My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (9 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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Mother crept over and turned down the radio’s knob with her rubber fingers.
“Some quiet,” she snipped. She then scowled at the radio and began to examine it carefully, as if it might be something more than it seemed.
The very next night Mother did indeed make sauerbraten, but this time it was not to Father’s liking. He excused himself to go outside and smoke, and Marlene turned on the radio as Mother made a fire. They sat and listened to an organ’s cheery song as flames seared the logs a deep white.
Just as Father came back inside the house, the radio’s song turned to static. This slowly gave way to the sound of wings, then music.
“Mother killed her little son; what a beautiful bird am I. Father ate ’til meat was gone; what a beautiful bird am I. Sister saved my bones; now I sing and fly . . .”
Mother’s eyes stared straight forward, wide with terror. “Looking at this fire,” she remarked in a flat and breathy voice, “I feel like I am burning up.”
 
Marlene awoke the next morning to a loud and constant wailing. Neither Mother nor Father seemed able to hear it; Father went away to work as usual and Mother spent her day on the patio killing bugs. Marlene desperately searched for the source of the noise, but she couldn’t tell where it stopped or started. Was it Brother’s room? The juniper tree? The basement?
The sound grew so loud that Marlene began to see small gray dots; occasionally it seemed as if birds were flying just beyond the corners of her vision.
For most of the afternoon, she lay in Brother’s room listening to records and getting sick into a bag.
When her parents insisted she come down for dinner that evening, Marlene did not think she’d be able to accept the smell of food. But as she sat down, the deafening static leaped from the inside of her head onto the radio.
“My mother forced me quick to die.”
Brother’s voice rang out inside the kitchen.
“My father ate me in a pie.”
Mother leaped up and started her bony fingers toward the dial. “Some quiet,” she said, but Father interrupted.
“Some music might be nice tonight.”
“Perhaps a different tune, then,” Mother suggested. But as she flipped the knob, she found that the song was on every station.
“Only my sister began to cry.”
Father stood up and squinted his eyes toward the window.
“Is someone walking toward the house?” Grabbing his pipe, he excused himself from the table to have a better look.
Mother slowly backed away from the radio, her eyes fixed upon the fireplace, her hands twisting. “When I look at the fire,” she stammered, “I feel as if I’m being burned alive.” Her smile grew lopsided; she began to unbutton her dress.
“But there isn’t any fire, Mother.”
Mother’s gloved hands grabbed the radio and threw it to the floor. It split into as many pieces as Brother, but the song kept playing. Her gloves started ripping at her clothes; she buried her head beneath the faucet of the sink and began to shriek.
Panicked, Marlene ran outside to Father. But when she saw the pale figure coming down the path, her heart leaped. “Is it Brother?” she cried aloud. Hopeful, Father began to wave a hairy hand, and Mother burst from the house topless with soaked hair. Marlene’s eyes flew to the ax Mother clutched in one yellow, gloved hand and the large Bible she held in the other. “I’ll chop them all down,” Mother screamed, her torn dress blowing off her body. “The tree and our visitor as well!”
But as Mother arrived beneath the tree, all its new berries rained down upon her and she halted in shock. The berries shook and spun on the ground, and as they cleared a hole around Mother, she and her ax dropped down right through the earth. Father and Marlene ran over just in time to see the white line of Mother’s scalp disappear into a thick powder of ash, to see the ash harden back to soil, to see Mother’s Bible fall to the ground. Its pages flew open and fluttered, then turned into white birds that sailed away. The berries lifted from the ground like a swarm of bees.
Their mass moved toward Brother as if to attack him; they landed everywhere upon his body and face and guitar until he was fully covered. Then, as if giving him juice to use as blood, the berries deflated and fell from his skin one by one, like dried scabs, flatter than onionskin. Marlene ran to him, breathless. “Look Father,” she cried, “Brother is pink and new!”
But Father loomed quiet beneath the tree. He was bent over, running his fingers along the ground, searching for some trace of either wife below.
As a child, what fascinated me most about Grimms’ tale of “The Juniper Tree” was that the father could not detect that he was eating his son; it seemed that such a bond would somehow be—dare I say—tasteable. Perhaps this is why I was so impressed years later when I discovered Angela Carter’s “The Bloody Chamber,” a story where the young woman’s life is saved through her mother’s devoted attention and sharp instinct. I find the primary modern relevance of Grimms’ “The Juniper Tree” as having a great deal to do not only with the perils of mentally or emotionally absent parents but also with ignorance in general and the various ways that being uninformed can open a space for danger: Where are the things we buy coming from? Who is making them? How are they making them? What are our tax dollars funding? Which companies control our food? Hyperbolized as it may be, the original version of “The Juniper Tree” makes a great case for Knowing, for being vigilantly present and aware.
In my rewriting of the tale, I wanted to retain not only the father’s ignorance but also the original source of hope for the murdered brother: his sister, Marlene. “Hansel and Gretel,” a similar story of child abandonment, movingly describes a brother and sister who rely on each other for survival after their father’s wife has convinced him to abandon the children. Most versions of “Hansel and Gretel” describe the pair returning to live with their father after their stepmother has died in the same way that “The Juniper Tree” ends, with the trinity of a father and his daughter and son. I am not a fan of giving these fathers a second chance, although I accept that the children, in their goodness, would grant it. So I wanted my retelling to emphasize that although the children accept their father, his emotional distance has rendered him unnecessary in their lives: the children’s devotion to each other is what allows for their ultimate safety, and their happiness is not dependent upon him.
Although I altered the lyrics of the song, the plot structure of my story and the original tale of “The Juniper Tree” both rely on the transcendental and sorcerous power of music. The line “Bird, moon, fly away soon” is inspired by Bob Dylan’s song “Jokerman,” which is, like so much of Dylan’s music, a fairy tale in itself.
—AN
FRANCINE PROSE
Hansel and Gretel
 
 
TACKED TO THE WALL OF THE BARN THAT SERVED AS LUCIA DE Medici’s studio were 144 photographs of the artist having sex with her cat. Some of the pictures showed the couple sweetly nuzzling and snuggling; in some Lucia and her black cat, Hecuba, appeared to be kissing passionately, while still others tracked Hecuba’s leathery rosebud of a mouth down Lucia’s neck to her breasts until the cat disappeared off the edge of the frame and Lucia’s handsome head tilted back . . .
This was twenty years ago, but I can still recall the weariness that came over me as I looked at Lucia’s photos. I didn’t want to have to look at them, particularly not with Lucia watching. I was twenty-one years old. I had been married for exactly ten days to a man named Nelson. It had seemed like a good idea to drop out of college and marry Nelson, and a good idea (it was Nelson’s idea) to spend the weekend in Vermont at his friend Lucia’s farm. At that time, I often did things because they seemed like a good idea, and I often did very important things for lack of a reason not to.
Lucia de Medici was an Italian countess, a direct descendant of the Florentine ruling family, and a famous conceptual artist. She was also, I’d just discovered, the mother of a woman named Marianna, the love of Nelson’s life, an old girlfriend who, until that afternoon, I’d somehow assumed was dead.
Striped by the sunlight filtering in through the gaps between the barn boards, Lucia and I regarded each other: two zebras from different planets. She was a small woman of about fifty, witchy and despotic, her whole being ingeniously wired to telegraph beauty and discontent. And what was Lucia seeing, if she saw me at all? A girl with the power that came unearned from simply being young and with every reason not to act like such a quivering blob of Jell-O.
She said, “Up here in the wilderness I am working so in isolation, some days I want to ask the cows what do they think of my art.”
“It’s . . . really something,” I said.
“Meaning what?” Lucia said. I was pleased she cared what I thought, but hadn’t she just explained: when it came to Lucia’s art, the cows’ opinion counted? She frowned. “
Prego
. Watch out, please, not to back up into the fish tank.”
I turned, glad for fish to focus on after Lucia and her cat. An enormous goldfish patrolled the tank with efficient shark-like menace, while several guppies hovered in place, rocking oddly from side to side. “I am scared of that big fish,” Lucia confided. “He push his sister out of that water, I find her gasping dead on the floor.”
“Are you sure it wasn’t the cat?” I asked.
“Of that I am sure,” she said.
I sensed that Lucia had tired of me, and I thought that now we would leave her studio. Instead, she switched on the stereo and voices filled the barn. Suddenly my eyes watered; it was my favorite piece of music, the trio from
Così fan tutte
that the women sing when their lovers are leaving and they beg the wind and water to be good to them on their way. Their sadness is a painful joke because their lovers aren’t leaving but disguising themselves as Albanians and seducing the women as a test, a test the women eventually fail, a painful joke on them all.
I listened to the delicate, mournful tones, the liquid rippling of the strings, cradling and oceanic. There was grief in the women’s voices, pitiful because it was wasted, pitiful and humiliating because we know it and they don’t.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
“So you say now,” Lucia said. “This, too, is one of my projects. I think everything gets boring sooner or later, no? The most fantastic Mozart becomes unbearable after a while. So I have put this trio on a loop that plays over and over until the audience cannot stand it and runs screaming out of the room.”
Lucia’s project depressed me. I felt personally implicated, though I knew: there was no way that she could have had me and Nelson in mind. In the ten days since we’d been married, Nelson had changed so profoundly that he might as well have gone off and come back disguised as an Albanian. You hear women say: Before the marriage my husband never drank or hit me or looked at another woman. But with Nelson there was nothing so violent or dramatic. Before the wedding he’d liked me; afterwards he didn’t.
He had been my lab instructor in a college biology course. He was a graduate student in anthropological botany, writing his thesis on the medicinal plants commonly used by the rain-forest tribes he’d lived among for two years. It was rumored that most of his research was on Amazonian hallucinogens, so it made sense that he was often strange, mumbly and withdrawn—but a perfectly capable and popular lab instructor. He was blond and handsome and tall; he looked lovely in a lab coat. He came from an old Boston family and played jazz clarinet.

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