The Traveling Death and Resurrection Show - Ariel Gore [5]
I wonder if Magdelena’s thinking about the man she left when we took our show on the road, the one who soon married her look-alike and settled down to children and office work. Or maybe it’s dawning on her that she might never get famous. “You only get one chance at this life,” she says gravely, then winks at me. “No room to screw up.”
I think to tell Magdelena about my own creeping anxiety and road weariness, but just then Madre Pia peers around the black door frame. “You ladies ready?” And for the first time all season, a shimmer of stage fright flashes across my chest. I look down at my palms. How strange that these tiny pink scars have become my way in this world.
Chapter 3
HUNGER
What can I tell you about my particular talent? Doesn’t every child deform herself somehow in order to get what she needs from the strange grown-ups who tower over her, offering and withholding love and sustenance at chaotic intervals? Doesn’t everyone learn, eventually, to trace patterns from that chaos?
You’re no saint yourself. Surely you, too, developed some ploy—maybe a series of ploys—to melt your father’s icy gaze, your mother’s waxy distraction. Maybe you learned a little dance that grabbed her attention just as she got that first twinkle of a faraway look in her eye, nostalgia for a season before you were born. Olives heavy on the branch.
As you grew, taller every year but still helpless and dependent, you learned the perfect joke that could turn base rage into laughter. You made your own kind of sense of the grown-ups’ world, learned to tease affection from annoyance, draw milk from exhaustion. It’s survival, nothing to be ashamed of.
My trick to stave off the grown-ups’ depression was unusually graphic, I’ll give you that. Or—who knows?—maybe it isn’t unusual at all. Maybe it’s as common as sin. Maybe it’s just one of those things that goes unconfessed. In any case, I’ve never actually met anyone else who’ll admit to the ability to bleed at will.
I’ve tried a hundred times to pinpoint the exact memory-scene—the first time I performed my trick. But my recollections refuse to stack themselves into neat chronological piles. My childhood is a shuffle of undated events and images. No matter. I’ll pull a card. We’ll say I’m seven years old. We’ll call it the first time:
I stood barefoot in our narrow green-carpeted living room.
God, I’m hungry.
My grandmother wept in her tattered gold armchair, the light from the small TV screen flickering like a candle.
I fixed my gaze on the wall behind her, on the rosaries that hung from rusted nails, then on the bright Easter portrait of Our Lord above. His blessed face shone like the sun behind him, and I knew—I could just tell—Our Good Lord was well fed. He stood with his hands outstretched, palms still bleeding from his Good Friday ordeal.
My stomach growled. I stared helplessly at the image of Our Lord, wished he’d show up, just this once, to multiply a few fish and loaves like he did in the olden days, but I knew it was useless. Even multiplication couldn’t help me now. Zero times zero equals zero. Empty refrigerator.
I could’ve gotten something myself, I knew I could, but I also knew I wasn’t allowed to cross the street to Kim’s Groceries by myself, wasn’t allowed to climb up onto the countertop in our closet of a kitchen to reach the raw potatoes in the high cupboard.
I was a patient girl, but my grandmother had been crouched like this for days, crying “What kind of God?” and “What kind of God?”
I closed my eyes, stretched my arms out like the image of our resurrected Lord. I forced all the pain and strength of my hunger up from my belly, up into my head, then out, out, out through my limbs. I concentrated on my hands. The dull ache of my hunger felt like nails.
“Nana,” I whispered, half-opening my eyes.