Boy, Snow, Bird(32)
“I’m glad you liked the paprikash, stupid. Do you think Charlie really means it when he calls you beautiful, Boy? Do you think he could be the one?”
I watched the rat lap hungrily at the corner of my mouth with its pink, delicate tongue; I saw it, but couldn’t feel it. The numbness was total. It froze my fear. After a moment he hauled the rat back up into the air and it snapped its snout this way and that, seeking me.
“There is no exquisite beauty without strangeness in the proportion, is that not so? Let’s fix it so that Charlie is truly mesmerized by you. Let’s fix it so that he stares. Seven scars should do it.”
There was a teardrop on my cheek; I know this because my father flicked it with a finger and thumb to make it fall faster. With effort I closed my eyes. No way out. Get through this, then kill him. Figure out the rest later.
“Why are you shaking like that?” my father asked, tenderly. “Do you think that if I scar you no one will love you? You’ve got the wrong idea, girl. This will help your true love find you. He’ll really have to fight for you now.”
There was a thickness to his voice; I cracked one eye open. He was crying. The rat hung limp and lay its head on my cheek in a confiding way, exhausted and childlike. Drool bubbled from its jaws, but it didn’t bite me. Perhaps it had become too hungry to eat. I don’t know if that happens to rats, I don’t know . . . a second later the rat was dead, its head smashed against the basement floor, and my father was running up the stairs, cursing, still crying. A true thing I can still hardly believe of myself is this: I fell asleep again until he came back to untie me.
I was reluctant to look at myself for a couple of days after this happened—the anesthesia had worn off and my lips and right cheek were sore. I couldn’t tell how much the rat had been able to do. I didn’t touch the sore places, not wanting to worsen any infected bites. But there were no bites. I probed the skin with my fingers—there wasn’t even a rash. The rat catcher stayed out of my way and I stayed out of his. The trouble is I can be such a slow thinker at times. But once I got the situation in focus it stayed clear. No matter what anybody else said or did my father saw something revolting in me, and sooner or later he meant to make everybody else agree with him. Worst and weirdest of all was his weeping—I think he’d really believed that he was doing something good for me. He’d faltered that time but the next time he wouldn’t.
Mirrors see so much. They could help us if they wanted to. In those days I spoke to every mirror in the apartment. I questioned them, told them I didn’t know what to do, but none of them answered me. The girl in the glass exaggerated my expression, her gaze zigzagging as though watching a waterfall. She was making fun of me for sure, but I decided not to take it personally.
mirror: ['m?r?]
noun
A surface capable of reflecting sufficient diffused light to form an image of an object placed in front of it.
Such a reflecting surface set in a frame. In a household setting this surface adopts an inscrutable personality (possibly impish and/or amoral), presenting convincing and yet conflicting images of the same object, thereby leading onlookers astray.
Beautiful Boy, ugly Boy, rat, rat, food for the rats, sick and sickening . . . it took two weeks for my thoughts to twist themselves into a membrane that I could break only by leaving, or by murdering the rat catcher. I’m not sure Charlie could have rescued me from that. And I think I decided not to love Charlie because I thought I had to be rescued. For practical reasons but also as a proof of love. It’s better that Charlie and I didn’t make an automatic transaction, love exchanged for rescue. All you can do after that is put the love and the rescue up on the shelf, moving them farther and farther back as you make room for all the other items you acquire over the years. This way a ragged stem still grows between us, almost pretty. Though really we should crush it now, before the buds bloom skeletal.
I didn’t say his name aloud to anyone. If Mia asked how he was, I pretended not to hear. But Charlie Vacic just wouldn’t let up. I’d think he was done, but a week or so later he came back ten times as strong.
Every now and again I’d look at Arturo, just look at him until he said “What gives?” He was a little surprised at me for not wanting to make my mark on the house, but I wasn’t interested in undoing what Julia had done. Across the years we accepted each other, Julia and I, neither of us exactly thrilled by the other’s existence, but there was enough difference between her and me to suggest that her Arturo wasn’t exactly the same as mine anyway. My puzzlement regarding him was greater: I didn’t understand how he could do the things he did. He took Snow cherry picking, he took me hiking around the lake, he swam at the pool with his father every Thursday afternoon, took Agnes Miller all the way to Baden-Baden because her chest wasn’t as strong as it used to be and he thought a spa week might help. He behaved as if he belonged with us, belonged to us. But he was crazy if he thought Julia was finished with him. I mean, it was bad enough with Charlie, and he was still alive.
Did I talk in my sleep? Was it the flag in my side of our closet? Somehow a corner of it always emerged whenever I reached for something to wear. Arturo and I never spoke about it, but somehow he knew that there was someone else. He must have, because it was around that time that Arturo began to make chains.
Ankle chains, wrist chains, necklaces made of heavy brass links. He laid the collection on a bed of red velvet, piece by piece, as he completed them.