We So Seldom Look on Love Page 6

  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 hands 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.”

  Her feet were cold, sunk in mud at the edge of the duck pond. Her little feet were tucked in the folds of her flannel nightgown. There were crickets.

  “But perhaps I’m being presumptuous,” he said. He paused. “Tell me, did … did what I think happened, happen?”

  She turned her head to look at him. “Did what happen?”

  He kept his eyes on the ceiling. “Did you experience orgasm with your …”

  She looked down at his left hand. He was rubbing his thumb and forefinger together so hard, he was making the noise that, for a second, she had thought she was hearing in her memory spell, a noise at the pond. “Two,” she said quietly. “I had two, I think. I mean, I know I did.”


  “Two?”

  “One in each place.”

  He reached for her hand and squeezed it but kept his eyes on the ceiling. After a moment he said, “We can pretend it never happened, you know. You see, technically speaking, you have not had intercourse. By you I mean you the autosite, the host body.”

  “Nothing has changed,” she said, but it was a question.

  “No, no,” he said. “Not as far as you’re concerned.”

  Back at the hotel, he is waiting for her on the sidewalk. He pays the taxi and takes her up to their room. He is very excited. The amputation (he uses this word for the first time) is set for three weeks today, here in New York. Wonderful, she says. He reaches for her hand and brings it to his lips. He won’t deceive her: the first operation isn’t entirely without risk, and there will be a long and not altogether comfortable recovery. But the follow-up operations will be less strenuous and will contain almost no risk. When the bandages come off, she is not to be frightened. The scarring will eventually be reduced by plastic surgery.

  “I won’t be frightened,” she promises.

  During the next three weeks, whenever she is with him, she has no doubts. But alone at night, in her bedroom, she starts to worry. Her little legs kick and fret. They know, she thinks, horrified. They know. They are licentious. Between her own legs, there is nothing, but between her little legs the urge for him is almost past bearing. She is overcome by terrible memories—her mother burning her scrapbooks, burning the picture of her father’s mother in its filigreed frame … burns on her father’s hands. She doesn’t know why, maybe it was Merry Mary’s offer of the burial plot, but baby Sue’s perfect face keeps appearing to her. Will she forget baby Sue’s face? What if her freak memory is connected with her freak legs? What if she becomes somebody else for whom nothing that happened to the person she was will be worth preserving?

  The mornings after these nights she can’t believe what went through her mind only a few hours before. “You’re a candidate for the loony bin,” she tells herself. The housekeeper brings in her tea, that bitter tea she’s starting to acquire a taste for. John pours it. If he has any misgivings about the operation, he never shows them. He talks about the future. They are going to have four children. They are going to visit her father’s village in Portugal.

  Two days before the operation they return with the surgeon to New York City. Blood tests have to be done, more X-rays need to be taken, and John and the surgeon are giving a news conference. The surgeon wants Sylvie at the conference, but John is afraid that some of the questions might upset her, so she’s not attending, which is fine with her.

  As the conference is scheduled for the afternoon of their arrival, John has time only to take her up to her hospital room. After he’s gone she lies on her bed and listens to “Vic and Sade” on the radio.

  About ten minutes go by, and then a nurse barges into the room and hands her a hospital gown to change into. Throwing open the curtains, the nurse says that Thursday is the big day. She pretends not to be dying of curiosity, but Sylvie isn’t fooled and she undresses facing her, letting her catch a glimpse.

  Throughout the rest of the afternoon nurses and interns arrive to take blood and her temperature or just to plump her pillow, and cleaners keep coming in to mop the floor and to empty the empty wastepaper basket. Sylvie sits on her bed with her skirt hiked above her little knees. Why not give them a thrill? she thinks wistfully.

  Around six o’clock John returns with their dinner on a tray, and they eat at the desk. “The news conference went very, very well,” he says. Pushing away his half-eaten meal, he gets up and prowls the room. “This is a very, very important operation in terms of certain precedents,” he says. He reminds her of Mr. Bean on opening night in a big city. Before he leaves for the hotel, he fills her coffee cup with water and has her take two sleeping pills.

  The next day, Wednesday, it’s mostly doctors who keep coming into her room. They don’t have to put on any acts. They pull up her hospital gown and take good looks, and if a couple of them arrive at the same time, they talk with each other about her little womb and menstrual cycles and bowel movements. Sometimes they ask her questions, sometimes they don’t even say hello. Off and on John pops in to see how she is. He isn’t as keyed-up as he was the day before, but he has meetings and can’t stay for long.

  When she is wheeled out on a stretcher to have X-rays, patients are lined along the corridors, waiting for her. She feels like a float in a parade. When she returns to her room, John is at the desk having his dinner, but there’s no meal for her because she isn’t allowed to eat now until after the operation. “Am I allowed sleeping pills?” she asks anxiously, afraid of what she might start thinking, and remembering, if she lies awake. John pulls out a bottle from his coat pocket. “How many do you think you’ll need?” he asks.

  A nurse wakes her before dawn to wash her and to shave the pubic hair from herself and from Sue. Several minutes later John and another nurse and an intern come in.

  “This is it,” John says.

  He keeps her calm by holding her hand as she is wheeled down the corridors and into the operating theatre. She is brought to the centre of what seems like a stage. John scans the rows of doctors seated behind glass in the encircling tiers. “There are some big names here,” he says quietly.

  “John?” she says.

  He bends toward her. “Yes?”

  She gazes at his beautiful face. She can’t remember what she was going to say.

  “Are you ready, darling?” he asks.

  She nods.

  A doctor places the ether mask over her mouth and starts the countdown. Still holding her hand, John leans to look into her eyes. The doctor says nine. John’s eyes bore into her. The doctor says eight, seven. Sylvie’s eyelids drop.

  Light hits glass and magnifies something. A polyphemus moth! she thinks excitedly. The light and the magnification grow stronger and stronger until she realizes that what she is looking at is even more infinitesimal than the moth’s atoms.

  It resembles a vast pine forest. A needle on one of the trees is magnified and becomes a million exotic fish, then one of the fish’s scales is magnified and becomes a galaxy of fireflies.

  The magnification stops there. The fireflies are lit. “They must be alive,” she thinks, and later, weeks later, John will try to cheer her up by telling her how she said this in a loud voice just before going under, and how it drew a laugh from the doctors seated in the gallery.

  Presbyterian Crosswalk

  Sometimes Beth floated. Two or three feet off the ground, and not for very long, ten seconds or so. She wasn’t aware of floating when she was actually doing it, however. She had to land and feel a glowing sensation before she realized that she had just been up in the air.

  The first time it happened she was on the church steps. She looked back down the walk and knew that she had floated up it. A couple of days later she floated down the outside cellar stairs of her house. She ran inside and told her grandmother, who whipped out the pen and the little pad she carried in her skirt pocket and drew a circle with a hooked nose.

  Beth looked at it. “Has Aunt Cora floated, too?” she asked.

  Her grandmother nodded.

  “When?”

  Her grandmother held up six fingers.

  “Six years ago?”

  Shaking her head, her grandmother held her hand at thigh level.

  “Oh,” Beth said, “when she was six.”

  When Beth was six, five years ago, her mother ran off with a man down the street who wore a toupee that curled up in humid weather. Beth’s grandmother, her father’s mother, came to live with her and her father. Thirty years before that, Beth’s grandmother had had her tonsils taken out by a quack who ripped out her vocal chords and the underside of her tongue.

  It was a tragedy, because she and her twin sister, Cora, had been on the verge of stardom (or so Cora said) as a professional singing team. They had made two long-play records: “The Carlis
le Sisters, Sea to Sea” and “Christmas with the Carlisle Sisters.” Beth’s grandmother liked to play the records at high volume and to mouth the words. “My prairie home is beautiful, but oh …” If Beth sang along, her grandmother might stand next to her and sway and swish her skirt as though Beth were Cora and the two of them were back on stage.

  The cover of the “Sea to Sea” album had a photograph of Beth’s grandmother and Aunt Cora wearing middies and sailor hats and shielding their eyes with one hand as they peered off in different directions. Their hair, blond and billowing out from under their hats, was glamorous, but Beth secretly felt that even if her grandmother hadn’t lost her voice she and Cora would never have been big stars because they had hooked noses, what Cora called Roman noses. Beth was relieved that she hadn’t inherited their noses, although she regretted not having got their soft, wavy hair, which they both still wore long, in a braid or falling in silvery drifts down their backs. Beth’s grandmother still put on blue eye shadow and red lipstick, too, every morning. And around the house she wore her old, flashy, full-length stage skirts, faded now—red, orange or yellow, or flowered, or with swirls of broken-off sequins. Beth’s grandmother didn’t care about sloppiness or dirt. With the important exception of Beth’s father’s den, the house was a mess—Beth was just beginning to realize and be faintly ashamed of this.

  On each of Beth’s grandmother’s skirts was a sewed-on pocket for her pencil and pad. Due to arthritis in her thumb she held the pencil between her middle finger and forefinger, but she still drew faster than anyone Beth had ever seen. She always drew people instead of writing out their name or their initials. Beth, for instance, was a circle with tight, curly hair. Beth’s friend Amy was an exclamation mark. If the phone rang and nobody was home, her grandmother answered it and tapped her pencil three times on the receiver to let whoever was on the other end know that it was her and that they should leave a message. “Call,” she would write, and then do a drawing.