The Fantasy Writer’s Assistant (11 page)

Her attempts at showing affection are similar to a well-trained soldier breaking down his rifle for inspection. The usual counsel of wise elders, namely, “Don't worry, it'll work out,” becomes metamorphosed on her lips to, “You have acted in a ridiculous manner once again.” For all of Dorothy's inability to display emotion, my wife did tell me about having seen her cry once. On the hutch in the living room, Dorothy displayed her zoo of crystal animals. They were expensive little knickknacks and, in lieu of having to actually think of a gift, her husband would give her money at each holiday to purchase another. There were dozens of them, arranged in concentric circles around her favorite, a delicate dragonfly, which she had purchased years before with her first paycheck from her first job. Every month she would perform the ritual of dusting each piece with a small chamois cloth the size of four postage stamps. During one of the dustings, the dragonfly slipped from her hand and smashed into slivers against the hardwood floor. Her reaction only lasted a moment, but there were tears in her eyes, and a small, muffled sound of anguish escaped from her mouth. Years later I interrupted her once when she was staring into the empty center of the zoo. Her eyes were unusually vacant and her lips slightly parted.

My mother-in-law's cold nature has had an adverse affect on both her husband and children. The children are all grown now, married, and live on their own, but she keeps all four of them trapped tightly in orbit around her. It is her fuming silence—her never-voiced but obvious disapproval—that works the trick for her. My wife has been in therapy for some time now, trying to figure out how to please her. The eldest son is a live wire of nerves. He can't leave anything alone. If he develops a wart on his foot, he must dig at it with an X-acto blade. My wife's older sister seeks solace in status, and veils the disappointments of the past in catalog silks and designer sunglasses. The baby brother has become a cop who, when confronted with emotional situations, stares silently into the distance. All of them are tight with a dollar. All of them can spot a garage-sale sign while doing sixty on a busy road. She does not approve of their marriage partners or the way they are raising their children. It is hard to tell how much responsibility Dorothy can claim for her husband's dark mood. At one time, he had been creative, an artist who had attained some level of recognition. Now he is a grouch who can barely lift a paintbrush without cursing his very existence. Because of her scorn for naps, he sleeps until noon every day. Then he has lunch and works until after dinner when he begins on the martinis. Each night, he sits in his chair in the den, gazing listlessly at the television while flipping through the forty-six channels, trying to find some soft-core porn that will take him through the night. When you ask him how it's going, his only reply is, “Grim.”

In times of crisis, the mind of the woman who counts her breath runs flawlessly, as if filled with the whirring gears of a Swiss watch instead of the usual, easily flustered gray matter. Her solution to most problems is to restore order at any cost and then mete out a swift, harsh punishment to the responsible individual or individuals. There is no such thing as an accident to our subject; even the inherent chaos of normal change has a culprit lurking behind it, more often than not a member of some minority. Occasionally, she feels it necessary to remind even Nature that she will not tolerate any monkey business.

My wife's younger brother told me that one night he discovered a raccoon inside a garbage can and was quick enough to trap it by slamming the lid down tightly and placing a large brick on top. Just then, as if she knew she was needed, Dorothy appeared in her nightgown. Assessing the situation with a look that might have cracked rock, she immediately began barking orders. “Get me a light,” she said. “Go to the laundry room and bring me a bottle of Clorox and a bottle of ammonia.” When he returned, he found that she had taken a ski pole from her collection of junk in the garage and punctured a hole in the top of the plastic garbage can. For some reason, she was also wearing a black ski glove on the hand she used to grasp the pole. He was ordered to hold the light above and behind her, and was admonished when its beam strayed from the opening she had made. “Ammonia,” she said like a surgeon demanding a scalpel. Her son handed it over. The entire bottle was emptied into the hole. The procedure was repeated with the Clorox. In seconds a yellowish-gray mist began emanating from the opening, as if it were a chimney on a winter's night, and, from within the can, he heard the creature's claws scrabbling against the hard plastic. She stood and listened for ten minutes, her nostrils flaring. He could tell she was counting. A little while later all was silent inside the can. She turned to her son and said, as if giving the last few instructions for a recipe, “Get it out of there and beat it with a shovel. Then cut the tail off and bury it.”

She was born during the depression, an only child. The family was poor and both her parents had to work. Her mother was a seamstress in a sweatshop, and her father a painter of houses. I have seen photographs of them. They are a tall and willowy pair. The mother wore small circular glasses that rested at the end of her nose, and her hair was put up in a bun that, in its tightness, appeared a perfect rock for hurling at a window. The father was lanky with thick wrists, and in every picture wears a look that verges on both horror and puzzlement. The mother's favorite pastime was ironing. As Dorothy has said, “She loved to iron. She could iron all day.” Next to drinking beer, her father's favorite hobby was cross-stitch. They lived on the bottom floor of an old two-story house. An Italian family, the Calabrias, lived in the flat above them.

The woman who counts her breath had a lonely childhood. Her parents worked six days a week, leaving home before sunrise and not returning until well into the night. The child would wake to an empty house each day, and at night crawl under the covers with no one there to read her a story or give her courage against the dark. She had her meals with the Calabrias upstairs and, now, willingly states that it was Mrs. Calabria who really raised her. When she was not with this surrogate family for dinner or lunch (breakfast she ate in her own apartment, usually a piece of bread), she spent her days alone. She walked the neighborhood by herself, and her greatest joy was kneeling on the pavement, studying insects. Her favorites were the ants, the way they marched in single file with proper determination, the way they returned for their dead when she would thumb one into oblivion, the way they would band together to remove the pebbles with which she had plugged their holes. Most of the time she sat at home staring out the window, counting off the seconds as Sunday approached, the day her parents did not have to work.

Sundays were days of chores. She would clean the apartment with her mother. Then they would prepare food, put up jam, bake bread. The place was not very big but the tasks continued from sunup to dinner. The times when she felt closest to her mother were when she would be allowed to sit and watch her iron. Three hours in silent communion, the old woman's glasses fogged with steam, shrouding her eyes. On Sundays her father would wake early and go out to the bar to buy beer. He would return late in the afternoon, bringing a pail of suds home with him, and, from then till dinnertime, would sit by the front window drinking and cross-stitching initials on handkerchiefs, making wall hangings that read “A Fat Cupboard, A Lean Will.” The plan was that he would sell these creations, but in reality they just kept piling up. Before bed, the child would lift the back of her nightgown and her father would scratch her back, not with his nails but with the rough palps of his calloused fingers. Even today when Dorothy tells about this, her lips clamp together in a grin like a closed vise.

One day, during one of her lonely journeys through town, she discovered an odd looking
something
growing on the branch of an oak sapling. It was shiny brown and looked like a miniature brain. She broke the branch off and brought it home and put it in her room. The seconds leading to Sunday came and went twice, and then one morning she woke to find her room filled with what she thought to be fairies. They were busy everywhere, crossing the expanse of bare wood that was her floor, scaling the curtains, traversing the ceiling, hopping about on the dresser, peeking from her shoes, reconnoitering the topography of her mounded comforter. They were tiny and dark and for much of the time stood on two legs like little men. When she crawled out of bed and her foot touched the floor, they all immediately stopped what they were doing. On closer inspection, she saw that they were baby praying mantises and that the strange little brain had been their nest. She sat down and began to count them, and, in the silence, they grew used to her presence and once again resumed their activity.

That morning she skipped her meager breakfast and began setting up her dollhouse for them. She built forts from blocks and arranged the fleet of little wooden boats, carved by her father, on the lake that was a blue braided rug. By lunchtime, she stood in the midst of a bustling insect city. At night when she would go to bed, they would climb the bedpost and infiltrate the covers. In the mornings she would wake with dozens of tiny red bites all over her body. These little wounds itched and tormented her, but she said nothing to anyone. She never felt alone during this time.

This all lasted till Sunday when her father, preparing to work her back, discovered, through his beer haze, the hundreds of insect bites. The slaughter that followed remains a blank spot in Dorothy's memory. But from the way her usually wide nostrils constrict when telling the story, I can envision her mother painstakingly seeking out each little citizen of the mantis civilization and crushing it with the same patience she displayed when ironing. Here, the record becomes silent and whatever transpired remains locked away in the past.

One Sunday afternoon, while in the middle of ironing, Dorothy's mother removed her spectacles and announced that she was going to have a baby. Instead of imagining a partner with whom she could share the burden of counting, Dorothy saw only a rival for her parents' already limited attention. Before her mother put her glasses back on, she added that Dorothy's bedroom would be needed for the nursery and that her father had gotten permission to build her a room at the back of the house. Her father, who had grown more reticent than usual of late, exhibiting a kind of general confusion in both his daily routine and cross-stitching, began at once on the room extension, working at night and on the weekends. He had always been handy with tools and had done construction before, but this job lacked his usual tenacious perfection. It was impossible to know at the time that he was suffering from the first stages of lead poisoning. The room at the back of the house was finished within a month. It was so poorly made that its walls would sway slightly in the autumn wind, and there were many gaps where the planks were supposed to fit together but, like her father's thoughts, did not. The only substantial aspect to the room was a vault-like door that would need to be kept closed so that the cold could not creep down the hall and affect the expected baby.

The child was promptly moved into the dark, cramped addition so that the nursery could be set up. Lying beneath mountains of covers, her nights were filled with terror. When the wind would blow through small chinks in the walls, it made the sound of someone murmuring. In her mind, the noises became words, and she imagined the voice to be that of the Devil, spewing out a steady string of threats and curses. When she told her parents about this they told her not to be foolish, but when she confided her fears to the Calabrias, a family of devoted Roman Catholics, they nodded silently and made the sign of the cross. When she would go upstairs for lunch and dinner, Dorothy was asked to sit at a separate table from the rest of the family. At night, if she was finally able to sleep, she dreamt that a flood came and washed away her room or that a terrific gust of wind toppled the weak structure, burying her alive. Even though the child had become a nervous wreck, she knew that much of what she feared was only in her mind. But when something began galloping across her bed in the middle of the night, she discovered that her room had become haunted by a flesh-and-blood creature. She would awaken to footfalls on her covered legs and scream, but the wind passing through the sieve that was her room would snatch her cry and carry it away before anyone could hear.

Determined to find out what it was that paid a nightly visit, she forced herself to stay awake. When she felt its presence, she quickly lit a candle. The sudden light revealed an immense black rat sitting at the end of her bed. She thrust the flame toward it and it screeched and dove onto the floor. Only when the rat had invaded the other part of the house, and was seen by her mother, did anyone believe in its existence. By this time she had spent many sleepless nights warding the thing off with the candle. Of course, traps were set. It was on a Sunday that the entire family heard one of the traps snap shut and then the place filled with the rat's agonizing screams. They ran to the kitchen and saw it flopping around in the trap by the garbage can. The rat was so huge and vicious looking that no one knew what to do. They simply stared in disbelief as the rat chewed its own leg off and then fled, running on a bloody stump, into the bathroom. Dorothy's father slammed the bathroom door shut, trapping it inside, while her mother ran upstairs to the Calabrias to fetch Mr. Whitey.

Mr. Whitey was a deaf, long-haired cat as big as a small dog. He had a fierce reputation in the neighborhood for never losing a fight, and was well known for leaping onto the back of a certain German Shepherd, digging his claws in and riding down the block. Mr. Whitey was thrown into the bathroom with the rat and almost instantly a battle ensued. They could tell by the noises that the rat had taken refuge in the big old bathtub that stood atop four porcelain lion paws. The Calabrias made the sign of the cross, Dorothy's mother stared rigidly at the door, and her father forgot more than once what he was doing. Dorothy herself has said that at one point she broke down and began screaming along with the screams of the beasts. In the end, the rat was dead and Mr. Whitey emerged, three-quarters dead himself.