This Wicked Tongue Read online

  Behind her, Em hears the squish of a nurse’s shoes, the occasional brusque clog of a surgeon making the rounds for the routine checking of fresh incisions. Sequestered here in this private room, the footsteps cause her to feel even younger than she is—in this world but not of it. Cribbed while the crackerjack adults make haste and lay waste around her, busy with their ancient bustling pathways. She feels drained, absorbed against her will by a familiar, tedious longing to be swept up.

  She’s missed out on something. Personal suffering, for instance—her own. Its absence is an itch she can’t locate, crawling uselessly around her scalp. Studying hard, paying for a portion of her way through divinity school by temping part time in the registrar’s office, inwardly searching (wrestling with psyche-shredding doubts would be overstating the case) before becoming certain that her calling is to facilitate the delicate transmissions between the dying and the living—all in the service of her effort to compensate.

  With Ken and Marta, Em recognizes an intimacy from which she’s excluded, a circuit from which she is barred. The effect is hypnotic, evokes in her a stale yearning. She forms a mental picture of half-gnawed graham crackers scattered around the base of a milk-stained glass, detects emerging into the bottom of the frame two tiny child fists, her own, while an enclosing cyclorama revolves clockwise and she feels—she’s not sure what. Returned or something. Unworthy. Verry verry sleepy.

  She steals a glance at the wall clock above the door, then Marta, who startles. Though she’s been stealth-watching Em, the woman’s eyes are soft and light rinsed. She’s the very picture of unravaged, defiant serenity. Verry obnoxious.

  Ken and Marta, Marta and Ken. Brushing her teeth that night, Em worries the couple around in her head. Two weeks ago he’d looked in the mirror while shaving and suddenly crumpled over as his spine gave, bone against bone corrading to dust the first sign of illness, what a shocker. Now he’s going faster than medicine can prevent let alone predict. Which is like what? Em thinks. She scrubs her mouth and pictures Einstein mirror-gazing and thinking of eternity. Then another image comes to her. A man in racing shorts and tank trying to outpace death, wings of ash lathering from his athletic shoes to indicate impotent speed. There, success. Ken does make Em feel spiritual. Visionary almost. He’s like a crystal ball she can gaze into and see anything she wants.

  Or would if it weren’t for Marta. Brushing an invisible crumb from Ken’s shoulder, smoothing his brow, caressing his earlobe. Picking at and preening him. Thirsty? she keeps asking and he keeps smiling. Putting aside Marta’s outburst yesterday, their bliss is as implacable as a butter dish. And serves as a wedge between Em and her meditations. Hard to intuit imperfections, pulled threads, wrinkles, handholds for her journey into elevated realms from which she might contemplate humankind’s dark wormy soul—harrowed, harried, embittered at finding itself not long for this world. Never long enough.

  She can’t work like this. What else is she supposed to get out of it all without that vertiginous short-cut to god? That non-denominational, non-anthropomorphic, non-culturally determined cynosure of holiness, since Em is progressive and unfettered. Was profiled last year along with several other maverick pastors-in-training in a sleek, large urban center magazine, which dubbed them The New Ecumenicals.

  Sometimes she thinks of other places in the world she might minister. Maybe when she graduates. Help refugees from torture, rape, and any of the other multi-purpose abuses that despots and poverty breed. But then she thinks if she just works a little harder she can get what she needs here, now. The tough stuff? Maybe later, much.

  She spits into the sink, tries imagining man and wife’s couplings. Tender, mutually respectful is as far as Em can penetrate—she’s distracted by the sounds of her mother and father in the den next door, their TV on, the murmur of their voices rising and falling above the shush of running water. The clink of ice in their nightly glasses of diet ginger ale—her nice old parents, it’s as if they’re pickled in it.

  She turns off the tap, leans forward and rests her elbows on the countertop and shields her head with her palms. Hello, inertia.

  Greetings from the Northwoods! ☺

  So she texts her friends, but the missives are becoming increasingly less frequent and sincere. When she’d applied to do her residency in this small city in which she’d grown up—the cheapest alternative by far, four months rent-free living with ma ’n pa—she’d convinced herself of early morning runs on dew-aquiver forest trails and sunsets blushing off the lake on her post-work rambles past her old nostalgia-soaked haunts. On her days off, barbecues on the patio, platters of grilled corn she’d pick and shuck herself, the neighbours’ seven-year-old twins tripping through the sprinkler on her parents’ lawn, stubbed toes, crying. Em proffering comfort like frosty tumblers of lemonade.

  It would be so—she can’t remember what she’d thought as she finished her term papers, plowed through her finals, aced her Greek and Latin exams.

  In the bathroom she doffs her self-made skullcap, places her chin on her overlaced knuckles, and meets her own image. Dusting of freckles over fine-pored alabaster skin. Clara-bow mouth. Lucid gray eyes. She is pretty and smart. In the fall she will solve the riddles of Aramaic. ☺ Somehow, though, she’d allowed herself to forget what it is like to endure this house, where one always knows who is in the room next door and the one next to that—a comfy dwelling with the kind of domestic overcrowding endemic to a middle class that’s almost extinct, the place resembling a tableau vivant behind dusty glass she might pass without a second glance in a museum. ☹

  She tries, she does. I did not have a loving family, she mouths in hopes of convincing the mirror. I have suffered.

  An untruth. She’d had an ordinary upbringing. Cupcakes and sparklers and the photo albums to prove it.

  A wavering image alights her head. A tinfoil tiara, rainbow cuff of candles. The dining room chock-a-block with children singing. More tinfoil—hidden treasure in the cake, to be gleefully forked into and discovered to mighty chortles and snorts at Em’s ninth birthday party. The day before, her mother had scooped nickels, dimes, and quarters and washed them, then painstakingly wrapped each coin in a pocket of aluminum and dropped them into the batter, stirring well to distribute them evenly—she was the type of woman who couldn’t bear to see even one child go without. It was amazing no one’s little Judy or Jeff had choked to death as they pigged through a second or third chocolatey slice.

  Make a wish, Em! And she’d huffed and she’d puffed and she’d blown the house down.

  Her child self had just had her first revelation. That she would like to hate her foolish mother. Too bad mater’s behaviour hadn’t been less pardonable.

  Ever since, if Em concentrates too intensely on what she wants, a tiny glowing disc kaleidoscopes an inch away from her forehead and her temples throb. She has to lie down for nauseated hours in a darkened room.

  She shrugs at her reflection, combs her hair, puts the toilet seat down, and sits to don her lace-up ankle braces. The braces help keep the tendons along the bottom of her feet—inflamed through overuse—stretched during the night. The goal is to prevent the scar tissue—which forms around the plantar fascia if she sleeps naturally, with her feet in a foreshortened position, toes pointed down—from shattering when she steps out of bed in the morning. She twists her mouth to the side and makes a sound like glass breaking. As quietly as she can, she makes another noise mimicking the noise she makes when the scar tissue unpieces.

  Ay yi yi. Her body is a Rolodex of pain. Bone spurs. Damaged illio-tibial band, unstable patellar meniscus. Last year, just when she was ramping up her mileage in preparation for the fall marathon, a disabling, near-demoralizing stress fracture in her hip. Oy. Pressure building and ebbing like a lava lamp in her sphincter the past six months. The worst thing—when she scratches herself she can’t find the sweet spot and wakes with welts on her neck, legs, and back. Something
about the way her nerves are bundled. Oddly, not like most people’s.

  She leaves the bathroom and hobbles to her bedroom. On her pillow a stuffed Eeyore, disheveled and grumpy, one-eyed ever since she’d poked him with a stick when she was six for no reason she would ever remember. Pennants above the neatly made bed from high school races, college track and field team. The cheerful coverlet, dresser drawers full of properly organized garments. Everything here saps her.

  Why are you moping? her mother and father would ask her when she was ten, eleven, fourteen.

  They’d look concerned—brows furrowed, mouths tugged down at the corners. What one would expect.

  I’m not moping, she’d say. I’m practicing moping.

  Her kindly confused parents would wander off, befuddled. It sickened her to watch them. There was nothing they could do to surprise her. She could have killed them for that.

  Ever since her summer-camp days—when murky heat and cicadas chanting combined with rapid-onset pubescence to create an intuition of ambitiously mystical escalations, ascendancies—she has wanted to make something of herself. And in doing so, the world. It is her struggle. She is a project she can perfect. A prize she must win.

  As for her feelings—whatever they might or might not be—let them fall as they may. Like a game of pick-up sticks.

  She closes the door behind her and climbs into bed, having determined that the fitted sheet is stretched tight and smooth—any fold or bump will banish sleep. She clamps her eyes shut, summons a prick of white embedded in a ball of darkness like a stone inside a snowball in reverse. She waits for the light to throb and grow larger.

  She can begin. She gives thanks, she is—but suddenly she isn’t whatever she is or would like to be. She isn’t however or however not she is feeling.

  Her parents are in the hallway. Both of them talking at the same time.

  Who’s the little man? Who’s the mucky ducky sailor boy? Oh he gives nice kisses.

  Now Em hears the excited arthritic scratching of Skye’s paws on the wooden floor. The thirteen-year-old border collie is likely the last of what had been the family’s long string of prize-winning herders. The den’s walls are papered with ribbons, the shelves weighted with trophies. But her mother’s bad hip means she can no longer attend trials and Em’s father claims not to have the heart to attend without her.

  Em has never made sense of her parents’ devoted canine love or their sadness now that so many of the pooches have passed—adored, much-beloved creatures bearing names like Promise, Beep, Darin’. Em never warmed to them. To her they were all alike—interchangeable eye-stalkers, foreign and powerful. There was seemingly nothing they couldn’t overcome, except for the fact that they were dogs.

  She rolls onto her side and burrows her head into the pillow. She can remember coming home from school soaking wet one rainy lunch hour when she was eleven to find her mother kneeling on the floor under the kitchen table, massaging Beep’s gums to calm him—he was petrified of thunder. Em heated her own soup, took down a bowl from the cupboard. She turned off the stove and spooned from the saucepan, pausing occasionally to watch her mother knead small circles above the dog’s teeth, under his nose. All the nerve endings were rooted there, she explained to Em, keeping her voice low. The idea was to relax him, coax him from his tranced quaking and panting, tail needling between his legs. Em stopped eating and shivered, feverish. Rain shot the window over the sink. This, she thought. Finally, this. She felt herself embarking, her life an avenging, onrushing raft.

  Now that she’s in her twenties Em finds it consoling to picture her parents growing verry verry old, their skin crepeing like elephants but their memories fissioning until they’re unable to recognize each other—toothless, noisily gumming their Pablum suppers like words of love gone rotten. Em will visit them, she thinks, not often but when she can, in the nursing home. With any luck they won’t know her anyway.

  She imagines their confusion deepening, widening, swallowing them up. Their eyebrows arching as they search through their vast stores of gibberish for the lost syllables of sense. As if sense were a home—the houses they’d each grown up in and left forever to start their own family—intact but rolling away, the wind huffing and puffing and blowing it across prairie and moraine, hill and dale, those long-dead dogs of theirs chasing it down, their small sturdy bodies flaring flat open like flying squirrels.

  Em is certain that in the end all her parents will remember will be those dogs.

  She turns again onto her back. Sleepily she lifts her cami. Her rippling abs, well-displayed in warm-weather running garb of shorts and bra top, console her.

  Like counting sheep, she fingers her ribcage, enumerates guy lines and under girders. Everything in order. A tender hurt pools left of the mole above her right nipple. Desolation and pride. Ever the spanners into the works, she can still hear her parents in the living room now, cooing at simple Skye, or is it Bart? When it’s not as if he could peel them a grape or get away with murder.

  We don’t need you.

  Two days after Em’s last visit with the couple, she now immediately recognizes the reception she’s getting from Marta—Em has been trained to identify and manage confrontational, blaming behaviour. Indeed, the woman’s anger and hostility are right on time, righty-o. Necessary stages on the path to her acceptance of the great event about to befall her husband.

  A loose jiggling sensation spooks the top of Em’s head. A migraine coming on. Trying to ignore it, she studies the gerberas—three orange and one unearthly-looking, chalky pink gathered in a blue vase on the nightstand beside Ken’s bed. Lying face down next to the vase is a card and a sprig of glowing cherry red ribbon. All the colours, all colours, suddenly gain in intensity, vibrate. Em re-crosses her legs, quiets her hands in her lap, tells herself that soon she will say the right thing. It is her gift. Her right, alrighty. She is chosen.

  It’s just not working out, Marta says, sounding as if she’s addressing a servant, courteous yet firm. Leave us, please.

  It shocks Em. She has just been dismissed.

  Affronted, she waits a beat in hopes Marta spontaneously manifests a hairy chin, a squint. That she transforms into a toad.

  Please, Em then mimics—and lets her eyes graze across Ken’s prone, suffering flesh. The man himself has already almost completely withdrawn, cocooned with his own final inner preparations. Em takes her time, feeling restful. When she is done she lobs a glance at Marta and registers the open incredulity. A hovering second and Marta’s expression settles on hatred most psycho. Ghoul, she says thickly.

  Em feels dizzy. Behind her now-shut lids colour pinwheels, silver ethers pullulate. Her migraine recedes, her cheeks sting. She unshutters her eyes and regards Marta with keen satisfaction. You hurt me, she whines silently to herself. Satisfaction morphs to raw relief. Marta’s done it—Em can hate her back and feel justified. It’s like unwrapping a long-awaited, much longed-for present. Birthday girl.

  She steps on a dead rat’s nose, shrinks away. Notices the testicles, wishes she hadn’t. What kind of person notices rat testicles? Worse, why should she care that she does?

  She steels herself and gingerly nudges the rodent to the side of the track. She resumes her 6:15-mile pace. Interval training at her old high school—a five-minute drive from the local marina, so it makes sense for the occasional vermin to show.

  On the way to the track she’d driven through quiet residential streets, lawns and rock gardens amply, artfully lanterned and sentinelled by statuesque oaks and maples, cars presumably secreted away inside garages and carports since the start of the dinner hour. Inside the houses, lights were on, TVs. Rolling by she had an echoey fretful sense there was something contained within these walls she was supposed to know but didn’t.

  She rests, sipping her energy drink. Recalling those coiffed homes, she has a distinct feeling of unreality. In a corner of her brain skirl endles
sly receding planes, rotating views labeled one through pi barely captive in water-blotched blueprints. She must be dehydrated, her body’s electrolyte imbalance and depleted glycogen stores playing tricks with her mind. She swigs heartily from her bottle, hopes she won’t have another headache.

  She undertakes another mile. Part way through she notices a knot-like sensation where her heel conjoins her leg—tendonitis. A marked decrease in flexibility, as if she’s growing a hoof.

  She feels badly in other ways. Her earlier exultation at having duked with Marta has faded. What if she lodges a formal complaint against Em? The last thing she needs is to go down tainted in her files as a narcissistic freak with affect-deficit issues. Making it unscathed through div school and getting one’s own parish is difficult enough these days, what with everyone and their auntie getting religion—something about the job market, the economy, the hellishly fragile world. A rill of abjection scorches along the skin on her back like a lacey ruff, a spongy mushroom-like sensation, a lamella burn. She is tired so she speeds up, a trick she learned from coach Doug down in the big city, where she trains during the school year.

  After a lap, she checks her watch on the fly. Shit, shit. She’s working harder only to go more slowly. She can tell that her form is off kilter, strides uneven and inaccurate, shoulders jutting far forward in front of her hips like some weird animal concoction. A jackalope with citrine eyes and an amethyst for a heart, unnaturally animate, its locomotion strained and awkward as it transports itself. It—she, she wryly muses, stopping, hands on her hips—would stink something awful. An annihilating, dreadful funk that would protect her from extinction.

  She doubles over from the waist. Halved, she stretches, panting, lets her tongue unravel from her mouth and hang loosely over her salty lips.