The three of us waited outside for the Tattas to arrive, hostesses of a solemn reception. Most of our neighbours simply let their guests in and out the front door without formality. We always had to help ours in and out of their car doors. This must have been some old Eastern European tradition, dating back to the horse and carriage when the beloved one needed a hand to make it down the high step; or dating back to the invention of the first car, when the entire village wouldn’t miss its arrival or departure for the world.
Ursula and Harry’s light blue Lincoln Continental turned lazily into our driveway, the wheels making crackling noises over the residues of sand. I stood awkwardly, looking at my own reflection in the tinted window instead of opening the door. How thin I looked, and dark beneath the eyes. The electric window descended, swallowing me and simultaneously giving birth to Harry’s bald head and white suit. The air coming out of their car was a mixed blessing, wonderfully cold yet saturated with stale cigarette smoke and aftershave.
“Hi there, baby doll,” Harry greeted me with amused eyes and a wink, absentmindedly inaugurating his emergency brake.
“Cut it out, Harry!” Ursula shot Harry a discontented glance and squeezed his knee. There were white marks around her fingers where she’d removed her rings.
“Don’ run in my driveway! You get black oil on you feet, you drag all ’cross my house!” my mother warned Tommy and Timmy, “I do not wan’. Be care, my cactus!”
“Boys will be boys,” laughed Harry and handed my mother the red suitcase Ursula had brought over last time, and a shopping bag full of sandy flip-flops and a greasy tube of sun block without a cap.
“My guard, my guard, wha’ I get myself talk-ked into!” my mother joked, but there was something sad and weary in her eyes, usually sharp and accusing, that made me go and put my arm around her shoulders protectively. Melancholic people can go through life with bloodhound eyes, they receive little compassion, but bad-tempered people need only look discouraged one minute, and they get whatever they want. Ursula and Harry waved to us as they pulled out of the driveway. I rested my chin affectionately on her head. “Aya! Don’ do dat. You stringbean! You hurt my neck!” was the thanks I got.
“Now you stay outside an’ play! I don’ wan’ no one in my house, in an’ out, wit you dirty feet!”
The others ran down to the canal. I staggered slowly after them. I didn’t feel like a child any more. I felt that the revelation my mother had made to me, of losing for some unknown reason quantities of my own blood and having to dress the wound all by myself made playing impossible. I foresaw a dismal life in that mature weirdness where play was undesirable to every adult.
Cecilia watched with amazement as Timmy and Tommy pulled up the dripping crab trap. They found a host of pig tails inside, caught here and there among the rusty grilles like waterlogged carrots. A stench rose, similar to the fish that float down the canal, swollen and upside down. Along the bottom of the trap, scrambled the multitude of armoured legs belonging to a forlorn navy of stone crabs. They faced us heroically, each holding out a single overgrown pincer.
Timmy forced a kumquat branch into the trap. When he tilted it, three crabs hung on stubbornly.
“Stop it! I’m going to tell! That one’s just a baby!” The tension in me sought release.
“That one’s just a baby!” Tommy Tatta imitated me.
“It doesn’t really matter, Kate. Mommy says we’re having them for dinner on Sunday.”
Tommy let out a violent, “Ugh! Better not be with prunes!”
The trap splashed back into the canal, the brownish water lifting the crabs just enough to give them hope before they were plunged to the murky bottom again.
Tommy, tired of swimming, knocked on the screen of our patio. He didn’t know that if it loosened, he would be subject to the medieval kind of punishment one still found within my mother’s realm.
“You aren’t allowed to go in anyway when you’re wet.”
“I gotta! Tell your mom to open up.”
“Just go behind a tree. Don’t make a big deal about it,” I advised him for his own sake as well as mine.
“I don’t want everyone to see.”
“See what?” I pried.
“My Oscar Meyer weenie.”
I thought his answer oddly corresponded to my absurdest whims and puzzled over it, with ketchup, mustard and relish. I was more convinced than ever that whatever it was, it was edible. For some unknown reason, I began to resent him. Maybe it was the hint of arrogance in his words, “My Oscar Meyer weenie,” insinuating whatever he had, I did not.
Timmy and Cecilia bent down under the dock to discern spitting barnacles and hermit crabs. The tide was high and they waved their fingertips around in figures of eight. There Tommy was standing, his back to me, with his bathing suit bottom still on, yet a long yellow arch of urine swayed left and right as though he were watering flowers with a garden hose.
“Where are you, Kate?” I should have known I could count on my sister to jeopardize my position.
Tommy turned slightly, and I saw he was definitely holding something in his hand; it was a cross between a gigantic earthworm and a small bratwurst. It had a tiny mouth and no eyes whatsoever.
“Kate?!” she called again with such insistence, as though my seeing whatever crustacean she had found were a matter of life or death.
The underdeveloped creature wriggled in dissent before Tommy hid it. I saw it thrash to the left and right. It was the embryo of a fire-spitting dragon. Just as a grape-sized egg yields forth a crocodile, it, too, would grow up into something horrendous.
A leech suckled my monthly blood until it grew teeth with which it began to gnaw a tunnel inside me. It grew scales, claws and a single horn, tools it used to scrape its way further into my flesh.
I read to Stag Head, “That is why a man will leave his father and his mother and he must cleave to his wife and they must become one flesh …” “I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing, in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband.”
So I would hunger for my husband’s flesh, and he would crave for mine. I closed the Bible. Conspiracy was in the air, I could smell it like the unseen smoke of a distant barbecue. Parents hid the gruesome facts of life from their children. No wonder they always had to be alone to converse freely.