We So Seldom Look on Love Page 5

  Not only did her mother not notice, she had a gift from the funeral parlour. After stroking and massaging Sue and asking about her day, she stood up, reached in her coat pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper.

  “Found it beside Mr. Arnett on the slab,” she said, unwrapping the napkin to reveal a dead praying mantis. “Right beside his ear, like it was praying for his old skinflint soul and then keeled over from the formaldehyde. Don’t ask me how it got in there, though.”

  As Sylvie carefully picked the insect up, the boy’s finger stabbing her and Sue became the darkness before the dawn, the terrible trial that had earned her this otherwise unaccountable blessing. The blessing wasn’t just that Sylvie had never seen a real praying mantis, it was that her mother had been trying for months to find a buyer for the microscope. Her father, claiming to have got the microscope cheap at a fire sale, gave it to Sylvie on her birthday. Ten dollars, her father finally confessed, and for a day Sylvie’s mother muttered and raged that amount, and then she posted For Sale notices on telephone poles in town. But there were no takers, and meanwhile Sylvie used the microscope to study insects.

  With the praying mantis, she began a collection. First she studied the insect from every possible angle, then, after flattening it with a rock or by rolling a pencil over it, she cleaned it off with vinegar and water. When it was dry she ironed it between pieces of wax paper and glued it into a scrapbook.

  She filled three scrapbooks in three years. In her fourth scrapbook she branched out to include larvae and worms. By then she was identifying her catches with the help of a library book, and making labels from letters cut out of the Montgomery Ward catalogue. On the facing page she would write down some aspect of what she had read or observed. “To defend itself the catocala hides its colourful wings with dull wings that blend in with the surroundings.” “A black line under its back wings is the only difference between the Basilarchia butterfly and the monarch butterfly.”

  A few weeks after her fourteenth birthday she gave this activity up. One day she didn’t have the heart to flatten another insect. Also she hardly ever discovered anything she didn’t already have, and this frustrated her, especially as she knew that there were hundreds, maybe thousands, of different insect species right on her land alone.

  The exciting feeling of the hunt didn’t end, though. In fact, because of her memory spells, it came back to her at least once a week, as vividly as the real thing. Other moments came back as well (she had no control over what entered her mind at these times) but usually in her memory she was stalking or preserving one of her insects.

  The spells had started a year before, and always when she was nervous or upset. Her mother would be yelling at her, and Sylvie would hear every word her mother said, and she’d see her mother there, banging a pot down, but why she squinted was from late-afternoon sun glancing off the barn roof, and why she felt an urge to lift her hand was that her hand was lifting, to pluck an aphid from the rose trellis. She heard her mother in the kitchen and heard her mother two years ago, calling from the barn door.

  Even without her spells Sylvie had an excellent memory. She memorized her textbooks and got perfect grades and achievement pins. During spare periods and physical education classes (from which she was excused) she studied in the library or in an empty classroom. Since everyone who wanted to had seen her legs at least once, she was left alone.

  In her junior year, however, an army base was set up down the road from the school, and cadets began to wait for her, two or three of them a day, outside the school gates. They took pictures of her to send to their families and to carry in their pockets—for good luck, they said, when they were shipped off to fight the war in Europe.

  Sylvie didn’t mind. The truth was, she had a soft spot for the cadets, who brought her chocolates and told her she looked like the movie star Vivien Leigh. They made jokes and teased her, but they did it to her face, there was no hypocritical pretense of sparing her feelings.

  One day a carnival came to town, and not a single person from school had the nerve to tell her about the freak show, but the cadets did, no beating around the bush, straight to the Siamese-twin foetuses in a jar.

  “Like you, except with four arms and another head,” one of the cadets reported. “And dead, naturally. Can’t hold a candle to you, though.”

  Sylvie turned on her heel and made for the Brown farm, where the carnival was set up. She found the side-show tent by following red arrows that said, “This Way for the Thrill of Your Life!” and “Keep Going, Thrill-seekers!” Next to the tent was a big sign that said:

  M.T. BEAN OF NEW YORK CITY PRESENTS

  THE SIDE SHOW OF THE DECADE.

  TALLEST, SMALLEST, THINNEST, FATTEST,

  STRANGEST, RAREST EVER TO WALK

  THE FACE OF THE EARTH!

  Underneath was a painting of a thin man in a tuxedo, a fat lady wearing a crown and sitting on a throne, and a tall lady with huge hands holding out a plate that had a midget standing on it. The foetuses weren’t in the painting.

  “Next show in half an hour,” a boy said. “You can buy your ticket now. Fifty cents.”

  Sylvie didn’t have any money, she hadn’t thought about having to pay admission. “I’ll come back,” she said.

  She was sure that her parents would want to see the foetuses as badly as she did. She was wrong. An odd, dark look came over her father’s face. Her mother called M.T. Bean a vulture.

  “But, Mother,” Sylvie protested. “Siamese twins. Like me and Sue.”

  “Not like you and Sue!” her mother cried, shaking a ladle at her. “Naked! Meat on display! That’s what I saved you from!”

  The next day Sylvie left home. She hadn’t planned to, but when she got to the fairgrounds and found the tents gone, she started walking to New York City. She remembered that Mr. Bean was from New York City. She figured that by heading east and following road signs, she’d eventually get there. In the back of her mind she had a plan to exhibit herself at diners in exchange for free meals and a place to sleep.

  Three hours later she came upon the carnival in a meadow, not set up but with the trailers spread out and people lounging around drinking beer. A piebald Negro wolf-whistled at her.

  “Is Mr. Bean here?” she asked him.

  “Honey, you don’t want to see the Bean man,” he said. “We got two trailers broke down, and the Bean man be a mean man today.”

  “He’ll want to see me,” Sylvie said.

  He sure did. He offered her his chair and a bottle of Coke. He said he knew her mother.

  “My mother’s dead,” Sylvie told him. “So is my father.”

  Mr. Bean narrowed his eyes. “How old are you?”

  “Almost eighteen.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “When I was born, it was in the papers.”

  He smiled. “Right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

  He was a fat bald man in an undershirt and suspenders and with an English accent. He had her take off Sue’s shoes and stockings, and then he squeezed each bare leg along its length. “Can you move ‘em?” he asked. “Bowels function?”

  She signed a contract that afternoon. Five years, forty dollars a week, free room and board, a fifty-fifty split on wardrobe and prop expenses. A second big sign would be painted, featuring her alone and calling her The Incredible Girl-Boy. Sue would become Bill, and Sylvie would tell funny stories about the trials and tribulations of being attached to a boy.

  Sylvie and Merry Mary share a trailer. They’ve been sharing one for six years, from Sylvie’s first day, their only stretch apart being when Mary had a fling with Leopard Man, and Sylvie moved in with one of the barker women.

  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. Perf
ect.

  “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, as 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 t
ouch 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.