36.

Zuzu Roar walked into the woods. She walked in even though her mother, Inez, had always forbidden it. As soon as Zuzu began walking, she was told she could walk anywhere, except she could not walk into the woods. Perhaps it was her rebellious streak, and her fierce independence, that had brought her into the woods initially, but it was the loud moans of a woman in pain that brought her upon a gigantic cabin with a gigantic front door and gigantic windows, so deep inside the center of the woods that the woods had folded over upon it. It was the kind of cabin that could only have been stumbled upon by someone who didn’t know it was there. It was buried in shade, half-covered by fallen branches, and on the backside of a hill.

Despite the fact that Zuzu had never been in these woods before, the cabin looked familiar to her. It was as if when she was looking at the cabin, she was looking inside herself, at the parts of her that belonged to her, but that she had never seen with her own eyes. The cabin’s roof looked like it was made entirely of birds’ nests, and the door hung on one of its hinges.

Zuzu kept a safe distance. She left enough of a head start between herself and whatever it was that was making the woman writhe. Zuzu had no plans to help—only to look. And then to run. Her feet were already pointed away from the cabin, even as her eyes were squarely pointed at it.

What she saw through the cabin window first was its face. It wasn’t like any face she had ever seen before. Its face was a cake of blood. The hair around its face was wild, and stiffened with more blood. It sat in a chair at the end of its dinner table which had upon it a very large meal. The large meal was the woman who had been making the horrible sounds Zuzu heard from the edge of the woods. The woman was naked, blood on one leg and on her mangled hip. One of her arms was already gone, and her ribs curved around her torso in a strange way. Zuzu watched the woman’s one breast shudder as she made those sounds. It seemed as though the woman was surprised by the new pain made by each of the monster’s bites. Her good leg was in the air. Her remaining arm reached outward like it was looking for something to grab.

Zuzu had never seen anyone in a kind of pain quite like this. It was a pain that she didn’t understand. It wasn’t a kind of pain she knew. It was softer. For the first time, as she watched the naked woman in the window writhe in this new soft pain, Zuzu felt her own rush up her thighs and spill inward into the center of her body like a heat, up her spine, and into her breasts. The same curiosity that brought Zuzu into the woods, and that led her to the woman’s moans, made Zuzu want to know this kind of pain. Zuzu unbuttoned her corduroys, and held the heat hard there.

Suddenly, the monster looked up from its meal, through the window, directly at Zuzu.

“Bebé?”

Zuzu should not have been there. She knew she’d never be able to get away if it wanted to eat her, too. She stood paralyzed instead of running. Her hand was still in her pants. Her eyes were still locked on its eyes. Did it yell my name? she thought.

The monster’s voice sounded human through all the glass of the gigantic window. It stood from its chair at its dinner table, and lumbered toward the window. It walked like an injured pack mule, slowly and falling to one side as if it had a nail stuck in its hoof for years. It walked like that over bloodstains on the wood planks of the cabin floor, over piles of blond, brown, and black hair. A torn blue dress with yellow flowers. A torn pink dress with green dots. A torn white dress with orange stripes. A dark green pair of trousers. A light blue pair of trousers. A white work shirt. A little square of yellow sunlight. The woman on the table rolled over onto her knees, and took the chance to tend to her own pain, the places on her body where she had been eaten alive. She collapsed onto her chest on top of the table. Her long black hair swung down and nearly brushed the floor.

Frantically, the monster tore down the red and white curtains in the window. Zuzu could see the monster much more clearly now, its huge body filling the entire frame of the uncurtained window. It rubbed its eyes and smoothed its mane of coarse and matted hair to the side to make a part, as if this would make its appearance somehow more palatable to Zuzu. She thought she heard something like her name again out of its mouth. She couldn’t be quite sure. Then it said something like it again.

“Bebé.” It wasn’t a question this time. It was just that pet name that only her mother called her. The monster said it to itself, into its own hair.

Zuzu wanted to say something back to it, to simply just say that yes, she was Bebé and that she wasn’t scared. But her legs were too scared, and they had a very different idea. Her legs wanted nothing to do with the monster, or its cabin, or being eaten alive for dinner. So her legs ran. She had no choice but to follow above them, back down the muddy path on which she should have never been on in the first place. She ran past the row of tallest trees in the woods, the birds chirping above her head madly.

“I didn’t see you in the garden today, Bebé.” Inez was sitting at the dinner table in front of a pork chop next to her new husband, The Barber.

A third place at the dinner table had been set and was getting cold. Zuzu was in front of the kitchen sink washing her hands. “Was today the garden?”

“You know Tuesdays are the garden.”

“Is today Tuesday?”

“You know today is Tuesday.”

“I thought today was with Vera at The Good House,” said Zuzu.

“So, you were at Vera’s?” asked Inez.

Zuzu realized she had just led herself into a trap. “You caught me. Ok. I was in the strawberry patch feeding Enid again.”

“Zuzu, don’t treat me like a fool.” Inez stared at Zuzu, then turned to The Barber and apologized by raising her eyebrows and lowering them.

Zuzu kept washing her hands. She didn’t want to turn around to find her mother’s glare. She couldn’t tell her mother the truth. She would be killed right there in that dingy dining room. Regardless, she wasn’t even so sure she could confess the truth if she tried. She wasn’t sure what the truth was.

“And what did I tell you about dressing like a boy?” Inez asked.

“Really, pork chops again?” Zuzu’s complaint about the pork chops was a terrible failure in the game of distraction.

“Your trousers are dirty at the bottom, Zuzu, and your zipper is undone.”

Zuzu was drying her hands now in the sink in the kitchen. She knew she now had to give up something of value, something that wasn’t the truth, but was something to be hidden, something to get her mother off the correct scent.

“I was at XO Meats. I was helping The Butcher. Ok?!” Zuzu’s false confession managed to break the silence. She waited for how the words would fall into the room, what they would knock over.

“Wait. You were at XO Meats? You were with The Butcher?” Inez asked, more curious than upset. Her tone was more surprised than disappointed. Her forehead moved like she was doing complicated math inside her head. “You were helping cut meat? You know they have these machines that...”

“No, not like that.”

“What do you mean then?”

“I mean, I was just there. Like friends.”

The Barber, who was by all accounts a remarkably boring man who could speak only of the weather or of the pain in his back, or of how the weather affected the dull pain in his back, spoke to Zuzu through Inez, which was his usual route. He had never once said a direct word to Zuzu, who he had been living with now for many years.

“Tell Zuzu that The Butcher’s too old for her.” The Barber cut his second bite of pork chop and spread it around in the yellow marinade. He winced with back pain as he lifted the bite from the plate with his fork.

The Barber’s cat walked underneath the table and peed a little.

Inez started three responses to Zuzu, but swallowed each of them before they came to fruition. Instead, she resorted to, “Go out to the garden. Pull some radishes.”

Since Inez and Zuzu moved in with The Barber, Zuzu didn’t have her own room. She slept on the couch in the living room. When Inez and The Barber wanted privacy, she was sent to the garden.

“But it’s dark,” complained Zuzu.

“Then just go out there and sit in the dirt in the dark and think about what...”

“You think about what I’ve done,” Zuzu cut her mother off. “Because I have no idea what I’ve done.” Zuzu re-entered the dining room, but kept the water running in the sink in the kitchen.

“Take your pork chop.”

Zuzu looked at the pork chop alone on the plate. It looked incredibly sad there, and grey. “I don’t eat meat.” She could only think to reject the one thing that was being offered, and to reject it permanently. She tossed her hand towel on top of the pork chop and walked out of the back door to the garden.

“What does your new friend, The Butcher down at XO Meats, think of the fact you don’t eat meat?” asked Inez to her daughter’s back.

Zuzu was able to escape her mother’s inquisition, and she only had to give up meat for life and feign an innocent romantic interest in The Butcher to do it.

The Barber cut another bite from his pork chop and winced. With her own knife and fork, Inez cut the rest of his pork chop into a dozen bite-sized pieces for him. She cut it for him not out of love, but because his winces at each cut with his knife were becoming unbearable to her.

“Thank you,” he said.

“Do you think...”

“Of course.”

“Is that...”

“She’s a woman now, Inez. It’s time she...”

“I can’t get her to wear a dress. I can’t get her to grow out her hair even...”

“That’s her haircut, alright. Every time, only like that. Short, a clean part, to the side, so...”

“No, no, it’s not even that.” Inez leaned back in her chair and slumped her shoulders. “She’s always been like that. She loves only books for boys. She likes to fix broken things. She is a boy. She’s been a boy her whole life. There is no woman in her. She refuses to cross her legs.” Inez pushed a bite of pork chop around on her plate with her fork. “On the day we left our cages, she ran to Vera’s. She was so free. She could have run anywhere, into my arms, wherever she could have imagined. But she ran straight to Vera’s.”

With both hands on the top of the table to steady him, The Butcher stood up and looked out the window at the dark clouds gathering above the hills west of XO City. “We’re going to get some rain.”

“Sometimes I think Vera would make a better mother for her. Do you know what I’m trying to say?”

“We don’t need any more rain right now,” said The Barber flatly. He rubbed the back of his neck with his hand. Six bites of his pork chop remained on his plate like sleeping pigs.

“Will you please just answer me?”

“She wasn’t at XO Meats to cut meat with The Butcher with her zipper undone, Inez. She’s more like you than you know.”

Inez cut her meat and took a bite. The bite was cold. She got a whiff of fresh cat pee.

Zuzu never really felt like doing anything she was told to do. She never worked in the garden when she was ordered to. Typically, she’d climb the tree at the far back of the garden, and work on the rudimentary tree house that she had started building there. It was just a handful of planks nailed into the crook of the tree, with one wall built up the side. Her next step in the construction of her tree house was to cut a window into the wall, but suddenly, since walking out of the woods, she felt much too old to be building a tree house.

Otherwise, when ordered to the garden, Zuzu would instead run around the streets of XO City on her own, completely free. She rarely walked, only ran. Running made her feel freer than walking. She didn’t really remember the caged days, as people now called them, but she’d been told a lot about those days. She wondered if living the very first part of her life in a cage was what made her want to run now. Zuzu liked to run from house to house looking in people’s windows. She liked to watch people move around inside their houses.

Zuzu’s favorite windows to look inside were the windows of The Good House for Children, The Old, and The Very Sick, which was Vera Good’s house, despite the fact that Zuzu spent every Wednesday and Friday inside that house babysitting everyone’s children. She changed diapers, led games, sat with the older ones on the swing on the porch, those sorts of things.

But the nights inside that house, when Zuzu wasn’t working, were different from the days. At night, there were no children of anyone else’s to watch. The house was still so full and warm with family. The Shoveler lived inside the house with his new wife, Hera Horn, and so did Ernesto, who lived inside of the house with his wife, Leda Horn, and their identical triplets, Luis, Luis, and Lois Horn. Ernesto and Leda’s daughter, Lois, was named after their grandmother, Lois Horn, The Shoveler’s first wife, who died by God’s Finger when Ernesto and Ernest were just young boys. Ernest also lived inside Vera’s house with his cats. And, of course, there was Vera, who rarely left the house to be in the world, and who was, in that way, a pure specimen of a human to Zuzu. Zuzu lay awake some nights on the couch at home just concentrating on what she remembered of how Vera walked, and how Vera smelled. Zuzu wanted to be a woman exactly like that woman.

What was most remarkable about The Good House to Zuzu was that it was big enough for everyone, and everyone had their very own rooms. They always sat together at the table, even Ernest’s cats would eat their food in the same room and at the same time as the humans, but they never peed on the carpet like The Barber’s cat.

The Good House was in the same neighborhood as The Barber’s house, which got smaller and colder in Zuzu’s mind after each day she’d return home from The Good House. Running to The Good House to stare into the windows was always a risk. Zuzu had to be sure to get back to the garden in time to sit in the dirt before her mother called for her to come back in.

On this night however, when Zuzu was ordered to the garden, she didn’t go to the tree, or run to The Good House to watch that family glow through the window. The sun had just gone down, and a black cloud was gathering over the part of the woods where she had earlier found the monster, and the woman it was eating alive, and the gigantic cabin. Most people would have wanted to hide from a black cloud like this one, but for Zuzu, a cloud like this one was a beacon. She would have never been able to sleep that night knowing the monster was still where she left it. Zuzu just stood there in the garden looking at the cloud, thinking about the monster. She wondered if it was thinking about her, too. She needed to know what it wanted from her. She needed to know how it knew her name. But, mostly, she needed to know something more of that new pain. It was growing in her own body and it needed a way out.

The feeling that made Zuzu feel as though she were too old to keep building her tree house was an awareness that she didn’t care if her mother called her back in from the garden and she was nowhere to be found. She didn’t care anymore. The blind impulse to obey her mother, or to please her, had disappeared. It was replaced by the need only to please herself.

While her mother and The Barber were inside discussing Zuzu’s stupid lie about visiting The Butcher at XO Meats that she had fed them at dinner, Zuzu walked back into the woods, breaking her mother’s most important rule, twice in a single day.