Joanna Ruocco: Dan

Melba was warned by her mother not to visit the hosiery district at night, although other children enjoyed the festive atmosphere and played complicated finger games with elastics cut from the big spools that overflowed the dumpsters.

“You’re not like the other children, Melba,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “You react poorly to elastics. Whenever you are given a piece of elastic your nose begins to bleed. I blame factors from before your birth. Namely, your abnormally long umbilical cord.”

At her mother’s mention of her umbilical cord, Melba probed her bellybutton.

“I didn’t know about my abnormally long umbilical cord,” cried Melba. “Can I see it?”

“I buried it in a secret place and disguised the map,” said Gigi Zuzzo, sharply. “You’re better off not seeing something like that, Melba.”

“You’ll never develop normal attachments,” sighed Gigi Zuzzo. “We’ve never been as close as other mothers and daughters, have we Melba?” But Melba was concentrating and barely heard her mother’s question.

“Those years that I had the hiccups,” asked Melba. “Was that because of my umbilical cord?”

“It was,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “And that’s the least of it! The cord’s torsional compression in the womb cut off blood flow to your brain and dried out your brainpan. Your brainpan cracked in half! Toxified brain fluid leaked into my blood stream! I was nearly poisoned! I had to drink charcoal every day for a week!”

“The toxic brain fluid,” asked Melba. “Did that reach your womb through osmosis? Or was there another process involved?”

“What other process is there?” barked Gigi Zuzzo.

“I don’t know,” said Melba quietly. “Reverse osmosis, probably.”

“No one said anything about processes, reversible or otherwise,” said Gigi Zuzzo. “Though the charcoal explains your hairs and your eye color, Melba.” Melba’s hairs were much blacker than the hairs of her mother, father, and sister, and she had not inherited the blue eyes of her mother and father, having instead dull, protuberant black eyes, which Randal Hans once told her resembled the eyes of a deer with a neck wound.

Melba heeded her mother, and only visited the hosiery district during the day. Outside Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, the women always seemed to be eating darkened wormy apples. They ate the apples rapidly, producing them one after the other from huge burlap sacks, until a man with a whistle appeared from nowhere, and the women hurried through the metal side-door of Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail, hauling the sacks between them.

As she watched the women from the culvert, Melba would feel the muscles on the sides of her tongue shivering. She longed for just a tiny bite of an oddly-shaped mahogany apple! Until one day Melba Zuzzo could not contain herself. Just as the metal side-door swung shut behind the women, she lunged from the culvert and scuttled across the gravel lot, searching for a discarded apple core. Something dark and slick glinted in the gravel. Melba Zuzzo picked the thing up impulsively and thrust it in her mouth. She recognized the taste! It tasted like when, as a child, she had mashed anchovy in the wall socket and licked the wall socket on all fours, pretending that she was an animal navigating a maze in the service of science. Melba’s mouth flooded with saliva. She shuddered. She wondered how the women could maintain their appearances of solid and attractive tidiness while lunching on such apples. The pH of their saliva must be 1! Or 0! What did this saliva do to tooth enamel? Were the women’s tongues corroded? For a moment, Melba doubted the sanity of the women, but the moment passed quickly. Melba realized that the dark thing she had discovered was not an apple core, but rather a metal whistle. She spat a hasp and a bit of broken chain into her palm. Suddenly, a man was running toward her. Melba recognized him as the man with the whistle, for even without the whistle, his lips formed a tense repellant O. Melba fled, the man’s whistle clamped in her mouth, her breath chirping as it divided inside the whistle, deflecting down into the whistle’s dank chamber and up across the whistle’s slot. Finally Melba reached a phone booth and ducked inside. She had no desire to keep the whistle in her mouth and removed it immediately.

“What a horrid, strident device,” thought Melba Zuzzo angrily as she shoved the whistle in the change slot.

Shortly after this disappointing episode, Dan Bras & Girdles No Retail went out of business. Melba heard that it reopened days later as a travel agency but she never saw anyone coming in or out and weeds grew up thickly in the gravel lot and it became customary for people to drive up to the gravel lot in the night to dump mattresses. What had happened to the women with their sacks of apples?

It was possible that they were sent on a group tour of a foreign land by the travel agency. Melba Zuzzo liked to think of the women eating apples, perhaps beside the Great Wall of China. Eating apples beside the Great Wall of China, a landmark of interest to people in space, the women had a very high chance of being photographed by satellites. Someday Melba hoped to go to a space station, or to Florida, to NASA headquarters. She would eat the astronaut ice cream she had heard so much about and she would buy a satellite photograph of the Earth. Running her magnifying glass along the Great Wall of China, she might at last obtain proof that the women still existed. The women would be unmistakable, crouched in the weeds with their cheeks filled with apples, and Melba knew they could still break her heart with their beauty, even in a photograph taken from the distance of the moon.

The bakery’s wall-phone rang and Melba sprang from her stool to answer.

“Bev!” cried a voice. Melba rested her forehead against the wall, cradling the receiver on her shoulder.

“Men lactate,” she said, at last. “I’ve never seen it happen, but they can. I heard from a man who did it. Not at a mere whim!” said Melba hurriedly. “I’m not trying to say that men lactate frivolously. It requires duress, great duress, but it can be done,” whispered Melba. “Like on the Oregon Trail. Don’t you believe me?”

“Bev!” cried the voice and Melba slowly hung up the phone.

I don’t have any obligation to inform Ned Hat, she reminded herself. It’s not as though I am Bev Hat, no matter what he says. She saw Grady Help’s profile moving along the bakery window at head height.

“Grady Help!” she called, running to the door. “Wait!” Grady Help had an open sore on his temple and stopped walking at Melba’s cry, looking around dimly, a finger in his ear.

“I’m here,” said Melba, rushing up to him. “Right in front of you.”

She felt the strangeness of stopping a man like Grady Help on the street.

Grady Help had once been a victim, and as such was not usually spoken to directly. Melba had herself inquired about Grady Help from time to time, asking other townspeople how he was doing and whether he had preferences in daily activities, but facing him now she could not help but feel flustered and importuning. He hasn’t been a victim for years, she reminded herself, at least not actively, and so she pressed on.

“Bev Hat is dead,” she blurted and wrenched at the waist, burying her face in her hands.

“Well that’s not so,” said Grady Help gently and Melba uncovered her face. Grady Help’s voice was soft and weak but it did not break. It wasn’t precisely firm , thought Melba, but it held together, possessed of a coagulated quality, like the innocuous cheese Zeno Zuzzo fed her after meals for several months when she was still a schoolgirl. He claimed it was an experiment, although he had never told her the purpose or results. Melba almost smiled at Grady Help’s voice; it was a triumph for a former victim, she reasoned, and blushed, not knowing the best way to recognize a former victim’s triumph, if tacit approval was suitable or if something more demonstrative was in order, and if the former, how to be certain the tacit approval had registered as such, and if the latter, whether or not the demonstration should center around an impulsive hug, and if yes, how to summon sufficient propulsion and which part of Grady Help’s loosely jointed body to encircle. Perhaps she should just grasp his hand in both of hers and press the knuckles to her cheek.