The Melancholy of Mechagirl (16 page)

MEMOIRS OF A GIRL WHO FAILED TO BE BORN FROM A PEACH

In the year that they rented the Los Angeles apartment

with turn of the century plumbing,

when her hair was cropped short, the bleach rinsed out,

when he still read Fitzgerald,

they had given up hope of a child.

I appeared without warning,

like the samurai Momotaro, who floated up

into his mother’s Tuesday washing

packed into the pulpy womb of a yellow peach.

And like him, I also cried out to my father:

Wait, wait!

when he thoughtlessly drew a knife from the kitchen drawer

to slice the fruit in quarters.

It would be nice to think that he paused,

listening to my sugar-buried exhortation,

that I sprang from the bed of wet gold

in a helmet of antlers and a bamboo
kusazuri
.

If I had leapt from the honey-bed and kissed my mother’s ear,

then I, too, might have given bean-dumplings

to the monkey,

the pheasant,

the spotted dog.

We might have gone together, then,

trampling the grass with filial feet.

We might have built a raft of palm fronds, held fast

by a paste of betel and coconut,

and sailing across the water,

we would have slaughtered in seven clean strokes

the giants of Ogre Island,

whose flesh was red,

and blue,

and black.

I would have brought home to them the magic hammer,

which produced gold whenever it struck the earth.

Perhaps the peach-musculature muffled my voice,

or perhaps their neighbor, who had lived alone

in her little room for 50 years,

was playing the piano again,

her foot death-heavy on the reverberating pedal—

but my father cut the peach with two clean strokes,

each slice falling onto the cutting board at the same moment

like four wasting moons.

THE GIRL WITH TWO SKINS

I.

On your knees between moon-green shoots,

beside a sack of seed, a silver can, a white spade,

a ball is tucked into the bustle of your skirt:

like a pearl

but not a pearl.

You pulled it up

round as a beet from between the mint and the beans

where I had sunk it in the earth,

as though I fished

for loam-finned, moss-gilled coelacanth

at the bottom of the world.

I thought it safe.

I crawl to you on belly henna-bright,

teeth out,

scratching the basil sprouts—

eyes flash phosphor. In the late light,

slant gold light,

you must see

the old tail echo

beneath my muddy dress:

two, three, nine.

I howl against the barking churchbells:

Give it back, give it back,

I need it.

II.

Once I skulked snoutwise through scrap-iron forests,

And to each man with his silver pail scowled:

You are not beautiful enough

to make me human.

I had a fox’s education:

rich coffee grounds in every house gutter,

mice whose bones were sweet to suck,

stolen bread and rainwater on whiskers:

slow theogonies of bottle caps and house cats.

I crouched, the color of rusted stairs,

and to each boy who chased me

through rotted wheat laughed:

You are not beautiful enough

to turn my tail to feet!

But this is a story,

and in a story

there is always someone

beautiful enough.

In a wood I found you

in the classical way,

a girl in a dress with a high hem,

ribbons in her teeth,

honey on her thumbs.

(Damn all of you. All your red hair

just enough like fur,

Damn all your small mouth,

your damp smell,

Damn all your pianos and stitching hoops.

Had I but paws enough to stamp out

your every spoken word like snow!)

You spooled out lessons

like an older sister:

Make your waist like this
,

indicating curve.

Make your eyes like this
,

indicating blue.

Make your face

make your skin

make your clever, clever hands,

make them this way,

indicating civilized,

indicating soft, your own,

your freckled breast linen-bound.

The old vixens, with their scabby,

mushroom-strung claws,

only said to run from boys,

and you looked so thick and pure,

like the inside

of a bone.

III.

I lashed my tail to my waist

in your gold-wood kitchen,

ridiculous in blue silk,

with cornflowers in my ears.

We bent over squash soup and sour cherries,

you put your hands over mine

to show me how to crease dough

over a silver pan.

I bit your cheek at teatime;

you smelled all day of my musk.

No
, you laughed like sugar stirring,

your feet are too black,

your teeth are so sharp!

Can you not stand up straight

in my old dresses?

Can you not make your flesh

like mine?

Shamed, fur flamed across my cheek,

but you patted it pale with flour and sweet,

and I wept to be savage and bristle-stiff

in such a tidy place,

in such silent, clean arms.

I slept curled

at the foot of your bed,

reeking of lavender and lilac

though I spied no purple field.

I growled at moths that plagued your hair

and woke with every stairwell creak.

But you brushed back my pelt

with lullabies,

into a long braid that fell

across pillows like shoulder blades.

You showed me the word
kitsune

in a book with a long ribbonmark

like blood spilled on the print—

I chewed the page and swallowed it,

and learned there only that

crawling into your arms,

embarrassed by my heat, my wet nose,

was like becoming

a girl with two skins.

IV.

This is a story,

and it is true of all stories

that the sound when they slam shut

is like a key turning.

I was sewing, hands two bloody half-paws—

it takes such a long time to

become a woman—

smears of needle-bitten skin,

and you scrutinizing the cross-stitching:

no, no, like this, my love, like mine—

when he came to call, when you

with hair sleek as linseed oil

and my eyes still so black,

still unable to imitate the blue you demanded,

danced with him in our kitchen,

fed him our yellow soups with sprigs of thyme.

He smiled at me, with pomade in that grin,

and walking canes, and silverware,

and spring gloves. I snapped at him,

for a simple fox may still understand her rival,

and know what is expected.

But the recoil! The shrieking of her

the shrinking into his great smooth arms,

the lifting of her blue skirts to keep them clear

of the stink of my fume!

A vixen chews out the throat of her enemies

like stripping bark from a birch;

it is the sophisticated thing.

How was I to know you meant to keep him?

Absurd in my torn dress,

tail bulging free, the muzzle

you tried so to train to lips,

curled back, knife-whiskered,

I stood with blood beating my flesh to drum-taut,

in our kitchen, in our hall,

mange-sodden and mud-bellied,

before the man who was

beautiful enough,

beautiful enough.

V.

It is not possible, you said later,

when I scrabbled at the door he built,

when my skin was blue and bruised,

and there was no russet left in me,

when my nakedness in the snow

was goose-pimpled and smelled so damp,

so much like soup

and cherries

and creased dough in a silver pan—

it is not possible to love for long

what is not a girl, sweet nor soft,

nor civilized,

nor trained to tile and mantle-shine,

stray beast in the house,

scolded when she spoils supper

with her hunger,

when her rough tongue spoils

every cultivated thing,

skin and sewing and lavender bed together.

See how tall he stands.

See how gentle his voice.

See how his hands on me never cut.

Then give it back,

I need it,

my pearl

which is not a pearl.

I do not want your shape.

Let me go back

I want to go back.

But you keep it by you,

pretty jeweled thing,

it adorns you as I did not.

The heat of you