My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (21 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Because the father, who’d already made enough money to keep the family in fine linens and silverware for life, was no longer interested in business. That part of his character had simply been removed, either by the impact of the flashlight or the subsequent brain bleed. It wasn’t that, as my lawyer assures me, his cognitive capacity was reduced, per se. He still performed adequately in standard aptitude tests.
No, it seemed to be more a matter of a changed disposition.
Myself, I didn’t fare so well. It adds up against you when you’re indigent at the time of felony commission, abusing alcohol, etc., even if the crime was committed in defense of a vulnerable party. And there was the trespass issue—although the girls, I have to say, did not desert me in my hour of need. They told the police I’d had their full permission to sleep in the house that night. Sadly, due to their ages—eleven and twelve—that testimony did not go far to clear me of the trespass charge.
I sometimes dwell on my last moments with those girls. It’s true we sat upon an old carpet, discolored by the father’s spreading blood, between dark-painted walls adorned with grim, even judgmental-looking paintings of the girls’ dead relatives. It’s true our clothing was splattered and gruesome, and the unconscious father was stretched out between us, casting a pall.
But I gazed up and around, when I’d done all the CPR I could—it was a kind of coma, I guess, though it wouldn’t last long once they got him to the emergency room—and saw the semiretarded mother. Even a ballerina, I remember thinking, did not deserve to be asphyxiated, and I was still glad I’d come to her aid. Now she was staring at me with eyes as big as saucers, murmuring something in her native tongue. She spoke the dialect of Spanish where everyone has a lisp. I saw Snow, whose lovely face, lit from within, bore the light, drying tracks of tears, and the vibrant Rose, nervous and biting her nails beside a Tiffany table lamp effulgent with orange-pink roses.
And I was overcome with a curious feeling of belonging and satisfaction, as though I’d eaten a full meal and was preparing now for a long winter sleep. With the father lying inert between us in his blue-and-white seersucker, I felt we were all where we were meant to be, all posed in a tableau whose composition had been perfectly chosen a very long time ago. Whatever came afterward, I recall thinking, this was a warm cave full of soft, harmless things.
Lately I’ve been dreaming about forests. I grew up in a city and I used to be bored by large groups of trees, which I considered tedious. Then suddenly I discovered the world: the smell of ponderosa pine in the sun, ladybugs teeming on a downed log. Herds of elk and a wolf running across a dirt road. Recently, when we were both somewhat drunk, an old friend told me she thought landscapes were boring. I knew just what she meant; I remembered that restless so-what as you gaze out the car window at the sight of mountains. And yet, I don’t feel that way anymore. I decided I wanted to write a tale set in a forest—not the wild forests you still find in the West, where I now live, but the quieter forests of the Adirondacks, not far from New York City, where I had once spent time with this dear friend. Fairy tales are set in or near forests so frequently, the threat of shadowy woods, the romance and thrill of the unknown or deeply buried, Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood and Sleeping Beauty enclosed in her hedge of thorns. The dreams called me back to the lower peaks and offered me a gesture of living there again, for a moment. So I wrote a story about a family in a wood-paneled house by a blue lake, its green lawn dotted with deer, and something that came into that house out of a dark forest.
—LM
SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM
The Erlking
IT IS JUST AS SHE HOPED. THE WORN PATH, THE BELLS TINKLING ON the gate. The huge fir trees dropping their needles one by one. A sweet mushroomy smell, gnomes stationed in the underbrush, the sound of a mandolin far up on the hill. We’re here, we’re here, Kate repeats to her child, who isn’t walking fast enough and needs to be pulled along by the hand. Through the gate they go, up the dappled path, beneath the giant firs, across the parking lot and past the kettle-corn stand, into the heart of the elves’ faire.
Her child is named Ondine but answers only to Ruthie. Ruthie’s hand rests damply in her own, and together they watch two scrappy fairies race by, the swifter one waving a long string of raffle tickets. Don’t you want to wear your wings? Kate asked that morning, but Ruthie wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes they are in cahoots, sometimes not. Now they circle the great shady lawn, studying the activities. There is candle making, beekeeping, the weaving of god’s eyes. A sign in purple calligraphy says that King Arthur will be appearing at noon. There’s a tea garden and a bluegrass band, a man with a thin sandy beard and a hundred acorns pinned with bright ribbons to the folds of his tunic, boys thumping one another with jousting sticks. The ground is scattered with pine needles and hay. The lemonade cups are compostable. Everything is exactly as it should be, every small elfish detail attended to, and as Kate’s heart fills with the pleasure of this, the pleasure of a world complete unto itself, she is also struck by the uneasy feeling that she could have but did not secure this for her child, and therein lies a misjudgment, a possibly grave mistake.
They had not even applied to a Waldorf school! Kate’s associations at the time were vague but nervous-making: devil sticks, recorder playing, occasional illiteracy. She thought she remembered hearing about a boy who could map the entire Mongol empire but at nine years old was still sucking his fingers. That couldn’t be good, could it? Everybody has to go into a 7-Eleven at some point in their lives, operate in the ordinary universe. So she hadn’t even signed up for a tour. But no one ever told her about the whole
fairy
component. And now look at what Ruthie is missing. Magic. Nature. Flower hair wreaths, floating playsilks, an unpolluted, media-free encountering of the world. The chance to spend her days binding books and acting out stories with wonderful wooden animals made in Germany.
Ruthie wants to take one home with her, a baby giraffe. Mysteriously they have ended up at the sole spot in the elves’ faire where commerce occurs and credit cards are accepted. Ruthie is not even looking at the baby giraffe; with some nonchalance she has it tucked under her arm as she touches all the other animals on the table.
“A macaw!” she cries softly to herself, reaching.
Kate finds a second baby giraffe caught between a buffalo and a penguin. Despite representing a wide range of the animal kingdom, the creatures all appear to belong to the same dear, blunt-nosed family. The little giraffe is light in her hand, and when she turns it over to read the tiny price tag stuck to the bottom of its feet, she puts it back down immediately. Seventeen dollars! Enough to feed an entire fairy family for a month. The Noah’s Ark looming in the middle of the table now looks somewhat sinister. Two by two, two by two. It adds up.
How do the Waldorf parents manage? How do any parents manage? Kate hands over her Visa.
She says to Ruthie, “This is a very special thing. Your one special thing from the elves’ faire, okay?”
“Okay,” Ruthie says, looking for the first time at the animal that is now hers. She knows her mother likes giraffes; at the zoo she stands for five or ten minutes at the edge of the giraffe area, talking about their beautiful large eyes and their long lovely eyelashes. She picked the baby giraffe for her mother because it is her favorite. Also because she knew her mother would say yes, and she does not always say yes, for instance when asked about My Little Pony. So Ruthie was being clever but also being kind. She was thinking of her mother while also thinking of herself. Besides, there are no My Little Ponys to be found at this faire; she’s looked. And a baby giraffe will need a mother to go with it. There was a bigger giraffe on the table, and maybe in five minutes Ruthie will ask if she can put it on her birthday list.
“Mommy,” Ruthie says, “is my birthday before Christmas or after?”
“Well, it depends what you mean by before,” Kate says unhelpfully.
Holding hands, they leave the elves’ marketplace and climb up the sloping lawn to the heavy old house at the top of the hill, with its low-pitched roof and stout columns and green-painted rafters sticking out from the eaves. Kate guesses that this whole place was once the fresh-air retreat of a tubercular rich person from long ago, but now it’s a center of child-initiated learning.
Ruthie’s own school is housed in a flat, prefab trailer-type structure tucked behind the large parking lot of a Korean church. It’s lovely in its own way, with a mass of morning glory vines softening things up a little, and, in lieu of actual trees, a mural of woodland scenes painted along the outside wall. And parking is never a problem, which is a plus, since that can be a real issue at drop-off and pick-up. At Wishing Well the parents take turns wearing reflective vests and walkie-talkies, just to manage the morning traffic inching through the school driveway! Or else there’s the grim Good-bye Door at the Jewish Montessori, beyond the threshold of which the dropping-off parent is forbidden to pass. For philosophical reasons, of course, but anyone who’s ever seen the line of cars double-parked outside the building on a weekday morning might suppose a more practical agenda. To think this was once the school Kate had set her heart on! She wouldn’t have survived that awful departure, the sound of her own weeping as she turned off her emergency blinkers and made her slow way down the street.
But she had been enchanted by the Jewish Montessori, helplessly enchanted, not even minding (truth be told) ghastly tales of the Door. Instantly she had loved the vaulted ceiling and skylights, the Frida Kahlo prints hanging on the walls, the dainty Shabbat candlesticks, and everywhere a feeling of coolness and order. On the day of her visit, she sat on a little canvas folding stool and watched in wonder as the children silently unfurled their small rugs around the room and then settled down into their private, absorbing, and intricate tasks. The classroom brimmed with beautiful, busy quiet. She felt her heart begin to slow, felt the relief of finally pressing the mute button on a chortling TV. How clearly she saw that she needn’t have been burdened for all these years with her own harried and inefficient self, that her thoughts could have been more elegant, her neural pathways less congested—if only her parents had chosen differently for her. If only they had given her this!
It came as a surprise, then, that the school did not make the least impression on Ondine. Every Saturday morning for ten weeks the two of them shuffled up the steps with more than twenty other potential applicants and underwent a lengthy, rigorous audition process disguised as a Mommy and Me class. Kate would break out into a soft sweat straightaway. Ondine would show only occasional interest in spooning lima beans from a small wooden bowl into a slightly larger one. “Remember, that’s
his
job,” Kate would whisper urgently as Ondine made a grab for some other kid’s eyedropper. The parents were supposed to preserve the integrity of each child’s work space, and all of these odd little projects—the beans, the soap shavings, the tongs, and the muffin tin—even the puzzles—were supposed to be referred to as jobs.
Ten weeks of curious labor, and then the rejection letter arrived on rainbow stationery. Kate was such an idiot, she sat right down and wrote a thank-you note to the school’s intimidating and faintly glamorous director in the hope of improving their chances for the following year. She had never been so crushed. “You’re not even Jewish,” said her mother, not a little uncharitably. Her friend Hilary, a Montessori Mommy and Me dropout, confessed to feeling kind of relieved on her behalf. “Didn’t it seem, you know, a little robotic? Or maybe Dickensian? Like children in a boot-blacking factory.” She reminded Kate about the director’s car, which they had seen parked one Saturday morning in its specially reserved spot. “Aren’t you glad you won’t be paying for the plum-colored Porsche?”

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