Mumpo was not quite three years old when he died. And you, Miranda, were two, stringing beads and eating vanilla wafers in Sister Lucy’s nursery. But you were nine years old before the doctors let me bring Crystal Lil home to the house on Kearney Street.
I was full-grown before I ever set foot in a house without wheels. Of course I had been in stores, offices, fuel stations, barns, and warehouses. But I had never walked through the door of a place where people slept and ate and bathed and picked their noses, and, as the saying goes, “lived,” unless that place was three times longer than it was wide and came equipped with road shocks and tires.
When I first stood in such a house I was struck by its terrible solidity. The thing had concrete tentacles sunk into the earth, and a sprawling inefficiency. Everything was bigger than it needed to be and there were so many shadowed, dusty corners empty and wasted that I thought I would get lost if I stepped away from the door. That building wasn’t going anywhere despite an itchy sense that it was not entirely comfortable where it was.
That was when I first recognized a need to explain myself. That was the time when I realized that the peculiar look on people’s faces when they saw me was not envy or hatred, but could be translated into one simple question: “What the hell happened to you?” They needed to know so they could prevent it from happening to them.
My answer was simple, too. “My father and mother designed me this way. They achieved greater originality in some of their other projects.”
For a while I told people this. I was proud of it. It was the truth. Only a few folks ever actually asked—little children, drunks, or people so old that they exempted themselves from the taboos of courtesy by pretending senile irresponsibility. I got interested. I’d throw the answer even when the question wasn’t voiced but was only lightly etched in the flesh around the eyes. I’d smile calmly and announce it to the kid at the gas pump, or the garbage collector, or a lady with a shopping bag at a street light.
Some, particularly women, would turn away as though I hadn’t spoken or they hadn’t heard me. They thought I was crazy. They didn’t want to encourage me. Next thing I’d be asking for money.
I worked on polishing my story and my delivery. To excuse them for wondering, to make them feel all right about it. I felt exhilarated by each explanation, but still they shut me out.
“Shit!” some would say. Or “Do tell!” The best I could hope for was “Born that way, eh?” Were they bored by it? Or embarrassed? Did they assume I was lying?
This mystery appeared when I first stood in a rooted house. I hadn’t understood before that anything about me needed explaining. It’s all very well to read about houses, and see houses from the road, and to tell yourself, That’s where folks live. But it’s another thing entirely to walk inside and stand there.
Al always laughed at the stuck houses. He hauled out his only bit of scripture to deal with houses. “The birds of the air have their nests,” he would announce as though it were a nursery rhyme, “the foxes of the ground have their holes.” And he would raise one finger and jut his eyebrows forward in his teaching way, “But the son of man hath nowhere to rest his head.”
BOOK IV
Becoming the Dragon
26
NOTES FOR NOW
The Swimmers
I, the dwarf whose ears are separated only by an oozing hemorrhoid, am now being punished for sentimental collapse during my swimming lesson. It was the soft flab over Miss Lick’s neck that broke me. The firm way she has of pushing her jaw down into the cushions of her multiple chins as she smiles at me in the water. I had set myself up with a splurge of vanity for my own malignant resolution. Then the mere sight of Miss Lick’s neck tipped me off my perch. I blubbered all the way down and damned near gave the show away.
There I am, soaking in the green air above the water, keeping tabs on the lifeguard who is fluttering winsomely at a golden-brown boy wearing, apparently, three pounds of grapes stuffed down the front of his wet swim trunks. The room echoes flatly, and four little girls are huddled in the water on the other side of the pool, swearing to each other in whispers that they have seen me in the dressing room without my swim cap and my green-tinted goggles. They are assuring each other that I am as bald as a baby’s ass and that my eyes are bright red.
With my eyes closed I can feel the children looking at me. They have stopped their games for a moment in the shallow end where they can watch me. I too am at the shallow end, sitting on the steps in water up to my nipples. Miss Lick is plowing up and down the pool in her ponderous and dutiful laps. The children’s eyes are crawling on me. If I opened my eyes they would smile at me and wave. They are just old enough to be embarrassed at their normality in front of me.
Because I am Olympia Binewski and am accustomed to the feel of eyes moving on me, I turn slightly on my submerged seat and reach down as though examining my toes under water. This angle will allow the children a clear profile view of my hump. I have never claimed that my hump is extraordinary in size or conformation, but it is a classic of its kind, rising in a clean arc and pulling my shoulders up, pinching my chest out in a narrow wedge. The top of the hump, if I bend at a certain angle, is as high as the back of my head. Now I will bring both hands out of the water and remove my goggles. There is some splashing from the children. They are impressed at the size of my hands on the ends of my short, thin arms. I smile and open my eyes so they can tell in the dapple reflections on the water that my eyes are a deep rose pink rather than red.
But Miss Lick is standing in the shallow end, glowering down at the children. I can hear her harshness. “Are you swimming laps or fooling around?” And four little creatures do not speak but kick off from the wall and chase each other down the far lane of the pool to escape.
The light is pale green and moves on Miss Lick’s enormous shoulders and chest. She turns and nods at me—a quick twitch of tension at her mouth that stands for a smile. She is telling me that she has saved me from the stares of idiots and that I am safe with her to guard me. Then she plunges back into the water and moves forward, beating the surface with the sound of a hiccuping cannon.
The children turn and come back but they won’t dare stop at this end again. Miss Lick doesn’t like children. She hates beautiful female children. These four ten-year-olds are long and absurdly slim, with clean faces. They are frightened of Miss Lick but not of me.
Maybe it’s because I am so old. They would worry if I was their age and they could imagine being me. They tell each other that I was “born that way,” which is reassurance for them and comfort for me. Nothing could make me hurt them.
But they are wise to fear Miss Lick. She could lose control for an instant and grind them to paste.
Miss Lick is giving me a swimming lesson. She holds me in her arms and mutters, “Tip your head back, arch your spine. Good. Now kick from the hip.”
Her face is big and serious, watching me carefully. Her arms and hands are warm beneath me. I lie on my back and squint up into her bulging face and know that she is the only friend I’ve ever had. We are in water that would be over my head if she let me go. I can hear the thrum of other swimmers beating the water around me. The light bounces off the walls and is broken by the water. Miss Lick holds me up. “Good, Oly,” she says, and she smiles at me.
Miss Lick is six feet two and a heavyweight athlete. She is not quite 40 years old and has 20-inch biceps. I have 7-inch biceps. I am 36 inches tall. I weigh 64 pounds and I am very old at 38. My arthritis is actually 110. But Miss Lick is even older because she is closer to death. Miss Lick has her arm around the bomb that will kill her and she is dickering to buy it.
“Kick!” she barks, grinning down at me. Suddenly the sting of grief spurts from my sinuses to my belly. This is all Miranda’s fault, I tell myself in rage. If my daughter weren’t such a fly-brained slut I wouldn’t be in this position. I could be a quiet, pleasant old dwarf, curling into a dry and sanitary death in my own blankets without ever having injure
d a soul. But here I am rocking in the arms of the creature I intend to slaughter. When I stop kicking and double up in pain, Miss Lick is worried.
“Water in your nose?” she asks, pumping her huge pillow hand gently against my hump. “Did you swallow some?”
Looking up through my smeared green lenses I see a roll of fat covering the artery in Miss Lick’s throat.
When I refuse to go to dinner at her house Miss Lick wants to carry me up to my apartment and tuck me into bed. “God, I’m so thoughtless!” she groans as she wheels the big sedan through the dark streets. “I act as though you’re a goddamned mountain like me!”
“Not at all,” I squawk, with my fingers clutching the soft leather of the front seat. “Not at all,” I repeat, grabbing with one hand at the dashboard and the other at the armrest to keep from hurtling into the dark well of legroom as Miss Lick stops for a light.
“You’re sure you don’t want me to come up with you? I could make you some soup. I know you don’t eat.”
“Not at all.” I fiddle with the door handle, and the door eases open at last and a crack of cool air slips in, dulling the hot reek of her chlorine flesh in the car. “I’m going to unplug the phone and crawl right into bed. I’m recording early tomorrow.”
Her big hand touches my hump as I slide toward the pavement. “Let me give you a lift to the radio station in the morning,” she urged.
“Not at all.” I can barely think anymore. If I don’t get away from her I will disintegrate and ruin everything.
“Thank you so much. I’ll see you in the pool tomorrow evening,” and I grab the car door with both hands and slam it on her goodnight and turn away, steering at top speed for the lobby entrance because she never pulls away from the curb until she sees me safe inside.
This building is new and Miss Lick could put a fist through my front door as easy as belching, which she does glibly. Miss Lick can belch every syllable of the name “Harry Houdini” on demand and enjoys being asked. Still, I lock the flimsy veneer behind me and then unplug the phone. I told her I was going to bed and I can’t risk a busy signal if she rings to check on me.
It is garbage night for Crystal Lil. I have to go home. Taxis are expensive for moderately employed dwarfs who rent extra apartments, swim at private clubs, and fancy themselves as righteous assassins. I use the footstool to stare into the mirror over the sink in the all-new bathroom. Straightening my wig, adjusting my glasses, I smirk snidely at myself because it serves me right for being such a flabby clot as to lose my nerve. Getting all choked up with sympathy for Miss L. A good two-mile walk in the dark and cold will teach my knees and ankles a little respect for discipline and self-control.
Fatigue makes me giddy. By the time I get to the alley behind Lily’s house, my head is floating several feet above my body and I have a bitter tendency to giggle. I can see myself and the view is pathetic. I don’t dare use the front door in case Miss Lick is pursuing her surveillance hobby.
The old dwarf rolls up the cat-shit dark stairs of the decrepit garage to get to the roof. Her feet hurt and her knees are pleading for a transfer to Bermuda. “Eeh,” grunts the frog-faced albino. Her hip joints have gone past red-hot to a temperature unfamiliar even to the flap-titted hunchback. “Hunh,” says the bald-headed mother of morons, as she stops to lean against the open door to the roof.
The air is grey, lit by a street lamp at the end of the alley. The garage roof is flat and attached at the rear to the tall wood house. The rain pops and silvers on the slimed pool of water that fills the center of the roof. The house fire escape sinks its feet in the roof tar. Miss Oly, the third or fourth Binewski child, depending on whether you count heads or asses, takes off her blue-tinted spectacles and rubs the sweat from under her bulging pink eyes and off the bridge of her wide, flat nose and then hooks the glasses back over her ears and settles them in place. Raising the entire flesh of her forehead and skull for lack of eyebrows, Ms. Binewski proceeds, with anxious care, to roll bowleggedly away from the cat stench of the stairway, around the edges of the rain pool, making for the first length of the cast-iron fire ladder. There she goes, humping up the damp, sooty rungs. She stops climbing and hooks her chin over the rung in front of her to rest for three breaths, thinking it may be time to get a cane. Or maybe a pair of canes hefty enough to help a burst toad of an elderly cretin up such flights of carpenterial fancy as those cat-slimed stairs in the garage without having to reach out and touch each sodden step with a hand.
She, this Oly, has reached the first slat landing of the fire escape and is hauling her thick carcass onto it with her spider arms and resting again—or, more accurately, peering through the dirt-fogged window of the room that looks out of this arse-alley backside of the noble West Hills, and, if those are tears puddling in the bottom of those wire-framed glasses she’s wearing, then this flabby old douche bag will be too blind to stay on the platform and will drop and crack like a beetle on the garage roof, next to the ornamental pool.
No, she claims she’s not crying, though her sinuses are trying to squeeze out through her eyeballs. She is, however, feeling sorry for herself because this is “her” window and the big dusty room on the other side is “her” room and Oly misses it and would like to crawl in and shut the window and never leave it again, but she cannot because instead of a brain she has been blessed with a flame-purple hemorrhoid and she is in miserable, though voluntary, exile until her little project is finished.
There, is she crying again? Or is she only realizing that if she had washed that smog-clogged hunk of glass anytime in the last three years she might actually see her reading chair and her hotplate sitting on the cupboard and the cupboard doors that open into the blanket nest where she sleeps with the doors snugged shut and her knees tucked up to her chin. This failure in the service of transparency is disheartening to the delicate mucous linings of the amphibious Miss Oly. Picturing her cranky joints curled in her own warm nest causes further heat and discharge from her cherry-pink eyeballs.
Quietly she slips the lock, pushes the window upward, snakes through into the warm dark, and feels the cushion-thick carpet beneath her brogans. She smiles her frog smile and considers calling a taxi for the trip back since surely she has punished herself sufficiently for what was, after all, an understandable weakness. Next time, she muses, I’ll simply stick my hand in boiling water.
I go downstairs and yell, “Garbage!” three times at Lil’s open door before she sits back from her magnifying-glass approach to the evening game show. Her white head moves, groping with ears and nose more than her sad, jellied remnants of eyes. Each time I look at her the white hair is paler and thinner, like spun glass above her mummy-grey scalp.
“Garbage?” she screams.
“Garbage!” I bellow.
She launches from her chair, leaping upward, neck extended, the tender underside of her jaw exposed in a flesh wedge aimed at heaven. Sailing the room, tacking from chair to table to cupboard, hand over hand, she locates her two wastebaskets and the tidy, plastic-wrapped bundle beneath the sink, clutches them to her breast, and turns toward the doorway, searching for me. I step in just far enough to grab the stuff. She opens her arms, letting it all go down to me. This is our Thursday ritual. To complete it, she will nod and turn away silently. I will lug the stuff to the junk closet at the end of the hall, where the big black bags of garbage from the roomers sit. Then I will drag all the bags out to the sidewalk, stacking them in the plastic barrels that sit there all week. That is all. We’ve done it this way for years. By the time I climb the stairs back to my room, Lil will be resubmerged in her struggle with the magnifying glass and the TV screen. Beyond the chant of “Garbage” we never speak. But tonight she cracks the mold. She follows me to the door of her room, leans there, waiting as I drag the big sacks past her. As I open the big front door onto the wet night, she calls out, “Thank you,” in a clear, unbroken voice.
I look back. She is poised, her milk-veiled eyes aimed in my general direction, her head
tilted back, listening. “You’re welcome,” I say, and she goes back into her room.
I climb all the way up to Miranda’s door and knock. Then I hear a soft male voice laughing inside and turn away. She opens. “Miss McGurk!,” smiling. “You’re sent by fate to try munching Gorgonzola and artichoke-heart salad while listening to …”
As she tries to pull me in, I try to pull her out into the hall. “Could I just speak to you for one moment?” She shrugs and steps out, folding her arms, looking down at me with her eyebrows pinched in concentration. “Something is wrong with Lily.”
Her eyes spring open and she sets to move quickly, “Is she hurt? Shall I call an ambulance?”
Gratified, I pat her arm, “No, no. She’s acting a little odd.”
Miranda hoots. “How can you tell?”
“No. She’s acting strangely. I can’t be here for a bit. I have to work. Could you keep an eye on her? Tonight? Just stroll down and listen for her breathing. You can hear her in the night if you put your ear to her door. She has a heavy sigh in her sleep. And if you can’t hear her, or if she sounds strange …”
Miranda hoists her eyebrows at me in surprise. “Sure. I’ll check on her. I’m not working tonight. Don’t worry.”
Nodding and waving, I retreat quickly. She stands looking after me. As I go down the stairs I hear the soft male voice call, “Miranda?” and then her door shuts quietly.
I stay in my room for a few hours, arranging the papers in the big trunk. At around eleven I hear Miranda on the stairs. Her footsteps pass down to the ground floor and pause for a while at Lily’s closed door. Then she goes back up. I find myself smiling as I listen.
I go down myself an hour later. The wheeze and bubble beyond Lil’s door is regular and strong. I use the wall phone to call for a cab and wait for it on the front steps.