Sylvie: Short Story Page 2

  A baby came of Mary’s affair, a surprise baby, since Mary had no idea she was pregnant until she started giving birth on her specially made toilet. Sylvie was in the trailer at the time, and she pulled the baby out while Mary grunted in mild discomfort and gripped the toilet’s support bars. It was a girl. Tiny, normal. Perfect.

  “Well, whaddaya know?” Mary laughed, and on the spot she named her Sue, after Sylvie’s legs. Mr. Bean went into high gear, planning a wedding, printing flyers. But before the flyers were sent out, Sue turned blue and died.

  “The fat lady don’t cry,” Mary said when Mr. Bean advised her to let it all out a couple of hours after Sue stopped breathing and Mary was still holding her. She gave her up only when supper arrived. After eating, she put on her crown for her act and said, “Easy come, easy go,” to comfort Sylvie, who was crying into a pile of laundered diapers and having a memory spell about gluing down a gypsy moth.

  It took weeks for Sylvie to stop crying. She couldn’t understand why she and Mary and the other freaks were alive, and a perfectly formed baby was dead. The minute she’d laid eyes on Sue it had struck her that it was all right being deformed if deformity had to exist for there to be such perfection. Sue’s death left her out of kilter. “It doesn’t make sense,” she kept saying. And Mary said, “It sure don’t,” and “That’s life,” and then she said, “Who said it’s supposed to make sense?” and finally she told Sylvie to snap out of it.

  Mary never shed a tear. She said she wouldn’t, and she never did. Instead she gained another eighty pounds, mainly in her lower half.

  Now, Mary can hardly walk twenty feet, and more than ever she badgers Sylvie to visit whatever town they happen to be in, to see what’s going on and to tell her all about it. “Take a break,” she says, referring to Sylvie’s ability to pass for a normal. It gives Mary a charge that the freak everyone comes to see is the only freak who can go around without being seen.

  At one time or another all of the freaks have asked Sylvie what it’s like to pass. What it’s really like. She knows that they want to hear how wonderful it is, because passing is their dream, but they also want to hear how strange, even unpleasant, it is, because passing is a dream that won’t come true for them. The truth is, it’s both things. On the one hand Sylvie loves the feeling of being like everybody else, which is to say like nobody in particular. On the other hand when she feels most like a freak is when she’s getting away with not being one.

  For one thing she isn’t as inconspicuous as the other freaks like to think. Aside from the spectacle of the unfashionably long full skirt she wears to cover her legs, there’s her resemblance to Vivien Leigh. Wherever she goes, men look at her. Of course, she discourages the advances of strange men, but one day, when she is having lunch in a restaurant, a man at the next table isn’t the least bit put off by her fake wedding ring or by the annoyed looks she gives him. He keeps smiling at her, an oddly conspiratorial smile, and in her agitation Sylvie is pouring a mixture of hot mustard and water down worm holes fourteen years ago while knocking over her Coke right now.

  The man is there in a second, offering his napkin and introducing himself. Dr. John Wilcox.

  Sylvie is trapped by him blocking her way. Trapped by his man’s body, his adoring eyes and all his questions. She gives her name and is surprised to find herself admitting that the ring isn’t really a wedding band. One part of her mind is rinsing the burning worms in a jar of water, and the other part is telling Dr. John Wilcox that she works in the travel business. Considering the miles under her belt, this isn’t entirely a lie.

  “I’ve got to leave,” she keeps saying, but weakly. She feels melted to her chair. Between her little legs there’s a soft ache, and she can’t tear her eyes from his mouth. He has a beautiful mouth, a rosebud, a cherub’s mouth. He has blond, curly hair. Seven years in show business and how many men has she watched watching her? Enough to know that ones like him aren’t a dime a dozen.

  Suddenly he is quiet. He lifts her hand from the table and holds it for a few minutes, turning it around, studying it. When can he see her again? He can’t, she answers, she isn’t what he thinks she is. No, not in love with anyone else, but not free … not what he thinks. Pressing her purse against her little legs to keep them still, she stands up and walks away.

  A few hours later she is on stage. As usual she’s deep into a memory spell while still managing to deliver her lines and to glance around at the audience and to see and register everything and take it into herself as if through lead-lined holes that circumvent veins, arteries and organs.

  “When Bill feels the call of nature, what do I do? Step into the ladies’ or the men’s?” She waits for the laugh, gets it, waits for the laugh to die, goes on. Fifteen years ago her mother is vilifying a woman named Velma Hodge. “Fat, wall-eyed sow,” her mother says. Coincidentally there’s a woman in the audience who could be Velma’s twin. In this woman’s face is the blend of repulsion and attraction that is in every face, and in the smoky air between Sylvie and the faces is the exchange of her watching them watching her.

  Everything is going back and forth, in and out like breath.

  And then she spots blond, curly hair, and it’s as if a hypnotist snapped his fingers. Her mother’s voice clears out of her head. All Sylvie hears is her own voice giving its spiel. “I tried to put a girl’s pair of stockings on Bill, but he started kicking up such a fuss that I couldn’t pull them up.” She feels a mystifying desertion, a snapping of links.

  Backstage she sits on a crate as the shock lifts and an old agony presses down. “I can help you,” says a voice. It’s him. Dr. John Wilcox. The worm memory resumes. She is squashing the life out of the worms, using the cut-off end of an old broomstick.

  Dr. John Wilcox kneels and takes her right hand in his. He says she will leave this place tonight. She will stay in his house. She never has to work in a side show again. He will consult with surgeons about an operation, he will take her anywhere in the world for an operation. He loves her. The minute he saw her he knew, and he only loves her more now. He wants to marry her.

  It is a miracle too big to question. What Sylvie questions are the particulars. Don’t worry, he says. Never worry again. Her contract he will buy out. Her friends she can visit. So while he goes to talk to Mr. Bean, she goes to tell Merry Mary the news. “Holy moly,” is all Mary can say. “Holy moly.”

  John has a housekeeper and a cook, both late-middle-aged women, polite and unruffled by Sylvie showing up. Her bedroom is next to his, and that night, after kissing her on the forehead, he tells her to knock on the connecting wall if she needs anything.

  “Do your servants know who I am?” she asks.

  “I’ll tell them in the morning,” he says and evidently does, first thing. The flustered, astonished look on the housekeeper’s face as she’s serving breakfast is a look Sylvie recognizes. Familiar territory, a relief in a way. All night Sylvie spent trying to convince herself that this unbelievable man, house and turn of events were possible. “He loves me,” she kept telling herself. “Dr. John Wilcox loves me.”

  After breakfast John takes her into his office and asks her to drink a bitter-tasting tea to calm her nerves. As he passes her the cup his hand shakes, and she is very moved by this and also reassured. He sits beside her on the sofa and puts his arm around her and says that she doesn’t need to explain about her little legs being female; he is a doctor after all. Everything else, though, he wants to hear—everything about her.

  He prods her with gentle questions, he hazards answers so close to the truth that she senses a holiness in him. Her head drops to his shoulder. She feels exquisitely calm and trusting. Nothing she says seems to surprise or even impress him, not until she mentions her memory spells. “Remarkable,” he says, and she feels his body tighten. “Fantastic.”

  Eventually she falls silent. John strokes her arm and asks, “May I see the legs?” She registers how formal this sounds—”the legs”—as if she carries them in her purse, a
s if he hasn’t heard her calling them Sue. Not that she minds. She is very serene. She lifts her skirt to her waist.

  Her eyes are on his face. She is so alert to repulsion that she can detect it in a blink. But his expression is like Mr. Bean’s. Absorbed and professional, nothing to do with her.

  “May I touch them?” John asks.

  She nods.

  He crouches down in front of her and starts with the right leg, pressing it as if checking for a break, lightly pinching the skin, asking does she feel this? This? “Yes,” she whispers.

  “This?”

  “Yes.”

  He taps her knee, and the leg kicks out. He goes on pressing and pinching up to where the white stocking ends, up to the naked thigh and up farther to the little hips in their toddler-sized underwear. She closes her eyes. He immediately lowers her skirt.

  They don’t talk about her legs again that day. At least, they don’t talk about them directly. In order to spend every minute with her, John has cancelled all his appointments. They go for a walk in the park. They hold hands. He tells her he is the only child of deceased parents. His father invented the grip in the bobby pin, that’s where the money comes from. After lunch in a ritzy restaurant they wander into a bridal shop and he picks out a tight white wedding gown that he insists on buying. “Surely not,” she says, for it takes her a few seconds to remember that, by the time of the wedding, she will be able to wear tight dresses. He laughs at what he thinks is her horror at the price tag. In bed that night she tells herself, “I am going to be a normal,” but she can’t grasp what being a normal means, other than that she will be able to wear the tight white wedding gown and to sleep on her stomach.

  The next day John sees patients until lunchtime, then he has her drink two cups of the nerve-calming tea before they go across the city to visit a renowned specialist in congenital malformations.

  “I cannot perform the operation myself,” John says. “I am not a surgeon. But I will be assisting. I will be right by your side.”

  The surgeon explains to Sylvie that she is an autosite-parasite. “You are the autosite,” he says. “They”—he gestures at her lap—”are the parasite.” He shows her pictures of other autosite-parasites: a boy in a turban who has a headless body growing out of his stomach, and a drawing of a man who has a foot coming out of his mouth. He then has Sylvie remove both pairs of her underpants and lie on a table, her own knees bent and draped with a sheet. John, standing beside the surgeon, tells him that both bowels function normally, both menstrual cycles are regular and not necessarily simultaneous, and that although both vaginas have been penetrated, she is, strictly speaking, still a virgin.

  He assured her of her virginity yesterday, after she told him about the boy sticking his finger up her. The surgeon’s fingers are in greased, clear- plastic gloves. It must be the tea, Sylvie thinks, wondering at how unabashed she feels. Why isn’t she having one of her memory spells? She is so relaxed, in fact, she could sleep. She closes her eyes, and her mind drifts to last night and John kissing her at her bedroom door, a long kiss on the lips that left her little legs tingling.

  The surgeon is optimistic that not only will he be able to remove her legs and hips but that he will also succeed in ridding her of what he calls her excess plumbing. Over the next few weeks Sylvie and John go to see him twice more at his office, and then the three of them fly to consult another specialist in New York City. As it happens, the side show is in New Jersey, and after her examination, while John and the doctors are conferring, Sylvie takes a taxi to the fairgrounds.

  She cries as she is being hugged and congratulated. She had no idea how homesick she was. Mr. Bean admits to having made the biggest mistake of his life, letting John buy her contract. Half-joking, he tries to talk her out of the operation. “Why would a four-leaf clover want to be an ordinary three-leaf?” he asks.

  He’s upset because attendance has dropped off. When Sylvie and Merry Mary are alone in their old trailer, Mary says that he had better get used to it, side shows are becoming a thing of the past. “I’m thinking of going on a diet,” she says.

  “I guess I got out just in time,” Sylvie says. She tells Mary about John’s library, where she spends her days reading. She describes the tight white wedding gown.

  “Boy oh boy, you hit the jackpot,” Mary says.

  “I love John with all my heart,” Sylvie says sincerely.

  Mary tugs up her shift to aerate her thighs. The pink mounds of her knees have always struck Sylvie as vulnerable, recalling the bald heads of old men. In her act, Mary informs the audience that each of her thighs has the circumference of a big man’s chest. Sylvie thinks with a thrill of John’s lean chest, how it would lose out to Mary’s thigh. “I’m so happy,” she tells Mary.

  Mary fans herself with the hem of her skirt. “So, what happens to Sue?” she asks.

  “What do you mean?” Sylvie says.

  “After the operation. What’s the doc going to do with her?”

  Sylvie feels light-headed.

  “See,” Mary says, “why I’m asking is I bought four plots in that cemetery where the baby is. One plot for her, two for me, and they threw in a fourth one half price, so I got one extra. Sue’s welcome to it if you need some place.”

  Mary’s huge moon face overlays but does not obscure the face of the surgeon, two weeks ago, listening to her heart and saying, “In Frankfurt I excised an abdominal tumour that turned out to contain teeth, hair and an undeveloped spine.”

  “Free, of course,” Mary adds. “No charge.”

  Sylvie cannot look at Mary. She looks at her new diamond-and-gold watch and is startled by how late it is. “Five o’clock!” she exclaims. The watch in her memory, the one on the surgeon’s wrist, says four-thirty, the time she should have left the fairgrounds by. Five minutes later she is on the street, climbing into a taxi.

  It’s a long drive back to the hotel, the taxi is caught in rush-hour traffic. “Two legs do not add up to a human being,” she says to herself. The night before last John said, “Just keep telling yourself that.” He said, “There is no Sue.”

  They were in a restaurant, drinking champagne to celebrate the future her. When she repeated “There is no Sue,” he kissed the tips of each of her fingers, then presented her with the diamond-and-gold watch. Afterwards, crossing the parking lot, he stopped and pressed her against a wall, pressing his hips against her little legs, and kissed her on the mouth.

  On the drive home Sylvie’s little legs started to twitch, but after a minute they settled into slow, rhythmic kicks under her skirt. It made her feel languid to hold her little knees. She and John didn’t speak, except once she said, “Oh, look!” at the ovations of fireflies glittering along her side of the road. She thought of the fireflies she had caught and preserved in her first scrapbook—a page of them. Until her mother said, “They have to be alive, stupid,” she had turned to that page every night, wondering where the lights were.

  John was nervous. He held her hand too tightly as they walked from the car to the door of his house. Sylvie wasn’t nervous, she didn’t know why. She tried to startle herself by thinking, “In a few minutes I will be in his bedroom,” but once they were inside the house John didn’t take her upstairs, he took her into his office. He threw the cushions off the sofa and pulled it out into a bed. Then he turned to her and began to kiss her on the mouth while undoing her blouse. His hands shook, reminding her of when he gave the tea and also that he was no surgeon. Since there were a lot of buttons (she was wearing a high-necked Victorian blouse), she started undoing some herself. She wanted him to know that she was willing. He started clawing at his own clothes as if they were on fire.

  As soon as he was naked he resumed helping her, pulling her stockings over her ankles, yanking down her skirt before it was undone. Popping a button. They still didn’t speak. He was out of breath. He drew the combs from her hair and let them drop on the floor.

  And then he stopped. On his knees in front of her, his h
ands on her knees, he stopped.

  Sylvie closed her eyes. “Do you call ten dollars a bargain?” her mother shouted. “Sure,” her father shrugged, backing away, “bargain.” “Ten dollars?” her mother shouted. “Ten dollars?”

  “God.” That was outside her head, that was John. He yanked down Sue’s underpants, pulling off her stockings and shoes at the same time.

  A great tremor went through her little legs, which then began to clasp his thighs and kick out, clasp and kick out. The moment of pain was nothing compared to the spectacular relief. Sylvie felt as if her little vagina were a yards-long sucking tube, and he was heading right out the back and into her own vagina. She felt a second sharp pain at what she imagined was the point of entry into her own vagina, and after that she felt him as a lightning rod conducting heat and pleasure from Sue to herself.

  When he began to ejaculate, he dug his hands under her hips and lifted her, crushing her little groin into his and bringing on her first orgasm. The waves of the orgasm rolled up his lightning-rod penis into her own vagina and along to her own clitoris, where she had another, more luxurious orgasm.

  For a few seconds longer, her little legs went on kicking. He seemed to wait them out. Then he withdrew and rolled onto his back. She ran her hand up and down the goosebumps on her little thigh.

  “God,” he said. “Oh, Sylvie, God.” He sounded stricken.

  Her hand stopped moving. “What?” she said.

  “We got carried away,” he said.

  “Yes,” she said uncertainly.

  “I had no idea,” he said.

  She waited, frightened.

  “Of course,” he said, as if hitting upon some comfort, “this presents a whole new angle.”

  Doors slammed in her mind. He didn’t want to marry her. He couldn’t let her have the operation, not now, and unless she had the operation, he wouldn’t marry her.

  “New territory,” he said. “New data.”