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Summer/Fall 2001Volume II Issue III

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Heidi Julavits has published short stories in Esquire (included in The Best American Short Stories 1999), Story, Zoetrope, McSweeny's, and was selected by the Voice Literary Supplement as a 1999 Writer-on-the-Verge. 

Her debut novel,

The Mineral Palace

The Mineral Palace was published in 2000 to rave reviews.

"One Mother's Blunder" is an excerpt from her forthcoming second novel, Pitcairn's Mistake

 

 

 

Newsweek called Julavits' first book, "a marvelous debut novel: harrowing, poetic and tragic enough to satisfy both Faulkner and Oprah."

Esquire described it as, "A beautiful, sinister novel."

"Heidi Julavits is a remarkable writer." says author, Amy Tan. "The Mineral Palace is a mesmerizing first novel and a spectacular display of her talents, her sensibilities on love and danger, and her utterly fascinating and singular voice."

 

 

 

 

 


One Mother's Blunder

Heidi Julavits

 

When I was an unworldly girl of eighteen, I traveled to Peru with my spinster aunt to see the Incan ruins and climb the peaks of Machu Pichu. Aunt Bea was a dynamic, self-perpetuated loner, the sort of woman who derived her sole erotic pleasures from mocking any man who was kind to her in even the most professional, indifferent fashion. Since she had been a pinched, peevishly attractive sorority girl in St. Louis, she boasted, she'd been turning men away in hoards. I traveled by her side as her apprentice, watching how she spurned airplane stewards and hotel concierges and lonely, married businessmen. My aunt, at fifty-one, was no longer even peevishly attractive; she failed to notice, how she no longer received advances, unless they were insincere.

We arrived by train at the base of the mountains and stayed in a log lodge with pyramid-sized stone fireplaces and Incan-patterned silverware, napkins, towels, carpets, stationary, toilet paper. The halls were lined with photographs of Hiram Bingham and his archaeological team in the prolonged act of discovering Machu Pichu, digging it out with pickaxes and tiny spades, looking as triumphant and first-time as moonmen. Nevermind the bones, Aunt Bea would say with a sniff. Her every comment was only the suggestion of a criticism, leaving it to me (as her apprentice) to interpolate the fully-fleshed judgment regarding the deluded ways of men who forgot that the city was not formed by the excavating motion of their pickaxes, who forgot they were digging out the homes and graves of people who preceded their elevated discovery with the daily discoveries of shitting, eating, dying close to the top of the sky.

The first man she spurned at the lodge was the concierge, a hairlipped Englishman who tried to bury his native cockney cadences and called her "Mademoiselle" and accused me of being her sister. "You're not her niece," he said, grinning like a rabbit, long upper teeth and stumpy, overly-alert nose, his desk clean of anything but a burly, antique telephone that appeared too cumbersome to ring. "You two girls look like sisters. Twins, I'd say." He scoffed goodheartedly at our attempt at deception. My aunt took her key and turned away without a word to him. To me she said, quite audibly, "you'd think they could find some miners' bastards locally, without having to import them from overseas."

I turned back to watch the man's jagged face slump. His windlessness persisted in me, so that I could not enjoy our game of cribbage, our cocktails on the log deck staring upward at the swelling flank of an Ande. After dinner, I discovered the man drinking alone at the bar and gave him a bit of bone I'd found while walking in the woods behind the lodge. It was a truly unremarkable bit of bone, gray and blunt and from a bird, but he accepted it with a resigned pleasure, as he accepted me, the peevishly attractive niece of a mean woman on vacation in the Andes. He took me to a room in the servant's building, a hangar-like structure hidden behind a looming wall of hemlocky hedges. I slept with him because I felt terrible for the way he was treated, because he was hairlipped, because I believed it was my duty to correct the misbehavior of other people, especially those to whom I was related. The English man was more full of gratitude than desire, and so I did not tell him that I was a virgin for fear of the unattractive thankfulness such an admission might unleash.

The next morning I ate an omelet across from my aunt who turned her pickled, morning face toward the Peruvian waiter, looking so dapper and sweet in his pressed white uniform, and said, "a shame they weren't all killed by Spanish pestilence. What has survival ensured them but a life of servitude?" She asked for more coffee and the waiter poured her a cup, perfectly hot, spilling not a single drop onto the native patterned saucer or her bumpy tweeded lap. Before his luncheon shift, I brought him the brown underfeather of a sparrow to the back room where he was polishing water glasses. His body was tightly packed and softer than the Englishman's, but his manner was similarly reverent and rueful. I did not tell him I was but one man from a virgin. I did not tell the other men that I was two men, three men away from obscurity.

I thus passed my vacation, dodging outsized gratitude and watching my aunt snub men during the day, feeling the heartbeat in my sore, recognized places and breathing in time to her pitiful snoring at night. Is it any wonder, then, that I mistook your father's tepid, unbeholden seductions for actual love? Is it any wonder that I revered this man who ignored me and treated me as less captivating than an aging uncle, and misunderstood his neglect as mature, adult adoration?

I mistook the day we met, even, mistook if for foggy though, simply, we were inside a cloud. We boarded a tram on our last day, my aunt and I, guided by a small man who might have been a sherpa, one of those dense, low-center-of-gravity men, as wide as they are tall, that form geologically like basalt beneath the crushing air of mountainous climates. Water condensed on the windows as we were pulled upward into the cloud.

At the top, the visibility was less than six feet. It was a terrible day to visit Machu Pichu. We might have been anywhere. My aunt accused the sherpa who extended his hand to help her, "we might be anywhere."

The sherpa did not understand English. He did not notice when she snatched her hand out of his, her ability to convey insults limited to body language. She disappeared angrily into the cloud, her failure to strike at the heart of a person causing her to reflect on her mortality, something that is always advisable to do in private.

I stayed with the tour, which was given by a young Peruvian woman who was beautiful from the front, but suffered an unattractive recession of her features when viewed in profile. She begged us to watch our step, to not disturb anything, to encourage our friends back home to take advantage of Peru's expanding tourist industry. We visited primitive kitchens like bird feeders, high up holes in a rockface with blackened walls where the fires once were. We visited deep basins chipped into the stone by the singular dripping of an icicle over millions of winters, the resulting divot used by the Incans for bathing. We visited a somber chamber with a stained floor, where sacrifices were thought to have taken place involving a sickle-shaped metal ax that hung on a wall like a hearth tool. At the Hitching Post to the Sun, a giant rock where astronomical observations about winter were made, I pocketed a tiny stone.

The Peruvian woman led us to a row of new granite slab picnic tables that were supposed to look out over the spine of the Andes. She described what we might have seen as if we were blind, and passed out sandwiches to us and thermoses of tea. My aunt, at this point, had been missing for over an hour. She was disdainful of guided tours. I assumed she was off conducting her own examination of the kitchens and the sacrificial chambers, until I saw a tattered, dragged-down figure being led by a man through the clouds. They looked like a pair of soldiers returning from a trench war, my aunt and the man, the fields around them still shifting with weary residue of battle.

My aunt collapsed next to me on the picnic table. Her clothes were filthy with a thick red mud like the insides of an animal. The man was thin with the put-upon redness of skin that has been forced to act as a hide or a pelt rather than just an underthing to clothes. He had deep crevices around his eyes that marked his smile, though he was not smiling. He wore a tool belt that jangled with tweezers and magnifying glasses.

My aunt did not speak. She pushed her muddy hair away from her face and asked for a cup of tea. The man sat at our table and pulled out a cigarette.

He lit it and pointed at my aunt with the breathing end. "Found your auntie neck-deep in a mud pit," he said.

My aunt smiled. She had mud on her teeth.

"Lucky for her," the man continued, "I was looking for fossils." He exhaled and looked out into the cloud. "Amazing acidity levels in the bog here. Best preserved insect fossils in the world."

"You're a bug man?" I inquired.

"In training," he said. "But bound to be a bug man."

"Brilliant," I said.

We were silent.

"But it must be a bore," I said, "this bug business."

The man played with his burnt match. He flicked it over his shoulder.

"Beats baking bread," he said. "Beats building bobsleds."

My aunt leaned forward and grinned with her muddy teeth.

I gestured toward my own teeth suggestively, and she rubbed hers with an index finger turned sideways like a toothbrush.

"This man saved my life," she said, swallowing mud. She delivered this news in the form of an accusation.

Man, I thought, was a bit ambitious for the bug man. He was more of a boy. A bug boy.

"What's your name," my aunt asked, sneering.

I could see the bug boy form a "buh" with his lips, but then his mouth relaxed. "Harold," he said.

"Well, Harold," my aunt said. "You should know better than to waste your time rescuing half-dead ladies from the bogs of this world."

He nodded. "I've learned my lesson. You're the last." He saluted her and wandered off into the cloud with his tweezers clinking.

That night I found your father in the hotel bar drinking water. I drank five scotches and gave him the rock I'd stolen from the Hitching Post to the Sun. He identified it as a piece of cement some archaeologists used to buttress a failing wall, and proclaimed it worthless as a souvenir. Later that evening he was unchanged after our encounter in his small hotel room, unchanged and unapologetic, as though he were fully deserving of my generosity. He disappeared into the cloud the next morning without saying good bye, even though he knew my aunt and I were leaving on the evening train. When he tracked me down in the states ten months later on his way from one bog to another, I agreed to marry him without his even needing to buy a ring.

See this ring? I bought it myself. I tell everyone that Harold gave it to me, but the truth is, I bought the diamond myself after I realized how much I'd come to adore the fake jeweled ring you'd received at the dentist office after your operation. I wore it on my pinkie finger and when you asked me where it was one day (you had never loved it adequately), I hid my hand in my skirt and said the maid had thrown the ring out. You cried and cried, because you'd lost your teeth and you'd lost your ring. Even after I bought myself a real diamond, I didn't give the ring back to you. I wrapped it in an old shirt and buried it in the trash because you were such a sensitive girl, so eager to grow weepily unstable at the first indication that things can come back to haunt you, even after you've given them up for dead. I don't have any good reason for doing this. I'm sorry.

© 2001 by Heidi Julavits