Omnivores

  A NOVEL

  LYDIA MILLET

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE: TYRANNOSAURUS REX

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  PART TWO: HOMO ERECTUS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  PART THREE: CANNIBALIS HORRIBILIS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  PART ONE

  TYRANNOSAURUS REX

  ONE

  “YOUR DEAD BUGS ARE DELICATE,” SAID BILL, BRUSHING a flake of ash off his suit sleeve. “Grease the pin up before you pierce ’em. Or else the little shits will fall apart.”

  Home from the crematorium, he took her under his wing. In his private gallery, in display cases lining the walls, were legions of the dead. There were those who crumbled in their tombs, furred bodies frail as dry leaves, leg segments long departed from their casings. A stray proboscis here, a palpus there. Mr. Kraft was less a hobbyist than a gamesman. His chief interest was the animal world: a grandiose moth collection, and then there were the cockfights. His new mission, he proclaimed, was to school his daughter in the science of nature. “Your female tussock moth,” he advised on their first night in training, “has no wings. Can’t fly. She lives to mate.” After which, with a chortle, he swung off in the direction of her mother’s room, the invalid’s sanctum, his flat-footed feet crunching down on a carpet of Noctuidae corpses.

  He insisted that the house be clean, and hired maids for this purpose, but his workroom, fitted out in dark wood, was littered with the musty debris of a thousand captures and purchases. If Estée put a drink down on a table she was sure to find, when she reached for it later, a dried-up bagworm floating and bobbing near the rim. He counseled intimacy with the specimens. The moths and butterflies, their cocoons and glistening pupae of infancy, had to be as familiar to his daughter as her fingers and toes. He administered tests to her on every other day. He was The Inquisition. His jiggling pounds and florid bursting face loomed close at every turn: he was a monstrous pachyderm, a monument in flesh who cornered her with his bulk, dogged her steps and breathed her exhalations. “Suborder Ditrysia?” he would bellow. “Describe! Define!” If she was slow he leapt into the breach. “Females with two genital openings, you stupid girl, receptive on eighth abdominal segment!” As penance he made her crush a specimen in her hand—something expendable, a common clothes moth or burrowing sod webworm. She was not allowed to wash it off till the session was over; for each wrong answer or long silence he would sacrifice an insect. At the start of her apprenticeship there were times she had to clutch whole handfuls of crushed bodies, whimpering for him to let her go. “You get ten wrong answers in a row, you eat them all,” he warned. She had to chew before she swallowed. “You keep this up, you pay the price,” he threatened when her scholarship did not improve. He vowed to make her ingest a goat moth, whose wingspan was over ten inches.

  Thus while other teenagers were surfing or practicing birth control she was learning superfamilies in her room, murmuring in the stillness of midnight, “Zygaenoidea, Cossoidea, Danaus plexippus.” Mr. Kraft claimed his strictness was in her best interests. “Discipline, my girl. As my only child,” he told her sternly over a glass of sherry, flicking his wrist to dislodge a chrysalis from the hairs on the back of his hand, “you’re gonna hafta be prepared.” But he forgot to say for what and dozed off in his armchair, leaving her free to avert her eyes from the caverns of his nostrils.

  She carried food to her mother in the evening and was trapped in a chair near the bed while the invalid prised pistachios from their fuchsia shells, dye mottling her fingertips, or sucked oysters down her throat, false teeth in effervescent liquid on the bedside table. Facing the canopied bed, whose aura was of medicine and rot, was the shrine, mama’s altar to the Bettys. Estée’s mother worshiped all famous Bettys, though there were only a few represented here: Grable, Friedan, Crocker, Rubble, Page, and Boop. Photographs, memorabilia, articles of clothing or publicity redolent of Bettydom hung on a tabernacle of gingham and lace. Betty disciplined her daughter in stillness: if Estée fidgeted while her mother ate, if she let her feet shuffle over the carpet in boredom, stretched out an arm in fatigue, or idly shifted in her seat, her mother would embark on a hunger strike. Pushing away her food she would sigh and remember the halcyon days. “I had all my teeth,” she would muse, “my own hair, and it was golden like yours,” while Estée bent over the supper tray, arranging morsels in appealing patterns.

  Her dad brought bettors home to watch the roosters. In the skylit atrium men jeered and cheered, yelling and pumping arms at their favorites. Afterward they gathered with beers in the armory, bills changed hands, backslapping ensued, and Estée would linger under the dome, feathers floating up to cling to her legs, to watch the final throes of a mangled cock left behind on his battle site. He might be covered in the loops of his entrails as she knelt beside him, stroking an eyeless head as legs trembled, claws clutched, heartbeat stopped. The victory cock, corralled again in a sandy meshed pen beneath the garbled branches of a eucalyptus, strutted and crowed to lose another day.

  Blundering into Betty’s boudoir while his two girls were sitting quietly, Bill was prone to bluster, “Betty, is that a smut on your nose or am I seeing double?” referring to his progeny. He would take Estée aside and say, “Your mother named you for Lauder the cosmetics queen, so let’s see you get gorgeous!” and jab his daughter in the ribs before she could reply. Estée hated her name, but Betty was proud of it and would not budge. “So feminine,” she liked to murmur. She had been inspired by a jar of cellulite cream on her nightstand, which reminded her of shopping days long past. Mrs. Kraft’s strained energies had during healthier times been channeled into volunteer work for humanitarian causes—civic beautification, Californian Ladies for the Right to Bear Arms, Orange County Citizens for Reagan. One year she’d thrown a charity dinner for hideously malformed children and financed a six-year-old’s harelip surgery with the proceeds. Now, bedridden, she concentrated on the home front. On her stronger days she was a hurricane. She made Estée sit beside a bust of Betty Grable, sculpted craftily in painted Styrofoam, and leering from her pillowed throne held up a Day-Glo hula hoop whose plastic sting was vicious.

  “Be like Betty,” she ordered through clenched teeth, and Estée became inanimate. Over her shoulder quivered the hoop, eager to lash if she betrayed herself through movement. Estée and the bust stared with identical blankness at the surface of the wall. She was fond of the bust: there was safety in numbers. A stranger might say they didn’t have much in common, but she certainly knew better. Admittedly, according to Bill’s dog-eared Gray’s Anatomy, the bust was missing features Estée had, was lacking optic nerves, the fibrous tissue of the brain, and neither did it possess the power of autonomous motion; but these were minor points. In space their positions were similar. A tenderness would overtake her as she sat, and if she’d been able to she would have reached out and touched the curve of its nose, the slant of its Styrofoam cheekbone, the strands of its blond, Authentic Human Hair wig.

  Massage was her duty. Betty would lie prone while Estée rubbed aromatic oils into her back, fragments of dead skin adhering to her palms and thumbs. The household dust was human epidermal cells sloughed off by Betty in paralysis. Her skin lined mantelpieces and old china, goblets and chandeliers, and with a breeze or Estée’s breath would float up in clouds and resettle on carpets and floorboards. Estée had witnessed, since a tiny tot, the constant exfoliation of Betty. Into her Fisher-Price tape recorder, by means of which she’d kept a private journal since she found it in a toy closet when she was ten, she confided, “The skin on top is clear, you can hold it up to the light and se
e through it. How does she store all those layers underneath?” Artificial talons were glued to the blackened crescent stubs of Betty’s fingernails, these in a bright rainbow of colors—another task assigned to Estée in the name of filial devotion. The maids were paid to keep house, but Estée was caretaker of its doyenne. Her schedule was tight and left few hours for diversion, and her movements outside the home were monitored with rigor. On rare occasions she escaped to freedom after school hours, but Bill, who waited in the car outside school grounds with a stopwatch in hand, caught up with her and meted out due punishment. “Told you, Esty,” he would lecture, “nothing but weirdos out there. They let ’em walk on the streets. Criminals, reprobates, and child molesters Esty. Death can jump on you lickety-split. It’s chaos Esty. At home’s the only place with order. You stay put and don’t stray. Sixteen years I fed you, not going to be ripped off now by some maniac with a switchblade. My investment in the future, girl. And don’t cry. Where’s your damn guts?”

  Her father’s girth was an expanding universe. His stomach ballooned, his chest became breasts, his ankles settled into tubes of wrinkly fat. He stopped short of four hundred pounds by the breadth of a hair. He felt no shame in his body’s excesses, explosions, secretions, its rude assault on the innocent air. When they stood in the same room he was always within a two-foot radius of her, belching, farting, allowing himself every breach of decorum from which, during the day, he felt himself required to abstain. Massive, greedy, and abhorrent, he quizzed her on the habits of Yponomeuta. Seating himself to defecate he would make her stand at the bathroom door and rhyme off the members of superfamily Bombycoidea.

  As her apprenticeship wore on Bill got sick of the laborious process of taxonomy and passed the mantle to her. She was the one to label the specimens he imported, to pin them on pads and encase them in glass. He wanted only to stroll through the gallery, admiring the blossoming crowd of rare species. He devoted his days to the crematorium, though he had a host of other assets, because it was his favorite enterprise. On his return in the evenings he would drink, put his feet up, and watch her at her labor.

  Her bedroom was subject to warrantless searches and seizures. Her father snuck in often while she slept and woke her up in the middle of the night, stark naked. “What were you doing with this? This?” he would threaten, and shake in her groggy face some object he had found, burrowing in her drawers or closet, behind which she could see, since her mattress lay at the level of his crotch, purple plumlike testicles waggling and peeking from between columnar, dimpled thighs, and the poking inquisitive head of a small pink cigar.

  Focus was Bill’s mantra: only a small canon of possessions was allowed, related to her studies at school or at home. Foreign material was not permitted, save for the few items related to personal hygiene and dress that Betty insisted she have. When she made the mistake of keeping a note she’d received from Mike Lamota in English class tucked between lined pages in a three-ring binder (Your hot, do you want to go Out), Bill found it on his nightly rounds. He didn’t wake her up; she found the scrap of paper glued to her forehead in the morning with industrial-strength adhesive. When she tried to pull it off it rent the skin. She had to go to school wearing the fragment stuck there, a banner of nonsense over her eyebrows, patchy with blood. She scrawled over the clumsy ballpoint words with a thick felt-tipped marker on her way to the bus stop, which saved her from specific humiliation though not from general.

  After this episode, pursuant to threats of a lawsuit directed at the school board, Bill removed her from school, on the premise of acquiring a tutor. To this position he appointed himself, and it was no longer difficult to get away from him, but impossible. If he relented it was never for long: the span of a measly hour was too much to ask. All day long, while Mr. Kraft worked, Estée was locked in with her mother, whose foul nest full of detritus choked her and gave her swimming headaches. Though in all else Betty strove toward a pristine ideal, she could not be bothered to have herself moved from the bed more than once a week, when the custom-made sheets were taken by a maid, shaken in the backyard to expunge accumulated filth, and laundered. The bed had a toilet beneath it, specially constructed, whose flush lever was set into the wall within arm’s reach. A panel in the frame of the bed, button operated, slid back when excretion became necessary. There were no common bedpans for Betty. Her bed linen was constructed with fitted holes to make room for the plumbing apparatus.

  The nature of her ailment? Medical experts hemmed and hawed and said it was in her genes, her history, her makeup. Yet there were some who claimed it was self-inflicted, that Betty Kraft condemned herself to paraplegia. No coincidence was it either that her wedding night had been the start, stated Dr. Joy the family psychiatrist, fired after one session. Once led to bed by Bill, penetrated and fertilized, she stayed there and refused to move. Was it the shock of violation or, as Dr. Joy was overheard to intimate, the laxness of postcoital bliss that laid her out for good?

  Estée heard Betty’s version of the tale told over and over. “Your father got me on the bed,” murmured Betty dreamily, twisting in her hands the neck of one of the fat Persian cats she raised from kittenhood and strangled absently. Estée watched as it sputtered, tongue protruding. “He pulled out the manacles and chained me down, spread-eagled.” For distraction from these inappropriate disclosures Estée would sing, inside her head, “I can’t hear you, I can’t hear you,” to the tune of “Exsultate, Jubilate.” Religion was forbidden in the household but she had seen it on TV. The library was full of it. She liked to sit in a carrel in the audiovisual section, holding the padded headphones to her ears, and listen to the choral voices rise in harmony as her eyes skimmed over the pages she held, where ganglia and Malpighian tubes were pictured in gross magnification. Luckily her father had never been to a library, or he would know temptations lurked there, under the innocuous guise of lepidopterology. He had been surprised when, after her first visit, she told him there were whole rooms of books.

  “I’m a self-made man,” he proclaimed, and left it at that.

  But the tide of Betty’s words could not be stemmed. “He took it out of his fly,” she wailed, “and beat me with it till my jowls hung down like a basset hound’s.” Estée knew that, like heroines in the old movies Betty favored, she was expected to fall on bruised knees at the bedside, clasping a weak maternal hand to her own tear-stained cheek. Instead she kept her sympathy in reserve, awaiting the advent of reliable sources.

  For visits from relatives, including her blind grandfather and a great-aunt with halitosis, Estée had to groom her mother, dress her, and affix to her bald pate, by means of glue, one of the wigs from her collection, which ranged in style from pageboy to beehive. On alternate Thursdays her mother Received. Reclining beneath her canopy, features painted into a ghoulish approximation of vigor, Betty ushered in her guests with a gracious beringed hand while Estée stood shyly behind the bedroom door. Mrs. Kraft had freshened the atmosphere with clouds of aerosol Glade, so that the visitors, on arrival, would cough, choke, and move toward the window to inhale. “Don’t open that!” Betty would screech, for natural light was her curse. The sun was unsubtle and would show her up in all her sad dilapidation.

  “How’s my baby daughter?” Estée’s grandfather would croon, his eyes on Betty while he tossed a gift to Estée. These gifts were always records of old musicals—Oklahoma! Carousel, Singin’ in the Rain—the scores of which he claimed to have written in his youth. “But it says here Rodgers & Hammerstein,” Estée objected. The old man cut her off. “I wrote ’em,” he said shortly. “Wrote ’em right off the top of my head.” It made no difference, since the gifts, which were no use anyway to someone who had never seen a record player, were confiscated by Bill as soon as his doddering father-in-law was down the front steps. “Into the furnace with these little fellas,” Bill would say fondly, and Estée never saw them again. She imagined he carted them off to work the next day and threw them in the mix with a dowager deceased of multiple sc
lerosis.

  How long could her parents persist? It was no use trying to talk of reason to them. Her father even knew more Latin than reason, though he believed it to be a lingo invented recently by specialists for the sole purpose of referring to moths. He was impatient when she forwarded the notion that there had once been an empire. “Don’t believe what you read,” he cautioned. “Lies and lies … I could tell you lies. I know guys who bring their kids up on a diet of the stuff. Never forget how lucky you are, Esty my girl. Take a walk through a church, they’ll have you believing in justice. Nothing but a sales pitch. Romans, Romans, everyone knows they speak French.”

  She practiced secret prayer, a rite not unlike masturbation. Her father warned her it would drive her blind. “That was what struck down your granddad,” he whispered, out of earshot of Betty’s room. “God, God, and more God. He went against the laws of nature and now he can’t see a foot in front of his face. The Protestant old fuck. Excuse me, Esty, Daddy said the P word.” The prayer was conducted alone in her bed, in silence, with the utmost concentration. “Dear Lord, I am under strange government. There are devils here who masquerade as saints. And they are clearly insane.”

  Her mother’s birthdays were celebrated with extravagance. Pretty Bettys emerged from eight-foot cakes, later to be fondled by her father in the hall for generous remuneration. “Today your mother turns thirty-nine,” Bill announced every year. “Bring on the dancing harlots.”

  Betty chose the occasion of her fifth thirty-ninth birthday to initiate Estée into the private club of womanhood. “Onanism is healthy,” she confided, manipulating invisible parts with an agitated hand beneath her blanket by way of demonstration, as Estée, humiliated, hummed “Ave Maria” in her head. “It’s really the best way, and absolutely safe. When you’re older I will show you the devices.”