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Bingo
Under The Crucifix
Excerpt
Chapter
One
When
Chloe got the call that her brother Irv had become an
infant, she was only surprised by the fact that he hadn't
become Spider-Man. For years Chloe had been waiting
for the call telling her that Irv had finally succeeded,
that after all of the years of comic books and costumes,
web designs and spider infatuation, he'd finally managed
to turn himself into his beloved superhero. He'd wanted
to be Spidey ever since she could remember, but a baby
was another matter entirely. This, she realized, was
a stunt she'd never expected, not even from Irv.
"Your
brother Irv's gone and become a baby," her mother
said evenly, as if she'd been rehearsing before placing
the call. "I found him on the front stoop with
a note stapled to his blanket. I nearly tripped right
over him."
Chloe
was struck not so much by the news that her brother
had transformed himself, but by the fact that her mother
referred to him as "Irv," the nickname Chloe
had given him in childhood for reasons she could no
longer remember. Her mother had always hated the nickname
and had forbidden Chloe to use it in her presence. Irv
was such an ugly name-a name for a lecherous old man,
her mother had always said-which was exactly what Chloe
had intended.
She
took a long drag on her cigarette and blew the smoke
out slowly, watching the puffs drift across the table
and hang suspended over the halogen lamp in the corner
of the room. She tried to think of something unexpected
to say, something quick and surprising that would take
her mother off guard, like her mother's use of the name
Irv.
"Become
a baby," she repeated. "My brother Irv has
become a baby."
Her mother coughed loudly into the phone, thick rasps
that rang through the receiver.
"Yes,
your brother," her mother said, louder this time,
her voice rising as if she were speaking to someone
hard of hearing. "Your brother Ralph," she
said, using his proper name now, "is now an infant.
A newborn, straight out of the womb. And Ruth is gone.
She took off and left him behind with nothing but a
note."
Chloe
said nothing for a long time. She held the cigarette
between her fingers and watched as the smoke wrapped
around itself and floated over the newspaper she'd been
reading. People had been wondering what went on inside
Irv's head for years, she thought, though she had tried
her best not to be one of them. He was a big baby, his
wife, Ruth, forever complained whenever she had a moment
alone with Chloe. All he ever wanted was his mother.
Ruth was eight months pregnant, and Irv had reached
the age of thirty-six without ever having learned to
operate a washing machine or cut his meat with a serrated
knife, preferring instead to lift a piece of steak with
his hands and suck the flesh off the bone. He still
had all of the Spider-Man figures from his childhood
and had only stopped sleeping on superhero sheets when
he'd gotten married. He managed a comic book store full
of teenage boys with whiteheads and mothers who washed
their damp sheets.
"How
do you know it's him?" Chloe asked, thinking for
a moment that some reckless teenager might have panicked
after giving birth and left the baby on her mother's
steps after loosing the infant in a movie theater restroom.
These kinds of things happened all the time in the New
York papers. In the past several months there had been
a rash of what reporters called "drive-by births"
on Long Island. Months earlier, a fifteen-year-old had
been tried as an adult and been sentenced to fifteen
years after delivering a baby girl behind a supermarket
and leaving her beside an ATM machine in the shopping
center. Just last week the homecoming queen at a nearby
high school in an affluent Long Island suburb had delivered
a ten-pound baby boy during halftime. She then took
her triumphant ride across the football field in a convertible
with roses in her hand, waving as the janitors sifted
through bloody towels in the girls' locker room. Chloe
had just finished reading the latest article about the
homecoming queen and had wondered what had made her
run.
She'd
have liked to have spoken to these girls, to ask them
how they had managed to hide their pregnancies even
from their parents, and more importantly, from themselves.
Both girls had said repeatedly that they'd never considered
what they'd delivered as "real babies." Just
years before they'd been playing with baby dolls. Maybe
they'd thought these infants had been dolls, too, which
was a concept that Chloe, as a dollmaker, could readily
understand.
"Oh,
it's Ralph, all right," her mother snorted. "A
mother never forgets."
Slowly
Chloe picked up the newspaper and stared at the photograph
of the homecoming queen taken from her jail cell. Her
thin prison uniform sagged on one side, revealing a
creamy shoulder. Chloe wondered why they hadn't been
able to find a uniform to fit the young girl properly.
The girl's lips seemed to tighten in pain, and she looked
very cold.
"Okay,"
Chloe said finally, stubbing out her cigarette, "what
do you want me to do?"
Her
mother took a deep breath and let it out in a rush.
"You've
got to come," her mother said. "I can't do
this alone. Your father won't even look at him, and
Aunt Chickie gets in her own way. I don't even know
who to call."
When
Chloe didn't answer, her mother cleared her throat.
"Please,
Chloe," she said. "He's your brother, for
God's sake."
Chloe
considered telling her mother that God had nothing to
do with Irv's being her brother; she was sure of that.
She thought of poor Ruth with her swollen belly, lugging
her infant husband back home to Mother and then running
off. Now she would be forced to give birth on her own,
without Irv there to hold her hand, wipe the sweat from
her brow, or perform whatever small gesture he might
have been able to manage. Wherever she'd gone, Ruth
had not only a baby on the way but a baby/husband to
worry about. Even the homecoming queen, alone in a jail
cell with her crown in tatters, seemed better off by
comparison.
"I'll
be there," Chloe said finally, standing up to hang
the receiver on its cradle. "Wait for us to come.
Nathan will know what to do."
Without
waiting for her mother to answer, Chloe hung up the
phone and held it down on the cradle, hard, then lifted
it off the hook to make sure the dial tone had returned.
She set the receiver on the table and waited for the
buzzing to begin, proof that no one could get through.
Slowly
she shuffled down the hall to her bedroom, an unlit
cigarette perched between her fingers.
Nathan
sat up when he saw her. Bunches of index cards crunched
beneath him as he moved to a sitting position.
"What's
the matter?" he asked, stopping to cross out a
line he'd written with the Cross pen Chloe had given
him for his birthday several years before. He was not
averse to using a good felt tip if necessary, but said
the right pen afforded his words an authority that no
other pen had come close to.
She
sat beside him on the bed, her shoulders hunched.
"Irv's
become a baby again," she sighed.
She
was suddenly shocked at the calmness with which she'd
taken all of this in, her mother's voice on the phone,
her brother's body shrunk back to infancy. In some strange
way, she realized she'd been waiting for this to happen,
that he'd always had a much better chance of returning
to babyhood than he'd ever had at becoming Spider-Man,
no matter how hard he'd tried.
Nathan
was a professional party planner, though his real love
lay in writing scripts and directing. But party planning
involved orchestration of the best kind-stage directions,
blocking, even set designs with the added bonus of celebration.
Once he'd thrown an elaborate shower for a celebrity
at a posh hotel and had the chef bake a cake in the
shape of a fetus with long strips of banana licorice
for the umbilical cord. He'd written a monologue for
the fetus which a child actor in a bonnet and matching
booties delivered to the expectant mother. At a Bat
Mitzvah, he hired a singer to dress as a rabbi and serenade
the young girl with "It Had to Be You." For
his and Chloe's wedding, he'd composed congratulatory
lines for every guest on the receiving line.
"People
never really know what to say at family functions,"
he'd said when Chloe initially balked at the idea..
"Why not give them a little help?"
And
in fact, the guests had appeared one by one with index
cards at the ready to deliver their lines. Some had
even taken bows. Her family had come to rely on Nathan's
penchant for scripts at holidays, always asking that
he write the specs for Easter and Christmas dinners.
"I
never know how the hell to say grace, even after all
those years in Catholic school," her father had
once said. "At least now I can always count on
Nathan to give me a good line."
Nathan
shuffled through his index cards as if searching for
a phrase appropriate to the situation, though Chloe
knew he wouldn't find one.
"Maybe
it's not him," Nathan said, dropping the index
cards on the bed. "Maybe it's some abandoned kid
like the one that homecoming queen just dumped. Maybe
it's not Irv at all."
"No,"
Chloe said, "it's Irv, all right. My mother's sure
it's Irv. And I promised her we'd come."
Nathan
reached for a fresh packet of index cards.
"We'd
better get started," he said. "We'll need
to know what to say."
As
she sat smoking, Nathan listed all the questions Chloe
wanted to ask:
1. Had Irv shrunk down to newborn size, his gums pink
with new life, the hair on his body vanished, leaving
his skin smooth and smelling faintly of baby lotion?
2. Was he conscious of his newfound infancy, crying
out to his mother like the shrunken man in The Fly,
trapped in the web forever, his little man's head squeaking
for help?
3. Were images from the womb still swirling through
his mind, his eyes glazed over with film, the whole
world a gauzy collage of faded colors and newness, his
adult life shucked away like dead skin?
4. How had he managed it? Had he (a) willed himself
back or (b) had it come upon him like a dream, his mind
swimming while his chromosomes did a crazy dance, scrambling
themselves into a gurgling mass of diaper rash and drool?
Nathan
passed each of the index cards to Chloe and waited for
her approval.
"There's
a problem with the second question," she said,
leaning back on the bed. "He'd certainly like the
web associated with The Fly, but he'd be a spider for
sure. A real bloodsucker."
Nathan
made a notation on the index card and pressed the end
of the pen to his chin.
"That's
a good point," he said. "But I'm sure that
will go right over their heads."
While
he continued scribbling lines on his index cards, Chloe
tried to imagine if Irv were capable of doing something
quite so willful, leaving Ruth with a nursery filled
with stuffed animals meant for a real baby, not a thirty-six-year-old
man masquerading as an infant. Poor Ruth, Chloe thought,
as she took deep drags on her cigarette. No wonder she'd
run. Ruth was nine years older than Irv and had certainly
babied him, but Chloe was sure that even Ruth hadn't
banked on a husband who would sneak back to infancy
just when she was ready to deliver.
If
nothing else, Chloe told Nathan, she was sure that being
a big baby was not endearing to Ruth-or to any of them,
for that matter. Even her mother had sounded horrified.
"Horrified,"
Nathan wrote in block letters before getting up from
the bed. "Good word. We may have to use that one."
As
Nathan moved about the room packing their bags, Chloe
took the newspaper and cigarettes into her work room
where the latest in her "Bingo Lady" doll
series lay half-stuffed. The doll's saggy breasts still
needed to be sewn and padded; her limbs hung loosely
from her polyfill-stuffed body. The Bingo Lady dolls
had become extremely popular in the last year after
she'd debuted the exhibit-Waiting to Wait-at an annual
doll show. Four needle sculpted women huddled together
at a wooden table, looking expectantly at one woman's
card with just two numbers left for the jackpot. Since
then, she'd been bombarded by requests from collectors
and gallery owners. Her friend, Gloria Rollins, a dollmaking
guru, was planning to set up an exhibit on game-playing
later that year. Gloria had once weighed nearly three
hundred pounds but had gotten herself down to the one-fifty
range, though she still wore muu-muus that hung about
her shoulders like deflated tents.
"It's
important not to forget who you've been," Gloria
was fond of saying. "Every dollmaker has a history."
In
the doll world Chloe was known as Esther Bing, a name
Nathan had come up with one night while planning the
couple's entrance at a silver anniversary party with
a Humphrey Bogart theme. All the guests had worn trench
coats and smoked cigarettes which was what had inspired
the idea of Esther Bing as a chain smoker. She liked
the idea of hovering over her dolls with a cigarette
pressed between her lips in her Esther Bing persona.
The smoking had quickly infiltrated her normal life
as Chloe, since she spent so much time working on the
dolls. Still, even with the smoking, no one in her family
had ever guessed that she made dolls for a living. No
one knew it was Chloe who had created the Bingo Ladies.
As
Esther Bing, she got herself a P.O. box and a social
security card and ordered cartons of cigarettes through
the mail. Esther Bing provided a kind of anonymity that
being Chloe Taft had never afforded her. When they'd
married, she'd decided to retain her maiden name and
not take on Nathan's, which was "Whittenstone,"
a name too long for perfecting the signature she'd come
to depend on after being asked so frequently by doll
collectors to offer her autograph. Her mother had been
displeased by Chloe's decision not to take Nathan's
name.
"You'll
get so used to being Chloe Whittenstone that you'll
soon forget who Chloe Taft ever was," her mother
had admonished, though Chloe thought that forgetting
who she'd been was not something she aspired to do.
Since
her father, the Big E, had achieved a certain degree
of notoriety in the World's Strongest Man contests,
Chloe had developed an uneasy relationship with fame,
blushing even when Nathan's name appeared on the backs
of invitations. As much as she loved dollmaking, she
still hated the exposure that went along with attending
conventions and doll shows. She felt much safer going
as Esther Bing.
She
always gave her dolls a history, and sometimes Nathan
even wrote lines that he thought the Bingo Ladies might
say. "Come on, O 75," or "This caller's
time has come and gone." This particular doll had
been a frequent jackpot winner who carried around a
handful of twenty-dollar bills, which Chloe had cut
from parchment paper and dyed green. Her name was Marilyn,
and she'd had a run of bad luck recently, which was
reflected in her tightlipped smile and the deep lines
that Chloe had needle-sculpted under her eyes.
As
she held the doll in her hands, she added wisps of ash-stained
cotton that she used for touches of gray in the Bingo
Lady's red mohair. Nylon doll skins and bits of fabric
lay spread across her work table. Now that Irv had become
an infant, Chloe sensed that this might be the last
doll she'd be able to finish for quite some time. The
smell of lint permeated the air, and the Bingo Lady's
face seemed to twist in pain, as if the doll could sense
the dread Chloe felt in the pit of her stomach.
Perhaps
this doll was right, Chloe thought, as she sat among
the pieces of cloth and thread that lay strewn over
her work table.. Perhaps Marilyn's luck had run out.
As
if to prove this very point, she spent the rest of the
evening sewing bits of red nylon to the doll's thighs,
bumps of flesh that rose up her skin like a series of
spider bites.
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