing my new dress, known in school as the Bell, a flowery thing that kept its all-weather puff thanks to a hula-hoop sewn into the bottom hem and had a square low-cut collar, front and back. You could wear it either way, it didn’t matter. You walked, it rang.

  All I would have liked to do was sit down; you’d think sitting down was the easiest physical activity humans can do; sitting down doesn’t take ten years of daily practice, wasn’t some great feat only Houdini could do; but sitting down necessarily meant sitting down next to somebody, and that was not as easy as one might think in a middle school cafeteria. Every chair was supposedly taken, or being saved for someone else. If I insisted, those seated began to shift around and squeeze me out, a round of musical chairs. I felt like a gypsy with her hand out, in tattered rags, begging for money at a benefit ball. In physical education, whenever teams were being chosen for softball, I always ended up the last one, the one left over, the one whose name wasn’t called, but one team had to take, to the delight and laughter of the other. Every school has one of those. I was that one.

  In class, I was the other one; the one whom peers fought tooth and claw to sit next to, the one they edged their desk towards. These friendships were short-lived; approximately one hour, the duration of the exam. If I tried to walk next to anyone after class, she or he usually stooped to untie a shoe.

  I wandered outside into the courtyard, opened my new Bedknobs and Broomsticks lunch box (Ursula’s Christmas present to me; in exchange, she received the gingerbread Cecilia got in school), and took out my Bible I was recently in the habit of hiding in there. What was happening to me was not only normal, it happened since Adam and Eve. Fleshy desires were one of the Bible’s central preoccupations.

  The Adam and Eve passages fascinated me the most. A few days earlier, changing classes, I happened to bump into my old teacher, Mrs. Wella. I pointed to the lump I felt in my throat and asked her if she knew what it was; it so happens she did: it was known as an Adam’s apple. I started noticing every Adam’s apple I walked by.

  Stacks of chairs were lined up against the wall. The rolling belt continued its way to the kitchen like a segmented creature, without a dirty tray left on its back. It was time for me to go. I put my Bible safely back into my lunch box, and left my beef tongue sandwich for the birds and ants.

  The Wachovi News Press came to our gym class that day to take pictures of the kids who had won Presidential Physical Fitness Awards, a big deal in our community, because the winners received certificates with photocopied signatures of Richard M. Nixon. The repressed giggles were like crumbs left here and there in a dark evergreen forest, nudging me on in the right direction. I found my dress lining the netless basketball ring, upside down, and filled with our gym’s reserve of basketballs. The hula-hoop sewn in the bottom hem kept it from falling through, though the weight of ten or so basketballs bent it sharply in two like the hinge and dual arc mechanism of a pair of jaws. It was quite a sight: my gown so altered, multitudes of bumps and domes molding the fabric into someone else; it was the incarnation of my subconscious; a surrealist sculpture of surplus breasts and buttocks. I hurried to find a chair I could reach it with.

  Cecilia and I had the habit of meeting at the flag after school so we could get a seat on the bus together; we weren’t unduly patriotic or anything; we pledged allegiance to the flag every morning in school like everyone else, and that was the extent of it. My mother, like most naturalized Americans that were once Eastern Europeans, had been accustomed to outbursts of nationalism; I deduced this from the way she waved a flag around during the fourth of July parades in this country: feverishly enough to make people around her wonder if we had just won a war. And not just any flag, no, no, no; the last page of the Wachovi News Press where the American flag was printed on one side only, for children! On the other side, were the answers to the crossword puzzle of the day before, the horoscope forecast, and the comic strips. She waved that around on a yard stick, yelling “God Bless Amer’ca!” and “Long Live Yuncle Sam!” until Cecilia and I acted like we didn’t know her.

  Cecilia was nowhere in sight; considering how late I was, I guess that was predictable. I made haste, cut across the grass, nearly tripped over a low, draped chain, and had just gotten on the school bus when Barry Ramsey pushed me off.

  “Go back in there right now, metal mouth, and put those basketballs right back where you found them.”

  “I found them in my dress.”

  “I don’t give a crap where you found them; it’s where you left them that concerns me. I’m responsible for the equipment.”

  “Then take care of it and leave me alone.”

  “I will as soon as you go back in there and pick them up off the floor. I’m not your fuckin’ maid!”

  “Nor am I yours.”

  “You better do what I say, railroad tracks.”

  “Stainless steel sex appeal.”

  The reply was Ursula’s; it didn’t sound like me; nor did it correspond to my looks.

  “Don’t make me puke.”

  “You had better let go of me this instant or I am going to tell.”

  “Be my guest. You’re the one who’s gonna get in trouble.”

/>   There was a small crowd forming around us. A boy I’d seen playing Frisbee in the morning instead of going to class looked at me. The stubble on his face was as long (or short) as his crew cut. I’d seen his name, Winston Bee, carved into the washroom walls. Without warning, he ducked into the tent-like space between my waist and hoop, before rushing out and fanning the air before his nose. He thought Cecilia and I wore the same dress all week and not a different version of the same dress every other day. The crowd encouraged him to more dramatic interpretations. He staggered before fainting and underwent an epileptic seizure.

  The buses had started. I made a pathetic run for it, the two yard dash in seven seconds. Barry had caught me by my hair, his eyes squinting down to hateful slits. I felt something almost gratifying, I know this will sound absolutely preposterous, as if I were a fish about to be eaten.

  “Your ass is going back in there now.”

  His Adam’s apple went up, and down. The more he squinted, the more I found myself looking up at him with strange sleepy eyes. An apple core was stuck in his throat; a bite of knowledgeable fruit surrounded by weak flesh, like a sweet baked apple in the snout of a roasted pig.

  My back struck the earth’s crust. At one point, I saw Cecilia kicking Barry in the head. Really, it wasn’t as bad as it sounds, for she was wearing my old, soft leather sandals which were only kiddy size thirty four; still I was moved; it’s the thought that counts.

  Mr. Liverpool rushed towards us, led by our octogenarian bus driver, Mr. Ginger. Everyone turned around to watch him run. Mr. Ginger had been the talk of the town for the past two years. Some said he shouldn’t be allowed to drive a bus at his age, that he could have a stroke at any minute. Others said his medical exams showed he was as fit as any forty year old man. The letters to the editor that the Wachovi News Press was only too happy to print were getting more and more below the belt, until Mr. Ginger made the front page by swimming four miles across the bay, towing a row boat by his real teeth. After that, no one dared say a word any more. Personally, I would have given him a psychological exam.