My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (35 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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I am madly in love with Annette Kellerman. I always have been. Known as the Million-Dollar Mermaid, she performed self-styled ballet inside water-filled tanks, which in turn played a role in the birth of synchronized swimming. Fame and riches (and longtime love—that, too) were by-products. Gorgeous, shocking, inventive, artistic—she’s a dream, breathless and suspended, overjoyed with how her immersion arrests the purity of a single moment. The earth with people who push was what she yearned to escape. She was very much in this world and very much in another.
One day I went swimming after not getting into a pool in a painfully long time, and my happiness at being back in water helped “The Little Mermaid” leap to mind as a story I’d enjoy reinventing. I could spend many hours in the realm of Annette. My choice of a fairy tale was as simple as that, I think.
I reread the original by Hans Christian Andersen—and good God! The prince is either monumentally cruel or blitheringly dumb. I wanted, first, to invent a smart, caring male character, though he makes the disastrous mistake of confusing love with the pursuit of a beautiful idea. Some critics dislike what they perceive as Andersen’s do-gooder ending and his excruciating portrayal of a mute woman sacrificing herself for a frivolous rich boy, but I was quite taken at how much his story embraces the form of a classic romantic triangle, one that avoids a conventionally happy (fairy tale) conclusion: A wretched, overly patient, tongue-tied woman is dying for love and cannot convey her heartbreak while watching a man (with whom she’s enjoyed a binding friendship) replace her with a fresher, younger ideal.
That’s a tale as old as time. That was my springboard. At the heart of Andersen’s remarkably melancholy narrative is the struggle to square mortal craving with a search for immortality, eternity—whatever we care to call it. I have profound compassion, as we all do, for the essential dilemma of wanting desire, love, and friendship to increase with one person, not die away simply because time passes. There’s a lot to be said, as well, for fighting the need to separate human love from what we think to call holy.
The details fell into place. I wrote quickly after going shopping in a department store, because the women spritzing perfumes and reaching for me with their fluttering fingers suggested the polypi when the Little Mermaid goes to the Sea Witch to admit she’s desperate to find a new life. That was the small image that triggered everything else.
—KV
KAREN BRENNAN
The Snow Queen
I
I’D JUST MOVED BACK TO THE CITY, HAVING BEEN AWAY FOR A LONG time during which I’d accomplished quite a bit of work—I’m no judge of the quality—and was crashing at the apartment of a friend I’d run into at Borders bookstore after two weeks of hapless wandering. It had been snowing, but it always seemed to be snowing here those days; even when it wasn’t snowing one had the impression of snow about to or having just, and I was therefore cold. I was wearing only a flimsy red windbreaker, which is the same as saying I might as well have been wearing my bathing suit. I suppose it was pity when my friend asked where I was living or if I had a place to stay for the night. My general look of forlornness must have prompted him to say, I happen to have a free sofa, and he winked at me, which I considered very kind, very warm-hearted, of this friend who, as I recall, did not have a reputation for either warmth or kindness.
We were browsing the psychology section, he holding a book on the borderline personality and I holding a similar volume concerning narcissism. The
maladies de jour
, quipped my friend, if you don’t count drug addiction. Ah, yes, drug addiction, I said vaguely. I wasn’t sure I wanted to discuss drug addiction with this friend. I had known many drug addicts and they all were unbearably sad and I found it hard to be irreverent about them. One such was my own son, a pathetic person who wandered the streets homeless, perpetually checking himself into and out of detox units and trying to scam me into purchasing phony prescriptions. I wanted to forget about my son, to excise him from my mind, but the more I tried to do this, the more his presence asserted itself and I could see him, as if a movie were being played in front of my eyes, as a serious, overalled toddler and then as a tender, pudgy preteen with straight brown hair that hung over one eye.
Judge not and ye shall not be judged
, warns the Bible, and actually I myself was homeless at the time, having just returned from a kind of vacation, really, during which I’d produced mountains of material (god knows how good any of it was). Still, I did not want to discuss my son.
My friend and I then repaired to the fiction section and explored the
A
s—Jane Austen, all the Andersons, Agee, Alcott, and others, the usual great variety under
A
—and we each perused according to our tastes, slipping a book from the shelf, riffling through the pages, and replacing it, but not before chuckling over a title or author photo, the way you do.
I hadn’t slept for a week. I’d been away, and when I returned to this city I found everything changed. For example, a certain street I’d remembered as going one way toward the state capital now pointed in a different direction. Where this boulevard had been tree-lined, it was now flanked with tall soulless buildings. A store that used to sell small appliances had sprung up in the place of the junior college where I’d once taught freshman composition and all the cars had new-style garish license plates. I do not remember the state motto being ___________, but it’s possible I’d never really attended to the state motto. It was very cold, as I’ve said, snowing or about to—whereas before it had been temperate, tending toward sea breezes, balmy and blue. Now, no sea in sight (though I searched until I exhausted myself) and a strange odor permeated the air, a cold odor, not quite fresh, as of old snow, but so recent that it did not qualify as memory, but more like the fleeting space between nostalgia and dread, frozen into permanence.
My friend was blind in one eye, and though he assured me he’d always been blind in one eye—the result of a sleigh-riding accident when he was ten—I don’t remember him being blind in one eye. You must have hidden it well, I remarked. At this he bristled. It’s not something you can exactly hide, he retorted. He was holding a paperback edition of H. C. Andersen’s fairy tales
—
as far away from his face as his arms could stretch, because in addition to being blind in one eye he needed new reading glasses—and he insisted on sharing with me an excerpt from “The Snow Queen,” which is all about a terrifying being called the Snow Queen who kidnaps a boy called Kay. I didn’t want to be rude, but I’m not especially interested in fairy tales, no matter how capable and esteemed the author. In fact, “The Snow Queen” had a particularly perilous association for me, as she—the cold and beautiful woman—put me in mind of my mother, who had once read me that story. Therefore, while my friend read—
it was a lady, tall and slender and brilliantly white ..—
I let my mind wander.
II
For two weeks, I’d been looking for the sea, sleeping where I could under whatever canopy or ledge I could find—bridges, which had been abundant in the old days, had vanished without a trace, and so I was reduced to buttresses—the new gargoyles, snow-laden and hideous, the tiny balconies that used to be so fragrant and flower-laden, where people now smoked cigarettes, pitching the still-smoldering rockets below, almost burning me to death on several occasions.
I did not like to ask my friend—or anyone for that matter—about the sea because it is entirely possible that I am misremembering my old home. While he read Andersen’s “Snow Queen” in that excited way people have when they desperately want you to share their enthusiasm, their voices ratcheting up dramatically, my mind wandered the streets in the same manner that my body, for the past month, had wandered the streets. Still no sea.
My friend did not have the reputation for warmth or kindness, nevertheless he invited me to his apartment where he said there was an empty sofa with my name on it. He must have known I was extremely tired, yawning constantly and twirling and untwirling a strand of my hair around a forefinger, a habit when fatigued.
My friend said: All I ask is that you remember to put the shower curtain inside the tub. Otherwise the water will drip into the downstairs apartment and that bitch will have a fit.
That’s easy enough, I said. We hadn’t even arrived at his apartment when he gave me this rule about the water and shower. I wondered if there were other rules that would be more difficult to follow because, like anyone, I worry about unconscious behaviors, those which I cannot control, and then I worry that I am too old to change.
I don’t see well, said the friend apropos of nothing. We were walking down some avenue or other—I should say sliding down some avenue or other, because it had of course recently snowed and the road held the tracks of sleds and skis as well as snow tires and chains—but there was really nothing to see, I wanted to point out to my friend, everything was white, the sky, the street, and all the things that might have been visible on a day without snow were now covered with snow—rows of automobiles to the point that I wasn’t sure they were automobiles. For all I knew, they might have been great hulking sea monsters who had lost the sea like the rest of us.
Nevertheless, I gave my friend my arm, and he clutched my red windbreaker, which probably did the opposite of keeping me warm, it was of such a weird, cold material, and in this manner we eventually arrived at his apartment.
III
I was perfectly comfortable in my new surroundings; they beat the hell out of wandering the icy streets homeless, running into bands of thieves and drug addicts, my son not among those I’d encountered, thank god. I don’t know what I would have done if I’d seen my pathetic son. My heart no longer bleeds for him, though there was a time when my heart was smashed to smithereens. Enough said. Every time I try to banish him from memory here he comes again with his tilted gray eyes, even in the guise of who I did not see in the past month, as he who was conspicuously absent from my wanderings.
Being homeless is no picnic and, unlike my son, I did it drug-free, with only my thoughts for comfort, my belief (mistaken) that the sea lurked somewhere, waiting to restore me to my bearings.
My friend had a sofa, a TV, a lamp, a rug, a stove, a fridge, a double bed, a closet full of shoes, and a cat. I hadn’t realized he was such an austere fellow. He didn’t have a reputation for warmth or kindness, but inviting me to his apartment suggested that this reputation was not entirely warranted.
I slept on the sofa, as instructed. It was foamy, not lumpy, and its velvet material a cocoon of sorts. We all like to feel swathed, I think. Also, my friend gave me a blanket—a nice blue blanket which I wrapped around myself multiple times—and a pillow that used to belong to the cat. In fact, the cat shared the pillow with me at night, which I didn’t mind, the paddling and purring of the cat next to my ear as I slept, though I believe it colored my dreams.
The cat was cream-colored with large irregular splotches on its back, giving it the appearance of a small cow.
As cats go, it was medium-sized.
I dreamed of cows, therefore, and human infants who were pitched into dark holes and drug addicts sleeping on sofas belonging to other drug addicts.
The last time I saw my son he informed me that he was living in a “squat.” I told him that that fact struck me as kind of ignominious.
I remember the ocean as being a deep gray color laden, on good days, with streaks of white, which gave it its characteristic shimmer. The sky on such days was lit with what looked to be rags hanging from a celestial clothesline. Very beautiful, but spooky.
IV
My friend was christened Frederick von Schlegel, after the German philosopher of the same name, but everyone called him Hans. My name was G, just the initial deprived of the clothing, I liked to say. The cat’s name was Fur and I won’t tell you my son the drug addict’s name.
I had been away for an indeterminate amount of time during which I completed a great deal of work. I kept residuals in a suitcase which, until I met Hans in Borders bookstore, I lugged around with me through the city. The bulk was housed elsewhere. I had no idea if any of it was successful. In more optimistic moments, I liked to think so; but eventually something would happen—the tiniest alteration in the atmosphere, such as the time when the crow who frequented the fire-escape railing growled at me through the window—and then I would be in despair over my accomplishments. At such times I felt I understood the impulses of those who scourged themselves with cato’-nine-tails and slept on beds of nails. I, too, craved punishment for the unworthiness of my effort, indeed the unworthiness of my being.

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