Still Life with Woodpecker (3 page)

Leigh-Cheri’s dilemma was resolved, for the time being, but she felt like a black candle at a wake for a snake. When an intern whistled “Proud Mary,” she had no inclination to sing along.

Her boyfriend telephoned about eight that evening. He was at his fraternity house. They were having a victory party. He said he’d drop by the hospital the next day, but he must have lost the address.

When her identity was learned, the Princess was moved to a private room. She was given the best sedative in the house. Château du Phenobarbital 1979. Asleep at last, she dreamed of the fetus. In her dream, the fetus went toddling off down some awkward dirt road like Charlie Chaplin at the end of a silent movie.

By Tuesday, she was physically recovered to the degree that she could return to campus, where she learned that her status as the only genuine princess west of New York was insufficient to deflect the moral indignation of the committee on cheerleaders. Asked to resign from the yell squad, she resigned from classes, as well. She also resigned from men, but rather late to appease the King and Queen.

Max’s heart was rattling like a full set of dishes when he told Leigh-Cheri that she must shape up or ship out. “We’ve been liberal with you,” said Max, “because, well, after all, this is America….” Max neglected to point out that it was also the last quarter of the twentieth century, but that, no doubt, was self-evident.

“Adolf Hitler vas a wegetarian,” Queen Tilli reminded Leigh-Cheri for the three-hundredth time. Tilli was attempting to discourage her daughter from joining a natural foods commune in Hawaii, an option that appeared to be open to her if she elected to relinquish royal privilege. In turn, Leigh-Cheri might have reminded the Queen that Hitler ate two pounds of chocolate a day, but she’d grown weary of that dietary debate. Besides, she’d decided to protect her claim on royal privilege, even though it meant subjecting herself to tighter social restrictions.

“You goan be a gut girl, then?”

“Yes, mother.”

“If we deal you a new hand, will you play by the rules?”

“Yes, father.”

They observed her as she turned to go upstairs. They observed her as if it were the first time they’d really looked at her in years. Despite her pale color and the un-happiness that clung to her the way a bad dream clings to a rumpled pillowcase, she was lovely. Her hair, as straight and red as ironed ketchup, rode gravity’s one-way ticket all the way to her waist; her blue eyes were as soft and moist as
huevos rancheros
, and the long curl of their lashes caused fimbrillate shadows to fall on the swell of her cheeks. She was not tall, yet the legs that hung out of her skirt seemed a tall woman’s legs, and beneath her No-Nukes-Is-Good-Nukes T-shirt, her astonishingly round breasts jiggled ever so slightly, like balls balanced on the noses of Valium-eating seals.

Tilli stroked her Chihuahua. Max’s heart made a sound like the sleigh bells on Mrs. Santa Claus’s dildo.

NEOTENY. NEOTENY. NEOT
—Oh how the Remington SL3 enjoys that word! Unrestrained, it would fill the page with neotenyneotenyneotenyneoteny. Of course, it bothers the Remington SL3 not a comma’s worth that very few readers know what the word means. Given an opportunity to write it again, however, the machine would be inclined toward definition.

“Neoteny” is “remaining young,” and it may be ironic that it is so little known, because human evolution has been dominated by it. Humans have evolved to their relatively high state by retaining the immature characteristics of their ancestors. Humans are the most advanced of mammals—although a case could be made for the dolphins—because they seldom grow up. Behavioral traits such as curiosity about the world, flexibility of response, and playfulness
are common to practically all young mammals but are usually rapidly lost with the onset of maturity in all but humans. Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.

One needn’t feel excessively ignorant if one was unfamiliar with neoteny. There have been queens and kings and princesses who also were oblivious to it, in word and in action.

During the period following Leigh-Cheri’s miscarriage, the supposed virtue of maturity was cardinal in the Puget Sound palace. Although understandably vague about what maturity might actually be, Leigh-Cheri strove, with her parents’ encouragement, to acquire more of it. Nightly, until the age of fifteen, and on a few evenings thereafter, she had been told a bedtime story; until a few weeks prior, she had been flailing about paroxysmally amidst pompons, shouting incomprehensible incantations meant to further the fortunes of a band of innocent sprites worshiping a sacred fruit (upon the fortunes of that same football team habitually rode much of mature King Max’s bank account, but that’s another matter). It was about time she grew up. Princesses were not exactly a dime a dozen. And this princess, it had suddenly dawned upon Tilli and Max, was a sexpot.

She might be expected, upon attaining the age of twenty-one, to marry well, very well, indeed. In fact, there was probably no man, from Prince Charles to the U.S. president’s son, whom she might not fairly mate. Those prospects pleased the King and Queen. Heretofore, living under the stare of the CIA, having agreed to “retire” from the royalty circuit, the Furstenberg-Barcalonas sheltered no particular ambitions for their daughter and were content to have her indulge a normal American girlhood (although they were unconvinced that developments such as vegetarianism and ecology were normal). Now, it occurred to them that if this young woman were to attract the attention
of the right man, one of the emerging Arab rulers, for example, even the CIA probably would be powerless to prevent a most propitious union.

It was the wrong time to speak of marriage to Leigh-Cheri. Leigh-Cheri had driven a wooden stake through the valentine. Yet, on the premise that it would aid preparation for her mission in life; on the premise that were she ever to resume her studies in environmental sciences she might not be so easily distracted by vibrations from the half-shellfish half-peach that occupied the warm, watery bowl of her lower regions, she made herself available to maturation, if maturation would have her.

Put away was her teddy bear. Put away were her Beach Boys records. Put away was her fantasy of a Hawaiian honeymoon with Ralph Nader, her daydream of Ralph and her driving off together into the Haleakala sunset with their seat belts fastened. Not that she’d changed her mind about how perfect she’d be for him—he worked too hard, smiled too little, and dined as one indifferent to both flavor and fate; he clearly was a hero in need of rescue by a princess—it was just that romantic fantasies were …
immature
.

Leigh-Cheri read books on solar radiation. She perused papers on overpopulation. To keep abreast of current events, she watched every news telecast that she could, fleeing the TV room immediately whenever a love story was dramatized. She gave her ears to Mozart and Vivaldi (Tchaikovsky was painful). She fed flies to Prince Charming. And she worked at keeping her person and her room exceedingly clean.

“Cleanliness is next to godliness” was one slogan of maturity to which Leigh-Cheri could faithfully subscribe—not stopping to consider that if by the last quarter of the twentieth century godliness wasn’t next to something more interesting than cleanliness, it might be time to reevaluate our notions of godliness.

GULIETTA DIDN’T WORK ON SUNDAYS.
It was only fair. Even Friday got Thursday off, thanks to Robinson Crusoe. On Sundays Queen Tilli would lumber into the kitchen, her Chihuahua affectionately clasped, and make brunch.

The odor of frying bacon, sausage links, and ham tiptoed on little pig feet all the way to the north end of the second floor. Inevitably, the odor would awaken Leigh-Cheri. Inevitably, the odor made her simultaneously ravenous and nauseated. She hated the sensation. It reminded her of pregnancy. Every Sunday morning, celibacy notwithstanding, Leigh-Cheri awoke to a pan of fried fear.

Even after the panic had subsided, she found little to admire about a Sunday. To her mind, Sunday was where God kept his woolly slippers. It was a day with a dull edge that no amount of recreation could hone. Some might find it relaxing, but the Princess guessed that a great many people shared her feeling that Sunday generated a supernatural depression.

Sunday, a wan, stiff shadow of robust Saturday. Sunday, the day divorced fathers with “visitation” rights take their children to the zoo. Sunday, forced leisure for folks who have no aptitude for leisure. Sunday, when the hangover knows no bounds. Sunday, the day the boyfriend didn’t come to the hospital. Sunday, an overfed white cat mewing hymns and farting footballs.

The day of the full moon, when the moon is neither increasing nor decreasing, the Babylonians called
Sa-bat
, meaning “heart-rest.” It was believed that on this day, the woman in the moon, Ishtar, as the moon goddess was
known in Babylon, was menstruating, for in Babylon, as in virtually every ancient and primitive society, there had been since the earliest times a taboo against a woman working, preparing food, or traveling when she was passing her monthly blood. On Sa-bat, from which comes our Sabbath, men as well as women were commanded to rest, for when the moon menstruated, the taboo was on everyone. Originally (and naturally) observed once a month, the Sabbath was later to be incorporated by the Christians into their Creation myth and made conveniently weekly. So nowadays hard-minded men with hard muscles and hard hats are relieved from their jobs on Sundays because of an archetypal psychological response to menstruation.

How Leigh-Cheri might have chuckled had she known that. On a particular Sunday in early January, January being to the year rather what Sunday is to the week, she wasn’t aware of it, however, and she awoke in mean spirits. She pulled a robe on over her flannel pajamas (she’d discovered that silk had a tendency to agitate the peach-fish), brushed the knots out of her hair, knuckled the crunchy granola from the corners of her eyes, and descended, yawning and stretching, into the hot hog hell of brunch. (She knew without tasting that her soybean curd would have soaked up some of the essence of bacon.)

As it has for so many for so long, the Sunday paper helped her through the day. Regardless of what else the press might have contributed to our culture, regardless of whether it is our first defense against totalitarianism or a wimpy force that undermines authentic experiences by categorizing them according to faddish popular interest, the press has given us big fat Sunday papers to ease our weekly mental menstrual bloat. Princess Leigh-Cheri, wriggle into your cheerleader uniform one last time and show us the way to hooray: two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate? The Sunday papers, the Sunday papers, yea!

It was in the Seattle paper, on that particular Sunday in early January, that Leigh-Cheri initially read of the Geo-Therapy
Care Fest, the what-to-do-for-the-planet-until-the-twenty-first-century-arrives conference. It was an event that would have speeded up her pulse even had it not been scheduled to occur in Hawaii. As it was, she bounced in her mother’s lap—hardly the ultimate mature act—for the first time in years and began her petition to attend, for under the Furstenberg-Barcalona code to which they now strictly adhered, the Queen would have to accompany her. Tilli on Maui? Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o.

THIS MAY BE SAID
for the last quarter of the twentieth century: the truism that if we want a better world we will have to be better people came to be acknowledged, if not thoroughly understood, by a significantly large minority. Despite the boredom and anxiety of the period, or because of it, despite the uneasy seas that separated the sexes, or because of them, thousands, tens of thousands seemed willing to lend their bodies, their money, and their skills to various planetary rescue missions.

Coordination of those far-flung projects was a primary aim of the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, slated for the last week in February at Lahaina, Maui, Hawaii. Leading experts in the fields of alternative energy sources, organic farming, wilderness preservation, alternative education, holistic medicine, nutrition, consumer protection, recycling, and space colonization were to lecture and lead panel discussions and workshops. Proponents of many diverse self-help systems and consciousness curses, ranging from ancient Oriental to contemporary Californian, would also be in attendance. Moreover, certain futurists, artists, visionary thinkers, shamans, and poetic seers had been invited to participate, although several of the poets
and one of the novelists were suspected by the organizers to register on the lunatic scale.

Don’t think the news of that conference didn’t melt the ice off the dog dish at thirty paces. If her life span were a salad, Leigh-Cheri would have dived into the dressing to present that conference with a perfect crouton. Not the least of her excitement was the information that Ralph Nader would deliver a key speech there and that one whole evening would be devoted to the subject of alternative methods of birth control. Even in the Siberia of celibacy, Leigh-Cheri was concerned with contraception. The problems associated with it had been more frustrating to her than the aggressive, competitive, assertive, egocentric, and crude behavior of the men with whom those problems
should
have been shared, and although she was presently free of the problem, she was too intelligent to mistake flight for victory.

The King and Queen hadn’t seen their daughter so animated in months. True, this animation was a relative thing: Leigh-Cheri moved about like a zombie, yet a few days earlier she had more closely resembled a corpse. That was progress. Now there were moments when, speculating about the Care Fest, she actually appeared on the verge of smiling. What would any compassionate parents do? Give in, of course. Allow her her conference.

As the date approached, Queen Tilli decided that Maui was simply too barbarous. It was bad enough being stuck on the outskirts of Seattle, it raining trout teeth night and day, blackberry vines trying to force their way into the privacy of her own chamber, without transporting her posh poundage to some jungle island inhabited by surfer boys and vacationing strumpets, to whose company on that particular week would be added a couple thousand coocoos intent on saving a world they didn’t fit into anyway. The Seattle Opera Company was opening
Norma
with Ebe Stignani that same week, and although Stignani was well past her prime, she provided true legato, a rare commodity in those jagged times, and the Queen had
been invited to be honorary hostess at a reception for the aging soprano. Since Max dare not travel because of his valve, it was agreed about the middle of February that Gulietta would chaperon the Princess in Hawaii.