Still Life with Woodpecker Read Free

programmed so that it would in no way interfere with the real purpose of human beings in a capitalistic, puritanical society, which is to produce goods and consume them?
    Since she could not possibly answer that question—she couldn’t even ask it without getting winded—and since the lunch-hour, parking-lot rendezvous in the back of her boyfriend’s van were frankly deficient in certain romantic details that she’d always associated with sex, the Princess decided that she would enter a second exile: celibacy. Before she could steal safely across the border, however, the biological IRS caught up with her and exacted its stubborn price.

10
    WHEN HER LOVER, the quarterback, implored her to have her pregnancy “taken care of,” Princess Leigh-Cheri rested her forehead against the plate glass of the vegetarian restaurant in which they were dining and wept. “No,” she said. “No, no no.”
    At nineteen, she had already undergone one abortion. She would not tolerate a second. “No,” she said. A teardrop hung out of each blue eye, like a fat woman leaning out of a tenement window. They bobbed, balanced, and bobbed again, as if dreading the uncertain journey down her cheeks. Wavering there, her teardrops reflected for a moment the sheen of the soybean curd upon her plate. “No more vacuum cleaners, no more steel. They can scrape my heart, they can scrape my brain before they’ll scrape my uterus again. It’s been over a year since my last D and C, and I still feel raw in there. It feels bitter when it should feel sweet, it feels ragged when it should feel smooth, it feels deep purple when it should feel pink. Death has thrown a stag party in the most sacred room in my body. From now on, that space belongs to life.”
    Any time that technology subverts a benevolent natural process, the sensitive smell sulfur. For Princess Leigh-Cheri, abortions had not only the reek of totalitarianism but the shriek of betrayed meat. If another D and C was an intolerable idea, however, the prospect of inopportune maternity was equally distressing—and not just for the usual reasons. Furstenberg-Barcalona was an ancient lineage in which strict codes had evolved. If a female member of the family wished to possess full privilege, if she would someday be queen, then she must neither marry nor mother before the age of twenty-one, nor could she beforethat age forsake her parents’ domicile. And although she considered herself one of the people, Leigh-Cheri did very much indeed desire full royal privilege. Leigh-Cheri believed that she could use that privilege to help the world.
    “Fairy tales and myths are dominated by accounts of rescued princesses,” she reasoned. “Isn’t it about time that a princess returned the favor?” Leigh-Cheri had a vision of the princess as hero.
    As Queen Tilli put it when Max asked her what she thought their only daughter wanted out of life, “She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”
    “What?”
    “She vants to buy zee vorld a Coke.”
    “Well,” said Max, “she can’t afford it. And the world would demand Diet Pepsi, anyhow. Why doesn’t she buy
me
a martini, instead?”

11
    IT WAS AUTUMN, the springtime of death. Rain spattered the rotting leaves, and a wild wind wailed. Death was singing in the shower. Death was happy to be alive. The fetus bailed out without a parachute. It landed in the sideline Astroturf, so upsetting the cheerleaders that for the remainder of the afternoon their rahs were little more than squeaks. The Huskies won anyway, knocking off favored UCLA, 28-21, and at nearby University Hospital, where Leigh-Cheri had to have a pint of common blood pumped into her royal conduits, the interns were in a festive mood.
    Leigh-Cheri’s dilemma was resolved, for the time being, but she felt like a black candle at a wake for a snake. When an intern whistled “Proud Mary,” she had no inclination to sing along.
    Her boyfriend telephoned about eight that evening. He was at his fraternity