Things that Fall from the Sky (Vintage Contemporaries) (13 page)

Life on the personal front is no
than on the political. I’m still out of work— the
position fell through—and I’m on the outs with
. Sometimes I wonder when and how it all turned so
.

hen you get the chance,
your half of this to me, so I can find out what I’ve written. When the words won’t come to me, I figure they must be yours. I miss you and
. .
.

All Right:
Half of Rumpelstiltskin

2:30 p.m. He delivers a speech to a local women’s auxiliary organization.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin stands at a lectern fashioned of fluted, burnished cherry wood and speaks on “The Birthrights of First-Born Children,” a topic in which he claims no small degree of expertise. Half of Rumpelstiltskin has had his fair share of ill-favored dealings with first-born children, particularly those of millers’ daughters. As he speaks, the cheery, preoccupied faces before him exchange knowing glances and subtle pointed smiles. Half of Rumpelstiltskin, when asked to address this meeting, was not informed as to whether the auxiliary was
for
or
against
first-born children and their concomitant birthrights— and so he has taken what he considers to be a nonpartisan slant on the topic. Listening to the raspy coughs of the women in the audience and regarding their nodding, oblate heads, he can’t decide whether he is offending or boring them. Half of Rumpelstiltskin concludes his speech to a smattering of polite applause that sounds like the last few popping kernels in a bag of prebuttered popcorn. When he steps out from behind the lectern and joins the women in the audience for a question-and -answer session, nobody has a thing to say about first-born children, birthrights, red pottage, or the nation of Israel. Instead, as he might have suspected, it’s all
straw-to-gold
this and
fairy tale
that.

—What, the women ask, happened to your other half ?

I split myself in two,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin,
when the Queen
guessed my name. However,
he says,
that’s a story that demands a discussion of
first-born children. So then—

—But, the women ask,
how
did you split yourself in two?

In a fit of anger,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
When the Queen
guessed my name, I stamped explosively, burying my right leg to the waist beneath
the floorboards. In trying to unearth myself, I took hold of my left foot, wrenching
it so hard that I split down the center. My other half lives overseas. I myself emigrated.

—I thought, say the women, that upon stamping the ground you fell to the center of the earth. Or that you merely bruised your heel and wandered off in a fit of malaise.

No,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin,
those are just myths.

—Is it true, ask the women, that you wish to huff and puff and blow our houses down?

No,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
You’re thinking of the Big Bad
Wolf.

—Is it true what we hear about you and the girl with the grandmother?

No. That, too, is the Big Bad Wolf.

—Is it true that you’d like to cook our children in your large, cast-iron stewpot?

Half of Rumpelstiltskin sighs.
No,
he says,
I am in fact a strict vegetarian.

—Do you believe in the interdependence of name and identity? ask the women.

Yes, I do.

—Why don’t you change your name?

Because I’m still Rumpelstiltskin,
says Half of Rumpelstiltskin.
I’m
just not
all
of him.

—You’re still Rumpelstiltskin? Even after having lived as Half, and only half, of Rumpelstiltskin for oh-so-many years?

Yes.

—Is there a moral to all of this?

No.
Half of Rumpelstiltskin checks his watch.
No, there isn’t. I
have time for one more question.

—If you were granted only one wish, ask the women, what would you wish for?

Half of Rumpelstiltskin doesn’t miss a beat.
Bilateral symmetry,
he says.

4:10 p.m. He shops for dinner at the grocery store.

Half of Rumpelstiltskin is standing in line at the checkout counter of a supermarket, reading the cover of a tabloid newspaper upon which is pictured a pair of Siamese twins and an infant the size of a walnut—who is actually curled, in the photograph, next to a walnut. The infant looks like the protean, half-formed bird Half of Rumpelstiltskin once saw when he split open a nested egg, and through his gelate, translucent skin is visible the kernel of a heart. The caption above the child claims that he was born without a brain. Half of Rumpelstiltskin, inching forward in line, finds himself thinking about the responsibilities delegated to either hemisphere of the brain. If, as they say, the right half of the brain controls the left half of the body—and the left half the right—Half of Rumpelstiltskin moves and talks, yawns and dances, under the edicts of the other Half of Rumpelstiltskin’s portion of Rumpelstiltskin’s brain. Is it possible, Half of Rumpelstiltskin wonders, that he is somewhere across the ocean, sitting in front of a fireplace or reading a magazine, operating under the delusion that he is standing here in the supermarket, buying ingredients for his evening’s meal and looking at the tabloids? That through half a world’s measure of Rumpelstiltskin-lessness, he sends directives, receives impressions, down a sequence of nodes and fibers concealed within the dense, gordian anatomy of the earth—and his other half the same? That he is never where he thinks he is or heading where he hopes to be?

Half of Rumpelstiltskin sometimes feels absolutely and undeniably alienated from everyone and everything around him.

Asleep in the shopping cart in front of him, her head resting upon the pocked rind of a firm green cantaloupe, a baby lies beside a bag of crinkle-cut potato wedges. She is breathing softly through her nose, and her dark, wavy hair frames the pudge of her face. As the Halves of Rumpelstiltskin told the Queen when she offered the treasures of the kingdom in exchange for her first-born child, something living is more important to him than all the treasures in the world. The baby gurgles, her legs poking through the bars of the shopping cart, and pulls to her stomach a round of Gouda cheese the size of her hand. He would never have imagined, not for a heartbeat, that children were so easily come by. Had he known you could buy them at the supermarket, his life might not have become the mess it is today.

He watches as the woman in front of him purchases her groceries—potatoes and cheese, leafy vegetables and globose, pulpous fruits, several green plastic bottles of soda, a wedge of ham garnished with pineapple, and the baby—and wheels them to the parking lot. As the woman at the register of the checkout lane scans his groceries above a brilliant red scattering of light, Half of Rumpelstiltskin leafs through his wallet looking for a form of photo identification and a major credit card. On his license he is pictured before a screen of powder blue. His head is tilted by a slim margin to the left, and looking closely he can just begin to see the white edge of his upper incisor and a sliver of cortical sponge. Half of Rumpelstiltskin was pleased to find that he was not grinning in his license photo. People who grin, he has always thought, look squirrelly and eccentric, sometimes barking mad, and, on occasion, dangerous and inconsonant—as if they’re trying to hide something from the world, something virulent and bitter on the surface of their tongues. People whose teeth show in license photos are most often just the eccentric sort—but never completely harmless. Half of Rumpelstiltskin had half a mind to return his own when he found that he could spot the edge of his upper incisor.