Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 18 Read online

  * * * *

  My tribe hates the Pacific Ocean more than anything else in the world. We hate it because we know that it is the one thing on earth more powerful than we. Every year we see if it has weakened or aged; we attack it with slingshots and arrows, with bottle rockets and trumpets and screams, and every year it survives the onslaught. We killed the Atlantic Ocean thousands of years ago. Its tide may still ebb and flow, fish may still wheel within its waters, but in every way that matters it is dead. We regret the destruction of its indigenous civilization in the resulting cataclysm, but we hope the distressed will understand it was a necessary act, that the world demands ideas of order, hierarchies of beauty and of strength.

  * * * *

  Before going into battle, members of my tribe bite the breasts of their fellow warriors, hard enough to draw blood. It reminds those who find such a ritual unpleasant how much worse life is about to get. For those who enjoy it, it reminds them of how sweet life can be, it gives them something to look forward to.

  * * * *

  He was Alexander of Macedon until he came to the borders of our lands, having previously claimed as his own everything touched by his hands and gaze. It was only after he halted his army, and led them in a long and circuitous path around our territory; after he radioed his pilots, and ordered them not to violate our airspace; after he left nine servile elephants at our gates to apologize for coming as close as he did, that he became Alexander the Great. Prudence was a cherished virtue then.

  * * * *

  In my tribe, we never sing. Singing is for the birds.

  * * * *

  We have heard that in other nations, men and women “re-marry,” after their spouses die. Such a practice seems eminently vulgar to us. Marriage is an irrevocable stamp up on the surface of reality; it transcends death, it transcends desire. When one's spouse dies, the world has chosen the pattern one's life is to assume. To accept such a destiny is to accept reality. Why debase yourself? Why revoke the significance of your life in the world's skein?

  Our death rituals may frighten the uninitiated; please remain calm. When a member of my tribe dies, her loved ones gather in the deceased's house at night, turn on all the lights, and scream for as loud and for as long as we can. In this way we conceal the sounds and sights of the departed's body being consumed by the animals of the night. The people who keen loudest are often thought afterwards (inaccurately, I believe) to have loved the deceased most. At my mother's keening, I was astounded that someone screamed louder than I: the Fool raincatcher that my mother had defeated, then retrained, after I had welcomed her into our family.

  * * * *

  My tribe's restaurants are hospitable, our recipes simple: rice, lemongrass, butter, and kale. A scoop of vanilla ice cream nestled between doves. A bowl of Fritos and an erotic puppet show. Pears, and paring knives to peel them.

  * * * *

  The longer you stay within our lands, the closer the pattern of your dreams will mesh with those of your countrymen. Do not be alarmed if you tell a neighbor that you awoke longing for, say, a pouch of fur in which to succor your children, and they exclaim, “Yes, a pouch! A pouch with tiny nipples, from which my children took sugared milk!"

  * * * *

  Only Fools think my tribe watches ravens in order to tell the future. We watch ravens to track the movement of the invisible stars.

  * * * *

  I mentioned at the beginning of this guide that every member of my tribe follows a calling. If your calling has been to wander, friend, answer a new one. I am the Welcomer, and I am called to tell outsiders of my tribe, to welcome you all into the Day.

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  Swimming

  Veronica Schanoes

  1. The House

  Today Adam's parents took us on a tour of their house, which is now larger and more ornate than the gaudiest of Oriental temples dreamed up in the fevered imaginations of barely repressed Victorian fantasists. It is for Adam, and now, for both of us.

  They take especial pride in the first floor dining room modeled on the courtroom of Louis XIV, the Sun King. There is a second dining room that is the whole of the second floor, simpler and rougher hewn and to my mind all the more cold, majestic, palatial. The tables stretch unto infinity, world without end and each place is marked with its own silver tankard. Leering, screaming demons are carved into the table legs, the backs of the chairs, the wooden rafters among which ravens soar jeering as if they can see into your very soul and are not at all impressed. And lounging on the table, wearing armor spattered with mud and blood, picking their teeth with sharpened slivers of bone and scratching their privates and flicking the dried or viscous secretions they find there at each other, are an infinite number of women, twice as large as I, toughened, leathery flesh spilling out between sections of armor. They are fat and thin, old and young, raven-haired and red-headed. And they are all, every one, glowering at me, glowering and smirking.

  Adam has asked me to marry him, and I have said yes, because I love him and I want to spend the rest of my life with him; I want to raise our children together. The only problem is his parents. They are still building this house; they are crazy; they want us to come and live with them.

  Adam's mother has the third floor and his father the fourth. Each has a bedroom, a study, a den, a bathroom, a dressing room. On the third floor his mother has a bird room. It is vast, with a brilliant skylight. There are ice floes for the penguins and gum trees for the kookaburras, saltwater for the seagulls and peaches for the peacocks. The air is full of whirring brown wings, the smell of feather mites, and falling feces. They shriek and fight and peck each other until the blood comes. And all the time, Adam's mother and father chatter as though their words are what speed the birds through the air.

  I love them. I do not mind their madness. After my own family's distance and isolation from one another I find soothing their unnatural chatter and loopy non sequiturs, their inability to allow a pause in the cosmic monologue they are both eternally engaged in delivering. Their fluttering talk floats through my inherited solitude and becomes a blanket covering me, preventing me from levitating indefinitely and steadily away from all that is human and recognizable.

  I stare up and further up, and on this day Adam's parents’ words feel no longer like a blanket warming me but instead like white noise, white water, water running into the sink as I stand trying to fumble under the dishes for the sponge and the water level is rising, the water is rising and drowning out the music on the stereo, the water is rising and the waves are rolling in and I can no longer hear words; all I can see as I stare up is a blur as feathers blend into leaves but up and further up is the ceiling because we are still in the terrible house. It is not a house at all, but a beast, a god, a toad-like Moloch-Baal squatting in the heart of Brooklyn devouring the offerings of labor, love, and material bounty my future in-laws offer up; they offer up their retirement, their sweat and dreams, in an orgy of joy and devotion. And see how it grows, fatter and fatter with each passing year, feeding on human life.

  On the fourth floor is Adam's dad's model room, in which they plan each floor. The model is almost the entire size of the room, and leaves us only some inches to stand. Adam tells me what a glorious playhouse this was when he was a child. He thinks he can still fit through it if he crawls. And he does, easy as pie, so to show willing I go in after him. I am little more than halfway when I get stuck in his father's dressing room and no matter how I turn I am wedged in so tightly and painfully, with my arm out one window and my foot resting up in the chimney that I can barely breathe, let alone get out.

  As I lie uncomfortably, twisted and all out of proportion, I envision layers of the house falling in upon me. There are voices outside—perhaps Adam whispering words of encouragement but the water is rising and I cannot hear him. I wonder what will happen if I can't get out. Will I be shut in this box forever while the water rises and the waves roll in?

  I cannot shed my skin, but I manage
to inch off my skirt, which slims me down enough to slither out on my belly like a snake, and then I am out, standing in my underwear, but there is no shame in it. I put my skirt back on and examine the Ferris wheel on top of the model while Adam steadies me.

  Years ago, so many years ago that it is long, long ago, though not far away at all, so many years that it is once upon a time, so long ago, and besides, the wench is dead, so many years ago that I have never been sure how old Adam's parents are, whether they grew up in the last century or the one before that, when land in Brooklyn was undeveloped and cheap, they bought some and began building. Perhaps originally their plans were modest, who can say? And who can say when they went mad? They adopted Adam long after they completed the first two stories, and his earliest memories, so he tells me, are of being taught how to hold a hammer, how to use a wrench, how to spread cement for bricks.

  I love Adam. But I do not wish to be consumed by that house.

  I do not wish to raise my children as little builders, always anchored, dragged down to the sea-bed by some ever-growing weight in Brooklyn, a mass distorting space and time, energy and light. I do not wish to be sucked into this collapsed star, no, not even if it means that I could travel in time, not even if it means I could live forever.

  "Of course we're nowhere near ready to finish the roof,” his parents tell me. They speak spontaneously, in unison, in harmony, one voice rising in pitch as the other falls. “But we plan to cap off the building with a Ferris wheel—an old-fashioned one. We keep making offers to the owners of the Wonder Wheel—we've already worked out how to reinforce the walls and foundation to take the weight because the water is rising—they won't sell so far but you never know. We remember when they built the Wonder Wheel. We were teenagers in love and we were already wizened and gray, even bald. We were little kids playing on the beach as the waves rolled in and we were thirty-year-old construction workers, but we were never lost, not for one moment."

  I imagine the Wonder Wheel atop this behemoth of a house, turning steadily in wind and rain and sun. It is not an unpleasant idea, but then, out of nowhere, I imagine the wind rising, the sky above Brooklyn darkening, and rain bombs being thrown down onto the borough, and out of the black roaring sea of the sky comes a lightning bolt striking the wheel, crackling around and across the circle, hub and spokes, which turns black and flies into pieces, shooting shrapnel in all directions and the water is rising.

  I open my eyes and see that the model Ferris wheel is burnt and smoking and in pieces on the floor.

  Adam's mother and father sigh. “Yes,” they say. “Yes, well, that does happen, and more often than you'd think. Adam, go downstairs and fetch the broom, please. We can put this back together tonight after you children leave..."

  After we clean up the scorched earth of the model room, we go upstairs to the carnival floor, the floor that Adam's parents are giving to us. There is a room of bumper cars with flashing strobe lights and a disco ball and loud jarring electronic music as cars speed back and forth slamming into the walls and one another and more than once we have to jump out of the way when a garishly colored car heads for us like a battering ram.

  Also on that floor is the room with a huge hand-carved carousel in the center whirling around and around as its internal organ howls out Petula Clark's “Downtown.” I wonder whether we could reprogram it to play something else, but doing that would mean going near the clown faces carved on the trunk. I remember my mother taking me to the carousel in Central Park when I was little, and part of the thrill was spinning around so close, but just out of reach of those scary clowns jeering at you and I think that was when I began to understand the pleasure, the eroticism, of being just a bit frightened. But I never had to go within reach of those clowns and I will not go near these, not so close that they could reach out with their wooden tongues and painted mouths and get me, drag me into the carved wood where I would be frozen trapped in a sharp relief of terror forever and ever. And trapped in wood, I would someday burn.

  The next room is not quite finished; it's the one they are currently working on; it's the one they have set aside for me, they tell me, and perhaps someday it will make a good nursery, or perhaps a university, an anniversary, an adversary, an anursereversary. It does not yet have a name.

  "We're still working on this,” they say. “It's quite tricky, working out how to make these stick together, but well worth the effort, we think you'll agree..."

  And I can see that it must be tricky, for instead of bricks and mortar, the walls are built of layer after layer of plastic mannequins, the kind found in shop windows everywhere, from Strawberry's to Macy's. They lie on top of each other, fixed in place by Crazy Glue and their own plastic flesh melted together by a blowtorch. Impossibly smooth and stiff limbs stick out of the walls like swimmers reaching for shore. And this room is not yet finished—a wall and a half remain to be done and cold winds rush in from the open sky outside.

  "Plastic repels water,” Adam's parents continue to explain, but I have stopped listening. Plastic does indeed repel water, but when I look closely at the wall I can see tiny drops of water in the corners of the mannequins’ eyes. They look like the eyes of a baby doll I had when I was very young. She was called Tiny Tears. She was small with a head of short black hair, and she had been my mother's before she was mine. Her eyes opened when you picked her up and closed when you put her down. She came with a little plastic bottle that you could fill with water. Then you would fit the tip of the bottle into her little open mouth and nurse her, and then the water would leak out of the tear ducts in her little eyes, and then you would comfort her. Tiny Tears. These weeping mannequins remind me of her, little Tiny Tears, my mother's doll, and my doll, and perhaps someday my daughter's doll.

  Later that night I dream about the house.

  In my dream, Adam and I and two tiny weeping babies are living in the Wonder Wheel on top of the house, climbing from one car to another whenever we need to move into or out of a room. The babies love it, swinging from one steel bar to the next with the greatest of ease, like little orangutans, but not I, I slip and lose my grip and then my balance and then I plummet, falling down and down and down until I stick. I try to sit up but I can't move, I'm glued down and I only realize where I am when I see Adam's parents lowering a mannequin smeared with Crazy Glue down to me. I try to yell but my mouth doesn't open because it's made of plastic, so I can't prevent them from gluing me into the wall of mannequins. My eyes begin to leak tiny warm tears that roll down my face and my feet and gather into a puddle that swells and I wake up with a sound between a gulp and a sigh as the water is rising and the waves are rolling in.

  I watch Adam sleeping next to me until the sky turns from black to royal blue. I realize what I have to do.

  I will blow up the house.

  Then I lie back down and sleep peacefully through the morning.

  * * * *

  2. The Plan

  It is important not to hurt anybody. I would never hurt Adam's parents, not if my life depended upon it. So I must make sure the house is unoccupied when my fuses reach their ends. I do not want to hurt anybody at all, just the terrible house, only the beast of Brooklyn.

  I want to kill the house, but I will not. No. To kill the house, to destroy it completely, that would be too terrible for Adam's parents. Their beloved older child, their life project, the house they began back when they were newlyweds, or young teenagers, or perhaps infants—think how it would hurt them to lose their house completely. All their love, all their work, the luxury of their sweat, and sweet Adam's work as well—no. I can't destroy the house entirely.

  I will hurt nobody and I will not destroy the house. All I wish to do is to cripple it a little. Scorch it a bit. Nothing that will not heal. Make the upstairs uninhabitable. Not the downstairs. I do not wish to make Adam's parents homeless—then they would move in with us. I just want to make them unable to house us. Adam and I have friends we can impose upon in the event of an emergency.

>   I can make an emergency.

  So. Not to hurt anybody. Not to destroy the house. This will be easy. I have resources. I can get a small bit of explosive and a timer. Oh yes. That is not difficult at all.

  And it will have to happen on our wedding day. During the ceremony. How else can I ensure Adam's parents will not be in the house? Adam and I are staying at the hotel the night before and the night after the wedding. The night before in separate rooms, so that the bride does not see the groom before the wedding. No. The other way round.

  Yes. Just a bit of explosive on the top floors. On our wedding day. During the ceremony.

  Yes.

  * * * *

  3. The Wedding

  It was easy and slightly disorienting, for I had not expected such—what shall I call it? Enthusiasm? Excitement? Co-operation?—from the house. Poor thing, it is as trapped as I am. But no longer. Soon we will both be free.

  I'm afraid I got a little carried away, but only because the house was so happy, so helpful. It wants to end. I can feel it. Yes.

  It was easy. I slipped out of the hotel at three in the morning. Nobody saw me go. I was too careful for that. I took the subway, slipped my key into the lock, and let myself in. At first I was very careful, anxious lest I wake Adam's parents, but I soon realized I could clatter up and down the stairs as loudly as I liked. We had formed an alliance, the house and I, and it was taking care of me, enveloping me in silence, taking care to muffle my noise.

  I started on the top floors, placing bits of explosive in the jeering mouths of the clowns—I knew that the house would protect me, would not let them get me. I put explosive in the reaching, grasping hands of the mannequins and in each careening drunken bumper car, each one nestling lovingly against my shins, waiting its turn. I left a large chunk of explosive in the center of the model, and then I realized that I'd gone farther than I had planned, that I had not wanted to hurt the lower floors on which the people soon to be my in-laws lived, but there was no going back, the house wanted this, and I could only go on.