The history of my body, p.6
The History of My Body, page 6
Okay, I kept saying to myself. Okay. It will be okay. Just go down to the kitchen, get a saucer of milk. Remember the eyedropper that you used when Jillily had itchy eyes? Find it and rinse it out a lot to get the old medicine out of it. Drop a teensy drop of milk into the baby bird’s beak. Do it near an open window. Maybe the bird will rouse itself and fly.
Do it now. Down to the kitchen. Nobody here. Good. Get the milk. Up the stairs with it. Jillily’s gone. Must be in some other part of the house, pouting. Fine for her. Open the window. Put the saucer of milk in the shaft of sunlight coming through; that will warm it a little. Check the bird. Chest still moving up and down? Good. Now into the bathroom. Find the eyedropper. Wash it with shampoo. Rinse it. Rinse it again. Dry it. But wait—maybe there’s still medicine in it; wash it and rinse it some more. Dry it again. Hurry now, back to the baby bird. Stroke its belly with your little finger to let it know you won’t hurt it. Suck the milk into the eyedropper; hold it close to the little beak.
No, wait! Practice emptying it a few times into the saucer. Now—carefully, one teensy drop into the open beak. Oh no. Too much. Wipe the beak with the tip of your fingernail. Try again. Careful now, straight in.
But by now the baby bird’s head was drenched with milk, and it was shivering and a blue film was coming over its eyes like a translucent screen. My heart was beating in the same fast and slow pattern as the baby bird’s. I lifted it up as gently as I could and held it close to my heart, covering its trembling little body with chicken peck kisses.
But it stopped breathing and never started back up again. Its little head flopped to the side loosely, as if it had no neck.
There are times when you have to face facts, when the thing you least want stares you in the face and you just have to stare back.
The baby bird was dead.
I had not meant to put it down.
I could feel a pulsing, evil shape forming at the pit of my belly, moaning like a coyote caught in the tightest trap of all. I didn’t want to hold the baby bird anymore. I dropped it back into the shoebox and flopped onto the floor, positioning my back against the familiar sharp edge of the dresser. I thought and thought about what I needed to do, which wasn’t so easy, because of the evil thing in my belly wanting my attention, instead.
This was my dilemma: when a living creature dies, its ability to chirp or breathe or fly may fall into the void, but its body does not. The thing about that baby bird was, as much as I knew it was dead and that its body should be given at least as much respect as Mother’s Anne Boleyn, I couldn’t bring myself to consider sticking it in the ground. It’s one thing to put a mildew-eaten rose bush into the earth. All its life the dirt has been its home. But birds are another thing altogether. When they’re not keeping their voids at bay by flitting around in trees, they like to fly.
But how can you send a bird back to its home in the sky when the lack of flapping wings will pretty much guarantee it’ll end up right back on the ground again? I briefly considered the possibility of inventing a giant slingshot to fling it farther than our planet’s atmosphere so it could escape the pull of gravity, but the thought of the baby bird floating in space like one of the upside down cats and dogs on my pajamas almost stopped my heart beating. Far too much void.
What complicated matters even further was that, as I pondered my dilemma, I became aware of Nana’s heavy feet Mack-trucking up the stairs, most likely aiming for my bedroom with a question about why I wasn’t on my way to the nursery with Ignacio. That was when I made my second mistake. I lifted the bird from my shoebox, only slightly aware of how cooled down its soggy body had become, and yanked open my middle dresser drawer, stuffing the bird behind a pile of winter wool sweaters.
When Nana flung open my bedroom door, I was already standing with my back to the dresser. I’m ashamed to say I had a pretend smile on my face. Nana didn’t seem to notice, though. She merely told me that Ignacio wouldn’t be taking me to the nursery that day. She said that Grandfather was feeling especially poorly, and Mother didn’t fancy Ignacio going off the grounds when she was waiting for Grandfather’s doctor to make a house call. She might need him to get some medicine.
When I heard that piece of news I forgot about the bird. I raced to Grandfather’s bedroom, but Nurse was barring the way as if she’d known I was coming, claiming that Grandfather was too sick to be bothered by children and that I should go and play. Since I wasn’t children, but me, and I knew Grandfather would want me by his side if he weren’t feeling well, I started screaming. But then Nana came and said how could I disturb my grandfather at a time like this and dragged me away to her room and tried chicken-pecking me. I made my throat be silent because maybe she was right. I didn’t want to disturb Grandfather, but I didn’t want her chicken peck kisses, either. I wanted only to close my eyes and invisibly glide down the hall, right around that mean old nurse, under the crack in Grandfather’s bedroom door, up onto Grandfather’s bed, where I could snuggle tightly at his side and stay with him until he felt better. So I closed my eyes tightly and wished as hard as I could. Nobody could make me open my eyes, not Nana, not Mother, not Fayga nor Dhani nor even Sister Flatulencia, who had entered Nana’s room trailing one of the worst farts ever known to mankind.
You can imagine my relief when I learned that Grandfather’s bad feeling turned out to be what Nana called a false alarm. At her insistence I was allowed to visit him before dinner, so I opened my eyes to walk to his room. Everything looked especially bright and clear after all that eye-squishing, and when I curled into bed with Grandfather and he brushed my hair tenderly with his blue-veined hand, I studied every single wrinkle and funny-shaped brown spot on his face so that I could be sure to remember them for a new diary I decided right then and there to start keeping. I called that diary, “List of the Wrinkles and Brown Spots on Grandfather’s Face,” and, sure enough, more wrinkles and spots seemed to bloom on grandfather with every passing day, so it was good that somebody was keeping track of them.
As for the bruises on Grandfather’s arms, I’d already started keeping a list of those in another diary, but Nana refused to believe me when I told her about them, and when I tried to explain to Fayga, she insisted on washing my mouth out with soap. I decided to keep my Book of Bruises somewhere safe and secret for the day when somebody came into our house who wasn’t nervous about losing another Hearts partner and actually wanted to hear the truth.
Long before, when I was five and had just found out I wasn’t going to be starting school after all, I’d discovered there was a loose brick in my bedroom fireplace. I hadn’t yet discovered the comforts of Nana’s second smallest closet. In some ways, the fireplace was even better. It provided a tight enough fit to stop me from shattering into a million pieces over the disappointment of not being able to play with other children at school. But it had the disadvantage of leaving me frightfully ashy when I came out again.
Sure enough, though, there was just enough room for my diary right behind that loose brick in the fireplace, and if the brick stuck out just a little now with the diary stuck behind it, it didn’t really matter. It was mid-April, and with any luck some truth-liker would show up before the weather turned cold again.
My biggest concern at that time was to sneak enough time with Grandfather to be able to keep track of his wrinkles and spots and the bruises on his arms. I pushed the baby bird to the back of my mind, as if my mind had its own dresser with color-coded winter sweaters to block the bird from view.
But despite the troubles in our home, Ignacio and I finally did make it to the nursery that week. It turned out Ignacio liked to sing Mexican folk songs while he drove his big white truck, but, while the ride there was quite entertaining, I felt a pang seeing children riding their bikes and walking together as if it were the most natural thing in the world.
Once we got to Somerset Nursery, we were disappointed to learn they were out of stock of Shropshire Lads and Brother Cadfaels. I ended up picking a Mary Magdalene. It was in its bare root state, so my nose had to imagine its “tea rose scent with a hint of myrrh.” I knew from reading Sister Flatulencia’s Bible that myrrh was one of the Wise Mens’ gifts to Baby Jesus, so I figured it had to be fine for Mother and me. As Ignacio and I rode home, he assured me that I had made a fine choice and that it was good I was willing to take a risk based on my keen imagination.
I ran into the kitchen, shouting excitedly, “We’ve got our Mary Magdalene!” Sister Flatulencia crossed herself and left the room. Fayga’s eyes started wandering everywhere except toward the part of the kitchen where Dhani was standing. Dhani shot a quick look at Ignacio while curling a protective hand over her newly rounding belly.
My first thought was that maybe I shouldn’t have relied on my keen imagination, after all. Maybe I should have brought home a third Sweet Juliet, instead. I started to feel hot and pit-ish, so I ran to my room and flopped onto the bed. Even pinching felt like too much work. Luckily, Jillily jumped up beside me and curled into a ball with her back against my face. I breathed into her fur, my breath spreading a hot little circle on her back, and I could think of nothing for a nice long while but her.
But within a few days, my room starting reeking something awful. At first, we all assumed it was Sister Flatulencia, who’d being coming for years to my room at bedtime to make sure I said enough Hail Marys to save all the unwanted babies in the world. But eventually it became clear that not even Sister Flatulencia’s infamous farts could account for the sickly-sweet smell pervading my room.
The smell got so putrid that even I had to acknowledge that something was terribly wrong. But it took me overhearing Fayga tell Nana that she was convinced the smell was something dead trapped in the fireplace, and that she had called a chimney sweep to take care of it, for me to remember the baby bird. It was as if I’d put a padlock on the dresser drawer in my mind. It was pretty scary to realize that someone with as much of a dread of voidishness as me would have her own personal black pit to fling things into that she didn’t want to think about.
That was when I made another one of my ill-conceived plans. I decided I would pinch myself into staying awake that night until the whole household was asleep, and then I would take the bird out to the grounds and spoon out a little place for it in Anne Boleyn’s grave, praying that Anne would take pity on the poor creature and keep it company, since it would be stuck so far from its home in the sky, feeding the worms in the ground rather than the other way around.
Staying awake that late wasn’t half as hard as I’d imagined. I’d gotten a jagged fingernail from trying to push the Book of Bruises further back into its hidey-hole, so my pinching packed an extra punch of pain, which proved quite helpful.
The house was as dark as it could be when I cautiously slid open my middle drawer. I nearly fell over from the smell.
I had to concentrate on swallowing to keep myself from puking. I could sense Jillily rousing at the foot of the bed, stretching and curling her tail into a question mark as I opened the drawer. My fingers found the bird, which was so loose-skinned that it threatened to fall apart in my hands. I hurriedly wrapped it inside a sweater and stuffed the whole thing under my pajama top, breathing heavily through my mouth to spare my nose the realization of what lurked right below.
Suddenly, light filled the room. A nightgown-clad Nana stood at the door, one hand on the light switch and one over her mouth. The decomposing baby bird tumbled out from my pajama top, scattering feathers everywhere. Jillily leapt down from the bed faster than a flying roach, fastening her sharp little teeth around the dead bird’s head.
I don’t even want to tell you what came next. There are some layers of hell one wouldn’t wish on one’s worst enemy.
Needless to say, Fayga cancelled the chimney sweep, so the Book of Bruises was safe, but I soon discovered I’d been given a new name. You can imagine how surprised I was, coming down for breakfast the next morning, to see that Mother was awake at a normal hour and was actually sitting at the table with Father. But then Father started describing in shaming detail the antics of someone called That Creepy Child. He continued, “You know, they say people who become serial killers usually start out torturing animals. What kind of person hides a stinking dead bird in her bedroom?” It didn’t take more than a few seconds to sort out that that person was me.
I waited for Mother to leap to my defense, but she didn’t. She merely gazed intently at her eggs Benedict as if the olive circles on top were staring back at her. She stabbed the tines of her fork into one of the eggs, dragging Hollandaise like an infected sore across her plate. I altered my path and headed for the kitchen. The fact that Mother hadn’t uttered a word on my behalf wasn’t lost on me. It felt terribly unfair that someone I constantly worried about didn’t seem very worried about me.
Chapter Five
LUCKILY, THERE WERE a couple of people in the house who chose not to subscribe to my new name. One of them was my increasingly frail Grandfather, whose recognition never took the form of words, anyway, but announced itself in the lift of his walrus moustache when I climbed onto his bed and the meltiness of his eyes when I snuggled next to him, his veiny hand gently untangling my hair. The other person was Dhani, whose visibly rising bun in the oven seemed to make everyone else in our household want to avoid her like one of Sister Flatulencia’s silent but deadlies.
It became a kind of ritual that whenever Nurse would shut me out of Grandfather’s room, I’d wander down to the kitchen. There—with my feet tucked under the rail of the kitchen stool—I’d listen for hours to Dhani’s King’s English and watch with great interest as she ground coriander and cardamom and cumin seeds for garam masala, browned lamb with onions and garlic for lamb korma, and soaked raisins in water to make them plump and soft for chicken curry.
I couldn’t help but notice that the more Dhani’s bun stuck out in front of her, the more her mind seemed to stretch behind her to her years in Islington and to Delhi, where she was born. Listening to Dhani’s soft voice made pleasurable goose bumps all over my head, as if her words were stretching my mind in every direction with thoughts and pictures I could store for the relief of future boredom.
These are some of the things I entered in my diary about what I’d learned in Dhani’s kitchen:
1. Islington is the home of the football team, which isn’t what you might think, because the players are not encouraged to crash into each other on purpose like football players on our television sets, but to bounce balls on their heads, instead.
2. Dhani’s mother has a red dot on her forehead, right between her eyes, and Dhani once did, herself, until her job interview with Father, who told her he wouldn’t tolerate any hocus-pocus in his household.
3.In Delhi there is a holiday named Holi where everyone throws colored water and colored powder called gulal at each other.
4. Father likes Dhani in ways that don’t bear thinking about. I did not learn this by hearing him say so. I learned it when Dhani and I were doing our own version of Holi right outside the kitchen door.
This is what happened: Dhani’s back was hurting from being thrown out of balance by her bun, so she decided to heat up some leftover biryani for dinner that night, which I thought was a terrific idea, since biryani is even tastier the next day.
We sat awhile on our kitchen stools, pretty quietly for Dhani, and pretty quietly for me, until Dhani’s void got the best of her. She said, “I’ll tell you what, let’s pretend it’s Holi.” Then she asked me if I had any leftover dye from Easter eggs. I went looking in Nana’s smallest closet—fortunately, Nana was busy on the saved children’s wing—and, sure enough, there was enough dye to make colored water for our pretend Holi.
It was while I was gathering together packets of dye that it occurred to me that coloring eggs is our way of showing how happy we are that Jesus came back from the grave. According to Sister Flatulencia, Christ rose from the dead after three days, which is how everybody knew that Jesus is Lord. I still didn’t get the connection between colored eggs and an alive Jesus followed by a dead Jesus followed by an alive Jesus, except that if you leave your Easter eggs out in the sun long enough they smell a lot like what happened to the baby bird on the lawn, so maybe Jesus’ grave was as cold as a refrigerator, and that was how He kept from getting spoiled and why we can still eat His body and drink His blood in Church without getting as sick as Jillily when she steals rancid food from the garbage bin out back.
Anyway, those were some of the thoughts that helped me fill my void before I got back down to the kitchen. By that time, Dhani had decided that, since we had no gulal, powdered cardamom would do. She insisted I go back upstairs one more time to put on a pair of white shorts and a white T-shirt that Fayga could bleach when we were through, but she didn’t bother to change clothes herself, saying she was so sick of the wide yellow smock and stretchy-waistband denim pants she was wearing that she’d just as soon burn them when we were done.
It was a warm day, so the buckets of cold colored water Dhani flung onto my limbs while we stood outside the kitchen door made me screech like one of the wild parrots that riot over our grounds every spring. Dhani passed me the bucket and twirled in careful circles, arms curled protectively over her bun in the oven, while I tossed enough water at her for her burnable clothes to be covered all over in pleasing pastel patterns.
Dhani had second thoughts about using cardamom for our gulal, worrying that my pale skin might get a rash from being covered in gritty spice, but she did make a paste of some cardamom and water and put a dot of it onto my forehead right between my two eyes, which gave me no end of stimulation trying to cross my eyes sufficiently to see it.
Then she sat on the ground and cried a little, and when I sat down beside her, rocking with nervousness, she said not to worry, it was just that a woman wanted her own mother at a time like this.
“You mean a time like Holi?”
