So Wlibgis stood under the maple and smoked her menthol cigarette with pleasure. The skin around her lips had turned into a wrinkled meat pie, and her mouth had tapered to match the kiss of a cigarette filter; without a cigarette her mouth was utterly orphaned.
And then a deadly cancer grew in her throat. She had one operation, then another, and yet a third. First they destroyed her salivary glands, then she lost her vocal chords, and finally most of her larynx was taken out. They made a repulsive hole in her throat, and Wlibgis was given a speech prosthetic, a big black tube that resembled a giant dog whistle. The prosthesis was connected to a black cotton string that slid around her neck, and then supposedly she would be able to talk again just so long as she took the time to practice patiently with the device.
At first Wlibgis thought she wouldn’t bother. She didn’t want to speak another word. Was she going to talk to Lisbet next door? Lisbet often imposed herself on Wlibgis under the maple tree, coming to “trade news” as the saying went. But they never traded anything, because without exception Lisbet always just launched into the same long, meandering sentence about her own wonderful son and Wlibgis’s terrible one. Let’s call them “Nicholas” and “Petrus”. When Lisbet opened her mouth, Nicholas and Petrus seemed to neutralize each other, so dreadful was the former, so marvelous was the latter. Once Lisbet had squeezed out her sentence, nothing was left for Wlibgis to say. She completely agreed with Lisbet about her own son. But what of it? She already knew that Petrus, who had the same appealing good looks as the late politician Pim Fortuyn, never made a ruckus in the stairwell and never screamed through the mail slot so loud that the whole corridor echoed.
“My son is in prison now,” Wlibgis once tried to say, but Lisbet, unsurprisingly, took this in a different direction than Wlibgis had hoped. “When your son comes back, he’ll be even more dangerous than before,” Lisbet said with a sigh and then sucked on her cigarette. “I’ll have to talk to Petrus about this. He can come help us.” And what would Petrus do? Run Nicholas off with his belt? Slam the junkie up against the wall of the building by his collar? Drag him down to the cellar and kill him?
They stubbed out their cigarettes, turned around, walked to the stairwell, and squeezed into the same small lift. No, Lisbet was no reason for Wlibgis to want to learn to use the speech prosthesis.
But there was little Melinda. Lovely, bright-eyed Melinda with her hare-brained imagination and her W’s she said in place of R’s. Melinda’s stories could always make Wlibgis’s wrinkled meat-pie mouth spread in a smile, and she would shed tears of joy as she laughed hoarsely. Then Melinda would giggle too since Grandmama had blessed her silly idea with her laugh. Perky ears, tiny pink glasses absurdly askew, freckled pug nose, face so plump you could eat it up. To her, Wlibgis still wanted to be able to say, “Oh, you dear silly sugarplum,” and all the love-filled variations of this theme: “bitsyboo”, “doodlekins”, “honey giggle-bunny”.
Really, if you looked at the situation from the perspective of Fate, the girl was her real child. Melinda was meant just for her in every way. The girl’s mother had to give birth to her, of course, and Wlibgis’s son was a necessary intermediary as well, whose gene map carried Melinda’s assembly instructions from the start. Without him, there would be no Melinda, and so Wlibgis could more or less tolerate his existence. Fortunately he had the good sense to stay far away from Melinda. In his typical traitorous style, he left the girl to her mother, who at least tried to stay clean. And because of Melinda, Wlibgis wanted to help her mother. Wasn’t this enough reason to fight? Wasn’t this sufficient grounds to practice with that stupid dog whistle?
Thank God she could still sputter through that hole in her throat, through the speech prosthesis, syllable by syllable, letter by letter, her reedy, wavering, jerky robot sentence, G-r-a-n-d-m-a-m-m-a. l-o-v-e-s. y-o-u. s-o. m-u-c-h. l-i-t-t-l-e. M-e-l-i-n-d-a. It came out misshapen, interrupted by phlegmy intakes of breath, and completely exhausted Wlibgis, but regardless of the technical performance, it was as true as true could be.
Nina finishes arranging the objects. The fireguard is handsome, with all manner of shapes. There is a ball, a ring, and a cylinder. There are rectangles, creases, and shapelessness. Nina shoots upright and begins resolutely to undress. The women obediently follow her example, all except Wlibgis, who believes that the order to disrobe does not apply to her.
Showing no shyness at all, Maimuna simply pulls her yellow dress off in one motion. The dress has frills on the bodice and the hem, and under the breast is a beautiful series of pleats; but at the waist and seat the fabric is too loose, almost shapeless, until it falls with its flowing frills toward the ankles. Then slender Maimuna is in her underwear. Suddenly she places her hands modestly over her vulva, although it isn’t even bare, and waits for the others.
Shlomith slithers out of her caftan in a series of complicated motions. First she pulls both arms inside the dress and then begins to scrape the garment off from within. She crouches and disappears completely, including her head, into the recesses of the fabric, but her limbs continue their work. The fabric bulges here and there, quite ominously, as she moves. No one can
