The history of my body, p.9
The History of My Body, page 9
After I observed seven buses and twenty-six cars pass through the closest intersection, Mother and Nana’s voices became louder, with Mother saying a lot of what-do-you-thinks and Nana saying more than a few this-place-goes-on-forevers, until, a few seconds later, they were back in the living room and Mother was by my side and a pigeon flew past the window, as if looking for somewhere to land. Mother stole a sideways look at me. She must have seen something in my face.
She said, “Well, I can see Flurry likes the view.” As if she had X-ray vision, Purple Lips was instantly back in the room, and before I knew it Mother was shaking hands in turn with the grinning agent, Nana, and me, announcing, “Well, that’s that, then. Say hello, Flurry, to your new home.” But I didn’t get much time to say that hello. Instead, I was whisked down the extraordinary see-through elevator to our waiting town car, which deposited us at a restaurant called Chat Noir, which Mother—giggling giddily—told me meant black cat. I already knew that, since Dhani had a poster of Toulouse Lautrec’s painting in her bedroom. The food at Chat Noir was yummy, but I felt pit-ish that there was no Jillily under the table to savor a few bites of my pignoli-crusted salmon steak. I made Mother promise that Jillily would come with us when we moved.
But Mother and Nana and I didn’t get to our new incarnations as smoothly as that preview of coming attractions might suggest. First we had to deal with our losses, and there were many of them to mark in the month before our departure from Father’s estate.
It was a month of goodbyes to Fayga and her furniture paste, to Sister Flatulencia and her farts. The sorriest of goodbyes had to be said to Uncle Bob, who deliberated long and hard before deciding that a miniature man like himself would skip along crowded city streets only at great peril to life and limb. But he did relieve me of a great load, promising to keep on eye on the Austins in my absence. You can imagine what it took to say goodbye to each of them. As for Mary Magdalene, let’s just say that I assured her that I would always remember her, and she in turn vowed to keep me in her prayers. I’d been pretty much avoiding Baby Eros and his peeing member ever since the advent of my hairy tweeter, but I forced myself to send him a little wave on one of my last tours of the grounds, turning away quickly in case he decided to wave back.
I kept putting off saying a final goodbye to Ignacio. The fact was, he’d been making himself so scarce he was easy to avoid. I heard Nana comment to Fayga that he’d turned into a shadow of his former self ever since Dhani had left. I knew what she meant. I missed her terribly myself.
The fact was, my life felt like nothing but loss. I spent whole days hunkered down in Nana’s second smallest closet, tickling my nose with the edge of her cave-scented robe. It was there that I worked on a hymn to commemorate the joint burial mound of Anne Boleyn and the baby bird on the lawn. In the end I decided to keep it simple. I ran outside and sang in a trembling voice, “Rest in peace, Anne Boleyn, rest in peace, baby bird, help each other with your boredom, goodbye.”
But, over time, loss began to blossom into gratitude. It was a thank you for learned lessons to my first shiny weed, which had repaid my conversion from hatred to affection by producing as many descendants as the biblical Abraham. And on the morning of our actual departure, I said a heartfelt Godspeed to the saved babies. In spite of all their peeing and pooping and depositing pukey smells on Nana’s shoulder, I figured we were almost related, so it was particularly painful saying goodbye.
And speaking of peeing, before leaving the house for good I paced a final fond farewell—fourteen steps exactly—to the familiar path between my bed and the bathroom, with a tip of the proverbial hat to my duck-billed night-light, which I had decided to leave behind as a parting gift for Uncle Bob.
In the course of all those goodbyes, I discovered something surprising. It was almost as difficult saying goodbye to the bad memories as the good ones. Pinching Jillily’s belly, staring at my lumpy shaven head in the bathroom mirror, sneaking past the mean-faced fish at the corner of the second fountain, even the remembered smell of Father’s armpits made me moody; there is no accounting for the mystery of the human mind. It was as if there were pieces of me floating around that house of my first incarnation, like armless, legless ghosts with nowhere to land.
In the end, I had to find places in my mind for all those memories, which is when I learned another important lesson about loss: if there were no loss, there would be no memories, and memories are what you use to begin filling up your void.
As for Grandfather, it wasn’t my mind that I filled up with him. His home would always be inside my heart. Saving his ghost from aimlessly wandering the rooms of my father’s home was the least I could do to repay him for being my very best friend in all the world.
There was another thing I ended up saying goodbye to: pinching my butt and tweeter closed while I slept. Biology made my efforts in that department pointless. Three days before we moved into our new apartment, I lay on my bed doubled over with stomach cramps, my belly as bloated as Sister Flatulencia’s on one of her gassier days.
When Nana came into my room with more boxes for packing, I told her I couldn’t possibly unfold from my fetal position.
She scooted a box filled with sweaters and hoodies out of the way and approached my bed, looking annoyed. “What’s wrong?” I told her, and then she asked me the oddest question. “How old are you?”
A little insulted that she’d forgotten, I reminded her that I’d turned eleven the previous December.
She sniffed, “A bit early, but there you go. It’s the hormones in the chicken, mark my words. I’ll have to send Sister Flatulencia out for some pads.” Clearly agitated by all the packing she wasn’t getting done, she hastily explained about periods, predicting I’d be getting mine any minute now and offering one ominous piece of advice: “Don’t worry about the blood. It’s only Mother Nature.”
I hadn’t realized Mother Nature could be so mean. Writhing like a slithery eel on my bed, I decided that physical agonies visited by Mother Nature were in a different category entirely from self-inflicted pain. I tried making a deal with that mysterious Mother, hoping she’d go lighter on me in the 480 or so months to come if I stopped my pinching and banging. And I tried, I really did.
As for multiple incarnations, I couldn’t get over the fact that just a week or so earlier I’d been just a girl—with a few errant hairs sprouting down below and a trainer bra covering my pointy little nipples up above—and now I was a woman with breasts overflowing their AA cup, compelled to drench my panties with Mother’s Chanel No. 5 to mask the fishlike smell rising up from my tweeter.
As if that weren’t enough, packing produced its own dramas. As you might imagine, it was taking forever to gather up my leather-bound books of lists. Nana, overstressed by her role of coordinating our move, was very angry with me that I’d accumulated so many, but she got even angrier when she came into my room just as I was climbing out of the fireplace, my Book of Bruises in my hand and most of me covered in soot.
Grabbing the journal from me, she cried out loudly, “What are you doing? Is there no end to the mischief this child gets up to?” Sister Flatulencia and Fayga must have heard her, for they burst into my room. While Fayga threw a fit over my ash-streaked clothing, Nana flipped through the entries in my book, until she said, “Oh my God. Wait a minute.” She sat abruptly onto my bed and motioned to Sister Flatulencia and Fayga. As the three of them inspected my carefully compiled lists of Nurse’s cruelties to Grandfather, Sister Flatulencia sighed heavily, Nana clucked, and Fayga’s upper lip stiffened like a sun-fried worm.
Seeing their three heads bent forward all in a row—Nana’s tangled and yellowy-white mop, Fayga’s silver waterfall spilling from her crown, Sister Flatulencia’s pubic-style coils bursting exuberantly from her bandana—I felt a pit-ish pang, wondering if I would ever see those three heads bobbing at some card table again, giggling and swearing over a heated game of Hearts.
The pain of sensing that I might not was worse than pinching. I ran out of the house and didn’t stop running until I came across Ignacio, dead-heading a Graham Thomas and muttering “come mierda, come mierda,” an expression I later learned referred to eating shit. I could tell how angry he was by his brisk snips at the rose with his orange-handled shears.
He looked up at me and sighed. “Ai, muchacha, what a terrible time.” Tossing his shears onto the grass, he stood up and rubbed the small of his back. “Little one, both our hearts are breaking. What are we going to do?”
I knew my own heart was broken; the tear in it was how I’d managed to insert Grandfather’s ghost inside me.
Just then Ignacio cried out plaintively, “Linda paloma! She has flown from me. What am I going to do?”
The thought of Dhani winging off into the sky made my belly stir in that diarrhea’s-coming sort of way, especially with the grave of my dead baby bird so close by. I piped up anxiously, “Do?”
Words tumbled chaotically out of Ignacio’s lips. “Your father wants Dhani to give up our baby. He says it’s his. He wants la monja que es como un arbol to care for it like those other povrecitos. Everything he says is wrong.” I could see that Ignacio’s hands were shaking. “I swear to you, muchacha, I know in my bones that child is mine! But Dhani is blinded by guilt. She says she’ll never forgive herself for betraying me. She wants to punish herself by signing up with the Indian Matrimonial Society.”
He stopped for a moment and took his handkerchief from his pocket, passing it across his sun burnt forehead before shoving it back in. Just then, a hummingbird zipped between us and disappeared just as quickly. As we turned back to each other, Ignacio’s voice was calmer. “You know, before Rosa was killed I was a jealous man.” He shrugged. “But now? Dhani is...she’s young and far from home. I believe what she said. She was lonely and her loneliness made her give in to the devil a time or two.” He knelt down and ran his thumb repetitively over one of Graham Thomas’ yellow petals. I wanted to tell him to stop, but I didn’t have the heart. His dark eyes were wet as he looked up at me. “Muchacha, if she gives up her baby—our baby—it will kill her spirit.” He looked up to the sky, whispering, “Dios, do not cheat me a second time.”
I found Ignacio’s words confusing. I’d been picking up a word of Spanish here and there, so I already knew that povrecito meant poor and that Ignacio had his own name for Sister Flatulencia, referring to her laughingly as the nun who is like a tree. I had a pretty good idea, too, of what he meant by Dhani succumbing to the devil; I hadn’t forgotten our Holi, with Dhani letting Father paw her tweeter and chew her lips. But the Indian Matrimonial Society? I had to ask Ignacio to explain. He told me it was not uncommon for a Hindu immigrant to be matched for life with some stranger by a Society in faraway Delhi, which seemed as foolish as purposely inserting a weed at the base of an Eglantyne.
I must have looked preoccupied, because Ignacio paused, then said, “Ai, muchacha, how selfish of me, complaining like a woman, while your own grandfather is barely settled in his grave.”
His characterization of women slipped right past me (though it would occur to me later that night that—in my own family, anyway—it was Father who’d complained the most). Instead, I was more gripped by Ignacio’s words about Grandfather. But I resisted the temptation to respond. Even someone as kind as Ignacio couldn’t be expected to know what it cost to have my grandfather sewn carefully inside my heart instead of softly ugga umphing and stroking my hair while we watched over our tree. Instead, I turned my mind to Ignacio’s predicament. I hadn’t been able to save my grandfather any better than I’d saved the baby bird on the lawn, but perhaps I could do something helpful about Ignacio’s lost dove.
I said abruptly, “I have to go now,” skipping back to the house so fast Uncle Bob could barely keep up with me. It took awhile before I found Nana. She was in the other wing of the house, holding one of the saved babies and sniffling over its bald little head. When Nana finally registered I was there, she said, “Aren’t you supposed to be packing, missy?” Then, clearly recalling what she’d read just a half an hour before in my Book of Bruises, she sweetened her tone, bending with her baby to chicken peck the top of my head. “Never mind. What is it, Deer?”
That was a new name and a surprising one. I had to physically restrain myself from running back to my bathroom mirror to see if I’d sprouted a pointy black nose and stick-out ears. Instead, I said, “Do you know where Dhani is?”
“Dhani? You know she’s been fired. She doesn’t live here anymore.”
“Yes,” I said, “but where is she?”
Nana just stared at me, then shuffled back toward one of the cribs and let the baby down with a sigh. She turned to me with a decidedly Mack truck expression. “You’re not cooking up another one of your plans, are you?”
My turn as a soldier had improved my capacity for deception. “Of course not,” I said, fingers crossed behind my back. “I just wondered if she’s okay and everything. If she and her bun in the oven have enough food to eat and all.” Nana’s eyes still looked suspicious, so I left the room in search of a new strategy.
An hour or two later, with Nana safely distracted packing up the contents of her smallest closet and stifling sobs as she pored through her book of babies’ names, I tiptoed downstairs to ask Dhani’s whereabouts from Sister Flatulencia and Fayga. They chimed in, nearly in unison, that they had no idea where Dhani was, but Sister Flatulencia’s eyes flicked around guiltily and I doubted it was because of the silent but deadly that forced me and Fayga to shuffle back a few steps.
I nodded politely and made a great show of retrieving a can of cat food and a clean dish for Jillily before marching out of the kitchen. As soon as I turned the corner, I marched in place for a while, and then aimed my right ear toward the kitchen, fanning my hand behind it like Grandfather when he couldn’t hear what you were saying.
His method was surprisingly effective. I could hear Sister Flatulencia’s words quite distinctly. She was saying, “That reminds me. I promised Cook I’d take over some infant sacks and diapers this afternoon. She thought washing and folding them would help Dhani snap out of her depression. Can you sling some in a bag for me?”
“Well, it’ll take me a while to get them washed and ready,” Fayga replied, a little nervously.
Sister Flatulencia snorted and farted at the same time. “What’s the use of that, if the whole point is to get her distracted with washing them herself?”
Fayga didn’t say a thing. Instead, she kept folding her apron skirt into little accordion pleats.
Sister Flatulencia broke the silence. “Just make sure Senator Robins doesn’t find out. He’ll kill us if he hears she’s up at Manus’ place.”
So that was where she was. I couldn’t help but think that Senator Manus was going to end up becoming one fat senator if he had both Cook and Dhani running his kitchen.
Fayga said, “How are you going to get out there?”
“Ignacio said he’d take me over in his truck. Poor man, even though she refuses to see him, he can’t resist an excuse to be in her vicinity. If you fling a bunch of pj’s into one of those big plastic bags for me, you can leave it by the back door. Ignacio said he’d be free about four o’clock.”
I carefully set down Jillily’s dish and knelt to untie my shoes. Fishy food dish in one hand and stinky tennis shoes in the other, I breathed as shallowly as I could as I tiptoed upstairs toward my bedroom. I figured Fayga would have the layette washed and dried and perfectly pressed and folded by 3:45 at the latest. If I do say so myself, my timing was excellent. She was just setting a tall Saks bag tied with a graceful yellow bow onto the kitchen counter when I returned to the kitchen at 3:43. I ran to her and tugged at her sleeve. I said, “Fayga, Fayga! Jillily just ate a mouse and is making noises like she’s going to throw up on my carpet.” I added one of my finely tuned renditions of a cat throwing up to drive home my point. Fayga grabbed some carpet cleaner and a rag and dashed out of the kitchen, her shiny hair swinging from side to side like an out-of-control pendulum.
As soon as she was gone, I hurried to push aside the bow and insert the letter I’d composed under the second topmost pair of footless Martian pajamas inside the Sak’s bag. I had to hurry back to the guest bathroom and let Jillily out, or else she’d yowl so loud that Fayga would know she’d been tricked.
This is what my letter said:
Dear Dhani,
Everyone here is sad. Nana has to leave her babies. Mother has to leave Sister Flatulencia, who I worry will have another nervous breakdown caring for all those babies. And Fayga and Sister Flatulencia are losing a third and fourth for Hearts. You must not give Father your bun in the oven. He might eat it and then you will be sad, too. Even if Ignacio is not the father, you should let him take care of you and your baby dove. Please do not fly into the hands of the Indian Matrimonial Society. You might get lost on the way and end up back in Islington or Ignorance.
Your friend,
And then I stopped. I had been called so many names, but I only called myself I or me. Finally, I settled on:
The possible sister of your bastard child.
Uncle Bob and I kept an eye on Ignacio for three days, knowing that if Dhani took my message to heart, she would not show her face inside the house and risk my baby-eating father. It worked rather well for me, since I still had a lot of goodbyes to say on the grounds. Here are the David Austins I visited with during that time:
1. Charlotte;
2. Constance Spry;
3. Country Living;
4. Eglantyne;
5. Evelyn;
6. Fair Bianca;
7. Geoff Hamilton;
8. Gertrude Jekyll;
9. Jude the Obscure;
10. Mayor of Casterbridge;
11. Othello;
12. Prospero;
13. St. Swithum;
