Weatherhead Read online

  “As far as she’s concerned, we’ve barely held hands—“

  “We live together. She don’t know that, does she?” She laughed and flopped her head back against the pillow. “What are you, twelve? This is ridiculous.”

  “It could be worse,” he whispered back, “at least we’re in the same room.”

  “Could you two please, no offense, Maggie, shut the fuck down?” A sister raised her head near to hand. Silver sat up too when she heard this. She loved Maggie to no end, and whispered to her newfound friend in the bed next to hers:

  “Count your lucky stars, my friend. I can’t even bring dates home.”

  A third sister, the youngest, drew herself up on her elbows. “That’s because you’re dates are other girls.” She pronounced the word with her typical pious disdain. The oldest sister, who had children of her own now, was allowed to bed with her husband and do as she liked.

  Maggie stuck her toes out of the end of her blanket and waggled them around. She was enjoying this, his sisters. Rooms like this were places were memories used to grow, a place where memory’s jigsaw cut out all the pieces, rolled them up in the front of its shirt and walked around the room sprinkling them like seeds to be discovered and reassembled into the plant. When she told him this, his surprise was abrupt and as sudden as her genius.

  Maggie looked from him to Silver and the youngest sister. “You guys didn’t grow up sharing a room like this, did you?”

  His mother and father, he explained, had shuffled around the house once the five had gone and turned the back section of their former rooms into small apartments. The mother did, though, keep all five beds crammed into a room made for one, maybe two, to maintain the illusion that there was still something for her to settle her giant, aegean ass over and mind.

  “So—no, we didn’t share a room. Much.” He shot a withering stare at his youngest sister in whom the keelhauled piety of three generations of disregarded orthodoxy had finally snowballed, avalanched, burst free. She was, God thought, better than all the rest of them.

  “This was,” he made a flourish with his hand in the dark, “my room—“

  “Our room,” amended the righteous one. When she’d come along, yes, he explained, he’d been forced to split his space with her, an inconceivable prospect nowadays.

  Maggie raised herself up on her elbows. “You two had to share a room? How’d that work?”

  Silver nodded. “A sound question. Example. How did you sneak girls in here?”

  “How’d you?” he shot back.

  “Har. I had my own room, boy-thing.”

  Maggie had had enough of being not next to him and all the talk of sneak inspired her. She slipped out of her bed and padded over softly, gingerly peeled down his covers while he watched her, bemused, and slid into his crush.

  “No fucky!” Silver shook a finger at them, eliciting a disquieting wince from the youngest. Then she twisted to the right and brought her fist down on the lump on the other side of her. “Aiming Amy! Are you killed?”

  “I’m not quite dead,” came a muffled voice.

  “I don’t want to go on the cart,” he joined in. Silver got up and sat down heavily on her sister, crying,

  “Well, you shall not have been mortally wounded in vain!”

  A half-threatening voice drifted from under an inadequate Barbie comforter, “I think I could pull through, suh.”

  “I don’t want to go on the cart,” he protested again. Now, even the severe one piped up, her back turned to the others as she hid the delights of this secret game of movies from the rest until the moment was ripe:

  “Oh, don’t be such a baby!” The room was flooded with laughter at this untoward, rare interjection from the baby who’d sat through the same films with them, eating candied gods instead of popcorn, inimmune to the zeal and zest of this cacophonous tribe of siblings. Now, Silver had a sword in her hand which she’d fished out of the trunk at the foot of somewhere and she leapt from bed to bed to bed to bed swashing and buckling until finally, a dyslexic Zorro, she slashed an ‘S’ on the headboard of her older sister’s bed and Aiming Amy swept her feet out from under her with a single deft tug on her pink Barbie blanket.

  From the heap on the floor came the assurance, “’Tis but a scratch!”

  Maggie watched all this like a cellar night-guard kidnapped into day. She’d never. Her brothers and she had silent ways about them, even when they played, they moved as one, never off the other as these four riffed. Quiet had been the squawks, tempers, and tears of the Mechaines.

  They pressed against each other, smiling without movement, listening to the banter of the others. He breathed in Maggie then and now, breathed in those creatures, his sisters, for to keep them all close to his chest was to somehow guarantee fates that he might never know: a marriage of competing puppeteers forced to share the same two-foot high theatre; a death in a desert where the cars explode—cars that have no place in sand, winning a bet with the brother that she always, always beat; the ironic sister, the silver sister, the only sister who found true love, married to a woman sent to Hell to make people laugh; finally, the virgin in all but spirit.

  That was the year of no World Series, when he and Maggie had gone to Chicago for the wedding of the naval-staring sister Silver sat on—her husband was in Cuba making a city for people for Christmas— but he took Maggie to visit his mother in New York City for the first time. See the family home and whatnot. It was Christmas and all his sisters would be there. They were getting married soon, too, so. They both hated flying, so. They drove the truck up.

  His father had died a few years before, driving a bus, a massive heart attack on a sunny street in Astoria and his body drove straight into the side of a building taking the bus with it. “Any moment, any moment,” his mother would always cry after that, wringing her hands any time any of them left the house mobile. It got so bad, with her preternatural talismans and rocking back and forth that, along with her, her youngest daughter became so deathly afraid of driving she swore off it for life. Born in Queens, their mother still managed to make genetic that fusty Old World nightscape of fears and demons and omens. She was a wealth of material for her feisty, foxy brood who mocked her to no end for her antediluvian sensibilities, her protean paranoia.

  The first thing his mother had said when she met Maggie Mechaine was, “Just lookit this! She’s so small, this girlfriend! Like a little bird! Come here, little bird, and let me look at you!” and her thin hairy arms stretched out to thread around her only son’s final conquest. She was a mother who secretly delighted in her son’s amorous antics, despite all her segregation of the sleeping. His women were all birds, bird-like, because she saw him as some sort of alleycat, like his father, pinning down those downy little bodies with their legs sticking out at odd angles, fangs barring but not piercing, carrying them gently back to a secret, dark place where he could devour them. The father had been the same way, as was Silver: hunters.

  Maggie Mechaine, for her part, was deathly afraid of birds. She called them anti-angels for worms. Alert the worms! Whatever was up there keeping them aloft, it had nothing to do with heaven. She knew this to be true, no matter how you slice it.

  In Chicago, Silver had been insistent at wearing down this phobia. “Even doves? NBC? Birds of peace?” She held up her plate of turkey, vanna-style. “This?”

  He did his best to head this off: prior experience taught him that Maggie could be a little inflexible. “Turn this shit off!” she’d screamed once. Hitchcock’s The Birds, she meant. That’d been Halloween past when he and several of his friends were marathoning The Master.

  Maggie loathed birds. Their feet were hateful excrudescences, dangling assassins meant for betraying childhoods with one natal slash; their beaks were hook-handed blasphemies to faces, dislocated knives, pecks on upraised palms, tugs on eyelids squeezed shut; their shark-eyes insane, rolling affairs, invocations of the pageantry of the fatal meaninglessness of all the hells the mind can imagine for wha
t is Bird but madness? They were mad creatures to Maggie Mechaine. The only time he’d ever seen her kill something other than herself was when, for her first birthday together he’d found her an impossible puzzle, titled ’10,000 Penguins’, and she’d set it on fire on the kitchen floor right there in front of him.

  Being called a ‘little bird’ by a large, hairy Greek woman was probably the last thing she needed. But, her dolorous country politeness trumping her phobia for a moment, Maggie merely leaned over his mother and asked in her soft voice, “See that sign that say ‘rib tip’—“ and pointed out the window.

  His mother hopped a little in her chair, fumbling with her napkin and rosary. “Sign? What sign? Rib what? What?” For there were omens in all.

  Silver snorted wine out her nose and became Maggie’s only friend when she interjected with, “Fuck that, you doan wanna go that way.” The mother paled and gasped. The eff word? And at dinner? Maggie paled a little, too, staring at Silver in wonder.

  “Any moment!” wailed Aiming Amy. “Any moment!” She clutched at her heart.

  He cried, thrusting a spatula at her, “God love it!”

  “God love it!” was his mother’s mantra. All the mother could do was cluck her tongue and swear at them all under her breath and hairy upper lip. She never used actual profanity, but surrogates that, somehow to her were sinister euphemisms for her frustrations, slightly, sinlessly disguised mispronunciations of their sources. “Bogmuckers”, “gas tolls”, “motor truckers”. For the longest time, the five children had written this off as their first generation immigrant mother’s inadequate grasp of the nuances of American English.

  “She’s making fun of you, ma.” The eldest was the most severe. She had no sense of humor whatsoever. And she did not like Maggie Mechaine.

  Silver leapt in, thrusting a pickle at this sister and her own excrudescence, her husband. “Jesus, it’s only the biggest hole in the world!”

  Their mother looked faint, swayed back and forth. The cursing, blasphemy, her empty daughter—all of it was too much for her and all she could, as it turned out, appropriately whisper apoplectically, was, “Watch your language.”

  “Make that the second biggest,” he couldn’t resist.

  Excepting him and the eldest, they were not a particularly attractive bunch. They were tall, big-boned, you might call them, these sisters. Maggie, plain ol’ Maggie, was the prettiest girl there. “Mixupoulos” they called him and Silver: he the spitting image of the mother, she the father. Appearances better suited to the opposite gender.

  “Don we now our gay apparel,” the three of them sang. Their mother hid her head in her hands. Oh, how she woed over her seedless daughter, this abrupt end to one-fifth of the family dynasteia. Women loving women! Any moment!

  Thus, Christmas dinner.

  “Do you believe in ghosts?” Why had she asked him that that Christmas Eve? Had she been visited by a ghost of Christmas futures?

  “There are with all men at least two evil spirits,” he told her. This was how he’d summed up A Christmas Carol to her that night when they’d finished reading it, Aiming Amy ‘s turn being the last.

  Dickens—right. He’d forgotten about that. It was his family’s tradition to read that out loud over the week before Christmas. Maggie never went for this. She was not one for Christmas. She didn’t put much stock by divine births—or deaths, for that matter. Not back then, anyway.

  What was it with this Christmas that haunted him so? This Christmas of once-had-beens when Maggie and Silver had gotten stoned to the beejeezus on the fire escape and the latter flubbed her way through the—ghost of Christmas present bit. Why remember Silver now? Oh, that was, he thought, the time that Silver had given Maggie Mechaine a painting, the only gift any of his sisters had thought to give to this little doll of their brother’s. “You need something in all your frames,” Silver told Maggie, “and this looks like you.” Silver looked at him. “Doesn’t it? Do you remember this story? The Lady of Shalott?”

  He did now. Merry Christmas, Weatherhead.

  (34 Across) I am the sum of all true things.

  I just can’t find them all. She rummaged around in her coat pockets and half-laughed, tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. There was some—some graffiti—she paused and peered down along a wrist into the crevice it’d opened near her—some graffiti left here by god for you. She shrugged off this shabby coat and rammed her hands through its sleeves, held it upside down and shook it out. Nothing. She frowned. Where is it? She stepped out of her shoes and stuck her face into them. Once these were tossed aside, she began patting down her roughspun tunic-like shirt that everyone wore in Weatherhead. She unlaced the front of it with an almost petulant impatience. There he saw, his eyes dislocated for a moment, her once-familiar abbreviated breasts that had once telegraphed sweats and future-milks into his palms, his mouths. He took a step away from her. All the spit he’d been storing up for her face had suddenly fled back down the dregs of his tongue.

  By night, she was saying as she shrugged off her shirt, the city is stranger. You can walk through shadows and crawl on all fours if you wanted. Was this why she’d woken him well before dawn this day? Brought him here, the last hospital in Weatherhead? Would you?

  A peal of torture made ceremonial ammunition stir somewhere below his navel. She was trying to seduce him again, he guessed. He had seen her naked before, the day that the zoo tried to free itself, those two beasts in the street, he and her, but that’d been savage, whip-like nudity of the berserker—feral in a feeding sense, not the fucky one. But now—oh, god, no, he couldn’t do this—not with this beast. Why was she—because of the Colored Girl? Penance for the corpses of the weddings? He couldn’t tear his eyes away from her skin, still church-crumble patchwork glass-shatter her nudity looked like the floor of a desecrated, bombed-out church exploded from outside-in, as if God had punched in all the windows in sheer anger.

  He stumbled backwards away from her. She was exhausting the floor, wringing the last breaths out of it by crawling across it, not a drip of her fire wasted. He knocked over an ancient tray of even older scalpels, knives, and saws. These scattered across the floor before her, a carpet of delicate slice, radiant edge spread out before her. All was edge here with her.

  She drew herself up on her knees with a single, lithe movement. I think I’ve found it. Her voice was as precise and tart as the tear-opens ground beneath her knees and palms. Here. She touched her mouth, leaving a smear of blood. He hadn’t seen her blood in a while. She feasted up at him. Climb into my jaws, she half-pleaded, half-commanded.

  I’m not sure— that I—that I should. Wildly, he fetched about for flight. The door was beyond her, just on the other side of the bed holding the hospital’s sole occupant. Wildly he fetched about for fight. The knives were all under her and how could he punch that wireless mouth? Not that way, no.

  Her face contorted. If you don’t, I’ll dance all over your apostrophes and I will stomp and smash them into ellipses until you have no sense of ownership nor contraction and just think of how tired your tongue will get having to say ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t’, ‘I am’ instead of ‘I’m’, so-and-so has instead of sssssssss stuck on the ends of everything, including me, for I will be the Gorgon of Words if I have to be and turn everything you say into silent stones stuck in your jaws now climb into my jaws.

  Meekly, he obeyed.

  Once inside, he was surprised to find no fangs, only a mere straight bite lacking jugular persecution, dawn rend—a perfect death-row of evenly topped tombstones. There were no signs of gnawing on ash. The descent towards her inner reaches was a carnivorous crimson, though, so dark it denied itself a name, so he stayed on the tip of her tongue, seeking purchase along the fringes of the wash of her spit, afraid of the rape of her speech as her tongue curled and ululated under his boots. He thought of Jonah, being trapped under the stairs by his sister, blanket crush fever days—he lifted up her tongue so he could see. See what? Hell, most l
ikely. There was a diamond carved into the soft flesh of her tongue. He guessed the underside held hexes, the place where she stored her curses, poems written in diabolical backwashes, a frenulum woven out of nooses, torn-out hair, whips, slaveries, salivaries.

  Can you see it? Her voice pulsed around him, breaking him out of his pause. He cowered against her teeth, squinting in the night of her mouth, looking for signs, runes, I-teeth. The graffiti? Shocked, he could. Someone had written all over the backs of her teeth, someone else had been in her intimate pit, had etched mazes of words along the white silk tombstones of her threaded jaw. He knelt down, the tide of her tongue lullabied him, her teeth parted slightly to let in light since he was already inside her. He ran his hands over the enamel, the inscription. It was written backwards.

  I need a mirror. Mirrors, he cried out to her. A moment later he was forced to leap aside as the canoe-length of a knife was thrust in just behind him. He directed her hand and wrist, turn it this way and that, catch the light just so, stab the words, yeah, perfect, don’t move, but she did, the slosh of saliva was now knee-deep. Her mouth was watering after him. Would he drown? Spurred on by the thought of dying in her spit, he crouched down again, an archaeologist of the dentifrice, studying the ruins and runes that kept her tongue company. Once he’d read the graffiti left there for him to discover, he stood up and looked back, back down her throat. All he had to do was throw himself into that abyss, become the monster, lodge himself there, dam her words, choke her, kill her. How many chances to fancy killing this beast! But once again, he turned away, staring down at the backmasted vandalism on the back of her bite and wondering at its meaning. Who wrote this here? He gave himself only a moment of reflection. He needed to rid her of the taste of him now, before it was too late. Soaked to the waist now with her want, he clung to the knife’s edge as she pulled it out. He collapsed into a pile of rags next to where she crouched on the balls of her feet, aloofly dinging the tip of the knife against her two front teeth as he lay there panting and suddenly-real.