Still Life with Woodpecker Read online

  Old Gulietta spoke no English, and Leigh-Cheri, who was brought to America when she was not much taller than a jug of wine, spoke nothing else. Yet, it was Gulietta who told Leigh-Cheri her bedtime story each night until she was fifteen, always the same story, a story so frequently repeated that the girl came not only to comprehend its general meaning but to actually understand every word, though pronounced in a foreign tongue. And it was Gulietta who sensed the true dimensions of Leigh-Cheri’s depression after the Princess suffered a miscarriage during the UW homecoming game. (She was in midair—all a-leap—when the blood broke loose, rivulets racing as if to hemophilic touchdowns from beneath her diminutive cheerleading skirt.) It was Gulietta who sensed that her young mistress had lost more than a baby that autumn afternoon, had lost more, indeed, than the baby’s father (the second-string quarterback, a pre-law student who headed the campus chapter of the Sierra Club and intended to work for Nader someday), although the memory of him sitting on the bench pretending not to notice as she was whisked from Husky Stadium in embarrassment and fear haunted her mind and her heart like an ugly specter in muddy shoes.

  It was Gulietta who, during that unhappy aftermath, came to her with hag hands cupped around a toad. The Princess was not immediately overjoyed. But she had heard tales of Old World totems, and if toad magic could help, she’d give it a try—and let the warts fall where they may.

  Alas, Gulietta, this was an American frog of the last quarter of the twentieth century, a time when wishing apparently no longer led to anything, and Leigh-Cheri eventually named it Prince Charming after “that son-of-a-bitch who never comes through.”

  9

  SANDWICHES WERE INVENTED by the Earl of Sandwich, popcorn was invented by the Earl of Popcorn, and salad dressing by the Oil of Vinegar. The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it. Princess Leigh-Cheri would have liked to reinvent it, but at that point she hadn’t a clue.

  She had ovened that rubber cookie called the diaphragm and gotten pregnant anyway. Many women do. She had played hostess to that squiggly metallic house-guest who goes by his initials, IUD, and suffered cramps and infections. Many women do. She had, in desperation and against her fundamental instincts, popped the pill. She became ill, physically and emotionally. Many women do. She had experimented with the jellies and jams, creams and goops, sprays and suppositories, powders and foams, gels and gunks only to discover her romantic personality—she had grown up with European folk tales (one tale, at any rate)—repulsed by the technological textures, industrial odors, and napalm flavors. Many romantic personalities are.

  This constant battle with the reproductive process, a war in which her only allies were pharmaceutical robots, alien agents whose artificial assistance seemed more treacherous than trustworthy, was gnawing with plastic teeth at her very concepts of love. Was it entirely paranoid to suspect that all those stoppers, thingamajigs, and substances devised to prevent conception were intended not to liberate womankind from the biological and social penalties imposed on her natural passions but, rather, at the insidious design of capitalistic puritans, were supposed to technologize sex, to dilute its dark juices, to contain its wilder fires, to censor its sweet nastiness, to scrub it clean (clean as a laboratory autoclave, clean as a hospital bed), to order it uniform, to render it safe; to eliminate the risk of uncontrollable feelings, illogical commitments, and deep involvements (substituting for those risks the less mysterious, tamer risks of infection, hemorrhage, cancer, and hormone imbalance); yes, to make sexual love so secure and same and sanitary, so slick and frolicsome, so casual that it is not a manifestation of love at all, but a near anonymous, near autonomous, hedonistic scratching of a bunny itch, an itch far removed from any direct relation to the feverish enigmas of Life and Death, and a scratching programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?

  Since she could not possibly answer that question—she couldn’t even ask it without getting winded—and since the lunch-hour, parking-lot rendezvous in the back of her boyfriend’s van were frankly deficient in certain romantic details that she’d always associated with sex, the Princess decided that she would enter a second exile: celibacy. Before she could steal safely across the border, however, the biological IRS caught up with her and exacted its stubborn price.

  10

  WHEN HER LOVER, the quarterback, implored her to have her pregnancy “taken care of,” Princess Leigh-Cheri rested her forehead against the plate glass of the vegetarian restaurant in which they were dining and wept. “No,” she said. “No, no no.”

  At nineteen, she had already undergone one abortion. She would not tolerate a second. “No,” she said. A teardrop hung out of each blue eye, like a fat woman leaning out of a tenement window. They bobbed, balanced, and bobbed again, as if dreading the uncertain journey down her cheeks. Wavering there, her teardrops reflected for a moment the sheen of the soybean curd upon her plate. “No more vacuum cleaners, no more steel. They can scrape my heart, they can scrape my brain before they’ll scrape my uterus again. It’s been over a year since my last D and C, and I still feel raw in there. It feels bitter when it should feel sweet, it feels ragged when it should feel smooth, it feels deep purple when it should feel pink. Death has thrown a stag party in the most sacred room in my body. From now on, that space belongs to life.”

  Any time that technology subverts a benevolent natural process, the sensitive smell sulfur. For Princess Leigh-Cheri, abortions had not only the reek of totalitarianism but the shriek of betrayed meat. If another D and C was an intolerable idea, however, the prospect of inopportune maternity was equally distressing—and not just for the usual reasons. Furstenberg-Barcalona was an ancient lineage in which strict codes had evolved. If a female member of the family wished to possess full privilege, if she would someday be queen, then she must neither marry nor mother before the age of twenty-one, nor could she before that age forsake her parents’ domicile. And although she considered herself one of the people, Leigh-Cheri did very much indeed desire full royal privilege. Leigh-Cheri believed that she could use that privilege to help the world.

  “Fairy tales and myths are dominated by accounts of rescued princesses,” she reasoned. “Isn’t it about time that a princess returned the favor?” Leigh-Cheri had a vision of the princess as hero.

  As Queen Tilli put it when Max asked her what she thought their only daughter wanted out of life, “She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”

  “What?”

  “She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”

  “Well,” said Max, “she can’t afford it. And the world would demand Diet Pepsi, anyhow. Why doesn’t she buy me a martini, instead?”

  11

  IT WAS AUTUMN, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remainder of the afternoon their rahs were little more than squeaks. The Huskies won anyway, knocking off favored UCLA, 28-21, and at nearby University Hospital, where Leigh-Cheri had to have a pint of common blood pumped into her royal conduits, the interns were in a festive mood.

  Leigh-Cheri’s dilemma was resolved, for the time being, but she felt like a black candle at a wake for a snake. When an intern whistled “Proud Mary,” she had no inclination to sing along.

  Her boyfriend telephoned about eight that evening. He was at his fraternity house. They were having a victory party. He said he’d drop by the hospital the next day, but he must have lost the address.

  When her identity was learned, the Princess was moved to a private room. She was given the best sedative in the house. Château du Phenobarbital 1979. Asleep at last, she dreamed of the fetus. In her dream, the fetus went toddling off down some awkward dirt road like Charlie Chaplin at the end of a silent movie.

  By Tue
sday, she was physically recovered to the degree that she could return to campus, where she learned that her status as the only genuine princess west of New York was insufficient to deflect the moral indignation of the committee on cheerleaders. Asked to resign from the yell squad, she resigned from classes, as well. She also resigned from men, but rather late to appease the King and Queen.

  Max’s heart was rattling like a full set of dishes when he told Leigh-Cheri that she must shape up or ship out. “We’ve been liberal with you,” said Max, “because, well, after all, this is America….” Max neglected to point out that it was also the last quarter of the twentieth century, but that, no doubt, was self-evident.

  “Adolf Hitler vas a wegetarian,” Queen Tilli reminded Leigh-Cheri for the three-hundredth time. Tilli was attempting to discourage her daughter from joining a natural foods commune in Hawaii, an option that appeared to be open to her if she elected to relinquish royal privilege. In turn, Leigh-Cheri might have reminded the Queen that Hitler ate two pounds of chocolate a day, but she’d grown weary of that dietary debate. Besides, she’d decided to protect her claim on royal privilege, even though it meant subjecting herself to tighter social restrictions.

  “You goan be a gut girl, then?”

  “Yes, mother.”

  “If we deal you a new hand, will you play by the rules?”

  “Yes, father.”

  They observed her as she turned to go upstairs. They observed her as if it were the first time they’d really looked at her in years. Despite her pale color and the un-happiness that clung to her the way a bad dream clings to a rumpled pillowcase, she was lovely. Her hair, as straight and red as ironed ketchup, rode gravity’s one-way ticket all the way to her waist; her blue eyes were as soft and moist as huevos rancheros, and the long curl of their lashes caused fimbrillate shadows to fall on the swell of her cheeks. She was not tall, yet the legs that hung out of her skirt seemed a tall woman’s legs, and beneath her No-Nukes-Is-Good-Nukes T-shirt, her astonishingly round breasts jiggled ever so slightly, like balls balanced on the noses of Valium-eating seals.

  Tilli stroked her Chihuahua. Max’s heart made a sound like the sleigh bells on Mrs. Santa Claus’s dildo.

  12

  NEOTENY. NEOTENY. NEOT—Oh how the Remington SL3 enjoys that word! Unrestrained, it would fill the page with neotenyneotenyneotenyneoteny. Of course, it bothers the Remington SL3 not a comma’s worth that very few readers know what the word means. Given an opportunity to write it again, however, the machine would be inclined toward definition.

  “Neoteny” is “remaining young,” and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals—although a case could be made for the dolphins—because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

  One needn’t feel excessively ignorant if one was unfamiliar with neoteny. There have been queens and kings and princesses who also were oblivious to it, in word and in action.

  During the period following Leigh-Cheri’s miscarriage, the supposed virtue of maturity was cardinal in the Puget Sound palace. Although understandably vague about what maturity might actually be, Leigh-Cheri strove, with her parents’ encouragement, to acquire more of it. Nightly, until the age of fifteen, and on a few evenings thereafter, she had been told a bedtime story; until a few weeks prior, she had been flailing about paroxysmally amidst pompons, shouting incomprehensible incantations meant to further the fortunes of a band of innocent sprites worshiping a sacred fruit (upon the fortunes of that same football team habitually rode much of mature King Max’s bank account, but that’s another matter). It was about time she grew up. Princesses were not exactly a dime a dozen. And this princess, it had suddenly dawned upon Tilli and Max, was a sexpot.

  She might be expected, upon attaining the age of twenty-one, to marry well, very well, indeed. In fact, there was probably no man, from Prince Charles to the U.S. president’s son, whom she might not fairly mate. Those prospects pleased the King and Queen. Heretofore, living under the stare of the CIA, having agreed to “retire” from the royalty circuit, the Furstenberg-Barcalonas sheltered no particular ambitions for their daughter and were content to have her indulge a normal American girlhood (although they were unconvinced that developments such as vegetarianism and ecology were normal). Now, it occurred to them that if this young woman were to attract the attention of the right man, one of the emerging Arab rulers, for example, even the CIA probably would be powerless to prevent a most propitious union.

  It was the wrong time to speak of marriage to Leigh-Cheri. Leigh-Cheri had driven a wooden stake through the valentine. Yet, on the premise that it would aid preparation for her mission in life; on the premise that were she ever to resume her studies in environmental sciences she might not be so easily distracted by vibrations from the half-shellfish half-peach that occupied the warm, watery bowl of her lower regions, she made herself available to maturation, if maturation would have her.

  Put away was her teddy bear. Put away were her Beach Boys records. Put away was her fantasy of a Hawaiian honeymoon with Ralph Nader, her daydream of Ralph and her driving off together into the Haleakala sunset with their seat belts fastened. Not that she’d changed her mind about how perfect she’d be for him—he worked too hard, smiled too little, and dined as one indifferent to both flavor and fate; he clearly was a hero in need of rescue by a princess—it was just that romantic fantasies were … immature.

  Leigh-Cheri read books on solar radiation. She perused papers on overpopulation. To keep abreast of current events, she watched every news telecast that she could, fleeing the TV room immediately whenever a love story was dramatized. She gave her ears to Mozart and Vivaldi (Tchaikovsky was painful). She fed flies to Prince Charming. And she worked at keeping her person and her room exceedingly clean.

  “Cleanliness is next to godliness” was one slogan of maturity to which Leigh-Cheri could faithfully subscribe—not stopping to consider that if by the last quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.

  13

  GULIETTA DIDN’T WORK ON SUNDAYS. It was only fair. Even Friday got Thursday off, thanks to Robinson Crusoe. On Sundays Queen Tilli would lumber into the kitchen, her Chihuahua affectionately clasped, and make brunch.

  The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor would awaken Leigh-Cheri. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, celibacy notwithstanding, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.

  Even after the panic had subsided, she found little to admire about a Sunday. To her mind, Sunday was where God kept his woolly slippers. It was a day with a dull edge that no amount of recreation could hone. Some might find it relaxing, but the Princess guessed that a great many people shared her feeling that Sunday generated a supernatural depression.

  Sunday, a wan, stiff shadow of robust Saturday. Sunday, the day divorced fathers with “visitation” rights take their children to the zoo. Sunday, forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure. Sunday, when the hangover knows no bounds. Sunday, the day the boyfriend didn’t come to the hospital. Sunday, an overfed white cat mewing hymns and farting footballs.

  The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called Sa-bat, meaning “heart-rest.” It was believed that on this da
y, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation.

  How Leigh-Cheri might have chuckled had she known that. On a particular Sunday in early January, January being to the year rather what Sunday is to the week, she wasn’t aware of it, however, and she awoke in mean spirits. She pulled a robe on over her flannel pajamas (she’d discovered that silk had a tendency to agitate the peach-fish), brushed the knots out of her hair, knuckled the crunchy granola from the corners of her eyes, and descended, yawning and stretching, into the hot hog hell of brunch. (She knew without tasting that her soybean curd would have soaked up some of the essence of bacon.)

  As it has for so many for so long, the Sunday paper helped her through the day. Regardless of what else the press might have contributed to our culture, regardless of whether it is our first defense against totalitarianism or a wimpy force that undermines authentic experiences by categorizing them according to faddish popular interest, the press has given us big fat Sunday papers to ease our weekly mental menstrual bloat. Princess Leigh-Cheri, wriggle into your cheerleader uniform one last time and show us the way to hooray: two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? The Sunday papers, the Sunday papers, yea!