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With some difficulty, Karen lowers herself into her steaming bathtub. Her left foot, encased in plaster, a plastic Safeway bag, and a pink towel, is balanced precariously on a metal crutch that stretches like a bridge from one side of the tub to the other. Curls of plastic advertisements for Pillsbury Dough peel from the crutch.
At eleven o’clock the previous night, Karen and Morris discovered that the hospital no longer sent crutches home with their disabled outpatients. A nurse sternly informed them that far too many crutches left the emergency ward, never again to return. In the wake of all the budget cutbacks, the hospital saw fit to revoke the privilege of sending crutches home with the lame. Instead, a local supermarket rented Karen a pair of crutches for a nominal fee, thus the Pillsbury Dough advertisements plastered on its surface.
Karen is now indulging in a hot bath because Morris magnanimously told her to take the day off from the teahouse. He wrote a note and stuck it in the window: “Closed for today due to affliction. Will reopen tomorrow. Sorry for any inconvenience.” From the sound of the rain battering the roof, Karen doubts that the suspension bridge, and therefore the Footstop, will receive any customers today.
Arms trembling slightly from bearing the brunt of her weight, she levers herself into the foamy water, groaning as her skin turns a delicious scalded red. From the bathroom floor Dilly meows.
“Just wait,” Karen murmurs, leaning back and closing her eyes. “It’s too hot for you. Wait.”
She lets her thoughts drift as tiny bubbles pop and crackle around her, releasing apple-scented steam. She thinks back to the previous night’s occurrence, to the indignity of backing out of the bush in front of a stranger with her buttocks exposed. Blushing, she begins to shampoo her hair.
By the time Karen finishes, the water has cooled enough for Dilly to climb in. The cat stretches across her stomach, purring as she kneads her breasts and butts her chin. Bubbles adhere to the cat’s fur like foam to a sandy beach.
Seven years ago Karen found four kittens stuffed inside a plastic ice-cream bucket on the doorstep of the Footstop. Two of the kittens were dead, not from lack of oxygen (someone had thoughtfully made holes in the lid of the ice-cream bucket) but from lack of blood: fleas swarmed over them. Karen immediately took control of one kitten and Candice the other.
Upon the advice of a local veterinarian, they purchased a pair of flea combs and spent the next few hours combing the kittens and drowning the captured fleas in a cup of bleach. (Andy, only two, tried to drink it.) Regardless of their efforts, the kittens weakened. The fleas crawled down their ears, up their nostrils, and into their half-closed eyes, hiding from the combs with a canniness that bordered on higher intelligence.
“They need to be flea-bathed,” Karen muttered, angrily squashing a flea between her thumbnail and the kitchen counter. It made a satisfying pop.
Candice frowned. “But the vet said we can’t do that. The kittens are too young. The chemicals will kill them.”
“Chemicals or fleas — either way they’re going to die. Watch your brother. I’m going to the pet store.”
Karen defied the veterinarian’s instructions and bathed her languid, flea-infested kitten in chemical shampoo; Candice staunchly continued with the flea comb. By nightfall Karen’s kitten was tentatively sucking on a doll’s bottle of milk; Candice’s kitten was buried in the backyard.
Since then Dilly insists on sharing the bath with whomever is currently in it.
The bathwater is beginning to cool. Karen lifts a sopping Dilly from her stomach and drops the cat onto the floor, where she promptly shakes like a dog and proceeds to groom. After a great struggle, Karen extracts herself from the bathtub. She scrubs her rosy, rounded flesh with a towel (does the towel smell faintly of Andy poop, or is that her imagination?), sits on the toilet, and works her panties over the bulbous cast on her left foot. It isn’t until the black cotton slides over the birthmarks on her inner thighs that she remembers the white hart by the creek.
Immediately, she freezes. Her birthmarks begin to buzz, much as an elbow tingles if the funny bone is walloped.
Ah, yes, those birthmarks. Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff had plenty to say about them during Karen’s childhood: “Karma. They are there because of karma. All Buddhists know that a person’s physical features are influenced by karma.”
And this: “Jesus was very open-minded, girl, very understanding of those who were confused about their sexuality. A prostitute was his closest friend — sex thrives on friendship.”
And this: “The Hevajra Tantra says great knowledge abides in the body, though it is not born of the body. Do you know what this means? This means that your body is a telephone between the human and the divine.”
Ah, yes, Mei-ling (aka Petra) Woodruff had a great deal to say about Karen’s birthmarks. None of it comprehensible.
Karen dresses in a daze, eats her scrambled eggs and toast in a daze, finishes mending the hole in Candice’s favourite plaid shirt in a daze, and hobbles into the teahouse in a daze. Yet she isn’t so dazed as to forget Morris’s edict to keep Dilly out. That she consciously chooses to ignore.
A door in the kitchen leads directly into Karen’s workshop nestled at the back of the teahouse. A heavy brocade curtain separates the workshop from the teahouse proper.
Glue, nails, chalk, papier mâché, sculpting burrs, and glitter spill from shelves; scissors, clay, oil paints, sanding belts, wood shavings, exacto knives, and Magic Markers overflow from stacked boxes. Upon a large, rough-hewn workbench lie beads, leather strips, pencils, hammers, chisels, turpentine, shrink-wrap plastic, and stacks of coloured paper. The room looks like a collision between a stationery store and a hardware depot and smells like the well-oiled wood of an old church.
In a corner of this room cowers a worn wicker basket lined with a hairy wool blanket. With a yawn Dilly walks into this basket, curls up, and proceeds to sleep. Karen flicks on a wire heater, leans her crutches against the workbench, and sinks onto a paint-flecked stool.
Almost twenty minutes go by as she sits and stares blankly at the heater’s red coils.
“I can’t do it,” she finally says aloud. “I can’t follow my Destiny. It will ruin the family. Candice will die of shame.”
Not true, a voice murmurs in her mind. Certainly, Candice may never speak to you again, may endure endless torment at school, and may even leave home, but she won’t actually die. Not unless, in running away, she ends up a heroin addict.
“What about Morris?” Karen argues. “It will destroy him. Who will run the teahouse? I owe him more than that.”
Why? What exactly has he done for you, other than bless you with an old one-level house, a foot-fetish fair, and two children? And besides, he’s been spending an awful lot of time at the office lately. And that honey-voiced, stout ’n single receptionist of his is always with him, isn’t she?
“But Andy will never understand! He’ll cry, he’ll beg me not to do it, it will affect his emotional stability.”
More so than the Footstop already affects it?
“I can’t do it, okay? I can’t.” Karen grabs the pillowy portion of her inner thighs and squeezes hard, trying to squelch the tingling in her birthmarks and the voice
