My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me (79 page)

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Authors: KATE BERNHEIMER

BOOK: My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me
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“Just go,” Doc said.
“What’s the matter?” Happy said. “Is it me? I did my best. It’s hard being a waiter. I never realized it was so hard, keeping everything straight.”
“You did fine,” Doc said.
“Do you really think so?” Happy looked thrilled.
“We’ll wait for you,” Sleepy said. “We can all share a cab.”
“You guys go,” Doc said.
“Cool, a cab,” Sneezy said. “Here’s something weird,” he said. “Whenever I get in somebody’s car, I make sure to buckle up. But in a cab, I never put on a seat belt. Isn’t that weird?”
“You should,” Doc said. He wanted to slap them. “Go,” he said. “Just get the fuck out of here and leave me alone.”
Sneezy and Happy stared. Sleepy pulled them each by a jacket sleeve. “Sure, man,” Sleepy said. “No problem. You want to be alone, we’ll leave you alone.”
Finally they were gone. “Over the Rainbow” was playing softly on the stereo. Judy Garland’s voice usually soothed him, but now Doc felt mocked by the promise in the song, the sappy land where dreams came true, the bluebirds and the bright colors everywhere, troubles melting away.
He locked the zippered bag of credit card slips and money into the safe. He switched off the stereo and straightened the stack of CDs beside it, then turned off the last of the lights. The alarm code had to be set by punching numbers into a keypad by the door that led from the kitchen to the alley; he was about to set it, but stopped. He walked back through the dark kitchen, out the swinging doors into the restaurant, and behind the bar, and took a bottle of Johnny Walker and a rocks glass.
 
At four A.M. the streets in this part of the city looked like a movie set about to be struck. The storefront businesses had mostly failed. Lights shone in the tall office buildings, where janitors were emptying waste-baskets and running vacuum cleaners. Doc knew what that was like; he’d done it, years ago, a flask in his back pocket that he’d drink from through the night, working under the fluorescent glare while everyone else slept. At dawn he’d be ready to pass out, and would reel off to find a hospitable bench or doorway. He’d forgotten the feeling of drunkenness, the happy, buzzy glow, how the world shifted pleasantly out of focus and retreated to a manageable distance. He staggered in the direction of the loft, clutching the bottle to his coat, hardly feeling the rain that was still falling, though not with its earlier force. Now it was soft, almost a mist, cold kisses on the top of his bare head, a damp chill coming up through his shoes.
He sang “Brown Eyed Girl” and “Swanee River.” He stopped in the middle of the street and looked around to see if anyone had heard him, but there was no one. A cat slid away, around the corner of a building, pale against the dark bricks. He was breathing kind of hard, he realized. He stopped to rest in a small park, a square of grass with a single wrought-iron bench, a narrow border of dirt—mud, now—where there were white flowers in spring. He remembered the flowers, and looked sadly at the wet soil. No flowers. There would never be flowers again. It was never going to stop raining. The rain would wash away the soil, and the park, and himself; he would float down the river of rain, endlessly, until he sank beneath the surface of the water, down to the bottom like a rock, dead and inert, and finally at peace. He looked for his glass, to pour himself more liquor, but he had lost it somewhere. He had a vague memory of seeing it smash against bricks, the pieces, glittering like the rain, lying under a streetlight. He took a pull from the bottle and slumped against the freezing iron of the bench.
His dreams were confused: having his picture taken with tourists at the restaurant, only the restaurant was really an office building and their meals were being served on desks, and water was seeping through the carpet and he was down on his knees trying to find where it was coming from. When he woke he was lying on the wet grass, under a dripping tree. The rain had let up. It was getting light; the air was slate-colored. He was still slightly drunk, and could feel underneath the cushion of alcohol the hard, unyielding bedrock of a massive hangover. He got up and walked over to the bench, where the bottle was lying tucked under a newspaper like a tiny version of a homeless man. He picked up both and laid them gently in the wire trash receptacle next to the bench.
On the way home he passed a few actual homeless people, still asleep in doorways. He peered at each of them, but none of them was Grumpy. It had been nearly a month since he’d left, and no one had seen him. There was one dog, black and scrawny, that raised its head as Doc passed and then settled, sighing, next to its master.
He let himself into the building and trudged upstairs, stopping on each landing to catch his breath and stop the grinding in his head. He opened the door to the loft quietly, in case anyone was up. But it was too early. He could hear the steady snores of Happy and Sleepy, and Sneezy’s asthmatic breathing. Dopey slept alone in the double bed, angled across it, one arm dangling out from the covers. Beside the bed were an overflowing ashtray, a box of wooden matches, and a litter of pistachio shells. Doc knelt down and scooped up the shells and threw them away in the kitchen. He went back and got the ashtray and matches, emptied the ashtray, put the box of matches on the shelf where they belonged. He rinsed a few dishes that were in the sink and set them in the dishwasher, then tidied up the counter—someone had apparently consumed a late-night snack of cereal and pretzels.
Someone had also brought home flowers. There were irises in a vase—a vase stolen from the restaurant, Doc noted—set on a cleared section of the counter. Around the main room were stalks of star lilies in quart beer bottles. On the coffee table, which had been cleaned off, was a Pyrex bowl of fruit—oranges and grapefruits and apples and a bunch of bananas—flanked by two candles that had burned down to stumps. Also on the table was a homemade card, featuring a drawing that looked like Sneezy’s work. It was a pretty good likeness of Doc, and on the inside, in Happy’s loopy script,
We Love You Doc
was written in blue across the yellow construction paper.
Doc took an apple and went to the row of windows. A few cars crawled by below, the first trickle of morning commuters, their headlights still on. Clouds hung over the city, gray and pearl smudges above gray buildings. There wasn’t any glorious shaft of sunlight breaking through to set the thousands of windows glittering, or any rainbow arcing over the dense trees of the park at the far end of the city. There was no black-haired goddess, eyes dark and full of love, floating toward him. He polished the apple on his shirt. His was a small life. His head was barely higher than the windowsill, but he could see that out there, in the big world, there was nothing anymore to wish for.
I don’t remember the genesis of this particular story. At the time I was interested in tales with some sort of fantastic or surreal premise: a pack of savage dogs in the room of a suburban home, an infant creature born from an egg found in a Dumpster, a half-vampire college student, etc. I think the trigger for “Ever After” had something to do with the idea of partial knowledge, with how easily a piece of something could be misinterpreted if you didn’t have the whole—or else used to create a whole. I’m interested in how communities form and then fracture, and in what kind of beliefs structure our lives and give them meaning. I don’t see any difference between worshipping Snow White or the Virgin Mary or Allah, since they’re all fantasies.
—KA
KATE BERNHEIMER
Whitework
THE COTTAGE INTO WHICH MY COMPANION HAD BROKEN, RATHER than allow me, in my desperately wounded condition, to pass a night in the thick-wooded forest, was one of those miniaturized and hand-carved curiosities from the old German folktales that make people roll their eyes in scorn. This, despite the great popularity of a collection of German stories published the very same year of my birth! As to the justifiability of this scornful reaction: I cannot abide it, nor can I avoid it by altering the facts. This is where I found myself: in a fairy-tale cottage deep in the woods. And I had no use of my legs.
When we came upon the cottage we were certain, by its forlorn appearance, that it had long ago been abandoned to the wind and the night, and that we would be perfectly safe. Or rather, my dear companion was certain of this. As for me, I was certain of nothing—not even of my own name, which still eludes me.
There were but few details for my enfeebled mind to record, as if the cottage had been merely scribbled into existence by a dreamer’s hand. Tiny pot holders hung from the wall in the kitchen, beside tiny dish towels embroidered with the days of the week. In each corner of each room was tucked an empty mousetrap—open and ready but lacking bait. At the entryway, on a rusted nail, hung a minuscule locket, along with a golden key. As to whether the locket ever was opened, and what it contained, I have conveniently misplaced any knowledge. About the key I will not presently speak.
My companion placed me onto a bed, though I would not know it was a trundle bed until morning. I had only vague notions as to how we had arrived at the cunningly thatched cottage, but I believe we had walked through the forest in search of safety. Perhaps we sought some gentle corner where we would not perish at the hands of those who pursued us. Or had we been banished, from a kingdom I no longer recall?
The room in which my companion put me to bed was the smallest and least furnished of all. It lay, strangely enough, down a long hallway and up a stairway—I say “strangely” because the house was so diminutive from outside. I realized, upon waking in morning, that I lay in a turret. Yet from outside, no curved wall was visible. With its thatched roof the house had resembled a square Christmas package, a gift for a favorite stuffed rabbit—a perfect dollhouse of a cottage, the sort I had painstakingly, as a child, decorated with wallpaper, curtains, and beds.
Though there was scarcely any furniture in this turret room, the sparse pieces were exactly correct—nothing more, nothing less: the trundle bed, empty and open; and the walls bedecked with no other ornamentation or decoration save whitework, the same sampler embroidered with the same message over and over. It was embroidered in French, which I do not speak:
Hommage à Ma Marraine
. In the center of each piece of linen was sewn an image of a priest holding two blackbirds, one on each hand. The edges of all the whitework were tattered, and some even had holes. To these white-on-white sewings, my foggy mind immediately fastened, with an idiot’s interest—so intently that when my dear companion came up to the turret with a hard roll and coffee for breakfast, I became very angry with him for interrupting my studies.
What I was able to discern, looking about me, while nibbling the roll after my companion had left, was that some of the whitework contained a single gold thread as the accent over the
a
. Why the gold thread was used, I had no idea, and in considering this detail, along with the remarkable fact that blackbirds had been so expertly depicted in white, I finally asked my companion to return to the room. I called him and called him before he returned—disconcertingly, for it seemed he had returned only by accident, to fetch my empty teacup—and when he took the cup from my hand he gazed into it for a very long time without speaking a word.
At last, he closed the shutters of the windows tight, which was my wish, as it allowed me to see the whitework more clearly: I find I see better in the dark. A candle in the shape of a bluebird sat on the floor beside the bed, and I lit it, and turned it just-so, toward the wall. Luminous! I felt I had not, in many years, experienced such nocturnal bliss—even though the broad daylight shone outside the curtained windows, at least a day as broad as a day may shine in a deep and thickly wooded forest where real and grave danger does lurk.

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