Katherine Dunn: Geek Love

Papa ordered signs painted for “Mumpo, the World’s Fattest Baby” and tried to talk Iphy into arranging a schedule so the baby could nap in a show booth and tickets could be sold. Iphy insisted on waiting until his first birthday. Papa was indignant. “This is a working outfit! No moochers! No parasites! And what about yourself, young lady?” he demanded. “How about a turn in the variety tent? You can work around Elly. There must be some way!”

Iphy bristled and reminded him of all the money she’d made for him the years she worked with Elly. She told him to wait. Papa left her alone. Iphy wasn’t worried about it.

“Papa’s just trying out old reflexes. He’s not the boss anymore.”

My belly grew. It hung at an odd angle and gave me a lot of back pain. The veins in my legs threatened to rupture until Chick took care of them.

I spent time with Iphy and became convinced that Elly was almost all there, almost all the time.

“She’s lying doggo, Iphy, don’t lie to me.”

Elly’s face was frozen on Iphy’s shoulder but her arms were coming back. Their dead flabbiness was turning to muscle again, and I could see it rolling thinly beneath the white skin, filling out the sleeves of her blouses.

“Elly? You’ve been exercising in secret, haven’t you?” I’d ask, coming up close and staring into the unfocused eyes. She never reacted.

“Buzz off, Oly,” Iphy would snap, and I’d wander away, speculating about Iphy too, and how much more like Elly she was now. Stronger. Meaner. She never cried anymore. Never sang. She cleaned. She fed Mumpo, lying down beside him because she couldn’t lift him. She gave up on bottles and turned so he could reach Elly’s breast when he had flattened her own. She urged him toward solid food and he gobbled that, too, spilling nothing, sucking it all in, then demanding tit.

In Santa Rosa a Twins Fan Club came to the door. They were sixteen-year-old girls who had started dressing the “Twin Way” when they were twelve or so and were still wrapping two waists in one big skirt like potato-sack racers. They dyed each other’s California hair to the blue-black gloss of the twins.

I went to the door. The pair in front tried to look past me into the trailer. “We just love them! Is it true they had a baby? We wanted to give them a present.”

The bouquet came in, passed from mock pair to mock pair and finally to me. I said Elly and Iphy were sleeping or maybe working. I took the green paper cone of flowers and thanked them and shut the door. Iphy watched through the curtains as the troop hobbled and giggled away, four pairs of twins with their arms around each other. Iphy absent-mindedly hugged Elly, who flopped from the squeezing.

“We used to have a lot of fans in this part of the country,” said Iphy. She put the flowers in a big jug of water and they sat on the table for days.

It was easy for me and it could have been much harder for the twins. We had a small world, peculiarly unalarmed by nature. We had no worries about food or shelter, the opinions of the family, or the hardships of lone child rearing. There were Mama and Papa and Chick. There was an inexhaustible reservoir of obliging redheads.

Part of being pregnant is that you think about it so much that you’re seldom bored. Terrified often enough, but rarely bored. There was some disappointment in my mind occasionally. I’d sit in the sun next to Grandpa’s urn on the generator truck and drift into lip-sucking melancholy.

Life for me was not like the songs the redheads played. It wasn’t the electric clutch I had seen ten million times in the midway — the toreador girls pumping flags until those bulging-crotched tractor drivers were strung as tight as banjo wire, glinting in the sun. It wasn’t for me, the stammering hilarity of Papa and Lil, or even the helpless, dribbling lust of the Bag Man rocked by the sight of the twins. I have certainly mourned for myself. I have wallowed in grief for the lonesome, deliberate seep of my love into the air like the smell of uneaten popcorn greening to rubbery staleness. In the end I would always pull up with a sense of glory, that loving is the strong side. It’s feeble to be an object. What’s the point of being loved in return, I’d ask myself. To warm my spine in the dark? To change the face in my mirror every morning? It was none of Arty’s business that I loved him. It was my secret ace, like a bluebird tattooed under pubic hair or a ruby tucked up my ass.

Understand, daughter, that the only reason for your existing was as a tribute to your uncle-father. You were meant to love him. I planned to teach you how to serve him and adore him. You would be his monument and his fortress against mortality.

Forgive me. As soon as you arrived I realized that you were worth far more than that.

Lily collected Mumpo’s castoffs and washed them and folded them into the drawers next to my cupboard. She moved the dish towels and the knives and forks and her plastic-bag collection and sewing scraps as well as Papa’s junk tools. “These will be your little hope chest,” she said.

Lily was delighted to have me swelling close to her, not cut off and strange as the twins had been. She would hug me distractedly in the kitchen or as we did the laundry together. “Now hope hard!” she’d whisper, squeezing me, with her watery blue eyes blinking in filmed pleasure. An odd, warm scent of her favorite spray warmed by sweat and a faint bite of rot had begun to drift around her. I would lean against her, watching her hands, her crumpled-paper skin rustling as she stroked my face. “You won’t tell …” she whispered once, “don’t ever breathe it.… I don’t like Mumpo.… I love him.… I’d tear my heart out for him … but there’s something about him I just can’t like.”

Mumpo was eating the twins. “Mama, he only shits once every three days and then not much. Is it O.K.?” Iphy fretted and Elly had frozen into an intelligent frown that bobbled perpetually against Iphy’s shoulder. They grew frail and bony except for the four breasts that ballooned every three hours in time for Mumpo to wake. He bellowed before he even opened his eyes, roaring until the gap was crammed with raw tit. Then he vacuumed the bag until it draped flat over the protruding ribs of his mothers, and bellowed for the next tit until all four milk bags were drained and limp. He would sleep for three more hours before beginning again.

“Every baby is different,” Mama would say diplomatically. But later, in the home van, she’d shake her head at me and crackle, “Greedy! Takes it in. Won’t let it go. Keeps it!”

Mumpo grew, spreading around himself in looping, creased pools of pinkness that pulsated with his breathing.

Chick checked me over each morning before he ambled off to the Arturans for the day. He was ragged, growing out of his clothes. Mama was too distracted to notice. He missed Dr. Phyllis.

“It was easier when she was here,” he explained. “I’m scared a lot now. Almost all the time.”

He came in for meals with his hands bloated like a drowned corpse’s from the perpetual washing followed by the airtight gloves of surgery. He sank into a doze if he sat still for more than a few minutes. He worried about the ritual wrangling of Horst and Norval Sanderson.

“It’s fair, isn’t it?” he’d ask me. “That’s the way Doc P. set it up. Horst gets the legs and arms and Mr. Sanderson gets fingers, toes, and hands and feet. It’s because the little bones are bad for the cats. That makes sense, doesn’t it? Why does Mr. Sanderson keep trying to cheat? I had to ask a novice to guard the thighs in the refrigerator truck the other day because Mr. Sanderson kept sneaking them away in garbage bags. Horst threatened to let Lilith, the Bengal, loose in Mr. Sanderson’s trailer some night if he doesn’t stop. Horst is drinking all the time now. He might do it. And Papa goes over there to drink with him. They sit inside with the checkerboard and argue and drink and forget whose turn it is to move.”