But that wasn’t all.
Celly had a tiny leg growing out from her pelvic bone; that must have been what had kicked me. From the area around her flat stomach, I could see three webbed fingers.
A thumb with no thumbnail protruded from her navel.
I was only seven and a half, but you learn fast when you don’t know what the next guy on the street is going to say or do to you. I told Celly that she looked beautiful, strong not vulnerable. Now I understood the reason for the Bohemian-style dresses. She began crying.
Still dressed, I went forward, carefully kissing her face. She responded in kind. After several minutes, I felt a tugging around my waist. I thought it might have been Celly’s hands, working at my pants.
I looked down from the corner of my bigger eye.
The head below Celandine’s rib cage was sucking on my shirt, pulling it into its mouth. Chewing on it.
I heard a noise and panicked, thinking the front door had opened. Celandine asked me if I was afraid. I said yes I was, that her mother might catch us.
Celly looked down and said that her mother didn’t care that someone might see her this way. In what had to be her own mixed-up way, Mrs. Tomei was evidently proud that Celly was not afraid to show off her body.
When I backed away slightly, the head bobbed up. The eyes stared at me. The mouth did not relinquish my shirt.
* * *
Christ, I’ve looked up so many medical words in the time I came back to Chicago, to Celly. I tried looking up the phrase “maternal eclampsia” and couldn’t locate it anywhere. Finally called the Harold Washington Library, a girl named Colleen told me that it meant that the mother would sometimes bleed to death during childbirth.
* * *
Celandine and I remained good friends throughout the next few years. We played doctor several more times when her mother wasn’t around.
More often than not, we would just walk around Wicker Park, and I would sometimes, in the steel shadows of the elevated, lift up her dress, reach under and caress the twin’s head. In the books about circus freak-shows, they were called “vestigial twins.”
What Celandine’s mother had was a foetal multiple cyst anomaly.
Nowadays, this is detectable by sonography. So Celly is certainly unique, especially that she lived. And the head was not stillborn.
Celly kept the leg, tiny like a chicken’s, strapped around her leg with something along the lines of a Posey gait belt, the kind used to lift patients out of wheelchairs. The fingers were slowly being recalcified into her body, due to the added weight gain of her prepubescent years. Many times, I had read, a vestigial twin never formed because it had actually been recalcified into the stronger twin during the time in the womb.
Ray-Ban invented a pair of wraparound sunglasses about 1970, that fit my eyes perfectly, and Bankers Life Insurance picked up the bill. If I didn’t have a full head of blond hair, I might have looked like one of the most intense punkers still visible in the old north side neighbourhoods. I think of all I know now, that I didn’t know then. All the medical terms that didn’t make a damn bit of difference to me. I loved Celandine Tomei.
You can find Celandine’s anomaly, if you wish to call it something safe, under any book that lists Foetal Monozygous Multiple Pregnancy Dysplacentation Effects. In the Washington Library’s reference book on birth defects, it says: SEE Also Michelin Baby Syndrome. Page 1433, no shit. Makes me think of John Merrick’s disease and how it became known as “elephantitis” because his mother fell in front of an elephant during a parade in the early days of her pregnancy. I wonder if she ever ran into Tom Thumb’s mother and swapped bad juju stories.
The head growing out of Celly was part of a foetal cyst that had skeletal dysplasia. Larger effusions of the cyst’s organs were beneath Celly’s subdermal region around her lower rib cage. Most thalidomide babies born this way had general effusions in the pleural and pericardial regions, that is, the lungs, heart, and spleen, and polyhydramnios may occur. I seem to recall a child at Childermas like this, the disease itself being excess water in the organs.
* * *
April, 1968.
Our happiness was short-lived. The spring after we had first seen each other nude, James Earl Ray assassinated Martin Luther King Jr. in Memphis. The neighbourhoods around us were burning to the ground. The biggest gang in the area was the Blackstone Rangers, and they vented their frustrations on the Puerto Ricans who were moving in to the west of us. There were daily rumbles with the Latin Kings.
The Friday that Ricky’s Deli, on our corner, was firebombed, my parents broke their lease on the Crystal Street apartment. I had hoped that I would continue to see Celly at rehab classes when this whole thing blew over, but it wasn’t to be. My father quit his job at RB’s and we moved down to Shelbyville, Kentucky to live with relatives.
Celly and I exchanged letters, and she often wrote how bitter she was at how everyone, even the therapists, looked at her. I told her not to worry. My parents said we’d be moving back to Chicago soon, maybe a nicer neighbourhood around Albany Park.
“Soon” became 1970, and when we returned to the place I was born, I found that the Tomeis had moved. Out of state and somewhere west was all I could find out. I received several letters from Celandine, postmarked Iowa City and Thermopolis, Wyoming. She sounded increasingly depressed, saying how her mother was taking her to a climate that would help her feel more healthy. They might move to Albuquerque.
I watched MASH and All In The Family, saw the Vietnam War end and Nixon resign. Around the time of the fall of Saigon, I received a letter from Celandine’s mother in New Mexico. She told me that Celly had left home.
In her room she found a ticket stub for Denver. She was going after her.
II. Zombie Tongue
The word freaks … sounds like a cry of pain —Anthony Burgess
“You ain’t gotten anything until you had yisself some zombie tongue.” Several men on downtown Fremont Street repeated this like a litany the entire first night Norm and I were in Las Vegas.
We had taken a week off from our jobs, working at the Lion’s Lair. Norm Brady was a bouncer, I was a disc jockey. Those wraparound RayBans were quite the style now. It was June of 1987, and I had been living in the Denver area almost since I graduated from college six years before.
Viva Las Vegas, Elvis sang back when I was at Childermas with Celandine. Visa Las Vegas was more like it. Expensive as shit! Well, the shrimp cups were cheap. Looked like little sea monkeys, I recall David Letterman joking once.
We walked the seedier part of town, thinking our long thoughts and keeping them to ourselves. We were just damn glad to be out of Denver.
The cool neon of The Mint and the Golden Nugget that was so prominent on Crime Story were far behind us. Eighth Street was home to a bail bondsman and Ray’s Beaver Bag. On Ninth, we saw The Orbit Inn, but couldn’t enter because an armless fat man wearing a purple sweatshirt had passed out in the revolving door. No one inside seemed to care. We kept walking, amused at kids pitching pennies between the legs of butt-ugly whores. Looking back towards Glitter Gulch, all we saw was a tiny blob of pink and blue neon. That, and the memory of voices whispering conspiratorially about zombie tongues.
I had a BA in English Literature from the University of Illinois. Tried my hand at Behavioral Sciences, but I couldn’t cut it. I guess it was because I still thought of Celandine. I was ten when she left Chicago for points west. I think it was the Holistic Center that told Mrs. Tomei that the drier air might do Celly good, by alleviating stress and “allowing a better view of oneself.”