The Entire Predicament Read online

  In the cement kitchen they were having words. They fought over what the word mean means. She accused him of accusing her. He accused her back. It was a whole word situation.

  In the corner, the baby scooted his eyes like an owl’s head, because the baby’s neck was immobilized, his head as if earless, and only his face shone bare. The fluffy spotted dog lay on the linoleum by the radiator, chewing a feather. His father’s fists knuckled deep into a loaf ’s-worth of bread dough. A teal fan blew down from a cupboard. The surface of the dough moved, and the dog tried to toss the feather but it clung to his teeth.The baby’s eyes tired, a pendulum plus friction, until they settled, and whatever lay before them slunk in.

  It was raining so hard and had been long enough that a puddle collected on the stoop outside and water pulsed under the kitchen door like a cat’s paw. Then his mother flung her oven mitts to the floor, snatched her purse by its macramé strap, and scooped him up by the bar. She balanced the strap on one shoulder and his bar on the other, facing the purse clasp toward her hip to discourage pickpockets, and facing his face away for obvious reasons. The baby’s gaze, upside down, remained placid. She checked to be sure. You can tell by its face how a baby feels. She peered at it.

  She shifted her body sideways to ease them through the kitchen door, cursed the puddle, climbed the few stairs, and used both her hands to push the cellar trapdoors open, her arms blooming, doors the green outer petals, the baby and the bag swinging like a milkmaid’s pails. “Don’t get any ideas!” she called, her voice zooming into the street, and the air, and the buildings, and the sky, but her words aimed backward, toward her husband where he raised the dough in a gesture of defiance, and it sunk over his fist. Somewhere between the mitts and the cellar steps, the rain had stopped.The mother gathered her skirt, mounted her bicycle, balanced the baby across her lap, pushed off, and pedaled. A girl across the street watched from behind an iron railing and then returned to gazing into the mouths of the tulips.Tulips filled the courtyard garden, and the girl’s head bent among them.

  The baby couldn’t recognize that he was seeing the world sideways and shifting with his mother’s knees. He didn’t know what was wrong, yet. He could feel the insides of his head slosh. He was so tired from being immobilized and surprised at moving so quickly that he didn’t cry. Inside the cast he jiggled, humid. His floating organs vibrated and shifted like raindrops on the window of a speedy car. The world looked brown and gray with flashes of bright mottled colors. The world had streaks and whenever the bicycle stopped at a curb the world stayed shaking. It bounced. It hummed and crackled. Leaves and bits of paper spattered through the bicycle spokes and zoomed under his head. He saw the scraps as fluid. He saw the world that encased and traveled with him. The low rosy sun warmed the surface of his cast, a slim inch from his gray-pink skin.

  Then his mother stopped the bike and let it clatter to the ground as she disembarked, and then she righted him so that she clasped around the cast at his waist and he faced, over her shoulder, her hair, which surrounded him like an enthusiastic wig. He could not see down, but soon the bicycle emerged, distant, back wheel hovering over a white asphalt walkway, front wheel appearing first to have disappeared, but emerging simply sunk into a lawn of grass overtaken by Boston ivy. Behind his head he heard his mother knocking at a door, a sound like pancakes falling onto a plate. “Open sesame,” she murmured, just as she did when opening the trapdoor in his cast for diapers. Behind his head his old aunt opened up and said to the blank plaster balloon she faced, “Beautiful! Look how big!”The sisters were further apart than most, his mother born from a menopausal womb.

  Inside they balanced him on a blossoming sofa. He stood, cast as if ready to hop, each foot set on a leaf that outlined it. His butt rested on one white bloom and his head rested on another, and on each side of his head, where his ears might have been, the sofa puckered with a button. His mother sat next to him, invisible, and his old aunt held up to him a fuzzy yellow-footed hooded bodysuit and tried to gauge what size he was inside. His smooth white cast outlined the yellow version. The aunt patted it, and the fabric and the plaster clung. He looked like a frosted cookie. She tilted her head from side to side, making her smile rock. Above him, behind the sofa, the landscape loomed in a picture window. A cloud the shape of a mountain crossed in front of a mountain. Across from him a blue parrot in a cage said, “That was delicious, I’ll have another.”When the aunt moved her head one way the parrot appeared on her shoulder, and when she moved it back the parrot was gone. Ticktock. His mother said, “I need a couple of days,” and the aunt rubbed her hands together as if they were cold or she wanted to make more static.

  “That bad?” said the aunt. A telephone rang, the aunt left, and then she said, “Yes.Yes.Yes.”

  “I have nothing to say,” said his mother and picked him up to comfort herself. She paced between the sofa and the coffee table. “Ass,” she said. “Bastard.” His head hovered near one shoulder and his mother’s hair lay on the other. She held him with one arm and pet the hair.The aunt returned with a silver tray and three martinis, olives lolling on their toothpick axes. His mother lay off her hair to sip while the aunt unlatched the parrot’s cage door. “I know, I know,” said the aunt and placed the second glass in the cage next to the cherrywood stick the parrot liked to gnaw on.

  The parrot eyed the martini with terror and began to drink.

  The baby’s mother sat on the sofa, balancing the cast bar crosswise on her thigh and now he could see behind her out the window. A woman walked along in a skin-colored jumpsuit. A man in a golf cart rode by them all. Evening settled into a fine dark film coating everything.

  “You know what he has?” said his mother. “He has a turkey lure called ‘call girl.’”

  “I know, I know.”

  “Can’t you see him with his rifle on his shoulder—” she cleared her throat and switched the baby to the other side—“whistling in a field and then this poor thing in spiked heels comes galloping?”

  “You’d miss that dog.”

  “I’d miss the dog.”

  Daily, each evening, starlings arranged themselves with regularity, evenly, like thousands of buttons along the phone wires, and then in a cloud they’d rise like static, and they did so now. Then more birds lined up, but this time when they left they left like tape pulled from its backing, the line of black birds separating from the black wire, one line leaving the frame like the side view of a page in a book, turning.This had never happened before, in all of history.The baby did not know what the organs in his body looked like, and he did not know history. When the cloud like a mountain crossed the mountain, this was the action of words that are sounds. In his mind floated an image: the woman in the jumpsuit having her skin unzipped for her, and nothing tumbling out but more skin.

  “Like Pepper!” said his aunt.“I miss Pepper. I might not ever have mentioned him. Those years you were in Greece. With that man, what was his name? You loved that man. Pepper, what a wonderful little dog. Silky terrier. Little hero. Did I tell you? No. Well, one day I’m walking in the golf course with Bradley, the old pie-face—this was back in the day—and we see the most luminous mushrooms, so we pick them, and as we’re having guests, I sauté little slivers into an appetizer with gravy over polenta, bruschetta, something, and everyone arrives. I have the whole service for twelve and Pepper is yapping and hopping about on his legs. So, under the table where he can’t be seen I deliver him nibbles of the mushrooms from my plate, and Pepper collapses. Right under the table like a canary in a coal mine. I can feel him on my shoe as if I’ve spilled. Well, we all go to the hospital—me and Pie-face and all ten guests, including the Mustards and the Newmans, march, march—and there we are all saved by vomiting. They give us something bitter and bubbling and we stand in the hospital corridor with private buckets. Without Pepper we’d never have called the ambulance so quickly. A hero, that little dog.” Then the aunt lifted her olive from her empty glass and sucked it off its stick. “That
was delicious,” she said. “I’ll have another. You’re here, my dear,” she shrugged. “We’ll make a thing of it.”

  The baby fell asleep and in his dreams he saw the insides of tulips come to encase his face and then move past like red- and peach-colored mist. A series of yellow rubber balls bounced among houses and rolled into the golf course like fruit into a bowl. He woke very close to his mother’s moving mouth. It was dark because outside the cast he was inside a blanket. He felt wind ease through the fibers onto his eyes. He cried and distant vibrations thumped from his shoulders down.

  “There, there,” his mother said.

  He said, “Ink. Album. Bog,” and his mother tilted him away from her shoulder and looked at him. She arranged the blanket around his plaster shoulders and leaned him again against her cotton one.They’d moved to the porch, into lantern light. Three cicadas spun on the floorboards like clowns. A fourth dive-bombed and lay stunned among them, face like an old, mean man. A fat one. Then the baby smelled sugar and then, mystery instantly solved as if he’d wondered, his aunt moved through his vision and placed a bottle of hand cream on the windowsill.“Another failed lotion,” she said, leaned her elbows on the porch rail, and looked out over the hunching bushes into the canopy of the yard’s one large tree. Behind the remark tunneled the private history of time in drugstore aisles, testing textures and staring at her skin. Inside, the parrot squawked once. “Crock,” it said. Outside, the sign under the street lamp and over the hedges read, “English Muffin Rd.” His mother leaned back in her springy swivel porch chair and put her feet up. The one stunned cicada loomed closer, others having buzzed off, and the lotion slipped into the blank world overhead. The table was a giant wooden spool, shellacked, fitted with a round glass top, all of which the baby couldn’t see. Then the mother put her feet back on the ground and jiggled him fussily. She threaded the blanket between his arms and his body and it made a limp hoop around his waist.

  “I will make you another martini and then I have a story for you,” said the aunt. “It’s about Narcissus. It’s a warning.” She gathered the two glasses into one hand, crossed at the stems so that the bowls looked both ways. “All right, I’ll tell you now. It’s not such a big story. I’m just telling it because you’re so sad.” A flock of geese flew overhead, sounding like noisemakers. The aunt said, “Knew a girl who wanted to kill herself, so she goes down to the river dock with a bag of quick-mix cement and a bucket and a watering can. Puts the bucket on the edge of the dock, stands in it, fills it with the stuff, waters herself, and waits. She watches her face stay still as the river moves by and thinks dreamily: that’s what I’ll soon be in the face of time, still as it moves, as still as it is moving. She thinks poetic because she’s suicidal. She weeps awhile. She looks at all the water wrinkles on her face. Soon she’s grounded in her resolve and she tries to wiggle her toes but cannot. She’s encased, she’s ready to go, and she makes the move to tip herself over but the bucket won’t budge. She’s rooted. She can’t even bend her knees and fall backward because she’s facing the river. She’d wanted to go head first.”

  The aunt went into the house with the glasses and the baby saw an imaginary animal in the shapes of the shrubs. His father’s head rode along the hedgerow and then, at the top of the walkway, his body materialized. He strolled. Then he crouched next to the empty bicycle.

  “To be brave,” said the aunt. “To look it in the eye,” she called from the house.

  “A bull. Oboe,” the baby said, watching his father spin the wheels. “Taboo.”

  “Did she wither there? Did someone come and cut her down? Did her knees buckle in the bucket?” asked the aunt, returning through the house with the glasses on a little silver tray in one hand, shaking a finger on the other as if to dry it, her head tipped contemplatively. She paused in the doorway. “That moon,” she said, “is hovering.” Then she said, “Well, hello Dan.” The baby and his mother clinked heads as his mother braced herself. Both his father’s hands were bare now, the dough replaced with flesh. He balanced, half risen, on the white strip of asphalt. Spokes flashed. Then he fully rose. Behind his head the moon bloomed, still hovering, and then, as his father neared, it seemed to sink.

  “Hello, Meg,” he said. “I need some time with Beth.”

  The baby heard breath. The baby heard tiny creaks from inside his mother’s neck, where many cords thrived. She turned in her swiveling porch chair. His father moved to where the baby’s ear would be. Past the lotion and through the screen, deep into the living room his aunt settled herself at the piano. She looked like a doll, playing: limbs all stretched out swimming. The piano’s angle in the house made it echo so that it sounded like a fleet of pianos. Flying. A flock. A fleet. Sound bouncing, making multiple Vs, invisible geometry.

  “The cellar is empty without you,” his father said somewhere near his ear.“I’m sorry I ruined the bread,” he said,“but I gotta come clean.” He placed himself at the table, opposite. The baby, not having eyes in the back of his cast, only heard. “Are you ready to hear what I have to say? I saw one of those trucks stuffed with anguished chickens, but I couldn’t tell you, because of all those times.”

  “That’s not what I meant, Dan, and I think you know it.”

  “All those long drives, I’d see an animal dead on the road and I’d say anything to keep you looking the other way.‘Look! Balloon Chase Vehicle! Sudden Stops and Indecision!’ You must have thought I was crazy. But it wasn’t anything. Only in my past.”

  “We have been through this and through this.”

  “Honey: growing pig teeth in the stomachs of rats.That’s all I’m saying. It’s just something reminded me.”

  “I know that’s how you see it, but I don’t.”

  His father’s voice became its quietest. It cut a silent hole through the air and then traveled though it. “I only want to protect you.”

  “I wish you could hear yourself sometimes,” his mother said, and snapped the tunnel shut with her teeth.

  In the baby’s line of vision was the metal fold-out stand teetering on chrome legs. It held music that he saw from behind, and only on the other side were tiny lines with tiny dancing inked rods and dots. Even his aunt only saw the way they moved up and down, and followed, knowing the tune. She’d put the music on the music stand instead of the piano because she wanted to look past it, toward the porch. The music stand was for the clarinet, but the baby didn’t know this. He could see her staring. He could only imagine. He imagined goldfish and berries raining.

  The baby could hear through the pores in his cast. “Abe,” he said. “Amok.” His parents continued to speak in code.

  “They cut the burial suit down the back.”

  “I remember.”

  “The whole house was awake from your packing tape.”

  “I know.”

  “Doll,” said the baby. “Bone,” he said and then, in a sort of spasm, his mother moved him to face her, his moony helmet hugging his moony face, her dark curls like night clouds around hers, and said, “What did he say? What? What?” Her eyes were like panic buttons and her mouth was a wilted petunia and her skin glowed like underwater lit with lamp bulbs. The baby’s blanket slumped to the plank floor in a heap.

  “I miss those cameos,” said his father. “I want all that stuff I said.”

  “I believe we have covered this territory,” she said, but still looked at the baby as if he knew something she didn’t know, or had known only a very long time ago.

  “God,” his father said.

  She still looked at him.Then she put him back.

  “I couldn’t see how you could understand. That’s why.” Over her shoulder, the window screen made the house inside gray.

  “Oh,” she said. She shivered. “I don’t. I don’t understand.”

  He could feel his mother hang there, a burnt coat. He could feel fuzzed edges of plastered fabric rubbing his sloughing skin. This is what he always felt. He could feel his blood beat. He could feel his body hummin
g. His body hummed and sweat. His mother’s body beat beside him, very far away.

  “Ba-ha,” said the baby.

  Hum. Drum. Inside: the frazzled piano, his aunt pretending she couldn’t hear, pretending to be swept away.

  “What does he mean, ‘Ba-ha?’” said his father. He walked around behind his wife and squatted, face-to-face with the baby. His father was bald, and even in the late summer he wore a black ski cap, as he did now. “Whatcha talking about baby, baby?” he said. He placed his hand on the round white cast-roof and rubbed as if it were furry. He made a frowny face. Then he stood and put the hand on his wife’s neck and drew her head back, leaned over her and kissed her from above. By the time he stopped, she was crying. He took the cap off his head and ambled into the night, swinging it like a lunch pail.

  His mother cried. Then she looked at her baby. He still seemed placid, but truly, he had already learned to keep the muscles in his face relaxed because of all they connected. He’d already learned, because of pain, and without knowing anything, to remain constant in an unreadable way. “Look at you, little chicken,” she said clearly. “When will you get to crack your egg?”

  Very far away, in other lands, but also in prisons and factories not so far, and in some of the houses on the aunt’s very street, the world was bad, beaten, beating, but here it wasn’t so. It was not too bad. People meant to be kind. They did all right. It’s hard to understand. The baby didn’t know he was in a cast. How could he want out? But he did want out. He tried to squirm.

  Inside, the piano clunked to a stop midtune, the aunt no longer pretending she’d been playing except to make herself scarce. She slipped back onto the porch and watched, with her sister, his father’s retreat.