“What the fuck is that, Gudrun?” Ruby snapped. Her infamous velvet voice sliced up the air between them like claws.
“Nothing, Mama!”
But Ruby was on top of her before she could stash Chet Hardtree and the Adoratron Mark 5 in her back jeans pocket. Those gorgeous blue eyes that once made senators swoon seared into her daughter, accusing, such a strange, dark shade of blue, like a lantern-fish’s deep-sea heart. Tears wavered in her dark lashes.
“Baby, baby,” Ruby whispered, sobs hitching somewhere behind her words, “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to yell. Don’t cry, I don’t want to shame you, preciousness. Mumsy’s not looking to scar you for life. It’s only…sweetie…you just can’t stack the blue mugs with the red ones! The warm colors and the cool colors have to stay separate, they have to, or else, or else…the balance will be upset…the balance of space and time and you and me and goodness and badness…baby, it’s so important, you have to learn…here, honey, see? They go left to right, like a spectrum. See?”
“I’ll learn, Mama,” Gudrun said softly, as her mother carefully re-arranged the universe, keeping ever her hands quarantined, left for reds and oranges and golds and bisques and pinks, right for blues and greens and blacks and purples and greys. And in between the two tottering ceramic columns of being and non-being, Ruby stacked three tins of Cold Palace Brand No. 1 Silver Needle Tea, a bulwark against contamination.
15. The Gardener Plants His Seed
Published 1927, Adonis Editions, 114 pages
Murray staked his claim in the Pemberley gardens ten years exactly after Ruby died. He wasn’t a local bird—the wild fowl running around the Ko’olau Range were skinny and skittish and rarely came up to Gudrun altitude. Murray was a splendid tall fat fellow with a proud bronze chest as iridescent as a peacock, a brilliant blue face and a throat as red as a Russian spy. Gudrun stumbled out in her long johns to check the rain barrels and the bean runners and whack a guava off her tree for breakfast and there he sat like a fancy lord between the eggplants and the red cabbage, mist dappling his chest like silver armor. He looked like he could hardly move under the weight of his finery.
The moment Murray saw Gudrun, love blossomed at Pemberley. He could move, and wonderfully. Murray puffed up his chest and sprang his thick fan of chocolate-colored tail feathers, his long neck flushed white, and he began to prance back and forth in front of her, dragging his grand speckled wings through the leek plants, telling her all he knew of turkey life. Not gobbling, as Gudrun thought all turkeys did and all they could do, but a barking, bellowing, drumming caw deep in his breast, a cry of desperate, loud, unlovely want that she recognized instantly, in her bones and her blood. If she had the anatomy for it, Gudrun would have made that sound at everyone she ever met. Please want me. Please know me. Please come with me and keep my eggs warm and secret and safe. Please don’t devour me. There is so little time left.
14. The Serpent in Eve’s Eden
Published 1933, Red Light Limiteds, 144 pages
Eventually, the truth came out of Ruby like an infected organ.
Gudrun couldn’t go to school because of the poisons, poisons everywhere, a toxicity so total that the two of them could only escape it by staying here, on the island, far away from the corrupted mainland. But that was not enough, not by half. The village was lost already. They had to make Pemberley a fortress, a haven, an outpost in a sea of infection. Up here, and only up here, they could stay safe. Didn’t Guddy see it was absurd and obscene to come all this way, then turn right around and send her from their cozy little bastion into the heart of miasma, into a swarm of germ-infested children and virulent teachers where Gudrun’s little body would be lashed with horrors? An invisible murderous horde waited down there: lead in the paint they use on pencils and plastic wrap and in water pipes and gasoline and lunch plates and gym walls, invisible radon gas seething from underground, fluoridated water to make the population docile, pesticides lacquering every scrap of food you didn’t grow yourself, bleach in the wheat and the milk, formaldehyde lathered on hormone-riddled hamburgers to make meat look fresh and injected in your arm to keep you fresh only then they called it vaccination, and the worst of it all, the radiation, radiation like a terrible golden rain everywhere, all the time, leftover from the bombs in Japan and the secret tests in the atolls, oozing from refrigerators and power lines and those new microwave ovens and planes overhead, from the radio waves pounding their heads constantly like the sea against the shore, and the sun, the broken, angry sun bleeding through holes in the sky no one could see but they’re there, Guddy, just because you can’t see it doesn’t mean it can’t kill you. Only Pemberley was safe, hoisted up above the venomous earth, beneath a thatched and metal-less roof, far from the soup of contagion that was other people and convenience and basic technology.
Ruby grabbed her daughter’s hands as tight as steel screws. Her nails dug in.
“Listen to me, baby. I know. Aggie told me everything one night years ago. We lay in a giant bed in the St. Francis Hotel and looked out over the San Francisco lights, down the rainy streets toward the Convention where Ike and ol’ Dickie were shaking their jowls and dodging balloons and he cried in my arms, Guddy. He said in thirty years, there’ll be nothing living on this planet but brine shrimp. Even the cockroaches will go. Every continent will be buried under irradiated human bones like snow. They can’t stop it. It’s already happening. They just don’t want people to panic. Let them enjoy their last days. But I know. I know the truth. And it’s not gonna get me. I’m gonna stick it out till the end. I’m gonna see the snow.”
But she didn’t, because Ruby got cancer anyway, even though she never drank the tap water.
13. Punishing the Teacher’s Pet
Published 1940, French Letter Books, 150 pages
Ruby proved to be no help at all. Her knowledge was enormous but haphazard, picked up discount from many flea markets of t
he mind, and useless to a twelve-year-old girl, unless she needed to understand how Russians had infiltrated the Manhattan Project or the CIA experiments with psychedelic drugs and astral projection. Besides, they had to get the garden in. The sooner they could stop relying on commercial products, the better for both of them.
Gudrun took herself in hand. She slept with Jack’s O.E.D. under her head, the constant, dripping humidity having softened it to a serviceable pillow. She peeled quickly through the fairy tales and Communist philosophy, feeling strongly both that the witch in the candy hut was framed and that the tragedy of the commons was so much bullshit, lingered briefly on the detective novels before deciding that it was nearly always safe to say that whoever loved the dead most had killed them, and finally, plunged headfirst into the real meat of the Oskander library, afraid at any moment that Ruby would stop her and burn the lot for compost ash.
She didn’t, but after the first week settling in, Ruby forbade her daughter to read two books together whose titles did not begin with adjoining letters of the alphabet. This would upset the balance of causality, just as a misalignment of the mugs would upset the balance of heat and cold.
Gudrun ignored the rule completely, and many years later, would ask Murray if he thought that was why it all happened the way it did. Murray thought the chances were about 50/50.
12. Cleopatra’s Chamber of Forbidden Love
Published 1957, Blue Fairy Books, 188 pages
There are worse educations than Gudrun’s. Enough pornography gathered together in one place constitutes a complete history of the world.
She wedged herself into the snug space made by the triangle of Historical (Hetero), Historical (Homo), and Historical (Lesbian) sections, beginning with the incestuous passion of Egypt’s pharaohs and the flesh gardens of Babylon, then on to the lascivious sworn bands of Greece and the sweat-drenched bath houses of Rome, the perfumed harems and enticing eunuchs of Byzantium, the medieval world full of lusty wenches and protected princesses and tragic Jewesses and wicked Inquisitors, the Italian decadence of the Renaissance and the frantic, nihilistic love of the plague years, the dandies of the Restoration seizing their servants in unjust and unbridled lust, the restrained and suffocated libidos of the Regency, the sadism of French aristocrats on the eve of revolution, the starched Victorian bodies writhing in unmet needs, the love of lieutenants and enlisted men in the trenches of the First World War, on and on into the modern world of class war between the working class mechanic and the rich man’s wife, the international intrigue of the Soviet spy and the American virgin, the mathematical possibilities of wife swapping, the oppression of the black man and his white bride, the night nurses in secret love, the sailors who dare not give in to their longings, the heaving social unrest of such vast need, unspoken, unanswered, in a long unbroken chain down the endless ages of man.
11. A Bird in the Hand is Worth Two Bushes
Published 1962, Adonis Editions, 115 pages
Murray was born in Texas. He never said anything about it to Gudrun, but sometimes, in the autumn, he still dreamt of the dry, crisping sun on the Rio Grande, the smell of smokefires and thirsty weeds. Nothing was ever thirsty here.