Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story (2 page)

“ ‘Experience in bookkeeping would be an asset. Must have a cheerful personality.’ Yeah, right. So they can walk all over you and gang bang you at office parties.”

One day she picked up the paper but immediately threw it down again. “I should have kept the baby,” she said. “At least then I’d be collecting mother’s allowance.”

“What about working for John Bucci?” Marion said from her reverie. John Bucci stopped by their table whenever he walked by. He managed the Elite Shoe Store, plus he was a partner in a gas station somewhere out on Highway 10 and he had an interest in a gravel pit.

“Forget it,” Cory said.

“He seems like a nice fella,” Marion observed.

“Nice fella,” Cory mimicked. “Mafia drug boss, you mean. No way a guy his age—what, twenty- five, twenty-six?—no way he’s tied in with all these businesses unless they’re fronts for selling drugs.”

This woke Marion up. “Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” she laughed.

“Okay, he’s full of shit,” Cory said. “One or the other. Anyway, I don’t trust short, pretty guys.”

But half an hour later, when he came by their table, she pulled him onto a stool and asked if his gravel pit needed someone to answer the phone.

“Maybe, maybe,” he said, nodding, twisting the gold ring on his baby finger and glancing around. “Not till after Christmas, though.”

“I’ll have slit my wrists by then,” Cory said.

“Hey,” he said. “I black out at the sight of blood.”

“So I won’t do it here,” Cory said.

“Why don’t you work in the store?” he said. His eyes were on the open zipper of her jeans. “This Saturday. One day, try it out. I need somebody this Saturday. Commission plus salary.”

“Forget it,” Cory said. “I hate other people’s feet.”

“It’s their socks I can’t stomach,” John said. He looked at Marion. “How about you?”

“I like socks,” she said.

Cory snorted.

“I mean, do you want to work in the store Saturday?” he asked.

“Oh.” Marion was mortified by her mistake. “No, no,” she said. “Saturdays I can’t. Saturdays—”

“Hey.” John patted her arm. “No problem.” For the first time she noticed how black and sad his eyes were. Sad from his own mother dying, she thought. He had talked about coming to Canada with his mother and sisters, about helping his mother
swab the ship’s deck to pay their passage, even though he was only five at the time.

“Bullshit,” Cory had said.

“It’s true, I swear to God,” he’d said. “My mother had arms like this”—he flexed his muscled arm—”from scrubbing other people’s floors. When she was my age, she looked fifty. But she was beautiful, like a rose.”

“Everybody thinks their slag-heap mothers are so beautiful,” Cory had said.

It’s midnight. Their car is still there. On the other side of the parking lot, outside the opened back door of the motel’s bar, two waiters whip at each other with dish towels. A dog snaps at the towels. The dog, Marion decides, is an Irish setter/Saint Bernard cross. She knows dogs. Dogs are one thing she knows.

She closes the curtains, goes over to the dresser and reaches for the eye dropper and the bottle of formula. In the light from the dresser lamp she sees two bruises on the underside of her wrist. She checks her other wrist, and it has one big bruise. When she and Sam were standing just here, and she was starting to unbuckle his belt, he seized her wrists and said, “I don’t have a real penis.”

She laughed.

“Listen to me!” he said, and there was such a feverish, lunatic look on his face that she went still and then, disoriented, she swayed, and he tightened his grip. She said he was hurting her. “Sorry,” he said, but his fingers didn’t loosen.

“I’m listening,” she whispered.

He said, “Okay,” and took a breath.

While her hands turned white he told her the whole story, going back to when he was eight and lived in Delaware. “He’s memorized this,” she thought at one point. She couldn’t catch
it all. There was only the astonishing crux. “Wait,” she said finally.

“What?” he said.

“I want to see it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I want to see it,” she repeated calmly.

“It’s a dildo, okay? You’ve seen a dildo before.”

“I want to see it.”

He released her wrists, turned around and opened his fly. She heard two clicks and then his fly zipping back up. When he turned back round he was holding it down along his thigh, concealed by his forearm. She glanced at his crotch, but he was wearing baggy pants—there was no confirmation of anything there.

“Let me see,” she said.

He opened his hand.

They both looked at it.

“It’s rubber,” she said.

“Silicone, I think. I’m not sure, actually.”

“How do you keep it on?”

“It attaches to a strap.” He folded his fingers around it and dropped his hand. “I hardly ever wear it.”

“I’m going to be sick,” she murmured. Instead her legs gave out and she fell to her knees while he tried and failed to catch her, first with his free hand and then with both hands, dropping the dildo on the dresser, but it rolled off and down the side.

“Oh, my God!” she said.

Since the dresser was bolted to a panel at the back and couldn’t be moved, he had to unbend a hanger to coax the dildo within his reach, an absurdly long and frustrating exercise that she watched in silence from where she had landed on the floor.

Cory didn’t work in John Bucci’s store on the Saturday he asked her to, but the next Saturday she did, and then in August she started working there full-time. Which meant that Marion only saw her Wednesday afternoons, when she came to the mall to do grocery shopping. Usually John wasn’t in the store. Usually nobody was.

“I can’t figure it out,” Cory said.

Marion could. Cory scared the customers, not on purpose, but she was so forbiddingly tall and glamorous, slouched in the door, and her blaring “May I help you?” had old women patting their hearts.

Driving home from the mall one day, it struck Marion that the reason John didn’t fire Cory was that he was in love with her. She looked at her stubby hands on the steering wheel and understood his craving for length. She pictured his and Cory’s light-red-haired, black-eyed, tall and short children. She
saw
these children, preordained, spectacular. But the following Wednesday, another salesgirl was lounging in the doorway, and when Marion asked her where Cory was, John came out of the back room and said she had quit. “She got a job stripping,” he said.

“You’re kidding!” Marion said.

He smiled. “Okay, dancing. You want a job?”

“Dancing where?”

“Ask her.” He kept on smiling. It wasn’t the smile of a broken-hearted man. “You want to go for a drive?” he said.

“Pardon?”

“You and me. Get some fresh air.”

Her eyes plunged to his shoes. In her mind one black pointed toe shot out and kicked a drug addict who didn’t have the money.

“Ah, come on,” he said. “It’s like a summer’s day out there. Beautiful. Beautiful as you.”

She laughed.

“Hey, you’re blushing,” he said. “I like that.”

He had a red convertible with the top down. Out on the highway the sun whipped her hair, but his black, combed-back hair didn’t move. Seated, he was no taller than her. Remembering what he had said about fainting if Cory slit her wrists, she wondered if all virgins bled. Her heart flapped in her stomach, but it could have been the murder. Out of the blue her heart sometimes rocked her whole body, and she put it down to aftershock. What haunted her these days was the second bullet entering a hole her mother was born with. Her mother should have been facing the other way, considering that Bert Kella pulled up the driveway in a car with a rusted-out muffler and then kicked in the door. “Why didn’t she turn around?” the police investigator asked. Nobody had an answer. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” the investigator said.

John Bucci drove to the provincial park, and they got out of the car to climb up the cliff. “Wait’ll you see the view,” he said, wrongly presuming that she never had. She followed him up the path, which had been railed with logs to provide a stairway. He loosened his tie. At the top of the stairs he opened his arms like an opera singer and made a slow, revelling circle that ended up aimed at her. With his tie off she saw the two gold chains around his neck. “Isn’t it beautiful?” he said. “I can’t believe I’m here and you’re here and it’s so warm and beautiful.”

She could feel herself blushing again. She turned and looked across the valley, where the tin roof of a house signalled out of golds and greens. A dog barked, probably from that place.

“Your hair is like music,” John said.

“For heaven’s sake,” she laughed. She had tightly curled hair the colour of barn board.

“Like pianos,” he said, stroking her head. “Like arpeggios.”

She walked away from him, over to a deep crevice in the rock. Her skin felt as if it was being pelted by rain. She went right up to the edge of the crevice and judged the distance across.

“I saw a porcupine down there once,” John said, coming up behind her.

Marion stepped back twenty paces.

“Hey, they don’t throw their quills, you know,” John said. She kicked off her sandals.

“Good idea,” he said, and started undoing his laces.

While he was still bent over, she ran past him.

Fifteen years ago she had watched her brother make the same jump. She did it the way he did, in a long stride, in splits through the air, landing on a lip of rock that jutted out below the crevice’s other side.

“Jesus Christ!” John shouted.

She grabbed a sapling to keep from falling backwards. John ran around the crevice and reached down to help her up.

“Jesus Fucking Christ,” he said. “Why’d you do that? I can’t believe you just did that.” She let him pull her onto the grass. “You could have killed yourself,” he said, dropping to the ground beside her.

“No,” she said. “I knew I could do it.” In fact, she felt like doing it again.

“But why the hell did you? I thought you were suddenly committing suicide or something.”

“I just wanted to.”

“You just wanted to,” he said, smiling, shaking his head. “In other words you’re out of your mind.”

She lay back on the grass. “I don’t think I am,” she said seriously.

He stroked her face. He kissed the scrapes on her hand. “You’re out of your mind,” he said. “I love you.”

He took off all her clothes but removed only his suit pants. The intercourse was so fast and painless she wasn’t sure it had happened until she saw a coin of blood on the grass when he was off retrieving her sandals and she was getting dressed. She placed a yellow poplar leaf over the spot. He came running
back, slapping her sandals together. Driving to the mall, he said that she was so beautiful, like a peach. He said again that he loved her. She couldn’t tell if she loved him, not until the next day when she went to the shoe store and saw him kneeling over an old woman’s foot and she remembered how as a five-year-old immigrant he had swabbed a ship’s deck.

After she feeds the kitten she puts it in the bathtub and dabs a warm, wet washcloth under its tail. It bats at its pee streaming toward the drain. It jumps to feel her tears on its head. She picks it up and it sits alertly in her hand. She puts it on the pillow and opens the drawer of the bedside table and takes out the Bible. Whatever she turns to will be a message.

“And a woman,” she reads, “having an issue of blood twelve years, which had spent all her living upon physicians, neither could be healed of any.”

“Good heavens,” she says, and then covers her mouth with her hand because the door is opening.

It’s Sam.

“I came back,” he says sheepishly.

She looks him over for a clue that could have told her. His narrow hands. Musician’s hands, she used to think. He walks to the chair and sits with his legs spread.

“Did you always have an Adam’s apple?” she asks.

He touches his throat. “Not like this,” he says.

“Is that the hormones?”

“Yeah.” He keeps his eyes on her. He’s been crying, she can tell from across the room. Twice before she’s seen him cry—when his dog, Tibor, was hit by a car, and when the girl picked up her father’s shaving mug in the movie A
Tree Grows in Brooklyn.
Those times, instead of thinking “Men don’t cry,” she thought she was witnessing a side of the artistic temperament.

She looks down at the Bible, at the word “Behold.” She says, “Well, I don’t hate you. I didn’t mean that.”

“You have every right to.”

Her throat tightens. “Is Sam your real name?” she asks.

“It is now, legally, but it’s not the name my parents gave me.” He runs his fingers through his fine blond hair, which is thinning at the temples because of hormone injections. Four years ago he started the injections. Two years ago he had a double mastectomy. His flat chest is the second thing she asked about.

“So what did your parents call you?” she asks.

His mouth twitches. “Pauline.”

“Pauline?”

“Yeah.” He gives an embarrassed laugh.

“Why didn’t you change it to Paul?” she asks, and the reasonableness and inconsequence of this question remind her of how she and her father used to dwell on why Bert Kella shot out a window in the living room instead of in the kitchen, and before Sam can answer her she cries, “I can’t believe this! I’m doomed or something!”

“Honey,” he says, coming to his feet.

“No!” She waves him back.

He puts his hands in his pockets and turns to look out the window.

“You don’t even have hips,” she says, her voice snagging. She falls back on the bed. The kitten pounces over and purrs into her ear. They have no name for it because as soon as it weighs two pounds it will be for sale. When she can speak she says, “You should have told me.”

“I know, I know,” he says. “I just love you so much. And I thought—” He taps his nails on the arm of the chair.

“Thought what?”

“I thought it would all be over by now.”

“What do you mean?”

“The surgery.”

The construction of a penis, the last in a series of operations.

“You mean you were never going to tell me?” she asks, twisting around to look at him.