Alligator - Lisa Moore [13]
The elevator lifted and Colleen thought of the runny egg she’d had for breakfast, a spot of blood on the yolk, nastily red and glossy. The judge took one of the files from under his arm and, licking his finger, flicked through the pages until he found something. Then turned to her and stared.
You the bulldozers? he asked.
I’m the bulldozers, she said. The wattle that hung under his chin shook after he spoke.
If you were mine I’d have the snot beat out of you, the judge said. They rose to the fifth floor. The doors started to open and then half-closed and then opened and the judge started down the corridor and then turned on his heel.
I knew your father, young lady, he said. And let me tell you, he’s turning over in his grave.
On Christmas morning David had taken a long time with the present, shaking it next to his ear, pausing to register bewilderment, careful with the wrapping paper. Even at six years old, she could see that he was genuinely moved. He unscrewed each lid, sniffed, and then screwed it back on tightly and fitted each bottle back into the squeaky Styrofoam box.
This one smells like a walk in the woods, he said.
The cologne eventually made its way up to the cupboard under the sink in the guest bathroom, behind the pipes, containers of Comet, cleaning rags. It remained there, even after David died, the plastic window of the box covered in a fur of dust.
BEVERLY
BEVERLY WATCHES THE numbers over the elevator doors flick up and then down. The doors open again and close and her daughter is gone. Colleen will be scolded and made to feel small. She wills her daughter a spiny fortitude, even if she was incomprehensibly wrong. Let her stand up to the lawyers and social workers and Mr. Duffy of the tampered-with bulldozers. It had turned out — thank God — sugar doesn’t do much harm to an engine, but Mr. Duffy had worked up the sort of self-satisfying rage that requires a refined feminine cunning to mollify.
Beverly thinks suddenly of the rooster eggcup that had once belonged to her grandmother. As a toddler, Colleen had hurled the eggcup at the fridge and cracked off the rooster’s head. Beverly had been inconsolable. An instant, jagged disappointment entirely out of proportion had ripped through her as she watched the china head dance over the kitchen tiles. The broken eggcup had brought her to an understanding: being a mother was an entrapment.
She had felt from the moment Colleen became visible in the mirror of the birthing room (she had screamed at the nurse, Tilt the goddamn thing, I can’t see) a profound rapture the magnitude of which dwarfed any sort of emotion she would ever feel again. It was a flooding hormonal love that never balanced itself out, never gained an even footing.
But her life was also irrevocably changed after the birth. She had been robbed of a store of vital, combative energy. Breastfeeding was an enchantment that caused her to drift into afternoon naps full of erotic dreams from which she woke blissful and useless.
Beverly had loved her grandmother — a fisherman’s wife with a loose, shiny grey bun and a network of delicate blood vessels over her cheeks. Her grandmother had bequeathed the beloved eggcup just before her death.
This morning Beverly had put the eggcup in front of Colleen without a word. It was an inscrutable reproach. Then she’d turned and stood at the kitchen window.
Colleen tapped the shell and the undercooked yolk streamed a hazard-tape yellow over the rooster’s wing and onto the saucer beneath. It made her gag, quietly, but she ate every quivering spoonful.
There were crystal prisms hanging in the windows all over