Along with last-minute lessons in extracting a foreign body from a choking victim, and instruction on how to throw herself, belly-first, against the edge of the couch in case she found herself choking in an empty room, Jemma’s mother demonstrated demure postures for Jemma to assume during the party. Her mother, who’d been celebrated herself at parties as a child, said, “You must be in the party but not of the party. Everything will revolve around you, but you mustn’t be frightened when strange people want to hug you, or take your picture while you open a present.” Jemma listened, nodded dutifully; she was obedient, not like her brother, and tried at that age to do good as she understood it. She tried to pose demurely at her mother’s side, receiving the guests. She tried not to loll her tongue out droolingly at the pile of presents she wanted so desperately, not to open, but to climb. She tried not to think about the cake, as big as her whole body, a great J, or the colored cream roses, and how she wanted to make it clear to every person that walked in the door that as birthday girl she had every right to the most rose-afflicted piece of that cake, that if she wanted to she could eat a piece that was all icing and no flesh. She tried not to think of the moonwalk beckoning from downstairs, inviting her to muss her hair, wrinkle her dress, bounce from her knees to her feet to her knees again. She was demure for less than ten minutes.
That was long enough. Her mother had been edging them toward the dance floor as the last guests arrived; at a certain distance it simply sucked her in. “In the party, but not of it,” she whispered to Jemma as a walrusy man swept her onto the porch. Seconds later, Jemma was shoeless in the moonwalk, and of it, bouncing on feet, hands, knees, bottom, head, in a turbulent sea of kids. Her socks dropped in twin bunches to the lowest portion of her ankles. She lost her hair ribbon and her hair frizzed up.
Still shoeless, she watched the puppet show, an interpretation of Hansel and Gretel, delightful for the real candy house that came leaning out of the theater on a long stick, swaying back and forth to be attacked by the audience, the roof shingled with jelly beans meant to picked off at every performance. The witch gave an extended monologue, an apologia for witches, who she maintained were much misunderstood. It was an ovenless show; at the end the children and the witch danced swayingly together and sang an ode to the goddess while a dragon swung above them in a dental-floss harness. The puppets bowed to silence, and there was no applause until the house came leaning out for an encore sweep.
Uncle Ned, less skilled but more traditional than the puppet lady, went over better. He walked unconvincingly against the wind, strummed tunelessly on a ukulele and sang “Camptown Races,” flinging out chorus-girl kicks with every doo-dah, and made huffy, buzzing noises with five kazoos stuck in his mouth, all these efforts received rather coldly. But his balloon animals endeared him to the crowd. He twisted and bent them at random, proclaiming the abstract shapes giraffe, camel, cheetah, aardvark, platypus. He offered up a bonobo, but there were no takers, not even Jemma or her brother. “It’s just a thing,” said a little redheaded girl, who Jemma was quite sure she’d never seen before in her life, of the foot-long, U-shaped chain of balloon sausage. She folded her arms across her spectacular party dress, fancier than Jemma’s, and noticed obsessively by Jemma’s mother, who would ask if this was not like showing up at a wedding in a dress fancier than the bride’s.
“Oh,” said Uncle Ned, clutching the sausage to his chest. “You’ve caught me. Clever as a pony, aren’t you? Well, tain’t no bonobo, certainly. Tain’t no chimp or ape. It is not an orangutan. Neither is it a potato, a piranha, or persnickety Penelope Poekelman, my first wife. What this is, Suzy… is that your name? Well, it’s a good name, and it would suit you fine. Suzy, what I’m holding here in my hands, what I’ll now bring closer to you, closer now, soon it will be touching you, is an exactly-to-scale model of a drippy, stinky, slimy little-girl… intestine!” The redhead screamed, the children cheered. “They’re full of poop,” Uncle Ned added unnecessarily. He sang as he worked, and no child went home that night without a string of intestines to hang around his neck.
More than she ate, Jemma looked at the food, and watched people eating. She plucked a dozen Vienna sausages from off their little beds of prosciutto and crostini and stuffed them one after another into her mouth, crouched behind the biggest couch in the living room, chewing and swallowing in a frenzy, and then she was done feasting. She was very fond of gray meats, Vienna sausages in particular, but number twelve, halfway eaten, became a chore to finish, and she felt a little sick after she had swallowed it down. There was yet room for cake, but she no longer wished to curve her hand into a paw and scoop icing into her mouth. She walked around, looking for her brother, who was running wild with the older set, the eight-, nine-, and ten-year-olds who were dashing up and down the stairs, drawing shouts of “Whoa!” and “Slow down there!” from the adults they grazed. She did not find him, and almost forgot she was looking, her attention was drawn so irresistibly to the open mouths and the small, beautiful arrangements of food that went into them. She’d pause close by them, under the very shadow of the longest chins, and look up at them till they noticed her, and mostly they would mistake her interest in their eating for interest in their food, and offer her a bite, or stuff hastily and then show her empty hands. But she’d scoot away as soon as the eating was done. She saw a lady eat a cracker piled high with black caviar; they broke against her lips, most consumed, some sticking under her nose in a thin mustache, some bouncing off her chin to fall and scatter on the wood floor like pearls off the string. She saw a man consolidate tiny portions of beef tartar into his hand, dumping them out of little mango boats into his palm; when he had a mound the size of a tennis ball he bit into it, gobbling it all down in one rapid fress and then licking his palm like a fond dog. She saw a lady do her same Vienna-sausage trick. She saw her father take two giant shrimp, pink and wet from the biggest shrimp cocktail in Severna Forest history, four-dozen jumbo shrimp, an entire head of lettuce, and a liter of cocktail sauce all arranged among ice in the very same bowl Jemma had toppled into earlier that day. He stuffed them into his mouth, head-first, so the tail hung out in fangs from his lips. He dropped to his knees and growled, friendly and ferocious, at Jemma. She ran away.
She danced in contracting circles around the central table, closer and closer through the crowd until she stood with her eyes level with the edge of the hook in the J. A pink rose as big as her mouth was within reach, but before she could smudge it away her brother collided with her.
“Time to open the presents,” he said, grabbing her hand. His hair, like hers, was characteristically ahoo, sticking up in sweaty horns from dozens of places. He drew her toward the present pile, but halfway there her mother seized her other hand.
“Time to blow out the candles!” she said.
“Time to open the presents,” her brother insisted, tugging, so Jemma’s arms opened at the elbows and she was suspended between them.
“Who’s calling the shots here?” her mother asked. She gave one sharp pull and Jemma’s sweaty hand popped free of her brother’s sweaty hand. There were four rose-shaped candles, spaced close together in a little thicket midway up the body of the J. As they were lit someone turned down the lights. All over the room cameras were cocked and raised. Jemma leaned forward over the cake, not averse to falling into it. She knew it would be so soft. But her parents had her firmly by the arms. They leaned her over the candles after the song. She blew wetly on their count of three, her fierce concentration on the task of extinguishing every candle rewarded with success, but realizing too late she’d been so single-minded she’d forgotten to make the wish. She cut the first piece of cake, her mother’s hand over her own, wielding the silver knife, her mother’s strength smoothing Jemma’s stabbing motions into a straight line. Then she was carried, reaching back for cake, to the foot of the hill of presents.