The Magic Kingdom (29 page)

“Look there!” Colin Bible said. “And
there.
Look at those over there!”

There was a couple with the lined, bloated, and satisfied heads of midgets. Wens were sprinkled across their faces like a kind of loose change of flesh.

There was a potbellied, slack-breasted man, his wife with bad skin, wrinkled, scarred, pitted as scrotum. They had smooth, fat fingers, and their hands were balled into the ineffectual, hairless fists of babies.

“Look, look there, how ugly!” Colin said.

An angry woman with long dark hair, her back to the street, stood near the couple with the wens. Her hair, tied beneath her chin, looked like a babushka. She stared back at Colin and the children, her black, thick eyebrows exactly the color and shape of leeches above eyes set so deep in her skull they seemed separated from her face, hidden as eyes behind a mask or holes cut from portraits in horror films. A set of tiny lips, Kewpie- doll, bow-shaped, red and glossy as wet paint, and superimposed, grafted onto her real lips like a botched bookkeeping or clumsy work in a child’s coloring book, tinted an additional ferocity into her scrutiny.

“It breaks your heart,” Colin said. “Imperfection everywhere, everywhere. Not like in nature. What, you think stars show their age? Oceans, the sky? No fear! Only in man, only in woman. Trees never look a day older. The mountains are better off for each million years. Everywhere, everywhere. Bodies mismanaged, malfeasanced, gone off. Like styles, like fashions gone off. It’s this piecemeal surrender to time, kids. You can’t hold on to your baby teeth. Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock smashes scissors. A bite of candy causes tooth decay, and jawlines that were once firm slip off like shoreline lost to the sea. Noses balloon, amok as a cancer. Bellies swell up and muscles go down. Hips and thighs widen like jodhpurs. My God, children, we look like we’re dressed for the horseback! (And everywhere, everywhere, there’s this clumsy imbalance. You see these old, sluggish bodies on thin-looking legs, like folk carrying packages piled too high. Or like birds puffed out, skewed, out of sorts with their foundations.) And hair. Hair thins, recedes, is gone. Bodies fall away from true. I don’t know. It’s as if we’ve been nickel-and-dimed by the elements: by erosion, by wind and water, by the pull of gravity and the oxidation of the very air. Look! Look there!”

A middle-aged woman in a print dress waited in house slippers for the parade to begin. She was crying. Tears pushed over the ledges of her eyes. A clear mucus filled a corner of one nostril.

A dowager’s hump draped a pretty young woman’s shoulders and back like a shawl.

They saw the details of a man’s face, the stubble, lines, cleft, dimples, and pores, sharp and clarified as closeups in black-and- white photographs.

Sunglasses in the form of swans, masks, butterflies, or random as the forms of costume jewelry. Odd-shaped wigs and hairdos sat on people’s heads like a queer gardening, a strange botany. And, everywhere, penciled eyebrows, painted lips, like so many prostheses of the cosmetic.

It had begun now, the parade. A well-dressed man in a business suit stood at attention as the floats passed by. He held his hat over his heart. (And sanity, sanity too, marred, scuffed as a shoe, wrinkled as laundry.) It had begun now, but the children weren’t watching. They couldn’t take their eyes off the crowd. (“
This, this
is the parade!”) They stared at the special area the park had provided for guests in wheelchairs, at the old men and women who sat in them, bundled against some internal chill on even this warm day, wrapped in blankets that tucked over their feet, in sweaters, in scarves, in wool gloves and mittens, covered by hats, by caps, Mickey Mouse’s eared beanies, dark as
yarmulkes,
on top of their other headgear; at, among them, an ancient woman in a rubber Frankenstein mask for warmth; at her nurse, feeding her cigarettes, venting her smoke through a gap in the monster’s wired jaws. At other women, depleted, tired, who sat on benches, their dresses hiked well above their knees, their legs (in heavy stockings the color of miscegenetic, coffee-creamed flesh) not so much spread as forgotten, separated, guided by the collapsing, melted lines of their thighs. At their husbands (or maybe just the men they lived with, for convenience, for company, for making the welfare checks go farther), their hands in their laps, incurious as people who have just folded in poker. (And
everywhere
those dark glasses. “It ain’t for the glare,” Colin told them, “it’s for the warmth!”) At grown men and women wearing the souvenirs of the Magic Kingdom: sweat shirts, T-shirts, with Eeyore, with Mickey Mouse, with Jiminy Cricket, Alice-in-Wonderland pinafores, Minnie Mouse dresses, carryalls with Dumbo and Tigger and Tramp. At a woman in her sixties, inexplicably wearing a boa, a turban, a veil of wide, loose black mesh; at hands and arms and shoulders blotched by liver spots; at a man in baggy pants suspiciously, unscrupulously bulging. At a man in shorts, the enlarged veins on his legs like wax dripping down Chianti bottles in Italian restaurants.

At a woman with oily skin and pores like a sort of gooseflesh, visible as the apertures of chickens where their pinfeathers have been plucked. At a still handsome woman with bare, shapely, but hairy legs (hair even on the tops of her feet), but carefully trimmed as sideburns or rolled as stockings two inches below her knees; at a powerfully built man in his sixties whose chest hair, visible through his sheer tank top, had been as lovingly, patiently groomed as a high school boy’s. (Everywhere, everywhere hair—the strange feeling they had that they were among birds, the wigs, the boa, the babushka of hair beneath the woman’s chin, the piled hairdos, the thinning hair, the penciled eyebrows, the tattooed mustache and sideburns of the strange Westerner. Mudd-Gaddis’s own baldness and the chemotherapeutic fuzz of several of the children. Because everything has a reasonable explanation, and almost all had heard that hair didn’t stop growing after you died. Because everything has a reasonable explanation and hair was the gnawed, tenuous rope by which they hung on to immortality.)

Everywhere there were peculiar couples. A boy and a girl who couldn’t have been more than twelve but looked in their runt intimacy as if they could have been married. The boy held his arm protectively about the girl’s shoulder, his free hand in the pocket of his three-quarter-length trench coat as though he fondled a gun. He wore a jacket, a shirt, and a tie. His floods, honed as a knife along their permanent crease, rose above sharp, snazzy shoes. The girl, shorter than her small boyfriend, in a decent wool coat that looked as if it had been bought at a back- to-school sale, smiled wanly. Her black full hair showed signs of gray and she seemed a little nervous, wary, even long-suffering, beneath the arm of her protector, as if she knew his faults, perhaps, his diseases—which weren’t diseases in her book—his excessive drinking, his compulsive gambling, his quick fists and rude abuse.

And stared openly at the mismatched couples: at the big, powerful girls next to undersized men and the men large as football players beside bloodless, scrawny women, at the couples widely discrepant in age in open attitudes of love and regard, handholding or clutching butts, the men’s fingers casually resting along breasts as if they lolled in water. Or their arms thrown abruptly across each other’s shoulders. Sending the smug signals of secret satisfactions, like the wealthy, perhaps, like people in drag.

And at a closely supervised group of the retarded, oddly ageless, the males in overalls, the females in loose, shapeless dresses and rolled stockings, clutching one another with their short fat fingers, their strange, pleased eyes fixed in their happy Smile Faces like raisins in cakes, beaming above their neglected teeth, beaming, beaming beneath their close-cropped hair on their broad, short skulls.

(Yet most were not defective, merely aging or old, or anyway beyond that thirty- or thirty-five-year grace period that seemed to come with most lives.)

Not even needing Colin now to direct their attention, to point things out. In it themselves now, raising their voices, like people outbidding each other in some hot contest, not even listening; or, if listening, then listening for the break in the other’s discourse, for that opportune moment when they could have their say, get in their licks; or, if listening, then listening not just for the other to finish but for some generalized cue, some more or less specific tag on which they could build, add, like players of dominoes, say, or card games that followed strict suit. But generally too excited even for that. Only half listening, really, less, fractionally, marginally, seeing how it was with them and concentrating only on the essence, pith, and gist of what they would say, thinking in a sort of deliberate and polite headlines but settling finally into a kind of conversation and still using the language of that other kingdom, the one they’d come from to get to this one.

“Lord love a duck!” said Janet Order. “Just clap eyes on these gaffers.”

“My word, Janet! They’re for it, I’d say so,” Rena Morgan agreed.

“Lamb turning to mutton.” Janet sighed.

“Fright fish.”

“Blood puddles.”

“Lawks!” said Benny Maxine. “Look at the bint with the healthy arse. I’m gone dead nuts on that fanny.”

“Ooh, it’s walloping big, ain’t it?” Tony Word said.

“If it ever let off it wouldn’t ’alf make a pongy pooh,” Benny asserted.

“Like Billy-O!” Tony said.

“Good gracious me!” said Lydia Conscience. “Say what you will, my heart goes out to the old biddy what looks like someone put her in the pudding club.”

“Yar, ain’t she dishy? There’s one in every village.”

Tony Word considered. “No,” he said. “She’s just put on the nose bag. It’s simply a case of your lumping, right grotty greedguts.”

“Only loads of grub then, you think?” Lydia asked.

“Oh, yes,” said Tony. “Oodles of inner man. Tub and tuck.”

“Jesus weeps!” said illiterate Noah Cloth, looking about, his gaze settling on the little group of the retarded. “He weeps for all the potty, pig-ignorant prats off their chumps, for all the slowcoach clots and dead-from-the-neck-up dimbos, and wonky, puddled coots and gits, goofs and goons, for all his chuckleheaded, loopy muggins and passengers past praying for.”

“Put a sock in it, old man,” Benny Maxine said softly.

“For all the nanas,” Noah said, crying now. “For all the bright specimens.”

“Many’s the nosh-up gone down that cake hole,” Tony Word said, his eye fixed on the fat woman Lydia Conscience had thought pregnant. “Many’s the porky pots of tram-stopper scoff and thundering stodge through that podge’s gob,” he said without appetite.

“She’s chesty,” Rena Morgan said, weeping, of a woman who coughed. “She should put by the gaspers.”

“She’s had her day,” said Janet Order.

“Coo! Who ain’t?” Rena, sobbing, wanted to know. “Which of us, hey? Which of them?”

“Are they all on the dream holiday then?” Charles Mudd- Gaddis asked.

“All, old son, and no mistake,” Lydia Conscience said wearily.

“A shame,” he said. “Letting themselves go like that. And them with their whole lives in front of them.”

And, at last, just rudely pointing. (They could have been mutes waving at entrées, aiming at desserts in a cafeteria line.) Whirling, indiscriminate, flailing about in some random “
J’accuse”
of the spontaneous. Whining, wailing, whimpering, weeping.

Because everything has a reasonable explanation. They lived in England’s cold climate. They came from a place where clothes made their men and their women. They were unaccustomed to sportswear, to shorts and the casual lightweights and washables of the near tropics. They were unaccustomed, that is, to the actual shapes of people and simply did not know that what they saw was just the ordinary let-hung-out wear and tear of years, of meals, of good times and comforts and all the body’s thoughtless kindnesses to itself. So that when Colin said what he said they believed him.

“I tell you,” he told them, “that’s you in a few years, never mind those three-score-and-ten you thought was your birthright. All that soured flesh, all those bitched and bollixed bodies. You see? You see what you thought you were missing?”

“Bodies,” Nedra Carp said. “Don’t tell me about bodies. I
know
about bodies.”

“I’ve got them!”
Colin Bible shouted, bursting into the room he shared with Bale, with Mudd-Gaddis and Benny. “
I’ve got their consents in my pocket!”

5

S
o Nedra Carp knew about bodies.

If nothing else, her duties as a nanny had given her expertise in that department. (Hadn’t she bathed and toweled dozens of children? Hadn’t she helped bathe and actually dress all those step- and less-than-step—“stair relation,” she called them—brothers and sisters of her early years?) And if her expertise was largely limited to the bodies of children, why, weren’t the bodies of children bodies in their purest form? Didn’t children wear the sharp, original shape of form itself? Hairless, without extrusion or eyesore, the blemish of sex? (She was no prude. She did not mean blemish. She only meant the body distracted from itself, allowed to drift from its intentions, from the air-and skin-tight condition of bone in its bearings: the baroque scroll and ornament of palimpsest flesh.) She had rub-a-dub-dubbed girls and boys for almost as long as she could remember and, seated on stools and chairs for leverage, drawn their bodies to her within the open V of her legs (and as little pederast as prude), vigorously scrubbing, rubbing, grooming them—for bed, for parties—as if they’d been poodles in shows, the texture of their skins and every inch and hollow of their bodies known to her even beneath the thick, rough nap of the towels and soft, slippery film and feel of the soap, discounting the misleading temperature of the water. Practicing on all that devolutionary line, her mitigated steps and halves (the two stepchildren, the stepbrother and stepsister, the half sister, the half brother, the three—what?—cousin sisters and her half brother’s sister, half brother and half sister and two stepsisters by the double widower, so that for the rest of her life she feels she stands—she doesn’t know
where
she stands—as much in
sororal parentis
as
loco),
the way some other little girl might play with dolls.