My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (16 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST WORKS
In a storefront gallery in a big city, a performance artist sits at a spinning wheel, spinning nettles into thread, sits at a loom, weaving thread into cloth for little shirts. She has made five and a half shirts. This has taken her five and a half years. In the beginning she had a lot of visitors. You wouldn’t believe how fabulous they looked or how loudly they commented on her spinning wheel, her loom, her nettles, her blisters, and her patience. But no matter what they said, she did not speak or smile. The visitors commented on that, too, saying, smiling, that it would be harder for them not to speak or smile for six years than to spin thread out of nettles, weave that thread into cloth, make that cloth into shirts. That was probably true, thought the performance artist, severing a thread with her teeth.
Attendance fell off. The gallery owners, who had interests in Buenos Aires, Barcelona, Hong Kong, St. Petersburg, Istanbul, went on a long business trip. Her dealer stopped calling. The windows grew streaked and dusty. A row of posters advertising a burlesque show was pasted up—a woman dancing, naked as a prawn, within a storm of her own extraordinarily long, blond hair. Then flyers, their fringes of phone numbers fluttering: LOST RING, LOST DOG, LOST CHILD.
Occasionally a woman with silver hands comes, bringing pears.
The performance artist watches the sun move across the dusty glass while her hands twist and pluck. Once in a while, a winged shadow intersects the light.
HER YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER
He was sitting on the edge of my bed. I was on my knees in front of him, face in his lap, and suddenly there was this . . .
wind
.
Later I found feathers in my sheets, in my shoes. A small one floating, curved and lovely, in my water glass.
He has a huge, bulging forehead, like Edgar Allan Poe, and thin lips. Little round eyes, one raised shoulder. So no, he isn’t handsome. I had him down as a one-night stand, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The wing, beating. Flying.
Yes, every time he comes.
HER PARENTS
“My sons were the flighty ones. My daughter was always super down-to-earth,” says the father. “It was a surprise when she told us she wanted to be an artist. We tried to steer her toward something more practical. My wife suggested she take Home Ec. That’s where she learned to sew, so we feel that we’ve contributed. Indirectly.”
HER SILENCE
Words rise in her throat like gas. She swallows them back.
HER HANDS
look like gloves, or fake hands inside of which her real hands are hidden.
HER EXPERIENCE OF TIME
Read this sentence; repeat for six years.
THE OPENING
One day, someone turns up with a bucket of soapy water, a razor blade, and a squeegee, and scrapes the years off the window. A janitor climbs a ladder and replaces a bulb. The floor is washed, a folding table is covered with a paper cloth and plastic cups, and then the gallery owners sweep in with great tans and lots of friends and the gallery is full again. There are five nettle shirts hung on the wall, dry and spiky and brown. They look dangerous, though also a little sad. A sixth shirt, laid out on the table, is finished except for the left sleeve.
The performance artist, at the loom, where the material for the last sleeve is slowly growing, doesn’t look up.
A reporter leans over her with his pen poised over a notebook. “
Tsk
. Not until eight o’clock!” says the dealer, drawing him away.
When the minute hand snaps to twelve, an uncertain cheer goes up. It’s eight, but the performance artist hasn’t quite finished the last sleeve. But she gets right up. Her smile looks a little odd, but then, she hasn’t smiled for six years.
There’s a man looking at an empty hook on the wall. She hangs the last shirt there. “I thought it was you.”
“Of course it’s me.”
“I’m not going to ask where the others are.” She prods with a fingernail at a blister pillowing the tip of her baby finger. It looks like a drop of clear water.
“At happy hour, probably. Stop picking.” He puts his wing around her. “What do you expect? They have their happy ending.”
AFTERWARD
Your brothers are billing and cooing around you, nibbling their arms and puffing up their chests. One wing shudders, is stilled by a jeweled hand. The smell of burning meat hangs in the air; it is the king’s mother, your mother-in-law, cooked like a goose. No one is sorry, not even the king, so smile. Do you remember how to smile?
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
“Fabulous,” said a member of the Stepsisters’ Collective, beetles spilling from her mouth. “I love it!”
The performance artist catches sight of her reflection in the window. She should not have put on lipstick, she can never remember that she is wearing it. It looks as though she has been eating something bloody.
No, it is her dealer whose lipstick is smeared, and who is now weaving purposefully through the crowd, one hand clenched in the sleeve of the critic, her smile hard.
No, what happened is that her dealer kissed her; possibly she intended a European peck on the cheek, and it was the performance artist’s clumsiness that caused their mouths to meet. Or possibly that was the dealer’s intention in the first place, since her mouth clung longer than necessary. But was that because she actually desired the performance artist, or because she wanted others to think they were sleeping together? And if the latter, was that to raise herself up, or to lower the performance artist, or both, or to make the art critic jealous so that he attached himself more firmly to the performance artist—or perhaps to the dealer herself—or to drive him away, so that if the dealer could not have him, neither could the performance artist?
Maybe it is not lipstick at all but sweet-and-sour sauce from the six little drumsticks that she served herself from a waiter who looked like her father, the bones of which are still folded in her napkin; she was always an enthusiastic eater.
Or, she has been eating something bloody.
ALSO ON DISPLAY
A teacup full of sand.
Three poppies.
A ball of yarn.
MAGIC
The ball of yarn rolls by itself, leading the way. All you have to do is hold on to the end.
FACT
A story is sometimes called a “yarn.”
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
She pushes through the crowd and closes herself in the bathroom, swiping at the light switch, and hissing as she catches, as well, the sharp tip of a nail. She pops her pinkie in her mouth, smearing blood on her lips.
The bathroom doubles as a storeroom; there are six small narrow wooden beds jumbled or stacked in the corner or spaced neatly along the wall. They are the perfect size for her brothers, who, coincidentally, have just flown through the window, dropped their feathers in six neat heaps, and now crowd around her, goose-pimpled but human, congratulating her on her big night. But they can’t stay, her brothers tell her, they will only retain human form for fifteen minutes, an hour, a night, and then the robbers whose den this is will return, and she, too, should leave at once.
How convenient that there were precisely six robbers, she thought. And such small ones!
I’m going, I’m going, she says. But do you have a Band-Aid?
THE YOUNGEST BROTHER’S LOVER
Once I caught him plucking it. The tip was already bare—a sorry raw red-spotted naked prong sticking out of a nest of feathers. I went down on it, which I think confused him more than it excited him. Me, too, really. Afterward I said, “Don’t you ever do that again. I want you exactly the way you are.” Which surprised me, because all I’ve ever thought about my whole life was turning into something else. That’s something we have in common.
THE PERFORMANCE ARTIST DREAMS
Nettles sprout from her shoulder blades, sheathing her arms.
She awakes, a strange taste in her mouth. Where are her brothers—that is, her children? Has she eaten them? Have they flown away? Did she ever even have children?
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
Looking for gauze, she opens the small supply cabinet beside the sink. Reek of pine disinfectant, and she is in the forest. She can make out the path only by the slight tug of the yarn running drily through her fingers, that and the dark shapes of the recycling bins pulled out to the curbs for the Friday night pick-up. A shadow heaves up before her; her shoulder dashes into someone else’s and a hand squeezes her arm apologetically. The blackout has made everyone temporarily friendlier, and she wonders whether she shouldn’t just sit down on a stoop, or a stump, and wait for someone to sit next to her.
Now headlights slide over the ball of yarn, which is pausing, turning, continuing on its way. The yarn tugs at her hand and she keeps going, or someone does. Maybe it is her father, coming to see her! But no, it is a woman, so she hangs back. Her hands clamped on the cold stone, wishing her brothers weren’t so trusting. Her chest is pressed against the parapet, which is so high she can barely see over it, and so cold it stifles her breath. Her youngest brother bends to scoop up the traitorous ball of yarn and the visitor throws something over him—a little white changing shape like a ghost: a shirt—and something happens. Then it happens again, and again, and again, and again, and again. Six times, dear reader.
“The King has six sons,” being what the servants must have said. Not thinking to mention that he also had a daughter.
Let’s be generous, perhaps the servants loved her best, and sought to keep her secret.
Let’s be reasonable, how could they have known that when her six brothers ran forward, she would stay back?
And why did she stay back?
Perhaps she is a reader too, and knows that women are dangerous, especially when they are stepmothers, especially when they are witches or the daughters of witches, especially when they are Queens.
Perhaps the servants did mention her, and the Queen did not choose to sew her a shirt. Wishing to give the boys a fair chance, perhaps. Knowing that daughters can do things that sons can’t, like spin nettles into thread, and keep their mouths shut. Daughters do their duty.
THINGS YOU LEARN FROM READING
Women are trouble—if it isn’t an evil wife, it’s an evil stepmother. Or mother-in-law. Mothers are usually all right, unless they’re witches—watch out for witches. And their daughters.
You might be all right with kings, princes, and fathers, unless, as is usually the case, they’re under the influence of someone else, usually a woman. Men are weak. Sometimes they rescue you, but they always have help—from ants or birds or women. Sometimes you rescue them. This is kind of sweet.
You can trust animals. Sometimes they turn into people, but don’t hold that against them.
Children had better watch out.
THE OPENING, CONTINUED
“I play it back over and over,” said the woman with silver hands. “Every damn time it’s the same. I just put my hands on a stump”—laying them with a clunk on the table—“and say, ‘Yes, father’. That reminds me.” She has been going out with a man with chicken feet. He crams them into motorcycle boots and looks normal until they take off their clothes.
“Is that a problem for your sex life?” the performance artist asks.
“No,” says the woman with silver hands, “I like his feet. I mean, my hands seem to like them, I can feel it.”
“I want to introduce you to my brother,” said the performance artist. “I mean he’s gay but you’d never know.”
The woman with silver hands wasn’t listening. “He sleeps with an axe beside the bed—the window to the fire escape doesn’t lock, he says, but I think he’s tempting me to cut his feet off. Want a pear?”
The performance artist likes the lips of the woman with silver hands—a woman who could eat a pear off a tree with her stumps tied behind her back. She imagines balancing on a bed in boxers and socks, holding a pear by the stem, with the woman with silver hands on her knees before her. Later the woman with silver hands could climb a tree and throw down first her earrings, then her belt, then her boots, then her underpants, until she was naked as a pear.
“Thanks,” says the performance artist, and takes a sweet, juicy bite, and without thinking about it, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Now she will have to go fix her lipstick.
WEAVING
Reading, your gaze is moving from left to right, left to right, left to right, like a shuttle across a loom. The page is a figured cloth, swan black, swan white.
ETYMOLOGY
L.
texere
, to weave; from which we derive
textile,
and
text
.
CARELESSNESS

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