I take a shower, get into a flannel nightgown, make instant coffee with hot water from the sink, and push the window up so I can see through. The streak of sky visible above the alley is heavy. I sit on the sill drinking death’s-head brew and watching the shadow creep higher on the blind wall of the warehouse across the way. I can hear the pigeons fuddling in the eaves. Rain begins to splat a shine over the puddle on the garage roof below me.
Downstairs the phone rings and then stops. Lil’s voice comes, shrill up the staircase, “Forty Wuunnn,” and from far away a door slams and the redheaded defrocked Benedictine begins his desperate avalanche down the stairs. The pipes gurgle. The heat is coming on.
I drag the big old costume trunk out of the closet and open it. The Miranda Box I call it, though there is little enough of her in it. The shallow tray in the top of the trunk holds it all. School photos. The stack of report cards. The bundled letters from Sister T. that came four times a year for sixteen years. Progress reports: “Miranda is reading two years beyond her grade level. Her disposition is cheerful but marred by stubbornness and a disruptive tendency.” The test scores. The list of inoculations. The chicken pox report. An indignant letter folded around a printed form crawling with the results of a medical examination.
She was fifteen that year and had run away and hooked up with an occult guitarist moonlighting as a United Parcel delivery driver who hid her in his “bohemian”—as the report called it — apartment for three weeks until she got bored and strolled back to the school. She was indifferent to repentance, according to the nun, and far from a virgin, according to the doctor. Heavenly Mary had prevented her from getting pregnant or diseased. They threatened to throw her out or to turn her over to the juvenile authorities. In the end my monthly payments increased by 50 percent and she stayed.
Fingering the blistering letter, I remember precisely the hoops my heart went through over the incident. I was terrified for her, but strangely delighted, as though her wildness were a triumph of her genes over indoctrination. I lay the thin sheaf of drawings she gave me on top of the rest, and then lift the tray out and set it aside.
The body of the trunk is crammed with clipping books, thick stacks of paper wrapped in black plastic. Photographs. Sound tapes. A tight roll of posters held by dry and brittle rubber bands.
This fragile, flammable heap is all that’s left of my life. It is the history of Miranda’s source. She soars and stomps and burns through her days with no notion of the causes that formed her. She imagines herself isolated and unique. She is unaware that she is part of, and the product of, forces assembled before she was born.
She can be flip about her tail. Or she can try. She is ignorant of its meaning and oblivious to its value. But something in her blood aches, warning her.
I slip the topmost poster from the roll. The paper is stiff, wanting to break rather than tear. Carefully spreading it, uncoiling it, sliding plastic-wrapped bundles onto the corners to hold it down, I open it on the musty carpet.
The Binewskis are revealed, dressed in glittering white, enchanted against sea greens and blues, smiling, together still on wide paper. The poster has a fountain format with the whole family spewing upward from Chick, during his brief “Fortunato — The Strongest Child in the World” period. Papa killed this poster, along with Chick’s act, before the public saw either of them. But it is my favorite family portrait. Chick, six years old and golden, is smiling at the bottom, his arms straight up with his parents standing on his hands. The beauteous “Crystal Lily” in an openly amorous pose, one leg kicking high out of her dance skirt, wrapped in the arms of the handsome “Ring Master Al,” our Papa, Aloysius, in high boots and chalk jodhpurs — their smiles leaping upward in yellow light toward our stars, our treasures—“Arturo the Amazing Aqua Boy,” afloat with his flippers spread angelically in hinted liquid in the upper right corner, his bare skull gleaming and haloed. In the left corner, at a cunningly suggested keyboard swirling out of the blue, “The Magnificent Musical Siamese Twins, Electra and Iphigenia!” Elly and Iphy with their long hair smoothed into black buns, slim white arms entwined, pale faces beaming out in shafts from their violet eyes.
And I am there also. “Albino Olympia,” viewed from the side to display my hump, bald nobbly head tilted charmingly, curtsying with one arm pointing at the glorious Chick and his miraculous burden. Chick was six and I was twelve but he loomed a full head taller. The arched banner across the top in joyous glitter, “The Fabulous Binewskis.”
The wallet-sized school picture from Miranda’s senior year shows her face the same size as the Binewski poster faces. I slide the photo around, next to Chick, to Arty, to Papa Al. It is Arty she looks like. Those Binewski cheekbones and the Mongol eyes. Would she see it?
BOOK II. Your Dragon — Care, Feeding, and Identifying Fewmets
4. Papa’s Roses
The Olympia McGurk profile in the personnel computer of Radio KBNK lists my training as “Elocution and diction, and microphonic presentation as taught by Aloysius Binewski,” which I wrote calmly and confidently into my résumé as though every well-trained voice would recognize the name of the master.
That was Papa, sitting in the back of the tent at the soundboard, wearing headphones and glaring at me as I stood on one foot on the stage with the old ragged microphone waving aimlessly near my mouth. Papa, hollering, “Boring!” at my fiftieth delivery of “Step right this way, folks!” or mimicking cruelly, “Ya-ta, ya-ta, ya-ta!” if I fell into a repetitive rhythm on “From the darkest mysteries of science, a revelation of poetic grace.”
“Move your lips, for shit’s sake!” howled Papa, or “Stop with the mouse farts and project!
“That’s a double-reed instrument! It is called a voice! It is not a comb wrapped in waxed paper! I gave it to you from the love in my guts for your scrawny and unmarketable carcass, so be kind enough to use it properly!”
And me all the while having to pee — coughing into the mike when my throat was tired and raw — eyes stinging and lips and chin crumpling in grief at his anger. The sweet tinkle of Electra on the bass and Iphy on the treble with Mama’s voice counting, “One and two and …” as the twins had their piano lesson inside the trailer. The gurgle and hum of the pumps that filtered my brother Arty’s “Aqua Boy” tank. And the dim round moon of baby Fortunato’s face peering at me from the dark of the risers above Papa.
If I finally did it right and got all the way through from “Step up, friends” to “A vision of the miraculous extravagance of Nature for the same simple price as an overcooked hotdog” without a single bellow of rage from my beloved papa, then he would swoop me up in huge arms and tuck me onto a shoulder, where I could grab his astounding hair in my fists and ride high through the tent flaps into the light, with Fortunato’s golden head chugging along far below, and we would parade the long street of booths with me laughing down at the red-haired girls who sold the candy and at the toothless wheelman and Horst the Cat Man all nodding at Papa’s instructions, and hearing, feeling his huge voice rumble out from beneath my legs, “This little beetle did her lessons just right today.”
It’s funny, in a dingy way, that I make my little living by reading. I have to smile because I used to avoid reading. It scared me.
It never bothered Arty. He read constantly — anything — but his favorites were ghost stories and horror tales.