Here I am your unshaved fennel
Here I am your unshaved cheese
All I want to know? is when I’ll—
feel your blade against my knees.
Its terribleness eluded her. Her lyrics weren’t sly or hip or smoky and tough but the demure and simple hopes of a mouse. She’d spent a decade barking up the wrong tree — as a mouse! Audiences booed — the boys in their red-framed spectacles, the girls in their crooked little dresses. Despised especially were her hip-hop renditions of Billy Joel and Neil Young (she was once asked to please sing down by the river, and she’d thought they’d meant the song. She told this sad joke over and over). Throughout the band tours she would wake up weeping at the edge of some bed or other, not knowing where she was or what she was supposed to do that day or once or twice even who she was, since all her endeavor seemed separate from herself, a suit to slip into. Tears, she had once been told, were designed to eliminate toxins, and they poured down her face and slimed her neck and gathered in the recesses of her collarbones and she had to be careful never to lie back and let them get into her ears, which might cause the toxins to return and start over. Of course, the rumor of toxins turned out not to be true. Tears were quite pure. And so the reason for them, it seemed to her later, when she thought about it, was to identify the weak, so that the world could assure its strong future by beating the weak to death.
“Are we perhaps unlovable?” she asked Dench.
“It’s because we’re not named, like, Birth Hearse for Dog-Face.”
“Why aren’t we named that?”
“Because we have standards.”
“Is that it?” she said.
“Yeah! And not just ‘Body and Soul’ as an encore, though we do that well. I mean we maintain a kind of integrity.”
“Integrity! Really!” After too many stolen meals from minibars, the Pringles can carefully emptied and the foil top resealed, the container replaced as if untouched back atop the wood tray, hotel towels along with the gear all packed up in the rental truck whose rear fender bore one large bumper sticker, with Donald Rumsfeld’s visage, under which read DOES THIS ASS MAKE MY TRUCK LOOK BIG? after all that she continually found herself thinking, If only Dench sold drugs! On hot summer days she would find a high-end supermarket and not only eat the free samples in their tiny white cups but stand before the produce section and wait for the vegetable misters to come on, holding her arms beneath the water in relief. She was showering with the lettuces.
She and Dench had not developed their talents sufficiently nor cared for them properly — or so a booking agent told them.
Dench took offense. “You forget about the prize perplexity, the award angle — they are often looking for people like us: we could win something!” he exclaimed, with Pringles in his teeth.
The gardenia in KC’s throat, the flower that was her singing voice — its brown wilt would have to be painstakingly slowed through the years — had already begun its rapid degeneration into simple crocus, then scraggly weed. She’d been given something perfect — youth! — and done imperfect things with it. The moon shone whole then partial in the sky, having its life without her. Sometimes she just chased roughly after a melody — like someone kicking a can down a road. She had not hemmed in her speaking voice, kept it tame and tended so that her singing one could fly. Her speaking voice was the same as her singing one, a roller coaster of various registers, the Myrna Loy — Billie Burke timbre of the Edwardian grandmother who had raised her, a woman who had trained at conservatory but had never had a singing career and practically sang every sentence she uttered: Katherine? It’s time for dinner went up and down the scale. Only her dying words—Marry well—had been flat, the drone of chagrin, a practical warning: life-preserving but with a glimpse of a dark little bunker in a war not yet declared. Marry well had been uttered after she begged KC to get a teaching certificate. Teaching makes interesting people boring, sure, she had said. But it also makes boring people interesting. So there’s an upside. There always is an upside if you look up.
Dench’s own poor mother wasn’t able to leave him — or his sisters — a dime, though he had always done what she said, even that one year they lived in motels and he obligingly wore the identical nightgown as his sisters so that they might better be mistaken for a single child, to avoid an extra room charge, in case the maid walked in. His young mother had died with breathing tubes hooked right to her wallet, he said, just sucking it all up. Dench made a big comedic whooshing sound when he told this part. His father’s disappearance, which had come long before, had devastated and haunted her: when they were out for dinner one night his father announced that he had to see a man about a horse, and he excused himself, went to the men’s room, and climbed out the window never to return. Dench made a whooshing sound for this part of the story as well.
“I can’t decide whether that is cowardice or a weird kind of courage,” Dench said.
“It’s neither,” KC replied. “It has nothing to do with either of those things.”
Motherless children would always find each other. She had once heard that. They had the misery that wasn’t misery but presumed to be so to others. They had the misery that liked company and was company. Only sometimes they felt the facts of their motherless lives. They were a long, long way from home. They had theme songs hatched in a spiritual tradition. There was no fondling of the gold coins of memory. The world was their orphanage.
But when they moved in together he hesitated.
“What about my belongings?” he asked.
“It’s not like you have a dog who won’t get along with mine,” she said.
“I have plants.”
“But plants are not a dog.”
“Oh, I see: you’re one of those people who thinks animals are better, more important than plants!”
She studied him, his eyes large with protest or with drugs or with madness. There were too many things to choose from. “Are you serious?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said and turned to unpack his things.
Now she rose to take the dog for his daily walk. She was wearing an old summer dress as a nightgown, but in the mornings it could work as a dress again, if you just tossed a cardigan over it and put on shoes. In this risky manner, she knew, insanity could encroach.
The sublet she and Dench were in now was a nice one, a fluke, a modern, flat-roofed, stone-and-redwood ranch house with a carport in a neighborhood that was not far from the hospital and was therefore full of surgeons and radiologists and their families. The hospital itself was under construction and the cranes bisected the sky. Big-jawed excavators and backhoes worked beneath lights at night. Walking the dog, she once watched as an excavator’s mandibled head was released and fell to the ground; the headless neck then leaned down and began to nudge it, as if trying to find out if it might still be alive. Of course there was an operator, but after that it was hard to think of a creature like this as a machine. When a wall was knocked down, and its quiet secrets sent scattering, the lines between things seemed up for grabs.