The Cannibal Heart

10

They found the starfish clinging to the underside of a rock in the shallow water. Mrs. Wakefield saw it first, just the tip of one of its arms uncovered by the ebb of a wave, but she said:

“You’d better investigate that rock, Jessie. I don’t seem to be able to find a thing.”

And so Jessie discovered the starfish for herself, and it was, from the first, her very own. It wasn’t as sweet and delicate as the baby one but it was far more sumptuous. Its five arms were fat and strong, violet-blue studded with silver beads. It was as big as Mr. Roma had promised it would be — as big as her head — and it clutched the palms of her hands powerfully, and curled one of its arms in dignified outrage.

“Look-it,” she cried in ecstasy. “He thinks I’m a rock, look-it!” And indeed, she felt like a rock, a fortress; a protector of all starfish; their friend, Jessie Banner.

“He can’t really think at all,” Mrs. Wakefield said.

“A little bit.”

“No, not even a little bit.”

“But he must!” It was monstrous that he could be so alive and beautiful and not be able to think, to know he was with a friend.

“He can’t feel either. At least, very little.”

“He can feel me. He is doing it right now.”

“Yes, but he can’t feel the way we do. If we cut off his arm he wouldn’t mind very much. He’d just go ahead and grow another one.”

“He can feel me,” Jessie repeated stubbornly.

“He won’t feel it when he dies, that is what I meant.” Mrs. Wakefield took the starfish and laid it flat on her palm, straightening out the curled arm. “Starfish aren’t like us, Jessie. They are hardly alive at all. They can’t even make a noise.”

“Does he have to die?”

“We all do, some time.”

“Not little girls, though?” Jessie said. Old people, yes, and very old dogs with no teeth; house flies, and bees that had lost their stingers, people who caught dreadful germs by not washing their hands before meals, fish on a hook, and elderly horses gone blind and deaf, and even little boys who couldn’t swim. But not little girls.

“Not little girls,” Mrs. Wakefield said.

“Naturally not.” She’d known it all the time, of course, but it was pleasant to be reassured. She said soberly, “If he’s going to die I don’t think I’ll name him. I have about a hundred names ready, though. I’ve got to save some of them for when I have children and puppies and kittens and rabbits, but I could spare one.”

“No, we won’t name him.”

The starfish, anonymous, mute, without thought or feeling, was carried up to the kitchen where Mrs. Wakefield filled Carmelita’s spaghetti boiling pan with water and put it on the stove.

The starfish sat quietly on a newspaper on the floor with one arm raised tentatively like a shy child in a classroom.

Standing on a stool beside the stove Jessie looked down into the water and watched it get warmer and warmer, until it began to swirl in the pan and the steam rose, dampening her brows and lashes, giving her a moist, beady little mustache.

The steam didn’t smell exactly like steam. Even though the starfish hadn’t yet touched the water the steam that curled through the kitchen was subtly tainted with the smell of fish.

Carmelita noticed it, too.

“Such stinks,” she said, holding her nose and indicating her great anguish. “All over the house it’ll be stinks, stinks.”

“Nonsense,” Mrs. Wakefield replied in Spanish. “It won’t smell at all. I’ve done this many times.”

“Already I smell it.”

“It’s your imagination.”

“My casserole and now my spaghetti pan. Pretty soon I’ll have nothing left, and we’ll be living on baked potatoes. Nothing but baked potatoes, morning, noon and night.”

“I like baked potatoes,” Mrs. Wakefield said calmly. “They’re very nourishing.”

“She talks funny,” Jessie observed. “Why doesn’t she talk like us?”

“She could if she wanted to, but she’s a very obstinate woman.”

Carmelita denied this by stamping to the door. She stood on the porch sniffing the fresh air with exaggerated relief.

Jessie climbed down from the stool, somewhat dizzy from watching the lively water. She wasn’t sure why the water was being heated; she thought it might be to give the starfish a good warm bath to clean him off.

“It’s warm enough now for a bath.”

“It has to be boiling.”

“Boiling is very hot,” Jessie said anxiously. “He’ll burn.”

“He can’t feel, Jessie, I told you that. And he has to be — fixed, if you’re going to keep him. We must boil him for a few minutes and then let him dry out in the sun. After that we’ll paint him with formaldehyde and sun him a bit more and then he’ll be all ready, very light and strong, yours for keeps.”

“But he won’t be able to move.”

“No, of course not.”

Hers for keeps, but dead.

The steam rose, a shroud of chiffon, smelling of death.

Mrs. Wakefield bent over the starfish and pressed its upraised arm flat against the newspaper.

“We want him to be a perfect star,” she said. “It will be too late to straighten him out after he’s boiled.”

Jessie averted her eyes. She felt somehow that it was too late to straighten anything out, ever again. She had been trapped by her own words: I want a starfish. Between the wanting and the getting was this room, this steaming witch’s cauldron and the witch herself.

Mrs. Wakefield picked the starfish up from the newspaper and slid it off the palm of her hand into the boiling water.

Jessie held her breath tight and hard in her chest, expecting a cry, a protest. At this moment of death the mute might cry out in horror, the insentient suffer, the thoughtless understand.

The starfish sank quietly into the bubbles, to be Jessie’s for keeps. There was no cry; only a sudden shocking change of color. The blue arms burst into a new vivid orange-red life, the color of the setting sun.

“Ten minutes,” said the witch, “will be enough.”

Jessie let out her breath and it left a hollow of pain inside her. She felt quite hollow all over, not a rock or a fortress any longer, but something brittle, filled with fish-scented steam.

“I think I’ll go outside,” she said, rather coldly.

On the porch steps she sat close beside Carmelita who was warm and brown as a baked apple.

“Esstinks,” said Carmelita.

Carmelita’s skin smelled ripe. The flies sat on her forehead and her arms and her legs, so that she was dotted with extra little black eyes that could see everything.

“Baby,” she said, sighing, patting Jessie’s yellow hair. “Hi, baby.”

She had wanted many children, all kinds and colors, pale blonde children and redheaded ones with freckles, and dark striking children, but the Blessed Virgin had refused.

She brushed away her extra eyes and fanned herself with her apron.

“You’re nice and fat,” Jessie said gravely.

Carmelita laughed, throwing back her head and showing all her teeth, white as chalk. Jessie laughed too, until the tears came in silver worms tickling her cheeks.

For the rest of the morning she laughed quite desperately and suddenly at every little thing. Her father, sitting on the patio with his legs angled, was a hilarious frogman. Luisa, with her hair upswept, had a pointed head. Mr. Roma was a forbidden word, a nigger. Yes, a nigger, nigger, nigger. Everything was a scream.

Except her mother.

“What’s got into you?” Evelyn asked when Jessie flung herself half-exhausted, on the davenport.

“Nothing.”

“You haven t done anything naughty, have you?”

Jessie’s face worked; she wanted to tell her mother about the starfish but she couldn’t get a grasp on the right words, they slipped away, fishlike, as soon as she caught one. I am guilty. I have murdered.

“I hope we’re not going to have any scene,” her mother said in a warning tone. “Especially after Mrs. Wakefield went to all that trouble to fix the nice starfish for you.”

Evelyn put out her hand, as if coaxing her to be less difficult to understand, but Jessie drew away, shaking with inverted tears. Mrs. Wakefield was a redheaded witch, and Mr. Roma was a nigger.

“Stop that, Jessie.”

“Everything is — so... so-f-unny.”

“I don’t like it when you make those forced-laugh sounds. Now calm down and behave yourself. Why are you sticking around the house like this anyway? Why don’t you go outside and play?”

It was simply excruciating to picture herself stuck to the house with glue. She ached all over with laughing and her eyes were so hot and puffed they seemed ready to burst.

The laughter was a cry for help, but no help came.

“If you keep this up you’ll go straight to your room,” Evelyn said. “And stay there. Do you hear?”

She heard. She ran out of the house leaving a trail of hiccups that hung in the air like bubbles.

Sitting in the sun on a packing case was the starfish, but she didn’t look at it. She kept her head turned away and walked past the starfish sideways like a crab.

Starfish, old men, stingerless bees and little boys who couldn’t swim. But not little girls.

Not little girls. The words were a stone fence behind which she would live forever, always young. But the moment had come when she was big enough to see over the fence, and what she saw was, yes, little girls, too.

She saw Jessie Banner in a rolling field of little girls. They lay like flowers dropped into the grass. Drowned, frozen, swatted like flies, slapped like mosquitoes, burned, smothered, broken, left to dry in the sun. She saw herself, Jessie, walking into the field of little girls to share death.

But the vision beyond the fence was too massive; it fell of its own weight into the bottom of her mind like a stone in a pond, and the only clues to its existence were the molecules it displaced, the bubbles of laughter, the hiccups, the swollen eyes.

“Hold your breath and swallow nine times,” Luisa said, dreaming on the swing in the pepper tree.

“What will I swallow?”

“Spit,” Luisa said. “Imagine, crying, at your age.”

“I wasn’t crying. I was laughing.”

It was very difficult to get enough spit for nine swallows but she did it by pretending she was sucking a lemon.

The hiccups went away and the world was suddenly and beautifully ordinary again. The rope of the swing scraped on bark, Luisa was patronizing and cross, the hummingbirds darted crazily in and out of the eucalyptus leaves and flung themselves at Jessie’s head. Spiders took a stroll in the sun and ants marched up and down the pepper tree.

Everything was alive, everything moved and felt and thought. Jessie’s pulse beat with love for this ordinary world. She loved even Luisa.

“I don’t think you’re a stinker,” Jessie said.