The Big World Versus the Little World
Skinny beckons me to the porch. Her dressing gown belt melts to the floor as Johnson, her newly-divorced son, stakes a windsock shaped like a golden carp. Prints of his unshod feet make circles in the mud, and the sky is filled with those butterflies that sting. I fish around the crotch of my spandex and the fruit falls from Johnson’s lap. Overhead, a small plane drags a long banner: THE KING IS DEAD! Skinny whistles and claps, shields her eyes, and points to it. Her old throat is cinched with a choker and hearts, which are everywhere, pasted around the bathroom and hallways; they are padded and purple, yellow and porcelain, red and without blemish.
“You know what they say about a woman’s heart?” Johnson says.
“No,” I say.
He holds up his finger and hovers it exactly there, over my heart. He talks like this until the bells ring, and the lights light up all around the house, and children come from every corner, smiling for me. Rows of silver teeth shiver in their skulls.
There is no end to the children’s laughter. It carries them from one moment to the next, from the loud and the obvious, to the small and humming stone beneath their tongues. It is always present, waiting behind an open door. It’s crouching in the shower. If they aren’t laughing at each other, at someone slow or stupid, at something whispered or mimed, there is always Skinny and the rooted stubble of her pale chin. Or there is Johnson with his frosty glasses of dark brew which he calls “horse piss”—after taking a sip, “ahhh,” he says, “horse piss”—and then there is me, scrubbing ovals of grease from small shorts, chasing them into a hole of the woods, pursuing them through fields, cutting through the tract where animals are hung up to dry, following the thrusts of their laughter as they bound ahead of me and out of reach, their legs tightening with pride and power.
All of the children were dropped off on different days in front of Skinny’s house. They came with government stipends and promises about their weak spots, as if they could only live out here in the country long enough they would learn how to be like those gentle cows in paintings that calmly stand around all day, happily waiting for dawn. But who knows? Two fat sisters, born with advanced cancers, can now be seen taking slow turns on a bicycle, miraculously cured and stronger than ever. “Science can’t explain everything,” Skinny says, “God will exercise HIS power.” She looks to the sky, and it cracks, her mouth opened enough for a credit card. Skinny will count all the money in heaven, shine through your window and wake you. She bought the children thick, refurbished phones that play games but make no calls, and instructed me to collect them at mealtimes to be kept in a blue velvet bag, dark as a closet.
“What do you think?” Skinny scoots her chair close. She chews the last piece of her roasted hot dog and swallows the ashes. “Have you noticed the one that used to be pretty has recently gotten ugly?” She whispers, concerned for the children’s losses because she has one as well, and through their losses she sees and prepares her own. Skinny believes that one day all of their losses will find each other again as they travel on the same upward path, toward the basket on top of the piano, where she keeps a nest of heart-shaped rocks the children find by the river. Skinny applauds as they approach. She is not out of practice. She holds open her arms, and the children come to her in turns to be re-packaged over her cinnamon stick thighs. She presses their faces deep into her chest.
“Are you tired?” Skinny counts their fingers.
“Do you mind?” they say, gumdrops screwed uncomfortably into their belly buttons. They turn their heads from her cough and fold their fingers into fists.
“I do,” she says and kisses them everywhere until they warm, pull their feet up from the ground, and show her where they feel love least.
Like this, days have passed, weeks, maybe even years. The days of tornado angels and big puffy tears, the days of the doll, the one with horse hair eyelashes, the days of reward and punishment, days of pillow and fever...they all just came and went. I pull around a cart, and the children crowd into and hang from it, like poisoned bodies to burial, bumping over mole hills, their t-shirts caught in splintered boards, their damp deep laughter.
I teach the children to swim in an old, deep river. They line up along the bank. The water cleaves off big noisy chunks of clay. “Think of your bodies as cars,” I say. “You need to get the goods from one end to the other. Imagine you have eyes in your chest that look in the direction of the turn.” When I teach the children to swim, I also teach the laws of attraction. I teach two things at once, but most of them are swept downstream.
“What do I always say?”
And the children yell, “Don’t panic.”
Small, familiar snakes dart against the current.
“Pretend your arms are soft garden hoses. Let the water rush through them.” I position the boys who will never learn in stiff grasses, but they make for the woods. The girls pick up a slapping game, and one by one, the others also disappear or lie on the ground and fall asleep under the heavy machine of heat.
Movie Star sits beside me on a ratty towel. She grinds her hips into the ground and asks me if that's what I want Johnson to do to me. I push down my sports bra so I don’t get tan lines as I do sit ups.
“31, 32, 33...” I huff and puff.
“What about here?” Movie Star pulls down her top to show her mosquito bite nipples.
“Here?” She points to her lips.
She has a country laugh.
“What about here?” Movie Star points to her butthole. “Is that where?”
“Yeah,” I say. “Right there.”
Her hair makes me ashamed of my own.
When I was Movie Star’s age my mother cried all the time. I never knew why. The sound reached my room every three minutes. Eventually, I carried my mother up and down stairs and placed her on the sofa, until the sun shone through the window and burned one side of my mother’s face, so I moved that chair, with her in it. I moved the TV and boarded the window. I did her makeup and nails, dinners and baths, poured detergent in hot water to ignite her nipples and insert. She peed in mugs when I left, which her dog knocked over, and when he died, I carried him, too, and anything else that she wanted, I delivered. We shared a car up until it was mine.
But as for Movie Star’s parents? What happened to them? Like the other children, all sorts of things, most of which they know very little. How do you tell a child the story of war? The girl who had this job before me, who enjoyed my private entrance and picture window, dealt with the question by making the children homemade popsicles, ordering boxes of paperbacks they couldn’t read, and teaching them old folk songs from her home country. That was their favorite thing about her, that she was from a place far away, and when they sing her song about a hapless old man who lost his only love, a song to be sung by drunks, they all become very foreign, too, very old in the face and neck, like their parents, I imagine, and I can see them when they were younger, back when there were turtles big and heavy as old car engines, and while the world was not without its dangers back then, it must have been better because its schemes were more practical, its disposition less confused.
Movie Star communicates the other children’s needs to me, to Skinny, and to Johnson who dutifully empties the bag of phones onto the lunch table, putting a long quiet finger to his lips. He uses his own phone to join their game in which they are all heads floating in a vast sea, with their game names hovering over them. When one drowns all of their animated eyebrows lift. They make these despairing cries, these bodiless creatures caught in a two-dimensional forward-moving plane…to go in any other direction is death. Movie Star blows on her hot consommé, dips the tips of her fingers, eyes still on her phone, and runs them through her hair to tame the flyaways.
It is true that on some nights Johnson scratches the door to my room and makes an evil noise, the color of his hair drawn from the moon, a cigarette butt sizzling on his lips. And it is true that, once inside, I put his head between my thighs and squeeze, and he laughs until he can’t breathe and cries and strokes my thighs, planting small Catholic kisses there, and then he laughs some more, until he finally taps me on the rump and tells me that’s good. He’s good now. Let him out, enough now. That is all. And then there are nights when we meet by the shed to drink something or other, and talk until we run out of things to say and we listen to the sounds of the forest creatures, waiting for them to look back at us with the shiny fleece of their eyes. Staring into the blackest spot in the blackness I remember a story my mother told me when I was young. It was a story about when she was little and would go fishing with her father at a lake in the middle of a forest, and every time they went there, they saw the same man with a hunched back whose head hung just above the ground, and he walked with a slow limp. My mother said that she would sit in the canoe as her father fished and watch him drag himself down the path surrounding the lake, over and over, his face pointed directly at his feet. One day, she went to the lake by herself because, even then, all she wanted was to be separate. She sat by the water’s edge for a while tossing pebbles and drawing meanders in the dust with a stick, until she noticed a flash of light coming from the weeds and brush, like sunlight catching crystal. It wasn’t until she was upon it that she realized it was him, the hunched man, lying there, covered in the muck of the lake, and for the first time in all of these years she could see his wide, frozen lips and his gleaming white teeth.
A flashlight swings back and forth in the dark.
“Uh-oh,” Johnson whispers. “Somebody’s looking for me.”
The world goes forward, and I cannot move. Even in my dreams I remain here, in the big back field encircled by trees, and as I look out into the distance, I can see them, the pods of dogs as men from my dreams…they enter the bluish haze of the field’s semidarkness. The others I’m with know what to do—you brush them, tell them they are beautiful, but only enough so that they might like you. They can not love you. I drink orangecello from a miniature Greek vase. I swagger. I’m ornamented and keen. We want to get rid of them, the dogs, but it’s dangerous, and there is the sound of their mouths, curled and pulled back. Their fur shimmers like an eel under the moon. A dark body tries to hide, but they find it, tear at it, and so on. There are no journeys to take. Everyone lives inside themselves. Skinny comments on the glory of a tired child. Time passes and nothing changes. Skinny appears behind the children with an eraser and doctors their drawings. She takes their beast’s left hand. They can only draw the devil if they do so without his ears or mouth.
Skinned vegetables are piled on the counter. “Go Pigs,” Johnson yells at the radio. The children flare their nostrils, jut out their bottom teeth, poke out their bellies, and soundlessly do it behind his back, Go Pigs! They laugh. Up close, Johnson has the skin of a much older man—pitted, red, and loose. He wipes his hands on his apron, puts a peeled potato to his cheek, and turns to me, his eyes full and wet. “I wish we could go somewhere for a drink.”
I do double-leg calf raises in the cartoon’s reflected light. The children’s pajamas are stained, but they wear sturdy sandals and boots and eat vanilla ice cream and pineapple crack candy. Movie Star can be heard over the others, soothed only by the TV panic, Look at this, look at this, not him, me, look at this. Two house cats are trying to escape through an air duct. Their tails are on fire. I press down into the balls of both feet. Nothing to worry about. Behind the children is darkness. Keep my hips in vertical alignment, perfectly still. The housecat’s eyes go bright with fear.
Eventually we hear “God, the All-terrible!” play from distant speakers, and the fireworks begin in the trees, and we all run outside and to the top of the hill to join in, to play out our anonymous roles in a far-off rejoicing. Each child receives one firecracker from Skinny’s sack, and they immediately blast it in the air, or toward someone, all heeding the same internal voice that calls upon them to not wait, to not watch, to quench their astonishment and do it. Do it now! They fill all of the silences between the giant crashes, fiery ponytails, and those soft and fizzy mandarins, and when it’s over they run toward the dark, always together and as one, rounding a turn as barn swallows. They light their soft mustaches with the beating glow of their phones, jingling the hits and misses of a shooting game. They wave them in the air, “Over there,” they yell and disappear. Bugs are erect in the tall grass. I run toward the children, and they toward me, or away, and I run toward them again, barely missing. Their faces gleam green, pink, then red, and purple.
By the arm, I catch a long-haired, quiet boy, round as a peach, a boy who sits perfectly still, until it’s time to relocate to another edge of room, far from the others, where he can touch himself furiously, all day, unbuttoned. I shove him to the ground. Grass clings to his cheeks, in his mouth, throughout his soft hair. He flashes his phone at me to show I’m too late. “You lost.” He is covered in sweat and is wheezing. “We won.”
“OK,” I say.
“We won,” he says, dirty and flat-faced, raw from the chase, but high on his victory. I put my knees to his chest and he struggles beneath my weight. “Did you hear me?” he gasps. “We won.”
Movie Star hits me with an open hand on the back. “I stopped by to see you,” she yells, out of breath, “in your stuffy little room. But you weren’t there.” She already has haughty eyebrows. She tells me kids have twisted their ankles by the river and I will never guess what fell out of their pockets. Her mouth is dark with chewed food, and I think of kittens who have been weaned too early, sucking on an armpit.
I pick up and run through the trees and stickers, toward the river, with Movie Star following me, repeating, “I came to see you, and you weren’t there!” She grabs my arm and I yank it away. The distance grows between us. “You weren’t there!” She catches up with me, grabs the back of my shirt, and I smack at her wrists. She is crying and laughing, screaming my name and begging me to wait, far behind and then close again. She trips, picks herself up and continues to run behind me, until we reach sand, and I see them, there on a small island of scrap and branches in the middle of the river. I see their dark elementary outlines behind bright white light. Mud is all over, what they hold is heavy, and then I see it, covering their mouths. It is like they are coming at me out of the darkness, a light coming from them is coming at me, but they are not moving. They are peaceful and still. I grab Movie Star roughly by the arm and lean into the wind.