Future Home of the Living God(12)
Mary Virginia laughs, soft and breathy, and says, “The better to eat you with!” She has a very sweet ancient type of laughter that comes out in panting gusts. We laugh together. She tells me that she had a full French grandfather who counseled her on the importance of scrubbing her teeth with a peeled willow twig. She takes a cracker from the table and shows me how she chews and bites with the vigor of a young person. The strength of her teeth, she says, is the key to her longevity.
“What’s that?” I touch a long piece of weaving in her lap. She shows me that she is making a belt, finger-weaving it from strands of yarn, braiding a sash with such precision that it will look like it was created on a loom. She pulls the flat piece of weaving taut and frowns at it, picks at an invisible flaw. Here’s how to do it, she says, and makes my fingers follow hers. We work in silence, until she nods in satisfaction. All of a sudden, her eyes spear me, sharp, and she puts the sash down and folds her hands on top of it. Clearly, she has thought of something. I imagine her mind as a pinball machine, one of the old-fashioned, nonelectronic kind. A thought ricochets off over a century of personal memory, lighting up and ringing associations that only connect because of the speed and arbitrary motion of the original thought.
She gazes at me so long and with such reptilian stillness that I think she might be having a stroke. It is odd to look at her and think perhaps she has lived through the final efflorescence of human culture and thought. She is perched on top of the pyramid, Grandma Virginia, a tiny, pinched gargoyle riffling a pack of cards.
“I am pregnant.” I tell her quietly, so my sister will not hear. “Are there illnesses in the family? Anything my baby might inherit?”
Her expression does not change. Probably my identity, our place in time, the muddy river of reality, all of this is bundled in shadow. Yet the word “pregnant” may have registered, because that word triggers a story, and then another story, many of them. Listening, I realize that her tales are so practiced that Grandma Virginia probably tells and retells them all the time. And here I am, new audience! It doesn’t matter who I am. Her memory shifts. The narrative is all that matters. She seems to have lived out many versions of her own history. Once she begins to speak, nothing can distract her. I hear the Story of the Two-Faced Child, the Tooth-Spitting Grave, the Talking Drum, When the Frogs Sang Like Birds, the Story of the Dog That Shit a Diamond Ring, the Unholy Mirror, the Nun Who Fed Her Baby to a Sow, the Nun Who Swallowed a White Ribbon and It Came Out the Other End White Too, the Twenty Dead Who Appeared at Mass, an Avalanche of Fish, the Much Confused Sister, How One Twin Killed the Other, a Weightless Apple, Boiling Rain, and others which I can’t just now recall.
As soon as she finishes her stories, Grandma Virginia drops her head and sinks into a motionless and rigid sleep. I wheel her into her room and stand her up beside the little single bed, then lower her slowly onto the mattress and lift her legs over and set them gently down. Her little tan moccasins stick straight up. I cover her with a bright quilt made of all different versions of yellow calico—a golden cloud.
When I come back out, my little sister is still sitting in front of the TV. She has on so much black eyeliner that her eyes smolder demonically into the changing screen. I begin to count her piercings—her ears have six or seven each. Her earrings look like twisted nails and screws. She has sprayed her bangs straight up into a black woodpecker’s crest. The rest of her long, thin hair—permanented and bleached and colored with those purple highlights or bleached again and again—hangs down her back in a dead and crinkled curtain. She’s made some changes to her outfit, added a pink bow to her hair. She’s wearing an incongruously sexy baby-doll nightie, ankle socks, and white Mary Janes. The cuteness contrast has an effect even creepier than when she dressed in full-on Goth. She’s sort of a nightmare kitten.
“Hey.” I sit down next to her.
She maintains her stony pose.
“Hey,” I say again, “what’s up with you?”
“What’s it look like?”
“I mean in general, what are you up to in a general way, and what do you think about what’s happening?”
“What what’s happening?”
“You know, the world changing, us going backward maybe, what they’re finding out.”
She looks at me with black contempt. Her lips part in a snarl and the pink bow in her hair bobs up and down like a sinister butterfly. She nods as she speaks, agreeing with herself.
“You’re just a stinking slut. You suck, you impostor. You’re not my sister, you’re an STD. You’re a piece of syphilis.”
Her hatred is simple. Predictable. Her outfit keeps throwing me—cutie-pie vampire. But I tear my gaze away and try to hold my own.
“You’re suffering from misplaced self-disgust,” I tell her. “Your feelings have nothing to do with me. I’ve never hurt you.”
“And I heard you tell Grandma you’re pregnant, but I can see it anyway,” she sneers. “You’re such a whore.”
“Oh, really. How do you think being pregnant makes me a whore?”
My heart is surging but I keep my voice calm. I’ve always found that the best way to deflect hostility is to ask questions. But Little Mary is like a politician, adept at not answering the question asked but sticking hard to her own agenda. She stays on the attack. There’s a frilly white garter on her leg.