But there is something. Something that occurs during that lunch, during my first meeting with Eddy. Something clicks, is what I’m saying. Eddy talks, but Eddy also listens. He is the first person in this newly met family and also, come to think of it, the first person including my adoptive family, who actually sits and just listens to me.
“Yes,” he says, nodding, or “Hmmm,” he says, or “More, more on the subject?” Or even, “What do you think?”
So it is Eddy I first tell of your existence. Eddy whose jaw drops, whose brow knits, whose eyes fill with sympathetic concern. It is Eddy who lets me cry in the booth across from him as I describe my fear—of going to a doctor, of visiting the ultrasound lab. I keep imagining stunned silence and some mystified pronouncement by a doctor. Eddy’s face is grave and concentrated as I tell him I fear that we are heading into a lightless future devoid of the written word. I tell him that nonetheless I am writing this long and involved missive which I hope that you will someday read.
“Of course there’s the big if,” I say. This actually just occurs to me.
“What?”
“If my baby’s teachable.”
“You’ve got to have some faith,” says Eddy. “Everything’s in flux right now. You’ve got to realize how little we know of our ancestors.”
“The hominins at Jebel Irhoud looked like us, but their brains were different. It’s too much to process.”
“Then don’t process,” Eddy says.
“What?” I laugh a little. “You’re actually telling me not to process? I’ve just met you, but I can tell that you’re the original processor, Eddy, you’re the one who thinks too much. You’re the one who examines your every waking hour. You’re the one who’s alive only because you process your reasons for living every single day.”
Eddy just smiles and orders coffee. He sneaks the bill from the hand of the waitress, but I snatch it from him. He pulls and tugs it gently back, and pays. We continue to sit there thoughtfully as people swirl in and out.
“I know,” says Eddy at last, looking at me with a kind of delicate distance. He’s being appropriate, but trying to show me that he’s fond of me in a newfound, stepfatherly kind sort of way. “I know today’s reason I’m alive.” He keeps nodding at me. I suddenly want to cry again, but I just keep nodding back at him. There is more stirring of coffee and sipping. I drink more ice water. I am waiting, but Eddy is lost now, perhaps composing pages in his mind. So at last I have to prod him.
“Aren’t you going to ask me about the father?”
“Well, yeah,” he says, “I was going to, but then I thought, number one, this is all too new. Number two, she’s got some reason for not telling me. So I’m letting you off the hook.”
Even though I’m disappointed, I notice that he numbers his remarks just the same way I do. I think that I was hoping Eddy would question me until I cracked and spilled my words. I think about your father all the time. I want to talk about him. But Eddy doesn’t seem to care. It is really frightening how expendable fathers can be in this culture. I think maybe I am wrong with the secretive thing. Maybe the better course would be to talk nonstop about your dad. Maybe then your father will become someone I can accept. So I do talk.
“All right,” I say, “you’ve twisted my arm enough. I’ll confess. The father of my baby is an angel.”
“Oh yeah?” Eddy smiles now, thinking maybe I am really in love and even might be happy. “Sure he’s not an archangel, just an angel?”
“Yes.” I do not smile back at Eddy. I look down at the gleaming cracks in the cubes of translucent ice in the water I am drinking at the table. The water from the vast and beautiful hidden aquifer below us, the gigantic underground source of purity, which we’re all sucking dry. I am missing your father, I am seeing his face, I am wondering if in any way you will resemble him or if your features will obscure your parentage completely. I am seeing him, yes, I am flashing briefly on the gorgeousness of the moment of your conception when he laid me down and kissed me deep and covered me with his soft brown wings.
* * *
I go back to the house, to say good-bye. The door to the house is open, so I peer in. Little Mary is sitting in front of the television. When I do walk in, she does not acknowledge me, but there is an odd smell emanating from her—more than the wild teas and roots I smelled the first time I entered the house. This time, it’s just a feet smell, something slowly going rotten. Behind her, I notice, the door to her room is open. Through that doorway, I can see pure chaos—a shockingly grand mess. It’s the sort of spectacle you can’t help gawking at, like a car accident. I stand there a moment, gaping, and then see that Grandma’s wheelchair is drawn up to the table and she’s snoozing upright. I walk past Little Mary and sit down to wait for Grandma to surface, so I can at least say good-bye to my oldest living relative.
While she’s sleeping, I watch her. I’ve never seen anybody old as her. I like the name Mary Virginia. Grandma Virginia. She has the softest skin, silkier than a baby’s, and her hands are little delicate curled claws. Her eyes are covered with thin membranes of skin. I think perhaps she can see right through her lids, they’re so transparent. I do know, from before, that she can stare a long time at you without blinking. She has not allowed anyone to cut her hair, I see, not for a very long time. Maybe an entire hundred years! It is braided into one thin white plait and wound into a bun. Her ears stick out a little as her hair is so thin. A pair of white shell earrings hang off her earlobes, which are fragile as flower petals. Most remarkably, I notice when she happens to yawn, she still seems to have most of her own teeth. Though they are darkened by time, her teeth are still strong.
Suddenly she’s looking at me, those bright eyes tack sharp. Startled, I say, ridiculously, “Grandma, what sharp teeth you have!”
Mary Virginia laughs, soft and breathy, and says, “The better to eat you with!” She has a very sweet ancient type of laughter that comes out in panting gusts. We laugh together. She tells me that she had a full French grandfather who counseled her on the importance of scrubbing her teeth with a peeled willow twig. She takes a cracker from the table and shows me how she chews and bites with the vigor of a young person. The strength of her teeth, she says, is the key to her longevity.
“What’s that?” I touch a long piece of weaving in her lap. She shows me that she is making a belt, finger-weaving it from strands of yarn, braiding a sash with such precision that it will look like it was created on a loom. She pulls the flat piece of weaving taut and frowns at it, picks at an invisible flaw. Here’s how to do it, she says, and makes my fingers follow hers. We work in silence, until she nods in satisfaction. All of a sudden, her eyes spear me, sharp, and she puts the sash down and folds her hands on top of it. Clearly, she has thought of something. I imagine her mind as a pinball machine, one of the old-fashioned, nonelectronic kind. A thought ricochets off over a century of personal memory, lighting up and ringing associations that only connect because of the speed and arbitrary motion of the original thought.
She gazes at me so long and with such reptilian stillness that I think she might be having a stroke. It is odd to look at her and think perhaps she has lived through the final efflorescence of human culture and thought. She is perched on top of the pyramid, Grandma Virginia, a tiny, pinched gargoyle riffling a pack of cards.
“I am pregnant.” I tell her quietly, so my sister will not hear. “Are there illnesses in the family? Anything my baby might inherit?”
Her expression does not change. Probably my identity, our place in time, the muddy river of reality, all of this is bundled in shadow. Yet the word “pregnant” may have registered, because that word triggers a story, and then another story, many of them. Listening, I realize that her tales are so practiced that Grandma Virginia probably tells and retells them all the time. And here I am, new audience! It doesn’t matter who I am. Her memory shifts. The narrative is all that matters. She seems to have lived out many versions of her own history. Once she begins to sp
eak, nothing can distract her. I hear the Story of the Two-Faced Child, the Tooth-Spitting Grave, the Talking Drum, When the Frogs Sang Like Birds, the Story of the Dog That Shit a Diamond Ring, the Unholy Mirror, the Nun Who Fed Her Baby to a Sow, the Nun Who Swallowed a White Ribbon and It Came Out the Other End White Too, the Twenty Dead Who Appeared at Mass, an Avalanche of Fish, the Much Confused Sister, How One Twin Killed the Other, a Weightless Apple, Boiling Rain, and others which I can’t just now recall.
As soon as she finishes her stories, Grandma Virginia drops her head and sinks into a motionless and rigid sleep. I wheel her into her room and stand her up beside the little single bed, then lower her slowly onto the mattress and lift her legs over and set them gently down. Her little tan moccasins stick straight up. I cover her with a bright quilt made of all different versions of yellow calico—a golden cloud.
When I come back out, my little sister is still sitting in front of the TV. She has on so much black eyeliner that her eyes smolder demonically into the changing screen. I begin to count her piercings—her ears have six or seven each. Her earrings look like twisted nails and screws. She has sprayed her bangs straight up into a black woodpecker’s crest. The rest of her long, thin hair—permanented and bleached and colored with those purple highlights or bleached again and again—hangs down her back in a dead and crinkled curtain. She’s made some changes to her outfit, added a pink bow to her hair. She’s wearing an incongruously sexy baby-doll nightie, ankle socks, and white Mary Janes. The cuteness contrast has an effect even creepier than when she dressed in full-on Goth. She’s sort of a nightmare kitten.
“Hey.” I sit down next to her.
She maintains her stony pose.
“Hey,” I say again, “what’s up with you?”
“What’s it look like?”
“I mean in general, what are you up to in a general way, and what do you think about what’s happening?”
“What what’s happening?”
“You know, the world changing, us going backward maybe, what they’re finding out.”
She looks at me with black contempt. Her lips part in a snarl and the pink bow in her hair bobs up and down like a sinister butterfly. She nods as she speaks, agreeing with herself.
“You’re just a stinking slut. You suck, you impostor. You’re not my sister, you’re an STD. You’re a piece of syphilis.”
Her hatred is simple. Predictable. Her outfit keeps throwing me—cutie-pie vampire. But I tear my gaze away and try to hold my own.
“You’re suffering from misplaced self-disgust,” I tell her. “Your feelings have nothing to do with me. I’ve never hurt you.”
“And I heard you tell Grandma you’re pregnant, but I can see it anyway,” she sneers. “You’re such a whore.”
“Oh, really. How do you think being pregnant makes me a whore?”
My heart is surging but I keep my voice calm. I’ve always found that the best way to deflect hostility is to ask questions. But Little Mary is like a politician, adept at not answering the question asked but sticking hard to her own agenda. She stays on the attack. There’s a frilly white garter on her leg.
“You got adopted out and grew up rich and think you’re smart as hell, but you’re not even a good Catholic. You had premarital sex! Ooh!” She opens her painted eyes wide and screws up her mouth like a wooden doll’s. I want to slap her. She sees how close she’s come, smells blood.
“You probably fucked a priest and now your baby’s gonna be a monkey. And it won’t get born with a silver spoon in its mouth, it’ll be wearing a little black and white collar like so—” Little Mary jumps up and begins to dance around making hooh-hooh monkey sounds and putting her fingers to her neck. She’s talented. She’s like the dark side, the devil version of her supersmart dad, Eddy.
“You’re possessed,” I tell her, and embarrassingly, my voice squeaks. “Your brain’s all cooked on meth.”
“Oh yeah!” She cocks her fists. “Oh yeah! Let’s go!”
But then she slumps down and in a typical display of sick emotional lability begins to cry. Fat tears swell from her eyes.
“Don’t tell Daddy, don’t tell Mom, okay?”
“I think they know. They live around you. For godsakes, they smell your room. I can smell it from here.”
“Will you help me clean it, huh?”
I look at her, my mouth drops open. She’s just met the sister she didn’t know existed and she wants me to help clean her room? It is so bizarre that I might be charmed, in a weird way, were it not for the room itself. That unnatural disaster. I stand up and follow her to the open door.
Little Mary’s room has the odor of rank socks, dried blood, spoiled cheese, girl sweat, and Secret, a miasma that seeps out of the open door. The room is knee-deep in dirty clothes she’s packed down and walked on—sort of a new conglomerate flooring. Within the stratified layers of clothing I can see potato and corn chip bags, cans of pop she hasn’t even drunk dry. A tiny haze of baby flies circles an old can of orange Sunkist. Stuff is balled up, pasted together with sparkle glue, thrown on the wall, smearing the windows. Spray-can confetti hangs off the fancy fanlight fixture. Bras and thongs, those are every place I look. Pink glitter thongs, black ones, gold lamé, sequined, lace spiderweb and zipper thongs, thongs with little devils on them. Little Mary has undressed by kicking them up onto the blades of the fan. The curtains are balled up around the cockeyed rods and there’s broken glass sifted over one entire corner of clothing-floor.
“It’s your mom’s job to make you clean this,” I say, feebly.
“Yeah, maybe,” says Little Mary. “She read in a parenting magazine that it is best to pick your battles with teenagers and that a teen’s room is her own personal space. But I’m”—her chin trembles and her painted mouth sags—“just don’t know how . . . too much.”
“I can’t face your room,” I tell her now, but I try to be kind. Obviously, she’s suffering from some heritable mental instability—Eddy’s the source, most likely. And it’s all come out in the state of this room—the den of a crazed ferret. Worse. I begin to think apocalyptic thoughts. Little Mary’s room is like an opening to hell, like there’s a crack in it that goes way down into the earth. While I’m thinking this, Little Mary takes a deep, sobbing breath, and edges past me, into that ninth circle. I step away as the door to her room gently closes and I reel backward, sit down on the couch. I move off the warm spot she’s just vacated. After a while, watching the nothingness, I decide that I will leave a note for Sweetie. I get up, lift my bag, take out a pen, and find a scrap of paper on which to compose it. As I am writing the words It was such a pleasure to finally meet you, Sweetie arrives with Eddy, in his pickup. When I hear them drive into the yard, I look out the window. Behind the pickup, I see a Volvo just like Glen and Sera’s drive up and stop. First Eddy and Sweetie emerge from the pickup. Then, I am way past astounded. Because my mom and dad get out of the Volvo. Sera approaches Sweetie like she already knows her. They all start talking. They must have worried about me. They must have always known Sweetie and Eddy. The explanation doesn’t really matter, though, just the fact that Sera and Glen are here.
From the picture window of the house, I can see them in the driveway, all four together now, gesturing and talking, a phantasmagoria of parents—I don’t understand it, but it’s happening. Now they are actually walking toward the house together. I am at the center of some sort of vortex. I can hardly maintain consciousness. I hold the strap of my backpack in one hand, and lift my laptop in the other, and slowly retreat. I walk backward, navigating through the living room, somehow, by subterranean memory, not bumping into anything. I put my hand behind my back and there is a doorknob. I turn it, and I back into the room, Little Mary’s room. I close the door, the reverse side of which is pasted over with hand-drawn green Magic Marker hearts, vintage stuff—a tragic-eyed Siouxsie and the Banshees poster, an Alien Sex Fiend T-shirt, a thong with actual little silver spikes in it, held up by a tack, many German beer
coasters, and what-all else. Frills, those too. Bucketloads of frills—lots of candy-pink flounces and bows. I turn around. Little Mary is sitting on the gigantic pile of clothing that is probably her bed. We look at each other. Her eyeliner has run down her face in two tracks like the tears of a tragic clown. She looks operatic now and when she opens her mouth I think that she might scream, or belt out a high C, anything but use a normal voice and speak to me as a normal person for the first time.
“You changed your mind? Oh, wow! I know it’s a lot to ask,” she says. “But this is, like, a big statement. Really nice of you. Thanks.”
I look down. At my feet there is a box of black Hefty Steel Saks, no doubt placed there by Sweetie as a subtle hint. I bend over, put my pack and computer where I hope I’ll find them again, and pull the first plastic bag from the box.
“Let’s put all of the colored dirty clothes in this one,” I say, holding up the bag. “And the ones we need to bleach, the white stuff, in this one.” I hand Little Mary another black trash bag. Her pink bow bobs and sways again, sweet and strangely demure.
“Your look’s kind of shocking, I like it,” I tell her.
“Goth-Lolita,” she says, almost shy.
She takes the bag and looks at me with something like grateful awe. I don’t have to bend over yet. I can pick up one limp black piece of clothing, another, another, off piles at waist height, off hooks on the wall. I pray that as I do excavate ever deeper there are no used condoms or old puke or large insects in the pile I see that I will have to peel up from the floor, layer by layer.
I hear them out there, now, coming in the door, together, talking.
And now I see that my prayers about the contents of the floor piles are definitely not answered—Saint Jude, I think, who answers hopeless causes. Please send me a clean pair of rubber gloves. There are actually layers of Chinese lady beetles from last fall’s infestation, but they are dead, and crumbled to dust. There are thongs like aggregate rock, glued into patterned bricks. I just heave those into the bag. But all in all, I think, even as I use a dirty sock to pick things up I can’t believe I’m seeing, all in all, considering what things are like in the living room, I would definitely rather be in here.