The Magic Kingdom (30 page)

So, without ever having had any very particular interest in them, she knew about bodies. At least was accustomed to them, the little boys and girls just so much neutral doll stuff to her. Knew, that is, their surfaces, their skins, polishing them, buffing their luster like firearms for inspection. As long ago, or for the child long ago (when she was five, when she was six, when she was seven and eight and nine), she had once buffed her own, slipping out of her bed when Nanny had read her her book, when, the child feigning sleep, the woman had leaned over her and made one last adjustment of the bedclothes, the little girl’s hair, and tiptoed out of the room, Nedra listening for her steps to fade before leaving the bed to go to the wardrobe, where, if it was during the warm months, she looked inside the sleeve of her thick winter coat or, during the cold, the sleeve of her lightweight summer one for the carefully rolled towel she hid there, returning not to the bed but to the full-length mirror that stood, out of sight of the window, in the corner of her room, there to remove the pretty nightdress and to examine her chest where she could not remember when she did not know one day breasts would grow, to see if the small, discrete port-wine stain, no larger and not unlike the partial ring that might be made by a damp glass set down on a wooden surface, was still there.

Which it always was, of course.

Using the towel, but only in those warm months first lubricating its edge with her spittle or with water from the glass on her night table (because a little wetness would not leave a mark on the grand, thick winter wool, whereas the light summer one easily spotted), at first patiently rubbing at it for as long as ten minutes, as if she wished to make it shine perhaps rather than disappear (and only in the cold months applying the elbow grease, using the material like an eraser rubber, scratching at it with the dry towel, abrading, scouring, swiping at it as one would strike a match against a strip of friction, actually scraping it until it bled—although never with her nails, though she longed to tear at it and was held back only by scruple, some prohibition she’d heard of against self-mutilation—raising welts, raising galls, bruising her bruise), only then switching from damp end to dry, going at it for ten more minutes or so but still gently—it was summer, it was close in the room, effort raised perspiration, and Nedra could not tolerate the smell of her own sweat, as she could not tolerate any of her imperfections—still with that same craftsman’s restrained and delicate patience. (So maybe it was the warm months that saved her, that kept her from raising a cancer too, that reprieved her from the English climate with its three-to-one ratio of cool to warm like a recipe for a pitcher of martinis.)

Though her nanny could see the results when she bathed her.

“Are you still playing with that thing on your chest?”

“I don’t play with it.”

“You do. One day you’re going to develop a nice case of blood poisoning from that nasty tic.”

But the nanny was wrong. It wasn’t a tic. What she did wasn’t unconscious, in no way like biting her nails or fooling with her hair, although she had neither of these habits. All she wanted was to be rid of the thing, to have it whitewashed away by her furious frictions. (And, sometimes—this would have been during the warm months, past her bedtime, the pale sunlight coming into her bedroom window, mixing with the light from the ceiling fixture, the lamp on her night table, or during the cold months, the night slamming against the window glass, the room’s only light coming off the dim wattage of the fixture on the ceiling and the lamp on the night table—she believed that the thing was actually fading.)

The doctor saw it when she went for examinations.

“Does it hurt?”

“No.”

“Does it itch?”

“No.”

“Then why fool with it? You’re just irritating it, you know. You’re going to end up with a bad infection. I’ll give her a salve for that thing. I want this put on the area every night after her bath for five days. Now, Nedra,” the doctor said, “this medicine is very strong. It’s a steroid ointment and you mustn’t scrape at it. You have to let the ointment do its work.”

Which Nanny applied and which Nedra, misunderstanding, and seeing that so far the salve had merely helped to take down the rawness without doing anything to the stain itself, and believing that the doctor was afraid of dispensing it in too strong a dose—she’d lost a mum; she knew about dosages, strong drugs, the reluctance doctors had to let a patient have them even when they were clearly helping; her mum’s morphine, for example, which the doctor told her mum she could take every four hours but which she needed again after two—continued to apply herself for another week, until, in fact, there was no more left in the tube and she had developed an ugly rash all over her body. The doctor told her she was allergic to steroids and no longer prescribed them. The rash cleared up in a while but the stain was still there.

Which she knew the name for now—stigma—and looked up in her father’s dictionary. Learning that the purplish, iridescent flaw she wore like a piece of costume jewelry branded into her skin was, variously, “a mark burned into the skin of a criminal or slave; a mark or token of infamy, disgrace, or reproach”; and, under Medicine, “a mark on the skin that bleeds as a symptom of hysteria; a mark indicative of a history of a disease or abnormality”; and, far down, at the end of the list, past its biological definitions—“the respiratory spiracle of an insect or an eyespot in algae”—and botanical ones, she read that stigmata were “sores corresponding to and resembling the crucifixion wounds of Jesus”—not hers, which more closely resembled a crescent moon stamped by that hypothetical glass of beer, say, left to dry on that hypothetical bar—“and sometimes impressed on certain persons in a state of religious ecstasy or hysteria.”

Not, she felt, a lot to choose from: the sores of hysterics; the tokens of infamy, disgrace, reproach; the marks of the abnormal; the brands on criminals and slaves. (She was marked. She was a marked little girl. She would become a marked woman.) She settled for slave and turned to the nannies.

A mother’s helper’s helper. Apprenticed herself to the nannies.

Who by this time, her mother’s house almost completely populated now—she was ten, her mum had died when Nedra was four, her dad when she was nine, her stepmother had remarried the widower and would within two years be dead herself, leaving the double widower free to marry, to bring his bride, herself a widow with two children, into their little club—as solidly booked as a reputable bed-and-breakfast, not only welcomed her but probably would actively have enlisted her if she hadn’t asked first. Transferring her old reflexive rub-a-dub- dub—she’d ceased swiping at the thing on her chest, the stigma—to the babies, all those doll substitutes whom she bathed and toweled almost as roughly as she’d done herself. The nannies attempting to make her ease off, to lighten up. “Nedra, don’t flay them so.” Taking the washcloth from her, the soap, giving her lessons in the soft, trying to. “You’re not whittling wood, Nedra dear. You must be more gentle with them.” And who would probably have given up on her altogether if it hadn’t been for all those deaths, the possibilities they continued to create for the marriages of the survivors to more widows, more widowers, with their own complement of kids. (They were shortsighted—she thought of the succession of nannies that came into her mother’s home as “they,” thought there probably was never more than one nanny in the place at any one time—and didn’t understand what was really happening. It’s only the deaths of the adults, Nedra thought, that keeps things manageable here at all.) And who at last, seeing that she would never learn, did not have the touch with babies, sent her on to the toddlers. Who—if only because they were bigger, stronger, had larger lung capacities, if only because they’d been around longer, had developed a frame of reference against which they could measure their treatment in Nedra’s hands against what they had received in the less dockwalloper ones of the real nannies, if only because they had begun to develop at least the inklings of a sense of indignation—made even more fuss than the babies.

So she was off toddlers now too and (because they saw that there was nothing actually mean about her and that her fury was without rancor and was probably only a sort of dedication, and something more, perhaps, something they recognized from their own old apprenticeships, just the helpless and maybe even just wanton sign of her accession and assent to her vocation, her nanny calling) promoted (who hadn’t properly graduated either infants
or
toddlers) to out-and-out children.

She would have been about eleven, she would have been about twelve. There would have been, not counting herself, around eight kids in her mother’s house by now. Nine when the double widower and the new stepmother once removed had a child of their own.

This was the pool from which the nannies had to choose. And if Nedra were twelve now and had already gone through all the infants and toddlers with whom they dared entrust her, then the only out-and-out children around—the stepsister and stepbrother were just a year or two younger—were her half sister and half brother, the only other Carps in the house.

They tried her out on the half sister, but the little girl was frail and could not stand up to Nedra’s furious drubbings.

They gave her one last chance. They sent her into the bathroom to eight-year-old Gregory.

She saw him through the steam. He saw her as she moved toward him through the vaporish idiom of the damp tiles, the slippery marble. He was startled and, up to his chin in a lather of bubble bath, at a disadvantage.

“Hoicks! Yoicks and hoicks! What are
you
doing here?”

“I’m supposed to help bath you.”

“What, help bath
me?”

“Come on, Gregory, give me the washcloth, please.”

“What for?”

“Hand it over, Gregory. I haven’t all day.”

“What are you, daft? You think I’m going to let some
girl?
No hope!”

“Don’t be silly, Gregory. Nanny’s bathed you for years.”

“Yeah, well, that’s Nanny, i’n’ it? You’re different pickles, ain’t you?”

“I’m your sister.” Her response to his offended modesty was obvious, even logical, but it was lame. Both knew that. There’d been little casual intimacy in this house. For all that the various issue of the strange, relay-race relationships and liaisons between their various parents lived and played together, took meals on the same schedules, had more or less the same bedtimes, shared the same clothes, lived behind the same unlocked doors, and, as they grew into it, were even at the same liberty to move at will about the same rooms and halls—her mother’s rooms, her mother’s halls—they hadn’t often, and Nedra never, run into each other in even only ordinary familial propinquity’s catch- as-catch-can dishabille. She didn’t know why, or how it had happened, but it was a little like being guests living in the same hotel. The occasional compromised glimpse of another was simply not in the cards. There were, simply, no embarrassing moments. Nedra’s forays into child management had permitted her certain privileged “views,” even a kind of hands-on experience, but she was so busily engaged at these times—so furiously, some would have said—that she barely regarded the sex of whomever it was she was bathing.

“Go on,” Gregory Carp said. “Get out of here.
G’wan!”

“Not till I’ve done you.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve heard you like that sort of thing. Sorry,” he said and, partially raising himself, tried to pull the shower curtain around the tub. Nedra grabbed it away—he was her last chance, the nannies had told her so—and folded the curtain high up over the shower rod. Gregory looked at her. “Oh, yes,” he said, “a regular bruiser’s what I hear. Jack the Ripper, they call you in nursery. Scrub the spots off a leopard. You’re queen of the queer-o’s, you are, Nedra.”

“You’re wasting time, young man.” She was on her knees, her sleeves rolled. She reached into the bathtub, searching with her hands for the washcloth. She pulled it from under his thigh.

“Go on, get away from me! Stop that!
You better stop that!”

“You want them to hear you scream?”

“Too right I do!”

She rubbed his arms with the soapy cloth. He suddenly lay back in the water. “Sit up,” she told him and he raised up a bit, the bubbles clinging to his chest like a soft chain mail. She scrubbed under his arm. He was ticklish. He began to giggle. “Don’t be silly, Gregory. Gregory, don’t be so silly.” Her half brother was laughing uncontrollably now. He grabbed a handful of bubbles and threw them at her. Something about their weightless trajectory amused her. She smiled and scooped up some of the bubbles herself. It was a little like trying to throw feathers. Indeed, all of this was like some weightless, glorious pillow fight. They slapped at each other with thousand-faceted airy boluses of bubble bath. The stuff was on her clothes, on her face, in her hair. Then her brother pushed himself all the way up in the water and began splashing her. He shoved sheets of it at her, pushing the water away from his chest with his palms.

Which was when she first noticed it, saw it.

It was, of course, the thing, the port-wine stain, the partial ring, the costume-jewelry crescent, the iridescent purple flaw brand bruise stigma, the hysterical abnormal infamy skin token. He had one too. He was marked too. And now she saw what it really looked like. It looked like a lip.

It was right there on her half brother’s chest, exactly, though reversed, where it was on her own, placed just so, where she could not remember when she had not known that one day breasts would grow.

It was at this time that Nedra began to work on their alliance, bringing into it, too, because she thought it was what Gregory would have wanted, Gregory’s sister, offering the little girl special relationship, favored-nation status; not suspecting that, except for their own, there
were
no special relationships in that house, that blood didn’t matter, neither full brotherhood, the fractured, fractioned fellowship of the descending halves and steps, nor any of the shadowy stair relation there: that nothing counted, not even normal friendship; not knowing that everything was exactly as her metaphor had it, that the others were no closer than guests staying in the same hotel (soon enough dropping the sister, when her half brother lightly mentioned his indifference to the child, feeling worse about it than he did), sitting on her own appetites to feed his, bringing him treats, saving him her desserts, reserving part of her allowance and, when they had gotten rid of the sister, the frail little girl who couldn’t stand up to her drubbings, adding to it that part of the tithe—it amounted to a tithe, the little girl’s portion—which Nedra (because she still believed in his goodwill, his generosity, sometimes actually chastising the boy for being too free with his—that is to say, Nedra’s—money, spending too much on the cheap toys bought with coins held back from her own reserves and which otherwise would have been added to what she held back, still from her own reserves, to spend on Gregory) had withheld from Gregory’s—she thought of it as Gregory’s—money.