There was a big fat man talking to his brother, a wiry skinny man; they were eating. At one point in their lives these two men had eaten dinner together daily in a Brooklyn tenement now sentimentalized in their memories, but these days they hardly ever ate together, hardly ever saw each other. Still, they were brothers. Married with children, each one had become a storeowner in the Bronx. Skinny Victor was a moneymaker living in the suburbs, a conservative. Fat Aaron was poorer: his store was a financial mess and he lived in a housing project; often he favored liberal and sometimes even radical speechmaking. They had both married brunettes. One brunette, the wife of fat Aaron, seemed depressed. Her gestures were choppy and uncoordinated. Skinny Victor’s wife took better care of her appearance: her hair was set nightly on rollers, her lipstick was never an out-of-date shade, but at night she occasionally sobbed in a way that was familiar to her sister-in-law.
Dinner had been prepared by Iris, fat Aaron’s wife. She had perspired over the stove all day, praying that the casserole come out perfectly, afraid of burning the crust. She had also defrosted some lamb chops (in case of disaster with the casserole) and cooked broccoli and made a soup and tossed a large salad. She had set out three types of bottled salad dressing: California Onion, Russian, Low-Calorie Russian. During her last pregnancy the difficult one with Carly, she had developed a love for Russian dressing. For months she had poured Russian dressing onto corn muffins, into yogurt, onto scrambled eggs. Then she would throw up each night around nine o’clock.
“Perhaps,” she whispered as she placed napkins down, “I should have named Carly something more appropriate, like Natasha or Tania.” Smiling was barely a reflex for her anymore.
Iris’ other daughter, Carly’s older sister Jo Ellen, had a long nose. For a seven-year-old she had an exceptionally long nose. Her school peers called her Nosy, Rudolf, and Snotface. Of course Jo Ellen hated her sister Carly. Carly was pugnosed and blue eyed; even strangers on buses told Iris that she should get her into television commercials. “Art Linkletter would love that one,” a woman in a supermarket had said. Once, Iris had run wildly into the girls’ bedroom when she heard Carly shrieking, “Mommy Mommy Mommy!” and there Jo Ellen had been, poised to strike Carly over the head with the metal iron. But the scar on the side of Carly’s nose, the jagged hole with slightly lumpy skin next to it (barely noticeable after awhile) had appeared one day because Iris hadn’t heard Carly’s yells, or had ignored them, or hadn’t understood them. In any case, Iris couldn’t remember what she had been doing at the exact moment that the scissors had flown from Jo Ellen’s hand into Carly’s skin.
Paul, the only son and oldest of the three children of Aaron and Iris, didn’t like Jo Ellen most of the time. She had too mean a streak, shoplifted too often from the candy store, and kissed the television screen whenever a Spin and Marty episode was shown on The Mouseketeers. Paul was eleven-years-old. He liked Carly, even though she was spoiled and demanded too much attention, especially when his friends were around. But she was cute and she was tough, and he had hopes of her becoming a lady wrestler some day. He stood silently hidden sometimes, watching her play in the project grounds with her girlfriends. She never let anyone get away with anything: Carly could hit for real, and he felt proud. After she’d broke her arm (jumping off the monkeybars) she’d gone wild with the power of the cast, hitting everything in her way; even then, even when his own nose got bloodied, he felt proud.
Now while the four parents seated at the kitchen table ate the dinner which Iris had prepared, while they spread their thighs comfortably on the four plastic orange chairs, Carly and Paul and Jo Ellen played in another room with Mimi and Shushie, the daughters of Victor and Lydia. Mimi hated Shushie. She didn’t mind Carly that much because she rarely saw her, but she hated the urine smell which Shushie, a chronic bedwetter, invariably carried around with her. Victor screamed and yelled at Mimi at least twice each week, and was given to beating her at least once each weekend if he’d been drinking, but he called Shushie “Princess Sha-Sha” and “Princess Shut Up” and never touched her.
Shushie had quietly peed on the floor of Paul’s room. Jo Ellen and Mimi whispered together and then announced that although Shushie had obviously done it, Carly was probably resisting the desire to do the same. “Carly,” they said, “is still a baby.” Paul, feeling left out, sang, “Carly likes piss, she makes piss and eats piss. . .”
“You eat shit and stuff,” Carly answered.
Shushie clung to Carly’s arm.
Jo Ellen pinched Carly’s other arm. “I’m going to tell Daddy that you made Shushie pee, that you pulled down her panties for her, that you made her do it, and that you tasted it like a dog! Like a pig!”
Mimi said matter-of-factly, “Carly, you know that Uncle Aaron will beat you up.”
“Why me? Why not Shushie? I didn’t pee on the floor!”
Jo Ellen smiled. “So what? You’re still a pig. You keep our room a mess, Mommy says you’re disgusting.” She hopped around the room.
“Jo, you don’t have to keep calling her a pig,” Paul said.
Jo Ellen stopped hopping. “Mommy found you in your crib when you were a baby covered with shit and vomit and even diarrhea, don’t forget it! I heard her telling Aunt Lydia that story. You were covered, in your hair, in your face, even in your mouth!”
Carly began to run. She would leave little clinging Shushie behind, leave Jo Ellen with her nose and fury behind, leave taunting Mimi and confused Paul. She would run, they could all sit in the piss for all she cared, they could drown in it. “Eat it yourself!” she yelled and began to run, enjoying the sensation of flight: out of the bedroom, racing through the living room weaving in and out of the two Woolworth coffee tables and the small table which her father had built — she could run forever, it felt so good — around the fish tank, the plants, the bookcase, over the lamp and television wires, into the kitchen, past the kitchen table . . . Her father was lifting a glass of black cherry soda to his lips. Carly raced by, running freely, somehow knocking the red and white dotted glass from his hand, then racing faster as it fell to the floor. The glass broke, causing the black-red liquid to pour onto the kitchen floor which Iris had mopped that morning. Aaron stood up. He was sick and tired of Carly knocking his food, her own food, everyone’s food and drink to the floor. She never sat still, she never even sat in a chair; instead, like a goddamned flamingo with one leg crossed under her and the other one of the floor so that she stood rather than sat, bouncing and eating, picking out lima beans from her soup with her fingers and leaving them on the table in mushy little heaps. She held the fork wrong. She fidgeted so much in restaurants that she knocked over her chair, even the time that Monty Hall was at the next table the night they all went to The Brass Rail. Carly kept running, into the bathroom. She locked the door, double locked it, pushed the clothes hamper against it, piled on top of the hamper bottles of shampoo, soap powder boxes, stomach relaxers, every box or bottle in sight. She sat down in the white bathtub, pulling the lima bean green shower curtain closed around her.
She would live inside the bathroom and never come out. She could do it if she wanted to. There was toothpaste in the bathroom, there was soap and water so she would be clean. There were things to touch and play with so that her fingers wouldn’t become crazy with boredom, but there would be nothing to draw with, yes there would! The four red lipstick tubes in the medicine chest, and the nailpolish, too. They would never be able to get her. Her father would kill her if he ever saw her again. She would lock herself in the bathroom all night, and then when her mother went shopping or to the laundry, she would come out. She would pack some shirts and shorts and her favorite doll, Black-Haired-Bazooka-Lady, and run for her life. Paul and Jo Ellen would be in school, so they wouldn’t have any idea where she had gone. She would leave rather than face him. She remembered the time that she had spilled her dinner on the floor, by accident, and he had forced her to eat a little bit right off the floor, while her mother had stood by the cabinet saying, “Aaron, stop it!” But she had said, “Mommy, I don’t care. I’ll do it, I’ll do it, he wants me to do it, I’ll do it.” And on her hands and knees she had crept to the food, listlessly touching some with her tongue and then saying, “Okay Daddy?” never expecting him to thrust his foot forward almost into her face and say, “Eat it all, just for that, you snotty wretch!”
The bathtub felt cool and soothing. Why did she have to knock it out of his hand, of all the people eating dinner? Mommy or Aunt Lydia wouldn’t have minded, they might have even laughed. Uncle Victor would have frowned and turned red, but she wasn’t his daughter. Why did the glass have to break into so many tiny pieces? Why did Mimi and Jo Ellen say she ate piss? They were the disgusting ones, they were the pigs. Shushie was just a baby who didn’t understand and she would try not to hate Shushie. But the thought of Shushie with her dripping nose made her sick.
Carly had promised herself long before this day that her tears, if and when she allowed them, would be short. “He won’t ever make me cry again,” she thought. “Fuck him, fuck him, I won’t cry because I didn’t do it on purpose, I’ll never come out, he’ll only miss me for a day or two, and for all I care he can use the Boys’ Bathroom in the playground tonight. I don’t care if he never goes to the bathroom again for the rest of his life. He takes all day in there, and Mommy says I should pee into a rubber bucket when Daddy is in the bathroom, because he gets angry if we ask him to hurry. He’s embarrassed because he has ‘bathroom problems.’ And if it’s a real emergency, we have to say, ‘Daddy, please, I really need it, I’m sorry, it’s a real emergency.’ And he gets mad and says, ‘In a minute, in a minute’ and comes out ten minutes later holding his crossword puzzle, and then he stands outside the door waiting until we’re finished.”
But the times when her father was in a good mood and he would hear Carly go into the bathroom (his bedroom was next door to the bathroom so he knew who went in and out) he sang songs to her outside the bathroom door.
Oh Pretty Carly The face that sank one thousand ships Oh Pretty Carly The sweetest eyes in all the town . . .
Once, as she was emerging from the bathroom, he had solemnly told her to follow him into the bedroom. His bedroom was usually off limits except for beatings. “You’re the pretty one,” he said after he had her sit down on his bed. “Paul is a boy, and Jo Ellen isn’t pretty at all, let’s face it. She’s smart no doubt, but no beauty, you’re the beauty, the one that the neighbors all want to steal. The Bennys wouldn’t mind if one night we forgot to close the front door so they could sneak in and take you away.”
Paul’s voice was suddenly outside the bathroom door. “. . . gonna get it, Daddy’s mad as shit, you better come out, Carly.”
Carly said nothing. If she didn’t talk or move, maybe they’d decide that a cockroach had eaten her, or a wasp had stung her to death. Why couldn’t Paul step in and stop the beating? It wasn’t fair, any of it. Paul got beaten even harder than she and Jo Ellen and he was a boy and the oldest and he couldn’t stop it. And he was supposed to be the generous one of the three of them, and even that didn’t help.
“Leave her inside, let her rot in there if she wants to,” said Jo Ellen. “And when you do finally come out, not only is Daddy going to beat you up, but Paul and I are going to take you into The Dark Room!”
The Dark Room. That means that they shut the lights and pulled her inside and shrieked, “Oh, come into The Dark Room, Carly, come inside The Dark Room, where little girls are eaten by monsters, little snotty girls.”
Whenever her parents went to the movies, which was once a week, every single week, Paul and Jo Ellen pulled her inside the bedroom and shut the lights. They would push her down hard on the bed and say she could never come out, never, and they would pinch and tickle. She would push and yell and fight her way outside, kicking and biting if she had to. She had bitten Paul’s arm so deeply once that he had yelped like Mimi’s dog.
Sometimes only Jo Ellen would be interested. Paul would be doing something alone in the room with the door shut. But Jo Ellen and Carly shared a room, and then Jo Ellen would push Carly down and say, “I’m the Va Va Voom, and I’m going to eat up YOU!” and she would pounce and hit, yelling “Va Va Voom Forever!” If Carly could gather her strength, she could possibly reverse positions. One time she had thrown Jo Ellen down and stuffed a pillow over her face, chanting over and over, “The Ugly Witch is Dead!” Jo Ellen had been very still, allowing Carly to chant until Carly grew scared and pulled the pillow off. Then Jo Ellen jumped up screaming, “Va Va Voom will eat you alive!” Carly had fallen off the bed, crying. But she never cried for long. Nobody even noticed, sometimes if she was quiet enough. She made sure that she never hiccoughed afterwards like her friends did when they cried. Mostly she got a lump in her throat that stayed. There was a dream she kept having that stayed also: the dream about gorillas invading the housing project and eating everyone up except for Carly and her mother, who chose to jump out the kitchen window instead, holding hands, rather than to die at the hands of the gorillas. In another dream the gorillas became octopi.
Her father pounded on the door. “You’ve been in there for almost an hour! Get out!” She jumped up. Her mother’s voice spoke, “Carly, Daddy’s very angry this time. You’d better come out now.”
Carly pulled the hamper from the door, scattering the shampoos and boxes and bottles onto the floor. She ran out. Her father’s arm reached and she was inside his bedroom, the door shut, her panties were forced down and she was hit so hard that she felt her skin wanting to bleed, although he hit her for a very short time, probably, really. And then she knew enough to say that she was sorry, Daddy, sorry, Daddy.
