The Girl Who Ate Kalamazoo (3 page)

McKenna had to bathe baby Audrey. Three times a week, she hugged shampoo, towel, washcloth, and soap to her chest and walked through the dining room to the kitchen, where she arranged the supplies on the counter. She could hear coos and gurgles resonating through the house from somewhere unknown, most likely Mother’s arms, most likely Mother’s bed upstairs, where Audrey was being rocked, sung to, and loved behind closed doors. McKenna dragged the collapsible stepladder from the space between the refrigerator and wall and spread it open at the foot of the sink. Following her father’s instructions (pinned by magnet to the refrigerator, “just in case” McKenna’s memory faltered [it never did]), McKenna climbed the stepladder. She unfolded the towel across the countertop. She filled the sink with two inches of “tepid” water. She submerged the washcloth, swished it, let it drink.

She pulled open a drawer and withdrew the silver bell, which was smaller than her five-year-old fist. Using three overhead arm motions, as deliberate as a lion tamer cracking a whip, she rang it. The high-pitched sound, her father had said, would ascend stairs, drift around corners, pass through doors and walls. The special curvature, along with the pea-sized, felt-covered clapper, allowed the bell to be audible from one hundred yards away, and most importantly—this was Murray’s big selling point—at a consistent volume. In other words, to a person standing two feet from the bell it would be no louder than it was to a person two hundred feet away. The patent was for The Tap-on-the-Shoulder Handheld Alarmer Bell.

Only one such bell was ever produced, and it remains in Mc-Kenna’s possession, tossed carelessly into the bottom of an un-labeled box in the attic.

Since the birth of her sister, McKenna had noticed that Audrey’s tiniest squeals were audible from almost any location in the house. Not always at the same volume, to be sure, but what did that matter? McKenna rang the bell and wrestled with the notion that her father’s invention—and by extension, her father—was a crock.

Still, the bell did summon her mother every time. So perhaps it worked. Perhaps Murray was as brilliant as he claimed. Mc-Kenna wanted it to be so.

Misty padded barefoot into the kitchen and placed Audrey, stripped to her skivvies, onto the towel. McKenna ascended the stepladder. Her sister was the size of a doll. She unpinned the cloth diaper and began the bath. Misty stood watch the first few times, offering tips for scrubbing the hair and neck. Once satisfied that Audrey was in no danger, she patted McKenna’s head, offered a “Thanks, buckaroo,” and retired to the living room for a nap.

McKenna hated cleaning the monster. Audrey’s bald head made her resemble Grandpa Mapes in his coffin. Red bumps that Mom called “baby acne” speckled Audrey’s forehead. Her unwieldy head lolled as if her neck had no bones. Instead of a thingy, there was a tidy slit between her legs.

McKenna could get past the lack of a thingy. She knew about anatomy. She understood that she herself had no thingy, and Mom had no thingy, and that no matter what Toby said, this didn’t make them any less of a person.

The baby kicked. Her legs resembled broken branches.

But without feet, can they still be called legs? Without ball peen and claw, is it still a hammer? Without tines, is it still a fork? Is a spoon without its bowl still a spoon?

By the end of the first week of washing, the stumps ceased to frighten McKenna. They became sad. They made her feel as if a heavy blanket were smothering her chest, suffocating her. Part of McKenna wanted to protect this crippled, sweet-smelling girl, this big-headed angel with the plump cheeks and curled swath of blond hair and nipples no bigger than periods. At the same time, she wanted to lift her by the throat and stuff her into the garbage disposal.

What made Audrey a monster was her mouth. Always needing to be filled. The mouth opened wide, enormously wide, as she lunged at any object in her path. Her own fingers were a typical target, but when these were restrained, she craned and twisted until her gums hit pay dirt: McKenna’s hands; the washcloth; the rubber duck; the faucet tap. Audrey’s eyes, pulsating like Kmart blue lights, registered no recognizable emotion. She resembled the hatchlings on
Wild Kingdom
that probed the air blindly with their beaks, ready to swallow what ever dropped into their dark holes.

In 1977, the year Audrey was born, none of the Mapeses had heard of Johann Zimmermann. He was moderately famous in his native Germany, having performed for nearly a decade at circuses, fairs, and European talk shows. His stage name was Herr Essenalles, which translates roughly to “Mister Eat Everything.” He devoured drinking glasses, light bulbs, chains, eyeglasses, and chainsaw blades. He ate a shovel.

Once, he ate a shopping cart. He took his time with this one, as you might expect. It was a plodding, meticulous process that sucked away every drop of urgency and excitement.

Kind of pathetic, really. Like a poodle trying to put away an elephant carcass. Makes you want to yawn and cry. For live demonstrations, Herr Essenalles generally consumed the smaller items—snow globes, whistles, screwdrivers—for quick applause. A ten-inch TV took him twelve hours. First, he crunched the VHF dial. Then the antenna, divided by hacksaw into inch-long segments. Then the UHF dial, which he worried like a stale cookie until it was soft enough to swallow. Then the TV’s plastic shell, broken by mallet into potato-chip-sized pieces. And finally, the cathode tube, also smashed into bites. Sometimes his mouth bled, but never seriously.

Audrey, as we all know, needed no hacksaws or mallets.

The doctors studied Herr Essenalles and found that the lining of his stomach was unusually thick. His stomach acids were also stronger than normal. Aside from these qualities, he was a regular, healthy guy. A fine swimmer, near-sighted, a mediocre conversationalist, a chess aficionado. Short-tempered but otherwise balanced. Sexual function = just dandy. Attracted to women his own age. That was the story, anyway.

A doctor examined the children’s mother regularly. Grandma Pencil babysat the twins every Wednesday from two to four so Misty could go to her “health appointments.” McKenna and Toby, infatuated with their mom, created and maintained the delusion that she was attending beauty school—not the kind where beauticians are trained, but rather where Misty taught other women how to look and act like princesses, where adoring attendants preened and primped her into the immaculate image they’d grown used to seeing around the house.

Deep down, they knew the beauty school wasn’t real. They’d seen the shadow that settled over their mother’s face. They’d noticed her naps getting longer—two, three, sometimes four hours a day. They’d seen her drift through the house in her canary-yellow nightgown from morning to night, speaking rarely, floating from room to room with an expectant face as if around the corner would be the unnamable something—a person?—that would ignite her insides and make her happy again. Each twin wanted to be that person. They stumbled over one another trying to make her smile.

Misty never held a job. Her estranged father, a Grand Rapids businessman, believed that the very notion of a woman working outside the home was unseemly, akin to letting a baby suckle a sweat sock.

But what did this matter to McKenna and Toby? They knew nothing of their maternal grandfather or his attitude. Their mother loved being a mother—the twins felt that this had to be true. They couldn’t picture Misty doing anything else. She’d raised them. She’d stayed home with them all these years. Hers was the face they fell asleep picturing, the face they sought out when they awoke.

But they also understood that things had changed. They were “big kids” now. The new baby was here. The twins played together. They depended on each other. Audrey kept Mommy busy. Audrey kept her happy.

Yes, at times Misty was happy. She sang. She played Candyland. She read books to them. She kissed their cheeks, one twin at a time, before turning out the light.

“It’s a medical record,” Toby said, on the eighteenth day of mea-suring. “For science.”

He scribbled numbers. He was irritated, indignant at being questioned. He promptly closed the notebook, snapped a thick rubber band around it, and thrust it under a pile of pants in the bottom drawer of his dresser.

This was a young boy trying to justify his obsessive need to compare every one of his and his “little” sister’s body parts during the summer after their kindergarten year. Kindergarten had made Toby a king, and he needed to make it clear that he was the
only
king of this house hold.

He forced the drawer shut with his foot and said, “If you touch it, you’re dead.”

“Why would I touch your crappy book?” McKenna answered from her seat at the card table, where she doodled a woman robot melting a man’s head with an optical laser beam. She, too, was indignant. But she’d never felt indignant before, and because she was unused to managing this particular emotion, she’d actually said, “crammy book.” She hoped Toby hadn’t noticed.

“You’ll change the numbers,” Toby answered. “You hate that I’m bigger than you.”

“Three centimeters? Big whoop.”

The height difference was one of seven documented disparities between the twins. The yardstick measurements had shown that Toby’s hands, feet, kneecaps, waist, spinal cord, and skull were ever-so-slightly longer and/or wider than McKenna’s. McKenna’s only advantage was neck length, but these results were circled in red crayon because Toby claimed that Mom had fudged the fig-ures so McKenna wouldn’t cry again.

McKenna hated the ritual, but even worse than enduring the ritual was being called a coward, so she succumbed to the weekly assessment, standing pole-straight and facing forward. She studied the crude Winnie the Pooh mural her mother had painted on their wall. Misty held the yardstick and yawned into the back of her free hand. Toby recorded the data, smug, satisfied.

Audrey, the footless one-year-old, crawled with confidence along the carpet in the middle of the bedroom, searching for something, anything, to stuff in her mouth.

Dad stood at an assembly line eight miles south, his feet aching, earplugs and safety glasses pushing the world away while the dust of steel and iron slipped into his nose with each breath.

Long before Audrey Mapes ate Kalamazoo, and long before Herr Essenalles ate his first light bulb, medical literature was rife with stories of people devouring coins, buttons, laundry detergent, screws. We can all agree that these are disgusting, if somewhat imaginative, dinners.

There’s more, too. Bed sheets. Chalk. Rust. Folks who can’t stop swallowing wooden toothpicks are so common they’ve earned their own nickname (I mean, medical term): xylophagians. Look it up. Compulsive swallowing is a condition that affects about as many people as are killed annually by falling out of bed.

Here’s a story from the archives:

A hardy man in Tucson by the name of Garry Tranquility (“Garry” pronounced with a short
a
, incidentally, because it rhymed with “starry”) once fit a Webster’s dictionary, hardcover and all, into his stomach. It took him a full business week. His body rejected the dictionary the next day, in an unsettling series of pulpy expulsions, but what no doubt carried him through this unpleasantness and made him feel worthy and strong was the memory of the hundreds of local folks who’d cheered him on. Somewhere between eight and ten of these people even sent flowers, dictionaries, and cards with yellow smiley faces and praise like, “You are first-place wild man!” (a Japanese tourist) and “My dad thinks you’re nuts!” One woman from the audience was so impressed with Garry’s gustatory abilities that she proposed marriage. Garry accepted her proposal, effectively ending his burgeoning rock-n-roll career. That’s the ‘60s for you! One minute he’s Garry Tranquility, front man for The Splendid Knights, the next he’s plain old Bertram Trank again, guitar instructor at Rainbow Music and future footnote in the New En gland Journal of Medicine.

My point is that while Audrey Mapes was unquestionably talented when it came to her craft (and you’ll find no bigger fan than this writer), precedent had already been set. She was the first in many categories—perfecting the footless Moonwalk, for instance—but she was not really a pioneer in gastronomical exploration.

I can hear the whining already: “Screws and cigarette butts and dictionaries are weird and flavorless, but an entire city?! You can’t even compare the two!”

I agree in principle. Certainly, even a city as culturally bankrupt and magnetic to clouds as Kalamazoo contains hundreds of thousands of bed sheets, millions of buttons and coins, metric tons of dictionaries, canyons of laundry detergent. Not to mention all that brick, wood, steel, and concrete—30,000 homes, hundreds of apartment buildings, a public university, a liberal arts college, a luxury hotel, ten motels, two root beer stands, five bowling alleys and five cemeteries (coincidence?), forty churches, three malls, miles of chain link fence, armfuls of dog houses, handfuls of cat-houses, a children’s museum, a restored theater, a railroad station, a factory for guitar chords. And so on.

Certainly, it’s diffcult to compare Audrey to even the most extreme compulsive swallower. I’ll just answer this way: Audrey was never a girl to go at a task without full commitment.

In fact, none of the Mapeses were (or are). Some people see this as a fault.

Audrey grew. By her third birthday in January of 1980, she was an average height of forty inches (without feet, mind you). She was a spunky child, full of vim, with eyes like blueberries and ringlets of shoulder-length blond hair inherited from a recessive gene not seen in a Mapes since Great Uncle Tilbert, who died in 1947 at the ripe old age of one hundred. She mastered all the skills that would earn her applause and adulation. She recognized her ABCs (upper and lower case), could count to forty, and was able to write the first name of each person in her family (except Grandma Pencil). She could spell a handful of words like
STOP, NO
and
OFF
. She’d memorized the Pledge of Allegiance, the lyrics to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and the entire Life cereal commercial with Mikey. She could, and often did, eat upwards of a dozen Crayola crayons without getting an upset stomach.

But her Dr Pepper feet were a disaster. Honestly, they’d never worked. Walking in them, she looked like she was constantly traversing a tightrope. Had she been an actual tightrope walker, though, she would have died thousands of times.

“She’s learning!” Murray used to yell, not even glancing up from his
Popular Mechanics
to see the fallen girl cradled in Grandma Pencil’s arms. “Toddlers tip. You’ll be okay, sweetie.”

“Feel these,” Grandma demanded. She fondled with disgust the set of four straps that connected Audrey’s left “foot” to the plastic band choking her thigh, just above the knee. “She’s standing on a goddamn see-saw.”

Murray ignored all criticism on the subject. For a year he did, anyway. He would kiss Audrey’s boo-boo, hug her to his chest, set her upright again, tighten the straps, and send her on her way.

There was a profound allure to the way the children’s dad so stingily dispensed his scruffy affections. On the rare occasion that he was home from work and not in the basement, Murray’s eyes were pointed at a book, a joist, a schematic, or a can opener that he quietly manipulated to study the movement of its parts. In those even rarer moments when he met one of the children’s gazes, they fell in love. His round-the-clock intensity, which in later years they would understand was only a screen for insecurity and pain, fooled the children into believing he was doing everything humanly possible, at every waking moment, for them and them alone—in the very way, for example, that he faced the bookshelf, scratched the top of his nappy head, yawned, and threw a handful of cashews into his mouth.

When he perched on the toilet for an hour with a notebook in his lap, hollering a string of invented curses at a mathematical equation that hadn’t panned out the way he’d planned (“Knuckles!” “Fist YOU, piehole!” “Pinto beans!” “Oh, rip my stick, buck-wad!”), McKenna and Toby, studying phonics in the dining room, could feel his energy like a pulse in the air. The twins faced each other across the table, and they shared a glance that meant they both understood. They understood that Murray’s fury was inflamed because the equation he’d toiled over had failed and would therefore not better the lives of his wife and children. They understood that this failure drove their father into the kind of rage a gorilla feels when his baby, or his banana, is eaten.

When Murray knelt between their beds to kiss the twins goodnight (every three weeks or so), his body odor, textured like one of Grandma Pencil’s exotic cheeses, clouded the air for hours after his departure. His gamey stench wasn’t an offense. It was a signal—a primal scent encoded by God and designed to narcotize his children, to tether them to him chemically so that they would never, not even far in the future, abandon him when he was sick and feeble and dying. He needed their love like he needed air. He needed their love to make him whole. The children knew these things. Toby and McKenna dreamed of him. They woke in the middle of the night thinking he was still by their bedside. They reached out to touch him, but he wasn’t there.

So this explains why three-year-old Audrey never disliked her shabby aluminum feet. She was only a child. She hadn’t known any other way. She’d worn the cans for a year without complaint. Even McKenna and Toby thought the junky things were miraculous. They bragged to their third-grade classmates at St. Monica’s about the wonders of their dad’s mechanical mind.

Meanwhile, the feet were destroying Audrey’s legs. The bruises above her knees darkened from purple to black. Her stumps swelled as if bitten by a rattlesnake. When McKenna bathed Audrey, now in the regular tub, she dabbed at the stumps with the washcloth, fearful that the skin might simply burst. Rigidly, Audrey sat, clutching a ducky, staring up at McKenna with her sad, round eyes, an invitation to love, or pity, or something else, perhaps, a question or a plea, something that made McKenna confused and afraid.

McKenna never spoke to anyone about Audrey’s legs, just as she’d never spoken to anyone about the way the suds when Audrey was an infant had slid so perfectly into her folds. She’d never spoken of Audrey’s arms, thinner than candy bars. Or the way Audrey giggled when she got splashed. Or the way McKenna let Audrey suckle her finger, and how the insistent, rhythmic pull—almost painful—made McKenna flush with shame.

McKenna never spoke of Audrey’s damaged legs. But neither did Toby, and neither did Misty. It was a fact of life that the Mape-ses bore without worry, without reflection. They believed steadfastly in the father, believed he would never allow them to experience pain. It was merely a matter of time, he said, of adjustments, of settling in.

As everyone knows, Murray finally removed the Dr Pepper feet. What most readers don’t know is that this only happened after Grandma Pencil stopped her scolding and threatened to inform Child Social Services.