Geek Love by Katherine Dunn Page B

edge of the sliding door to Mama's room at the end of the van.
    She was sitting on the bed with the baby's cardboard box beside her. She looked up at me as I whispered Papa's message. She nodded and reached out a red-gloved hand for the tape. We were moving again. She tore off tape and neatly plastered the note to the flap of the box. Tears ran quietly down her cheeks. There was a crackle from the paper in the box. The baby was moving slightly. Mama's eyebrows peaked in a tent above her nose as she looked at me through her red eyes.
    “He might wake,” she whispered wetly. “He's been asleep almost three hours. He'll be hungry.” Her voice squeaked out through the whisper. “Tell Papa we have to wait till I can feed him. Tell him to park somewhere.” A push in her eyes sent me back, feeling my way toward the cockpit, with tears coming out of my own eyes. As I reached for the support bar behind Papa, the van reeled beneath me and we were turning right beneath a streetlight into the purple shadows of a three-island, twelve-pump gas station with its “CLOSED -- open again 6 A.M.” sign large and pale in the window of the office. On the wall of the office, a tire with a clock in its center hung numbly, with one hand drooping to 12:35.
    “Papa,” I started to say, as he lurched up from the seat and swung toward me.
    “Gangway, Oly,” he snapped as he pushed past me, a wave of heat and cigar smoke and father flesh moving away toward the open door of the bedroom. Arty smiled at me from the passenger seat. He reared his head back, baring his teeth to show me his excitement.
    “No, Al!” came Lil's voice from the bedroom.
    “Quick, Lil, get a move on!” and I could see Papa bending over the visible corner of the big bed, reaching.
    “Al, I've got to feed him! He's awake!”
    But Papa was pulling and the cardboard box slid toward him with Mama's long red gloves attached to it.
    “Lily, there isn't time!”
    A thin, monotonous siren wailed from the box as Al lifted it and the reaching red gloves towed Mama along in her limp robe. Papa came through the door toward us and put the box down on the floor next to the side door as Mama rushed behind him, with the light from the bedroom door shining through her pale hair. Papa opened the side door and peered out, and Mama hit the light switch as she leaned over the box. Her pink robe and red-gloved hands dove toward the wadded papers that filled the box around the baby.
    Papa said, “Hand it to me, Lily,” as he stepped down to the pavement and turned around to see, as Arty saw, and I saw, Lily tilting oddly, her head against the door frame, her robe spreading open around her, her whipped-cream hair jerking out in thick snakes that tried to escape from her head in all directions. We heard the ping of hairpins hitting the window, the floor, the wall, and Mama's gasp and muffled shriek as she lifted off the floor and floated, lying on the air while her thick-strapped brassiere stretched away from her with an ugly, ripping sound, and her feet, in pale lavender socks, stretched wobbling toward the light in the ceiling, and her hair fell in coils over her face. “Mama! Lil! Mama!” we all howled, as her huge blue-veined breasts burst through the brassiere and she dove into the cardboard box, falling with her breasts in the box as her arms waved and her head lifted against the pull from the box and her white legs twitched and crawled on the floor beneath the rucked and flapping robe and one lavender sock rumpled its way off her foot.
    Then Al was on his knees in the doorway, stroking her head and saying, “Sweet shit, Lily,” through her soft sobbing. Arty grunted, his head craned around the back of the seat. His eyes overran his wide face. I sat on the floor against the cupboard with my mouth and eyes open, and Elly and Iphy sat up in their bunk with bewildered eyes and wide befuddled mouths saying, “Mama,” in a drawn-out complaint. A painful, thin whine came out of my own