St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Outside, the sun was setting, spilling through our curtains. My father’s horns throbbed softly in the checkered light. His ears, teardrop-white, lay flat against the base of his skull. His expression was unrecognizable. Who was this, I wondered, this pupiless new creature? I had never seen someone so literally carried away by a desire before. All the reason ebbed out of his eyes, replaced by a glazed, animal ecstasy. If he hadn’t been wearing his polka-dot suspenders, you would have mistaken him for a regular old bull.

“And are you happy, Velina, with our life here? Have you stopped hoping for anything better?” This last bit got drowned out by the five o’clock scream from the asylum, which set our blood curdling like clockwork.

My father is doing the heavy labor, sweating through the traces, plunging into the freezing water, into rivers so deep that sometimes only the shaggy tips of his horns are visible. But he is happier than I have ever seen him. People need my father out here. In town there was always a distinct chill in the air whenever he took Ma to birthday parties or pumpkin tumbles, barbeques especially. But on the Trail, these same women regard him with a friendly terror. Their husbands solicit him with peace pipes, and obsequious requests:

“Mr. Minotaur, could you kindly open this jar of love apples for us? Mr. Minotaur, when you have a moment, would you mind goring those wolves?”

And I am so proud of my father, the strongest teamster, the least mortal, the most generous.

Ma likes to talk as if she could have done better than my father. All of my aunts married postmasters, and prim, mustachioed mayors.

“Your mother,” my father snorted, between a laugh and a sneer. “You women, you’re all alike…”

“It’s not too late, you know. It’s never too late to turn the wagon around—”

“Listen, Velina,” my father is saying. “I’m telling you, it’s too late. We can only go forward. Our geese have been eaten. There are strangers living in our house…”

There is some wooden clattering that sounds angry and deliberate, and an iron shudder. Then silence on my mother’s end.

For the first time, I feel just as sorry for my ma as for my dad. Everybody wants to go home, and no one can agree on where that is anymore.

“Who promised you that you were going inside the shells?”

Big Red bit her lip. She couldn’t remember who had made her that promise, although she felt certain that someone had. Big Red felt a dull, cuckolded rage, but she wasn’t surprised. For her first nine years on the planet, Big Red had lived a life of compromise. She wanted to be beautiful, but she’d had to settle for being nice. She wanted to see the Aquanauts for her birthday, but she’d had to settle for the gimp lobsters at Crab Shack. She wanted a father, but she’d had to settle for Mr. Pappadakis. […] Big Red’s mother has many epithets for Mr. Pappadakis: “our meal ticket,” “my sacrifice,” “vitamin P.” He is an obdurate man, a man of irritating, inveterate habits. He refuses to put down toilet seats, or quick sucking on pistachio shells, or die.

The neighbor woman, Miss Markopoulos, fills her days with a steady diet of black olives and soap operas and, most recently, the maternal nurture of stingrays. Like most of the residents of the Out-to-Sea Retirement Community, Miss Markopoulos has spent decades hoarding a secret cache of love, shelved and putrefying in a quiet cupboard within her; and now, at the end of a life, she has no one to share it with. No one but the rays, Sawtooth grunts, a bunch of wall-eyed invertebrates. He would pity her, if she wasn’t such a damn fool.

Sawtooth is living in a Biscayne star-fishing barge. Zenaida Zapata, Sawtooth’s neighbor to the right, is living in La Rumba, a former Venezuelan party rental. She complains that the smell of limeade and fornication has saturated the wooden walls. These are boats that fought in foreign wars, that survived wild hurricanes, that carried young lovers along moonlit currents. Now they sit on short tethers in shallow water, permanently at anchor. After two of the residents tried to elope, they sent Gherkin from maintenance around to remove all the engines.

Man-made waves lap gently against the sides of the boats, controlled by a machine that hums like the rise and fall of a giant respirator. But the Out-to Sea Retirement Community has been sealed off from the real ocean. A stone seawall extends under the water and wraps around the marina like a giant gray honeycomb.

Our mothers and fathers were werewolves. They lived an outsider’s existence in caves at the edge of the forest, threatened by frost and pitchforks. They had been ostracized by the local farmers for eating their silled fruit pies and terrorizing the heifers. They had ostracized the local wolves by having sometimes-thumbs, and regrets, and human children. (Their condition skips a generation). Our pack grew up in a green purgatory. […] Our parents wanted something better for us; they wanted us to get braces, use towels, be fully bilingual. When the nuns showed up, our parents couldn’t refuse their offer. The nuns, they said, would make us naturalized citizens of human society. We would go to St. Lucy’s to study a better culture. We didn’t know at the time that our parents were sending us away for good. Neither did they.

Jeanette was the first among us to apologize; to drink apple juice out of a sippy cup; to quit eyeballing the cleric’s jugular in a disconcerting fashion. She curled her lips back into a cousin of a smile as the traveling barber cut her pelt into bangs. […]

I was one of the good girls. Not great and not terrible, solidly in the middle of the pack. But I had an ear for languages, and I could read before I could adequately wash myself. I probably could have vied with Jeanette for the number one spot, but I’d seen what happened if you gave in to your natural aptitudes. This wasn’t like the woods, where you had to be your fastest and your strongest and your bravest self. Different sorts of calculations were required to survive at the home.

One night I came back early from the closet and stumbled on Jeanette. She was sitting in a patch of moonlight on the windowsill, reading from one of her library books. […] Her cheeks looked dewy.

“Why you cry,” I asked her, instinctively reaching over to lick Jeanette’s cheek and catching myself in the nick of time.

Jeanette blew her nose into a nearby curtain. (Even her mistakes annoyed us—they were always so well intentioned.) She sniffed and pointed to a line in her book: “The lake-water was reinventing the forest and the white moon above it, and wolves lapped up the cold reflection of the sky.” But none of the pack besides me could read yet, and I wasn’t ready to claim a common language with Jeanette.