Claire Watkins - Gold Fame Citrus

“Jeez. What did she eat?” said Ray.

Luz wiped Ig’s rump with the maxi pad, wiped her own toes with it, then let the pad and the Hermès flap down into the shitting hole. “How would I know?”

Ray looked down the hole as if regretting the ignoble burial of the beshitted scarf. “Should we keep those?”

“She has a million of them.”

—

Ray dragged the couches and the mod low-slung armchairs from the library and the foyer and the drawing room and with them built a baby corral in the living room. He cleared out all the ouchies, as he called them, and put duct tape over the outlets though they had no juice. He hoisted the glass end tables onto his shoulders, carried them out front and chucked them down into the ravine. For toys Luz unplugged an antique rotary phone from the library and placed it in the baby corral. She gathered up the starlet’s collection of glazy babushka dolls, Guatemalan worry people and cottonwood kachinas from a guest room and, though Ray asked if letting a child play with a kachina wasn’t to invite a wicked hex, she put those in the corral, too, along with a taxidermied desert tortoise, the thickly lacquered and glass-eyeballed head of which Ig promptly began to gnaw.

From then on out it was The Ig Show, an onslaught of enslaving cutenesses. Ig seemed to need a dress, so Luz outfitted her in one of the starlet’s French silk camisoles cinched up on the side with a scrunchie. Ig was a cracker junkie, so Ray emptied the pantry to find her favorite. Ig took everything into her mouth, so Luz cinched dry ration rice into a pocket of gauze and made what Ig instantly called a nini , for her to suck. Ig was savage for walks, so Ray made her shoes out of packing tape and corkboard prized from the walls of the library and Luz let herself be pulled endlessly round the starlet’s backyard, shading the baby with a cherry-blossomed paper parasol, big bloom of gauze sprouting from Ig’s face.

Together Luz and Ray deciphered her tells: fists mashed into eye sockets, walking bowlegged and tugging on her silk diaper, a carp-like opening and closing of the mouth, the bulging of her coin eyes.

They cataloged her tastes. Likes: crackers, rocks, ration cola, questions, her new shoes, the ding the antique phone made when she bashed it with the earpiece, opening and closing the sliding doors, the tool belt, the burbling sounds Ray made for her benefit, mounting and dismounting things, i.e. the stairs, the fireplace ledge, the space-age sofa.

Dislikes: the shitting hole, being changed, the empty pool, glass, the fur coat going crusty in the backyard, certain textures (polyester, chintz, velvet, shag), certain sounds (the hand pump squeaking, heavy footsteps on the floating staircase, Luz humming), the sun, the mountain.

Ig could be impossibly silly, her clucking laugh like a seizure, a little worrisome. A spaz, Ray called her with love. Little pill. She was moody, became pensive or enraged without warning. She went berserk at the sight of a plate of saltwater noodles Ray fixed her for lunch, sending up painful-sounding screeches. If they reached for an empty cola can before she had decided she was through with it, she let loose an autistic, unsettling moan, which they made every effort not to hear. After the first day, only Ray could change her, for Ig bit Luz whenever she tried.

The child let loose her meanest mean streak on her toys. She scolded them in her private, wrathful language. She hit them, despite both Luz and Ray begging her not to. She chucked the worry people to the floor and was especially hard on the kachinas, whose legs she wrenched apart, popping them out of their indigenous sockets. After walloping the jujus mercilessly she would put them to sleep, draping them with a tissue and whispering fluffy comforts to them. She was kind to the tortoise, though, whose name she said was also Ig. She carried tortoise Ig everywhere, eventually caving his head in.

Nights Ig soothed herself to sleep by stroking the frayed edge of gauze back and forth across the tip of her nose and moaning. The baby starfished on the floor of the corral beneath a chenille throw with her brain-damaged tortoise double, Luz and Ray collapsed head-to-toe on the space-age sofa above, where they did not say, “What have we done?”

Nor, “We have to get out of here.”

Nor, “I’ve never been so happy.”

Though all were true.

For it was blissed-out chaos up in the canyon, it was joy and love, love for the coin-eyed baby and for each other and for everything, everywhere. But it could not last. (Nothing here could.) Luz spent her afternoons following post-nap Ig around the backyard with the parasol. Days went by and the baby went jumpy, twitching at the crunch of gravel in the rock garden or if Luz snapped open a ration cola.

“What is?” Ig would cry fearfully at the sound.

“Soda,” Luz would say. Ray, “Pop.”

Sometimes Ig jumped at nothing and stood staring at the mountainside, petrified, the Santa Anas keening through the canyon. Luz froze too, her heart gone manic, palping the way Baby Dunn’s had after her father taught her of mountain lions, You won’t see them until they want you to see them.

“What is?” said Ig, meek as dust.

Luz managed, “Nothing, my love,” though she too was trembling. Perhaps Ig knew something they didn’t, felt her people coming for them, somehow. Felt all the horrors creeping up the canyon.

Luz was exhausted, was not drinking water, could never remember where she put her jug. Was maybe sleepwalking.

“You’re holding it,” said Ray, and there was the jug cradled in her arms.

He was not sleeping at all. All night he paced along the wall of windows, peering over the bridge driveway and the laurelless canyon beyond. Ray’s decency had always been a succor, an anchor, and it was still, though now Luz feared it was an anchor buried in the wrong sand.

At night Luz listened to Ray’s patrol and made the first list of her life, unwritten.

—

What we must do:

— leave

— go to Seattle

— find a little cottage on a sound where the air is indigo and ever-jeweled with mist

— take Ig walking in the rainforest, barefoot

— show her velvet moss and steady evergreens and the modest gibbous of glacier on Mount Rainier

— encourage her to stroke gently the fins on the underside of orange mushrooms

— pry open rotting logs and watch grubs and slugs and earthworms at their enrichment business

— let her take some of the sweet colloidal humus into her mouth

— come upon a moose, his antlers splayed like great hands raised to God, his ancient beard swaying as he saunters silently through the forest

— return home, where Ray must be stirring a big pot of chili and I must assemble a rainbow salad and Ig must set her dolls kindly on the redwood windowsill, all in a row

— eat dinner on a picnic table or on the porch Ray built, sipping from tall beaded glasses of ice water, watching orcas breech across the sound

One night, Luz came to at the lip of the starlet’s dry unshreddable pool, the moon a pale blade overhead, her fingers in a jar of capers. She blinked; she did not even like capers. She stood staring at the inky mountainside, its sinister stillness, the slug of it, tasting the vinegar tang inside her mouth. She saw the Nut trailing them in circles around the yard, saw his mongrel dog hung by its rope leash from the barren lemon tree. The daddy-o on the driveway bridge. The starlet going wicker in the ravine. Ig stumbling from the wrecked raindance bungalows.

She returned to the mansion and found Ray sitting in the hallway opposite the unyielding wall of glass. She slid down beside him and took his face. “Let’s go to Seattle,” she said.