When I finally did convince Number One to arrange for a visit with my mother (during which Number One would be present, of course, since she feels herself a guardian of Good Taste, but I was ready to be the essence of propriety), this jar lay on the far corner of my eating stand. I would move my smallest pillow to the near edge of the stand and rest my chin there and watch the starfish feel its preposterously slow way along the glass. Note the suckers along the undersides of the starfish fingers. You might say they are the starfish's tiny army. Commands move across them like a wind, a very slow wind, that is, over grass. Move, suck, release, and each starts a little after the one next to it.
This was not my first starfish, though the largest, and I have come to know them intimately. I have learned to love them in a way that I have not loved any other creature. I have thought: What if I had this army for my own? If this were my hand? My little suckers all along the palm? I have thought I might button a button, blow my nose, answer a telephone, turn out the light. I have thought I might feel my way across the floor, this star on the end of some long radius and ulna. I might risk the stairs, letting myself down, reaching lower and letting myself down again. I could run away, and even if it took all night, moving at a starfish pace, to get as far as the next house, I might find a hiding place to spend the day and set out farther the next night, each day finding a hovel or a thicket to rest in, never discovered, ever onward by silver moonlight.
Later, this same starfish was dried and it is still here upon my low shelf. I once felt it with my tongue and now I know the sea tastes of sauerkraut.
I insisted that I be dressed up for the interview in my best shirt and even a tie, though I never wore one; also, I never had the top button of my shirt buttoned, for you can imagine to what uses I have to put my neck. I wished, then, I had a jacket and a pair of real pants for the occasion. I thought they might be stretched out beyond me and a pair of shoes stuck into the pants legs. After all, so much of what we do is for show; why not, out of deference, do a little something extra? But Number One thought not. Still, she arranged a quilt very prettily up around my waist, made tea, brought out a box of pastries, combed my hair, wiped the sweat off my forehead. A pity I had no toes to tap, no knuckles to suck nervously, hardly anything to fidget until she came, but I chewed on my upper lip and posed myself as calmly and as aesthetically as I could manage, twisting slightly in a sort of reclining contraposto.
And so Mother came in. She was wearing one of those basic blacks with a silver necklace and one could see at a glance that she was chock-full of cultivated charm. Sedate, nothing flashy or overdone. She crossed her legs and her little skirt snuggled up around her thighs, bonneting her stockinged knees, which leaned together like two nuns, a bit of white slip peeping out beside their cheeks. (Could she really be all this and pious too?) I felt quite untidy beside them even in my best expression.
"Tea ... a cake? ... Disturbing news of Cuba ... Yes, South America is so revolutionary ... Cold for fall ... an early frost ... I was wondering ... "
I remember best her feet (this is not unusual, considering my low position here upon my mattress) in little black pumps reflecting the squares of the window and reminding me of Number One's nose ... something classical about them both, I guess. I would have liked to press my tongue across the shine of the shoes ... well, yes and the nose too. (I still wonder what their flavors might have been, the nose, certainly vanilla or apple, the shoes a red-winy taste soured by the sidewalks.) (I do often wonder if they can appreciate flavors as I do, if they even know the real pleasures of eating. Certainly they have too many diversions and, though as babies they tested things as I test them, I am sure that, by now, they have forgotten the joys and understandings of tongue and lip.) Mother, pressing her dactyls into ladyfingers in a useless proliferation, had just said the view from my window was the best in the house and I had just said that I had been thinking about my future and would like to have her help, at least for some of the details, until I could get started on my own. "Future," Mother said, just at that moment glancing down, and then she saw it. She forgot the studied beauty of the classical smile, the corners of the mouth faintly Ionic but not yet Corinthian and she forgot to watch out for those knees under that tight skirt of hers. Her eyes saw a wound ... some horrible wound of the genitals, lustrous, blistered, purple. (And yet I suppose exposed genitals, pure and simple, healthily blooming and blushing, would do to describe her stunned and outraged look.) And my starfish was firm-bodied, beautifully turgid and a rosy, tan-pink colour.
"What is that thing?" The way she said thing, to flush it down the toilet was too good for it, though she would certainly want to dispose of it as quickly as one would dispose of a particularly hairy spider ... Still, nothing hairy here.
The starfish reclined (one might say) near the top of the jar, one finger hidden by the punctured lid, one stretched languidly sideways along the ridge where the glass curved, and three almost straight down. Infinitesimally, one of the lower fingers was edging upwards. I don't believe Mother could have noticed this movement and certainly she couldn't have had time to examine or understand the waving suckers, yet gall touched her tongue and even her knees paled. I saw she saw the world in that jar, caught in that abyss, sour sea water all over it, and she, without wanting to, drinking its juices ... or me. Was it me she thought she looked at? Opposites reflecting each other, he all digits and he of none, or rather one? Whichever it was, I saw, in the shape of her lips, that the taste of death (or life) was on them and I held my breath.
That's the last I ever saw of her; isn't that strange? Those rejecting lips and then the shoes departing in uneven clocks, for though she was hardly half as old as Number One (but I must admit Number One keeps up her strength extraordinarily well, rinses it in, I suppose, with the henna of her hair, or sucks it from me with that avid, other mouth. I do age fast) — for though she was hardly half — as I said — Mother, who refused ever after that to come into my room, died a year later. One could say that she faced her moment of truth with a starfish.
And so, after all, I have been forced into approaching Miss Number Two whom, as I've already mentioned, I really felt to be my only salvation from the beginning, but instead of photographs (I had started with Number Two in exactly the same way I started with Number One in spite of the mention of a censor) — not understanding what I had in mind at all, instead of photographs, Number Two brought me a mirror, a rather large hand mirror, round and with a blue cast to the glass.
I was surprised to find that I had a handsome, rather noble head. No reactions, no expressions on any of the faces of those that had appeared before me had ever led me to believe that this might be. In fact, I was sure of the opposite and I had only hoped I might be passable. Also I found that I did resemble, to a surprising degree, Miss Number Two, and was, in my own masculine way, quite as attractive as she was, my hair the same matt-black, my eyes, mysterious, my cheeks with a mute, aristocratic pallor, my nose, stark. I had a thick, muscular neck not exactly in keeping with my fine-featured face and, as she held the mirror farther from me, I saw a barrel-chested manatee-thing, certainly ichthyoid, with little wing shapes lumping under my clothes at hips and shoulders as though I could actually, as I've dreamed, swim into the air, and I saw the eyes of Number Two leaning to get the same view as I had of myself. I could see her thought reflecting my own! What a curious shape, and is it beautiful or ugly? Has it a meaning of its own? Is it a symbol of sloth or courage or of sex? Or is it a symbol at all?