Chapter 36
The day Bella laid her first egg was a national holiday, Día de la Revolución. Henry found it, running into the house shouting and holding it aloft.
“Stop yelling, Henry,” Ida commanded like a miniature Louise. “Don’t hold it like that, you’ll drop it!”
He pivoted, darting past her, and she lunged at him so that I thought he really would drop it. But I grabbed her shoulder, holding her back, as Louise said calmly:
“Here, give it to me.” She had gotten a knitting needle from somewhere. We went back out onto the patio, still bare except the arrangement of boxes. Carefully she pierced the shell with the needle. “We’ll take turns,” she said. “It’s tradition.”
Tradition for whom, I wondered, from where?
I seemed to remember once seeing a girl do it in a movie set in the South of France.
Ida and Henry were bickering about who would taste it first. “I found it,” Henry kept exclaiming.
Which was correct. I wanted Henry to be the first, but I was nervous about Ida’s reaction to having to go second; she could behave as though Henry was contagious, recoiling from things he’d touched or eaten.
As I was parsing all of this—the ways I cowered before Ida, the ways I so often privileged Henry over her—Louise broke in:
“Mia will taste it. Your mother goes first.”
When she put it in my hand, still warm, I shuddered involuntarily.
It wasn’t like an egg from the grocery store.
It seemed textured, one side marked with a yellowish smear of shit.
But it was clean and smooth at its tip where she had pierced it, and with an effort to master my repulsion, I put it to my lips, thrilled as the warm viscous liquid filled my mouth.
“Now me!”
With care, I passed it to Henry, his eyes wide with wonder.
I worried he would drop it, he would gag, he would be crushed by disappointment at the taste.
He took his sip with gusto, Ida screeching, “Not so much!” Immediately after he swallowed, he cried out in triumph, “It’s good; I like it!
” Probably it was largely face-saving, but what did it matter?
He would remember this moment forever, I thought.
I sensed the current of Ida’s impatience, almost aggression.
“Now Ida,” Louise instructed.
Compliantly, Henry passed the egg with great solemnity.
Ida took it from him as if he were a thief and she’d only just managed to wrest from him what was rightfully hers.
Then she steadied herself as an actor does when about to step onto the stage.
She audibly exhaled. When she lifted it to her lips, it was with her eyes closed and a little smile on her face, making a show of piety like she was being admitted into a divine secret.
She kept her eyes shut for several seconds after she swallowed and, when she opened them, said nothing despite Henry’s pleas, as if her experience alone was untranslatable.
Lastly Louise drank. She tilted her head all the way back, her slender throat moving with her swallows like an egret’s gulping down a fish.
You can tell a lot about people merely by observing them.
If Louise taught me anything, it’s that people give themselves away all the time.
The only question is, are you able to see deeply enough?
And are you prepared to accept what you find?
Henry was talking loudly about what would happen next. “It’s finished,” said Ida mockingly. “We ate it.”
“But what about the shell,” he whined, appealing to Louise when he asked, could he have it? Could he take it back to his house? Ida crossing her arms at the foolishness of that suggestion.
“Come. I’ll show you what to do.”
The pronouncement, the way it was delivered, made me want to hide Henry in my arms, somehow preserve the magic of what we’d experienced, keep her from showing him what the world really is.
Ida was smiling smugly as we followed out the front door and across the street, where a half dozen men were busy at work.
Louise as ever a solitary, irreverent figure, hobbling and lurching ahead of us.
We went all the way to the farthest edge, where nothing had been cleared.
Sunlight beat down without warmth. We stopped.
When Louise lifted her arm ceremoniously, I was seized by the same desperate urge to stave off the moment, to scream, Don’t do it!
Just give him the fucking shell! For once in your life, be yielding!
Her arm was extended rigidly, the shell tucked in her hand.
In a few quick, pulsing motions, she had crushed it to powder and begun scattering it onto the cracked arid earth.
Then Henry did scream at her, too late, “No! Please!”
She half squatted beside him, bending just on one knee, her damaged leg thrust stiffly forward. In a rare moment of tenderness, she rested her hands on his small shoulders. “It’s okay; this is good, Henry.”
“No!” he cried again, though with less conviction.
Patiently, she began a recitation on the cycle of life, that the shell would feed the earth, the earth would feed the bugs, the bugs would feed Bella so that Bella could make more eggs; the next one, she would let him keep.
“I can keep the next one only for me?”
“Yes.”
“Can I have one?” Ida wanted to know.
“Of course! The very next one after Henry’s,” Louise said, and with the same intensity with which I had wanted to scream, stop her at any cost, I now wanted to fall on her in gratitude.
Back in her living room, she put on music and we all danced.
Later they ran outside to play and Louise and I smoked, laughing as we blew rings into the air.
Even after the cigarette and the two or maybe three glasses of wine, I could still taste it.
I could still feel the viscous warmth of it in my throat.