My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (19 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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BENTNECK: Chinscraper, Kneescraper, Beauty, the shot-up dog, the shinbone, the impaled egg, and the Warm Mouth were startled to find before them the very sight they had fantasized: an open door. They dragged themselves inside and sat on the couch. They attempted to manipulate the controls of the boxing game. Then they closed the broken door and the broken blinds as best they could and dropped off into a noisome sleep. (All make barnyard noises.)
BENTNECK: Meanwhile day was dawning. The young man had run for a few blocks but was quickly winded. He climbed up onto a porch he knew and curled up under the remains of a swing that was hanging by one chain and made a kind of canted roof. As the day grew hotter the heat roused him from his cramped slumber, and he got up and banged on the door. He told his friend about his vision:
YOUNG MAN: I saw into the heart of me, I saw, like, into the heart of me, I saw beneath my, skin. I saw back into the, back of time, I saw like, out through the back of me, back through a hole in the skull of me, shot through a mouth in my skin, my life, like it had happened to me, the life, like, under my skin. And everything that would happen to me and everything I’d done like it had happened to me.
BENTNECK: His friend gave him a bump on credit, but also laughed at him.
FRIEND: Yeah man, but where’s the gun and where’s the stash? Where’s the gun and where’s the stash? Is it nestled up inside the shinbone of a horse, or sleeping in a smashed egg, or is it stuffed up in a murdered eight-year-old’s cunt? You better get your ass back over there if you love your life
.
Ash and stash, gash and snatch, love and life, cunt and gut, gun and gas. Run back. Run back.
BENTNECK: Did he love his life? The young man did not ask himself this question. He jumped up like a man in reverse and moved backward through the streets to the motel, all the way tilting away from it. He moved like rewound footage. He moved like across the moon. In this way he slowly slowly reached the door that he had fled. He could hear the video game cycling through its start-up screens. He could smell a morgue with broken air-conditioning, a rifled grave, roadkill, a suppurating wound, a stiffening body, a room full of sweat and sex, an unwashed child. He knew and recognized each of these smells. Perhaps he was not such a young young man. Plus an ooze was trickling all around his sneakers, green and foul, threaded with black. With held breath he tipped open the door.
BENTNECK: What he saw inside was a burst spectacle, a room filled with stinking pus, flaps of skin and tissue driven into the walls, a room that pulsed and seemed to be digesting a horrible gallimaufry, the fur, bones, and innards of an animal rotted beyond recognition, a boy so skinny his ribs, wrists, and leg bones had finally splintered through his flesh, a girl with bulging eyes and a wrung neck, a peltless dog whose every muscle was being slowly worked from the bone, a suppurating wound without a body left to speak of, bits of shell, tooth, hair, tongue, claw, and fat bobbing and resurfacing in the fuming fluid that bathed everything, bathed even his own eyes. Then he closed his eyes, opened his mouth, and he took it all into his mouth, the room and the world, the causes and their outcomes, the couch and the game, the gun and the stash, the fix and the flesh, the anger and the relief, the hope and the violence, the illusions of adulthood, chief among which is childhood, the growth and the decay, the decay and the rot, he took it into his mouth until his mouth was warm and leaked a little and bulged at the lip like a piteous frog’s.
 
This is Beauty speaking, with my warm mouth.
“The Warm Mouth” is a rewrite of Grimms’ “The Bremen Town Musicians” that combines the violent strangeness of the original with the violent strangeness of life in the postindustrial-slash-rural ruins of northern Indiana (an area known as Michiana for its closeness to the Michigan border). Both the Grimms’ story and my play also take up the problem of shelter, including the body as a kind of failed shelter. I live just up the road from Bremen, Indiana (pronounced BREE-min
).
The figures in “The Warm Mouth” are thus figures I could run into any day, literally, on the Bremen Highway—or see from a passing car in South Bend. Central to both my experience of life here in Michiana and to “The Warm Mouth” is the Wooden Indian, a “residential” motel that seems entirely made up of catwalks, staircases, and storage sheds, a shelter-without-shelter, without an interior. This structure, and its infirm yet resourceful inhabitants, who are always visible, since their building has no interior, thus manage to evoke somehow Bosch, Dante, and Deleuze. It also recently got a second wooden Indian, both of which are chained up by the Coke machine, which is also chained up—outside, naturally. In contrast to its surroundings and fellow residents, the Coke machine seems flushed and absently cheerful, as if demented or heavily medicated. Thinking about embodiment and pharmaceuticals, I also wanted to collapse the Grimms’ musicians from their separable, intact species (dog, donkey, etc.) into one grotesque, gooey, hybrid body, the Warm Mouth, which is then swallowed by Beauty, most terrible of all.
—JM
LYDIA MILLET
Snow White, Rose Red
I MET THE GIRLS AND INSTANTLY LIKED THE GIRLS. OF COURSE I LIKED the girls. A girl is better than a feast.
This was before the arrest, before the indictment and the media stories.
The girls were sisters, as you may know, and lived, during the summer, in one of those upstate mansions built by the robber barons who made their fortunes off railroads and steel and unfair business practices. It was in the Low Peaks of the Adirondacks—the southern part with glassy lakes and green slopes and white-spotted fawns. The girls, who were innocent in the glut of their wealth because they’d never known anything else, called their summer house “the cottage” to distinguish it from “the apartment,” which was a ten-thousand-square-foot penthouse on Fifth Avenue near Washington Square Park.
Their father was in real estate, but no one ever saw him. Correction: from time to time we caught sight of him briefly, the girls and I, getting in or out of a long gleaming car. Once, from the woods, I spotted him walking down to the dock in a pale-gray suit, his phone held to his ear.
He looked like a groom doll on a wedding cake. I wanted to tear his legs off.
At twilight, on the grounds of the massive yet log-cabin-style robber baron mansion, dozens of deer stood around, their graceful necks lowered, eating the grass. There’s an abundance of deer up there, due to the hunters who’ve killed off all the animals that were supposed to be preying on them. So the deer.
And the girls, equally graceful with their light, carrying laughter and long limbs, spun glow-in-the-dark hula hoops or played croquet with ancient peeling mallets as the purple dusk fell. The older one had honey-colored hair and blue eyes; the younger had brown hair and her eyes were a shade of amber. They hardly looked like sisters, but they were. The blonde was called Nieve, Spanish for
snow
, and the brunette was Rosa but she went by Rose. Their mother—a former ballerina from Madrid who was both anorexic and mentally slow—had named them but often she forgot their names.
We only met because I came out of the woods one night. I came out of the woods and walked right across the rolling lawn, scattering the Bambis. The sun was setting over the lake and a slight breeze rippled the water.
I admit the girls appeared frightened. What Rosa told me later was this: those first few seconds, they actually mistook me for a bear.
They’d never seen a homeless guy before—they were that sheltered, even though they lived in downtown Manhattan; trust me, it can be done—and though I wasn’t technically homeless I had that same dirty, hirsute aspect. I’m not a small man but tall and barrelchested, and that June evening I wore filthy clothes and a long beard and needed badly to bathe in the lake.
I had a home in the forest, or a temporary shelter, anyway; but to girls that pampered and young there’s no perceptible difference between an aging hippie and a transient.
So they were frightened at first, but I held up my hands as I walked up to the porch. The cottage had a wide wraparound porch, stone-floored, with swings, chairs, rugs, and potted plants. The girls retreated partway up the stairs and stood there uncertainly on the steps in their simple cotton frocks, clutching a Frisbee and a skipping rope. I held up my hands like a man who was surrendering.
I was lucky the help wasn’t around and the mother, as usual, had gone to bed early. If anyone else had been there—the cook, for one, who was a domineering type—they probably would have run me off.
I’d had too much to drink, of course. It was my pastime then—the summer before my divorce, a strange and isolated time. I was camped out in an old airplane hangar on one of the smaller lakes and now and then I hitchhiked into town, bought booze and groceries, and prayed not to run into my estranged wife. We’d had our own more modest summer place nearby.
What I’d done was, I’d disappeared. I didn’t want my wife to know where I had gone. It was the only trick I had left: hiding and vanishing. I got some meager satisfaction from an idea I had of her not knowing whether I lived or died—her wondering if maybe, defying all her expectations, I’d left my dull old self behind and flown off to a distant and unknown country.
Those girls were good. Plenty of rich girls aren’t, we all know that. But those two girls were innocent. I don’t know how they turned out that way, with the mother who wasn’t all there and the father who wasn’t there at all. That goodness came from them like milk from a rock.
Snow, as I came to call her because I couldn’t be bothered to pronounce her real name, mostly liked books, and sat in the shade of the porch on afternoons, reading. Her sister was more social and spent her time talking to everyone. She rode her bicycle to an old folks’ home most days and helped the people there.
As I stood on the lawn looking up at them, I noticed something I hadn’t seen from a distance: the girls’ skin glowed. Both of them had this luminous kind of skin.
That clear, young skin is part of what makes girls look so edible.
I asked them not to be afraid. I told them my name, and after a few moments they seemed to relax and told me theirs. They had a dog, an old Irish setter who lay around and barely raised his tail even for flies. I sat down on the steps and petted the dog, after a while.
So we were friends. Of course, I wouldn’t have had a chance if the girls hadn’t been left on their own so much. Now and then a friend their own age came up from the city to visit and I didn’t intrude upon them then.
But those visits were rare. Often at dawn or dusk, when the deer and the girls were out, I was the only company they had. I kept a low profile and did not throw the Frisbee back and forth with them, in case someone could see us from the house. Usually we stood together and we talked, a little out of sight. Once or twice they sat on the end of the dock and trailed their feet through the water, and I swam, only my head above the darkening surface.
From the high bedroom windows of the cottage’s second floor, that wouldn’t have looked like anything.
The girls were kind to me. They let me use the canoes in the boathouse, even encouraged me, and some mornings I would row out into a hidden bay and sit and drift, trying idly to fish in the shade of a red pine. There were some old rods in the boathouse, and since I had none of my own I used to borrow them.

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