The Entire Predicament (15 page)

“Hello, Meg,” he said. “I need some time with Beth.”

The baby heard breath. The baby heard tiny creaks from inside his mother’s neck, where many cords thrived. She turned
in her swiveling porch chair. His father moved to where the baby’s ear would be. Past the lotion and through the screen, deep into the living room his aunt settled herself at the piano. She looked like a doll, playing: limbs all stretched out swimming. The piano’s angle in the house made it echo so that it sounded like a fleet of pianos. Flying. A flock. A fleet. Sound bouncing, making multiple Vs, invisible geometry.

“The cellar is empty without you,” his father said somewhere near his ear.“I’m sorry I ruined the bread,” he said,“but I gotta come clean.” He placed himself at the table, opposite. The baby, not having eyes in the back of his cast, only heard. “Are you ready to hear what I have to say? I saw one of those trucks stuffed with anguished chickens, but I couldn’t tell you, because of all those times.”

“That’s not what I meant, Dan, and I think you know it.”

“All those long drives, I’d see an animal dead on the road and I’d say anything to keep you looking the other way.‘Look! Balloon Chase Vehicle! Sudden Stops and Indecision!’ You must have thought I was crazy. But it wasn’t anything. Only in my past.”

“We have been through this and through this.”

“Honey:
growing pig teeth in the stomachs of rats
.That’s all I’m saying. It’s just something reminded me.”

“I know that’s how you see it, but I don’t.”

His father’s voice became its quietest. It cut a silent hole through the air and then traveled though it. “I only want to protect you.”

“I wish you could hear yourself sometimes,” his mother said, and snapped the tunnel shut with her teeth.

In the baby’s line of vision was the metal fold-out stand teetering
on chrome legs. It held music that he saw from behind, and only on the other side were tiny lines with tiny dancing inked rods and dots. Even his aunt only saw the way they moved up and down, and followed, knowing the tune. She’d put the music on the music stand instead of the piano because she wanted to look past it, toward the porch. The music stand was for the clarinet, but the baby didn’t know this. He could see her staring. He could only imagine. He imagined goldfish and berries raining.

The baby could hear through the pores in his cast. “Abe,” he said. “Amok.” His parents continued to speak in code.

“They cut the burial suit down the back.”

“I remember.”

“The whole house was awake from your packing tape.”

“I know.”

“Doll,” said the baby. “Bone,” he said and then, in a sort of spasm, his mother moved him to face her, his moony helmet hugging his moony face, her dark curls like night clouds around hers, and said, “What did he say? What? What?” Her eyes were like panic buttons and her mouth was a wilted petunia and her skin glowed like underwater lit with lamp bulbs. The baby’s blanket slumped to the plank floor in a heap.

“I miss those cameos,” said his father. “I want all that stuff I said.”

“I believe we have covered this territory,” she said, but still looked at the baby as if he knew something she didn’t know, or had known only a very long time ago.

“God,” his father said.

She still looked at him.Then she put him back.

“I couldn’t see how you could understand. That’s why.”
Over her shoulder, the window screen made the house inside gray.

“Oh,” she said. She shivered. “I don’t. I don’t understand.”

He could feel his mother hang there, a burnt coat. He could feel fuzzed edges of plastered fabric rubbing his sloughing skin. This is what he always felt. He could feel his blood beat. He could feel his body humming. His body hummed and sweat. His mother’s body beat beside him, very far away.

“Ba-ha,” said the baby.

Hum. Drum. Inside: the frazzled piano, his aunt pretending she couldn’t hear, pretending to be swept away.

“What does he mean, ‘Ba-ha?’” said his father. He walked around behind his wife and squatted, face-to-face with the baby. His father was bald, and even in the late summer he wore a black ski cap, as he did now. “Whatcha talking about baby, baby?” he said. He placed his hand on the round white cast-roof and rubbed as if it were furry. He made a frowny face. Then he stood and put the hand on his wife’s neck and drew her head back, leaned over her and kissed her from above. By the time he stopped, she was crying. He took the cap off his head and ambled into the night, swinging it like a lunch pail.

His mother cried. Then she looked at her baby. He still seemed placid, but truly, he had already learned to keep the muscles in his face relaxed because of all they connected. He’d already learned, because of pain, and without knowing anything, to remain constant in an unreadable way. “Look at you, little chicken,” she said clearly. “When will you get to crack your egg?”

Very far away, in other lands, but also in prisons and factories not so far, and in some of the houses on the aunt’s very street, the world was bad, beaten, beating, but here it wasn’t so. It was not too bad. People meant to be kind. They did all right. It’s hard to understand. The baby didn’t know he was in a cast. How could he want out? But he did want out. He tried to squirm.

Inside, the piano clunked to a stop midtune, the aunt no longer pretending she’d been playing except to make herself scarce. She slipped back onto the porch and watched, with her sister, his father’s retreat.

“Poor piano,” she said, wiggling her fingers. “All that music inside and no way out. Come, come, now, what was all that?”

“I don’t know,” said his mother. “Nonsense really. I think he was trying to warn me. I can see right through him. It’s just so much work.” Light from the porch lamp tented them, and the nature of the moon, a reflective surface with no light of its own, was especially appropriate.

“Coded. Coated,” said his aunt. “I know how it is. Look who I’m with. Not to mention the beak! Ha! Okay, not so funny. Here, I’ve got another one for you. When I was teaching, living in that crappy apartment. Had a neighbor. Shelley. How did I know her, really? I don’t remember. One day Shelley comes over, ravaged. It’s four in the afternoon. Man arrived to fix her sink and raped her. Pete. We learn this later. No question, girl was ravaged, heaving. Wouldn’t go to any hospital. Spent a couple of nights on my sofa. Said she had dreams of penises like feet.Then she went back to her place. I kept an eye on her but she retreated and soon enough there she is, lugging groceries up the staircase, huge, and then she’s having the baby.

“She tries to prosecute the guy. I’d see him around, still fixing apartments. He says no sex happened, they do a blood test, then he says, well, maybe sex but no rape, so she gets child support. I don’t know. Having that baby. Not moving away. I moved before she did. Here, in fact. But this is more my point: I had a student, year or two after Shelley’s baby, this lovely, bright girl, very put together. Rose, my student. She got an award from the department—clever, inventive girl, very steady. This is when I put it together. I’m at the award ceremony and turn around to meet the girl’s father, and it’s the guy: Pete. From the rape. I guess he knows I know because his face gets chaotic and then he flees.

“I can see his daughter, Rose. Then and now I can see her. She’s up on the stage where she’s supposed to be with those twats from the department.There behind the white tablecloth and that blue bunting, or what-d’ya-call-it, what they use to skirt folding tables.Table skirt. It that it? God, she’d been trying to catch his eye, to wave, watching for him and feeling happy to see him in the throng and meeting her professors, meeting
me
, and then there, he shakes my hand—my hand!—and, as soon as the guy starts fleeing, as soon as I put it together, I look up at the stage and I can see her change. It’s like something was cracking, this happy surface of hers. I could feel his vibrations still in my
hand
. Looking up at her. I just stood there and watched her whole world falling away. That rosy girl.” She gazed across the baby at her sister, who had laid him like a dulcimer across her lap. “She must have been
suspecting
something,” the aunt said. The consciousness of the aunt was, at this point, completely encased in her story. “Well,” she said, the case dissipating, “you can imagine.”

The baby’s mother wasn’t thinking about the story, which was filled with the names of people she didn’t know. She thought about her sister’s stories and her husband’s stories. She thought, It’s always one thing or another. She thought about growing up, knowing more and more things, and having no idea how to put them together. It just wasn’t right. It was, she felt,
unjust
.

The aunt looked at her and squinted. “Or perhaps, I see, you can’t,” she said.

“Why did the woman have that baby?” asked his mother.

“Hell, I don’t know. No offense, sugar,” said his aunt, leaning forward and patting his head as if it were his head. “But I was thinking about the girl. I mean Shelley, sure, same as always with raped people. But I mean that Rose who tried so hard and learned so much . . .”

“I hear what you’re saying, but Dan’s not a
rapist
,” said his mother. “I know he wants to tell me something. I’ll figure it out. I’ll get it out of him. I have my ways,” she said, her voice lightening.

“Cipher. Siphon,” said the aunt. “He’s something.”

“He’s not
bad
. He’s just my husband.”

“What’s bad? What’s bad enough?”

“He’ s not bad like that. I am not a beaten wife.”

“Just beaten? Just wife?”

“Meg, you are exhausting and predictable. Look at you.”

The aunt’s head hovered, damp and white, below the beaded porch ceiling.The baby didn’t know that he heard as if underwater, all sounds surrounded, glaze over a dark cake. Still, sounds moved for him like heavy-headed flowers on a faintly jiggling earth.

“Echo,” he said, bubbles at his lips. “Atone.”

“Look at this,” said the aunt, lifting an envelope from a pile of junk mail on the glass-top spool. “‘The information you requested is enclosed.’ Ha.”

“Ba-ha!” called the parrot from behind the screen and the skeleton of its complicated cage. “Doll! Bone!”

“Hold him,” said his mother. They shifted their springy swivel chairs toward each other and tilted the baby lap to lap. If he had not been wearing his cast, the baby could have felt the very top ribs of his aunt’s core against his back. His plaster brushed her clavicle. His mother wore a housedress decorated with tiny red apples, not what she’d been wearing before he’d slept. The apples lay along a grid in various phases of being eaten. Then his aunt turned him to face her. She looked into his round eyes with her crumpled ones. “Knock, knock,” she said, tapping his lid. “Is there anybody there? May I come in?” Some of the moon shone against the scalloped edge of the largest tree in the yard, the rest of it obscured by night-black leaves. His mother traveled from somewhere behind him to the corner of the porch and leaned on the rail with her elbows, holding the parrot’s feet in her fist. The parrot stood, cleanly outlined in the earliest of morning light, all silhouette and glow. Between his mother’s body and the parrot’s, white letters from the street sign shined, “uffin.”

“Why did you end up with Sonny and not me?” his mother asked.

“No one wants an inherited bird. Mother made me promise. And I liked him. And I was there.”

“I like him a little. Sonny must be very old now. How old must he be?” she asked, a little to the bird himself.

“Not old.That’s Sonny two. Sonny the second.”

“I don’t understand.”

“New bird.”

“No. It can’t be.”

“Absolutely. God, where were you? Entirely new bird.What the hell, Beth? Why are you crying?”

“Where was I? Where were
you
? It goes both ways.”

“Beth,” she said, “no one is trying to fool you.”

“I loved that bird. We grew up with that bird. First you, then me.”

“It’s funny, Beth. It’s a
parrot
,” said the aunt. “Gertrude Stein did it with dogs. It’s even funnier with a parrot.”

“Gertrude Stein is not funny. She’s incomprehensible, and that’s just mean.”

“Look, when Sonny died, Mother was saying she’d really named him Sunny—like bask in the sun—but nobody ever wrote his name down, as far as anyone knew, until there I was, filling out a form at the vet’s. So, you know, we got a new bird. Then Mom died. I’m sure you remember. I believe you were out of town. In fact, I believe you were having
marital problems
, surprise, surprise. But good news: refrain from suicide and you could inherit
this
fine bird. Only one letter off the original!”

“I thought I
knew
you,” said his mother. Then she opened her fist out of rage, and the parrot flew. He flew frantically, overcoming clipped feathers. He made it to the sign and rested over “Rd.” Then he heaved himself into the tree and disappeared within it. Dawn creaked, beginning to hum under the ending night. An entire family walked by: a man, a woman, and two little children, all wearing yellow rain gear and carrying fishing nets. In front of them, the baby saw his mother
looking in his direction very angrily. Part of him knew his aunt’s face hovered above his, but he still felt it. “What happened to Sonny one?”