Stunt (6 page)

Immaculata follows, her frond fingers unbuttoning her white dress. It drops to the floor, a flirtatious handkerchief. She lights a cigarette and sits across from me – bending her body, a pale fan folding. ‘A preacher with a microphone in one hand and a baby in the other while sprinkling holy water on the baby's head he electrocuted himself whoa.' She smiles wanly. I don't. I cannot find the muscles in my face.

Immaculata should never go outside because her beauty makes her unsafe. It is a high note breaking the glass in your hand. Men spend their days wondering if she will draw her curtain aside. They memorize her dresses. They are all white. The men appreciate that. It's consistent. As if it's for them. A code. They imagine her in miniature dancing on their fingertips. They create a whole life with her in their heads. What she wants for breakfast. How she will nod at them with grace. How she will not mind their habits. How she will fetch them things and rub their necks. Her nightgowns, their ruffles. But when she walks by them they cannot move. They are just men with toothbrushes in their
breast pockets sleeping in their cars in front of our house. They are just useless bits of glass that can never be made whole again.

In the bath, our sleek white bodies are stretched out into flags of surrender. I am hypnotized by this lagoon of soapy water. Between us, I blow circles of smoke in the damp air. I scorch my lungs until my dandelion head rises and pops off my spine. Rings hover above me. They are spaceships and ghosts and epitaphs. They are hints of an alternate universe.

Mink opens the door. The steam in the bathroom evaporates and leaves all of the surfaces in wet lines. Everything is the face of a broken woman. Mink is wearing her black silk robe with the Chinese dragon on the back. She has a white robe for the morning. Black is for night. She never switches them. The morning and the night dragons match. They are gold with formidable teeth. They have fangs, they breathe fire and they are sewn into a fight without repercussion. No one ever loses.

Mink paints her lips red. It is a red that she told me was a nightshade red. Nightshades kill. Hemlock is a nightshade. It killed Socrates. Everyone knows that one. When I first heard Mink say, ‘I have to put on my face,' I was afraid that she had a trunk of faces and she would come downstairs as somebody else. This meant that if we were at the beautician's together and Mink went to the ladies' room and didn't come back, I wouldn't know which customer was really my mother. Anyone could have tried to convince me. So I used to watch her, my feet dangling over the counter, as she applied her concealer, her foundation, her eyeshadow, blush, mascara and lipstick to make sure that she stayed herself. And she did. Mink. Always leaning into the
mirror, putting on her face. To me, a death mask. The rest of the world: possible mothers.

I lift my hands above my black eyes and wave them in the air. You told me that if I am ever stranded in the woods and an airplane circles overhead, wave with two hands. This means: HELP! Most people wave with only one hand. This means:
A-OK
. Then the pilot tips his wings and he disappears and you starve, found upon first thaw. A skeleton in a winter coat. One dumb hand in the air.

Immaculata waves back. With one hand.
A-OK
. Small, like I am behind the window of a dollhouse. Mink doesn't. She is busy. Perched on the toilet seat beside us, lighting cigarettes one off the other, she smokes in deep drags and exhales in all straight lines. It is geometric. I bet her organs are too. Her heart is an octagon, and she will be exhumed by a mathematician who will store it in a jar and bring it to bed with him where he will rub it and sing it ballads from the old country.

Mink's eyes are fastened on her own reflection. If she blinks, we too will vanish. First her husband, then her daughters, her face, her faucets. She is keeping us here. She is
pulling it together.

We are less than one year apart, Immaculata and I. Six months and three days exactly. They call this Irish twins. Immaculata is born after seventeen hours of labour. You are frenzied, lapping the hospital corridor, lit bright as a fish shop, smoking and tugging at your clothes as though they are shrinking and soon you will be naked. You are not allowed into the birthing room, the nurses remind you. You offer them apples, interpretive dance, a nose kiss. They are tempted.

Mink, her face detonating, her body a yowling hell, curses the obstetrician at her feet. Ear pressed to the door, you join in.
Colline de bin de bobby pin, sac à patates, crème glacée molle, beurre d'arachide, au chocolat, con, cul, couilles, chier, bite, nichons, putain, merde.
Mink keens and, finally, feels her tenant leave the premises. And you, boxed by the sudden silence, burst into her room, a tornado.

The child is a fresh ballet. Her toes are long, her hands too. She is languid and ravishing as a mermaid. Her lashes are a perfectly curled inch of wet black. Her eyes are a most miraculous purple. She enters the world with one cry and has not cried since. Mink names her Immaculata.

Mink takes to motherhood instantly. She grows her garnet hair long and watches the muscles in her arms rise and tighten as she hoists her daughter about, slings her to her hip, lifts her up in the air and holds her to her breast for hours at a time, listening to the soft whale sounds she makes as she feeds. She is so thankful, her daughter. Mink takes her everywhere. Baby as decoration. Baby as corsage. It is the world of strangers that has Mink hooked. Bending and peering, they revere the baby. The whole world has leapt to its feet and is applauding Mink for what she has made. And for the first time, she is alone on the stage. All of the noise is for her and it is deafening. It makes her heart, that octagon, split into smaller units. But Immaculata will surely grow and learn to walk – eventually away – so Mink wants another one immediately.

I am born three months premature on the kitchen floor in less than twenty minutes. Mink later jokes that my birth is like a one-night stand. ‘Quick and dirty. We didn't even make it to the bedroom.'

You move in strides, breathing along with Mink in exaggerated baritones. You see the crown of my head cropping up, a siren in the kitchen. You pull me free. You sever the umbilical cord with your palette knife and place me on Mink's chest. My mother: smooth as the skim of a frozen pond – one that, with its darkened centre, no one has dared to cross. Slick, white-blue, I have a full head of black hair standing on end. And one tooth. Surprise. Mink looks at me and I can hear the chatter in her brain. It is ticker tape: runt, whelp. I shriek. I am a tadpole, a thing birthed in the wild. I see a moose kicking away its young. She hands me to you. My father. I fit inside your palm. We lock eyes. I am quiet. So are you.

You refuse to call an ambulance. You refuse to leave the house. You refuse to go to the hospital. I am almost three pounds.

‘She is the size of the world's smallest cat his name is Mister Peebles,' says Immaculata, already talking. Mink scrubs the floor with lye until it goes from red to pink to white, until she can no longer lift her head. It appears to her as the site of a massacre. Her own. And there don't seem to be any other witnesses.

Blown back into a corner of cupboards, the aftermath of an explosion, you hold me to you, your smallest finger in my mouth, a succour. You are a heat lamp. In your arms, I grow hesitantly. In slow and suspicious inches. To tonight. Five feet tall. Eighty-five pounds. And my heat lamp is gone.

Immaculata coughs, the bathwater splashing the edges of the tub. She coughs again. It is an imitation of the first cough. Without breaking her reflection, Mink claps Immaculata hard on the back. Immaculata's face turns to glee under a blanket. The smoke
is suddenly spears in my throat. I stub my cigarette out in the marble soap dish. Tap tap. And now that we are in conversation, I say to God that I quit smoking and I welcome his wrath. I could use the attention. Go ahead. Drown me. I hold my breath. Cheeks puffed out, I slide under the water.

Floating there, in that waterlogged quiet, I remember the moment of my conception. My parents are under sheepskin in the afternoon, sun fissuring the blinds, turning everything to honey – even the dust helixes are made of sugar. My parents are good at sex. Aside from their feet, this is their other point of commonality. Their other standard greeting. They twine each other, Immaculata – their perfect halfway point, never a cry – is bundled between them, an elegant cocoon. They have not slept for three days, my parents, dreaming her and each other, slithering through blood and wishes, pooling themselves, and then me: a collision in sharp edges.

See, I cannot shake anything. I cannot shake anything because my brain is a weakling. Whip-skinny, it wants to fight everything and everything wants to fight. Drum roll.

This is my brain: a stranger on the streetcar with a runny nose playing the flute. Mink in her dish gloves throwing out a half-finished jar of mustard because it no longer looks neat in the fridge. How when we are camping, the stars are the confetti left on the floor of the legion hall. How when I tell you this, you say that I should write every book that is ever read. I wonder for a second if this could happen. And then I think that you are bad for me. And then I think that you can hear this thought so I stamp it out but it still burns. So I picture the van that was parked down our street for a year that had no seats in it. And that it could house a very small opera sung by the shortest man in Parkdale, Leopold of the Onions. Lettuce. Pyrotechnics. The hole in the end of my tights that lets my big toe poke out. How it used to be a recluse and now it is a showgirl, how it has stopped drawing cartoons and become one. Your last words to me. The sound of them in my ear. The feel of your mouth there, a storm
rolling in. This is the worst fight my mind is in. It is a brute. It always lands its punches. They are square and straight-faced and they don't negotiate. I search out other smaller fights but I am down. The bell rings. A small man in a black bow tie declares:
It's a knockout.
And just when I start to get up and find my bearings, there they are again. Your last words to me.
Smack.

Find me.

I wish for one blank moment, one flatline moment, but just when I think I am alone in my head, a parachutist with nothing but the wind, those words crop up. They are the ground rushing at me from below.

The bathwater is loud as an isolation tank now. It is lodged in my deaf embryo ears. I am zero gravity. I continue to hold my breath. What little is left rises to the surface in tiny bubbles.

Once you cried while we were listening to the radio. You pulled it to you like a friend who had gone out of his mind and wanted to cause himself harm. You shook it while it spoke. You tried to reason with it.
No. No.
A group of whales was stuck in a chain of northern lakes. There was only one hole in the ice for them to breathe through. The whales were taking turns breathing through the one hole. But they were running out of oxygen. Already, some of them were falling into the deep never to return. They were all going to die. A team of hunters and scientists was on its way to kill them. This is mercy, you told me.

I don't want my oxygen anymore. Take it.

Mink pulls me up by the hair like I was a kitten in a pillow-case and now she wants me for a pet. Immaculata examines our cabled shapes. ‘What a polite thing to do,' she commends Mink. ‘Death for life a clean trade I have learned something.' She has unburied our family crest. ‘Save people.'

I take in a deep breath. The air is a battle cry. Your French cigarettes. Bombs and redcoats in the distance. Shivering hands holding open maps. They were the kind of cigarettes you bought from your special man at your special store. You bought your coffee from another special man, greens from another and meat from another. The meat man. The greens man. The coffee man. The cigarettes man. They dot the city, these special men, and you were bonhomie to every one of them. You knew their wives' middle names and their parents' diseases. Together, you spoke in exaggerated gestures like you were doing a show for deaf children whose wondrous faces were pressed up against the window, the world an aquarium to them. You spoke in Greek and Yiddish and Polish. Yours was cobbled together, but your pronunciation was so perfect it was as though you had lived there and you really were brothers.

We would walk into their stores. The smell of oil paint and urethane coming off you, spiralling in the air in whips and sinews. A bullfight. I was tall as your belt buckle. I watched it shimmer telepathic. You would lift me up so that I could ring the bell. When I did, I could see into the back room. The special man would scuttle to a leather case, pull out a hand mirror, flatten his hair and eyebrows with his saliva, pop a mint into his mouth, lick his lips and undo his top button. Arms open, he would emerge victorious; he had just stepped off a plane and his stock was screaming his name. ‘Monsieur Ledoux,' he would say, shaking
your filthy hand – long and gangly and sure. He would shake it as if you were a tourist and his town were dying. ‘Welcome.' He would yield to your every request. He would take you into his storeroom. He would unlatch the backs of refrigerated trucks. He would lift lids off boxes that had not been opened in years. He would dig up his mother if you thought she might be the freshest.

When we left, I would feel sad because these men now had to bide their time before you would return again and who knew when that would be. You weren't sad. Nothing would cling to you. You would already be inside the next moment. Time with you, in compressed portions. Time with you: all poems.

I open my eyes to Mink. My hair is still in her palm. It is a root system dug up. It shivers in the light. It wishes to be underground. Mink has broken her reflection. But it is not us falling away. It is her. She stares at us. Her lips quiver. Her face sinks. Smoke comes out of her nostrils in tailwinds. She is a dragon collapsing.

I walk out to the backyard, hair still wet, like I have greased it for a fight, my body too, slick in your shrunken suit and boots. Your stray cats climb out of the dark and into my arms. Their bodies beat warm in my hands, their hearts striving, bombs in their chests. Tails curl up into ties around my neck, bracelets around my wrists. They are a coat that flexes. I attach small bags to their backs filled with two feedings each of your bony fish and a small note that reads: