Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection. Nell Zink
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Название: Mislaid & The Wallcreeper: The Nell Zink Collection
Автор: Nell Zink
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Современная зарубежная литература
isbn: 9780008139933
isbn:
Peggy thought about the poets’ ability to fund their own publications and wasn’t so sure. Lee had a friend with a printing press—not Linotype or the new offset kind, but movable type made of lead—and with it he could make anything Lee wrote look valuable. And the Stillwater Review could turn anything into poetry just by publishing it, even forty-one reiterations of “c*nt” arranged in the shape of the Empire State Building. “Poets were not put here to put labels on the world,” he explained to her. “If that poem is about anything, it’s about the act of reading. To cite it for obscenity, you’d have to say what it means, which is why I can publish it.”
“I don’t like it,” she said. “It turns cunts into a penis.”
“Cunts were made for penises. What you do with yours is your business, but those are the facts. Nothing else was ever made for penises. Never slowed me down. It’s a free country.” He lit up a Tareyton and blew a smoke ring that nearly crossed the room.
Peggy was inexperienced, but a feeling of unease told her things were not necessarily going to end well.
The spring was a little warmer than usual. By April you could drink and bullshit with poets around the fire all night. She had thought poets were different, but by then she knew they just bullshit like good old boys everywhere. You could take winos off the sidewalk in front of the drugstore and teach them to be poets in half an hour. They’d refuse, or maybe the ones who were closet homosexuals would say yes, but they all could have done it, and better than college girls, because college girls have inhibitions to get over. The people who talked revolution made out like if you just overcame whatever was holding you back inside, you’d be free. But you’d just be a wino in front of a drugstore, saying whatever came into your head in the most provocative way you could think of, repeating and refining it because how else were you going to kill a hundred and fifty thousand hours until your father died in a crash. The poets reminded her of barflies, in love with their own wisecracks, stiffing the bartender because they don’t know what work is. But freedom isn’t speaking your mind freely. Freedom is having the money to go to Mexico.
“Jesus, Peggy. You can’t abort a seven-month baby. That’s infanticide. You need to get your daddy down here with a shotgun, because I keep on forgetting to marry you. And I do want to marry you.”
“So marry me now.” Peggy had heard of alimony. She wasn’t sure how much you get and if it’s enough to live on, but it had to be better than being an unwed teenage mother. She was barely eighteen and wouldn’t be grown up for three more years. They could have put her in a home for wayward girls.
“Dare me,” Lee said.
“I double-dare you with whipped cream and a cherry on top.”
He called a magistrate and arranged to be married the next afternoon for fifteen dollars.
When she had the baby, she couldn’t believe how beautiful he was. Rhys! She picked the name out all by herself. Labor was easy, no worse than cramps, which always made her feel like she was giving birth to a calf, then five hours in the hospital and there he was. He lay on a little cart, wrapped up in blue blankets, while she drank juice. Lee’s mother picked him up and said, “Welcome to the world, little Harry!”
“What are you doing, Mrs. Fleming?” Peggy said. “Give me my baby.”
“You didn’t really want this baby, did you now. Not from what I hear.”
“Lee!” she yelled. “Lee!”
Lee came in from the hallway. “Yes, dear? Well, would you look at that. My lord. What a sweetheart. Just look at him. Aw. Cleans up real nice.”
“His name is Rhys,” Peggy said. “Rhys Byrd Fleming. Do you like it?”
“But we’re christening him Harry,” Lee’s mother said.
“Moms, drop it. This is my wife. I’m his father. This not y’all’s baby. This my baby! Yes, sir! Who’s my baby!” He took Rhys and kissed him on the cheek, then leaned down and kissed Peggy.
“Well, we’ll be happy to help take care of him, if you need any help,” Lee’s mother said.
“You know what,” Peggy said, “I think it’s time I tried feeding him. Could we have a little time alone?”
“Yes, could you weigh anchor, darling?” Lee said.
“I’ll go fix you some formula,” his mother said, looking around for supplies. “Don’t tell me you’re going to—no. I refuse to believe it.”
“It’s the natural way,” Peggy said. “It’s good for him.”
“You’ll be tied to that baby like a ball and chain. You can’t let him out of your sight and no one can help you with him. No self-respecting woman does that. It’s like turning yourself into an animal.”
“I got news for you, lady. Guess where he came from.”
“Don’t get all in a snit,” Lee said.
“But that’s exactly it,” his mother said. “You don’t know the chemical composition. There could be anything in there. It’s unscientific.”
“Science gave us the bomb and DDT,” Peggy said.
“Moms,” Lee said, pushing his mother toward the door, “please just let us handle this. It will be fine. It will be right as rain. Little Rhys Byrd here is a Fleming. If anybody can survive mother’s milk, he can. She’s just, I don’t know,” he said, turning to Peggy as he looked for a word, “anxious. It’s her first grandchild.”
“She sure acts like an expert.”
“Well, she raised me. That’s what makes me think anyone can do it.”
There was no circumcision. Lee said circumcision was dreamed up by moralists and lotion salesmen to make hand jobs chafe, and Peggy deferred to his better judgment.
She settled in with baby Byrdie. She did all the housework. She did more laundry than had ever been done before at Lee’s house, and by September you could see exactly where on the front lawn the septic system was, traced out in darker bluegrass.
She couldn’t fit into the clothes she’d bought for school, so she wore Lee’s polo shirts. She seldom got around to washing her hair, and it seemed to be coming uncurled. Her breasts were heavy and sore. But she felt that the thing that was terribly wrong with her would soon be all right. The thing that was wrong with her was so right about Lee and Byrdie that she figured it didn’t matter. They were in perfect health and looked like they belonged in magazine advertisements for shirts and baby food, respectively. She looked like their maintenance man.
Lee had visitors who sat by the fire and bullshitted until long after СКАЧАТЬ