She had Arty’s face and I named her Miranda because Miranda’s father loved her.
Arty did not love my baby. He never asked to see her. When I finally went to see him — took him his breakfast a few days after she was born — I left her with Chick. I was testing the water and I found it cold.
“How kind of you to call,” Arty sneered. “Good of you to take the time. I suppose you won’t be working anymore. Gone into retirement like Iphy.”
I felt my lungs ice over. I couldn’t snap back at him. I went back and hid in the cupboard, holding Miranda, careful not to press her bottom the wrong way for fear her tail would be twisted or pinched.
I always slept curled around her in my cupboard. It made Mama nervous but there was no room for me to turn over so I thought there was no danger that I’d crush or smother her. I didn’t dare put her in a box or drawer separate from me.
• • •
“He doesn’t hate her,” Chick said. “How could he?” Chick was holding Miranda in the sink as I bathed her. His arm looped behind her flat little back so she wouldn’t topple over and crack her perfect skull. I was afraid to trust myself bathing her. Her five-month-old fingers grabbed at his moving lips and he kissed them, making slurpy noises. “Mama and the redheads say you should be getting better now, Oly. Not so afraid.”
My arms disappeared below the elbows, covered by the warm grey water in the sink. Across the lot, Leona the Lizard Girl was floating, still and silent, in the green murk of her jar. Miranda could chortle and hurl a spoonful of pablum at the wall but she would be as helpless as Leona against Arty. I wanted Chick to believe me, to be as frightened and watchful as I was.
“Baby’s no threat to him.” Chick spoke as though he were answering my thoughts. A bubble of light swelled in me. He was right. That puny tail of hers was no threat to the Aqua Man.
“Besides,” Chick protested, “he keeps after me to bring Elly back. He says it would be good if she could help with Mumpo. I’ve been working on it but it’s tricky in there. In her head.”
My bubble fantasy sank into a chilly puddle. So that’s why Chick was so sure of Arty’s benevolence. “Guilty,” I said.
Chick nodded agreeably, his shiny head bobbing on his scrawny neck above Miranda’s unfathomable curls. “He feels bad.”
I sponged her puffing cheeks and she opened her gums and clamped down on the sponge, squeezing it happily. “I thought she was coming back.”
“It’s slow,” he nodded. “It was starting anyway. But I’m trying, a little bit every time. You should go over more. They’re lonely, the twins. It helps if things are busy, exciting around them. Elly notices more.”
“I help Iphy with the cleaning.”
“You don’t like Mumpo. You think he’s bad, but he’s not. Take Miranda to play with him.”
“He doesn’t play. He just lies there and eats.”
Chick’s golden face fell into a shadow of hurt. “He’s a wonderful baby. He’s different from Miranda.” His face drooped down to rub against her damp hair. “But he’s wonderful.”
I reached for a towel. “Let’s get her out now.”
She rose, dripping, straight up from the water and swooped into my arms, crowing.
“She likes to fly.” I smiled up at Chick, ashamed of insulting his other child.
“I have to go to surgery now.” He wouldn’t look at me. His face was flushed.
“We’ll come with you.” I started dressing her quickly.
“No, Oly. Don’t. It’s hard for me to concentrate when I have to take care of you. I have hard things to do.” I watched him through the window as he walked away. The ragged straps of his coveralls rode his bare bony shoulders as though nobody loved him.
Miranda was just learning to walk. She traveled from Papa’s big chair to the built-in sofa bench where Chick slept at night. Then she fell, face first, and split her lip. I was crying. She was bleeding and screaming. That was when Arty decided to come calling. It was the first time he had ever seen Miranda.
It is true that I’d been useless to him since she was born. She changed me. When I did work I was afraid to be close to him because I had something to lose.
After he wheeled out in disgust, I ran, with the baby still bleeding in my arms, and burst through the door of the surgery. The nurse grabbed my shoulders and hustled me into the waiting tent. Chick was severing a thigh. A critical procedure. She gave me a swab for Miranda’s lip and went back to the surgery.
He came out in his green scrubs and I flung myself on him. He was thirteen years old. I was nineteen. Miranda was one. He looked at her and she stopped crying. Her lip stopped bleeding. She reached up to him and he lifted her. She sighed and let her head fall onto his shoulder.
“He called her a norm,” I stormed. “He says he’ll feed her to Mumpo! He wouldn’t even look at her tail! Iphy will laugh all crazy and Mama will pop a pill and Al will swig on his bottle and nobody, nobody can help me but you!”
His child face rumpled in puzzlement. “I don’t understand,” he said.
At once a coolness swept over me. A woods-pond stillness filled me. “No!” I shrieked. “No! Don’t!” But it was too late and the anger and pain were small and hard in me, not gone, but distant.
“Now explain, please,” Chick pleaded. And we walked calmly out through the tent flap and strolled up the grass behind the midway booths, and Miranda fell asleep in Chick’s arms on the way.
I believe Chick tried. When he came out of Arty’s van he looked a thousand years old. He was the one who had to tell me.
• • •
Dear daughter, I won’t try to call my feeling for Arty love. Call it focus. My focus on Arty was an ailment, noncommunicable, and, even to me all these years later, incomprehensible. Now I despise myself. But even so I remember, in hot floods, the way he slept, still as death, with his face washed flat, stony as a carved tomb and exquisite. His weakness and his ravening bitter needs were terrible, and beautiful, and irresistible as an earthquake. He scalded or smothered anyone he needed, but his needing and the hurt that it caused me were the most life I have ever had. Remember what a poor thing I have always been and forgive me.
He saw no use for you and you interfered with his use of me. I sent you away to please him, to prove my dedication to him, and to prevent him from killing you.
The Arturan Administrative Office arranged everything. They located the convent school. They deposited a lump sum of money in a trust fund to be doled out to the nuns.
My job was to take you to that cross-cursed old woman — who, don’t forget, had given up children for her God-love long before you or even I came along. I had to take you to her and come back without you.
My job was to come back directly, with nothing leaking from beneath my dark glasses, to give Arty his rubdown and then paint him for the next show, nodding cheerfully all the while, never showing anything but attentive care for his muscular wonderfulness. Because he could have killed you. He could have cut off the money that schooled and fed you. He could have erased you so entirely that I never would have had those letters and report cards and photos, or your crayon pictures, or the chance to spy on you, and to love you secretly when everything else was gone.
Arty could have done worse, but he chose not to.
25. All Fall Down
Hopalong McGurk smiles with pearly dentures because my perfect Binewski teeth went down the spout with everything else. Yet the day we lost it all was nothing special. Miranda had been gone a year or so. Late in the morning I was in Arty’s dressing room as usual, coating him with grease as the tent filled and the ropy voice of the crowd came through the wall, thickening the air. Arty lay on his belly on the massage table while I painted him. He watched me in the big wall mirror.