The Arava Review

It is a bad day and age for the kind of freaks we used to be: tattooed ladies, fat women,
rubber-faced babas, those mermaid girls with sweet webbed feet. Melancholy freaks,
wistful in our gauzy dresses or our striped unitards, every hair in place with a ready song
or a line of verse. Before every man was a mark, there was an etiquette.


Now we want more! Better! Gills! Pinheads! Hermaphrodites! There are specialists of all
sorts, with no skills to speak of. Just simple insults to the eyeballs. We used to want to
educate our freaks, have them perform moonlight sonatas, play games with the children,
woo our women with their tender hearts. Now we watch them on the television, isolated

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in our own wards, providing no entertainment except in their very formities.


And the state of the freak show? No one takes pride of place in the bally, all the good
mikemen have gone the way of the buffalo. It’s irony that’s ruined this country, the people
in it. You treat your freaks as if you’ve seen it all before. No anomaly, no matter how
exotic or fundamental, can turn your heads.


I don’t take these things lightly, you know– if a tear happens to spring from my ductless
eyes, what of it? What care you wandering by the fleabitten stadium with our threadbare
plush? After you’ve knocked a good tip into some carnie’s pocket for your girl? After
you’ve slummed in the sugar shack and taken a ride on the ferris wheel to cop that first
feel. It’s heavier than you expected, isn’t it?


I remember it as if it were yesterday, my first day on the box. “Worm Girl” was
emblazoned everywhere in royal purple and gold, arrows all over the show pointing down
to me and they came to me with wonder in their eyes and they touched me, the places
where arm or leg would have been. Wriggling for them was the necessary evil. But the
looks on their faces when I sang an aria from Carmen, or the national anthem (I knew
several: I had travelled the globe), the way their eyes filled—it was as if they didn’t even
know what they had come looking for.

A woman stands. At her side?
The real Flower’s secret armada of red “petals”–––
Each carries the divine passenger.
How could I have known?

The real Flower’s secret armada of red “petals?”
A word can hoard entire stories: Man!
I should have known–––
like the hand, a wanted possession; or the mouth, the bitten tongue.

Words hoard entire stories: Man! Don’t let no man
wipe his feet on your dress sang a great Scotts-Irish woman.
Without biting my tongue, without burning my hands:
I clap the oiled hot bread.

No man wipe his feet on your dress! sings my great-gran Nicholls
from the bridge of my grandmother’s mouth.
I clap the oiled hot roti.
I douse the tawah with ghee.

From the bridge of my grandmother’s mouth:
Remember? Olive oil and lemon juice–––
(I douse the hand-forged iron with ghee)
will keep knuckles from darkening.

Olive oil and lemon juice? Remember:
Gingerlilies float on the table.
Will keep my elbows from darkening?
Still, I am the breadfruit’s roast brown skin.

Gingerlilies float on the table.
Her hands: the breadfruit’s creamy insides.
I am the breadfruit’s outside skin, brown
like the Garifuna woman, unnamed in this floating kitchen.

Our hands knead and roll and twist and fold the bread’s creamy insides
against a hand-polished horizon.
Why is her Garifuna mother unnamed in this floating kitchen?
If I taste salt, raise a veil of flour, will I see?

Against a hand-polished horizon–––
At her side! A woman stands.
Salt-still, in a veil of Flowers. Red Mother–––
Granny’s one dark passenger.

The maker kept making her, long after she was finished. The girl had an overcooked
quality, singed brittle round the edges. Separate things—toes and fingers, eyes, lips—had
run all together. Stumps for arms. Stumps for feet. Mute for mouth. Cyclops. She looks
like a lumberer, but her passages are soft, as is her eye, colorful as a whorled marble.

The scientists come from everywhere to make a study of the girl. She pirouettes in
hospital gowns, is the gracious acceptor of injections and prodding fingers, trembles
charmingly before their photographic lenses. She loves to hear them say her name, loves
the circular sound of Cy-clops, psyclops eyeclops, like a horse galloping over their
tongues.

The girl holds out both dry palms, so, and between them there is air, and this is the shape
of loss. The girl lectures the scientists on the Manners of Loss, the Occasions of Loss,
the Style of Loss, even, with appropriate palettes and tailoring. Her lectures have been
published in the House of Infinite Loss in the unmappable Infinite City, (picture, if you
will, the sideways-slanted 8 that signifies that which has no beginning and no end. For
loss has no beginning and no end.)

Scientists are interested in Loss as a subject matter, but much more interested in the girl.

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She has so many seams— between toe and toe, finger and finger, the place where her
earflap would have met her head. Her head so smooth and hairless—no strangely shaped
cartilage, no Roman bridge or fleshly earlobe. Just that eye, blue and green and brown,
roaming moist within its socket. No pupil, no white sclera: all iris, all rainbow. The girl
lived on only one thing, that thing that must not be named.

We near the end now, perhaps she can break the spell. She leans over, paints it on the
back of your hand. Your mouth curves in a derisive smile. Of course. But you watch her
fade away and feel suddenly old, tired of this irony, your only companion. It has come
and gone. Let it. Now begin.

White-gloved and perched on the rear hood
of the chrome-hubbed convertible gleaming
white in the Lake Huron sun, I am one of
three girls chosen to be Vestal virgins to
the altar of white, Diana’s maidens to the
Homecoming Queen. Our white-stockinged
legs and polished white shoes brood
statuesque over the rear red leather. Our
white eye-let shivering. Our white ribbons
flagging. Our white-gloved hands waving
and waving and waving to the white faces
lining the tree-lined streets lining this small
Scottish town.

.            .But the hand inside my glove
is brown and the face peeping from the
white-ruffled neck of my summer white
dress is a beautiful hazelnut brown. This is
my hometown. My legs: two severe batons
majorette the hot red leather. Even after
the crowds thin out and the breeze off the
lake picks up. Even after the bagpipes’
keen moan fades. Out past the protestant
oaks, out past the immigrants’ bell-less
church with its small brick frame, its gravel
driveway, out towards the cornfields, when
only Lake Huron with its lull of tall grasses
and only the perennial pines wave back, I
am still waving.