Honeydew: Stories Read online

  “What is it, Henry?” And she did an eager jig on her high heels.

  He didn’t relinquish the little square. “It’s an excellent photograph of the separation of the labia with a speculum, a wooden one for heaven’s sake—the thing ought to be in a museum.” At last he handed the slide to Gabrielle.

  What a strange mystery lay between a woman’s legs. The skin of thigh and pubis was the same grainy brown as the old instrument, but within the opening all was garnet and ruby. “Yes, too…graphic.”

  Henry adjusted the carousel on her coffee table. He held another slide to the light.

  “What’s that, Henry?”

  “A trachelectomy…a sort of D and C. I hope they used some analgesic, something more than the leaves from the stinging nettle.”

  “Why is she sending slides we can’t show?”

  “She wants to remind us that despite our efforts, despite our money, the practice continues.” He switched off the lights. They sat in the dark, and Henry clicked, and the wall above Gabrielle’s couch—she had removed her Dufy print—became a screen. Gabrielle and Henry watched unseen hands manipulating visible instruments.

  “Surgery is thrilling,” he mused. “Do you mind if I smoke? These village witches probably get a kick out of it. You divorce yourself from everything except the task at hand. Your gestures are swift, like a bird’s beak plucking a worm. The flesh responds as you expect. Someone else takes care of the mess.”

  Gabrielle imagined herself collecting blood in a cloche.

  Click. “An excellent example of splitting the clitoral hood. Sometimes they excise the external genitalia, too, and then stitch the vaginal opening closed. This is known as…”

  “Infibulation,” supplied Gabrielle, who was growing knowledgeable. She too was enjoying a rare cigarette.

  Click. “Here’s a procedure not yet legal here.” An instrument was attacking something within a vagina; there was a glimpse of a pregnant abdomen. “They are destroying the infant’s cranium,” said Henry.

  IV.

  With her usual thoroughness Gabrielle went beyond her official chapter assignments. Often on one of her days off, Wednesday or Thursday, she visited Selene in her town, once thriving with factories, now supported, Henry said, by the welfare industry.

  There were houses in Pittsburgh too that had been home to factory hands—little brick two-stories, near the river. But there they had been rehabilitated and now belonged to young academic gentry. Here they belonged to the wretched. Here immigrants and their children and a stream of relatives packed themselves into the structures and onto their uneasy porches. The railroad station was a mile away. Gabrielle walked from the train along a broad and miserable street, never wobbling in her high heels though she was always carrying two bulging paper bags. She took a right and a left and fetched up at Selene’s shanty. She distributed toys and clothing to the children, and delicacies to Selene—it would have been insulting, she knew, to bring grocery items, and anyway there were food stamps for those. She played with the kids, she talked to Selene, she learned songs, she admired the proverbs that Selene had embroidered on cloth and nailed to the walls. A cow must graze where she is tied. Men fall in order to rise. Some were less explicit, riddles, really. A bird does not fly into the arrow. “A woman does not seek a man,” interpreted Selene.

  At nine o’clock on those occasions Selene’s consort drove Gabrielle to the last train in his pickup truck. He had a spade-shaped face, as if his jaw had been elongated by force. One Wednesday he didn’t return to the house in time to drive her—as it turned out, he didn’t return at all.

  “Stay with me,” Selene said with a shrug.

  The children were asleep. It had been a mild wet spring, and Gabrielle’s raincoat and scarf were hanging on a hook in Selene’s bedroom. She took off her little dress and hung it on another hook, and took off her strapped high-heeled shoes that exactly matched the pewter of that dress, and in her silk underwear climbed into Selene’s bed. A light blanket was all they needed. They fell asleep back to back. But during the night the weather turned cool. They awoke in each other’s arms…or, rather, Gabrielle awoke in Selene’s arms, her head between warm breasts, Selene’s fingers caressing her area.

  V.

  “Minata will take the same bus I take,” Selene had said.

  Gabrielle met the bus. She had no way to recognize the new witness—so many dark-skinned people were disembarking. Perhaps Selene had told her friend Minata to look for a petite femme, stylish, nice face. Walking toward Gabrielle was a rare beauty. She wore a chartreuse raincoat made of tiny scales. Long brown hair combed back from a broad brow. Wide eyes above a simple nose. “Ms. Gabrielle?”

  “Ms. Minata?”

  They shook hands. Short skinny white woman with dyed hair and ridiculous shoes, maybe that’s what Selene had said to Minata. Brilliant blackie in a coat of fake lizard, she might have said to Gabrielle. Minata wore golden sandals. Her toenails were golden too. She carried a leather hatbox with brass fittings. “We take the subway from here, yes?”

  “Tonight, a taxi,” said Gabrielle. Goddesses don’t hang from subway straps. She explained that the Dutch doctor and an American doctor and an American lady in pink would join them for dinner in the hotel. In the cab Minata turned her head toward the city lights. “Have you been to Boston before?” Gabrielle wondered.

  “Oh, yes, it’s not the moon. It’s the Cradle of Liberty. My children learn that in school.”

  “You have borne children?” Did you wish yourself dead?

  “Five.”

  Gabrielle was quiet during dinner. She was thinking of Selene, her spectacles, her teeth, her martyred air. She was remembering Wednesdays. She was feeling the probe of Selene’s strong hand, the fingers then spreading like wings. Her own fingers always fluttered in a hesitant way, fearful of causing pain. Sometimes Selene guided them further inward…Minata too said little, was no doubt conserving her energy for the testimony. Dr. Gouda, just arrived from New York—she was on her stateside fund-raising tour—spoke in low tones to Henry. Doctor talk: the gabble of baboons.

  After coffee the little group moved to the function room. There they were greeted by a group smaller than the previous one. “Female-circumcision fatigue,” Henry whispered. She shook her earrings at him. To her relief, a few more chapter members wandered in. Perhaps they wanted to hear about the progress of the fistula hospital and the opening of a new clinic. Perhaps they wanted to see the Follies. Perhaps they wanted to listen to the witness. Perhaps they had nothing else to do.

  The evening followed the usual pattern.

  Dr. Gouda made some introductory remarks.

  The white-haired man showed the slides. Some were new, some were old, none were from the batch that Henry and Gabrielle had judged too gory.

  Minata’s presentation resembled Selene’s, though her voice had no sad lisp but instead a kind of lilt. She talked of the cutting, of the women’s belief in its necessity, of the children’s bewildered compliance. She provided a few extra details. “My cousin—they left her genitals on a rock. Animals ate them.” Gabrielle attended, her high heels hooked around the rung of the folding chair as if around the pedals of her bicycle. Her black crepe knees were raised slightly by this pose; her white satin elbows rested on those knees, her fingers laced under her little French chin.

  “It causes immediate pain,” sang Minata. “Recovery also is painful.” She bowed her head.

  “And the sequelae—the aftereffects,” urged the accented voice of Dr. Gouda.

  Minata raised her head. “Ma’am?”

  “You must have suffered further…when touched by your husband,” said the doctor in a kinder tone.

  The head rose farther. “I have never had a husband.”

  “When touched by a man…” The voice softer yet.

  “I do not usually talk about these things—”

  “Of course.”

  “—to strangers. But you are perhaps like friends. To me, being touche
d by a man is a happiness. Perhaps the cutting made it more so. I also enjoy amusement parks.”

  “Me too!” from the projector, heartily.

  “But childbirth,” moaned the barren Gabrielle.

  “Oh, one of my sons was a breech: awful. The other four children…pushing and straining, yes, you know what it’s like. Pain? No.” The listeners were silent. “It is a matter of…choice,” said Minata. “You can choose to like, to not like. ‘Wisdom does not live in only one home.’”

  Gabrielle’s aunt too had been childless. She had lived as a scorned spinster with Gabrielle and her parents, part of the dry severity of the family. In Gabrielle’s room there had been a few books, a few records, curtains with embroidered butterflies, their wings trapped within the gauzy folds. She thought of this squeezed girlhood, her careless husbands, the restrained Henry. She remembered the slides, the jeweled vagina.

  What had she chosen? Divorce, self-sufficiency, an enameled piquancy—the phrase remembered from some novel. She had achieved it all, hadn’t she. But she felt weak. (Later Henry would tell her that her blood pressure had dropped.) She grew dizzy. (He would tell her that she began helplessly to swoon.) The heels of her shoes clawed the bar of the folding chair. She toppled sideways, her shoes still clinging to life. The chair toppled too, but in a delayed manner, as if only reluctantly following its occupant.

  “Usually an ankle breaks from a fall because of the sudden weight that is exerted on it. But in your case it was the twist itself that did the work. You managed to wrench your left fibula right out of its hinge. And break a few other things, like the ankle joint, very important, a gliding joint, supports the tibia, which—”

  “My left fistula?” she said, turning toward him from her hospital bed.

  “Fibula. A bone. Poor Gabrielle.”

  “What pain I was in.”

  “You had every right to be in pain, the nerves in the foot…”

  “A different kind of pain,” she muttered.

  “…you’d be in pain now if it weren’t for that lovely drip. You won’t be able to walk without assistance for a while, old girl.”

  “Minata,” she said. Now she turned her head away from him.

  “Minata had several drinks afterward with the doctor and the projectionist.”

  “Minata betrayed the chapter.”

  “Dear Gabrielle, we surgeons can never confidently predict the outcome of our work. The midwives of Somalia…likewise.”

  She leaned forward, and some dismayed tubes shook. He slipped a pillow behind her back. She hissed at him. “You can’t say mutilation may enhance sex.”

  “Minata said it for me.”

  “‘Choice,’ she said,” Gabrielle bitterly remembered.

  “‘Luck,’ she meant,” Henry soothed. “Probably rare.”

  Gabrielle’s recovery was awful. One of the little bones failed to heal properly. “We have to go in again,” her surgeon admitted. Back to the hospital, back to rehab, back to her apartment at last. Her hairdresser couldn’t make a home visit. Her coiffure acquired a wartime negligence. Wherever she parted it a white stripe appeared.

  Still: “I have a darling device to get around the house,” she told her friends. It was like a child’s four-wheeled scooter. Rising from its running board was a post, and atop that post, at knee level, was a soft curved resting place. Gabrielle could bend her affected leg at the knee and lay her plastered shin on that resting place and then grasp the scooter’s handles and propel herself by means of her good leg. In this circus manner she went from room to room, from chair to chair, from bed to bathroom. With it as support she could water her flowers, even make an omelet.

  She received many get-well cards—from friends and coworkers, from Minata, from her aunt. I wish you a speedy recovery, wrote Selene in penmanship that resembled her samplers. Men and mannish women sent flowers—the white-haired projectionist, Dr. Gouda, Mr. Devlin of course. Henry brought books. “I could go back to work now, my surgeon says,” she told Mr. Devlin on the telephone. “With the scooter. Perhaps the guests will be amused…”

  “Come back whenever you’re equal to it,” he said, sounding harried. “Not a minute earlier. But not a minute later.”

  Another week went by and the surgeon took off her immobilizing plaster and replaced it with a fat walking cast and a crutch. The cast was white fiberglass with wide blue straps. The monstrosity reached almost to her knee. Within its unyielding embrace her bones and tendons would continue to heal. But of course she couldn’t bike. And she was to throw her high heels into the trash, the doctor said, and never buy another pair.

  Mr. Devlin sent the hotel handyman to pick her up every morning. At the end of the working day sometimes the handyman drove her home, sometimes Mr. Devlin himself, sometimes she took a cab, sometimes even Henry showed up. At least she hadn’t gained weight. But her hairdresser had rented a house in Antigua for a month.

  “Why don’t you just go gray,” said thoughtless Henry.

  She waited a minute or two, then asked, “What’s happening with the chapter?”

  “Oh, still high on the list of do-good causes,” he told her. “Contributions are up, in fact.”

  “Minata…”

  “Didn’t hurt us. May have helped us. People adjust to contradictions, you know. And she’s prettier than that horse face.”

  “She gave the lie to what we believe,” said Gabrielle, furious again.

  “Anything we believe may be disproven. Think about it, Gabby. The Salem women were possessed by the devil. Homosexuality was a sickness. Cancer was God’s punishment. False beliefs, every one.”

  “The earth still circles the sun!”

  “Today,” he admitted. “Don’t count on tomorrow.”

  VI.

  Gabrielle was working late one evening, sitting at her glass-topped desk, reviewing tomorrow’s tasks. She looked up, as was her habit: to see what was going on in the little lobby, to smile at guests in a welcoming but not forward manner. She could not avoid the glimpse of herself in the mirror beside the clerk’s desk—head striped like a skunk’s fur, leg awkwardly outstretched within the disfiguring cast, crutch waiting against a pillar like a hired escort.

  A woman stood at the elevator, her back to Gabrielle. Though she was wearing an orange jacket, not a green raincoat, and though her hair was flicked sideways into a toothed barrette, not hanging loose, Gabrielle knew who it was. The hatbox was a sort of hint. But beauty like Minata’s once seen is recognizable even from the rear—beauty originating in a place where skin is brown and teeth white and nymphectomies the local sport. Gabrielle identified also the white-pompadoured man pushing the elevator’s button.

  This is not a love hotel…She kept staring until Minata turned. Minata flashed a happy grin, and Gabrielle gave her the professional grimace with the gap where a tooth once resided.

  Minata walked across the lobby toward Gabrielle. Her eyes traveled downward and stopped at the boot. Her smile collapsed. “You must wear that thing? For healing? They tell you that?”

  “Yes. I can hobble now. When they remove it I’ll be able to walk.”

  “Do not wait. Go to Selene.”

  Gabrielle felt her face redden. Shame? No, desire: desire that had eluded her for fifty-two years until Selene, maimed Selene…

  “Hobble to her from the train station,” Minata suggested. “Or take a cab,” she added, revealing a practical streak, perhaps the very quality that enabled her to make the best of things.

  Gabrielle frowned at her own enlarged and stiffened leg.

  “Ugly but only a nuisance,” Minata said. “‘The tortoise knows how to embrace its mate.’”

  The Golden Swan

  The Golden Swan is the grandchild of the Normandie,” said Dr. Hartmann in his frail but grating voice.

  What on earth was he talking about now. His slight accent was German, she guessed.

  “I mean, Bella, that cruise ships descend from the great transatlantic liners. There was a time
, before airplanes, when if you wanted to cross the ocean you boarded a steamship.”

  His student—for Bella felt like his student, though she and Dr. Hartmann were in fact fellow passengers—fingered her limp hair. Dr. Hartmann was what you called professorial—yesterday he had delivered himself of a brief impromptu lecture on semiotics. She wished she’d understood it.

  “And there was a time before steamships when, if you wanted to cross the ocean, or even if you didn’t, you sailed on a three-masted schooner.”

  “‘Even if you didn’t’?” Bella echoed.

  “If you happened to be a slave.”

  Their small library—not theirs alone, but they were the sole occupants—was in the innermost portion of the lowest deck available to passengers. It was entirely devoid of natural light. It had a patterned rug, leather chairs, lamps with parchment shades, and four walls of shelves entirely filled with books…some stern hardbacks, some lively paperbacks.

  “And now,” Dr. Hartmann wound up, “these ships are constructed solely for the joys of the cruise.” How joyless his voice was. “For swimming, dancing, sunbathing, eating, gambling. The ports of call, you will see for yourself, are incidental. And I have heard of ships which make no stops, giving up all pretense of purpose.” And he produced an inadvertent shudder, and then affected to twinkle.

  This cruise was a gift to Bella and Robin from Grandpa, a gift to his dear girls, sweet as candy, pretty as pictures. He liked a little flesh on a female, yes sir! And so, last June, when they were both about to graduate college, he offered them a trip. Anywhere within reason, he said. He didn’t mean Paris.

  They didn’t want Paris. They didn’t want Europe at all; they didn’t want to exhaust themselves tramping from site to important site. They wanted bright places and good food, and they knew that a Caribbean cruise promised both. An off-season one would strain Grandpa less—and so, though they could have claimed their gift along with their diplomas, they decided to wait almost a year, until the low rates of March. Meanwhile they got themselves jobs, found apartments.