The Assembler of Parts: A Novel (8 page)

Nana was miffed when Ned returned to his seat next to her. She looked quickly around the room and saw it was too late to return my arms to the sack’s secrecy. Ned said, “We checked out an old wood bench on the other side. It’s a beauty.” Nana stared at him. We were called after a few minutes of silent waiting.

The nurse slid the rest of me out of the casing, removed my shirt and diaper and put me on a scale. I had gained almost four pounds. She wrapped a tape around my head and wrote a number in my chart. She slid a ruler under me and stretched out my legs and wrote again.

“Growing like a weed, Mrs. Jackson. You’re doing a real good job.” Then she looked at me. “We’ve got something special for you today, baby girl.” She winked at my mother and said softly, “Shots.” She wrapped me in a pink blanket, handed me to Mother, and brought us to the examining room where for fifteen minutes I studied the cartoon forms of animals painted on the walls. In real life, only monkeys and porpoises smile. On Dr. Burke’s wall, the lips of every species—aardvark to zebra—curved up into big expressions of glee. On the way home, both my thighs aching from that nurse’s promise of something special, I saw those smiling rabbits and puppies and fawns and mice. For the remainder of my life, I would be wary of happy animals.

Burke wore a backwards baseball cap and a pin-striped Yankees shirt. He greeted Mother with a “Kate,” Nana with a “Mrs.,” and Ned with a “Hmm” when he heard him blurt out, even before their handshake had concluded, “You ought to look into switching her two big toes to her hands. Seems like the thing to do. To me, anyway. Shouldn’t be that hard.”

Nana groaned and Mother frowned. Burke said, again, “Hmm.” He tugged the visor of his cap and added, “Well, that’s not such a bad thought.” In those few seconds when everyone in the room arranged themselves around the exam table to watch Burke’s investigation of my growing body, I caught his eyes darting repetitively from my feet to my hands. Finally, the lids narrowed and he nodded a little. “I’ll mention it to Dr. Garraway and see what he thinks.”

He asked about my development and tilted his head in disbelief when Mother told him I was holding objects up to my line of vision and on the verge of turning over from belly to back. “Let’s try this,” he said. He put his hand under my head and neck and brought me to a sitting position. He waited a second for me to stabilize, then he removed his support. I swayed for a moment, first left, then right, then steadied long enough to drip a sticky streak of saliva onto my belly and shriek at its wet tickle. “Very good, Jess,” Burke complimented as his hand went to my back again. “She’s way ahead in her development. Doing things at two months we usually see at four to five. Dr. Garraway’s prediction seems right on.” He eased me carefully down and began his exam. For ten minutes he looked and he listened, pushed and pulled, and pronounced, “Heart’s doing fine. No change in anything there. Kidney’s not palpable. Very advanced in milestones. She’s fit as a fiddle. We’re all expecting big things from her.”

Mother smiled. Ned smiled. Nana smiled. Those cartoon beasts on the taupe walls smiled. The nurse came in with her tray.

Ned drove, so proud of Burke’s endorsement that his elbows jutted wide as swan wings. Nana hugged the passenger-side door and hummed. Mother sat next to me with her eyes half closed. I cried all the way home. It didn’t bother anyone.

Nana carried me into the house and gave me a diaper change. Her gray face was soft as silk and there was a sheeny creaminess in her eyes. She whacked the bottom of the talcum can a second time. “An extra dose of dust for a day well done,” she said. She taped the diaper at the corners. She slipped her hand under my tee shirt and felt my chest over my heart and nodded.

It was the only time I went to a cemetery with Cassidy while I was alive, the Saturday I went with him and my family. I’d return yearly with Nana to visit the grave of her friend, Carina, but Cassidy never again went with us. The Saturday we all went was two days before Nana and Ned flew back to Florida. We were all dressed for Sunday, everybody in black except Cassidy and me. But even Cassidy wore a suit jacket. The next day, Easter, he would come to our home for dinner in a ketchup-wounded sweater and a day’s growth of beard. But that Saturday his face was smooth, and he wore a brown shirt under a bright green jacket. He looked like the sod on the graves in that jacket.

He met us in his car at the entrance to the place. The graves were close enough to walk to. Robins hopped the grass in spurts, came to proper attention, and watched us with single dead-still eyes as we passed. It was nearly ten o’clock, too late for their singing. The low sun stretched their shadows to arrows on the grass. When, startled, they flew away to the budding trees, it looked as if they were being hunted.

Mother pushed my stroller. Father and Cassidy carried flowers. Nana held a prayer book. Ned, empty-handed, was the only one who spoke as we walked. “You’re getting a little bit of a squeak in your brakes, Ford. Let’s check ’em when we get back.” Father nodded his agreement. Cassidy sniffed his roses and looked at me grimly.

We found the plots easily. The headstones were on a slight hill just off the paved drive, under a maple tree that dripped red pollen onto their granite shoulders. From left to right, there were Carina Daley Cassidy, Rose Mary Ferraro Cassidy, and Joseph Delaney Cassidy Jr. There were dates on the stones. Numbers occupied almost all of the space on Joseph’s small stone: 10-23-1984 and 12-22-1984. There was room only for a single additional word, chiseled in tiny letters: Joey. Rose Mary’s bore the same date of death as her son.

Ned lifted me out of my stroller. At first we stood in a line facing the graves. Nana walked up and laid her lilies on Carina’s grave, just beneath the headstone. Cassidy put his flowers on Rose Mary’s. They stepped back to our line. Nana said to the deceased, “I miss you, Carina Dee. I remember all those years. Your smile and your tea. Your laughter and your soda bread. May God bless you in peace, Carina.” She quieted for a moment and then went on. “And God bless Rose Mary and little Joey. We had such a short time to know you, but loved you in full measure still. Rest in peace.” Ned shifted me to his other hip while everyone stared straight ahead. After a while, Father said, “Amen to that, Lord.” “Yes,” said Mother. Ned shifted me again and coughed a little before he added, “Well said, Mae. Well said.” They waited in silence a while before Nana asked, “Joseph, would you add your prayer to ours?”

Cassidy looked down to his feet and ran his hand over his bristly gray hair. “Ta the dead of all the days, good and bad, mother and son and mother, God grant you rest.” Even before he had finished his declaration, he was moving to the headstone. He bent down and reversed the position of his flowers. Now the blossoms lay between Rose Mary and Joey, and the stems, cut by the florist on a sharp angle, touched the fringe of Carina’s grass. Nana sighed and opened her book of prayer. She led us in the Act of Faith and three Hail Marys.

We walked silently back to the cars. As Mother began to arrange my car seat in the back, Cassidy asked excitedly, “Kate, maybe you’d like ta ride with me back ta your place. You and Jess? Give the old folks a little peace on the way. Room ta stretch.”

Mother looked at Nana with an expression half between sorrow and annoyance. But Ned said, “Aw, Cassidy, if it’s about the brakes don’t go on about it. They’re fine. A little dust in the pads is what it’ll be. Don’t go worrying about it.”

Cassidy stepped close to him. “Worrying lasts but a minute, Ned. What can come after goes on and on.” Cassidy’s face was black in the hollows in the bright spring sun. “And not just the grief but the anger. The anger, that’s what strikes the heart, Ned. All for want of worrying.” He turned his blank eyes to Nana. “I’ve not had a drink today, Mae. You can believe that.” She touched his arm and tugged the lapel of his jacket, moving it on his shoulders as the wind shrugs the grass.

“Kate, you and Jess ride with Joe. We need to stop at the bakery on the way anyway. We’ll have a nice cake with our tea.”

In the early morning hours of Easter, Mother came to my cry to feed me. We settled in the chair and she rocked as I nursed. Between the first and second breast, she grew taut in her frame and said absently, “He needs to stop blaming his dead ma for it. It wasn’t her fault. She was just driving the car.” She burped me and sat me on her lap. “There was no call to move those flowers. None at all.” Her second breast held on to its milk that Easter morning. It resisted the force of my hungry mouth. She put me down and I slept again. Scarcely two hours later I woke to the Resurrection hungrier than ever before.

There was early Mass in the damp church. Nana had dressed me in my new green sweater and tights. In the pew lying on my back, I watched her pray. She’d turn and look down on me every once in a while, her mouth moving in short bursts like she was chewing words. At one point her lips said, “Maker of Heaven and Earth, all that is seen and unseen.” I held up my hands and clasped them. It made her smile, pinked her cheeks.

She fed me sugar water from a four-ounce bottle when I squirmed during the long procession to Communion. I helped her hold the bottle. For a step or two down the aisle, she took her hand away. I held the bottle steady between my palms. It was very light. She turned her head to Mother processing behind her and whispered.

*

I wonder now* if there weren’t multiple purposes in my unique construction. The Assembler never really told me I’d find only one reason to explain my life, after all. So, yes, why not, then? I was put on Earth to heal both these victims of pain, Cassidy and Nana. A thumb for each, then, and other bones to spare as the need may arise. Truly, there was so much of me to share, to spare, in life. The miracle I see in the making, the Assembler’s miracle with me, through me: He shared even what I did not have. What was not given was what I gave. I see, I see.

T
he evening Nana and Ned left, a teacher came to our house to instruct Mother and Father in the art of communicating with the hearing impaired. She came three times a week at first, and later added a Saturday visit to make it an even four. Posture, gesture, eye contact, facial expression, body language; this was their initial curriculum. I watched them practice with Miss Lamb for an hour in the living room. They arched their eyebrows till their foreheads ached for the press of their palms; they squinted and widened, rolled and crinkled their eyes for Miss Lamb’s emotional demand. “Be happy!” she giggled, instantaneously lighting her plump, childlike face with joy as if it had just been plugged in. “Now, disapproval!” she growled and scared me with her countenance cold and clouded like a day of winter rain. “Surprise!” she exclaimed and ran her eyebrows up the masts of her elastic forehead. Halfway through the exercise, Mother said she was dizzy; Father had a rumbling nausea. Miss Lamb allowed a quick break. While Mother and Father boiled water for tea, she looked at me and waited for some action to attack with her quick gimmickry. I passed gas. She sucked her eyes deep into their sockets and tried to blow them out of her flaring nostrils. “Not nice, lady girl,” she said with the close of her lids and a shake of her head.

The lesson resumed. They practiced their stares. Mother and Father locked each other’s eyes so tightly it seemed to draw their faces closer. They forswore the blink until their conjunctivae itched with urgency, and then they blinked a single blink of capitulation only to start the stare again when Miss Lamb ordered, “Again!” Near the end of the hour, Father said, in the midst of a stare that lasted minutes, “You’re beautiful, Kate,” which made her laugh, which made her blink, which made him laugh and blink, to which Miss Lamb said, sternly, “Not now, you two.” The blinkless gazing resumed with a passion.

She
was
beautiful, my mother. Her face had an eternal softness to it. No sharpness anywhere. Her nose was small and rounded, the bony rims around her eyes thin and flat as sand dollar shells, her chin uncleft and modest. Her brown eyes held a dollop of gray in them, as if they were too shy to boast of their richness. Milk chocolate, they said, not the fancy dark. And when she laughed, they turned almost a terra-cotta color, like those tiny pots used to hold sprays of flowers. Yes, there were flowers in her eyes. I saw them every day.

Father wasn’t so much handsome, as reliably rugged. The beard, when it was there, was bristly and dark, as if he had just stepped off the deck of some old sailing ship. He had that look of a sailor even after he shaved his beard— the deep creases at the sides of his nose ran down toward his broad lips, looking like they had been etched by the millennial run of river water. And there was that patch of baldness on his chin, not a scar’s legacy, just a hairless spot. When I touched it with the thumb-poor side of my hand I felt as if we both had just been rejoined with something missing. It always made him laugh when I touched him there, connecting us both to things we never had. But for all the rips and marks on his face, his blue eyes were pristine as an unruffled lake, clear and sparkly. Those eyes now grappled with Mother’s again at Miss Lamb’s command, held her eyes for another minute, and Miss Lamb had to repeat, “I said, not now, you two!” when Father moaned, softly.

They tucked me in early that night after she’d left. A quick feed and change, tired faces pushed into my eyes, a soft pat on the head, and they were gone.

I stared at the new mobile hanging over my crib, a gift from Nana, a carousel of colored ponies with forelegs bent in flexion. I fussed and cried a little, hoping to stir them into motion. Father came, shirtless, and turned the key. The ponies pranced.

For that month before my ear operation, Mother and Father seemed never to have their faces, their eyes, to themselves. Hour upon hour they gave me looks of approval, of love, of concern. If I cried out of diaper discomfort, Mother’s face would ask what’s wrong, her eyebrows bunched and her forehead furrowed. When I cried for hunger, her face was different, full of supplication but with her mouth agape and her tongue flapping like a matador’s red cape. When I lay quiet, fed, content, her face would beatify the moment with her simple beguiling smile spread straight across her mouth like the sea horizon. Father, in the evenings, was less perfect but no less persevering in his gestures. He had a way of bunching his beard to convey dismay at his defeat in deciphering my mood that always made me laugh. I’d be cold or hot, or wet or hungry, or even sometimes just bored, and he’d try his “What’s wrong?” look. Less adept at intuiting my needs than Mother, he’d at first panic at my persistent screams. The panic torqued his beard clockwise ten degrees. Another cry, pitched and piercing, would reverse the twist of facial hair, and another would rotate that black mass clockwise yet again. I had him in my power, running him in circles with my little imperfect voice. That’s what made me laugh. I began to laugh at fourteen weeks.