Ursula popped by regularly to see how we were doing at dinner-time. In the kitchen light, her sparse eyebrows gave a small sanctuary to the burgundy streak of eyebrow pencil. Her hair had recently been dyed to a pepper red, but the chlorine and the sun were robbing it of some vital element and it was turning into a burnt-looking burgundy. I noticed she always carried with her, even in an evening gown, a faint scent of suntan lotion. No one could compete with her tan; her forearm beat anyone who dared present their own next to hers, as I often did.
My mother slid lima beans into an iron pot of salted water. Ursula unwrapped a bundle of brown paper to reveal four forked hooves.
“Pi’ feet, oh!!” my mother laughed merrily.
The skin was rubbery and thick, the colour of the Crayola crayon called “flesh”.
“My grandparents used to eat the tail,” admitted Ursula.
If mine did, I wouldn’t go around bragging about it.
“But the butcher said he already threw it away. Would make good fishing, you should tell Joseph to stick one on his hook and toss it in your canal.”
“We ask de butcher to save dem for us nex’ time, I put it, you know, in my crab trap. I get stone crab wit’ it, big, beautiful like dis … ” I looked up quickly to catch my mother in the midst of a lie; her demonstration, honest to the point of vapidity, disappointed me: big was not bigger than her index and thumbs joining together to form a crab’s spadelike back, which left three fingers on each hand to wiggle for the legs.
Ursula plopped the hooves into the steamy water.
“In honor of Harry,” she dryly claimed.
Ursula used any pretext to swerve the conversation back to Harry. I thought she came over to forget Harry.
“He still up to such no-sense?”
“Oh, he denies it, but …” Ursula wriggled her nose emphatically, “I see it. I smell it. His collar’s a classic … His britches …” Ursula stopped as she looked at me.
I pretended to play with a stray lima bean as if it were a car, producing a brr-brr noise I was too old for.
“From what I can tell, somebody out there’s wearing ‘White Linen’, which I take as a personal insult because I’m sure she knows I’m the one doing the dirty laundry. Pig-dirty laundry!”
Ursula grabbed the lima bean I had momentarily parked on the kitchen tile and flung it down the garbage disposal.
“What’s linen?” I asked when the grinding had stopped.
“Go set de table, you!” snapped my mother, “Don’ always stick you big nose inside ot’her people’s oats!”
I was about to remind her that one can say “business” or “bee’s wax” but not “oats”, but the look on her face told me it was not the best time. If any human soul thinks they are going to persuade me to eat a pig hoof, they are making a big mistake, I muttered to myself.
Each time I returned to the kitchen, I caught fleeting bits of conversation. Harry was working all the time. He worked on weekends. He worked late at night. He went on business trips to Tallahassee. I guess being an estate agent was demanding, especially in a growing area like Cypress County. I felt sorry for Mr. Tatta. Just for that, Ursula was considering leaving him.
“Take wha’ you can get, you,” my mother offered Ursula her own slogan in life, both pecuniary and spiritual.
“Yuck!” exclaimed Cecilia when Ursula clarified for what exactly she was about to say grace.
My mother gave me the evil eye. I suppose she thought Cecilia had learned the word from me. I stabbed one lima bean after another. Black-eyed beans were Cyclops, but lima beans were eyeless and reminded me of something a caterpillar would gnaw its way out of. Ursula, trying to carry on the kitchen conversation, spelled every other word, but my mother was having trouble with the English spelling. Ursula didn’t speak Lithuanian. My mother didn’t speak Pig Latin.
My mouth was packed with the putrid flesh of the hoof. Too repulsed to resort to “de cherry”, I brought the napkin to my face, and out of true desperation, narrowed my lips and blew it out, hoping the sound resembled someone sneezing. My napkin bloated. Ursula cringed.
“Mótina! Can’t she go to the bathroom to do that?” urged Cecilia, adding again, “Yuck!”
This time she was pinched for it.
I dropped the napkin in the toilet and as soon realized my error. A film of finely chopped pink expanded over the water surface and remained stagnant and unsightly. My mother lived as though we were in some European war. In the United States, in a time of prosperity, she cut paper napkins in two, forbade reading at night, and would not let us go in and out of anywhere, the refrigerator, the house. The temperature could rise one degree and it took energy, thus hardworking money, to cool it down. Flushing the toilet more than once a day made her scream, “You don’ use twenty litres for jus’ a teeny yellow water!”
It wasn’t like we were poor. We lived on the water. My mother had two jobs, making her money work and full-time penny-pincher, both of which she took seriously. Trembling, I filled the waste can with water and thrust it into the bowl like I had seen my mother do to change the water in her toilet that she used as a bidet to save water during the week. She was stealing lima beans from my plate as I returned to the table. I slowed down before she saw me.
My cold lasted some time. To make it more realistic, I sneezed between meals, too, and had occasional coughing fits. I shouldn’t have overdone it. Doctor Kreushkin checked the thermometer and glued his palm to my temperate forehead. I, in most likelihood, let my eyelids sag much more than they really would for a common cold. Doctor Kreushkin lifted them and examined my normal pupil dilation.
“Wha’ is it??” my mother questioned, worried his silence signified disease.
“I suspect … Could be allergies …”
“Allergies?” my mother’s voice rose, as though it were his fault. Allergies sounded expensive to her. She would argue her way out of it. “Her nose! It is a’ways full! I give her fresh squeeze orange juice! I keep her from de school! An’ still, her nose is a’ways full! De poor chil’, her ears, dey hurting her! Now you do sometin’!”
My mother always forgot to say “please”. Doctor Kreushkin tried to explain how disturbances of the respiratory tract could be due to many different causes. I feared my mother would explode any minute.
“I’m feeling better. Look.” I jumped twice. “It’s just a runny nose!”
“Keep quite, you! Nobody pays you!”
Dr. Kreushkin took offence. My mother threatened not to pay unless something more medically competent was done than putting his hand for five seconds to my forehead. Under pressure, he signed a prescription for antibiotics and told her to call him in ten days.
My mother had faith in the antibiotics. I had even gone so far as to get her to let me take them with chocolate milk. Cecilia reacted melodramatically over her not getting to have any.
“You sis’er is sick! You, be lucky you not sick!”
My over-confidence grew and God found my acquisitions dishonest, especially my first glass of Coca-Cola. I took another piece of steak into my mouth and didn’t even bother to chew. I was blowing it back out when suddenly God struck me with his wrath and ordered the Coca-Cola bubbles to ascend to His Kingdom in Heaven. The additional pressure unexpectedly ejected the meat through my half-napkin; it landed a few inches in front of me, next to my glass. My mother at first blinked at it in apprehension, as if this were the final stage of tuberculosis.
“Yuck!” exclaimed Cecilia, then she had to go and ask, “Did that come out of her nose?!?”
“Let me see dose ot’her napkin,” my mother requested.
Next to my plate were a few balled-up ones I hadn’t bothered to throw away. My lack of movement was confirming her suspicions. She reached over the table. As she opened her valuable half-napkins up, one after the other, each contained, to her horror and to Cecilia’s fascination, a piece of steak. Crying, my mother called the flesh I’d wasted, “her own sweat an’ blood”. I was lost in confusion.
Locked up in the pantry closet, I stared at the shadows of hanging prosciutto with distaste. A silhouette of provolone cheese in a nylon net swayed in the air as I hit it with a yardstick. I was seated on a twenty pound bag of Idaho potatoes. The stale air reeked of smoked carcass, thyme, nutmeg, goose-garlic and onion-chive. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t been offered a choice. I could have gone to my room, but there I would have had to write, “I will not in the futur I pramice, to spit Momy’s hardworking meet out of the window.” I found the phrase long for five hundred times, even if I had already convinced her to scratch off the redundant “never again”. I could have stood outside with one foot on Fool’s Stool, but I wasn’t keen on Ursula seeing me like that, should she come over. At least here, I could play.
“The closet?? Geez! Isn’t that kind of … severe? Locking up your daughter in a dungeon?” I rejoiced at Ursula’s shocked tone.
“Dere’s no lock!” replied my mother, “an’ she deserve.”
“Yeah!” added Cecilia, “That’s what she gets for trying to fool us.”
“Us” … I vowed to myself that I would tell my mother to look under Cecilia’s bed. She had broken my mother’s Greatest of Modest Moussorgsky record thinking it could soar like a Frisbee and thought it had less chance of being noticed there.
“You! Go to bed! It’s pas’ you time!” accused my mother.
“No it’s not!” retorted Cecilia who could not quite read Roman numerals, yet had fine intuition when adults wanted to be alone.
“You wan’ go wit’ you sister in de closet?” threatened my mother.
I hoped she would say yes, but hearing no answer after a while meant she preferred the comfort of her bed. I shifted the potatoes more comfortably under my bottom and tried to sleep.
Suddenly, I heard something rustle, probably my own foot, scratching a stem of bay leaves. Cockroaches darted into my mind. I imagined them by the dozens, feasting on the mounds of organic reserves. If I hadn’t had sandals on, it wouldn’t have been so bad, but my mother was convinced that our feet should “breathe”.
“Mom! I’ve got to urinate!” I shouted.
In our household, we were allowed to use the noun but not the verb “pee”.
“Mom!” I yelled louder, slapping my arms and feet anywhere I felt the scrunchy little legs were likely to creep.
My mother opened the door, allowing a ration of the kitchen light to peer in. To my surprise, the pantry looked exactly like I had found it.
“Jus’ be quick,” she warned, as her top lip curled in enough so that one could see her gums above her teeth.
On my way to the bathroom, I had noticed a red suitcase. The metal clip “Samsonite” confirmed my hunch, my mother would never pay extra for a famous brand name and even I had seen an ape jump on one of these on TV. Was Ursula going to live with us? Would she have some influence on my mother, who didn’t know American justice? Someone turned off the kitchen light and the last rays that had comforted me through the gap under the door were gone. I blinked into the darkness.
I pretended I was Anne Frank to make the time go by. I imagined sharing the space with Ursula, Harry, Tommy, and Timmy Tatta, having to live on small portions of bread, sleep together on the floor and drink broth out of the same thermos. I was still young and naive enough to think it sounded fun. But the dark tampered with my imagination and I grew unspeakably bored. My sweat trickled down my chest in small rivulets. I wished I were allowed to at least flip through the pages of a cookbook, but my mother would not invest in unnecessary wattage after the doctor’s bill. When I had meekly asked her when I could come back out, she only replied, “Whe’ I feel like. You deserve all night.”
My fingers throbbed after I broke through the net to procure an Idaho potato. I held it in my palm. The outside felt dusty and cold. With my fingernail, I scratched off the eyes and clumps of dirt. Mrs. Wella, my fifth grade teacher, said that a raw potato turned to starch then to sugar in your mouth after awhile. She had told us to experiment with this at home, but my mother had refused to spare a potato for “such stupidity”. I bit through until I came upon a skinless bite. I churned it in my mouth, expecting to discover the taste of candy. Waiting for the potato to transform seemed longer than for my mother to show up, and less likely.
I knew my mother came from a country like Alice in Wonderland’s rabbit-hole, where heads used to be chopped off and those who managed to keep theirs watched like we watch cartoons on TV. But still, this was the United States. Even if people in Japan have rooms smaller than this, in this country we call it a “closet”. I could see my mother in her recliner, her feet up at a forty-five degree angle, chatting with Ursula as she sipped a salt-rimmed martini and dipped her hand in a bowl of pistachios. How peaceful she must find the evening without a child butting in to ask a question. Maybe she’d decide to keep me here until I was old enough to support myself. I’d be blind by then, mute, wrinkled; a vegetable … I cried louder than I normally would have, hoping someone out there might come to my rescue or at least feel bad.
The doorbell rang.
“Who’s dere?!” my mother never failed to consult the peeping hole before asking.
“Harry. Who the devil do you think?! The Ambassador of Vilna??”
“A’ dis time of de night?” My mother’s aggressiveness was already thinning.
The screen door screeched. I sighed. Some men knew how to handle my mother. Their bark had to be louder than her bite. My mother encouraged Ursula, Ursula insulted Harry, Harry laughed at Ursula’s silliness before repeating “Goodnight” and “Thanks a million” to my mother. I knew she would soon be on her way. I lay tragically on my stomach with droopy, eagle-spread arms, like Ulysses cast upon the shore without drink for ten days.
When I awoke, my back was stiff. My hair dripped over my neck like seaweed off an uplifted anchor. Potatoes were pushing into my chest and my foot was stuck under a bottom shelf, next to a soldier line of unopened family-sized dill pickles. There must have been a liquidation sale.
“Can I come out now?” I would walk straight up to my mother and ask in a simple, direct manner; yet I procrastinated. She would be capable of doubling the sentence if she considered it an impudence.
I tiptoed down the corridor. To one side, was an ancestral portrait in oil. A man on horseback wore a handlebar moustache that only a Hell’s Angel would be caught dead wearing today. It ran into the low ceiling, where the cavalier’s throat was nearly sliced by the fan’s blades. I assumed it had once belonged to my father.
On the opposite wall were my mother’s two attempts at art. “Sun, Sky, and Tree” looked more like “Bacon and Egg” because the sky was white and dominated by the yellow globe; and the tree, a trunk without branches, was brick red. “Self-portrait of the artist” was but a circle painted on a square and what were supposed to be earrings looked like golden fringed military shoulder-pieces, after all, there was no neck. One upside down triangle represented both her eyebrows. An orange slice represented her mouth, facing down. Signed Olga Yulof, her maiden name. Cecilia and I called it, “Mótina is watching you.” It prevented evil spirits from getting anywhere near the house.
I could hear sheets stirring as I neared the door of her bedroom. My knees grew weak as I turned the knob. The sheets continued to rustle followed by occasional gasps for breath, as though she were dreaming that she was running in some race. I feared waking her, lest she was just steps away from victory. I strained to make out two acrobatic forms. One was obviously my mother, arching her back; her legs, bent and open, gave strange little jerks, as did her hips. The other seemed to be feeding gluttonously on her stomach. As it descended lower, my mother gave little cries of pain and struck his back a few times with her heel.
“Eat me …” I was startled to hear Ursula’s voice and not my mother’s.
I figured out that it must be Harry, who began to make slopping noises like when a dog laps water; his jaws and lips were without any doubt up to some strange work.
I covered my mouth, thinking I’d vomit or faint. I could tell from Ursula’s groaning that he was hurting her. She took hold of his great bald head and tried to pull it back up. He refused. She stifled the sounds of her pain by biting a pillow. At Sharon Minsky’s sister’s daughter’s wedding, the priest had proclaimed that man and woman will become one flesh. I hadn’t understood what exactly that meant, though I had imagined the newly-weds united, not so much as a man and wife shish kebab but as a rosary, with pink and white beads touching each other as our own palms do in prayer. Were couples forced to consume each other’s flesh? Or somehow share each other’s meat?
“No, no, no … ” protested Ursula …
Her voice had grown deathly weak, very much as though she had lost mouthfuls of flesh and blood; yet Harry continued to gnaw mercilessly at her thighs. The sounds he made were sickening me. How could anyone watch unmoved. I ran to the refrigerator, desperately sought my leftover steak that I finally found on the second to bottom shelf in the right Tupperware behind the leftover carrots and leeks, and rushed back to the bedroom.
Harry was now on top of Ursula, crushing her. He panted like a wild beast as he tried breast-feeding from both her breasts at one time. He squeezed them together with both hands like a bouquet and sucked. He was starving. Ursula threw her head from side to side in pain.
“Now!” Harry ordered her, shaking her repeatedly with his whole body to get her to react.
I switched on my mother’s bedside lamp and bravely offered my cold meat to Harry, holding the opened Tupperware container as close as I could to his mouth.
Harry and Ursula stopped moving. Ursula’s neck and breasts had red specks all over them. No wonder she was in pain, I thought. Harry’s back had long scratches down it, some of which were bleeding. I started. Was Ursula defending herself or feeding on him, too? Well, they can both share my steak.
“Thank you, um, Kate, that’ll do,” Ursula pulled my mother’s sheets up over Harry’s shoulders.
Harry still hadn’t moved but remained poised on his fists, like a bulldog. Only his ribs continued to move, in and out, irregularly. His belly, hairy and drooping, never looked so huge.
“Thank you, Kate,” Ursula repeated. I suppose I really was contemplating the last hairs that had not yet abandoned Harry’s bald patch.
“Get lost, kid,” Harry finally barked.
I was hurt, usually he called me “Sweetie.”
Unable to think, I found myself returning to my own room. My mother was sound asleep in my bed, snoring softly. Appalled, I took back my Raggedy Ann and sock monkey and went to sleep on the sofa. But I couldn’t sleep. Ursula had said, “Eat me.” I’d heard it with my own ears. The priest had said, “Man and woman will become one flesh.” Was my father being fed upon, too, when he was killed? The firemen had found “it” in sixteen-year-old “Peggy’s” mouth.
Perhaps a fruit grows down there, I conjectured. An apple, that in God’s punishment to Adam, every woman and man must still eat. Or a vegetable? I concluded it must be meat. Otherwise, why would the priest have distinctly used the word “flesh”. Which meant it was raw. A sort of meat that probably kept growing back over and over again, like a fingernail. No wonder my mother kept forcing me to eat red meat. She was preparing me for adulthood.