Milk by Darcey Steinke

Author:Darcey Steinke [Steinke, Darcey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
Published: 2011-01-14T20:00:00+00:00

TWO

THE ALEPH HAD come to represent to Mary an outward manifestation of her soul. For a while Walter was fascinated by how she claimed to have seen her mother as a girl chasing a chicken on one shiny disk and on another a lady watching television. There were on other disks noisy baby birds waiting for their breakfast and a nighttime parking lot. Not to mention the dead boy with red running out of his nostrils, and the white tulip moving slowly back and forth on the tiny circular screen.

But after a few weeks of her insisting on talking about the aleph over breakfast and dinner, as well as bringing it up in front of Mr. Cabalaro, the head of the church trustees, Walter was growing frustrated. He explained to her how, when the present became unbearable, the brain’s happy hideout was the supernatural. He urged her to wean the baby and get on the pills, but she refused. Seeing his discomfort, she tried to replicate the aleph using tiny mirrors she found in a store on Canal Street and suspending them with dental floss from the ceiling of her room. In the evening, after extinguishing the lamp, she shined a flashlight on the glass slivers and described the internal sensation that accompanied the sightings. A sucking sensation, as if her heart were sucked by the nozzle of a vacuum, and mental deterioration, similar to the mind’s assignations on mushrooms, the brain’s surface texture changing from hard metal to something damp and porous like bread.

She was becoming, even Walter had to admit, a sort of spooky chick with her delicate frame, its angular elegance akin to a skeleton’s and her limp hair hanging around her face. A dozen times he found her praying inside the closet. She seemed to prefer the one on the third floor where he had first found her, but he also discovered her inside the kitchen pantry, kneeling among cans of tomato juice and rolls of paper towels.

Mary said she needed to talk to him, and he decided that if she started up about the aleph, he was going to suggest again that she wean the baby and get on the pills. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe her. He did. But if God wasn’t going to make his message known, there was nothing Mary could do to force it.

He’d known other people who got obsessed. One, a pale southern boy in seminary, was fixated on kudzu, its viscous growth pattern and how the noxious vine infiltrated America. Walter remembered how, in Old Testament class, this young man always tried to use kudzu as a metaphor for God’s motivations in biblical narratives. The other was a cousin, who, after John Lennon was murdered, became convinced that his spirit inhabited all cellular life, so that even a blender had qualities of the most complicated Beatle, as did her tennis shoes.

He looked up and there was Mary walking down the stairs. She seemed thinner, less materially substantial, as if thousands of her atoms had disintegrated.

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