Quickening Page 2

  In the meantime, I talked Robbie into phoning Trudy, impersonating Buck (“duuuuh”), and cancelling her date to sing. Say Trude, now that I think of it, you can’t carry a tune worth squat. Something like that.

  When she answered, Robbie got a fit of the giggles, and said, “Here’s Marsha.”

  “Oh, hi, Trudy,” I said gaily (hope you gag on a swizzle stick). “Just calling to wish you luck” (hope it slashes your vocal cords).

  In summary, I’d have to say that I’m pretty much tarred in my own black thoughts and don’t expect I’ll live to see the New Year.

  I RESOLVE to dissolve.

  NEW YEAR’S EVE. Yours truly is all dressed to go. Really go, if you know what I mean. I’ve got on my black dress, black nether wear, and a corsage I bought for myself that’s gone kind of brown, kind of rotten, on account of having to keep it in my room. Looks like compost pinned to my chest. Ah yes, organic matter, like myself. This getup, my going-away outfit, is cleverly concealed beneath my housecoat. Don’t want the folks to suspect anything’s up. While they’re watching Guy Lombardo on TV and shoving popcorn into their faces, I’ll be on Highway 22, bride of the white line, marrying some transport truck. Me, done to a turn on the grill.

  Robbie’s spent most of the day rubbing balloons on his head and sticking them to the wall. His hair stands straight out, alive with static, as he works himself to a lather playing an invisible guitar, in the throes of a soundless yet demented version of “The Night Has a Thousand Eyes.” I’ll miss him. But not much.

  I take a last fond look at the folks. Good hearts all in all, and to prove it, Daddy reaches into his pants pocket, pulls out the keys to the Comet and tosses them over to me.

  He WINKS, and says, “Why don’t you go to that dance at the Lantern, Princess. Show them what you’re made of. Get up on that stage and sing. Sit around waitin’ for people to ask, you’ll never get anywhere in life.”

  “Now, Daddy,” says Mom.

  “Now, Mom,” says Daddy.

  “______,” they both say, when I whip off my housecoat and stand before them, transformed, reborn, ready to party.

  IT’S NO NIGHT for hair, believe me. As I traipse giddily out the door, the wind grabs my fancy French twist like the knob on a joystick and yanks it viciously around my head. Do I look prettily tousled by the time I get in the car? No, more like a hag recently exhumed. Never mind. I’m driving down the road, getting somewhere in life. Dooo whaa, dooo whaa ditty. It feels sooo good to have my hands on the wheel. In control. Though I’ve got butterflies the size of bats in my stomach. And the wind’s gone positively mental. I can feel it frisking the car, sucking at the tires and trying to draw it into the ditch. A mad dog with the road in its teeth.

  Over the top of McLeod’s Hill and down, at the junction of Draper and Hardbargain Road, is the Lantern, sitting pretty as a Christmas ornament.

  I zoom down that hill and kind of lift off the ground, like the wind’s snatched the road out from under me. Teeeee, heeeee, I hear Grampy laugh in my ear. And I realize then, approaching the Lantern at a truly wicked speed, that I’m about to crash this party in style. That I’m going to pop through that wall there like a woman jumping out of a cake. And I do. I close my eyes tight, then hear this metal-wrenching wood-splitting glass-shattering explosion, and when I open them again, guess what, I’m in.

  I drive through a shrieking diving confusion of people, clawing to get out of my way – all couples I know (I wave) – and park in front of the stage. Parallel park too. I’ve never pulled that one off before, and I’m tickled pink.

  First, I check to see if there are any unseemly organs hanging out of my body (I don’t suppose this is what Daddy meant when he said to show them what I’m made of). Everything is shipshape, so I get out of the car. No problem, as the door seems to be missing. I brush a swatch of the colour-keyed vinyl roof off my shoulder, then hop lightly onto the stage.

  I notice that Trudy’s mouth is frozen into a round red “o” of astonishment. She brays once then faints, hitting the deck like a slaughtered animal.

  Two strings on Buck’s guitar are broken and wildly probing the air like antennae. He stands there shaking his head (admiringly? is that a gleam in his eye?).

  The wind that raced me into the Lantern, a close second, is now wearing about sixteen party hats and having a riot lifting girls’ dresses.

  I step over Trudy, take my place at the mike, and suddenly, you want transportation, I’m singing.

  India

  MAY, MINNIE, MAUD for God’s sake, or Myrna – even worse. Names she might have worn like a crown of link sausages. But no, it was not to be. Her mother opened her eyes in heaven during the birth and saw two archangels walking hand in hand. She named her baby girl Michael Gabriel, stifling the protest of the paternal great-aunts (May, Minnie, Maud, and Myrna) by saying, “You have not seen what I have seen.”

  The great-aunts were relentless in their disapproval. The Island was home to neither snakes nor Catholics, and they disliked sinuous fanciful names, names that suggested the impossible. One honest name, chosen from within the family, was all anyone needed. But their nephew’s son, who worked on the boats, had married off the Island into a family nobody knew anything about. This was the result: a girl child named Michael Gabriel.

  Their names clanging in the air like school bells, that’s what most of the Island children heard when they were called in to supper. They heard their names ringing and they raced each other like dogs down the street, home to hot kitchens, steaming bowls of mashed potatoes, and platters of burnt-black meat. When Michael Gabriel’s mother called her in, a dark deck of ancestors standing behind her on the porch, the name travelled like a charm through the mute evening air. Michael Gabriel, playing alone by the dock or in the woods, picked up the lilting thread and followed it, a long poem winding through the dusk.

  Though Michael Gabriel’s mother never talked much about her dispersed and wandering family, she sought them in her mind and addressed them privately. Now and then she heard back from one of them. A postcard might arrive from anywhere in the world, the message indecipherable (or so they complained at the Island post office), yet clear enough to Michael Gabriel’s mother who would close her eyes and grip the card tightly in her hands. Sometimes presents were sent, crazy presents in the aunts’ opinion: painted eggs, a scapular from Rome kissed by the Pope; a large red smiling Buddha that resembled some of the Island uncles; a sistrum; silk robes; games with instructions in Arabic or Greek; drums; flutes made of bone; and Day-of-the-Dead confections which featured marzipan skeletons rising out of shortbread coffins. Sometimes one of these mysterious relations even turned up in person. They always arrived without warning and stood quietly at the screen door staring in.

  When Michael Gabriel’s teacher caught her daydreaming he tried to snap her name. He tried to grind it through his teeth and reduce it to dust. “Michael Gabriel” was the sweetest sound he ever made. The great-aunts were filled to the skin with their names, like cans of stew. Not her. Her name was mercurial, slipped out of her body like a soul, became a hovering dragonfly or an alcove whose boundary expanded whenever she reached out to touch it. Her name was all the bright objects in the sky bursting like fireworks around her. “Michael Gabriel” . . . the teacher said it so beautifully that tears came to his eyes. Hearing her name she’d glance up and the rest of the class would turn to her and squint as though she were pure unshaded light.

  She was popular but hard to get at. Burrowing children with moth-soft hair and hands fought to be near her and couldn’t find the way. Her name was a little door that didn’t open. She was invited to parties and won all the prizes; asked to play games and undermined them, enlarging or unravelling them until they made no sense. She told stories about hell that came to her out of the ground under the rocks, and gave the children nightmares that neither daylight nor the warm breath of parents could melt.

  People complained, but what could her mother do? She had chosen from among the angels, not the aunts. The angels wore white, or nothing at all; the aunts favoured maroon, ugly plaids, and brooches made of cheap coloured glass. Whenever Michael Gabriel came to visit them, the front windows of the old family home darkened as they stood watching her run up the lane with a bouquet of leaves. One of them would reluctantly accept the gift, which disappeared instantly from sight, while the others hugged her, scratched her with their brooches, and offered powdered bulldog cheeks to be kissed. Michael Gabriel kissed them carefully, unlike her Island cousins whose wet lips plopped kisses like spitballs. The cousins tumbled in trailing mud and burrs, scuffed up the hardwood floors, left fish hooks stuck in the sofa, occasionally a dried worm or a dead frog on the tea table. For the great-aunts they emptied their pockets and their heads, showing their new-found treasures and telling everything that had happened since their last visit. Michael Gabriel’s secrets were discreetly wrapped and well hidden. She left her small white shoes at the door, met each crabby question politely, and possessed the room like an adult. Her manner irritated the aunts. Should she clear her throat musically and ask after their health, their caterpillar-thick eyebrows twitched with irritation. If she said, I beg your pardon, instead of whaat, teacups hit saucers with a noisy clatter. Unlike her cousins, she wasn’t given to fart jokes or loud barking burps. The great-aunts, understanding as they did the true fabric of the family, developed a belief that she was not one of them at all, but a foundling, fool’s gold dropped in their nest by idle hand-holding angels.

  When Michael Gabriel was five she found him sleeping on the green velvet couch. Night was dawdling into day, excitement just beginning to trickle through the branches of the trees. Colour had not yet crept back into things. Shadows curled around him like black cloth baring only the side of his face, shoulder, and thigh – pale as shell. She moved closer, smelled distance. She moved closer still, until she could feel his cool breath on her cheek. She saw then that he wasn’t asleep, but had been watching her. “Michael Gabriel,” he whispered. Her name rustled like silk in her ears. “Michael Gabriel,” he whispered a little louder, and her name swept out of the room taking night, a child in hand, with it. Birds all round the house went wild with song.

  Michael Gabriel’s mother recited poetry, the only form of prayer she liked, and waltzed with her daughter across the cracked kitchen linoleum. She often stood at the window warming her hands in the sun and willing her eyes to see as far as the mainland. She was looking for herself over there, dancing petits tours and pirouettes all the way down the road to Mexico. She’d have binges of sadness and Michael Gabriel would have to stroke her back until her soul settled down and tucked itself in, like a cat on a cold day. Mornings she’d wake up fiercely disappointed in dreams full of rock and water and gulls that nattered like the great-aunts. She was accused of letting Michael Gabriel run wild. They didn’t understand. She had learned years ago not to worry. If her baby rolled under the bed and spent a happy afternoon with the dust devils, or somehow got herself buried in the laundry basket – no matter. Powers far greater than her own were in control. This apparent lack of concern fed the great-aunts’ suspicions about Michael Gabriel’s legitimacy. They expected misfortune daily. But the girl, it seemed, was put on this earth to abuse their expectations. Childhood accidents eluded her however close she came to them. She frequently wandered into the lake over her head without drowning; safely set fire to numerous beds and bushes; and accepted candy from the seamiest of strangers who then failed to spirit her off to some unspeakable end.

  Angels being what they are, Michael Gabriel grew up with an exaggerated sense of her own safety. The rough-and-tumble cousins saw death everywhere. Saw it rising on the lake, saw it falling with night out of the trees. It was sewn into their names and written in the blunt lines of their palms. They chased it with snares, shotguns, and crazy drunken rides down dirt roads. They chased it in the boathouse and the bush as they screwed their Susies and Bettys and Barbs. Michael Gabriel studied the beautifully etched lines on her palm and didn’t see it there, hiding under those little woven vines of flesh. Her name might lose its lustre, or settle into a shape that could drive her mad. The black bird that carries it in her beak might let it fall to the ground. She didn’t know.

  His name was Jules. He had pushed through the screen door one morning and surprised them. Her mother hugged him hard, like a lost doll, and cried until her loneliness let go. By this time Michael Gabriel was fifteen and her Island cousins were trying to stick their fat tongues in her mouth every chance they got. The tongue, Jules told her, is a dancer. But the tongues of the cousins were thick and tough. A certain walk, a stiff swagger brutalizing motion, a certain way of moving the tongue, against language. They pounded words with their tongues the way they pounded the heads of fish with rocks. “Howz Jewlz,” they sneered when they saw him in town. “Hey, howzit goin’ . . . Jewlz.” He’d stare at them indifferently as though they were cows, then pass by, moving fluidly along each bend and curve of the path. When he looked at them like that a fist tightened in their chests. They hated him. Him with his white skin and green eyes. “Fag.” Spit snapped against the rocks just right – “gobbed good” – but they weren’t satisfied. Something about him they couldn’t see that the women did. Their girlfriends watched him like prey, forgot everything else. Even the great-aunts had started wearing rouge, a girlish pink, then more feverish shades of red. “Piss,” the cousins said, and fresh spit gleamed on the rocks. He knew something they didn’t. Which was true. He knew how to use his tongue.

  Michael Gabriel’s mother put on her party dress and stayed up late. During the night smoke rings drifted whole into Michael Gabriel’s room on a steady undercurrent of talk and laughter. Her mother slept peacefully deep into the afternoon and woke with the sun soft, poised above the bay, ready to slip into an envelope of water and be delivered to the underworld. When she got up, Jules made her coffee and fried-egg sandwiches, the yolk runny the way she liked it. The three of them sat on the porch in the twilight, feet up on the railing, listening to the water sing. It purled around the dock telling them the whereabouts underwater of sinkers, bottles, snagged lures, and sunfish. Michael Gabriel’s mother licked a dribble of yolk from between her fingers and smiled. The water switched from the Mills Brothers to Handel. This was heaven.

  While Jules was on the Island, the angels might have heard a hissing noise coming from there, like a kettle boiling in a distant room. It was talk. Whisperings carried from ear to ear until the whole place was squirming with sound. They would have heard what Jules and Michael Gabriel were doing every afternoon on the green velvet couch while her mother slept. The great-aunts, formidable virgins themselves, could describe these goings-on in detail. People started dropping in for tea. They ate up the stale store-bought cookies, smacking their lips, and eyed the green couch lewdly. One or two even dared to slip over to it, feel the velvet, and raise the toss pillows, hands trembling, as though expecting to find rattlers coiled underneath.

  Michael Gabriel enjoyed the gossip. She liked the way their names entwined and multiplied. Their echoing names followed them everywhere. Like a procession of bodyguards, or a stream of altar boys. They walked into the woods and their names embraced them in the dark. But when Jules suddenly left, was suddenly gone without word or warning, and the merry-go-round of talk wound slowly down and died, her name flattened like a good solid skipping stone and settled in her hand. She knew that if she was careless and tossed it across the water after him, it would no longer return to her. She sat down to consider, sinking into the green velvet couch as into a soft shadowy deafness.

  The great-aunts heaved a sigh of relief. The cousins got together and bought her a pot of mums. Her father came home from working on the boats and wanted to know his daughter’s name. “India,” her mother said musing, taken with the sound, drifting past him at the door. And the fluffy, cherubic clouds that had hung so long over the Island, like decorations in a play, were reeled up far into the sky.

  Patronage

  THE GODS get by on charm, that’s their secret. It’s the black greasedback hair, the flashing smile that momentarily sears the eyes, the sex lights in their cars that draw us in. Swordfish cufflinks and satin underwear. Salty, whispering lips. The gods glide into our hearts point blank. Slip presents into our open hands. Gifts. El rewardo, as your father used to say. Do you remember our life together? It was a peak time, madness unfurling, and your father buzzing around the edge of it like a filthy little fly. For two years he drove everyone crazy speaking Spanish. His Spanish. El batso, he would say, el nutso. He stole tips off restaurant tables. He liked to tell how he knocked your mother up, banged her against a brick wall behind the Majestic Theatre. They laughed about it at Sunday dinner, your older sister choking on the ham while he demonstrated how her head was flatter than yours. Embarrassment was a kind of currency in your family. When you were a boy your father used to grab you and pull down your pants in front of guests. For a joke. What a nut, they laughed. A pair of nuts, he corrected. El nutso. Your father was like a body falling in another room.

  Everyone was writing rat poetry then. I wrote a poem in which the rats had red lips and were the lithe blue princes of the bay. The bay was my bay. The body of water I carried around with me and laid down like a placemat wherever I needed it. At night I set it in front of my downtown apartment, my little seashell slum. With cockroaches running inside the walls along the wiring like a network of familiars, I submerged the heart of the city. Cars rolled into waves that rocked me to sleep. Currents carried drunks and midnight walkers away, their anguished dead-of-night prayers floating ahead of them like black dogs. As I slept, I stocked my bay with drop-offs into darkness and lithe blue Speedo rats with red lips and southern tongues.