“Eat, you!”
“But it won’t go down …”
“You jus’ put in de mouth an’ swallow!” my mother yelled.
I added another finger width of leprosy-stricken banana into my mouth and wished she’d stop staring at me like that. It joined the stagnant reserve which I moved from right to left to show her I was trying.
“I don’ wan’ to see de cherry.”
“De cherry,” to which she alluded was the pouch for storing unwanted nutrition in my left cheek. She seized it and twisted until the saliva-softened food seeped back onto my palate.
“How long i’ take?”
“I’m chewing.”
“You wan’ I count three??”
She had concluded there was nothing to chew. Leprous pus could, according to her logic and the laws of physics, slide down any inclined surface with ease. I wished it were the kitchen sink tube and not my own.
“One. Two …”
I drove my finger into the flesh and began to carve out the soft brown spots someone had the big idea to name bruises, all the while trying my hardest to stop imagining the banana was Mir’i·am’s forearm and what I was sapping were the undrained sores under her scabs. What I considered a bruise, my mother considered consumable flesh. The banana was drawn out of my hand and thrown in my face, which I turned aside in time.
In less than a week, I could not walk straight any more than could a drunken sailor. I complained to my mother about it; she measured my legs, told me to eat more. I was carrying in groceries, when I fell down and chipped my front tooth on the driveway. She left the papaya, the fennel and the half-priced bags of whole-wheat flour where they were, and checked my polio vaccinations.
The doctor pressed my tongue with an ice-lolly stick, examined my eyes and ears with a ray of light. He told me to be still and with a fine pointed tool, pulled something yellowish out I thought was dried pus.
“How in hell did banana get in her ear?!” Most eyes squint with anger; Dr. Kreushkin’s opened wide, exposing the upper pink edges of the lower eyelids that have always reminded me of ham.
“Oh, she do anyting, dat child, no’ to eat her food. She’ll make me ol’ b’fore my time.”
My mother shrugged, then readjusted the tissue paper in her cleavage. The beads of sweat on her lip, for some reason, bothered her less. Dr. Kreushkin looked down at me with unconcealed disgust. With a crinkle of the chin, I swallowed my pride. I was not allowed to contradict my mother, which basically meant, to tell the truth.
On our way home, she stopped at Mr. Walter’s garage sale and purchased “Fool’s Stool” for one dollar. Mr. Walter had designed it for his son, Jade, long before he was the local weather forecaster. “FOOL” was written on the seat with tenpenny nails, points up. My mother declared that from now on, until I cleared my plate, I would have to sit on it. She was a persuasive woman, and more often than not I ended up giving in.
Abandoned at the table, I was facing or rather faced by, a stuffed stag’s head, and that, for hours on end. My father had eaten the rest of his forest-roaming body long ago in his bachelor days. The nails poked at my bottom until I lifted up one cheek after the other. Despite his imposing antlers, the stag had wise, benevolent eyes, like the suspended man we saw at Saint Andrew’s on Sunday, whose open sores would save me from my sins.
“This is the body of Christ,” explained our priest, and afterwards offered us some, “and this is the blood of Christ,” which we were not obliged to drink, though my mother grudgingly gave up a nickel or a dime so he would drink it out of his golden chalice instead of us. At our father’s funeral, my sister and I were each given a one inch figurine of the same man to hang around our necks on fine silver chains. I hid mine inside my dress. He was half-naked, and bleeding badly.
I think it is necessary to add that whenever my sister and I fought, my mother would throw her hands into the air and sob, “You own flesh an’ blood! Flesh an’ blood!” She repeated this phrase until, without quite seizing its meaning, the thought of my own sister as red meat made me cry as well. I would hug my sister and let her play with my Mr. Potato Head. The intensive doses of theology and genealogy did not assist my cold-blooded eating of flesh.
One evening, I was facing the stag who not only understood but granted me eternal salvation for not eating a quail that my mother had anointed with butter before baking, then baptized with whisky before setting aflame. In my mind, I called it Saint Quail, to join that space between purgatory and heaven that God reserved for Noah’s faithful pairs. There it would find Lassie and Flipper from the original series, I was sure. Stag Head agreed in silent majesty, upon which Ursula Tatta rang the doorbell and let herself in.
“I’m fed up! Up to here!” she saluted her hair-line.
Before my mother asked for particulars, Ursula added, “With Harry.”
That was how adults referred to Mr. Tatta, her bald-headed husband. My mother was relieved to see the bird on my plate as yet uneaten, and retreated with Ursula to the living room, a showroom of crystal ashtrays she would never consider offering anyone to use and carvings of more wounded men on crosses.
I pressed my ear to the door. From what I could understand, Ursula had not had dinner, Harry was drinking, and not at home, for she’d found matchboxes in his pockets when she did the laundry. There was a long silence before she admitted that she had smelt, “Harry’s underwear.”
I cracked the door open to see my mother holding Ursula in her arms, patting her back. I was ashamed that Harry had hurt her so. Had he neglected to wipe when he did a number two? I had sat sideways with my sister to share the toilet once and we began shoving for space then missed. My mother yelled but she didn’t cry about it. I assumed it more forgivable with children.
That is when I learned the unspeakable circumstances of my own father’s death. I had known that he was killed in a car crash when my sister was a baby and I, four. It had happened in Rhode Island, US21, when he was selling insurance policies for The Mutual Insurance Company of Freyburg, the tragedy rendering my sister and I fatherless, and my mother anaemic, or so I’d overheard.
“Paul,” my mother began, Paul Lester was our father, “wasn’ ’lone in de car.”
Ursula stopped crying and stared at my mother in disbelief. “A woman?”
My mother played with one of the ashtrays, and for some time, there was no change in her expression. “All men are jus’ animals,” she finally responded, “dey think wit’ wha’s b’tween deir two legs.”
“But how can you be sure that they were …” Ursula could not come up with a suitable verb.
“B’cause whe’ de firemen, dey go through de chassis an’ find ’em, it was in her mouth,” my mother spoke wryly.
Here, Ursula gasped and covered her own, as if she feared intrusion of a similar sort. What was in the woman’s mouth?
“It was bitten right off. He die on de spot. She chok-ed on it, Peggy Summer, only a youn’ girl, she was jus’ sixteen,” added my mother with no regret, but rather as if the Old Testament God had given the incident special consideration. My mother believed in a personalized God that punished those who trespassed against her, including any salesman who didn’t give her a reduction when she found a defect in his merchandise, be it a blouse, a sofa, or a loaf of bread, yet never seemed to fear Him herself; her personalized God realized she lived in a hard world. What could the girl have possibly been eating? An adjutant brain? An inner leg? We were, I remembered, not allowed to eat in my father’s nauseatingly new-smelling car.
My mind was racing, especially when Ursula concluded it was better for my father, my mother and the girl that way. My mother returned to evaluate my progress. I rushed back to Fool’s Stool and poked the quail with my fork.
“Mom, I’m really not hungry!” I complained so she would not suspect all I’d been lucky enough to learn.
My hand was trembling. My mother stared at me for some time.
“It’s a’kay,” she patted me on the head, “Go an’ play wit’ you sis’er.”
I ran to tell Cecilia everything.