When Papa came in, he was carrying Mama across one shoulder. One arm locking Mama’s legs against his chest, he sat on the toilet lid, nudged the rabbit’s box aside with his shoe, and slid Mama forward till she was sitting on his knees, leaning into his arm. “Steam will make it easier,” he said. “That’s it, good, Floria girl, keep breathing.”
Grasping my rabbit by the folds in back of his neck, I settled him into my arms. “That’s it, good, Ralph. Keep breathing.” I’d had lots of pets, when all I’d really wanted was a dog. But we never had enough space. Still, Ralph was the largest of my pets. And there were small dogs that were the size of Ralph. I sneezed.
“Bless you.” Sweat trickled down Papa’s forehead. His chin rested on her hair.
As I crouched on the edge of the tub, I wished I could sit on his knees.
“Let’s practice numbers,” he said.
I scuttled closer to him.
“So, then…imagine you have twelve chocolate snaps. You want to keep half of them for yourself and give half to—”
“But I want to keep them all.”
“Division is about sharing.”
“I don’t like to share.”
“But knowing division helps you to make sure you don’t ever get cheated.”
“You wouldn’t cheat me.”
“Not you.”
“I’ll share them with Anthony.”
“So, after you give half of the chocolate snaps to your cousin, how many do you have left for yourself?” Papa’s voice sounded fuzzy as the steam flowers wrapped themselves around each word. Where the mirror had been was a milky square.
“Six.”
“Right. Twelve divided by two equals six. Twelve chocolate snaps shared by two children equals six. Now, what if you want to share those twelve chocolate snaps with Anthony and Uncle Victor?” He raised one hand from Mama’s thigh as if shaking a pair of dice that would spill the correct number across Mama’s skirt.
“Four.”
“Excellent. So that’s twelve divided by three equals four.”
I sneezed, and when Papa motioned to his shirt pocket, I reached inside. As always, his handkerchief was fresh, folded, because he only carried it for me. I blew my nose.
“I know you can do it, Floria girl.” His voice and the flowers became Mama’s breath—filling and leaving her without struggle—until her sadness melted into the hot mist. All at once her breath popped, gurgled.
I laughed, and right away felt bad for laughing, because of Mama’s sadness.
But Papa winked at her. “I bet you didn’t know mothers burped.”
“She isn’t crying anymore.”
Papa’s hand below my chin, he tilted my face, and in the center of his light brown eyes, I found my own real self, not Bianca, who was no longer here but who’d left her clothes, so that, for a while, I had doubles of skirts and blouses and dresses and nightgowns. But most I had outgrown, except for the green skirts and striped cardigans. Now when Mama sewed she made only one outfit. For me. Except sometimes she made a smaller outfit for the doll that stayed the same size forever, just as my twin stayed the same size in photos and in my dreams, larger than the doll, but still the same size she’d been before her funeral. Sometimes I loved the doll, because she looked almost like Bianca. And sometimes I was spooked by the doll. For the same reason.
When Papa bent his neck, his hair tumbled across his eyes, hiding my reflection. He ran his fingers between his collar and his throat. Where his shirt clung to his body, it was wet.
But the heat didn’t seem to bother Mama. One side of her face was resting against Papa’s chest, and her lips were half open, curled. When she spoke, her voice was sleepy. “You forgot to change out of your school clothes.”
I knew she was better, because she always reminded me to take off my brown uniform as soon as I got home from school
“I’m…soaked….” Her face moved against Papa’s shirt. Bunched it up.
“Set down that rabbit, Belinda, and dry yourself off. Give me one of those towels, too.” He dried Mama’s face and neck. Her wrists and arms. “I’ll make you some hot milk and honey.”
I followed him as he carried Mama into the kitchen.
Before he lowered her onto the green couch, he tightened his arms around her. “You want the radio on?”
“Close the window, quickly.” She started to cry. “I can’t believe I left the window open.” Usually Mama opened the windows at dawn, when everyone else was still asleep, and closed them before I got up. But today the window was open. “I can’t leave windows open and get everyone killed.”
“Hey—” Papa shut the window and took her by the shoulders. “Hey, girl. You’ve got to stop this. You’ve got to stop being afraid. Belinda, get a cigarette for your mama.”
As I reached for her pack, my thumb snagged on the chipped table. Where the white paint had worn off, the wood was dim and grainy. I lit a cigarette for Mama.
“Schaefer is the one beer to have when you’re having more than one,” someone sang on the radio.
To cheer Mama, I sang the rest of the advertising jingle, though I didn’t like the taste of beer. If I did, I’d drink Rheingold, because of Miss Rheingold. In grocery stores were voting boxes with pictures of girls who wanted to be the next Miss Rheingold on the radio and on the television for one whole year. Mama and I had voted for a girl with hair like ours, thick and dark. “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer,” the sign on her picture said. I hoped the dark-haired girl would win, because if she could then maybe I, too, could become the Miss Rheingold girl once I was finished with high school.
Already, I could see my picture in grocery stores for people to vote for. “My beer is Rheingold, the dry beer,” I sang.
“Listen to her, Malcolm,” Mama said.
When I finally saw Anthony, the middle of January, he said his ear was hurting and gave me two surprises: pink bubble gum with trading cards of foreign flags; and wax lips in cherry flavor with a licorice mustache. But when I pressed them over my lips, I felt someone else’s teeth marks in the red wax.
“They’re used lips.”
“I tried them on. Just once.”
I sucked at the ends of the mustache. “I got a surprise for you, too.”
Behind our building, where the bricks were gray with frost, I reached beneath my plaid skirt, shoved my crotch forward, and created an astonishing arc of yellow that made a funnel in the snow. I thought Anthony would be impressed, but he just kicked at a clump of frozen weeds, their spines curled and brittle.
That night I got spanked for playing nasty with Anthony. I didn’t explain that I’d just shown him how I could pee, didn’t protest the punishment, because I understood it was old punishment that belonged to me and was finally catching up—not for peeing, but for stealing the onyx giraffe. “Which hand?” Great-Aunt Camilla had asked, but Bianca had gotten the giraffe, because she’d chosen swiftly. In the other hand was an onyx bull, clumsy where the giraffe was graceful, but Bianca wouldn’t take turns, wouldn’t trade. What was I willing to trade? To lose? What I lost, I believed, was my soul, when I hid the giraffe inside a pair of socks and hiding turned into stealing because Bianca died. I wanted to return the giraffe to her, tuck it between her pillow and the domino game, but I was never alone with her coffin. Scared that someone would see me with her giraffe, I kept it in my pocket and only laid purple and pink paper-candies next to her elbow.
Those years after her death, Anthony and I became more like siblings than cousins—the only children in a family of adults. We both liked movies, and we had the same favorite DJ, Alan Freed on WINS, who introduced us to rock and roll, to Elvis, to Bill Haley and the Comets. We didn’t talk about my twin. No one talked about my twin. The day she had fallen from our lives, she had taken along all stories of herself, leaving me with fragments of myself that didn’t feel true. Stories about our first communion became stories of my first communion. Stories of how we learned to walk the very same day became stories of how
I learned to walk.
Till then I’d loved stories, because the relatives would spur each other on. “You tell that part.” “No, you. You do it so well.” In their stories, even people long before my time became real for me. Stories often gave me bits of additional stories that might not be finished until a week, say, or a month later. And not even finished by the same person. But always finished. Except for the story of Bianca falling. That story had no ending. Because only Anthony knew.
So many ways of falling. Walking from Mama’s hollow screams that follow me like screams of long-traveling birds. Now I’ll have Anthony all to myself. Already, I can see Anthony and me building a snowman, training my rabbit to stand on its hind legs, riding bicycles come spring. To see if I’m still the same, I climb on the sink in front of the mirror. My face is flat. All my bones have melted, and there’s nothing behind those melted bones. Frightened, I touch my jaw…ears…cheeks…neck…chest…waist…belly…legs…relieved I’m still there behind my melted bones. “Now you can let Bianca come back,” I pray.
Franklin and I had a long weekend for our honeymoon, and we drove along the New Jersey shore in the Oldsmobile we’d borrowed from his father. As a child, I’d yearned to live in New Jersey, because I’d pictured it as one endless meadow speckled with chicks and turtles and rabbits. From there it was quite rational to envision my twin in New Jersey, too, getting ready to fly back to the Bronx.
When Franklin and I got to Cape May, we found a swanky hotel at off-season rates right on the beach, with an indoor pool and those little rip-off refrigerators. Franklin was thirty-one years, two months, and eleven days old, and he had never been fucked. He wanted to reclaim what he had yielded to God all those years—yielded willingly, granted—and he reclaimed it with such fervor, such ecstasy, that fucking him felt holy.
Outside: waves and the half-light of moon; salt in the watery air. Inside: so many things this new husband and I didn’t know about each other yet. He had an innocence about him that made me feel immeasurably wiser, though I was just two years older. As I let my hands study the landscape of his skin, where it felt rough, where it felt silken, it occurred to me that already I was learning what I’d wondered about that day in the confessional—the direction his hair grew on his back; the four small moles between his shoulder blades—and I thought, This is what it’s like to discover an unfamiliar neighborhood during your first year there.
After we made love, I nestled one side of my face against his shoulder, one palm low on his flat belly. “Is this what you meant when you said you were trembling to make love to me?”
“This. Yes.” He kissed me. Hard. Loving me with his soul and with his body, and I could feel that he didn’t regret leaving priesthood for me. He had told me so before, but feeling it inside my body transformed it into belief. I wasn’t jealous of him missing priesthood—it would have been odd if he hadn’t—but there was a difference between regretting and missing, and being with other ex-priests and ex-nuns helped him through the missing.
“Fifteen? Your first time…”
I dipped one fingertip into his clavicle, rotated it, lightly. “I have a history of doing things early. It goes back to when I was a kid and opened presents ahead of time. I have a talent for sniffing out presents ahead of time. For a week before my fifth birthday…I played with a burp-me doll I found in my grandpa’s music room. Whenever Riptide caught me with a gift she’d hidden, she asked, ‘Wouldn’t you rather be surprised?’”
“Surprise me…”
I stroked his pubic hair, his erection. “When I told Riptide I’d rather know than be surprised, she came at me with the same story…how she was seven and still living in Italy and sneaked into her parents’ bedroom and opened a present intended for her first communion and got cramps at mass and threw up her first communion wafer in the aisle.”
“Maybe—” Franklin raised himself toward my palm. “Maybe the priest gave her a rotten communion wafer.”
“Tell that to Riptide.”
“I’ll give her the Vatican’s statistics on rotten communion wafers….”
“I felt like a thief.”
Franklin’s head came up, his Adam’s apple a sculptor’s final touch. “Opening a present ahead of time does not make you a thief.”
I thought of the onyx giraffe at the bottom of the file box with old tax returns. But I told Franklin, “A thief for stealing you. Away from Jesus.”
“That’s not my interpretation.” Franklin tunneled one arm between my thighs. Cupped me.
I pressed myself down. “I don’t know much about thieves. That’s not true. Papa always—”
“Here, now—” Franklin swung himself atop me.
I pushed up, against him, felt him inside me, urgent and deep. “Riptide Grandma—”
“—who is in this bed with us this very moment—”
“—grew up all tangled in guilt, and she’s done her best to pass it on to Mama and me. The way I see it, you’ve got to keep yourself free of all that shit. I mean, when something starts feeling heavy or cross, I shake myself loose. While Mama holds on to the same kind of thing and tries to figure out what it was she has done wrong.”
“This is not a…time to think of…guilt.” Almost. He was almost there. Heavy and swift and almost there.
“Slow…” I was swaying against him. “Slow…Think of Riptide Grandma.”
“That’ll stop me altogether.”
“When it comes to sex, she’s quite radical.”
He was thrusting himself faster.
“What I’ve figured out, conscience—her kind of conscience—is what makes you feel bad.”
“I think of conscience as…” Faster now. “…something to figure out choices. Something instinctive.”
Instinctive…
In-stinc-tive… a pulse now, the word In-stinc-tive… an echo throughout my body.
In-
stinc-
tive…
In-
stinc-
tive…
In—
“Franklin? I love you—” But it was Jonathan’s voice I heard. “You instinctively find the sun and lie in it. Like a cat.”
stinc-
tive…
In-
stinc—
…an echo throughout my body, urgent and sweet—
“You’re like a cat, Belinda. You instinctively find the sun and lie in it.” Another husband, same bed—“You inspire me, Belinda. You mind if I write it down? ‘Like a cat, you instinctively find the sun and lie in it.’”
tive…
In-
stinc-
Days, Jonathan works for the IRS, but evenings he designs greeting cards. “I know I’m getting closer,” he says whenever Hallmark rejects his cards, and—
“I love you,” my other husband, this new husband, was saying, throat arched. “I love—”
tive…
In—
Franklin. Reaching between us, thumb stroking my clitoris—
In-stinc-tive…
In-
stinc—
tive… an echo, a pulse—
In—
“Franklin? I love you—”
Jonathan buying yet another one of those ridiculous books: How to Turn Your Hobby into a Career Without Leaving the House. Jonathan daydreaming of becoming eligible for the IRS home-office deduction, of designing his greeting cards while watching our children. How often—
Franklin, kissing the sweat from my temples.
stinc-
tive…
—do I tell Jonathan that I can’t see myself with children of my own? And how many nights does he go on about our children—chil-dren, always plural—while I let him talk himself to sleep? Until one night when it feels dangerous to listen to him about chil-dren because he may convince me, outlast my will.
“Too much of myself is still missing in Bianca.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t want to talk anymore.”
&
nbsp; “I think it means you use Bianca as a scapegoat for everything you don’t want to feel.”
“Not with me. You cannot have children with me.”
But he does his patient voice: “You’ll want chil-dren before too long. It’s a biological thing, Belinda.”
I fly at him. “Don’t tell me what I want.”
He’s quiet then. For almost an entire minute, he is quiet. And then accuses me, “You only do what feels good to you.”
I kissed Franklin. “He wasn’t like you.”
“Who?”
“Jonathan.”
“I guess one more person in bed with us doesn’t really matter. We already have your grandmother here.”
“Let’s buy a new bed.”
“To make room for a few more people?”
“It’s still from that other marriage.”
“We’ll get a new bed.”
“Jonathan said I only do what feels good to me.”
“Why would anyone not do just that?”
“You’re cold like a cat.” That’s how Jonathan summarizes me when he finally believes I do not want chil-dren.
“What is it with you and cats?” I ask him. “First you go on about cats and sun, and now all of sudden cats are cold.”
But he slings the last words. “Some cats eat their young, Belinda.”
Franklin was shy around cats. Our landlady had adopted two strays, and they slunk against Franklin’s legs when we returned from our honeymoon. He got alarmed because he’d grown up with horses, and anything smaller seemed at risk to be harmed by his wide hands. Though he felt gangly because of his size, I found such beauty in the way his bones were linked. With most people you first noticed hair and eyes, but with Franklin you saw bones. Raw and harmonious. Rawboned. When he stroked the cats’ backs, it was gingerly and with one finger; yet they sought him out, leaned against his finger as if to train him in caresses he hadn’t considered yet.