I was born three years after my sisters. My father spared no expense in these experiments. My mother had been liberally dosed with cocaine, amphetamines, and arsenic during her ovulation and throughout her pregnancy with me. It was a disappointment when I emerged with such commonplace deformities. My albinism is the regular pink-eyed variety and my hump, though pronounced, is not remarkable in size or shape as humps go. My situation was far too humdrum to be marketable on the same scale as my brother’s and sisters’. Still, my parents noted that I had a strong voice and decided I might be an appropriate shill and talker for the business. A bald albino hunchback seemed the right enticement toward the esoteric talents of the rest of the family. The dwarfism, which was very apparent by my third birthday, came as a pleasant surprise to the patient pair and increased my value. From the beginning I slept in the built-in cupboard beneath the sink in the family living van, and had a collection of exotic sunglasses to shield my sensitive eyes.
Despite the expensive radium treatments incorporated in his design, my younger brother, Fortunato, had a close call in being born to apparent normalcy. That drab state so depressed my enterprising parents that they immediately prepared to abandon him on the doorstep of a closed service station as we passed through Green River, Wyoming, late one night. My father had actually parked the van for a quick getaway and had stepped down to help my mother deposit the baby in the cardboard box on some safe part of the pavement. At that precise moment the two-week-old baby stared vaguely at my mother and in a matter of seconds revealed himself as not a failure at all, but in fact my parents’ masterwork. It was lucky, so they named him Fortunato. For one reason and another we always called him Chick.
“Papa,” said Iphy. “Yes,” said Elly. They were behind his big chair, four arms sliding to tangle his neck, two faces framed in smooth black hair peering at him from either side.
“What are you up to, girlies?” He would laugh and put his magazine down.
“Tell us how you thought of us,” they demanded.
I leaned on his knee and looked into his good heavy face. “Please, Papa,” I begged, “tell us the Rose Garden.”
He would puff and tease and refuse and we would coax. Finally Arty would be sitting in his lap with Papa’s arms around him and Chick would be in Lily’s lap, and I would lean against Lily’s shoulder while Elly and Iphy sat cross-legged on the floor with their four arms behind them like Gothic struts supporting their hunched shoulders, and Al would laugh and tell the story.
“It was in Oregon, up in Portland, which they call the Rose City, though I never got in gear to do anything about it until a year or so later when we were stuck in Fort Lauderdale.”
He had been restless one day, troubled by business boondoggles. He drove up into a park on a hillside and got out for a walk. “You could see for miles from up there. And there was a big rose garden with arbors and trellises and fountains. The paths were brick and wound in and out.” He sat on a step leading from one terrace to another and stared listlessly at the experimental roses. “It was a test garden, and the colors were … designed. Striped and layered. One color inside the petal and another color outside.
“I was mad at Maribelle. She was a pinhead who’d been with your mother and me for a long while. She was trying to hold me up for a raise I couldn’t afford.”
The roses started him thinking, how the oddity of them was beautiful and how that oddity was contrived to give them value. “It just struck me—clear and complete all at once—no long figuring about it.” He realized that children could be designed. “And I thought to myself, now that would be a rose garden worthy of a man’s interest!”
We children would smile and hug him and he would grin around at us and send the twins for a pot of cocoa from the drink wagon and me for a bag of popcorn because the red-haired girls would just throw it out when they finished closing the concession anyway. And we would all be cozy in the warm booth of the van, eating popcorn and drinking cocoa and feeling like Papa’s roses.
2
NOTES FOR NOW
The Joy of the Worm
Now Crystal Lil holds the phone receiver clenched against her long flat tit while she howls up the stairwell, “Forty-one!,” meaning that the red-haired, zit-skinned, defrocked Benedictine in room Number 41 has another phone call and should come running down the three flights of stairs and take this intruding burden off Lil’s confused mind. She puts a patented plastic amplifier against the earpiece when she answers the phone and turns the knob on her hearing aid to high and screams, “What! What!” into the mouthpiece until she gets a number back. That number she will shriek up the mildewed staircase until someone comes down or she gets tired.
I am never sure how deaf she is. She always hears the ring of the pay phone in the hall but she may pick up its vibration in her slipper heels. She is also blind. Her thick, pink plastic glasses project huge filmy eyes. The blurred red spurts across her whites like a bad egg.
Forty-one rattles down the stairs and grabs the receiver. He is in constant communication with acquaintances on the edge of the clergy, cultivating them in hopes of slinking back into his collar. His anxious muttering into the phone begins as Crystal Lil careens back into her room. She leaves her door open to the hallway.
Her window looks onto the sidewalk in front of the building. Her television is on with the volume high. She sits on the backless kitchen chair, feels around for the large magnifying glass until she finds it on top of the TV, and then leans close, her nose scant inches from the screen, pumping the lens in and out before her eyes in a constant struggle to focus an image among the dots. When I come through the hall I can see the grey light flickering through the lens onto the eager blindness of her face.
Being called “Manager” explains, for Crystal Lil, why no bills come to her, why her room is free, and why the small check arrives for her each month. She is adamant in her duties as rent collector and enfeebled watchdog. The phone is part of the deal.
When Crystal Lil howls, “Twenty-one!,” which is my room number, I stop by my door to grab the goat wig from its nail and jam it onto my bald pate before I take the single flight of stairs in a series of one-legged hops that is hard on my knees and ankles but disguises my usual shuffle. I pitch my voice high and loud, an octave into the falsetto. “Thank you!” I shriek at her gaping mouth. Her gums are knobby and a faintly iridescent green—shiny where the teeth were. I wear the same wig when I go out. I don’t trust Lil’s blindness or her deafness to disguise me completely. I am, after all, her daughter. She might harbor some decayed hormonal recognition of my rhythms that could penetrate even the wall of refusal her body has thrown up against the world.
When Lil calls, “Thirty-five!” up the stairwell, I wobble over to the door and stare one-eyed through the hole drilled next to the lock. When “Thirty-five” comes hurtling down the staircase, I get an instant glimpse of her long legs, sometimes flashing bare through the slits in her startling green kimono. I lean my head against the door and listen to her strong young voice shouting at Lil and then dropping to its normal urgency on the phone. Number Thirty-five is my daughter, Miranda. Miranda is a popular girl, tall and well shaped. She gets phone calls every evening before she leaves for work. Miranda does not try to disguise herself from her grandmother. She believes herself to be an orphan named Barker. And Crystal Lil herself must imagine that Miranda is just one more of the gaudy females who trail their sex like slug slime over the rooms for a month at a time before moving on. Perhaps the fact that Miranda has lived here in the big apartment for three years has never penetrated to Lil. How would she notice that the same “Thirty-five” always answered the call? They have no bridge to each other. I am the only link between them and neither of them knows me. Miranda, though, has far less reason to remember me than the old woman does.
This is my selfish pleasure, to watch unseen. It wouldn’t give them pleasure to know me for who I am. It could kill Lily, bringing back all the rot of the old pain. Or she might hate me f
or surviving when all her other treasures have sunk into mold. As for Miranda, I can’t be sure what it would do to her to know her real mother. I imagine her bright spine cringing and slumping and staying that way. She makes a gallant orphan.
We are all three Binewskis, though only Lily claims the name. I am just “Number Twenty-one” to Crystal Lil. Or “McGurk, the cripple in Twenty-one.” Miranda is more colorful. I’ve heard her whispering to friends as they pass my door, “The dwarf in Twenty-one,” or “The old albino hunchback in Twenty-one.”
I rarely need to speak to either of them. Lil puts the rent checks in a basket just inside her open door and I reach to get them. On Thursdays I take out the garbage and Lily thinks nothing of it.
Miranda says hello in the hall. I nod. Occasionally she tries to chat me up on the stairs. I am distant and brief and escape as quickly as possible with my heart pounding like a burglar’s.
Lily chose to forget me and I choose not to remind her, but I am terrified of seeing shame or disgust in my daughter’s face. It would kill me. So I stalk and tend them both secretly, like a midnight gardener.
Lillian Hinchcliff Binewski—Crystal Lil—is tall and thin. Her breasts hang in flaps at her waist but her carriage is still erect. She has the long-faced, thin-nosed stamp of the Protestant aristocrat. She never goes out without a hat, usually a tweed hiker with the brim pulled so far down over her pink glasses that she is forced to throw her head up and back to catch what faint light and movement her eyes are willing to deal with. Draped with a few dead rodents she could slip unsuspected into cucumber luncheons.
Following Lily is easy. Her long Bostonian body lurches from one touch point to the next at an impressive clip. She is suspicious and fearless and her progress is alarming. She never passes any vertical shape without grabbing it and feeling it to make sure what it is. Telephone poles, stop signs—she runs at them, catches hold as though just saved from falling, gives them an exploratory rub with each hand, and then, tossing her head back, pushes off toward the next upright shadow that smears across her eye. Lily also uses humans this way. I have seen her move through twenty blocks of crowded noontime sidewalks, swinging from one startled pedestrian to another, grabbing one by a shoulder, patting in examination, while stretching out an arm to snatch at the breasts of the next one in her path. When someone takes offense, snaps or swears or pushes her away, she reels only momentarily before the next body presents itself and she hurtles on, using body after body as handholds through the air.
I toddle along behind. Twenty feet between us is complete protection from her noticing. It intrigues me to see people pause and stare after her as she lunges on her desperate way. Some wide-minded type with a textbook under his arm, surprised at his own stifled impulse to backhand her for using him as a trapeze, a little ashamed, gawks in her wake. Then he turns and sees me, humping along and looking directly into his eyes. The double image scars him. My mother, on the street alone, can be written off with the gentle oddities of rambling mumblers, drunks, and beggars, but when I come twenty feet behind, there is an ice moment. Even the smug feel it. They go home and tell their wives that the streets of Portland are filled with weirdos. Their dreams weave a bent linkage between the wild old woman and the hunchbacked dwarf. Or they think we are residents of an institutional halfway house, or that the circus is in town.
A few times a week, apparently convinced that she is in Boston, Crystal Lil struggles up the hill to a big house on Vista Avenue. She runs at the wrought-iron fence, galloping her hands along it, searching for something. Then she stands with her mouth hanging open, an elastic strand of spittle bridging her jaws, and waits on the sidewalk in front of the door. Probably she can’t actually make out the shape of the dormer windows, but she waves at them. Occasionally she grabs a pedestrian and shouts, “I was born there! In the Rose Room! Mama gave us tea in the solarium!” When her captive escapes, she lapses into murmuring. She doesn’t register that the Georgian brick is now an expensive condominium. She waits for some old dog or servant to wander out and discover her with tears of joy, the prodigal come home after all these years. Maybe she dreams she’ll be taken in and cosseted by her own mother, tucked up cozy in a virgin bed. Only the slim professional men go in and out, sidestepping her skillfully. Eventually she wanders back down the hill to her room on Kearney Street.
Crystal Lil, her door propped open, sits in front of the television with a pan in her lap, a brown bag at her feet. She takes long green beans out of the bag and snaps them into inch-long chunks that drop into the pan. I pause on the stairs, marveling at how she came by those green beans.
Lillian in the supermarket, terrified and angry, her long hands running over shelves, knocking down cans, grabbing at last a box and muttering, reaches out to grab an innocent shopper, thrusts the box into the woman’s face, shrieking, “What is this! Tell me what this is!,” until the shopper, in irritated charity, says, “Cornflakes,” and shakes loose.
• • •
Lily in summer, with the street dirt rising into the thickening heat, lifts her window and shoves two grimy geraniums from the inside of the window to the outer sill. Later that afternoon, Crystal Lil rushes down the sidewalk, grabbing every moving human by the collar, caterwauling, “Thief! Little bastards! Stole my plants! Thief!” And sure enough the pots are gone, only two faint rings left in the dirt on the sill.
Jingle of keys. High-pitched burbling in the hall. Lillian delivering the mail. She is supposed to leave it on the table in the downstairs hall. Or, at most, slip it under the doors. Sometimes she uses it as an excuse to come into the rooms.
Once Miranda, frenzied on the floor with her lover, did not answer Lil’s knock. The two, beneath a sheet in the brick heat of summer, sweating into each other, lay still, hushed themselves, and were shocked when the door opened and Crystal Lil staggered in, touching walls, grabbing tables, making her way to the heaped sheet itself, where it tented in the middle of the floor, patting the edges, barely missing the tangled legs of the lovers, who lay silent, watching her greedy investigation. After making a complete round of the room she found the table again, put the envelopes on it, and groped her way out, closing and locking the door. Miranda told me this when she was trying to befriend me in the hall, trying to talk me into posing for her drawings.
Miranda seems preoccupied with deformity. She has lured the fat man from the corner newsstand up to her rooms several times to model for her. There is no obvious reason for such a fascination in her own life, even if her living does depend on that tiny irregularity of hers. She is strong and straight. Her spine and legs are as long as history. It may be that the impressions of her infancy are caught somehow in the pulp of her eyes, luring her. Or there may be some hooked structure in her cells that twists her toward all that the world calls freakish.
Miranda is hard to follow. Her stride is as long as Crystal Lil’s but without the detours and distractions. She is also alert and mine is not an inconspicuous figure. I usually lose her within a few blocks. Either she leaves me choking in the dust or I have to duck and hide from her swiveling face. I’ve managed to follow her all the way to work twice in the three years she has lived in this building.
• • •
One evening, leaving the radio station, where I had worked later than usual, I saw her at an intersection. She was wearing dark green, a cocktail dress and jacket. She wears simple clothes to her classes at the art school so I was struck by the difference. Her makeup was dramatic and her body moved strangely, unfamiliarly in high-heeled sandals with only thin gold chains to keep them on. I followed her without thinking about it. Of course I would lose her but I took pleasure in the eyes of men on her body. She was apparently going to work. I trailed along all the way down to the Glass House Club. She was slower in her high heels. I watched her pick up an envelope from the doorman. She went around to the employees’ entrance and I slipped into the club itself.
The ceiling was an enormous mosaic of mirrors. The walls and carpet were dar
k. Small islands of light from the table lamps fractured and multiplied in the reflections. The room was large and crowded. There were a few women, but mostly men, several hundred, the tables filled, and the aisles between filled with people standing with glasses in their hands.
I stayed at the back of the room, slid onto a chair against the wall, and only stood up for the show.
A very thin girl was first, her skin tight to her bones with as little muscle intruding as I’ve ever seen on someone who could still sit up. She pranced around in a gauze veil and undid a few beads as the band concentrated on their bass line. The finale of her act was to pull a comb out of her tightly rolled hair and let it fall shimmering pale down her back, give it a shake, and turn around so we could see that it hung down to the floor (whistles). Then she ground her hips around until she faced us and undid the bead that held her G-string in place. Her pubic hair began to unroll in the same way, a crisp version of her head hair (table pounding), until a soft cloud of nearly white hair billowed out from her crotch, waving all the way down to her knees, the crotch hair and head hair blending. I wondered if she had to depilate the rest of her body. The bald man was chanting into the microphone, “Yes, it’s real, folks, give it a tug there, Denise. We’d let you come up on stage and pull the little lady’s hair for yourselves, boys, just to verify it’s genuine, but state law forbids, and you’ve got to admit, a few souvenir hunters could put poor Denise out of business.” She swayed her hips and the long hair flicked from side to side. “How do you find her in there? I want to know!” And Denise sauntered smiling offstage, more or less to the beat.