My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (55 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Just then, punctual as misery, fragrant as the coming of bungled valor, there appeared at the door a huntsman. The huntsman took one look at the bloated wolf, put two and two together (crack huntsman, he), and reckoned all parties worth saving were at this moment being digested. He’d been sent by the young tomato’s mother to reclaim the loaf of bread, which she had decided she could not live without. The huntsman, to summon the requisite mettle, lifted to his mouth the wineskin slung over his shoulder and squeezed a stream of port into his gullet.
Drink ye all of it, for this is my blood
, came a gauzy voice as if from under a hidden pillow. “What’s that?” asked the huntsman. A higher-pitched voice said, “My, oh, my, what a big spleen you have!” And another voice, clearer but sporting an incognito hoarseness, said, “The better to chide you with, lovey!” And the woman, wrapped in a swaddling of wolf, let rip a musical belch and the girl inside her immediately recognized the melody of those windy gripes and she added to them by gasping: Grandmother! She hadn’t seen her maternal grandmother for many years, not since Nana and her mother angrily parted after an argument about how best to attend to the loaf. The girl remembered the delicious wolf soup her grandmother used to make her and felt a fond stirring in her own kishkas
.
And the huntsman, so easily sidetracked when a quarry began to spill its guts, hastily reached a brawny fist into the wolf ’s maw and extracted . . . a frumpy girl! Whose cheeks were so frightfully abloom he thought she might be better off left to the vagaries of the wolf’s intestines, but she held the bread in her hands, so he dropped her onto the ground. Next, with the skill and boredom of a surgeon performing his one-thousandth appendectomy, he carefully plucked a quivering aspic of flesh from the throat of the wolf and decided the old woman, with her long nose and big ears, was likely beyond saving and he dropped the slop of her onto the floor and wiped the residual goo onto his gambeson, but when thick-nailed, corn-tumored toes poked through the fur as though it were a footed sleeper a size too small, the huntsman reached in again with the resentful finesse of a down-on-his-luck magician who believes he’s bound for a destiny far grander than the endless extraction of rabbits from hats, and he neatly skinned what turned out to be . . . a very old woman, ta-daa! Well, fancy that. The wolf’s weathered exterior, heavily trafficked of late he could see, lay rumpled at the old woman’s feet like a discarded cape too threadbare to repair. This nested zoology made the huntsman vertiginous, and he dropped himself onto a chair. Just then the jumble of flesh inched up the bed, enveloped the bones, then slid into the fur and got back under the covers, where he rattled a final breath and went limp with extinction. The girl, with a face like a rusted skillet, clutched the bread, and when she saw the huntsman, she went, stem to stern, red as the end of the world; the huntsman took one look at the girl and thought
Bolshevik
and decided no brazen-faced rose that rutilant was worth deflowering, bread or no bread, and he pumped the bladder beneath his arm and took another slug of wine; and the naked old crone? She smiled at the pair of them and bowed her head at the wolf, messianic with mange, who had just been alive then inside her. Then alive again, repatriated to the fatherland of his ailing skin. He’d be back, that one, sure as pokeweed.
The old-old woman, much older now than when she’d arrived, a coon’s age older than when she’d grudgingly passed down that loaf of bread to her daughter, picked up a sausage between her fingers and pretended to smoke it, then looked at herself in the shiny dowager’s hump of a soup spoon, and admired the salvaged eyesore she’d become.
This is what I started to think about at some point in the rewriting and corruption of “Little Red Riding Hood”: I like the idea that a character can be flat and complex at once if one abandons attachment to conventional notions of character psychology and allows characters to become a container for ideas. If you flatten a character, the reader doesn’t have to feel anxious about sniffing out motivations and you make way for other kinds of interpretive or subtextual richness. As Kate Bernheimer says in “Fairy Tale Is Form, Form Is Fairy Tale,” the essay that provoked these ideas and this story, this willful flatness of character “allows for depth of response in the reader,” and if interpreting psychology is your exegetical wont, this allows you to put the whole story on the couch.
A statement of the obvious: if you’re working with language, everything is representation, a letter symbolizing a sound, a word symbolizing an object or notion, and in writing “The Girl, the Wolf, the Crone,” I liked the (not original, certainly) idea of acknowledging and exploiting the mediation in an effort to tell a story, and maybe to untell a story too in a way, but I’m fond of narrative and wanted things to happen and so didn’t want the story to be merely a metafictional exposé; that is, I wasn’t interested in calling attention to the artifice in order to dispel the dream that is fiction but rather to create a different kind of garishly lit, demi-lucid dream. I think the form of the fairy tale is liberating in allowing both writer and reader to be mindful of the fact that anything we refer to as “reality” in fiction is just a shared hallucination, however seductive, while at the same time casting come-hither glances of its own.
—KW
SABRINA ORAH MARK
My Brother Gary Made a Movie and This Is What Happened
ALTHOUGH HE IS WEARING A PAPER BAG OVER HIS HEAD, I INSTANTLY recognize Gary. Gary is my brother, and he is making a movie. Don’t get me wrong, the eyes were cut out. I mean, Gary could
see
. “What’s the name of the movie, Gary?” “The name of the moobie,” said Gary, “is
My Family
.” “You said moobie, Gary.” “No, I didn’t. I said, moobie.”
“You did it again, Gary.”
Gary’s eyes moved very quickly back and forth. Gary was miffed. “I’m going to flip out!” shouted Gary. “I’m sorry, Gary.” Gary had trouble with words. It was his sorest spot. Sometimes he was so tragically far off I wanted to gather him up in my arms, climb a tree, and leave him in the largest nest I could find. He’d mean to say “human” and it would come out “cantaloupe.” He’d mean to say “dad” and it would come out “sock.” Even my name he malapropped. He called me Mouse.
“Did you build that camera yourself, Gary?” The camera was an old tin can with a bunch of leaves pasted to it. Gary held the tin can up in the air. A few leaves fluttered off. “Action?” he whispered. And then, even softer, he whispered, “Cut?” “May I make a suggestion, Gary?” “What is it, Mouse?” “Maybe you want to point the camera at something.” “Like what?” “Maybe like an actor, Gary. Like an actor who is saying words.” “Like these actors?” asked Gary. I was proud of his pronunciation. He led me behind the couch.
The actors groaned in a heap. “Is that Grandpa, Gary?” It was unquestionably Grandpa. He was on the very, very tippy top. “Hi, Grandpa,” I said. “Hello,” said Grandpa. He was not excited to see me. I had married a black man, and he was still ticked off. “This is not about you,” said Grandpa. “This is about Gary, and his burden of dreams.”
“Look!” said Gary. “There’s Sock.” Gary meant our dad. “Hi, Dad.” My father gave a little wave. He was about four actors from the bottom. My eleven other brothers also were there: Eugene, Jack, Sid, Benjamin, Daniel, Saul, Eli, Walter, Adam, Richard, and Gus. They groaned. Aunt Rosa was shoved between my mother and grandmother. A bunch of cousins were balled up at the bottom.
“Hand me that shovel,” said Gary. “What shovel?” I asked. But Gary already was pointing his tin can straight at the heap. “Lights,” said Gary. “Turn off the lights!” I turned off the lights. “Camera,” said Gary. “Action,” said Gary. “Cut,” said Gary.
“May I ask a question, Gary?” “What is it, Mouse?” “Why are you shooting in the dark, Gary?”
“I’ve had it,” yelled my mother. “We’ve been here for six goddamn years.” Aunt Rosa made little clucking sounds. I turned on the lights. Gary went into the kitchen and returned with a large tray filled with tiny cups of water.
“I can’t live in a heap this close to your father,” yelled my mother.
I began to wonder about footage.
“I need a mani-pedi,” yelled my mother. “I need a goddamn blowout.” “You look beautiful,” I said. “This is not about you,” yelled my mother. “This is about Gary and his burden of dreams.” I handed her a cup of water. “This water tastes fake,” yelled my mother. “It is fake,” said Gary.
My father’s beeper went off. His patients were dying.
“Did you know,” asked Grandma, “that the fear of being touched is called aphenphosmphobia?” My mother rolled her eyes.
“What’s the movie about, Gary?” “The moobie’s about the Holocaust,” said Gary.
“Is there a script, Gary?” “Bring me that ladder,” said Gary. I brought him the ladder. He leaned it against the heap, climbed all the way up, and stood on top of Grandpa. Grandpa smiled.
Gary pulled the paper bag off his head. His silver hair tumbled out. The actors oohed and aahed. Gary blushed. He turned the paper bag inside out, and off of it he read the script:
“Thou shalt have no other Gods; Thou shalt not make any graven images; Thou shalt not take the Lord’s name in vain; Remember the Sabbath day; Honor thy father and mother; Thou shalt not kill; Thou shalt not commit adultery; Thou shalt not steal; Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor; Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s house . . . nor anything that is his.”
“Such a good boy,” said Aunt Rosa. “Such a good boy,” said Grandpa. “Such a good boy,” said my father. “Go to hell,” said my mother. My eleven other brothers groaned.
“Did you know,” said Grandma, “that the fear of the skins of animals is called doraphobia?” I began to wonder whose heart was a doomed spoon. Mine or Gary’s.
The best I could do for Gary at this point was hold him, and ask him what he was going to do after.
“After what?” asked Gary. “After shooting,” I said. “I’m going to Barcelona,” said Gary. Now, that really ceiled me. I would’ve said “that really threw me off the heap,” but I wasn’t invited to be on the heap. Wasn’t really sure I ever wanted to be on the heap. “There are these scrambled eggs in Barcelona,” said Gary, “I really need to try.” “Oh, come on, Gary. You know you’ll scream the whole way.” In the States Gary was just fussy. Overseas he screamed.
And then I remembered Gary’s problem with malapropping. “Barcelona?” I asked. “Barcelona,” said Gary. “Scrambled eggs?” I asked. “Scrambled eggs,” said Gary. I looked over at the heap. My mother was halfway out of there. “Six more years,” she yelled, “and then I quit.” My father gave Gary an idealistic thumbs-up. “Did you know,” said Grandma, “that the fear of puppets is called pupaphobia?” “Well,” said Grandpa, “bye.” “I’m not going yet,” I said. I was still holding Gary. I held him as tightly as I hold my breath when I pass the cemetery. “Why do you do that?” asked Gary. “Do what?” “Hold your breath when you pass the cemetery?” I looked over at the heap. Aunt Rosa smacked her hand over her mouth to muffle her laughter, but she wasn’t even laughing. She wasn’t even smiling. “Because I don’t,” I whispered, “want to make the ghosts jealous.” “This isn’t about you,” said Gary.
“This is about me and my burden of dreams.” “I know, Gary.” “I know you know,” said Gary. He picked a few leaves off the tin can and handed them to me. I put them in my mouth, chewed, and swallowed. A month later I was pregnant.
I stayed on the set until my husband, the black man, came to pick me up.

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