The History of My Body Read online

  THE HISTORY OF MY BODY

  The Fleur Trilogy, Book 1

  A novel

  by

  Sharon Heath

  Copyright © 2011 Sharon Heath

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, with the exception of brief quotations in a review.

  This book is a work of fiction. While some of the place names may be real, characters and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination and are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to events or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  The author gratefully acknowledges permission to reprint excerpts from:

  “Anthem” Words and Music by Leonard Cohen. ©1992 Stranger

  Copyright © 1992 Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC and Stranger Music Inc. All Rights Administered by Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, 424 Church Street, Suite 1200, Nashville, TN 32719. International Copyright Secured. All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard LLC.

  “When the Red, Red, Robin (Comes Bob, Bob Bobbin’ Along)” by Harry Woods. Copyright © 1926 by Bourne Co. (Copyright Renewed). Rights for extended renewal term in USA controlled by Songwriters Guild of America on behalf of Callicoon Music. All rights outside the USA controlled by Bourne Co. All rights reserved. International copyright secured.

  Harold Pinter’s Nobel Lecture. © The Nobel Foundation 2005.

  Author photograph by Marcella Kerwin.

  “Ring the bells that still can ring

  Forget your perfect offering

  There is a crack, a crack in everything

  That's how the light gets in.”

  Leonard Cohen, Anthem

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter One

  THE BIBLE SAYS that in the beginning was the void, and it hasn’t escaped me how fast the Lord moved to take care of His own particular vacuum—dividing day from night, spitting out vast oceans, carving out competing continents that could one day have the power to blow each other up. What an inspired series of creations to keep the devil of boredom at bay. No wonder God kept seeing that it was good.

  Maybe it all would have happened differently if the bird on the front lawn hadn’t given me my idea about my grandfather’s balls. Or maybe not. You never know in this life; there are too many variables. In ancient times they might have called it Fate, more recently the Butterfly Effect, but I like to think of it as the human race’s chronic aversion to boredom. I figure any species lacking fangs and claws had a powerful incentive to evolve an active sort of mind.

  I suppose I’m not the only one who likes to hear about her own beginnings. Luckily for me, Nana loves to reminisce about the period in her life that coincides with my first eleven years, when we all lived together on what Time Magazine once described as “Senator Robins’ conspicuously spacious Tudor estate in the Main Line suburb of Gladwyne.” While the rest of us spent virtually all our time on that property, Father often spared us his presence, commuting to an apartment in D.C., where, as he liked to put it, he served as the only senator from Pennsylvania defending the sanctity of human life.

  I had my hands full defending my own. Looking back from the perspective of my fifteen years, I have to appreciate my infant ingenuity in keeping me just this side of the lurking pit of nothingness. Nana says I made more of a racket than all the saved babies combined, directing frantic tom-toms at my mother, who’d cry back at me from the foot of my crib, a drowning woman clutching her wine glass like a life raft. The crib still exists. I saw it a few years ago, its slats bearing the imprints I made with my bullet-shaped head.

  I saw Mother defend me against Father only three times in my life. The first was on my tenth Easter. I remember because I was wearing the dreamy pale blue dress and matching strappy shoes Nana had bought me for just that occasion. Having talked Cook out of one of her yummy lemon squares after returning from church, I was humming and chewing my way toward the den until I realized Mother and Father had gotten there first. Father had already begun one of his rants against the devil abortionists. This time he added an extra twist. “Who knows,” he taunted Mother, “how much you wanting to get rid of her made our only child autistic?”

  Usually, when Father got mean, Mother ran up to her room, but this time she stood her ground, though her voice quivered noticeably. “That’s not what Dr. Sand said!”

  Father made a sound that was more like a bark than a laugh. “Oh, what’s the difference? Doesn’t matter a hell of a lot when everyone can see she’s a freak. Spinning like a maniac her first day of Sunday school just because some kid made a dumb crack about the crucifix. Kids are like animals. They know. No wonder none of them would go near her after that.”

  “Don’t!” Mother stepped back as if she’d been hit. “That’s not fair! It was an awful thing for that boy to say. Dr. Sand isn’t convinced she’s even on the spectrum. You can’t shove her into some category just because you don’t know what to do with her.” I watched her face turn a particular shade of pig-pink. “Besides,” she added breathlessly, “if someone’s getting punished, maybe it’s the senator who had to marry the child he took out for a burger and a good screw after a pro-life rally.”

  Transfixed, I watched spit fly out of Father’s mouth as he shouted, “Child? Hardly! But you’re right about one thing. You may stink as a wife, but you were a hell of a good screw. As for the kid, maybe you’re right about that, too. Maybe she’s just a born space cadet. Or maybe it all comes down to maternal neglect. Maybe if you hadn’t been at the bottle all these years, she’d be cured by now.”

  Just then, Sister Flatulencia had rushed into the room and was steering me out of it and down the stairs toward the kitchen, one hand on my shoulder and the other frantically fingering her rosary beads. I had barely been able to follow my parents’ argument—I had never heard the name Autistic before, and the part about screws was more than a little confusing—but I always felt sorry for Mother when Father blamed her for not wanting to have me. Why would she have wanted a child like me, who was always driving people away with her words and her whirling and flapping?

  When Sister Flatulencia and I entered the kitchen, it was apparent we’d walked in on the beginning of a game of Hearts, the three-handed variety they occasionally had to resort to when they couldn’t scramble up a fourth. Nana and Fayga and Cook each held a clumsy spread of seventeen cards, and a one-card kitty interrupted the pattern of the washable Stars and Stripes tablecloth covering the small kitchen table.

  Sister Flatulencia answered their upturned questioning faces with a curt, “They’re at it again,” but that didn’t stop me from loosening myself from her grip and approaching Nana, asking, “What’s autistic mean?”

  Nana snorted and replied with a dismissive, “Shhh, don’t be silly,” cuffing me on the ear with her handful of cards more forcefully than she p
robably intended. That was the odd thing about Nana. For a nanny with an addiction to a game called Hearts, she had all the gentleness of a Mack truck. Just like the angel in the Bible who wrestled with Jacob and made his thigh go out of joint before blessing him, one minute she was treating me like a side of beef, the next she’d be showering me with little chicken-peck kisses that sent waves of pleasurable goose bumps over my oddly shaped head.

  As Nana’s eyes veered back to her hand, Fayga chipped in with a nasal, “I can’t believe he actually said that in front of the child,” her wriggling worm of an upper lip stretched tight and wide, like it was getting fried to a crisp by the sun. I’d often reflected that it was too bad about her face, which was so nondescript that it looked dangerously like a void punctuated by the teensiest salvation of a wormy lip.

  Cook chimed in predictably, “I can’t believe it either,” looking around the table as if she’d actually contributed something. Cook was a weakling when it came to having her own opinions. When Fayga was mean, Cook thought she had to be, too, which made me worry that perhaps Cook wasn’t real at all, just a little trick of the void to personify itself. Sometimes I had to remind myself that Cook was really one of my angels, the only one in our house who could bake angel food cake, which is my favorite food. Luckily for me, she’d baked a nice round loaf the night before, so when she set down her cards and pushed up from the table, her round body sailing past me toward one of the long kitchen counters, I held my breath, and not just because I’d gotten a whiff of her hands and breath, which smelled eternally of garlic and onion.

  Suddenly Fayga threw down her cards and flew out of her chair to the corner of the kitchen, stomping her Comfort Flex shoe on the floor several times. “Got you!” she cried. She hated roaches. Short of burning down the house, she did everything she could to kill them. Her mission in life was to keep dirt under control, which was pretty clever of her, because the earth is made of dirt, so her particular method of keeping the void at bay had a pretty good shelf life. But when she was overworked she tended to get mean and complain a lot, particularly about the washing she had to do for Father’s saved babies: dirty diapers, pukey crib sheets, soiled terry cloth infant sacks constructed with arms but no feet as if we were host to mutant Martian babies with only one set of limbs apiece—all of it purchased in lots of a hundred from Leland DuRay, an infant clothing wholesaler who was one of Father’s frequent contributors.

  I tried to keep my eyes averted from the squished roach Fayga was scraping up from the floor as Cook motioned me to sit down at the table, setting my second dessert for the day in front of me. I was still licking my lips fifteen minutes later as I took the stairs two at a time up to my room to look up my new word.

  I’d been using the dictionary and encyclopedia to battle boredom ever since teaching myself to read, my little bottom planted comfortably on a potty stool painted a pastel yellow that put my amber pee, stinking of vitamin drops and creamed asparagus, to shame. I created something of a household brouhaha back then by graduating so quickly from Goodnight Moon and Green Eggs and Ham to increasingly hefty dictionaries, Sister Flatulencia’s World English Bible, and an assortment of dog-eared Vogue and Elle magazines Mother kept in the pretty pink basket in the corner of her bedroom. As you might imagine, sounding out words at the age of four was a lot easier than comprehending their meanings, but a couple of phrases have stayed with me to this day, like “an honest answer is like a kiss on the lips” (Proverbs 24:26) and “pearlescent pink and robin’s egg blue are all the rage for spring” (Vogue Magazine).

  Autistic sounded a teensy bit like me, but mostly it didn’t. It wasn’t that I hadn’t been called names before. Sweetie Pie was one. I stopped liking it after dreaming of lying curled into a ball on a giant pie tin at the center of our massive, burled wood dining table—shined up so often by Fayga that every piece of food I ever ate there smelled like Ye Olde English Furniture Paste. On one side of me sat a slightly burnt apple pie with sickly-green crescent moons decorating the top and on the other a lemon meringue, one of my favorites ever since I discovered I could make Jillily sneeze if I put a dollop of meringue on the tip of her pink triangle of a nose. But here’s the worst part: everyone but Grandfather was salivating and aiming giant forks in my direction.

  Fortunately my second name, Angel Face, didn’t disrupt my sleep. Since my potty stool was convertible, with a lid that could be flipped over to stand on, I could slide it across the marble floor to the flower-and-butterfly-painted sink that Nana never failed to remind me was much nicer than the plain white ones in the big, bare bathroom father built for the children he’d saved from the devil abortionists. Standing on tippy-toes, I’d spend hours staring at my angel face in the mirror, hoping I’d see wings start to sprout from the curved handles of my ears so I could fly out of the house and up to heaven.

  I entered Father’s new name for me in my diary. I liked to keep lists of words I looked up, taking particular pleasure in words with more than one meaning. But the reference to the major characteristic of the name Autistic—poor eye contact —made me nervous. I scrambled off my bed and stood in front of my dresser mirror, staring straight into my watery blue eyes and counting out a full sixty seconds without blinking, until I got distracted by the shape of my head, deciding it really was pretty pointy at the top.

  Nana once told me that my bullet-shaped head is living evidence of my mother’s distaste for anything too painful. She said that when it came time to push me out of her body, Mother gave one heave that allowed the tip of my head to squeeze through the swollen opening at her bottom, then decided it hurt too much and waited around until Father yelled bad words at her before reluctantly releasing me into the world. The other problem is that my bullet of a head is covered with funny-looking bumps and indentations. I saw them for the first time on the afternoon of my fifth birthday, when Nana said, “Oh, for heaven’s sake, I’m not going to watch you scratch yourself like a monkey one minute longer,” and drove me off to the doctor.

  Only days before, I’d wandered over to the wing of our house Father had converted for the children he’d saved from the devil abortionists. Climbing into one of the new toddler’s cots, I’d put my body right up next to hers so I could pretend we were Siamese twins. With her peach-fuzz cheeks and round blue eyes, she looked so much prettier than pale-eyebrowed, crooked-grinned, stringy-blond-haired me. Who knew she was going to infect me with a nasty case of ringworm and make me get my head shaved?

  My rash prompted Father to permanently ban me from the saved babies’ wing of the house, so I mostly struggled in secret with my insatiable curiosity about those other children. It wasn’t as though I had a bunch of friends to distract me. Thanks to my banging and flapping, none of the local private schools were willing to accept me, and Mother wasn’t exactly rushing to organize play dates.

  I suppose I should give Nana credit for the bumps and indentations on my head. It probably took her flinging me into hundreds of hard landings onto my old rock of an infant changing table for me to realize I could actively give myself pain. Nana still cringes when she describes the first time she caught me squirming around my crib, rhythmically banging my head against its slats as if I were consciously aiming at slightly varying angles each time. I personally count it my earliest achievement, a terrific means of dispelling the void. Because as sure as my grandfather’s balls could qualify for the Guinness record of the world’s most gargantuan testicles, conquering the feeling of emptiness was the chief challenge of my young life. After all, Nana couldn’t spend all her time slathering my little butt with Johnson and Johnson’s. There were all those other butts, that revolving door of children my father kept rescuing.

  But it wasn’t just pain and reading and making lists that kept me going. Ever since turning four, I’ve had Jillily. As long as I can remember, Sister Flatulencia liked to call Jillily a tuxedo cat, which set the stage for some awful confusion when Fayga remarked offhandedly sometime after my sixth birthday that tuxedos were how
Father dressed when he went off to rake in the dough. On the next Saturday that Father stayed out late, I tried to keep myself awake as best I could, pinching and banging until he got in, so I could sneak into his bedroom when he was showering and try to find his cat suit and where he kept his dough. I didn’t find either one, not even a streak of flour on his wide-lapelled jacket, although I detected some unfamiliar perfume mixed in with the sharp jolt of bitterness in the jacket’s armpits.

  I vowed to try again, so the next time Father didn’t come home for dinner, I kept myself awake by busily pinching my belly fat in a room that was pitch dark except for a little circle of light around my nightlight in the shape of a duck with a chip at the edge of its bill. My belly started hurting so badly that I opened my eyes and saw the silhouette of my mother at my doorway. She was craning her head in my direction, as if she couldn’t quite see me, and she was holding her arms with her hands, as if she had to hold herself in one piece, and she was crying softly, just like Jillily after Cook shut the kitchen door on her paw. My room started smelling like the rubbing alcohol Nana dabbed on my knee whenever I fell, and I found myself hating Father, though I couldn’t have explained why.

  Under normal circumstances, when there was something confusing going on that I was trying to figure out, I felt good, because it filled up the you-know-what. But when my mother slipped away and took with her that disturbing smell, I had to pinch my tummy a lot harder to keep myself out of a pitch-black pit.

  Nana yelled at me the next morning, “What’s your doctor going to say when you go for your tests this afternoon?” I asked her why I had to go to so many doctors, anyway, if I wasn’t even sick, but she turned away and muttered under her breath, “I have to see to the babies,” and left the room without answering.

  Needless to say, none of this resolved my confusion about Father’s pits and the mysterious perfume he used to bring home with him instead of dough. The fact was, except on his late nights, Father had no smell to him at all. Which should have been a clue right there. Most people have the common courtesy to give off a little whiff of something to help other folks with their voids.