CHAPTER VIII
Transmogrification: How nails became needles; how pustules, dessert
Friday night, Cornelius and Irwin at the table, a fading Mrs. Ekes already excused.
“It’s OK if Dilly comes to the wedding,” Cornelius said, “but you invite her.”
“She’s had a rough time.”
“Poor Dilly,” said Cornelius, whose concerns lay elsewhere. He dreaded his next words. “Dad? Abigail and I have plans. I mentioned her little shop. She makes costumes.”
“For actors?”
“Sometimes.”
“They never have money.”
“Some people like to dress up.”
“I know who.”
“Maybe you don’t. She makes just about anything and I’m learning. I’m good with my hands. You said so.”
“You’re sewing?”
“She’s teaching me. Cutting, the machines, everything.”
“That’s not a living.”
“It is. There’s a market.”
“Don’t. You’ll be tired after work. I know what it’s like.”
“I have to do it this way. Sorry.”
“Why sorry? The point is don’t work that hard.”
“Dad? It’s settled. I’m quitting the boardwalk, going full time with Abigail.”
“Cornelius!”
“She knows I’m not happy, what I’m doing now.”
“But I got you in. Keep your job.”
“Now we’ll be together all the time.”
“Even worse.”
“It’ll work. You’ll see.”
“Son! Every dumb so-and-so sits at a machine. Now you too?”
“Don’t worry, Daddy. We’ll manage.”
Sunday night, Dilly and Irwin at the table, a faded Mrs. Ekes already asleep.
“I worked with major morons. They sit all day and do nothing. They think no one notices, but I did,” Dilly said. After two months, Dilly was moved to Geriatrics, on the opposite end of Treatment Complex. Lionel had phoned Irwin; Liny’s friend at Treatment had changed his mind: Dilly was “quite seriously diligent.” More phone calls, a new position for Dilly.
“You have to try,” Irwin told her, “get along with these people.”
“No. I did their stupid work for them. I’m doing scheduling now and I’m just like you.” She smiled at him. “Efficient and practical. Whoever was there made a mess. Now I do the scheduling. The assignments fit perfectly.”
“That’s wonderful. We’re proud of you. And there’s something else.”
“Money. I’m saving all I can.”
“Good. We can’t support you forever. But there’s something else.”
“Maybe Mom’s tired but I’m tired too. It’s my only day off. She likes doing dishes.”
Dutiful Irwin condoned anything his daughter needed to regain her strength. “The point is, Cornelius is getting married. Sunday night, in three weeks.”
“That’s nice,” Dilly said because she had to. So he’d found a woman willing to tolerate a feckless runt.
“We want you there. For us and him, try to get along.”
“I’ll go.” Curious about who would marry incompetence, she asked, politely.
“We haven’t met her.”
His bride was bald, hunched, hairy, desperate. Leaving Daddy with the dishes, she went to her room to lie down and nurse a postprandial brood. She glowered in the shadows at her brother, married, wriggling with his troll. Cornelius, sex? He might be a father before she was a mother, Grandma and Grandpa oogling and ogling. She would be second, again. Swick? No. She needed a father as precaution, not entanglements.
After work the following Wednesday, she lured one from the boardwalk. He was squat, verbose, refused to try an egg cream but as Mom used to say, we don’t make babies with our faces. Dilly compromised; he reached her goal that night, at 9:58. Soon it would be, Our Dilly with a baby, we’ll have to help. Even if she portrayed herself as plucky, they would never let her down. She attended Cornelius’s wedding smugly pregnant, escorted by Swick. The father never knew, and no one knew the father.
Abigail satisfied Dilly: eight inches taller than Cornelius, pudgy, stumpy hands, phlegm in her throat. After the ceremony and feast, over raspberry reception sherbet, a beaming Irwin stood behind the seated bride and groom. His hands on their heads, “My personal blessings to both, my congratulations to my dear son and his lovely bride.” Overcome by paternal joy, he paused to catch his breath and walked back to his seat, tears falling on his bursting heart. Dilly’s grin was straight, tense, a double underline of pressed lips to emphasize her foresight. “Congratulate me too. I’m pregnant!” Lionel wished her good luck, hugged his beleaguered brother and left with his hands on his ears. Swick’s young wattles quivered as he pulled up his smile; he never even finished his sherbet. Cornelius was forced to drive his moaning mother home earlier than planned, while Irwin waltzed with the bride. But Cornelius beat Dilly to it only seven months after the wedding. “Brant was such a beautiful boy,” Irwin said to Dilly, who repeated vehemently, “I don’t want to hear about his premature brat.” Her efforts to induce early labor failed; she blamed her fetus, slow.
When they were alone, Irwin closed their bedroom door and cried to his wife, “We can’t have them live with us. I’m not up to it. Not you either.” Mrs. Ekes swore no babysitting, never, and not Irwin either. They would help support Dilly in a small apartment after the baby was born. “At least Cornelius is settled,” Irwin said. Mrs. Ekes only hoped.
Dilly’s eighteenth birthday coincided with the first day of her third trimester. Obstetric appointments were convenient enough, at Treatment; she worked every day until she couldn’t. On a Tuesday morning in January, precisely forty-four days after the birth of Cornelius’s son, Dilly bore a daughter. Pearl, proper name designating her inherent luster; Sue Borne, asserting Dilly’s majority and therefore her prerogative not to identify the father.
The twice-proud grandparents arrived at Treatment minutes after the birth. Congratulations were in order, Dilly thought, and she expected a large bouquet and hoped for a check; but all they said was, Well now Brant will have a cousin who loves him, and was Pearl a healthy, normal girl? Then Mrs. Ekes whispered something to Irwin, who said, “So you ask,” and he left the room, Mrs. Ekes right behind him.
Dilly smirking as they left, smirking at Swick, who held her lovely fingers close to his lips and asked the same question, she answered, “No.”
In the corridor, Irwin said, “That Swick fellow’s the father,” but his wife disagreed. Even now at her age she would never allow that flabby lug to touch her. She couldn’t believe it, not even of Dilly. Anyway the baby didn’t look like him.
“Not like her either,” Irwin said.
Well, she’d never let him touch her.
“No accounting for taste, Grandma,” Irwin said, and shrugging and chuckling, rubbed her wasted hand against his thigh.
New mother and daughter rode home to their cozy studio apartment with Swick, who planned, as he drove, to pluck a baby hair and have it tested, just to be paternally sure. She might grow to love him. How did Dilly know?
Within fifty-eight hours a mild rash appeared on the infant’s chest, back, buttocks and pitiful little face, light, mild, scattered patches of white raised dots. It worsened. She screamed, then whimpered, and never slept. Dilly phoned Treatment’s neonatal dermatologist, who observed Pearl in his office the next day. Plastic gloved and goggled, he examined her and diagnosed: “It’s a rash.”
“Yes,” Dilly said with only a dash of disdain, because her limp, pustular Pearl lay in extremities on the table, “I can see that. Doctor.”
The thin-skinned specialist caught her new-mother skepticism and ignored it. “Yes,” he said, scrutinizing Pearl’s bubbly scalp but avoiding contact, “eczema. What have you been feeding her?”
“Breast milk.”
“Whose?”
Whose? Instead of ‘Quack! Get butchered!’ she answered, “Mine, obvious
ly.”
“Obviously she’s allergic to you. Or your milk,” and the doctor pulled off a glove. “I suggest you experiment with commercial formula. Try the canned stuff. No mixing mistakes.”
No. She was not allergic.
After ten months of working at Treatment, Dilly was familiar with dozens of terms in the medical lexicon; she recorded, memorized, absorbed and overheard arguments among ignoramus experts every day. Pearl was hers. There was no reason to follow advice, or pay the advisor, unless she agreed. Dilly took Pearl home and nursed her, vigorously and on schedule.
Oozing milky blisters coated her, even inside her eyes. Dilly’s parents wailed, “Get a doctor! Another doctor!” At Dilly’s urgent call, Swick came to help. He looked at Pearl; such disgusting glop could never be his daughter. “Looks like Dad’s pudding,” Swick said. “Tapioca. Huh. Poor Pearl.”
Dilly didn’t want to hear it. She relented, fed her canned formula, and the sores disappeared -- all but the white flecks which remained in her left eye and roamed her black iris: nine vassal moons, bound to return in phased intervals.
Oca remained with her, too.
It was late, 5:26, when Sonja and Zennie left with Mr. Kurt, who offered the ladies protection under his umbrella. Coincidentally, they were all headed to the parking lot. Zennie was anxious about her new dress and her old, unreliable battery; Kurt obliged, no charge.
Swick put the Brakpond file and Dilly’s petition, ready for her signature, into his briefcase and rushed to his van.