Rochelleratner.com - Bearing Life: Rosenthal

Winging It
By Carole Rosenthal

If my husband's impeccable, I'm not. I'm the opposite. Peccable? What does it mean? Sprawling in my deepest armchair, legs out, I look it up in the dictionary. Like peck-able? Behaving like a denizen of an old-fashioned chickenyard, a free-range chicken, where hens and nasty roosters deliver sharp beaks to my head? But the modern chicken inhabits crowded chicken factories, incubated and de-beaked, aggression forcibly curbed, leading congested broken-feathered lives like the homeless men with their stumps and crutches rounded up each winter near my apartment building.

My grandfather, who owned a junkyard in McHenry, Illinois scattered corn to chickens behind his house. Wringing their necks and plucking chicken feathers, he offered up chickens for grumpy Sunday repasts while my parents looked pleased with themselves for taking us on "healthy" visits to the country.

"Don't pick at your food," my father nagged me, wishing he'd stayed in the city as I pushed dead chicken around my plate. My mother slapped my hand. The peppy chatter of Paul Harvey on the car radio had excited her. Her eyes looked boiled, bulgy and white.

On the stove, more chicken boiled, scaly legs and yellow claws scrabbling up from the pot. "Look!" my grandmother crooned, her loose-skinned neck the one my own is beginning to resemble, as she ladled rubbery pea-sized yolks for me, a treat. "I saved the unborn chicken eggs for you!"

One snowy Easter in Chicago after a party on the North Side where the children knocked each other off chairs, down steps, and under tables in the mean zeal of an Easter Egg hunt, my sister and I started to cry. I had fallen on my eggs and they cracked. The mothers swished their nylon-ed legs, feigning dismay at the confusion and noise for the sake of the other mothers, rivals and friends, even as they grabbed their children firmly by the shoulders and hissed clues, secret orders, about where their children should look. The mothers had hidden the eggs, they knew where to find them, but we refused to follow our mother's orders. "Ma, we're not cheaters!" we cried, doubting that other mothers could be as sneaky as our own.

Walking home, empty-handed, our sobs puffed clouds of frost. It was March, an early Easter, and we did not have any eggs. But passing the bus stop I heard a cheep-cheep from the trash can and shouted, "Wait!", yanking sideways from my mother until my mitten slid loose in her glove. I dived into the trash, digging out a shoebox stuffed with cellophane grass. Two chicks, weightless miracles, huddled in my hand, two chicks like me and my sister, thrown out to starve and freeze beneath abandoned bus transfers and newspapers under a blanket of bitter rime. Babies like these, sometimes goslings and ducklings, dyed pastel green or pink, clustered in the display cases of the dime store every Easter.

"How can we keep chickens in the city?" my mother yelled.

"You're a sucker," my father laughed, pretending that my mother was the softie instead of him.

"I'm the one who has to clean up after them," my mother complained.

Then my sister solved half the problem by hugging one of the babies to death, to lifeless scrawn, while I was outside in the courtyard playing marbles. I came in and I beat her in the back until she crouched lower and lower under the chair. Her little shoulderblades protruded like wingbones.

Stop! There is no such word as peccable! I need a bigger dictionary. This one is abridged.

Just as I thought, my husband says. I never heard anyone use it.

I sit upright, scanning words.

Peccary, yes, I say. A javelina, a wild pig.

A wild pig lurks in the corners of our apartment, our messy and cluttered apartment, spiny and fierce. My husband is a lot less peccary than I am with his broad shoulders and sturdy jaw. But certain words make you laugh, and peccaries remind me of pessaries (also not listed in this abridged dictionary), although I know from National Geographic they are stones thrust into camel wombs to prevent conception, desert birth control devices, primitive IUD's.

Anyway, I told my husband yesterday when we sat on the bridge overlooking the city across the river that I am not sure I want to have children. For one thing our apartment's too small, our life's too small.

Think it over some more, Sweetie. Don't jump to conclusions, he cautioned. This isn't about the past, it's about the future.

Whose future? I said. I can't conceive the future. Am I a bad woman?

He strokes my hand and answers, Not to me. Definitely not.

Say, whatever happened to the second chicken? he asks me today.

When its comb sprouted, I answer, we sent it to my grandfather in the country.

But was that before or after my mother gave birth to a dead baby boy? I don't know, I'm not sure. My mother never talked about it. She never allowed us to talk about it. ("You have to talk about it, it's not healthy, Jill," my father said. "Of course you're grieving, but you're being silly, you're being superstitious, what about your girls?") We could hear his pleas, her silences, her fears, through the wall. The wall grew spongy. Years later, other new brothers were born and not even my father or my sister or I thought that it was good luck to tell those boys that we had another dead brother before.

How happy and shy we were though, before, sitting on twig rockers on my grandfather's porch with silvery birch leaves whipping below in the valley, my father flushed and stammering, errant dark curls falling over his ears as he explained to us that a new baby was coming. He urged my sister and me, "Press your ears to Ma's belly and listen, listen hard, to the riddle fluttering inside." He belonged to a generation and a cultural circle that longed to be open about the body and its uses; he always carefully left the bathroom door ajar.

"I hear the fluttering," I boasted. Perhaps it was a lie. "It's gurgling like a toilet."

My mother was embarrassed. Her wavy hair, filigrees of gold, blew in the breeze. An artist, she specialized in flowers, not bodies. She didn't like all this attention to inner life.

"And you smell funny. Like swamp water," I told her.

Slats of light fell through the railing. They barred my mother's face. My father said, "Let's choose a name," pretending to consult us when he had already chosen Ricard as the name for a boy ("a man needs a boy"), explaining, "It's a name like our family, nothing fakey or rich about it, just a little bit different, not English, not Spanish--"

"Then what kind of a name is it?" I interrupted.

"Like custard!" my sister shrieked. She danced until she fell. She sang, "Ri-card, Ri-card! I like it too."

"Who is this dead Richard we never heard of?" my brothers accused me years later, thrusting a bible at me, my own, purloined, in which during a temporary fit of adolescent longing to have a history and a God I'd recorded the dead baby's name.

My brothers' faces were white, their voices were trembling, as if they'd murdered him.

"Ricard," I corrected, hitting the hard c.

There was no murderer. Yet knowledge, putting it into words, a name, made me feel responsible. Our family secret, our silence, implied guilt. But a secret that . . . what? That death had touched us? That it was nobody's fault?

The Sunday my mother came home from the hospital Auntie Bea Ritmanic, a three-chinned neighbor who told me never to listen to my father because he was an atheist and whose oldest daughter Maureen was a nun with periodic amnesia that once caused her to disappear to Las Vegas for three months, took my sister and me to the circus.

There, we stared at wild animals, a leopard dancing in a tiger-skin suit, and an elephant in a zebra-skin coat, a lot of animals wearing other animals' skins, a bear in a tutu, but I dreamed that night of a spindly little blue-eyed baby with chicken wings living in a giant ostrich egg. In the dream the egg was balanced perfectly on top of the majestically high steps of the Chicago Art Institute, where my mother aspired someday for her own paintings to be hung. Then the wind blew and the egg started to roll faster and faster down the steps and before I could stop it, it crashed.

In the morning, my mother sat on the kitchen stool peeling potatoes. When I told her my dream she dropped a long curly potato peeling on the floor and said, "Diana, please pick this up for me."

From the threshold of the braid rug, I watched icicles dripping behind the windowpane.

"Diana, pick up that peeling for me. Put it in that bag."

She turned the potato round and round between her swollen fingers.

"Ma," I said. "The dream scared me. The baby fell out of the egg. I tried, but I couldn't save the baby."

Her lips parted. A fleck of saliva broke from her mouth and flew through the air.

"It never happened," she said. "Don't talk about it, don't tell anyone. Pick up that potato peeling for me."

The potato dropped to the floor. It rolled, lopsided, across the linoleum, picking up twirls of dust. The curved metal slit of the potato peeler on her lap reflected light and filled my eyes. She rose and grabbed me. She shook me hard.

"It hurts me to bend," she wept. "Don't you know, don't you know, that it hurts me to bend?"

So now I'm turning forty and I'm stuck trying to figure out what to do. Improvisation is my natural mode, not dictionaries and definitions, but after that baby died I imagined that other people outside our family knew how to control things that we didn't and I tried to learn their rules. This made me slow. Still, I got expelled from the 7th grade for telling everyone that Mildred Hill (a.k.a. Trailer Tush) was having a baby and that she did it in the woods, and I deeply wish that I did not dream so often these days of losing my eyeglasses and my purse.

Perhaps I need more comprehensive references.

My husband, long and luminous, with a premature shock of white hair, angles neatly opposite me on the couch. He is revising an article on the Knights of Columbus, a history professor at Princeton, impeccably genteel in public, with knobby wrists and a playful nature. In private, he is a little worried about me just now, so he gets up to fetch the Oxford English Dictionary, volume 2, and places it carefully upon my thighs.

Between my eyes and the page, I clasp the magnifying glass he hands me. The print is tiny.

Between pectinated (comb-like, formed like the teeth of a comb; having straight closely-set divisions like the toes of a grouse), and peccadillian (small enormities), I find peccable; capability to sin. John Donne, 1631: "peccabilities, the possibilities of sinning, are the nature of angels."

Does this confuse you? It does me.

I long for celestial creatures soaring on trumpets instead of the flustered flapping and squawking of my chicken memories, my peccable childhood. I long for an egg, round like the world, solid and unbreakable.

Carole Rosenthal's frequently anthologized short stories have been dramatized for radio and television, and translated into eleven languages. She teaches at Pratt Institute, in Brooklyn, where she is a Distinguished Professor. She can be reached at carolero@juno.com.