Labrador Read online

  I shook my head. “It’s okay,” I said. But then I didn’t know what to say. For a moment I felt as if I was the one who’d gobbled up Grandfather, and that now, in a lump, he was trying to get out.

  “You saw him die, didn’t you? God, it must have been awful. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to see someone die.”

  He was there, right at the back of my throat—the pared-down, essential version of Grandfather; a slick, damp finger—negotiating the final bent turn into my mouth.

  “All I can get out of Dad,” you said, “is that Grandfather ‘passed away.’ The Mouse Queen’s lips, as usual, are sealed.”

  The two hands of the clock came together like clappers.

  “Kitty, are you all right?” you asked.

  You bent forward, concerned, just as I jumped up, my hands pressed against my mouth—there seemed to be wavering coronas of green light radiating out from each of the doorways through which I ran, transmitting to me the prickling ice and heat of nausea. By the time I got to the kitchen, you were right behind me. You held on to my shoulders as I leaned over the sink, throwing up on top of the mismatched plates with their smears of ketchup and crumbs of meat loaf, the cutlery white with congealed fat, the saucepans and glasses and the several bloated noodles. Tears sprang from my eyes. I think I really expected to see him lying there, viscous and tiny on his back, his face black and shrunk like a prune.

  “I’m sorry,” you said. “God, Kitty, I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  “It wasn’t you,” I said. I straightened up and wiped my face with the dish towel, which smelled sour, like the inside of my mouth. The truth is, I felt much better. “I’m glad I didn’t eat a big dinner,” I said, and then I started to giggle.

  “Listen,” you said, “maybe you’d better go to bed now.”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I sat down on one of the chairs, because laughter was forming in every part of me; I pointed at the sink, laughing wildly. “I think what I’d better do is wash the fucking dishes.”

  I turned on the faucet, and the water, brownish at first, jumped out in separate, noisy bursts, like a companion joining me in my hysteria.

  “Cut it out, Kitty,” you said, whereupon I selected a paring knife from amid the sink’s foul soup, waving it around and around in the air.

  “Cut what out? Cut what out?” I thought I was unspeakably funny.

  I can’t remember how you actually did it: removed the knife from my wet hand, turned off the water, and got me back into the west room, where you made me lie down on the sofa, propping one of Mama’s hard little cushions—embroidered with a mean-looking parrot—under my head. In fact, all I can actually recall is your fingers skimming along my brow, the shh shh of your incantation, the soft wind of your breathing. I thought it was spring, and that a window was open, the wind, spangled and momentary, a trapeze artist preparing, at last, to leap.

  When I woke up you were gone. I could just make out the time on the clock’s face. Four-thirty. Little pieces of my dream, two-dimensional and intricately shaped, shuttled through the cold space around me, some of them locking together: a cupped hand held a white ball with blue stars on it; the blue eye of a man stared out at me from between the fingers of a white hand; the marble folds of a robe shivered, quickening, lifting from beneath.

  “Where are you?” I said. My body felt very weak and, with each breath I took I felt sad, the way I would after swimming in seawater. I knew that he’d come back; I knew that Rogni was somewhere in the house, looking for you. Maybe he had already found you. Maybe that was why you were no longer in the room with me. And I realized that the whole time I’d been away I hadn’t thought of him, not even once. Was it possible that it had all been his idea: that marble shelf on which I’d perched for three months like Nana’s goose girl, stupidly imagining that I was at the heart of the story, when, in fact, the real story was going on in another room of the house? A passionate and violent story, capable of disturbing the arrangement of the objects around me?

  “How could you?” I asked.

  I meant you, Willie.

  Arms of you, voice of you, face of you, breath of you! You were my sister! How could it happen that my love for you would keep getting bigger and bigger? How could it happen that I would find myself flitting, finned and cool, through the thumping, fluent corridors of the house, as if my love for you were a thing external to myself—as if it were the only substance in which I could move or draw breath? On the second-floor landing I paused for a minute and checked my appearance in the mirror. Vanity is mortality’s sidekick. But I don’t have to tell you that, do I? Nor do I have to tell you that I caught, out of the corner of my eye, the briefest glimpse of a face, like dough left to rise too long, collapsing in on a bean-shaped mouth.

  “Go ahead,” a voice said. “It’ll serve her right. Why do you think I made two of you, anyway?”

  I turned around, fast; all I could see was the empty stairwell, although I thought I could smell the faintest odor in the air, glutinous and porridgy.

  The third-floor hallway was intermittently lit with moonlight wherever a door stood open. It was like walking past clipped boxwood and statuary in a formal garden at night, and I felt as if, turning to enter any one of those rooms, I might find stretching before me other long passageways—I might surprise, with my presence, amorous couples, their faces washed clean of personality. Each dark interval, as I walked through it, was like an intake of breath, the suspended moment preceding great activity.

  Of course, I found you where I expected to find you: in our room, sitting cross-legged on the bed, looking out into space.

  “Kitty!” you said. “What are you doing here?” You moved over a little, making room for me, patting the mattress with your hand. Do you remember? The ticking was hardly dented where your body’d been.

  “Where is he?” I asked.

  You smiled and shook your head. “You know, I’ve always loved the way you look when your mouth’s hanging open. Come here. Have a bowl of gruel for old times’ sake.”

  I saw them then, the two pink bowls, still sitting side by side on the dresser. Why hadn’t Mama taken them back downstairs?

  “Dr. Chun,” you said, “explained the whole orphan thing to me. My shrink,” you elaborated, as I continued to stand there, my arms pasted to my sides, staring.

  “Willie, where is he?”

  “Where is who?” you asked. You got up, arching your back, and went over to the dresser, where you set one bowl inside the other—I realized I’d never seen them that way before. “The part we can’t figure out,” you said, “is which one of us thought it up. You or me? Kitty or Willie?”

  “I asked you a question,” I said.

  “And I answered it,” you said. “Besides, I don’t know why you’re getting so angry. This is my house, too, in case you’ve forgotten. I can go anywhere I want to in it.”

  I looked around. The windowsills were thick with dust, above which, on the panes, plumes of frost arose. A mouse scampered past within the walls, its little feet scrabbling for purchase. Everything seemed to have a moral lesson attached to it, an unfurling scroll such as one sees in medieval paintings. I went over to the northward-facing window and tried to look out. Vaguely, through the frost, I could see the moon, perched like one of the glacial boulders of Labrador high on top of Mt. Chocorua. “He was here, wasn’t he? You can tell me, Willie. I know he’s been here.”

  It was a shock to feel your arm circling my waist. “Kitty,” you said, “I really don’t have any idea what you mean. Really.” Each of your fingers, distinct and individual, pressed in on my skin as you tried to pull me away from the window. Miss Pinky, I thought, Pointer, Thumbkin, bearing out the message of one of Mrs. McGuire’s endless songs. “Unless it’s that hearty fellow in the uniform I saw wandering towards the bathroom? If so, you’re barking up the wrong tree. He’s all yours, if you want him.” Your head came to rest on my shoulder, and then I felt the slow rotation of your face towards
my neck, and the pressure of small, wicked kisses where the pulse leaped. “I only have eyes for you,” you said.

  But I pulled away. “What I mean,” I said, “is the angel.”

  “Oh,” you said. “That again.”

  “Don’t pretend, Willie. I saw you. I saw you together on the raft, right before I left for Labrador.”

  Wearily you stretched out, on your back, on the bed. “Look at that,” you said, “there’s a stain up there that looks just like Africa. I don’t remember that. It must be new.”

  “Don’t change the subject, Willie,” I said.

  “Willie,” you repeated. “How did I ever get a name like that? Willie.” Then you rolled over on your side, facing me. Your eyes were stitched shut along the seams of your lashes, but there were tears getting out anyway, dripping onto the mattress. “How could I be changing the subject when I don’t even know what it is?”

  “You and Rogni on the raft,” I said. “That’s the subject. Before you found the boat, remember?”

  “The boat?” Your eyes opened, wet and shining. “No, I don’t remember any boat. Listen, Kitty,” you said, “I’m not trying to be obtuse. If you want to know the truth, I’ve been having a rough time myself lately. I mean, hasn’t it occurred to you that I’m supposed to be in Philadelphia?”

  “Sure,” I said. “But I thought, you know, that it was because of what happened.” When I was little I had a puzzle composed of cubes, the faces of which each had printed on them parts of six different scenes: the transformation from Little Miss Muffet to, for instance, Little Boy Blue was always gradual and marked by an incongruity of detail, as if the boy asleep under the haystack remained haunted by an earlier memory of an enormous spider, dangling in the summer air above the small and distant cows. My anger began to change into confusion; the confusion into something else. I could feel a fissure opening in my brain, out of which a sleek, fearsome thing dragged itself up to look around. “I thought you were here because of what happened to Grandfather,” I said.

  “Well, you’re wrong. But how could I expect you to know what’s been going on? Let’s face it, Kitty, our parents are not exactly communicative.”

  “Mama said that you haven’t been well.”

  I wasn’t prepared for your reaction. All of a sudden you sat straight up and punched your fists down, hard, into the mattress, sending forth a surprising amount of dust. My point of view shifted, so that I no longer was focusing just on your face but on your thin torso within the context of the room—a pink stalk wavering, solid and alive, against the blue currents of the walls, above the blue floor where the darker shadows eddied, pooling here and there into the bewitching prints of your feet. “Not well,” you said. “Jesus Christ! Can you believe it? For your information, Kitty, I’m in disgrace. For your information, I went and got myself pregnant.” You pointed, but I couldn’t tell if you were pointing to your stomach or farther down—I couldn’t tell if you were indicating cause or effect.

  “You mean you’re going to have a baby?” I asked.

  “That’s not what I said.” As suddenly as you’d sat up, you flopped back again onto the mattress.

  “I knew it,” I said. The words had a bitter flavor to them as they came out of my mouth and, with their utterance, I felt strangely purged, as if my heart, without that brackish coating, was now the newest thing on the face of the earth. It was new, Willie, and already there was a little arrow through it.

  “You knew what?”

  “What I’ve been trying to tell you,” I said. “About you and Rogni.”

  Then you sighed—such a tender, soft sound. I thought what I was hearing was the voice of the baby. “It’s a mystery to me,” you said, “why I’m the one in this family who’s supposed to be a little unglued. Willie’s always the one with the shaky grip on reality. God, Kitty. Sometimes I think if it weren’t for me—”

  “But I saw you,” I said.

  “Come here.” Your arm reached out; in a tusk of light it raced towards me. “I want you to listen to me. I want you to lie down here beside me, and then I want you to listen. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Your eyes were looking right into mine, but I knew you were seeing something else. Someone else’s eyes? Or an entire landscape, the sun a tiny peephole in the sky through which God’s vision poured beneficent and warm, across two bodies rocking together? Rocking and rocking.

  “I don’t think I can stay awake too much longer,” you said, “so I’m going to make this fast. For a while now I’ve been, well, involved with Peter Mygatz. You remember him, don’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Your birthday party.”

  “That’s right. I’d almost forgotten. He gave me a necklace. I wonder what ever became of it?”

  How could I tell you, now, that I’d found the necklace one day where you’d hidden it in the secret drawer of your jewelry box? How could I tell you that, in a private ceremony, I’d wrapped it up in toilet paper and buried it in the woods, digging a hole with a soup spoon—scooping the moist and leafy soil away from the pervasive tree roots, chanting? “What do you mean,” I asked irritably, “you’d almost forgotten?”

  “Give it a rest, Kitty. Do you want to hear this or don’t you?” You yawned so that I could see the whole inside of your mouth, the pink stamen of your tongue quivering.

  “Go ahead,” I said.

  “At first it was just a crush,” you said. “I mean, I was a kid and he was this grown-up. It was very pure. Sometimes we’d hold hands, stuff like that, but always in a very pure way. I used to go visit him in that bread truck where he lived. Over near the bog.”

  “I know,” I said. “It had a window cut right in the side. You could see his table and chairs.”

  “I never realized we were being watched,” you said. “I wish you’d told me. At least I would’ve had a good reason for feeling paranoid.”

  “But it was always empty. I just looked in. I never saw anything.”

  You raised your eyebrows, and it occurred to me that even your skepticism was enchanting. “He was into being a holy person,” you said. “You know, we spent a lot of time sitting face to face, cross-legged, breathing. Peter wasn’t into sex. Or, at least, that’s what he said. But then, after I moved down to Philadelphia, he began coming to see me. The Brezinskis were very enlightened; Ozzie, especially—he liked to think of himself as a liberated kind of guy, if you get my drift. And everything changed. Sometimes it was all I could do to remain upright at the barre.”

  I saw, for the first time, a flat, rose-colored mole on your left temple; I wanted to kiss you, right there, but I was afraid. “The man puts his penis in the woman,” I said, and you looked at me, your drowsiness tightening, momentarily, into interest.

  “Well, yeah,” you said. “But—”

  “It makes her rattle and rattle,” I continued, watching you closely. “It spreads out everywhere.”

  For a second your face was surprised, and then you closed your eyes. “What happened up there in Labrador, Kitty?” Your arms folded lightly around me. “Did you fall in love? You can tell me.”

  “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I said.

  “You did, didn’t you? You did fall in love in Labrador. I should have guessed. Why do I always forget how much alike we are?”

  “It was before,” I said. “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. He told me he touched you. He was your lover.”

  “Peter told you that?”

  “No!” I shouted. “Not Peter. I don’t even know Peter. Rogni told me. When you’d be dancing. I was supposed to keep him away from you, but I couldn’t.”

  “Jesus,” you said, “I don’t believe this. Kitty, listen to me. The only person I’ve ever slept with is Peter. Period. Why do you keep harping on this Rogni? Don’t you think it’s time you grew up? I mean, if there was such a thing as an angel, don’t you think our lives wouldn’t be in such a big mess as they are now?”

  “He’s
real,” I said.

  “I wish you were right.”

  “I am,” I said.

  Then you shook your head from side to side, slowly. “Oh, Kitty,” you said, and as I watched, your face grew liquid, with recognitions swimming in dim schools under its surface. “Except, you know, it’s funny you would say that,” you whispered, “about the dancing. It’s funny you would say that.”

  I could see sleep branching through you. “Willie,” I pleaded, “not yet. Wake up. Please.”

  “I was really good, wasn’t I?” Your voice was so soft I could hardly hear it, extending in silver rings around me, lapping softly against the far-off walls of the room. “Maybe you mean that? A long long time ago?”

  And then you were gone—your arms slipped, little by little, away.

  I got up and went over to the dresser. The bowl that I picked up was full of gruel, and I carried it back with me, carefully, to the bed. Downstairs I could hear people moving around: conversations with the undercurrent of nighttime emergency, power failures, sickness, doors left unlocked, tempting in all things foreign. “Her bed’s empty, too,” I heard Mama say.

  Soon, I thought, they would be up here, their chests rising and falling; soon the room would close in on us, like fingers around a firefly. To the curve of your lips I lifted an invisible spoon. I could see it: my hand guiding that spoon slowly through space, bearing that spoon slowly towards your closed mouth, which, as I got closer, began to open.

  “Willie,” I said. “That’s right. That’s right. Now swallow.”

  You were sound asleep, the castle of your face lit from within by secret assignations. Someone had to feed the baby. So tiny—it was just a tiny human baby and it didn’t know anything! I thought of it, curled up in its moist nest; I was sure it was a girl. “Open wide,” I coaxed, and she stirred. “Just your mouth,” I implored, because I realized that she didn’t know how it might be a dangerous thing to open her eyes, how the whole room was dancing with shining bits of her mother. She didn’t know how it might happen that a fleck would fly into her dark blue eye, changing the way she would see the world forever.