Katherine Dunn - Attic

She wondered why I never asked questions about that and once when I was taking a bath in the washtub on the kitchen floor — the old gray corrugated tin washtub that she bent over with the scrub board and poured hot water into from the big kettle and if you sat in it too long you came out with red dents in your bottom like sitting too long on the pot — it was raining almost dark and there was no one else home and she tried to explain about how babies are made and all that and I couldn’t think how to make her stop talking about it so I looked very hard at the yellow plastic duck how round and hard and smooth it floated between my knees with its black painted eye so cocky bobbing and her hands red and burned from the hot water and the knuckles raw where she scrubbed over my dungarees.

She always tucked me in with my arms outside so I wouldn’t play with myself and it was not in the room with the blue airplanes on the wall but I think the same house as the slide thing one night I was lying in bed awake feeling my nose and thinking about turkeys I remember thinking about turkeys and suddenly the crack of light where the door wasn’t quite shut got very wide and I put my hands up to my eyes and she bent over me and picked me up by the arm and took me downstairs and made me lie down on the couch and spread my legs and she looked at me very closely there and said you’ve been playing with yourself again haven’t you and I didn’t say anything because I usually didn’t say anything it feels so tired when that happens and somehow you almost don’t care and you draw back further and further into some quiet place and watch and she said show me show me how you do it and I just lay there and she got angry and she said if a bitch dog did that they’d have to kill her and the next morning at breakfast she said she would send me to an institution if I did that any more and I couldn’t help it I started to cry and my big brother came in and said what’s the matter and she smiled and said Sexy here was monkeying with herself again last night and my brother took a piece of bread and went out. I always called him Brother — he would roll down the stairs grunting and groaning and calling my name and then lie very still sprawled at the bottom and I would come running down saying Brother! Brother! oh poor Brother! and crying I thought he was dead I took his poor head in my lap and touched him all over and cried he lay so still with his eyes closed and I couldn’t move him and then he opened his eyes and smiled at me all his golden freckles folding in his eyes and said do you love me Trinka? and I so happy he was alive said oh yes Brother and kissed his wrinkles near the eyes and he jumped up and said well then I’m O.K. Holy Cow I didn’t mean to make you cry and then he’d carry me out to the swing and let me watch him eat a raw lemon and maybe let me watch him carve the little totem poles in the kindling. He says when he was little she used to beat him all the time — she says no never but I believe him because Nicky who is younger than me remembers and I remember when she would go wild with the broom or the plunger and chase us all over the room under tables and beds screaming and poking and slashing and she says no never.

Nicky would always cry even before she hit him and I hated him for that and other things and once in the summer I would have killed him — he ran with his diapers almost touching the ground I silent behind him dragging the ax with its double face furrowing the dust — I pulling at all my arms and in all of my hands to bring the steel up on its long pale handle and let it fall once hard on him to quiet him to make him still and silent for once — she was cooking in the house out of earshot and I was nearly blind with killing him — with knowing what would happen if I could lift the ax high enough but then Brother was there and took the ax and hit me once hard across the head with his hand flat and took us each by the hand in to supper and I so shaking sick. I didn’t mind Nicky much after that.

When doorknobs were still high and people usually knees but no one was ready to carry me far — in the house in the project where George first came — there were children next door — girls — older — I would sit on the stoop next the coalbin where Brother hid with an apple jack-o’-lantern and they played in the dust between houses — I asked her how to get to know them and she said do this and leaned all her one side against the door jamb and bending her arm at the elbow and with the face of her hand up and all her fingers but her index finger curled up and her index finger pointing out with its soft belly up she crooked it — curled it back and straightened it and curled it back toward her again and her head was back against the door jamb and she looked out through almost closed eyes and then went away to make beds — I did that just like her to them and they came up and said Hiya stupid and tumbled me in the mud so I went in the coalbin with a match in the old apple jack-o’-lantern.

It was there she told me about hermaphrodites and I dreamed of them wonderful like cupids in the pictures round beautiful children all golden with wings flying over laurel hedges at night and I hiding down in the hedge and wanted so to be one but I read in the book they could “under no circumstances fertilize themselves” and lost interest.

Most of these girls are in here for prostitution or bad checks like me. Kathy’s got armed robbery and there are a couple of parole violators and shoplifters. There was one assault with intent to kill, that was Mad Patsy. Sister Blendina is the only murderer. There are a few, like Kathy, who are serving time here. The rest of us are waiting for trial. Blendina’s been here almost a year they say.

Rose is pregnant. Her husband Sherman is in Seagullville. His letters tell about golf courses, tennis courts, swimming pools — like a country club he says. That’s a federal pen.

Rose takes pills every day so she won’t lose her temper. When she feels like having a row she puts the pills down the toilet. We all tread easy around her though she’s so thin and tiny.

Sometimes I wake in the night and hear her cursing quietly in the next cell. She hates her belly. She has two deaf children. She is in for stealing her mother-in-law’s skunk coat and helping Sherman escape from some job or other. She says the only good thing about the kid is that they’ll let her out of here just before it’s born so they won’t have to pay for the delivery.

It has no name — that place — cunt is a man’s word or mine for another woman but not for my own — I have Jesus feet because of the matching scars on the arches — my hands are square and do with all the lines in the left palm starting at the thumb and all the lines in the right palm far away from the thumb — my stomach is Gertrude and my hair is Rachel and Ass and Pits and Tits and Laigs and the me inside in the small place behind the eyes is KZ-Babe but that place has no name — it has smells — Bumblebee for the fish when it’s wet and not washed — and Piss and Blood — all smells but no name — Annie calls hers Tweety — her Tweety is awful sore.

Glad-Ass is on duty today. There are three or four matrons but I only see two of them, Glad-Ass and Mrs. Eliot. Mrs. Eliot is a tall, dignified gray-haired lady who dresses nicely and speaks gently. Glad-Ass is a fat nigger. Her name is Gladys but we call her Glad-Ass to annoy her. We treat her badly because she’s a nigger. It wouldn’t be so rough except that she thinks we treat her bad because she’s a nigger. She’s always much nicer to B tank than to us but then they’re nicer to her. I’m from the north, Oregon, and I always thought Negroes were just like anybody else. Since I’ve been here though, I’ve wanted to insult them.